Convergence

Well, as many of you know, Grandma died on Thursday, and the funeral was yesterday morning. So, it’s been a rough week in the midst of what’s been difficult year so far.

We’re getting by though. I definitely feel as though a lot of prayers were answered (and thank you for your prayers for Grandma and for the family, by the way). I know I spent a lot of time praying for peace in the situation, and that was granted. Grandma was doing awfully badly, and I think that much worse than death for her would have been being torn away from her farm and being put in a nursing home. Thankfully, those things didn’t happen.

Plus, considering the life Grandma lived, I don’t think death is going to be much of a hurdle for her.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway, I guess along those lines, I just wanted to stick a couple of my thoughts down here. Feel free not to read them.

A couple of weeks ago, when we admitted Grandma to the hospital, I said that there were two moments from that night that were going to stick with me. At that time, I only wrote about one of them. This is the other.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

That night, those of us at the hospital thought Grandma was going to die at any time. We had gotten her into the emergency room, and the doctors had pretty much given us no hope. They had cleared up our answers to the “life-support” questions, and we had confirmed those answers with Grandma. Then, we were left alone in a room to wait.

Grandma was clearly miserable. She was writhing and struggling to get her breath, and her heartbeat was jumping all over the place, reaching speeds of over one-hundred-forty-beats-per-minute. Her skin was grayish and yellow. She couldn’t focus her eyes, and she could hardly speak.

Aunt June, Mom, and I stood around the bed not knowing what we might do to comfort her.

Besides just being there, we only knew one thing we could do, and we weren’t allowed to do that. Grandma had been able communicate very clearly that she was desperately thirsty. And I mean desperately. Her lips were cracked and bleeding because she was so dry. Grandma’s request laying there was that we give her some cold water.

The problem was that we weren’t allowed to do so. Grandma had pneumonia and congestive heart failure, and so she was basically drowning already. The nurses had told us that we couldn’t give here any fluids, though they promised that they would bring some ice chips eventually. That would comfort her some without putting too many harmful fluids directly into her.

They were busy, though, and understaffed and never could remember when they came by to get her the ice chips, and we didn’t know where we could get any to help Grandma.

Finally, Mom hatched an idea. She (and Aunt June) figured that Grandma could suck water from a rag, and it would control the intake of fluids about as well as sucking on ice cubes would do. Mom grabbed a rag and wetted it under the tap. Then, she put it up to Grandma’s mouth. Grandma sucked in, but she immediately spit the rag out.

“I want cold water,” she said. (At this point should could grunt short phrases)

Mama: “That was cold water.”

Grandma: “Didn’t taste like it to me.”

The odd thing was, this little interchange struck us all as being extremely funny. We all laughed aloud, and I swear, Grandma smiled, too. I think she was meaning for it to be a funny statement. It definitely fit her normal sense of humor.

Anyway, Aunt June then remembered that I had snuck in a bottle of water for Mom and her to drink over in the corner of the room where Grandma couldn’t see them. It was cold. Mom poured that really cold water on the rag and put it to Grandma’s mouth.

She closed her eyes and sucked the water from the rag as quickly as she could, Mom maneuvering it so that she could reach all of the wet parts. When Mom moved to rewet the rag, Grandma said, “It’s good. It’s cold.” Then, she smiled even though she was still in such pain.

And somehow, at this, the mood of the room seemed to have lightened. The three of us stood around the bed, Mom repeating the process of wetting the rag and holding it to Grandma’s lips and Grandma drinking in the cold water. And the three of us around the bed laughed the whole time and Grandma, when she wasn’t busy drinking, managed to smile.

I can’t claim to entirely understand this scene. Looking back, it seems slightly odd to me that we could be standing around what we thought was Grandma’s deathbed laughing. It struck me as odd at that moment.

Of course, it seemed natural in the moment as well. There was potential for some joy, despite the difficulty of the situation.

I remember being reminded, as I stood there in the hospital room, of the point during the crucifixion, as it’s told in the Gospel of John, when Christ is thirsty and is offered sour wine on a sponge to drink. He drinks and says, “It is finished” and dies. As I watched Mom holding the wet rag to Grandma’s lips, I was struck by this instance of convergence. At this point, I thought, Grandma’s life had pretty much become aligned with Christ’s. And as so many people who knew Grandma can testify, that had been the end toward which she had striven her entire life, and here she was well-prepared to take those difficult, final steps along with Him.

