A Parable of Grace
By Allan Roy Andrews
If you're among the seeming minority who has not yet viewed the seven-minute YouTube clip of the April 2009 audition of Scottish singer Susan Boyle on the "Britain's Got Talent" show, by all means view that video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk before you read further.
Today (Nov. 23, 2009), seven months after her audition (and after her 48th birthday), Boyle's debut album goes on sale. Pre-order sales at Amazon.com are at the highest for any pre-order of the year. Incidentally, Boyle's performance on YouTube has been watched over 100 million times, setting her clips as an online record (the clip to which I've referred above has been viewed over 79 million times as of this writing).
Back in April, I used the clip of Boyle's audition for an exercise in a Composition 101 class I was teaching at a local community college. I stopped the clip after Boyle introduced herself to the skeptical judges and audience and asked students to write their naive impressions of this woman who was about to sing. Almost to a person, they described her as dumpy, dowdy, and not likely to impress anyone.
I stopped the clip after Boyle finished her rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream," from the musical Les Miserables, and asked the students to write a second reaction to the video. Again, there was almost universal shock and surprise at the power and quality of this singer's voice. The most frequent expression of these freshman writers was how the clip underscored the truth of the old aphorism: "You can't judge a book by its cover."
This, of course, was part of the writing and literature lesson I hoped to impress upon the students, and I asked them to write a third response after they heard what the astonished judges had to say after Boyle had sung. Most of them saw what I saw: three judges confessing their biases and repenting of their prejudicial expectations.
The three judges, Simon Cowell (best known to American TV-audiences as the seemingly harsh and abrupt judge of "American Idol"); British actress Amanda Holden; and Piers Morgan, the author and editor turned talent scout and judge; each responded to Boyle's performance with honest surprise and repentance. Holden called the performance the "biggest wake-up call ever" to the cynical negativism she and the audience displayed and told Boyle she felt it a "complete privilege" to have heard her sing, and Morgan, the first to vote on Boyle's audition, said he was in "total shock" and gave her the "biggest yes" he's ever given anyone on the talent show.
Similarly, the audience, many of whom rolled eyes and snickered at Boyle's introduction, spent most of the time of her performance on its feet in a rousing ovation to her talent.
For me, the seven-minute clip was a parable of the triumph of grace.
For the record, Boyle did not win the competition; she placed second to an acrobatic and precision team dance act called "Diversity." The Great Britain audience that watched the final competition of "Britain's Got Talent" was a record-setting 17.4 million viewers. But one might say that "winning" is a matter of interpretation, as is demonstrated in the dynamic of many of the parables of Jesus. The Good Samaritan and the widow who gave her mite, along with many others, turn out to be the "winners" of the scriptural stories. In the parable of "Britain's Got Talent," Susan Boyle emerges a winner.
Briefly hospitalized for treatment of exhaustion after her highly publicized performances on the British talent show, Boyle has put together her first album, a mixture of well-known songs and Christian hymns, including renditions of "Amazing Grace," "How Great Thou Art," and the Christmas carol, "Silent Night."
A reprise of her attention-grabbing first audition singing of "I Dreamed a Dream" is on the album as well. Two cuts I find surprisingly attractive are calm and thoughtful renditions of the Mick Jagger song, "Wild Horses," and another of the John Stewart (one-time member of The Kingston Trio) number made popular by The Monkees, "Daydream Believer."
Excerpts of the album are available at http://www.susanboylemusic.com/gb/music/
I concur with the advice Simon Cowell gave Susan Boyle at the end of her audition, "You can go back to the village with your head held high . . . ."
Monday, November 23, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Conversing with a five-year-old
By Allan Roy Andrews
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This essay is an expansion and rewrite of a column I published during my tenure as editor of Pacific Stars and Stripes in Japan. That column, originally titled “A Ride Home from the Airplane Base” was published in 1996.
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This essay is an expansion and rewrite of a column I published during my tenure as editor of Pacific Stars and Stripes in Japan. That column, originally titled “A Ride Home from the Airplane Base” was published in 1996.
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My middle son, now in his twenties, was one year old on the day my wife, our oldest son, and I took him on a Boeing 747 and flew for about 17 hours to Tokyo, where I became a civilian editor with the Department of the Army working for Pacific Stars and Stripes, the U.S. government’s daily newspaper for overseas military personnel stationed in the Far East.
The newspaper’s offices were located in downtown Tokyo on a tiny U.S. installation known as Hardy Barracks, and most personnel with the paper—both military and civilian—were housed at the larger military base, Yokota Air Base, about 50 kilometers west of Tokyo. Civilians were granted base privileges comparable to military personnel, and the Department of the Army paid most of us who worked as civilian editors the salaries we’d be paid if we were serving as colonels or captains in the armed services.
My wife was no stranger to Tokyo, she is the daughter of American missionaries, and had been born at a hospital near Tokyo and had lived most of her life in a western suburb on the Seibu-Ikebukuro train line before going stateside to attend college. For that reason, we did not choose to live on base, but instead rented a house “on the economy” in the neighborhood in which my wife had been raised. Our Japanese home was about 30 kilometers outside Tokyo and about 20 kilometers east of Yokota.
In the eight years plus that I held the job with Stripes, I learned to drive around the Kanto Plain in a series of automobiles we purchased during our tenure. All of them used, all of them Japanese-made cars—Hondas, Nissans, and Toyotas—all of them with steering on the right, and most with standard-shift that required me to learn to shift gears with my left hand. Because Stripes was an evening newspaper, editors began work around 5 a.m. Tokyo’s commuter trains did not begin running until closer to 6 a.m. Thus, I became an adept morning commuter and fairly competent at reading Japanese road signs.
