A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (What I Learned While Editing My Life) by Donald Miller///Commentary by G. White

After reading Donald Miller’s new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (wow, that’s hard to type all those l’s and i’s and m’s), I sat up on my couch and thought, dang, my life is boring. I kinda think that’s what Don wanted me to think. The premise of his book: live a better story.

After being approached by filmmakers, Don had to rewrite his life into a coherent, entertaining narrative for the common movie audience. He realized that his life was boring. He realized that his life was just a series of slightly related, yet somewhat distinct vignettes of writing, speaking, and smoking pipes.

In the Author’s Note, Miller questions us about film content. If we went to a movie about a guy who wanted to get a Volvo, and in the end he got a Volvo, we wouldn’t walk out of the theatre mystified or satisfied, we would wonder why anyone ever wanted to make that movie. Miller’s point: that’s your life. Your life is about silly things like getting Ipods and Volvos and about making the basketball team and getting that new job, but once we obtain those things, the story ends.

Miller says that most of our stories wouldn’t make good movies or even novels. We need to live better stories.

After thinking about this, I examined my life. I’m a junior in college with no idea what I want to do. To entertain myself I read books, watch movies and drink margaritas with my fiancé. Don talks about how his story got interesting, from kayaking in Oregon to biking across America to climbing the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. And I sat there and thought, well, that’s easy for you Don because you’re probably bathed in cash from your successful books. I have to try and graduate with good grades so that I have a hope of getting a job and supporting my fiancé-soon-to-be-wife. I don’t have time to write a better story for myself. I go to a liberal arts college, where I’m getting a useless degree, I won’t be able to have your illustrious adventures.

But then I stepped back and realized that I’m having those adventures all the time. I’m writing a fairly good story, and soon Hannah and I will be permanently sharing a pen writing on the blank page of the rest of our lives.

Don talked about how a character needs to want something and to overcome conflict in order to get it. That’s a good story. I realized, I don’t know what I want, and I avoid conflict. So my story is pretty boring. But I decided to think of some things I want. I want to support my future spouse well. I want to pay off my debt in five years. I want to go to the Grand Canyon this spring break with my friends. I want to go to Spain with Hannah. I want to move to a big city. I want to go to grad school. I want to serve the poor and needy for the rest of my life. I want to love Hannah forever.

Now that I know what I want, I’ve got to overcome some conflict to get it. Well, Hannah, let’s make it to Spain and back. Josh, Jeff, Jordan, Matt: we’ll get to the Grand Canyon and enjoy every minute of it, even when we’re burying our own feces.

Miller challenged me to write a better story. I’m not sure if anyone will ever want to make my life into a movie, but hopefully we wouldn’t have much editing to do.

The book is challenging, hysterically funny, deep and wonderful. Miller tells the most beautiful, moving stories with his knack for humor, and with mature, yet humble insights.

Avatar

James Cameron didn’t spend three-hundred million dollars on a fresh story or good actors. He spent three-hundred million creating a beautiful, luminescent natural world that we should all feel bad destroying with capitalism.

The film opens up with a bird’s-eye-view of Pandora, a magnificent new world, explained as the moon of some other large planet. Quickly we realize why Pandora is valuable: unobtainium. A fake resource that the U.S. seems to want a lot of. There are references to a green-less earth back home, destroyed by America’s rape of the planet. The Army has established a base and a mining corporation partners with them to exploit Pandora for her precious unobtainium.

Enter Jake Sully, an ex-jarhead who lost his legs in combat. His brother was part of a project to make peace with the Na’vi, the native blue tall people of Pandora. Sigourney Weaver is the head scientist of the project and she’s not too happy to have another dumb gun on the planet to replace Sully’s now dead Ph.D. brother.

Weaver’s character, the treehugging and aptly named, Grace, has grown hybrid clones of the Na’vi with human DNA, and has found a way to mind meld with them. That’s where the title, Avatar, comes in. These copies can be inhabited “wirelessly” by people in coffin-like containers. Jake plugs in and is amazed to be able to walk and run again, and even have blue-people sex.

Then the story turns Fern Gully, er, I mean spy-falls-in-love-with-the-natives-and-changes-sides. Jake is sent on a mission by the grunting, white-haired Army commander to try to convince the Na’vi to move out of their tree village that sits on a large quantity of unobtainium. Jake goes, falls in love with blue princess, and conflict ensues.

Like I said, the plot isn’t too fresh or even interesting. But the world is. Pandora is a rain-forest by day and a fiber-optic glow show by night. It is a romanticization of the natural world that we have, a fossil of what may have once been on Earth. The Na’vi, blue people, are intimately connected with their world. I don’t mean that metaphorically. They can actually connect with some kind of organic internet that “flows,” like The Force, between all living things by taking their pony tails with nerves and attaching themselves to different animals and trees.

The Na’vi culture is an indigenous mixture with Native American leanings. They are a symbolic culture whose destruction Westerners mourn because of careless colonization and exploitation.

When Jake’s peace mission seems to fail, the caricature Army man decides to hit the massacre button. Cameron is unflinching in his accusations of America. Massacres like Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, and My Lai, are something that we tend to amnesiate into the academic periphery of our collective memory. But Cameron won’t let us forget.
The Army man goes painfully George Bush, “We have to fight terror with terror, we have to use pre-emptive strikes.” This blatant evoking of Bush-era rhetoric seals Cameron’s markedly green and blue message.

Avatar is preachy and romantic; the plot and characters are bland; the dialogue is spotty and cliché. But the message needs to be heard. Cameron used three-hundred million dollars to convince me that the Earth is something beautiful and bravura that we can lose through our undaunted avarice.

Drops Like Stars

Rob Bell’s newest book, Drops Like Stars, is a coffee-table-book-sized illustrative collection of “thoughts on the suffering and creativity.” It is a short, yet expansive work of sleek design layout and evocative imagery. Most of the pages have a few words on them, punctuated by powerful images.

One of my friends picked up the book, leafed through it, and said, “This is trendy as frick.” But the lustrous, minimalist design certainly works. It is filled with beautiful images of soap carvings, to colorful Times Square, to a squirrel. The images back up Bells power-packed words. Bell’s previous books, Sex God, Velvet Elvis, and Jesus Wants to Save Christians, have all had similar designs: strong colors and sharp shapes, and straight lines. The space keeps you focused on the few words that are on the page.

Bell’s “thoughts on creativity and suffering” are divided into six “arts.” These arts are observations on the nature of suffering or its side effects. The first, disruption, is when our plans don’t go right, they get completely disrupted, and we have “to imagine a totally new tomorrow.” Honesty is the next art, which happens when people suffer and they have to express that suffering. Everyone feels “the ache” when they hear a story about human suffering. “Suffering unites,” which spells out solidarity, the fourth art. Bell talks about how we can all relate to Christ because he became flesh and suffered, just like the rest of us. We have solidarity with Christ. Elimination causes us to trim down to only what is necessary. This art coheres with the economic situation: Americans have had to eliminate extra things from their lives. The art of failure resides in the human ability to bounce back, evolve, and learn from mistakes.

In a recent interview with the Burnside Writer’s Collective, Bell said, “Great rhetoric has never been about how many words one can fill the air with, it’s always been about how clean and uncluttered and lean an idea can be articulated. It’s always been the short, crisp parable that has infinite layers of meaning that knocks around your head for days.” Drops Like Stars is just that. Bell doesn’t blab on and on for one-hundred and sixty pages. He puts a few strong words on each page and leaves space for readers to knock his ideas around.

Bell also said in the interview, “I’m endlessly interested in content—how to make something shorter, denser, get to it faster.” Drops Like Stars is a dense, short, thought provoking exploration of a question that most never ask about suffering.

Bell says that most people ask why? when it comes to suffering, but nobody really has the answer, even though there are volumes of explanations, they all fall short. So he asks a more practical, fresher question: what now?

Mexican Indigenous mother loses child because she can't speak english?

This is so outrageous. Some social services somewhere in Mississippi took a woman's baby away because she can only speak an indigenous tongue (not much Spanish and no English). Is this what immigration law has come to? Oh! you don't speak english, we'll take your kids now. Thank You! Have a nice day!

