Awana and A-Two-a: How Narcissism Pervades Contemporary Culture & What to Do About It

Earlier today I had the chance to visit the home office of Awana, a program designed to introduce children to the Bible. I let some people know I was going, and they went gaga--people who have experienced Awana are crazy fans of it.

Awana ("Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed," drawing from 2 Timothy 2:15) is a Chicago original. The model for Awana's Bible-based youth outreach was developed in the early 1940s by Lance Latham and Art Rorheim for the North Side Gospel Center. Today the program is run in over twenty thousand churches spread throughout over a hundred countries. And they do it all out of their corporate offices in lovely suburban Streamwood, Illinois. I went to a Christmas party at their corporate office once; it's very nice.

I was there today to talk about issues related to my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville. How do we explain the apparent rise in narcissistic tendencies in contemporary culture? How do these trends relate to more fundamental spiritual conditions that we can identify? And if a culture of narcissism is in some ways an outcome of a spiritual state, how do we contend with it and help people (and ourselves) recover from it?

This was the stuff we talked about. The book is its own thing, but I thought folks might appreciate some supplemental material, so I made a handout available. I post it here for the convenience of folks who listened to the podcast, and for those of you who might be interested in such things.

• “In data from 37,000 college students, narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present.”

• “By 2006, 1 out of 4 college students agreed with the majority of the items on a standard measure of narcissistic traits.” (The Narcissism Epidemic, p. 2)
o Grandiosity and exaggerated self-importance
o Fantasies of, and obsession with, personal exceptionalism
o A deep sense of personal uniqueness and “special class”
o A desire to be admired and/or feared. (Michael Scott of the Office: “Would I rather be feared or be loved? Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”)
o A sense of entitlement
o Manipulative and exploitative
o Devoid of empathy
o Aggressively envious and paranoid
o Arrogant, magical thinking and behavior, and prone to rage when frustrated

• Two types of narcissism: the “cool” and the “vulnerable.” The vulnerable form can lead to, among other things, eating disorders and other self-destructive behaviors.

• Such behaviors also manifest in people who are victims of a narcissistic culture, with its impact on body image and perfectionism, and so on. (Note: I’m not a psychologist, and self-injury and other self-destructive behaviors require clinical assessment and care.)

• The authors of The Narcissism Epidemic identify “five key causes of the rising narcissism in American culture”: a focus on self-admiration; child-centered parenting; celebrity glorification; an exhibitionist Internet; and easy credit.

• Contemporary cultural narcissism is more tornado than virus; it’s a force with its own momentum in technology, educational models, national identity, etc. People suffer from cultural narcissism, but we also suffer through it.

Traveling Wilburys, Vol. Next

I've always felt conflicted about supergroups. They always look good on paper, and yet they never quite live up to the hype. I shouldn't say "never," since the occasional supergroup song is honestly super: I heard Asia's "Heat of the Moment" the other day and was instantly transported back to my childhood, when I was wholly prepared to become a rock drummer.

Asia wasn't just a rock group; it was a rock "super group," featuring a who's who of progressive rock: Steve Howe from Yes, John Wetton from King Crimson and blow-my-mind drummer Carl Palmer from Emerson, Lake and Palmer (in the video for "Heat of the Moment" he played this sweet fill and then THREW HIS STICK IN THE AIR AND CAUGHT IT!!!). I was all about Asia for the very brief period of time in which they were popular. Critics, apparently, weren't as blown away by Palmer's stick throwing, and the band sort of imploded. I moved on to devote myself temporarily to other supergroups like the Power Station (with Robert Palmer and members of Duran Duran), Hindu Love Gods (with Warren Zevon and members of R.E.M.), and Animal Logic, featuring Police drummer Stewart Copeland, jazz bass phenom Stanley Clarke and some piano teacher they hired to write songs and sing.

Asia is only one of many supergroups, as it happens, each of which has its moment and then doesn't. From the 60s-era Cream and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, to the glut of the last couple of years (Them Crooked Vultures, Tinted Windows, the Dead Weather, Atoms for Peace, the Damned Things and Broken Bells), supergroups keep seeming like a good idea to successful but restless musicians. Sometimes they crank out some great music; other times they fail to thrive. Time magazine once described these phenomena as amalgams "formed by the talented malcontents of other bands," which is probably the clearest insight into why they tend to be short-lived.

