I look for meaning
In an instant
As each moment I stand myself up against
The tick-marks on the doorjamb my hand marking head-high
Looking down and up and measuring
In a day
I lay me down to sleep and did I
Advance any skill or craft or goal that will
Keep my soul ‘til tomorrow
That should I not wake would this day serve my final testament
In a week
House at 7:00
Glee at 7:00
Supper at 5:30 so Mom can get to church
Bones at 7:00
No date night this week
Football all day
Don’t go to church
The week a wheel with a busted spoke da bump da bump da bump da bump
In a month
Four and a half rows of seven blocks stacked up
Each block startlingly empty (mostly)
Maybe a meeting here or there maybe one Sunday gig
But mostly blank like next year’s month instead of one just past
Knock them down and start stacking again, mostly empty
In a year
Just last year I protested all years all time keeping
As tyrannical artificial circular medieval reductionist superstitious shallow infantile
Stomping my foot holding my breath protesting
Just one more game I promise a quick one
Before nap time
In a life
Astounded at fifty-one and what have I done
Just to sit and remember each year if I can and
See if I can account for each one’s landmarks and passing
Are they distinct or have they molded together inseparable and confounded
Like different colors of playdough hastily pushed into tubs and forgotten
Maybe I could pry them apart
All dry and crumbly glued
In the future
Will I be remembered in a year or a decade or a century or am I
Truly anonymous except to parents and children and siblings and wife
Who don’t seem to count as much as peers and
Public acclaim being satisfying justifying
One’s rep stepping down the block the kids oohing and ahhing and stepping back
More gratifying more lasting in a moment than lineage or descent
In eternity
That my life should reverberate down all ages and eons
Past all human history when every achievement has eroded
Become sediment and rock and cut to make pavers and bricks for
Alien streets and monuments that erode and crumble and blow dusty on fading solar wind
Even to the last dying spark of starlight when light itself
Becomes absolutely cold and still and dark
And yet my echo whispering in that searing void
No less than this is meaning.
Thank you for reading.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
About Jesus' Birthday
Here’s a surprise: I don’t like Jesus’ birthday any better than my own, but for an equal and opposite reason. On the one hand, I don’t like my birthday because birth and death are enmeshed, but on the other hand, I don’t like most churches’ celebrations of Jesus birthday because they separate his birth from his death.
First, to review, I don’t like my birthday because it dredges up birth/death dread and, purporting to celebrate the day of one’s emergence, as it surely does in one’s early years, while the years mount one’s birthday becomes a grim countdown toward the last one, and no one ever talks about this other side of birthdays though birthday humor – and sometimes humor is a last-gasp honesty – usually points to it: you’re growing old, you’ve got grey hair (my friends sang this to my before I was ten) or numerous birthday cards that remind you of that inverse rule of aging: the more years the fewer functions, especially those functions one most wants to carry undiminished into one’s dotage (cards addressing these, though addressed to a sextuagenarian [say that fast and hear the irony] or septuagenarian, often feature someone young, nubile and half naked). Birthdays seem dishonest with a frosty, sugar coating: yay, another year, may be your last.
Now, to Jesus’ birthday: I see churches celebrating Jesus’ birth with no mention of his death. Good god, the horrors I’ve seen: come worship the Christ child, come kneel at the manger, come welcome the Babe (not the babe on the birthday card). And the pageants, excuses to parade the church’s children around in ridiculous costumes (if you were ever a sheep in one of these you know what I mean) and have them recite a conflation of Matthew and Luke with a little of John’s prologue thrown in (mercifully, Mark has proven particularly resistant to this harmony). The whole season of Advent I find particularly foolish, like Jesus is going to be born again (I love that theological irony) and surely not that Jesus is actually going to return some day ‘cause that would be way too eschatological for the mainlines (churches who look fervently for the Lord’s return usually don’t celebrate Christmas at all, at least in worship). This whole season reminds me of a medieval passion play for illiterates – the people could never understand the Scriptures so we’ll put on little vignettes to help them - and last time I checked most of us church-goers are literate enough to text or email each other though not so much with the Scriptures (so maybe this mess is a good thing after all), cause if we did understand the Scriptures we’d never sit still for so much of this nativity nonsense.
Now, after that rant I hope you’re saying, “Ok, wise guy, you tell me what the Scriptures say!” Oh, I’ve got you now, and I dare – I triple-dog dare you – not to admit even grudgingly when I’m through that I’ve got a point. If you have even a shred of self-respect you’ll concede now.
Ok, to the Scriptures. Jesus’ birth is mentioned just about exclusively in two gospels, Matthew and Luke. I think we can leave the prologue to John’s gospel and the couple of places where the epistles speak of Christ’s pre-existence out of the discussion, though those scriptures, one may easily argue, invariably include Christ’s post-existence, i.e. the descent and ascent of the divine-human figure. Matthew and Luke have explicit stories of Jesus’ birth, on which the churches base their Christmas services. My thesis: Matthew and Luke entwine Jesus’ birth inextricably with his death. Let’s start with Matthew and for ease of reference I’ll quote from the NIV.
Mary is found to be pregnant so Joseph is going to divorce her but sleeps on it and has a dream, one in which an angel visits him, and here’s what the angel says to Joseph and, concurrently, here’s what the narrator says to us readers:
“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
Now, I want you to set aside all your long theological or ecclesiastical training in how Jesus saves us from our sins and stick with Matthew’s gospel. Taking this last clause – “he will save his people from their sins” – how does this birth announcement enmesh Jesus’ birth and death? (You see it already, don’t you?) Note also that, aside from the narrator’s quote from Isaiah (which is actually kind of contradictory to the angel’s message, unless you can tolerate Jesus having two names – Jesus, which means “the Lord saves” and Immanuel, which means “God with us,” the latter name closing the gospel with Jesus telling his disciples “I am with you always,” which actually argues against the divine-man’s descent and return to heaven, since Jesus doesn’t go anyplace but stays here forever, see the problems with harmonizing?), this announcement and a brief sentence (“But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son”) are all we’ve got from Matthew about Jesus’ birth (please don’t get me started on “We Three Kings from Orient Are”). So you may be saying, “Jeff, with so little to go on, how can you argue that Jesus’ birth and death are inextricably entwined?”
I don’t want to go into great detail here, and am confident my short explanation will suffice to make my argument, but I do suggest you spend some time concording the words “save,” “people” and “sin” in Matthew’s gospel. I’m using Schmoller’s “Handkonkordanz zum griechischen Neuen Testament” primarily to intimidate you with German, though it’s way handy and fairly exhaustive as a pocket-sized concordance to the Greek NT. But using a concordance you’ll find these three words – save, people and sins – grouped in Matthew’s unique usage (I’m discounting here those places where Matthew explicitly uses Mark, since the author’s creation is usually more indicative of her intent than her quotes from other sources) in two places. The first, at the last supper, when Jesus describes a blessed cup of wine as “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” – and, remember, we’re talking a heavily Jewish context so you’ll have to read up on the use of blood in forgiveness of sins in the Hebrew Bible, as well as Passover celebrations, etc. This gets close to Jesus’ saving his people from their sins, though the reference to “many” is not so explicitly a reference to Jesus’ “people,” but you see where I’m going, right: those churches that celebrate the Lord’s Supper on Christmas Eve are heading in the right direction.
But that’s not the best part in Matthew. I encourage you to read up on the narrative use of irony in the first century and in Scripture, because the second, sure, rock-solid tie in between the angel’s telling Joseph how to name Jesus and the entwining of his birth with his death comes in the scene before Pilate. Pilate – a classically ruthless bastard to his subjects and a sycophantic suck-up to his superiors – asks the crowd of Jesus’ people – Pilate’s Jewish subjects – a question impossible to answer: “Which one do you want me to release to you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” Remember now – “Christ” is a pre-Christian term meaning “anointed one” and was used to refer to deliverers or kings, so I imagine Pilate just itching for the crowd to shout for a messiah so he can retaliate, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got your messiah right here!” I also imagine the crowd is way too smart to fall for such an obvious trick. And though the author seems apologetic for Pilate, ironically things are quite different. Think about the redemptive power of blood in Jewish sacrificial theology as you read this:
“When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’ All the people answered, ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’”
You will call his name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Jesus saves from sins through the covenant (no mention of a “new” covenant in Matthew), in which his blood atones. Pilate says, ironically, tragically, as do all who do not see both our complicity and blessedness in Jesus’ death, “I’m innocent (!) of his blood.” And way more tragically, this redemptive cry, “His blood be on us and our children,” rather than affirming that for its first century the Jesus movement was mostly a Jewish movement, led in later centuries to the Church’s persecution of Jesus’ own people. Call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. And lest you wish to argue that it is Jesus’ resurrection that saves his people and not his bloodshedding death, read this, unique to Matthew, from Jesus’ crucifixion:
“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”
You see, at Jesus’ death, the resurrection – the final deliverance from our sins – begins.
Now, I don’t want you to get hung up on whether Jesus actually saved his people in subsequent history. My point is the author of Matthew inextricably links Jesus’ birth with his death, so I don’t think the two should ever be separated (no Christmas without Easter, no Easter without Christmas, though I have serious reservations about the ways we celebrate both Christmas and Easter). And you may not find my argument about Matthew very convincing (remember: this is shorthand for a lot of scholarship that you can address with your own concordance and some basic exegesis). “Jeff, that’s a lot of words, they can mean anything, so what.” Sure, so let’s turn to Luke and address images instead of words.
Ah, Luke. Here’s where we get so much of our Christmas pageants – angels and shepherds and mangers and starry nights and noels. I want to concentrate on these verses from Luke’s birth narrative (I challenge you not to think of Linus as you read these):
“While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” (Ok, Linus was reciting from the King James version and I said I’d stick to the NIV, so the two are different enough that you may not have heard Linus at all).
Now, you and I are probably heavily influenced by Western European culture, especially in so traditional (meaning – straight from the Old Country) a matter as Christmas, so you’ve probably got in your mind a picture of your parents’ crèche from when you were young, which probably looks like a barn of some kind straight out of Germany or Scandinavia: wooded sides, thatched roof with the baby Jesus lying in a wooden feed trough. The author of Luke would never have had that image in mind, because it’ constituent parts would not exist for, I don’t know, a millennium or so. Indeed, if the author is telling the truth in the introduction, she has compared sources and “investigated everything from the beginning,” so she knows something about inns and mangers in Bethlehem of Jesus’ day (and actually for centuries thereafter), and the facts are these: wood was scarce, so was hay and wheat therefore so was thatch. But caves are abundant, especially in Bethlehem, they’re dry and cozy and they’ve made great homes from Jesus’ time to ours. And since we’re not talking housing standards such as we have in the U.S.A., but much smaller and simpler dwellings as humans have used well until very recently, and drawing on good archaeology from Bethlehem, the customary family cave had two main sections, one for people and the other for animals. Contrary to our expectations, the front of the two sections was reserved for people, the back for the animals (usually not very many animals) and, get this, the word usually translated “inn” (bringing to mind hotels and motels and quaint English inns, all anachronisms) means actually “higher room” or “upper room” (both Mark and Luke use this word to refer to the place Jesus ate his last supper!) and actually referred to the room for people (often a step or two higher than the deeper, lower room further back in the cave), so Mary and Joseph and the baby found no room in the people area (too many people in town because of the census) of a local family’s perhaps relative’s cave home and had to go further back in the cave.
