This Cross Kills Elitists

In the Year of Our Lord CCCXII, Roman Emperor Constantine beheld a vision in the sky of a cross, made of a spear, bearing the message "By This, Conquer." Shortly thereafter the destinies of the Roman Empire and the Christian Church were married, and they begat and begat and begat, and have been begetting ever since.

Brian McLaren in his new book Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha and Mohammed Cross the Road? briefly entertains an alternative history: What if Constantine had seen, for example, a bowl and towel--reminiscent of Jesus' foot-washing episode on the night he was betrayed--and the message "By This, Serve"? Or if Constantine had seen a table with bread and wine--alluding to the elements of Christian communion--and the message "Around This, Reconcile"? What if Constantine had seen something other than a symbol of war, mashed up with a symbol of deliverance?

Frankly, I think McLaren is being a bit silly. "Conquer" is language an emperor can work with; by contrast, "serve" and "reconcile" are meaningless, even alien terms. The whole vision would have been incomprehensible, easily dismissed. Maybe "By this [communion table] or this [bowl and towel] conquer" would have worked, but I think a more cautionary vision would be more interesting: "By this [cross] shall you be conquered," perhaps--or, the image that's lately captured my fancy: "This cross kills elitists."

The great American protest musician Woody Guthrie decorated his guitars with the phrase "This machine kills fascists"--supposedly an allusion to fighter pilots in the Spanish Civil War--as an implicit message to the powers-that-be that their days were numbered. It was ironic, of course: a guitar can't kill anyone. Oh, I suppose it could if you tried hard enough: if you took the strings off and choked someone with them, maybe, or if you broke the car into shards and splintered someone to death. Highly unlikely though. A guitar, in the hands of most everyone, doesn't kill. The music, though . . . the music could, conceivably, topple empires.

In another era, a different symbol would offer a similar message. Who, after all, is more elitist than an emperor, inheritor of a life station equated by the people with gods? Such a person may be a fascist, but only because why wouldn't he (or she) be? If you had the authority and the funding to make everyone fall in line behind you and do your bidding, wouldn't you? And so fascism, I think, is a byproduct of a more insidious spiritual problem: elitism. And who is more elitist than the most powerful person in the world?

I am, I suppose. We live in an era of democratized elitism. We all (in the West at least) have experienced the privilege of bending reality to our will; we can have whatever we want whenever we want, on demand. We apply our experience of consumer sovereignty to our politics and culture, so that those who don't bend to our will are enemies to be vanquished. We're practical fascists, but we're everyday elitists.

This cross, though: it kills elitists. The ground is level before it; on the far side of it we are all brothers and sisters with one father--all parts of the same body with one head. Our claims to cosmic sovereignty are crucified on it; our wants are purified through it; our lives are transformed by it. As much as we might desire and even presume ourselves to be kings and queens of the world, by the cross all our elitist aspirations are conquered.

The world would look very different had Constantine seen the vision "This Cross Kills Elitists." Only two options would have remained for him: forswear his elitism, lay down his crown and transform the way the world understands power and leadership; or wipe Christianity off the map--in the same way Herod tried to wipe Christianity off the map in the Year of Our Lord I, when Jesus was born, fulfilling prophecies and announcing a different kind of kingdom. That didn't work out so well for Herod, and I daresay it wouldn't have worked out so well for Constantine. He's lucky he saw something else, frankly.

You can't change the past, I guess. But I think this cross still kills elitists--all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding--and that means each of us is faced, daily, with Constantine's choice: side with the elitists, or side with the cross.

The good news is, though this cross kills elitists, by this cross every elitist might become a new creation--a different kind of person, fit for a different kind of kingdom.

A Gentle Force: Brian McLaren's Case for the Book

I've just started reading Brian McLaren's new book Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road, graciously sent me by his editor/publisher, Wendy Grisham. It's good so far--big shocker, as McLaren is a very good writer and has a real command of how a book flows and moves. I was converted almost immediately from my initial skepticism about what I thought was a pretty weird title to enthusiasm for it--simply by how McLaren riffed on and ultimately subverted the contemporary suspicion that religion is a joke. I love that sort of thing.

McLaren is making the case for a strong, benevolent approach to faith: adherents who wholeheartedly embrace their distinct religious identity while giving honor and kindness to adherents of other faiths, even wishing them well and working toward their well-being. Scandalous, I know. Jesus said it in five words: "Love your neighbor as yourself"; for even as effective a writer as McLaren, such a thesis takes 273 pages (plus two pages of acknowledgments).

