Sunday Drive: The Failure

Excerpt from today's meditation:

Matthew 25:14-30. Well done, thou good and faithful servant.

. . . But what about the servant who invested his master’s money and lost it? This parable is usually preached as urging us to take risks for Christ. That’s fine—but what if the risk turns sour? What would Jesus say to a servant who tried and failed?

. . . Maybe the person made a stupid, ill-advised investment, but Jesus never asked about that. The mere fact that someone was down and out seemed sufficient to attract his compassion. If this is how Jesus would have responded to the servant who invested his talent and lost it, I’d still like to hear it from Jesus’ own mouth. And I wonder why that servant is missing from this parable.

My thoughts:  But then, upon further reflection, was not Christ himself the greatest failure? A small-town guy from nowhere, a hick from the sticks, coming to tell people the good news of God's unbounded love, healing the sick, embracing the lost, speaking truth to power, confronting the self-righteous and exposing the hypocrites . . . and yet, in the end all was lost, all was for naught. Betrayed, mocked, beaten, condemned, tortured, executed in the most degrading way. And the last heartbreak: even God seemed to forget him.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.

They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.

All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying,

He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.

And so it was finished, there in dust and dirt and blood, amid the gleeful laughter of fools and suck-ups and hypocrites, every hope crushed, all zeal extinguished.  And only his mother and his dearest friend were left to witness the final moments of agony and despair, there on the dark and windswept hill.  Only Love stayed to the very end - but love is such a small thing in the brutal machinations of the world.

And yet - and yet - despite all appearances, beyond all dreaming:  the story did not end there.  Rather, the ever-new and ever-living Story really began in that black hole of sorrow, that horrid mangling of all that was good.  This is our faith, we who believe:  that no matter how great our failure, nor how tiny and hollow our success, all that is good in us is known and honored and cherished in that great reality at the heart of all things - the Love that moves the stars.  Which, when all that we see and know has been swept away, remains the eternal Constant:  in which we shall abide forevermore.

All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Which is why for me, Christianity is so deeply moving and beautiful:  the concept, which I'm not aware of in any other religion, of not merely a loving God, but of a God who loves the world so much that he empties Himself

to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us

who understands our weaknesses and failures because He Himself has felt them, lived them too. He does not merely look on benignly from some high, unapproachable perch above the blood and toil and tears and sweat - He knows.

Yes, child, I understand:  been there, done that, sucked at it.

Even God Himself, the great architect of Creation, is helpless in the face of the world's ignorant cruelty; even God was a great failure, by every human measure.  And yet that is not the whole story, but merely the prologue to unending triumph over all that is dark and withered and empty.  And unto Himself he will gather all those lost sheep who know his voice and follow him in their hearts, though the road lead only to the slaughterhouse, as we see it here.

A helpless failure of a man, a suffering God, bloody, defeated, finished - and yet victorious:  take it as theology or as poetry, the implications are breathtaking. So that in the end, that anguished cry from the Cross is not the trumpet of doom, but the opening peal of inextinguishable Joy - to them who believe.  This is the Christian faith:  that we glory in our human weakness and, no matter how mixed up or messed up our lives turn out to be, even in our deepest failure triumph, through Him who in dying vanquished every evil, even the last enemy, which is Death.  For even at the grave we make our song . . .

Who'd a-Thought?

Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
by dwarthy

Bless her heart. Just goes to show, boys - you absolutely cannot judge a book by its cover.

Remember that next time you see that shy, kinda goofy-looking guy standing all by himself over in the corner of the bar, that nobody seems to want to talk to.

If you ever got to know him, you just might be very pleasantly surprised.

Everybody has a talent.

(Honk to The Daily Martini)

Now that I've got this thing rolling . . .

. . . after fiddling around with the controls and features, the question is, What to write about, and how to write it?

No doubt somewhere, somebody has written some great guidelines on successful blogging . . . but I'd rather figure it out myself. First of all, it seems intuitively clear that the temptation to make this a confessional or a dear-diary must be avoided at all costs. That sort of thing can be theraputic in private; but it's not terribly interesting to read all about someone else's inner angst at length, unless it's done by a truly great writer. Which I know I'm not.

Much more interesting to read what someone thinks about the world he or she encounters - and glimpse the inner person between the lines of the commentary.

Second, homophobia is alive and roaring here in the Redlands of America . . . where it's still 1950 in many ways and many minds. So unlike bloggers who live out there in the Big World, I don't feel free to share all kinds of personally identifying details. Now the truth is, I absolutely loathe, despise, and hate beyond measure the need for hiding my identity as a gay man. Equivocation is not in my nature. But I realized long ago that there is just no point making yourself a victim when it serves no higher purpose.

(Some reader is wondering, If you feel smothered there, why don't you leave? Answer: Economics. Like many another middle-aged guy, I'm tied to my job and no prospect in the near future of anything else anywhere else that would pay me enough to live on.)

Anyway, as I was saying . . . I think of great essayists I admire: E. B. White and Joan Didion spring to mind. And I think of professional bloggers I enjoy like Andrew Sullivan and the others on my blog list. All these folks somehow make me return again and again to their writing; they are sharing their minds, but they aren't usually telling the-story-of-my-life or describing what-I-did-today. Sometimes they share an anecdote from their personal lives, but usually with an implicit literary point to make, a viewpoint that transcends the ordinariness of quotidian affairs. They have a talent for relating the personal and private to the global and universal.

I didn't realize I knew this until I wrote that last paragraph. Not sure I have that much talent. But guess it's worth taking a shot at. What the hell, it's a free country, right?

One more concern I'm mulling over: what level of frankness to use here? The sex and language question. Naturally, one writes in order to be read. If I'm really going to do a blog, it would be nice to have some family and friends read it; but not to be embarassed by it. Which of course springs the trap of self-censorship on the writer. When discussing sexuality--or politics--should I use the word f*ck, or better yet, f*cked over, if I feel like it? It's 2008, after all; but how far is too far for a "respectable" blog? Standards have changed dramatically in my lifetime, and blue state bloggers would probably just laugh at the question. But when I think about my kinfolks reading this . . . What would Aunt Martha say? Did William Faulkner ever worry about this sort of thing? Or Tennessee Williams? Not that I'm in their league, but . . . .

Actually, I had a creative writing professor once who said that "both Aunt Martha and Henry James [a big ol' queer, I later learned] are worthy of being pleased." So there you go. But how to please both at the same time? I forget what the prof said about that . . . .

Well, guess I will just figure it all out as I go along. Gotta get some chores done in real life, so adios for now, Gentle Reader.