Whimsical Theology I: The humanity of Jesus

Incarnation at Ease:  Thoughts on bread, beer, and John Prine’s “Everybody”

By Allan Roy Andrews

          An anonymous 20^th-century devotional writer, reflecting on Jesus’ proclamation in the gospel of John that He is the “bread of life” (John 6:35), casually asserts that bread is “the most basic food there is.”

          Without challenging the historical and liturgical implications of Christianity’s prayer for our daily bread or the cultural significance of bread as a fundamental and necessary sustenance of life (as in prisoners, the hungry, and the fasting staying alive on bread and water alone), I wonder about putting bread in this exalted position.

          After all, aren’t the basic ingredients of bread the same as, or at least similar to, those that go into the making of beer?

          What would it do to our theology—especially our view of the Incarnation—if Jesus had proclaimed, “I am the beer of life!”?

          Many, from Martin Luther to Brennan Manning, would rejoice at such a seeming earthy assertion.  This notion implies we might meet the savior as easily in a local pub as in a church sanctuary:  What a drinking buddy we have in Jesus!

          Sure the notion is a bit whimsical, but not, I think, without merit.  Our attempts to understand how God could become a man (pitching his bodily tent among us) must allow that being fully human might mean drinking beer as well as eating bread with us (and would allow us to give thanks for our daily grains in all their forms).

          Such thoughts form what I like to think of as whimsical theology, and one of my favorite proponents of this thinking is the singer and songwriter John Prine.  Consider Prine’s encounter with Jesus in the lyrics of his song, “Everybody.”

         

While out sailing on the ocean;

While out sailing on the sea;

I bumped into the Savior,

And He said, "Pardon me."

I said, "Jesus, you look tired."

He said, "Jesus, so do you;

Oh, sit down son

'Cause I got some fat to chew."

Chorus:

Well, he spoke to me of morality,

Starvation, pain and sin.

Matter of fact, the whole dang time

I only got a few words in.

But I won`t squawk--

Let `im talk--Hell, it`s been a long, long time,

And any friend that`s been turned down

Is bound to be a friend of mine.

Chorus:

Now we sat there for an hour or two

Just eatin' that gospel pie,

When around the bend come a terrible wind,

And lightning lit the sky.

He said, "So long, Son, I gotta run;

I appreciate you listenin' to me."

And I believe I heard him sing these words

As he skipped out across the sea.

Chorus:

See, everybody needs somebody that they can talk to,

Someone to open up their ears

And let that trouble through.

Now you don`t have to sympathize

Or care what they may do,

But everybody needs somebody that they can talk to.

Everybody needs somebody that they can talk to.

Lyrics ©1972 John Prine

           I'll drink to that!  Just remember:  One cannot live by beer alone.     

'Crazy Heart': It's in the music--a divine call?

By Allan Roy Andrews

It’s not in the acting; although, Jeff Bridges does an outstanding job portraying a country singer waging a losing battle with fading fame and booze.

             

It’s not in the romance; although, Maggie Gyllenhaal is captivating as the younger lover of the troubled star.

It’s not in the script; although, the story moves intelligently from bowling alley to big stage with lots of foreshadowing in dialogue and drama.

             

It’s not in the booze; although, for a change there’s some deep reality to the hope provided through 12-step  programs, and in the end sobriety trumps a doomed sexual liaison.

             

It’s none of these that make “Crazy Heart” one of the outstanding movies of 2009; it’s in the music!

             

For one thing, Bridges is as admirable a singer as he is an actor, and his renditions of “A Hold on You,” “Fallin’ and Flyin,’” “Brand New Angel,” and snippets of the Academy Award winning song, “The Weary Kind,” mesmerize.

             

It helps to be a fan of country music to enjoy “Crazy Heart,” but the people who put this film together are connoisseurs of the genre.

             

Consider the songs that fill the background and carry Bridges’ staggering performance along its travels from drunkenness to degeneracy to dalliance to dangerous neglect to deliverance:  Buck Owens singing “Hello, Trouble”; the Louvin Brothers singing “My Baby’s Gone”; Kitty Wells singing “Searching”; Waylon Jennings singing “Are You Sure Hank Did It This Way”; Lucinda Williams singing “Joy”; George Jones singing “The Color of the Blues”; the Delmore Brothers singing “I Let a Freight Train Carry Me On”; and in a happy transition scene (a balloon ride symbolic of transcendence), Townes Van Zandt singing “If I Needed You.”  The music of “Crazy Heart” is more than window-dressing; it’s the dynamic driving the script.

