Living Wills

It's been too long since my last post. Things at the hospital are progressing. Here's a quick tip: if you haven't made a living will, DO IT NOW! Don't burden your loved ones with decisions you should make yourself. It's agonizing enough to have to disconnect someone from life support, don't make it worse by adding guilt to the experience.

That's my tip for the day.

On Call...

Tonight is my first weekend on-call shift as a chaplain at Strong Memorial Hospital (weekend shifts are usually doubles, 24 hours straight). I got the pager handed to me about an hour ago and have already been called to one tragic encounter in the MICU (Medical Intensive Care Unit). I'm hoping to get some sleep, I'm hoping to do some reading, I'm hoping to do some work for Sunday's worship, but hoping may be for naught.

Peace.

Gathered As One

I went to a small, liberal-arts college in Annapolis, Maryland (Saint John's College). It's an unusual place, where great books are read and discussed. It's a fixed curriculum, which means no pesky majors or electives. Everyone starts as a freshman (no transfers, thank you), and everyone takes the same classes, in the same order, from the 1930s to the present. That's bound to bring a great deal of cohesion to any group.

It's a smallish place; they only admit about a hundred freshmen each year. Since everyone begins as a freshmen, the size of the student body is kept in check. When I attended (1983-1987), the vast majority of students lived on campus. Campus life was rich and rewarding. As I look back, my mind often ends up in the dining hall.

Now, I'm as a big fan of cafeteria food as the next guy (as long as the next guy is my friend, Elliott). I ate my way through some memorable meals (THIRTEEN patty melts! Take that!!). I can probably still find the red Jell-O stuck to the high ceiling by Jack Handy one bored lunch. The room itself is a thing of beauty. Deep, wide, high, with a wooden floor and two rows of columns running its length, it's a wonderful space.

Yet it's not fond memories or architecture that recommend the place to me. It's community. With such a small student body and with so many on campus, meals at Saint John's were where (essentially) the entire community met several times a day. Sure, we all sat at separate tables--often zealously guarded for years at a time--but we came together around a single (if metaphorical) table.

So, if the guys from third-floor Randall decided at the last minute to have a party, all they had to do was ring a glass at dinner and make the announcement. Everybody knew. Instantly (years before the advent of Instant Messaging). It's occurred to me that that was the real power of the place. Everybody at their own tables, with their own friends, in their own conversations, yet with the ringing of knife on glass, we were One Body.

In the 1990s, major construction was required on some of the old, decaying dorms. As a necessity, more students lived off campus. I wasn't there for those years, but a good friend of mine was and noticed the shape of the community change. Gone were the days when the tinkling of a glass could attract the eyes and ears of the body as whole. That incredible sense of togetherness was lost. I don't know how things have fared since they re-opened those dorms. I don't know if community life has coalesced around that wonderful dining hall. I pray that it has, because that wwas where the beating heart of that place was to be found in my day.

Shields and Swords

When I was in grad school the first time, I took a number of law classes. I remember well my Criminal Law & Procedure class, taught by a pair of Secret Service agents. One night, in a conversation about Constitutional rights, one of them quoted "the Constitution is a shield, not a sword." (A recent Internet search has turned up no definitive author of this quote, but suggests James Polk.) The line has always stuck in my mind.

In subsequent years, I came to study the Bible with some great seriousness. I discovered that many people wield the Bible as a weapon against others (notably against other Christians). This grieved me greatly (and still does). In my own mind, I began to apply the Constitutional quote to the Bible, thinking (and saying), "the Bible is a shield, not a sword."

That's what troubles me about this week's lectionary text: Ephesians 6:10-17. It speaks powerfully about the "whole armor of God," which is to keep us safe as we take the Gospel of Peace into a hostile world. What's not to love about the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness? I want that shield of faith and helmet of salvation!

But then Paul shifts gears. To all this protective armor is added the "sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Here's where Paul's metaphor breaks down for me, as I see the word of God (or the Word of God, for that matter) not as a weapon, but as a force of grace, healing, peace and protection.

The armor of God is essential if we're to take the Gospel of Peace out into the dark places. I just don't know why we need the sword.