Now, some of that length is simply wordiness; forty-five pages in and I find myself thinking Yeah, yeah, you've already made that point. But what a caffeinated and impatient reader like me takes as redundancy is, in McLaren's mind (I suspect) a careful ellipticism, leading the reader slowly and carefully along a spiraled path, with plenty of secure touchpoints along the way, toward a confident embrace of his thesis: that we really should love our neighbor as ourselves. Such is the nature of persuasion in an age of tribalized conflict: any provocative premise must be handled slowly, with great care.

Today I read the following little bit, which is encouraging to me as a book publishing professional (though my colleagues may beg to differ): in McLaren's view, books are particularly useful tools in forming, informing and reforming people's core convictions and fundamental self-understanding. In a world of blaring headlines, in a world where everyone can point to the teeth-marks of at least one sound bite, a book can be as gentle as it is forceful, as careful as it is controversial.

Identity formation--and reformation--takes time and can't be forced or pushed. It involves many dangers, toils, and snares--threats and setbacks, wrong turns and recoveries. Even under the best of conditions, there are limits to the speed by which a religious identity can come of age and face the challenges before it. Perhaps that's why a book like this can be important: it can provide privacy, time, and space for people to consider the unsettling and dangerous proposal of an identity change. . . . [A] book makes no demands. It remains easy to put down and easy to ignore. That very gentleness can be its greatest power. It is hard to defend against something that is not aggressive.

Nice, huh? I may share it with some authors or should-be authors I know. Lest we overemphasize the unique value of a book, however, let me also draw your attention to the potential power of a tweet, as demonstrated in the same passage:

It is hard to defend against something that is not aggressive.

Cry Like an Angel: My Review of Diamond in the Rough by Shawn Colvin

Diamond in the Rough: A Memoir by Shawn Colvin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remember where I was when I first encountered Shawn Colvin. I was in a Best Buy in Bloomington, Illinois, in the spring of my freshman year. Her album Steady On was sitting on an end-cap display in the new music section; it looked good, and I was feeling consumeristic, so I bought it. I probably, quite frankly, put it on my Discover Card, as I was wont to do back then, which means I'm probably still paying for it. That being said, it was worth the money.

Shawn Colvin's music has shown up at a lot of significant moments in my life. Her cover of "Every Little Thing He Does Is Magic" was playing while my wife and I enjoyed a poolside meal at a resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, during our honeymoon. I sat with my sister on the floor of the student center at Northwestern University while Colvin moved effortlessly from her song "Polaroids" into the chorus of "Just My Imagination" by the Temptations. I bought her album Whole New You in a Borders Bookstore that no longer exists. And on September 11, 2001, I sought solace in her song "Cry Like an Angel" as I tried to make sense of the violent deaths of more than three thousand people.

All the feelings associated with those moments came back when I learned that she had written a memoir, Diamond in the Rough. I gobbled it up and enjoyed every nibble, although I'm not sure I would have been as enthralled had I not already been a fan. Diamond in the Rough isn't so much a memoir, in the sense of a book that mines an event or setting or relationship for some universal meaning, as it is an autobiography. It's a book for fans, first and foremost. I don't mean that disrespectfully, but I do think if someone saw my four-star rating for a memoir and bought it without prior connection to Colvin, they'd be disappointed with their reading experience.

That being said, it was, for me, a great reading experience. Colvin is a singer-songwriter, and such people are uniquely gifted storytellers, if not always the most articulate interpreters of stories. Songwriters tell stories in song, and so the meaning is usually intentionally obscured. Not so in a book, though: Colvin tells her life story compellingly, taking us through several distinct chapters--a childhood occasionally disrupted by family relocation; a young life on the road as a traveling musician; a more settled but arguably less stable life as a New York musician; an award-winning recording career; a post-major-label singer-songwriter's schedule--all with a through line that involves addiction, depression, anxiety and turbulent romantic relationships. No great surprises or big new insights here; we sadly have come to expect substance abuse, emotional hardship and complicated relationships of our celebrated artists. They're sad stories in many cases, but they're told here with the perspective of time passed and life recovered. Like a good storyteller Colvin can find the grace and humor in each chapter.

I think one of the best reason for reading books by musicians and other artists (such as Steve Martin and Joe Jackson, for example) is the window such books provide into the artistic mind and the creative process. Colvin's songs are in the foreground of her later chapters--once she's committed herself to songwriting and recording. I learned a lot about the songs on Steady On that has since enriched my listening; I learned about her later albums as well, having my suspicions confirmed, for example, by her comments about the first line of "Polaroids": "Please no more therapy . . ."

