Hattie the Foodie

A friend invited me for lunch today at a hip restaurant in Dallas' bustling, newly-chic Bishop Arts District.

I had my choice between Hattie's and a gourmet brick oven pizza place. I picked Hattie's.

Not because I'd ever been there before, because I hadn't. Or even because I knew what kind of food they served, because I didn't. I just liked the name.

My Aunt Hattie

You see, one of my mom's aunts in Maine was named Hattie, and what a character she was! Although I don't talk about Maine nearly as much as I do New York City, it's not because I don't have fond memories of people and places in the Pine Tree State. And Hattie was one of those people.

Aunt Hattie was married to my mom's Uncle Arthur, who was one of my grandmother's brothers. So, strictly speaking, she would have been my great-aunt, athough we never got that complicated about it.

Aunt Hattie and Uncle - even though she had several uncles, my mom always referred to Uncle Arthur simply as "Uncle" - were dairy farmers who also had a large vegetable garden. During the summers, back in the good old unregulated days, Uncle would dig up or pick fresh produce and bring it out to simple wooden tables set up in the front yard, where Aunt Hattie would sell it to customers driving by.

If they ran out of something and Uncle was in the fields with the cows, Aunt Hattie would hurry through the barn to the garden out back, pick whatever the customer wanted, and rush back to the front of the house with the fresh-from-the-earth veggies. Carrots, peas, string beans, potatoes, corn, squash. You couldn't get 'em any fresher if you'd gone with Hattie and picked 'em yourself. And that kind of honest-to-goodness freshness was what their neighbors and three months' worth of summer people wanted.

For Aunt Hattie and Uncle's year-round neighbors, back when salt-of-the-earth simplicity defined New England, this was just how you got your vegetables in Maine in the summer. Their village didn't have a grocery store. Most of them labored all day at their own dairy farms, in the woods, on the docks, or out on fishing and lobster boats. Just because they all lived in rural Maine didn't mean they all had time to tend their own gardens.

For the summer people, however, Aunt Hattie and Uncle's stand provided a kitchy, classic blast from the past. Something uniquely country. Virtually all of the summer people came from big cities and growing suburbs outside of Maine, so having a simple roadside stand run by a quiet farmer and his no-nonsense wife was a quaint anomaly. Of course, having fresh corn on the cob every night with one's catch of the day couldn't be beat, either.

Back in the Day

Not only was Uncle quiet, I can barely remember ever hearing him talk. He would smile and wink, and he liked showing my brother and me his cows whenever we visited my grandparents, but like a lot of Maine men, talking was just something guys did when there wasn't anything else to do. And in rural Maine, at least back then, there was always work to be done.

Aunt Hattie, on the other hand, had a gift for gab, along with a gravely, high-pitched voice. Both she and Uncle had weathered skin on their hands and faces, etched by the intense Maine weather and the constant manual labor they both apparently enjoyed. Aunt Hattie would serve customers at the front of the house, her wrinkled hands in constant motion, fingering the collar of her starched blouse, pressing creases out of her apron, washing carrots, shelling peas... and if she thought Uncle was within earshot, she'd call out for him into the clear Maine air with a shrill "Ah-tha! Ah-tha?" (Mainers don't pronounce the letter "R.")

Usually, only silence would greet Aunt Hattie's calls. At least in my memory, Uncle had an uncanny knack of disappearing to the back fields, usually without even a tractor. Or he'd be high up in the barn, further away from the garden than Aunt Hattie in the front yard. But with only a quick apology to the customer, Aunt Hattie would dash off, through the barn, to the back garden, then back to the stand.

That's simply how summers were spent at Aunt Hattie's.

Don't Have Time to Waste

Years later, after Uncle had passed away, and Aunt Hattie was alone in their rambling, quintessential New England farmhouse, my family visited her one summer afternoon.

Aunt Hattie still had children living nearby with their families, who checked on her regularly, but she was too independent to move in with any of them. Instead, she'd closed off the upstairs of her old home and set up a cozy bedroom for herself in the unused stairway hall. With no stairs to climb, and saving money by heating only half the house, why leave?

We pulled into the driveway, and parked near where they used to set up their vegetable stand, which by now had become a distant memory, as had the garden, and the cows.

Already parked in the grassy driveway was a silver car with Massachusetts license plates. Dad suggested that maybe now wasn't a good time, but Mom figured since the car wasn't from Maine, it wasn't anybody important, like Aunt Hattie's children. And sure enough, she was right.

We entered through the summer kitchen, an airy room between the barn and the main house with lots of windows (but no insulation, hence the room's name). Through the screen door between the summer kitchen and the real kitchen, we could see Aunt Hattie, seated, talking with a well-dressed woman who was obviously "from away."

When she saw us, Aunt Hattie burst into a smile, her mouth spreading generously across her broad, wrinkled face. She got up and invited us in with gusto.

Mom and the woman "from away" got into a conversation almost immediately, while Aunt Hattie escorted my father and me into her dining room. Dad leaned over to her and whispered, "who is she?"

"Oh, a former customer," Aunt Hattie's smile disappeared, but she didn't drop her voice like Dad had. At full volume, Aunt Hattie complained: "She's driving me crazy!"

"Shhh!" Dad quickly tried to hush Aunt Hattie, surprised at her apparent lack of tact. "She can hear you."

"Oh, I don't kaya," Aunt Hattie assured Dad, dropping her "R" like a true Mainer. "She's boring me to death!"

Different Hatties

Just as native New Yorkers have a unique quality about their character, so do native Mainers. I guess for people born and raised in one of the bleakest climates and economies in the United States, Mainers adopt stoicism and tenacity as basic survival skills.

Obviously, "Hattie" isn't strictly a New England name. For the restaurant here in Dallas' rapidly-gentrifying Bishop Arts District, "Hattie's" is meant to conjure images of a southern chef. With, as their website pretentiously describes, a "low-country" influence, whatever that means.

Not that it wasn't delicious food. A generous slab of deep-fried yet lightly crusted chicken with zesty Dijon mustard on some Hawaiian bread, with freshly-made onion rings.

Definitely not anything that would have come out of my Aunt Hattie's kitchen up in Maine.

Supposedly, "Hattie" is short for "Harriet" or "Henrietta," but I can't imagine my mother's aunt being called anything but "Hattie."

I don't know why, but I can imagine somebody named "Henrietta" putting a chicken sandwich in Hawaiian bread and still calling it Southern cooking!
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God is NOT Reckless

Define the word "reckless."

This is Merriam - Webster's definition:

"Marked by lack of proper caution: careless of consequences; irresponsible."

Doesn't sound like a particularly admirable quality, does it? Yet in the past several years, the term has taken on a firestorm of popularity in some Christian circles to define an attribute of God.

While I suspect Wild at Heart author John Eldredge may be at least partly culpable for this unfortunate trend, it seems to have really taken off since Redeemer Presbyterian's Tim Keller's book, The Prodigal God, advances a variation of the phrase. In addition, Keller once tweeted, "God's reckless grace is our greatest hope" to his legion of fans.

Considering his dynamic ministry in New York City and his proven track record in reformed evangelical apologetics, I would be inclined to give Keller a pass on this issue, if not for its burgeoning popularity. I've heard there is a contemporary Christian band out there, a contemporary Christian DVD, and other pop-culture twists to Christianity that have jumped on the "reckless" bandwagon, turning it into a hot, hip byword for edgy evangelicalism.

A short post currently on Christianity Today's website spells is out a bit more, claiming that God is reckless in His love for us. Or at least, so says Nathan Foster, son of Christian author Richard Foster, who wrote Celebration of Discipline (1978).

But is God really reckless? Is calling God reckless and prodigal being clever while sacrificing clarity? Does portraying a risk-taking, rebel-happy god of sloppy proportions - which is the imagery "reckless" conjures up - a wise thing to do? God is many things, but a caricature of irresponsibility and waste?

A Word Aptly Spoken?

Don't say I'm splitting grammatical hairs or playing the vocabulary purist on this one. I realize it's fun and cheeky to strip evocative words of their conventional meanings and contrive new contexts for them. Politicians have been doing it for years, as have used car salesmen. However, just because the trend has finally hit a sort of mainstream with the advent of information technology, where rules get re-written constantly, doesn't mean the Gospel needs words re-contextualized to stay relevant.

Granted, when enough people in a culture use a word the wrong way, the wrong way ends up becoming the right context for that word. Take the term "gay," for instance. Thirty years ago, if you said Christ was gay at the wedding of Cana, everybody would have known you meant he was happy and having a good time. Today, if you said Christ was gay, everybody would assume you were saying Christ was a homosexual.

Is that what people who want to think their god is reckless are trying to do? Distort our language?

Because really, when you start investigating what these people intend to say by claiming God is reckless, you soon realize none of them have come up with new understandings of the Trinity. We already know God's love is lavish. We already know it's free, oftentimes contrary to what we would expect, limitless, and will not be thwarted. Do we need a new way to express eternal truths? If so, is this the best way?

Of What Prodigal Means

Of course, Keller has seized upon a word many of us use improperly anyway. The church fathers who compiled the Canon used the word "prodigal" in its traditional sense, with its original meaning. Which, as Keller explains below, isn't the same as what many of us have assumed it to be.

