Signposts

Am I the only one who wasn’t impressed by Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, or were you also unmoved?

I mean, I sat down, I furrowed my brow and I listened intently to almost the whole thing.

Ordinary listening is difficult. Listening to an inauguration speech is excruciating.

It takes enormous effort to keep the mind focused.

I began to think about how intently I was listening. This is bad.

You can’t listen to somebody while you are thinking about how hard you are listening.

Try it.

Anyway, I brushed off this second self and returned to the presidential mouth as it moved to produce sounds intended to stir.

And what I found was this.

The gravitas Obama sought eluded him. The calls for service and sacrifice that he issued were, I think, lost in the celebrity worship.

Here’s an analogy: People on Dr. Phil’s TV show always end up nodding their heads and saying, “Yes, Dr. Phil. You are right. I am a hopeless loser who had no idea how to live until you told me what to do.”

Dr. Phil might be right on some things. But I swear, the rabbits on the show would jump into a blender if he told them to.

And I swear that the Obamaphiliacs do the same with their man.

This is hardly the kind of clear-headedness people need to deal with their malaise.

And do you remember Obama talking about how we must return to traditional American values of hard work, honesty, fair play and the like?

Since when are these traditional American values?

In the last 20 years, traditional American values have been to overspend, go into massive debt and pursue the easy life, by whatever means necessary.

Maybe the values Obama described were true of an earlier time, but do they still signify?

I don’t think Obama really comprehends the devaluation that has taken place.

As the speech neared its end, Obama kicked up his rhetoric several notches until he began to preach.

This was my cue to notice the ant crawling by my shoe.

I noted the peculiar nasal snuffle of a certain co-worker in the cubicle next to me.

My brain went into Frankenstein mode.

“Hard work.” Yes. hard work good. Must hard work. “Fair play.” Yes. fair play good. Like fairness. Fairness wonderful. ” “Tolerance.” Yes. Must tolerate. Cannot not tolerate. No tolerate bad, very bad!

Rhetoric doesn’t soar anymore. I fancy Obama thought he was George Washington or something, delivering a stirring speech in a time when speeches really stirred.

The term “stirring speech” has lost its meaning. As have words like “fair play, honesty, hard work”, etc.

They are strange syllables, sounds which you suspect ought to carry a certain meaning, but it slips your grasp.

Perhaps these linguistic husks can be revivified. Perhaps they are beyond recovery and must be scrapped.

I get the sense that Obama doesn’t really understand the true predicament Americans are in.

Nor do they.

Kierkegaard said that the true nature of despair is not to be aware that you are in despair.

Sure, we know we’ve got economic troubles, but do we understand that were are living in the middle of a jumbled heap of cultural ruins? That so many trustingly look to experts to fix their problems?

I’m afraid that people are going to turn the Obama administration into the governmental version of the Dr. Phil Show.

Obama good. Like Obama. Obama gooooood, heh heh! Obama friend. Obama rescue. Need Obama. Want Obama.

I hope I’m wrong.

Because if I’m right, were in deep doodoo.

“In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to me, ‘Flee like a bird to the mountains?’ For lo, the wicked bend the bow, they  have fitted the arrow to the string, to shoot in the dark at the upright of heart.”

Thus, David, in the biting opening to Psalm 11, cuts through so much utopian nonsense I’ve been fed throughout the course of my American life.

I take refuge in the Lord.

Don’t tell my that if I can achieve a certain state, that if I can live in America, and have great material wealth, and have clean streets, and freedom of speech, and peaceful transitions of power, that the pain of existence is removed.

Don’t tell me, and I have been told this, that Americans have banished the falleness of man, that evil and death and violence and suffering are reserved for dark countries in Africa that nobody’s ever been too.

I can go to Florida when I’m old, live in Sunset Acres on hole number nine, the weather fantastic all the time, and the falleness will hound me (actually, perhaps with a greater vengeance, since I’ve done everything within my power to banish it.)

Don’t tell me that if I move to this city, change to this job, marry this woman, have these kids, take this medication, that the lonely pilgrim way of the Christian wayfarer has been abolished.

Even in America, even in the midst of great prosperity, the Christian is still a wanderer, still a discomfited pilgrim, searching for his true home.

In the Lord I take refuge.

It is becoming ever clearer that there is no real refuge in the American Way.