It's not just her music, of course; Colvin was part of what might be considered a folk renaissance in the late 1980s bleeding into the 1990s. Her experience writing with Jon Levanthal, touring with Buddy Miller, even just hanging out with Joni Mitchell offer insight into where artists find inspiration and how such inspiration is translated into something that can be received and embraced by an audience.

It should by now be obvious that I struggle in vain to have objectivity about Shawn Colvin. More objective readers might write a more robust critique of her book. More power to them; me, I'll remember it fondly as a story that touches ever so faintly my own story. "If you could show me the story of love," she sings in "Climb On (a Back That's Strong)," "I would write it again and again." If she did, I would surely read it at least once.

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People Are Corporations!

I've written before (here and here, most notably) on my concerns with corporate personhood. But lately I've been reflecting on another troubling trend: personhood incorporated.

I don't suppose this is a new trend; celebrities, for example, have always had entourages--teams who attended to them and accompanied them everywhere. I think I started to realize that individual celebrities actually represented whole universes of employment and output when (a) I saw Bono from U2 congratulate a stageworker on his retirement during a show in Pittsburgh and (b) I heard some country singer talk about pop singer Adele's 2011 throat surgery and the economic impact on everybody who works for her thanks to canceled shows and delayed recordings. That actually helped me understand the phenomenon of celebrity better: it takes a village, it seems, to keep a fickle public interested in an actor or musician in between releases, and that sustained interest is a driver of success for future products. It's simple free-market economics.

Then, of course, you have celebrities who are famous for nothing. The Kardashians are the most notable examples; they have any number of television series that consist of little more than home movies, with conspiracy theories suggesting that any drama that enters into these meandering documentaries is manufactured to keep the viewers interested. Even marriages and divorces, so the scuttlebutt goes, are contrivances cooked up to make us care about the Kardashians and get us to visit their stores and buy their fragrances or whatever.

The Kardashians aren't exactly what I'm troubled by, though. They were absurdly wealthy before they got absurdly famous, and I think they simply (and very shrewdly) gamed the system that their celebrity friends are forced to play in order to expand an already profitable enterprise. I'm actually more troubled by the likes of "Honey Boo Boo Child," a young girl whose family has organized itself around her as their best shot at fame and fortune: first in the child beauty pageant community and now in the field of reality television.

Honey Boo Boo Child is six. Her mom, I'm told (I don't watch the show), is the real center of the universe on the eponymous reality show, but Honey Boo Boo is the draw--sort of like, back in the day, when Madonna would star in a Guy Ritchie movie because he was her husband and, if she didn't, no one would go see it. Madonna wasn't just a person, she was a brand asset that could be exploited to good effect. Honey Boo Boo, at age six, is exactly that.

Because these corporations are also people, there's a built-in symbiosis. Madonna benefits from the exploitation of Madonna by Madonna, Inc. Honey Boo Boo does likewise (assuming that the benefits that accrue to a child reality star are actually benefits in the long term). But symbiosis is not always a virtue. When resources go scarce, one side's needs dominate the other's. Whatever ecological harmony is achieved in any corporation, much less one that is built around a human being with a personality and personal needs, is vulnerable and easily toxified.

The mind goes quickly to reality television when discussing people as corporations because there are so dang many of them. But I'm starting to realize that this phenomenon is offline as well. The children brought up in the age of helicopter parenting--parents orbiting their children and addressing each need immediately as it surfaces--are now adults, and in many cases the parent-child dynamic has entered adulthood with them. I've heard of parents helping their adult children with their professional growth, their day-to-day work, their housework, their graduate studies. The success of the whole family in these instances, it seems, is dependent on the success of the child because success has been defined around the child. It may take a village to raise a child, but it seems increasingly to take a child to justify a village.

