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).

Oh, Canada

I had a childhood fascination with Canada. I'm not sure why. My aunt lived in Prince George, British Columbia (PCBC) for a good chunk of my youth, and I like my aunt quite a lot, so that may have had something to do with it. I know I liked the Canadian flag; it had a simple, monochromatic elegance that appealed to me, and a maple leaf still strikes me as an endearing icon. I used to hang the Canadian flag in my bedroom, which I suppose might have called my patriotism into question back in the day. I knew who Pierre Trudeau was--the prime minister of Canada, not the creator of the comic strip Doonesbury. I celebrated the notion of socialized medicine. I subscribed to the comic book Alpha Flight, the serial drama of a team of superheroes whose exploits were underwritten by the Canadian government. I owned a tape by Glass Tiger--the band who recorded "Don't Forget Me When I'm Gone." Yeah, I had a thing for Canada.

You'd think such a fascination would translate into a real comprehension of the country, but you'd be wrong. I trip up on the geography of the place, and I couldn't name the current PM. My spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak, eh? Sorry.

Last night my ignorant appreciation for Canada in the abstract was on display as I met with the sales team from Cook Canada--the folks who will be selling Deliver Us from Me-Ville in the great white north. You might expect that we would meet over a meal of salmon and back-bacon and Sasquatch jerky, but you would be wrong. We met at a table for ten at P. F. Chang, not far from my house. I don't know about them, but I had a great time, even though I chose my seat poorly and didn't get to interact much at all with about half the table. I suspect I learned more about how a sales team that spends much of their time on the road apart from each other cultivates a sense of togetherness than I did about how their government's prescription drug program works, but that in itself was a great experience: I learned from the Cook sales team a little more than I knew before about what makes for good friendship.

In Deliver Us from Me-Ville the trajectory of the discussion is, roughly, from the kingdom of self to the kingdom of God, from "Me-Ville" to "Thee-Ville," if you're feeling cheeky. Along the way we come to what might be called "We-Ville," that place where we seek the security of one another. It's an important mile-marker, because God is drawing us into the community of his people and establishing his kingdom as a fellowship. But it's also a temptation toward idolatry; in the perceived absence of a God we can't see, we make God's church our surrogate, and inevitably we are disillusioned when a church that can't bear such a burden lets something drop.

Bonhoeffer says that God in his grace "speedily shatters such dreams," that our disillusionment is part of our spiritual development. On the far side of such trauma, if we keep moving, we can come to recognize that true friends take friendship seriously but don't take themselves or one another too seriously. We leave room for one another to be ourselves, and we keep our eyes trained on the invisible God out in front, who still has a destination in mind for us.

It's All About Me-Ville

This week, everything I've seen and done has reminded me of Deliver Us from Me-Ville. This week I joined a small group of authors for a round of manuscript Bible study (exploring a passage from the Bible without the distractions of chapter numbers, verse numbers or other indicators of context) looking at John 1:35-51, a passage from the Gospel of John that figures prominently in my chapter on community. This week in my free time I corresponded with a few churches and bookstores about doing something related to the book with them. This week I heard from a bookselling group in Canada about the possibility of getting together to discuss the book. Last night I attended the DVD release party for Living Waters, a play I was in last year that wound up being source material for the introduction to the book. I'm on the precipice of becoming that obnoxious author who can't shut up about his book, who won't leave his poor publicity department or his unwitting audiences alone. Now that the book's release is only a few weeks away, it is, apparently, all about Me-Ville.

I find that funny--I'm not going to lie to you. My friends in publishing every so often talk about the "level 5 author," the author who, like the level 5 leader in the book Good to Great, is wildly enthusiastic about the task at hand but shockingly evasive when it comes to taking the credit for success. The level 5 leader is marked by humility and commitment, and as such the level 5 leader, or author or actor or plumber or whatever, is about as easy to find as Sasquatch or the source of that weird smell in my office.

This week, however, I've also been reading and discussing Tolkien's Ordinary Virtues, a journey through the Lord of the Rings in search of character qualities to emulate, written by a friend of mine. The section we discussed this week is about leadership, but it includes such odd topics as mirth and submission. The interesting thing about Tolkien's books and Mark Smith's treatment is the awareness of both that virtues are not necessarily housed where we might expect to find them. In Tolkien's creation, kings regularly need correction, and Hobbits often prove to be heroes. And yet Hobbits themselves often fall short, and kings regularly prove their mettle. The books are about journeys both physical and developmental--an entire cast of characters, an entire universe, really, moving awkwardly and slowly but resolutely from where they are to a better place, one that improves their own lot while serving the far greater good.