In his preface to Prodigal God, Keller explains his title this way:

“The word ‘prodigal’ does not mean ‘wayward’ but according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, ‘reckless spendthrift’. It means to spend until you have nothing left. This term is therefore as appropriate for describing the father in the story as the younger son. The father’s welcome to the repentant son was literally reckless, because he refused to ‘reckon’ or count his sin against him or demand repayment. This response offended the elder son and most likely the local community."

So for Keller, it seems plausible to jump from "reckless" to "prodigal," and then use the two words interchangeably when describing God.

But what's the flaw in this assumption? Which word most defined the son who took his inheritance early? It's not the "reckless" part of the definition, but "spendthrift," as in "wasteful expenditure" (which is the first listing in Merriam-Webster for the word "prodigal.") Just being reckless could have meant the Prodigal Son was irresponsible in any number of ways, but it was his unwise use of money that led him to eat pigs' slop.

We can't necessarily take the definition for a word or phrase and then use that definition to describe something else entirely. It's linguistic hubris predicated on the assumption taught by our culture that such correlations should be transferable.

Christ Wasn't Wasted

But they doesn't necessarily work out that way. Particularly when we're describing our Heavenly Father. Did God waste His resources to save us? Christ, His pure Son, was poured out as a holy sacrifice for our sins, but was that a reckless plan on God's part? Particularly since both of them knew Christ's death and burial were not going to permanently separate them from each other, or from the Elect?

Even if you don't believe in predestination, can you see how your salvation, as something you could never have earned, has been provided to you out of pure love? Even if Christ died for just one soul, would His death have been in vain? Would the defeat of sin, Hell, and Satan have been a reckless demonstration of God's sovereignty? How much of a box are we putting God in by ascribing such a contrivance as recklessness?

Who - and What - God Is

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-present, which means He will save whom He will save, and He'll do whatever He needs to do to save His people. But that does not mean God is reckless.
Going back to our definition of the word, consider the fact that God does not ignore caution. He's God - who or what can caution Him about anything? What danger could He ever face? What problem might He encounter that He wouldn't be able to anticipate and overcome?

God is not careless of consequences. All things - ALL things - work TOGETHER for good for those who love God and are called according to His purposes. God knows everything that has happened, is happening now, and will take place tomorrow and 23 million years from now. Everything He does is perfect - there are no negative "consequences" because everything that takes place ultimately points to His glory.

God is not irresponsible. Good grief, He MADE everything! He knows how everything works! Everything - from how blood circulates in our bodies to number of hair on your head (obviously, He's got a lot less my hair to keep track of) to the number of Islamic militants who are training as suicide bombers at this very moment. God can't not be responsible - everything is His for Him to do with as He pleases. He's it. The top. You can' get more trustworthy, reliable, or secure than God.

Can I have a witness here?

So let's stop with the borderline heresy of ascribing recklessness to God. I appreciate the point Keller tries to make about God's lavish love. But even the Prodigal Son's father was motivated by genuine love that was untainted by recklessness, as seen by the way he reasoned with the loyal son and understood his bitterness. Just as their father had the situation well in hand, even moreso does our Heavenly Father.

How thankful we should be that our God is not reckless!
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Lambs Make Bad Shepherds

Note: Today's essay may simply seem like another in a series of Christian-bashing missives, but to be fair, yesterday's critique of Chuck Colson's editorial was to support his goal by endorsing a better battle plan. Today's essay is, unfortunately, your run-of-the-mill televangelist bashing, for which, I must admit, it's hard for me to muster any apologies...


Sad to say, but it's hardly a scandal anymore when a flashy televangelist gets caught with his pants down. Instead of reacting to the news in disbelief, we ask "what took so long?"

Well, at least I do, but then, I'm more cynical than most. So when word got out that Marcus Lamb, founder of the Daystar religious broadcasting network, had an affair several years ago and has tried to keep it quiet all this time, I think I rolled over in my bed and slapped the snooze button.

District Attorney Says No Shake-Down Took Place

Indeed, the way this story has been treated in the press, the "news" isn't that he had an affair, but how he kept it hidden, how he got the woman to move out of state, and why he and his wife never bothered to tell their television audience. This ambivalence about Lamb's violation of his marriage covenant speaks more to the sad state of televangelism in the United States than anything else.

Lamb and his wife, Joni, have rationalized away their cover-up of the affair by saying it was a private family matter they wanted to resolve without public scrutiny. Well, I hope they've gotten everything resolved by now, because lawyers have begun crawling all over things.

Last week, the Lambs went on their daytime show to announce his past affair, claiming three people were extorting them for millions in hush money. As it turns out, the Lambs, apparently true to their sensationalistic Pentecostal leanings, were making more of the "threats" than was true.

A lawyer for at least one former employee did notify the Lambs that his client was suing them over the trauma she had endured for keeping his affair secret. And yes, she's suing the Lambs for millions of dollars. But he claims to have in no way threatened to go to the media with the story if they didn't pay up. It was a court case, after all, not a back-room shake-down. Instead, the Lambs panicked and, realizing they'd made a big mistake by not coming clean with their viewers years ago, decided to try and deflect some of the attention off of themselves and onto their former employees.

How's that for a slimeball husband who's had an affair: blame your employees for having to tell the truth!

They're Both Trying to Spin Their Way Out of It

Joni Lamb hasn't exactly been a saint through all of this either. While she can hardly be blamed for her husband's affair, she apparently learned of it from the employee whose lawyer informed Daystar of the lawsuit. Although initially thankful to the employee, by outing her as an extortionist, Joni is hardly taking the high road in this situation. In fact, by her attitude and the way she's phrased her perspective on her husband's indiscretion, she seems more devoted to preserving their cash cow of a television empire.

Which is what this all comes down to, doesn't it?

If their TV ministry truly engaged with their virtual flock, wouldn't Marcus have felt enough remorse to confess to them what he'd done against his wife and God? Why didn't other executives at Daystar hold him accountable and insist on a sabbatical until counseling and reconciliation with his wife had been completed? This is standard procedure in other ministries - along with, on occasion, dismissal and replacement.

Instead, the Lambs posted the following on their website:

"After Joni told her husband the Lord convinced her he was worth fighting for, together they submitted to an intense process of repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration through pastoral counseling and personal accountability under the leadership of an expanded church-based spiritual authority team."

What is "an expanded church-based spiritual authority team?" And why didn't this team consider the people who watch the Lamb's television ministry worth including in this reconciliation? Granted, the actual sexual component of an extra-marital affair affect the husband and wife the most. But if you're a preacher of the Gospel with a television ministry, don't you owe your congregation some sort of apology? Do you wait until you fear being exposed before you try and backtrack publicly?

And if it was, of all people, your employees who learned about the affair and told your wife, wouldn't you - and your wife! - want to lavish some Biblical therapy on them to help them sort through what has happened? After all, if they're the dedicated employees you'd want to have working for a TV ministry, they would be heartbroken, disillusioned, and angry. Why didn't the Lambs have pity for the people who found themselves caught in the middle? From all outward appearances, haven't they just concentrated on themselves?

All of This is Getting Old

Maybe they're the Gospel charlatans many televangelist critics have supposed them to be. Maybe because they have a horribly shallow faith that can't see beyond money and ratings? Maybe because they're so myopic and driven that one's personal reputation comes before treating one's employees fairly and with grace after they're the ones who learn of your affair?

Defenders of the Lambs might accuse me of charging into this story like a bull in a China shop. I don't know enough of the facts to render a judgment. This is still a private matter that we have no business interfering with.

To which I retort with an unequivocal: Balderdash! God holds ministers of His Gospel to a high standard, and fellow believers have the right to expect sin to be dealt with in accordance with those high standards. Notice, I didn't say we have the right to expect ministers to be perfect. Some people may have expected the Lambs to be saints, and I'm not blaming them because they're not. But believers do have the right to not be deceived by those who lead us.

Of course, the Lambs will be in court soon, explaining away how and why they did what they did - to each other, and their employees. And it will all become public record.

Oddly enough, if they had done the right thing - even after Marcus's unfaithfulness, they would probably have emerged from this mess with a lot more privacy than they're going to be left with now.

Which is too bad for all of us.
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Pot, We'd Better Meet the Kettle

It's hard to talk about legalizing marijuana with a straight face. This narcotic has born the brunt of goofy jokes for years, and acquired a legion of pop-culture slang terms. Compared with much harder illicit drugs out there today, marijuana, or pot, or weed seems so relatively benign, it's hard to get worked into a lather about it.

We've heard all the reasons why some people would like to see it legalized:

• It's a great pain medicine, and people suffering severe physical hardships should have legal access to it.


• Legalizing marijuana could immediately wipe out a lot of drug-related crime, from human trafficking to illegal immigration to inner-city gang wars.


• Legalizing pot means you can tax it, which could provide a lucrative revenue stream for taxing authorities.

We've also heard all the reasons why some people say it should never be legalized:

• Marijuana isn't the only pain medicine out there. Why use a narcotic when we have legal drugs that have been clinically tested?


• Legal access to marijuana won't cure the physical damage it causes in the health, earning potential, and longevity of its users.


• Latin American drug cartels aren't going to simply close-up shop if marijuana is de-criminalized in the United States. They'll just move on to something else so they can preserve the empires they've built with other peoples' blood.