My favorite supergroup, bar none, was the Traveling Wilburys. It was a classic blunder in many respects (a Beatle! Bob Dylan! Roy Orbison!) and their accomplished admirers from a later era (Tom Petty! That guy from ELO who produced Tom Petty!). They took fake names and pretended they were brothers, and they made no attempt to blend their voices; how could they, with sweet-toned George Harrison and Roy Orbison standing right next to road-worn Dylan and nasally Petty? They took turns singing, with one member playing point, and never quite sounded anything more than George Harrison and a bunch of friends horsing around. But I like when friends horse around, and regardless of how funny they sounded, you're still listening to some of the best songwriters ever singing each other's songs. Everybody wins and no harm done.

Roy Orbison died before the release of the band's second single, and George Harrison died in 2001, and the band has effectively died as a result. But the idea of the band never quite died. Get some friends together, have a good time, record some undeniably catchy tracks, make your fans happy while enjoying yourself. Harmless fun that I'd like to see some more folks have. So I put the question to some friends on Facebook: Who should populate a revived Traveling Wilburys?

Three of the original members, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan, are still living. So we might give them honorary spots. But here's the very nostalgic and potentially entertaining list my friends came up with:

Kid Rock, hard-edged rocker and noted nostalgist.

Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac.

Mark Knopfler of the Dire Straits.

Elvis Costello, straight from heaven.

T-Bone Burnett, Grammy- and Oscar-winning producer.

Pete Townshend of the Who.

Robyn Hitchcock, of Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians.

And Sufjan Stevens, artiste extraordinaire.

A list this long looks less like a supergroup and more like a benefit concert. But I'm open for more suggestions. I just want to horse around and enjoy some good music; is that so wrong?

Adam and Ezer

I sometimes indulge in the relatively sick pleasure of "playing with Scripture." I picked up this habit from Peter Rollins, an Irish theologian who does it quite a bit better than I do in his books The Fidelity of Betrayal and The Orthodox Heretic (his other books are focused on other things). Anyway, even Peter Rollins is only one in a tradition of playing with Scripture that is perhaps best described by Robert Farrar Capon in his trilogy on the parables of Jesus, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment:

My commitment to Scripture as the inspired Word of God–as a sacred deck of cards, not one of which may be discarded and not one of whose spots may be altered or ignored–in no way inhibits me from playing with Scripture. . . . We were meant first of all to spend huge amounts of time in the attic just poring over it and trying all of it on for size. And were were meant, above all, to invite the world up into the attic to play dress-up with us. We are supposed to be kids, you see: ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them to babes.’ You can’t get more encouragement than that for holy horsing around.

This week I ran across some writing by British import and missions trainer Jo Saxton that inspired some further holy horsing around on my part. Jo was writing about the translation issues associated with the biblical story of the creation of Eve, the first woman. Here's a common translation of how the story begins.

The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Many people have suggested that the language of "helper suitable" has contributed to the long history of the subjugation of women. Women aren't treated as "equal partners" in a male-female relationship (personal or professional) but are praised for "helping" men. Women are not valuable in and of themselves but only insofar as their are "suitable" for some man. That sort of thing. They may be right; I'd be a horrible editor indeed if I didn't think the words we choose matter. In any case, this translation is problematic even without speculation about its political implications, because the Hebrew being translated evokes much more than "helpfulness." Here's Jo's take on the language behind the translation:

The word translated helper or helpmeet is EZER. We discover that it appears many times in the OT, but the vast majority of those times EZER describes God, as he is delivering and rescuing (helping) His people. It’s a word conveying power and strength, a word with military connotations. . . . Then the Knegedu “suitable” bit. The phrase means facing, corresponding to, like it. . . . The EZER is not wrapped up and consumed in someone else’s story. The Ezer stands in bold partnership separate and equal, eyeball to eyeball. EZER is also a verb meaning to protect, surround, defend, cherish.

So it appears that what God thought of the first woman and what history has made of her have little in common. We might say that God's impression of woman is from Mars, and history's impression of woman is from Venus. (We might say that, but we would be incredibly cheesy if we did.)

So why the big mixup? It might be because God didn't name the woman; Adam did, because while making stuff was God's job, naming stuff was Adam's.

