John Koessler's Blog, page 16

Baptists Gone Wild

[image error]The first Christian movie I ever saw was called A Stranger in My Forest. I don’t know when it was made but I watched it in the 1970’s. I was attending a Baptist church that wouldn’t let its members go to the movies. But films like this one, along with Moody Science Films, were considered a righteous alternative. It was New Year’s Eve. I guess they were trying to keep us off the streets and out of the bars. The thought of watching a movie in the church felt like living on the edge. This was our vision of Baptists gone wild: sing a few hymns to organ accompaniment, watch the movie, then end the evening holding hands and singing “Blest be the Tie that Binds.” We were home by 9 pm.

The plot of Stranger in My Forest was your basic reworking of Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. I had never heard of any of the actors and the production quality of the movie was a little lower than cheap television. If I am remembering correctly, the turning point in the story’s plot was a car accident, which was also the occasion for the film’s only moment of graphic violence. It was a zooming shot of the shattered paws of the little dog who was killed in the wreck. There was an invitation to believe in Jesus at the end of the film.

The most famous Christian film of that era was A Thief in the Night, a movie about the rapture of the Church. This was before Left Behind became a cultural phenomenon. For those who don’t know, the rapture is a term that some Christians use to speak of the church’s being caught up to be with Jesus Christ in the end times. The word puzzled me in my early days as a follower of Jesus. It sounded too much like the title of a Christian romance novel. Not Baptist’s Gone Wild exactly but maybe something like Rapture in the Pews. They could have made a movie based on the book and showed it in church on New Year’s Eve.

I soon learned that most of my Baptist friends were ignoring the church’s rule about not going to the movies. I eventually broke the rule too, when the first Star Wars film came out. I can still remember hearing gasps during the opening scene when the star destroyer first comes into view. I think I actually ducked. I had never seen anything like it before. Certainly not in any Christian movie. The film’s underlying pagan philosophy didn’t bother me too much. I was mostly interested in the explosions.

Now those original Star Wars look a little like A Stranger in My Forest to me. Sort of quaint and outdated. Low production quality. Or at least, lower production quality than we usually see today. Meanwhile, the Baptists are making films for the movie theater. They often star actors whose names you actually know. I think Billy Graham started it all with The Prodigal, a film that was loosely based on Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. Graham actually appeared in the film somewhere toward the end and gave an invitation to believe in Jesus.

The other night I rented a Christian movie from the video store. You might have seen ads for it when it was first released in theaters a few months ago. The movie had at least one major star in it. If I told you his name, you’d recognize it. The acting was pretty good. The soundtrack was full of popular songs. You really couldn’t tell a difference from any other Hollywood film, except that there was no swearing or sex in it.  Also, Iron Man, Thor, and Wonder Woman did not appear in any of the scenes.

There wasn’t any graphic violence either, except for the one scene where someone breaks a plate over someone’s head. There was some implied domestic abuse. The plot was a basic reworking of the parable of the prodigal son, only Jesus was hardly mentioned in the film at all. The movie was really more about the Christian music industry and the importance of following your dreams. There was an invitation at the end to call a phone number, if you had any problems with domestic violence.

Baptists gone wild.

The Unexamined Life

[image error]A friend once told me that whenever you look in the mirror, you automatically deduct ten pounds. I believe her. I think we add hair too. I watched a video of myself a couple of years ago and wondered why the camera lighting made me look so bald on the top of my head. When I went to the bathroom mirror to check it out, it didn’t look nearly that bad to me. I found that if I tilted my head the right way, I couldn’t even see the top of my head. So I decided that the real problem was the camera angle. A great philosopher, Plato I think, observed that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. But I’m not sure I agree with him. He said it just before they killed him.

When I was a pastor, there was a woman in my church who was very critical of me. Looking back on it, I don’t think her criticisms were really personal. She was just critical in general. But I was young and insecure, so I took it hard. I tended to avoid going to her house to visit. Of course, one of her chief criticisms of my ministry was that I didn’t visit enough. After a while, I felt guilty about it. So I stopped by for a pastoral call. When she complained that I didn’t do enough pastoral visitation, I sort of lost it.

