Inspired by a True Story

Schedule Update

An unusual schedule this week is forcing a brief blogging hiatus for me. Blogging will be light to non-existent until Monday, June 11.

The conversation I've started with Max and which you can read here, here and here will have to wait until then to resume.

Taking A Break Today

A busy schedule is starting to get to me. Not only has my blogging time been reduced, but I'm also getting tired and I need a break.

My conversation with Max about sports and the nature of idolatry continues, however.

Though I won't be able to respond fully for a couple of days, I've decided to repost Max's last comment here so the rest of you will be sure to see it and chime in.

Here's Max:

Literally worshipping an earthly pleasure is obviously idolatry (by definition), and perhaps so is demanding that an earthly pleasure somehow enable one to rise above his earthly limits. Now, the hard part. Under what circumstances does a love of sports qualify? You don't need to write a book--just give a plausible, concrete example, real or invented. I, for one, have never met anyone who has demanded of a sport something that only Christ can supply, such as the remission of sins, communion with the Father, or eternal life. To be sure, people do seek from sports some things associated with religion, such as a feeling of solidarity with their fellow men, a sense of being part of a meaningful narrative, the satisfaction of achieving something so decisively as to make a difference in the world, and so on. But I don't see what is idolatrous about such things, even if they can only be most fully enjoyed through union with Christ.

I hope I am not being too persnickety. Most of what you write on your blog is wonderful. And I can appreciate that you have a sense that people value sports too highly and that you are perhaps groping around, in an experimental spirit, for a coherent theological explanation of what has gone wrong. Finally, I do accept that, in an extended, non-literal sense, all sin has an element of idolatry in it, as any good Augustinian will tell you. But while I suppose I can imagine someone literally worshiping football--burning incense to it, attributing divine qualities to it, seeking its favor--I'm pretty sure I have never known anyone to come close to this. I'd like to hear what sorts of practices or habits of mind you are thinking of. Is it dedicating more airtime to school sports than to a local murder, as you mentioned in your previous post? I can think of both healthy and unhealthy explanations for this that do not involve charging broadcasters and viewers with just about the worst sin in the bible.

Why do I care about this? First, because many Christians, apparently unable to differentiate degrees of sinfulness, condemn everything they disapprove of in the sternest possible terms. And this takes the oomph out of their condemnations of the stuff that is really bad, like easy divorce, for instance. Second, suspicion of innocent, constructive, universal pleasures makes me wonder about one's theology. After all, as C. Hays cogently points out, there is no neat dichotomy between religious life and the rest of life--sport itself can be an avenue for Christian virtue. Finally, it makes me wonder about one's motives, though I am naturally reluctant to make any hasty judgments here. Is it an accident that single people rant about the idol of marriage and unathletic people rant about the idol of sports? (For the record, I have no idea how inclined you are towards sports--I am making a generalization based on other people's rantings.) It is comparatively rare to hear people condemn as idols the things that they themselves spend a lot of time, money, and energy on.

Idolatry and Sports: A Clarification

I'm starting to think I wasn't as clear about this as I should have been. So, let me try again.

In the last day or so, I’ve received two comments on my previous post titled Games People Play raising more or less the same issue.

Max Goss, editor and contributor at the great Right Reason blog, and C. Hays, a regular commenter here wrote to say they did not think excessive enjoyment or devotion to sports equated to idolatry.

Rather than spend time writing separate lengthy responses to their comments in the threads, I’ve decided simply to write a separate post to clarify my position.

Max expresses his skepticism by writing:

I have heard this kind of thing before. People arrange their schedules around, spend a lot of money on, and invest deep emotions in sports. Therefore, they make of sports an idol. Or so the argument goes. Unfortunately, there are some premises missing. I don't want to deny that some have an unhealthy fixation on sports, occasionally even to the point of sinning. But idolatry?