I simply can't claim to be a level 5 author. But I suppose I can strive toward becoming a level 5 author, as long as people cut me some slack: I imagine it will be a slow, awkward process for all of us.

I'm My Own Copilot

Today I saw, on the back of a vanity car, surrounding a vanity plate, a slogan that seemed particularly contextually appropriate:

It's all about me.

I remember an ad campaign from some time ago in which a practical couple drove a practical car around the city, passing flashy cars populated by people who shouted their idiosyncracies through megaphones: from the sportscar, the bleach-blonde woman declared "I crave attention!" From the oversized sport-utility vehicle, the blow-dried, manicured businessman proclaimed "I have a small . . ." The couple, meanwhile, have branded themselves: in a world of vanity, they are pragmatic and sensible, and fiercely proud of it.

I guess people identify with their cars, and some go so far as to make statements with their cars. I do this myself: the Z from my spandex bodysuit shows through the window of my hatchback, helping me distinguish my Hyundai from every other, and letting people know that there's a geek of the highest order within walking distance of the parking lot. But it strikes me today, having seen this car from behind, that we inhabit a culture predisposed toward the exaltation of the self.

Moving People

I'm just back from a cruise, one that took us from Galveston, Texas, to Cozumel and Progreso on the Yucatan Peninsula, and back to Galveston. You might say I ate my way through the Gulf of Mexico; that's certainly what my scale seems to be saying.

It struck me on this cruise that tourism is, to a great extent, a people-moving industry. American Airlines moved us through its check-in terminal, the security lines, the gate, the air, the baggage claim. We went wherever they told us or their retractible line designator directed us. (Continental Airlines, incidentally, moved us from Texas back home, although American moved us to Continental, over the course of ten hours in the Houston airport.)

Carnival Cruise Lines took over from baggage claim and moved us by bus to Galveston and by a labyrinthine passage of retractable line designators and gangways onto the ship. They moved us up and down, fore and aft, through an impossibly large though comparatively small cruise ship (the "Ecstasy") so that we'd be out of their hair while they cleaned portions of the ship (including our teensy-weensy cabin) and out of each other's hair during densely populated events such as dinner or theatrical revues. They moved us through buffet lines and beverage stations, directing our paths inevitably toward the shops and casino. They deposited us on the shores of Cozumel and Progreso right where the cab drivers and street vendors wanted us to land. From there we were moved from the pier to the beach, or from the pier to the ruins of Chichen Itza, depending on the port of call. We went, as usual, wherever they moved us.

On the cruise I began reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen, a gift from a friend I'm currently editing. I wonder if it should be surprising to me, given the context of my reading, that I identified more with the cattle and chickens in the book than the people who were harvesting the corn or raising the livestock. Even those farmers and ranchers, however, are being moved--not by the tourism industry but by a market economy built on a shaky foundation: a cult of perpetual and exponentially increasing consumption. The market demands ever more and ever cheaper product, so the producers systematically strip out ecological complexity in favor of mass-producible monocultures; the government and industry sponsor processes that allow for production and distribution at an enormous scale; consumers adapt their eating habits to embrace, as the author suggests, a diet constructed largely of corn and petroleum.

Tom Sine, in his book The New Conspirators, characterizes the global econonmy as a "ship of fools," and I think now, on the far side of this cruise, I get the analogy. We've happily ceded control of our destiny to forces we've unwittingly created. We go where our free market direct us; we do what our corn tells us.

Lessons from Odd Jobs

L. L. Barkat, whose book Stone Crossings I'm about halfway through, and marveling at the soul of it, memed me with the following instructions.

1. Write about the Strangest Job I Ever Had and tell what I learned from it.

2. Link to other "Lessons from Odd Jobs" posts.

3. Tag my post "Lessons from Odd Jobs".

4. Tag other bloggers, in or out of the HC network.

5. Link back to the Lessons from Odd Jobs page and and email this month’s host at “Marcus AT highcallingblogs DOT com”.

This is one tough meme! I'm not sure which was harder, coming up with the job to write about or syncing up with the other stuff. But here goes.

My dream odd job would be the odd job prophesied by Cameron for Ferris Bueller: "Fry cook on Venus." That's a dream for two reasons: (1) I only want to do it so I can live out my fantasy of being Ferris Bueller and (b) there are no fry cooks on Venus--that we know of . . .

But my oddest job ever, in a long list of unremarkable jobs, I suppose is the summer I spent reviewing legal documents out of the archive files of a garbage dump. I was a contract employee for a special project involving a waste management's firm compliance with federal law or something like that. Every day there'd be a new roomful of dusty, smelly, bankers boxes full of backdated contracts and other legal documents. We would sift through each file looking for noteworthy documents.

