Brad Wise, Michael Stipe & RISD

Just read this post, and I liked it a lot. Quite a bit of what I’m wrestling with in there.

Ob La Di

Hey this blog is still here, even without new posts for months. It’s like a Sopranos episode I watched recently, with Carmela in Paris. How do we know the people in Paris existed before we got there? And that they’ll continue to exist after we leave? (My apologies of course to my Parisian reader[s].) Which led her into deeper existential questions of life and death fit these days only to be addressed on prime time pay TV or in the theater. In any case, the blog is still here. You may have even visited it since last I posted. And for the record, it hasn’t been the Droid keeping me away, as captivating a distraction as that little toy is.

Perhaps it’s that I’ve been less reflective these days. I am and have always been hopelessly self-aware and therefore self-critical. If you read this blog at any length, you’ll recognize quickly who my favorite topic is. And if life were all about me this would be one of my most valuable character traits. For me to be less reflective is something at least worth writing down. (Though worth posting publicly you be the judge). It could be I suppose that I’m beginning to give up on myself. Or rather, beginning to give up on my ability to improve myself through thorough self analysis. Journaling is useful. Self-analyzing is informative. The examined life and all. But if these last five or six years have been about anything they’ve been about pummeling my self-centeredness into oblivion (by of course pummeling me into oblivion). Self analysis is not so valuable at the bottom of the crater where my big dreams were. Turns out self pity goes much further down there, but that’s a topic for another post. In any case it doesn’t get me out. The way out is by moving forward without my big bad self – a journey I’ve been on this last year or two. At least I hope I have; I could probably also rewrite this post and just as easily cast myself as stagnant and apathetic instead of heroic and overcoming. You see how much I still like myself?

Anyhow, life goes on. And if life is after all not about me then I hope I have the balls to recognize who it is about.

Testing

I got a Droid this weekend, courtesy of my generous employer. In conservative terms it’s probably the coolest Christmas present I’ve received since I was young enough that every Christmas present was the coolest Christmas present ever. That’s more a testament to the boyish wonder this thing evokes than to the quality of the presents I’ve received as an adult.

This here is a test of the system, to see if indeed I can post to my blog from my telephone. Which is an odd notion, that the handful of ultraconcentrated technology I’m holding is also a telephone. I owned it about 24 hours before I took a call on it, there’s so much other internettiness and such to be had here. And it’s even more odd to be posting something longer than 160 characters from a phone.

Get Mad

Advice to myself for the day, from Alec Baldwin’s speech in Glengarry Glen Ross, his only lines in what is arguably his best performance:

“Get mad, you sons of bitches, get mad.”

Don’t fold, don’t complain, don’t get all sorry for yourself. Get pissed off and get something done.

 

Love It or Leave It

I’m reexamining my life recently. Something I have had a lot of practice in over the years. I can diagnose and prescribe appropriate plans of actions like it’s nobody’s business, hyper self-aware and ubercritical as I am. What I am less good at is doing the things I determine I should do to improve my life, at least in a long-term, life-improving fashion. I mentioned Francis Chan’s book Crazy Love recently; I think it would have been more appropriately titled something like Love that Kicks You in the Rich White American Ass and Scatters Your Uselessly Hoarded Stuff to People Who Maybe Really Need It. Or else perhaps One of Those Books You’ll Love and Recommend to All Your Christian Friends and then Try to Forget About as Quickly as You Can. Not the sort of titles that sell books though, which would undercut the purpose of writing it I guess.

I am hesitant to pronounce anything I have gleaned or “figured out” from reflecting on this book, even in such a quasi-anonymous forum like this blog. Perhaps this one thing is pertinent though: “trying harder” to love God and live toward others in that light is preposterous. Renewed effort only covers up my own drastic shortcomings in the faith and spirituality department; it doesn’t fill the hole.

I opened the Bible this morning, the first time in months (years?) I haven’t done so just to follow along with something someone else was saying or writing. I didn’t get through much, maybe a chapter, but it’s a very different world in there when I read it as best I can as written, trying to leave aside all the things I have been spoon-fed about it, whether those things were genuinely helpful and offered as such or not. It was a simple experiment and hardly worth mentioning if I didn’t intend to continue it.