I think I'll leave mine at home.

Update on my Netbook

My friend, Amy, asked me how I like my new netbook (ASUS Eee PC 901). I've been writing about it to a few people, so I thought I blog it for posterity...

I got mine in early July 2009. I played around with it, but didn't really use it much (not a lot of wi-fi in Arkport). I got a great deal ($169) on a lower-end model that seemed to meet my low-end needs. I did some common upgrades (upping RAM from 1G to 2G and replacing slow 4G Solid-State-Disk with faster 16G SSD) and was content.

As a low-cost netbook, mine came with Linux (no biggie, I like UNIX variants). I replaced the so-so stock Linux install with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (better formatted for small screens). I started using it. Fun, quick, no probs. Life was good, and it was great to have a command line again.

Then my old, slow laptop died. I'd been using it as my office PC. When it went, I needed to put the netbook into service fast. Ubuntu gave me a few hassles here, some I've experienced before with Linux, others were new. I needed to add the fonts I use in my church publications. No biggie, I've added fonts to UNIX systems before. I even found clear and helpful instructions on the Internet. The only problem? They didn't work. Grrr...

I also need to print at work, and printing is (in my 15+ yrs experience) the Achilles Heel of Linux. I'm sure others know how to make it work and have no issues. I've NEVER been able to get a Linux/*BSD/Solaris machine to print successfully. Call me dumb.

So, this week I jumped ship and installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate on it. I've been testing Win 7 on my home PC since last year and like it a lot. I wasn't sure if the netbook could handle it, but Microsoft is specifically targeting the netbook market (the only PC market to have any real positive sale this year). Once I made a bootable Windows 7 USB thumb drive, I was off to the races. Installation was a snap, hardware recognized without a hitch.

Speed is great. The laptop I was formerly using was a Sony VAIO from the year 2000. It had a Celeron 600 CPU and 256M of RAM. I was running Windows 2000 Pro on it and it was OK, but sluggish, especially loading programs. The netbook is like a Ferrari compare to it (though just about anything would be!). I've yet to experience even a hiccup.

I am conscious about hard drive space. I've got a 16GB SSD in it, Win 7 takes up under 6G of that. I also have a 4G SD card to store stuff like music files. It's really no biggie, I keep all my working documents on a thumb drive. My media-intensive files (images, movies, music) mainly live on my home PC, with it's whopping 80G hard drive. I'm not anticipating a problem with the 16G capacity of the netbook (though I can get a 32G or 46G SSD for it, if I do).

So far, so fun!!

Shooting Star!

While it's hardly earth-shattering news (in fact, it barely broke the atmosphere), I did see one Perseid meteor last night. I was out taking the dog for her late-night wee when I saw the bright streak in the sky. I wasn't able to get out any other time this week, when the shower was at its peak. Well... at least I saw one!

The Deplorable State of Magical Education Today

I've been thinking about Harry Potter. Something's been bothering me for years about the current crop of young wizards and witches portrayed in the HP books and films. They all seem to suck at magic. By this I mean that they seem to be in no way the magicians their predecessors were. Maybe this is a commentary on the decline of education at Hogwarts and beyond...
Consider Harry's dad, James, and his Hogwarts pals, Sirius, Remus and Peter. By the time they were Harry's age, they had created the Marauder's Map (one of the most infallible and amazing pieces of wizardry in the series) while three of them (if memory serves) had become accomplished Animagi -- able to transform into animals at will (stag, dog and rat). All this before they were eighteen.
Reading (or watching) the Half-Blood Price shows us young Severus Snape, who was busy correcting his textbooks and inventing his own powerful spells. Let's not even talk about the things that young Tom Riddle was able to do whilst at Hogwarts.
While still a student (we hear in the Half-Blood Prince movie), Harry's mom-to-be, Lily, was able to conjure a wondrous magical fish that swam contentedly until the day she died.
In short, who among the current crop of Hogwarts students is doing anything like this? It seems like Harry, while plucky, only knows three of four spells. Even Hermione, the genius of them all, seems to be a master of Magical Trivia (knowing the answer to every magical question there is) without actually doing much momentous magic.
I'm sending my kids to private wizard school.

