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Memory #30: Softball at "The Campgrounds"

My dad played church league fast-pitch softball in a league of mostly Missionary Church teams on the back diamond at Prairie Camp. I remember the smell of mosquito repellent.

I also remember one night when my dad, who played right field, leaped high in the air near the fence to take away a homerun from some poor sucker. And the time he hit a long flyball that landed on the roof of the concession stand just beyond the rightfield fence for a homerun.

I got to play in some games with him by the time I turned fifteen. I wonder, what on earth would I do in the summer now if I hadn't been introduced to this game when I was so young?

Last summer I played about fifty games. This summer, Lord willing, I'll play in at least that many again. I'd play a hundred and fifty if I could.

This is no exaggeration: I think about playing fast-pitch softball every day. It's a dying sport, and they haven't played fast-pitch at the campgrounds for almost twenty years. But there was a day when the Wakarusa Missionary Church had no trouble fielding two fast-pitch teams in that league.

I guess people have a lot of tv to watch these days, instead.

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Memory 29: October 10, 2001

I've said many times that the most powerful worship services I've ever been in have been U2 concerts. I was a security guard (can you imagine?) for this concert, the opening concert of the third leg of Elevation tour, and the first U2 concert in the aftermath of 9/11. I think they very intentionally chose Notre Dame--home of the "fighting irish."

Definitely worth putting up with the ignoramus who was the supervisor of we one-time security guards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TCP-mdpSFE

There were so many great moments in the concert, but I liked these two especially. What's foreshadowed in Bono's rambling preamble to "One" is realized in the closing hymn, "Walk On."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwd1xoYRfDw

Apparantly, those really are NYPD and NYFD members on the stage. Is this shameless pandering to the intense emotions of the time, or is it a sincere celebration of courage and our longing for "home"? I like to think it is the latter.

Either way, the place erupted.

Love the "Pied Piper" image of Bono leading them around the heart shaped stage.

Hallelujah, he sings. And I think he really means it. I know I did.

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Memory #27: Skunked

So this fall, Anne and Joel and I are sitting around the campfire in our back yard, and Morgan is behind the giant compost pile maybe ten yards away rooting around in the dark for something, the way he always does, when I hear him let out a sharp yelp and I slowly start to smell the most potent burning tire odor ever, and Morgan comes staggering out of the dark, frothing at the mouth and stinking to high heaven and clawing at his face and sliding his body and head around on the grass trying to get the skunk stink off.

Apparantly some sort of peroxide mixture works. We bathed him using that stuff; the house smelled like skunk for a little while.

You can still faintly smell skunk on Morgan's face if he gets his head rained on. They say it can take as much as a year for the smell to go away entirely.

Memory #28: Yellow Jacket

A few days later, Morgan ate a yellow jacket. He's eaten roughly four thousand bees in his life, and never had any kind of reaction. This time, though, his face got all bumpy and mumpy and swollen and he acted like he wanted to scratch the inside of his skull. He was on the brink of berserk.

A hundred and fifty bucks, a short trip to the emergency vet, and two shots later he was ok, though he still smelled like skunk.

Later that week he crashed into Jeanie while playing ball in the back yard, giving her a lovely black eye.

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Memory #26: Hair

I remember having this much hair. That was March 2007.

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Memory #25: Zapallo Grande

Allow me to continue the story from my previous post.

Our transportation from Borbon to Zapallo Grande was this long canoe thing with an outboard motor that rattled your teeth and tickled your nose. The woman and child beside me were hitchikers; we simply gave them a ride from one village to the next. Our ride was in the neighborhood of four hours long, mostly in the hot sun, and then four hours back, only a small part of it in the rain.

Can you see how narrow that board is that I'm sitting on? I don't have a lot of cushion down there, so to say the least, my bum was sore after this trip.

Jim Stump took this picture (and the picture in the previous post). Not pictured, then, is his everpresent Boston Red Sox hat. When we got to the jungle village we were showered by a chorus of "Boston sucks! Boston Sucks!"

Apparantly, even in the remotest equatorial jungle, they know.

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Memory #24: The Best Literature Class Ever

It was all about context. I'm the one in the orange jacket, looking professorial. This is the first class meeting of the course--Multicultural Literature for students in the Ecuador semester abroad program. We're sitting in an open courtyard of our hotel in the mountain town of Otavalo, Ecuador.

What did we do? Simple. We read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," a story you should read right now if you never have, and maybe even if you have. Click here for the story: http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/garciamarquezoldman.html

After we read the story, someone said, "Tomorrow, when we get to Borbon and then when we go up river into the jungle to Zapallo Grande, WE will be the 'very old man with enormous wings.'"

I liked that.

Other people said many insightful things. I said, "Sometimes stories signify; sometimes they are also self-reflexive. This is a story about the way we interpret stories. This story itself is 'a very old man with enormous wings,' and this story has dropped into our little western village, and here we sit trying to make sense of what to do with it in the only way we know how."

The next morning we went out into the marketplace in Otavalo and bought alpaca wool sweaters and blankets. Later we drove to Borbon.

I love my job.

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Memory #23: Warm Christmas

On December 24, 1982, the high temperature was 60 degrees in Wakarusa. A day later it was 65. I remember this. I played basketball outdoors in shorts. On December 25, 1998, it was 87 degrees in Kingston, Jamaica. I remember this as well; I played basketball outdoors. On December 25, 1981, it was 86 degrees in Campinas, Brazil. I played basketball outdoors.

I'm sure I played basketball outdoors on many other colder, snowier Christmas days, but those are much more forgettable.

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Memory #22: Blue Mountain Peak

One of the best parts about waking up every morning in Kingston was looking out the window toward the hills of upper St. Andrew, and in the deep distance, the peaks of the Blue Mountain range.

Eleven years ago today, Jeanie and I hiked Blue Mountain Peak in Jamaica, and that is where we squat, smiling, in the picture above. On a clear day, you can see Cuba from this spot. I must tell you, a breezy 50 degrees felt like heaven, after months of relentless, hellish heat in the dusty asphalt jungle that is the city.

The peak is a seven mile hike (an ascent of 3000 feet through a stunningly fertile and dense forest) from where we stayed the night before--a quaint cottage among giant eucalyptus trees called Whitfield Hall with our friends the Allens and their three children.

The walking was easy compared to the drive from Mavis Bank to Whitfield Hall--another seven miles of one-lane dirt, carved into the side of a mountain.

Trying to turn around on that road I nearly drove the pick-up off a sheer cliff to an inglorious end. For some reason, my heart still races and I twitch nervously when I think about how close a call that was. But I have not the words to describe it well.

When people ask me what is one thing not to be missed on their Jamaican vacation I always say Blue Mountain Peak. I don't think anyone I've ever said that to has bothered to make this trek.

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Memory #21: "I'm a Rebel"

It was July and I was driving home from mowing the lawn at Church on a Saturday evening a couple summers ago. "Prairie Home Companion" was on the radio. Garrison Kiellor introduced a group I'd never heard of--no big surprise there. He called them the Old Crow Medicine Show.

Have I mentioned that sometimes I really miss Jamaica?

The guy said, "We're gonna take you on back to the Caribbean for this next number." And then they played this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUU6jbBmJ6U

In some mysterious and secretly unique way, I was taken on back to the Caribbean with that little number.

I love that song; I love reggae music. And now I love bluegrassed reggae.

Have I mentioned yet that I love bluegrass music, also? I love it all the more because a lot of it is the best happy-feet before bedtime dance music any two and half year old blondie of a little girl ever heard. One of my best memories from this past summer is the early evening Jeanie, Syd, and I spent at the Osceola Bluegrass festival. We ate rib tips. We bought a one dollar piece of junk toy for Sydney--a fuzzy wire spider attached to stick with elastic like string that helped you to make the spider dance.

And we all danced--Sydney and the spider the least self-consciously--as the sun set in Fern Hunsburger Park.