At that time, gasoline was sold on base for about half of what it cost at a neighborhood Japanese service station. As a result, we made frequent trips from our home to Yokota Air Base, not only for gasoline, but for inexpensive shopping, entertainment, and, despite our growing love for Japanese food, a welcomed taste of America.
On one particular occasion I was driving home from the base with my five-year-old son as a passenger beside me. It was dusk when we left the base, and I could see that he was on the verge of falling asleep. I recall that it was this son who insisted we should call the place we’d just left “the airplane base,” not the air base, which makes good sense if one thinks about it.
“The best thing you could do,” I said to him, “is lie back and go to sleep.” We’d already eaten supper. Neither of us was hungry, and we were both somewhat eager to get back to the comfort of home.
“Go to sleep?” he said, a bit astonished. “Go to sleep without any diaper pants?”
“You don't need diaper pants,” I said, trying to be an encouraging father and strong male who shared grown-up mastery of the sphincters.
“What if I pee all over the seat?”
“You're the one who knows if you're going to pee,” I said.
“Well, Dad, let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”
“You're the one who knows if you have to pee.”
“Yeah,” he replied, “but let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”
Seeking to stop this circular talk, I said, “Well, you shouldn't have to pee, because we went to the bathroom just before we left the air base.”
“You mean the airplane base,” he said. O.K., I thought, we’re off that topic.
“You know what, Dad?”
“What?”
“Sometimes just after I pee I feel like I still have to pee again.”
Sometimes a father can do nothing or say nothing more. I've discovered that some conversations are best unfinished; or rather, they're best finished by the child rather than the adult. Children know when such conversations are supposed to end; adults don't.
Several minutes later, he picked up our conversation. “How long before we get home, Daddy?”
“About a half an hour.”
“A half an hour and how many minutes?” he asked.
“A half hour is 30 minutes, so about 30 minutes,” I said.
“No, Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes?”
“A half hour is 30 minutes.”
“But Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes.”
At that point, I realized again that adults often don't know when such conversations are finished, so I figured I'd better invent an answer just to keep us from going around in what I perceived to be endless circles.
“A half hour and two minutes,” I said, grabbing a number from the air and wondering what I'd say if he replied, “That's thirty-two minutes.”
He didn't say this, and I was happy; I don't appreciate precocious mathematicians. He seemed to understand (even if I didn't).
“Oh, is that what you meant?” he said as he glanced out the window at a truck we were passing.
“Yes, a half hour and two minutes,” I repeated, happy to have worked my way out of that conversation.
“Well, you said a half hour. I must have been confusing you,” he concluded.
Children also have a way of making adults feel small and foolish, especially when we attempt to be too rational and meaningful. After a few more minutes passed, my son turned theological:
“Can I ask you some Bible questions, Daddy?”
“Sure.”
“These are going to be really, really, really hard questions,'' he said in a tone meant to reassure me that I shouldn't feel too bad if I couldn’t answer them. To drive this home, he added, “I’m not sure I even know the answers myself.”
“O. K.”
“What day did Jesus die on the cross?” he asked.
I recall that this conversation took place shortly after Easter, so I assumed he was recalling something he picked up in Sunday School.
“You mean what day of the week?” I asked.
“Yeah, what day of the week?”
“It was Good Friday,” I answered.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, that's what the Bible tells us. Then it says that on Sunday -- Easter Sunday -- he rose again.” I'm really not trying to sound like a proselytizer, I just figured I'm repeating what he's learned.
“Is that when he went up to heaven?”
For me the conversation had subtly shifted. “Yes, I guess so,” I said, pondering exactly when Jesus went to heaven.
“When he died on the cross he was already in heaven,” my son pronounced with the aplomb of a dogmatic theologian.
I remained silent. The mystery of this conversation had already gone beyond me.
“Here's another really hard question,” he continued.
“On what day did David begin to play his harp?”
“I don't know. Was it a Monday?”
“I don't know.”
End of discussion.
I loved those drives; they provided conversations that kept my mind turning long after the wheels of our car had come to rest at home.
The newspaper’s offices were located in downtown Tokyo on a tiny U.S. installation known as Hardy Barracks, and most personnel with the paper—both military and civilian—were housed at the larger military base, Yokota Air Base, about 50 kilometers west of Tokyo. Civilians were granted base privileges comparable to military personnel, and the Department of the Army paid most of us who worked as civilian editors the salaries we’d be paid if we were serving as colonels or captains in the armed services.
My wife was no stranger to Tokyo, she is the daughter of American missionaries, and had been born at a hospital near Tokyo and had lived most of her life in a western suburb on the Seibu-Ikebukuro train line before going stateside to attend college. For that reason, we did not choose to live on base, but instead rented a house “on the economy” in the neighborhood in which my wife had been raised. Our Japanese home was about 30 kilometers outside Tokyo and about 20 kilometers east of Yokota.
In the eight years plus that I held the job with Stripes, I learned to drive around the Kanto Plain in a series of automobiles we purchased during our tenure. All of them used, all of them Japanese-made cars—Hondas, Nissans, and Toyotas—all of them with steering on the right, and most with standard-shift that required me to learn to shift gears with my left hand. Because Stripes was an evening newspaper, editors began work around 5 a.m. Tokyo’s commuter trains did not begin running until closer to 6 a.m. Thus, I became an adept morning commuter and fairly competent at reading Japanese road signs.
At that time, gasoline was sold on base for about half of what it cost at a neighborhood Japanese service station. As a result, we made frequent trips from our home to Yokota Air Base, not only for gasoline, but for inexpensive shopping, entertainment, and, despite our growing love for Japanese food, a welcomed taste of America.