C.  brings her concerns to the table as well. She writes:

Our own son, who is 11, excels in football, basketball, and baseball. He even dreams of being a pro basketball player as an adult. I don't know how bad that is, he makes straight A's in school, and all kids dream of being something, right? During the different sports seasons, we do spend lots of time practicing, going to games, and there is an expense involved. But we do these things as a family, and his Dad is teaching him about commitment to a team and to a goal. He goes to a private Christian school, and most of his teammates go to public school. I can't count how many parents have told me what a fine boy he is, and how do we get him to be so mannerly and compassionate? I give credit to God for these qualities, as well as where we chose to send him to school, and how we have prayerfully raised him. So, I would most definitely not want to be idolizing sports, and intend to consider this possibility, and examine our hearts and motives here.

So, Max and C. don’t think enjoying sports, even in a way that might seem extreme to others, counts as idolatry.

Neither do I.

I do not believe that enjoying sports, participating in them, and being a devoted fan even at the cost of significant amounts of time and money necessarily becomes idolatry. I’m not sure what I said or failed to say in the original post that might lead readers to think otherwise and I invite you to let me know.

Max asks me to be more specific in my charges. He writes:

For once I would like to see a workable definition of idolatry and a careful explanation of how sports qualifies as an idol.

To do what Max asks in sufficient detail would require writing a book. Since my book writing time is limited, I’ll offer only a beginning answer.

Idolatry isn’t just enthusiastic enjoyment of some wholesome, innocent pleasure. It is worshiping that pleasure rather than the One who created it. I tried to get at this in my former post when I wrote that so many people “look for something to thrill them, to lift them above the vast expanses of McMansions, above the limitations of the secular assumptions they have tacitly accepted.”

Innocent enjoyment of created things is to be encouraged and celebrated. Idolatry in these things is not a matter of degree, as if one could enjoy a pleasure God has given “too much” and thus slip into idolatry. Rather, we slide into idolatry when we expect more from any created good than it was designed to deliver, when we look to it for Life, when we look to it to do for us what only He can.

Swallow's Pride: Offending the 60's Generation

Wendy Swallow appears to be a woman easy to offend.

In fewer than ten pages of her book, Breaking Apart: A Memoir of Divorce, the author relates two telling anecdotes that reveal this trait.

In the first, she describes a friend coming to see her at the apartment she’d rented after moving out of the home she had shared with her husband and children.

Here’s the excerpt:

“Oh, Wendy," she said. “I had no idea it was this bad.”

I looked around in dismay. The place was messy, but it had everything we needed. “What’s so bad,” I said.

It’s just such a, well, step down from where you were with your own house, and a nice yard. 

She began to falter, could see that she had offended me.

Eight pages later, Swallow is offended again. She calls a distant cousin after considering throwing herself off the balcony of her apartment. At the last minute she says she reconsidered and that thinking about how close she had come to suicide scared her later.

Again, an excerpt:

That’s probably a good sign, she finally said. You know what? I don’t think you have it in you. I don’t think you’re going to jump off the balcony.

For some reason, that offended me, as if my problems weren’t dark enough to be worthy of serious depression or thoughts of suicide.

Swallow is a baby-boomer and these instances betray a psychological pattern present in many lefty boomer types.

Behind this penchant for taking offense lies a strange marriage of demand for independence from tradition and a narcissistic need for approval. Many boomers have grasped the opportunity afforded them by their numbers and their wealth to destroy traditional modes of living, but what’s worse is their expectation that their efforts should be greeted with universal applause.

Swallow’s anecdotes crystallize this dynamic. In both, she is offended that another would have a perspective other than her own. In the first, she is offended that someone notes out loud that her repudiation of her marriage vows has resulted in a tangible decline in her living arrangements. It’s clear what the writer wants is to be able to trash her commitments and be patted on the back for doing so.  Anyone who dares point out the obvious negative fallout of her behavior is met with annoyance.

The second anecdote is even more telling. Swallow takes offense when she thinks her cousin implies the problems she’s encountering aren’t serious enough to warrant suicide.

