Author Archive for David Driedger

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The Passion of David Bazan

Published on July 31, 2009 by David Driedger. 1 Comment Tags: .

I came across this great arti­cle on the life and faith(?) of David Bazan.  Here is a post I wrote for my old blog on my own expe­ri­ence with this great per­former in rela­tion to my own min­istry expe­ri­ence.  The post was orig­i­nally titled ‘Min­is­ters of Death’

I sus­pect you can guess who I am (with my star struck eyes) and who Bazan is (appar­ently chew­ing tobacco or something).

I have been lis­ten­ing to Bazan’s music for some ten years now. His music has always rep­re­sented a brave and engaged crit­i­cism of Chris­t­ian reli­gion. What sets his approach apart from more reac­tionary crit­i­cism is how hon­est he remains in his own sense of hope­ful­ness to the spirit of faith. After the show I talked with him and asked if he kept any per­sonal ties to the church. He said that his wife and daugh­ter attend church but that he had ‘made his exit’ (adding a com­ment of it being a hope­ful exit; I think is how he put it). Hav­ing grown up as a pastor’s kid he has tried to dis­tance him­self from the insti­tu­tion with an attempt to sus­pend his received assump­tions. What remains is still a sense of God’s exis­tence, which in his words has cre­ated a strong dis­so­nance to where he thought he was going (athe­ism). He admits that this could sim­ply be the result of such an entrenched world view that he received grow­ing up. I would have liked to talk longer.
David Bazan remains for me a of min­is­ter of death. A min­is­ter in the truest sense (though prophet may be a more appro­pri­ate term) in that his engage­ment with the social impli­ca­tions of faith and reli­gion remain sig­nif­i­cant in his work. The role of death func­tions promi­nently in much of his lyrics whether it is phys­i­cal death, the death of a rela­tion­ship or the death cer­tain beliefs. To those in the church who will lis­ten this min­istry of death injects needed per­spec­tive and the pos­si­bil­ity of change and move­ment.  I believe it was Flan­nery O’Connor (or some­one speak­ing about her work) who said that the rea­son an artist focuses on death is because death is ‘gett­gin some­where’.  In tran­si­tion to the sec­ond sig­nif­i­cant event of the week (when this post was writ­ten) here are his lyrics to “Priest and Para­medics” (see below for video).

Para­medics brave and strong
Up before the break of dawn
Putting poker faces on
Bro­ken bod­ies all day long
The neigh­bors heard a fight
Some­one had a knife
It must have have been the wife
Husband’s lost a lot of blood
He wakes up scream­ing, “Oh my God
Am I going to die?
Am I going to die?“
As they strapped his arms down to his sides
At times like these they’d been taught to lie
“Buddy, just calm down, you’ll be all right”

Sev­eral friends came to his grave
His chil­dren were so well-behaved
As the priest got up to speak
The assem­bly craved relief
But he him­self had given up
So instead he offered them this bit­ter cup
“You’re going to die
We’re all going to die
Could be twenty years, could be tonight
Lately I have been won­der­ing why
We go to so much trou­ble
To post­pone the unavoid­able
And pro­long the pain of being alive”

I per­formed my sec­ond funeral yes­ter­day and the first on my own. I had never met the man who passed away. He was 48 and died of a heart attack in his sleep with no warn­ing (a hus­band and father of two). As a min­is­ter of death who works firmly within the insti­tu­tional church my work stands in some con­trast to David Bazan’s. I hope to make death a lit­tle more palat­able so that its hem­or­rhag­ing force move through the sys­tem with less resis­tance. In rela­tion to death I often recall the words at the close of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness. Mar­low is try­ing to recount the words of judg­ment at Kurtz’s death to Kurtz’s wife. He fails in trans­mit­ting this mes­sage of death, instead he says that Kurtz uttered her name at his death. Mar­low says this in response to his action,

It seemed to me that the house would col­lapse before I could escape, that the heav­ens would fall on my head. But noth­ing hap­pened. The heav­ens do not fall for such a tri­fle. Would they have fallen I won­der, if I had ren­dered Kurtz that jus­tice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he only wanted jus­tice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark — too dark altogether …

David Bazan appears lib­er­ated to speak some of those dark words, but what is his com­mu­nity that needs to hear the dark words of faith if he remains largely unheard out­side the church walls? My speech is mod­i­fied within these walls and not all for bad. Some things are too crush­ing and need medi­at­ing, but the right medi­a­tor is cru­cial. I wres­tle between the min­istries of death. I hope to con­tinue in both, in some way.

