Mark Helprin is a Genius, or Why Courtly Love Still Matters

This post is tangentially related to the news out of the Pentagon a few weeks back that women are now able to kill and be killed in combat just like men. This makes sense in our brave new world of gender obfuscation, but is a tragedy from a certain, classical point of view (a view that I happen to find myself sympathetic with). 

I say tangential because mostly what I want to do is put this beautiful passage from Mark Helprin's novel In Sunlight and In Shadow in front of as many people as possible and let it do the arguing for me. 

To set the stage ever so briefly, the main character, Harry Copeland, a recent World War II veteran has fallen madly, wildly, and intoxicatingly in love with the socialite Catherine Hale. In a fit of mutual love and youthful zeal, she has abandoned her well-connected fiance on the night of their engagement and fled the Hamptons with Harry in tow. Over a pre-dawn dinner on the return ride to the city, Harry tells Catherine--who has previously been misused by men--that he wants to court her: dress up in his best suit, meet her parents, get her back before curfew, etc. She begins to protest and this is where I turn it over to Helprin:

"We were told," she began, "that courtly love. . . ."
"Told by whom?"
"By our professors. . . that courtly love is twisted."
"How so?"
"Demeaning. Controlling."
He straightened in his seat, lifting himself up until he seemed taller, unconsciously positioning his upper body as if for a fight--not with Catherine, but with an idea. His eyes narrowed a bit as they seemed to flood with energy. "I don't know who told you, but I do know that whoever said this was a fucking idiot who must never have seen anything, or risked anything, who thinks too much about what other people think, so much so that he'll exterminate his real emotions and live in a world so safe it's dead. People like that always want to show you that they're wise and worldly, having been disillusioned, and they mock things that humanity has come to love, things that people like me--who have spent years watching soldiers blown apart and incinerated, cities razed, and women and children wailing--have learned to love like nothing else: tenderness, ceremony, courtesy, sacrifice, love, form, regard. . . The deeper I fell, the more I suffered, and the more I saw. . . the more I knew that women are the embodiment of love and the hope of all time. And to say that they neither need nor deserve protection, and that it is merely a strategy of domination, would be to misjudge the highest qualities of man while at the same time misreading the savage qualities of the world. This is what I learned and what I managed to bring out with me from hell. How shall I treat it? Love of God, love of a woman, love of a child--what else is there? Everything pales, and I'll stake what I know against what your professors imagine, to the death, as I have. They don't have the courage to embrace or even to recognize the real, the consequential, the beautiful, because in the end those are the things that lacerate and wound, and make you suffer incomparably, because, in the end, you lose them."

A Christmas Letter to My Students

I wrote the following letter to my students for Christmas this year. Teaching is so much more enjoyable in my second year, and I have been incredibly blessed by a few outstanding groups of students with which to work. Anyway, I don't know how much time I am going to have to write, so I thought I would post what I have already written. Merry Christmas!

Hey all,

So there are a few things I want to say here at the end of the semester: some is simply reiterating things I have already said; some is somewhat new. I usually try to write individual letters to students but that proved impossible this semester. I promise to be more individualized in the spring.

First of all, I want to tell each of you how much I enjoyed this semester. I love teaching juniors because you guys have reached this stage where you are becoming more emotionally and intellectually mature. Teaching freshmen is garbage. This is the prime year of high school, I think. I have enjoyed your willingness to talk, discuss, philosophize. I have enjoyed the honesty with which you have approached our time together, the honesty with which you wrote in the faith poetry unit. I appreciate the clarity of thought I have seen developing over the semester. And I look forward very much to our time together in the spring. We know each other a bit better now and we will be able to build on that going forward.

Second, I want you to know how much I deeply care for you all in every respect of your life: intellectual, spiritual, emotional. I want each of you to know Christ and to seek him and savor him in your life. From what I have seen, that is the surest path to fulfillment in all three of those arenas of life. And I fully know and gladly acknowledge that for some of you that is not a reality or a possibility. I hope you don’t feel like I am ever too forceful in the way I talk about faith in the classroom; mostly I try to confine what I say to that which is overflowing out of my life. I don’t try to manufacture spiritual feeling or emotion for the benefit of the class. In other words, I try to be real with you guys. I hope that is the way it is perceived by each of you. I hope you trust, too, that I want this school to become a better place—a place that meets your spiritual needs (or at least attempts to do so) and answers the burning questions you have about life. I hope to do this more explicitly with some of our class time in the spring. But I want you to know that despite its problems I do love this school. I am happy to be here and happy, too, that each of you is here.

