The Carpenter

I remember, said his mother, when he was just five, watching his father work, asking, Daddy, what happened to that chair? and Joseph said, People treated it badly and broke it, son, and he started crying and said Daddy it shouldn’t be broken, how can we fix it? and his daddy said hammer and nails, son, hammer and nails. And it didn’t make sense until he saw it happen. How can hitting it, driving spikes into it, fix it? Surely that could only break it more. But then he saw the chair when it was finished, and it made sense.

 When he became a man, he saw how the world is, and he wept, and asked the Father Daddy, what happened? How could they break themselves? They shouldn't BE broken! How can I fix it? And when he came back from the desert he said he’d heard the answer, hammer and nails, son, hammer and nails. And the day he found the hammer and nails to do it, it didn’t make sense to me. It only seemed to me that the world was now broken utterly. But now I see the people who met him when they were broken, and I see how they look now…. And it makes sense.

 

© John M. Munzer

The Moment

I just got an invitation to the 15-year reunion of my college class. That means HOLY *&^%$#@! I’M GETTING OLD. It also means that, for the first time since I arrived at Wheaton College 19 years ago, I could go to the place and not still owe Sallie Mae money for the time I spent there.

I won’t be going, though.

There’s lots of reasons, many of them with dollar signs in front of them. This is a time when we need to work as much as possible, and squirrel away as much money as possible for the future (we finally paid off our student loans a few months ago and actually have the ability to start saving now). Spending a couple grand on a weekend trip doesn’t fit into that plan.

There’s also the fact that any classmates with whom I wanted to re-establish contact, are already Facebook friends. It’d be nice to see them in person again, but it’s not like we’re cut off from each other currently, and we can even banter as a group on each other’s pages. I can talk to these people for free, why pay for plane tickets?

Although, it’d certainly be fun to go off-campus and drink together, now that we’re all of legal age and no longer under the Pledge.*

*For those who didn’t attend Wheaton College, it’s a conservative evangelical Christian school. As such, everyone who attends signs a commitment that while they attend they will avoid, among other things: drinking, illegal drugs, premarital sex (yes, we used terms like that), smoking, and “most forms of social dancing” (pretty much anything where people’s naughty bits might touch was considered outside the Pledge, but square dancing was okay). Believe it or not, most of us actually stuck to that while we attended Wheaton.

But even if money and time weren’t an obstacle, and even with the prospect of drinking with people who are pretty damn funny even when sober, even with getting a chance to hug people whose hugs I’ve missed for 15 years (my friends, I haven’t forgotten those hugs)… Even with all that, I don’t think I’d be ready at this point.

 I’m not ready for The Moment.

I’ve had The Moment before. It was when I went back to my old church youth group for the last time, at the age of 21. None of the people I’d known from high school were there. Not even the youth pastor I’d grown up with was there anymore. The songs were the same, the place was the same, the preaching was the same, the stuff that was happening was the same, but it felt different. I went outside afterwards and sat on the bleachers by myself and thought:

I don’t belong here anymore.

That was The Moment.

And I’m not ready to have that experience at Wheaton yet.

It must happen to everyone at some point, when they go back to visit a place that used to be the most important place in the world to them. The place is the same place, even if buildings change. But we aren’t the same people anymore. The people who used to be there with us aren’t there anymore. And even if they were, they aren’t the same people anymore either.

I wasn’t even particularly sad when The Moment happened at youth group, which surprised me. Just a little wistful – like when I was 8 years old and realized that my favorite Spider-Man shirt from when I was 5 wouldn’t fit me anymore, not even tightly. The shirt was a good shirt, and it was right for me for a while, would be right for someone else who was ready for it… but it wasn’t right for me anymore. I remembered the days when I fit that shirt, the good times I’d had being 5 and playing Spidey while wearing that shirt. Then I shrugged, passed it on to… I don’t even know, maybe little brother, maybe a cousin, maybe Goodwill. Someone out there might be able to tell me. And I moved on to clothes that fit the person I’d become.

