We Read to Know That. . .

Last year we were facing a decorating existential crisis in our dining room.

It was time for a change, and the opportunity presented itself in the form of re-plastering the cracked walls in our hundred year old home. We decided to change what had not been changed in the near decade we had owned the house. Now, I'm not one who knows much or even cares about what interior decorating is supposed to look like. I couldn't tell you what's on the walls of any of our friends' homes with any sort of clarity.

However, this was something I wanted to take great care with; I knew that what we decided was worthy of hanging on our walls, in the room where we most often host, was going to say something about who we are. We searched randomly, never very seriously, hoping that inspiration or a fortuitous purchasing experience would strike that brought into our dining room an element of class, personality, originality, and a clear indication to guests that they were dining with the coolest people they'd ever met. It was no small task.

After an introduction for me to the world of Etsy.com, we settled on a literary theme. We already had a tribute to the settings of all of Steinbeck's California novels given to me by a friend who had recently visited the land of one of my favorite authors. To that we added some C.S. Lewis-themed art. One of the pieces is a dictionary page used as the background for the featured Lewis quote, "We read to know that we are not alone."

I have felt particularly not alone in the last two weeks, awakening me to the beauty of this quote.

A week or two ago, a good friend of mine texted to ask if I had read or heard of a book he was reading. I had not. He responded by ordering the book from Amazon and having it sent to my house. I've had books recommended to me before, and I appreciate it. Realistically, though, I'm only going to get to about 20% of the books someone else thinks are good. I'm typically four or five books behind in the list I've already selected and often purchased. At least that many brand new books stand waiting on my shelf right now. But this is a recommendation on a whole other level. Here - read this. It's showing up at your doorstep. So I read it.

The book was good. Really good. It's a book I would have never picked up on my own, but the writing was engaging and real. I enjoyed the read. More important, though, was the experience of reading. Because I knew that the pages I was covering each night were the same pages that had moved him, it felt like he was there with me in the room on a nightly basis. I read, and I was not alone. I was not only connecting the book to my experiences, I was connecting it to his and the history of our friendship.

Reading not only connects us to the world around us, it connects us more closely to those who are already the closest to us. My wife Emily and I gave our daughter Elise the first Harry Potter book for her 9th birthday. We had never read it, but we wanted to give her something different. Emily decided to read the book as well, and the two of them have had their own little book club conversations together as they each individually worked their way through the plot.

Elise and I read Calvin and Hobbes together to know that we are not alone. I get to watch her read the same strips I read at her age and see her reaction identifying with Calvin, while I now read it with a tendency to nod my heart knowingly towards the diatribes of Calvin's poor father. When we read together, she is reminded that I was once a kid her age, and I am reminded of the exact same thing.

Two separate former students who are now in college emailed me this past week to say hi and offer their own book suggestions.

Our family has come up with a group Halloween costume idea each year in which we all have a roll to play. This year's idea comes from a book the girls and I read together at the end of the summer.

18 years ago I knew it was true love when I told Emily to read two books that I loved and thought spoke about me, and she did.

Last week I sent a letter to another friend who had agreed to read the New Testament book of Colossians with me. I read it, knowing he also was reading it, and I sent him my personal reactions and thoughts, knowing that he cared. I knew that while I read those passages, piece by piece, I was not alone.

It's my turn, now. Emboldened, I purchased the next book on my shelf and sent it to the doorstep of my friend. One sword fight at a time, we'll be sharing our way through Steinbeck's re-telling of Arthurian Legend. One hundred miles apart from each other, we will not be alone.

The Long Road Back

So how do you turn a writer into a non-writer? How do you make a blog go silent?

One way is to get a dog. A puppy anyway. A big hulking chocolate lab puppy who drops toys onto your lap whenever you sit at the computer screen. A mass of energy who alternates between making you laugh and play and scream in frustration at yet another clandestine mission of destruction. That will slow a writer down in a hurry.

Or you ignore the laws of momentum until the snowball is rolling at uncontrollable speeds. One day of doing anything is nothing. But string two or three or four together, and the immutable laws of physics kick in, the gravitational pull hurtling your motivation downward at a steady increase of  9.86 meters per second. Make that six weeks worth of days and momentum, and you wake up and realize you don't have any idea how to reverse it. You want to, and you need to, but you forget how after so many days of just not writing.

