I'm A Sucker

Jesus I’m a sucker; I
Wish I believed less of the lies
Did anything I thought I knew
Turn out to be true?
Baby boys and little toys are all that I see anymore
Will somebody close the door?
It’s cold outside

Every single time I thought that
I had figured it all out
I was run aground again and
Floundering with crazy doubt

Maybe every way I’d learned
To deal with the tragedy
Was just another junkyard find
Rust-eaten and raggedy

Confronted with the reality of having to be a father to his new son, Don Chaffer of the band Waterdeep wrote these lyrics to his song "Close the Door". He knew his son would look to him as a guide, provider, comforter, and he realized he was a total "sucker".

While I am not dealing with the responsibility of raising children, I am continually confronted with some sort of demand that exposes who I really am and how I really deal with life. It always leaves me bare, and it always shows that the ways I've "learned to deal with the tragedy" are simply junk. I cope in whatever way I can, but like Don Chaffer the demand brings me to my end and all I can do is confess "Jesus, I'm a sucker; I wish I believed less of the lies".

The Forgotten Verse

Last year I found out that my all-time favorite Christmas carol, "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear", had a missing verse. It's the original fourth verse, and most hymnals sadly stopped listing it long ago. Amazing when you consider how beautiful it is:

O ye, beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing.
O rest beside the weary road,
And hear the angels sing!

Two Words not Three!

I've spent the last couple of weeks laughing hysterically at this video:



I think it articulates one of the most common and tragic misunderstandings of Christianity, one that I've heard from both Christians and non-Christians. Most of us, when/if we go to church, hear pastors expound the Gospel in three "words" (or stages): demand, love, demand. But God speaks to us with only two words: demand and love! More on that later. For the time being, check out how the clip uses this to great comic effect.

Year In Music

I have never been able to resist the pull of year-end lists. I look forward to them, well, all year.

Eight Favorite Albums That Came Out in 2007
1. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible. Apocalyptic rock gets me every time.
2. Jarvis Cocker - Jarvis. For the Romans 7 moment of the year, see "I Will Kill Again". We had the pleasure of seeing him play (twice!) earlier this year, and I'm pleased to report that he lived up to my ridiculously high expectations.
3. Bishop Allen - And the Broken String.
4. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. My conversion to Spoon is now complete.
5. Josh Ritter - The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter.
6. Okkervil River - The Stage Names.
7. Mark Olson - Salvation Blues.
8. Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala.

Nine Musical Obsessions of 2007, aka What I Actually Listened to This Year
1. George Harrison: From the demos for All Things Must Pass to the posthumous Brainwashed record, I dig it all, even the stuff about Formula-1. With the possible exception of Dylan, I can't think of anyone better able to mix humor and cynicism with genuine faith. Hard to believe someone so famous remained so religious, right to the end. I could not respect him more. My favorite Beatle, hands down.
2. The Beach Boys: I thought it would never happen, but this was the year I got deep into their 80's output. No shame!
3. The Who: How did I miss Quadrophenia?! It rocked my Spring, as did everything remotely related to their aborted Lifehouse project.
4. Electric Light Orchestra. Eldorado is my favorite, followed by Out Of The Blue and Discovery.
5. The Turtles. Just look at them!
6. The Bee Gees reissues. Lame as can be, but also unbelievably catchy and consistent. I cannot wait for Odessa.
7. The Killers. I did a lot of jogging to get in shape for the wedding, and I couldn't have done it without them.
8. Bob Dylan. Especially the post-Gospel-but-secretly-still-Gospel stuff from the mid-80s (for more info, read this).
9. And of course, Chinese Democracy. Though at this point, my interest in Axl Rose probably goes beyond obsession. A few rough tracks leaked in May, and I've been checking the GNR message boards ever since.

More to come.... Feel free to share your own.

Beyond Deserving

My favorite piece of non-fiction this year was Beyond Deserving: Children, Parents, and Responsibility Revisited. It was written by a teacher of mine named Dorothy Martyn and is jam-packed with insight and wisdom. Don't be put off by the child psychology vibe; the real thrust of the book is theological. She uses case studies of troubled children (and a whole lot of poetry) to show how unconditional love and grace actually work in everyday life, and she does it so well that I've almost wanted to adopt it as the handbook for this whole Mockingbird project. You can get it at amazon. Here are a couple quotes from the final chapter:

"A good parent doesn't simply wash his or her hands of hurtful behavior and abandon a child to impulse. He or she recognizes that the out-of-control child, attempting to act on a destructive impulse, is at the the mercy of a force within that he may not be able to withstand alone."

"Understanding what it is like to be under siege, the good parent, as well as the good mentor, intervenes powerfully and unconditionally on the side of what is good for the child, standing with the child instead of standing over against him in judgment. Such a stance is in fact derived from the way that God enters into human suffering with mercy, moving first with grace - not waiting for bad behavior to change - and with patience, that is to say, sustaining and accompanying the human being without coercion."

