Arts

Cherry Blossoms (photo by missjanetb; used by permission)

The winter blasts of cool and snow and clouds have stirred a longing in our hearts for spring. Spring breaks into our world with color and light and magic. For a few weeks the ordinary world around us is lit with brilliant fire. Then it fades.

In this little poem, Ou Yang Hsiu celebrates the glory of spring but laments its transiency. As I read his sweet lament, I am reminded our our transiency and the oh-so-brief glorious moment of our lives.

Spring Walk to the Pavilion of Good Crops and Peace

The trees are brilliant with flowers
And the hills are green.
The sun is about to set.
Over the immense plain
A green carpet of grass
stretches to infinity.
The passerby do not care
That Spring is about to end.
Carelessly they come and go
Before the pavilion,
Trampling the fallen flowers.

Ou Yang Hsiu (translated by Kenneth Rexroth)

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The Road

What happens when the world comes to an end, and you’re still here? As I watched the “The Road” last week, that seemed to be the question burning in my mind. The story never tells us why the world dies, it simply immerses us into a world where everything is dull grey. Trees, plants and all wildlife are dead. A few shell-shocked humans remain. To continue living means finding some old canned food that survived the end, or eating other survivors.

Into this dark and devastated world, a baby is born.

Is this a cruel joke? How can you raise a child in a world where everything is dead or dying?

This film was released in Knoxville during the Christmas films. While theaters were packed with audiences enjoying heart-warming, family inspiring films, a few of us stepped into the darkness of night to watch a bleak and anguished look at a father and son attempting to survive when all is lost. After the film, my friend who watched it with me suggested that I have a depressing taste in films.

On the surface, this film is depressing, horrific, and deeply disturbing. The cannibalism alone is enough to drive most folks away. Yet what I witnessed was an unexplainable hope. The father was determined to take his son South to the possibility of a better place. A deep, unexplained hope drives the action of the film. How can you have hope when everything is hopeless?

In a film where God seems to have abandoned his world, a transcendent hope shines into the heart of a small boy who is seeking to “keep the fire inside” alive (this hope might be compared to the film Children of Men). As I watched the film, I kept thinking of the dark struggle for many Europeans during the 14th century. Famine, crusade, raiders, revolts and the black plague devastated entire regions. Many people assumed God had plunged our world into judgement with no hope or respite. A “cult of death” sprung up as people became infatuated with the death that lurked around every corner. Instead of promoting repentance and righteousness, this dark century plunged many people into darker actions.

Hopelessness and suffering and struggle to survive can strip us of all that we call human. As Maslov’s hierarchy of needs are stripped down to the most basic needs physiological needs for existence, we may begin to look and act like every other animal, fighting, killing and eating to simply survive. How then does a father teach his son to “keep the fire inside” alive? And yet, again and again the father and the son discuss why they will not eat other humans and why they will not violate other humans and why they must continue to live with some sense of honor and moral restraint.

In this deep and unexplainable drive to live for a better day, I saw a glimmer of transcendent hope shine through. In the midst of the devastation of the 14th century, some people did cultivate hope, some people did not lose faith, some people discovered an unshakeable hope. This hope is not the articulation of hope in Christ and his resurrection, but it is an God-given pre-Christ hope that is still waiting to hear the reality of the Good News again.

In the middle of the film, the father and the son take refuge in an old abandoned church building. This broken down structure provides a moment of sanctuary in the midst of an arduous journey toward hope. I have met people who are walking on that road toward hope, fighting to preserve some sense of humanity while they face inner demons. I’ve known a couple who lost hope and are no longer here.

Just because a person makes good money and has nice things does not mean that they are free from battling that road of encroaching darkness. Like the broke down church, I, in my own brokenness, might give refuge, sanctuary to those around me. Thus I cannot watch a film like this outside of my own Christian faith.

A movie like “The Road” reminds me that there has already been a natural cataclysm, sending humanity on a downward spiral. And yet, God has not forsaken us. He enters into the cataclysm, the suffering, the darkness of human pain and sin. In Christ, the broken, sin-scarred, fatherless humanity has been taken up into God and redeemed. In that hope, I live and move. In that hope, I am called to join the action of my heavenly Father by extending grace and love and kindess in the midst of the messiness of human existence.

Spoiler: In the final moments of the film, the little boy has reached the Southeastern shore America and is walking down the coast. His father has died from the strugge of the journey. He is alone and trying to “keep the fire inside” alive. A man approaches him, and the boy holds up his pistol with one bullet. The man tells the boy, “I want to help you.”

