Signs & Wonders

Come, signs and wonders,
pour out on me:
A street sign, stop sign, anything
that could show me where I should be.
And while I'm talking wonders
I'll wonder why they seem so hard to see,
when the sensitive and wise tell me they're all around,
these signs and wonders.

Don't say it's obvious;
it's not, to me.
I know: the Word is in my mouth and in my heart.
But sometimes my heart is empty,
and if I speak when my mouth is full
that's something no one wants to see.
So I never miss a good chance to shut up,
if it's not obvious.

(At least she's here, but she is losing patience.
She's not alone: I'm losing patience too.
She can't be sure who she will wake up with on any given day,
or what strange gods I'll serve with breakfast.)

Come on you signs and wonders,
just lay it down on me.
Now I'm not one to shake a fist at heaven, but I'd try
nearly anything
to take this road I've travelled
and make it count for something
that's cleaner than a string of roadside billboards
declaring signs and wonders.

epic

It can be tough to make up your mind how to spend an unspoken-for Sunday, and moreso if the weather is in some ambiguous state like "scattered thunderstorms". Such was our situation yesterday. To go to church or not? Not; we haven't been to our UU church in a couple of weeks, but it's summer and they're cool with that; there was long-overdue yardwork waiting. But to mow or not to mow? To mow indeed, though there were a couple of brief cloudbursts before I was done. But then what to do with the rainy (or maybe not) afternoon?

Ordinarily we'd head for the neighborhood pool, but weather radar showed forbidding-looking spots of red and dark green possibly headed our way, so we thought about a movie. The only thing currently in theaters that we'd even consider taking our kids to see is Epic, and reviews have been mixed. My wife sifted through some of these before finally alighting on one that was, very possibly, the most helpful movie review I have ever read: A delightful animated woodland fantasy for undemanding families. Ten minutes later we were in the car headed toward the theater.

The eight-year-old loved it. The four-year-old claims to have loved it, although it's not clear to what extent she was just imitating her sister; she was all smiles afterwards, but occupied Mommy's lap for a large part of the movie. My wife enjoyed it, for what it was-- she has never been such a big fantasy fan, though she tolerates it better than sci fi.

Me? Oh, I was merely moved to tears.

Maybe you've seen the movie. Maybe you're thinking What?! Did you watch the same movie I did? I mean, OK, it was good fun, but... little faerie people riding around on hummingbirds? This is for grown men to weep over?

I see your point, but see, you were watching a delightful animated woodland fantasy for undemanding families. I was getting a flogging.

Did you look at the backstory? The protagonist (an older-teen-aged girl) comes to live with her estranged father after her mother dies. Why wasn't she living with him before? Because he spent all his energy in pursuit of evidence for the existence of the little faerie people I just mentioned. Many years before he had inadvertently driven away the woman he loved (and with her his own daughter) because he insisted on the reality of something that everybody around him thought was impossible and insane.

I found the parallels with my own life (or rather, with my own worst fears) to be rather striking.

Yep: I could not help reading this animated kids' flick as a commentary on the nature of faith. Specifically, the sort of faith that tears up families. Luke 14 faith. Of course the faith I have in mind is not about miniature "leaf men" but the reality of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God. Every professing Christian knows that when you say these things out loud, with a straight face and no nod to "myth" and "metaphor", many people will back away or at least try to change the subject. Now imagine the person backing away is your spouse.

To sum up, it was actually a pretty good movie. Lots of fun action. Lots of profoundly beautiful visuals. But what sticks with me, in my doubt, in my silence, is a scene near the end when the daughter and father (now vindicated in his odd beliefs after years of loneliness following the loss of his family-- courage or selfish stupidity?) are looking at an old picture of the two of them with the mother. And the dad says, "I always thought... if I could just prove it to her..."

If I could just prove it to her.

A room without a door

The moment men cease to pull against [the Church] they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it. But when that affection has passed a certain point it begins to take on the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair. The man has exactly the same sense of having committed or compromised himself; of having been in a sense entrapped, even if he is glad to be entrapped. But for a considerable time he is not so much glad as simply terrified.