It’s Not About Me

I read Francis Chan’s book Crazy Love the better part of a year ago, and I’m going back through it now with our small group. It’s a short book and a quick read, but I think I’ll always be measuring my life by some of the standards it touches on. Reading it alone the first time, I felt overwhelmed. This time through, as I begin to talk it out (I’m such an external processor), I’m seeing some things I hadn’t before.

There’s not time now to explore what I’ve come across, but here’s what I’ve been chewing on recently:

It’s not about me.

Such a simple and self-evident statement pertaining to the sort of impassioned and self-sacrificial life I believe a faith in a good God requires. But I really don’t get it.

It’s not about me.

The roadblocks to the life I really want are all about me. What I have or don’t have, what I can or can’t do, what I will or won’t do. These things keep me in my current day to day life. Which is a fine life. But perhaps its defining characteristic is that it’s about me. This other life, or way of life actually, is not.

Signing off, mid-ponder.

NakedPastor

I’ve enjoyed this guy’s cartoons before, but I just found his T-shirt design gallery. Some pretty comical stuff in there for the casual Christian, like these gems.

Fishionary Position

WANTED: New Black Bag

Complaining has been a problem for me recently. Or rather I’ve had no problem complaining, it’s the toxic fallout of stewing, criticizing, looking for worst-case scenarios and playing out arguments in my head that has plagued me. I discovered this quote from Richard Rohr today that resonates with me:

“I will offer you a simple litmus test to determine whether a person has healthy or unhealthy religion. What do they do with their pain—even their daily little disappointments? Do they transform their pain or do they transmit it?

We all have pain—it’s the human situation, we all carry it in a big black bag behind us and it gets heavier as we get older: by betrayals, rejections, disappointments, and wounds that are inflicted along the way. If we do not find some way to transform our pain, I can tell you with 100% certitude we will transmit it to those around us.

At the end of life, and probably early in life, too, the question is, “What do I do with this disappointment, with this absurdity, with this sadness?”

I have known people who carry their big black bag on their chest and open it up for you as often as speak to you. And I’ve known other folks whose bag somehow seems to have a perpetual hole in the bottom.

I was talking with a friend the other day about responding to pain. And to another friend about adjusting our attitude. And with both the consensus was this is no small matter. It is one thing to practice the habits that essentially amount to squeezing my eyes tight and whistling along with Monty Python (come on, you know it),

Always look on the bright side of life…

It’s quite another thing to make a fundamental worldview shift and learn to deal with the vast quantities of pain and disappointment I encounter in a transformative way rather than deny it and/or transmit it. On the other hand, as I admitted in yet another recent conversation (interesting how most of my processing these days is through conversation), I used to be the sort of person who who contributed more positively and constructively to my world; lately I seem to be trending toward the negative. So on these terms at least my worldview has already shifted at least once.

In an article on suffering, a Harvard Law Professor writes about his own suffering ,

“Cancer and chronic pain remain ugly things, but the enterprise of living with them is not an ugly thing.”

This strikes me as close to reality. The “enterprise of living” with pain, disappointment and tragedy is not by definition a bad thing, though the pain itself is notably convincing to the contrary. Is misery as much a self-chosen mantle as joy and hopefulness then? Is a profound worldview change as simple as a deliberate series of choices? I figure if I got myself here somehow, then somehow there is a way out.

The Song That’s Stuck in My Head #4

“How He Loves”
David Crowder* Band

David Crowder and his pals dare you not to smile when you see the cover of their forthcoming album, Church Music, a jab at the glitzy charm of religious television. “How He Loves”, the first single off the record is at once utterly top-of-your-lungs singable and awkwardly clunky. The verses are poetic in a high church hymn sort of way, with more creative rhyming and unexpected meters, and when I first heard them in a congregational singalong setting I found them darn well inaccessible. But it’s the singable chorus that gets lodged in my brain, another THTSIMH example of passionate melody carrying my day. And with that said, here’s a verse:

We are his portion and he is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes,
If his grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
So heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss,
And my heart turns violently inside of my chest,
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets,
When I think about, the way…

Things You Can Only Get Away With When You’re Four

So I’m at the Reds game Sunday with my family and telling my four year old we’re rooting for the guys in the red shirts. So the guy in the black shirt steps up to bat and Zeke yells at the top of his lungs, “Hey blacks, get out!” I resist the urge to remind him we’re a block from the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and he really shouldn’t say things like that, and tell him instead, no, call them the Rockies please.