Caroline Ferdinandsen

Photoshopped Faith and The Lies It Tells

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:45:06 -0700

Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows. -Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

Photoshop lets me be whoever I want for a brief, narcissistic moment (yes, that’s my face strutting down the catwalk). Websites ranging from Yearbook Yourself to Face In Hole have capitalized on our identity-switcheroo imaginations. It’s rather addictive. One glimpse of yourself as Margaret Thatcher or Jack Sparrow or a Teletubby and you’re hooked. And did I forget to tell you? Photoshopped religion allows you the same creative fake-out.

I’ve had some practice with this sort of thing before, but my own faith identity crisis, not any clever software, powered the transformations. In junior high school, I attended a Pentecostal youth group, and I fitted my head so perfectly onto the “on fire for Christ” look that you’d swear I was the real thing. In high school, I went back and forth between a legitimate believer and a glammed-up version of my spiritual self. When I finally got to college, I had configured a handful of evangelical variations of my true self: one for casual dating, one for relating intellectually to my professors, another for spouse-hunting, and a really good one for quiet times with God.

When your focus is on yourself, Christianity is a just a cool masquerade party. You can create whatever self-serving identity suits the moment. But the fourth chapter of the book of Hebrews says this about our hidden motives: Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable.

Now I’m in trouble. The terrifying, beautiful, redemptive thing about the New Testament is that it constantly reminds me that external appearances don’t mean squat.

When I attended high school in Texas in the 1980s, I remember girls (and sometimes their big-haired mothers too) who would go to a store in the mall named Star Shots, a creepy faux-studio with plenty of pancake makeup. A couple of formula-trained photographers would glam up their clients and drape them over leopard skin rugs for an hour while clicking their shutters. For fifty bucks and a couple of hours, you could get a counterfeit version of yourself to hang in your foyer.

Jesus used different metaphors, but you can hear him attacking the Pharisees and lawgivers for the airbrushed 16 x 20 reproductions that they proudly hung in their synagogues. Paul also speaks to the church at Corinth this way: We refuse to wear masks and play games. We don't maneuver and manipulate behind the scenes. And we don't twist God's Word to suit ourselves. Rather, we keep everything we do and say out in the open, the whole truth on display, so that those who want to can see and judge for themselves in the presence of God. (2 Cor. 4:2)

The problem with taking Christianity into the studio is that the final product might bear little resemblance to the true Christ. The truth is supplanted by fiction—the Christ we invented rather than the Christ revealed in the Bible. It is because of this danger that Paul tells us For we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord. (2 Cor. 4:5)

I’m afraid I’ve been guilty of photoshopped faith. I have felt the shame of airbrushing my own identity instead of letting the spirit of God clothe me. But today, because of God’s grace, I pray that I would be the same, through and through, whether you meet me in the sanctuary or in the street. In Erasmus’s words, I don’t want my life to be “presented by shadows” but under the clear, good light of Jesus Christ.

The Case for a Little Spiritual Quarantine

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:19:22 -0800

Why have so many of the non-readers at my high school read Twilight? How come the aprons in the 1800s were all made from calico prints? Why do some Christians believe that Obama is the anti-Christ?

In his bestselling book The Tipping Point (2000), Malcolm Gladwell explores the parallels between ideas and viruses. He uses an epidemiological motif to promote his thesis—that human behavior is shaped suddenly and powerfully by viral influences in their communities. If ideas are viruses, then my proximity to both Christian skepticism and Christian trendiness is bringing me dangerously close to getting the flu.

I’m going to admit something very honest. My Christian faith has suffered from my chronic reading, interfacing, and networking this past year. I'm rather shocked by this. I thought I was doing myself some good by jumping into the conversation. I’m not talking about the good and beautiful result of knowing all sorts of people. I’m not talking about exposure to new ideas, or being challenged to examine the credibility of my beliefs. But I’m suffering from some information inflammation—the relentless sound bytes, articles, videos, jokes, books, concepts, marketing, and opinions that my spiritual antibodies must filter every day. I don’t think my soul was designed for this much discernment.