So get this image in your mind: a cave with a trough hewn out of rock, Mary wrapping up Jesus with cloths and laying him down in it. The author wants to make sure that we remember this image, because she repeats it three times (“she wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger . . . this will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger . . . so they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger”). Now ask yourself where else in Luke’s gospel do we see a similar scene. Remember Joseph (there’s that name again) of Arimathea:
“Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body. Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock.”
The wondrous sign the shepherds saw – and all signs make us wonder not just about their magnificence but about their meaning – was a baby appearing as one entombed. I imagine that besides being inconvenient, using a manger for a crib would also bring a bit of superstitious creepiness to Jesus’ parents, like our using a baby’s casket for a bassinette. But the author understands – and wants us to understand – that, at least looking back, we cannot understanding Christ or what his life means without keeping both his birth and his death united. In neither Matthew nor Luke are we considering history: the actual events of Jesus’ birth are wrapped so completely in theology that Jesus’ history is unrecoverable. But the mere fact of Jesus’ being born is trivial and ordinary, in spite of those who claim there’s no proof Jesus ever existed. So is the mere fact of his being killed. What is important, ecstatically important, is that his birth and death and all they encompass are immensely meaningful, that Jesus in his life – birth, living, death – did all that was right, was always about God’s business, fulfilled God’s plan and, following the analogy from a prior post, changed the course of human history, including my own.
For one like I, so caught up in wondering if what I do with my time and life will ever mean anything, Scripture reminds me that Jesus’ life has great meaning and that, by joining my life with his even though that means a cross in my future, my life can mean something, too. But Scripture offers this hope through the conviction that from the very get-go Jesus’ death was foreseen and embraced, even in the earliest moments of his life, not as a problem to be overcome or an outcome to be avoided, but as a redemptive conclusion without which his saving life would be incomplete. Our celebrations of Jesus’ birthday are surely incomplete when we forget this. Thank you for reading.
First, to review, I don’t like my birthday because it dredges up birth/death dread and, purporting to celebrate the day of one’s emergence, as it surely does in one’s early years, while the years mount one’s birthday becomes a grim countdown toward the last one, and no one ever talks about this other side of birthdays though birthday humor – and sometimes humor is a last-gasp honesty – usually points to it: you’re growing old, you’ve got grey hair (my friends sang this to my before I was ten) or numerous birthday cards that remind you of that inverse rule of aging: the more years the fewer functions, especially those functions one most wants to carry undiminished into one’s dotage (cards addressing these, though addressed to a sextuagenarian [say that fast and hear the irony] or septuagenarian, often feature someone young, nubile and half naked). Birthdays seem dishonest with a frosty, sugar coating: yay, another year, may be your last.
Now, to Jesus’ birthday: I see churches celebrating Jesus’ birth with no mention of his death. Good god, the horrors I’ve seen: come worship the Christ child, come kneel at the manger, come welcome the Babe (not the babe on the birthday card). And the pageants, excuses to parade the church’s children around in ridiculous costumes (if you were ever a sheep in one of these you know what I mean) and have them recite a conflation of Matthew and Luke with a little of John’s prologue thrown in (mercifully, Mark has proven particularly resistant to this harmony). The whole season of Advent I find particularly foolish, like Jesus is going to be born again (I love that theological irony) and surely not that Jesus is actually going to return some day ‘cause that would be way too eschatological for the mainlines (churches who look fervently for the Lord’s return usually don’t celebrate Christmas at all, at least in worship). This whole season reminds me of a medieval passion play for illiterates – the people could never understand the Scriptures so we’ll put on little vignettes to help them - and last time I checked most of us church-goers are literate enough to text or email each other though not so much with the Scriptures (so maybe this mess is a good thing after all), cause if we did understand the Scriptures we’d never sit still for so much of this nativity nonsense.
Now, after that rant I hope you’re saying, “Ok, wise guy, you tell me what the Scriptures say!” Oh, I’ve got you now, and I dare – I triple-dog dare you – not to admit even grudgingly when I’m through that I’ve got a point. If you have even a shred of self-respect you’ll concede now.
Ok, to the Scriptures. Jesus’ birth is mentioned just about exclusively in two gospels, Matthew and Luke. I think we can leave the prologue to John’s gospel and the couple of places where the epistles speak of Christ’s pre-existence out of the discussion, though those scriptures, one may easily argue, invariably include Christ’s post-existence, i.e. the descent and ascent of the divine-human figure. Matthew and Luke have explicit stories of Jesus’ birth, on which the churches base their Christmas services. My thesis: Matthew and Luke entwine Jesus’ birth inextricably with his death. Let’s start with Matthew and for ease of reference I’ll quote from the NIV.
Mary is found to be pregnant so Joseph is going to divorce her but sleeps on it and has a dream, one in which an angel visits him, and here’s what the angel says to Joseph and, concurrently, here’s what the narrator says to us readers:
“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
Now, I want you to set aside all your long theological or ecclesiastical training in how Jesus saves us from our sins and stick with Matthew’s gospel. Taking this last clause – “he will save his people from their sins” – how does this birth announcement enmesh Jesus’ birth and death? (You see it already, don’t you?) Note also that, aside from the narrator’s quote from Isaiah (which is actually kind of contradictory to the angel’s message, unless you can tolerate Jesus having two names – Jesus, which means “the Lord saves” and Immanuel, which means “God with us,” the latter name closing the gospel with Jesus telling his disciples “I am with you always,” which actually argues against the divine-man’s descent and return to heaven, since Jesus doesn’t go anyplace but stays here forever, see the problems with harmonizing?), this announcement and a brief sentence (“But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son”) are all we’ve got from Matthew about Jesus’ birth (please don’t get me started on “We Three Kings from Orient Are”). So you may be saying, “Jeff, with so little to go on, how can you argue that Jesus’ birth and death are inextricably entwined?”
I don’t want to go into great detail here, and am confident my short explanation will suffice to make my argument, but I do suggest you spend some time concording the words “save,” “people” and “sin” in Matthew’s gospel. I’m using Schmoller’s “Handkonkordanz zum griechischen Neuen Testament” primarily to intimidate you with German, though it’s way handy and fairly exhaustive as a pocket-sized concordance to the Greek NT. But using a concordance you’ll find these three words – save, people and sins – grouped in Matthew’s unique usage (I’m discounting here those places where Matthew explicitly uses Mark, since the author’s creation is usually more indicative of her intent than her quotes from other sources) in two places. The first, at the last supper, when Jesus describes a blessed cup of wine as “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” – and, remember, we’re talking a heavily Jewish context so you’ll have to read up on the use of blood in forgiveness of sins in the Hebrew Bible, as well as Passover celebrations, etc. This gets close to Jesus’ saving his people from their sins, though the reference to “many” is not so explicitly a reference to Jesus’ “people,” but you see where I’m going, right: those churches that celebrate the Lord’s Supper on Christmas Eve are heading in the right direction.
But that’s not the best part in Matthew. I encourage you to read up on the narrative use of irony in the first century and in Scripture, because the second, sure, rock-solid tie in between the angel’s telling Joseph how to name Jesus and the entwining of his birth with his death comes in the scene before Pilate. Pilate – a classically ruthless bastard to his subjects and a sycophantic suck-up to his superiors – asks the crowd of Jesus’ people – Pilate’s Jewish subjects – a question impossible to answer: “Which one do you want me to release to you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” Remember now – “Christ” is a pre-Christian term meaning “anointed one” and was used to refer to deliverers or kings, so I imagine Pilate just itching for the crowd to shout for a messiah so he can retaliate, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got your messiah right here!” I also imagine the crowd is way too smart to fall for such an obvious trick. And though the author seems apologetic for Pilate, ironically things are quite different. Think about the redemptive power of blood in Jewish sacrificial theology as you read this:
“When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’ All the people answered, ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’”
You will call his name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Jesus saves from sins through the covenant (no mention of a “new” covenant in Matthew), in which his blood atones. Pilate says, ironically, tragically, as do all who do not see both our complicity and blessedness in Jesus’ death, “I’m innocent (!) of his blood.” And way more tragically, this redemptive cry, “His blood be on us and our children,” rather than affirming that for its first century the Jesus movement was mostly a Jewish movement, led in later centuries to the Church’s persecution of Jesus’ own people. Call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. And lest you wish to argue that it is Jesus’ resurrection that saves his people and not his bloodshedding death, read this, unique to Matthew, from Jesus’ crucifixion:
“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”
You see, at Jesus’ death, the resurrection – the final deliverance from our sins – begins.
Now, I don’t want you to get hung up on whether Jesus actually saved his people in subsequent history. My point is the author of Matthew inextricably links Jesus’ birth with his death, so I don’t think the two should ever be separated (no Christmas without Easter, no Easter without Christmas, though I have serious reservations about the ways we celebrate both Christmas and Easter). And you may not find my argument about Matthew very convincing (remember: this is shorthand for a lot of scholarship that you can address with your own concordance and some basic exegesis). “Jeff, that’s a lot of words, they can mean anything, so what.” Sure, so let’s turn to Luke and address images instead of words.
Ah, Luke. Here’s where we get so much of our Christmas pageants – angels and shepherds and mangers and starry nights and noels. I want to concentrate on these verses from Luke’s birth narrative (I challenge you not to think of Linus as you read these):
“While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” (Ok, Linus was reciting from the King James version and I said I’d stick to the NIV, so the two are different enough that you may not have heard Linus at all).
