genuflecting with a binky

At the end of the Eucharist every Sunday, after we have all gone down the aisle to receive communion and then back to our pews, we sing one final hymn before the priest offers a benediction. It always ends with the words, “And may the blessing of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be with you now and remain with you always.”

At the mention of the Trinity, you can watch across the room as a sea of people creates a subtle ripple effect by making the sign of the cross. Each person in their own time but more or less all at the same time, like a bowl of marbles dropped to the floor, lifting a hand to the forehead, down to sternum, and back up and across to each shoulder. With this motion we pluck the priest's words out of the air and affix them to our bodies with our hands, hoping they remain with us.

It has been several years since I first learned of the theological history of the sign of the cross, not only the motion but also the position of the fingers. The thumb, index, and middle fingers come to a point to symbolize the Trinity while the ring and pinkie fingers press into the palm of the hand, a reminder of Christ's paradoxical nature: fully human and fully divine. Each of these subtle symbols stand as a testament to the Church's long history of wrestling with the nature of God and man, and patching together words and symbols in the hopes of doing justice to those struggles.

This past Sunday morning, I was having my own struggle as I tried to participate in the liturgy with a three-month-old son in my right arm. Although a good amount of bowing, kneeling, standing up and sitting down is involved in the Episcopal liturgy, there is not a lot of hip movement or bouncing like you might find in a more charismatic tradition. But my efforts to keep a baby asleep and/or happy during an hour and a half service required of me the gentle rhythm of moving hips and bending knees, making me look about as ridiculous as a strung-out flower child at a military funeral. Needless to say, I chose a pew in the back of the sanctuary.

With the baby sleeping in my right arm, I prepared for potential baby squeaks by holding a binky in my left hand, a small arsenal to preemptively combat dirty looks from church ladies if the squeaking turned to shrieking. So when the benediction came, forgetting for a moment about my armament I raised my left hand and half-surprised myself when the latex nipple of the binky touched my forehead. I smiled to myself and completed the cross with the binky clutched between the fingers of the Holy Trinity.

I'm smiling to myself quite often these days. I am getting the chance to see and experience our world in new and often comical ways. What a joy to see the world through a child's eyes, and to see us humans for what we often are: holy fools who patch together words and symbols and stitch them on our sleeves, crossing ourselves with binkies and clothing ourselves in grace.

Small is Beautiful and Good Works

Last winter I read E.F. Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful, and I just recently started reading his quasi-sequel Good Work. After I took an Intro to Economics class last year, and in light of this past year's economic upheavals and uncertainties, I've been increasingly amazed by two things: (1) The absolute prophetic nature of Schumacher's writings from over thirty years ago in contrast to conventional economic thought of the time, and (2) the absolute failure of governments, communities, and individuals to make the necessary changes to redirect our history toward a more sustainable future, as though we never saw (and still don't see) the writing on the wall.

It is understandable that Schumacher, being only one man, would not be able to redirect the course of modern civilization. One also has to consider the time period in which he was putting forth his ideas. Schumacher had the opportunity to advise President Carter in the year before Carter gave what would become known as his "Malaise Speech". As I have written in the past, rather than the speech being evidence of Carter's failure as a president, I believe it is evidence of America's failure to recognize the reckless course we were on, and to accept responsibility to change that course for the better. Even the words of the leader of the free world fell on the deaf ears of a nation obsessed with a lifestyle of acquisition and consumption.

Hold on. This is not a political post, but a personal one. If I expect government to change then I must first demand that I change because, in theory, I am my government. There are two parts of Good Work I would like to quote, the first being Schumacher's trinitarian definition of good work:

"...We may derive the three purposes of human work as follows: First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services. Second, to enable every one of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards. Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity."

The second quote considers the challenges that come to those living life in a way that steps out of line from the onward march of American progress and marches instead to a different beat. Enjoy:

"The degeneration of the industrial system- that is, the ever-intensified idolatry of getting rich quickly- offers everywhere ample opportunities for bringing light into dark places. Everywhere the values of freedom, responsibility, and human dignity have to be openly affirmed, even where a neglect of these values would appear to allow the big industrial machine to run more smoothly and more efficiently. It may not be possible to do this without causing offense. To tell a young person that his personal integrity is more important than his career may sound almost like sabotage in the ears of the efficiency experts. To insist that the reckless waste of natural resources is a crime does not sound cooperative to those who think that the highest possible rate of consumption is the only worthwhile pursuit for mortal man." (italics mine.)

Random Recents

Good Reading: I used to read Real Live Preacher on a much more regular basis. I don't know why I have become so sporadic, especially when he writes good stuff like this. What does it mean to be true to yourself?

Garden: We spent an hour on Saturday raking leaves with a few neighbors, loading the leaves into three pick-up trucks, and driving up to the community garden to unload them into what is possibly the world's largest pile of leaves. The three kids who were with us took turns jumping from a seven-foot ledge into the pile and one by one disappeared beneath the leaves. Eventually a few of us big kids joined in on the fun. By next spring, those leaves will have broken down a bit to help us restore nutrients to the soil for planting, but for now they are just one big pile of fun.

