lenten journal: upside down
My schedule has made it difficult to find much time to read these past few days, so I took some time this morning to listen to Parker Palmer and Madeleine L’Engle, two names you are quite familiar with by now. Palmer was talking about the temptations of Jesus as a way of looking at the temptations of an active life. He named three (borrowing from Henri Nouwen): the temptation to be relevant, to be powerful, and to be spectacular – each one tempting us to act for some other reason than answering the truth within us. All three temptations of the strong ego, Palmer said, are kith and kin to the temptation of the weak ego: to be inadequate.
[All] destroy our capacity for right action because both proceed from the same mistaken premise: the assumption that effective action requires us to be relevant, powerful, and spectacular, that only be being so can we have a real impact on the world. (114)
As Bush and the Boys babble on three years after inflicting “Shock and Awe” on both the Iraqis and us, they are living proof that nothing much is solved by shows of power, attempts at relevance, or spectacular acts for their own sake.
L’Engle was talking about some of the same stuff (at least to me), but with an artist’s eye. For her, turning the world upside down is not the same thing as looking at the world upside down.
First of all, you have to love anyone who has the word “hippo” in his name. They’re my favorite animals. I wonder how you get to put “Hippo” in your name. Can you just add it on?
Milty of Hippo. I like it.
The upside down view for me starts with friends who are in pain. Just before I started writing this morning, I got word that my friend’s father was taken off of life support. All the family can do now is wait. We wait and pray with them.
The other person I want to mention is a kid named Thomas Bickle. Thomas is little guy who is fighting a big fight against brain cancer. His parents are also waging a battle with our inadequate health care system. A bunch of his parents’ friends organized a blog-a-thon to help raise money to help his family deal with the financial weight of life as they are living it. (You can also hit the button in the sidebar.)
The view of the world we are most fed is top down, big picture, as if history is really about bombs and press conferences to explain them. As I thought about young Thomas (who in his stocking cap looks like he could be a rapper – I want to call him T-Dawg), I thought of something I wrote in my Lenten Journal as the US invasion began three years ago:
Peace never rides in on a bullet or a bomb.
Peace,
Milton
