Brian Williams on the Culture of the First Person

Brian Williams, NBC News anchor, was on Letterman's Late Show last night. They talked about a lot of things, principally the question of whether Letterman or his chief rival, Jay Leno, has more gravitas. That took a while, and it was quite funny; Letterman does a good Leno impression, and Williams has a decidedly non-newsy wit about him. But my fondness for David Letterman is not why I'm posting this.

News anchors are regularly asked--even expected--to decipher the zeitgeist, to assign a diagnosis to the current state of the culture. Their job is essentially to narrate the times we live in, and that requires a pressing problem. For Williams last night, that pressing problem is narcissism on a grand scale.

[I] still come back to this that says you're the star. It's about you. Listen to the commercials on all those channels and the message is all in the first person in ways we never ever used or would dream of in the time of say Mad Men, for a modern television reference. So I think it's that.

Admittedly, news anchors are notoriously nostalgic for more noble eras. The times they narrate are held up against older, seemingly better eras and found wanting. For Williams's predecessor, Tom Brokaw, that better era was during World War II, and he spoke in glowing terms to whoever would listen about "the Greatest Generation" who fought that war and recovered that economy. For Williams, it appears that era is the Camelot Age, when Kennedy was president and advertisers smoked and drank in their office. (They don't do that anymore, right?)

Of course, no era is without flaw, and usually, in the light of history, those flaws are pretty obvious. The Greatest Generation locked Japanese Americans (and others of Asian heritage) in internment camps; the Kennedy years were marked with racial violence. And those are just off the top of my head. No disrespect to either gilded age, but they both have their share of tarnish to contend with.

Nevertheless, the narcissism epidemic facing the current culture is well documented, far beyond my own Deliver Us from Me-Ville. I'm not sure it's the bogeyman Williams makes it out to be, but Me-Ville has a strong gravitational pull, one that in and of ourselves we don't have the strength to surmount. Fortunately, we're not left to languish in our self-absorption. In Christ God enters the culture of the first person and draws people to himself. Maybe Brian Williams and the rest of us, the next time we're tempted to look back, should spend a little more time looking up.

Uber-pious, I know. But I couldn't resist.

Between Churches: Merton on Basic Pseudo-Christianity

I have the privilege of working for a "long tail" publisher, whose business model involves looking past the BIG BOOK OF THE MOMENT to work on books that will endure over time. Some books may sell modestly in their first year but continue to sell steadily every year after that, and before you know it, the editor who acquired it has retired while the book keeps selling.

I occasionally, then, reread books that were written thirty, forty, fifty or sixty years ago, when they're up for a new cover or a new edition or approaching a milestone anniversary. Most recently this was the case with Basic Christianity, fifty years old in 2009. John Stott wrote this book while he was rector of a church in post-WWII London; he went on to become one of the most influential people in the world. If you've not heard of him, that's not our fault.

Anyway, Basic Christianity is what it claims to be--a simple, straightforward presentation of what is, in the mind of Stott and the evangelicals of his era, basic to Christianity. As his later career proved, Stott has remarkable clarity, enabling him to transcend the cultural quirks of his era to declare something timeless that nonetheless speaks prophetically to his times. No wonder it continues to sell like hotcakes.

But I'm not writing today about Stott. I'm writing about Thomas Merton, Stott's Roman Catholic contemporary whose books leave Stott's in the dust in terms of sales and whose name you are even more responsible for not knowing. Merton entered monastic life in roughly the same time period that Stott entered pastoral ministry and went on to publish numerous books of theology and social commentary before his death in 1968. One late entry in his corpus, which I'm currently reading, is titled Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. (Let me here acknowledge that his publisher has more fun titling books than mine does.)

In this book, mostly sketchy thoughts and commentary on the "interesting times" we inhabit and our inherent responsibility to such times (and our all-too-common failure to live up to that responsibility), Merton devotes a couple of pages to "the basic Christian faith." I find myself wondering whether he's responding to Stott here; perhaps he glanced at Stott's little book on a shelf in the library at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and thought, Hmmm, maybe I should do something like that. Such a plainspoken, presentational book is not his cup of tea, however, so he journaled about it and moved on. Here, digested from its already digested state, is Merton's perspective on basic Christianity--and, perhaps more interestingly, its corrupted form as experienced today:

The basic Christian faith is that he who renounces his delusive, individual autonomy in order to receive his true being and freedom in and by Christ is "justified" by the mercy of God in the Cross of Christ. His "sins are forgiven" in so far as the root of guilt is torn up in the surrender which faith makes to Christ. . . .

The Church is the place in which this surrender of individual autonomy becomes real, guaranteed by the truth of the Spirit and by His love, and by the pardon of sins: for the Church herself takes upon herself all man's sin. The Church at once confesses the sins of all men as her own, and receives in herself the mercy that is offered to all men.

But now, supposing that, instead of confessing the sins of the world which she has taken upon herself, the Church--or a group of Christians who arrogate to themselves the name of "Church"--becomes a social mechanism for self-justification? . . . Suppose that she becomes a perfect and faultless machine for declaring herself not guilty? . . . SUpposing that, instead of conscience, she provides men with the support of unanimous group approval or disapproval? . . . The "Church" becomes simply a place where men gather to decree that others are guilty and they themselves are innocent. . . .

It is characteristic of pseudo-Christianity that, while claiming to be justified by God, by faith, or by the works of faith and love, it merely operates a machine for excusing sin instead of confessing and pardoning it--a machine for producing the feeling that one is right and everyone else is wrong. . . . Thus gradually the determination to pervert the Christian conscience becomes a function of the "Church"--perhaps even its prime function. And this becomes, inevitably, the sign of God's judgment upon that "Church."

