Could all of yesterday really have gone simply to paying my AMEX bill and tidying up sword competition details from last weekend?

Well, how about some perspective?

OK, those little chores aren’t hanging over my head any more. That’s a pretty good thing. One less drain on the battery.

Plus, on reflection, it was great to be reminded that, recent setbacks notwithstanding, I am still able to afford a few simple pleasures, like the music of John Tavener and the prose of Wendell Berry. More, paying off reimbursements from preaching and worship leading at Lookout Mtn. Pres. two weekends ago brought refreshing memories of a healing time with old and new friends.

Reliving last weekend’s sword tournament gave me one more opportunity to give thanks that Randy has found something he does remarkably well … as well as one more opportunity to give thanks that, as event registrar, I’m learning to serve outside my area of gifting.

Recalling last weekend’s tournament also gave pause to consider what a “ruinous visitation” it was for my sensei’s sensei to expose a glaring flaw in my suihe (side to side cut) and to observe that I didn’t know yet how to aim the sword accurately. Change or die, for sure. (Learning how to accept “ruinous visitations” will have to become a chapter in the book: Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Coaching Little League, Training Dogs, or Submitting to a Samurai Sword Sensei.)

Moreover, I did get a couple of hours in Scripture yesterday … with no “preparation agenda” … just getting caught up in the flow of the narrative in Numbers and Mark. That was pretty cool.

I did get to talk with Bob and Charlie (yesterday was his 21st, and his first Newcastle), and wish them well on their spring break trek to MS to do Katrina relief work. That was pretty cool too.

Randy and I did get to cut some pool noodles. My new Hataya Wakizashi is absolutely amazing. Beyond cool.

And Shari and I did get to consider together that in a world that Ecclesiastes describes so keenly, nonetheless God is at work … and in his time and in his way, he will make all things right. Way beyond cool.

This Lenten season is providing a remarkable opportunity to rediscover the wonder of what was redeemed — from the brutally painful to the mind-numbingly mundane:

In a grave they laid you, O my Life and my Christ;
and the armies of the angels were sore amazed
as they sang the praise of your submissive love.

O Life, how can you die? Or abide in a grave?
For You destroy the Kingdom of death, O Lord,
and you raise up the dead of Hades’ realm.

John Tavener, Lamentations & Praises

Nietzsche said, “It is our taste which now decides against Christianity, not our reason.” Accordingly, for a century the battle in the West has been for the imagination. And artisans of the imagination have been of three kinds.

First, believers like J.R.R. Tolkein, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Madeleine L’Engle, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and of course, C.S. Lewis have helped us imagine that what we see is not all there is, and that the Christian story makes all other stories make sense. Such verbal craftsmanship has helped us inhabit a reality in which, to elide Tolkein and Oliver Goldsmith, every fairy tale bears the trace of Grace stooping to conquer.

Walt Disney embodied a second approach to the imagination. Disney sought to fill a cultural mindscape with myth and story and legend, minus the specific content of any particular faith- or truth-claims. As Mark Pinsky (The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust) quips, Disney and his “Imagineers” have taught us to “wish upon a star, but not pray to a living God.”

A writer like Philip Pullman represents a third approach to the mind’s eye, one hostile to Christianity and aggressively promoting of an alternate vision of the divine.
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In his magisterial Magic Mountain, German novelist Thomas Mann observes that boringly empty periods of life seem to take forever to live through, but in retrospect appear quite short, even empty. Conversely, he muses, other seasons are so full you don’t know how you can possibly keep up; on hindsight, though, they look longer than they actually were.

I’ve just been through one of the latter. I feel like I’ve lived ten years in the last month.

Inexplicably, I woke up the day after being wondrously delivered from a potentially eternity-ushering-in auto accident with a listlessness that went to the core of my being. The switch was “Off” and I didn’t know how to get it back “On.” Truth is, I didn’t want to get it back “On.”

I soon recognized mine to be a condition similar to one that had set in on my father when he was forced to retire from teaching before he was ready. Dad tried to write, but when he found publishers disinterested, he sank into his recliner, put the Braves on TV, and pretty much went away.

Likewise, and to my surprise, after the accident I discovered I too wanted just “to sit and watch a while.”

Mercifully, my life is too full of commitments, my wife too determined that I live, and my memory too full of what I’ve learned from Josef Pieper, Os Guinness, and Carla Waterman about the fourth of the seven deadly sins, sloth.

