RECESS!

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." --Emerson

IF YOU'VE BEEN READING THE LAST FEW POSTS, you know this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson has had me thinking--about being a trailblazer.

I guess if we're supposed to be trailblazers, we need to know what one looks like. Maybe we can figure that out by taking a closer look at a few. A few of my favorites:

Left to Right: Amelia Earhart, pioneer; Dr. Jonas Salk, a very important trailblazer to all of us Baby Boomers; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visionary; Steve Jobs, designer, solution finder; Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher, poet, worldview shaper.

So what comes to mind? Adventurous, activist, bold, badassed, curious, courageous, driven, determined, enlightened, earnest, free-spirited, fervent, etc. etc.

What about motive? What is the spark in the heart of a true trailblazer: altruism, notoriety, a death-wish, financial gain, service to a cause greater than themselves, or maybe they just can't help it.

Well; WHERE IS Ralph WALDO Emerson in the matter of trail-blazing? RECESS!

That's right, it just may be that Ralph Waldo Emerson is responsible for one of my favorite things about school: recess.

From the course description on Emerson, Thoreau and Transcendentalism taught by Dr. Ashton Nichols, University of Virginia:

"Where did the America we know today—so different in its fundamental views about almost every aspect of life as to be unrecognizable to our countrymen of two centuries ago—really come from? How, for example, did the colonial idea of the classroom as a place devoted to "breaking the will" and "subduing the spirit" of students, change to that of a vibrant, even pleasurable experience—including innovations such as kindergarten and recess—with children encouraged to participate actively in their own education?" 

Emerson and Thoreau are important (to me at least) because I tend hard to Transcendentalism: an emphasis on the divine in nature, on the value of the individual and intuition, and on belief in a spirituality that might "transcend" one's own sensory experience to provide a more useful guide for daily living than is possible from empirical and logical reasoning.

Before you can be a trailblazer, you have to believe that you are free to, and capable of, trail-blazing. If you hold to a view of pre-destination, you are obviously, pretty much placed on a predetermined path--obviously. If you hold to a religious creed that has the effect of breaking the will and subduing the spirit; why? 

"But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic monotony that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” G.K. Chesterton, trailblazer.

Maybe God wants us to have recess. Maybe He wants us to be immersed in creativity and play. Maybe that's the essence of trailblazing--having "the eternal appetite of infancy."

Having A Place

HOME SWEET HOME. You have to love a band that would call themselves Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. No doubt you've heard their music, at least the song called, "Home" with a chorus that says, "Home is wherever I'm with you." That's a sentiment I can appreciate.

I know for a lot of people having a place seems important. Maybe there's something agrarian in their blood, or maybe that's just normal. After all, some of mankind's earliest stories are about a people seeking a Promised Land. And now, a bazillion years later they're still fighting over whose dirt is whose.

On the other end of the spectrum is the "this earth is not my home, I'm only passing through" crowd; also a sentiment I can appreciate. Back in 1972, a guy named Larry Norman made a record called, "Only Visiting This Planet". He was an important person for me back then.

As I mentioned in a post a few days back called, Coming of Age in 1969, I was swept up in the whole "give peace a chance" deal. Larry was one of the catalytic characters for a bunch of us who wanted to shake things up and saw in Jesus a model we could identify with: universal love, pacifism, radical worldview, etc. So the "Jesus Freak" became a part of the counter-culture movement.

One of the prevailing themes of the day (at least in my memory of it) was to be good stewards and caretakers of this big round ball that is our temporary home. Communal living and farming became grand experiments in the new paradigm.

Today, there is something very familiar in the air (and I'm not talking about the air in Colorado and Washington). Every time I go to Whole Foods® for groceries, there's a wash of nostalgia--young guys with full beards and flannel shirts, young moms with a baby swaddled to themselves. There is one big difference though: back in the day, the girls wore long dresses and beads. Today they wear yoga pants (regardless of their size) and a North Face® pullover.

The magazines on the rack by the cashier have to do with organic cooking and raising chickens rather than the public and private lives of pop culture's finest. I'm a sucker for subliminal advertising and I will admit right here that if our fair city of Oklahoma City had passed a recent consideration to allow us gated-community suburbanites to raise a couple of chickens, I would be building my coop as we speak. It didn't pass.

