Diary of the Blue Ridge

A new home

2004-02-18T15:15:00.000-05:00

For my blog. DiaryOTBR is headed for the greener pastures of Upsaid.com, and can now be found at http://www.upsaid.com/joshuaseth/. I hope my loyal readers (all five of them) will follow me there.

Leithart on the Psalms

2004-02-16T12:13:00.000-05:00

Peter Leithart, preaching on Psalm-singing. In the midst of our all Christian sub-culture's obsession with writing newer and cooler praise songs, his sermon points out the irony of all this...not only are we largely ignorant of the Church's hymns, but we don't even have a clue how to sing its oldest prayers. My grandparents have spent the last decade helping to found a PCA church in their county - it is a delightfully "irrelevant" church, and one of the best things they do is sing a Psalm every Sunday. It is usually a haltering, awkward process - no one really knows how it should sound, but week after week they work their way through the Psalter. It is a beautiful picture of the Church slowly growing into maturity; every week they sing the ancient songs with more confidence, as God increasingly blesses their obedience in this unfamiliar, but correct, path.

Since the time of David, Psalm-singing has been the center of prayer and singing for the people of God. That is obvious in Judaism, for from the time of Solomon's temple, through the Second temple period after the exile, and into the period of the New Testament, the Psalter was THE hymnal of the church. The same is true of the early church. Psalms were chanted and sung in churches during the early centuries; monks chanted through the entire Psalter each week during the Middle Ages; and one of the great liturgical achievements of the Reformation was the development of Psalms that could be sung in congregational worship.

We are seeing something of a revival of Psalm-singing today, not only here in Moscow but also in various places around the country. In some cases, people have visited Moscow, been overwhelmed by our Psalm-singing, and gone home to organize Psalm-sings in their home churches. But, since familiarity often breeds incomprehension, it's important to remind ourselves continually of why we are doing this.

First, we are doing it above all because it is well-pleasing to God. God requires Psalm-singing. Sing and make melody in your heart, in Psalms, and hymns and spirit-songs, Paul says. I do not believe that God forbids hymns, and the church has a great tradition of church music. But those hymns must be secondary to Psalms in the church's worship and piety, since Psalms are God's own hymns, which He commands us to sing. Refusing to sing Psalms would be as much a violation of God's commandment as neglecting the celebration of the Lord's Supper. But the Psalms are not only commanded by God but PLEASING to Him. Yahweh is the Hero of the Psalms, and He enjoys hearing His exploits sung by bards. He delights in our praises, and He particularly delights when we praise Him with the songs He has given.

Second, we are learning Psalms because our Psalms provoke God to act for us. I mentioned in the communion meditation last week that the Supper is a memorial, and that means it is presented before the Father to ÂremindÂ Him of His covenant. God does not forget, for His throne is surrounded by the rainbow. But just as He acts in response to prayer even though He knows what we need before we pray, so also He responds to our memorials even though He remembers His covenant before we remind Him. And one way we remind Him to act in accord with His promise is in song. Chronicles tells us that song is a memorial before the Lord, and as we sing of God's great acts, we are calling on Him to do it all again. We praise Him for cutting Rahab in pieces, and we want Him to do it again; we celebrate the gift of manna in the wilderness, and we remind Him to provide for us in the same way; we sing of David's many dangers and many deliverances, and we remind God of His promise to rescue us from all evils.

Third, we are learning Psalms to prepare us for war. Singing Psalms is itself an act of war, because we are calling on Yahweh, the Divine Warrior, to fight for us. But singing Psalms also empowers us for battle. It is simply a fact that vigorous singing heightens our spirits, increases our energy, makes us ready for action. Armies throughout the centuries have known this, and every great army has had fight songs, and sports teams know this principle too. Here especially we need to make sure that the Psalms are dominant in our singing, for, sadly, many of the hymns of the Christian church have been hymns for retreat rather than battle, hymns of withdrawal rather than Psalms of advance.

It is also important to be reminded of HOW we should sing. Take time to learn the Psalms at home with your children, and take advantage of the Psalm-singing opportunities we have. And when you come here to worship sing even the Psalms we donÂt know all that well. Don't sit silently waiting for a familiar tune. And sing vigorously. The acoustics in this room are terrible, but don't let that inhibit you. The Lord will hear and notice, and someday Lord willing we will sing in better circumstances. Paul says that we are filled with the Spirit to sing Psalms and hymns and spirit-songs, and the Spirit is always, always an energizing power. Psalm-singing at the temple was part of IsraelÂs replication of Sinai: The smoke of hundreds of sacrifices rose from the altar and enveloped the temple mount, as the smoke and cloud enveloped Sinai. And that rising smoke was accompanied by singing and shouts from thousands of priests and worshipers, by the crashing of cymbals, by stringed instruments and trumpets, music that mimicked the deafening and thunderous voice of God when he came to Sinai. So, do your best to make the walls and ceiling shake, and we can be confident that the Lord who made the ear will hear and will make Moscow shake.

On how funny it is to lose all your stuff

2004-02-16T11:34:00.000-05:00

It's been a crazy week for my family; first our cousin dies, and then the house burns down.

They basically lost everything that was in the house at the time of the fire; clothes, computer, dishes, old family furniture, kid's artwork, toothpaste, scotch tape, Valentine's cards - everything. Insurance will cover the rebuilding of the house, probably in four or five months, and the cost of the lost possessions, which is a blessing, but there are of course things you can't replace. God is good, though; the church (Covenant Pres. of Richmond) has been overwhelminingly supportive, as have friends and family. I think Rose (my five year old sister) has been given more dolls and stuffed animals in the last week than she ever owned in her life.

The bottom line though, is that my family has already laid up its treasure in heaven, where rust does not corrupt and thieves do not steal; losing all their worldly possessions is simply another chapter in the increasingly good and interesting story of how God is displaying His glory and building the kingdom through their lives.

It's a cheesy story, the kind you find forwarded into your inbox, but when it's your life, your stuff, it's a little more complex, a little more true. After the firemen finished knocking holes in half the walls and quenching the last of the fire, they told my mother it was safe for her and dad to go in and see if they could salvage their valuables -- and my mother laughed. It was a gospel chuckle, a profoundly biblical giggle, a real Romans 8 guffaw; for all that was valuable to her was already safe, and even if they had indeed perished in the smoke and flames, even death could not keep them dead.

So this then, for this week, is faith: to watch your house burn and laugh.

The Home Fires are Burning

2004-02-13T09:43:00.000-05:00

Please pray for my family, who was displaced from their home in Richmond, VA after it burned Thursday morning. The structure stands, but smoke and fire damage were extensive, and we're not sure what (possession-wise), if anything, will be able to be salvaged. No one was hurt.

The Comfort of the Resurrection

2004-02-11T15:12:00.000-05:00

Death seems to be winning. My cousin Pamela, only 42, died this week after an eight year battle with cancer. Her body, which only weeks ago was still healthy, now lies in a graveyard east of Richmond, in the same plot where my great-grandparents both rest. Each of them followed a Christ who promised life, and yet their bodies lie dead.

But the story is not finished. The Word did not put on flesh simply to send our souls to heaven. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, and that same Richmond graveyard is the site of a future battle that will be won by our Messiah King, when those who now sleep will finally be changed. On that day we will chant and sing "O death, where is your victory?; O death, where is your sting?" for it is death who will die, and we who live. And Pamela will come back out of that grave we put her in, and she will lead the cry with a shout, for all will finally have put to right. Maranatha.

The gospel is a paradox; it is not the strong who will win, but the weak, and not the rich who are blessed, but the poor. The death of a saint is not therefore reason to despair, but rejoice, and reaffirm our faith in what is as yet unseen. So it is that, on this miserable, cold day in February, we look anew for resurrection of the dead, and wait with even more longing for the life of the world to come.

Wanted Men

2004-02-06T17:27:00.000-05:00

Bob Dylan, on the passing of his friend, Johnny Cash.

Of course, I knew of [Cash] before he ever heard of me. In '55 or '56, "I Walk the Line" played all summer on the radio, and it was different than anything else you had ever heard. The record sounded like a voice from the middle of the earth. It was so powerful and moving. It was profound, and so was the tone of it, every line; deep and rich, awesome and mysterious all at once. "I Walk the Line" had a monumental presence and a certain type of majesty that was humbling. Even a simple line like "I find it very, very easy to be true" can take your measure. We can remember that and see how far we fall short of it.

Johnny wrote thousands of lines like that. Truly he is what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified and what it means to be here; and he said it all in plain English...If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses. He rises high above all, and he'll never die or be forgotten, even by persons not born yet -- especially those persons -- and that is forever.

Dylan and Cash are throwbacks to an earlier age; in the world of modern pop music, they seem, well, medieval. Though neither fit into America's Christian sub-culture, both men publicly identified themselves with Christ, and ironically sang from a far more biblical worldview than the average CCM artist. Both understood deeply the twisted nature of their hearts, and more importantly, the relentless love of their God. In 1969 they collaborated on a song which Cash recorded during his concert at the San Quentin prison, and its title, Wanted Man, captures perfectly the worldview from which both men sang. That is, they knew they were guilty, and they knew they were pursued by one greater than themselves.

George W. Bush, Pantheist

2004-02-06T11:24:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Little Geneva, in an article in the December 29, 2003 issue of Newsweek, the hero of the evangelical political world is quoted when speaking to an Iraqi muslim leader during his surprise Thanksgiving visit, "Dr. al-Rubaie, I want you to convey this message to Mr. Sistani [the elusive Shiite cleric]. Tell him that I pray to the same god he prays to... Tell Sistani I have nothing but praise for your religion. I have many millions of Muslims in my country back home."

Given that there has been no missive from the White House challenging Newsweek's article, I think we can safely assume Bush stands behind his words, meaning that this is the second time he has publicly affirmed that the Holy God of Israel and the false god of Islam are the one and same. But there is only one God, and He is a jealous God.

The Art of Naming

2004-02-04T14:54:00.000-05:00

Art made by a person you know may not be more aesthetically valuable than a similar piece by a stranger, but it does usually allow you to understand it a bit better; and sometimes gives you insight into the person themselves. I think that when poetry, and especially modern poetry succeeds, it is when the deeply personal is communicated in such a way that the reader understands the emotion and makes it their own. Whitman was the first to realize this, and American poetry since has often been a quest to translate the intimately personal into an universal language. The Psalms are much the same way; when Christ quotes King David's 22nd Psalm he is allowing the poet to speak for him in his moment of terror --and by crying "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he is pointing toward David's closing lines, which read,

For God has not despised or abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted,
and he has not hidden his face from him,
but has heard, when he cried to him.

While I don't really know Claudia Emerson, she was a visiting professor for one of my undergraduate poetry classes, and I at least know something of her story. Her poem, Frame, an Epistle is an instructive example of a personal grief translated into an universally accessible emotion. It begins, "Most of the things you made for me--blanket- / chest, lapdesk, the armless rocker--I gave / away to friends who could use them and not / be reminded of the hours lost there, / not having been witness to those designs, / the tedious finishes. But I did keep / the mirror, perhaps because like all mirrors, / most of these years it has been invisible, / part of the wall, or defined by reflection-- / safe--because reflection, after all, does change." While her background story is only implicit in the poem, Emerson's husband died fairly suddenly several years ago from cancer, and she has since remarried. This knowledge accentuates the final lines, which read,

I hung it here in the front, dark hallway
of this house you will never see, so that
it might magnify the meager light,
become a lesser, backward window. No one
pauses long before it. But this morning,
as I put on my overcoat, then straightened
my hair, I saw outside my face its frame
you made for me, admiring for the first
time the way the cherry you cut and planed
yourself had darkened, just as you said it would.

