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

61 years ago today (thanks, John Muether), life changed for people in this country, when Jackie Robinson first took the field for Branch Rickey’s Brooklyn Dodgers.

Praise be to God for the fortitude and restraint Robinson displayed on and off the baseball field, deflecting hate with love, overcoming evil with good.

Praise be to God for Branch Rickey’s relentless pursuit of just the right man to rise to Jesus’ challenge to turn the other cheek.

Praise be to God for Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ, the book that gave Rickey the words with which to couch the challenge to Robinson.

This Thursday I’ll write in more detail for Glenn Lucke’s Common Grounds community about this shining moment in the history of racial reconciliation. But I just had to put up this brief tribute today.

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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The light turned green, and I hesitated — prompted, I’m certain, by some angelic whisper. No sooner did I inch out than a drunk driver going 65 mph (the posted limit was 35 mph) blasted through the intersection — and right through the engine compartment of my Toyota Sienna.

I’m OK. Beyond belief, I walked away from the accident. But I’m finding it takes a while to sweep up all the physical, financial, and emotional debris that comes with an event like this.

So now I’m driving my mother’s ‘92 Buick while I get insurance worked out — and (sigh) I’m selling my 1965 Mustang so I can replace the totaled minivan.

OK. Battery on the Buick goes out yesterday, and there’s something wrong with the hood, so I can’t get it open to jump the car. Reader beware — here comes a parable:
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“If when we die we just go back to the dirt, well, then nothing matters. But if the Christian story is true — that Jesus died and rose again — then everything matters,” says the Newsboys’ lead singer Peter Furler.

If Jesus died and rose again it means every one of us is heading for one of two destinations, according to C. S. Lewis: being “immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

My friend Greg Davis lost his battle with esophageal cancer this week. But he won a more significant campaign. Greg loved Jesus. And Greg lived as though he weren’t just returning to dirt. He lived as though he were destined to become an everlasting splendour.

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The Athenians waived their claim in the interest of national survival, knowing that a quarrel about the command would certainly mean the destruction of Greece. They were, indeed, perfectly right; for the evil of internal strife is worse than united war in the same proportion as war itself is worse than peace. It was their realization of the danger attendant upon lack of unity which made them waive their claim, and they continued to do so as long as Greece desperately needed their help. (Herodotus, Histories 8.2)

Following the deaths of the Spartan King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the various Greek city-states decided they needed to pull together. Xerxes’ gargantuan army and navy were poised to overwhelm Greece, indeed the whole of Europe. At the eleventh hour the Greeks realized they needed each other.

Traditionally, Greece looked to Sparta for leadership on land and to Athens for leadership on the sea. But in this case there were misgivings about giving Athens command of the city-states’ combined fleets (despite Athens’ contributing the largest number of ships). Herodotus isn’t clear whether the reluctance was due to lack of confidence in or envy against Athens, or due simply to a recognition of Sparta’s moral capital.

The point is: Athens “got it,” to quip Herodotus: civil war in the face of an external threat is suicide.

Or, in Facebook-speak: mutual defenestration means self annihilation. When the enemy is at the gate, that’s not the time to be throwing each other out the window.

Rather than lobby for their traditional right to command, Athens accepted Spartan command of the navy as well as of the army. The result: two brilliant victories — one by Greece’s combined navies (at Salamis) and one by Greece’s combined armies (at Plataea) — and one huge and final retreat by Xerxes. The result: daughters of neither Athens nor Sparta were exported to harems in Persepolis.

There are times that call for a sense of measure and proportion — times when you need not to be doing a smack down on each other. Fifth century B.C. Greece it figured out. Will we?

On one front, we face militant Islamists who have declared a reverse Crusade on us, demanding we either grovel before a disincarnate cosmic monad, or die.

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The enemy outnumber us a paltry three to one. Good odds for any Greek. This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny — and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine. Give thanks, men, to Leonidas and the brave three hundred — to victory.

I know it’s a comic book version of history, but I am irresistibly attracted to 300 — both Frank Miller’s graphic novel [i.e., comic book for “grown ups”] and the movie it inspired. Forget the poetic license (we don’t know why the shepherd Ephialtes betrayed the Spartans, we don’t know how King Leonidas’ wife supported his campaign back home, we don’t know if the doomed king made anybody like the above-quoted Delios return home to tell the tale and marshal support for the next campaign) — 300’s license is no greater than Braveheart’s. Forget the over-the-top visual and auditory reconstruction — yeah right, the Spartans fought with exposed six-pack abs and celebrated to heavy metal music while Zeus punished the Persian navy. The genre is Classics Illustrated on steroids — perhaps literally to judge from how buff this Leonidas and his Spartan warriors are.

The fact is: Europe came close to capitulating to Persian conquest in 480 B.C. — save for the time purchased and the example set by 300 brave Spartans (and others, to be sure) who perished in the shade of Persian arrows (a line Frank Miller takes directly from Herodotus) at Thermopylae. Fictional though the character is, and fictional though his lines are, Delios’ (and through him, Frank Miller’s) homage is apt.

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This was a summer of firsts, including my first (and hopefully not last) gator hunt. It couldn’t have been more fantastic. We went out on the St. Johns River, between Orlando & Titusville, only a half hour away from my house (there are gators everywhere in Central FL … you know you have to be pretty hardy to live in the subtropics).

So what happens is that we (hunting party of 3, plus 2 guys running the airboat) hit the water at 7:30 this past Tues. night … it doesn’t get dark till 8:30, when you can start hunting. I’m up front with my harpoon (think: Captain Ahab looking for Moby Dick).

The idea is to get a gator’s reflective eyes in a high powered spotlight, run up on him in the airboat as fast as you can before he can dive under, harpoon him, chase down the buoy connected to the rope connected to the harpoon tip in his back, then reel him in, dispatch him with a 45 caliber “bang stick,” pull him aboard, tape his mouth shut (“just in case”), and take care of his spinal nerve (at which point you assume he’s probably actually dead).

By 9:00, after about 5 or 6 unsuccessful runs, but increasingly good harpoon thrusts (it takes a while to realize you have to thrust the harpoon, not throw it), I’ve harpooned a 7-footer (good size for tasty meat). What a man-rush! Entirely primordial.

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