Matt and Cheri Appling’s “Plus or Minus”

It begins with hope, the hope of many if not most young couples. Gradually it gives way to anxiety. You do everything imaginable to deal with it. People around generally nod in sympathy but don’t really have the first clue about what you’re going through, and in an effort to be comforting they tend to be insensitive,  clumsy or full of knot-headed advice.  In the meantime, the anxiety has given way to fear and hopelessness, like traveling a dusty road in a wilderness.

One in seven couples have to face it and deal with it. Which also means that all of us, even if we don’t deal with directly ourselves, will be touched by it.

Infertility: the problem marked by absence rather than symptoms.

We may understand what infertility is, but not what it means, especially for the people experiencing it. And it typically means everything.

I didn’t understand all of the ramifications myself until I read Matt and Cheri Appling’s Plus or Minus: Keeping Your Life, Faith and Love Together Through Infertility. It’s an informative, moving, heartrending account of three couples dealing with infertility. Including the Applings.

What struck me most as I read it, however, was how much it was filled with gentleness, wisdom, and love. While it is certainly a book for couples dealing with infertility, but it is also a book for the rest of us. The wisdom it contains applies far beyond the immediate problem it addresses. And it’s wisdom that can be applied to almost any serious problem people experience.

Infertility is “a whole-life experience that encompasses our marriages, our relationships and our faith,” the Applings write. This isn’t just about being able to have children; this is about what we understand about ourselves and our spouses, and how we consider our marriages, and what we believe about what we think are God’s promises.

Matt and Cheri Appling

Infertility shakes all of those suppositions, and shakes them hard. Because of that, it’s not necessarily a problem that can be “solved” by adoption (one of the many things discussed in the book that I previously didn’t grasp). It’s a problem that can karate-chop even the strongest marriages.

Plus or Minus covers a full array of issues and problems associated with infertility, and it does so in an engaging, readable style. How to deal with well-meaning friends. How to understand and deal with in vitro fertilization (and all of us Christians know the drill here). Navigating the world of fertility medicine. Understanding your existence as a husband and wife, and how that existence does not depend upon children. And what happens when all of your friends are getting pregnant and everyone keeps looking at you.

Yes, Plus or Minus is a book about infertility. But even more it is a book about faith, one of the best about faith I’ve come across, because it is written in the words of people who experience infertility and find their ways through it.

And I will say I was personally blessed to read it.

Top photograph by Lilla Frerichs via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Born to create

You read a book like Matt Appling’s Life After Art, and you remember things long buried and forgotten in memory.

What I remembered was that I wrote poetry in high school.

It wasn’t love poetry. If I remember correctly, it had more of an apocalyptic, alienated bent to it. And I actually held on to the poems for years, stuck in a box or old filing cabinet in the basement. I went looking for it recently, but it wasn’t where I thought it would be.

What I can’t recall is what prompted me to write poetry in the first place. I would have been 16 or 17. This was at least a few years before I knew that writing forever would be a part of my life.

Forty years would pass before I started writing poetry again. And I can’t really explain why I did this time, either.

But I think it has something to do with the idea of beauty.

I was trained as a journalist, and have spent most of my career in public relations.

You have to look hard to find beauty in journalism or public relations. It’s there, of course, as it is in all of life, but journalism is a lot about ugliness, and public relations is, too, for that matter.

“The world is full of ugliness,” Appling writes. “It is desperately searching for beauty. And even the beauty the world thinks it finds is usually ugliness in disguise.”

I was in a boringly routine meeting at work when I first began to hear the beauty of work, a kind of poetry pouring forth from the repetition of the same thoughts, ideas, words, and sentences. At first I thought I was hearing things, but as I continued to listen, I discovered there was beauty in some the most mundane aspects of my workplace (a meeting, no less!).

The novelist Athol Dickson has written a lot about beauty, and it what he strives for in his stories. “Maybe we’re embarrassed by the idea of discussing beauty in our work,” he says. “Maybe we feel it is immodest to admit pursuit of such a goal. Or maybe we’re intimidated by the subject. Maybe we fear open talk of beauty makes us more accountable for its absence from our words.” (The whole article is here.)

