Naked or Nekked?

One thing I enjoy about reading the Bible is how the same old things can be revolutionary. I have been looking at the creation narrative in the book of Genesis lately. It is something I kind of take for granted. You know everything that is written there so you tend to avoid reading it but when you do read it, you find that you are being spoken to, being shaped. Don Miller once wrote about the whole “naked and not ashamed” idea and he said that in a perfect system we would be so saturated with awareness of God that we would be completely unaware of ourselves. I was thinking about that when I read the most incredible verse when God says to Adam,


“Who told you that you were naked?”

So, I'm asking the same question. Who told you that you had to be ashamed? Who told you to hide from God? Who is telling you to run away, cover your tracks and put on a mask? I hope it isn't me.

I think that it is important to think of things in these terms. Sometimes we overlook these one liners in scripture. Like God just decided to include some dialogue in the Bible to make it more readable. But this question resounds through scripture. You can almost here Jesus saying this very line to Nicodemus or the Samaritan woman at the well.

So think about who is telling you that you are naked...stop listening to them.

A co-worker from the South once told me that there is a difference between naked and nekked; naked is when you ain't got no clothes on, nekked is when you ain't got no clothes on and you're up to something.

ART

There is a coffee house in Charlottesville where they feature local art on their walls. When I was there for a long weekend I discovered a guy named Mike Clark whose paintings were displayed so, every morning I would stop there and have a coffee and look at his work. They really weren't paintings but rather bas-relief images. That means he takes a photograph and then cuts part out of it to make a stencil. He puts the stencil on a panel and then uses drywall joint compound to fill in the stencil. It's really a unique medium, but here's what I liked the most about Mikes art; he chooses old junk and trash as the subject for his pictures. This is what he says on his website,

"In my paintings, I seek to capture the beauty in things that are marginal,abandoned, ruined. To me, traces of forgotten industries, such as old buildings, smokestacks, street signs, and pre-modern machinery, are inherently striking and physical, markers to the overlooked realities of daily life." -Mike Clark

I found it interesting because people usually associate art with the beautiful, I mean like nature or a woman, things that are already beautiful. In a way, if you think about it, it's kind of like cheating. Anyone with a little talent can reproduce the natural beauty of a flower or a landscape or a woman holding a baby. It takes considerable effort to release the hidden beauty from that which we have discarded. Mike has effectively redeemed that which has been marginalized by society.

So, when we look for beauty in our contextual lives perhaps we should look deeper. Transfixed by this conundrum, a seeming paradox; the ugly becomes lovely, I inquired about the art but, alas, it was quite beyond my means.

Closed System

My friend, the Asian Imports Attorney, once said that the system of human rights is a closed system. Meaning, I can’t ratchet up my liberties without ratcheting down someone else’s. An interesting concept, I think it applies not just to human rights but to many aspects of life.

As an ugly American I have been raised to think that I have to right to acquire comfort in life by working hard. We teach this concept to our children and it is the hallmark of a functional society that it produces what we call “productive members” of that society; people who have jobs, pay taxes vote and report for jury duty. In an open system as long as you follow the rules you can consume as much liberty as you choose and have nothing but a positive effect on the world. Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness.

Nothing wrong with that. But what if we look at things differently. What if there wasn't an infinite supply of goodwill, comfort and happiness in the world. If it is a "closed system" then nothing is added or taken away, nothing is created or destroyed. Things are merely moved around. What if in order for me to be rich someone else has to be poor. What if in order for me to be right you have to be wrong. For me to be beautiful you must be ugly, for me to be comfortable you have to be tortured, for me to be happy you have to be hopeless, for me to feel safe and secure you have to be scared shitless.

I recently received an email containing this quote, “…the government cannot give anything to anyone -- that they have not first taken away from someone else.” This is, of course, true and not isolated to governmental affairs. Think about it the other way round also. It is impossible for the US to increase the standard of living of the countries around us unless we are willing to lower our standard of living. We just need to figure out if that is worth doing.


Now think locally. Can I increase the importance of a child or a neighbor or a coworker without decreasing my own self-importance?

Now if I examine myself and my culture and compare my existence to the existence of most I find that if this closed system theory is not true then it eerily describes what is true.

Where the rubber meets the road.

