Monthly Archives: July 2005

Thursday Short Poem: Collins’ “Death of the Hat”

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I’ve posted some Billy Collins before; he has become one of America’s most popular and accessible contemporary poets, and that is surely no insult.

In honor of my new Tilley Hat, and all the men in my old family pictures wearing hats:

The Death of the Hat

Once every man wore a hat.

In the ashen newsreels,
the avenues of cities
are broad rivers flowing with hats.

The ballparks swelled
with thousands of strawhats,
brims and bands,
rows of men smoking
and cheering in shirtsleeves.

Hats were the law.
They went without saying.
You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.

You bought them from Adams or Dobbs
who branded your initials in gold
on the inside band.

Trolleys crisscrossed the city.
Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.
Men with hats gathered on the docks.

There was a person to block your hat
and a hatcheck girl to mind it
while you had a drink
or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.
In your office stood a hat rack.

The day war was declared
everyone in the street was wearing a hat.
And they were wearing hats
when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.

My father wore one to work every day
and returned home
carrying the evening paper,
the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.

But today we go bareheaded
into the winter streets,
stand hatless on frozen platforms.

Today the mailboxes on the roadside
and the spruce trees behind the house
wear cold white hats of snow.

Mice scurry from the stone walls at night
in their thin fur hats
to eat the birdseed that has spilled.

And now my father, after a life of work,
wears a hat of earth,
and on top of that,
a lighter one of cloud and sky–a hat of wind.

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Violent fantasy,or how Hugo went through $24 worth of quarters in an hour

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Camassia had a great post about pacifists, fantasy, and war games last week.  Writing about everything from competitive board games to violent movies, she warns against the "catharsis theory":

Back when I was in grad school I took a course on the media and children, and this is what they called the “catharsis” theory: if kids enjoy violent entertainment they’ll get it out of their system and be able to go on peacefully the rest of the time. It is, not surprisingly, a popular idea with makers and supporters of violent entertainment. Trouble is, there’s really no evidence to support it. In fact, the various studies we looked at it that course offered a consistent connection between violent entertainment and aggressive behavior.

Camassia and her commenters then enter a very helpful and interesting discussion about fantasy, reality, and what it means to be a pacifist in a world of violent entertainment.  I do recommend a visit.

I did not grow up playing video games.  They’ve never had much hold on me.  When I was in high school, I played Pac-Man with my friends at the arcades, but was quickly bored.   Frankly, I’ve tried playing more recent video games with my younger cousins (who all have X-Boxes and Playstations and what-have-yous) and been utterly unamused.  But I do know the power that one kind of arcade game has over me:  shooting games.

It was June 1999.  A friend of mine and I were at dinner in Eagle Rock, and he suggested we go play some games in the huge arcade nearby after dinner.  I was reluctant, but he insisted, so off we went.  He immersed himself in something, and I wandered around until I came to a huge machine with a great big screen and two very realistic looking handguns attached to the front of it.  Essentially, as I remember, the player is an undercover police officer shooting it out with bad guys.  The screen was big and vivid and colorful; having not played a video game since the mid-1980s, I was stunned at the quality of the new technology.  I put in my quarters, picked up the gun, and started to "play."

For the next HOUR, I was hooked.  When my friend stopped by to see what I was doing, I pressed a $20 bill in his hand and made him run to get me more quarters.  I loved the shooting.  I shot everything at first (including my fellow undercover operatives and innocent children), and then gradually got more judicious.  But I loved what happened to people, good and bad, when I shot them!  Blood would pour from heads and chests, and they would fly up in the air and collapse in a satisfying heap. 

I have never fired a handgun.  When I was a child, I fired a .22 rifle with my cousins at the ranch, and missed the can of Olympia at which I was supposed to be aiming.  I never had much interest in guns after that.  But on that June night six years ago, I was sweating with excitement, my heart racing, shooting and shooting until I had gone through almost $25.00 and my friend was demanding to leave.   He was a bit stunned at my obsession with the game:  "Dude, you were WAAAY to into that", he said.  He was right.  I felt excited, stimulated, and edgy.  I had trouble sleeping that night.

And several times over the course of that summer, I went back to the arcade to play that one game.  I eventually gave it up, as I began to realize that my fixation on the shooting was deeply disturbing to me.  Frankly,  it seemed a lot like porn.  Playing my shooting game, I was using fantasy images of other people’s bodies for my pleasure.  When one uses porn, one fantasizes penetrating and possessing another’s body; when one plays a shooting game, one’s imaginary bullets penetrate and destroy the flesh of imaginary enemies.   To me, then and now, using porn and playing violent video games essentially involve an identical sin: the sin of using others for selfish pleasure.  Of course, much of porn involves "real" actresses, and the images on my screen at the arcade were computer-generated.  But modern technology has seen the proliferation of computer-generated images in porn, and of real-life actors in video games.  The line between the two has become increasingly blurred.  And it goes without saying that the obsessiveness with which I played my shooting game was similar to an obsessiveness with porn; it was the sort of activity where one loses all track of time and all sense of accountability to others.