The Moment happens when you realize that a place you used to belong is like a shirt that doesn’t fit anymore.  And when you know that there’s nothing to do but shrug and pass the place on, with your blessing, to someone who will fit.

Wheaton was a GOOD fit, while I was there. It was the right place for me to be while I wrestled with hard questions about my faith, about who and what I wanted to be when I grew up, about how to deal with the fact that I would HAVE to grow up (and also to meet every Tuesday evening at 9:58 p.m. with a group of friends who would read children’s stories like Winnie-the-Pooh together, because it’s important to hang on to some things about childhood.) It was the right place for me to figure out the kind of people I wanted to spend time with, and the kind of things I wanted to do. It was the right place to start practicing the rudiments of being a grown-up, with the safety net of not having a mortgage that could be foreclosed on when I was overdrawn (because 18-year-old John sure as hell wasn’t mature enough yet for a full-time job and paying his own bills). It was where I met my future wife, who is still the one person on earth with whom I fit perfectly, and it was the right place for us to get to know each other. (And such a rare and wonderful gift, to be dating in a place where the accepted norm was to NOT have sex. For all the emotional baggage and guilt around sexuality that happens in the evangelical sub-culture, they’ve got at least one thing exactly right: It’s easier to live by the value that sex belongs within a committed loving relationship, if you’re part of a culture that shares and supports that value.)

Wheaton was home.

But it’s not home anymore. I don’t believe the same things about God. I don’t believe the same things about what is and isn’t sinful. I don’t believe the same things about how I should act towards people when I don’t agree with their choices. (For instance, I still believe that sex outside a committed loving relationship is missing the point of sex, and is a set-up for heartbreak; but I no longer believe that it’s a ticket to Hell, or deserves censure from me or anyone else. Any punishment that results from a poor choice about sex happens in THIS life, from what I’ve seen, and the people enduring it do not need me to tell them that it was a bad choice.) I don’t believe the same things about the world. I don’t believe the same things about human nature. I don’t believe the same things about myself. And – this is important – I’m no longer a 20-year-old who gets to drift along with no bills, or real responsibilities, or real-world consequences for my decisions. The John who fit Wheaton perfectly 15 years ago is not who I am today.  If the two Johns could somehow meet in the same room, I don’t think we’d even enjoy talking about big issues. He’d want to try and argue theology with me, and I’d want to beat some self-discipline into him, and he’d be horrified to know how soon he would go bald, and I’d be horrified to see how naïve and arrogant I was… and neither of us would listen much. The only thing we’d really enjoy doing together, I think, would be reading children’s stories at Pooh Corner. And Young John would, no doubt, be able to do Tigger’s voice better than I can. But I’d be better at telling the story, and (slightly) better at giving other people a chance to tell their part of the story.

Other people’s life journeys will take them down different paths; maybe even, in the faith journey, down the same path in the opposite direction. I became more liberal as I matured, but that doesn’t mean that becoming more liberal (or conservative) equals maturity. It doesn’t mean that my old shirt was a bad shirt. It just means that the shirt that fits me now is different than the shirt that fit me 15 years ago.

I know all that, without having to get on a plane, walk around campus and see that the kids there are young enough to be my kids. I know it without going to listen to a lecture and think how little the lectures at school prepare you for the actual experiences of trying to apply the information at work. I know it without going to the chapel and thinking how utterly different my current beliefs are from the beliefs that would be expounded from that pulpit. I know it without sitting in the corner of Fischer Lobby where we used to read together on Tuesday night (where, I’m told, a group still meets every Tuesday night to read children’s stories. But: they’re kids, and I’m not anymore.)

I know all that, but I’m not ready to actually go there and experience all that. I’m not ready to physically try on the shirt and feel that it doesn’t fit. It was SUCH a good shirt when it fit. I’ll just put it back in the drawer for now, and enjoy fond memories of how I used to play grown-up while I wore it.