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

But for the man no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took part of the man's side and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”

We learn later that Adam further names the woman "Eve," which probably meant "living," "because she would become the mother of all the living" (Genesis 3:20).

It strikes me that Adam may have gotten Eve's name wrong; if God had named her, God might have called her "Ezer." Adam picked a name based on how, not why, the woman was made. If he had given the matter a bit more thought, the story--and maybe even all of history--might be just a little different.

***

The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a powerful person like him to rescue him from alone-ness.”

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

But none of the birds and the wild animals proved capable of rescuing the man from alone-ness. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took part of the man's side and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a person from the part he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘Ezer,’
for by her I shall never be alone.”
***
The passage goes on to extrapolate forward and explain how this story makes sense of current cultural realities. "That is why," the Bible tells us, "a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh." Such a notion has fallen on hard times in the recent past; U2's song "Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World" aims at empowering women, but they manage to throw men under the bus as they do so. "A woman needs a man," Bono sings, "like a fish needs a bicycle." This lyric was an homage to Irina Dunn, an Australian educator credited with the line.

I was paraphrasing from a phrase I read in a philosophical text I was reading for my Honours year in English Literature and Language in 1970. It was 'A man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle'. My inspiration arose from being involved in the renascent women's movement at the time, and from being a bit if [sic] a smart-arse.

Often Eve gets blamed for humanity's fall into sin; after all, the serpent wooed her, and she strong-armed Adam into eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But that again is a relatively careless reading of the Scriptures, and in any case I think the impulse behind the fall from grace was a particularly human one, not a specifically feminine one. Women don't need men; men don't need God--these are assertions of arrogance. In the earliest pages of the Bible, the only person who seems capable of recognizing real need, and of addressing it in real ways, is God:

"It is not good for the man to be alone." . . . So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. . . . God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

Something Akin to Charlie Sheen

Next week I'm giving a talk/interview at Awana next week. An old friend asked me to come and discuss my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, and its implications for the work Awana does (put simply, child spiritual formation). I don't know much about raising kids, not having any myself, so it'll be a bit of an uphill climb. I can use all the help I can get. So lately I've been reading The Narcissism Epidemic, by Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell.

Twenge's earlier book Generation Me was pretty important to me as I wrote Me-Ville; while she generally avoids issues pertaining to spirituality and faith, she has made sounding the alarm about narcissism (from the cultural to the clinical) her life's work. Generation Me was a bit snarky and self-indulgent, as cultural critique goes, but Campbell evens her out a bit in the followup--and besides, when it comes to dealing with narcissists, a little snark can be a good thing.

Today I read about the Proteus Effect, a phenomenon labeled by social psychologists studying people's behavioral changes in a virtual environment. The term alludes to Proteus, son of the Greek sea god Poseidon, who was a reluctant clairvoyant and shape-shifted to avoid telling people the truth about their futures. Researchers noted the malleability of personalities in a virtual environment, not to mention their association of personality traits with certain body types: people operating attractive avatars talked more about themselves and walked closer to other avatars; short avatars lost out in negotiations with tall avatars--because the operators of the tall avatars were more assertive and competitive.

This, according to Twenge and Campbell, extrapolates out into how our use of virtual social media affects our behavior and even blows back onto our personality. This is reflective of philosopher Marshall McLuhan's assertion that "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." Twenge and Campbell argue that the "brand management" taking place on MySpace (the book's a few years old now) and other social media, and the aspirations put before us there (high friend counts, high comment counts, etc.), are making us something akin to Charlie Sheen.

They don't mention Sheen, of course; at the time of their writing he was still a few years from his most recent freak fest. But we might, if we accept Twenge and Campbell's assumption that as a culture (and thanks to our latest technologies) we're becoming chronically narcissistic, think of Sheen as the chip off our block, the termination point of our flow chart, the nut that has fallen from our tree. We might consider that Sheen, like Proteus, has the capacity to tell us our future, to tell us the truth.

Sheen made the fastest recorded climb to one million followers in the history of Twitter, so he's got the friend count thing mastered. He's been a fixture of all trending topics (perhaps briefly sidelined by the death of Osama Bin Laden) for most of 2011, so in terms of comment counts he's a raging success. Where things get tricky is when we consider Sheen as a case study in the Proteus effect, because Sheen is something of a hybrid. He has seemed to fully embrace the persona he played (till his very public parting of the ways) on Two and a Half Men, and yet his character was (supposedly) modeled after Sheen's personal life. So in a sense there is neither chicken nor egg here: Charlie Sheen is his avatar, and his avatar is him.