The work of poetry is the same as Adam's, when he took the animals and gave them names; poetry's work of taking dominion is naming mankind's story, and Emerson's poem broadens the language, makes another name for another story--in the same way David's story named Christ's.

A post-Roe reality

2004-02-03T16:07:00.000-05:00

In the good to know category, some legal analysis on what would happen if Roe v. Wade were at some future date overturned. Basically, states would each determine the legality of infanticide within their own borders. That's comforting. I'm so glad kids my age are getting shot and blown up to spread American liberty and democracy. It really is "God's gift to humanity." (G.W. Bush)

The young Kerry

2004-02-03T15:44:00.000-05:00

Though I do not support John Kerry, the fact that he seems (at this early hour) to have at least a 2 or 3 to 1 chance of being our nation's next President, a recent Atlantic article examining the then Lt. Kerry's service in Vietnam is worth considering. The portrait that emerges in the (doubtless not agenda-free) article is that of a courageous and sensitive leader, one who was prepared to sacrifice his life for the men he led (and nearly did on several occasions) but at the same time was attuned to the complexities and fuzzy morality of America's involvement in the Vietnam conflict. Most revealing is when the article quotes from Kerry's own young and occasionally wise letters and journals.

"I know that most of my friends felt absolutely absurd going up a river holding a loaded weapon that was supposed to be used against someone who had never really done anything to you and on whose land you were now trespassing," Kerry wrote. "I had always felt that to kill, hate was necessary and I certainly didn't hate these people." In truth, he added, scanning the shore for suspicious movements to shoot at made him "feel like the biggest ass in the world." Kerry had explored similar feelings in a letter to his parents in December of 1968. Describing the sight of American soldiers and their Vietnamese girlfriends strolling down the streets of the U.S. rest-and-recreation-center city of Vung Tau one sunny afternoon, he reflected on the crucial difference between occupiers and liberators of war-torn places. "I asked myself what it would be like to be occupied by foreign troops—to have to bend to the desires of a people who could not be sensitive to the things that really counted in one's country," Kerry wrote in that letter. He had been considering Germany's occupation of France during World War II, he added, when "a thought came to me that I didn't like—I felt more like the German than the doughboy who came over to make the world safe for democracy and who rightfully had a star in his eye."

Less than three months later experience had brought him to another melancholy observation. He wrote in his war otes, "It was when one of your men got hit or you got hit yourself that you felt most absurd—that was when everything had to have a meaning in order for it all to be worthwhile and inevitably Vietnam just didn't have any meaning. It didn't meet the test. When a good friend was hit and perhaps about to die, you'd ask if it was worth just his life alone—let alone all the others or your own."

"But the ease with which a man could be brought to kill another man, this always amazed me," he went on. Even more troubling to him was the imprimatur the U.S. military accorded this coldheartedness. To illustrate his point, he referred to the messages that would come in from the brass at Cam Ranh, praising the Swifts' gunners whenever they had killed a few Vietcong, and ending "Good Hunting": "Good Hunting? Good Christ—you'd think we were going out after deer or something—but here we were being patted on the back and receiving hopes that the next time we went out on a patrol we would find some more people to kill. How cheap life became."

Simply judging him on the merit of those words, this is a man I could support for President. But, to read Kerry's words now, with his full scale support of abortion on demand, lines like "the ease with which a man could be brought to kill another man, this always amazed me," takes on a whole other meaning.

Christmas

2003-12-24T22:59:00.000-05:00

“Like a stone on the surface of a still river / driving the ripples on forever, / redemption rips through the surface of time, / in the cry of a tiny babe.” - Bruce Cockburn

It’s winter in the Blue Ridge. The leaves have long since turned color and fallen, blue smoke is funneling out our chimney, and the wood pile is starting to thin. A couple Saturdays ago, on the last really nice day of the year, Ami and I were working outside breaking kindling and splitting wood when the sky was suddenly carpeted with hundreds of hawks heading south.

In many ways, this year has been a season of death and ending for our young family. Symbolically, we’ve died to our old life of singleness as we joined ourselves to each other; literally, our marriage has been colored by an encounter with physical death, as Ami’s brother Doug passed away suddenly this fall, adding to the earlier deaths of both of my maternal grandparents; and vocationally there has been death, as I recently lost my job at The Rutherford Institute due to budget cuts.

Superficially, despite the recent hardness in our lives, there is good reason to keep a stiff upper lip–we are young, bright, and well-educated, most of our lives lay before us, and surely the light years will outnumber the hard when all is said and done. But profoundly, there is reason even to rejoice. For we do not live, like those unfortunate Narnians, in a land where it is always winter and never Christmas. Rather, we, like you, dwell in a reality that was irrevocably changed by the God who, for his glory and our pleasure, put on flesh, proclaimed his kingdom, and kicked down the doors of Hades along the way. For in Christ, there is not winter and there is no death; there is only and always resurrection.

And so we go to Lowe’s and use our wedding gift card to buy a big fat Douglas Fir. We cram it into the Pontiac and take it home and string it with lights and icicles and snowflakes and angels, we make chocolate chip cookies and mail cards to friends and family, we throw another log on the fire–not to put a good face on tragedy and hardness, but rather, to celebrate the deeper and only lasting reality; that is, in December of 2003, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. So let us rejoice. For Christ’s birth is not the end of the story, but merely the beginning–Israel has found her King, we live in his kingdom, and there are so many chapters still to be written; indeed, it will take all of eternity to tell of the wonders we will see. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. A very Merry Christmas from Scottsville.

Good memories

2003-12-04T16:25:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of 40 Bicycles--

One of the great triumphs of the film The Lord of the Rings, it seems to me, is that it takes precisely the opposite line [to existentialism], urging us to find our true selves by following and staying loyal to the vocation that we wouldn't have chosen, that comes to us from outside. - N.T. Wright

What Wright names is why the films (and books) are so counter-cultural, and it is also I think why they are so popular. We live in a post-Christian society, but we still long to be redeemed, to know the gracious law of God. We don't know how to be good, but we remember goodness when we see it in Aragorn, Gandalf, Frodo and Sam, because it is beautiful.

Play hard

2003-12-04T16:18:00.000-05:00

Peter Liethart reports on an interesting book which purports that schoolchildren don't play enough (and no, they don't mean video games), arguing that children who learn through play are actually better students than those who are chained to their desks for hours at a time. I'm a big believer in this - my first five or six years of home education consisted of something like, "read a book, do your math workbook, read another book...and play outside." I think there's a great deal of wisdom in this (though it probably could a little more structured than my experience was).

Leithart comments:

No doubt there's some trendy pomo anti-authoritarianism in this, but it also rings true. Yahweh, after all, trained his people not only through instruction in the Torah but also through "playful" rituals and festivals. Sacraments are more than drama and play, but they are that as well.

Revering nature

2003-12-04T15:38:00.000-05:00

More spiritual weirdness from our President, though it happened about a year and a half ago. Evidently Bush visited Japan in 2002 and thought it'd be a good idea to be a sensitive multi-cultural president and visit a Shinto shrine to worship the idol of a dead Japanese emperor, where he and Laura supposedly bowed before the idol and "clapped their hands to awaken him." I don't remember any American evangelicals raising a peep about this, but it did get some Korean Christians riled up.

According to the BBC, "in its purist form the Shinto faith reveres nature." Well, isn't that nice and harmless. If I was of the dispensationalist persuasion, given Pres. Bush's seemingly obsessive attempts to pay homage to all religions, I think I might be ready to call him the best current candidate for the anti-Christ. Especially considering the way he has most evangelicals duped. But being a good Reformed Presbyterian, I think George W. Bush, like most of the politicians our country has been cursed with, is afflicted with a desperate fear of man and is consequently constantly mocking the one true God. But God will not be mocked.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Bad memories

2003-12-04T10:01:00.000-05:00

It's a bad week to be an Arkansas Pine Bluff basketball fan, after they lost to Oklahoma 94-24 Tuesday night.

ESPN reports that the Golden Lions trailed 48-9 at halftime, and the partisan Oklahoma crowd broke into cheers in the second half when they cracked double digits. That's pretty humiliating. Meanwhile, APB player Chris Parker put up numbers that are reminiscent of my all-too-long high school basketball career: 23 minutes, 0-5 shooting, 8 turnovers. That's what I'm talking about. I always liked practice a lot better than the games.

On C.S. Lewis

2003-12-04T09:22:00.000-05:00

John Robbins, at the Trinity Foundation has published an interesting essay on Clive Staples "Jack" Lewis' flirtation with bad theology. I don't agree with everything Robbins says, who seems to see a heretic around every corner, but he does make some good points, and seems to have done his research well. Most interesting is a letter Robbins quotes in which Lewis explains his disclaimers for the inerrancy of scripture.

“Whatever view we hold on the divine authority of Scripture must make room for the following facts.

“1. The distinction which St Paul makes in I Cor vii between [“not I, but the Lord”] and [“I speak, not the Lord”].

“2. The apparent inconsistencies between the genealogies in Matt i and Luke iii: with the accounts of the death of Judas in Matt xxvii 5 and Acts i.18-19.

“3. St Luke’s own account of how he obtained his matter (i.1-4).

“4. The universally admitted unhistoricity (I do not say, of course, falsity) of at least some narratives in Scripture (the parables), which may well extend also to Jonah and Job.

“5. If every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights then all true and edifying writings, whether in Scripture or not, must be in some sense inspired.

“6. John xi.49-52. Inspiration may operate in a wicked man without his knowing it, and he can then utter the untruth he intends (propriety of making an innocent man a political scapegoat) as well as the truth he does not intend (the divine sacrifice).”

While I have a hard time believing, as Robbins seems to do, that Lewis is in hell, it does seem that he has some untenable beliefs about Scripture. From reading other parts of the essay, it seems that Lewis placed a great deal of emphasis on Christ being the true "word of God" at the expense of scripture, which led to his disclaimers. What I know of Lewis' writing would seem to bear this argument (about his lack of faith in scripture) out. That is, when Lewis makes a theological argument, he often uses natural law instead of scripture to prove his point; before I thought that this was simply a way in which to convince those who didn't believe in scripture to his own way of thinking, but now I wonder if it's because Lewis didn't completely believe in scripture himself. In any case, I think that Clive Staples will remain one of my favorite writers...but this essay gives some good insights on how he should be read.

Some baseball writing

2003-11-26T10:29:00.000-05:00

Rob Neyer at ESPN has a nice piece on Warren Spahn , and in one of the winter's great pleasures, Roger Angell's season recap has been published in the New Yorker. Angell is one of our country's best essayists; his step-father was E.B. White, of Charlotte's Web and Elements of Style fame--Angell was given the recent task of revising Elements, which is the one essential book for any writer of prose. It is a wonderful fourtune that of all the the subjects Angell could turn his skill to, he has chosen baseball; for the last forty years, he has functioned as its unofficial bard--his books are worth buying for anyone interested in baseball or enjoys good writing. He writes particularly beautifully this year about the seventh game of the Red Sox-Yankees series, in which his Sox failed to beat their rivals again. Enjoy.

