One of the first pieces of pop culture I consumed after a two-week fast in Kenya this summer was the trailer for the recently-released film Captain Fantastic. Right away it looked like something right up my alley: a homeschool family with a passion for nature and a desire to not be sucked into the entertainment-obsessed, intellectually flaccid, consumeristic excess of contemporary America. If everything after that colon sounds self-righteous, you're not wrong, but I look around at the way so many children are being raised in our culture and it strikes me as inhuman, hollow, even depraved. I know I'm not perfect and I imagine I will find unique ways to screw my kids up, but I don't want any help from a media system and education system that seem designed to stultify thought and snuff out any allegiance to tradition and beauty. Anyway, on to the film. I'll summarize very briefly: the film opens on a family of six children being home-educated by their father, played brilliantly by Viggo Mortensen, in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. The children's mother, never shown except in dreams, has committed herself to psychiatric treatment in New Mexico and kills herself (this is in the first act of the film and hardly counts as a spoiler as it sets the film in motion). The deceased's parents, appalled by the lifestyle embraced by their daughter's family and blaming her emotional issues on the dogmatism of her husband, banish them from attending the funeral. At the behest of his children and his own desire to honor his wife, the family packs up an outfitted school bus and heads south. Adventures and lessons ensue as the kids "impractical" training comes up against the realities of the "real world." If you want to know more, go see the movie. Upon reflection I am still not entirely sure what I think about this film. There are moments of deep resonance for me: the father banishing the use of the adjective "interesting" as a non-word in describing literature. When his daughter then offers plot summary he presses her to go further into analysis. It seemed almost designed to warm my heart, as did the first night we see the children reading books around a campfire: a pre-teen reading The Brothers Karamazov, an eight-year-old reading Middlemarch. I want to scream to the world that this is possible. If we dumb things down for children they will go along with it and play dumb; if we call them to a higher standard they will rise to meet it. I enjoyed the impassioned oversight and planned formation combined with little hand-holding and independence. The kids are on a plan, but they are not guided through every step. Every minor wound is not fawned over and they are allowed to cry and grieve and get angry and yell as the situation warrants. I love that they saw the systems of our culture as poisonous in just the same ways I do and sought to avoid the corrupting nature of technology and entertainment. But my appreciation of the film is not quite what I expected as I felt my soul stir in watching that trailer upon my return from Africa. My wife and I went to see the film at the Esquire Theatre on 6th avenue. We got there early and walked around the neighborhood chatting. At one point we made predictions for the movie; my main prediction was that, in order not to alienate their audience base, the film would go out of its way to distance the family portrayed from any semblance of religious conviction. There would be no Bible memorization scene, in other words, but I imagined a scene with someone quoting Nietzsche. I was wrong, but only slightly. They did not quote Nietzsche, they quoted Noam Chomsky. One of the main scenes played for laughs is when the family bus has been pulled over by a cop suspicious by the presence of six school-age children chilling in a bus on a school day. Rather than explain that, you know, we're homeschooled and this is America so chill, the kids all pretend to be religious fanatics, even holding hands and singing a hymn. The mortified cop exits the bus and the family is on its way. I get it. Dumb, knuckle-dragging Christian homeschoolers. Haha! Not us. We're doing this to stick it to the man, man. But it felt forced and over the top. And it made--and maybe this was the intention?--Mortensen's character in particular look like a smug asshole. At one point the kids remind each other they are not to make fun of anyone. They all nod in agreement until one of the younger children reminds them of the caveat to the prohibition: "Except for Christians." Knee-slapping stuff, that. I don't think my main problem here is that the film takes shots at Christians. I am inured to that, mostly, at this point. I think the thing that frustrates me is that these people think they are better than Christians because they don't worship fairy tales. But, instead, they worship Noam F*cking Chomsky. They are members of an organized religion and they are worshipers. They just don't like what some other people worship. But is celebrating Christmas any less ridiculous than celebrating--and I am not making this up--Noam Chomsky Day on his birthday? I think, in other words, that the family portrayed in this film has correctly diagnosed the ills besetting our culture but chosen the wrong cure. There is some virtue in opting out of the excess of our late modern age, but if it is filled with some equally vapid philosophy then what, really, is the point? I think this showed in the way the film was filmed as well. This was not a contemplative film; there were no questions being asked here. The lesson learned was simplistic and the compromise position adopted at the end made so many previous efforts nearly meaningless. The film took no time to pause, to consider the implications of the characters' lives, to help us find the beauty in the mundane, the everyday. Everyone they met was stupid or fat or stupid and fat. The kids were made judgmental and self-righteous by their withdrawal; they did not withdraw for the life and beauty of this world. This is the risk everyone runs by withdrawing; it is one I am certainly conscious of as we move into the homeschooling phase. But the end in mind for me is clear: I am removing my children from the world (for a time) for the good of the world, so that when they enter it their lives are governed by truth and beauty and goodness, so that in their efforts to glorify their savior and seek his kingdom they left up the one who gathers all people unto himself.
