Avdat

The Truth Is Out There

You think that by releasing the long form of the birth certificate, the President has put this thing to rest. Au contraire, mon frère. "Facts are stubborn things," said John Adams, but conspiracy theorists are even more stubborn.

Take the Holocaust. Is there a historical event more surfeit of facts? There's the archival evidence of the Nazi regime. There's survivor testimony, meticulously recorded for posterity. There's the testimony of the liberators and the accompanying war correspondents. There's the Nuremburg transcripts. There's census data, and tax records from before and after the war. Most of all, there's the testimony of dead bodies. Their blood cries out from the ground.

And yet there are people out there who deny the Holocaust. Malice don't break for facts.

And malice of a sort motivates the Birther Movement. America is a white, Christian country, don't you know? Given that, and given the fact that our President is a black guy with a Muslim-sounding name, something has gone seriously wrong. Our country can't have succumbed to pluralism to that degree, can it? So, the Birther is faced with two choices: either his head explodes, or he subscribes to a conspiracy theory that explains this "usurpation" of power.

Birtherism is racism, pure and simple.

Now there's lots of conspiracy theories out there:

• Evolution is a myth.
• 9/11 was an inside job.
• Vaccines cause autism.
• The moon shot was filmed in Hollywood.
• Global warming is a hoax. 

Some of these are benign; others are malevolent. What unites them all is the misguided belief that "the truth is out there," when in fact it is right under your nose. But it's an inconvenient truth. When confronted with facts that undermine one's preconceived notions, one has a choice: deny the facts or change one's mind. Guess which option is scarier for some?

All that said, I was rather disappointed after watching this:

 

In short, the President is mad because the media gave Donald Trump more attention last week than he. Well look, you're the President of the United States. You're the most powerful man on the planet. If you can't get the media to pay attention, maybe you or your staff needs to resign.

Bomb somebody, OK? Pardon somebody. (I'm being facetious.) Or tell the truth in simple, unadorned language: The Republicans voted to kill Medicare last week, and I won't stand for that.

Fight, Mr. President. Stop whining about the Lamestream Media. Leave that to Sarah Palin.

Sleepwalking through Easter

Lent. Meh. This was the most spiritually indifferent six weeks before Easter I've ever experienced.

I thought about adopting some sort of new, Lenteny discipline, but anything that came to mind seemed forced. So I plodded through the usual: morning devotion, get kids to school, plow through one more book on Merovingian France, eat dinner, run, family time, evening prayer, sleep, wake up from anxiety dream about comps, go back to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.

On Sunday I did change it up by not going to the library and going to church.

I could tell it was spring, but I couldn't tell it was Lent. Why not? I chalked it up to the misfortune of my Saint Matthew's Passion CD ruined by crayons melting on it in the car, and my grad school budget ruling out purchasing a new copy.

I chalked it up to the practical atheism inherent in being a religious professional. How many of us are so earnestly interpreting texts and the tradition and yet utterly oblivious to their power to interpret us? We become Wizards of Oz. Behind the curtain, we conjure up mission, meaning and even God himself for those who listen to our words.

I also chalked it up to the subject matter that confronts me every day in my carrel. I swear to God, if I read one more story about a Christian bishop conspiring with a Christian king to have his half-brother and his infant nephews assassinated...

But I figured out what it really was when I got up this Easter Sunday morning, opened the Times-Dispatch, and saw a classmate of Ethan's on the front page:

For 17 years, Karl and Linda Peterson have been fighting — in courtrooms and schoolrooms, in doctors' offices and living rooms — to bring consistency to a child born to chaos.

On this Easter morning, a time of rebirth, James Peterson has never been closer to revealing himself as the young man his family prayed lay within the labyrinth of his autistic barriers.

On Good Friday, in Mechanicsville, James — the young man who for years wanted to be alone and barely spoke — went bowling with friends.