Third, I want to one more time encourage you (especially if you are a Christian) to geek out about the Christmas season upon us. Stare at a baby (in a non-creepy way) and contemplate God becoming man; find your way into a barn and smell the smells and imagine that is the place God decided to be born; go check out the crew waiting for work outside of a Home Depot or collecting your trash and imagine that the equivalent cohort is whom God first declared his presence in the world to (the shepherds). Sing songs, drink egg-nog (un-spiked, of course), eat sugar cookies cut into Christmas trees and angels and candy canes. Write a letter to someone you love. One thing I have been thinking a lot about this advent is Christ’s promise to return again, about the fact that I will one day see Christ face to face. It blows my mind (and I don’t understand it at all), but it is the future that I believe in, the end of the cosmos that is actually a beginning. The Bible tells us that when Christ comes back he will wipe away every tear from every eye and make all things broken, degraded, and destroyed brand new. And because of Christ’s first coming—the advent, Christmas—we can look forward to this second coming because we know now that we can be made right with God.

There is a song I wanted to play for you all, but I lost track of time and we never got to it. I will print the words below.

O Holy Night

O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining

It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth;

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

Till he appeared and the soul felts its worth

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

Fall on your knees, O hear the angels’ voices

O night divine, O night when Christ was born

O night divine, O night, O night divine

Truly he taught us to love one another

His law is love and his gospel is peace

Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother

And in his name all oppression shall cease

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we

Let all within us praise his holy name

Christ is the Lord! O praise his name forever!

His power and glory evermore proclaim

I love the whole song, but the second verse is what sticks out to me, because for most of my life the reality of Christianity has diverged from what this verse promises: that in Christ the chains with which we bind each other and ourselves have been broken by Christ and because of his triumph all oppression—all evil, malice, judgment, deceit—will end. Forever. I long for that day. Long for it with me, friends.

Have a great Christmas.

Cheers,

Coffman

At Least Fundamentalists Sing and Dance

When I was younger and newer to faith my beliefs were simple and my reactions emotional to much of what happened at church. I had no qualms in raising my hands, dancing and jumping around, saying things like "hallelujah" and "yes, Lord" in the middle of worship songs. Call it age (maturity?), call it less faith, call it whatever you want, but I don't do that anymore.

I think in many ways my faith has changed and not always for the better. I miss the emotion; perhaps I relied on it too much in my youth, but I miss it nonetheless. I am smarter now, better read, even a better man in a number of ways, but I still can't help feel like I am missing something.

This was heavily on my mind as I read a section of Chaim Potok's The Promise (a follow-up to The Chosen, a book many of us probably read in high school) this past week. Potok was a Jewish novelist whose novels tended to focus on the collision of faith and the burgeoning systems of thought--sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc.--that marked the twentieth century. I do not know how devout Potok was in his Judaism, but he is a humane writer in the very best sense of the word and has compassion on all of his characters across the spectrum of Jewish religiosity. 

The particular scene that stuck out was an engagement ceremony between the son of a highly regarded Hasidic rabbi and the daughter of a mostly nonobservant family. After the formalities of the engagement are completed, the tables and chairs of the synagogue are moved to the side and the party begins. For hours, these highly devout, highly fundamentalist Jews sing and dance and drink wine. The narrator is more moderate in his beliefs but both he and his father leave the event in awe of what they have witnessed.

In processing the event as they walk home, Rueven, the son, tells his father that despite the beauty of the evening "[w]e can't ignore the truth, abba." In other words, it was fun to get swept up in the emotion of the evening, but let's not get carried away: what these fundamentalists believe is wrong. His father replies: "'No,' he said. 'We cannot ignore the truth. At the same time, we cannot quite sing and dance as they do. He was silent a moment. 'That is the dilemma of our time, Reuven. I do not know what the answer is.'"