Anyone can take a kid up to a mountain top, but it’s what he does in the valley that counts.
I’ve been struggling with fatherhood lately. Truth be told I’m just not as good at it as I had always imagined I was.

I remember being on a Men’s Retreat with church and a guy was telling us that we should make a timeline for our lives, kind of like we were going to write a story and the story would start with, “On a cold Baltimore morning in March Illustrious Brendar was born and subsequently dropped by the attending Obstetrician.” From there we would go through various mile markers of our lives; things that stood out for any reason, good or bad. Most people used mountaintop experiences and great tragedies in their lives for these mile markers. We had long pieces of paper on which to lay out the unfolding stories of life and were supposed to project into the future as so many magic-marker wielding prophets.

What I found interesting, as a few bold men shared their story boards with the group, wasn’t the future projections but the past. Most men had more mountain top mile markers than valley mile markers, but it became clear to me that these men were forged into who they were by what they did in the valley.

One man was on the crew of an airplane in WWII and, as he put it, “We got shot up, caught on fire and had to ditch her in the Pacific.” He did not want to elaborate on this event but was obviously moved by it. All he would say was, “We got through it…most of us.” If you added up all of his achievements of life, his enduring marriage, his wonderful family, his success at work, nothing had as profound an impact on his life that his experience that day in the drink.
At the time, the exercise seemed corny but looking back I’ve learned from it. A friend recently told me that parenting is often more about enduring than enjoying. This might mean walking through the valley with a child instead of coaching them from the high ground. I’m sure that when my kids and I look back on our lives together we will want to focus on the mountain tops. Those will be highlighted on our story board, but when it comes to character and who we are as people, it’s slogging through the dark valleys of life and not giving up on each other that has made us who we are. And we will be able to say, “We got through it…most of us.”

odd shoe

Uncle Gary was the uncle who was always on some kind of a kick. He would easily get caught up in the excitement of something new. I'm thinking about him because of a story I told my wife's family about fads. I reminisced about one Christmas when Uncle Gary had sent my father a pair of running shoes. Now this was back in the seventies and no one whore running shoes. they were very strange looking with their nylon and suede. The rubber from the sole was turned up at the toe and the heel to give the illusion that you could actually use more of you foot than was practical if you were a "runner". People didn't run back then unless they were being chased. Nobody thought about health or exercise very much. But Uncle Gary was in to it and my father announced that he was now (by virtue of the shoes alone) a "runner". I recall a total of two trips to Woodlawn High School track, my father in his ridiculously small shorts and t-shirt and new running shoes, the three kids in their toughskins and jack parcel's. My father lumbered around the track and we followed amazed at his speed and form. It seemed like it took an eternity but we finally made it around the track once and retired to Hersch's Tavern. Dad at the bar with a beer and his bar-fly friends , us at a table with tragically small glasses of Coca-cola with a cherry floating in it.

Have you seen this chicken?

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
-C. S. Lewis
I was pondering some writings of Clives Staples Lewis while my kids were watching Wallace and Grommit and it all resulted in a strange blog...

I believe in beauty. Beauty helps us link what is ideal with what is real. In our culture, beauty has been reduced to glamour, and we settle for it. I believe that there is a deep need in our lives to identify with beauty. In our culture there is a tendency to equate identity with biography; you are what has happened to you. But I don’t believe that is who we are. I believe there is a place within the soul where neither time nor space nor flesh nor no created thing can touch. There is a place with in each of us where no one has ever gotten to us; where we are undamaged; there is a seamless sureness and a natural confidence and tranquility. This is who we are and it is the intension of an active spirit to take us, through imagination and creativity, to this place of spiritual beauty as frequently as possible.

Ambition amoung the Religious

Ambitious people annoy me. I allow things to annoy me too much. I have noticed a trend among some of my Christian friends. It is a trend in the religious community at large and perhaps my Christian friends are merely victims of it. To me, the concept looks like this;

a.) Christianity is awesome.

b.) People want awesome stuff.

c.) People pay cash for the stuff they want.

d.) I should be able to leverage "a + b = c" to my advantage.

The ambitious are always repackaging things and preying on the fact that the future is unknown and the unknown scares the hell out of normal people. The Christianity that was portrayed by Jesus Christ was not sellable, it consisted of the stuff everyone knows they need but no one will do. Solitude, service, silence and selflessness are hard sells.

Good luck my Christian friends.