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Letters to a Young Poet — Letter 10

Published on July 21, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

This is the final para­graph in the last let­ter that Rilke wrote to Franz Kappus,

Art too is only a way of liv­ing, and, how­ever one lives, one can, unwit­tingly, pre­pare one­self for it; in all that is real one is closer to it and more nearly neigh­bored than in the unreal half-artistic pro­fes­sions, which, while they pre­tend prox­im­ity to some art, in prac­tice belie and assail the exis­tence of all art, as for instance the whole of jour­nal­ism does and almost all crit­i­cism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called lit­er­a­ture. I am glad, in a word, that you have sur­mounted the dan­ger of falling into this sort of thing and are some­where in a rough real­ity being soli­tary and coura­geous. May the year that is at hand uphold and strengthen you in that.

I sus­pect that most of us with some appre­ci­a­tion towards the arts feel a lit­tle sting in Rilke’s part­ing words. I also sus­pect that Rilke is not inter­ested in crit­i­ciz­ing pro­fes­sions as such but in crit­i­ciz­ing those who “pre­tend prox­im­ity”. Nature, real­ity and truth will not be fooled. Rilke believes that they can be trusted, but this in turn means that they must be trusted. We can­not fool or manip­u­late art and beauty. Prox­im­ity and pres­ence is key both to the for­ma­tion of iden­tity and to the healthy rela­tion­ships with oth­ers. Rilke’s call inward demands that we begin ana­lyz­ing or most pri­mal walls, those inte­rior walls that divide our pas­sions, goals and com­pul­sions. What have we ghet­toized in our self? What is it in us that remains her­met­i­cally sealed? This move­ment is nec­es­sary first because it in turn affects our exter­nal sen­sual real­ity. In greater self-understanding we develop courage and sta­bil­ity to allow our­selves to “pres­ence” real­ity and not pre­tend prox­im­ity. There is no peer review here that can val­i­date our inte­rior and the move­ment is not nat­ural. Much of Rilke’s admon­ish­ing focuses around receiv­ing the dif­fi­cult. This can of course be reduced to pathol­ogy and veiled masochism, but this is not truly dif­fi­cult. The rela­tion­ship between pres­ence and dif­fi­culty is key here. To expe­ri­ence pres­ence we need iden­tify par­tic­u­lar divid­ing walls and either dis­man­tle or at least gate them. Walls, how­ever, are the very essence of our grasp for con­trol and power. To take down a wall is con­trary to the nature indi­vid­ual self-preservation, or at the very least it is an act of trust beyond one’s self. The move­ment of dif­fi­culty is the move­ment of de-centralizing a per­sonal posi­tion of power. This how­ever, is also the move­ment and pos­si­bil­ity of pres­ence, even communion.

Letters to a Young Poet — Letter 8

Published on July 14, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

With respect to our place in the future Rilke says,

The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kap­pus, but we move in infi­nite space.

In an attempt to get my own head around Rilke’s thought in the fol­low­ing para­graphs I will quote in full with per­haps some brief com­ments clar­i­fy­ing what I am focus­ing on or perceiving.

And to speak of soli­tude again, it becomes always clearer that this is at bot­tom not some­thing that one can take or leave. We are soli­tary. We may delude our­selves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much bet­ter it is to real­ize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assum­ing it. We shall indeed turn dizzy then; for all points upon which our eye has been accus­tomed to rest are taken from us, there is noth­ing near any more and every­thing far is infi­nitely far. A per­son removed from his own room, almost with­out prepa­ra­tion and tran­si­tion, and set upon the height of a great moun­tain range, would feel some­thing of the sort: an unpar­al­leled inse­cu­rity, an aban­don­ment to some­thing inex­press­ible would almost anni­hi­late him. He would think him­self falling or hurled into space, or exploded into a thou­sand pieces: what a mon­strous lie his brain would have to invent to catch up with and explain the state of his senses!

