IVP - Strangely Dim

The Sublime & the Sick

I've got a thing for spring. When I first moved into my house, the above-ground pool in the back was covered in snow and served no real purpose until spring sprang, at which point the snow melted and the pool became a temporary home to a family of ducks. I took out the trash one morning and found myself face to face with a lackadaisical duck, waddling around my driveway, minding his own business, being wondrous. I got over my buyer's remorse in a hearbeat.

I've since junked the pool, so the ducks don't come around the house anymore. But this morning I noticed a family of ducks crossing the road (to get to the other side, I'd imagine), and then I noticed a mother in a car pointing out the ducks to her young son. He became quickly overcome with wonder, and my day started to perk up a bit.

Ducks and, really, let's admit it, all waterfowl are wondrous. The sleekness and vividness of a duck's feathers, the casualness of its waddle, the dignity of its beak, the intricacy of its webbed feet--I'm awestruck by it when I come across it. I don't really know why, except that having grown up in Iowa and now living in the suburban midwest, waterfowl remain mildly foreign, faintly exotic.

After my commute I stepped into the office and noticed, perched high above me on the building's skylight, a goose freshly returned from its wintery exile. I'd never seen webbed feet from below, and it was wondrous. I called my friends to come give witness to this sight, to mark this moment. But then, somewhere between the call and the response, the goose decided to mark the moment on its own.

That's the seedy underside of the wondrous waterfowl. They poop. Everywhere. All the time. I know peaceable people who get positively serial in their desire to kill waterfowl, based solely on the animal's propensity to poop. And really, who can blame them? Goose poop is gross to look at, gross to smell, gross to accidentally step in. And in some areas (say, for example, our parking lot), it's nearly impossible to avoid.

So there I stood, trying to avoid direct eye contact with the slowly rippling stain above me, while simultaneously transfixed by the wondrously webbed feet mere inches away. It was sublime. It was sick. It was irreducibly complex.

Yesterday I started reading the book Becoming Who You Are, a series of reflections by Jesuit author James Martin about the spiritual process of Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton and Mother Teresa. What I've read so far is a fascinating exploration of Merton and Nouwen, both celebrated for their spiritual depth and profound humility, yet both remarkably confessional about their inner pride and pettiness. Readers of Nouwen and Merton are generally awestruck by them and inclined to see them through the lens of that depth, but in reality humility and pride are there in them both, tightly commingled. Merton and Nouwen are sublime, but they're also sick. In a word, they're complex.

So am I, of course, when I step back and think about it. The psalmist recognizes both the inherent wonder in being human and the wickedness that so tragically attends to us. "I am fearfully and wonderfully made," he writes, only to admit shortly thereafter that he can't clean himself up: "See if there is any wicked way in me" (Psalm 139:14, 24). We're sublime, but we're also sick. In a word, we're complex.

Not so complex, however, that God can't see us for who we truly are, and not so complex that God can't take delight in us. I'm unwilling to suggest that God is awestruck by us, but I do think he's willing to endure the gross in us out of love for the grace in us.

Treat Your Author Right

Taco John's: Lunch of Champions

This week I visited Chris Heuertz, international director of Word Made Flesh and forthcoming Likewise author (I'll tell you the title when we make up our minds). After being well-fed and hydrated by him and his wife Phileena (below) and well-entertained by the good people of WMF for several days, I treated them to lunch at Taco John's, because I know how to treat people right. I wore my extra-large jeans in anticipation of all the Potato Ole's I ate. Yummy.

From left: Chris Heuertz, Phileena Heuertz, Dave Zimmerman

The U.S. office for Word Made Flesh is based in Omaha, Nebraska, but they have like-minded people befriending the poorest of the poor all over the world. If you've read the Likewise book The New Friars, Chris probably looks and sounds familiar. Keep an eye out for his book; it's gonna be a good one for shizzle.

A Matter of Life and Death

My sister and I have been mourning the death of our ivy. Its death is not surprising; we don't have a good history with plants. Most of them, this one included, have been gifts from our mom, and usually they die relatively quickly because we never remember--or bother--to water them. Particularly hearty ones might last a few months, in which case our mom waters them when she comes to visit, and they temporarily revive. But this ivy has been our longest living plant to date: it lasted three years, surviving a move from the small, narrow windowsill in our last apartment to a new, roomy windowsill, as well as our vacations when it was left to fend for itself. There've been a few close calls, but it's always survived. Until now.