Of course, Charlie Sheen (as well as his character on the show), by taking center stage so forcefully, and by wooing us into following his rants and antics--indeed, simply by becoming a celebrity, a TV star--has become our avatar as well. What does that portend for us? A personality too big to fail loudly asserting that he is "winning" even as he appears to be failing. An adrenaline junkie eschewing propriety and self-care and significant relationships. A hedonist drowning in his own self-indulgence, singing as he goes. And the whole world sings with him.

Charlie Sheen may feel, at the moment, like last month's news. But give it a month; I suspect he'll be back. Also give it some thought, because when we imagine something akin to Charlie Sheen, when we allow him (or something like him) to become our avatar--when we shape him as a tool for our amusement--he subtly but unrelentingly goes on to shape us.

Death Comes to All

When I was a kid (I don't recall what year) my class was visited by a retired CIA agent. I think he had written a book or something. He was regaling us with stories of failed assassination attempts against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Maybe I was a lazy student, but I still know precious little about Castro and all his crimes against America; from what I can tell, our beef with him is that (a) he aligned himself with the Soviet Union and (b) he oversees a country uncomfortably close to our national border. In any case, it stimulated my nascent imagination to hear such tales of international intrigue; I remember him telling us that the CIA, knowing of Castro's fondness for conch shells, packed a particularly irresistible shell full of explosives and planted it near where Castro liked to go swimming. No dice: forty-some years later Castro is still swimming.

Failed assassination attempts aside, I find it a little disconcerting that twice in the past decade the United States has made headlines, called press conferences, interrupted broadcasts to celebrate bringing two world leaders to justice.

* Saddam Hussein, fished out of a spider hole in Iraq by American troops and later publicly executed by his own people.

* Osama Bin Laden, descended upon and shot dead in a mansion outside Islamabad, supposedly (it's still early, and details are still sketchy) buried at sea by the U.S. government.

Both were legitimately considered enemies of the state: Hussein, among other things, had attempted to assassinate former president George H. W. Bush; Bin Laden had sponsored the attacks on September 11, 2001, among many other campaigns against the United States. The death of each was a strong message to the world: Don't mess with US.

These executions, however, seem to be aberrations of history. Like Castro, any attempts on the lives of other enemies of state were kept under wraps, and most of the most notorious lived long and prospered despite our declared enmity. Consider some other public enemies, number one:

* The Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of Iran who approved a 400+ day hostage crisis against the American embassy, died a decade later of natural causes.

* Ho Chi Minh, leader of North Vietnam during its war with the United States, died of heart failure.

* Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union and sworn enemy of the United States, died of a cerebral hemorrhage (although it's sometimes claimed that a member of his inner circle poisoned him).

* Adolph Hitler, genocidal maniac who led the whole world into war, died by suicide in the face of advancing Russian armies.

* Emperor Hirohito, who authorized the second-most devastating attack on U.S. soil (Pearl Harbor), died decades later of pancreatic cancer.

* Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, which threatened to destroy the integrity of the United States and launched still the bloodiest war in American history, died of natural causes nearly twenty-five years after his capture by Northern troops.

I'm no fan of Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or anyone who declares jihad or war or any other state of violence against my country. I also don't pretend to know the inner workings of our government, particularly its military or foreign policy protocols. I believe in justice and long for a day when justice will be embraced worldwide. But it's worth noting, at least briefly, that Bin Laden and Hussein are exceptions to the rule in the long history of American world relations. By and large, regarding its international enemies, the U.S. government has let nature take its course.

In the meantime, the death of anyone at the hands of anyone else gives me pause. So while today the United States, indeed the world, celebrates the conclusion of the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden, may we also shudder at the power that we hold, and at the vulnerability we still face. And may we be utterly circumspect about both.

Your Walls Are Ever Before Me: An Easter Reflection

In my last post, most excellent theophilae, I recalled the destruction of Jerusalem, lamented by the prophet Jeremiah. That was a sad day for the people of God - one of far too many, in my opinion. We might just as easily recall the theft of the tabernacle by the Philistines, the civil war led by the son of King David, the enslavement in Egypt, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The story of God's people is brimming with stories of very sad days. Each of them demands its own search for meaning, but on reflection we find that they each have in common not God betraying the people, but the people betraying God.

