The Internet is a boss place to find lesson plans.  While looking for ideas to sharpen my students’ critical reading skills recently, I came across a set of plans entitled, “Using Excerpts about Slavery.”  The plans employ excerpts from four different works: a history textbook serving Virginia students in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, a slave narrative, an Englishman’s travelogue, and a Frederick Douglass speech given in 1850.  According to the brief “Notes for the Teacher” that preface the material, the teacher should require students to consider and discuss the excerpts in small groups on successive class days, focusing on the excerpt’s credibility and engaging with a set of “Questions to Consider” that follow each excerpt.  It looked promising.

The notes begin with the lesson’s goal: “Students need to be cognizant that any historical account is one person’s truth. An author’s point of view is colored by his or her own experiences and belief system. Lack of direct experience can result in an author making assumptions that are not borne out. As an example, who but a slave could effectively understand the perspective of a slave or what the life of a slave was like?”

In order to judge the lesson’s utility for my own classroom, I read the first excerpt [ellipses original] and answered its questions:

Excerpt from Virginia: History, Government, Geography 
Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1964[1] 
“How Negroes Lived under Slavery,” pp. 368-376

A feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in a majority of Virginia homes. . . The house servants became almost as much a part of the planter’s family circle as its white members. . . The Negroes were always present at family weddings. They were allowed to look on at dances and other entertainments . . . A strong tie existed between slave and master because each was dependent on the other. . . The slave system demanded that the master care for the slave in childhood, in sickness, and in old age. The regard that master and slaves had for each other made plantation life happy and prosperous.

Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked. . . But they were not worried by the furious arguments going on between Northerners and Southerners over what should be done with them. In fact, they paid little attention to these arguments.

1Textbook used in Virginia schools as late as 1972.

The “Questions to Consider” and my answers:

1.  How long after the Civil War was this written?

Not quite a century.

2.  Who do you think the authors were?  Could they have been former slaves?  Why or why not?

I think all three of the textbook’s authors were Virginians.  I don’t have any direct knowledge about two of them, but the third one was my aunt.

My aunt was not a former slave.  I presume from my answer to the first question that the other two authors were not former slaves, either.  Like a good judge, then, I could decide this question without reaching the merits of the authors’ race.  But I surmise that all of the authors, and not just my aunt, were white.  None of the former slaves in this country were white.

3.  How do you think they came up with their account of slavery?

My aunt would entertain us from a black-leather wing chair pierced with brass tacks in a small library lined on all four sides from floor to ceiling with books, mostly leather bound, standing muffled on shelves caged by glass panes.  The house was always clean and slightly musty, like my college’s rare books room I would discover years later, and it had no air conditioning, serviced as it was continually from before the War with a fairly dependable breeze from the tidal Rappahannock River, which was framed by the library’s only window.

My eldest niece would visit us at about the same time of life I first remember visiting my cousins on the Rappahannock, and when she was dishing out nicknames at a family dinner my somewhat loquacious father became “Grandfather Sit-in-Chair.”  Similarly, I can’t remember my aunt anywhere else but sitting erect at her chair’s edge – the back of her chair serving more as a reflection and an extension of herself than as a support – with her legs crossed and her index and middle fingers slowly incising a long cigarette that accentuated her small, slim build.  She’d waive the cigarette back in conversation, and sometimes throw her head back in laughter, but her posture always held firm and her elbow always seemed to hold the chair’s arm under subjection. Her smoke smelled like elegance and hazed the fading and cracked binding on the red and tan and black books behind her.

My father was a raconteur, but my aunt was more of a conversationalist.  She would turn her head from my parents to my siblings and me and ask us questions with a frankness that serves adults better than the sugary tone many of them employ with children.  Our answers would elicit a comment from her that would get the adults laughing, but we never felt ashamed or excluded.  We were happy to sit on the antique, Oriental carpet and play with the wooden toys she and my uncle favored for our cousins.  If my generation had been raised on my aunt instead of on Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin, it would have had a better inkling of what an interviewer and conversationalist could be.

The old house sits on a large tract of land down several country roads from my uncle’s law practice at the county seat.  After paying our respects to the adults for a suitable length of time, my two siblings and I would reacquaint ourselves with the antique-filled first floor, and then, with our cousins, we’d head outside.  At some point we’d always see Floe and Sammy.  Floe worked in the house and Sammy worked outside in the fields, helping with the garden and keeping things in repair.  I don’t remember ever seeing Floe and Sammy together, but my siblings and I liked both of them immensely.

One day, when my brother and I were both teenagers, we became conscious that our conversations with Floe always started and ended with the same subject: our growth.  My mother would take us through the narrow kitchen blocked entirely by Floe, who was either ironing or, more often, baking.  “Ummm-mmm!  My how you grown, child!  My how you grown!” Floe would say to us, wagging her face at us with a hand on her hip but sometimes just glancing at us out of the corner of her eye as she prodded the family’s dinner around on a skillet.

Sammy was also genial – a slim, middle-aged man whose gait pointed up his feet and knees and elbows – but our conversations with him were equally limited.  I remember only his responses to my aunt’s directives, remarks like, “Yessum, I’ll have that done by supper,” or “Yessum, over against the shed.”  My youngest cousin, a bit younger than my brother and I, would always address Sammy as “Sammy-boy,” picking the habit up, I guess, from my uncle, and it didn’t seem to bother Sammy, or my uncle, one bit.  I grew up addressing all adults by their title and surnames, but I never learned Sammy’s or Floe’s last names.  I don’t think I addressed them as anything.

Besides his responses to my aunt, I remember only Sammy’s laughter.  He’d laugh at most anything anyone said, laughing even when most people would have responded with words.  His good-natured laughter seemed as deep as an empty well.

When my brother and I were in our late teens, we speculated that the pay must have been pretty good for Floe and Sammy to act the way they did, and we suspected that they shed their roles with my cousins’ family when they were off duty.  But we didn’t know for sure.  We never really talked to them.  They didn’t seem to pay much attention to anything that animated us: news or politics or sports, for instance.  Looking back on it, I would have been surprised, I think, to have stumbled on Floe with her feet up, reading the newspaper at my aunt’s place, even though she lived there for a while, or to have seen Sammy in front of my relatives’ black-and-white TV.  In fact, I would have been shocked to have caught him in the house at all, now that I think of it.

To answer the question, I’m not exactly sure how my aunt came up with her account of slavery, but I know that she was a real historian and that she was certain of her facts.

4.  Do you believe the account is an accurate portrayal of slavery? Why or why not?

I first read this account in history class as a seventh-grader in the Newport News public school system.  It’s funny reading it now, word for word, because none of the wording surprises me but only bolsters my recollection of what I was taught.  I remember the general points from my textbook: the slaves were happy, happy to work hard, appreciative of their masters for taking the risk and the responsibility out of life – appreciative in a way children never are – and disdainful of the far-away, brooding political storm that centered on them in the abstract.

I don’t think I believed it or disbelieved it.  I remember wondering about it.  I remember trying to put myself in the slaves’ shoes for a little while in our all-white classroom at Riverside Elementary, not a half mile from the James River near its mouth.  My aunt’s words seem to paint a picture in my head of how the slaves could have enjoyed a simple life of labor under the beneficent hands of their masters.  But (I remember thinking) who would want to always do what someone else said? 

Maybe they were dumb, I remember reasoning.  Too dumb to survive on their own or too dumb not to know it was not much of a life.  We had two African-Americans among our four classrooms of seventh graders when I was there, a girl and a boy.  I wasn’t friends with either of them, but both were popular and seemed smart enough.  They seemed to act like white children, mostly, except for certain phrases they would use as well as a manner of speech that ran counter, in some critical respects, to what we were learning in English class.  I remember thinking how long it had been since the Civil War and wondering how much these two might have been like the slaves.

I thought about Martin Luther King, who was assassinated a year before my seventh grade, the Watts riots I saw on the news, and even the vandalism King’s assassination had occasioned in my hometown’s faraway downtown.  I thought two ways, and I had two pictures in my head – one of happy slaves and one of angry slaves.  I don’t remember either picture winning out.

I do recall reading my aunt’s textbook and concluding that slavery would not be a life that I would choose for myself.  But if the Negroes really liked it, I thought, more power to them.

5. The excerpt is from a book that was once used to teach children in Virginia about slavery. Why would a textbook want students of Virginia to believe slavery was a positive experience for slaves?

You may or may not learn your roots in history class, but you learn your place.

Book reviews are only about books.  I want to write reading reviews.  Could Twitter help?

I shoot long shots because I want to photograph a river one day.  Not the mouth without the source or the source alone but the whole meander and rush and sail.  I can’t crop worth a crap.

If Thomas Wolfe had been a photographer, he’d shoot like me.  He couldn’t bear to edit, you know.  He’d have forced his editor, Max Perkins, to learn Photoshop. 

People Twitter all kinds of stuff that unfolds – baseball games, political conventions, boat trips – and then, even when the event lies unfolded, people still go back and read the unfolding, if it were good enough – the unfolding, that is, not the event unfolded – though maybe seeing all of those Tweets in reverse chronological order – and why does what makes a river not enter it by its mouth?  Does a river just perpetually throw up? – makes the unfolded less than the unfolding, makes Twitter web pages not as good as getting Tweets piecemeal on Twitter clients.  (Twitter’s all about immediacy, right?)

But books unfold, or at least their plots do.  Books proper bristle open and thunk shut and sleep shut, really, but they don’t unfold like maps or trips or meetings or news stories or even newspapers.  Besides, how can I Twitter a book if I can read it anytime and anywhere?  Is a book an event if I have that much control?  Sitting on my porch and watching the morning unfold is more of an event than reading a book, perhaps.  (Though one may quite effectively Twitter a book, too.)

Can I Twitter the act of reading a book?  Even with all of the control we have over our reading, the experience of reading can sometimes feel more "eventful" than almost anything.  Here is some Twittering from my reading of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, a book you should read because I’m your friend.  (If you must have a book review (and I do love book reviews, really), The New Yorker earlier this month published a great article on the program era that amounts to a review of McGurl’s book.)

(I’m not really going to do this on Twitter.  I don’t want the character limit.  I want just the immediacy.  Thomas Wolfe, remember?)

Page 147. O’Connor to her friend who pointed out how similar O’Connor and her character Hulga were to each other: “Now I understand that something of oneself gets through and often something that one is not conscious of.  Also to have sympathy for any character, you have to put a good deal of yourself in him.  But to say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration.  A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen. . . . Those elements of the personality that don’t bear on the subject at hand are excluded.  Stories don’t lie when left to themselves.  Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you.  Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.”  “Stories don’t lie”: great sentence, but what does it mean?  (I lied.  I was going to type this Tweet for another reason, but then I got stuck on that sentence while I was typing it and forgot my initial reaction.  No real time – sorry.)

Page 147. “As a minor term in a dialectical binary, ‘self-expression’ lies in wait, ready to reassert itself not as a contributory feature of the literary work but as the end-point of it all.  It was already doing so in the Beat movement in the 1950s and would soon do so on an even larger scale in the progressive educational revival of the 1960s, which saw the emergence of the now ubiquitous pedagogical imperative to ‘find your voice.’”  Sin lieth at the door!

Page 146. O’Connor would agree with Cassill: “’The writer of an original story begins to shape his material by accepting an emotional commitment to it – very much as if he himself were the first character to appear in the story to be.’  This ‘scaffolding’ is then ‘totally replaced by structural elements of the story itself before the story is done.’”  Wolfe would disagree.

Page 146. “. . . however heavy the scare quotes we might wish to put around the relevant terms.”  So there’s a name for that: “scare quotes.”  “’Scare quotes.’”

Page 145.  This still isn’t real time.

Page 144. He doesn’t pretend to be above New Criticism or even over it yet.  I guess we’re all too freshly widowed to have healthy marriages.

Page 137. “As [O’Connor] put it in a panel discussion held at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia . . .”  What research!  Probably made his grad students do it all.

Page 137. “. . . is left to crumb the table . . .”  I love that verb.  When did crumb become a verb?  Too lazy to consult OED.

Page 137.  What was on page 136 that made me think of that?  Who cares.  Stay immediate.

Page 136.  I can’t talk about literature in social settings.  Names and books don’t come to mind.  Feelings, or the memory of feelings, do.  It’s like writing a poem at a party (though I admit I’ve never tried it).  That professor I had, the first day of class: “I am your enemy” to those of us who wanted a smattering of literature for the cocktail circuit.  What was his name?  Big beard.  He knew nothing about kids.  Just loved to hear himself talk.  Probably great at parties.  But, see, I can’t even come up with names, even of acquaintances I’ve known for years.  No wonder I hate parties.

Page 134-35.  What a great paragraph on O’Connor!  . . . . “’For the reading of literature ever to become a habit and a pleasure,’ she wrote, ‘it must first be a discipline.’  And ‘if the student finds that his is not to his taste?  Well, that is regrettable.  Most regrettable.  His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.’  For O’Connor, a devout Catholic who made something of a show of her obedience to the institutional authority of the Church, not only was religion understood as a kind of discipline, a willed acceptance of human ‘limitation’ before an Almighty God; but so was discipline itself a kind of religion, an article of faith arguably as basic to her thinking and writing as her specifically theological commitments.  Discipline meant obedience to rules, and rules were established and maintained by institutions; and to submit to the authority of these institutions, while painful, was also a source of great potential pleasure, aesthetic and otherwise.  Not that O’Connor’s sense of institutions was either monolithic or simplistic.  Seen in the light of her devotion to the church, the authority of worldly liberal institutions like universities was certainly questionable, and subject o her usually humorous derision.  And yet the habit of obedience to the one was obviously transportable, under the right conditions, to the other, where what Sarah Gordon has called her ‘obedient imagination’ could be cultivated as a specifically literary resource.”  She died at 39?  People lived full lives back then. (Also not real time: I’d love to say that to my charges: “Your taste should not be consulted.  It is being formed.”  Wouldn’t the principal love the phone calls!)

Page 133.  Brooks and Warren's Understanding Fiction “confirms how much the discipline of creative writing as we know it owes to the large-scale intrusion of practitioner-critics like Warren himself into the domain of literary scholars, beginning in the lat 1930s.  The New Criticism put the point of view of the artist at the very center of postwar literary studies . . .”  Unstinted praise for Warren!  Francine Prose may be hard on New Criticism, but she owes her Reading Like a Writer to them.

Page 122. My butt hurts.

Page 99.  DeVoto in 1936 on Wolfe’s work: “long, whirling discharges of words, unabsorbed in the novel, unrelated to the proper business of fiction, badly if not altogether unacceptably written, raw gobs of emotion, aimless and quite meaningless jabber, claptrap, belches, grunts.”  And the reviews have gone downhill from there.  I’ll have to remember that, though: “words unabsorbed in the novel.”

Page 99.  Wolfe defends himself to Fitzgerald by pointing to Don Quxiote and Tristram Shandy.  To hell with “the aesthetic benefits of subtraction,” he says.  Meantime, Henry James’s “show don’t tell” evolves from 1930s forward into “a more general understanding of good fiction as founded on discipline, restraint, and the impersonal exercise of hard-won technique.”  Now you can’t say “show don’t tell.”  But I do.  To ninth graders, granted.

Pages 97-98.  So the guy who coined “writer’s workshop” was the real-life version of Professor Hatcher inOf Time and the River.  Who knew?

If I wrote you a book review or report, it would only foreshorten the book, creating waterfalls in the navigable, tidal river.  Besides, even if I wrote the best book review, it would only stand on its own, pour itself into only its own river, so – best case – I’m no longer reading with you when you read it.  I want you to read with me.  We’d feed off of each other’s reactions, but even that’s not enough, ultimately.  You have to read the book with my reactions and associations.  So you have to read it with me, maybe as me, or maybe in heaven one day.

Religion is affection, Jonathan Edwards wrote.  So is writing, I think.  All writing is travel writing.  Henri Nouwen (Bread for the Journey) writes about the traveler’s affection:

Traveling – seeing new sights, hearing new music, and meeting new people – is exciting and exhilarating.  But when we have no home to return to where someone will ask us, “How was your trip?” we might be less eager to go.  Traveling is joyful when we travel with the eyes and ears of those who love us, who want to see our slides and hear our stories.

This is what life is about.  It is being sent on a trip by a loving God, who is waiting at home for our return and is eager to watch the slides we took and hear about the friends we made.  When we travel with the eyes and ears of the God who sent us, we will see wonderful sights, hear wonderful sounds, meet wonderful people . . . and be happy to return home.

The only writing genre is the postcard.  There’s something both kind and callous about sending one.  All writing may rise and foreshorten to “Having a great time; wish you were here.” I want you here and not just here but behind my eyes to see what I think and know and feel, we have to share the eyes so at least tell me what you see, the binoculars’ timer sounds inexorable as a stream there’s only thirteen seconds left on my last quarter I dropped into the binoculars before we go dark

Writing and reading sometimes seem as necessary and as insufficient – and as loving and lonely – as life.

(The photos are from our recent hike on Mount Weather.)

This morning, the morning after Virginians finished learning who would compete in this fall’s gubernatorial general election, the Washington Post declared that the election “is expected to drawintense national attention.”  Can the Democratic Party keep its victory streak in statewide office alive in this center-right state? the article asks.

But Virginia’s gubernatorial election always draws national attention, just as New Jersey’s does.  I just found a column in the October 21, 2005 Washington Post entitled, “Why Many Eyes Are on the Virginia Race.”  This is why pundits outside of Virginia and New Jersey always see national implications in those states’ gubernatorial races:

1. Virginia and New Jersey are the only states to elect their governors the year after a presidential election.  A lot of pundits outside of those states interpret the election results as the first referenda on the current, ten-month-old national administration.
2. Politicians are interested in what issues and tactics may or may not work in the changed political environment resulting from a new presidential term.  Successful issues or tactics could carry over into the following year’s off-year congressional elections.
3. There’s no competition – no other statewide election of any kind for political junkies to follow the year after a presidential election when they are fighting withdrawal symptoms.

The last Democrat and the last Republican to be elected governor while his party occupied the White House was Mills Godwin.  He won as a Democrat in 1965 and as a Republican in 1973.  (Godwin was the embodiment of the Republicans’ Southern Strategy: a conservative Democrat who switched to the Republican Party when he had not changed, he said, but his party had become too liberal.)  To put it another way, the party occupying the White House has lost in each of the last eight Virginia gubernatorial elections.

I do think the presidential election acts as mild vaccine on Virginians the following year.  There’s an unspoken need for Richmond to feel distant from Washington, which is, after all, just two hours north of Richmond, that may assert itself every four years, and having the governor’s mansion and the White House in the hands of different parties may help satisfy Virginians’ desire for a kind of divided government.  Maybe Virginians also have a smoldering desire for these nearby capitals to be at odds, as they were when Richmond, like Washington, was the capital of a union of states.

Whatever the reason for Virginia’s streak, it could fall this year.  A kind of political miracle happened yesterday: a state senator in third and last place in two statewide polls a month or so before the Democratic primary beat his opponents by a 50% to 26% to 24% margin.  Sure, it’s hard to accurately poll in gubernatorial primaries when the vast majority of people don’t vote and most of the ones that do don’t decide on whom they’re voting for until shortly before the election.  But Virginians apparently took a second look at R. Creigh Deeds just in time. (Creigh is pronounced like the “cre” in “credence.”  I’ve never heard of the name before, but it sounds vaguely preppy.)  (The first look Virginia had at Deeds was against Bob McDonnell, the Republican gubernatorial nominee Deeds will face this November, when Deeds lost to McDonnell by around 700 votes in Virginia’s attorney general’s race four years ago.)

Thanks to the Washington Post’s well-timed endorsement, Northern Virginia voters were reminded that Deeds risked alienating his Western Virginian constituency by advocating and voting for higher taxes to fund Northern Virginia roads.  He also benefited for his opponents’ perception that they had more to fear from each other than from Deeds.  They spent a great deal of energy attacking each other, and with some success.

It was also a matter of (with apologies to the Anglican liturgy) thoughts, words, and Deeds.  Terry McCauliffe, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman last year and the former Democratic National Party Chairman during the Bush II years, emphasized his innovative ideas for raising money to fix Virginia’s transportation and educational systems (e.g., McCauliffe proposed commercializing patents generated by Virginia’s public universities as a way to restore some of the income stripped from them during Republican gubernatorial administrations).  McCauliffe is widely seen in Virginia as a carpetbagger, a term carrying far stronger negative connotations in Virginia than in New York, the adopted state of his former employer.  Employing his national fundraising prowess, McCauliffe heavily outspent his opponents.

Brian J. Moran is a fourteen-year veteran of Virginia’s House of Delegates and a brother of Jim Moran, the Northern Virginia Congressman.  He received the most endorsements and the kindest words from the Democratic establishment.  But he tacked left on a few issues during the campaign, and many Democrats perceived it as pandering.

Deeds sort of grows on Virginians, I think.  He’s from rural Bath County.  When he says he’s not Governor Kaine’s intellectual equal, people tend to believe him.  His most common mannerism seems to be opening his mouth wide, shaking his head from side to side, and waiting for the next words to form themselves from somewhere deep down his esophagus. He’s not much of a speechmaker, but he’s a good debater and pretty good with a sound bite.  He also happens to have seventeen years’ experience in the state legislature where he has built a reputation as an effective legislator, a high-road campaigner, a hard worker, and – this is quite unusual – someone who puts the concept of the state over the concept of his region of the state.

Deeds isn’t Obama, which is a good thing.  Virginians broke another streak last year – voting Democratic in a presidential election for the first time since 1964 – but they want someone authentic.  Deeds seems to be himself, and Virginians – at least the ones who voted yesterday – seem to have discovered that.  His reputation is also way too centrist to ever be tagged generally as “out of touch with Virginia,” a winning mantra for Republicans in the past.  The Democrats elected the only one of their three candidates who I think could beat McDonnell and break the White House’s losing streak dating back to the year Jimmy Carter was inaugurated president.

I have never swum the waters above the heavens.
I have never sailed the waters above the heavens.
I have never drunk the waters above the heavens.

God created the heavens for the waters:
the heavens divide the waters and the waters.

The earth drank the waters below the heavens
and never looked back, or up.

The psalmist sang to the waters above the heavens,
sang for them to praise the Lord.

Galileo looked up but did not see the waters
above the heavens, for he did not look for the waters

above the heavens the way
Ponce de León had looked for the waters:

the latter sailed the waters below the heavens,
the waters that divide the dry land.

I have not so much as tossed a stone
across the waters above the heavens.

I’ve eaten several slices of a large, five-to-eight-topping pizza every other Friday night or so for the past several years. Regular, “hand-tossed” crust, too – not thin crust.  Some meals I eat the whole pizza.  It’s part of this Bill Phillips Body for Life diet I’ve been on for eight years now: you get to pig out once a week.  My version of Mr. Phillips’s diet plan has managed to disgust everyone I love, and what little I’ve related here is probably enough to disgust you.

But it gives me some credibility as an expert on what to do with all that pizza crust.  I’ve tried the brackish stuff that comes with some delivered pizza or gets served with bread at many suburban restaurants.  I’ve tried vinegary, store-bought dipping sauces, too, but nobody gets it right.  For the last three years or so, I’ve been experimenting each fortnight with olive oil and lots of spices, and I’m happy enough with my current concoction to release it here:

Two parts ground black pepper
Two parts dried oregano leaves
One part cumin
One part chili power
One part garlic powder
However much unfiltered, extra virgin olive oil you’d like to dilute the spices in

Eat a slice of pizza, and then stir the ingredients with the slice’s outer crust.  Bite the moistened end, and stir the ingredients again with the remaining crust.

This sadness feels Medieval,
locked in ice and dusk

-- Lisa Russ Sparr, “Penance I”

Rounding the century and having bested the last eighty years’ most malignant forms of government – fascism and communism – Western liberalism had only to fear problems stemming from the economic success its political success had fostered: pollution, global warming, and something about the computers all shutting down at the century’s stroke of midnight.  All of these problems stemmed from our not thinking about the future, the last of them – a failure to write computer script that would recognize years beginning with 20 instead of 19 – being perhaps the perfect analogy for our lack of forward thinking.

Nine months into the new century’s term, we realized what must have lurked in our collective subconscious all along – that we had rounded not only a century but also a millennium, and that our biggest contribution to our biggest problem was not a failure to look forward as much as it was a failure to look backward.  Our political response to radical Islam, we decided, must be rooted in something more millennial and seminal than the liberal notions that gave birth to our young governments.  Everything became negotiable to meet a new, ancient threat.

President Bush’s speech to an emergency joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001 seemed both eloquent as well as terribly naïve and misleading.  Within two minutes of beginning his speech, he claimed that terrorists attacked us because “they hate our freedoms.”  What could a movement based on a fundamentalist view of Islam care one way or another about modern Western political thought?  Surely the terrorists didn’t strike to take away political freedoms.

The nation seemed reassured, however, in the months following the speech as Bush’s War on Terror began to cross policy lines America had never crossed before, most notably in instituting a “preemptive war” and in torturing prisoners of war.  This is how one must respond to an ancient struggle employing twenty-first-century terror, we reasoned.  Our democracies are at once too new to comprehend the philosophical and religious underpinnings of radical Islam and too slow – too mired in slow notions like “due process” – to respond to new biological, chemical, and nuclear threats.

Writing in the street-level shadow of 9/11, Paul Berman contradicts all of this.  Radical Islam has less to do with the ancient struggle between Islam and Western Christianity as it does with twentieth-century totalitarianism that we never really defeated in the first place.  Islamic terrorism is not a combination of ideology that predates liberalism and a method of warfare that postdates it – a combination that would blow us away from ourselves and make us search for solutions that have nothing to do with liberalism, such as torture.

Berman’s 2003 book Terror and Liberalism examines the writings of radical Islam’s greatest and most influential thinkers, particularly Sayyid Qutb and his younger brother Muhammad – the latter a professor of Islamic studies who taught Osama bin Laden – and describes their similarities with the philosophies supporting the one-party states of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  The aesthetics of terror, the ideal of submission, the aggrandizement of suicide, the myth of racial or religious purity and Armageddon, the uniqueness of parochial interests, the divinity or near divinity of the strongman ruler expressed through his accepted madness, the cult of death, and the extreme and oft-expressed hatred of liberalism’s freedoms – all of these intellectual symptoms are as present in radical Islam as they were in Mussolini’s fascism or in Stalin’s communism, Berman argues.  Islamic terrorism has more to do with eighteenth century Romanticism than it does with a literal interpretation of Koranic passages.

An effective Western response, then, is not out of reach.  Radical Islam is no less modern than we are.  But we have to understand the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy more than we do of radical Islam to have a chance.  Implicit in Berman’s book is the notion that our failure to understand our enemy points to the less obvious and more dangerous failure to understand ourselves.  Berman does a fair job of this, comparing the historical and philosophical differences between American European liberalism.  His examination of liberal democracy is not nearly as detailed as his examination of fundamentalist Islam, however, and that is disappointing.

Berman is no pacifist, and he cites the Gettysburg Address in his book in support of his notion that liberal democracy must have a universal appeal and must be militant at times, as well as true to its values, to survive.  Berman is a chief philosopher of the liberal hawks, most of whom supported Bush’s 1993 invasion of Iraq, though Berman doesn’t address the relative merits of that invasion in his book.

Bush was right to describe the 9/11 terrorists as “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” Berman argues, and Bush was right in certain other particulars, most notably in championing women’s rights in Afghanistan in the months following our attack on that country.  Berman establishes, however, that most of Bush’s actions in the “war of ideas” were pathetic, and he demonstrates that Bush was wrong, of course, to surrender the very ideals he said we were fighting for by adopting torture.

But what is liberal democracy?  And until we understand who we are, how can we trust our government to fight effectively and in accordance with whatever set of ideals we claim to possess?  In the resurfacing debate about torture that led to yesterday’s dueling speeches by President Obama and former Vice President Cheney, Berman’s book is important.

1

All thought
is two
dimensional.
Like so.

2

All non
parallel
lines will
someday
intersect
someday
some sweet,
sweet day

Texas Governor Rick Perry’s recent suggestion that Texas might feel obligated to secede from the Union over President Obama’s proposed tax plan brought the Civil War back to many Americans’ minds.  Seeming to confuse his wars, though, the governor made his remarks at the Austin version of a “tea party” rally, one of a series of “Taxed Enough Already” rallies popularized by Fox News and held on this year’s Tax Day.  (Hendrick Hertzberg has a great satire in this week’s New Yorker on Perry’s remarks, by the way.)

The governor broached secession by incorrectly stating that the “deal” admitting Texas to the Union in 1845 included a right to secede.  He then went on to say:

My hope is that America, and Washington in particular, pays attention.  We’ve got a great Union.  There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it.  But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what might come of that.

The tax plan that serves as the ostensible reason for Texas’s second secession would, starting two years from now, increase the top marginal tax rate for those making over a quarter million dollars a year from 35 to 39.6 percent.  The proposal also would decrease income taxes for Texans making under that amount, but the proposed tax cut didn’t get much play at the Austin rally.

Texas last seceded from the Union on March 4, 1861, the day Lincoln was first inaugurated.  The immediate cause of the Southern states’ secession was the election of the nation’s first “Black Republican” president, and based on exit polls showing Southern white males voting disproportionately against Obama this past fall, I wonder if the election of the nation’s first African-American president had anything to do with the governor’s thinly veiled threat.

Texas is a special case, I suppose, having being a sovereign nation for a decade preceding its admission into the Union.  According to the Hertzberg article, a recent poll shows that a third of Texans support secession, and without researching it, I suppose that the current percentage does not reflect a great increase in that sentiment since Obama’s election or his proposed tax cut.

Still, the concept of secession should be troubling to Americans, not just from a political point of view but also from a philosophical one.  Simply put, the argument in favor of a right to secede is the argument against a right to revolt, and the right of revolution – a right we must hold to now as much as we did in 1776 – is a basis of our political liberty.

The political problem with secession is simple.  If a state can secede instead of submit to the lawfully exercised will of the country’s majority, then majority rule is defeated and, as Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” will have perished from the earth.  A state claiming a right to secede permits by its example any political subdivision thereof to follow course, and the result will necessarily be, as Lincoln pointed out during his first inaugural address, either anarchy or despotism in the long run:

Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

Secession, then, doesn’t work well a practical political doctrine.

