Hollow men and their despair

2 Corinthians 2:6  "For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

My friend and former roommate, Jeremy Cowan, recently gave me one of the nicest gifts I've ever received--a ticket to see U2 in Atlanta.  U2 is my favorite band, and I had never seen them live before.  The gift was apropos of nothing--just a sheer act of generosity on his part.  The fact that I got to see the concert with him and Rudy, another dear friend and our third roommate from the apartment, made the experience even sweeter.  As we all noted, the time in our life when we would be able to pull these type of collegiate hijinks was rapidly coming to an end.  For me, this reflection did not diminish the joy of the experience in any way; it's simply the progress of life.  There are certainly elements of single life I miss.  The memories are precious, and I will cherish them forever--I even took part in a college movie with this theme as its central conceit--but if we all were about to turn 30 and were living together with no career, ministry, or family prospects I think I would be more depressed than anything else. The Father has a purpose for our lives, and we need to press towards it.  There is a glory in times past, but there is surpassing glory in the future.  We are changed from glory to glory.

The concert was incredible, as any review will tell you.  Jeremy, who is far more knowledgable about music than me, said it was easily the most spectacular show he'd ever seen, or anticipated seeing.  He said he didn't think there was any other band in the world that could pull it off, and I agreed.  First, there is the financial excess of it all.  Not many acts in the world could afford to even attempt U2's show, with their 170 foot tall 360 degree screen, moving stage and other pyrotechnic marvels.  Second there is experience, coordinating a show for 35000-80000 people (depending on the venue) is hard work, and takes a serious stage presence.  More imporantly, there is U2's popularity.  There just aren't many acts around that can play 25 songs or so, and reasonably expect that even the casual fan will know half of them (or more) by heart.  This was especially brought home to me at the end of the show, when U2 were able to play a series of 5 or 6 songs, all of which had been concert closers at some point in their career.  It's a luxury afforded to very few bands indeed.  Undergirding the entire performance, and, in my opinion, its most important feature, was the solid, hopeful nature of U2's music.  While I think the "U2 is a Christian band" theme is really overplayed by some gullible Christians, the fact is that U2's music is about something.  They wrestle with big ideas and hard questions and usually, if not always, come down with a position that is at least compatible with Christianity, and often is explicitly Christian in message.  This dovetails quite nicely with the bands legendary (and oft-mocked) social conscience.  Again, Jeremy rang in with the comment that he really doubted if any band in the world could generate the amount of positive energy that U2 seems to routinely conjure at each tour stop.  It was a great experience, and I'm really thankful for it.

But now for the undercurrent.  U2 are dinosaurs.  Their position in pop music is paleological, and they are quite aware of it.  Bono refers to himself in some of his lyrics as "the last of the rock stars" and I really don't think he's being ironic.  The days of the larger-than-life rock band have passed; and it is in large part because the days of larger-than-life anything have passed.  The current zeitgeist declares all meta-narratives dead.  Postmodern thought has a decidedly demotivational and nihilistic bent.  And the concert brought this home to me as well.  U2's opening act were a British band named Muse.  I'd heard one or two singles from Muse, but was largely unfamiliar with their work.  Having seen them live, let me tell you that Muse are among the most technically proficient musicians I've ever seen.  Frankly, they're probably more skilled than U2.  They generate a massive, complex sound from their three-piece band, and their music is truly unique--their instrumentation and time changes are unlike any other music I've ever heard.  But for me, it was not enjoyable; their entire act is permeated with a character that I can only label "despair."  Not anger, rage, or sorrow--but clearly and definitely despair.  They achieve some truly shocking moments, but the sound and fury signify nothing.  I would classify their mood as "anti-hope."  Muse (and most post-moderns) claim to not hold certainties (of course, such a statement disproves their claim, but I digress), but they really do--they're just all expressed negatively.  There is no truth.  There is no point.  There is no hope.  There is nothing but the meaningless conciousness attained by random chance in the milieu of a world that is indifferent, dying, and purposeless.  I know that philosophically speaking, I have technically conflated post-modernism with nihilishm there, but I defy any person to argue that it is not an accurate representation of current Western thought.  Foucault, Nietschze anyone?  Muse are apocalyptic to the bone, with title tracks like "SuperMassiveBlackHole" and "Thoughts of a Dying Atheist" one would be hard pressed to argue that this is not an intentional artistic statement by the band.  Their happiest, most upbeat song wails, "Far away, the ship is taking me far away from the people who care if I live or die...our hopes and expectations?  Black holes and revelations."  Like U2, Muse live out their convictions; they are noted for frequently partying with fans after their show--sometimes not knowing where they are or how they got there when they wake up.  The really jarring thing to me about the concert was the reaction of the people in front of me.  Most seats were not filled for Muse (they were the opening act) and most people only paid slight attention to them.  But at the first song, the group in front of us immediately stood up and enthusiastically sang along, danced, and pumped fists.  This continued for pretty much the whole set.  After mocking Rudy (who consequently had no view of the stage) I vacillated between amazement and pity at the devotion to Muse's bleak message.  Perhaps it was a prompting of the Spirit, but at that moment I was more aware of the plight of the unsaved than I had been in many months.  For the modern man, with his decontstructed world and disintergrated hope, what is left but to revel in the bleakness?  And what greater motivation can there be for the Christian than the motivation of seeing his brethren accept a grim, joyless life followed by an eternity of suffering?