It’s one thing to say something is beautifully written. It’s quite another to say the writing is beauty, that beauty is what we strive for because it is beauty that so distinguishes the work of God from the work of humanity.

Beauty points to God. We are creators, and the beauty we create points to God.

At The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Life After Art this month. Today concludes the discussion. To see what others are saying, please The High Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Failure is an Option

One of the most intense movies I’ve ever watched is Apollo 13, the story of the space mission that was to land on the moon but went awry. Based on the true story of the ill-fated mission, it was a gripping tale starring Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Kevin Bacon, and Gary Sinise.

At one point, Ed Harris, playing Gene Kranz at Mission Control in Houston, tells his colleagues that they have no choice but to figure out how to save the astronauts’ lives. “Failure is not an option,” he says – in the movie.

The real Gene Kranz said something like that during the actual crisis, but it took Hollywood to turn what he said into a line both memorable and enshrined in the American cultural lexicon.

In the case of Apollo 13, failure was indeed an option – and three lives hung in the balance. In fact, in anything worth doing, be it space missions, writing a novel, implementing a new program at work, or anything else, failure is always a possibility, and it is always an option. We can experience failure through unforeseen circumstances, and we can choose to fail by the actions we take and the decisions we make.

The question is, is the possibility of failure sufficient to stop us from trying in the first place?

Over the years, I’ve worked for several large organizations, mostly in the corporate and educational fields. Organizations become large for many reasons – marketplace success and natural monopolies (like school districts or county governments) are two of them. One thing all large organizations have in common is the desire to minimize risk.

It’s a natural phenomenon. You become successful, and the desire to remain successful leads you to minimize risk and seek control over things that can upset your success, or challenge your natural monopoly. The problem is that that the desire to control or reduce risk comes with a cost – the stifling of creativity and innovation. Over a long period of time, creativity and innovation can become anti-cultural, which may explain what happens to so many Fortune 500 companies that have disappeared forever.

This desire to avoid risk isn’t limited to large organizations. It also applies to individuals. “It’s our survival instincts that help us judge when to take a risk of failure and when to retreat,” writes Matt Appling in Life After Art. “But we’ve reprogrammed our instincts with the assumption that failure is not an option. So we stay home and protect ourselves from failure and deprive the world of our gifts.”

If we believe in what we’re doing, or what we want to do, we have to accept the reality that failure is an option. Creativity is dangerous. It upends the status quo. It challenges vested interests. It challenges the whole notion of “this is how we do things here.” If we are being creative, we should expect opposition, or worse, indifference.

Failure is always an option. The fear of failure is always present.

We can play it safe. Or we can choose to create, knowing we may fall flat on our faces.

We’re discussing Life After Art over at The High Calling. To see the discussion, please visit the site.

Photograph: The damaged Apollo 13 Service Module, seen after separation from the Command and Lunar module; via Wikipedia.

Coloring Inside the Lines

It’s a lesson few of us like to learn.

“God created a world constrained by gravity, constrained by innumerable physical laws,” writes Matt Appling in Life After Art. “He created animal and plant life, each kind with its own strengths and limitations. And he created humanity to live and die by all kinds of constraints. God created all of these constraints and limitations—and called them good.”

Not exactly our favorite words.

Constraints.

Limitations.

Rules.

Guidelines.

Expectations.

Laws.

That’s like seeing a 65-mile-per-hour speed sign on the interstate, and declaring it to be good.

The fact is, though, we all work and live within constraints. It might be legal, or financial, or moral, or ethical. But constraints are our daily fact of life.

My constraints are often called lawyers. And experts.

My day-to-day work is in the freewheeling, Wild West atmosphere of the internet – web, social media, blogs, online news sites. What’s critical to functioning in this kind of environment is speed. Wait too long to respond, and you can find yourself to be roadkill.

Companies and other organizations are not designed or structured for speed; what they are structured for is deliberate consideration by all parties concerned. Lawyers review things; other kinds of experts review things; people seek a calm and orderly approach to anything that must be said publicly. There are reasons for this, including the lawsuit-happy society we live in.

But when you’re dealing with online time, that’s institutional roadkill. Wait too long and you won’t know what hit you.

