Running Big-Easily

Usually when I go for a run in Chicago suburbs, I find myself enveloped in a cone of lonely exertion.  Sometimes this is self-chosen: I’ll admit that some days I enjoy the low-key drama of being a lone runner, bent on some destination whose indeterminacy somehow justifies my athletic hauteur.  But often enough, I’m glad to talk or wave or smile commiseratingly towards others whom I encounter on the trail or the street.  Most people, though, won’t do much more than nod.  They’re loyal to some Nordic code of respect for the travails of the isolate trotter.  They maintain a grim quietness, softened only momentarily by eye contact.    

Last week, while attending the National Communication Association conference in the Big Easy, I went running every afternoon.  I tried to run in a different direction each day—once through the French Quarter, once into the Garden District, and so forth.  Running in New Orleans is great, good fun.  Restaurants and pubs and shops are always spilling out onto brick sidewalks where you run.  Smells of gumbo and hot sausage and stale beer and po’ boy sandwiches and coffee accompany you.  Sounds of tourists and proprietors and local musicians envelope you.  Running is always a sensuous experience.  But in New Orleans, the city that so recently lost itself to a hurricane and now has found itself again, that sensuousness is redoubled. 

And people talk to you while you run.  At least they meet your eye.  One guy in particular stands out, in my memory.  He came swinging out of a pub, beer in one hand, caught sight of me, and—instead of ignoring me—addressed me:  You’re running for me, bud!  I’ll admit I was a little startled to be enacting a piece of substitutionary atonement on my afternoon jog, but I was glad to oblige. 

(Besides it was as close as I’ve ever been to being in what looked like a Budweiser commercial.)

It reminds me of all the running that we’re doing around Trinity’s campus these days.  Not so much running literally (I’m actually doing less of that than I wish, alack-the-day), but carrying on with the good, long work of teaching and learning, reading and writing.  It’s easy to fall into a comportment of grand solitude.  You have no idea how hard I’m working, etc.  But maybe there’s some wisdom in that slightly bleary word I received on the streets of New Orleans.  As you see others pushing hard, there’s more to say than simply, Well, I’m working hard, too or If you think you’ve got a lot to do, you should see my task list.   Maybe we should reposition ourselves as admirers of others’ work—and even more to the point, as recipients of others’ work. 

You, too, are running.  It’s good to see you at it.  And, hey, keep it up: I’m one of your beneficiaries.  You’re running for me, bud.

Beauty in the Simple

A post from Joshua DeJong…

I have always loved fall. My mom makes her homemade applesauce, we carve pumpkins, and giant piles of leaves are constructed to be jumped (or hidden) in. The color palate of the trees widens as browns, oranges, and reds bring signs of the end of plant growth for the year.

The other day I decided to take a walk around campus to look at the trees.  Call me crazy, but I spent 15 minutes looking at the trees in between South and West Hall.  At first, I had to force myself to take the time to look at the trees.  But as I examined each branch and each of the final leaves I saw a uniqueness in each part of the tree. Not just that, but I saw how distinct and sharp the bare branches looked with a clear blue sky as their background.  The sight struck me as beautiful as I tried to experience the tree in a new way.

Well if you are not a tree person, maybe you can appreciate this. After my excursion with the trees, I went to the Beebs/Boot/BBC for a cinnamon roll. Personally, I cannot have the cinnamon rolls without first warming them. It makes me feel as though it came straight out of the oven. I sat by the fire and watched the flames dance as I ate the gooey delicious mess that had resulted from my cinnamon roll. Again, it took me a few minutes before I was able to completely settle myself and just enjoy my treat and the fire. Once I had, I found a calm in each of them. What a great end to my afternoon!

The next day, I caught myself walking past the same trees without even looking at them. I couldn’t help myself because I was too busy to stop, let alone slow down and look at my surroundings. I went to the caf and scarfed down some food so that I could hurry back to my room to get some work done.

