Tolle Lege

The other night I dipped into the correspondence between Shelby Foote and Walker Percy in a book which covered the lifetime of a long friendship between the two. The following day, I heard the news that Foote had died at the age of 88.

Speaking of books, the introduction to Anne Tyler's novel, Back When We Were Grownups, is a delicious worm on a hook:

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.

She was fifty-three years old by then - a grandmother. Wide and soft and dimpled, with two short wings of dry, fair hair flaring almost horizontally from a center part. Laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. A loose and colorful style of dress edging dangerously close to Bag Lady.

Give her credit: most people her age would say it was too late to make any changes. What's done is done, they would say. No use trying to alter things at this late date.

It did occur to Rebecca to say that. But she didn't."

Defining the Damned

“The God of Genesis is characterized in part by the pleasure he takes in what he has made. ‘And God saw that it was good.’ The worldview of the envious – and to a certain extent, of the lustful and avaricious too – runs counter to God’s vision. Nothing they see is good, or good enough, or else nothing they see is enough of the good. In other words, you can never please them, which is as good a definition as you may get of what it means to be damned.”

Garret Keizer, The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin

Living With a Wee Bit of Imagination

The latest Lorica article is a reflection on Finding Neverland, Hebrews 11 and the life of imagination.

The Balm of Gilead

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”
Marilyn Robison, Gilead, 243

Father Abraham Has Many Sons and Daughters

God’s first word to Abraham is a call to obedience, “Go.” As a command it is unambiguous. Pack your suitcase. Put your home up for sale. Move out of the neighbourhood. The summons can only be satisfied by action. The heart, however, has a perverse skill in creating ambiguity where none exists. And so we linger (Lot’s wife). We laugh (Sarah). We improvise our own schemes of what ought to be done (Abraham).

Thomas Wingfold, the minister in George MacDonald’s novel, The Curate’s Awakening says, "...the most precious answer prayer can have lies in the growing strength of the impulse toward dreaded duty, and in the ever-sharper stings of the conscience.”

Wisdom speaks. How often we temper what must be done into what may be done, or still yet, what may not be done. How often the corrective mechanism of the conscience is impaired by the corruption of our desire.

The duty before us, our present obligation, is dreaded because it includes a hard step along a narrow way through a small gate. And yet, as Jesus says, that way is the only way that leads to life.

Watching Baseball in the Mid-Life Crisis

The Cardinals are presently hosting the Boston Red Sox and it gave me occasion to remember a road trip I recently made.

Two years ago I feigned an early mid-life crisis so I could justify driving all through the night to watch the St. Louis Cardinals play the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. It happened this way. I had just made the friendship of a guy who was coaching my son’s Little League baseball team. Wes told me that he and his wife, Shelly, were avid baseball fans and together they liked to visit a different ballpark every summer when they took a vacation. I told him I had the perfect road trip for him to make. A person could travel to Boston to watch the final game of the Cardinals-Red Sox series on a Thursday. Then, he could hop down to New York to watch the Cardinals play the first game of a series against the Yankees. A fan could see three historic franchises in the span of two days. At the time, those games had an added importance in that the Cardinals hadn’t played either of those two American League clubs in the past thirty years.

From my end of things, our conversation was just chit-chat, friendly banter. But Wes went home and invested in the idea. He stayed up late that night checking for airline tickets and game tickets. The following morning Shelly called and asked if I would have any interest in making a trip with Wes. That was Saturday morning. I delayed giving them an answer. The idea was enticing but highly impractical. I figured it was a good idea for someone else, just not me. They called again Sunday after church. Wes and Shelly discovered that airfare was too expensive on such short notice. But we could make the trip in Wes’ brand-new Corvette. He had spent Saturday afternoon waxing the car in the event that I would take him up on the idea. Shelly found tickets on eBay and we had just a few hours to make our decision.

After discussing it with my wife, I decided to make the trip. Three days later, on a Wednesday evening, we left Columbia at 9:15 p.m. Well-stocked with junk food and caffeinated beverages we began the 1,135.8 mile trip to Boston. Wes and I took turns driving though neither of us slept. We drove all through the night, only stopping for a total of 45 minutes to refuel, drain our bladder and stretch our legs. We finally arrived at our destination – Fenway Park and its famed green monster. The first game we sat in the right field bleachers and watched the Cardinals defeat the Red Sox in 13 innings.

After that, we slept a few hours at a friend’s house in Boston. Then we got up early and drove to New York. We arrived there at the break of day and parked our car outside of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. We took the subway to Manhattan, toured the harbor, visited the World Trade Center site, ate at Carnegie Deli and walked through Central Park. Later that night we saw Roger “The Rocket” Clemens defeat the Cardinals in a game of historical importance. Clemens reached two milestones that evening, becoming the 21st player in baseball history to win 300 games and the 3rd player to strikeout over 4,000 batters in his career. After the game we made the long trip back to Missouri, arriving in Columbia late Saturday evening.

I’ve already started planning my next mid-life crisis.

Cellular Apocalypse

Have you ever experienced a vibration in your leg or chest or side and thought that someone was trying to call your cell phone, only to discover that was not the case? I am not alone in this experience. Others I have asked attest to the same phenomenon. This leads me to suspect that in years to come scientists will identify all sorts of deleterious effects of carrying cell phones on our person. Our biophysical response mechanism will be completely altered. We will end up in nursing homes with our legs nervously twitching, our arms reaching for something that isn’t there. The dining area will be one giant cacophony of dissonant sounds, the patients madly humming ring tones as an unavoidable reflex action.