I am a fan of Annie Dillard. I read her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek like some people eat dessert, thoroughly enjoying myself. And I laughed my way through her An American Childhood, brooded with her in Teaching a Stone to Talk, and learned from her in The Writing Life. So when her latest book, The Maytrees: A Novel, came out in paperback, I read it straight away.

The story is an unusual love story in that Dillard through her main characters, Maytree and Lou, ponders, probes and pokes at what is lasting love? It can’t just be biological (sexual) thrill because old people fall in love. Poets try to capture it, but all poets are meaningless until one experiences love. “Love so sprang on her [Lou], she honestly thought no one had ever looked at it. Where was it in literature? Someone must have written something” (31). Science fails to grasp lasting love, chalking it up to adrenaline. “Lasting love makes no scientific sense after the kids can hunt and gather… . That it [lasting love] was outside science’s lens did not mean it did not exist” (129-130). Like most lovers, “Lou and Maytree saw their love as unique. Of course they rarely fought; she rarely spoke. They both knew love itself as an epistemological tool.”

I found the book cumbersome to read in places and I freely admit that it could just be me. I am not in the same Northeast, Cape Cod culture in which the story happens. Also I admit Dillard used some words I have never read and didn’t know their meanings, but I kept reading anyway. Annie has an intriguing, artful way of using words and you feel like she is leaning over your shoulder as you read and at times says “Gotcha!” Reading on to experience these moments is the gravitational pull of the Annie Dillard adventure. Here is one describing Lou who went into a self-appointed solitude: “Lou hoped to scandalously live her own life. …She only wanted to hear herself think. …Maybe someday a thought or two would come. In the meantime she cleared the landing strip” (133). Another amazing two sentences: “Now she knew he woke. The room seemed to get smarter” (32).

Annie Dillard is 63 years old. She is at the leading edge of the Baby Boomers, many of whom are following her into the last 20 years or so of life. To have an artistic, accomplished author of her witty skill craft a story about love-growing-old is a gift to readers everywhere and of any age.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Sensitive to Smell
by
John W Frye

They could have heard
a feather drop.
Quiet. Still. An eye blink a thunder clap.

She snapped the frail neck
of the valued jar.
Surprising, captivating smells assault their senses
pushing back musky odors of weary men
resting from the dusty heat of a turbulent Jerusalem day.

One of the men is Jesus,
anointed alive for burial by her.
“Outrage!” snort the Twelve,
calculating the cost of her crime.
“Beautiful,” replies Jesus, “she is gospel worthy.”
Timing, her most sensitive gift.

The Bethany Leper smiles, too, nodding his approval,
as alabaster pieces lie on his floor.

Popularity: 12% [?]

CONTEXT MATTERS

Have you ever been bored silly listening once again to the flight attendant rattling off the routine “…in case of loss of air cabin pressure, an oxygen mask blah, blah, blah…”?

How can a life-saving device be considered so boring? Next time you’re on a jet, look intently and with great interest at the flight attendant as the message is given. You will make a lasting friend because everyone else is ignoring the sound counsel as they put on their Walkman headphones or read a newspaper or fall asleep. Act interested and the attendants almost go into cardiac arrest.

Yet the question remains: how can a life-saving device be considered so boring? One word: context. I suspect that should the cabin pressure actually drop at 30,000 feet and those little yellow masks make their real debut, they will instantly become objects of supreme interest. Context, my friend.

I’ve been musing about how the USAmerican suburban life renders the life-saving gospel of the kingdom of God almost as boring as a flight attendant’s speech when we’re safely taxiing along to the runway. USAmerican comfort and materialism serve to blind many of us to the exigencies and emergencies assumed by the gospel of the kingdom. Our numbing context filters out what makes kingdom survivability possible. For us, almost every New Testament imperative to “Watch out!” and “Be alert!” and “Stay rivited to Jesus” (Hebrews 12:2) comes across as bland as “…pull the mask toward you and place the strap around your head… .” We read our morning snippet from My Utmost for His Highest. We yawn and then read the paper or watch TV or play another round of golf. All is well…in the context.

What makes My Utmost for His Highest an enduring devotional classic? Context, my friend. Oswald Chambers wrote during a time of war. He served as chaplain to Australian and New Zealand troops in Zeitoun, Egypt. He wasn’t writing in and from the comfortable suburbs.

Would we have Henri J. M. Nouwen’s profound book The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming if he had stayed as a Harvard professor and had never lived with the poor in the barrios of Bolivia and Peru or had never served the multiply-impaired at L’Arche? Context, my friend.

JESUS AND CONTEXT

I have been paying attention lately to the Gospel of Mark. It’s a dangerous thing to do. If (and it’s a big if) we are deeply attentive to context, then the life of Jesus is radically reframed for most of us. Why?

We have been conditioned to view Jesus as the idyllic good shepherd who wanders the Galilean green hillsides and rests by still waters. Why, what a beautiful suburb Jesus lived in. Jesus, the One who makes friends (except for that dastardly Judas), and shows such sweet, sweet compassion toward men, women and, of course, the little children. Jesus, the One who teaches such lovely, heavenly moralisms on how we can live the really good life. In most pictures in our churches Jesus looks like the Breck girl with his long, flowing hair and sweet face. Isn’t it such a shame that gentle, beautiful Jesus was so misunderstood and mistreated? Shame, shame. We have no clue about interpreting Mark 13 other than in some fantasizing, dispensational “end times” way. Why? Because what Jesus is describing fits no context we know. We know, however, Jesus just had to die for our sins so that, if we believe in him, we can go to heaven when we die. So nice, so clean, so tame.