In a way, I'm rather amazed that the talk of legalizing marijuana continues to surface in our social dialog. The valedictorian of my high school class back in the 80's was advocating for the decriminalization of pot, and it was already an old idea at the time. Some First World countries and a few states have approved medical marijuana, although widespread acceptance of the drug still seems more the stuff of juvenile dreams and frat boy jokes than anything else.

Then again, we Americans have become so jaded by duplicitous politicians and their reasons for supporting or opposing legalization, talk of making marijuana legal sounds more like a pipedream (pardon the pun) than legitimate legislation. We hear contradictory scientific studies on the merits and disadvantages of marijuana, and a lot of myths on both sides of the argument masquerade as fact. Even our own increasing ambivalence towards morality in general encourages advocates for legalization to live in hope that one of these days, Americans will simply give in.

But what are the facts about marijuana? As it turns out, reality is a bit more murky than both sides care to admit.

• It is not considered particularly addictive. Depending on a variety of factors, including frequency of use, dosage, and ancillary drug use like alcohol, between 9 and 10 percent of users develop a clinical addiction over time.


• Doctors and scientists suspect that it causes some health problems, can harm the fetus if a pregnant woman uses it, and can lower worker productivity, but nobody can say whether marijuana use itself is the culprit, or other factors which can actually precipitate marijuana use.


• Psychologically, marijuana can become a crutch, masking other problems and distorting one's ability to deal effectively with stressful or complicated situations.


• Virtually everybody agrees that it alters the user's awareness, which makes pot as dangerous as alcohol for drivers, pilots, and other people who need to keep a clear head.

Maybe now you can see why the issue isn't as clear-cut as many people on both sides of the issue would like it to be.

What strikes me most about this topic, however, is how similar marijuana sounds to alcohol. Try to find a reputable source on the Internet which doesn't admit that marijuana consumed sporadically, by adults, in small doses, without other mood-altering drugs, causes more problems than the same type of alcohol consumption. If alcohol didn't enjoy the widespread social acclaim that it does, would we be having the same debates over beer and wine that we're having over marijuana?

By way of full disclosure, perhaps I should inform people who don't regularly read my blog that I don't drink. Maybe this makes it easier for me to imagine a world in which alcohol, a conventional drug, and marijuana, a drug with a bad reputation, can be compared. I'm sure most people at their country club's bar right now would consider me insane for even suggesting their gin & tonic or imported beer has the potential of inflicting the same type of damage we suspect marijuana of being capable of.

Nevertheless, doesn't it make sense that the apparent reality of marijuana's similar affects on consumers as alcohol plays a greater role in the discussion of marijuana's legalization? Why has alcohol enjoyed virtually a universally-cheered position in cultures the world over, while marijuana - which carries the same dangers and, frankly, quite similar pleasures - has been stigmatized as illicit?

If it's simple ignorance as to the similarity between marijuana and alcohol, then maybe, if society continues to frown on pot, we need to call the proverbial kettle black, too. Shouldn't we need to re-visit how harmful alcohol can be to our society? And whether or not we really benefit from having multinational conglomerates peddling all sorts of libations to people who need to keep a clear head?

Of course, if society decides that marijuana is harmless and should be legalized, then what does that say about our willingness to tolerate people driving under intoxicating influences, people getting hooked on substances that can distort their ability to function in the workplace, and people who need artificial crutches to cope with interpersonal relationships?

After all, we already have enough of those types of people with legal alcohol. And look how much good it's doing us.

And them.
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Your Money or Your Life? Part 2

For Part 1, please click here

Yesterday, you may have thought I painted the case for lavish charity with too broad a brush. Perhaps I left a little too many blobs of paint on your worldview, or maybe I didn't color mine in well enough.

Well, lest you think I'm just letting off steam or railing against the mindsets of other people, let me remind you that in my essays, I'm often preaching to myself. So if any of my convictions stick in your consciousness, then by all means, work them out for yourself, but don't think I'm not doing the same thing in my own soul.

I'm no better - and probably a lot worse - than anybody reading these essays. And oftentimes, I find myself writing things that I had no idea would appear on my computer screen. Some people would say that's the Holy Spirit directing me to say things that maybe I wouldn't normally say. But at the risk of sounding pious or holier-than-thou, I'll simply admit that just because I write something in an essay doesn't mean I've already mastered it myself.

And don't all of us run the risk of spending so much time talking and debating, that gritty Kingdom work gets left on the back burner? I don't particularly enjoy ministering to people mired in raw poverty. I spent a semester in graduate school studying the fledgling homeless shelter here in Arlington, and have volunteered there some, but while I have friends who selflessly serve at the shelter, I feel conspicuous by my inadequacy.

I think I may have already shared the story of walking through Union Square one chilly, rainy evening, and encountering a homeless man begging for money to buy a meal. Like a good New Yorker, I brushed past him, pretending to ignore him, but I turned the corner and ducked into a pizzeria. After purchasing a thick, steaming slice of Sicilian pizza and a chilled bottle of orange juice, I went back outside to the beggar around the corner. In the pouring rain, I held up the pizza and juice to him, expecting at least a smile, if not outright gratitude. Instead, his face soured up, his fiery gaze glancing at the pizza and then scornfully at me.

"What the ---- is this?" he bellowed.

"You said you wanted money for food, so I thought you were hungry," I explained, realizing I had caught him in his lie. And sure enough, he batted the plate with the pizza disdainfully with a greasy hand, shot off some unimaginative expletives, and stalked off into the rain.

If you've ever been to New York City, you've probably seen plates of half-eaten food left on ledges and benches. People sometimes leave their leftovers for the homeless to eat, so they don't have to paw through garbage cans. It's hardly any more sanitary or appetizing, but that's what I did with the pizza and juice. I left it on a broad granite window ledge, and continued my journey home, vowing to never again pay any heed to street beggars.

We All Owe Someone

Indeed, I have my own preconceived ideas about why certain segments of the population are notoriously poor, and I struggle with the idea that God doesn't give a lot of caveats when He tells us to reallocate funds He's given us to them.

But that's really the core of this issue, isn't it? None of what we have is ours. Even if you've gone to college and graduate school and earn a six-figure income, working 60-hour weeks, the salary you receive isn't yours because you deserve it. Is it? Maybe on a basic economic level, but there's more to it than that, isn't there? God gave you talents and abilities, and He's placed you in a part of the world where you're privileged to leverage those abilities through education and work to create a profession that accomplishes something our society values. But are you entitled to what you earn solely on the basis of your own accomplishments?

Who put you in North America, within easy access to some of the best educational systems and most lucrative employment opportunities in the world? Who gave you the ability to think, process information, and learn? Who provided you a job to put your skills to work? Who created our society and sovereignly allows your profession to be one our society is willing to pay for? Who created our treasury and currency, without which your paycheck would be worthless?

Is Everybody Worth What They Earn?

You can see where I'm going with this, can't you? And maybe you're objecting, protesting that reality is much more complex than that. To which I'd also agree - God has allowed mankind to rig the system so that our Ultimate Benefactor gets easily obscured. Well, "rig the system" may seem a bit harsh to some evangelical capitalists, but that's what's happened, isn't it?

After all, the profession of public school teaching has become so marginalized in our society that far fewer highly-qualified people choose it as a profession, or stay in it after a few years. Our society values teachers so poorly that we pay them a fraction of their merit in terms of training future generations to be innovators and thinkers themselves. Nursing represents another profession - oddly, also staffed mostly by women - which demands exceptional proficiency without the financial reward.

On the other hand, stock brokers on Wall street can earn upwards of one billion dollars a year by gaming risks and betting other people's money. But since so many people stand to also reap a windfall if the risks fall on the right side of the ledger, we all cheer in the face of the utter futility such actions pose as legitimate ways to produce a viable commodity. After all, as we've seen in the past couple of years, electronic money doesn't have nearly as much value as what it's supposed to be able to buy.

Money Love

Not that money itself is the problem. Money is just another thing, like shirts, trees, and diplomas. It can sit in your bank account, or in a drawer at your home. It's neither good nor bad. It can be transferred, accidentally washed in the laundry, tossed into the air at the start of a game, pay for good things, pay for bad things, appreciate, and depreciate.

But we love it so much, don't we? We like the way a lot of it makes us feel. We like the things we can buy with it. We like how it can insulate us from people who don't have as much of it as we do.
And before we know it, the poor have fallen completely off our radar. The only times we think about them are when people like Rush Limbaugh rant about how much of our money those lazy poor ingrates want now.

Many Americans who consider themselves to be self-made people with an admirable net worth tend to forget that many things are relative. Yet there is an economic line in the sand, called the "cost of living" in the United States, which can make life incredibly hard or easy, depending on which side of the line you happen to sit.

Tale From the Village

As I've mentioned before, one of the reasons I like New York City so much involves its many contradictions and exaggerations of life. And Manhattan, in particular, offers a slice of American life that is more true than its cacophony of multiculturalism, sheer vertical audacity, and excess of almost everything might initially suggest.

One of these slices of life has to do with the cost of living. And in New York, factors related to costs of living smack you in the face all the time.

You might recall my essays describing the middle class housing experiments of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town along Manhattan's 14th Street, between Union Square and the East River. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, as it was called then, built the massive complexes after the Second World War as GI's came home and started families. Many servicemen checked in with their parents in New York's aging neighborhoods and took a quick turn out to Long Island, to the brand new invention called the suburbs, of which Levittown was the first.

