Random thoughts on a Monday morning …

I’m grateful to Thomas Howard for Dove Descending, his commentary on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” But why must Eliot be so pointedly obtuse as to need line-by-line decoding? (Though I suspect some of my students would think I find in Eliot a kindred spirit.) Having forced my way through “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” and “Wasteland” last week, I’m ready for some words of redemption. I’m just getting started on “Four Quartets” — I love the notion of there being “a way up that is at one and the same time a way down,” but this poetry is tough going. (I hope I can get some help from Charlie Kidd when he returns from abroad.)

Last week while grading exams (almost done), I listened several times (and am doing so even now) to Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. The Alpine Symphony, a tribute to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, makes Nietzsche’s atheism (or at least his quest for a “nobler god”) feel so, I dunno, so what? Brave?

Then again, if your best hope is to have your ashes parked on the top of the Himalayas in a Chock Full o’Nuts can (per The Bucket List, which movie Shari sat me down to watch this weekend, and which movie felt to me like an extended commentary on how to make Nietzsche work for you — even if the main characters do make non-Nietzschean moves toward relationships), you move past bravery into, well, again, what?

OK, I guess it makes a pretty big difference whether there’s a Redeemer or not. If not, The Bucket List is about as close to redemption as you’re going to get, I suppose. That said, I’m not sure a bucket list isn’t a bad idea even if (or since) there is a Redeemer.

What could be on mine? I’ve already killed a gator, hit a home run, played Bach & B.B. King, swung a samurai sword, driven (even briefly owned) a muscled up Mustang, kissed the most beautiful girl in the world, raised with her the three most vibrantly alive sons ever, written more than I have the right to expect anybody to read, spoken truth into the lives of half a generation of seminarians, seen tons of the majestic …

Before we leave Strauss, his Also Sprach Zarathustra (the whole tone poem) has inspired me to try to get the “Prelude” into my fingers on my Lucille and out through my Fender tube amps.

My head still hurts (that good hurt when your head feels like it’s taken in more than it’s able) from how rich the Institute for Worship Studies experience was this session. I’m grateful especially for bold prayers and wise counsel I received, and for the self-giving love I witnessed among strong-willed and talented worship leaders. It’s curious that my teaching partner and I are going through such parallel dysfunctions in church life. I love the church so — may all of us who love the Groom and his Bride help each other help Her not dress so ugly. I hold much promise of Her better adornment through my IWS friends.

Like I said, random thoughts … but, hey, it’s my blog.

Note to both devoted readers: I won’t forget about the other seven reasons for samurai sword training in Japan.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. • T. S. Eliot

From May 25 to June 3, my youngest son Randall and I were in Tokyo to enjoy a week of samurai sword training and to participate in an all-Japan taikai (tournament). Here begin my “Top Ten Reasons for Samurai Sword Training in Japan” …

Reason No. 10: The ability finally to “get” Bill Murray’s movie Lost in Translation. Somebody had told us before the trip, “Don’t worry about English. So many people in Japan speak the language, you won’t have any problems.” A preposterous lie. Our travel agent booked us into a businessman’s hotel — a Japanese businessman’s hotel. It wasn’t easy … I couldn’t tell if I was being told, “Your bank card overpaid us by 200 yen,” or “You owe us 200 yen more.” By virtue of the fact that we were allowed out of the country at the end of the week, I infer the former. Nonetheless, even when language was a problem, we kept finding people who tried to help. And it so happens that body language is a pretty amazing dialect.

Reason No. 9: A chance to get a very quick take on an extraordinary people and land. Japan is about many people and much stuff in small spaces. Emblematic: in the little bit of soil around an electric pole on a city sidewalk somebody, I observed, was grooming a lovely rose plant (of course, I never got around to taking a picture). Tokyo and environs are filled with electrical wires, over which you can easily envision Godzilla tripping. Plumbing pipes are on the outside of buildings (all the better for servicing — brilliant!). Cars travel on the left side (note, I resist saying “wrong” side) of roads, and people walk on the left side of sidewalks. Every time I got in the front seat, passenger side of a car I’d reach for a nonexistent steering wheel and start to adjust the mirror. And, oh, the variety of vehicles! My favorite was the Nissan Cube (rival to my beloved Scion xB — which, over there is called the dB). People don’t jaywalk. Bicycles are everywhere — and whereas bicycles in the U.S. are normally recreational, bicycles in Japan are for basic transportation. Thus, they all have fenders and baskets, and are almost all “female” (which makes a lot of sense, once you think about how much easier it is to mount and dismount when there’s not this crazy bar you have to lift your leg over).

The little bit of sightseeing our schedule allowed took us to Mt. Fuji on one day (in the vicinity of which stands Odowara Castle) and to Kurakama on another (home of a famous Buddha statue, and historic shrines).

Reason No. 8: Intense training. In the U.S. it’s awfully hard to come by tatami mats (the slicing & dicing of which is the basic point in the art of batto jutsu). Not to mention they’re prohibitively expensive (sometimes as much as $6 per mat to cut). In Japan, tatami mats are in abundant supply, and they are quite cheap (about $2 per mat to cut). So, while in the U.S. we might get to cut two mats a week, during our week in Japan we cut every day but one. I figure we cut about forty tatami in that week. I went to Japan fairly confident in my basic 5-cut pattern (godan-giri), but scared to death of the next-step-up 6-cut pattern (rokudan-giri). I felt pretty good about both when I left. I hope it was a turning point. We’ll see. At any rate, it was training paradise!

In this regard as well, it was wonderful just to be in Hataya Mitsuo sensei’s sword shop and dojo. Watching him work on swords, you realized you were witnessing generations of artisans — his samurai family served the clan of the great samurai Date Masamune (1567-1636). Oh, and by the end of the week, I at least had a name, “Kidd San” as did my son, “Young Man.” It meant a lot that Hataya sensei gave “Young Man” so much encouragement, sparring with him (not with live blades, thank you very much!), and giving him the last double mat to cut on the last day of training.

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

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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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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