One of my favorite westerns is “Unforgiven.” I walked away from watching it thinking I had just seen Eastwood make a clear statement against redemptive violence. But when I talked to some others, Christians and non-Christians, their response was that the movie gloried in violence. The climax of the film is a shootout where he kills all the evil-doers. The denouement could indicate that he sold his soul or that he was rewarded for what he did.

Eastwood made a much stronger and straight-forward statement with “Gran Torino.” But I’m not sure most average film-watchers picked up on what he was saying any more than they thought through the supposed equivocation of “Unforgiven.” As the credits began to role on Gran Torino, a guy with his girlfriend at my screening actually said: “Wait a minute, when does he go back and kill everybody.”

The reality is that many people watch movies solely as entertainment. They don’t spend a lot of time thinking about any deep or hidden meanings. They don’t use them as a jumping off place for discussions about truth or good or the way the world is vs. how it could be.

But that is what I do with films and books and TV shows and news accounts. I recently watched “Pulp Fiction” with my 15-year-old daughter. It got us talking about the dangers of drugs (no sugar-coating in the film) and how people go through their lives without thinking about the consequences of their actions. We talked about the non-linear story-telling, the changing points of view, the characters that appear and disappear only to come back again in a totally different context. We talked about how you couldn’t understand any of the film unless you watched the whole thing. And we talked about the passage of “scripture” that Jules quotes more than once, but only comes to some understanding at the end.

Sorry to disagree Jules, but the real truth is that we are all the weak, we are all the tyranny of evil men and some (most, maybe even all) of us, at one point or another, at least try to be a shepherd.

“Inglourious Basterds” isn’t a film I have seen. I will probably watch it on video. I’m not a big fan of Tarantino. I loved “Pulp Fiction,” but thought “Kill Bill” was mostly eye candy that pandered to my darker desires for vengeance. Don’t even get me started on his piece of the Grindhouse film (talky sexploiation, to give a hint).

Yet despite his inconsistency, I pay attention to Tarantino. He is popular and he is frequently trying to say something (good or bad, most of his work isn’t just mindless entertainment to make a buck). Yes, the language in Tarantino’s films is often strong, but my kids hear worse on the school bus each day. Some of his films may have sexual content that I wouldn’t let any of my children see. And the picture of the world he paints often isn’t pretty, but I work in Newark and have to admit — the world I’m in often isn’t pretty. But back when I started listening to popular music I came to the conclusion I would much rather listen to an artist who was searching than one who claimed to have all of the answers. Listening to “Hotel California” caused one of my college roommates to turn away from the mindless pursuit of sex and drugs and believe there was a higher purpose for his life.

Should I avoid Tarantino’s work or the work of others because I (and some around me) are the weak? I see the point. An alcoholic should stay out of bars. But short of closing your eyes and ears and mind, how do you avoid all of the ugly and unholy things in the world? Should I lock myself away in a false bastion of purity to avoid tempting myself or my brother? How, then, do I converse with those who don’t even desire my context on life if I can only speak to them of what I will or won’t do? And what if, in all the effort to protect my weakness or that of others, I also close my heart?

I understand the position of those who believe Christians should only allow in what is holy and pure and that, conversely, they should preserve themselves against the polluting effects of the world. I was raised in that tradition. Perhaps it was just my peculiar up-bringing, but that tack seemed far more false in the end.

My childhood also left me with the sense that people don’t call Christian’s hypocrites because we act like everyone else. Rather they see us as false because we often insist on trying hide our weakness with our tyranny by insisting that we are acting on behalf of the Shepherd. Their disrespect for us and our message isn’t because we will or won’t sit in a cinema, but because we all to often refuse to sit down with publicans and prostitutes unless we let them know and they accept their position in the flock (they’re the lost one; we are the holy ninety-and-nine).

Quite frankly, I have a better time discussing Tarantino with the atheists whom I know than I do Tay-Sachs or the God-decreed genocides of the Old Testament. And for their part, many of them claim they would have less problems with me (i.e. those who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ) if we didn’t worship love and forgiveness of Sundays, then advocate war and exploitation of our enemies Monday through Friday.