Why is it that the move­ment towards the soli­tary is so dis­ori­en­tat­ing? I have writ­ten else­where that I can­not con­ceive of a non-relational real­ity, which seems to make this idea of pri­mal soli­tude a prob­lem.  While that may be true I won­der if what Rilke is get­ting at is that our notion of con­nec­tion or rela­tion­ship is more often the con­nec­tion to our­selves which we see in oth­ers. We love in oth­ers what we love in our­selves and there­fore do not love oth­ers at all.  We hate (or cre­ate) in oth­ers what we also hate. We are dis­ori­en­tated in soli­tude because we have lost the self-perceived affir­ma­tion we find in others.

So for him who becomes soli­tary all dis­tances, all mea­sures change; of these changes many take place sud­denly, and then, as with the man on the moun­tain­top, extra­or­di­nary imag­in­ings and sin­gu­lar sen­sa­tions arise that seem to grow out beyond all bear­ing. But is nec­es­sary for us to expe­ri­ence that too. We must assume our exis­tence as broadly as we in any way can; every­thing, even the unheard-of, must be pos­si­ble in it.

This is where my sense of Rilke’s tran­scen­dence emerges. By tran­scen­dence I mean open­ness.

That is at bot­tom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most sin­gu­lar and the most inex­plic­a­ble that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cow­ardly has done life end­less harm; the expe­ri­ences that are called “visions,” the whole so-called “spirit-world,” death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily par­ry­ing been crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atro­phied. [empha­sis mine]

Then he writes this in con­nec­tion to human relationships.

For it is not iner­tia alone that is respon­si­ble for human rela­tion­ships repeat­ing them­selves from case to case, inde­scrib­ably monot­o­nous and unre­newed; it is shy­ness before any sort of new, unfore­see­able expe­ri­ence with which one does not think one­self able to cope. But only some­one who is ready for every­thing, who excludes noth­ing, not even the most enig­mat­i­cal, will live the rela­tion to another as some­thing alive and will him­self draw exhaus­tively from his own expe­ri­ence.  [empha­sis mine]

Rilke goes on to encour­age Mr. Kap­pus to explore the con­tours of his world crit­i­ciz­ing human­ity for becom­ing to accom­mo­dat­ing to their envi­ron­ment. He continues,

We have no rea­son to mis­trust our world, for it is not against us. Has it ter­rors, they are our ter­rors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dan­gers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life accord­ing to that prin­ci­ple which coun­sels us that we must always hold to the dif­fi­cult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faith­ful. How should we be able to for­get those ancient myths that are at the begin­ning of all peo­ples, the myths about drag­ons that at the last moment turn into princesses; per­haps all the drag­ons of our lives are princesses who are only wait­ing to see us beau­ti­ful and brave. Per­haps every­thing ter­ri­ble is in its deep­est being some­thing help­less that wants help from us.

Far from being an attempt to view the world through rose col­ored glasses Rilke here advo­cates a “nar­row path” rec­og­niz­ing that we can­not trust the smooth and the easy. This path is both unsta­ble and promises no fruit. Rather, this per­spec­tive opens wide the embrace of ter­ror and abyss with the knowl­edge that they are not embed­ded or foun­da­tional in the cre­ated order. They too will be dis­solved or as Rilke sees it trans­formed as we approach them in beauty and bravery.

Letters to a Young Poet — Letter 3

Published on July 8, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

Rilke offers inter­est­ing com­men­tary on art, sex­u­al­ity and gen­der in his third let­ter to Franz Kap­pus. Though many com­par­isons exist between the birthing process of human life and of art Rilke encour­ages the con­nec­tion fur­ther that the artist offer only the truly human in the artis­tic process. In this let­ter Rilke refers to the poet Richard Dehmel as one who writes in heat. He acknowl­edges that such writ­ing indeed moves him, that Dehmel’s “poetic power is great, strong as a prim­i­tive instinct; it has its own unyield­ing rhythms in itself and breaks out of him as out of moun­tains.” But he con­tin­ues to say that, “this power is not always hon­est.” Rilke claims that Dehmel’s artis­tic urge as “it comes to the sex­ual” does not find a “clean” sex world, that is it is not suf­fi­ciently human.

