On Opening Day And Getting Better

Note: we interrupt our normal Monday Morning Quarterback series to offer this annual post on the opening day of baseball season.

Today is the beginning of the baseball season. I had trouble sleeping last night so I watched the last episode of Ken Burns’ marathon documentary on baseball late into the night. My day will revolve around a 1:00 pacific start time to my team’s first game. I may even wear my team’s cap into the office. Baseball’s opening day is a big deal for me, and I make no apologies for it.

Yet I know it will end badly. My team isn’t very good. It hasn’t been for nearly three decades. It is among the least successful operations in all of sports.

These days, baseball and the fate of my team is a stand-in for measurements of value. This is for baseball an age of tremendous enlightenment, when fans have access to as much statistical data on teams and players as do the General Managers and owners, data fans can analyze themselves for the sake of long blog posts condemning the decisions of men who are paid millions to make them. This Sabermetric community within baseball has brilliantly re-framed the notion of value when it comes to a baseball player, lifting from obscurity undervalued skills (like this) and packaging valuable player contributions into novel statistics like OPS and VORP. Naturally, this community has elevated the celebrity of the guys spending teams’ money on these players and their skills, which is good if you’re name is Billy Beane but bad if it’s Dayton Moore.

More and more of my life and vocation is taken up with the question of value: where does value really reside and how is my work contributing value to the world? Here, potential is a curse. Potential is only valuable once it’s realized. In my work with youth, students’ potential for a strong faith and a compelling witness to the love of God is far less valuable to me than their actual faith–weak and confused though it may be–and their actual stammering witness to something closer to fairness on God’s part. The latter is theirs, something they can be held to and challenged to grow. The former is my projection, a thing that asks nothing of them and so gives them nothing.

My baseball team is a fitting backdrop for these kinds of considerations, especially on this opening day, because after years of drafting and developing dugouts full of potential, the team traded much of it away last winter for some proven real world value, and the bloggers went crazy in protest. “Why,” they demanded, “would you trade away six years of team control over a player who could be a superstar for two years of a player who’s only a regular star?”

The team’s rationale is simple: trading away the consensus top amateur player to get a star commodity makes the big league roster significantly better today, and six years is a long time. The opposition is fueled by an ideological purity that prizes rationality and analysis over hoping for things to “work out.” Things, they correctly point out, “work out” in increasingly predictable patterns, and if you ignore the pattern, nobody’s going to feel bad for you when it plays out to your detriment.

I have read almost every damning word aimed at my team and nodded my head in dignified agreement with many of them. Likewise, I compulsively read condemnations and dire projections about my church. Those, too, make skillful use of data and eloquently lampoon the decisions of decision makers as badly informed or, worse, immoral. I nod in agreement at some of those as well.

Yet on this opening day I take my stand on the side of measurable improvement and the risky, ill advised move that willingly disappoints ideology for the sake of the good we know we’re getting right now, which, everyone can see, improves what we are immediately. It’s older. It has less potential. It may leave us for greener pastures in 24 months. But it makes us better now. Perhaps not better enough. But better.

Today, I’m for better.

Play ball.

The Present Shocked Church

Douglas Ruhkoff’s new book arrived this week, and, predictably, I’m hooked. I’ve devoured nearly everything Rushkoff has written in the past decade, and my interview with him for PLGRM Magazine last fall was a landmark experience for me. The Douglas Rushkoff tag on this blog is dense.

Present Shock is concerned about the ways that contemporary life is thoroughly simultaneous. To his great credit, Rushkoff worries about stuff, and the stuff he worries about he writes and talks about. Now, he’s worried that texts and Facebook and The Simpsons have driven us all to be present RIGHT NOW to lots and lots of stories and people in disparate places.

Example 1: the collapse of narrative. Present Shock is full of nuanced and searching analysis of the ways in which the traditional narrative arc has stopped working. Broadcast media are rapidly learning that the interactivity ushered in first by the remote control and then by the internet has rendered the traditional narrative arc a dull weapon. That arc rewarded the storyteller who was able to lead her audience into greater and greater states of anxiety before saving them with a climax (read: a product) that resolved all the conflict. Rushkoff is arguing that audiences won’t stand (or, rather, sit) for that anymore.