I dwelled on those words--"we cannot sing and dance as they do." I feel that way. I cannot sing and dance as I used to, as I know other people now still can. It is not that the substance of my belief has changed dramatically--if anything, I am far more aware of the doctrinal claims I am making these days. It is simply that whatever emotion bound up in simple faith allowed those expressions in my youth is mostly dried up. What good is liberation to a higher truth if it prevents you from singing and dancing?

Sound of Body, Weak of Mind

I have only ever run one marathon. The 2009 Rock'n'Roll Phoenix Marathon. I failed spectacularly. My goal time was 3:10 and a Boston Marathon qualification. After mostly walking the last 10k, I limped across the finish line in 3:35. Shortly thereafter I ditched the road scene and started running trails, competing in a few ultra marathons before quitting running altogether and getting fat. 

In moments of self-flattery I describe my transition to trail ultras as a more primal switch to running for the hell of it and to see how far I could go. Oprah ran a road marathon, for God's sake. At the start in Phoenix I lined up with people who intended to walk the entire thing. I was clearly above that. 

In reality, though, I had it handed to me by a road marathon. I left, licking my wounds, gratifying myself with the enhanced social clout that came with the ultra. Everyone knows the marathon distance and can probably guess at a good marathon time. No one knows how in the hell long it is supposed to take to run 50 miles. They are just impressed that you did it at all (even though I was slow and weak and would still have come short of my goals at the road marathon). 

But what has haunted me persistently since that bad race in January of 2009 is the question of what went wrong that day. My training was incredible: I regularly cranked out sub-1:35 half marathons in Saturday morning training runs, broke 19:00 minutes in a 5k, 40 minutes in a 10k, and my 20 mile training runs came in around 2:20. In other words, I was primed for success. Yet I crumbled.

There were physical issues. I have a finicky gastrointestinal system and when taxed in long runs it is a crapshoot (get it?) as to how it will turn out for me. However, what haunts me isn't the fact that physically I broke down, but the question of whether or not the breakdown was purely physical. What haunts me is that I toed the line that morning strong of body and weak of mind. That I simply wasn't ready to shrug off the pain of those last, grueling miles. That, despite being fast in training, my training itself was plagued by runs where I ran well as long as I felt well and ran poorly as soon as I came under duress. In other words, I was never forced to grit it out a training run, and therefore was unprepared for the day that grit was required.

Fitzgerald talks about the ways in which we conflate actual real physical fatigue with simply our perceived effort. We mistake feeling bad for actually doing bad. He writes: "perception of effort. . . is the primary source of the discomfort that causes athletes to slow down or quit when they hit the wall in races." We are not actually physically at our limits, as is amply displayed by the fact that we feel immediately better once we stop expending the effort, i.e. once our perception of effort returns to a low level. Fitzgerald's conclusion resonates: "Physical fitness determines where the wall that represents your physical limit is placed. Mental fitness determines how close you are able to get to that limit in competition."

My physical fitness should have allowed me to run a great race: I was lean, fast, and confident. However, without having stretched my mental fitness during training, I was unable to get my body to respond when I found myself in the unfamiliar territory of mental duress. I buckled, and none of the fast, easy training runs in the world would prepare me for what I needed: the mental power to tell my body it was just fine. And that is something to keep in mind, so to speak, as I try to recover what I lost when I gave up my best habit.

Mind With Matter: A Brief Lesson in Prepositions and a Word on Athletic Training

As an English teacher I am by nature concerned with the way we frame words. The way in which we speak matters. For example, during our chapel lesson at my school a few weeks ago, the young man who was speaking made a disconcerting verbal lapse repeatedly: asked to speak on the subject of worshiping (God) with our bodies he made the linguistic error of dropping both the implied direct object (God) and the quite necessary preposition (with). His subject, therefore, became "worshiping our bodies" (caveat lector: in case you have already tuned out, know that the actual content of this post is wildly divergent from a grammar lesson). 

While this was a humorous (for those whose level of attention caught the error) and quite, I am assuming, unintentional misspeak the broader lesson holds: the way we frame things matter, the way we say things has consequences. My post title is a play on the oft-heard mantra "mind over matter," which has been used to will countless thousands through seemingly endless windsprints, laps around a track or in a pool, and hideous sets of lifting plates of metal off your chest. The idea, of course, is that our mind (our wills, our grit, our mental toughness) is somehow separate from our matter (our bodies, our capabilities, our physical strength). This idea is prima facie ludicrous. No amount of mind will allow me to run an Olympic-qualifying marathon time or lift a ridiculous piece of metal weighing 300 pounds off my chest. But we repeat it. Grit it out, boys. Rest is for sissies. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Grrrr.

