It Can't be 1980 All Over Again

Change is coming.

I sense it as uneasiness.

Not all change is good. But it does always require adjustment.

This is not me trying to be coy or to pretend that I have prophetic powers. I don't. But we will soon have a new president, or precedent, depending on how you chose to spell it. The transition since the election has been anything but easy. About one-fourth of the American population seems happy about the change--the group that supported and voted for the new president. The rest, about 75% of the population, did not vote for him. Many of them are mad because of what he said to get himself into office.

I remember the winter of 1980, the period after Reagan won his first term. I remember people wondering how it could happen. They referred to the Gipper, a star of B movies, taking on his "greatest role, as President of the U.S." Of course, many were elated that we were finally going to have a conservative in office. I didn't know what to think. I hadn't voted for him either. We all adjusted, though. Soon enough, I was wearing docksiders and an occasional polo shirt with an alligator on it. That was about 1983. It took me three years. My hair, though, was still parted down the middle.

Today, though I'm much older and not about to change the style of clothes I wear, I'm not just wondering about what is about to happen, though I do. A reality TV star has won the election. He's got a brand and name recognition. But I think I'm uneasy because it is now possible to wonder if we will have news outlets and media that will give us fair coverage of what is going on. We might not. We might have a press that keeps going for ratings. And not only that. I'm also concerned that we will have an electorate of people who actually care about getting that news.

Too many people I talk with today don't care to hear the news. They don't have details. They have an alternate view. Everyone has his or her talking points taken from favorite columnists and TV shows.

It may turn out okay. Or it may turn out that we will just be subjected to frequent tweets and ads that make major, over-the-top claims about the new leader. Without a free press, will the new man in office be held responsible for his actions and words? He hasn't been so far. He won his office doing what no one before him has done. Others saw their candidacies sink in the mire of their bad behavior caught on tape or reported. Not our leader-elect.

So what is ahead? Some say we get the leaders we deserve.

Change is ahead. It is coming.

You can expect some adjustments. 

Getting Started Early with Holiday Re-reading

I decided this year to get an early start on my holiday reading. I think I was challenged to do this when I learned that this year, Black Friday was actually starting on Thursday afternoon—3 pm on Thanksgiving Day. It occurred to me that if the stores could do this, so could I.

I was also a bit driven to start reading my holiday fare after seeing Arrival, a movie that is as much about linguistics as it is about aliens. After I saw it, I found my oldest copy of Lewis’s first book in his space trilogy, which also concerns a linguist and some fun passages about learning a language that is from another world. The rest—with early Black Friday and the allure of an old, folded book cover—seemed natural.

Holiday Re-reading

I started reading Out of the Silent Planet while on Thanksgiving break. This is what I do during the holidays. I read fantasy and science fiction, genres I don’t seem to be able to read the rest of the year. But during the holidays, I can. I reread books in a genre I used to love before I turned 18.Next on my list is Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

I don’t know why I can stay with these science fiction and fantasy books when I can't the rest of the year. I wonder if there is something wrong with me. I know that C.S. Lewis would say there is. One of the problems I’ve found with reading science fiction the rest of the year has to do with the fact that I can sense that the writer is more fascinated with the invention of the story than on character development. Mostly, as with many stories in other popular genres, the characters are secondary to the plot, the new world or worlds being explored, or some fantasy element that is innovative.

Normally, I like to read stories where characters surprise me. The relentless degenerate has a moment of sadness and sudden wonder at the world around him. The callous old man remembers something that draws him to humanity. This also feels like something very real. People surprise us. Most important to me, this suggests possibilities. People are like that—deeper than we think we know. We interact with them mostly on a day to day basis, and we rarely see the inner states they—and we—might be protecting.

Re-Reading is the Draw

Part of the draw in all of this is that I love rereading books. I see technique in old things—what I didn’t see during the first reading because I was just trying to figure out the plot. Seeing technique helps me as a writer. Also, I see things I didn't see before in the characters and their situations.