And it's not just places like Whole Foods®. The other day I was in Lowes® home improvement store. On the rack with books about building your own deck or converting your den into a garage was a book on raising goats. This was something I know something about. I had a goat when I was young. His name was Cocoa. I'm not sure what ever happened to him. I don't remember seeing him after my Uncle David, who had lived for years in Corpus Christie introduced us to a delicacy called the fajita.

While I do enjoy having a place to call my own, I believe that Woody Guthrie was right; in a sense. "This Land Is Your Land; This Land Is My land" sort of; at least for a while longer. However, I would be perfectly happy to hook to the Airstream® (once we own one), and with my Amazing Missus head off on some nomadic adventure, swapping stories and good food in the wayfaring commune of other adventurers.

Manger, Magi, and The Mystery of Majesty

INCARNATION! THAT'S WHAT THIS SEASON IS ABOUT. The Word becoming flesh and dwelling with us. (John 1.)

It is so weird to me that God would do this--enter humanity like this; and then we, the church, seem to work so hard to make Jesus something other than human. Why would we do that?

I want you to meet a dear friend, Mako Fujimura. Mako is the person that taught me about the concept of "re-humanizing" the world. Becoming what God intended us to be.

Somehow in understanding this, the mystery of incarnation became clearer to me.

Mako Fujimura

For this post, I am sharing with you some of Mako's words.  This is from a talk Mako did to artists encouraging them to create art for the Christmas season. Mako is an artist and founder of International Arts Movement, a movement I've had the joy and honor of being a part of for several years now. I asked Mako for permission to share this with you and he graciously agreed. You can find more of his writings and learn of his work at www.makotofujimura.com.

What a strange beginning to what many have called “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

A teenage girl engaged to a carpenter gets pregnant. She claims that an Angel appeared to her to say that she would have a virgin birth. Her fiancé is hesitant to believe her. They cannot make it back home when she is ready to give birth, and they cannot find an Inn in which to stay. So she gives birth in a stable.

The people who come to visit are not the in-laws or other family members, but shepherds—an identity few people desired, like today’s garbage collectors. A few weeks later, Magicians from the East come with their gifts. They are fortune tellers, not religious leaders, and the stars are their scriptures.­

The themes of the Greatest Story are not of power, wealth, and worldly notions of success; it is rather the story of people in the margins, people under suspicion, people who are outsiders—people like artists.

When I meet someone on a plane and I tell them I am an artist, I almost always have to go into “explaining mode” to answer the same common questions: “What kind of art do you make?” “Why do you do it?” “Can you make a living?”

If I said I was an electrical engineer, explaining would not be necessary. But tell people, particularly Christians, that I am an artist and I am immediately regarded with suspicion and thoughtless dismissal: “You don’t paint nudes, do you?” “I don’t understand modern art.” “You make that weird stuff that my kids could paint and then call it ‘art,’ don’t you?”

No wonder artist types sit in the back of the church and leave as soon as the music ends, if they come to church at all. Church is for successful people, for respectable folks with real jobs.

But church people forget that the Bible is full of wonderful, strange artsy folks. Ezekiel the prophet believed he was told by God to do performance art like eating a scroll and cooking with human dung. King David danced naked in the streets. The prophet Hosea claimed that God told him to marry a prostitute and, when she’d run off, to keep buying her back from her pimp by baking food for him.

Stillpoint-evening. Makoto Fujimura.

Then you have this pregnant teen who gave birth to a supposed King in a food trough—a King who was first greeted by the garbage collectors of the time. Right.

When I read the Bible as an artist, though, it really makes sense. Artists do all sorts of strange things to communicate—they create language to describe the indescribable. Ezekiel, David, and Hosea were marginalized, poor, outcast, creative, curious—more like artists than “respectable people.” God is also an artist, inventing strange ways to communicate. Since he exists outside Time and Space, He has to translate the indescribable into our notion of the ordinary. He humbled Himself to condescend to us, daring to use us, broken and lost, to do the work of re-creation. And like “modern art,” this looks strange, otherworldly, and full of mystery.

Saint Paul, while in prison, asks for prayer to “boldly proclaim the mystery of the gospel.” The “gospel” is the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, which on the surface seems pretty clear. So why does he use the word “mystery?” Why not say, “Pray that I can be clear,” or “Pray that I can be persuasive?” Perhaps what Paul meant by “proclaiming the mystery” was revealing things spoken of in the past, in the Old Testament, secrets that were now being revealed through Christ.