What can I say. "I'm a soul adventurer."

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Memory #20: Blizzard

On the television today I saw the words "Blizzard Warning." A closer inspection of the fine print revealed that the Blizzard Warning was not for us, but for our neighbors to the northwest, across the state line. But that word, Blizzard, always makes me think of the winter when I was eight. The snow drifts were enormous, and I don't remember the facts, but it must have taken my dad hours to shovel the four feet of snow off our driveway, only to have the end of the drive buried in another six feet of snow when the snow plows finally got around to clearing C.R. 1. It seemed like school was cancelled for a week. So we went sledding and made tunnels in the drifts and never once worried that anyone would make us make up lost school days in June.

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Memory #19: "Boston Sucks"

So it's July of 2001, and we're walking to our seats in right field at Yankee Stadium: Jeanie and I and all of the Stumps--Chris, Connor, Trevor, Casey, and the philosophy professor/dad, Jim. The Yankees are playing the Blue Jays this day; we arrive just a little late for the start of the game because the traffic was horrible.

Anyhow, we're making our way to our seats, up the stairs in the right field bleachers, when a guy stands up in the middle of the crowd and starts pointing somewhere behind me and chanting "Boston sucks! Boston sucks!"

Professor Stump (did I mention he's a very smart guy?) is a huge Red Sox fan. When I get to my seat, I realize that pretty much the entire section of bleachers is now standing, chanting wildly: "Boston sucks! Boston sucks!" pointing at James B. Stump, PhD, who happens to be wearing his Red Sox hat to the game between the Yankees and the Blue Jays in Yankee Stadium.

Allow me to shift tenses here. I think I'm not mistaken that his beloved wife, Chris, removed Jim's hat before he was able to sit down, and his loyal sons showed their support of their father by laughing hysterically.

Philosophically speaking, there was but one conclusion to draw from the experience: Boston sucks.

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Memory #18: Pretending

Sometimes when I hit the wiffleball to Morgan in our backyard--if by sometimes I can mean practically every day--I pretend that I play for the Cubs, that some pitcher tried to sneak a fastball "up and in" past me, that I see it coming, turn on it, and watch it sail over the rightfield ivy and onto Sheffield Avenue.

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Memory #17: Thunder

Sometime in February of 1998, about half way through our first year serving as missionaries in Jamaica, the good people at Grace Missionary Church in Kingston decided it was time to host a basketball tournament on their new basketball court. So we put together a 3 on 3 tournament, invited teams, and roughly thirty teams showed up. The tournament lasted three Saturdays, and culminated in a grand party and feast with food and drink and gospel reggae.

I treasure this picture above. I can't stop myself from staring at it. They called themselves the "Tower Hill Thunder"--Tower Hill for their neighborhood church in Olympic Gardens. Thunder for no other reason than that I suggested it and everyone liked it. They called me "Coach."

Andrew (they called him "tall-ite"--don't ask me how that's supposed to be spelled) holding the ball in one hand near his head had one of the ugliest jumpshots you could ever imagine. He could dunk the ball ferociously for someone who was 6'5" and an unhusky 180 pounds soaking wet. But anything outside of five feet from the basket was an adventure.

So as the clock wound down in the championship game that day, with the Thunder losing by two, I was on the sidelines, trying to look impartial in my role as tournament director. But I was of course hoping that Andrew (tall-ite) would take the ball to the hoop and try to get a lay-up or a foul. Instead, he launched a twenty-five footer from just left of the top of the key that floated ludicrously high in the tropical breeze, paused for a second at its peak, and then fluttered basketward. It clanged violently against the backboard.

And then swished through the net.

You ever wonder what the angels do when some sinner comes home? I like to think it looks like grown boys wildly dancing, hooting and chanting, with the sheer ecstasy of the impossible shot that somehow found its mark.

I cheered too. There was a relatively small cash prize awarded to the champions--the equivalent of 100 U.S. dollars. Divided five ways, that's not much.

Though none of them at that point was a Christian, the next day they appeared in their neighborhood church--Tower Hill Missionary--and presented their trophy to the congregation. And half their cash prize.

Picture:

top row: Andrew Bloomfield; Bullah; Lionel Lamont; Cephas Miller

bottom row: Coach (me); Andrew Lamont

Not pictured: The angel that redirected that shot through the hoop.

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Memory #16: Everything Is Illuminated

"I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out. Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine." (Alex, in Everything is Illuminated)

He wonders if the past is just the past, or if it really is "along side of us, on the inside, looking out?" He writes memories. Where do they come from, if not from the inside?

He remembers grading writing portfolios. At the end of every fall semester for the past ten years he has read the revised work of his freshmen writing students. These portfolios tell the story of their semester; they are testaments of their devotion to the writing process. But they are also examples of the past making its way from their insides and out on to the page.

He reads these testimonials: nine essays on various topics; a research paper; commentaries on how each paper has been revised and improved since he last saw it; a self-evaluation of each paper; a cover letter reflecting on the writer's growth over the course of the semester. He grades them, sure. But he reads them. With wonder. And gratitude.

Everything--(Is this hyperbole? No! Let it stand.)--everything is illuminated in the light of the past.

Inside out.

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Memory #15: An Unreliable Memory

I seem to be suffering from some sort of memory blank tonight. Since I can't remember anything to write tonight, let me . . . um . . . construct a memory, instead.

Let's suppose there was once a painfully shy first grader who found himself hopelessly attracted to the most beautiful little blonde haired girl from his class. One day, instead of playing football like normal, he chased her around the playground. At first, playfully. But then, for no reason he could ever fully understand, furiously.

He tripped her.

He felt the anguish of remorse before she hit the ground, before she burst into those heart-breaking tears, before she stormed off to tell the teacher.

The teacher, the little girl's giant blonde doppelganger (could it have been that he was furiously attracted to her as well?), sat the boy and girl down and asked the boy: "Why? Why did you trip her? Do you not like her?"

He cried, but he could never make them understand, because he could not himself understand, that he had done it because he loved her.

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Memory #14: I Am a Witness

For the past two years in FYE I have had my students read the novel Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. If you haven't, by all means rush out and get a copy to read. Allow me first to quote a little passage from the first chapter--a little something about miracles. A memory will follow.

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week—a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards. I'm sorry, but nope. Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word.

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave—now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle
contradicts the will of earth.

My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed—though ignoring them will change you also. Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will. (p. 3)

On Friday, October 24, 2008, I witnessed a miracle in my office. Someone (who had recently read this very same book) was dead, and came to life. Was lost, and was found. Was blind, and saw. Was born again. Became a child of God.

I know what I saw. I am a witness. This is how it went. Make of it what you will.

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Memory #13: U2: Zoo TV

I was in the house for this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sUXZ8RNzco

U2 and their Zoo TV tour came to the Pontiac Silverdome in September of 1992. The thing sold out in like 13 minutes. Luckily I called during the 13 minutes tickets were available and bought six. It wasn't hard to find people who wanted to come along.

At this point in the concert, Bono starts clicking through the channels projected on the huge screens spanning the back of the stage and stumbles into Garth, who happensto be hosting the MTV music awards, live, this very night.

They closed the concert with a short rendition of "Unchained Melody" followed by "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Brought the house down.

I hear they signed an eternal contract as the worship band just beyond the pearly gates. Got tickets?

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Memory #12: Crayfish

The once rocky part of the Baugo Creek, the part down by the bridge over C.R. 1, at my parents house in Wakarusa, was home to oodles of crayfish. I used to catch them.

The trick was to turn over a rock and have a big cup ready for when the thing tried to swim away. I liked to put two similarly sized crawdads into a tin bucket, shake the bucket up, and then watch them fight.

I liked it. But then I didn't like it.

I don't know what pain freshwater crustaceans feel when they are clawed to pieces by a brother. I just came to feel something like remorse for my cruelty.

