Vacation: the dark yawning pit of destruction

I took six books with me for a two-week vacation. Since I also took my four children, we have a clear indication that I understand neither math nor children. This may also explain why I found myself, through a series of events with which I won’t bore you, driving a 14-passenger van into Washington, D.C. with three mothers and eleven children. That’s right, I was acting out my own version of Big Love, which is a lifestyle I simply cannot understand. It takes all my time and energy to disappoint one woman on a regular basis.

There I was nonetheless, dropping off my temporary brood at the National Building Museum to see the really amazing Lego exhibit. Then I set out to find parking. This is because I am an idiot who, in addition to understanding neither math nor vacations, has no spatial reasoning skills whatsoever. So around and around the Building Museum and its adjacent blocks I drove, waiting for the Parking Fairy to wave her magical traffic cone and materialize a spot especially for me, the guy who was sick the day they taught parallel parking in driver’s ed.

Did I mention that the National Building Museum is near Judiciary Square? The place crawling with armed local and federal officers? Let that picture sink in: me, a relatively tanned man with a goatee, irritated look on his face, circling the courthouse again and again in a large unmarked van. An ugly look from a guy with a big sidearm, the third time I circled past him, told me to take my quest elsewhere.

Eventually I tried a parking garage. The thing about parking garages is that they have low ceilings. They warn you about this with hanging bars that have the maximum height painted on them in big black letters. To be even more helpful, they suspend these bars at that very height. This particular garage, however, suspended its not-so-helpful height warning bar at the bottom of its steep, narrow entrance. Once I got the van down there, and heard the ominous thump-thump-thump of that bar tumbling over the top of this too-tall van, there was simply no place to turn around.

I broke into a sweat as I leaned over the steering wheel to scan the ceiling for pinch points, driving 0.0001 miles per hour to the great consternation of the motorcade behind me, praying God would reveal to me a place to turn around the van, wondering just what it would cost when I had to reimburse my friends for having the top of their van cut off with blowtorches and dragged out of there.

I got the van backed up, but the exit bar wouldn’t raise high enough, so I had to lean out the window and give it an extra boost as I inched out. More thump-thump-thumping as I went through. At the top of the narrow exit my sigh of relief was cut short as a woman in a Jaguar turned in, under the impression that she was driving one of those trucks that pulls motor homes, rather than a slender overpriced hunk of underperforming polished metal. No kidding, she had three feet of space to her right, which meant she needed my van to be about one foot narrower.

She gave me a look like she wanted me to suck in my gut and let her through. There was no way I was going back down into that hole again. So I held up one of those six books I never finished and waved it at her. “Lady,” I said, “I can sit here all day.”

She backed out in a huff. Eventually I found an open lot about a hundred miles away, and trudged to the museum, cursing the idiot who said we ought to go there first. But it turned out to be worth it, which is probably true of most of life, even when its details irritate the jujubees out of us.

I’ll probably turn this into a post-hoc travelogue for the next few days. Because it’s cheaper than therapy, which is often what many of us need after a vacation with family.

Loss

I’m on a top-secret mission, storing up little pieces of missives to share with you later, but I wanted to pass along this touching piece by Elizabeth Scalia, in First Things. Here’s an excerpt:

A neighbor of mine works as a therapist for Alzheimer’s patients, both high-functioning and low. She recently described one sixty-ish daily visitor. “He is a saint. Every day he brings his lunch and eats with his wife. She doesn’t recognize him, so every day she is meeting a new friend. When we told him he needn’t come so often he said, ‘But she is my bride; if I did not see her, I would miss her.’”

It’s something we can only possibly bear from the suffering, I think, this notion that suffering carries with it blessings, or at least lessons, or at the very least something other than blind purposelessness. But it’s something we desperately need to know.

HT: Ed Chinn

Bread

One of my favorite writers, the grace-filled Ann Voskamp, humbles me with the gentle strength of parenting in her home. Read the tradition her husband brought to their table.

Graveside

Some of you may appreciate my latest World blog post, about the rising trend among cemeteries to make themselves into amusement parks, which I contrast with our souls’ need to remain mindful of death.

