Steve Earle

At our house, we’re still chewing our way through the leftover candy from Halloween.  Maybe that’s why I’m in the mood for a ghost story.  I thought of a novel I read a little over a year ago by Steve Earle.  If you follow Americana music, you already know Steve Earle from his prolific and poignant songwriting.  Since his songs are often narrative in form, it’s not too surprising that he would eventually get around to writing a full-blown novel.  But, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive is not just a novel.  It’s also a ghost story.

It is 1963 and Doc Ebersole’s life has been wrecked by addiction.  He’s lost his medical license and lives in a rented room on the wrong side of San Antonio.  But that isn’t his biggest problem.  His biggest problem is that he is haunted both figuratively and literally.  He is haunted by regret from past failures.  He is also haunted by the ghost of Hank Williams. 

Hank Williams

The iconic singer was once both friend and patient.  Rumor has it that Doc gave Hank Williams the final dose of morphine that ended his life.  Now that Doc has his own morphine habit to support, he is also the recipient of annoying visitations.  The angry ghost of Hank Williams shows up at the most inopportune times to heckle him and to remind him that redemption can be insufferable work.

After one of Hank’s visits, Doc is reminded of his classic song, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.  He muses about the difference between being lonely and the much more tragic condition of being lonesome.

“Lonely,” Doc finally decided, is just “a temporary condition … like when you’re far away from home and you miss the people you love and it seems like you’re never going to see them again.  But you then you do and you’re not lonely anymore.” 

“Lonesome is a whole other thing.  It’s incurable.  It’s a hole in your heart you could drive a semi truck through and nothing can fill it up because you dug it yourself.” 

Maybe Hank Williams’ classic song is so sad because it touches on an undeniable truth:  It’s one thing to feel alone because someone left you.  It’s “a whole other thing” to feel alone because you were the one who did the leaving.

The Gospel story of sin and redemption takes this difference into account.  The human condition is not just loneliness.  It is not only that God feels distant to us.  It is also living with the vague awareness that beginning with Adam and Eve on down to our own most recent foibles, we push God away.  

The Christian doctrine of sin simply says that we are not just lonely.  We’re lonesome.  All of us are sitting at the bottom of deep, dark hole we have dug ourselves.  It’s more than a temporary condition.  It’s incurable.  It is a hole we can’t fill.

The Christian doctrine of redemption simply says that God’s gracious response – incarnation, cross, resurrection – is appropriate to the severity of our condition.  In Christ, we discover God sitting with us in the dank, darkness of a hole we have dug ourselves.  In Christ, we see God suffering for us, bearing our burden and sharing with us the hard work of redemption.

Maybe Steve Earle had something of this in mind when he wrote this song …

Click here to hear Steve Earle sing God is Good

That we have to breathe    exhale in the world   to live in the world

That we eat the world     its plants and flesh    digest the world

That we build here    name localities   congregate the world

That we have imagined it   speak it   in all languages

That we have designs   world blueprints   books of the world

That we library world   shelf it   consult it

That now and here   set as it is   we must turn it

                                             Terry Jones, “Trinities,”
                                             Poetry Review, vol. 101, 3 (Autumn 2011), p.41
                                             Used with the author’s permission.

It is more than odd that throughout most of Christian history, followers of Jesus have seemed determined to drive a wedge between divine love and the world.  The latter term is often used as theological shorthand for what must be left behind in pursuit of individual salvation.   And in our devotional lives, we often act as though God can only reside in cathedrals sequestered from what John Muir called “the Cathedrals of Nature.” What makes this so strange is that the passage of scripture that most Christians call their favorite begins, “God so loved the world…” 

St. Francis of Assisi by Michael D. O’Brien

This beautiful poem by Terry Jones makes me wonder if this disconnect resides in our failure to fully comprehend when we say the word “world.”  We forget that we cannot separate our world – what we breathe, eat, name and know — from our life.  This is what John 3:16 tells us: that God, love and world are intimately connected.