It comes to a seventh game—could anyone have doubted it? This will be the twenty-sixth time the Red Sox and Yankees have faced off this year—a record for any two teams in the annals—and while there have been stretches when the latest renewal held all the drama of a couple of cellmates laying out a hand of rummy, this is another killer dénouement. For all we know, it’s up there with the 1978 Bucky Dent playoff and the DiMaggio late return of 1949. There’s a wired, non-stop holiday din at the Stadium, which dies away only with the first intensely watched pitches. Everything matters now. Clemens is back and so is Pedro—but this Roger appears frail and thought-burdened. The No. 2 Boston batter, Todd Walker, raps a safe knock after a ten-pitch at-bat, and Nomar Garciaparra lines out hard to right. An inning later, Kevin Millar singles, and Trot Nixon, from his flat-footed left-handed stance, delivers a businesslike homer into the stands in right: his third two-run job in the post-season. With two out, the bearded, dad-like Jason Varitek doubles into the right-field corner. Johnny Damon’s grounder looks like the last out but—geez!—third baseman Enrique Wilson mishandles the ball and his throw pulls first baseman Nick Johnson off the bag, as Varitek turns the corner and scores. It’s 3-0, and when the teams change sides the Stadium has gone anxious and pissed-off conversational: fans up and down the stuffed tiers complaining to their seatmates or sending the bad news home on their cells, with gestures: . . . plus Wilson is in for defense, right? . . . our only chance was stay close to [sic] Pedro.

Martinez, for his part, survives some first-inning wobbles and is soon in rhythm: the stare-in from behind his red glove, the velvety rock and turn, and the strikes arriving in clusters. After each out, he gloves the returning ball backhand, and gazes about with lidded hauteur. No one else in the world has eyes so far apart. The Yanks go down quickly again, and we’re at the top of the fourth—and the startling sound, it’s like a tree coming apart, of Kevin Millar’s solo shot up into the upper-deck left-field stands. Clemens, down 4-0 and almost helpless, gives up a walk and a hit-and-run single to Mueller and departs, maybe for the last time ever. A ten-year-old Yankee fan I know named Noah has by this time gone down on his knees on the concrete in front of his seat near first base, hiding his head.

There were Sox fans here, too, of course—you could see them in red-splashed knots and small parties around the Stadium, and pick up their cries. The Boston offense had been a constant for them all year, including the sixteen-hit outburst in the series-tying 9-6 win the night before. This year, the Sox set major-league records for extra bases, total bases, and slugging percentage. The Boston front office, headed by the twenty-nine-year-old G.M., Theo Epstein, had traded vigorously to build a batting order with no soft sectors or easy outs in it. Mueller, the double-grand-slam switch-hitter, was batting eighth today. For me, Kevin Millar, a free agent acquired for cash from the Marlins last winter, was the genius pick. On April 1st, the second day of the season, he contributed a sixteenth-inning game-winning home run in Tampa, and in June pinch-hit a grand slam that helped pull off a seven-run turnabout against the Brewers. With his blackened cheekbones and raunchy grin, he became the model for the Sox’ newfound grunginess—dirt-stained uniforms and pine-smudged helmets, and an early-October outburst of shaved heads that transformed sluggers and pitchers and old coaches into plebes or pledges. His “Let’s cowboy up!” rallying cry from the dugout and the on-deck circle caught on with d.j.s and schoolkids and Green Line subway riders, inundating Greater Boston in “Cowboy Up!” caps and T-shirts and fan towels and diapers and souvenir glassware. Somebody found a clip of eighteen-year-old Kevin mouthing the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” in a Beaumont, Texas, karaoke solo, which became a staple on the Fenway message board. The unimaginable had happened: the Sox were loose.

Mike Mussina, called into the crisis with Boston runners at first and third, and no outs—Clemens had just gone—went into his ceremonial low-bowing stretch and struck out Varitek, the first batter, on three pitches. Three more brought a handy 6-6-3 double play at Damon’s expense. “MOOOOSE!” the bleacherites cried. It was Mussina’s first relief appearance after four hundred lifetime starts, but he understood the work. Jason Giambi, struggling at .190 in the series, hit a homer barely into the center-field seats, for a first dent in Pedro, and, liking the range, did it again to the same sector in the seventh, bringing us to 4-2, with the old house roaring and rocking. The press-box floor thrummed under my feet, as I had felt it do on an autumn late night or two before. Young Noah had lifted himself off the deck by this time and stood by his seat, yelling.

I had been looking about the familiar Stadium surround in valedictory fashion—the motel-landscape bullpens, the UTZ Potato Chip sign over in right—but from here to the end sat transfixed by the cascade of events, scarcely able to draw a full breath. No other sport does this, and even as we stare and cry “Can you believe this?” we forget how often it comes along, how it’s built into baseball.

Joe Torre, patching in relievers after Mussina’s three-inning stint, produced David Wells, whose first pitch was sailed deep into the bleachers by Sox d.h. David Ortiz. 5-2 now. Checking the video monitor, I saw Wells’s top teeth hit his bottom lip with the expletive. But Pedro had been long at his tasks, and when Jeter doubled to the right-field corner in the eighth and was singled home by Bernie Williams, the margin narrowed again to two, and here came manager Grady Little, out to hook his ace and pat him on the rump as he left. Little likes to stand below a pitcher, on the downslope of the mound, and here again, looking up at Pedro like a tourist at the Parthenon steps, he said a few words and walked away. This could not be. Martinez had thrown a hundred and fifteen pitches, and given up ringing hits to five of the last seven batters. A Sox-fan friend of mine, Ben, watching in his apartment on West Forty-fifth Street, had gone on his hands and knees, screaming. But Pedro stayed on: a ground-rule double by Matsui, then the dying bloopy double by Posada that landed untouched out beyond second base, for two runs and the tie. “There’s a lot of grass out there,” Posada explained later. Grady Little, in his own brief post-game, said, “Pedro Martinez has been our man all year long, and in situations like that he’s the one we want on the mound,” which was understandable but untrue. This had been only the fifth game in thirty-one starts in which Martinez was allowed to pitch into the eighth.

It was Mariano Rivera time—the waiting Boston bad dream—and Mo, defending the tie, poised and threw, poised and threw, whisking through the ninth. There was a scary double to left by Ortiz with two gone in the tenth, but Rivera, sighing, delivered the cutter to Millar, who lined gently to Jeter. Midnight had come and gone, but the Yankees could do no better against Embree and then Timlin, the tough Sox relievers Grady Little had slighted in extremis (the two surrendered no runs at all in this series, in sixteen-plus combined innings). The top of the eleventh went away, to noisy, exhausted accompaniments; the latest Boston pitcher was Tim Wakefield, the tall knuckleballer who had embarrassed the Yankees with his spinless stuff, twice beating Mussina in close, low-scoring games. Mo was done: the balance had swung the other way. I looked at my scorecard to confirm the next Yankee batter—Aaron Boone, who had come into the game as a pinch-runner in the eighth—looked back, and saw the ball and the ballgame fly away on his low, long first-pitch home run into the released and exulting and rebelieving Yankee crowds. I yelled, too, but thought, Poor Boston. My god.

The consequences of an addiction to power.

2003-11-25T16:53:00.000-05:00

In a press conference on November 20th with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush finally cleared up all the confusion about what he really believes about the relationship between Yaweh and Allah. The excerpted transcript is as follows:

QUESTION: Mr. President, when you talk about peace in the Middle East, you've often said that freedom is granted by the Almighty. Some people who share your beliefs don't believe that Muslims worship the same almighty. I wondered about your views on that.

BUSH: I do say that freedom is the Almighty's gift to every person. I also condition it by saying freedom is not America's gift to the world; it's much greater than that, of course. And I believe we worship the same god.

As I've chronicled before, President Bush has often been confusing in regard to his religious beliefs. But this time he traded vague language and actions for a clear statement: Islamics and Christians worship the same god.

What's really disturbing is the predictable reaction of evangelicals. A Washington Post article published November 22nd reports that some Christians are upset about the President's remark, but it won't really hurt his political fortunes.

A Baptist Press report quoted Richard D. Land, president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, as saying that Bush "is simply mistaken."

"We should always remember that he is commander in chief, not theologian in chief," Land said in a telephone interview yesterday. "The Bible is clear on this: The one and true god is Jehovah, and his only begotten son is Jesus Christ."

But Land, who [is a] frequent visitor to the White House, doubted that the remark would cost Bush votes in 2004.

"This president has earned a lot of wiggle room among evangelicals," Land said. "If he had said that Islam is on a par with Christianity, it would be a more serious case of heartburn. This is just indigestion."

He's earned wiggle room? By what, signing the partial-birth ban? And saying that the god of Christianity is the same as the god of Islam is "just indigestion"? What will it take for evangelicals to consider voting 3rd party in 2004? Bush worshiping in a Islamic temple?

Evangelicalism's addiction to power and relevance is what is damning it to irrelevance; now it is even causing it to look the other way at heresy.

The greatest southpaw (this side of Koufax).

2003-11-25T09:40:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has published an obituary for Warren Spahn, who died yesterday at the age of 82. Spahn was the winningest left-handed pitcher in baseball history, and a World War II vet who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and received a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Spahn's distinct pitching style, with his high leg kick (shown in the photo) was a large part of his success, as he disguised the ball from the batter until the last possible moment. The Times' piece quotes him as saying that the "hitters said the ball seemed to come out of my uniform." Throwing a fastball, curve, screwball, changeup and slider, Spahn was successful because of his control more than the speed with which he threw the ball. And successful he was, winning 20 games in 13 different seasons and retiring with 363 victories, 5th best of all time.

The Return of the King.

2003-11-25T09:16:00.000-05:00

Newsweek is running an interesting article on the upcoming final piece of Lord of the Rings trilogy. Rumor has it that theaters around here will be showing The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers consecutively on the night before TROTK is due to come out, and then showing the new film at midnight. My memories of the books go back to the nights dad read them to us over a period of at least a few years. He was often tired and would seemingly always nod off at the most dramatic points, at least until one of us kids yelled in protest. As epic as the films have been, they in no way replace those images which were burned into my memory as I drifted off to sleep at the sound of my father's voice. In a way the movies are sad really, as they inevitably limit the lengths my mind will go to now to recall the story. My best remaining memories are of The Hobbit, and I don't think it's coincidental.

An argument for art.

2003-11-17T16:49:00.000-05:00

My employer, The Rutherford Institute, has published a recent essay I wrote, entitled Naked Christs and Balaam's Ass: A blueprint toward a renewed Christian aesthetic. My work at The Rutherford Institute has been an eceletic experience, to say the least. Some days (today) I mostly stuff envelopes. Other days I write essays about art. It's a good job. Rereading my essay today, which I actually wrote a few months ago, I'm realizing that it's long on vision and short on nitty-gritty. Hopefully I can flesh out some of those details here in the coming weeks.

Coming this week: reviews of two recently-read novels, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, and Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. Both are highly recommended to anyone who enjoys a well-told tale.

Two articles.

2003-11-10T16:57:00.000-05:00

Some essays of note: David McNair examines celebrity culture in America, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. writes on imperialism and Iraq.

A cozy apologia for poetry

2003-11-05T17:04:00.000-05:00

This post is the second in series which I have adapted from the introduction to my senior major thesis, where I essentially outlined my blueprint for poetics. The first section was a personal reflection on the visceral beauty of language music. This section broadens my argument.

Ultimately, I want to create a poetry that is read and enjoyed again by the layman (and woman). Today, most contemporary poetry has lost contact with the mainstream culture of America. People still turn to poetry to make sense of their lives, but they more often do it by switching on the radio dial and listening to pop music rather than heading to the “Poetry” section of their bookseller. Some amongst the academic elite would like to argue that this rejection of current poetry is due to a general cultural demise that has deadened audience’s ears to the quality of the art that is being made. While there is something to this argument, especially given our culture's rejection of written language as the primary medium of communication and entertainment, the idea also demonstrates the academic snobbery that has much to do with the current situation; it focuses on maintaining the status quo rather than dealing with the real disconnect that exists between contemporary poetry and the general public. As an art form, a large part of contemporary poetry has deserted its foundations of accessibility and pleasure in the last eighty or so years to insulate itself within the academic castle, and it is the consequential production of so much weak, self-absorbed and “difficult” poetry that has caused the larger culture to look elsewhere for its bards, its truth-tellers. It is past time to remember what makes poetry enjoyable and crucial as an art from, how it can succeed, and what good it can do.