Henry David Thoreau, a pantheist of sorts who became transcendentalism’s greatest disciple, did have some cool things to say about simplicity. After living in the woods for two years, it was Thoreau who determined that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can let alone." It used to be that I was able to read the Bible by itself. Now, I have grown accustomed to seeing what ten other people have to say about the Bible first. I used to trust my circle of mentors to help me discern truth from error, but now I can access the anonymous advice of my Facebook friends, bloggers, radio hosts, political pundits, and celebrities. It’s screwing up my immune system.

The more sources I consult, the more likely that Gladwell’s lightning-fast social epidemics will influence my thinking. I’ve heard from and read about all kinds of faith-labels this year: mystics, postmoderns, charismatics, seekers, emergents, traditionalists, culture warriors, apologists and more. I used to think I was educating myself, but now it’s beginning to feel a little absurd. Why would a healthy person kiss every contagious person in the room? My information might be outpacing my application—I mean, do I have any idea how to apply all the things I’ve learned?

I’m positioned awkwardly between two generations, separated by a semi-permeable wall called the Internet. I am old enough to remember the way my grandmother lived. As a simple European immigrant, she never read a daily newspaper or drove a car, nor did she have a college education. She read the Bible, listened to a few radio preachers, and dreamed of being a missionary. She told everyone she knew about the Jesus who changed her life. She was hopelessly out-of-touch and uninformed. While her isolation was sometimes maddening to a young girl who tried to be culturally in-the-know, I also loved the simplicity of her faith. When she found a piece of the Good News, she would camp on for a long time, not looking to find a better insight to replace it too quickly.

You might have been scrolling around the Internet, and you happened to find this little posting. If you did, I’m going to say something counterintuitive for a writer looking for an audience. Try the old-fashioned quarantine approach, when momma locked you in your room with a good book when sister had the measles. Run away from all the voices and hunker down with the Bible for a while. When you’re done, pray for discernment. It’ll be the simplest—and healthiest—thing you’ve done in a long time.

Jesus Doesn't Need our Publicity Stunts

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:38:09 -0800

I’ve determined there are three effective methods of getting widespread attention: death, blasphemy, and public nudity.

David Blaine and Harry Houdini, generations apart, capitalized on our fear of death by flirting with it during dangerous stunts, and in 1999 (long before Paranormal Activity made grainy realism super-scary), the marketing geniuses for Blair Witch Project pretended to release real life footage of young people being murdered in the forest. Of course, if Jimmy Hoffa or Tupac were to rise from the dead tomorrow, that might be the best stunt ever.

The death trick always works, but blasphemy gets equal press, as Salman Rushdie knows too well. Lindsay Lohan and her Christ-ish photograph (complete with crown of thorns and arms outstretched) or Madonna’s now-classic blending of Catholic imagery and eroticism are cheap stunts that cost the public millions in itunes and tabloid subscriptions.

Nudity is the fastest way—literally—to get an audience especially if the young women from PETA in lettuce bikinis are dashing naked through Pamplona, Spain in “The Running of the Nudes.” Fashions in various levels of immodesty have made celebrities famous. Even Dennis Rodman got in on that action. The serpent in the garden was the only one who reversed the formula in every way possible by garnering more attention for getting Adam and Eve to dress themselves than they got for being naked in the first place. And come to think of it, death and blasphemy was part of his tactic, too. What a clever marketer, that Satan.

So now, when I discover that an atheist group on a Texas campus has started their “Smut for Smut” campaign, in which students can trade in their holy texts for pornographic magazines, I don’t know how to react. It’s disgusting and shocking and really, really creepy, but I’m kind of happy about their stunt. Atheism desperately needs this kind of smug, aren’t-we-clever gimmick to point everyone to their vast intellectual reserves.

Don’t misunderstand me. Zealots, shamefully using the name of Christ, have been doing similarly outrageous things for centuries, things that make me cringe and cry for the bad publicity (thank you, Fred Phelps). But true, authentic Christianity needs no yearly gimmicks or strange publicity stunts. The global publicity of Jesus Christ’s resurrection was the most outrageous, shocking, never-before-seen campaign that ever was. Long before the campus atheists were raising awareness, God was raising his Son, and I say there’s no competition.

James Horton, veteran PR executive, believes that most stunts fail if the message and medium don’t reflect each other. In other words, if all you can remember is the stunt—but not the reason behind it—then it was poorly conceived. How beautiful that Jesus’ message AND method is, and always will be life, life, and more life. We’d best get out of his way and not try to run his campaign.