Just As I Left It

As many of you may know, I just returned from an eight-day trip to the Navajo Nation, my seventh since 2004. This year, the team helped with the construction of a new church parsonage at Ojo Amarillo, New Mexico. We also put on a Vacation Bible School for the area children.
I find coming back from the mission field strange and disorienting, far more than going out. Mission experiences can be strong (even overpowering), yet when we get back to "the World" everything is just as we left it. It can almost feel like we never left at all. It's far too easy to jump right back where you left off, filing your mission experiences away as pleasant memories.
On the other side of this, the mission field can be very alluring. It can be so refreshing to step out of our day-to-day lives that it's tempting never to return! Even when you get back, you can leave a part of yourself out there.
Neither of these extremes is healthy; we must seek a middle path. Can we come back from the mission field energized by our experiences, yet able to incorporate into our ordinary lives some of what we discovered Out There? That's the question I'm trying to answer this week!

Kind Words

I was just re-reading an email from Ted, a guy I knew in college. His wife, Kate (also an old college friend), made him listen to my recent Come-To-Jesus sermon (Thanks, Kate!). He sent me some thoughtful words of encouragement, which are much appreciated (and needed).

In his email, Ted wrote, "The modern Christian seems to want a Savior but not a Lord." This simple sentence seems to sum up many of my frustrations at the moment. We may yearn for the Kingdom, but whose kingdom? I long for the Kingdom of GOD, right here, right now. Putting my life under the lordship of Jesus Christ was at once the hardest and easiest thing I've ever done.

Hard because we are a culture of individualists. We elevate the Self, placing it on the highest pedestal. We admire self reliance, self control and self sufficiency (self, self, self). I'm as guilty as the next guy. As a child and young adult, through my twenties, I strove to be a Complete Person (Behold, Modern Man!). I took Donne's words, "No man is an island, complete unto himself," as a challenge. I could be complete; I would be complete. Such is the struggle of the Modern American Man. The cost of giving up this struggle is so high that most of our churches are populated by women and children. This amount of humility and submission is simply UnManly!

Yet my decision was also easy. Once I came to accept the reality of this Jesus, that he is who he claimed to be. Once I came to believe the unbelievable, I was faced the the Big Question: "So What?" If I believe that the creator of the universe longed to be in relationship with me, how must I respond? If he loved us (me!) enough to walk among us, enduring shame and death, how must I respond? What would it say if my life were to go on unchanged, without interruption?

When we come face-to-face with Jesus, the only two reactions that make any sense are to crucify him or fall on our knees an proclaim him as Lord.

Try, Try Again

After months of inactivity, I'm trying to be a better blogger. I'm looking for a good way of linking my personal blog and my church blog. I think, in the end, that I may just need to copy-and-paste common posts between them. Ug.
Life has been hectic. I'm struggling to motivate my congregation. For a long time I've been in the front, urging them to follow. A few weeks ago, I got behind and started pushing. Reactions have been mixed, to say the least. If it weren't for the calling of God, no sane person would do this job!
Things are calming down, but I feel stuck in the same rut. How do we call people deeper into relationship with Jesus? How do we call them past their comfort zones? Hard questions with no easy answers.
I'm convinced that the way to begin is to expect more of people. For decades we've been expecting less and less, and we have been succeeding fabulously! The time has come to expect more.

Good Friday and Forgiveness

I spent much of Holy Week this year contemplating a single verse from Luke's Gospel: "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34 NRSV). I began to think about the power of forgiveness: how hard it can be for those who have done harm to offer it and how hard it can be for those who have been harmed to go without it.

In my own life, I have done things I know I ought not have done. I have done them and gotten away with it. At times, I have felt remorse over my actions, but too often I have felt that I owed an apology to no one.

On the other hand, I have been hurt by the thoughtlessness of others. Something once happened to me, when I was a young man, that hurt me very deeply. I reacted as we all react when we are injured, I protected myself. I retreated, building an impenetrable wall around myself. I spent five years safe from harm, behind my wall.