Now, that's not a terribly odd job. The odd thing about it was the vibe established among the workers. We had a quirky assortment of folks there--the severely withdrawn buttoned-up mouse-eared lady; the middle-aged gay lapsed Catholic who followed me home and wanted to show me his translations of medieval masses; the shift supervisor who really wanted to be a montage artist and who had eloped to Peru a year earlier; the Jesus-freak (not me) who tried to get me to join his cult; the fish-out-of-water quiet religious nut (that's me) who wanted to talk to people about God but only occasionally managed to even talk; the lunchtime fishermen who were smarter than any of us but also fundamentally the most unlikely to succeed. We were managed not by The Office's Michael Scott but by Michael Scott's superior/dominatrix, Jan, a young MBA with ambition but perhaps poor judgment, who had somehow wound up in an isolated office building making sure a bunch of weirdos made their numbers for grimy documents reviewed. She was attentive the way a manager should be attentive, but I remember her rubbing her temples quite a lot.

I learned from that odd job that people--from the most to the least socially adept--are odd, and that while people's oddnesses often subvert their attempts at meaningful work and relationships, there's a sense in which people's oddnesses are what makes them interesting and even endearing. I also learned that oddness and competence are unrelated. I learned by observation that people management is a tough job and doesn't afford the people manager much downtime. I learned that some people are way too into their own belief system, and that some people are way too wary of belief in anything beyond themselves. I learned that even dirty work has dignity, and that even work that is ultimately futile should be given dignity. I learned more than I would ever expect to learn about waste management, and I learned that, all things considered, I'd rather be a writer.

OK. I'll tag Elaine and Allen, Rebecca and Al.

On Death and New Life

Right around this time sixty-five years ago, Thomas Merton’s brother John Paul died at sea after his warplane crashed. I read of his death in Seven-Storey Mountain, the memoir of Merton’s early life. Thomas read about it in a telegram after his Lenten cloister ended at the abbey.

I knew someone died in Seven-Storey Mountain because I had flipped to the end and seen evidence of “his death”; I didn’t, however, discover the antecedent for “his” until much later. I was sad to read of it, because John Paul was, in the writing of his brother at least, innocent.

I have never lost a loved one to war, and I’ve never witnessed war close up. That’s not the case for many in my country, those who came here to escape war, those whose loved ones engage in military service, those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I suppose that technically I have grieved for them on days in which we commemorate our war dead or on days when I’ve heard a compelling report of the suffering of the innocents. But I have never grieved the loss of a loved one to violence over which someone somewhere had some degree of control. I’ve never felt the direct sting of the struggle of nations. I am, I suppose you could say, a different kind of innocent—the kind that’s more naive than guiltless.

Before Merton recounted the death of his brother, he recounted his brother’s baptism, hinting that he had an inkling that the occasion of John Paul’s impromptu baptism might be their last moments together. I’m told that soldiers sometimes make serious, life-altering commitments just before shipping out, and John Paul made two: he married a girl, and he converted to Christ. Thomas wrote of the baptism with the kind of nervous excitement you imagine an older brother bringing to such an occasion for his younger brother. He crammed a years-long catechism into a couple of days. He advocated for his brother’s baptism to his superiors. He geeked out over the things that were particularly important to him though not particularly relevant to baptism. You can picture the barely-contained zeal to convert, set against the shucksy simplicity of a wet-behind-the-ears younger sibling. These two were no strangers to the vicissitudes of life, and in a real sense—judging at least from Thomas’s memoir—they didn’t have much of a life together, but in the end they acted to type as adult brothers often act: enthused, endeared, mildly paternalistic, oddly clingy.

And then John Paul was gone, only the latest loved one whom Thomas lost. I often wonder as I read this book why it created such a stir in its day—it’s so Catholic, so East Coast, so personalized, so, so, so. But even as I wonder such things I find myself envisioning the Kentucky winter that melts into spring, speaking my peace in conversations about faith, grieving the loss of a mother, a father, a brother.

Over the course of writing Deliver Us from Me-Ville I’ve taken to thinking of Thomas Merton as one of two patron saints of the Greatest Generation, the generation that persevered through World War II. Merton is the one who survived; Bonhoeffer is the one who did not. In reading Merton’s memoir I think I better understand—despite all the uniquenesses that distinguish his story from any other—my grandparents and the world they bequeathed to us.

Jesus Christ Is Risen Today--Allelujah!

From "Ah, Holy Jesus":

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee,
think on thy pity and thy love unswerving,
not my deserving.

My Song Is Love Unknown

O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take frail flesh, and die? . . .

O, my Friend, my Friend indeed,
Who at my need his life did spend.

