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It has been one year since my father died. Lately I find myself thinking a lot about him and am reminded of him constantly. Last week I watched The Alaska Experiment; they drop several people into the Alaskan wilderness for three months with minimal supplies and see what happens–there is a Chris McCandless appeal to the story. One of the contestents received a phone call that his father is very ill and in the hospital; before his trip, the man sat down with his father–his father had cancer–and had a frank discussion whether the man should return if the cancer spread. The answer: stay in Alaska. This decision did not stick, thankfully, and he left with 11 days left. The last scene was him holding his dad’s hand and laughing; he soon thereafter died. I cried throughout the whole decision-making process. It reminded me of my decision to go to Virginia last year; I would not trade those three weeks for the world. I got to love my dad and have my dad love me in the last days of his life; it was beautiful.
Another reminder of my dad came while riding the bus this morning. I decided to listen to the Vinyl Cafe podcast “The Wedding Dress.” For those of you without Canadian cred or an NPR nerd patch, the Vinyl Cafe is a variety show of sorts from our friends in the North. There is a focus on music and stories; in particular, Stewart McLean has two recurring characters that he writes about, Dave and Morley. In this episode hilarity ensues–I will not give it all away. After a particular awkward moment, Dave is talking with Katie, the college aged daughter of his wife’s friend. She is preparing to give the maid of honor toast after her mother remarries; while they talk, she asks about Dave’s daughter. He starts telling Katie about how his daughter will be planting trees this summer again and that he thought the first time she did it she would hate it. Katie asked, “Well, why did you let her do it?” To which Dave responds, “I don’t know; I guess that’s what parents do. We love our children; we hold them close, and before we are any where near ready, we have to let them go. It’s sort of about love, but it’s more about trust…maybe it is all about trust.” I will not ruin the story for you, but these words spoken by Dave, I imagine, were the exacts words bouncing around my dad’s head every time I would call him. Whether I was hiking the Grand Canyon or sleeping in random yards, my dad had to trust…to trust God.
In the midst of all of these reminders, I am reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson–a truly gifted writer. The novel is a series of thoughts and reflections written by an elderly father to his young son. After discovering he has a terminal heart condition, the life-long pastor decides he wants to leave something for his son to remember him by. In the last section that I have read, the pastor is explaining about his recent sermon about Hagar and Ishmael and Abraham and Isaac. In both stories God calls Abraham to cast out his sons into the wilderness and both times angels intervene to save the children. He goes on to say: “It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best of circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.” In the last weeks of my father’s life he had to let God’s providence wash over him, covering the fear for his children with the Grace of God.
For a long time I have wanted to collect stories and thoughts about my dad from the people that knew him best: his shipmates, his family, his coworkers, and his friends. I do not think my heart will rest until I start collecting these stories. Now that I have written this down for the world to see, I can have a sense of accountability. Often I find myself telling my students that just because something is hard and complicated does not mean it is not worth doing; it is time to follow my advice. I hope that by putting these stories together, I can create a book of sorts for Bradie and Beau. When it comes time to tell them about Papa Carl, I can dust off these collected stories and say, “You have a Grandfather that loves you very much. Here are the stories about his wilderness and the angels that intervened for him.”
…who’ll stop the rain. I woke up yesterday with some awesome tooth pain. After calling my oncologist to make sure I could get dental work, calling my dentist to make an emergency appointment, and going in for a blood draw to check my blood cell levels; the consensus is that my body does not like me right now. All of this hither-tither resulted in my first–and I hope last–root canal.
If you look at my previous post about teeth (link) you will understand that there is a strong theological connection between failing teeth and falling humans. I am baffled that no theologian of note has used this metaphor; when the old has gone and the new has come (II Corinthians 5:17), I am looking forward to new teeth. There is an interesting book by an Anglican theologian named N.T. Wright called Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Ressurection, and the Mission of the Church that examines what happens when we die. Wright, from what I gather so far, believes that we will be resurrected and have new bodies; I am excited to have perfect teeth and both my testicles–hmm, would I need testicles after being resurrected? Despite my degression, I think my point is valid: the metaphor of failing teeth illustrates the human condition. It is not until we recognize the weakness of our teeth–admitting we cannot fix them and we need help–that we need something to heal them–the dentist. If I was not tired I am sure I could fit grace into the haphazard exegesis, but for now I am satisfied that this is my rough draft.