"We are more responsible, not less so, when we are aware of forces that are working on us beyond our ability to control them. Denial of that truth, along with actions that do not take that truth into account, is the height of irresponsibility".

Perhaps The Best Xmas Calvin And Hobbes

I can think of at least three different ways this strip encapsulates what I love about Christmas.

Another One From Martin Luther

I often wonder if we make too much of Luther, if we've exaggerated his insights or given them an emphasis that he did not intend. But then I'm confronted with a passage like this:

"God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to one but the dead. He does not give saintliness to any but sinners, nor wisdom to any but fools. In short: He has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to none but those who are in disgrace. Therefore no arrogant saint, or just or wise man can be material for God, neither can he do the work of God, but he remains confined within his own work and makes of himself a fictitious, ostensible, false, and deceitful saint, that is, a hypocrite."

-Luther W.A. 1.183f

Statler And Waldorf

American Heresy

In the most recent issue of Harpers, author Curtis White describes what he sees as the core theology of the so-called American Religion. Nothing that hasn't been said before, but interesting nonetheless:

"It's difficult to avoid the conclusion that our truest belief [as Americans] is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without orthodoxy. It is heresy as an orthodoxy. The entitlement to belief is the right of each to his own heresy. Religious freedom has come to this: where everyone is free to believe whatever she likes, there is no real shared conviction at all, and hence no church and certainly no community."

"Strangely, our freedom to believe has achieved the condition that Nietzsche called nihilism, but by a route he never imagined. For Nietzsche, European nihilism was the failure of any form of belief. But American nihilism is something different. Our nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once. It's all good!"

Woody Allen

My love for the films of Woody Allen began in grade school when my dad took me to see Radio Days. The phrase "take the gas-pipe!" has been a fixture in our house ever since, even though I still don't know what it means.

As I've gotten older (and despite the wierdness of his personal life), my appreciation of Woody's work has only grown, particularly his bleak take on human nature. It's always struck me as pretty New Testament, minus the hope. I'm not kidding - there are some strong similarities!

Of course, Woody's also an outspoken atheist, so his films tend to be fairly depressing. I interpret this as an indication of his artistic integrity; I mean, any honest depiction of life without God should ultimately be depressing, right? Hopefully the following quotes illustrate what I mean:

"It's like we're all checkmated, and unless somebody can find a move that will relieve us, that will free us from the checkmate, then we... we've had it."

"You know, if we're to be saved, it's got to be something that we don't know about now, and it's none of the things that are offered up by the authority figures - the politicians, the scientists, the artists - all the people we rely on to save us from our fate. They have not been able to do it, and they can't do it."

"You know, you can never resolve the epistemological conundrum. I once did a joke a long time ago about having to take God's existence on faith, and then I realized that I had to take my own existence on faith."

"Once when I was publishing my book of collected New Yorker pieces, they sent me the copy for the back of the jacket - the about-the-author [blurb]... I just penciled in, 'his one regret in life is that he is not someone else'." - if that doesn't sum up the appeal of substitutionary atonement, I don't know what would.

"I feel that... luck guides our lives much more than we care to admit. Coming out of an age of psychoanalysis, people tend not to feel that way. They tend to feel, 'I'm in control.' ... My observations in life have not been that.... I feel that really luck plays a much greater role - a frightening role in our lives - than we care to admit." Substitute 'luck' with 'providence' and voila!

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my own work. I want to achieve it through not dying."

"The only thing standing between me and greatness, is me."

I could go on and on (and maybe I will at some point), but instead here's a list of my ten favorite of his movies:

1. Annie Hall
2. Manhattan
3. Stardust Memories
4. Radio Days
5. Husbands And Wives
6. Alice
7. Hannah And Her Sisters
8. Crimes and Misdemeanors
9. Bullets Over Broadway
10. Manhattan Murder Mystery

Luther on Christmas

From his sermon on Shepherds:

"This is a fair, dear and precious assurance to troubled and tormented consciences laden with sins, that to them and to us all a Child is born who will rule and vindicate, who will help and not destroy, murder, strangle or kill."

"The Christian faith is foolishness. It says that God can do anything and yet makes himself so weak that either his Son had no power or wisdom or else the whole story is made up."

"God does not even send an angel to take the devil by the nose. He sends, as it were, an earthworm lying in weakness, helpless, without his mother, and he suffers him to be nailed to a cross... So spoke Caiaphas and Pilate, "He is nothing but a carpenter," and then in his weakness and infirmity he crunches the devil's back and alters the whole world. He suffered himself to be trodden under the foot of man and to be crucified, and through weakness he takes power and the Kingdom."

"If I had come to Bethlehem and seen it, I would have said: 'This does not make sense. Can this be the Messiah? This is sheer nonsense.' I would not have let myself be found inside the stable."

