Avdat

A body that TSA screeners would love to pat down

In today's Times-Dispatch, Barton Hinkle tells the story of Aaron Tobey, arrested at the Richmond airport last December for disorderly conduct. When TSA staff directed him to enter one of those see-through screening machines, Tobey yanked his shirt off revealing the text of the fourth amendment penned across his bare chest. This act may or may not be illegal.

Let's set aside the security and civil liberties issues for a moment. It strikes me that both Tobey and his more famous partner in TSA resistance, John "Don't touch my junk" Tyner, are fairly young men and fairly touchy about being touched. Could there be a demographic or cultural issue lurking here?

Maybe. The issue would be Male Insecurity About Body Image.

Of course women have been made to feel insecure about their bodies for a long time. "Your boobs are too small; your hips are too wide; your butt is too big," are just some of the insults, spoken or implied by Barbie dolls, super models and jerk husbands and boyfriends.

But in these more egalitarian times, men too can be made to feel physically inadequate. Just read Men's Health, or it's soft-porn partner Maxim. Listen to the ads on sports talk radio, or play a video game. The not-so-subtle message that these media outlets pitch to young adult men is that even a healthy body will no longer do. You need a washboard stomach. Your chest needs to be large enough to merit its own zip code. Male pattern baldness is a capital offense.

Even the notoriously high young adult male sex drive isn't high enough. You've got to push it into the stratosphere. Here's a Cialis. Now chase it with a red bull and vodka. You need the stamina of a porn star because that's what the ladies expect, don't they?

Only a miniscule few are able to sculpt their bodies and jack up their libidos to meet the new and impossibly high standard. Which leaves the ones who accept the standard as gospel feeling woefully inadequate.

And I wonder if that's not behind some of the pat-down backlash. The bravado in the face of so-called "unreasonable searches and seizures," or "sexual assault" by TSA screeners may be over-compensation for massive insecurity about one's own body.

Young adult heterosexual males need their own version of the It Gets Better campaign. Call it, It Can Get Better: work out less; work at being a better person more; fall in love with someone who's committed to being a better person, and you know what? They won't love your body because it looks like it was chiseled out of granite. They'll love your body because it's yours. And that brings a security that makes the occasional indignities that the human body has to bear--like colonoscopies and airport pat-downs--a bit more bearable.

You can do this even if you never fall in love and mate for life. Seek truth and goodness, and beauty will take care of itself.

Finally, to return to the security and civil liberties issues, we do live in a world where people try to do bad things on airplanes like blow them up, hijack them, and/or crash them. It would appear as though we need security that's equal to the threat.

Now just what is that? I read here and there that a lot of what you experience in an airport is public relations. It's there to make you feel better. Leave it to the government to annoy people in an attempt to make them feel better.

Are see-through imaging machines and aggressive pat downs necessary? As to the latter, the Israelis have been doing it for some time now. Aside from my wife and my doctor, no one has touched me more intimately than a security guard at the Frankfurt, Germany airport before I boarded a flight to Tel Aviv. If I had objected, their attitude would have been, "Fine. If your junk is that precious, don't go to Israel!" And you know what? Terrorists don't do bad things to jets that fly in and out of Tel Aviv.

Long story short, I'd rather get felt up than blown up. Provided that feeling people up is a legitimate technique for keeping bad guys off of airplanes.

What I ate on vacation: bugs

I remember a Candid Camera segment in which this guy pops into a fast food restaurant to order a burger. Only it's a fake burger joint. As soon as he places his order, one of the staff leads a cow through the room into the back. Then the sound of a saw starts up, followed by copious amounts of bovine bellowing. Then silence, and shortly thereafter out comes the burger! Now that's what I'm callin' fast food! Naturally the guy was beside himself.

I had a similar experience at Thurston's Lobster Pound in Bernard Maine. You walk in and place your order at the window. In the window are three sinks, one filled with small lobsters, one with medium, and one with large. Say you order four small lobster dinners. Well, the girl yanks four lobsters out of the far right sink, throws them into a big tupperware container, and then the heavily-tattooed woman takes them away to boil outside the restaurant door. And in five minutes, Viola! Your lobster is served.

My younger son found the whole experience appalling. He's a budding vegetarian--of a sort. He does eat burgers, but he always asks if our sausage is the soy stuff and not from the little piggy that went to market. I'm not sure if he understands that burgers are meat too, or if he's just inconsistent. I haven't accused him of inconsistency, which, after all, is a feature of most adult's moral reasoning, so why should I expect more from a nine-year-old? Anyway, he was quite ornery at dinner, and only straightened up when his mother gave him pen and paper and told him to express his feelings in that medium. So he drew pictures of bombs falling on the lobster pound. My son, the eco-terrorist.

My older son isn't the slightest bit troubled by where his meat comes from. "Look, granddaddy; those are his eyes!" CRACK.

