Dear Reader,
Here’s some feedback I received about last week’s “Covid & the Church” post:
“I enjoy being a sporadic freeloader of your weekly email/blog…I just wanted to comment on your introductory appreciation of the focus of your featured article to be of the evangelical, rather than ‘monolithic’ religion.
Retrospectively, I am struck by the reflection that the identical debate has gone on in my ‘monolithic’ Catholic Parish throughout the Covid thing as what you and your featured article describe within the evangelical community, marshaling the very same arguments on either side of the issue: the vaxxers/maskers v. the no-vaxxers/maskers…we all seem happy enough to find divisors. May we learn to gather—and how to gather!”
No argument from me on the need for gathering rather than dividing in response to Covid; I’ve urged folks all along to get vaccinated, but stopped short at saying they’re “wrong” (or worse, not “loving your neighbor”) if they don’t (for more on the neo-fundamentalism of that argument, read last week’s post). Personally, I bite my tongue when I see people still wearing masks, but I try to believe the best that they have a medical reason for doing so and defer.
I have no patience for the hypocrisy of elected officials saying one thing and doing another, and wish Randi Weingarten and the teachers unions (all of whom have been on the wrong side of this from the beginning) would get out of the way of kids being unmasked in school, as the health risks are so very minuscule compared to the detrimental effects on learning. In short, I’ll continue to encourage folks to give grace to one another, while asking for the same.
On a different note, here’s a short text from a reader who became a paid subscriber because of the T-shirt offer:
“I have your dog on my shirt and it is delighting me to no end.”
Whatever works! Thanks for subscribing, and as always, thanks for reading Second Drafts.
Craig
P.S.: Comments are closed. As a reminder, you’re welcome and encouraged to email me directly with feedback, ideas, links, etc. at cmdunham [at] gmail [dot] com. Just know that, unless you specifically tell me not to, I may quote you (though it will always be anonymously).
Programming Note for Paid Subscribers
For paid subscribers this month, look for these extras between now and the end of February:
Saturday, February 12 - For February’s Second Drafts podcast, Peaches and I sit down with friend, Nick Ross, member of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nations, Program Manager for the American Indian/Alaskan Native Student Success at Montana State University, and deacon at Trinity Church. Nick and I talk about his Native American heritage, how he grew up on a reservation, what he does working with indigenous students on campus, and why he came to Christ and serves the Church despite American colonization’s abuse of Christianity to the detriment of his people.
Nick, Peaches, and I recording earlier this week.
Saturday, February 26 - As background to the conversation with Nick, Peaches and I have been reading Fools Crow, a novel by James Welch. We look forward to sharing an in-depth book review at the end of the month. Pick up your copy and read with us!
Just $5 gets you a month of full access to the podcast, book review, and everything else on the site. If you decide it’s not worth it, cancel anytime, no questions asked. Click now to subscribe!
Hot Takes
Another round of all the news that drives me crazy. Seriously, can we just grow up?
“Florida Senate Committee Passes ‘Don't Say Gay’ Bill That Would Bar LGBTQ Discussions in Schools” - Positioned as a “parental rights” bill, the Florida Senate is considering legislation to make discussions about sexuality illegal in primary schools:
“The Florida Senate Education Committee passed a controversial bill on Tuesday that would bar school districts from encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity. The Parental Rights in Education bill, commonly referred to the ‘Don't Say Gay’ bill by its critics, would apply to such topics in primary grade levels, as well as in cases where the discussions are deemed ‘not age-appropriate.’”
In its current version, the proposed bill has teeth should school districts not enforce it:
“The bill, proposed by Republican State Senator Dennis Baxley, would extend to student support services, including counseling, and would require school district personnel to give parents all information related to a student's ‘mental, emotional or physical health or well-being,’ unless it's believed that such disclosure would result in abuse. Parents would be able to sue districts that do not follow these requirements.
The bill's purpose, according to its text, is to ‘reinforce the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children.’”
On the one hand, for the sake of consistency with the misinterpreted Establishment Clause prohibiting religious expression, the bill makes sense; there are few groups that express and evangelize their beliefs more religiously than LGTBQ “advocacy” groups. On the other hand, this seems another government overreach (this time by Republicans) that proposes to offer a cure that’s (almost) worse than the sickness in curtailing speech (notice I said “almost”—the idea of teachers purposely convincing young children of a “fluid” sexuality is perverse and nothing short of child abuse.)