I'm not one to talk about "kids today" and all that. I think it's far too easy for people my age to critique people in their early twenties. I actually think the adult-onset helicopter parenting dynamic is more pressure-inducing on the grown child than actually helpful. With so many people's self-worth and sense of achievement weighing on their shoulders, I envision early-onset gray hair, ulcers and other stress-born struggles. I write this as a non-parent, incidentally; who knows what kind of pressure I might have put on a child by virtue of trying to protect her from all hardship and set her up for nothing but success. The logic of helicopter parenting is obvious to me: kids are your responsibility, and besides that you love them and want the best for them, and so you invest whatever you can in them. Turns out, we learn twenty years later, we can invest more of ourselves in other people than is helpful for them or healthy for us. It's good to acknowledge that no one achieves success on their own. God knows that whatever success I've achieved in life has a great deal to do with sacrifices my parents and other loved ones (and even casual acquaintances and total strangers, if I'm being honest) made on my behalf. The problem is that we've let success be defined by standards that are specific to very specific fields: what constitutes success has been dictated by moguls and heiresses, which places unrealistic expectations on parents and children alike. I can't be a mogul without stepping all over any number of people and neglecting the needs of countless others; if I want my children to be moguls, I'm going to have to let them step all over me.

I once heard Andy Crouch suggest that all idolatry ends in child sacrifice; that's true of cultic religions, he says, but it's also true of the idolatrous inclinations of civilized society. By setting mogul-sized goals for our children, by organizing our families around the success of children, we lay them on altars of our own constructions, and we raise the knife. Only God can save us now.

Good Point, Lesslie Newbigin

For me, 2012 has been, ostensibly, the Year of Overdue Books. I've been reading books that I probably should have read long before this point in my life. I've had little forays into less timeless or more timely books, but on the main I've been playing catch-up all year. Right now that's meant reading something, anything, by Lesslie Newbigin.

Newbigin was a four-decade Christian missionary from England to India, who came back to Britain and found the West a very different place from how it was when he left. The church had lost its lofty position in the culture; its authority had been segregated from the public realm of "facts" to the private realm of "values," and it was struggling to find its footing on this terra nova. In Foolishness to the Greeks, Newbigin suggests that this was at least in part because the church had taken its lofty position for granted.

The true posture of any authentic Christian movement, Newbigin suggests, is that of a missionary--someone who purposefully enters into redemptive conversation with a host culture. Like Daniel and the Babylonians in the Old Testament, or like Paul and the Athenians in the New, the missionary gets to know the host culture and then asks penetrating questions of it, which ultimately lay the groundwork for the good news that the God of the Universe loves the host culture so much that he lays down his life for it. (Do keep in mind at this point that I'm halfway through the shortest Lesslie Newbigin book I could find on a friend's bookshelf, so my characterization of his philosophy of the church is not especially nuanced.) The work of the church is fundamentally set against the way of the world--not in a combative way but as a means of juxtaposition, showcasing the finitude and correspondingly limited wisdom of the host culture, and the ultimate wisdom and commitment of the ultimate Other, God. The missionary is never quite at home, her mission only accomplished insofar as the host culture, and the individual persons in it, turn progressively toward the God who loves them.

This story demands a happy ending. Missionary meets host culture; missionary loves host culture; missionary introduces host culture to God; God loves host culture; host culture loves God; they live happily every after. Ultimately that's the plan, I suppose, if you read the last couple of chapters of the book of Revelation. But in a universe as yet ordered by time and space, there are no grand finales, only chapter endings and plot twists. The host culture that embraces the missionary God exchanges one set of problems (alienation from the God of the universe) for another (a sloppy love relationship, made complicated by the finitude and correspondingly limited wisdom of God's new loved ones). It turns out that Jesus was right: even in a receptive host culture, for the time being at least, the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.

So, the work of the church is a tricky business. I've been, of late, swayed considerably by the Anabaptist impulse, of which I've read precious little (again, please excuse my lack of nuance) but which suggests among other things that the church was greatly compromised in its mission by the conversion of Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity and his subsequent legislative and military support of the authority of the church. A church in the center, arguably, has lost sight of the path of Christian discipleship and mission, and becomes more self-protective (in the way of empire) than self-emptying (in the way of Christ). An imperial church doesn't ask questions of host cultures; it makes demands of them. It imposes meaning on them and allows no dissent. It fails the missionary task, and so the work of God must happen elsewhere.

Sounds pretty accurate to me. But then Lesslie Newbigin drops this whammy on me:

The church, in the power of the crucified and risen Jesus, bears witness to the truth and pays the price with its blood. But what was the church to do when the imperial powe lost its will to continue and the emperor turned to the church to provide the spiritual cohesion for a disintegrating society? Much has been written about the harm done to the cause of the gospel when Constantine accepted baptism, and it is not difficult to expatiate on this theme. But could any other choice have been made? When the ancient classical world, which had seemed so brilliant and so all-conquering, ran out of spiritual fuel and turned to the church as the one society that could hold a disintegrating world together, should the church have refused the appeal and washed its hands of responsibility for the political order? It could not do so if it was to be faithful to its origins in Israel and in the ministry of Jesus.