Often confused with mere laziness, sloth is more a shrinking of the spirit than an indulging of the flesh. What makes sloth sloth is not the nap, but the fact that the nap is the response to the report that there is a lion in the street (Prov 26:13-14). Sloth’s nap has been a constant temptation my entire conscious life, but at no time more oppressively so than in these past few weeks. I’ve come to understand acutely the majority report: “There are giants in the land — if we follow Caleb and Joshua’s counsel, we will perish.”

A month later, and I’m back — but not without an unlookedfor journey into a dark place. Others, too, I suppose, teeter on the balance point between “Further up and further in” and “Whatever … What’s on SportsCenter?” So I thought I would chronicle a few of the tipping points that seem to have brought me back from the edge of the abyss.
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“Why did Jesus Christ have to be God?” the potential ordinand was asked. And, at least so it seemed to me, he muffed it: “It took God to offer perfect obedience.”

Well, no.

The perfect obedience Christ offered for us he offered because he was human. Jesus Christ came as the Last Adam, the “Son of God, the Son of Adam,” who undid in a wilderness and on a cross the harm done in a garden and by the eating of forbidden fruit (see 1 Corinthians 15:45; Romans 5:12-19; and Luke 3:38-4:13). To offer perfect obedience was why Jesus Christ had to be human.

My puzzlement at the potential ordinand’s stumbling over the necessity of our Savior’s divinity sent me back to Robert Webber’s cogent discussion of the incarnation in his Ancient Future Faith. Even as I write, my late-in-life friend battles terminal cancer, and I find myself especially prizing the economy with which he says profound things.

Webber notes that the early church settled on (or perhaps groped towards) two axioms:

One: “only God can save.” The other: “only that which God becomes is healed.”

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As all my friends know, because I can’t not talk about it, my youngest son and I have been studying a form of Japanese swordsmanship for a little over a year and a half now. Well, we were finally invited to do our first testing this summer, and we both passed. My son did so somewhat more respectably than I. To mix metaphors (well, to mix sports), I hit a single just inside the baseline, while my son hit a double off the wall. Regardless, we’re now both “first rank” (in the U.S., not the Japanese, association), though that’s not something you’d ever actually mention — which is one reason this whole sword thing is so cool.

The predominant lesson is one I’ve ruminated about before: the “way” of submission I’ve seen in my Scottish-bred, Key West-born sensei. He doesn’t cut corners. He has given himself in humility to learn what his Japanese sensei wants him to know. He has no patience with “know it alls” and self-promoters. He’s learned a power of greatness that comes from taking the lowly path. For my son and me, what we learned from testing is something we already knew: testing isn’t the deal — making progress in the art of the sword is.

A second lesson has to do with the cumulative power of little acts of obedience when combined with a master teacher’s powers of observation and timely guidance. It has only been since the spring that the sword thing has become enjoyable. That’s because there have been several “breakthroughs” for me recently — that is, finally “getting it” about certain mechanics of the discipline.
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For almost a year and a half now my son and I have been pursuing samurai swordsmanship. Finally, next month my son and I will undergo our first testing, aiming for our first “rank.” It’s taken a year and a half of tutelage for our sensei — our sword teacher — to think we’re decent enough to show in public.

From our first class to the time we were allowed to handle sharp swords and cut tatami (reed floor mats rolled up, rubberbanded, and soaked), it was six months. Six months of tutelage in how to take a dull sword out of its sheath and put it back in without losing a finger. Six months of trying to do “forms” that require our bodies to move in stylized, ritualistic, awkwardly Japanese ways. And then another year before being deemed ready to try to earn our first rank. In all, eighteen months of waiting to do “the good stuff.”

Our sensei’s attitude? “We’re not interested in students of the sword who are not students of ‘the way.’” He’s made it clear that if you’re going to be exasperated at “a long obedience in the same direction,” you’d be better off elsewhere.

Really, though, it’s been remarkably easy to submit to a man who himself has submitted to another.
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I started Japanese sword training three months ago — that’s right, the stuff of Kill Bill and The Last Samurai. Wasn’t really my idea. My 14 year old son has long been enamored of all things Japanese — it’s a Godzilla thing. So we’ve been training to become samurai warriors together, and I’m told this is the pinnacle of the martial arts. My son’s good at it. I’m horrible. My sense of my body-in-space is so not Japanese — and as my sensei keeps saying, “Looks are everything.” (Even folding your uniform “just so” after class is part of the class! Actually, I’m getting pretty decent at that.) Overall, it’s been a humiliating experience so far.

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