Are things feeling a little extra timey-wimey to you today? That’s because it’s Doctor Who Day! Here’s a song we wrote to celebrate.
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HERmitage
For 48 uninterrupted hours last week, I lived in a little cabin in the woods – alone, and, I repeat, uninterrupted. (Today my children do not have school, and so the “uninterrupted” part feels especially important as I remember my retreat.)
When I started taking solitary retreats a few years ago, I approached them with a sense of lofty significance. I expected a burning bush, a still small voice, a bright light, or some other monumental encounter of biblical proportions. But that has never been my experience. Instead, these retreats have become well-anticipated rest times, and that is plenty.
Attached to the tiny cabin is a screened porch with a solid comfortable Adirondack chair. I sit in the chair and gaze into the woods. A breeze softly shushes through the sleepy trees, who absentmindedly undress, leaf by falling leaf. It is always autumn when I take my retreat, not by my intent, but it always works that way. It is probably the rhythm of my life – summer is large and loud and light-flooded, and usually around the first of October I am ready for a very long nap.
I have always been an introvert. I’m not sure if there is a universal definition for this word, but for me, it means that spending time with people, which is something that is so very good for me (and which I usually enjoy!), takes more emotional energy from me than it does from people we call extroverts. In my young and restless high school and college days, my house was a headquarters for social gatherings, and I loved it. But often I would sleep fitfully after everyone went home, dreaming that all those people were still there, sitting around me on my bed; and I felt I should keep up the conversation, try to be fun and smart and beautiful, but the shy wild creature inside me had already pulled the shades and turned off the porch light.
A solitary retreat, then, is for me a complete pulling of the shades and extinguishing of the porch light, with no expectation from anyone that I will keep up appearances and maintain social graces. I bring my guitar, a pile of books and a few journals (I like to read over past ones and write in current ones). Usually I end up just sitting for long periods, going to bed early, sleeping in late, walking breezy forest trails and sunny prairie ones, and singing quiet songs now and then.
This time I read three books. First, I finished Grace (Eventually) by Anne Lamott, a former addict, recovering G.W. Bush-hater, single mother, pro-choice feminist, and lover of Jesus. Her writing always refreshes me because she is so not me. She sometimes feels like the mirror image of me – child of divorced nonreligious intellectuals, wild background, outspoken demeanor, whose adulthood devotion to Jesus never sat well with her mother. Next, Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm, poetic prose that I enjoy like fine wine or rich baklava – slowly savoring each sentence. I try to set aside my own ambitions of writing when I read either of these Annes, because who needs that form of torture? Instead, I become a wholly abandoned, joyful reader, and it is good.
Then I tackled The Myth of Certainty by Daniel Taylor, a book the renegade professors at my fundamentalist Christian college used to praise. Fifteen years later, I finally got around to reading it. The subtitle is The Reflective Christian and the Risk of Commitment. For those who ask about breakthroughs or “what God did” on my retreat, I humbly and with no certainty but a risk-taking commitment say that I found great comfort and voice for much of my struggle with faith in this book. I’ll leave that for another post.
For now, I feel rested and just a little more practiced at peace, more able to hold a center of calm even on very interrupted days like this, when I hear my children in the kitchen bustling around, yelling, “Mom, we’re cooking!”
Quoting Ippolit
Portrait of Dostoyevsky in 1872
I’m reading The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (thanks for the recommendation, Brian!), and came across this portion of a speech by a character named Ippolit:
“. . . there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you for ever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps, the most important of your ideas.”
We do our best with words, music, painting, dance, touch, and so many more forms of expression, and yet – there is always “something left,” according to Ippolit. Feels like that to me, much of the time. I begin with an idea, I write it in my journal, a blog post, a song; or I tell it to a friend – and in the writing or the telling other ideas sprout, other factors and perspectives become involved, and though I may still be able to experience my understanding of the original idea, I cannot, no matter how I try, exhaustively articulate it. I find this interesting.
A little before the above quote, Ippolit was expounding about Christopher Columbus being his happiest not when he discovered America, but when he was discovering it. He said, “. . . the highest moment of [Columbus’s] happiness was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn’t the New World that mattered, even if it had fallen to pieces. Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all [bold type mine].”
