A Time to Laugh

“Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the LORD as in the days of old and as in former years.”

Malachi 3:1-4

I’m told I’m wrong about this. But no matter. I’m going to make my case anyway. Even if it is wrong because I can’t stop thinking about it.

I made a phone satchel this week for my new iPhone. I have trouble keeping the phone on me, so as usual I’d solve that problem with one of my two favorite coping methods: knitting.

Knitting as a process itself is pure bliss. But to be practical about it, my favorite construction method is really felting or, rather, fulling. Felting is what you do when you make a whole piece of cloth. Fulling is what you do when you make the garment and then shrink it to size. You knit something in wool about double in every dimension and through alternate hot and cold baths, friction, and soapy water the whole thing shrinks to a completely different looking item.

Felt is one of the oldest known ways to make cloth. They discovered it by some poor schlep sticking raw wool fibers into his shoes to keep his feet warm. By the end of the day, the heat, sweat, and friction had created something more sturdy and resilient than before.

Like with these Stetson hats.

I knit the thing with just a hunch about its future purpose. More instinctive art than exact science, I imagine the approximate proportions and the general design. And just run with it, changing as I go and incorporating mistakes as . . . well, challenges.

I wish I had taken a picture of the purse, post-knitting but pre-fulling. It was pretty ugly. It looked homemade. You could see each stitch and every tucked-in yarn tail. Every flaw was as plain as day. Yet you could see a vision of its final purpose too.

Then into the wash it goes. About 6 times. Friction, soapy water, and heat turns a floppy, gargantuan purse into a tidy little wallet. The stitches disappear. The curling that inevitably happens with a knitted garment is no longer a problem. It’s resilient now — strong and durable. And, in my not-so-humble opinion, it’s much prettier.

You need the soap. The oily soap makes the wool’s fibers slippery enough to “stand up” and the friction makes them connect. When cool and dry, the fibers lock and form the felt.

The NIV translates Malachi’s words as “launderer’s soap.” But the KJV and ESV choose “fullers’ soap.” The latter image is very different than the former. From my vantage point, that Soap is not just cleaning, but strengthening. It’s not only purifying, but also perfecting. The Knitter of our bones and sinews has a end purpose in mind for His creation. We start out floppy and misshapen — a kind of Burkean burlesque. But life’s friction and heat under the Fuller’s watchful eye and, of course, with His Soap make something entirely new.

It’s redemptive.

Isaac came home talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. this week. He learned about him in school, of course — the first one in our immediate tribe to hear about him as a fact and not a threat:

See this picture, Mommy? He’s waving hello. And he’s saying, “White people, you be nice to black people. And black people, you be nice to white people.”

That about covers it.

Being the public address nerd that I am, I said, “Let’s watch his speech, Isaac!” And more motivated by the snuggling than the learning, he settled into my lap for a viewing.

“He said Stone Mountain, Georgia! I know where that is. That’s where the presidents heads are carved — George Washington, George Bush, and Abraham Lincoln.”

Oh, so close. So, so close and so very, very far. “You’re thinking of Mount Rushmore. But we’ve been to Stone Mountain, remember? There are presidents carved into stone there, but presidents of the Confederacy.”

“What’s the Confederacy?”

Sigh. . . . Where to begin. I did my best. The differences between the North’s industry and South’s agriculture. The labor-intensity of cotton. And slavery. I hate talking about slavery.

I ended up at Abraham Lincoln’s conclusion that the South’s leaving the Union was no option at all. And the Blue Coats and the Grey Coats.

We listened some more and jumped ahead a hundred years to the Civil Rights Movement. I told him that right here in Greenville, people couldn’t eat lunch in a restaurant simply because they were black. Or drink from the same water fountain or use the same bathroom.

I finally sighed through saying, “And you know what, Isaac? Mommy has just discovered one of the most hateful sources of this racism. Right here in Greenville. That’s Mommy’s job right now — working with God as He makes that crooked path straight.”

While I was stuck in my little Public Speaking 121 lecture, I listened to this greatest speech of the 20th-century again. For the first time in a long time. King’s talking about the same thing I read during Advent. It sounds different now than it did in my previous life.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together:

No wonder King was such a threat. Shalom is a threat. A threat to habits, isolation, pride, greed. And King was just preaching Shalom. No, I think he was singing it.

