Faith At Ease

Mother of Exiles at 125

2011-10-29T21:56:00.002-04:00

By Allan Roy Andrews

Igrew up a neighbor to the Statue of Liberty.

Fromthe apartment in which we lived during my youth in Brooklyn, I could glance downthe street toward New York Harbor and see the statue on Liberty Island (which weknew as Bedloe’s Island; it was renamed in 1956). The statue gleamed at nightas floodlights shone upon it; during the day it showed the green tint ofweathering copper.

OnOctober 28, 2011, the statue celebrated the 125^th anniversary of itsdedication.

NewYork City children in the late 19^th century donated pennies thatwent toward the building of the pedestal upon which the statue stands.Newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant, promised to publishthe names of every donor to the pedestal fund. The French, who presented thestatue to the United States--a gift celebrating America’s 1876 centennial--calledit “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

Almostevery New York City school child recalls the 1883 poem of Emma Lazarusdedicated to the statue. Thousands have heard or read Lazarus’s poem; not many,however, recall its official name, “The New Colossus,” a name the poet chose toemphasize that the Statue of Liberty was “Not like the brazen giant of Greekfame” providing a defiant defensive stance, but one that would be a beacon of“world-wide welcome.”

Lazarus,a well-known New York poet, was asked to write a commemorative poem to beauctioned as part of the pedestal fundraising, and she responded that shecouldn’t write a poem about a statue; however, she turned her compassion for JewishRussian refugees—many of whom she taught--into a compelling appeal on theirbehalf. She understood the statue’s imagery and its powerful message to thosesailing into a welcoming haven.

Themost memorable lines of her sonnet are words given the “mighty woman with atorch”:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I  lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Lazarus turned the French appellationof enlightenment into a compassionate symbol of freedom and opportunity, apromise of liberty to those oppressed in foreign lands. In her sonnet, shecalled the woman with the torch that gleams with that message of welcome the“Mother of Exiles.”

Lazarus was not on Bedloe’sIsland when the statue was dedicated in 1886. Her poem was read but barely noticedand little recalled following the celebration.

The poet died the followingyear. She was 38. Her poem later became immortalized on the pedestal of the statuein 1903.

Despitebeing raised in New York City, I’ve never visited Liberty Island; I’ve neverstood at the base of the statue or climbed up inside its magnificent structure.I’ve never taken a tourist’s stance toward Lady Liberty; to me, she was aneighbor and friend. Even as the son of immigrants I’ve never felt a need for acompulsory visit to her island home. Nevertheless, with a little help from EmmaLazarus, I knew deeply what the Mother of Exiles exemplified about my country.

A victim of frequent neglect,the statue has been refurbished twice, once in 1938 and again in 1986. OnOctober 29 of this year she was closed again to inside climbersso alterations could make her safer.

We may recover her safety andsheen, but we have neglected to polish her symbolic message.

Sentiments such as thosepromoted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), for example,suggest the statue’s beckoning of openness in this era is “an invitation tonational disaster.” Playing on mean-spirited and misguided fear-arguments ofjob losses and national security, FAIR apparently would rather we muffle orextinguish the lamp of freedom blazing above New York Harbor as we seek toferret out terrorism and illegal aliens. Emma Lazarus would disagree.

What is now in need ofrefurbishment in a time of selfish anti-immigration attitudes in several statelegislatures of America are the sentiments of compassion, freedom, and welcometo the legitimately tired and poor yearning to breathe free, sentiments thatLazarus symbolically attributed to the copper-clad gift from France.

Protectionism often inhibitsenlightenment. Should I decide soon to take my family to Liberty Island, itwon’t be to focus arrogantly on Liberty enlightening the world or on somewarped sense of national security. Our visit will be to appreciate the Motherof Exiles and her enduring message of openness to poor and tired immigrants andrefugees.

ALLAN ROY ANDREWS, aBrooklyn native whose parents sailed into New York harbor in the 1920s, is aretired editor of the Pacific Stars and Stripes newspaper and a poet teaching and living in Maryland.

Taking on the prosperity gospel

2011-04-21T11:33:00.002-04:00

A review of: David W. Jones and Russell S. Woodbridge, Health, Wealth & Happiness: Has the Prosperity Gospel Overshadowed the Gospel of Christ? (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2011)

By Allan Roy Andrews

Let’s get a few things clearly out in the open.

The church of Jesus Christ is not in the profit-making business.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not proclaimed to make anyone financially wealthy.

The gospels of the New Testament have more to say about poverty and helping the poor than about gathering riches and becoming wealthy.

Happiness, in biblical terms, is not something humans pursue or earn (sorry to disillusion fans of the truths proclaimed as “self-evident” by Thomas Jefferson, et al.); it is a gift from a loving God, who asks nothing for his grace and love.

God doesn’t keep books or hire accountants or collect taxes and fees.

Nowhere in God’s kingdom is there a place for an emphasis on acquisition of “things” and “monies.”

The only legal tender in the gospel of Jesus Christ is love.

Furthermore, the Acts of the Apostles, an extension of the Gospel attributed to Luke, makes clear that the early church was a community of sharing where those who had provided for those who did not have. (OK, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty that marks a large segment of American conservative Christianity: think welfare and social justice!) That’s right, the gospel that’s recorded in the church of the second chapter of Acts is a church driven by the Holy Spirit to minister to, provide for, and to protect those who, in the language of the New Testament, are lost.

Just to get us into the crux of the critique that Jones and Woodbridge are outlining in this good but truncated book, if you listen close enough to the message proclaimed and the innuendos that percolate in the messages of the prosperity gospel preachers (most of whom, not ironically, minister on television), you’ll discover that welfare and social justice come across as evils and anathemas.

Unfortunately, Jones and Woodbridge shy away from detailed discussion of this phenomenon. They are content to argue that “Jesus gave no systematic, detailed economic plan” (140), and their only confrontation with evangelical thinking that might challenge this point is in a footnote where they describe any “preferential option for the poor” as a “theologically moderate” position (181, fn10).

Let’s face it, anyone who reads the gospels with honesty and openness cannot help but see that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is revolutionary and counter-cultural; although, Jones and Woodbridge favor a spiritualizing escape from this emphasis: For them, Jesus “teachings on wealth and poverty are wide-ranging and their spiritual impact is what is usually emphasized” (141).

The so-called “prosperity gospel,” with its promoting of health, wealth and happiness, is not only “overshadowing the gospel of Christ,” as the subtitle of this new book declares, it is waging all-out war with the gospel of Christ and making a sham of the authentic love, compassion, and peace that Jesus demonstrated and that the apostle Paul listed among “the greatest” of all gifts from God.

With that lengthy introduction, let’s commend Jones and Woodbridge for introducing and competently condemning the prosperity gospel as it is proclaimed by several leading TV evangelists, past and present, among them: Oral Roberts, Kenneth E. Hagin, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, and a trio that Jones and Woodbridge describe as “soft” prosperity advocates, T. D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, and Joel Osteen (several others are mentioned historically).

Jones and Woodbridge, both members of the theological faculty at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, a Southern Baptist school located in Wake Forest, N.C., on what once was the campus of Wake Forest University before the latter relocated to Winston-Salem, are astutely attuned to the theology of the prosperity gospel.

They single out the errors of doctrine they detect as: 1) a distorted view of God; 2) the elevation of the mind over matter; 3) an exalted view of humankind; 4) a focus on health and wealth; and 5) an unorthodox view of salvation.

Once establishing these erroneous teachings, the authors devote several chapters to their “corrections.” They begin by demonstrating that “suffering is a normative part of the Christian life” in contrast with the extreme opposition to suffering that the prosperity gospel proponents advocate.

The second corrective emphasis of Jones and Woodbridge is on the biblical teachings regarding poverty and wealth, which may well be the section of the book that separates the authors and their Southern Baptist orthodoxy from many other evangelicals who share their concern with the errors of the prosperity gospel preachers.

Next, Jones and Woodbridge demonstrate how the promoters of the prosperity gospel contradict the scriptural call for Christians to be generous givers, what may be called the erroneous practical theology of the prosperity gospel.

This is not the place to take deep issue with the authors’ evangelicalism; they are worthy allies in a spiritual battle with the hucksters, con-men, and greed-mongers who dominate the prosperity gospel’s televised preying on susceptible victims.

However, I fear the authors’ personal positions on social and economic policies, which they appear to mask as irrelevant to the discussion of the prosperity gospel, only hide a root problem; that is, that almost to a person, the evangelists of the prosperity gospel are steeped in consumerism and a capitalistic profit ethic that drives their ministries.

Jones and Woodbridge, in their theological battle with the prosperity gospel, have given little attention that addresses what A. W. Tozer incisively recognized as the particular distortions of the gospel in a society that runs through marketing and sales profits.

Theologian Lyle W. Dorset helps us see this. He wrote of Tozer:

Tozer wrote and spoke against a growing trend of churches being run by business models rather than biblical principles, and he criticized the way Christ Jesus was being marketed and sold rather than lifted up to convict men of sin, righteousness, and judgment. In short, he railed against cheap grace that was producing an ugly and impotent church.*

This book, as good as it is, simply ignores that the television celebrities who pose as prophets of the prosperity gospel are steeped in the culture of a profit-driven, spiritually impoverished society, and that their message is more crass advertising and marketing than it is gospel, more mammon loving than God worshipping.

* Lyle W. Dorset. “Profiles in Faith: Aiden Wilson Tozer,” in Knowing and Doing: A Teaching Quarterly for Discipleship of Heart and Mind, Springfield, Va.: C.S. Lewis Institute, summer, 2008), accessed April 20, 2011, at http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/files/webfm/knowing_doing/ProfileTozer.pdf

Six-Word Essays on Time

2011-03-08T13:55:00.001-05:00

By Allan Roy Andrews

Now always dies

in clock time.

Streams of time

eventually dry up.

Life gives, but

Time takes away.

Clocks truly lack

faces and hands.

Has anyone seen

a clock smile?

Moment by moment

time abandons us.

The six-word essay is often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, who took up the challenge of telling a story in just six words.

The form has been popularized in recent years, largely through the online publication of Smith Magazine http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/ and Narrative Magazine http://www.narrativemagazine.com/.

Whimsical Theology I: The humanity of Jesus

2010-08-20T18:48:00.010-04:00

Incarnation at Ease: Thoughts on bread, beer, and John Prine’s “Everybody”

By Allan Roy Andrews

An anonymous 20^th-century devotional writer, reflecting on Jesus’ proclamation in the gospel of John that He is the “bread of life” (John 6:35), casually asserts that bread is “the most basic food there is.”

Without challenging the historical and liturgical implications of Christianity’s prayer for our daily bread or the cultural significance of bread as a fundamental and necessary sustenance of life (as in prisoners, the hungry, and the fasting staying alive on bread and water alone), I wonder about putting bread in this exalted position.

After all, aren’t the basic ingredients of bread the same as, or at least similar to, those that go into the making of beer?

What would it do to our theology—especially our view of the Incarnation—if Jesus had proclaimed, “I am the beer of life!”?

Many, from Martin Luther to Brennan Manning, would rejoice at such a seeming earthy assertion. This notion implies we might meet the savior as easily in a local pub as in a church sanctuary: What a drinking buddy we have in Jesus!

Sure the notion is a bit whimsical, but not, I think, without merit. Our attempts to understand how God could become a man (pitching his bodily tent among us) must allow that being fully human might mean drinking beer as well as eating bread with us (and would allow us to give thanks for our daily grains in all their forms).

Such thoughts form what I like to think of as whimsical theology, and one of my favorite proponents of this thinking is the singer and songwriter John Prine. Consider Prine’s encounter with Jesus in the lyrics of his song, “Everybody.”

While out sailing on the ocean;

While out sailing on the sea;

I bumped into the Savior,

And He said, "Pardon me."

I said, "Jesus, you look tired."

He said, "Jesus, so do you;

Oh, sit down son

'Cause I got some fat to chew."

Chorus:

Well, he spoke to me of morality,

Starvation, pain and sin.

Matter of fact, the whole dang time

I only got a few words in.

But I won`t squawk--

Let `im talk--Hell, it`s been a long, long time,

And any friend that`s been turned down

Is bound to be a friend of mine.

Chorus:

Now we sat there for an hour or two

Just eatin' that gospel pie,

When around the bend come a terrible wind,

And lightning lit the sky.

He said, "So long, Son, I gotta run;

I appreciate you listenin' to me."

And I believe I heard him sing these words

As he skipped out across the sea.

Chorus:

See, everybody needs somebody that they can talk to,

Someone to open up their ears

And let that trouble through.

Now you don`t have to sympathize

Or care what they may do,

But everybody needs somebody that they can talk to.

Everybody needs somebody that they can talk to.

I'll drink to that! Just remember: One cannot live by beer alone.

'Crazy Heart': It's in the music--a divine call?

2010-06-04T21:01:00.011-04:00

By Allan Roy Andrews

It’s not in the acting; although, Jeff Bridges does an outstanding job portraying a country singer waging a losing battle with fading fame and booze.

It’s not in the romance; although, Maggie Gyllenhaal is captivating as the younger lover of the troubled star.

It’s not in the script; although, the story moves intelligently from bowling alley to big stage with lots of foreshadowing in dialogue and drama.

It’s not in the booze; although, for a change there’s some deep reality to the hope provided through 12-step programs, and in the end sobriety trumps a doomed sexual liaison.

It’s none of these that make “Crazy Heart” one of the outstanding movies of 2009; it’s in the music!

For one thing, Bridges is as admirable a singer as he is an actor, and his renditions of “A Hold on You,” “Fallin’ and Flyin,’” “Brand New Angel,” and snippets of the Academy Award winning song, “The Weary Kind,” mesmerize.

It helps to be a fan of country music to enjoy “Crazy Heart,” but the people who put this film together are connoisseurs of the genre.

Consider the songs that fill the background and carry Bridges’ staggering performance along its travels from drunkenness to degeneracy to dalliance to dangerous neglect to deliverance: Buck Owens singing “Hello, Trouble”; the Louvin Brothers singing “My Baby’s Gone”; Kitty Wells singing “Searching”; Waylon Jennings singing “Are You Sure Hank Did It This Way”; Lucinda Williams singing “Joy”; George Jones singing “The Color of the Blues”; the Delmore Brothers singing “I Let a Freight Train Carry Me On”; and in a happy transition scene (a balloon ride symbolic of transcendence), Townes Van Zandt singing “If I Needed You.” The music of “Crazy Heart” is more than window-dressing; it’s the dynamic driving the script.

Bridges’ cry for help: “I want to be sober,” and the portrayal of his session at a treatment facility should hearten the evangelists of 12-Step programs.

In that regard, I believe I detected a lyric change that might credit the emphasis 12-Step programs place on divine intervention.

Recovering from drunkenness, Bridges’ character, Bad (Otis) Blake, entertains in his friend’s bar with the song, “Brand New Angel.”

I’ve trooped through Web sites seeking the lyrics of this Greg Brown song. The chorus of which goes:

“Open the gates, welcome him in;

“there’s a brand new angel,
a brand new angel . . ."

The final line in the versions I searched is given as:

“With an old idea”; or

“With an old violin."

However, if you listen carefully to Jeff Bridges’ film rendition (not the soundtrack cut), the final line is:

“Who doesn’t know me.”

Can this be God’s call to open the gates?

Serendipitous laugher: Two experiences

2010-05-31T22:52:00.025-04:00

By Allan Roy Andrews

Experience No. 1:

Radio-television personality and humorist Art Linkletter died last week at 97. Until about two years ago, when he suffered a mild stroke, Linkletter was still active on the philanthropic circuit.

A few years before that, I heard Linkletter entertain at a small school fundraiser. Linkletter, whose adoptive father was a Canadian preacher, told someone at that gathering that he “liked to help out small Christian schools.”

In his comments that night, Linkletter told a joke that I have commandeered as a staple of fun found in growing older. Here’s the joke:

“You know you’re getting old when you bend over to pick something off the floor and you say to yourself, ‘What else can I do while I’m down here?’”

I have learned experientially what Linkletter spoke of. So I’ve used the joke a number of times, and it never fails to elicit hearty laughs.

Two of Linkletter’s books also keep me smiling: Kids Say the Darndest Things, and Old Age is Not For Sissies.

Experience No. 2:

For the group’s edification, I recently read to my Bible discussion gathering a favorite poem by Billy Collins called “Flock.”

Here’s the brief poem:

It has been calculated that each copy of the
Gutenberg Bible . . . required the skins of 300 sheep.
–from an article on printing.

I can see them squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed,

all of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike

it would be nearly impossible
to count them,
and there is no telling

which one will carry the news
that the Lord is a shepherd,
one of the few things they already know.

--from The Trouble with Poetry, by Billy Collins. (Random House, 2005.)

After a moment of silent reflection, one member of our group put me—and several others—in stitches when he said, “I’m having a Gary Larson moment,” referring to the prize-winning cartoonist of The Other Side who was noted for his surprising and often warped sense of humor.

“I can see a room full of monks, having just sheared a flock of sheep, taking up their calligraphy pens and writing verses of sacred scripture on the flanks of the shorn animals,” my friend continued. “They probably had a difficult time keeping the pages in order!”

It was a wonderful moment, and if Billy Collins ever reads about our experience, I have a feeling he’ll be smiling broadly too. And if Larson ever reads this report of my friend’s experience, he’ll probably be saying, “I wish I’d thought of that!”

'Faith at Ease Lite': Reforming this blog

2010-05-18T17:20:00.002-04:00

By Allan Roy Andrews

I attended a writer’s conference several months ago at which the emphasis leaned decidedly toward writing for electronic media, and the predominant and repeated axiom asserted: online essays should avoid the curse of excessive scrolling; that is, keep those blogs to a maximum of 400 words.

Readers, especially young readers, increasingly read on a computer (or on a pad device). Newspapers have taken this pronouncement to heart. At least one well-known newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, during the past year abandoned print and offers its news online (there is a vestige of print in a weekly news summary). Other major publications—newspapers and magazines--are leaning in the same direction. Writers take note: shorter is better.

I once claimed I’d discovered the secret of writing a successful newspaper column. Keep it under 600 words, I argued. In the era of electronic blogging, 600 words means long-windedness.

The standard is 400 words. In taking stock of my archive of postings for this blog, I estimate my average entry is between 900 and 1100 words (and I claim to be an editor). I’ve fallen prey to the notion that longer essays encourage deeper reflection.

I repent. I am taking a new tack and aiming for postings of 400 words or less; I call it “Faith at Ease Lite,” and in a way that title captures the conviction. Eugene Peterson, using Job’s comforters as illustrations in his book, Subversive Spirituality (Eerdmans, 1997), reminds us that much of our talk about Christian spirituality is “chatter.” I confess a proneness to such chatter, and my archives are convicting evidence.

Of course, the other lesson urged upon bloggers at the same writer’s conference: Write consistently and often.

So I stop here, in the neighborhood of 300 words, and hope to be back more often.

Be at ease.

Memoir Exercise: An Essay on Influence and Calling

2010-02-15T21:18:00.004-05:00

By Allan Roy Andrews

I can’t be too far from water. I may not see it, smell it, sail on it or swim in it, but I have to know that it’s there. Sometimes I think a river or a lake just won’t do. Chesapeake Bay, which lies about one mile from my house, is OK, but it would be much better if it were the ocean.

This longing for the nearness of the sea is a warped gene I apparently inherited from my father. His father was a schooner captain, as was my mother’s father, and as a young man my father went to sea aboard a cod-fishing schooner, serving mostly as a cook. He hated it, and when opportunity presented itself to leave the bleak future of a fisherman’s life in Newfoundland—compounded by a worldwide Depression—he relocated to New York City and became an ironworker. His work was far from the sea, but his consciousness was not, and our residences during my boyhood were within miles of New York Harbor or the Long Island Sound. I recall him once saying he could never live in the Midwest because he had to be close to the ocean. I didn’t realize it as a boy, but I recognize now that I instinctively knew what he meant.

We are shaped for good or ill by our parents, often in ways we don’t realize. I recall once sitting at dinner when I was in my mid-thirties (my father died when I was 32) and I leaned back and placed my hands over my face and eyes and let out a sigh. I had no more made the sound when I shrieked, “Oh, my God!” (prayerfully, not swearfully). I had caught myself in mid-gesture and recognized that I was repeating movements I had seen my father make hundreds of times, usually at the end of a good meal.

Asked in any academic or social setting if I thought my father had influenced me or had anything to do with my “calling,” I would offer a scoffing negative. The idea is absurd. My father was not, as I have become, a worker of the mind; he was a man of manual labor. He discouraged my pursuing his line of work. Not because of any fear; he just wanted his sons to know a better way of making a living than he had known. If he needed a business letter written or a simple math problem solved, he always asked me to handle the work. Despite this difference, as I have grown older I have recognized the subtlety of inheritance.

