The Van

There is some question as to whether or not I'll get home tomorrow.  Not much, mind you, but enough that I find myself a little unsettled.  

Last night, after I warmed up our old Honda van to schlep the family to a nearby pizzeria, I was unpleasantly surprised when...goaded to movement...it sputtered into silence.  Sure, the temperature was barely fifteen Fahrenheit, but it had started without a hitch, and it'd warmed up for ten minutes with no problem.  I'd expected to slither it out through the eight inches of wind-driven snow without too much difficulty.

That was not, however, what the Fates had in mind.  The idiot lights, suddenly all illumined.  A warning on the primitive LCD informed all who cared that the charging system had failed.  The lights dimmed.  The engine pulsed and surged and waned, then went cold.  The van was kaput.  It would not restart.

It was, as intuition and a little frantic dabbling through Reddit revealed, the alternator.  Almost without a doubt.

The thwarted family recoalesced into three smaller vehicles, and together we made our way to an Uno's dinner.  But my mind was on the van, and the uncertain return to Virginia.   My thoughts remained there throughout the night, as my sleep was repeatedly disturbed by fretfulness.  Where would it be repaired?  And could the repair be accomplished in time to get me back for worship on Sunday?  None of these things were known, when I went to sleep last night, so Lethe was miserly with her ministrations.

But further, there was my peculiar care for the van itself.  Not for its use.  For what it is.  

We have had that van for thirteen years.  It has been, for a quarter of my middle-aged life, a perfect and practical thing.  It's been a shared family space, not a home but very much homely.  I have taught children to drive in that van.  Eager teen canoodling has happened in that van, because, yes, my sons, I know why those rear seats were down in the morning.  It has carried us all, together, to vacations and graduations, to funerals and marriages, to weeping and joy, all in humble comfort.  It's a liminal space, a travelling space, a Maker of the Ways, in an Esu Ellegua/Soichiro Honda sort of way.  

We've been sinking money into it lately, more and more as the years have progressed.  System after system has failed, five figures worth in the last twelve months.  It is a dying Honda in winter.  My Scots blood knows that to continue this is madness.

Part of me...probably the Irish part...wants to hold onto it forever, like I'm Cubano and it's a '57 Chevy.  But it's fading, and unreliable, and practical me struggles to justify such a romantic absurdity.   It may be time, I say, and my wife...never one to care about my concupiscent lust for novel wheeled and motorized things...agrees.

It is doomed.

"I can see the van recoiling in terror," said my older son, who drove it to prom, and who was moved in and out of college with it many a time.  "'No, surely, surely you won't, not after all these years,' it cries."

I too personify this object.   It has the heft of time and care.  I allow it to be imbued with my deep fatherly male pleasure in its function, in providing both utility and comfort and a sense that all is well, that all is safe, and that all are cared for.  It is now The Van.  We have named it.

Yet I remember the van that was The Van before it.  A machine that held that name, that carried tiny little ones in carseats, that carried beloved family that are now ancestors, and that schlepped mulch and brick and appliances. 

And though my midlife cries out in protest against it, surely and convertible yearnings be damned, there will be a van that follows the Van.

That will, in time, become the Van.  As I hope, someday, not to be the Dad, or my wife the Mom.  That a small voice will name another with our name, and that will be a good thing.  

Assuming, of course, that the country garage that holds our van now delivers it, functioning, as expected.

Bad Family Businesses

Having a family business can be a good thing.

Like, say, the humble hole-in-the-wall strip mall Chinese restaurant my own family has been ordering from for nearly two decades.  The food is classic American Takeout Chinese, cheap and abundant and generically tasty.  We've been their regular customers as management has passed among and between members of an extended Chinese family over those years.  We've watched extended family arrive from China, folded into community through the business.  We've watched the children of the family grow up, first diligently doing homework in the restaurant while their parents worked, and then helping with the business while juggling school and life.

Family farms and restaurants and businesses of almost all ilks can be a cross-generational blessing.  The bonds of blood and trust that unite extended families can add to the sense of purpose that rises from a shared labor.

But there are some lines of work that lend themselves poorly to that connection, where the expectations that rule family life and expectation clash with the reality of the vocation.

Pastoring, for pointed example.

Just because your Daddy was a preacher doesn't mean that you are, kid.  Call is a fiercely particular thing, and while it can run in your blood, it operates on a different plane from the logics of lineage.  When it becomes the family business, faith often goes awry, becoming less about being a servant of the divine encounter and more about social position and remuneration.

Because that works socially...human beings get attached to a name, to the story of a brand...it too easily loses authenticity, as the self-serving necessities of nepotism take precedence over all other considerations.  In churches, it creates a willingness to raise up too many of Eli's sons, too many of Samuel's sons, those who see the power that comes from that position, and who are eager to milk unearned social authority for their own benefit.