A few moments later, the boy meets the man’s wife, children and pet dog. They welcome him into their family. The struggle to survive may not be over but the film ends with renewed hope as a new family ventures into a new world.

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Photo uploaded to Flickr by Snap Man

I am looking through my poetry books for poems of Incarnation (as I think about Advent’s soon appearance). Tonight I was reading through Mary Oliver’s poems, when I landed on this little treasure and wanted to share it with someone. Hope you enjoy.

In Praise of Craziness, of a Certain Kind

On cold evenings
my grandmother,
with ownership of half her mind–
the other half having flown back to Bohemia–

spread newspapers over the porch floor
so, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath,
as under a blanket, and keep warm,

and what shall I wish for, for myself,
but, being so struck by the lightning of years,
to be like her with what is left, that loving.

by Mary Oliver (from New and Selected Poems, Volume 2)

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Small Town Sunset by visualrhetor

Throughout my life I’ve had a series of dreams about other towns. Sometimes I travel through a forest and discover a football field. The crisp smells of fall leaves are in the air as are the sounds of the small town preparing for the “big game.” Sometimes I fly to another town and see buildings and neighborhoods and parks that stir me with longing. Other times I encounter a person or group of people that are unfamiliar, and yet when I meet them I feel bound to them. In fact, I awake longing for those lost friendships.

This series of dreams has one thing in common. Each time I awake with an ache for people and places that seem part of my life and yet are unfamiliar. This ache, this longing, this memory seems so real and sometimes it haunts my mind and heart for days. Today as I read the following poem by Rod Jellema, I heard in his words the echo of this longing. Jellema captures the essence of the longing for a land that is just out of reach, the place CS Lewis reminded us was “higher up and farther in.”

Travel Advisory

Remind yourself, when you wake to a strangeness
of foreign lights through blowing trees
out the window of yet another hotel,
that home is only where you pretend your from.
What’s familiar sends you packing,
watching for “some lost place called home.”
You’re from wherever you go.

Don’t admit what you’re looking for.
If you say to a baker in Bremen, to a barmaid
in Provence, “Back home we think of you here
as having deeper lives,” they’ll shrug you wrong
and won’t respond. And then you’ll know:
they’re strangers too. Broken and wrinkled
stones and skin, brush strokes and chords,
old streets and saints you’ve read about,
flute-notes in the laughter of foreign children,
the nip of the local market cheese–
there’s a life we almost knew once.
Watch. Just let it in.

The return ticket will take you only
to the town where you packed to get on the plane.
It never missed you. You’ll notice
alien goods in your kitchen, wind in a wall,
losses in the middle drawer of your desk.
Even there, the strange is the cup of communion
you drink; that dim outlandish civitas dei
you’re a citizen of never was a place.
Remember not to feel too much at home.

by Rod Jellema, A Slender Grace, 79

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Sunshine, sunshine
Sunshine, sunshine

Oh, oh
You know your name so punch it in
Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak
Shush now
Oh, oh
Then don’t move or say a thing

The opening moments of Unknown Caller by U2 brings to mind the closing moments of THX38 by George Lucas. In the closing moments of the film, the Robert Duvall characters is running through the outlaying section of the enclosed society where he has been born and bred.

He outruns robotic police and climbs of long stairway to emerge at the dawning of a new day. The first new day he has ever witnessed. This scene brings to mind Plato’s Cave as a person emerges from the Cave to behold real light for the first time.

Unknown Caller opens with a sunrise.

In the opening moments of the song the soft hum of an alarm clock drones against a a canvas of birds chirping, a simple yet layered melody, and eventually and a chorus singing, “Sunshine.”

A new day is dawning.

The vocals interplay between the lone voice of Bono singing verses about an awakening with the voices of a chorus (of angels?) calling through the interface of a computer to shout out, rise up, escape yourself (and escape the crashed program), reboot the computer, to shout for joy, and to enter your password and name. Again and again the chorus tells him (us) to hear me, cease to speak and don’t move and don’t say a thing.

In this “hymn for the future,” I hear rhythms of the ancient psalmist crying out through modern technology. Awake. Wait. Be quiet. Listen.

The still small voice of the “unknown caller” is speaking. I can’t help but think of the anonymous mystical work, “The Cloud of Unknowing.” Where the Spirit of God calls the pilgrim beyond the edge of knowing into the way of unknowing, the apophatic path of pure love, pure light, pure life.

In a world that is bombarded day in and day out with endless bits of data, the “Unknown Caller” could very well be calling us beyond the comfort of our shallow pools of endless knowledge an into the deep wells of unknowing.