Desiring to be close to the sea is a good example of what I’m talking about. My father could hardly swim, and I did not learn to swim until I was in my sophomore or junior year in high school. Neither my father nor I have ever owned a boat. I jokingly tell people that my family is one of the half-dozen families living in Annapolis, Maryland—the sailing capital of the East—that does not own a boat. We live in a “water privileged” community, which means there’s a boat slip accessible to us (for a fee), but as far as we’re concerned water-privileged could mean we have flush toilets.

When I was a boy, I was convinced I would one day join the Navy. In high school, I explored the possibility of Navy ROTC. I learned some harsh things in my investigation: one is barred from Navy ROTC if one does not possess perfect vision (I don’t), and the ROTC manual even shocked me by asserting that one could be disqualified because of “extreme ugliness.” The Navy has since abandoned such a criterion, and I learned much later that perfect vision is required only of pilots and line officers and it can be measured as corrected vision. However, after that flirtation with Navy ROTC, I never thought of being a sailor again.

Both of my older brothers joined the military soon after high school. The oldest went into the Army; the next went into the Air Force. Ironically, they seem to have missed the be-near-the-ocean gene: The oldest settled in Indiana; the other in Ohio. I alone stayed in college and never served in the armed forces, and except for a brief sojourn to study and break into journalism in the Midwest, I’ve stayed within striking distance of the Atlantic coast. Eventually, I was called (I have a mild aversion to this phrase, but more on that later) to go overseas as a journalist (to the Pacific Ocean coast), and as God’s sense of humor would have it, I spent a decade of my adult life as a civilian editor for the Pacific Stars and Stripes, the Department of Defense newspaper that circulates on military bases overseas and on all the ships at sea. After that experience, I probably knew more about the ins and outs of the military than did either of my veteran brothers but nothing about the sea except to note that Japanese use every part of a fish.

I am surprised when I reflect on those who influenced me during my youth; many seem to have been niche players. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, an ardent Dodger fan, and my imagination and calling in those days was to one day play professional baseball. My favorite player on the Dodgers was a strong, silent outfielder named Carl Furillo. Decades after my meager baseball talents forced me to settle as a fan (alas, still a Dodger fan), I realized that Carl Furillo, often referred to as a “blue-collar” player, had strong hands, a thick neck, and the square features of my father. In a 1989 eulogy by Carl Erskine, one of his teammates, Furillo was described as a mixture of iron and velvet. That’s how I perceive my father. He could reprimand his children or grandchildren with a bellowing “Don’t do that!” A microsecond later, he’d lower his voice to a compassionate whisper and say, “Don’t do that, my love!”

My Sunday School teachers sensitized me to faith; my elementary school teachers implanted a love of the English language; my high school teachers led me to the delights of art and drama and journalism. Once again it appears God has some cosmic comedy script he is following in designing my eclectic life. I became a journalist. Somewhat ironically, my high school graduated its last class in 2004 and has been since turned into a city magnet school called—I smile each time I say it or write it—The New York City Secondary School for Research, Law and Journalism.

Two areas of my life drew lots of praise and encouragement when I was a boy: My singing and my writing. I’m not speaking of creative writing, but of my skill with a calligrapher’s pen. I won praise in art class for my lettering and script ability. I grew up in an age during which one of the mainstays of elementary education was instruction in penmanship; in fact, everyone in my family, my father, mother, sister and brothers, each had a distinctively beautiful handwriting. To this day, my children (whose penmanship deteriorated with their age) mock the compulsive possessiveness I show for my collections of pens.

Later, after a failure as an engineering student, I took my mechanical drawing skills and experience and began working as an apprentice draftsman. Throughout that time, I was more captivated by the master draftsmen’s skills with lettering. I read lots of books about the alphabet; I read entire tomes on the shaping of letters; in short, I taught myself to be a calligrapher. I’ve never worked at it professionally, but during my second stint in college I became the poster-maker par-excellence for whatever event on campus needed hasty advertisements. My children as pupils took a certain pride when I inscribed their names on brown lunch bags. They frequently had to convince other students that the names on their lunch bags were not stamped or pre-printed.

Regarding singing, I probably could have been trained as a boy treble. I sang solos often in church, and at the age of 10 I sang on radio. A half-year later, I was a featured soloist in my sister’s wedding (and 23 years later, as an adult tenor, I sang the same solo selections at the wedding of my niece, my sister’s daughter). My mother made overtures about sending me to school to study voice with a boy’s choir. But sports were my passion and there was no way I could be made to sing instead of playing ball. I still love to sing, but to me it is an ancillary joy, something I enjoy for the pure pleasure of it. I tend to shun pressures to sing in church choirs or to join seasonal entertainment programs.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

[This memoir was originally composed for an online class in spiritual memoir writing using a prompt on influences of my “calling.” It has been revised and adapted for this essay.]

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I confess that at a point in this memoir-writing exercise, I found myself paralyzed in answering. That moment came when I encountered the writing prompt’s follow-up question regarding a time when I found myself “longing” to help a person or creature.

I’ve probably spent more time pondering this question than any other aspect of the assignment, and I have to say I can’t recall such a longing. The word longing, in fact, seems totally foreign to my reflections. Oh, I’ve known selfish longings for romance and fame and reward, but I think the question is probing my soul’s desire to serve others, and I confess that this language of longing has little meaning for me in that context. I want to say that those who nurtured and influenced me instilled a kind of Nike ethic, if you will. Longing seems counter-productive. The operational and pragmatic phrase becomes “just do it.”

I think I have a similar sense of any “call” in my life to become a prophet, priest or journalist. I’ve always thought a calling had more to do with matching one’s skills and talents to the job at hand rather than describing any mystical or spiritual setting apart. This is not to say I don’t believe that God calls or sets apart; however, I’m not certain we are always able to grasp the intentions of God when we are placed in life situations that demand our just-do-it response, if I can borrow that phrase again.

Even the response of putting words on paper in an effort to complete this exercise ultimately came down to my responding to a just-do-it urging.

I’d have probably felt a lot more comfortable with it if I’d been somewhere near the ocean.

A Parable of Grace from YouTube: Susan Boyle sings

2009-11-23T14:21:00.004-05:00

A Parable of Grace
By Allan Roy Andrews

If you're among the seeming minority who has not yet viewed the seven-minute YouTube clip of the April 2009 audition of Scottish singer Susan Boyle on the "Britain's Got Talent" show, by all means view that video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk before you read further.

Today (Nov. 23, 2009), seven months after her audition (and after her 48th birthday), Boyle's debut album goes on sale. Pre-order sales at Amazon.com are at the highest for any pre-order of the year. Incidentally, Boyle's performance on YouTube has been watched over 100 million times, setting her clips as an online record (the clip to which I've referred above has been viewed over 79 million times as of this writing).

Back in April, I used the clip of Boyle's audition for an exercise in a Composition 101 class I was teaching at a local community college. I stopped the clip after Boyle introduced herself to the skeptical judges and audience and asked students to write their naive impressions of this woman who was about to sing. Almost to a person, they described her as dumpy, dowdy, and not likely to impress anyone.

I stopped the clip after Boyle finished her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream," from the musical Les Miserables, and asked the students to write a second reaction to the video. Again, there was almost universal shock and surprise at the power and quality of this singer's voice. The most frequent expression of these freshman writers was how the clip underscored the truth of the old aphorism: "You can't judge a book by its cover."

This, of course, was part of the writing and literature lesson I hoped to impress upon the students, and I asked them to write a third response after they heard what the astonished judges had to say after Boyle had sung. Most of them saw what I saw: three judges confessing their biases and repenting of their prejudicial expectations.

The three judges, Simon Cowell (best known to American TV-audiences as the seemingly harsh and abrupt judge of "American Idol"); British actress Amanda Holden; and Piers Morgan, the author and editor turned talent scout and judge; each responded to Boyle's performance with honest surprise and repentance. Holden called the performance the "biggest wake-up call ever" to the cynical negativism she and the audience displayed and told Boyle she felt it a "complete privilege" to have heard her sing, and Morgan, the first to vote on Boyle's audition, said he was in "total shock" and gave her the "biggest yes" he's ever given anyone on the talent show.

Similarly, the audience, many of whom rolled eyes and snickered at Boyle's introduction, spent most of the time of her performance on its feet in a rousing ovation to her talent.

For me, the seven-minute clip was a parable of the triumph of grace.

For the record, Boyle did not win the competition; she placed second to an acrobatic and precision team dance act called "Diversity." The Great Britain audience that watched the final competition of "Britain's Got Talent" was a record-setting 17.4 million viewers. But one might say that "winning" is a matter of interpretation, as is demonstrated in the dynamic of many of the parables of Jesus. The Good Samaritan and the widow who gave her mite, along with many others, turn out to be the "winners" of the scriptural stories. In the parable of "Britain's Got Talent," Susan Boyle emerges a winner.

Briefly hospitalized for treatment of exhaustion after her highly publicized performances on the British talent show, Boyle has put together her first album, a mixture of well-known songs and Christian hymns, including renditions of "Amazing Grace," "How Great Thou Art," and the Christmas carol, "Silent Night."

A reprise of her attention-grabbing first audition singing of "I Dreamed a Dream" is on the album as well. Two cuts I find surprisingly attractive are calm and thoughtful renditions of the Mick Jagger song, "Wild Horses," and another of the John Stewart (one-time member of The Kingston Trio) number made popular by The Monkees, "Daydream Believer."

Excerpts of the album are available at http://www.susanboylemusic.com/gb/music/

I concur with the advice Simon Cowell gave Susan Boyle at the end of her audition, "You can go back to the village with your head held high . . . ."

Conversing with a five-year-old

2009-09-26T18:03:00.010-04:00

By Allan Roy Andrews
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This essay is an expansion and rewrite of a column I published during my tenure as editor of Pacific Stars and Stripes in Japan. That column, originally titled “A Ride Home from the Airplane Base” was published in 1996.
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My middle son, now in his twenties, was one year old on the day my wife, our oldest son, and I took him on a Boeing 747 and flew for about 17 hours to Tokyo, where I became a civilian editor with the Department of the Army working for Pacific Stars and Stripes, the U.S. government’s daily newspaper for overseas military personnel stationed in the Far East.

The newspaper’s offices were located in downtown Tokyo on a tiny U.S. installation known as Hardy Barracks, and most personnel with the paper—both military and civilian—were housed at the larger military base, Yokota Air Base, about 50 kilometers west of Tokyo. Civilians were granted base privileges comparable to military personnel, and the Department of the Army paid most of us who worked as civilian editors the salaries we’d be paid if we were serving as colonels or captains in the armed services.

My wife was no stranger to Tokyo, she is the daughter of American missionaries, and had been born at a hospital near Tokyo and had lived most of her life in a western suburb on the Seibu-Ikebukuro train line before going stateside to attend college. For that reason, we did not choose to live on base, but instead rented a house “on the economy” in the neighborhood in which my wife had been raised. Our Japanese home was about 30 kilometers outside Tokyo and about 20 kilometers east of Yokota.

In the eight years plus that I held the job with Stripes, I learned to drive around the Kanto Plain in a series of automobiles we purchased during our tenure. All of them used, all of them Japanese-made cars—Hondas, Nissans, and Toyotas—all of them with steering on the right, and most with standard-shift that required me to learn to shift gears with my left hand. Because Stripes was an evening newspaper, editors began work around 5 a.m. Tokyo’s commuter trains did not begin running until closer to 6 a.m. Thus, I became an adept morning commuter and fairly competent at reading Japanese road signs.

At that time, gasoline was sold on base for about half of what it cost at a neighborhood Japanese service station. As a result, we made frequent trips from our home to Yokota Air Base, not only for gasoline, but for inexpensive shopping, entertainment, and, despite our growing love for Japanese food, a welcomed taste of America.

On one particular occasion I was driving home from the base with my five-year-old son as a passenger beside me. It was dusk when we left the base, and I could see that he was on the verge of falling asleep. I recall that it was this son who insisted we should call the place we’d just left “the airplane base,” not the air base, which makes good sense if one thinks about it.

“The best thing you could do,” I said to him, “is lie back and go to sleep.” We’d already eaten supper. Neither of us was hungry, and we were both somewhat eager to get back to the comfort of home.

“Go to sleep?” he said, a bit astonished. “Go to sleep without any diaper pants?”

“You don't need diaper pants,” I said, trying to be an encouraging father and strong male who shared grown-up mastery of the sphincters.

“What if I pee all over the seat?”

“You're the one who knows if you're going to pee,” I said.

“Well, Dad, let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”

“You're the one who knows if you have to pee.”

“Yeah,” he replied, “but let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”

Seeking to stop this circular talk, I said, “Well, you shouldn't have to pee, because we went to the bathroom just before we left the air base.”

“You mean the airplane base,” he said. O.K., I thought, we’re off that topic.

“You know what, Dad?”

“What?”

“Sometimes just after I pee I feel like I still have to pee again.”

Sometimes a father can do nothing or say nothing more. I've discovered that some conversations are best unfinished; or rather, they're best finished by the child rather than the adult. Children know when such conversations are supposed to end; adults don't.

Several minutes later, he picked up our conversation. “How long before we get home, Daddy?”

“About a half an hour.”

“A half an hour and how many minutes?” he asked.

“A half hour is 30 minutes, so about 30 minutes,” I said.

“No, Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes?”

“A half hour is 30 minutes.”

“But Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes.”

At that point, I realized again that adults often don't know when such conversations are finished, so I figured I'd better invent an answer just to keep us from going around in what I perceived to be endless circles.

“A half hour and two minutes,” I said, grabbing a number from the air and wondering what I'd say if he replied, “That's thirty-two minutes.”

He didn't say this, and I was happy; I don't appreciate precocious mathematicians. He seemed to understand (even if I didn't).

“Oh, is that what you meant?” he said as he glanced out the window at a truck we were passing.

“Yes, a half hour and two minutes,” I repeated, happy to have worked my way out of that conversation.

“Well, you said a half hour. I must have been confusing you,” he concluded.

Children also have a way of making adults feel small and foolish, especially when we attempt to be too rational and meaningful. After a few more minutes passed, my son turned theological:

“Can I ask you some Bible questions, Daddy?”

“Sure.”

“These are going to be really, really, really hard questions,'' he said in a tone meant to reassure me that I shouldn't feel too bad if I couldn’t answer them. To drive this home, he added, “I’m not sure I even know the answers myself.”

“O. K.”

“What day did Jesus die on the cross?” he asked.

I recall that this conversation took place shortly after Easter, so I assumed he was recalling something he picked up in Sunday School.

“You mean what day of the week?” I asked.

“Yeah, what day of the week?”

“It was Good Friday,” I answered.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, that's what the Bible tells us. Then it says that on Sunday -- Easter Sunday -- he rose again.” I'm really not trying to sound like a proselytizer, I just figured I'm repeating what he's learned.

“Is that when he went up to heaven?”

For me the conversation had subtly shifted. “Yes, I guess so,” I said, pondering exactly when Jesus went to heaven.

“When he died on the cross he was already in heaven,” my son pronounced with the aplomb of a dogmatic theologian.

I remained silent. The mystery of this conversation had already gone beyond me.

“Here's another really hard question,” he continued.

“On what day did David begin to play his harp?”

“I don't know. Was it a Monday?”

“I don't know.”

End of discussion.

I loved those drives; they provided conversations that kept my mind turning long after the wheels of our car had come to rest at home.

A Journalist Learns from Singing in the Choir

2009-07-15T23:45:00.006-04:00

by Allan Roy Andrews

"All God's critters got a place in the choir." So begins a bouncy folk tune written and recorded several decades ago by New England singer and songwriter Bill Staines. I've sung in church choirs off and on for most of my life, but I'm still attempting to figure out what draws me to it.

In many ways, a church choir is the ultimate community of cooperation. Many voices attempting to sound as one. E pluribus unum, and all that. In many other ways, a church choir is the hotbed of petty jealousies and competing egos, as well as the deep harbor of catty criticisms of the institutional church.

Almost every choir I've belonged to harbors a cadre of heretics who to some degree choose to sing in the choir so they don't have to sit under the convicting gaze of the preacher or so they can slip in and out of services through a choir door (mea culpa on both counts).

Church choir directors, even those who rely on hiring professional soloists, don't require a test of faith; I've known some vocally talented agnostics who sang on Saturdays in the local synagogue, on Sunday mornings at the Episcopal Church and on Sunday nights at a downtown pub.

When one wants to find the rebels of a church congregation, one needs look no farther than this week's row of contraltos or basso profundos (or tenors or sopranos). Not so oddly, this all sounds like the world of a daily newsroom, where often a righteous muckraker by day becomes a profane cynic at night.

Despite petty problems, I'm convinced there's a lesson for democracy, not to mention lessons in theology, hiding under those choir cassocks and albs that have known more wearers than a starched hospital gown.

But why does anyone give up several hours of his or her week to sit in uncomfortable chairs and rifle through sheaves of indecipherable code, much of it in a foreign language? All of this while sitting beside someone who either smokes too much or often is in need of a bath or a breath mint.

I believe singing in the choir may be one of those hidden graces that God uses to evangelize the soft of tone but hard of heart (or the heavy of tone but soft of faith).

I was one of those boyhood sopranos, a treble as they're known in chorister circles. I probably should have gone to a cathedral school and become a trained chorister, but there were too many baseball dreams in my blood. When my mother offered to pay for singing lessons, I rejected them because of the time they would demand, taking me from ballgames in the neighborhood. I was enlisted as a 10-year-old to sing two solo selections at my older sister’s wedding, but that was enough of a vocal career for me.

As if getting what I deserved, my three sons, all now young adults and fair singers, totally rejected my suggestions that they join the youth choir at church. I never tried to push it, remembering the angst I went through as a teen turning away from church singing opportunities.

When, as an adult, I had strayed for several years from attending church, it was joining a choir that drew me back into the fold, and now, several years and several choirs later, I’ve learned some of the mysteries of sacred song.

Among those who pay attention to the ancient Rule of St. Benedict, some discover a way of reading called lectio divina. As I understand it, such reading, primarily of the Bible, involves reading with more than the eyes and the mind; it engages the heart and the whole person. Lectio divina is a slow, contemplative process that demands frequent pauses and a peaceful "listening" to the text.

Without necessarily being aware of it, church choirs are doing something like this every Sunday. They take a tiny text, perhaps little more than a sentence or a phrase, and mold it into a four-part anthem that speaks of the deepest recesses of being to listeners in the congregation.

The English writer C.S. Lewis once suggested Christians should begin each day with reading both the Bible and a daily newspaper--would that we journalists and our readers could apply a kind of lectio divina to our consumption of the daily news.

And perhaps Lewis didn’t go far enough; maybe we need to take some time to sing a meaningful text to ourselves more frequently. All God’s creatures, including homo sapiens, have a place in the choir.

______________________________________

This slightly updated essay is an adaptation of a column published online for The American Reporter in March of 1999.

______________________________________

Poetry survives in a prose-prone world, but evangelicals (and many others) remain phobic

2009-07-05T14:42:00.008-04:00

By Allan Roy Andrews

In the past month, the Academy of American Poets launched a new page on its Web site devoted to poetry and teenagers. The page, labeled “Poetry Resources for Teens,” is quickly reached by visiting poets.org and pulling down the menu “For Educators.” The resources on the new page include “reading recommendations, writing help, spotlight audio and video recordings, as well as new ways to get involved in grassroots poetry projects,” according to an Academy press release.

Describing the motivation for producing the page, the Academy’s press release sounds much like what could be written by any American church or religious organization. The Academy acted, in its own words, in response to a recent survey they conducted, which showed that over 75% of the people who use poets.org share one characteristic: they first developed an interest in poetry before their eighteenth birthday. With young people spending a reported average of 16.7 hours a week online, it seemed clear that in the long term, the best opportunity to reach new readers and writers of poetry is in their early years.

In pondering this news from the Academy, I thought again of the importance of poetry and the contrary disdain it experiences in American life and letters, especially among religious movers and shakers, and in particular amidst the evangelical subculture.

I guess my real problem with this push to give teens access to poetry is that it further distinguishes adulthood as a time for generally disdaining and disregarding poetry as unimportant to faith and life in the twenty-first century.

We need more people like John Keating (the fictional English teacher played by Robin Williams in the film, “Dead Poet’s Society”), who told his adolescent charges:

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for . . . .

(Alas, I use a movie to make a point about poetry!)

My wife asked me a trick question last week: “What language is spoken in heaven?”

“Probably Aramaic,” I quipped.

If I had taken, as she did, any course in college offered by Dr. Thomas Howard (author of Christ the Tiger and subsequent others—see http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/authors/thomashoward.asp), she informed me I would have hastily answered, “Poetry!”

