Category: Words and Rabble

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Shoo, Bird, Shoo

The birds are back.

One small but inordinately vocal (and tenacious) feathered species has apparently added the Collier house to its annual Spring Virginia tour. Without making reservations but with plenty of brass, the little buggers descend on our alcove and set up house. Their intentions are focused: to mate and nest. I don't begrudge them their space; and I certainly agree that, given our stellar view of the Blue Ridge, it's a romantic spot for getting your groove on. However, we have a history now, and we've proven this doesn't end well.

It would be disingenuous of me not to confess that cute as they are, these birds are a pain in the tooshie. Their incessant, shrill chirping makes you want to gouge your eyes with a hot poker. Then do it again. A lovely birdsong is one thing. This sharp, metallic chorus is another thing altogether. And the shit, oh the shit – it's astounding the amount of mess a couple tiny birds can unload. If that ratio held for humans, I can't begin to fathom what changing diapers in our house would have been like. 

Besides the noise and clops of poo and the other filth the birds bring, there are altruistic reasons why I've decided that this time the birds can't stay. One year, a young toddler son (whose mother, by the way, had repeatedly told him to keep his grubby paws off the eggs) tried to sneak a small white pearl into his bedroom. He had lined a box with grass and twigs and hid it under his dresser. He wanted "to help the birdie grow." Needless to say, the bird did not come of age. Another year, our dog pounced on a nestling just after she cracked through her shell. Our boys are still working through the trauma. I could go on.

The cruel truth is that our house is not a gentle haven from which mommy and daddy bird can succor new life. Mere feet away from their chosen perch, we have a lush, sturdy tree they can inhabit, and I'm happy for them to do so. Only, not on the porch. Not this year.

But these birds refuse to take no for an answer. Yesterday morning, I gathered the ladder and cleaned out the beginnings of their 3 bedroom / 2 bath build. A couple hours later, I looked out only to see fresh foliage had returned. This has happened six times so far. Six times I've cleared out their sprigs, six times they've packed them back in. These chirpers are watching me, feathers crossed over their chest, saying, Listen, pal. I can do this all day. 

The story that keeps playing in my head is Jesus' parable of the widow who hounds the unjust judge until he caves and hands the woman her request. Since my options for characters I could play in the story are slim, I don't care to draw too many parallels. However, I do find my resistance wearing thin. 

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Those Sneaky Poems

Being National Poem in Your Pocket Day, today is the moment for letting words rather than the spare coins jingle in your pants or your purse or wherever you stuff things you want to carry with you for the day's adventure. I once thought poems as merely something that rhymed. However, because I've been given the good grace to have a wife and a couple friends who are poets – and because I've been knocked sideways by more than a few metered lines – I now know poetry to be more than repeating words finished with -ing. Poetry teaches us how to see and how to hear, how to observe and how to speak.

Poetry insists we watch for delicate distinctions, fully aware of how meaning can turn on the difference between a finch and a sparrow. Poetry coaxes us to nurture memory, aware that if we've forgotten old Moses terrified when the desert shrub struck flame, we won't encounter this splendid awesomeness when Whyte speaks of "the man throwing away his shoes / as if to enter heaven." Poetry provides us language that's as much about discovery as it is about stacking up facts. Of course, we'd have chaos if our tax forms were arranged in poetic verse, but wouldn't we have coldness and sorrow if our lovers and friends and our walks in the woods didn't play in things poetic?

Yesterday, Wyatt was discussing the Avengers, which led to a conversation about favorite superheroes. Wyatt ran through the list, outloud as he does. Noticing a pattern, he made an observation: "I don't really like girl superheroes. Well, I do like Cat Woman." 

"Why?" we asked. 

"I like Cat Woman," Wyatt concluded, "because of all the sneakiness."

That's one of the big reasons I love poetry: because of the sneakiness. Poems have a tendency to catch me when I'm dozing. They seem so docile there on the page, short and tidy, all mannered and in neat rows. And then that one line or phrase – a single word sometimes (syllable even) – and my head's buried in my hands or my heart's ripped wide. 