Well, leaving aside the fact that Swallow initiated her divorce and thus began the process that led to the problems that pushed her to the brink of suicide, let’s take stock of her situation. First, she’s a professor. She makes her living at a comfortable job that affords her intellectual stimulation and freedom from backbreaking manual labor. She lives in the suburbs of Washington D.C., an exciting city with numerous opportunities. She has an education. She rents a small apartment that, presumably, has running water and electricity. She owns a refrigerator. I could go on.

I am not saying people going through divorce don’t suffer intensely, nor do I want to be flippant about the deep pain people feel over all kinds of life situations. I merely mean to point out that the problems that nearly caused Swallow to fling herself off her balcony are problems most people in the world throughout human history would love to have had. Her demand that her cousin not even imply as much bespeaks a perspective that seems to have forgotten the enormous suffering that has been, and still is, commonplace in the world.

This twisted perspective permeates so much boomer thinking that many boomers seem blind to any suffering but their own. They are convinced their rejection of traditional morality and family structures has been good simply because they believed their motives for rejecting them were good. Consequently, many of them simply cannot see the suffering they have caused. But we, the children of their generation who have suffered from their choices, know better.

Games People Play

His decision was big news; at least that’s what the TV people said.

The lead story on all three local news broadcasts the other night was about a high school basketball player who had signed an agreement to come play for one of the big universities here. The stations dedicated ten minutes, maybe more, to the story.

The second story was only two or three minutes long. It was about a man's being shot. The story of one human being trying to murder another received about a fifth of the airtime devoted to who would be hitting the hardwood for the university basketball team in the fall.

They know their audience and their audience’s priorities down there at the TV stations.  Fanaticism for sports in the area where we live is so intense, I suspect many people do care more about the recruiting maneuvers of the University’s athletic program than about whether one of their neighbors has been shot.

We live in an area typically considered part of the Bible belt. That doesn’t mean much. Someone once told me without a trace of irony that there’s nothing people here care about more than religion, except sports, of course.

Somehow, this kind of devotion to sports has become an easy and acceptable idolatry here. The drudgery of suburban life in a secular consumerist culture gets to people after a while. They look for something to thrill them, to lift them above the vast expanses of McMansions, above the limitations of the secular assumptions they have tacitly accepted.

They hope sports will do this. Casting the hopes of the self onto an athlete or team and experiencing those wins and losses from a distance is easier than casting one’s hopes on God. Also, there’s lots of stuff you can buy.

Sports gives those mired in secular culture a chance to shore up their flagging sense of self, to tamp down their lack of purpose, in a cascade of t-shirts, hats, tote bags, key rings all bearing their team’s logo. Their team is not merely a sports club. In the secular consumerist society it is an avenue to identity, comfort, and community, a substitute for the divine.   

Paranormal Investigation and Occult Practice: How Can We Know The Difference

As Christians thinking about the paranormal, it’s important we get our distinctions right.

First, we must distinguish between the paranormal and the occult. We have to be able to determine what claims and practices simply counter the anti-supernaturalist thrust of modern philosophy and what are actual religious practices that come bundled with scripturally untenable worldview assumptions.

For example, investigators who respond to claims of paranormal activity normally do so with a visit to the site of the phenomenon where they measure electromagnetic fields and air temperatures. They use infrared cameras and electronic voice recorders, hoping to collect data.

Nothing about this activity violates any scriptural command. As humans, we are free to use our intelligence to investigate the world around us, including purported hauntings and other weird happenings. This kind of intellectual approach to the subject is different from engaging in practices like consulting a medium to try to contact a dead loved one. Paranormal investigation does not require a commitment of the heart the way personal use of occult services does.

The second important distinction is between data and theory. Some Christians dismiss paranormal claims too easily because they do not pause to ask what is being presented as evidence and what is being presented as an interpretive and philosophical framework for interpreting that evidence.

Again, ghost hunting is a good example. Some Christians are convinced that participation in such activities is forbidden because they believe these efforts involve trying to contact the dead, or because they believe the dead enter immediately into heaven or hell after death.