The Moment will wait.

In the meantime, young Wheaties: Enjoy the shirt. It won’t fit you forever, but it’s a GOOD shirt.

© John M. Munzer

Names of blessing, and names to be forgotten

Talking with a rabbi earlier this week, I learned that the Hebrew language has (perhaps not surprisingly) both the most beautiful blessing in the world and the darkest curse.

We were talking about Jewish history and mythology, and the rabbi said "So Hitler, yimach sh’mo, believed that the Jewish legend of the golem was real and tore apart Prague trying to find it..."

After he'd told the story, I asked him to backtrack and repeat what he'd said.

ימח שמו (sounds like yimakh shemo): "May his name be erased".

That was both chilling, and perfect. The rabbi expounded further (as rabbis apparently are wont to do) that in Jewish culture, to be remembered is to continue to exist; every year, there is a ceremony of writing or reciting the names of the blessed dead in a book. If someone's name is erased, the memory of them will die; and if they are no longer remembered, they never existed.

What made it more chilling and perfect was the tone in which he'd said the words. It managed to simultaneously be the tone of someone casually, reflexively saying the thing that always gets said, like we say "How are you?" without actually waiting to hear a reply; and AT THE SAME TIME the tone of an Old Testament prophet who had invoked the Power, rent a hole in the fabric of reality by speaking the words, and made it so.

That's how the Jewish people feel about Hitler. He doesn't deserve to be remembered; he doesn't even deserve to be spoken of with loathing. He deserves to be as if he never existed, his name and memory erased from this world and the next.

And that's exactly right. Why should we make the serial killers, the mass murderers, the monsters, famous in news accounts and history books? That's what they wanted, and what they committed their crimes FOR - power and fame (infamy is still fame, after all). Let them be staked through the heart, their bodies burned, their ashes buried in the local dump with all the other waste, and then let them and their influence end.

Let the news articles and history books remove their names and pictures, and name instead the victims and the heroes, tell the stories of those who were hurt by the monsters and those who finally destroyed the monsters; and let the monsters themselves be referred to only by the words He is erased. Let no one even care enough about them to spend the time and energy it takes to hate them or remember their names. Let them no longer have power even to anger anyone; let them be treated with the contempt with which we treat a mosquito that has been swatted.

Let them no longer have been.

May their names be erased.


Then I asked the rabbi whether there is a corollary blessing when a righteous person passes away. There is: זיכרונו לברכה (sounds like zikhrono livrakha) - "May his name be for a blessing."

How cool is that? How beautiful to be remembered forever as a blessing, your very name a benediction, your life continuing in the lives of others who have become better people just by hearing about you. How wonderful for your name to be invoked when people pray for their friends to have their burdens eased, or for themselves to be better people. How wonderful to be remembered  like Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, or Oskar Schindler - people whose very existence was a rebuke to those who deserve the epithet yimakh shemo; people who will never die because their deeds are now woven into the fabric of the world, into how human beings define what human beings ought to be.

May you, and I, and all of us who try our best but continually fall short of our own standards, someday become the people we want to see in the mirror, the people we wanted to be when we were kids and imagined ourselves as grownups, the people we want to be for our own children.


May your name be for a blessing.


© John M. Munzer

Racism and nationalism in Disney movies

Today I saw bits and pieces of Disney's Aladdin. The music was as much fun as I remembered from when I saw it in the early 90s, and Robin Williams was as Robin Williams-y. But what I hadn't noticed back in my teens was how not-so-subtly RACIST the thing was.

In the world of Disney's Aladdin, Good Guy = looks and sounds American. Bad Guy = looks and sounds Arabic (or in Jafar's case, looks Arabic and sounds sorta British.) Iago sounds like he's from Brooklyn, but he's not human and he's comic relief, so that one doesn't count.