Now, you and I are probably heavily influenced by Western European culture, especially in so traditional (meaning – straight from the Old Country) a matter as Christmas, so you’ve probably got in your mind a picture of your parents’ crèche from when you were young, which probably looks like a barn of some kind straight out of Germany or Scandinavia: wooded sides, thatched roof with the baby Jesus lying in a wooden feed trough. The author of Luke would never have had that image in mind, because it’ constituent parts would not exist for, I don’t know, a millennium or so. Indeed, if the author is telling the truth in the introduction, she has compared sources and “investigated everything from the beginning,” so she knows something about inns and mangers in Bethlehem of Jesus’ day (and actually for centuries thereafter), and the facts are these: wood was scarce, so was hay and wheat therefore so was thatch. But caves are abundant, especially in Bethlehem, they’re dry and cozy and they’ve made great homes from Jesus’ time to ours. And since we’re not talking housing standards such as we have in the U.S.A., but much smaller and simpler dwellings as humans have used well until very recently, and drawing on good archaeology from Bethlehem, the customary family cave had two main sections, one for people and the other for animals. Contrary to our expectations, the front of the two sections was reserved for people, the back for the animals (usually not very many animals) and, get this, the word usually translated “inn” (bringing to mind hotels and motels and quaint English inns, all anachronisms) means actually “higher room” or “upper room” (both Mark and Luke use this word to refer to the place Jesus ate his last supper!) and actually referred to the room for people (often a step or two higher than the deeper, lower room further back in the cave), so Mary and Joseph and the baby found no room in the people area (too many people in town because of the census) of a local family’s perhaps relative’s cave home and had to go further back in the cave.
So get this image in your mind: a cave with a trough hewn out of rock, Mary wrapping up Jesus with cloths and laying him down in it. The author wants to make sure that we remember this image, because she repeats it three times (“she wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger . . . this will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger . . . so they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger”). Now ask yourself where else in Luke’s gospel do we see a similar scene. Remember Joseph (there’s that name again) of Arimathea:
“Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body. Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock.”
The wondrous sign the shepherds saw – and all signs make us wonder not just about their magnificence but about their meaning – was a baby appearing as one entombed. I imagine that besides being inconvenient, using a manger for a crib would also bring a bit of superstitious creepiness to Jesus’ parents, like our using a baby’s casket for a bassinette. But the author understands – and wants us to understand – that, at least looking back, we cannot understanding Christ or what his life means without keeping both his birth and his death united. In neither Matthew nor Luke are we considering history: the actual events of Jesus’ birth are wrapped so completely in theology that Jesus’ history is unrecoverable. But the mere fact of Jesus’ being born is trivial and ordinary, in spite of those who claim there’s no proof Jesus ever existed. So is the mere fact of his being killed. What is important, ecstatically important, is that his birth and death and all they encompass are immensely meaningful, that Jesus in his life – birth, living, death – did all that was right, was always about God’s business, fulfilled God’s plan and, following the analogy from a prior post, changed the course of human history, including my own.
For one like I, so caught up in wondering if what I do with my time and life will ever mean anything, Scripture reminds me that Jesus’ life has great meaning and that, by joining my life with his even though that means a cross in my future, my life can mean something, too. But Scripture offers this hope through the conviction that from the very get-go Jesus’ death was foreseen and embraced, even in the earliest moments of his life, not as a problem to be overcome or an outcome to be avoided, but as a redemptive conclusion without which his saving life would be incomplete. Our celebrations of Jesus’ birthday are surely incomplete when we forget this. Thank you for reading.
Friday, December 24, 2010
About My Fear
“You’re scared and a coward!”
“You mean you’re not scared?”
“Sure I’m scared, I’m not an idiot.”
“Then why am I a coward and you’re not?”
“You’re scared so you run, but I’m scared so I fight!”
I can’t catch my breath, like air has left me but I’m holding my breath, too, I feel my heart thumping and hair on my arms and back and neck standing up goose-pimply, all my attention riveted on something I don’t understand, something dangerous, unknown, trying real hard to identify it but meanwhile wanting to run so bad just get the hell away before something gets me or just that it would show itself so I can stomp the living shit out of it . . . that’s fear. Deep in our heads, down in our brain stems sits an ancient trigger fundamental to life’s long survival, a toggle (on/off) that can override higher brain functions instantly sending us into rage or terror, desperate fight or flight. You know this, you’ve felt it many, many times, perhaps (like me) you’ve studied basic psychology so you get it, like me you’ve lived with fear all your life and do quite well, thank you. So if you’ve read my last post(s) you may have asked yourself, “Why in the world was he afraid of his birthday?” or, if you read to its end, “Why in the world is he afraid of cooperating in celebrating his birthday?”
Look, I’ve always found something creepy about birthdays (creepy being that pre-fear feeling, when skin begins to tighten up and tingle and move, usually away from extremities and toward one’s heart). Perhaps it has something to do with mom or having a mom and asking those questions early “Where did I come from?” so a nervous parent who wants to be honest but not go into anatomical detail answers “From mommy’s tummy” like she spit me up one day and boy do I remember how bad that felt. Or maybe because as a small child I spent so much time anonymous (this was before children were so forefronted) and unremarked until one day suddenly the white spotlight has me blinded and blinking in confusion. But allow that child to grow just a couple of years and suddenly he’s pondering one of life’s fundamental mysteries: I came from nothing (or almost nothing: “The best part of you ran down the crack of your mother’s ass!” and just thinking about mom reading this brings up a whole lot of things Freud talked about), literally didn’t exist, actually was not in every way, how can it be that before my birth (and the nine month’s gestation, since we’ve learned basic anatomy) I didn’t exist at all? Think about that a bit, you’ll find it a scary thought.
Pascal noticed, famously, that just thinking certain thoughts or imagining a scary event can make us feel the fear we would if we were actually experiencing that event. That’d be a trivial psychological factoid except that Pascal built the Enlightenment on it, hoping to supplant the messy lower mental functions with pure, crystalline thought: because I think (and not because I feel) I know I exist. But his method held its own undoing, because that rational ability to think so that one can postulate and induce conclusions is the very same ability that can make one shiver and squirm by simply imagining someone dumping a snake in one’s lap (more with the Freud). And Pascal stayed pretty basic, whereas Schleiermacher went straight and deep to one particular thought and it’s feeling consort, that of absolute dependence. Thinking deeply – which means thinking so that one feels, too – about not existing before conception or about falling into dust after living leads one to feel a certain way, according to Schleiermacher, a way he described as feeling absolutely dependent on something besides myself for my existence, and not dependent in a good way but in a helpless, can’t do anything for myself way. Both Pascal and Schleiermacher recognized that some thoughts seem to open onto an abyss, where we feel not just fear and want to run or fight but where we feel like we’re going to fall, like when you’re standing on a rock bluff or a high building’s observation platform and you look down and feel that yawning void at your feet and imagine a great sucking force that if you let go will pull you over and you’re rushing down faster and faster, some thoughts threaten with falling into . . . confusion, inhumanity, insanity, into being anything but rational, an animal gibbering.
Frank Herbert imagined such a place at each person’s inner core, a place from which the Bene Gesserit recoiled in terror, could not face. That’s a non-cognitive place, one both Pascal and Schleiermacher would recognize, so I think it’s worth our attention, too. Some thoughts by their form or content lead us down to a brain-stem fear response where they grab handfuls of that stuff then swerve back up into our higher cognitive functions coupling fear-response with our imagination and our speculative reason and leaving us feeling – this is a feeling, now, and not a thought - like a huge void has suddenly yawned open, that we really don’t understand exactly what’s going on but that something big is happening and we sense just a tiny bit of it, and that terror threatens to shake us to pieces but we’re survivors so we take that tiny bit that gives us the briefest, slimmest glimpse of how awfully complicated, complex, way beyond us it is and using it we construct a way that we – and I mean the personal, individual first person singular use of “we” meaning “me” – fit into this immense reality, and if the fit is right and feels solid, then we feel not terror but amazement, overwhelming and grateful astonishment. When we feel that, we’ve moved through fear into awe.
Awe respects the abyss beneath certain thoughts, or questions, or assertions. “Respect” is a paltry word here, I wanted to write “reveres” but that feels wrong. We feel awe when we find ourselves a place in abysmal thoughts, and these are thoughts, mind you, awe is a thinking person’s response, even a dervish after twirling twenty hours though deep in ecstasy does not trip over into awe unless she thinks about that ecstasy’s place in the world, how that ecstasy points to another, deeper reality permeating this basal, mundane one, then the abyss opens and she feels fear perhaps terror but when she makes the connection, the personal connection between that abyss and her world she feels not fear nor terror but awe. Paul Tillich called questions that connect us to the abyss “ultimate questions,” dealing with “ultimate concerns,” concerns about our tiny, individual place in a huge, abominably huge and complex universe. Tillich’s ultimate questions are questions of meaning and he postulated a “ground of all being” on which our most terror-filled experiences ultimately rest, a ground in which terror is transformed into awe because no matter how huge the abyss, underneath the abyss is some place where we mean something.
Ultimate questions about birth and death are questions of meaning: what do I mean, what will my life mean in the great river of human history? I’m born into this huge stream of humanity, I die out of it, and what’s left over? I think of Tillich’s “ground of all being” like the bed of a river, a really big river that encompasses all time and space and everything in it. Which is more the river, the bed or the water that flows through it? The bed is relatively stable (floods may change the course of a river suddenly, the regular flow of the river changes its course gradually) and determinative of the river’s contours, even the eddies and swirls reflect river bed topographics. I don’t find Tillich’s ground all that comforting (in terms of transforming terror into awe) because it’s rather impersonal. Imagine me, an individual, as a drop or a bucket or even a bathtub dumped into the Mississippi. What does that one drop or bucket or bathtub of water mean in the scale of the river? Perhaps it’s my arrogance, but if that one additional drop or bucket doesn’t make the river swell so that it changes course (perhaps not dramatically, but at least somewhere along its great length), that it interacts with and changes the river bed and moves even the slightest bit into a new direction (just adding to the flood, just flowing right along seem little more than inertia or gravity), forming a new curve or bend, then in spite of the ground/bed that shapes the river I don’t see how one life can mean very much. And in spite of Tillich’s pastoral concern to comfort us in modern terms, that big ol’ river may be no more than life itself in all its myriad forms and all its long history, and birth and death – that dynamic that terrifies me so much – may be nothing more than a very successful strategy for life to get more life, damn the details. And though life’s long evolution is awesome to conceive, it’s also terrifying in its brute impersonality.
What can one life mean in the three-billion-year history of life (at least on this planet)? That’s the subject of all biography and autobiography and every birthday party you or I have attended. You bet I fear birthdays, not because of cake or singing or presents or the inexorable addition of years, but because of the question that fuels the celebration: what do I mean? What can one life mean? That’s a terrible question, one from which any sane person should recoil. The challenge is to transform it into an awesome question, one resplendent with possibilities, to ask, “Can one drop move that great river” and in spite size and time to say, “Yes!” and here’s how. Thank you for reading.
“You mean you’re not scared?”
“Sure I’m scared, I’m not an idiot.”
“Then why am I a coward and you’re not?”
“You’re scared so you run, but I’m scared so I fight!”
