Monthly Archives: April 2011

April 19, 2011 · 1:58 pm

The Task in Life

What a ride we’re on…

Sometimes I think the anxious people, the people with high blood pressure, the people always on edge, maybe even the paranoid folks…sometimes I think they’re more right that the calm ones.  Why should we think good things will happen today?  Heaven knows there are lots of bad things happening.  Reading U.S. history from 1820 until now, especially if you concentrate on the journey of African-Americans through this troubled land of freedom, one does not forget that bad things happened then, and will no doubt happen now.  And most of the time, they don’t just happen.  There’s usually someone else on the other end of the bad thing that’s happening to you, incarnating something other than the “good” of our nature.   Not always, but often.

The task, I think, is to find the story, wrestle the meaning out of it, and then tell it as best we can.  As Brian McClaren (The Story We Find Ourselves In) and a host of others are telling us, we are in a narrative in which we are not the primary protagonist.  Oh, from our point of view, we are the protagonist, but in the end, the film is not really about us.  We are, at best, bit players in a cosmic, centuries-old, unfolding drama.   God’s world rolls on past us, and future generations will debate the old values just as previous ones have.  All manner of human sin and proclivity will parade on, and life will continue to be done according to the faith of those tasked with the task of living it.  Meaning, I used to say, is something we don’t really have to strive for, because in Christ, it’s already been given.   Well, may be, but now I’m more inclined to think the whole thing is about naming that meaning.   I’m postmodern enough to believe that there are always multiple ways to tell a story, see a story, or live a story.

Reversals are big in story-telling.  Unexpected turns in the road.   We fall into pits from which heroes must extract us.   Friends turn their backs, or we turn ours, and then there’s a whole list of complications that must be lived through to get those friendships back.   Stories of race, of what makes a family, of the nature of love, of who’s right in religion, and who best tells the story of history or better yet, who best owns the story of history.   And what of war?

The task in life is to risk being wrong, and living and telling the story you find yourself in with all your heart.  To watch, to observe, to act, to listen, to risk, to dream, to challenge, to hope, to weep, to rage, to repent: all these and so many more verbs make up that action of life that is our task.  To live in the sight of God (and what if He’s not there?) with all our hearts, loving more than we are capable of ever grasping.

In Brigadoon, one of the lines I remember sounded achingly like Jesus:  ”It’s so hard to give everything.  Even though its the only way to get everything.”

Writing to remember…

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April 8, 2011 · 7:01 am

Honor

“You can’t compare men back then to men today.  There’s just no comparison.”

So said one of the more compelling Civil War Reenactors I talked to at the “Battle of Waynesboro” in Waynesboro, Virginia last weekend.   What he meant was that there was something that the combat veterans of the American Civil War understood, that they were men that had a qualitatively different understanding of life, manhood, strength, and honor than do men today.   And frankly, after my brief, but intense, study of this period of history, I tend to agree.  As much as I love the men I know, Grant, Lee, Frederick Douglass, James Longstreet, Joshua Chamberlain, the 54th Massachusetts, and all the men in the  trenches that didn’t run, but stayed and fought “with honor” seem to me to demonstrate an approach to life that is, in some ways, far superior to what we do today.

I know they were wrong about things, most specifically about race.   These men (Frederick Douglass and the 54th Massachusetts excepted), by and large on both sides of the Mason Dixon, could not wrap their heads around the idea that black people, in their humanity, their worth, their potential, and their value on the planet, were not one iota, not “one drop”, different or less than those of white skin color.  Why this is true is beyond me really.   But it was true.  They had this dead wrong.

So how could I suggest that they were somehow living in a better fashion that we are?   Again, let me state categorically, so no one misunderstands, that their lack of understanding about the actual meaning of “all men are created equal”, was at best a gross error, and in the worst cases, a heinous evil.   So in the context of that error and evil, what am I suggesting that we should learn from these men?

Here’s  the question:  when it comes to the men you want to travel with, would you rather be running with people who will abandon you, even though they have the right answers to the biggest, most complicated moral and political questions of the day, or would you rather be depending on men who disagree with you about everything, but (given their honest-to-God understanding of the world) who live lives of integrity, honesty, perseverance, humility, and faithfulness, even if it costs them their personal, day-to-day feelings of “happiness” and “comfort?”

Oddly, we often seem to prefer the ones who agree with us, regardless of their character.   My study of the Civil War is a personally convicting one, one that is driving me more and more to an uncomfortable place of examination and repentance for my latent idolatry of “feeling good” as in, “How are you today?”

I ran across a piece of writing yesterday that tried to explain a state of mind we civilians simply can’t understand: the military combat code of Honor (and the way this word functions among the military, it deserves to be capitalized).  Simply put, honor means you will not abandon your comrade in arms, no matter what fire you are taking, no matter the odds of death, no matter the chances of survival of the man down in front of you.   And frankly, I willingly confess this “battle” state of mind is one I have never experienced, and probably never will.   Yet the piece also asserts that living in this state of integrity and commitment is a place of intense  life and experience.   And it makes perfect sense that that would be the case.