Tomorrow my root canal will be completed and Thursday I will have my last chemotherapy treatment. Over the last month and a half I have made up for all the times I have not gone to the doctor or the dentist; I should be good for a while. I am not sure how my wife does it; she has basically three children to take care of and she still manages to wake up everyday. Thank you Sara for loving your husband; you deserve a pony or a monkey.
While orchiectomy looks like a term from Lord of the Rings (removal of orcs) it is actually the removal of the orchis (that is Greek for testicle.) I am the proud owner of three and half inch scar from my orchiectomy. I had a strange sensation in my testicle and had the urologist take a look and after a scrotal ultrasound, it was decided that it needed to go. I feel pretty good and we should get the pathology back Friday or Monday. It seems like we caught it early, but we won’t know until the pathology comes back. Thanks to all of the people praying for me and my family; God has given me tremendous peace about this and I feel like we are going to be okay in the end. It is just the waiting that is no fun…and the body part removal. As I know more I will post. God bless. I shiny apple goes to the best one testicle joke in the comments (Tanya may already be in the lead.)
My wife picked up Into Thin Air after several years of prodding–I read it two times more before she finally gave in and started. Although I hike and occasionally scramble to high places, I have no illusion that I climb mountains or I am a climber; but I do know the feeling of irrational decision making. Krakauer explains the drive to climb tall mountains as an irrational act, in spite of all reason people feel driven to do it. Usually this drive has no connection to what other people think, despite the reckoning of most people; it springs from inside a person, a challenge that can only be satisfied by trying.
Many of my favorite memories stem from my ability to make irrational decisions: playing the heater game in 90 degree weather, hiking the Grand Canyon from rim to rim, asking Sara to marry me, taking time off from school to live with my dad for six months, sleeping on a football field in Ogden, Utah. This list could stretch much longer, but that is not the point. As an educator, I strive to make rational and logical decisions and I even look at decisions that do not follow some discernible logic as inferior decision making. This is wholey untrue, irrational does not equal crazy or stupid; there is a part of being a human being that goes beyond our ability to form a system to explain it. This is the land of the irrational where grace lives and the mystic speaks truth. By no means am I saying that our souls are a simple dichotomy where you either push the rational or irrational button, but that we are terribly complex and yielding to a human explanation–this is what rationality is, to the best of our ability, how things work–does a great disservice to ourselves. To live in the mystery allows us to grow and to feel God’s grace.
I am sure that I am not done pondering this; till next time…
When I was a young human I read Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance by Donald Miller–this book has since been reworked and re-released as Through Painted Deserts. In this book, he recounts his roadtrip from Texas to Oregon with his close friend in a Volkswagen van; this book is the inspiration for my rim to rim hike of the Grand Canyon with my close friend Devin Tschirley.
Several years later I picked up his book Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. In this book one chapter really jumped out at me; it was the chapter on grace. He recounts a time when he saw a woman in a grocery store using food stamps…
It was obvious as she unfolded the currency that she, I, and the checkout girl were quite uncomfortable with the interaction. I wished there was something I could do. I wished I could pay for her groceries myself, but to do so would have been to cause a greater scene…
…I realized that it was not the woman who should be pitied, it was me. Somehow I had come to believe that because a person is in need, they are candidates for sympathy, not just charity. It was not that I wanted to buy her groceries, the government was already doing that. I wanted to buy her dignity. And yet, by judging her, I was the one taking her dignity away.
Not only do I lose sight of what grace really is, sometimes I forget that I need grace just as much as anyone else. Miller goes on to say…
I love to give charity, but I don’t want to be charity. This is why I have so much trouble with grace…
…It isn’t that I want to earn my own way to give something to God, it’s that I want to earn my own way so I won’t be charity.
This is humbling; not only to Miller, but also for me. I want to be worthy in God’s eyes, yet the only way is if I receive God’s full grace.