“You know, every time I come to your house, you get out your list of all the things I’m not doing right,” I said. “Well, I won’t always be your pastor. Maybe your next pastor will do better.” She stared at me in wide-eyed astonishment for a second. Then she began to cry. “Are you saying that I’m too critical?” she asked. “I’ve never thought of myself as critical.” I felt terrible that I had made her cry.

I’ve thought of that conversation many times since. Not so much as an example of how not to do pastoral care, although I suppose it is that as well. But as a cautionary tale about what it means to lack self-awareness. I have seen it many times since. Bad leaders who thought they were good. Dull preachers who thought they were interesting. Ordinary looking people who thought they were attractive. Proud people who thought they were humble. Somehow, they all have the capacity to reconstruct what they have seen in the mirror of personal experience into a better image. They see themselves in a way that nobody else does. Meanwhile, they are oblivious to what seems plain to the rest of us.

Maybe Plato was right. Perhaps the unexamined life really isn’t worth living. Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I can’t help but ask what others see in me that I cannot see myself. The answer that comes back is always the same. You don’t really want to know. You probably wouldn’t believe it anyway.

Saved by Science Fiction

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I started reading science fiction in Junior High School. It was a matter of survival. My Junior High School career began inauspiciously with a punch in the gut. I was standing outside the door to the gym and feeling awkward on the first day of class when a giant walked up and punched me in the stomach. “Nice shoes,” he said as he turned to walk away. I don’t think he meant it. Later I learned that his name was Greg Savage. Somehow it seemed appropriate.

If this had been a movie, the two of us would have been forced to sit together in a class where we would eventually become best friends. Oh, sure, we would suffer a falling out over the same girl, but in the end, true friendship would win out. We would dump the girl and stick with our friendship, or the girl would decide it was better to be a buddy to us both, or another girl would come along and we would all walk into the sunset holding hands. You know how the story goes. But, of course, it wasn’t a movie, so I pretty much tried to steer clear of Greg for the next two years.

Unfortunately, there were plenty of other predators roaming the halls of the blackboard jungle. Someone once told me that a disproportionate number of our alumni were incarcerated. I could easily believe it. The school seemed like a war zone to me. In gym class, new fish like me were subjected to daily flicks, tweaks, and the occasional kick down the bleachers from upperclassmen, who always managed to carry out their assaults when the teacher was looking the other way. You don’t want to know what they did to the guy in the locker room who asked what the athletic supporter was supposed to be used for. Of course, this was all in addition to faculty enforced and federally mandated group nakedness in the showers, a function of the government’s desire to see that the youth of America were more physically fit than the Russians.

Between these two activities, the first of which took place at the beginning of the period as the teacher took roll and the other serving as the closing ceremony for the day’s class, we were regularly subjected to a demanding regimen of exercises and games which seemed especially designed to shine a spotlight on students like me. They laid bare the soft underbelly of the rising baby boom which was quickly filling up the school’s halls, proving why we would never be worthy of epithets like “the greatest generation.” We were the weak link in American culture. We were out of shape and lacked stamina. We couldn’t climb the rope. We threw the ball like a girl. Unless of course, you were a girl. If the Russians had invaded, we would have been sunk. In other words, gym class, like the rest of Junior High School, was basically Lord of the Flies and I was Piggy.

But it was study hall, not gym class that was my real undoing in Junior High. Because it was there that I was smitten by a vision of loveliness two rows away named Jeannie. I just kept staring. I couldn’t help myself. At first, it was because I was stunned by the sight. Then it was because I figured it was the best way to get noticed. It worked. After about ten minutes, Jeannie glared back at me and stuck out her tongue. If this had been a movie, she would have hated me at first. We would have traded witty barbs for a few months. Eventually, we would have attended the Junior High Prom with someone else as our date. But by the end of the night, we would have left hand in hand, while our original dates were out on the dance floor falling in love with each other. You know how the story goes. But, of course, it wasn’t a movie, so things pretty much went from awkward to downright embarrassing.

