This Present Suffering

Read this book NOW!

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.

Time Will Run Back

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.

In Sunlight and In Shadow Review: The Best Kind of Romanticism

How about I lay my cards on the table at the beginning here: I am (was?) enamored by Mark Helprin's latest novel In Sunlight and In Shadow. After I finished the last pages I fell to the floor in something mimicking prayer. It was not as great of a novel as A Soldier of the Great War or as mesmerizing (and, let's face it, confusing) as Winter's Tale, but this is the one that gut-punched me the most of the big Helprin works. Briefly, the novel follows the love story of Harry Copeland, a 32 year old Jewish World War II veteran and inheritor of a struggling Manhattan leather goods company, and Catherine Thomas Hale, a socialite WASP with aspirations for Broadway. They meet cute on the Staten Island ferry and the book proceeds from there, which is to say spends the remaining 690 pages tracing this love and the characters' desires to embrace the beauty of this world (and its overwhelming pain) through bravery and sacrifice. 

I was first introduced to Helprin in his short story collection The Pacific and I think part of what makes him so memorable to me as a novelist is the short story-like feel that asserts itself even within novels--the three aforementioned--that were my son to stand on them he would be able to ride any rollercoaster his heart desired. As I look back even on my reading of In Sunlight, what sticks out to me most of all is the vignettes: the girl Harry races through a reservoir on a kayak, enraptured by her beauty but shut out from her life, never even learning her name, this moment of rapid, unrequited love; the flashback to Harry's WWII service, in particular the tank that exploded while carrying his men and his helplessness to help; his swim across the inlet outside a posh East Hampton club to declare his love for Catherine and accost her swinish fiancé; the attack on the mafioso's compound juxtaposed with Catherine's stage performance in the books culminating act. And on and on. It is not that the book doesn't have a cohesive narrative, it is simply that what lodges in my mind most is not the broad scope of the novel and its denouement, but the little moments of observation and intense detail that make you pause, scoff, laugh, shake your head, or crumble to the floor your heart overwhelmed by the beauty of it all.

The criticisms of Helprin as a novelist--such as they exist--tend to focus on two areas: his romanticism and his anachronism. Wedded to one another, the charge becomes that he romanticizes what in reality was a crappy, falsely-idealized past. Thus you have the New York Times reviewer bemoaning the "idealized portrait of how society looked" that has been "resuscitated" by Helprin. Romanticism makes an easy target. Grit is in. The grittier the better. Want to see a body broken by hand so as to fit into a suitcase? There's a show for that. Ever wondered what chemicals would dissolve a human corpse? Breaking Bad has you covered. And Game of Thrones exists primarily to showcase the depravities humans can inflict on one another. But the debunking of romanticism is so often tired and so often misses the point.

This past fall I taught Lord of the Flies to a group of sophomores. Bleak. Affecting. Unromantic. But, realistic? That is the question: are we really that bad? Was Calvin right to the nth degree? A question I posed my students, as we came to the conclusion, centered on this question: is the novel ultimately realistic? We talked about the rose-colored glasses through which romantic literature often wants us to look and how the soft hues distort the crushing realities of the world. True. But is it better to look at the world through shit-colored glasses? (As a sidetone, this is a shocking question to ask students at a Christian school.) In other words, by shifting from a romantic worldview to a harshly realistic worldview are we not simply falling into a ditch on the other side of the road? 

Perhaps the best thing I can say about this novel--and about Helprin's oeuvre in general--is that he makes me want to be better person: a better husband, lover, father, son. By unashamedly allying himself with the order of the past, he is calling forth the deep community that at one time governed our relationships and has since been replaced with today's enervating individualism. He is calling us into love, beauty, divinity. He is inviting us to recognize the world around us as something ineffable, infused. This is good. 

Romanticism is problematic when it denies a Creator with a sovereign plan for this world. Put another way, romanticism is problematic when it takes as its basis a distorted notion of human goodness (and this it does often). But for a Christian, isn't the world--and the story we live within this world--ultimately a romance, a comedy in the classical sense? Doesn't it end in a marriage, with every tear wiped from every eye, and all things made new? I know virtually nothing about Helprin as a person or a religious believer, but the romanticism he calls us into is a world governed by God and his goodness. The world, then, as it really is. Or, if failing that, the world as it should be and one day will be. It is at its core redemptive literature.

In One Ear and Out the Other

Continuing to make my way through Helprin's In Sunlight and In Shadow and found myself nodding along to this part. The main speaker is the protagonist, Harry Copeland, and his interlocutor is an older man complaining about not being able to learn as quickly. As someone who reads far more than I have time to process, I resonate with this deeply: 

"Think of it. Throughout your life you've read thousands of books, newspapers, journals, monographs, letters, documents, magazines--millions of pages, scores of millions of sentences, hundreds of millions of phrases, and perhaps a billion words. Of this, what do you remember? How much can you quote? Most likely not a thousandth of one percent, perhaps much less, which, of course, is what it's written down. 

"And yet your reading, your education, what you have seen and learned, have shaped you. Although the exact form falls away almost immediately, the essence remains. In what you have read, the difference between the great and the pedestrian is something very subtle that rides above the static form. The clarifying spirit can't be memorized, and the essence is in what's elusive, which is why those who can't grasp it other than willfully tend to deny it, because they can't see it." 

"Go on." 

"To know what you have read isn't necessarily to understand or to benefit from it immediately, as its central qualities exist above its mere form. If you and a cow listen to Mozart, you both know exactly the same sounds, the same notes, but you and presumably not the cow would hear a lot else, beyond the sounds, meaning, and meter. You would hear something the cow would not, and that the cow, if he could, would strenuously deny--I imagine."

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?