They also each have in common an eventual - sometimes imperceptibly gradual, sometimes almost overnight, but always, in retrospect, inevitable - redemption of the moment. Oh, the pain is not forgotten; it's part of the legacy of God's people now, part of the long story being told. But the pain is transformed into joy, the mourning turned into dancing. The tabernacle was returned to God's people, but not before the Philistines learned that God alone is sovereign over all the earth. David's kingdom was restored, and a much humbler king completed his reign and turned over the throne to his much wiser son. The Egyptians were eventually pressed to release God's people, who then marched gradually into a land promised to them long ago. And, read to the end, the Bible tells us that the Garden we left will become a city, where we will live and reign with the one God forever and ever.

And so it is with the destruction of Jerusalem, and so it is with the execution of the Christ.

First, the latter. An impotent governor, trying to maintain control of a tyrannized people by controlling who lives and who dies, is brought a man of peace who nevertheless has offended the religious sensibilities of the people of God - by confronting their excesses and departures from their sacred texts, by describing God (and himself) in uncomfortably powerful, uncomfortably loving ways. This is not behavior becoming of an itinerant (read: homeless) teacher (read: upstart). Nor is it becoming, in the eyes of the tyrants, of a man of the tyrannized people. The impotent governor, at the request of the people of God, delivers the uncomfortably powerful man of the people to his death, where he reportedly says, "Forgive them, for they do not know what they do."

"Who can forgive sins but God alone?" some might have wondered when they heard him.

Three days later the uncomfortably powerful man cannot be found in his grave. Rather he is showing up among those who love him, declaring the defeat of death. The old things are passing away, everything is being made new. Three days after the execution of God comes a very good day.

Now to the former - the destruction of Jerusalem. Jeremiah's lamentation ends similarly to how it begins, with devastation and despair. From chapter one:

How deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces
has now become a slave.

Bitterly she weeps at night,
tears are on her cheeks.

And from chapter five:

You, LORD, reign forever;
your throne endures from generation to generation.
Why do you always forget us?
Why do you forsake us so long?
Restore us to yourself, LORD, that we may return;
renew our days as of old
unless you have utterly rejected us
and are angry with us beyond measure.

Jeremiah is right to ask, but his memory is wrong. The long story of the Bible is not a story of God forgetting or forsaking; it's a story of God remembering and restoring. If God can bring good from the execution of God, if God can still care for the people of God even after such a bitter betrayal, even after such a revolting, tyrannical act, if God can make all things new in the wake of such a cosmic cataclysm - then can any hardship really be considered the end of the story?

The prophet Isaiah gives voice to God, answering Jeremiah's lament directly:

But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me,
the Lord has forgotten me.”

“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are ever before me.

This is our God, who brought each of us out of Egypt. This is our God, who is rebuilding paradise for our eventual return. This is our God, who forgave us from the seat of his own execution. It is this God toward whom we direct our laments, and it is this God who we trust to make good of them.

This Is Why I Weep

Churches come and go, I guess. Along my commute to work there used to be what looked like a stuffy old conventional fundamentalist church. It had, apparently, bought land at just the right moment, and the town grew up around it. That stuffy old conventional fundamentalist church has since been replaced by a hip new marketing-savvy church looking to make a a big splash in our community. They hang banners in four colors, displaying a test-marketed church name and a web address. The building is no longer stuffy and old; it's suddenly retro and chic.

I miss the stuffy old conventional fundamentalist church, not because I'm a stuffy old conventional fundamentalist but because, during Lent, they always caught my attention and framed my thinking during my commute in a way that a four-color banner displaying a web address and a test-marketed church name simply can't. There, planted in the vast expanse between the road and the church building, were three crosses and a stark, black and white banner: "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?"

That phrase may evoke for some memories of driving through the rural south, where local zealots had erected makeshift billboards confronting sinners and promising God's judgment. The intent of the display was obviously to evoke for many the cost of Jesus' crucifixion, to recreate the drama of the moment. But for me it evokes something different: the destruction of the city of God.