Thus, St. Francis of Assisi sought to live his whole life as a prayer of thanksgiving for Creation.   He instructed his friars to sleep – not in cloistered spaces – but under the stars.  And when he died, he asked his brothers to strip him naked and lay him down on the dirt floor of a cow-shed.  After reading Jones’ “Trinities,” such peculiar behavior seems less odd to me than the course of much Christian history.

SCOREBOARDS

Henry Skrimshander is a savant.  Though undersized and often underestimated, he is a once-in-a-generation short stop.  He has just the right balance of hand-eye coordination and zen-like concentration.  By his junior year with the Westish College Harpooners, Henry is being courted by his beloved St. Louis Cardinals.  He is also approaching the NCAA record for most consecutive games without an error.  Henry isn’t just good.  He’s perfect and the pursuit of perfection is a dangerous game.

That’s one of the themes of Chad Harbarch’s highly acclaimed first novel, The Art of Fielding.  Henry Skrimshander hasn’t just been perfect in college ball.  He’s always been that way.  After every little league game, his mother would casually ask, “Any errors today.”  “No.”  Henry would announce.  This routine – along with his incredible streak lasted a decade.  Henry called his lucky glove “Zero” because that was his barometer of the acceptable.  In his mind, every game should contain zero errors. 

What makes baseball unique – in Harbarch’s estimation – is that each game holds to possibility of perfection.  This is the sport’s singular beauty.  It is also the source of its cruelty.  Throughout little league then high school and two and a half seasons of college ball, Henry remains error free.  Yet, one late spring afternoon Henry is just going through the motions of a routine play.  The ball slips from his hand and sails toward the dugout.  The next game, Henry cannot forget.  He gets tight and tentative.  His throws to first go from “frozen rope” to “wounded duck.”  Each time, he looks to the scoreboard and watches in horror as the errors pile up.  The scouts stop calling.  The game Henry fell in love with feels like a prison.

I’ve known quite a few folks who have pursued the life of faith this way.  At times, I have myself.  We strive so hard to live error-free – which we often describe as sins – that we lose our “love for the game.”  God becomes a scowling umpire.  Souring the field with keen eyes.  Keeping score.

The Psalmist prays, “If thou should count iniquities, O Lord, who could stand it?” (Psalm 90: 8).  Well, no one of course.  More to the point, who could ever really love a god like that?  Thankfully, much of the poetry of the psalms coheres with the core message of Holy Scripture: God is no umpire.  God is a kind and loving Father.  And, most of the time, when good fathers watch daughters and sons play ball, they interested in more than just the score.

As I read The Art of Fielding what I wanted for Henry was that he would glancing back at the scoreboard.  I wanted him to stop cringing and just ‘let ‘er rip.’  That seemed the only way he could once again fall in love with the game.

Lately, I have grown more convinced that God doesn’t get nearly as hung up about our errors as we do.  I’ve pictured God less as a scowling umpire and more as a grinning Dad in the stands.  If that’s the case, then what God wants for us is found in the old Heidelberg Confession: “Our chief end,” says the catechism, “is simply to love God and to enjoy Him forever.”

In other words, all God really, truly desires for us is that we play hard and love the game. 

In her novel, Run, Ann Patchett introduces us to a fourteen year-old girl named Kenya.  Kenya lives in the projects of Boston – a difficult and sometimes dangerous place — just a few blocks from the beautiful brownstones and prestigious universities of Cambridge but a world away nonetheless.  We also learn that Kenya possesses a rare athletic gift.  She is a track star – a real prodigy who runs with power and grace.

One day, Kenya takes the city bus to Cambridge, to the campus of Harvard.  She has come with one goal in mind: To run.  Kenya manages to talk her way past the gate attendant checking for Student ID’s and onto the beautifully manicured track of Harvard University.

Padgett writes that at first, Kenya kept her workout light swinging past “gently jogging sorority girls” and a “step lunge guy” who “moved like a mechanical doll.” But, then, “Kenya let herself float forward.  Every step became “a leap,” Kenya’s legs “like scissors opening wide.”  As Kenya ran “like a beautiful, infallible machine,” all the other runners on the track began to stop their own workouts and simply watch her.  As Padgett says, they did this “the way dancers will stop when the soloist steps forward to dominate the stage.” (Ann Padgett, Run, Harper, New York, 2007).