Well, when you put it that way, Lesslie Newbigin, you have a point. But a few questions remain: assuming (as we must assume) that the society that emerged under the authority of the church was fundamentally flawed, what would it look like done right? And how is the mission of the church sustained when the church is forced off the margins and into the center? And how does the missionary church guard itself against the political and material enticements of empire while serving an imperially inclined society with moral and ethical leadership? And what does expatiate mean?

I'm not at the end of the book; I'm not even at the end of a chapter. But these are questions that merit reflection without end until the last tear has been shed and all earthly empires have been supplanted. So I guess we all have some serious thinking to do.

Supervision by Status Update

I hate to read too much into something, but I think I may have discovered an unintended consequence of the Age of Social Media: people who report to you now want to report to you every little thing.

I hasten to add: no one reports to me. The only people whose vocational success I am entrusted with are interns, who work for free, and I am currently internless. So my research pool could not be smaller. But I do observe stuff, both firsthand and secondhand, and it seems to me from what I've observed that people raised on social media tend to give people who, um, weren't so raised updates on the progress of a project in extraordinary detail.

"Just wanted to let you know I wrote that email."

"Just wanted to let you know I finished that filing."

"Just wanted to let you know I got back from my break."

It's really quite conscientious, I guess, but it's also sort of like micromanagement in reverse--"micro-managedment" or "micromanage me!" maybe. I don't know what protocol or even etiquette demands in such a situation: "Roger that"? "Well done"? "Okey-dokey"? I actually think no response is expected; I think there's simply now a new expectation that no task is completed until its completion has been shared.

It strikes me that this is how an early adopter of social media might organize her day: chronicling and reporting every action is the regimen Twitter is notorious for. Older and less networking-savvy folks find this to be obnoxious and a sign of immature self-involvement. I've never subscribed to that opinion and was as early an adopter of these media as I could be, which may be a signal of my own immaturity and self-involvement but I prefer to think is evidence that I got the inherent logic of it: a world that has barreled relentlessly into a culture of atomized individualism--human rocks and islands who have no need of anyone (no, old people, that's not at all obnoxious or self-involved)--has unmet needs for a shared life. We post our thoughts and feelings and actions not because we are so satisfied with ourselves (well, sometimes that's why we post them) but because we can't be sure of what's going on in and through us until they've been at least put in the way of other human beings to affirm or dispute. "I think, therefore I am" has, as a first cause for the Modern Age, shown its limitations: our thinking cannot be independently verified, and so it is in fact the least reliable indicator that we exist.

In place of Rene Descartes' dictum has stepped the tribal African notion of ubuntu, characterized by John Mbiti as " "I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am." I reviewed a book about ubuntu here a few years ago, and I've also encountered it in other reading, particularly that of Desmond Tutu and other writing about the South African experience. Its impact on the world, it seems to me, reaches far beyond people's familiarity with the term. We are, I'm happy to speculate, more influenced by non-European cultures than we realize; in some ways ubuntu has transcended its long-officially segregated conceptual location to completely overhaul how we understand ourselves and, more prosaically, how we report to our supervisors.

I'm all for it, although it strikes me as a bit inefficient to have to hear and acknowledge every little thing that every coworker is doing at any given moment. It makes me sort of want to start a new social media platform just to outsource the whole process: call it DoneList, maybe, or Get Out of My Space.

Read with Ears to Hear: My Review of Richard Rohr's Falling Upward

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have never not been preoccupied by aging and death. My friends have observed that about me and exploit it for comedic effect; my younger friends like to tell me what grade they or their parents were in when I passed through some key rite of passage; my older friends like to remind me that I haven't been a kid for a long time and that there is a fiber-rich diet in my future. They laugh when they see me stress out over such comments, but I'll get the last laugh, I think: the younger ones will eventually themselves be old; the older ones will eventually be dead.

The passage of time is certainly fascinating to me, but it's made more profound and troubling by its association with questions of vocation. "What do I want to be when I grow up?" is a question that plagued me for a long time but that has long since been replaced with "What am I doing with my life?" or, worse, "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?" In the face of such weighty questions, a simple vision for aging and calling is undeniably attractive. I found such a simple vision in Richard Rohr's Falling Upward.

