Obedience and Happiness

Last week I gave the chapel sermon at my school. Since the topic I spoke on is one that I have covered in some depth in this space as well, I thought I would post a link. It is mostly aimed at a high school audience, but I think there is relevance across seasons of life. The file is too big for me to embed in the post, but you can follow the link below to the Vimeo page. 

I start speaking somewhere around the 25 minute mark, though you can check out the opening band to see some representation of the level of talent at my school. Also, I hate the way my recorded voice sounds.

https://vimeo.com/199046800

And Her Unborn Child

I spent the past weekend in New York, gallivanting around with a good friend and enjoying what the city has to offer. I love being in that city--the energy, the masses of people, the lights, the smells, the claustrophobia-inducing quality of a series of 50 story buildings. I have been to the city recently but had not taken the time to go the 9/11 memorial.

We had some time to kill on Saturday morning so we went by. I don't know what I was expecting, and I think to some degree it was helpful to come at it with no expectations. It was perfect, I thought. Just the right combination of sober and sombre without descending to the macabre or the kitchsy. For those of you who have not been, the main feature is two square monuments, erected over the site of the original towers with cascading waterfalls leading down to concentrically smaller terraces. Around the outside of each monument is a granite slab with the names of the deceased in each tower inscribed in the rock. Visitors are encouraged to run their hands along the etchings and trace the names of the dead. It was an entirely sobering experiencing.

One of the main things that struck me as I was there was the ethnicities of so many of the names: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Italian, Greek, Arabic. The international nature of both that city and this particular tragedy was well-conveyed with no overt mention required. 

The names are sobering, too, in their very quantity. As you walk the circumference the plenitude can be overwhelming. And then both my friend and I were stopped in our tracks. Next to just shy of a dozen names in the dual monuments are the names of a woman followed by "and her unborn child." Tears instantly came to both of our eyes. My friend is a new father; I have two children and a pregnant wife. It was not hard to imagine the depth of despair at that phone call or that realization that your loss is twofold. Though in another sense I can hardly imagine it at all.

I told my students at the beginning of the week about this anecdote. I told the story well with the appropriate pauses at the appropriate junctures. And it was a fresh punch in the gut at each telling.

And I think I know why. It's this and it's simple, really: we all know and recognize that it is not simply the death of one person being remembered in that cut stone but the death of two. We know in that moment, whether the mother was on her last day of work before maternity leave--like one of the mothers--or she and her husband had discovered the pregnancy only that morning--as was the case with another--that what was forming in each woman's body was not a simple cluster of cells with the potential of life but a person in the making. We know that whatever the death toll of the adult bodies in the towers on that sacred day that the names of a dozen more are rightfully added.

Too often right to life issues can become abstracted from what is actually being discussed. This simple monument broke through the pretensions. Those four simple words--and her unborn child--contain a world of meaning. A world of meaning that many of us in our perverse and broken culture are willfully denying. Those plain words, etched in stone, cry out the truth.

Ambition and a Lesson from Alexander Hamilton

I mentioned in my 2017 resolution post that I wanted to spend some time thinking through and writing about the topic of ambition. This is the first such post. More will follow at irregular intervals.

It is no secret to those who have spent much time around me in the past six months that I have come under the spell of Hamilton, the Musical. The central figure of the play, founding father Alexander Hamilton, is nothing if not ambitious. He rises up from poverty and orphanhood on St. Croix to become what biographer Ron Chernow calls "the father of the American government." Hamilton, both the character in the play and the actual historical figure, was an unstoppable force, challenging American luminaries like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson while serving as an indispensable ally and mouthpiece for George Washington. He accomplished this by working constantly.

And herein lies at least part of the problem with ambition. Let's call it the opportunity cost of ambition. In order to complete the voluminous list of tasks set for himself both internally and externally, Hamilton perforce neglected other important elements of his life, most notably his family. In his biography, Chernow is careful to commend Hamilton as a doting father (when he was around), which is all well and good, but his ambition kept him from his family for long periods of time, led to a scandalous affair, and the pride in his accomplishments helped spur him into the ridiculous duel with Aaron Burr which cost his life.

This is my fear when I consider ambition. Not, I should note, that I will die in a duel but that ambition will lead me into too much single-mindedness and lead to me neglecting my family or my friends or my physical health or . . . The list mounts. Ambition freaks me out because I don't want to miss out on the vast realm of life experience that lies outside the narrow corridor of my ambition. 

Here I want to say that one option is just to be ambitious in every part of life: an ambitious father, husband, teacher, friend, athlete, writer, etc. I'd like to say that. But the problem is, that's bullcrap. Again, opportunity cost. If you want to be great at anything it takes a whole lot of time. A whole lot of time that is not being spent on something else and actively taking away from time that could be spent on those other things. All of the great men and women that we read about from history were single-minded. I can't pretend otherwise. You don't back into greatness. You cultivate it over years of sacrifice. You work to put yourself in the way of greatness. There is no other way. 