A guy from gym class told me that Jeannie “liked” me. He said she wanted me to write her a note and tell her about my feelings. I know, I should have seen through his ruse. But I thought I had seen this movie before. I knew how the story was supposed to go. I wrote the note. It got passed around the school. When I tried to start a conversation with Jeannie in study hall, she screamed and ran away. By the time it was all done, I was generally regarded as a weirdo. I felt like a weirdo too. I desperately wished I was living someone else’s life.

This is where Robert Heinlein, the dean of science fiction writers, enters the story. He rescued me. Actually, I didn’t know it was him. It was just some book, Podkayne of Mars. I’m not sure why I picked it up. It might have been the title. Or maybe it was the cover. I started reading it in class when I should have been paying attention. Suddenly, I was transported. I felt like I was a different person. Clever. Brave. Funny. I felt like I was living in a world where the underdog wins the day and the misunderstood weirdo proves to be a hero. I spent the rest of the year reading Robert Heinlein along with a lot of other science fiction authors too: Theodore Sturgeon, Andre Norton, and Isaac Asimov.

But Heinlein was my favorite. I read so many of his books, it got so I could recognize his voice. He seemed like a favorite uncle to me. If I met him, I was pretty sure he would be my friend. If this were a movie, I would have written a letter to Robert Heinlein. We would have struck up a correspondence. He would have become a mentor to me. Today I would be a science fiction writer. But life is not a movie. It never occurred to me to write.

I went to the library’s annual used book sale the other day. There in the stacks was a weather-beaten copy of Podkayne of Mars. It was only a dollar. I picked it up and smiled. For a minute, I thought about buying it. But the truth is, I’ve already got a copy. Thanks, Mr. Heinlein. You never knew it, but you and your friends probably saved my life.

The Geography of Somewhere

[image error]The landscape of my childhood was a subdivision in Roseville, Michigan. My parents moved there from their apartment in Detroit in the 1950’s. Roseville was the kind of suburban space that sociologists would later contemptuously describe as “the geography of nowhere.” For them, suburbia’s monotonous uniformity and non-descript architecture epitomize the cultural decline of the United States. Although our neighborhood was not nearly as uniform as Levittown, the prototype for all American suburbs, it was similar enough. Most of the homes were small and built in ranch style. They had screen doors, a milk chute, and a basement. Sidewalks ran up and down each side of the street and the blocks were laid out in a criss-cross pattern, running north and south or east and west.

Still, there was enough difference between the houses on our block to at least differentiate them from each other. One might have awnings and another a garage. Some had trees planted on the parkway near the road. It is true they sat in a uniform row but there was relatively little danger that you might walk into someone else’s house by accident. What is more, each block had its own kind of flavor. Belleair, the block behind us, always seemed to be a little more upscale to me. Perhaps it was because it had been developed after ours. Or maybe it was because of its pretentious sounding name. Some blocks were older, others poorer.

One of the most significant landmarks in our neighborhood was the field to the west of our street, a swath of undeveloped land that we always referred to using the definite article. It was not “a” field but “the” field. We spoke of it as if it were the primeval field of the world, the garden where God planted His first tree. In actual fact, there weren’t many trees in that field. Yet to my childhood imagination it was a wilderness, as mysterious as it was wild. We spent hours there, exploring its boundaries, hunting crayfish or frogs and hiding from bullies among its weeds. It was dotted with wildflowers, a few strawberry patches, and smelled of milkweed and uncut grass.

The field was bordered on its east end by a farmhouse, which stood across the street and kitty-corner from our brick ranch. An old two-story home, I always believed that it was the first house in our neighborhood. I wondered if we were living on the remains of someone else’s farm. In my memory, that old house was green and inviting when it was inhabited and dark and mysterious when it was not. I visited it only once or twice, entering by the back door into the kitchen. I remember a red plaid tablecloth. After while it stood empty, and we were certain it was haunted. It was eventually torn down and replaced by three new, brick ranches which fit the look of the rest of the neighborhood better. I was sorry to see it go.