I’ve thought this often, that it seems every conversation, every action, is part of the process of discovery, and it is that process that I enjoy far more than any actual discovery. Once I have made a discovery, it is gratifying, but then I want to move on to discover something more. I thought maybe this was some “postmodern” idea I had absorbed, but there it is in Dostoyevsky’s novel of 1868.
The Good, the Bad, and the Younglings
Danny DeVito made a movie in 1996 called Matilda, based on a book of the same name by Roald Dahl. A copy of this movie wound up in the bargain bin at a local video store, where my mother was browsing for something to entertain her grandkids so we adults could spend an evening in conversation which included complete sentences. My six-year-old daughter Luthien told me later about the movie and how much she liked it. Her favorite parts, which she described repeatedly, sounded lame to my adult sensibilities.
Typical kids’ story, I thought. Poor little child misunderstood by her parents (at least not orphaned like so much of children’s literature). People are either mean or nice, and she has some sort of magical powers to help her through her ordeals.
A week later when we took the kids to my parents’ house for a movie night, and Luthien asked to see Matilda again, I groaned and asked if we could please see something everyone would enjoy, not just the kids. But, poor misunderstood-by-my-parents me*, I was outvoted. On with the show.
Maybe it helped to have my enthusiastic fresh-faced daughter at my side, and her excessively giggly little brother primed to let loose at all the silly parts. I’m sure Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman playing the outlandish parents helped too. Whatever it was, it turned out to be a fun movie to watch together with my kids. I gave my grown-up critic the night off and joined with my kids in relieved laughter when the victorious school children chased away their mean principal once and for all, hurling the contents of their lunch bags like a G-rated mob.
Later, when the grown-up critic came back from her night out and the kids were asleep, Nathan and I had a conversation (which included complete sentences).
“That movie bothered me,” Nathan began. “All those flat characters – the perfectly mean principal, the perfectly good teacher, named Miss Honey even?! Where’s the redemptive value in a story like that?”
Both of us having only in adulthood discovered subtlety (I love Jodi’s post about this), Nathan and I appreciate stories that humanize people. We remind ourselves and our children almost daily that there are no “bad” people and no “good” people – that every person is a complex being marbled with good and evil.
Classic children’s literature, however, does not often concur. Many of these stories tell about good people (who are usually underdogs and often children) winning by destroying bad people. We see it often in today’s movies for kids too. Up, which was a fun story idea and colorful and interesting to watch, disappointed us for the same reason. The bad guy, apparently, had to go.
Not all children’s stories conform to this standard, but in those that take the conflict of good versus evil as their theme, good and evil are often personified and therefore become polarized characters. Therefore the good character must destroy the bad character for good to triumph over evil. In a more complex story, the good character may do bad things (like Edmund in the Narnia chronicles), but ultimately that character will exhibit his/her inherent goodness through repentance. If there is character development, it will most likely be the good characters who get developed, and not the bad.
At least, that is the explanation I came up with when Nathan and I had this conversation and I tried to understand why children’s stories are not often redemptive.
No expert on childhood psychology (of which, as the parent of small children, I am more painfully aware than ever), I’m pretty sure I’ve heard somewhere that children are concrete thinkers; and I think this means that subtlety just isn’t something they get. So, maybe these stories help to cement into their concrete thinking the persistent human belief that no matter the odds, good will overcome evil in the end.
And maybe subtlety is something to be gained through maturity, interacting with the world, listening and observing others. Maybe the understanding that every person – and every situation – is complex and has something beautiful as well as something ugly or dangerous or evil in it can only come through experience, cannot be transferred through external teaching.
Taking this viewpoint, I think that Avatar should be classified as a children’s story (a highly interesting, predictably violent and visually stunning one) while Star Wars is for mature viewers.
Then again, even in Star Wars, the bad guy known as the Emperor never gets redemption. And maybe Darth Vader would just be classified as a good guy doing excessively bad things for an excessive amount of time until he repents and gets to be immortalized as good.
I dunno. It just feels deeply right and true to me when, as the Doctor triumphantly said in one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes, “Just this once, everybody lives!”