You also start worrying about who your audience is and how to please them. You wonder who that audience is, and you forget that it never really mattered before. You start thinking about how to grow the audience. You become a marketer of that audience rather than a writer who needs none. And every time you want to write again, the doubting voice in the back of your head whispers, "Who really cares about this? Who would actually read this?"

You then want to make sure that whatever you write after an absence of writing is worthy of that absence. Finding nothing, the absence grows larger.

Worst of all, you fear that you really have nothing to say. And you realize that the reality is you probably don't. And you don't because you quit asking so many questions, quit viewing events as part of a larger story rather than an immediacy to be dealt with. You don't read as much and think as much and listen as much. You allow yourself to run near empty, believing that much activity is the same as good activity. You allow fatigue to produce fear and you call it rest. When there is nothing to say, there is no hunger to say it. The blinking cursor chastises. It is far easier to not having something to say away from the keyboard than it is right in front of it.

Then it just seems hard. Too hard. And it is hard. Momentum has made it so. You may want so badly to turn it all around, but every day of not writing, of waiting, has a price. That price is the feeling right now, the one making each clause seem impossible. That price is the long road back.

The long road back starts with a single post. Sometimes it starts with several single failed posts, or a handful of half-started ideas jotted on envelopes or paper scraps that sometimes make it to the table and sometimes don't. But those failures lead to something, eventually. Hopefully a small victory.

The first post is easier than the second. The second is probably easier than the third. But a third, and then a fourth, scratching those out when the renewed freshness is gone and the grind is back, those are the hurdles to getting momentum back in your favor. A mere relapse away from idleness becomes a rhythm. I seek the rhythm.

How does a writer become a non-writer? How does a marriage become distant? How does a prayerful life become prayerless? How does the disciplined diet become an extra 8-pound afterthought? For many reasons. Some of them good. But of more interest to me now is the long road back.

Help, Please

I've never liked asking for help.

More than anything, asking for help is admitting deficiency or need. At times it requires a sheepish shrug of the shoulders, a nodding "I know I should know how to do this but I don't" look on your face, a hint of pleading without clear desperation as you ask someone to sacrifice their time or resources to meet needs that are not their own. It is a pride-swallowing admission that "you know something I don't know" or "I don't have it all figured out like I want you to believe I do." Whether it's help moving, help fixing, help learning, or help providing, the request puts you in a clear position of inferiority.

There are people who take pride in never having to ask for help. They may want help. Help may make their situation easier. But they will not ask, because, just to be clear, they do not need it. I have never had the skills or resources to be one of those people. Now I don't even want to be.

This week I came to realize more fully why asking for help is one of the best requests you can make. At the beginning of the week I spent two days on RAGBRAI, a major bike ride across the state of Iowa. I love the ride and have been thrilled to have ridden parts of it over the past four years with a good friend of mine, but it can be an absolute logistical nightmare. First, my friend and I needed transportation to the western edge of the state. We also needed places to stay in two different locations. Then we needed someone to come pick us up in the middle of nowhere. Also, I needed someone to watch my kids and my dog. All this for the selfish cause of two days on a bike with a good friend consuming gluttonous amounts of roadside calories.

The favor requests began. And they were all met. My wife agreed to give up much of her weekend to drive us to the start. Her sister offered us supper and a place to sleep on Saturday night. My sister volunteered to watch both my kids and our 5-month old lab. An old friend from high school supplied food and lodging on the second night. Strangers we've never met before transported our bags from one town to another. My friend's parents picked us up after two days. Obviously we were blessed, blessed beyond belief, helped in every way to meet every need (or want) that we requested. We asked for help. We were provided for. But it was more than that.

Asking for help felt like I was making a huge burden of myself. And I probably was. But in reality, I see that what asking for help did was provide me the opportunity to build relationships, or strengthen them, and to share time and stories and laughs. Every person who agreed to help provided that. I would not have spent two hours with my sister and her husband on Saturday if we had not asked for help. Similarly, I wouldn't have had a couple of road hours with my wife, or a great meal and good stories with my sister-in-law and her family, or a stroll down the Iowa Walk of Fame on the sidewalks of Shenendoah, Iowa with an old friend and her husband. They were all so eager to offer help, and what I see now is that they were eager to offer themselves.

