Crawling Between Earth and Heaven

Looking at my own religious piety,
Hamlet's speech to Ophelia is a great descriptor:

Edwin Booth as Hamlet, c. 1870 

HAMLET: ...I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?
(Hamlet 3.1, the famous "Get thee to a nunnery" speech)

Yep. That fits me. If my true value is going to be determined by listing all the good-stuff-I've-done alongside all the bad-stuff-I've-done, then you'll get a rather mediocre or "indifferent honest" fellow. However, dig just a little deeper into the naughty-stuff-I-really-wish-I-could-do and there are all the building blocks needed for a very base creature. Hamlet and I are arrant knaves. And I cannot stand as judge over you.

Similarly, heap together all the church's actions--at once loving and hateful, destructive and uplifting, life-saving and murderous, oppressive and freeing--and you create a crumbling aggregate of marble shards and excrement. When judged by its actions, an honest church can only stammer, "Yes, but look at all the nice things we've done, ...as well." There are times that Christian hate tears at the very flesh of Christian love; we have explicit photos, venomous quotes, and cold lists of names to prove it. Why breed more hypocritical sinners and sins, O church? Get thee to a nunnery.

And yet, does that mean any other person or body of people is somehow more pure or less hypocritical? Admitting hypocrisy doesn't make it less so. No matter who stands to criticize the other, scratch just a little into the makeup and find ridiculous irony. "Well, yeah, but compared to you..." The comparison itself is an act of misdirection and self-delusion.

A cherry looked up and, squinting, saw an apple swaying high up in the branches. The cherry thought to itself, "See how tiny that apple is!" The apple fell from the branch and landed heavily near the cherry and exclaimed, "Wow, next to you, I'm huge!" The orchard heard the apple's boast and shook her leaves in silent laughter.

Once in a great while, I think our lives and institutions accidentally intersect with the moral high road, but as soon as we lift our noses to admire the scenery, we find ourselves scrabbling down the embankment on the scree of false pride and self-promotion. We are arrant knaves, all.

Shakespeare's Hamlet let this self-awareness petrify him. On the one hand, he was motivated by justice. He hated the lies; he wanted truth rise up for air. On the other hand, this only masked his darker desire for vengeance, and he used deceit and trickery to bait that truth to the surface. And on reflection (which Hamlet does, ad nauseam) he became frozen.

What, then, shall we do "crawling between earth and heaven." There is nothing else to do but to accept and admit our own knavery, forgiving ourselves and each other, as we place our feet firmly on the earth. Then we use knees and bodies and any helping hands to leverage our heads back up into the sky. Here, people of faith have to trust God's unrelenting love and his ability to use the best and worst of all of us and whatever we've done. From there, we walk with our honest feet on the ground and our heads bobbling around in the heavens. We slip, we fall, and we help each other back up.

In the meantime, we are called to and can take stronger and preemptive stands against injustice, snobbery, and bigotry once we recognize them in ourselves. And the true victims will win when they stand, or are finally lifted up, their spirits renewed and still uncrushed by all the injustice, bigotry, devilish interpretations and applications, and pious preaching.

I'm not confident that we have found a moral high road, or have made significant progress toward the destination "Decent Humanity." Instead, these are brief and usually quiet occurrences on whichever road we happen to be. And those moments of human kindness only rise above the surface of the road when given an honest and forgiving nod that keeps and uses the best intentions and actions, and allows the dust and dirt to settle back down behind us.

Sometimes I Suck at This...

(I wrote this back in November, '13, but waited to post it on a day that I don't feel so sucky.)

The truth is: sometimes I suck at this. I've heard compliments about how I live out my callings, as a father, pastor, husband. I'll admit--just to you--that often it's very uncomfortable to accept these. Compliments seem more appropriate for the man I wish I was.

Full disclosure: yes, I sent my boys off to school the other morning with a hug and kiss on each head. I said, "No matter what..." and they answered, "...you always love us." That's the "good" part. What it ignores is all the nagging, manipulation, anger, dark thoughts, and--frankly--poor fathering that got them to the drop-off zone at school.

Yes, I love my wife, deeply. She amazes and stuns me. At my best I've remembered to tell her. That's the "good" part. What that hides are the cynical snide remarks, lack-luster hellos or goodbyes, too-frequently broken promises, and--honestly--the weak husband to whom she's been married for more than twenty years.

The truth is: the only way I'm going to make it with my head up, is for God's grace and their undeserved forgiveness to prop me up as I stumble along through life, because, sometimes, I really suck at this.

New Message

Fluttering against the dark

A dim amber light is splashing
Up the wall, across the bookcase
Against our ceiling.
In pulses,
That silent heartbeat is
Letting my sleeping love know that
She has a new message.
New message.

New message.

New message.

New...

It stops.

But in its place
Shadows return
Silently seeping
Through my eyes,
Into my ears
To pool thickly
At the back of my tongue
Where they drip steadily down my esophagus
Slowly filling every cavity in my chest;
Suffocating.

At last I hear

The distant chime of the clock

From the hall and down the stairs.
I count them, each chime...
Three, four, five.
My chest relaxes,
I breathe in.

Eight, nine,

My tongue loosens...

Twelve.

After a polite pause, I

Clear my throat by quietly croaking 

Into the murky dark,

I love you.

She stirs softly just as

The amber light blinks again to say 
That there is a new message.
New message.

New message.

New message.

New.

Where the Pavement Sings

A couple of weeks ago my nine-year-old was riding in the front passenger seat of our Honda Odyssey van. We were headed north on Interstate-5. About the time we took the exit for Highway 16 West, the road surface changed from the normal asphalt to concrete sections. You probably know how that affects the sound from the tires, especially with those long ridge lines and joints in the slabs: hmmm thup-thup, hmmm thup-thup, hmmm thup-thup, hmmm. 

When I bothered to notice, I usually found that noise and vibration slightly annoying...until that trip. We hit the concrete, and my son started humming and thup-thupping along with it. Finally, he turned to me and said, "Dad, it's probably a lot of hard work to make a road, so isn't it cool that they built music into it, too?"

Now, we know that the singing and bumping of the highway against my tires is more a symptom of structure and friction than any intentional built-in "song," but my son's honest question sent a shiver through me, and has changed my experience of that stretch of road. As we turned onto Highway 16, with all the ramp and bridgework, we saw several dozen workers wearing their reflective oranges with machines, tools, and trucks.

Setting aside all cynical comments, I am grateful for hard-working men and women, in service, construction, education, in the home, or offices. Thank you, especially when it's more than getting a paycheck, but about doing your best, or adding your song to whatever you do, lifting up the people with whom or for whom you work. 

I take that exit almost every work day. After that trip with my son, instead of being irritated by the vibration, I find myself singing arrhythmically, "hmmm thup-thup, hmmm thup-thup, hmmm thup-thup, hmmm." It brings a grin to each morning which shapes much, if not the rest, of my day!