On one particular occasion I was driving home from the base with my five-year-old son as a passenger beside me. It was dusk when we left the base, and I could see that he was on the verge of falling asleep. I recall that it was this son who insisted we should call the place we’d just left “the airplane base,” not the air base, which makes good sense if one thinks about it.
“The best thing you could do,” I said to him, “is lie back and go to sleep.” We’d already eaten supper. Neither of us was hungry, and we were both somewhat eager to get back to the comfort of home.
“Go to sleep?” he said, a bit astonished. “Go to sleep without any diaper pants?”
“You don't need diaper pants,” I said, trying to be an encouraging father and strong male who shared grown-up mastery of the sphincters.
“What if I pee all over the seat?”
“You're the one who knows if you're going to pee,” I said.
“Well, Dad, let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”
“You're the one who knows if you have to pee.”
“Yeah,” he replied, “but let me know if you think I'm going to pee.”
Seeking to stop this circular talk, I said, “Well, you shouldn't have to pee, because we went to the bathroom just before we left the air base.”
“You mean the airplane base,” he said. O.K., I thought, we’re off that topic.
“You know what, Dad?”
“What?”
“Sometimes just after I pee I feel like I still have to pee again.”
Sometimes a father can do nothing or say nothing more. I've discovered that some conversations are best unfinished; or rather, they're best finished by the child rather than the adult. Children know when such conversations are supposed to end; adults don't.
Several minutes later, he picked up our conversation. “How long before we get home, Daddy?”
“About a half an hour.”
“A half an hour and how many minutes?” he asked.
“A half hour is 30 minutes, so about 30 minutes,” I said.
“No, Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes?”
“A half hour is 30 minutes.”
“But Daddy, a half hour and how many minutes.”
At that point, I realized again that adults often don't know when such conversations are finished, so I figured I'd better invent an answer just to keep us from going around in what I perceived to be endless circles.
“A half hour and two minutes,” I said, grabbing a number from the air and wondering what I'd say if he replied, “That's thirty-two minutes.”
He didn't say this, and I was happy; I don't appreciate precocious mathematicians. He seemed to understand (even if I didn't).
“Oh, is that what you meant?” he said as he glanced out the window at a truck we were passing.
“Yes, a half hour and two minutes,” I repeated, happy to have worked my way out of that conversation.
“Well, you said a half hour. I must have been confusing you,” he concluded.
Children also have a way of making adults feel small and foolish, especially when we attempt to be too rational and meaningful. After a few more minutes passed, my son turned theological:
“Can I ask you some Bible questions, Daddy?”
“Sure.”
“These are going to be really, really, really hard questions,'' he said in a tone meant to reassure me that I shouldn't feel too bad if I couldn’t answer them. To drive this home, he added, “I’m not sure I even know the answers myself.”
“O. K.”
“What day did Jesus die on the cross?” he asked.
I recall that this conversation took place shortly after Easter, so I assumed he was recalling something he picked up in Sunday School.
“You mean what day of the week?” I asked.
“Yeah, what day of the week?”
“It was Good Friday,” I answered.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, that's what the Bible tells us. Then it says that on Sunday -- Easter Sunday -- he rose again.” I'm really not trying to sound like a proselytizer, I just figured I'm repeating what he's learned.
“Is that when he went up to heaven?”
For me the conversation had subtly shifted. “Yes, I guess so,” I said, pondering exactly when Jesus went to heaven.
“When he died on the cross he was already in heaven,” my son pronounced with the aplomb of a dogmatic theologian.
I remained silent. The mystery of this conversation had already gone beyond me.
“Here's another really hard question,” he continued.
“On what day did David begin to play his harp?”
“I don't know. Was it a Monday?”
“I don't know.”
End of discussion.
I loved those drives; they provided conversations that kept my mind turning long after the wheels of our car had come to rest at home.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
A Journalist Learns from Singing in the Choir
by Allan Roy Andrews
"All God's critters got a place in the choir." So begins a bouncy folk tune written and recorded several decades ago by New England singer and songwriter Bill Staines. I've sung in church choirs off and on for most of my life, but I'm still attempting to figure out what draws me to it.
"All God's critters got a place in the choir." So begins a bouncy folk tune written and recorded several decades ago by New England singer and songwriter Bill Staines. I've sung in church choirs off and on for most of my life, but I'm still attempting to figure out what draws me to it.
In many ways, a church choir is the ultimate community of cooperation. Many voices attempting to sound as one. E pluribus unum, and all that. In many other ways, a church choir is the hotbed of petty jealousies and competing egos, as well as the deep harbor of catty criticisms of the institutional church.
Almost every choir I've belonged to harbors a cadre of heretics who to some degree choose to sing in the choir so they don't have to sit under the convicting gaze of the preacher or so they can slip in and out of services through a choir door (mea culpa on both counts).
Church choir directors, even those who rely on hiring professional soloists, don't require a test of faith; I've known some vocally talented agnostics who sang on Saturdays in the local synagogue, on Sunday mornings at the Episcopal Church and on Sunday nights at a downtown pub.
When one wants to find the rebels of a church congregation, one needs look no farther than this week's row of contraltos or basso profundos (or tenors or sopranos). Not so oddly, this all sounds like the world of a daily newsroom, where often a righteous muckraker by day becomes a profane cynic at night.
Despite petty problems, I'm convinced there's a lesson for democracy, not to mention lessons in theology, hiding under those choir cassocks and albs that have known more wearers than a starched hospital gown.
But why does anyone give up several hours of his or her week to sit in uncomfortable chairs and rifle through sheaves of indecipherable code, much of it in a foreign language? All of this while sitting beside someone who either smokes too much or often is in need of a bath or a breath mint.
I believe singing in the choir may be one of those hidden graces that God uses to evangelize the soft of tone but hard of heart (or the heavy of tone but soft of faith).