My anti-porn convictions are clear; I’ve written about them many times.  (Here, here, here).  But my own (admittedly limited) experience with violent, realistic video games has left me convinced that they are in a very real sense as problematic as pornography.   Porn offers the viewer the fantasy of consequence-free sex; the games offer the player consequence-free violence.  Players and viewers feel more powerful; porn and video games flatter the agency of their users.  When an insecure teenage boy masturbates to porn, he fantasizes that beautiful women can’t wait to have sex with him.  When that same boy plays his violent video games, he fantasizes that all the big muscle-bound bad guys end up dead as a result of his deft manipulation of his joystick or ersatz gun.  In both instance, he’s trying to overcome his insecurities and make himself feel big and powerful — invariably at the expense of others.  In porn the women all "want it" and in violent video games, the people you kill "deserve it."   And if there’s a significant moral difference between the two activities, I’m missing it!  (Yes, I am well aware that there are teenage girls and adult women who like porn and violent video games too — but I suspect that they are dwarfed in number by their male counterparts.)

When I have teenagers, I will be no more inclined to permit them to play violent video games in the home than I will be to allow them to visit hardcore pornographic websites.  Fantasy is not without its redemptive purposes, but when it is about sexual conquest or violent destruction, it is, I think, at odds with what it means to live an authentically Christian life.

Thoughts?

Me not a serious academic

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I’ve got a post in mind for later today on violent video games (which have been very much on my mind lately), but first this:  Mr. Bad writes in a comment:

I know that it’s not standard fare for anyone in women’s studies to go against the grain, but for serious academics defending one’s position is de rigeur. I think that it’s time that women’s studies types start doing the same, or else admit that they’re not serious academics and close down operations.

I’ve responded to this sort of charge before.  I do think, however, that it’s necessary to explain to folks once again that THIS IS A BLOG.  Blogs are not required to be peer-reviewed.  Evidence is not required.   Some bloggers do put up posts with footnotes that would put a graduate student to shame.  (Heck, many bloggers ARE graduate students).  But I did not start this blog to get a wider audience for my views on gender, sexuality, and faith (though that’s been, for better or for worse, a consequence).  As I’ve written before, I started this blog because I wanted to be able to write without the constraints of the academic life.  I wanted to be able to write about (amost) everything, from sports to chinchillas to the intersection of sex and belief.  Look, I’ve done my dissertation.  I’ve published a whopping total of one article on Medieval English Ecclesiastical History.  I know what it is like to agonize over each sentence, each paragraph, each argument.  I know what it is to write a thesis like a geometrical proof.  And you know what, folks?  I’m sick and bloody tired of it!

This is not to say that I don’t believe that providing evidence is important in academic work.  Ask my students about their research projects in my Lesbian and Gay American History course!  What I am saying is that this blog may be many things, but it is not a forum for an academic defense of Women’s Studies, or any other subject for that matter.    There are plenty of terrific feminist writers out there who do like the fierce give-and-take of intellectual debate, I don’t need to be one more.

Call me intellectually lazy if you will, but I have given my entire life to the academy.  I’ve never not been in school.  From Humpty-Dumpty Nursery School in Santa Barbara (where I began my academic career at age three in 1970) until today, I’ve always been either a student or a teacher.  Every fall and every spring has seen me in a classroom in one capacity or another, without fail, for thirty-five of my thirty-eight years. I learned respect for a solid argument, and I teach it to my students.  But intellectual battles get tiresome for those of us who make our living in the teaching trenches. I’ve earned the right to have a blog where I don’t have to play by the rules of legitimate academic discourse.  The only rule that matters to me here is civility, folks; take it or leave it. 

More soon.

More on girls, high school, cruelty and competitiveness

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I’ve been thinking about Amanda’s post (inspired by my ruminations on Sixteen Candles) and the plight of popular girls (or as Amanda puts it, the "Queen Bees.")  Perhaps too candidly, I had written:

"When I was in my late twenties, I went through a brief and rather nasty period where I quite consciously thought of myself as getting "revenge" for what had happened to me in high school. When I was 29, I was in a brief relationship with a gal simply because she was a dead ringer for the most popular girl in my high school, a girl on whom I had had a mad crush but who had never given me the time of day. I confess that nine years ago, I was quite a jerk. I dated a former prom queen largely because she had been just that; I was consciously living out a fantasy from my adolescence, and this twenty-somethin’ gal was more or less a victim of that fantasy. We broke up after a few intense weeks, and I’m pleased to say that years later, I was able to make amends to her for having intentionally "used" her. To my surprise, when I told her about this, she laughed and laughed and said, ‘Hugo, after the way I behaved in high school, I probably had it coming!’"