Good Friday

From The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton:

Do you know what Love is? Here is Love, here on this Cross, here is Love, suffering these nails, these thorns, that scourge loaded with lead, smashed to pieces, bleeding to death because of your sins and bleeding to death because of people that will never know Him, and never think of Him and will never remember His Sacrifice. Learn from Him how to love God and how to love men! Learn of this Cross, this Love, how to give your life away to Him. . . .

See, see Who God is, see the glory of God, going up to Him out of this incomprehensible and infinite Sacrifice in which all history begins and ends, all individual lives begin and end, in which every story is told, and finished, and settled for joy or for sorrow: the one point of reference for all the truths that are outside of God, their center, their focus: Love! . . .

Do you know what Love is? You have never known the meaning of Love, never, you who have always drawn all things to the center of your own nothingness. Here is Love in this chalice full of Blood, Sacrifice, mactation. Do you not know that to love means to be killed for glory of the Beloved? And where is your love? Where is now your Cross, if you say you want to follow Me, if you pretend you love Me?"

Is the "Friend" of My Internet Social Utility My "Friend"?

Everyone who populates Facebook eventually faces the same dilemma: whether to accept or ignore a friend request. I very regularly have conversations with my Facebook friends who are also my "Loud Time" friends or my "publishing industry" friends or my "family" friends about this dilemma. Because we all eventually face it, we all have what you might call "provisional policies" regarding Facebook friendship.

The thing is, we don't necessarily have fully formed or fully articulated provisional policies, and so our inevitable forced decision creates an inevitable anxiety--every time. I've recently watched two friends cringe as they've hovered their cursor nervously over the "Ignore" button, wanting to dispense with a potential "friend" they've never even met but feeling queasy about it. Agnieszka Tennant wrote a very insightful piece about the experience for Christianity Today last fall.

But Agnieszka's article didn't solve the problem for everybody, at least in part because everybody processes the word friend differently. The word carries a peculiar weight for each of us, and so when someone out of the blue wants to drop that weight on us--whether or not that's what they're really asking or offering--we each face the uncomfortable dilemma of deciding whether to invite that extra burden on ourselves.

I don't generally cringe the way many of my friends cringe when they entertain an unwanted Facebook advance, and I suppose it's time I explored why. The main reason, I think, is that when I entered into Facebook I perceived that I was entering into a new social realm, and as such I'd be meeting people there that I haven't met and might never meet elsewhere. Facebook is a place I reside, so to speak, and so I might as well get to know my neighbors.

When I first started blogging, one of my earliest posts had to do with "accidental friendships"--the relationships we find ourselves thrust into. That post more than many has reasserted itself in my memory over the years as I've entered into new social realms--a new neighborhood, a new church, new voluntary organizations and, yes, even Facebook. It strikes me again and again that, for example, when I applied for, interviewed for, begged for and eventually accepted the invitation to join the company I work for, I was consequently signing away my right to determine which of my coworkers I would talk to. I couldn't determine that I would open my door to folks in the editorial department but leave it closed to folks in the business department. I couldn't greet people my age and snub people the age of my parents. I couldn't even avoid interactions with people I suspected were just trying to use me or people I found personally unpleasant. Part of signing on to my job meant signing on to the people who I would be working with. Eleven years later I'm closer to some than others, but I'd happily count them all among my "friends."

I'm reminded of the story of Adam and Eve, who set the bar for how human beings meaningfully relate to each other since they were the only human beings they knew. We most often read the introduction of Adam to Eve romantically:

Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

The man said,
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman, '
for she was taken out of man."

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

I think it's fair to read that passage through the filter of romance. This is, after all, the first marriage, and Jesus himself uses it in his teaching to sanctify marriage as a uniquely special relationship. But I often wonder how much of Adam's effusion can be attributed not to his visceral reaction to the perfectly naked woman in front of him but to the realization that his loneliness has come to an end. It's the notion that "it is not good for the man to be alone," after all, that led to his introduction to Eve. Eve was, in a sense, the Edenic equivalent of a Facebook "friend request": and Adam could hardly ignore her.

So I tend to think of friend requests through Facebook not as requests per se, more as invitations. Friendship is the coin of the realm of a social utility, after all, and there's a sense in which I need all the friends I can get.

I recognize, of course, that there are likely fundamental flaws and enormous gaps in how I've approached this question, and I'm not trying to convince anyone that (a) their approach to Facebook friend requests is wrong or (b) my approach to Facebook friend requests is better. I'm really just trying to more fully articulate my own provisional policy, and in a larger sense, I suppose, to explore the dynamics of virtual friendship. So I invite your comments, critical or otherwise.