It is no coincidence that a kid in my class asked me to write a college letter of recommendation for her. As she told me her story, she told me about being a Big Sister for a little girl. I was blessed by her willingness to love this little girl. This story reminded me about what God says we should value. This is at the heart of what Jesus said as he started his Sermon on the Mount:
3 Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
4 Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted
5 Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.Matthew 5:3-8
When we are in a situation where we need grace–we need someone to stand in and fight for us, that is when we understand the true blessing of God.
14 The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still.
Exodus 14:14
I pray that I can be still; that I can take God’s charity–his grace.
I have started a new book, or at least I am trying to start a new book. The Great Poems of the Bible by James L Kugel examines the Bible. Although my poetry chops are nearly nonexistent, I think I am going to enjoy this book.
Lately I have struggled with the connection between my intellectual life and my spiritual life; I know that I experience God through the brain that He has given me, but how that grows my faith is a mystery to me. Kugel explains in his introduction that he trys to “understand the way of seeing” of the texts that he selects. He continues:
Perhaps it is most natural for us today to explain the differences between our view of things and those of earlier civilizations by saying that in premodern times people simply did not know this or that fact, that they were under this or that misapprehension, from which we have now happily freed ourselves. No doubt there is some truth in this proposition. But it seems to me we ought at least to be prepared to entertain the opposite hypothesis as well, that however much progress the intervening centuries may have brought in some domains, they have also led us to lose a way of seeing that existed in former times. By “way of seeing” I mean to suggest something more than simply another point of view; perhaps people were actually enabled by this way of seeing to observe things that we no longer observe nowadays. It is difficult for one who reads the Bible carefully, and takes its words seriously, not to arrive at such a conclusion: something, a certain way of perceiving, has gradually closed inside of us, so that nowadays most people simply do not register, or do not have access to, what has been visible in an earlier age. What we have–all we have–are those texts of the Bible that bear witness to that other way of seeing (and perhaps invite us, with the use of some spiritual imagination, to try to enter in to it, open our eyes, and look).
This rings true in my life; I have been teaching about the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution which are steeped in the ideas of progress. It is important to remember change and progress are not synonymous with better and more important. In the same way, my intelligence–or lack thereof–does not supersede my faith. I hope that I can crack open that way of seeing that will let my faith grow beyond what I can think, explain, defend with logic, or reason because if my faith rests in my own ability to justify its existence, I miss God’s grace.
Over a pound of love–no worries, this is the affectionate name for a basket of fries–and some good beer–except Josh, somehow he has been converted to…shutter…Bud Light–we welcomed Jeremy back to Rory’s last night. As always, Jeremy had a question for the night: what do you think about church membership? I will not go into the discussion that we had, but I do want to share with you something I read this morning that deals with that issue. It comes from a book called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought by Marilynne Robinson–a book that I picked up while getting my substitute notes together this morning. One of the essays is on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Here is what she has to say about Bonhoeffer and the Church:
By “the church” Bonhoeffer means Christ in this world, not as influence or loyality but as active presence, not as one consideration or motive but as the one source and principle of life of those who constitute the church.
It seems we have a hard time creating this idea of the church in a local body because too often the focus is on influence or loyality and not the active presence of Christ in the body. Food for thought.
Wish me luck, now I must go to a district training on the newly adopted Senior Social Studies materials. It is my belief that school districts remove spoons from training rooms to cut down on missing eyes lawsuits.
If you have not noticed my blogging has slowed down a bit (your RSS readers may have given up on me already.) Should anyone wonder, a correlation can be drawn between my return to work and the decline of my writing; but as we all learned in our science classes, correlation does not mean causation. Making such a declaration of logic, at face value, seems, well, logical; but in my mind, the fellow who coined this correlation and causation dictum must have been thinking: hmm, loophole, loophole…ah yes, I have it.” I suppose that any student who uses this correctly as an excuse should get a pony.
Although work has reduced my writing, it has not stopped my ability to think about writing. About two weeks ago my step mom Peggy called me at work to tell me that she was delivering my dad’s ashes to the submarine where he would be put out to sea. Out of Providence, I road the Sounder into Edmonds and road my bike up Olympic View Drive to work that day.