My argument for rejuvenation of poetry consists of three elements. First, poetry should be musical. It is the musical nature of its language and rhythms that sets poetry apart from all other forms of written speech. Many of us, including myself, learn to love poetry at a young age because of the pleasing music it creates. It is this physical pleasure that sustains poetry as an art form, which sticks it in the reader’s ear and mind. Novels depend on plot, and dramatization, but poetry depends upon the music of the line. We don’t all remember “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” simply because of its story, or because of the images it creates. It is the music of the words that carves its space in our crowded memories.

Second, poetry should be explicit. The annals of 20th century poetry that dwell in the abstract and the obscure are long, and are, to the average reader, too ambiguous to make sense of. We can marvel at a convoluted poem, or wonder at its complexity, but excepting the occasional Ph. D. student, we likely will never love it, unless it allows us a way into its intricacies. Much of academia has forgotten that poetry has at least as much to do with the senses as it does the intellect, that its concern is physical pleasure as well as metaphysical delight. Explicit should not imply that poems be simplistic, or readable on only one level. But it should mean poetry that is accessible on some level. As Stephen Dunn writes in his essay, Bringing the Strange Home, “Poets can say what they mean, if they are wise and skillful enough. And when poets resort to metaphorical or analogic language, their poems can still be as clear as Christ’s parables. That they might be more difficult, demand more of us, is of course understandable and fine. But the poet must not love difficulty.” Instead of using abstract and ineffable language to get only at the equally abstract and ineffable, effective poetry uses distinct and concrete language to reveal the intangible and hint at the mystery. The chaos of life takes no effort to recreate in poetry. But to make order of the chaos, to dance with the hurricane, to find the eye, and live to tell the tale—there is the real work and risk.

Finally, poetry should be redemptive. In a time of cultural relativism and post-modern attitudes, there are some who would question the very possibility of redemption. But I would argue that the poet often redeems simply through his choice of subject matter—William Wordsworth redeemed the language of the common man by his decision to reject the prevailing culture of the time and write with words people actually used. For years, Phillip Levine has striven to redeem hard labor in the American consciousness. Langston Hughes did much the same with race. Poetry has always been about the work of redemption, and the short, concentrated lyric is often more effective than any memoir or novel.

As I write these words, I realize though that I'm not sure what I still mean by "redemption," or if I even believe that is part of the work of poetry. More thoughts on this later. But, for now, a poem by Rita Dove, an old teacher of mine, that demonstrates wonderfully what good poetry can do--in the hardest form invented, the simple love poem.

Cozy Apologia

For Fred

I could pick anything and think of you--
This lamp, the wind-still rain, the glossy blue
My pen exudes, drying matte, upon the page.
I could choose any hero, any cause or age
And, sure as shooting arrows to the heart,
Astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart
As standing in silver stirrups will allow--
There you'll be, with furrowed brow
And chain mail glinting, to set me free:
One eye smiling, the other firm upon the enemy.

This post-postmodern age is all business: compact disks
And faxes, a do-it-now-and-take-no-risks
Event. Today a hurricane is nudging up the coast,
Oddly male: Big Bad Floyd, who brings a host
Of daydreams: awkward reminiscences
Of teenage crushes on worthless boys
Whose only talent was to kiss you senseless.
They all had sissy names--Marcel, Percy, Dewey;
Were thin as licorice and as chewy,
Sweet with a dark and hollow center. Floyd's

Cussing up a storm. You're bunkered in your
Aerie, I'm perched in mine
(Twin desks, computers, hardwood floors):
We're content, but fall short of the Divine.
Still, it's embarrassing, this happiness--
Who's satisfied simply with what's good for us,
When has the ordinary ever been news?
And yet, because nothing else will do
To keep me from melancholy (call it blues),
I fill this stolen time with you.

by Rita Dove

Then the father hen will call his chickens home.

2003-11-03T17:14:00.000-05:00

One of the most distinctly Christian songs I've heard in a long time is on Johnny Cash's IV (and final) album. The Man Comes Around features an sparse acoustic guitar and piano instrumentation behind Cash's powerful baritone booming out a vividly apocalyptic vision. The song is a bold proclamation of the certain return of our King; the glory of his merciful redemption alongside the fury of his wrath. It's a stunningly beautiful song, haunting with its call and echo of our deep and lasting hope in the Risen Christ.

The Man Comes Around

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder:
One of the four beasts saying: "Come and see."
And I saw.
And behold, a white horse.

There's a man goin' 'round takin' names.
An' he decides who to free and who to blame.
Everybody won't be treated all the same.
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down.
When the man comes around.

The hairs on your arm will stand up.
At the terror in each sip and in each sup.
For you partake of that last offered cup,
Or disappear into the potter's ground.
When the man comes around.

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers.
One hundred million angels singin'.
Multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum.
Voices callin', voices cryin'.
Some are born an' some are dyin'.
It's Alpha's and Omega's Kingdom come.

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
The virgins are all trimming their wicks.
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

Till Armageddon, no Shalam, no Shalom.
Then the father hen will call his chickens home.
The wise men will bow down before the throne.
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crown.
When the man comes around.

Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still.
Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still.
Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still.
Listen to the words long written down,
When the man comes around.

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers.
One hundred million angels singin'.
Multitudes are marchin' to the big kettle drum.
Voices callin', voices cryin'.
Some are born an' some are dyin'.
It's Alpha's and Omega's Kingdom come.

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
The virgins are all trimming their wicks.
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

In measured hundredweight and penny pound.
When the man comes around.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts,
And I looked and behold: a pale horse.
And his name, that sat on him, was Death.
And Hell followed with him.

A change of heart.

2003-10-30T14:38:00.000-05:00

More wisdom from Peter Leithart, this time on the implications of our modern society's concept of romance.

On courtly love: The basic shift is from the ancient and early medieval view that eros sapped and vitiated virtus to a belief that eros was a condition of the possibility of virtus and valor. This is, as Lewis said, a seismic shift in our sensibility, and one that we still do not quite understand.

This change, as I understand it, is why biblical accounts of courting are incompatible for us. To find his son a wife, Abraham sent his manservant on a journey--the manservant is struck by Rebekah's kindness and believe God intends him for his master's son. So the servant bargins with Laban for his daughter, and Rebekah joyfully returns with him to Abraham's family; when they arrive, Isaac immediately takes her "into his tent and love[s] her." We moderns (including Christians) look at this story with sharply raised eyebrows; if it is not offensive, it is at least backwards and distasteful. How can Rebekah be joyful at being given to a man who lives far away, whom she has never met? This man could be anyone! He could be fat! He could be unable to understand Rebekah's complex needs! And what about this Isaac fellow? No one ever asks him what he wants, it's all Abraham, Abraham, Abraham.

The account of Isaac and Rebekah's marriage deeply violates our modern conception of love, which consist primarily of two tenets; first, love is based on whether a person sexually and emotionally excites you, second, love is neccessarily free. This philosophic shift in the understanding of romantic love has consequences, not just for the way we marry, but in all kinds of other areas of our lives. For instance, this, in large part, is why most American Christians' default understanding of the nature of their salvation is basically Arminian. For those who have adopted this modern notion of love, it is unimaginable to be able to love God without having the freedom to also not love him.

On time.

2003-10-27T17:09:00.000-05:00

Here's a day late Sabbath poem, for my father, who continues to rise in the dark in faithfulness, laboring for the provision of his family and the glory of his Father. When I consider what it means to be a man who fears God, I look to my father. He is my paradigm not because of his perfection, but the opposite. I cannot imagine a better model for my life. In watching him I know that God is good, and keeps his covenant.

On time

At six am, Tuesday morning, February 17th,
it is still dark. My father is standing
in the shower: tired, awake. Soon he will eat
his quick, silent breakfast, lit by a single table
lamp. Raisin bran, coffee with milk,
a banana. In the next room, my mother begins
to stir. Lunch waits, packed
in the refrigerator. If he’s on time
the whole month long,
there’s four hours paid vacation.

Worshiping Christ alone.

2003-10-27T14:46:00.000-05:00

Excerpted from an article by Douglas Wilson, in the latest issue of Credenda Agenda,

We have recently fought a war, and we have a twofold duty as we seek to understand it. The first is to reject all of forms of earthly partisanship in our thinking. We have an ultimate loyalty to the Lord Jesus, and not to America. But the second duty consists in remembering that political responsibilities and connections are not detached from the rule and realm of Jesus Christ. The gospel does have political ramifications, some of them direct. We must be like the men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.

We are on the threshold of the establishment of an unbelieving American empire. This by itself does not exclude our involvment in it--think of Daniel, Joseph, the faithful centurion, and Erastus. The problem is caused by the fact that it is a militantly secularist and pragmatic empire and, as such, the pressure is already being applied to abandon its exclusivist claims concerning the Faith. The logic of such empires always insists upon the joint worship of various gods in the pantheon. This, above all else, places us at odds with the current religious climate.

So, from this point on, every Lord's Day, as you worship the Triune God only, remind yourself, remind your family, that we worship as exclusive Trinitarians. We pledge allegiance to one nation under Christ. We pledge allegiance to nothing under any idol, or under any generic and undefined deity.

Wilson hits on many important themes in this short excerpt, most importantly noting the fact that the United States of America is on (or over) the brink of imperialism, that its empire is a godless one, and that the danger to and responsibility of American Christians is great, and will only grow. The warning against partisanship is an important one; our Lord is not the acknowledged head of either major political party, and this fact has serious consequences--including the reality that they are essentially the same. As Francis Schaeffer wrote, "The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen thing in bits and pieces instead of totals." We must heed Schaeffer's words and realize that even when a political party gets a specific issue reasonably right, it does not mean they are on our side, or we on their's. For example, when a party rightly opposes killing babies (though, illogically, not in cases of rape or incest) or a party rightly opposes Iraq War II (though, illogically, not Iraq War I), we must understand that even blind squirrels stumble on acorns occasionally. It does not mean they know anything about surviving the winter, and certainly doesn't mean they should therefore get our vote for President. Above all, we must not fall prey to the crooning of the seductress Pragmatism, who promises the advancement of our goals with just a little compromise--until we discover she was lying on both counts.

For more thoughts on the American Empire, read Claes Ryn's insightful essay, The Ideology of American Empire. Make no mistake--our empire will neither be benevolent nor eternal. America will either be reformed, or it will crumble. The only independent variable in this equation is time. And godless democratic empires are just as totalitarian as godless dictator-led ones--they are just slightly less efficient.

Finally, Wilson reminds us of what the ultimate price of participation in the coming empire will likely be--a renunciation of Christ as the only path to salvation. Witness our current "Christian" President's beliefs about Islam and other religions, and the blind eye turned by most evangelicals to his posturing. Those Christians who hold to the exclusivist claims of Christ are sure to be pushed to the sidelines of national discussions; we will be isolated, and we may be persecuted. As in the days of the Roman empire, citizens will be allowed to believe anything they like as long as they worship Caesar--except in this day and age we prostrate before ideas instead of people, and the religion we will be asked to pledge allegiance to is democratic pluralism and tolerance. The lions will be just as real, though.

The pleasure of language music.