Why is it so hard for us to enjoy these small things? When God created the world, he looked at each part of his creation and said that “It is good”.  Most of us would agree with him. We can see the beauty in a sunset, in a painting, or even in another person. But how about in the grass? How about in the wonder that is called an ice cream cone (A food dish to be eaten and enjoyed!!)? How about the ability to be reading this?

Maybe we should try to focus less on the big complex things of this world and try to enjoy the little things that God gives us to brighten our days.

Moviegoing

I like movies, especially when I should be doing something else.  I’m like Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, who was happiest while watching films, even bad ones.  What with my profession and all, you’d think I’d like foreign films, black-and-white Danish flicks made in the 1960s, say.  Well, yes.  But I can be a cinematic philistine, too.  I like expensively and crassly produced films involving few words and large explosives. 

I may need a support group. A fine Mark Edmundson essay in American Scholar suggests,

People who need movies, the true moviegoers, go in the afternoon; matinees are therapy for those who can’t afford therapists or don’t know that they should get one.

Edmundson said that when as a young man he wandered the streets of Manhattan, he heard again and again the same message:

This city….does not require you at all. No provisions have been made. There is no slot. You’ll have to force your way in, on the off chance that you can get in at all.

I wonder how many students think that as they walk Trinity’s sidewalks, as they stand at the soda dispenser in the Caf, as they put in the DVD at 4:00 on a Thursday afternoon.  Sure, we watch movies because we love story and character, symbol and beauty.  But we’re also looking for a way to jack into the world.  Moviegoing is a tactic for dealing with the distress of disconnectedness.  Disconnectedness from God, from each other, from the creation, from the self.  But there are other ways to be alienated.  Come to think of it, nothing makes you feel disconnected and lonely like being a Super Responsible Person.  Sometimes when I feel like I just don’t belong anywhere, I try to work harder.  Grading earlier, reading longer, typing faster, sleeping less.  And sometimes that works.  But what a weariness to the flesh.  Dealing with lostness by living a decent, hard-working, pay-for-what-you-get kind of life–it is, in the words of Seerveld’s Ecclesiastes, a constipated fart.  It also looks suspiciously like I’m trying to get onto some celebrity talk show: 

Welcome back, everybody.  Today, in Studio Amazing our guest is Craig Mattson, and I wonder, Craig, if you’d be willing to share with your fan base—just how do you do it?

Isn’t that a vision?   The leading, flattering question.  The deferential interviewer.  The boom mic just off camera, but poised and fully on.  Funny thing is, being a Super Responsible Person doesn’t make me easier to live with.  I’m liable to get angry with others who aren’t so ethically caffeinated as I am.  I’m vulnerable to fits of self-congratulation, followed hard by self pity.  I crave being noticed.   Little wonder, I get stuck in a dialectic, oscillating between a duty-doing that intensifies alienation and moviegoing that massages alienation.

My hunch is that if we are to foster good, sustainable intellectual community here at Trinity–especially among those of us who are too often Super Responsible People–we should seek grace to slip the oscillation between moviegoing and duty-doing.  We should find ourselves together in the strange world of God’s excessive goodness.  We’re unacquainted with this goodness.  We’re used to the goods served up by celebrities or the goods achieved by time-management gurus.  But these are goods in a world in which you find yourself in God’s company and in the company of those deeply loved by God. 

Does that sound too literary for life as it is?  Maybe if you’re a moviegoer.  You know there has to be a letdown in here somewhere.  

“[N]o hangover is so common,” writes Edmundson, “as the one that ensues when we walk out of a movie, especially out of a matinee and into the sunlight.” 

But let’s keep eyes peeled for ways to get in on things in this world of God’s making.  Let’s look for ways of dealing with our sometimes alienation by faithful work, not sanctimonious sacrifice; trusting rest, not restless amusement. 

And then, let’s trade notes before the matinee.

 

Edmundson, Mark.  “Alone at the Movies.”  The American Scholar. 

            http://www.theamericanscholar.org/wi08/movies-edmundson.html.

 

 

 

Breaking Up

People don’t do first dates any more–or so says Ilana Gershon of the 2010 book The Breakup 2.0. 

