Changes IX: on our feet. on our knees.

I've been wanting to become a better person, and I suppose that is as much as anyone can ask. Its something which has had to begin at a reasserted sense of self-identity- a real desire to become better because its where I believe creator God wants me to be, but also as i realize the advantage it holds for me. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Over the past semester, under the pressure of academic deadlines a tired body and heart I became effected by the duality of, on one hand, my own failures- and on the other, determination. I like the romanticism of positivism and the idea that i can make myself a better person, but I admit that it is God's grace that I continually rely on in a world where I am pulled by two relentless polarities- often failing, ever weak. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So we do the best we can in a world which is fraying under the weight. Sometimes we feel stronger and sometimes weaker and the lies fed to the strong are that they will always be strong and that their strength is a licence to run solo. What I think I've become more aware of is that my strengths are not for me alone any more than my weaknesses are. We help each other, and usually out of a place of shared infirmity, relative limitation, and the awareness of equality that that brings: “beggars telling other beggars where to find bread,” someone once said. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “One thing I realize as I get older” Said a friend recently, “is that there is a lot of sorrow in the world”. I think there is a time early in life where you can largely ignore this sorrow, and it might even evade you. At some point, however, it will find you and it might destroy you or it might define you. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Discipline and conviction are, i suppose, what helps prepares someone for an event which his heart would normally respond badly to. It is what helps rescue workers focus on the tasks at hand and ignore shock. It is what makes you want to keep becoming better even after the girl who was your aim and hope cuts you lose. It might help you stay alive when others die. We take a deep breath, and with strength which comes from community and Grace that comes from God we put another foot in front.... And then another.

Changes VIII: encounters

I used to think that Clint Eastwood's movie Unforgiven was a little bit ridiculous. Just because I didn't really think that a woman could change a man. The fact that he finally reverted to his old cold killing self after she died shouldn't have come as a surprise. The fact that she had changed his character at all, and until years after she died seemed pretty far fetched. At least to me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- But then I met someone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I didn't really get that someone could fall for someone else so fast and so hard. Damn. So hard it hurt. Didn't know that could happen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The point here being that she made me want to be a better person. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now, its worth saying that it didn't go anywhere. I had to take a lesson in humility and acquiescence. I guess life goes on. But when I was trying to make an impression I felt like I had no ammunition. I felt like any charms up my sleeve had been had been corrupted on shallow flirting and social manipulation. I felt like a politician trying to be a real person offside the campaign trail. He suddenly realizes that aside from gimmicky speeches, honestly proving substance comes hard. Trying to be real, I stumbled and choked and I felt a welling within to be better. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was no gunslinging killer, but I realized I could be better, that I should be, and that I wanted to be. I suddenly realized what kinds of things motivate people improve themselves. The “WHY” hit me. For her, yes. For friends, yes. For God, yes. Why? Because I was made to be better, it just took some realizing that I wanted to be the way I was made: that this was in fact a very beautiful transformation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Over the past couple of years I have written on my disillusionment with ethics and christian religious life, contouring slowly back to where i have begun to find value in discipline and community once more. I think in more or less words I have decided that it takes seeing oneself as consequential to see a life as something worth improving. The “who” in my life have been cataclysmic.

Changes VII: Chivalry, not quite dead.

I recently have had the opportunity to spend time with woodsman John. John often gets poked fun at for his being a woodsman and all. He lives in the wilderness, carries a knife, has a truck, owns guns, wears suspenders and looks like an offspring of Paul Bunyan. This is why I call him Woodsman John. The interesting thing, though, is his“old fashioned” sense of chivalry. I know enough of the redneck variety, who would live up to their stereotypes of creepily asking girls to go 4x4ing with them, bragging about how many guns they have or talking about killing animals like its something they savour. John, however- I don't think I've even heard him swear, certainly not in front of a girl. He calls senior men and woman as Maam and Sir and saves his words so they don't run off. Staring into the face of the wild he not become wild. And the funny thing is that when he is spending time in the “civilization” of the city he is the one who stands out as being the most collected character- the disciplined type. If you wanted someone you could trust to get your kids home safe from a party, or think straight in a dangerous situation, I think he'd be your man. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I like the romanticism of positivism: the idea that we can better ourselves and are on a vector towards self-made perfection- that is, in as far as it means surrounding myself with fine art and quality workmanship and bowler hats or fedoras. I like fedoras. But the problem remains that we are animals as well as humans- a fact which gets in the way of our humanity. Christians often point to the doctrine of “the fall” to explain our corrupted nature- the part of us that might go wild without checks and balances. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There might be some value, I am led to think, in a disciplined life, but the belief that we can perfect ourselves is historically a recipe for fundamental ideologies and painful falls off big and well trained horses. Chivalry is dead they say. Its true that things have changed. Chivalry was a social construction, existing in a time of dragons or something. Maybe we don't need it anymore. I don't think, however, that the fact that it was only a social construction means that its necessarily destined for death. Does chivalry reflect an ideal which degraded humans, or a discipline which gave them value? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The way i figure is that civilization has always been protected by a “thin red line” somewhere. On that front the animality of men, through barbarous failure to compromise have kept civilians far within cities and borders enjoying peace. In the age of the roman empire, the armies weren't even allowed inside Rome. They were a threat to society. Presently, many don't even like the police officers in their cities- and yet they are the forces which keep a healthy democracy from adopting anarchical violence on the fringes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When we think about chivalry we think about knights. It was the social construct that took the animal barbarity of a warrior, removed his helmet, replaced it with a hat and had that hat throw down his jacket before a woman lest she should step in a puddle. It allowed the animal to become a human. Couldn't she have figured out a way to go around the puddle? Not the point. The point is the act of discipline which kept the inherent animal an identity of human decency which could contribute to a healthy society of not just men, but woman and children too. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I wonder if some social constructs like this, though unpopular now, have been crucial to what have kept humans “civil”, although even that word has fallen from popularity also. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My point here is that, although I enjoy the romanticism that I can become a better man, making a list of times in the day that i screwed up like Ben Franklin did, believing that by wearing a a bowler cap I might take on an upper class lilt and treat my fellow men with instantaneous Christian benevolence, the case is that I am at once an animal- a fallen human. It is a balancing game of being the best I can, but also being aware of my limitations. I walk like a toddler, doing his best to put one foot in front of another, but with hands above his head, guided and balanced by his father. Only here loosing the fear of stumbling. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In this season when I seek a structure wherewith to interpret what it is to be a good and decent and respectful man, the ethic of chivalry has regained some of its lost popularity, at least to me. Humility balanced with discipline. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Being a good man, perhaps, is not natural at all. From a civilization perspective it is a construct designed so that more of us can live here. From a Judeo-Christian perspective, it is a discipline which resists our fallen nature and brings us closer to what God wants us to be. Good things have been corrupted by selfishness. Fear replaces trust. Lust replaces admiration. Cash value replaces beauty. Materialism makes everything and everyone into an exploitable resource. The spiritual mentality of religion can foster a discipline and, to some extent, a worldview which supports something much better. While realizing the rightly placed criticisms upon both chivalry and religion as social constructs, I nonetheless see elements of both in my life which help me become who I believe I am destined for- an objective which I hope I am collectively becoming. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- An old friend of mine used to be a pastor, and I used to listen to him preach a lot. As it goes, I don't remember very many of the topics he preached about now. The one I remember best, however, was about the will: Will vs. Heart. Follow your heart, everyone says. Rob said don't. Your heart can be lead you good places as well as bad. It is fickle. The will is something grounded in predetermined and thought out convictions which serve as a countercheck against what the heart might be saying. Take control of yourself Rob seemed to advocate: follow your will, not just your heart. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ... and then when that truly true and really real good good comes along and the will agrees, you give heart soul and strength to get it.

