Conviction and Civility

The President appropriately did not blame anyone who uses phrases like "Lock and load" or "take out the opposition" in political debate for the shootings in Tucson. It appears, in fact, that the president managed to turn the whole debate around and some very thoughtful people have taken up the challenge of suggesting exactly what "civility" would look like in public discourse in our society. 

Senator John McCain used the same approach in a  Washington Post article. 

Jim Wallis and Charles Colson are easily identifiable as representatives of the "Religious Left" and the "Religious Right", respectively, but they coauthored an article in Christianity Today in which they wrote:  

" . . . we affirm the politics of conviction. Conviction is not  inconsistent with civility, which is far deeper than political niceness,  indifference, or weakness. We recall the example of Dr. Martin Luther  King Jr., who could never be accused of a lack of passion; yet he  persisted in the non-violent treatment of his adversaries, hoping to win  them over rather than to win over them.   

Perhaps the most helpful article I've read comes from Martin Marty, a noted historian who has watched and commented on current events for decades. He finds guidance in Martin Luther's Shorter Catechism (Dr. Marty is a Lutheran and P-R-O-U-D of it!).  Luther is explaining the commandment: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor" to what we would today call "teenagers".  

Martin Luther says this commandment means:  

"We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them, or destroy their reputations. Instead we are to come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light." 

Now here is a spiritual exercise. Just as a litmus test let us suppose that you choose either Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin as your subject, whichever one rubs you the wrong way the most, and try it out. 

Maybe we can handle the first part: "We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them, or destroy their reputations."  

But, what about that second part? Instead we are to come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light." 

Not so easy, is it? Or maybe I'm just speaking for myself.  

It shows how much our souls are affected by what passes for public discourse these days that we may not feel a need to strictly "fact check" the criticisms we make of people we disagree with and even actively dislike. (I've read and passed on so many emails that I later learned were "urban legends" that I now check even the most plausible with Snopes.com .) And it is even sadder that we are almost proud of our suspicion and cynicism about public figures with whom we almost always disagree.  Indeed, many of us, I suspect, would feel that we would be betraying our own integrity if we ever " come to the defense, speak well of, and interpret everything [the public figure we despise] does in the best possible light." 

It is precisely here that we see and experience a spirituality that can counter the spiritual poison that often claims a bizarre caricature of Christianity as its basis and authority.  Christian "conviction" is not an excuse to put the cross-hairs on anyone, even metaphorically, and it precludes a self-righteous presumption (and I mean both those words theologically)  that we are completely right about any issue. 

Christian moral and spiritual conviction, in fact, demands non-violent discourse and action. It demands truth. Truth may not be comfortable for those who don't want to hear it. And the truth places two obligations on those who would speak it.  

One is that the speaker must be open to the possibility that he or she may not have the whole truth or even be mistaken. John Wesley used to preface some of his statements of deepest conviction by saying, "Until I am better instructed, I will believe . . . "  

The second is that the speaker of the truth must seek the ultimate good of the person being addressed. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that the white racists' souls would be saved if they were confronted with the truth about the evils of their racism, even though, in the short run it might deprive them of an economic or social advantage.  

Colson and Wallis give us an alternative that is open, I think, even to those who are not conventionally religious and it is liable to make those of us who are conventionally religious to become unconventionally open-minded and open-hearted:  

The scriptural admonition to pray for those in political authority is  more than a religious duty, it promotes good civic behavior. It is more  difficult to hate someone when you are praying for them. Jesus'  commandment to love our enemies, including those with whom we  politically disagree, is even more challenging and defies the ideologies  of both left and right. 

 

Fifteen Fictional Characters Who have Influenced Me

I decided to take up Andy Walsh's challenge to list 15 fictional characters who have influenced me. Note that they are not THE 15, but 15 out of many characters I've met in books or watched on TV or in the movies. These are characters who have become reference points for me - and also as shared reference points with members of my family. In fact, the characters who serve as a kind of short-hand for family discussions of values: Roark, for independence; Ayla, for adventure; Frodo, for overcoming evil - are the ones that stand out from the rest.