This past Saturday, a few of us from the Honors Program glided downtown in a rented Cadillac (an upgrade at Enterprise) to hear Professor Gershon speak at the Chicago Humanities Festival about courtship and dating and, most of all, breaking up online.  We spent much of the drive down town trying to figure out how to use the onboard navigation system, despite the fact that we had printed Google maps and smartphones.  The onboard system was tantalizing and quite baffling.  Our bewilderment, as it turns out, was a good preparation for Professor Gershon’s discussion of the ways we map our social lives today online.

Take, for example, the glory we ascribe to first dates.  Gershon claims that they’re something of a chimera.  People chat for a while on line.  They text each other.  They post on each other’s walls. They even do something so risky as to talk to each other by phone.  (In fact, the phone is becoming an increasingly important medium for romantic interaction, given its prevalance, of course, but also given the fact that our technology allows us to conduct more relationships long-distance.)   But they have a hard time locating the moment when they sat down across the table from each other for the first time.  The mythology surrounding the big first date has dissipated a bit with the blurring of clear lines between computer-mediated-communication and face-to-face interaction.

Professor Gershon is a likeable cultural anthropologist from Indiana University who comports herself with a kind of wryly objective, cheerfully amused air.  She likes people, which was a useful trait for her as she conducted 72 interviews in order to write this book.  She is also shocked by people.  Often she found herself saying internally mid-interview, “You do what?”

After hearing her talk, Katelyn, Kathryn, Alicia and I headed to memorable little lunch joint called the Hash Brown and talked things over.  Here were some of our take-aways.

1. Everybody thinks there’s One Right Way to Do Things when you’re breaking up.  But few can agree on what that is.  Often there are “pockets of etiquette” in which a group of people agree that this or that is how things should be handled.  But some of the pain and rage associated with breaking up comes down to a breach of etiquette between people who seem to be working from different manners manuals.

2. People do a lot of lurking online, looking at other people’s Facebook pages.  But the odd thing is, stalkers don’t believe they’ll be stalked.  People who forget that other people are creeping on their page assume, apparently, that only interested people will creep their blog or FB page.  Au contraire.  Sometimes this surveillance is pretty sophisticated.  Groups of twenty or so people will, for instance, for, a group to create a false Facebook page in order to spy on their X-es.  This false Facebook persona will “friend” the unsuspecting former girlfriend or boyfriend, thereby giving a disconcerting amount of access to the jilted lover.

3. Some of the most useful status descriptions on Facebook are “It’s complicated” and “In an open relationship.”  How people define these signifiers varies very, very widely.

4. One unexpectedly tricky aspect of breakups today is the negotiation of electronic property, such as (say) your boyfriend’s ringtone. All the moral weight of breakups comes not from the moment of saying, “It’s over,” but rather in the actual process of the breakup, not just for your significant other, but for all the people in your network of friends.  It’s something of a tortured question.  Do you send an email to your friends in advance of your breakup to prepare them for the moment when you post your changed status on Facebook?  Or do you post first?  Or do you simply change your status?

5. There was one problem with our lunchtime conversation, though.  We went on eating and talk too long and so missed the next lecture we’d been planning to attend.  But we changed our Facebook status to “It’s complicated” and drove our rental caddy home.

Why We Love It

Yesterday at Honors Tea, Jake took some video of us naming things we spontaneously love about the Honors Program.  People laughed.  People cried.  People hid behind couches.  Here are some (but not all) of the findings from our raw footage:

Top Ten Reasons People Say They Valued the Honors Program

1. Brittany appreciates not having to use a meal swipe on Wednesdays.
2. Dan appreciates the “Kick-Off” dinners in faculty homes, although he’s never been to one.
3. Leah is glad that the faculty do not treat her like a child.
4. Adam likes talking with the old men from the old country.
5. Matt uses the program as a platform for reenacting scooter accidents.
6. Sarah likes being splendiforous.
7. Crummy Craig enjoys being a Subsidiary Advisor (which sounds like a part that goes next to your carburetor).
8. Kim appreciates licorice and talking in front of a camera.
9. Bryan appreciates boom mics and sitting on the white couch with his feet straight out in front of him.
10. Dr. Peters appreciates Honors Tea as a break from his heavy ballet schedule.

