PeaceBang

Hounds Bawling

Remember when you read Wilson Rawls’ heart-breaking, unforgettable novel Where the Red Fern Grows about ten year-old Billy and his two Redbone coon hounds in the Ozarks?
Billy saved all his money and went all the way to Oklahoma on foot to fetch his hounds, and if the scene where those two pups tumble out of the gunney sack with their floppety ears doesn’t make you cry, you’re no friend of mine. The pups are named Little Ann and Old Dan and I think it’s their fault that I love hounds so much.

In the novel Billy would always describe the wonderful bawling sound Ann and Dan made when they treed a raccoon. As I read the book I would imagine the sound and smile.

Let me tell you something. Maybe the sound of hounds bawling a treed ‘coon in the Ozarks is a charming noise. In suburban Boston, it’s sheer hell.

Max has been so amazing at staying with me off-leash in the yard — coming back to my call even after brief forays into the woods — that I stupidly opened the door this evening to let him out ahead of me. We both spotted the cottontailed hind end of a bunny at the same time and Max took off like a mad thing, bawling his head off.
It is not a charming noise. It is a noise from hell.

And he did not come back.
He zig-zagged all over our woods, baying to wake the dead.
He did not come back.
He jumped the low fence onto the State Police Barracks property, white tipped tail wagging non-stop and taunting me from a distance as he bawled and bawled.
I bawled, too.
“MAX! Come on! Come, Max! C’mon, sweetie! C’mon, buddy! …Come HERE YOU LITTLE BEAST!”
Emerging from the underbrush, the little monster darted up to my outstretched palm with snacks in it, decided the snacks didn’t compare with fresh lapin, and bolted. Murder.

A nice officer named Kevin came out of the barracks to help. He thought Max might be in trouble; stuck or in a fight with a coyote. No, I assured him. He’s fine. He’s just chasing rabbits. He’s just a loud, stupid beagle.

You don’t even want to know what I was wearing. Let’s just say it warn’t my most dignified outfit. Thank God it was the officer who saw me in that condition and not any other neighbors. The Staties are used to seeing people in undignified clothing, I’m sure.

So there’s Max bawling at the rabbits and running. There’s me, galumphing through the swampland yelling, “Max, I’m going to kill you! There could be snakes in here!”
Max ran to Officer Kevin, got almost all the way there, and ran away.
Murder.

I gave up. I was hoarse, it was dark, I don’t even know how I’m going to find my way out of the woods, I think. The bloody beagle will come home when he gets hungry, I figure. The bloody beagle has a sense of scent that will lead him home, I resassure myself. I refuse to worry.

Just as I turn my back and pick my way, sloshing, to the State Police driveway to go home by the road, a filthy, wet Max careens toward me.
I cuff him… I mean leash him, and drag him home.

He has had a bath. He did not like the bath.
He did like the being dried off part.
He is asleep in his bed by my feet.
He smells vaguely of Swamp Thing.

Wireless fence. Tomorrow.

And now for your Friday Dog Blogging moment:

Let’s Have A Beer

From Understocked. Hat tip to C. Malcolm Keating.

Dental Floss

I was just mentioning to a commenter on “The Shack” post that sometimes, when I don’t want to converse on the airplane or on the bus or train, I take out a real long piece of dental floss and stick it in my back molars and let the excess hang down either side of my face. It’s comfortable and people think I’m mentally ill at best.

The floss is easy to drink through, and you just take it out to eat.

I also carry one of those big nerdy donut travel pillows. That and my dental floss assure that I will not have to exchange more than a flossy grin and “good morning” with anyone on a flight.*

I learned this from comedian Dave Barry. I think it’s a lot more polite than sticking deafening pods in your ears or taking up elbow room with a computer.

* I’m usually friendly and social but not at 6 AM.

PeaceBang Reviews “The Shack”

The most meaningful thing to me about this book was that it was sent to me as a gift by a reader of this blog.
So I read it from a place of love and gratitude to begin with, which I think makes a difference, and is a nice emotional place to read any book from.

I’ll keep this short.

I thought The Shack was gag-inducing at times, but that it had many redeeming moments and ideas.
The author tried to cram WAY too much theology in there, and as I read I began to suspect that the book had been written more by a committee than by an individual. The credit on the first page, “A novel by Wm. Paul Young In collaboration with Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings” validated my suspicion. The advertisements for Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cumming’s books on pop theology on the closing pages were also a wee hint.