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Memory #11: Applause

Today was the last day of FYE this semester; it was also the end of ten year partnership I've had with John Dendiu as the "faculty mentors" of Block 10/7 (Block 10 for nine years; Block 7 this year). Next year, John will transition into a new role in the school of graduate studies at Bethel. Over the past decade, John and I have grown into a true team. While he was primarily responsible for Exploring the Christian Faith, and I primarily responsible to help students read and write better, we both saw that our primary purpose was in mentoring and discipling Bethel students to become more passionate, thoughtful, disciplined, and articulate followers of Jesus Christ.

I hardly knew John at all when I first met him a couple of weeks before our first block class together in August of 1999. He was the tennis coach then, and all of the tennis matches were played on Tuesdays and Thursdays--block days. So he was absent a fair amount during my first month or two of teaching at Bethel.

I have learned a lot from John over the years. I learned to laugh, to lighten up, to care for students as persons rather than as my mere pet projects that I would transform into brilliant writers. Watching him teach, I learned just how powerful a personal story as part of a lesson (on anything) could be. I was never as good at planning the whole semester out day by day the way John could, but he never expressed any frustration with my last second ideas. Together we learned the importance of the "daily ritual" of reading and discussing classic devotional literature with our students.

Today in block class--and I write of this because I will not soon forget it--John played the piano for our students and for the students in the block across the hall. We sang Christmas carols. Then he briefly played a little Chopin followed by some jazz.

And the students thundered their approval.

Maybe they were just clapping for the guy who can make something beautiful come out of the piano, but I heard something more. It was an ovation for ten years of service in mentoring freshmen through that often painful, often transformative first semester of college. I was clapping, too.

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Memory #10: Bus Race

I do not think she liked me; in fact, she did not even stop at our driveway to pick me up each morning. Instead, she stopped directly in front of the neighbor’s drive across the street—still in front of our property, yes. But it meant in winter or in wet that I had a longer, snowier or muddier, walk to the school bus.

And she did not like to have to honk the horn if I was not out waiting for the bus. Truth be told, she did have to honk the horn on many occasions because I was not out waiting in the dark or the rain or the snow or the whatever. I could tell by her look and often by her snide comments—“running late today, eh”—that I was not her most beloved passenger.

I remember feeling shamed by her more than once for making her wait and making our bus a little later than our usual fifteen minutes early arrival.

The bus drivers would talk to one another on CB radio on the way into Wakarusa Elementary and Middle School, and I knew of what they spoke. They were racing. Who would be the first to arrive at the school, and then to wait triumphantly as the other buses slowly pulled in ingloriously behind. We weren’t allowed off the bus until the school doors were opened at 7:50 a.m. I do not know why—perhaps in those days it was thought better to inhale diesel fumes than fresh air. So there we sat.

I remember my bus driver. I remember that what she seemed to care about most was beating her husband, another bus driver, to the finish line at the school. And I remember that once we got there, we were made to sit in the bus and wait for the doors to open. I remember thinking the whole thing absurd. I remember feeling that I was simply an obstacle—a barrier, an annoying burden—to her on her daily quest to get to school before all the other buses arrived. I remember.

Every trip is a quest, and the real purpose of a quest is always the acquisition of self-knowledge. Nothing in my experience of being an obstacle on my bus driver’s quest would lead me to believe that she ever had any sort of epiphany about the way she treated the cargo she delivered each morn. And yet, in my more compassionate moments, many years later, I trust that at some point before she retired and then “retired” that her eyes were opened and that she did see the light.

When it some day comes to send my Sydney on a school bus in the cold dark Baugo township morning, rest assured that her bus driver will know that my Sydney is not an obstacle—is most certainly not a mere barrier or annoying burden—to him or her winning a bus race to the doors of the elementary school. Her cargo is my treasure.

Bless you, Lorna, my bus driver, wherever you may be.

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Memory #9: Personal Best

During the two summers I worked the most intensely on writing my dissertation, I would often take breaks from the pain and strain of composition--writing a coherent sentence is always a pain for me--to go out to my driveway and shoot free throws. I shot a lot of free throws those two summers.

I like to keep track, but percentages don't excite me. Strings do.

On June 25, 2006, I got hot and made 125 free throws in a row. The most I had ever made in a row at any point in my life prior to this was 66. I thought 125 was pretty good. I knew it was nothing like a world record or anything, because of course someone would have made three or four or even five hundred at some point.

So I looked it up.

On April 26, 1996, dairy farmer Ted St. Martin made 5,221 free throws in a row, breaking his own world record, something he had repeatedly done (that is, break his own world records) since 1972.

I find some consolation in the knowledge that the world record in 1971 was 499 free throws in a row, a record held by Harold “Bunny” Levitt, who won a YMCA free throw shooting contest shooting underhanded in April of 1935. 499 is at least in the neighborhood of 125, and I had to go chase the ball myself after each shot.

But it's not even in the same galaxy as 5,221.

Back to the line, I guess.

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Memory #8: Grace Incarnate: A Dissertation Excerpt

The summer his best friend died, he drove home from summer school at Drew University the first week of August and discovered waiting for him in his back yard a tiny black Labrador retriever he immediately named Morgan—after the Big Red Machine’s all-star and now Hall of Fame second basemen Joe Morgan, his first favorite baseball player when he was five.[1] Perhaps every person who loses someone close searches for a replacement, for someone or something to fill the void left by death. His wife knew him, intuited his broken heart, and remembered that he had wanted a dog for more than a decade. She bought him Morgan—Morgan the post-modern wonder dog. How does one go on after the worst that can happen happens? Morgan licks away the tears.

R writes his dissertation on summer mornings, alone in the spare basement room that serves as a kind of office. Morgan often lies on the floor under his feet, waiting patiently, or mostly patiently, for the chance to go to the back yard and chase the squeaky pink ball that R bats (hits with a wiffle ball bat, not throws) to him over and over. Morgan lets him know when it is time with a whine, a paw on the leg, a stolen towel from the bathroom. Laubach’s dog, Tip, comforted him on his dark night on Signal Hill. Morgan came to live with R and saved him from suffocating despair.

But it could have turned out so differently; Morgan almost died that first week. He was full of worms, and by the time they took him to the vet, he was badly dehydrated. And R nearly broke down, sick with worry for that tiny creature whom he loved desperately already.
He wonders what might have happened had Morgan not survived the night in that animal hospital. Could this have been enough to destroy a man’s faith in a compassionate God? Perhaps. Perhaps that is why the compassionate God spared Morgan and Morgan’s best friend that day. It’s not Laubach’s Signal Hill experience—with poetry from heaven—but he remembers it as a gift from a kind and merciful God. Not obviously mystical, but mysteriously transformative somehow.

To this day he struggles to make sense of how the grace of God comes incarnate in a creature who has grown to eighty plus pounds, occasionally eats his own vomit, goes berserk for the mailman, and spears him in the groin several times a day.

____________________________________

[1] Joe Morgan played second base in the major leagues from 1963-1984. He played for the World Champion Cincinnati Reds in 1975, and hit a homerun the day I attended my first ever major league game that summer. I played second base in pee-wee league, too. He was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in 1990, and has since worked as a color commentator and baseball analyst for ESPN. When I named my dog Morgan, I didn’t realize one similarity the two Morgan’s shared. Joe Morgan was a Gold Glover at second base. I can still see in my mind’s eye the way he would field ground balls. The other Morgan, without the help of a baseball glove, is an amazing fielder as well. I hit him hundreds of balls every week. He won’t chase the thing if I just throw it!

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Memory #7: Memorial service

My best friend Dave was short and round. He had dark hair that got thinner and grayer by the year, perhaps because he attended more Bethel College sporting events since 1980 than any other person.[1] He laughed hard and sang loud; his gusto for life was contagious; he made you feel important.

He was also about the funniest person I have ever known. An e-mail from Dave could leave you in stitches. His voice-mail greetings, which were only occasionally in English, made you want to call him back when you knew he wasn’t home. Meanwhile, Dave claimed that 19 years of Bethel undergraduate education had taught him that he was clearly illiterate in at least four languages.