It’s a good thing, too, because I’m terrible at drawing signs on poster board, and most of the Christians I know wouldn’t look good in a lettuce bikini.

Chaucer and the Tale-Spin: Why His Satire Works Best

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:40:55 -0800

Geoffrey Chaucer, the guy who might have had Shakespeare’s reputation if Will hadn’t done his thing so brilliantly, wrote this little book you might have heard about. His magnum opus is, of course, The Canterbury Tales, and its prologue reads like 13^th century reality television, a sort of Real World for Medieval England. Chaucer examines his own society in all its wacky diversity and throws twenty-seven characters together on a journey, many of them religious. They are, supposedly, going to pay homage to a slain archbishop, but it's just a set up. We're more interested in the bufoonery on display than the pilgrimage itself.

As I see it, Chaucer’s pilgrims are the perfect mirror of his society. They are alternately perverse, holy, hypocritical, promiscuous, chaste, and hilarious. The Roman Catholic Church is the target of much of his fun, but he also takes a shot at gender roles, infidelity, body building, stupidity, and farting, among other targets. It’s a hoot, let me tell you.

In re-reading Chaucer, I am impressed by his wit. It can’t be missed. Had Chaucer’s Christian characters all been scoundrels, I would’ve dismissed him as a nasty critic, only eager to expose the religious misfits and hypocrites. But Chaucer’s genius is even better displayed in his evenhanded treatment of the world he observes. Consider this description of the humble Parson, a country pastor whose love of his congregation showcases the transformation of Christ in a perverse world:

He was a shepherd and not mercenary.
And holy though he was, and virtuous,
To sinners he was not impious,
Nor haughty in his speech, nor too divine,
But in all teaching prudent and benign.. . .
There is nowhere a better priest, I trow.
He had no thirst for pomp or reverence,
Nor made himself a special, spiced conscience,
But Christ's own lore, and His apostles' twelve
He taught, but first he followed it himself.

I like Chaucer’s impartiality. The poet painted an unflattering portrait a few stanzas earlier of a religious evangelist selling fake relics for profit and seducing the barmaids, but takes the time to cast his gaze in the direction of a true servant of God in the middle of all that hypocrisy.

Modern satirists, I’m afraid, seem uncomfortably relentless in their attacks, choosing only one absurd camera angle. They will ignore the beauty right in front of them while chasing the ridiculous. Christians are hammered for peering through a too-narrow peephole from which to see the world, but I say it's a human problem not reserved for the religious. Secularists tune their radio frequencies to the loony hypocrites, all the while missing the clearest pictures of Christ and his transforming power in the lives of regular people.

Chaucer perhaps teaches us that the best critical minds discern the nuances in humanity, the possibility that one man doesn’t speak for all men, the chance that God transcends the absurdities of humankind. I've met both of Chaucer's Christians in my lifetime. The fakers might still be doing their thing, but the humble servants are walking in the light as they've done for centuries. Will anyone notice?

Ski Lodge Christianity

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:41:57 -0800

It’s the tail end of winter. I’m sitting in one of those wooden-beamed ski lodges in the Sierra Nevadas. I am not a downhiller—probably never will be—so I’m being a good sport today, watching my family whoosh down the runs while I sit in the wussy lodge with my laptop and a fake ski cap. Veteran skiers with hi-tech goggles and marshmallow pants have been wandering past me all morning. If I really want to feel like a loser, I'll watch the Olympics later today.

The outsider vibe feels familiar. I, a follower of Jesus Christ, have gotten used to watching the rest of the world do its risky things while I sit in the safety of the lodge. I’ve grown accustomed to observing breathless speed through a 9 x 12 foot picture window. If someone saw me in the hallway, he might think I belong here, with my appropriate Goretex pants and cute little gloves. But does he know I’m really a lodge-sitter, a mogul-shunner, a lover of sea level?

It’s faintly unsettling. Like using a laptop all day in a ski lodge or wearing jeans at the beach, loving Jesus in the middle of the world requires some awkwardness. Don’t get me wrong: I’m more than a little jealous in a superficial, junior high sort of way. I watch the sinners dangling from the chairlifts and wonder what the view looks like from the top. It looks so exhilarating. The thirteen-year-old snowboarders walking by have dismissed me as nothing more than a Driver Mom, just a lodge fixture. Is that what Christianity looks like to a downhiller eager for the Black Diamond rush?