I was initially eye-rollingly offended by the idea of God as the Great Mammy Cooking For the White Man (So He Feels All Better Now) concept. When “Papa” (the Mammy God figure) actually says, “Sho’ nuff” at one point in the book, I almost hurled it across the room. To the author’s credit (or authors’), he seems somewhat aware of how close he steps to offensive racial stereotypes and tries to provide justification for it. “To reveal myself to you as a very large, white grandfather figure with a flowing beard, like Gandalf, would simply reinforce your religious stereotypes…” says “Papa” to our protaganist, Mack.
His choice of racial stereotypes in the case of Papa still feel really loaded to me, though. Big Black Mammy comforting shattered white man has been done before, sho’ nuff. And then some, sugar. Dude, ya couldn’t have gone for something with just a little less cultural baggage?

Sonya Sotomayor showing up as the Wisdom of God (Sophia) was another eye-rolling moment. We get it! We get it! God is a One-In-Three Rainbow Coalition of Stereotyped Minority Figures! Which led me to start wondering when the flippant, gay aspect of God might appear … someone like Paul Lynde cracking wise about Mack’s hetero-normative worldview and draping him in sequined scarves as he revealed the secret power of forgiveness. I’ll wait for the sequel. Maybe we’ll get an Angel Gabriel in high drag or something.

My feminist ire is always activated when women in novels exist purely to nurture or forgive or heal men. The Shack is all about that. Both the murdered female child, the perfect wife and the self-blaming survivor daughter have no literary function beyond giving Mack an opportunity to receive love, be redeemed, and to bestow grace. No surprise there, just a weakness of the book. And for one as shoddily written as this one, no particular insult. Here’s a little taste of the sexism, spoken by Jesus:

“From the first day we hid the woman within the man, so that at the right time we could remove her from within him. We didn’t create man to live alone; she was purposed from the beginning. By taking her out of him, he birthed her in a sense. We created a circle of relationship, like our own, but for humans. She, out of him, and now all the males, including me, birthed through her, and all originating, or birthed, from God.”

GAG!!

The book is indeed poorly written (not hideously, just poorly), but here’s the thing: I felt that it was genuine. It seemed to sincerely desire to communicate healing and redemptive spiritual truths to me, and for that reason I did not feel labored in reading it. As many times as I wrote, “Ack! Gross!” or “God, what GARBAGE” in the margins, I wrote “Love this” or “Very nice!”

I am torn as to whether I would or would not recommend this book to individuals or to church study groups. There’s a laundry list as long as my arm of theological concepts in The Shack, and none are very adeptly handled. They all make a brief appearance and are filtered through some pretty heavy duty pop psychology. Here’s a partial list:

Calvinism
Anselm’s Theory of Atonement
Tschuvah, or return, a Jewish concept of personal responsibiity emphasized at the High Holy Days
Grace
Salvation theology
Trinitarian theology (and a personal shout-out for the non-hierarchical, relational hypostases concept originated by Origen in the 4th century!)
Universalism
Freedom v God’s omnipotence
neo-Platonism
Theodicy

That’s kind of a lot!

But I did read it, and I did fulfill my promise to let you know what I thought of it.

My favorite part was how God kept emphasizing that it’s not about rules and religions, but about relationship. Jesus says, “My ability to communicate is limitless, living and transforming, and it will always be tuned to Papa’s goodness and love. And you will hear and see me in the Bible in fresh ways. Just don’t look for rules and principles; look for relationship — a way of coming to be with us.”

AMEN to that, Brother Jesus. Maybe in The Shack II you’ll be a fat, sassy Unitarian and then I can play you in the movie.

Reading “The Shack”

So, I am reading The Shack.

I already feel like the kid in the back seat who keeps saying, “Are we there yet?”

Do you mind if I do some skimming?

It’s just that I truly can’t tolerate much of this uber-folksy tone. I think it’s just a matter of style and personality: I don’t like to be served Life Lessons with that much treacle. It ruins my teeth.

More later.

The Sparrow, you say?

Have You Read “The Shack?”

A few people have asked me what I think of it, and I was just wondering if it’s as full of crap theology as I fear it is.

