Monthly Archives: June 2008

Of pears and plants, rebellion and depravity: a response to Augustine and Richard Mouw

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Fuller President Richard Mouw is perhaps the one modern theologian who can make Five Point Calvinism seem not only winsome, but reasonable.

The first “point” of Calvinism is the doctrine of total depravity, the notion that wickedness extends to our deepest self. It doesn’t mean, of course, that each of us is incapable of doing good. Total depravity, the way most Calvinists explain it, is the idea that there is no aspect of our person that is not touched by sin. None of us can, in this life, escape from the influence of wickedness by our own efforts; grace alone is the one thing that keeps us from being totally consumed by depravity.

In a post this month, President Mouw shares how depravity manifested itself in his own childhood:

Recently I went through some old family photos and saw a picture of myself riding a tricycle in the backyard of the first home that I can remember. I know I could not have been older than four years old at the time—probably closer to three—because we moved away from that home (actually an upstairs apartment) not long after my fourth birthday. My mother planted a small garden plot in that yard, and one day she worked with me to plant some seeds. She showed me how to dig holes and do the planting, and she instructed me about regularly watering the ground. She also helped me to block off that area with sticks and string, so that no one would walk on the planted area. And she warned me: “Do not ever step on this ground where you have planted the seeds, or the plants will not grow!”

One day when I was playing in that yard, I looked to make sure my parents were not watching, and then I stepped over the stretched string, and I deliberately stomped on the ground where I had planted the seeds. I can still remember the spirit of rebellion that motivated me. I was stomping on the ground precisely because I knew it was an act of disobedience. I also remember often lying awake in my bed in the weeks after I did that, fearful that the plants would not grow and worried that my rebellion would be revealed. I even prayed some childish prayers for deliverance, although I do not think they included any elements of confession and repentance—just something like, “God, please, please, make those plants grow!” I was greatly relieved when one day the green shoots suddenly appeared in the place where I had stomped my feet.

I tell that story to say that while I did not go from a wicked lifestyle to a pattern of holy living in my youth, I did need to be redeemed from a rebellious spirit that was grounded in my sinful nature. And it was not a rebellion that was motivated by any particular angry feeling I had toward my parents. It was a spirit of rebellion against authority as such, one that was grounded in a very basic desire simply to do something that was wrong.

It’s a similar story to the one St. Augustine, writing 1600 years ago, tells about his famous pears:

There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night–having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was–a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart–which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.

Bold emphases are mine.

My mother is a retired professor of philosophy, and was a good friend of the Mouws in the early 1960s. Year after year, she taught Augustine to her students — and though she didn’t always do so publicly, she regularly expressed exasperation with the way in which the bishop of Hippo (and now, her old friend the president of Fuller) interpreted childish rebelliousness as so inherently depraved. My mother, an atheist from adolescence on, found Augustine’s self-flagellation wildly unnecessary at best. As she pointed out, if he condemns pear-stealing with such venom and self-loathing, what vocabulary will he have left for greater sins? What words are left for murder, for rape, for acts of genuine cruelty against sentient creatures, when the strongest possible language has already been employed to describe a puerile act of third-rate vandalism? Continue reading →

Poor white boys: school leaving, male under-performance, and the disaster of masculine anti-intellectualism

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Regular reader Frederick often likes to send me “grist for the mill”, as it were, and last week sent me this Telegraph article: White working-class boys becoming an underclass. In one of those periodic reminders that the UK and America are very different indeed, the paper reports:

White teenagers are less likely to go to university than school-leavers from other ethnic groups – even with the same A-level results, according to official figures.

The gap is widest among male teenagers from poor backgrounds, raising fresh fears that working class boys are becoming the education “underclass” in England.

According to a Government report, just over one-in-20 white boys from poor homes goes on to university.

This compares to 66 per cent of Indian girls and 65 per cent of young women from Chinese families.

The full report is here, in a PDF file.