I have a brief moment of schadenfreude when I notice one of the snowmobiling paramedics hauling some daredevil off the slopes. It’s good for my theology—and my ego—until I realize that 268 other skiers will go home happy and whole at the end of the day. I cannot say with certainty that lodge-sitting was the most exhilarating choice. I could say the same about Christianity on some days, although most of us try to compensate for our occasional jealousy by insisting that we are deep down happier than the rest of those sinner-losers.

Perhaps I’ve gone too far with my ski lodge = Christianity metaphor (it’s my writer's weakness). But here’s the bottom line for me as I sit here feeling like a pretender. When it comes to being a lover of Jesus in a world of haters, I’d better get used to feeling like an outsider. The gap between us is growing wider every day, and in America I’ve been used to blending in so easily. Next time I come here, I’m not going to fake it anymore. Forget the phony skiwear; I’m coming in my flip flops and Hawaiian shirt just to clear things up. It’ll be good practice for an occasional poser like me.

Christianity’s Secret Handshake: Why It Might be Better Not to Know It

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:59:22 -0800

If you spent your childhood outside the evangelical bubble before Jesus Christ and his radical, irrational message knocked you flat as an adult, then you, like the apostle Paul, understand the mystery of spiritual conversion. You might have been missing some Christian street cred—an Awana certificate, a Precious Moments figurines collection, a working knowledge of Dove Award winners—but what is all that anyway? You didn’t know the secret handshake at the front gate, so Jesus sprung you an entrance through the back door of God’s Kingdom, and you crossed the divide between life and death.

I’m so stinking jealous of you.

I, on the other hand, spent my life knowing the secret handshake. I suspect I first experienced a cultural conversion, learning the lexicon of American Christianity as one learns his ABC’s. (A man who grows up in Mexico City is hardly applauded when he gets an A in high school Spanish, just as it was simply to be expected that Caroline would grow up to become a Christian.) I was never uncomfortable for one moment inside a church. I knew the idioms and articles of my faith, and I can picture the yellowing photograph of me standing in a blue dress, age 6, at the microphone reciting the 66 books of the Bible in record time.

I spent my early years in the church basement doing hand motions to Christian songs before spending years at a Bible Belt megachurch as a teenager. I rode church buses to summer camp, dropped salvation tracts in bathrooms, listened to The Gaither Vocal Band on 8-tracks, and was afraid to kiss boys for the first half of my life. I never used bad language. I was a Christian back then—a damn good one.

I was a club insider, and that knowledge alone sometimes kept me from intimacy with Jesus Christ. In my mind, the theology of man’s depravity was a Sunday School sticker, not a genetic encoding, so when I did have authentic encounters with God (and I will tell you that I still did despite the showmanship), it was because God’s mercy thwacked my religion.

Consider this analogy: If someone asked you to be a Hindu, what would he expect of you? Would it be like Here’s a sari—put it on! Go and buy a statue of the elephant Ganesha and put it in your front foyer! Watch Bollywood movies, scent your home with cumin, and learn to enjoy the sitar. Is that what it means to be a Hindu? Would that make you an insider? Or is the Hindu identity something else—something less cultural? I am asking the same questions of Christianity in America where it has become, at times, a process of cultural home décor, devotional objects and secret handshakes that have little to do with following Jesus Christ.

Even though my family surrounded itself with the objects of our faith, I can point to the powerful influences that kept me from being poisoned by too much curry, so to speak. The model of my parents’ daily, unadorned faith in Jesus Christ was so simple, so convincing in its power to change people, so lovely in its consistency, that it eclipsed the cultural stuff on most days. I also knew real people who transcended the symbolism and I saw how their Christianity affected the way they served, spoke,and lived. Perhaps most convincing of all was the shift in my own spirit as I matured, and even if the scripture might have been packaged in weirdly marketed ways, the Word of God still made deep cuts into my selfishness. A rapture bumper sticker can't do that.