Jesus prayed that his followers would not be “of the world” just as he was not. But he also sent them into the world, just as he was sent. There is a difficulty there, a balance that must be found. But the honest search and struggle for that balance seems far less fraudulent (if perhaps more equivocal) and invites more fellowship, than insisting there is only one way for a believer to be true to their faith.

A couple of years back a friend from high school reached across the sundered decades (via Facebook) to ask me a question. Less than a year before her oldest son — a talented young man who had just begun his career in Washington, DC — had been killed in a bicycle accident. She expressed concern for how his three younger brothers would deal with the loss.

She asked me because my older brother had died while I was a sophomore in college. I had faced death as a young man and she wanted to know how it had affected me. She was too polite to point out that my brother’s death had come by his own hand.

Her question affected me in an unexpected way and I don’t think my response was particularly helpful to her. But maybe it holds some truth.

—-

I read about your son’s death. I can’t permit myself to even try imagining the impact of such a loss. It is too terrifying.

I don’t really know your family and advice on how to cope with such a tragedy would be hollow at best. I can tell you how my brother’s death affected me and why, though I’m not sure it offers any insight or even that you would want to know. My intensity on some subjects can scare people.

I was the last person in my family to see my brother alive. It was evening on Thanksgiving Day of my freshman year in college and I was alone in our living room. My brother stepped out the front door saying he just needed to get some air. It was very warm in the house. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, so I thought nothing of it.

When he didn’t come back we all assumed he had just run away again. A big part of me was glad he was gone. He had come home from Temple University in late November/early December of my senior year in high school and torn my life apart. At the beginning of 12th grade I felt as if I was finally becoming what I wanted to be. I had good grades, good friends; a sense of not just belonging but of being wanted. My brother dropped in like a bomb: raving at everyone, potentially violent; at best a public embarrassment, at worst a madman who might be capable of just about anything. His previous disappearances, usually a day or two before police picked him up somewhere, came as almost a relief to the constant tension of having him around.

His body was found on Easter Sunday about 5 months after he he walked out that door. I didn’t know how to feel at the time. We had not been close before he went insane. He was too brilliant, too talented, too intense for me before he went away to school. After returning from Temple he was a nightmare; barely human, much less my brother. I didn’t think his death ripped a hole in my heart, it felt more like a wound had been closed.

Yet for years after I would be walking in a mall or down a street and think I saw him just up ahead, going in the other direction, standing at a bus stop, getting off the subway. I would dream about him showing up again — reports of his death greatly exaggerated — or never having been gone at all. I would see a movie and wonder what he would have thought of it. I would listen to a song and think he would have liked it. I would hear a violin and suddenly want to cry. He remains an amputated limb in my life; a phantom pain in an arm cut off long ago.

I have been told by therapists that healthy families deal with such things by pulling together. My family was not healthy by any measure. My parents didn’t speak to us about my brother’s death other than that it had happened. Rather than bringing us together, it drove us apart — beginning to expose terrible cracks. My mother became living guilt. My father carefully cultivated an image of someone both aggrieved and grieving. I heard some people speculating at an event soon after his death about how good parents like mine could possibly have sired a black sheep like my brother. “Some kids are just born bad,” one of them said. It wasn’t until years later that I figured out the role my parents played in my brother’s death. Behind the facade of normalcy — even holiness — maintained by my father were unbelievably awful things. In the end, my brother couldn’t live with them.

There would seem to be few parallels between the death of your son and that of my brother. I have read testimonials about him from co-workers, friends and others. They speak of a vibrant, positive, joyous young man cut down as he was beginning to bloom; a young man who loved and was loved by his family. I couldn’t tell you if the circumstances of my brother’s death made my experience easier or more difficult. Death only comes close to acceptable for those who are old and die in their sleep. I have wondered what it would be like if I had a less cluttered picture of my brother. Not just one without craziness and family problems, but one without my compulsive self-comparison to his abilities and accomplishments. Maybe it would be easier if I could just admire him, embrace his memory, and celebrate his life. But I doubt it. Death just isn’t normal and every death is different in how it affects those who are left behind. Some are pulled together, others are torn apart. Sometimes it isn’t clear who is which.