Mr. Wooten lived in one of the new houses. Our neighbors whispered that he was shell-shocked. Something had happened during the war, but nobody knew what it was. On some nights we could hear him shouting at his wife in their home across the street. They argued loudly until he finally stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him. In the early morning hours, he reappeared on our doorstep, hammering at the screen door and ringing the doorbell. At first, I thought he had mistaken our house for his own. But with a mumbled apology, he explained that he had forgotten his keys and needed to call his wife to let him in. When she seemed unwilling to do so, he slammed the phone down and with another mumbled apology wandered off into the darkness. I was never sure whether she let him in or not.

On the field’s northern border was a small party store that my father used to call “the great facility.” He got the title from the owner, who told him when it first opened that he planned to provide the neighborhood with “a great facility” that would sell them cigarettes, beer, and bread. But my brother, sister, and I always called it “the little store,” once again employing the definite article in a way that seemed to suggest that there was no other. My father bought his vodka there, while we purchased penny candy by the fistful.

The western border of the field was marked by another old house. We viewed its inhabitants with some suspicion because the children who lived there had a reputation of being unruly. How could they not be wild, living on the border of civilization as they did? Our homes rested on neatly measured property lines and along a paved street, while they lived on a gravel road that went past the little store. Who knew where their property began or ended? To the rest of us, they seemed like mountain people living deep in some Appalachian holler, strange and exotic with customs that were foreign to our own way of life. Our suspicions seemed confirmed when some years later the father of one of our friends abandoned his wife and ran off with the woman who lived there. We did not usually venture that far into the field. If we had drawn a map, we might have etched the warning “Here be Dragons” in that spot.

On its southern border, the field was hemmed in by Church Street, the block where the Baptist and Catholic churches were located. Those two landmarks made a deep impression on the landscape of my soul. It was where I first sensed the fear of the Lord and became God-haunted. It was in that space that I first heard the gospel.

The emotional memory of much of my childhood is contained within these boundaries. On the one hand, there was the teeming life of the block with its orderly row of homes, each one a cultural universe of its own. The overall topography of the block may have seemed the same but the smells, customs and values of my Polish and Italian neighbors seemed quite strange to me. What is more, every house was a center of drama. Each one the site of its own daily morality play, where husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, loved and fought, defended or betrayed one another.

Then there was the other world that lay in the direction of the horizon and the setting sun. This expanse, although it was really only a few blocks square, seemed to my child’s mind to be almost infinite in scope. I thought I could spend my whole life exploring there. The wild beauty I saw in its weedy shambles lit the spark that granted me my first vision of the undiscovered country. It shaped some of my earliest images of what heaven might be like.

Sometimes, I go back to the neighborhood where I grew up. The streets seem the same but my friends are all gone. I drive past their houses and remember what it was like to stand on the porch on a summer’s day and call them out to play in singsong chant. I imagine them appearing at the door and tumbling out into the yard. The field is gone too, having given way to more developed land and nondescript office buildings. The few trees that once grew there have been cut down. The old houses that marked its borders have disappeared. The little store is still there but it is no longer as little as it used to be. You can still get your beer and bread there but you can no longer buy a fistful of candy for a penny. As I turn the car toward the expressway, I drive past the place where the gravel road used to be and recollect the scent of milkweed and uncut grass. In my mind’s eye the old boundaries of my childhood reappear. Once again I see the familiar geography of somewhere.

The Day After the Funeral

[image error]The day after the funeral dawns fresh, like the first day after creation. Black crows taunt one another and dart in an out in a game of tag. A breeze casts about, tumbling the bees and making the flowers turn their heads. In the distance, a mourning dove on a wire calls out to me, “Who?” “Who?”  It almost seems as if yesterday’s brush with death has somehow rejuvenated everything so that the old world is made young again.

Yet to me it feels as if the world is emptying. I know this is not true. One generation goes and another comes. If the world is divesting itself of old souls, it is also filling up with new ones. But the day after the funeral, I feel the absence of the departed more than the presence of those who remain. In my mind, I run through the list of names I know of those who are already gone. Some are friends, some are family, and some are merely acquaintances. In this roll call of the dead, their absence presses upon me like a crowd.