2003-10-23T16:54:00.000-04:00

My copy of Poetry magazine that I first read this Charles Wright poem in is now all yellow and battered. I'd paid the thirty dollars to get a year subscription to try and see whether or not I could like poetry--Nine-panel Yaak River Screen is what convinced me I did. What I loved about Wright's lines were the occasional intersection of music and image...that wonderful moment of prosidaic beauty that is unique to the art of poetry. What I mean are lines like this; "Creek waters murmur on like the lamentation of women / For faded, forgotten things. / And always the black birds in the trees, / Always the ancient chambers thudding inside the heart." Wright's ideas are interesting, but they're not what makes me want to spend time reading his words--rather I read them because of the thick and pleasing sounds they make. Samuel Coleridge called it the "sense of musical delight"; and it's the first plank in my blueprint of poetics.

Nine-panal Yaak River Screen
by Charles Wright

Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition
Of armoire and table weights,
Oblongs of flat light,
the rosy eyelids of lovers
Raised in their ghostly insurrection,
Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings,
Late June and the lilac just ajar.

Where the deer trail sinks down through the shadows of
blue spruce,
Reeds rustle and bow their heads,
Creek waters murmur on like the lamentation of women
For faded, forgotten things.
And always the black birds in the trees,
Always the ancient chambers thudding inside the heart.

-------

Swallow pure as a penknife
slick through the insected air.
Swallow poised on the housepost, beakful of mud and a
short straw.
Swallow dun-orange, swallow blue,
mud purse and middle arch,
Home sweet home.
Swallow unceasing, swallow unstill
At sundown, the mother's shade over silver water.

At the edge of the forest, no sound in the grey stone,
No moan from the blue lupin.
The shadows of afternoon
begin to gather their dark robes
And unlid their crystal eyes.
Minute by minute, step by slow step,
Like the small hand on a clock, we climb north, toward
midnight.

------

I've made a small hole in the silence, a tiny one,
Just big enough for a word.
And when I rise from the dead, whenever that is, I'll say it.
I can't remember the word right now,
But it will come back to me when the northwest wind
blows down off Mt. Caribou
The day that I rise from the dead, whenever that is.

Sunlight, on one leg, limps out to the meadow and settles in.
Insects fall back inside their voices,
Little fanfares and muted repeats,
Inadequate language of sorrow,
inadequate language of silted joy,
As ours is.
The birds join in. The sunlight opens her other leg.

-----

At times the world falls away from us
with all its disguises,
And we are left with ourselves
As though we were dead, or otherwised, our lips still
moving,
The empty distance, the heart
Like a votive little-red-wagon on top of a child's grave,
Nothing touching, nothing close.

A long afternoon, and a long rain begins to fall.
In some other poem, angels emerge from their cold rooms,
Their wings blackened by somebody's dream.
The rain stops, the robin resumes his post.
A whisper
Out of the clouds and here comes the sun.
A long afternoon, the robin flying from post back to post.

------

The length of vowel sounds, by nature and by position,
Count out the morning's meters--
bird song and squirrel bark, creek run,
The housefly's languor and murmurous incantation.
I put on my lavish robes
And walk at random among the day's
dactyls and anapests,
A widening caesura with each step.

I walk through my life as though I were a bookmark, a
holder of place,
An overnight interruption
in somebody else's narrative.
What is it that causes this?
What is it that pulls my feet down, and keeps on keeping
my eyes
fixed to the ground?
Whatever the answer, it will start
the wolf pack down from the mountain,
The raven down from the tree.

---------

Time gnaws on our necks like a dog
gnaws on a stew bone.
It whittles us down with its white teeth,
It sends us packing, leaving no footprints on the dust-dour
road.
That's one way of putting it.
Time, like a golden coin, lies on our tongue's another.
We slide it between our teeth on the black water,
ready for what's next.

The white eyelids of dead boys, like flushed birds, flutter up
At the edge of the timber.
Domestic lupin Crayolas the yard.
Slow lopes of tall grasses
Southbound in the meadow, hurled along by the wind.
In wingbeats and increments,
The disappeared come back to us, the soul returns to the
tree.

-------

The intermittent fugues of the creek,
saying yes, saying no,
Master music of sunlight
And black-green darkness under the spruce and tamaracks,
Lull us and take our breath away.
Our lips form fine words,
But nothing comes out.
Our lips are the messengers, but nothing can come out.

After a day of high winds, how beautiful is the stillness of
dusk.
Enormous silence of stones.
Illusion, like an empty coffin, that something is missing.
Monotonous psalm of underbrush
and smudged flowers.
After the twilight, darkness.
After the darkness, darkness, and then what follows that.

------

The unborn own all of this, what little we leave them,
St. Thomas's hand
returning repeatedly to the wound,
Their half-formed mouths irrepressible in their half-sleep,
Asking for everything, and then some.
Already the melancholy of their arrival
Swells like a sunrise and daydream
over the eastern ridge line.

Inside the pyrite corridors of late afternoon,
Image follows image, clouds
Reveal themselves,
and shadows, like angels, lie at the feet of all things.
Chambers of the afterlife open deep in the woods,
Their secret hieroglyphics suddenly readable
With one eye closed, then with the other.

-----

One star and a black voyage,
drifting mists to wish on,
Bullbats and their lullabye--
Evening tightens like an elastic around the hills.
Small sounds and the close of day,
As if a corpse had risen from somewhere deep in the
meadow
And walked in its shadows quietly.

The mouth inside me with its gold teeth
Begins to open.
No words appear on its lips,
no syllables bubble along its tongue.
Night mouth, silent mouth.
Like drugged birds in the trees,
angels with damp foreheads settle down.
Wind rises, clouds arrive, another night without stars.

Predestination and bras.

2003-10-22T16:29:00.000-04:00

I've just finished reading Franky Schaeffer's very enjoyable new novel, Zermatt, the second book in a promised trilogy of self-biographical books that represent a pioneering effort in the so-far-unmined genre of comic reformed Presbyterian coming-of-age literature. Zermatt flew by; though it's 250+ pages, I read most of it a single sitting, out in the sun on Saturday mid-morning--above all things, it was a delightful and entertaining read. The novel follows the misadventures of the Becker family, an American missionary family ministering among the Swiss during the 1960s and vacationing in their customary low-budget alpine ski hotel for a winter holiday from the Lord's Work. The novel is written as a first person narrative of the youngest son, Calvin Dort Becker. In case you haven't yet made the connection, Franky Schaeffer, son of the oft-knickered reformed theologian Francis Schaeffer, was also the youngest son of an American missionary family ministering to the Swiss in the 1960s. It's unclear how far the parallels continue after that, but the reader is left to draw their own conclusions.

Calvin's parents, Ralph and Elsa, are fundamentalists of the most fundamental sort; they do daily battle against the "papists" and wonder if there are any "Real Christians" left (even most other protestants don't count). They sigh at the other guests who smoke and take wine with their dinners, and panic when they discover that their low-budget hotel has acquired an electric guitar and drum set in the last year, leading, they rightly fear, to mixed dancing. As Calvin recounts, it's somewhat difficult to tell who's a "Real Christian," after all.

Real Christians were "Kindred Spirits," as opposed to "just nominal Christians." So many people who seemed at first like Real Christians turned out not to be. In fact, who was and who was not a Real Christian was something that had to be closely watched. Anything could get a person demoted from the A list to the B list, from being Kindred to being "merely saved," from being merely saved to "not even a Christian at all." A drink of alcohol, a mention of jazz or rock and roll in some causal way that betrayed an "overfamiliarity with the World," a "dubious theological opinion," even an "inappropriate joke" about the Things of the Lord, even what someone wore, what their wife wore, any kind of opinion that deviated from what the Lord had laid on Mom's heart concerning the "direction of the Lord's Work" and the "Lord's leading," all this and more could lead to a "break in fellowship."

Few were called and even less were chosen. Other than our family, God, in his wonderful plan for mankind, had apparently decided to save very few people.

Indeed. Needless to say, Calvin is not exactly enamored by his family's lifestyle or beliefs. Before the vacation, he spends hours searching newspapers for descriptions of recent movies so that he can pretend he has seen them, if asked by some "real people." He hides copies of MAD magazine in the attic, to furtively read in his more rebellious moments. And like most boys in the beginning throes of adolescence, he is mostly obsessed with only one thing. Girls.

No matter what I was doing, even while singing hymns in the Monday morning Bible study, I was thinking about the girls around me. I liked the smell of them, warm and sweet, something like melting butter and my pet cat's tummy back when she was a kitten. Girls loomed up in my mind a lot, or at least certain parts of them did. But the girls at the mission were not the sort who let you kiss them. They had come to learn about Jesus and were all much older than I was, mostly in their twenties, and mostly dressed in a godly way that hid everything I longed to get a better look at.

Calvin is a delightfully honest and sympathetic character--especially if you, like myself, grew up in somewhat (I here would like to emphasize somewhat) similar circumstances. His consuming sexual curiosity is not exactly innocent, but the blame for its dysfunctionalism largely rests on his parents' lack of parenting in this area. His only sexual instruction seems to have come from one conversation with his mother when she related the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, instructed Calvin to "reserve himself until after marriage" and to report to her if he ever thought of sex before then. Ralph and Calvin evidently never discuss the matter. Needless to say, Calvin's curiosity was not sated. One of the book's funnier moments comes when Elsa discovers Calvin spying out his sisters' laundered bras, which are hung to dry deep within a maze of sheets precisely so that he won't see them. Calvin attempts to talk himself out of trouble by explaining that he was eyeing the undergarments because he is curious about exactly how the Church is the "Bride of Christ," and positing that since God is sovereign over all things, it must have been his will for him to examine the underwear. "Calvin!" yelps his mother. "[It] sounds to me like you're being dreadfully levitous about the Things of the Lord!" "No, I'm not," the innocent Calvin answers. "I just wanted to ask about predestination and bras."

At first glance, Ralph and Elsa have a reasonably strong marriage and seem quite sure about their beliefs--but as the book goes on, it turns out aren't things aren't quite as peaceful as they seem; indeed, as Rachel, Calvin's truly angelic older sister confesses to him, "it's hard to be a Real Christian."

Elsa is often frustrated by her husband's poor table manners and lack of social graces, especially his "dreadfully working-class upbringing," and she doesn't hide it very well, by turns scolding and praying out loud for him. Ralph is a classic passive-aggressive husband--he quietly rolls his eyes at his wife's constant posturing, and when she begins talking of God's great blessings on their missionary life, he sarcastically remarks that the reason they're stationed in Switzerland instead of India or the Congo, "eating lice on a stick," is not the will of God but rather the fact that Elsa's uncle is on the mission board. After his wife leaves in a huff, Ralph tells the stunned children, "See, Elsa likes to pretend that everything is just so great, so special! But there's a real world out there and I get sick of all her pretending."

Much to Calvin's dismay, it turns out that there aren't any girls his age at the hotel this winter, but he quickly discovers the more mature charms of the thirty-five year old Swiss waitress, Eva. Their daily flirtations quickly become more serious, and the tensions in the Becker marriage come to a head when Calvin's sexual experimentations are discovered by his parents. While Elsa dissolves into righteous hysteria, Ralph suddenly realizes the superficiality and hypocrisy of the religious morality he's been living being by, and his son is (albeit sinfully) rebelling against. I won't spoil the ending for you, but suffice to say that things begin to get pretty crazy (in a fundamentalist sort of way) after that.

