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.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 1

Seeing as it has been some time since I have written with any regularity, consider this post as my hope that this can soon be rectified. It is not, necessarily, that I don't have time to write, merely that I have used this time mostly for other things. That being said, I have undertaken a couple of reading projects for Lent and my intention is to update with things I am reading and learning.

One of these works is Lesslie Newbigin's The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Newbigin wore many hats throughout his career, but he started his ministry in the mission fields of India. The purpose of the book is to recover gospel proclamation in an era where plurality is valued for the sake of plurality and dogma is a bad word. He posits the question thus:

Only what can stand up under the critical examination of the modern scientific method can be taught as fact, as public truth: the rest is dogma. One is free to promote it as a personal belief, but to affirm it as fact is simply arrogance. How, in this situation, does one preach the gospel as truth, truth which is not to be domesticated within the assumptions of modern thought but which challenges these assumptions and calls for their revision? (5)

One assumption of modern thought, the Enlightenment focus on "rationality," often works to constrain the church. Newbigin points out that even a large number of those defending the faith do so on the basis of rationality, adopting as they do so the "fundamental humanist assumption" (2). What looks like a defense is therefore a "tactical retreat" (3). We are playing under the terms set for us by a philosophy hostile to viewing the non-empirical as fact.

Dogma, which originally meant "to seem" and was used by the ancient church to delineate what could be accepted on "competent authority" now stands "precisely for all that is ignorant and arrogant, for the very opposite of a sincere searching after truth" (5). Dogma narrows the world and denies the abundance of avenues to truth in the world. Dogma destroys our open-mindedness, which is a virtue in the modern world, closing us off from the beliefs of others. Our culture distinguishes facts from values. Christianity, and other faith systems, belong to the world of values and it is wrong to impose those values on others. Newbigin ends the first chapter by making a few points that will be picked up as the book continues.

The first is that "dogma is not the unique particularity of the Church." Every faith system is built on dogma; assumptions, premises, are necessary in believing anything. It is difficult to question the assumptions we have built our worldview upon; difficult both for the Christian and for the pluralist.

Second, every culture "depends for its coherence upon a set of. . . 'plausibility structures' which predetermine which beliefs are acceptable within a culture and which are anathema. Within the plausibility structure of modern science, divine explanations for events will naturally seem implausible. Newbigin contends, though, that "the gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel" (9). 

Third, the statement that truth is bigger and more complex than any one person or one system of thought can articulate is well-intended but can also be used to close off any dissent from that position. In the famous example of the people feeling different parts of the elephant and describing a wildly different creature what we often lose sight of in the pithy lesson of different apprehensions of the truth is the fact that to know they are touching an elephant someone has to see the whole elephant. To the charge of arrogance at Christian belief in truth, Newbigin responds: (a) "The truth is that it is dogma rightly understood, namely the free gift of God's grace in Jesus Christ, which alone can establish and sustain freedom of thought and of conscience." (b) "[W]e do not defend the Christian message by domesticating it within the reigning plausibility structure." (c) Christians should be lifelong learners and seekers after truth, but it is important to insist that "this learning is, like all genuine learning, an exercise which is guided and disciplined by a tradition." (d) "The dogma, the thing given for our acceptance in faith, is not a set of timeless propositions: it is a story."

The defense, then, of our faith becomes as much about who we are and how we live as what we believe. By living outside of the plausibility structure of scientific, postmodern, late-capitalist America we invoke a different story and way of living than that which dominates our culture. We tell ourselves a different story about life and the ordering of virtues and the practice of community and the beauty of dogma and the exclusivity of truth than is allowed in our culture. And, implicit in Newbigin's picture, we do so joyfully.

The Feast of the Epiphany

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, a day in the church calendar when we celebrate the arrival of the magi to give their gifts to the infant Christ and the day that also marks the end of the twelve days of Christmas. 

I have been trying to imagine this feast as it must have felt to Christians hundreds of years ago, to my ancestors in northern Europe for example. One thing that I love about Christmas is that it takes place during the darkest time of the year. Of all of the pagan holidays to appropriate for the birth of the Christ-child, surely a holiday celebrating the winter solstice is a great place to start. And, yes, I know that Jesus was more likely born sometime in April. I don't care. People who point that out tend to be annoying anyway. The point is the arrival of light in the middle of darkness, the glory of the only Son from the Father driving out the darkness. To imagine that the symbolism of the day chosen is not important is unimaginative.