I wonder if we are to encounter the Easter story of John’s Gospel (John 20: 1-18) in a similar way.  Everywhere we look people are running and if we allow our imagination to take hold, it is beautiful to watch.  Mary Magdalene runs with all her might to bear witness to the other disciples that the stone has rolled away.  Peter and John race each other through the garden to see if what she has told them could be true.

As the runners on the Harvard track stopped to watch Kenya in all her beauty and grace, so should we.  As the season of Easter begins, we watch Mary and Peter and John.  With their exuberance, they show us how the resurrection is to be received into our own lives.  Like Kenya, they allow us to see what is possible through the disciplined training that we in the church call “discipleship.”  I see these three disciples pouring out their hearts on that first Easter morning, and I stop and stare.  I say to myself something those persons on the Harvard track must also have thought, “If only I could run like that!”  And then I realize, I can.  I, too, am called to be a disciple.  If I will let myself “float forward” into the mystery of the resurrection, my heart – and yours – may “open wide” and really run.

“Holy Spirit” by Hildegard of Bingen, Risking Everything, 110 Poems of Love and Revelation, p.15.

Holy Spirit,
giving life to all life,
moving all creatures,
root of all things,
washing them clean,
wiping out their mistakes,
healing their wounds,
you are our true life,
luminous, wonderful,
awakening the heart
from its ancient sleep.

My favorite line in this poem is “awakening the heart from its ancient sleep”: Hildegard of Bingen was a German abbess of the tenth century.  She founded two monasteries and is remembered for her mystical theology and religious poetry.  This seems somewhere between a poem and a prayer to me.  I am drawn to the images of redemption and grace.  Yet, its the last line that speaks of our Lenten journey.  The goal of  all this self-reflection is not just self-awareness.  Rather, as we consider our “mistakes,” and “wounds” we are also reminded of God’s love and care.  We neglect this.  Like Jonah in the bow of the boat, we fall asleep and miss so much all around us … so many signs of grace.  As in the classic fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” our  torpor is a kind of death. Perhaps during Holy Week we will open ourselves to God’s spirit with the hope that our hearts will awaken again.

WERE YOU THERE?

In his native England, Julian Barnes is a public intellectual in the best sense of the word. A literary editor and television pundit, Barnes   has also written many well-received books including eleven novels.  A few years ago I read Barnes’ memoir, Nothing to be Frightened Of.  Despite the e sunny title, this book is a confession of Barnes’ lifelong struggle to come to grips with his mortality.  I found it powerful, at once deeply philosophical and deeply personal.  Ever since,  I have intended toread one of Barnes’ other novels.  When The Sense of an Ending arrived on the shelves at Barnes and Noble, I received more than I imagined.  This beautifully written book – winner of the Man Booker Prize – complements his earlier memoir on mortality.

If Barnes’ memoir tried to come to terms with the limits of time, with the reality that for each of us, time does come to an end, his latest novel wrestles with “time’s malleability,” how it “bends and doubles back” throughout the course of our lives.  On the first page of The Sense of an Ending, we meet Tony Webster – a middle-aged, divorced retiree – sharing a reflection that is both deeply philosophical and deeply personal:

We live in time – it holds us and molds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well.  It takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.  Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing never to return.  (Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, Alfred A. Knopf, pp.4-5).

When we first meet Tony he has just received a very strange gift.  A woman he met only once – the mother of a long-ago college girlfriend – has bequeathed to him a diary that belonged to another friend from his youth named Adrian Finn.  Reading Adrian’s diary, leads Tony to reflect on his days in secondary school as he and Adrian banded together with two other boys to endure the awkward years of pining for girls and competing for the attention of an admired schoolmaster.  He recalls how the gifted and well-rounded Adrian outpaces the other members of their little group.  Adrian receives a scholarship to Cambridge and then innocently wins over Tony’s girlfriend after the two had broken off their romance.  That’s when Tony remembers something else, something that fills him with remorse.  A poisonous letter he wrote the new couple wishing them nothing but heartbreak and misery.  Tony then begins to put the pieces together and comes to recognize the destructive role his letter came to play in Adrian’s life and with every member of his girlfriend’s family.