This is a data/theory confusion. 

The specific claims of a haunting or strange occurrence are the data. For example, a woman once told me she was gardening one day and looked up from the dirt where her hands were buried to see an old man in 19th-century clothes standing there looking at her. When she spoke to him, he turned and walked around the corner of the house. When she followed him, he was gone.

Later, some research turned up a photograph of her home’s previous owner. It was the man she had seen. Over the years, she and her husband continued to see the man around the farm, sometimes outdoors, sometimes in their home.

The details of her story, seeing a man in old-timey clothes that first day, finding his photo, and then continuing to see him on occasion, are our data. They are mere bits of information about this woman’s experience. Nothing in them implies that what she saw was the disembodied spirit of a dead person.

That such apparitions are the spirits of the dead is simply the most popular theory in circulation. That doesn’t mean it’s correct. There are other options; as Christians, we are free to explore those without compromising a scriptural worldview.

House of Cards

“These are my tarot cards,” she said, placing the yellow box on the table. “Anyone who wants to look at them afterward can find them here.”

Tarot cards were just one bit of paraphernalia displayed by the presenter at the talk on the paranormal I attended a few days ago. The cards were no surprise. They are standard equipment for people involved with the occult.

What was a surprise was the next sentence out of her mouth.

“Before we get started, let me say that I am a Christian,” she said. She went on to detail how she gets flack from both her Christian and her Pagan friends for being a Christian who uses Tarot and engages in other occult practices.

I don’t doubt it. Christians have traditionally seen use of Tarot cards and other methods of foretelling events as divination prohibited by Scripture.

As I listened to her speak, I remembered another encounter with a Tarot devotee.

A few months ago, I went browsing in a witchcraft supply shop, one of those stores that sells candles and incense and herbs and, in this case, ceremonial robes. 

In the back, the owner sat on a couch in a section of the store cordoned off by rustic screens and exotic fabrics. On a table before him, his Tarot deck lay ready. A sign announced his willingness to give readings for a small fee.

He looked at me and said hello. As I greeted him, the deepest reason why that sort of divination is prohibited for Christians struck me.

It’s not because of some unreasonable prejudice, some petty jealousy on God’s part. It’s not because God hates anything spooky, or because He wants to keep us in the dark.

It’s not, as many Christians might say, because dabbling with the occult opens the door for demonic activity in one’s life, though in some cases that may certainly be true.

Divination has been prohibited because it’s useless to the Christian, but nevertheless has a tempting pull for some.

Tarot and other methods of predicting the future are built on the idea that through them we can read the flow of fate, track the progress of our destiny. These practices are predicated on the notion that, though our choices may shape our lives, we are ultimately beings tossed about on the waves of impersonal cosmic forces.

Such practices are inconsistent with Christian faith because we know we are not, in fact, at the whim of such capricious powers. We are in the palm of One we can know, whose motives and intentions he has made clear to us. We can trust Him. We can converse with Him directly without the mediation of some cryptic method of divination.

For a Christian to be involved with Tarot and other methods of divination is a step away from the intimacy of loving relationship with his Father and into futility of attempting to manage what only One, sovereign over the whole earth, is capable of controlling. 

Evangelicals and the Paranormal: Some Initial Thoughts

Note: I'm trying to get away from spending so much time online while other projects are clamoring for my attention. I'll still try to post daily as long as I can, but my posts may not be as substantive or detailed as they have been for a while.

Last weekend I attended a presentation on the “mysteries of the paranormal” given by a local woman who is somewhat of an expert on those topics.

Her talk was scattered and, in some places, repetitive. She spoke of her own paranormal experiences, including working as a psychic to help police find missing persons. Tales of strange occurrences she had encountered were fascinating, though her philosophical interpretations of them were confused and often self-contradictory.

I was willing to cut her some slack. I have a soft spot for people obsessed with the paranormal and, sometimes, with the occult. They routinely accept ridicule as the price for attempting to quench their spiritual thirst in a way many attendees at your local mega-church would likely refuse to do.