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

--from The Second Coming

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

--from Amusing Ourselves to Death

"Perhaps this will become clearer if we take a concrete instance. When a Roman father told his son that it was a sweet and seemly thing to die for his country, he believed what he said. He was communicating to the son an emotion which he himself shared and which he believed to be in accord with the value which his judgement discerned in noble death. He was giving the boy the best he had, giving of his spirit to humanize him as he had given of his body to beget him. But Gaius and Titius cannot believe that in calling such a death sweet and seemly they would be saying 'something important about something'. Their own method of debunking would cry out against them if they attempted to do so....

...The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

--from The Abolition of Man 

This is how the world ends
This is how the world ends
This is how the world ends
Not with a bang but a twitter.

--paraphrased, from The Hollow Men

Have a nice reflective day! 

1 Thessalonians 5:19  "Do not quench the Spirit."

I just didn't feel like making the call.  Conor's drug problems were an open secret while we were at school, and we had been down this road before; I was working (more than) full-time hours, taking a fairly heavy seminary load, leading two bible studies, not to mention my wife and baby.  I hardly have enough time for my close friends.  And it's s not like Conor and I were tight--I hadn't spoken to him in about a year--why should I have this urge to call him now? 

Okay, yes--we were friends.  We played frisbee golf and ping-pong and video games.  He crashed at my house over break sometimes.  But he moved back to Augusta after college--that's like an hour away.  And I have it on good authority that he's relapsed.  I don't have time to argue about the merits of charismatic theology and the application of God's moral law with a man who doesn't even take the time to stay sober and observe the government's civil law.  He has other friends.  Closer friends.  Better friends.

Okay, yes--I know he respects my opinion...but only to a point.  Has all of our time together ever produced any real change in his behavior?  Or his thinking?  He's pretty much the same-old-same-old, right?  You know I'm busy because of You.  I'm working in the church for You.  I'm going to seminary so I can serve You.  Elijah doesn't see his grandparents very much because of what I'm doing for You. 

Forgive me, Father.  My life is blessed, and I thank You for it.  I'll make that call as soon as I have a little time.

Conor died of an O.D. two weeks ago. 

It's not like I really think a phone call from me would have changed much--it had been a long, long struggle on that front, and there were many others involved in Conor's life, for better and worse; on the other hand, I really do think the Lord was leading me to call him, and I just didn't want to.  Nor was my rationale incorrect: I am busy, we weren't that close.  But he's the second friend in a few months to die this way.  In the final analsyis Conor's choices are his own, but it's a darn shame he didn't have a better friend.

Forgive me, Father.  And Conor.

Have a nice day! 

No Scripture with this, for obvious reasons...

"Are you crazy?!  Do you want to die?!"  Not words you ever want to hear in a public place, least of all from a maniac brandishing a gun.