It probably seems plain enough why my writing self would love poetry so. However, does it strike you as odd for me to say that poetry affirms something about why I love the work of pastoring and the study of theology as well? To pastor, as I see it, is to be a resident poet, a poet for the parish. A pastor works his poetry amid the subtleties of babes and grandfathers, treacheries and joys, noting all the while that a sparrow is not the same as a finch. With this, studying theology (a curious attentiveness to God's story) is to ask questions and listen for nuance and to be swept away by beatific themes pregnant with possibilities. As Marilynne Robinson says, "Great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or saga." If our Christian teaching doesn't play well with poetry, we have most likely identified a problem. 

If all this is true, then we are desperate for poets, poets of every sort. We need women and men who live attentive to the life about them, their work and their family – which is to say, their art. We need brave and imaginative souls who see and hear and then help us see and hear. "The most regretful people on earth," says Mary Oliver, "are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time." I think she's right. Give it power and give it time. Please, for all of us.

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Be is Way Better than Not-Be

When I found my tracks in the snow
I followed, thinking that they might
lead me back to where I was. But
they turned the wrong way and went on.
                                          {Kooser and Harrison}

 

When we think of the questions we ask children when first getting acquainted, children of friends or neighbors or co-workers, it's typically a bland and predictable litany. Do you like school? Are you ready for summer? What games or sports do you enjoy? What do you want to be when you grow up? It's a wonder kids don't write us adults off as imbeciles, with our dim-witted conversational imagination.

My dad, ever a kid at heart, used to ask a child how old they were. It was a ruse allowing my dad to land one of his favorite jokes. It went like this:

Dad: So, how old are you?
Kid: 7
Dad: Really? That's great. When I was your age, I was 8.

Worked every single time. The child was always bewildered, but at least she wasn't bored. This curve ball provided a welcome surprise and the excitement of going off script.

Of course, asking a child – or a grown man for that matter – what they'd like to be when they grow up can invite a wonderful conversation that explores hopes and possibilities and fears, the things we might be too timid to admit if we're sticking to standard repartee. 

However, at some point (and I wish we could locate this precise point and blow it to smithereens), we cease living with a roused imagination of what could be and we commence a life defined by an austringing vow of what we will never, ever be. We are wounded and angered by another's imperfections. A parent, sibling or friend shatters our emotional cocoon, our naiveté.  Some of us suffer a thing far more vile, something that must be named evil. Others of us run up against the dark or embarrassing side of a community or a system we had once accepted uncritically. We feel duped, disregarded or mauled. Even more perilous, we learn to hate something about ourselves, something we've come to believe is too foolish or too simple or too sensitive. We've been dismissed or scoffed, and we vow never again. 

In response (consciously or unconsciously) to these disorienting experiences, we promise to never be that. Ever after, far too much of our energy and far too much of our person exists in reaction to whatever that represents. 

Living in reaction to something means that this something defines our questions and our direction; it sets the parameters of possibility. Our vision shrivels to a myopic little square. Your life deserves far more than a square. If we fix our attention on what we're leaving, we'll never have a wide view of the vast terrain stretching ahead. Instead, we'll just keep looking back, and we're bound to only walk in circles, a loop with arcs round that single story. We can never forget (nor should we try) what we're leaving. It's part of us. For good or ill, it helped to make us. Along the way, we may even come to see some of our experiences in new, mature light. However, the past is only one fraction of who we become. There's so much becoming yet to do.

A good and courageous and free life won't be lived when you're trying to not-be. You have to be. Take whatever truths or scars your story has handed you, take them in and listen to them. And then go discover new ones.

In the Bible God enjoyed giving people new names. And these new names had little to do with whatever they were leaving and much to do with where they were going.

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Spark

We have a cat in our house. I've never been fond of these coy creatures who strut about like they own the joint. However, Wyatt loves cats, and I love Wyatt. So on Wyatt's ninth birthday, we adopted a felis catus that had been abandoned in a cardboard box on the doorstep of our local vet. They couldn't nail down the cat's age, but she is well beyond kitten. They pulled most of her teeth, rotted as they were. We have no idea of the cat's original name, which was welcome news to Wyatt because this meant he could pick a new one. For a boy, naming your pet is half the reason for having a pet at all. We purchased a litter box and a couple toys and new feeding dishes. Spark took up residence in Wyatt's room, settling on Wyatt's bean bag as her nest and perch. 

