What Does it Mean to Work?

As another Labor Day moves toward twilight, I find myself wanting to reflect on the nature of work. After all, it does consume more of our time than sleep—that is, if, like me, you don’t sleep well. And it seems to be what consumes much of our attention and worry as well.

My wife just began a new full-time position teaching elementary band, something she is extremely well-qualified for, and she is enjoying it immensely. One of her colleagues looked at her after they had introduced another elementary school to the instruments that make up the band and the symphony orchestra and said, “We actually get paid to do this.”

This is fulfillment in ones work, an enviable prospect. When I was younger, I was forced to work at jobs that did not require my best, or they challenged me because I wasn’t quite qualified. And when I went through a season of unemployment, I began to understand the importance and dignity of all labor.

As I reflect on this Labor Day, when the economy seems, by jolts and setbacks, to be getting better, it seems to me that this one day off seems universal, unlike many of the religious holidays we have today. And I am aware that work may be the way we separate the boys and girls from the men and women. That’s right. Work, a job, constitutes a kind of rite of passage. A first job in ones teen years seems to do this, even if it lacks the dignity of a Bar Mitzvah.

This is, of course, to really note that rites of passage as form and external markers are largely lacking in American culture, and so men in their late thirties can continue to live in their parents’ basements and aging, slumping middle aged managers with comb-overs can go on pretending that they don’t have to admit that they are outside of the eighteen to forty-nine year old demographic television producers covet.

What Fits Our Style

No, it seems to me that Americans seem pretty okay with the fact that we are lacking in the quest images that were social markers of hunting and warrior tribes, or even the celebration and symbolism of the Bar Mitzvah. We really don’t seem to mind that we don’t have much clarity on how to establish that childhood has ended and adulthood has commenced. In former times, the assumption seemed to have worked that, in a democracy, the passage into adulthood should be handled by the family and in the privacy of the home. More recently, this democratic process seems to have evolved into a lasez-faire, existential void.

As a rite of passage, a first job lacks any of the high seriousness or religious significance of these other forms of cultural expression. But it does introduce the young to the very secular adult requirements of paying taxes and bills and learning to balance a personal budget, and this is what seems to matter most to us as a people. It also can announce a new responsibility to the social forces of the community at play beyond the enclosed, presumably nurturing structures of family and neighborhood, though apparently it doesn’t always.

Why A Book about the Mafia is on My Top Ten List

Recently, I responded to a Facebook posting I was tagged in by listing the top ten books that have stayed with me. I normally resist such temptations, but this time, the subject was too alluring. Even as I posted, I knew the folly of what I was doing. I had to post quickly? And keep my list to ten books?

One of the books on my list—at number ten, I listed Mario Puzo’s The Godfather—might seem suspicious, and for a couple of reasons. As a Christian, I admit to being influenced by this violent bestseller? And really, I would list it instead of other books?

I admit that I haven't read the book since high school, at a time (1972) when I saw paperback copies around our school that fell open at the scene where Sonny is having an adulterous liaison that seemed hilarious to the average high school student at the time. And even the author once said it could have been written better. Yes, Puzo himself once said he wished in retrospect that he’d written the book that brought him fame and fortune more carefully. (Most authors say this about their published works, of course, and shouldn't always be believed.)

Lists are arbitrary, and I will admit that mine was certainly influenced by a few things I went through this week. Next week I might think of other books, depending on what I am facing then. But this week, I listed The Godfather at number ten not because of its style or anything other than that I think it belongs in the same category about the American Dream that should be headed by Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The American dream says that if you are willing to work hard and play by the rules, you will get ahead and succeed no matter who you are and no matter what your circumstances might be. The fact that this has not been the case for many people groups is often ignored.

The Godfather is set in an Italian-American immigrant community in New York city and manages to question most of that dogma at just about every turn. From Johnny Fontaine's new movie deal (remember the horse's head scene?) to the importance of corrupt cops and politicians to the plot, the novel manages to say something truthful in an entertaining way about corruption in American politics and business that goes back at least to the Di Medici family and may be as old as Rome. We might as well be honest and note that the same corruption can run through ecclesiastical and academic cultures and hierarchies, though the stakes are often petty.

Sure, there’s that one line near the beginning of the third act in the book where Kay says, “Michael, Senators don’t have people killed.” Michael answers, “Kay, now who is being naïve?” That line often drew knowing chuckles from an audience in the early '70s just getting over the Viet Nam conflict. It still resonates, of course, with all the new conflicts. And it is just a few lines of dialogue. Puzo’s account of an underground syndicate running successfully parallel to the system on the surface and also pulling many of its strings may sound more like the stuff of headlines coming out of Mexico these days. But it is also a stable American story.