I can’t catch my breath, like air has left me but I’m holding my breath, too, I feel my heart thumping and hair on my arms and back and neck standing up goose-pimply, all my attention riveted on something I don’t understand, something dangerous, unknown, trying real hard to identify it but meanwhile wanting to run so bad just get the hell away before something gets me or just that it would show itself so I can stomp the living shit out of it . . . that’s fear. Deep in our heads, down in our brain stems sits an ancient trigger fundamental to life’s long survival, a toggle (on/off) that can override higher brain functions instantly sending us into rage or terror, desperate fight or flight. You know this, you’ve felt it many, many times, perhaps (like me) you’ve studied basic psychology so you get it, like me you’ve lived with fear all your life and do quite well, thank you. So if you’ve read my last post(s) you may have asked yourself, “Why in the world was he afraid of his birthday?” or, if you read to its end, “Why in the world is he afraid of cooperating in celebrating his birthday?”
Look, I’ve always found something creepy about birthdays (creepy being that pre-fear feeling, when skin begins to tighten up and tingle and move, usually away from extremities and toward one’s heart). Perhaps it has something to do with mom or having a mom and asking those questions early “Where did I come from?” so a nervous parent who wants to be honest but not go into anatomical detail answers “From mommy’s tummy” like she spit me up one day and boy do I remember how bad that felt. Or maybe because as a small child I spent so much time anonymous (this was before children were so forefronted) and unremarked until one day suddenly the white spotlight has me blinded and blinking in confusion. But allow that child to grow just a couple of years and suddenly he’s pondering one of life’s fundamental mysteries: I came from nothing (or almost nothing: “The best part of you ran down the crack of your mother’s ass!” and just thinking about mom reading this brings up a whole lot of things Freud talked about), literally didn’t exist, actually was not in every way, how can it be that before my birth (and the nine month’s gestation, since we’ve learned basic anatomy) I didn’t exist at all? Think about that a bit, you’ll find it a scary thought.
Pascal noticed, famously, that just thinking certain thoughts or imagining a scary event can make us feel the fear we would if we were actually experiencing that event. That’d be a trivial psychological factoid except that Pascal built the Enlightenment on it, hoping to supplant the messy lower mental functions with pure, crystalline thought: because I think (and not because I feel) I know I exist. But his method held its own undoing, because that rational ability to think so that one can postulate and induce conclusions is the very same ability that can make one shiver and squirm by simply imagining someone dumping a snake in one’s lap (more with the Freud). And Pascal stayed pretty basic, whereas Schleiermacher went straight and deep to one particular thought and it’s feeling consort, that of absolute dependence. Thinking deeply – which means thinking so that one feels, too – about not existing before conception or about falling into dust after living leads one to feel a certain way, according to Schleiermacher, a way he described as feeling absolutely dependent on something besides myself for my existence, and not dependent in a good way but in a helpless, can’t do anything for myself way. Both Pascal and Schleiermacher recognized that some thoughts seem to open onto an abyss, where we feel not just fear and want to run or fight but where we feel like we’re going to fall, like when you’re standing on a rock bluff or a high building’s observation platform and you look down and feel that yawning void at your feet and imagine a great sucking force that if you let go will pull you over and you’re rushing down faster and faster, some thoughts threaten with falling into . . . confusion, inhumanity, insanity, into being anything but rational, an animal gibbering.
Frank Herbert imagined such a place at each person’s inner core, a place from which the Bene Gesserit recoiled in terror, could not face. That’s a non-cognitive place, one both Pascal and Schleiermacher would recognize, so I think it’s worth our attention, too. Some thoughts by their form or content lead us down to a brain-stem fear response where they grab handfuls of that stuff then swerve back up into our higher cognitive functions coupling fear-response with our imagination and our speculative reason and leaving us feeling – this is a feeling, now, and not a thought - like a huge void has suddenly yawned open, that we really don’t understand exactly what’s going on but that something big is happening and we sense just a tiny bit of it, and that terror threatens to shake us to pieces but we’re survivors so we take that tiny bit that gives us the briefest, slimmest glimpse of how awfully complicated, complex, way beyond us it is and using it we construct a way that we – and I mean the personal, individual first person singular use of “we” meaning “me” – fit into this immense reality, and if the fit is right and feels solid, then we feel not terror but amazement, overwhelming and grateful astonishment. When we feel that, we’ve moved through fear into awe.
Awe respects the abyss beneath certain thoughts, or questions, or assertions. “Respect” is a paltry word here, I wanted to write “reveres” but that feels wrong. We feel awe when we find ourselves a place in abysmal thoughts, and these are thoughts, mind you, awe is a thinking person’s response, even a dervish after twirling twenty hours though deep in ecstasy does not trip over into awe unless she thinks about that ecstasy’s place in the world, how that ecstasy points to another, deeper reality permeating this basal, mundane one, then the abyss opens and she feels fear perhaps terror but when she makes the connection, the personal connection between that abyss and her world she feels not fear nor terror but awe. Paul Tillich called questions that connect us to the abyss “ultimate questions,” dealing with “ultimate concerns,” concerns about our tiny, individual place in a huge, abominably huge and complex universe. Tillich’s ultimate questions are questions of meaning and he postulated a “ground of all being” on which our most terror-filled experiences ultimately rest, a ground in which terror is transformed into awe because no matter how huge the abyss, underneath the abyss is some place where we mean something.
Ultimate questions about birth and death are questions of meaning: what do I mean, what will my life mean in the great river of human history? I’m born into this huge stream of humanity, I die out of it, and what’s left over? I think of Tillich’s “ground of all being” like the bed of a river, a really big river that encompasses all time and space and everything in it. Which is more the river, the bed or the water that flows through it? The bed is relatively stable (floods may change the course of a river suddenly, the regular flow of the river changes its course gradually) and determinative of the river’s contours, even the eddies and swirls reflect river bed topographics. I don’t find Tillich’s ground all that comforting (in terms of transforming terror into awe) because it’s rather impersonal. Imagine me, an individual, as a drop or a bucket or even a bathtub dumped into the Mississippi. What does that one drop or bucket or bathtub of water mean in the scale of the river? Perhaps it’s my arrogance, but if that one additional drop or bucket doesn’t make the river swell so that it changes course (perhaps not dramatically, but at least somewhere along its great length), that it interacts with and changes the river bed and moves even the slightest bit into a new direction (just adding to the flood, just flowing right along seem little more than inertia or gravity), forming a new curve or bend, then in spite of the ground/bed that shapes the river I don’t see how one life can mean very much. And in spite of Tillich’s pastoral concern to comfort us in modern terms, that big ol’ river may be no more than life itself in all its myriad forms and all its long history, and birth and death – that dynamic that terrifies me so much – may be nothing more than a very successful strategy for life to get more life, damn the details. And though life’s long evolution is awesome to conceive, it’s also terrifying in its brute impersonality.
What can one life mean in the three-billion-year history of life (at least on this planet)? That’s the subject of all biography and autobiography and every birthday party you or I have attended. You bet I fear birthdays, not because of cake or singing or presents or the inexorable addition of years, but because of the question that fuels the celebration: what do I mean? What can one life mean? That’s a terrible question, one from which any sane person should recoil. The challenge is to transform it into an awesome question, one resplendent with possibilities, to ask, “Can one drop move that great river” and in spite size and time to say, “Yes!” and here’s how. Thank you for reading.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
About My Birthday #3
(I can’t help myself my mom for two decades at least has asked each one of us what kind of cake we want for our birthdays which she then bakes except when she doesn’t have time then she picks one up at a local grocery store bakery so never liking to celebrate my birthday I’ve always picked Lady Baltimore cake whose tricky icing always throws my mom)
(this is interesting in a family-dynamical way my older brother and I tried to replace the birthday standard with one derived from the viral badgers song that was going around the ‘net, oh, around 2004, but instead of “badgers, badgers, badgers . . . mushroom, mushroom . . . snake, snake” we’d sing “birthday, birthday, birthday . . . ice cream, ice cream . . . cake, cake, oh, it’s a cake” but that would mean my brother and I would be establishing a birthday tradition, something my mom could never allow so she came up with a different tune “happy happy birthday to you to you to you, hey!” which we’ve sung since oh 2006 though I and perhaps my brother thought ours was way more hip)
(“everybody” means in this memory my mom my grandmother and my older brother and not my father since he and mom divorced when I was a year and a half old so you have to picture four of us in November 1962 or ’63 and if ’63 then JFK had just been assassinated so that adds another layer)
(picture a 1200 square foot post-WWII stick built wooden-shingled 3/1 “ranch” if you can call a cramped drafty greatroom kitchen bed bed bed bath a “ranch” that’s six rooms and the kitchen was separated from the greatroom only by a half-wall so when I say “den” I mean one of the bedrooms though come to think of it if mom had a bedroom and by brother and I shared one and the third was a den then my grandmother must have lived elsewhere)
(I recognize that I’ve the advantage of having a better than most memory since I swear and my grandmother can corroborate that I remember an event from when I was 2 weeks yes that’s 2 weeks old and a year and a half and two years etc. though I may have constructed false memories)
(I’m from Alabama so when and if we’d go to the beach we’d go to PCB though my grandmother’s sister and her family lived in Florala so that was closer to Fort Walton beach so my pier memory may be from FWB instead of PCB which was much sparser in those years – think of the old black and white Cracker Jack commercial and how everything seems sear and empty and hot and dry that’s my memory of FWB)
(my mom was dragging me out you understand because back then even though Dr. Benjamin Spock had already spoken very wise words about childrearing but to my knowledge my mom never read his book so she was dragging me out to help me “get over” my fright though to be fair I didn’t know how to swim and in fact wouldn’t learn until I was thirteen in the pool at the Spyglass Inn in PCB)
(I know you’ve seen pictures like the one I just saw yesterday no lie of a little child sitting on Santa’s knee and wailing absolutely wailing in terror well that was me after waiting in a long line at a department store this is before malls you see and thinking I’d be brave but by the time I’m perched on a stranger’s knee which is way intimate and the stranger is more strange by wearing a fake beard we all knew it was fake and anyway in how many strangers’ laps did you sit when you were that young)
(and how many times do you get to hear your family sing unless you’re one of those from a musical family where everyone plays and instrument and you’ve got all four or five parts covered I imagine some families even have someone on the descant)
(believe me divorce in Alabama in the early sixties though known was extremely rare and carried a lot of shame not just for my mom and my grandmother and my great-grandmother all divorcees but also for my brother and me though of course we didn’t understand shame the way I do now after a lot of socio-anthropological research as biblical hermeneutic)
(in my memory is a picture of Jack Dempsey or I should say in my memory of my mind’s eye at the time I remembered a picture of Jack Dempsey so I adopted his rather classical and stylized boxing stance though my torso was not bare and I was not wearing tights and knee-high boxing boots)
(when I say “maid” I’m mean one of two women from a nearby African-American neighborhood this was the early 1960’s in Alabama so neighborhoods were largely segregated as they are in most places in the United States still to this day to our shame but either Miss Barbara or Mrs. Pearl would “sit” us while my mother was at work because she had to work because there was no man in the house so she could stay home and raise us)
(today we say “assaulted” which is by no means inaccurate)
(one could call the former “fearing fear” which is alliterative and pithy and is also a form of fear too)
(though honestly though mice seem to have a sufficient amount of fear they do seem to be preoccupied a lot of the time and not necessarily vigilant at least from the expressions on their faces when I empty the traps we have to set because we live in the middle of a field so we have field mice taking advantage of the warm and dry house we’ve built but from their expressions they don’t seem to have anticipated the trap’s snapping their skulls or necks or backs in two so I can’t imagine it’d be all that different if a cat were to pounce from the mouse’s perspective out of the blue)
(though children the age she was when she wrote this often come to a painful awareness of death of the fact that we’re all going to die some day for me that realization came oddly enough from watching “The Greatest Show on Earth” at the part where the trapeze artist tries a triple somersault without a net and he or his catcher misses the grab and he falls to the ground and injures his right arm ending his circus career though in Hollywood fashion he eventually gets back the use of his arm and flies again but for some reason I understood right then our mortal frailty explicitly in terms of my mom mind you I knew then that she’d die some day and that there was nothing I could do about it I was six or seven at the time and after that I’d have nightmares about being stranded on the roof of our house with me and mom and my brother surrounded by a rising flood and knowing that I was the one who would have to swim my mom to safety and I’d have to choose her over my brother and at this time I still didn’t know how to swim though ironically both my mom and my brother did so who’s saving whom)
(if I’m honest not even by avoiding my birthday)
(and yes I think having crossed a half a century I can speak about when I was a child and not expect the chortle I got from an English professor in college who read one of my poems that had the line “when I was a child” and thought I had not lived long enough to write about reflecting on my childhood being only twenty-one at the time well she’s dead now and I just turned fifty-one so I think I’ve got some perspective and I mean no disrespect to her by mentioning that she’s dead now and for those of you who were at Maryville the same time or around the same time I was there I’m not talking about Dr. Blair for whom I have the greatest admiration and still a bit of a crush and who died a couple of years ago in a nursing home near Birmingham and I didn’t know she was ill or I would have tried to see her)
(and honestly I’m trying to be honest here)
(too many sloppy tenets for me like when does one get a soul at conception or at birth what makes a soul immortal do animals have one when does it leave a dead body what does it look like what does it weigh etc.)
