Tim Stafford's Blog, page 21

Home Town

I’m so (irrationally) proud of Kevin Jorgeson and his ascent of the Yosemite Dawn Wall with Tommy Caldwell. I’ve been aware of Jorgeson for years, because he comes from my home town of Santa Rosa. (As this story reveals, he still lives here.)�� I have a longstanding attraction to rock climbing, since my college roommate, Dwight Olsen, once led me up a Yosemite wall. (Royal Arches Direct, to be exact.) I’m very proud to say I climbed a Yosemite wall, but I haven’t forgotten the terror. I never climbed again, but every time I am in Yosemite I stop at the El Capitan meadow to see if I can locate some climbers.

If you want to experience a tiny slice of fear, google Dawn Wall and check out some of the pictures and videos of the climb. For example.

A Good Local Newspaper

A friend’s father was murdered a few weeks before Christmas. He was shot at a trailhead after a botched robbery, with his wife witnessing his death. The murderer drove off to shoot another person a few miles away (though not fatally) and attempt another robbery before he was apprehended.

When I heard of this awful crime (through email) I immediately googled it to learn more. In subsequent days I searched the internet repeatedly. All I found, however, was one short, incomplete story from a television station. It gave no names and only the sketchiest information. Apart from that, it appeared that the crime did not exist.

I think there is a simple reason for the blackout: the area has no local daily newspaper.

I live in a community that has an excellent local newspaper, The Press Democrat, thoroughly covering local crime, local sports, local business, local politics and any other local news you can think of. I guarantee you that had my friend’s father been killed in our county, there would have been several detailed stories, with followup pieces on the subsequent prosecution and trial of the murderer.

There are many reasons to worry over the demise of newspapers. For me, most important is that the number of reporters assigned to national and international stories has plummeted, and with it the supply of in-depth understanding of complex stories. Twitter feeds are great for updates on spectacular ongoing dramas, but they don’t make up for the loss of experienced reporters.

Local newspapers don’t contribute much to this kind of investigative journalism, and never have. They have always depended on feeds from AP or the New York Times or other big media outlets for their national and international news. What local newspapers uniquely do, however, is create community. In particular, they assure us that nobody’s murder goes unnoticed by the community at large.

Speaking of Truth

For Christmas, my friend gave each of his grown grandchildren a book on Christian faith. He hoped they would read it; he communicated how important he believed this matter to be. One of his grandchildren wrote back, very thoughtfully but sadly. He admitted that every time he received his grandfather’s Christmas letters, which inevitably communicated about faith, it made him feel bad. He was unsure what message his grandfather meant to convey. If it was a matter of ethical living, then implicitly he felt judged as not good enough, whereas he believed that he was a good person. If, on the other hand, his grandfather was concerned about religion, didn’t he understand that there are different ways? He didn’t hold it against his grandfather that he was a Christian; why should his grandfather hold it against him that he wasn’t?

It was a classic misunderstanding, endemic in our era. Faith is understood to be about ethical living or about spirituality. It’s almost unimaginable that faith has anything to do with truth. That it might be a matter of urgent news.

David Brooks gets at the same concern in a recent column in which he writes of meaning. Meaning goes beyond material success or happiness, and is undoubtedly a proper object in life. But the quest for meaningfulness has devolved into a warm feeling devoid of meaningful standards. You get meaningfulness from doing something that you deem meaningful. There is no lesson for anybody else. You couldn’t argue about the right way to find meaning. You could only share what you find meaningful.

My generation of Christians certainly has contributed to this state, for we have communicated a message that is fundamentally individualistic and utilitarian. We have not said: we must answer to the God who made us, who has revealed himself in Jesus. We have said: come to faith, you will feel better.

As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, God is humble enough to take us on our own terms. If our motives for coming to him are selfish and short-sighted, he welcomes us nonetheless. That doesn’t mean, however, that there are no consequences for speaking of the gospel as though it were centered on our desires.

Does Christian faith makes you feel better? Does it teach you ethics? Yes and yes, but only because it announces truth. This truth is that we did not make ourselves but were created by a Power and a Personality to whom we owe gratefulness, if nothing else. Furthermore, that Power has shown himself. He has indeed offered to be in relationship with us. And so we can find peace with our very nature and with the nature of the universe of which we are part. And so we can know how to live meaningfully.

A Roman governor in the first century asked, “What is truth?” That’s a difficult question, and always has been. But it’s something even grandparents and grandchildren can discuss.

Double Standard

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-the-imitation-of-marriage.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

In this op-ed Ross Douthat continues his occasional reflections on the sexual revolution and its impact on class divisions. I think he puts his finger on something fundamental.

America historically has been a highly mobile society, in which the poor, hard-working immigrant could by pluck and luck rise to the top. In the words of Carousel’s Billy Bigelow, musing about the future of his unborn son:

“He might be a champ of the heavyweights,

Or a feller that sells you glue,

Or president of the united states,

That’d be all right, too

His mother would like that

But he wouldn’t be president if he didn’t wanna be!”

