Death and Resurrection for Toddlers

The kid only ever wants to read two stories in his Bible: the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ. I am awfully reluctant to overspiritualize something like this, and so, I believe the reasons include the following:

The crown of thorns. It was February or March when he strayed from the playground into some flower beds and ended up tripping. His face landed on a rose bush and the thorns left several fairly deep scratches on his cheek that started bleeding right away. It hurt. We cleaned him up at home, which stung in its own right, and finished with a few band aids. We read the story by chance the next night, and when the crown was mentioned he immediately interrupted: "Thorns? Thorns? Hurt my cheek! Ouch!" as he pointed to the illustration.

Boo Boos. Relatedly, there's a picture of Jesus with a few "boo boos," and each time without fail it's, "Lotsa boo boos! Put a band aid on it! Needa band aid!"

The soldiers. He calls them "shoulders." What boy doesn't like them? Especially when they're the ones that get to roll the rock. Which brings us to the next point.

The big rock being rolled. The kid loves rocks. And this is a big one. And it gets rolled twice. And maybe it's the words "rock and roll" that help too, because he has "rock and roll" pajamas that he loves. The other day we went to hear a guy at the library playing some blues music in English. The kid was soaking it up, probably because it's the first he's heard English in public for quite some time. He was listening to the lyrics really intently and repeating any familiar word he could detect. When he heard the guy sing, "like a rolling stone" he got really excited and exclaimed, "Rolling stone?!? Like Jesus?!? Rolling the big stone away?!?"

Mary running and jumping. Each day we ask him, "What did you do at school today?" Like a nonchalant teenager who gives a trite answer just to blow off his parents, each day he has the same response, "Ummm...running...and jumping." The kid loves to run and jump, apparently. And apparently so did Mary after she found out Jesus had risen from the dead.

Lately he's been into asking if various people "like" things, like his own little survey or something. When he got a new toy piano, he went on, "I like pianos. You like pianos? Mama likes pianos? Uncle Wes likes pianos?" So tonight, when I tried explaining that Jesus carried his cross and died because loves us, he continued the train of thought, "Jesus loves you? Jesus loves Mama? Jesus loves Banjo?"

Then finally, his ears perked at a different part of the story, where it says Jesus cries out to his "Papa." He interrupted: "His papa? Nate his papa? Nate? Like you, papa?"

Well, that's enough to put a lump in your throat and realize just how big your responsibility is in so many different ways. Thanks, kid.

My staggering response was something like this: "No, no. His papa is God. Your papa is Nate. But God can be our papa too, and he's a much better one than I am."

Maybe the story fascinates simply because it naturally evokes so many questions. If we talk about this guy all the time, why is he dying? If he was such a good person, why is he killed? And who is his Papa?

On one hand, a two year old who has cut his face on a thorn bush and rolled stones can understand it. On the other hand, it leaves an impression that, well, something bigger is going on here. I guess it reminds me of something Roger Ebert said about a movie I liked: "A good story for children should suggest a hidden dimension, and that dimension of course is the lifetime still ahead of them."

If there are things here "into which angels long to look," surely it will capture the attention of a childlike spirit too.

War Scene

I've been trying to wrap my head around that imminent day, that impending moment that will arrive like a thief in the night in late June. I'm not predicting the rapture, I'm referring to the labor.

I asked a friend about it recently. He told me quite simply that it would be like a war zone.

I realized then for the first time that I have never once heard a man talk about what exactly went down behind those hospital doors. It's a mystery, almost as if it's never happened. Repressed, denied, ignored. They might be the toughest patriarch you can imagine, but all dads are unnervingly silent about that event, indeed resembling something like a shell-shocked soldier returning from war, unable to talk about his experience, wrestling the rest of his life with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

It's an uncanny metaphor.

déjà vu

First, a French lesson: déjà vu means "already seen."

Not even a year and a half ago, I was unexpectedly building a crib in my house. My father-in-law helped.
A week ago, I was building a crib again, in some ways expected, other ways not quite. This time, an-almost-three-year-old helped.
I try not to think about my life too much. It's a little insane. Not that I have any complaints, not at all. A guy like me just has a tendency to hyperventilate with things like this, that's all.

touché

Wesley made a perfect, loving spoof on some of the videos I've been making, reminding me that--as long as these two are living there, anyway--Hellertown has just as much charm as Paris.