People like to think that the dearly departed are somewhere nearby, hovering above our lives like a bird that is ghosting on a sea breeze. The silent dead watch benevolently as we go about our business, like invisible guests at our meals, weddings, and family reunions. I do not believe that this is true. Such affairs are tedious enough for the living. It is hard to see how the dead would derive much pleasure from them.

Yet there are times when the absence of someone who was once close to me presses in hard. There is no sight or sound. Only a sense of real presence, like the way it once felt to be in the same room with my father or to sit in comfortable silence with an old friend.

Taking note of the dead puts me in a calculating frame of mind. So I count up the number of years that I have worked and try to estimate how many years I might have left before I make my own exit. Could the ten-year smoke alarm I bought outlast me? It occurs to me that the house I am sitting in has seen generations come and go. The more I do the math, the shorter time seems. We are all hurrying toward the exit.

As a Christian, I believe that there is a life beyond this life. But I do not really know what form it takes. At least, not in detail. There must be some continuity with the life I now live in this world of earth and trees. When Jesus met the disciples on the road after His resurrection, His appearance was so ordinary that they could not recognize Him. It was only after the fact that they said, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).

What I do know is that for now at least, this old earth is not a final destination. It is a point of departure. Those of us who remain watch as others leave, their lips pursed in the determined features of the dead. We bid them farewell as they set out on that journey to a distant shore. But if they return our wave, we do not see it. The sight of it is lost in the mist. On the day of the funeral, we are left with our memories and with the task of caring for the house they have left behind.

But the day after the funeral dawns fresh. As if the world has already moved on and I have moved with it. That is when it occurs to me, I am not really standing on the shore bidding farewell. I am standing in line.

The Seven Deadly Virtues-Justice

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A popular saying goes, “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” These words are commonly attributed to St. Augustine but no one seems to know where or even whether he actually expressed such a thought. To be honest, it sounds more like something a modern would say. The view of the ancients was much less approving of anger. Their attitude was more like the one expressed by the fourth-century desert father Abba Macarius: “If when you want to reprove someone you are stirred to anger, you are pandering to your own passion. Lose not yourself to save another.”

The old monk’s restraint seems peculiar to us. Everybody gets angry. Some people deserve our anger. Anger is just an emotion, an expression of our righteous indignation. When it is rightly employed, anger can be the fuel that energizes change. At least, that’s how we think about anger. Perhaps we are right in thinking this. As the words attributed to St. Augustine suggest, maybe anger really is the offspring of hope. Is it possible that this anger that I feel within me is actually a fire kindled in my soul by a vision of a different world? Maybe the moderns have it right after all. That’s why they have removed anger from the list of deadly sins and declared it a cardinal virtue.

But if I am truly honest with myself, I will have to admit that there is often more indignation than righteousness in my anger. Anger itself may have its origin in the fires of God’s justice. But once it is in my hands it turns into something else. Upon closer inspection, my anger proves to be exactly what Macarius warned that it would be. Instead of a passion for justice, it is simply pandering to my own passion. Our anger often bears little resemblance to justice as God’s defines it. We would do better to call it sentimentalized outrage.

Jeremy Begbie observes that the pathology of sentimentality has three primary features. According to Begbie, the sentimentalist misrepresents reality by trivializing evil, is emotionally self-indulgent and avoids taking costly action. It is my contention that all three of these marks are prominent in much of the anger that is directed at injustice today. It misrepresents evil, not by denying its existence, but by oversimplifying its nature. Difficult complexities are ignored in favor of a superficial diagnosis which can be easily turned into a stereotype. The emotional self-indulgence of our anger is evident in our rhetoric, which usually gives off more heat than light. We are quick to speak, slow to listen, and too intellectually impatient to do the hard work of analysis that is really needed to understand the nature of the problem or divine a solution. We are willing to shout, carry a sign, or post to social media. But that’s about as far as our plan of action goes. Anger is our only real contribution to the cause.

The level of comfort we feel with our own anger is matched only by the degree of discomfort we feel when it comes to God’s anger. The notion of a wrathful God has largely fallen out of favor. This is true even among those who believe that such wrath exists. We treat God’s wrath the way we would the awkward personality trait of some family member. We hardly ever talk about it. We would rather not think about it. Instead, we attempt to put the best face on a bad situation. Sure He flies off the handle once in a while but that’s not really who He is. He is a good guy, once you get to know Him.