So here's my confession: I don't want to go to that kind of "Church"--except that I kinda do. And assuming that the church is portable--that it's a "we" embedded in every Christian's "I"--to the extent that I nurse and nurture this "Church" in me I threaten the vitality of every church I visit. God help us all.

Cloud City

Darren Prince, one of the authors of the forthcoming Living Mission (IVP/Likewise), turned me on to a website that generates "word clouds"--a graphic representation of the dominant words in a document. This is the word cloud generated for my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, in case you were wondering whether you'd like the book.

The Art of Demotivation

Years ago now, my friend Judi loaned me a book by E. L. Kersten, cofounder of Despair Inc., which produces those Demotivators posters ("Burnout: If attitude is contagious, mine could kill you"). The jacket of the book reads "Ethics, Integrity and Sacrifice in the Workplace," but that's just a cover, literally: under the jacket is the real book, The Art of Demotivation: A Visionary Guide for Transforming Your Company's Least Valuable Asset--Your Employees. Har har snort.

Anyway, Judi finally asked me if I could give it back to her, so I thought, before I do, that I'd finally read it. It does what all good satire does: takes an absurd system and treats it seriously, turning it on its head in an equally absurd way. Kersten's book--at least in the eleven pages I've read so far--indicts the twentieth-century infatuation with self-actualization as the reason for the mediocrity of so many companies. The solution he proposes, with tongue at least partially in cheek, is "demotivation," or the systematic humiliation and alienation of employees so that they'll quit looking for their jobs to fulfill them and instead concentrate on fulfilling their responsibilities at their jobs. It's horrific, it's distressing, it's brilliant.

Exhibit A is this long excerpt on the "motivational industry," or consultants who are hired by corporate executives for weekend employee pick-me-ups. It makes a far less sympathetic but otherwise similar diagnosis of the culture we find ourselves in to the one I made in Deliver Us from Me-Ville. Enjoy it, understanding that he's being provocative on purpose:

Much of what passes for motivation in the motivational industry is little more than egoistic, short-term enthusiasm, or warm feelings generated by the creative packaging of the "principles" of the human potential movement, which itself is little more than a curious amalgam of common sense, humanistic religion, sophistry, and psychological snake-oil. The primary objective of the motivational industry is to stoke the fires of your employees' narcissism so that they fall in love with themselves all over again, just like they did when they saw their own beauty in the distorted reflection of their mother's adoring gaze, prior to their exposure to any of the objective, real-world criteria that would define them otherwise. The insights peddled to your employees revolve around the ideas that they are uniquely equipped to do something special, that they have a proprietary configuration of underappreciated skills that they have yet to discover (or show any evidence of), that their weaknesses are really strengths, and that they are winners who have simply not had the chance to win. They are regaled with stories about people like Thomas Edison who regarded failed experiments as stepping-stones on the path to scientific discovery, and they end up concluding that their own personal histories of failure and non-achievement are signs that they are bound for greatness. In this systematic distortion of reality, they learn to label their stubbornness as conviction; their bad attitudes as a passion for justice; their willful subversion of the company's goals as a unique, underappreciated perspective on how the company should proceed; and their general surliness as a natural response to a global lack of appreciation for their supremely valuable uniqueness.

Kersten attributes the perpetuation of the motivational industry to the way it calculates its success rate: not consequent improvement in employee productivity, but comment cards filled out by the employees in attendance. In actuality, "the life-changing insights sold by the motivational industry are the source of their problems rather than the solution to them. The consultants . . . are like ice cream vendors at a fat farm, pimps at a treatment facility for sex addicts, or drug pushers at a methadone clinic. They pander to your employees' cravings, and in so doing they exacerbate the problems they are paid to solve."

You'll get your book back soon, Judi. I promise.

Andrew Young & the Ethics of Ambition

I've always been fond of Andrew Young--not the assistant and accessory after the fact to former presidential candidate John Edwards (not the eighteenth century pastor-theologian), but Andrew Young the former mayor of Atlanta, ambassador to the United Nations and key player in the Civil Rights Movement. I feel bad for this Andrew Young--and for Jonathan Edwards the theologian, for that matter--that events of the past two years have overshadowed their significant historic accomplishments.

Yet I must confess, I feel a little bad for the new Andrew Young as well. I heard him interviewed on the radio this week, discussing his role in attempting to cover up the new John Edwards's affair. The radio host called him "probably the sleaziest person I've ever interviewed." I don't suppose they were face to face during this interchange, but they were likely as close as radio interviews get. Maybe it's because I know how much pressure authors feel from publishers to sell their own books, but this exercise in indignity made me feel bad for the guy.

It also reminded me of something I recently read (or re-read, as I am wont to do in the case of this book). In Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose, nature's most nearly perfect book (which I rely on a great deal in Deliver Us from Me-Ville), author Brian Mahan talks about the various "bells" that ring throughout our pursuit of vocation. Some, he says, are like "the inkin, a bell used in Zen practice to announce the start of a period of silent attentiveness." Others are less reflective and more urgent, such as "the tocsin, or alarm bell, that warns of imminent danger" (p. 74).