Safe I may have been, but sound I was not. The person who had hurt me was not in my life, and I had no place to turn for the healing I needed. The hurt remained. As the years went on, I began to feel that I had gotten over the pain, but I've come to realize that I hadn't gotten over it, I'd merely gotten used to it.

It seemed, as Holy Week went on, that part of the mystery of Christ's saving work has something to do with Forgiveness. A long time ago, God was hurt by the selfishness of humanity. We thought we had gotten away with it, and came to think that we had nothing to apologize for. After all, we didn't do anything. The stories, if indeed they are true, happened at the very dawn of creation. Surely we have nothing to feel sorry about.

Likewise, God has been hurting all this time. Unlike my own hurt, God did not retreat, but tried again and again to connect with fallen humanity. God would reach out and humanity might respond for a time, but eventually they would fall away. Yet God kept on trying.

But it wasn't working. God had been seeking a solution, but could not find the way. Despite God's best efforts, the hurt was perhaps too deep.

That is where Jesus comes in. He came to us to show us a new way, but perhaps he also came to show God a new way. Wrapped up in their pain and guilt, neither God nor humanity could solve the riddle. Like Alexander slicing through the Gordian Knot, Jesus came and wiped away our failed solutions.

As he was being nailed to the cross, the latest victim in the ongoing war between God and humanity, he saw clearly the way out. He saw what had eluded God and humanity since the Fall. He saw people who knew no reason why they should feel sorry for anything and he saw God in pain. Though they didn't deserve it and didn't ask for it, Jesus saw the way through: "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing."

Perhaps part of the mystery of Good Friday is that Jesus found the way to reconcile God and humanity, and that way is Forgiveness. "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." By extending forgiveness, God could begin to heal. By receiving forgiveness (grace, by another name), humanity came to discover its fault. Only after that could reconciliation be possible.

Who Watches the Watchmen

I do, apparently. It's 11:00pm and I just got back from watching the movie version of Watchmen (my all-time favorite graphic novel and near-all-time favorite novel period). I'm feeling a bit down, as I often do after my occasional re-readings of the graphic novel. The themes Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons wove together so expertly lead my mind toward melancholy, but there's more to it tonight.

Let me get a few things out of the way first. As an adaptation of an iconic graphic novel, it was OK. I'm not going to go into the quotidian details. It was OK. I liked it. They were dead-on true to the original in parts, and omitted entire major and minor plotlines to make the thing fit into three comprehensible hours. It was an Olympian task, which explain why it took over twenty years to get to the screen. I don't have a problem with the film. It was fine. Job well done. Finis.

What's got me down tonight was my vicarious experience of the film. I saw the film in a small, local theater in the neighboring town in middle-of-nowhere New York State. Judging by previous films I'd seen there (usually with just one or two other patrons), Watchmen was a smashing success. There were dozens of people there! Behind me sat about eight or nine young people. They had all obviously read (and I dare say loved) the graphic novel and could not seem to contain themselves as they saw it brought to the big screen. I was fortunate enough to get a glimpse of the movie through their eyes, as they could not keep quiet throughout the entire film.

Don't read this as me complaining ("Drat those durned kids!"). I was actually glad to overhear their reactions to each scene and how it did or did not differ from the canon. It was eye-opening. Maybe I'm an old crank, but they just didn't seem to "Get It." They found the high-style violence satisfying enough, but they laughed in all the wrong places. There seemed to be a fundamental disconnect about the genre they were watching.

By my reading, the over-arching theme in Watchmen is impotence. Each of the main characters has lost control, is losing control or is desparately trying to hang on to control. Often the control they've lost (or they seek) is an illusion. Yet the story gives none of them real satisfaction. Each character comes face-to-face with powerlessness. Their different reactions shine a light on their basic personality types. The best example, in the novel and the film, is the scene where Dan and Laurie fumble on the couch. The scene is at the same time tender and awkward, and also frustrating as Dan's excitement gets the better of him before he can make love to this beautiful woman. In both novel and film, the scene is a metaphor for the impotence experienced by everyone in the story.