I was wondering to myself, If we did sell burgers the way we sell lobster, would we eat less meat? I think not. When most people farmed, whatever personal relationship between human and animal that arose on the farm didn't deter hog-killing season from rolling around. Today's industrial farming model makes the relationship between humans and livestock much more impersonal, but it also makes meat much cheaper, which I suspect is the determining factor.

There are a million good reasons to be a vegetarian. It's a healthier diet. The animals are subjected to discomfort, even cruelty, in modern confinement operations. It's good stewardship: It takes millions of acres of corn and soybeans to feed the cattle, hogs, chickens and turkeys we eventually eat. Why not raise food to feed humans directly instead of indirectly? Vegetarianism may also be a prophetic sign of the coming kingdom of God, when "the lion and the lamb shall lie down together." Oh, and it's cheaper, modern agribusiness efficiency notwithstanding.

And yet I'm not the strict vegetarian I once was. We do, on rare occasions, buy organic beef, and on long journeys like the one to Maine and back, McDonalds does seem to be rather handy and fast. And in the spirit of "When in Rome..." I ordered lobster last week.

I was of two minds about it. Going from living to dead pink in boiling water before your very eyes, and then setting upon it with the crackers, yanking the meat out of the claws, the legs, and dodging the, Ahem, green stuff exploding out of the body cavity seemed barbaric to me. My hands were sticky and slimy. Flecks of green ooze on my shirt. Plus, lobster meat doesn't have that much taste to me. I think most people actually like the taste of the butter, not the meat.

Then again, I was also reading Linda Greenlaw's The Lobster Chronicles while on vacation, and learning that lobsters are arthropods, underwater spiders basically, and nicknamed "bugs" by lobster fishermen. Their brain-mass to body-mass ratio is among the worst in the animal kingdom. They can walk into a lobster trap, but seem to lack the brainpower to turn around and walk right back out. They are, in short, stupid, revolting little creatures whose very existence seems to justify preying upon them by anything higher than they on the food chain.

And that's all I have to say.

What I read on my vacation: The Shack

Technically my vacation isn't over. I'm lollygagging at the 2008 Comfort Inn location of the year in lovely Sturbridge, Massachusetts. (And it is lovely! New England's rolling, nearly mountain-sized hills covered in birch trees and balsam firs are lovely. At least they are in the summer.) Anyway, I can't watch TV because I want the kids to go to sleep, so why not blog a little bit before hitting the road tomorrow?

OK, what I read. The Shack. It was on the living room table with the other detritus that made it in from my family's convergence on The McKinley House in Bass Harbor, Maine. I'd heard of the book but literally knew nothing about it, other than that it was of a religious nature. My mother-in-law brought it with her, but she didn't like it. So I decided to read it.

Quickly into the novel I realized I had ventured into the dread regions of inspirational fiction, where plot, character development, credible dialogue and a nice turn of phrase are all sacrificed on the altar of doctrinal truth and point-scoring. But I pressed ahead because I knew that you, my legions of adoring readers, were starving for new material from me, and I had to provide it for you in the form of this book review!

Until I got to the middle of the book when the protagonist, a bereaved father, chills out with the Triune God for a weekend in a log cabin in the woods. I just had to set it aside then, not because I object to the book's iconography of the Holy Trinity as Queen Latifah, Lucy Liu and a swarthy, middle-eastern carpenter. I mean, I'm a mainline Christian. I read Beyond God the Father as an undergraduate! Back in the day, everybody I knew was calling the Almighty "she." I had to set it aside because the book was so late 1980s, you know?

But that's what the conservative Evangelicals do. They ridicule "liberal" Christians for both capitulating to culture and for being irrelevant to the culture (a contradictory argument if there ever was one). And then they pick through the best mainline scholarship of the previous generation and regurgitate it. So Open Theism is conservative evangelicalism stoned on process theology, and I'm guessing The Shack is a little Moltmann, a little feminist theology, and assorted theodicies ground up into a sausage of awful prose. I swear, if liberal Protestantism didn't exist, evangelicals would have to invent it.

I'm saying I'm guessing because I didn't finish the book. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia. Is that unfair? Augustine put off converting to Christianity for a long time because he was such a literary snob that the idea that the New Testament was divine revelation scandalized him. Am I a snob?

Well, not enough of a snob to not be a Christian. But like P.D. James, I detest it when cynics mock excellence as elitism. Here's the thing: after Dostoyevsky penned Ivan Karamozov's devastating takedown of all attempts to justify God's power and love in the face of natural and man-made cruelty, the only solution to the "problem of evil" is his brother Alyosha's rejoinder, also penned by Dostoyevsky: he kisses his brother on the cheek. There is no good explanation for why evil exists if God is sovereign and good. There are only acts of love grounded in resurrection hope. By the time I was a third of the way through The Shack I had a pretty good feeling that the author wouldn't be able to demonstrate that in an artful manner.