changes VI: Impulse

I was reading Don Miller's road trip story again, and I liked the way he said that beauty wasn't, to him, entertainment, a fact which he felt the institutional church had mistaken. Real beauty should make you hurt a bit on the inside. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I never used to miss people very much when I, or they, left town. I had a pretty engrained idea of self that to be independent was to be strong. But I've just had a couple friends leave, just for the summer, and I'm left wanting words that explain that by saying I will miss them I mean that they are so important. It hurts, but its a good kind of hurt. Does this make me weak, to become weak for another person? I think this, rather, roots us in whom we are meant to be. Roots us in one another. God, we might accept, is a Trinity- a community in one entity. I love this idea, that community could be so core to our divinely created identity. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't know if anyone falls in love, but I have observed that lives can make sudden shifts, as if a chemical switch is turned in the brain. My boss told me the other day that he was smoking three packs a day, had tried to quit multiple times but one day he just realized what he didn't want to end up like, and, throwing his last pack out the window on the way from one city to another never had another craving. I wonder if you can't fall, by some extraordinary miracle, into purpose. When I met somebody who made me want to be a better person, who made me want to fall for them, I determined that I would if i could. A shift so strong took hold that it hurt to realize it. A good kind of hurt. A kind of hurt that used the lens of grace and determination against my self-realization to get a glimpse of what could be. Like music: a thousand mistakes and poor decisions and absurd stubbornness to create five or ten minuets of uninterrupted incredulidity. Sometimes this resolve would hit me, just like it was whatever the antonym of depression is. Take that experience (you might know it) when a depression hits so hard that it moves through emotional pain and manifests on the edge of physical pain: the moment that undermines hope and drills a hole from the chest to the stomach, that makes you stoop, grimace, clutch your arms around yourself, reduced to grasping at loose timber after the boat has sunk. It is this, but inverse. The resolve hits the same nerve centre with a different impulse. It strikes a piece of rebar into the hole that depression left and causes you to stand upright, proud, determined, eyes locked on the goal, swimming for shore. A determination that is banked on one side with a clarity which vice falls against, and on the other side with the awareness of self- frailty and the need for divine help.

changes V: Help wanting help

Sometimes we receive without giving anything back. And sometimes we give. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ My favourite American book is “A River Runs Through it” by Norman Maclean. The Redford film is also wonderful. It is a beautiful, though sad, story about our own limitations in helping others who won't or can't accept our help. This idea is fleshed out in the conversation Norman, writing as himself, has with his father about his brother who has gotten himself into serious trouble. Norman's father tries to make sense of the elusive hope of loving someone without knowing if it does any tangible good.

“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. “So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, 'sorry, we are just out of that part'.” I told him, “You make it too tough. Help doesn't have to be anything that big.” He asked me, “Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?” “She might,” I told him. “In fact, yes, I think she does.” “Do you think you help him?” he asked me. “I try to,” I said. “My trouble is I don't know him. In fact, one of my troubles is that I don't even know whether he needs help. I don't know, that's my trouble.” “That should have been my text,” my father said. “We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed? I still know how to fish,” he concluded. “Tomorrow we will go fishing with him.”

Sometimes, even if we want help, a human doesn't have the ability or strength to reciprocate it. If we, like Norman and his father, are the ones extending love, we might take some redemption in the idea that the limitation we experience might be like what God knows before we know His love. If we are the broken we can perhaps only be lucky enough to feel this love manifested in human form, because just maybe if we survive we will do so to know what love is better than anyone else. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I suppose this is how one might find the strength to appreciate a season of gain against a season of pain: only against a dark canvas could such light be cast. Like flowers from ash, this too might become strangely beautiful.