Let’s remember that the New Testament Pharisees couldn’t grasp the non-religious aspects of Jesus Christ either; they were comfortable with circumcision, Mosaic law, Sabbath observances, and so forth, but really uncomfortable with Jesus. When Christ came to them and told them their secret handshake wasn’t cutting it any more, their exclusive club was in jeopardy of being shut down—of being run over with Gentiles and newbies. It’s no wonder he made people crazy. What do you do with a man like that?

What do we do with a man like that?

First of all, we don’t use the stupid stuff as an excuse to dismiss the essential stuff. I’ve seen scores of young people in particular get all indie-arrogant on me, telling me that mainstream evangelicalism is full of crap, so “let’s all just quit believing in its little fairytales.” People love to use public relations disasters and quotes from smug agnostics to wipe out their theology, but I caution us to explore a little deeper.

Secondly, we look at the global church which is probably a better indicator of what God does with people when the Pharisees aren’t blocking the view. The global Christian church is moving across great swaths of land and sea as we speak with nothing but the transforming work of the Holy Spirit to its credit. I say spend a month abroad and find out what Jesus Christ’s gospel is doing underground. It will shake off the religious excess that’s been getting to you in America.

Thirdly, we quit blogging about Christianity and we pray. Not cheek-pecking, condescending prayers, but hours-long, down and dirty, I’m-gonna-test-this-thing-and-see-if-it’s-for-real prayers. The kind of prayers that become the intersection of Me and the Spirit of God. If you’re feeling like a cultural Christian today, shut off your freaking computer and see if God will meet with you. Then drop me a note and we’ll have lots to talk about.

My husband, who many years ago at age 21 was accosted by the love of Jesus Christ without knowing the secret handshake, is my daily reminder of God’s grace. My parents, who practically invented the handshake, but loved Jesus anyway with an authentic passion, provide the same. But most powerful of all is my own miracle, a reformed Pharisee who is still learning what it means to follow Jesus.

An inspired reminder from Romans 2:

If you're brought up Jewish, don't assume that you can lean back in the arms of your religion and take it easy, feeling smug because you're an insider to God's revelation, a connoisseur of the best things of God, informed on the latest doctrines! . . .You can get by with almost anything if you front it with eloquent talk about God and his law. The line from Scripture, "It's because of you Jews that the outsiders are down on God," shows it's an old problem that isn't going to go away. (The Message)

The Writer’s Lament: Should Everyone Write a Blog?

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:02:33 -0800

Here's a repost from the past.

Writing is like sex. When you get the impulse to do it, you’re seldom in the right place, and when the atmosphere is sublime, you might not be in the mood. I suspect this accounts for the vast number of unsatisfying blogs written every day across America.

So goes my theory about the mysterious impulses of the mind and body. Blogging is a mystery to me, a modern curiosity that is trying to find its place in the history of mankind’s literary arts. The percentage of people who write a blog is growing every day, and it's changing the art of the word.

I’m coming to understand the art of blogging as a hybrid of inclination, narcissism, and curiosity. Do I come to my screen as the ancients did with a quill, looking to shape and frame an idea, a thesis, an ideology? Does the spontaneity of the medium favor only freshly baked insights, or is it all right to offer the timeless truths of an essayist? Am I truly a writer—or am I, as they say, merely a Cat Blogger, someone who enjoys telling you that my cat did such and such today with the profound assurance that someone cares? (Cat Bloggers, by the way, aren’t new; they’ve been around for centuries, but their daily rhapsodies were mercifully trapped in little diaries with cheap aluminum keys).

When I get the impulse to think, I write. The two are inextricably bound together. The millions of bloggers around the world haven’t figured out quite what they want to say until they’ve said it, and that’s precisely the point of blogging. Writing helps us take all of the tangled pieces of intellectual thread and string in the bottom of the sewing basket and make something of it. If you’re Milton, you design a tapestry for a castle wall; if you’re Eddie Callahan with a MySpace page, you come up with a cheesy macramé dream catcher for your girlfriend. That’s the mystery of writing.

I used to get frustrated by the sheer numbers of bloggers in the universe (the Huffington Post, Politico and the Drudge Report alone have over a thousand contributors) and we’re just talking about the professional writers. What about Jim and Stacey and Ricardo and Desiree and Lulu—all sorting through their sewing baskets on BlogSpot and Xanga and Googleblog? How come they have an audience, too, when they can’t even use a semicolon?