When Tony realizes this, he experiences an emotion more painful than regret.  He feels remorse.  He then describes the difference: “Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you.”  He feels “the strength of the [original] bite.” Something he did forty years ago and the wound is fresh again because time is pliable.

This helps me understand the Lenten spiritual, Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  This plaintive hymn evokes something deeper than regret that such a terrible thing happened to Jesus.  It calls for remorse.  We feel the sting of recognition that somehow you and I participated in the crucifixion.  We share responsibility for the death of our Lord.  As the Lenten season draws to a close, time becomes pliable.

Were you there?  pleads the spiritual, when they crucified our Lord?  Yes I was, we must say, I was there and as the soldiers did their work I held the nails for them.

The Butterfly Effect

Mark Ralls ~ March 15, 2012

Intricate webs of relationship link all of life together.  This truth is sometimes called “the butterfly effect.”  This concept goes back to a mathematician named Edward Lorenz who demonstrated in mathematical terms how one seemingly insignificant action can have unexpected influence on far off events.  His demonstration led some philosophers of science to ask a bizarre question: Could the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil set off a chain of events that ultimately results in a Texas tornado?

I’m not smart enough to even venture a guess about that, but I do believe that our moral influence is much more powerful than most of us ever imagine.  This is one of the themes of Stephen King’s new novel 11/23/63.  The novel begins in a diner.  The proprietor, Al Templton, summons one of his customers, a burned-out and recently divorced English teacher named Jake Epping, for an urgent meeting.  Al is close to death and he must share his secret with someone before it is too late.  The pantry of his diner is actually a time portal that bridges the present to September 9, 1958.  In less skilled hands, such a worn-out premise would come off hokey, but King brings a philosophical depth to the question of time travel.  Thisin part due to the author’s fascination with “the butterfly effect.”  Al suggests as much in their first meeting.  He proposes to Jake that if he remained in the past until the fateful day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he could dramatically alter the course of history. “If you ever wanted to change the world,” he tells Jake, “this is your chance.  Save Kennedy, save his brother.  Save Martin is Luther King.  Stop the race riots.  Stop Vietnam, maybe …. You could save millions of lives.”  Jake takes the challenge and goes back in time with the goal of changing history.

Yet, it’s a long wait from 1958 to 1963.  So he moves to a small town in Texas and becomes a teacher once again.  One of the more touching themes in the novel is that Jake rediscovers his love of teaching.  In one especially touching chapter, he directs a high school drama of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, helping a shy football player discover his remarkable dramatic gifts. His little production becomes a conduit for change in that little Texas town.

Like George Bailey in the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, Jake is blessed with the opportunity to see the difference he has made in the lives of others.  When he returns to the present, he is able to reconstruct the arc of the lives of those he met fifty years hence.  One of the things he discovers is that it is, in fact, his smallest acts – not only preventing a presidential assassination – that have changed the course of history.  Like a butterfly flapping its wings, even Jake’s smallest acts of compassion and friendship ripple through time and alter history.  Jake unleashes the butterfly effect.

Of course, the moral of the story is so do we.  All of us have the potential to change the course of history.  And, more often than not, this potential lies in simple expressions of mercy and random acts of kindness.  A reflection I once read from an Episcopal priest suggests as much.  “When I was young,” he said, “I wanted to change the world, but the world did not want to be changed.  So in discouragement, I decided to change my community; but to my disappointment, my community did not want to change.  As I grew older, I decided that perhaps at least I could change my family, but alas I could not.  Finally, as a last resort I decided to at least change myself.  And then I realized that had I begun by changing myself, my change might have influenced my family, my family might have influenced my community and my community might have begun to change the world” (qtd. In John Izzo, Second Innocence: Rediscovering Joy and Wonder, p.166).