Dave loved books, but wasn’t afraid to poke fun at popular titles. He read, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and suggested that it should have been called Dating Kissed ME Goodbye.[2] Dave considered writing his autobiography. It would be fashioned loosely after Jim Cymbala’s book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. Dave’s version would be called Break Wind, Light Fire.[3]

Dave was refreshingly honest; he knew well his shortcomings, and yet he wasn’t forever rehearsing them. If he needed to confess, he confessed. He longed for deeper intimacy with God and saw self-examination and candid confession as the place to begin.

Dave sharpened me—sharpened my mind, my spirit, my imagination. We had long conversations in my living room, in his car on trips, at our campsite at Cornerstone music festival.[4]

One long conversation concerned our childhood fantasies—pretend baseball and basketball games that we each had played alone as kids. Dave wondered about the meaning of such imaginings; I mentioned that C.S. Lewis seemed to think these imaginings might be a subtle indication of a person’s deep, almost hidden, longing for a world beyond this land of shadows.

I had just finished reading Lewis’s The Silver Chair.[5] In it, King Caspian dies at a very old age. Eustace and Jill are taken by Aslan from Caspian’s funeral up to a “mountain” stream. In that crystal stream they see Caspian’s dead body, water flowing over his wrinkled skin, long white hair, and beard. When the children see him, they cry. When Aslan sees him, he cries giant Lion tears that drop into the river.

Then the lion tells Eustace to pluck a thorn from a nearby bush. “Drive it into my paw,” he says.

Eustace obeys.

"A great drop of blood. . . . splashed into the stream over the dead body of the King. . . . And the dead King began to be changed. His white beard turned to gray, and from gray to yellow, and got shorter and vanished altogether; and his sunken cheeks grew round and fresh, and the wrinkles smoothed, and his eyes opened, and his eyes and lips both laughed, and suddenly he leapt up
and stood before them. . . . He rushed to Aslan and flung his arms round the lion’s huge neck; and he gave Aslan the strong kisses of a King, and Aslan gave him the wild kisses of a lion."[6]


When I told Dave this story, though it was after 3 a.m., his eyes sparkled. Sometimes more is communicated in a short silence in the pit of the night than a million words could ever express.

Life is full of mingled contrarieties. I oscillate now between heartbreak over my loss and immense joy over Dave’s gain. I miss those conversations with Dave—conversations that fluctuated from riotous laughter, to righteous indignation, to hushed awe. Dave could appreciate the resurrection of Caspian by the Lion’s blood because he had a healthy sense of wonder and a respect for metaphor and mystery. He could appreciate it because it was a picture of his Christian hope. At the same time, Dave could respect the simple, straightforward message of a Christian pop song.

When we were frustrated by life and had used each other to “dump on,” Dave would put things into perspective, recalling the lines of a Keith Green song. He told me if he ever got to preach a sermon his message would be a simple rhymed triplet. “Just keep doing your best / and pray that it’s blessed / Jesus takes care of the rest.”[7]

Frank Laubach, a different kind of best friend of mine and perhaps the greatest missionary of the twentieth century, whose books Dave read shortly before he died, said this. “God, what is man’s best gift to mankind?”

“To be beautiful of soul and then let people see into your soul.”[8]

My friend Dave spent much of his life giving this very gift to those he knew. I will treasure the beauty I saw in Dave’s soul all the days of my life.


[1] Dave was at far more than men’s basketball games during his nineteen years around Bethel. But let me focus on just basketball for a moment. I played in 147 games during my four year basketball career at Bethel. Dave was there for all but three played during a Christmas Break Florida trip my freshman year. We won 113 of those games, five of them after trailing by more than 20 points in the second half—we had made a habit of impossible late game comebacks. Winning that way is enough to give people heart attacks, never mind gray hair. Dave was also present at the NAIA national championship victories in 1995, 1997, and 1998. Consider the heart stopping finishes in each of those three games. In 1995, Mark Galloway hit an impossible three-point shot at the buzzer of regulation to send the game into overtime and on toward victory. In 1997, Randy Romer’s running jump shot in the lane with just seconds left put the Pilots ahead, but the opposing team threw a length of the court pass to a wide open player streaking down the court for a lay-up. Romer, racing after him, may have bothered him just enough. He missed the easy shot and the Pilots had their second NAIA national championship in three years. The next year, Rico Swanson’s fall away jump shot from the right wing at the buzzer made the Pilots back-to-back national champions. And Dave was there keeping statistics for all of this in his official capacity as the college’s Sports Information Director. Mostly, though, he was there as Bethel’s biggest fan. It’s a wonder, considering all he witnessed watching Bethel basketball, that his heart didn’t stop much sooner than it did.

[2] Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1997). When this book was first published it hit the evangelical youth pastor crowd like a tsunami. I can envision these well-meaning men (and very occasionally women) of God taking their young flocks on retreat and preaching to them the dangers of the secular patterns set for dating. Nearly a million copies of the book have been sold in almost a decade. Dave, trying to keep current on the culture of his dormitory full of eighteen and nineteen year old college males, read the book to find out why so many of them were beyond frustration with the girls on campus who had suddenly decided that dating was evil.

[3] Jim Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997). Anyone who knew Dave soon found, always (of course) in the high and holy literary spirit of “The Miller’s Tale,” that Dave was prolifically flatulent. He was as sincere and God-loving a person as you could ever hope for, and he was as hilariously irreverent as they come. Cymbala’s book is about reinvigorating the church via the “prayer meeting.” Dave prayed. Dave also farted. Both well and often, and I’m betting he did them frequently at the same time. And God laughed.

[4] “Cornerstone Music Festival” is a huge “Woodstock” type event put on by Jesus People USA on the Cornerstone farm in Bushnell, IL. Dave and I went half a dozen times in the 1990s, camping, talking, laughing, mocking bad music, and enjoying the good stuff. Since Dave died, I’ve never been able to bring myself to go back. Maybe someday.

[5] C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillan, 1953; reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

[6] Ibid., 252-53.

[7] Keith Green, “He'll Take Care of the Rest,” Ultimate Collection, Chordant, 1977, CD.

[8] Frank Laubach, Letters By a Modern Mystic (New York: Student Volunteer Movement, 1937), 21.

thirty-nine memories (6)

Memory #6: “IMPORTANT”

About forty-five minutes before my seminar on C.S. Lewis (taught by Professor Pain—I kid you not) one Thursday the summer of 2001 at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, I walked into the library to check my e-mail. It had been several days, and there were about thirty or so mostly useless, mostly non-personal e-mails awaiting a courtesy open and delete. But I was hungry and in a hurry, so I deleted the majority without reading them, deducing from their subject headings that they didn’t apply to me. The last e-mail left to be deleted, the one at the top of the list, was entitled “IMPORTANT MESSAGE.” I was skeptical that it was, in fact, important, for I could tell it was a mass e-mailing to everyone on campus at Bethel from an address notorious for announcing trivial urgencies. But for some reason I decided to open this one before rushing off to get a sandwich before class.

The message, quoted in full, read as follows:

“Today at approximately 12:15 p.m., Oakwood Hall Resident Director Dave Slater was found dead in his apartment. A prayer meeting will be held in the Shiloh Prayer Chapel at 3:00 p.m. We will forward further details as we receive them.”

Dave was my best friend; in fact, probably my only really close friend. If he knew enough about computers and could pull it off, this was just the kind of practical joke he’d pull. He lived completely alone in a college dorm all summer. I remember him joking, “Man, if I died in my apartment when school’s out, it’d be a week before anybody found me.” It turned out, we think, to be about five days. It was no joke; there was a message on my cell phone to call home right away. My best friend was dead.