I saw Rohr speak on this topic at the 2011 inaugural Wild Goose Festival and was immediately won over to his take on it. The basic premise is this: we spend the first half of our life building the container into which we will pour the product of the second half of our life. Our first half is preoccupied with externals--status, yes, but also personal rules and priorities, a vision for how life should be. In the second half we turn our eyes from such externals and start to note both what they've done and failed to do for us, what they've allowed us to do in life and what our preoccupation with them has cost us and those we love. The first half is the search for identity; the second half is the search for serenity.

That is probably oversimplifying things, but Rohr's premise is alarmingly simple. There are two distinct calls placed on us in life; the first is provisional, preparing us for the second. The transition from one call to the next is often precipitated by crisis, but more generally by a sense that the first call is completed, or incomplete: it cannot fulfill a life in and of itself.

The notion of "falling" enters in at this transitional moment. We experience the death of a loved one, or the collapse of a profession that we had come to define ourselves by, or the end of a relationship that we thought was forever. Or we start to notice that the things we have invested so heavily in for so long are simply not returning their investment; they don't prop us up so much as trap us inside themselves. We feel ourselves in free fall, all the while hearing a whisper to some higher aspiration. We are being beckoned beyond ourselves; we are, it turns out, falling up.

This transition calls for wisdom and humility and resolve. "The human ego prefers anything," Rohr writes, "just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future." Rohr suggests that most people actually never enter into the second half of life; rather than fall upward they grasp tightly to some artificial anchor to the present--they make an idol of their kids or their spouse or their job or their car--and drown out the divine whisper with TV and music and corporate worship and even their own inner diatribes against the status quo. People who reject the second call don't become the elders that ground a culture and give it a future; they just become old--wrinkly, crotchety, useless. They have neglected or even rejected the search for their true self, the self beyond the reputation that they've often carefully cultivated. They never ceased being the persona they created to occupy the space they found themselves in, and so never die to themselves only to be resurrected into what their community needs, their God demands and they themselves have always wanted to be. "Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not 'true,'" Rohr writes. "It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die."

That's the thing: we should outlive our fictional selves. The world needs us to, because in order to run well it can't itself be bothered by these deeper truths. We need ourselves to, because we will search in vain for the ultimate meaning of our lives without the perspective of the second call. The people we love need us to, because the grace God invests in us is dispensed best and perhaps only out of this second half of life. "The classic spiritual journey always begins elitist and ends egalitarian." In other words, only our elders (in the truest sense of that word) can give us what we need for our own spiritual journeys, and they can only do it by forsaking their own impulses toward elitism. The truest elders among us, like Desmond Tutu or the Dalai Lama, are sometimes the most childlike.

The book wasn't perfect. For as much as Rohr avers that not everyone achieves their second calling (in fact most don't), it often comes across as an inevitability, which will reinforce in some old (but not elder) readers their automatic moral and spiritual superiority over people who are younger than they are. The old, crotchety people I know don't need any such reinforcement, and so I'd be reluctant to put this book in front of them. Rohr also implies that Christian doctrine is the enemy of the second call, that the codes of conduct and the attitude of exclusivity that attends to most organized religion (not just his own religion, although he minces no words about the state of contemporary Christianity) is helpful for the immature but to the person on the second journey seems silly. He may well be right, but his argument feels a little thin (and self-serving), and will be a bridge too far for many readers.

Bottom line: this book, like any book that aspires to call someone from one developmental stage to the next, should be read mainly by those with ears to hear. And those folks should read it more than once. So, probably, should those who read it without ears to hear; the second or third time might be the charm.

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A Quick Thought on Hopelessness

Being, as I am, a bit of an Eeyore personality, I find that the undaunted cheeriness of some of my friends can be occasionally grating. I'm reminded of R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People," a fizzy jangle from a band generally more comfortable in the shadows. When the book of the world is finally written, R.E.M. will be remembered ironically for "Shiny, Happy People" and remembered gratefully for its more somber, empathetic "Everybody Hurts." Mark my words.

Anyway, today I read a line from someone who suggested that if you are hopeless, it's generally your own fault. You have turned your eyes from the Giver of every good gift; you have turned instead to ephemeral idols and found that they cannot bear the weight of idolatrous need. You are hopeless, and you need to stop it.

I found that line of thought annoying. Mainly because I'm not sure that such a thing as hopelessness actually exists.

Oh, I've felt hopeless, believe me. Any Eeyore worth his stuffing has. But feeling hopeless and being hopeless are two different things. Hope is, in fact, a thing--not a thing possessed by us but a thing visited on us. "Hope is the thing with feathers," Emily Dickinson wrote,

That perches in the soul. . . .
Yet never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Hope is self-sufficient; it has no need of us for it to endure. Moreover, hope is a gift, a promise of God: "Yes, my soul, find rest in God; my hope comes from him" (Psalm 62:5). Hope is present where God is present, and God is everywhere present.