The causes of “male under-achievement” are many and complex, and this study does not concern itself much with them. But it does seem clear that whatever the matrix of influences that lead young men to underperform their female peers, feminism is unlikely to be one of them. The study notes that even among recent immigrant groups in Britain, groups in which it can be safely assumed that the Western model of liberal feminism has not yet been fully accepted, girls outperform boys:

Overall, 58 per cent of men from Indian backgrounds and 66 per cent of women go on to university. Among Chinese families, 60 per cent of boys and 65 per cent of women go to university.

Anti-feminist voices, under the guise of concern about the well-being of young men, suggest that contemporary pedagogy doesn’t meet the needs of boys, who aren’t suited to long periods of concentration. The underlying racism of that charge becomes apparent very quickly when one looks at the much-stronger performance of boys from, say, Indian or Chinese descent. For a very long time, white European men have questioned the masculinity of Asian men, seeing the latter as somehow more effeminate. When we posit the ability to concentrate and “do school well” as essentially a feminine trait, then bigotry and anti-feminism collude to explain why so many East and Southeast Asian lads are doing so much better than their white male counterparts. The implication is that Chinese and Indian males are “more like girls” than “real” (white) boys.

I do think we see a performance gap between boys and girls in many places in the Western world. Much of that gap is attributable, I think, to a kind of masculine anti-intellectualism that has developed in response to the relatively recent success of young women in school. In both British and American society we define masculinity as, first and foremost, the absence of feminine characteristics. “No sissy stuff” is the first rule of Western manhood. As long as girls were systematically excluded from education, boys showed great aptitude for intellectually rigorous activity. Once girls began to be admitted to the same schools as boys, and began to demostrate the same intellectual abilities, the life of the mind lost its exclusive masculine cachet.

Boys can sit still. Look at any group of young Marines on the parade ground; paying attention is something well within the range of masculine capabilities. “Boys can’t concentrate as well as girls” needs to go the way of “girls can’t understand science as well as boys”, discarded as a vile myth that shortchanges the full range of human potential with which each and every one of us is born.

The real problem, as I see it, is a culture of “masculine anti-intellectualism” that seems increasingly rife among certain sub-groups of young men. Young men, particularly in Britain perhaps young working-class white men, are more likely than their sisters to see little practical need for education. Too many of these young men under-estimate the value of education, and over-estimate their ability to “make do” on their own, perhaps by doing “a little of this, a little of that.” Many of these lads are filled with ambition, but with little sense of how vital formal education actually is to realizing that ambition. And too many of these young men are eager for a perverse kind of masculine distinctiveness with which to assuage their own anxieties. Dropping out of school to work gives them that masculine distinctiveness, particularly as school is no longer (as it once was) an exclusively male province.

Does everyone need a formal university education? Perhaps not. But I do lament the unwillingness of many boys to buckle down and work. Knowing that earlier generations of the be-penised and the be-Y-chromosomed were able to master complex material and learn by rote, I don’t accept that men as a rule can’t thrive as well as women in the contemporary educational model. The problem is a lack of strong male role models who value education, the problem is a culture that emphasizes to young men that anything of real importance lies in an arena from which women are largely excluded.

Dad’s DVD

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Another busy day. My wife and I were up in Santa Barbara yesterday; my sisters and step-mother hosted an intimate garden gathering at their home to mark the second anniversary of my father’s death. It’s hard to believe that two years have passed; we got to see the “final cut” of a DVD based on interviews done with Dad in the final weeks of his life. When he received his final prognosis, giving him only weeks to live, he consented to be filmed with his wife and children answering questions and talking about his life. We’re very fortunate to have his voice and his face preserved for us forever.

Interview the living, people, and preserve those interviews as best you can.

I’ll see if I can get another post up later today.

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Until Monday: short update

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I’m resting at home, watching the Croatia-Turkey European football quarterfinal. It’s well over one hundred degrees outside, and I have no desire to blog or do much of anything other than do something I so rarely do, which is sit on a couch and be, for a short while, a vegetable.

Posting resumes Monday. Come on Croatia!