Church becomes a place of falseness, of self-serving plunder and profit.  But there's a place where social power plays even more freely.

Politics, if one believes in republican virtues, is another place where familial expectations are poorly applied.  I've always looked a wee bit askance at the various political dynasties that have arisen over the course of the short history of our republic, because dynastic thinking is antithetical to constitutional principles.

It's difficult to avoid, because political systems are systems of relationship and social influence.  Those connections inhere within family networks, in ways that must be warily watched. 

The more deeply a single family weaves its name and its brand into the political life of a constitutional democracy, the more danger there is that we will slide back into a functional monarchism.  I mean, sure, it was romantic and young back in the day, but Camelot wasn't the capital of a republic, eh?  

When we see leaders promoting family members to positions of power, approaching both party and nation as if they were the family business?  It's a red flag for a republic, a warning light on the dashboard of democracy, an alarm ringing in the ears, no matter what the party.

Dad's Garden

When my family returned to the States from London back in 1982, my father planted a garden.  

A five-by-ten patch of grass on the southeastern side of our back yard was dug up, soil amendments added, and every year in the late spring, he'd set tomato seedlings into the earth.  Better Boys, generally speaking, because they were the perfect complement to BLTs and burgers.

Dad was a single generation removed from actual farming-stock, as my paternal grandfather grew up on several hundred acres of family farm in upstate New York.  Hops were the primary yield of the family farm just outside of the little village of Chuckery Corners, but there we Williams grew everything, as most Americans once did.  

Connecting with the soil was a thing for Dad.  Not as important as music and performance, but still something that gave a sense of heritage.  It was part of his story.

Every summer from middle school onward, the tomatoes at home were fresh picked.  Rows were set out on our screened-in porch to sun-redden to ripeness, safe from the depredations of deer and squirrels and the occasional enterprising turtle.

As the years progressed, the tomatoes kept coming.  Eventually, gardening got harder.  Dad's knees started to go.  Then his hip.  Then, bit by bit, his heart.  By the time he was in congestive heart failure, the garden was too much for him.  My brother and I pitched in to help keep it going, and as the CHF progressed, we managed to keep a few tomatoes coming.  Dad took pleasure knowing they were there, as my brother tended the plants during the summers he spent caring for my folks.

When Dad died early last fall after a hard season, the garden sat fallow. With spring coming on, Mom asked that I pull the fence I'd put in a few years back, and take up the pavers that once sat between rows of plants.

So this last week, I did.  The fence, gone.  The paving stones, dug from earth. 

What had been a garden is now returned to grass.

The pavers, I took for my own gardens. 

They took their place in my eight by eight raised beds, where they will provide stepping stones between tomatoes and garlic and greenbeans, between the garden that is present and the garden that has passed.

Adoption, Discrimination and Conscience

As the Virginia State government moved vigorously to the right following the mid-term elections, it is perhaps no surprise that it has chosen to move aggressively.  For years, it was constrained by the counterbalancing force of a moderate Democrat in the State House, or a moderate majority in the Senate.

This is no longer the case.  Absent that counterweight, things in Richmond have gone precisely the way you'd expect.  Folks on the right are releasing all that pent-up paleoconservative tension, as drunk with freedom as the child of helicopter parents in those first few blurry weeks of college.   And Lord have mercy, have they gone on a legislative bender.

They're pitching out new laws right and left.  Or right and further right, to be more accurate.

They would permit multiple simultaneous handgun purchases, much to the great delight of our friends in the Zetas drug cartel.   They would mandate medically unnecessary ultrasounds for any woman considering an abortion, because health care mandates are what American Conservatism is all about.

And now, there's a bill...likely to pass...that would explicitly allow private faith-based adoption services agencies to refuse to work with couples who don't meet the standards of their faith tradition.  This would include agencies who receive funding from the state.

This is being described as a bill that would protect the consciences of faith-based providers, and is generally understood as being a Trojan Horse for keeping children away from gay couples.  If you believe that homosexuality is inherently sinful, or so the not-really-spoken argument goes, then you shouldn't be required to place children with same-sex couples.  That is, rationalizations about preserving freedom notwithstanding, the sole, entire, and only purpose of this bill.

Understand that this has nothing to do with protecting the child from abuse or neglect.  Under federal law, adoption agencies are required to do significant background checks on parents and individuals who seek to adoption a child.  The effect of this bill is to permit discrimination against individuals whose beliefs do not mesh with the agency.  Federal law forbids racial discrimination in adoption, but is silent on the subject of religious discrimination.

