God, faith, and some other dirty words

Monday, June 23, 2008

George Carlin and banned words

By Allan Roy Andrews

Comedian George Carlin’s humor was a delightful bashing of our human silliness, especially our penchant for euphemisms, e.g., bathroom tissue instead of toilet paper; landfill in place of dump; and sanitary engineer in place of garbage man. Carlin died Sunday at the age of 71. He had a 30-year history of heart ailments and a career almost double that in stand-up comedy. The New York Times noted that Carlin was a master of words that most people could not or would not speak.

It was Carlin, I believe, who first noted that we park on driveways and drive on parkways, and he marveled and got lots of mileage out of oxymorons such as “military intelligence” and “jumbo shrimp.” But in the end he’ll be forever remembered as the broadcaster of the seven dirty words banned on television.

Despite his profane reputation, Carlin’s clever arguments often made sense. There are no dirty words, he claimed: dirty thoughts, dirty intentions, dirty people, yes; but words simply cannot be dirty, he argued. His attitude was a bit like that of Jesus reminding us that what comes out of persons corrupts not what goes into them.

I think Carlin probably read the second-century Roman dramatist Terence, who is credited with saying, “nothing human is alien to me.” (I say probably, just as I’d say former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle probably copied without attribution one-liners from Carlin’s 1997 book, Brain Droppings, an obscene journalistic deception that eventually cost the columnist his job in Boston.)

Off course, Carlin’s reputation—call it notoriety, if you will—came from his irreverence, especially in cataloging the seven words that cannot be spoken on television or radio. His doing so led to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling (by a 5-4 vote) in favor of FCC regulation of language in broadcasting and made Carlin an iconoclastic culture superhero.

Here are Latinized versions of Carlin’s seven dirty words: defecation, urination, copulation, pudenda, fellatio, maternal incest, and mammary glands.

My list admittedly lacks the shock and punch of Carlin’s Anglo-Saxon—and for the most part single syllable—equivalents, but no court or station censor will object to the terms on my list; in fact, there’s a good chance many station managers wouldn’t understand several words on my list so I prefer my list as thought-provoking and educational rather than shocking. Even Alex Trebek (a philosophy major in college, by the way) has been known to utter words from my list.

In case you haven’t picked up on it, I have read several of Carlin’s books of humor (Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help, 1984; Brain Droppings, 1997; Napalm and Silly Putty, 2001; When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? 2004; and Three Times Carlin: An Orgy of George, 2006) and found beneath the blatant obscenities a piercing mind and an admirable and cogent social analyst.

What I find somewhat bewildering is Carlin’s castigating of religion. Apparently Carlin (in spite of his Roman Catholic upbringing; or, perhaps, because of it) would have preferred we not use words such as God, Christ, faith, hope, charity, sin or forgiveness in any serious context (yes, that’s seven words). He seemingly had no objection to their use in a profane context.

The late Harvard personality theorist Gordon W. Allport used to note that our value-language has been turned topsy by the Freudian revolution. In Freud’s day, Allport wrote, everyone talked about God and nobody talked about sex beyond the boudoir. In our day, everyone talks about sex (and for some inane reason, our talk is predominantly dirty!). God-talk in our culture, however, is borderline taboo, reserved for dimly lit rooms called sanctuaries.

God-talk as I define it, by the way, means real theological conversation, not the God-as-political-lever-and-lobbyist language that Carlin often chastised as part of American hypocrisy.

I never met Carlin, but I have fantasized a chance I might have to converse with him over a plate of pork chops and suggest that I think God laughs heartily and approvingly at the comedian’s exposition of our human silliness; but I’d also have to suggest that Carlin’s dirty words have become pedestrian, unnecessary and boring, and deserve but a marginal place in television, film or literature.