I was struck, as I undertook this, that I was writing a kind of autobiography. The bulk of the books mentioned here come from my childhood and youth. Others are books I've read together with Jacquie and Matt and Jim. Only a couple come from books I read by myself as an adult - although I've read a lot of novels and short stories and seen a lot of movies.

This is also a different question than what authors have influenced me. If I were to put in an "honorable mention", I'd like to say that the first week in April in 1992, Matt, Jim and I all mourned the passing of William Gaines, the publisher of MAD magazine, and Isaac Asimov, whose Foundation and Robot books meant so much to all three of us.

Finally, I've left biblical characters out of this list entirely, such as the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan and - pace fundamentalists - Adam and Eve, too. I guess I just wanted to prove that I also read other books.

Here are my fictional characters:

1. Ollie:
I asked my mother to read The Little Boy with the Big Horn  to me over and over again. Ollie's search for a place to practice playing his tuba without bothering his mother, the townspeople, or the cows in the country, led him to row a boat out into the ocean. As he practiced in the fog, his horn alerted a big passenger ship that it was too close to the rocks. Ollie went from being a problem to a hero! The attraction of that story is still inexplicable to me, but at a certain point, both my grandsons read it over and over again, too. Maybe every little boy feels like a problem and longs to be a hero, instead.

2. Davy Crockett:
Technically, Davy was a historical figure, but in technicolor, he was definitely a fictional character. Actually, the real Davy Crockett was, in many ways, a fictional character of his own creation. 
When the first Fess Parker film arrived at our local movie theater, we couldn't even get in - the place was sold out the first night. We got there early the second night.  My most prized gifts for my seventh birthday were a coonskin cap (fake) and a matchlock pistol (also fake).The image of Davy swinging his rifle as the Mexican army overran the Alamo is like an icon through which I see courage and dedication to a cause bigger than oneself. When Fess Parker died last year, I felt genuine sadness. 
Looking back, the continuing significance of Davy Crockett for me is that he taught me about how fact and legend mix. He taught me that even answering the simple question, "how did your day go?" means selecting what to tell and what not to tell and how to frame and arrange the narrative. In order to say something true about our day, we create fictions, just as Walt Disney and Davy Crockett, himself, created fictions to say something true about life on the wild frontier. It's not the only truth. The Creek tribe and the Mexicans have their own versions of that story and encountering those stories later in life taught me a lot about the nature of truth, too.

3. Superman:
In contrast to Davy, Superman is a real fictional character - the product of imagination. I spent a lot of hours with Superman, both in his televised incarnation and reading practically every issue of the comic book from 1957-1961. When I was in elementary school, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fly. Did I need a real cape? Maybe if I just jumped off something higher? As an adolescent, I coveted his X-ray vision - but I won't go into that. Superman taught me the limits of what is humanly possible. In some ways, I still wrestle with those limits. I suspect people wrestled with those limits before Siegel and Schuster invented Superman in a little house just a few blocks north of where I'm sitting right now. They gave a name and an image to an aspiration we all have to transcend the limits of human strength.

3. Robert A. Heinlein's Young Man:
This guy ranged in age from about 16 to 24 and appeared in Heinlein's science fiction novels under various names. Sure they were different characters, but they were really all the same young man. He was always underestimating his intelligence and courage. He was always curious about space and other planets. He might win a space suit in a contest, live on Mars, become a homesteader on a moon of Jupiter, use his telepathic powers to communicate with his twin brother across light years of space, or join an interplanetary army and wear an exoskeleton that enabled him to leap tall buildings at a single bound. These guys all had mentors who taught them how to solve problems with the principles of math and engineering. They lived in worlds dedicated to libertarian ideals, where everyone, for example, carried a gun - the mentally ill, the lazy and the impolite were eliminated by the "harsh mistress" of a dangerous environment. This is fiction, after all - and Heinlein's vision sure beats Ayn Rand's.
In some ways, this young man represents roads I did not travel into science, technology and a different philosophy of life; all of which have their attractions. Ultimately, I had to decide that wasn't the road for me and choosing not to go that way gives me more ownership of the path I did follow into words, tradition and community.