[It] is only male, is heat, intox­i­ca­tion and rest­less­ness, and laden with the old prej­u­dices and arro­gances with which man has dis­fig­ured and bur­dened love. Because he loves as man only, not as human being, for this rea­son there is in his sex­ual feel­ing some­thing nar­row, seem­ing wild, spite­ful, time-bound, uneter­nal, that dimin­ishes his art and makes it ambigu­ous and doubt­ful. It is not immac­u­late, it is marked by time and by pas­sion, and lit­tle of it will sur­vive and endure. (But most art is like that!) Nev­er­the­less one may deeply rejoice in what there is of great­ness in it, only one must not lose one­self in it.

In the realm of art and beauty cat­e­gories of male and female carry sig­nif­i­cant cur­rency.  The role the fem­i­nine womb or inte­rior can play a sig­nif­i­cant sym­bolic role in artis­tic and spir­i­tual for­ma­tion. Here Rilke warns of the heat and rest­less­ness of the mas­cu­line. Per­haps he is point­ing to the need for receiv­ing the artis­tic urge “in com­mu­nity,” in the “clean” sex world of the human so that abid­ing beauty emerges. I am intrigued by Rilke’s notion of a “clean sex world”. This image both evokes and dis­tances itself from cul­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the sacred in the Hebrew Bible. Hav­ing sex under Mosiac Law ren­dered one cer­e­mo­ni­ally unclean and required a dis­tanc­ing from the holi­ness of God. How­ever, the union between God and human­ity is often ren­dered in sex­ual terms as in Song of Songs, the prophets and the New Tes­ta­ment. As with Rilke this too is con­ceived of as a (cer­e­mo­ni­ally) “clean sex world”. In the New Tes­ta­ment this would be expressed with the image of “the pure spot­less bride”. In the Bible as with Rilke this union emerges only in trust and humil­ity. In the Bible this is con­ceived in the act and life of wor­ship.  For Rilke this is con­ceived in the space within and beyond our­selves (trust), “in the dark, in the inex­press­ible, the uncon­scious, beyond the reach of one’s own intel­li­gence.” In this space the artist is called to “await with deep humil­ity and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity.”

Letters to a Young Poet — Letter 1

Published on July 3, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

In 1902 19 year old Franz Kap­pus decided to send some of his writ­ings to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in the hopes of gain­ing some guid­ance and direc­tion in his writ­ing and life.  The two began a cor­re­spon­dence that would last about six years and form the con­tent for a small but influ­en­tial work that was sim­ply titled Let­ters to a Young Poet.

Kap­pus asked the anxiety-laden ques­tion in his first let­ter to Rilke, “Are my verses good?”  Rilke per­ceives that he is not the first per­son Kap­pus would have asked this ques­tion.  When we cre­ate some­thing and offer it to an indi­vid­ual or to the pub­lic we are often ask­ing the sim­ple ques­tion, “Am I any good?”  In response to Kap­pus’ angst Rilke replies,

I beg you to give up all that. You are look­ing out­ward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can coun­sel and help you, nobody. There is only a sin­gle way. Go into your­self. Search for the rea­son that bids you write; find out whether it is spread­ing out its roots in the deep­est places of your heart, acknowl­edge to your­self whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all — ask your­self in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? … And if this should be affir­ma­tive … then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and expe­ri­ence and love and lose.

And if out of this turn­ing inward, out of this absorp­tion into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask any­one whether they are good verses.

Our Father

Published on May 27, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed Tags: , , .

