A quote

From "What The Trappist Monk Said In His Talk-Part 2", by Linford Detweiler of Over the Rhine, a great band.

"If we try to make heaven out of earth/We'll destroy the earth"

# posted by Daniel at 1:53 AM.

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In which I drop my cell phone into the campfire

I just returned from an overnight trip to Enchanted Rock State Natural Area. This wasn't anything intense; just one night of camping with my friends Devin, Jonathan, and Cole.

Enchanted Rock is a beautiful, beautiful place. If you ever get the chance to go I highly recommend that you do. When I was in Boy Scouts we would camp there at least once a year, but before this week I hadn't been in probably eight years. E-Rock, as we called it in Scouts, is located in the middle of the Texas Hill Country, and consists of three or four enormous granite domes that rise out of the middle of the hills. To give you a sense of scale, the trail that loops around the two largest is four miles long. Enchanted Rock proper rises probably four hundred feet from its base, and is a bare dome of pink granite. It takes its name from the Native American tribes that lived in the area. After a hot day, the granite cools quickly at night and sometimes makes groaning sounds, hence the name--any geological feature that groans is probably enchanted, right? But enough of this travel brochure nonsense. You can get all that from the link.

Yesterday, after we arrived at the park and set up camp, we hiked up to the top of Little Rock (the second largest rock in the park), then came back down around dark and started a fire, which we proceeded to feed until around midnight. Good conversation was had, and Devin and I smoked about an ounce of pipe tobacco apiece. We kept the fire going, as the temperature had fallen to below freezing, and as soon as the fire went, we knew we would have to head for our sleeping bags pretty quickly. As it was we had to bundle up like Eskimos (I'm assuming here that Eskimos do in fact bundle up--it's not as though I've actually studied their clothing habits. If I lived above the Artic Circle you'd better believe I'd be bundling up. But maybe they like being cold. Anyway...)

I had on five layers of clothing--thermal underwear, a few shirts, and over it all my baggy parka thing with a big fat kangeroo pocket in the front. My cigarettes, camera, and cell phone all nestled in this pocket for easy access.

Come midnight, our last piece of wood reduced to glowing embers, we began to try and put the fire out. Problem is, we had no water other than a liter of Dasani with which to extinguish it. So instead we spread the by-now-prodigious coals around the fire pit with a small shovel and began turning them over and pouring dirt on them. This didn't really put them out--they glittered in the pit like red eyes in a dream of a dark forest, and continued to give off little licks of hot blue flame. Being as hairy and masculine and un-showered as we were, however, we were in no mood to turn around and ask directions, or to think about putting them out in another fashion for that matter, and so we continued to take turns burning our hands with the shovel, pushing them around the pit, hoping that sooner or later this specific action would, like a magic spell, cause the fire to go cold.

It was my turn with the shovel, and I was leaning over the pit, chopping with the small blade at a particularly recalcitrant ember. My three compatriots stood with me in a circle around the fire, staring down. Maybe it was the bobbing motion as I chopped, maybe it was that life as an electronic device had just gotten too hard to take, but as I chopped something fell out of my large parka pocket and into the middle of the glowing-hot-cook-a-steak-in-thirty-seconds coals. We stared, mouths gaping, for at least three seconds before it dawned on us that my cell phone had landed in the fire. The other three guys stood there watching, looking at each other as if to confirm that there was in fact a cell phone in there. In their defense, there's not exactly a lot they could've done. I had the only shovel, and the fire was hot...REAL hot.

For my part, I freaked out. I tried using the shovel to scoop the phone out. The only problem with this was that to actually scoop it, the blade had to be under the phone, and the only way to get the blade under the phone was to position the blade (and therefore the handle of the blade, and therefore my hand) horizontal, parallel to the fire. I tried this a few times, squealing about how hot and well-done my hand was rapidly becoming before finally managing to flip the phone out onto the dirt beside the fire.

Time moves at a much different pace in situations of this sort, but I estimate that it spent no more than fifteen seconds in the fire, no less than ten. Another five or so seconds passed while I caught my breath, then I burst into wild, unsettling laughter. It was pretty funny, really. Everyone else began to laugh with me. Cole told me later he had to choke back his laughter the moment he realized my phone was laying in the coals, but refrained until he knew that I wasn't going to be pissed about the whole incident. How little he knows me.

