A Guide to Great Arms

My sister and I used to have picnics in our family garden and study Greek Mythology.

Well, not exactly.

What we actually did was sit on a blanket with flowers on it—our mother referred to this as the garden—and watch Xena and Hercules. We probably ate pizza on paper plates. Come to think of it, the paper plate thing may have only happened once and, for reasons I cannot even begin to explain, I just remember that one time quite fondly.

About a month ago, I relived this memory with my fiancé. We sat on the couch, ate pizza (on real plates) drank wine, and prepared to binge watch Hercules. “This is not good,” I said. It wasn’t bad in a way that can be excused by 90’s nostalgia, but it is a poorly designed, written, and acted production. As we watched Kevin Sorbo brood and throw things, I struggled to remember what exactly I, as either a child or adult, liked about this show. I like drawing doodles of cyclops. I like loose, flowing dresses that resemble bed sheets. I have an obsession with deltoids, which I believe is a direct result of a vested Kevin Sorbo and those upper arm bangles that every female character wore. “Nope,” Sean shook his head. “It’s not great. Not at all.”  

The deltoid is one of the muscles in the shoulder. It is used for lifting, hugging, holding, and hanging on. While weight and resistance are great ways to strengthen and sculpt the muscle, there are three main ways to strengthen and sculpt your deltoids without external assistance. The first is abduction. It is the act of moving something away from the center of your body. The second way is a yoga pose known as a downward dog. In addition to forcing the hands and shoulders to endure the weight of an inversion, this pose increases blood circulation and detoxifies the body. It is like the movement version of a juice cleanse. The final way to get Herculean arms is pushups, forcing yourself to get off of the floor, to fall, and to push yourself back up again.

For a muscle to strengthen it has to tear. The tears are small. They are not without pain or discomfort. Science says that when, or if, the muscle repairs, the new muscle is stronger. Tears are real. They hurt. Eyes tear. Muscles tear. Communities tear. We can only hope that when healing has taken place, it has done so with enough precision and strength to make us forget how bad everything was before.

To Be Made Complete

Lady Macbeth - Gabriel von Max

The Latin word condere means to found, to make, or to bury. It also means to strike such that the instrument is plunged in what is struck. Virgil sets the multivalent word to work at once in his Aeneid, tuning it to sing the praise of Roman making. ("tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem" ; "So great a task it was to found the Roman race.")

But when we meet the word again at story's end, there is a shudder, as a circuit we did not know was being fashioned, line by line, is made complete: Aeneus sinks his blade into the side of Turnus, an issuing of violence that in turn gives birth to Rome. Destined rage, destined mercilessness, destined empire: we're made to think again of all that came before, and all that came of that.

My wife, figuring another circuit, describes such linguistic pairs as knots at the ends of the tailor's thread. One allows the stitch to happen, the other's made to stem the seam that's stitched. The kindred knots, sharing a nature, are separated by the union they helped to fashion.

Thus in Denmark, Grendel slaughters thirty men, and the hero, stepping ashore two hundred and fifty lines later, is said to have "the strength of thirty" in his grip.

Thus the troubled prince of Denmark calls his love "nymph"--nymph, the water-bride; nymph, the water-called--and in the span of an act, Ophelia's drawn into the brook.

Thus Macbeth, drenched in guilt, turns to his wife:

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
Augurs and understood relations have
By magot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret'st man of blood. What is the night?

And his wife responds,

Almost at odds with morning, which is which.

Shakespeare sets her line at the play's dead center (act III, scene iv): midnight in the drama's time, midnight in the staged running of that time, midnight in the realm of the usurping king's soul. How apt, then, how terrifyingly apt, that Lady Macbeth unconsciously (that is to say, homophonically) reminds him (and herself?) of the force that set the dark in motion ("which is which"). The stitch.