This is crap. If this woman loses her baby then I'll lose my faith in democracy. Let me explain. Democracy has produced one of the most confusing, intricate and absolutely impossible immigration systems in the whole world. It doesn't even make sense to the people who enforce it.

Check this and this out. It's more confusing than the Bible. It's impossible to get here unless you're a billionaire or whatever.
Let's remember that there are desperate humans all over the world who look to the United States as a symbol of hope to change their miserable lives, but when they apply, it ends up taking twenty years to become a citizen. Can you imagine if you had to wait twenty years for anything. That's about as slow as dial-up. We need to take some responsibility and change this legislation.

I have a friend who recently told me about his family's immigration story. His dad applied 3 years before my friend was even born, and didn't hear back from the U.S. till my friend was 12. That means he waited fifteen years to get in. I spoke with his dad who said that coming to the U.S. was the most difficult thing that ever happened to him because he had to come first, then his sons, then his wife, then his daughters. He told me that they came in four stages like that. They are completely legal, which is entirely rare because of the insane process and expense.

If we want people to come here legally, let's make it a little easier on them.

that's all.

-g

The Fall of the Flannel Graph

After spending five years researching, writing, and drawing, Robert Crumb, a lauded comic artist, published “The Book of Genesis.” This graphic novel leaves nothing out. Full of sex and war, this novel casts the foundational narratives of Judeo-Christianity in a whole new light.

What Crumb did in this book is bold, especially in a nation with such conservative mental claustrophobia. He illustrated a book of the Bible, and left no story untold, no scene un-shown. We like to leave the strange stories about Lot and his daughters screwing in caves or Abraham doing it with his wife’s slave out of our Christian Education Hour curriculum. Crumb includes these sexual scenes, and even shows us some boobs.

R. Crumb draws on a few different translations of the Hebrew text, as well as some artistic freedom, to illustrate every verse of the biblical book of Genesis. In his introduction, he says, “I, ironically, do not believe the Bible is ‘the word of God.’ I believe it is the words of men. It is, nonetheless, a powerful text.” But, let’s set theology aside, and look at the novel as a piece of art.

Crumb uses visceral images to present the text and culture with all of its taboos and nuances. This tears the Sunday school, flannel-graph, always-smiling Bible characters of my fond childhood asunder. He replaces the posh, happily robed flannel-graph Abraham with a balding man whose remaining hairs appear pubic. His facial expressions of love, mourning, war-rage, jealousy, fear, astonishment, pleasure, confusion, curiosity and sadness convey Abraham’s polyvalent relationship with the divine.

To me, all this raw re-representation of the familiar characters truly humanized the people that my Sunday school teachers stripped of their suffering. I can relate better with Abraham now that I see his face. Perhaps we share similar struggles in our relationship with God than I thought. He pleads with, bargains with, cries out to, and questions his Lord. And God is okay with that.

The gut-churning representations of the text show us how little we talk about the bizarre stories of the Bible. The foundations for out faith are laid out in stories told, written and edited through thousands of years in a dead language from a completely foreign culture. And they are not often represented as such. Not many preachers give a history or language lesson to help us understand these outlandish tales. They usually try to fit the complex puzzle piece of a passage into the current cultural jigsaw. They cover the passages in a thin film of simplicity, all the while ignoring the Ancient Hebrews and their culturally layered relationship to the stories.

Crumb doesn’t beat around the bush. And he doesn’t burn it either. Some will say that he profanes the sacred text and characters by drawing them. I think he makes the stories come alive.

“The Book of Genesis” is definitely rated R for content. Isn’t it interesting that said content is the foundation for our Christian understanding of the world? Crumb doesn’t theologize or change the stories of Genesis, he only shows us how strange and awkward they can be to see.

On idiolect in community

My fiancé recently informed me that my group of friends from back home and I don’t really have conversations, we just joke. If I were and unreasonable person, which most men are, I would have told her off, but since I am reasonable, I sat back and thought about what she said. I examined the topics and style of our conversation and realized that we don’t really talk about anything. We just fling phrases and laugh. We have our own language of humor that we all enjoy when we come together, so we don’t rely on each other for deep, intense conversation. Our “idiolect” or “private tongue” can be inclusive and exclusive. We feel like members of our community because we can contribute to the ocean of jokes. But my fiancé feels excluded because she wants to have a real conversation and she doesn’t feel welcome we just gossip and joke in a foreign idiolect. I don’t blame her. Try to budge yourself into a group of people who are already friends. Their idiolect (inside jokes, funny words, and communicative nuances) is probably deeply developed. If you want to break into a group of people, you have to learn their idiolect. It will take patience and failure. And perhaps, in the process, you will realize that you don’t want to be part of the group, but I dare you to try.
We’ve been told before that on Second East Coly, we “speak a language of our own.” This is true. It is the idiolect that we have developed from common triumph, trial, fun and failure. We know how to talk with each other, whether it is a storm of nonsense, or a deep conversation.

an enexpected party

I’ve recently decided to revisit J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.” I read it almost eight years ago when I was a seventh-grader. I couldn’t remember many details. But I remember enjoying the battles like most pre-teen boys. I remember skipping the brilliant and rhythmic poems and songs. I remember thinking of Bilbo as a small, prickly creature who lived in a dirt tunnel. I remember imagining each of the dwarves and their strangely colored beards tucked into their belts and their hunger for adventure and wealth. That was before Hollywood corrected me.

Bilbo, our burglar and protagonist, is satisfied with a quiet, boring life and a vast inheritance in a comfortable home. He meets a mysterious wizard one morning, who graciously proposes an adventure. Bilbo rudely declines for the sake of his after-second-breakfast-smoke. Half an hour later, thirteen dwarves knock on his door and barge in without invitation. They propose the adventure. Bilbo leaves behind his lifestyle of five meals a day and they all set out to get their treasure from the evil dragon Smaug. As soon as they leave the placid Shire and venture into the outside world, madness ensues: they meet trolls, goblins, evil wolves; they fly on eagles, get kidnapped by elves and fight a colossal battle. I’ve taken a journey of sorts in the eight or so years since I last read this lauded classic. I was probably a foot shorter in those days, with no hope of ever getting a girlfriend or being good at anything but digging those big boogers out of my nose. Well…I still pick my nose, but I do have a fiancé now, so there is hope after all.

At the end of high school, the adventure known as ‘college’ was knocking on my door, but four years seemed like an inconvenience, like too long of a break between first and second breakfast. I didn’t want to go on that adventure with strangers. I didn’t want to leave the comfort and solace of everything and everyone I had ever known.

But I did. And like Bilbo, I’ve looked back fondly on the simpler times. But in my adventures at Northwestern I have mooned people from the windows of the children’s library, totaled my roommate’s car, dropped TVs from the bleachers just to hear them explode, and it’s been a pretty good time. I’ve travelled to the beach, the desert, the mountains and to lakes. I’ve ministered, learned, written, cried, puked, laughed and slept my way through college. I’m no Bilbo, but adventures are fun every once in a while.

Decision time

So I've decided that i will try to do three blog posts a week for a whole year. My inconsistency has frustrated me, and i need some accountability. Maybe this will help.

so here is an entry for now.

I like to listen to folk music. It’s pretty soft music, usually. But it’s not country, which I can’t stand the sound of. All that twangy nasally lyrical masturbation. Ugh. I don’t like country, even though it is a cousin (some would say a brother) to my beloved folk. I like folk music because of its natural sounds, plethora of instruments, creative harmonies, simple melodies, nostalgic lyrics, soulful vocals, spacious experimentation, spiritual honesty, prophetic imagination, historical impact, bearded musicians, redemptive concerts, and the calm that it creates deep within me every time I listen. I like folk because it tells the honest story of America, a story of trial and error, success and regret, hardship and comfort, Black and White, Red and Yellow. Folk leaves no one out. It addresses the rich and the poor. Folk music doesn’t take itself too seriously. The harmonica humming out beautiful interludes provides the landscape for the transcendent sound of folk music. I like to take myself too seriously when I write stuff like this. I like that folk music vocals range from falsetto to gritty.
You see, I took StrengthsQuest once, and my results told me a lot about why I like folk music. One of my strengths is history, which means that I look to the past to explain the present, and perhaps predict the future. I like to hear peoples’ stories. I like to learn about the history of different countries, peoples, and places. I see a lot of tragedy in the past. And a lot of joy too. There are a lot of folk ballads. Ballads usually tell the story of someone from the past to say something about the present. That’s why I like folk music.
I listen to Sufjan Stevens because he creatively intertwines local history with dialogue with God. Illinoise, Michigan, and Seven Swans are my favorite of his. Seven Swans is Stevens’ musing about different stories from the Bible. Michigan is a tribute to his home state, and to all its folk-tales and modern problems. Illinoise narrates the great land of Abraham Lincoln. It tells of a serial killer, Superman, a childhood memory, love lost, the great city of Chicago, a college road-trip, and the Exodus. His banjo, piano, and other splay of instruments create a distinct and unique sound.
I like Fleet Foxes because their songs probably don’t mean anything.
I like Paper Bird because the sing about Jesus and Arizona, and the best way to make beer.
I like Bon Iver because he articulates our sorrow and redemption.