The case and antennea are a little scorched and scuffed now, but remarkably the thing still functions perfectly well as a phone. I suppose I could get on television doing one of those real life testimonials for Sprint, but they'd have to pay me a lot of money to do so. Until that time, here's as far as my product endorsement goes--if you plan on dropping your phone into hot coals for fifteen seconds at a time, Sprint PCS is the way to go. Two well done thumbs up.

# posted by Daniel at 6:27 PM.

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Christmas musings

I've come in the last year or two to the understanding, possibly inaccurate, that truth is frequently if not always best expressed in terms of paradox. Paradox is a word that gets used quite a bit, so in the interest of clarity I'm going to define it (for my purposes) as two statements, seemingly contradictory, that are in fact both true (note--this is a little different than the customary definition, so bear that in mind when you use the word).

The Bible is full of paradox. The example that comes immediately to mind is Galatians 6:1-5. In the New King James Version:

Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself lest you also be tempted. Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one examine his own work, and then he will have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. For each one shall bear his own load.

(Thanks, by the way, to David James Duncan's The Brothers K for pointing this particular paradox out.)

This is really pretty fascinating, when you look at it. We're told, in the space of four verses, to share our burdens and to not share them, to bear them alone. It seems, on the surface, grossly contradictory, but it can't be. This isn't like reconciling the Christmas stories of Matthew and Luke. This is written by one guy, Paul, in the same passage. Unless the Apostle was hopelessly schizophrenic there has to be something deeper going on here.

Paul is talking about the ideal Christian life, and the ideal Christian community. This ideal, this truth, is something that must be lived, that is almost dangerous to formulate too precisely. If he says "Bear one another's burdens," and leaves it at that, the Christian community devolves into a sort of slavish quasi-Communist situation. But if he says "Bear your own load," without a corrective, the Christian community becomes, well, Capitalist. The truth is that these are both important, both essential. The ideal "lived truth" holds on to both of them and corrects excesses in one direction with the other. By introducing them as distinct commands Paul leaves room for discovery, for the working out of the necessary balance. And the necessary balance can only be known through wisdom, the quality of "lived truth" (I like that term so much I think I'll stop putting it in quotation marks). Wisdom is ultimately what Paul is getting at, but wisdom can't be formulated. Wisdom can only be attained through living with the truth and working it out in one's life. What Paul is supplying, through paradox, are the necessary poles by which to navigate oneself in this pursuit of wisdom (simply being alive for a long time doesn't impart wisdom). Put more succinctly, the way of wisdom is to aim between the poles of the paradox.

I've let myself get sidetracked, though. Wisdom (and my lack thereof) is something else I've been thinking about of late. But that's for another post.

Another classic Christian paradox, soteriological rather than ethical, is the famous faith versus works paradox. We are saved (from sin, Hell, and ourselves) by faith (in Jesus as Messiah and savior), not by works (doing good things and/or avoiding bad things). But we are also told that faith without works is basically worthless. It doesn't exist. A faith that completely lacks some manner of righteous work isn't faith (James 2:14-24), and, presto chango, isn't saving (more specifically, the theologians I tend to agree with would say that a profession of faith that doesn't lead to a regenerate life wasn't a genuine profession of faith in the first place). This is a vastly important theological point to make, but it sure throws a bastard of a wrench in my self-satisfied understanding of my salvation. If the word was faith, and forget about works, I could contentedly kick back and just believe. Give intellectual assent to the tenets of the Christian faith. And if the word was works, it'd be harder, granted, but I could conceivably bust enough ass to make a plausible bid for heaven. This isn't it either, though. Truth is, they both play a role. Righteousness, or the pursuit thereof, is a necessary consequence of saving faith. Which makes me look at myself and ask "Does my life give evidence of saving faith?"

This doubt can, if misused, slide towards either pole of the paradox. I can stifle my concern for my gross moral shortcomings and chirp "Faith alone!" with the best of them. Or I can role up my sleeves and start trying, post facto, to earn my salvation. But the way of truth is to hold on to both of these, to bounce around in the space between them. This tension is what drives (or should drive) the Christian life.

Christmas is getting closer. Trust me.