The American Way has been one of overspending and overconsumption and utopian materialism that has gotten a lot of people into a lot of debt and a lot of related trouble.

This is a good time to be a Christian, because,  if our priorities are right, we can show people where we’ve hopefully been all along – with one foot in the kingdow of God, not worried about prosperity per se.

Would that we could all be like the Apostle Paul right now! Remember how he said it did not really matter to him whether he had nothing or was drowning in wealth?

If we are wealthy, then we are wealthy with the abundance of Christ.

If we are suffering, then we are drawing into the fellowship of Christ’s suffering.

Either way, our time, resources, money, energy, is Christ’s.

But we are not so naive as to shut our eyes to the evil and suffering around us.

In fact, like Christ, we are asked to bear the burdens, to “make up what is lacking” in Christ’s suffering on behalf of the world.

So the American Christian is called to be discontent, all the more so because of his general prosperity.

And we believe that – even as we work for good – the ultimate victory over evil can only come from God.

After all, he created the world, he affirmed it as good.

And, after it fell into sin and evil, he promised to redeem it.

So, without self-deception, without BS positive thinking, the Psalmist boldly proclaims that God has not given up on his creation.

That he still loves it, especially his most glorious creation man, and that he will redeem it.

The writer of Psalm 11 affirms this almost defiantly, in the face of persistent evil.

Here’s the glorious ending to a Psalm that started with faith, passed through sorrow and returned again to faith:

“For the Lord is righteous, he loves righteous deeds.”

And then the joyful kicker, the thing that Christians yearn for with a yearning so intense it hurts:

“The upright shall behold his face.”

Tolerance is a word I’ve come to dislike.

So much so, I almost wish we could ban it from usage.

Why? Because the meaning has been so battered and abused, it has hardly any content left.

One very popular meaning of the word tolerance is that any and every viewpoint should be accorded equal weight.

So, if somebody says the world is flat, well, they are flat earthers, and our job is to tolerate them, perhaps nod our heads and say, “Yeah, that’s a very interesting perspective you have there.”

Not! If you find a flat earther, and you do nothing to correct her views,  you’ve done nothing noble.

Rather, you’ve left sombody in ignorance, and now it’s on your conscience.

Which points out the ludicrosity of this commonly held understanding of “tolerance.”

An older meaning of tolerance – the one that got usurped by the current one – did NOT mean that you affirmed everything coming out of somebody’s mouth.

It was more, I think, along the lines of, “I think that view is hogwash, but if you persist in it, I won’t harrass you.”

In other words, let’s agree to disagree.

The new meaning of the word is really a cynical assertion that there is no objective truth to guide one in answering the question “How should I live?” 

So then the Christian, who claims that God has acted in a certain way in history to rescue the entire human race, is automatically thrown into the “intolerant” category – which surely is one of the cardinal postmodern sins.

This postmodern person is contantly checking herself to make sure she is sufficiently tolerant to avoid censure.

But then, strangely, people start acting as if justice, goodness and beauty really mean something.

I think this is best seen in the negative case.

Do we ask for tolerance of terrorists as they approach us with a bomb strapped to them? Oh no! The most dedicated modern toleraters run for cover, grateful that somebody (police, military, firefighters, ordinary citizens, whomever) is willing to stop tolerating and start stopping the bomber from hurting people.

So the postmodern mutation of “tolerance” collapses into laughable absurdity.

But the better, older definition has its own shortcomings.

It carries with it the negative connotation of merely putting up with somebody’s behavior, but perhaps secretly disliking them.

It can easily become something condescending and belittling, i.e. “I think you are absurd, but in the interests of smooth relations, I’ll show my nobility by tolerating you.”

This meaning of tolerance is neutral, it is mechanical and it is most certainly devoid of love.

One of the best illustrations of this for me was having roomates who were basically strangers. We  put up with each other for mercenary reasons, but there was no real fellowship.

How I hated that!

This is a far cry from what St.  Paul was talking about when he instructed Christians how to relate to other Christians who didn’t behave exactly like them.

Did he want them to tolerate one another as they held their noses in disgust? No, he wanted them to embrace one another in fellowship, to rejoice in their differences, to recognize that the eye needs the foot and the foot the eye.

This is about as far away as you can get from the wretched superiority-inferiority implications of the old word “tolerance.”

Imagine if John had written, “Beloved, let us tolerate one another.”