I went to C.S. Lewis class that night anyhow (I was 700 miles from home; I didn’t know what else to do!), and a man gave a presentation on Lewis’s A Grief Observed. It was the first time I’d ever been in a graduate seminar where the material of the presentation touched the presenter so deeply that he cried. The only more ironic possibility might have been if I’d been taking a course on the literature of grief—which was, believe it or not, an option that summer.[1] Nevertheless, no one should learn via e-mail in a university library that one’s best friend has been discovered dead in his apartment.

[1] Drew University, Summer 2001, “The Literature of Grief” taught by Dr. Laura Winters.

thirty-nine memories (4 & 5)

Memory #4: The most delicious flavor on earth

The “Pork Pit” in Montego Bay, Jamaica was the first place I ever tasted jerk pork and festival. Jeanie and I had traveled with Courtney to scout out his homeland for future long-term ministry opportunities. That sultry, salty night air; that perfect charcoal and pimento smoke aroma; the sea breeze; the rhythms of reggae and dancehall pulsing in the tropical air—we sat on stone benches and I took my first beloved bites of a spicy island delicacy. I wouldn’t want to guess how many pounds of searingly delicious jerk pork served in brown paper with no plastic wear (all the world’s best foods must be handled with one’s fingers) I ate during the two years we lived in Jamaica.

When we ruminate upon the land we called our home, we remember the people, the sights, the smells, the sounds. Jamaica has to be experienced with all the senses to be known. And our taste-buds will never forget her.

Memory #5: The most beautiful sound in the world

On that same first ministry scouting trip to Jamaica, we spent most of our time in the sauna that is Kingston in early August. One day, with no excursions planned, I was out on the veranda reading a book, when I heard in the distance a familiar sound. The shrubs and wall surrounding the property blocked my view of the road, but the sound was unmistakable. A siren song—irresistible. I wandered to the end of the drive and heard voices before I saw the three young boys, pounding a basketball on the pavement, making their way up the road, and now toward me.

We had come to Jamaica to see whether or not we might begin a kind of mentoring and mentor training ministry to try to reach young men. I was interested to find out if we might start a ministry utilizing the vehicle of basketball, but was told that in Jamaica, Soccer was king. Cricket and athletics (track and field) were beloved as well, but nobody much played basketball.

This day was the first I had seen a basketball, and I had seen no basketball courts anywhere we had traveled. Of course I asked the boys about their ball. They said they had been playing in the street just down the road on a makeshift hoop nailed to a tree—until the hoop had broken down a few minutes before.

“But Jamaicans don’t play basketball,” I ribbed them with a smirk.

“Ya mon,” chimed in one of the boys. “Wi luv da game.”

They explained to me how for the first time just a few months prior, one of the two local Jamaican television stations had carried the entire six game series of the Bulls and Suns in the 1993 NBA finals. My eyes must have bugged out of my head.

As we spent days after this asking questions about basketball, come to find out the little island had gone Michael Jordan and basketball crazy as a result of those televised games. One pastor told us that there were hoop like iron rings nailed to nearly every telephone pole in his ghetto neighborhood, and the children played basketball, barefoot, with anything that might serve as a ball (tin can, rolled up t-shirt, deflated soccer ball) for hours upon hours outside his church property.

And I had my call from God. His voice is most beautiful, I must tell you--it sounds like the pounding of a basketball on hot pavement.

thirty-nine memories (3)

Memory #3: Imaginary Friend

When I was very young I had an imaginary friend who played with me. What we mostly played, though not exclusively, were sports. Football, mainly. Baseball and basketball to. There is a photo of me, in some dusty album somewhere, wearing one of my father’s tattered church basketball jerseys. I hold a red, white, and blue basketball, in the stone cold, unfinished basement of our rural Wakarusa home. Behind me, a wooden backboard and a full-sized basketball rim and net hang on the wall, five feet or so from the concrete floor. I suspect my friend and I had just finished a wild game, defeating some imagined team, for my cheeks look flushed and rosy. My father’s jersey hangs to my ankles.

I think my friend—Rebound, he was called—had made the winning shot that day.

Deadly Stampede At Wal-Mart Not Surprising : NPR

Deadly Stampede At Wal-Mart Not Surprising : NPR

thirty-nine memories (cont'd)

Memory #2: The greatest Pony League baseball team in the history of Wakarusa

Virgil Weldy, Jr. Insurance. This was the name of my pony league (12-15 years old) baseball team in the Wakarusa Little League. When I was twelve, we were an expansion team. All the other teams in the league had existed the previous season(s), and thus, had returning (and older) players. To make up for the inequity, those who ran the league decided to give our coach a bunch of early picks in the draft of “little leaguers” who were coming into “pony league.”

I think we ended up something like 0-12 that summer. Our coach kept reminding us: “Just wait boys, we’re going to dominate this league in a year or two.”

He was right. The next year we won just over half of our games. The final two seasons we all played together, we never lost a single game, and our first five batters combined for a batting average of over .600. My memory fails me here, but I think at least six of us from that team (it may have been seven) went on to play varsity baseball at Northwood High School.

thirty-nine memories

On January 5, 2009, I will celebrate my 39th birtday. I wish I'd thought to start this series a few days ago and then posted once a day until January 5. Anyhow, it's a little less than 39 days until my birthday, so I'll post one memory (in completely whimsical order) from my life in honor of each year of my life. No, the memories will not correspond to particular years. I have no memory of being 17 months old. If all goes well, I may even include a visual aid or two in some of the posts. But not this one.

Memory #1: "Hillside demolition derby"

My two younger brothers and I used to take the following items out to the hill in our backyard: a bigwheel tricycle (Derry), a little red wagon (Jamie); an old metal tricycle (me). Derry would ride his normal little kid style. I rode mine standing up, on the back axle. Jamie rode the wagon the way anybody would, sitting (sometimes kneeling) in the wagon, using the handle to steer. No big deal. Kids ride toys down the hill for fun.

I think it was my suggestion that led us to discover the mad hilarity of a game I would like to now dub "hillside demolition derby." Perched at the top of the hill, each wearing a football helmet of some sort, we aimed our vehicles so as to collide about half way down. Derry (the youngest) gave the countdown. "3-2-1 go."

We met with horrible and hilarious violence somewhere half way to the bottom, bodies and body parts scattered randomly in the summer grass, three boys laughing riotiously at the double flip one of us had turned or at the way the wagon had run over our leg or neck. Only rarely did someone cry. Never for long.

Random things I'm thankful for:

1. The acid burn in your throat when you take that first gulp of an ice cold coke.
2. The delightful sound of plastic on plastic as bat meets ball in my backyard virtually every day.
3. That I never have to take a driver’s education class or pass a driving test again as long as I live.
4. A sofa with seats that recline.
5. The Lombardo translation of Homer’s Odyssey.
6. Students who care, who read, who think, who discuss, and who really want to grow.
7. Loose fitting cargo pants.
8. New tires.
9. A new Humanities Major.
10. That the revolution has begun.

"as you squint with the light of the truth in your eyes"

Ten songs:

1. “Hey You” by Pink Floyd. “But it was only fanstasy / The Wall was too high, as you can see / No matter how he tried he could not break free / And the worms ate into his brain” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1yD9avOGgM

2. “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Don’t worry / About a thing / Cause every little thing / gonna be alright”

3. “I Fall to Pieces” by Patsy Cline. “And I’ve tried, and I’ve tried, but I haven’t yet.”

4. “Pressure Drop” by Toots and the Maytals. “I say when it drops, oh you gonna feel it /Know that you were doing wrong.”

5. “We’re All In This Thing Together” by Old Crow Medicine Show. “We're all in this thing together / Walkin' the line between faith and fear / This life don't last forever / When you cry I taste the salt in your tears.”

6. “Barney Theme Song” by Barney Kids. “Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination / and when he’s tall he’s what we call a dinosaur sensation”

7. “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. click here “Come on Eileen, / I swear (well he means) At this moment you mean everything, / With you in that dress my thoughts I confess verge on dirty / Ah come on Eileen.”

