The .Plan

I.

‘Paycheck’ is about a reverse engineer, Ben Affleck, who gets paid insanely large sums of money to take a competitor’s product and figure out how to make it. But the deal is, after each assignment, he agrees to have his memories erased so that he can’t divulge any corporate secrets. Since it usually takes him a few weeks to do his reverse engineering thing, this means he loses a few weeks’ worth of his memory in return for cold, hard cash. The real meat of the movie occurs after he accepts a mystery assignment that is particularly lengthy (duration: 3 years) and lucrative (paycheck: $90 million). After he finishes, bad things start happening to him, and, bewildered and handicapped by the loss of 3 years of his memory, he has to figure out what’s going on, rescue the white blonde chick, and save the world.

Would I willingly allow someone to erase portions of my memory?

We live in a society that is committed to a destructive and careless amnesia, but as Walter Brueggemann so often reminds us in his exposition of the Old Testament writings, the covenental God is always calling us to a simultaneous passionate remembering and a liberated forgetting. For what gives us courage other than a long memory of His faithfulness?

And what determines who we are other than our memories? We are historically and socially contingent beings. I have many memories, particularly ‘bad’ ones, that I feel I could do without — but somehow I have the feeling that my lack of appreciation for even these has to do with my inability to understand how God moves in the world and that these memories are all important… somehow. And, that to willingly part with even the worst of my ‘bad’ memories would yield someone who is less of me than I am.

II.

By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion. (Ps 137:1)

God is constant. But life is not. And full worship, as Bruggemann reminds us in his The Message of the Psalms, requires participation in all seasons of faith: orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Life for the psalmist rarely dwells for long in the season of disorientation; he is always on the move. And the old season of disorientation (eventually) becomes the new season of orientation. To the faithful, these are all truisms.

Yet the movement to reorientation is more difficult for some of us than for others. The dominant ideology is the avoidance of hurt, the commitment to continuity, and the maintenance of success. In this context, it seems appropriate that some of us flail about in the foreign land, and the former lucidity of one’s communion with God seems much murkier. We are mature enough to know that we ought to assess the current unfamiliarity of things through the lens of dislocation, but we more often than not are unable to see the new ways in which God touches our lives. We’re just a little bit behind the curve.

III.

And the music rolls on.

I’m in the way of fallin’ down
I won’t let you go that far now
I’m in the way of fallin’ down
I won’t let you go that far now
–Jars of Clay, “I’m in the Way”

That’s all for now, folks. Thanks for reading.

I expect I’ll be back sometime, but I don’t know when. Could be a month, could be a year. Check your RSS feed reader.

Gerard Manley Hopkins has a poem:

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

I envy the kingfisher. Through her example, Hopkins hints at the fact that we have been created precisely for the Christ to come alive in us. But the kingfisher somehow effortlessly achieves congruence between what it is created for and what it ultimately does.

But that is the sort of congruence that needs to be achieved in me.

Stanley Hauerwas is right. Much of the time, we don’t have a clue what we’re doing. Perhaps someday I can do out of love and intuition what I try to do today out of duty. But until then, on those occasions when having a clue is in short supply, the church — as the embodiment of Christ in this world — will continue to speak truth into my life.

From Psychological Science, on the virtues of quitting:

In a paper published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia and Carsten Wrosch of Concordia University found that teenage girls who are unable to disengage themselves from trying to attain hard-to-reach goals exhibited increased levels of the inflammatory molecule C-reactive protein (C.R.P.), which in adults is linked with diabetes, heart disease and early aging. “There’s this traditional idea in Western culture and science literature that being persistent is good, that if you work hard, you can achieve anything,” says Miller, who has published several papers with Wrosch on the psychology of quitting. “Our take is that persistence is good, but there are times where the most adaptive thing is to say, ‘This goal is not going to work out.’ ”
–Clay Risen, “Quitting Can Be Good for You”, New York Times, December 9, 2007

She had been crying. Not in the runny mascara and eyeliner kind of way, but in the puffy eyes with dark ringlets kind of way. You could tell by looking at her that she had probably cried herself to sleep that night, burying her face in the pillow to muffle her sobs so that the medicine intern in the call room next door wouldn’t be woken up. Perhaps, unmercifully, her pager had been uncharacteristically quiet for a few hours, giving her no reprieve from the turmoil of her inner life.

This morning, she seemed tenuous. A slight scowl darkened her face, as if she were concentrating as hard as she could to scrounge up the reserve to make it through the morning without unleashing another sobbing, gaspy, mess of snot and tears.

Seeing my hesitance, she said, “I’m okay. Just tired”. The scowl melted, and was replaced briefly with a smile.

