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Archive for December 2009

Heads Up! A Meditation on Blunt-Force Trauma

December 18, 2009 by djackson.

Ther was no dore that he nolde heve of harre,
Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed.

- Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, lines 552-553

Well, Chaucer’s miller may have been able to butt down doors but my own talents in that direction are much more modest. I woke up today to say the morning office before heading to the gym. The house was cold so I went into the laundry room to retrieve my watch cap. The night before, we had hung up some clohtes to dry on the door frame - you know, the kind of knit stuff that you can’t put in the dryer. (Or at least, you can, but only if you want to end up with doll clothes.) Anyway, in the act of ducking under the haberdashery I whammed my noggin against the jam. I split it nicely down the middle - my head, not the door - which resulted in a fun trip to the ER. They glued it shut (Becky asked if they could do my mouth while they were at it) and now I have this lovely Frankenstein slash about two inches long between hairline and eyebrows. In the vast expanse of forehead I sport it stands out like a neon beer sign in a convent. All of this besides the whacking headache.

The worst of it, of course, it that now I have to tell that bland and embarrassing story to everybody I see for the next week or so. Makes me feel like such a klutz. The ER nurse commented that I have the blood pressure and pulse of an athlete, but it was hard to preen myself much over that point given the circumstances. Unlike Henry V’s yeoman soldiery I cannot strip my sleeve and show my scars/And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.” It occurs to me that I could always engage in a little revisionist history, perhaps tell people that Jack Swagger caught me with a folding chair during our cage match on RAW? Or maybe mutter something under my breath about the modern world being no place for unicorns?

So it’s not the injury; it’s the embarrassment. Doubtless had I been St. John (Revelation 4.1) I would have stumbled at the threshold of glory and bled all over the twenty four elders. When, at the end of the play, the Lord finally appears in his blood-boltered BDU’s I’d blush to think that at least some of the stains came when he had to mop up my gushing noggin (Revelation 19.13). And perhaps that’s just the point. Spiritually or physically, I am willing to suffer but not to look silly, to be injured but not to be inept. And yet maybe a good deal of living in the Kingdom of Heaven means getting comfortable with just that concept. There is a set of scars in that heavenly throne room that reflects intention instead of inattention, sacrifice instead of sloppiness, heroics instead of moronics (Revelation 5.6). As for the rest of us, probably even the martyrs beneath the altar cuddling up in the white-robed warmth of anticipated vengeance, we mostly bear the whips and scorns of our own outrageous stupidity. We’ve slammed our stubborn heads against the solid doorposts of holiness; we’ve pitted our sinful flesh against God’s righteous law and learned - multiple times, but each one as if it were a fresh discovery - that it is our flesh that gives. We can violate God’s laws but we can’t ultimately break them.

And perhaps, in the end, that’s what we have to offer - the goofy evidence of our felix culpa, the sinful stumbling that provides an opportunity for our Lord to show how much he loves us. Melville’s Captain Ahab hated his peg-leg (and the whale who made it necessary) because it reminded him of his mortality. “Here I am,” he puffs while getting fitted for a new limb, “proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on!” Injury creates humanity, and, even worse, community, and Ahab’s self-concept can’t stand it. In the end it kills him and virtually everyone around him.

So here, Lord, I offer you my busted head as a tribute to your greatness. I also offer you - a two-for-one bargain suitable to the season we’ve transmogrified from your Son’s birth - all the brickbats of witticism I’ll have cracked across my already-cracked dome. (”You must’ve made Becky really mad!” “It wouldn’t be so bad if you had some hair to cover it!” You know the sort of thing, Father.) Like David doing the dance of the seven skivvies before the Ark of the Covenant, I will be yet more undignified in your worship. It isn’t much, I grant you, but it’s what I have.

However: I have a free copy of my book, The Fountain, for whoever comes up with the best alternative version of how I got this zipper up the middle of my face. The decision of the judge is final.

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I Wonder as I Wander - a Blog for the Feast of Christmas

December 11, 2009 by djackson.

And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. - Luke 2.18

The shepherd’s sermon produced wonder in the hearers. No big surprise there; wonder surrounds the birth of Christ. Zechariah had everyone wondering because he loitered in the sanctuary when any sane sinner would flee that God-soaked danger zone before the fog of incense could dissipate (Lu 1.21). Then his wife Elizabeth wonder-whipped the whole village by insisting on naming her son herself and getting her God-muted mate to go along (Lu 1.63). Mary and Joseph’s heads whirled with wonder when rickety old saints mummified in holiness broke forth in prophecy concerning their baby boy (Lu 2.33).

Karl Barth, in a sort of reverse Inferno, declared wonder to be the outermost circle of theology. If encounter with God does not astonish you, he advised, consider a different career. If theology no longer astonishes you, consider a second career. So central did Barth consider this emotion that he insisted that “as long as even a poor theologian is capable of astonishment, he is not lost to the fulfillment of his task. He remains serviceable as long as the possibility is left open that astonishment may seize him like an armed man.” Or like a crazed shepherd or a blazing angel or a strong-willed wife or a decrepit priest.

All of this leaves us to ask what we mean by wonder. I like the definition that Edward Rothstein of the New York Times offers. “Wonder, he explains,

is not puzzlement, bewilderment or confusion. But it is also not satisfaction, completion or understanding. It is more open-ended, even a little unsettling. There is an element of calm, poised detachment in wonder but also a restless amazement. In the wake of wonder, we are literally moved. We cannot remain still. We are spurred to explore.