Worse than the dysfunction inherent in secession, however, are its counterrevolutionary implications.  John C. Calhoun, the chief philosopher of secession, made the case for secession by discovering “state rights” in place of the individual rights, including the right of revolution, that were of utmost importance to the Founders.  As Harry Jaffa puts it in A New Birth of Freedom, “It was Calhoun’s writings . . . that transformed the question of individual and minority rights into the question of state rights” (281).

Calhoun’s attack on individual rights started with his attack on the Declaration of Independence’s ideals and on Locke’s ideas expressed in his Second Treatise that forms the basis for the “all men are created equal” in the Declaration and the basis for similar language in eight American colonies’ prolegomena to their Revolutionary-era constitutions.  Calhoun discounted Locke’s “all men in the state of nature are free and equal,” claiming that man, being a social animal, “cannot exist in such a state.”  Calhoun disagreed with Locke – and, indeed, with Aristotle – by recognizing no prepolitical state for humankind (Jaffa 410).

Calhoun’s choice, of course, was to view Locke’s “state of nature” from an anthropological standpoint, while the Founders, Locke, and Locke’s antecedents referred to man’s “state of nature” from an ontological standpoint.  Calhoun, then, did not believe that man entered into society by a voluntary association but by necessity.  The individual therefore has no rights that attach to her at birth, Calhoun believed:

Instead then of all men having the same right to liberty and equality, as is claimed by those who hold that they are born free and equal, liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances.  Instead then of liberty and equality being born with man; instead of all men and all classes and descriptions being equally entitled to them, they are prizes to be won, and are in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won – and when won, the most difficult to be preserved.

As Jaffa puts it, “In [Calhoun’s] final analysis, whatever men lack in power, they lack in right” (418).

In his excellent introduction to Political Writings of John Locke, David Wootton points out that three political philosophers covered the gamut of arguments in favor of the Whig position just prior to the English Civil War.  James Tyrrel asserted that the king’s subjects might have to rebel, “but only, he believed, to defend the principles of the established constitution.”  Algernon Sydney argued the republican position that ancient Rome, Machiavelli, and Venice’s constitution were the best models of government in place of what was threatening to become an absolute monarchy.  And Locke asserted a set of inalienable rights that have become the foundation of liberalism (14 – 15).

The Declaration of Independence, of course, deliberately echoed sentiments current a century prior to it during the English Civil War in order to best assert its case against the crown and Parliament.  In writing the Declaration and the state constitutions asserting independence, the colonists were able to choose from the English constitutional theory of Tyrrel, the republican theory of Sidney, and the liberal theory of Locke.  They all deliberately sided with Locke, asserting his famous proscription against taxation without representation, and they avowed his theory of a right of revolution against the English king.

Calhoun did not believe in a right of revolution, however.  According to Calhoun, because people have no inalienable rights, people have no right to revolt.

In a sense, since 1800 we exercise an institutionalized right of revolution every time we participate in an election.  The election of 1800 – our fourth presidential election – was the first régime change in world history accomplished by a ballot.  It came two years after Jefferson threatened a revolution through the Kentucky Resolutions.  “One might even say that the victory of the Republicans in the election of 1800 came about because of the [revolutionary] threats implied in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions,” Jaffa opines (416).

Jefferson believed that “the right of revolution, and the threat to exercise that right, had throughout history been the only recourse of the people against the evils of tyranny,” according to Jaffa.  The treat of revolution still functions today – a threat not subsumed by our record of peaceful elections – should even a democratically elected government act against the safety of its people.  Calhoun would disagree – ironically, since the supporters of secession in Lincoln’s time tried to take the moral high ground by fashioning themselves as the defenders of minority rights against an oppressive majority.  Instead, they were, wittingly or unwittingly, the defenders of a brand of states rights that nullified individual rights, including the right to revolt.

Calhoun’s refusal to recognize individual rights apart from the state, including a right to revolt, led to his assertion of a state’s right to secede.  Calhoun developed a theory of “concurrent majority” under which any interested minority had a veto over the federal government’s action (Jaffa 432).  Significantly, the position that would lead to the veto would be based not on reason, which Locke and the Founders believed all men had access to, but on the narrow, mutual interests of the minorities involved.  Just as Calhoun looked to Rousseau’s more anthropological notion of the state of nature to counter Locke’s ontological version, Calhoun seemed to reach for Rousseau’s version of the will in the development of his concurrent majority theory:

Except upon prudential grounds, the governed may not consent to what is intrinsically unjust, as Lincoln argued against Douglas.  The reconciliation of conflicting interests must ultimately proceed from a conception of right that is independent of the interests themselves.  But Rousseau introduced into political philosophy the idea that political justice is to be found in the form of the will, rather than in the reason that informs the will.  More than anyone else, Rousseau is Calhoun’s intellectual progenitor. (432)

Under Calhoun's theory, because no univerally recognized rights would be involved in a secession threat, and because reason (Locke's law of nature) is not appealed to, the minority could have its way against the majority over relatively trivial matters.

Governor Perry’s opposition to Obama’s tax plan, for instance, seems to be based on interest – the interest of those making more than a quarter million dollars a year – and not on reason.  (Opponents of Obama's plan could rightfully make a smilar assertion against the plan, too, of course.)  Interests may help legislators craft an alliance to pass a law, but interest alone was never intended to serve as grounds for revolution.  (The Founders never envisioned secession under any circumstances.  Unlike Calhoun, who believed the Union began by contract in the form of the states' ratification of the Constitution, the Founders believed that the Union preceded the Constitution.  "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union . . ." (emphasis mine).) (Calhoun faced another hurdle in the Constitution's preamble, which doesn't begin, "We the States . . .)

Calhoun’s exclusive reliance on positive law reminds me of denominations that rely exclusively on positive theology.  Without linking positive theology with a healthy, existential understanding of God through a “negative theology” – perhaps a more mystical approach to God – positive theology tends to separate us from God and from ourselves.  Similarly, Calhoun believed that people were in no sense human without government and had no rights outside of it:

In Calhoun, there is no doctrine of individual rights apart from the positive law of any given community.  He does not recognize any criterion outside the political process to which men can appeal to justify rebellion against tyranny. (Jaffa 418)

For Calhoun, man was made for the state, just as Jesus’ Pharisees believed that man was made for the Sabbath, and not the other way around.

This is the chief problem I have with most jurists who rely almost exclusively on what they call the framers’ “original intent” in interpreting the Constitution, particularly those jurists who see their support for “states rights” as a corollary to the support of that intent.  Lincoln and his Republicans were willing to enforce the letter of the Constitution, even to the extent of supporting slavery in the original states and enforcing the return of fugitive slaves, but “they insisted . . . upon a distinction between the Constitution’s compromises and its principles” (Jaffa 90).  Former Chief Justice Rehnquist, on the other hand, refused to recognize any principles antecedent to positive law.  “Rehnquist’s ‘original intent’ has less in common with the intent of those who ratified the Constitution than with the intent of those who ‘de-ratified’ it in 1860 – 61” (87).

Calhoun’s refusal to recognize natural rights was influenced, of course, by his philosophy that recognized slavery as a “positive good.”  Any recognized inalienable rights would attach to slaves just as they would to other South Carolinians.  Locke understood that his natural rights philosophy, if adopted, would spell the end of slavery, and Calhoun understood that, too.  For Calhoun to deny inalienable rights to slaves, then, he had to deny them to everyone.  And his twisted logic is still all that supports a state’s claimed right to secede from the Union today.

Calhoun’s first written support of states rights against the Union came in 1828 when, as the United States’ vice president, he anonymously authored South Carolina’s “Exposition and Protest” during the nullification crisis (Jaffa 278).  In doing so, Calhoun saw Jefferson as his model, since Jefferson had anonymously drafted the Kentucky Resolutions while he was vice president thirty years earlier (522).  Jefferson was not supporting a state’s right to secede based on positive law, however, but a people’s right to revolt based on natural law.

Governor Perry seems similarly confused.  By reintroducing a state’s right to secede during a protest modeled on the Boston Tea Party – a famous precursor to the American Revolution – Perry has indeed confused his wars.  Let Perry endorse revolution instead of secession.  Let’s see what he’s got.

One day my fiscal year may start on May One.

Maybe that day will be May One.

On May One, harden not your hearts, as the Scripture hath said, while it is still called “May One.”

I have reels of tanks rolling down Moscow streets on May One.

One year, one day, on May One, snow fell in Reston woods on May One.

We need a president who will be ready on May One.

There is no yesterday or tomorrow; we have only May One.

“Can one lift her food with her fork in her left hand? After she cuts her meat? If all at the table know that she’s left-handed?”  “‘May one?’”

Our sinistral president signs bills on May One.

“One day” may be May One.

“Okay: ‘May One?’”

Tonight is the first night the temperature wants to stay above sixty.  It’s 2 A.M and my window’s still open.  I had forgotten at least one smell of summer – the smell of a somewhat musty, steel-mesh screen.  I didn’t think of it all winter, but it came back like the birds.

No June bugs are slapping themselves against the screen yet, and I hear no frogs or crickets.  They’re coming, I’m sure.  And the moths, too; I’m looking forward to the moths.  They flit from grass like soot from a chimney, I recall.  It will remind me of cold weather.  I want to see that again.

I have no reason to think I won’t.  I’m glad I’m here, though, and I might as well say it.  I’m looking forward to those moths.

The guy with the plunger walked into the Rotunda before us.  Did Jefferson design the Rotunda with plumbing, I wondered, or was the plunger a kind of mace with a stylized Rotunda at one end and the groundsman (as they call them here) some officiant of a secret rite performed in Virginia’s most hallowed hall?

The first paragraph of the Rotunda’s web page describes Jefferson’s vision of an “academical village,” emphasizing a life of interactions among professors and students and the credo that “learning is a lifelong and shared process.”  The Rotunda is one of two bookends of the Lawn, which is otherwise lined with Jefferson’s student housing, rows of dorms punctuated by classical-styled, brick pavilions in which the professors live.  As the university got older, though, it grew away from Jefferson's student-professor housing model.  Its student housing today is much like that of other universities.  I never saw a professor near student housing when I went here.

The plunger seemed to focus me.  I was on the lookout for the Rotunda’s bathrooms and found them to be the size of powder rooms and tucked, like so many of the building’s utilitarian functions, between the oval or circular rooms and the rectangular exteriors on the north and south porticos.  What are the curved rooms for?  Jefferson used them as classrooms, but one oval room is now a museum exhibit, one is a meeting room for the university’s board of visitors, and the circular room on the top floor under the dome is a multi-function room surrounded by short spokes of bookshelves that create an outer rim of alcoves for students looking for a bright, quiet place to study between classes.

The Rotunda’s curves brought to mind Calypso’s “smooth cave,” the suggestive shorthand Odysseus employed for his seven years with “that loveliest of goddesses.”  After seven years of higher education and another quarter century of life, I still find college seductive.  Could one go back, or do the years make it both compelling and impossible?  Could Odysseus have returned to Calypso’s island – I mean, beyond some kind of reunion weekend?  Would Penelope have heard of such a retelling?

It was everybody’s spring break and I saw them everywhere, the parents and the high school juniors, on tours and in restaurants and hotels and in the reflective doors of closing elevators: mirror images of Bethany and me, the students stopping on one floor and the parents averting their eyes as the doors slid to again.

Bethany and I crossed the university’s main drag from the Rotunda to Alderman Library so Bethany could see what was holy to me.  The stacks in the library’s rear are half-floors of books, dust, and and carrels where I spent hours most weeks studying and snoozing as an undergrad.  We walked down the narrow, submarine-worthy stairwell to my favorite haunt, floor 3M, institutional green and just as musty as I had last left it some long-ago spring.  I remember feeling hidden, not so much by the stacks’ relative seclusion as by its half floors and the associated idea that no one would make his way down those stairwells unless he needed some obscure volume of Italian or Russian literature.  It was my favorite spot on Grounds.

We spend our lives between things, and the between-ness carries the loneliness we claim.  A dear friend sent me an email this morning asking me for guidance.  His recent birthday brought him squarely by middle age, and he’s feeling some of the same anguish he remembers me going through at that floor of life.  I told him how something in me would like to go back to my identity crisis – the comfort, the new vistas . . .

Bethany wants to pursue her art in college, and she took part in a sculpture class at Virginia’s new studio art building just before we visited the Rotunda.  We left Charlottesville for Richmond that night and visited Virginia Commonwealth University, home of the nation’s premier sculpture program, the next day.

Unlike U.Va., VCU is all angles and retrofit; its campus is a mostly a hodgepodge of buildings reclaimed from Richmond’s rundown downtown.  No former president-slash-amateur architect planned the place, but the campus’s energy is palpable.  Bethany and I ended our art program tour at VCU’s Fine Arts Building, a sprawling, aircraft carrier-sized rectangle on the north end of one of the university’s two main campuses.  We fell behind the other parents and prospective students because we wanted to see what was going on in every studio.  I’m glad we did.

“And, do you know, they accepted me?”  Her voice caught.  She seemed close to tears with gratitude though she had been in the program a full seven months by the time Bethany and I met her, a woman about my age who was painting a picture of a jagged city skyline.  She stood out to us as soon as we entered the studio.  It could have been her age – she and I were the oldest people in the room, by far – but I think it was her spirit.

She put down her brush and recounted her story.  Her children had recently graduated from college, and she and her husband felt free to pursue lifelong dreams.  Her husband was busy with a new career, and she had returned to school.

“This is such a holy place,” she confided, her voice catching again.

Via Negativa published my article on teaching diction and syntax with Twitter earlier this week.

The Washington Post, my local paper, recently folded its business section into its national news section, eliminated its separate book section and relocated what remains of its book features into its style section, and, worst of all, reduced its comic pages from three to two.  The Post isn’t alone in downsizing, of course.  Some of my favorite magazines arrive at my mailbox looking like waifs from lack of advertising, and many of their operations have reduced their staff and features.

It’s no different here.  To weather the recession, I just eliminated the slow reads digest – that ezine I’ve collected email addresses for on these pages for years – and I gave the pink slip to Google’s Friend Connect.  I’ve also put off my annual spring, site-wide redesign and expansion until further notice.

I did add a new category, “church & state,” and I renamed another category.  “Reviews” are now “books” because my written interactions with books rarely resemble reviews anymore.

B, Warren, and I walked along the Virginia side of the Potomac a few miles above the falls yesterday.  The sun was out, and the temperature rose to fifty-five or so.  The path got muddier and windier as we walked along, and pretty soon we were past where the other strollers would turn around.

We came to a narrow inlet that was still largely covered with ice.  Warren lamented that there were no stones around; he loves skimming stones, and so do I.  We continued up the inlet and came across thousands of hand-sized stones, many of them excellent for skimming.

We skimmed stones for a long time.  We also threw the larger and rounder stones way up into the air and watched and listened to them hit the ice at various thicknesses. After B finished seeing and holding a lot of trees and rocks, she skimmed stones with us.

It seems like a long time since we’ve explored together.  I sit around so much, reading and writing, working.  I had forgotten how many of my dreams involve traveling and exploring by myself or with friends.

“But you won’t believe this” – here Fr. Dioscuros lowered his voice to a whisper.  “You won’t believe this, but we had some visitors from Europe two years ago – Christians, some sort of Protestants – who said they didn’t believe in the power of relics!”

The monk stroked his beard, wide-eyed with disbelief.  “No,” he continued.  “I’m not joking.  I had to take the Protestants aside and explain that we believe that St. Anthony and all the fathers have not died, that they live with us, continually protecting us and looking after us.  When they are needed – when we go to their graves and pray to their relics – they appear and sort out our problems.”

“Can the monks see them?”

“Who, Protestants?”

-- William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain (page 406)

But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

-- Jesus (Matthew 22:31-32)

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

-- T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

I have limited the dead.  My communion of saints has been a communion of only those now living – a more immediate communion consistent with a world and a religion that lasts no longer than a generation.  My old world view is as much to say that Jesus was born in 1948, died and rose again in 1981, and will come again before this generation passes away.

And what if he doesn’t?  What if another generation comes instead?

In the Torah, God had Israel pile stones and observe festivals in order to remember.  Future generations – the Torah’s readers – were consulted on the spot, seemingly, concerning how the event in question would benefit them and how they would best be informed and reminded of the event.  The Torah reads, for instance, as if no one would escape Egypt until God finished explaining to Moses how the Israelites would celebrate Passover in the Promised Land.

The New Testament isn’t like that, at least in the early years.  When I was young, a good friend of mine just about flunked out of school, waiting for the Savior’s soon return.   What was the point of an education if the world is about to end?

The Early Church I’ve lived in was so early that angels had to remind us, as they reminded Jesus’ disciples at his ascension, to stop staring into heaven.  That’s early enough that the New Testament’s biggest memorial – the Lord’s Supper – was still an agape feast, and any attempt we made during the Charismatic movement to participate in a sacrament seemed awkward and overly formal – “quenching the Spirit,” I believe we said.  Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?

One way of living in the Primitive Church is to despise every seeming compromise that a subsequent generational cycle began to require of Christianity.  In this way of living, one makes everything consistent with how one reads about the first generation: denominations become Pharasees and the feds become the Romans, for instance.  There is little need for memorials, for mysticism, or for the dead.

But even before the New Testament generation died away – even before most of the New Testament’s books were written – memorials began.  In his book The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, Albert Schweitzer summarizes how the Eucharist changed over the course of Christianity’s first generation to incorporate new meaning from Jesus’ mysterious sayings surrounding it:

Once the necessary intensity of eschatological expectation had died down, and the view of the “Lord’s Meal” as a thanksgiving-meal which looked forward to an early reunion with Christ at the Messianic feast had consequently become untenable, the Meal at once ceased to be a real meal, and the food and drink ceased to be thought of as consecrated to be holy food by the thanksgiving and petition of the coming Kingdom and the return of Christ.  As the original meaning faded, the new meaning arrived at by going back to Jesus’ sayings about the bread and wine found its way in – namely that the bread and wine were . . . in some sense the flesh and blood of Christ.  This substitution of the new for the old came about as something self-evident, since Jesus’ mysterious sayings at the historic celebration were generally known from the Gospels, since Paul had already made use of them in interpreting the church’s “Lord’s Meal,” and since the old Thanksgiving-celebration still remained unaltered in the liturgy.  New and old thus continued side by side, until the old entirely lost its significance and in the course of generations withered and fell away.  (272)

Schweitzer claims that Paul is a hero in part for transitioning the church to a form of “in Christ” mysticism that helped it survive the earth’s survival.  To do it, Paul blurred the lines among the living and the dead in Christ and the lines between the temporal and the eternal:

While other believers held that the finger of the world-clock was touching on the beginning of the coming hour and were waiting for the stroke which should announce this, Paul told them that it had already passed beyond the point, and that they had failed to hear the striking of the hour, which in fact struck at the Resurrection of Jesus.

Behind the apparently immobile outward show of the natural world, its transformation into the supernatural was in progress, as the transformation of a stage goes on behind the curtain.

For the man of insight who dares to see things as they really are, faith ceases to be simply a faith of expectation.  It takes up present certainties into itself.  This invasion of a belief in the future by a belief in the present has nothing to do with the spiritualizing of the eschatological expectation; it arises in fact from the intensification of it.  During that world-period between the Resurrection of Jesus and His Coming again the transient and the eternal worlds are intermingled.  Thereby the conditions for a peculiar Mysticism are created.  In consequence of the actual condition of the world, not merely by a pure act of thought as in other mystical systems, he who has the true knowledge can be conscious of himself as at one and the same time in the transient world and the eternal world. (99)

In describing the universality of Paul’s “in Christ” mysticism, Schweitzer – a Protestant, of course – comes close to Orthodox amillennialism (a view based on the idea that the millennium in Revelation coincides with the church age) and Orthodox views on the inseparability of mysticism and church doctrine.

In fact, in his 1998 foreword to William Montgomery’s English translation of The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, Jaroslav Pelikan quotes from Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church:

All true Orthodox theology is mystical; just as mysticism divorced from theology becomes subjective and heretical, so theology, when it is not mystical, degenerates into an arid scholasticism, “academic” in the bad sense of the word. (xviii – xix)

Pelikan sees the reissuance of The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle and The Orthodox Church as symbolic of the greater church’s greater acceptance of mysticism over the past few decades.

Orthodoxy seems like a rich faith, a faith that has slipped past the narrower thinking present at the beginning of the first last generation.  Both in its doctrine and in its mysticism, the Orthodox Church demonstrates its catholicity, encompassing, as it does, both the past and the dead, and emphasizing with its eschatology both the spirituality inherent in this life and our hope in the next.

Many Protestants find Orthodox views concerning the dead illogical or superstitious.  I wonder, though, if their distaste is based more on a limited notion of the communion of saints and a misapprehension of the mysticism Schweitzer describes than it is on modernity alone.

The Orthodox explain that they don’t pray to the dead or make them mediators between God and man, but that they merely ask the dead for intercession.  They assume that the dead saints’ proximity to God may help in this regard.  So, when the Orthodox ask others for prayer, the “others” in question may be dead or alive.

I have spoken to the dead, beginning with my grandmother.  I cannot say that they have appeared, but like Fr. Dioscuros, I have felt their presence.

I like “like,” but I hate “wait.”  Some of my snootier colleagues get around to expressing their exasperation with this generation’s overuse of “like,” but I never hear anyone complain about what drives me bats: my students’ use of “wait” in addressing me.

For my entire five-year teaching career, most students have addressed me as “Wait,” as in “Wait, do we need to write this in our sketchbooks?”  People with little recent contact with teens might imagine that the student calling me “Wait” was asking me to slow down or to return to a subject that I had just finished covering.  Those people would be right in some cases but not in most.  I am most often addressed as “Wait” when I am not speaking to the class at all.  I might be walking around the classroom helping people.  I might be bending over my backpack for a mint or staring out the window, searching for snow clouds.

“Wait,” then, feels like an unfair accusation.  It’s as if the person addressing me assumes that I’m insensitively plowing on, or that, even if I’m not doing so in this instance, I’ve plowed on often enough to earn the nickname. Maybe one or more of them is subtly threatening me with a lawsuit, suggesting that I have Left One Child Behind.

When I’m lucky enough to have a student address me by my name, I’m still not in the clear.   The questioner often has another annoying lead-up in store for me, though in this case I have a passive-aggressive means of getting even.

“Mr. S?”

“Yes?”

“I have a question.”

Here I fall silent.  My silence is designed to communicate that the student’s declaration tells me nothing that I am not quick enough to surmise.  Sometimes, when I’m feeling lucky or uncommonly ornery, I rub the silence in by continuing some activity at hand that involves no eye contact with the student, such as staring at a monitor and nudging a mouse.

Invariably my questioner, realizing that I am not going to say “Yes?” again or even “Mm-hmm?” eventually asks his question.  And it feels so good to me.

You may think that I am being petulant.   But if you got hit with this stuff twenty or thirty times a day, you’d find ways of coping, too, and of convincing yourself that you’re doing it for your students’ sake.  I believe that I am inculcating my slice of today’s youth with less provocative means of addressing adults and of propounding questions.

As for “wait,” I wait until the spring to get my revenge.  In the process of teaching some rudimentary Elizabethan English during our study of Romeo and Juliet, I make my students address me as “But soft” every time they start at me with “Wait.”  Most of them smile thoughtfully while saying it slowly – “Butt Soft” – and they ask their questions.

By June, I have done my part to retrain another set of young interlocutors.

I have a long history of writing unsolicited missives to the Evangelical church, that large, middle ground among American Protestants between fundamentalism and liberalism.  While my own thinking has moved away from some traditional Evangelical tenants, my bond with my Evangelical brothers and sisters seems stronger than ever.

I wrote an earlier draft of this letter for some close friends of mine, and one of them asked me to present it to a group of people in the Christian intentional community movement this morning.  I rewrote the paper with them in mind, though nothing in it has anything to do with intentional communities.  But a broader audience helped me make it easier to understand.  My thanks to Bill of Shadows and Symbols, who read an earlier draft and gave me some strong feedback.

Most of my readers aren’t Evangelical, I’m pretty sure.  Readers not used to Evangelical church language may be struck with the offhand way I seem to speak about God and the self-assurance with which I present my views.  That’s how we talk to one another when we’re working out our Evangelical thinking.

Sam Soleyn, a friend – not a close friend, but a friend, and a close friend of a close friend – wrote a letter that also helped my thinking a lot.  I mention Sam and his letter in my missive.  If you take my link to Sam’s letter, you’ll be struck, I think, by his certitude.  I hope you won’t hold it against him.

By inviting mega-church pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren to give his inaugural invocation this month, Barack Obama has magnified a squabble within America’s Evangelical community.

The narrow bone of contention is this: should a pro-life, pro-Proposition-8 pastor give the invocation for a pro-choice, anti-Proposition-8 president?  Since the Culture Wars began thirty years ago, no president has given such a high-profile honor to the side generally opposing him, so the Evangelical church has not had to address such a question until now.

What Do We Do About Obama?

This small controversy magnifies a larger controversy in the American Evangelical church: what are we supposed to do about Barack Obama, a practicing Christian who has captured the imagination of America’s youth and a politician who has little taste for fighting the Culture Wars that have dominated national politics for decades and who, if his cabinet choices are any indication, seems intent on governing from the political center?  What reaction should we have to the new civic stirring not seen in the country since John Kennedy’s administration, or perhaps since Franklin Roosevelt’s?

And what stand should the church take concerning Obama’s economic proposals, which show every sign of continuing the expensive, government-expanding prescriptions inaugurated by his predecessor over the past three months?  What about the opportunity the economic crisis gives him to reshape American capitalism, to address chronic trade deficits with – and massive federal debt owed to – China and, to a lesser extent, other nations?

As citizens whose civic decisions are informed by our understanding of the kingdom of God, should the American Evangelical church be inclined to support Obama’s efforts, to oppose them, or to stay on the sidelines perhaps more than a responsible, democratic citizen feels comfortable in doing?  Finally, whether supporting, opposing, or hiding, how will the church be impacted by Obama, by the national crisis many people sense on the horizon, and by the country’s new civic stirrings?

The Church’s Divided, Generational Response to Obama

God may have given us a prophetic picture that will help the American church understand the short-term and long-term meaning of Obama’s election.  The picture also gives us some idea of where we are in world history and of how we might comport ourselves as American Christians over the next years.

The picture is the story of Joseph.  In this picture, Joseph is Obama, Egypt is the country he’ll lead, and Jacob and his other children are Joseph’s kin – America’s Christians.

It may be easiest to start with Warren’s decision to pray at Obama’s inaugural.

Have you noticed that the Evangelical controversy over Warren’s decision is generational, for the most part?  The older, Baby-Boom-generation culture warriors generally line up against Rick Warren’s decision, seeing it as a betrayal of the pro-life and anti-homosexual-rights causes.  The younger generation of Evangelicals, however, seems to take the invitation in stride.  This younger generation, who are generally pro-life as well, are more attuned than the older generation to social issues that liberals have cornered during the Culture Wars, issues like poverty, the exploitation of women and children, and global warming – issues also that Warren himself has become attracted to over the past three years.  While not Democrats, many of these younger Evangelicals have little interest in the Republican Party and little hope in a political solution to chronic Culture War issues.

Spiritual Boomers’ Fears for the Next Generation

Listening to the debate is like listening in on the somewhat comical and yet poignant squabble at Jacob’s camp about whether his sons should go to Egypt for food.  Jacob was against it, but his sons persuaded him to let them make the trip.  When Jacob later learned that Joseph was in charge of Egypt, God felt the need to speak to Jacob in order to reassure him that going to Egypt was the right thing to do:

Do not be afraid of going down to Egypt, for a great nation will I make of you there.  (Genesis 46:3)

It is the older, Baby Boom generation of Evangelicals that will have the hardest time adjusting to what God may be doing through an Obama administration.  Baby Boom Evangelicals understand that their children are growing up in a far less secure world than they had grown up in.  They worry that, in order to meet these outward-oriented challenges, the next generation may compromise their values. 

Baby-Boomer Evangelicals need to understand that they aren’t the first generation to see this happen.  According to William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1991 book Generations, almost every fourth generation of Americans is an idealist generation, coming of age during a spiritual renewal and entering old age just before or during a time of national crisis.  All idealist generations worry that their children will compromise their spiritual values in the process of gaining or maintaining civic stability.  Many of the Puritan generation (another idealist generation) in old age, for instance, “looking down on the troubled souls of their grown children, feared the young would trade ideals for security and thereby destroy everything that mattered” (Strauss 127).

God’s Mixed Message to Jacob – and to the American Church

One can see Jacob making a similar calculation as he contemplated what he might have regarded as his surrender of God’s promise to give him and his descendants the land of Canaan.  And there was also that nagging prophecy his father Isaac had told him about, the one in which his grandfather Abraham heard that his descendants would be afflicted for four hundred years “in a land that is not theirs” (Genesis 15:13).  Was moving to Egypt the beginning of this horror?  Was Jacob walking his progeny into a trap?

God told Jacob that his people would become a great nation in Egypt.  But God also told Abraham that his people would be afflicted in Egypt.  Both, of course, came true.  But, from Jacob’s standpoint weighing his options in Canaan, how could Egypt be both a blessing and a curse?

If Jacob struggled with this set of seemingly conflicting messages, then the Evangelical church will really struggle with its role in twenty-first-century America.  The American Evangelical church has rarely been adept at digesting what seem to be mixed prophetic messages from God.  And God may be giving the church a seemingly conflicting message today.  Obama, his generation of leadership, and the policies they will institute may turn out to be first a blessing and then a curse.

A Chronic Deficiency in the Church’s Prophetic View

I’ll pause my application of Joseph’s story to what is happening in America today in order to examine what I believe to be a major deficiency in the church’s prophetic outlook.  Unless this deficiency is addressed, the church’s prophetic vision will remain behind the vision of secular poets, songwriters, and even politicians, and the church will understand neither what is transpiring in America nor what its own role in it might be.

The church’s prophetic deficiency lies to a great extent in the church’s exclusively linear understanding of history and prophecy.  The American Evangelical church generally insists on an exclusively linear approach to history and prophecy despite all biblical and historical evidence that history is both linear and cyclical.  The Bible has both a linear and cyclical view of history.  It speaks of former and latter days, suggesting a continuum, but it also speaks of generational cycles, most notably in books such as Judges and Ecclesiastes.  By seeing history and prophecy only in a linear continuum, the Evangelical church comes up with thin and inaccurate portrayals of the future. Most famously, solely linear views of history have caused American church leaders to make fools of themselves by making countless inaccurate predictions of Yeshua’s return.  These portrayals generally serve to mislead or frighten Christians, and their inaccuracy eventually tends to make some Christians cynical about prophecy in general.