Amanda responded:

There is so much to unpack there it’s hard to know where to begin. (Funnily enough, as I write this, my boyfriend is DJ-ing in the background and he dropped in "Rebel Girl", completely unaware I was posting on the topic of teenage female identities.) There’s the whole notion of men fucking women as some form of punishment for one thing and the whole weird thing with using sex as a way to settle long dead emotional issues. But I want to address the comment, "I had it coming."

No one more than me is welcome to the idea of the Queen Bees deserving a beat-down for their mistreatment of others, particularly other girls, in high school. But the whole "mean girls" thing lately bothers me a lot. There’s been a spate of books and movies lately that address the emotional harassment and abuse girls give each other in high school, but as others have pointed out, these discussions usually start on a good foot and quickly devolve into the catfight stereotype where "meanness" is characterized as an inherently female trait and all discussion of the pressures that lead to these anti-social behaviors are completely ignored.

I agree completely.  I’m not going to provide more details of the story I related here, as that would merely inflame my MRA critics. (Witness here).  I will also say that I have only a general idea what the young lady in question meant when she said "I had it coming."  I certainly don’t believe that that line of hers justifies my behavior towards her.  But I do want to say that I agree completely with Amanda that the often shocking stories we hear of how "Queen Bee"  girls treat the less popular in high school have to be understood within a larger social context.

As Amanda points out, beauty is not the only qualification for Queen Bee status (though it surely doesn’t hurt):

True Queen Bees are the epitome of toadies–excellent both at kissing the ass of their betters while pissing on their lessers like no one’s business. I remember being young and naive and truly shocked at how girls who were just harassing me with a tenacity that would get them promoted in the SS could turn around and demure and flutter around popular boys like they were born to toady. And you find yourself thinking, "Man, if those guys only knew…" And from that moment, you can see how sexism perpetuates itself.

Because if the boys didn’t know consciously, they knew subconsciously. Girls who show immense ruthlessness and power to the nerds and geeks and then toady to the jocks are reinforcing the power of the jocks. That they can expect their lessers to enforce the status quo for them is the jock privilege.

For a parallel example, you won’t usually find a king or dictator who actually saddles up and oppresses his own people himself, except on the super rare occasions that are especially important. He leans on his lessers to do it–real power is shown by one’s ability to command minions, something sci-fi writers know all about, probably in no small part from being on the receiving end of abusive high school power plays.

So, anger at Queen Bees, while understandable, is misplaced. They are trading in solidarity with other girls for a handful of privileges for acting as the stand-ins for the actual authorities in their community. And while to your average teenager they are alarmingly powerful, it’s sobering to see one kicked off her perch. Like the summer between my 8th and 9th grade year when the super blonde princess cheerleader, a girl whose dedication to standing in for male authority was so sure that she actually inspected my legs once to make sure I had shaved that morning, got knocked up by (who else) the most popular boy in our junior high school…

Bold emphasis is mine.

Neither Amanda nor I are absolving teens who treat each other cruelly of responsibility.  But she’s right that the profoundly sexist culture of most American "coed" high schools forces many young women who long for acceptance to, as Amanda puts it, "trad(e) in solidarity with other girls for a handful of privileges."   The stunning pettiness of the "super blonde princess cheerleader" is a consequence of a culture which idealizes a very narrow, ultimately unattainable standard of female beauty and behavior.  Rather than do the difficult and painful work of rebelling against the ridiculous ideal that suggests that a junior high school girl ought to shave her legs every morning, the culturally-imposed rules about the body become a tool that desperate young women use to compete with one another in the hopes of receiving the validation they crave.  This does not make the "meanness" okay, but it goes a long way towards explaining why and how that "meanness" manifests itself.

I always share stories about youth group, so here’s another one.  A year or so ago (maybe more, I keep forgetting), we were having an "open discussion" where the kids get to pick the topic.  Somehow, "meanness" and "bullying" came up.  It was a mixed group of both boys and girls, but they quickly all agreed:  girls could be much crueler to each other than boys.  For that matter, the boys thought girls could be crueler to boys than their male peers!  I wasn’t surprised to hear this, and we just let them "vent" and share stories for a while.  Then, with what I admit was limited success, I tried to get the kids to discuss why it was that they perceived girls as being "meaner".  A few retreated to the nature argument:  "That’s just the way girls are!"  But a few were able to take the challenge and look thoughtfully at the role that our culture’s highly restrictive (and ultimately contradictory) rules for young female behavior play in creating this apparent "epidemic" of "mean girls."