The corollary concern, of course, when it comes to ambition is failure. You put all of your eggs into one basket, work your butt off, and accomplish nothing. I'll talk about that fear a bit in the next post.

The Power of Christ Compels You

I just read the most fascinating article on demon possession in, of all places, Vanity Fair. The author is William Friedkin, the man who directed the demon-themed horror classic The Exorcist in the 1970s. It recounts his time spent with Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist of the Vatican. (Amorth died in the time Friedkin was working on this article.) Read the article. Seriously.

Amorth, and his pseudonymous patient (is that what she should be called?) Rosa, allowed Friedkin to film an exorcism. What he witnessed shook him to his core. I don't want to give too much away. I very much encourage you all to take the time required to read the article. It made my skin crawl. To recount briefly, this calm, attractive woman starts screaming and shaking and claiming to be Satan during this exorcism. She is being restrained by a number of priests who help Amorth and they are visibly straining to hold her back, sweat pouring down their brows.

One thing worth noting is that Amorth doesn't agree to see and treat every kook who walks through his door. He makes sure that people have been to professional therapists before and even then he acknowledges that only 1-2% of the people he meets with are actually demon possessed. It is not as if, in the language of C.S. Lewis, Amorth sees a demon behind every bush. Nevertheless, he is convinced that active spiritual evil is a force in the world today.

Apart from the frightening telling of the exorcism, perhaps the most illuminating part of Friedkin's essay is when he lets neurosurgeons and psychiatrists weigh in on what they see in Friedkin's film. The neurosurgeons are stumped. None of them are able to categorize what they see. It is not delirium because Rosa's verbal power is beyond what you can see with a delirious patient. The psychiatrists are likewise perplexed. They all agree that Rosa isn't faking it, another argues that the psychiatry community can acknowledge something called "possession" without assenting to divine machinations (a weird sort of compromise), and another, in a story that's making me regret typing this at midnight in a creaky house, recounted a time when he was experiencing a particularly intractable patient. He said her behavior was "psychotic-like" but didn't exhibit other normal traits of schizophrenia. After seeing her and conferring with a colleague he returned home. There was a weird blue light emanating from his house and he felt a piercing pain in his head. He called his colleague to tell her what had happened; she had just experienced the same thing at her home.

Friedkin helpfully quotes Hamlet's famous line to Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth. . . than are dream't of in your philosophie." How can you rationalize something like that away? 

Ultimately I'm a novice on these matters. I don't tend to spend much time thinking about the supernatural in this capacity. The standard skeptic response seems to be that everything called possession throughout ancient history would simply be diagnosed more appropriately as a mental disorder today. But does naming something remove spiritual power? Does claiming something emanates from imbalances in the brain explain why it happens? Does the physical, of necessity, obviate the spiritual? Again, I am totally ignorant on this matter, but to read experts and skeptics unable to process what they see in these situations ought, at the very least, to inject a bit of humility into all of us. There are limits to what we can understand; there are things we cannot dream of knowing.

As I finished the article I was left with a major question. I'll pose it first like a skeptic: is it only previously religious people who experience possession of this type and seek the help of a figure like Amorth? In other words, do you need an a priori belief in demons and the supernatural in order to feel that there is something like this happening to you? More succinctly, do you have to be predisposed to believe to believe? 

As I said, that's the skeptical way of framing the question. Here's another: is it only religious people that are able to discern what is happening to them and that it is beyond the boundaries of explanation and treatment provided by contemporary neuroscience and psychotherapy? In other words, does religion help us name things science is powerless to name? Or, another way: was Rosa possessed by Satan in some unique and real way and was Gabriele Amorth doing the work of his Savior?

Writing in 2017

This post makes me nervous. I am occasionally given over to hubris, all the more so when it concerns my meager intellectual gifts. But, to bring up again the Augustine quote from my post on reading, writing helps shape learning, helps to make it in the modern buzzword "stick." But my ambitions for writing exceed a running journal on whatever I'm reading at the time.

So my big writing plan for 2017 is to write a book. It looks stupid seeing that on a page. Who the hell am I to write a book? It's a good question and one I'll puzzle through as I burn the midnight oil, fueled by Red Bull and regret, and try to piece together something that can with generosity be called a book.

The book is on obedience and submission as the key to happiness. Popular topic, I know. Prepare a seat for me please, Oprah. I'll be using various philosophers, but mostly Scripture and Paradise Lost. I'm under no illusion that this will be a wild seller or bring me lasting fame or allow me to afford a new car when my Expedition with 205,000 miles finally craps out. But I need to do this; I'll regret it if I don't. So there.

As far as the blog goes, my goals is to do 100 posts in 2017 or roughly two per week. It's ambitious--especially given the expansion of my family coming in early February, but I think cultivating the habit of writing will lead to better writing, both for my book and this blog.