We assume Spark has abuse in her background. She was skittish her first months in our home. In high school, a friend spotted a cat sunning on the sidewalk where we walked. He snagged the feline by the tail and twirled her, screaching as only a terrorized cat can, above his head in large, looping arcs. At the height of one of his whirls, he released the cat, catapulting the shrieking projectile toward the roof of a building near us. She survived the ordeal, but all that to say that the world can be cruel to the Sparks among us.

The beauty for Spark is that she's found herself a Wyatt, a boy who will hug her and talk to her and who would surely punch in the nose any ruffian who intended to toss her on a roof. Some mornings, Wyatt will come downstairs with his t-shirt covered in white cat hair, proof of all the play and love he's pouring on that little creature who has now found a place to belong. 

Each of us have a bit of Spark in our story. And, I pray, everyone of us has a Wyatt. 

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Subtlety

We're told the way of the world will be won by big players and big ideas. Cultural landscapes, so we're told, shift with the tremors of voluminous visions and cataclysmic bursts when a people or an idea swells to an irrepressible quake. We are told these things, and perhaps those who tell us know what they're talking about. There are even a few spherical truths that have transformed me. So, I won't argue. 

But I will offer an alternative account: my world turns on subtleties. That fresh path of freckles on Wyatt's nose. The coffee Miska made this morning, with extra grinds since she knows I prefer it stout. The friend bristling with anger but who, if you brush past the prickly and into the raw, you'll discover fear and maybe sadness too. That lone bird scooping the air with his broad wings. The tender curve of Miska's bare back. The midnight "I love you, dad," from a boy named Seth who can barely keep his eyes open. A God who became a man, a man with a name and a story.

On my run this morning, I stopped at a red light. A fellow walking to work downtown came up beside me. We stood there, ready to pounce on the flashing symbol telling us "Walk." He pulled out his ear buds and said, "I've seen you since the first of the year. You're doing a good job." My crosswalk mate noticed a face, a human. He pauses at the subtlety of a stranger. I'm glad he did.

Miska has these words from Mary Oliver up on our kitchen blackboard:

that light is an
invitation to happiness
and that happiness, when
it's done right, is a
kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.

What Mary's offering is subtlety, no way around it.

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Sins Still

In the car this weekend, Miska told Wyatt and Seth they needed to keep the noise in check when they got home.

"Why?" Seth asked.

"Because dad's studying," Miska answered.

"Why is he studying?"

"Well," Miska explained, "he's studying for a sermon."

"Oh…" Seth murmered, contemplating some ephemeral mystery before finishing: "Dad's the best pastor in the world."

The wheels were turning…

"You know," Seth added soberly, "Dad's like God to me."

There was no way that Wyatt, ever the stickler, was going to let this pass unchecked. "Well, maybe God's helper."

"Yeah," Seth said, reconsidering, "he still sins."

 

Children splatter extravagant love, unlike we adults who fastidiously measure our responses so as not to get carried away. Children also blurt out the truth, reminding us – whenever we get a little big for our britches – that we're not nearly so much the stuff as we pretend. Thank God for the children. 

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An Amish Way

In 1911, perhaps still hung over from the fumes of the Industrial Revolution or simply doubling down, Frederick Wilson Taylor penned The Principles of Scientific Management. "In the past, man has been first," Taylor said, "in the future the system must be first." Frederick believed that the system made the person, not a person the system.

I'll leave it to you to decide what you think of Frederick's assertion. I'll only say that there's no system I've found that can make my boys embrace their manhood or that can fuel tender love in my heart for my wife. No efficiency regimen I know of tells a friend "happy birthday, I'm glad you were born." The General System is not going to shut down sex trafficking in Bangladesh or Atlanta. Each of these requires a woman or man with heart and soul, a person of courage and character.