I can’t help but remember the terrible howl from Anne’s husband [she was a slightly younger mutual friend killed shortly after I graduated college] at her funeral. I thought then: This is what devastating loss sounds like. I wondered how it would be possible for him to ever recover but heard only a few weeks later that some were growing frustrated he couldn’t get past mourning.

In the losses I have experienced since having my own children I have simply tried to be honest with them. I have tried to avoid secrets or concealing my emotions. I have tried to respect their expressions of fear and sadness without hiding behind a stoic appearance, the pretense of normalcy or a wall of anger. I say tried because I can’t pretend to have always done well.

My church family has been helpful during those times. Partly it is because our church is so small I can’t simply hide in the back; I have to participate. Partly it is because almost no one tells me how I should feel, what I should do to get through it, or quotes scripture at me as if Job’s words cause everything to make sense. It may have been easy for him to say: “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord,” After all, he got back twice as much as he had before.

Most important, no one tells me that time will make everything better, which is good because I’m pretty sure it won’t. Time just makes things different. The arm never grows back, but maybe I can learn to live without it.

Perhaps I should not say any of this at all. I’m already recriminating. Forgive me if I have said things I shouldn’t.

Last Friday temperatures were around 70. A week later they are less than half that and the ground that was vowing green has returned to white.

March is the month of delayed gratification, dreams deferred, and barely credible hopes that maybe tomorrow will be better than today. It offers spring like a cryptic note from a long-forgotten love that leaves you wondering if she wants to see you again or is threatening a restraining order.

She wants me; she wants me NOT.

This week the air is cold, the streets mined with slush and the icy run-off from snow melt. But last week at this time I was taking my first outdoor bike ride of the season.

Usually I delay until the street sweepers pass through the township, sucking up the chips and cinders put down to aid traction during the snowy season. And it was fairly windy.

But I couldn’t wait this year. Perhaps with the climate reversal looming I just felt the need to take advantage of the warmth. Maybe it was a subliminal weather ritual; a two-wheeled dance beckoning spring.

Whatever the reason I took off on a 25-mile loop that runs along the Delaware River. Given hills, the head-wind and my determination not to use my asthma inhaler, I figured about 75 minutes.

Thirty minutes into the ride I was valiantly grinding against 20 mph gusts on a flat that leads past the eagle eyries and into Portland, PA when my phone rang.

It was my youngest needing a ride home from her activity two hours ahead of schedule. So I turned around and started to peddle hard for home. At least the wind would be at my back.

Then I threw a chain. Then I breathed a bug. Then I almost got killed by a driver who attempted to pass me on a blind curve and had to slam on her brakes because there was a stop sign on the far side of that arc. I slid momentarily on the loose pebbles, skidded upright into a turn, then loudly blessed the driver’s insensate stupidity while accelerating away.

May the road rise to meet you, right in the face.

When I got to the house, my daughter was already home, having cajoled a friend’s mom into giving her a ride.

March is such a trickster, calling me to come play then leaving when I arrive. Asking me to come over, then sending me home as soon as I show. Offering a brief but beguiling kiss, the barest touch of a warm hand on my face, then disappearing without a backwards glance.

I think Spring loves me. Perhaps she loves me not.

Wish she would call.

A couple of days ago the peepers started to call. Their piercing notes always begin to rise in a perpetual chorus from the wetlands near the front of our house in the days before the vernal equinox. And that sound won’t cease for several weeks.

It is an annual rite of spring. Thousands of these little chorus frogs gather near every marsh in this area as soon as the last ice melts. And there the males inflate the bladders in their necks and begin to call.

The nature writer Joseph Wood Krutch wrote of the spring peeper’s call, “…I wonder if there is any phenomenon in the heavens above or in the earth beneath which so simply and so definitely announces that life is resurgent again.”

My oldest, who has a bedroom at the front of our house, claims their incessant peeps, a sound some compare to little bells but I consider closer to the cry of a chicken hatchling, drive her crazy and thwart her sleep.

I understand her antipathy. After a few days the unending nocturnal noise can be irritating. But their dedication is admirable; it dwarfs their diminutive stature.

Though tiny, average 1-1.5 inches in length, the Northern Pseudacris crucifer crucifer are loud. Their cries, when made in sufficient numbers, can be heard up to two miles away.