Do you?

Oh! America - who are your gods?
Have you fashioned them and let them oppress you?
Do you not see the distance from the white collars to the blue?
Do you not hear the voices demanding total conformity?
Do you not feel pain anymore?

I see white collared men shackled by cash
a boy with a needle of muscle
your shoes kill dark children
the dark shadow of the swoosh
fear burning our pockets
and I see couch potatoes and french fries
a great river that no one can cross
the brown people toil in our fields
their paychecks with no social security numbers
and I see the bold lines on the map
a church frozen by comfort
an assembly satisfied by stasis
no votes for Jesus

I hear the native heart drumming across the tamed plains
the blood of Uriah cry out from the dirt
the trees wail as their brothers and sisters fall
I hear King Solomon order another Big Mac
the fire roaring in his trash mound
his songs blaring from all the white steeples

I feel like i will never get a job
like i will die alone in the gutter
and i feel sad for all the soldiers' families (even though they tell me not to)
the weight of the loans and debt of my life
and i feel no grace from anyone on this earth
no jubilee for the poor and needy
and i feel no pain, no imagination, no hope
no future, no alarms, and no surprises

do you?

Grandpa learned a new word

Alex came back from a day on the farm.
He told me that grandpa learned a new word.
"He was messing with the sprayer
out by the berry patch. It wasn't working.
He called it a bitch."

Sorry to disappoint, Alex.
I'm guessing grandpa knew that word
long before we were born.

Maybe he heard his dad murmur it
under his breath during a calving.

Maybe he saw it on black-and-white TV shows.
Probably not.

Maybe he yelled it as he threw his
football helmet after losing
to a rival on homecoming.

Maybe he said it for the first time
when his prom date dumped him for
his best friend.

Or maybe he heard it from the
captain on that aircraft carrier during
the Korean War.

Sorry Alex, grandpa probably knew that word.
But be thankful that you don't know that word
because bitches are not fun to know.

El Rio Bravo/El Rio Grande

i decided to cross the river.
I wonder if Moses needed a visa
to get out of Egypt
and into the wilderness?

well, Moses wasn't
there to split the waters
this time. So i swam.

When i got to the other side
the pillar of fire said to me,
"follow me through the desert
and i will lead you to the promised land."

i wandered alone through painted deserts
and strawberry fields
and i slept under trees
and drank out of streams.
this, mi amigo, is true liberty.

When i reached Mt. Sinai, he told me
that soon i might be free.

Capitalism Kills Soul

“I work in corporate America.”
“Yeah, I used to do that.”
“Didn’t you feel like your soul was dying every time you went to work?”

I went to Wal-Mart today.

I went to buy groceries.

When I arrived, my vision was fine. But as the visual fluorescent turbulence began violating my eyes, I felt like I needed a new prescription for my glasses. Luckily, they had the “WAL-MART VISION CENTER.” I didn’t even have to leave the building with the lights that destroyed my vision to get my vision repaired!

After the doctor checked my eyes, I shopped around. I drove my cart like I was in the Daytona 500. I weaved in and out of the produce aisles. I squeezed between slow moving soccer moms in the pasta aisle. I even got some drift while whizzing around the dairy sector.

But that’s the only fun I had.

Mind you; I was squinting that whole time.

Well, after burning all that energy shopping,
I had to eat. Not to worry: McDonald's’ had a store in the Wal-Mart Store!
So I ate some super-processed slave labor greasy warm soggy fast American food.

I had to ask myself, “Did I eat those French Fries, or did I rub them on my face?” I wanted to clean myself off a bit. I thought that a nice haircut and shampoo was in order. Luckily, all I had to do was turn around and sure enough, they had a salon too!

The lady butchered my hair.

But she still wanted twenty dollars. I opened my wallet. Empty.

However, Wal-Mart had a bank! I went over and made a nice fat withdrawal. I paid the supposed “stylist,” whose own hair looked like a raccoon or a skunk had settled on her head.

“Oh! Wait! I’m here to shop!” I got right back on task by going out to the “Lawn and Garden Center.” They call it “center” like it’s all important. Like it’s the only place in the whole world where you could possibly get the stuff you need for your “Lawn and Garden.” But when I started looking around at the mezzanine and the shelves and the wilting flowers, I realized something: I don’t have a lawn. Or a garden.

I put that filthy grey cart into fifth gear and shredded my way back across the hundred million square feet store to the grocery aisles.
As I was searching for Banquet Frozen Fried Fish Fingers, I ran the cart into a freezer on accident. It collided with the door at such a velocity and with such force that I broke a finger nail.

I didn’t want to walk around the rest of the day with a hang nail. I glanced over to “Customer Service” and saw that they had a “Nail Spa” as well as the McDonald's’, the Salon, the Bank, the Money Center, and the check out lines.

I hurried over to the “Nail Spa” and those Vietnamese ladies fixed me right up.

Since I knew that I looked so handsome, I wanted to have somebody take my picture.

So I looked back, and they had a “Photography Studio” as well. I went in and they took my picture!

As I walked out of the store with my photos in hand, I got a headache from all the registers squealing like piglets ripped from their sow every time they scanned a new item.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

The doors slid open and a smiling lady, with oxygen tubes shoved up her nose, smiled and waved goodbye to me.

I stepped into the real world, which was bright and painful.

I opened the door to my car and turned the key to the ignition. No go.

Fortunately, Wal-Mart had a “Tire and Battery Center” too. They call it "center" like there’s no other place in the whole world to get new tires or new batteries. Well, they gave me a new battery; sixty dollars later.

After leaving the “Tire and Battery Center,” I realized that I forgot my groceries over in the “Frozen Foods!”

I checked all my stuff out with a cashier named Betty who probably gets paid $7.50 an hour to hear a beep every time she scans a product. I bet if she ever tried to start a union for beep-hearers, she would get canned. “Canned Goods are in aisle 4.” I heard someone say in a monotone voice to another “customer.”

After getting out to my car a second time, I didn’t even want to go home.

“Why don’t they have apartments at Wal-Mart? They already have groceries clothes sporting goods tire and battery lawn and garden photography salon nail spa bank McDonald's’?”

Why can’t I just live here? I could even work for Wal-Mart. Maybe I’ll suggest that they build apartments.

That way people never have to leave.





American monopolies and big business once feared Teddy Roosevelt because he swung “a big stick” at them. Isn’t it ironic that his stony eyes now survey a land that thrives on Walgreen's Sam’s Club Little Cesar’s Starbucks McDonald’s Wal-Mart ?

Comparative Divinity 102

Comparative Divinity 102
Isaiah 46.5 To whom will you compare me or count me equal?
To whom will you liken me that we may be compared?

Oh God! why would we ever try? We can compare you to nobody and no thing!
Our language fails us. Is there a human who even knows you well enough
to begin to describe you? Is there no thing we can compare you to? Is there
no person merciful and powerful enough that we can liken you to? Can anything
on earth give us a glimpse of your beauty and glory? Will we ever know you
in this life? If we can't describe you, should we even try? If we can't understand you,
should we even try?

Comparative Divinity 101

Comparative Divinity 101
Isaiah 46.5 To whom will you compare me or count me equal?
To whom will you liken me that we may be compared?

Okay, God. I get the point.
We can't compare you to anything. You are too
great awesome amazing beautiful glorious
holy mighty wonderful marvelous merciful forgiving.
We try to compare you to our dads, but we distort you
because they're definitely not perfect. A friend of mine
once compared you to plaid. He said it represented your
vast complexity. But plaid isn't beautiful: it's what preppy dooshbags wear (with leather flips-flops). Nor is plaid majestically grandiose. So that didn't work.