This time around with Lewis’s book, I’ve been noticing what other critics have sometimes said before about his adult characters: They really aren’t so developed as the worlds he is creating. In fact, they seem a bit unchangeable. They are either the good guys, aware of the beauty and wonder around them, which has drawn them to God, or they are the bad guys, who see the worlds they’ve entered as grounds to exploit, as they move forward, bent on world conquest.

There’s something good in this, of course, something I used to like about it. Out of the Silent Planet, a book I've read perhaps seven or eight times, has a distinctly satirical feel to it, and the bad guys who appear in it might, in another book, appear as the good guys—empire builders, fighters for humanity, world conquerors. In Lewis’s hands, they are exposed for the shrunken-souled megalomaniacs they really are. There is a spiritual quality to their being. In re-reading about them, I can hear his criticisms of empire builders on Earth, including those who settled the American continent.

The rest of the year, I might miss this. But now, there are some things I can see in Lewis, things he grasped almost 80 years ago that people around me are still not always clear about. T

To think I have the early consumerist glow of the stores and their demands nostalgia and spending to thank for this. It apparently is possible, if rarely, to make good come from bad. Reading. It is my way of battling creeping consumerism. 

A Mathematical Reflection of Little Significance before the Election

With less than two weeks before the election, I have been turning my thoughts more and more to other things. I’m just very tired of the way this one has spiraled downward.

I do know the mythology we are told as children. “Anyone can become president.” However, this “anyone can do it” ideology has worn thin. Anyone? I'm sure that a great majority in our county would counter with, Then why haven't we gotten better results this year? 

I’ve done some basic math, and I think I've figured something out that might help us. In every generation, there is room for about five people to become president—if two or more of them have two term presidencies. For my parents, members of the generation that lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, their generation saw the office held from Kennedy to the first George Bush. That’s Kennedy (Johnson was actually part of the previous generation), Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and the first Bush.

That's five people. Bill Clinton was our first boomer president. 

And this year's election might be the last election in which one of my generation provides a president—Trump or Clinton. Add him or her to Bill Clinton, the second Bush, Obama, and now, pick your poison.

Four people.

What this all means, of course, is that there aren’t that many openings for the job. We were told that any one of us could be president. Those were the words of my first grade teacher. However, there are only four or five openings, and there are millions of people in each generation (as I admitted, this is basic math—the same math I use when deciding not to buy a lottery ticket).

As I understand it, the presidency is a very specific job. I'm not sure that one can get there by starting as a short order cook. I mean, I suppose anything is possible. But we should be honest. The holders of the office of the presidency represent an elite group, more elite than poet laureates. Contrary to what I was taught, according to the math, almost no one can be president. 

But if one wants to be, it’s important to consider what it takes. It used to help to go to a law school. More recently, that requirement has been replaced by fame, as it has become obvious that it helps to have media attention, and wealth and celebrity will get one plenty of that, if you know how to say things that will keep getting you attention. And this year, it has become clear--to me, at least--that one of the candidates, outside of his celebrity and his wealth, has no business even running for the presidency. 

Yet there he is, poised to be one of the four or five my generation provides to the office. It makes me feel a bit shameful. This is my generation providing the fodder here. 

I’m not going to lose sleep over any of this. Things will be okay. I remember living through the Nixon resignation. 

That experience convinced me that I never wanted to be a president. It was never an ambition. But still, it does bother me to have more or less refuted a belief that I grew up with, one that has worked so well for elementary school teachers. But perhaps the reality is better that the lie we were told. What if you become wealthy and have appeared on a reality show? These things happen all the time. You can then make a serious bid for the white house, even with nothing else to recommend you.

Many are the contradictions, of course, on any given day, and always, anything is possible. And none of this may be possible.  

But play the cards you are dealt. You can never tell. 

That will be the take-away I choose to gain from this election. 

Mazel tov. 

Presidential Debates and the Failure of Argument

My Humanities class recently finished discussion of Antigone, a play by Sophocles that has more than one tragic hero in it and plenty of bloodshed, though the bloodshed is done off stage, of course. The class we are reading this play in is concerned with great works, but we don't stay on tragedy for very long. We study this play as a prelude to studying writers in ancient Athens who were concerned with making speeches and whether or not oratory was really an art. After Sophocles, we moved on to a sophist named Gorgias, and now we are reading Plato and Aristotle on rhetoric. 