What's more, because the work at hand cannot exist without us, the circuit's made complete within us. The stitch's loop depends on our awareness. We feel a sudden tautness ripple the warp and weft of our material. Cinched more tightly to the act of creation, we feel an intimation of immortality; we feel the final meaning of condere: completion.

Blind in Depths: The Delusions of Carmela Soprano

“I thought therapy was going to clear up the fucking freak show in his head.”      —Carmela Soprano

In The Sopranos, Tony Soprano and his wife, Carmela, spar over differences, but they’re largely united in their delusions about Tony’s line of work. Tony believes he is a “soldier” carrying out orders—sordid, illegal, it doesn’t matter—for the good of the mob Family. And he does. Not always unflinchingly, but unfailingly.

Carmela’s delusions center on the home front. She convinces herself that her place is at Tony’s side. Usually Tony’s business rarely troubles the waters of Carmela and their children’s lives (Meadow and A.J.). But when mafia blood seeps under the door, Carmela is reminded of the high stakes she gambles to ignore. She sometimes wrestles about staying with Tony, but in spite of the dubious origins of the guns and piles of money hidden in the ceiling tiles; despite increasing number of Family disappearances, she stays.

In fact, for a while she is church sanctioned to remain in the marriage. When Carmela seeks the counsel of the well-meaning family priest, he encourages her to help Tony be a better person.

Carmela overlooks Tony’s philandering, telling herself the women mean nothing to him. But when one calls their home looking for Tony and A.J. answers the phone, Carmela is incensed. Only as it crosses her threshold does she feel the threat of Tony’s infidelity.

This breaching of her walled fortress spikes internal turmoil, and she seeks out a therapist. He catches on quickly to the delicate way she frames her husband’s work, and knows instantly what it says about her.

Carmela: His crimes … they are … organized crime. Dr. Krakower: The mafia. Carmela: (Gasps) Oh Jesus. Oh, so what. So what. He betrays me, every week with these whores. Dr. Krakower: Probably the least of his misdeeds.

Carmela becomes defensive when the therapist labels her an accomplice to her husband’s crimes, telling him, “All I do is make sure he’s got clean clothes in his closet and dinner on his table.”

Her love of money competes with her love of family. She doesn’t see how being an accomplice to Tony has created blindness in her children. Meadow becomes a high salaried attorney defending white collar criminals. Tony seems set to help A.J. reach his dream of opening his own nightclub, which could easily be the next mob front like Bada Bing.

Carmela’s denial is haunting. Haunting like the crosses that are all around her, on her necklace, on the walls of her home, in the church she frequents. They are everywhere as in Flannery O’Connor’s “Christ haunted South,” where Jesus is invoked but not followed.

She has moments of spiritual clarity, like when Christopher nearly dies and she intercedes for him and her family. “Tonight I ask you take my sins and the sins of my family into your merciful heart. We have chosen this life in full awareness of the consequences of our sins.” But her vision clouds again, and later she asks Tony to put extra pressure on the building inspector so she can move forward on her spec house, knowing full well what that type of pressure implies.

Carmela whitewashes Tony’s career because of what she gains from it. In his poem “Moby Dick,” Dan Beachy-Quick writes:

You beat your head against the jagged rocks. Blind in depths so dark light itself is blind, You knock your head against the rocks to see And scratch the god-itch from your thoughts.

We can hope Tony’s gestures of forgiveness and compassion at the end of the show signal a new direction for the Sopranos. But if they don’t, the last scene, when they gather at their favorite restaurant, is chilling if it marks only the perpetuating of a mafia family status quo.

Creativity Connects

I was in a porn film. The previous sentence is actually factually incorrect, but it’s an attention grabbing introductory line, right? Where substance doesn’t grab us, spectacle usually does the trick. I seem to recall coming across a McSweeny’s Internet Tendency entry that suggested a simple fail proof way of attracting (and keeping) more readers: insert GIFs of jiggling breasts throughout the text. For those of us who laugh, is there a ring of fatigued disillusionment in it? As song writers or poets or visual artists or composers our creations feel sterile without some type of social interaction, or at least recognition. Having an audience is nice.