If that be so, it’s clear to me that the heavenly language fights for a public voice in today’s prose-dominated world. Oh, to be sure, poetry is available to any who hunt for it, but such a suggestion is a bit like telling sushi lovers in the Dakotas they can find their favorite food if they just search long and hard enough. Sorry, folks, but Fargo ain’t Tokyo!

If poetry is the language of heaven, it still gets short shrift on earth, even among those who claim to be diligent advocates for life beyond our numbered days.

Case in point: Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of Christianity Today International, a moderately evangelical organization that counts as one of its founders the evangelist Billy Graham, recently ran a poll to determine if its readers still counted themselves as “supporters of the arts” in these disturbing economic times. I’m less interested in the results of the poll (Weekly newsletter, Jun 23, 2009) than in the way the question was framed:

Are you cutting back on spending money on the arts (music, painting, movies)?

Please note the limiting listing of the arts: “music, painting, movies.” Poetry flies under the radar in Christianity Today’s perception. In fairness, the survey accompanies a compelling argument by Canadian singer-songwriter Carolyn Arends on why the arts are important; although, she seems to limit poetry’s influence to its aid in worship, comparable to icons.

In other contexts, I’ve chided Christianity Today and other popular evangelical publications for not regularly publishing first-rate contemporary poetry. One can look to Christian Century, Commonweal, First Things, and Sojourners to find a smattering of poets in religion journals, but one must look long and hard to find poets being published in the largest circulation religious magazine, familiarly referred to as CT. Among the magazines I’ve listed here, Christianity Today alone is without a poetry editor.

Almost a decade ago, an English professor at Houston Baptist University, Louis Markos, in a Christianity Today column of open commentary, called evangelicals “poetry phobic.” In the ensuing years, the magazine has done little or nothing to address and attack this phobia. Even Books and Culture, Christianity Today International’s intelligent and erudite collection of book reviews, does not have a designated poetry editor other than editor John Wilson, who often shows his personal appreciation of poetry but does not push for any regular publication of poems.

Let me be clear: I welcome poets.org’s effort to expand the exposure of teenagers to poetry. What I’d like to see is religious publications, who often target teenagers as an audience to be addressed and assessed, spend more time exposing their adult readers to the rising cadre of fine poets addressing questions of faith and the dilemmas of life and theology.

If it is true that evangelicals (and perhaps other religious subsets) are poetry phobic, much of the fault can be laid at the feet of the journalists, essayists, commentators, and preachers whose words fill the monthly magazines and who too often show a disdain for the poetic voice.

Note: Anyone interested in fine contemporary poetry from a Christian faith perspective should visit the Journal of Christianity and Literature hosted by Pepperdine University at http://www.pepperdine.edu/sponsored/ccl/journal/.

Another excellent source of such poetry is Image: A Journal of Art, Faith, Mystery at http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/. Image is closely tied to the Graduate Writing Program at Seattle Pacific University and to the Glen Writing Workshop in New Mexico.

Youth on mission to Honduras working through tensions of coup

2009-06-29T14:32:00.007-04:00

I share with all this news just released by the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland:

June 29, 2009

A Message from the Honduran Missioners

Working in Talanga, Honduras

In the news today (Monday, June 29) are reports of a non-violent military coup in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, on Sunday, June 28. The Diocese of Maryland is in the midst of its annual high school youth mission trips to the country, serving El Hogar de Amore y Esperanza, an Episcopal orphanage in Tegucigalpa, and the orphanage's agricultural and technical training school in Talanga, located north of the capital city.

We are pleased to report that the 13 youth missioners currently working at the training school in Talanga and their adult chaperones are safe, having arrived in the country on Friday morning, June 26, prior to the changing political situation. The group destined for the orphanage on Saturday, June 27, returned to Baltimore after reaching Miami, the first leg of the trip.

A phone conversation yesterday with the Rev. Wes Wubbenhorst, youth missioner for the diocese and on-site leader of the mission trips, confirmed the group's safety, upbeat spirit and willingness to stay undeterred. "Everyone here is fine, the city is quiet and we will be in touch with reports as we find out more," Wubbenhorst said. He added that this is the third time in his 20-plus years organizing these trips that something of this magnitude has happened and each time the groups have been safe.

Wubbenhorst had been in touch with diocesan point-of-contact the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool by Sunday afternoon, who in turn contacted the parents and spouses of those on the trip. Many of the parents were unaware of the political situation and all were glad to have been informed.

There are three overlapping mission trips to Honduras. The first group arrived in Talanga on June 19 and returned to Baltimore on the 26th. The second group, also in Talanga, arrived June 26 and will return on July 3. The group headed for the orphanage would have arrived June 27 and returned July 4. To learn more about these and other mission opportunities for youth in the Diocese of Maryland, visit http://youth.ang-md.org/index.php/missions.

=====================

A quick way to keep up with what's happening in Honduras is to visit http://news.yahoo.com/world

A note: Wubbenhorst, the diocese of Maryland's youth missioner, is a former Peace Corps worker in Honduras.

Snippet scholarship: being at ease

2009-05-18T09:31:00.006-04:00

Snippet scholarship: A note to the likeminded

By Allan Roy Andrews

I consider myself a snippet scholar.

While not a perception I particularly desire or encourage, I confess being a snippet scholar can often be thought pejorative. Snippet scholarship could be construed as my being a connoisseur of television sound bites or street-side church signs or as the way of one born to think as a Jeopardy! contestant.

What I speak of is not exactly an attraction to trivia; it is more of a resistance to lengthy expositions. I once heard a teaching colleague describe an administrator as one who “When you ask a question, you get a pageant for a reply.” I do not easily suffer pageantry in conversation or exposition; I want to get through explanatory prose as quickly as possible.

My discovery of my own predilection for what I call snippet scholarship arrived late in life when I became consciously aware of a lifelong attraction to so-called “handbooks.” In fact, I might better describe my leaning as more of a handbook scholarship than a snippet scholarship.

On my living room bookshelves as I write, an “accidental sample”--as the data buffs might say—reveals about 40 such volumes, not including dictionaries (such as a Dictionary of Symbolism), or grammar and style tomes on the order of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and the less sparse volumes produced by Theodore M. Bernstein, such as The Careful Writer. My quick count runs a gamut from Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace, subtitled, A Vocabulary of Faith, to Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s Jewish Literacy, subtitled, The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History. And this count does not include the row of dictionaries and writing guides that adorn my desk.

One must understand: I do not simply refer to these books, I read them. The latest of my snippet guide devourings is something of a best-seller, ’isms and ’ologies: The 453 Basic Tenets You’ve Only Pretended to Understand, by Arthur Goldwag, who says his book “can serve as an intellectual and social shorthand.” A few months ago I finished reading (in its entirety) Nathan P. Feldmeth’s Pocket Dictionary of Church History: Over 300 terms clearly and concisely defined.

It would be easy for me to lay my snippet penchant at the feet of a college professor of psycholinguistics who habitually encouraged students to read—actually read with care and in detail—dictionaries. (I confess to being one of a handful of students who took his admonitions to heart and developed a habit of perusing—in the true sense of that word—dictionary entries.)

However, I have to go further back to account for my snippet tendencies. I have always been a slow reader. My wife, for instance, can devour a Dick Francis novel in a couple of hours that would probably take me a couple of weeks to complete.

I went through high school in the days before CliffsNotes, Spark Notes, and most of the other “shortcuts” that secondary school teachers disdain. Had I access to them, I would have been a grateful champion of their snippet approach. Instead, I had access to Classics Illustrated Comic Books (to get the best flavor of this treasure trove, I recommend one visit this site: http://www.tkinter.smig.net/ClassicsIllustrated/index.htm and its links.)

By the way, my high school teachers held these graphic adaptations of the classics in disdain as well, and that inculcated guilt in my consciousness that took a long time to shake. Even after learning in college that most literature students were more familiar with Masterplots than with original editions, I always felt I was somehow cheating by taking the “shortcuts.”

It has taken decades for me to be at ease with my snippet tendencies. One cannot imagine how vindicated I have felt with the invention of the hyperlink and the ascendancy of Google as a way of scholarship; alas, many of my colleagues and many of my son’s high school teachers have nothing but disdain for Google. Be at ease, they will learn.

I am now a proud snippet scholar. Perhaps that’s why I’m so attracted to blogging, as you also must be! Be at ease, my snippet friends.

Cowboy Contemplative: Heaven or Home?

2009-05-07T22:23:00.011-04:00

Cowboy Contemplative: Singing our way home

By Allan Roy Andrews

[in memory of Mom]

Years ago a popular country song recorded by Tanya Tucker extolled the bliss of Texas. The song was “Texas When I Die,” and was written by a Tennessean (born in Arkansas), Ed Bruce (along with a couple of collaborators). Bruce actually cut a much better version of the song than Tucker’s, but her version moved further up the charts.

It begins with this repeated quatrain:

“When I die, I may not go to heaven;

I don’t know if they let cowboys in.

If they don’t, then bury me in Texas

‘cause Texas is as close as I’ve been.”

I have no connection whatsoever to Texas [other than an out-of-touch first cousin in Amarillo], so when I heard and fell in love with Bruce’s song, I toyed with the lyrics and made it my own.

“When I die, I may not go to heaven;

I don’t know if they let cowboys in.

If they don’t, then bury me in Brooklyn

‘cause Brooklyn is as close as I’ve been.”

New York actually gets dissed in Bruce’s lyrics, as does Detroit, Milwaukee, and—one could extrapolate—also Hell, while San Antone and Willie Nelson and Texas beer are given a treatment close to apotheosis. But no matter, for me Brooklyn—with or without Schaefer or Rheingold beers—is sweeter than San Antone or Houston or Big D.

One could, of course, plug in one’s own place of heavenly memories: “. . . then bury me in Boston/‘cause Beantown is as close as I’ve been.” Or, for less urban devotees, how about, “. . . then bury me in Springfield /‘cause Main Street is as close as I’ve been.”

For me, it was living in Brooklyn, believe it not, that drew me as a teenager to the thrall of country and western music. At the time, a New Jersey radio station, WAAT, beamed Don Larkin’s “Hometown Frolic” into the region with its theme song, the Gene Autry standard, “I’m Back in the Saddle Again.” (Nora Ephron and Tom Hanks proved that song a favorite even to the Sleepless in Seattle!) If confronted with the quasi-Biblical query, “Can anything good come out of Jersey?" I would have quickly and confidently responded, “country music.”

So while my high school buddies in Brooklyn were losing themselves in Alan Freed and the rhythm and blues music that evolved into rock ' n’ roll, I was steeping myself in Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Hank Thompson, Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow, Slim Whitman, and cowboy favorites such as Autry, Tex Ritter, Ernest Tubb, Roy Rogers, and Rogers’ original compatriots, the Sons of the Pioneers. My adolescent fantasy of singing on the “Grand Ole Opry” ranked second only to playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and I learned about five chords on the guitar and about 500 country and western songs.

At that time, the only thing truly cowboy about that line-up of singers I mention is that several of them wore cowboy hats and occasionally appeared in chaps and spurs. Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that “cowboy” is an attitude and a mindset more than a way of life or vocation; like me, most of the singers I mentioned above probably weren’t comfortable around horses, steers, or ranch waste; nevertheless, they extolled the way of the cowboy.

I think what cowboy singers promoted and what appealed to me as a boy was what I now can identify as the life of a “cowboy contemplative.” My heroes didn’t respond to life with Clint Eastwood macho aided by a big six-shooter; they backed off, rode alone, extolled the trail, preferred the dogies to the barroom, and sang quiet ballads.

Even when they did have to turn to the gun, they acted and then, like Alan Ladd’s “Shane” or the legendary Lone Ranger, rode into the distance to be alone with themselves—and perhaps, with God—and to sing a song (I just know the Lone Ranger sang when he was alone).

And they may well have asked the question repeated in Bruce’s “Texas When I Die,” which wonders if cowboys get to heaven (they do, as surely as ragamuffins enter God’s kingdom) and asserts that dying cowboys are ready to accept the next best thing: home.

Though she was neither a cowgirl nor a singer but surely a psalm-loving contemplative, it’s no wonder my mother always said of those who’d recently died, “They’ve gone home.”

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Writer’s Note: Ed Bruce, the writer of “Texas When I Die,” and the writer and original singer of “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” in the twilight of his career has cut two successful gospel albums—“Changed” and “Sing About Jesus”—and, as noted on his official Web site, has become an ambassador of God’s life-changing love in Jesus Christ.

P.S. If you’ve read this far and would like to know more about my own cowboy contemplative life, you can click a link on this blog for “Poetry by ARA” to find my poem entitled, “One of Their Kind.” Or, just click here.

The Power of Tears: My April Showers

2009-04-22T08:45:00.009-04:00

By Allan Roy Andrews

I’ve never bought into the adage that “real men don’t cry,” and thankfully Jesus belies those words by showing his manly humanity at news of the death of Lazarus (John 11:35).

My wife likes to tweak me occasionally by telling others I’m the only grown man she knows who cried during Disney’s “101 Dalmatians.” (Damn you, Cruella de Vil!)

I’ve simply never tried to hide my tears at poignant movies, and I discovered more than a decade ago that tears are basically uncontrollable as I delivered a eulogy to my mother during a family memorial service. I was fine about two-thirds through my prepared remarks. Then my mouth started quivering uncontrollably, my tongue turned to Styrofoam, and deep sobs broke from my soul, interrupted only by my sniffling apologies to the gathered relatives.

Something similar occurred years earlier when while visiting friends in Philadelphia I read the newspaper at bedtime and discovered an obituary of a college friend who had been killed in Vietnam. I fell back on my pillow and cried deeply for 10 or 15 minutes.

Over the past three or four weeks, I’ve found myself moved to tears on numerous occasions, and all of them have come as a result of my reading or viewing.

I picked up a 2008 book of poems called America at War (NY: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2008), and cried over a poem by children’s poet Rebecca Kai Dotlich. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of these fine poems gathered by Lee Bennett Hopkins; nevertheless, by the time I read Dotlich’s poem, “My Brother’s Shirt,” the futility and injustice of war had overwhelmed me as I read,

It is mine now,

one stiff Army shirt,

THOMPSON printed

on the pocket.

United States Army

sends something home;

gives part of you back.

The part that cannot

breathe, or speak

or tease me

anymore.

Memory and a fictional voice triggered my tears a few days later. Reading Bernice Morgan’s novel of Newfoundland, Random Passage (St. John’s, NF: Breakwater, 1992), I came across this pedestrian declaration: “We’ll have hot bread for you before you leaves.”

It was my Aunt Eva speaking, or it could have been my Aunt Jen, or my Aunt Mary Winsor, or my cousin Frances McGowan—Newfoundlanders all—expressing hospitality in dialect that I’d known as a boy, never questioning their grammar. Now I heard them again, and cried.

I cried last week reading the sports pages and watching televised accounts of baseball in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s as the nation celebrated Jackie Robinson Day. I am a boy who grew up in Brooklyn and has never been able to get the Dodgers out of my fan’s consciousness. I can recite the uniform numbers of the stars of the Brooklyn Dodgers in Robinson’s era: Duke Snider, 4; Pee Wee Reese, 1; Carl Erskine, 17; Preacher Roe, 28; Billy Cox, 3; Carl Furillo, 6; Junior Gilliam, 19; Gil Hodges, 14; Roy Campanella, 39; Clem Labine, 41; Don Newcombe, 36; Johnny Podres, 45; Jackie Robinson, 42!

As I watched clips of Robinson as a revolutionary rookie, I realized again how his story defined race relations for me as a teenager. To see every major league player, coach, manager, and umpire wearing Robinson’s number 42 on April 15 was a sign of hope and progress and unity that rarely appears in the modern world, and I wiped tears from my eyes.

Finally, I confess I was moved to tears (not unlike Demi Moore) when I watched the YouTube performance of a Scottish woman singing before a panel of judges in an audition for “Britain’s Got Talent” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY ). By now, Susan Boyle has become an Internet and entertainment celebrity. What moved me to tears was the triumph of her strong and pristine voice in the face of disdain and cynicism from the audience and the judges.

Then, the honest confession by the judges of surprise, delight, and as actress Amanda Holden put it, her “complete privilege” of hearing this wonderful voice. I was witnessing a triumph of grace, and it made me cry.

In these episodes of April I’ve had to confront my own humanity, and I better understand the power in tears and the wonder of knowing that Jesus wept.

Ease and Worship: A Gleaning

2009-03-20T10:03:00.004-04:00

Ease and Sabbath:

Gleaning from Crossan’s God and Empire

By Allan Roy Andrews

Faith at ease, an idea I seek to communicate in these entries, is teased out wonderfully in John Dominic Crossan’s book, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome Then and Now (HarperOne, 2007).

The book is Crossan’s reasoned apologetic for justice and against violence, much of it built on the ambiguities of Jesus’ way and the unambiguous errors of power.

I’m not certain I buy into Crossan’s largely demythologized interpretations of the historical Jesus, but along the way he emphasizes a wonderful Creation exegesis that lays a fundamental case for a faith at ease.

Here’s Crossan’s powerful argument:

In the Genesis Creation narrative, God blesses and hallows the seventh day, Crossan notes. Importantly, this blessing is surrounded with the assertion that God “rested from all the work he had done.” Genesis 2:2-3 hammers home this announcement of God’s resting by relating it three times.

Humanity is created on the sixth day and given dominion over the heretofore created order. However, as Crossan astutely points out, the culmination of Creation does not come with the making of man and woman. Instead, the creation of Sabbath rest is the acme of the Creation narrative.

“It is not humanity on the sixth day but the Sabbath on the seventh day that is the climax of creation,” Crossan writes. “And therefore our ‘dominion’ over the world is not ownership but stewardship under the God of the Sabbath” (God and Empire, 53).

The powerful lesson of the story, Crossan underscores, is that “The Sabbath Day was not rest for worship but rest as worship” (God and Empire, 54).

This is from where a faith at ease draws its inspiration and strength: rest as worship.

Martin Luther, in his writings if not in his actions, sought to underscore this emphasis by insisting salvation and justification rest on faith and not on deeds. I think if we drill deep enough we can conclude that any general resistance to Luther’s stand will disclose itself as being built on a conviction and claim that such a faith is too easy.

You mean, the argument flows, there is nothing for me to do?

Crossan helps us see that ease and worship are precisely the point. Be at leisure and know I am God.

Of course, once I grasp this, I have plenty to do.

A potpourri for Lent from CCBlogs

2009-03-10T23:03:00.002-04:00

Don't Eat Alone The Connection Pastor's Post

Faith at Ease Holy Vignettes I-YOUniverse

Where the Wind As the Deer The Other Jesus

Mark Powell Getting There Ellen Haroutunian

Theolog Welcoming Spirit Living Word by Word

Where the Wind Faith in Community When Grace Happens

Theophiliacs J. Stambaugh Theophiliacs A. Hunt Everyday Liturgy

Available Light Work in Progress Allan Bevere

A Diner at the End of Time The Painted Prayerbook Just Words

The Church Geek Breaking Fast on the Beach The Pocket Mardis

Reflectionary One Hand Clapping Unorthodoxology

Just as I am; I come, I come.

2009-02-25T23:15:00.007-05:00

Remember you are dust; I come, I come.

By Allan Roy Andrews

Lent began this week with one of those denominational surprises.

Episcopalians don’t bask in their memories of walking the altar-call path to repentance and forgiveness to the strains of “Just as I am, without one plea,” the 19^th-century evangelistic hymn that has become an unofficial anthem of the Billy Graham Crusades (Text by Charlotte Elliott, 1789-1871, and music by William B. Bradbury, 1816-1868) .

Nevertheless, we sang all six stanzas of the hymn as the hundred or so Ash Wednesday evening parishioners sauntered down the aisle to the altar rail and knelt to have a cross of burnt palm branch residue streaked across our foreheads and be reminded: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Back in the pew as the music and the imposition of ashes continued, I read carefully the words of the hymn. “I come, I come.” The credo of “I believe,” is overwhelmed by the venio of movement—“I come”--toward the altar. The verb come is repeated 13 times in the singing of the six stanzas in The Hymnal of the Episcopal Church; the 13^th sneaks in describing the bidding of the savior.

But the gracious wonder resides in how I come: Just as I am. No garments of morality; no sacrifice of doves or chocolate denial; no sackcloth; no swollen or scarred knees; no promises or pleas on my tongue; no because clauses; no self-assertions.

Just as I am: unemployed, underemployed, bought out by bonuses, crushed by balloon payments; fighting off the creditors; avoiding the turn to Chapter Nine; rescuing the resume; remembering unreturned favors; thinking seriously about ebay; mining for a family nest-egg.

Just as I am: Joining others who recognize their dust-ness. I come. I come.