Seriously. Look at Aladdin and Jasmine. They drew a couple of all-American white kids, colored them very slightly brown, and voiced them with a couple of all-American white kids. As for the Sultan, you could put him in a Santa Claus suit and he would fit right into any Christmas special - he's a jolly fat white guy with a tan so slight as to be barely noticeable.

Then look at the merchant guy at the beginning trying to foist worthless junk on us tourists. Look at all the guards who enjoy pushing people around, who are such caricatures that they might as well be in a 1930's Popeye cartoon, brandishing scimitars and threatening to cut off thieves' hands and - oh, look, they're brandishing scimitars and threatening to cut off thieves' hands. Look at all the background characters in the story who are supposed to be foils to Aladdin, and especially look at Jafar. They're several shades browner, they have beards and turbans, they have accents. The further along the continuum they lean towards evil, the more "foreign" they're drawn and voiced.

And I don't think it was an accident, or even just the unthinking kind of discrimination that all human beings have built in - the unspoken assumption that "folks like us" are better than "folks who aren't like us." This movie was, after all, released a year after the first Gulf War. I think they were playing deliberately to the public's not-fans-of-Middle-Eastern-people-right-now mood. That greedy, slimy little merchant with the ridiculous accent in the first scene - he was pulled straight out of our country's resentment about the fact that we'd had to start paying more than a dollar a gallon for gas. (Ahhhhhhh - remember when $1.25 a gallon was expensive?)


I haven't watched other Disney movies for many years, but I'd bet that "Foreign/non-white = bad guy" is a thing in a lot of their other movies too. Thinking back to the ones I remember:

Pocahontas - this one was actually ABOUT racism and how that's wrong and stuff - but again, Pocahontas herself looks like a white model with a tan, has no accent, and her costume is basically a leather version of the same basic dress any American girl has half-a-dozen of in her closet. The more aggressive and warlike her tribesmen get, the more "Indian" their costume and voices get, till you can't see the people for all the feathers and warpaint.

Jungle Book: More subtle here. Mowgli, Bagheera and Baloo are American. Shere Khan and the vultures are British. So, the bad guys aren't very foreign, but foreign enough to let you know which characters will eat you given half a chance.

Robin Hood: Everyone's supposed to be British and they're all animals; but Marion, Little John, and Friar Tuck all sound American, and Robin's English accent isn't very pronounced, while Prince John is being British just as hard as he can. Foreigner equals eviler, even if they're all from the same  country.

Ariel, Triton, the prince Ariel's trying to hook up with - good guys, sound American, very white (Ariel's a redhead, as melanin-free as you can get without having albinism). Chef who tries to cook Sebastian - bad guy, sounds French, foreign-looking mustache. Sebastian - sounds Jamaican, but he's comic relief and therefore allowed to have an accent without being a bad guy. Ursula - sounds American, but look at her coloring. NO other character in this movie has even slightly dark skin. Her non-human parts are black, and her human parts are dark, almost purple.
But what the hell, no one's looking at anything but Ariel's little shells anyway. So Ursula's coloring probably isn't doing much to reinforce any stereotypes here.

Simba, Nala, Mufasa, Timon, Pumba - good guys, sound American. Scar - bad guy, sounds British. Rafiki - sounds vaguely African, but he's a monkey and therefore falls under the "comic relief" exception.

Mulan - Everyone's supposed to be Asian here, right? But my (admittedly very vague) recollection is that only the bad guys sounded like it. Mulan's dragon was allowed to be a black man without being a bad guy under the "comic relief" exception.

Beauty and the Beast - we're in Western Europe here so everyone who isn't a main character is French or British. Belle, her father, and the Beast are all American. In this one, Gaston sounds American too. But even here, the main villain and his sidekick Le Fou have the French-iest sounding names. More foreign still equals more evil.