“Mystery” can also, in the generative sense, mean indescribable, unseen, or unforeseen things. Jesus—himself a mysterious, artistic person—often spoke of mysterious things by using parables, stories that did not really work on a normative level. He said things like, “Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or wear,” and then, as an antidote to our worry addiction, suggested, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

He told the story of two sons. The younger, wayward son takes his inheritance from his father and goes to town, wasting it all on frivolous pleasures. His father does not stop him from destroying himself, but when the son loses everything and decides that it’s better to be home than homeless, the father throws the biggest party for him, saying, “My son was lost, and is found.” The elder brother is understandably upset with his younger brother’s reckless behavior and cannot fathom why his father would welcome his younger brother home. Where’s the discipline? Where’s the punishment? As Jesus tells this story, he turns to the religious authorities of his day, insinuating that they were that elder brother who did not understand the Father’s frivolous love for his inconstant and selfish child. They were as we often are—legalistic and wayward, an anxious people who cannot stop to appreciate beauty or hear music in the spheres of our world.*

A journey with Jesus is more like being an artist than working a predictable 9-to-5 job. It’s unpredictable, risky, and often strange. It’s an adventure for which you need faith. You don’t need to be a “respectable Christian” to walk with Jesus: in fact, it’s best if you are not. You’ll be better able to wrestle with the deeper realities of your journey, to confront your brokenness. You’ll be able to let your life’s experience become the materials for your craft, articulating that deep mystery within you rather than trying to explain it away.

The church needs artists, because, like Jesus, they ask questions that are at the same time enigmatic and clear, encouraging and challenging. But, unlike Jesus, they are far from perfect. And that’s okay because none of Jesus closest followers were respectable, well put-together people either. Jesus still gave them “authority” because they were chosen, broken creatures in need of a Savior who learned of their dependence on God. He gave them “author-rity” to write the story of the Kingdom and the mystery of redemption. He made them into artists. 

We are all chosen, broken creatures and Jesus has made us all into artists, whether we use a brush or simply ride on a garbage truck. Our stories are living stories of the Kingdom that we write every day. Infused with the mystery of the Great Artist’s spirit, our stories can become a wide open adventure—part of the Greatest Story Ever Told.

If It Quacks Like A Duck

IT SEEMS LIKE EVERYONE who has a news outlet, a Facebook account, Tweets or has a blog  also has an opinion about The Duck Dynasty deal. I thought to myself: should I say anything about it? Does Phil Robertson the real guy owe it to "Phil Robertson" the "reality" guy to keep the dynasty quackin'? 

I had no answers for myself and as I've explained before, here at AboutPOPS I try to steer clear of politics and religion. (That doesn't mean I won't occasionally talk about my faith and beliefs, it's just that those doesn't necessarily have anything to do with religion.)

But, then Donald Miller came to my rescue when he tweeted a link to this article from Scientific American magazine. It is relevant because it speaks to both issues: gays and ducks.

Why are all the good blue ducks gay?

That’s what Cherry, the last remaining lass of her kind in England, may be asking herself after two male prospects that might have helped her perpetuate the species fell for one another instead of for her.

Image of Blue Duck by Karora via Wikimedia Commons

"They stay together all the time, parading up and down their enclosure and whistling to each other as a male might do with a female he wants to mate with," Paul Stevens, the warden at Arundel Wetland Center, tells the Telegraph.

The boy birds, Ben and Jerry, were introduced to Cherry, but to no avail. "Cherry showed some interest in him," Stevens told the newspaper, referring to Jerry. "She displayed typical mating behavior—she approached him and called to him, she even looked like she was nesting. We thought it was great and it was all going to happen, but nothing ever did."

Feathers flew, however, when Ben and Jerry were shacked up together. "To our surprise, the two males really took to each other and it was obvious that they really liked each other," Stevens said, adding: "Ben and Jerry do make a lovely couple."

But Ben and Jerry’s coupling is bad news for blue ducks in England, where the threesome is thought to be among the only such birds in the country, the Telegraph reports. Blue ducks are native to New Zealand and are threatened with extinction, according to that country’s Department of Conservation.

As for Cherry, she’s taking Ben and Jerry’s relationship in stride, Stevens told the Telegraph. "Cherry doesn’t seem bothered by it," he said. "She’s just happy to keep to herself."

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I will say, I bet Ben and Jerry have a very hip looking nest.

You can read the entire article here. If you're in to this sort of thing.