Reinhold Niebuhr--Journalist (and Obama's Theologian)

2009-02-13T16:03:00.013-05:00

There’s much chat these days about the late Reinhold Niebuhr being the theologian whose thinking most influences President Barack Obama’s ideas, a suggestion with which the president concurs (hear Krista Tippett’s discussion with journalists David Brooks and E. J. Dionne on the NPR program, “Speaking of Faith”). In that light, I’ve resurrected a column I wrote 13 years ago.

Reinhold Niebuhr--Journalist

By Allan R. Andrews

First published June 23, 1996, in Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan. At that time, Andrews was Managing Editor of the newspaper and a weekly columnist.

Although he started a magazine and wrote for several others, few remember Reinhold Niebuhr as a journalist.

Niebuhr certainly rates as one of the most renowned American theologians of the 20th century.

Because of his German heritage, and probably because of his close association with German thinkers such as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr is often erroneously thought to have come out of the German theological academy.

He didn't. He was born June 21, 1892, in Wright City, Mo., and attended the graduate school at Yale University, though he never finished because of boredom and the press of family needs.

(Writer's note: It has been called to my attention that Niebuhr did indeed complete BD and M.Div degrees at Yale but left before completing his doctoral program).

Nevertheless, more than any other philosopher or theologian writing in the first three quarters of the 20th century, Niebuhr is a politician's--and a journalist's--thinker.

One recent commentator claims Niebuhr is ``one of the very few theologians to whom secular and humanist thinkers pay attention.''

Niebuhr, who died in 1971, never thought of himself as a theologian and lacked the usual credentials associated with the ivory tower. He thought of himself as a pastor, and much of his thinking came from his 13-year tenure as minister at Detroit's Bethel Evangelical Church.

His incisive mind, however, put him on the faculty of New York's Union Theological Seminary, where he lectured and wrote for 32 years.

As a thinker, Niebuhr stated his goal was ``to establish the relevance of the Christian faith to contemporary problems.''

The magazine that Niebuhr founded to that end, Christianity and Crisis, folded in 1994. It was never a big seller, but it served as a philosophical editorial page, provoking many movers and shakers who read it.

Many think its collapse signaled a failure of liberal theology, but Niebuhr was admired and listened to by conservative thinkers as well. One of the most appreciative studies of Niebuhr was written by the late conservative evangelical philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary, Edward J. Carnell.

Niebuhr's major writings included two massive studies, one entitled The Nature and Destiny of Man, which is credited with dispelling the notion of the perfectibility of society, an idea that had persisted in liberal American thought through two world wars and continues to exert an influence on American social policy.

The other of his great works, Moral Man and Immoral Society, propounded Niebuhr's conviction that one gets a clearer picture of what drives a human being not by studying the individual but by studying the groups in which that individual behaves. Groups--including those of organized religion--he thought often were influences of egoism and evil.

I can't do justice to his thinking here, but several American politicians--knowingly or not-- have built their philosophy of society and humanity out of exposure to Niebuhr's thinking.

My appreciation of Niebuhr is more pedestrian and takes some extrapolation.

Just a year after Niebuhr left the church in Detroit, he published a little book of journal entries from his years in Michigan. The book was released in 1929 under the title Leaves From the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic.

Journalists frequently are accused of cynicism. Rather than deny such a label, I find comfort in Niebuhr's notion of a ``tamed cynic.''

In this book, Niebuhr addressed the church, but as I reread it last year it struck me he could just as easily have been talking to journalism.

Was Niebuhr thinking of columnists when he wrote of his preaching task, ``I don't know whether I can ever accustom myself to the task of bringing light and inspiration in regular weekly installments''?

Aren't journalists as well as preachers taken to task with these words: ``all these momentary simplifications of the complexities of life cannot be finally satisfying, because they do violence to life''?

If Niebuhr didn't intend it when he wrote, I certainly thought of Washington, D.C., and other centers of power when I read: ``I have to work in the twilight zone where superstition is inextricably mixed up with something that is--well, not superstition.''

``America worships success,'' he wrote. ``And the only kind of success the average man can understand is obvious success.''

We journalists major in reporting obvious success; it's the not-so-obvious ones we miss.

A 1994 book listed 25 stories that journalism underplayed in the past decade. It includes the issues of labor law violations and environmental pollution and several political issues that were never tracked during presidential campaigns.

The Center for Diseases Control consistently argues that journalists should stop playing up bizarre medical stories such as cannibalistic bacteria and devote more time and energy to the less sensational, more boring but more important stories of medical research related to cancer or AIDS. Had he been a journalist, Niebuhr would have followed and investigated those kinds of stories.

Also in 1994, in an article entitled ``Reinhold Niebuhr and the Evening News,'' a Wisconsin Presbyterian minister, Randall K. Bush, wrote: ``Given the changing complexities of the world, a voice like Niebuhr's would be most welcome today--one able to speak with discernment about the state of affairs around us.''

What could be a better goal for journalists and commentators than this: to speak with discernment about the state of affairs around us?

Bush is convinced that Niebuhr's relevance is related to his understanding of ``the religious dimension inherent in all history.''

Far from being a cynic, Niebuhr is a pragmatic idealist. He wrote: ``Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair.''

Amid any despair related to economic stagnation, racial or ethnic hatred and random violence in the streets, America would do well to attend still to this ``tamed cynic'' whose birth anniversary passed last week

(ed. note: Niebuhr was born June 21, 1892, and died on June 1, 1971).

My lectio divina: I

2008-11-23T17:24:00.004-05:00

My lectio divina: I

“. . . then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice (96:12; KJV) . . . The hills melted like wax at the presence of the Lord (97:5) . . . Let the floods clap hands (98:8). . . .”

The Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) designates Psalms 96, 97, and 98 as the psalms of the Christmas Propers.

As I grapple to make lectio divina a part of my being, I am learning that biblical commentaries don’t aid necessarily my listening.

Commentaries tell me about “enthronement” psalms, for instance, or “psalms of descriptive praise.” They may instruct me in how the RCL wonderfully “layers” the texts of the “Christmas Propers” so that Isaiah’s prophecy is juxtaposed with the Lukan birth narrative and lined up with a passage from Titus delineating Christ’s saving work. Each of the propers is filled out with the above-mentioned “Christmas Psalms,” something like a multi-media show, one liturgist has suggested.

The problem I see with these labels and structures is that they satisfy an anthropocentric need and bias. God gives us metaphors and deep poetry, and we see enthronement, descriptive praise, and multimedia salvation shows. What God’s words emphasize is something superhuman: Trees sing; mountains melt; floods clap hands!

God is not just a big guy; he (she or it) is more than the Big Kahuna. Yahweh, the one of the not-to-be-pronounced name and the vowel-less tetragrammaton, lies beyond our categories of comprehension and expression.

Perhaps the most appropriate delineation is that given to Moses: “I AM.”

Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is trumped by the One beyond our thinking! The great I AM speaks through sacred word—and beyond it. No baptistic limits can stifle God’s voice “in these days.” None can corral or limit “I AM.”

God may even speak in strange tongues that appear to be gibberish, but he more likely speaks in science—stem cells, evolution, viruses, immune deficiencies—or in the cries of undocumented immigrants, starving children, unwed mothers, and those with affections for the same gender. (Do words tell us truly how brotherly love differs from homosexuality?)

Speak, Lord, in the trees and mountains and floods and lightning and thunder—speak in the Son and the Spirit--for your servants listen and seek understanding, faith and love.

Deep meaning to be found in non-reading

2008-10-14T09:37:00.007-04:00

The deep meaning of non-reading

By Allan Roy Andrews

It may be an apocryphal tale, but the story goes that the executors of the estate of philosopher-psychologist William James discovered when going through James’ library after his death in 1910 that his books were heavily marked, but only for the first 50-75 pages. After that, the pages showed no signs of having been turned or read. The great thinker didn’t finish most books he had started.

In a similar vein, talk-show host Larry King often interviews authors of new books. King has nonchalantly admitted that he rarely if ever prepares for the interview by reading a guest author’s book. In his own defense, King claimed he wanted the author to tell him what the book said so he didn’t feel compelled to read beyond its dust jacket.

These two stories bounced around my brain recently as I read Pierre Bayard’s fascinating volume called, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Bloomsbury USA, 2007). (In the spirit of full disclosure, I confess as of this writing I have read 125 of the 185 pages of Bayard’s book.)

Bayard created a system of abbreviations that involves letters and plus or minus signs assigned to books. Thus, he indicates books as UB, SB, HB, and FB, which are shorthand, respectively, for “book unknown to me,” “book I have skimmed,” “book I have heard about,” and “book I have forgotten.” Each of these abbreviations can be augmented with one or two plus or minus signs indicating whether the reviewer’s opinion was positive or negative, and two additional designations, BR (book read) and BNR (book not read), Bayard dismisses as unessential.

To my delight, I find Bayard unabashedly defending and encouraging what he calls “the rich category that is non-reading.” Books we have skimmed, books we have heard about, and books we have forgotten fill this rich category. Those unread and forgotten texts are crucial elements in our “collective library” and become part of our intellectual and social personae, Bayard argues. Keep in mind, please; this is an argument from a man of letters, a professor of French literature at the University of Paris.

Our educational enterprise, with its compulsive consumption of texts, needs a strong dose of this appreciation for non-reading. Bayard says a book stops being unknown to me as soon as it enters my perceptual field, and once it enters my “cultural space” the question of whether or not I have read it is unimportant. In fact, Bayard argues, by distancing ourselves from our compulsions to read a particular book we may discover the text’s true meaning. By having to talk about a book we have not read we are engaging in a creative act that is far more important than anything we might gain from having devoured a particular text, Bayard says.

Permit me a paraphrase of Bayard’s thesis (which of course is a summary of my understanding of Bayard and that is the important creative act here). He is teaching us to relax about our literary ignorance; in fact, he fondly quotes Oscar Wilde who felt 10 minutes was the required time he should devote to reading any single book. I think the leisure of non-reading may lead us to greater meaning as we confront texts that enter our cultural space.

Think for a moment what this implies for students and for overbearing instructors who decry the shortcuts of Cliff’s Notes, Spark Notes, and Wikipedia! Be at ease; there is deep meaning to be found in non-reading, in skimming, and in crib notes (based on someone else’s reading).

Let me take Bayard out on a theological/devotional limb here and address what is often a Christian compulsion related to reading the Bible. I posit two extensions of his argument that non-reading is a significant part of a person’s cultural space.

First, our non-reading of the Bible may be important when we are put in a situation of having to talk about the book we have never read or perhaps merely skimmed. I dare say that most Sunday School children have either never read or have merely skimmed (or as adults have forgotten) the Bible stories that lie at the foundation of their faith. Nevertheless, the meaning of those unread stories has shaped to a great degree their understanding and image of God, the world, sin and salvation.

Second, the wisdom and value of lectio divina, which encourages a leisurely, contemplative attending to a single word or phrase in a Bible passage as a path to spiritual understanding and growth, often resolves into what is called “praying the scriptures” and can be viewed as a deep and creative journey into non-reading.

There used to be a recurring feature in literary magazines under the headline: “Books that changed my mind.” I wonder how many of those mind-altering treatises were actually unread.

I’m not trying to denigrate or deny value in literacy, but there is no salvific power or inherent goodness in devotion to reading or in our compulsive consumption of texts. I have read the New Testament story of Jesus and the rich, young ruler, and in none of the versions I’ve consulted does Jesus admonish, “Go, and read every book you can get your hands on.”

Journalists policing their ethics

2008-09-12T13:49:00.006-04:00

Good Journalists police their own ethics
By Allan Roy Andrews

Just before Christmas of the year I broke into journalism covering the courts and government offices of a county in Central Indiana, the county treasurer, an affable and very electable politician (the only Democrat to be re-elected in my rookie year of covering politics), handed me a small gift-wrapped package as I made my beat rounds.

Without realizing it, I’d been bought.

At least that’s what I concluded after my opened gift--a pen-and-pencil set engraved with the treasurer’s name along with a message of “Season’s Greetings”--still sitting in its Christmas wrapping on my desk, spurred questions and discussion among my newsroom colleagues. My news editor, my city editor, and eventually my managing editor entered into the sporadic but persistent discussions with me and one or two other reporters on the ethics of accepting gifts from those we were covering and potentially criticizing.

My bosses in that tiny newsroom were excellent teachers. At least two of them were graduates of fine journalism programs at Northwestern U. and the U. of Indiana. But they’d also been on the beat and faced the same ethical test I had failed. They played down, of course, the significance of the “bribe” I’d brought back to show around the newsroom, but their gentle and persuasive discussions implanted an attitude and conviction that became a guide for my professional life in newspapers.

With perhaps the exception of allowing some politicians to give me rides around the city during campaigns (some of my best interviews were had while riding to or from airports), I practiced the vow I took that evening as a rookie. For the length of my career as a reporter and editor, I never accepted even a token gift from anyone who was a possible subject of my reporting and writing. It just made perfect sense to me that a journalist must be, as the Hoosiers I learned from might have put it, “beholden to no one.”

In this era of civic journalism, entertainment journalism, highlighting infotainment and blustering TV commentators, and with the praised biases of “talk show” hosts and ranting bloggers, we need reminders of the ethical principles upon which modern American journalism has been built.

When I hear so often in our political discourse of “liberal media” or “right-wing media” being castigated by citizens who apparently have never been encouraged toward critical thinking, I want to interrupt them and say, “That’s not how most of us play the game.” Instead of hating the media, citizens must learn to respect journalism; the converse, of course, is that journalists must earn that respect by adhering to high ethical standards.

To put this in perspective, I invite you to revisit with me a four-year-old booklet that probably only a few hundred people have ever read. It underscores the principles that I learned from foolishly accepting a kindly politician’s Christmas gift. The booklet—47 pages plus an index—is called Ethical Journalism, an internal publication of The New York Times. The 2004 tome is subtitled, “A Handbook of Values and Practices for the News and Editorial Departments.”

The Times’ proscriptions are unlike other journalistic codes of ethics that arose in the 1990s following a wave of incidents in which well-known journalists lied about their reports and sources. Those ethics codes, in the words of Marianne Jennings, an ethics professor at Arizona State University, “err by focusing less on journalists' conduct than on the ‘public's right to know.’ In other words, they say a lot about the rights and very little about the press' responsibilities.”

The Times’ handbook, in contrast, goes right to the details.

For example, in a section that spoke to my sin of taking a gift called “Accepting Hospitality from Sources,” the handbook reads:

“A simple buffet of muffins and coffee at a news conference . . . is harmless but a staff member should not attend a breakfast or lunch held periodically for the press by a ‘newsmaker’ unless the Times pays for the staff member’s meals.”

(In my opinion, incidentally, this constraint also applies to such innocuous events as a Presidential Prayer Breakfast.) The Times handbook goes on to list complimentary tickets to artistic and athletic performances as being out of bounds for a serious, ethical journalist.

Here is another proscription that might surprise the devotees of televised news forums:

“No staff member who takes part in a broadcast, Webcast, public forum or panel discussion may write or edit news articles about that event.”

This may bring up short those who specialize in interviewing colleagues in front of the camera and get little more than interpretive pap or those who write reports about what politicians and other officials say while engaging in televised and sponsored discussions.

Citizens who are prone to castigating the media need to understand more clearly the efforts professional journalists impose upon themselves and their colleagues in order to avoid biased delivery of the news. Many citizens are simply too cavalier in their dismissal of the press. I think a browsing of the Times handbook on ethics could do much to educate the public and help them hold journalism to its stated ethical stance.

New York Times staff members are ethically prohibited from participating in contests or competitions sponsored by groups that “have a direct interest in the tenor of Times coverage.”

The handbook makes specific reference to some popular competitions. Times staffers are advised not to take part in competitions that ask them to vote on the outcome. Listed as prohibited are voting for winners of the Tony Awards, the Heisman Trophy and other awards picked by members of the press such as most valuable player, rookie-of-the-year awards and entrance into various halls of fame.

When it comes to politics, the handbook states flatly: “Journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics.” Wearing campaign buttons or insignia is prohibited, as is the display of bumper stickers or lawn signs endorsing a particular candidate. Times staff members are flatly barred from seeking public office anywhere.

There is a trove of educating tidbits in this handbook about how the press expects its members to operate. What I have highlighted is just a taste of the handbook’s riches. The document is posted on the New York Times company Web site.

Recently, with the rise of blogs and other freelance material appearing in print media, the Times has initiated a program of having freelancers sign a statement that they have read and are familiar with the Times’ ethical provisions as spelled out in the handbook.

I think it a fine idea for every blogger to peruse this important document.

The joys in the tiniest of memories: Remembering David M. Scholer (1938-2008)

2008-08-31T21:17:00.017-04:00

Relishing the influence of the tiniest of memories
In memoriam: David M. Scholer (1938-2008)

By Allan Roy Andrews

As I write, a funeral has taken place in Pasadena, California, for David M. Scholer, a New Testament scholar at Fuller Theological Seminary who died on August 22 after a six-year battle with colorectal cancer. Scholer was 70 years old.

In the Los Angeles Times obituary for Scholer, he is cited as singling out the “dividends,” if that word is appropriate, of his fight with the debilitating disease:
He discovered the importance of memory, reveling every day in recollections of the people he met and loved, the places around the world he visited. "The joys and the achievements of the past don't mean I live in the past," he said, "but I do celebrate with gratitude what has been." [7]
I celebrate with gratitude my memory of Scholer; he was my tutor and guide in New Testament Greek during my seminary studies at Gordon Divinity School in Massachusetts in the mid-1960s. I write of the tiniest of memories; what is here is more about me than about Scholer, though his cited words tell me he would understand and appreciate my memory.

With no intention of entering the ministry, I enrolled at seminary to expand my understanding of theology, but my advisor insisted I had to study biblical languages and put me in an independent-study course with Scholer as my tutor.

He was a third-year student at the seminary and worked as a teaching assistant to faculty in the New Testament department (three men who eventually produced an outstanding college-level introduction entitled, The New Testament Speaks [1969]).

This meant that several days each week I met with Scholer and his best friend at the seminary, Ken Swetland (now a senior professor of ministry at Gordon-Conwell), while they ate their brown-bag lunches in a classroom. As they chatted and poured drinks from Thermos bottles, Scholer casually and quickly reviewed my lessons from Machen’s introductory Greek textbook.

I was a bipolar (in the statistical sense) student of Greek. The work I did for Scholer was either feast or famine, and on those days when it was apparent I’d neglected my lessons and homework he would dismiss me courteously but quickly with encouragement to try again and matter-of-factly resumed his conversation. Swetland sat silently as I was tutored, waiting patiently to pick up the conversations he and Scholer enjoyed each day.

My memory of those minor, forgettable lunchtime sessions is anything but forgettable in my brain. Unwittingly, these two friends and future scholars and seminary professors were indoctrinating me in an unseen part of the scholarly culture—friendly but focused conversation. I picked up tidbits of New Testament study (as well as faculty scuttlebutt) during those casual lunches that students never get from classroom study; I was bathed daily with unassuming anecdotes and attitudes of frustration and love that I absorbed in the depth of my consciousness.

I squeaked by in Greek, but unlike Augustine, who was alienated from the language by his initial tutoring, I became an enamored spectator to it, largely because I saw how easily and comfortably Scholer handled it. I still covet his grace and ease with the ancient language.

Neither Scholer nor Swetland at the time, I think, knew that I was their age (give or take several months). I’d finished college late and spent a year in graduate school before I entered seminary. These friends, a Minnesotan and an Oklahoman, alumni of the same college, were in their last year of seminary and were casually demonstrating academic maturity to a beleaguered Brooklyn student.

I went on to become a journalist, and in the pedestrian way that journalists have for tucking away information, I took note of Scholer’s career:

• his years at Gordon as a Greek and New Testament professor during which he labored—as did his mentors before him—almost two decades to earn a Th.D. from Harvard;
• his years at North Park and Northern Baptist, where he was as much administrator as teacher, but where he forged his quiet, ground-breaking work in support of women as leaders in the church; and
• his years at Fuller, where his quiet, creative and ever-challenging mind seemed to have found a theological home where “perfect love casts out fear.”

Those conversations over lunch and Greek in the 1960s constitute the only time I ever spoke with Scholer. However, his work as a bibliographer, as a faithful and tedious scholar of the New Testament in its original language, and as a quiet champion for the full discipleship of marginalized Christians planted seeds I didn’t know were growing in my own life.

As a layman in my own Episcopal church I labor to encourage more Bible study, to foster deeper appreciation and encouragement of the ordination of female disciples, and to prevent the abandonment and marginalization of those living disparate lifestyles within the body of Christ. I thank God for the unassuming and unwitting influence of David M. Scholer in shaping my thinking.

=====================

Links:

Scholer, who since 1994 taught at Fuller Theological Seminary, was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2002. On September 18, 2005, he preached in Pasadena, Calif., a sermon called, "Living with Cancer."