We began with Sophocles, the ancient dramatist, because I have a theory that Antigone, or at least Sophocles' version of it, is concerned with rhetoric. In addition to being concerned with the hubris of the title character and with Creon, her uncle, this is a play about persuasion. More to the point, it is a play about the failure of persuasion. 

I am not alone in this view. A few other writers have noted the way that argument is undercut in the play. There are also similarities between the arguments presented in the play and the early theories on persuasion and logos attributed to sophists like Protagoras and Gorgias. Few have made much of these theories, but they are there and offer a critique of the early polis of primitive democracy in Athens. 

Antigone Among Sophists 

The play concerns Antigone's attempt to give her dead brother, who has turned traitor against Thebes, the ceremonial burial that all families must perform for their fallen kin. Complicating her action is a new decree by Creon, who has ordered that no traitor to the city shall be given a burial. 

This plot sets up a larger conflict between the state and the gods, between dictates or laws established by government and the requirements of family and home. It is clear what side of this ancient debate Sophocles is on. Also clear are the questions he seems to raise about the possibility for consensus and the power of argument in a city that is divided along these secular and sacred lines. In the play, first Antigone, and then later Haimon and Tiresias come forward and argue with the resolute Creon, but no one listens to the other. 

In the end, there are three suicides and one broken old man. 

Debates on TV

The failure of argument is not merely a phenomenon of ancient cultures. It has been on prominent display as well in various media outlets in recent months. With the presidential election in full swing, there are plenty of slogans and bumper sticker accusations being flung back and forth, and while these may count as persuasion, they aren't really examples of sustained argument. If nothing else, talking to friends, neighbors, and colleagues in an election year reminds us that we are in a culture war, and observing how argument and persuasion play out in this "war" could perhaps suggest to some brilliant contemporary writer the material for another tragedy. 

The presidential debate the other night between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might be cast as something more, and something less, than debate. In recent years, many viewers have come to expect not a debate or a set of reasoned propositions on a series of policies, with a measured set of refutations and counterarguments, but a carefully staged public relations stunt. Many have been the debates I've watched in recent years where both candidates used the moderator's questions to switch the subject to whatever talking point they wanted to give air time to. 

The other night, the moderator's questions were sometimes little more than triggers for the release of deep animosity. There wasn't much patience for reason or for argument. Statements of policy or conviction were often countered with insult or accusation. 

Is this the failure of argument? 

No Endorsements 

The truth is that argument was hardly evidenced the other night. There were attempts to avoid answering questions, there were interruptions, there were accusations and smears. But there was little sustained argument. Like Creon, who claims that he will not listen to women, young men, or the elderly, our candidates did not hear each other out. Worse, in reading responses after the debate and listening to people talk and post on social media (not a scientific sample, I know), it was easy to get the impression that we are way beyond the possibility now of an honest exchange of views. People have remained entrenched in the views they held before the "debates," so many of us saw our own champion winning. Victory was mainly based on who "looked presidential," whatever that is supposed to mean. 

One of the candidates did emerge as highly qualified, and there is something to be said for the sustained habit of discipline in one direction for a long time. The other candidate is so new to all of this that he seemed caught in the failure of trying to do what worked for him in the past. 

I am working hard here to avoid giving an endorsement. I do think this first debate demonstrated who has the qualifications for the job. But there was no real argument about the issues we face. All of that was submerged behind two widely disliked people who have built large followings and have been given this time to appear. 

Beyond that, there were no arguments. We remain deeply divided and troubled over issues that we cannot seem to talk past. And this is a problem that is not resolved if we are simply trying to find who "looks best in the part." 

This was recognized, in part, in the late 5th century B.C.E. when Sophocles imagined Antigone coming forward before dawn to convince her sister to act, but failing even that bit of persuasion, and having to act alone. 

Can We Read the Bible?