             

Bridges’ cry for help:  “I want to be sober,” and the portrayal of his session at a treatment facility should hearten the evangelists of 12-Step programs.

             

In that regard, I believe I detected a lyric change that might credit the emphasis 12-Step programs place on divine intervention.

             

Recovering from drunkenness, Bridges’ character, Bad (Otis) Blake, entertains in his friend’s bar with the song, “Brand New Angel.”

             

I’ve trooped through Web sites seeking the lyrics of this Greg Brown song.  The chorus of which goes:

“Open the gates, welcome him in;

“there’s a brand new angel, 
a brand new angel . . ."

The final line in the versions I searched is given as:

“With an old idea”; or

“With an old violin."

However, if you listen carefully to Jeff Bridges’ film rendition (not the soundtrack cut), the final line is:

             “Who doesn’t know me.”

Can this be God’s call to open the gates?   

Serendipitous laugher: Two experiences

By Allan Roy Andrews

             Experience No. 1:

Radio-television personality and humorist Art Linkletter died last week at 97.  Until about two years ago, when he suffered a mild stroke, Linkletter was still active on the philanthropic circuit.

             A few years before that, I heard Linkletter entertain at a small school fundraiser.  Linkletter, whose adoptive father was a Canadian preacher, told someone at that gathering that he “liked to help out small Christian schools.”

             In his comments that night, Linkletter told a joke that I have commandeered as a staple of fun found in growing older.  Here’s the joke:

“You know you’re getting old when you bend over to pick something off the floor and you say to yourself, ‘What else can I do while I’m down here?’”

I have learned experientially what Linkletter spoke of.  So I’ve used the joke a number of times, and it never fails to elicit hearty laughs.

Two of Linkletter’s books also keep me smiling:  Kids Say the Darndest Things, and Old Age is Not For Sissies.

Experience No. 2:

For the group’s edification, I recently read to my Bible discussion gathering a favorite poem by Billy Collins called “Flock.”

Here’s the brief poem:

It has been calculated that each copy of the
Gutenberg Bible . . .  required the skins of 300 sheep.
–from an article on printing.

I can see them squeezed into the holding pen
behind the stone building
where the printing press is housed,

all of them squirming around
to find a little room
and looking so much alike

it would be nearly impossible
to count them,
and there is no telling

which one will carry the news
that the Lord is a shepherd,
one of the few things they already know.

--from The Trouble with Poetry, by Billy Collins.  (Random House, 2005.)

After a moment of silent reflection, one member of our group put me—and several others—in stitches when he said,  “I’m having a Gary Larson moment,” referring to the prize-winning cartoonist of The Other Side who was noted for his surprising and often warped sense of humor.

“I can see a room full of monks, having just sheared a flock of sheep, taking up their calligraphy pens and writing verses of sacred scripture on the flanks of the shorn animals,” my friend continued.  “They probably had a difficult time keeping the pages in order!”

It was a wonderful moment, and if Billy Collins ever reads about our experience, I have a feeling he’ll be smiling broadly too.  And if Larson ever reads this report of my friend’s experience, he’ll probably be saying, “I wish I’d thought of that!”

             

'Faith at Ease Lite': Reforming this blog

By Allan Roy Andrews

             I attended a writer’s conference several months ago at which the emphasis leaned decidedly toward writing for electronic media, and the predominant and repeated axiom asserted:  online essays should avoid the curse of excessive scrolling; that is, keep those blogs to a maximum of 400 words.

             Readers, especially young readers, increasingly read on a computer (or on a pad device).  Newspapers have taken this pronouncement to heart.  At least one well-known newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, during the past year abandoned print and offers its news online (there is a vestige of print in a weekly news summary).  Other major publications—newspapers and magazines--are leaning in the same direction.  Writers take note:  shorter is better.

             I once claimed I’d discovered the secret of writing a successful newspaper column.  Keep it under 600 words, I argued.  In the era of electronic blogging, 600 words means long-windedness.

             The standard is 400 words.  In taking stock of my archive of postings for this blog, I estimate my average entry is between 900 and 1100 words (and I claim to be an editor).  I’ve fallen prey to the notion that longer essays encourage deeper reflection.