We yearn to connect. It chafes the less mature of us when we see mere scandal and spectacle reap a harvest of readers/watchers/listeners that objects of genuine artistry are likely to never see. Ever. The mean-well people (often non-creatives) who empathetically suggest a genuinely creative spirit doesn’t need any sort of audience because the joy rests in the act of creation are, well, wrong. (In part, Jacque Maritan’s reminder that true creativity is not mere self-expression or cathartic release of personal feelings; rather, it is the building of something for its own good, seems to make sense here.)

We are an interactive people. It’s not mere egotism which drives our desire for communicating our work; it’s the desire to connect, to grow, to truly communicate. This impulse to share is not one that should be repressed or bemoaned, but rather one to be celebrated because it reflects the desire for communion with others. In God Has A Dream, Desmond Tutu relates the concept of ubuntu beautifully: “[ubuntu] does not say, ‘I think therefore I am.’ It says rather: 'I am human because I belong. I participate I share.’” This insight is especially pertinent for us in a culture that, despite all our communication technologies, urges us towards isolation and the tendency to see success as the achievement of ultimate independence.

In a lecture on virtue based ethics, Bill Dejong suggested that there can be a sinful element in the “in the comfort of your own home” culture. (I.E “Enjoy theatre or gormeau cooking or symphony or whatever in your own home” that we hear from the advertisers of giant television screens etc.) He suggests that to deliberately participate in practices of isolation is to indulge pride: pride that we can be happy and fulfilled only with ourselves—that we don’t need the participation of others in our emotionally, spiritually, and perhaps even physically, isolated lives.

I’ve been thinking that creativity, with its deep longing for resonance, perhaps, could be part of a solution for the dehumanizing idealization of the isolated hero. After all, creativity yearns for relationship, for response, for connection: for the acknowledgement that we are human and that we belong.

Become a Believer

I first came across the idea of the “holy fool” in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story, “Gimpel the Fool.” The story was in a literature textbook I was using, and I didn’t have anyone to tell me what it meant. That was all the better. Even though I count it as a real flaw in my literary education that no one brought up the archetype of the holy fool, a story like Singer’s is best stumbled on alone, where the story’s very oddity throws you into vertigo.

In the story, Gimpel the baker is the butt of everyone’s jokes. The biggest joke? The townspeople marry him off Hosea-like to the town prostitute, who bears him six illegitimate children. Repeatedly, Gimpel takes action to end the marriage, but instead comes to conclusions like, “What’s the good of not believing? Today it’s your wife you don’t believe; tomorrow it’s God himself you won’t take stock in.”

For a long time, I’ve struggled with the designation of Christians as “believers” for two reasons: on the one hand because it’s too wide, designating naivety and gullibility for products from Buddy Christ bobbleheads to the Precious Moments Chapel; on the other hand, because it’s too narrow, as Christians seem to be willing to believe in primarily one direction, primarily allegorical—as in, Gandalf is Jesus and the dwarves are the twelve disciples (Crap, there’s thirteen; well, Tolkien’s a word guy, must’ve miscounted).

Then, in graduate school, I came upon, well, unbelievers.

One of them, in 19^th Century Nature Writing, called into question the basic ethic of the course, that we should value life because life was itself a good. “How do I know that ‘life’ is a ‘good’?” she asked. “How do I know that it’s not better that life go extinct?”

Now that’s radical, respectable doubt. She’s right: “We should value life because we should value life” is not believing; it’s tail-chasing.

In another class, I read Life of Pi with a smattering of students who were studying to be experts of story. Famously, that book spends two-hundred-plus pages recounting the trans-pacific trip of a boy on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Then, it performs a bait-and-switch. Investigators arrive on the scene who doubt the story. The survivor, Pi, then tells them a different story than the one we’ve been reading, a naturalistic tale in which all the characters are humans who kill each other in order to survive. The dilemma is, which story do you believe?