Even in our post-feminist age, far too many young women are raised with three imperatives:

1.  If you’re a girl, remember that looks count for almost everything.

2.  Be a "people-pleaser".

3,  Don’t openly display anger.

The first rule creates a highly competitive climate in which status is determined by one’s appearance according to a highly-complex, frequently arbitrary, and ever-shifting set of rules about the ideal female face and body.  The second and third rules prescribe the socially acceptable ways in which this competition for status and male attention will take place.    The open and unabashed display of anger and other emotions is a privilege reserved for the dominant group: young men (particularly the athletic, but ultimately, all males).  Girls will have to "play the game" using less ostentatious methods, of which acts of appalling verbal cruelty — or degrading inspections like that administered by Amanda’s classmate –  are frequently the most potent of permissible weapons!

As educators and youth leaders, it is our job to help young people to question and challenge the unpleasant and unfair "rules of high school."  But we cannot place the burden on young folks alone.   Adults must take responsibility for their own rule in creating this viciously competitive culture, and take ever-more active steps to undermine the impact of these unwritten codes for male and female behavior. 

We will never be able to make adolescence easy and pain-free.  But when those of us in positions of authority see cliques developing, and when we learn of acts of deliberate cruelty committed in response to social pressures, we cannot succumb to the old lie that "that’s just the way kids are" or "girls will be girls" or "boys will be boys".  We’ve got to be willing to not only protect individual teens from bullying, but to work tirelessly to help all of our young people escape the brutally competitive and cruel world that is, for far too many, the reality of the secular, coed, public American high school.

I absolutely believe that it’s possible for adults to transform the ways in which their teens experience adolescence. It isn’t easy, but I am convinced it can be done.

Penguins

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First off, Amanda at Pandagon has an interesting response to my post yesterday inspired by "Sixteen Candles."

Sunday night, my fiancee and I stood in a long line at the Laemmle theatre here in town to see what surely is, in my mind, the best film of the year so far:  March of the Penguins.  We are rather mad animal lovers in our house; we are also devoted subscribers to National Geographic.  But we had never seen a film like this: every single scene left me gasping in awe at the filmmakers (who spent a year in the brutal conditions of the Antarctic) and at the beauty of the Emperor Penguins.   The film is narrated by Morgan Freeman, but I would have been happy to watch the whole thing without human voices, just listening to the sounds of wind and the water and the animals themselves.  (To be fair, the sounds of the penguins were apparently enhanced by foley artists, but that doesn’t detract from the picture at all.)

Please go see this film if you live in Los Angeles or New York or Europe (where it is already playing); it will expand nationwide soon.  Though it’s rated G, there are scenes that could disturb the very young ones, and move older sensitive folk to tears.  But it’s a profoundly serious film for all ages, and though I don’t usually turn a blog post into an advertisement for a movie, I’m doing so here today.  Honestly, I haven’t cried so much in a film since the last ten minutes of Lost in Translation.

For those folks interested in conservation efforts with penguins, check out the work of Falklands Conservation, which sponsors an adopt-a-penguin program on East Falkland.*  For 25 quid, you too can adopt a King Penguin, the closest relative to the Emperor Penguins of the film.  (There are no charities currently working on wildlife conservation in Antarctica, for understandable reasons.  Let’s hope that they are never necessary on our coldest continent.)  We’ve adopted a couple of penguins in our household at Matilde’s request.  Please see the film, and if you are able, consider a contribution to the work of Falklands Conservation.

*My father, brother, sisters and I are all British citizens.  But we also have Argentine cousins who would rather we call these islands the Malvinas.  I recall that back at our Easter gathering in 1982, there were some rather tense words amongst the family at the time of the war.  And as a fan of English football, there’s no team in the world I’d rather see beaten regularly than Argentina.

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“Sixteen Candles” inspires a reflection

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Today is one of the darkest days in sports:  baseball is on the all-star break; there is no football, basketball (NBA or WNBA), or hockey.  The Tour de France is on a rest day.  The Gold Cup of soccer is taking a day off.   No golf.  No major track meets.  No auto racing. This is,as far as I can tell, the single worst day of 2005 to be a sports fan.  Fortunately, I have all my college football preview magazines with which to amuse myself!

Anyhow…

My fiancee and I watched Sixteen Candles on television last night.  It’s one of those films ("Breakfast Club" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" are others) that helped define what it meant to be a high school student in the early-to-mid-1980s.    I had a fleeting crush on Molly Ringwald, as did half the boys I knew.  (I ought to use Google to find out what has become of her).

