The sacrificial Joker
Image from Steve Robinson
Also this:
This hand learned to print, color inside the lines, bathe a dead man, draw outside the lines, build houses, churches, high-rise offices and coffins, write cursive, wipe a tear, change the diapers of a child and a parent, pour a beer (both into a glass and down the drain), dig a grave, knead a loaf of bread dough, type a Master’s thesis, a blog post and a book manuscript, put a Band-aid on a boo-boo, cook for dozens and for one, turn a page, pull a trigger, bait a hook, clean a toilet, pet a mean dog, sew a button, point in the wrong direction, flip off an idiot, shake hands, beat an adversary, dress a bishop, caress a beloved, anoint the dead, wave goodbye, build a bobber motorcycle and twist its throttle, make a bar-chord and play the blues, torque a bolt, snap a picture, cleanse a chalice, handle a snake, slap my forehead, hang on too long and let go too soon….
“Whatsoever thine hand shall find to do, do with all thy might…” Ecclesiastes 9:10, and I have done so.
And there’s much more from Robinson’s “Free Pithless Thought.” That was a lovely gift in the inbox this morning. I’m going to feel like a glutton reading anything else today.
Flipping through Berry’s A Timbered Choir. I do think you can see the love and even the cheerfulness that Andrew Peterson has seen in Berry’s personality and hospitality.
Russel Moore’s tribute to Wendell Berry here is lovely.
I was at a medical conference at some mega church — and I do mean mega — in Louisville 6 or 7 years ago. This church had an enormous lobby, complete with its own giant escalator and substantial bookstore. I remember one of lecturers (half?) joking that if you wanted to know what was wrong with the church today, just go down to the bookstore in the lobby. “One of the best living writers lives 50 miles from here and there isn’t one of his books on the shelves.” He added that he’d asked the people who ran it about Wendell Berry. They said they’d never heard of him.
Conversations stopper of the day:
“Have you seen that trend on TickTock…?”
Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!
Looking forward to adding We Have Ceased to See the Purpose to the bookshelf.
Anne Fadiman:
In San Diego, the manager of an electronics plant was so enthusiastic about one Hmong assembly worker that he tried to promote him to supervisor. The man quit, ashamed to accept a job that would place him above his Hmong coworkers.
For the many Hmong who live in high-unemployment areas, questions of advancement are often moot. They have no jobs at all. This is the reason the Hmong are routinely called this country’s “least successful refugees.” It is worth noting that the standard American tests of success that they have flunked are almost exclusively economic. If one applied social indices instead—such as rates of crime, child abuse, illegitimacy, and divorce—the Hmong would probably score better than most refugee groups (and also better than most Americans), but those are not the forms of success to which our culture assigns its highest priority. Instead, we have trained the spotlight on our best-loved index of failure, the welfare rolls.
Life is not the Olympics…
David Whyte:
I often think that one of the great qualities that’s necessary for every human being, besides a generous and attentive heart and mind, is a sense of self-compassion for the way that you’re made in particular. That you wouldn’t lose faith, no matter what, in your own difficulties and awkwardnesses. And that some of your own awkward ways of being in the world are actually necessary to your final confrontation with existence. And that you couldn’t get there without somehow being bereft in certain ways, by having certain failings, that those failings are actually a core part of our experience of the numinous.
I do think that we diminish ourselves with many of the images that we hold for success in life so that we feel as if in order to get to any kind of extraordinary experience in life we have to cross the finishing line like some Olympic athlete. But I do believe that there are many experiences in life, many extraordinary edges that you can only actually crawl into on your hands and knees. That part of the experience of the final meeting would be missing if you did not actually follow the whole vulnerable contour of your own imperfect belonging into the fullness of the experience.
Jack and Jerry • This had all the makings of a great slapstick comedy routine. And this is after Jack chased him halfway around the pole several times in each direction.
