David's Challenges

Karate is one of David's many challenges these days, and getting it right is hard work, whether it's the horse stance or ken-po, keeping his balance in the obstacle course or kicking a cushion through the target. Then there's swimming: executing that breast stroke and breathing correctly. And fencing: keeping perfectly erect when en garde. And chess: carefully thinking through your strategy. And church: learning the stories and rituals, the seasons and feasts of our tradition. And a normal school day: learning to read and write, to draw, add, subtract.

Until a year ago, his challenges were minimal, with no worries about getting everything right. Then, suddenly, all these demands arrived at his doorstep like a huge special delivery from the big wide world. Now, words like "focus", "discipline", and "hard work" take their place alongside "fun", "awesome", and "cool".

And yet, when he's with Papa and me, I want it to be different. Forget about getting everything right. We'll ride our bikes, play board games, build train sets or race stock cars, laugh, explore the world, talk of cabbages and kings. And, OK, so we'll watch a little TV now and then, too. The point is that home is for fun, letting down our hair, chilling.

I know, I know: family life has its own demands--saying "please" and "thank you", attending to each other's feelings and needs, forgiving each other again and again, doing the chores around the house, welcoming guests. Papa and I will guard these demands because we ignore them at our peril.

But in the big wide world, let David's other mentors be the heavies. Here at home, papa and I will be his champions.

Ian McEwen's Enduring Love

A gay Jesus freak stalks a secularist, straight, middle-aged man. You can tell right away it ain't gonna work. But as you watch this crash in slow motion, you experience all the textures, shadows, colors, and sounds of a dysfunctionality that is both sexual and religious.

It starts with a tragic accident in the Chilterns where science writer Joe Rose sees a hot-air balloon tossed by the wind; there's a boy trapped in its basket. Joe joins the effort to bring the balloon to safety, as does a young loner, Jed Parry. Quickly obsessed with Joe, Jed mistakes his uncontrolled feelings as a divine calling to bring Joe to God. That destructive, pseudo-religious mission tests the limits of Joe's beloved rationalism, threatens the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drives him to the brink of murder and madness. It's goodbye real love, hello Fatal Attraction--but with a religious twist.

In an appendix, McEwen reflects: "It is not always easy to accept that one of our most valued experiences may merge into psychopathology." He got that right. And these days the pathological forms of both sex and religion are hard to miss. Think of the heart-breaking stories of domestic violence and child abuse. Or the many pseudo- religious "missions" that end up crushing both bodies and spirits--Bush's war in Iraq, for example, or the crusades against gay equality.

But here's the amazing thing: Given the many possible distortions of both sex and religion, most of the time we still manage to get them right. Despite its pathological forms, as San Francisco writer Mark Morford states, sex still "shoots huge gobs of endorphins and raw divine energy" into our ids, raises our kundalini, inspires awareness of the cosmos. It reveals "the interconnectedness of all things from all time in all places everywhere." And despite the many religious nuts running around these days, the genuinely religious missions of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and the slain Jesuits in El Salvador still inspire our own smaller efforts to make the world a little kinder and lovelier.

We don't always get sex and religion right as McEwen so vividly observes. But sometimes we do. And in those moments, we humans are nothing short of magnificent!

Your Soul for a Doughnut

A mind-frying work week has left me in a heap, wondering if I'm yet another of Catbert's conquests, like this pathetic, lovable, coffee swizzling, doughnut muncher from Dilbert.

I tell myself: My job is as ennobling or soul-devouring as I make it. I'm the one in charge here. It's really up to me.

That's partly true. But the state of my soul is not my doing alone. We're social critters--partly shaped, for better and for worse, by other people. Catbert and the Evil Corporation really can mess us up, steal our souls. And, to the extent that they're the culprits, then standing up to them, demanding changes in our work, is clearly the noble path.

But here's where it gets both complex and fun: The problem can also lie within me, in my way of seeing my job, the way I choose to invest myself, make something meaningful out of those 8, 10, 12 workday hours.

A story... A man sees a worker hauling huge boulders and asks him what he's doing. "I'm a miserable man," he answers, "doomed to a life of menial drudgery, breaking and hauling these huge rocks all day in the hot sun. Woe is me." He sees another man doing exactly the same thing, asks him the same question, and hears him reply: "I'm earning a living to take care of my family." And then he sees yet a third man doing exactly the same task who replies "Me? What am I doing? Why, I'm building a cathedral."

I need to take charge of my job. Dunno yet whether it's the system I need to challenge or just myself and the way I look at my job. Whatever. Just don't wanna be an anesthetized victim like our buddy from Dilbert.