8. “I Wonder if I’m Growing” by Raffi. “My mom says 'eat your sandwich / It will make you grow up tall' / But when I eat my sandwich / I'm hardly bigger at all”

9. “I Wanna Be Sedated” by Ramones. Oh for crying out loud, just click here and sing along.

10. “The Finish Line” by Steve Taylor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJhwc2d7y-E “And I gasped / When I saw you fall / In his arms At the finish line”

random things about me

1. I have a hard time with eye contact. It must be from being a very bashful and introverted child. I try to look people in the eye in conversation, but I fail more often than not.

2. I love rib tips. In fact, any kind of grilled pork doused in barbecue sauce makes my mouth water. If you're ever on Bethel's campus and looking for a great meal or snack, try Double T's, just off Hickory a few hundred feet north of McKinley.

3. I once attempted 30 shots in a high school basketball game. Actually, I think I may have twice attempted 30 shots, or maybe one of them was just 29. Can you say, "pass the ball?"

4. One of my all-time favorite novels is The Brother's K, by David James Duncan. It's about baseball, family, and growing up through the turbulent 1960s.

5. I really like English majors. In fact, I think the world of business would be served much better if more business people had majored in English. Because reading literature is good for your soul, and the business world (especially in these chaotic economic times) desperately needs some soul.

6. I kiss my dog every day. And most days, he kisses me back. Don't tell anyone, but he (Morgan) has been swimming more than once in the ponds on Bethel's campus.

7. I am a very passive person. But my wife, Jeanie, is the most admirably relentless person I have ever known. Don't ever try to pull one over on her. You try to sneak a funny charge on our cell phone bill, you can jolly bet she will call you up and she will not quit until she has not just an apology and a credit, but free stuff to keep her as a customer. She is AMAZING that way. I'm a pushover.

8. I own a machine that pitches golf ball sized wiffle balls so that I can take batting practice in my backyard. I'm 38 years old. Last summer, I hit 18 homeruns in 52 games of fastpitch softball. It must have been the pitching machine.

9. Occasionally I have assigned students to read books that I haven't read yet myself just so that I will be forced to read them myself. Example: I had never read C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces until I assigned it the first time in one of my classes several years ago. Now it is one of my favorite books to teach.

10. I learn something new about literature from my students virtually every day during class discussions.

to be continued...

Writing assignment from LIT 421

In Myth & Archetype class the other day, Stephen and Mary assigned the class to read the chapter in The Classic Fairy Tales dedicated to "Cinderella." We were told to pick three things that marked the Cinderella story type and then to write our own Cinderella story. Mine was by no stretch of the imagination the best of the class, but here it is for, for what it's worth.

Cindy and the Browns
(written in a 20 minute flourish right before class J)

A long time ago when kids still played baseball all afternoon, all summer long, unlike now when they sit around in air-conditioned basements playing stupid video games getting grotesquely fat, there was a certain group of friends in a neighborhood not far from where you now sit who were a ferociously competitive bunch. They played baseball all afternoon, all summer long. There were enough of them to have a team, nothing like little league today— no umpires, no parental consent forms, no fundraisers. Just a bunch kids who played baseball.
Everyday they would play against their arch rivals, whom they called “Nine Dwarves” just to hack them off, since most of them were short and stubby. Really though, the Dwarves dominated the action on the field. The nine dwarves called their rivals “Charlie Brown and friends.” It wasn’t quite that bad. Charlie Brown and friends really weren’t as bad as the real Charlie Brown and friends, but they lost an awful lot more than they won, and being so ferociously competitive, this really got their blood boiling.
Little did any of them know that all their games were being watched from an attic window overlooking the park field. In that attic, there lived a young girl named Cindy. She was small and tiny and thin and lovely, but because her mean old step-mother locked her in the attic every day while she went off to shop and flirt with boys half her age at the public pool, she was rather filthy and pale for lack of fresh air.
You see where this is headed, don’t you?
Of course you do. One day in the middle of that season the star shortstop for the “Charlie Browns” crashed his bicycle on the way to the game and broke his leg, and now the team was not only without a shortstop, but without even a complete team—they’d have no chance at all against the nine dwarves if they only fielded eight players.
They sat under a tree just beyond the right field fence and within earshot of Cindy who listened from her window.
“What’re we gonna do?” “Who’ll play short and lead-off”? “We’re done, there goes the summer.” All that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, Cindy, who had long ago discovered an old baseball glove in a trunk of stuff belonging to her dead mother as well as a set of cleats, a jersey, and a hat that fit perfectly, had sprung into action. She tucked her long hair under the cap, rubbed a little attic dust under her eyes to make it look like the eye-black a lot major leaguers wear, and shimmied her way very quietly down the chimney just outside her window.
“Hey kid,” said one of the Charlie Browns as he spotted her strolling toward their whine-fest under the tree. “You play ball.”
Cindy said, “I play short stop.”
This had a kind of enchanting effect on the whining Browns.
You know the rest of course. They inserted her into the line-up, she went 4 for 5 that day and made several dazzling plays at short, and they won in the bottom of the ninth when she took away a hit from the Dwarves clean-up hitter that would have tied the game and turned it into a game ending double play.
But before they could carry her off the field in jubilation, she was sprinting toward right field, hopping the fence, disappearing in the shadows.
“Aw man, we forgot to ask him his name. I hope he comes back.”
The clever twist here is that, of course, the nitwits never even noticed that Cindy was a girl, for she had so carefully disguised herself with the hat and the eye-black and her… well, how should I say it…she didn’t exactly throw like a girl.
Cindy did come back the next day. And this time, with the game tied in the bottom of the ninth, she hit a screamer into the right field corner.
And she ran.
She ran like the wind.
You’ve seen Ichiro run? It was like that.
Rounding third and heading for home she lost her hat, and her hair flowed blond and dazzlingly behind her as she crossed the plate to the ecstatic delight, stunned surprise, and stirred pre-pubescent hormones of the other eight Charlie Browns.
But she kept right on running, hopping the fence, disappearing in the shadows.
“I guess her name probably isn’t actually Bart, eh?” said one of the more observant Charlie Browns.
Cindy didn’t show the next day, and the Browns got smashed 21 to 3, having to pick up an old wino to stand in right field and bat ninth.
The following day they decided they’d be better off just playing with only eight players and lost 17-2.
They needed to find that girl. And besides, they still had her hat.
The search was on. They knocked on every door in the neighborhood with that hat and told the story about the most amazing ball player they’d ever seen, and a few mothers even let their young daughters try on the hat, but it was too small for any of them.
They knocked at Cindy’s house and the mean step-mom answered, still (very inappropriately) in her bikini from her day of flirting at the public pool. Evil as she was, these eleven year olds were a bit young for her, and when she heard their story she flew into a rage.
“Cindy, get down here before I skin you.”
And there she was, in uniform, minus the hat.
Acting fast, the Browns whisked Cindy away, called Child Protective Services, and Cindy was placed in foster care with the family of the Browns team captain. They played baseball everyday that summer, and though they didn’t win every game the rest of the season, it was clear that the tide had turned. The former star shortstop with the broken leg had lost his position for good, and Cindy had found a new home at shortstop, at least until these pre-pubescent boys became post-pubescent and would be utterly unable to function with a drop dead hottie for a shortstop.
But heck, by then, they wouldn’t probably care much about baseball anymore. So we might as well just say that Cindy and the Browns lived happy ever after.

The end.

the sacrament of the present moment

Sacraments are acts regarded as sacred, holy.
Confession is sacred, holy.
Blogging is confessional.
Keeping a blog is sacramental.

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xanga

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hip, hip, hooray!

top five reasons you gotta love Morgan

today's weather...