Reading in 2017

At year's end I try to be a bit reflective on how my reading habit has helped shape my year and what changes might be worthwhile to implement for the next year. My reading is still guided in large part by "whim," thanks to this extraordinary little book by Alan Jacobs. Nonetheless, I think there is a degree to which I can plan the unplannable and make space for serendipity while still adhering (mostly) to a plan.

For example, last year I achieved a few of my ambitions, the main one of which was to read more theology and philosophy than I had in 2015. In 2015 I read 12 books in that category, or, brace yourself for some math here, one book per month. In 2016 I more than doubled that total, bringing the number to 25 and, math trigger warning again, a monthly average of ever so slightly more than two. In general, I am happy with how this went though if I had to make a critique of 2016's reading in this category it would be that I read too few primary sources and too many books about books. I hope to keep the high percentage of theology and philosophy books in 2017 but add more primary texts. Though I have to say that the book I am perhaps looking forward to the most in this category is Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe, a book that is decidedly about books. I am also looking forward in this category to Augustine's work on the Trinity paired with Augustine on the Christian Life, Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge, and Anthony Esolen's forthcoming Out of the Ashes. 

As far as novels go I don't have much in the way of plans. I am eager to finally read Shusaku Endo's Silence and the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset, to finally finish Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet (I've read the first two), and I am trying to squeeze in a rereading of Harry Potter. It feels like it's time. There is also a copy of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest taunting me from the bookshelf. It might be time to dive into that rabbit hole.

One of my goals for 2016 that went unaccomplished was a reading of the Shakespearian corpus. That goal is carrying over to 2017. The only play I teach is Macbeth which feels woefully inadequate (though if you were to ask my students, more than enough). 

I am willing to sacrifice total number of books read for depth of reading. Despite my high figures from 2016--92 total books--I think I did a far greater job of in-depth reading. The sure path to this is through writing. My students probably get tired of me quoting Augustine's dictum that "I learn as I write and I write as I learn," but it is nevertheless true. Writing makes learning stick. And I hope to achieve far more in writing this year than I did in a fairly productive (at least second half of the year) 2016. I will have a post on 2017 writing goals forthcoming.

If you, reader, have any recommendations you would like to make for my list, please feel free to do so. 

Resolved in 2017, to Fail More

OK, I'll admit at the outset that this is a gimmicky post title. I am not actually actively looking to fail in 2017. But I want to be bold enough to leave open the door for failure.

Here's what I mean. Over the past week or so I've been listening to Jessica Lahey's book The Gift of Failure while I exercise or drive around completing my various Christmas break projects. While in some ways it strikes me as having that one great transgression of most popular sociological/cultural books--taking a good idea for a long article and wringing a book out of it--I've thoroughly enjoyed the book as a balm from our accomplishment-oriented, failure-averse, credentialing culture. 

Lahey is only another in a growing chorus of disillusionment with contemporary childrearing and educational practices. Books such as William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America's Elite and the more scholarly Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum take aim at the narcissism and lack of curiosity bred in contemporary academia. Paul Tough's How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character and Angela Duckworth's extraordinarily buzzy Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance extend the analysis to early education and childrearing practices. Each argues that children in our system are shaped to be nothing but academic box checkers, beings honed to superficially placate and defer to the adults in their lives in order to attain to the next level of accomplishment. Kind of like playing a video game. 

Though I first heard this truism in connection with someone striving for partner in a legal firm, this cycle of accomplishment for the sake of attaining what's next in order to seek accomplishment in order to attain what's next, is like a pie-eating contest where the prize for winning is more pie. Such is our current dispensation. And what's missing is the willingness and the passion and the drive that opens the door to great and lasting success but, of necessity, leaves the door for failure open as well.

Though all of these broader cultural implications are of great interest to me, I want to make the focus more internal here. It is easy to recognize these broad trends and bemoan them (and I do), but this basic--and I don't know what else to call it--conservatism when it comes to ambition is primarily fear-based. We are scared to death of failure, which is why most of the time we do what is known and comfortable. Fear is basically how Chili's exists. And I don't want to live my life governed by fear, which is, as Marilynne Robinson points out, "not a Christian habit of mind."

Hence the gimmicky goal.

Again, my goal is not failure, but to be willing to extend myself enough that failure becomes an option. To, in other words, be ambitious. This means not watching much TV (even sports) and using that time productively to read and write and having crazy ambitions for that writing (more on this to come shortly). Whatever else it might mean remains to be seen. 

Partially this is to show my kids--who are being raised in the teeth of this risk averse culture--that there are worse things than failure. There's the refusal to try.

Endnote: I want to expand on the idea of ambition a bit more in a few subsequent posts. I am starting Macbeth with my sophomore honors kids this week so it's a pertinent philosophical issue. I want to think about ambition a bit from a Christian worldview--what it should or might look like