Looking back, I know that every time I've asked a friend to help me figure out a home improvement project, or to borrow a tool, or to water my garden, it's given us more time together. When I ask my parents, or my in-laws for help, we become closer. And when I admit to my wife what I won't admit to anyone else, that I just can't do it all, that I need her, need emotional support, need energy, need prayers, need someone to help me limp across whatever finish line there may be, need her, that it is then that we are the strongest. I've built and grown many relationships on the premise of needing someone's help. I needed their help, but I mostly needed them in my life.

John Steinbeck said that, "people are more inclined to help each other in hard times. Good times don't bring out the best in people." In good times, we isolate. Pride swells. We are not vulnerable, we do not reach out, and we do not seek the connections that are the oxygen of living well. No matter how hard asking for help seems, we are always better, in many more ways than we sought, after having done so.

The best of times, it seems, is when we most need others.

Throw Away Your Novel

Martin Lloyd-Jones, in his book Preaching and Preachers, writes that "The best way of checking any tendency to pride - pride in your preaching or in anything else you may do or may be - is to read on Sunday nights the biography of some great saint." It is reading that will humble us, remind us that there is a vast universe, that we are a small part of it, and we are both nothing special in particular and also not alone in our pride and joy and fear and sin. Reading gets us out of our own way, out of our own world, and into a much larger reality. Biography, as Lloyd Jones mentions, is an excellent source for this. Not only does biography humble, it also inspires.

Reading about John Steinbeck's life and work has that effect on me. In my last post I discussed one of the reasons I love Steinbeck's works so much, citing his willingness to try anything that interested him, try it with passion, regardless of whether or not he thought he'd be good at it. Tonight I look at his doggedness, his ability to grind, and the understanding that he couldn't become a great novelist in a day.

In one of the interviews I recently read about him, the interviewer wrote this about him:

"He wrote hard for almost fifteen years before he had his first success. He has always written more than he has published. Indeed, he destroyed two full-length novels before Cup of Gold, his first published novel, made its appearance in 1929."

He destroyed two full novels. They're gone. Years of work, thousands of words, pages and pages of thoughts and ideas and communication of his heart and mind, and he threw them away. Gone. I typically have to cut and throw away 20% of any sermon I write for the purposes of time and clarity, and I am breathlessly despondent with each click of the delete key. But I've never had to throw away a whole sermon, or even a blog post, let alone a novel.

It took Steinbeck fifteen years worth of grinding out pages that would never be read to get to his first success. Let that one sink in.

What are you doing now, that in fifteen years, might define you? Can you name anything you do that will matter in fifteen years? Not because it lasted, but because you threw it away, and threw some more away, and threw enough time and energy doing what nobody would see to reach a lasting contribution?

Yes, this is a call to put hours and commitment into something and stick with it. Of course it's that. But more so than that, this is a call to be doing something today that might matter in fifteen years - something big, something that you love, something that feeds you and the world. It doesn't have to feed the world today. But might it, down the road, after it's fed you and you've thrown it away, be your contribution?

Steinbeck was beginning a life's work, a great literary career, and he didn't know it. He had no assurances that he was headed anywhere of significance. But he wrote anyway.

Someone asked him in an interview was his personal philosophy was. His response: "Like everyone else in the world I want to be good and strong and virtuous and wise and loved." Writing, unnoticed for a really long time, allowed him to do that. And it reminds me today to get down some words, take in another book, work on another sermon, and feed good and true and loving words into my daughters and wife as often as possible. No one may notice or remember any of it. But in fifteen years, that work will have produced something that matters greatly to me.

The Right Kind of Stupidity

I love John Steinbeck. It's an improbable love affair that has nothing to do with being introduced to his work in school or introducing him to students myself as an instructor now. Frankly, I don't know when it began. But his words squeeze truth and joy out of thin air, offering literary manna in the form of comedy and tragedy, whether written to alarm or agitate or educate or delight.

One of my first reads this summer was Douglas Wilson's book Writers to Read: Nine Names that Belong on Your Bookshelf. In it Wilson describes nine authors and their attributes that make them worthy of his recommendation, his admiration, and his desire to introduce them, on a personal level, to his audience. Writers Wilson, "If books are among our friends, we ought to apply similar standards to them that we apply to our flesh-and-blood friend. We should want to choose them wisely and well and hope that we will be the better for their companionship." He offers us, then, his favorite "friends" and the authors who have written them. 