Not to put words in the mouth of my northern European ancestors, but I imagine that the celebratory mass and 12 days of feasting meant a lot to them in the middle of winter. We are so protected from weather and darkness in our culture that we cannot conceive of what it must have been like to endure a winter with very minor restraints from the bone-chilling cold and the all-pervading darkness. I read the other day that part of the reason we are so fat is that we don't spend any time being cold anymore. In our overcalorified, enlightened (literally) era it can be difficult to grasp what Christmas must have meant, how anticipated it must have been, how melancholy that last night of the festival must have been. That last night of feasting before a season of privation and darkness. 

However, I did not intend to write ruminations about our coddled inability to appreciate winter festivals, but rather to celebrate with the church the arrival of the magi, those mysterious Asiatics with their inscrutable gifts. This year during Advent we would read our devotional and then sing a Christmas hymn. Invariably we sang the classic "We Three Kings," a song that features prominently in my recollections of childhood Christmases but which I dropped as kind of cheesy sometime around the millennium. As we sang the words, though, both Clara and I noticed a depth to the song we neither remembered nor anticipated. (The tune still kind of sucks.)

The verses, for those who like me do not remember them, track each gift given to the baby Jesus. The first is gold:

Born a king on Bethlehem's plain
Gold I bring to crown him again,
King forever, ceasing never,
Over us all to reign.

The next gift is frankincense:

Frankincense to offer have I;
Incense owns a deity nigh;
Prayer and praising, voices raising
Worshipping God on high.

And, finally, myrrh: 

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom;
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone cold tomb.

I am ashamed to admit that before reading these lyrics I had never before made the connection between these gifts and their purpose, or what they say about who Jesus is. Gold for a king; incense for a deity; myrrh for a dead man. Each gift evocative of another aspect of the manifold glory of Christ. I got chills reading that, and on this day when we remember and celebrate the wizards who tracked down Jesus it is wonderful to reflect on how much foreknowledge they were given into the life of our Savior.

T.S. Eliot taps into this in his poem, "The Journey of the Magi", where the now elderly king remembers the journey and the mystery of the birth they encountered:

This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

What the magi came to witness was not merely the birth of a beautiful child, but the certain knowledge that this child was born to die, born for Death, in a manner in which no other mortal could be. In celebrating Christ's birth we celebrate his death. In reflecting on the infant laid in the manger our minds are inexorably drawn to the man upon the cross. The season itself is infiltrated with death. The magi brought in their wake the genocide of infants surrounding Bethlehem, when impious Herod tried to hold onto power. And reflection on death is as it should be, which is to say that it is not morbid, at least in a pejorative sense. All three things were heralded at Christ's birth: his kingship, his divinity, and his death. Amen.

The song ends:

Glorious now behold him rise,
King and God and sacrifice;
Alleluia, Alleluia,
Peals through the earth and skies.

As the twelfth night wraps up, let us remember that. Though embalmed he rose. And when he returns he will return as king forever. 

Unapologetic

Today I started reading a book that I have been looking forward to for a long time: Francis Spufford's Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Spufford is a British author and novelist as well as a believer. Unapologetic is his effort to show that Christianity is not merely a matter of believing a set of facts but living a set of emotions. I read the first chapter, and Spufford already has pulled me in with something very near and dear to my heart. I have nothing to add; simply read this:

The point is that from the outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue. If I say that, from inside, it makes much more sense to talk about belief as a characteristic set of feelings, or even as a habit, you will conclude that I am trying to wriggle out, or just possibly that I am not even interested in whether the crap I talk is true. I do, as a matter of fact, that it is. For the record, I am not pulling the ultra-liberal, Anglican-going-on-atheist trick of saying that it's all a beautiful and interesting metaphor, snore bore yawn, and that religious terms mean whatever I want them to mean. . . I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. No dancing about; no moving target, I promise. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas. (18-19)