I Want To Be a French Horn When I Grow Up

 

nightswimming deserves a quiet night

like anyone would be, i am flattered by your fascination with me

"It's hot." That's the first thing I said to her, and she responded, "It's because the earth tilts." Then I fell in love with her and wondered what to say next.

"It won't always be like this," I said after a few minutes' silence.

"No?"

"No. I'm pretty sure it won't always be like this."

"Why?" Her Prettiness asked.

"We won't talk about that. I want to see you nights."

She smiled and my heart melted, but I didn't tell her that, because then how would I feel anything for the next 80 years if I didn't have that important organ anymore?

One thing I might regret is not smiling much. A guy told me yesterday I have really white teeth. He dispensed this information after asking if I used teeth whitener.

"No." And then some laughter.

But I wanted to be witty around Her Prettiness, and witty people don't smile. I know this because I watch comedy television.

There have been times when I was flipping through the channels and FRIENDS came on and I said, "Where's my life like that? I want to be like that." I think I was quoting a rock song, which I know from listening to the radio a lot in high school.

It would go like this: normal line, normal line, normal line, punch line without a smile, audience laughs.

So I tried this with Her Prettiness, and I don't know if it worked, but she did stay in the seat across from me in the coffee shop and she didn't move, not even when my punch lines without smiles weren't funny. Sometimes I would laugh at those because it seemed a shame for the sound waves to float out into infinity unnoticed. Then I wondered how many jokes that weren't funny to the original audience landed on ears across the room and were carried out and taken to homes where the outside paint cracked and the 13-inch color TV with an antenna blared into the living room while a man in overalls held a beer in his sun-colored, rough hand. And the carrier became the teller and the beer-drinking recipient said, "Ha!"

Here, though, I swam in her eyes for a little bit, even if it wasn't socially cool, because what if her pool dries up? I'd regret never taking a dive for as long as we both shall live.

"When it rains do you ever wonder if each drop has its own story and on the way down they all have a little party and are nothing but happy because, hey, we were up high and now we're going down to soil and cement and horses and roofs and Singapore, but then we're going back up again, and then it's another party!"

"Do you spend a lot of time alone?" Her Prettiness asked.

"I don't see the relevance of your question."

"Has your best friend ever died?"

"No."

Her Prettiness looked down and I knew what was going on in her beautiful mind. I almost grabbed her hand like old men do to their elderly brides, which I know about from the movies, but I held myself back because while eye-swimming is a little strange it's not nearly as strange as touching, even if my soul did already shoot towards her and hover around her body because my insides can't help but be near her, so my fingertips on her skin would have only been ceremonial anyway. "Tell me about your dead friend."

She smiled a little because she draws from a deep well. "He"

He?!

"liked to hunt for frogs. He was very deliberate about making sure they could breathe in the little cages he made for them, though. 'Death is not for the living!' he would say, so he avoided ants on the sidewalk and captured spiders and took them outside, and made sure the frogs had big breathing holes."

I loved her more than I did while swimming in her eyes because now I knew one more thing about her, and I already forgot that I was jealous her best friend was a boy. Then I might have said something stupid: "But isn't death only for the living? I mean, a dead person can't die, so death really is for the living. Does that make sense?" I asked tenderly because I wanted to be able to swim for the next 80 years.

She smiled because she understood that humans, even the good ones, say stupid things they later regret. "I think you're right."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"I don't miss him."

Pause.

Another pause.

I stopped looking at the ceiling because I remembered I'm self-conscious about my Adam's Apple. "I don't read comics."

"Not even the funnies in the paper?"

"Not even the funnies in the paper."

Thirty seconds or more of silence passed. I only looked at the ceiling for a moment this time because I caught myself, and she wouldn't say yes to forever with me if she wasn't attracted to my throat.

Silences were OK around her because the soul operates differently than the brain: the brain needs stimulation like from sound waves or touch or taste. I wanted to ask what was at the center of her world because that was pretty important to me, and she was also important to me, so why not put the two together and have happiness times two?

"Do you think Hawaii gets lonely?"

"Hawaii is a couple of islands, so they have each other," Her Prettiness said right away, and that just made me think of having her and her having me, but how can I have a normal conversation when that's going on in me, or rather around her, since my soul had already found a home near her?

"How long have you been the smartest person you know?" I asked.