Meanwhile, back in New York City, top business leaders saw the need for keeping middle class families in the heart of Manhattan. Teachers, nurses, hardware store owners, chefs, garbagemen, police officers, office clerks, and low-level managers still offered valuable services to the city's business class. However, ever since its founding, New York has not exactly boasted a low cost of living. Keeping enough attractive housing affordable enough in the city presented enough of a challenge on the open market, so to enhance the option of city living over the brand-new suburbs, New York's power brokers got the city to create some inventive incentives for Met Life to construct Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. Even today, they remain bastions of middle-class housing on an island that has seen its open market real estate prices skyrocket.

So what? Does this have anything to do with poverty and money?

Well, I hope so. I'm trying to draw a picture of how capitalism doesn't necessarily value what it should. I'm not saying capitalism is evil or fatally flawed, but you have to admit that it isn't perfect. Sometimes situations are created through the course of economic dynamics that can't be ignored as simply the price we pay for enjoying capitalism. Sometimes, the rich - in New York's case, the corporate titans who didn't want their police officers and secretaries all forced to commute in from the suburbs - need to make allowances for people who would otherwise be shut out of certain economic realities. Call it limousine liberalism if you want, having some well-heeled New York businessmen take pity on lowly schoolteachers and bus drivers so they can have a corner of the city all to themselves. But it has worked - at least, up until now.

Granted, compared with the rest of the country, the rents residents of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town pay seem shockingly high, but for Manhattan rates, they're artificially low. You really need to have lived in Manhattan and forked out market rate rents for yourself to see how important this story is to the ethic of accommodating certain income disparities. Suffice it to say that while this experiment does indeed violate the principles of pure capitalism, its long-term benefits have proven valuable: it's ensured a sizable population of middle class consumers for local merchants, kept teachers close to public schools and other public servants close to city facilities, provided city companies with low-level employees who don't have long commutes, and maintained a stable neighborhood which has become an anchor for gentrification in adjoining neighborhoods. Those are all assets which may not have big dollars attached to them, but sometimes, it takes money to make money. And that's how I think the original intent of these complexes has been rewarded.

God's Economy Isn't Capitalism

Of course, I realize this is not a seamless comparison between conservatives grousing about entitlement programs and people who are poor because they are lazy. All the residents of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town have middle-class income and employment; these have never been public housing complexes in the slum sense of the term. And some developers, drooling over these properties' profit potential, have complained for years that these two complexes mock the very economic underpinnings that have made New York City the finance capital of the world.

Yet for all their dowdy aesthetics, contrived civic value, and limited applicability to other cities, Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town represent an acknowledgement that society can benefit from financial grace. This wasn't an experiment in Utopian, altruistic good-for-goodness sake. It was a long-range endorsement of the value hard-working yet minimal-wage people contribute to a community. It represented an understanding that some people will be paid more than others, but that doesn't mean the lower-paid folks are scum.

Which is where it all comes down to relativity. Many middle-class Americans bristle with disdain at the notion of their taxes supporting welfare cases. But for those of us who believe in Christ, how can we reconcile that animosity with Ezekiel 16:49, "Now this was the sin of your sister, Sodom... they did not help the poor and needy..."

Some people need more help than others, and sometimes costs of living become inequitable. This is where poverty starts, and to the extent that we can help mitigate it, shouldn't we?

I'm not saying that everything liberals have done to address poverty is right, and all of the problems conservatives find in our current welfare state don't really exist. We have a distorted and ineffective entitlement system that needs to be overhauled.

But can we ignore our responsibility to participate in the solution? And not giving anything, even while the systems are broken, is not a Biblical option. Instead of saying entitlements reward laziness, and that taxation to fund entitlements is wealth redistribution, let's get serious about whose money we're talking about here.

God's economy isn't capitalism. Capitalism is a man-made economic contrivance, just like communism, feudalism, neo-colonialism, socialism, and all of the other "ism's" societies have used to structure their financial resources. While I happen to consider capitalism to be the most effective socioeconomic structure ever invented, I hold no false illusions as to its ability to cure everything that ails us. At best, capitalism can provide a robust framework for guiding our economy, but even the best-engineered framework is designed to flex a bit to accommodate adversity.

Now, I'm hardly the prototype of the flexible, accommodating personality. But when it comes to managing God's money and helping those in poverty, I'm trying! How about you?

In Memoriam

Before I close, please allow me to remember this day that "lives in infamy;" December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. The first residents of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town were people who fought in the war precipitated by that fateful day.
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Your Money or Your Life? Part 1

Sometimes you have to hit me upside the head to get my attention.

At least, that's how today has seemed.

This morning, I came across a Bible passage from Ezekiel 16:49, which carries a stiff warning: " 'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy...'"

Then I read an interview on ChristianityToday.com with Redeemer Presbyterian's Tim Keller, in which he bluntly states, "It's biblical that we owe the poor as much of our money as we can possibly give away."

But still, I cluelessly trolled the Internet in search of a suitable topic for today's essay. I didn't think I had found anything, and began sinking into a gathering cloud of discouragement as the afternoon wore on. Then, a longtime friend contacted me about something we had discussed a while ago, and mentioned that their pastor yesterday reminded the congregation that Christ wasn't born so we could lavish ourselves with stuff.

Lavish ourselves with stuff.

And that was the *whomp!* upside my head.

Who is Teaching You About Wealth?

I've written about North American Christians and poverty before, and spent some time evaluating Keller's convictions about lavish charity. But that all sounded too counter-cultural to be practical. Instead, we've been bombarded by political hyperbole from conservatives furious that entitlement programs continue to sap them dry so lazy pigs can wallow at the trough of liberal wealth redistribution. And that has made a lot more sense to us pragmatists.

While most of this rhetoric has come from some of the most Biblically illiterate people in the United States, namely our conservative talk radio stars, some religious conservatives have also jumped on the social-welfare-as-socialist-propaganda bandwagon. Combined, these right-wing pundits have succeeded in crafting the illusion that poor people deserve to be poor, and rich people deserve to be free from worrying about poor people.

Now, if you need Biblical references for proof of this fallacy, then maybe you should read your Bible more than you listen to Rush, Beck, Hannity, and the other peddlers of financial idolatry. You're not going to get God's perspective of money by listening to guys who've made their wealth sitting in radio studios, swaddled in leather chairs, feeding their listeners a daily diet of testosterone-fueled vitriol against anybody who dares to think before they vote.

Then again, they wouldn't be making their millions if they didn't have millions of listeners across the country who enjoyed being spoon-fed this pablum. Rush and his ilk get some stuff right, yet their credibility gets washed away by the flood of stuff they get wrong.

Reality Check

But I digress.

Nobody is saying that to be a good follower of Christ you need to give away everything you have and check in to your local homeless shelter. How does that really help anybody? Christ never tells us to become dirt poor, but His Gospel expects us to pursue a healthy economic balance between those who have abundance and those in need.

He tells us to give our redundant possessions to those who lack; for example, people with two coats should give one to the person who can't afford to buy any. If that's wealth redistribution, then I guess wealth redistribution is a Biblical concept, isn't it?

Not that when it comes to our government, all of our taxes should go to propping up what has become a wasteful, corrupt welfare system. Since we live in a close approximation of a democracy, we have the right and - hopefully - ability to work towards equitable support for people who may be experiencing some sort of disadvantage, and to advocate for change when bureaucratic systems actually harm society by perpetuating poverty.

I'll even go as far as to claim that some political liberals have actually abused poverty to subjugate classes of Americans and trick them into voter servitude by denying them chances to advance themselves. If black Americans still in our country's ghettos could see how their Maxine Waters' and Charles Rangel's have manipulated them for personal gain, we would have a breakthrough in race relations and economic opportunity. But here, too; if the evangelical church was carrying more of this social welfare burden instead of the government, we would be in a better position to direct the money we're spending towards programs we believe will yield better results.

For example, by the way our government has handled welfare programs, a lot of people have come to expect such benefits, and have cultivated the attitude of entitlement which grates against taxpayers. Generational poverty has evolved from this constant spoon-feeding of benefits which oftentimes rewards the lack of motivation and perpetuates sexual activity which, frankly, breeds more people who cyclically become dependants of the welfare state. This type of deliberate slothfulness is unbiblical, and if churches exercised their proper role in the funding of social programming, we could more effectively teach against such unethical behavior. Being poor is not morally or ethically wrong in and of itself; but when you decide to choose entitlement over initiative, you are not honoring Christ. The writers of Proverbs repeatedly say that if you don't work, you don't eat.

We Can't Let Go of the Money

Yet, even after we did all we could to reasonably insure that money going to poor people was being well-spent, how upset should we become when we learn that people are still abusing the system, and wrangling for entitlements they don't deserve?

With our current system, conservatives get all bent out of shape, furious at the injustice of working people paying taxes that are squandered on lazy poor people. But are we really upset about the perceived moral inequity, or are we upset about... the MONEY?