"We are on a long journey, and there is a long way still to go," said his mother, Linda, as James padded around the family's Hanover County home last week. "But the signs of accomplishment and growth we had always hoped were there have never been more obvious. He has become a new person from what he had been."

This month, James, 17, ended six years of schooling at Dominion School for Autism, which began in Westminster Presbyterian Church and is among the few intensive, hands-on learning and behavioral treatment centers in the area specializing in helping autistic children.

"James became someone who was incredible in wanting to engage, who thrives when he's congratulated, who grew with positive reinforcement and developed a strong sense of self-advocacy, which he'd never had before," said Jennifer Morgan, his teacher there.

His entry two weeks ago into Northstar Academy, a private school in Henrico County for special-needs children that expects a high degree of behavioral self-control, was a long-sought goal. "Years ago, I told myself if he ever was able to go there, I would be the happiest mom on Earth," Linda Peterson said.

That quote by Linda Peterson in the fourth paragraph--I could say the exact same thing about our situation. Things were very, very bad this time last year, but then they started getting better. And they keep getting better.

Pastor Janet announced that she was organizing a new Sunday School class for middle schoolers and pretty much told us that Ethan would be in it. Now Ethan had never made it through a Sunday School class before. But we did as we were told, and he loves it. The other boys in the class (they're all boys) have accepted him, or at least put up with him. I suspect this is due in part to the fact that they have their own issues as well, and due in part to the fact that Ethan earned a little street cred with them one Sunday when he lifted up his shirt and showed them his surgical scars.

Laura has said that one of her biggest fears about leaving Salisbury was finding a church that would accept our whole family. They loved Ethan at John Calvin Presbyterian, but he was theirs from three months of age. When they aren't yours, they're harder to accept unconditionally. But the Gayton Kirk has.

I could go on and on. He broke his camera last summer, and instead of beating one of us up over it, or breaking a lamp, he spent his own money on a new one. He came up with that idea all by himself.

I attribute his success to his having the right amount and variety of medication in his system, the outstanding education he's getting at the Dominion School, and to his own maturity.

When he was younger we grew afraid of punishing him for misbehavior because it just threw gasoline on the fire. That's a maddening feature of autism--when you're so curved in on yourself that you don't respond normally to carrots and sticks.

Then we became acquainted with ABA therapy, which counseled us to ignore the bad behavior and lavishly praise the good behavior. So we started doing that, and it did seem to pay off (although you'd never want to raise a non-autistic child like that; you'd be raising a sociopath).

But by late last year we seemed to have gotten all the mileage we could have out of that technique, and still there were an annoying set of misbehaviors we weren't having success with. So one day, fed up, I rolled the dice. I said, "If you do that again, you'll lose your allowance for this week." Well, he did it. So I said, "No allowance."

"You can't do that!" he yelled. "I am doing it," I replied.

More misbehavior. "Now you've lost a second week's allowance," I said. And on it went until poor Ethan had lost a year's worth of allowance.

So I made him a deal. No misbehaviors, and he could earn back a few weeks every day. And he did! Rationality! God be praised!

And so this, you see, is why I had no zeal for Lent this year. Because for me, Easter had already arrived. What I described above as the seeming drudgery of my life is actually the secure rhythm of a rather settled life, unpunctuated by broken furniture, raised voices, bruises, and tears of rage, regret and fear, which was how our life was for a long, long time. Like Hawkeye Pierce, who only belatedly would realize that the shelling had stopped, it was only this morning that I realized that, in a penultimate but nonetheless real sense, The strife is o'er; the battle won/The victory of life is won.

Naturally, one would not want to reduce the Resurrection to mere normalcy. And there are those theological rigorists who decry comparing the unique event of the Resurrection to any old death and rebirth experience, like Springtime, for instance. Or even, I suppose, to coming out of the tomb of developmental disability.