The last paradox I want to talk about, and the one I've been driving towards, is what seems to me the Big One. The one that Christmas is all about.

God's relationship to the world is frequently discussed (by everyone, not just Christians) using the dichotomy of transcendence versus immanence. Transcendece is the idea that God is completely other. He's up in heaven; we're stuck down here on earth. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so His ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9). Immanence, on the other hand, is the idea that God is present, here with us. Where can we go that He isn't already there (Psalm 139:7-12)?

This is part of the physical/spiritual split. How can a transcendent God interact with a finite creation? How can a finite creation think that it could know anything about God, particularly as described by Christian theology (all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good...I have less in common with him with every "all"). How can God be both eternal and present?

The resolution of this paradox lies in the Incarnation, in Christ. This is the place where, more than any other, God touches the world, becomes part of the world. There was a debate in the first few centuries of the Church as to the exact nature of Jesus's divine/human makeup. Some people said that God had merely inhabited the human person named Jesus long enough to accomplish his purposes, that Jesus was never fully divine. Others said that Jesus only appeared to be human, that He was God coming down in human clothes in the same way that Zeus and Neptune and the other Greek gods would periodically put on human appearances. He was never fully human. It has to be one or the other, right?

I can't remember the name of the council that decided this debate (it's 3:30 in the morning--I don't feel like looking it up), but they articulated Jesus's nature in exactly the right way. One hundred percent God and one hundred percent human. Your mind rebels ("but that adds up to two hundred percent!"). It shoots right through the middle of the paradox, affirming both sides. The truth of Jesus's nature defies our ability to define it. The paradox points us not to a definition of Christ, but to Christ Himself. The paradox is resolved not by better articulations or smarter theologians, but by the life of discipleship, of obedience and imitation. In this lived truth the paradox recedes. As the writer of Hebrews says,

Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham. Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to aid those who are tempted. (2:14-18).

Christ ate and slept and sweated and shat. Fully human. But as John says in his Gospel,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. (1:1,14)

Fully God. Amen, and amen.

# posted by Daniel at 12:02 AM.

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Further adventures at Jim's

I walk in and sit down at a booth at the back of the restaurant. There's a group of twenty-somethings two booths over, six of them or so clustered around around a table. I don't pay them much attention when I first come in, other than to register their presence while selecting a seat.

Always tricky, selecting your own seat, whether it be in a restaurant, in class, on a bus, wherever. Everyone has their own routine. My general modus operandi is to select the seat most equidistant from all other patrons of the establishment. Keep us all nice and spread out. From what I've observed, most people follow a similar protocol. We're like gas molecules in a balloon. We maintain a uniform distribution.

Incidentally, this is quite similar to the Urinal Protocols, adopted in 1893 by the International Congress of Manliness. When you walk into a public restroom with multiple urinals, you always leave at least one empty between you and your, um, compatriot. If space allows, you can leave more, but if you choose to do so you need to make sure there are an odd number of urinals between the two of you. Otherwise, if additional men walk through the door you can force them into a socially awkward position. Imagine four urinals in a row. You walk in, and there's somebody using the last one. You, naturally, gravitate towards the first, so as to put maximum distance between the two of you. But now a third man walks through the door. You have, in essence, forced him to decide which one of you he wants to stand next to while peeing. This is not a choice anyone should have to make. It's kinder instead to just take the second urinal from the beginning. This way, when the third guy comes in he can take the one urinal between you and the first guy. He may be standing next to both of you, but you have removed the necessity that he choose one of you over the other.

But I digress. Badly. I may write a handbook, though, on urinal ettiquette.

When selecting a seat in a restaurant, I consider the additional factor of booth versus table. I'm a booth guy, myself, whether alone or with people. So a lot of times I'll go with the booth in situations where it isn't necessarily the seat most suited to even distribution. This is what happens tonight. I sit down a couple of booths away from the unkempt twenty-somethings, and begin to unpack my notebook and pencils.

