IVP - Strangely Dim

Sanctity is Wrapping and Unwrapping

My saintly parents are moving. Someday. In the meantime, they are, like St. Francis of Assisi, increasingly eager to part with virtually everything they own, in the hopes that their children's covetousness will lower their moving costs.

Always happy to oblige, I came home from Thanksgiving with a book I've long ogled on their bookshelf: Sanctity Is a Broken Television Set on a Rainy Day. Published in 1970 by Franciscan Herald Press and written by Tom Sharkey for "wives and mothers everywhere," this nicely illustrated book exemplifies the ordinariness of sanctification--becoming more and more like Christ--in simple acts such as doing the dishes, dealing with telemarketers, entertaining guests, making mistakes and caring for loved ones. You can read it in about five minutes, but why would you want to do a thing like that? Here's a taste:

Sanctity is Knowing

When to Get Mad. When to Go Home. When to Say No. When to Say Maybe. When to Say Yes. When to Say Wow! When to Say Thank You. When to Say Nothing. When to Laugh. When to Cry.

There's more to sanctity than knowing, of course, and most of the book has to do with being, or rather, becoming. But what we come to know is part of how we come to be like Christ. In calling us to sanctification, God calls us to know as well as to be:

Be still, and know that I am God;

I will be exalted among the nations,

I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm 46:10)

Next week is Christmas day, and between then and now we will each have ample opportunity to be sanctified, I am sure. May we each between now and then find time to be still, and to know increasingly that God is here, and God is good.

Merry Christmas from Strangely Dim!

Lisa and Likewise

Lisa Rieck, my new partner in all things strange and dim, looks like this--except that she's normally in color and much less blurry. Blame the photographer--which is to say, blame me. Likewise looks like the donkey that's coming out the side of her head.

What a Strange, Dim Trip It's Been

I've been the sole proprietor (and, quite possibly, the sole reader) of Strangely Dim for more than three years now. I've enjoyed having this venue for thinking out loud, soliciting wisdom, critiquing the culture, airing my dirty laundry, what have you. There's something about blogging that is, as a friend of mine recently confessed, addictive.

It's hard to believe that I've managed to be so consistently scintillating lo, these many years, but I've recently come to the humiliating conclusion that (a) there are many more people in the world than just little old me, and (b) they each have their own opinions that merit reflection and conversation.

I've come to such a conclusion at least in part by interacting with some of the folks I work with. InterVarsity Press is, I say with unembarrassed bias, a ceaselessly interesting place to work. I'm surrounded by thinking, feeling, believing people who have all signed on to work with books that engage the heart, soul, mind and strength of their readers' faith. Over the years I've shamelessly exploited some of these folks, turning our offhand conversations into Strangely Dim posts. For the most part, they've been very gracious.

All that is about to change--not that they've ceased to be gracious, but that I've ceased to inhabit Strangely Dim entirely by myself. Soon--and very soon--you'll get to peek inside the head of Lisa Rieck, a poet, editor and youth minister, and my friend. She'll be posting occasional musings on whatever comes to mind and can be justifiably categorized as either strange or dim. I'll still be posting as well, and on occasion we may post in dialogue. But you're still free to comment and spin the conversation in whatever direction you deem appropriate.

With Lisa joining the mix, we'll be making a more pronounced leap into the world of Likewise Books. These are books that explore a thoughtfully active, compassionate faith in real time. I don't get the technology behind the switch that will take place, but trust me: Strangely Dim will be more likewisey without sacrificing any of the strangeness or dimness.

You're also welcome to drop by my personal blog, Loud Time, any time you want.

I'll post a picture of Lisa soon. Be sure to welcome her aboard!

An Open Letter to ER

I’ve been watching ER for twenty years now, it seems (even though this is only your thirteenth season). I’ve lived in Chicago throughout your run and enjoyed the occasional visual and verbal references you make to my city (even though technically my city is not Chicago but its western suburb Lombard). I’ve gone on the Warner Brothers Studio tour in the hopes of catching a glimpse of Noah Wylie or Anthony Edwards (even though neither of them was still on the show when I took the tour). I’ve worn ER t-shirts and ignored phone calls during ER broadcasts and badmouthed CSI (even though I’ve never watched it), all out of loyalty to your show. ER is must-see TV for me—even though “must-see TV” is a relic from a previous century.

So in general I applaud ER for your writers’ writing and your actors’ acting and your directors’ directions. But one thing I have against you: you seem to have no clue whatsoever how to write religion.

That’s not always been the case. Luka’s struggle, for example, with agnosticism in the face of war and personal tragedy was portrayed very poignantly in his encounters with a dying priest a few years back. But this year you seem to have lost your way, and in the process you’re wasting an opportunity that you provided yourself: you’re wasting Hope.

Hope is the Christian character written into your show this year, aping the opportunistic antics of shows such as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Ever since The Passion of the Christ, the conventional wisdom in Hollywood appears to be that religion sells almost as well as sex. And so giving the occasional nod to religion will prompt religious viewers to give an occasional nod to your advertisers.

I can respect that: I work in an industry that caters to the religious public, and besides that, I’m religious myself, and I enjoy being catered to as much as the next guy. My problem isn’t that you’re catering to people like me; it’s that you’re not doing a very good job of it.

The problem with pandering to people is that your creative integrity tends to suffer when you do it. Genesis, for example (the band, not the book), were critical darlings in the music world until they got a few radio hits under their belts. All of a sudden each new release sounded hauntingly similar to their previous release, which sounded hauntingly similar to lead singer Phil Collins’s most recent release. It’s not exactly jumping the shark; it’s more like jumping on the bandwagon.