Spot of grace

I stepped out onto the wet sidewalk this morning and looked up at the sky and tried to see whether the grey clouds were dissipating or gathering tighter, because sometimes on a dark day I just want to know whether the light is spilling in or fading away. I looked up to heaven and a single, thick drop of rain smacked my forehead, a blessing or an insult or maybe both.

There was no more rain, just that one drop. I let it stay, let the water run along my brow and down my cheek, and I walked with scraping feet. That drop was to me a baptism and communion and a kiss all in one. I don’t remember my baptism, and it’s been so long since I’ve had communion, or even a kiss on my forehead, for that matter, and so I want to believe that last drop hurtled earthward with the sole purpose of striking me as I looked up for it, smack between the eyes, which is where I have to be hit with something before it sinks in.

It’s a spot of grace that any of us wants, a single cool drop when we feel parched in our souls, like anything that might have grown there has withered. This grace in the small things has been for me the chanted liturgy, the sleeping sighs of my children, that spot of rain just when I am asking God if he is still there, if he can hear me, if he cares. A kiss on the brow or spit in the face, either are better than the silence, aren’t they?

Good opinions

Ryan Streeter has a nice discussion of a recent Rasmussen poll, which finds that Americans have low opinions of Congress, journalists, and CEOs, but high opinions of pastors and small business owners. I’m not as confident as Ryan that this reflects something fundamental about American support for faith and entrepreneurial capitalism; it may just as well be the case that we simply feel good about feeling good about preachers and shopkeepers.

If we consider the rate of new business start-ups and church attendance, meanwhile, we find that both appear to be in historical decline. While Americans express good opinions of small businesses and preachers, we also seem decreasingly likely to want anything to do with them. Perhaps it’s the cowboy effect: hagiographies of Old West heroes, followed by traveling cowboy shows and then cowboy films, all took off in the wake of the cowboy’s great day in America.

Still, the fact that Americans seem to hold the ideas of business ownership and church leadership in high regard is encouraging, in light of what we see made of them, especially the clergy, in popular entertainment media.

Good intentions

The University of Virginia has adopted a tough new policy that requires student criminals to self-report arrests. In other news, local fraternities are being nicely asked to send flower bouquets to every co-ed who finds herself taken advantage of on their premises, professors are admonished to report to their students the number of times they skim a term paper without really reading it, and monkeys are politely encouraged to fly.

You say potato, I say clear your plate or else

From recent research into childhood nutrition: “Children will come to love vegetables more after they are exposed to activities employing multimedia and personalities they can identify with. . .”

Or, you can put veggies in front of the spoiled little wretches every morning, noon, and night until they get so hungry that they’re thankful for what they’ve been given. They won’t come to love vegetables, but they’ll sure come to love a full belly over an empty one.

But I’m no scientist.

“She felt justified in getting anything at all back that she could, money or anything else, as if she had once owned the earth and been dispossessed of it. She couldn’t look at anything steadily without wanting it, and what provoked her most was the thought that there might be something valuable hidden near her, something she couldn’t see.”     (Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor)

Refine this

Terry Nichols, the terrorist whose twisted little mind told him to fight government oppression by blowing up babies and postal clerks, is suing officials at the federal prison where he resides, apparently not counting it so much a blessing that he has yet to join mass murderer Tim McVeigh in a bunkhouse in hell.

Nichols’s complaint? It seems he wants more whole grains and less refined foods. Oh, and unpeeled fruits. Following in the footsteps of his Al-Qaeda brethren at Guantanamo, Nichols went on a hunger strike, and prison officials gave him I.V. nutrition. Perhaps the glucose wasn’t free-range glucose, but instead that overprocessed, Wal-Mart kind of glucose. Or perhaps instead of an I.V., the prison doctor should have prescribed a swift kick in the pants, however likely that might be to cause Nichols brain damage.

I’m all for presumption of innocence before guilt is proven, and for humane treatment of guilty-as-sin prisoners. But I think we need a re-examination of the social contract here. At some point, perhaps when the number of your victims requires a football field for burial, you give up the right to any nourishment beyond a daily bowl of gruel, and anything that comes from your piehole other than “I’m so sorry for being a murdering sack of monkey poo” gets you a slap in the jaw.