What the opposition of mind to matter obscures is the fact that without substantial matter mere mind is grievously incompetent for some tasks. What it also obscures, and from quite another angle, is that our minds and our bodies are simply not separated from each other in the least. The West, by and large and in innumerable areas of life, still is besieged by a Platonic dualism that separates mind/body, soul/spirit, physical/material. But mind over matter is actually closer to the truth than simple biological determinism. Some people are better competitors than others; some are simply able to will themselves through pain in a way that similarly trained athletes cannot. This much is undeniable. As an athlete who best fits in the Clydesdale category of racers, I have whooped people much fitter than me (from the outside). Likewise, I have had it handed to me by people I could no doubt take to task in a wrestling match. What gives? Why are some people able to double down in effort while redlining and others start walking? Why do we separate mind and body, giving primacy to either one or the other?

It is this basic misunderstanding that Matt Fitzgerald counters in his new work How Bad Do You Want It? Fitzgerald's work could actually smack at first glance as further strengthening of mind over matter drill instructor aphorisms, but Fitzgerald is instead promoting a newer psychobiological school of endurance athleticism. Mind, body joined. Our brain guiding our bodies. Our bodies responding to our conscious mental activity. I started reading the book this evening. It is going to be hard to put down. I want to be better. I want to run faster when I want to run slower. I want to want it more than I want comfort and easy-breathing. 

Sex Without Consequences

If a dystopian author from the past 100 years—take your pick, but I like to picture Huxley somehow having this keen vision—had imagined a scenario in which several hundred thousand infant children were murdered each year in utero with a black market developing for the sale of their parts to Frankenstein-like medical adventurers and wrote such a scene into his book I cannot imagine anyone believing it. Impossible, people would say.

Then, if rather than a black market existing for such “tissue,” the author upped the ante and placed this transaction in clean and sterile labs funded by tax dollars under the (rather broad) banner of women’s health, staffed this fantastic clinic with educated doctors who swore to the Hippocratic oath, and, perhaps most unbelievably, made such a system legal under the current political regime, well, then, the literary critics would have argued that—allowances for the genre aside—this was just too otherworldly, transgressing even satire. Swift might have recommended eating Irish babies, but that is a more straightforward, Maslow’s hierarchy type need, and besides it was just the Irish. But pilfering baby parts to aid medical research so that a fattening, lazy population could use medical science to buttress their sagging frames—come on.

I do not want to talk only about the videos that have been released in the past few weeks. I will say that what disturbs me about their content is not so much whether or not Planned Parenthood profited from the sale of baby parts (for me killing the babies in the first place is the most egregious crime), but the blasé nature in which all of the functionaries of the organization speak about heinous acts. It makes my skin crawl to hear someone talk about a murdered baby’s organs as if they are spare parts from a broken down Dodge.

I will also say that we are seeing here is the flowering of an ideology that has sought to divorce sex from children. I cannot overstate the degree to which this is true of our culture. We want sex without consequences. This cuts across race, ethnicity, social class, and even religious beliefs. The true god of most Americans is self-actualization and that process has been known to be severely hampered by babies taking up all of your time and money. Indeed, children can actually make self-actualization look like a bad thing, a selfish thing. They are an 18-year long self-emptying. I can think of nothing more anathema to our culture than that. How can we go to Prague and find ourselves if we are bogged down with children? Asia beckons, but here we are knee-deep in diapers. And I have witnessed Christian friends buy into this as well. Christian couples who have no intention of having children and if they do they push off the date into the mystical future when, self firmly discovered, they will be able to accommodate the interests of another.

What follows is merely an anecdote and therefore subject to the limits of all anecdotes, but one I believe to be telling. It is fully true, as I remember it. Several years ago Clara and I attended the Austin City Limits music festival. A roommate from college lived in that fine Texas town and we stayed with him during the festivities. The night we arrived we walked around the famous downtown district before ending up back at his apartment complex with a bottle of wine (maybe two). We sat outside in the courtyard area where another group had already established itself.