As I was watching this scene, I found the crew sitting behind me a bit distracting. They found it hilarious, missing the point entirely. They found a lot of scenes mysteriously hilarious. In one of the musical montages, a peace-loving flower child puts a daisy in the levelled barrel of a rifle, only to have the squad of young soldiers open fire on the hippie protestors. This seemed the height of comedy to my back-seat neighbors. Likewise, Rorschach's antics in prison were hilarious to them, as criminals tried to settle old scores and were put down one by one. The pathos and tragedy from which these scenes were built were lost on them.

If Impotence is a main theme of Watchmen, Irony is the writer's weapon of choice. Time and time again, characters discover (or we, the reader/viewer, dicover) that things are the opposite of how they seem. Power and powerlessness masquerade as one another. As former superheroes take off their masks, they actually lose their identities. We see that in several characters, literally and metaphorically.

Through the horrors of his violent crusade, Rorschach has become the mask he wears. His "real" face is the disguise he wears for the world. Overpowered and unmasked by cops, he screams "Give me back my face!" Dan Dreiberg, on the other hand, abandoned the life of the superhero. He lives a private, anonymous life, yet he is never free from the power of the mask. After his fumbled (and failed) attempt at lovemaking on the couch with Laurie, he and she are able to ignite the skies with their passion after donning their costumes. The irony is that they discover their true selves only when they put on their masks. Perhaps the greatest discovery of all is that everyone wears a mask.

So, with so much text and subtext, all the kids behind me were able to do was to laugh at the violence without feeling it's true force. What was that all about, I wondered. True, it's hard for a twenty year old to relate to Dan's pathetic, fumbled attempts at lovemaking. Maybe one has to have experienced some kind of helplessness to generate any real empathy. Still, I was their age when I first read the graphic novel and I didn't find that scene funny, I found it profound and revelatory. I could write them off as dumb kids, but I think that's too easy.

In the end, perhaps it's impossible for viewers who weren't even alive when Watchmen was written to really "Get It" (at least not without more advanced empathy skills). Cold war themes dominate the story and perhaps that experience is a necessary enzyme for connecting to the themes of impotence and powerlessness it presents. Thought I was their age when I first read Watchmen, I had grown up in the shadow of the cold war.

True, I was not around for the Cuban missile crisis, but Watchmen is not of a retelling the 1960s. It is all about the 1980s. At the same time that I received my U.S. government plans to build a nuclear fallout shelter in my backyard, I was reading books like Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, which painted a grim picture of the effects of nuclear war (quite unlike the image I had of me safe and cozy in my fallout shelter). On television, we watched Testament, while War Games kept us entertained in the theaters. The spectre of nuclear annihilation was in the very air we breathed.

Underneath all cold war thinking is futility, despair, and powerlessness. This is the zeitgeist tapped by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen, and the kids who sat behind me in the theater know nothing of it. Small wonder that they laugh at the fumbling sexual antics of a forty-year-old man, they've never experienced the kind of helplessness that scene is meant to evoke. Even at their age, back in 1985, I'd had a taste of that. Everyone who grew up in the shadow of Manhattan had.

So, I'm sad. Not because kids these days are clueless chuckle-heads (they are), but because the aching beauty of Watchmen is beyond their ken. The irony out of which the story is built should have brought tears when it only elicited cheers. The Comedian is dead.

[As a postscript, just let me give a hearty cheer to Jackie Earle Haley, who played Rorschach in the movie. He brought a malevolent power to every scene he was in and I couldn't keep my eyes off of him. If the late Heath Ledger got the Oscar for playing the Joker, Haley deserves the Novel Prize for Acting. Kudos.]

Procrastination!

I need to start writing. Not this blog, I need to start working on my written work to become a Provisional Elder. It's due at the end of this month. I have twenty-one questions that need answering. The answers need to be thoughtful, authentic, rigorous and be fully annotated. Ug. Did I mention that I need to get going Right Now?

I have rough-draft answers to most of the questions already, but they need re-working, polishing and annotation. Time to stop making excuses and start working. Bye for now...