Adding a Cyclical View to a Linear View of Prophecy

The church would do well to read two well-received books on generational history by William Strauss and Neil Howe:Generations, published in 1991, which I mentioned earlier, and The Fourth Turning, published in 1996.  Seventeen years have elapsed since Strauss and Howe wrote Generations, and twelve years have elapsed since they wrote The Fourth Turning.  Based on generational precedence, the books predicted events in the ensuing years with what turned out to be great prescience, though with some specific errors as well.  Nevertheless, if prophets are to be judged on their track records, then Strauss and Howe are more prophetic than anyone I’ve heard prophesy in my lifetime about the future in the name of God.

As Strauss and Howe point out, one can see the four generations pictured in the Bible, beginning with Moses’idealistic generation.  The following generation – Strauss and Howe call them the Golden Calf generation – was a streetwise reactive generation.  The children of Moses’ idealistic generation were the Joshua generation, a civicgeneration that Moses’ generation discipled but who were much more efficient at implementing a more civic (one might even say worldly) mandate.  The reactive, Golden Calf generation later sired the following generation, the “First Judges Peers,” an adaptive generation like our own Silent generation that dominated Congress through much of our Culture Wars, “the obliging young adults who served the mighty Joshua; and the midlifers whose exercise of power was marked by political fragmentation, petty feuds, and uncertainly about the future.” (See Bill O’s fuller treatment of Strauss and Howe’s theories in his post “At the Dawn of the Fourth Turning?”

The Importance of Living as Prophetic People

Prophecy, signs, and an understanding of the times are important since God uses them to give Christians a context in which to operate in a given age as well as a backdrop for his specific instructions, which often make more sense in light of God’s bigger picture.  The reason why the tribesmen of Issachar had an understanding of the times was precisely so Israel would know what to do (1 Chr. 12:32).  We should not let a deficient, linear view of history and of prophecy keep us from living as a prophetic people.

Issachar’s gift keeps us from spending large chunks of our lives in futility.  People praying that nationwide revival will take place in the next few years, for instance, need to understand that a large revival at this point in our generational cycle would have no historical precedent.  Without a rudimentary understanding of history’s cycles, then, Christians will grow frustrated after many hours in misdirected prayer.  We need the context of a proper prophetic understanding to pray and to act properly.

How a Cyclical View Helps Us

While not accepted by all historians, generational history has made great strides in the past few decades and has aided many leaders with a framework with which to understand movements, national crises, spiritual awakenings, and shifting and recurring views on parenting, children, gender roles, old age, government interventions, and religion.  Generational history helps to explain crime cycles, educational test score cycles, and changing roles in government.

A purely linear view of history doesn’t help in this regard at all.  Our Evangelical, linear view of society teaches us, for instance, that society is gradually but steadily falling apart and will not get better until Yeshua’s return.  Yet history belies this simplistic assertion.  Crime rates and test scores have ebbed and flowed throughout our nation’s history.  Currently, our crime rate and test scores are both relatively high, a combination typical of our point in a recurring generational cycle.  Crime rates and test scores have fallen dramatically before in our country, and every sign is that they will both fall again.

How Did We Get So Exclusively Linear?

Our Evangelical view of history is linear in part because of the life experience of its most influential members.  The American Evangelical church has always been most influenced by America’s idealistic generations that serve as the foot soldiers in the large spiritual awakenings that occur once each generational cycle and always in the idealist generation’s coming-of-age years.  These idealistic generations – the most recent of which is the Baby Boomers – rebel against the spiritual depravity their fathers’ material successes bring. They live their lifetimes in a society that starts with oppressive order but ends in spiritual chaos and national crises.  We all tend to see national events and trends during our lifetime as part of a greater linear continuum, of course, and the spiritually influential idealist generation in every American generational cycle always sees society move from control to chaos.  Thus we have generations of Evangelical leaders who see their lives being played out against a backdrop of a society moving inexorably toward a biblical apocalypse.

This is not the experience of other generations in the American generational cycle.  The more practical and street-wise reactive generations that follow idealist generations, for instance, come of age in culturally stratified and relatively depraved societies, come into midlife leadership during national crises, and live out the rest of their lives in societies that enforce stricter moral codes.  Their view of history is generally also linear, but it is usually less apocalyptic.

Having had the idealist generation’s apocalyptic view reinforced over several generational cycles, there’s almost a fear in recognizing the cyclical aspect of history’s nature.  Are we denying the truth of the second coming by recognizing that society moves in cycles?  Hardly.

Refusing to Choose Between Cyclical and Linear History

A linear view of history leads us inexorably to Yeshua’s return and allows for progressive factors such as international trade, international government, and scientific and technological advances.  A cyclical view, on the other hand, accounts for much of the fits and starts, the disjointed way in which generation follows generation and the timing and relative placement of spiritual movements and national crises.

An understanding of how God generally works over generations is like a pastoral understanding of how sin and grace work in different types of people.  People are as individual as snowflakes, yet pastors (and businesspeople and educators) know that, in some ways, categorizing perople by personality types can be helpful.   Generations are all different but may be grouped into types, too, and prophets should be as familiar with generational types as pastors are with personality types.

So we need a more balanced and biblical view of history and prophecy, one that recognizes history’s cyclical aspects as well as its linear ones.  It’s not a choice of one or the other. When we are open to both, we are open to a richer picture of what God is saying to the church.  A linear view of history correctly teaches us that Yeshua is returning, but a cyclical view of history keeps us from seeing ourselves as the culmination of history.  Such a generation-wide exercise in narcissism would earn Job’s sarcastic rebuke to his shortsighted friends: “No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you!” (Job 12:2)

Generational theory gives us the necessary tools and insight to receive what God may be saying to us about Obama, his streetwise, reactive Generation X leadership, and the next few decades in our national history.  I use Strauss and Howe, though one might use other, less renowned generational theorists for this purpose.  Without some appreciation for the cyclical aspect of history from one source or another, however, the American church stands a greater chance of choking on the message I think God may intend for our nourishment.

Our Coming National Crisis . . . and Our Past Ones

Generational history confirms what many of us have suspected for years: in the next ten or twenty years, America will face a national crisis that will threaten its survival, much as Egypt faced at the time of Joseph’s rise.  Egypt’s crisis was economic in nature, stemming from seven years of famine.  America’s crisis could be economic, too, though it could as easily be military, ecological, climatic, social, and/or terroristic in nature.

America has faced such a crisis once every generational cycle, beginning with the Glorious Revolution and following with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II.  Between each crisis has come a spiritual awakening, starting with the Puritan Awakening, the Great Awakening, the Transcendental Movement, the Missionary Awakening, and, most recently, the Boom Awakening and the Jesus and Charismatic Movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s.  A period of unraveling, such as the one we are coming to the end of, arrives after each awakening and before each crisis.

According to Strauss and Howe, we are moving to the end of a twenty-plus-year-long unraveling phase in our own generational cycle.  Unraveling periods are characterized by deepening social anxiety as institutions fall into disrepute and as America seems to drift politically.  Politicians focus on Culture Wars and put off longstanding civic problems the country does not have the political will to address.  It happened in the 1920’s, and it is happening again today.

The End of the Culture Wars

American Culture Wars always grow up between spiritual revivals and national crises.  On at least one occasion, a Culture War helped bring on a national crisis – America’s Civil War.  But Culture Wars usually fade away, just as Prohibition was repealed during the last generational cycle as that cycle moved from its third (“unraveling”) phase to its fourth and final phase, the crisis phase.

Our Culture Wars will fade, too.  The national crisis we’ll be involved in over the next decade or two may resolve some of them for us.

The Upside to National Crises

A national crisis is a bad thing, of course, but, along with sometimes resolving Culture Wars, it often generates the political will and unity necessary to solve longstanding civic challenges.  Supporters and critics alike are amazed at the opportunity the current financial crisis is affording Obama before the first days of his administration.  Polls show that the country in general is supportive of his spending of close a trillion dollars to get the economy fixed.  Political friends and foes alike believe that Obama could get in almost all of his more expensive proposals through, including energy reforms and health care, under the guise of fixing the economy.  He even has the necessary political cover for it, thanks to the current administration’s successful attempts at persuading Congress to write similar checks for up to seven hundred billion dollars.

The current financial crisis is not the national-survival-threatening crisis I speak of, but it may be a harbinger of it.  As such, the alignment of events in Obama’s favor is a sign to  the church of the crisis season we are entering.  In fact, for a season, I think God may allow the financial situation to get worse each time the public shies away from supporting Obama’s strong medicine.  The reason?  The church needs to understand that, during a national crisis, “everything is new and yielding,” as Benjamin Rush said of his own American Revolution era (Strauss 178).  Our institutions and assumptions are more malleable now than they have been since Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.  Many government institutions and the assumptions about the government’s role vis-à-vis our freedoms and finances are about to change, and most of these changes will last for another cycle of four generations, should our nation last that long.  And God has special roles for national leaders during crisis periods.

This is not to say that Obama’s decisions will be the correct ones or that the church should invariably support him.  It is only to say that Christians should have a prophetic understanding of the times and of Obama’s presidency in order to develop a humble, prophetic voice at a national level.  We should not have a linear view of history -- of our own life cycle, in essence -- in which we resist every economic change in the name of God, or at least in the name of the God we associate with the stifling 1950’s and twentieth-century capitalism.  A closer look at Joseph and his times may help us with this prophetic framework.

Survival vs. Loss of Freedoms

The Bible has nothing bad to say about Joseph even as he spent fourteen years transforming Egyptian society into a dictatorship under which Pharaoh ended up owning everything and everybody.  Presumably, the Bible’s lack of negative commentary concerning Joseph’s plan means that this state of affairs – the loss of economic and political freedom – was better than the alternative, which was worldwide starvation.  Here’s how David prophetically looked back on Joseph’s role:

He called down famine on the land and cut off their daily bread. But he had sent on a man before them, Joseph, who was sold into slavery, where they thrust his feet into fetters and clamped an iron collar round his neck. He was tested by the Lord’s command until what he foretold took place. Thing sent and had him released, the ruler of peoples set him free and made him master of his household, ruler over all his possessions, to correct his officers as he saw fit and teach his counselors wisdom. Then Israel too went down into Egypt, Jacob came to live in the land of Ham. There God made his people very fruitful . . . (Psalm 105:16-24, REB)

I do not mean to say that we’re facing slavery or that we should submit to it should it come.  But we may lose financial and personal freedoms as a result of a national crisis that could occur over the next twenty years and as a result of how Obama or his successors and Conrgress deal with the crisis, assuming that our country survives in some form.  This loss of freedom – even perhaps a partial or complete loss of national sovereignty – will be part of God’s judgment on our country for the decisions we’ve made against his will, decisions that both right-wing and left-wing Americans can easily compile, if  not agree upon yet.  But God has sent Obama and his street-wise, practical generation (Gen X) to help lead America through whatever crisis it will face and to help it survive as well as can be expected.

In his mercy, then, God may have raised up Obama to begin to help America prepare for its crisis so it can survive and endure.  At times, Christians won’t have much of a choice but to consider helping Obama or his successors out, since the survival of many Christians will depend on it.  We won’t be able to take a geographic out, either, since the crisis will be more or less worldwide, just like the crisis that Jacob and his sons faced.

Obama and his Generation as Joseph

If we look at how God’s picture of Joseph may describe Obama, we may be more likely to understand what God is doing through Obama and his Generation-X cohorts.  Joseph had a hardscrabble existence as a young adult, first as a servant and then as a prisoner in a foreign country.  Obama, too, spent some of his teen years overseas, separated from his father as well as his sister.   He received his training in the inner city, which may be comparable in some respects to Joseph’s prison.

Immediately following Obama’s election, America was treated to the unusual spectacle of primitive-looking Kenyans dancing in celebration of their native son’s election.  This is a sign to the church – a reminder of how a small band of unsophisticated shepherds to the east of Egypt rejoiced when it heard the news of how its native son Joseph had, against all odds, risen to lead that great nation.

Obama’s story of alienation, drug use, and then hardscrabble rise is picture-perfect for his Generation-X cohort, too.  Boomers have long derided Gen-Xers as lazy, valueless, and treacherous, just as every idealistic generation has done to the reactive generation that followed it.  Yet reactive generations, sandwiched between the more dominating idealistic and civic generations, have produced some of our country’s most effective leaders, including George Washington and Harry Truman.  Probably no student of cyclical history was surprised that Obama has taken steps demonstrating his preference for governing from the center.  His cabinet is as distinguished and as ideologically diverse as Washington’s, and on average as moderate.  Obama, like Washington and Truman before him, will have lively cabinet debates, but he will govern with little regard for the kind of ideology that drives the decisions of presidents of idealist generations, such as the Boomers’ Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  While Obama’s presidency and the presidencies that follow it will most likely have more impact on the next cycle of generations than either of Obama’s two immediate predecessors, it won’t be seen as a victory of what we now define as liberal orthodoxy.

It may be a blessing from God that the likes of Clinton and Bush and their idealistic Boomer generation probably will not be president during the next national crisis.  The idealistic Transcendentalist generation was in power in both the North and South as the Civil War approached.  “. . . [B]orn to heroic parents, indulged as children, fiery as youth, narcissistic as rising adults, and values-fixated entering midlife . . . [Transcendentalists] ultimately chose to join technology and passion to achieve the maximum apocalypse then conceivable” (Generations 205).

What other qualities do Obama and Joseph share?  The long-running presidential campaign that just ended offered us a view of Obama’s qualities, and they mesh well with Joseph’s:

Inspiring and organizing people.  Obama speaks to get people to act.  Even when he was forced to give a speech in Philadelphia to protect himself from the effects of Rev. Wright, it turned out to be a persuasive call for a national dialogue on race.  Obama has attracted people with his rhetoric, but he has also helped those people find their place in the most impressive presidential campaign in U.S. history.  His campaign was both personal and technological with a modern corporation’s care for extending and protecting its brand – a perfect fit for the candidate and the times.  It was well organized, but it allowed for a lot of flexibility on the local level.  In the end, his description of it as a grassroots movement wasn’t too off the mark – a grassroots movement overseen by a master community organizer who learned to do nationwide what he had done on the streets of Chicago.  The number of donations, donors and volunteers to his campaign has broken records, as we all know.

Obama’s people seem at a loss over what to do with the three million members they have signed up to his web site.  So far it has just raised money for the inauguration and for charity.  A national emergency may make this list, or a similar one, a leading national force again.

Joseph sold Pharaoh and an entire nation on his plan, and then he mobilized the nation to follow thorough on it.  If we face a crisis, Obama may need to mobilize and organize Americans in a similar fashion, and he seems to have better skills than any recent national politician to do it.

Valuing pragmatism over ideology.  One of Obama’s biggest problems will be the Democratic Congress.  To return to a previous point for a moment, I think Obama may prove in the long run to be one of the least ideological presidents we’ve had, even though his Congressional voting record would suggest otherwise.  Obama was preaching post-partisanship when post-partisanship wasn’t cool, back a year ago when the other Democratic candidates were trying to inspire primary voters with a vision of Democratic Party ascendancy.  I remember one Washington Postarticle in particular that questioned whether Obama’s bipartisan message during much of 2007 could possibly win the nomination of an angry, eager Democratic Party (Washington Post, "Does Obama's Message Match the Moment?" 17 Oct. 2007).

Joseph also had little concern for precedence or ideology as he implemented a plan to save Egypt from starvation.  His reforms for collecting and distributing food were unprecedented, apparently.

Sticking with the plan.  Joseph must have gotten a good deal of heat for sticking with his plan no matter how silly it seemed to do so during the plentiful years.  Obama and his advisors stuck to their overall campaign strategy, showing very little worry or shifting, for instance, when his poll numbers didn’t rise as quickly as he had expected against Hillary Clinton late last year.  When McCain picked Palin and then later “suspended” his campaign to save the nation from its financial crisis, Obama again stuck with his plan, never criticizing McCain’s choices until doing so implicitly a week before the election. Obama has shown that he can stick with a plan even though the payoff isn’t evident to most.

Seeing around the corner.  Joseph’s foresight was vindicated in the end, and some of Obama’s foresight has been vindicated, too.  Obama was criticized for stances he took with regard to Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran, but in each case the Bush Administration found itself forced to follow his lead.  With regard to Pakistan, Obama suggested that we not ignore any evidence of bin Laden’s and Al Qaeda’s whereabouts but that we attack them, unilaterally if necessary.  He got a lot of heat for that position, but four months later President Bush did just as he suggested: he attacked Al Qaeda positions inside Pakistan, and he did so with moderate success.  The second instance is Iran, where Obama has advocated direct engagement at lower diplomatic levels and not at the presidential level unless and until progress is made.  Senator McCain doesn't seem to understand this distinction, and he ridiculed what once was an unquestioned tenet of our foreign policy under presidents like Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy.  Later we learned that President Bush had again adjusted his foreign policy to follow Obama’s lead.  He dispatched officials who are negotiating directly with Iran.  With regard to Iraq, Obama advocated a sixteen-month withdrawal timetable, was criticized for it, and then had his approach, if not the specific number of months, affirmed in essence by the presidents of both Iraq and the United States.

(I hope you’ll excuse the sometimes politically biased nature of the four previous paragraphs.  I wanted to state the issue most favorably to Obama in order to make a point about his specific gifts.)

Our Children: The Latest “Greatest Generation”

Aging Evangelical Boomers wonder how their children will relate to an Obama presidency and to presidencies that follow.  Some aging Evangelicals expect their children – biological and spiritual – to smell what they consider to be a rat and to counter Obama’s policies.  By and large, this will not happen.

Our children will generally settle in and support Obama and his immediate successors, just like the people of Egypt supported Joseph.  The Missionary generation of the early twentieth century – another idealistic, values-oriented generation like the Boomers – had a rebellious youth and a narcissistic, Culture-War-filled adulthood, and they couldn’t comprehend how 100,000 of their children could flood Boston Commons in 1933 and chant in honor of a new president, “I promise as a good American to do my part.  I will help President Roosevelt bring back good times” (Fourth Turning 292).  This young, G.I. generation was the latest of our country’s civic generations, the “Greatest Generation” that saved democracy during World War II and helped forge the governmental institutions we’ve lived under since the 1930’s.  The Millennial generation, now moving into adulthood, promises to be the next civic generation, and they have given America the spectacle of a government-supporting, political youth movement unseen since the days of FDR.

Our inner-oriented and spiritual Boom generation has already warmed to many aspects of the Millennial generation, but we Boomers may eventually be disappointed with them.  The Millennials are easy to disciple: like all civic generations, it longs for the spiritual guidance offered by the elder idealist generation before it.  But our current youth generation is not the generation that will usher in or show forth our Boomer notions of the Kingdom of God.

How Boomers Will Sometimes Misunderstand Millennials

Civic generations are far more outward-oriented than inward-oriented, and their spirituality always has less of a judgmental and apocalyptic feel than does the idealistic generation that mentors them.  They insist that their religion, like everything else about them, be practical, positive, and supportive of their civic mission.  In other words, the Boom generation has given birth to a generation that looks more like their G.I. fathers than themselves.  It will be up to the Millennial generation’s own children to begin to break the bonds of the institutions the Millennials themselves will help to fashion.

To many aging Boomers, this Millennial can-do, civic spirit will seem anathema.  The apostle Sam Soleyn, for instance,wrote the church that Obama literally summoned a spirit of self-reliance when he proclaimed during his election-night speech: “Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people."  Sam’s view that Obama literally invoked a spirit tells me that Sam saw something in the spirit – specifically, a call for a young, civic-minded generation to come into its own.  Sam was right: it was a significant moment.  However, Sam’s literal take on Obama's use of the phrase "summon a new spirit" also demonstrates that he sees the moment in a negative light, as a spiritual member of an idealist generation might well do. And accepting Sam’s literal view of Obama’s statement on its face, Sam is also somewhat negative – and somewhat unfair – in characterizing the specific spirit invoked as that of self-reliance instead of patriotism, responsibility, and brotherly love.  If we’re literal about the invocation, we should in fairness be literal also about what’s invoked.  While Sam’s characterization is insightful, it is also indicative of a spiritual Boomer’s dissatisfaction with a civic generation: we rejected self-reliance in our fathers, and we will come to reject it in our daughters and sons, too.

The Release of a Secular, Practical Civic Generation Is Good!

Just as Obama released a civic generation to its purpose on Election Night, wise Boomers will learn to follow his example and do the same.  Because generational types mirror personality types, it is helpful to compare generational relations with family relations.  Children often resemble grandparents in ways that challenge parents, and so do generations.  Wise parents not only recognize this but give themselves to their children in ways that foster their children’s calling.  One can see this on a generational level, too.  Strauss and Howe think so: “Historians agree that the spiritual fury of the Great Awakening fed directly, decades later, into the political fury of the American Revolution.  According to Nathan Hatch, ‘Few would doubt that the piety of the Awakening was the main source of the civil millennialism of the Revolutionary period’” (Generations 163).  The Boomers’ spiritual energy can feed the Millennials’ civic energy, just as the idealist Awakener generation fed the civic Republican generation.(1)

This self-reliance (if you will), unspiritual as it might seem to many spiritual Boomers, is precisely what every American civic generation is principally about.  God is wise enough to use civic generations for his purposes, and he always offers them a spiritual identity and expression that satisfies them.  Whether members of that generation accept their God-given identity and expression is another matter.  And civic generations are the most overtly secular generations – think of most of the Republican generation and the G.I. generation leaders – who, as a whole, see their elders as somewhat moralistic and impractical (which, as a whole, they are).

Historically speaking, if the self-reliant, overtly secular Millennial generation didn’t show up, America would be in a lot of trouble.  In seven generational cycles, civic generations have failed to follow idealistic and reactive generations only once -- at the onset of America’s Civil War.  During that generational cycle, the idealistic Transcendentalist generation’s Culture Wars were never resolved but spilled over into overt war.  Indeed, in 1991, Strauss and Howe hoped that the national crisis they spoke of would not come early.  If it did, then Boomers would still be in power, and “the national cycle suggests that the risk of cataclysm would be very high.  During the 2000—2009 decade, Boomers would be squarely in midlife and nearing the peak of their political and institutional power.  From a life-cycle perspective, they will be exactly where the Transcendentalists [the Civil War cycle’s Prophet generation] were when John Brown was planning his raid on Harper’s Ferry.”  For all of their theory and emphasis on spiritual matters, idealist generations are very warlike when in power at or near national crisis.  It’s better to have them on the political sidelines where they can serve as advisers – particularly as spiritual advisors – to  reactive and civic generation leaders, just as Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams, and their idealist generation successfully served reactive generation Washington and civic generation Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe during and after the American Revolution.

So, under Strauss and Howe’s theory, the biggest drama each generational cycle is whether or not a civic generation will show up at all.  Happily, every sign points to their arrival.  Like every young civic generation before it, the Millennial generation is marked by rising test scores; an earnest desire to please; a willingness to be discipled by their elders, particularly on spiritual matters; a practicality that worries their idealist predecessors; and a penchant to value social structures (think Facebook and YouTube) over individual pursuits.

To me, the biggest sign that a civic generation has arrived and is coming into its own is its strong response to Obama’s candidacy.  Civic generations often do very well being led by someone of the immediately preceding reactive generation.  The release of a new civic generation under a Generation-X leader may be an indication that, by God’s mercy, America will be a lot more prepared for a national emergency than if Boomers remained in power.

A young, civic-minded, can-do generation has indeed been released on the world, just as it has been released during every American crisis age since before the republic, with the unfortunate exception of the Civil War.  The release of the Millennial generation to its God-given, civic calling is a good thing even though, as a generation, it will often act unjustly and will often lack the spiritual insight of either its parents or its children.

Joseph’s Success Empowered Future, Malevolent Pharaohs

I return now to the mixed signals God is giving the American church today, similar to the mixed signals Jacob got from God as he was deciding whether to move to Egypt with his family.  God is telling the American church, I think, to be open to the possibility that Obama and his immediate succesors may help lead a new generation to see us out of a future national crisis, even though the crisis is in some measure a judgment against our country and even though the measures, like Joseph’s, will amount to future impingements on our economic or personal freedoms, or both.

God may also be saying that our posterity will suffer under those measures.  Not our children, mind you – many of them will be helping to enforce those measures in various ways.  But a day will come when Obama and his reactive generation are gone from leadership, and the policies and institutions that were necessary to lead us out of a crisis may well be used to hamper the poor and the church that associates with the poor.

Remember that ominous beginning to the Book of Exodus? “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8).  Although they helped to save Egypt – helped to save civilization, in fact – Joseph’s policies created a mechanism for a future Pharaohs to persecute his own descendents.  Joseph left the office of Pharaoh with institutions and powers that made future Pharaohs much more powerful and more menacing figures.

Sam Soleyn, then, may be right in saying that the institutions formed under Obama and his immediate successors will be turned against the real church of the Millennial generation.  But a more cyclical (and, I think, biblical) view of history would suggest that these instruments and institutions won’t be turned against our children so much as against our children’s children.

Our Next Oppressive First Turning

In American history, the periods between national crises and spiritual awakenings resemble the years of groaning that Israel suffered under Pharaoh’s hardships.  The last such “first turning,” as Strauss and Howe label these times in our generational cycles, was oppressive, though not to mainstream American Christians, per se.  The late 1940’s and 1950’s witnessed a uniformity of cultural expression unthinkable in our current, late-third-turning segment of a generational cycle.(2)  The period following a crisis generally sees institutions, newly formed by necessity under that crisis, in high regard, and the civic generation that helped form those institutions generally guards them in midlife with their considerable political power.  This will happen again should our country survive its coming crisis in some form.  By and large, our children will help guard these dearly won institutions from all threats, even if, in doing so, it harms a significant segment of society.

Our Next Spiritual Awakening . . . and Our Next Idealist Generation

I believe that a significant segment of the national and world population will be on the short end of the political stick following the crisis, and they will be oppressed and persecuted.  Compromises with our economic creditors and with growing military powers or terrorists may create international institutions that will have a greater reach than our own generational cycle can imagine living under.  What we call the church will be divided into those that support the oppression and those that are among the oppressed.  The church, which has already been growing exponentially in the third world and in lower strata of various countries’ societies, may begin to be associated internationally with the third world and with those marginalized strata.  Seeking no worldly power but nevertheless threatening the worldly powers with a spiritual awakening, the post-crisis poor and disfranchised may find themselves on the wrong side of these newly minted institutions.  Our children’s children, then -- a new idealist generation that may be more tried by more fire than our own Boomer generation -- may well fulfill the promise of our own idealistic generation, called to lead future generations into a fuller understanding of the kingdom of God.  And there will be a new institutional church and a new authentic church, one on each side of the institutional divide.

Perhaps the next idealist generation will hear about how the last previous idealist generation, the Boomers, generally squandered its chance to help lead the intervening civic generation to its destiny.  Perhaps it will hear of somewhat more successful idealist generations, such as the Awakening generation that discipled the Republican generation, a civic generation that enshrined our liberties (and, tragically, the slavery of African Americans).  Perhaps it will realize its calling to nurture an international community with a spiritual awakening that will sweep not just the nation but a better part of the world.

Just as God may be raising up a Joseph of sorts for our coming civic crisis, God will raise up a deliverer (or, far more likely, many deliverers) like Moses to administer an awakening and to lead his people out of the tyranny caused by the political apparatus Joseph and his cohorts will leave behind.

But let’s not be too quick to say that Christ will return then and there.  He might, but let’s not say so.  I reckon it’s better to say with John: Come, Lord Jesus.

Boomers’ Spiritual Seeds in Millennials

In speaking in terms of generations, I do not speak of everyone within a generation.  Generations are made up of all types.  Each generation has a dominant personality type, however, and faces similar upbringings and adult challenges associated with that generational type.  Generations within a generational type imprint the nation’s history with similar accomplishments and tragedies.  Many in the can-do Millennium generation will carry the spiritual seed from their Boomer parents, especially from those parents who have learned how different a child’s calling may be from their own.  Many of these Millennial children will carry these seeds even as the full expression of that generation will be more civic and less spiritual in nature than its parents’ generation.  Those Millennials will understand, in a unique way specific to their milieu, what it means to live in the kingdom of God.

In Conclusion

This piece is not a call to support Barack Obama, nor is it an attempt to make him more palatable to Evangelical sensibilities by cloaking him with the many-colored coat of one the church’s chief heroes.  Instead, I’m only one voice in an important dialogue that might lead to a broader and more prophetic framework for the Evangelical church to use in relating to future national and international events.

I do not mean to suggest that Obama is Joseph, one of the few major biblical figures without a documented shortcoming.  Obama, by his own admission, has many shortcomings, and I’m sure we’ll discover many more than we are aware of now.  I suggest, rather, that Joseph may provide us with a prophetic picture of Obama's role, just as Joseph's time in power (preparation and crisis) give us a way to see some aspects of our own times.

Through Barack Obama’s election, God may be giving the Evangelical church the opportunity and the motivation to shed its myopic, linear-only, and idealist-generation-oriented view of history and prophecy for at least a generation.  If the Evangelical church does so, it may be better able to release and serve the immediately succeeding generations.  The framework from our dialogue might also be helpful in deciding which candidates and bills to support and which invocations to give, but that is less consequential.

I am speaking generally and am surely wrong in many particulars.  Still, I hope something in here helps.

__________

1 The Evangelical church is far from recognizing generational roles in the accomplishment of significant milestones, such as the United States’s political independence, the abolition of slavery, and civil rights. In insisting that America was founded as a Christian nation, for instance, the Religious Right recasts the civic Republican generation of Jefferson and Madison as an idealist generation like their fathers (Awakeners). The Evangelical church does not accept the secular nature of the Republican generation, just as it won’t accept the secular nature of the Millennial generation. The Evangelical church would be better off recognizing successful relationships between idealist and civic relationships, such as that between Awakeners and Republicans. It would be more historically accurate, and it would help the Boomer-oriented Evangelicals discover how its spirituality can positively influence and support the civic-minded Millennials.