Part way up Olympic View Drive, the trees clear and a sweeping view of the Sound opened up on my port side; in spite of the chill in the air, the soreness in my legs, and the hill ahead, I felt peace. It was not until after hanging up with Peggy that I realized why I had that moment of peace.
Post Script Here is a picture of Bradie chowing down on her Birthday cupcake. PPS Click for a larger picture.
Day three of my economic conference welcomed the beloved demand curve and supply curve. The fundamental assumption of economics is that people need stuff and want stuff; whether these are real needs or wants is not the point, what matters is the desire. Enter the supply and demand curves. Deftly they measure the relationship between price and quantity neatly packaging the equilibrium price–that is the point will supply meets demand perfectly, all things being equal. While it may not seem so, I believe economic thinking is useful. Economic thinking provides a great way to understand certain quantifiable human interactions; trade, time management, education, robots. But economic thinking does not concern itself with the underlying question of why we desire stuff and how human relationships should work. What should be the source of our desires and what should we actually want? Is there really an opportunity cost–the next best thing–that must be paid to spend time with a friend?
Before going to bed tonight I started chapter 2 of Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island. It is hardly chance that this is what I read:
We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination.
When we do not desire the things of this world for their own sake, we become able to see them as they are. We see at once their goodness and their purpose, and we become able to appreciate them as we never have before. As soon as we are free of them, they begin to please us. As soon as we cease to rely on them alone, they are able to serve us. Since we depend neither on the pleasure nor the assistance we get from them, they offer us both pleasure and assistance, at the command of God. For Jesus has said: “Seek first the kingdom of God, and his justice and all these things[that is all that you need for your life on earth] will be given to you besides” (Matthew 6:33).
Supernatural hope is the virtue that strips us of all things in order to give us possession of all things. We do not hope for what we have. Therefore, to live in hope is to live in poverty, having nothing. And yet, if we abandon ourselves to economy of Divine Providence, we have everything we hope for. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. If we hope in God, by hope we already possess Him, since hope is a confidence which He creates in our souls as secret evidence that He has taken possession of us. So the soul that hopes in God already belongs to Him,and to belong to Him is the same as to possess Him, since He gives Himself completely to those who give themselves to Him. The only thing faith and hope do not give us is clear vision of Him Whom we possess. We are united to Him in darkness, because we have to hope.
Merton argues that misplacing our hope and desire will only create a hollow existence. The idea of creating something for wealth generation of to fulfill some perceived need misses the point. Our desire and hope is in God and through that we can see the usefulness of stuff, but it is not until we are willing to give up the desire for stuff simply for its own sake. I am not a strong advocate asceticism but Merton is right, in poverty is where we find hope. Why would hope be necessary for someone who fulfills all their wants and needs with stuff? Stuff is measurable; hope is not. Jesus spoke of this in Mark 8:36:
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
It is not right thinking to focus your desires on stuff no matter how noble your reasoning may be. Often economists argue that those that take the large risks that pay off with money (stuff) have the ability and resources to help thousands of people through philanthropy. Our hope in God stems from our poverty in spirit that is filled by Jesus. In the same way we can provide that hope to others by simply being with them; our philanthropy is not measurable by how many people we can help or how much money we give. We simply share our hope; this is how we nourish our souls
Those of you interested in No Man is an Island check it out:
Thank you to all of you who prayed for me. Here is what I got to share about my dad at his funeral.
When I was young, I did not get to know my dad very well. For various reasons, I only knew my dad through phone calls and cards…well maybe more phone calls than cards. It seems that I have inherited his ability to purchase cards, write in them, sometimes address them, and then not mail them. I think I have a Father’s Day card from 1999.
I did not get to know my dad until I was an adult. While working at a Young Life camp in Canada, God spoke to me clearly: you need to live with your dad. Not only did I live with my dad, I worked with him for six months. I got to know him as an adult. While I missed the mythology of my father—you know, my dad can beat up your dad, my dad walked on the moon, my dad smells good without showering, my dad is a super hero—I got something even more special: my dad became my friend as an adult. We would stay up late into the night talking about cars, Boyle’s Law, God, and what would happen if you pulled all the boats in the ocean out of the water at the same time. By the end of my stay I recaptured a little mythology about my dad; I learned he did not need to wear super hero underpants, he could rebuild an engine better than your dad, and he has one peculiarity.