Schaeffer's novel succeeds because its characters are all effective caricatures of actual people, ones we likely almost know, but he is not content to leave them there. Instead of slipping into a mockery of conservative evangelicals, those caricatures become believable and sympathetic characters--ones we care about, and whose adventures instruct us. Zermatt also succeeds because it is genuinely funny--Schaeffer knows his subject, the tensions of modern Christianity, well, and it shows in his playful and witty treatment of it. Instead of the forced and contrived drama of most contemporary Christian literature, Zermatt dodges into the gritty realities of religious life and, through truly delightful comedy, helps us rediscover one of the essential paradoxes of our faith; the weakness of the vessels God has chosen to work through. That said, Zermatt does contain fairly explicit (though adolescently comic) depictions of sexuality, and is certainly an "adult" book. For better or worse, this fact, along with the brassiere-clad bosom that adorns the book's cover, will probably keep most conservative evangelicals from reading Zermatt. Which is a bit of a shame, because they're the ones who would probably most enjoy it.

The nature of Christian ministry.

2003-10-21T11:23:00.000-04:00

Some piercing thoughts from Peter Leihart's blog on two models for Christian ministry--the prophets Moses and John the Baptist.

Moses is the matchmaker who brings the bride to a trysting place with her lover, Yahweh. He is the "friend of the bridegroom" who, like John the Baptist, prepares the bride for her husband. As such, Moses and John are models for all Christian ministry, which is also all about protecting the virgin bride, training and perfecting her, for the consummation of her wedding. Ultimately, this is a work of the Spirit, the divine matchmaker, but the Spirit works through human "friends."

I have often struggled to see evangelism as anything other than a great dumbing down of Christianity, a simplistic and patronizing message usually delivered with something of a mixture of self-satisfaction and guilt; but Leihart's words, along with the examples of others, have helped reform my thinking into seeing evangelism for what it truly is--a delightful and fathomless mystery, a participative welcoming in of the Kingdom of God.

One too many knuckleheads.

2003-10-20T17:04:00.000-04:00

With apologies to Red Sox fans everywhere who believe so desperately in the beauty of their own century long anti-Yankee angst, watching the Sox-Yank series was a bit like observing Hitler and Stalin duke it out on the Eastern front during World War II. Game 3 was where things began to turn for the worse; with Pedro and the Rocket pitching, the Saturday afternoon match-up had all the markings of a classic battle until it dissolved into an adolescent chicken fight. Trouble started brewing in the third, when Pedro nailed Karim Garica in the back and then got into a Spanish cursing match with Jorge Posada while jabbing his index finger at his head, communicating in a language that everyone involved could understand. Then, in the next inning, Manny Ramirez took loud exception to a high (not inside, just high) fastball from Clemons, and started out to the mound, bat in hand, to discuss it with him. Of course, both benches emptied, Don Zimmer forgot he was 72 and went after Pedro (who was the real culprit) and the game was delayed for at least 15 minutes before the umpires sorted everything out and decided, remarkably, not to eject anyone. From this point of view anyway, it's clear that Pedro and Manny were the root causes of the whole battle; Pedro for hitting Garcia and taunting Posada, Manny for going after Clemons for no reason than his own ego--if it were up to me, both would have been watching the rest of the game on TV (which probably would have been good for the Sox, since they lost anyway).

After the third game, Wakefield momentarily straightened things out by pitching splendidly again in Game Four, tying the series at two apiece. The teams split the next two, leaving them knotted at three wins and forcing a Game Seven that featured a rematch between Pedro and Clemons. The pitching matchup turned out to be slightly overrated, as Clemons was knocked out in the fourth and Pedro blew a three run lead in the eighth, enabling Mariano Rivera to come in and throw three sparkling innings and hold the Red Sox long enough for the Yankees to score the winning run in the 11th. Aaron Boone's homer off Tim Wakefield (who, incidentally would have had three wins in the series if the Sox had managed to score) was a lovely thing to watch, and was a wonderful example of the kind of drama only those sports not tied to a clock can offer. The pure joy on his face and in his pumping fist as he rounded the bases was a beautiful, blessed thing; for one moment, the million dollar salary didn't matter, he was just a man celebrating hard work done well.

As the scruffy Boone's hit soared into the upper deck of left field, I have to admit that, even though I'd pulled for the Red Sox the entire series, I wasn't that disappointed. As I watched the Yankees mob Boone at the plate, Derek Jeter jump at least three feet in the air for joy, and Mariano Riviera crumple to the ground in delight, it was clear that, for all their sins, the Yankees play, and win, with class. For a team of superstars, the Yankees are surprisingly quiet; much of this owed to the leadership of players like Jeter and Pettitte, but it's difficult to imagine a Yankee pulling the same kind of self-interested antics Pedro and Manny did last Saturday, and harder still to imagine any of them needing the same kind of ego-massaging that the Red Sox's stars seem to require on a regular basis. Case in point--Ramirez took himself out of a crucial weekend series with the Yanks in August because of an "ankle injury." After being caught by the media in a bar late Saturday night, Ramirez didn't even show up to the game on Sunday and was AWOL until sometime Monday morning. Incidentally, the Yankees, who are often accused of "buying championships" start six "home-grown" regulars in their everyday lineup (Johnson, Posada, Jeter, Soriano, Williams, Rivera), while the Red Sox have only three (Nixon, Garciaparra and Varitek).

In the end, curses withstanding, the series came down to this: Grady Little sticking with his ace and de facto team leader, Pedro Martinez in the eighth inning with a two run lead and runners at 2nd and 3rd with only one out. The batter, of course, was the same Jorge Posada who Pedro had threatened in Game Three, who now flared an inside fastball in-between the shortstop and centerfielder to score both runs and tie the game the Yankees would later win, sending Pedro to the showers. The three games the Red Sox won in this series were started by Tim Wakefield, Tim Wakefield and John Burkett. If Pedro had held only one of the leads he was given in Game Three and Game Seven (two run lead in Gm. 3, four run in Gm. 7), the Red Sox would be playing in the World Series. "Cowboy up," indeed.

Rt. 20

2003-10-18T23:32:00.000-04:00

One of the blessings of living in Scottsville is that Ami and I spend half an hour every morning and afternoon driving through some of the most beautiful landscapes in central Virginia--the eighteen mile stretch of Rt. 20 between Charlottesville and home. The rolling hills of the piedmont have an understated beauty; the morning mist that mixes in with the oaks and maples that line the road, the fields of baled hay rolled into massive round bundles that cast their dark shadows across the field in late afternoon as we drive home. The best thing about driving an hour in rural Virginia every day is that you get to see the seasons turn, slowly, one into another. Our summer is almost completely gone now; autumn is here, in all its cool and quiet splendor. This poem is actually more of a September than an October poem, but it'll do. I wrote it my first fall at UVA, struck by the loveliness of this particular road I would sometimes travel; now God has brought me back to travel it every day. He is good. A poem, for the Sabbath.

Driving stick-shift on Rt. 20

The fields are tainted by slanted sunlight
soaking the air yellow and tender, warm
like my grandmother's hand as she slept.

This summer is dying, also. Mailboxes
here are mostly hand-painted, simple
lasting names. The sky is a blue

upside down sea, empty as my backyard
back home at dinner time. This field
on my right holds hay-bales rolled

like giant marbles or boulders strewn
up and down the hills where workers stopped
work for the day. We are

constantly unaware. Orange and red
and gold are beginning to creep into these trees,
weightlessness into my heart.

Beauty, Pleasure.

2003-10-17T12:58:00.000-04:00

All beauty begins with pleasure. Though it was beauty that I found in the tones of poetry on those early November mornings of my childhood, the avenue through which I encountered it was pleasure. At five or six years old, listening to that poem with a full stomach and looking forward to a day of playing in the woods with my cousins and brothers, I had no idea what beauty meant; but pleasure I understood, and drank it in. It seems there is an inherent relationship between beauty and pleasure, indeed, Webster (1913 edition) defines beauty as "an assemblage or graces or properties pleasing to the eye, the ear, the intellect, the aesthetic faculty, or the moral sense." That which brings us pleasure is beautiful.

The difficulty is that there is much in this world that seems pleasurable, but we know is not beautiful. The alcoholic and the adulterer and the rich young ruler are all pursuing their own brands of delight; but they are ugly, and lead only to death. They are perversions of pleasure, and so they are perversions of beauty. The trick, it seems, is finding an objective standard for pleasure and beauty beyond our own cravings. The ancients argued that that which is beautiful must also be true and good; in this way they established boundaries for deep pleasure, for drink and sex and wealth are all beautiful things when they are enjoyed in true and good ways. This is true, but it is not preached on much. For much of my life, I believed that following Christ meant that I had to give up pleasure--it made me hate God, for I saw him as my enemy, the One who threatened me with death and sought to keep me from finding the desires of my heart. I longed for a pleasure-filled life I believed I could never have, and I became bitter and angry because of it.

But God has mercy on whom He will have mercy. For I have learned that it is not pleasure He hates, but the perversion of pleasure. And when I cloak myself in his righteousness and submit to his definitions of truth and goodness, I have not less pleasure in drink and sex and wealth, but rather more. I envy the pagan no more; for my delight is far deeper than his.

What then is beautiful? It is what gives those who fear God pleasure. It is the fresh apples I peeled and sliced, the ones my wife rolled in cinnamon and ginger and sugar before piling them into in the pie she made with her hands and we shared with friends. It is my wife herself. It is the moment the sledgehammer hangs in the air before pounding into the wedge to split the logs we'll soon burn in our fire. It's Tristan, who is my charge for an hour every Sabbath, who is four and always walks on his tip-toes, who thinks grass is "mighty tasty" and tells me I have freckles when I'm trying to make him be quiet and listen to the teacher. It's grown men flailing at a slow, floating knuckleball, and Aaron Boone leaping for joy down the third-base line, and onto home plate when he finally hit it hard. Of course, it is also realities like absolute sovereignty of God, His consuming passion for His glory, and His particular and relentless love in my life. But while there is much pleasure to be found in those deep theological truths, that pleasure is inseparable from delight in the concrete and physical reality of our lives. For the theme of the gospel is not to turn our backs on the pleasures of this life; it is to truly enjoy them.

Not so, Chicago.

2003-10-16T11:18:00.000-04:00

In contrast to the American league, this year's NLCS featured two teams that few would have predicted in April--the Marlins lost 83 games last season, the Cubs 95. But now, after seven breathless games that ended with exactly 26 happy human beings in Chicago (one very old manager and 25 mostly young players), I don't think anyone would have rather seen the Braves and Giants.

The series began with two teams peaking at the right time; the Marlins had beaten the Giants in three straight close games to upset the defending National League Champions, while the Cubs outlasted the Atlanta Braves in a tight, five-game series, winning almostly entirely on the pitching of their two fine young starters, Kerry Wood and Mark Prior. Game One featured Josh Beckett against Carlos Zambrano, but the drama came after both starters had hit the showers; down two runs, Slammin' Sammy Sosa hit one high and deep with one man on and two outs in the bottom of the 9th. As the ball floated into a crowd of raucous Cubs fans, one could feel nearly a century of angst being stripped away in one moment--the Cubs were playing for the pennant, and their favorite slugger had come through in with the game on the line. Mike Lowell eventually won the game for the Marlins with a home run of his own in the 11th, but the Cubs took the momentum from their near come-back and turned it into three straight wins, blasting the Marlins 12-3 in Game Two, winning another close, extra-inning marathon 5-4 in Game Three, and cruising again in Game Four to an 8-3 victory. The Cubs couldn't have planned it better--they would have to lose three consecutive games to miss the World Series; two of those games would be started by Prior and Wood, and both would be at Wrigley. It seemed impossible for them to lose. Not so, not so, Chicago.