2 It is interesting to me that the Religious Right looks back with longing to the oppressive Forties and Fifties. Ozzie and Harriet, Ward and the Beaver have become this Evangelical generation’s version of Egypt’s leeks and garlics that the Bible’s Wilderness generation longed for in Egypt. Idealist generations spend their childhoods in culturally oppressive first turnings and long for the reassuring fruit of that oppression during unraveling periods, such as the present third turning.

I sometimes confuse apocrypha with apocalypse, apocalyptical with apocryphal.  Sure, they look and sound the same, but I think something in me feels like they mean the same, too.  The Apocrypha and the Apocalypse both seem out of the New Testament mainstream and seem vaguely threatening to that mainstream.  The Apocrypha, it might be said, is a bunch of books that could be God’s Word that is often printed with God’s Word.  Who was behind this, and what was he trying to do to my concept of God’s Word?  It's as insidious as the beasts with their lying wonders.

In my Evangelical mind, the New Testament seems sandwiched in time between true-sounding stuff that might be false, and false-sounding stuff that must somehow be true.

Hanukkah, of course, is a minor Jewish holiday instituted (probably) in the apocryphal Book of 1 Maccabees.  Actually, the Catholics and Orthodox include 1 Maccabees in their canon, but the Jews and Protestants don’t.  The Jews, of course, don’t have much use for sola scriptura, so everyone’s on board with Hanukkah one way or another but us Protestants.

I didn’t celebrate Christmas for years, either, not finding any evidence for that holiday in Scripture.  (Under this reasoning, Hanukkah has a greater claim to legitimacy than Christmas since Hanukkah at least makes it into the New Testament: we catch Jesus celebrating it in the Gospel of John.)  Now I celebrate both holidays.  While this inclusive approach may or may not be commendable, it’s been fun.

1 Maccabees feels like the Bible to me.  Its central character reminds me of Nehemiah, a defiant leader who bucks the odds with a lot of success. As soon as his dad dies and leaves the Jewish resistance movement in his hands, Judah “The Hammer” Maccabee rallies many of his fellow Israelis in their guerrilla warfare campaign against one of Alexander the Great’s political descendents, his vast army, and the Jewish “renegades” who have gone over to the dark side.

1 Maccabees also reminds me of the Book of Esther.   Both books have the Jews’ apocalyptic struggle against annihilation by their conquerors as their themes, and neither book makes any direct reference to God.

The story of Hanukkah also reminds me of my two children.  Judah, who had a difficult time going along with what everyone else was doing, could be Warren's patron saint.   Once when Warren was three, Victoria was getting him ready for Sunday school.  He raised a lament, apropos of nothing: “But I don’t want to obey my teachers!”

Two years later, Warren was skating counter-clockwise while the other three hundred children on the ice rink were skating clockwise.  Victoria stopped him and told him that he needed to skate “like everybody else.”

Warren stared incredulously.  “Why do I need to do that?”

(Victoria treasured up these sayings in her heart, wondering what role he might play in the latter days.)

For me, Bethany comes into the Hanukkah story once the Jews recapture Jerusalem.  The Jews clean up, rebuild, and rededicate the temple.  Bethany is very dedicated to God and finds a lot of meaning in worship.  The Bible’s comparison of our bodies with the temple of God resonates strongly with her.

Bethany especially likes the story about the miracle of lights.  When she was little, she’d watch the candles as we’d read in the storybook about how the one-day supply of oil lasted the eight days it takes to celebrate Hanukkah.

The only problem is, the miracle of lights never makes it into 1 Maccabees.  Its writer, always reticent about more than inferring divine intervention, leaves the miracle of lights story to be told in the Talmud.  My Protestant mind scoffs: the miracle of lights is too apocryphal for the Apocrypha!  But the story sounds like the God of the Bible, and watching Bethany relate to it over the years, I’ve become a believer, too.  It’s hard to arrive at the whole truth according only to Protestant lights.

I’ve included two photographs.  The first is of Bethany at age four, intent on the menorah she had made out of clay.  The second is of Warren, taken tonight, lighting the shamash out of order with a blowtorch.

Happy Hanukkah.  Here’s to truth and light.

Somehow I end up with Fords, and somehow they all let me down.  Fords follow cars I like (and even name): my Ford Pinto wagon followed my VW Squareback (tan; hence, “the Pig”), my Ford Mustang followed my Toyota Corona (dubbed “the Sewing Machine,” due to its engine, by my father), and my current Mercury Sable wagon followed my Subaru Impreza (“the Zipmobile”).  With the exception of the Subaru, the three foreign cars were dreams I scraped up money for and bought near the end of their lives.  The Subaru was the only new car I’ve ever bought, but I totaled it on an icy overpass a few years back.

After the death of each dream car, my parents graciously step in with a bailout plan, and one of the plan’s conditions is always a Ford.

This cycle has gone on uninterrupted since my sister and I bought the Pig back in 1977.

My Fords die relatively young, and my Sable, after about 65,000 miles, has been in the shop for about a month.  The repair guy’s shop has a great reputation, and he has always treated me well.  He hasn’t figured out what’s wrong with the Sable’s electrical system.  He recognizes, though, that his customer isn’t hot to get his car back, so my car hasn’t gotten much attention from him over the past few days.

I’m at the point in my car cycle where I’d scrape together some cash and buy another small, foreign, dream car.  But this time I have no cash, and I no longer want a car.

Cars don’t allure me anymore.  I like the idea of being green, but it’s more than that.  Even electric and hydrogen fuel cell cars don’t move me, perhaps because I’ve been reading about these cars for decades and have felt like the auto industry and Congress misled me about their willingness to make it happen.  But the allure is gone mainly because cars are such bothers.

My life, already pedestrian in my students’ view, is becoming more pedestrian in the more pedestrian sense of the word.  I ride my bike or walk to school and to the public library.  Our neighborhood’s one-month-old grocery store is a seven-minute walk from our house.  Last month, I quit the gym I’ve been a member of for the past ten years in favor of one that will open in two weeks around the corner from the grocery store.

Victoria’s Sienna would make us a one-car family, and I wouldn’t mind if I never drove a car again.  We live just off the W&OD bike trail; maybe I’ll scrape up enough money over the next couple of years for a good used road bike to replace my current, yard-sale clunker.  Thanks, folks, but no more automobile bailouts.

Four Anglican Communion bloggers have lit my Advent candles.  Simon Kershaw at Thinking Anglicans (I dislike the name's implication) homilizes the life of Nicholas Ferrar in preparation for Holy Communion to be celebrated at his grave in Little Gidding:

Nicholas Ferrar and his family, living a quiet and godly life at Little Gidding, did not forget the poor and needy. They welcomed into their household a number of poor widows, they provided alms and education for many, and Ferrar, utilizing his training in medicine, ran a dispensary for the neighbourhood.

Fr. Scott, who pointed me to that post, picks up on its Four Quartets overtones at Fr. Scott & Co. Ask Some New Questions.  Indeed, Fr. Scott chose to link not to the post but to theThinking Anglicans site itself, where the hopeful, big-themed Nicholas Ferrar post is surrounded by posts filled with links to dire-sounding news reports concerning the recent American Episcopal Church rift.

Like Four Quartets, Beth’s words often feel like music to me, and here she is at Cassandra Pages, sweating out and enjoying a new challenge in preparation for the Advent Lessons and Carols program at her cathedral today:

We've just learned an exciting new piece, a setting of the poem "Earthquake" by Thomas Merton, composed for the choir by the director and organist, Patrick Wedd. It's unlike anything I've ever sung, with twenty bells rung in chords by choir members and free-form chanting of the text in some places, where each of us starts and ends a phrase individually before the choir comes together again on a following phrase.

Finally, Paula of Paula’s House of Toast posted “Advent,” a new poem with four stanzas accompanied by four striking photographs, all of which reminds me also of Four Quartets.  Here’s the first stanza:

There is no lack of lack. 
The wind, restless and laden, sinks, 
erases what might lead us back to where
the leaves unbleach, unmould
to ancient, ever-virgin green
or so we think.
There is no way but what's beneath the feet.

By the way, you can catch Beth’s choir’s performance today at Radio Ville-Marie (click “Nous ecouter en direct” in the upper-right portion of the window).  When?  4 P.M., of course (EST).

Each year my high priestess, not without blood, phones to recite the story of my birth.  We danced at the Chamberlin against a night of few stars, she says, colonnade women and poplin men in brick-soled bucks on bluegrass. Heat lightning tugged at tankers in a dark offing.

We were at a point; you’ve seen the Chamberlin from a skipjack, rising and falling against sky and Hampton Roads, respectively; well, we rose and fell in the barest swell, I’m sure, the Navy Band’s brass and dress whites narrowly ruffled in black water. It was hot, a solstice hot, not unrelenting but apogeic; I think a June night is an anomaly and a celebration, brief as it is, and a summer night young enough to admit that summer hasn’t come, and 1957, too, the boom year of baby boom babies, the height of something you were born to fall from, and the top of a clock; I wanted you born by midnight.  I didn’t want you born on the thirteenth.

To the side, in a green dress, your grandmother, just five years older than you are today, her hair a black and silver you never knew, talked with her friends. (I have never thought of her with either friends or dark hair, I think to myself, but later I realize that I had thought last year when Mom had called how I had never thought of her that way; this year, though – I think for the first time – I think: nor have I ever thought of her in a cotton dress.)

Between numbers, after months of expansion, the contractions, the clock hands climbing and not falling, the heat a haze and not unrelenting, a presence and a midwife, really, and your father, excusing himself from his fellows, took me by an elbow, if you can picture that.  His long, black Studebaker bent around Newport News Point to 50th Street and the hospital, ablaze above the James River and its own silent ships.  The doctor and I worked to have you born today; your father, outside, rocked on his heels.  11:43.  There you were, and she hangs up again.

I look out my window, appeased.  I cradle the phone.  I can see the same moon that floated below those ruffled colonnades.  But I reflect that the hospital is now a parking lot, and my June nights have become like asphalt, too, expanded and contracted by a hundred solstices, buckled like lips turned upwards for their mother’s kiss.

November and poetry.  I named my only stuffed animal November; I don't know why.  I became aware of him when his eyes were scratched out and his rabbit ears were torn from their metal wires.  I remember accepting on some level that I had done this before I was I, before I remembered anything, and I remember feeling that I would never love November as much as when I didn’t know I loved him and didn’t know anything the way I did then, feeling the way I felt then and trying to see myself scratching out his eyes in love.

The memory of writing poetry is as dark as when I left school tonight just past six, gusty and cold as January night.  I walked past the bike rack I had given up a month ago, and I got in my Sable wagon.  Something electrical happened to it yesterday.  The radio and clock don’t work, half the dash lights are out, and the heat and defroster are frozen on, full blast.  I was warm by the time I stopped at the strip mall to pick up the pizza and subs.  I won’t need to get any of it fixed for a while, though I miss the radio.  I must have hit the knob six times during the five-minute drive home.

November we write poetry, mostly in muck we shape later.  We aim to make a mess, I say.  Don’t worry about spelling, poetic forms, rules of any kind.  Some days it’s work, but some days you’re unconscious.  I remember a college day playing ball in Blow Gym, and shot after shot falls; I steal the ball and race for a lay-up, three guys behind me, but I stop and do this jumper at the end, the three guys flying by me and hitting the wall.  I don’t remember it going in, but I remember knowing it goes in and being happy for the knowing and not seeing, for the forgetting that makes memory.  One guy, a real gym rat, pats me, says, “It’s a good thing you pulled up ‘cuz we were coming down on you.” That day made the other days all right.

Moving from desk to desk this week, I pushed through a hundred and twenty writer sketchbooks.  I promised not to read them but only to count the pages and finger the dog-ears.  Show me shop floors strewn with shavings and sawdust.  Brown leaves blown back through black afternoons.

Your life, little girl, is an empty page
That men will want to write on
-- Rolf to Liesl in The Sound of Music

I remember reading somewhere that Thomas Merton wondered whether he and Fundamentalist Christians served the same God.  I wonder similarly if YourBO is MyBO.  Unless you’re frank, I may not learn how MyBO offends you.

“No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.”  What do you make of that?

If you break open Obama’s memoir and take a gob of pages in each hand, bearing down somewhat with your thumbs on each open page as you might to read it, the book applauds. My daughter thought so, too.  Now, mine’s a used paperback; my mother read it at home this past summer in Tidewater where pages can get a little soggy.  Anyway, it’s the loudest book I’ve ever held.  And I think Isaiah’s prophecy that “all the trees of the field will clap their hands” has come to pass in my day, in MyBO.

This week, even the hazard of a cabinet appointment marginalized MyBO.

I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.  “I am ready to turn the page on the politics of the past.”

Christians argue most over Genesis and Revelation.  We are half-blind in different eyes, each the other's spitting image.  We see trees as men, walking.  But MyBO sees the past and future rooted in each clattering leaf.

Eventually, the rain stopped, and we found ourselves looking on a barren landscape of gravel and shrub and the occasional baobab tree, its naked, searching branches decorated with the weaver bird’s spherical nests.  I remembered reading somewhere that the baobab could go for years without flowering, surviving on the sparsest of rainfall; and seeing the trees there in the hazy afternoon light, I understood why men believed they possessed a special power – that they housed ancestral spirits and demons, that humankind first appeared under such a tree.  It wasn’t merely the oddness of their shape, their almost prehistoric outline against the stripped-down sky.  “They look as if each one could tell a story,” Auma said, and it was true, each tree seemed to possess a character, a character neither benevolent nor cruel but simply enduring, with secrets whose depths I would never plumb, a wisdom I would never pierce.  They both disturbed and comforted me, those trees that looked as if they might uproot themselves and simply walk away, were it not for the knowledge that on this earth one place is not so different from another – the knowledge that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.

That’s from pages 436 and 437 of Dreams from My Father.  Obama was in Kenya then, crying over his father’s grave.  There was no plaque on it, nothing in writing.  When he returned years later with a wife and a Harvard law degree, he found a plaque.

The GOP wrote Bill Ayers all over Obama’s book.  Turns out it was just their copy.  So they offered Pilate $10,000 to revise it, but they panicked when they read the blank proofs.  TheirBO came out last week as OurGOP and sold millions of copies.  What I have written I have written.

Thomas Merton and the baobab tree.  Neither MyBO nor I can cite sources.

We are dogs, rooting in crotches.  The past is present in a scent, the future’s brazen innocence.  MyBO is me; YourBO is you.

And Liesl’s dreamy echo: “To write on.”  There’s something indiscriminate about an empty page.

Yesterday was pouring rain.  We came, maybe five minutes apart, walking past the Obama yard sign and the For Lease sign into a suburban professional park suite smelling of fresh paint, thin and white.

By the time the fifth one of us had filed in, we pretty much looked like Ashburn: three women, two men, a black, four whites, a teacher, a government contractor, my Jewish buddy who lives behind me, and two ex-lawyers.  Five.  Different ages, too, from maybe twenty-five to sixty.  The lobby didn’t feel giddy or self-congratulating, as I had feared, though it felt like a roomful of stories untold by people who liked to tell them.

The campaign guy, a quiet kid with thinning blond hair, probably in his early thirties, mentioned the rain and suggested that we canvass by phone, and one of us, a young black woman, acquiesced.  The rest of us said no, we weren’t there for no phone.

The campaign guy looked at us and scratched the back of his neck.  “Yeah.  Okay,” he said, walking to another room with a sheaf of paper.

None of us told our stories, but I knew that some of them would come out canvassing from under umbrellas.  Debbie and I decided to go as a pair until we got comfortable enough going solo so we could cover more ground.

That’s what the [community organization] leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried with them some central explanation of themselves.  Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them.  Sacred stories.  (Dreams from My Father 190)

My father ran for office once – an unsuccessful run for the Newport News City Counsel.  I remember looking at the yellowed copy of the Daily Press that had come out sometime during the year of my birth.  My father, the headline read, “Throws His Hat in Ring.”  It gave me some clues about what the Old Man did when he left home in his white Lincoln convertible every day: a top hat, maybe a circus, his smiling face in the morning paper.

My parents and I used to canvass for Democrats in a white and increasingly Republican end of town.  The blacks lived down in East End, across the tracks from the shipyard, the municipal buildings, and what little else was left of Newport News’s downtown by the time I was a kid.

I remember at about ten years of age folding and unfolding a simple card a friend of my father’s had prepared.  Unfolded: “Vote Alan Diamonstein.”  Folded: “Vote Alan in.”  We handed our cards out to unfailingly polite neighbors who seldom voted for our candidates.  Sometimes our candidates would win, anyway, aided by the bloc vote from East End.

I haven’t canvassed since, until yesterday.

Our last house together had a front porch, so we each had two hands free.  Debbie, a cheery, slightly heavy woman who had been airing out the Obama cards she had dropped in the rain, introduced us to him.

The man, gray bearded and brusque, seemed a lot older than thirty-three, the age the campaign manifest had assigned to him from the registrar’s office.  “Obama.  Obama,” he assured us.  He had voted for Bush the last election but wanted his vote back.

“I’ve voted for a Republican in every presidential election since 1980, until now,” I confided to him.

Debbie looked up at me.  As we walked down the driveway, she said, “You’re good at this.”

“Thanks!” I said.  “You’re good, too.  We’re real, you know that?”

My father, a raconteur, has told me a certain story only twice.  At a vestry meeting at our midtown Episcopal church during the Fifties, he had made a short, impassioned plea in favor of permitting black people to worship there.

“Jenkins raises his voice and says, ‘You’re a nigger lover,’” my father told me.   Jenkins was a generation older than my father. “It was awful.

“A week later, Jenkins pulls me aside. ‘I’m sorry, Warren,’ he says.  ‘I shouldn’t have called you that.’”  My father’s eyes get a little wet like they do at the end of some stories.

Only recently have I understood that the denouement was the most important part of that story, that it didn’t tie up a loose end so much as it reflected a reversal of fortune.  It has been hard for me to understand Jenkins’s generation.

Even Jane or Zeituni could say things that surprised me.  “The Luo are intelligent but lazy,” they would say.  Or “The Kikuyu are money-grubbing but industrious.”  Or “The Kalenjins – well, you can see what’s happened to the country since they took over.”

Hearing my aunts traffic in such stereotypes, I would try to explain to them the error of their ways.  “It’s thinking like that that holds us back,” I would say.  “We’re all part of one tribe.  The black tribe.  The human tribe.  Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia.”

And Jane would say, “Ah, those West Africans were all crazy anyway.  You know they used to be cannibals, don’t you?”

And Zeituni would say, “You sound just like your father, Barry.  He also had such ideas about people.”

Meaning he, too was naïve; he, too, liked to argue with history.  Look what happened to him  . . . (Dreams from My Father 348)

Debbie and I were on opposite sides of another suburban street with expensive homes.   The rain had stopped, but I still carried my umbrella, now at my side.  My canvassing manifest indicated that my next house was home to a young, first-time voter, but her mother, a black woman peering through an eight-inch opening in the doorway, told me that her daughter was away at college.

I introduced myself as an Obama volunteer who lived just behind the high school.   (“Don’t let them think you’re from Maryland or something,” the campaign guy had told us.  “I mean, I’m from Illinois, and we get a lot of volunteers from Maryland.  But if you’re from around here . . .” He finished his thought with a shrug.)

“Have you decided whom you’ll be supporting for president – Barack Obama or John McCain?” I asked her.

“Who do you think I’m supporting?” she asked.  The doorway stayed eight inches wide.

I thought about my canvassing of white neighborhoods in Newport News with my parents forty years ago, and about the support we always assumed would come from an area of town I learned to be afraid to visit.

I won’t take the bait, I thought.  I wanted her to feel empowered, to feel the irony I was savoring at that moment.  A white man trying to get a black woman to vote for a black man for president.  Here in Virginia, where I grew up.

“Well, I don’t know!” I said.  “Are you for Obama or McCain?”  I smiled, probably somewhat coyly.

She didn’t answer.  She turned her head and pursed her lips.  The opening held steady at eight inches.  I glanced down looking for a chain lock, but there wasn’t one.

Finally, I said, “I assume you’re for Obama.  Are you planning to vote?”  And I went through the rest of my spiel.

She was ambivalent about volunteering for the campaign, but she confirmed the phone number the campaign had gotten from the registrar’s office.  I told her that she might get a phone call from my campaign guy asking her if she was ready to help out somehow, maybe with canvassing or phone calls, at least with some paperwork.

She accepted my offer of two absentee ballot forms.

She closed the door, and the rain picked up. I checked off a box or two on the manifest.  I don’t think she’ll volunteer.

WHEREAS, we have fought the Culture Wars for almost three decades, and

WHEREAS, the Culture Wars being typical of an unraveling phase of a generational cycle, the said phase and cycle described by leading generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997), an unraveling phase (a phase also called a “turning”) in which, according to Strauss and Howe, “people have had their fill of spiritual rebirth, moral reform, and lifestyle experimentation. Content with what they have become individually, they vigorously assert an ethos of pragmatism, self-reliance, laissez faire, and national (or sectional or ethnic) chauvinism” (Howe), and

WHEREAS, during an unraveling (a.k.a., a third turning), such as the one that most of us have spent the majority of our lives in, “as moral debates brew, the big public arguments are over ends, not means. Decisive public action becomes very difficult, as community problems are deferred. Wars are fought with moral fervor but without consensus or follow-through” (Howe), and

WHEREAS, the unraveling itself shows signs of unraveling, beginning with the spiritual maturation of significant segments the politically influential Evangelical Movement, a growth which has seen these segments champion causes, such as poverty and health care, that are more closely identified with the Democratic Party, which growth is a signal that the Culture Wars are ending, and

WHEREAS, the unraveling appears to be unraveling faster at the presidential level, since the divisive, sixteen-year era of Boomer presidencies is drawing to a close and since no generation since Abraham Lincoln has returned to the White House after leaving it (Generations 459 - 60), Boomers being an insufferable “prophet” generation (of which I hereby admit to being a member) at the front lines of both sides of the Culture Wars, one president on either side of that war and elected in large part to advance the cause of his side in that war; drawing to a close, I say, since, at least arguably, none of the four national, major-party candidates in this election are Boomers, each ticket containing oneSilent Generation member (McCain and Biden) and one Gen-Xer (Obama and Palin), “arguably” since one might argue with Strauss and Howe’s formulation of the Gen-X Generation as beginning in 1961 instead of 1964, as is more traditional, though Strauss and Howe’s formulation seems to be particularly apt for Obama, born in 1961 and showing little inclination to re-fight the Culture Wars, himself a poster child for Gen-X cool, pragmatism, and rough upbringing, and

WHEREAS, the said unraveling may be unraveling faster since this presidential election may be the first in American history in which all four major-party candidates are from what generational theorists call recessive generations, the civically dynamic Hero Generation (e.g., the G.I. Generation) and the spiritually dynamic Prophet Generation (e.g., the Boomers again) being the most influential and the Adaptive Generation (a.k.a., the Artist Generation and e.g., the Silent generation) and the Nomad Generation (e.g., Gen Xers) sandwiched between those dominant generations to help correct their excesses, the Adaptive Generation as ameliorators (think how McCain, long an inclusive politician, has adapted himself (as people in Adaptive Generations will do to the younger Prophet generation’s ways) to the divisive Boomer Culture Wars during this campaign as, in his view, I guess, a necessary and justified means to a good end) and the Nomad Generation as pragmatists (Obama stating frequently, for instance, that his foreign policy would be free of ideology), and

WHEREAS, parenthetically, this anti-Boomer, recessive correction was confirmed again to me as late as this morning in a video email from David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager who, parenthetically, seems to have adopted Obama’s clipped cadence and facial mannerisms when speaking, and who, in announcing that the Obama campaign had added over 632,000 donors in September, pointed out that “the two groups who have given us the most contributions are retirees and students,” who, of course, are Silents and Millennials – not Boomers – all (and by “all,” I mean the stuff in this paragraph and in the non-parenthetical paragraph above it) of which may point to a major corrective ahead of, and a national and unconscious preparation of sorts for,

WHEREAS, a fourth turning, a crisis turning (think turning like the hands of a clock, the fourth turning being sort of a sweep of the hour hand from 9 P.M. to midnight when we ourselves turn, if perhaps not into pumpkins, then at least into something we’re not at all familiar with except from history) much like the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II era fourth turnings before it, that will threaten our national existence is coming, a military, ecological, economic, social, and/or terroristic crisis that most of us have feared in one form or another during this long unraveling (as people do during all unravelings, often calling themselves prophets in so doing), especially towards its end, a turning which I used to feel we could not survive because of our collective moral and civic depravity compared with the civic spirit evinced by that generation that came together to suffer the Great Depression and fight World War II, say, not knowing what it would feel like to live in a fourth turning when, say, 100,000 young people chanted in Boston Commons in 1933, “I promise as a good American to do my part.  I will help President Roosevelt bring back good times,” (Fourth Turning 292), or even so much as having the capacity of comprehending the possibility of such an event, until perhaps recently, and

WHEREAS, a fourth turning, I say, in which “Public order strengthens, private risk-taking abates, and crime and substance abuse decline. Families strengthen, gender distinctions widen, and child rearing reaches a smothering degree of protection and structure. The young focus their energy on worldly achievements, leaving values in the hands of the old. Wars are fought with fury and for maximum result” (Howe), and not understanding that the100,000 people who turned out to see Obama yesterday afternoon and the 75,000 who came to see him last night, both crowds ironically gathering in the Show Me State, a nickname perfectly suited for the cynical third turning we are turning from, the unraveling long unraveling, were drawn by a new sense of something like civic pride, the first stirrings, I say, of our unconscious preparation for a national crisis, and gathered certainly not to see a unraveling-era Paris Hilton or Brittany Spears but gathered instead as a kind of collective repudiation of our generational cycle’s version of the divisive unraveling-era “politics as usual,” and

WHEREAS, the Boomers are too much the creatures of the divisive, self-centered, cynical third turning to lead a nation, or to even yet prepare a nation (the fourth turning itself not being scheduled to come until sometime between 2010 and 2025 according to Strauss and Howe in 1991 (Generations 381 – 83)) – though the Boomers as they age may yet have an important role – for a fourth turning, Strauss and Howe knowing enough about Boomers to warn us in 1991 that, should the crisis come during our decade, “the national cycle suggests that the risk of cataclysm would be very high.  During the 2000—2009 decade, Boomers would be squarely in midlife and nearing the peak of their political and institutional power.  From a lifecycle perspective, they will be exactly where the Transcendentalists [the Civil War cycle’s Prophet generation] were when John Brown was planning his raid on Harper’s Ferry.  [The Civil War Fourth Turning was not an unqualified success in Strauss and Howe’s books, unlike the World War II Fourth Turning.]  Boomers can best serve civilization by restraining themselves (or letting themselves be restrained by others) until their twilight years, when their spiritual energy would find expression not in midlife leadership, but in elder stewardship” (Generations 382), and

WHEREAS, the presidential candidate himself being the message of both the Republican and Democratic parties for the first time in my life anyway, John McCain (before trying to adapt to the Boomers’ divisive brand of politics this election cycle, one cycle too late as I believe we’ll discover next month, but as a member of an Adaptive generation) pointing to an impressive list of attempts at forging legislation with his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, and Barack Obama pointing to his lifelong pursuit of bringing people together, first as a community activist in Chicago before and after law school and more recently as the head of his well-run presidential campaign, a campaign that he continually refers to, with some justification, as a movement for postpartisan politics, and

WHEREAS, the candidates themselves being the messages, both major-party presidential candidates seem almost reluctant to champion specific policy positions, in stark contrast with the unraveling-era primacy of plans and policies over leadership in presidential politics, which unraveling-era primacy of plans was championed even during this election cycle by most of the presidential nominees’ primary opponents who of course all failed, not understanding the times we’re living in, each nominee now advancing plans only because that’s what you do in the general election phase of a presidential campaign, but neither having much heart for it, McCain having little interest in matters having to do with the economy (or expertise, by his own admission, famously), health care, or education, anyway, and Obama, for his part, spending the first ten months of his campaign downplaying any particular solution to almost anything, his Democratic rivals, in contrast, loving to highlight the differences among their competing health care plans, for instance, but Obama emphasizing instead the persuasion it would take to get any of it passed, telling Iowans a year ago, “We need to build a movement for change. [Universal health care] is not going to happen just because you elect a Democrat," and

WHEREAS, the wisdom of both men’s reluctance to champion specific plans is now becoming more evident from the dynamic nature of what we call the Financial Crisis, in the midst of which “last week's unthinkable idea quickly becomes this week's imperative” as columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. pointed out last week, the said Financial Crisis being, perhaps, a harbinger, perhaps one of many, 9-11 perhaps being another, of the said fourth turning and the national-existence-threatening crisis to come (and there's the rapid depletion of centuries-old polar ice packs, food shortages, and all kinds of stuff),

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that, with the election of Barack Obama, a Gen-Xer – McCain’s Silent-Generation, inclusive style of leadership having an equal claim to high office during the unraveling of the unraveling but McCain having forfeited that claim by campaigning like a third-turning Boomer, as an Adaptive generation member might be tempted to do (can you imagine what the campaign would have been like if McCain had campaigned like innovative, inclusive, Silent-generation McCain of old?) – we Boomers accept that we will never step into the White House as presidents again (taking perhaps some comfort that the un-Boomer-like Obama is by several reckonings a Boomer), that we Boomers will be the first Prophet generation not to serve in the White House during a national-existence-threatening crisis, Lincoln and Roosevelt belonging to the Transcendentalist and Missionary Generations, respectively (Prophet generations both), as a fitting judgment against our selfish, sanctimonious generation, that we accept further that the Culture Wars are over even though they don’t feel over to many of us, that the fourth turning crisis, when it comes, will resolve our Culture Wars for us if the nation survives at all, that we not insist on our divisive, unraveling agendas or bemoan unduly the end of the positive particularities that attend an unraveling generation (the ascendancy of the individual and of the arts, for starters) nor insist on controlling events but rather confessing plainly, with Lincoln, that events have controlled us, and that we assist Obama, who may be quite unpopular and act quite slowly on occasion in stark contrast (as least with respect to slowness) to Boomer presidents, and other future leaders, rather than impede them, in instinctively preparing us for a national crisis, and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the organizing (not in the institutional or paperwork sense of organizing, but in the community activist sense) and consensus-building that Obama has accomplished thus far and that could not have been accomplished by even him as late as four years ago, the generational cycle not in support of such things back then, that (as I say) Obama’s organizational and consensus-building skills will help us prepare for a national crisis but will inevitably fall short of the organization and consensus we will need for the crisis itself, the crisis itself pushing us to the full organization and relative consensus that has attended every fourth turning in our nation’s history, and

BE IT FURTHER AND HIGHLY RESOLVED that the dead from every crisis generation, including the Millennial Generation (our cycle’s hero generation, now in their twenties, teens, and childhood), war or no war, shall not have died or die in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In a comment to “A Slow President,” maggie writes:

I would love to know what Lincoln biographies are you're favorites. I haven't read anything on Lincoln in a LONG time, but would love to read something fresh on him.