(by and large though being multi-valent one can find a lot of different things in Scripture and surely one can find references to something that sounds like our modern or post-modern conception of an immortal soul though really we’re talking about the modern conception of soul in that a soul is an immaterial identity and animating force that on the death of the body persists with all our memories and personality whereas the post-modern conception of soul and its persistence after physical death sound more like composting)
(and in those places primarily in Luke and Acts both written by the same author you understand one may argue and many have just ask me for a bibliography since this is my field that the authors of these instances are trying to be accommodating to a Graeco-Roman culture steeped in belief in an immortal soul though the more middle-Eastern convictions of most of those writing Scripture embraced the body as complete and concrete with the soul referring to the combination of the body and the Deity’s animating breath or spirit or wind)
(at least among the cognoscenti in the PC(USA) my own ordaining denomination though if you pressed very few of us Presbyterians would either know or believe my reading of Scripture above though it’s seriously right)
(reading such amateurish profundity in comments to news stories where you can log on and comment with an alias so that no one can actually find you and tell you how if you’d taken at least one religion course in college you’d know how ignorant you are and would keep your ignorance to yourself always makes me both laugh and feel frustrated and please know when I say “you” I’m not accusing you dear reader of this essay but I’m using “you” in that more general second-person universal sense)
(if you’d taken even just that introductory course in college you’d know this)
(and those were in high school where I was a part of a deeply faithful though young so young church youth group and I did believe wholly in my immortal soul and its sure future rest in the arms of God)
(though there have been more times that I haven’t attended church regularly which should be distinguished from “being religious” but to be more precise I would say “I’ve always been firmly pious” because “pious” is a technical term referring to a person’s being committed to living a faithful life and holding faithful tenets about God and the meaning of life)
(my nagging depression low-grade to be sure dates from that period)
(best described in Sartre’s “Nausea” if you’ve read it and if not please do and you’ll hopefully feel existential nausea which is quite different from simply being nauseated)
(believe me, television is a potent soporific against dreading death)
(and that is still a possibility only committed atheists argue otherwise and they have quite a job proving God does not exist the most they can argue is disbelieving in God’s existence is a better alternative to its obverse)
(I certainly did not consider this a probability)
(though one can say quite a bit more about the former, and I may)
(again, “Preacher, where’s your faith?”)
(this is interesting in a family-dynamical way my older brother and I tried to replace the birthday standard with one derived from the viral badgers song that was going around the ‘net, oh, around 2004, but instead of “badgers, badgers, badgers . . . mushroom, mushroom . . . snake, snake” we’d sing “birthday, birthday, birthday . . . ice cream, ice cream . . . cake, cake, oh, it’s a cake” but that would mean my brother and I would be establishing a birthday tradition, something my mom could never allow so she came up with a different tune “happy happy birthday to you to you to you, hey!” which we’ve sung since oh 2006 though I and perhaps my brother thought ours was way more hip)
(“everybody” means in this memory my mom my grandmother and my older brother and not my father since he and mom divorced when I was a year and a half old so you have to picture four of us in November 1962 or ’63 and if ’63 then JFK had just been assassinated so that adds another layer)
(picture a 1200 square foot post-WWII stick built wooden-shingled 3/1 “ranch” if you can call a cramped drafty greatroom kitchen bed bed bed bath a “ranch” that’s six rooms and the kitchen was separated from the greatroom only by a half-wall so when I say “den” I mean one of the bedrooms though come to think of it if mom had a bedroom and by brother and I shared one and the third was a den then my grandmother must have lived elsewhere)
(I recognize that I’ve the advantage of having a better than most memory since I swear and my grandmother can corroborate that I remember an event from when I was 2 weeks yes that’s 2 weeks old and a year and a half and two years etc. though I may have constructed false memories)
(I’m from Alabama so when and if we’d go to the beach we’d go to PCB though my grandmother’s sister and her family lived in Florala so that was closer to Fort Walton beach so my pier memory may be from FWB instead of PCB which was much sparser in those years – think of the old black and white Cracker Jack commercial and how everything seems sear and empty and hot and dry that’s my memory of FWB)
(my mom was dragging me out you understand because back then even though Dr. Benjamin Spock had already spoken very wise words about childrearing but to my knowledge my mom never read his book so she was dragging me out to help me “get over” my fright though to be fair I didn’t know how to swim and in fact wouldn’t learn until I was thirteen in the pool at the Spyglass Inn in PCB)
(I know you’ve seen pictures like the one I just saw yesterday no lie of a little child sitting on Santa’s knee and wailing absolutely wailing in terror well that was me after waiting in a long line at a department store this is before malls you see and thinking I’d be brave but by the time I’m perched on a stranger’s knee which is way intimate and the stranger is more strange by wearing a fake beard we all knew it was fake and anyway in how many strangers’ laps did you sit when you were that young)
(and how many times do you get to hear your family sing unless you’re one of those from a musical family where everyone plays and instrument and you’ve got all four or five parts covered I imagine some families even have someone on the descant)
(believe me divorce in Alabama in the early sixties though known was extremely rare and carried a lot of shame not just for my mom and my grandmother and my great-grandmother all divorcees but also for my brother and me though of course we didn’t understand shame the way I do now after a lot of socio-anthropological research as biblical hermeneutic)
(in my memory is a picture of Jack Dempsey or I should say in my memory of my mind’s eye at the time I remembered a picture of Jack Dempsey so I adopted his rather classical and stylized boxing stance though my torso was not bare and I was not wearing tights and knee-high boxing boots)
(when I say “maid” I’m mean one of two women from a nearby African-American neighborhood this was the early 1960’s in Alabama so neighborhoods were largely segregated as they are in most places in the United States still to this day to our shame but either Miss Barbara or Mrs. Pearl would “sit” us while my mother was at work because she had to work because there was no man in the house so she could stay home and raise us)
(today we say “assaulted” which is by no means inaccurate)
(one could call the former “fearing fear” which is alliterative and pithy and is also a form of fear too)
(though honestly though mice seem to have a sufficient amount of fear they do seem to be preoccupied a lot of the time and not necessarily vigilant at least from the expressions on their faces when I empty the traps we have to set because we live in the middle of a field so we have field mice taking advantage of the warm and dry house we’ve built but from their expressions they don’t seem to have anticipated the trap’s snapping their skulls or necks or backs in two so I can’t imagine it’d be all that different if a cat were to pounce from the mouse’s perspective out of the blue)
(though children the age she was when she wrote this often come to a painful awareness of death of the fact that we’re all going to die some day for me that realization came oddly enough from watching “The Greatest Show on Earth” at the part where the trapeze artist tries a triple somersault without a net and he or his catcher misses the grab and he falls to the ground and injures his right arm ending his circus career though in Hollywood fashion he eventually gets back the use of his arm and flies again but for some reason I understood right then our mortal frailty explicitly in terms of my mom mind you I knew then that she’d die some day and that there was nothing I could do about it I was six or seven at the time and after that I’d have nightmares about being stranded on the roof of our house with me and mom and my brother surrounded by a rising flood and knowing that I was the one who would have to swim my mom to safety and I’d have to choose her over my brother and at this time I still didn’t know how to swim though ironically both my mom and my brother did so who’s saving whom)
(if I’m honest not even by avoiding my birthday)
(and yes I think having crossed a half a century I can speak about when I was a child and not expect the chortle I got from an English professor in college who read one of my poems that had the line “when I was a child” and thought I had not lived long enough to write about reflecting on my childhood being only twenty-one at the time well she’s dead now and I just turned fifty-one so I think I’ve got some perspective and I mean no disrespect to her by mentioning that she’s dead now and for those of you who were at Maryville the same time or around the same time I was there I’m not talking about Dr. Blair for whom I have the greatest admiration and still a bit of a crush and who died a couple of years ago in a nursing home near Birmingham and I didn’t know she was ill or I would have tried to see her)
(and honestly I’m trying to be honest here)
(too many sloppy tenets for me like when does one get a soul at conception or at birth what makes a soul immortal do animals have one when does it leave a dead body what does it look like what does it weigh etc.)