Mahan goes on to review the curious case of John Dean (not Jimmy Dean, the sausage guy, nor John Deere, the tractor guy), former legal counsel to President Nixon. Dean was a young, up and coming attorney when he was invited to join the president's staff. He was living the high life during the events that led to Nixon's eventual downfall. At the same time, for example, that he was enjoying direct access to the leader of the free world, he was being given permission by one of the architects of the Watergate break-in, G. Gordon Liddy, to "have him shot if this would help with the cover-up." Dean was enjoying first-class flights and accommodations wherever he went at the same time he and his assistant, Fred Fielding, were deciding to put on surgical gloves "to avoid leaving fingerprints" while they "rifled through Howard Hunt's safe" (p. 75). They don't teach you that stuff in law school, so far as I know.

Mahan's intent in rehearsing Dean's story is to show how easy it is to deceive ourselves when we're caught up in something big. He doesn't excuse himself from this scrutiny; he goes on to tell the story of what great lengths he was willing to go to win a round of "hide the eraser" in grade school. Trust me, it's gross. But it's an important observation nonetheless.

Andrew Young indicated during his animus-dripping radio interview that his judgment was clouded by the thought that "what we were doing would literally change the world." He had long before decided that John Edwards was presidential material, qualified to lead the free world and for his time the best person for the job. Little indiscretions like a dalliance were scandalous enough to derail the train of history but little enough that they shouldn't be allowed to.

So in the thin air of a presidential campaign, Young became convinced that pretending to be the father of a child born to a woman his boss was having an affair with was politically expedient, if not patriotic. Life was moving too fast, with too much drama as a constant companion. Young couldn't hear the bells, Mahan might say. Only time could clear the air enough to see how absurd his patriotic impulse was, how closely his idealism resembled hubris, arrogance.

The trouble with living history is that it doesn't become history till you're dead. Till then, it's simply wading through wave after wave of urgent decision-making and murky ethical optioneering. "If you are to be armed for success in the real world," Mahan observes, "the capacity to rationalize on your feet, extemporaneously and with conviction is not optional; it is required" (p. 84). So I feel bad for Andrew Young, though my opinion of his behavior has not changed from shock and revulsion. There but for the grace of God, I suspect, go I. Till then, may we all listen for the bells as they ring their messages to each of us, and may we do as they suggest, because when it comes to the ethics of ambition, the bells are a blessing.

Jean Vanier Is a Genius, Part Three

Community & Growth was published in 1979, the same year as Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism. Sociologist Lasch was pointing out the societal trends that reflected a turn inward and its deadening effect on culture. Vanier's Community & Growth had a different function, a sort of justification for his at that time twenty-five-year project of bringing together able-bodied and disabled people in committed relationships of mutuality and gratuity. Lasch was pointing out that we'd allowed "normal" to become something dysfunctional and self-defeating; Vanier was showing that what appears abnormal to the broader society offers a prophetic vision of what could be.

Thirty years later the gulf between Lasch's culture of narcissism and Vanier's vision for community has widened. Social psychologist Jean Twenge recently reported that contemporary college students today openly acknowledge that they're the most narcissistic generation ever. I think you could argue that some other generation still holds the title, but it is nevertheless interesting that (a) people would say such a thing about themselves and (b) not be moved to repentance by it.

Meanwhile Vanier's notion that people can commit to one another in healing relationships has been embraced and experimented with more and more broadly, to the point where one of the more interesting stories in contemporary religion is the New Monasticism, where young people commit to living together in consecrated relationships with each other and the neighborhood surrounding them. I don't know that all of them would point to Vanier as their spiritual fountainhead, but they're certainly all playing in similar waters.

The contrast between these two portraits, I think, hints at their interconnectedness: a big slide from what we were meant to be calls for a big vision of the same. Late in his book Vanier suggests the following shift in missional priorities for the church:

There are so many people who live alone, crushed by their loneliness. It is obvious that too much solitude can drive people off the rails, to depression or alcoholism. More and more people seem to have lost their balance because their family life has been unhappy. There are so many who are lost, taking drugs, turning to delinquency; there are so many who are looking for a family and a meaning to their lives. In the years to come, we are going to need so many small communities which welcome lost and lonely people, offering them a family and a sense of belonging. At other times, Christians who wanted to follow Jesus opened hospitals and schools. Now that there are so many of these, Christians must commit themselves to the new communities of welcome, to live with people who have no other family and to show them that they are loved.

It's occasionally interesting to me how much shame we assign to narcissism; when I've discussed Deliver Us from Me-Ville with people who are parents and grandparents, they almost to a person cluck their tongues and wish their children and grandchildren would read the book--even though in the book I argue that this narcissism is part of the human condition, something that we each contend with and are never entirely free of, which means that parents and grandparents have their own narcissism to face up to. I also contend, however--and I think Vanier would agree--that this plague is at its root a reflection of insecurity, that we are narcissistic at least in part because we feel alone and unprotected in the universe, and that one way of contending with inordinate self-love when we encounter it is to remind people that there is other love available to them, that the love of God for them is purer and more enduring than the self-absorption they've so often settled for. You don't cure a pandemic of narcissism by quarantine; you cure it with love, and lots of it.

Everybody Needs a Catchphrase

Ally McBeal's therapist once told her everybody needs a theme song. When Ally tentatively started singing the theme song to her own show, the therapist stopped her: "That's a terrible theme song," she said.

I like the idea of a theme song, but being a wordsmith, I think it's more important that everybody have a catchphrase. Heroes have it: the Thing shouts "It's clobberin' time!" whenever he enters into battle, and the Tick strikes terror into the hearts of his enemies every time he yells "Spoon!" There was a time when any adorable child actor worth his network timeslot had a catch phrase, from Jason Bateman's sly "You're gonna laugh!" to Jan Brady's whiney "Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!" I taught each of my nieces catch phrases until their parents subtly suggested I stop; the most recent were "I'm important, yo!" (the story behind that one is in Deliver Us from Me-Ville) to the politically savvy (if I do say so myself) "What's the drama, Barack Obama?"