That’s the old romance of freedom. My son could be a champion athlete, or a successful businessman, or president. But only if he wants to be!

As I understand it, studies show that such possibilities are considerably more remote than they used to be. The top and the bottom are more than ever permanently divided, with three factors pre-eminent: income, education, and marriage. They tend to go together. If you are well-off and well-educated, the chances are good that you will marry and not divorce. The reverse is also true: if you are poor and poorly educated, the chances are good that you will not marry or stay married, and that you will raise children alone.

The double standard in American sexuality has gone beyond male and female. Now it is between rich and poor. Those who are well off can afford sexual liberty, because there are forces in their lives that limit destruction, not least of which is the power of cash. (The movie Chef offers excellent storytelling of how this works on the ground.) Those who are poor may be destroyed by liberty, as they lose their most valuable asset, family.

The mores of the well-off dominate the cultural scene: think movie stars, TV producers, magazine editors, public intellectuals. They celebrate freedom. The background insinuation is that if only everybody could be as flexible and non-judgmental and open-minded as we are, problems would quickly dissipate.

Douthat suggests that the poor have adopted that philosophy, much to their detriment. And that its adoption by the rich is  more tempered by conservatism than is obvious. “We may have a culture in which the working class is encouraged to imitate what are sold as key upper-class values — sexual permissiveness and self-fashioning, spirituality and emotivism — when really the upper class is also held together by a kind of secret traditionalism, without whose binding power family life ends up coming apart even faster…. If so, it needs to be more widely acknowledged, and even preached, that what’s worth imitating in upper-class family life isn’t purely modern or progressive, but a complex synthesis of new and old.”

Of three fundamental factors—income (jobs), education, and marriage—that correlate and interact closely, I believe marriage has the longest and most tenacious hold on people’s welfare. Clearly there’s no returning to the “happy days” of the Greatest Generation. Birth control has changed everything. So have “softer” factors: the (partial) undoing of the gendered double standard; the rise of two-earner families; the end of blame and shame for children born without benefit of marriage; no-fault divorce; a more positive valuation of sexual desire; pornography. Many of these changes are good, some bad, some worth arguing about. Put it all together and the situation is very complicated. It’s not easy to say how on earth you could change it.

But as we think about it, we would do well to bear in mind this two-class reality: what works for the rich may devastate the poor.

Never Again, Please

That the country I love and belong to practiced torture as official policy against its enemies makes me sad and sick. May it never, ever, be so again.

The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

The latest Atlantic Monthly has a cover story by Jonathan Rauch regarding midlife crises. He describes his own mid-40s time of frustration, and sums up the experience this way:

“Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie, the greatest writer I have known, told me: ‘Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.’ In my 50s, thinking back, his words strike me as exactly right. To no one’s surprise as much as my own, I have begun to feel again the sense of adventure that I recall from my 20s and 30s. I wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than the five decades past. Gratitude has returned.”

That’s about right, at least for me. But life in my sixties has brought other realities.

In my fifties, a big recognition began that life has a definite horizon. That means that when you make a career choice, it might well be your last one. Is this my last book? Moving to a new place, or even redecorating the kitchen, bears something of that finality. The horizon is not endless. I cannot see exactly where it lies, but I know it is there, that I will reach it, that it is not an eternity distant as it seemed to be when I was young. This makes me more serious and reflective. I want to live my life well; it is my last chance.

What I’m discovering in my sixties is a very distinctive sense of—well, call it serenity. I have less drive, and a lot less ambition. I don’t care as much. I’m less easily distressed. I’m better able to wait on things: whether family issues, or lines in the grocery store. I’m more content to watch other people lead the way, even when I think they are mucking it up.

The flip side of this coin is a pervasive sense of loss. None of my closest friends is yet gone, but my parents (and Popie’s) are, along with most of their generation, some of whom I knew well. Some of my peers have died, and it’s quite clear that this is a trend.

I’m in good health, but I can’t help noticing physical loss. I don’t like to hike as far, I run more slowly, I wake up stiff or sore just from cooking dinner. In every way, I’m less physically vital—and this, too, is a trend.

This adds up to an internal sense of loss. In some ways, it’s just that I miss the drive I once had. I miss caring about my future. I miss ambition.

I live with an awareness that life is slowly leaking out of me.

So, I live with my internal thermostat set at 62. It’s a little cold, but it’s not so uncomfortable I want to get up and change it. I can pull a blanket up. I’m happy enough with my book. This can look and feel like serenity. Or, it can look and feel like mild depression.

And this, too, is surely a trend.

What am I to do with this reality? It’s not something I expect to rise above. It’s rather something I hope to inhabit in the best way possible. I’m still exploring what that means. I think some of these are involved:

–learning to number my days, so that I don’t let them flood past without noticing or appreciating.

–learning to pray.

–learning to love.

I value your thoughts.

We Need Thanksgiving

I hate listening to the news these days, which is saying something because ordinarily I am a bit of a news junkie. I know I share this feeling. All the polls say that Americans are sick to death of ranting and blame. Yet they seem to increase, like nausea on a winding road.