No easy solution here, other than get your kids out of government schools if you’re not prepared to deal daily with the immorality being shoved down the throats of young kids in the name of the unholy trinity of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. (And please don’t make the argument that you’re sending your six-year-old out as a missionary into this mess; they’re not equipped for that).
“Which Skin Color Emoji Should You Use? The Answer Can Be More Complex Than You Think.” - As cultural journalist Rod Dreher pointed out in a tweet,
The tweet was in response to NPR’s article considering (of all things) emoji skin tones:
“In 2015, five skin tone options became available for hand gesture emojis, in addition to the default Simpsons-like yellow. Choosing one can be a simple texting shortcut for some, but for others it opens a complex conversation about race and identity.”
Forgive me, but I’m missing the complexity of said conversation (not to mention the point of NPR). It’s an emoji; pick a color and stop sewing seeds of division with it.
“‘Bored’ Security Guard Drew Eyes On $850,000 Painting On 1st Day On The Job” - There’s definitely a crime here, but I would argue that it’s not vandalism.
“A Russian security guard at an art museum could face criminal charges for vandalizing a painting on his first day of work. The unnamed guard is accused of drawing two sets of eyes on artist Anna Leporskaya's 'Three Figures' (1932–1934) painting.”
The criminal’s stated motive? Boredom.
“After an investigation into the defaced painting, which was on loan from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, officials determined the 60-year-old security was responsible. He told investigators that he did it because he was 'bored' during his first day on the job. He has since been fired and could face criminal charges.”
What’s sad here is the 60-year-old man was probably never taught an appreciation for art. I wonder if his parents ever took him to museums as a child? Or if his school ever scheduled field trips to art galleries? Or if his teachers ever taught him history by illustrating it through art and literature rather than just timelines and textbooks?
Acedia makes for lousy art.
Feature: “Playing Grandfather”
This winter, I’m playing the theatrical role of “Grandfather” in a Montana State student’s rewrite of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (shameless self-promotion: the show runs five performances, Thursday-Sunday, March 24-27, so mark your calendars).
Because of the role, I’ve been thinking a lot about age, not just because I’m playing a senior citizen who has adopted a mother and grandchild in the show, but because I’m the oldest member of the mostly twenty-something cast and I’ve noticed a majority of my cultural references falling on deaf ears because of our generational difference.
To be sure, apart from being the only person laughing at my own jokes, it hasn’t been all that bad; in fact, it’s been a ball. I’ve been able to introduce the youngsters to the Spinal Tap scene at Elvis’ grave while trying to find the right pitches for a song; I’ve been asked to define ska music (which I kind of got right, at least the third wave of it); I’ve reminded them as they prepare for “V-Day” (which they consider to be Valentine’s Day), that the original “V-Day” (or “VJ-Day”) actually commemorates the anniversary of Japan's surrender to the Allies in 1945, which ended World War II; and, I’ve quoted Wendell Berry ad nauseum and encouraged the students to read his books because, when it comes to Wendell, that’s just what I do.
Lest you think or be concerned that I’m turning into “that guy,” rest assured: I’m already him. But that’s part and parcel of being one of the older two generations now.
Being Heterochronic
How old are you? How do you think about the question?
I ask because, for most of us, we immediately think numerically; that is, we’ve kept track of an increasing number from year to year, or, if you’re getting long in the tooth like I am, you make it a point to at least remember the year you were born to do the math in case you lose track.
I was born in 1971, which means that, mathematically speaking, I’m 51 years old. As of my 51st birthday last week, I’ve been running loose on the planet for 18,615 days. But, is the sum total of my time spent spinning around the universe all that I am? Could there be more to us than just our chronological age?
This is the question posed by Robert Pogue Harrison in his book, Juvenescence: a Cultural History of Our Age. In it, Harrison suggests that humans possess cultural age as well as biological age; that is, we belong to a history that preceded our arrival in the world and will outlast our exit from it.