Maggie, I’ve been waiting a long, long time for someone to ask me that.  Some of this might not be "fresh," since I've included one book almost as old as I am.  Well, let’s get started! 

A good reintroduction to Lincoln might be Stephen B. Oates’s With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln, which came out in 1977.  I’ve read it twice, mainly because it’s such a good story.  Oates’s Lincoln is a bit romanticized, kind of an updated Sandburg version.  If you can find the unabridged, recorded version, you’re in for a treat.

The least romanticized Lincoln may be David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, which was published in 1995.  It’s a fine biography with lots of good detail.  Lincoln plays the part of a political operator, which he was, but one gets the feeling that the Lincoln here is a bit the product of late-twentieth-century America.  Too much the callous C.E.O.

My favorite Lincoln biography is Allen C. Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, which was published in 1999.   Quoting from my own customer review on Amazon: “But unlike most biographies, Redeemer President centers on the maturation of its subject's thinking. Guelzo shows how some of Lincoln's most famous ideas, such as his reliance on ‘the proposition that all men are created equal,’ were part of Whig orthodoxy. To trace Lincoln's development takes nothing away from his genius, of course.”  The book examines the maturation of Lincoln’s religious thinking, too.

The most recent Lincoln blockbuster, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is a lot of fun.  It gives a brief biography of Lincoln and his three chief rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination up to that year’s party convention.  Then it follows the men through Lincoln’s presidency.  William Seward, the odds-on favorite for the party’s nomination in 1860, becomes Lincoln’s closest friend in his cabinet after Lincoln earns his respect.  Salmon P. Chaise is made out to be a vain opportunist that Lincoln must expend lots of energy managing during his first term.  The book focuses, as you might imagine, mostly on Lincoln’s cabinet. Published in 2005, Team of Rivals is really a great biography.

My favorite Lincoln books are not biographies at all, but works of political philosophy by Harry V. Jaffa.  The first isCrisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, published in 1959.  Jaffa first makes Douglas’s case for “Popular Sovereignty,” the doctrine that allowed each territory to vote on whether it would be a free or slave state when it entered the union.  The second half of the book makes Lincoln’s case for natural rights, which Lincoln found embedded in the Declaration of Independence and which, when combined with the Constitution, required the eventual extermination of slavery.  The book focuses not only on the debates’ arguments but also on speeches and other historical events that flesh out those arguments.  If you read it, read its appendix first, which gives a great overview of the five years leading up to the debates, beginning with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Jaffa’s sequel, published in 2000, is A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War.  I set out here my Amazon customer review of the book:

A New Birth of Freedom is a book about Lincoln's political philosophy, which Lincoln himself said (in so many words) emanated completely from the Declaration of Independence. The book is the sequel to Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided, written over 40 years earlier. In Crisis, Jaffa takes up Douglas' arguments in the famous 1858 debates for the first half of the book and then Lincoln's in the second half. In New Birth, Jaffa backs up from the 1850's to take in a sweep of history and thought from Classic Greece to the present.

If the material in New Birth is far more wide-ranging than in Crisis, the theme in New Birth is much more precise. The south lost the war, but the philosophy behind the justifications advanced by southern leaders such as Calhoun, Taney and Stephens is winning the battle of the minds.

Crisis of the House Divided is like being in philosophy class, but New Birthis like being over at the professor's house later for drinks. Jaffa seems to lazily go over mountains of quotes, philosophers, and arguments, and he returns again and again to make the same points. But it's never tedious. One finds Jaffa's repetitions well worded and essential in understanding how far we've fallen philosophically. And eventually, toward the end, one gets a sense of the book's structure.

Here's the book's thesis. Most of us admire Lincoln, but most of us wouldn't agree with his political philosophy. Lincoln really did believe that our nation was dedicated to a proposition -- a proposition that also brought forth natural rights. Mr. Jaffa demonstrates how 19th Century historicism has won out over the Founders' concept of natural rights. Just as Nietzsche bitterly accounts for how Jewish thought won out after the Israelites were defeated, A New Birth of Freedom laments the ascendancy of the Confederacy's historical approach in today's political thinking.

Jaffa traces natural rights from Greek and Jewish thought through Locke, Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln. Basically, Jaffa teaches that natural rights begin with the doctrine of the "state of nature." In this state, a person has the right to life and liberty, and to property in order to defend his right to life and liberty. People form government in order to better protect these inalienable rights. In so doing, they yield the exercise of some of their rights, but not the rights themselves, which are inalienable. The people reserve the right of revolution, which is strongly asserted in the Declaration of Independence. Legitimate government can only exist through the consent of the governed, by a unanimous compact or contract. The measures of such a government by the majority's will are deemed the will of the whole, so long as the minority's rights are not violated by the measures.

All of this presupposes that all men are created equal. Jefferson found this self-evident, famously pointing out that we don't find some people born with spurs on their shins and others born with saddles on their backs. Natural rights recognizes a distinction between God and mankind, on the one hand, and a distinction between mankind and beasts, on the other. The historical school finds all of this an accident of history. Picking up with Jaffa:

"The historical school, which by the 1850s had largely displaced the natural rights school of the Founding, had also given rise to the romantic movement of the mid-nineteenth century. It too repudiated natural right, because it repudiated 'rationalism,' insisting as it did that 'the heart had its reasons which reason did not know.' Accordingly, Lincoln's Socratic reasoning was rejected, because the very idea of justification by reasoning had come to be rejected. History, not reason, decided that some should be masters and others should be slaves. This movement of Western thought, from the natural rights school to the historical school, culminated in the Nazi and the Communist regimes of the twentieth century."

This was one of Jaffa's few specific references to how the relativism of the historical school has affected modern history. I hope that, in his next book, Mr. Jaffa will give many more examples of how our retreat from the Founders' conception of natural rights – and the clear distinction among God, people, and beasts underling that conception – has cost us.

Speaking of Amazon, to which I've linked each book title discussed, you pretty much have to ignore the aggregate stars the customer reviews give a Lincoln book.  Confederate sympathizers bash most modern books on Lincoln because these books don’t generally share their views of him, and by so doing they artificially lower these books’ star totals.

I seem incapable of writing short posts these days.  I hope you’re not sorry you asked, maggie.  And thanks for asking.

If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next Commander-in-Chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have.

         -- Barack Obama during his acceptance speech in Denver last month

It seems like Barack Obama benefited politically last night by debating John McCain to something like a draw on foreign policy, which is supposed to be the latter’s turf.  And, arguably, Obama began to raise America’s comfort level with the unknown, much as Reagan and Clinton did in 1980 and 1992, respectively.

But if this was the debate Obama promised last month in Denver, he didn’t try very hard.  Instead, it was McCain who repeatedly suggested that “Senator Obama doesn’t understand,” setting himself up for an effective closing argument: “ . . .and I honestly don't believe that Senator Obama has the knowledge or experience and has made the wrong judgments in a number of areas . . .”

Maybe it’s the trial lawyer in me.  I wish Obama were more of an advocate.  Obama easily could have gone for the jugular as he suggested he would when he accepted his party’s nomination in Denver.  He should have not been satisfied with a draw.

I’ve been sort of breaking character by delving into political issues on this site some this year.  Presidential political strategy fascinates me, but it’s more than that.  Last night’s debate got to the crux of why I talk some politics here now: McCain’s approach to foreign policy really scares me.

Anyway, here’s my closing argument last night, were I Barack Obama.  The language I use is not what I would employ to express myself (I’d never be elected to any office if I did that), but I think many Americans would accept it.  Admittedly, time constraints would not have permitted Obama to say this all at once.  And if my approach seems tough, remember that McCain had just called Obama unfit for the job based on a lack of knowledge, experience, and judgment.

I’ve made two points here that Sen. McCain, even if he believed them, would be unable to follow through on as president.  The first is the essential relationship between our economy and our military strength.  In the history of the world, no nation has sustained military superiority in the face of chronic economic problems.  Therefore, our longstanding economic issues – and even this current economic crisis that average American citizens feel far more keenly than the deregulation crowd whose policies have betrayed us – these bread-and-butter issues that Sen. McCain has professed an insufficient knowledge of – will help determine whether America will continue to be strong throughout the twenty-first century.  America must get moving again.  My economic proposals, including a health care plan that takes the burden of costs off of families and small businesses, a tax cut that benefits working Americans and not the rich, and an energy policy that leads to energy independence once and for all in ten years – these proposals will make us stronger at home, and economic strength at home is a necessary condition to a strong foreign policy.

The second point that Senator McCain cannot deliver on is the American President’s position as Leader of the Free World.  That job description should be just as apt today as it was during the Cold War.  The people in many nations, including North Korea, Iran, Burma, and even China and Russia, are not free.  Their people suffer, and their governments’ actions in some cases threaten the Free World.

The phrase “Leader of the Free Word” means little if no one wants to follow.  The broad alliance President Bush tried to put together to invade Iraq never materialized, and he became the “Leader of the Coalition of the Willing,” itself an overblown title.  Part of Senator McCain’s unwillingness to meet with the President of Spain, which not surprisingly caused a bit of an international stir last week, stems from his anger over Spain’s decision to leave President Bush’s small coalition as the Iraq War dragged on and on.  We don’t need an enemies-list mentality to infect our foreign policy.  We have enough enemies.  We need to get our reputation in the world back where it was before the policies of President Bush and Senator McCain began tarnishing it six years ago.  Sometimes you stand alone, but not for two entire presidential terms on issues as diverse as Iraq, global warming, and economic strength.

We can be the leader again – a leader with followers.   Our allies who stand under the specter of a strong China and a resurgent Russia want this, and they don’t share Senator McCain’s assessment that I’m naïve.  If, as Senator McCain believes, proximity to Russia gives people greater foreign policy perspective, then the cries of our allies in Germany, France, and England for American leadership are something we can no longer afford to ignore.  I’ve been there.  I’ve seen American flags waived in Europe again.  I’ve the seen the ache of some of our most important and historic allies for America to retake its rightful place as Leader of the Free World.

We won’t be strong by retreating.  Senator McCain in three instances tonight advocated positions no longer held by his party’s own president who has seen fit to follow my judgment and leadership in correcting at least some of his foreign policy.  The first instance is Pakistan, where I have suggested that we not ignore any evidence of bin Laden’s and Al Qaeda’s whereabouts but that we attack them, unilaterally if necessary.  I got a lot of heat for that position, but four months later President Bush did just as I suggested: he attacked Al Qaeda positions inside Pakistan with moderate success.  The second instance is Iran, where I have advocated direct engagement at lower diplomatic levels and not at the presidential level unless and until progress is made.  Senator McCain doesn't seem to understand this distinction, and he ridicules what once was an unquestioned tenet of our foreign policy under presidents like Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy.  Now we learn that President Bush has again adjusted his foreign policy to follow my lead.  He has dispatched officials who are negotiating directly with Iran.  Events and his own party’s president have left Senator McCain behind again. 

The last instance that I will bring up tonight is Iraq.  Despite the Iraqi president’s and even now President Bush’s embrace of timetables – timetables that look very close to the 19-month withdrawal timetable that I have advocated for months – Senator McCain continues to support an unlimited presence in Iraq.  Although he apparently slipped this summer and admitted that my timetable was reasonable enough, he has gone back to his hundred-year-presence position that even President Bush has moved away from.  Once again, Senator McCain has been left behind.

Time does not permit me to more than mention Russia, which Senator McCain wishes to alienate by drumming them out of the Group of Eight Industrialized Economies – a sanction even the provocative Bush administration rejects.  Suffice it to say that, on many issues, Senator McCain has been left behind.

We can’t go back with him.  We need change, but not the kind of backsliding Senator McCain proposes tonight.  We don’t need more bluster, more empty words in the face of danger.  And we don’t need to retreat to the worst foreign policy positions advanced over the past eight years by the current administration.  We don’t need to find more enemies; we don’t need to go out of our way to make enemies out of allies, as Senator McCain seems willing to do with even Spain.  We don’t have the luxury to be vindictive.  In fact, it’s not even in our national personality.  America needs a president who shares its strong and fair temperament and judgment.  During my presidency, I look forward to working with Americans of every political stripe to make America stronger, to restore our leadership position in the world, and to see America not only respected but admired once again by our allies.

Obama will win.  He will be an unpopular president during most of his term.  Republicans will gain seats in Congress during his administration. But Obama will help to reconnect our civic life with our constitutional values.  If he lives, he will be reelected.

Or he could lose this year.  Or win and be popular.  It just helps me to understand Obama by projecting him against a blank future.

Obama will be unpopular because he is chiefly concerned with reconnecting us with our national ideals.  This concern will cause him to take a very long time to make some important decisions, and many will view his protracted decision-making as evidence of a weak presidency.  His vacillation will be more pronounced in time of crisis, because he considers decisions politically (like all presidents), patriotically (like many presidents), and constitutionally (like few presidents).  By “patriotically,” I mean he cares how the decision will leave our nation in the long run.  By “constitutionally,” I mean he cares how the decision will leave our Constitution and our relationship to it in the long run.

In other words, Obama will be unpopular because he will be slow.  But Obama might just be as slow as the best of them: Abraham Lincoln.

We’re familiar with most of the parallels between Lincoln and Obama, of course.  Both men are Illinois lawyers who never run anything, really, before becoming president.  (I refer to Lincoln in the present tense for ease of comparison.)  Both men grow up distant from their fathers, one emotionally and the other physically.  Both men are seen as theorists and orators whose talents arguably would be more suited for the legislature, but both men are drawn to the presidency not by ambition alone but by a desire to address fundamental discrepancies between what our nation was meant to be and what it is.  Before his presidential campaign really begins, each man becomes nationally known initially only for a single, electrifying speech he gives in the Northeast to party faithful.  The campaigns of both men emphasize their candidates’ humble origins and deemphasize their candidates’ careers in law.  Both men win their party’s nominations as dark horses against highly favored candidates from New York, favorites who many party leaders fear would be too divisive in a general election.  Both men benefit from running after in a year favoring their party’s general prospects.

Some of these parallels are almost as meaningless as the ones I read as a child between Lincoln and John Kennedy (e.g., each had a secretary who shared the other’s last name).  For me, though, the most important parallels between Lincoln and Obama have to do with what makes them both slow executives: a driving desire to connect policy and public with constitutional ideals and principles.

Obama takes a long time to respond concerning important matters.  When he finally responds, he responds conceptually, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not.  He is slow to distance himself from Reverend Wright.  When he finally reacts to the public’s distaste for the clips of Wright’s sermons, though, it is in the form of a critically acclaimed speech that addresses race in America in fresh, constructive ways.  Then he is slow to respond to accusations that he is unpatriotic.  He finally reacts with a speech just before Independence Day this year that advocates a broader, less divisive concept of patriotism.  It is not a stirring speech, though, and it is not as well received as his earlier address on race.

Lincoln’s final speech is to a fired-up crowd that comes to the White House to celebrate the successful end of the Civil War.  Lincoln uses the occasion to offer an olive branch to the South and to outline a generous philosophy for admitting the succeeding states back into the Union.  Disappointed, the crowd starts to thin out before the speech ends.

Whether or not Lincoln’s and Obama’s more-important speeches are successful, they are usually theoretical in nature, connecting current events with broader themes.  Both Lincoln’s and Obama’s speeches generally make for terrible sound bites, since neither Lincoln nor Obama relies on cute turns of phrase.  Their rhetoric has a lawyerlike force that requires a longer attention span.  Fortunately, both men know how to keep their audience’s attention.  Both men are good writers, and one could use the best of both men’s writings as texts for teaching both rhetoric and prose.

But most of the force in both Lincoln’s and Obama’s speeches comes not from their literary and rhetorical skills but from the way they connect current events to constitutional values our government fails to live up to.  Indeed, both men know constitutional law well: Lincoln obsessively studied it late nights during the 1850’s in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Obama taught it for over a decade.

But this same felt connection to forgotten national values – values rooted in involved political and legal theory – that makes both men electrifying speakers also makes them slow executives.

Lincoln claims as president-elect that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”  For sure, Lincoln is a political animal; Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William Herndon famously describes his political ambition as “a little engine that knew no rest.”  But Lincoln’s claim about his political thinking is a fair one.  As president, his decisions are generally made to advance a Whiggish view of the Declaration of Independence, a view that is best expressed in his Gettysburg Address.

At the war’s outset, the North has one goal: preserve the Union.  After the Emancipation Proclamation, the North adds the destruction of slavery to the original war aim of preserving the union.  The Civil War amendments, bracing in their simplicity, accept African Americans as citizens.  And, long after Lincoln is dead, the Gettysburg Address helps the nation coalesce its constitutional thinking around “all men are created equal” as a guiding principle.  Lincoln takes advantage of a war he never intentionally prolongs to fundamentally change our relationship to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (not to mention the Northwest Ordinance and several other founding documents – heck, he helped change how we look at the Founding Fathers).  For Lincoln, a change in what we all believe is change you can believe in.

Lincoln is derided as slow and vacillating, and this perception is accurate.  His first major decision is how to respond to the South’s attack on Fort Sumter.  Like any president would, Lincoln considers his options from a political and military standpoint.  Like few presidents, though, Lincoln considers his options from a constitutional standpoint, too.  I do not mean only that he considers whether various actions he could take would be consistent with the constitution.  Lincoln considers also whether his options would preserve the constitution and augment its role in our civic life. Changing a country’s constitutional viewpoint is slow work advanced only by an astute and principled politician with a cool temperament.

But his constitutional scruples make Lincoln come across as weak and slow.  Lincoln is slow by nature, too; someone who generally likes to weigh matters long past the time the country or the Congress wants him to act.  He is slow to fire generals and cabinet members, and he is slow to take offense, even when his failing, top general who despises him walks past his own study where he knew Lincoln is waiting to speak to him, and goes to bed.  He almost loses the war, and he almost loses the 1864 election to the same general who has a completely different view of the Constitution and of the North’s proper war aims than he has.

Obama’s responds to his opponents’ unfair attacks with preternatural patience – a patience that frequently drives me crazy.  Like Lincoln, Obama doesn’t respond in kind to many attacks, and he seems to believe that the public can be drawn to act by “the better angels of our nature,” to use Lincoln’s phrase.  Obama appears not to see the danger in his opponents’ unfair charges, even though he frequently says that he does.  This vulnerability attracts a following of people who wish to protect him.  Together, they give millions of dollars each time one of his opponents attacks him in a particularly unfair and potentially effective manner.  Lincoln also frequently finds himself explaining his failure to strike back at opponents, and his handlers were insanely loyal and protective of him, too, according to one of Lincoln’s biographers, Stephen Oates.

So maybe Obama’s slowness comes from his need to sound out his options’ effects on broader principles, as I suggest here.  Or maybe Obama is slow because he’s a listener and a negotiator, a problem-solver and a consensus-builder. Maybe he's slow because he's stubborn: he’s not easily intimidated or goaded or tricked into reacting.  He could also be slow because he’s simply more comfortable weighing major decisions over a period of time.  He’s slow, though, for some or perhaps all of the above reasons. Even more than in the 1860’s, Americans today seem to prefer a take-charge, decisive CEO-type in the White House, and that’s neither what they got with Lincoln nor what they’ll get with Obama.

As I read Jacob Needleman’s book Lost Christianity: A Journey of Rediscovery over these last weeks of summer, I stopped swimming and for the first time felt the current of my headlong search into Orthodox Christianity.  The book helped me pull my head out of the water and look downstream.  When I did, I saw lots of other people swimming roughly in the same direction, toward Christianity’s past, toward a rainbow that has formed in the mist generating over a waterfall, a beautiful end.  We are all swimming, but we are tired of swimming, we hope that swimming in a waterfall will change something of the dynamics of seeking, and we are ready to give up what we’ve always known about swimming, about the techniques and even the aims of swimming, to get to the bottom of it.

Because Lost Christianity is about what it means to search for Christianity’s origins.  Needleman does not profess to be a Christian, but he implicitly claims to experience what a Christian must experience in making headway on her search.  As a philosophy professor, he also doesn’t claim to be an authority on the Early Church.  He’s on a journey, and, like most of us on similar journeys, he feels unqualified to make it.  Part of the book’s fun is watching Needleman watch himself speak with monks and church leaders about what’s missing from Christianity today.

I knew – or rather sensed, for I didn’t really formulate it to myself – from that moment on that there was a quality to Father Vincent’s life that I needed to understand.  It is extraordinary how such a tiny, fleeting impression such as this can actually be the most significant event of an entire day, even a day filled with far larger, “more important” events and insights.  Of course, the truth is that in that fleeting glimpse of Father Vincent, I myself was in a special condition of balance; one does tend to forget that these rare, fragile impressions, these “mustard seeds” point in two directions: toward the inner stat of the subject and toward the new reality revealed in the object. (58 – 59)

The book struggles with the object – Ancient Christianity – quite a bit, but the book’s real subject is the subject, the seeker.  We watch Needlemen begin to realize that is always realizing things later.  As he discovers this about himself, he also begins to understand a more intuitive, one might say spiritual, side of himself that he hasn’t had to draw on during more purely intellectual pursuits.

Lost Christianity says that the kind of historical search Western culture is trained in – a search that involves only the intellect – will never recover Original Christianity.  The search for Original Christianity must involve a spiritual search that would transform me so I can search some more.  The adjustments I make in order to swim a waterfall will prepare me, inexplicably, for the deep, calm waters – the pool I long for – at its bottom.  The swim is back through time, yes, but it’s also a swim through myself to myself.   I can’t recover Christianity without recovering myself in the process.

Christians seek for Christianity at or near its inception.  Generally speaking, Catholics and Orthodox Christians experience Christianity in traditions handed down since early Christian experience began to coalesce into traditions.  Protestantism doesn’t do that too much, but Protestantism is itself an attempt to restore the church to the way it existed before the church went wrong somewhere.  So Protestantism is also aiming for the past, or at least using the past in order to reach a brighter future.  The more fundamental the Protestant sect, the more limited the historical timeframe and the more limited the sources considered in its search for Original Christianity.  But many Protestants, like me, feel that the timeframe and sources we have considered have been too narrow.  We have begun to think that church tradition may constitute part of the means by which ancient Christianity has delivered its secrets to every subsequent age.

Christianity – really, all major religions that have survived over the centuries, according to Needleman and his fictional or non-fictional Father Sylvan – has two traditions, two approaches to God: the stream and the pool, to continue my waterfall analogy.  Most people wade in the stream, the religion where religious text comes off as proscriptions and prescriptions to help us live moral lives and bring us salvation.  It’s a good fit for most state governments and most people.  But certain bends in that stream, certain ways in which the sun reflects off broader expanses of the stream where the water runs quieter, may hint at a large, quiet expanse, a destination that gives explanation and even purpose to the stream itself.  Otherwise, the stream dries up after a few centuries at most.

Needleman values both the orthodoxy and some of the heresy of the Early Church for their roles in maintaining Christianity.  He puts a lot of stock in orthodox teachings because they have preserved the stream as well as the concept of the pool. Father Sylvan writes, “The service of orthodoxy is to stabilize the life of mankind as a whole through a morality that not only gives some kind of meaning to the millions, but which resists or absorbs the initiatives of ‘great men’”  (194).  The “great men” are often the mystics, the ones who would refashion and ruin the stream if their language suitable for only the pool were used there as well.

People of the pool tend to speak a spiritual language unfamiliar to those in the stream, and that’s a big reason why Christianity is lost to itself, according to Needleman. Telling people how to get to the pool doesn’t work, and “how to” language is not how people in the pool – the waterfall’s basin – talk anymore, anyway.  Some Gnostic sects had much to offer Christianity, but their language came across as false doctrine. The church’s problem with Gnosticism, Father Sylvan asserts, came precisely when Gnosticism opened its mouth.  “The Gnosis becomes mere Gnosticism when the language of silence is used to persuade, provoke, or explain” (202).  Even Orthodox monks and other people of the pool have had their former vocabulary, including words such as “humility,” “purity of heart,” and “contrition,” watered down over the ages by people of the stream (iv).  No language currently exists to describe the working of the Spirit in the inner man (59).

But Needleman sees a value in many sects of what the Church labeled as Gnosticism because these sects provide fragments of the pool’s lost truth. Many fragments tend to confirm these two views of religion and reality, one focused on morality for the masses (the stream), and the other focused on mysticism for the few (the pool).  These views, as different as moralistic Confucianism is from Chuang Tzu’s philosophy that challenged it, speak different languages.

Some early Gnostic sects spoke of two Gods, “a God beyond the cosmos [for my pool] and a lesser, creator God, the Demiurge, who has fashioned this world and who rules over it [for my stream].  The highest God, the supreme reality, is variously characterized as the “Fore-Beginning,” the “Inconceivable,” the “Beyond-Being,” etc.  The Demiurge, on the other hand, is a working principle. (196)

Such teaching is heretical, but it helps one feel a difference between the stream and the pool.  And Father Sylvan himself uses Christian expressions in unorthodox ways to describe the pool and the waterfall.

A fine line often exists between Gnostic heresies and the third stage of spiritual development called Gnostikos, which many early monastic Fathers recognized.  As John Anthony McGuckin explains in the introduction to his Book of Mystical Chapters, a difference of experience, and the language used to express that difference, created a gulf between the more experienced monks and much of the rest of the church:

In Christian circles, from the late third century onward, when the writings of the earlier gnostic movement had largely been sidelined by the main tradition’s bishops and theologians, [Gnostikos] was used as a technical term in monastic literature to connote esoteric speculation and reflections on the higher mysteries.  Many of these later Christian “gnostic treatises” also fell under the disapproval of the bishops and were suppressed, or even destroyed.  Some of the gnostic chapters survived, however, as the more advanced monks kept the tradition alive despite all opponents – those outside the church and even those within it – who have often tried to stifle the currents of Christian mysticism because of their unease with a fiercely personal wisdom tradition that was not always easy to control or define.  The books of gnostic chapters are often enigmatic and difficult to interpret. . . . [T]hey were not meant to be a teaching tool for those who had not yet experienced such things.  The gnostic chapters . . . were meant to be a signal to those who had already experienced some of these things that others were around them who had also experienced the moving of the divine Spirit within and who were ready to communicate on an equal level about the higher mysteries. (9 – 10)

Of course, our tradition, or culture, and our age, among other things, help define how we look at religious text, gnostic or otherwise.  But I wonder how much my place along the Fathers’ threefold ascent may influence how I see religious text.  With regard to some Scripture, I wonder whether God intended the text to have fundamentally different meanings depending on the maturity of the reader.

Sometimes, religious text seems to hint at this pool I’ve never swum in or even seen.  What I call the Holy Ghost may be drawing me, after many years in the stream, to where the stream is headed, and I look at the text with new eyes and find that the pool and the text have been there the whole time.  I hope I’ll be saying that, at least, in whatever language I learn on the way to the pool.  Here’s a verse I’ve seen in a new way after I began to feel the stream’s pull:

Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. (1 Peter 1:4, KJV)

A ditty I learned as a teenager best describes my streamlined exegesis of this verse:

I am the righteousness of God in Christ
I’m a new creation in him
I’m a partaker of his divine nature
To me he does not impute sin.

This ditty combines verses from three New Testament epistles, including (in line three) the one I quote from 1 Peter.  The ditty interprets all three verses, more or less, as describing things that happened to me by virtue of my decision to receive Christ.  My interpretation is very reassuring for a young man who feels the same urges and attachments he felt before he became a Christian.  I’m not perfect and I still sin, this interpretation goes, but I’ve realized certain important attributes: I’m as righteous as God, I’m a completely new person, and I have taken on a divine nature; that is, I have become like God in some way that I wasn’t like God before.

These attributes came cheaply.  “No,” my teenage self would have countered were it alive today, “they came through Jesus’ death.”  Yes, but they came cheaply to me, to someone who is called to follow a stream to a similar death.  But my stream religion taught me that the righteousness and the divinity I was experiencing then was just about all I’d ever experience, that the stream was all the water I’d ever swim in before death.  Anything unusual would come from the Spirit’s occasional outpourings (kind of the stream at flood stage) that we all hoped for.  I was promised that, if I swam in the stream long enough, I’d be swimming in that, too.

Christian tradition as well as the Orthodox Church looks at the verse in Peter differently.  We can partake of the divine nature after the resurrection, they teach, and we can even partake of it on earth if we follow the stream to the pool.  Several people that we know of have done so, and they are regarded as saints – as guides to help us discover the current in our stream. These saints shine like this: I feel part of myself come alive in their presence, a part of myself both vital and undiscovered by me, or at least essentially unknown to me, before I met the saint.  These men and women have partaken of the divine nature, or, as the Revised English Bible renders 1 Peter, they have “come to share in the very being of God.”

Needleman’s book is part speculation into the Early Church and part interaction with religious leaders who speculate with him.  All of them have taken this longer, more difficult view of the means to spiritual maturity.  One of them, Father Vincent, has few of a Catholic priest’s outward trappings.  Needleman meets him smoking before a TV set watching an NFL game.  He is visibly annoyed that his team is losing.  Despite Needleman’s disappointment over Father Vincent’s lack of spirituality, he comes to find himself resonating with Father Vincent in ways that suggest he knows something about at least the waterfall that leads to the pool at its end.

Needleman tries again and again to describe the small intuitions and connections he makes to people who seem to have been where he wants to go spiritually, and sometimes I found his descriptions unwittingly humorous.  With his own experiences, Needleman seems to prove his point that we no longer have an adequate language to describe the inner workings of the Spirit.

My movement away from my self-centered view of important Scriptures has been a gradual one, and one can trace some of it on this blog.  In “Advent,” I question the currently accepted interpretation of the “born again” analogy and suggest a more prominent (but associated) birth analogy in the New Testament: we carry Christ around inside of us, and we give birth to Christ at our resurrection.  It’s a less selfish perspective, and it affords a better view of God’s kingdom.