We call you lord shepherd teacher rabbi the great physician.
but lords sometimes exploit their workers, shepherds accidentally loose their sheep,
teachers can loose their temper, rabbis were human, and even doctors can't heal everybody.

Don't even get me started on the Trinity: the egg.
The son is the yoke, the spirit is the white, and the father is the shell.
but those things come out of the chicken's ass...and if you drop it
it explodes. so that doesn't work either.

Lament for Lakota

All day long i roam the city. all day long
i see the haggard homeless lakota.
they trudge through the alleys and
down the long railroad gravel.

Alleys fill every day with the the smell of
sweat and alcohol. the drunk homeless
wander and slump under trees and shadows.
but can i blame them? is there a better
place to sleep?

Because it is the season of economic fall,
the lakota homeless are the leaves on this
problem tree. they dry out and change color,
the brutal north wind of white man tosses and swirls
them on the broken concrete; only for capitalism
to trample them under foot.

Before, they owned the land. but "owned" doesn't do them justice.
they loved the land - the fed the land - the land fed them.
mother earth and father sky met and loved
their lakota children - their lakota children loved them.
they were one with the land --- the swaying prairie grass -
the dark thunderclouds roaming over the hills like the bison -
the sunlight glinting off the rive - the tower of the bear (not the devil).
the land was their soul: and we dump our filth on it everyday with
garbage exhaust buildings tourist traps highways and the edifice of white man.

Open the eyes of my church?

These last four weeks I been in Denver, Rapid City, Denver again, and Rapid City again. I will reside and work in Rapid City, SD for the rest of the summer. This city spreads itself out at the foot of the Black Hills and is surrounded by Native American reservations. I have seen many homeless Native Americans wandering the streets of Rapid City. I saw many white and black homeless wandering the streets of Denver. I have been to rescue missions, nursing homes, community rejuvenation projects, mental health institutes, and kids’ day camps. This has taught me about the variety of ministry in the world. But I have also been to three very interesting, very different churches.
Here in Rapid, our home base is Trinity Lutheran Church. Trinity has a small congregation with a big heart. The building is located in downtown Rapid: a hub of Native American homelessness and panhandling. Everyday the church receives homeless people with open arms and gives them some food or a voucher. Many homeless call this place home, meaning that they protect the church because of its great compassion. They know the church serves them, so they want to protect it.
Our first Sunday in Rapid, we went to Trinity’s second service, which is contemporary as opposed to their first which is traditional. They told us that the first service is packed (probably in the neighborhood of 200 people). But the contemporary service only had about thirty people. To me the service was still a mix of contemporary and traditional because they still recited liturgy, creeds, and had us walk up to the front and kneel for communion. Sadly, I couldn’t really follow the sermon. We went on Pentecost Sunday, so he talked about that, and I tried to follow him, but I really couldn’t.
This church has been very hospitable by letting us use their facility for housing, activities and even cooking. Usually our meals waft smells up the stairwells from the basement all the way to the second floor.
On our Sunday in Denver, we went to and Episcopal Church called Church of the Epiphany. The service was very liturgical: we sang five or so hymns all called The Holy Trinity. They rang bells for communion, and we all walked up to the front and kneeled to take the Lord’s Supper. They gave us wine, which tasted really sweet. The Priest/Father gave a fantastic, coherent, and intriguing sermon on John 3. He talked about the meaning of the Greek that we translate to “born again.” He talked about how the concept of “born again” doesn’t mean that we have to go back into our mothers’ wombs, but it is means that the Spirit of God breaths new life into us. He asked us to ponder how the spirit is breathing into our lives now. This church had a very diverse body ranging from elderly, to young marrieds to Tanzanian refugees to families. Their alter boys were all black Tanzanian refugees. After every Sunday service they all eat together. To me this church really represented the community of faith. They take care of each other, eat together, and love one another. During the service, they had a time where you are supposed to go around and shake peoples’ hands and say peace. Well, everyone took about ten minutes to go around and talk with the other members of the church. They love each other, and want to know how each other are doing. This church really spoke to me by demonstrating the community of faith.
About three days ago on Sunday, we attended Hills View Evangelical Free Church. This church met in a reception hall, so they don’t have their own building. However, they are incredibly hospitable. (This just goes to show that you don’t need a giant home or church building to show utmost hospitality. You only need an open heart.) By the end of the service, we had at least three people tell us that if we need anything, that we should just call or email. People who have never met us before are going to let us do our laundry at their home. All four of us received guest gifts, which were Hills View mugs filled with packets of hot drink mixes. As four strangers from hundreds of miles away, we felt completely welcome. We sat at round tables in the reception hall as the worship team (a guy on a guitar and a girl singing) belted out three Chris Tomlin songs. During greeting time I met Jim, who was glad to hear that we were going to get the young people out to do something because “they never get out and do anything, they have too many pizza parties.” They had a long prayer request time with a hilariously humble lady who then prayed for all the requests that the body presented.
My experience at these three churches has taught me volumes about the body of Christ. But I won’t bore you with volumes. The Church is a diverse, hospitable, beautiful people. We honor God with song, prayer, and communion. We honor God with conversation, peace, and gifts.
I always had such a closed view of the church. I always thought that there were maybe three good churches in the world: Faith Bible Church, Indian Hills, and Berean in Lincoln. But after Berean became a mega-church, I wrote them off. Indian Hills told my roommate off for going to a reformed school, so they got the shoe too. Then Faith really hasn’t done much in the way of helping my family out lately. But these last two years, and especially this summer, God has opened my eyes to the beauty and diversity of his vast family of loving children.

Love in the Black Hills

trees grow thick on the hill
like a man's beard on his chin.
the whiskers nuzzle
the smooth face of the cloud
resting on the hilltop.

The boy who cries wolf

oh! media:
TV, commercials, billboards, news:
why do you cry wolf!

Y2k scarred the heck out of me
or did you plant the seed of fear
in my the dirt of my mind
and water it, let the water slowly trickle
out of the can until the ball dropped...
and nothing happened.

you cry wolf once a year, once a month, once a week, once a day!

first the birds carried the virus
now the swine: H1N1.
I never thought i would live past the SARS scare!

China's trying kill our kids with lead in their crayons!
don't let your kids go to school, or they'll die!
if they are near a crayon, lead will seep into their
skin and poison their systems, ravaging their bodies
and rendering them useless.
at that point, you might as well have aborted them before the whole ordeal.

Halloween, what a night!
somebody (probably a black guy) slipped a razor blade into
my son's m and m. He ate one, and cut his tongue and DIED.
don't let your kids trick or treat
or the razor bladers will put a trick into their treat
and they'll be dead before you know it.

you cry wolf at harvest, during winter, under the sun, in the spring.

the drug cartels will invade america! don't go to mexico.
are we always coming up with reasons to stay away from mexico:
drug cartels, swine flu, mexicans? what could be worse
than a mexican drug kingpin sitting on a toilet
crapping his guts out because he has swine flu?
maybe they should build that wall. at least then
they could keep the mexicans out.

Marylin Manson will eat your children.
they'll discover his black and white makeup on your kid's face
in the alley after midnight. you shouldn't have let them out,
you know that nothing good happens after midnight.
Manson's music will make your kids eat babies and sell their souls to the devil.
I thought we had grace to redeem people from stuff like that....

the economic crisis will swallow america with its parasitic teeth.
it will be worse than the depression, worse than death. In fact
if we don't do something fast, we'll all die, or worse, we'll all
be poor and then we'll be forced to rely on other people! anything but that!

COPS. can we get a few more shirtless black guys running from white policemen?
i don't think so. Can we delineate racial behavior anymore? i don't think so.
can we make the issue anymore black and white? i don't think so.
European bees versus killer africanized bees. Yeah, that's what i thought.
Don't worry white america, they're not the killer hoard you make them out to be.
they're actually pretty nice. should i be calling them "they?"

maybe at one point, there was a real wolf, i'm not sure. but nobody's seen one other than you for quite some time.
you cry wolf (as you have many times before), but your screams fall on dead ears. too bad i'm the only deaf one.