As part of a larger series on wor­ship last week I preached on prayer and used the Lord’s Prayer as my text.  I quickly real­ized in my prepa­ra­tion that it was dif­fi­cult to move past the first two words with­out address­ing the ever increas­ing polit­i­cal aspects of gen­der and lan­guage.  I decided to allow the the text sit with us as ‘Our Father’ and explore what that could mean.  I did this in con­text of the emerg­ing iden­tity and tran­si­tion of an infant to a child.  Here is an excerpt,

Con­tinue read­ing ‘Our Father’

Travelling The Road

Published on May 5, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

(!warn­ing spoiler at the end of this post!)

Cor­mac McCarthy, author of All the Pretty Horses and No Coun­try for Old Men, is begin­ning to receive broader recog­ni­tion for his lat­est work The Road. This a book praised at some length by peo­ple whose opin­ion I tend to trust. I finally came across a used copy of it and digested it this past week­end. Amer­ica is burned, ash cov­ers the ground and the sky. A man and his son attempt travel away from the cold weather towards the coast even though the man knows there is no promise on the coast. The book moves episod­i­cally from grim depic­tions of the land­scape to brief mem­o­ries of the past to visions of judg­ment on him­self and on the world. Some of these selec­tions are indeed insight­ful but the nar­ra­tive runs aground in rep­e­ti­tion. The two are des­per­ate near star­va­tion, then they run across a mea­gre sup­ply of food, then the food runs out, and they are near star­va­tion, etc. Inter­spersed are encoun­ters of hos­tile nomads will­ing to kill and can­ni­bal­ize. The boy con­tin­ues to dis­tin­guish between them­selves as the good ones and oth­ers who are the bad ones. There is lit­tle nuance in this depic­tion. Encoun­tered peo­ple are good, bad or victims.

I could not find much depth in the main char­ac­ter as he strug­gled on the brink of sui­ci­dal despair at times but con­tin­ued to offer not hope but courage to his son. Yes he was sac­ri­fi­cial. Yes his love was deep and evi­dent. But it all lay on the sur­face and per­haps this was inten­tional. Per­haps McCarthy attempted to paint pic­ture of human­ity as it would exist with­out all the lay­er­ing and insu­la­tion of tech­nol­ogy and social cus­toms. Per­haps in this con­text there is only sur­face and judg­ment is pure.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world.

He’d had this feel­ing before, beyond the numb­ness and the dull despair. The world shrink­ing down about a raw core of parsible entities.

Mean­ing then also comes from the sur­face like breathe, per­haps like spirit. There is no tra­di­tion to sus­tain it no secured future for it.

The boy sat tot­ter­ing. The man watched him that he not top­ple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoul­ders where he would sleep and he sat hold­ing him while he tou­sled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anoint­ing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve noth­ing else con­struct cer­e­monies out of the air and breathe upon them.

We may be tempted to trans­late this into a Chris­t­ian under­stand­ing of being ‘Spirit-led’ but even at Pen­te­cost the expe­ri­ence and birthing of the church did not emerge from nowhere. Events such as John’s rev­e­la­tion and the cre­ation account are weaved into what I think can appro­pri­ately be called a ‘depth’. We do claim that the past and the future are the eter­nally present in Christ. What does this mean though? It means that we exist in a body and a body has depth and tex­ture. Per­haps McCarthy’s book is as much a med­i­ta­tion on god­less­ness as any­thing else. God is removed and so all is flat, sur­face, good and evil.

(In ref­er­ence to why the boy acted kindly to a stranger)

Stranger: Maybe he believes in God.

Father: I don’t know what he believes in.

Stranger: He’ll get over it.

In the end the father dies and the boy is taken into the fam­ily of one of the ‘good guys’ and so the bare exis­tence above the sur­face of death con­tin­ues down the road.

Home and Exile in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

Published on April 27, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

The world is an inter­tex­ual place. It is more than that, but it is that. Texts run par­al­lel and inter­sect con­stantly. Some­times the texts are par­al­lel but run too far at a dis­tance and so we can­not see another’s com­mon pur­pose and direc­tion. Some­times the inter­sec­tion is a vio­lent and grand col­li­sion but it hap­pened in the past or too far in future and so we can­not learn from its warn­ing and wis­dom. But if you are lucky and atten­tive you can rel­ish in the uncon­ducted orches­tra of meanings.