UPDATE: 24 hours later, I’m once again on the couch, enjoying two consecutive relatively leisurely days. That hasn’t happened in I don’t know how long, but I shan’t feel guilty. I need this down time. And my wife’s flight lands at LAX in a few hours.

One of my favorite “looks” for myself is a fitted, carefully tailored button-down shirt, tucked into khaki or navy-blue trousers, with the sleeves rolled tightly almost to the elbows. Thanks to Juergen Klinsmann, the former Germany skipper, I see that it’s become a nearly-universal style among coaches in this year’s Euro football tournament. I cannot take any credit, but I am glad this very smart look has spread about. My shirts tend to be pink or pale lavender, however, rather than the crisp white favored by the managers.

Friday Random Ten: “What is this ‘sleep’ you speak of?” edition

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All over the place here. Love all these songs and all these artists… even though I’m a teensy bit embarrassed about #4. The bonus, #5 and #8 have been much played this week.

1. “The Sinking of the Reuben James”, Pete Seeger
2. “Silver Stallion”, Cat Power
3. “Don’t Follow”, Alice in Chains
4. “Wisemen”, James Blunt
5. “4th of July”, Shooter Jennings
6. “Farewell, Angelina”, Joan Baez
7. “Kol Ha Olam”, Chesed
8. “Kern River”, Emmylou Harris
9. “Alan Watts Blues”, Van Morrison
10. “Kid Fears”, Indigo Girls

Bonus Track: “Me Enamora”, Juanes
Bonus Track Two: “Swimmer”, Kathryn Williams

Schwarzenegger gets it right on oil: another reason to praise the recall

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For all his many faults, I want to say again that five years on, Arnold Schwarzenegger has turned out to be a much better governor than many of us feared. In some not intangible ways, the former movie star has helped move California farther to the left than would Gray Davis had the latter stayed in office rather than suffer the indignity of the October 2003 recall election. I certainly have a great deal of schadenfreude when I contemplate how frustrated many right-wingers in the state are with Schwarzenegger’s bi-partisanship!

The governor is on record as opposing the November initiative to overturn gay marriages, and he came out forcefully this week against any oil drilling off our coast.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday he opposes lifting a ban on new oil drilling in coastal waters, breaking with President Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Schwarzenegger, who has endorsed McCain’s presidential bid, said the federal offshore drilling ban was not to blame for soaring gas prices. A federal moratorium has been in place for 27 years.

“We are in this situation because of our dependence on traditional petroleum-based oil,” Schwarzenegger said in a statement that referred only to Bush’s call for the ban and did not mention McCain. “The direction our nation needs to go in, and where California is already headed, is toward greater innovation in new technologies and new fuel choices for consumers.”

He said that is how fuel costs ultimately will be reduced.

I was born in Santa Barbara. When I was still a toddler in that town, a Unocal rig off the coast of my birthplace leaked 200,000 gallons of oil, wreaking environmental catastrophe. Every Santa Barbaran over 45 remembers that terrible winter, and the scenes of devastation. The oil companies claim that their drilling techniques have improved substantially since then, but spills still happen even in first world sites. The safety improvements seem over-sold, and our coastline is not worth the risk.

Fortunately, with the exception of Santa Barbara County there are few other areas of off-shore drilling in the Golden State these days. After we left Santa Barbara, I grew up in Carmel by-the-Sea, one of the most beautiful spots in the world. I’d rather pay $25 a gallon than see a rig in Monterey bay.

And whatever his myriad shortcomings, our good governor agrees with me.

A run aborted, a rabbit cradled

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It’s 6:30AM, but I’ve already been up for over two hours. I went out early to do an eleven-mile loop through the hills of Pasadena and La Canada. While running near the Rose Bowl, before dawn, I came across a small wild rabbit that had just been hit by a car. She had one broken leg (with obvious massive fractures) and was sitting quietly in the road, helpless.

