bleeding out loud

Every now and again, I read a book that blows me out of the water. Not an interesting book. Not a book that has some good things to say. But the kind of book that when you put it down, you are forced to live in a new way because you’ve seen too much. You know too much, and now you can never go back because it’s ruined you or maybe saved you.

Or maybe both.

That’s what happened when I read Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slowness (slowplanet.com). Honore has joined voices with many others who are calling into question our culture’s obsession with speed. He is advocating a different way to live. Slowly.

There is a chapter in which Honore recounts the first European town to set up a clock in the town square and how that clock re-ordered the life of the community, and eventually the world. There is no corner or crevice of life untouched by the obsession with speed: food, work, sex, parenting, and the list goes on.

His assessment of our culture’s obsession with time got me thinking about clocks. Namely, the fact that they’re everywhere. If I want to know what time it is, I have only to look at my wrist or my cell phone. There’s a clock featured prominently on the wall at home. There’s a clock on my computer screen, on the oven, on the coffee maker, on the television, and in any public place you never have to look far to find one. The proliferation of clocks in our world seems to me symptomatic of something much more than an obsession with time. It makes me think of idolatry.

Idols were images of gods, often placed in places of worship and people’s homes. Idol making was big business. I’m still looking into it, but I’m convinced that people carried around smaller images on their person, and that all of these idols were meant to be visual reminders of a person’s responsibility to live in obedience to that god. Every ticking clock around me screams, “You have somewhere to be. Time is running out. Get a move on.”

If you think you’re exempt from this form of idolatry, pay attention to these kinds of statements: “If I can just get through Thursday, then things will slow down.” This turns into “If I can just get through May, then things are going to slow down,” which then morphs into “If I can just get my masters degree finished, by 2013 I’ll have some time for my family, for myself and my sanity.” Eventually, you begin to feel that you aren’t living your life but that your life is living you, that you are simply a passive observer as time moves on-a hamster on a wheel, just waiting for the day when you have some time. I’ve actually heard people say things like, “I’ve been living for my kids for 30 years. I just want 10 years of my life that can be mine, belong to me.” And now the house that was supposed to pay for retirement won’t sell. At some point you have to wonder, will I have wasted all this time chasing after a future that has been present all along?

Then there’s God, who is obsessed with Sabbath, who, in fact, built it into the rhythm of creation. Page after page of the Hebrew Scriptures you find God reminding the Israelites just how serious he is about keeping Sabbath. Then you get Jesus saying, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” In my mind, that was Jesus’ way of telling people that they were meant to live their lives and not the other way around.

Our obsession with the next thing takes us out of the present. There is an interesting Jewish take on Exodus 24. God calls Moses up on top of Mt. Sinai and says, “Come up to me on the mountain and stay here.” The Jews, who love the text more than anything and read it carefully and lovingly noted God’s interesting semantics. They believed that the God of the Universe didn’t waste any words (doesn’t waste any words), and that the addition of the phrase “and stay here” was either God stuttering or something entirely different. And since God doesn’t waste any words, they gathered that God was saying something profound. See, Moses’ hike up Mt. Sinai would have taken hours-a long, arduous trip. Maybe, the Jews surmised, God told Moses to “stay here” or “be here” because Moses would already have been thinking about going back down the mountain. The classic case of being here but not really being here.

Like when you’re out with someone trying to have a conversation and they’re looking at they’re watch or paying attention to everything else around you except what you’re actually saying. Or the person who answers their phone while you’re with them. They are physically sitting across from you, but they are somewhere else.

At any rate, the story of Israel, and I would argue the story of human history, is the story of idolatry: looking to created things for the peace that only comes from God. Anything can be an idol, but I think there are a few that are particular to our culture: time, stuff, nationalism, militarism, individualism.

And the Scriptures are clear, idols are lifeless and those who make them are like them. Lifeless.

One last story. There’s a Jewish tale about Abraham. The story goes that Abraham’s father was an idol maker and that Abraham helped him cut down the trees. One half was shaped into an idol. The other half was burned for fuel. One day, Abraham’s father had to run some errands and left Abraham in charge of his vast collection of idols. Abraham, so the story goes, took an axe and chopped down all of the idols except one. When his father returned, he asked Abraham, “What have you done?” Abraham replied, “This one idol must have taken the axe and chopped down all the others.” “C’mon Abraham,” his father replied. “We both know that’s not possible. They aren’t even alive.” To which Abraham replied, “So why then do you worship them?”