I was one of those boyhood sopranos, a treble as they're known in chorister circles. I probably should have gone to a cathedral school and become a trained chorister, but there were too many baseball dreams in my blood. When my mother offered to pay for singing lessons, I rejected them because of the time they would demand, taking me from ballgames in the neighborhood. I was enlisted as a 10-year-old to sing two solo selections at my older sister’s wedding, but that was enough of a vocal career for me.
As if getting what I deserved, my three sons, all now young adults and fair singers, totally rejected my suggestions that they join the youth choir at church. I never tried to push it, remembering the angst I went through as a teen turning away from church singing opportunities.
When, as an adult, I had strayed for several years from attending church, it was joining a choir that drew me back into the fold, and now, several years and several choirs later, I’ve learned some of the mysteries of sacred song.
Among those who pay attention to the ancient Rule of St. Benedict, some discover a way of reading called lectio divina. As I understand it, such reading, primarily of the Bible, involves reading with more than the eyes and the mind; it engages the heart and the whole person. Lectio divina is a slow, contemplative process that demands frequent pauses and a peaceful "listening" to the text.
Without necessarily being aware of it, church choirs are doing something like this every Sunday. They take a tiny text, perhaps little more than a sentence or a phrase, and mold it into a four-part anthem that speaks of the deepest recesses of being to listeners in the congregation.
The English writer C.S. Lewis once suggested Christians should begin each day with reading both the Bible and a daily newspaper--would that we journalists and our readers could apply a kind of lectio divina to our consumption of the daily news.
And perhaps Lewis didn’t go far enough; maybe we need to take some time to sing a meaningful text to ourselves more frequently. All God’s creatures, including homo sapiens, have a place in the choir.
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This slightly updated essay is an adaptation of a column published online for The American Reporter in March of 1999.
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Sunday, July 5, 2009
Poetry survives in a prose-prone world, but evangelicals (and many others) remain phobic
By Allan Roy Andrews
In the past month, the Academy of American Poets launched a new page on its Web site devoted to poetry and teenagers. The page, labeled “Poetry Resources for Teens,” is quickly reached by visiting poets.org and pulling down the menu “For Educators.” The resources on the new page include “reading recommendations, writing help, spotlight audio and video recordings, as well as new ways to get involved in grassroots poetry projects,” according to an Academy press release.
In the past month, the Academy of American Poets launched a new page on its Web site devoted to poetry and teenagers. The page, labeled “Poetry Resources for Teens,” is quickly reached by visiting poets.org and pulling down the menu “For Educators.” The resources on the new page include “reading recommendations, writing help, spotlight audio and video recordings, as well as new ways to get involved in grassroots poetry projects,” according to an Academy press release.
Describing the motivation for producing the page, the Academy’s press release sounds much like what could be written by any American church or religious organization. The Academy acted, in its own words, in response to a recent survey they conducted, which showed that over 75% of the people who use poets.org share one characteristic: they first developed an interest in poetry before their eighteenth birthday. With young people spending a reported average of 16.7 hours a week online, it seemed clear that in the long term, the best opportunity to reach new readers and writers of poetry is in their early years.
In pondering this news from the Academy, I thought again of the importance of poetry and the contrary disdain it experiences in American life and letters, especially among religious movers and shakers, and in particular amidst the evangelical subculture.
I guess my real problem with this push to give teens access to poetry is that it further distinguishes adulthood as a time for generally disdaining and disregarding poetry as unimportant to faith and life in the twenty-first century.
We need more people like John Keating (the fictional English teacher played by Robin Williams in the film, “Dead Poet’s Society”), who told his adolescent charges:
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for . . . .
(Alas, I use a movie to make a point about poetry!)
If that be so, it’s clear to me that the heavenly language fights for a public voice in today’s prose-dominated world. Oh, to be sure, poetry is available to any who hunt for it, but such a suggestion is a bit like telling sushi lovers in the Dakotas they can find their favorite food if they just search long and hard enough. Sorry, folks, but Fargo ain’t Tokyo!
If poetry is the language of heaven, it still gets short shrift on earth, even among those who claim to be diligent advocates for life beyond our numbered days.
Case in point: Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of Christianity Today International, a moderately evangelical organization that counts as one of its founders the evangelist Billy Graham, recently ran a poll to determine if its readers still counted themselves as “supporters of the arts” in these disturbing economic times. I’m less interested in the results of the poll (Weekly newsletter, Jun 23, 2009) than in the way the question was framed:
Are you cutting back on spending money on the arts (music, painting, movies)?
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Please note the limiting listing of the arts: “music, painting, movies.” Poetry flies under the radar in Christianity Today’s perception. In fairness, the survey accompanies a compelling argument by Canadian singer-songwriter Carolyn Arends on why the arts are important; although, she seems to limit poetry’s influence to its aid in worship, comparable to icons.
In other contexts, I’ve chided Christianity Today and other popular evangelical publications for not regularly publishing first-rate contemporary poetry. One can look to Christian Century, Commonweal, First Things, and Sojourners to find a smattering of poets in religion journals, but one must look long and hard to find poets being published in the largest circulation religious magazine, familiarly referred to as CT. Among the magazines I’ve listed here, Christianity Today alone is without a poetry editor.
Almost a decade ago, an English professor at Houston Baptist University, Louis Markos, in a Christianity Today column of open commentary, called evangelicals “poetry phobic.” In the ensuing years, the magazine has done little or nothing to address and attack this phobia. Even Books and Culture, Christianity Today International’s intelligent and erudite collection of book reviews, does not have a designated poetry editor other than editor John Wilson, who often shows his personal appreciation of poetry but does not push for any regular publication of poems.