In “Lichen,” I question my long-held view of Jesus’ riddle about John the Baptist.  “The least in the kingdom of heaven” that is greater than John turns out not to be the Christians, the new race of Supermen that Jesus’ resurrection would usher onto the planet.  Instead, the “least in the kingdom” is Jesus himself, as he shares elsewhere.  This is a less self-centered, more kingdom-centered view.

And in “What Is Conversion?” I question the use of “conversion” to describe a decision to become a Christian, even a decision to “receive Jesus” (a more scriptural way of putting our initiation into the faith).  I argue that “conversion” describes the fruits of a hard-won inner struggle, and I suggest that Peter’s denial of Jesus lead to his conversion – even lead to his being “born again,” perhaps.

My earlier misunderstanding of Scripture tracks my misunderstanding of my spiritual condition.  I am not far along my spiritual journey, except in years.  Whenever God got close to me in the years leading up to my identity crisis, it seemed that he would point out my sin or suggest that I was at the beginning stage of learning the truth.  This surprised me; this was not how I had learned Protestantism.  This was not how I saw myself or how I reckoned my point on my spiritual journey.  I had been a born-again Christian for a quarter century.  But I was way ahead of myself, just like my view of religious text was ahead of reality.

Because Christianity in general has lost what I call the waterfall between what passes for Christianity today and what the saints experienced, we’ve appropriated Scripture that has to do with a far more mature spiritual state to describe our shallower understanding of Christian life.  Consequently, we’re often underwhelmed by our experience.  “Is that all there is to [being born again, being a saint, being an apostle – you name it]?” is a common Christian lament in the West.

A lot of this is a problem with language, I think Needleman would say.  We've lost the experience, but we keep taking the language that the saints of old used to describe the experience and applying it to our own more shallow experience. As Westerners, we're not satisfied with viewing large (and, from the context, obviously important) stretches of Scripture and saying, “I have no idea what this means.  I better not come to any conclusions about it until I’ve lived some more.”

I'd like to use our understanding about our relationship to sin to flesh out how we've generally gotten ahead of ourselves, both conceptually and experientially.

A Jesuit priest tells Needleman that not just some portions of the Bible but other Christian teachings as well were meant not for novices splashing about in the water but for those for whom the stream was giving some direction:

He went on to explain that, in his opinion, the traditional Christian teaching about mortal, or deadly, sin refers to a relatively developed individual.  He enumerated the three characteristics of mortal sin: it must be of a serious nature; it must be done consciously, with “full knowledge”; and it must be deliberate.  Until a man has the power to act consciously and deliberately, his sinfulness is of an entirely different nature, as described by St. Paul in Romans: the sinfulness that is in me but is not my own act, the original sin that represents the general human malaise.  “It is destructive, but not conscious.” (154)

The Jesuit priest is not saying that St. Paul (or those he may be describing) is not responsible for his sin.  He is suggesting instead that there is not enough humanity in this part of Paul’s life for him to even choose to sin.  Paul (or the people Paul writes about) is not free enough from sin to be human, to make real choices.

I’m beginning to see another Scripture in a new light, a light that implies a little tongue-in-cheek from Paul in one of his letters to Timothy, his son in the faith and the Bishop of Ephesus:

Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned: From which some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling; Desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.  But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,  For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust. (1 Timothy 1:5-11, KJV)

The law isn’t for a righteous man, Paul says.  But maybe he speaks of how people view themselves.  If a Christian finally flows toward the waterfall and discovers his sin, suddenly the law was made for him.  Spiritual direction takes on new importance.  The commandment leads in the end to “charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned.”

Or maybe Paul speaks of both the waders and the swimmers – of anyone, in fact, who has discovered his or her lawlessness and disobedience.

Oswald Chambers, the American Evangelical church’s favorite devotional writer, confirmed to me years ago that novice Christians were normally in no position to know much about sin and repentance.  He disagrees with the Jesuit priest about Paul’s spot on his spiritual journey when he wrote Romans 7, but like the priest, Chambers talks of two levels of Christianity and their different relationships to sin:

Conviction of sin such as the apostle Paul is describing does not come when a man is born again, nor even when he is sanctified, but long after, and then only to a few.  It came to Paul as an apostle and saint, and he could diagnose sin as no other.  Knowledge of what sin is is in inverse ratio to its presence; only as sin goes do you realize what it is; when it is present you do not realize what it is because the nature of sin is that it destroys the capacity to know you sin.  (Biblical Ethics, p. 75)

The stream has few people who really get to know their sin, Chambers is saying.  But the stream is where we first adopt spiritual disciplines, and the spiritual disciplines may help us to become human.  As Merton puts it:

To avoid sin and practice virtue is not to be a saint, it is only to be a man, a human being.  This is only the beginning of what God wants of you.  But it is a necessary beginning, because you cannot have supernatural perfection unless you have first (by God’s grace) perfected your own nature on its own level.  Before you can be a saint you have got to become human.  An animal cannot be a contemplative. (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 256)

I am an animal, or, as Father Sylvan calls himself, pre-Christian.  The stream in this sense is pre-Christian.  If I follow the glints on the water I see late summer afternoons and begin to sense the stream’s pull toward the Early Church, I may well shed the attachments that hide me from myself as I also shed the years that have hidden much of Christianity from itself.  In other words, I may reach the waterfall.

Needleman and Father Sylvan call my waterfall “intermediate Christianity.”  In intermediate Christianity, the soul is born.  “[T]he intermediate in man actually represents the source of all the attributes that generally define human nature as distinguished from animal nature: free will, consciousness, moral power and rationality (in the sense of independent reason)” (155).  The soul lives in a realm rid of religious emotion and enthusiasm, on the one hand, and intellect, on the other – the two hands of the Protestant church experience.  The soul becomes like Adam, God’s fully human son, capable of sinning and of becoming like God.

Intermediate Christianity is lost to us, Needleman asserts.  “And the lost element in Christianity is the specific methods and ideas that can, first, show us the subhuman level at which we actually exist and, second, lead us toward the level at which the teachings of Christ can be followed in fact, rather than in imagination” (155).  Needleman doesn’t say whether or not we can find it, but he says that the search itself will be transformative.

His interviews with religious leaders and the papers of Father Sylvan offer some guidelines for the search, though.  We need to “occupy the body of the old Christianity, the mortal body of the immortal truth,” Father Sylvan writes. (Presumably, he means Orthodox Church practice.)  That way, we value “presence.”  Our own efforts to correct things (Protestantism is an example) speak of our lack of appreciation for presence and lead to a lack of help from the Holy Spirit, he says (89).  We need to involve our bodies because that involvement helps to do things in our spirit that go beyond any emotion we may experience or idea we may get.  For this, we should follow the example of the monks, who adopted certain practices of prayer as a result of experimentation (37).  Along these same lines, we should work to starve emotion in order to reach “feeling,” which is beyond emotion and allows us to sense and operate from our core (24).  Feeling, and prayer itself, makes us vulnerable.  “This is the whole aim of asceticism: to become open” (27).

Lost Christianity is the invisible path from the Christianity generally practiced today to the saints we revere.  Lost Christianity is the waterfall we may learn to swim in to become free enough to sin and human enough to experience “the end of the commandment” – that is, to love impulsively, like God.

I’m full of updates, or maybe I’m just more susceptible to spotting denouements: my psychic year draws to another hot end.

Nash never got that grant from The Old Farmer’s Almanac to study a connection between cow arrangements and long-term weather forecasting.  Instead, he has been taking advantage of his sales territory along I-81 to volunteer for Virginia Tech's biology department.  He amounts to Google’s eyes along the Valley on cloudy days when cow photos from space are difficult to snap.  Nash’s field reports may one day help determine the feasibility of replacing compasses with cows.

He hopes Tech will spring for an overseas trip he’d take early next year to discover why Scottish cattle seem to ignore the north-south alignment favored by cattle of other nations.

Ultimately, though, Nash would like to work alone again and not for scientists, as he did when he met his farmer friend years ago.

“The scientists were unable to distinguish between the head and rear of the cattle, but could tell that the animals tended to face either north or south,” according to BBC News.

“North and south are like poles apart on a compass,” Nash told me.  “Those scientists don’t know a cow’s ass from its antlers.”

[I sent the following email today to Nancy Schnog, a high school English teacher in the D.C. area.]

I teach ninth grade English at X High School in X County. I've run into the same reactions from students -- often my brightest students -- that you describe your students having to literary essay assignments in your article in today'sWashington Post. It was gratifying to read about your experiences and conclusions.

I published an article earlier this year in the Virginia Writing Project's Journal criticizing the literary analysis essay assignment in ninth grade English classes. (You can find the online version of the article here.) My journey to this essay's roots began when a bright student (not quite as articulate as the student with whom you maintained an email correspondence, though!) told me how analyzing literature was ruining it for her.

Your article, of course, addresses our schools' assigned reading selections more than it does their assigned essays about literature. Thanks for raising your voice about both of these important issues.

I am a mustang seated
in the wet stands
of a horse show

I am an old stray
at a dog show
smelling the slack leashes

Enfogged and drizzling
the priest walks past

I am Absalom’s ghost –
an unsensed, ebbing
essence – jealous only
for my father’s tears

Men sing through me
like schooled fish

I am a wild plant
stunted and fazed
by the wet lattice
covered with angels
of roses

Lectio divina is reading for the heart, so my mind needs something to occupy it while I’m trying to meditate.  Otherwise, my mind stands outside barking like a dog at every passing worry, project, to-do item, obsession, or imagination.  So this summer I’ve thrown it a bone: here, boy, write the McLaughlin Bible.

My mind loves a good fight, so when I meditate on a psalm, I let my favorite English versions compete for each phrase of the psalm.  In the process of going over five versions of each phrase, my mind slows down enough and focuses just enough to read a psalm the way Jesuit priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade advised the nuns under his pastoral care to read:

Read quietly, slowly, word for word to enter into the subject more with the heart than with the mind. . . . From time to time make short pauses to allow these truths time to flow through all the recesses of the soul and to give occasion for the Holy Spirit who, during these peaceful pauses and times of silent attention, engraves and imprints these heavenly truths in the heart. . . . Should this peace and rest last for a longer time it will be all the better.  When you find that your mind wanders, resume your reading and continue thus, frequently renewing these same pauses.  [From de Caussade’s book The Sacrament of the Present Moment]

It’s hard for me to get that quiet by just reading a familiar passage slowly.  But by reading a passage in five translations and picking out a favorite translation of each phrase, I trick myself into reading slowly enough for one version of the phrase to sink in a little.  And if the phrase hits me, I stop and either pray it or at least think about it some more. If it doesn’t hit me, I just go on to the five translations of the next phrase.

The idea is to meditate; meanwhile, my mind is cutting and pasting the winning phrases into my own version of the psalm.  If I do this for eighty-five more years, this monkey-mind residue may add up to an entire copyright-infringing Bible.  I’d call it the McLaughlin Bible, named after the McLaughlin Group, the talking-heads panel that discusses politics on PBS.

Each panelist on McLaughlin has his strengths, blind sides, and axes to grind.  Once you get to know the panelists, then you may get something approaching a well-rounded view of the news they’re discussing.  (I cling to the idea that it’s possible to get at the truth through an adversarial proceeding. Maybe it’s the old trial lawyer in me.)

I have all five Bible versions on the computer screen in columns using Accordance software.  Here are my versions, in order of seniority:

The Geneva Bible, based mainly on Tyndale’s Bible and associated with dissenters such as Calvinists and Puritans, was the most popular Bible in England from just after its first publication in 1560 until several decades after the King James Bible was published.  The laity (including Shakespeare) loved its punchy language, and scholars liked its accuracy.

The Bishops’ Bible, which was first published in 1568, was the Establishment’s first answer to the Geneva Bible.  It never caught on.  The committees of translators responsible for various books didn’t look hard at the individual ways each committee was translating the original words into English, so the Bible felt choppy.  It seems to add words frequently in order to make sense of the text, and it does so without the italics that the King James and the New American Standard use for the same purpose.  I love many of the Bishops’ Bible’s turns of phrase, though.  It seems like an original compared with the Geneva Bible and the King James, which often gang up against it.

The odd phrasing of the King James Bible compared with that of the more approachable Geneva Bible kept the Geneva the more popular translation in England until at least the late seventeenth century, but the King James’s more modern spelling and usage helped it eventually to displace the Geneva Bible.  Most of the King James’s beautiful language is borrowed from its predecessor English versions.  I’m more familiar with this version than any other, so it begins most panel debates during my meditations.  The KJV likes to use different English words for the same Hebrew or Greek word in the interest of improving the text’s sound and beauty.  Draft translations were read orally in plenary meetings of translators, which helped to keep the focus on how the version sounded in public readings.

Jumping ahead to the twentieth century, the New American Standard Bible, which emphasizes word-for-word translation at the expense of any sense of mellifluence, usually reads like an updated King James Bible except where to do so would be misleading in current English or just plain wrong, based on modern research.  Having the NAS on my panel is like having the accountant or the engineer or the lawyer at a board of directors meeting: before the board signs off on something, the chairman asks, “Can we do that?”  If the NAS nods its approval, I’m ready to copy and paste.

The Revised English Bible is often more beautiful than even the Bishop’s Bible to me.  It goes for the sense of a verse more than for a word-for-word translation.  It’s often quirky and at odds with everyone else on my panel, kind of like Justice Stevens with his separate, dissenting opinions.  But, comparing its take against the other versions, I can often see its point, and the verse opens itself up for me a little more.  The Psalms contain examples of the best and worst of the REB.  Verse one of Psalm 81 contains the Hebrew root “ruwa,” which Strongs says literally means to shout or to mar.  Strongs says also that “ruwa” has the figurative meaning of splitting the ears with sound.  My other panelists had some fun with the word – the Bishops’ Bible, for instance, puts up “a chearefull noyse” – but the REB prefers “acclaim,” presumably so as not to offend any Anglican sensibilities.  In the immediately preceding psalm, though, all of the other versions have God “angry” against the prayer of his people, but the REB has God “fume” at the prayers.  There are at least three reasons why I think “fume” is the better choice: (1) it’s consistent with Psalm 74, where God’s anger either smokes or fumes, depending on the panelist, (2) prayer is compared to incense in two or three other Bible verses, and the noun “fume” picks up that resonance and suggests some irony, and (3) you would expect a god to fume.

The following, for example, is Psalm 76 in each of my five favorite translations, followed by the McLaughlin version.  Note that the colors in the McLaughlin version correspond to the colors of the original versions from which it took the language.

King James Version

Psa. 76:0   To the chief Musician on Neginoth, A Psalm or Song of Asaph. 
Psa. 76:1   In Judah is God known: his name is great in Israel.  2 In Salem also is his tabernacle, and his dwelling place in Zion.  3 There brake he the arrows of the bow, the shield, and the sword, and the battle. Selah.  4 Thou art more gloriousand excellent than the mountains of prey.  5 The stouthearted are spoiled, they have slept their sleep: and none of the men of might have found their hands.  6 At thy rebuke, O God of Jacob, both the chariot and horse are cast into a dead sleep. 
Psa. 76:7   Thou, even thou, art to be feared: and who may stand in thy sight when once thou art angry?  8 Thou didst cause judgment to be heard from heaven; the earth feared, and was still,  9 When God arose to judgment, to save all the meek of the earth. Selah.  10 Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: the remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain.  11Vow, and pay unto the LORD your God: let all that be round about him bring presents unto him that ought to be feared. 12 He shall cut off the spirit of princes: he is terrible to the kings of the earth.

Revised English Bible

Psa. 76:0 [For the leader: on stringed instruments: a psalm: for Asaph: a song]  1 In Judah God is known, his name is great in Israel;  2 his tent is in Salem, his dwelling in Zion.  3 There he has broken the flashing arrows, shield and sword and weapons of war. [Selah]  4 You are awesome, Lord, more majestic than the everlasting mountains.  5 The bravest are despoiled, they sleep their last sleep, and the strongest cannot lift a hand.  6 At your rebuke, God of Jacob, rider and horse lie prostrate.  7 You are awesome, Lord; when you are angry, who can stand in your presence?  8 You gave sentence out of heaven; the earth was afraid and kept silence 9 when you rose in judgement, God, to deliver all the afflicted in the land. [Selah]  10 Edom, for all his fury, will praise you and the remnant left in Hamath will dance in worship.  11 Make vows to the Lord your God, and keep them; let the peoples all around him bring their tribute;  12 for he curbs the spirit of princes, he fills the kings of the earth with awe.

New American Standard

Psa. 76:0    For the choir director; on stringed instruments. A Psalm of Asaph, a Song. 
Psa. 76:1                God is known in Judah;
            His name is great in Israel. 
2             His tabernacle is in Salem;
            His dwelling place also is in Zion. 
3             There He broke the flaming arrows,
            The shield and the sword and the weapons of war.             Selah. 
Psa. 76:4               You are resplendent,
            More majestic than the mountains of prey. 
5             The stouthearted were plundered,
            They sank into sleep;
            And none of the warriors could use his hands. 
6             At Your rebuke, O God of Jacob,
            Both rider and horse were cast into a dead sleep. 
7             You, even You, are to be feared;
            And who may stand in Your presence when once You are angry? 
Psa. 76:8               You caused judgment to be heard from heaven;
            The earth feared and was still
9             When God arose to judgment,
            To save all the humble of the earth.             Selah. 
10             For the wrath of man shall praise You;
            With a remnant of wrath You will gird Yourself. 
Psa. 76:11               Make vows to the LORD your God and fulfill them;
            Let all who are around Him bring gifts to Him who is to be feared. 
12             He will cut off the spirit of princes;
            He is feared by the kings of the earth.

Geneva Bible

1 To him that excelleth on Neginoth. A Psalme or song committed to Asaph. God is knowen in Iudah: his Name is great in Israel.  2 For in Shalem is his Tabernacle, and his dwelling in Zion.  3 There brake he the arrowes of the bowe, the shielde and the sword and the battell. Selah.  4 Thou art more bright and puissant, then the mountaines of pray.  5 The stout hearted are spoyled: they haue slept their sleepe, and all the men of strength haue not found their hands.  6 At thy rebuke, O God of Iaakob, both the chariot and horse are cast a sleepe.  7 Thou, euen thou art to be feared: and who shall stand in thy sight, when thou art angrie!  8 Thou didest cause thy iudgement to bee heard from heauen: therefore the earth feared and was still,  9 When thou, O God, arose to iudgement, to helpe all the meeke of the earth. Selah.  10 Surely the rage of man shall turne to thy praise: the remnant of the rage shalt thou restrayne.  11 Vowe and performe vnto the Lorde your God, all ye that be rounde about him: let them bring presents vnto him that ought to be feared.  12 He shall cut off the spirit of princes: he is terrible to the Kings of the earth.

Bishops’ Bible

Psa. 76:1 In Iurie is God knowen: his name is great in Israel.  2 At Shalem is his tabernacle: and his dwellyng in Sion.  3There he brake the arrowes of the bowe: the shielde, the sworde, and the battayle. Selah.  4 Thou art honourable: and of more puissaunce then the mountaynes of robbers.  5 The hygh couragious stomackes are spoyled, they haue slept their slepe: and the valiaunt souldiours coulde not finde their owne handes.  6 At thy rebuke O God of Iacob: both the charet and horse be brought to naught.  7 Thou, euen thou art dreadfull: and who may stande in thy syght when thou [begynnest] to be angry?  8 Thou causest thy iudgement to be hearde from heauen: then the earth trembleth, and is styll.  9 When God ariseth to iudgement: and to helpe all the afflicted vpon the earth. Selah.  10 The fearcenesse of man shall turne to thy prayse: [and] the remnaunt of the fearcenesse thou wylt restrayne.  11 Make vowes vnto God your Lorde, and perfourme them all ye that be rounde about hym: bryng presentes vnto hym that is dreadfull.  12 He abateth the spirite of princes: he is dreadfull to the kynges of the earth.

McLaughlin Bible

Psa. 76:0 [For the leader: on stringed instruments: a psalm: for Asaph: a song] 1 In Judah God is known, his name is great in Israel; 2 his tent is in Salem, his dwelling in Zion. 3 There he has broken the flashing arrows, shield and sword and battle. Selah. 4 Thou art more bright and puissant, than the mountains of prey. 5 The hygh couragious stomackes are spoyled, they sleep their last sleep, and the valiaunt souldiours coulde not finde their owne handes. 6 At thy rebuke, O God of Iaakob, both the chariot and horse are cast a sleepe. 7 Thou, euen thou art dreadfull: and who may stande in thy syght when thou [begynnest] to be angry? 8 You give sentence out of heaven; then the earth trembleth, and is styll. to helpe all the meeke of the land. [Selah] 10 The fearcenesse of man shall turne to thy prayse: [and] the remnaunt of the fearcenesse thou wylt restrayne. 11 Make vowes vnto God your Lorde, and perfourme them all ye that be rounde about hym: bryng presentes vnto hym that is dreadfull. 12 for he curbs the spirit of princes, he fills the kings of the earth with awe.

So the McLaughlin Bible collects the bones I’ve used to occupy my doggie mind this summer while I’m digging for a different kind of bone each day or two for my heart to chew.

[A lot of the information about my five “panelist” English Bible translations is from the Wikipedia pages on these translations linked here as well as from In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture by Alister McGrath.]

I love Faulkner and I love Merton. I learned recently that Merton loved Faulkner and said this about him:

His novels and stories are far more prophetic in the Biblical sense than the writings of any theologian writing today (at least, any that I know!).

Merton was contemplating writing a book on Faulkner’s work, but he died instead.  Merton loved to write about literature, and thirteen years after his death New Directions put a lot of this writing into a five-hundred-plus-page book entitled The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton.  In an appendix, this book also contains transcripts of informal talks Merton gave to his brothers at the Abbey of Gethsemani concerning The Sound and the Fury, Go Down, Moses, and The Wild Palms.

I love Faulkner and I love Merton.  Go Down, Moses is my favorite Faulkner novel, and The Sound and the Fury ranks up there, too.  I wanted to read The Wild Palms this summer because Merton had read it and loved it and wrote about it, and I wanted to read what Merton wrote about it but not before I had read the novel myself.

I read The Wild Palms this week like I used to read books during those years when my Great Books book group was hot.  I couldn’t wait to share with Merton my impressions and read about his.  If I become Orthodox, I thought, I can talk to Merton because he’s not dead because God is not the God of the dead but of the living, thank you.  If I don’t become Orthodox, I could just scrawl margin notes in the appendix as usual, and that’s pretty satisfying.  Because I know Merton and I know Faulkner, and I’m so happy that they were friends, or at least that Faulkner was Merton’s friend the way Faulkner and Merton are my friends.

Merton says that The Wild Palms is a meditation.  “Yes, a meditation!”  (Merton is animated.  The Literary Essayseditor does little editing so as not to detract from the talk’s informality.)  Merton thinks The Wild Palms is a meditation because of the depths of the truths it gets across through a kind of counterpoint (I’ll explain at the end); I think it’s a meditation, too, but I say it’s because of Faulkner’s high-wire prose that unites thought and act through epic similes and movie-director detail and repetition, through non-sequential time and fraying syntax, a union that seems to thin out under a reader’s feet at a vertiginous height above a truth where she fears that she or the character one will fall and die in contact with that truth.  The prose is like a meditation, a spell, a dull spell (no matter how much you like Faulkner); it affects you like a dream, not a vivid dream but like your last evaporating dream as you wake up: precisely the imprecise mood and the seemingly random images or words that stick with you not because they are the dream’s best moods or images or words but because they are the slowest moods or images or words to leave, the last bats, the ones that fly home in the orange sunrise; truth’s dull, pervasive, dawning impression.

Like this, Tom, this interaction between Wilbourne (lover) and McCord (husband) as McCord sees the couple off:

            Wilbourne and McCord shook hands.  “Maybe I’ll write you,” Wilbourne said.  “Charlotte probably will, anyway.  She’s a better gentlemen than I am, too.”  He stepped into the vestibule and turned, the porter behind him, his hand on the door knob, waiting; he and McCord looked at one another, the two speeches unspoken between them, each knowing they would not be spoken: I won’t see you and No.  You won’t see us again.  “Because crows and sparrows get shot out of trees or drowned by floods or killed by hurricanes and fires, but not hawks.  And maybe I can be the consort of a falcon, even if I am a sparrow.”  The train gathered itself, the first, the beginning of motion, departure came back car by car and passed under his feet.  “And something I told myself up there at the lake,” he said.  “That there is something in me she is not mistress to but mother.  Well, I have gone a step further.”  The train moved, he leaned out, McCord moving too to keep pace with him.  “That there is something in me you and she parented between you, that you are father of.  Give me your blessing.”

            “Take my curse,” McCord said.

On we go, our little book club, tonight, and when Tom left I thought again about The Wild Palms and about Bill, Tom, and me.

What would Louise Rosenblatt say about us tonight?  Her transactional theory of reading accounts for only two of us.  She puts everyone and everything but me on her stage in the preface to The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work: the writer (that’s Bill), the text, and the reader (Tom).  I’m a reader, too, but I’m also the reader’s reader, the reader of Merton’s secondary writing.  Where would I fit in?

Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, which I like very much, emphasizes the reader’s role in the transaction among writer, text, and reader.  She says that classicism and neoclassicism seek to mirror accepted reality, that Romanticism emphasizes the author, that New Criticism emphasizes the text, and that her transactional theory strikes the best balance by emphasizing the reader and the text (1-3).  I’m never on stage, never part of the big theory, but I do get a shout-out later in the book as the reader of criticism.

So what am I doing reading Tom reading Bill?  As a reader of criticism, am I being shortchanged or enriched?  Is this metacognition or metaestrus?

Valid literary criticism must come from a reader as a reader, Rosenblatt would say, and it must be about “the web of feelings, sensations, images, ideas, that [the reviewer or critic as reader] weaves between himself and the text.”  The text is important, too, but only as “the external pole in the process” (137).  “Objective” literary criticism (i.e., criticism focused only on this external pole) – no matter how good (and she likes the New Criticism’s brand of objective theory) – cuts readers off “from their own aesthetic roots” and so (ironically) drives them from the subject of the criticism: the text (140).

Merton does a good job avoiding that. “Yes, a meditation!” means that he has processed the novel, and his meditation exclamation gives way in his talk to some experiences he had as a reader along with some insightful takes on the text.

But even more than Merton’s personal approach, my perceived friendship with Merton, dead or alive, makes his criticism fruitful.  I know where he’s coming from, and, more importantly, I don’t know where he’s going.  This is also why I like to read book posts on blogs I’m familiar with – well, that and the comment fields, which sometimes amount to interactive marginalia.

I can even enjoy what Rosenblatt calls “objective” criticism if I have some dirt on the critic.  I started to enjoy Cleanth Brooks’s essays more once he got roughed up a bit, once Rosenblatt and Harold Bloom pointed out New Criticism’s shortcomings to me.  A biography on Brooks helped me, too.

For me, the best literary criticism is like a good book discussion group or like a marriage of true minds, impediments and all, in which the author is the celebrant and his text is the covenant we choose to honor or contravene.

(Here’s a little about The Wild Palms, which Faulkner originally named If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem before his publisher had its way.  Faulkner wrote it mid-career in 1938.  In it, he examines love, sexual and otherwise, by interweaving two stories, each about a man and a woman.  I never knew that Faulkner had it in him to examine sexual love so well, and Charlotte may be his most interesting and most human female character.  The stories, one about a modern couple who live only for their mutual love and the other about a convict stuck on a skiff with a pregnant woman he rescues during a flood, balance each other out thematically and emotionally (the “counterpoint”). The modern couple story is a psychodrama, probably kind of shrill as a stand-alone, and the flood story is action and comedy, so the stories in The Wild Palms mix a bit like the stories comprising Go Down, Moses.  Noel Polk, the editor of the current Vintage edition of The Wild Palms, says that the original manuscripts demonstrate that Faulkner wrote the novel in the order it appears – in “alternating stints” and not one story at a time.  I knew that if Merton liked novel then I would like it, too, and I did.)

I’m enjoying three new blogs, two by people I’ve known for years before they became bloggers. Each of these blogs speaks from an overtly Christian worldview in some way.

Bill explores the web and the bookstalls better than I do, and he has been recommending links and books to me for years.  He has also given me several books that have become invaluable to me.  What a special friend, to know when a book might hit me.  Shadows and Symbols, which he opened last month, focuses on places where biblical truth may be tucked away, unobserved by most Christians.  The blog is broader than that already.  I find I can air out my thinking a lot in Bill’s comment fields, and I’ve spent more time there than here lately.  (Am I the only one who finds his blog stultifying at times?)

Beryl, the one of the three I’ve never met, writes Finding Time for God, an honest and unassuming blog that starts with her devotional life.  It’s quiet over there, like shade.

I wish you could meet Maggie, a potter and a writer and someone fully alive, but since you probably can’t, you can at least read her stuff.  In Alternative Church, she examines what community is for and what Christian community might look like.

Knowing people first as friends and then as bloggers is new to me.  I find that their blogs enhance our friendships.

Most summers we get a week with Michael and Toby, but this summer we got only today, a spring day that had lost its way. We'll take it in. We won't tell it of its tribe’s fate.

Michael cooked us breakfast.  After we ate, we played catch with Julie, their adolescent Gordon setter, and we picked blackberries and swung in the hammock.  We played Master Clue and ate berries and Victoria’s chicken salad, the summer one, the one with the pecans and mandarin oranges, for lunch.  We told our parents’ and grandparents’ stories, and they were there, younger and not so wise, ha, ha!  After lunch we walked to the general store where Bethany got strawberry honey and Warren got a peach ice cream cone.  He gave me a bite.

Breakfast was toast and scrambled eggs.  The air was off; last night’s storms had broken the humidity.   The white window sash dominated the kitchen, and the breeze bought the sheers to term and delivered them into our laps.

Julie likes to throw her big dog self against us as she runs past.  She chases the motorcycles for the length of the electric fence.  Then she runs over the knoll to the back of their nine-acre place and back to us again.  She runs like breakdown music. 

We haven’t had a day this nice since before school ended.  The very white bricks and blades of grass seemed to glint with June juvenescence. We are not certain how old we are.

Blackberries are up now, though many are unripe.  The adolescent ones move between red and black.  Summer’s half done; soon, I’ll return for a new batch of ninth graders.

Bethany collected berries for lunch in a white cup, but Warren ate the berries as he picked them.  Warren befriended a worm that crawled out of a berry at the lunch table, though.