As wonder wound itself around and through the first Christmas, so Christians through the ages have felt it again and again. “I wonder as I wander,” says the old spiritual. But perhaps some of us would admit to a loss of wonder over the miracle of Christmas. By this time of the season the relentless assault of “the holidays” has worn treadless the tires of our souls so that we gain no traction on the ancient path to Bethlehem, which seems to lie snow-bound beneath layers of lifeless secular ice.

If the birth of Christ bothers us - let alone seraphic birth-announcements and special-order quasars - we might bog down in puzzlement, bewilderment, and confusion. We might even feel driven to seek scientific respectability for the whole scenario. Barth considers this a bum steer from the start. “Those theologians and nontheologians hunt for the impossible and nonsensical,” he scoffs,

who assume that the quest for the truth entrusted to theology must be identified with an inquiry into the possibility, verifiability, and explicability of the events that form the backbone of the Bible’s message.

“Theology,” he offers instead, “is necessarily the logic of wonders.”

If on the other hand the birth of Christ bores us - if we wince from carpal tunnel syndrome of the soul at the repetitive stress of the same old stories - we may have settled somnolently into satisfaction, completion or understanding. The completed circle of the creche explains it all nicely. The pastor reads the right verses on Sunday and the family gets the right gifts and our team wins its bowl game and restlessness atomizes beneath the gentle vibrations of our Barcolounger.

But if we would just look again at the story, something might happen. To return to Barth once more, we “might find that astonishment wells up within (us) anew, or perhaps even for the first time.” We might actually enter the packed streets of a tiny town where Romans register the locals like so many ripe pigeons marked for the plucking, and where liberation theologians finger daggers in the shadows and mutter that “messiah” might mean no more than “God helps them that helps themselves,” and where stolid peasants simply sign up and pay off and wait for this latest wave of empire to wash back out to the sea of history and leave the land to them once again. We might even see past the bathrobe-and-blanket-draped deacons and fidgety children and off-key sopranos at the annual Christmas musical and begin to encounter Christmas as something that happened in a world where things happen, but was something that never happened in any world before. And in the middle of a strikingly familiar world we might feel a strikingly familiar ache and suddenly realize that we yearn to hear wild-eyed shepherd babbling on about angels they have heard on high.

We might find that, like those ancient herdsmen, we are literally moved. We cannot remain still. We are spurred to explore - and to repeat our crazy account that makes no logical sense unless we dare to parse the logic of wonder.

Shakespeare at Advent

December 4, 2009 by djackson.

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have express’d
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And, for they look’d but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Had eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

- Sonnet 106 by William Shakespeare

Bill got it right, of course; of course, he often did. But in this case I think he got it less right than he thought, and more right than he knew.

He was, of course, writing about some girl (or some guy for those whose Shakespearean scholarship swings that way), some mortal who, we can be pretty sure, couldn’t live up to the praise the Bard heaped on her. Lotta pressures - who COULD live up to one of Bill’s sonnets? His poem complains that earlier poets, moved by lesser subjects, couldn’t do justice to his beloved. I would argue that his beloved, when she finally came sashaying across the dimly-lit backstage of literary history, couldn’t do justice to the playwright’s rap.

So what do we decide when a poet’s praise out-values the market, leading to infatuation inflation? Well, we could turn cynical and decide that no movie is ever as good as the trailer. We could lament with another poet, Robert Burns, that “nothing gold can stay.” Or (and I don’t think I thought this up myself but I can’t remember where I read it), we could consider that perhaps some inspired emptiness buried deep within the psyche of the race yearns for a fulfillment that earthly experience doesn’t seem to offer. Maybe we offer idolatrous praise to over-blown mortals because, at the bottom of it all, we have been made, not to compliment one another, but to worship God.

I see their antique pen would have express’d
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring

Or, as Peter expressed it, “Unto whom it was revealed , that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into” - 1 Peter 1.12. This is the spirit of Philip the Evangelist as he thumbed a ride on the Ethiopian’s chariot, found the fellow gunnel-deep in Isaiah and, “began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus” (Acts 8.35). This is the tradition of Apollo who, barn-storming the sawdust trail of ancient Achaia, “mightily convinced the Jews, and that publickly, shewing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ” (Acts 18.28)

The real kicker here is that Jesus agreed to sit for this portrait. “You search the Scriptures,” he told the leading Bible scholars of his day, “because you think that in them you have eternal life ; it is these that testify about Me” (John 5.39). Our Lord himself laid direct claim to be the satisfaction of that something within all of humanity that, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, feels freer when it bends, and taller when it bows.

That’s what Advent comes down to: a looking back by which regain touch with those days before Christ came, when the world needed to do more praising than anyone they’d seen could take delivery on. The emptiness of Advent re-creates, not only our hunger to be saved, but our hunger to be struck into utter and delicious humility before One whose worship never overflows His worth.

But, of course, Advent also looks forward, to the Lord’s Second Coming. In that sense we recognize that while we now have a Savior who can handle all the adulation we can dish out, we lack the ability to praise Him according to His full worth. Advent urges us to long for that complete consummation when faith becomes sight, when, in the words of C. S. Lewis, truth ceases to be an abstract and we “can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom.”

Shakespeare saw that one coming, too. Earlier poets, he scoffed, spent their praise on unworthy objects. He, by contrast, feared to find his object too great for his praise:

And, for they look’d but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Had eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Or, as a lesser poet but a greater saint expressed it,

When this poor lisping, stammering tongue lies silent in the grave
Then in a nobler, sweeter song, I’ll sing Thy power to save.

And thus we pray at this Advent season: Even so, Lord Jesus, come.

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