Out of the mouth

"for out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks."

does that mean that my heart is so full that
you only hear the few drips spilling over the rim of the cistern of my heart?
you will never taste the full swallows from the depths of my cistern.
you will miss the texture and nuance of my thoughts.
you will never be able to drink deep from the overflow of my heart.
you only get those few drips that creep over the edge of my humble cup.

Odyssey

To me it is crazy:
he sailed for ten,
and I not even two.
My odyssey began
with a siren calling me
my men waxed my ears
her song faded and fell.
The Poseidon within me
lifted the waters and
I refused the titans their due,
while I sat in this pew.
I refused to listen to their good news. They cried
for Nicaragua, Mexico, Chicago.
their cries fell silent on my waxed ears.
I refused the Amish, the Mennonite and the Jew.
Shalom! the mustache screamed, but I refused him too.
I refused Paul Baumer's rhetoric
while I sat in this pew.
They were the wind to fill my sails,
but I didn't want to open them,
I was stubborn.
The many lonely nights
on the sea,
I would light a candle
and watch the shadows
dance along the wall
of my frail wooden ship.
Athena heard my cry
and in the snow and swing
we held hands and strolled along
the pine trees on mount Olympus.
They say that she opened Zeus' mind,
well she did the same to me.
She wanted to
release my cords
that held my sails tight upon the mast.
but I didn't let her. Yet.
From snow and snot came poetry
written to the goddess
who brought bread to my lonely ship.
I met a man named Prufrock
and he taught me a lot.
"There will be time to murder and create...
and time yet for a hundred indecisions,
and for a hundred visions and revisions."
So my voyage murdered me.
My notions of moralism died
and of course, they were revised.
I realized that I would
have to murder
and create.
but like an ass, I stood stubborn still.
Prufrock left me with More.
Athena dropped another loaf of
bread from the sky
and I arrived at Utopia
where St. Augustine resides.
He confessed, confessed, and confessed some more
"The church is my mother, but she is a whore."
I didn't understand
these notions of excess and justice while
the titans tried to break my shield,
and Athena cheered them on (as she should).
With my sail slightly open,
the wind of Poseidon took her and I
to the land of mosquitoes
and trash.
There Poseidon tightened his watery grip
on my frail wooden ship.
After a titan smoked a Cuban
and I stuffed down some mangos,
we left the trashy shores.
Athena loosed those cords an inch
here and an inch there.
She prophesied of faith and failure
of racism and sexism.
She prophesied about that old whore,
our mother.
I still did not understand the confessor
but I was getting close.
Then one day,
my arms were tired from rowing on the high sea
so I loosed the cords from the sails
and Zephyr gave a burst.
my ship took off, and Athena clapped and smiled.
my poetry from snot and snow
got better. In pursuit of Mary Oliver, and Gary Snyder too.
As my sail flapped in the wind,
I began to see the lamb as my captain.
He led my ship
and gave it wind
(not from his butthole of course).
After a while,
the bags of loot from troy,
that I excused as ballast,
weighed my boat down in the treacherous waters.
I threw them overboard.
My ship sped up again
and sliced through the water.
My destination: Ithaca, my home.
I realized what St. Augustine
meant when she said
that my mother was a whore.
She sells herself
to out for moralism
and suburbia.
The titans call out for the oppressed
and the wax fell from my ears.
Athena finally opened my mind too.
But I’m still so far from home.
She holds my sails open,
now Poseidon is distracted.
Now we sail on the open sea,
at night
I fall into Kurosawa's dreams
and thank Zeus,
that Athena found my rosebud.
One day I find myself in Plato's cave
watching the shadows on the wall
wondering what it all means?

How can we apply this (the bible) to our lives?

This is a commonplace in sermons, Bible studies, Christian non-fiction, and even conversations between Christians. We always are trying to figure out how to apply the bible to our lives. “Let’s read the sermon on the mount…(5 minutes later)…how can we apply this to our lives?” People sit in silence and look at the ground listlessly. Eventually someone spouts out some abstract answer about how we shouldn’t worry. I’m not sure if we have the order right on this maxim. Instead of taking scripture and attaching it to our lives, shouldn’t we make scripture the solid foundation that we build our lives upon? Instead of making the gospel fit onto our lives, should our lives fit the gospel? How can we apply our lives to the bible? Shouldn't that be the question?

Holes in the bucket

I have been thinking a lot lately about what I really believe that I should be doing with my life. More than that, what does God think that I should be doing with my life? I have been reading about discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German theologian, labels discipleship as complete self-denial and complete self-alignment with Jesus Christ. To me, that is a good theory, but what does that look like? I always have this problem with people who give good concepts, but never any advice about practice, but that is another topic for another essay. In my search for how to practice this complete denial and complete alignment, I have done a lot of reading. From Shane Claiborne, to J.I. Packer, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and they all say the same thing. Give up your modern suburban consumer materialistic self-serving bastardization of Christ! Leave behind your possessions, abandon yourself and follow Christ as much materially as spiritually. So from this, I have gained a very negative view of the suburban Christian life. I have given up notions of a comfortable yuppie future for the vague romance of a missional life. This life would definitely not take me to dwell in the suburbs and go to a church with a Starbucks franchise in the foyer, but to the hood, the ghetto, to the margins, to the economically cast out, to the blind, to the weak, to the orphan, to the widow, to the poor, to the homeless, to the blacks, to the Hispanics, to the inner city. In my romantic notions of missional living, I will be married to a beautiful woman and we will live in the hood and love God and love our neighbors not because they are marginalized, but because they are made in God’s image and deserve dignity. We will serve Jesus by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, giving drink to the thirsty, visiting the prisoner, clothing the naked, and welcoming the strangers. Our neo-monastic lifestyle will flow from our front porch to our dinner table to the neighborhood playground. We will both have full time jobs, but we will love our neighbors and we will be the Good News in their impoverished lives full time as well. All of this romance about moving to the inner city and serving God without materialism to restrain our ministry lights me on fire. However, a good friend of mine recently started to poke some holes in this bucket of thought. He finds problems in the romanticizing of these missional notions. His contention is that many ‘believers’ are rich and live extravagantly. How can they justify this? I don’t know, but my friend says that there is nothing wrong with living comfortably, and I can agree with that, but I think that extravagance plants problems in the garden of ministry. We decided that the purpose for Christianity is somewhat two-fold. We can draw it from Ecclesiastes and the Sermon on the Mount. Ecclesiastes says to enjoy life, live comfortably, but fear and love God. If we can synthesize this with the somewhat missional message of the Sermon on the Mount, then we can found the reason Christianity: to enjoy life, and live with a purpose or a mission: to be the good news to those who need it.

extractions on the mug metaphor

Today in chapel a speaker had a coffee mug resting on a saucer on a circular table. He lightly spoke about how we are the mug always being filled up. “Maybe a disaster in your life has tipped you over,” he said, gently placing the mug on its side, causing a slight ting from the contact between the two porcelain fixtures. A common verse with the metaphor is John 7.38, “out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” So the basic picture is that God fills our cup with water or love and we pour it out to others. I have a few questions for the metaphor. Are we the cup? Or do we just hold the cup? If we are the cup, then we must be nudged or knocked over in order to do any pouring, for we all know that a cup can do no pouring of its own. If everyone is a cup and if we want to be able to pour into people, then logically shouldn’t the other cups have to beneath our cup in order for the water to fall into them? If someone is below us, then aren’t they inferior to us? The metaphor of us being cups and trying to pour into people by design enthrones our mug with superiority, especially if a table is involved. Is everyone else is on the tile floor of our coffee shop theology, just waiting for a random force to push our full mug over and spread water over the table and wait for the living water to slowly drip, leaving the cups on the floor with only a meager portion of God’s love? Instead, all the cups are on the divine earthly table, and God is above us filling us with each other’s flowing waters of his own love. He has an ocean of water overflowing from his vast cisterns of love that fills the coffee mugs of humanity.

The true metaphorical implications that we are filled by God and then poured into others need a different picture. Let’s say that everyone else in the world is a cup full of coffee. They are just a plain mug with plain black coffee. If we want to follow the ‘salt of the earth’ metaphor, then should we, the believers be creamer, or milk, or sugar or something? Shouldn’t we be changing the world for good? Straight black coffee tastes the bottom of a rubber soul-ed shoe, shouldn’t we be the milk, creamer or sugar that makes it taste sweet, smooth, or just plain good? The divine barista in the great celestial Starbucks fills the earth’s coffee cup with sweet honey from us, his vessels of love.