Does it all still come down to our love of money? Does it all still boil down to our desire to keep as much of it for ourselves as possible? Do we forget that whatever we claim to have "earned" in our jobs, through an inheritance, or even by marriage, comes from God Himself? If it's all His money to begin with, and we're simply taking advantage of an earthly system which rewards people based on jobs our society is willing to pay for, how mad should we get if we see poor people using money we've given them in inefficient and ineffective ways? How much does our own squandering of money sadden our God Who gave it to us in the first place? Are we trying to get the speck out of somebody else's eye when we've got a 2x4 sticking out of ours?

I'm not saying we should give money to people we know will, by their ingratitude, automatically flush it down the toilet. But on the Day of Judgment, those people will be held accountable for how they spent that money. And when we get to Heaven, we'll be evaluated by how we treated them - and with what attitude.

After all, the reward for us isn't the bigger house and the comfortable retirement here on Earth. It's the reward waiting for us in Heaven.

Maybe it's not only the squanderers of entitlement programs who are wasting their opportunities.
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Tomorrow: Part 2

New York on Parade

Growing up, every Thanksgiving in memory started with watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on television. Live television is fine, but I used to wonder what it would be like to experience the whole parade thing in person. So when I was living in Manhattan, one year I decided to do just that.

Most people think the parade is just that: a parade. Floats, bands, drill teams, clowns, and Santa bringing up the rear. And while the Macy's extravaganza usually has all of these components, their flagship store at Herald Square was still the largest department store in the world back when I lived there (South Korea's new Shinsengae Centumcity Department Store, opened in 2009, is now the title holder) so they're compelled to do things over-the-top.

During Thanksgiving week, Macy's bombards the city with reminders of the parade, either to drum up support among the locals so the parade route will be stuffed with cheering throngs, or to warn the locals to git outta Dodge before the West Side and Midtown become gridlocked Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, the media machine in North America's largest metropolitan area publishes routes, recommends viewing areas, gushes about the newest balloons, runs poignant nostalgia stories about the parades of yore, and banters trivia about the Big Apple tradition. If it wasn't for the fact that this was New York City, it would be easy to wonder if the original holiday for being thankful wasn't being co-opted for a dazzling marketing barrage. After all, just how do the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes commemorate the Pilgrims?

They don't, of course. They're just advertising the season's mega-show at the storied Rockefeller Center performance hall, the Christmas Spectacular. Which, all kidding aside, actually is a must-see and so moving, I teared up both times I experienced it. If you travel to New York between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, the Christmas Spectacular is just that - spectacular. And you know I don't use that term lightly.

Backstage Before the Parade

After the traditional Thanksgiving Eve service at Manhattan's Calvary Baptist Church on West 57th Street, I walked with some friends through Central Park to the American Museum of Natural History at West 77th Street. A heavy, cold mist shrouded the park in a dark suspense, enhancing the glow from the Tavern on the Green's twinkling lights wrapped amongst its garden's trees.

Within earshot of Central Park West and the museum, we could hear the gleeful chatter of children and see the hazy glow of spotlights. Emerging from the park, we were swallowed up in a good-natured crowd of parents with children propped on their shoulders, video recorders drinking in the memories.

Memories of what? Of blowing up the famous balloons, of course! Every year, Macy's spends the entire night before the parade inflating Garfield, Betty Boop, Snoopy, Superman, and other icons of Western society. Beguiled by the scene of so much taking place so effortlessly - humming inflation machines were doing all the work - my friends and I strolled among the sprawling lumps of Mylar that were slowly taking shape, noses lifting off the pavement, fingers getting fatter, wrinkles vanishing from faces. On the balloons, I mean; not us.

For generations, families have made a tradition of watching these creatures take shape on the streets and lawns around the Natural History museum. On Thanksgiving morning, the parade belongs mostly to tourists and the rest of the country via television. But this ritual of the balloons' inflation, however, is New York's own little celebration, and some quirky sentiment inside me appreciated this backstage revelry.

Indeed, none of my friends from church who were admiring these misty, serene transformations with me were planning on attending the parade the next morning. For Gotham denziens starved for intimacy in America's most congested yet isolating city, these up-close-and-personal encounters with creatures which would later float above the crowds had become the part of the parade they most treasured.

Show Time

Thanksgiving morning didn't so much dawn as emerge grimly from the night, still chilly, and now drizzly. Being a vacation day, I slept in and watched the beginning of the parade on TV. As it begins on the Upper West Side, I had time before the real show arrived in Herald Square, a mere 15-minute walk from my apartment, where I planned on taking in the festivities.

Walking westward down a nearly-deserted 34th Street, I could see Pluto bobbing around the corner above Broadway four blocks ahead. If New York didn't already have enough bizarre sights, that would probably have been quite funny. As it was, with the raw breeze and spitting rain, Pluto's handlers probably didn't want him to get as high in the air as would be necessary to look really thrilling. It would have been nicer if we had the cold temperatures counterbalanced with bright sunshine and calm air. Oh well, this was still the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, I told myself.

In Herald Square, grandstands towered over the sidewalks, but television cranes and on-location RVs blocked most of the good views. Hundreds of people were milling about, no one seeing much of anything except probably those at the tops of the grandstands. Plus, since it was raining, we had to dodge umbrellas. So much for not arriving early, I chided myself! I could tell the crowd must have been mostly tourists - despite the weather and poor views, few people were as grumpy as I was. I kept forgetting this was the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Finally, I found a good spot in a corner near 35th Street that police had barricaded, but were letting spectators occupy anyway. Remember, this was before 9/11, back before terrorism lurked around every New York corner. I found myself near one of the on-location RVs, and when I couldn't see the action in front of Macy's, I watched the action as people who probably were famous came and went. Although I didn't see anybody I actually recognized as being famous, by the way they acted, a couple of people apparently thought they were anyway.

Before long, yet far sooner than I expected, Santa Claus suddenly rolled through Herald Square, and without any fanfare, the parade was over. No announcer wishing the crowd "Happy Thanksgiving!" No encore. No scrolling of credits. Santa's sleight turned the corner headed to Madison Square Garden, and that was that.

Turning Towards Home

I turned around and went back to my apartment, the excitement of the parade fading with each block I walked. I couldn't escape a nagging disappointment that watching the parade on TV is actually better than being there live. The weather didn't make that much difference, the crowds didn't make that much difference. Even the lousy amplification - we could barely hear what was going on - didn't make up for the sheer confusion taking place within one short block in front of Macy's east entrance. So many acts, so many people, so much activity was churning through this small piece of real estate, that you didn't know what was what. Things were obviously being orchestrated for the TV audience, and those of us in the crowds were part of Macy's window dressing.

But did that mean the morning was a waste? Surprisingly, I didn't think so. Sure, it's all part of the commercialization of a holiday whose original intentions were faith-based. But considering how garish Christmas has become, a parade down the west side of Manhattan's Midtown seems almost tame these days.

Besides, as I turned to walk up my block, my mind shifted to the Thanksgiving feast I would be joining later in the day in Brooklyn with my aunt and family friends. Delicious food, loving family, good friends, a warm house...

Thankfulness has its privileges!
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Enjoy your Thanksgiving weekend! See you back here on Monday.

Art as Solace of the Mind

Show and Tell

"Majesty of God" by Judy Franklin, 2010

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

"I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."

"To each his own."

You'll be happy to know I'm not going to get into a lecture on art appreciation or how beauty should be defined. These popular phrases above reflect the subjective nature of our cultural encounters with the creative arts, and there's little point in anybody telling anybody else what they should or shouldn't appreciate.

Right?

Yet I'm not convinced that, overall, our society has done a good job of maintaining a beneficial interest in the creative arts. Maybe because over time, we've let subjectivism generate a nihilistic mindset concerning things that used to be important. Particularly in western civilization, we've become extremely pragmatic and efficient, to the point where if something doesn't serve a practical function, save us money, or make something easier, we're not interested in it. So art loses its importance.

Which is a bit perplexing, considering that compared with less sophisticated epochs in history, Westerners have more free time and expendable income at our disposal than ever before. But many of us fill this time with quantitative things like superiority-oriented sports, destination-centric travel, instant-pleasure amusements, passive movies, intense video games, and other goal-oriented activity. We measure things by scores, distances, fun, proficiency, and the like.

Just as I'm not going to set parameters for that which constitutes art, I'm not going to rate the ways we spend our free time as good or bad. I'm simply trying to point out that very little of what we choose to do involves the solace of the mind.

By "solace of the mind," I'm not talking about dumping everything that's in your brain into a bucket. Or abdicating common sense, propriety, and ethics. By "solace of the mind," without sounding like a New Age guru, I'm trying to convey the concept of engaging with beauty for beauty's sake.

Consider the infectious joy conveyed by the "flash culture mob" in Macy's downtown Philadelphia store a couple of weekends ago. Several hundred singers from the Philadelphia area convened in the main hall of the former Wanamaker's store and broke out into an unannounced rendition of the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's Messiah. Shoppers, caught off-guard, were delighted by the "random act of culture" which has been viewed on YouTube over 3.6 million times.

At the risk of sounding flaky, esoteric, or goofy, may I suggest that as our society has given up on the classic arts, which were intentionally designed to express beauty, we've lost a little bit of the humanity that has helped to smooth life's rougher edges? Is that a silly thing to suggest? I realize that here, my brave attempt at not telling you what I think good art is has faltered a bit; I can't deny having the "Hallelujah Chorus" soaring throughout the vast atrium at Macy's proved far more pleasurable than if it had been a rock anthem instead. But take the question in the spirit with which it is intended: have we forgotten how beneficial good art can be?