Yet we cannot really grasp the Bible’s view of justice without taking the wrath of God into account. God’s wrath is not a divine personality flaw but a measure of the distance that sin has introduced into our relationship with Him. It is this same sin which interjects the fatal flaw into our anger. It is not wrath in itself that is the problem according to James 1:20 but the fact that it is the wrath of man which “does not bring about the righteous life that God desires.” Sin is also the reason we cannot grasp the biblical idea of justice without taking into account divine wrath’s complementary attributes of grace and mercy. Grace reflects God’s disposition toward us in Jesus Christ. Mercy describes His action. Together they are able to quiet the accusing voice of divine justice. In the person of Christ, God took the punishment that justice demanded upon Himself and offers us forgiveness in exchange.

The Writing Life

[image error]My childhood vision of the writer’s life was shaped by black and white movies of the 1940’s. The writer is something of a rogue and adventurer. He doesn’t really work except when he writes. When he does write, it is in a burst of creative inspiration or is sparked by prophetic outrage. It is all “Stop the presses!” and “Thus saith the Lord!”

As is the case with all childhood fantasies, the reality is something else. Writers are mostly introverts who stand on the sidelines and observe. The work is solitary, often tedious. There are few bursts of inspiration, though I will admit to occasional moments of prophetic fervor. Those moments are usually cut by the editor.

I started writing in college. Not very well. Not very often either. I wrote one piece a year, usually submitting it to HIS magazine. There was no such thing as email, so I had to wait a month or two for the rejection letter to come back in my self-addressed stamped envelope. It usually took me six months or more to get up the courage to try again. In those days, the writing life felt mostly like my love life in junior high school. Each attempt began with a transcendent vision of glory and ended in humiliation.

I used to worry that the editors who considered my submissions would read them with snickering ridicule and make fun of my work. I pictured the editorial team clustered around a table (it was always a circular table for some reason) pointing at my manuscript and laughing (not in a good way). A couple of decades later, when I served as a consulting editor for an evangelical magazine, I discovered that this was pretty much the case. At least, sometimes. “These people want to write for us in the worst way,” the managing editor once said. “And they usually do.”

The writing life really is a lot like junior high. There is a small handful who occupy the highest seats at the cool kids’ table in the lunchroom. Then there are the rest of us nerds huddled on the periphery trying to edge our way closer. There is not enough room for everybody. Those of us on the outside never seem to be wearing the right clothes.

When I started writing seriously and regularly, my dream was to publish an article in Eternity magazine in which I quoted Annie Dillard. Everybody was quoting her in the 1980’s. But Eternity ceased publication and Annie Dillard seems to have stopped publishing too. But I still love her work. Sometimes I pick up her books when I get stuck.

I have been writing for thirty-three years. I feel like an amateur. But I’ve learned that you can’t really trust your feelings. Especially, where writing is concerned. “The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.” Annie Dillard said that.

 

 

Secular Eating and Daily Bread

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Wendell Berry has pointed out that most eaters these days are passive consumers. “They buy what they want–or what they have been persuaded to want–within the limits of what they can get” Berry explains. “They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged.” It seems as though we can get almost anything but that does not necessarily mean that we can always get what we want. We can only get what is made available to us. It certainly does not mean that we can always get what we really need or what is good for us. Berry points out that specialization of production leads to specialization of consumption. To explain how this affects our eating Berry points to the entertainment industry as an analogy: “Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers.”

Anybody who has spent hours scanning the vast selection offered by their cable provider only to give up in disgust or settle for something they have already watched once or twice before and for which they are paying too much will understand his point. Just as we have lost the capacity to entertain ourselves and must now settle for options chosen for us by the entertainment industry, we have also lost the ability to eat for ourselves. We are dependent upon food that has been selected and prepared for us by those who are far more interested in our wallet than our health, despite the nutritional information on the back of the package. We are what Berry calls industrial eaters. “The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical–in short, a victim.”