When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.
This is my fifth (sixth?) reading through Gilead. It is passages like that which will keep be coming back every couple of years for the rest of my life. Lord willing. We are liberated by God's grace to respond out of kind, to subvert our need to get what we think we deserve. Amen.
Right after finishing my undergraduate studies at CSU, my family went on a Caribbean cruise. There is a lot I remember from the trip: my inaugural scuba-diving sessions, sunburning my thighs so badly I teared up while putting on pants for dinner, gaining 10 pounds, subsequently realizing just how fat our country really is, the tour guide driver on St. Thomas who took us to a grocery store and a bank before getting on to the sites. Great times! But one thing I remember and that has stuck with me since (and a sensation that I have felt at numerous times in the succeeding decade) is one that is hard to articulate without people thinking I'm crazy. While standing on the balcony of my parent's suite the first night of the cruise I had an unmistakable and non-suicidal urge to fling myself off the boat and into the water. Both of my adjectives are imperative there. Unmistakable in the sense that I really wanted to do that thing. It first started while taking pictures from the balcony and having this instant urge to chuck my camera into the water. I then thought/felt (let's not bring rationality needlessly into this), Why not chuck my whole self into the middle of the sea? I really felt it; really, almost, contemplated it. As to the second adjective, and this is where it gets sticky, I really did not want to die. That is, of course, what kept me from ultimately taking the plunge: the whole inevitable death thing. I have had this thought numerous times in the succeeding ten years (damn, I'm old). A lot of the times it is in similar high places: the Golden Gate Bridge; the summit of Sunlight Peak; the odd temptation to not follow the road on Red Mountain Pass and sail into the abyss. I have mostly kept this to myself because it is a hard thing to explain. The typical response ranges from outright confusion to outright concern. However, while traveling to Kenya a few weeks ago I asked the person next to me a very weird question: if some small part of her doesn't like the idea of a plane crash. (It should be noted here that the inherent creepiness of this question is mitigated somewhat by the fact that I knew this person, a student at my school; this is not the type of thing I go asking random strangers on an airplane however much that would make for an interesting flight.) Expecting incredulity and horror I was met instead with recognition. It is not in the least that either of us wanted to die in a plane crash, but the intensity of experience of knowing that the plane is going down is a feeling we are not entirely opposed to experiencing. I'm afraid I've lost some of you. Let me bring science into this for a minute. When I got home I Googled (and fervently hope my work doesn't monitor my Google searches): Why do I want to jump off high places? (One of the real surprises here is that Google auto-filled the latter half of that search query.) A few articles came up referring to an academic study published in 2012 entitled: "An Urge to Jump Affirms the Urge to Live: an Empirical Examination of the High Place Phenomenon." "High place phenomenon" is the American psychological word for this feeling I am talking about. It is not very artful but it does get the basic emotion across. I can't read the full study because my school doesn't subscribe to the database that hosts it, but the title says everything we need to know for the purpose of this post: there is a way in which such desires enhance our willingness to live and our passion for life. They found that people with "no history of suicidal ideation" experience this phenomena at comparable rates as people with more of a temptation to suicide. After some more clicking around, I found that the French have a more elegant word for