Recommended Reading:

Here's an anecdote that not many will access in the weeks following the comedian's death:
http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/blogs/bloom/2008-06-25.html

Congruent Reflections: Silence and Daily Meditations

June 15, 2008

[This is a rambling essay I wrote near the end of May for an online course offered through the Church Divinity School of the Pacific's CALL center. The course was called "The Uses of Silence" and was moderated by Maggie Ross.]

Reviewing April:
A Comment on the Serendipity of Congruent Readings.

By Allan Roy Andrews

Forward Day by Day provides daily meditational readings for Episcopalians. Published by the Forward Movement in Cincinnati, Ohio, the quarterly journal is endorsed by The Episcopal Church. Its daily selections, based on the lectionary, are written by anonymous writers identified only by the editor’s notes. Each writer provides a month’s worth of meditations, and each of the quarterly volumes provides three-month’s worth of readings that follow the daily lectionary for the church year. The readings range from highly academic to pedestrian in their approach; from expositional to metaphorical in their interpretations; from conservative to liberal in their theology.

In some instances, the writing is broken up among more writers. The current volume covering May, June, and July of 2008, for example, is written by the 11 deans of the 11 seminaries of the Episcopal Church. Each of the academics has written eight or nine meditations. Typically, a meditation on a scriptural passage and the optional inclusion of a brief prayer runs to about 330 words.

The cover of each issue often displays a well-known piece of art (or a detail from such artwork). The issue for February-April, for example, shows Italian Renaissance painter Bergognone’s Christ Risen from the Tomb, a 1490 oil painting from the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The Forward Day by Day selections for the months of February, March, and April, 2008, were unusual in that they were written by a single author identified by the editor as “a lay woman from the American Southwest who is a widely published spiritual director.”

Coinciding with my reading of the selections for April, 2008, was my participation in a course taught by Maggie Ross (an Anglican solitary and writer who spends a good part of every year living in relative isolation in Alaska) called “The Uses of Silence,” an online offering of the Center for Anglican Learning and Leadership (CALL) at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif. What astonished me at this time was the congruence of what we were reading, discussing and experiencing in our online course and what was being presented by the author of April’s meditations in Forward Day by Day (FDD).

The April 1 meditation in FDD begins with a verbal look at Fra Angelico’s painting of the Annunciation. I learned here that the artist did this painting as a fresco on the walls of the monastery of San Marco in Florence, and that the painting was done at the head of the stairs leading to the monk’s upper dormitory at the monastery.

The writer says of the painter: “He placed the Annunciation . . . as though he meant the monks literally to approach and enter—to inhabit—the encounter between the Virgin and the archangel.”

Silence is implied in this encounter, and the writer says, “one is invited to enter more deeply all the unanswered questions, the still-listening freedoms in our own lives.”

The meditation, incidentally, is on verses from Luke’s gospel that include the Virgin’s words: “Let it be with me according to your word.”

The April 2 meditation on the Vine-Branches “I am” statement of Jesus focuses on discipleship. The writer provides a tiny critique of contemporary Christianity that echoes almost all of the discussion and readings in the “Uses of Silence” course, especially the invitation to contemplation by Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land (Laird, 2006). Laird offers a guide to contemplation that begins with the assertion “We are built for contemplation.”

The writer of the FDD April 2 meditation writes: “I suspect we often firmly believe . . . that the active part of our discipleship is way more important than our contemplative vocation to abide in Jesus.”

I don’t intend to go through the 30 days of April comparing the author’s meditations with the content of the CALL course (though that might be a worthwhile exercise), but having this kind of reinforcement of ideas with which one is grappling strikes me as a delightful example of the serendipity of the Holy Spirit.

One of the most important books we read in “The Uses of Silence,” I think, was The Paradox of Intention by Marvin C. Shaw (Shaw, 1988). Its subtitle stresses a phenomenon particularly important to any Christian’s striving for spiritual growth and direction: “Reaching the Goal by Giving Up the Attempt to Reach It.”