The smile vanished as quickly as it had surfaced, dispelled by a deep breath and a furrowed brow of concentration.

“Cross cover is a killer. Your guys didn’t give me any trouble, though. Yesterday afternoon I did get paged by nursing about Mr. Smith…”

I breathed easier, glad for the out.

“Tell me about him.”

Besides XKCD, another comic strip that I have begun to appreciate is Indexed: modern life captured through charts, graphs, and Venn diagrams. Some require a few seconds of your brainpower.

“Is A wise, or something else?”

Sometimes she just illustrates timeless truths.

“It will get easier. Really, it will.”

Jessica Hagy is a genius. Watch for her book out on Penguin in February.

A flash of a smile in an otherwise chilling article:

New Jersey’s hardcore — mostly urban — gang population has almost doubled since 2001, from 9,000 to 17,000. But in the last few years, even nontraditional gang areas in the Northeast like Westchester County, Long Island and Princeton, New Jersey, have started having gang problems. There are tens of thousands of wannabe gangsters in New Jersey alone, Hampton says. Police call them “wangsters.” Mostly, they traffic in what they think is cool about gangs, the sort of young white men of means and options who go to upscale Manhattan private schools and wear baggy pants and talk ghetto.
–Peter Landesman, “L.A. Gangs: Nine Miles and Spreading”, LA Weekly, December 12, 2007

Poor Charlie Brown. A single ornament and his Christmas tree collapses. “I killed it! Augghh! Everything I touch gets ruined!”

Is this what the Christian life is meant to look like?

Walter Brueggemann has pointed out that the God of the prophet Jeremiah grants His covenant to His people without reason or explanation. It is not preceded by invitation. And so it goes: “I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” If only it felt that easy.

We romanticize this process but in doing so forget that it is a process. It doesn’t simply conclude 5 minutes later with Linus and Lucy singing a rousing “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”. The permanence is not to be taken lightly. After all, tattoos hurt. Firebrands hurt.

Maybe the discomfort is a not a sign of injury but rather a marker of overcoming.

God, by invading our hearts, has written the capacity for faithfulness and commitment into our souls. We will become God’s people, and perhaps someday we will do out of love and intuition what we try to do today out of duty — but that will involve a certain death of the self, a radical shifting of allegiances, and I wonder if we shouldn’t expect some grind this side of the eschaton.

William Cavanaugh has written compellingly that the Christian life is about “practicing heaven now, on earth, even if it gets you killed. It’s not about making our way to Christ in some far-off eschaton; Christ is the way”.

At sunset on a November day, a palette of ochre, gold, green, moss and sage in the surrounding fields darkened to duskier tones under pink-tinged skies. A couple rocked lazily on a wooden swing overlooking the vineyards, wineglasses in hand. Inside the tasting room, Jessica Stapp poured for a handful of guests, chatting amiably with them as they tasted, paused and tasted again. Her relaxed rhythm matched the murmur of conversation, making for a setting that beckoned guests to sip slowly and savor the day.

“Are you ready for the next one?” she asked.
–Louise Tutelian, “Sipping Through the Next Great Wine Region in California”, New York Times, December 14, 2007

After every Sunday morning service, my former pastor would say the same prayer:

Now go into the world in peace,
and have courage.
Hold on to what is good.
Honor all men.
Strengthen the fainthearted,
support the weak,
help the suffering,
and share the gospel.
Love and serve the Lord together in the power of the Holy Spirit,
and may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ
be with you all,
until we meet again.

As a closing benediction, it was brilliant. He couldn’t go wrong repeating the same thing week after week. Because there was always something in there that could touch you deeply.

Anna Broadway, my third-favorite non-academic female Christian writer, recently decided to hit the Internet dating scene. And she writes:

What I’m looking for in a Soulmatch
Nothing. Because I’m not looking. For a “soulmate,” anyway.

From the standpoint of divine destiny, I understand why people want to believe in one. And I do think God is involved in our lives. But all too often the desire to know how God is involved creates an abdication of responsibility. People would rather be told what to decide than how to decide.

But I suppose I’m dodging the question. Or rather, its intent.

I used to have so many lists of “qualities,” but they were often slanted by the guy I liked most at the moment.

Honesty matters, of course.

But the most important thing — the hardest to find — is sincere, thoughtful passion for God and His glory that manifests itself in humble but courageous leadership. That, right there, is probably asking a hell of a lot. But I really feel that God designed spouses to have complementary roles. The strength of the woman is displayed more in the seeming weakness of submission (though that in itself is about five conversations alone!). But I am only prepared to submit to a leader I respect. I realize that, if I marry, I will disagree with my spouse. But if I can at least respect his thinking and decision-making process, it will be much easier for me to abide by a decision I would not have made.