The need for constraints and limitations run smack up against a world where the very natures of time and speed have fundamentally and profoundly changed, and they have changed forever. Constraints are still needed, but of different kinds and in different ways.

The tension with all of this is sometimes unbearable. They think they’re dealing with the guy who always wants to color outside the lines; what they don’t see is that the lines have changed.

We’re trying to accommodate each other. It’s not easy. I’m constantly chafing against institutional constraints. Some days the response comes way too late to be useful; I ‘m often left with finding someone credible outside the organization who’s already responded or communicated. It can make us look foolish, but foolish is better that looking stupid or arrogant.

As Appling says, constraints and limitations are good. The lines, the design, are what give us order, stability, and even beauty. The trick honoring those limitations – and still doing what’s needed to be done.

And sometimes you have to color outside the lines, and perhaps in the process draw new lines.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing Life After Art. To see the discussion on this chapter, “Coloring Inside the Lines,” please visit the site.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Life without Beauty

For a long time, longer than I really care to admit, I was a cretin when it came to modern and contemporary art. I had this tongue-in-cheek attitude that summed up my thinking on the subject in general: if I could do it, it wasn’t art.

Gradually, that attitude began to break down. I read more. I looked more carefully. I stopped rejecting exhibits or installations out of hand (although, I have to say that the installation of several television monitors talking to each other at the St. Louis Art Museum may still fit my tongue-in-cheek attitude).

But there was a moment, some years ago, when something happened that changed my attitude about contemporary and modern art. It was a series of three paintings at the St. Louis Art Museum by Gerhard Richter, titled individually November, December and January. (That’s December at the top of the page).

I still can’t explain why, but the day came when I looked at those three paintings closely, and realized they represented something far more, far larger, than various shades of gray paint on canvas. I looked at those three paintings, and I felt physically cold, as if I was in the very real presence of a representation of weather.

Richter was the doorway through which I walked into contemporary and modern art. The St. Louis museum has other Richter works, like Gray Mirror (1991), four mounted panels of gray glass, and Betty, a portrait of the back of Richter’s daughter at about age 12. And then I began to read about his work. And moved on from there. Twenty years ago, if someone had asked me who my favorite artist was, I would have likely Cezanne, pr perhaps Andrew Wyeth. Today, I would answer the question by saying Makoto Fujimura.

And I surprise myself even more by finding significant contemporary and modern elements in a painter like El Greco.

The art itself didn’t change; I changed. I understood what I didn’t understand before. The biggest change came in my understanding of creativity.

In Life After Art, Matt Appling says that “human survival never demanded that a poem be written or a song be sung or a play be performed or a story be told or any number of other beautiful, emotional, moving things be created. Beauty is never essential to survival. Yet humanity has spent millions of hours on unnecessary, nonessential creation.

“God’s life is not just about existing. It is about beauty.”

And I found beauty in what I previously didn’t understand, expressions of the creative self that we carry with us because we are made in God’s image.

Over at The High Calling, we’re reading Appling’s Life After Art. To see the discussion today on “Life without beauty,” pleasevisit the site.

Related:

My review of Life After Art.

Broken Hallelujahs, a poem inspired by Gerhard Richter’s December.

Painting: December, oil on canvas by Gerhard Richter (1989).

Life After Art

When I was in third grade, my teacher was the one officially designated as the “art teacher” for the entire grade. My mother loved telling her relatives and neighbors that I had the art teacher. What she didn’t say was that Mrs. Sibley was in her early to mid-60s, rarely could remember our names, and told stories so outrageous that even we eight-year-olds knew she was telling something other than the truth.

But art we did. We had two big simultaneous projects. The class was divided right down the middle. The teacher had the janitor tape a long roll of brown paper, roughly three feet wide and forty feet long, to the classroom walls.

We painted murals.

To continue reading, please see my post today for The High Calling. 

Becoming More Aware of Time

I’ve read Matt Appling’s Life after Art, and been going back over it, looking closely at the questions and exercises at the end of each chapter.

One question caught me up short. Actually, several questions clustered together caught me up short.

What would I like my life to mean when it is over? What do I want my life to say about me? What legacy am I building? What will I leave behind that will tell people about my life?