But I’m softening to the egalitarian ideals of blogging, especially as I see young people sorting our their own thoughts through language. Writing makes you commit to an opinion—if only for the space between one Send button to the next—and this is good. You might not have captured the Big Idea without it, and if you find out you were wrong, you go back and hit delete. The selfish, beautiful, transforming thing about writing is that I don’t always have to borrow other’s thoughts; I can create some for myself. My spiritual impulses—those prompted by prayer, love, or scripture—give me lots more pieces of string to work with. Lots of people create lousy thoughts, lazy thoughts, and borrowed thoughts, but writing helps us figure out which is which.

On the other side, such freedom makes it infinitely difficult to commit to the unchanging truths of a sacred text. The interpretation of the Bible, for example, is now more like a public swimming hole, where everyone performs his stupid tricks in the deep end without a lifeguard. We don’t know the difference between matters of opinion and matters of doctrine, and when that happens, somebody’s going to drown. Language alone cannot decipher the difference.. Don’t pretend that God needs to read your blog (He saw the first draft before you typed one letter), and sometimes even your mother might not even care, but that doesn't mean you should quit. Maybe you’re the one who needed to see what your mind was up to today. I say that’s good. Our souls have things to say, and sometimes it’s helpful to take a look at our thoughts in black and white.

In the 1800s Samuel Butler wrote: “The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.” His dated metaphor still works today. It's often easier to read everyone else's opinions and sway in the breezes of rhetoric rather than owning your own thoughts. I like Butler’s admonition: nurture your own cow and drink the milk warm and frothy, right from your own barn. It might have a short shelf life, but the hard work can be delicious.

Evil in My Backyard? You Bet.

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:21:07 -0800

I'm being assaulted.

Not by violence, you see, but news of it. All the stories of bloodshed and disaster and evil are getting to me. It's really messing up my happy new year here in the suburbs.

For those of us whose lives don’t seem to reflect the expanse of human suffering in the world, how can we label our good luck as a divine blessing without simultaneously implying that God decided to screw everybody else? It is then that God starts to feel like a nickel slot machine. Solomon used different language when he proclaimed in the book of Ecclesiastes, “There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve.” Aw Shoot. Makes no sense to me either.

People living in perennial peace are often afraid to question God’s sovereignty. Maybe if we don’t say anything, God won’t check his records and notice we got two paychecks by mistake while someone else forgot to get paid at all. Or perhaps worst of all, the numbing softness of our lives prompts no philosophical questions whatsoever. When that happens, God becomes unnecessary. Suffering has no meaning. Violence is mere cinema.

Dictators dreaming of nuclear weapons, suffering children dying in rubble, desperate looters shooting the innocent at will—how can we not see the hand of evil at work in the world? Essayist Lance Morrow wisely observes that “each era gets its suitable evils.” The play is the same; only the cast of characters changes from generation to generation.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth the playwright practically splatters the script with bloodshed. Halfway through his tenure as one of literature’s most twisted assassins, Macbeth compares his tour of violence to crossing a body of water. He stoically announces, “I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er." At least the guy knew what lake he was wading in. Others aren’t so clearheaded, like Christopher Speight, the most recent Virginia shooter whose history of mental illness makes his form of evil all the more insane.

And yet, for all its drama, global suffering still feels like my grandfather’s 1950’s comic books: surreal, brightly colored, a mere reproduction of the real thing. I cannot grasp such evil despite the relentless imagery, both real and imagined. My suburban life is tucked neatly beneath blue skies. The earthquakes of suffering are reserved for other settings such as voodoo-laced Port-au-Prince or a bombed street in Baghdad.

The old poet John Milton explores the almost comic book clash between good and evil in his epic Paradise Lost whereGod and Satan battle it out in beautiful poetic contrast. The Old Testament records an interesting exchange when God, in the book of Job, asks of Satan, "What have you been up to?" Satan answers God with, "Going here and there, checking things out on earth." Ah, the great tormentor is always eager to stroll the neighborhood.

Yet my suburban American life is so far away from such cosmic wrangling, or so I imagine. My day-to-day trauma is shockingly tame. Perhaps a criminal’s bullet, southeast of town, rips through an apartment window. Occasionally a local loony flips out and shatters the peace. The dark specter of suicide swallows up a high school student with too many pills. Horrifying, indeed. But chronic, relentless human suffering? Not in my backyard.