[1] Listen to this sermon at: http://www.archive.org/details/sermons_fbcp

[2] That same sermon--slightly edited--is reprinted at: http://www.rca.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=3051&srcid=3512

[3] The tract to which Scholer refers in his sermon--well worth reading--is available at: http://www.harvestnet.org/teachings/suffer.html

[4] A summary of Scholer's thought on "headship," which illustrates his high view of women in the Church of Jesus Christ, can be read at:
http://www.godswordtowomen.org/scholer.htm

[5] One of his students has posted a tribute on a blog that includes several other links: http://patmccullough.com/2008/08/26/prof-david-m-scholer-1938-2008/

[6] Fuller Theological Seminary, where David spent the last 14 years of his distinguished academic career, has posted a tribute to his legacy at:
http://www.fuller.edu/page.aspx?id=4412&terms=Scholer

[7] Obituary, Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-scholer28-2008aug28,0,4627887.story

Some innies and outies of spirituality

2008-08-07T11:15:00.006-04:00

Retreat and Exposure:

When Extroverts Become Silent—and Introverts are Exuberant

By Allan Roy Andrews

I’ve spent much of the past year considering and appreciating silence and trying to assess its role in my own spiritual life. I took an online course called “The Uses of Silence,” and came away convinced more than ever that silence is deeper and more profound than the simple absence of sound. I am moving in the direction of considering silence a form of revelation or a form of knowing. In a culture that appears to decry and belittle—indeed, to fear--silence, I am concluding that quietness and silence provide a pathway to a deeper relationship with God.

Wouldn’t you know that just when I think I’m beginning to understand the nature of contemplation and serenity as a part of our need for private, introverted time alone with God, along comes the argument in favor of deep spirituality for extroverts, extolling a life of prayer and devotion that “appeals to those who thirst for inebriation in the vast fullness of life.”

Father W. Paul Jones, a Roman Catholic (ex-Methodist) university and seminary professor, has brought me up short with a little tract he’s written entitled, A Spirituality for Extroverts. (This theme runs through several of the 11 books Jones has published, but this little pamphlet from The Forward Movement, the Episcopal devotional publishers in Cincinnati, summarizes his thinking on extrovert spirituality.)

Because of the culture of introversion in which he was raised--where quiet aloneness was cherished, where the deliberate, slow and silent processing of experience was encouraged, where deep and devoted mulling always preceded action--Jones grew up believing “I didn’t have a spiritual bone in my body.”

For over 30 years, Jones writes, “I was left with the conclusion that if ‘God’ was whatever was supposed to happen in the silent insides of me, then I was doomed to be a spiritual failure.”

Jones takes us through a tiny history of contemplative Christianity, noting that Teresa of Avila placed contemplation at the apex of one’s prayer life and advocated “a consuming silence transcending all relationships” as her spiritual goal.

Similarly, John of the Cross suggests spirituality is “divorced from all things external” to the extent that even the appreciation of natural beauty must be broken.

Where does this leave the exuberant energy that marks the Pepsi Generation? Jones asks. He says the introverted spirituality of these saints implied that any spirituality claiming his extroverted personality would need to reclaim what the saints appear to deny. His spirituality would involve “a yearning to taste, smell, hear, touch, and see in all things.”

Without giving away Jones’ solution to the extrovert’s spiritual dilemma with which he struggled (enough to say he finds a corrective model in the incarnation of Jesus Christ), I share a bit of advice that probably rescued me from similar introvert-extrovert bewilderment in my continuing search for a spiritual path; although, my dilemma probably had more to do with hyperactivity than a quest for spirituality, and my quest is by no means over.

A wise professor with whom I studied the New Testament urged upon his students a strategy of retreat and exposure. He argued that we needed time alone to think and get our professions properly ordered; however, he also argued that isolated aloneness was minimally helpful over an extended period; we needed to expose our well-honed thinking and beliefs to both friends and critics.

“Retreat and exposure,” he repeated as his scholarly mantra. “Retreat and exposure” must become the way of spiritual growth.

That mantra made sense to me. Each time I sought to retreat into some sanctuary or quiet place to “get alone with God,” I grew lonesome and fidgety. Conversely, in a crowd of worshipers, I found myself often longing for a quiet and isolated time to speak with God. Retreat and exposure outlined for me two facets of my spiritual quest, both valuable and necessary. The same God who urged stillness also urged going into the entire world, or in my professor’s words: “Retreat and exposure.”

I have never been able to classify myself accurately on the introvert-extrovert scale. If I can be permitted a sports metaphor: I’ve always valued true teamwork, but I know that when a player steps into a batter’s box or goes to the free-throw line, that player is utterly alone. There’s a time for retreat and a time for exposure. In sports, that usually translates into defense and offense, both of which the game requires.

Jones uses a series of poetic descriptions to capture this dual nature of spirituality. He calls it “a carnal spirituality,” a “fleshly mysticism,” a “sacramental living.” Deep spirituality, he suggests, is “a cello well played, a motorcycle aimed at the sunset, a contagious laughter, a friendship wanting nothing, a playful kite at the end of its string, a child’s giggle.”

Where seriousness characterizes the introvert’s spirituality, Jones notes levity is the mark of an extrovert’s spiritual life. “What silence is for introverts,” he writes, “music is for extroverts.”

The key, I think, for understanding Jones’ extrovert spirituality is recognizing that greed and self-centeredness have no place in his engagement of the world and of life.

Whether we are introverted or extroverted, our spirituality has nothing to do with us; it’s not all about me; it’s ultimately about God and who I am in my relationship to my Creator-Redeemer and the wonderful world I find myself trying to understand.

The apostle John probably captured this best in speaking about Jesus: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30, KJV).

Trees, Doves and Cancer

2008-07-10T15:09:00.008-04:00

A Five-year Survival Celebration

By Allan Roy Andrews

A Japanese cherry tree has been planted in my name.

My tree is near the Ferko Recreation Center on East Cayuga Street, a neighborhood facility in northeastern Philadelphia, part of the rejuvenated Juniata Golf Course (a city-owned course that is one of 63 parks in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System). A grove of trees has been planted in honor of those who in 2008 reached a five-year anniversary of surviving after cancer treatment.

I am among those survivors, having been treated for prostate cancer in July of 2003 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at Southwestern Regional Medical Center, one of five hospitals and clinics operated nationally by the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA). CTCA hospitals operate in Philadelphia, Pa.; Tulsa, Okla.; Zion, Ill.; Seattle, Wash.; and a new medical center set to open in 2009 in Goodyear, Ariz., just outside Phoenix.

When CTCA opened a new Eastern Regional Medical Center in 2005 in Philadelphia—across the street from the backside of the Juniata Golf Club—I decided driving to the city of brotherly love was much easier than flying to Tulsa for my annual checkups. Thus, I became a patient at the Philly facility.

All of the CTCA facilities celebrate life by planting trees for five-year survivors; it is a hopeful tradition. “We want to plant a forest,” the CTCA literature proclaims. CTCA’s original facility in Illinois planted 105 trees in 2008. The two-year old Philadelphia hospital planted six.

Last month, the CTCA in Philadelphia invited the five-year survivors back for a two-day “Celebration of Life.” The hospital’s main parking lot was transformed by two huge tents into a dining hall and an assembly hall. Movie star Richard Roundtree, the original “Shaft” of the silver screen, himself a survivor of breast cancer, was the keynote speaker, but the real “stars” of the festival were the five-year survivors.

We were treated as celebrities. Although not all of us attended the full-blown program, we were interviewed and video-taped, feted by every speechmaker, seated for meals with the “suits” who administer and run CTCA’s multimillion dollar operations, and congratulated by every hospital staff member from the chiefs of surgery and radiology to the porters of maintenance and the drivers of CTCA's characteristic white buses and limos.

I frequently found myself responding to a congratulatory greeting by thinking, “What did I do?” It was as if the entire enterprise of CTCA was celebrating my birthday; and, in a way, I suppose that’s true.

My cancer treatment turned out to be a case of bombarding my prostate gland with external radiation beams, a non-invasive and almost pedestrian procedure—if any treatment for cancer can be considered pedestrian (think of trying to steadily hold a laser pointer on a postage stamp from about ten-feet away). In 2003, I spent a month at the facility in Tulsa receiving daily radiation. The treatment itself took about one hour each weekday. The rest of my time there was like being on vacation, or perhaps more like being on a cruise ship. My then 11-year-old youngest son spent a week in Tulsa with me, watching me undergo treatment via closed-circuit TV and learning to play BINGO at night with the other patients. He won an umbrella and a pair of kitchen scissors that we still use.

When I was undergoing treatment, the Southwestern Medical Center in Tulsa occupied several floors of the 20-, 30-, and 60-storey CityPlex towers that were built as the “City of Faith” by the television evangelist and faith-healer Oral Roberts. Financial considerations forced Roberts to lease the tower complex, but there remained an aura of holiness Christianity hovering over the place (as there is in much of southeastern Tulsa around Oral Roberts University).

Because of its innovative treatment approaches to cancer and its temporary location (Southwestern four years ago moved into a new facility of its own several miles to the east), I think CTCA in Tulsa had to deal with a wrong-headed image of “religious quirkiness” that some attached to its locale and its practice. The only truth in that image is that faith is not discounted or discouraged at CTCA, and chaplains are incorporated as professionals in the total comprehensive treatment plan. The only active association I learned of between CTCA and Oral Roberts University was that two of its chaplains held degrees from that school.

One woman who shared the celebratory spotlight in Philadelphia with me has become something of a willing and enthusiastic spokesperson for CTCA and a force for the medical and psychological fight against cancer.

Jan Pedersen is a survivor of ovarian cancer. She had been through surgery and had been advised that chemotherapy was her only hope or she would be dead in six months. Her oncologist, in Jan’s words, “scoffed” at her questions about diet, nutrition and supplements as a treatment program. That’s when Jan discovered CTCA and learned about what she calls “a team of professionals who cover every aspect of body, mind and spirit. They treat the whole person, and this was what I was looking for . . . a team of doctors who would work with me to decide the best course of action to fight this disease.”

Treating the body, mind and spirit is a hallmark of CTCA, and among the many options for treatment that my wife and I investigated when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, it was by far the only option that integrated holistic medicine, psychological hope, state-of-the-art technology and the mystery of the healing spirit.

In Tulsa, I learned a great deal about nutrition and naturopathic medicine; one naturopathic physician planted a watchword in my brain: “take daily probiotics and drink lots of water!” I was ministered to daily by chaplains who understood that my spirit had cancer too. I ate meals with patients from all over the United States—and some from beyond. Many of them had been dismissed or rejected by other cancer treatment facilities, having been told in effect to “go home and prepare to die.” Not all of them, of course, lived to have a tree planted in their names, but I believe most found a modicum of hope and peace being among professionals who wholeheartedly joined their struggle to live.

When it comes to surgery, I rank among the top of the world’s wusses, and when my urologist, who biopsied my prostate, was ready to put me on the operating table the next day, I balked. Several discussions later, that urologist asked me as I spoke of pondering radiation treatment if I were willing to put “an atom bomb” in my body.

I have a close friend who is a top-notch radiology researcher, and I’d been talking to him about radiation therapy and the advances in that field in the 21st century. The urologist’s attempt at drama became for me a sign of misinformation. After a visit to Tulsa and consultations with the specialists there, the treatment choice for me was clear.

Five years later, I am celebrating that decision, which is not to say that surgery wouldn’t have kept me alive, but I’m quite certain the quality of my life would not have been what it has been for the past five years.

Jan Pedersen and I got to stand near the cherry trees planted in our names and then we opened a small cage and released seven white doves into the sky. The woman who had delivered the birds for the ceremony came from Bethlehem, Pa.--about a 90-minute drive away. She said the white messengers would be home before she. “They can fly about 80 miles an hour with the right wind conditions,” she told us.

The cherry tree and the white dove have become for me symbols of hope and freedom and my celebration of life as a cancer survivor.

My faith in God has been strengthened in my five-year odyssey, not because I’m convinced that God has something to do with my survival (which I am), but because I made the trip with fellow sufferers and cancer treatment experts who in their pursuit of knowledge and tools to combat this killer disease humbly acknowledge that medicine alone does not heal, no more than it causes a tree to grow or a dove to wing its way home.

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Thanks to Natalie Bounds-Adams, the alumni director at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, for correcting my error in suggesting that the CitiPlex Towers had ever been sold. The towers are still owned by the university. My editing of the essay reflects her correction. (ARA--July 25, 2008)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This posting has been reprinted in The Leaf, a newsletter of the Eastern Regional Medical Center in Philadelphia; August 2008, Vol. 3, issue 8.

Seeing old movies in a better light

2008-07-04T14:17:00.000-04:00

July 4, 2008

Revisiting Movies

By Allan Roy Andrews

Teaching developmental psychology to freshmen and sophomores as a young professor gave me a great opportunity to test a theory I had about how students read.

I asked my classes to read J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Of course, they all complained they’d had to read that book in high school English. Those that didn’t complain smugly thought they faced a cake-walk assignment. They could skim enough to pass any quizzes I might give.

But interesting things happened as we read (i.e., re-read) and discussed that book.

Almost every student in the class confessed that the book seemed different to them as they read it this time. The language didn’t shock them the way it had when they were first exposed to it; they viewed Holden Caulfield in a completely different light, they mostly said. Best of all from my perspective, they read with an analytic mind toward adolescence instead of with the defense of a life-style most of them had experienced as teens themselves.

What had changed? Not Salinger’s writing; it was the same text they’d read four or five years earlier.

Of course, they had changed; they had grown older; their perspective had matured; their readiness to deal with adolescent development had awakened, and I was rewarded because almost to a person the students thanked me for having them re-read the novel.

Recently, I’ve been having a similar experience with films. Thanks to the convenience of Netflix, I’ve been re-watching some older movies and have developed a completely different attitude and appreciation of them. This experience has reinforced my challenge to our culture’s tyranny of the new.

I offer three examples of films that have moved near to the top of my favorites list because I revisited them. Prior to my reviewing them, they had been enigmatic to me; they were films I should have liked better than I did. All three had won great accolades when they were new, but they didn’t impress me when I viewed them. Now, more than a decade later in some instances, my reviewing of them has allowed me to see their greatness, and at least two of them have moved into that constantly flowing category of “all-time favorites.”

The first is The Mission, a British film produced in 1986 starring Robert DiNiro and Jeremy Irons. It is a historic depiction of Jesuit missionaries working in South America and their conflict with commercial interests that sought to enslave the natives to whom the Jesuits were ministering.

When I first viewed this film, I saw it as a swashbuckling adventure story that focused on the repentance and conversion of a hardened mercenary. The film ends in tragedy and disappointment as the mission outpost is overrun and the heroes are slain. I concluded The Mission was a downer of a film.

This month, in re-watching the film, I see it as a sad but powerful telling of the power of faith even in failure. The film has become for me more of a challenge to my own comfort zone regarding faith than a historical rendering of a sad period in church history.

I noted in my newfound appreciation that Church Times magazine, the Anglican journal of news, opinion and culture, listed the 50 best religious movies of all time and placed The Mission at the top of its list.

Any argument I had with that placement would be nitpicking; this is a great movie and has become one of my favorites.

To understand my new appreciation for a second movie, one has to know that my ethnic background is that of Newfoundland. My parents emigrated from that British colony (it has since become part of the Canadian Confederation) in the North Atlantic early in the 20^th century and raised a family in Brooklyn, New York, that was more rooted in Newfoundland than in America.

Thus, it was with great anticipation in 2001 that I welcomed the film, The Shipping News, based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and starring Kevin Spacey and Judy Dench. The film tells the story of Quoyle, a journeyman pressman who marries a slut, has a daughter, and watches his life spin away from him.

An aunt shows up at his door looking for the ashes of her brother, Quoyle’s father, and convinces Quoyle to relocate to their family’s old home in Newfoundland, where Quoyle stumbles into a job reporting on the coming and goings of ships in the local harbor.

The movie, to me as a 2001 viewer, was dark and convoluted, and struck me as filled with juveniles who refused to grow. Its depiction of Newfoundland was stark and almost without hints of any joy that I’d known was a part of life in the outports of my parents’ homeland.

Seeing the film for a second time turned me about 180 degrees. I realized that Newfoundland is a character in the film, and that through it Quoyle finds strength, happiness and new life. I heard the accents of the natives (especially in the lines of Wavey Prowse, played by Julianne Moore) and was struck by their subtle authenticity that I knew from being surrounded as a boy by Newfoundland dialect. The film remains dark and quirky—but, hey, that’s Newfoundland.

The Shipping News, like The Mission, has moved into the top echelons of my all-time favorite movies.

Most recently, another film I’d pretty much written off when I first saw it came back to life for me, the 1997 thriller, Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

As Newfoundland was a character in The Shipping News, so Greenland is a character in Smilla.

The movie begins with an apocalyptic episode of a Greenland seal hunter at the turn into the 20th century who is overwhelmed in the aftershock of an asteroid that crashes into the barren tundra where he is hunting. Fast-forward to Denmark in the 1990s.

A Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson (played by Julia Ormond), who lost her mother and conflicts with the partner of her rich father, is now living in Copenhagen. Smilla cannot accept the hasty conclusion that a young boy—a neighbor and fellow Greenlander--died when he fell from the roof of their apartment building. Her investigation, including her “reading” of the child’s footprints in the snow on the roof, suggests he was frightened into running and falling off the roof.

Thus begins her convoluted, thrilling and enthralling quest for the truth behind the child’s death. As one might guess, the death and the asteroid are linked by greedy scientists and entrepreneurs.

When I first viewed this movie, I must have been mistakenly lured into thinking I’d be viewing a disaster movie; strangely, I found it difficult to recall all but the opening scenes of the movie. This time around I found myself intrigued by Smilla’s persistent amateurish detective work as well as with her persistent and strong feminist attitudes.

To be sure, the movie is flawed, including the convenience of her wealthy father who funds her romps in search of evidence; her unnecessarily harsh clashing with the young woman who has replaced her mother at her father’s side; the fanatic caricature of the secretary who gives her key direction to clues, and the shoot-‘em-up final episodes that diminish the power of the on-location filming in Greenland . The stuttering romance with her neighbor mechanic who assists her in her pursuit of truth and justice—often without her cooperation—also proves a bit clumsy.

Nevertheless, Smilla won me over on a second viewing, and gave me a new appreciation for the beauty of Greenland. Smilla’s Sense of Snow didn’t jump to the top of my favorites list, but it moved up significantly.

All of this is to say that re-viewing movies can be a rewarding and enriching experience, and I recommend it heartily, especially now that Netflix makes older films so accessible.

I’m afraid, however, you’ll still have to go to the bookstore if you’re looking to review Catcher in the Rye. To date, no one has gotten Salinger’s permission to write a screenplay or to adapt the story for the big screen.

God, faith, and some other dirty words

2008-06-24T08:55:00.001-04:00

Monday, June 23, 2008

George Carlin and banned words

By Allan Roy Andrews

Comedian George Carlin’s humor was a delightful bashing of our human silliness, especially our penchant for euphemisms, e.g., bathroom tissue instead of toilet paper; landfill in place of dump; and sanitary engineer in place of garbage man. Carlin died Sunday at the age of 71. He had a 30-year history of heart ailments and a career almost double that in stand-up comedy. The New York Times noted that Carlin was a master of words that most people could not or would not speak.

It was Carlin, I believe, who first noted that we park on driveways and drive on parkways, and he marveled and got lots of mileage out of oxymorons such as “military intelligence” and “jumbo shrimp.” But in the end he’ll be forever remembered as the broadcaster of the seven dirty words banned on television.

Despite his profane reputation, Carlin’s clever arguments often made sense. There are no dirty words, he claimed: dirty thoughts, dirty intentions, dirty people, yes; but words simply cannot be dirty, he argued. His attitude was a bit like that of Jesus reminding us that what comes out of persons corrupts not what goes into them.

I think Carlin probably read the second-century Roman dramatist Terence, who is credited with saying, “nothing human is alien to me.” (I say probably, just as I’d say former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle probably copied without attribution one-liners from Carlin’s 1997 book, Brain Droppings, an obscene journalistic deception that eventually cost the columnist his job in Boston.)

Off course, Carlin’s reputation—call it notoriety, if you will—came from his irreverence, especially in cataloging the seven words that cannot be spoken on television or radio. His doing so led to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling (by a 5-4 vote) in favor of FCC regulation of language in broadcasting and made Carlin an iconoclastic culture superhero.

Here are Latinized versions of Carlin’s seven dirty words: defecation, urination, copulation, pudenda, fellatio, maternal incest, and mammary glands.

My list admittedly lacks the shock and punch of Carlin’s Anglo-Saxon—and for the most part single syllable—equivalents, but no court or station censor will object to the terms on my list; in fact, there’s a good chance many station managers wouldn’t understand several words on my list so I prefer my list as thought-provoking and educational rather than shocking. Even Alex Trebek (a philosophy major in college, by the way) has been known to utter words from my list.