I'm reminded of the destruction of God's city because, the three crosses notwithstanding, that's what the quotation represents. It's pulled from the first chapter of the book of Lamentations, written by the prophet Jeremiah. There he mourns the destruction of Jerusalem, the City of David, the city on a hill:

Bitterly she weeps at night,
tears are on her cheeks.
Among all her lovers
there is no one to comfort her.
All her friends have betrayed her;
they have become her enemies. . . .

The roads to Zion mourn,
for no one comes to her appointed festivals.
All her gateways are desolate,
her priests groan,
her young women grieve,
and she is in bitter anguish.

Her foes have become her masters;
her enemies are at ease.
The LORD has brought her grief
because of her many sins.
Her children have gone into exile,
captive before the foe. . . .

In the days of her affliction and wandering
Jerusalem remembers all the treasures
that were hers in days of old.
When her people fell into enemy hands,
there was no one to help her.
Her enemies looked at her
and laughed at her destruction.

The kingdom of God, in the minds of the people of God, had dropped anchor in Jerusalem. Zion had become the center of the Promised Land, the resting place at the far end of a liberated people's exodus. King David had consecrated the city; King Solomon had built God's temple there. God, in the minds of God's people, had settled down in Jerusalem--until the people's enemies had moved in and leveled the place.

Why? Why would God allow such a thing to happen to his people--to himself? Jeremiah's prophecy continues:

Jerusalem has sinned greatly
and so has become unclean.
All who honored her despise her,
for they have all seen her naked;
she herself groans
and turns away. . . .

All her people groan
as they search for bread;
they barter their treasures for food
to keep themselves alive.
“Look, LORD, and consider,
for I am despised.”

Jeremiah doesn't deny the culpability of God's people. They are not guiltless; there's blood on their hands and the callousness that attends to any imperial ambitions. But just deserts aside, there's no delight to be taken in such suffering. Only the wicked could look on in glee; only the heartless could walk by without a thought.

“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look around and see.
Is any suffering like my suffering
that was inflicted on me,
that the LORD brought on me
in the day of his fierce anger? . . .

“My sins have been bound into a yoke;
by his hands they were woven together.
They have been hung on my neck,
and the Lord has sapped my strength.
He has given me into the hands
of those I cannot withstand. . . .

“This is why I weep
and my eyes overflow with tears.
No one is near to comfort me,
no one to restore my spirit.
My children are destitute
because the enemy has prevailed.”

It's been said that in stepping into the River Jordan and then going to the desert and then challenging the Temple system, Jesus was retelling the story of Israel the people of God, reminding his people (and all who would come after them) that the grand narrative of history is a matter of people breaking faith with God and God going to great lengths to redeem the relationship. Jesus was baptised, and set on the course that he took from there, "to fulfill all righteousness." Our history with God is complicated; it is we who complicate it, and it is God who resolves it.

As such, the destruction of Jerusalem seems an apt analogy for the execution of Jesus. The death of God at the hands of God's creation is a moment that only the heartless can ignore, only the wicked can delight in, and only God can redeem. However casually we pass by, it is not nothing that this Good Friday signifies to us; as a matter of fact, it is everything.

Love During Wartime

I'm nearly finished with Higher Than Hope, an official biography of Nelson Mandela published toward the end of his imprisonment at the hands of the South African government. Most of the biography has been political history, detailing the Mandelas' struggle and the broader fight to overturn apartheid,but now that I'm approaching the end the book has shifted to annotated excerpts of correspondence, with an understandably nostalgic and sentimental bent to it. "The world is truly round," Nelson writes to his wife Winnie on July 1, 1979, "and seems to start and end with those we love."

I know little of Winnie Mandela, beyond the international news reports from the late 1980s that had her participating in acts of horrendous violence. She seemed to tarnish Nelson's legacy, in my mind and I daresay in the minds of many others. And yet, having read this book, I find myself cutting winnie some slack.

Winnie has suffered from a bit of a Yoko Ono syndrome, at least in my head. Even the story of how she and Nelson met, and his subsequent and matter-of-fact divorce of his first wife to make way for Winnie, remind me of Yoko's abrupt disruption of John Lennon's homelife and musical career, and so I find it hard to be sympathetic toward her.

