Archive for the 'religion' Category

What are your secrets?

Published
by
Dave
on April 27, 2006
in midlife and religion
. 5 Comments

Last Sunday�I heard a sermon by Verne Arens that got me thinking even more than usual. The gist of Verne’s message was that when we reveal our inner flaws and scars to others, we create a basis for real human interaction. Only when a person is willing to share some secret (deep or not so deep)�can one feel that one really knows that other person.

This got me to thinking about my own secrets. No, I don’t think I’m going to reveal them here. The blogosphere is too public. There are (or could be) people reading this with whom I’m just unwilling to do that kind of sharing.

But there are facts in my personal history that, for some reason or other, I haven’t necessarily chosen to reveal even to the people closest to me. Nothing dramatic. I wasn’t imprisoned for dealing drugs at an early age. I’m not secretly gay or bi-sexual. I don’t have information the CIA would like me to hold onto. Just little things. Things that might embarrass me if I recalled them.

Okay, here’s one. It’s the only one I’m letting go today, and you all get to read it: I was about seven or eight when I was in the third grade, since I was born in October and skipped the first grade. One day in third grade I wet my pants in class, just�sitting right there in my seat in school. My teacher was a mean old witch. She had made it�clear to all of us kids that we would not be allowed out to the restroom, and I really had to go, and finally I just couldn’t hold it any more. It was one of the worst moments I can remember from my childhood. I had failed utterly to control my body.

It’s the only time this has ever happened to me, but it remains, 45 years later, one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.

We all have them, these nagging little secrets. There are a lot of reasons we don’t want to give them up. They might be simply embarrassing, or take us back to a moment of embarrassment from long ago. They might cause us to be perceived as something other than the way the people closest to us see us.

Or there might actually be professional consequences. When Valerie Plame was outed as a CIA agent by Dick Cheney or Scooter Libby or whomever, with the knowledge of Karl Rove or George Bush or whomever, it ended her career.

In today’s Washington Post there’s a story about the Rev. James Moran, a priest who was sexually abused as a young man. When he tried to talk about this openly during Holy Week, when he tried to share this secret and thereby share his humanity, the Catholic Church first reprimanded him, then removed him from his position as a hospital chaplain.

That’s a real loving church, eh? That’s a great way to show Christ’s love for the shunned. Push one of your own onto the street for even remembering and talking about what happened. Keep the secret, above all else.

Dan Brown in the news

Published
by
Dave
on March 14, 2006
in books and religion
. 1 Comment

This morning’s Washington Post has a report of a plagiarism trial involving Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. (I have railed against this lazily written book before in these pages.)

According to the report, Brown was called as a witness in a lawsuit brought against his publisher (not Brown himself) by a couple of writers who claim he lifted the structure of his story from their non-fiction work. He finds their claim “absurd” and says he drafted the outline himself in 2001 in his parents’ laundry room.

I cannot tell from this report what the merits of the case might be. I observe, simply, that plagiarism is a lazy tactic often used by lazy and unoriginal writers. I have observed this in my 20 years of college and high-school teaching.

And, of course, I’ve earlier argued that The Da Vinci Code is a very lazily written book. I’m not saying he lifted the plot from Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s work–I have no idea one way or another. I’m just saying I would not be at all surprised if that turned out to be the case.

The Post Style-section article, by Kevin Sullivan, has the rather sarcastic and bemused tone of so many Style-section pieces, and seems to assume that Brown is the victim of money-grubbing star chasers. I guess this is to be expected, since Brown and DVC are the flavor-of-the-week (flavor-of-the-decade?).

Too bad. It would have been much more interesting to read a bit more about the merits of the case, rather than Brown’s “exasperated” answers to “a line of questioning as compelling and clear as a toaster warranty.” Kevin Sullivan describes the attorneys and the judge as “[wearing] … august black robe[s] and … white wig[s] with Shirley Temple curls.” Yeah, well, it’s a British court. They’ve dressed like that for centuries, Kevin.

Sullivan must not have observed many trials. Legal inquiry, to someone outside of a case, is usually stultifying. That doesn’t, however, make it invalid.

Categories: , ,

Why I can’t stand “The DaVinci Code”

Published
by
Dave
on February 10, 2006
in books and religion
. 10 Comments

The movie of The DaVinci Code is coming out soon, with Hollywood’s Mr. Nice Guy, Tom Hanks. (I actually like Hanks a lot onscreen.)

The book’s been out for a couple years now. I bought it with fascination after Christmas 2003, right at the beginning of the time when it became a phenomenon.

I was appalled. Not because I am a conservative Christian (I’m not), but because it was so horribly, stupidly written.

Any “mystery novel” whose protagonists are much more clueless than I am as a reader is a failed “mystery.” When I could see what was coming three pages before the characters in the story, I felt really disappointed. It was like learning the secret of a magic trick: “Is that all there is?”

The most egregious stupidity, I think, is probably the “mystery” of the code writing–the point when the main guy (whose name I’ve forgotten) makes the stunning discovery that something is written in a “secret code.” Duh. Hold the book up to the mirror. Most eighth-grade kids learn something about DaVinci and mirror writing.

In the NY Times on February 9 there’s a piece by Laurie Goodstein about the film company’s setting up a website for critics of the film to vent. The site seems intended for those conservative Christians who can’t abide the feminist theology that underlies the story.

I was actually fascinated by the feminist theology and the notion of Jesus of Nazareth having a wife. What galled me was Dan Brown’s ham-handed and glib way of presenting this notion in fiction. Somebody should have done a better job with this. Oh well. Brown’s laughing all the way the bank now.