Ask people in blood-splatted Belfast if that’s the way they see Jesus’ life. Or those who survived apartheid South Africa. Or those who survived Hitler and Stalin. Read the diaries of the Christian martyrs who, fleeing the Roman persecutions, lived in deep caves, dying for Jesus rather than voicing allegiance to the State. Go anywhere besides USAmerican suburbs and you’ll experience a different context. Your comfort-filters will slip and suddenly Jesus and the Gospels explode with meaning. Things get messy fast. Mark 13 becomes survival instructions. You can’t escape the sight and smell of massive amounts of blood in the dust.

Jesus, from his earliest days of public ministry, was a marked man. Marked for death (Mark 3:6. See also 11:18; 12:12; 14:1-2). Had there been “wanted” posters in those days, Jesus’ picture would have been on every corner lamp post. Jesus lived urgently. Get that? Urgently, not frantically. He was a man quickly on the move to accomplish his aims. He didn’t kick back after a rough day and watch American Idol. He didn’t fuel up his SUV and drive to Disney World with his friends. He lived alertly. He kept watch. Sometimes, when the plot thickened, he slipped the trap set for him.

Take a look at the disciples’ finger nails…if you can find them. They were chewed to the quick as they followed the man whom the government described as demon-possessed, illegitimate, insane, deceiving, traitor and a Galilean nobody.

Please, Christian leaders, make sure you discover and define your “discipleship principles” in that context or you will miss the Jesus Way completely and lead people astray. “Follow me and duck for cover when needed” is an appropriate paraphrase of Jesus’ call to discipleship.

OUR DANGEROUS COMFORT CONTEXT

We USAmerican believers have been emasculated by popular, suburban theology. We don’t know how to live the improper life. The kind of life Jesus lived in Galilee and Judea and for which he died. We don’t know how to live as outlaws. We older ones will sell the upcoming generation down the river in order to preserve the tidy faith and comfortable life we’ve always known. How sad is that? Very, very sad.

If sometime soon, we lose cabin pressure in the jumbo jet of USAmerican Christian piety, many people I think will die for lack of Life.

Popularity: 20% [?]

It’s that time again! Time to offer some of my new terms for the ever emerging USAmerican theology.

sipphony–the sound of people sipping in unison their tiny cups of Communion juice

megalobiblia–the compulsive need to carry a really BIG Bible

proleperous–Jesus’ tendency to heal lepers

loafquacious–feeding thousands of people with five loaves of bread

golfertory–a foursome made up of pastors

dazzledermatitus–when a human face shines like lightning

treeophany–climbing a tree to see Jesus

sermocide–dying as Paul preaches way too long (Acts 20:9)

theofanny–Moses seeing the “backside” of God

How about you? Do you have any new terms for us?

Popularity: 19% [?]

Sweet with Age
by
John W Frye

They live on property
near the valley
of the shadow of death.

This man I know who weeps
involuntarily when he remembers
90 years of life’s kindnesses.
He’s seen war and the damage of war.
He’s worked hard and believed well.
He wants to outlive his aged wife
so he can care for her to the end.

This woman I know
whose labored breathing scares her.
Who likes independence, not the limits
of a hospital bed. She likes to
drive her car and has the best cookies.

This other man I know
whose wife died two years ago
and who says, “I’m lonely a lot now
in my house.” Who gets in his car
and visits lonely widows of his
dead friends. Who embraces and weeps
with a man whose wife is aged and ill.

A rice paper-thin veil separates these
time-seasoned ones
from eternity’s landscape.
They remember things and laugh,
and cry, but do not seem to regret their journeys.
In their wrinkled faces I still can see the life
that sparkled in their wedding pictures.
They call me “young man” and I like that.
They are sweet with age,
porous to God and others.
They are free from scrambling to make it
or to be somebody.
They are at ease with the uneasy sounds
of the final curtain falling
on this play called life.

They remind me that the dark
shadow of death valley
is cast by the great,
shining light of God’s love.

Popularity: 20% [?]

You’ve probably read the “why did the chicken cross the road” jokes as written by famous people.

Buddha:
If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Bob Dylan:
How many roads must one chicken cross?

Mark Twain:
The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

And…

Ernest Hemingway:
In the rain. To die.

Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed is posting about “The Greatest American Novel” which he contends is Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

I read the Old Man and the Sea at least once a year, too. Setting aside Hemingway’s tragic outlook on life where the center of the universe is inhabited by “nada,” we must admit to his brilliant innovation in writing. Growing up on this side of Hemingway’s death, most of us (baby-boomers) don’t feel the massive concussion of Hemingway’s literary genius.

How can you get in touch with Hemingway’s daring contribution? Simple. Read a page or two of any of Charles Dickens’ novels, for example, Great Expectations. Then read a page or two from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Crisp.

Sparse.

Lean.

In the rain.

To die.

One of my favorite, crisp short stories by Hemingway is “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.”

Read it here.

Popularity: 23% [?]