I'm drawn to catch phrases because they communicate reliability. We know that regardless of how different his strokes get, Arnold Drummond will still give voice to his suspicions by cocking his head to the side and inquiring, "Whatchoo talkin' bout?" We know that no matter what kind of vodka goes into the glass, James Bond's martini will be "shaken, not stirred." We let out little cheers whenever we hear our hero's catchphrase because they offer a baseline of familiarity, stability, to a scenario we otherwise haven't figured out.

I've noticed lately that some writers have a literary equivalent to a catchphrase. They don't serve quite the same purpose, but their persistent occurrence in a writer's material offers some of the same clues to their personality. We know, for example, that Sting is particularly impressed with one line of lyric from the song "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic":

Do I have to tell the story
Of a thousand rainy days since we first met?
It's a big enough umbrella
But it's always me that ends up getting wet.

We know Sting likes this lyric because he sings twice in that song, and because he imports it into other songs he writes, including "O My God" from the Police's Synchronicity album and "Seven Days" off his solo project Ten Summoner's Tales. It's an unorthodox line--Irish in its sensibility and bite, ironically romantic--that characterizes Sting's approach to songwriting. No wonder he likes to remind himself of it.

But some phrases occur less intentionally, I think. They serve as indicators of a writer's unconscious agenda, a thematic phrase for what they consider important. I've read several books by Lynne Baab, for example, including her most recent Reaching Out in a Networked World about church communications. I even edited a couple of her prior books--Sabbath Keeping and Fasting, both on particular spiritual practices. In all three she slips in the phrase "for our time" at key moments. I lost count as I read through Reaching Out. I doubt she'd notice if it were edited out of any one of her books, but the fact that, in various permutations, "for our time" occupies so much space in her writing is evidence of how much space it occupies in her thinking.

Lynne is a pragmatist, a practical theologian with an emphasis on practical. Her latest book is immensely so, helping usher intimidated church secretaries, pastors and elders into the digital era in a way that communicates their church well. She does this because of her conviction that every church is where it is, every Christian where she or he is, "for our time"--intended to carry a message from ancestors to descendants and to give witness to that message "in our time" to onlookers and critics. Lynne thrives as a writer because of her unspoken conviction that there's no point writing for some past or future time, only for the cultural, spiritual moment we find ourselves in.

Lynne is not alone in employing an unconscious catchphrase. I deduced the band behind a song I heard on the radio this week as much because of a representative lyric--"in this life"--as because of the singer's singing and rhythm section's rhythm. The song was "Gone"; the band was Switchfoot; the lyric appears in at least two other songs of theirs and I suspect several more, a reference to the brevity of the life each of us is experiencing and the consequent significance of each little occurrence and the simultaneous importance of not putting off the life to come. "In this life" for Switchfoot communicates both pastoral concern and cultural critique.

I'm pretty sure I have my own unconscious catchphrases and even unconscious catchphrase constructs in my writing, but I don't know what they are; if I did, they wouldn't be unconscious now, would they? Such turns of phrases can become our own little cliches if we're not careful, or they can become a rut that our thinking settles into. But more often than not, I think they serve as an organizing theme for our communication, the through line that tethers even our most divergent creations to each other. I'd be interested to hear of any catchphrases you've identified in authors you enjoy reading, and if you'd like to point out some of my own, I promise I won't blow you off with a flippant "Asta la vista, baby."

I’m the Governor! I’m Important, Yo!

Pardon my long post, but I'm feeling a bit heady. Illinois is a heady place these days, after all: the Bears may make the playoffs, the junior U.S. senator is about to become president, and the governor is about to be impeached and imprisoned. The 2016 Olympics are a possibility here that is strengthened by our favorite son ascending to the presidency but weakened by our chief executive allegedly conducting a political crime spree.

I’m fascinated by the governor’s story. He’s been in view here far longer than President-Elect Obama, to be honest, and his own presidential aspirations have never been far below the surface. Senator John McCain, the “maverick” reformer cum failed presidential candidate, told David Letterman that Governor Blagojevich once told him that he considered himself a reformer like McCain, thanking him for being a political role model. McCain and Letterman shared a laugh over those comments, absurd as they sound alongside transcripts of foul-mouthed shakedowns from the governor’s office.

The conversation about Governor Blagojevich has shifted, at least temporarily, to the question of his mental health. People think he must have been crazy to conduct so brazen a campaign as the one to sell a senate seat and force the firing of critical journalists. The mental health community, however, is stopping short of calling the governor psychotic; instead, they’re calling him a narcissist.

Dr. Daniela Schreirer is a forensic psychologist at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and she does not see any sign of mental illness in the public Blagojevich, but believes he does have sociopathic traits.
"We're just talking about traits. We're not talking about full-blown diagnosis. But certainly, there's the same sense of entitlement, the same sense of thinking I am superior. I can do whatever I want. I am not going to be caught," Schreirer said.