Over time I've acknowledged to myself, however, that Yoko the human being and artist is not Yoko the Destroyer of the Beatles that we've made her out to be. I've developed some sympathy for Yoko over time, actually; sometimes I even entertain the notion of buying and listening to some of her solo work.

If I can muster up some good feeling for Yoko, who's a weirdo musician who had breakfast in bed on behalf of world peace, I trust that before it's all over I'll be able to do the same for Winnie, who suffered for decades in her struggle for human dignity.

I got a little burst of such sympathy when I read the following note from Nelson to Winnie, intended to be complimentary and romantic but surely not received as such. "You look wonderful to me," Nelson wrote at the end of a letter about Winnie's health, "even when you appear like one whose lungs have been eaten away by a pack of impundulu."

If he had tried that line on her the first time they met, the world would be a much different place.

Dangerbooks! Higher Than Hope

I'm reading the authorized biography of Nelson Mandela, written while Mandela was still imprisoned in South Africa: Higher Than Hope by Fatima Meer. At this point I'm reading transcripts from Mandela's statement during the trial that would send him to prison for decades.

Mandela was being accused of being a communist, of fomenting violence, of all sorts of crimes. He wasn't a communist, but he admitted his involvement in acts of sabotage against the Afrikaner government. I suspect that his statement, made in 1963, informed later discussions in the United States about the extent to which acts of violence might be appropriate to the civil rights movement. Mandela was a lawyer and political philosopher, and his thought processes are on display as he argues his rationale for supporting sabotage. But also on display is his larger commitment to democracy, to racial reconciliation, to social justice. Check this out:

During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for, and to see realized. But . . . if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Thirty years later, he was released from prison. Forty years later, he had seen his ideal realized. A postracial South Africa had emerged under his leadership with shocking humaneness. This guy is one of the greats.

This isn't the greatest biography I've ever read. Still in prison while it was being written, Mandela couldn't speak freely, and it verges occasionally on hagiography rather than objective reporting of history. But really, how could you not venture into saint-making when you're writing about a living martyr, a prophet of the age? I'm doing it right now, aren't I?

My Counterfactual Romance

My wife and I celebrated twenty years as a couple this past weekend, so we thought we'd revisit our old haunts. It was fun to see the places that had been so significant to our early relationship, to stay at the hotel that twenty years ago I had considered a benchmark for future success. Funny how the young adult mind works.

Sometimes I wonder if we would have met if our circumstances had been different; if Kara had gone to college in Des Moines, where I grew up and which she considered. Or if our mutual friend Chris hadn't made a point of connecting us to one another. Such alternate realities are nothing more than thought experiments, but they're also the stuff of such an unlikely couple as science fiction and romance--films like The Adjustment Bureau or Sliding Doors, where the ending is always happy because, despite the whims of circumstance, the destiny of one person is always revealed to be mingled with that of another. I got to thinking that if Kara and I had both been born twenty years later, we probably would still have wound up together, but the story would be completely different.

So, in the spirit of love, and science fiction, and blog maintenance, I hereby present my counterfactual romance.

***

Kara was getting excited as the start of her first year of college quickly approached. She had applied all over and finally settled on Illinois Wesleyan University; they had a killer library and a good sociology program, not to mention a variety of choirs she could sing in. She went to church that morning and bumped into her friend Chris, who after two years at her chosen school had decided to complete his degree online so he could work full time at the church. "Any tips for me?" she asked him.

Chris pulled out his smart phone and opened the Facebook app. "You'll want to connect with these five people," he told her, calling each up in turn and suggesting Kara as a friend to each of them. Then he called up the Bump app and passed along their contact information to Kara so she'd be able to contact them directly. Kara was excited; it'd be good to begin college with some friends in place. She sent them each an e-mail introducing herself and looked forward to the year to come.

***

Dave noticed that Chris had made friend suggestion to his Facebook account and called up Kara's profile to check her out. She was cute. Liked "music, people." Seemed to like the Beatles an awful lot. He made a mental note to connect with her once they were both on campus again.

***

The school year began at its usual brisk and hectic pace. Kara got an Eventbrite e-mail inviting her to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and quickly got involved with that group. Not really a joiner, Dave had never gotten into InterVarsity, favoring more activist-oriented social clubs like Amnesty International (which he quit shortly after learning he'd have to write a lot of e-mails) and Habitat for Humanity. He and his friends, however, had formed their own little Bible study and prayer group, and eventually they got their meetings on the calendar at the IWU website and sent an invitation to Kara. They met for the first time on the stairs leading to the small chapel above the information desk; that would become a regular meeting place for the whole group, and Dave and Kara in particular.