But when you hear and accept this it is not your power, but God’s grace, that renders the Gospel fruitful in you, so that you believe that you and your works are nothing. For you see how few there are who accept it, so that Christ weeps over Jerusalem and, as now the Papists are doing, not only refuse it, but condemn such doctrine, for they will not have all their works to be sin, they desire to lay the first stone and rage and fume against the Gospel.

Luther’s First Sunday of Advent Sermon

I wish you could see what I see sitting here. In my reading nook. Next to me a sweet schnauzer warms my legs. In the next room, a gentle husband snoozes. Upstairs the sleepy preschooler has conked out for his Sunday afternoon coma, and the silly kindergartner tries his best to keep quiet in his own room. But I hear the leaping off the bed and the happy dancing directly above me.

I see our Christmas tree. Lit. A miracle in itself since just last night the sentimentally appointed pinester was dark due to a malfunction somewhere in its dozen strands of light. From my point of view, the Hubby divined the exact problem (blown light fuse) and fixed it effortlessly. Yesterday’s dead car battery, however, needed Geico’s help. And the vintage Lionel that usually circles the tree couldn’t be fixed without parts, so it waits for us next year. We were electrical Schleprocks yesterday.

But between me and the tree, I see, for the first time in our home, a single advent candle burning brightly. The Candle of Hope. I cobbled together a wreath of velvet leaves I made for Elise’s birth nine years ago and some wool leaves I cut from my old felted sweater. An evergreen of a different sort. All leaves intended for another purpose, resurrected for celebration.

We sang Christmas songs this morning at church. Imagine that — singing Christmas songs during the Christmas season. If you’ve never been a independent, fundamental Baptist, you have no idea what a gift that is. You see, Advent is a big no-no. And you don’t sing Christmas songs until the week of Christmas. Or maybe the two weeks before. And even then, the truly spiritual sing them almost grudgingly. Because Christmas is Catholic (i.e. pagan) and extending the Christmas season is commercial, we really should just ignore it altogether. The pious do!

I can’t even tell you how many Christians I know who refuse to celebrate the holiday at all. I think, in fact, Charles Dickens wrote a novel about just such a person.

But deep down, we want to anticipate and celebrate. We want an old ritual that connects us all to a Story grander than just our own. We want to sing!

Last night, we watched an old Ken Burns special on the Shakers – the mostly 19th-century agrarian sect which took in orphans and made the most simplistically elegant furniture imaginable. Burns’ hagiography brushed past all their ideological problems — that Mother Ann taught that Original Sin was sexual intercourse (and so they were celibate) and that God was both male and female with Jesus being the male manifestation and Mother Ann being the final female manifestation and Christ’s Bride. And, of course, that they must discipline their evil Body in order to let the wholly good Spirit reign.

Instead Burns highlighted their seemingly beautiful straining, struggling, and striving toward perfection. And in 1840 it looked like they had made it. They were booming. They were taking in the poor and homeless. Their industry and craftsmanship was admired and profitable. Their ethic, however, was tailored to a 19th-century agrarianism and could not survive life in the industrialized 20th century. And now in the 21st century, there are only three living Shakers left.

Sound familiar? It’s eerily familiar to me. Scarily familiar. In grad school, I read all about the Shakers and all the utopian sects born out of the Second Great Awakening (most of whom came from the Burned-Over District). And I empathize with all of them. I understand the appeal of perfection — that if I make my work pristine enough and sincere enough, I’ll build an American ziggurat to God. I understand the appeal of the bifurcated thinking — that the world is evil and that my industrious piety is righteous. I understand the appeal of defining sin as out there instead of in here – that my containing evil makes my perfection attainable. I understand the appeal of being peculiar — that doing the hard thing and the unexpected thing will woo people to me/us/God. Whether the hard thing is celibacy or modesty or Scroogery.

What a different Story I heard this morning! That God comes to me and I don’t work my way toward Him. That His love is greater than my sin. That doing good comes because Jesus has made us good. That the first Advent guarantees the second. That Jesus is King. Now!

There’s no room for the curmudgeon in that Story!

The kindergartner has just been freed from his quietness. Daddy bounded down the stairs carrying him piggyback. And the preschooler followed with a big case of bed head. We all have the evening to rest together (and fix the lights on the tree again because another fuse just blew). Three years ago on this day we would have already been headed to a church service or a rehearsal or some such duty. Straining, struggling, and striving toward some illusion of perfection.