Having been steeped in the Logotherapy of Viktor Frankl as an undergraduate and graduate student of psychology, I was delighted to find Frankl’s therapeutic principle of paradoxical intention supporting a guide to spiritual growth, and I found Shaw’s conclusion that “The Way to Do is to Be” a wonderful antidote to the moralizing pedantry of evangelical attitudes in which I have been nurtured.

I see paradoxical intention in the FDD April 9 meditation on the passage from Matthew 3, where John the Baptist says to Jesus, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

The FDD writer points to this as an illustration of the humility of Jesus, and writes in clear though perhaps unwitting exposition of the paradox of intention: “It is shocking, the humility of God. That God would choose to share our human nature at all defies logic. That Jesus, without sin, would choose to join sinful humanity in ritual repentance makes no sense.

“But that is the heart of the mystery of love, the mystery of God-with-us.”

A favorite of mine among the FDD meditations for April focuses on the words in Colossians 3: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.” The writer confesses an uneasiness at the word “rule” expecting it should be a more contemplative term such as “rest” or “dwell.” Yet, she points out that the peace of Christ means “yielding to God’s sovereign authority over every aspect of my life” (FDD, 12April2008).

Quoting a poem by American William Alexander Percy, she notes that the disciples who cast their nets into the Sea of Galilee were,

Contented, peaceful fishermen before they ever knew
the peace of God that filled their hearts brimful, and broke them too.

This poem of Percy’s, which mulls what the FDD writer calls “this dangerous sort of turning-life-upside-down peace” is in The Hymnal of the Episcopal Church as number 661 and known as “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.”

I read the entire hymn and was struck by the closing verse:

The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod.
Yet, let us pray for but one thing, the marvelous peace of God.

Perhaps I’m stretching here, but the sentiment of Percy’s poem is similar to that expressed by St. Ephrem the Syrian, whose words are brought to us in the obscure but important text of Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye (Brock, 1992).

The FDD writer explained a dream she had about peaceful sinking (FDD 16April2008) that she interpreted as a dream of “resting in God.” God wanted her to let go and allow God’s love to support her. She concludes: “Since then, I have learned that resting in (not striving for, not racing after, not talking about) the presence of God is a definition of contemplative prayer.”

Finally, let me share the FDD writer’s exposition of St. Paul’s words to the Thessalonians: “Pray without ceasing.” She focuses on the fourth-century men and women known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers, who went into the wilderness to live in silence and ponder what it meant to pray without ceasing.

“They realized,” she writes, “that it was only possible to pray constantly if prayer descended from the head, as it were, and entered the heart—if prayer somehow became not a conscious enterprise, but as constant as breathing.”

What would it mean, the writer asks in conclusion, “for us to attempt to pray—to breathe, to live—this way?

I don’t know what it would mean, but I think I’ve learned it must begin in silence.

References:

(FDD, April2008) Forward Day by Day. February/March/April 2008. Cincinnati, Ohio: The Forward Movement.

(Brock, 1992) Sebastian Brock. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications.

(Laird, 2006) Martin Laird. Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. New York: Oxford Press.

(Shaw, 1999) Marvin C. Shaw. The Paradox of Intention: Reaching the Goal by Giving Up the Attempt to Reach It. Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press.

The Hymnal 1982. New York: The Church Pension Fund (No. 661)

A curriculum alone is not the path from good to great

May 17, 2008

The Path from Good to Great: Curriculum . . . Not!

By Allan Roy Andrews

Imagine a high school faculty as a collection of music-lovers.

Some favor classical music. These are the sophisticates with a long history of excellence and a precision of melody rarely matched in any other genre.

Imagine many who favor popular music. These are the bedrock of community. They comprise by far the largest collection of fans (and teachers). This is the music of the majority: Among their icons are Elvis, the Beatles, and ‘Ole Blue Eyes.’ Crooners and Rockers provide the music of historical landmarks: first date, first kiss, first heartbreak, first triumph.