Sometimes I sit on our back door sill during an electric storm, all lights out.  It feels like a hundred verdicts read in a hundred hot, packed courtrooms.

I want to be a monk.

I feel bad about it sometimes.  It’s a selfish desire for a married man.  Stupid, too: Victoria is my soulmate and beautiful, nine years younger than I, and the work we’ve put in over almost seventeen years of married life has been paying off, we both think.

My therapist, Dr. Kennedy, told me ten years ago that couples with exactly opposing temperaments – she’s an ESTJ (a guardian) on Myers Briggs’s indicator, and I’m an INFP (an idealist)  – often have a hard go of it for the first twenty years, but if they work through their differences, they may have a great relationship thereafter.  (Dr. Kennedy’s marriage exemplifies his assertion, by the way.)

But Dr. Kennedy also inadvertently started me on this monk idea.  While helping me through an identity crisis, Dr. Kennedy clued in on my charismatic and rather evangelical form of Christianity.  He suggested that I read some devotional classics – a genre that had never appealed to me before – to reinforce what I had been learning during my crisis.

I read Augustine, St. John of the Cross, and others, and I was hooked right away.  The writers spoke to me about a side of spirituality that was at the edges or entirely outside of my Protestant experience, a spirituality that insisted on a deeper knowledge of self.  No heights without depths, the concept goes.  The road to self-knowledge is a paradox: it’s humbling and hard, but effort alone isn’t enough; it also requires God’s grace.  For the first time in my life, I was learning what Benedictine monk Anslem Gruen calls “spirituality from below”:

By descending into our earth-boundedness (humility is derived from humus, or soil), we come into contact with heaven, with God.  When we find the courage to climb down into our own passions, they lead us up to God. [Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You, p. 21]

I had been living in an Evangelical world that couldn’t even agree on whether it was appropriate to call Christians sinners in any sense.  Those who feel the word “sinner” is exclusively a label for unbelievers argue that we Christians need to identify ourselves as children of God so as not to void his work on the cross.  I’ll leave my rebuttal for another occasion; my point is that I now believe we can’t know God’s love to the extent we were created to experience it unless we go with God to the bottom of our false nature and discover more than we’d care to about our depravity.  When I read in these classics and in related books about spiritual leaders and explorers who openly acknowledge their status as sinners and who are frank about their sins and faults, I got courage to do the same, and I found a new place of fellowship and consolation with God.

I was almost forty years old when Dr. Kennedy made these reading recommendations, and I had just extended my first real invitation to God to peel away my false self.  I was motivated to do so by a deep-rooted, existential fear that I had avoided for years by constructing my own identity.  A career change and Victoria’s own personal growth conspired to finally expose it as a fraud.  I was about to discover that my approach to God and the Bible had been limited by the contradictory and patchwork manner in which I had built my identity (“I’m a fearful person.”  “I’m better than most people.”  “I’ll never measure up to my father.”)

Most of the devotional writers I read at Dr. Kennedy’s instance are monks, hermits, or spiritual fathers of nuns or monks.  You probably know the names: Thomas a Kempis, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Thomas Merton, others.  Something in their writing speaks of the fire that they permitted to burn away a good deal of their false selves.

During my crisis, I shared some of the rudimentary experiences some of them speak of.  I found the grace to admit more of my depravity to myself.  I know that, over twenty years into my Christian vocation, I would have consented to Jesus’ death had he been living then.  I discovered God in the people around me – Christian and non-Christian alike – and I found a new place inside me that seemed to respond to God in a more lissome way.  God was beginning to answer my prayer for intimacy with him.

My stagnation

In the years after my identity crisis waned, my spiritual progress waned, too.  In a way, I have been living out the Song of Moses: my rescue and my ride on God’s wings, followed by my complacency and distraction.  (A lot of great stuff having to do with my spiritual life has occurred in the past ten years, but I am speaking here about an elemental area of my prayer life.)

About seven years ago, I flushed when I read this passage from Merton’s The Ascent to Truth, part of a larger passage parsing John of the Cross’s stages of spiritual development:

. . . the Night of Sense and the period of consoling quietude are only a preparation for the mysticism of the Spiritual Night, Betrothal, and Transforming Union.  In the Night of Sense and the Prayer of Quiet, the contemplative is still in his infancy, and the tragedy is that in most cases mystical prayer does not get beyond this cradle stage.  The cause of this arrested development is to be found in subtle forms of attachment to which the spirit clings perhaps without ever realizing its own imperfections. [pp. 288-89]

It is probably presumptuous for me to claim to be even at the “cradle stage” – stages of spiritual development lose their allure and are no end in and of themselves, anyway – but somehow I recognized myself as suffering from something like this “arrested development” Merton describes.

Part of this stagnation was natural.  Over the last ten years, I’ve had a new career and a growing family.  I couldn’t focus on my spiritual life to the extent I did when my self-identity seemed at stake.

But before my identity crisis, struggles, blessings, jobs, relationships, and coincidences – everything usually seemed to feed into spiritual challenge and growth.  I haven’t felt that way over the past ten years, generally.  The job, the relationships, and the responsibilities – as important as they are – usually feel like more of a distraction than a teacher.  I’ve often been bitter about the great amount of time my job takes.  I often wince or curse when the phone rings.  I pray and meditate, but it seems to take me an hour – and an hour of prayer and meditation is a very rare event, given my schedule and spiritual torpor – just to clear my mind.

I pray and do Christian stuff.  But at some fundamental level, I miss God.

And I keep reading works by or about these monks and hermits, past and present – at least twenty-five books by now.  I’ve read enough to know that monasticism isn’t glamorous (or even necessarily spiritual or healthy, depending on the monk).  That doesn’t seem to lessen my ardor for the vocation, however.

Listening to fantasy

My ardor reached a fever pitch over the past month as I read two books my friend Bill gave me about the Orthodox monks and hermits on Mount Athos and some of their spiritual descendents: Kyriacos C. Markides’s The Mountain of Silence and Gifts of the Desert.  These books demonstrate to me that the tradition and spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers is alive.  Men and women are living out Anthony’s pattern of withdrawing from the world in order to rid themselves of every vestige of their false selves and in order to love the Lord without distraction.  Many of them have become spiritual parents and counselors, and many of them have been sent outside of their monasteries to help others.  Like Anthony, many men and women are leaving the world in order to return to it as better conduits of God’s love.

These two books confronted me with my lukewarm spiritual condition, and they encouraged me with what is possible in God.  They also fed my monastic fantasy, of course.

There are several reasons why I fixate on the monastic life, I think.  First of all, writings by and about monks have helped me.  Second, I am an introvert with a job that quickly drains my limited extroverted energy.  My favorite monastic daydreams therefore involve orders that severely limit talking.  Third, I feel more and more trapped by the ascendant values of Western civilization – time management, consumerism, and logic, for instance – and so my favorite daydreams drift also to more Eastern monastic traditions.

My monastic fantasy is somewhat like sexual fantasy, I think.  I have learned to neither repress sexual urges nor give in to them.  Instead, I listen to them as friends (old friends!).  What should I pay attention to about them?  Probably not the precise fantasy that they may couch themselves in, but a particular need that I may have overlooked.  Similarly, I should neither ignore my monastic fantasy nor leave my wife and family to establish a hermitage.  (I assume no sound monastery would accept me.)

I laid out my monastic fantasy to Michael last week as plainly as I have to anyone.  (Michael is my best friend and spiritual father.)  He thought a long time before he said anything.

We ended up comparing our fantasies of the future, analyzing and laughing at their specifics and considering what they might mean.  Michael pointed out that many people either ignore their higher callings expressed in such fantasies or set out to fulfill them in the half-baked form they usually arrive in.  Our talk was a huge help.

I think I’m itching for the next season in my life, whatever it is.  My fantasy may provide some hints about it, and I think it’s asking me to take some steps in preparation.  For one thing, I need to allow the inward part of me to be developed.  It may not be smart for me to take my ball and go home because God won’t play by my fantasy’s rules.

Two elements of Orthodox mysticism

I hope also to continue examining Orthodox mysticism.  I’m already about through with Timothy Ware’s excellent book,The Orthodox Church and Vladimir Lossky’s classic book, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.  I also hope to blog about some of the stuff I discover.

And I mustn’t forget the twofold purpose of much of Orthodox monasticism expressed well by Theodorus the Ascetic, a seventh century monk who lived near Bethlehem:

When you are in love, surely your constant concern is to be near the beloved at any and every opportunity, and you avoid anything that would hinder you from being in the company and the society of your loved one.  So it is when someone loves God. One constantly desires to be with him and to speak with him.  This can only be achieved though pure prayer.  So let us apply ourselves to prayer with all our strength, for it makes us become like the Lord.  This is the meaning of the Scripture that says, "Oh God, my God, I cry to you at dawn, my soul has thirsted after you."  This person who, in the psalms, cries to God at dawn signifies the spiritual intellect that has withdrawn from every evil, and that has been wounded to the heart by the love of God.

As John McGuckin, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, points out in a podcast I listened to today, Theodorus’s coupling of active purification and an inward turning in prayer to God as to a lover is common in Orthodox theology.

McGuckin’s podcast and Theodorus’s words reminded me of how these two elements were coupled for me just a few years before my identity crisis.  Here’s how I wrote about it to myself in my journal during my identity crisis:

The morning of your wedding, you sensed the Holy Spirit’s grief.  You knew your fellowship with God would suffer from the marriage.  That does not mean it was a mistake to marry.  It means you were fixed on substituting Victoria for God.  God is using this struggle to restore Jesus’ place as your beloved and to put your marriage in its proper place.

Three years ago, God showed you a powerful image of Jesus looking at you with the eyes of a lover.  His expression was engaging and jealous, like a lover’s.  You felt both broken and happy because you thought your marriage had ended a close relationship with Jesus.

A moment later, God allowed you to see yourself as a furnace.  As the fire burned, light from the furnace flashed different colors.  These colors represented impurities God wanted to burn out of your life.

Both of these images are beginning to be fulfilled.  The purpose of this struggle is to remove impurities, but the greater purpose is to prepare you for your beloved, Jesus.  Victoria has beautiful eyes, but you have never seen eyes like Jesus’ eyes, and you never will in this life.  Let the longing come.

I know my religious ideation, now as well as then, involves these two elements: purification from the false self (a process involving self-knowledge) and relationship with God.  Orthodox monasticism is not the only way God can fulfill these to my heart’s satisfaction.  (God, I know from my limited experience, is more willing than I am when push comes to shove.)

Two things you should know, since you’ve read this far.  Victoria is quite good-natured about this.  She is too experienced with my idealistic tendencies to be alarmed by them.  Second: I do know myself well enough now at least to know that, even if every impediment to a monastic or hermitic life dissolved today, I’d chicken out.

I tried to keep July relatively free of obligations so I could get in touch with myself a little bit again.  Schoolwork resumes the second week of August.  I’m glad I got to bring my fantasy to the surface of my mind, even if that is all I accomplish this month, and I’m grateful, more than ever, for good friends like Victoria and Michael.

“Why didn’t Warren empty the dishwasher this morning?” I asked.

“Franklin had to cancel,” Victoria explained.

“So?”

“I told Warren that he had to empty the dishwasher before Franklin could come over.  Warren took that to mean that he had to empty the dishwasher because Franklin was coming over.  The condition precedent failed, so he didn’t have to do the job.”

Warren is still at it.  He squeezes conjunctions out of prepositions whenever possible.  Three and a half years ago, it was unless and until.  Today it’s because and before.

I’m a Nouns, Whatever type, really I am.  But Warren, an inveterate Conjunctivite, seems to bring out the Prepositionists in Victoria and me.

Stage curtains kind of kick as they close,
kind of sweep the act up before them, then
bow, broom to dustpan.

Can we still pretend once the curtains
have put on such a show?

After the sex scene, two housecleaners
snap and levitate the sheets while
speaking in an unknown tongue.

Curtains shush their own pulleys and
the stage whispers of pulling hands.

Ever watch a sail unfurl, the hands
watching as it fills?  They’ll watch
until the wind pulls.

A flower unfolds like dark intermission
between birth and death.  It has its own beauty.

Paratroopers ache mid-fall
between draft and deployment.

They giggle and bend over the ropes,
those girls in black shirts, but the audience
stays in its seats.

In the morning, I can read only in her basement.  Every other room has someone sleeping in it, usually on a couch or floor.  Betty’s house is small, but it’s big enough.  One toilet and bath got seven of us through with a little charity.  I fixed the toilet yesterday and was treated like a hero.

I read on the floor of Betty’s office, the only room in the house with wall-to-wall carpeting.  She keeps a lot of her books down here.  Like her home, her shelves are simple and Spartan, clean of unexplored interests.  She cooks, and she collects cookbooks.  There are also books about God and lots of Victoria’s old storybooks, textbooks, and yearbooks.  Each summer, two or three of Victoria’s old friends come over, and we inevitably open the yearbooks.  Pictures of Victoria at every stage of life grace about every room, even in the basement.

And Betty grows roses.  This morning I discovered Betty’s vases, the delivery systems for her simple charity, hidden in a basement recess.  I found some roses in her icebox last night, ready to go.  Yesterday I spent time in her garden, photographing her flowers.

I have a photograph of five generations: B (my daughter), Victoria, Betty (my mother-in-law), Granny (Betty’s mother), and Grandma H (Granny’s mother-in-law, who at the time was 109 years old).  Betty’s in the middle, the hinge in this lineage.  She takes care of Granny and showers gifts on us, too.

B inherited Betty’s quiet and her gentle fingers.  Betty holds and arranges and mends with entire attention, and her artisan ways made room for B’s art.  Her concentration and fingers, which seem dexterous enough to have four joints each, remind me of a spider at work.

We just got back from ten enjoyable days in Nashville this morning.

We don’t need an “office” anymore, so we threw away our desks and turned the basement office into the spare bedroom last month.  We made the old spare bedroom into B’s art studio, so now she holds two of the four upstairs rooms.

B came home from school at year's end with a trove of artwork, and she opened an exhibit in her studio last night.  “Art Through the Ages,” the banner over the studio door reads, and the “Ages” are her ages.  The exhibit is a B retrospective covering her artistic development from first grade through the present (rising high school junior).  Some stages are better represented than others, but there’s enough from my favorite years (seventh and tenth grades) for me to make the case for my preferences to patrons.

This may be the most comprehensive exhibition of my daughter’s art ever.

The pictured figurine from the current epoch began as a self-portrait but grew into a bust of the artist’s brother.  Those who know W recognize this stare as his signal that he wants something. (The foreground figure is actually a Happy Meal toy, I think, though its face shape uncannily resembles my own.)

School ended two days ago.  Last summer was pretty much planned out: a week with friends on a mountain, a five-week graduate course, a week at the beach, a week for chores, and back to school.  Not this summer.

This summer I have little planned.  I’ve got some school stuff to do – an article to write, a couple of meetings, an in-service to plan for – and I hope to implement a writer’s workshop model more extensively into my planning for this fall – but I’ve turned down some bigger projects.  We’ll go to visit our families in Nashville and Tidewater.  But, in between, I want to take time.

For what?  For my family and for me. On the me side, and on a lark, I decided on the first day of vacation to learn a little Welsh.  This is odd.  I haven’t taken on a new hobby on a lark in years.  Also, learning any language is crazy.  I demonstrated little aptitude for languages when I was taking French in high school and college, the last time I tried learning a language.  But if I just take it slow and let it all be discovery, I think it could be fun.

I don’t have any goals.  I don’t plan to become fluent in Welsh.  I just want to see if learning a language can be fun.

I’m not sure why I picked Welsh.  Welsh isn’t a dead language, but almost no one speaks only Welsh.  (Most Welsh don’t speak Welsh, but almost all Welsh speak English.)  That makes me feel more comfortable – less responsible, somehow – than if I were learning a language that one or more nations rely on, like Spanish or Japanese.  I’ve never been to Wales and have no plans to visit.

I know I want to get some objectivity on English in order to read, write, and teach English better.  Welsh is not closely related to English – it’s the most prevalent extant Celtic language – but it uses the same alphabet.  I want to get away from Romantic languages, but I don’t want to mess with a new alphabet.  In Welsh, the letters more consistently represent the sounds that you learn to associate with them than do the letters in English.  So that’s handy.  But I’ve read that it’s a hard language to learn.

I got the idea the night before last reading Hopkins.  I discovered that he learned Welsh.  I thought of Dylan Thomas, though I discovered yesterday that he never learned Welsh.  I just thought: maybe I can learn a little Welsh!

I’ve started with the BBC's The Big Welsh Challenge, which seems wonderful.  It is slow going for me, though.  I worked at it for an hour and a half Thursday night, and, on Friday morning, I could remember only the phrase for “good morning”: “bore da.”  But I walked all over the house wishing everyone bore daseveral times, just like they do on the BBC Flash videos.  And just like a two-year-old might.  It is sort of like rediscovering the world and my place in it.

I wish I had a two-year-old’s aptitude for language.  Think where I would be when I would turn six!  But I’m on it for the ride.  Right now, no goals allowed.

the heat came too early
overhead, early june

raced off like two balloons
attached, screaming

let go
when her mother was
helping her into the back seat

her parents shut
their bedroom door

she saw her
life through tears

she saw herself
too early
the white between
two clouds

the lines between
two stanzas

she got rich
writing verse

but she never
let go

Where the sun lies abed, he glows with tomorrow.
His bridal tent distends with the air of tomorrow.

Every creature that swells to attract its lover
    makes out to have swallowed him.

The morning’s the heat of his night’s satisfaction.
He discounts the ropes of the afternoon clouds.

Each evening the moon pulls off a part of him
    and mounts him with bright nails on
    the walls of her rib cage.

the end.
ing credits rise at
not appear when the roll
could cleanse, and you may or may
a silent film that no amount of washer fluid
our read?  her head meets your shadow-head against
in feet-first were she naked on a late-afternoon bed.
shadow might lead you to the pedestrian and take her
finally, in the time remaining, contemplate how your
you would've said it at recess: the ing-xay & the ed-pay.
answers in the form of questions, & remember how
punch lines (backstroke, waiter, fly, soup), put your
the end in mind.  write your own storyline.  anticipate
bottom’s up, we say, but think a brew thru – begin with
inattention accounts for more fatalities than alcohol.
top-down works only in spring – only when
to change your reading habits.  ponder:
have less than a millisecond
studies show you
our traffic

I love East Coker. I do. Last night I patched up my thirty-year-old copy of Eliot’s Four Quartets with clear packaging tape. When I was in college, one of my friends paid twenty dollars to rebind my twenty-five-dollar, leather-bound King James Bible for my birthday. But by last night no one had offered to rebind my $1.65 Harvest Book paperback edition ofFour Quartets. Maybe I’m supposed to have internalized all the words I need by now.

The paper is thick, and the pages haven’t yellowed at all. The top edges of the pages have inexplicable, rusty freckles like the ones on my arms. I’m also “in the middle way.” In fact, I’m as old as Eliot was when he wrote East Coker.

Since when is fifty “the middle way,” by the way? Was Eliot flattering himself? My life divides neatly into smaller, decade-long lives, as if I were leading six different lives, and my fifties life makes me feel old, a lot like my thirties life did. My thirties were a little hard. I was out of shape and had lots of aches and pains. Some clock went off in my head at age thirty: I’m not married! What divides our lives?

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?

When I was forty, I discovered the fountain of youth. An identity crisis and a slow recovery made the world seem new. I started an exercise-and-diet regime and a new career. I rediscovered poetry. My forties fulfilled the promise of my twenties – all of that Bible study and those fifty-four hours of English courses. But old age seemed to return with vigor last year about the time I turned fifty. For the first time, I know in my bones that most of my life has passed.

But, as I say, my youth and old age seem to come and go.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

A lifetime burning in every moment. “That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past,” says the Preacher.

I was twenty when I wrote the first marginalia in my Four Quartets. What gets across the naiveté: my balloon-like script or my borrowed thoughts? Today my handwriting looks more wrinkled – more nuanced, I think. In college I wrote “the neg. theology” beside these lines:

In order to arrive at what you do not know

     You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess

     You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not

     You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

I remember the professor mentioning negative theology, which was the first time I had ever heard of the idea. I remember thinking that it sounded rather holy and cool, kind of like the essence of what my Jesus buddies and I were after in pursuing our very positive theology.

Why did I like Four Quartets back then? I remember liking the somewhat stiff diction that circled around on itself. The “dust in the air suspended” and the roses and bowls reminded me of quiet rooms of now-dead relatives and their loud, slow-ticking clocks. There was something quieting and alarming about rooms like that, and you can’t experience them after middle age. You’re too busy remembering them, outfitting them.

Earlier in his career, Eliot used the inherent contradiction of his language (his diction and syntax are at once kind of stately and creaky) to saturate his voice with irony. But Eliot uses his contradictory language in East Coker to achieve something quieter than irony; he achieves a kind of wisdom-poem, and his language seems perfect for an examination of negative theology. All that dust in the rose bowl and all that shadow fruit, all those footfalls in the garden. It’s an elegant and “a worn-out poetical fashion” all at once. In his end is his beginning.

But little in East Coker would have made sense to me in the beginning except for some of the more aphoristic and outwardly Christian portions of it. My overall attraction was inexplicable. Perhaps my spirit had found a kind of blueprint.

              My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

East Coker is built on an Ecclesiastes chassis, and, like Ecclesiastes’s body, you can’t tell if it’s coming or going. Old age, darkness, wisdom, despair, writing, and life cycles of people and families and civilizations circle around one another.East Coker has Ecclesiastes’s “a time for”’s, and it has a loosened pane and a tattered arras for Ecclesiastes’s loosened silver cord and broken golden bowl. The sun also rises:

        Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence.

A lot of people think Ecclesiastes is depressing, and a lot of people think East Coker is depressing, too. But those people don’t understand apophatic theology, I say. The only thing that seems to depress Eliot in East Coker is his writing.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate . . .

The subject of preaching and writing is the toughest part of Ecclesiastes for me, too, because the moment preaching and writing point to negative theology (the “goads” and “nails” below, perhaps), they also create a chasm between positive and negative theology:

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs. The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth. The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd. And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Do you feel the chasm? After all he went through, the Preacher was stuck looking for acceptable words.

According to the negative theology, God is ineffable, so suddenly you have a problem if you want to explain him or the dance he set in motion around him. Here’s the other point in East Coker where Eliot seems to throw down his pen:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

These appearances make the poet a subject of his own poem. As Eliot moves from the irony of his early poetry to negative theology, he replaces the anti-heroes of his early poetry with his narrator – himself. Ecclesiastes is a personal book, a working through, a seeker’s journal, and East Coker is, too. Eliot’s ancestors emigrated to America from East Coker.  He chose the poem’s opening and closing lines for his epitaph on the commemorative plaque in the church where his ashes are buried -- St. Michael's Church in East Coker.

In East Coker, the only anti-hero – the only fool – is the narrator, since anyone who preaches (or writes about) the negative theology is a fool. Ask the apostle Paul, who in his second letter to the Corinthians only risked preaching it in a clown suit.

East Coker shares Ecclesiastes’s ambivalence toward old age and wisdom just as it does toward writing. In East Coker, old men have nothing positive to offer the young.

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The only wisdom resides in the darkness of God, and the only thing old men have to offer is something negative: the loss of themselves, a kind of death before death.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

But works like Ecclesiastes and East Coker are meant for the young as well as the old. In fact, East Coker reconciles the young and old, the ends and beginnings, in darkness. Perhaps Ecclesiastes and East Coker lend a little mystery to life, or at least to old age. I remember thinking as I read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes as a teenager, “Maybe the hoary head is a crown of glory, after all.” Young people feel a connection with a long, authentic life, or at least I felt one back then. Even if I couldn’t decipher the old stone in my youth, I could at least carry it around with me.

Ecclesiastes ends rather perfunctorily: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” I can hear Thoreau rage against this ending, much as he raged in Walden against the Westminster Catechism’s summary of man’s purpose: to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Suppose Shakespeare had taken Polonius’s famous aphorisms early in Hamlet and had put them in the prince’s mouth at the end. That’s the feeling I get from Ecclesiastes.

To be fair, Ecclesiastes’s end seems to focus on its younger readers – all of us, I guess, with beginner’s mind – since the fear of God and the keeping of his commandments may lead us, by God’s mercy, into the dark night the Preacher and John of the Cross and Eliot’s other mystic heroes believe in.

But East Coker ends with a challenge to the old:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Eliot has given me a vision for my fifties, and maybe for my seventies if I go that long. (My sixties will take care of themselves, I reckon, like my twenties and forties.)

I carry my Harvest Book edition around now like I carried my pocket New Testament around as a teenager. In my beginning is my end.

[This article appeared first in The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project's spring 2008 issue.  I have made a few minor changes to it for publication here.  My thanks to the Project for permission to republish.]

Good courses teach me stuff I don’t know, but great courses are more like revelations of things I didn’t know that I didn’t know.  Last year’s summer institute was a great course!  I discovered that I am permitted to use my writing instincts in teaching writing.  That may seem obvious, but it was a revelation to me. I love to write and to self-publish, but I never honestly thought these loves would also interest my students or affect my teaching.  Instead, before this past summer, my main means of motivating students to write well had been to instill the fear of my red pen.  But this year I’ve been selling my ninth graders on what has always sold me: writing for an audience.

So far, my classes are using three ways to discover audiences outside of the classroom: web logs (otherwise known as blogs), a class literary anthology, and submissions to print publications.  This article presents what my students and I did this year with the first of these efforts.  Through a lot of trial and error, I figured out one way of including blogging in a writers’ workshop classroom model.

Authentic Audiences

Before this year, I was already discovering that students usually put more effort into their writing when they know other students will read their work than when they know that only I will read it.  Also, when I tell students that their peers will be reading their papers in the next class, I find that all but one or two of them get their papers in on time.  Real-world deadlines involving real audiences seem to work better than my artificial deadlines, even though I enforce my artificial deadlines with real penalties.

This past summer’s institute opened my eyes to my hypocrisy concerning audiences – a hypocrisy that should have turned my writing focus around years before.  Before this past summer, I had made my students pretend that they were writing for real audiences, even though they were writing for only me.  Indeed, the audience in a typical student paper is not a teacher but a construct, a kind of dramatic convention the student and the teacher pull off to make the paper assignment work.  Since the teacher usually knows more about the paper’s subject than the student, the student is conscious of telling her one-man audience something he often already knows.  Despite this, students and teachers pretend that someone besides the teacher will eventually read the paper to be informed or entertained.  It’s a fake audience, and the cost is often a paper with a strained, pretentious, and fake voice.  The long-term cost may be a student with a learned loathing of writing.  So why just pretend?

Why Blogs?

Blogs, the popular, shorthand name for web logs, give students an authentic audience in a twenty-first-century medium with which they are comfortable. Blogging also helps students associate good writing with their increasingly technological future.  Blogging may not be the latest online phenomenon, but its current growth is still phenomenal.   As of this past September, a recognized tracking service counted over a hundred six million blogs worldwide, up fromseventy-five million this past April. Over fifty-seven million Americans read blogs. The number of readers worldwide, of course, is far higher.  Blogs are a recognized medium with an authentic audience.

Blogs are the most writing-oriented of Web 2.0 type web sites. (Web 2.0 is shorthand for web sites with visitor-generated content, such as blogs, social networks, and photo- and video-sharing sites.)  Blogs, after all, evolved from online diaries. Despite their technical evolution and subject-matter expansion over the past ten years, good blogs still require good writing.

Blogging demonstrates that a popular online medium can honor good writing. My survey results indicate that most of my students either blog or participate on social networks. By incorporating good writing in a popular teen genre, teens are more likely to write and are more likely to discover more sophisticated possibilities for their existing online spaces and, more importantly, for their future online endeavors in whatever form they may take years from now.

Ensuring a Positive Online Experience

Around the beginning of November, I launched our multi-user blogging network.  Each student had her own blog site and was free to choose from a number of skins for her readers’ interface.  When she posted on her blog site, she came up with her own topic, title, and genre listings for the post. 

I was blogging on our site along with them.  Like many of my students, I took on a blogging alias, and we kept a running list of who was who to make it fair.  Ostensibly, I was modeling blogging for my students, but the main reason for my participation was that I just didn’t want to be left out.  They were having too much fun. (I must not have been getting enough attention on my adult-world blog site because, after our site got going, I started checking my site on it for comments after I published something halfway decent more often than I checked my adult-world blog for comments.)

I required that students leave eight comments per blogging check (usually, every two or three weeks) on other students’ posts.  I didn’t comment on my students’ blogs because my students may not have been ready for their teacher as a subjective reader.  It also sounds potentially creepy: “I heard this teacher was leaving comments on his students’ blog posts!”

My students and I deliberately kept our comments positive.  In the classroom, we have writer support groups where the students and I can receive all the constructive criticism we want.  Online, though, I wanted my guys to experience what I struggled to accept during the first three years of my own blogging: specific, unmitigated praise.  This past summer, I was fuming in a post that my blog readers weren’t leaving any constructive criticism of my writing in their comments.  One comment a reader (another writing teacher) left me in response to my post helped me see things differently:

As a teacher and reader of your blog, I'd much rather enjoy what you write and respond to what inspires and excites me--as this piece has--than edit and critique your work. I trust that as you write more, you'll find your way to more and more clarity about how to polish your writing to a shine. I think celebrating what's working in a piece has far greater value in keeping us inspired to write and improve than anything else.

Her comment led me to understand that purely positive comments on blog posts were more important in the long run to me as a writer than critical comments.  I also began to see how my own writing had improved over the three years I had been blogging despite the lack of criticism.

I emphasized to my students that praising doesn’t mean faking it.  Blog commenters maintain their integrity (and credibility) by selecting an aspect of a post on which to lavish praise.  Of course, a comment can be effective even if it involves no praise, so long as the commenter expresses some connection with even just part of the post.  This specificity is what gives a comment its worth.  When someone picks something in one of my posts to either compliment or to expand on, I feel read.  After blogging for three years, I know that some stuff just isn’t getting read much.  Some of the other un-commented-upon material was probably read or appreciated, but readers just don’t have much to say about it.  (I’ve learned also that longer pieces don’t usually get read very often unless they’re personal or funny or both.) 