I laugh at the irony. Our reactionary anti-Catholic shunning of all things Advent has still duplicated the identical medieval religious feudalism. And our dispensationalist adventism won’t touch an extended celebration of the first Advent.

But I’ll light my Candle of Irony on another day. Today is the Candle of Hope.

This is what is meant by “Thy king cometh.” You do not seek him, but he seeks you. You do not find him, he finds you. For the preachers come from him, not from you; their sermons come from him, not from you; your faith comes from him, not from you; everything that faith works in you comes from him, not from you; and where he does not come, you remain outside; and where there is no Gospel there is no God, but only sin and damnation, free will may do, suffer, work and live as it may and can. Therefore you should not ask, where to begin to be godly; there is no beginning, except where the king enters and is proclaimed.

I know it took me forever to complete. I’m trying not to hyperfocus on that. Trying, but often failing. So I’ll tell the whole story again to distract me.

When our daughter Elise was born (still) in 2001, I was so out-of-my-mind overwhelmed that I didn’t bring any clothes for her to the hospital. The gentle and firm OB nurses found a little dress in their “drawer” — a dress that some lady in Greenville county had smocked for her. I was so thankful and touched.

To celebrate her birthday every year, I decided to “pay-it-forward” by smocking another dress for another little girl whose first day of birth was in Heaven.

On Elise’s fifth birthday, I was ready to do something a little different. I wanted to make a party dress for a little 5-year-old girl. But Gavin was brand new, and I was overwhelmed. I didn’t finish it.

And then the whole BJU thing happened, and I was out-of-my-skull overwhelmed again (I’m sensing another theme here!).

But I just finished it. Last night! So I now just need to find a little size-6 girl who wouldn’t otherwise have a happy little dress!

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Elise! Your brothers, your daddy, and I are going to have red velvet cupcakes to celebrate you!

Thank you for continuing to sweep me off my feet for nineteen wonderful years!

Entering into this fullness is not something you figure out or achieve. It’s not a matter of being circumcised or keeping a long list of laws. No, you’re already in—insiders—not through some secretive initiation rite but rather through what Christ has already gone through for you, destroying the power of sin. If it’s an initiation ritual you’re after, you’ve already been through it by submitting to baptism. Going under the water was a burial of your old life; coming up out of it was a resurrection, God raising you from the dead as he did Christ. When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive—right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s cross.

Colossians 2:11-15

Today our precious boys were baptized into God’s Family. While I would probably say that Isaac’s baptism was a credo-baptism (he tells me often that the Holy Spirit is prompting him to do the right thing), it’s no matter. It is God Who baptizes us into His Family.

After it was all over, Gavin said, “That fun, Daddy!!”

What a day that was, punkin. The day you were born.

Just this week you are starting to correctly say “milk” (instead of “rilk”), but “firetruck” is still something I’d rather we didn’t talk about in polite company.  You demand a kiss, a squeeze hug, and a ‘nuggle at every parting. You told me this morning that eating bugs was “gistuskin’” [disgusting]. You still closely identify with Yoshi and Caillou. And you can answer your first catechism question very clearly.

Your favorite joke is:

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Goats. [Ghost]

Goats who?

Goats to show my name you know. [Goes to show you that you don't know my name.]

You’re a magpie. You swipe little, little tiny things and the more the better. Dice, pennies, a tiny playmobil cell phone. . . . Your dad and I wonder what God will do with this curiosity in the future.

Right this minute, you’re in my lap, snuggling my “chets” [chest] and forcing us to rock back and forth. “You’re my Mommy.” you say, as you cut your eyes.

We love you, Gavin. Happy Birthday. Stolat! May you have a 100 more!

I’m such a dork. No, really. I am. If you haven’t figured that out already. It’s okay because my parents — as lovely and as lovable as they are — are dorks too. So I come by it honestly. And they love me.

Maybe everybody’s a dork and only a few of us admit it and embrace it. . . . Yeah, that’s the one I’m going with.

I found some more proof of my dorkitude today although, to be honest, it was Junior High and everybody’s a dork in Junior High.

I found the signatures on the inside fly-leaf of my Bible.

Now, in 1980, this was the thing to do if you were a fundamentalist child (a.k.a. dork). A famous preacher/speaker came to your church (probably also a dork) and you race up afterward (very dorkily) to get his signature in your Bible.