The influence of modern anti-supernaturalism has been pervasive. It can be seen even in that contemporary protestantism which downplays mystery and plays up the importance of the consumerist have-it-all-now ethos.

Evangelicals do a disservice to themselves and others when they withdraw from conversation and interaction with devotees of the paranormal. Evangelicals are often quick to dismiss everything paranormal, say, interest in ghost hunting, for example, as being pagan occultism.

The truth is that many of what are considered paranormal hobbies, from researching claims of weird haunting to experimenting with ESP, is not occult at all, but phenomena that contradict the categories of modern philosophy to which many evangelicals tacitly cling.

When evangelicals dismiss or scoff at others interested in these areas, they prove their loyalty not to Scriptural religion, but to an underlying philosophical materialism that paranormal claims offend.

There are many places where paranormal enthusiasts and evangelical Christians could stand together against modern secularism. We are, however, too often separated by prejudices that arise from assumptions foreign to Christian faith. This will not do.

Christians have an obligation to reach out, to do the hard work of sorting through what parts of the sub-culture of paranormal enthusiasts can be accepted and redeemed and what must be rejected for real theological reasons. This is what missionaries do, after all.

Tomorrow, I’ll write about where Christianity and an interest in the paranormal must part ways and a principle we can use for determining which paranormal-related activities are acceptable and which are not.

Listening to Da Voices

I'm learning children of divorce need to be encouraged to speak up. So,before moving on from the topic of divorce, I want to make sure some of the comments I received in private emails get heard.

Instead of publishing them all and including the commenter’s names (since I don’t know if their authors intended me to do so), I offer these snippets of a few of the messages I’ve received.

1) I had to choose with whom I wanted to live. I remember first deciding to live with my mother, because I thought it would be exciting to live somewhere new, but not really understanding the situation. After a summer of living with my mother, I felt sorry for my dad, and didn't want him to be lonely. I often remark that I became an adult at 11, because my childlike view of the world was prematurely matured.

2) I married into a divorce. My husband is one of two twin sons born to his parents. This was the first marriage for each them. His mother remarried when my husband was ten or so, and eventually had another son, my husband's half-brother. That marriage has remained intact. My husband's father (a man, until recently, of lower character and conviction in these areas--not a Christian, mind you) remarried and had a daughter and then a son, my husband's half-sister and half-brother "on the other side," as we call it. That marriage failed also. My father-in-law is currently on his third marriage, which I suspicion is the one that will finally last. They never had children, though his wife did have children from a previous marriage, a boy and girl. She never had custody, so though they had six children between them, they have always essentially been childless.

You may have to draw a diagram just to understand the situation. I do.

3) I am a child of divorce, and boy, that legacy of pain lasts a lifetime.

My mother has been married four times, and my father had been married to and divorced from at least two other women before he married my mother. Once he left those wives, he abandoned the children. I don't know what made my mother think he would treat her any differently.

Once they divorced due to his cheating and generally abusive behavior, he abandoned me too. He took every photo of himself when he moved out, and so I could look him in the eyes today and not know him. He lived in the same city as me for a decade without a single phone call, letter, or visit. He was ordered to pay child support, but never paid a dime. I located him a few years ago and wrote him a letter. He never wrote back.

4) My parents divorced after 8 years of marriage and 2 children. The different ways that this divorce has affected me are too numerous to count. I was 2 years old when they separated and the divorce was only finalized 4 years later because my father wanted to remarry.

Both of my parents remarried and my father has 2 more children with his 2nd wife. My father cheated on my mother. Enough so, that my older sister, when she was about 3 or 4, asked my mother, "Are you my mom or is Joyce (my father’s girlfriend)?" And yet it was my father who filed for divorce from my mother.  This has caused such insecurity in me that I’m only now beginning to understand it, and it’s been 25+ years. When I got married, I was terrified of my husband cheating on me and I was so worried about possibly having to get a divorce. I had told myself early on, that I would never get a divorce. But I kept thinking, now that I’m in this marriage what if this? Or "what if that?" I am so thankful that God lead me to a wonderful, Godly man who comes from a strong, Christian family. After 7 years, I no longer have those fears or thoughts.