As I wrote earlier, I don’t think death is going to be much of hurdle for Grandma to overcome.

Hope and Doom and Stuff, Part I

I doubt this will be compelling reading for many people, but a couple of people seemed interested. These are actually a couple of little pieces I wrote for a class last semester. I’m not really sure what the class thought of them. We posted one per week for everyone to read, and each person, the whole semester, would get two are three comments, or more, per post. At the end of the semester, each student in the class had received at least fifteen comments, and most people had twenty-five or thirty or more. All except for me, of course. Altogether, my posts received two comments the whole semester. I’m not sure why that happened. I asked the professor once what he thought, and (without using quite these words) the answer he gave was that there must not be very many people in the class who liked me. I had just thought that the posts weren’t any good. I’m not sure, though, what really happened. It is highly likely that these are utter crap.

Both of these posts were in response to reading some of the Hebrew Bible prophets, and they’re not exactly essays. They’re responses to a series of questions from the professor, which I put in bold. You should probably read this one first; the second is below. Enjoy.

Based on your reading of Amos and the other material for this course, how does the juxtaposition of hope and doom influence the reader (ancient Israelite or today's) to think about (1) the interaction between God and Israel, (2) the nature of grace and divine demand, (3) moral reflection on justice in society? How do hope and condemnation relate to each other, if they do? What implications might there be for us today given the shaping of this oracle?

“Be joyful,/Though you have considered all the facts.” Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”

Cornel West makes a useful distinction between optimism and hope. For him, “Optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Yet we know that the evidence does not look good.” Hope, on the other hand, “enacts the stance of the participant who actively struggles against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides of wealth inequalities, group xenophobia, and personal despair. […] Only a new wave of vision, courage, and hope can keep us sane-and preserve the decency and dignity requisite to revitalize our organizational energy for the work to be done. To live is to wrestle with despair and yet never to allow despair to have the last word.” In this sense, hope is somewhat absurd because humans (both in our time and in that of the prophets) have little basis for optimism. It takes a lot of faith to be hopeful.

The Hebrew prophets aren’t optimists, but their vision does seem to me, essentially, to be hopeful. This is where doom comes in. The prophets spend significant effort proclaiming doom. Collins goes says of Amos that he does not “dilute his oracles of judgment with any glimmer of hope.” The prophets denounce the nations and Israel for a lack of justice and for a general lack of humanity, and the consequence for these failures is destruction. What’s important is that these prophesies of doom are based upon a vision of cosmic order. Ongoing human misery and future destruction are signs that humans have failed to realize the transcendent purpose demanded by the God of creation.

So, paradoxically, the pronouncement of doom simultaneously produces in the reader an intense awareness (1) of the chaos of a world marked by human misery and (2) of a cosmic force that is not indifferent to this plight. Thus, the doom of the prophets, in declaring the presence of a cosmic order, affirms a basis for faith, which in turn provides a basis for hope, which in turn provides the basis for just living (or, you might could say, for love).

So, the hopeful ending of Amos (and moments of consolation in all of the prophetic works) is, in a sense, absurd. There is little obvious evidence in either the world or in the previous portions of Amos to suggest a positive conclusion. The hope and the grace exhibited here is definitely surprising. In another sense, though, such an ending also seems inevitable. The clearly evident doom makes possible hope (with which it exists in a dialectical relationship), since it presents a God who cares. As Graham Greene once said, “The opposite of love isn’t hatred, but indifference.” The God of the prophets is not indifferent.

Hope and Doom and Stuff, Part II

Here’s my second post on this general subject. This was actually the post (out of the twelve we did) that received a comment, and the response I gave to the comment was what sort of completed the thought (at least a good bit more so than it had previously been articulated).

I’m putting both the prompt and then the comment it received in bold. The rest is me.

Hope does not make us ashamed, or does it?