And they have a won’t quit attitude. They stay awake night and day for the first few weeks after waking from icy hibernation, alternately hunting and singing. Though it seems like they never shut up, their vocalizations begin near dusk and carry through past dawn.

And what are all these guy frogs going on about? Love. Well, reproduction or perpetuation of the species, it we must be prosaic and Darwinian. But I like to think of them as tiny terminators of love. Like Schwarzenegger’s famous cyborg, they won’t stop, they won’t every stop.

What sounds to us like a piercing peep is actually frog-speak for: Love me. I will love you.

And they shout that out without ceasing through nights that sometimes fall back past freezing until a companion finds them.

Love me. Love me. Love me, they proclaim. I will love you, love you, love you.

The only things that will stop them are meeting a mate or death.

Sure, those lady frogs have standards. Size does matter even in the amphibian world. And the boy with the biggest voice sac is more likely to get a girl. But hope springs eternal for each and every one of the guys. They seem to suffer no crisis of insecurity or feelings of inadequacy, they don’t weep for being ignored or consider suicide because someone else got the one with those sweet crooked legs that they had their eye on.

Nothing stops their song and, eventually, they seem convinced, their one voice will rise above the cacophony of their companions, at least to the ears of one special lady.

Then they will be satisfied.

And with that satisfaction will come silence.

 

 

In 1788, Benjamin Franklin wrote (with typical bad grammar and endless run-on sentences) in praise of a scientist and theologian with whom he was friends. He called his colleague, Joseph Priestly, “the honest heretic.”

“I do not call him honest by way of distinction,” Franklin wrote, “for I think all the heretics I have know have been virtuous men. They have the virtue and fortitude or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them.

“Do not, however mistake me. It is not to my good friend’s heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, ’tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic.”

Some things never change. Willfully dishonest people proudly parade in mantles of orthodoxy and many are proclaimed as leaders. Just as many honest folk are declaimed as heretics and cursed for not supporting the status quo.

I frequently find myself more drawn to the apostate, those believers who maintain religious opinions contrary to what is accepted or those free-thinkers from the wider world who question rather than conform to an established attitudes, doctrines, or principles.

My attraction is not to their contrariness. It is because heretics seem more willing to consider the why of beliefs or, in the words of Franklin, they OWN what they believe while many others passively accept (thoughtlessly inherit) the structures and systems around them. What is, according to that latter group, is as it should be.

May 1 is for revolutionaries and April 1 for fools. Maybe March 1 should be for celebrating honest heretics. Not coincidentally, it also happens to be Beer Day in Iceland.

 

A ran across the following thought provoking question at a blog site.

what is the relationship between ‘secrecy’ and ‘intimacy’? i mean, there’s, of course, the etymology:

the English word intimacy
derived from the English word intimate
derived from the Latin word intimus (inmost; most secret; most intimate)
derived from the Latin word intimatus
derived from the Late Latin word intimare (tell, tell about, relate)
using the English suffix -acy

and

the English word secrecy
derived from the English word secret
derived from the Old French word secret
derived from the Latin word secretus (separate, apart; private)
derived from the Latin word secernere (separate)
derived from the Greek word agogos, ἀγωγός
derived from the Greek word agein, ἄγω
derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *ag-

I couldn’t help but respond.

Despite the linkages between secret and intimate I think their meanings are somewhat at odds with each other. Secrecy most often connotes something kept hidden and very frequently the purpose of such hiding (whether for individuals, corporations or governments) is fear. A lyric from a song I like says: “The darker the secret, the harder you keep it.” The more I fear the information or connotation of a secret, the deeper it is buried. The more singular a secret is held, the more true it is to its purpose. The old saying is secrets were meant to be told. While that may be a natural inclination, that is also the ultimate failure when it comes to secrets.

Intimacy is about sharing. Intimacy is about openness. While secrecy involves closing up, intimacy requires opening even if only to one other person. While there may be trust in the sharing of a secret, the trust is not really about the hiding it is about the sharing. Intimacy, as it grows, must drive out fear and must eliminate all secrets between the intimates in order to achieve perfection.

Another word related to secrets is confidence (that which is confided). That word seems a far more able companion to intimacy. It is a word that contains trust, faith, assurance and even certainty. It is a word that can say both I believe in me and I believe in you. Failure in this context, the betrayal of a confidence, may be caused by the sharing of a secret, but it is really much more about the breach of trust than it is about the secret. There is no consideration of fear when there is complete confidence.