Oh, Lake

I still love you. Stay weird.
Haven't found a record store yet to buy your new album, but I hope to someday soon.
When will you tour Europe? See you soon?
xoxo.

LAKE "Within/Without" from Howdy Friend on Vimeo.

These Movie Theaters are Strict

E and I went to our first movie together the other night. We saw Woody Allen's latest, Midnight in Paris, which was a good bit of fun. There's plenty I could say about the whole night, but I will leave you with just this short anecdote.

The man who took our tickets, if I understood his French correctly, gave E a strict order before entering:

"No giving birth in the theater!"

How To Buy A Car in France

1. Do the research. Narrow your choices.
2. Contact the person with the car and set up a rendez-vous.
3. Let your wife test-drive, carefully because the owner is in the car with you, and try to act like it's all no sweat even though you've never driven in this country, you haven't driven period in 4 months, and you haven't driven stick in several years.
4. Call two days later and tell the person you want the car. Have them agree to hold it for you.
5. Wait several days for money to be deposited into your US bank account.
6. Wait another week for the money to transfer to your French bank account.
7. Go to the bank to ask for a bank check. Have them tell you to go to another branch.
8. Wait three days for the bank to be open again, go to the new branch and ask for a bank check. Have them tell you to go back to your original branch.
9. Have your director call the bank since you don't know how to yell in French yet.
10. Pray before going to the bank for the third time...I'll learn this lesson eventually, but it always seems to help when the system here keeps slamming doors in your face. When you arrive, have the manager greet you at the door since he got a call from headquarters about you. He'll order the bank check right away and explain everything you need to know about car insurance.
11. Spend the day trying to make sense of car insurance in a second language, comparing, searching for the best option.
12. Go back to the second bank on the next day to pick up the bank check.
13. Fix the rendezvous with the owner for when she is free, four days later. Give her the phone number to your bank so she can make sure you're not trying to give her a bad check.
14. Invite the couple selling the car into your home to sign the papers.
15. Hope your car doesn't get vandalized or stolen during the night and call the insurance company the next day.
16. Three weeks later, you can drive the car, carefully, because you still technically don't know how to drive in this country, but it's still not technically completely yours until you go and get your very own title in your name, which is a whole beautiful process of its own, involving even more forms and even more photocopies...

Now that you've gotten a taste of this ordeal, I'll spare you the details on that part of the process and call it quits here (unless it turns out to be awful or embarrassing).

The good news is: we can drive to the grocery store now, and when Erica goes into labor, she won't have to walk to the hospital.

On Ending the World

We haven't heard much about Harold Camping over here, haven't seen any billboards for ourselves. We've deduced what we know from Facebook status updates (such a source of news!) and a few articles on BBC.

A funny thing, this predicting the end of the world. The followers believe and hope he's right, trying to ignore that nagging suspicion. The scoffers mock and hope he's wrong, trying to ignore that tiny question: "But what if..?" The day after, the believers feel bewildered, confused, perhaps foolish, and the rest shake their heads with laughter and feel that much more invincible.

But it doesn't seem like too many people were actually asking, "But what if?" Christians are quick, and rightly so, to point out that Jesus taught absolutely no one--including angels and Jesus himself!--knows when he will return. But I wonder if giving that correction is actually a way to just avoid worry or reflection and keep on living as we always have.

In our reaction to a man like Camping, I get the sense we don't expect Jesus to return any time soon and maybe we don't even want him to return, at least not yet. Perhaps what I'm trying to say is this: in blowing off Camping, we need to make sure we are not blowing off the second coming of Christ.

Jesus taught a lot more than "No one knows when." In the same teaching, he urges his followers to keep watch, be alert, stay awake, and prepare oneself with expectation. Our easy mockery doesn't make us sound like a people who are ready and waiting.

Those trite Hallmark quotes aren't too far off from what Jesus said: "Live every day like it's your last." And yet few of us succeed in doing so. Living with an expectancy in Christ's return causes some re-prioritizing, a difference in living. It's easier to hedge our bets.