Let me be clear: I welcome poets.org’s effort to expand the exposure of teenagers to poetry. What I’d like to see is religious publications, who often target teenagers as an audience to be addressed and assessed, spend more time exposing their adult readers to the rising cadre of fine poets addressing questions of faith and the dilemmas of life and theology.
If it is true that evangelicals (and perhaps other religious subsets) are poetry phobic, much of the fault can be laid at the feet of the journalists, essayists, commentators, and preachers whose words fill the monthly magazines and who too often show a disdain for the poetic voice.
Note: Anyone interested in fine contemporary poetry from a Christian faith perspective should visit the Journal of Christianity and Literature hosted by Pepperdine University at http://www.pepperdine.edu/sponsored/ccl/journal/.
Another excellent source of such poetry is Image: A Journal of Art, Faith, Mystery at http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/. Image is closely tied to the Graduate Writing Program at Seattle Pacific University and to the Glen Writing Workshop in New Mexico.
Another excellent source of such poetry is Image: A Journal of Art, Faith, Mystery at http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/. Image is closely tied to the Graduate Writing Program at Seattle Pacific University and to the Glen Writing Workshop in New Mexico.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Youth on mission to Honduras working through tensions of coup
I share with all this news just released by the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland:
| June 29, 2009 |
| A Message from the Honduran Missioners Working in Talanga, Honduras |
| In the news today (Monday, June 29) are reports of a non-violent military coup in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, on Sunday, June 28. The Diocese of Maryland is in the midst of its annual high school youth mission trips to the country, serving El Hogar de Amore y Esperanza, an Episcopal orphanage in Tegucigalpa, and the orphanage's agricultural and technical training school in Talanga, located north of the capital city. We are pleased to report that the 13 youth missioners currently working at the training school in Talanga and their adult chaperones are safe, having arrived in the country on Friday morning, June 26, prior to the changing political situation. The group destined for the orphanage on Saturday, June 27, returned to Baltimore after reaching Miami, the first leg of the trip.
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A quick way to keep up with what's happening in Honduras is to visit http://news.yahoo.com/world A note: Wubbenhorst, the diocese of Maryland's youth missioner, is a former Peace Corps worker in Honduras. |
Monday, May 18, 2009
Snippet scholarship: being at ease
Snippet scholarship: A note to the likeminded
By Allan Roy Andrews
I consider myself a snippet scholar.
While not a perception I particularly desire or encourage, I confess being a snippet scholar can often be thought pejorative. Snippet scholarship could be construed as my being a connoisseur of television sound bites or street-side church signs or as the way of one born to think as a Jeopardy! contestant.
What I speak of is not exactly an attraction to trivia; it is more of a resistance to lengthy expositions. I once heard a teaching colleague describe an administrator as one who “When you ask a question, you get a pageant for a reply.” I do not easily suffer pageantry in conversation or exposition; I want to get through explanatory prose as quickly as possible.
My discovery of my own predilection for what I call snippet scholarship arrived late in life when I became consciously aware of a lifelong attraction to so-called “handbooks.” In fact, I might better describe my leaning as more of a handbook scholarship than a snippet scholarship.
On my living room bookshelves as I write, an “accidental sample”--as the data buffs might say—reveals about 40 such volumes, not including dictionaries (such as a Dictionary of Symbolism), or grammar and style tomes on the order of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and the less sparse volumes produced by Theodore M. Bernstein, such as The Careful Writer. My quick count runs a gamut from Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace, subtitled, A Vocabulary of Faith, to Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s Jewish Literacy, subtitled, The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History. And this count does not include the row of dictionaries and writing guides that adorn my desk.
One must understand: I do not simply refer to these books, I read them. The latest of my snippet guide devourings is something of a best-seller, ’isms and ’ologies: The 453 Basic Tenets You’ve Only Pretended to Understand, by Arthur Goldwag, who says his book “can serve as an intellectual and social shorthand.” A few months ago I finished reading (in its entirety) Nathan P. Feldmeth’s Pocket Dictionary of Church History: Over 300 terms clearly and concisely defined.
It would be easy for me to lay my snippet penchant at the feet of a college professor of psycholinguistics who habitually encouraged students to read—actually read with care and in detail—dictionaries. (I confess to being one of a handful of students who took his admonitions to heart and developed a habit of perusing—in the true sense of that word—dictionary entries.)
However, I have to go further back to account for my snippet tendencies. I have always been a slow reader. My wife, for instance, can devour a Dick Francis novel in a couple of hours that would probably take me a couple of weeks to complete.
I went through high school in the days before CliffsNotes, Spark Notes, and most of the other “shortcuts” that secondary school teachers disdain. Had I access to them, I would have been a grateful champion of their snippet approach. Instead, I had access to Classics Illustrated Comic Books (to get the best flavor of this treasure trove, I recommend one visit this site: http://www.tkinter.smig.net/ClassicsIllustrated/index.htm and its links.)
By the way, my high school teachers held these graphic adaptations of the classics in disdain as well, and that inculcated guilt in my consciousness that took a long time to shake. Even after learning in college that most literature students were more familiar with Masterplots than with original editions, I always felt I was somehow cheating by taking the “shortcuts.”
It has taken decades for me to be at ease with my snippet tendencies. One cannot imagine how vindicated I have felt with the invention of the hyperlink and the ascendancy of Google as a way of scholarship; alas, many of my colleagues and many of my son’s high school teachers have nothing but disdain for Google. Be at ease, they will learn.
I am now a proud snippet scholar. Perhaps that’s why I’m so attracted to blogging, as you also must be! Be at ease, my snippet friends.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Cowboy Contemplative: Heaven or Home?