Years ago, during the first spring season after the tragedy of 9/11, I participated in a week long seminar with colleagues at the college where I taught. The text we had come together to study was the Qur'an, in translation. I understood that this meant we were reading what the Islamic world would consider a "commentary," not a translation--certainly not the Qur'an itself.

I should admit up front that I am an English teacher and not a theologian. So as I began to read this complex, rich, and deeply spiritual work in preparation for our seminar, I experienced some confusion, I began to realize that I had brought my own expectations about what I was going to find to my reading. I expected, for example, that a great deal would be made about the importance of Abraham's son, Ishmael. And yes, I expected to read passages that supported Jihad.

What I found, however, was very different. I had to let go of those expectations. Once I did, I found myself immersed in a work--a commentary, of course--that was concerned first with the Deity's greatness and holiness. Primary in this work was a continual refrain of praise and prayer to Allah in the form of beautifully written Surahs, which at times resembled Old Testament Psalms. At least that was my main reference point for them. Like the Psalms, these Surahs occasionally would vere over into the retelling of histories I was familiar with from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.

Here I found many stories I knew, of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and figures in the New Testament as well. A general acknowledgement of the importance of these stories was underscored with the point that the Jewish community and the Christian community had once had the truth, but they each in their turn had fallen from it, corrupted it. Only in Islam was the true religion rediscovered.

What I read, as I've noted, did not confirm the prejudices I initially brought to my reading. Ishmael is hardly mentioned. And while many passages confirm the need to defend the community of the faithful, nothing in my reading could be construed to support or even define the concept of Jihad.

I should have expected this. As an English major, I have made a life of reading texts that subverted or contradicted my expectations. At a very superficial level, approaching the Qur'an for the first time was not unlike approaching the Old and New Testaments for the first time. In both cases, I found that I had all sorts of cultural baggage that I was bringing with me to my reading. But both are ancient texts, written in a time and place far outside of our own. As I picked up our family Bible to read for the first time in the eighth grade, with my training in Catholic Catechism, I expected lessons in being good and rules against drinking alcohol. (People I know who read it for the first time in the 1980s expected to read passages condemning abortion.)

What I found myself reading instead was an account of a creative, loving God, and Humanity's fall and failures to understand or desire God. Even the most respected "holy" men of the Old Testament--David, Sampson, Israel--were screw ups at some point.

As I reflected on this difference between my expectations and these ancient texts, I began to think about how they are appropriated culturally. I began to think about how just in the last thirty to forty years, there have been many "leaders" who have placed emphasis on certain verses over others and created a version of the Christian faith that might have little connection to historical Christian traditions. I can't speak with any authority about leaders in Islam. The media have all tended to focus on the most militant.

There has been a lot written around the Bible, and there is a translation of it for every conceivable American interest and identity. I suppose that in some ways, this could be acceptable. Any time I am encouraged to love my neighbor in specific ways instead of just practicing rote rituals, I am getting closer to what is actually found in the Bible, though many have been the strange teachings "found" in the Bible: Southerners once read the Bible as supporting slavery. Northerners read it the other way. Some have used it to decry war, arguing on the basis of the apparent pacifism of Jesus. Some often see it as a text that supports capitalism, or worse, is a textbook for getting wealthy, healthy, and famous. Forty years ago, I remember someone writing a book of end-time prophecies--none of them happened. Some see in the Bible a call to get busy and do good works. Others hear only a call to rest in grace.

Is everyone wrong? Is everyone right? If the Bible has been read in these different, conflicting ways, is everyone just hallucinating when they read it? Can we even get at what the Bible, or the Qur'an, is really saying? Is meaning possible?

Cultural appropriations seem a given, one of the first strong tendencies we have when we open any text. My job, as a Christian, as I read the Bible from day to day, is complicated, but it is important that I first try to recognise that not everything in my own time and culture is going to be reflected back to me in my reading of passages from another time and place. If I am finding that my own prejudices and values are not quite reflected there, I might be getting closer to what it is saying.

What the World Need Now is Love and Rhetoric

A familiar figure has been appearing in the news these days just about as frequently as the names of our most notorious politicians. This figure is everywhere, and not always used wisely or well. As with anything that everyone seems to think they know, there's a great deal of abuse of it--in social media and on TV,

The figure is rhetoric. And not only is this figure being misused. There's been a great deal of bad reporting on the practice of it. 