I take pride in the fact that I was the only one who took the first story. After all, I’m a believer. The rest? Unbelievers.

As per Singer’s story, “believing” is dangerous business: other people might quite literally shit on you, continually heap insults on you, stick you with their illegitimate children. But if you clump together with other believers under one roof and call it a church, what better place for illegitimate children?

I remember one critic on Singer’s story suggested that the Gimpels of the world get cooked in Nazi ovens. But isn’t that exactly the problem—that we blame the victim, believers, at the expense of the cynics? “Don’t believe,” the lesson goes, “or the Nazi’s will get you—we’re helpless to prevent them from rising to power and killing millions.”

Here’s the dirty little secret of a rationalist society: we revile the believer who sends all his money to the TV evangelists more than the TV evangelist; we revile Trump or Hillary supporters more than Trump or Hillary him- or herself.

I wonder if radical believing could blow up our polarized society. What happens if you believe what you see on Fox and CNN? What happens if you believe climate change and believe its doubters? What would happen if we believed everything that was said by both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—and the green party—and the legalize marijuana party?

Maybe the holy fool explains the election season in America. Maybe that’s the only way to explain it. We turn into believers every four years.

But only partial believers. We should throw open the floodgates of belief, believe in every and all directions.

The Holy Fool archetype has roots in scripture—in Isaiah, Hosea, Ezekiel, who actually refused God’s command to cook his food over burning human dung and settled for animal scat instead.

Why not give all away all your money, marry a prostitute, support her children with your diligent work at the bakery or prophesying at the town gate?

One final sign that I’m right on this, that I’m going to become an omnivorous believer: as I wrote this—no lie—I received a “random” email form a listserv I’m a part of.

It was from Richard Parker.

From a Place of Anger

I write this from a place of anger. And I think it’s a good place for me to write from.

Over the past two years I’ve been able to invest more time into understanding myself. It began when a friend introduced me to the Enneagram. It’s a personality test that assigns one of nine “types” to people based solely on their motivations. From “The Perfectionist” to the “The Peacemaker”, it definitively accounts for the way I, and others, behave.

The Road Back to You is a sublime primer on the Enneagram. Written by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile, it’s witty and informational and I highly recommend it. The book explains the way the Enneagram demonstrates the spontaneous and unpredictable beauty of being human, and how it can flourish and flounder in a predictable away.  

Discovering my type has changed the way I understand myself. For example, as a 9 (“The Peacemaker”), when it comes to anger I have an innate ability to dissolve it. To bury it and effectively pretend that it wasn’t a big deal. Sometimes it’s not. But sometimes it is. Like today. The day after the election. This is a big deal and it can’t ever not be.

I also have this incredible ability to put everyone’s desires ahead of my own. I rarely ask myself what I want to do. None of these are de facto negative qualities, but they can be. And my tendency is to let them cripple me. To let them prevent me from doing something, from speaking up.

The Enneagram has also shown me how the people closest to me are very different from me. None of us are the same types. And the Enneagram is at it’s absolute best when it’s showing how the types respond to each other in relationships, in decision making, in conversation. It has become the single most useful tool to help me listen and understand the people around me. We are different. We are each our own type, with our own motivations for action and inaction, for decision and indecision, for happiness and sorrow. The Enneagram advocates for empathy. It lights a path to loving our neighbors in a very real and bright way.

One day soon I will see that the evangelical church I am angry with is made up of different people, with all types of wants and fears. But today, in the days after election day, the Enneagram is teaching me about being honest with my anger. To kick over a few tables—to borrow from a famous scene in the Gospels. American evangelicalism has made a mockery of my faith.

So much of my life as a Nine is to seek peace. To deny my anger because it brings disharmony to my life. But, what looks like my desire for peace is really just a desire to shy away from conflict. Should I pray that this anger translates into action? As a nine, when I move toward action because of anger, I enter into a state of becoming. I awake, soul intact and strong and true, into a better person. And I realize that behind all true peace there must be pain and conflict. As Fr. Richard Rohr says, “The only way to overcome the bad is to be the better.”