"I don't mind your questions," Her Prettiness said, and I hoped she said that in 2017 and 2022 and 2057 around several different dinner tables; I wanted to see her nights.

"Sometimes when the right song plays I forget sadness exists," I whispered to her while leaning forward, but she didn't lean forward like me because she's read a lot of British Literature and she knew where she's been and where she's going and therefore knew the best choice to make in that moment. "For a couple minutes, anyway, but the feeling goes away pretty quickly and - bummer - it's back to life, back to reality," which is a song I'm familiar with.

"I come here a lot," Her Prettiness said, and she might as well have said, "I do," because I made a plan.

I didn't watch her leave because I know about the good guys in British Literature.

Worldview 09: Story, Rescue, So What?

One Friday I had the whole day off work so I went to a bookstore, ordered a grande peach tea and started writing how I saw the world.  After 5 hours I looked back and noticed that it was part philosophy, part theology, part spiritual memoir.  It's too long for one post so I'll divide it up into 9 days.  This is post 9 of 9.

“We are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories are necessarily rooted in our experience, and by how we choose to interpret the experiences of others. These mechanics of memory create a new, present reality that then determines the future.”
– The Stories We Tell Ourselves, Newsweek July 14, 2008

Contrary to what most of us were taught, our understanding of the world rests not on pure scientific fact but on stories.  Scientists assume whatever they assume about the world based on their experiences, and these rest upon stories.^{5 6}

I am here simply attempting to briefly sketch the one from which I am attempting to live.  It’s a story of the irruption of heaven into the affairs of earth.⁷

About that great rescue

As I said earlier, for a long time I (and many others) had an understanding of the world that consisted of the god-man saving individual souls from this worldly evil, ultimately taking them up to heaven when they die.  I am coming to understand that the story is much wider, deeper, higher and heavier.  The overlord has not given up on his original good creation.  When the god-man hung on the execution stake for a couple of hours and then breathed his last breath while his blood poured onto the ground, he was accomplishing no less than a world-wide rescue.  This means grass, worms, marriages, wallets, ecosystems, governments, villages, families, and every square inch on earth.^{8 9 10 11 12}

If you’re wondering how a dead man can accomplish these things, the answer is, obviously, he’s not still dead.  A couple hundred witnesses saw this great rescuer for a couple of weeks after he was brutally murdered and set into the earth for 2 or 3 days.  His coming-back-to-life was not a simple, “See?  I came back to life, therefore I am the god.  Believe in me.”  This raising-from-the-dead was nothing less than the pushing of heaven into earth, commencing a new sort of world.  Easter is not just an egg and religion holiday. That crisp Spring morning was the beginning of this planet’s great reversal from decay and bondage to rescue and freedom.¹³ A new day has come.^{14 15} I wonder if the grass sang and the earth shook with uncontrollable happiness when it felt him again.

So what now?

If it’s true that the overlord began his great rescue project in this god-man, and this person is still alive, then he must be at work even right now.¹⁶ Which means I have a choice.  I can join him in this rescue project or I can curl in on myself and live a selfish, unsatisfying, hedonistic life, which would actually be going against the very fabric of my being.¹⁷

It’s very temping for me to shrink back into a condemning posture towards the world.  This is part of my spiritual heritage, a part I hope to leave behind.¹⁸

At the end of time humans do not ascend to the heavens.  Rather, the overlord descends to earth and finally sets up his new society here.  A physical planet is our home forever,¹⁹ and the signs seem to point to it being this very earth, although with a few touch-ups.

So if the world-maker is rescuing his land, and if I am a part of that rescue, one way to join this project is by pointing to the good wherever I see it — celebrities, neighbors, current events, inmates, ingrates, apostates, anywhere.  I have joined up with a local and worldwide community of people who actually believe that the spirit of this overlord is hovering around Rocky Mountain ski slopes and crouching into Mumbai slums; sneaking into Wall Street meetings and running to first base at Little League games in Delaware; blowing out candles in the Red Light District and resting on a hospital bed in Beijing; inspiring a cellist in Okinawa and hanging out with an architect in Stockholm.  If it’s good, if it’s true, if it’s excellent, if it’s beautiful, I will point it out, because it belongs to the overlord, and I belong to him, so if it’s good and true then it’s mine to claim, and I will claim it.  I will point it out.  I will be happy in it, because it is in character of the way things were always meant to be and the way things always will be.