Clear; 55

perfect

faculty retreat

Robby Prenkert
Faculty Retreat 2008
Bethel College
The Intersection of Faith and My Discipline
“our lives as odyssey”

Were this the third day of the semester in World Literature class, I’d be telling be telling you to “jot down some notes about a time when you just really, really wanted to go home. You know, something like it was the fourth day of summer camp and it was still raining, or it was two weeks to spring break, or three weeks into my semester in China…you get the idea. What did you feel, and why did you feel that way, and how did you come to that point of just wanting to go home.”

“Write. Write for a minute,”” I’d say—just enough time to get something on paper.

Were this the third day of World Lit class, I’d encourage my students to volunteer a neighbor and we’d all get to hear a few especially good stories. It’s great fun really. Then I’d do my best impersonation of an English teacher and transition the class like this…

So after we read the first four books of the Odyssey, and we noted that, though he’s mentioned over and over again in those books, Odysseus doesn’t actually make an appearance “on stage” until we get to book five. Those first four books of the Odyssey are about Odysseus’ son Telemachus taking his own “odyssey” to see what he can find out about his long lost dad—who left to fight the Trojan War shortly after Telemachus was born twenty years ago.

If I may digress quickly, those first four books of the Odyssey connect well with my 20 year old students who are all “journeying to make a name for themselves” in the world just like Telemachus; they’re on quests for their own identity, just like Odysseus’ son. Many of them, just like Telemachus, are even making “odysseys” toward their “Father.”

By the way, You do “ “ this a lot as a Literature teacher—anytime you want your students to get that you’re speaking figuratively—that you’ve slipped into metaphor.

Anyhow, the real point of day three in World Lit is this. Having warmed up the class by letting them tell funny stories about times they wanted to go home, I ask them, “so what is Odysseus doing the first time he makes an actual appearance in this poem—in book 5?” And the room grows silent. Finally someone will say… “he’s on that island and he’s on the beach, crying.”

“And why is he crying?”

A shorter silence until someone offers, “because he wants to go home?”

“Right!!! Because he wants to go home.”

The first time we actually see Odysseus in Book 5 of the epic bearing his name he is a captive of the nymph/goddess Calypso (whose name, incidentally, means “I conceal”). She wants to make Odysseus her immortal husband. He has been her prisoner for seven years when we see him for the first time, “weeping… wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish, gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears.”

For whatever else it is, the Odyssey is a story about a guy who really wants to go home. It’s also (among a host of other things) the story of how he got to the point of really wanting to go home, as well as the story of his journey getting there.

“So what?” you say. Well…… You have been there on the beach with Odysseus, yearning for home.

Maybe you didn’t spend 10 years fighting the Trojan war, 3 years adventuring and wandering the seas gathering up riches for a triumphal return to Ithaca from Troy, only to lose all 12 of your ships and all 600 of your men along the way before ending up as Calypso’s prisoner on Ogygia for seven years. But still, the longing for home and all it represents is something we, too, know about.

How did Odyssues get to this point? Has he wanted to go home this badly all along? Well…it doesn’t seem so. Those first three years after the war ended, he wandered a lot—looting and partying and adventuring, much of which seems unnecessary to many readers. Those three years of wandering include a year long stay as the guest of another sorceress-nymph-goddess, Circe—who provides Odysseus and his men with exceptional hospitality, while they seem to forget about the goal of home.

Odysseus’ family, mother, father, wife, and son, sit home wondering what has become of him. After a year with Circe, she finally sends Odysseus to the underworld of the dead to speak with the shade of the prophet Tiresias. He also speaks to the shade of his dead mother there, who tells him that she died of grief, longing for her son’s return. He begins to get it—he needs to get home. (Sometimes, my little lovers of literature, we’re left to descend into the realm of the dead—we “die” (dare I say, to our old selves)—even as we are wake up to the mess we’re making of things for ourselves and others). More than seven years after that, Calypso has Odysseus “concealed”, imprisoned, at the end of his rope—longing for home.

In the world of the Odyssey, Home becomes a symbol for the ultimate good—the enduring good, the best of the best in life. It is what Odysseus should desire. But what about us, who read the Odyssey through eyes of faith? HOME might represent the Christ who is our home even as it is the home he is preparing for us one day. We long for it. We pursue it. We still haven’t found what we’re looking for.

Yet it is easy to get lost on our way—and some of us, like Odysseus, take the long way home. Sometimes we need a kind of “terrible grace” to shock us back to reality and awaken our desire for what truly matters.

Based on what they write in later assignments, I can tell that my students get the point. They tell me how they have wandered from home. Some of them tell me how they have come back—reading the Odyssey as a kind of prodigal son pre-telling. Some of them tell me how they are still shacked up with Circe or feel stuck and imprisoned by Calypso. Some feel like they’ve eaten the lotus and forgotten all about home. They get it, I think. They start to read this really old book with new eyes, and they also start to read their lives through brand new lenses as well, alert to the perils along their own journeys and at least aware that there is a home that yearns for them even more than they yearn for it.

I play pop songs and hymns for them that riff on this theme:

“Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling oh sinner come home.”

“Homeward bound… I wish was…. Home where my love lies waiting silently for me.”

“I am a pilgrim and a stranger traveling through this wearisome land, I have home in that yonder city…”

You get the point already. I likely border on beating the point almost dead.

Literature, in more ways than one, is not rocket science. The nearly endless avenues we might travel connecting literature and our Christian faith don’t require rockets either.

The intersection of my faith with my discipline was supposed to be the topic here. I read stories with students. Sadly, too many of them come from experiences with public school teachers who managed to turn reading stories into a trivial exercise.

I assume they will forget who Nausicaa is, and whether Telemachus visited Nestor or Menelaus first on his journey, and they won’t remember that Calypso’s island was called Ogygia. But they won’t forget that the Odyssey is a story about finally waking up and realizing that you really do, very desperately, want to go home, and that you’re willing to suffer any hardship for this great and enduring good.

I find that my students are eager to connect what we read with their lives. Sometimes they need a little help, but that’s the best thing about teaching literature—providing a little nudge that opens them up to read with brand new eyes—eyes that recognize that our Christian lives are a journey home. And not that unlike one of the world’s greatest stories.

Welcome to Bethel; sorry your old school closed

Have you heard the news? Taylor University decided this week to close its Fort Wayne campus. http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/14/taylor


Here's my top five reasons TUFW students should transfer to Bethel. (Do I have to remind you that top five or top ten lists of this sort are composed "tongue in cheek"?)

1. We recently acquired and bulldozed an old trailer park where you’d be welcome to pitch a tent. Good squirrel and duck hunting; clean water source nearby.

2. Let’s face it; it should’ve been Bethel-Fort Wayne in the first place. Taylor cheated us on the coin flip.

3. Spend your lunch hour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays watching your professors put on a dazzling display of basketball wizardry.

4. We hate Taylor, yes we do; we hate Taylor, how about you? Welcome to the club.

5. We have a really good school song.

Seriously, though, it's a sad and traumatic time for Taylor-Ft. Wayne students. Come one, come all. We'd love to have you!

fall break looms

For me, the first seven weeks of the fall semester always goes by faster than any other seven week period of the year. I don’t know why. I don’t even wish to speculate as to why time flies sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t.

But here I sit, with only one full day remaining in the first half of the first semester, wondering how it can possibly be time for a mid-semester break already. I don’t mind the break at all. I’ll enjoy two days at home with Sydney and Morgan (the daughter and the dog). We’ll play in the yard and enjoy the color. We’ll take a nap each day. We’ll read books and watch Barney. We'll eat popcorn and ice cream.

I do find these breaks a bit scary. In some of my classes I’m thinking, “how can this be… we haven’t gotten anywhere yet.”

I also try to put myself in the shoes of my students. While this is my seventeenth fall break (4 as a student, 3 as an R.D., 10 as a professor), for many of them, it is their first. First of four. Some of them are now 1/4 of the way through their freshmen year. That’s 1/16 of the way through college. Seven weeks.