But the New Testament makes some large claims for Jesus Christ, namely that all things were created through him. And the Church has made some equally large claims for Jesus Christ, that in the Incarnation he assumed human nature itself, and not merely one, particular human personality. So it seems reasonable, if not irresistible, for Christians to refer all events to the one in whom all things hold together. Or, in the words of the hymn In the Cross of Christ I Glory:

Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure

By the cross are sanctified

Peace there is that knows no measure

Joys that through all time abide

We made it through church today as a family! We sang Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, and Pastor Janet admonished us, in the words of Wendell Berry, to "practice resurrection." We hung out this afternoon, chatting on the phone with loved ones. We went to Bryan Park and walked among the azaleas. We ate a delicious dinner my wife prepared. And now I am going to go to bed.

Today we "sat under our own vines and under our own olive trees and no one made us afraid." If that's not practicing resurrection, I don't know what is.

In which I get up-to-speed on the Belhar Confession

I've been out of the parish and holed up in a carrel long enough that the MDiv students now know more about church politics than I do. The Belhar Confession has come up several times in Theology II this semester, a class in which I am a TA. Turns out that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is voting this year on whether or not to add it to our Book of Confessions. I didn't know what the Belhar Confession was, so I had to look it up. (Shorter Belhar Confession: Apartheid is a sin).

In this afternoon's section, in which we were considering the relationship of the Church to society and reading the Confession of 1967 in that context, one student asked why there was any opposition to the Belhar Confession since the Constitution already contains a document that condemns racial discrimination, namely C '67. Another student replied that some people fear that Belhar is a trojan horse for approving gay ordination.

Sigh. This is pure guilt by association. And faulty logic:

Some people who support gay ordination also support the Belhar Confession.

I do not support gay ordination.

Therefore I cannot support the Belhar Confession.

No, I don't think it follows either.

I suppose one could argue that since our Book of Confessions already condemns racism, why add another confession that does the same thing? But the thing about a Book of Confessions is that you have multiple documents treating the same subject. For instance, a majority of our confessions contain expositions of the Ten Commandments. Should we get rid of all except one? No, because there is value in the particular treatment that particular documents give to a given topic.

That said, I have a feeling that amending our constitution in this way is just one more symbolic gesture. Presbyterians are surfeit of symbolism, but what we need are deeds, not words. Despite our formal and seemingly endless endorsements of diversity, the Presbyterian Church (USA) remains overwhelmingly white, middle class and on the far side of 55.

One student quipped that the Confession of 1967 would have been a much more prophetic document had it been the Confession of 1957. Too right.

And that makes an interesting point about our consideration of Belhar. There's a whiff of Donatism at work here--establishing one's contemporary purity on the basis of the purity of one's ancestors. Only the Donatists had real martyr ancestors. We Presbyterians invent them by endorsing their words ex post facto.This gets us perilously close to those Pharisees whom Jesus condemned during Holy Week--the ones who decorated the tombs of the prophets of yesterday while stoning the prophets of today.

Somewhere I read that the chief predictor of a congregation's multiculturalness isn't its denominational affiliation but whether or not it was established before or after 1970. So it seems to me that if we want a truly diverse church we need to A. Establish new churches and evangelize young adults (who don't have the hangups about interracial worship and marriage that their elders do), and B. Train pastors to transform congregations imprinted by the segregationist culture in which they were founded.

That takes more than amending the constitution. That takes money. Big money. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."If we care about breaking down barriers, to say nothing about making disciples, we'll put our money where our mouth is.

It also takes a willingness on the part of presbyteries to ordain and authorize people to work in new, creative and unorthodox ways to make disciples and found congregations.

I take it that either the money or the creative thinking is lacking given that the denomination has planted but 20 new congregations in the last five years. Whether we adopt Belhar or not (and let me be clear--had I been able to attend my presbytery meeting I would have voted for it), we are not a denomination that cares much about either making disciples or creating a multicultural church. Deeds, not words, tell the story. "Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Hurt feelings

It's just too bad that Republicans got their feelings hurt when President Obama laid out his debt reduction plan last week. Medicare and Social Security are now part of our social contract. We have long since decided that no citizen need face the inherent dangers of aging, such as poor health and inability to work, on their own. We'd no more stand for abolishing either program than we would repealing the First (or the Second!) Amendment.