For these reasons, I think this book belongs on my top ten list. It’s not a beautiful book. And it may or may not have been written as well as the author was capable of writing. But even in its 1970s bestseller form and its almost comic book figures, it does explore how power works best when it is ignored and mostly hidden from view.

When Words Choose Us

I can really only dance around this. I haven’t heard anyone else talk about it. Though they should be the ones to make the most of it, Charismatic Christians generally don’t.

In one of the gospels, there appears to be evidence that Christ was at least aware of the Greek art of Rhetoric. In one of his discourses to his followers, he says that because of their faith and their testimony they can expect to be dragged before the law courts. What I’ve always found interesting is the advice he gives them about these court dates.

When it happens, he says, don’t prepare what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will speak for you.

This flies in the face of Aristotle’s heavy emphasis in rhetoric on invention, or finding persuasive arguments ahead of time. Rhetoric, Aristotle famously wrote, is “the art of being able to discover in each particular case the available means of persuasion.” In outlining his “art,” he presents three artistic appeals that will make a case persuasive to an audience: logos, pathos, and ethos—the appeals to reason, to emotion, and to a good character, respectively. In the ancient world, in Aristotle’s paradigm, this was the method for bringing a case before judge and jury.

And this, it seems, is what Christ was saying not to do. However, I don’t think he was saying to simply be lazy and blow things off. He seems to be suggesting something else.

I’ve always read Aristotle’s rhetoric as an attempt to find agreement with an audience through cultural norms and values—norms of a benevolent character and probable understanding of the world as it is. His Rhetoric emphasizes reason, though he admits that most of the time we can't have certainty, and then we must trust the speaker's character. And most of this discussion of reason, or logos, is where we find him talking about finding agreement through the enthymeme, which he refers to as the “soul of rhetoric.”

It seems that Jesus is up to something a bit different here. If we follow out what happens to his followers in the Book of Acts, they seem to get dragged before authorities frequently, and their defense is always very simple and plain, and honest. And it seems they often enough get out of trouble, sometimes on technicalities, once because of an earthquake, sometimes on the advice of the learned, and once, the early church claimed, because of an angel. It should be noted that in many of these instances, they were often beaten or whipped.

Only in the case of Stephen, the early martyr, do we get what George Kennedy has referred to as genuine proclamation, and this again is quite different from Aristotle’s rhetoric. In Aristotle, at the end, we the audience are called on to be the judge of the case. In Stephen’s speech, the audience is judged.

And they don’t like this.

Stones fly.  

If this is persuasive, at least in an Aristotelian sense, something is missing. 

The Gospel According to "Amadeus"

Last night, I viewed the 1984 film Amadeus with my kids. I hadn’t seen it for decades, and I’d forgotten the many famous scenes in this story: the scene where Salieri meets the young “vulgar” Mozart who is playing an adolescent, sexual game on the floor and under the table with Constance; the perhaps most famous “too many notes” scene, where in the Emperor Joseph criticizes Mozart’s new opera The Marriage of Figaro for having “too many notes.” And then there is perhaps my favorite, the last scene, where the old Salieri is wheeled out into the larger asylum and declares himself the patron saint of mediocrity and blesses the madmen around him.

But this time around, I was perhaps most challenged by an early scene that makes this movie “theological,” when Salieri prays as a young boy to become a great composer who sings his praises to God. The lad loves music and bargains with his deity, “Make me a great composer and I will give you my praise, my…industry.”

A Theology of Prayer

Most of this film is about the answer to that prayer and what it looks like to the older man. Salieri indeed becomes an important court composer in Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, a place where his music is even celebrated when it is premiered. But we see all of this through the lens of the covetous old man, who seems to be the only person in Vienna to recognize that it is Mozart who has been given the divine gift.

So much for prayers for greatness, for great art, one might say.

The movie can be considered a fictional account. It makes up a great deal about Salieri’s role in Mozart’s early death, for example. And Salieri tells this story as someone who has rejected God, when the evidence I've seen is that the real Salieri worked and wrote a great deal for the church in his retirement. But in the movie, he declares himself to be against God's designs.

Less fictional, meanwhile, and probably more accurate, is the way that Mozart is constantly shown in the act of composing. The movie shows the young composer walking away from arguments with his father and his wife over income, closing the door, and getting to work on his music, which at any given moment is clearer to him than a passing domestic quarrel.

Meanwhile, Salieri fritters his time away with his students and his schemes to find out what Mozart is up to. The film also provides some theology according to Salieri, who chooses to recognize God as the source of his adversary’s gift, and this can only torment him like an Old Testament King Saul, who wants to have the younger David executed. Salieri is not a modern nihilist. He very much believes that God is behind his own misery. He doesn't belittle God. He hates God because he doesn't like God's choices.