Band music lovers are revered in educational institutions, perhaps because band music is the music of institutions with the military and the battlefield always in view. It is the music of discipline and precision, if not of tune certainly of choreography. This is the music of celebration; the music of victory.

A few faculty members favor country music. These are the patriots and the blue-collar bedrock. This is the music of trains and pick-up trucks with the themes of troubles and moaning. This is a world of values, where honesty trumps perfection, and sincerity defeats phoniness.

Pockets of this imaginary faculty are niche music-lovers. There are those who favor folk music, often with overtones of political activism. There are some with special tastes who favor Irish music or Celtic music, Italian love songs or German drinking songs. Drama-lovers lean toward show tunes, whether from the stage or the cinema.

A yet smaller cadre leans toward rap or hip-hop music, often defining an ethnic minority. In the classroom, the elders tolerate this genre as the choice of the immature.

In a religious institution, there are those who favor sacred music, often sung by choirs. Some favor praise music, celebrating the body and voice as instruments of worship. In many ways, the popular religious music sector mimics the secular music world, altering lyrics and themes with an eye toward God. (Unfortunately, the eye too frequently focuses on the performing ‘I’ who is doing the singing or praising.)

And in some dusty corner of the campus, there are the jazz fans. Typically, these are the least tolerated among the imaginary faculty. This is the music of chaos and improvisation. Of all genres, this is the music that defies curriculum. It is the music of nonconformists; it is the sound of the institution being challenged.

Enter the education mechanics who are laying the track for moving the institution from good to great. With their devotion to curriculum development, they leave little or no space for chaos, improvisation, and challenges to conventional wisdom. Curriculum does not easily tolerate jazz.

Please understand carefully my argument here: I am not opposing curriculum development. What I’m opposing is the tyranny of curriculum that brooks no questioning or challenging of the conformity that curriculum development demands. If it helps our understanding, let me propose an anti-curriculum component to the curriculum. Give the jazz-lovers the opportunity to improvise and experiment. A good deal of learning comes out of chaos.

When curriculum is king (or queen), an educational institution demonstrates that its goal is not education in the most clear and critical sense of encouraging the liberal (read as liberated—“. . . and the truth shall set you free”) mind; instead, it is driving toward conformity.

I write this with some passion since a favorite colleague of mine recently was refused a new contract because, as the conventional wisdom and the music-lovers’ gossip net puts it, “she didn’t follow the curriculum.” As I write this, I replay images of the arguments made against an excellent teacher—Mr. Keating-- in the film “The Dead Poets Society.” Don’t try to change things, he is instructed, “the curriculum is set!”

The institution at which this woman taught postures itself as one moving from good to great, and in making that move it has developed a strong attachment to its curriculum, as if curricula somehow define an excellent school. This is an idea, incidentally, that is out-of-hand rejected by those who have championed the good-to-great movement in education.

Curriculum is a guide, a sign-post suggesting the direction in which education should be traveling; it is not a lock-step straight-jacket that prevents educators from experimentation, improvisation, and—I dare say—failure.

The educational mechanics who demand strict conformity to a set curriculum unwittingly are driving toward educational fascism. As another former colleague of mine put it shortly before he departed this same school, “We’re educating the mind but not the imagination.”

I love the expression of another colleague, a younger woman who this year decided to leave her job and return to graduate school. “I’m often frustrated by the curriculum,” she told me. “What I want them to know is that in my classes I am the curriculum!”

I don’t know this for sure, but I’d guess in her heart—and in the hearts of my other dismissed or disappointed colleagues--there’s a soft spot for improvisational jazz.