In this week's prophets, there is a recognizable shift from pessimism to hope. Based on your readings, how does this shift take place? What theological justification exists for it in the texts themselves? By extension, when is hope justified today? By this I don't mean merely hope for an eternal reward/resolution of the problem, but hope in the present world. How do we articulate a theology of hope for today's church and world?

“God is not ‘beyond us’ or ‘in us,’ but ahead of us in the horizons of the future opened to us in his promises.” – Jurgen Moltmann

In the readings this semester, I’ve been struck several times at how God is always present to the Israelites (when he’s present) as promise for the future. From the Abrahamic covenant on, the Israelites are in relationship with God when they are offered a series of future promises: a future people, a promised land, a kingly succession, a temple, a just society, restoration from captivity, etc. Even when they are not on such good terms with God, the prophets attempt to restore Israel to relationship through future promises of destruction. The difficulty the Israelites have is in doing their part in the transformative work of actualizing these promises.

The hopefulness of the post-exilic prophets, thus, seems to stem from an intense awareness of the imminent promise of God, along with the realization that that vision has yet to be actualized. The restoration of Jerusalem, of the temple, and of the type of society promoted by God has not yet been accomplished, and as Boda points out, much of Zechariah is intended to remind the Israelites that “a new age was still not inaugurated” and that “the reason these promises remain unfulfilled is that the people are replicating the patterns of the earlier generation.” The convergence of God’s promise with the awareness of their present failure makes possible hopeful living and the hopeful impulse of these prophetic works.

In today’s church, I do think it’s difficult to articulate a theology of hope. I may be wrong, but I do get the since that we conflate the concepts of “optimism” and “hope” (I wrote about this a little last week). This allows us to be optimistic and passively think that everything’s going to turn out right for everybody. Optimistic living is simple and naïve and stems from our privileged position in the world. Naïve optimism should make us ashamed. Hopeful living, however, demands that we confront the hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness in our own lives and in the lives of those around us, and in the face of this despairing reality, and with the resulting humility, perform the revolutionary actions that transform the world toward being something more like the Kingdom envisaged by God. We must be poets and visionaries, capable of witnessing to the coming promises of God, and we must have the courage to make something of those visions immanent in our lives.

I appreciate you nuancing the difference between naive optimism and true hope. Moreover, I appreciate how call us to articulate hope in the midst of meaningless and nothinglessness. I guess my question is how do we articulate this poetic vision in the midst of 'void' (as some might say)? Certainly, we need to be able to do this, but what sustains our hope in order to do this if we are just as much a part of the problem?

Secondly, while I agree with you that the present situation of the 'post-modern' west is one that is void of meaning and value, I don't think the vast amount of people in our culture, let alone many of the people in our churches, want to acknowledge this reality. I agree somewhat with the argument that many in America tends towards consumerism instead of confronting the nihilistic void. So if we are going to visionary poets casting a vision beyond the loveless and meaningless void how we articulate such a vision when most of our audience not only doesn't want to acknowledge the reality that we see but also wants to place their hope in something else (i.e. consumerism and materialism)?

You’ve definitely caught me hiding behind a metaphor here, which I think I was doing because, at this point, I’m honestly not very sure about how to answer these questions. I’ll give it a shot, though; I’m thinking as I go.

First, I’d agree that our (post) post-modern western audience isn’t likely to jump to acknowledge the pervasive despair that I think is there. I forget exactly how Kierkegaard put it, but he writes somewhere that “the nature of despair is that it is unaware of being despair.” I’d agree. So many of us are bored, sad, confused, and alienated from ourselves and from others (not to mention from God), and the worst thing is that we don’t even realize it. The obvious thing to do in response is to diagnose the problem, so that we can begin the search for the solution. That’s what the prophets did first. This is obviously difficult, though, for at least two reasons. For one, in our free market church culture, it’s awfully easy, at the first challenging word in church, to walk out the door and down the street to Joel Osteen’s stadium, where very little that’s remotely real will ever be said. Second, our Christian language has been so overused and sentimentalized, “worn as smooth as poker chips” as Walker Percy (my favorite novelist) used to say, that there’s little real edge to it anymore. So, to (weakly attempt to) answer your second question about how address an audience that doesn’t want to hear the message, I think we have to acknowledge that we’re not likely to be very successful (I don’t think that the prophets or Jesus were overly successful at persuading people either). I’m not an optimist. But if we’re going to attempt to say it anyway, I think we have to reform our language so that it regains some texture. I think that this reformation of our language is only partly aesthetic. Mainly, this would mean acquiring the experiences and virtues that would make our speech authentic. The difficult thing, I fear, is that I think this would mean, in part, that we abandon our notions of Christendom and find our way to the margins of society, a position from which we can speak prophetically. Revolutions are carried out by people at the bottom, and to live and to speak our hope is to be a part of a revolution.