So, onto a better written book, whose myriad of (theological?) anthropologies, while not Christian, were far more entertaining and thought-provoking. Yes, I'm talking about Watchmen. In the meantime, I googled I Hate The Shack, and the White Zombie song Shack of Hate was the third hit. That inspired me to create a White Zombie channel on Pandora. So all is not lost!

What I did last summer

I wrote up this little article about my Iona experience for the church newsletter.  No mention of vomit-filled shoes naturally, but you can't say everything in one little article!

            On June 6 I traveled to Scotland for ten days as part of a continuing education project sponsored by Columbia Theological Seminary.  I attended a conference on Celtic Christianity at the restored Abbey on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland.

            Iona is an important site in the history of Scottish Christianity.  The Irish monk Columba came to Iona in 563 AD to establish a monastery.  Monks fanned out from there all over Scotland, converting its inhabitants to Christianity.  The monastery had its share of ups and downs.  It was plundered by the Vikings in the 9^th century, and rendered obsolete when Scotland became Protestant in the 16^th century.  But it has endured as a religious and historical pilgrimage site.

            In the 20^th century, George MacLeod, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, began a unique project.  He brought together seminary students and skilled tradesmen to restore the ruined abbey.  He wanted to bring the gospel and the church into closer contact with the problems of ordinary working class people.  He was also experimenting with new forms of Christian community.  Out of MacLeod’s experiment came the Iona Community, whose members live all over the world, devoting themselves to peace, social justice, and worship renewal.  Members are accountable to each other for the use of their time and money.  While the government now owns the abbey, the Iona Community is responsible for the worship services and seminars that are conducted there.

            In the week that I was there, I worshipped twice a day, attended seminars in which we read Irish and Scottish prayers and poems from the Middle Ages, went on a hike across Iona, visited the spooky and awesome island of Staffa, where Mendelssohn was inspired to write his Hebridean Overture, and hung out with people from all over the English-speaking world.  It was a great experience. 

            People in the Middle Ages lived a lot closer to nature than we do, for good and for ill.  More so for them than for us, the Creation was a realm which revealed God’s plan for redemption, but could also be a menacing place in which divine protection was needed.  We who labor on keyboards and not in fields can find a more holistic spirituality in the writings of the saints who’ve gone before us.  And, in an age in which nature may be bucking human attempts to keep it on a leash, we need the wisdom of our ancestors in faith whose use of the Creation was bridled by a reverent awe.

            Our stereotype of monasteries is that they are places where people go to flee from the problems of the everyday world.  But the monasteries that Irish monks established on Iona and elsewhere were on the front lines of mission. 

            In a book the Session recently read about healthy mainline congregations titled Christianity for the Rest of Us, one of the more curious details was that congregations that are growing in numbers and vitality tend to require a lot of potential members in terms of time spent in worship, Bible Study, prayer and volunteering, before they can join the church.

            What both examples teach us is that high-commitment Christian communities can have a higher impact on transforming society than low-commitment communities can.  In some sense, we do need to be a people set apart from the world, but only in order that we can better serve the world. 

            In the 21^st century we are still seeking new models of Christian community that can faithfully advance the cause of the gospel in the world.  Fortunately we have history to learn from, and the Holy Spirit to lead us into the future.

Traveling companion

I was in a gloomy mood. I'd just said goodbye at the train station to some new and lovely friends.  But the train station was in Glasgow, a few thousand miles away from home.  No family was there to greet me. 

At the time it'd seen like such a good idea:  round off the pilgrimage to Iona with a weekend of sightseeing.  And save some money in a hostel!  But I was unenthusiastic about bunking with a bunch of strangers.  What if my roommates were psychos?  Or more probable:  what if I awoke the next morning to find my shoes filled with a stranger's vomit?

I needed a travel companion.  And I found one in a Border's on Buchanan Street, Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island.  How clever to stick a British Isles travelogue in a bin close to the door through which many foreign tourists were sure to pass?  I was a sucker.  Having howled my way through The Mother Tongue and A Walk in the WoodsI grabbed it immediately, a precious gift of levity for my homesick heart.  And so, as President Bush made his valedictory tour of Great Britain, I on the same weekend made my maiden voyage through the streets of Glasgow, and, accompanied by Bryson, toured the streets of Dover, Oxford, and Edinburgh as well.

Bryson is an American who's lived, married and raised a family in Great Britain.  Before he and his family relocated to the States for a time, he decided to tour his adopted home and write about it.  He begins with not so fond memories of his arrival in the land, a cold, rainy night spent outdoors, and then some uncomfortable time in a B&B run by a Nurse Ratchet figure allegedly named Mrs. Smegma.  Misery loves company.  Thanks to Bryson's hilarious writing, I woke up in my hostel room in a much better mood.  Plus there was no vomit in my shoes.  Just the peaceful sound of snoring Aussies.