In case you haven’t picked up on it, I have read several of Carlin’s books of humor (Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help, 1984; Brain Droppings, 1997; Napalm and Silly Putty, 2001; When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? 2004; and Three Times Carlin: An Orgy of George, 2006) and found beneath the blatant obscenities a piercing mind and an admirable and cogent social analyst.

What I find somewhat bewildering is Carlin’s castigating of religion. Apparently Carlin (in spite of his Roman Catholic upbringing; or, perhaps, because of it) would have preferred we not use words such as God, Christ, faith, hope, charity, sin or forgiveness in any serious context (yes, that’s seven words). He seemingly had no objection to their use in a profane context.

The late Harvard personality theorist Gordon W. Allport used to note that our value-language has been turned topsy by the Freudian revolution. In Freud’s day, Allport wrote, everyone talked about God and nobody talked about sex beyond the boudoir. In our day, everyone talks about sex (and for some inane reason, our talk is predominantly dirty!). God-talk in our culture, however, is borderline taboo, reserved for dimly lit rooms called sanctuaries.

God-talk as I define it, by the way, means real theological conversation, not the God-as-political-lever-and-lobbyist language that Carlin often chastised as part of American hypocrisy.

I never met Carlin, but I have fantasized a chance I might have to converse with him over a plate of pork chops and suggest that I think God laughs heartily and approvingly at the comedian’s exposition of our human silliness; but I’d also have to suggest that Carlin’s dirty words have become pedestrian, unnecessary and boring, and deserve but a marginal place in television, film or literature.

Recommended Reading:

Here's an anecdote that not many will access in the weeks following the comedian's death:

http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/blogs/bloom/2008-06-25

Congruent Reflections: Silence and Daily Meditations

2008-06-15T17:46:00.000-04:00

June 15, 2008

[This is a rambling essay I wrote near the end of May for an online course offered through the Church Divinity School of the Pacific's CALL center. The course was called "The Uses of Silence" and was moderated by Maggie Ross.]

Reviewing April:
A Comment on the Serendipity of Congruent Readings.

By Allan Roy Andrews

Forward Day by Day provides daily meditational readings for Episcopalians. Published by the Forward Movement in Cincinnati, Ohio, the quarterly journal is endorsed by The Episcopal Church. Its daily selections, based on the lectionary, are written by anonymous writers identified only by the editor’s notes. Each writer provides a month’s worth of meditations, and each of the quarterly volumes provides three-month’s worth of readings that follow the daily lectionary for the church year. The readings range from highly academic to pedestrian in their approach; from expositional to metaphorical in their interpretations; from conservative to liberal in their theology.

In some instances, the writing is broken up among more writers. The current volume covering May, June, and July of 2008, for example, is written by the 11 deans of the 11 seminaries of the Episcopal Church. Each of the academics has written eight or nine meditations. Typically, a meditation on a scriptural passage and the optional inclusion of a brief prayer runs to about 330 words.

The cover of each issue often displays a well-known piece of art (or a detail from such artwork). The issue for February-April, for example, shows Italian Renaissance painter Bergognone’s Christ Risen from the Tomb, a 1490 oil painting from the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The Forward Day by Day selections for the months of February, March, and April, 2008, were unusual in that they were written by a single author identified by the editor as “a lay woman from the American Southwest who is a widely published spiritual director.”

Coinciding with my reading of the selections for April, 2008, was my participation in a course taught by Maggie Ross (an Anglican solitary and writer who spends a good part of every year living in relative isolation in Alaska) called “The Uses of Silence,” an online offering of the Center for Anglican Learning and Leadership (CALL) at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif. What astonished me at this time was the congruence of what we were reading, discussing and experiencing in our online course and what was being presented by the author of April’s meditations in Forward Day by Day (FDD).

The April 1 meditation in FDD begins with a verbal look at Fra Angelico’s painting of the Annunciation. I learned here that the artist did this painting as a fresco on the walls of the monastery of San Marco in Florence, and that the painting was done at the head of the stairs leading to the monk’s upper dormitory at the monastery.

The writer says of the painter: “He placed the Annunciation . . . as though he meant the monks literally to approach and enter—to inhabit—the encounter between the Virgin and the archangel.”

Silence is implied in this encounter, and the writer says, “one is invited to enter more deeply all the unanswered questions, the still-listening freedoms in our own lives.”

The meditation, incidentally, is on verses from Luke’s gospel that include the Virgin’s words: “Let it be with me according to your word.”

The April 2 meditation on the Vine-Branches “I am” statement of Jesus focuses on discipleship. The writer provides a tiny critique of contemporary Christianity that echoes almost all of the discussion and readings in the “Uses of Silence” course, especially the invitation to contemplation by Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land (Laird, 2006). Laird offers a guide to contemplation that begins with the assertion “We are built for contemplation.”

The writer of the FDD April 2 meditation writes: “I suspect we often firmly believe . . . that the active part of our discipleship is way more important than our contemplative vocation to abide in Jesus.”

I don’t intend to go through the 30 days of April comparing the author’s meditations with the content of the CALL course (though that might be a worthwhile exercise), but having this kind of reinforcement of ideas with which one is grappling strikes me as a delightful example of the serendipity of the Holy Spirit.

One of the most important books we read in “The Uses of Silence,” I think, was The Paradox of Intention by Marvin C. Shaw (Shaw, 1988). Its subtitle stresses a phenomenon particularly important to any Christian’s striving for spiritual growth and direction: “Reaching the Goal by Giving Up the Attempt to Reach It.”

Having been steeped in the Logotherapy of Viktor Frankl as an undergraduate and graduate student of psychology, I was delighted to find Frankl’s therapeutic principle of paradoxical intention supporting a guide to spiritual growth, and I found Shaw’s conclusion that “The Way to Do is to Be” a wonderful antidote to the moralizing pedantry of evangelical attitudes in which I have been nurtured.

I see paradoxical intention in the FDD April 9 meditation on the passage from Matthew 3, where John the Baptist says to Jesus, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

The FDD writer points to this as an illustration of the humility of Jesus, and writes in clear though perhaps unwitting exposition of the paradox of intention: “It is shocking, the humility of God. That God would choose to share our human nature at all defies logic. That Jesus, without sin, would choose to join sinful humanity in ritual repentance makes no sense.

“But that is the heart of the mystery of love, the mystery of God-with-us.”

A favorite of mine among the FDD meditations for April focuses on the words in Colossians 3: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.” The writer confesses an uneasiness at the word “rule” expecting it should be a more contemplative term such as “rest” or “dwell.” Yet, she points out that the peace of Christ means “yielding to God’s sovereign authority over every aspect of my life” (FDD, 12April2008).

Quoting a poem by American William Alexander Percy, she notes that the disciples who cast their nets into the Sea of Galilee were,

Contented, peaceful fishermen before they ever knew
the peace of God that filled their hearts brimful, and broke them too.

This poem of Percy’s, which mulls what the FDD writer calls “this dangerous sort of turning-life-upside-down peace” is in The Hymnal of the Episcopal Church as number 661 and known as “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.”

I read the entire hymn and was struck by the closing verse:

The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod.
Yet, let us pray for but one thing, the marvelous peace of God.

Perhaps I’m stretching here, but the sentiment of Percy’s poem is similar to that expressed by St. Ephrem the Syrian, whose words are brought to us in the obscure but important text of Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye (Brock, 1992).

The FDD writer explained a dream she had about peaceful sinking (FDD 16April2008) that she interpreted as a dream of “resting in God.” God wanted her to let go and allow God’s love to support her. She concludes: “Since then, I have learned that resting in (not striving for, not racing after, not talking about) the presence of God is a definition of contemplative prayer.”

Finally, let me share the FDD writer’s exposition of St. Paul’s words to the Thessalonians: “Pray without ceasing.” She focuses on the fourth-century men and women known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers, who went into the wilderness to live in silence and ponder what it meant to pray without ceasing.

“They realized,” she writes, “that it was only possible to pray constantly if prayer descended from the head, as it were, and entered the heart—if prayer somehow became not a conscious enterprise, but as constant as breathing.”

What would it mean, the writer asks in conclusion, “for us to attempt to pray—to breathe, to live—this way?

I don’t know what it would mean, but I think I’ve learned it must begin in silence.

References:

(FDD, April2008) Forward Day by Day. February/March/April 2008. Cincinnati, Ohio: The Forward Movement.

(Brock, 1992) Sebastian Brock. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications.

(Laird, 2006) Martin Laird. Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. New York: Oxford Press.

(Shaw, 1999) Marvin C. Shaw. The Paradox of Intention: Reaching the Goal by Giving Up the Attempt to Reach It. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press.

The Hymnal 1982. New York: The Church Pension Fund (No. 661)

A curriculum alone is not the path from good to great

2008-05-17T17:48:00.000-04:00

May 17, 2008

The Path from Good to Great: Curriculum . . . Not!

By Allan Roy Andrews

Imagine a high school faculty as a collection of music-lovers.

Some favor classical music. These are the sophisticates with a long history of excellence and a precision of melody rarely matched in any other genre.

Imagine many who favor popular music. These are the bedrock of community. They comprise by far the largest collection of fans (and teachers). This is the music of the majority: Among their icons are Elvis, the Beatles, and ‘Ole Blue Eyes.’ Crooners and Rockers provide the music of historical landmarks: first date, first kiss, first heartbreak, first triumph.

Band music lovers are revered in educational institutions, perhaps because band music is the music of institutions with the military and the battlefield always in view. It is the music of discipline and precision, if not of tune certainly of choreography. This is the music of celebration; the music of victory.

A few faculty members favor country music. These are the patriots and the blue-collar bedrock. This is the music of trains and pick-up trucks with the themes of troubles and moaning. This is a world of values, where honesty trumps perfection, and sincerity defeats phoniness.

Pockets of this imaginary faculty are niche music-lovers. There are those who favor folk music, often with overtones of political activism. There are some with special tastes who favor Irish music or Celtic music, Italian love songs or German drinking songs. Drama-lovers lean toward show tunes, whether from the stage or the cinema.

A yet smaller cadre leans toward rap or hip-hop music, often defining an ethnic minority. In the classroom, the elders tolerate this genre as the choice of the immature.

In a religious institution, there are those who favor sacred music, often sung by choirs. Some favor praise music, celebrating the body and voice as instruments of worship. In many ways, the popular religious music sector mimics the secular music world, altering lyrics and themes with an eye toward God. (Unfortunately, the eye too frequently focuses on the performing ‘I’ who is doing the singing or praising.)

And in some dusty corner of the campus, there are the jazz fans. Typically, these are the least tolerated among the imaginary faculty. This is the music of chaos and improvisation. Of all genres, this is the music that defies curriculum. It is the music of nonconformists; it is the sound of the institution being challenged.

Enter the education mechanics who are laying the track for moving the institution from good to great. With their devotion to curriculum development, they leave little or no space for chaos, improvisation, and challenges to conventional wisdom. Curriculum does not easily tolerate jazz.

Please understand carefully my argument here: I am not opposing curriculum development. What I’m opposing is the tyranny of curriculum that brooks no questioning or challenging of the conformity that curriculum development demands. If it helps our understanding, let me propose an anti-curriculum component to the curriculum. Give the jazz-lovers the opportunity to improvise and experiment. A good deal of learning comes out of chaos.

When curriculum is king (or queen), an educational institution demonstrates that its goal is not education in the most clear and critical sense of encouraging the liberal (read as liberated—“. . . and the truth shall set you free”) mind; instead, it is driving toward conformity.

I write this with some passion since a favorite colleague of mine recently was refused a new contract because, as the conventional wisdom and the music-lovers’ gossip net puts it, “she didn’t follow the curriculum.” As I write this, I replay images of the arguments made against an excellent teacher—Mr. Keating-- in the film “The Dead Poets Society.” Don’t try to change things, he is instructed, “the curriculum is set!”

The institution at which this woman taught postures itself as one moving from good to great, and in making that move it has developed a strong attachment to its curriculum, as if curricula somehow define an excellent school. This is an idea, incidentally, that is out-of-hand rejected by those who have championed the good-to-great movement in education.

Curriculum is a guide, a sign-post suggesting the direction in which education should be traveling; it is not a lock-step straight-jacket that prevents educators from experimentation, improvisation, and—I dare say—failure.

The educational mechanics who demand strict conformity to a set curriculum unwittingly are driving toward educational fascism. As another former colleague of mine put it shortly before he departed this same school, “We’re educating the mind but not the imagination.”

I love the expression of another colleague, a younger woman who this year decided to leave her job and return to graduate school. “I’m often frustrated by the curriculum,” she told me. “What I want them to know is that in my classes I am the curriculum!”

I don’t know this for sure, but I’d guess in her heart—and in the hearts of my other dismissed or disappointed colleagues--there’s a soft spot for improvisational jazz.

Reading Philosophy Can Be Fun

2008-04-15T17:40:00.001-04:00

April 15, 2008

Exposing the humor and leisure of thinking

By Allan Roy Andrews

At one time, I worked as a young, aspiring academic teaching psychology to students in a community college. While there, I offered a manuscript to a book salesman who took it to his editors for critique. My manuscript amounted to a prolegomenon to the study of psychology (of course, I avoided using the word prolegomenon because only philosophers, theologians and literary critics use such a term). I called my offering, Getting Psyched: An Introduction to the Introduction to Psychology. (Agents and publishers take note: I still have the manuscript tucked away somewhere in my garage.)

In my proposed little book, I argued that every psychologist begins the study of human behavior from a perspective that presupposes some view of humankind, a philosophical anthropology, if you will.

After his editors had a look at it, the salesman-friend came to me with the manuscript containing one word circled in red in several places by one of his editors. My book couldn’t sell, he told me in earnest seriousness, because I had used a word that self-respecting psychologists never use; the word was philosophy! Yes, those were the days in which psychology was dominated by behaviorists and multivariate statisticians who saw themselves as scientists laboring with difficulty to break away from the casual subjectivity of philosophy.

How I wish now I could have turned to my bookcase and pulled out one or all three of the books I’m about to describe. This incident, of course, preceded the phenomenon of the “For Dummies” series, though that genre of books doesn’t introduce any subject with the talent and verve contained in the books I’m urging upon my audience here.

Reading philosophy can be fun and of great value--even for psychologists and other overly serious thinkers.

To support this assertion, I suggest a perusal of three books, one more than a decade old and two others of more recent vintage. Even if one has never read another publication related to philosophy, one should take up these three books and read. They clearly demonstrate that one can be at ease while confronting the conundrums of human thought.

The oldest of the three is a book that masks as a novel. In Sophie’s World, published in 1994, author Jostein Gaarder, a Norwegian high-school teacher, set out to interest his children in philosophy and wound up writing a surprising international best-seller. Most critics have derided Gaarder’s fiction, but they’ve judged his exposition of philosophy from the Garden of Eden to the Big Bang theory of cosmology as first-class.

The sub-title of Gaarder’s book is “A novel about the history of philosophy,” and each narrative chapter interweaves a summary of an epoch in Western philosophical thought.

A colleague at my school confessed after reading Gaarder’s book that he understood Plato’s analogy of the cave for the first time, and a woman in a study group that I am a part of told us that she never read or understood philosophy at all until her husband introduced her to Sophie’s World.

The second of my triad of books is a non-fiction text aimed at teachers (and I mean authentic teachers, those who nurture pupils in grades 4-8). It is a volume for the philosophically challenged called Little Big Minds, a textbook of sorts for those who believe they’d like to share philosophy with children.

The author, educator and consultant Marietta McCarty, has been introducing philosophy to kids in elementary schools for more than 15 years. In her words, “kids are natural philosophers.” The sub-title of her book explains her conviction: “Sharing Philosophy with Kids.”

McCarty takes a topical approach—friendship, responsibility, happiness, justice, and so on through freedom and love—for 15 chapters. Each topical chapter focuses on a philosopher or pair of philosophers; e.g., Time: Augustine and Alan Watts. The exposition is followed with lesson ideas and discussion topics for presenting the topics and thinkers to young minds; i.e., to “Little Big Minds.”

Of course, one is guaranteed that by taking the plunge into a book aimed at teaching children one is bound to learn a great deal for oneself. I believe it was Gail Sheehy, the author of several popular psychology books in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who confessed that one of her secrets of doing research was to first visit a children’s library and find the wonderful books that aim at teaching difficult subjects to kids. Her point, of course, is that one can learn a lot from kids—or from teaching kids. McCarty would certainly concur.

My third recommendation is a joke book written by two New England students of philosophy (and graduates of Harvard’s philosophy program) who seem to have found their niche in humor. It comes from the best-seller lists of 2007; it is a tiny book called Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar. The title alone hints that philosophy and humor await anyone who delves into its pages.

Authors Tom Cathcart and Dan Klein clearly have recognized the affinities between college teachers of philosophy and stand-up comedians. It’s difficult at times to tell whether they have written an introduction to philosophy punctuated with jokes or a contemporary joke book interlaced with lessons from philosophy. Either way, one is treated to sane thinking and wry humor because the authors rightly recognize that philosophy and comedy both attempt to turn things upside down and challenge us with what is uncomfortable about life.

To be sure, many of the jokes are corny or bawdy or both, and much of the philosophy is secular and simplified, but both are presented in a relaxed and easy-to-take manner. Cathcart and Klein clearly not only want their readers to think, they want them to relax and smile while doing so.

The authors of each of the three books I’m suggesting to readers in their own way exhibit elements of leisure at the root of their writing. Gaarder in mystery and fantasy; McCarty in childishness and innocence; and Cathcart and Klein in humor and dilemma. They seem to grasp the true meaning of being at leisure and they recommend it. So I recommend them to anyone seeking to be at ease with the puzzlements of life.

Unpacking silence: An informal exercise

2008-04-13T18:45:00.000-04:00

April 13, 2008

Unpacking silence: An exercise for an online course, "The Uses of Silence,"

taught by Maggie Ross for the Church Divinity School of the Pacific's CALL program.

By Allan Roy Andrews

Without a doubt, some ancient Greek philosopher first framed the question, but I learned it from reading Heidegger; it goes something like this: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”

To add to my bewilderment, today my son and I read on a car waiting at a traffic light in front of us this bumper sticker: “The best of things is not a thing.”

And many of us have been moved by the Vietnam era anthem made popular by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel—“The Sounds of Silence.” (Do I hear paradoxical intention in these words?)

I am objecting to the phrase that describes our course, “The Uses of Silence.” Silence is not an object.

My sense is that “use” is part of our commercial, materialistic, attainment society. To make myself more clear, you are going to have to indulge a bit of my professional rantings. Back in the 1990s, one of the slogans of the newspaper industry—as well as of the TV and radio business mavens—urged editors and reporters to give readers or listeners (called consumers in this mentality) “news they could use.” This became of course a slogan aimed at increasing revenue and marketing the daily news much as if it were a consumable commodity.

A little more than a decade ago I wrote a column criticizing the “news you can use” mentality. Let me offer a précis of my argument:

“Of what use to readers is news that enemy combatants are mercilessly killing each other? Of what use is it that a man with a gun in Utah went on a rampage and killed three people? Of what use to readers is the news that a father and son perished in an airplane crash in Wyoming last week?

“What these stories do is challenge our comfort zones and remind us of the frailty of human existence. Such stories should arouse compassion and move us to acts of charity and correction. We report the horrors of war in a faint hope that future wars can be averted.”

My complaint went on to defend the freedom of the press and to castigate the business school mentality that sees the sale of the news as the bottom line of journalism.

I hear echoes of that mentality in the phrase the “use of silence.” It’s as if this course is not going to have any value to those enrolled in it unless they can somehow devise a way to “use” silence in developing some programmatic spirituality.

Whatever silence is, it is not a marketable commodity; it is not something we can dress up with colors and images, not something we can package, sweeten and sell; it is not something we can promote or seek to turn into a profitable object; it is not another form of indulgences. In a word, it is not something we use!

I respond appreciatively to those who describe silence as a phenomenon in unity with language; the negative spaces of the painter; the spaces between the notes of the composer; the time of absorption at the close of a homily.

I prefer to think of silence as a revelation, or better perhaps, as a revealer. It is not something we discover or grow into or develop with varieties of practices. It is more of a gift; a gift we perhaps need to learn to accept or to open without cost or benefit.

The verse in the psalms that we all know usually translated: “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10 KJV), is better translated as “Desist, and know I am God” or “Be at leisure, and know I am God.”

To me the psalmist appears to be implying that silence (or leisure) can reveal something to us.

As I told Maggie, I’m still unpacking this for myself. I have to stop here. This is thinking by writing--perfect fodder for a blogger.