I’m not sure how I’ll ultimately answer those questions, but I know that I’ve already started the process of answering them.

I’m becoming more aware of time.

Specifically, I’m becoming more aware of my time.

It’s getting shorter.

When you’re 20 or 30, the time in your life stretches into infinity. You rarely think about time at all, in terms of the time allotted for your life. It beckons with possibility.

I will say this: my time still beckons with possibility. What time is left is shorter than when I was 20 and 30, but it’s still filled with possibility.

I started riding a bike when I was not quite 53. I published a novel when I was 60, and a second novel at 61. Would it be too much to say that there are at least 10 novels left inside my imagination? And a collection of four long stories. Two novellas. And this non-fiction book that’s well underway, and looks like it just might make its manuscript deadline of July 1?

But that’s only a partial answer to those questions. Perhaps the smallest part.

What will I leave behind that will tell people about my life?

I know most of the answer to that question.

My two sons. Travis and Andrew.

They’re eight years apart. Travis gave us such a run for the money that we thought he might be an only child. But eventually Andrew came along.

They’re both adults now, and I can see elements of myself in both of them. I hear their words and expressions, and I’m struck with amazement at how much I hear my own father. How did that happen? I hear them tell a story, and I hear myself telling a story.

But that business about screaming at the television set during sports games? That’s their mother. I am not making this up. They’re louder than she is. But they get that form their mother. In fact, they inherited all of their sports genes from their mother.

I look at my two grandsons, and I see another part of the answer. I am part of their lives, both carefully and wildly.

Wildly, in that with them, I am ready at any time to try anything and do anything. Grandchildren suggest a kind of freedom for grandparents, oddly enough, freedom to be a child again and no one thinks you’re an idiot.

And carefully, because I will not crowd out their father. They need him in ways they won’t fully understand until I’m long gone and he’s waving his cane at his own grandchildren.

So those are a good part of the answers to those questions. There’s more to tell, but for now, they’re sufficient.

Related:

My review of Life after Art.

Matt Appling’s "Life After Art”

Important things can often come in small packages.

Physically, Matt Appling’s Life After Art is a small book – 142 pages. Thematically, its size belies the important message it contains.

We are made in the image of God. And because we are made in the image of God, we are designed to be creators.

For some reason, most of us left that creative spirit behind about the time we left 6^th grade. We out grew it, encouraged by peers, parents, adolescence. Creativity, like art and music (and even writing), didn’t fit our ideas of “useful” or paying occupations. The further we drifted from childhood, the more those days of joyful creativity were left behind.

Appling is not arguing that we should all become artists. Instead, he says we should “peel away” the layers of paint lacquered on our creative spirits, and discover, or rediscover, what God intended us to be. Or, to use the present tense, to find what God intends us to be.

Creators.

Drawing upon his experiences as an art teacher for schoolchildren, his own childhood and life, and his understanding of the creative urge and what happens to it, Appling concisely walks us through where we were, where we are, and where we could be. His case is compelling.

“Today,” he says, “most things we consumer are cheap, unimportant, and disposable. The things we create have an exceptionally short shelf life and a rapidly approaching expiration date. We consumer, we repeat. Consume, repeat.

“We accept this, and lower our expectations.”

What we create says much about the people who do the creating. Our creativity, or lack of it, reflects the deprivation of our souls.

If we peel away the paint and find our creative spirit again, what it is that we are to create?

Appling has an answer for that, too.

Beauty.

Beauty that expresses the spirit of God.

It could be in art, music, writing or any of a hundred other creative endeavors. But we have the capability to create beauty.

If you doubt that, then perhaps you should sit in Appling’s art class, brush in hand (and it’s a brush, not a hammer, so don’t pound the paint on the paper), and listen to him explain why rules and confinements are important, that it’s not about painting with a disregard for the lines but using the lines to master and direct the creativity within you.

Life After Art is thought-provoking and desire-provoking. We recognize what Appling says as true because the creator image within us responds to it as true, and responds powerfully. It’s an important book, every page filled with what we have forgotten, what we need to know, and what we need to do.

Related:

Matt blogs at The Church of No People.