Bryson is good at making the minutiae of life fascinating and funny.  So he does with British place names and people names.  It's hard to decide which is funnier, Bryson's made-up locales, or some actual town names he reports.  It reminded me of a game our choir director played with us once.  She'd read three country music song titles, and we had to decide which one was fake.  Hint:  If the Phone Don't Ring Baby, It's Me is a real song.

Tea time, says Bryson, has made the British some of the kindest people in the world, apologetic to a fault, capable of taking extraordinary delight in simple pleasures.  Brits, says Bryson, suffer from an inferiority complex, but why should they?  They won the war they needed to win, dismantled their empire (peacefully, for the most part), and built in its place a social welfare system that's the envy of the world.  Their train system is efficient, comfortable and a real deal for the taxpayer.  Plus there's all this old stuff, everywhere!

But not as much as there used to be.  Bryson's description of any given town includes its lovely architecture and a seething critique of those modern glass and concrete monstrosities that have elbowed lovely Victorian, Georgian and older styles out of the way.  It became a game with me.  Which new adjective would Bryson hurl at the horrible post-war construction he took in on his road trip?  Criminal?  Obnoxious?  Hideous?  After reading Notes from a Small Island, one could be forgiven for concluding that post-war urban planners did more damage to Britain's architecture than the Luftwaffe.

Bryson can be wickedly funny in his descriptions of others, and himself.  Cheap but elegant might summarize his preferred accommodations.  I have close relatives who've hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, and they were greatly disappointed with Bryson's A Walk in the Woods because he only made it as far as Tennessee.  But after reading account after account of Bryson storming out of a B&B at the first sight of a little mildew in the sink, it's a real wonder he attempted such a feat in the first place!

Glasgow was one of the last stops on Bryson's trip, and his take was essentially the same as mine:

It has all this new-found prosperity and polish, but right at the very edge of things there is always this sense of grit and menace, which I find oddly exhilarating.  You can wander through the streets on a Friday night, as I did now, and never know when you turn a corner whether you are going to bump into a group of tony revelers in dinner jackets or a passel of idle young yobboes who might decide to fall on you and carve their initials in your forehead for purposes of passing amusement.  Gives the place a certain tang.

Fix the foolishness

I reach into my "They'll know we are Christians by our love" drawer and pull out... a palm frond!

Dozens of Greek and Armenian priests and worshippers exchanged blows at one of Christianity's holiest shrines on Orthodox Palm Sunday, and used palm fronds to pummel police who tried to break up the brawl.

The fight came amid growing rivalry over religious rights at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the site in Jerusalem where tradition says Jesus was buried and resurrected.

It erupted when Armenian clergy kicked out a Greek priest from their midst, pushed him to the ground and kicked him, according to witnesses.

When police intervened, some worshippers hit them with the palm fronds they were holding for the religious holiday. The Eastern Orthodox churches follow a different calendar from Western Christians and celebrate Easter next Sunday.

Two Armenian worshippers who attacked the Greek Orthodox clergy were briefly detained by Israeli police. Scores of Armenian supporters then protested outside the police station during the questioning of the two, beating drums and chanting.

The Holy Sepulcher is shared by several Christian denominations according to a centuries-old arrangement known as the "status quo."

Each denomination jealously guards its share of the basilica, and fights over rights at the church have intensified in recent years, particularly between the Armenians and Greeks.

Here's one of my favorite pictures of the Holy Sepulchre.  Our tour guide told us that in the mid-19th century, somebody put this ladder up to do some repair work, which was subsequently interrupted.  Then the Greeks, Copts, Armenians and other claimants to the church agreed that no part of the Church could be changed unless all agree to it.  So the ladder has remained there to this day, a small monument to Christian disunity. 

And perhaps it's the most valuable relic on the whole site!  After all, it is wooden.  How does a wooden ladder survive 150 years of exposure to the elements without some sort of divine intervention?

No monks exchanged body blows when we were there in May of 2006, but some in our group saw a fight between two tour guides.  Each was vying to get their respective groups closest to Station 12, the part of the Church which encloses Golgotha.  It was reported to me that one guide was shoving the old ladies in his group up to the railing. 

When I think about my visit to the Holy Sepulchre, and reads news stories like the one quoted above, I can't help but wonder if the cast of Clean House needs to make a road trip to Jerusalem.  Mark will probably want to start by getting rid of this chandelier.  It shouldn't be too much of a problem.  The Church boasts a rather roomy (by Old city standards) courtyard in which Trish can set up a Yard Sale.  Speaking of lighting, Matt will want to brighten up the dreary interior by installing some skylights in both domes.  Expensive? Yes.  But Trish will make a killing selling relics to the tourists.  And we'll leave it to Niecy to crack monks' heads together.