*Uh, Mom . . . Dad . . . my tongue is firmly in my cheek here. (Can’t afford to lose my biggest fans!)
More Thoughts About God and Violence
Two post-evangelical memoirs (am I inventing a genre here?) I read recently, Losing My Religion by William Lobdell and Reasons to Believe by John Marks, make for some interesting comparisons. Both these authors are journalists who for a time embraced an evangelical form of Christian faith, but who lost that faith, including belief in a God of any kind, through their work of chronicling human suffering. Both concluded that a God who would allow such things as priests raping children with the knowledge and collusion of their superiors (in Lobdell’s case) and a father living in the false hope of reuniting with his sons who the journalist knows to be dead in the Bosnian war (in Marks’ case) cannot be any sort of superior being.
Both also encounter suffering people who devote their lives to God through Christ, including an adult survivor of horrible childhood sexual abuse by his priest (Lobdell) and a middle-aged couple whose adult son, once headed for success, spirals through mental illness to an early death (Marks).
This has me wondering. To the thoughtful but detached observer of suffering, the thought of God is understandably offensive. If God is like me, standing there watching such things, but infinitely superior to me in being all-powerful and completely good, how can God allow this? How can I justify accepting such a God?
But many who suffer greatly tell us that God is extraordinarily present with them in that suffering. Of course, many others who suffer have also found nothing, no one, no god, and their voices deserve our ears and respect.
Though I keep hoping for news of something else, for now I have concluded that there are really only two ways of dealing with evil – either to destroy it with violence (which inevitably is only a lesser evil and never seems to ultimately get the job done) or else to go on living in the face of evil and refuse to return violence for violence. This often works like salt in a wound, drawing out the worst of the poison, but in so doing exposes the evil for what it is, making an appeal to justice which is often more powerful at defeating a particular evil (think of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and countless others . . . “one more in the name of love”).
Assuming there really are only these two options, is it possible that God chooses option two? Certainly we humans have attributed great acts of destruction to God, when we felt that destruction was justified, the lesser evil to bring about the greater good. (Read the Old Testament, read much of church history, read the billboard on the side of Interstate 35 that says God is speaking through twin towers and hurricanes but no one is listening.) Is it possible, though, that God only ever has chosen option two, to simply be, the “I AM,” present with people, which means that by definition, the “I AM” is always suffering? And yet that by virtue of being God, as shown in God incarnate in Christ – if this is true – that God has power to bring life from death, and therefore make evil as we know it ultimately powerless?
And that God’s presence with the suffering ones records the truth about what has been done to them, even as it sometimes reveals to the sufferer the humanity – and therefore the suffering – of the perpetrator? And that somehow in this mediating presence there is the possibility for peace and love to erupt?
I tread very lightly here, mostly ignorant to any depth of human suffering, cushioned and cut off as I am from pain, privileged and rich, comfortable like only a slice of humanity has ever been, expressly because others suffered – and suffer – to make this unsustainable lifestyle of mine possible. Do I have any right even to speak of suffering, to treat it lightly as a subject for philosophical conversation?
Is there any valid response to suffering other than being present with the sufferer? Is that what Jesus meant by enjoining those who would follow him to “take up your cross”? Shut up and listen, hush up your condemnations and your ideologies about who’s right and wrong and love everybody, dammit?! I do know enough to know that love, the unconditional kind, the non-respecter-of-persons kind, cannot last long without suffering of some sort.
I agree with Lobdell and Marks that Supreme-Righteous-Ruler-of-the-Universe-God just doesn’t make any sense with the way things are. A God standing over and above all things, watching Rwandan machetes and Nazi gas chambers with unblinking eyes and idle hands is no god I want to worship. I’m an atheist too when it comes to this god, and wary of the religionists who follow this god.
A suffering God, though – a “least of these” God, a “with us” God; I can consider this, even as the thought of it condemns me. Of course it is hard for me to sense a God like this – I am mostly the perpetrator and rarely the sufferer.
These thoughts are hardly conclusive, just another untried idea kicking around in my brain. To quote a song I’ve been writing for six years now, “there are rocks in my heart and holes in my thoughts but I’ll keep pounding this pavement with my genuine rubber soul.”
Julia Bloom 