[excursis: “The Bible’s stories–at least the Old Testament’s–don’t work quite the same way. They were based more in the oral tradition, where the main object of the storyteller was simply to keep people involved in the moment. Information and morals were conveyed, but usually by contrasting two characters or nations with one another–one blessed, the other damned.”]

Here’s my assertion: modern evangelical and liberal theology is dependent on the traditional (non-Biblical) narrative arc, and part of the “decline” of these expressions of Christianity is the result of peoples’ media-trained immunity to that arc. For Evangelical theology, one’s salvation and the threat of personal damnation is the conflict that is solved by the climax of the cross and empty tomb. Yet for people who don’t go with the evangelist into the conflict, the climax holds no meaning.

Similarly, liberal protestant theology unfolds a story of increasing conflict not over an individual’s salvation but the state of humanity and the planet. The climax comes with values (typified by Jesus) of sharing, self-sacrifice, and, of course, love. But for a religiously plural populace, the question is: who’s values are those and why should I trust that person?

In place of the narrative arc we now have The Moment. People live in The Moment, love in The Moment, believe in The Moment, and search for The Moment. Where is faith in The Moment?

The Value of Force: An Open Inquiry

Yesterday I asked readers to make a positive case for the value of guns. Thanks to everyone who contributed; it was one of the most heavily commented upon posts ever for this blog.

Here’s a recap of what people said. Guns are valuable for:

The exercise of power, both physical and psychological, over others
Hunting, both for sport and for food
The application of force

There were lots of qualifications and explanations, but the value added by guns reduced to these three goods, the first and third of which are quite similar, and the second of which seems to be an instance of both one and three.

I also asked by junior high students yesterday to list things a gun is good for, and the items on their list all fall within these three (their first item was vidid and telling: guns are good for threatening people–a clear example of exercising power).

Murphy got to the heart of the matter: guns are for the exercise of force, and force has a value all its own. Today, let’s tackle that question: what is the value of force?

Surely someone will point out that there are different kinds of force. Surely someone will point out the different ways people exercise force, from compelling their child to obey to shooting someone to funding wars through taxes.

What say you? What is the value of force? Where and when is it most valuable?

Guns! Hunh! What Are They Good For?

In one day, the proposed federal assault weapons ban runs out of breath and the Arizona Senate passes a bill allowing teachers to carry guns in school.

I’ve written before of my antipathy toward guns. That I’m not a fan is no secret. But here’s a basic question seeking earnest answers: what is the value of a gun?

Clearly guns are valuable. Their production, sale, and possession is vigilantly protected by the most powerful lobbying outfit in the land. But in what does their value consist? I’m asking you, dear reader, to post an answer in the comments. Here are a couple of ground rules:

Defense against others with guns doesn’t count as value. That’s simply a circular argument.
Flameouts against guns and their defenders aren’t helpful.
Answer the question: what is the value of a gun? Then stop.

Somebody, please, make the case for the value of a gun. I’m eager to hear it.

A Post on Guns And Mother

I hate guns. My mother made me hate guns, and I’m glad she did.

In the charged up climate of debates over gun control measures and second amendment rights, I’ve come to realize the controlling part my mom has played in my views and sensitivities and to believe the world would be better if more people were like her.

She and my father are both veterans of the Air Force. They’re both evangelical Christians who were as swept up in the Reagan Revolution and the Moral Majority of the 1980’s as any suburban middle class evangelicals could have been. She was a Den Mother.

Yet, as my boyhood friends in the neighborhood played “guns,” using their newest shiny plastic AK’s and pistols, I wasn’t allowed. My older brother and I were the kids who’s mom wouldn’t let them play with guns.

Looking for ways around this restriction, we would still play guns with our friends, interlocking our middle, ring, and pinky fingers, pressing the sides of our thumbs together, and fashioning our aligned pointer fingers into a barrel. “Bang. Bang.”

Mom heard the “Bangs,” and came outside to declare a ceasefire. And our grounding.

Even though we were in Cub Scouts and fired rifles every year at scout camp; even though dad bought us a b.b. gun and set up cans along the back fence to shoot; even though grandpa was a hunter and Uncle Bill was a cop: Mom didn’t entertain guns.

Movies and TV shows featuring gun battles got switched off.

And toys? Transformers? Forget it. G.I. Joe? Are you kidding?