             I repent.  I am taking a new tack and aiming for postings of 400 words or less; I call it “Faith at Ease Lite,” and in a way that title captures the conviction.  Eugene Peterson, using Job’s comforters as illustrations in his book, Subversive Spirituality (Eerdmans, 1997), reminds us that much of our talk about Christian spirituality is “chatter.”  I confess a proneness to such chatter, and my archives are convicting evidence.

             Of course, the other lesson urged upon bloggers at the same writer’s conference: Write consistently and often. 

             So I stop here, in the neighborhood of 300 words, and hope to be back more often.

             Be at ease.

            

             

Memoir Exercise: An Essay on Influence and Calling

By Allan Roy Andrews

November 20, 2013 -- Update note from a like-minded dreamer:

"If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."

-- Herman Melville, speaking as Ishmael in Chapter One of Moby Dick.

          I can’t be too far from water.  I may not see it, smell it, sail on it or swim in it, but I have to know that it’s there.  Sometimes I think a river or a lake just won’t do.  Chesapeake Bay, which lies about one mile from my house, is OK, but it would be much better if it were the ocean.

          This longing for the nearness of the sea is a warped gene I apparently inherited from my father.  His father was a schooner captain, as was my mother’s father, and as a young man my father went to sea aboard a cod-fishing schooner, serving mostly as a cook.  He hated it, and when opportunity presented itself to leave the bleak future of a fisherman’s life in Newfoundland—compounded by a worldwide Depression—he relocated to New York City and became an ironworker.  His work was far from the sea, but his consciousness was not, and our residences during my boyhood were within miles of New York Harbor or the Long Island Sound.  I recall him once saying he could never live in the Midwest because he had to be close to the ocean.  I didn’t realize it as a boy, but I recognize now that I instinctively knew what he meant.

            We are shaped for good or ill by our parents, often in ways we don’t realize.  I recall once sitting at dinner when I was in my mid-thirties (my father died when I was 32) and I leaned back and placed my hands over my face and eyes and let out a sigh.  I had no more made the sound when I shrieked, “Oh, my God!” (prayerfully, not swearfully).  I had caught myself in mid-gesture and recognized that I was repeating movements I had seen my father make hundreds of times, usually at the end of a good meal.

            Asked in any academic or social setting if I thought my father had influenced me or had anything to do with my “calling,” I would offer a scoffing negative.  The idea is absurd.  My father was not, as I have become, a worker of the mind; he was a man of manual labor.  He discouraged my pursuing his line of work.  Not because of any fear; he just wanted his sons to know a better way of making a living than he had known.  If he needed a business letter written or a simple math problem solved, he always asked me to handle the work.  Despite this difference, as I have grown older I have recognized the subtlety of inheritance.

            Desiring to be close to the sea is a good example of what I’m talking about.  My father could hardly swim, and I did not learn to swim until I was in my sophomore or junior year in high school.  Neither my father nor I have ever owned a boat.  I jokingly tell people that my family is one of the half-dozen families living in Annapolis, Maryland—the sailing capital of the East—that does not own a boat.  We live in a “water privileged” community, which means there’s a boat slip accessible to us (for a fee), but as far as we’re concerned water-privileged could mean we have flush toilets.

            When I was a boy, I was convinced I would one day join the Navy.  In high school, I explored the possibility of Navy ROTC.  I learned some harsh things in my investigation:  one is barred from Navy ROTC if one does not possess perfect vision (I don’t), and the ROTC manual even shocked me by asserting that one could be disqualified because of “extreme ugliness.”  The Navy has since abandoned such a criterion, and I learned much later that perfect vision is required only of pilots and line officers and it can be measured as corrected vision.  However, after that flirtation with Navy ROTC, I never thought of being a sailor again.

            Both of my older brothers joined the military soon after high school.  The oldest went into the Army; the next went into the Air Force.  Ironically, they seem to have missed the be-near-the-ocean gene:  The oldest settled in Indiana; the other in Ohio.  I alone stayed in college and never served in the armed forces, and except for a brief sojourn to study and break into journalism in the Midwest, I’ve stayed within striking distance of the Atlantic coast.  Eventually, I was called (I have a mild aversion to this phrase, but more on that later) to go overseas as a journalist (to the Pacific Ocean coast), and as God’s sense of humor would have it, I spent a decade of my adult life as a civilian editor for the Pacific Stars and Stripes, the Department of Defense newspaper that circulates on military bases overseas and on all the ships at sea.  After that experience, I probably knew more about the ins and outs of the military than did either of my veteran brothers but nothing about the sea except to note that Japanese use every part of a fish.