4. Roseasharn:
Actually, I'd include the whole Joad family in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, but the daughter, Rose of Sharon, whom her family calls "Roseasharn" stands out if only because of the final scene in the book. I was fortunate to go to a high school that did not require us to read books like this for class. They were left for us to discover in the library - or not (see Holden Caulfield below). I came to the novel without any context to put it in. It would be years before I learned that the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I just knew that the novel was like a punch in the gut. It awakened my social conscience. It's one reason why I didn't become Heinlein's young man.

5. Winston Smith:
1984, like The Grapes of Wrath, was just a book I took off the school library shelves. It taught me everything I need to know about propaganda and political speech. It made even more sense when I later learned that Orwell had chosen the title by reversing the numbers in 1948, the year it was published and the year I was born and the year that the U.S. War Department became the "Defense" Department.
But it was Smith and his struggle to find some privacy and truth and love in an environment that had redefined lies as truth and hate as love and war as peace and where every room was scanned by Big Brother, that really influenced me. I think of him every time I drive past a stoplight camera or stand with my legs spread apart and my hands behind my head in the airport security zone. (I can't think of Winston without also thinking of John, the Savage, in Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. There are days when I feel as alienated from the values of my culture as John did from the superficial world of Soma and Fordism and Winston from the world of Big Brother.)

6. Holden Caulfield:
Again, growing up in an extremely conservative and backward school district has its advantages. The Catcher in the Rye was in the backroom of the high school library. A kind of inner sanctum where certain Juniors and Seniors were allowed to take out books that shouldn't fall into the hands of more impressionable students. So, I really ate it up. The recent shooting death of that 9-year-old girl in Tuscon reminded me once again of Holden's desire to stand in the rye field at the edge of the world and catch the little kids before they fell over the edge.

6. Screwtape:
I also found C. S. Lewis in high school. Screwtape, the senior devil writing to his bungling nephew who is a kind of "guardian devil" to a young man who unfortunately becomes a Christian, introduced me to irony, satire and theology. I still return to Screwtape to remind myself that sometimes we see the truth best from the underside. And we tell it best with our tongue in our cheek.

7. Meursault:
Albert Camus' novel, The Stranger, wasn't even on the shelves in the library's back room. I think our librarian must have kept it under lock and key. There were stories about adolescents who killed themselves after reading it. When she offered it to me, I jumped at the chance to read it.
I knew I was reading something I did not understand. Camus pushed me and stretched me. I made all kinds of judgments about Meursault based on my limited world view as a Methodist farm boy growing up in Appalachia, but I also loved being pushed by his bizarre behavior and callousness - smoking while viewing his mother's dead body, his willingness to engage in cruelty and murder for no apparent reason. He taught me that there were people in this world whom I would never fully understand. There were world views that I hadn't even heard of yet. There were people who lived beyond the horizon of my experience. I've spent my life journeying toward that horizon trying to find what is on the other side either through literature or through personal contacts with people who are different from me.

8. The Bear
Faulkner's short novel by the same name tells the story of the Boy who goes hunting for the bear in the forest. We read it in college freshman English.  The guy who sat beside me had already read it in high school and he was pretty condescending to me because I had never even heard of Faulkner. But I got an "A" on the paper we wrote and he got a "C" (not that things like that matter to me or anything).  It taught me that I had a talent for something that I never even knew existed. I was able to read narratives and find deeper meanings in them.
I was reminded of The Bear, just last week when I was telling my 4-year-old grandson, Ziv, about 4 encounters I've had with bears in the hills along the border between southwestern New York (where Jacquie and I grew up) and northwestern Pennsylvania (where we camp every summer). Bears are like God in the Torah. You seldom see the Bear. When you do, it's usually only a glimpse as he disappears ahead of you. But the Bear always inspires awe, and when you know that he really is somewhere in those dark woods, it changes everything.