I'm tempted to say God didn't come back on the 21st just to prove Camping wrong. But part of me wishes he would have come back just to prove the rest of us wrong. Maybe he'll come back today to prove all of us wrong. The truth is, if no one knows, then Camping can't know for sure he's coming on the 21st. But the rest of us can't know for sure he's NOT coming on the 21st.

Am I coming to Camping's defense? Not at all, really. If he studies the Bible as much as he says he does, he should know better. But perhaps we could all in some way learn from his sense of expectancy and anticipation.

And perhaps most of all, it's all a sign that our eschatology is weak and uninspiring. With there being so much we can't know, I wonder if we've resigned to not knowing or believing anything at all.

(On a different note, it would have been a lot of fun to see Sufjan Stevens in Netherlands last night, listening to "Seven Swans" and other apocalyptic songs on the night the world's supposed to end.)

Je m'appelle Sufjan

I am not unaware of the fact that adding the phrase "in Paris" to nearly any action makes it automatically sound a bit more glamorous, more exciting, more interesting. I haven't decided yet if it's a reality or if it's all in our heads.

But take for instance the phrase: "I went to see Sufjan Stevens last night...in Paris."

It was really not much different from seeing him in Asheville, except that I rode the subway to get there and some of the English jokes went over the heads of those in the audience.

There were updated costumes, including the most breathtaking massive swan wings for the opener. The set list was mostly similar, but included the welcome addition of "I Want to Be Well" which was entirely as intense as you might imagine.

He joked about Waldorf Schools and ironing leaves between wax paper and not learning to read until 10th grade and I think I was the only person laughing.

There were some interesting cultural nuances to observe...the way these Frenchmen chuckled at certain songs and in certain moments where I'm not sure Americans would, or the way they sang along in a foreign tongue like they understood the depth of what was being communicated.

Something about this album/show/extravaganza seems so perfectly and progressively creative. It made me think about how each new work Sufjan presents makes his past work look a bit trivial, even juvenile, or at least normal. Not that the albums lose their worth, not at all. But such entirely complete reinvention each time evokes a surprise for a moment, but then quickly feels entirely natural, and causes you to wonder what made the previous album so important and new and fresh at its time.

© Sarah - Le HibOO

Of course, in this turn, it's over the top. In his own words, it's "too much, too much, too much." And that's intentional, all part of the design. To see him go from the stripped-down-play-every-instrument-myself Seven Swans to this complete chaos is just confounding. But it all leaves one wondering: what's next? Where does he go from here?

I have no doubt he'll find something just as creative, just as progessive. God bless him.

I love the intriguing tension in this current work of art: exploring that fine line between believing in/speaking about the supernatural and just plain being/sounding crazy. And while it is all presented in a manner of schizophrenic madness that is supposed to be somewhat humorous, it has oddly enough only served to affirm my belief in the return of Christ and make me eager for that day, as scary as it just might turn out to be.

And of course, every time I'm in the middle of thousands of people cheering as loudly as they can for this humble man, I can't help but chuckle to myself about helping to bring him to the student union at Taylor. I painted a banner for the Dining Commons that said "SUFJAN IS COMING" just to pique people's curiosity. I helped Jared copy and distribute reviews from Rolling Stone so that people would know he was a legitimate artist. He played his banjo by himself for a small group of people. His solo version of Seven Swans was somehow just as powerful as the one last night. It all was beautiful.

That's not me trying to earn scene points. (Although I do get a few, don't I?) That's me wondering just how in the world it must feel to be in his shoes, and being quite glad that he's getting the attention he deserves. There are not many artists like him out there today.

Bravo.

Oh So Quiet

I walked through my town tonight at 1:45 AM.

I didn't see a single car, a single bus, a single motorcycle.

It was the first time I heard the wind blowing through the trees here.

I scraped my foot across the ground and it echoed back and forth between buildings.

Not a single apartment light was on.

I imagined all the people we see during the day sleeping in their beds, snoring collectively.

We've got a lot in common when we're sleeping. Finally, we can agree on something. United. Much the same.

We're all a bit more feeble laying on our beds.