Perfect intimacy and complete confidence are ideals, no doubt. They seem unlikely given human limitations. I don’t always know my own heart and mind. If I am, at times, opaque to myself then how can I be completely transparent to another. Within my own murkiness lie the seeds for fear, the potential for betrayal, the possible failure of trust (ultimately I can only trust you as much as I trust me), and a conceivable loss of intimacy. But even in an adulterated form, which may be the best I can achieve, the coupling of intimacy and confidence seem far more alluring, much more desirable, infinitely more freeing than any joining involving secrecy.

One of my favorite authors is William Gibson. I first read his debut novel, “Neuromancer,” around the time the internet was taking off. I read it just before a book by Howard Rheingold called “Virtual Reality.” Rheingold was and is an expert on evolving computer technology. Gibson, when he wrote that novel, was an unknown who professed almost no understanding of computers. “Neuromancer” was written in 1984 and “Virtual Reality” in 1991. Remarkable was the similarities between the technological visions of the two books. Not the least of which was that Gibson imagined a universe in the interconnection of computers. He named it “cyberspace.” Rheingold talked about how that place was being. and would be used.

In short, Gibson is a very good writer who is also a remarkable visionary. His books, somewhat like Ray Bradbury’s, don’t focus on the science part of SciFi. Tech is not a character, it is just part of the world in which the stories take place. But while his worlds are often dystopian, some nearly apocalyptic in fact, they dovetail in some rather remarkable ways with the way technology is affecting our “real” world.

So when I saw the New York magazine had asked him for his top ten list of science fiction books, I had to take a look. Some are expected gems of the genre. But others ….

One caveat, some have said Samuel Delany’s book warrants a PMRC label warning for explicit (and graphically detailed) sex scenes. Where is Tipper Gore when you need her? And will we be seeing her around here any time soon?

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/66294/index2.html

SCIENCE FICTION

Tiger! Tiger! (1956)By Alfred BesterIt’s also known as The Stars My Destination. My favorite literary expression of mid-century Manhattan, and I doubt I’d have written without having read it.

Dhalgren (1975)By Samuel R. Delany It won’t work unless you can allow it to become your head for a few weeks; it helps if you’re rather young. Closest thing I know to a great “sixties” novel.

Arslan (1976)By M. J. EnghA very different sort of alien invasion: America as Earth. One of the best works of science fiction you probably haven’t heard of.

The Crystal World (1966)By J. G. Ballard It’s hard to pick just one Ballard, but you could certainly start with this.

The Forever War (1974)By Joe Haldeman The most adult and intelligent novel of military science fiction.

Pavane (1968)By Keith Roberts The Roman Catholic Church still rules England in 1968, Protestantism having been destroyed in the wake of the 1588 assassination of Queen Elizabeth.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993)By Jack Womack A heart-rending and perpetually more likely near-future Manhattan.

Great Work of Time (1991)By John Crowley Vast and all-encompassing, it’s a novel magically disguised as a novella.

Holy Fire (1996)By Bruce Sterling A glacially logical yet emotionally intelligent extrapolation of age-extension technology. Also brilliant on bohemias.

334 (1972)By Thomas M. Disch Everyday life in Manhattan, 2025, at 334 East 11th Street, a vast housing project. I think of it whenever anyone seriously suggests my work is dystopian.

William Gibson, SF’s current visionary has a new novel, Zero History (Putnam), due out September 7.

P.T. Anderson, according to many accounts, did not begin writing “Magnolia” with any thoughts of religious overtones. The amphibian event in the film was not inspired by a biblical reference (that was written in after the script was mostly done) but by the work of Charles Fort, who wrote books about scientifically inexplicable events.

Anderson has been fairly circumspect on what the movie is about, telling Charlie Rose during an interview that a) “none of us could figure it out, it’s too hard to describe” and b) he could go on all day with the subject. He concludes: “Let’s just say here’s who is in it….”

But quite plainly the film is an exploration of failure, regret, forgiveness and, in the end, the prospect of redemption that defies any sense of propriety. Some might call that grace.