Every morning, a reporter calls a politician's speech rhetoric, and she means to suggest language that is separated from facts or reality. In this view, in the news especially, rhetoric is seen as mostly empty talk. Most people who think this think there are two ways to use language--to lie or tell the truth; to create impressions or simply state facts. And in this bad/good binary, rhetoric is seen as bad, as quick bumper sticker jingles. We've seen them on placards or heard them chanted at the conventions: "Stronger together," "Make America Great Again," "Lock her up," or "Feel the Bern." 

For better or worse, this is the way we think about this figure. And in a political season, rhetoric is the politician's trade. 

No wonder we don't like politicians or their trade. 

Factions and Values

The peculiar political atmosphere we are collectively experiencing, I am convinced, is because rhetoric is not being taught. I really think this has to do with education. 

This year, the two major political parties in our country have been threatened with break ups, mostly connected to the questionable character of the parties' candidates, but also due to what are interesting, changing demographics. On all sides, committed and sometimes idealistic voters have splintered off into factions. In one convention last week, many seats were empty, and many important party stalwarts refused to show up. In the other this week, protests and chants have sometimes disrupted the proceedings. A big part of the problem seems to be the controversial character of the nominees, who inspire hate or love in a way that can only be fueled by a strong sense of certain values. 

Ethos is the traditional rhetorical term used to describe this form of persuasion tied to character. It is also seen as the problem. We could blame TV. We could blame social media. But our current political atmosphere seems poisoned by attacks on character--devil terms and ad hominem attacks (that is, instead of addressing an opponent's arguments, we attack the person). 

What is needed more than ever at this time, both to break us out of attack mode and out of thinking that people who disagree with us are evil, is a healthy dose of the kind of rhetoric the ancient Greeks and Romans would have understood. We need a rhetoric that is not just represented by slogans and catch phrases--though those are some of the forms that rhetoric takes. We need to understand that rhetoric is about values. Where we see evil--Hitler, The Joker, The Criminal who needs to be locked up--the ancients saw values. Where we see absolute certainty and "facts" and, in our opponents, the demise of the free world, the ancients saw opinions. Values and opinions are always in play, ways to find consensus and build understanding, even with opponents. Values and opinions, when shared, help to unite the village. 

This seems less accessible today. In our binary view of language, we believe that there is scientific language--what is unbiased and true and accurately representing reality. And then there is poetry--pretty metaphors that are decorative but frivolous. We usually think that our party holds the truth and is being scientific. Our opponents are engaging in poetry or, worse, rhetoric. 

Rhetoric as Art 

The art of rhetoric involves recognizing that no one is objective and scientific, and that everyone is doing rhetoric. The moment the scientist turns from her lab to explain her findings to the public, she is practicing rhetoric, not science, because she is engaging in values and opinions. As one great teacher of rhetoric, Richard Weaver, once put it in a wonderful title to a wonderful essay, "Language is Sermonic." That is, all language preaches values. It never does not do this. It is never merely scientific. 

The trouble is that most of us don't believe this. We believe that what we have is absolute certainty. We believe so strongly in our dogmas that we can't hear the other people in the room talking. This has sometimes been referred to as the "rhetoric of the closed fist." It's opposite, "the rhetoric of the open hand," seems vulnerable, but it is a wonderful difference from the slogans and posturing of people who are convinced that they are right, and everyone who disagrees with them is not just wrong, but evil--threatening the constitution, trying to help our enemies, or wanting to bring the barbarians in. 

This means that we can't persuade each other. This means there is no discussion. There is only chanting and ugly meme fights on Facebook. And we don't even know that our opinions are opinions. 

The Greek word for opinion, doxa, is found in a word like "paradox." As long as we are convinced that we are right, or that our opponents are just fools, clowns, or communists, that is all we will have. Equally opposed opinions. 