It was one of those “Oh God, why me?” moments. I’m ashamed to say that I stood there for a second, trying to decide what to do, fighting the impulse to continue my run and let another car — or a dog — finish the little creature’s life. But of course that isn’t what I could do. I sat in the road with her, talked to her for a while, and then gently stroked her. She tried to escape, ineffectually, and I could see she still had some life (as well as pain and shock) in her eyes. So I gently scooped up her broken body and carried her home. It was a mile and a half back home, and on that walk, I waited for the little one to die. So many wild creatures die quickly in these situations; prey animals usually relax into death quickly after major trauma, part of their defense mechanisms against enduring pain. But the little grey girl, so much like my chinchillas, nestled against me, still blinking, heart still beating, whiskers still moving.

With the Humane Society closed, I drove her down to my 24-hour vet in South Pasadena, wrapped in a towel. The after-hours receptionist started giving me a spiel about the office’s institutional reluctance to treat wild animals; I’ve heard that speech before. We had what in diplomatic circles is called a “frank exchange of views”, which involved my repeated requests to see the doctor on call while waving my Amex card with my free hand, insisting that I would happily pay all charges. The doctor did examine the little girl, and gave me the news I was fairly certain I would hear — the massive compound fractures were very serious, and though she still showed signs of energy, her chances of making a decent recovery from such a rear-leg injury were rare. Dogs and cats can do three legs; rabbits and chinchillas have a much tougher time when they lose a rear limb. The vet and I agreed to euthanize the rabbit, and that was done just minutes ago.

I’m still in my sweat-soaked, blood and tear-stained singlet. I’ve got to jump in the shower and go off and teach three classes, have coffee with friends after school, hit the gym for a make-up treadmill run in the early evening, dinner with other friends in the later evening, and chinchilla “out time” before bed. It will be a busy day.

I could not save this little creature’s life. But I did all that I could, all that I should have done. Death is part of nature, but cars aren’t. Had I come across an injured rabbit in the wild, I might have gritted my teeth and moved on, knowing that its little body would be food for a hungry predator soon enough. But where a human has inflicted the injury, a human must do the rescuing to the best of his or her ability. I could not save this rabbit’s life, but I know she died a gentler death than she would have otherwise. And though I know the terror that we people strike into small wild mammals, I am convinced that on our walk home, as I sang softly to the little broken girl in my arms, she found some tiny degree of comfort in the warmth of my body and the softness of my voice and the stroking of my trembling fingers.

I’m not sorry I missed my run today. I’m grateful I got the chance to be there for this creature to the best of my ultimately insufficient ability. In the end, all we can do is all we can do. I will have the feel of her weight in my arms with me for the rest of the day.

Note: I have now opened comments on this entry, but anyone who makes light of the death of an animal, or even hints at misplaced priorities, will find themselves banned.

Thursday Short Poem: Peacocke’s “Child and Toad”

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I have a basic rule: if a poem makes me cry the first time I read it, it ends up on the TSP. Meg Peacocke’s lovely offering puddled me up. I have loved toads, both literary and real, and I have known how heartbreaking it is to lose that childlike relationship with nature.

Child and Toad

She would lean and reach in
to the hollow root slowly
as far as her elbow
and stroke the toad’s chin
and in the waiting afternoon
he would carry his yellow bulk
out of his place of dark
to throb in the unwanted sun
giving his eyes to light,
his cool pale pads of toes
his mouth lipless and wordless
and the skin of his throat.

If the ancient stump
is there lodged in the bank
of the leafy paddock
where we made our camp,
perhaps he still crouches
breathing secret hours,
days, seasons, years,
still dozes, still watches
the light’s transformation
from his earthy seat
beside the hollow lane.
Hunker down, toad.
She won’t come again.
Hunker down, heart.