And yet that's what Representative Ryan's plan would do. It would slash the national debt by replacing Medicare with subsidies for younger workers to purchase private insurance once they turn 65--subsidies that aren't designed to keep pace with inflation. This would save the federal government a ton of money, but only by shifting the cost of health care to the next generation of seniors. Where does Representative Ryan's plan leave those who don't save enough? On their own.

President Obama's plan is a bit vague, but it does preserve the safety net for the elderly, which is paramount. It calls for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which is sensible, given that tax rates are at post-war lows. It establishes an advisory board that will review government payments to doctors and hospitals. No doubt such a board will revive GOP conspiracy theories about death panels, but the Ryan plan has a death panel too: the market. The rich and aged will be able to buy any treatment they want; the rest, not so much.

The President was also right to remind the public why we're in this mess. When the GOP ran the government, they basically put Afghanistan, Iraq and Medicare Part D on the nation's credit card. That's well over a trillion dollars right there. But now that they're out of power in the Senate and the White House, they're suddenly worried about the debt. Which is the only time they ever worry about debt.

What Republicans really worry about is how to dismantle the welfare state and return us to a Gilded Age economy. At least during the first Gilded Age most Americans could grow their own food. A second Gilded Age would make most of us corporate serfs. Such an agenda deserves a serious rebuke. If that's partisan, so be it.

I'm sorry, but John Calvin is from our "out of the hood" program

I learn a lot from my classmates. Today I learned that Bon Qui Qui would be John's Calvin's ideal civil magistrate. See, you may think you can have it your way in a free society, but don't kid yourself. Bon Qui Qui cannot be resisted without God being resisted at the same time, and she will call security on you if you get crazy on her.

A poem for the Monday of Holy Week

Or any day, really... 

Before I knew its power, I asked in prayer

For love of Christ, believing it was sweet;

I thought to breathe a calm and tranquil air,

On peaceful heights, where tempests never beat.

Torment I find, instead of sweetness there!

My heart is riven by the dreadful heat:

Of these strange things to treat

All words are vain;

By bliss I am slain,

And yet I live and move.

Jacopone da Todi, Cantico dell'amor superardente, as quoted in Erich Auerbach's Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages.

 

Why I can't sleep

I just finished Julia M. H. Smith's Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000. It's a book that poses the urgent question, Is Smith an alien? Do people like Smith, Peter Brown and Ian Wood have an extra cerebral cortex marked "Just for History" floating in a vat in their office? Are they time travelers from the superintelligence, singularity future masquerading as medieval historians? Where do they get all this?

Whenever I finish a book I Iook up scholarly reviews of said book to see if my opinion of it agrees with the scholars' opinion. For some strange reason, my first query this afternoon turned up no reviews for Smith's book. But it did turn up her review of Carole Cusack's Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

Awesome! The topic of Cusack's book is basically my dissertation topic.

And Smith lowered the boom on poor Carole Cusack. Cusack's book, said Smith, relies too heavily on texts in translation. Her bibliography is shockingly short on non-English secondary sources. Her conclusion, that kings had a lot to do with it, will surprise no one.

That's "Booyah!" in academeze.

This is exactly what I'd be capable of producing at this moment in my grad school career: a completely unoriginal synthesis of English-language scholarship on a selection of early Medieval texts translated from Latin. My nightmare is that this is as good as my French, German and Latin will ever get, and if I do manage to eek out a dissertation and if it ever gets turned into a book, an 800 pound gorilla like Julia Smith will squash me like a bug.

And you know what that means. That means teaching remedial English in an open door admission community college built on a former nuclear testing site--my office a cubicle demarcated by Les Nessman-like imaginary walls in a trailer where the AC wall unit always shorts out.

Or even worse. It could mean... back to the parish!