We treat hope as a responsibility when it's a gift. And so we see people who feel hopeless, we see circumstances that appear hopeless, and we pass judgment and declare them as such. And then we wash our hands and get on with our day. In doing so we fail--we sin against--those who have lost sight of hope.

Why does God provide us with hope? "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit" (Romans 15:13). We are to pour out the hope that we carry by God's grace; we are not meant to hold on to it but to lavish it. Love, the apostle Paul tells us, "always hopes" (1 Corinthians 13:7). And love is our responsibility to our neighbor, the second great commandment that is like the first.

Hopeless, in our current climate, is a term we assign to people or circumstances that we're no longer willing to deal with. We've forsaken the challenge to love our neighbor as ourselves and so to hope on their behalf, to share our hope liberally with them. To call another person or circumstance hopeless is in fact to call ourselves hopeless--or, more to the point, to call ourselves pitiless, merciless, useless.

Sorry. I guess I'm a little cranky today.

Why So Serious? Batman Versus the Avengers

I've now seen Batman: The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man three times each, which means The Avengers officially still holds my heart. If I had to rank the three films, I'd say The Avengers is my favorite, The Amazing Spider-Man (while still enjoyable) is my least favorite, and Batman is somewhere in the middle.

I'm not entirely surprised by this, since I've been a geek for The Avengers for roughly thirty years. But maybe I should be surprised. Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy is entirely unique in the catalog of superhero films; it's the only set of films that's had a fighting chance at winning Oscars for acting or directing. (Heath Ledger, for example, won best supporting actor for his portrayal of the Joker.) Superhero films are in a class all by themselves, judged by their own peculiar merits, but among superhero films the Batman trilogy is in a class all by itself. And yet this year I prefer The Avengers, which, for as much as I like it, is pretty standard comic book fare.

I find myself wondering, What if? What if Batman had been released first? It's possible that, as much as Batman Begins was hailed as a "game changer" at the time of its release in 2005, resetting the bar for what a superhero film should be, The Avengers was this year's game changer, and The Dark Knight Rises suffered in our estimation as a result.

I've written elsewhere about what might be called the "sine wave of silliness" in Batman storytelling. To wit: Stories about Batman are either serious or silly, and they trend toward the one or the other for long periods of time until the pendulum swings back. The 1960s Batman TV show was unabashedly campy, and it defined the character for the better part of a decade. Then the serious side of Batman came back with a vengeance, until Saturday morning cartoons demanded a kinder, gentler and smileyer Bruce Wayne--until Frank Miller envisioned a dystopian future when a retired Dark Knight Returns. And then, George Clooney put on the tights for Joel Schumacher's homage to 1960s camp in 1997's Batman & Robin, killing a film franchise that under Tim Burton's watch had effectively reconciled Batman's silly and serious sides.

And then, in 2005, Batman Begins made us take superheroes seriously. The film was dark and sober, penetrating and poignant. Everything since then, from Superman Returns to Ghost Rider, has been judged by it. Only Batman: The Dark Knight eclipsed it, with Heath Ledger creating a portrait of the Joker that is still haunting.

Just because nothing compares to Batman films, however, doesn't mean that we won't drop good money on other superheroes. Iron Man benefited from our good faith, presenting us with a lesser-known character portrayed by an actor whose career had stalled. Robert Downey Jr. delivered a comically care-free and cool performance, a billionaire playboy whose superpowers are not natural but manufactured,--a less heroic but more relatable alternative to Batman's uber-serious, mopey Bruce Wayne.

The success of Iron Man set into motion the release of The Avengers, which retained Downey's cavalier and larger-than-life attitude, and extrapolated it out into a team/community setting. The Avengers was the culmination of five films showcasing four characters (six, if you include the cameo by Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye in Thor and Samuel L. Jackson's appearance in Iron Man and Captain America). Over the course of those films (all of which, with the exception of the first Iron Man, were released in between the final two films in the Batman trilogy), our expectations have been changed: we've come to ask of our superhero films--with Heath Ledger's disturbing Joker, ironically enough--"Why so serious?"

If Batman: The Dark Knight Rises had come out in April, we would have thought of The Avengers quite differently come May. But in some respects the die had already been cast: whereas Batman is a trilogy, The Avengers has been, in a manner of speaking, a quintilogy. Five against three in the battle between serious and silly: the odds favor silly.