But I’m a conservative troglodyte that way.

The NCAA’s hypocrisy

Here’s a shocking bit of news: rather than go with calls for coaches to have their performance evaluations tied to the graduation rate of their players, the NCAA has opted for a metric that sounds valuable, but instead simply measures how good a school is at making sure its players stay eligible to play.

Which we probably don’t need to measure, because we can rest assured that no matter how ill-served some athletes are by the schools that claim to care for them, they will always by given every possible opportunity to help their teams win.

The NCAA claims it wants a “real-time” measure like this, rather than graduation rates, which have a six-year lag. This is silly on its face, given that little has been done for years about coaches like Bob Huggins, for example, who rarely graduates players. Former NCAA coach Kelvin Sampson didn’t graduate a single University of Oklahoma player for six years and received no scrutiny until he got tripped up by rules governing what money players can receive.

The NCAA has plenty of historical data, in other words, to indicate that some coaches (and their schools, and the governing trustees of those schools) are taking advantage of young people who might have a chance of earning degrees in places where sports are not the only priority. But these coaches win games, and these schools are powerhouses, and so none of us should hold our breath waiting for the NCAA to start behaving as if it cares about student athletes more than it cares about revenue.

Duly noted

Isaac is standing at my hip as I make omelets. He’s giving advice. “Dad,” he says, “if you have to sneeze when you’re cooking, turn your head.”

I suppose that’s helpful, but I can’t help but be a little offended that he thinks I need to hear this.

What remains

Some of you may appreciate my latest Worldmag post, on cremation, among other things.

Sample size matters

Spokesman for British retailer Tesco: “We do not think this skirt is inappropriate and neither do the parents we’ve talked to.”

Except, of course, the many parents who are so troubled by the hem-hiked mini-skirts you’re marketing to nine year-olds that they feel compelled to protest, just as they did when you tried to sell padded bikini tops to little girls.

So other than normal parents in possession of an ounce of common sense, nobody seems to be offended. To think, this was once the land of Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher.

Equal is as equal does

Here’s an interesting little wrinkle for companies: new Labor Department regulatory interpretations indicate that a same-sex couple working for the same employer can take more time to watch over a sick child in its care, under the provisions of the Family Medical Leave Act, than can a husband and wife in the same situation.

To heck with parity, let’s just do for the whole hog, shall we?

Here’s your diploma and your AARP card

Most college students now take six years to earn a degree. The silver lining? Perhaps we’ll begin to break down the notion that most people should go to college, and come up with a less expensive mechanism for companies — many of which have to essentially train their new hires from scratch anyway — to weed out the complete misfits.

On the virtue of not being qualified

“Orville Wright did not have a pilot’s license.”

HT: Ed Chinn

Shaming

Local officials in Florida fret over what to do about rotten teenagers infesting a local park. One seems to hit upon the right idea in a rhetorical plea: “”What are we going to do, other than sending their parents back to school and teaching them how to be a parent?”

Close, but it puts too much faith in education professionals. Instead, how about every time one of the thugs is arrested, you put his ugly mug on a billboard, alongside that of his parents? The billboard could be labeled: “Crime’s Family Tree.”

The sad thing is that while it might have made a difference a generation ago, even this kind of public shaming probably doesn’t matter any more.

UPDATE: Just saw this particularly nauseating example of criminally incompetent parenting in Florida.

Little emperors

Modern parenting, says U.K. psychologist Aric Sigman, is yielding a generation of “little emperors.” He no doubt acquired his perspective through years of education and research, whereas I reached the same conclusion after one too many visits to McDonald’s.

Breathe easier?

I’m always leery of research by people who desperately, desperately want a certain answer. So when I hear shouts of joy over a new study running counter to previous studies in its conclusion that putting small children in daycare has no adverse effects, I develop a more skeptical eye than usual.

Which I know is pretty skeptical. But still.