Just Jump

I am learning that finding truth is not limited to discovering certain facts and then living in light of them.  The past several years I have come to understand that much of what we believe about the world is due in large part to trusting certain people.  Everybody has a few people that they respect, and their view of the world is shaped by their trust in those peoples’ opinions.  I have found over the past several years that the people I admire the most are not the ones who have it all figured out, but who have studied and experienced things and then choose to live a certain way despite their limited knowledge.

In other words, some people spend their whole lives watching, analyzing, dissecting, and arguing over the various components of a trampoline, while other people decide to start jumping.  I find myself drawn more and more to people who are rockin’ the double-bounce despite its dangers and despite the crowd of people surrounding the trampoline, judging and pontificating on what they see.  Still some others have decided that jumping on this trampoline is not for them; they’d rather go do something else.  The excuses range from “It’s too dangerous,” to “It doesn’t make sense,” to the brutally honest, “I don’t want to live in a world like that.”  That’s respectable.  I for one am deciding to take the risk, to make the leap, to start jumping.  And from what I hear it is, in the immortal words of Bill & Ted, an excellent adventure.

_____

5 “Truth is not limited to that which has been proven by scientific experiment or deductive logic.  If it were, we would never know any truth at all.  Scientists need assumptions and logicians need premises to make their demonstrations relevant to life.  Assumptions and premises come from our experience; they rest upon stories.” Dickerson, pg. 258

6 “Consider this: only a small portion of the Bible contains propositional information about God.  Why is this?  Propositions attempt to define God, to capture God in information that we can handle, hold, conceive, wield.  And there is a risk that if religion is only theological propositions – a series of affirmations about God – then it becomes an idol.  It does not grow; it can only decay.  Graven images of God become barriers to knowing God, because they satiate the imagination with thoughts: ‘God is like this, and that is all.’  Propositions, if they stand alone, can do the same thing.  But from start to finish, the Bible is full of stories.  It is one grand narrative composed of hundreds of small narratives…The Bible is not so much concerned with defining God as with describing God, and telling a story.  The aim of the story is not to capture God but to point to God and invite the reader to engage in the adventure of seeking God.”  Dickerson, pg.71

7 “Mark begins his Gospel by stating that he is writing the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, not its entirety.  That gospel is not merely a statement; it is a transforming narrative.  It has transforming power because it is the unique story of the salvific irruption of heaven into the affairs of earth.  It takes place at the boundary between heaven and earth in a way that takes the business of earth just as seriously as it takes the business of heaven.  Earth is dignified by receiving the exclusive attention of heaven; heaven is validated by its entrance into earth.” Dickerson pg.89

8 Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen phrase it this way in their book The Drama of Scripture:  “In the cross, Jesus acts to accomplish his purposes for all of history – to save the creation.  Too often we reduce the significance of the cross to the fact that ‘Jesus died for me.’  Believers do share in the accomplishments of his death, and so we can say this with joy and confidence.  Yet God’s purposes move beyond the salvation of individuals.  In the death of Jesus, God acts to accomplish the salvation of the entire creation: Jesus dies for the world.” 2004: pg.164

9 “From the beginning God’s redemptive work aims at recovering and restoring his good creation.  Thus, the people who seek to be obedient to him must seek a redemption as wide as creation itself.” Bartholomew pg.198

10 In his book Only Human ethicist David Gushee agrees with Bartholomew by phrasing it this way: “A better understanding of the Christian faith is that God did more than make a scattered collection of individual me’s.  He made a world.  And he has a bigger plan than rescuing a select few out of the world and out of eternal perdition.  God’s project is not just the personal salvation of you and me but the redemption of the world as a whole.  This leads to a different kind of proposal as to the ultimate destination of life’s journey.” 2005: pg.296

11 “Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken.” Keller pg.96

12 “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: Mine!” Abraham Kuyper, Abraham Kuyper, A Centennial Reader, 1988: 488)