Cowboy Contemplative: Singing our way home
By Allan Roy Andrews
[in memory of Mom]
Years ago a popular country song recorded by Tanya Tucker extolled the bliss of Texas. The song was “Texas When I Die,” and was written by a Tennessean (born in Arkansas), Ed Bruce (along with a couple of collaborators). Bruce actually cut a much better version of the song than Tucker’s, but her version moved further up the charts.
It begins with this repeated quatrain:
“When I die, I may not go to heaven;
I don’t know if they let cowboys in.
If they don’t, then bury me in Texas
‘cause Texas is as close as I’ve been.”
I have no connection whatsoever to Texas [other than an out-of-touch first cousin in Amarillo], so when I heard and fell in love with Bruce’s song, I toyed with the lyrics and made it my own.
“When I die, I may not go to heaven;
I don’t know if they let cowboys in.
If they don’t, then bury me in Brooklyn
‘cause Brooklyn is as close as I’ve been.”
New York actually gets dissed in Bruce’s lyrics, as does Detroit, Milwaukee, and—one could extrapolate—also Hell, while San Antone and Willie Nelson and Texas beer are given a treatment close to apotheosis. But no matter, for me Brooklyn—with or without Schaefer or Rheingold beers—is sweeter than San Antone or Houston or Big D.
One could, of course, plug in one’s own place of heavenly memories: “. . . then bury me in Boston/‘cause Beantown is as close as I’ve been.” Or, for less urban devotees, how about, “. . . then bury me in Springfield /‘cause Main Street is as close as I’ve been.”
For me, it was living in Brooklyn, believe it not, that drew me as a teenager to the thrall of country and western music. At the time, a New Jersey radio station, WAAT, beamed Don Larkin’s “Hometown Frolic” into the region with its theme song, the Gene Autry standard, “I’m Back in the Saddle Again.” (Nora Ephron and Tom Hanks proved that song a favorite even to the Sleepless in Seattle!) If confronted with the quasi-Biblical query, “Can anything good come out of Jersey?" I would have quickly and confidently responded, “country music.”
So while my high school buddies in Brooklyn were losing themselves in Alan Freed and the rhythm and blues music that evolved into rock 'n’ roll, I was steeping myself in Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Hank Thompson, Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow, Slim Whitman, and cowboy favorites such as Autry, Tex Ritter, Ernest Tubb, Roy Rogers, and Rogers’ original compatriots, the Sons of the Pioneers. My adolescent fantasy of singing on the “Grand Ole Opry” ranked second only to playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and I learned about five chords on the guitar and about 500 country and western songs.
At that time, the only thing truly cowboy about that line-up of singers I mention is that several of them wore cowboy hats and occasionally appeared in chaps and spurs. Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that “cowboy” is an attitude and a mindset more than a way of life or vocation; like me, most of the singers I mentioned above probably weren’t comfortable around horses, steers, or ranch waste; nevertheless, they extolled the way of the cowboy.
I think what cowboy singers promoted and what appealed to me as a boy was what I now can identify as the life of a “cowboy contemplative.” My heroes didn’t respond to life with Clint Eastwood macho aided by a big six-shooter; they backed off, rode alone, extolled the trail, preferred the dogies to the barroom, and sang quiet ballads.
Even when they did have to turn to the gun, they acted and then, like Alan Ladd’s “Shane” or the legendary Lone Ranger, rode into the distance to be alone with themselves—and perhaps, with God—and to sing a song (I just know the Lone Ranger sang when he was alone).
And they may well have asked the question repeated in Bruce’s “Texas When I Die,” which wonders if cowboys get to heaven (they do, as surely as ragamuffins enter God’s kingdom) and asserts that dying cowboys are ready to accept the next best thing: home.
Though she was neither a cowgirl nor a singer but surely a psalm-loving contemplative, it’s no wonder my mother always said of those who’d recently died, “They’ve gone home.”
--------------------------------------
Writer’s Note: Ed Bruce, the writer of “Texas When I Die,” and the writer and original singer of “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” in the twilight of his career has cut two successful gospel albums—“Changed” and “Sing About Jesus”—and, as noted on his official Web site, has become an ambassador of God’s life-changing love in Jesus Christ.
P.S. If you’ve read this far and would like to know more about my own cowboy contemplative life, you can click a link on this blog for “Poetry by ARA” to find my poem entitled, “One of Their Kind.” Or, just click here.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The Power of Tears: My April Showers
By Allan Roy Andrews
I’ve never bought into the adage that “real men don’t cry,” and thankfully Jesus belies those words by showing his manly humanity at news of the death of Lazarus (John 11:35).
My wife likes to tweak me occasionally by telling others I’m the only grown man she knows who cried during Disney’s “101 Dalmatians.” (Damn you, Cruella de Vil!)
I’ve simply never tried to hide my tears at poignant movies, and I discovered more than a decade ago that tears are basically uncontrollable as I delivered a eulogy to my mother during a family memorial service. I was fine about two-thirds through my prepared remarks. Then my mouth started quivering uncontrollably, my tongue turned to Styrofoam, and deep sobs broke from my soul, interrupted only by my sniffling apologies to the gathered relatives.
Something similar occurred years earlier when while visiting friends in Philadelphia I read the newspaper at bedtime and discovered an obituary of a college friend who had been killed in Vietnam. I fell back on my pillow and cried deeply for 10 or 15 minutes.
Over the past three or four weeks, I’ve found myself moved to tears on numerous occasions, and all of them have come as a result of my reading or viewing.
I picked up a 2008 book of poems called America at War (NY: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2008), and cried over a poem by children’s poet Rebecca Kai Dotlich. Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of these fine poems gathered by Lee Bennett Hopkins; nevertheless, by the time I read Dotlich’s poem, “My Brother’s Shirt,” the futility and injustice of war had overwhelmed me as I read,
It is mine now,
one stiff Army shirt,
THOMPSON printed
on the pocket.