So let me tell you about my weekend.  Since we graduated college, my friend Curtis and I have made a point of trying to see each other sometime in early August, as this date falls between our birthdays and is kind of a last hurrah for summer before work and school duties resume.  This year, we planned to go see the new G.I. Joe movie.  Despite the awful reviews, we were both excited since we had been fans of the cartoon growing up.  We even had a party to watch the animated movie at college.  Curtis was always a bigger fan than me (it was his movie), and his enthusiasm manifested itself this weekend in the construction of a Cobra Commander costume.  The costume Curtis constructed was surprisingly accurate--although it must be admitted that most people remember Cobra Commander's blue outfit from the cartoons more than his black one.  Curtis heeded the good advice of his wife and did not bring his telescoping baton (illegal to carry in the state of GA) to the theatre, but did not elect to leave behind the airsoft gun in his makeshift thigh holster.  It was a decision he would regret.

Of course heads turned when he came in.  Our group had taken multiple vehicles, and those who arrived first had quickly lined up for tickets, so I was not actually standing with Curtis when the police acted, but I was only about five feet away.  As Curtis conversed with his friends and puzzled moviegoers an officer plunged though the crowd, drew his gun, slapped Curtis' hand away from his waist and took seized the airsoft gun.  Curtis was then taken out of line and questioned.  After the officer determined that Curtis was not in fact insane--at least not violently so--he proffered some unsolicited life advice in that special form of patronizing that only armed authority figures have the cheek to dispense and then instructed Curtis to replace his mask so that other officers could come and gawk at the spectacle.  The airsoft gun was replaced in the car and the mask had to stay off once the policemen's sideshow ended, but aside from advising Curtis that wearing costumes resembling Klan robes during Black Biker Week was exceptionally unwise, that was the end of the affair--at least it should have been.

Evidently, the officer's actions had created some unrest in the crowd.  Now I hate to go here, because I have a friend who is a police officer, but this particular representative of the force did correspond to most of the unfortunate features of a stereotypical Southern cop.  He was middle-aged and fat, glistening with a veneer of sweat from his two seconds of physical exertion.  His stiff, gray flat-top haircut made him look like a cross between a skunk and a drill sergeant.  I believe his methods in dealing with Curtis were justified, Curtis brought that on himself by wearing the airsoft gun, but his manner certainly left a lot to be desired.  I have no doubt that working crowd control at a movie theatre on Friday night would turn most people surly and misanthropic, but that doesn't make the attitdue any more palatble to experience.  If Curtis had actually posed a threat or intended violence, he probably would not have been chatting with people as he stood in line for a ticket.  So the gun-waving plunge-into-the crowd histrionics were a bit much, even if they could be technically justified from a training manual.  And calling other officers away from their patrols to gawk, was just unprofessional.  I saw one man (who wasn't with our group) request a badge number so that he could file a formal complaint, and I heard others talking about it.  All in all, it was a memorable experience.

P.S.  The reviews of the movie have been un remittingly negative.  They are unfounded.  G.I. Joe is certainly no masterpiece, but it was exactly what I wanted--a loud, fun, silly film that reminded me of the cartoon and had some cool action sequences.  On these counts it delivered.  The professional critics panned it for being "long, loud, and absurd."  One wonders what type of movie they expected to see: the source material for the entire franchise is an action figure from the 60's, and the cartoon chronicled the conflicts between the Joes--an elite international fighting force--and Cobra--a terrorist organization whose members were actually biologically descended from snakes, hailed from the hidden kingdom of Cobra-la, and were led by a being named Serpentor who was an amalgamated clone of all of history's most ruthless war leaders.  I think the truth is more along these lines: the studio did not allow critics to review the film before it was released and they are having a very public hissyfit about it.  Moves like this threaten critics' livelihood; they should be especially fearful that their unfailingly negative reviews seemed to have done little to influence the box office--the movie made around 60 million in its first weekend.

Have a nice day! 

No Scripture, as this has almost no spiritual application and will likely set off some heated arguing.

Unless you're living under a rock, you probably heard that health care reform bills are currently before the House and Senate, and will most likely go through quickly.

I cannot wait for the opportunity to kick my insurer to the curb.  I may well send them a detailed and cattily worded letter explaing the numerous and varied reasons as to why.