Museum attendance across the country has stagnated, dependant more on clever marketing and hip new buildings than the public's insatiable demand for timeless paintings, sculpture, and other visual media.

Symphonies, orchestras, opera and ballet companies, and live theater troupes have all begun strategizing for both their short-term and long-term survival as their audiences consolidate into an older, smaller, and less committed demographic. Perhaps now more than ever, the arts are perceived as being elitist and old-fashioned, which society at large automatically translates into unnecessary and hard to appreciate. Fun is far more easily obtainable from pop culture, even if pop culture doesn't provide the same rewards.

Which is the real issue here, isn't it? Not all art is as universally appreciated as the "Hallelujah Chorus," which while not everybody's cup of tea, certainly didn't cause anybody to erupt in anger in Macy's. But how many of those shoppers would prefer purchasing tickets to a rock concert instead of using free tickets to hear Messiah in concert? See what I mean?

Some paintings require more than a quick glance for their beauty to be seen. Sometimes you have to sit still and be patient as a musical score unfolds. Most sculpture requires at least a couple of complete 360's for the entire piece to make sense. Yet today's culture actually conditions most of us to expect instant gratification instead of expending much effort for a reward.

For something to be a solace to the mind, how much extra work is involved, really? Not that people can't find comfort in their favorite non-classical pursuits. But should we expect all of the bits of information and stimulation we stuff into our heads to be sufficiently dislodged by quick and/or easy entertainment? Can we mentally relax with good art in the same way we enjoy a video game or skiing? All pastimes provide fleeting encounters with enjoyment, but the afterglow of good art sticks with me longer than the afterglow of a B movie. Maybe I'm just different that way?

Not that art provides a magical cure-all, or is the fountain of youth. Great art can cure a gloomy day, but it can't cure diabetes. Nor am I advocating a revolt against pop culture entirely, because moderation in a variety of activities and interests can be like diversification in one's financial portfolio.

Just don't dismiss good art as irrelevant or outdated. And don't assume I'm some snobby Renaissance man who can tell his libretto from his ritornello. I'm not crazy about opera, and I don't care for ballet at all. But play anything by Bach, Beethoven, and sometimes even Mahler, and my mind can find its solace quite nicely, thank you very much.

You don't even have to pay a lot to get a bit of culture. My church hosts an annual arts festival, and the photo in today's essay shows one of the entries, a cut-glass and crushed-glass mosaic by Judy Franklin. Entitled "Majesty of God," Franklin's work uses the birth of Christ to express a grand theme of the Incarnation with a pastel palette suitable for swaddling an infant.

So maybe it will never hang in MoMA or the National Gallery. But it's good therapy to consider the crushed glass as not only snow, perhaps, but diffusers of light. Amidst all of the pastel coloration rises the golden sun (Christ as "beauteous Heavenly Light") and the stark red field punctuating the cross. Indeed, at the center of Franklin's work is the Cross of Christ, Trinitarian triangle, and further afield, a beveled gold radiance.

Why is it good therapy? For one thing, each of these components gives testimony to the deity and holiness of Christ. Perhaps we don't actually see a visual representation of Christ, but that's not an entirely unBiblical consideration, is it? Franklin does not concern herself with what God Incarnate may have looked like, because she's creating a depiction of His majesty, which for us today is far more important.

If you just glance at this work and tick off its obvious attributes; "broken glass: check; fang-looking things: check; pretty colors: check; cross in the middle: check;" then you're not engaging with the message Franklin has woven into each of her components.

Here's a challenge for you: don't look at this photo - gaze at it instead. No matter how much theology and doctrine you know about Christmas, what is this composition telling you about the Christ child? As you work these truths over in your mind, do you realize how things you were thinking about before you began reading today's essay here have been placed on your brain's back burner?

That's the solace of the mind I'm talking about.
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Making Music at Macy's

People may accuse me of many things, but being at the cutting edge of cultural fads will never be one of them.

For example, I'm just now getting around to talking about the October 30 "flash culture mob" event at the old Wanamaker's Department Store - now a Macy's - in downtown Philadelphia. Over 2 million people have already viewed the YouTube video of several hundred singers gathered in the department store's main hall who break into an unannounced rendition of Handel's thrilling "Hallelujah Chorus" from the Messiah.

You may recall that earlier this year, the City of Brotherly Love was plagued by a violent social phenomenon called "flash mobs," in which large gangs of rowdy teenagers would congregate and storm through city streets en mass, destroying private property, injuring passersby, and generally inciting chaos which wreaked havoc on businesses, imperiled racial harmony, and generally make Philadelphia life miserable. One flash mob even tore through the very same Macy's which hosted the "Hallelujah Chorus" singers, with punks punching stunned shoppers and destroying store fixtures and merchandise.

What a great juxtaposition, then, to have this event at the very same venue, showcasing the best of Philadelphia against its worst. In case you haven't yet seen it, click here for the most wonderful five minutes of Christmas shopping you'll ever spend.

Of course, the accolades reverberating around cyberspace by people responding to this video don't need repeating here. They're simply proof that the arts remain capable of moving the soul. As part of the "Random Acts of Culture" project by advocacy group Knight Arts, the Philadelphia event wasn't the first such production, nor will it be the last. The purpose for these events is to remind average Americans that the arts provide a surprisingly humanizing balm to our lives. Good art is good because we don't need somebody to explain to us why we're enjoying it. Sure, there were probably a lot of shoppers in Macy's who would never list classical music as their favorite, but they could still appreciate the grandeur they were witnessing. Chances are, blasting a rock anthem throughout the store would probably not have the same effect at all.

And kudos to Macy's, which could have just as easily nixed the whole idea, fearful of offending customers who might object to a Christian song being belted through the sales floors of the historic shopping mecca. Granted, Philadelphia's flagship Wanamaker's makes an ideal venue for just such an event, with its soaring atrium and historic pipe organ, the world's largest. And art lovers of many different faiths can appreciate the aesthetics of Handel's music on a purely artistic level, even if, as I've said, the oratorio genre isn't their favorite. Still, Macy's could have approved the general idea but insisted on a different song. As it was, however, with Christmas shopping underway and the doldrums of a weak economy to shake off, the right choices were made all around.

Oddly enough, I've watched the video several times with both the sound on and with the sound muted, and either way, I get kind of a goose-pimply vibe when I realize that black and white, young and old, are joining together to sing this incredible piece of music. At the end, there's a broad, tall black man, raising his right arm as he sings the final "Hallelujah," a wide smile breaking across his face. Indeed, the expressions on so many faces in this video - spontaneous wonderment, joyful surprise, incredulous awe, and realizing they were witnessing something incredibly special - tell a story all their own.

And yes, that story needs to be told in this day and age, as our society slides into sociopolitcal frustration, economic despair, and personal anomie. Not exactly because of the Biblical text enshrined by Handel's Messiah, although even those who consider this masterwork as just a nice piece of music will be forced one day to acknowledge what it says.

If we could start at a base level, however, of acknowledging that great art has value, we all have five minutes in our day to stop and be personally touched by it.

I can't resist wondering if the impact would have been the same if the singers had performed something more saccharine like "White Christmas," "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," or even "Hey, Santa Baby." As well-known as these songs may be, they don't make you stop in your tracks or otherwise pause to take in the moment. But the "Hallelujah Chorus" does, doesn't it? There's some element of transcendency about it that takes us away from the everyday and adopt a comparatively reverential demeanor, even if you just appreciate the music as music, not as a triumphant anthem of Christianity.

Indeed, doesn't it make you stop and bask in the beauty of something that takes a bit of ourselves and flashes visions of your "happy place" across your brain?

That's why this video has become a YouTube sensation. And probably why you'd like to see it again - so here's the link, again!

See? A little bit of culture does a body good!
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Sneak peek: I'm planning a follow-up to this essay later this week!

Sagrada Familia's Exuberant Homage

So, there we were, my longtime friend Gretchen Schwab and I, browsing through Barnes & Noble, and suddenly she shrieks with excitement. To her noisy delight, she'd stumbled upon a big photo book of the architect Antoni Gaudi. Gretchen could barely contain herself. With giddy enthusiasm, she held it up for me to see.

"Isn't he the guy who designed wavy building facades in Spain?" I groaned, betraying my own personal distaste for Gaudi despite my friend's obvious admiration. Not that Gretchen, an avant-garde spirit herself, could be dissuaded. The fact that we didn't share the same opinion about such a polarizing designer didn't faze her one bit.

In case you've never heard of the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi, he's not as obscure a historical figure as you might think. If you've visited Barcelona, you may have seen at least some of his striking apartment houses and curvaceous windows. But just by looking at Barcelona's skyline, you'll learn all you really need to know about him by his most famous commission. Indeed, his phantasmagorical Sagrada Familia basilica, which towers over the city, serves as an apt metaphor for his unusual life and ardent Roman Catholic faith.

After 130 years of construction, it remains unfinished, yet every bit as controversial and improbable as when he took over what was supposed to be a conventional neo-Gothic project in a conventional Spanish city. Indeed, even with completion still two decades away, a mere photo of Sagrada Familia will elicit an emphatic response. Not many buildings have that power.