United States Army
sends something home;
gives part of you back.
The part that cannot
breathe, or speak
or tease me
anymore.
Memory and a fictional voice triggered my tears a few days later. Reading Bernice Morgan’s novel of Newfoundland, Random Passage (St. John’s, NL: Breakwater, 1992), I came across this pedestrian declaration: “We’ll have hot bread for you before you leaves.”
It was my Aunt Eva speaking, or it could have been my Aunt Jen, or my Aunt Mary Winsor, or my cousin Frances McGowan—Newfoundlanders all—expressing hospitality in dialect that I’d known as a boy, never questioning their grammar. Now I heard them again, and cried.
I cried last week reading the sports pages and watching televised accounts of baseball in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s as the nation celebrated Jackie Robinson Day. I am a boy who grew up in Brooklyn and has never been able to get the Dodgers out of my fan’s consciousness. I can recite the uniform numbers of the stars of the Brooklyn Dodgers in Robinson’s era: Duke Snider, 4; Pee Wee Reese, 1; Carl Erskine, 17; Preacher Roe, 28; Billy Cox, 3; Carl Furillo, 6; Junior Gilliam, 19; Gil Hodges, 14; Roy Campanella, 39; Clem Labine, 41; Don Newcombe, 36; Johnny Podres, 45; Jackie Robinson, 42!
As I watched clips of Robinson as a revolutionary rookie, I realized again how his story defined race relations for me as a teenager. To see every major league player, coach, manager, and umpire wearing Robinson’s number 42 on April 15 was a sign of hope and progress and unity that rarely appears in the modern world, and I wiped tears from my eyes.
Finally, I confess I was moved to tears (not unlike Demi Moore) when I watched the YouTube performance of a Scottish woman singing before a panel of judges in an audition for “Britain’s Got Talent”. By now, Susan Boyle has become an Internet and entertainment celebrity. What moved me to tears was the triumph of her strong and pristine voice in the face of disdain and cynicism from the audience and the judges.
Then, the honest confession by the judges of surprise, delight, and as actress Amanda Holden put it, her “complete privilege” of hearing this wonderful voice. I was witnessing a triumph of grace, and it made me cry.
In these episodes of April I’ve had to confront my own humanity, and I better understand the power in tears and the wonder of knowing that Jesus wept.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Ease and Worship: A Gleaning
Ease and Sabbath:
Gleaning from Crossan’s God and Empire
By Allan Roy Andrews
Faith at ease, an idea I seek to communicate in these entries, is teased out wonderfully in John Dominic Crossan’s book, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome Then and Now (HarperOne, 2007).
The book is Crossan’s reasoned apologetic for justice and against violence, much of it built on the ambiguities of Jesus’ way and the unambiguous errors of power.
I’m not certain I buy into Crossan’s largely demythologized interpretations of the historical Jesus, but along the way he emphasizes a wonderful Creation exegesis that lays a fundamental case for a faith at ease.
Here’s Crossan’s powerful argument:
In the Genesis Creation narrative, God blesses and hallows the seventh day, Crossan notes. Importantly, this blessing is surrounded with the assertion that God “rested from all the work he had done.” Genesis 2:2-3 hammers home this announcement of God’s resting by relating it three times.
Humanity is created on the sixth day and given dominion over the heretofore created order. However, as Crossan astutely points out, the culmination of Creation does not come with the making of man and woman. Instead, the creation of Sabbath rest is the acme of the Creation narrative.
“It is not humanity on the sixth day but the Sabbath on the seventh day that is the climax of creation,” Crossan writes. “And therefore our ‘dominion’ over the world is not ownership but stewardship under the God of the Sabbath” (God and Empire, 53).
The powerful lesson of the story, Crossan underscores, is that “The Sabbath Day was not rest for worship but rest as worship” (God and Empire, 54).
This is from where a faith at ease draws its inspiration and strength: rest as worship.
Martin Luther, in his writings if not in his actions, sought to underscore this emphasis by insisting salvation and justification rest on faith and not on deeds. I think if we drill deep enough we can conclude that any general resistance to Luther’s stand will disclose itself as being built on a conviction and claim that such a faith is too easy.
You mean, the argument flows, there is nothing for me to do?
Crossan helps us see that ease and worship are precisely the point. Be at leisure and know I am God.
Of course, once I grasp this, I have plenty to do.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Just as I am; I come, I come.
Remember you are dust; I come, I come.
By Allan Roy Andrews
Lent began this week with one of those denominational surprises.
Episcopalians don’t bask in their memories of walking the altar-call path to repentance and forgiveness to the strains of “Just as I am, without one plea,” the 19th-century evangelistic hymn that has become an unofficial anthem of the Billy Graham Crusades (Text by Charlotte Elliott, 1789-1871, and music by William B. Bradbury, 1816-1868) .
Nevertheless, we sang all six stanzas of the hymn as the hundred or so Ash Wednesday evening parishioners sauntered down the aisle to the altar rail and knelt to have a cross of burnt palm branch residue streaked across our foreheads and be reminded: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Back in the pew as the music and the imposition of ashes continued, I read carefully the words of the hymn. “I come, I come.” The credo of “I believe,” is overwhelmed by the venio of movement—“I come”--toward the altar. The verb come is repeated 13 times in the singing of the six stanzas in The Hymnal of the Episcopal Church; the 13th sneaks in describing the bidding of the savior.
But the gracious wonder resides in how I come: Just as I am. No garments of morality; no sacrifice of doves or chocolate denial; no sackcloth; no swollen or scarred knees; no promises or pleas on my tongue; no because clauses; no self-assertions.