I like to think it died because it outgrew its little pot. (Not, of course, from our neglect to water it.) We haven't thrown it out yet because we keep hoping it will revive one more time, in which case we will faithfully water it every day (or every other day?) and get it a larger pot and play Mozart to it in the evenings. But I fear it's too late.

At the risk of sounding morbid, I'll admit I've been thinking about death. Not just because of the ivy (though it is a daily reminder), but also because of Lent and the suffering of Christ we contemplate, and because of the pre-Lent sermons on mourning at my church, and because of the morning news, and because of my own sins and struggles and those of people I know. Death is everywhere, really, and it makes its presence known keenly.

I've been trying to imagine the despair the disciples must have felt that day Christ was crucified: the person they had placed all their hope in was Dead. But then--the depths of joy they must have experienced at his resurrection! As I observe Lent in personal and corporate ways but also anticipate Easter, I'm struck by the stark, extraordinary contrast of the two events: suffering and death and mourning and then almost incomprehensible rejoicing. The pain of one and the joy of the other cannot comprehend each other.

The same must have been true for the widow in Luke 7:11-17. Jesus and his disciples and a large crowd of followers encounter the funeral processional for the widow's only son as they reach the gate of the city of Nain. "When the Lord saw her," Luke writes, "his heart went out to her and he said, 'Don't cry.' Then he went up and touched the coffin, and those carrying it stood still. He said, 'Young man, I say to you, get up!' The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother."

In the midst of the widow's pain--widow, of course, meaning that she already lost her husband--I'm sure she couldn't imagine joy, life, even not crying, as Jesus told her to do. All of those must have sounded impossible; she was dead in spirit, in hope. But in one moment--there is life from death, joy from despair.

It doesn't always happen that way, of course--not that quickly or easily. Jesus healed many and raised a few from the dead, but many more died while he was on earth, and even today, some people are healed while others are not. The road from grief to hope is rarely instant. But this account of Jesus reminds me that this is what Jesus is doing all the time: bringing life in the midst of death, to remind us what wins, finally, eternally. It may not be as dramatic as raising someone from the dead, but he is bringing dead things, places, relationships to life every day if we open our eyes to see it, constantly reminding us that death does not have the final word, grief does not have the final word, the current pain we're experiencing and the sin we're struggling with do not have the final word. The final word is his own: "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

The death in and around us is as easily seen as the dead ivy on my windowsill: broken relationships, abuse, depression, loneliness, a funeral, a sealed tomb. Can any life really come in the midst of or after these? Jesus' resurrection tells us: Yes. And today, after a stressful, tiring week when I was forced to face my own brokenness and sin, spring coming outside after a cold winter and friends' healing and my own small steps of growth tell me: Yes, life can come, even when we--like a dead widow in Nain grieving her dead son—can't imagine it.

If It's Too Personal, You're Too Old

A friend of mine sent me an interesting article from New York magazine ("The magazine that never rests") that offers a surprisingly sympathetic take on personal blogging. While many hoity-toity, high-brow, big-shot wordsmiths deride bloggers as "fame whores" "farting [their] way into the spotlight," and while social psychologists are worried about the longterm effects of putting body and soul on public display, some others are seeing a cultural sea change comparable only to the early days of rock and roll, when accordion players were scandalizing the popular music industry.

Clay Shirky, who teaches new media at New York University, puts the naysayers in their place:

Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we're mad about it now.

Of course there are the extremes of online behavior, where virtual exhibitionists imagine a world in which they're Paris Hilton and the rest of us are paparazzi. And there's the opposite impulse: to change your password with each new online registration, to limit your Flickr or Facebook account to approved audiences only. But the new conventional wisdom about the Internet is that it's a kind of external hard drive for your personal memories.

The residual fear of people who grew up before the Internet is the invasion of privacy--that we will be known and judged by what we leave unguarded. I'm reminded of a lyric by Dar Williams:

If I wrote you, you would know me, . . . and you would not write me again.

The new, prevailing perspective may be dismissed as naive by those folks, but it has its own internal logic, even its own internal ethic. As one particularly self-disclosing blogger put it:

You've got to be careful what you say--but once you say it, you've got to stand by it. And the only way to repair it is to continue to talk, to explain myself, to see it through.

So, let's continue to talk, to see it through. Post a comment: What scares you about Internet exposure? What appeals to you about the prospects of it? Maybe ten years from now millions of people will be living with great regret. But then again, maybe if it's too personal, you're just too old.

The Thrill of Victory

Rabbit.

Happy March, to Dave and to all.