The result is that I am a 36 year old red-blooded American man who hates guns. It’s not a reasoned, analytical stand; it’s a gut-level revulsion to guns, their core function, and the genre of entertainment that traffics in them.

[A caveat: I have actually fired guns. My best friend growing up and his dad were goose hunters. They took me hunting one weekend when I was 15. We spent the whole time hunkered over in a plywood-covered hole in the ground with a space heater. Every 30 minutes or so, the hunters would pop up and fire at flocks of geese flying overhead. I didn’t have a license, so I could only watch. Yet late in the afternoon of the second day, off on a walk by ourselves, my friend allowed me to fire his shotgun. I took aim at a yucca plant about 20 yards away and squeezed the trigger. BANG.

My shoulder hurt for a week. I’ve never fired another gun since.]

The mass shootings that have plagued this country since Columbine have only deepened my antipathy toward firearms. But it was firmly established in my youth by a woman who had served in the military and who knew boys killed in Vietnam, a woman who therefore refused to allow her own boys to swim in gun-infested waters, especially the imaginary ones. The imaginary ones are, in fact, the more sinister, since they lull people into an acceptance of shooting and killing as routine. Mom made sure her kids knew that guns and the death they inflict are real, real, real.

All this as she voted Republican, fretted over the corrupting influence of “secular” school, and defended the second amendment.

She cried when we spoke on the phone the day of the Sandyhook shootings. “This is it for me,” she said. “This is too much.” By which I took her to mean that her reasoned support of gun rights has finally lost to emotional aversion to them.

I hope it’s some comfort to her that, for the son she raised to hate guns, it was never a fair fight. Guns lose. Always.

The Multiplicity of Narrative (Or: “Dude! That’s My Chin in A Lumineers Video!”)

I wrote an essay for the last issue of PLGRM Magazine about an afternoon my daughter and I spent as extras on the set of a Lumineers
music video in Los Angeles. It was a fun experience that wore on for much longer than I thought it would and that presented something of a crisis of professional integrity, as remaining on the set into the early evening caused me to be rather late for a wedding rehearsal for which I was the officiant.

Well, the video was released yesterday, and you can view it here (sorry for the ads, but it’s not on YouTube yet).

I’m having a strange reaction to it. I’ve never been an extra for anything before, but I never suffered under any delusions of grandeur about this. So the one second grainy appearance the side of my torso makes at 2:56 is a bonus. More than I expected, really.

The more interesting thing I’m thinking about now is the role we play in stories about which we know next to nothing. If I thought the shoot we participated in was the whole video, boy was I wrong; despite the five hours spent on that set, that shot makes only a passing appearance in the more than four minute production. And if I thought the precocious little girl who got to ride in the car from which the crew was filming was just an extra special extra, I was even more wrong still.

It turns out, the video is something of a tear-jerker story about a girl who’s parents are splitting up. They leave the girl’s dad in the rain during the video’s opening shots, and he never appears again. For the duration of the short film, she watches the world go by out her car window as she and her mom relocate to Los Angeles. It’s sad, sad stuff.

Then the sun comes out, a smile breaks over the girl’s face, he hair blows in the wind, and the whole thing turns into a little resurrection allegory. Who knew?

A video production only makes explicit the reality of our everyday lives and the constant reel of scenes that never get filmed. We’re all part of other peoples’ stories. The people who make passing appearances in your story, the story about an afternoon spent with your daughter brushing elbows with a folk band, those people are actually the centerpiece of a bigger story you’ve never heard.

Making Paper Cranes: Collision and Fragmentation

Note: Making Paper Cranes is a weekly engagement with Mihee Kim Kort’s New book . . . uh, . . . Making Paper Cranes: Towards An Asian American Feminist Theology. Mihee handles complicated things gently. Also, her fastball touches the low 90’s.

The fifth chapter of Making Paper Cranes spins out the vivid metaphors of “Collision” and “Fragmentation” that have been maneuvering behind everything the book’s been doing up to this point. “I use collision,” Mihee explains, “as a metaphor to mean the ongoing encounter of stereotypes, expectations, standards, and conflicting realities that lead to fragmentation.”

In order for Mihee’s Asian American Feminist theology to move the needle, theologically, culturally, or ecclesially, she’s convinced that it must involve the risk of uncomfortable–even painful–collisions that move people’s real, physical bodies, to transformative action.