Read­ing Han­nah Coul­ter by Wen­dell Berry after House­keep­ing and along­side Alain Epp Weaver’s States of Exile has been mean­ing­ful if try­ing expe­ri­ence. House­keep­ing was a story of place but more of absence and tran­siency. The nar­ra­tor is search­ing or reflect­ing on an absence of iden­tity in her youth. Fig­ures come and go mov­ing through life leav­ing lit­tle per­ma­nence. She only takes on what is present to her at a given time. The one house stands through­out the story by the end even that house is no more. The novel ends in dis­so­lu­tion. She is present and alive but not grounded. Han­nah Coul­ter is a story of placed­ness. Han­nah grew up not far from the farm where she spent over 60 years of her life. Through her life Han­nah is taught, formed, filled with knowl­edge, sense and skill. She is reflect­ing now on full life. This is not an ide­al­ized life or an easy life it is indeed a hard life hav­ing out­lived two hus­bands and watched her chil­dren move away (some fur­ther than oth­ers) from the life that she so dearly loves. Her life as we learn remains in many ways bounded to the earth around and under­neath her.

Add to this Epp Weaver’s States of Exile which is a the­o­log­i­cal reflec­tion on exile as an eth­i­cal and crit­i­cal posi­tion and as the lived real­ity of mod­ern day Pales­tini­ans. Epp Weaver moves us towards con­sid­er­ing a life that must always be con­sid­ered exilic so long as injus­tice remains in the land. An exilic pos­ture is liv­ing out­side those pow­ers that ground and sta­bi­lize life at the cost of oth­ers. As I read through Han­nah Coul­ter I began to won­der if Berry had allowed him­self to move too far towards a type of sen­ti­men­tal­ity that con­sciously or uncon­sciously grounded his past in other unjust pow­ers such as patri­archy, US impe­ri­al­ism, or ‘hard work’. I am still a lit­tle uneasy with Berry’s work though as a piece of fic­tion it is pow­er­ful reflec­tion of mem­ory and love.

Per­haps the under­ly­ing theme of ‘exile’ that runs through this novel is Hannah’s under­stand­ing of expec­ta­tion. She and her hus­band Nathan at times fall into the temp­ta­tion of expect­ing a par­tic­u­lar future. Han­nah is wise to dis­tin­guish hope from expec­ta­tions and to acknowl­edge that hope, if indeed it is hope, is always a good thing, nour­ish­ing and com­fort­ing. Expec­ta­tion attempts to con­tain truth and real­ity not allow­ing it to breathe and to bless as it chooses. Han­nah is always tempted with expec­ta­tion and is aware of its pres­ence as when her grand­child appears to take to farm­ing when none of her chil­dren had. In the end though, even as this comes at the end of a life, Han­nah knows that no mat­ter how much her life is grounded in place and soil she must stand on it and work it with open hands. “I want to leave here open­handed, with only the ancient bless­ing, “Good-bye. My love to you all.”

There is no rea­son to leave the place where we are stand­ing. There is no rea­son to stay. There is only the call to love and faith­ful­ness. This is exile. This is home.

On Beauty and Housekeeping

Published on April 21, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

I can say that Mar­i­lynne Robinson’s House­keep­ing is the most beau­ti­ful book I have read in some time. The pace is slow and as one reviewer com­mented this is also how the book should be read. This is a story of women and of the pres­ence of an absent man. The book begins with a grand­fa­ther, Edmund, who is never per­son­ally known by the nar­ra­tor, Ruth, a woman look­ing back on her child­hood. Edmund is known as a sim­ple man who longed to see the peaks of moun­tains and so he set out on the rail­road one day ask­ing to be directed towards the moun­tains. Per­haps as an act of cru­elty he was given a ticket and dropped off at the less the majes­tic hills of Fin­ger­bone Idaho. The train, his long­ing for beauty or wild­ness or both even­tu­ally becomes his grave. Edmund takes a job with the rail­road, gets mar­ried to a woman names Sylvia and has three daugh­ters Helen, Molly and Sylvia. One day as the train was pass­ing on the bridge over the town’s lake there was an acci­den­tal derail­ment and the train nosed into the lake sub­merg­ing itself com­pletely in a dark moon­less night. Through the night and at dawn and in the days to come there were left no traces of the train itself, it was not deter­mined where it finally came to rest. The next the day the lake froze over for the winter.

