So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

-T.S. Eliot, from "East Coker," The Four Quartets.

God's abiding concern for the flesh

Read this.

•

In the sermons on the martyrs which Augustine preached at the very end of his life, we are left in no doubt as to what the donum perseverantiae, the gift of perseverence unto death, meant to him. They are extraordinary as evocations of the strength of the love of life, and of the intimate grip of the human flesh from which the soul is torn so unwillingly:

They really loved this life; yet they weighed it up. They thought of how much they should love the things eternal if they were capable of such deep love for things that pass away.

. . . [Augustine's] account of the miracles at the shrine of Saint Stephen, in the last book of the City of God, were far from being a capitulation to the "silly stories" current among the "common herd." For Augustine they were surreal rather than "silly." They betray the effort by which Augustine, a man formed in the most austerely immaterialistic current of Neo-Platonic thought available to an educated man of his age, had come to think the unthinkable concept of a future integration of flesh and spirit. The recorded miracles of healing at the shrines show God's power and his abiding concern for the flesh. . . . Miracles that had once struck Augustine, the contemplative, as of little significance, as so many lights dimmed by the sun of God's harmonious order, now take on a warmth and a glow of their own, as Augustine pays more heed to the instinctive fears of yearnings of the once-neglected body:

I know you want to keep on living. You do not want to die. And you want to pass from this life to another in such a way that you will not rise again as a dead man, but fully alive and transformed. This is what you desire. This is the deepest human feeling; mysteriously, the soul itself wishes and instinctively desires it.

-Peter Brown (The Cult of the Saints)

•

The Psalms thus become a voice for the dying in which all are engaged, partly because the world is a place of death and is passing away, partly because God gives new life, but only in the pain of death. It is because God is at work even in the pain of such death that the Psalmist dares enter God's presence with these realities. They have to do with God.

- Walter Brueggemann (Praying the Psalms)

Taking Youth Sports Seriously

Jonathan Mahler has a fascinating, somewhat counter-intuitive argument about how to cure American youth sports over at Deadspin:

America’s youth sports culture is sick. But the conventional diagnosis of the illness has it backward: The problem isn’t that we take youth sports too seriously. It’s that we don’t take them seriously enough. As a result, we’re producing bad citizens and bad athletes.

From my limited experience as a middle school basketball and JV soccer coach--and my much larger though less mature experience in playing sports*--this rings true. The kids who tend to cause the most problems and create the most tension are actually the kids who take it the least seriously. The ones who are serious tend not to mess around with trash talk and shoving. Those who are not serious, on the other hand, do not mind disrupting the game. 

*My tentative count has me playing thirty-seven seasons of organized sports between age 4 and high school graduation (twelve seasons of soccer, nine seasons of basketball, eight seasons of baseball, six seasons of swimming, and two seasons of flag-football).

Mahler notes that "Europe’s soccer academies... are serious and demanding, but the kids are still having fun. There is pleasure in playing the game right, in learning to look for a pass or move into open space." Again, drawing on my experience as a player and coach, I believe that kid have more fun playing well the game well rather than messing around. The problem is that at the age I coach--twelve-to-sixteen years old--most kids would rather mess around, because playing well requires hard work.

And I think, to make a vastly generalizing and get-off-my-lawn statement, America as a whole has given over to the idea that kids should almost always be able to do what they want rather than what's good for them--perhaps because most Americans no longer buy into the idea that anyone should have the authority to tell another human being what's good for them.

Story and the Church

I gave this as a faculty devotion. In some ways it's a continuation of my earlier two posts on "Teaching History, Confronting Suffering." In other ways, perhaps, it's a response to those posts.

I’m going to start with a passage from The Historian’s Craft, a classic by the French historian Marc Bloch. The book is famously unfinished—unfinished because, in the midst of its composition, its author, who was a member of the French Resistance, was tortured and executed by the Gestapo.

In it Bloch writes, “Christianity is a religion of historians. Other religious systems have been able to found their beliefs and their rites on a mythology nearly outside human time. For sacred books, the Christians have books of history, and their liturgies commemorate, together with episodes from the terrestrial life of a God, the annals of the church and the lives of the saints. Christianity is historical in another and, perhaps, even deeper sense. The destiny of humankind, placed between the Fall and the Judgment, appears to its eyes as a long adventure, of which each life, each individual pilgrimage, is in its turn a reflection. It is in time and, therefore, in history that the drama of Sin and Redemption, the central axis of all Christian thought, is unfolded.”

Indeed, the Christian faith rests wholly upon the historical reality of Christ crucified and Christ risen again. As St. Paul writes, "...if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."

It matters, in other words, that Christ was actually—historically, physically—resurrected. For if he only served as a good example and the resurrection is only spiritual and non-corporeal, Paul indicated, we're a bunch of fools who deserve pity. It’s the story of Christ’s resurrection that lends our faith the weight of reality.

A bit earlier in the same letter, St. Paul corrects the Corinthian church’s abysmal failures with a story. “For I received from the Lord,” he says, “what I also delivered to you”... and then he tells the story of the Lord's supper. And so, when we take communion, we also tell that story. And retell it, over and over again until he comes again. Our ecumenical creeds, too, are stories. The heftiest portion of the Nicene Creed tells who the Lord Jesus Christ is through story—it tells us he was begotten of his Father before all worlds, that all things were made through him, that for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man; he was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again...

The four gospels tell—and between the four of them, retell—story after story after story. The Old Testament is filled with books of history—and the books that aren’t historical, strictly speaking, are stuffed with stories too. I could go on and on.