Taking an online course: "The Uses of Silence"

2008-03-30T18:38:00.000-04:00

March 30, 2008

Uses of Silence

I enrolled in an online continuing education course called "The Uses of Silence" taught by Maggie Ross (aka Martha Reeves)for the Center for Anglican Living and Learning at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

I've taken several courses through CDSP, most of them in the Anglican Studies category. I latched on to this program many years ago when I signed up to read Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk.

For the most part, my classes have been stimulating and rewarding. The idea of going through six weeks of study with people whose faces I never see is a bit disconcerting, but it has advantages, too. No one gets bogged down in fashion, as it were, and most people have to think before they communicate (mostly by Blackboard messages and e-mails). At any rate, I'm using the course as an excuse to write something for this blog.

I've always been convinced that most of us--especially those who spend their lives in the media--are challenged by silence; in fact, many are frightened and made anxious by it.

Certainly, Maggie Ross is not one of those. She recently placed "Silence" in the Museum of Curiosity, a clever, comical, and conspiratorial BBC radio program. I say it's conspiratorial because under its guise of comedy and light-hearted banter, it weighs heavy in its considerations. Of course it is restricted by the superficiality it presses into 30 or so minutes.

Speaking as Martha Reeves on the March 26 program, Ross raised some interesting ideas and challenges--not only regarding silence but also regarding her own theological stance on things such as the definition of God and whether or not she believes that Jesus was the "Son of God."

Stop back here for further reflections.

Browsing and reading in the age of the Hyperlink

2008-03-27T17:04:00.001-04:00

March 27, 2008

Reading and the Internet:

BROWSING AND READING IN THE AGE OF THE HYPERLINK
By Allan Roy Andrews

This column was originally posted on January 2, 2005, as part of a collection of columns.

ANNAPOLIS, MD -- (January, 2005) —

Remember the time you turned to the dictionary to look up a word and got sidetracked by another word or words along the way, eventually closing the book before finding the word you sought in the first place?

There's a subtle pattern in this activity that's important to understanding the modern mind of adolescence, and especially the mind of the adolescent reader.

That you are reading this column indicates, I suspect, that you are one of those persons who picks up a newspaper or goes online for leisure, sits, and relaxes by scanning some generally innocuous words. O.K., so you're doing so now with a computer, but, admit it, you still like to read the newspaper.

Modern adolescents are far less likely to engage in such activity.

A study of young readers and where they get their news—a study now almost a decade old— indicates that young adult readers claim to read the newspaper about three times a week, and that's the high reader group.

You've heard it from many quarters, no doubt, especially from educators, that today's teens simply do not read. It's wrong to call them illiterate, but they may be a-literate; that is, they know how to read but prefer not to.

That assertion, however, needs careful elaboration. High school students do not read the things they are assigned to read by teachers.

They are indifferent—notoriously indifferent—to reading anything that they are assigned to read or ordered to read by others.

They choose to go against most things intellectual that have an adult flavor, and that includes the adult habit of keeping up on the news through newspapers. Most teenagers, faced with the prospect of a fresh newspaper newly delivered and still encased in its plastic wrap, will pull out the comic section or the sports section--just as most adults did when they were learning to read the newspaper.

Nevertheless, the assertion that teenagers do not read is blatantly untrue!

Their reading, however, is more often than not in a form that many adults are only beginning to experience and understand. (As you are because you've come to this Web site to read what is basically an opinion column similar to many in the daily newspaper. To grasp what I'm arguing here, consider how you arrived at this Web site!)

When I say teenagers are reading in a different manner, I speak of a reading that depends heavily on hyperlinks, and hyperlinks are the basic stepping stones of reading on the Internet

Reading on the Internet is, I think, much like getting caught up in the exploration of words while looking up a specific word in the dictionary. One just never knows where the trail is leading, and while one has some control over which hyperlinks to follow, there is a path that becomes almost irretrievable once the first two or three links are opened.

In the old days of newspapering, the rigid principal of the inverted pyramid guided journalists, and while that principal is still at work in many news stories, its rigidity has been greatly relaxed. According to the inverted pyramid model, the most important elements of a story must appear in the first few paragraphs; in fact, the opening paragraph is to contain most of what is determined to be "new." Second and third paragraphs become supporting or buttressing paragraphs of what was introduced in the lead. For many people confronting the daily newspaper, reading beyond the first few paragraphs is unnecessary.

By virtue of its physical presentation to readers, the Internet also demands a "lead" and supporting information below. Many of the popular search engines charge a premium for the upper echelons of their listings; thus, one sees "sponsored results" topping off many search listings. These essentially are nothing more than paid-for leads.

Similarly, most news sites on the World Wide Web provide simply a lead to the story, often with a headline that is a hyperlink. One reads the lead and clicks the hyperlink to get to the story in its fullness.

The point of the matter is this: What we have known as "browsing" a newspaper (or even the library shelves, for that matter) has been revolutionized by the Internet and the Web. Browsing is no longer a leisurely scan or a chance glance; instead, it has become a kind of electronic hopscotch, a multiple checker game jump on an unlimited board with no squares.

The reading skills of a newspaper reader and an Internet reader are essentially identical, but the dynamics are miles—and generations—apart.

Hyperlinks, virtually unknown two decades ago, have become commonplace, not only in advertising and popular literature such as magazines, but in scholarly research. Look at a bibliography on a scholarly paper that's been written in the past five years. There's a good chance it has more hyperlinks than references to books.

Teenagers haven't stopped reading; they've simply stopped reading the way most adults were taught to read. Once we grasp this, we may recognize that the hyperlink is as revolutionary as the double helix.

The other side—perhaps the frightening side—of this sort of reading, of course, is that it tends to randomness and disorganization; some might even say to chaos.

Nevertheless, there are those who argue that genuine learning emerges more from chaos than from organization! But that's another avenue to explore, and I haven't reached that hyperlink just yet.

So, you wanna be a writer!

2008-03-04T17:30:00.000-05:00

March 4, 2007

(Editor’s Note: This article is adapted slightly from a column written in 2000 and published by "The American Reporter," an online daily newspaper and reprinted in Connections, a publication of the Annapolis Area Christian School [Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2003]. It was written before the writer began teaching at Annapolis Area Christian High School, and is a response to the authentic e-mail that begins the piece.)

So, you're a writer wannabe!

BY ALLAN ROY ANDREWS

Dear Editor:
I’m almost 14 and want to start a serious writing career. Can you please help me decide the best courses to take in High School to help me get a head start on my career? I would really appreciate it alot.
Thanks, 555.

Dear 555:

You ask a difficult question because “courses” are tough to choose to plan a specific career. Sometimes a course that seems least likely to help you turns out to be the best course for what you need or want. Even math courses can help a writer!

My advice has three steps (perhaps four):

Step 1: Read everything you can get hold of or are assigned in school.
Step 2: Read some more.
Step 3: Read even more. Don’t eliminate any area.

Read in science, literature, religion, computers, sports, geography, poetry (especially poetry), business, economics, political science, world history, journalism, romance (go easy on that one), science fiction, psychology, medicine. Read style books and grammar books (and don’t use words such as “alot”). Make the dictionary the most important book you own, after The Holy Bible, and learn how to truly read both books.

Read lots of magazines. Learn your way around your school library, the public library, and any college libraries close to where you live. Learn your way around the libraries with sites on the World Wide Web. Browse in every library. Read the magazines in the library. Become a friend of librarians; they may be the most valuable teachers you’ll have at school.

Read when you’re in the doctor’s office; read in the dentist’s or orthodontist’s office; read when you’re waiting to have your hair cut. Read in the bathroom. Occasionally, you can skip the shower and take a bath, just be sure to read when you’re in the bathtub.

Learn a foreign language (several, if you can), and read about the countries where that language is spoken. Don’t let anyone tell you there is such a thing as a “dead” language. Books keep languages such as Latin, New Testament Greek, Ancient Hebrew and Ugaritic alive. Learn other “languages” such as Morse code and American Sign Language. Study Native American languages, lots of them are hidden in the names and places you may travel to in the United States. Learn the languages of computers and especially the language of statistics.

You get the picture. Oh, yes, look at lots of pictures in books and magazines, too. Read books about photojournalism. Read books of cartoons, especially older ones. Don’t let “Calvin and Hobbes” or “Garfield” keep you from Thomas Nast or James Thurber. Did you know there is a Web site that gives access to every cartoon ever published in the New Yorker magazine, one of the most literary magazines ever published? [http://www.cartoonbank.com]

At those tough times when you’ve got “nothin’ to do,” and you’re tempted to drop into a soft couch and watch TV -- don’t! Read instead. Make it a habit to read before watching television. Read cereal boxes; read junk mail; read billboards; read road signs; read CD and DVD cases; read movie credits. Reread books you read in grade school. If you have younger brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces or neighbors, read to them or read with them.

Read maps. Oh! Please read maps, and don’t just read them when you have to find directions to get somewhere. Study them, memorize them, and keep them close to other things you are reading so you can understand expressions such as “the road to Mandalay,” and “the snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “a shooting in Sarajevo.” You never know where maps may lead you.

Set aside a regular time to write. Keep a journal. Write for yourself not for anyone else (unless it’s an assignment). Share your writing with an older person you trust: a teacher, a parent, an older brother or sister, even a pastor or priest or another thinker or writer you may know. Ask them not only to read your stuff, but also to edit it. Learn to trust good critics and not rely on people you know simply to say, “This is good,” or “I like it.”

Send your poems, short stories, essays, plays or news and feature articles to contests (you can find them listed in magazines such as Writer’s Digest, The Writer, or Poets & Writers) or to magazines that might publish them. Write for your school paper. Write for your school yearbook. Write for your school literary magazine. Write for your church or club or team.

Never, never pay to have someone read your writing or to publish your writing. Publications are supposed to pay you for your writing, even if they pay only in copies of what you write. At your stage, don’t write with an eye on getting paid. An old adage applies to writing careers: Do what you love to do, the money will come later.

Don’t worry about special courses. Concentrate on the courses you’re required to take and read everything you’re assigned. Write personal reactions in your journal to what you read. Go back over your reactions every so often and write later reactions to how you reacted the first time you wrote about a particular topic in your journal. Write poems and short stories based on your journal reactions. Take your journal everywhere you go and write in it about everything that happens to you or that you observe.

Make every conversation a kind of interview. Try to learn as much as you can about the people you meet. Make notes on what you see and hear and understand about them.

If you can afford it, take a summer writing workshop--one sponsored at a local college is best, I think--but don’t spend a lot of money on this and don’t worry if it’s filled with old people. You can interview them and write about them. Two books that were written as a result of chance conversations are Schindler's List and The Life of Pi, last year's winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize.

When it’s time for you to go to college, don’t look only at writing programs. Get a good general liberal arts education in a subject field you love, and if you still want to be a writer, think about getting a master’s degree in writing.

Remember that a writer emerges from a group of people who write much more frequently than from a group of people who only study writing. Even if you don’t wind up becoming a professional writer, you’ll be better at what you do because you write carefully and well.

Pray! Not that you’ll become a writer, but that you’ll grow in wisdom and grace as you grow in years. Try writing prayers. Read others’ prayers.

Show this email to a teacher or some other mentor that you trust and find out if they agree with what I’m telling you. This is what I would do if I were about to turn 14 and wanted to become a writer.

Don’t stop thinking. Don’t stop writing. Most of all, don’t stop reading.

My best wishes to you and your future.

Peace.

Teaching poetry as an outlaw and heretic

2008-02-02T17:27:00.001-05:00

February 02, 2008

The powerful place of poetry in education and life

BY ALLAN ROY ANDREWS

[This is an updated and slightly revised version of a column posted in May, 2003]

ANNAPOLIS, MD -- Were I permitted to do so, I would teach my high school students nothing but poetry, not only during the month of April (national poetry month) but throughout the academic year.

I wrote this reflection in the wake of National Poetry Month in the United States in May 2003, and I still recognize that teaching nothing but poetry sounds a bit heretical, even to the literati among my colleagues at the private Christian school in which I teach.

In 2003, high school English and Journalism, along with “Creative Writing,” were my assignments as defined by the curriculum for 9th- through 12th-graders, and, frankly, there is much poetry that can be taught under the rubrics to which I’d been assigned. My English-teaching colleagues and I make forays into the worlds of British, American and international poetry. For these poetic opportunities I’m thankful.

But it isn’t enough.

We live in an era that masks and hides its poetry; in a time that disdains its poets; in a culture that dispatches poetry to the margins of consciousness generally classified as “nice” but not truly relevant. Poetry, while seemingly tolerated and accepted as a tradition worth visiting, appears to our culture as hopelessly irrelevant. To be sure, there is a subculture of poetry, mostly associated with a tiny portion of the academic world, where poetry slams and literary readings abound, but these fit better into entertainment calendars rather than into mind-shaping cultural movements and events.

In our world, finances, wars and personal relationships come and go with meteoric speed. The slowness that poetry demands often is perceived as ill-fitted to a modern mind. Poetry’s structured meanings often are seen as needlessly convoluted. For many, poetry--like its literary cousin, theology--has nothing to say to a post-modern world. Unfortunately, while many thinking Christians would balk at saying theology is irrelevant, they join the cultural mentality that relegates poetry to a category akin to dodos or unicorns.

Many educators, even those who love and teach literature, would begin to see problems with my suggestion that modern secondary instruction focus only on poetry. College preparatory curricula demand disciplined lessons in critical prose analysis, fact-finding, vocabulary and grammar as well as in a variety of writing styles and genres of literature. Our curricula are driven by an academic competition that cannot permit students to slow down, pause or take time for reflection in the midst of their studies.

This is where my notion of teaching only poetry becomes a bit radical. I endorse the words of contemporary Hispanic poet and teacher Alberto Rios, who in an interview called poetry an “outlaw” and noted that the art of poetry is “almost heresy.” His words are best quoted:

“And that’s in some sense what makes poetry exciting. It’s outlaw-like. It’s almost heresy. It’s saying, ‘Don’t go forward. Stop for a moment and understand where you’re standing. Just understand this moment.’ ”

Poetry makes us stop. Its brevity and its artistic presentation are to be savored and not raced past. Almost every teacher and textbook of poetry that I know suggests that poems must be read at least three times. I’d say at least five times, but that’s not the point. Good poetry should be read unceasingly, a suggestion akin to the Apostle Paul’s admonishment concerning prayer.

In the driving, hectic, achievement-obsessed world in which I live and work, brevity is known prominently in ads and sound bites. Savoring the lines of a good poem simply does not fit easily into a world occupied with Instant Messenger, video games, calculators, cell phones, reality TV, put-down comedy, lacrosse Moms and competitive athletic scholarships. There is no contemporary equivalent of Bart Simpson quoting poetry; there is no Bill Gates of iambic pentameter.

The poet and critic Robert Bly once curtly concluded that Americans haven’t grown up and are still singing nursery rhymes. Newspapers long ago gave up publishing poetry with any regularity, generally suggesting it lacks news value (Contrarily, The New York Times in 2003 began running poetry in its Sunday magazine once more, and if one currently searches The Times carefully, one can find news about poetry, but not a great deal of poetry itself). Aptly, poetry is an outlaw; it has become a form of heresy among the techno-economic worldviews that motivate much of modern culture.

Even in the evangelical Christian world in which I have worked, poetry largely is disdained unless it runs toward greeting card verse with some sort of evangelistic witness to a sinful world or chronicles the sinner-ego emphasis of a contemporary praise chorus. Check the popular literature of contemporary evangelical Christianity. I can’t recall the last time Christianity Today published a contemporary poem (in any of its stable of publications) or that World magazine interviewed a working poet. This seems a rather disjointed phenomenon, given that The Bible, the book on which evangelicalism asserts its rootedness, contains vast sections of poetry in its Old Testament. And some of Christianity’s most theologically rich poetic words crop out of the New Testament.

To be sure, there are Christian poets at work; however, their forum of expression lies in obscure little magazines. There are not many homes with copies of Image or Christianity and Literature on the reading stand. There are not many graduates of Christian schools looking for creative writing scholarships. Even in the wake of the so-called evangelical publishing boom of recent years, poetry gets little attention. The commercial success of pretribulation apocalyptic literature has not translated into more widespread exposure for poetry. Christian educators, I fear, have mishandled badly the importance of poetry in our lives.

Don’t read me wrongly; I’m not trying to be a Luddite calling for a return to pre-technological education (or to pretribulation education, for that matter). The famous poet W. H. Auden once made that mistake when he claimed the camera and the internal combustion engine had become the bane of modern life. What would he have thought of plasma TV and NASCAR? Nor am I on some pop-cultural crusade to have our culture recognize and appreciate the poetic voices hidden in rock music and rap (instructive though this might prove). This path, I think, may represent the poetic immaturity that Bly has identified with Americans.

Rather, I’m calling for recognition of poetry’s power to shape the mind and spirit. Therein lies the “outlaw” nature of poetry that Rios perceives. Poetry, I’m arguing, may be our culture’s neglected path to knowledge and wisdom. Poetry is the arena of philosophers and world-shakers, not the stuff to be banished to the “Kids Korner” like some ersatz Sunday School materials.

When I began teaching in a public institution many years ago, a colleague who taught philosophy insisted that his students read regularly from an anthology of poetry. The instructor had no interest in rhyme, meter or any of the traditional elements associated with poetry; he wanted students to grapple with ideas, and he found the most accessible grappling was with those who wrestle with words--the poets.

A journalist colleague of mine once told me that as a youth he read everything he could find written by Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and e. e. cummings. Their poetry had a tremendous influence on his life, he said, especially during that critical search for identity that marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Unfortunately, he confessed to not having read poetry in several years.

This exposes a problem in our teaching of poetry. We treat it as a canon of wisdom that all must be exposed to in youth, but we neglect its power to challenge and shape our current thinking and opinions. The conventional wisdom seems to suggest we outgrow our need for poetry once we’ve moved beyond nursery rhymes and the so-called schoolboy poets, or once we’ve been force-fed Britain’s bards and poet laureates.

Or perhaps we fear poetry’s power.

When a group of poets scheduled to read at the White House early in 2003 were dis-invited because they suggested they might read words of protest to policies of war, we may have witnessed an unwitting nod to the power of creative poetry. Can poetry actually influence political and moral decision-making?

You bet your sweet sonnet it can! (And, by the way, the nation’s press that so diligently reported the dis-inviting of the poets made no effort to uncover what the poets planned to say. Their poetry couldn’t possibly have news value, the editors must have decided.)

In 2002, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Ruth Walker made a gentle plea for a “marketplace for poetry.” She said, “ . . . I somehow want to connect Shelley's reference to poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ with Jefferson's preference for newspapers without government over government without newspapers. Would we be more wisely governed if we had more poetry in our daily papers?”

Walker points to a power in poetry beyond art.

In Rios’ words, poetry can force us to stop and understand where we are standing. Furthermore, we can learn from analyses such as that of former White House press secretary and PBS documentary journalist Bill Moyers, who in his book The Language of Life called poetry “the most honest language I hear today.

“Poetry is news,” Moyers asserted, “news of the mind, news of the heart.” So powerful is it, Moyers said, echoing Walker’s conviction, that “democracy needs her poets.”

My conviction holds that poetry is a way of knowing, an epistemology, for those with a philosophical bent. Poetry probes the mind and the heart in ways that science, technology and economics cannot.

In 2003, Margo Jefferson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said under the headline “News from poetry”:

“As for the question of poetry's role in the public realm, why does the United States seem to be the only country in which artists still argue about whether politics can coexist with aesthetic complexity? It can. And poetry can be the only sure conduit to emotional truths that politics has done its best to shut down.”

One could easily substitute education or religion where Jefferson wrote politics. (One could easily substitute economics or journalism or science or social science, as well.)

Just to set the classroom record straight: Is there a better way to learn vocabulary than to be exposed to great poetry? I think not. The syntax and punctuation of poetry demand an understanding of the structure of English sentences. One can learn an immense amount of grammar from studying poetry--and lots of other stuff taught in textbooks, too.
___________________

Allan Roy Andrews taught journalism in the high school at Annapolis Area Christian School in Maryland when he posted this essay. He can be contacted at aroyandrews@gmail.com
References:

a) McInnis, Susan. ‘Interview with Alberto Rios,’ Glimmer Train. 26: Spring 1998. 105-121. Accessible at http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/interviews/page6.html

b) Walker, Ruth. ‘The marketplace for poetry,’ Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 2002. Accessible at http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-84026550.html

c) Moyers, Bill. The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

d) Jefferson, Margo. ‘On Writers and Writing: The News from Poetry,’ New York Times, May 11, 2003. Accessible at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFD61F3DF932A25756C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=

Challenging a Christian notion of excellence

2008-01-27T17:19:00.000-05:00

January 27, 2008

Challenging a notion of excellence

The Pride of Excellence: A Christian View of a Better Way

A key point in any comprehensive Christian worldview consists of engaging the culture and the world around us without unnecessarily seeking to mock it, destroy it, or conquer it. We want to transform it, perhaps, but do so without adopting its faulty values.