The thought behind the study is wise, it seems — rather than simply comparing small children in daycare to those who stay with their mothers, consider whether some children in the former camp in fact demonstrate no differences with the control group, and then assess whether they have commonalities. Doing so, the researchers claim, reveals that when mothers put their babies in very high-quality daycare centers, earn significantly high levels of income, and spend considerable time in their off hours engaging with their babies, there are no adverse effects.

“Babies don’t suffer when mothers return to work,” The Guardian all but shouts from the rooftops. “Millions of working mothers,” claims Motoko Rich at the New York Times blog, can breathe a sigh of relief.

Really?

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Millions of harried working mothers should breathe easier about the heart-wrenching decision to give their babies over to daycare company employees, just so long as they take a considerable portion of whatever precious time they have left to cook and clean and manage the bills and pick up the dry cleaning and try to find a half-second to themselves, and spend it on deeply engaging their babies, to make up for the hours they’ve been apart.

Further, they should be sure to get the kinds of jobs held by women who are friends with women who write for The Guardian and The New York Times, which I’ll venture to say is not waitressing or bus driving or shoe selling, all so they can earn enough money to pay top-notch professionals to do with their children what most of them in their hearts would rather be doing themselves.

Breathe easier indeed. The people who can breathe easier are the ones for whom this question of daycare is not an open research endeavor, but an ideological commitment.

Pathological

Given the propensity of communist dictatorships over the decades to lock up dissidents in mental institutions, and of the Chinese government in particular to aggressively hunt down dissidents engaged in state-disapproved internet activity, I can’t help but look askance at a new study of Chinese teenagers purporting to diagnose “pathological internet use.”

It’s a plausible hypothesis, and the researchers (one in China, the other with a Chinese last name working in Australia) seem qualified, but I’m wondering whether the Chinese government funded this research, and further, whether it occurred to the researchers that their findings might be used to justify suppression of dissidents. By all means scientists should be above politics, but not so far above that they fail to see how their work might be politicized.

Conduct this study in Australia, or the U.S., or even Hong Kong. Doing it in China suggests willful ignorance or indifference to the harm it may cause.

Children with head lice, says the American Academy of Pediatrics, should not be kept out of school. They’re not a medical threat, say the experts. I wonder how quickly, if any school decides to adopt the AAP’s more tolerant outlook, we’ll learn that this effort to reduce missed school days actually backfires, as the incidence of head lice spreads, necessitating a greater number of intensive cleanings and in some cases doctor visits, which translate into more missed school by many more children, including those who don’t get head lice, but whose parents keep them home once word of an outbreak gets out. If only we lived in a world without unintended consequences.

Awaiting hope

Somewhere between a speed too slow to get killed and too fast to get away, a grasshopper found himself clinging to my windshield wiper. He wrapped his thin wire legs around black metal and held on with that baleful, narrow-headed look grasshoppers have. I kept waiting for him to let go, to tumble and topple into my truck’s wake until the turbulence subsided, until he knew ground from sky again and found himself a hundred yards or a half mile from home, feeling reborn or let down or just plain grasshopper lucky.

But he held on, and as I went faster he worked his striated legs and turned until he faced the wind, his antennae bent backward in tight arcs, his tapered body quivering. Then he turned again, and crawled behind the wiper, making it his shelter. He hid behind that long piece of metal and rubber, and I hid behind my windshield, and together we flew down the highway.

I watched that grasshopper hunkered down against the violent wind and it occurred to me that I had intended to write about hope and love and I really just can’t bring myself to say anything about them that doesn’t sound false, that doesn’t seem more ridiculous with each pretty word. First there was love and then there was sacrifice and then there was the church to explain these things and even give us a bible to help with the explaining, which is where we read of faith, hope, and love. We read that the greatest of these is love just as the beginning of these is love, and I realize that I don’t really know much at all about what love means or how to live it or how even not to kill it.

And if you can’t keep from destroying the love that finds its way to you, then you don’t have much hope at all, do you? Not here or in any life to follow. But I’m stubborn and so I wrote and wrote and wrote about hope, stacked word upon word, because this is what you are supposed to do when you write about the church you have found and the faith that has found you, you are supposed to write next about hope and then about love and at the end of it you are supposed to say something that means Something, if only to whisper it back to yourself, because while most people first make sense and then they say it with words, sometimes the best you can do is say words until you come to your senses.