Contrast Frederick's musings with the recent PBS documentary on the Amish. Watching this piece carried me back to my childhood when we'd travel once or twice a year to Nappanee, Indiana, to have work done on our portable house. We lived in a forty-foot travel trailer, and the factory was in Amish country. We'd visit Amish Acres and stuff ourselves with family-style old world food. Amish Acres is not an actual Amish business, but rather, something like the Disneyland of Amish culture (an irony beyond measure). Still, we enjoyed it, as well as the Mennonite donut shop. I mainly loved all the black buggies and the posts for tying up the horses around town. To a kid who always imagined himself smack in the middle of a Western movie, it didn't get much better.

It would be a mistake to think of the Amish as simply Luddites who idyllically resist modern advancements. Rather, the Amish have made many of their lifestyle choices because of their guiding commitment to being a people who live in community. When grappling with cultural change and new technology, they wrangle with this question: how will this adaptation impact our community? They don't allow phones in their homes – not because they believe Satan arrives via electrical wires but because they believe that once they get accustomed to calling their neighbors on a device from their kitchen, they'll eventually stop dropping by to see their neighbor for a chat in the kitchen. If they need to talk to their friend, they have this odd hunch that it's best done face-to-face.

Amish don't use mammoth, gas-powered farm equipment because they want to depend on their neighbors, not a machine, come harvest time. The Amish don't own cars – not because they believe that hell arrives on wheels (they can ride in a car, they just can't own one) but because they believe that once their life conforms to traveling distances further than a buggy can carry them, they'll begin to work in far-flung towns. Eventually their family and communities will scatter. As one Amish man said, "If you want to love God — and live simply and close to the land — and if you want to live within 20 miles of your family your whole life, being Amish is a good way to do that."

I'm obviously not Amish. I couldn't be. It's not my life or story, not to mention the embarrassing fact that I'm completely incapable of growing facial hair for something as amazing as those Amish beards. But I admire the Amish. I admire their rooted sense of life and land and place. And I think Frederick Wilson Taylor was a doofus. 

 

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Risk and Love

I was a foolish, foolish boy. Miska and I had been dating plenty long to be at the point where a fellow needs to put up or shut up. Embarrassed as I am to admit it, I was in the grip of a selfish line of thinking: "There are billions of women in this world, and I've only met a couple thousand. Who's to say I won't someday, somewhere, meet someone better for me…?"

Who's to say… as if love comes announced from some external authority. Someone better… as if love takes shape by probability calculations.

Of course, I was to say. Love does not arrive at that final moment when, having all possible options closed and the edict unequivocally delivered, we finally limp to the altar and declare, after rummaging through every single alley, yes – you. Love leads the way. Love charges in. Love names the truth and then leaps after it. Love comes as a tender surprise, but then it asks us to surrender our mind, body and soul. Love knows nothing of the penchant for playing the numbers and hedging our bets. Love doesn't tamp down the danger; love sets the fire.

But my love hesitated because of fear. Fear of what I didn't know. Fear that I might be wrong. Fear of what I might discover later. Fear that new information or experiences might alter the truth I perceived. That fear, rational as it may have been, kept me from loving the one woman right in front of me, this mysterious, exquisite woman. I was a boy who had yet to become a man. I had yet to give myself to the glorious terror of love.

Love is the center of the universe. God's love for the world, God's love revealed in Jesus Christ. To be loved (and to love in return) requires risk. We hear God's call in Jesus; and we say yes – or we don't. Love will wait for us. Love will whisper to us and, at times, ravage us. However, love – if we'll have it – requires that we lay our cards on the table. Love will require that we leave behind our adolescent machinations and step into mature love, love that lays down self-protection and walks into the beauty and joy that only comes along the way, not before. There will always be other possibilities, a thousand reasons not to love. We might be wrong, we might. But God, in love, invites us to come and see. To take the risk and come and see.