But they make a lot of noise. I hear what sounds like dice rolling. One of them cracks a joke that involves the phrase "two-handed axe," and they burst into laughter, like a table of overnight trolls. I realize, suddenly, that they're playing Dungeons and Dragons. At midnight, in a diner in Texas. This I have never seen. They don't show any signs of lowering the volume, so I move over to a table in a corner, but can still hear them pretty distinctly, rolling their 12-sided dice, flipping through rule books, talking about things like dexterity and longswords and weapon bonuses. From the sound of things they're fighting a leopard. Or something. Maybe one of them has the leopard for a pet. Hell, for all I know one of them is the leopard. I wish them well.

There's a cowboy-looking gentleman sitting with his lady at a table across from the role players. They're both gussied up, like they just spent the night two-steppin', and stopped in at Jim's for a midnight snack. Polished boots, hats, him in a pearl snap shirt and her in a denim skirt. These two are the real deal.

The lady doesn't pay them much mind, but from time to time her fella glances incredulously out the corner of his eye at the roleplayers. It's hard to be clandestine with your head movements in a hat as large as his. I can tell he'd like to turn and gawk at them, but isn't sure what they'd do. They're loud and overweight and unshaven and obnoxious. They're rolling dice, for goodness sake. One of them--a grown man--just uttered the phrase "Hey, I'm the Dungeon Master here." He could not be more repulsed by them if they sprouted third arms from their chests. He could not be more fascinated if they each had two heads. And he would have no more difficulty believing in them if an enormous glowing disc were to touch down in the parking lot, honk its horn, and all six role players packed up their books and dice, paid their bill, climbed into the spaceship and flew away.

This is his problem. He hasn't quite convinced himself they exist. They are an experience so utterly foreign to his conservative, rural sensibilities that he is not quite capable of believing in them. This will change, though. Let him glance their way a dozen more times. Let him assign them coordinates on the rumpled cognitive map he carries around in his skull. Give him a few minutes and he'll just be pissed.

# posted by Daniel at 12:18 AM.

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Apologies for my extended absence. Two weeks ago was finals, and this last week...well...let's just say I haven't had my head screwed on quite right. Not that it's ever fastened as tightly as it should, but it's been unusually loose the last few days.

However, in the words of Frank Costanza, I'm back, baby!

# posted by Daniel at 6:22 PM.

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Journal entry, 11/7/03 ("Waiting for the poem to come")

Waiting for the poem to come, I order coffee and smoke a cigarette down to the filter, rub it into the heavy glass tray on my table. Sip at the coffee, look around the nearly empty smoking section. Two waitresses on break sit at a table near me. They both wear red shirts they wouldn't if they weren't getting paid. They talk about their hours, then their roommates. My waitress comes. I don't need a refill, yet. She offers me creamer. I drink my coffee black. She leaves me a glass of water I will use with luck to wash down the poem after I eat it. On the radio some American plays a piano and sings stadium-tour poetry. The earnest radio hits of twenty years ago. Bruce Hornsby? Billy Joel? It ends. Another song slides in and takes its place. Could be George Harrison. Now it's Phil Collins. I wonder how much I'd have to pay to get them to turn this shit off. The poem is scared. I can feel it crawling around the bottom of my skull, under my wet brain, like a cat under a bed. I smoke another cigarette and wait for it to show its head.

# posted by Daniel at 1:56 PM.

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The world from the back of a bicycle

I live in a small house on an out-of-the-way street corner in San Marcos. The corner isn't an intersection so much as it is the place where two streets end. Depending on your direction of approach, the street suddenly turns ninety degrees to the left or the right and continues on its happy residential way, only under a different set of signs.

Because there's only one way to go, the city treats it as they would a (sharp) curve in the street, rather than a full blown intersection. There aren't any stop signs, speed bumps, or even warnings that you are about to hang a sharp left or right. To make matters worse, its a blind curve, and my sister and I hear tires squealing all the time as cars frantically try to avoid running off the road or into other cars. They don't always succeed. In the six months we've lived here I've personally witnessed three wrecks (including one guy who managed to flip his Miata over the curb, bounce it off one of the trees in our front yard, and land upside down in the street, effectively blocking the driveway...twenty minutes before I had to be at work). Every time we hear tires, we wince, waiting for the unmistakeable sound of metal tearing itself from its former shape.

I just heard a particularly close (sounding) near miss. I thought for sure I was about to find myself running barefoot across the lawn to give first aid to some drunken frat boy. No such luck, at least for tonight.