It made me consider my own literary love affairs and why I would want anyone I know to be introduced. In that spirit, I begin with this post to attempt to share with you my relationship with Steinbeckian lyric and lore.

Steinbeck wrote a lot of stuff. A lot. Late in his career, he decided he wanted to try writing for the theater, which was far from what anyone would term his comfort zone. In an interview, he offered these thoughts: "I'm just determined I'm going to learn something about the theatre. Last time we were kicked around like dogs but I still want to do it. This shows a truly pure quality of stupidity. Just nuts. I'm so fascinated by everything about the theatre. I don't really care if the show's a flop."

John Steinbeck is the right kind of stupid, and I love him for it. Throughout his career, he tries. Just to find out. He just wants to see. See if part-time college work is for him. See if a California country boy can embrace living in New York. See if living in migratory camps and writing about it can change the American landscape. See if he can properly and accurately put his best friend Ed Ricketts into his works and have his audience be as pleased with him as Steinbeck is. Try war journalism, try breaking all the rules of writing a novel, try commentary on the past and commentary on the present and commentary on what it's like to get into a vehicle with a dog and drive across the country. 

Critics, be damned, he shouts with every swipe of the pen in a new direction. I don't write for you. 

And I am delighted by this. Reading a lesser known work of his, or one of his so-called "experiments" (which he considered such texts as Of Mice and Men and East of Eden), I can see him smirking, giddy at the attempt. There is joy in the words, in the tinkering, in the curiosity that must be satisfied. Can I do this? What will it look like? 

In Steinbeck's career, and sprinkled lightly in so many of his texts, I see his example, and it implores me: "Get out and do things, even if you'll be bad at them. Quit worrying about winning or being successful. Worry about doing. Find out. And find out for you."

Try. Experiment. Do. Wise thoughts, for sure. I can only hope to be stupid enough to dare them myself.

Changing Moods

I am fond of saying that an individual cannot let feelings dictate their reality. I know I've written about it here on this blog on more than one occasion, and I just mentioned it once again in the last sermon that I gave. It is an unpopular and difficult truth, and it is one that I struggle with consistently. Frustration and fatigue can be crippling for me when they strike. Six months into the year, and my blog output has been terrible. My reading list hasn't been much better. I've been too tired, or too stressed, or too distracted to get much done that I know I want to and need to and should get done. But how can you be tired for six months? Or distracted?

There are ways to fight this, of course. Mostly those ways are repeating this truth over and over and hoping it sticks. And it does, for me personally, until I'm tired or stressed or distracted again. Then I tend to forget. A bag of Doritos and 2 hours of re-runs later, I've accomplished nothing, done nothing to improve my "feelings," and ultimately I've stayed up late enough to ensure that I'm tired again the next day and more stressed due to a lack of personal productivity. In hindsight, repeating this truth hasn't necessarily helped in the middle of living it.

I may have run across a better way, though. I've been taking down notes and important passages from a book I read months ago and have meant to collect notes regarding for a while. Having been tired and distracted, I'm only now getting them down. Anyway, the book is Martin Lloyd-Jones' Preaching and Preachers. It is a meticulous and passionate collection of Lloyd-Jones' perspective on every possible aspect of preaching. As I collected the notes, I came across this passage:

"The preacher should never be moody; but he will have varying moods. No man can tell what he will feel like tomorrow morning; you do not control that. Our business is to do something about these changing moods and not to allow ourselves to become victims of them. You are not exactly the same two days running, and you have to treat yourself according to your varying conditions. So you will have to discover what is the most appropriate reading for yourself in these varying states. There will be times when you will be unhappy. There are these states and conditions of the soul, and the sooner you learn how to deal with them, and how to handle them, the better it will be for you and for the people to whom you preach."

Reading a book on how to improve my own occasional preaching, I unexpectedly found this paragraph that made my English teacher heart cry out triumphantly. Don't like your mood? Then read! Do something about your changing mood. That something is read. And read with purpose.

This is a far cry from my typical Nick-at-Nite marathon or glass of wine approach.

What does your anger need? Or your lethargy? What sets your distracted mind back on your priorities? What will fight against your own provincialism and victimhood? You need a plan. I need a plan. A literary plan.