In response to your first question, what sustains our hope, particularly when we are such a part of the problem, I guess I would say humility. We’ll never not be part of the problem, at least to some degree. The humility to admit that, along with the humility to accept that grace is a possibility, seem to be the basis for hope (I guess in some ways my definition of humility would be synonymous with “faith,” so that could be another way of answering the question). I’m not exactly sure that’s the sort of answer you were looking for though.

I’m sorry I’ve written so much…

Thinking Aloud

Last week, I graded somewhere around 300 papers from TTU freshman. It was a pretty simple beginning-of-the-semester sort of assignment, and so part of it was just that they relate some potential career plans. It was a depressing job for me.

Here is why, a quotation I got from one of the drafts:

"They say that you need to pursue your passion, but that can often be difficult when you are not passionate about anything."

The depressing thing about reading these three hundred or so papers was just this sort of thing. Draft after draft after draft (etc.) sent an identical message to this one, and even though I think it was something that I was already pretty aware of, it was amazingly saddening to me.

The problem, as I see it, isn't that the kids don't know what sort of career they want to pursue yet. I don’t see that as the core issue at all. The real problem is that they can't even begin to ask the question of what they might want to do with their lives because they can't identify anything that they're passionate about. There is practically no sense of meaning, no sense that there’s anything worth dying for, in their lives (except for, perhaps, a Hummer). These students made very clear that there has been such a collapse of meaning in this culture that they, quite literally, see no reason to get up out of bed in the morning. And so, they don't.

I find this especially sad considering that well over ninety-five percent of those Tech students would profess to be Christians. I think that this is a fairly strong indication of just how dead God is in our lives at the moment, even for many of those who profess faith so loudly. I would think that there would at least be a starting point for these people who profess faith, a core of meaning from which to eventually build some vision of the particular life. But, I don’t think there is that core, not in their realities.

Anyway, my perception of this situation has been high in my considerations recently. Basically, I think that this is why I've been moving away from English studies.

My thinking’s not entirely clear on this at the moment. I know that there is a lot of value in gaining the skills offered by learning to write and learning to read, skills that go well beyond the English classroom. But, it feels to me as though acquiring those skills provided by the English class is sort of a level-two accomplishment, and the students haven’t gotten even close to reaching level-one yet (this statement makes sense to me, though I’m not sure how clear it is outside of my head.). It just seems to me as though the skills offered in English classes are meant primarily to enhance lives of meaning; I don’t think they necessarily provide the skills to create lives with meaning. (This is my most debatable point, and I'm not going to provide much clarification at this time. I will say that if you read early American documents, I’m specifically thinking of works like ol’ Ben Franklin’s Autobiography and Charles Brockden Brown’s novels, you'll find that that’s what early Americans sort of envisioned--the composition of individual meaning. Basically, existentialism. I think, though, that this idea is only about halfway right, and for my students, it's the other half that's missing.)

So, it seems, that’s why I see myself moving away from the idea of teaching English for a living. My rule, provided by Frederick Buechner, is this: “I believe that it is possible to say at least this in general to all of us: we should go with our lives where we most need to go and where we are most needed.”

So, I think this explains a little, at least to myself, about why I’ve felt that compulsion to head from literature studies and toward seminary. The problem I see around me, the primary problem I see, is the sort of pervasive spiritual impoverishment that seemed so evident to me in the students’ papers last week. Answering that problem, at this point, is the need. Lord knows what, specifically, needs to done next. That's not the important thing, though, at this point. At least, I've got a starting point.