Blagojevich was, at one time, a rising star. He achieved office initially by being charming and self-deprecating; an advertising campaign consisted of everyday Illinoisans struggling to pronounce his last name but admiring his qualifications and energy. He eventually became a U.S. Representative and made a name for himself by helping to negotiate the release of three American soldiers, who were being detained in Yugoslavia under dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

Three years later he was running for governor, but the presidency was on his mind. In an ad that cemented his reputation in my mind as a twerp, he had grade-school students quiz him about American presidents: “Sixteenth president?” “Abraham Lincoln! . . .” Ostensibly about his commitment to education, the ad told me that he viewed the governorship as a stepping stone to his true destiny as president of the United States. And yet he spoke clearly, candidly and winsomely with interviewers, among other things stating with enthusiasm that he and his family “love Jesus.” This at the time was one of the most plainspoken, unambiguous comments on personal faith I'd heard from a candidate who wasn't in the pocket of the religious right. So while I didn’t vote for him (remember, I thought he was a twerp), I had hopes that his tenure as governor would be marked by policies that reflected his love for Jesus—just and compassionate programs, ethical policies and practices.

Blagojevich became governor in what might be considered the easiest campaign ever: the current Republican governor, George Ryan, was on notice that he’d be facing trial after his term ended, and the Republican candidate to replace him shared the same last name: Jim Ryan, no relation. For the second time in his career, Blagojevich’s last name carried him into office. Four years later the Illinois Republican party still couldn’t get its act together; State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka was the only Republican holding statewide office, and when she ran against the governor on the argument that he had failed both to manage the state’s economy and to fight corruption, one video of her dancing with former Governor Ryan put an end to her chances to unseat Blagojevich. He made Elvis jokes about being “All Shook Up” over his victory and settled into his second term.

The governor’s second term has been characterized mainly by gridlock. It seems that he’s systematically alienated everyone in state government, such that the legislature and the Chicago Transit Authority, among other institutions, faced near-implosion while he sat in the bleachers enjoying hockey games. Some tried to call a constitutional convention for the express purpose of making it legal to recall his position; others spoke explicitly and frequently about his grandstanding and bullheadedness.

Barack Obama, it’s presumed, frustrated Blagojevich’s career plans by taking the national spotlight in 2004's Democratic National Convention and launching an ultimately successful presidential campaign in 2007. This was to be Blagojevich’s year, if you believe the scuttlebutt, but public and peer opinion had turned against him, so that by election day 2008 he had, among his liabilities, a federal investigation into his office and a devastatingly negative reputation among his constituents, and as almost his only asset, a recently vacated senate seat.

I feel bad for Rod Blagojevich. That’s a relatively new feeling for me; I’ve typically dismissed him as a mere worshiper of “the characteristically American bitch goddess of Success,” as Mark Stritcherz put it in America magazine. But Blagojevich is merely the most recent and most pronounced example of the pervasive streak of narcissism, with its attendant sense of entitlement and invulnerability, that runs through our culture and, I think, every human heart.

Blagojevich is, in that respect, this year’s Gary Hart, who dared reporters to follow him in their suspicions of his infidelity, and who resigned his own presidential campaign when they did exactly that and caught him in an affair. Blagojevich is this year’s Richard Nixon, who publicly told onlookers “I am not a crook” but who privately and obscenely violated the law on tape. He’s this year’s Ananias, who made a grand public gesture in donating his wealth to the early church but who was revealed to be just another poser with a wicked heart. He's this year’s Cain, who killed his brother and then stared down God with a brazen dismissal of the accusation: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He's this year's me, and all the mes here in Me-Ville.

Stritcherz goes on to lament the Me-Ville we find ourselves in, a world effectively incapable of policing itself or aspiring to self-sacrifice toward the greater good, by describing the world we've fallen short of:

In a morally and spiritually robust society, institutions identify such characters as rascals and discipline them accordingly; they can separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

I paraphrase the apostle Paul: Who will rescue us from this city of death? Thanks be to God who, if we dare follow, will deliver us from Me-Ville, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

Shameless Stocking Stuffer Solicitation

To be an author in the third millennium is to be a shameless self-promoter, a crass hawker of wares; consequently, I have selfliness* to promote and wares to hawk. So let me humbly remind you that Deliver Us from Me-Ville makes a fine, inexpensive Christmas gift!

Nothing says "Merry Christmas!" quite like a book in a decorative stocking, if I do say so myself; I have a Batman(tm) Christmas stocking hung on my office bulletin board with care, and the copy of Deliver Us from Me-Ville sticking out of it really adds to the ambiance. After all, nothing keeps Christ in Christmas quite like a book which presumes that all of society--including the people on your gift list--is hopelessly narcissistic.

To those of you who are even now muttering, "Put a sock in it, Dave!" I respond in true humility: put it in your sock.**

Happy holidays,
Dave Zimmerman,
author, Deliver Us from Me-Ville

*A word coined by a kid in my church. I like it; it's clever.
**The one hung by your chimney with care.

The Gift That Keeps On "Smashing Those Sacred Cows into Oblivion"

Nice review of my book from the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding. Many thanks to Walt Mueller, who also endorsed the book. Makes a good Christmas gift to older high school students, college students and above, and the parents and pastors who deal with them, if I do say so myself.

We need people who help us recognize the sacred cows that are so familiar to our lives that we don’t even know they exist. And, we need those people to take us a step further, helping us to catch a vision for smashing those sacred cows into oblivion so that we might grasp and live God’s grand vision for our lives.

In his book, Deliver Us From Me-Ville (David C. Cook, 2008, ISBN #978-1-4347-0009-4), David Zimmerman takes us on an aerial tour of Me-Ville, the place where many North American Christians have laid down their roots and have called “home” for a long, long time. Zimmerman masterfully and simply exposes the lay of the Me-Ville land, helping us see how living there keeps us from living fully in the Kingdom of God. What Zimmerman delivers is a compelling call that we can either follow, or choose to walk away from—as the Scriptures tell us—with deep sadness.