Not only does reading attack a mood, it also works proactively to create it. I seldom walk away from Steinbeck without inspiration to write. The Bible keeps me grateful. Calvin and Hobbes comic books remind me to not think like a father all the time, and any book with two children on my lap listening makes me feel like the most valued man on the planet. Other authors, like Shauna Niequist, even make me want to cook, or at least enjoy what my wife cooks, and sit around a big table with good friends and loud conversation. I cannot point to anything on a screen, any screen, that comes close to producing any of this.

Whatever the mood, it seems that there's a book for that. If you're not sure what it is, pick one up anyway. It'll lead you to some feeling far more worthy of calling a reality than the predatory fatigue and frustration.

Father's Day Apologies

I'm not sure if it's a recent trend or not, but I've noticed that in churches on Father's Day, fathers commonly are in danger of being under attack. It's not on purpose, of course. Nor is it malicious. There are Father's Day well-wishes. Sometimes there is a celebration of manhood itself. But in an understandable rush to call God the ultimate Father, there is an admission and even an apology to all in the church body who have had less-than-stellar father figures. "Some of you have had absent fathers or abusive fathers or distant fathers," someone will say. And then they will point those to God as the faithful, love-without-end Father that He is. Rightfully so. But can you imagine the same thing being said on Mother's Day? On Mother's Day the lamenting and understanding tones are for those who wish to be mothers but either are not or can not for reasons out of their control. And they deserve those lamentations. But I don't hear the same for those who cannot be fathers. Instead, there are apologies for the bad ones.

There is a book that I teach to my juniors titled Until They Bring the Streetcars Back by Stanley Gordon West. In it the life of a teenage boy, Calvin Gant, is examined; and a major aspect of the plot is his tenuous relationship with his father. The father is distant but hard-working. He is generally serious with occasional flashes of frivolity. He served in the war, and that service changed him. He speaks sparingly of feelings and never of love. He demands much and provides much. He has a perfect record of attendance at work but a non-existent record at Cal's athletic events. It's been fascinating over the last 14 years in the classroom to hear student discussion on the merits and flaws of this father. Consensus has moved from generally positive and understanding to primarily critical in little more than a decade. Cal's father is a punching bag for them, a father who doesn't do enough, show up enough, express love enough. The flaws are memorable; the contributions, cast aside. For many of them, they say, the same goes for their own father.

This tells me that one of two situations is true: either we are too hard on fathers and quick to judge them if they are not the perfect balance of everything expected of men in the shifting expectations of the last 5 decades combined, or there truly are a lot of bad fathers out there.

I work hard to be a good father, but I admit that my great fear is that my children will remember me most in 30 years for my flaws rather than my contributions. That possibility haunts me if I allow it to. What flaws will stick out? My stubbornness? My fatigue-induced low tolerance? The frustration in my voice when they haven't obeyed as I saw fit? What have I missed that they won't forget or forgive? My daughters aren't even teenagers yet; I can't imagine the atrocities I'll commit during those years.

My father has the comfort of knowing that 30 years later, it is not the flaws that his son remembers. The flaws are mere foibles, and many are comical. One Father's day I remember we made my dad a shirt mocking his frequent and unmistakable use of the phrase, "You know?" in his conversational speech. It is "flaws" like this that make me remember and smile. I know who my father is, and I know he's not perfect. I'm not looking through some rose-colored glasses and waxing poetic about some non-existent past. Instead, I see who he was and is, and I know I see a good man and a good father who can rest easy knowing that.

I don't remember the absences so much as I remember the work ethic. I know he is stubborn, but only because he has stubbornly shown up every time I've needed him. He didn't let me choose the radio station, and he didn't let me choose when we were done working or what jobs were my responsibility. Because of those "flaws," I know and appreciate Paul Harvey and the satisfaction of a late night shower cleansing fatigue and manure from the day. He loitered when I preferred to hurry, and I learned the value of community.

Thank you, church, for your concern. But my father needs no apology for him. He is not God. But he helped me know God, and he helped me know callouses, and he helped me know the value of a face to face conversation. I hope I give my own children as much as my father gave to me so that they can look back at any flaws, hear the world's assessments of my shortcomings, and know that I did everything in love from the bottom of my heart, just like my dad taught me.