the phenomena: l'appel du vide, the appeal of the void. What a gloriously Frankish way of saying something. This is what I feel; not the desire to die, but the desire to experience the void. To know what it is to fall unrestrainedly and live to feel it intensely. If I could jump off a cliff without dying I would probably do it pretty regularly. None of this is to say that this feeling isn't at least somewhat unsettling. It is. Most people don't understand it. I don't understand it. It is pre- or sub-rational. It's a feeling. And not one to be acted on. Writing about the concept Sartre reflected that it is unsettling because "it creates an unnerving, shaking sensation of not being able to trust one's own instincts." He's exactly right. But I think the American psychologists are onto something as well. There is something basically life-affirming about this desire. Maybe you should not trust your instincts in all cases (no shit), but every time you stare over a ledge and feel the urge to jump and refrain, you are affirming your commitment to life. And, to me, that is a feeling worth experiencing at odd times. *I am working on a follow-up post to address the implications for this instinct if you actually do struggle with suicide ideation and depression. I will finish it, fittingly enough, if I do not die climbing Mount Rainier this weekend. L'appel du vide, indeed.
The first time I read Gilead was in the Neuro-ICU at University Hospital while my mom's body rebelled against the shock of an aneurysm and the attendant surgeries and we were waiting to know if she would live or die. And, if life won, to what degree that life would be impaired going forward. In other words, I was suffering, perhaps for the first real time in my life. By God's grace my mom lived. And thrived. But the book was an epiphany for me and a great gift. A literal gift, I had received it as a graduation gift from my best friend some six months before but, not being a reader at the time, it had sat on my shelf until then. Somewhere in the funk of that period, and the days bleeding into days, and the deep tiredness, I began reading. And I will read it every two or three years until my body or mind is taken from me. Here is one passage that stuck out particularly to me the first time I read. It was pertinent, then, in a way it is not necessarily so now. But I believe it more than I did at that first reading. Experience and age have taken the initial raw emotion of the reading, but it is no less precious for that exchange. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day. Good old Isaac Watts. I've thought about that verse often. I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality. A thousand ages in Thy sight Are like an evening gone. . . No doubt that is true. Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life. It is unnecessary to point out how little our culture enjoys suffering or cultivates the ability to suffer with dignity. To say we are addicted to comfort is simply to say, at this point, that we are Americans living in the 21st century. But, if Robinson is right (or her mouthpiece, the Reverend Ames, is right), then suffering is something inextricably human, something upon which our very humanity is predicated. In other words, to be human is to suffer. And these sufferings are not without purpose. They are, according to the Apostle Paul, achieving for us an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all. As we suffer we approach the sufferings of Christ, our elder brother and co-heir. As we suffer, too, we prepare to share with him in his glory. We might, some day and by God's great grace, come, like Paul, to rejoice in our sufferings. Though I know no one granted that type of sainthood. This is not to say that we seek out suffering or become indifferent to it when we see it ravaging the lives of those whom we love; rather, it is to acknowledge the beautiful truth that on the day when every tear is wiped away from every eye the joy we feel will be all the more joyous for the sorrows we once endured.