In speaking about the film Anderson once said that the character of the police officer was a picture of moral certainty that was alien and yet attractive to him.

“It’s a little embarrassing to say, ‘No, I’m not up to the moral place that someone like Jim Kurring is.’ I’m trying, and maybe by writing it down it’ll get me there faster.”

At the time he stumbled across the Ex. 8 reference that appears repeatedly in the film, Anderson said he was “going through a weird, personal time”, and he started to understand “why people turn to religion in times of trouble, and maybe my form of finding religion was reading about [a supernatural event] and realizing that makes sense to me somehow”.

It seems clear that with this film Anderson, who both wrote and directed, made a public record of his personal search to understand something he longed for. Wonderfully and terribly he comes to the brink of a place familiar to many Christians but stops on the doorstep.

Much of the condemnation for this film emanates from the ugliness and profanity that pervades it. Everyone in the film, with the possible exception of the police officer and male nurse, are terribly flawed people who have fallen far.

But all of them, save one, is forgiven by the film’s end. I can’t help but think the impact of that would have been lessened by white-washing their failings.

More important, the seaminess in the film is not just a cinematic contrivance. Various accounts have Anderson referencing the sexual abuse by her father of Fiona Apple, his girlfriend at the time, in the creation of some characters. Other ugly and actual events are said to have leavened his script, making the story in some ways an exploration of the terrible things people really do to themselves and others.

Maybe we could all be righteously incensed if he had simply looked at the putrid insides and outsides of corrupt people bathing in filth. But regardless of Anderson’s hedging in interviews, that just isn’t what the film is about.

If nothing else, the movie is about hope. Toward the end of the “Magnolia” trailer the words appear: “People fall down. People look up.” They don’t pick themselves out of the mire, they don’t bootstrap themselves to salvation. They need something outside of themselves and are looking for it.

Many say that movies like this don’t work as tools of conversion. I agree. This movie in particular isn’t evangelistic, at least in part, because the person who created it clearly sees himself as a seeker rather than a shepherd. He doesn’t stand with the ninety-and-nine. Maybe that’s why he has such an amazing sense of how lost people can be.

But I might quibble about whether there is any “ministry” that can come from the movie. Anderson and his film are unintentionally analogous to the namesake character of a well-known parable who acted in a way his betters felt was beneath them and, in the process, taught everyone something unconscionable about God.

The spiritual teaching of “Magnolia” may be mostly for those of us who are “saved” and need reminders of what it felt like to receive a gift both unearned and undeserved.

“The book of love is long and boring
No one can lift the damn thing
It’s full of charts and facts and figures
And instructions for dancing….”

From “The Book of Love” by Stephin Merritt

Just the other day my 16-year-old daughter and I were discussing love — and all that goes with it — during the car ride back from church.

She dismissed the concept of love as just the product of biology, body chemicals, acculturation and environment combining to create a sense of beauty, a desire for companionship and, over all, an evolutionary imperative to reproduce.

“I don’t see what’s the big deal,” she said, with certain dismissiveness. How can someone that age be so assured they have been there, done that and know it all?

Yet, the truth is she already knows too much about love American style. Half her friends live in broken homes. Her own family fell apart before her eyes as parents went from silence to separate rooms to divvying up the days she would spend with each. And at school “love” is consummated almost without conversation, bartered for self-esteem or status or tickets to the prom, then used as a bludgeon when something goes wrong.

So she points to Darwin and says: What else is there? Selective breeding is at once more logical and less painful than most of the things she sees people doing in the name of love.

Perhaps in that there is some small measure of hope. She hasn’t bought into the national myth of love. Perhaps she won’t be swayed by the commercials, the peer pressure, the confectionery clichés, the glitter glue of romance and sex that has come to define love in this day.

But even if she avoids all of those negatives, that still leaves the question: What else is there?

I stammer about commitment as a sturdy adhesive that carries couples through the fire and ice of anger and boredom, of the calming assurance that can come from experiences shared and survived, of the hope and joy that grows when love doesn’t hide from knowing and being known.