But I come to realize that all of these points of view depend on one faulty assumption: as long as my body is safe, I have nothing to fear. Give me a safe neighborhood, an impenetrable military fortress, or an earthquake-proof structure and I’m good to go. When my health is secure, my flesh uncut, I am beyond the reach of terror. This becomes my measurement of good luck and blessing. Peaceful communities enjoy this kind of security because we perceive that our safety rests in our own hands—through our tax dollars, infrastructure, vaccinations, armies, and gated neighborhoods.

Can we not see we’ve calmed our heaviest fears with the flimsiest defense? In the tenth chapter of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus says this about our enemies: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” So while we are have lined up our greatest intellectual resources to defend the body, evil slips around back and steals our souls.

I bear some guilt living in a quiet cul-de-sac while others in the world bear the brunt of evil’s rampage. Why did God give me such simple joys? Why are my children spared the terror of full scale disaster while other beautiful children must die? Anyone who has lived along the peaceful sidewalks of suburban America has experienced the quiet guilt of being given too much. Children might grab the best piece of cake without a second thought, but as we mature, too many rewards for too long can feel like a divine mistake.

To victims of evil, we define God’s sovereignty as mysterious. Our answers come out sounding like “God’s ways are unknowable” or “He works all things out for his good.” If mystery doesn’t satisfy us, we can cite the famous Old Testament principle that an old family tree rotted by sinful fathers will crash upon its innocent descendents. Those arguments don’t sound the same for the happy folks. Oh, I guess my ancestors must have behaved themselves—lucky me!

But Satan’s attacks on the body are merely shadow puppets for his larger scheme: to devour the soul of man, to separate us from the glory of God. My efforts to protect my family must extend to the spirit, so that I may say with confidence “Death where is thy victory? Oh grave, where is thy sting?” I grieve for my human brothers and sisters whose bodies are being destroyed today. Their pain is crushing; I pray for their safety.

Yet I would do well to remember that as I watch the winter rain falling peacefully outside my window, with my children safe and dry while dinner simmers on the stove, Satan still makes his rounds around my neighborhood tonight. I have no guarantees that my body will last the night. But my soul? That's where the assault ends.

The Legitimacy of Sadness: Why Blue is so Cool

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:32:15 -0800

In the Greek pantheon of emotions, Love has the power of Zeus, Compassion is the lovely Aphrodite, and Anger kicks butt like Ares—but Sadness? He’s just a hated Cyclops, weeping out of that one ugly eye, a monster that nobody likes at all.

Sadness is the emotion that Americans like to eliminate right away. If our children are sad, we try to fix them with candy and distractions. If our best friend has the blues, we invite him to Happy Hour. A spouse feeling down? Well, here’s some shopping money, a round of golf, maybe a massage. We are uncomfortable with sadness; it’s such a downer to everyone in its radius.

Poets seem to understand the beauty of sadness better than the rest of us, but some are really just happy pretending they are sad. Bands like Atreyu (who sing lines like It only hurts when I breathe) capitalize on youthful angst with an almost self-conscious joy, and when the Smiths sing My gut is burning. Won't you find me some water? / Hey,just forget it . . . Can you bring me gasoline? their hyper-tragic lines betray a twisted kind of happiness

Yet John Donne, a profound 16^th century metaphysical poet whom I reckon never wore an emo haircut or painted his fingernails black, wrote “Affliction is a treasure and scarce any man hath enough of it.” I believe he was closer to getting at the real paradox of sadness: that when we try to kill suffering too quickly, we short circuit the natural order of things.

And what is the natural order of things? It’s first moving in rhythm to Ecclesiastes chapter 3, where there is a time for everything under the sun. It’s experiencing both suffering and joy, the juxtaposition of which ultimately defines both. It’s found in the book of James which makes the audacious claim, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.”

Solomon writes, “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting” and later that “a sad face is good for the heart.” He even asserts that “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.” If this is so, the Bible is downright anti-American in a land where we believe a little deep breathing and a martini can put a smile back on yourface. So why does he write such a thing? Perhaps because unrelenting happiness here on earth is artificial, a counterfeit condition which deadens our spiritual nerve endings.