May I need to want to be better. May I need to want to not be scared. May I need to want to speak up and fight and change this.

Lord, let me stay angry.

A Defense of Skeletons

The truth is that man’s horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all. It is man’s eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque. - G.K. Chesterton, "A Defense of Skeletons"

In his quirky essay, Chesterton writes of walking through woods where the forest folk kept apologizing that it was winter and the trees were bereft of foliage. “There was evidently a general feeling that I had caught the trees in a kind of disgraceful dishabille and that they ought not to be seen until, like the first human sinners, they had covered themselves with leaves.” We’re a lot like those peasants regarding our own souls, trying to appear more clothed and commendable than we are, knocking around with planks sticking out of our eye sockets while we swipe at someone else’s dislodged eyelash with a bony phalange and hope no one mistakes us for a character in Saint-Saëns tone poem, Danse Macabre. (See St. Matthew 7:3) Yet deep down we know that when death strips us of the pretty outer wrappings, our “shamelessly grotesque” frame will be exposed by the likes of devouring worms.

How little of grace we understand. For if our hearts were more gripped by grace, we might not only be less shy about our undignified skeletons, but waste less energy in denial about the inevitable core of our human nature. Who knows, laughing at our souls’ bare bones might be just the thing that begins to heal our poorly disguised pride.

As an example, I give you my recent preparation for the Sacrament of Confession. I wrote out my tiresome, amateurish sins on a 3x5 card as usual, using a pencil (badly in need of sharpening) so that I could tweak my wording. Somewhere down the list I wrote, “I’ve been jealous of another’s life.” What nonsense. It isn’t the other’s life I’m jealous of; I have one of my own. And who is this ambiguous “another?” I forced myself to erase and rewrite the embarrassing truth: “I’ve been chronically jealous of a close friend’s wealth and opportunities.” How petty the words looked on paper, how undignified. Still, I felt a twinge of elation in my brute honesty, blurted out the next day at church before the icon of Christ while the priest stood by. For in my insistence on specifics I had momentarily conquered that eccentric glory Chesterton talks about, that tendency to grope for coverings to hide the truth of what I am. And I take heart that someday I might be comfortable enough with my skeleton that I can boldly dash off concise sins of omission and commission with an expensive pen that doesn’t skip ink, and without hesitation. “Let our sins be strong,” Martin Luther said. And let our willingness to admit them for what they actually are be stronger still.

Afterward, I turned from the icon and went my way, vaguely amused. I forgot to look into its glossy surface to see whether a reflection of my own skull was grinning back at me.

An Acolyte of a New Liturgy

I’m starting to get it. The spirituality of baseball. The miraculous has happened: the Cubs have won the World Series.

Consider me an acolyte of this liturgy. It’s taken me a long time to warm up to it. I grew up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, i.e., a Cubs fan by birth. I never quite got the game, but I learned both to hope for the unimaginable and to guard my heart against the usual.

I guess I’m cynical that way.

And then we got into the postseason. Then into the conference championship. Then there were only four more wins between us and history.

In fellowship we watched on the edge of our seats, tearing the hems of our garments, when at the eleventh hour failure suddenly seemed possible.

And then, the heavens opened. The powers that be called for an interruption to the conflict. We waited, catching our breath. We reflected on what victory would mean. We prepared for the possibility of defeat, of facing the next day with our messianic hopes crushed.

Was it something divine that guided our brave, tired warriors’ arms? Zobrist the Constant. Montero, spiting the odds. (Don’t bet against Montero.) Bryant. Rizzo. Suddenly it was over and we were hearing words no living person has ever heard.

Their struggle is a whole city’s reprieve from the grave. Their victory vindicates a century’s hope. It reinscribes the future not as “next year” but as “anytime.”