Just as I am: unemployed, underemployed, bought out by bonuses, crushed by balloon payments; fighting off the creditors; avoiding the turn to Chapter Nine; rescuing the resume; remembering unreturned favors; thinking seriously about ebay; mining for a family nest-egg.
Just as I am: Joining others who recognize their dust-ness. I come. I come.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Reinhold Niebuhr--Journalist (and Obama's Theologian)
There’s much chat these days about the late Reinhold Niebuhr being the theologian whose thinking most influences President Barack Obama’s ideas, a suggestion with which the president concurs (hear Krista Tippett’s discussion with journalists David Brooks and E. J. Dionne on the NPR program, “Speaking of Faith”). In that light, I’ve resurrected a column I wrote 13 years ago.
Reinhold Niebuhr--Journalist
By Allan R. Andrews
First published June 23, 1996, in Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan. At that time, Andrews was Managing Editor of the newspaper and a weekly columnist.
Although he started a magazine and wrote for several others, few remember Reinhold Niebuhr as a journalist.
Niebuhr certainly rates as one of the most renowned American theologians of the 20th century.
Because of his German heritage, and probably because of his close association with German thinkers such as Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr is often erroneously thought to have come out of the German theological academy.
He didn't. He was born June 21, 1892, in Wright City, Mo., and attended the graduate school at Yale University, though he never finished because of boredom and the press of family needs.
(Writer's note: It has been called to my attention that Niebuhr did indeed complete BD and M.Div degrees at Yale but left before completing his doctoral program).
Nevertheless, more than any other philosopher or theologian writing in the first three quarters of the 20th century, Niebuhr is a politician's--and a journalist's--thinker.
One recent commentator claims Niebuhr is ``one of the very few theologians to whom secular and humanist thinkers pay attention.''
Niebuhr, who died in 1971, never thought of himself as a theologian and lacked the usual credentials associated with the ivory tower. He thought of himself as a pastor, and much of his thinking came from his 13-year tenure as minister at Detroit's Bethel Evangelical Church.
His incisive mind, however, put him on the faculty of New York's Union Theological Seminary, where he lectured and wrote for 32 years.
As a thinker, Niebuhr stated his goal was ``to establish the relevance of the Christian faith to contemporary problems.''
The magazine that Niebuhr founded to that end, Christianity and Crisis, folded in 1994. It was never a big seller, but it served as a philosophical editorial page, provoking many movers and shakers who read it.
Many think its collapse signaled a failure of liberal theology, but Niebuhr was admired and listened to by conservative thinkers as well. One of the most appreciative studies of Niebuhr was written by the late conservative evangelical philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary, Edward J. Carnell.
Niebuhr's major writings included two massive studies, one entitled The Nature and Destiny of Man, which is credited with dispelling the notion of the perfectibility of society, an idea that had persisted in liberal American thought through two world wars and continues to exert an influence on American social policy.
The other of his great works, Moral Man and Immoral Society, propounded Niebuhr's conviction that one gets a clearer picture of what drives a human being not by studying the individual but by studying the groups in which that individual behaves. Groups--including those of organized religion--he thought often were influences of egoism and evil.
I can't do justice to his thinking here, but several American politicians--knowingly or not-- have built their philosophy of society and humanity out of exposure to Niebuhr's thinking.
My appreciation of Niebuhr is more pedestrian and takes some extrapolation.
Just a year after Niebuhr left the church in Detroit, he published a little book of journal entries from his years in Michigan. The book was released in 1929 under the title Leaves From the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic.
Journalists frequently are accused of cynicism. Rather than deny such a label, I find comfort in Niebuhr's notion of a ``tamed cynic.''
In this book, Niebuhr addressed the church, but as I reread it last year it struck me he could just as easily have been talking to journalism.
Was Niebuhr thinking of columnists when he wrote of his preaching task, ``I don't know whether I can ever accustom myself to the task of bringing light and inspiration in regular weekly installments''?
Aren't journalists as well as preachers taken to task with these words: ``all these momentary simplifications of the complexities of life cannot be finally satisfying, because they do violence to life''?
If Niebuhr didn't intend it when he wrote, I certainly thought of Washington, D.C., and other centers of power when I read: ``I have to work in the twilight zone where superstition is inextricably mixed up with something that is--well, not superstition.''
``America worships success,'' he wrote. ``And the only kind of success the average man can understand is obvious success.''
We journalists major in reporting obvious success; it's the not-so-obvious ones we miss.
A 1994 book listed 25 stories that journalism underplayed in the past decade. It includes the issues of labor law violations and environmental pollution and several political issues that were never tracked during presidential campaigns.
The Centers for Disease Control consistently argues that journalists should stop playing up bizarre medical stories such as cannibalistic bacteria and devote more time and energy to the less sensational, more boring but more important stories of medical research related to cancer or AIDS. Had he been a journalist, Niebuhr would have followed and investigated those kinds of stories.
Also in 1994, in an article entitled ``Reinhold Niebuhr and the Evening News,'' a Wisconsin Presbyterian minister, Randall K. Bush, wrote: ``Given the changing complexities of the world, a voice like Niebuhr's would be most welcome today--one able to speak with discernment about the state of affairs around us.''
What could be a better goal for journalists and commentators than this: to speak with discernment about the state of affairs around us?
Bush is convinced that Niebuhr's relevance is related to his understanding of ``the religious dimension inherent in all history.''
Far from being a cynic, Niebuhr is a pragmatic idealist. He wrote: ``Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair.''
Amid any despair related to economic stagnation, racial or ethnic hatred and random violence in the streets, America would do well to attend still to this ``tamed cynic'' whose birth anniversary passed last week
(ed. note: Niebuhr was born June 21, 1892, and died on June 1, 1971).
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