If it was simply survival of the fittest, I insist, then every boy would be little more than an indiscriminate donor and every girl simply an appreciative receptacle to be filled. Her look tells me that is many, many of the “relationships” she has seen. So I try to evoke in her memories, glimpses, rumors of things I may have known or still hope to believe as evidence we are not just animals mindlessly driven to perpetuate.

We have brains and hearts and eternal souls to inform our choices, I say. We have friends, old and young, obviously living out relationships based on more than chemical bonds. We have those we fellowship with in church, some of whom have demonstrated a constancy in caring for each other and us that goes far beyond casual friendship.

And, over all, we have a God whose crazy love doesn’t hinge on merit or reciprocation. A God who didn’t ignore a planet peopled with beings who mostly disdained him when they thought of him at all. A God who stepped into the world and, with that act alone, gave a special meaning to a word that, more than any other, has captivated, confused and consumed humans.

Stephin Merritt, who wrote “The Book of Love,” as part of his 3 CD song cycle: “69 Love Songs,” says the song was written as an intentional collection of hackneyed phrases. Listening to him sing it, you sense a jaded cynicism accreted from age and experience. His deep bass is almost exhausted when it drones of heart-shaped boxes and wedding rings.

There is more to love, his lyrics allow, but those are things we will always be too young to know.

Recently, as part of a special project called “Scratch My Back”, former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel recorded a version of that same song with just his voice over a bed of strings.

Gabriel’s take on the song sounds almost like a patient counselor encouraging a disheartened companion to take one more look, to give one more try.

Sure, love has devolved to sad facts and silly things, his soaring tenor seems to say, but it can be so much more.

An interviewer recently asked Merritt what he thought of Gabriel’s re-imagination of his song. The notoriously down-beat songwriter fairly gushed in his response.

“I think it’s fantastic,” Merritt said. “It’s a totally different interpretation. My arrangement and recording of it is emphatically skeletal and all about the insufficiency and helplessness, whereas his sounds like he’s God singing to you about his creation.”

Proclaiming, or so it seems to me, that
“The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from….”

A few days ago I ran across a book review in a newspaper. The book being reviewed was “Reading Magic: Why Reading Aloud to Our Children will Change Their Lives Forever,” by Mem Fox. It was the headline of the column that caught my attention — Dads and books make a powerful combination.

In the column, writer Kendal Rautzhan says: “One of the points Mem Fox brings forward in her book is the importance of fathers reading to their children. She is especially insistent that fathers read aloud to their sons. Not only does this establish a lasting, strong bond between father and child, Fox points out that ” anything that demonstrated a male enjoying reading would probably be the most significant factor in getting the boy to read.” “

Author Fox, on her own website, provides a few more directives.
• Read aloud with animation. Listen to your own voice and don’t be dull, or flat, or boring. Hang loose and be loud, have fun and laugh a lot.
• Read with joy and enjoyment: real enjoyment for yourself and great joy for the listeners.
• Look for rhyme, rhythm or repetition in books for young children, and make sure the books are really short.

That last item reminded me of some of the early reading I did with my daughters. Lucy was a big fan of “Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You,” by Dr. Seuss. It had rhyme, rhythm and repetition, as well lots of sounds. “Mr. Brown is so smart he can even do this: he can even make a noise like a goldfish kiss!… pip!”

I began reading with “voices” to Susan. I found my form with the Harry Potter books. Each character had their own voice and accent. All had to be remembered for weeks as we made our way through those titanic volumes one chapter at a time. Eventually both girls were sitting in for the readings in which I would try to capture some of the personality, fierceness or humor of the Hagrids, Weasleys, Snapes and Dursleys.

Both girls love to read these days and they still, sometimes, ask me to read aloud. Always reminding me to use the voices.

When I began reading to the girls I was working nights and taking care of them during the days. I was getting by on 5-6 hours of sleep a night. Every time I sat down for more than 10 minutes I tended to drift off. Many weekends, the only nights I got to put the girls to bed, it was a toss up whether I would go out before they did. Sometimes I couldn’t finish a chapter because my eyes wouldn’t stay open. The girls forgave all of that, I guess, and just appreciated the reading we did together. I hope it played a small role in making them the wonderful persons and great students they are today.

So I add my testament. Dad’s reading to their kids is a powerful combination.

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Tags: fathersreading to daughters, rhyme, rhythm, repetition, moo, voices