***

Dave and Kara's friendship grew over time, and they had many late night IM sessions in which they'd chat for hours about all kinds of stuff. But Dave had this weird thing about not dating friends, which never really made sense, come to think of it. Then Spring Break came. Dave went to New Orleans with Habitat. He came to look forward to the daily, lengthy e-mail from Kara while he was away, and as he walked along Bourbon Street in the evenings he found himself thinking about her over and over again. She was his friend, but he thought he'd like her to be something more.

He texted Chris and told him what he was thinking. Chris texted back that he had wondered all those months ago, when he was connecting Kara to his IWU friends, whether Dave and Kara would ever get together. Chris was one of those Holy Spirit guys, so when he said stuff like that, you kind of payed attention. So Dave started to work up the courage to ask Kara out.

***

It took a while. But eventually Dave got it together and called Kara's room. Her roommate, Reena, answered and told Dave that she was out, would be back later. Dave tried to hide the disappointment in his voice; asking girls out had always made Dave exceedingly nervous, and he wasn't sure he'd be able to go through with it later. But he asked Reena to have Kara call his cell when she had a chance.

Reena texted Kara, but Kara thought it was an April Fools joke. So she waited till she was back in the room before calling Dave. He picked up on first ring; it took a bit of hemming and hawwing, but eventually he managed to invite her to a movie after his concert that Friday night. She said yes. He hung up and added it to his iCalendar. And then he changed his Facebook status to "In a relationship." And the rest is history.

***

OK, so new technology doesn't change the story as much as I thought. But this is sort of how I imagine kids today getting together--the same amount of social clumsiness and testing emotional connections, spread out over a number of alternate technologies. Back in the day I had one phone number and a wall phone with a cord. Today I could reach out and touch Kara any time, any place. I'd still do so awkwardly and anxiously, though, and we'd still have to do the hard work of connecting. It'd still be worth it too, for the record.

Every Little Soul Must Shine

Last month at my other blog (which I share with three people) was "March Music Madness": we took turns blogging about songs and artists who get in our heads and linger. Turns out I really like to write about such things; I wrote eight of the ten entries. It wound up being mostly a nostalgia trip for me; I mined the backlist for songs and albums, and reflected on the first time I heard the song or artist. I have a lot of sense memories attached to music, I guess.

Today's yet another nostalgia trip for me, as my wife and I travel back to the college town where we first met and I first asked her out (twenty years ago today). When I first asked Kara out I was really into Sinead O'Connor and They Might Be Giants and Shawn Colvin and Sam Phillips. I was also still a jazz musician then and playing a fair bit of (at the time) contemporary and classic jazz with my combo, Active Ingredient. Kara and I bonded over the Indigo Girls and Kim Hill, and she got me into the Beatles, but we parted musically over artists like Trip Shakespeare (mine) and Bon Jovi (hers). We made mix tapes for each other and all the other sappy lovey-dovey stuff that college students do. It was fun.

We're driving back to our old school today to see how much has changed since the day I called Kara and left a message with her roommate, since Kara worried that her roommate was pulling an April Fools Day joke on her by telling her I'd called, since I finally pushed through my insecurities to ask Kara on a date. It's easier to track the passage of time by looking at places than by looking at ourselves, I think: for all my age spots and weight gain and wrinkles and other markers of the aging process, I still think of myself the way I thought of myself back then--young, alive, full of promise, scared out of my mind about all that lay before me. Twenty years later I still think like a twenty-year-old sometimes, but I think if back then I could look forward twenty years--if I had as much foresight then as I have hindsight now--I would have been able to relax a bit. Life's been good, and I've had a good time with it. I'm reminded of a song that often comes to mind for me on the first of any month: I know "Mr. Rabbit" as a song by Paul Westerburg (of the Replacements), although apparently Burl Ives (the snowman in the claymation "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer") recorded it first. Like Mr. Rabbit, my coat today is might gray, but I can bless God in spite of it, even because of it.

mr rabbit, mr rabbit
your coat is mighty grey
yes, bless god it's made that way
every little soul must shine