What We Might Want to Think

This is perhaps first a movie about jealousy and creativity, certainly. But there is also this twisted theology running through Salieri's motivations as a character. What does this movie have to tell us about prayer? What does it mean to say that we can pray? One thing does come through to me: As sovereign over the universe, God has his own inscrutable plans, as inscrutable to me most of the time as they are in the movie to Salieri. In the words of TerryTaylor, “We live upon this dark surface, and God moves upon the deep.”

As for my own prayer, it comes down to this: I'm not sure that my choices and character are all that well aligned with God's. When I do pray, the first part of it is a struggle as I try to work through all of my own issues with my nature—my selfishness, my feelings of unworthiness in the face of the infinite, my anger, my desire to get back at people.

I'm comforted in that I sometimes see these layers of “personality” in the Psalms attributed to David—the Old Testament version of the "man after God's own heart" who was not afraid to pray that God would “smite” his enemies.

Perhaps one lesson should be learned from this old movie and a broken down character like Salieri--I believe there always is something to learn when human nature is rendered accurately. I am reminded that no matter how much I repress and try to hide, my life is always an open book before God. And there are other points of view out there, other needs. God may be planning to use someone else as his "instrument." But the problem as I am made to see it in "Amadeus" is this: I’m more like Salieri in my prayers than I’ll ever be like Mozart in my compositions.  

A Reflection Next to the Great Divide

Like most people born after Matthew Arnold published “Dover Beach” (that is, about 1867), I have walked along the great science/religion divide my whole life. For me, it started with my parents, each of whom stood on a different side. How they managed to stay married to each other for over forty years would be a good lesson to us today. In high school, I tried science but found it taught by men who believed that science required that we check our imaginations at the door before walking in. “What fellowship,” they seemed to tacitly argue, “hath hard science (to me it was hard) with fancy?” Then, as a Christian, I found some people saying things I knew were not true about science and scientists, most of whom were very creative and imaginative people, and many of them even Christians, or at least respectful of mystery. 

Today, the great divide seems to me a tiresome rift. I am suspicious that the rift has more to do with ideological perspectives than it actually has to do with science or religion. In a country given to deepening political divisions, with more and more people skewing hard right or left and “unfriending” (not even a word until about ten years ago) anyone who disagrees, I want to advocate for a kind of “both/and” policy. I love hearing from scientific researchers. For example, how bees communicate is endlessly fascinating. I also am convinced that there is an eternal beyond, outside, within, somewhere--whatever directional metaphor we might choose--that remains related to the material.

A friend who is a scientist and also a Christian recently gave me a sermon on the Hebrew verb “to create” in the book of Genesis. Like a typical scientist, he was to the point. “The verb suggests that in creation God hovered over chaos and gave it purpose.”

That I find persuasive, both in terms of how "creation" happened and happens, and what has happened in my life.   

The Curmudgeon's Guide to Commencement Speeches

Over the last two weeks, I have heard commencement speeches given by students. All of them were delivered well, even if the content of them was unremarkable. That is, each student had fun with friends, had a few great teachers, and gained some great memories. And in all cases, those memories weren’t detailed for the parents in attendance.

After hearing the fifth speech in this genre over a roughly two week period, however, I also learned something I’m likely to remember a year from now: the template these speakers followed. It’s a common one, and it reminds me of the templates for writing essays most of them have been subjected to. 

1) After salutations and general comments about the state of life, give a dictionary definition.

One of the speakers did this by defining the word "graduation."

2) Remind the audience of what they know already but might have forgotten. But stay positive and aim for the broadest appeal.

After her illuminating definition of graduation, the speaker went on to remind her classmates—and, overhearing them, the parents—of the most general highlights of the previous two years and their favorite teachers. I heard this several times: favorite teachers and larger class or school events like dances and trips to places, but little detail that would even suggest that the speaker was present in some way at them.

As I listened, I wasn’t reminded of Cicero. But I did reflect that at one time, speech writers would have been coached to quote from greater minds than their own, mainly encountered through reading, and then to elaborate on these choice nuggets. This is advice that can be abused, of course, when the speaker doesn’t read much and gets his or her nuggets from a Book of Quotes for Speakers of All Occasions.

Memorably, not one of the speakers I heard, either at an eighth grade commencement or at a college graduation, quoted a favorite author or drew on anything other than clichés about time and memories.

I try not to be a curmudgeon at these events. The problem for me is that I have little to do at them other than hold my wife’s camera and fold the program into new figures. So, against better advice, I find myself listening to what is being said. And that is probably not being done, judging from the parental catcalls, whistles, and cries from various corners for the graduates walking across the stage to shake the hands of principals and board members.