            I am surprised when I reflect on those who influenced me during my youth; many seem to have been niche players.  I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, an ardent Dodger fan, and my imagination and calling in those days was to one day play professional baseball.  My favorite player on the Dodgers was a strong, silent outfielder named Carl Furillo.  Decades after my meager baseball talents forced me to settle as a fan (alas, still a Dodger fan), I realized that Carl Furillo, often referred to as a “blue-collar” player, had strong hands, a thick neck, and the square features of my father.  In a 1989 eulogy by Carl Erskine, one of his teammates, Furillo was described as a mixture of iron and velvet.  That’s how I perceive my father.  He could reprimand his children or grandchildren with a bellowing “Don’t do that!”  A microsecond later, he’d lower his voice to a compassionate whisper and say, “Don’t do that, my love!”

My Sunday School teachers sensitized me to faith; my elementary school teachers implanted a love of the English language; my high school teachers led me to the delights of art and drama and journalism.  Once again it appears God has some cosmic comedy script he is following in designing my eclectic life.  I became a journalist.  Somewhat ironically, my high school graduated its last class in 2004 and has been since turned into a city magnet school called—I smile each time I say it or write it—The New York City Secondary School for Research, Law and Journalism.

Two areas of my life drew lots of praise and encouragement when I was a boy:  My singing and my writing.  I’m not speaking of creative writing, but of my skill with a calligrapher’s pen.  I won praise in art class for my lettering and script ability.  I grew up in an age during which one of the mainstays of elementary education was instruction in penmanship; in fact, everyone in my family, my father, mother, sister and brothers, each had a distinctively beautiful handwriting.  To this day, my children (whose penmanship deteriorated with their age) mock the compulsive possessiveness I show for my collections of pens.

Later, after a failure as an engineering student, I took my mechanical drawing skills and experience and began working as an apprentice draftsman.  Throughout that time, I was more captivated by the master draftsmen’s skills with lettering.  I read lots of books about the alphabet; I read entire tomes on the shaping of letters; in short, I taught myself to be a calligrapher.  I’ve never worked at it professionally, but during my second stint in college I became the poster-maker par-excellence for whatever event on campus needed hasty advertisements.  My children as pupils took a certain pride when I inscribed their names on brown lunch bags.  They frequently had to convince other students that the names on their lunch bags were not stamped or pre-printed.

Regarding singing, I probably could have been trained as a boy treble.  I sang solos often in church, and at the age of 10 I sang on radio.  A half-year later, I was a featured soloist in my sister’s wedding (and 23 years later, as an adult tenor, I sang the same solo selections at the wedding of my niece, my sister’s daughter).  My mother made overtures about sending me to school to study voice with a boy’s choir.  But sports were my passion and there was no way I could be made to sing instead of playing ball.  I still love to sing, but to me it is an ancillary joy, something I enjoy for the pure pleasure of it.  I tend to shun pressures to sing in church choirs or to join seasonal entertainment programs.

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[This memoir was originally composed for an online class in spiritual memoir writing using a prompt on influences of my “calling.”  It has been revised and adapted for this essay.]

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I confess that at a point in this memoir-writing exercise, I found myself paralyzed in answering.  That moment came when I encountered the writing prompt’s follow-up question regarding a time when I found myself “longing” to help a person or creature.

I’ve probably spent more time pondering this question than any other aspect of the assignment, and I have to say I can’t recall such a longing.  The word longing, in fact, seems totally foreign to my reflections.  Oh, I’ve known selfish longings for romance and fame and reward, but I think the question is probing my soul’s desire to serve others, and I confess that this language of longing has little meaning for me in that context.  I want to say that those who nurtured and influenced me instilled a kind of Nike ethic, if you will.  Longing seems counter-productive.  The operational and pragmatic phrase becomes “just do it.”

I think I have a similar sense of any “call” in my life to become a prophet, priest or journalist.  I’ve always thought a calling had more to do with matching one’s skills and talents to the job at hand rather than describing any mystical or spiritual setting apart.  This is not to say I don’t believe that God calls or sets apart; however, I’m not certain we are always able to grasp the intentions of God when we are placed in life situations that demand our just-do-it response, if I can borrow that phrase again.

Even the response of putting words on paper in an effort to complete this exercise ultimately came down to my responding to a just-do-it urging. 

I’d have probably felt a lot more comfortable with it if I’d been somewhere near the ocean.