You can’t admit hopelessness. This is why you lie, when someone asks how you are doing, because this is your sin, to have no hope, and if you confess it they will try to fix you, they will try to get you to manufacture it before their eyes, because no one knows how to grieve with anyone any more, raised as we are in a fix-things-up culture. This is why you lie and say that things are okay, or hard but passable, or peachy damned keen. You are not supposed to look at the arc of your life, and come to the conviction that it will only get worse from here, that at best you are fighting a holding action, that you are hunkered down like that grasshopper for only as long as your quaking arms will hold you, that the wind will not stop, that the spirit of the air claws and grabs until it takes what it wants.

Some days I haven’t a scrap of hope, but I have the hope of hope, or perhaps something like faith that hope will come, if only because it has to. Maybe it’s when your tired grip fails that hope rushes in, or salvation, or just a cool spot of water on your straining face. Maybe our story here really is like a fairy tale, and this is why we write so many stories about last-minute rescues, because something beneath our skin tells us this is our story, that it has to be our story, that everything can be redeemed, which means anything can be redeemed, which means the likes of you or me can be redeemed.

And maybe this is all hope ever can be, a faint whisper of itself. What need we of hope, until all hope is lost? You look back at the long, crooked, down-tumbling path of your life, and you peer forward into darkness, and everything tells you to despair. This is when hope has to rush in, if hope means anything at all. So I haven’t hope, but I have hope that hope will come rushing in, or soughing slow like a breeze in summer, or welling up like warmth in your belly when you are in love. I hope to one day have hope, and if that isn’t the best kind of hope, maybe it’s a kind of hope all the same.

Fine lines

Home yesterday afternoon. The boys drop toys and ditch bikes and jump off swings to come hug me, before I’ve even all the way out of my truck. Isaiah insists on being held. He wraps his arms and legs around me, like he is a bear cub. I lug him and my luggage and my computer bag into the house.

“Daddy,” he says, peering around my arm at the brown leather bag hanging from my shoulder, “is that your purse?”

“No. It’s a . . . a man bag.”

“Oh, a man bag. It’s Daddy’s man bag.”

Somehow this sounds patronizing, even though he doesn’t mean it that way.

The found faith

Faith is this knowing in the center of you that will not leave. It has been to you a light that guides, light that illumines the worst of yourself, weight that steadies, weight that holds you where you do not want to be. Perhaps, when it first stirred inside your chest, you tried to build a home for it in your head. You read the books, learned the phrases, spouted your word-filled prayers. You learned how to speak of it to others. You studied clever ways to prove it to them. You resented them when they rejected your clever words. It became, for a time, your self-worth, your assurance that you inhabit a special place in the universe.

But your faith would not live in the house of your intellect, only your pride, and your self-love, and your anger, all of which you clothed in righteousness and labeled God. Then you stumbled, or the world destroyed some part of you, or took someone you loved, or maybe all of these things, and then the house you constructed for your faith held only the echoes of your catechisms, the hollow encouragements of your well-meaning, faith-minded friends, the obligatory notion that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us more holy.

Only it didn’t make you more holy. It left these holes in you, this world, and so perhaps you cast what passed for faith out of your mind, and set about the business of self-medication or self-destruction, which in the end come always to the same place. You shuttered the house built for faith in your mind, and perhaps you told everyone or perhaps you told no one, but you next tried to live a life without faith, ran from faith until you were empty, empty and broken down and not knowing any more what you had ever known or why you ever thought you knew it.

And then you find that faith will no more leave you than it will take wings at your bidding. You find that it will never live in your head, that it will never be fine thread to weave with words, that it will never adorn you as something crafted to make you more complete.

You find, instead, that it persists in the deepest parts of you, in the places where you most desperately need and fear it. You find that you have run all this way and never departed from it, because it has never departed from you, because it was never any more your choice than is the beating of your heart.