I probably thought too much into this metaphor, but I just thought it was fun. Any comments on the range of metaphors that we should use for God?

Top Five Love Songs

If you spend Valentines Day canoodling with your Valentine, you usually want the environment to be perfect. Refined food like homemade spaghetti and a five dollar bottle of sparkling grape juice will elegantly whisk you and your lover off to a picturesque seaside resort in southern Italy. The sweet caresses of dim lighting may lull you and your valentine into a saccharine ambiance. Music can set a romantic and tender mood. But with oodles of love songs, choosing the proper tunes for you relationship can be difficult. So here are five songs for five different relationships.

“Can’t Get Enough of Your Love Babe” by Barry White is suitable if you have troubles expressing that soaring love for your valentine. “How can I explain all these things I feel?” This low-spoken love poem will make any girl feel appreciated with lyrics like, “Girl, your love for me is all I need and more than I can stand, oh well, babe.” The echoing wishful guitar and the softly shuttering cymbals should set the perfect low-key atmosphere for your date with a valentine who satisfies you.

“Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton, with a tingling magical intro and soft vocals has become an icon of the love genre. But with a closer look, this song would be appropriate for the insecure relationship. “Do I look alright? And I say yes, you look wonderful tonight.” If she has to ask you to tell her she’s beautiful, then she’s not sure how you feel or she’s compliment fishing. The girl can tell that Clapton is nervous because she asks him, “Do you feel alright?” In the last verse, Clapton admits that he got a headache from going on the date.

If you are creeping on a girl, then you might sing her “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. Sting whispers into his prey’s ear, “Every step you take, I’ll be watching you.” According to RollingStone.com, this song was The Police’s biggest hit. The lyrics embody the type of love that psychologists known as ‘mania’. Mania is a possessive, passionate, jealous and controlling love. If that is your kind of lovin’, then “Every Breath You Take” by The Police is your song.

This brings us to “Your Song” by Elton John, a humble piano melody. If you are an ‘external processor’, then you can relate to Elton, who processes his love by talking the listener through metaphors and the reasons for his song. But in the end, he says, “Anyway, the thing is, what I really mean, yours are the sweetest eyes I’ve ever seen.” If you have to talk yourself through your feelings with your valentine, then this is your song.

If those fail, then there’s the classic “My Girl” by The Temptations. With its melt-your-heart vocals and staccato snaps, this song will put your valentine on cloud nine. If you want a girl to know that she has you, then play her the Temptations. But don’t be too tempting in your mood planning.

Scattering Chickens

i walk out the door
across the dew-quilted yard
towards the shed
where the chickens are.

i unlatch the door
and it creaks
open on rusty hinges.

through the crack,
the morning lights fade
into the shed.

it warms the moist straw
thatching the ground.

i see a yellow bantam
as he picks
around the shed.

i dip a plastic
cup into a bag of feed.
the grain and grit
pour from the cup
into the feeder.

hearing the flowing grain,
chickens awake.
their staccato saunter
goes before their pick
at the feed.

i walk across the moist green lawn,
and go back
to bed.

slapping my shoulder, a hand
drags me to my feet
only to see the chickens
running free.
I forgot to latch door!

the green yard
is speckled
with yellow chickens
who pick
around
for food.

i sprint down the stairs,
and out the door, frantic!
i chase the chickens all around,
and corral them near the shed.

they kick
and fight
and banter back.
flapping wings and flared
feathers give me quite
a scare.

i shoo and shoo
them in the door
and latch it.

i have since moved
from the farm
and have no chickens now
but they still get out sometimes.

i can feed them,
give them water,
gather eggs,
but if i forget
to lock
the door,
if i make
one mistake
these days,
my life scatters across the lawn.

this routine, this staccato saunter,
is speckled
with mistake.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This poem is supposed to compare the experience at the shed with my life today. Does that work? Someone commented that it is perhaps too obvious? any better ideas about transition?
are the images of the chicken farm vivid enough, or too much so? if you read it out loud do you hear the percussion of the "k" and "d" sounds? other comments?

the last two posts were off shoots of the same idea...let me know which one you think works better...
they came from me thinking about my character development as a form of carving.
i still have a lot of character development to undergo, but i am far better than i once was.

dj spank

Carved into adoption

he has been working on me for a while.
i was once a block of wood, but he has been
whittling away at my anger,
sanding my temper smooth,
carving in grooves of honesty,
and blowing off the dust of impatience.
soon he will paint my robes white
and give me a crown.
this block of wood,
has become a chosen son:
adopted to be formed and shaped.

this is a persona poem. the speaker is a now figure of a man, who was once just a block of wood. does the poem give this sense of personal development? do you pick up any religious implication? i want the reader to feel as though the figure was once a rough block of wood? do you feel this way? are there any images that don't work?

the wood block and the wood carver

a block of wood
lies stagnant on the table.
the woodcarver takes it in his worn hand.
he turns it over,
again and again.
he abrades it with a brawny finger.
splinters want to enter his calloused flesh,
but they dare not as
he sands away insolence. the woodcarver
whittles grooves of honesty.
shavings of jealousy fall to the dusty floor.
he holds the figure up to the light
and blows off the dust of impatience.
he rounds the head of the figure with a crown.
the block of wood,
now a king with robe and scepter,
painted white and red
stands of the shelf.

any changes? what images work, which ones don't? howabout the end? any suggestions? does the 'crusted finger' image make him seem experienced or just gross? any better word suggestions?

Defying Zephyr

zephyr capriciously chose to gust through northwest Iowa
without a thought, he thoroughly threw snow
over the perilous prairie.
his blustery caprice drafted
a sketch of snow onto the stagnant fields

his gust became a blizzard
and we were driving in between the lines.
between shrouded yellow solid
and frosted white strips of paint
through his vast white blunder

his bluster cried for our submission.
but our defiance stronger than his will:
tires inched along,
plowing white padded cement,
with gentle touch of slow
and speed,
we trounced his angry squall
---------------------------
this poem came from my drive from lincoln, ne to NWC this afternoon. there was quite a wind and snow storm. i had to drive with little visibility. but it was an adventure. i wrote a response to Zephyr, the greek god of the west wind, who attacked us. i want it to be a humble, yet defiant piece. from reading it, do you get an image of an incredibly blusterous blizzard and a very arbitrary wind system? from your reading what is the tone of the poem? what images work for you? does the repeated 'th' sound in the first stanza sound like wind?

please help me by answering any of these questions or by just giving me feedback...

Gran Torino (take 2---possible NWC Beacon edition)

An ex-auto worker, Walt Kowalski, whose wife has recently died, lives in a rotting neighborhood in Detroit. He is the last white person in the neighborhood, now teeming with Hmong people. His sons express their concerns with his living in the old neighborhood. Walt’s neighbors are a Hmong family with a cute daughter, Sue, and a timid son, Tao. Tao’s gangbanger cousins try to get him to join their gang, but when he fails the initiation of stealing Walt’s Gran Torino, things get ugly. They try to force him into the gang, but Walt growls at the gangbangers to ‘get off his lawn’ as they look down the barrel of his Korean War carbine. Tao culturally has to make amends with Walt, so he takes the boy under his blue-collar wings and disciples him on how to ‘be a man’: consisting of racial slurs and cuss word grammar, as well as respect for property and elders. The gangbangers strike back, the situation quickly escalates out of Walt’s control and confrontation is necessary. Any more summary would give too much of the story away, you’ll just have to see it for yourself.
As a brusque old man, Walt is a microcosm of a dying racist American generation. In the film, young Hmongs, Hispanics, and Blacks create the palate of the neighborhood shrouded in violence. But like Walt, racism still blots the landscape here and there. Because the neighborhood is so diverse, Walt has to learn to coexist or to live with his neighbors. Since multiculturalism and community are hallmarks of Northwestern College, we can draw many lessons from Walt. After the recent elections, the student body was indignantly rebuked in chapel by Kevin McMahan because one of the international students was appallingly taunted for the color of their skin. This is no way to live in community. In Gran Torino, Walt has to learn to accept the fact that his neighbors were different. They come from foreign culture, but they still are able to teach him something about himself. He also has to learn to take initiative to gain understanding. Seeing Walt talk with ‘Yum-Yum’ and Su, and eat platefuls of Hmong food are some of the more touching moments of reconciliation in the film. Sacrifice is vitally important to community. Walt’s iconic sacrifice solidifies his friends’ safety and happiness. Acceptance, initiative and sacrifice are fundamentals for community life.
Gran Torino is a story that should keep hopes of reconciliation afloat. Viewers will see the light on their journey through this tunnel of American racial history, and its redemptive realization is very satisfying. Even with all the guns, swear words, and racial slurs, it is a film that suggests that violence only escalates, but sacrifice brings true reconciliation.