(by and large though being multi-valent one can find a lot of different things in Scripture and surely one can find references to something that sounds like our modern or post-modern conception of an immortal soul though really we’re talking about the modern conception of soul in that a soul is an immaterial identity and animating force that on the death of the body persists with all our memories and personality whereas the post-modern conception of soul and its persistence after physical death sound more like composting)
(and in those places primarily in Luke and Acts both written by the same author you understand one may argue and many have just ask me for a bibliography since this is my field that the authors of these instances are trying to be accommodating to a Graeco-Roman culture steeped in belief in an immortal soul though the more middle-Eastern convictions of most of those writing Scripture embraced the body as complete and concrete with the soul referring to the combination of the body and the Deity’s animating breath or spirit or wind)
(at least among the cognoscenti in the PC(USA) my own ordaining denomination though if you pressed very few of us Presbyterians would either know or believe my reading of Scripture above though it’s seriously right)
(reading such amateurish profundity in comments to news stories where you can log on and comment with an alias so that no one can actually find you and tell you how if you’d taken at least one religion course in college you’d know how ignorant you are and would keep your ignorance to yourself always makes me both laugh and feel frustrated and please know when I say “you” I’m not accusing you dear reader of this essay but I’m using “you” in that more general second-person universal sense)
(if you’d taken even just that introductory course in college you’d know this)
(and those were in high school where I was a part of a deeply faithful though young so young church youth group and I did believe wholly in my immortal soul and its sure future rest in the arms of God)
(though there have been more times that I haven’t attended church regularly which should be distinguished from “being religious” but to be more precise I would say “I’ve always been firmly pious” because “pious” is a technical term referring to a person’s being committed to living a faithful life and holding faithful tenets about God and the meaning of life)
(my nagging depression low-grade to be sure dates from that period)
(best described in Sartre’s “Nausea” if you’ve read it and if not please do and you’ll hopefully feel existential nausea which is quite different from simply being nauseated)
(believe me, television is a potent soporific against dreading death)
(and that is still a possibility only committed atheists argue otherwise and they have quite a job proving God does not exist the most they can argue is disbelieving in God’s existence is a better alternative to its obverse)
(I certainly did not consider this a probability)
(though one can say quite a bit more about the former, and I may)
(again, “Preacher, where’s your faith?”)
About My Birthday #2
When I turned 50 in 2009, I told my immediate family that I didn’t want any presents for my birthday. Having notched half a century, I thought, “Finally, I shall dictate the terms of my birthday!” But my family – strong-willed and pig-headed to a person - ignored me and bought presents, anyway. Around my cake they sang our own, irritating take on “Happy Birthday” and presented me presents, which I opened, tight-lipped and thankless.
Lest you think my curmudgeondry betrays dismay for my advancing age, please know I’ve never enjoyed birthdays. My earliest birthday memory dates from my third or fourth year, and I remember hiding most, running from our kitchen table as everybody began to sing “Happy Birthday.” In our den we kept a three-legged, corner end table that crashed over occasionally, if we were careless. Underneath, I loved to hide, way back in the corner. I hid there then. If my memory is close to accurate, I hid first from embarrassment over my family’s singing to me, but also from no little fear.
You may think it strange that I should fear my family’s celebrating my birthday, but I encourage you to think back to your own young childhood and remember how often you were afraid. In my memories of those early years, I’m often afraid but just as often compelled to do the very thing that frightened me. I was afraid – no, terrified actually – to walk out on the pier at Panama City Beach because I could look down between the boards and see the water growing deeper the further out we walked. I remember making a public spectacle, screaming and crying to go back because I feared falling in and drowning. I feared going to the doctor and getting a shot, often the fear proving the worst of the three. As I was born in late November, my birthday looks forward to Christmas, and I remember also looking forward to fearing Santa Claus. About my birthday, I certainly didn’t fear presents, just the public receiving of presents, my family’s celebrating me alone on this day with singing and the expectation that I would have to sit still for it.
I used to hide from bullies, too. I take the current, public descrying of bullies and bullying sympathetically and seriously. I grew up without a man around the house, so until my mom remarried when I was ten my brother and I were especially susceptible to bullies in your neighborhood: we were easy targets, already marked as socially weak. If we stayed in our yard or on our front porch, we were almost entirely safe. But then no one stayed in their own yards, even at pre-school ages, especially not my brother and I: we were two who had “too much energy,” so we were often away from our “home base.” I remember one instance when three brothers, current and future delinquents all, came around the block and, finding my brother and me around the corner from our house, declared that we would have a boxing match. I was teamed with the youngest, my brother with the oldest, with the third serving as “referee.” When he pantomimed dinging a ringside bell, I adopted a boxing stance, but my opponent leapt up, grabbed both my ears and pulled down, hard. I began to cry, to wail, actually, and the two older boys jumped on my brother and pummeled him. Somehow we got away and made it back to our front porch, both of us crying, our maid rushing out the front door to see what was the matter. And this was by no means an isolated event: our neighbor thugs – young children not even ten years of age but already well along the path to thugdom – stalked us, constantly. We had to stay on our toes, practice constant vigilance, to keep from being punched and ending up on our front porch, crying.
Childhood is, I think, rife with such instances of anticipating the time when one will be afraid and then, when the time arrives, of being afraid. When my daughter was slightly older than I was in the aforementioned events, she wrote a poem that captures feelings about death very similar to those I remember feeling about bullies and compulsory events. In her poem, she described death as a huge, heartless cat and herself as a small, hyper-vigilant mouse. She wrote quite well from the mouse’s perspective describing the mouse’s watchfulness, its terror, and also the inevitability of the cat – silent, stalking, still as a statue – pouncing on the mouse, death pouncing on her eventually. And my daughter, as young as she was, described some of my own, adult dreads about death, dread that you and I go mincing through life, constantly casting worried glances over our shoulders though ultimately becoming too consumed with some life matter, while death implacably stalks us and will pounce some day, perhaps when we become engrossed in life and forget to keep watch. I find myself hoping death will do quickly for me and not toy.
As I grew older I often thought of death in implacable terms: the day of my birth, even the act of my being born, created simultaneously the day of my cessation, of my expiring, and there’s no way humanly possibly that I can avoid that final day. Over the years I’ve thought of death as a debt I owe, a bill that will come due, but those concepts do not capture the feelings that, if I am honest, reverberate with childhood fear both of the bald fact of death and of my fearing anticipating my death. I’ve found myself regretting my own birth because it drags along with it an inseparable, hideous twin. I’ve found myself hating the fact of my birth because, had I not been born, I wouldn’t have to go through dying – nay, so that I wouldn’t even have to anticipate dying, that I wouldn’t have to fear expecting to die. In such times, I’ve imagined it preferable never to have existed at all, rather than to be and know that someday I won’t.
Now, you may say if you know me and my calling, “Preacher, what about your immortal soul?” I don’t believe you or I have an immortal soul and, here’s an interesting bit of trivia, neither does Scripture. Scripture seems intent on reminding us that we are mortal from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our feet and all points in between, that there’s nothing in us that has life in itself that is not dependent on its existence to Someone outside. Except for a very few places, Scripture sees us all as coming from and going back to dust, walking and talking mud briefly animated by God’s own breath. So if there’s any hope at all for any existence beyond death, we have to rely on God for it, that just as God once created everything seen and unseen out of nothing at all, some day God will recreate God’s faithful people even though they’ve fallen completely into dust, even though the world itself may have fallen completely into dust. That’s all orthodox, but to be honest, I don’t really believe all that, either.
Sometimes, I hear people argue that the only reason we have religions is to help people deal with the fact that they’re going to die. Though religion certainly holds comfort in death, that’s hardly the only reason for religion, nor is religion’s comfort a sufficient reason for the phenomenon to be so prevalent in our history and culture, even today. Personally, except for a few brief, intensely evangelical times, I’ve never escaped dreading my death and those of those I love, even though except for a brief period in college I’ve always been firmly religious. During that period in college, I had crushing doubts that any religious conviction – my or anyone’s – was true. And these doubts, more specifically their “crushing” character, were feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, futility and inconsequence.
At the time, such feelings hit me invariably and most forcefully in the backcountry. Perhaps because of the absence of electricity and, consequently, light and television, when my wife and I would backpack I’d feel death dread most acutely. I remember one time, in November of 1982 when Nancy had come to Maryville around my birthday so we could go backpacking, we hiked up above Cades Cove to a campsite we’d visited before. The night was cold and crisp, illuminated only by starlight, and I lay staring at the roof of our tent frantically trying to think some way out of my thoroughgoing, shivering dread of dying. Eventually, somewhere in that night, I thought of the postulate that if God exists God may have a beneficent interest in me. Please know, I considered this a bare and remote possibility, that even should God exist that certainly did not necessitate God’s ensuring I’d live eternally. But somehow, that possibility – the barest hope that if God exists God may condescend to keep my existence – proved enough to dampen my despair, my dread. Over the last quarter-century, I’ve had ample occasion to revisit that dread and, please be assured, my religion has proved no buffer to its despair. I have practiced my religion more because I fear living a faithless life than because I dread dying. I recognize neither of these is a ringing endorsements for the faith.
So I don’t like birthdays. Birthdays remind me that I’m small, powerless, that even two or three of my family are together stronger than I. Birthdays seem to me to be an unappreciated example of blaming the victim, of taking a person and rubbing their noses not just in their birth but in birth’s inseparable consequence and then having the temerity to sing about it. And I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a single gift that would make that sting any less. So I refuse to cooperate. I fear to do otherwise. Thank you for reading.
Lest you think my curmudgeondry betrays dismay for my advancing age, please know I’ve never enjoyed birthdays. My earliest birthday memory dates from my third or fourth year, and I remember hiding most, running from our kitchen table as everybody began to sing “Happy Birthday.” In our den we kept a three-legged, corner end table that crashed over occasionally, if we were careless. Underneath, I loved to hide, way back in the corner. I hid there then. If my memory is close to accurate, I hid first from embarrassment over my family’s singing to me, but also from no little fear.
You may think it strange that I should fear my family’s celebrating my birthday, but I encourage you to think back to your own young childhood and remember how often you were afraid. In my memories of those early years, I’m often afraid but just as often compelled to do the very thing that frightened me. I was afraid – no, terrified actually – to walk out on the pier at Panama City Beach because I could look down between the boards and see the water growing deeper the further out we walked. I remember making a public spectacle, screaming and crying to go back because I feared falling in and drowning. I feared going to the doctor and getting a shot, often the fear proving the worst of the three. As I was born in late November, my birthday looks forward to Christmas, and I remember also looking forward to fearing Santa Claus. About my birthday, I certainly didn’t fear presents, just the public receiving of presents, my family’s celebrating me alone on this day with singing and the expectation that I would have to sit still for it.