Deliver Us From Me-Ville is a timely and challenging guide out of worshipping and serving the contemporary “holy trinity” of me, myself and I, reminding us that our purpose only can be found in the relentless pursuit of Christ and His Kingdom. This is a book that you can read and teach, prayerfully asking God to challenge our materialistic and selfish American-Dream distortion of Christianity, while providing a road map to the place where we belong.

John Stott Is a Genius

When it comes to Me-Ville, Jesus, says John Stott in his Basic Christianity, is a stranger to these parts.

It is this paradox that is so amazing, this combination of the self-centeredness of his teaching and the unself-centeredness of his behavior. In thought he put himself first; in deed last.He exhibited both the greatest self-esteem and the greatest self-sacrifice. He knew himself to be the Lord of all, but he became their servant. He said that he would one day come to judge the world, but he washed the feet of his friends. . . .

This utter disregard of self in the service of God and man is what the Bible calls love. There is no self-interest in love. The essence of love is self-sacrifice. Even the worst of us is adorned by an occasional flash of such nobility, but the life of Jesus irradiated it with a never-fading incandescent glow.

Jesus was sinless because he was selfless. Such selflessness is love. And God is love.

It Takes a Village

Last night was my book release party, a reading and signing event at a local Barnes & Noble. It was a fun time; my friend Ken from Carpe Diem Video Productions crafted an intricate video archive of the event; check back here over the next couple of weeks for the first look. I was reunited with friends from various eras and spheres of my life, and I spoke for three hours straight in an outdoor voice. My apologies to the non-Me-Ville bookbuyers last night.

I once heard a conservative humorist say he wanted to write a book called "It takes a village to raise an idiot." He was critiquing the Clinton administration--Hillary Clinton had recently released her book It Takes a Village to Raise a Child--but I nearly spit out my coffee over the title alone. It does strike me, however, that some things are best pursued not in solitude but in community, such that even something so self-indulgent as a book signing is made richer and more enjoyable by the participation of many people:

* friends who lent me their talents, such as my friend Ken the filmmaker or my friend Elaina, who got the best photo of me with my wife in recent memory
* friends such as the Arnotts, who bought me a special pen to use in signing the books
* friends such as the Cotes and the Bigelows, who already had copies of the book but who bought more just for kicks
* friends such as the Hsus and my brother Steve, who kept their kids up late or who deferred going home for the night so that they could be a part of the evening
* friends such as Myron, who didn't come to the signing, choosing instead to take care of my other responsibilities so I could be free to play
* friends such as Kristie and Mark, who patiently endured being put on the spot for the sake of the theatricality of the night
* friends such as Dave and Eric and Rachel, who scrambled from one event to the other in support of multiple friends with overlapping special occasions
* friends such as Emily, who showed up early, knowing nearly nobody

It can truly be said that a book signing without people would be incredibly sad. But last night I came home happy, because for a few hours last night I was surrounded by friends.

Sniff, sniff. I handed out a quiz last night: the first person to correctly determine which of the following fourteen quotations are from Deliver Us from Me-Ville, and which are from random crazy bloggers (emphasis on "random," I confess I took quotes out of context to make them sound crazy), gets a free copy of the book.

1. “Life is passing by so fast. Where have I been? What have I been doing?”
2. “We’re a meandering step on an evolutionary journey dictated by random events and mathematical possibilities.”
3. “The annals of power are reduced in our minds to an abstraction.”
4. “I offer all my salutations to the Guru.”
5. “A single, solitary human being couldn’t possibly embody such complexity of feeling in one life, right?”
6. “When you buy any informational product or downloadable software, do you feel better about it when it has an image of a book cover or a software box, even though you know it’s just a download?”
7. “Countless men and women are dehumanized by new technologies that render them incompetent or, at worse, inconsequential.”
8. “Don’t think too much. It's not good for my health.”
9. “The world is alternately enticed and threatened by watching us.”
10. “I simply want to retaliate.”
11. “I'm not in the sand because I was seeking the shade.”
12. “This was my first move and extremely difficult for me as I was leaving all my friends behind and starting new. Wow. I am getting way off topic.”
13. “Self-denial isn’t a willful act.”
14. “May the simple act of nourishing . . . bring you thankfulness.”

Oak is to Brook as Barnes is to Noble

In case you're among the handful of people I haven't already pestered about this . . .

Ahem.

Wednesday night, July 9 (that's real soon), I'll be at the Barnes & Noble in Oak Brook, Illinois, to read from, answer questions about and sign copies of my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville. I'll be getting there at 7pm and reading at 8pm. The store will kick me out at 9pm. I'd love to have you join me before they do.

I fully recognize that a two-hour book signing is not worth traveling across country for, but if you're in the Chicago area, please do consider coming out. A friend of mine will be videotaping the whole thing, so if you aren't able to come, check back here or on Facebook for a video archive. Sure to be exciting; I tend to spit when I talk.

North Carolina

I'm fighting sleep in Macomb, Illinois, as I wait for a midnight concert by Over the Rhine to cap off my first day at the Cornerstone Christian Music Festival. I spoke here this morning to a tent full of high school students, and since then I've been realizing that North Carolina is quickly becoming my favorite state.