Having known gay couples who have adopted kids, and who are wonderful parents, this bill bothers the bejabbers out of me on that level.  It is woefully wrong on that front.  But my issues with it go deeper.

Sure, it's meant to be anti-gay, but in being coy about it and couching itself in what it imagines is the language of freedom, it's more than that.  Reading the text of the bill as written, it is also potentially anti-Muslim.  Or antisemitic.  Or anti-mainline Protestant.  Or anti-atheist.  Or anti-Christian.  

Let's imagine for a moment that the state-licensed and funded agency in question is run by a literalist Christian group.  As far as they are concerned, failure to believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God is a sure path to Aitch-EE-Double-Toothpicks.  

Now imagine for a moment that a Bible-believing woman is married to a Christian-ish man who's not quite so sure about what he believes, and they find a child through this group.  The state-funded agency in question would now be perfectly within its legal rights to stop the adoption process mid-cycle if they feel that such a family might not raise a child in keeping with its values.  "It's your husband.  We just can't risk little Tyler going to hell, Ma'am."  

Again, it's not that they'd be bad parents.  Just that they'd be the wrong sort of people.  What of a conservative Catholic agency that receives state funds and licensing?  Could such a group refuse a child to a nondenominational couple on the basic of their beliefs?  Under this law, the answer is yes.  

Given that conscience, at its heart, means "knowing together," the internalization of a shared ethos, does such a bill really represent conscience across the entirety of the state?  Does it represent our shared statewide understanding of what is in the best interest of children?  Does it even represent what the Apostle Paul would have described as "doing what is right in the eyes of all?" 

No.  The answer to those rhetorical questions is of course not.   But that's the way Richmond rolls these days.

Family Values and DRM

Over the last few days, as I've downloaded music using the handful of iTunes gift cards that were left over from Christmas, Hanukkah, and my birthday, I've found myself wondering something.

I enjoy music, of all kinds.  But something else I enjoy is sharing said music with my kids.  Their nanos and Touches are filled with music that belongs to me.   I've purchased it, and if it is cool/appropriate, shared it with them.  If I encounter something that I appreciate, I want to pass appreciation for that thing to my kids.  When I download the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack for my own listening pleasure, it immediately populates their players.   It's the fun part of parenting teens and tweens, the part that involves you rocking out together in the van while on the way to drums/swimming/tutoring.

They do the same thing in return, connecting Dad with those things that the younglings are thinking and/or watching.  How else would I have learned of Nyancat, or watched the Epic Rap Battles of History?

Yet I am aware, as my older son grows even taller and high school looms on the horizon, that my boys are growing up.  Soon, Lord willing, they'll be leaving the nest.  That's just how life goes.

And when they do, what then happens to my ability to share with them?   I have no intent of stopping, of course.  But if most of the music is on the family account...hmmm.  I suppose, as things go to Cloud, that they could just continue to snag what they want from wherever they may end up.   This was less of an issue back when I was a lad, and the physical media I owned was the physical media I owned.  It was utterly distinct, physically different, from the collection of music that still rests on silent vinyl in my parent's house.

Everything I own also belongs to my children, and to the grandchildren that will eventually hopefully come.  And to their children, to the thousandth generation, as they say.  But as we go a generation deep into the digital era, I find myself wondering whether DRM and copyright will be used by corporations to trump genetics and inheritance.

I wonder if we'll reach a point where that becomes an issue, when corporations will look at fathers and sons who share a love for the same music, and attempt to prevent us from sharing music and joy across generations.  Will I be able to pass music to my grandchildren, the flesh of my flesh?  Will I be able to have them access my library, without fearing that the RIAA will come knocking at my door, lawyers snarling?

Interesting times, as they say.

For Every Thing, There is A Season

Yesterday evening, I did something I haven't done in years.  I went camping. 

As Saturdays and particularly Sundays aren't really...ah...good days for me, I've managed to miss every single cub scouting camping trip my boys have taken.  The wife has taken 'em instead.  She always comes back with her hair slightly mussed and smelling of woodsmoke and marshmallows.  It's a very appealing scent.  If you really wanted to make a perfume that drew the interest of men, that might be a good place to start.

Last month, though, with the last camping trip of the little guy's season coming up, he began asking if I could go. 

I hemmed and hawed.  Things are challenging at the church right now.  My session usually meets on the second Sunday of the month, and we've got some pretty serious ecclesiastical heavy lifting to do.  And...

And...

And my youngest son, on one of the last camping trips he's may take as a scout, was asking me to go along.  "I just want a chance to hang out with you, Dad," said he, meltingly.  