“Like other life forms, we humans undergo an aging process, yet the historical era into which we are born has a great deal to do with how that process unfolds, even at the biological level...Thus, a seemingly simple question—how old are we?—places us in an unfamiliar region where, among all the life forms on earth, we find ourselves alone and without definite coordinates.”
The poet W.H. Auden wrote at the beginning of his poem, “Doggerel by a Senior Citizen,” the following brief but insightful thought:
“Our earth in 1969
is not the planet I call mine.”
For most of us (even the youngest pups among us), we could write an updated version:
“Our earth in 2022
is not the planet I once knew.”
Perhaps an example is in order (there are plenty I could share, but three will suffice):
I remember a world with phone booths, in which you weren’t on-call 24 hours a day, but had to plan if/when you were going to “reach out and touch someone” (not that that jingle would work in our sexually abusive culture these days).
I remember a world with cassette tapes, in which you physically bought a whole album (rather than downloaded just a single track) and listened to all the other songs from that artist as part of getting to the one you really loved.
I remember a world with Polaroid cameras, in which the thrill of the instant fuzzy picture came with the healthy reinforcement that there was indeed a relationship between immediacy and quality (or the lack thereof).
I do not share these examples as nostalgia but as markers—as relics—of a world that no longer exists as it did 30 years ago. Chronologically speaking, I was 21 then; I’m 51 as of last week, but one could say that I am by nature “heterochronic” in age, just as you are. We possess diverse kinds of ages: biological, historical, institutional, psychological. And, as Harrison writes, “we will see how these various ‘ages’ intersect with one another—both in individuals and in civilizations.”
Think about this: your body contains a brain. Is your brain the same age as your mind? No. Unlike the brain, your mind is linked by affiliation and inheritance to other minds, both past and present. When you read the Apostle Paul or Plato, that makes your mind, informed by the thought of others, over two thousand years old!
This is why reading the best books that were written decades, centuries, and even millennia before us is important; we are not just developing our brains (though there is all kinds of neuroscientific research to support the benefits of broad reading), we are developing our minds by guiding them to the best authors and most important ideas.
Have you ever heard or used the phrase, “She’s an old soul,” to describe someone? Is this used as some kind of chronological measure? Hardly. It is meant to explain an intangible aspect of a person who seems older than she is. And yet, what we really love about someone described as an “old soul” is usually not that she seems old, but that he or she actually seems young.
The ancients suggest as much when they declare that human consciousness first sprang from wonder, which can take the form of marvel, puzzlement, or dread—all conditions associated more with youth than with age. Harrison offers Albert Einstein as a prime example. He writes:
“Toward the end of his life, Einstein claimed that his breakthroughs in physics were due to the fact that, in mind and in spirit, he had remained a child his entire life. Now Einstein’s mind obviously did not cease its development when he was still a child. What he meant was that he never stopped asking more probing and technically sophisticated versions of those basic questions that parents never quite knew how to answer: Why is the sky blue? How old is God? Why can’t I see the wind? It takes a childish sort of inquisitiveness to wonder what an atom is made of, or under what conditions time might move backward, or what light would look like to someone traveling at its speed on a parallel beam. Einstein’s mind continued to grow in capacity and complexity while holding onto to its intrinsic wonder, curiosity, and love of the marvelous...which is another way of saying that he was quite a genius.”
Love. Wonder. We think of childhood when we hear these two words, but as Harrison suggests, childhood is what every adult has lost to an Enemy who knows that love and wonder only and ultimately lead to the person of God. Over time, each of us develops a combination of habits and practices to escape the hurt of the world by hardening our hearts toward it or insulating ourselves from it, mythologizing a missing childhood’s golden age and attempting to transfigure its reality through selective memory, fantasy, nostalgia, and retrospective project. Regardless of motive, the outcome is the same: a loss of childhood, Harrison suggests, is our first “intimation of mortality,” if not our first taste of death itself.
The Child Is Father of the Man
I think there’s something to this, and the reason why we struggle so much to grow up—we don’t know how to handle the pain of our loss of childhood as we become adults, so we fight it. Some examples:
The grown male adult refusing to be called “Mister” because “that’s my father” and he doesn’t want to be thought of as “old.”