I used to hide from bullies, too. I take the current, public descrying of bullies and bullying sympathetically and seriously. I grew up without a man around the house, so until my mom remarried when I was ten my brother and I were especially susceptible to bullies in your neighborhood: we were easy targets, already marked as socially weak. If we stayed in our yard or on our front porch, we were almost entirely safe. But then no one stayed in their own yards, even at pre-school ages, especially not my brother and I: we were two who had “too much energy,” so we were often away from our “home base.” I remember one instance when three brothers, current and future delinquents all, came around the block and, finding my brother and me around the corner from our house, declared that we would have a boxing match. I was teamed with the youngest, my brother with the oldest, with the third serving as “referee.” When he pantomimed dinging a ringside bell, I adopted a boxing stance, but my opponent leapt up, grabbed both my ears and pulled down, hard. I began to cry, to wail, actually, and the two older boys jumped on my brother and pummeled him. Somehow we got away and made it back to our front porch, both of us crying, our maid rushing out the front door to see what was the matter. And this was by no means an isolated event: our neighbor thugs – young children not even ten years of age but already well along the path to thugdom – stalked us, constantly. We had to stay on our toes, practice constant vigilance, to keep from being punched and ending up on our front porch, crying.
Childhood is, I think, rife with such instances of anticipating the time when one will be afraid and then, when the time arrives, of being afraid. When my daughter was slightly older than I was in the aforementioned events, she wrote a poem that captures feelings about death very similar to those I remember feeling about bullies and compulsory events. In her poem, she described death as a huge, heartless cat and herself as a small, hyper-vigilant mouse. She wrote quite well from the mouse’s perspective describing the mouse’s watchfulness, its terror, and also the inevitability of the cat – silent, stalking, still as a statue – pouncing on the mouse, death pouncing on her eventually. And my daughter, as young as she was, described some of my own, adult dreads about death, dread that you and I go mincing through life, constantly casting worried glances over our shoulders though ultimately becoming too consumed with some life matter, while death implacably stalks us and will pounce some day, perhaps when we become engrossed in life and forget to keep watch. I find myself hoping death will do quickly for me and not toy.
As I grew older I often thought of death in implacable terms: the day of my birth, even the act of my being born, created simultaneously the day of my cessation, of my expiring, and there’s no way humanly possibly that I can avoid that final day. Over the years I’ve thought of death as a debt I owe, a bill that will come due, but those concepts do not capture the feelings that, if I am honest, reverberate with childhood fear both of the bald fact of death and of my fearing anticipating my death. I’ve found myself regretting my own birth because it drags along with it an inseparable, hideous twin. I’ve found myself hating the fact of my birth because, had I not been born, I wouldn’t have to go through dying – nay, so that I wouldn’t even have to anticipate dying, that I wouldn’t have to fear expecting to die. In such times, I’ve imagined it preferable never to have existed at all, rather than to be and know that someday I won’t.
Now, you may say if you know me and my calling, “Preacher, what about your immortal soul?” I don’t believe you or I have an immortal soul and, here’s an interesting bit of trivia, neither does Scripture. Scripture seems intent on reminding us that we are mortal from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our feet and all points in between, that there’s nothing in us that has life in itself that is not dependent on its existence to Someone outside. Except for a very few places, Scripture sees us all as coming from and going back to dust, walking and talking mud briefly animated by God’s own breath. So if there’s any hope at all for any existence beyond death, we have to rely on God for it, that just as God once created everything seen and unseen out of nothing at all, some day God will recreate God’s faithful people even though they’ve fallen completely into dust, even though the world itself may have fallen completely into dust. That’s all orthodox, but to be honest, I don’t really believe all that, either.
Sometimes, I hear people argue that the only reason we have religions is to help people deal with the fact that they’re going to die. Though religion certainly holds comfort in death, that’s hardly the only reason for religion, nor is religion’s comfort a sufficient reason for the phenomenon to be so prevalent in our history and culture, even today. Personally, except for a few brief, intensely evangelical times, I’ve never escaped dreading my death and those of those I love, even though except for a brief period in college I’ve always been firmly religious. During that period in college, I had crushing doubts that any religious conviction – my or anyone’s – was true. And these doubts, more specifically their “crushing” character, were feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, futility and inconsequence.
At the time, such feelings hit me invariably and most forcefully in the backcountry. Perhaps because of the absence of electricity and, consequently, light and television, when my wife and I would backpack I’d feel death dread most acutely. I remember one time, in November of 1982 when Nancy had come to Maryville around my birthday so we could go backpacking, we hiked up above Cades Cove to a campsite we’d visited before. The night was cold and crisp, illuminated only by starlight, and I lay staring at the roof of our tent frantically trying to think some way out of my thoroughgoing, shivering dread of dying. Eventually, somewhere in that night, I thought of the postulate that if God exists God may have a beneficent interest in me. Please know, I considered this a bare and remote possibility, that even should God exist that certainly did not necessitate God’s ensuring I’d live eternally. But somehow, that possibility – the barest hope that if God exists God may condescend to keep my existence – proved enough to dampen my despair, my dread. Over the last quarter-century, I’ve had ample occasion to revisit that dread and, please be assured, my religion has proved no buffer to its despair. I have practiced my religion more because I fear living a faithless life than because I dread dying. I recognize neither of these is a ringing endorsements for the faith.
So I don’t like birthdays. Birthdays remind me that I’m small, powerless, that even two or three of my family are together stronger than I. Birthdays seem to me to be an unappreciated example of blaming the victim, of taking a person and rubbing their noses not just in their birth but in birth’s inseparable consequence and then having the temerity to sing about it. And I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a single gift that would make that sting any less. So I refuse to cooperate. I fear to do otherwise. Thank you for reading.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
About My Birthday
When I turned 50 in 2009, I told my immediate family that I didn’t want any presents for my birthday. Having notched half a century, I thought, “Finally, I shall dictate the terms of my birthday!” But my family – strong-willed and pig-headed to a person - ignored me and bought presents, anyway. Around my cake (I can’t help myself: my mom for two decades at least has asked each one of us what kind of cake we want for our birthdays, which she then bakes except when she doesn’t have time then she picks one up at a local grocery store bakery, so, never liking to celebrate my birthday, I’ve always picked Lady Baltimore cake, whose tricky icing always throws my mom) they sang our own, irritating take on “Happy Birthday” (this is interesting, in a family-dynamical way: my older brother and I tried to replace the birthday standard with one derived from the viral badgers song that was going around the ‘net, oh, around 2004, but instead of “badgers, badgers, badgers . . . mushroom, mushroom . . . snake, snake” we’d sing “birthday, birthday, birthday . . . ice cream, ice cream . . . cake, cake, oh, it’s a cake” but that would mean my brother and I would be establishing a birthday tradition, something my mom could never allow, so she came up with a different tune, “happy happy birthday to you to you to you, hey!” which we’ve sung since, oh, 2006, though I and perhaps my brother thought ours was way more hip) and presented me presents, which I opened, tight-lipped and thankless.
Lest you think my curmudgeondry betrays dismay for my advancing age, please know I’ve never enjoyed birthdays. My earliest birthday memory dates from my third or fourth year, and I remember hiding most, running from our kitchen table as everybody (“everybody” means in this memory my mom my grandmother and my older brother and not my father since he and mom divorced when I was a year and a half old so you have to picture four of us in November 1962 or ’63 and if ’63 then JFK had just been assassinated so that adds another layer) began to sing “Happy Birthday.” In our den (picture a 1200 square foot post-WWII stick built wooden-shingled 3/1 “ranch” if you can call a cramped drafty greatroom kitchen bed bed bed bath a “ranch” that’s six rooms and the kitchen was separated from the greatroom only by a half-wall so when I say “den” I mean one of the bedrooms though come to think of it if mom had a bedroom and by brother and I shared one and the third was a den then my grandmother must have lived elsewhere) we kept a three-legged, corner end table that crashed over occasionally, if we were careless. Underneath, I loved to hide, way back in the corner. I hid there then. If my memory is close to accurate, I hid first from embarrassment over my family’s singing to me, but also from no little fear.
You may think it strange that I should fear my family’s celebrating my birthday, but I encourage you to think back to your own young childhood (I recognize that I’ve the advantage of having a better than most memory since I swear and my grandmother can corroborate that I remember an event from when I was 2 weeks yes that’s 2 weeks old and a year and a half and two years etc. though I may have constructed false memories) and remember how often you were afraid. In my memories of those early years, I’m often afraid but just as often compelled to do the very thing that frightened me. I was afraid – no, terrified actually – to walk out on the pier at Panama City Beach (I’m from Alabama so when and if we’d go to the beach we’d go to PCB though my grandmother’s sister and her family lived in Florala so that was closer to Fort Walton beach so my pier memory may be from FWB instead of PCB which was much sparser in those years – think of the old black and white Cracker Jack commercial and how everything seems sear and empty and hot and dry that’s my memory of FWB) because I could look down between the boards and see the water growing deeper the further out we walked. I remember making a public spectacle, screaming and crying to go back because I feared falling in and drowning (my mom was dragging me out you understand because back then even though Dr. Benjamin Spock had already spoken very wise words about childrearing but to my knowledge my mom never read his book so she was dragging me out to help me “get over” my fright though to be fair I didn’t know how to swim and in fact wouldn’t learn until I was thirteen in the pool at the Spyglass Inn in PCB). I feared going to the doctor and getting a shot, often (but by no means always) the fear proving the worst of the three. As I was born in late November, my birthday looks forward to Christmas, and I remember also looking forward to fearing Santa Claus (I know you’ve seen pictures like the one I just saw yesterday no lie of a little child sitting on Santa’s knee and wailing absolutely wailing in terror well that was me after waiting in a long line at a department store this is before malls you see and thinking I’d be brave but by the time I’m perched on a stranger’s knee which is way intimate and the stranger is more strange by wearing a fake beard we all knew it was fake and anyway in how many strangers’ laps did you sit when you were that young). About my birthday, I certainly didn’t fear presents, just the public receiving of presents, my family’s celebrating me alone on this day with singing (and how many times do you get to hear your family sing unless you’re one of those from a musical family where everyone plays and instrument and you’ve got all four or five parts covered I imagine some families even have someone on the descant) and the expectation that I would have to sit still for it.