For a moment, that little demonic meme that misapplies Scripture in ways that make male pastors crappy, distant fathers tried hitting me with something about hating family and even life itself.  But I batted it down.  Most of that is just ego and self-importance, masquerading as spirituality.  Nothing was happening today at church that couldn't be rescheduled, or handled perfectly capably by someone else.  The life of your children, on the other hand, has an unfortunate tendency to pass by.  Just once.  Miss it, and it won't be back.

So I handed some things off to folks, rescheduled others, and left for the mountains with my boy.  We came back just a few hours ago, sleepy and s'more-sated and smelling of woodsmoke.  I love that smell.

Call, Family, and Livelihood

In a pronouncement last week responding to calls for Catholicism to reconsider the whole No-Pastoral-Nuptials thing, Pope Benedict once again affirmed the concept of priestly celibacy. With some other critics of mandated celibacy, I tend to think that there are few human beings who are able to healthily still the sexual side of their identity. There are some, of course, folks for whom a sense of God is so strong that it dims the need for physical intimacy with another human being. But the significant majority of humankind just can't do that. We ain't wired for it.

With that as a standard, it becomes very difficult to fill organizational slots with souls who are really and truly disengaged from the flesh, rather than those who: 1) suppress it and then succumb, as did the aptly named Father Cutie or; 2) are sexually dysfunctional, as evidenced by the agonizing mess of clergy pedophilia that has wracked the Catholic church for the last decade.

Yet oddly enough, I find it difficult to reject the ideal of celibacy completely, mostly because I can see the challenges that have come on the Protestant flip side. When pastors have spouses and families and mortgages and car payments and orthodontia to consider, ministry becomes livelihood. It's the thing you do that pays the bills, which means it has a transactional element. That means economics become a factor in call. With higher ed debt and the demands of providing for family, suddenly it's not just about the dynamics of Christ and community. You're looking to insure that you're sufficiently pee-ay-eye-dee, and fretting about salary equity, and always looking over your shoulder for that next "call" that just so happens to come with a bigger congregation and a fatter paycheck and a car allowance sufficient to get a very slightly nicer car.

That leavens call with material considerations, and can lead folks to stick around in ministries that pay the bills when they really and truly should be elsewhere. It can turn pay into a sign of spiritual attainment, as every paycheck inflates the ego of the Big Parking Lot pastor. It can also turn pay into an issue of contention, a bone to fight over as a pastor and/or their spouse stresses about the well-being of the family.

Paul wasn't just being a repressive and/or repressed freak when he commended celibacy. He knew human nature, and just how easy it is for us to put personal material concerns above those of the church.

Discerning Light

Three readings seem to be mingling in my frontal lobe today.

The first was in an obit. It included a description of the testimony of Susan Atkins. Ms. Atkins died of brain cancer this week after spending a lifetime in prison for several particularly gruesome and pointless murders back in the 1960s. She was one of the followers of Charles Manson, who spurred his disciples into drug-fueled madness. Though Ms. Atkins appears to have truly reformed in prison, her quotes from the trial about murdering an eight-month pregnant actress were striking. She showed absolutely no remorse whatsoever. At trial, she indicated she "...felt no guilt for what I've done. It was right then and I still believe it was right." When pressed how killing another human being...two, really...could possibly be "right," she said: "How can it not be right when it's done with love?"

Clearly, this was the statement of someone utterly disconnected from the reality of love. The statement is completely incoherent. It is insane.

In reading through a portion of John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion last night, I found his assertions about the truth and goodness of the Bible. To the rhetorical question posed about the truth of the Bible's teachings, Calvin responds:

Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of it's own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.

It does, of course. What is good in Scripture is radiantly good, self-evidently good. The central truths that the great narrative of the Bible...the Torah, prophets, and writings, the gospels and epistles..convey can be clearly discerned. That doesn't mean that we always read it correctly. We like to read in our own biases, to see our prejudices and presuppositions instead of what is intended, or to assume a text says one thing when it clearly says another. But using the Bible correctly yields good fruit.

That means not saying evil is good, and not saying good is evil. We have, in the core teaching of the Christian tradition, pretty solid idea of what is good. When we encounter things that clearly violate the intent of Christ's teachings, we are obligated to resist them. Embracing that which is in opposition to the ethic of love for God and neighbor that defines the Way is simply not acceptable.

That includes where that darkness is found in Scripture. Yesterday I read again the story of the "divinely appointed" massacre of the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15:2-3. I've had many a conversation with Bible-believing folk in which they've insisted...with complete earnestness...that there is no tension at all between Christ's insistence that we love our enemies and the butchery of unarmed women and children. It's all God's Word! It must be a manifestation of God's love!

But that, like the delusions of Ms. Atkins, is not real. It is not coherent. It is not sane.

It is also, rather notably, not Christian faith.