Nativity

She visits every Christmas.

She wears the robe she wore on our honeymoon, green and translucent. She wears it well, like shortly before--

It is nothing she’d have worn in public, before. But no one else can see her, so she isn’t in public, not really.

We find a time to talk alone. It’s wonderful to catch up, necessary, leaving me empty and yearning.

I’ve seen a therapist. He said the visions would fade, and that they don’t lock people up for hallucinations anymore. It never faded, but I'm not locked up, either.

I wake up cold, earth-born in winter.

(This story is written for Loren Eaton's Advent Ghosts 2009 contest. Click the link to see the rest.)

Quote of the Day from Internet Monk

Context: Michael Spenser, "The Internet Monk," is a self-described post-evangelical whose pastoral-focused blogs on various subjects of contemporary theology manage to follow in the great tradition of combining serious theology with a constant commitment to pastoral issues of real people and real suffering.

Today, he continues his recapitulation of Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, in which a demon gives instructions on how to best create apostasy. iMonk is no C.S. Lewis when it comes to diabolical wit (though his demon's ambivalent views of Dawkins and co. are hilariously dead-on; see above link.) However, I think he hits something at the core of the issue dead-on:

By the way, it’s exceptionally ironic that the creator has endowed his creatures with the capacity to be completely overwhelmed by the implications of love and justice. Apart from Jesus ***mumbling*** – excuse the use of the name- these attributes of God will drive humans to despair. Take almost any of them, but especially sovereignty, justice or love. It’s like being forced to look at the sun. (Something those of us in the spiritual world know all too well.) But Jesus makes the deity tolerable without resolving all questions. To that end, may we all be encouraged by the disappearance of teaching and preaching about Jesus. Another 50 years of what we see with Osteen, and victory is at hand.

Briefly, on Making Cliches (and Poetry)

There are, I think, many types of cliches.

One is when the author attempts to sound poetic, and doesn't control the sounds of the language enough to have a somatic effect. The result is something that looks like the worst form of cliche, that makes the author grit his teeth in frustration, but that may be a small edit away from poetry.

That is a hopeful thought.

This also, I think, explains the difference between Tolkien and Tolkienspeak. Tolkien's language in its heightened, theatricality is always one small step away from cliche. But, for those who have a taste for Tolkien and the patience to savor his words, there really is that subtle interplay of sounds that makes his writing beautiful and transporting.

LeGuin knows this, and can recreate a Tolkienesque feel while using language somewhat removed from Tolkien's. Many authors don't know this, and copy Tolkien's vocabulary without making anything interesting.

Hence, the fact that Tolkenesque fantasy is legendarily cliched.

How Language Matters

[Warning: this post about cursing contains cursing]

I wanted to like Derek Webb's "What Matters More." I really did. I find myself in agreement with a lot of Derek's premises: Christians are sinning when they ignore the effect of their speech on those they consider sinners (especially those self-identifying as homosexuals); Christians need to be marked by a profound care for the poor; the call of Christ is one that doesn't fit neatly into the culture-war mentality; "Christian" art should not necessarily mean "sanitized" art. And Derek Webb has, occasionally, managed lyrics that blow me away with their intelligence, wit, and (above all) sincere passion.

But listening to "What Matters More," I found myself profoundly underwhelmed.

The offending passage comes from the end of the song:

If I can tell what's in your heart by what comes out of your mouth
Then it sure looks to me like being straight is all it's about
It looks like being hated for all the wrong things
Like chasin' the wind while the pendulum swings
'Cause we can talk and debate until we're blue in the face
About the language and tradition that he's comin' to save
Meanwhile we sit just like we don't give a shit
About 50,000 people who are dyin' today
Tell me, brother, what matters more to you?
Tell me, sister, what matters more to you?

Provocative lyrics are well and good; but Derek's line seems to come out of nowhere. One can be, for instance, a culture warrior with no curiosity about the plight of homosexuals, and give 90% of one's income to those areas of the world where 50,000 people are dying. The line seems (and certainly there are people who have said this) to be there simply for shock value. But more to the point, it draws the wrong sort of battle lines. If you aren't with Webb on this, you're with the terrorists--oops, I mean the Pharisees who don't care about anything but the appearance of piety.

In this villainization of his audience, of course, Webb the folk singer has a long tradition. Tom Lehrer mocked it quite wittily and succinctly: "We're joining the folk song army / Everyone of us cares / We hate poverty, war and injustice / Unlike the rest of you squares." His point is, I think, valid. For all the real issues music can engage with, it has a great potential to merely redefine hip; people who buy Organic Fair Trade simply because that's what the cool people do.

But the tradition Webb claimed isn't that of folk-rock counterculture, but of the equally antagonistic Old Testament prophecy. "Israel is a whore, a pillager, a nation so far from its roots that God cannot stand it," the Old Testament prophets say. Mostly because they no longer worship God, and don't give a shit about the poor and foreigners. And, of course, they have delusions of holiness.

If one accepts a prophetic voice, however, one has to tell the truth. Yes, the term "whore" is a strong word, but it accurately describes Israel's foolish departure from godliness towards whatever shiny new cult their neighbors share.

If Webb wants to write a song about how we "don't give a shit" about poverty, that's fine. More than fine, we need such voices. But he starts sticking a line in the middle of his song on sexual identity. "If you're a conservative, you hate the poor," he seems to say. Kind of like how "if you're a liberal, you love terrorism."

Why, I wonder, couldn't he have put in something that actually made sense? How about giving his Evangelical audience a taste of its own medicine? Show it what its words really sound like? I'm no Derek Webb, but how about this as an improvement:

...Cause we can talk and debate until we're blue in the face
About the language and tradition that he's comin' to save
And all the lost Jesus Christs who are neighbors down the street
Hear just how holy we are, and how we think that they're shit
Tell me, brother, what matters more ...

