Daniel Bowman Jr.’s “A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country”

I can tell you almost exactly where I was around 2 a.m. most nights in January 1988 – doing the graveyard shift for the feeding of our second, youngest and last child, Andrew.

I held the baby on one arm, my right arm cradled around him with his bottle, while in my left hand was The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper. The book was required reading for a course I was taking for masters program. I will forever associate The Deerslayer with baby bottles.

The book is one of the five “Leatherstocking Tales” written by Cooper, with The Last of the Mohicans being perhaps slightly better well known, thanks to the 1992 Daniel Day Lewis movie. Cooper set his novels in central New York State, and today the region is known as “Leatherstocking Country.”

It is also the region where poet Daniel Bowman Jr. was raised, and it provided the title for his first collection of poetry, A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Painting of The Deerslayer by N.C. Wyeth.

Daniel’s First Statement: Why

It’s a familiar scene. You’re sitting in a strategy meeting at work, thrashing through the best approach to a problem or issue. The issue is difficult and not clear-cut. All of the needed people are sitting around the table, representing Law, Human Resources, Public Relations, the business group, the research group. An outside consultant or two is on the phone.

Everyone’s expertise is brought to bear. As the discussion goes on, it’s clear that the Law perspective is likely to prevail, even though it’s likely to generate damage for the organization’s reputation. Finally, you speak out, representing a perspective that is alien in these halls of secular business culture.

You see the reactions. People don’t like what you have just said, what in effect you are predicting if the consensus perspective is implemented. This has happened before; sometimes you’re ignored, and sometimes what you say is acknowledged with some small change.

This time you’re ignored. Two people are clearly angry with you. You know exactly what they are thinking: Not a team player. Your speaking out is going to cost you in organizational terms, regardless of whether you’re listened to or not. But you know you have argued for doing the right thing, even at the cost of short-term pain.

Organizations don’t like short-term pain.

The decision is implemented, and what you predicted fully comes to pass, causing more problems and rippling back on the business.

The team’s response: even more anger directed at you. Because you were right.

You don’t feel smug. You feel sorrow. And you know it will be worse the next time, assuming you’re even invited to participate the next time.

Your question to yourself, and to God, why does this happen?

For a Christian, it’s easy, perhaps too easy, to attribute everything to sin and mankind’s fallen condition. Organizational politics. Embracing the wrong thing. Crime. The Islamic State butchering Christians, women, children, the defenseless. A culture growing increasingly coarse and turning its back on decent behavior. Children suffering debilitating diseases.

Sin is certainly a part of it. But there’s more, and the more is difficult to accept.

In Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, John Lennox points to what the prophet Daniel recognized from the very beginning: “The first thing Daniel says about God in his book is that he is involved in human history: a statement of immense import, if it is true.”

This is what Daniel says: “In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, along with some of the articles from the temple of God. These he carried off to the temple of his god in Babylonia and put in the treasure house of his god” (Daniel 1:1-2, New International Version).

Think about that.

The Lord God delivered the king of Judah into the hands of a pagan ruler.

The Lord God allowed his own temple to be plundered.

The Lord God allowed valuables from his own temple to be placed in the temple of Nebuchadnezzar’s god.

Daniel doesn’t ask why. Daniel knows why.

With all of the evil swirling around our world, our society, our culture, and our communities, we have to remember that God is involved in human history.

God is involved suffering and genocide? The murder of innocents? Disease and physical infirmities? The Islamic State? People at work getting angry with you because you were right in what you told them?

The Lord God is involved in human history. We may not understand it. We may never understand it, at least in this lifetime.

But the Lord God is involved.

I’ve been discussing Against the Flow by John Lennox and will continue to do so for the next several weeks on Mondays. It’s a deeply insightful, highly readable book. Lennox is a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and a speaker on the interface of science, philosophy and religion. 

Painting: The Siege of Jerusalem by James Tissot (1902); Jewish Museum, New York.

The week after

The week after

begins with absence,

a lightning flash of empty;

intended prayer becomes

fear

wonder

they hear, and they run

to the stone,

broken

gone

The dust of the road

kicked up by the missing

this road to Emmaus

prefigures the road

to Damascus prefigures

the road to Rome

the absence

is transmuted

into presence

into life

into eternity

Painting: Appearance on the Road to Emmaus – oil on canvas by Carolyn Thomas Jones. Private collection, Birmingham, Alabama.