I have spent a good while thinking about what it means to be a people of history—a storied people. I am thinking about this as a Christian first and foremost, but also secondarily as a historian, and now as a teacher of American history at a Christian school.

And I have to admit that I am extraordinarily cautious about the uses to which I put history.

History: A Spring Mix, 2013

We make sense of the events of our lives through story.




Download here.
(it's fixed!)

Track list:
1. "Je Pense a Toi" by Amadou et Mariam
2. "Heirloom" by Sufjan Stevens
3. "Plans" by Dinosaur Jr.
4. "This Time Around" by The Radio Dept.
5. "Junkyard" by Page France
6. "Isaac's Song" by DM Stith
7. "Foam Hands" by Destroyer
8. "Toboggan" by Breathe Owl Breathe
9. "Under Your Spell" by Desire
10. "I Didn't See It Coming" by Belle and Sebastian
11. "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" by Sigur Rós
12. "Fast Jabroni" by Surfer Blood
13. "Zorbing" by Stornoway
14. "Impregnable Question" by Dirty Projectors
15. "Ragged Wood" by Fleet Foxes
16. "Playing Dead" by Breathe Owl Breathe

"Yo La Tengo by the minutes"--over at the Sad Bear.

Rest in peace, John Reist. You will be missed.

I have posted one of my favorite Reist stories to the wonderful obituary over at the sad bear.

"...though I know better..."

The past week was hectic and frustrating. Because it was "Spirit Week," every single day was on a special (read: crazy) schedule, except for Thursday--our craziest normal bell schedule day. On top of that, JV soccer's final week consisted of three games in three days in the middle of the week, capped off by our longest road trip of the year. This week is similar. Tomorrow is a half day--after which I will be in parent-teacher conferences almost non-stop from 2 PM to 7 PM, and then again on Friday from 9 AM to 4 PM.

Even so, I have felt privileged to teach and coach in the past week.

---

For reasons I do not entirely know, the soccer team seemed to fall into a malaise in the middle third of the season. Our practices and games seemed lackluster, filled with laziness and bickering rather than the earlier energy and enthusiasm. We stayed with one of the best teams in the state for almost the entire game, only to allow their slim one-point lead to explode to three in the final four minutes of the game. In two games our lack of intensity let leads slip through our fingers and turn into bad losses. Meanwhile, the tenth graders utterly failed as leaders, instead encouraging an attitude of selfishness, indifference, and disrespect.

But they turned it around in the last week, approaching practice with renewed seriousness and dedication--and playing much harder. In our blitz of a final week, we tied the first game against our cross-town rivals and won the final two.

I have seen or played in few games more exciting than our season closer, which we won 3-2. Our set-piece specialist boomed in the first goal and his first of the season from 30-yards out, bouncing it over the head of a poorly positioned keeper. After the other team tied it up in the second half, Alex again scored to put us ahead. Only this time, he scored from a free kick about five yards in front of half-field. The ball was a missile, exploding into the top-let corner--a finer shot I cannot imagine. Unfortunately, the opposition again tied the game with only six minutes left. Despite a fearsome response by our boys resulting in numerous close calls, the other team still clung to their lead nearly three minutes into stoppage time--well after Sean and I expected the game to be called.

Enter Alex, again, for a corner kick. We pushed almost everyone into the box, leaving two lone defenders and our keeper to halt any counterattack. Alex's corner was a beauty, but it popped out of the box in left field after bouncing around for a few seconds... during which time, Amal, one of our two reserve defenders, had moved forward. And so, when the ball popped out, it landed right at his feet. He took two quick dribbles to the right, and then took his first--and only--shot of the season. Upper right at an unbelievable velocity. 3-2. Pandemonium. 30 seconds later--game over.

---

The next day, I began discussions with the 8th graders about the purpose of studying history. And although almost all remain deeply skeptical of my thoughts about history's great worth, most chose to engage me in serious discussion--which I would much rather have than any sort of bland agreement. I am hoping we can build on this in the future, cultivating respectful discussion and reflective thought.

---

Too much that we do is done at the expense of something else, or somebody else. There is some intransigent destructiveness in us. My days, though I think I know better, are filled with a thousand irritations, worries, regrets for what has happened and fears for what may, trivial duties, meaningless torments--as destructive of my life as if I wanted to be dead. Take today for what it is, I counsel myself. Let it be enough. 

And I dare not, for fear that if I do, yesterday will infect tomorrow. We are in the habit of contention--against the world, against each other, against ourselves. 

It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are. 

(Wendell Berry) 

Short stories

Tonight I read the first two stories in the 2012 Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories. Wonderful, both.*

Alice Mattison writes plainly in the latter story. Descriptions of characters skew more towards longform journalism or memoir rather than literary fiction. Despite and because of its unpretentiousness, "The Vandercook" resonates with a mixture of verisimilitude and beauty that again reminds me how profound this medium can be.

Molly turned, looking at Tony, not me, and I understood that it was because she didn't want to find out--yet--how much she had lost. I couldn't look at her frightened face. I wanted love to be simple. I wanted to tell her how nimbly our son with his new haircut had darted across the street, how scared he seemed, how hard it was not to run toward him, stretching my arms out wide.

Short stories will survive the novel's demise. I hope.

*I also read a story by Mark Helprin but will withhold my opinion of the latter out of the regard for my readers whose taste in such matters surpasses my own and who much esteem the man.

The faux-closer last night--after which Kristen shout-requested and Peter Mulvey played "Charlie."