The result of these collisions is the fragmentation of the body involved, a gritty (if not violent) image. But it’s also creative and constructive. For Mihee, this fragmentation involves “a continuous recognition of the numerous sources of my identity, deconstruction of these influences, and then, most important, a work of intentional reconstruction.”

The sources of identity for a woman of Asian ethnicity living in the United States are multiple. Being an Asian American Woman in a church context adds yet another source. Making Paper Cranes spends a lot of time tracing these identity sources and unfolding them for the reader’s examination. As a white American man working alongside Mihee in that same church context, there’s tremendous value in listening to her description of the collisions she undergoes. But also, as she describes the strain and the promise of “reconstruction,” I’m given new eyes to behold the value that my Asian American brothers and sisters in the church are contributing to our common life, value I was ignorant of before.

As the verbs “collide,” and “fragment” indicate, this value emerges from mess. It has to. It’s produced by flesh-and-blood experience in real time. It grows in particular, real, places:

For collision and fragmentation to resonate as metaphors, theology must be rooted in the physical and flesh-and-blood—in the mess and chaos of humanity. This theology of embodiment is grounded in the reality of God in Christ Jesus. It finds its roots in a doctrine of the incarnation of Christ that highlights the importance of apprehending Jesus Christ in a particular human, social context. This, then, becomes the basis for validating our own social histories and situations. We are able to view our own lives as the center and subject of stories rather than in relation or association to what is considered normative. The emphasis is placed on human experience in the body more than on abstract ideas of the mind as the starting point for understanding God, so body experiences are positively viewed as occasions of revelation.

And so it is that I realize the errors of how I’ve been approaching this book, looking for analogies to my own experience instead of listening for the “social histories and situations” unfolded in its pages. Making Paper Cranes and its Asian American Feminist theology is not an abstract exercise in metaphysics or cultural anthropology. It’s one human beings testament of God from where she is, as who she is.

I Don’t Care About Your Conviction

In the disputes dogging North American Christianity in the 21st century, it appears to me that the damage done by the warring traditionalists and progressives has almost nothing to do with the perceived differences in their views. Rather, these arguments are doing a much greater harm through a posture they both share and an aim they both seek to advance. The posture is conviction and the aim is the taking of a stand on that conviction.

I go to lots of meetings with folks who appear all too eager for an opportunity to exhibit their knowledge of controversial issues and who annotate their contributions with footnotes from the New York Times. Many of them seem animated by a need to prove to themselves that they’re on the “right” (read: left) side of gun control and marriage equality by gathering on the second Wednesday of every month with like-minded liberals over coffee and cookies. The making of statements is the paramount public action.

At the same time, I’m watching evangelicals flee my denomination out of a conviction that it has abandoned the Bible in its ordaining of gays and lesbians. They, too, wish to make their convictions known and to be observed taking a stand.

Traditional liberal stands are taken on behalf of the poor and marginalized. Traditional conservative stands are taken for the Bible and religious or cultural norms. Different as their objects may be, though, the impulse of the stand-takers is getting harder and harder for me to tell apart.

When did taking a stand become equivalent to faithfulness? When did conviction get crowned king among the virtues? What ever happened to discernment?

By “discernment” I mean the humble and prayerful searching out of the best way.

By “searching out” I mean studying your Bible and your monthly magazine subscriptions in like proportion to cultivating civil conversations with people who study their Bibles but who subscribe to different monthlies, people who may actually be gay and who may actually own a gun. And no, Facebook doesn’t count.

By “the best way” I mean the most Biblical way. That is, the way that most vividly embodies the most prominent principles and values laid out in the Biblical narrative: honesty, compassion, fidelity, justice, and many others.

By “the best way” I mean the most lovely way, the way whose path leads toward more charity and courage in the world.

By “the best way” I mean the Godly way, pursued through prayer, worship, and service with a community with whom one is covenanted.

By “the best way” I do not mean the most secure way, the most safe way, the most poll-tested way, or the way best articulated by Mother Jones or a three point sermon.

Here’s an earnest question for you, dear reader: Where do you see people practicing discernment together? Where are the examples of people not taking public stands but publicly committing to working out contentious questions together?

Let’s hear some. Please.