Saturday Good Reads

We started the week with The Columbia Journalism Review harshly criticizing Rolling Stone Magazine for a series of journalistic failures in its report last fall on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. The story almost began unraveling when it was published. It turned out not to be true, but it spoke volumes about American news media, cultural elites, and the narratives we are so willing to believe because we want them to be true.

But there was also much good poetry (it’s National Poetry Month), photography, art, and a couple of fun videos of some college students visiting London.

Faith

The Way of Love vs. the Way of Justice – Rod Dreher at American Conservative.

Up from the Grave – Matthew Van Maastricht at thealreadynotyet.

Ancient Evidence for Jesus from Non-Christian Sources – Michael Gleghorn at Be Thinking.

We Have a Duty to Speak Out About the Persecution of Christians – U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.

Work

Compromise and Character in the Workplace – Dr. Art Lindley at Faith, Work & Economics.

Photography and Art

Bloodroots – Timothy Good at Photography by Tiwago.

J.M.W. Turner: Britain’s Painter of Light – Anglotopia.

Representing Women in Contemporary Art – Julie Hamilton at Curator Magazine.

Poetry

After Dark – Natasha Head at The Tashtoo Parlour.

The Man Who Was Thursday – Christopher McCurry at Rattle (Hat tip: Nancy Davis).

A Cure for What Ails Poetry – Charles Webb at Publishers Weekly (Hat tip: Maureen Doallas).

Almost Refrain – Meg Wade at Linebreak (Hat tip: Tania Runyan).

Barn Swallows – Amy Katherine Cannon at Curator Magazine.

Culture

The Report on the Rolling Stone UVA Story – Columbia Journalism Review. And Rolling Stone’s Fake Apology – Rod Dreher at American Conservative.

A Little Respect for Dr. Foster – Nicholas Kristoff at The New York Times (Hat tip: Janet Young).

Marriage

What They Never Tell You – Shawn Smucker.

Writing and Writers

The Great Detectives: Albert Campion – Mike Ripley for Strand Magazine.

Fun

A group of students from Taylor University did a “Literary London 2015” tour in late March, and two videos are up on the English Department web site. It’s a wonderful montage of sights from London and southern England, including reading Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre and “Murder in the Cathedral” at Canterbury Cathedral. If you look fast, you’ll see a painting of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy on a wall in Bath. No words; strictly images and scenes.

Photograph: Peter Davison (center) as Margery Allingham’s fictional sleuth Albert Campion.

Wandering in a desolation of dust

We wandered in the desolation

of the office, walls removed,

wires dangling without attached lights,

bathrooms emptied of all utility

we stumbled through clouds of white,

seeking the holy grail

the treasure at rainbow’s end:

the blueprint,

not what is

but what will be

what will be our place

This blueprint of promise,

of hope, of desire for something better,

even if something worse is suspected,

or feared, or anticipated,

this blueprint is the point of our wandering

in this desolation of dust,

dust wiped away

if only for a moment.

And we see it. It’s there,

hanging on a wall.

We cluster around the altar

of information, the intelligent design

of forcing the greatest number of people

into the smallest amount of space.

In silence, the blueprint speaks,

communicates its magic of certainty,

displaying its obvious wisdom.

And we know

this too shall pass.

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

The Narratives of the Media

When I was in journalism school in the early 1970s (still something of the hippie era in universities), I was one of three members of Greek fraternity / sorority system in the program. The other two were members of sororities, and one of them was in advertising, not the news / editorial sequence.  

As a general rule, journalism students did not like the Greek system. This was an egalitarian time in universities, and, by and large, journalism students saw fraternities and as elitist, playgrounds for the children of the well-to-do. There was some of that, of course; but the Greek system actually offered a reflection of the student demographics as a whole. My own family, for example, was not well-to-do; it was about as middle class as you could get.  

The three of us in journalism school who were “Greeks” experienced some derogatory comments from our fellow student journalists but it was not something to file a lawsuit over. But the antagonism was clearly there but it wasn’t overt. The faculty was generally of a similar mind.  

I’ve read the report by the Columbia Journalism Review of the “failure in journalism” by Rolling Stone Magazine in its story about the alleged gang rape at a fraternity at the University of Virginia. The editors of Rolling Stone have apologized and retracted the story. A fraternity’s reputation was destroyed. The university’s reputation was damaged. But at least the magazine apologized. That’s something, I suppose.  