And so you come, at the end of your running and rending of flesh, to faith, which long ago came to you. It is weight and it is light and it is knowing. It is belief in the midst of unbelief, quiet truth uttered after lies. It is waiting, it is silent prayer. It is whispered thanks for the way your child sighs in his sleep, and for wind that soughs the trees. It is knowing you are unforgotten. It is what bears you homeward.

The found church

Church is light streaming in, mingled voices, the expectation — sometimes against all experience — that this time God will meet you here, or at the very least, that you will leave your miserable ways long enough to meet Him.

It doesn’t happen every week or even more than a few times in your life. Maybe this is because we have made these buildings into theaters and lecture halls. Our plays are passionless — we act out neither bliss nor despair, only the shabby optimism of elevator music and morning television. The lectures you have heard before, even the weepy, sentimentalized ones, because one does not survive the modern American church without having been lectured about what the words mean, or about what one ought to feel, or about how one ought to feel about people who don’t have the right way of thinking about what the words mean.

But sometimes even the words of men cannot keep out the Word, and then you know the God who is neither text nor calculus, who is past the intellect, past anything your meager tongue might utter. Then church is voices in unison with the voices of angels, the soft thump of a child’s head against a smooth wooden pew, the merciful hand laid upon the bowed shoulder, the indrawn breath as tears come unbidden.

Church is the child tasting bread, the man stooping low, the cloud of witnesses who for once are not weeping at what we have made of things, the sudden realization that all of it is true, the parts we yearn for and the parts we dread and the parts we ignore or twist to fit our tiny theologies — all of it is true, and it is true the way your fury and love and secret shames are true.

You find church and you weep, because you know it is a rare thing and it should not be this hard to find. You stand in it, as you might a quivering ray of light slipped through a cloud-burdened sky, and you pray that it will not end, that the light will spread or only stay, that this could be every day, forever and ever amen, not a spot of mercy but the way of all creation. You stand in the light already going dim, and you think you might be better, if only you could touch God.

The latest news

The fact is that I’m a terribly neglectful blogger these days. If it’s any consolation, I have been up to some writing here and there. For example, you might enjoy my latest essay in The Wall Street Journal, about my copyright odyssey. And I’ve been working on a short story in which John Calvin joins a community college creative writing workshop. It’s funnier than it sounds. I think.

I know, I know, many of you would rather hear about my youngsters. I don’t blame you; they’re cuter and smarter than me. I’ll see if I can’t give you an update on them all soon. I find any more, what with all the extra work and travel, my writing about them (aside from the book, of course) comes in little microbursts on Twitter, as often as not. If you’re interested.

Happiness Overrated

Some of you might appreciate my “Case Against Happiness” over at Megan McArdle’s site, which got some angry comments, as well as some nice words from Rod Dreher and Joe Carter.

A father’s waning day

As I write, there are nine minutes left in Father’s Day, which is just right, given that every father I know feels like he has so much left to do, and just a scrap of time in which to do it. I’ve had two and a half lovely days at home, and tomorrow as well before I’m back on the road. They are all asleep, my little ones, which leaves me these dark quiet hours to reflect on the ways I fall short, on this selfishness that permeates every part of me.

We like to think that it is we who benefit them, but the truth is that they benefit us, if we will let them, if we will simply lay down ourselves and die, which is alien talk to people who are not aliens in this world. But every father with ears to hear knows he must lay down and die, today and the next and the next, and pray for grace in the interstitial places, and give thanks that there is more watching over them than our weakling prayers.

They need us, to be sure, but we need them more, for where would we be without them? Somewhere happier, perhaps, and certainly more peaceful, but also more empty and shallow, and in now wise more holy. It’s only when we abandon thought of living for our own happiness that we can truly begin to father, to make that a word bearing heft.

Tomorrow I will mow and mend, and in the hot summer evening we will all go to see Caleb play a baseball game. Once I’ve tucked them in I will pack — I will pack my clothes and any tenderness away, and go once again across space to where money is but my heart is not. I will eke out another week, wondering if I will get this task of fathering right in the months to come, and if at least there is redemption in the striving.

There has to be redemption, in the striving.

Kind words

The folks at Image Journal have some very nice things to say about my new book, which I’ve added to other reviews.