I've reconnected with one person here and met fifteen to twenty others, nearly all of whom live in North Carolina, all of whom are remarkably thoughtful, wildly creative and wonderfully hospitable. I've been to North Carolina only once, for a conference in Charlotte, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and now I'm wondering if there's something in the water that makes people there cool. It's just a theory, of course . . .

I spoke on the challenge of abandoning our wrong ideas about God without being abandoned by God. It went fine, I suppose, although I could have benefited from one more cup of coffee before I went up. The general idea was that our ideas about God aren't necessarily transferable from vicissitude to vicissitude, but that they become comfortable and so we cling to them when we should be clinging to God. So the challenge is to lean into the discomfort of living without failed ideas of God, in the hope that God himself will sustain us. Or something like that. I feel sorry for the poor folks who drove all the way in from my favorite state just to hear that, although at least they have a long, long road trip to decipher it.

Get into Me-Ville Free

Quick update on my new book:

My publisher has posted the introduction and first chapter of Deliver Us from Me-Ville on its website. There you can read about the scandal of the spilled coffee on the church carpet, my prideful portrayal of the apostle Peter, my celebrity-studded wedding to my niece, and oh yeah, begin the journey from the kingdom of self to the kingdom of God.

If you've read the book, I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. Feel free to post comments here, or join the Deliver Us from Me-Ville Facebook group and post comments or questions on the wall or in the discussion forums.

Spam of the Day

Who knew spam could be prophetic? Thursday night I received several copies of my new book, Deliver Us from Me-Ville (have I mentioned it?), in the mail. So Friday I was riding high, showing it off to my coworkers, gently caressing it in the privacy of my office, occasionally popping over to Amazon.com to see if it had hit #1 in the sales rankings yet (not yet), and generally feeling pretty self-satisfied. Along came an e-mail into my in-box with a very friendly and vaguely familiar name in the "from" column and one word in the "subject" column: "best."

I was feeling pretty best at the moment, I freely confess, so despite suspecting that this particular e-mail might not be from one of my old high school classmates but rather from some soulless spamming sleazebag, I defied logic, threw caution to the wind and opened the e-mail to read the following:

Your life is crap.

No links to online mortgage brokers, no recommendation of various low-cost Viagra substitutes, no Russian women looking for love, no promise of a bazillion pounds sterling if I do some foreign luminary a solid. Simply that brief, cutting message: Your life is crap.

OMG! LOL! It's been a long, long time since I've shared a spam of the day here at Loud Time, but that has to be my favorite spam ever. I'm reminded of a story I read once (I don't remember where; feel free to let us all know) of an emperor parading through the city on the way to his coronation. While crowds of his subjects shout loving, effusive praises as he passes by, he's accompanied by a jester, seated over his shoulder, whispering steadily in his ear, "Remember you are nothing."

Next week I'll be addressing a graduating class of high schoolers in Alexandria, Indiana, and I have two goals for the evening. I want to commend them on what is in fact a commendable moment: their completion of high school and their transition into adulthood. But part of me wants to play that jester because I think the jester has an important, even prophetic message: even on the day when we are most confident that we are all that, we are only us. Our best move is to find a quiet place and pray to God the words of Psalm 40 from the Message:

I'm nothing and have nothing:
make something of me.
You can do it; you've got what it takes--
but God, don't put it off.

The Cult of 'Selfism'

Funny what you stumble across. I found in the Tyndale New Testament Commentary on Mark a discussion of Mark 8:34-38, in which the author, the late R. Alan Cole, expands in a footnote on his observation that "the Lord warns all the crowd, not just his professed disciples, that to follow him means to deny all natural inclinations and to 'shoulder one's stake'."

This is why the cult of 'selfism' (self-fulfilment, and the like), much favoured by the so-called 'me generation', is utterly foreign to the gospels, and, in particular to the teachings of Jesus. . . . There is no commendation of self-love [in Mark 12:31, for example], but only a realistic recognition that we do in fact always desire to promote our own good.

The notion that self-love is a default condition is pretty sensible to me; I'd only add that while self-love isn't commended, it isn't condemned either. Inordinate self-love, now that's another story. It's a tragic case when self-love is absent from a person; that person has been wounded, even defeated, by a world that has loved itself to the neglect of its neighbor.

No New Insights Are Good New Insights

I'm just back from the Urban Youth Workers Institute at Azusa Pacific University, one of my favorite conferences of the year. People come from all over the country to consider how youth ministry functions in the urban context, which is important, since most major publications related to youth ministry is produced out of a worldview that is largely ignorant of urban life. The environment of UYWI is casual, relational--almost like a reunion--but simultaneously very serious and no-nonsense.

I managed to supply some nonsense. I was selling books and meeting with authors and other culture-shapers along with my friend and coworker Andrew. We had a good time commenting on all the quirks of Azusa, California, particularly its aversion to hotels and sit-down restaurants. I got to present a book contract to a relatively new friend and his wife, and I had conversations with a number of complete strangers about what they'd like to read or write.

Andrew and I were joined for a good chunk of the silliness by Chris Heuertz, a good friend and author of the soon-to-be-released Simple Spirituality, and Andrew Marin, a good friend and author of the 2009 release Love Is an Orientation.

We had hoped to have copies of Simple Spirituality available to sell, but no such luck; the book is still at the printer for a couple of weeks. I had hoped to have copies of Deliver Us from Me-Ville to give to my friends and save myself some postage, but that too didn't quite make the deadline. Bummer. I drowned my sorrows in Cap'n Crunch Shakes from Carl Jr's and consoled myself in the company of very goofy friends. We danced on the edge of making a waitresses night and getting ourselves kicked out of a Thai restaurant--the best food within walking distance of the campus of APU, even though we didn't walk. I watched two of my friends/authors get to know one another and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I have no new insights coming out of UYWI--oddly enough, between selling books and meeting with people I caught only about fifteen minutes of the conference itself--other than the insights I gained over coffee or saki or Cap'n Crunch shakes or leaning against a post talking to a complete stranger. All in all, I'd saythe conference was a success.