Obviously, the fact that this is all taking place as people are killing each other creates a very real irony, but my point is that men that enter into that kind of compact with each other experience something vastly different that they usual negotiations that take place in relationships among us regular folk.   The question is very simple:  how often do we break our word?

Frankly, its an embarrassing question.  We want to say, “Depends on what you mean.”   Yet somewhere in our gut we understand exactly what that means.

Jesus said few would find the road to life.

Strange that it would take the study of the American Civil War to make that clearer to me than its ever been.

Don’t hear me advocate for some American yahoo macho militarism–that’s not what I mean.   Anyone who knows me knows immediately that’s not what I mean.  But war is an apt metaphor for much of life, though I resist it because it’s so awful and so costly.  But make no mistake.

So was the cross.

Christ was, among all the other descriptors, a man of honor.

Why do you call me lord…

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April 5, 2011 · 8:14 pm

Still in the Wake of The Civil War

Here’s an interesting question:  what types of ceremonies, rituals, and celebrations are appropriate for remembering the war officially known as “The War Between The States”?  (So said Congress in 1948, one reenactor pointed out to me last weekend.) Actually, Wikipedia refutes my friend the reenactor, saying Congress never officially legislated a name for the war.  I’ll bet I’ll come across someone soon who will argue the point.  Any takers?

Anyway, given the wide range of feelings Americans have about the war, I’m wondering what you think is appropriate.   There’s a great article about this over at Civil War Memory.  (Tremendous resource, by the way.)

I’m writing a play that began as a rather innocuous attempt to do something timely with Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, but the more I’ve read about the war, the less inclined I am to do something that simple and that straightforward.   The realization that the Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves, and the ongoing struggle of black Americans over the past 150 years, compels me to go deeper, rummaging around in the complexities of culture and skin color relations that still impact many of the simple human exchanges that mark day to day life in America.

Yesterday, I posted a list of things that were on my mind as a result of my reading over the past couple of months.   I’m not sure why this topic has seized me by the throat emotionally.   Frankly, I have been moved deeply by the stories of suffering, abuse, bravery, loss, compassion, and struggle that were a part of this great American upheaval.  I’ve learned about the all too real tension between Federal power and States’ rights.  I’ve been reminded again about the power of, well, power, especially economic and political power.   No wonder God is on the side of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed…who else is going to be on their side?  I’ve been profoundly reminded that evil is out there, and that the actions of a few can turn the tide of history for large groups of people.   I’ve been instructed on the intricate dance everyone dances as they try to get it right when talking about race.  Offense is always lurking, and I’m pretty sure that over the course of the next couple of years, as I explore this, I’m bound to offend more than my fair share.

I’ve also been challenged to look around me, and see where injustice of this happening right now, today, and how I’m being called to respond to it.  I applaud the shift in many Christian cultures (you thought there was just one?) toward social justice and an awareness of serving the whole human being.  At the same time, I stumble over the question of Jesus and Paul glossing over the slave culture and torturous capital punishment cultures of their day.  They did not rail against Roman civil and military authority, instead going after religious leaders and the problem of the hypocritical heart.   The transformed heart, of course, transforms everything.

Anyway, back to the first question:  should we celebrate this war?  And if we at least commemorate it in some way, how would you suggest we go about it?   Will you remember it?  Attend any events?  And if you do, what are you most interested in commemorating?

Another thing I’ve learned?

Most of us just don’t care that much.   I certainly didn’t.

Maybe we should…

 

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· 6:59 am

What Two Months of Civil War Reading Will Do To You

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.”

After two months of reading, and a trip to Gettysburg, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, here’s a little of what’s on my mind:

  • The Civil War
  • The battle for how history is told
  • Robert E. Lee and “honor”
  • The muddy boots of U.S. Grant at Appomattox
  • The disparity in the number of black Americans in prison today
  • The war of wills between the American South and  the Radical Republicans in the years 1868-1877
  • Two books:  Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
  • My apolitical life around which political leanings are gathering
  • The revival that swept through the camps of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac in 1863-64, following Gettysburg and Vicksburg
  • White privilege and whether David Mamet, in Race, is right about what white folk have to say about race.   Which is nothing…
  • What Christ’s ministry would have looked like in Reconstruction Louisiana
  • How we run from our lives
  • The power and fallibility of the Supreme Court
  • The process of memorializing war, heroism, the dead, and the causes that cost young men (mostly) their lives
  • Biracial life
  • The role of fathers in the lives of daughters among people of all skin colors
  • The power of sin…and evil
  • The fact that my Lenten fast has been a complete fail this year
  • The play emerging in my mind, and my love of the characters in it.
  • The fact that we are all involved in a grand “lost cause”
  • Pacifism and the accomplishments of War

How’s that for a list?  There’s more, but that’s a fair start.

There’s got to be a piece of theatre in there somewhere.

In days to come, I’ll riff on some of this stuff, keeping a loose, improv sort of thing going.  If I wait to blog until I get all my thoughts straight, I’ll never write.  But here’s the thing. There’s so much I don’t know about this stuff.  And I must say, it’s far more interesting to pursue writing in areas in which I am passionately curious, knowing that the process of the search is life-changing, conversation changing, and effort changing.

It’s been 150 years…

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