The film seems dated to me now; certain themes (ranging from racism to date rape) would be nearly impossible to portray in the same way in 2005.  That’s probably a good thing, overall.  But I found myself shifting uncomfortably during the scenes with actors Anthony Michael Hall and John Cusack (long before the latter was a major star.)  The two portray "geeky freshmen" obsessed with sex; last night for whatever reason, their depiction of fourteen and fifteen year-old nerds really resonated with me.

This will no doubt come as no surprise to any regular or occasional readers of this blog, but I was a very nerdy high school boy! (Click the link for an embarrassing photo.)  My clothes came from Sears (Tuffskins jeans, of course); I was nearsighted, slightly overweight, shaggy-haired and nonathletic.  Mind you, I didn’t have the miserable high school experience that so many self-proclaimed "geeks" seem to have had.  I had a small circle of friends who shared my interests in books, music, and politics.  (There were two kinds of brainy, nerdy kids in my school: the ones whose primary interest was in math and science, and the ones who were drawn to English Lit, drama, and government.  I was definitely in the latter group.  I’m not sure if we were any less nerdy merely because we carried around copies of the Federalist Papers rather than a slide rule.)  I became friends with many teachers, and was twice president of our little chapter of the very-nerdy Model UN.  (Junior year, we were Zaire; senior year, we were Peru at the state Model UN convention in Berkeley.)  But though I can say with all honesty that I enjoyed high school, it was not without its humiliations and disappointments.   And last night, for whatever reason, many of those unpleasant memories came back to me as I watched the film with my beloved.  I’m not sure why these memories are coming up now, though it is possible that my 20th high school reunion in October has something to do with it! 

My fiancee and I talked a bit last night about our very different high school experiences.  I always protect her privacy on this blog, but I will say that she and I did not travel in the same sort of high school circles.   She was a popular girl in high school; she was drill team captain and an accomplished club soccer player.  She was — and of course I’m biased — gorgeous as a teenager (and still is).   Before last night, we’d never spent much time talking about what sort of  cliques we belonged to in high school, and it was an enlightening conversation.

When I was in my late twenties, I went through a brief and rather nasty period where I quite consciously thought of myself as getting "revenge" for what had happened to me in high school.   When I was 29, I was in a brief relationship with a gal simply because she was a dead ringer for the most popular girl in my high school, a girl on whom I had had a mad crush but who had never given me the time of day.  I confess that nine years ago, I was quite a jerk.  I dated a former prom queen largely because she had been just that; I was consciously living out a fantasy from my adolescence, and this twenty-somethin’ gal was more or less a victim of that fantasy.  We broke up after a few intense weeks, and I’m pleased to say that years later, I was able to make amends to her for having intentionally "used" her.  To my surprise, when I told her about this, she laughed and laughed and said, "Hugo, after the way I behaved in high school, I probably had it coming!" 

Obviously, I’m well past the stage where I feel the need to prove that I’m not the chubby, awkward "nerd" that I was nearly a quarter-century ago.  But it hit me last night that so many of the young folks with whom I work at All Saints are going through the same sorts of insecurities that I went through.  Before I went to sleep, I brought into my mind about two dozen faces from my youth group: boys and girls; frosh and sophs, junior and seniors.  Some of "my kids" are, from what I can tell, very popular.  Others are on the fringes of high school life.  I began to wonder, and still am wondering, if I do a good-enough job paying attention to those kids who are more "nerdy", or more alienated.  I try very hard to spend an equal amount of time with each kid in the group each week (a daunting task sometimes).  But I wonder if my own life experiences affect how I interact with the seemingly "cool" and "uncool" kids.

I remember one night a few years ago when I was first leading a discussion on sex,  that the conversation quickly became dominated by a small group of older, popular teens.   Without always labeling themselves as such, these were the "experienced" kids.   I had opened up the room to open discussion about feelings and experiences, not realizing that the most sexually precocious kids in the room would quickly take over.   Too late, I noticed that many of the younger kids, as well as the less outgoing and popular ones, were dead silent.  A couple of animated, talkative senior girls had hijacked the conversation — and I had allowed it to happen.  Someone overhearing what we talked about in the lounge that night might well have assumed that all of our kids were sexually experienced and eager to share about it!   I forgot that in that room, there were as many teens who had "never been kissed" as there were teens who had already had sex.    A week later, during a follow-up discussion, I made a gentle and oblique apology to everyone for allowing so many of our young people to be left out.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s accurate to describe high school as a place where "popular=sexually active."  There are plenty of exceptions; some popular and attractive kids are proud virgins; some kids who are on the margins of high school society are quite experienced.  But I have noticed that my teens perceive that equation to be real, just as teens in my era (and in "Sixteen Candles") did as well.  For my generation of high school boys, losing one’s virginity before graduation was seen as the Holy Grail that would guarantee us admission into a "cool" clique of those who had "done it."  There was no more effective way to disprove one’s geekiness than to find a girl willing to have sex with you!  The homosocial desire for approval and acceptance was as much a driving force towards premature sexual activity as biological lust. For too many kids, perhaps boys in particular, the "popular=sexually active" equation is an unquestioned truth in secular high schools.