The old word “tolerance” is part and parcel of the falleness of man.

The love that Paul wanted Christians to show one another, the love that he himself demonstrated (think of his moving statement that he would be willing to be condemned forever if his fellow Jews might be saved), was infinitely removed from tolerance.

If fact, as Paul understood it, Christian love is a harbinger, a breaking into the present, of the fulfilled kingdom of God that is to come.

So down with tolerance!

May there instead be actual, genuine, unmistakeable love among all Christians who “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”

This weekend, country boy decided to take a trip to the big city- the top of Russian Hill, to be exact, a few air miles due south of Alcatraz.

Now, ordinarily, I never would have gone to Russian Hill, probably never would have known that it existed.

The  is enough to terrify the timid – a 21-degree slope I made the mistake of stopping midway up in my Corolla with a worn-out clutch.

Then there is the perennial parking problem. Driveways are separated by postage-stamp-sized chunks of curb crammed with bumper-to-bumper vehicles.

If you see an opening, however small, you wedge your car into it.

If you do not carpe espacio, your fate will be to drive around in concentric circles farther and farther away from Russian Hill, eventually weeping and gnashing your teeth as darkness descends and you end up going the wrong way down a narrow street with angry San Franciscans telling you to go back to the farm where you came from.

Yes, San Franciscans have little patience for my gawking up at tall buildings, my weaving uncertainly through the bewildering array of downtown streets, my Mr. Magoo like cluelessness.

Except one, that is: Adrienne Klein, who lives atop Russian Hill and is the only good reason I can think of to venture into the urban maw.

Adrienne is not one of those hardened San Franciscans with their God-damn-get-out-of-my-way-I-have-three-pedigreed-pooches-to-walk attitude.

She has a beautiful lightness of being, an earnestness, a sensitivity, a quiet, that rises far above the crazy human logjam and takes me to a place of rest and joy.

It is pleasantly odd to be in her home atop the Hill and experience the silence. The house is on a walking street – really a sidewalk, and it is sandwiched between larger houses and apartment towers in such a way that they act as a sound barrier.

The home  is a reflection of its inhabitant. Simple, clean, and full of ambient rays.

Adrienne is one of the few people in my life whom the mere sight of puts a huge silly grin on my face.

Usually, there are so many barriers we humans throw up to fellowship, so much calculation and modification and guardedness.

But with her, there is joy.

How to understand this? Where does this unspoken bond come from?

Surely we are made for fellowship, and surely we get closer to our true humanity in the presence of one another.

And yet … the joy I know with Adrienne is is tempered with the knowledge that there is a mysterious distance between us that must not be violated.

If I try to get too close, to the point of near possession, I go where I have no right to go.

She is God’s, and not mine. 

It is paradoxical but true: To love someone truly, you must not be too attached to them.

And it is also true that the closer I tried to be to her, the more I became aware of my own shortcomings and problems, issues which throw up barriers to communion.

But still there was delight, stubbornly returning to reopen the ego’s cage door  every time it clanged shut on me.

We talked deeply into the night, we rode bicycles around in a spell of incredibly warm California winter sunshine and we relished one another’s presence.

But we also knew, without speaking it, that the source of the relish was our grounding in God.

Adrienne would not call herself a Christian.

But she shows the love that Christian doctrine struggles to point to.

In its own way, such unconscious goodness gives a far greater glimpse of the glory of God than doctrine does.

And so we found wisdom, me, Christian boy from a young age, reciter of Scripture verses in services, son of missionaries, strong believer in dogma.

She, daughter of Berkeley, bleeding heart liberal, deep practitioner of yoga and decidedly undogmatic.

Both of us children of God, yearning for salvation, steadfastly seeing goodness even as we openly acknowledged the world’s corruption.

I left for Hanford as late as I could Sunday night. I drove down the dark emptiness of Interstate 5 with a deep sense of satisfaction, having freshly known the beauty and the power and the love of God.

Uniquely, irreplaceably, and preciously manifested in the person of Adrienne Klein, who is, in fact, my San Francisco.

Marxism isn’t a complete load of crap.

Sure, dialectical materialism is a pile of heaping dung.

But the tension between management and peons under capitalism is no figment of the imagination.

I’ve had a rude introduction to this tension in my own workplace.

My primary manager subscribes to  the “absentee landlord” theory of management.