13 NT Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus introduces and expounds on this.

14 “The kingdom of God has arrived in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Two great figures stand at the entrances to two worlds: Adam stands at the gate of the old world, Jesus at the gate of the new.  Adam’s first sin inaugurated the old age and brought sin, death, and condemnation.  Now in Jesus a new day of righteousness, life, and justification has come (Romans 5:12-21).  If we are ‘in Adam,’ we are part of the old age and under its sway.  But if we are ‘in Christ,’ we are part of the age to come and can already experience God’s life-giving power.” Bartholomew, pg.189

15 “In the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a new world is dawning.  The night of evil has ended.  The light of God will fill the whole earth again.  The resurrection stands at the center of the Christian faith.” Bartholomew, pg.165

16 See the introduction of Cornelius Plantina’s Engaging God’s World for a compelling vision of this kind of world.

17 “You were made for mutually self-giving, other-directed love.  Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made.” Keller, pg.217

18 “Many Christians who know about the promise of Christ’s return assume that the end of all things will involve a destruction of this earth and a transfer of God’s people to heaven.  So in the end their hope is not so much for the redemption of this world but for their personal escape from it in the company of other believers.  They believe this based on their interpretation of certain key biblical passages, such as 2 Peter 3:9-10 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18.
I am among those who believe that although the details are not shared with us, what the Bible actually teaches is the final ‘renewal’ of all things earthly, rather than their destruction.  God’s intent is to purge, heal, reclaim, and reconcile to himself the earth and its inhabitants, and this is what will occur at the end of time.” Gushee, pg.198-199

19 Michael Wittmer, in his book Heaven is a Place on Earth says this: “We don’t hope merely for the day when we go to live with God, but ultimately for that final day when God comes to live with us.” 2004: pg.17

note:  After listening to Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis today in the car today I was struck at how much of my own thoughts are just poor rephrasings of this book.  This is a classic example of how 90% of our thoughts about the world are “underwater.”  I didn’t quote him because I didn’t even realize how much of my thought process was coming from his own thoughts.   You know what they say, though: the good writers borrow while the great ones steal!

Worldview 08: The World is Good, Evil, and Being Rescued

One Friday I had the whole day off work so I went to a bookstore, ordered a grande peach tea and started writing how I saw the world.  After 5 hours I looked back and noticed that it was part philosophy, part theology, part spiritual memoir.  It's too long for one post so I'll divide it up into 9 days.  This is post 8 of 9.

The world is good

During my spiritual toddler years I thought the world was a temporary and evil place.  I still believe it is one of those.  My opinion has changed, though, after being convinced by the very same text that was used to teach me the opposite.  But I also have eyes and ears and have noticed a few things around me.

Have you ever been interested in somebody of the opposite sex and then one day you catch their eyes across a crowded room not once but twice within a few minutes, and a couple weeks later they reach for your hand and your stomach does a cartwheel?  In those moments do you believe that the world is evil, or do you feel that somehow being alive just got a whole lot better?

Have you ever stood on a beach with warm sand between your toes some August evening as you watch the sun turn the clouds overhead three shades of orange as it descends past the horizon?  In that moment do you insist that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, or do you simply stand in awe at the wonder of it all?

Do you have enough faith to believe that an overlord creative enough to design 35,000 species of beetles; 326 million trillion gallons of water; planets weighing 6 sextillion metric tons suspended in space revolving around a 27 million degree ball of fire at such a consistent pace that on our planet we only need to adjust our calendars slightly once every four years; and 3 pounds of gray matter resting inside a protective casing setting at the top of an erect, moving, shock-absorbing structure that is capable of designing symphonies, love letters and bulldozers, would make all these things and more only to destroy them in the end?  Do you have that kind of faith?

Or do you trust your gut feeling that resonates with all of the beauty you see around the world and in those closest to you?  Do you believe that all that has been made is good?

I look around me and see too much beauty, too much love, too much kindness, too much potential, too much laughter to believe that it all randomly happened, or that it's all meaningless in the end, that only the immaterial part of humans will last forever.

The world is evil

If you have access to CNN or have family members you'll recognize very quickly that any view of life that doesn't involve tragedy, suffering, sadness, loneliness and death is at best severely misguided and at worst profoundly destructive.  The reality is that the same beautiful sun kissing the summer sky over the west coast horizon is at the very same time scorching an underpaid and malnourished servant in a wheat field across the ocean, contributing to his dehydration and ultimately his premature death.  He won't be buried, and the work will go on.  The same gravitational pull causing the planets to revolve magnificently around the sun will cause the ocean waves to increase in size and ultimately smother a seaport town, killing tens of thousands of humans, animals, insects, and vegetation in the process.  The same gray matter capable of designing a sweater for a homeless Michigan girl will also craft an atomic bomb and drop it on an island full of school teachers, assassins and newlyweds.