It took me many years (more than a decade, frankly) to come to terms with the humiliations and disappointments I experienced in high school.  Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted to work with high school youth was that I knew first-hand how unhappy a time it can be in the lives of American teens.  But I realize that I still have work to do. I must be vigilant about not giving more attention to the cool and the popular kids than to the awkward ones.  It’s a genuine effort sometimes to treat all kids the same; even youth group leaders pushing forty can be affected by subconscious messages that suggest that the pretty, the handsome, the athletic,and the articulate are more deserving of time and attention.  I know I do a pretty good job of dividing that attention equally, but there is still more I can do, and I resolve to do it next year.

Thoughts about sin and acceptance

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I just downloaded all of Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes, an album that would surely be among the ten I would take to a desert island.

I’m home from lunch at California Pizza Kitchen with the senior high youth minister at All Saints Church.  We talked about our plans for the coming year, which gets under way in less than two months.

Most of what we discussed is not for blogging, but this bit is:  we had a long chat about how difficult it is to challenge our teens to make morally appropriate decisions.

At All Saints, we do "acceptance" and "tolerance" very well.  Those are important values.  It is vital that we offer the fellowship of Christ to everyone who comes in the door.  This is especially vital for teens, who are chronologically pre-disposed to feelings of alienation.     Our motto, coined by our former rector, George Regas, is repeated every Sunday:  "Whoever you are, and wherever you are on your journey of faith, you are welcome here."   The first time I heard it, on Palm Sunday 1999, I burst into tears in my back-of-the-church pew.   I felt included and loved as I never had before. 

But there’s more to being church than welcoming folks in the door.  There’s more to church than telling the guilt-ridden and the marginalized that they are loved, that no one here will condemn them!  Our motto speaks of the journey of faith — but surely it’s our job to help people move further along on that journey, rather than only affirming them for just being along for the ride.  As a wise friend of mine used to say, "Jesus always loves people where they are, but He never leaves them there."  The adulterous woman in  John 8 is forgiven all her sins, but she also is told to go and "sin no more."    But we don’t talk that kind of talk at All Saints very often.  Forgiveness, we get.  Challenging people to transform in their private lives, we don’t do so well.

So when we encounter kids who are caught up in "sinful" patterns of behavior, do we have the courage to confront them?  (Hell, do I have the courage to even use the word "sinful"?) If we are to love them like Jesus, we have to do more than hug them and tell them we love them unconditionally; we have to be willing to "call sin sin" and challenge them to transform.  And that doesn’t come easily to me.   Hugs come easily to me.  Affirming words flow easily from my lips.  But challenging our kids about pot, underage drinking, or promiscuity is so hard! I’m reluctant to call our kids on their behavior for two reasons: one, I fear not being liked.  That’s the obvious one, but it’s also not as important as the second reason: I’m still  reluctant to make judgments because of my own past.  It’s simply not easy to tell kids not to do what I’ve done, particularly when much of what I did was pleasurable!

I don’t have a hard time working with kids who are caught up in self-destructive behavior.  I’m comfortable intervening with kids who are struggling with addiction, eating disorders, self-mutilation, or abuse.  When a young person is obviously trapped in pain, I’ve got no problem trying to do anything I can to help.  But there’s a colossal difference between confronting a kid who is miserable, and conscious of that misery — and confronting a kid about a behavior that doesn’t trouble him in the least. 

You see, I am still of the mind that real sin always feels real bad.   I don’t believe in total depravity like my dear Calvinist friends; I have a far higher regard for the human conscience.  Part of me continues to believe that when we are falling short of God’s best, He will make us aware of it.  But obviously, that’s not always true.   My upper-middle class level of consumption certainly feels good, and it wasn’t my conscience that challenged me to change my spending patterns!  I felt good driving an SUV and wearing Versace; I had to be confronted by others with the global consequences of prioritizing consumer goods over giving to others.  My own internal sense of justice was an insufficient compass to guide me to a more just relationship with money.  Isn’t it likely that our teens have equally faulty consciences when it comes to marijuana or oral sex?  Isn’t it my job as a loving shepherd to challenge them; even if I don’t proscribe certain activities, shouldn’t I be presenting a more authentically counter-cultural Christian message?