It was an election year—2008—and we spoke about the hysteria surrounding then candidate Obama and I gave Tim good-natured hell for campaigning for Bush in 2004 (even planting a peck on Jenna Bush’s cheek at a rally; true story). I made some offhand comment about never being able to support a party that allowed (some might even argue, celebrated) the killing of babies under the ghastly Orwellian phrase “reproductive rights.”

Little did I know—and I wonder if, had I known, I would have said anything at all—that I was sharing a bottle of wine with a girl who worked for Planned Parenthood. She, obviously, spoke up. I remember at one point she made the absolutely insane claim that more women had died in botched abortions than babies had been aborted since Roe. Given that the number of abortions carried out under Roe by 2008 was somewhere just shy of 50,000,000 (I write out the zeroes to be instructive), I find this claim a bit tough to take seriously.

She also made the comment at one point that she was not in favor of late term abortion. I asked her why and she didn’t have much of a reason. I pointed out that the only difference—in substance—between a late term and an early term abortion is that a late term abortion is grosser. The gore might repulse us, but if the baby is not a baby at six weeks then why is it one at 26 weeks? What sort of alchemy takes place in the womb at that point? Anyways, I don’t bring this up to point out the logical tete-a-tete that we engaged in. Logic would never win an argument like this anyway.

As the conversation progressed it became more personal as things tend to do aided by the a.m. hours and wine. Eventually we got onto the subject of this girl’s current relationship situation. She was 30 or 31 at the time and in an “open relationship” with her boyfriend. Her translation of this was clear: he had sex with other women while she stayed faithful and committed to him. She then got emotional and made a startling admission. She told us that whenever she had sex with a man she wanted to have his babies. She told us that though her education taught her that the desire for motherhood is a mere vestige of the patriarchy, as worthless as that appendix taking up space in your innards, she could not resist the desire. She told us she simply had to deny it.

What I see in Planned Parenthood and our culture at large is the fruition of a system that teaches people the twin lies that 1) babies are a problem and 2) babies have nothing to do with sex. As much as I hope for political change and the end of the murderous regime of Roe, unless this broader mentality changes we will lapse right back into a similar system. We are a nation of addicts; a nation dogmatic in our fealty to the god of self. What we need is repentance.

I have thought a lot about that conversation in Austin these past seven years and I have often prayed for that girl. I hope she found peace and broke up with that douchebag. I hope she stopped believing the lies. I hope she finally listened to herself. I hope she’s a mom.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 2

You can read my first post on Newbigin's book for some context on the matter. Today's post will cover Chapter 2 of the book, "The Roots of Pluralism."

At the heart of our pluralist society is the stark division between what we can know as fact and what we merely believe to be true (for us). That we are created by a good God, who is sovereignly in control of everything in the world, and who sent his son Jesus to die for our sins was, for the 1500 year period from the start of the church to the Reformation and the Enlightenment, fact in the same that gravity is a fact and that the laws of thermodynamics are facts. Now, we consign such facts to the category of belief, something that might work for an individual "believer" but not for humanity writ large. 

Part of this is signaled, as so many things, in the way we speak. Rather than speaking of right and wrong in an objective sense, we speak about "values." These values are not grounded in any ontological claims about the world, but simply in our own feelings on an issue. 

Compounding this division is the way in which modern scientific discoveries unsettled what was previously known as "fact" and therefore unsettled the whole world. Descartes is famous for trying to find some truth that could be known absolutely. He settled on something as boring as his own consciousness. Pass. Newbigin argues that since Descartes, the "dualism" inherent in his thinking between our sensory experience and our intellectual experience of the world has developed into a "skepticism about whether our senses give us access to reality ," a skepticism that has become the defining trait of European philosophy. Since we can only know the phenomenal world available to our senses, our managing of existence is contingent no longer on a kind creator but by the exigencies of our minds. The buck stops with us, so to speak. 

What Newbigin does in the latter part of the chapter is attempt to critically examine what dogma "undergirds this rejection of dogma" in the modern world. Chesterton once quipped that when people reject Christianity they don't believe nothing, they believe anything. So it is. The absence of faith does not leave a vacuum but is precipitated by some other theory that seeks to both create and fill the void. I will come back to the direction of that examination in the next post.