Do you have enough faith to believe that all is well, has always been well, and always will be well?  That evil is an illusion or a political game played in order to label the "others"?  I don't.  I have to believe that the shame I feel over poor decisions I've made, the increasing number of inmates in prisons around the world, the extermination of 6 million people at the hands of their own countrymen, and the unnatural disasters claiming millions of lives in our human history are as much a part of life as the pure, unadulterated joy we feel when we hold a soft, innocent newborn in our arms.

If a person is going to try to make sense of his surroundings, he must include at least the glaringly obvious: there is darkness in the world.

The world is being rescued

Do you have enough faith to believe that the creative overlord would watch his world descend into chaos while sitting back with folded arms, doing nothing about it?  Do you have enough faith to believe that a Midwestern middle-aged white man raised under the roof of a racist father quits his triple-figure job and buys a plane ticket to the Middle East in order to lovingly care for the very same people he was taught to hate...simply because he wanted to do something nice?  What happened to him that he completely changed the way he thinks about the world and the people he was raised to despise?  What is it that causes a woman who was viciously raped to look her attacker in the eyes and tell him that she holds nothing against him?  What compels a German soldier to bring food to a hiding Jew in German-occupied territory?

I don't have the faith to believe that what I see around the world can only be explained by natural causes.  I trust that there is an invisible force moving around the earth, and that this force is both powerful and personal.  I believe that the person who made the world good was deeply grieved when he saw it descend into chaos, and then he decided to do something about it.  I believe that at a certain point in history the power that made all-that-is decided to run into flesh, as it were, and enter into human history.  I believe that this person was born in a similar way to all of us, experienced life in a similar way as all of us, and died like all of us will.

This god-man is similar to us in many ways, but different from us in others.  Some of us believe that when this man was murdered, something mystical happened.  When a nearby soldier thrust a spear into his side and blood poured out onto the same dirt from which the young soldier’s great ancestors came, a timeless work was done.  All of the evil things that every human is guilty of, thus separating each of us from a connection with the overlord, have been paid for and forgiven.  It’s as if you were convicted of a serious crime and sentenced to death row when all of the sudden a man steps out from the shadows and says that he will take your place - he will be killed so that you can go free.

This is a great thing, and I’ve seen entire villages erupt in 2-hour long parties after hearing this news.  It's a beautiful part of the story.

But it’s only the beginning.  When religious people tell you that this is “the gospel,” it is like taking you to meet their friend Jimmy, and then pointing to his foot and saying, “This is my friend Jimmy.”  Jimmy’s foot is indeed a part of Jimmy, but it’s not Jimmy.  Jimmy also has another foot, and arms and knees and triceps and a heart and rotator cuffs and fingernails.  You do a disservice to Jimmy and your friend when you introduce only a small part of Jimmy and claim that that is all there is to Jimmy.

There has been a block of people throughout history that have understood their religion to be much more than a Jimmy’s-foot gospel.  The past hundred years or so this wonderfully dramatic and beautiful story has been shrunk into a few propositions that a person needs to mentally assent to if they wish to ascend to the heavens when they die.  Besides being boring, this is simply untrue.⁴

I have been energized and excited to learn that these mysterious nudges I’ve felt throughout my life are an invitation to participate in nothing less than the greatest drama the world has ever known, and if I’m willing, I can play a small role in this great rescue project.

_____

4  Matthew Dickerson phrases it this way in his book From Homer to Harry Potter: “The story of Jesus is not an addition to religious law or practice.  The gospel ‘rule’ is that no rule can ever suffice to reconcile humanity with God.  The gospel is the story of the triumph of grace.  This is important: grace is not to be mistaken for some stale doctrine of religious economics, whereby sinful flesh is exchanged for an equal quantity of forgiveness.  It is a story, a living story – one might say it is the story, the one that validates and energizes all other stories.  It is a story in which we all participate, and this is why Mark says that his account is only the beginning.  The gospel is not a creed; it is life itself, continually growing, ramifying, fructifying.  2006: pg. 89