Of course, sadness is not a permanent state; we pass through the valley rather than taking up residence there. We have much to do in God’s kingdom, and a life of permanent asceticism can make us self-absorbed. But natural sadness clears a pathway for God to speak to us in ways that happiness doesn’t allow. In my house, my husband and I have taught ourselves to stop asking, “Why is this happening,” and instead look at each other and say, “I wonder what God is up to?” Our children, our best friends, our mothers and father—should we not leave them alone for a time to live in their sadness, to lose a night or two of sleep, to weep? There will be time to come alongside and help them hoist the burden, but perhaps not in the early hours before God has had time to speak. He is up to something.

I read a story in my local newspaper about a young man who not long ago decided to walk across California like John Muir. When asked what the high points were, he offered a few stunning memories of euphoria and beauty, but insisted that slogging through the repetitive, monotonous Central Valley gave him reference points against which to measure his occasional joy. Ah, I thought. There’s wisdom in his experience. The metaphor almost writes itself.

My essays have a cool way of leaving markings for me to follow. In looking over the scores of postings over the last several years, I can see the line where the tide rises and falls. I’ve been inspired by Love, Compassion, Anger, and yes, even that hated monster Sadness. I am in a slow, dark season but God’s life is still stirring within me. The spring will come again, but not before his work is done.

I Got Nothin'

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:09:55 -0800

What do pastors do when Sunday morning is barreling down on them and they realize they have absolutely nothing to say from the pulpit? Women-in-the-pulpit theology aside, I’m awfully glad I will never be a pastor. The burden to create life-changing sermons week upon week must weigh on a man, especially if he is naturally a shepherd, a hand-on-the-shoulder guy, or just rhetorically average.

Inspiration is a tricky cat. If you believe in the Holy Spirit—and I do—you want to believe that God can zap our intellect, give us supernatural insight, and use his Holy Scriptures to shape our teaching. Yet I’m pretty sure God didn’t deem sacred the seven-day cycle of insights, where the Holy Spirit punches his time clock at certain intervals just in time for the church secretary to print the sermon title every Wednesday for the church bulletin. Our church system seems to have nudged out the natural growth cycles of Inspiration and his sister crop Revelation. But here we are in a system where the vast majority of churches operate on the expectation of a sturdy Sabbath harvest, delivered by the local pastor / farmer right on cue.

What if by Friday afternoon that farmer’s got nothin’ but rocks and weeds?

Zadie Smith in her intellectually demanding collection of essays Changing My Mind, believes inspiration happens in two ways. The first comes from absorbing everything you can find—great novels, comic books, the daily news, essays, conversations—in an attempt to allow great thinkers to wash over you in some kind of intellectual marinade. This, many believe, is a legitimate way of boosting inspiration, and some go so far as to suggest that no insight ever happens in isolation. Even that burrito you ate last night shifted your midnight thoughts and led to a new conclusion in your grand idea.

The other, fiercely independent, strategy is to shut yourself off from the world of ideas, fasting, as it were, from the rich foods of books and essays. In this way, you are assured that your inspiration comes from within (or in the case of pastors, from God himself), safe from the plagiaristic temptations of men.

So what would God ask of our pastors and teachers? What would he ask of me, a writer? Should I be looking for objects on the ground from which to create a Found Poem, a musical cover, a refurbished engine? Or should I search only within myself to find the heart of God himself, the mystical union of mind and spirit?

I have no great answer. But the man or woman who spends his life in both realms is better equipped, I think, to discover God’s spirit. God works within and without, using the supernatural and the mundane to push us toward elevated thoughts, both methods working like sun and water to bring a harvest of inspiration.

If I were a pastor (and since I never will be, I find it easy to throw out such an audacious proposal), I would tell my congregation to go home some Sunday mornings. I got nothin’ I would tell them. Go home and write your own sermon today. And if salaries weren’t such a pesky detail, I might also gather ten teachers together, young and old, internet trollers and pensive thinkers, deep philosophers and rhetorical comedians—all wedded to sturdy doctrine—and I would say Let’s all teach this year. Whenever you get a crop, let the rest of know and we’ll let you show up on Sunday. The rest of us will enjoy your food and wait until our sprouts are green.

Now I think I got something.