A Time to Laugh

From the complete and crippling lack of irony to its saturated opposite. This was the only book ever that Grant and I independently bought one each for the other. A kind of Gift of the MST3K Magi or something. So if you seem the type, you may be receiving the extra copy from us soon.

As you’re reading the book, you get a whiff of mothballs and Sweet Honesty perfume as imagine yourself nibbling on nut brittle and prying your stuck leg from the plastic-covered Louis the XIV-ish chair. It’s a feast for the senses alright.

I admit. I’m starting with the one I like the least.

Please don’t buy this book. I can sum it up for you: A narcissist takes himself way too seriously and fantasizes about the war against him and Christmas by shadow-boxing those who claim he takes himself too seriously. Trust me, Bill. Christmas will make it just fine without you.

My brother’s right. The only way to get through this book is by hearing Stephen Colbert read it. Then it does have that truthiness quality to it.

Why oh why does Dobson recommend this?

Two obsessions meet. :grad

In honor of my new t-shirt and in honor of all the books Santa brought me this Christmas and last, my goal is to read one a day. They aren’t big books. Let’s see if I can do this. I’ll blather about them here.

Isaac, Gavin, and Sugar would like to wish you a Merry Christmas.

Mommy and Daddy are too tired to be elfy right now.

My little man. He’s three. Such a grown-up age. All the neurons are firing, too. We started with antibiotics, CPAPs, and feeding tubes. And now it’s spiderman slippers and McDonald’s “casha misters” (cash registers). We were in the NICU scared that we’d never get the latch correct. Today we were at Gattitown with lemonade and cake. It used to be a too-big snap-up jammie. Now it’s your Woody costume.

Our Savior’s infant cries were heard,
And met by human love,
Before He preached one saving word
Or prayer to God above.

In Joseph’s arms, at Mary’s breast,
while Herod’s violence spread,
God’s love by human love was blessed,
protected, nurtured, fed.

Whoever calms a child by night,
Or guides a youth by day,
Serves Him whose birth by lantern light
Was on a bed of hay.

For Christ, who was a refuge
From Herod and his sword,
Is seeking now, thro’ us to be
Our children’s friend and Lord.

Thomas Troeger, Baptist Hymnal [Nashville: Convention Press] 1991, No. 116

Little did Jeremy Bentham realize how Michel Foucault would run with his idea of the Panopticon.

Bentham imagined that the best way to keep prisoners in line was with an all-seeing and potentially-punishing eye. It wasn’t that the prisoner was always being watched. It was that he might be watched that forced him to conform. One single guard with a giant gun could imprison hundreds of criminals if they just never knew when he was watching.

Foucault saw culture no differently. Within discourses of power, people conform just in case others are watching, reporting, and punishing. When we’re afraid of getting caught, we discipline ourselves to submit. Employees wash their hands, teenagers wear stylish clothes, drivers obey the speed limit not because it’s healthy, comfortable, or safe but because they might get caught if they don’t. Think 1984.

What Foucault was describing perfectly was the ubiquitous ideology of ungrace. He’s right. We’re caught in a discursive prison that forces us to comply. It squeezes us into its mold.

Friedrich Nietzsche, that end-of-modernity Modern who intellectually sired Foucault, agreed. He proposed a solution: take over. You be the guy with the gun and imprison that guard. Might makes right after all.

Foucault, that proto-postmodern, imagined similar take-overs. He did shrug off the whole idea of actual cultural change. Go ahead and get the gun and imprison the guard. But just remember that you’re still both stuck in that dank prison in the end. Touché.

Jacques Derrida, the actual postmodern (if there is such a thing), took the next logical step by scoffing at any sort of takeover. “Why bother?” after all. You can imagine in Nietzsche’s revolution, Foucault might be participating half-heartedly while Derrida is sleeping off a hangover in his cell.

In the years I’ve discussed the Panopticon with my students, my conclusions have rung hollow. I usually end with an unsatisfying “but God is sovereign even in the Panopticon.” That response leaves the Christian stuck in his ideological prison cell, looking outside at the stars, perhaps, but still leaving prison of ungrace intact.

Phil Yancy’s description of the Poles resisting communism, however, got me thinking. How does Grace act in a Panopticon? How does Grace respond in ungrace? Does she escape and go frolick outside the prison hoping that someone will see her down there and join her? Does she shine a light on the guard tower to show that it’s not that scary? I think, Grace would just walk outside the cell and start talking to those imprisoned around her. Maybe she’d bring the guard donuts and coffee. She might get punished, sure, but she’d assume that death is no worse than being imprisoned in this way.

For the believer immersed in God’s grace, neither Nietzsche, Foucault, nor Derrida can be our model. We can’t take over, join other take-overs (while snarkily critiquing them), or passive-aggressively deconstruct them. Nor can we sit alone and dream of life outside the prison. As J. I. Packer says, we must “trust God, and get going.” We must act in a way the discourses of power can’t foresee. We must love our enemies, turn the other cheek, heap coals of kindness on their head.

Grace is a kind of radical, other-worldly, hopeful action in this fractured, hopeless postmodern condition. We’re more than conquerors after all.