The almost middle-aged mom desperately trying to relate on a peer level with her adolescent daughter’s friends because it makes her feel cool and temporarily young again.
An entire parent culture so preoccupied with their children’s athletic, musical, and creative exploits because, having lost the love and wonder themselves for God’s good and created world, all they have left is what they can remember from their lost childhood, combined with attempts to reincarnate those memories vicariously through their children.
William Wordsworth wrote in his short 1802 poem, “My Heart Leaps Up”:
“My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So it was when my life began;
So it is now I am a Man;
So be it when I shall grow old
Or let me die!
The Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”
The man recalls his earlier delight at the sight of the rainbow, relaying it forward in the hope that in his old age he will continue to respond to that sight with something of the child’s primal joy. While this joy seeks to remain true to itself in time—that is, to remain identical—it cannot help but differentiate itself as the aging process takes its course; thus, the child will become the father of the man, for childhood sentiment lies at the core of the “faith that looks through death” and, according to Harrison, “informs the wisdom that comes later in the arc of life, in years that bring the philosophic mind.”
Preserving the Love and Wonder of Childhood
And so at last we arrive at the question you’ve been asking: so what? What does any of this have to do with anything? Why does it matter?
It matters because as the aging process follows its course, it is possible that this childhood sentiment submits to maturation whereby what the grown man gains in depth and insight he loses in awe and intensity, such that the sentiment blossoms with age rather than withering away like a dried-up seedpod. This is the flourishing and the telos (or end goal) of our pursuit. As parents, we are not attempting to raise children but adults, all the while tapping into—and still preserving somehow—the love and wonder of childhood in them and in us by doing so.
In Matthew 18, in an attempt to once and for all answer the apostles’ inquiries about who the greatest in the kingdom of heaven is, Matthew records that,
“Calling to him a child, Jesus put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me...”
But then a warning:
“...but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.’”
The wise parent takes seriously the burden and responsibility of our task and heeds Jesus’ teaching that, for us to be good parents requires us to become like the ones we raise—curious, energetic, and willing to learn. Our demeanor as those who would shape children has to be one of humility, of having a sense of place and security in it, and of a submission to higher things and the One who created them.
This is who we and our children are called to be—humble, secure, and submissive to God as we teach and “train up a child in this way he should go, so that even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). For those of us who are older—chronologically, biologically, historically, institutionally, psychologically—have we departed from the way we should go? Harrison writes with warning and hope:
“Before we get too carried away with the romance of the child or kneel at the altar of juvenility, we should recall what the chorus in Antigone had to say about the youthful spirit of anthropos (that is, man), namely that for all his capacity for wonder, for all his openness to the strangeness of things, for all his ingenious ability to manipulate the forces of nature and devise new gadgets and tools, there persists in ‘man’ a strange, self-destructive recklessness that can easily get the better of him and engender disaster. The fact alone that the chorus is composed of Theban elders should serve as a reminder that it is not thanks to children that our species has survived; it is thanks to their parents, teachers, leaders, and sages.”
Indeed it is. For those of us who have children (and even for those of us who don’t), let’s not be afraid of being the adults in the room. But let’s be the adults who have somehow managed to hang on to the love and wonder we had as children, and seek to pass that love and wonder on to the generations coming behind us.
This is the kind of “Grandfather” I want to play on stage—and become in real life.
Post(erity): “How We Know We Are Loved”
Each week, I choose a post from the past that seems apropos of something (of course, you’re always welcome to search the archives yourself whenever you like).
This week’s Posterity post, “How We Know We Are Loved,” comes from April of 2007, in which then 3-year-old Millie taught me an amazing lesson about what a child-like response to God’s love is. As the saying goes, “Out of the mouths of babes…”
Fresh & Random Linkage
“The Race to Reconnect Tonga” - How engineers plan to repair the undersea communications cable severed by a recent volcanic eruption is fascinating stuff.
“Steven Spielberg's 32 Movies, Ranked from Worst to Best” - I cannot take this list seriously when Duel is not even mentioned. Weak sauce.
“Apocalypse Jacket. Built to Withstand Black Lava, Flash Fires and Chemical Erosion. Zombies Will Hate It.” - Thought I’d pick up two for Megan and me.
Until next time.