Reading Philosophy Can Be Fun

April 15, 2008

Exposing the humor and leisure of thinking

By Allan Roy Andrews

At one time, I worked as a young, aspiring academic teaching psychology to students in a community college. While there, I offered a manuscript to a book salesman who took it to his editors for critique. My manuscript amounted to a prolegomenon to the study of psychology (of course, I avoided using the word prolegomenon because only philosophers, theologians and literary critics use such a term). I called my offering, Getting Psyched: An Introduction to the Introduction to Psychology. (Agents and publishers take note: I still have the manuscript tucked away somewhere in my garage.)

In my proposed little book, I argued that every psychologist begins the study of human behavior from a perspective that presupposes some view of humankind, a philosophical anthropology, if you will.

After his editors had a look at it, the salesman-friend came to me with the manuscript containing one word circled in red in several places by one of his editors. My book couldn’t sell, he told me in earnest seriousness, because I had used a word that self-respecting psychologists never use; the word was philosophy! Yes, those were the days in which psychology was dominated by behaviorists and multivariate statisticians who saw themselves as scientists laboring with difficulty to break away from the casual subjectivity of philosophy.

How I wish now I could have turned to my bookcase and pulled out one or all three of the books I’m about to describe. This incident, of course, preceded the phenomenon of the “For Dummies” series, though that genre of books doesn’t introduce any subject with the talent and verve contained in the books I’m urging upon my audience here.

Reading philosophy can be fun and of great value--even for psychologists and other overly serious thinkers.

To support this assertion, I suggest a perusal of three books, one more than a decade old and two others of more recent vintage. Even if one has never read another publication related to philosophy, one should take up these three books and read. They clearly demonstrate that one can be at ease while confronting the conundrums of human thought.

The oldest of the three is a book that masks as a novel. In Sophie’s World, published in 1994, author Jostein Gaarder, a Norwegian high-school teacher, set out to interest his children in philosophy and wound up writing a surprising international best-seller. Most critics have derided Gaarder’s fiction, but they’ve judged his exposition of philosophy from the Garden of Eden to the Big Bang theory of cosmology as first-class.

The sub-title of Gaarder’s book is “A novel about the history of philosophy,” and each narrative chapter interweaves a summary of an epoch in Western philosophical thought.

A colleague at my school confessed after reading Gaarder’s book that he understood Plato’s analogy of the cave for the first time, and a woman in a study group that I am a part of told us that she never read or understood philosophy at all until her husband introduced her to Sophie’s World.

The second of my triad of books is a non-fiction text aimed at teachers (and I mean authentic teachers, those who nurture pupils in grades 4-8). It is a volume for the philosophically challenged called Little Big Minds, a textbook of sorts for those who believe they’d like to share philosophy with children.

The author, educator and consultant Marietta McCarty, has been introducing philosophy to kids in elementary schools for more than 15 years. In her words, “kids are natural philosophers.” The sub-title of her book explains her conviction: “Sharing Philosophy with Kids.”

McCarty takes a topical approach—friendship, responsibility, happiness, justice, and so on through freedom and love—for 15 chapters. Each topical chapter focuses on a philosopher or pair of philosophers; e.g., Time: Augustine and Alan Watts. The exposition is followed with lesson ideas and discussion topics for presenting the topics and thinkers to young minds; i.e., to “Little Big Minds.”

Of course, one is guaranteed that by taking the plunge into a book aimed at teaching children one is bound to learn a great deal for oneself. I believe it was Gail Sheehy, the author of several popular psychology books in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who confessed that one of her secrets of doing research was to first visit a children’s library and find the wonderful books that aim at teaching difficult subjects to kids. Her point, of course, is that one can learn a lot from kids—or from teaching kids. McCarty would certainly concur.

My third recommendation is a joke book written by two New England students of philosophy (and graduates of Harvard’s philosophy program) who seem to have found their niche in humor. It comes from the best-seller lists of 2007; it is a tiny book called Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar. The title alone hints that philosophy and humor await anyone who delves into its pages.