Of Spain and Modernists

Gaudi is to architecture what Salvador Dali is to art, which since both men were Spaniards and cohorts in Modernism, probably shouldn't be surprising. Almost everybody has seen Dali's bizarre "Persistence of Memory" with its limp, dripping clock faces. Gaudi takes surrealism one flamboyant step further with his signature facades and windows. Only he's working in 3D, which meant that for Sagrada Familia, his only limitations came from physics and finances.

Interestingly enough, Sagrada Familia has been a pay-as-you-go, or expiatory, project for the Catholic church. In other words, faithful parishioners in Barcelona, not the treasury in Rome, have funded the construction of Gaudi's vision. That says a lot about the commitment to this vast undertaking by the people that have claimed it as their legacy.

But aside from special services, they've only been officially worshipping in Sagrada Familia for less than a week. After 130 years, the church has just recently been consecrated for regular use. On November 7, Pope Benedict XVI sprinkled "holy water" on the church's massive altar, making it suitable for use during daily Mass.

Tourists, meanwhile, have been visiting the site for decades, making it a stunning, world-famous attraction while masking its ineffectiveness as a working Catholic religious building.

Indeed, the church is still a living construction site. Its website even warns tourists that during strong rain or wind, the church will be closed because the elements can still enter the building. Officials hope to have the enormous basilica finished by 2026, the 100th anniversary of Gaudi's death. Even though Sagrada Familia has already become part of the Catholic lexicon in Barcelona.

Church as Really Expensive Art

As intriguing as it is, however, and as exquisite as many of its architectural flourishes may be, and as impressive as the hand-crafted engineering of the towering structures have proven to be, there's an uncomfortable question that remains: is it all worth it? Along with New York City's incomplete Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, Sagrada Familia pays hallowed homage to the ancient construction techniques of centuries-old cathedrals. It's no secret why Sagrada Familia and Saint John's are the only two projects of their kind in the world today: their exorbitant cost, the poor availability of skilled labor, and the sheer amount of time required to hand-craft key structural elements fly in the face of modern efficiencies. How viable a religious project is Sagrada Familia when this year's cost alone could reach $24 million?

Gray-suited accountants could quickly rattle off the conventional religious items $24 million could more readily purchase today. Protestant scholars could bemoan the extravagance as typical hubris by the Roman Catholics. Secularists would question whether the ancillary financial benefits to Barcelona's tourism industry exceed annual construction expenditures. Some critics even wonder if Pope Benedict's consecration, timed as it was after recent priest sex scandals in Europe, represented a splashy way to jump-start a moribund Spanish branch of his church.

Sagrada Familia certainly stuns the senses. Its size trumpets majesty. Its exterior embellishments put the "gaudy" in "Gaudi." Its soaring interior spaces audaciously subordinate mortal visitors. Its exquisite ceiling coffering is literally over the top.

Years ago, as an architecture student, I saw slides and photos of Sagrada Familia in lectures and textbooks, and scoffed at the absurdity of it all. At first, the tube-like latticework spires reminded me of war correspondent footage of pockmarked churches bombed during the World Wars in Europe. Indeed, even the novelist George Orwell called Sagrada Familia one of the world's most hideous buildings.

Maybe because Gaudi seems to be mocking the reverential classicism inherent in the great Gothic cathedrals, the traditionalist in me silently revolted against Sagrada Familia. Having already become prejudiced against Gaudi because of those silly windows and wavy building facades that we students had already encountered in theory lectures, Sagrada Familia just seemed like more of the same petulance and contempt for conventionalism.

Extra or Ordinary?

But now, looking at fresh images from the basilica, with more windows, parts of a roof, and a greater sense of cohesion as distinct components begin to resemble a spacial unit, I'm tempted to wonder if Gaudi's contempt for conventionalism may actually be appropriate for a house of worship. I still don't like parts of Sagrada Familia; the Nativity Facade looks like something sculpted from bleu cheese, the spires still seem caricaturish, and some of the vaults look like bats wings. Indeed, none of it is ordinary.

God is holy, which means He's set apart from the everyday. Yes, He's the Creator of the everyday, but only He is worshipped by all of His creation. Who else could possibly claim that? Do Gaudi's exuberant flourishes and garnishments draw attention to themselves as surreal elements of the structure? Or, do they individually and corporately point to the Deity towards Whom the activities within these spaces are intended?

I'm not going to get into the distinctives of Roman Catholicism vis-a-vis evangelical Christianity, particularly since arguments can be made that some aspects of Catholic liturgy are blasphemous to evangelicals. But ultimately, it is the God of both Jews and Christians to Whom acts of worship will be conducted in Sagrada Familia. Maybe not in ways most evangelicals, including myself, will embrace. Yet what Gaudi has envisioned for this basilica doesn't much depend on the forms this worship will take. By all appearances, his building embodies its own proclamation of the excellencies of our Creator God. Even if that proclamation defies convention.

Architecturally speaking, many religious structures today betray a slavish devotion to money and budgets more than they do a distinct acknowledgement of the deific properties of the Person being celebrated in the space. While prudence and fiscal discipline remain important Christian virtues, the story of the woman who broke open the expensive bottle of perfume to wash Christ's feet gets far less pulpit time.

Or household budget time. With many statistics showing less than half of all members contributing financially to their church, yet with many Christians enjoying discretionary income for a variety of unnecessary trinkets, trips, and trophies - and I'm preaching to myself here more than anybody else - no wonder Gaudi's effusive Sagrada Familia seems almost ludicrous next to our warehouse-looking megachurches. Even little country churches - which historically have embraced the best expressions of their local cultural aesthetics - now exude all the charm of a brick box.

What are we worshipping in these functional yet uninspiring places? Are we worshipping our hoarding mentality, spending just enough so that church members don't need to compromise their materialistic lifestyle? Or are we lavishing our Creator with material expressions of our love for Him?

Not that good design and inspiring architecture need to cost a lot of money. God-given creativity can do a lot with not a lot of cash. And not every faith community can - or should - come up with $24 million a year for their building fund. Sometimes, though, I wonder: don't we need to acknowledge that God doesn't want our ordinary stuff when we come to Him in worship?

Is He worth our ordinary effort, or our extraordinary effort?
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Right Talkers Can Be So Wrong

By now, most of us know it was a hoax. Or, at the very least, a poorly-reported story.

As I write this, President Barak Obama is jetting his way across the globe with his wife and daughters to begin a 10-day trip to Asia that starts in India, where it was reported that security costs would run $200 million per day. It was estimated that over 30 warships, 40 planes, several bullet-proof limousines, 3,000 staffmembers, and dozens of hotel rooms would be involved in an excursion to break all previous records for a presidential state visit.

And right-wing elites were hopping mad. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other conservative pundits pounced on the story as just more proof about how out-of-touch the Obamas really are. First it was Michelle's lavish trip to Spain, which even drew gasps of surprise from the liberal press. There was the family's 27-hour snub of the oil-stricken Gulf Coast in favor of an impromptu weekend in Bar Harbor, Maine, and a longer vacation on Cape Cod, two New England havens of exclusivity.

At least when George Bush took his vacations, he usually went to his personal ranch here in Texas, which even his ardent left-wing detractors struggled to call fancy.

For Obama, the hapless limousine liberal, a $200 million-per-day junket to Asia, at the start of Diwali, no less, just seemed like more of the same wasteful spending from which Republican talking heads make their livings.

Except nobody bothered to run down the story's sources. Nobody checked leads. Nobody tried corroborating the validity of any facts. Nobody ran the security financials. Not even me when I posted a link to the story on my FaceBook page. I found the original story from an Indian news outlet on Google, and assumed media standards in India were at least as strong as ours. In addition, I figured the scathing implications from this story for our Democratic president would be enough to silence the American media, which would explain why nobody else was onto the story. The liberal media elite were still smarting over the results of Tuesday's elections; why would they heap any more bad news on Obama's plate?

I Apologize

But, I should have known better. Not that North America's leading press agencies report the news perfectly all the time, or exist in a vacuum free of bias. But it wasn't until yesterday that conventional media outlets decided the rumors had festered long enough, and spokesmen from both the White House and the Pentagon addressed the phantom scandal as nonsense.

So, to all my FaceBook friends and their friends who responded to my post, I'm truly sorry for being complicit in spreading falsehoods about our president and this Asia trip. Sometimes it may not seem like it, but I strive to make sure the things I tell my friends aren't rumors or gossip. I'll try to be more careful in the future.

Anybody Else? Rush? Glenn? We're Waiting...

There's more to this incident, however. I'm also taking this opportunity to prove why I don't believe Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck deserve much credibility. Not because I was gullible enough to think they might be right. And not even because we were all wrong. But because of what they haven't done.

Although this story has been proven false, neither of these two blowhards have acknowledged that. None have yet made any public retractions, which media personalities with any integrity would have done. They haven't even bothered to apologize for misleading their audience, which proves their sullen disrespect for people who hang onto their every word. And of course, they haven't apologized to the president. Apparently, free speech only goes one-way for these right-wingers.

For the record, Rush appears to have simply dropped the story. Like it never existed. But as of 11:56 am CST today, Beck's website still carried the story, "Financial crisis? What crisis? Obama spending $2 billion to visit Mumbai" on its home page.