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“Scrubbing the calendars of every conceivable risk”: Carolyn Hax on trust and fidelity

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Leslie very kindly sends me a link to this Carolyn Hax column that ran in the Minnesota paper. Carolyn responds to a young man who has broken off a relationship with his girlfriend over her refusal to give up her (platonic) friends of the opposite sex. After some general remarks about the importance of honesty, Hax opines:

…you were hiding, too, behind that ridiculous opposite-sex boycott. You were hiding from the very real risk every couple faces, that one of you will fall for someone else. People who love and respect each other do so not in a vacuum, but in a world populated by others — some of whom, inevitably, will prove tempting.

If your relationship can’t survive that, it can’t survive, period, no matter how thoroughly you scrub each other’s calendars of every conceivable risk.

Emphasis in the original.

“No matter how thoroughly you scrub each other’s calendars of every conceivable risk” is a terrific line, and I am going to borrow it regularly. Hax is on to something very important: despite our best and worst efforts, we can never — thankfully — control what an adult romantic partner will do. Part of being in a real relationship, a real marriage, is honoring the omnipresent possibility that your partner could make a different choice. For some, that reality is too terrifying to contemplate, so they stay in denial; for others, that reality is so terrifying that it turns them into over-controlling snoops. And for others, that reality is part of the risk of what it means to love someone. We cannot be vulnerable to the possibility of joy without being concomitantly vulnerable to betrayal; it is axiomatic that intimacy and risk are nearly perfectly correlated. To the extent that you are unwilling to take on the latter, you assure yourself of not having the former.

My wife is somewhere in central Africa at the moment. A classic ESTP and a successful businesswoman, she travels a great deal (sometimes without me). She’s beautiful and gregarious, and every day she meets and works closely with handsome men and gorgeous women in what is our town’s most famous industry. She has excellent boundaries, or so I believe; the ring she wears is an outer symbol of a profound inner commitment, one that I am confident radiates forth from her. Mutual friends have said to me that they have seen my wife in social situations (such as “girlfriend weekends” in Las Vegas) where I wasn’t present, and that she was exuberant, extroverted, and — in her words and actions and aura — evidently married. I like hearing things like that.

My wife could be meeting all sorts of men on her trip: hot young European businessmen in the British Airways T1 lounge, dynamic Ugandan tour guides, impassioned volunteers with NGOs in Kigali or Kampala. Some of these men will be cuter than I am, younger than I am, better muscled than I am, wittier than I am, and so forth. But they won’t be the unique package of Hugo-ness to which my beloved has pledged her fidelity and her love, and I trust in that love and in her good judgment.

I meet all sorts of attractive people in my world as well. I’d like to think I exude a certain level of married-ness (uxoriousness?). I was a pretty damn good flirt in my younger years, and I consciously avoid being flirtatious with women (or men) these days. Though I always wear a wedding ring in public unless I’m working out, I am fairly certain I project a clear “taken” energy even when that David Yurman band is not on my left ring finger.

Better than most, I know marriages can end. A promise given on a wedding day is not, in and of itself, surety of everlasting faithfulness. For me, fidelity is a choice. It was a choice I made when I first decided to stop seeing other people and be “exclusive” with she who is now my wife. It was a choice I made again when I asked her to marry me, a choice I made when we were married, and a choice I make day after day after day.

The other day, I was in a coffee shop I don’t normally go to, playing with my iPhone, which I still don’t understand. An attractive woman near my age also had her iPhone out, and we started talking about our mutual frustration that the “new” model was coming so soon after we had purchased the soon-to-be-outdated ones. I was getting ready to go to Pilates, so I was in workout clothes with no ring on my finger. At one point, I caught “that vibe” from the woman in Seattle’s Best Coffee, the vibe that suggests at least some initial interest. And I made the decision that comes blessedly easily to me these days: I dropped a reference to my wife into my next sentence (remarking about my beloved’s far greater technological facility.) The tall brunette deftly picked up on it, and in that unspoken and yet obvious way, withdrew “the vibe” without the slightest hint of incivility. We chatted for a few minutes more, and off I went.