Quasimodo, Esmerelda, Phoebus - all American. Phoebus is blond with blue eyes, and Esmerelda's a gypsy but still has very Caucasian features with a slight tan. The evil priest dude, on the other hand, looks and dresses like Jafar, and sounds British. The story's set in France, but what the hell, bad guys are British - because we're still pissed off about the Brits taxing our tea centuries ago, I guess.


Then there's the older Disney films, where it's not even remotely subtle:

Lady and the Tramp - Siamese cats are bad. American dogs are good. The Tramp mimicking the accents of the immigrants who feed him, that's meant to be funny. Ungrateful son of a bitch.

Peter Pan - dear GOD, the racism in the portrayal of the "Injuns". Also, Hook is darker-skinned than Pan, as are many of the pirates. Tinker Bell, on the other hand, looks like Marilyn Monroe; and Pan, Wendy, John and Michael are as white as white can be.

Snow White - It's right there in the damn title. White equals good, whiter equals better, Snow White is fairest of them all. The darker-featured Queen is, of course, evil.

Of course, those are from before the civil rights movement so they really can't be held to the same standard as the movies made after the 60s. But the ones done in the 90s? The animators and producers should have known better.

But they also knew what sells, and what sells is telling the audience (mostly white Americans) that the good guys are "folks like us" and the bad guys are "not folks like us".


I haven't seen the Frog Prince, so I don't know whether Disney's made yet another princess that looks like someone painted a Barbie doll brown and sounds like a bland, accent-free Caucasian, or if they actually made her look and sound African-American - actually made a protagonist that isn't drawn and voiced as a blonde white person with optional spray-on tan. Might be worth watching someday, to find out if Disney's finally ditched this "White makes right" device. It's long overdue to be ditched.

Explaining Holy Week to a toddler

I hadn't really thought ahead about how I would explain to my three-year-old what Holy Week means. Despite being a Christian all my life and going to Christian schools from 5th grade through college, I can't really claim to understand it myself (hence the term "holy mystery").

I've also had an awful lot of doubt and anger towards God over the past few years... a long story which can be summed up in roughly these words: "If you're there and you're good, why the FUCK did you make the world as it is? Why do good and innocent people suffer? Why does everyone die? Whatever plan you had in mind for making us into better creatures, why not just make us good to begin with? You have all the time and all the power there is, and THIS is the best world you could come up with? And if this whole Jesus thing is true: Who the hell asked you to come suffer and die? We want you to STOP suffering and death, not join us in experiencing them! Drowning people don't need you to jump into the water and start drowning with them, they need you to get them the fuck OUT of the water! Or better still, don't fucking throw them into the water to begin with! How can omniscience be such a dumb-ass? How can ultimate Good be such a bastard?"

So, basically, my prayers often sound like half the Psalms. Or the book of Job, or Ecclesiastes, or several of the prophets, or Christ's haunting cry "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" I figure if the people who were closest to God can say those things to God right there in the Bible without being smitten by lightning - if even God says that to God, on the cross - that must mean that God's a big boy and He can take it. Or, if He's not okay with us complaining about His creating a world where we suffer and we don't understand why, then He deserves all the verbal abuse I can throw at Him. So either way, I'll go on praying like that when I need to.

I still believe, mind you. Not sure exactly WHAT I believe these days, but I still believe, and I still pray, and go to church, and do my poor best to follow Christ... and that still seems to meet a need which nothing else can.

Now, as the parent of a toddler, I know that they need to know what to expect in advance, and therefore I told her a couple days ago "We'll be going to church a lot this week." She asked "Why?", of course, so I told her, "Well, this week we celebrate Easter. We celebrate because Jesus did something very special." Naturally she asked "What?", so I jumped into the part of the story I hadn't actually thought about how to explain to her. I said "He died and came back to life! No one had ever done that before!" She said "I'm not EVER gonna die!" I then made another jump without thinking first about where things might go from there and said "Well, everyone does eventually. But Jesus came back to tell us that it's gonna be okay."

