Cursing With God

More battle scenes please

Once teaching a high school American Literature class — and let me tell you, once is enough —a student he says, “I don’t understand The Red Badge of Courage.  It’s a war book, but there are hardly any battle scenes.  I don’t get it.”

So we did a little Socratic dialogue, and while I don’t remember particular questions, I can say I did great.  That day, I was an awesome teacher, leading the maturing man through a process of growth.

[So OK, sometimes once isn’t enough. But I can also say such awesomeness did not happen often as a teacher, which is why I’m a writer who occasionally teaches, instead of a teacher who writes.]

Anyway, at the end of the line, the student goes, “Ohhh … That’s why there are hardly any battle scenes. It’s not a war book.  It’s an anti-war book.”

And bells rang and angels sang. Saint Johnny, tell the young man what he’s won.

A minor epiphany is what he won.  I can say, humbly but without qualification, he learned.

OK.

So, many years later I’m driving home after dropping my son off at work.  I’m rehashing several examples of things people have been “off” about in recent months, including me.  Stuff what has sucked and stank and made my life not what I want. Insurance companies, friends, people I need to interview for articles, how it’s going to go wrong today and tomorrow and the next day … real major suckage.

It was awl wrohng, as my wife’s New Jersey born-and-bred mother says.

Sometimes this stuff has taken hours of back-and-forthing, only to end up, I’m not kidding, right where we started.  We, meaning “me and me” but this time I also mean “me and God” because I am cursing and railing him like he just cut me off on the freeway.

“What the fuck is going on?!  This bullshit is a total waste of time!”

Again and again and again.

Also “Motherfucker.”

You get the idea.

This lasts about a mile: less than a minute how I’m driving.  Then I really nail Him. I mean I spring the big question on Him.  No way He comes back from this one.  I don’t care whose God He is.

“And why can’t we Goddamn fucking get it right?!”

And I get my own little epiphany, just like that young man in the lit class.

Just as ignorant and immature in my way, too.

But I did see. As the blind John Newton says in the film “Amazing Grace” —

“Didn’t I write, ‘I was blind but now I see’?  And now it’s finally true.”

For the goal, I saw that once, the goal is not to get it right.  We’re not here to get it right, or help everyone else get it right, or, heaven forfend, make ‘em get it right.  It’s not irrelevant or no part of the plan, but it’s not first.

The first thing is love.

Duh.

If we do that, we’ll often get “getting it right” thrown in.  Maybe not.  But outcomes are not our problemo; that belongs to God.  Our task is the work.  Our task is the love.

I had it wrong for a long time past, which is going to affect the long time future.  First I thought I had to make it right, and kinda sorta mostly make other people get it right.

Even when I matured to helping them get it right — guiding, counseling, directing, whatever — that was still not the thing.  For the Holy Spirit is the one who guides into all truth.  And I’m not the Holy Spirit.

Duh.

Now look — apologetics wants to get it right.  Algebra wants to get it right.  Hell, even flower arranging wants to get it right.  We all do want to get it right, and to help others get it right — guiding, counseling, directing, whatever.  [Making people get it right is excluded, completely.]

We help remove impediments.

Accentuate the positive.

But it’s not the goal.

The goal is love.

Class dismissed.

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

Random

Time, Treasure

Saw an episode ages ago of one of the Twilight Zone reboots which, I’m pretty sure, starred Mark Hamill as this weird kid who collected toys. All this kitschy stuff from the ‘50s and grew up collecting them — and thus stayed weird and for the most part apparently lonely for his life entire. Of course

Read More »

The Walmart Fairy

Want to know when you can be sure the economy is in the turlet? It’s when even Walmart’s not hiring. According to this item, the company has hired essentially nobody for the last six years. Nobody says it’s since the bankers ripped us off again and the government let them, and all the oceans stopped

Read More »

Whee

Each animal has its glory. The dog his ears, the rabbit her tail, the dolphin their leaps. Elephant trunk Moose antlers Giraffe … duh Walrus tusks Whale tails Wolf howl Bear claw Bird caw + [We’d first say flight of course but see, think, feel they all fly and largely the same — tho the

Read More »

God a Day

My sister gave me a “page-a-day” calendar for Christmas. Michele’s not as fond of them, because of all the paper I think she says. For me, it seems the perfect item: you tear one off, and bam! you’re done. Though it is a lot of paper … But mine is Bible verses, and it’s a

Read More »

Related

All Things Considered

This could go a couple different ways. An image likes could be Veteran’s Day, it’s not, or Memorial Day which, though closer, it’s not. Could be about a song (actually a poem) I found only a few months ago or an automatically somber meditation on mortality that’s begun before you’ve even begun to read …

Read More »

Get In The Boat

You’re in this boat. I’m going to say the boat is our life in Christ, though over time the boat image, the water metaphor, has done yeoman’s work for pastors immemorial — it’s our body, our life, our church, our baptism, our faith, our death. You get the idea. Now imagine you’re the first guy

Read More »

What Price Anger

Anger cost small for years then nearly all. Like decades of tossing nickels and dimes in a 5-gallon water bottle until it can’t be carried anymore not even to the Coinstar or your credit union and if you tried you’d hurt something and badly … or the plastic o’er time has degraded and the bottle

Read More »

Jesus All The Way Down

The other day I wrote about having no hope. More specifically no hope in this world, more specifically because the hopes we had have been hammered against hardened sand and dirt and clay, that is, against the rocks. That may be the basic choice in life: Heart hardened … or Hopes hammered … And then

Read More »