I’ve spent my entire adolescent and adult spiritual life running back and forth between communities that challenge me and communities that welcome me unconditionally.  I loved my time with a Communion and Liberation small group 15 years ago; they pushed me hard.  But they pushed too hard, and I got scared and ended up worshipping with a bunch of liberal Paulists until I left Catholicism entirely.  Years later, when I returned to Christ, I came to All Saints in order to feel welcomed.  At the same time, I hung around the folks at Lake Avenue and InterVarsity  and (especially) Chi Alpha in order to feel challenged.  Eventually, I joined the Mennonites; I was struck by their commitment to sacrificial living, social justice and personal holiness.  But my living arrangements with the woman who is now my fiancee were questioned by my new Anabaptist friends, and in a huff I stalked back to the Episcopalians, where no one would ever openly question my private life.

This has been a long journey for me.  I know that following Christ means leaving behind old patterns of living; it means surrendering autonomy and self-will.  And yet my self-will and rebelliousness are so strong! No wonder I am so drawn to working with teenagers, who so often — like me — oscillate between staggering selflessness and equally stunning self-absorption.

I’ve got some work to do in this area before I begin my seventh year as a volunteer youth minister at All Saints.

Reflections on London

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Some new pics from the Fourth of July are here.  Scroll down.

I don’t quite know what to say about the London bombings.  I will say that like many folks, I am more personally moved by tragedies that take place in countries I know well.  I’m a dual national, with a passport that identifies me as Her Majesty’s subject.  My brother and sister live in England; my father still carries the accent of his rural Berkshire childhood.  I’ve been on the Piccadilly Tube line on many an occasion.  Before 9/11, I’d never been in the World Trade Center; I’d only seen the Pentagon from a distance; this attack seems more "real" to me as a consequence, though in terms of loss of life, this was blessedly less severe.

Pacifism does not come easily to me.  Yesterday, when I turned on the television before dawn, I was settling in to catch a bit of live Tour de France coverage before heading off to breakfast with my friend Steve.  Instead, I watched the bombing aftermath, and felt the rage wash over me.  It’s a rage I felt on 9/11 as well; the desire to "hurt the hurters" was overwhelming.  Just for a moment, the thought coursed through my brain:  "Whatever we do in retaliation is okay."  Just for a moment, George W. Bush was fully "my" president again, with my unequivocal support for his war on terror.  That only lasted three or four minutes, but as I watched the images from the Edgeware Road early yesterday, I would have been happy to authorize any act of vengeance, no matter how bloody.

Today, prayers for peace and forgiveness, as well as for all the victims of terror, come more easily to me.  I’m fortunate by temperament, I suppose — I never stay angry at anything or anyone for long.  A moment’s blood lust passes quickly, but I can still feel the after-effects.   That kind of self-righteous rage is toxic for me, and even after I’ve calmed down, I can feel it lurking in my system for a day or two.  But I have to be careful: Scripture tells us that anger has its place and its function.  It’s dangerous, maybe even unChristian, to always preach peace when there is no peace — especially if what I end up doing is ignoring atrocities and widespread suffering in order to maintain what I think of as proper Christian emotional equilibrium!  Sometimes, I think I make an idol out of civility.  I’m reminded that calm reflectiveness is far less of a virtue than a commitment to justice and a commitment to protect the vulnerable.  Much to think about.

I will say that I was moved by the enormous racial diversity of London I saw on display yesterday.  Years ago, when I was visiting an old friend in Brixton, I overheard two American college students in the Railton Road:  "Amy, who knew there were so many black people in England?"  (I had no idea how these two ended up in one of the least-white areas of South London, but there they were with their ignorance on magnificent display.)   I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the grittier areas of both London and Los Angeles, and have generally felt safe in both cities.  I will say, however, that I’ve always felt that race relations seem more harmonious in London than here, particularly in terms of outward acceptance of interracial romances.    I realize that that’s just the personal experience of one white guy, of course, but my perception of greater safety and toleration in Britain is only reinforced every time I visit.

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More on Mireille, autonomy, and standing on islands

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I’ve been reading through the more than 100 comments beneath the post about Mireille and driving.  It’s been a very thoughtful discussion, and I am glad that Mireille herself has weighed in.

It is always dangerous to take one family’s story (told from one member’s perspective) and create universal truths from it.  It’s what I did in the original post, of course, but reading the comments reminds me of how difficult it is for us to fully understand what goes on inside other families.  I do appreciate Mireille’s clarifications, which have helped all of us in the thread to understand her situation better.

I’m struck by how much of this issue revolves around money.  Mireille is 23, and is living at home for the summer to cut expenses in the hopes of finishing college debt-free.  If she were financially independent, her father’s influence over her private life would be negligible; she is a legal adult, after all.   Indeed, it is Mireille’s financial vulnerability that allows her father to continue to dictate some of the conditions of her romantic life.  The old  "As long as you are under my roof, you will live by my rules" line impacts folks quite differently based upon the degree of financial autonomy that they enjoy!