The lake is depicted as almost bot­tom­less cer­tainly deep and dark offer­ing no order to those who enter it. The book hardly gets brighter as the wid­owed woman Sylvia raises her chil­dren alone. The story moves to the daugh­ter Helen who has two girls of her own Ruth, the nar­ra­tor, and Lucille. Helen returns to her home after a long absence drops her two girls off at her mother’s place and then dri­ves a bor­rowed car off a cliff into the lake that held her father. Any hope, any pos­si­bil­ity of free­dom seems cower in the pres­ence of this lake.

So why would I say that this book is beau­ti­ful? Was there a redeem­ing end to the story? Not really. There remains through­out this story a deep and deep­en­ing sense of loss and con­fu­sion. And yet the nar­ra­tor assumes that the world is always more than it seems. There is always an abun­dance of mean­ing even if that mean­ing is dark and dis­as­trous. Win­dows, water and light are god-like in their abil­ity to tell you about life. So is this beauty? Is it pos­si­ble to redeem a sit­u­a­tion purely because it acknowl­edges the tran­scen­dence of the world, the great and ter­ri­ble pos­si­bil­i­ties of mean­ing? Or does this assume to much of beauty? Can beauty redeem? I don’t think so.

For all its great beauty House­keep­ing redeems no one and noth­ing. At one point I believed that beauty could save. If only we rec­og­nized the beauty of this world then we would live in the light of its sal­va­tion. But beauty is only ever beauty, that is all though it is not sim­ply super­fi­cial and façade. Beauty is in fact depth but it is only spa­tial not mean­ing­ful in itself. Beauty only shows where it is pos­si­ble to travel. Beauty can show us the length and bread of our real­ity and the pos­si­bil­ity of mean­ing. But being moved by a story or a song is only to be moved and one place is no bet­ter than another.

I was moved by House­keep­ing but I was not redeemed and I think that is how Mar­i­lynne Robin­son would have wanted it.

A Reflection on Rage and Praise

Published on April 2, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

Why do the nations rage?

Likely a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion for the psalmist but I want to let that ques­tion stand for a moment. I can clearly remem­ber a time when I was at my grandma’s apart­ment prob­a­bly in junior high or younger. A few of my rel­a­tives were gath­ered watch­ing TV. As we flipped through chan­nels we came across Much Music or MTV and there was a music video for some metal band like Slayer. It was heavy, hard music and the video was of a large group of peo­ple in a cage and they were rag­ing within it; shak­ing, rock­ing the cage as the music played. I can remem­ber my uncle say­ing some­thing like, “See the rebel­lion of this gen­er­a­tion.” What he did not do was ask why were they rag­ing, against what or who were they rag­ing? This is not a ques­tion to jus­tify actions because there is lit­tle we can do well when gripped by anger but the ques­tion should give us pause and help us to think of the inter­nal and exter­nal envi­ron­ment that nur­tures anger.

John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath can be read at least in part as a med­i­ta­tion on the ori­gins and com­plex­i­ties of anger. The story begins in Okla­homa at the start of the Great Depres­sion. The Joad fam­ily attempts to hold on to their farm but as con­di­tions worsen they become allured to the promise of land and work in Cal­i­for­nia. As they travel across the Amer­i­can south­west towards Cal­i­for­nia they begin to see how deep and wide­spread the hard­ships are for other Amer­i­cans. Then as they draw closer to the promised land of Cal­i­for­nia some of the fam­ily mem­bers begin to won­der whether there will be enough work for every­one. And sure enough arriv­ing in Cal­i­for­nia they are greeted by mul­ti­tudes, waves of other fam­i­lies who were also hop­ing for work and a new life. Stein­beck presents the mount­ing des­per­a­tion of those who are scram­bling for any type of work they can find. He describes the wealthy farms and busi­nesses prof­it­ing off of these peo­ple. He paints a pic­ture of the hos­til­ity that the locals showed towards these for­eign­ers who threaten to take their jobs. These migrant peo­ple were pressed on all sides. The locals fought the migrants out of fear and anger for los­ing what lit­tle they had. The migrants fought to under bid each other to secure what lit­tle work there was. Stein­beck writes,