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Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life

by Scott Cairns

We are but dim reflections of a love so true, a light so pure, a life so alive. Created in the image of God, we still carry the haunting beauty of his touch despite our falling and failing. Reading Scott Cairns’ new volume of poetry, “Love’s Immensity,” I am reminded of the hope of restored glory that shines from our “gleaming Liberator Jesus Christ.”

Drawing from the writings of early Church Fathers, desert monastics and Medieval mystics, Cairns weaves a wondrous cord of images and words that capture the beauty of our creation and restoration through God’s transforming presence. Translating always offers challenges for the reader and the writer. Are we reading the translator or the original writer? How does a translator capture ideas that are not translatable?

Cairns addresses some of this complexing challenge by addressing the challenge of translating “nous,” a word common in early church and Eastern Orthodox writings. This multi-layered idea is not easily translated. When we interpret “nous” as mind or heart, we tend to rob the word of nuanced implications by reducing the meaning to our deficient and disconnected understanding of mind and body.

So Cairns writes, “There is one word .. that I have decided for the most part not to translate at all, hoping that we might acquire a renewed sense of the word itself, and hoping that we might dodge the diminishments of its uniformly unsatisfactory translation.” Since “nous” and “noetic prayer” are fundamental ideas in many ancient writings, it worthwhile to try and penetrate some of what the New Testament and early church writers meant when they used this word.

Cairns attempts to open the richness of the word by explaining it as follows:

It is the center of the human person, where mind and and matter meet most profoundly, and where the human person is mystically united to others and God. I have written elsewhere that an “individual does not a person make.” Personhood–if the Image of God is relevant here–is revealed in relationship, and the nous is the faculty that enables and performs just such a relationship. (xiv)

That succinct explanation conveys the richness and the beauty of this word. It is a hint of the beauty that is to come as Cairns begins to unfold the prayers and teachings of our forebears. Again and again I am drawn to his phrasing that brings alive the beauty of these writers that has often been hidden in the dusty translations of scholarship. Capturing the provocative spirit of Athanasius, he uses words like “dim occasions,” “slow senses” and “beloved numbskulls” to address the slow and struggling people of God.

In spite of our blindness, God makes a way for us to see. So we hear Athanasius proclaim, “As we had turned from cosmos–the beauty above, light-laden–and sought Him in the muck among created things, the God in His great love took to Himself an earthen body.” God comes to meet in the midst of slow and dim senses. He comes to restore the true icons of God, “our faces.”

Reading Cairns’ new book is not a rush to the finish. Rather it is a stroll in the garden of heavenly delights. For in these short prayers and poems and sermons, we encounter presence: the presence of these great saints who went before us, the presence of Scott Cairns in his lovely words of translation and another Presence. This book could help some to slow down, listen, wait and behold God’s love.

I think this little treasure is a helpful prayer book that might give us words to express the longings of our heart. Words like this prayer from St. Basil, “Pierce our souls with love, so that–attending to You always, being lighted by You, and glimpsing You, O unapproachable, everlasting Light–we may offer confession and speak our joyful thanks to You.”

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Clint Eastwood, like John Wayne, embodied the American icon. From the mysterious cowboys to the gun-toting Dirty Harry, many of his characters embodied traits that Americans readily identify: loners, anti-establishment, rebels, smart, pragmatic and intentional or unintentional redeemers of the downcast. In his recent, Gran Torino, Eastwood plays yet another loner, Walt Kowalski.

At the beginning of the film, his wife just died and he obviously has no relation with his children. Mr. Kowalski, as he prefers to be called, relates better to his dog than to other humans. He lives in a neighborhood that has gradually become home to a predominant minority Hmong population. His unflinching expletives and racial comments seem funny because they are so over the top, much like a Don Rickles performance.

Early in the film Kowalski gets caught up in a conflict with a gang that is harassing his neighbor. And in strange twist of events, this supposed racist becomes a savior for the Hmong family. Up to this point, Eastwood is playing the icon exactly according to the American mythic narrative.

We as a nation would just as soon keep to ourselves. We get in wars only when forced. We don’t want to be a part of some big global cooperative. We’d prefer to go it alone. And yet, we dream that we are really the world’s savior. Whether our mythic values are truly lived or not, Americans consistently reflect variations in our icons.

But then something odd happens. Kowalski is changed by the Hmong family. A Hmong shaman speaks the same words of wisdom that Kowalski’s priest has been trying to teach him. On multiple levels the family enters his life and begins to soften his heart and teach him how to life. Since he knows a lot more about dying.