What Have I Done?! (Or, On Fooling My Daughter’s Developing Feedback Mechanisms)

Douglas Rushkoff’s latest piece for Edutopia says no iPads for kids under eight. Gulp.

In a piece titled “Young Kids And Technology at Home,” Rushkoff (who I recently interviewed for PLGRM Magazine) takes the metaphorical screen off the figurative tablet (and tv):

all screens may be different, but they’re still screens to young children. On a most rudimentary level, this means they either depict two-dimensional realities (like cell phone interfaces and sideways-shooter arcade games) or use their 2D displays to depict 3D realities, such as TV shows. No biggie — except for babies and toddlers, whose ability to understand and contend with 3D worlds is still in development. They don’t fully understand the rules of opaque objects (that’s why peekaboo behind a napkin poses endless fascination), so high quantities of time spent sitting in front of 2D screens may actually inhibit some of their 3D spatial awareness. That’s why so many pediatricians recommend that kids under the age of two probably shouldn’t watch any TV at all.

My daughter is approaching five, and she’s been manipulating 3D representations of reality on a 2D screen since she was three. On a five hour drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles last year, she played almost constantly and went berserk when the battery finally died. Since then we’ve improved her emotional connection to it; she understands that it’s in her long term interest to shut it off when we say so. Now when she asks to play it, she cranks up the charm and bats her eyes.

Her favorite apps by far are the dozen or so Toca Boca simulations of cooking and making clothes. I love these apps, and I quite proudly show them to people whenever the little one is playing them in a restaurant. Still, Brother Doug wants none of it:

Little kids play with balls, seesaws and slides as they develop their vestibular senses, and come to learn about the wonders of gravity. They move on to Frisbees, bikes and Hula Hoops as they explore angular momentum and harmonic motion. The weightless world of a digital game or virtual environment fascinates us for the way it defies the rules of the real world; until we are firmly anchored in the former reality, however, these new principles are not neurologically compatible with a developing sensory system. Up and down, light and dark control a whole lot more in human biology than we might like to think. Best not to fool these feedback mechanisms before they have a chance to come online in a developing child.

Have I been fooling my daughter’s feedback mechanisms? Those of you with young kids, how do you manage their interaction with digital stuff?

The Year in Review

Thanks to the readers of Yorocko for sharing part of the 2012 journey. I did you wrong for half the year.

A few highlights:

The series on Diana Butler Bass’s Christianity After Religion. Really the only substantial thing the blog accomplished all year. It took about a week and featured daily posts culled from chapters of the book. It got the author’s attention, somehow, which fueled the completion of the series.
PLGRM Magazine. The product of texting conversations with the inexhaustible Landon Whitsitt, the magazine was born of Landon’s energy and infinite sense of possibility. We published two issues, and we’re planning on more. I got to interview Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas Freaking Rushkoff.
The All Star Game. Brian Ellison is such a good friend that he invited me to join him in Kansas City for the Major League Baseball All Star Game. Gawd it was great. Brian is great. Really, really great.
Peru. In July I accompanied a group of 11 high school students and seven adults from the San Gabriel Presbytery on a 10 day work trip to Ayacucho, Peru. We partnered with churches and mission workers in the synod and did things none of us thought we could.
10 Year Anniversary. Meredith planned a week for us in Napa to celebrate our 10 years of wedded bliss, and her folks came and stayed with our 4 year-old. Wine, mud baths, a hot air balloon ride, and terrific food: could anything be better?
Ministry collaborations. I have good friends in ministry where I live, a fact I know much more clearly today than 12 months ago. Becca, Paul, Reece, Erin, Erik, Jason–this crew led a junior high work week in June and then a high school confirmation retreat in November. Without this team, neither of these events happen. They made my year.
Ramak. My man stumbled into my work in July, and the time I’ve spent listening to him and working with him has been the most easily passed time of the year. He pitched me on the idea of a photo workshop with junior high kids, and he taught them how to take portraits with a Rollieflex. No small task. Some students were more into it than others, but working with him was 100% worth it.
Bucket of Hooves. Jeff Bryan is a terrific writer, and this year he published a quasi memoir that I gobbled up in days, practically hours. He’s the consumate human being, and it’s a delightful book.
Music. The Tallest Man on Earth; Best Coast; The Lumineers; Shearwater; A.C. Newman; The Gaslight Anthem; Bhi Bhiman; Big Deal . . .