Eating and the economy are obviously linked. We must buy our daily bread since most of us do not produce it for ourselves. Those who do produce food are in the business of selling it. But eating is a matter of economy in a much larger and more theological sense. The term economy comes from the Greek word for household. It speaks of more than buying or selling. An economy is really an ecosystem. It is part of a larger whole. In this respect, every community is also an economy. Daily bread is much more than an individual act of consumption, it is a community enterprise.

The communal implications of eating are in evidence all through Scripture. They are embedded in the Law of Moses, which required growers to leave behind the grain that was dropped in order to provide for the poor (Lev. 19:9–10; cf. Ruth 2). They are implied in the biblical rule of hospitality, an exercise which always involved eating (Rom. 12:13; 16:23; 1 Tim. 5:10; Heb. 13:2; 1 Pet. 4:9). The link between eating and communion was especially evident in the practice of sacrificial meals. Several of Israel’s sacrifices involved eating in God’s presence. This was most vividly portrayed in Exodus 24, which describes how the elders of Israel ate and drank in God’s presence. In 1 Corinthians 10:18 Paul calls those who offered such sacrifices participants in the altar. In saying this he seems to be drawing a parallel with the Lord’s Supper in an effort to persuade the Corinthians to pagan idol feasts (1 Cor. 10:16, 17, 21).

Eating is a communal activity that is tied to the means of production and the well-being of the community at large but it is also a sacred act. In other words, our problem is more than the fact that we have been turned into industrial eaters. Our chief difficulty is that we have become secular eaters. We fail to see the connection between God and our daily bread. Food is still a common feature of the church’s experience, but eating is not viewed as a context in which we experience fellowship with God. Indeed, we do not even see our observation of the Lord’s Supper as a meal in any real sense. We regard it as a valuable symbol but do not consider it to be spiritually sustaining in any meaningful way.

In the Genesis account, we find that four of the most fundamental aspects of human life are interrelated: the need for daily bread, work, community life, and fellowship with God. They were not originally the separate and unrelated spheres which we so often experience today. It is just here that Jesus chooses to engage with us on this subject. He does not speak about our quest for daily bread from the comfort of Eden before the fall. He faces it head-on in the broken world in which we now must make our way. His message to us is that the God who provided for our needs in the garden continues to provide for us in the fallen world. He teaches us to pray that our Heavenly Father will provide our daily bread (Matt. 6:11; Luke 11:3). He tells us not to be anxious about what we will eat, drink, or wear because our heavenly Father knows we need these things (Matt. 6:31-32).

But how can we not be anxious in a world where the ground that bears its fruit also produces thorns and thistles and where we must eat our bread by the sweat of our brow? Jesus does not say that our daily bread will come without effort, but rather that we must not think about these things like orphans. “Thank God that this Father is so compassionate and realistic that he appraises the little things in our life (included a warm sweater and our daily bread) at exactly the same value that they actually have in our life” theologian Helmut Thielicke observes. “Thank God that he accepts us just as we are, as living men, with great dreams, but also with many little desires and fears, with hunger and weariness and the thousand and one pettinesses and pinpricks of life that fill even the lives of the great of this earth (one need only to read their memoirs).” Give us this day our daily bread.

My Dad

[image error]My dad was a typical father of the 1950’s. When I was born, he sat in the waiting room and read magazines. There were no birthing rooms in hospitals in those days. He did not coach my mother or tell her to take short breaths to help with the pain. He participated in the blessed event from a distance, like all the men of his generation.

He did a lot of his parenting from a distance. Dad went to work during the week and stayed home on weekends. He sat in his chair and read the paper when he got home in the evening. He drank beer and watched our black and white television at night when the television wasn’t broken. When it was broken, he tinkered with it on the workbench in the basement. He opened it up and exposed its mysterious inner workings, filled with large tubes and gossamer filaments that glowed orange when the set was turned on. The fact that he could undertake such a project persuaded me that he could fix anything.

My father was an artist and an introvert. He did not like to travel. He did not like yard work either. There are many things I know about him now that I did not know in my childhood. Most of them I learned by seeing him through the lens of my own experience. The older I get the more I think I understand him. The older I get the more my memory of him seems to recede. As if he were calling out to me from some great distance. I know him now better than I ever have before. Yet I feel as though I never knew him at all.

