It's Not All Black & White

There is something that stirs within me this time of year. I think it has to do with feeling like summer is slipping away and the start of school is just around the corner. I haven’t started back to school in years, but still this haunting feeling returns.

Soon now, good times at the pool will be replaced with learning locker combos, class schedules and how to conjugate a verb. No more sleeping in or staying up late. Not that it’s all bad. There are some things to look forward to, like Friday nights, when the air begins to turn crisp and the atmosphere crackles with the excitement of a high school football game. Yes, I’m a band nerd, but at least I was in the drumline—the rowdy rebels and evil necessity of every band director.

I better be careful or I will reminisce myself into a longing to go back to school.

Recently, My Amazing-Missus took the grand-girls shopping for their back to school supplies. I got to playing around with the boxes of crayons and created one that was all black and white crayons. I showed it to our oldest grand-girl and she looked at me like I had jerked a rainbow from the sky and strangled a unicorn with it. Then she said, “That can’t be real. That would be horrible!”

She’s right.

Attention boys and girls. Today’s lesson is about the importance of having colors in your crayon box.

Here’s the thing about politics and religion and dogma and institutions and fundamentalists: They will steal all the colors out of your box if you’re not careful. Everything will be reduced to this or that, right or wrong (their version of it of course), black or white. When it happens, our worldview narrows, we become narrow-minded and single-minded and mean and bitter. We think everyone is out to get us. We believe every conspiracy theory that comes along.

Worse yet, we miss out on the wonder, the beauty, the possibilities. I asked Karlee, our oldest if she knew who Roy G. Biv is. “Of course.” Of course she knew. We could all learn something if we would pay more attention to Roy G. Biv.

I am sick and tired of politics. I’m tired and sick of the religious right telling me who I should hate and why. I’m tired of people saying, make up your mind. It’s either black or white. 

No it’s not. Meet Roy G. Biv, or as Karlee knows him, the colors of the rainbow: Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo and Violet.

Make a note of that, it will be on the test. And put some color back in your crayon box.

If I Had A Hammer

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

That’s one of my favorite “proverbs”. I’ve used it for years and always attributed it to Abraham Maslow. But, have I been correct in doing so? Wiktionary to the rescue:

From the book Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham H. Maslow (1962):

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Similar concept by Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, (1964):

“I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”

This blog post is about tools and utility and reductionism and throwing away some of life’s wonders like so much ephemera.

One of the frustrations of aging is losing your tools, not your physical tools like your screwdriver or tape measure, but finding you don’t hear as well as you once could, or see, or smell, and that wonderful tool of memory, where did I put that? Years ago a guy named Stephen Covey reduced the concept of being “highly effective” to seven habits. Number 7 was, “Sharpen the Saw”. Sometimes these days I can’t even remember where my saw is, much less how to sharpen it.

But even more tragic than losing tools through aging, is when we recklessly throw out tools—reducing the options in our toolbox by seeking simple, quick solutions—casting aside the tools of wonder, creativity, inquiry, spiritual quests, and in their place adding dogma, doctrine, principles, processes—tools that certainly have their time and purpose, but ugly and dangerous when they become the only tools we have.

If Kaplan is right about his “law of the instrument”, then I can probably look at my behavior and attitude and learn something. If I’m constantly pounding everything, there’s a good chance that I’ve reduced my toolbox to a hammer. You know what I mean?

So today, I’m taking stock. I’m thinking of my worldview, my politics, my religion, my relationships, my motives, my dreams, and I’m asking myself: what tools do I have in the box?

I read a column in the Washington Post. As I read I thought, I want more hope, that somehow we can collectively see that it’s going to take more than a hammer to pound everything, more than a screwdriver to continue to do what screwdrivers do. The proof is in the opening paragraph of the story:

There is so much anger out there in America: “Anger at Wall Street. Anger at Muslims. Anger at trade deals. Anger at Washington. Anger at police shootings of young black men. Anger at President Obama. Anger at Republican obstructionists. Anger about political correctness. Anger about the role of big money in campaigns. Anger about the poisoned water of Flint. Anger about deportations. Anger about undocumented immigrants. Anger about a career that didn’t go as expected. Anger about a lost way of life. Mob anger at groups of protesters in their midst. Specific anger and undefined anger and even anger about anger.”

---

I love poetry. Since our culture tends to reduce the idea of manliness to a caricature that real-men shouldn’t enjoy reading much of anything, especially poetry, I’m including a manly-esque poem, written by John Updike, author of works every guy should read. I share it because it has helped me take the measure of my tools.