I remember a few awkward summers in my college years.  Away at Berkeley, of course, I had no curfew; no one supervised my private life or questioned how I spent my time.  When I came home for the summers, my mother and I had a few minor tiffs as a result of my insistence that I be allowed to live by "college rules" when I was in her home.  For the most part, we were able to compromise, and for better or for worse, she was willing to grant me the same degree of freedom (if not the same degree of slovenliness in my room) that I enjoyed living on campus.  The summer after my freshman year, I convinced my mother to let me spend the night at my girlfriend’s house a few times.  As I remember (it was 1986, after all), Mom was not happy about it — but she also felt "silly" (her words) asking me to be home by a certain hour when she knew that I had no such restrictions at Berkeley.  I’ve often wondered if I would have had that same degree of freedom had I been a girl.

I’m not yet a parent, but I imagine that I will "parent" my kids much as I was parented.  The rules that were in place when I was still under-18 changed radically when I became a legal adult; I cannot imagine treating my 23 year-old daughter or son the way I would a 17 year-old.  Of course, I have the very great hope that my children will not need to live with their mother and me after turning 18.  As I’ve written before, I come from a family where everyone moves out at 18, heading off to college.  Some come back for summers, but most do as I did after my sophomore year, and move in with friends or stay on campus or do something to avoid moving back in with their parents for long.  I recognize that this desire for autonomy and independence may be culturally conditioned — but it’s a desire that I think is usually healthy and which I have, on more than one occasion, done my best to defend.

Of course, when I attended UC Berkeley in the 1980s, tuition and fees were less than $2000 per year.  I lived in the co-ops for just over $1000 a semester — with 19 meals a week included in that price!  I’ve seen how the cost of public higher education in this state has skyrocketed since my undergraduate days, and I bemoan how it has priced so many young people out of the invaluable experience of living away from home for all four years of their undergraduate careers.  It’s very clear to me that generous state support for higher education is the key factor in enabling young people to begin the vital process of developing independence and autonomy!   Heck, this is one of the key reasons I’ve always been fond of  moderate socialism: the greater state support for the poor and the young, the greater the chance that the young and the poor can live on their own at an earlier phase of life.  The power that Mireille’s father has over her seems to me to be inextricably linked to the high cost of public education in this state.

Here’s where I inevitably get tangled up in my own ambivalence and contradictory impulses.  My Christianity is mistrustful of the whole notion of radical autonomy, recognizing that that notion is more rooted in the secular Enlightenment of Diderot and Mill than in the Gospels.  But my own past experience and my own gut instincts tell me that financial independence is the sine qua non of real intellectual and personal discovery.   One  of my favorite books ever written, Forster’s "Howard’s End", nails this truth perfectly.  Margaret Schlegel, Forster’s protagonist, says to her younger sister:

"You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence … I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same … and all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders."

That’s what I want for my children. I want them to stand on a sure foundation of faith, but I also want them to stand on an island of money; not so much wealth that they can be permanently indolent but not so little that they cannot defy their parents with relative impunity.  If I could wish anything for the Mireilles of this world, it would be such an island.

Or am I, like the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels of Howard’s End, hopelessly elitist?

Thursday Short Poem: Payne’s “Self-Portrait”

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This little Craig Payne poem resonates with me for the obvious reasons, though it’s less "me" now than it was years ago.

Self-Portrait, 1998

He is actually very happy, which goes to explain
why unexpected tears fill his eyes.
His job is good, he’s a teacher. Humanities.
The terms stretch out, but pass swiftly by.
He is not good-looking—his face is quite bland—
but he is very funny, and kind.
He falls in love two or three times a day;
it goes away in an hour.
The poems he used to write aren’t readable anymore;
the ones he writes now are no better.
Thinking about politics, about his President, makes him angry.
So he thinks about politics all the time.
He loves his home town, where he grew up and lives;
he loves his wife, his child, his job:
This reads like a midlife crisis in verse,
he thinks. But I’m too young.
And besides, mortality doesn’t bother him,
any more than anyone else.
The Incarnation of Christ is real to him,
explaining all else, itself unexplained.
"Love Me above all others," Christ said. "If not,
you are not worthy of Me."
I am not worthy, O Lord.
He reads a Protestant Bible every single day,
and Catholic thinkers by night:
Gilson, Maritain, Thomas, Thomas, Thomas—
his child is named Nathan Thomas.
His wife—she loves him, exasperatedly—
barely kept it from being Nathan Aquinas.
The money he makes she handles. He knows
if it were left to him they’d be poor.
To be poor—what about it? To live without
the house, two cars, the insurance and books—
to live like Jesus, Who had none of these things.
He doesn’t think about it, at least not often.
He is actually very happy, which goes to explain
why unexpected tears fill his eyes.

I am not worthy, O Lord, indeed.

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