It has been far too long since I have written in this space. Rather than pleading some reason (of which I find none to be exculpatory) let me just say that I am a better thinker, reader, teacher, and writer when I am utilizing this space. So, in short, this is for me. But you're welcome to read along as well. Every now and then I stumble on to a good point. I changed the quote at the header of this page. Previously it was a line from a Donne poem--a very good line from a very good poem. When I started this I was taking a class on Donne and was busy memorizing a number of his Holy Sonnets. (I think I could still recite a couple, gun to my head.) I stand by the excellence of Dr. Donne and mean this change in no way as a slight to his poetic prowess and lyrical beauty. The new line, however, from Milton's poem "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," is one that I have been thinking about a lot lately. It seems that the idea of time has been encroaching itself upon my consciousness over and over again. Books, movies, conversations. Everywhere I keep coming back to it. I've thought a lot about time over the years. It is a remarkable thing. When I had a sales job in El Paso that I did not enjoy, I was so attuned to time that I could tell you what time it was within five minutes at any time of day. That may be the only skill one acquires from watching a clock tick along all day. I felt every moment of every day. That is one way to think about time; waiting it out, so to speak. Time is also invented, as Augustine pointed out a long time (this word) ago. God is outside of space and time, living in the eternal present, seeing all things before his omniscient vision*. Therefore, time is false, or maybe not false, but temporal. When Christ comes back he will wipe out death and sadness and war and disease and crime and pettiness and sorrow and time. Amen and amen. I don't know that I feel the weight of time as intensely as I did when I was younger. The Lord be praised. But I don't think this slackening is due to the weight of time being less profound, just my own consciousness becoming slowly more inured to the effects of time. I am less likely to feel everything as intensely as I did when I was younger. Sometimes we are tempted to call this wisdom. Sometimes it may very well be. Sometimes I am tempted to side with the old man in A Farewell to Arms who tells the young Hemingway stand-in: "No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful." Not that I am an old man, exactly, but I am infinitely more careful when it comes to opening myself to hurt than I was as a young(er) man. Maybe that is wisdom; maybe I am just afraid. Anyway, back to the line from Milton. This little punk wrote this poem for Christmas Day when he was 20 years old and it is better than anything I will ever write**. The poem first reinforces and then subverts the standard Christmas tropes so that by the end we have the infant Christ banishing the gods of the ancient world to the abyss. I'll add Blake's drawing to give you the idea.
The incarnation is the great moment of the already/not yet dialectic in Christianity. The kingdom arrives but not in full. The king comes but must return and claim his kingdom. As he welcomes the infant Christ within the poem, Milton wishes for a complete and dramatic fulfillment of the promises of the kingdom, for the songs of the cherubim before the shepherds to ring out as "when of old the sons of morning sung" while God spoke the earth into existence. He imagines, and here is where my line comes in: For if such holy Song Enwrap our fancy long Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold, And speckl'd vanity Will sicken soon and die, And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould. And hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. The mere singing of the angels is enough to restore the world, to fetch the age of gold, to melt away sin, to empty hell. And Milton wishes for this song to be sung, to enwrap our fancy long, to keep going and going until all is restored. I want to pause here for a minute. A couple of months ago my wife and I watched the movie Interstellar. That movie, like so much of Christopher Nolan's oeuvre, is centered on the idea of time. I thought it a brilliant film, but while I was watching it I couldn't get this line of Milton out of my mind. Time will run back. We also recently watched The Theory of Everything, the biopic on Stephen Hawking. The climactic scene of that movie is Hawking's life winding back to the moment he first saw the women he fell in love with and was married to for two decades.*** Again, this line leapt to my mind and I cried as I watched. How badly I want time to run back. How badly I want to step outside its boundaries. How badly I want its pernicious sway to end. But, like Milton, I love this world and I love the providence of God. After imagining the restoration of all things and the defeat of sin, Milton comes to a realization: But wisest Fate says no, This must not yet be so, The Babe lies yet in smiling infancy, That on the bitter cross Must redeem our loss; So both himself and us to glorifie. And so that is where we are to day. In the process of redemption. In the midst of our Lord's work to glorify both himself and us. In the frustration of seeing through a glass, darkly. In the midst, for now, of time. * However any of that works, of course, I have no idea. ** Milton actually wrote about time quite a bit, as certain flashes of his poetry come through my mind. I am actually thinking it would be fun--my version of fun--to study the concept in his writings a little more widely. *** As a sidenote on this movie, I really love how this is the moment of the rewind. Not to some moment of grand accomplishment or the time he realized how much he loved physics, but to a simple, profound, beautiful, and fleeting moment of eye contact at a party.