The field workers are left to manage themselves for months, then the manager suddenly shows up, yells a lot, metes out harsh punishment based on rules known only to her, and disappears.

Fearing the manager’s wrathful appearances, some of the workers develop elaborate suck up strategies to make it appear that they are on the manager’s side, when in fact their real identity is elsewhere.

Then a strange things happens.

The ability to brown nose becomes the measure of success, rather than actual productivity.

This is no way to work or live.

Such punitive and fear-based management is a sharp reminder that authority is authority, that managers have power and that that power can be exercised as effective leadership or it can be turned into a kind of corporate despotism.

Unfortunately, I think it  has become more the latter than the former in my workplace.

Fortunately, me and most of the other peons have become subversives.

It is a wonderful thing to be immune to the big stick of fear that is management’s default strategy.

In such a situation, it helps not to have a mortgage hanging over your head or a family to feed.

It is difficult for such people to speak their mind to their superiors.

Obviously, the best way to express dissatisfaction with management is to exit the company - cheerfully, happily, and preferably with a roar of laughter.

Getting fired in some situations isn’t a bad thing either.

Either way, my colleagues and I dream of moving on to better things.

I used to think that rebellion was  something evil.

Now, I see that one should be rebellious against certain things. That it is human to do so. And that if you don’t stand up against things that should be resisted, you will lose your self respect.

Long live the truth.

Even in a fragmented postmodern context, it is there, still to be discovered, by those longing for an anchor point.

May our time of free-floating confusion see people who engage in the right kind of rebellion.

Not mindless rebellion, but rebellion toward good.

“Who am I? Why am I here?”

This immortal line, uttered by Admiral James Stockdale during a vice-presidential candidate debate in 1992, was the funniest political moment of my life.

But it could just as easily be seriously applied to many people without roots in our highly individualistic, commercialized society.

Once people leave the bonds of home and strike out on their own, they face a situation of ever-shifting alliances and allegiances, focused mainly on individualistic premises and seemingly infinitely malleable.

Identity becomes a calculation, rather than something intrinsic.

For many people, there is no history. Family connections do not really hold, because they are based on childlike need, and the link evaporates once the need is over.

I know men in their late 20s and early 30s who are either living with their parents or psychologically and materially dependent on them. They are reluctant to break the bond, because they know what a vacuum is out there.

There is little sense of duty to carry on civilization. Why bother, when norms have crumbled and you have lost a sense of who you are?

For many, civilization itself has lost its value.

Identities are assumed and discarded like commodities.

Am I Sexual Man? Sexual stimulation and eroticism are the only things that can be called real in relationships, if indeed we are defined by what science can demonstrate.

Many have turned to sex in an attempt to satisfy their deepest hunger. They have attempted to compress the full range of human desires into an orgasmic function, with disastrous results.

Think of how much violence can be traced to someone leaving someone they used to sleep with.

Am I Intellectual Man? Does my identity consist in being able to demonstrate that I am more intelligent than others, that I have risen about the common herd of dolts, the mass I am destined to manipulate and rule over?

Or perhaps I am Commercial Man. My objective is to  be constantly dissatisfied with what I possess. My job is to believe the advertized lies of corporate America, and engage in a never ending loop of consumption in the belief that fulfillment is just around the retail corner. My finest moments are spent rooting through piles of stuff at Marshall’s, my eyes glazed over, not paying attention, vaguely ill-at-ease, but unable to pull myself away.

How about Violent Man? I am endlessly competitive, always looking for a scrap, defining myself by who I can beat, who I can best in combat. I love horror movies, mixed martial arts, football, and, of course, warfare.

No, no. I am Religious Man. I believe that I have found the faith that is a better path than all the others. The practitioners of those other belief systems have fallen into deception and confusion. I, on the other hand, possess the truth. I attend services constantly, my speech is a kind of godspeak that is endemic to the crowd of believers I huddle with.

We spend most of our time talking about the disturbing trends among “secular” people.

Ah, but what if my identity is rather in Christ, who taught no religion, but rather did something that defined who I am and who I will be?

I maintain that the assumptions of evolutionary theory (that we are the product of randomness) are absurd when applied to human beings. We are created beings, we have a creator, and our creator wants to be in fellowship with us.

The only way to ferret out the false identities hurled our way is to be grounded in the foundation of being itself.

Perhaps we do have a real human identity after all.

But you have to seek to find.