Fair warning, Batman fans: your next Bruce Wayne, I predict, will look much less like Christian Bale and much more like Adam West.

NOTHING LEFT OUT! My Review of R. Crumb's Book of Genesis Illustrated

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My Year of Overdue Books continues with The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, a legend in underground/indie comics from the late 1960s and 1970s, who has long been fascinated by Jewish history and heritage, and who thus took on this 2009 book as something of a passion project. I was a bit dubious, frankly. I don't remember the circumstance, but someone in the media contacted me about it before its release--likely because of my 2004 book Comic Book Character, which made me an expert in the eyes of some (though surely not in the eyes of God or R. Crumb). I looked through some of the frames that had been pre-released to the public, including the opening frame, in which an impossibly white old man with a timelessly flowing beard held the gestating universe in his hands. I thought--and tried to communicate to the media as respectfully and professionally as possible--Give me a break.

Then I got the book for Christmas from my mother-in-law, who is very generous and attentive to the kinds of things that I might like. I received it with a thank-you, then took it to my office, where I work as an editor for a religious publisher. I thought my coworkers would get a kick out of it; they did--the entire academic editorial staff (a systematic theologian, a philosopher, a historical theologian and a biblical scholar) flipped through it for what seemed like hours while I tried to get work done. Then a visiting author saw it on my shelf and borrowed it, returning it about a month later with nothing but praise for it. Two years later I decided, Maybe I should finally read this thing.

First off, it's not for everyone. My comic book book offers a brief orientation guide for new readers of the genre; you can get an excerpt here. But if you've not read a lot of comic books, the progression from frame to frame, from text box to text box, might seem a bit intimidating at first. With the advent of reading online, of course, such reading is less alien now, but even so you might be further thrown by Crumb's graphic style and text treatment--thick, heavy lines that feel positively antique, which would seem appropriate given the text if the text weren't peppered so generously with exclamation points, the punctuation of late modernity. As much as this is the sacred text of Scripture (NOTHING LEFT OUT!), it is also unabashedly a work of R. Crumb.

So I entered this book dubious, but I came out of it a true believer. Crumb is as reverent as someone who takes his content to be mythology could be, and his reverence carries over even into the earthiest parts of the book of Genesis--which is, as it happens, quite earthy. There's lots of sex, graphically depicted; a fair bit of murder, graphically depicted; and a variety of other images you may never have allowed yourself to imagine, graphically depicted. (The world outside of Noah's ark is a stark case in point.) Crumb drives home a point that pastors sometimes make with a wink: the Bible is a grown-up book. The jacket for The Book of Genesis Illustrated says it straightforwardly: "ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS.

So yeah, it's graphic. It's also reverent and insightful. Genesis has a lot of sex and violence, but it also has a lot of genealogies--begetting and begetting and begetting. Crumb's approach to that is remarkably human; sections of Scripture I often skip over in this case I read with pleasure, as Crumb presented distinct human beings with their loved ones in their element. The various altars of remembrance built throughout Genesis are made more real, more meaningful, by seeing not only what they may have looked like but how they may have been built (Jacob's pillar in Genesis 31 is an image that has stuck with me.) The tensions between people who are blood related but sworn enemies (Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, Joseph and his brothers) are palpable, and consequently whatever resolution takes place between them is greatly satisfying.

Crumb has done his research; his text notes are worth reading, although I give Genesis more authority than he does. For me Genesis is a sacred text, the first account of God interacting with human beings, establishing his posture toward the world he created, which involves love and frustration and self-sacrifice and redemptive action. For Crumb it is the earliest artifact of the Jewish people, an identity marker that explains much and little at the same time. For Crumb, Genesis is what it is; I suppose it is for me as well. Whatever that is, The Book of Genesis Illustrated was a delight to read and worth the wait.

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A little Barbra Streisand to lighten our moods and light our paths:

Hegemonies light the corners of my mind . . .

Misty water-colored memories of the way we were . . .

Scattered pictures of the power we're now denied

Power we used on one another for the way we were.

Can it be that it all was so simple then,

Or has time rewritten every line . . .

If we had the chance to do it all again

Tell me: would we? Could we?

Hegemony may be useful. And yet

What's embarrassing to remember we may choose to forget.

It's self-righteousness we remember

Whenever we remember

The way we were.

***

Or, if you prefer, from the Who:

Meet the new boss . . . same as the old boss.