At least he'd be on topic; if you take the words of Christ seriously, his is the only way to life. And if that message is being perverted to a message of hate for sinners, then great should be our judgment.

It seems a clear misstep of artistry, but it irritates me more than that. And perhaps Derek's culture-war-in-reverse language is indicative of something more. On the latest trends in Webb's music, Michael Spencer has perhaps the best summary:

..And make no mistake about it, on the “law-Gospel” continuum, this is law and prophetic denunciation, delivered with relentless consistency. No one else is saying this stuff and Webb doesn’t miss his punches. His pleasant voice betrays his very unpleasant message. We are a captive church that is now identifying with the values of our cultural captors, and it’s not pretty. Our treatment of the gay community provides a painful example. [...]

Webb is an artist, and I respect his freedom to create and I encourage you to get and listen to Stockholm Syndrome. As a Christian, I want to give Webb all the artistic room possible, and my soul needs to be jolted as much as anyone. But I’d like to pray that Webb has a Lutheran turn in the near future, and finds that speaking of law and Gospel, prophetic intensity and Christ’s love are things that can go together in art and must go together in life.

It would be a turn as well, I think, away from the culture war rhetoric (both left and right) that requires one's enemy to be caricatured and hated, and towards the love, peace and grace of Christ.

McKinley and the Poetry of Coziness

There are two authors who have earned a place, literally, next to Tolkien on my bookshelf: Ursula K. LeGuin and Robin McKinley. (LeGuin is to the left and McKinley to the right, if you must know, but any political significance is purely accidental.)

My choice of the two authors is somewhat intentionally subversive. Both are women, first of all, whereas Tolkien famously included just about three female characters (out of about 17 leads) in the entire Lord of the Rings and virtually none in The Hobbit. (Galadriel and co. get somewhat better treatment in the Silmarillion, but that is neither here nor there.) Moreover, both are authors who in different ways have actively asserted their femininity; most notably neither is the Hawk that Tolkien was, and if they celebrate courage it is far more likely to be an introspective, Frodo-like pacifistic persistance than the Norse courage-at-life's-end of an Aragorn or Gimli or Theoden or Beren or Turin.

But mostly, they both simply understand (and deploy) the power of words and legends to make life, ease pain, and build imagined communities. There is a richness in the best moments of stories that doesn't simply represent life, but re-awakens us to the wonder of existence. If Oscar Wilde preferred the beautiful lie to the ugly truth, both books seem to tie the two inextribly together.

While LeGuin ranges far and wide in search for her inspiration, covering seemingly every possible culture and perspective in an attempt to embrace all in her liberal-minded poetry, McKinley consistently stays determinedly at home. Her books are, without exception, about coziness.

This doesn't mean that they are always feel-good, or that they ever fit into the Hallmark-sentiment mode. She manages to frankly and explicitly deal with topics ranging from purely soulless vampires and dystopian regimes to the trauma of early-life incest and rape, and she has no problem leaving characters with continual emotional and physical wounds. Yet the center of each story is not the physical or spiritual war and anguish that forms the heart of the revenge tales and world-saving adventures that form the bulk of post-Tolkien fantasy. It is, instead, the quiet desire for peace and home and family and, above all, the comfort of being a human in a world that miraculously contains other humans.

And so it makes sense that her first and tenth books would both be reworkings of Beauty and the Beast, a fairy tale about being separated from the home you love, about cultivating something safe and beautiful and living in the midst of a dead, monstrous, masculine domain. And while historians and literary critics can (and, I would argue, should) talk until they're blue in the face about how the story represents the psychological experience (and idealized) of medieval marriage, which after all sent very young women into strange castles to live under the alien rule and control of strange men, McKinley finds something that seems much more primal in the story. It becomes an allegory not for some lives but for all life, lived in the cozy corners between the harsh inhumanities of war or taxes or job markets or statistics. It is the wonder of community, and affection, and things that don't go as poorly as they maybe should for someone who has the persistence to keep hope and love alive.

But really McKinley puts it best herself, when Rose Daughter's protagonist, Beauty, finds herself encountering for the first time an enormous glittering mural on the roof of the insubstantial and alien mansion of the Beast:

"But--no--splendid is not the right word. They are splendid, but they are--they are so friendly. Oh dear!" she said, and looked up at him, half laughing, half embarrassed. "How childish that sounds! But so many of the beautiful things in the rooms beneath us--push you away--tell you to stand back--order you to admire and be abashed. These--these draw you in. They make you want to stay and--and have them for company. Yes, that's right. But I--I am still making them sound like a--like--sort of comfortable, though, am I not? Like a bowl of warm bread and milk and an extra pillow, and that's not it at all. They are not comfortable. Indeed, I feel that if I lived with them for long, I should have to learn to be ... better, or greater, myself. If this Queen of the Heavenly Mountain looked down at me from my bedroom wall every day, soon I should have to go looking for that path to her domain. I wouldn't be able to help myself."

It isn't the poetry of arrival, nor of anguished and fevered search. But it is the poetry of life, and of the coziness that comes when the world is harsh and one has found a nook in which is shelter and fire to keep off the chill and rain--and a human to help out and offer company. It is pure escapism, if you will, but it is escapism in the best sense of the word. It is escapism that offers but a rest and a gentle stop, and that (like Tolkien's Shire) also asks to be used as a stopping off point for the greater tasks of living. And a reminder, that every day we encounter far more than we will ever dream of in our philosophies, and that the cozy details of life are not unworthy of serious celebration.