Gran Torino

Walt Kowalski, an ex-auto worker, whose wife has recently died, lives in a rotting neighborhood in Detroit. He is the last white person in the neighborhood, now teeming with Hmong people. His sons express their concerns with his living in the old neighborhood. Walt’s neighbors are a Hmong family with a cute daughter, Sue, and a timid son, Tao. Tao’s gangbanger cousins try to get him to join their gang, but when he fails the initiation of stealing Walt’s Gran Torino, things get ugly. They try to force him into the gang, but Walt growls at the gangbangers to ‘get off his lawn’ as they look down the barrel of his Korean War carbine. Tao culturally has to make amends with Walt, so he takes the boy under his blue-collar wings and disciples him on how to ‘be a man’, consisting of racial slurs and cuss word grammar, as well as respect for property and elders. The gangbangers strike back, the situation quickly escalates out of Walt’s control and confrontation is necessary. Any more summary would give too much of the story away, you’ll just have to see it for yourself.

The film, like Walt, carries marks of religion, race, age, war, family and economics. Like the decadent neighborhood where he lives, Walt too has been cast aside by his society, most notably his sons. They both drive Japanese cars, which Walt takes as an insult on his character. Constant inquires by a Catholic Father of Walt begin to pull back the layers of scar tissue that sheathe the whole Cold War generation. Scars of war and family loss and trouble seep through these conversations. There is also a Hmong religious man who makes Walt feel ‘more at home than with his family.’ The portrayal of religion is not one of annoyance, but of a therapeutic way to understand self. At the end of the film, Walt’s kids come to a greater understanding of him through religion, and Walt understands true religion. As a study on race in America, the film is not reluctant or dark yet hopeful for the future of reconciliation. But we have to trudge through a lot of muddy, grotesque racism to get to that point.

The polished Gran Torino and the brusque Walt are the decaying Old America. The shiny antique car is a symbol of the respected generation of America who fought in the ‘Cold’ War. Walt is an archetypal growling old man who learned to survive in battle and now alone. The car signals a transition in the relationship between the Tao and Walt, and it also hints at a passing down of one generation’s traditions to the next. As a microcosm of the elderly American generation, Walt’s frustrations culminate with an argument with his son and her wife. The son wants to relocate Walt to an ‘independent retirement community.’ With a close up shot of Walt’s face in a crescendo of growling (perhaps a deeper growl from American elderly) he kicks his son out of his house.

Gran Torino is a microcosmic reading of an abrasive old man named Walt, who just needs something fresh and foreign to show him the truth.

Update

the posts on here now were not all invented in the last couple of hours...
a couple are from thanksgiving
and the rest are from earlier in the semester
more to come.

dj spank

Christian Horror Novels

For Thanksgiving this last weekend, my family went to Oklahoma City to visit some friends. They live in a horribly normal suburban home, and I was truly impressed with how nice it was. They had all kinds of yuppie décor and other things to fill a big house with such as a pool/ping-pong table and a TV the size of a whole wall. But what really surprised me was their bookshelf. I walked up to it and saw nothing but ‘Christian’ fiction. It was all Peretti, Dekker, and LeHay and Jenkins. I would consider all of these to be one big genre: dark, horror, eschatological, futuristic fiction. Seeing all these books made me wonder, “What is the appeal of ‘Christian’ dark fiction? Do Christians really like being scared? If so why, is it because we don’t fear God himself enough? That seemed like a logical conclusion according the reading that I was doing at the time: Shane Claiborne. According to him, and other well respected Christians from past centuries and decades, these people didn’t fear God, and their lifestyle showed it. Maybe our friends were filling their fear void with dark Christian fiction…who knows?

But I still wondered what the appeal of these books was. Jenkins and LeHay have invaded Christianity with their fictional interpretation of eschatological Bible passages. Having talked with many friends over the years about these books, I have begun to pick up on some of their appeal. After people read them, they begin to compare their world to world of the books. “Who is Nikolai in our world?” people would ask themselves. This kind of paranoia crept upon us at the right time: Y2K. I would make the argument that these writers contributed to the ‘fear and consume’ culture surrounding the terror of the new millennium, (thank you Michael Moore) but that is an argument for another time. This attitude of searching for the antichrist has stuck with Christians in the US, as clearly illustrated during this last election (or even the last decade i.e. Osama and Saddam). Perhaps the Left Behind series gathers its appeal from the fact that it writes about something we all fear: the future. Christians especially fear the future because there really is no clear interpretation of the eschatological passages of Revelation, Daniel, or even Ezekiel. Since we fear these things so ardently, when someone offers an interpretation set in our world and culture we latch onto it. All of the books except for the last one have dark covers, but the last one is white. These books offer us more than fear, they also offer us hope for a beautiful tomorrow. Perhaps that is where their appeal is.

This still does not account for Peretti or Dekker. Why do Christian writers try to make other Christians scared? Peretti has pumped out many books, including a series for kids, and they all inspire awe or fear in us. Dekker writes ‘Christian’ horror novels, which my little brother reads by the dozen. What is up with people wanting to be scared? Is there a vacuum of fear in our hearts? Perhaps as believers we are simply bored. Claiborne makes this argument in his book The Irresistible Revolution. He argues that teenagers and the younger generation of believers are disenchanted with the church because the church doesn’t challenge them. His contention lies within a basic disagreement with modern-day evangelicals: what it means to live the gospel. Claiborne’s idea of living the gospel consists of total lifestyle reorganization and redirection toward Christ, whereas most modern evangelicals simply change a few patterns of behavior while still living their boring 9 to 5, bureaucratically controlled lives. This idea of total lifestyle reorganization has been quite the experience for Claiborne: he has traveled the world, Iraq, India, he has been arrested on many occasions, he has moved to the ghetto to live, he has lived on the edge (with no real income) for over ten years. This ‘style’ of Christianity is exciting and dangerous, like the books of Dekker and Peretti. Since most evangelicals don’t want to get out of their suburban environment and live on the edge like Claiborne, they insulate themselves by reading dark Christian novels. They get their religious excitement through sweeping worship services, short-term mission trips, and horror novels. All these things make modern evangelicals feel like they are doing something with their lives, when in reality they are not.