Too bad. It’s a shame such a lousy book has become such a favorite of the theological left.

Categories: ,

How to observe Martin Luther King Day?

Published
by
Dave
on January 16, 2006
in politics, race and religion
. 12 Comments

Today, Monday January 16, is designated as Martin Luther King Day in the United States. Although this date is not his actual birthday (he was born January 15, 1929), the U.S. government usually puts federal holidays on Mondays. This holiday has been officially observed by the federal government since 1984, resulting in a long weekend off work for many people for the last 22 years.

Dr. King was a man as important in American history as Abraham Lincoln. In the 1950s and 60s he worked bravely, tirelessly, and persuasivly to save us from ourselves. When I started school in North Carolina in 1960 the schools were racially segregated. There was not a black kid in any of my classes until I was in the fifth grade. Nowadays, government-sanctioned racial segregation is impossible to imagine in the U.S. And that is a direct reflection on Dr. King’s work to teach Americans that they should build a just society, once and for all.

So what did I do to observe this holiday? I slept late, since I didn’t have to teach school today; I did a 25-minute exercise workout with FitTV; I shopped for hardware for the new doors for my house; and I went to the movies.

Some commemoration.

I participated in no special commemoration of how far Dr. King brought this country in the thirteen active years of his career. For thirteen years–from 1955 until he was killed in 1968–he put himself in harm’s way again and again. In the 1950s black people in the southern U.S. could be arrested for using the same water fountain as white people. When folks like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and the students at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter started just saying no to this American apartheid, it began to change everything.

Yesterday I was thinking about how hollow this holiday has become for a lot of white people as I was sitting in the choir at my church.

Now, like a lot of churches in the U.S., my church has an aging membership. The church was founded in 1955, the very year Dr. King started his work on the national stage, as an overt gesture of racial integration.

The founding ideals of this church remain at the center of its philosophy, and most of its members can remember the days before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They can remember when the simple idea of “mixing the races” was a powerful notion, when black people as a group were completely disconnected from mainstream, middle-class (read: white) America. In 2005 this view seems quaint, but 40 years ago it was anything but.

As we celebrated MLK Day in church yesterday, we made the standard one-time shift in our musical selections: both the choir and the congregation sang “Negro spirituals” instead of the 19th- and 20th-century European-American hymns we usually sing.

The ephemerality of this one-time change has bothered me for several years now. If these songs are so worthwhile, why do we save them up for the Sunday before the third Monday in January? What point are we making by singing these songs this weekend in particular? And what does it say that practically all the people doing the singing are European-Americans from the suburbs? When we as a choir try to infuse a bit more “rhythm” into our performance, isn’t it a rather lame gesture? (In any event, it’s usually a futile effort. Our choir remains resolutely locked into square eighth notes and diatonic scales.)

I know I’m sounding like a guilty, liberal, self-criticizing curmudgeon, but for some reason, the fact that our congregation is overwhelmingly white struck me yesterday.

I always feel as though I should attend one of the official commemorations of the life of this great man–and I always blow it off and treat the day like just another free day on which I don’t have to work. And then I’m always sorry about it.

Categories: ,

I gotcha season to be jolly, right here!

Published
by
Dave
on December 23, 2005
in midlife and religion
. 7 Comments

It’s the night before the night before Christmas. Several thoughts have danced in my mind the past couple days:

  • It goes without saying, maybe; but it must be awfully hard to be non-Christian in late December in most of the Northern Hemisphere. Everything revolves around this holiday we now refer to as “Christmas.” Late December (starting, of course, about October 15) seems to be all about Christmas. (Although I must say, I can’t find anywhere in my New Testament where it claims that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born in a European forest four days after the winter solstice.) On behalf of sensitive Christians everywhere, I apologize to all of you non-Christians for the European-American culture shoving this holiday down your throats.
  • The whole “Christmas giving” thing is just about the exchange of value. I’ve realized this this year, finally, for the first time. “How much are you spending on me?” This is a question I’ve heard, in some form or other, from siblings, spouse and others. My God, why don’t we just give each other the money? Or better still, stop pursuing this whole business of “shopping for your Christmas list” and all the associated guilt trips. Or maybe best of all, just mandate that everybody has to go out and spend, say, at least half of one percent of their annual salary on retail crap before the end of the year. We’d still incur painful credit card debt in January, but at least we’d have less of a sense of panic about the actual shopping.
  • Expectations are so high for this holiday that people get crazy. The only murder that I was ever aware of happening near me was Christmas Eve 1991. Two brothers living across the street from me in Nashville got into an argument, and one shot the other dead late at night–thankfully missing Santa and the reindeer. There’s just too much damn pressure. Why don’t we just run Thanksgiving again, shall we? Eat a lot and watch television, and either skip the gifts or just go together to the mall and spend our required percentage to keep the retailers (and office-party performers like me) in business.
  • If I don’t hear another radio “Christmas song” this weekend, I won’t be sorry. I do love Vince Guaraldi and his trio, but the music from the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special is about all I can endure at this point.
  • Finally, the ultimate insult to the “non-believers” appeared in the evening news today, the day before what the Germans refer to as Holy Evening: it was announced that the FBI has been spying on mosques since 2002. Peace on earth, goodwill toward (non-Muslim) men, I guess.

I’m eager for this holiday to be over with and to get back to my routine. I do, however, appreciate the 10 days off from school here in mid-winter.

Categories: ,