The collapse began innocently enough. Josh Beckett, the young Marlins ace pitched the game of his life in game five, beating a weary Carlos Zambrano. No problem. The Cubs had Wrigley, Prior and Wood, and Beckett seemed done for the series. Game Six followed the script perfectly, Prior pitching his usual excellent game and the Cubs getting a run early and adding to the margin again in the 6th and 7th innings. Mike Mordecai ground to third to start the 8th, and the Cubs were five outs from history. Next up, Juan Pierre doubled to the gap, bringing up Luis Castillo, who worked a full count and then hit a high, foul, pop fly to left field, seemingly giving the Cubs their second out of the inning. But when Moises Alou leaped into the first rows of the seats to catch Castillo's ball he found himself competing with an oblivious clump of Chicago fans, every one regaled in sweatshirts and hats of the team they were dooming by their (understandable) enthusiasm. The ball fell harmlessly to the ground. Alou and Prior both yelled obscenities, Castillo walked on the next pitch, and the floodgate opened. After a string of singles, doubles, walks and errors, the Marlins found themselves ahead 8 runs to 3, and 39,577 fans ready to riot in the streets sat in stunned silence.

Much has been made of the fan's interference with Alou's attempted catch, but the blame truly must rest on the Cubs. If Mark Prior makes a good next pitch to Castillo on that 3-2 count, biting the corner with his curve, say, or blowing his fastball by him, everyone forgets about the fan's play and the Cubs mostly likely get to the World Series. But Prior, in striking contrast to Josh Beckett, showed his youth by not even coming close to the plate with his next pitch and then giving up a series of hard-hit balls. The Cubs unraveled when they had to keep their composure, and they lost the series because of it.

Game seven was an anti-climatic affair; the Cubs went up 5-3 in the 3rd, but after the Marlins scored three times in the 6th, the Cubs never mounted anything at all like a rally, meekly allowing Josh Beckett to shut them down the rest of way. Beckett was pitching on only two day's rest and further confirmed his new ace status by tossing four innings of one-hit ball, even though he obviously was tired and didn't have his best stuff. Then, in the 9th, when Paul Bako's soft fly to left landed in Jeff Conine's glove, pandemonium broke loose--hugs and high-fives and pounding mobs of players dancing on the infield. Jack McKeon, who at 72 had given up coaching his grandson's little league team in May to take over the floundering Marlins was thrilled, in a grandfatherly way--he had waited a long time for this moment, too. It would be his first World Series. And so, Florida was going to play for a World Championship for the second time in its decade long history. Chicago had failed to win the pennant for the 59th straight season. There were tears at Wrigley, but not of joy.

As I noted earlier, much will be made of "the play" in the months to come. It is likely that Moises Alou's failed catch will be placed in the same sacred area of memory as Bill Buckner's muffed groundball. Regardless of all that, it is certain that the best team won this series. The Florida Marlins found themselves on the brink of elimination in three consecutive games and won all three, coming from behind in two of them. When all conventional logic said that this was the Cubs' year, that they were destined to win, the Marlins simply put their heads down and kept playing, scratching out runs on singles and doubles, pitching well on two day's rest, never believing that the games were over until they'd had their last say. In contrast, the Cubs lost one out on an unfortunate play and still couldn't win a game they still led 3-0 with only five outs to go--and then were so shell-shocked in the next game that they couldn't mount even a whimper of a rally against a twenty-three year old throwing on short rest. After the events of the last 48 hours, it is abundantly clear that that most intangible of baseball qualities, heart, does in fact exist, and only the Marlins had it. Whoever wins tonight's game between the Red Sox and Yankees will be heavily favored to bring home the Series crown, but they will overlook the Marlins at their own peril. Indeed, they had better prepare for a war, and a team that doesn't know when they're beat, because that is what they will get.

What poetry is.

2003-10-14T13:23:00.000-04:00

For me, poetry first happened at church. Every year, since long before I was born, my family has attended an early morning Thanksgiving service at Fairfield Presbyterian Church in Mechanicsville, Virginia.

The service starts at seven in the morning, and there are hymns, prayers, a short sermon on some variation of the importance of giving thanks and the pilgrims and Squanto and jokes about how much turkey we’ll eat. After the sermon, the entire congregation files over to the fellowship hall, where there waits a huge country breakfast, prepared by the Men’s Sunday School—the reason people come back every year. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that I began to realize the men probably orchestrated the whole breakfast part because it got them out of hearing a sermon so early in the morning on a holiday, but the meal is always a truly glorious affair; scrambled eggs, sausage, biscuits, grits, and fried apples on Styrofoam plates, milk, coffee, or juice in your cup, and always more for the asking.

Then, when everyone’s finished, and I’m eating my sister’s leftover sausage, and the grown-ups are drinking coffee and hoping for a nap before lunch, my Great-Uncle’s brother, Murrell, goes to the front and everyone quiets down as he reads aloud James Whitcomb Riley’s poem, When the Frost is on the Punkin. I know now that the poem is overly sentimental and hardly qualifies as a great piece of writing, but those two minutes every year when Murrell Nuckles would read that poem are my single best memory of childhood. My belly was full, my cousins were in town, and this white-haired man with a beautiful, 1930s Richmond accent was making music telling a wonderful story of thanksgiving. I've recorded the poem here, but you should know that, for full effect, it must be read out loud.

"When the frost is on the punkin"
- James Whitcomb Riley

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it's then the time a feller is a-feelin' at his best,
With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here—
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossoms on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees;
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries—kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover overhead!—
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the cellar-floor in red and yaller heaps;
And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With theyr mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and sausage too!...
I don't know how to tell it—but ef such a thing could be
As the angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around on me—
I'd want to 'commodate 'em—all the whole-indurin' flock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

It wasn’t the story I remembered, or loved. Rather, it was that mellow voice repeating the enchanting sounds, the rhythm and the cadence of those rhymed lines. I would drink in the pleasure of it, trying to freeze the music, the feeling, and hating when it was over. It was like a live performance of your favorite song by your favorite singer – a moment you could never recreate, regardless of how hard you tried. Poetry is many things; most of all, it is an encounter with beauty--and those sleepy November mornings were the first time I ever saw it.

Josh Beckett, Ace.

2003-10-13T12:45:00.000-04:00

With their backs against the wall on Sunday, down three games to one, the Marlins pinned their hopes on Josh Beckett. Born May 15, 1980, Beckett is some six weeks older than I am, and has been mostly inconsistent over his two year major league career, with a record of 17-17, though his ERA is better than that, at 3.32. His main calling card is a fastball that tops out around 98 mph, "high heat," as they say. But as with most power pitchers, Beckett is effective when he can rely on his other pitches, too--a big, overhand curve and a developing changeup.

I missed the first four innings hiking in the Shenandoah Park with Ami and Aaron and Nicole, but we heard the rest of the game on the radio driving home, and then caught the last few innings on TV. When we started listening in the bottom of the fourth, it was clear that there was a first-class pitchers' duel going on--both Beckett and Zambrano were throwing well, the score was 0-0, and it was clear that whoever blinked first would probably lose. Zambrano had been in some tight spots, but had pitched out of them, while Beckett had yet to give up a hit.

The turning point of the game came in the top of the fifth, when Aramis Ramirez, who had already homered three times in the series, got into a dramatic showdown with Beckett leading off the inning, fouling off pitch after pitch on a 3-2 count until, on the eleventh pitch of the at-bat, Ramirez lined a high hard one down the left-field line, with only about 18 inches keeping it on the wrong side of being a homerun. It's hard to overstate the importance of this at-bat to the game; you've got two young starters facing each other in their most important game ever--the score's knotted at 0, and one the other team's best just smacked your best pitch, only barely missing a home run. And so, with all the naivete and stubbornness of youth, Beckett rears back and throws him the same exact pitch; a high, hard fastball--but this time, Ramirez swings and misses. Game over. The Marlins score twice in the bottom of the inning, and the Cubs don't come close to threatening again.

And the end of the game, Beckett's stat line was indeed impressive; nine innings (his first career complete game), two hits, zero runs, one walk, eleven strikeouts, only 115 pitches, and remarkably, only five balls hit out of the infield. But what I'll remember about that game is that one moment in the 5th inning, driving back from the mountains and hearing Josh Beckett give Aramis Ramirez exactly the pitch he wanted; and striking him out anyway.

The barn lasted all that winter and the next.

2003-10-11T23:32:00.000-04:00

It's autumn in the Blue Ridge, and we're gathering ourselves for the explosion of color that's coming in the next few weeks. I heard on NPR the other day that because of all the rain this summer the trees are supposed to be even more beatuiful this fall than most years. I'm hoping for that. Truly, the trees teach us to worship, as they clap their hands in joy at the goodness of creation and celebrate the turning of the seasons that mark us another year closer to its consummation. They know we must die to live; they put on their best clothes to do it. A poem, for the Sabbath.

Moseley, Virginia

At the old house, each October
we raked walnuts into the drive,
where car tires would roll them over
all month long--bruising and splitting
their hulls, staining our tires in long
splotches, stripping the skin from the meat.

Later, after the leaves had all fallen,
the four of us piled them into lines,
building houses. We each laid out
our own room, and built long halls
between; quiet, colder afternoons
waiting to be called for dinner.

-----------------------------

That fall, Gramps made each of us
eat a persimmon before the frost,
"the only way you won't forget."
The unripe fruit unfolded our mouths
and knotted them again. My brothers and I
spat behind the bushes, remembering.

A week later, the grass turned
green thatched ice, Gramps sat on the porch
and, on newspaper, peeled three
brown persimmons with his pocketknife.
That morning, they seemed
the only undead things in sight.

---------------------------

In January, snow's soft weight
broke in the roof of the old cattle barn.
My father went, with his axe and me,
to fill a wheelbarrow with boards.
Inside, you could sit in the stalls

and see the sky. He split the wall
and roof, legs spread to swing, and
I filled. I asked him to explain
"momentum," a word I'd seen in a book.
The barn lasted all that winter and the next.

Five smooth stones, and the quiet Texan.

2003-10-10T10:54:00.000-04:00

After splitting the first two games in the Bronx, the Yankees and Red Sox are heading to Beantown, and a Saturday showdown between two future Hall-of-Famers--the Pedro and the Rocket. I watched both of the opening games, which were a near mirror of each other, score-wise, with the Sox winning 5-2 on Tuesday, and the Yanks coming back to claim a 6-2 victory last night. Both were well-played, but lacked the drama and intensity of the five game opening round series set, and I watched them that way; drinking coffee and reading and talking to Ami at the kitchen table as we watched.

In game one the Yankees were thought to have a decided advantage, with their ace, Mike "Moose" Mussina pitching on six days rest, while the Red Sox, because of the five game showdown with the A's, were forced to start only their third best hurler, Tim Wakefield. Of course, "hurler," usually a quite good descriptive noun for major league pitchers, is a misnomer for the 37 year old Florida native, who never throws the ball harder than 80 miles an hour, and most often throws a knuckleball that floats in at around the mid-sixties. "Tosser" would be more accurate.

The knuckleball really is a truly ridiculous pitch, slowly arching toward the plate like something you'd throw your eight year old son (pitchers throw sixty-five mph in the Little League World Series) before it dances up, down or sideways. Hitting a knuckleball is like "trying to hit a bumblebee with a boat paddle" I heard someone say one time; and I think what they meant is that it's difficult to do, and even harder to do very well. That was certainly the case for the Yankees on Tuesday, who were usually able to hit the ball, only striking out twice against Wakefield, but very rarely hit it hard, managing only two hits in six innings. The Red Sox got three home runs from their much ballyhooed and muscular lineup, but the game, and night, belonged to the knuckleballer.