Now I am not saying that you shouldn’t have Christian characters on your show. Call me biased, but I think Christian characters can bring an intriguing and dynamic energy to a story. But to do so they need to be written three-dimensionally, and Hope has not been written as such. I speak only anecdotally, I freely confess, but I have never attended a Bible study in which a group of people huddled in the dark playing the telephone game with the seven deadly sins and seven cardinal virtues, as you had Hope and Archie experience in your very special Christmas episode. Nor have I attended a Bible study in which the guest (Archie) was expected to have the seven deadly sins and their corresponding cardinal virtues memorized in order. Nor have I attended a Bible study in which a person pretending to be a confessing Christian but espousing a nihilistic spirituality was immediately praised as a guru, as Archie was by Hope.

Those experiences are the accidentals surrounding Hope, of course. Surely the person will be granted full personhood in your writing, correct? Not so, I’m afraid. Hope, apparently, managed to homeschool her way through medical school and acquire a residency at a teaching hospital without learning any actual medicine. Her clinical assessments are not medical but maternal; she coos and frets over patients without thinking to discover what’s actually wrong with them or propose a realistic treatment plan. A doctor who practiced like that would be dismissed from her hospital before her employer could be sued, but for Hope, that’s just another purpose-driven day in a normal Christian life.

Hope, I’m sad to say, is a caricature of a practicing physician, which is unfortunate on a show that portrays the gritty reality of medical practice. Worse in this case, she’s a caricature of a Christian on a show that’s capable of much greater nuance and sympathetic sophistication. Worse than either, she’s a caricature of a human being on a show that has held the bar high in its writing of the humanness of its characters.

If you’re going to capitulate to the cultural trend of “just add Christian,” please don’t surrender your creative talents in the process. ER is a great show and could do a great job exploring the ethical and moral dilemmas of living a life of faith in real time; you’ve added the Christian, now add the depth.

PS: If you need a consultant, my rates are very competitive.

It Only Takes a Spark . . .

Paul Grant, author of Blessed Are the Uncool, got his book today and blogged about it. If you've ever wondered what it's like to be handed your first published book, you can read about it here.

One of the joys of working for a publisher is playing midwife. Be sure to congratulate Paul on his new baby, and remember: uncool is the new cool.

Everybody Needs a Theme Song

I’m not ashamed to admit it: I’m a fan of John Mayer. Sure he’s a pretty-boy, sure he dated Jessica Simpson, sure he’s on shuffle on my thirteen-year-old cousin’s I-Pod and on the wall in her room, sure he’s a little smug and self-important. But I’m a fan, for a number of reasons.

For one thing, when he was a kid he liked to dress up as a superhero, and you have to respect that. For another thing, he plays guitar like he invented it. But more than those reasons is the fact that he dares to speak for an entire generation of people. That takes moxie, and I respect moxie.

He’s written about the bitter nostalgia of life after high school, the social awkwardness of relationships, the wonders of sexual intimacy, the perils of vocational uncertainty and the quarter-life crisis. He’s a living, breathing discography of early-adult ennui. And now he’s written what I hereby nominate as the theme song of Generation Me: “Waiting on the World to Change.”

Generation Me, characterized by author and psychologist Jean Twenge as adult survivors of the self-esteem movement, is known for confidence that borders on arrogance and self-importance that borders on narcissism, but also for a profoundly fragile self-image and a low threshold for depression. Twenge argues that where twenty-somethings in the late 1960s were characterized by statements such as “I can change the world!” Generation Me is characterized by statements such as “You can’t beat the system.”

You could spend forever exploring the origins of this pandemic of fatalism among people born after 1970, but thanks to John Mayer, you don’t have to look far to see its impact. In “Waiting on the World to Change” he asserts that “me and all my friends, we're all misunderstood.” He doesn’t try to overcome the misunderstanding, he just embraces the reality. You can’t beat the system. You have to play the hand you’re dealt. Fill in your own cliche here.

The self-esteem movement shows its influence as Mayer claims a critical omniscience—“We see everything that's going wrong”—but he then confesses an inability to address the problems: “We just feel like we don't have the means to rise above and beat it.” You could understand why a person who sees all the bad in the world and yet feels powerless in the face of it would struggle with depression. And why does Generation Me feel powerless to change their world? Because someone else pulls all the strings: “When they own the information, they can bend it all they want.” You can’t trust what you know because you can’t trust the people who put it in your head.

Mayer and his fellow twenty-somethings are often derided as hopelessly apathetic, which is a pretty hopeless and apathetic thing to say about a group of people, if you think about it. In reality, apathy is an understandable response to hopelessness; a defense mechanism, so to speak. Here’s the lyric that jumped out at me more than anything in the song, maybe because it’s such a clever rhyme, maybe because it betrays just a hint of attitude by using the word ain’t: “It's not that we don't care, we just know that the fight ain't fair.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the world we inhabit: a chronic sense of helplessness in the face of an unrelenting onslaught of big problems, combined with an ingrained suspicion of authority born out of scandal after scandal across the spectrum of life experience. Our government and industry leaders, our local and international authorities, our priests and pastors, our parents and teachers, our friends and neighbors, have all fallen short of the glory of God—and we see the impact on ourselves and everything around us. It’s all too much.

Nevertheless, Mayer is able to muster up some meager hope, and that hope may just be enough to tide him and his friends over: “One day our generation is gonna rule the population, so we keep on waiting on the world to change.” There’s plenty of circumspection that needs to take place between now and then—particularly that what we are thinking about everybody else, they are thinking about us—but in the meantime let me share words of encouragement from another cynical yet insightful songwriter, Tom Petty: “You’re all right for now.”