Go to the Boll Weevil: A Review of Joseph Bentz’s Nothing is Wasted

Early in Nothing is Wasted: How God Redeems What is Broken, Joseph Bentz writes of the people of the town of Enterprise, Alabama, who nearly 100 years ago saw over 60 percent of their cotton crop destroyed by the boll weevil.

Then there is the account of apparently huge waste in the death of a single whale.

Then there is the hard story of Jerry Deans, a writer Bentz met at a writer’s conference. Deans tells of losing his daughter in a swimming accident, a loss that would be enough to destroy anyone. Yet as other losses were to follow, the loss of a granddaughter, the loss of a brother's wife, and then an accident that left one of his twin sons paralyzed from the waist down and the other facing a life-threatening injury, lot of time would elapse before Deans could begin to make sense of his experiences. 

Redemption Does Not Obliterate Pain

I admit that in reading stories so true to life, so true to what we really experience and hear about, I had my doubts. Many of the stories told here seem hard and very real—the real news of the world we live in. How does God redeem such losses? Do people really recover from such devastations? Does it really happen? Or is that just the usual clichéd Christian response to suffering?

“This book does not treat suffering lightly,” Bentz writes, “nor does it try to explain it away or find an explanation for why it exists in the first place” (12). Instead, Bentz wishes to suggest that redemption can emerge from pain, though it never obliterates it. In a very real way, he sees pain and redemption as running along parallel tracks. 

“The story of …divine reversal is told most fully in the Bible” (13), he notes. But an emerging strength of his book really is found in the decision to see this “story” in the most unlikely places of loss and suffering. I admit that I was helped by the continued arguments in this book against the usual ways many well-meaning people who haven’t experience such tragedies try to respond to them.

How Does Resurrection Occur?

In reading these accounts, I began to think about my own suffering. I have understood that redemption doesn’t necessarily mean turning the clock back, getting back everything I lost and having it again as I had it before, or simply not feeling pain anymore. As Bentz suggests, pain is not removed or obliterated. It has been my experience that my losses have changed me, and that is perhaps what I have most hated about them. The process of grieving is long, and yet the cycle of loss and redemption, as Bentz sees it, seems built right into the universe as how God works.

The town of Enterprise mentioned above, for example, devastated by a boll weevil infestation, eventually found its footing when it turned from being a producer of cotton to producing peanuts. A new era of boll weevil-proof prosperity was theirs when they did this. They’ve even gone so far as to erect a statue, not of liberty or of a soldier, but of the insect itself that led them to make the changes they needed to make.

Suffering and Transformation

Though it might seem clichéd, a further example is the account Bentz gives of the caterpillar into butterfly transformation story. Again, this might seem dangerously close to being too familiar as a neat, clean, easy cliché. Not in Bentz’s hands, however. Here, the naturalistic rendering of the process wherein the caterpillar is melted into nothing but goo redeems the cliché. It makes this account into something even the biblical King Solomon would approve of. “Go to the ant” becomes here “Go to the caterpillar,” an account that restored my belief that the road to redemption is not easy, but it is possible and real.  

As full disclosure, I will also note that Jospeh Bentz is a friend, and over the last year and a half, I had the opportunity to hear him, on a few occasions, talking about what he was discovering in his work with this subject. However, I will admit that hearing those few, scattered accounts did not do justice to the complete work we have in Nothing is Wasted. In this work, Bentz offers an involving account of suffering and redemption that is honest, highly readable, and humane. His voice is that of a fellow traveler. There are moments of sadness, of wonder, and humility in this powerful book that stands above other books on Christian living. 

(Joseph Bentz, a professor of American Literature at Azusa Pacific University. He is a frequent speaker and the author of four novels and five books on Christian living. For more information, go to www.josephbentz.com.) 

Routines and Other Routes

I suffer from too much routine. 

Routine keeps me thinking one way. It keeps me business-minded, focused on the same old world and the same old possibilities, always ready and able to see other people in reduced terms. Routine allows me to finish things at work. 

Most of the time, routine is nothing more than the usual baleful plodding that every half-conscious person must bear daily.

However, I do occasionally look up from my routine, Then I get a bit more thoughtful about what is right in front of me, and I start to see other possibilities. I even begin to suspect that it is possible to get more imaginative.