Student commenters were also free to politely disagree with the substance of any post.  The disagreement could be strong, I told them, but they were not to criticize or even to point out perceived mistakes in other students’ writing (grammar, syntax, etc.).  I found that it was important to drill students on the art of good commenting.  I warmed to my task; I think students need to learn how to be both honest and positive with each other and with each other’s writing.  Despite my drills and my entreaties, I still had to ask a student to modify a comment every now and then.  Sometimes I redacted a comment as soon as I read it, fearing that the comment might hurt relationships or tear down the encouraging atmosphere the students and I had worked to inculcate on the site.

Feeling Read All Over the World

Comments make students feel read, and feeling read is one of the best things about writing.  If you ask a writer how she came to see herself as a writer, she will probably tell you a story or two about some of the first times her words got to other people.  Maybe she published a poem in an elementary school anthology.  Maybe a class put on a play she wrote.  One way or another, she felt read.

Site stats also confirm to my students that their blogs command a higher readership than they could probably expect from taping their work onto our classroom walls.  I reminded students that anyone on the planet with Internet access could read our posts – a potential audience of millions.  I did get practical when I explained the site statistics, which amounted to hundreds of visitors instead of millions, but they were pretty impressed with the few hundred unique visitors over the life of their blogs.  I also explained search engine dynamics.  I told them how more words and the passage of time means more hits and more links and maybe more readers.  Many of them quickly grasped another rule I never taught them: the more regular the posts, the more regular the readership.

I hope that other readers outside of our class members have been (and will be) drawn to something fairly unique: a self-contained community of online writers.  I hope also that readers will be drawn to the writing itself.  Of course, there’s no hiding that it’s ninth grade writing.  I didn’t advertise the writers’ age or make the site look like a school site, though.

A Gated Community

More words on our site may have meant more readers, but not more commenters.  We blog in a kind of gated community.  Everyone can see us, but only my seventy honors students can comment on posts there.  The site’s gate keeps out possible predators as well as commenters who may not wish to play by our rules.  But the site's exclusivity also gives the students another way to experience the writing community that they’ve begun face to face in class in writers’ support groups and other activities.  Internet safety, then, dovetails with my vision of augmenting our experience as a writers’ community by bringing it online.

I also described this fishbowl feature in an email introducing our site to my students’ parents.  I invited the parents to enjoy their students’ posts and comments.  I employed my reverse-psychology, parental-relations strategy here: I find that the more I tell my parents, the less they think there’s anything to be concerned about.  Each month of the school year, I send them long, colorful ezines of what we’re doing in class.  Most parents delete them without reading them, saying to themselves, “This guy must have it together.”  So, predictably, I didn’t get any emails, positive or negative, about any online content during the four and a half months our site was up and running.

I instituted some other policies to maintain online safety.  I told the students that I would read every post and comment, and I followed through with that.  I did not allow any music, pictures, or videos: I had enough to keep track of just with the writing!  I disabled trackbacks and pingbacks to insure that no spam reached our sites.  I made students sign a code of conduct that referenced the school’s online acceptable use policy the students signed at the beginning of the year.  The code of conduct also contained specific and dire consequences for code infractions.  I assured parents that the sites were in compliance with our school system’s policies and regulations manual.

Not a “School Site”

I have discovered that high school students don’t go out of their way to write on “school” sites.  According to the results of my written survey, a majority of my current students have a social network page (e.g., My Space or Facebook), a YouTube account, or a blog.  Moving from such user-centered environments to an institution-centered one is comparable to returning to dial-up after a few months of high-speed Internet.  I’m not trying to compete with Facebook, of course, but I’m not going to needlessly repel students, either.

Besides, how could my students feel like real writers if they were writing on a school site?  They’d probably feel like they were on training wheels as the "real" Internet writers streaked by them on motorcycles.

I did a great deal of research to find out what multi-user blogs and private social network sites are available.  All of them that I found last year were either too “educational,” too inflexible, or too easy for students to bring objectionable material into.  Others did not have the right combination of universal viewing with membership-only interaction.  Some services may be right for you, such as Blackboard (if your school system subscribes to their blogging services), Edublogs.org, and Ning.com.  This last is a social networking site that is working hard at meeting teachers’ needs, but it didn’t offer enough teacher control when I was researching sites.  Besides, my school system’s Internet filter began blocking Ning around the beginning of this school year.

I gained a lot of flexibility by building the site on WordPress MU. I had my Internet server download the MU (“multi-user” blog) software from MU.WordPress.org, and then my server followed that site’s instructions to install and configure it.  MU has a sensible interface that all of my students understood almost at once.  It comes with several “skins,” or blog-page looks, for students to choose from.  I also installed simple plug-ins that enhanced the sites’ capabilities.

I have no training in computer technology (though I admit that I enjoy technology), so I needed lots of help customizing the site to fit my purpose.  I found MU’s online forums to be helpful, though many of the old pros helping out the rest of us were often cranky.  (Well, how pleasant would I be if I were giving away my time and being asked the same question three times a day – questions that could be answered by digging a little in the forum’s back pages?)

How Blogging Fit into My New Writers’ Workshop Model

Around the same time we started blogging, I started to use the writers’ workshop model I had discovered at the Summer Institute through the writings of Nancie Atwell and Lucy McCormick Calkins.  About a month into the blogging, I began to see how the blogging and the writers’ workshop could complement each other.

I showed students how their writing might progress from their English class sketchbooks through very polished pieces for print publications, and I described blogging as falling in the middle of this continuum. I taught students to take material out of their writer’s sketchbook (free-writes, reader responses, and poetry “messes,” for instance) and to develop them into blog posts.  I also asked the students to choose some of their blog post writing, in turn, to revise for more polished writing.  By making the blog posts a kind of middle step between sketchbook writing and more formal pieces, I was able to claim that blogging wasn’t really all that much extra writing.  These writing “steps” also got students practicing revision without my having to force them.

I also let students post any writing they wished to (school appropriate, of course).  Most students published a mix of sketchbook work that they developed for their blogs, work they wrote for other assignments and classes, and work they wrote specifically for their blog sites.  I introduced a few genres in writers’ workshop mini-lessons, and students often experimented with these genres on their blogs.

I required my students to publish at least 300 words in blog posts per blog-check period, which became about every two weeks.  Four of the eight comments each student had to leave on others’ posts had to be either the first or second comment to a post.  This latter requirement assured that everyone got some of these valuable comments and that early postings did not attract all the comments just because they were at the top of the list.  I was afraid also that kids would get cliquish and that less popular kids wouldn’t get as many comments as the others.

At first, I made the posts and comments due every two weeks, but when we had to focus on other parts of the curriculum, I stretched it to every three weeks.  I was glad to stretch it out because it took me about eight hours to read and tabulate all of the posts and comments for a given blog-check period.  I have seventy-five honors students, so every third weekend was pretty much shot.

In keeping with the positive spirit with which I wanted my students to approach their blogging, I never formally assessed the quality of their online work.  I had enough assessments of their writing from the more formal pieces that the county curriculum guide requires and from the few blog posts the students developed into more polished pieces.  Besides, any kind of assessment of this material on top of the time I was already spending reading all of it would have done me in.

Despite the lack of formal assessment, I found that the writing quality overall on our site was pretty good.  Five or six of my writers occasionally amazed me, writing poetry or stories at a level most college students probably haven’t reached.

With all of the reading I had to do to adequately oversee the material, I was delighted to find that, for the first time in my career, I was beginning to know my students as writers.   As a result, I have been able to encourage my students to write in certain directions based on how effectively they’ve used their blog space.  I now have a few budding poets, fiction writers, and personal essayists!

Student Feedback

My students gave our blogging positive marks in a survey I gave them about a month after we began blogging.  Over ninety percent of them rated it either “It’s okay” (Hey, that’s effusive for ninth graders!), “I like it,” or “I love it.”   When I modified the question somewhat to ask if they would prefer to write the same amount but in more traditional assignments handed in to the teacher, only two students in the fifty-nine who responded to the survey indicated their preference for traditional assignments. 

The survey also brought me some good news related to whether students were “feeling read.”   In response to a question about how much they liked reading their fellow students’ blog posts, only six percent of my students expressed any distaste for it.  Also, all but three of the fifty-nine responding students enjoyed reading the better comments to their own posts. 

Here are a couple of the more positive student comments:

I love how I can see what other people like about my writing without being in class. It is a way to encourage other's writing and to grow in my own writing. I have found that I have a nice poetry voice through the blogging. I HATED writing before this year, but now that I get positive feedback, I am liking it more and more. THANK YOU [our site]!

I really like using [blogging]. I really enjoy reading some of my class mates work that I wouldn't have gotten to read without our blogs. I also really like that we can post whatever we want (we don't have specific papers we have to post or pieces on certain topics). I like that we have so much freedom with our blogs.

One of my biggest success stories involves a young man whose parents introduced me to him just before the school year began.  He and his parents told me that he loves reading (he had read most of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance), but that he has always hated writing.  They were concerned about his being in honors English because English class had not been his strong suit.  Some of his other, current teachers have since told me that he has been writing for our site just about every chance he has gotten.  He has written a wonderful science fiction serial that developed quite an online readership.  He’ll be submitting the serial for print publication in the next couple of weeks.  His expression and punctuation have improved in the process, too.

More critical comments from my survey responses involved the site’s navigation, my refusal to allow pictures and music, and the amount of writing I required.  Many students didn’t like my rule that four of the eight comments had to be one of the first two comments to posts.  In response to their concerns, I added a Google reader in order for students to find new posts quickly to meet their “four comments must be one of the first two comments to a post” requirement. 

For an experiment, I also threw out the “first two comments” requirement for the last blog-check period.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that the comments were as evenly divided as they had been before.  Next year, I’ll still keep the rule for the first couple of months, but then I think I’ll drop it once I feel like students have broadened their blog-reading horizons sufficiently.  From what I could gather, about two-thirds of my students were sorry to see us stop blogging in mid-March, but the rest of the students were somewhat tired of it.  Next year, I need to figure out a way to have more frequent checks, which makes students focus on the site more.  I think the blogging will be more integrated into the students’ writing plans as I increase the use of the writers’ workshop model next year.

Blogging for Academic Students

I wouldn’t try this broad form of blogging with my academic students.  They just don’t have the interest in writing that my honors students have, and many of them wouldn’t take the assignment seriously.  Besides, seventy students turns out to be enough for this exercise.  It would have drained the life out of me to have had my other fifty-four students blogging, too, considering that I was responsible for reading everything that goes up on the site.

I have a more focused blogging lesson plan that I’ve been using over the past few years for both my academic and honors students.  I’ll use it again this spring to teach all of my students Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, a play about jury deliberations after a murder trial.  I assign each student a juror number and split each class into two jury rooms (i.e., two multiple-user blogs).  The students spend two days in the computer lab interacting with their fellow jurors and discussing the play’s evidence.  That’s more of the assignment size and time span I need effectively to get my academic students involved with blogging.

Please feel free to visit our site anytime to see for yourself the good and bad aspects of my approach to student blogging.

work

she
taught
us

make
them
work

she
said

they
won’t
like
it

you
know
unless
they
work

work

work

(work

#
taught
#

#
#
work

#
said

#
#
like
it

#
know
# #
#
work)

hello
said the
poem

&
hopped
off

The plan was for 6.3 miles, but Warren and my first Boy Scout hike ended up being 9 miles yesterday.  “The GPS maps were bad,” insisted the scoutmaster.  Prince William Forest Park offers its own trail maps for its 15,000 acres of piedmont forest, but I’ve learned that doing things the easy way isn’t part of the Scouting culture. 

We all slept well in our tents last night.

The Spirit is not the rock, but the night and the rock.
The Spirit is not the rain, but the rain and the rock.
Don’t write it, don’t paint it, don’t touch it.
Don’t use it.  Just worship.
Just worship.

Don’t look for the way the night and the rain
The way it came for you.
Don’t look for the rock again.

The face has lifted into fog
And the Spirit is high overhead
Opposite the sun.

I'd never seen a hawk light on anything around here.  Its presence in our backyard just before supper tonight seemed as exotic and as portentous as the scarlet ibis’s coming in James Hurst’s short story – more visitation than visit.

At first we thought it was injured.  It stayed in one spot in our high grass and appeared to be picking at its leg.  Victoria was dialing the number for the animal shelter when B’s friend told us it was eating a rabbit. You can see a trace of rabbit in the above photo’s lower-left corner.

Some of our backyard birds took exception to it, and one of them took a few swipes at it (see photo).  Nothing ruffled it. I got right close to it, too, hoping it would spread its wings.  At my closest point, it merely lifted up its back tail to me and shit.

When we looked for it again after supper, it had left, apparently sua sponte.

We had two doves live for a short time in a short tree against our townhouse.  That visitation comforted me when I was emotionally flat on my back with an identity crisis.  I didn’t want them to go, but they left when they had done their bit.

I don’t know what to make of myself a decade after the doves.  The doves purred with sanction from a treetop.  This hawk looked me in the eye.

I’m blessed.  This doesn’t happen every year.

Every year many Jews, heeding the levitical command “And you shall count . . .,” count off the fifty days between Passover and Shavuot in reflection.  Having thrown off Pharaoh’s law (Passover), they seek to prepare themselves to receive God’s law at Sinai (Shavuot).

Written during this fifty-day period two years ago, Rabbi Shai Gluskin’s Omer Journal is one of the finest blog series I’ve read.  Shai takes part in the traditions that have grown up around “counting the omer” by connecting his life to the aspects of our personalities associated with each day of the count.  (Here’s an article on counting the omer and on Shai’s journal.)

Shai is journaling again this year.  My spring is far richer for it.

Bill is out of his mind, but he's happy: forty-five people recline at his table tonight. Rocket Scientist Friend ("RSF") leads Bill's Seder. 

RSF explains part of a five-hundred-year-old Haggadah [above].

Michael [above] watches RSF elucidate a shankbone.

Bunny [below], wearing a bunny yarmulke, washes people’s hands.  She's a nurse, and she looks like a nurse anytime she helps out with anything.

I’m full.  I’m awash with chocolate-covered matzo.  Regular matzo would have been enough.

°°°

dry
lan
d

        sea

dry
lan
d

                sea

dry
lan
d

                       s ea

                                    s e  a

a je
sus 
fre
ak
sang me a song

her
hair
vert
i
cal

her
hea
rt

emp ty

& full
like lungs

her
song

high

& i
can i

ha
ve
lo
ve
can i

be
lo
ng

can i

i
as
the
heave
n
s

ea
ch
str
ing

plu
ck
ed

ju
st
e
n
ough

cho
rds
cir
cle

be
lo
w

& i
& i

be
lo
ng

tom would hum
for days
before
we recognized the tune

i forgot the tune
so
tom’s
humming again

Bob Lax would have liked blogging, which was born just about the time Lax’s health began to fail.  In his heyday, Lax printed and distributed his own broadsheet, Pax, among his friends as the spirit moved him.  And blogging is for friends, for people you can picture reading your stuff the way you would picture, on the bus ride home from Kindergarten, your mom making over your new artwork.  Lax was also something of an artist and a photographer, pastimes that make for better blogs.

I’m glad Lax had Pax, because Lax didn’t get but about ten percent of his poetry published during his lifetime.  Why?  First, Lax’s poetry looked too easy to be good.  From the 1960’s on, his poetry tended to be in the minimalist vein, and he would often use only five or fewer words per poem, though the words were often repeated.  The second problem was that much of his work resisted analysis.  It was meditative and largely free of metaphor; the words seem chosen for their lack of clear connotation.  He eschewed “good” and “evil,” for instance, and took to “black” and “white” (and “blue” and “red,” too).  As time went on, Lax posed less of a challenge to his audience’s intellect.

But the main problem with his poetry from a publisher’s standpoint was its vertical orientation.  Much of Lax’s poetry is narrow. Maybe the most challenging of Lax’s poems was “Sea & Sky,” which, when finally printed, covered 117 pages mostly with the words “sea” and “sky” printed on separate lines with a lot of lines in between. A lot of Lax’s poetry has only one or two words per line.  Publishers couldn’t give up that much white space, and they told him so.  But he kept on.

We bloggers can give up unlimited white space (or whatever color space we wish).  We can get a lot on a page, too, since the Internet has returned the reading world to scrolling.  We don’t go from right to left like the Torah Scrolls, either; we go up and down, so we can get a lot on a page. “Sea & Sky” would have fit on a single page on Lax’s blog, so its presentation would have been more true to the poet’s intent than the poem’s print version.

Thoughts while reading Merton & Friends: A Joint Biography of Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice, by James Harford

I feel a tension between my devotional life and my love of writing.  I have recognized this tension also in the writings of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, a modern-day contemplative and a gifted writer. I bought Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton and the Vocation of Writing, a 2007 compilation of Merton’s writings on writing, to see how Merton lived with a calling to both writing and devotion.

I’ve always found Merton’s distinction in New Seeds of Contemplation between a poet and a contemplative both true and tough:

The poet enters into himself in order to create.  The contemplative enters into God in order to be created.

I found language in Echoing Silence (this from “Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal” in 1958) that expands on the New Seeds aphorism:

Now it is precisely here [a novice contemplative’s tentative experiences of grace, which reflection threatens to spoil] that the aesthetic instinct changes its colors and, from being a precious gift, becomes a real danger.  If the intuition of the poet naturally leads him into the inner sanctuary of his soul, it is for a special purpose in the natural order: when the poet enters into himself it is in order to reflect upon his inspiration and to clothe it with a special and splendid form and then return to display it to those outside.  And here the radical difference between the artist and the mystic begins to be seen.  The artist enters into himself in order to work.  For him, the “superior” soul is a forge where inspiration kindles a fire of white heat, a crucible for the transformation of natural images into new, created forms.  But the mystic enters into himself, not in order to work but to pass through the center of his own soul and lose himself in the mystery and secrecy and infinite, transcendent reality of God living and working within him.

Consequently, if the mystic happens to be, at the same time, an artist, when prayer calls him within himself to the secrecy of God’s presence, his art will be tempted to start working and producing and studying the “creative” possibilities of this experience. . . . The artist will run the risk of losing a gift of tremendous supernatural worth, in order to perform a work of far less value.  He will let go of the deep, spiritual grace which has been granted him, in order to return to the reflection of that grace within his own soul.

(Merton isn’t always so categorical in seeing a contemplative’s role as higher than a poet’s.  In another selection from Echoing Silence, he advises some to accept their vocations as writers – the grace given to them – and to stop pining for a contemplative vocation that God probably did not intend for them.)

Merton fights this writer-versus-contemplative battle less abstractly and more personally in his letters and journal entries.  In one 1948 letter to a friend, he resolves not “to either renounce or to adopt whole ‘blocks’ of activity – cutting out ‘all’ writing or ‘going into solitude for good’ (as I would like to) . . .”  On the other hand, a 1949 journal entry states, “At the moment the writing is the one thing that gives me access to some real silence and solitude.”  Later on, however, especially in the 1960’s, he sometimes describes his writing as a distraction and an obsession.

When I bought Echoing Silence, I bought a recent biography of Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice at the same time to get free shipping and to learn more about how Merton got along with his Columbia friends – Lax, Rice, and others – once Merton took his vows a couple of years after leaving Columbia with a master’s degree in 1939.  James Harford’s Merton & Friends: A Joint Biography of Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice introduced me to the poetry of Robert Lax.  If Merton’s life and writing have clarified my struggle with writing and devotion, Lax’s life and writing have helped me see how devotion and writing may come together for me.

With regard to Merton, Lax, and Rice’s relationship after Merton entered Gethsemani, they stayed in close contact with one another through their letters and publishing endeavors.  Rice founded and edited Jubilee, an influential and unprofitable American Catholic magazine published from 1953 through 1967, and he relied heavily on his Columbia buddies to supply articles, photos, artwork, and other writers.  Merton was a frequent writer-contributor.  Lax, who published earlier than his Columbia buddies – a few poems in The New Yorkerin the 1940’s – was a more sporadic contributor of both photography and writing to Jubilee.  When Lax was in New York, he’d hang out at Jubilee’s modest, crowded office.  Staff members would often find him meditating on the office’s fire escape to escape the commotion.  But Lax spent many of the Jubilee years in France, North Carolina, Connecticut, Greece, and elsewhere.

Lax, Rice, and Merton, along with fellow-Columbia pal and painter Ad Reinhardt, increasingly influenced one another as their fame grew.  Reinhardt’s paintings were moving to purely black canvases about the time Lax’s already spare palette was frequently cleaned of all but six or seven words per poem, words that were repeated in vertical shapes that invited contemplation more than mental work.  Reinhardt’s paintings and ideas influenced Lax a great deal.

But Lax was a gifted copy editor, and he was known for his concision long before he came under the influence of Reinhardt’s minimalist theories. One photographer at Jubilee said, “If you worked with Lax, you didn’t need Strunk and White.  My eight pages of pictures and his forty words caught the whole story.”  Lax’s concision and his quiet spirit seemed to affect his poetry more as the Jubilee years went on.  During the fifties and sixties, Lax’s poetry reflected a more contemplative bent, employing little religious imagery – in fact, little metaphor at all.  Here’s “The Port Was Longing,” an example of his poetry from the early 1960’s:

The port
was longing

the port
was longing

not for
this ship

not for
that ship

not for
this ship

not for
that ship

the port
was longing

the port
was longing

not for
this sea

not for
that sea

not for
this sea

not for
that sea

the port
was longing

the port
was longing

not for
this &

not for
that

not for
this &

not for
that

the port
was longing

the port
was longing

not for
this &

not for
that

The increasingly spare and simple words in Lax’s poetry and his experiments with vertical forms got Lax labeled as an abstract minimalist.

Lax’s move to Greece was as seemingly impulsive as his previous moves, but he settled there. Before Greece, Lax made several moves and career changes by jumping in the backs of friends’ cars as they were leaving town.  The Circus of the Sun, published in 1958 and arguably Lax’s best book of poems, was the result of a year he spent as a circus clown and juggler.  His meditation on a picture of John writing the Apocalypse in a cave at Patmos precipitated his move to the Greek islands in 1963, and he lived there until just before his death in 2000.

Lax didn’t move to sparsely inhabited Greek islands to become a hermit, but to become a better poet.  As he explained in his introduction to A Greek Journal, “I thought I needed [a quiet place] for my work, as a photographer needs a darkroom.”  Lax became fascinated with the Greek fisherman and other characters near his modest, rented home, though, and he enjoyed his island contacts.  Nevertheless, he gained an international reputation for being a hermit, much as he had gained a reputation among his coworkers at Jubilee’s offices years before as being a kind of quiet “clown saint.”

At Patmos and the other Greek islands on which he lived, Lax seems to have found the quiet, contemplative place that Merton had hoped to find at Gethsemani.  Merton did move to a hermitage at Gethsemani, but the move never seemed to fit him.  Unauthorized picnics with friends (including, famously, Joan Baez) and a romantic interlude seemed to make some of his Catholic friends feel that the regular monastery life was a better fit for him.  But much of the distraction came from the chief demand on Merton’s time – his writing. Merton lived under the pressure of constant writing deadlines.  One visitor to Merton’s hermitage described the atmosphere there as a one-man newsroom. 

The difference between Lax’s and Merton’s spirituality had something to do with their temperaments.  Lax once described Merton as a “type A” and himself as a “type Z” personality.  Merton’s temperament reminds me of the Apostle Peter – strong and restless, sometimes at home, but more often picking fights.  Lax reminds me of John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” the one who leaned on Jesus’ breast at Passover and whose portrait in Marseilles involves him both writing and praying and caused Lax to pick up his tent for the last time until his health declined in old age.  Lax, like John, was the last of his old buddies to die.

Their temperaments also influenced the way they negotiated their vocations as writers with their callings as contemplatives.  Somehow Lax witnessed a more joyful marriage of contemplation and writing than did Merton.  Lax found and arranged shapes and sounds and expressions that, for me, largely bypass the ego and suggest meditation.

Here are some thoughts from James J. Uebbing’s introduction to Lax’s Love Had a Compass (1995) that I think rings true:

[Lax’s] insistence upon patience, upon attention to trivialities is not an incidental element of design, for simplicity – its centrality as a human virtue and the necessity of its cultivation – is at the heart of Lax’s achievement as a poet and as a man.

º º º
With Lax it is necessary to put aside the very notion of interpretation, the expectation – so basic to us that it is barely recognizable as a strategy – that an author’s art will by its nature be linear and syllogistic.

º º º
The elements of his art are the elements of the created world: the sea and the men and the animals and the light.  Like every artist he makes his use of them, but unlike most he acknowledges that they do not belong to him.  They find their origin elsewhere.  It is in this respect that Lax must be acknowledged as a religious man, insofar as for him artistic creation is not a ransacking of the visible world or an assertion of some unfettered consciousness so much as it is a participation in a process that was already in motion long before he arrived on the stage.

Lax’s poetry often feels like a clear reflection of God creating.  It also seems beyond the inspiration and creation that Merton suggests can keep an artist from losing herself in God.

Unlike Merton, who remains one of my favorite writers, Lax was at peace with his art.

lap                        lap

lap                        lap

him

lap

                             lap

bob lax dried his lines
on the bright rocks
of his dumb revelation

today he pulls
on a sweatshirt

never the same gull
pecked at itself
always the same gull

john’s cave keeps him centered
able to amplify
helped the waters lap
& the seagulls cry

tomorrow he stood
on a crag

he went home & died asleep
his dream was that real

[This article appeared first in The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project's winter 2008 issue.  I have made a few minor changes to it for publication here.  My thanks to the Project for permission to republish.]

You’re back in ninth grade.  Take a moment to reorient yourself, and then say these words out loud, slowly: “Literary.  Analysis.  Essay.”  Repeat.  How do you feel?

Hmm.  Maybe you don’t remember ninth grade.  There were those moments when your mind showed signs of catching up to your body.  In them, you laid claim to adulthood. But there were those other moments – moments too protracted to be “moments” – when your disorganization, your concrete thinking, or your lapses in behavior made you look like a misidentified middle-school student.

Reoriented now?  Let’s start again.  Your English teacher introduces you to something his county’s ninth-grade pacing guide describes as a “literary analysis essay.”  If you’re an academic student, you write two of them that year.  Double that if you’re in honors.

Snap out of it.  Now you’re the English teacher.  Oh, all right: I’m the English teacher, and I might as well switch to the less theoretical, more confessional past tense.

Last June I wanted a little affirmation from my departing charges before I hit the Northern Virginia Writing Project’s summer institute, so I read some of the responses to my end-of-year survey.  Peg, an honors student and one of those sweet, positive, and brilliant kids you’d like to stock your classroom with each year, wrote the following as part of her response:

Though I enjoy writing and reading, I don't like analyzing what I read. It loses all power and becomes boring and hateful. I once liked the story of Romeo and Juliet. I now despise it. Many of the poems we read that would have been rather enjoyable turned into crummy pieces of literature upon analysis.

Peg (not her real name) was kind enough, though, to make clear that I wasn’t alone in screwing up literature for her.  She perceived it as a trend in her language arts and English classes over the past few years.

I started the institute a week after exams with Peg’s words still irritating me.  After three years of teaching ninth grade, am I still messing up this essay assignment, this chief manifestation of all the wretched analysis Peg complained of?  In the process of meeting my county’s benchmarks, am I alienating kids from the very subject I love?

This is not the story of how this summer’s NVWP institute changed all that.  Here’s my thesis: Through my three-week immersion into writing instruction theory and practice at the institute this summer, I discovered that I was not alone in opposing the literary analysis essay’s prominent role in the ninth-grade curriculum. I also learned some new strategies in teaching that essay, and I met with some success and some failure in trying out those strategies this past fall.

Ninth grade is a big year for literary analysis in Loudoun County.  Peg’s past language arts teachers introduced her to most of the literary terms I use, and Peg has been writing essays since at least fourth grade.  But I introduce my kids to formal essays analyzing literature.  From the written analysis standpoint, then, it’s zero to sixty from middle school to high school in my county.

Peg was one of my few students to get the literary analysis essay this past year, or at least she figured out how to write one.  Most of my students’ first drafts sound like book reports – long plot summaries sandwiched by superlatives such as, “This story will make you hold on to the edge of your seat with excitement.”  That kind of writing drives me to teach model essays, which only makes my students’ papers come across as cheap knock-offs of the models.  So then I teach structure, such as the five-paragraph essay and a formula for writing its body paragraphs.  Those papers, in turn, come in sounding fake, strained, and pompous.  Meanwhile, a vague feeling of alienation begins to pervade the classroom: I’m losing the kids, and the kids are losing literature.

Peg’s comment was my focal point this summer.  She had been astute enough to spot what I consider to be my biggest failing as a teacher: I have never taught writing about literature well.  Worse, she had argued what was becoming my own opinion about ninth-grade literary analysis essays: they do more harm than good.  Not only had Peg pegged me as one of the heavies in her literary analysis drama, but her thinking about literary analysis in the classroom was also a step or two ahead of mine.  I also didn’t want to have another year of turning off even my brightest students with this essay assignment.

The institute’s mock trial of the five-paragraph essay really got my juices flowing.  Each fellow had a role in the trial, and, as fate and Don Gallehr would have it, I was picked as the lead prosecutor.  Our team put an elementary school teacher, a high school teacher, and a college professor on the stand to demonstrate the corrupting influence of this popular essay structure on the writing of students at every age.

You know our defendant, the five-paragraph essay?  The introductory paragraph grabs the reader’s attention and orients her to the subject.  The paragraph ends with a thesis statement promising three ways in which the essay will address a central point.  Three body paragraphs flesh out these three ways, and a final paragraph restates the thesis (careful to use different words) and either suggests an extended application of it or sums up the essay’s findings with an apt quote or witticism.  The body paragraphs’ topic and concluding sentences sport transition words – words like “not only” and “second.”

I poured my three years of essay-teaching frustration into some frantic trial preparation.  (We had one day to prepare for trial.)  I found lots of ammo in the mass of used books I had purchased at the suggestion of the institute’s reading list.  For instance, in his book Crafting Authentic Voice, Tom Romano says that the five-paragraph essay produces “a voice of serious-minded pretentiousness, statements of the obvious, and high-flown diction.” I researched Amazon and found no five-paragraph essay anthologies in print (big surprise).  I showed up the next morning with a stack of books and a smug look for opposing counsel.

But the jury split three to two against us.  I’ll spare you a difficult post-mortem.  Suffice it to say that the adverse outcome was more of a verdict on my lawyering skills than it was on the five-paragraph essay.  None of the summer’s twenty-five fellows supported Ms. Essay (as we called her) without reservation.