This is what Beck says:

"If Mumbai sounds familiar to you it's because less than 2 years ago, radical Islamic terrorists carried out massive attacks that killed 173 people and wounded 308. It's so dangerous there that the President is traveling with 3,000 people, bringing 34 warships, and spending $200 million a day to make the trip. What in the world is so important to take such a risk, and the financial burden in the middle of a crisis? Something isn't right."

It's Not Right of the Right

Well, you are correct, Pontificator Beck. Something isn't right, and it's your own warped desire to make a name for yourself at the expense of somebody many conservatives don't like anyway. Obama's presidency, as ineffective and wasteful as it may be, is expendable in your pursuit of ratings and sensationalism. Granted, you couch your story in the form of a curious question, perhaps thinking that gives you the leeway to backtrack later and say you were just presenting a rumor to your audience without actually endorsing it yourself. But is that a hallmark of a trustworthy person?

What harm does any of this do? What's another negative story about Obama when so many already-angry voters have participated in one of the most anti-incumbent elections in history?

For one thing, it harms the conservative agenda by further obfuscating the relevancy and accuracy of the information they disseminate to their base. You can't say this is the first time Rush, Beck, & Co. have sacrificed integrity for ratings.

Second, it demeans the office of the US presidency, not so much for getting information wrong but failing to own up and apologize. Rush, Beck, & Co. hate it when their mortal enemy, the media, demeans Republican presidents, but apparently Democratic administrations are expendable.

Third, it shows to Third World idiots how easy it is to get Americans all worked up over something that isn't true. As new media takes more and more control of our information flow, propaganda can only become more insidious and more difficult to qualify.

Fourth, it's simply wrong ethically. If you make a mistake, don't we all still need to apologize and take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again? Have maturity, respectability, and integrity simply ceased to be important?

Two months ago, Glenn Beck hosted a rally in Washington DC with the slogan of "restoring honor."

See the discrepancy?
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Striving Rivals? Competition's Place in Church

Here's a topic that doesn't often come up when discussing Christian disciplines: competition.

Yet within the past few days, I've come across two different Presbyterians with two diverse opinions on the subject.

One, Louis Weeks, used to be a missionary in Africa, and currently is president emeritus of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. The other is Patrick Lafferty, currently on staff at my own Park Cities Presbyterian Church here in Texas. And while my personal prejudices may immediately be evidenced simply by introducing these two men, let's give Dr. Weeks the honor of setting the framework for considering the validity of competition as a Biblical characteristic.

Competition Good for Consumers, but Fellow Believers?

In his essay entitled Striving Together: Is There a Place for Competition in Ministry? which first appeared in Duke Divinity School's publication, Faith & Leadership, Weeks himself professes to never having seriously considered competition as a viable motivator for people of faith.

That is, not until a mentor of his boasted of its attributes.

This mentor had made competition the motivating factor for becoming a more educated Christian leader and preacher. He benchmarked his own progress in his professional faith life against other preachers and teachers, and whether the others knew it or not, engaged in a phantom race with them in his lifelong pursuit of learning.

Now, I understand that's not what most people would consider to be a negative form of competition. And, after all, it's the negative form of competition that raises the eyebrows in the context of things good Christians shouldn't do, isn't it? We think Christians should work together for the cause of Christ, and view competition as introducing unnecessary and even damaging behavior.

Competition, after all, implies that somebody is better at something than somebody else, and other people need to work harder to erase that lead. In economic terms, competition can benefit society by encouraging innovation and cost savings. At its core, competition involves discovering the weaknesses in competitors and exploiting those weaknesses for our own benefit. But it's one thing to invent a better widget through competition. It's another thing entirely to place yourself in competition with a fellow believer. To do so, you're forced to discover ways in which they struggle in their faith walk, lack the education you have, or have been led astray by the Devil. In reality, we end up using a fellow believer's weaknesses as leverage for us to succeed. Is that a proper demonstration of Christ-likeness? Isn't the world supposed to know we're Christians by our love for each other?

Sanctification Isn't Competition

Weeks appears to ignore these questions. He launches into an extrapolation of competition as a striving towards something in a fashion which God blesses because, after all, He gave us the desire to compete. Sports fanatics will abruptly stop here and endorse Weeks' theory heartily, because it appears to make a lot of sense. Many people derive considerable entertainment and even a physical adrenaline rush from participating in an intense sporting event. Even when I was watching the Texas Rangers play in the World Series this weekend, I found myself getting caught up in the excitement. And to a certain extent, there's nothing wrong with playing so as to prove who the better team is.

But when it comes to Christianity, we already know who the better team is. Indeed, we know Who is perfect at everything. So where does competition fit within communities of faith? Isn't it one of the weakest of arguments to justify doing something because "God gave us the desire to do it?" With that logic, we could sweep a whole ocean of sins under divine grace thanks to emotive proclivities. Any parent worth their salt can see right through the "it feels good, so it must be right" rationale, can't they?

Yet Weeks continues. He takes Paul's "running the race" analogy from 1 Corinthians 9 and "winning the prize" to validate the competitive spirit. If Paul did it, certainly we can compete against each other. But can we use such simplistic logic on this verse? Is Paul talking about running a race just to win a prize which will distinguish him as a purer follower of Christ than you and I? Instead, isn't he talking about the process of sanctification? In his analogy, a runner who values the significance of a race will train and discipline themself for their own good and the approval of the race officials. Where else in Scripture is sanctification compared to a competition between saints? When we reach those fabled Pearly Gates, will God be standing outside with gold, silver, and bronze medallions for win, place, or show?

Yes, we will get rewards of some kind based on what we've done with the opportunities God has given us for our earthly faith walks. But since He bestows the Fruits of the Spirit differently to His various children, can we tell what all of His benchmarks are for optimum performance so we can exceed what somebody else has done? Can we know how high-achieving somebody else's faith is? We can guess, based on their spiritual fruits, and we have Scripture to show us how to live lives that please God, but only He knows our hearts and the level of our true devotion to Him. Which means only He knows how well we're doing in the ministry opportunities with which He's blessed us.

Pegging our faith journey on what we see happening around us, how well we think other people preach, how well we think they teach or serve or cook or exercise their spiritual gifts, yadda, yadda, yadda... is this what Paul is talking about in his analogy of the race? We run so as to win the prize. But is God's prize based on a comparison between what you and I do here on Earth? Are we running against Paul, or Peter, or Billy Graham? Can you see how self-centered, humanistic, and ethnocentric such an approach can be? Is it really about us?

If Weeks' mentor wanted to please God as a preacher, and since being an effective communicator of Biblical exposition would be an appropriate use of the speaking and educational gifting God had given him, that still doesn't mean that pegging "success" on a pattern established by another preacher is a good way to gauge his own use of the gifts God had given him. Does it? Where in scripture do we receive instruction on how to quantify our faith performance and rank it against other believers? We can deploy Biblical discretion, but that's to help us be pure before God in a vertical relationship, not better than somebody else in a horizontal relationship.

The Personal Side of Competition

How does the concept of competition fit with the analogy of the Body of Christ as a physical body with many parts, organs, bones, and tissues? If the heart could compete against the eye, what would happen? If you left thumb wanted to race against your liver, what would happen?

No, I don't think competition is a good idea for fellow believers. Instead, let's move to Lafferty's viewpoint, which encompasses a far more holistically Biblical ethos.

Writing for Every Thought Captive, my church's weekly devotional e-mail, Lafferty takes a more relational perspective of competition, and in the essay from which I'm quoting him, talks about rivalry instead. After all, rivalry doesn't exist without competition, does it?

He writes: "Working out our own salvation [or, sanctification; what Paul was talking about when Weeks incorrectly applied the "running the race" analogy] first means to pause and reflect upon our priorities and practices — to take note of our patterns and how we conduct ourselves in them. Rivalry insists on proving ourselves right or better than others. It seeks to surpass them and it often manifests either in a delight over their loss or a despair at your own."

"If by what Jesus has done I am not only acceptable to God but beloved by Him, then my attempt to establish my worth through rivalry is not only a waste of effort, but entirely futile since it will only deliver a fleeting satisfaction, if any—in that is my folly."

"So rivalry offends God and destroys us as it seeks to best another. Whereas trust in the gospel assures us of an irrevocable acceptance by no less than God which a rivalrous spirit at first ignores, and then seduces me into a series of choices that will never yield abiding satisfaction. A preliminary grasp of the offensiveness and folly of rivalry is for now enough to move us to a new obedience—even if our walk by faith in that obedience is more often like a stumbling in it."

Reality Check

Seeking to serve God with the whole of your heart and being is certainly a noble ambition. But it's also a holy one. By invoking practices which require subjective interpretations about what God may or may not be doing in fellow believers, how do we position ourselves as their betters? To take Weeks' initial example, in the deceptively egocentric world of Christian preachers, benchmarking one's performance against someone else's may seem like an easy way to grade yourself and make improvements, but should Weeks and his mentor fall for such a beguiling trap?

Or should we? If we are to serve one another in love, bear with one another, and live in peace with each other (Colossians 3:12-15), where does competition fit in?

Maybe during a friendly round of golf or game of football. Or maybe even Scrabble.

But that's about it, isn't it? Not that this is a church rule or penalty meant to discourage improvement, but if we really love Christ and His people, we join with them in service.

Not against them.

1 Corinthians 9
24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. 27 No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
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