- G. K. Chesterton, On Conversion

i cannot name this
i cannot explain this
and i really don’t want to
just call me shameless
i can’t even slow this down
let alone stop this
and i keep looking around
but i cannot top this

if i had any sense
i guess i’d fear this
i guess i’d keep it down
so no one would hear this
i guess i’d shut my mouth
and rethink a minute
but i can’t shut it now
‘cuz there’s something in it

we’re in a room without a door
and i am sure without a doubt
they’re gonna wanna know
how we got in here
and they’re gonna wanna know
how we plan to get out
we better have a good explanation
for all the fun that we had
‘cuz they are coming for us, baby
they are going to be mad
they are going to be mad at us

- Ani DiFranco, “Shameless”

For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.

 - Deuteronomy 30:11-14 KJV

The trouble

with being liberal, religiously or politically, is that almost by definition you have to be the kind of person who considers the other point of view. You Might Be Wrong. People who “know right from wrong” in the typical conservative way do not suffer from this disadvantage. They might be persuaded on details, but it’s impossible to be both a solid conservative and at the same time open to a ground-level shift in your thinking. Some points of view often labelled “liberal” are similarly entrenched (e.g. dyed-in-the-wool Marxists), but they belie the liberal label thereby; the operative principle of freedom is absent. Freedom is freedom to change. It’s hard to write good liberal rhetoric. If it’s presented truthfully, it’s going to lack the heroic edge, the certainty of God’s blessing in the face of adversity. It should also hope to reach the truth at any cost, and that’s surely worth the trade in poetic goosebumps?

“Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.”

—	G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

An opening

Interesting developments at my house around religion in the last couple of days.

My oldest daughter (7, soon to be 8, but precocious in many ways) professes to be "not sure" what she believes about God and religion, "like Mommy." She has recently become friends with a Jewish boy in her class. He has been given the opportunity to share some of the traditions of Judaism (e.g. festival days, food regulations, fasts) with their second-grade class now and then, and my daughter has always eaten it up.

Last night when my wife was driving her home from the restaurant where they grabbed dinner, my daughter told her that she "wanted to be Jewish." Of course we thought it was mostly because she wanted participate in the "different" holidays and fasts and what have you. But later, when her mother was putting her to bed, she expressed an interest in learning how to pray. (This is not really something we do at my house as a family.) So my wife called me upstairs and we all shared a short prayer. Yeah, it was pretty shallow. And yeah, it was awkwardly syncretic as my wife was simultaneously trying to explain her own informal system of meditation or internal "prayer". But it was an opening. And this morning she tried to help her little sister (four years old) say a prayer, too; and she reiterated her interest in Judaism, which I take as a step in the right direction.

Now here's the thing: I'm a cradle-Protestant Christianoid who's frankly unsure how far to trust the Church, or any church (though I try to confess Christ as God before my children when the subject of religion comes up.) But I do pray privately, and of late I have asked Jesus, Mary, and Saints Monica and Thomas More to work on my family, to draw us all to Christ and the Sacraments. It could be coincidence. It feels like an experience of answered prayer, or the beginning of an answer, and I thank God and all who have prayed for us.

I have an opening. Or, please God, He has an opening. This morning I pointed my daughter to the Old Testament as an obvious place to start learning about Judaism, but the only editions of the Bible I have to hand her are decidedly geared toward adults. So if anybody's reading this, please help me out with your suggestions! Ideally I need a Bible translation/edition (or maybe a collection of Bible stories?) that an academically-gifted 8-year-old will find grown-up enough to feel authentic-- she thinks she's too old for picture books, and anyway I want it to have some gravitas for her-- but it needs to be accessible enough that it doesn't require excessive fortitude to read through. Maps would be nice. Any ideas?

And if anybody who reads this blog has been praying for my family, please please PLEASE keep it up. I need all the help I can get.

A lonely expatriate

Here I was, once again thrown back into the world, alone in the turmoil and futility of it, and robbed of my close and immediate and visible association with any group of those who had banded themselves together to form a small, secret colony of the Kingdom of Heaven in this earth of exile.

No, it was all too evident: I needed this support, this nearness of those who really loved Christ so much that they seemed to see Him. I needed to be with people whose every action told me something of the country that was my home: just as expatriates in every alien land keep together, if only to remind themselves, by their very faces and clothes and gait and accents and expressions, of the land they come from.

 - Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 383

Oh yes. I hear you, Thomas.