When I was growing up in Abilene, before the days of my first car, my bicycle was my chief (i.e. only) means of personal transportation. My first bike was a small, red one speed. It came with training wheels and shed them soon like some vestigial tail. I flipped myself over the handlebars too many times to count. Some Christmases later and several feet taller I received a Huffy Grand Canyon ten speed. I became ambitious.

I kept a map of Abilene which I pored over with all the diligence I should have devoted to my school work. I memorized the lines of the streets. I drew a large yellow star where I thought my house was, and proceeded to color code my two-wheeled conquests. Green for the region immediately surrounding my "home base," for the streets and alleys I knew intimately, like the back of my own hand. Blue for the neighborhoods beyond, the ones I patrolled with relative frequency. These were my territory, my demesne. But I had colors besides blue and green. Orange marked the next area of travel. Orange neighborhoods were the ones I had ridden through a few times, knew somewhat well, but might get turned around in. And beyond orange was red, the wild frontier. Here cowboys and Indians chased each other on tricycles, and savage hordes threatened to sweep in from the east on riding lawnmowers. Red was reserved for those places I had braved only once, those places I had reconnoitered rather than explored. And beyond red were the white lands, nothing but black lines and empty paper, like nineteenth century maps of Africa.

I was not a popular child.

That Huffy yielded in time, as all bikes do, to my first car. I never looked back, or even bothered to glance in the rearview mirror. I was too distracted by my own awareness of the rite of passage, the heady mix of duty and potential. Neighborhoods? I could circumnavigate the city--the universe--in under an hour. Every square mile of the fabled State of Texas (previously an abstraction rather than a possibility) lay within a day's drive, and, given the gas money, the entire North American continent was my own asphalt-veined oyster.

Map of Abilene? Color codes? Feh. I figured I didn't need that kid stuff anymore.

This may have been a mistake.

There is no freedom like the freedom of a bicycle. A car can get you further, sure, but a car brings with it a thousand concerns and unfamiliar noises, the need for gas, insurance, and therefore employment. A car is closed off from the world. It's like being inside a television, or like having a television screen wrapped all the way around you. They come to the same thing. A car can do Very Bad Things if you do not carefully control it. A car requires a license. And most of all, at least in our culture, a car gives you a burden much greater than the weight it carries when it carries you, even if you should balloon out to eight hundred pounds. It gives you the burden of image, the knowledge that you are being watched and judged by the appearance of the car that bears your own inconsequential mass. This becomes less of an issue for many people as we get older, but at sixteen everyone feels the burden of image.

A bike, at least in my experience, is nothing like that. A bike is wings where a car is wheels. A bike means no dependency. Nothing but you, your legs, a pair of pedals and a selection of gears. A bike is the definition of utility, but beautiful all the same. On a bike you are a part of the landscape, not an observer of it. You can squeeze the brakes, step off the bike, and talk to some lady in her garden for ten minutes if you want to. This is all true of a car as well, but a bike doesn't give you the illusion that things are otherwise. On a bike, "moving through" does not contradict "being in."

And therefore on a bike, you carry no weight of image. That weight is too heavy for a bike, and if you couldn't put it down you wouldn't have climbed onto the bike in the first place. You see people, certainly, and are seen in turn by them, but you see each other as other persons in a larger context, a landscape, a community. In a car, you're locked behind your windshield. Sounds and smells come into the car, if at all, only as shadows of their real selves. A bike has no such mediating element; in the world from the back of a bicycle there are no Things Behind Glass other than the people still behind the wheels of their cool, crushing cars, for whom you feel a vague pity...

My bike got its first tune-up today.

But I've gotten ahead of myself. I bought a bike a month ago; I rejoined the ranks of the children. I've been riding it, weather permitting, to and from class, and whenever else I have the chance and inclination. Today was a beautiful day, and as I cruised down Belvin Street I thought about all these things. So I hope you'll forgive me for any excess of rhapsody in this post-- in the world from the back of a bike you tend to ramble on a bit. There aren't any radios to drown out your thoughts or muddle your prayers.

P.S. Here's a picture of my personal set of wings. K2 Bayside. A work of art. You may commence drooling now.

# posted by Daniel at 6:54 PM.

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