Tools
By John Updike

Tell me, how do the manufacturers of tools
turn a profit? I have used the same clawed hammer
for forty years. The screwdriver misted with rust
once slipped into my young hand, a new householder’s.
Obliviously, tools wait to be used: the pliers,
notched mouth agape like a cartoon shark’s; the wrench
with its jaws on a screw; the plane still sharp enough
to take its fragrant, curling bite; the brace and bit
still fit to chew a hole in pine like a patient thought;
the tape rule, its inches unaltered though I have shrunk;
the carpenter’s angle, still absolutely right though I
have strayed; the wooden bubble level from my father’s
meagre horde. Their stubborn shapes pervade the cellar,
enduring with a thrift that shames our wastrel lives.

IF I HAD A HAMMER. Click and listen. Makes me long for the beautiful complexity of the 60s and my first Coming-Of-Age, when my toolbox was full, even though I often tore up more things than I fixed or built. At least I was alive.

For This Sunday, December 13, 2015

“The idea that nothing is true except what we comprehend is silly, and that ideas which our minds cannot reconcile are mutually destructive, sillier still.”

— Winston Churchill

“​For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

— Paul the Apostle; FKA: Saul of Tarsus (1 Corinthians 13:12)

The Jesus I don't Believe In

According to the National Candle Association (I’m not making this up), candle sales “have taken off like wildfire.” They didn’t say whether the pun was intended or not. The candle industry experiences growth of 10 to 15 percent a year and annual sales have topped $2 billion with a B.

Some will say that’s a lot of money going up in smoke, but these people have probably never been to a candlelight dinner, saw Liberace play piano, or watched a children’s choir sing a candlelight Christmas concert.

I wish that we weren’t burning so many candles like those we see at vigils and makeshift memorials. I wish this only because I wish we didn’t need to have these, but it seems to be our new reality.

I really do try to avoid politics and religion in anything I post on the WWW. Maybe, if I was the president of my daddy’s university, I could just rant there, but since I’m not, I’ll use my little blog here. After all, “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Or, so they say.

Jerry Falwell Jr. and I have something in common: I am so, so grateful that Jerry Falwell Jr. doesn’t represent or speak for all christians. And, if Jerry Falwell Jr. knew me at all, I’m certain he would say that he too is so, so grateful that I don’t either.

In deference to Jerry Jr., I didn’t hear all of his convocation address to his young soldiers, and I won’t repeat the soundbites here. You can find them for yourself if you’re so inclined.

I have a document at home called a Cradle Roll Cerftificate. It states that I was enrolled at the Brookside Baptist Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as a wee little lad. (I think we were called “Sunbeams”). One of the things I’ve learned over these many years is that we should not hide our light under a bushel. We should share our testimony.

In that spirit, I will testify and confess that I am having a crisis of faith. I’ve had them many times before but it’s been a long time.

My freshman year in college, I was driving back to campus after a weekend at home. I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. Don’t worry. It was the early 70s. He was a hippie. I knew he wasn’t going to shoot me and steal my car. We talked smalltalk. It went roughly like this: 

Hippie: Where you headed man?
Me: Back to school. 
Hippie: Cool, cool. Where?
Me: OBU.
Hippie: What does that stand for?
Me: Oklahoma Baptist University.
Hippie: That’s a heavy trip man, that whole religion scene.
Me: But you’re not heavy, you’re my brother. (I didn’t really say that. It was probably more something like): Why do you say that?
Hippie: I believe there is divinty in every thing. What do you think of that? Mind if I smoke?
Me: I don’t belive that spirit can enter inanimate things. (I guess I assumed we were going to speak esoterically.)
Hippie: Actually, I don’t believe in Jesus or anything like that.
Me: Tell me about the Jesus you don’t believe in.

And he told me. He told me about a typical, americanized, generic diety that is primarily concerned with sorting good and bad behavior.

Me: I’m pretty sure that the god you’ve rejected is not the true God. I feel like if you would really spend time getting to know Jesus, you would find him to be completely different than your concept of him. He is the creator and source of this amazing thing called grace.
Hippie: Fair enough.

By that time we were halfway along the turnpike. I bought him an ice cream at Howard Johnson’s and as we parted ways, he hugged me and said, “Peace, brother.”

“Exactly.” I said.

Here’s my crisis. I’m pretty sure that the “Jesus” that has been hijacked by the likes of Jerry Falwell Jr. and the most hardcore of fundamentalists for political gain, and co-opted for their agendas, is not the Jesus I know from scripture, from a long life full of teaching from faithful followers, and from personal experience.

This is the Jesus I know:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counseller, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. —Isaiah 9:6

Peace, brothers and sisters. May the only candles you have to light this season be those of the advent.

P.S.: Speaking of who Jesus is and songs by candlelight. WATCH THIS BREATHTAKING VIDEO FROM PENTATONIX

For more on this topic, I recommend this from Relevant Magazine.