Spoiler alert: As Walt softens, he can finally enter into relationship with other people including his priest. He is becoming more human. As he begins to live, he offers something Dirty Harry was incapable of offering. He loves. In his love, he is willing to die for the relationship, so that the Hmong family can really be helped instead of a temporary fix through an act of violence and vengeance.

In one act of sacrifice, Walt becomes father to the Hmong boy, judge to the gang, healer to the Hmong family and possibly even a prophet to his own family. Eastwood connects with the American icon but then challenges us to enter into relationship and to learn that sacrifice may open doors that power and violence cannot.

As I dream of what America could be, I am going to keep thinking about Walt Kowalski and the power of modeling the cross, laying down my life on behalf of those I love. And if I follow the rhythm of the gospel, this means loving my enemies as well as my friends.

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After hours of digging, we finally quit. My sister and I were going to dig to China (or at least discover some buried treasure in the process). I guess we choose the wrong spot. Like most children, visions of treasure chests often danced in our eyes as we longed to find that one map that would lead us to “x marks the spot.”

I never found that map.

Over time, the passion of childhood dreams is buried beneath layers of pain and disappointment. Hope that is frustrated again and again goes underground. But it still bubbles, and once in a while we feel fleeting sensations of this childhood ache for Christmas magic, buried treasure and the world of fairies. Chesterton and Lewis realized that this we wouldn’t have this longing if it wasn’t for something real.

Here is a delightful verse from my favorite poet Bobi Jones (translated by Joseph Clancy). Hope you enjoy, and may it stir a little longing in your soul.

Labrador
By Bobi Jones

Cold ugly lady with beads
of icebergs around your sea
like stumps of teeth,

Uncivilized, empty, and fruitless apart
from the ore beneath your soil that is
a complex in the sub-conscious.

Out of sight your embryo, in
your wine cellars, the love child
deep beneath your desolation,

Is about to flourish like a fountain. Overhead
the sun is always moon
shining over the blossoms

Out of sight beneath the soil forever.
Singing was hid there,
colours are buried: here it is all

A waiting, all of it is about to come,
and the strain of holding the possibilities
inside, a discipline

We in Wales don’t know much about.

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While my wife delivers a late night training session, I sit here in the hospital lobby listening to Bob Dylan’s recent release Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol 8. After listening to most of the album, I get stuck on the song Series of Dreams.

I can’t move on but listen over and over and over. When songs like this impact me, I am always asking myself, “Why?” Not sure I can explain, but here are thoughts echoing through my head. The rhythm is relentless forcefully driving the melody forward. The lyrics and the melody are repetitive, interacting with the dramatic tension of the drums to arrest my attention–much like some of the surf songs in the mid-60s. With minor variations in the melody at the end, Dylan brings a limited resolve to the tension, but it is incomplete.

For me, this tension highlights the spoken/sung lyrics that paint a series of pictures about unresolved tension within dreams. In these dreams, “time and tempo fly” as the dreamer is left running, climbing, and witnessing troubled scenes.

“And there’s no exit in any direction, ‘cept the one you can’t see with you eyes.”

In the middle of the song, Dylan offers this one line of transcendent hope. And I am reminded that in the middle of this life of struggle and doubt and fear and pain, hope may be the one real thing penetrating the illusions that so often pervade my thoughts. Oddly enough, as I’ve been listening to this tune over and over, I’ve also been reading St. Paul’s discussion of Abraham’s hope beyond hope.

The future was hopeless. Yet Abraham persisted in trusting the promise of God’s goodness. In this hope that endures the dark nightmares of failure, the future shines out with the surprise of love.

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While I’m working on business KPIs and online marketing, I listen to the Grateful Dead belt out Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.”

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

I feel a bit foolish as tears fill my eyes and a deep ache fills my heart because something, someone “calls for me.”I don’t always understand what makes me cry so easily. One minute I in the midst of promotions and products and schedules, and the next moment, I’ve slipped over into a thin place.

This joyful pain seems out of place in the cold light of fluorescent rows, staring down on endless cubicles of people pounding out metrics on laptop machines. And yet, the voice still calls.

Beneath our engines of enterprise and above our monuments of marketing, the still small voice is wooing, drawing and stirring us to love. Maybe the match I strike does not burn up this material world around me. Maybe instead I leave the cold, relation-less sterility of business behind, and remember once again that I am a lover and called to love and embody love in the midst of every place–whether lush green valley or a cynderblock room of cubicles.

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