Mystery And Manners

A while ago, someone recommended Flannery O'Connor's collection of essays, Mystery And Manners. I finally got around to reading it last week and was floored. Here are some excerpts:

"When you write about backwoods prophets, it is very difficult to get across to the modern reader that you take these people seriously, that you are not making fun of them, but that their concerns are your own, and, in your judgment, central to human life... [The reader] has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence."

"I have observed that most of the best religious fiction of our time is most shocking precisely to those readers who claim to have an intense interest in finding more 'spiritual purpose' - as they like to put it - in modern novels than they can at present detect in them. Today's reader, if he believes in grace at all, sees it as something which can be separated from nature and served to him raw as Instant Uplift. This reader's favorite word is compassion. I don't wish to defame the word. There is a better sense in which it can be used but seldom is - the sense of being in travail with and for creation in its subjection to vanity. This is a sense which implies a recognition of sin; this is a suffering-with, but one which blunts no edges and makes no excuses. When infused into novels, it is often forbidding. Our age doesn't go for it."

"I have found, in short, from the reading of my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil."

The Maid-Servant At The Inn

Until recently, the only exposure I'd had to Dorothy Parker was the movie about her that came out a while ago starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, which I hadn't particularly liked. Maybe I was too young when I saw it, or maybe the filmmakers made her out to be too one-dimensional, who knows - for whatever reason, I wasn't prepared for this amazing Christmas poem of hers:


The Maid-Servant At The Inn

"It's queer," she said; "I see the light
As plain as I beheld it then,
All silver-like and calm and bright ---
We've not had stars like that again!

"And she was such a gentle thing
To birth a baby in the cold.
The barn was dark and frightening ---
This new one's better than the old.

"I mind my eyes were full of tears,
For I was young, and quick distressed
But she was less than me in years
That held a son against her breast.

"I never saw a sweeter child ---
The little one, the darling one! ---
I mind I told her, when he smiled
You'd know he was his mother's son.

"It's queer that I should see them so ---
The time they came to Bethlehem
Was more than thirty years ago;
I've prayed that all is well with them."

Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)

I used to make mixtapes every December and send them out instead of Christmas cards. They started out as a way to share music with friends but eventually evolved into thematic things, where I would thread songs together to tell a story, usually the Christmas story.

When tape-decks became a scarcity, I tried making the mixes on cd, but it didn't work as well. It sounds silly, but I missed the control that cassettes gave me over the listening experience (people being much more likely to push the skip button on a cd player than mess with the fast-forward/rewind on a tape-deck). I also liked having two sides to play with. Anyway... how better to kick off this blog than with some Christmas playlists? And this time I'll spare you the narrative pretensions. Enjoy!

Eight Good Songs With the Word "Christmas" in the Title:

1. Christmas Must Be Tonight - The Band. If I ever meet Robbie Robertson, I'm asking him about this song. It's a complete anomaly in The Band's catalog: a sincere attempt at a modern, sacred carol. Apparently he wrote it after the birth of his first son.
2. Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight) - The Ramones. The title says it all.
3. Just Like Christmas - Low
4. Child's Christmas In Wales - John Cale
5. Christmas Day - The Beach Boys. A couple years ago, Brian Wilson put out a Christmas record and everyone was surprised by how much "sacred" material it contained. Not me! Even though this unreleased track was written by Mike Love (and therefore a bit of a put-0n), I still like to think it's indicative of a deeper religious feeling in the group.
6. Christmas Party - The Walkmen
7. I Believe In Father Christmas - Emerson Lake and Palmer. I have no idea what Greg Lake is singing about, but the keyboards are magic!
8. Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home) - Phil Spector/Darlene Love. He may be insane, but there is no denying that Phil Spector created the classic "Christmas sound" on this recording and the album it accompanied. Just listen to the sleighbells! Spector also had a hand in the third great parenthetically-titled seasonal classic, Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)".
9. [Bonus Xmas-Themed-But-Not-Titled Track] 2000 Miles - The Pretenders. Is there a better fade-in in all of rock n' roll?!

Five Favorite Recordings of My Five Favorite Carols:

1. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Neil Diamond. It exists! and it's a cappella...
2. O Holy Night - Duvall
3. O Come O Come Emmanuel - Belle & Sebastian
4. It Came Upon A Midnight Clear - Brian Wilson. A truly ridiculous take on perhaps my favorite carol.
5. What Child Is This? - Sufjan Stevens

Four Winter-Themed Songs

1. Winter Symphony - The Beach Boys. For a band associated so closely with summer, they sure produced their share of fantastic cold-weather music.
2. Valley Winter Song - Fountains Of Wayne
3. Winter In The Hamptons - Josh Rouse
4. Ring Out, Solstice Bells - Jethro Tull

Feel free to post your own lists in the comments. And welcome to Mockingbird. More soon...