I loved this little Bible. It was my 12th birthday present from my parents. It was red and had a snap cover. Cambridge. KJV, of course. I didn’t have a Scofield (new or old), but my parents did. Frankly, my parents had every translation known to the English and French and Polish world, but that’s why I love them too!

So look.

Stop laughing at my dorky stickers. Stickers were soooooooo I.T. in 1980. They had whole sticker stores in the mall. And that pizza one was scratch-n-sniff!

And the second page:

First, isn’t my mother’s handwriting lovely? Dad’s is too. Steve and I must be a throw-back to some primitive inscrutable scrawl.

Notice all the women I got too! Yeah for me. My silent-but-rebel mom probably encouraged that. Or my loud-and-rebel dad. Or both. My parents are gems.

But look at the first signature I got up there at the top — Beneth Peters Jones. I remember when I got that signature. She was promoting her (then) new book Beauty and the Best at a neighboring church, and, of course, I bought a copy! I remember the sweater I was wearing. I loved that sweater. It was pink fair isle that I got at American Eagle which was really cool back then (read: dorky) and not slutty like it is now (read: cool). Also let me say that while that particular sweater is long-gone, I now know exactly how they are knitted (in the round from the top down) and where you can find the math to make your own (Elizabeth Zimmerman) and that kids in British Isles learn to knit such things as they are walking around (because they have this belt that they can shove one needle in). But I’ve never actually knitted one (DORK!).

I was elated that I got her autograph that day! Really elated. She said something very polite — and she is an extremely gracious and hospitable lady — about it being new and how she liked the snap covers and all that. Bless her. Bless her for being so much a gentlewoman to a dorky 12-year-old.

Weird. All that she and I would share in the years to come but could never predict at that precise moment of my fawning dorkitude and her polite conversation. That my husband and I would travel with her husband and her to Mexico for 10 days (we were the singing side-kicks). That she would barely pass my grad project because she was uncomfortable with the topic (feminism!). That I, like her, would have a first born who was born still. And the rest, of course. . . . All the rest.

Look at those names. If those were the celebrities in my Junior High life, is it any wonder I became who I was? Several names are my pastors. Most of the others are evangelists or just guest speakers.

I got out my High School Bible too. We wear out our Bibles quickly in fundamentalism! It was smaller and not as fine but still KJV (my college Bible was so small that I had to hold it up right next to my nose to read it and it was NASV). It does have my Wordless Book bookmarks still in it because I was a CEF missionary for two summers, and I was prepared (kinda dorky). It has no signatures. I s’pose I had figured out it was a dorky thing to do.

Except for one thing is exactly the same and in the exactly same place — across from Genesis 1. From my Junior High Bible:

and in my High School Bible:

I remember why I wrote it the first time. I was told to! And I can probably take you right back there on 11-mile and Schoenherr and show you exactly where I was sitting in the front row (DORK!). Why did I think it was so important that I transferred that alone from one Bible to the next? I really don’t remember.

I’m glad that my High School self caught my Junior High mistake of “conversation” instead of “conservation” in that First Law. Whew!

Now, I know why these where there in that place — because I was a reared a Creationist through and through. Heck — I still have my Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter upstairs, the text that is most often referenced for its fallacies. I remember Science class in 7th grade. Most of our time was spent being told how wrong Carl Sagan got it on Nova the night before. It was our assignment to watch him and to deconstruct him the next day. None of us in that class will ever forget when Andrea Cloud unwittingly said the exact. wrong. thing. in response to Miss Westray’s question: “Miss Cloud. Do you agree with Mr. Sagan when he said that the Earth is billions and billions of years old?” To which Andrea shrugged, “Well, yeah. He’s on TV. So he must be right.” Oooooooh! We all felt her pain.

But I got this in Sunday School, not in Christian Day School. And uh . . . it’s curious.

The first law of thermodynamics is actually:

Energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed.

Seriously, why did my teacher leave out the first part? She got it from her pastor/husband, I’m sure. Why drop that?

And the second law of thermodynamics has to do with entropy and is best summarized as:

It is impossible for there to exist any process whose only effect is to transfer energy from a system at a low temperature to one at a higher temperature. In other words, heat flows downhill.

Creationists reason from that that everything tends toward disorder and randomness, and, thus, evolution defies that law. I’ll let the believing scientists deconstruct the fallacies in that Creationist criticism. I don’t really much care about the Science per se.