Go Cubs.

*

Reasoning with Myself

My left brain tells me it’s a lot about psychology. Baseball, more than any other sport, is a perfect storm of intermittent reinforcement. Most sports have constant action, constant movement, progression up or down a field. Baseball mostly has a guy throwing a ball either well or poorly and another guy mostly not hitting the ball. When the guy does hit it, maybe 90% of the time someone catches or throws him out.

It’s a game where mostly nothing happens. It’s structured on disappointment.

Until something does happen. Until disappointment becomes a single base, then a runner on third, then a scoring run. Hope is rekindled. Why? Because So-and-so was throwing against My Boy? Because I was drinking a Chicago beer? Because my friend’s wife hasn’t washed her Cubs jersey since the series started?

The drama of the game depends on rare, seemingly random moments of excitement drawn out over long spans of time. That’s well-known as the best recipe for reinforcing behavior, and it contributes, I think, to so much of the superstition around it.

*

Despite Myself My right brain doesn’t care about the intermittent reinforcement schedule. Doesn’t care about how little relationship there is between me and anything to do with the Cubs outside of geography.

I still got caught up in the drama. I still cheered for Ross’s home run, for just about anything Zobrist did, for Rizzo tagging Lindor as he raced back to first. I still felt that mystical participation for which there is no philosophical justification.

Because it really is spiritual. Not that the Cubs have effected anything beyond a social salvation, but because we’re spiritual creatures seeking fellowship. Seeking hope. Seeking the concrete emblems of the drama we feel, deep down, belongs to our lives together.

Entering Openness

Out of all the treasures in the Book of Common Prayer, to me chief among them are the collects, the compendium of short and beautiful prayers, and chief among these is The Collect for Purity:

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid:

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify they holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

This prayer was born before the advent of the Book of Common Prayer: a close version appears in the 14-century introduction to the beautiful text The Cloud of Unknowing—a text that prompts openness—nakedness, as the writer calls it—to God. Indeed, this prayer is called the Collect for Purity, but I think it is first for something else. The prayer pushes into the openness required for such purifying work to actually happen in the human heart.

The second half of the prayer (after the colon) does ask for purity—it’s a searing request, beseeching God’s work of purifying, cleansing, making new and re-fashioning our ability to love and praise him. It’s a beautiful request.

But I know my own heart. Or at least, I know it with brave, occasional glimpses down into its depths. I know how slow and weird it is. If I’m honest, I have to ask: how would such a request have any real traction in me—in the wild, wily, frightened and glorious expanse of this soul that I’m asking God to care for?

I think it’s because before any purifying action happens, I have to trust God’s ability to know—to see, behold, stare at, and hold—my heart, desires, and secrets. And I have to trust (as this prayer helps me to do) that God does not just know through cognitive cataloging: here is Jessica’s ugly secrets, here is her sad desires . . .

No. He knows via love.

God’s knowledge is woven, in divine DNA strands of holiness, with love. He cannot grimace or flinch away. That colon, those two dots stacked on top of each other, is kind of like a doorway. A threshold. And as we enter the openness of that first half of the prayer, as we open up our heart and desires and secrets, can we enter even deeper pools of grace?

But let’s face it: this real openness can be terrifying. Encased in elegant words of the English language, the reality of this collect is outrageous—like walking into a clearing during a lightening storm. It’s scary. And it would be foolish to think otherwise, that it’s easy for the soul just to open and ease into being known, when we have endless methods of hiding and the compunction to edit and prettify runs hard in the grain.

But perhaps, gradually, slow like how a tree grows, this real openness may become for us the safest place in the world. Sometimes during this prayer, I think of a little animal burying down into safe, warm soil. A badger tucking into his sett. An eagle settling into her aerie, the protected nook on the high cliff. Or a person, returning to the home where he or she is thoroughly known—the faults, foibles, the heavy and tired secrets, the treasured plans—and is welcomed through the doors.