9. Aslan:
Even though I read just about everything by C.S. Lewis that I could get my hands on, I didn't read the Narnia novels until I read them to our sons. Matt was about 7 when I started reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Jim was about 4. I started reading to Matt, but Jim  listened and after a couple of nights it was clear that he was as deeply engaged in the story as any of us. By the time we finished the series, we had established a family ritual of reading together that Jacquie and I continue when we are on vacation and both Jim and Matt continue with their families, as well. I admit that I've grown somewhat less enamored with Aslan himself as I've grown older.  Lewis presents a Manichean vision in which some characters are all good and some are all evil and seems to buy into the myth of redemptive violence in ways that probably have more in common with Davy Crockett and Superman than with the Lamb who was slain (Rev. 2).

10. Frodo:
We followed Lewis with Tolkien and our kids kept up. Again, The Lord of the Ring trilogy was not on my reading list when I was young  (or even in our school library, although Jacquie had an outstanding 4th grade teacher who read the Hobbit to her class). Tolkien's vision of good and evil is more nuanced than Lewis'. Frodo struggles with the temptation of the ring and even Gollum has some redeeming qualities.

11. Ayla
Eventually our family read together The Clan of the Cave Bear and Valley of the Horses by Jean Auel. Ayla, the main character is a Cro-Magnon who was adopted as a small child by a clan of Neanderthals.  The second book of this series is a kind of romance novel. This is  how our sons got their sex education.  Ayla's discovery of her abilities to domesticate animals and to invent new ways of solving problems contrasted with her experiences with the Neanderthals raises all kinds of questions about what it means to be human. Anthropology has made great strides since these books were written (I just read that Auel plans to publish the last book in the series in 2011) but just thinking about people living in communities tens of thousands of years before "civilization" began has been as humbling as gazing at stars whose light left them thousands of years ago.

12. Howard Roark:
I made fun of Ayn Rand above, but her novel The Fountainhead, was a book all four of us read at different times in our lives and, for our family, it's a point of reference. Jacquie, Matt and Jim read it in high school. I didn't get to it until my 30's. The contrast between the visionary and uncompromising Roark and his contemporary, Peter Keating, who is described as a "second-hander" continues to influence me and prick my conscience whenever I just go along with the way everyone else thinks.

13. Henry James:
OK, Henry James was a real person, brother of the philosopher, William James, and one of the greatest novelists and short story writers in the English language. He is also a character in Colm Tóibín's novel, The Master. Jacquie and I read this together last year and I continue to think of the subtlety of Henry James' observation of human nature and his creative use of those observations as well as the way he handled his sexual orientation in a time and world that did not allow him to ever express it.

14. Fredrik Welin
This character appears in a novel called Italian Shoes, by Henning Mankell, who is probably better known for his crime novels featuring a detective named, Kurt Wallender. Mankell is the Swedish crime novelist who isn't Stieg Larsson.
Welin is a failed orthopedic surgeon in his early 60's, who lives alone on the coast of Sweden with his dog in a small cottage. Every day during the winter, he cuts a hole in the ice and immerses himself in the freezing water in order to both feel something and, I think, to numb himself, as well. He always keeps the door to the dining room shut because there is a giant anthill growing in the middle of the floor. The novel advances as it unravels the mystery about why Welin lives this way and how he eventually deals with his failure, rebuilds a relationship with his daughter and starts living again. I read this novel a couple of years ago, and Welin continues to be a touchstone for me.

15. Odysseus:
Didn't know where to put this guy. He's kind of the alpha and the omega of my fictional characters. I ran into his story first in the World Book Encyclopedia that I read from cover to cover to cover to .  .  . throughout elementary school. I knew his story years before I learned how to correctly pronounce his name. I read the Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey in a college English class even as I was slowly translating parts of the Iliad in 3rd year Greek. And, recently, when I've visited my grandchildren, I've read stories about Odysseus to them. I just had a discussion with my four year old grandson about Scylla and Charybdis. If a story lives for 3,000 years and appeals to 4-year-olds and Ph.D.'s it must be good. Odysseus' desire to return home, his fidelity to Penelope (in his fashion) and his overcoming of all the barriers put in his way continues to intrigue and inspire me.

Longing

I'm spending five days this week helping my son, Jim, take care of his kids while their mother is attending a spiritual retreat for rabbis, so I'm sitting at the Rabbi's desk and writing this on her laptop. Next to it is a book she left there, Devotion_, by Dani Shapiro. 