“The roads were crowded with men rav­en­ous for work, mur­der­ous for work. And the com­pa­nies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it. The fields were fruit­ful, and starv­ing men moved on the roads.… The great com­pa­nies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for black­lists, for drilling. On the high­ways the peo­ple moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.”

But anger is not the final word in Steinbeck’s vision. Like the in the psalms rage is not given infi­nite space to con­sume and destroy. Rage instead is released into the con­fines of liturgy. And within this space it is trans­formed. This is the sort of trans­for­ma­tion that Tom Joad expe­ri­ences in The Grapes of Wrath. The family’s and indeed the country’s sit­u­a­tion spi­rals down­ward through­out the novel. Ten­sions and anger increase as work and pay decrease. The Joad family’s friend Casy, an old preacher, who trav­elled with them started to orga­nize some work­ers to try and strike so that they can hold out for a live­able wage. Farm own­ers caught wind of this and begin to hunt those orga­niz­ing strikes. One night Tom finds Casy who is try­ing lead a group of migrant work­ers in a strike.

A group of men come and sur­round them and even­tu­ally kill Casy. Tom losses con­trol of him­self becomes enraged and kills one of those men in return. The pure real­ity of his anger that cul­mi­nated in that moment lashed out in death against that man. In fear of the trou­ble that he would bring to his fam­ily Tom goes into hid­ing. His fam­ily is still able to bring him food but he no longer inter­acts with the out­side world, the world struc­tured in anger and vio­lence. Tom’s hid­ing spot acts like a monk’s cell as he is forced into a type of reflec­tive patience think­ing about what is going on around him. As he says later to his mother, “you get thinkin’ a lot when you ain’t movin’ aourn.”

Towards the end of the book Tom’s mother brings him some food and she is invited into his small den. Tom begins to artic­u­late to her a vision of how the peo­ple could restore their qual­ity of life and work together again. Tom’s mother warns him that this will be dan­ger­ous and he might end up like Casy did. Tom does not claim to know all the details of what should unfold but knows that his life needs to be offered in the ser­vice of another order. The words and actions of the unortho­dox preacher Casy and the cir­cum­stances of the world around him began to form a type of litany in the den where he stayed.

He knew that his life was now in the order of the peo­ple not of power. His anger was trans­formed into liturgy, a higher order­ing. In the cli­max of the con­ver­sa­tion Tom’s mother is con­cerned about him going off on his own. She asks how she will know whether he is okay or not, alive or dead. Tom laughs uneasily and says,

“Well, maybe its like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big on – an’ then – ” Then what, Tom’s mother asks. “Then it don’ mat­ter. Then I’ll be aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where – wher­ever you look. Wher­ever they’s a fight so hun­gry peo­ple can eat, I’ll be there. Wher­ever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be the way guys yell when they’re mad an – I’ll be the way kids laugh when they’re hun­gry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.”

Tom’s anger was trans­formed so that his life now became a part of a new order. This is the vision of Psalm 2. There is an anointed one of God, a child of God, already enthroned in this new world. This King­dom is achieved not through the imma­ture or vio­lent out­burst of anger but through enter­ing into com­mu­nion with God and neighbour.

So why do the nations rage? We do we rage? Our anger can lead us to con­trol and vio­lence. Instead, in our anger we should not sin. Like Tom may we find our­selves drawn or even forced out­side the world that fuels our anger so that in patience God would trans­form us to be love in the midst of those things we once hated. That we might be peace in the midst of all that rages. That the anointed one of God would be rule in our hearts and to the end of the earth.