Authors Tom Cathcart and Dan Klein clearly have recognized the affinities between college teachers of philosophy and stand-up comedians. It’s difficult at times to tell whether they have written an introduction to philosophy punctuated with jokes or a contemporary joke book interlaced with lessons from philosophy. Either way, one is treated to sane thinking and wry humor because the authors rightly recognize that philosophy and comedy both attempt to turn things upside down and challenge us with what is uncomfortable about life.

To be sure, many of the jokes are corny or bawdy or both, and much of the philosophy is secular and simplified, but both are presented in a relaxed and easy-to-take manner. Cathcart and Klein clearly not only want their readers to think, they want them to relax and smile while doing so.

The authors of each of the three books I’m suggesting to readers in their own way exhibit elements of leisure at the root of their writing. Gaarder in mystery and fantasy; McCarty in childishness and innocence; and Cathcart and Klein in humor and dilemma. They seem to grasp the true meaning of being at leisure and they recommend it. So I recommend them to anyone seeking to be at ease with the puzzlements of life.

Unpacking silence: An informal exercise

April 13, 2008

Unpacking silence: An exercise for an online course, "The Uses of Silence,"

taught by Maggie Ross for the Church Divinity School of the Pacific's CALL program.

By Allan Roy Andrews

Without a doubt, some ancient Greek philosopher first framed the question, but I learned it from reading Heidegger; it goes something like this: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”

To add to my bewilderment, today my son and I read on a car waiting at a traffic light in front of us this bumper sticker: “The best of things is not a thing.”

And many of us have been moved by the Vietnam era anthem made popular by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel—“The Sounds of Silence.” (Do I hear paradoxical intention in these words?)

I am objecting to the phrase that describes our course, “The Uses of Silence.” Silence is not an object.

My sense is that “use” is part of our commercial, materialistic, attainment society. To make myself more clear, you are going to have to indulge a bit of my professional rantings. Back in the 1990s, one of the slogans of the newspaper industry—as well as of the TV and radio business mavens—urged editors and reporters to give readers or listeners (called consumers in this mentality) “news they could use.” This became of course a slogan aimed at increasing revenue and marketing the daily news much as if it were a consumable commodity.

A little more than a decade ago I wrote a column criticizing the “news you can use” mentality. Let me offer a précis of my argument:

“Of what use to readers is news that enemy combatants are mercilessly killing each other? Of what use is it that a man with a gun in Utah went on a rampage and killed three people? Of what use to readers is the news that a father and son perished in an airplane crash in Wyoming last week?

“What these stories do is challenge our comfort zones and remind us of the frailty of human existence. Such stories should arouse compassion and move us to acts of charity and correction. We report the horrors of war in a faint hope that future wars can be averted.”

My complaint went on to defend the freedom of the press and to castigate the business school mentality that sees the sale of the news as the bottom line of journalism.

I hear echoes of that mentality in the phrase the “use of silence.” It’s as if this course is not going to have any value to those enrolled in it unless they can somehow devise a way to “use” silence in developing some programmatic spirituality.

Whatever silence is, it is not a marketable commodity; it is not something we can dress up with colors and images, not something we can package, sweeten and sell; it is not something we can promote or seek to turn into a profitable object; it is not another form of indulgences. In a word, it is not something we use!

I respond appreciatively to those who describe silence as a phenomenon in unity with language; the negative spaces of the painter; the spaces between the notes of the composer; the time of absorption at the close of a homily.

I prefer to think of silence as a revelation, or better perhaps, as a revealer. It is not something we discover or grow into or develop with varieties of practices. It is more of a gift; a gift we perhaps need to learn to accept or to open without cost or benefit.

The verse in the psalms that we all know usually translated: “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10 KJV), is better translated as “Desist, and know I am God” or “Be at leisure, and know I am God.”

To me the psalmist appears to be implying that silence (or leisure) can reveal something to us.

As I told Maggie, I’m still unpacking this for myself. I have to stop here. This is thinking by writing--perfect fodder for a blogger.