The Alchemist
The DaVinci Code
The Four Agreements
The Purpose-Driven Life
The Celestine Prophecy
The Power Of Now
The Five People You Meet In Heaven
Eat, Love, Pray (which I retitled Gripe, Brag, F***)

These are all works of pop spirituality that have achieved huge success in recent history. I dutifully slogged through each one.
They were either great works of Crap Theology, New Age Nonsense, or brilliant achievements in Stating the Totally Obvious in Some Gimmicky Way. In Dan Brown’s case with The DaVinci Code,the book was totally crap history but at least it was entertaining. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Love, Pray was one of the most disgusting exercises in White Woman’s Self-Indulgence you could ever hope to read, although written in such a lively, engaging fashion as to lure the reader into a sense of fun and sympathetic understanding. It’s a truly vile book.
Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet In Heaven is, to quote Dorothy Parker, “a book that should not be tossed aside lightly… it should be thrown with great force.”
The Alchemist was a sweet little fable and I have nothing against it except its sheer predictability, and the fact that that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

It’s not like I’m sitting around reading John Murray’s original works or Hosea Ballou’s treatises or Channing’s sermons all day. I mean, I do that sometimes. For me, “popular” theology means Kathleen Norris, Barbara Brown Taylor, Henri Nouwen, Elie Wiesel, Abraham Joshua Heschel, James Hillman, maybe some Thomas Moore, Annie Dillard, stuff like that. I am almost always a little suspicious when the NEXT GREAT SPIRITUAL BOOK (“Ohmigod it changed my LIFE!”) makes its appearance.

Yea, I’m a tough crowd.
How about you? What are your favorite “pop” works of spirituality/religion/theology? And by “popular” let’s say anything you might find at the local Barnes & Noble.

Food, Inc. and Eating Alone

Have you seen the documentary “Food, Inc.?”

I had read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation and several other works about corporate ownership of our food supply, the corruption in the FDA, the horrors of the meat industry, etc., but I thought this film did a really good job summarizing a lot of that information for a wider audience.

Highly recommended.

On a second food note, I was so disappointedt by my favorite American Public Media talk show, “The Splendid Table’s” July 11 episode. Lynne Rossetto Kasper interviewed authors Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin about their new book, What People Eat When They Eat Alone (a subject that I thought was covered in a wonderfully entertaining fashion in the book of essays, Alone In the Kitchen With An Eggplant) — you can hear the audio here — and maybe I was just an extra Sensitivo today or something, but I found the tone of the whole thing incredibly hurtful. I eat alone every day of my life and I don’t think of myself as a freak or an object of pity, as the authors and Kasper seemed to imply. The segment’s tone to me was like, “Oh, it’s so FASCINATING what humans will eat when they’re in the highly unusual situation of HAVING TO EAT ALONE.” I’m driving along thinking, “Gee, I manage to eat quite normally under those BIZARRE circumstances. I wasn’t aware that I was such a sociological phenomenon!”

I mean, what? When I think of eating in America I think of people grabbing a Dunk’s coffee and bagel on the way to work, eating lunch at their desks, and then microwaving something fast for dinner. From what I observe, when families or couples do get to eat dinner together they consider themselves fortunate. I admire people who make eating with family a priority, even though some of my most unhappy childhood memories are located at the Sacred Family Dinner Table (and I hardly think I’m rare in that!).

Anyway, instead of being all depressed about it, I thought I’d make a positive recommendation: invite a single person over for dinner this week! We really do get sick of eating alone every day. We’re happy to contribute to the meal, too, which totally does not need to be fancy. Here, I’ll even recommend a simple menu (inspired by The Splendid Table!):

Pasta with a simple olive oil and garlic sauce
Steamed green veggies to go in the pasta
Grated parmesan
Bread
Wine or sparkling water and lime
Fresh berries over vanilla yogurt for dessert

Bon Appetit!

This Just In

Ermengarde was seen a few hours ago lounging approximately one centimeter from a sleeping Max and patting and kneading his back with her paws. Purring was not involved, but I think we’re getting there.

Titian, the Master

What rivalry? Titian had no equal. I saw the exhibit tonight and these are ever so much more glorious in person… what a total treat. More than that. Transcendent.

Someone asked me a few years ago if it was really worth all the money I’ve spent flying to different countries and paying to get into “all those museums.”

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!!

Sorry, Spider

Taking Max out for his late night walk just now, I walked into the most incredible spider web I have ever seen and wrecked the bottom half of it, saving the life of the bumble bee who was snared in it. I wound up stepping on the bee later, so that’s kind of sad. Sorry, dude.

I’m glad I had my flashlight with me so that once I was through freaking out and brushing web off of my face and shoulders I could turn around and inspect this marvelous work of art. Madame Spider was busily repairing damage and I apologized to her. This web is something like three feet high and four feet wide, strung across from the drainpipe of the house to a hedge. She is one beautiful spider.

I should go back out there with my camera but I don’t know how I would hold the flashlight and my camera at the same time. Maybe the sensor light and my camera flash will do the job. Let me see if I can find her.