It’s odd, because by some measures we are doing okay. The economy may not be great but it is much better than most. We survived the Great Recession. Crime is down. The flow of illegal immigrants is down. We aren’t fighting any major wars, and while we worry about events in Syria and Africa, they aren’t having much direct impact on us. Not yet, anyway.

And yet as a people we seem so bitterly unhappy, and preoccupied with blame.

I can trot out my favorite suspects and play the blame game with the best of them, but it’s monumentally unproductive. All sides have been ramping it up for years, maybe for decades, and all they seem to provide is more kvetching, more anger, more bitter denunciations.

I think it’s a spiritual disease. Not a political disease, one that can be solved by campaign reform or electoral victories for the good guys or constitutional jurisprudence or whatever your favorite recipe may be. I’m not denying there may be something in those recipes, but I don’t think the lack of them explains the sour mood and I doubt that the attaining of them will change this resentment. I think it’s a spiritual disease that we must all, one by one, family by family, group by group, deal with.

This coming holiday, Thanksgiving, is meant as medicine for this disease. It is only one day, intended for us to stop and be thankful. Deliberately. Thoughtfully. Prayerfully. Even joyfully. We really do have a lot for which we should be grateful.

Hemingway the Creep

I have been reading about the Spanish Civil War lately, partly because it is my daughter’s specialty and partly because it is so very interesting in its own right. It was the Vietnam war of its day—passionately argued over, saturated by media coverage, attracting celebrities. Also very deadly and very disheartening.

One excellent, gossipy book is Amanda Vaill’s Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War, which tells the story of the war through a number of more-or-less celebrity couples that experience it: Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn among them. Hemingway was cheating on his wife and doing his macho bluster thing, writing dispatches that suggested he was seeing a lot more combat close up than he ever did. As Vaill writes of him—in this and also in Everybody Was So Young—Hemingway was a truly repellant human being. As to cheating on his (several) wives it does not seem that he was promiscuous so much as he was a born cheater, in a self-glorifying, self-justifying way. He trashed many of his friends in print, including people who had helped him a lot and put up with him a lot. He was vicious with those who (he thought) crossed him. He drank too much, bragged constantly, thought it was a great thing to knock somebody down. Ick.

But my daughter reminded me, as I went on about this, that he was also quite a writer. I hadn’t read him since I was in college. I remembered good things regarding the depressing The Sun Also Rises, but I was thinking that the rest was mostly Hemingway’s macho schtick. Which it is, I think. But with my daughter’s encouragement I re-read For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is a wonderful book, probably the best war book I have ever read. I can only conclude that Hemingway, when he stopped talking and sat down to write, became a much more contrite and controlled human being.

It’s a small reminder that people of great talent are human beings, and that even dreadful human beings may have something truly great in them. I like this quote from Philo of Alexander: “Be gentle with each person you meet, for each of them is fighting a great battle.”  

Interview with Eric Metaxas

My interview with Eric Metaxas is now online. He’s talking about his new book Miracles. He has an interesting take… for one, he doesn’t particularly focus on healings or other material happenings; he’s just as interested in appearances of angels or in voices directing someone out of the Twin Towers on 9/11. He understands miracles as irruptions of the heavenly realm into the earthly; and as such he pays almost no attention to “proof,” like X-rays before and after, and much more to the question of reliable human testimony. He’s basically saying: trustworthy people have experiences that suggest a wider reality than the purely physical. The nature of reality is more than what meets the eye.

Happiness

Craig Barnes (Body and Soul) describes the plight of highly successful young people raised in families that gave them every opportunity. They have great jobs, cool cars and their own apartments, yet they go to therapists lamenting that they aren’t happy. “After the therapist pokes around a bit, revealing how wonderful their lives actually are, the young adults say, ‘Well, I guess I am happy. But I could be happier.’ Right. Of course, we could always be happier.”

Barnes goes on to say that the pursuit of happiness is not a good foundation for a worthy life. And he reminds us that seeking after total happiness is not a new phenomenon, relevant only to affluent, pampered Americans. “According to the biblical story of creation, we were placed in a garden in which we did not have everything. In the middle of the Garden of Eden was a tree with forbidden fruit, the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’ And every day Adam and Eve had to walk by this tree and remember that they were never created to have it all. That is God’s idea of paradise.

“Each of us is also created to live a life in which something will always be missing. This is simply the nature of being a creature rather than the Creator, who alone is whole and complete and lacking in nothing. But the holes in our little piece of paradise can drive us wild with anxiety. So rather than enjoy the blessings of the many fruits we are given, we become obsessed about what we don’t have.” So, as the Genesis story goes, while living in paradise we manage to create Paradise Lost.

I found this a striking thought: Paradise is described as a place where we do not have everything.

Barnes is not suggesting that we settle for mediocrity. Rather, he is speaking of a life lived fully within limits. “Living fully” does not mean having everything, it means fully applying yourself to loving God and neighbor. As another catechism puts it, “The chief end of humanity is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.” That turns out to be anything but mediocrity: it demands my soul, my life, my all.