One thing has stuck in my mind from that funeral last week, and I keep coming back to it because it troubled me quite a bit.

The thing that bothered me was how all of those who attended reacted…or, more to the point, what it was that brought about a reaction.

You see, my uncle had an extraordinary life. When he was eight, his mother committed suicide, and by the time he was eleven, he was totally on his own. And this was during the Great Depression. I don’t know all of the stories about how he survived, but the ones I know are fascinating. For instance, I know that at the age of twelve, he bought a hog in Eden, and carried it on foot for twenty-two miles to Menard to sell it. That money from the sale provided his a few weeks in meals.

My uncle’s struggle to survive in such a difficult time was particularly damaging for his spiritual life. Eventually, his primary means of living during those early years was as the helper to his crooked uncle. His uncle was a bootlegger, a gambler, and a professional wrestler, and my uncle’s youth proved to be an asset in helping out in the bootlegging operation and in helping my great uncle to cheat at cards. This spiritually depraved part of his life culminated in my uncle’s entering the army. That was a place where his skills of surviving at any cost would be rewarded. He thrived in the army, and to all accounts, he came out of the service a cold, sometimes cruel, and spiritually empty man.

And then he became redeemed. This came about as a result of God working through the wonderful woman he married, the family he raised, and the church he joined. The man of the last forty years wasn’t the same man who would do anything he could to survive. The man who died last week was no longer the rigid, depraved man of his youth and was instead a strong moral person and a caring family man.

And that’s the story that I heard at the funeral. The preacher who did the funeral was excellent. He told about the terrible years of my uncle’s youth, and he told about the redeemed family man that developed.

And here’s the problem…nobody cared about that story of my uncle’s spiritual redemption. This was sort of a textbook example of Christian redemption, a powerful example God’s grace working to better a man’s life. But as I watched the people at the funeral when the preacher was telling about my uncle’s sacred journey through life, I saw only one reaction. With just few exceptions, the Christian interpretation of my uncle’s story only invoked boredom. As the preacher told personal stories about my uncle and as the preacher read appropriate scriptures, I looked around and saw that almost nobody was really paying attention. Eyes were glazed over and directed out the windows. The preacher’s efforts to show that my uncle’s life had such spiritual significance were futile. The Christian meaning of my uncle’s life actually had no meaning for the people gathered there. They had heard those words before, and they didn’t sound true anymore.

Perhaps more depressing was what followed. After the funeral, we went to the graveside service. The preacher read the twenty-third psalm, and he said a prayer, and once again, I don’t think anybody was listening. But then, as soon as he was finished, a person from the local American Legion stepped forward and began to speak. And to his words, the people listened. I was still watching everyone, and as soon as the man with an Army uniform stepped forward, the eyes of the crowd became unglazed, the focus turned from the ground to the words this man in uniform was speaking about. And he didn’t speak about my uncle’s love for God. He spoke about my uncle’s love for America. And for his “comrades.” And he said that it is the veterans greatest dream to “go to sleep” while hearing “Taps” played. So, of course, an old bugler played taps, and they did the twenty-one gun salute, and they presented my aunt with a flag. And that was the only time in the whole day that I saw people crying. And with that flag presentation, the funeral was over.

And that’s what bothers me. Almost nobody in this one-hundred-percent Christian crowd cared anything about my uncle’s Christian journey. They didn’t show to care about the sacrifices my uncle had made for God. They cared about the two years he spent driving a bulldozer in Alaska during the Korean War during the darkest period of his life. They didn’t care anything about the way God had led my uncle out from the valley of the shadow of death. They cared about how my uncle was being “put to rest” while hearing “Taps.”

That’s what bothers me. Even for Christians, Christianity no longer seems to have power to render life sacred, to make life meaningful. Allegiance to America, though, does have that power at the moment.

Funerals exist, in large part, so that we can convince ourselves that, no matter how absurd all this life seems, particularly at its end, it was worth living. To remind ourselves that this life that always ends in tragedy has meaning after all; there was something in this life worth dying for. I’m awfully worried, though, about where we are deriving that meaning from. It seems to me, more and more, that we are more American than we are Christian.