That is not my usual routine, of course.

No Paradoxes or Parallels

Most days, I don’t think I am required to go into anything in much depth. I’m not about to deal with higher math. And I won’t go near something as confusing as paradox. 

Paradox, I tell myself, must not exist in the real world, though here is the rub, if I’m perfectly honest. Perhaps the most important word to people of faith is the word "grace." This is a word that breaks down easily into paradox. Grace is something we can't earn, and yet it is something we think we must work for. There is the grace of routine, and there is the grace that breaks in on routine. I would like to propose that we have at least two ways of understanding this word. There is our routine way of seeing and using it. And then there is the more serious, more powerful, freeing way of seeing it.  

Grace and routine seem at odds in my life. I plod along, fail miserably, and then ask other people or God for grace. I ask to be let off the hook. Forgive me. Let me go on. Let me stay with it. 

Then there is the grace that has as its root the Greek word charis. This is the power of God for charity cases. There is nothing in my routine to improve me. There is nothing I can do to become better. My routine just makes me increasingly weary and a little harder at hearing. The idea in charity, or grace, is that it empowers us in some way to do what we should do. I think that people who are empowered by grace must be the most imaginatively alive people we could meet. 

Creative people do share in this. They see new combinations where most people only see the old. And while most people talk about being outside the box, these people wonder “what box?”

I don’t know if routine is the enemy of living or if it supports it. But routine I can afford. Staying in routine means I won’t over-spend. But I also stop seeing clearly. I have little use for experiences and things that I might see in new ways. And I don’t see much promise in the people around me, and I don’t make time for them. But routine is usually preferred to the breaking out of grace. 

For All the Days In Between

Today is unusual. It is the Saturday of what Christians celebrate as Holy Week.

To be particular about today here in SoCal, we are having warmth and sunshine, a relief from the clouds, rain, and cold my wife and I faced this week when we traveled to Seattle. Spring is here in abundance. Yet this Saturday is one that I usually think of in the way I think of myself. It is a day “caught in-between.” Today, this one Saturday, is the between time, for it falls between Good Friday, the day of the death of Jesus, and Easter Sunday and His resurrection. It is a day when nothing seems to happen. It is a day between days. 

In a way, it is a unique day, a day of deep sorrow, a day of shocked grief and fear of the end. For Christians all over the world, it is also a day of waiting, mainly because the day is shot through with the light of Easter. But in another way, perhaps because of the feeling of living in the after effects of loss, it reminds me of so many days I experience during the rest of the year.

Growing up Catholic, I learned to think of the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter as a time for silence, but a silence that does not necessarily lead to meditation. It seemed as close as I might get to the Zen idea of nothing. 

Throughout the world-wide church, many people try to re-enact the events that have come to shape this week. In their re-enactments, they try to experience the profound sense of hope, expectation, fear, and loss that the first followers of Jesus must have felt after the arrest, trial, torture, and death of their leader. This is admirable, and some years I have tried to do this. The trouble for me is that I always catch myself faking it too much, and I just have to stop and admit that I now live in what I call the “happy after time,” the time of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The result is that now, even trying to celebrate the “in-between” of Saturday, after death and before resurrection, seems enlightened and infiltrated with what I now understand is the next part of the story.

The best I can do is a kind of silent reflection on what it must have been like to suffer so much in a world that saw that suffering, the kind that Christ suffered, as the ultimate scandal. If you were there and you were a Greek, you would have considered it the worst shame, something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemies. .

I guess, though, that I also see one more lesson to be gained from this “in-between” time as I reflect and write about it, and that is this:

Though it is true that the church is living year around in the Easter belief that Christ has overcome sin and conquered death, and Easter itself is a time of celebration, it is also true that the story is not finished yet. In a sense, we are all still living in the time before the coming resurrection of the dead. In a sense, we are still waiting and wondering, and no one really knows for certain how long we will do this. We rejoice, but we also suffer. We overcome battles with our own sin, but we also still fail. The Scottish writer and preacher George MacDonald once wrote that “Christ suffered and died not that we wouldn’t have to, but so that our suffering would be more like his.” That is the difference that I see today—between the way I used to suffer before Easter and the way I suffer now, in light of it.