Although I find the Republican deification of the free market fatuous, I must confess I am both morally and intellectually dubious about government-run healthcare.  My glee comes pretty much exclusively from revenge.  Revenge on a system that has been crushing me under its oppressive thumb for many years now.  Revenge on a system that collects exorbitant premiums up front on a monthly basis for the privilege of meeting deductibles and co-pays that run into the thousands.  Revenge on a system that has two administrators for every actual health care worker.  Revenge on surly "customer service" providers who act as if they are doing me a great favor by merely performing their job duties, and that not until after I negotiate their near-impenetrable answering machine service and suffer through an interminable hold time.  Revenge on policies that make me financially responsible for decisions made by my physician while I am etherized on an operating table, even though my monthly payments are always made, my yearly deductible was met in full and the cost of the operation was already agreed upon by the physician, the patient, and the insurance company.

I must confess there will be a smug gleefulness in my voice as I inform some administrative factotum that I will no longer be subsidizing their extortion scheme and that the $425 that come out of my pocket each month, along with my employer's c.$600 will no longer be contributing to their corrupt enterprise.

Instead it will be where it belongs, in the hands of the federal government!

Seriously though, I am very excited about the potential benefit this poses to me, even though I am concerned that it may prove to be detrimental to the nation in the long run.

Have a nice day! 

Exodus 20:12  "Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you."

A few unrelated topics and updates:

1.  The fellowship group Laura and I attend recently turned its attention to a discussion of the (biblical) church.  The obvious starting place was to define the bare minimum--the LCD--of what constitutes a church.  Although the conversation was somewhat inchoate, I believe the following accurately represents our conclusions:  a church is multiple believers who regularly meet together for the expressed purposed of intentionally worshipping God. through means of prayer, preaching/teaching of the Scripture, and observance of baptism and communion.  Members encourage one another and hold each other accountable--exercising discipline when necessary--and a leadership structure should be formed at the earliest possible time.

What are you thoughts and reactions to the above?  Remember, we're going for the minimum necessary qualifications--obviously a church can (and should) do much more.  Our "definition" is not restrictive but prescriptive.  Also, as we discuss various issues we may sharpen up some of the details, the form of leadership e.g., this is just our setting out point.

2.  You must read The Courage to Be Protestant.

3.  "Reaching the unchurched" is a buzzword used to justify every evangelistic movement--good and bad--under the sun.  And it is a laudable goal; I don't mean to denigrate the heart behind it.  However, in some forms--and I'm thinking specifically of Willow Creekesque mega-churches and their step children, those segements (not all) of the emerging church that eschew doctrine over experience--I think we have gotten to the point on Sundays where we are "unchurching the reached."  That is to say, the main "worship" is so focused on staying relevant and interesting to an unsaved or nominally Christian attendee that it has derelicted Jesus' initial charge to the first leader of the church: "Feed my sheep."  Not to put too fine a point on it, but it seems like many churches are more interested in attracting goats.

4.  New Adventures in Paternity:
A.  My best friend was coming to town in preparation for a road trip to another very dear friend's wedding.  Then my baby started to run a fever--always more harrowing because he has a slight kidney condition.  Then my plumbing went out.  So on Father's Day morning I had a sick baby that was stressing me out and the joy of offering my wife and bff a house without plumbing.  I then had the further delight of calling my own father on Father's Day and telling him I'd be hitting him up for money to fix the plumbing in the near future.
B.  After church that morning Laura and I considered that use of the facilites at church might be wise, before we returned to our arid abode.  She had the diaper bag and Bibles, I, Elijah.  For obvious reasons, I didn't want to let him run free among the urinals, so I chose to hold him one-handed as I went about my business.  Ordinarily, this would be no problem, but Elijah seemed especially intrigued about certain features of my anatomy he was previously unfamiliar with.  As he lunged for me, I contorted my body to prevent him from a most unfortunate introduction to potty-training.  However, the movement dramatically reduced my accuracy, resulting in my suffering the fate I was so intent on sparing him.  Since women tend to view the bathroom as some kind of social club, it took several mortifying minutes for Laura to re-emerge from the ladies' room.  I then dangled Elijah in front of me by his armpits to provide maximum cover and hurriedly made my way to the car--thankful that at least service was over, and ruefully contemplated the memorable nature of this Father's Day.

Well, I really need to get back to work.

More to follow: it's been an eventful hiatus from blogging.

Have a nice day!