I used to hide from bullies, too. I take the current, public descrying of bullies and bullying sympathetically and seriously. I grew up without a man around the house, so until my mom remarried when I was ten my brother and I were especially susceptible to bullies in your neighborhood: we were easy targets, already marked as socially weak (believe me divorce in Alabama in the early sixties though known was extremely rare and carried a lot of shame not just for my mom and my grandmother and my great-grandmother all divorcees but also for my brother and me though of course we didn’t understand shame the way I do now after a lot of socio-anthropological research as biblical hermeneutic). If we stayed in our yard or on our front porch, we were almost entirely safe. But then no one stayed in their own yards, even at pre-school ages, especially not my brother and I: we were two who had “too much energy,” so we were often away from our “home base.” I remember one instance when three brothers, current and future delinquents all, came around the block and, finding my brother and me around the corner from our house, declared that we would have a boxing match. I was teamed with the youngest, my brother with the oldest, with the third serving as “referee.” When he pantomimed dinging a ringside bell, I adopted a boxing stance (in my memory is a picture of Jack Dempsey or I should say in my memory of my mind’s eye at the time I remembered a picture of Jack Dempsey so I adopted his rather classical and stylized boxing stance though my torso was not bare and I was not wearing tights and knee-high boxing boots), but my opponent leapt up, grabbed both my ears and pulled down, hard. I began to cry, to wail, actually, and the two older boys jumped on my brother and pummeled him. Somehow we got away and made it back to our front porch, both of us crying, our maid (when I say “maid” I’m mean one of two women from a nearby African-American neighborhood this was the early 1960’s in Alabama so neighborhoods were largely segregated as they are in most places in the United States still to this day to our shame but either Miss Barbara or Mrs. Pearl would “sit” us while my mother was at work because she had to work because there was no man in the house so she could stay home and raise us) rushing out the front door to see what was the matter. And this was by no means an isolated event: our neighbor thugs – young children not even ten years of age but already well along the path to thugdom – stalked us, constantly. We had to stay on our toes, practice constant vigilance, to keep from being punched (today we say “assaulted” which is by no means inaccurate) and ending up on our front porch, crying.
Childhood is, I think, rife with such instances of anticipating the time when one will be afraid and then, when the time arrives, of being afraid (one could call the former “fearing fear” which is alliterative and pithy and is also a form of fear too). When my daughter was slightly older than I was in the aforementioned events, she wrote a poem that captures feelings about death very similar to those I remember feeling about bullies and compulsory events. In her poem, she described death as a huge, heartless cat and herself as a small, hyper-vigilant mouse. She wrote quite well from the mouse’s perspective (though honestly though mice seem to have a sufficient amount of fear they do seem to be preoccupied a lot of the time and not necessarily vigilant at least from the expressions on their faces when I empty the traps we have to set because we live in the middle of a field so we have field mice taking advantage of the warm and dry house we’ve built but from their expressions they don’t seem to have anticipated the trap’s snapping their skulls or necks or backs in two so I can’t imagine it’d be all that different if a cat were to pounce from the mouse’s perspective out of the blue) describing the mouse’s watchfulness, its terror, and also the inevitability of the cat – silent, stalking, still as a statue – pouncing on the mouse, death pouncing on her eventually. And my daughter, as young as she was, described some of my own, adult dreads about death (though children the age she was when she wrote this often come to a painful awareness of death of the fact that we’re all going to die some day for me that realization came oddly enough from watching “The Greatest Show on Earth” at the part where the trapeze artist tries a triple somersault without a net and he or his catcher misses the grab and he falls to the ground and injures his right arm ending his circus career though in Hollywood fashion he eventually gets back the use of his arm and flies again but for some reason I understood right then our mortal frailty explicitly in terms of my mom mind you I knew then that she’d die some day and that there was nothing I could do about it I was six or seven at the time you understand after that I’d have nightmares about being stranded on the roof of our house with me and mom and my brother surrounded by a rising flood and knowing that I was the one who would have to swim my mom to safety and I’d have to choose her over my brother and at this time I still didn’t know how to swim though ironically both my mom and my brother did so who’s saving whom?), dread that you and I go mincing through life, constantly casting worried glances over our shoulders though ultimately becoming too consumed with some life matter, while death implacably stalks us and will pounce some day, perhaps when we become engrossed in life and forget to keep watch. I find myself hoping death will do quickly for me and not toy.
As I grew older I often thought of death in implacable terms: the day of my birth, even the act of my being born, created simultaneously the day of my cessation, of my expiring, and there’s no way humanly possibly that I can avoid that final day (if I’m honest not even by avoiding my birthday). Over the years (and yes I think having crossed a half a century I can speak about when I was a child and not expect the chortle I got from an English professor in college who read one of my poems that had the line “when I was a child” and thought I had not lived long enough to write about reflecting on my childhood being only twenty-one at the time well she’s dead now and I just turned fifty-one so I think I’ve got some perspective and I mean no disrespect to her by mentioning that she’s dead now and for those of you who were at Maryville the same time or around the same time I was there I’m not talking about Dr. Blair for whom I have the greatest admiration and still a bit of a crush and who died a couple of years ago in a nursing home near Birmingham and I didn’t know she was ill or I would have tried to see her) I’ve thought of death as a debt I owe, a bill that will come due, but those concepts do not capture the feelings that, if I am honest (and honestly I’m trying to be honest here), reverberate with childhood fear both of the bald fact of death and of my fearing anticipating my death. I’ve found myself regretting my own birth because it drags along with it an inseparable, hideous twin. I’ve found myself hating the fact of my birth because, had I not been born, I wouldn’t have to go through dying – nay, so that I wouldn’t even have to anticipate dying, that I wouldn’t have to fear expecting to die. In such times, I’ve imagined it preferable never to have existed at all, rather than to be and know that someday I won’t.
Now, you may say if you know me and my calling, “Preacher, what about your immortal soul?” I don’t believe you or I have an immortal soul (too many sloppy tenets for me like when does one get a soul at conception or at birth what makes a soul immortal do animals have one when does it leave a dead body what does it look like what does it weigh etc.) and, here’s an interesting bit of trivia, neither does Scripture (by and large though being multi-valent one can find a lot of different things in Scripture and surely one can find references to something that sounds like our modern or post-modern conception of an immortal soul though really we’re talking about the modern conception of soul in that a soul is an immaterial identity and animating force that on the death of the body persists with all our memories and personality whereas the post-modern conception of soul and its persistence after physical death sounds more like composting). Scripture seems intent on reminding us that were are mortal from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our feet and all points in between, that there’s nothing in us that has life in itself that is not dependent on its existence to Someone outside. Except for a very few places (and in those places primarily in Luke and Acts both written by the same author you understand one may argue and many have just ask me for a bibliography since this is my field that the authors of these instances are trying to be accommodating to a Graeco-Roman culture steeped in belief in an immortal soul though the more middle-Eastern convictions of most of those writing Scripture embraced the body as complete and concrete with the soul referring to the combination of the body and the Deity’s animating breath or spirit or wind), Scripture sees us all as coming from and going back to dust, walking and talking mud briefly animated by God’s own breath. So if there’s any hope at all for any existence beyond death, we have to rely on God for it, that just as God once created everything seen and unseen out of nothing at all, some day God will recreate God’s faithful people even though they’ve fallen completely into dust, even though the world itself may have fallen completely into dust. That’s all orthodox (at least among the cognoscenti in the PC(USA) my own ordaining denomination though if you pressed very few of us Presbyterians would either know or believe my reading of Scripture above though it’s seriously right), but to be honest, I don’t really believe all that, either.
Sometimes, I hear people argue that the only reason we have religions is to help people deal with the fact that they’re going to die (reading such amateurish profundity in comments to news stories where you can log on and comment with an alias so that no one can actually find you and tell you how if you’d taken at least one religion course in college you’d know how ignorant you are and would keep your ignorance to yourself always makes me both laugh and feel frustrated and please know when I say “you” I’m not accusing you dear reader of this essay but I’m using “you” in that more general second-person universal sense). Though religion certainly holds comfort in death, that’s hardly the only reason for religion, nor is religion’s comfort a sufficient reason for the phenomenon to be so prevalent in our history and culture, even today (if you’d taken even just that introductory course in college you’d know this). Personally, except for a few brief, intensely evangelical times (and those were in high school where I was a part of a deeply faithful though young so young church youth group and I did believe wholly in my immortal soul and its sure future rest in the arms of God), I’ve never escaped dreading my death and those of those I love, even though except for a brief period in college I’ve always been firmly religious (though there have been more times that I haven’t attended church regularly which should be distinguished from “being religious” but to be more precise I would say “I’ve always been firmly pious” because “pious” is a technical term referring to a person’s being committed to living a faithful life and holding faithful tenets about God and the meaning of life though very few outside the scholarly study of religion understand this more positive sense of "piety"). During that period in college, I had crushing doubts (my nagging depression low-grade to be sure dates from that period) that any religious conviction – my or anyone’s – was true. And these doubts, more specifically their “crushing” character, were feelings (best described in Sartre’s “Nausea” if you’ve read it and if not please do and you’ll hopefully feel existential nausea which is quite different from simply being nauseated) of hopelessness, worthlessness, futility and inconsequence.
At the time, such feelings hit me invariably and most forcefully in the backcountry. Perhaps because of the absence of electricity and, consequently, light and television (believe me, television is a potent soporific against dreading death), when my wife and I would backpack I’d feel death dread most acutely. I remember one time, in November of 1982 when Nancy had come to Maryville around my birthday so we could go backpacking, we hiked up above Cades Cove to a campsite we’d visited before. The night was cold and crisp, illuminated only by starlight, and I lay staring at the roof of our tent frantically trying to think some way out of my thoroughgoing, shivering dread of dying. Eventually, somewhere in that night, I thought of the postulate that if God exists (and that is still a possibility only committed atheists argue otherwise and they have quite a job proving God does not exist the most they can argue is disbelieving in God’s existence is a better alternative to its obverse) God may have a beneficent interest in me. Please know, I considered this a bare and remote possibility (I certainly did not consider this a probability), that even should God exist that certainly did not necessitate God’s ensuring I’d live eternally. But somehow, that possibility – the barest hope that if God exists God may condescend to keep my existence – proved enough to dampen my despair, my dread. Over the last quarter-century, I’ve had ample occasion to revisit that dread and, please be assured, my religion has proved no buffer to its despair. I have practiced my religion more because I fear living a faithless life than because I dread dying. I recognize neither of these is a ringing endorsements for the faith (though one can say quite a bit more about the former, and I may).
So I don’t like birthdays. Birthdays remind me that I’m small, powerless, that even two or three of my family are together stronger than I. Birthdays seem to me to be an unappreciated example of blaming the victim, of taking a person and rubbing their noses not just in their birth but in birth’s inseparable consequence and then having the temerity to sing about it. And I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a single gift that would make that sting any less (again, “Preacher, where’s your faith?”). So I refuse to cooperate. I fear to do otherwise. Thank you for reading.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)