Many Christians of my acquaintance in the field of secondary education believe the adoption of a comprehensive Christian worldview compels them to the highest order of competition and a demand for unrelenting excellence. The notion of Christians striving to be the most excellent in all they do is often promoted as the acme of any Christian worldview and surely the goal of explicit Christian education.

It would appear, however, that the apostle Paul decried this attitude in his listing of the gifts of the body of Christ (I Corinthians 12). After cataloging the evidences of Christian excellence, Paul writes, “I will show you the most excellent way” (I Cor. 12:31). These words form Paul’s entrée to the well-known and often recited love chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 13, where he argues that without love the Christian’s life is nothing.

Paul could easily be echoing the words of the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 64:6), who—if I may be permitted a paraphrase--warns: “All your excellences are as filthy rags.” Paul, in another epistle, echoes this sentiment with his observation, “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). If anything, Paul’s words place humility before excellence in a Christian worldview.

To espouse excellence—be it in education, athletics, politics, or business--as the crowning Christian virtue is to misconstrue the gospel, I think. Christians are not called primarily to excellence; they are called first to love.

In our modern, materialistic, consumer culture, a call to excellence carries subtle and intriguing overtones, especially regarding human pride. Without love, such an emphasis on excellence can be harmful to the gospel of Jesus Christ by placing a premium on human enterprise and effort.

What does it mean and imply, for example, for members of a Christian athletic team competing in secular arenas to assert that they must be excellent? Most, if not all, teams will be striving to be the best. What is the more excellent way for Christian athletes? Paul and other biblical writers insist that love must trump excellence!

To argue, as many do, that Christian athletes, in order to be effective witnesses to their faith in the surrounding culture, must be the best in all that they do is to court the deadly sin of pride. Frankly, a Christian’s performance in any arena has little or nothing to do with his or her witness to the culture.

Isaiah has it nailed: “All our excellences are as filthy rags.” Christian athletes are not called to mock, to belittle, to disdain, or to outstrip their opponents.

Christ has nothing to do with winning championships in athletic competition. He has everything to do with an athlete’s pride, humility, greed, sacrifice, and love.

At the Christian high school where I work, a young athlete once boldly asked, “What does Jesus Christ have to do with lacrosse?”

If our answer to his query has anything to do with winning or with excellence in athletic endeavor, we have missed the heart of the gospel. Perhaps an answer arises when his question is revised and restated this way: “What does Christ’s love have to do with lacrosse—or with any athletic endeavor?”

Often one hears Christian athletes and coaches couple this demand for excellence with some form or experience of piety, as in this assertion: “We play to glorify the Lord.” The glory of God, implied in this viewpoint, is often upheld or lowered by the excellence of our performance or the lack of same. Sadly, such a view gets measured by success, and implied in its premises is the conclusion that only victory or success can bring glory to God.

Frankly, this viewpoint leans dangerously close to a subtle heresy that encourages a Crusader mentality. It strikes me as a subtle form of the non-Biblical gospel of success espoused in many quarters of our capitalistic, consumer-oriented society. It implies that God needs our victories, our successes, or our excellences to demonstrate his love and grace or that God signifies his acceptance and approval of us by giving us victory and success in our endeavors.

God doesn’t call us to higher GPAs and SAT scores, to better won-lost records or to larger bank accounts and stronger stock portfolios. My conviction is that God cares no more whether we win or lose in athletics—or succeed in business or politics--than he cares whether males are circumcised or not circumcised. To act in love is to understand Paul’s words about Christians’ circumcision of the heart (Romans 2:29).

The real question for Christian athletes—and business persons--becomes this: How does Christ’s love become expressed in the field of competition? In a culture filled with pride, mockery, belittling, and disdain for one’s opponents, what can it mean to play any game as a Christian? Certainly it has little to do with excellence and much to do with the “more excellent way.”

A supposed Christian worldview that exalts excellence—the key word here is exalts—risks turning the gospel of grace into a gospel of works and of pride.

Returning to my opening reflection and putting athletics aside, let me note again that engaging the culture is not intended to be a form of triumphalism. Too many who call themselves Christian adopt a non-Christian attitude of mockery, conquest, and destruction into their engagement with contemporary culture. Such an attitude smacks of smugness, pride, and triumphant disdain for one’s “enemies.”

What did Jesus mean when he exhorted his followers to “love your enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;” (Matthew 5:44)?

Love, the apostle Paul said, “does not boast.” It is not, he continued, rude, self-seeking, or easily angered. Any cultural engagement by a Christian who forgets or disregards these words can hardly expect to be a witness for the body of Christ. In other words, our witness to the culture doesn’t lie in our excellence, which can become a veiled form of our own righteousness; it lies instead in our transformation by grace and our expression of Jesus Christ’s love.

Allan Roy Andrews taught high school journalism and coordinated the Web site at a Christian school in Maryland when this essay was first posted. He is a retired newspaper editor and columnist.

Andrews can be contacted at: ara@allanroyandrews.net

As newspapers seek profits, where are the prophets?

2007-11-13T17:00:00.000-05:00

November 03, 2007

This column was originally posted in 1999 in
The American Reporter
July 9, 1999
________________________________________
IN A PROFIT-CONSCIOUS JOURNALISM, WHERE ARE THE PROPHETS?

By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON - The words have become a mantra of modern journalism: "Keep the readers in mind; we work for our readers; we must give the readers what they want."

I confess I sometimes take a cynical view of these admonitions, believing that for many in the newspaper business the term "reader" has become an acceptable euphemism for "sale," as in "keep the sales in mind; we work for our sales."

In fact, it's become quite natural in the growing economic jargon of journalism to slip into speaking about "customers" instead of "readers."

Quite recently, I heard a well-known newspaper designer making an eloquent plea for editors to keep readers in mind. His ringing personal charge in this direction was expressed when he said, "I am a slave to the customer."

Well, that may be fine for designers working to satisfy corporate clients, but it's a worrisome stance for an editor to be taking.

Surrounded by and pressured by the fiscal realities of the newspaper business, editors can be forgiven if they slip into a mentality that appeals not to intelligent readers but to units of the market subsumed as consumers (or customers, if you will).

Editors who slip may be forgiven. Editors who commit to such a mentality must be challenged at every turn.

In the business offices of many newspapers, the question of whether or not the newspaper (aka "the product") is read becomes secondary to the question of whether or not the consumer has plunked down his or her money to carry off the product.

In the business of journalism, the product, like so many bars of soap or models of automobile, becomes generic; its packaging and marketing defines the mission of not only the business office but of the editorial staff.

Perhaps I speak for a minority, but I think modern journalism's suspect credibility has less to do with our ethical lapses than with our mimicking of promoters and advertisers. We've barked so much about our product that we've fallen in with the snake-oil salesmen and the carnival con artists.

In our compulsive concern with "giving our readers what they want" we've redefined our readers as persons who do everything with a newspaper except read it.

Modern editors have begun to put more stock in the judgment of consumer focus groups than in the editorial judgment of their professional staff.

In a frightening irony, many modern editors are worrying more about readers they don't have than concerning themselves with supplying the readers the publication does have.

I know the financial arguments against my case: Newspapers are losing circulation. We live in a visual age. Young people want pictures not words. The modern digital age of computers is sounding the death knell of the printed page. No customers, no advertisers; no advertisers, no newspaper. News is changing. It's no longer gathered; it's created, shaped and spun.

Which leads me to my premise, a perhaps overshadowed and forgotten premise, but the most important premise nevertheless: News is not a commodity! It is vital information to the defense and growth of pluralistic democracy.

Just as politicians alienate constituents when they begin to perceive the people merely as votes, so editors alienate readers once they begin to perceive readers as customers.

It is the job of newspaper advertising departments to go after readers the newspaper doesn't have; it is the job of editors to educate and inform the readers a newspaper already has.

Faithful readers don't want news as a commodity; they want good stories and reliable information.

Editors who allow their mentality to tilt toward customers who are not buying the paper are doing a disservice to established readers. A slave to the customer cannot be a servant of the reader. In trying to build circulation with gimmickry and condescension, many newspapers are taking faithful readers for granted and feeding them more style than substance.

My corollary is that while editors may determine what is news, they don't do so in order to sell newspapers. The best editors work to inform and educate the public; they do it to keep the public from becoming the sorry and silent sheep that marketers, bureaucrats and manipulative politicians often assume them to be.

My argument flies in the face of the philosophy of modern corporate media moguls. I'm sorry if my premise represents a dying, minority view; it may well be that the editor's voice has become a voice in a profit-wilderness.

Treating news as a commodity delivers such bastardized information categories as "celebrity journalism," "sensational journalism," and "news you can use." It also turns over responsible editorial judgment and criticism to accountants, bookkeepers and amateur journalists.

It's not newspapers that are threatened by our devouring "bottom-line" mentality; it is the very core of democracy that depends on the free flow of information that newspapers should be pressing for and providing.

I'm not attacking newspapers as businesses. That's why newspapers have advertising, marketing and circulation departments. I'm attacking editors who surrender their editorial vision for the sake of customers.

An editor's calling is to keep the prophets among us in view, not the profits.

We lose with 'News You Can Use'

2007-11-07T16:50:00.000-05:00

November 7, 2007

WE LOSE WITH NEWS YOU CAN USE
By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON - In a world enamored with McNews and Infotainment, there has emerged among many of the nation's editors a subtle conviction that readers must be given "news they can use" if the newspaper is to survive as an alternative to headline scanning news on television.

This seemingly harmless and pragmatic argument and slogan is a danger to freedom of the press and an unwitting ally of forces that would control our lives.

Of what "use" to readers is news that Serbs and Kosovars are mercilessly killing each other?

Of what use to readers is news that a world leader in Africa has died or that an angry man with a gun went on a rampage in Atlanta or that three promising people perished in a private plane crash?

The cold truth is that news is not something we use except as we recognize, as John Donne reminded humankind a few centuries ago, "No man (or woman) is an island."

We don't use the news that 45 people died when a cross-country train ran off a track or that more than 20,000 residents of a distant country died in a killer earthquake.

What these words do is challenge our comfort zones and remind us of the frailty of human existence.

Such stories should arouse compassion in us and move us to acts of charity for the unfortunate victims of disaster and crime.

Much news is in this category. We report the horrors of war in a faint hope that future wars can be averted.

News of railroad accidents and airplane crashes alerts us to human error that can cost lives and motivates us to urge regulations that will guard against such errors.

There's an old journalistic claim that news is anything that threatens one's life or one's pocketbook.

Those advocating news-you-can-use buy this argument and reduce journalism to two motives: to increase one's lifespan or to increase one's income. Read the news and live! Read the news and get rich!

But threats to life and wallet don't exhaust the definition of news. Much news threatens the heart. Much news stretches the narrow mind.

Much news lifts our level of anxiety for those we love. Much news alerts me to those who threaten my freedom of inquiry, my freedom of movement, or my freedom to pursue a life of joy and peace.

When I read of neo-Nazism or rampant ethnic cleansing, I'm reminded how important it is for me to defend the open airing of ideas and opinions and to provide a voice for the oppressed and disestablished.

The genius of democracy is that the majority is compelled morally to defend the rights of the minority.

When I read of elected officials caught with their hands in the till, I'm reminded that my being free in a democracy means more than chanting "We're number one" at a basketball game or doing everything I can to grab a deduction on my income taxes.

Democracy means the citizenry is responsible for its leaders; much that threatens democracy seeks to turn this responsibility on its head.

You don't owe your president, senator, representative, mayor, or county commissioner anything; they owe you, and the press is your eyes and ears - your lifeline - to their behavior and policy making, seeking to make sure they pay what they owe.

Sure you can use news to make money, but quite frankly if you're reading the newspaper to keep track of your investments, you're about two days behind the market and have probably already lost your chance to get in or out as you wish.

Most of what you read in the news is out of the ordinary - hardly "useable." It just isn't news to say that 5000 airplanes crossed the country last week without incident or that 8 million New Yorkers went to work yesterday and came home without being shot at.

I regard editors who advocate a news-you-can-use approach to journalism as unwitting bedfellows to those who abhor and attack a free press. Their view smacks of commercialism influenced more by MBAs and PR gurus than by the First Amendment. Their view equates news with a consumer product that can be collected, dressed up with color and pictures, packaged, promoted and profiteered: When it stops selling, it can be upgraded.

If I write like an idealist, I've been understood, because American journalism is rooted in an ideal.

News-you-can-use is based on pragmatism, which is exactly the logic and motive behind arguments that favor ethnic cleansing, suppression of the news for national security or government intervention in the media.

News-you-can-useism sees news not as ideas and actions demanding reflection and thought but as a breakfast cereal of the mind that can be sweetened, packaged, delivered, and consumed.

News-you-can-use is a notion developed in business schools, not in newsrooms. It owes its genius to heartless accountants and bottom-line barkers not to courageous and crusading editors.

If they had newspapers in ancient Rome, they would have advocated news-you-can-use to go along with the bread and circuses that kept the population happy and ignorant.

Allan Roy Andrews is the former editor and weekly columnist of Pacific Stars and Stripes in Tokyo, Japan. He most recently served as Publicity and Web site Coordinator for the Annapolis Area Christian School in Maryland.

This column is a slightly altered and updated version of a column that appeared originally on April 3, 1994, in Pacific Sunday Magazine, published in Tokyo, Japan, by Pacific Stars and Stripes.

Relaxation in high-achievement high schools

2007-11-03T17:15:00.000-04:00

November 03, 2007

Too much stress in high school:
Achieving at a hidden cost

By Allan R. Andrews

I’ve added to my list of people I admire the principal of Needham High School in an affluent suburb of Boston, Mr. Paul Richards.

According to a story in The New York Times last month (“Less Homework, More Yoga, From a Principal Who Hates Stress,” by Sara Rimer, October 29, 2007, www.nytimes.com ), the principal is attempting to change a high-powered high-school culture built on high achievement by advocating--the story’s headline tells us--“less homework, more yoga.”

Mr. Richards wants Needham’s students to be trained in relaxation techniques, and he doesn’t want it done in an extracurricular fashion. Relaxation should be part of the culture and curriculum.

The principal is suggesting regular yoga classes, and he is urging teachers to schedule weekends and holidays when students are totally free from having to do homework! He’s suggesting the school hire relaxation consultants.

The startling revelation of the story, however, is that Richards’ efforts have met strident criticism. As part of his culture-changing approach, he stopped publishing honor rolls in the local newspaper at the end of marking periods, suggesting the lists had been turned into an accountability issue by some parents.

As a result, Richards and Needham High School have been accused by none other than Rush Limbaugh of coddling students in order to be politically correct. Jay Leno, who lives off news-story-induced humor, mocked the school for its stance, and Richards has been the recipient of hate mail from across the country.

Richards argues that he’s not trying to change the elements of high school that encourage achievement but simply wants to get there in a healthier manner. He insists there is an irony in the students’ responses: they say they appreciate the relaxation time because it helps them catch up on schoolwork.

Richards, who holds a doctorate and has made himself something of an expert in research on stress, argues that many students are so stressed about grades, test scores, and getting into prestigious colleges that they can’t engage with life at school. He told The Times such students “are being held hostage to the culture.”

A key point from his stress research that Richards emphasizes is this: while a certain amount of stress is necessary for learning and growth, too much of it interferes with students’ learning and their maturation.

David Smokler, an English teacher at Needham High School, buys into the principal’s call for a change of culture. He told The Times, “The culture has always been about rigor,” but the principal is trying “to make sure it’s not just about rigor for rigor’s sake, but that it’s meaningful throughout the school.”

Since I removed myself from a newsroom about a decade ago and stepped into the classroom of a private high school, I’ve struggled to understand what is amiss in American high schools (and make no mistake, I consider high school teaching to be the most difficult job I’ve ever had--and the most rewarding.)

Paul Richards and thinkers like him have begun to convince me that the problem is not necessarily a “school” problem as much as a “culture” problem.

The sad side of the story, of course, is that so many teachers, administrators, parents, educational planners—as well as Congressmen—have bought into the achievement-at-any-cost culture.

A former colleague of mine, Steve Larson, who spent more than a decade as a private school superintendent before returning to teaching, used to say often, “We’re doing lots of achieving, but we’re not teaching the imagination.”

Steve and I had lots of conversations about maintaining rigor while encouraging relaxation, though we may not have used that phraseology. We also agreed such a program was an uphill battle, not because of student resistance, but because of the misunderstandings of colleagues, administrators and parents; indeed, because of a gross misunderstanding of the nature and meaning of educating adolescent minds.

I found it heartwarming and telling that when Steve decided to leave our school after just a few years and move his family south, he was voted by his colleagues as faculty person of the year, an honor traditionally reserved for faculty who were long-term employees of the institution.

Apparently, somewhere, there’s still an appreciation for relaxation.

Be at leisure, my friends.

Be at leisure, and know God

2007-02-06T16:15:00.000-05:00

Be at leisure, and know God

The Roman Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, in his book Leisure, the Basis of Culture (St. Augustine’s Press, 1998; orig. in German, 1948), first introduced me to the idea that that there is authentic leisure in the Christian faith. Pieper begins his reflection with a translation of the familiar verse from Psalm 45* : “Be still and know that I am God.” Pieper points out, however, that a more accurate translation of the Hebrew might read, “Be at leisure, and know that I am God.”

We Christians—or I should say many of us—are not good with the idea of leisure. We have great difficulty, for example, with the notion of Sabbath rest (I hasten to note that Pieper ties his thinking about leisure to the Sabbath), and we have bought into, to a large degree, the Western-Capitalist idea that idleness is the enemy of success and profit-making, though Western-Capitalism by no means has a corner on this attitude.

Even when we say we are at leisure, we are busy with our doings. We play games, we travel to exotic places, we garden, we build, we clean, we de-clutter, we drive, we fly, we ply the seas, we seek to entertain and be entertained, etc.. Leisure is a time for doing, hardly a time for rest. (Another point along similar lines could be made about our fear of silence, but I’ll save that for a later essay.)

Sociologist Max Weber’s interpretation of Calvinist theology in his exposition of the Protestant work ethic has had the effect of defining idleness—be it religious or secular—as a shortcoming (an effect not intended by Weber, I believe).

In keeping with a popular perception of that ethic, however, we constantly are admonished to avoid “wasting time.” And we are warned that “time is money” by the economic interests that drive our culture. I have learned to respond to this warning by countering, “Time is not money; time is life.”

I spent much energy in my childhood and youth—and early adulthood--fighting what I now call the anxiety of faith. I’m not talking about any genuine concern with sin and failure (although I think that’s a related topic), and I’m not speaking of the fear that comes with anxiety about losing one’s faith; rather, I’m speaking of the anxiety that arises when one feels one has to spend much time and energy defending one’s faith or justifying one’s beliefs and religious behavior.

Don’t get me wrong, you readers out there who think deeply about what is known in theology as apologetics, I’m aware there’s a place for thoughtful exposition of the tenets of one’s faith. What I resist is the compulsion to defend the “rightness” or “correctness” of one’s theological views in such a manner that it seeks to belittle or destroy another’s beliefs or doubts. A parallel piety to such a compulsion is a negation of authentic leisure. Fortunately for me, I studied Christian apologetics with a professor who wisely reminded his charges that “God needs no defense from us.”

For most of my life I have aligned myself with a Christian faith community that is best described as evangelical. I continue to live and work largely among evangelical Christians, where I am judged conservative by my liberal friends and liberal by my conservative friends. Such are the pangs of Christianity at leisure. However, as I’ve grown older and come to appreciate more the magnificent mystery of God and his incarnate Christ and indwelling Spirit, I’ve recognized a kind of Achilles’ heel in evangelical thinking that looks something like this: Enlightment Rationalism produced modern Biblical criticism as well as theological Liberalism, and the best way to resist and battle this way of thinking is to out-rationalize the rationalists.

The word “relax” and its concomitant attitude of being at rest seem to have escaped this supra-rationalism of Evangelicalism. A consistent demand for “right” doctrine that divides and separates often ends with the anxiety of faith I’m describing. We do not love our neighbors as ourselves; we instead attempt to make-over our neighbors in our own image.

Looked at this way, our resistance to authentic leisure is brought to an abrupt halt by the Psalmist’s admonition to know God by being at leisure (in fact, several translators render the familiar “Be still” of the Psalm as “Desist!”).

This blog, called “Faith at Ease,” is an attempt to work out what it means for contemporary Christians to give leisure its rightful place in our worship and theology.

Welcome aboard. Relax! and perhaps we will better know God along the way.

* Pieper refers to Psalm 45 (verse 11), which is the quotation in the Douay-Rhiems translation. Most Protestant translations have the reference at 46:10.