She seemed to take it in and then moved on to talking about her day, asking for music, and other normal stuff.

Then tonight, at the Maundy Thursday mass, she was asking a lot about what was going on. My wife told her we were remembering that Jesus had a meal with His friends, and He was sad because He knew He was going to be hurt and lonely. My toddler then asked "Is He gonna DIE?" My wife was blind-sided a bit by that, but soldiered on and said "Yes, but He came back alive afterwards". The kid then asked why all the candles were being taken off the altar, and my wife explained it this way: "Well, we use that table to remember the table where Jesus ate with His friends. All the bread and cups and candles are being taken away to show that Jesus went away for a while". The little one was a bit upset, saying "I don't WANT the candles to be taken away!", but seemed to handle it pretty well.

During the ride home, there were more questions:

 "Why did Jesus die?" [parents try to explain that he said things some strong people did not like]
"What did he say?" [parents stammer about being nice to people and giving our things to help them even if we don't like them or we think they're gross.]
"I won't be nice to people I don't like. I won't do what Jesus said."
[parents empathize, ruefully... then talk about how she already has done some of the things Jesus said, like taking care of small people who can't protect themselves, and being kind to people even when she was angry at them - and Jesus was right, things work better when we do that]
"Where did Jesus go?"
"What does come alive mean?"
"I don't like sad parts, can we have Easter now instead?"
and finally:
"...I don't want to die."

Damn.

Now she's hit the part that NO one knows how to answer.

I deflected by saying, "Well, you're not going to for a very long time." When she's older she can be angry about living in a world where death happens; for now, she's three and she needs reassurance that she's safe and okay. She seemed to take that.

When we got home and got her into her bath, she thoughtfully said, "Sometimes, sad things happen". Not a sad tone, just in the tone of someone processing and accepting a reality.

And then, I finally knew what to say, both for her and for me:

"Y'know, Jesus talked about how sad things happen, but sad and scary things can be turned into good things. Like in your book about the caterpillar becoming a butterfly - remember the caterpillar was scared and sad about going into the cocoon, but then came out more alive than ever? And how happy she was to be a butterfly? That's kind of like what Jesus was talking about."

And then she visibly cheered up, and went on to tell stories about her Thomas the Train toys.


We already know all about bad news - we see it around us every day. We see abused children grow up to abuse children. We see bad people hurt and destroy good people. We see monsters turn people, vampire-fashion, into monsters like themselves. We see people get old, and sick, and weak, and their brains deteriorate, their SELVES deteriorate. We see them die. We know our turn is coming, and we know there's not a damn thing we can do to stop it. And part of parenting is to try and somehow prepare kids to become adults who can cope with that, without despair.

We know about the bad news. We need some Good News.

And that's the power of the Gospel. That's why I'm still a Christian, despite my vast misgivings. That's why I still think Christianity has something worthwhile to say to humanity. It's because we all know damn well that sad, and scary, and just fucking WRONG things happen, to everyone; and we need to believe that those things can, in some way too deep for us to understand, be harnessed and transformed for good. We need to believe that there's something more to the story after "Life sucks then you die" - that suffering and death can be redemptive, that there is a reason for them, and that whatever the reason is, it was so important that God chose to endure them too.

We don't know why. Maybe the reason is that nothing and no one can grow up without suffering. Look at the maturity level of spoiled rich kids who grow up getting everything they want and are miserable, vs. the maturity level of kids who grow up having to deal with hard things and make it work. Maybe we all suffer and die because that's what will force us all to grow up. Maybe God Himself had to grow up, and Calvary was His coming of age. But despite our finite brains' inability to grasp the answers to the infinite questions (or even, perhaps, grasp the real questions), the Gospel gives us a place to begin, a hint that there IS Good News to follow the bad, and that the bad not only isn't as powerful as the good but is even compelled to bring about good despite itself.

If it be so, then so be it.

© John M. Munzer