I think that’s the question for all of us. Why, then, do we worship them? Why do we let the clock call the shots? We were created to live our lives not the other way around.

Traveling with small children is a stupid idea. Not so much because of the kids, but because of all the stuff that comes with them. Before we had our two girls, our home was clean, orderly and quaint-the kind of place you wouldn’t hesitate to sit down and entertain guests in. All that changed with the first baby shower. That’s when the stuff started arriving.

That stuff quickly mixed in with all the other stuff we already had, and before I knew what was happening, our house was no longer an abode of Shalom but a gauntlet to be survived. There are the train tracks to walk over, the building blocks to be avoided, the random toy cars that can take out an ankle with precision accuracy, not to mention all of the deadly accessories that come with a toy house. This was all fine until one day I nearly brushed my teeth with diaper rash cream. Why in God’s name would someone design a tube of diaper rash cream that looks just like a tube of toothpaste? And then why would anyone put diaper rash cream in the same cabinet as the toothpaste?

Leaving home for vacation doesn’t mean leaving all the stuff behind. Oh no. It means taking as much of it as you can with you to wherever it is you’re going. Where we were going was Orlando, and getting there meant taking the kids and all their stuff through Detroit’s Metro Airport.

Maybe it’s just the culture of airport personnel, or maybe it’s just the culture of airport personnel in Detroit, but every airport worker I encountered shared one trait in common: Absolute disinterest in my plight. With airport personnel, I feel like you can get a range of different people. There are the professionals. They’re nice but in an all business kind of way. Then there are the perky ones whose bubbly energetic banter just irritates me. Or there are the bitchy ones who have learned how to give someone attitude while at the same time asking, “How can I help you?” Then, there are the airport personnel at Detroit Metro, and they are just flat out disinterested. When they talk to you, their faces are expressionless. The woman at the airline counter didn’t even look me in the face when giving me instructions. Instead she was looking behind me. I was trying to listen but I kept looking behind me to see who or what she was looking at.

Then there was security. Moving through the airport I looked like a pack mule. Every inch of usable body space was saddled with a diaper bag, a breast pump, two personal bags, and two pieces of carry on baggage. Plodding forward in ass-like fashion, I tried to corral our three year old-keeping her in line and getting all our things through the scanner. The TSA worker obviously didn’t care that I was tending a child. I was trying to convince Braylen to follow me when I made eye contact with him. He looked at me with incredulous eyes as if to say, “Let’s go. What’s the hold up? Step through.” Then my three year old came into view. I thought then that he’d soften. I was wrong. “Come on. Let’s go,” he said rudely. The TSA is not an administration of people concerned with transportation safety as much as they are a compassionless race of human beings with no capacity for mercy, the result of Social Darwinism gone wild. Toting Braylen around always wins me compassion. I was thinking, “She’s got braids in her hair for God’s sake. Braids!”

His disinterest was shared by the woman working the Caribou Coffee store in the terminal. Our flight had been delayed, and I needed a cup of coffee, but the aluminum rail that closes over terminal stores at closing time was half drawn. I asked the woman at the register if they were closed and without even looking up from what she was doing she nodded as if to say yes. She didn’t even look at me. I could’ve been anyone. I could’ve been Jesus Christ come down from the right hand of God the Father, standing in the Detroit Metro Airport in a bathrobe and something like birkenstocks asking her that question, and she’d have been clueless.

The flight itself was mostly uneventful, and gave me the opportunity to study the passengers seated around me. Over the last month I’ve been watching the first three seasons of LOST. So I looked at everyone around me and tried to match them to characters on the show. There was a bald man two rows in front of me. He was John Locke. There was a forty-something guy with headphones on near the front of the plane. He was Hurley. Bernard and Rose were seated next to me, snuggling obnoxiously and snoring loudly.

I wondered what life would be like with these people if our plane were to crash. Then it occurred to me that our flight path was over the continental U.S. and not the South Pacific. If we crashed, we’d be lost in Kentucky rather than a deserted Pacific island. After ten minutes of thinking about how we were in the back of the plane and would land smack dab in the middle of “the others,” (and I could totally see rural Kentuckians being “the others”) I decided that I’d given too much thought to the whole thing.

In the end, I didn’t mind being the donkey, and watching Braylen roll her Hello Kitty carry-on through the airport was nothing short of hysterical.

I’ve been messing around with the guitar again. I thought this riff was fun. It begins with an Eastern sound then finishes with an Album Leaf feel. I got this sound by turning the capo backwards on the 2nd fret leaving the E,B,E strings open.