The difference seems to be the presence now of hope.

Try as I might, that is what I sense today, in between. May you have this the rest of the year. 

Reflection on Words We Work With

Early Monday morning, I was thinking about something that I doubt ever crosses the minds of the gainfully employed.

I was thinking not just about work, but also about language at work, especially language as it is used in different settings. 

I think this started with what I was hearing in church. I was thinking that as the people I know there who hear the same words in that setting every weekend go out again for the week to their different jobs, they, we, must all be subjected to other, different sets of words. Since my friends work at jobs different from mine, the key words they hear must be quite different from what I hear as my daily routine. How those words shape the working worlds we all inhabit is mostly invisible. But they also must be powerful in defining for us some of the fundamental ways we think.

The Words of My Job

This is not to fall into the usual sacred/secular tirade. Most of what I have to say here has to do with a certain kind of workplace idealism. I can only give examples of what I am talking about from my own life. As I am a teacher of English, I have the benefit that I often am asked to stop and think about the words. One of them I often hear at my job is the word “passion.” Most students use it. Some faculty do. Administrators use it. It is a term shaped by our workplace. 

Usually it is used to describe a teacher or a student who “gets passionate” about a subject. The word seems to be a synonym for “getting excited” or “really getting into something” more than is normal. 

The word comes from the Latin word for suffering. This is what it means to speak of "the passion of Christ." And this gives sense to a word like compassion, which means “to suffer with.”

As I said, the word doesn’t mean that now. I’ve even been on job interviews where I was asked “What are your passions?” or “What makes you passionate?” And understanding what these interviewers were really asking for, to pass the interview, I would shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, there are certain subjects that I get talking about, and I can’t stop. Students tell me I'm passionate about it. Writing is like that. I get passionate talking about writing.”

That is usually what they want to hear.

Old and New Passions

When I used to work at a group home for the developmentally disabled, I would often hear the term “mainstream.” When I first heard it, right after being hired, I was curious about it. I realized that the group home represents a kind of transitional space for its residents between their parents' homes and independence, a space that most of the severely developmentally disabled adults I would work with would never move beyond. Even so, our staff meetings were caught up in the mission of mainstreaming, of implementing behavioral programs to help guide our residents' progress. 

Mainstreaming often works. But I admit I found it difficult to be passionate about this, at least, that is, excited about it. Most of our residents would not move beyond our help. But perhaps in another sense, the older sense, as in “the passion of Christ,” I had to be passionate all the time because I was suffering with them, with people struggling with their limitations and wanting to be someone better than they were but never quite making it. 

We aides could be seen suffering with them. It wasn’t any kind of sentimentality that we were involved in. We were simply there to help, support, make sure that no one got hurt or abused, and then clean up afterward. 

Connecting to the Other Words

Today, in education, as I said, I often hear about passion. But I also regularly hear people going on, sometimes “passionately,” about "excellence" or "greatness." This leads me to recognize that this is all the talk of the self-esteem movement, which seems increasingly like a movement that wants to deny limitations. But what if there does come a point where, like many of the adults I worked with in group homes, we can go no further?

We don't usually think this far with the words that guide and govern our working lives, The question is, will we as a society understand our passions enough to be compassionate? We currently have a politician campaigning to “ make America great again.” Fearful of what he really means by this, if anything, I wonder: When this fails, will those who are passionate about this greatness become compassionate?

After all, we are all limited. As much as we want to see our dreams of the workplace and our dreams of a society in which all that we hoped for comes true, it is much more likely that we will be expected to simply adjust when things don’t turn out. 

Adjustment is another key word, but it is one we don't like to hear quite so much as the others. 

But my deepest concern at present is this: If we no longer get that passion is really about suffering, then we may no longer understand what it means to be compassionate. To those who suffer, we can only offer sentimentality. We can't see that we are called to enter into their suffering with them. This is not just the loss of a word. Our culture looses something more important in the process.