Music: Fiction Family. This album is a collaboration between Sean Watkins (of Nickel Creek) and Jon Foreman (of Switchfoot). Check out the song "Resurrect Me" and come back and tell me if it didn't rock your face and stir your soul at the same time.

Quote: "Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." ~George Eliot

to the season of tomatoes

Twelve tomato plants were shriveling and turning brown before my eyes on a cold and drizzly Sunday afternoon in October. I had already dug up the remaining sweet potatoes and tilled under the brittle corn stalks, and now I stood over these tomato plants, facing a moral dilemma.

Scattered all over the ground around the plants were dozens of small but still-ripe tomatoes, and there were at least a dozen more still clinging to the plants, literally holding on for dear life. I had room in my basket to load them all up and take them home. But this is October we are talking about. My enthusiasm for tomatoes builds in mid- July, peaks in early August, and is near extinction come Labor Day. Where I once was in love with the bulbous fleshy feel of plucking a ruby-red tomato from the vine, I now simply wish I wasn't looking at them, like an awkward encounter with an ex-girlfriend.

But my instinctive reaction of disgust gave way to my sense of virtue, and the moral dilemma began. After all, this was foodstuffs I was staring at. Scavengers of post-WWII Europe would have made off with these tomatoes weeks ago, and perhaps so would today's homeless of Kansas City, if only they knew where to look. Did I have a responsibility to not let this food go to waste? Or do I let these few remaining late season tomatoes simply remain to rot and replenish the soil? Who needs the nutrients more-- the self or the soil?

And then I heard something coming from a few blocks away-- the cheery sound of "Pop Goes the Weasel" coming from an ice cream truck. I remembered at that moment that certain things can be out of place in time. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, "For everything, there is a season." An ice cream truck circling the block on a cold drizzly day in October simply doesn't belong. Picking plump tomatoes to take home should not take place on the same day that I prepare the garden for winter. The time for ice cream trucks and tomatoes has passed. And the time of year has arrived when I must slow myself, go indoors, turn inward, conserve my energy and eat starchy foods, and begin dreaming ahead-- rather than looking back-- to the season of tomatoes.

hit the RESUME button

I've been told that it has been too long since I blogged. I will try to start writing more in the coming days and weeks. As an apology to my three or so dedicated readers, I offer a photo collage of what I have been up to the past month or so.

saw a movie.

brewed a special beer for a party.

went hiking and celebrated the arrival of Autumn in Weston, MO.

went to the Wilco concert.

drove through West Virginia and stayed with our friend, Emily.


went to Chapel Hill, NC for my sister's wedding.

brewed a special beer for the wedding reception.

the boy.

new music tuesday

Sinful Babies in a Fucked Up World, pt. 2

When I wrote the original post on this topic, my wife was still a few weeks away from giving birth to our son. As such, my credibility in critiquing one parent's view of his child as being Satan's spawn was nil. Now that I have three weeks as a father under my belt, I can confidently say that my child, too, is the spawn of Satan. Every time I look at this child, his beady little eyes steal a piece of my soul, and I can hear the sound of the Jesus in my heart getting the crap kicked out of him, over and over again, just from being in the presence of this wicked wart of a child.

OK, back to reality. I am the father of a beautiful boy, born in God's image, entering into an amazing and loving world. True, my son has some of the funkiest shit I have ever seen/smelled/inhaled, but I can't really hold it against him (although, thanks to the diaper, he holds it against himself quite well. Ba-dum ching!). He cries quite regularly for several reasons: (1) when he is sitting in shit, (2) when he wants to eat, and (3) whenever he can't figure out where the heck he is. On this last point, if I spent nine months floating in warm liquid in the dark, and was suddenly shoved into this world, I would be crying a lot more than he does. He has my respect for how well he is handling the transition. Props to my boy.

So yes, he cries. Is he selfish? Is he sinning? Honestly, I don't know and I don't care. Like I wrote in the previous post, my "default setting" is to assume the best: my son is created in the image of the divine, with the capacity to choose. At three weeks old, he does not yet make cognitive choices but instead relies on instinct. He does what he needs to do. As he grows, he will learn from me and others how to choose, both for good and for bad. You may say that this is our curse as humans, but it is also our blessing. In the end, my theological thoughts toward my son matter little to him. What matters to him is how I respond to his needs, not how I theologize them.

But it does matter to me. It matters that I look at my child through a lens of love and acceptance rather than a lens which seeks evidence to validate my own worldview. I am in awe of the goodness of his humanity. I do not pity him for his condition, this creatureliness that we all carry at different times. What I pity is the person who sees in a child the proof of our fallen condition. Our redemption comes when we start to see God among us, "all this untouched beauty". But redemption is a long way off when each generation looks at the next as proof of the Fall and washes its hands of responsibility, thus teaching the next generation to do the same. These are all just broad generalizations, abstract ideas, wild hopes and dreams. May the best of these ideas, hopes, and dreams find their way into the very small and particular life of my son.