In my young years, I held a naive conviction that I would marry someone I couldn't possibly live without. Now, I don't know what that even means. However, that posture selfishly offered me a kind of perceived safety that comes from absolutist certainty. It would require nothing of me other than the ability to see the obvious. It was a numbskull's vision of love. I discovered, however, that the true question was not can I live without Miska?, but do I want to live without Miska? That second question swelled with danger, but the answer I could not contain was no, god help me, no. And with that, I embraced the peril of love. And I became a man.

Personal knowledge is impossible without risk; it cannot begin without an act of trust, and trust can be betrayed. We are here facing a fundamental decision in which we have to risk everything we have. There are no insurance policies available. {Lesslie Newbigen}

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Puffles and Mercy

The boys and I were trapped in the car. We crept toward the red light that flashed green only for a nanosecond, ruefully congratulating the two or three vehicles that made it past while mocking the rest of us strung-out in the agonizing row. The boys were in the finest of moods, and by the finest of moods I mean the sort where every word (every. single. word.) ignites a small land war. I despise traffic, and the boys' fighting is, to my soul, like that chalkboard thing, the one with the nails and the scratching. The whole setup was lovely.

Given this perfect storm, I lost my cool. I may or may not have uttered the word "bitching" during my fatherly attempt to explain to my boys their delightful behavior. As part of my exemplary dad moment, I rashly decreed that they were banned from the Puffle Party. Certainly you don't know what such a thing as a Puffle Party might be, and I'm not much better informed. It's an online game of some sort and yesterday, March 15th, was the magical day when the entire Puffle world as we know it was set to metamorphose, or so I'm told. "It's a once in a lifetime event, dad," Wyatt cried amid contorted moans befitting the apocalypse or water boarding but surely not a missed Puffle Party.

I let the moment pass, and after finally maneuvering through that blasted red light, we eventually made it home. Everyone was sad and quiet. These are the moments when we parents wonder what it is exactly we're doing, how we got here and how to pull it back together. I played my part, but these boys don't have any halos hovering over their heads. They were awful. Double awful. Do you tow the line and make them pay the piper? Do you veto the judgment and risk bad precedents? Heck if I know.

I do know this, though. I'm a bit of a softy. And I always hope to err toward mercy and crazy love, if it's even possible to err on such things. You should check out a Puffle Party, it's wild in there.

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What Feels Good

A couple mornings a week, during my morning jog, I meet the motherly trio: two pregnant women, with their capri pants and floppy sun hats, accompanied by the matron of the bunch. They have babies in their belly and babies in the two strollers they're pushing. By the look of things, they won't have much sleep or sanity until somewhere around 2026. They are aglow, though. They greet me with smiles. They're far cheerier than I am, though that may have something to do with the fact that at the point I encounter them, I've just topped a grueling climb up the Hill of Retribution. I've given the Hill (the one with the mother of all inclines) this name because with each plodding, grinding step, it seems I'm atoning for some past sin.

But the happy pregnant women with their cute floppy hats walk the neighborhood and engage in lively conversation. They are spry and joyful, and they always greet me with a warm hello. If I were pregnant (and a woman, which I guess would be necessary), I'd want to be their friend.

Today, after we greeted and passed, I heard one of the pooch-bellied women say, "Whatever your body feels good doing, you should do." The words weren't intended for me (or anyone like me, I understand), but I received them.

There is an attentiveness to body and soul and space that creates an open-handed, leisurely way of being present in our world. Most of us are concerned with narcissism and nihilistic consumption. I get it. However, that's not attentiveness. Rather, that's a manic-like failure to tune into the truth in you and the people around you. When we are attuned to our yearnings and our rhythms, to our tears and our pleasures, to those places (and people) who either drain or infuse life – then we have wisdom about the path to follow and the path to avoid.

Miska has encouraged me to create a violence-free zone around my heart, a place where I refused to do injury to myself by the words I receive or the lies I believe. This is good wisdom. Some of us cling fiercely to the ways we've screwed it up – or might screw it up. We playback the conversations. We relive our mistakes. We see the badness in us, but we refuse to take in the beauty. If this is you, then take words from an effervescent pregnant woman, lugging a stroller down the street while carrying a small watermelon in her tummy: Pay attention to what feels good. 

Follow what's good and leave the rest behind.

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