Word on the Street

I heard today that Deliver Us from Me-Ville is now in print. That's good. I read earlier this week that whole denominations almost never recite the Lord's Prayer, and so (I infer) may never get the joke in the title. That's bad.

Being in print means that the book will soon be on sale at fine booksellers from Amazon.com to Zazzy'z Coffee House and Book Seller. That's good. I also learned that Borders Online lists the title as "Deviler Us from Me-Ville." That's bad; nobody wants to be deviler than they already are.

These are the things bookwriting divas such as myself fret over as their books go from the abstract to the concrete, from being in their heads to being on their shelves. I have never been quite so neurotic as those weeks surrounding the release of my books. So I apologize in advance or at long last, depending on whether I've already worn out my welcome with you, or I'm starting to sound a wee bit obnoxious.

The following people are the final endorsers of my book. They, along with eight other folks whose comments were posted earlier, saw fit to declare publicly that they read the book and didn't throw up. Their endorsements are particularly meaningful to me because I'm fans of each of them; their own writings have been in many cases seminal for me, and their decency has in many cases been arresting and inspiring all at once. I hope you'll check out their books and, if you're so motivated, you'll pick up a copy of mine and let me know what you think.

***

David offers a winsome, intelligent, and challenging look at one of the most difficult subjects to address honestly—ourselves. Below the surface of this book is an insightful critique of the self-centered approach to life. For those who are interested in finding a better way, this book offers hope.
—Brian Sanders, executive director of the Underground Network and author of Life After Church

In Deliver Us from Me-Ville, David Zimmerman focuses on the problem we all want to ignore—namely, that we are all stuck on ourselves and that it messes up every relationship we have. I can’t think of a more important problem to address in a new book. (I just wish I had thought of it first!)
—Mike Sares, Pastor, Scum of the Earth Church

With Deliver Us from Me-Ville, David Zimmerman has established himself as a credible social critic, a subversive voice calling for virtue in an age of substance-less posturing, and a humble prophet of hope in an image-driven day of cynicism and self-absorption. His newest book is provocative, imaginative, and full of pointed, yet understated jabs at what Christian community has become. His thoughtfulness regarding over-identification with self is guided by his pithy gems of literary hilarity. Deliver Us from Me-Ville is fresh, innovative, and all that is great about insurrectionism in Christian authorship.
—Christopher L. Heuertz, International Executive Director, Word Made Flesh, and author of Simple Spirituality

Zimmerman’s book is a searching, sober, and at times very funny, analysis of the impact that the culture of narcissism, or excessive self-importance, has on the Christian mind. It even offers escape routes out of Me-Ville—ways to keep the saving knowledge that we matter so much to God, safe from the corruption of mattering too much to ourselves. So read this book and get over yourself!
—Ben Patterson, campus pastor, Westmont College and author of Waiting and He Has Made Me Glad

With light-hearted wit, self-effacing humility and utter seriousness, Dave Zimmerman takes on one of the great idols of our cultural-captivity. Deliver Us from Me-Ville is a warm invitation to leave behind our narcissism to more fully embrace The Way of Jesus.
--Mark Scandrette, author of SOUL GRAFFITI: Making A Life In the Way of Jesus

Quiet on the Set

This weekend I heard a fellow on the radio make the intriguing observation that all communication is self-serving. I was just starting to mull over the notion as he went on to explain, at length, how this insight led him to regularly spend the weekend not speaking with his wife or life partner or some such. He was still rattling on about his retreats of silence when I parked the car and turned off the radio.

It strikes me that, in his case at least, communication does seem to be self-serving. Communicating this idea to his wife got him whole weekends at a time free of the hassle of having to talk to people and, more important perhaps, being talked to by people. Communicating the ironic notion of a retreat of silence got him on the radio and will likely get him at least a magazine article, if not a book contract. If he plays his cards right, he could parlay his one interesting idea into becoming the next Morgan Spurlock.

It further strikes me that, in this guy´s case at least, even not communicating is self-serving. By not speaking he turned an intriguing idea into a curious event, curious enough to get the media to pay attention to him-even though his curious event is common practice throughout the monastic tradition, for example. He´s not alone in his practice of self-serving silence, though. People keep their mouths shut for their own benefit all the time. We keep silence in mixed company to avoid sounding foolish; we keep silence in unfamiliar environments to remain anonymous or enigmatic; we keep silence in the face of injustice to avoid the inconvenience that speaking out creates.

I keep silence all the time-not that you´d notice. I have a loud laugh and a voice that carries, and when I have a captive audience that is easily impressed, I can go on for hours. But when speaking up or speaking out involves risk, I´m inclined to keep my mouth shut, because I´m risk-averse and fiercely protective of my reputation.

There is, however, a redemptive aspect of communication. Without communication we can´t reach consensus. Without communication we can´t forgive or be forgiven. Without communication we never hear or offer good news, we never call for or are called to repentance, we never experience release from the prison of our own self-centeredness. That prison is the Me-Ville I´m seeking deliverance from, and to borrow from the apostle Paul, such deliverance is not a matter of talk, not even a matter of silence, but of power. (1 Cor 4:20).