He loved coffee, especially in the morning. After consuming 27 pots of coffee we would hop in the car to go to work. On several occasions we had to make an unplanned pit stop. Usually this consisted of him squirming in the car, exiting quickly from the freeway, and stopping at McDonalds for a consult in the hall of tiles, but one day was very memorable. He arrived at work and he was really feeling his coffee. He looked at me, looked at the door to get to the elevator, and then looked at the door of the garbage transfer room…after returning from the garbage transfer room, he felt much better.
While I lived with my dad over five years ago, I happened across John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Over the past three weeks this book has been on my mind for several reasons. First, Steinbeck has an affinity for the West Coast—which is my adopted homeland, and second, it has reminded me of my father. Let me tell you a little about my father before I tell you why. My dad had cancer for 17 years; if you ever met him, you would never know. His routine would consist of getting up early, going for a walk/run, taking care of the three Ses, drinking an insane amount of coffee, making an unplanned pitstop because of the aforementioned coffee, working all day, coming home, changing clothes, working in the yard, coming in when dark, working in the house or garage, and going to bed. Now there would be some variation to this schedule–except the coffee and pit stop–but my dad always managed to put more work in a 24 hour day than anybody that I have met. Never would you here my dad complain, more than likely you would find him trying to encourage somebody. Along the way he had an impact* on hundreds of peoples’ lives; those people poured into his home as he prepared for his last days on Earth. Had I the foresight or equipment, I would have stood at the door with a clicker to get a formal count, but by my rudimentary math skills I would say well over one hundred people have visited him or called him to say how important he is to them.
Seeing all of these people come to see my father made me see something in him that I had not recognized before. In the beginning of Cannery Row, Steinbeck describes Cannery Row in Monterey. After carrying on about the geography he starts talking about the people of Cannery Row. That is where these lines come from:
Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘Whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches’, by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men’, and he would have meant the same thing.
My dad has spent his entire life trying to look through that peephole to see saints and angels and martyrs and holy men; this does not mean he has always been successful, but his effort is the reward and it is not a Sisyphean effort.
Before I moved to Virginia to live with my dad, I hiked the
Grand Canyon rim to rim with my friend Devon. As I left Virginia my dad told me that if I had friends going to Virginia, to give them his number. People exchange these types of pleasantries all the time, even family; the difference with my dad is he really meant it.
Devon, who was in the Coast Guard, had several weeks of training in Virginia, so I gave him my dad’s number. I called Devon several days ago to talk to him about my dad. He told me that my dad took him in as if he was a son; Devon said he felt like he was a connection to me for my dad. During one of their visits, they went to the Air and Space
Museum. It was here that Devon realized what he wanted to do with his life… fly planes. After the visit, my dad talked with Devon about what he wanted to do. When my dad found out that Devon wanted to fly planes, he relentlessly pursued Devon and his dream.Devon graduated from his class and received several honors; my dad was there to see him honored. Devon said that my dad played a huge part in helping him understand who he was and what he wanted to be. My dad saw Devon’s potential and would not let him settle for anything less. Devon will graduate from the University of Washington next week and in four months he will be in Quantico for officer candidate school, his first step to becoming a pilot. This is just one of hundreds of stories where my dad looked through the other peephole and saw the good in someone.
In this way, my dad has lived his life; a life where he has poured out blessings onto other people just as his Savior has poured out blessings in his life. If God could extend his grace even to my Dad, despite his shortcomings, how could my dad not extend his grace to all the people he met?
Let me end with hope from II Corinthians chapter 5:
1Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, 3because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. 4For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. 6Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. 7We live by faith, not by sight.
Thank God for his grace that he extends to us through his son Jesus Christ. I have hope because my dad is in his eternal house, not because I can see but because of faith. II Corinthians continues in verse 17:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!
I love you Dad; you are a man of God that no one will forget. Also, please let me know if your coffee and pit stop routine continues…God does have a sense of humor.