I’m mystified by this thing: seven weeks seems like nothing, like such a small period of time in the grand scheme of things. A blink of an eye. And yet for some of my students, a lot has changed. Some found a major. Others found a new major. Some have found new friends that will last a lifetime. Some have begun to truly find themselves. Some may, without realizing it yet, have even found a future spouse. Some have begun to realize that college is probably not for them–at least right now. Some have found that they should have paid more attention in high school. Some have found God, for the first time in their lives. Some have grown–physically (you’ve heard of the freshman 15; some might be 1/4 of the way there already). Some have found the more interactive environment of college classroom to be liberating and have re-learned their love of learning. At least I hope.

Seven weeks is nothing, really. Especially when you compare it to a lifetime or to eternity. On the other hand, when life-shaping stuff is happening like happens in the first seven weeks of college, seven weeks is everything. Especially when you consider eternity.

Must a senior pastor have a penis?

At the church I used to attend, the pastor insisted that you have one in order to serve as an elder. At present, the leaders of my denomination appear to think you need one to be a senior pastor. The Roman Catholic church has inisted that priests have one.

Perhaps I lack imagination, but I can't figure out why that body part is so essential to particular kinds of ministry.

Below, N.T. Wright explains far better than I ever could why I have long thought (as you can tell by the sardonic title of this post) such a position is nonsense and cannot be supported from scripture.

http://www.cbeinternational.org/new/pdf_files/wright_biblical_basis.pdf

trivial fact about me

I wear a plastic guard on my teeth ($400 something at your local dentist if you can imagine that) when I sleep because my dentist thinks I clench my teeth, cracking them. This little device, he says, is a "deprogrammer." Jeanie has always made fun of me for sleeping with my mouth open. I'm content to live with these contradictory truths.

I'm reminded of cartoon figures who clench their teeth so fiercely in rage that they shatter in a heep on the ground.

Cryptic opening remarks from tomorrow's world lit class

Hell is the place where you get what you want only and always. Only and always getting what you want is not freedom but slavery. We can be a slave to self and remain a slave (to sin, to our own impulses), or choose to become a slave to God and be set free. There is no third option. In Romans 6 Paul puts it very clearly—we have a choice between slaveries. The first option is death that results in nothing but Death. The other is a death that leads to Life.

notice...

Almost everything here can be found somewhere else.

Except for this.

What you write when you can’t think of anything to write…

My brother is a prolific blogger. His blog is the Don Quixote or the War and Peace, if you will, of the blog world. It’s like he’s got diarrhea of the keyboard. I don’t know how he does it; I can’t keep up. It took me 13 minutes just to write these five sentences.

It took me four years to write my stupid dissertation.

So if you ever come here and you don’t find anything new worth reading, chances are my younger and more famous youth pastor brother has probably written something worth your musing. Occasionally he even mentions me. Check him out.

http://www.derryprenkert.blogspot.com/

Speaking of my dissertation, I’m pretty sure, if you were to bother reading it, it would be the most unconventional dissertation you’ll ever read. There are several reasons for that, not the least of which is that most people don’t read that many dissertations, and if you read mine it just might turn out to be the ONLY dissertation you ever read. In the spirit of shameless self-promotion-which is what blogging is all about (isn’t it?)-allow me to entice you with my dissertation’s abstract.

I’m tempted here to copy and paste an example of the typical dissertation abstract. But let’s just say of dissertation abstracts, exciting reading they are not.

Not that mine will be either. It’s just different. And sometimes, I still can’t believe I got away with it.

ABSTRACT
On the Wonder of Mentors Never Met:
A Memoir of a Reading Life:
Part One

D.Litt. Dissertation by
Robby Christopher Prenkert

The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies
Drew University May 2008

This dissertation-a “memoir”-is about R, a man who loves books. The narrative’s central layer explores the ways some of these beloved books have shaped his character, formed his faith, and impacted his life. A further layer of the work is a meta-narrative deconstructing the challenging process of writing a doctoral dissertation about “book mentors,” which eventually makes a case for the value of the subjective in scholarly writing. It is at once a memoir with multiple voices; an involuted, post-modernist “novel”; an elegy on grief and loss; a spiritual and intellectual autobiography; a tribute to mentors and friends, and to books as mentors and friends; and a meditatioin on the effects of writing about all of this.

Acknowledging, questioning, and ultimately affirming the potent influence of his evangelical heritage and Christian faith upon his life, R borrows the vocabulary of that tradition and attempts to find connections between his progress as a reader and his faith journey. He narrates his conversion, baptism, and “second conversion”-which in the Wesleyan tradition is frequently called the “filling of the Holy Spirit”-and tells the story of the important real-life persons who helped to mentor him in the Christian faith. Interwoven with this is the main narrative of the work: the story of the books that mentored him and influenced his growth as a reader and lover of literature. This “reading life” is marked and shaped by its own “conversion,” “baptism,” and “second conversion,” suggesting that this reading journey is mysteriously but inseparably connected to his faith journey.

These books, which include Frank Laubach’s journals on the mystical prayer life, the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, Shusaku Endo’s Silence, and C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, become his friends, his conversation partners, his mentors in the art of empathy. They teach him about loss, life, and love. In the end, his contribution to their conversation, the book he has written as an expression of gratitude to his mentors, becomes his most significant “book mentor” of all.

Did you catch all that? Layers. Multiple narrative voices. Post-modern self-reflexivity. Deconstructive gamesmanship. Grief. And it goes on and on for like 300 pages. I bet you can’t wait to buy a copy at the local bookstore.

Oh ya. You can’t. At least not until hundreds and thousands of you send letters to all your big publishing company friends saying, “You’ve got to publish this book now! I’m a reader, I’d buy it.”

Meanwhile, back to reality.

I’m not very good at this blogging business, but I’m going to try in the days ahead to give you my very (did I say very) subjective perspective on life here at Bethel College. Where I sit at present writing these words is where I sat for hours upon hours writing the 80,420 words that make up my dissertation.

Let’s just say I have a love/hate relationship with this little corner office, and this little keyboard, and this little chair I nearly wore out my rear-end on while writing that stupid thing.
But I’m glad I did it. It was hard. But I really like hard things. Like working like mad for four years as an undergraduate to try and win a national basketball championship. I don’t miss the glory of the championship. I miss the hard journey getting there.

I don’t miss the glory (I’m still waiting for the glory) of finishing the dissertation. I miss the hard work of writing it.

Maybe that’s why my brother writes so much on his blog day after day. He likes the hard work of filling the blank screen with something like coherent and often amusing thoughts. I admire him for that.

Anyhow, what you have just read is the sort of rambling mess I end up writing when I can’t think of anything to write. One thing I end up writing when I can’t think of anything to write. A blog. Another thing I end up writing when I can’t think of anything to write. A dissertation.

http://www.bethelcollege.edu/blogs/?p=1300

Happy (belated) birthday, Cervantes

Yesterday (29 September) was Miguel de Cervantes’s birthday. I’m sure you’re still recovering from the huge party you held celebrating the life of the author of what many people have called the “greatest novel ever written.” The rest of you are wondering, so who is Cervantes?

Incidentally, I can be a little sarcastic from time to time. I’m allowed. I’m an English professor.

Cervantes wrote a book you probably have heard about but have never read cover to cover. The reason you probably never read it cover to cover is because its 940 pages long (at least the best translation by Edith Grossman is), and your high school English teacher knew that if she assigned it you wouldn’t get anything else done that semester. Don Quixote is a really long book. But you should read it cover to cover anyhow. Not because it’s good for us to read great literature or because educated people have read the great books or because it would be something to brag about on a college entrance essay, but because it’s a really entertaining story. And funny. Even sad.

Incidentally, I like to use sentence fragments. I’m allowed. I’m an English professor.

I’m also allowed to recommend good books, and in fact, I’m probably expected to. So I’m recommending Don Quixote today, the day after we celebrate Cervantes’s 461st birthday. Because it’s entertaining, funny, and even sad.

Let me know what you think of it.

http://www.bethelcollege.edu/blogs/?p=1202