I care more about how that idea of the inevitability of disorder affects and infects the conservative Evangelical ideology. Everything and anything — if left alone — will deconstruct into chaos. At least that’s what I was taught. Work hard — very hard — and you can resist the inevitable decay. Effort can trump entropy. And if it doesn’t, if you fail, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or right enough.

And if we get it wrong in our hoist-them-on-their-own-petard mudball we lob at Science, how could it possibly be correct in our misunderstood application of this 2nd law to the Christian life? We are so infected with this same effort-can-trump-entropy trope. We actually believe past generations’ goofs are a result of their not working hard enough or smart enough or biblical enough.

We think we’re better. But we’re just as big a dorks as we always were. Just with more and more appeals to misunderstood laws, more and more effort, more and more rigidity, more and more illusions that our way is “biblical.” So the Law of Thermodorknamics could be:

The amount of effort is directly proportional to the dorky destructiveness of that effort.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address

Mary Poppins was always my favorite record growing up. Yes, I said record. I wore grooves in it. I loved singing along with my Sister Suffragettes. It was actually my own personal spoonful of sugar (listening to the music) while I did my chores (cleaning my room). This was before VHS players, of course. And we didn’t go to the movies (good fundies that we were). So the record was all I had. I did read the original, however.

My boys were watching the DVD in the car this week. What I would have done to have TV on those long trips, let alone a recording of my fav movie I’d never even seen! When you listen to something behind your head, while you’re mindlessly driving around town, you hear it differently — deeper or something.

Disney produced the film in 1964. Julie Andrews, having just been rejected for the role of a cockney flower-girl, played the “practically perfect” witch/nanny in-between her roles of queen and nun (her role as a man would come much later). She beat out Audrey Hepburn for the Oscar for Best Actress that year too. Sweet revenge!

Mary Poppins ever-so-gently needles its audience to consider those who are most-often forgotten. Its story is really the same as The Sound of Music when you think about it. It’s talking to us parents more than entertaining our kids. Just like the show M*A*S*H was set in the Korean war so that it could really talk about Vietnam, Mary Poppins is set in 1910 so it could nudge parents about mid-century problems.

The second-wave of feminism hadn’t really begun yet, so Mrs. Banks’ tribute to her fellow suffragettes just seemed quaint back then. Norman Vincent Peale had not yet accused Dr. Spock of ruining America by his permissiveness, so that anxiety had not been named as such.

The stark class difference between Mrs. Banks and her hired help point up the fatal flaw of independence. The cook and maid endure their mistress’s middle-class eccentricities. They even dutifully harmonize along. But she ignores their working-class needs. Just like Mr. Banks ignores her.

And they all, for the most part, ignore the children. Katie Nanna can’t stand them. The cooks won’t tolerate them. And the rich bankers are nothing but irritated by them. The upper, middle, and working classes have no time for the children. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Banks can even fathom minding their own children.

For the most part, each adult member of the Banks household is independent — each is an island. They work separately, on their own interests and within their own spheres. When they do cross into another’s “path,” the interactions are hollow, rushed, or predictable.

And the children mess up that predictability. Yes, they are disorderly and chaotic. But more than that, they are dependent. They defy isolation. They mess up independence. And while the adults mistakenly think that minding the children ruins their economy, their success, and their political activism, nurturing a child is a pretty politically radical thing to do.

Now Admiral Boom does watch over the children as they pass by. But not until filled-with-magic Mary Poppins “pops in” do the children get included. She flies in (literally) with a bottomless carpetbag, order, routine, and even a parallel universe — a community — full of silly words and two-dimensional animals. She introduces them to Bert, Uncle Albert, the Bird Woman — the lowest class of jobless vagabonds who simply enjoy life and, so, enjoy children.

That’s what’s so practically perfect about Mary Poppins. She knows what’s important. Enjoying children and communing as a family is the most radical thing we can do. The whole movie is like a “Carpe Diem” for parents.

I think we’ve lost that spirit again. We need more of that Poppins woman in 2009. The show is on Broadway right now. Conservative Evangelicals, especially, have caught some kind of hideous idea that the solitary adult work is more important, more spiritual, more rewarding than our children. We think that being independent is more valuable that being together. We insist that the parents are the center of the home and that children should serve the parents. What is wrong with us?

We are no different from the Banks! . . . Or worse.

Spit-spot! Stop! Enjoy life. Our children are life. Take some tuppence for paper and strings and get your own set of wings. . . . go fly a kite!