Thoughts on the Cost

As our Honda mini-van weaves around the intricate patchwork of winding suburban streets and avenues, my eyes wander all around the neighborhood. Each house is an exact replica of the one next to it. It’s almost as if somebody hit copy and paste a thousand times. All the fake brick sidewalks and stucco walls and pseudo-barn doors make for quite the ‘parade of homes.’ The streets are perfectly clean and the yards perfectly cut. There are no leaves on the ground, because there are no trees. This is the kind of neighborhood that I dread. We pull up in the drive way of our friends’ home, and I realize that even they have bought in. As I walk into their outrageously enormous ‘home’, I see a TV screen that covers a whole wall, a ping-pong table room, and further in lies the ‘living space’ with rounded drywall corners and yuppie home décor. Untouched candles and recessed lighting are just a few of my frustrations. Not to mention the massive faux rustic clock sitting on top of the mantel above the gas fireplace. Tile counters, floors and even walls are adorned with even more useless trinkets and gadgets, which contrast with the maroon accent wall in the kitchen. This intricate piece of suburban normality becomes an itch in my brain, pleading to be scratched, in the form of the very page you are reading. I begin to wonder things that my mom would strangle me for saying. Like, “This neighborhood is the most horribly normal place I have ever been!” “Is there any authenticity here, or is it just the superficial paranoia of a privileged white society too scared to get out and into the ghetto and help their ‘brothas’ in Christ out?”
“This is the suburbs, where it is all white and safe and happy!” “I would be grateful if a volcano somehow came out of the ground and swallowed this whole materialistic neighborhood!”
After travelling in the car for seven hours with your six person family, you have to find things to do to entertain yourself, such as reading over 200 pages of Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution. After hearing him speak of the true cost of discipleship, about the biblical ideals for faith and community, and about Christ’s call to feed the poor and visit the lonely, I find this suburban ‘Christian’ home to be in stark contrast with the Biblical ideals put forth by this ordinary Christian radical. But then I realize something: the reason that Shane and others like him, such as Bonheoffer and Francis of Assisi, are so radical is because of people like these suburbanites! Shane calls us to give up the ‘Christian’ notion that faith only serves to sanctify the individual and then live comfortably, and to embrace the idea that the church is more than just multi-million dollar buildings on hills above comfortable suburban communities. In Bonheoffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, he discusses and verifies the ideas of ‘radicals’ like Claiborne. Bonheoffer’s idea for the believer is completely and infinitely pervading self-renouncing faith, not just a change to our moral conduct, and to take an oath of self-alignment with the life and person of Jesus Christ. Self-renouncing faith? What a concept…What does it mean to totally renounce yourself for Christ? This is something that I am just beginning to explore. But I cannot blame the suburbanites for their comfort. That would be utter hypocrisy. While my eyes may have been surveying the scene set earlier, my mind is set on self examination. What have I bought into? How can I accuse people of not grasping self-renouncing faith whole-heartedly when I myself cannot even do so? I sit comfortably in the warm mini van with my Adidas shorts and my Eddie Bauer Shirt and my Nike shoes. Thinking back to the massive amount of unused clothing just sitting around my dorm room, I realize how ridiculous it is just to let it all sit in my drawer while there is definitely somebody somewhere naked who would love to wear some of it. Sure, it’s nice to have some variety in our wardrobe, but I was so blind to my own actions. I have complete excess! There are shirts and shorts and all kinds of other things sitting in my drawer that I will never ever wear. What do I do now? What would Jesus do?
Driving through the neighborhood was a deeply disturbing experience for me. In my devotions lately I have been reading through Philippians. One day I got to Philippians 1:27 and it reads somewhat like this, “Only let your conduct be worthy of the gospel of Christ…” I sat back, thought for a second, and then asked myself this question: What is the Gospel of Christ?
…
…
After pondering this for a few minutes, I came up with multiple AWANA verses that explained faith and grace and whatnot…But what I really wanted to know was this: What does it mean to conduct ourselves according to the Gospel of Christ?
What the heck does that mean?!?!?
Have I ever actually seen someone do that? I began to frantically search the scriptures, only to find that the gospels told me everything that I had never heard of in my suburban evangelical community: peacemaking, social justice, loving my neighbor, Christ’s heart for the poor, and so on and so forth…
What does it look like to ‘conduct ourselves according to the gospel of Christ?’
I am beginning to see what others have discovered in their search for the answer to this simple question. They have discovered that their self-renouncing faith screams at them to renounce not just their sin patterns, but their lifestyles! Lifestyle means place, culture (attitudes), possessions, social groups, and religious and political interactions and practices. They see that aligning their lifestyles with Christ means more than just living comfortably and not sinning. It means complete devotion to Jesus Christ, no matter what the cost.
What does this look like?
I am still trying to figure that one out.
As I began to make some of these realizations, I felt this easing sense of liberation. The gospel became alive to me, and that was very liberating. As it should be according to the passage of scripture that says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Even though life may not always be easy when we are wear the yoke of Christ, we can be at ease knowing that He is sovereign and that we are trying to follow His will according to the gospel.

I am just trying to find the Way.

Mission Trip to Bluefields, Nicaragua

What we see in Bluefields:

A polluted bay,
Houses made from rusting metal sheets,
Roads of red mud,
Miles of wrappers and tires that stretch down every ditch,
A deluge of garbage slumped against a hill,

Taxis that tear down the ancient roads;
The passengers with nowhere to go.

What we hear in Bluefields:

A soccer ball bouncing as we boot it with the kids,

The sharp sound of the scissors slicing paper

to create some clever crafts, such as a colorful mask,

a tongue-tied toddler,

Too timid to join and play,

Adrian strumming the strings of his guitar, and

the kids’ clapping crisply echoing

while they sing a Spanish worship song,

“! Dame la mano, querido hermano! ¡Dame la mano y mi hermano serás!”

The Art of Fishing...

The tanned skin on his hand
Wrinkles as he bends it back at the wrist.
He glances at the top of the pearly fishing pole,
Raised high above the surface.
His wrist, like a catapult,
Releases the pressure and
Grandpa swings the pole over the water, cutting the air.
Fishing line whirs from the reel.
The small plastic worm plops into the water.
Lowering the rod and
Tipping his hat up, then down,
My Grandpa reaches one index finger
Into a frayed belt loop
And adjusts his trousers.
His hands have clenched
Too many wrenches
And his cracking fingers
Have pricked themselves many times
With the very hook they rig,
While sitting on the back bench
Of the faded green rowboat.
He settles into the quiescence of the pond
Hearing only the grunting bullfrog,
Seeing only the twilight
Hover on the water
With the dragonflies.

Blade Runner Review without summary

“Time…to die,” says Roy Batty, with a nail in one hand, he bows his head while sitting on the rain soaked rooftop of some old skyscraper in the middle of Los Angeles as his soul leaves his body in the form of dove flying up above the cityscape. Gaff asks Deckard if it is done, and Deckard declares, “Finished.” This religiously metaphoric end to the sci-fi thriller, Blade Runner, conveys the sense that the ‘Replicants’ could perhaps save man from his consumer depravity. But religion is only one of the themes, or should I say streams of consciousness, that mark this film.

A dark, swirling cesspool of human filth is all that’s left of Los Angeles by 2019. The decadence of Los Angeles is one of many elements in Blade Runner that are reminiscent of the noir genre. The whole film is a futuristic celebration of old film noirs. We run into this tribute in the first scene of the film. The camera is positioned above a slowly moving ceiling fan in a room where a man, wearing an old brown suit coat, sitting at a desk, is smoking. This scene is very familiar to anyone who has studied film noir at all. Another man enters the room, and the first man interrogates him, almost like a private eye questioning a suspect or witness. Such a tense interaction between two men with props such as the ceiling fan, desk, cigarettes and the man’s suit sets our mentality to film noir. We aren’t sure who is ‘good’ (human) and who is ‘bad’ (replicant) throughout the film due to ambiguous clues, such as Rachel asking, “Have you ever taken that test yourself?” There is a lot of dark and shadowy lighting throughout the film as well, such as in the room the first time Deckard kisses Rachel. Smoking and liquor were both common in film noirs and are prevalent in Blade Runner as well. This use of ‘drugs’ begs the question, “What pain are these people suppressing?”

“More human than human, that is our motto,” says Dr. Tyrell. This motto personifies another element of the film: the question of what it means to be human. The interrogation scenes in the film demonstrate that to be human there has to be some sort of emotional response toward animals. Since Replicants are the ones being tested and showing empathy for the animals, this brings up the question of how human are the real humans? Throughout the film Gaff makes a few origami animals, this may suggest he is a Replicant. At the end of the film, Deckard finds one of his origami unicorns; this furthers the ambiguity about his status as replicant or human. This question of humanity as empathy toward nature originates in the film’s portrayal that corporations have depleted the earth of any organic beauty, and that humans have become inorganic, paranoid beings. With constant police surveillance and pervasive neon advertisement as the only light in the darkness, we are led to believe that man has become wholly depraved, and is in need of a savior. Roy becomes this ‘savior’ figure in the end of the film. He says, “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.” Roy has been in fear of death for his short life, but when he releases that fear; he becomes human and his spirit is free to escape above the dark corporate void of Los Angeles. After giving this speech, Deckard and Rachel are released from their slavery in the paranoid society, and they run away, like the unicorn spliced into the piano scene running through the forest, as they become truly human.

Portrayal of corporate destruction of organic life and humanity is a very counter culture theme today, considering the great amount of corporations and their dehumanizing practices. What would Roy ask us today? Do you live in fear? Are you free? Are you human?