Dad was my hero in my childhood. He was a big man who liked to fight when he was younger. He talked about barroom brawls with his best friend Mickey Marshall and one time when he stood in a ditch and traded blows with someone for hours. He may have been exaggerating. I never saw him throw a punch at anyone. Most of the time he was quiet and withdrawn.

In my teens, I thought that my father was the enemy. There was a time when I could hardly stand to be in the same room with him. The reasons made sense to me at the time. He drank too much. We didn’t understand one another. He seemed too critical. This was in the 1960’s and early 70’s. We weren’t supposed to get along. Those battles ended long ago. I look back on them now and wonder what it was that made me so angry.

My dad died in a hospital bed in 1987, after a weary-eyed doctor said there was nothing she could do for him. She seemed annoyed. She seemed to imply that he was taking up space that could have been used by someone else. But that was probably just my grief and my imagination. She might only have been tired after a long shift. The last conversation I had with my father was only a whisper.

“I love you,” I said. “I love you too, Johnny” he replied.

The Seven Deadly Virtues-Leisure

[image error]My first job was short-term employment. I suppose you could say I was a day laborer. A neighbor hired me to weed her lawn. She provided me with a two-pronged weeding fork and promised to pay me five dollars when I was done. At the time it sounded like a fortune. I said yes eagerly, carried away by visions of all the comic books I intended to purchase with the money I earned. Plus this was work I could do in a more or less recumbent position.

But once I was on my hands and knees in the hot sun, my enthusiasm soon diminished. The lawn looked bigger from that angle than I had first imagined. There were more weeds than I thought. As the sweat trickled down the back of my neck, I poked them half-heartedly with the weeding fork, pausing every few minutes to scan the yard and see what kind of progress I was making. The view was not encouraging. The number of weeds appeared to be growing not shrinking.

After a while, I persuaded myself that I had worked long enough. There was still a weed or two left but surely my employer didn’t expect me to pull every single weed? She did. “You’re done already?” she asked skeptically when I went to the door to collect my money. Then she walked the lawn with me, pointing out the weeds that still remained and grumbling about my work ethic. There were more than I thought. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed them. Probably because they were the same color as the grass, I reasoned. With a sigh, I knelt down again and went back to work, this time with even less enthusiasm than before. Eventually, my employer paid me off and sent me on my way. By now more eager to be rid of me than of the weeds.

“A sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he is too lazy to bring it back to his mouth” Proverbs 26:15. I suppose my unhappy employer would have said that a sluggard buries his hand in the lawn, too lazy to pluck out the weeds. The sin that the ancients called sloth or acedia certainly includes laziness but it also involves more. Sloth has many features and manifests itself in many forms. At times it looks like what we call ennui, an immobilizing lethargy that leeches away our interest in those things that ought to concern us. Other forms of sloth are more active and profligate. We squander our time and energy on meaningless trifles at the expense of other obligations.

In our day sloth is often reflected in what is falsely called leisure. Sometimes this involves empty activity that does not provide either rest or pleasure. It is marked by a kind of frenetic busyness whose aim is to distract us from whatever is making us uncomfortable. Theologian Joseph Pieper observes that true leisure has a different character. Leisure is a kind of silence. It is an attitude of contemplation: “Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as activity, leisure implies (in the first place) an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm, of silence; it means not being ‘busy,’ but letting things happen.”

True leisure is marked by an attitude of confidence and peace. It is grounded in trust and particularly in trust in God. The essence of leisure is expressed in Psalm 138:8: “The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O LORD, endures forever—do not abandon the works of your hands.” By this definition, true leisure is as important to our work as it is to our play. Leisure as most people describe it is merely time off. Leisure as God defines it is a state of grace. It is the ability to rest in God, confident that He will bring to completion all that concerns me according to His plan.

If you are interested in learning more about the Bible’s theology of rest, you might enjoy The Radical Pursuit of Rest: Escaping the Productivity Trap by John Koessler (IVP).