Thanks for your laughter yesterday.  It’s a midweek sabbath, thanks to your goodwill and good talk.

God rest ye merry.

Saying “Shit”

At the Bonhoeffer’s Cost production, which the Honors Program attended this past Sunday, one of the characters, a German guard, used the expletive “shit” repeatedly.  After each usage—and I mean each usage—he apologized to the person he was speaking to, usually Pastor Bonhoeffer, but sometimes Dietrich’s fiancé.  The guard often covered his mouth in childlike fashion, as if to say, “There, I’ve gone and done it again.”  Almost every time he used the word, the audience tittered.

I did, too, at least at first.  There is something funny about excrement.  C. S. Lewis once said that you could work out a rough theology from the simple fact that humans think poop is embarrassing.  And I’ll admit that there’s a good deal of laughter in the Mattson household about the large remains of the day that we find in the smallest room of the house. 

How did something that gigantic come out of someone so small?

So, no complaints from me about using that particular expletive.  At the play’s intermission, the people around me agreed that we really liked the character of the guard, liked this earthiness and his thickheaded commonsense.  Those values were important elsewhere in the production as well.  After the play was over, I found myself missing Pastor Bonhoeffer, at least as he was portrayed.  He was deeply humane, convincingly pious, and wry and wily in just the way that late modernity seems to require of us.  So, the expletive felt important for naming something recognizably messed up about a world in which people like him die the way he did.

And there’s the further complexity that Provision Theatre addresses a variegated audience.  This company is in the rough and ready Chicago theatre scene, doing their work with indisputable skill, “devoted to producing works” [as their mission statement says] “of hope, reconciliation and redemption; works that challenge us to explore a life of meaning and purpose.”  Because of that mission, they’re also drawing pretty large audiences from the good people of Wheaton and Trinity and Moody. So, you might say, given this diverse audience, all along the spectrum from secularity to piety, it’s no mean accomplishment to use an expletive and draw a laugh. 

I should add, too, that the use of this word was by no means the most important issue raised in this production.  The show compelled us to talk and argue and wonder about nonviolence and resistance, about truth and truthfulness, about loyalty and faithfulness.  I’ve gone to a goodly number of plays with students; and, at least in my experience, no other production has elicited so much discourse afterwards, both on the van ride home and at the burger joint afterwards.  Perhaps all this good talk was somewhat a function of the fact that honors students are particularly primed to talk, but I can’t help feeling that this production did an admirable good job as a conversation-starter.

But oddly, the show also compelled us to wonder what saying “shit” is good for.  By having the guard apologize after each usage, the show made laughter the primary function of the expletive.  (Brooke and Bryan noted that this was especially incongruous as the play drew to its conclusion.)  

I confess I have higher hopes for poop pronouncements.  I find myself thinking about Ecclesiastes and its refrain (in Cal Seerveld’s translation) that all of the effort we put forth under the sun is like “a constipated fart.”  And when Bonhoeffer’s interrogator said, near the end of the production, that everything the pastor had worked so hard for had turned out to be worthless, I couldn’t help thinking about the Teacher’s insistence that everything is wind-chasing.  And when that noose fell and lay claim to dear life just two days before the Allies might have freed that shrewd, hard-thinking, good-living pastor, you have to nod to Qohelet’s insistence that “chance and what just happens” comes to everyone. 

I’m thinking, that’s what expletives are good for. 

Not for laughs among squeaky-clean-living folk.  Not as a nod to hard-living Chicago theatregoers.  But for an honest statement about the human condition.  Maybe we should say the word very quietly and through our teeth.  Maybe we should say it with a wry laugh.  Maybe we should say it with tears.  But an expletive that true could be—perhaps should be—a confession, a lament, an answer to the Lord’s devastating question in Genesis,

Where art thou?  

We’re deep in it, Lord, up to our knees.  And because we are, what else can we do but stand in awe of You?