The CJR report on the story is long, painstaking and excruciatingly detailed. There was no single failure; the failures were multiple and compounding. I read the report because I wanted to see if the CJR review team identified what was likely the biggest failure and the impetus for doing the story in the first place.  

A statement of it is there, but it’s not identified in and of itself as a cause or contributing factor. 

The fact is that the reporter started with her conclusion. And then went looking for an example to verify it. She found it. The example wasn’t perfect, and it had problems that should have raised red flags. The fact that the alleged victim fingered a fraternity only made it a better story. And it played all the right notes: male supremacy, female victim, sexual crime, elitist school, elitist fraternity. The story was too good not to be true. 

Did the reporter and the Rolling Stone not remember what happened with the lacrosse team at Duke University? That one turned out to be fiction, too.  

I don’t downplay sexual crime and rape. They’re despicable. They’re serious problems, and they’re serious problems on college campuses, as they are in society at large.  

But the media believing and promoting its own narratives without question is also a problem, and destructive in a different way.  

These media narratives – the stories the media believe without question – are tearing the fabric of society apart.  

It was a media narrative that helped demonize police in Ferguson, and my own town’s daily newspaper led the way with its screaming, hysterical editorials. Even the Justice Department, which has promoted plenty of its own narratives, eventually corroborated Officer Darren Wilson’s account of what happened. 

And it was a media narrative that gave us the spectacle of Indiana. You have to stop and ask yourself if any of the people making solemn, grim pronouncements – Tim Cook of Apple, Hilary Clinton, the NCAA, the reporters and editorial writers covering the issue – bothered to read the law in the first place. (No one bothered to ask Tim Cook about Apple’s business connections with China, one of the worst abusers of human rights on the planet, not to mention Uganda, which has the death penalty for people convicted of homosexuality. No, to ask Tim Cook about those issues would have been inconvenient to the media narrative.) 

The media promote individual liberty to the detriment of everything else. Religious liberty isn’t even a concern. Truth and reality aren’t concerns if they get in the way of the narrative. 

But the media should be concerned. Freedom of religion can be found in the First Amendment of the Constitution. It’s the same amendment that houses freedom of speech. And the right to assembly. And the right to petition the government.  

And freedom of the press.  

The media are going to lose it.  

And we will all lose with it.   

We already are. 

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Girl with the Red Balloons

You’re sitting in a hallway in a clinic or hospital, waiting your turn for chemotherapy. This is not a place you want to be; this is a place you never prepared yourself for. If you look at the other faces, you see the same pain, the same gauntness, the covered heads missing hair that stares back you when you have the courage to look in the mirror. 

And here comes a woman, looking and feeling as bad as you do, and she tells you she is here for the same reason you are, to get those treatments that convince you that the treatment is as bad as the disease.  

She gives you a red balloon. Or she hands one to your husband or wife. Or your three-year-old granddaughter. Or she offers a hug. And you realize she is just as physically weak as you are. 

After weeks of enduring chemotherapy and its associated treatments that were debilitating on a good day and horrible on the bad days, Margaret Feinberg has reached the end of her rope. She had been fighting back with joy, but she found herself in a place where she had no more joy to give. 

A Bible verse comes to mind. Acts 20:35. “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” 

Jesus said it, although, as Feinberg points out, none of the Gospel accounts record it. It is St. Paul speaking, and he said he is quoting Jesus.  

It’s how Jesus lived his entire life. 

And in the depth of pain and despair, Feinberg asks herself a question. 

Am I supposed to give away joy, even when I have no joy to give? 

As she writes in Fight Back With Joy: Celebrate More. Regret Less. Stare Down Your Greatest Fears, “Flat broke in mind, body, and spirit, generosity was not a spiritual discipline I wanted to practice.” 
She wanted a passport out of pain, not a ticket to encouraging others. 

But then she realizes that the statement contains no qualifiers or exemptions. 

So she finally answers her question with red balloons. 

I suspect that a healthy person handing our red balloons in a cancer treatment center might be mildly appreciated, or perhaps possibly resented. What does a healthy person really know about the pit of chemotherapy? 

But Feinberg was one of them. She was going through it with them. She was feeling just as awful as they were. She identified with the pain. More to the point, she was living the pain.  

That’s how lives can be changed.

When you people know you understand, they respond.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Fight Back with Joy. To see more posts on this chapter, “You’ve Got to Give This Away,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.