For my sister, things were a lot worse. My sister has many, many issues and she is a good one for pushing people’s buttons. That’s not to say that his actions were right and true, but she takes responsibility for things too. The issues she has stem back to the divorce. She has many emotionally, spiritually, and mental issues that begin at the time of my parents divorce.

5) I don't believe my father will ever know the devastation his choice has caused the rest of us.  Consequently, he is now married to his fourth wife, my mother being the first.  (Incidentally, both of my parents came from multiple broken homes.) I have forgiven my father, but will be forever unwhole (for lack of a better word) because of the divorce.  It has been 27 years since the divorce, but sometimes still feels like it happened yesterday.  My brother probably suffered more than I did, and is now divorced from his second wife.  He also has three children with three different mothers.  Our much younger half sister has no relationship with our father (her mother was his second wife) or any of the rest of the family and seems depressed.  She doesn't seem to have much aim in life other than piercing herself to the extreme and being hurt and used by men.   My mother lives alone with 20 cats (she did not have all of these cats when married to my father.)  She barely gets by financially, mostly living off the government.

More Thoughts on Divorce

Note: I've modified the original ending of this post because I thought perhaps it conveyed a less gentlemanly tone than I generally aim for.

I want to thank everyone who has participated in the comment thread on the previous post, especially those who shared stories of the way divorce has touched them. Thanks too to those who emailed me your stories privately.

If you haven’t taken time to read through the comments here, do so now. Be prepared. It ain’t pretty.

As I continued my research this weekend, I came across a couple more quotes I thought were striking.

The first is from Wendy Swallow’s Breaking Apart: A Memoir of Divorce. Swallow says her friends want her to divulge details on how tough her marriage got. Her insight into why they want these is telling.

Swallow writes:

“These friends want to know where their problems lie on the spectrum of marital misery. They want a scale that will tell them what is tolerable and what is not. They want to know what others have endured, whether a husband who never changes a diaper is bad enough to get the boot or if he has to commit greater sins. Is yelling OK? Is an affair an automatic out? And what about illnesses like alcoholism or depression? My friends seem to be looking for reassurance, for comparison that will put their devils into perspective. They want to know where the threshold is, the pain that absolves them of blame if they need to divorce.”

Swallow articulates well a major assumption behind a lot of popular thinking about marriage and divorce: that even if divorce is normally wrong, and even if there’s no abuse or infidelity in my marriage, if I simply get unhappy enough, leaving will be justified in my case.

The second quote comes from Jen Abbas again. Near the end of her book she writes:

“We face a limitation as children of divorce because, at this time, we don’t have widely accepted societal permission to talk about our lingering hurts. But just because our pain is not understood does not mean we should suffer in silence.… We must give ourselves permission to acknowledge and grieve the scars we still bear decades after the divorce decision. I’m optimistic that…society’s eyes will soon be opened to our needs and hurts, if by nothing else but the sheer number of our names.”

I’m not so optimistic.

The resistance to hearing and acknowledging the pain of children of divorce will go on so long as baby-boomers, the divorce generation, continue to hold power.  Those who don’t want to hear what children of divorce have to say will shut them out as long as they have the strength to do so.

The notion that children of divorce owe their parents silence about the suffering they have experienced is deep and tenacious. Some comments in the previous thread imply this belief pretty strongly.

I need to spend more time on some off-line projects and so don’t have time to debate all the points made regarding whether no-fault divorce should be the law. I would, however, like a straight answer to one question from those who defend it. 

Is there any imaginable amount of suffering on the part of children of divorce that would cause you to believe such laws should be repealed, or is no-fault divorce such a positive good that no amount of suffering thrust upon the children of destroyed marriages could ever outweigh its benefits?