Bottom line: I make choices every damn day to honor my marriage. I have other options, my wife (younger and lovelier than I) has far more. My happiness and security are not predicated on controlling who it is that she talks to. My goal is to take all of my sexual energy and direct it towards her, and no one else: that means fidelity in fantasy as well as in body. She has told me she does the same, and I believe her. It would devastate me if I found out it were otherwise, but I am smart enough to know that joy and growth are contingent upon two things: my own trustworthiness on one hand, and my radical willingness to be open to devastation and betrayal on the other.

Carolyn Hax nailed this one; brava, sister woman.

Reprint: Sailboats, Thanksgiving, and Growing Up Loving Lesbians

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This post originally appeared September 21, 2004. Nearly four years later, it still seems timely.

I’ve been thinking about four women who formed two couples in my childhood. I’ve been thinking about Jane and Carla, Christine and Rachel. (No, not real names). I’ve been thinking about them in terms of explaining how it is that I, a hetero man, became so focused on gay and lesbian rights.

Until my parents divorced when I was six, we lived in Santa Barbara (my father taught at the university). Most of my parents’ friends were academic couples. Somehow, early on, little Hugo figured out that adults seemed to come in pairs, just like my mother and father. In my life, it was obvious that sometimes a pair could be two women. (If my parents had any good gay male friends, I don’t remember them). But I do remember Jane and Carla vividly. They had a sailboat, and one particularly happy memory from my childhood is of sailing out from Santa Barbara on a weekend afternoon, Carla guiding the boat, Jane and my parents laughing and watching my baby brother, me munching on chocolate. I felt happy and loved and safe surrounded by these grown-ups who loved us and each other.

The last Thanksgiving that we spent as a family — before the divorce — was, as I remember, a small affair. My parents invited just one couple: Christine and Rachel. I was only six or so, so my memories aren’t clear. But I remember being clear on the fact that Christine and Rachel went together the way my mom and dad went together. I had no idea what sex was, or what being a couple really entailed. I just knew that most adults paired up, and that it didn’t really matter whether men were with women or women with women. What mattered was finding another adult to be with. That seemed to be very important.

Though our early childhood memories can be deceptive, it seems to me that these four women were around at least as often as any straight couples my parents knew.

I haven’t seen any of those women for years. My parents divorced, and I moved with my brother and mother to Central California. It wasn’t until I was in early adolescence that I realized what the nature of those women’s relationships had been. I was perhaps 13 when, in the course of a serious and thoughtful discussion about homosexuality, I rather innocently asked my mother if she knew any lesbians. She laughed and explained about Jane and Carla, Christine and Rachel. I was floored, and then realized “of course!” The word “lesbian” was used as a laughing pejorative by my male friends, who discussed the graphic details of women’s sexual relationships with each other with a mix of excitement and revulsion. To be able to connect it to these four women whom I had loved and felt safe with was a profound awakening.

The very word “lesbian” to me still conjures up Carla and Jane’s sailboat (that is, when it doesn’t conjure up the residents of a Greek island in the northeastern Aegean.) I’ve got quite a few lesbian friends in my life today — as well as gay male friendships. Indeed, some of the closest relationships I’ve had with women in my adult life have been with lesbians. While the stereotype of an older generation of gay women is of folks who were deeply mistrustful of men (often with damned good reason), I note that a great many younger lesbians today are able to form enduring, affectionate, truly honest and “platonic” friendships with straight men. I don’t think we’re going to get the straight man/lesbian version of “Will and Grace” on TV anytime soon, but we may be on our way.

I’ve wandered from my topic. Really, it isn’t much of a topic at all. It’s just that when I think about same-sex marriage or other homosexual issues, I flash back to these women from my childhood. To me, who they were and how they lived seem utterly normal, healthy, and good. It goes without saying that seeing these four women with each other did not harm or undermine me in any way.

And even now, when I hear words like “unnatural” or “immoral”, I think about real people whom I loved and who I believe loved me. I think about sailboats, Thanksgiving dinners, and chocolate. And when folks start condemning or pathologizing women and men who lived and loved like Jane and Carla, Christine and Rachel, I get very, very, very angry.