Wakefield's pitching career is something of an accident; he was drafted in 1988 by Pittsburgh, after four record setting seasons as a first baseman at his alma mater, Florida Tech. But after a season or two in the minors it became clear that Wakefield wasn't big league material; until, presumably in a moment of desperation, the young, weak-hitting first baseman realized he could throw a knuckleball. Throwing the knuckler is truly a gift, a special vocation; like most things with the pitch, the ease with which it appears to be delivered is deceiving. Roger Angell writes about the pitch in his book, Once More Around the Park,

The mystery of the knuckleball is ancient and honored. Its practitioners cheerfully admit that they do not understand why the pitch behaves the way it does; nor do they know, or care much, which particular lepidopteran path it will follow on its way past the batter's infuriated swipe. They merely prop the ball on their fingertips (not, in actual fact, on the knuckles) and launch it more or less in the fashion of a paper airplane, and then, most of the time, finish the delivery with a faceward motion of the glove, thus hiding a grin.

There's something deeply biblical about the absurdity of the knuckleballer; like David, he strides confidently to the mound armed with only a few pebbles to use against his much stronger and more athletic opponents' swords and spears--and on Tuesday, he got Goliath squarely between the eyes.

Last night's game two was dominated by the starting pitcher, as well, but this time it was the one on the opposing side. Just as in the opening series against Minnesota, Andy Pettitte was called upon to start the second game for the Yankees in somewhat desperate circumstances; if the Bombers had lost last night they would have headed for Fenway down two games to none, and knowing they'd have to beat Pedro to keep it from being a three-game margin, which no team has ever recovered from. The tall, lanky Texan is the quietest Yankee pitcher; surrounded by Mussina, Clemens and Wells, he's easily forgotten--though on most teams he'd be a left-handed ace, with his good fastball, changeup and sinker, along with a nasty pickoff move to first (even when Pettitte's not actually picking runners off, he's impacting the game; last night Gabe Kapler got such a bad break when he tried to steal second in the first inning that he was out by five feet, saving at least one run). Rumor is that Andy--who is engaging, though soft-spoken, in person (or at least on TV), had a lot to do with that other Texan taking to Yankees clubhouse the way he has.

Even though he gave up six hits in the first two innings last night, Pettitte allowed only one run, courtesy of two double plays and good situational pitching. Then, after the second frame, the lefthander got in a zone, pulling down the brim of his cap and holding up his black glove as he read Jorge Posada's signs, so that all you could see was were his two dark eyes peering out before he went into his delivery. Ami was especially struck by the intentionality of his windup, the way he slowly and deliberately raised his leg and then placed it down as he followed-through with his long left arm, and said so. He was working quickly, and well. By the sixth inning, the score was 4-2, and there wasn't even a hint of a BoSox comeback brewing; and with Jose Contreras, the rookie Cuban, and Mariano Rivera coming on in relief, the Yankees never even allowed them to consider it.

So now it's the best of five. One gets the feeling that this could be historic series, and if the Red Sox can only exorcise this demon, winning the World Series will certainly follow--after all, it is the curse of the Babe, so it would seem fitting that the Sox would have to beat his team in order to end it. On to Fenway, and destiny.

Ted Williams

2003-10-09T14:15:00.000-04:00

I was reading an essay today by Roger Angell about the 2002 World Series, the first all-wild card affair (which could happen this year, too), and stumbled across this bit about Ted Williams. The Splendid Splinter died last year, and Angell, the poet laureate of baseball, does a beautiful job memorializing him. One of the best parts of baseball is its history, and one of the best parts of its history is the batting stance and smooth swing of Ted Williams.

The picture of Ted batting is burned deep into the collective New England memory: the youthful, intelligent gaze switching from his bat to the pitcher and back again; the loosening shrug he gave his limbs and shoulders as he stepped in; the lightly bent knees and tilted head; and the bat held well up behind, completing a tall vertical line at plate-side--from foot to knee to elbow to chin to bat tip--that defined for the pitcher the dimensions of the chilling task at hand. His right-front shoulder drooped as the pitcher's motion began (he batted left, of course), putting the bat still farther back, but your attention now swerved to his lead hip, which had cocked and turned even as he strode forward, so that his body, now moving swiftly toward the pitch, simultaneously coiled and twisted away. The extended swing (if he chose to swing) would start a fraction late but then catch up, reaching full power as his hands and arms drove through the ball. But that hip-cock was the whole trick: it made you smile even as you drew in your breath. It kept him loose--there was a touch of cha-cha-cha there--and it provided that extra beat of time which hitters call the prime ingredient of a sound swing. He'd given himself a chance.

He never sounded lofty about hitting, despite a lifetime .344 average, five hundred and twenty-one homers, and a .482 lifetime on-base percentage (the best ever), plus the ghostly speculative numbers that could be tacked onto his totals had he not missed the better part of five seasons while in service as a fighter pilot. He appeared to remember baseball at first hand, without sadness or sentimentality. I recall a mid-eighties Florida conversation of his with the eminent outfielder slugger Gary Matthews, then with the Phillies, who wanted to know the best response for a batter to a pitcher's backup slider after two fastballs up and in. "Why, take that pitch, then!" Ted cried. "Just let it go by. Don't be so critical of yourself. Don't try to be a .600 hitter all the time. Don't you know how hard this all is?"

Fenway, too.

2003-10-08T16:52:00.000-04:00

Game 5 of the Red Sox/A's series was Monday night, and it was even more enjoyable than the Cubs game...because it was a better game, and because my wife stayed up to watch it with me. I'm amazed at the effort she's putting into understanding baseball, how it demonstrates her love for me, and how she's beginning to find pleasure in it, too. Ami's parents and sister also came over for dinner before the game-I grilled hamburgers and hotdogs on the deck and talked to her dad about seminary while the girls were inside. We all ate out there and afterwards sat in the growing dark, listening to Simon and Garfunkel and the woods and not talking much. It's times like that I'm glad we live in the country.

Oh, and the game: it started out with two of the major's best pitchers, Pedro Martinez and Barry Zito cruising through the first five innings or so without breaking a sweat. Martinez is widely acknowledge to be baseball's best when he's on, and he was on Monday, with his hard, moving, two-seam fastball, good slider and paralyzing changeup. However, as dominant as Pedro was, Zito was better, dropping his big, sweeping overhand curve in for strikes, which left the Red Sox batters to choose between trying to flail at the ball as it dropped or hoping, usually in vain, that the pitch would miss the strike zone. 1-0 Oakland, after five.

Then, in the sixth inning, Zito inexplicably lost his control, and Manny Ramirez finally hit a ball hard, pulling it far over the leftfield wall for a three run homer, giving the Sox a 4-1 lead. At that point, the game should have been over...a three run lead, late in the game, Pedro on the mound. But these are the Red Sox.

And so it was that, after a scary moment in the 8th, when Johnny Damon and Damien Jackson collided with each other in the outfield, stunning both fielders and seemingly everyone in the stadium except for Nomar Garciaparra, who reached between his prone teammates, found the ball and nailed the Oakland batter at second to end the inning, the Sox found themselves in a jam in the bottom of the 9th with Oakland runners at 2nd and 3rd, one out, and a scanty one run lead. Enter Derek Lowe, the passionate sinkerballer who started his career as a closer but is now Boston's 2nd best starter. Lowe struck out the first batter, walked the second to load the bases, and then, with his team's season riding on every pitch, threw a backdoor sinker that caught the inside part of the plate, striking Terrence Long out looking and winning the series for the Sox. As Ami said to me, it was almost too much to watch. Too beautiful. God is good for making a game like this.

There's joy in Wrigleyville.

2003-10-08T13:11:00.000-04:00

Well, after a long, tv-less summer, Ami and I decided to invest in an antenna in order to watch the baseball postseason. I won't pretend it was her idea.

So far, the investment has more than paid off--this October has all the markings of a classic, with two decisive games in the opening round, and the Red Sox and Cubs both winning. I watched both games - the first pitted the offensively dominant Braves, who were baseball's best team most of the summer, against the historically hapless Cubbies, who won the Central division this year largely based on a young starting rotation that is the envy of every team in the league excepting Oakland. Kerry Wood, who is only the Cubs' second-best starter, was brilliant through eight innings, mixing a high 90's rising fastball with knee-buckling curves.

The only time the Braves really mounted anything like a challenge to the imposing Wood was in the seventh inning, when they put men on first and second with no one out, and slugger Gary Sheffield coming to bat.
Sheffield's batting stance is all violent, tensed-up energy--he stands against in the pitcher and wags his bat back in forth in the air constantly until the very last moment when he swings. The unorthodox batting style might help put him in the Hall of Fame one day, though, and this season it helped him to probably the third best offensive marks in the National League, behind the god-like Barry Bonds and quietly explosive Albert Pujols. Cubs fans everywhere had to be imagining the worst - a three run homer.

Their fears proved to be foolish, however, when Sheffield hit a hard, sinking liner to center, which Cubs outfielder Kenny Lofton appeared to trap as he caught the ball. Replays would later show that Lofton actually did catch the ball without the help of the outfield grass, but the umpire said he didn't catch it, much to the confusion of Braves baserunner Marcus Giles, who was forced out at second after he retreated to first base, thinking the ball had been caught. When it was all over, Sheffield was safe at first, and one run was in, and still only one out; but Chipper Jones could only manage a hard grounder to short off of a Woods breaking ball, and the consequent 6-4-3 double play ended the inning.

After that brief flirtation with offensive effectiveness, the Braves hitters quickly reverted back to their early habits of striking out on high, hard fastballs or swinging at curves in the dirt, and the game ended without anymore drama, 5-1. The Cubs seemed to take a brief moment after the last Brave made the last out before they began celebrating, as though they were still expecting the home team to somehow mount a last minute rally and dash their World Series hopes. But when your team hasn't won a pennant in 58 years or a chamionship in 95, a little disbelief seems appropriate. Once the final score registered, though, the Cubs were giddy with delight--Moises Alou and Sammy Sosa hopping to slap gloves in the air, Kenny Loften grinning hysterically as he charged in from center, threading through the pack of Cubs fans who had made the trek to Atlanta and were now running on the field.

The Cubs, of course, have a long way to go--the Marlins team they'll face in the National League Championship Series will be a tough match, especially with their youthful exuberance and 60,000 screaming fans who only lately remembered there was actually a baseball team in Florida--but, for now, Wrigleyville is happier than it's been in a long, long time--and even this diehard Cardinal fan can't begrudge them that.

The Woodstove

2003-10-08T12:45:00.000-04:00

I'm posting the text of an email I sent recently to family and friends, since those are the only people I anticipate visiting here.

Dear all,

Just wanted to update you on some articles I've recently written for my employer, oldSpeak. So now you'll have something to do if find yourself with a few minutes of internet surfing to spare.

My editorial on the legacy of September 11th.

My article on the new, super-cool teen Bible called Revolve.

And if you missed it the first time, my article on the "Christianity" of Dubya.

Ami and I are coming up on 5 months of marriage, and continue to find ourselves suprised and grateful at God's goodness in bringing us into covenant together. Not that there haven't been difficult weeks/months, but santification is a slow process at best, and there is good in that, too. Tempatures are dropping in our part of Virginia, and it's been cold enough the last few nights to light a fire in the woodstove--with varying degrees of success. Last night I managed to literally fill the whole house with smoke before I could get a real fire going. But my wife (my wife!) is patient. We recently bought an antenna to be able to pick up the baseball playoffs from a tv station in Richmond...which means our summer evening ritual of sitting on the deck and playing dominoes has been replaced with sitting in the living room and watching the Red Sox and Braves. We're also continuing to consider the possibility of attending seminary in St. Louis next fall, and I've begun to take formal steps at Trinity toward that goal. Pray for us with that. But life is quiet, and good--in the best senses of those words. Hope that each of you are doing well. Give us a call if you're in the Charlottesville/Scotsville area--we'd love to have you come over for dinner and enjoy the woodstove with us.