Shapiro is a fairly well-known novelist who, in her mid-forties, embarked on a spiritual search. Her father had been raised as an Orthodox Jew. Her mother had rejected religion. Dani had been caught in the middle, but her mother had mostly won. As she entered what Carl Jung called "the afternoon of life", Shapiro began asking if life consisted of more than appointments on a calendar and to-do lists. Something kept waking her up in the middle of the night. 

Her search takes her into New Age disciplines like energy therapy and Eastern paths such as yoga, but she keeps returning to Judaism (which is probably why it is sitting on the Rabbi's desk). It's the kind of book that you can "read around" in, just picking it up anywhere and taking a couple of minutes to polish off a short chapter that can be almost like a poem in its beauty and succinctness. 

In one, she visits the last member of her father's generation, his sister Shirley, who gave birth to four children whose many children are starting to have children of their own. The whole family is moving even farther into ultra-orthodoxy.  Dani's mother could never stand Shirley so Dani didn't know her well, but she needed contact with someone who had known her late parents when they were young. During the visit Shirley invites Dani to look out one of her windows at her "lady".  She is referring to a majestic weeping birch tree in the park across the street; 50 or 60 feet high. 

"How big was it when you moved in here?" Dani asked.

"It wasn't even planted in those days", said Shirley.

Dani writes: "I tried to imagine what it would be like to spend an entire lifetime in one place. To put down roots - to live in one single spot long enough to see the world sprout up around you. To watch the empty space outside your window become a sapling - and that sapling become an old, stately specimen. To give birth to a village. To be surrounded by the world you've created. To be governed by a belief so strong that nothing - not sadness, nor anger, nor grief - can shake it. To believe in God." 

She later her describes her aunt and her cousins as having something she doesn't have, certainty, while she will always have her doubts. 

Perhaps. 

It's been a long time since I've been absolutely certain of anything - ever since I encountered the Holy more than half a century ago, in fact. But, it has always seemed to me that I could be certain of my longing.  Would I thirst in a world without water? Would I hunger if there were no such thing as food? 

"Identity"

To the other people at the reception, you are name on an adhesive badge. To the TSA guard at the airport you are a face on a driver's license. To your great uncle Arthur, you will always be the kid who spilled an entire pot of spaghetti sauce even though 30 years have passed since then. To your employer and customers you are a commodity or service. To your friends you are the person who can be counted on to  ____________________________ (can you fill in the blank?)  

"Identity"  

Take away the badge, the official documents, the relatives who have known you all your life, the job, the title, the habitual roles you play in your family and friendship circle and who are you?  

St. Francis of Assisi is said to have spent entire nights praying: "O God, who are  You? And who am I?"  

The two questions go together. Find the answer to one and you will find the answer to the other. 

  

There is  little game you can play in your mind:   

 

You have a job, but you are not your job. Who are you if you aren't your job? 

You have a family, and your role in that family is important, but you are not that role. Who are you without that role? 

See and listen to the things you were told about yourself as a child by people who were important to you. Does that define "you" or is it just someone else's construct of you?  

See your clothes, your house, your possessions. You are not your possessions. Who are you? 

See the sum total of your life experiences. Would you still be "you" if you had different experiences? If you are not the sum total of these experiences, who are you? 

See your thoughts whirling around in your head. On any given day at any given time you will have different thoughts swirling in your head than you have right now. If  you are not your thoughts, who are you? 

See your body. Think of the way it has changed over the years. Indeed, except for the enamel on your teeth, the cells in your skin and bones and other organs constantly replace themselves. You have grown from a tiny infant weighing just a few pounds to an adult weighing  . . .  more than a few pounds.  If you are not your body, who are you?  

See your goals, your sense of purpose and your plans for the future. Do these not change over time?

Does your identity change with them? If you are not your plans and goals, who are you?  

As Jesus came up out of the Jordan after his baptism, a voice spoke, "This is my beloved Son."  

Strip away all the things that are not God that claim to give you your identity and you will find that you are a beloved child of God.  

Try it  and see.