Persistence with a Purpose

The story is familiar. In the Gospel of St. Luke (17:20 – 18:8), Jesus has just finished talking to the disciples about the coming of the kingdom, “the day the Son of Man is revealed.” It’s an unsettling passage, and it finishes with an unsettling image – of vultures around a dead body.

Then he tells them the parable of the persistent widow – or the parable of the unjust judge. The purpose of the parable is made explicit from the beginning – “to show them that they should always pray and not give up.” That, too, is unusual – the meaning of most of the parables is made clear after they are told. But not this one.

The story is simple. A widow brings a complaint to a judge, to defend her against her adversary. The judge, “who neither feared God nor cared about men,” ignores her, refusing to deal with the issues. This apparently goes on for some time, until the judge finally gets tired of it all. The woman is clearly going to keep coming and bothering him. So he decides to deal with it and grant her plea.

The first time I read this passage years ago, I wondered if this parable was truly about prayer, why Jesus seemed to be comparing God to the unjust judge. Then I read further, and realized that wasn’t what Jesus was saying at all. In fact, he wasn’t comparing but contrasting, that God will answer the pleas of his “chosen ones” because, unlike the judge, he does care about men.

The story is simple, but the lesson seems more complex, wrapped as it is in what Jesus had been saying about the coming of the kingdom. But it’s clearly about persistence, and it’s clearly about persistence in prayer.

“Jesus is explicitly addressing the matter of delayed answers in this parable,” writes Bob Sorge in The Fire of Delayed Answers. “He is affirming there are times when God designs a delay in order to produce a specific work in us through the pain of unresolved suffering. His purpose is that we maintain our persistence and intensity of cry until His work is complete in us.”

What the context of the passage suggests is that Jesus is telling the disciples to be persistent in prayer – and the prayer for the coming of the Kingdom. What they will hope for, what they pray for, may be long in coming. But they are to be persistent, because the Kingdom will – one day – come. Interestingly enough, Jesus recognizes that unanswered prayer – that answer so desperately desired – can sap one’s faith. He says, “However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith?”

Persistence will eventually prevail. God will hear the pleas of his children, and the pleas will be answered.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “Jesus’ Teaching on Delay,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

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

Poets and Poems: R.S. Thomas’s “Poems to Elsi”

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) was an Anglican curate and rector, a Welsh nationalist, and, as it turned out, an extraordinarily fine poet. Born in Cardiff, he spent most of his life and career in Wales. In 1940, he married Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge, and they were married more than half a century until her death in 1991.

If one had considered the couple in 1940, one would have expected Elsi to be the one who would achieve fame and notice. She was an artist, trained at the Royal Academy of Art and already recognized for her work. He would not publish his first book of poems until 1946, six years later. Their relationship has prompted much speculation as to how close they really were and whether Thomas’s troubled relationship with his mother affected his marriage.

And then we have the poems, the poems he wrote to and for Elsi. They provide a deep insight into not only the Thomas marriage but, like poems have a tendency to do, into all marriages.

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

Passion, Curiosity, and Risk

When I started college, my plan was to become a doctor, so I chose to enroll in a pre-med curriculum. My first chemistry class convinced me that my future was not medicine; I faced another 13 hours of the subject and I knew that simply wasn’t going to happen.

Medicine had been my father’s dream, transferred generationally. He had wanted to go to college and become a doctor, but the Great Depression intervened and ended that dream. After high school, the would-be doctor instead went to work in the only place offering jobs – the oil fields of East Texas. He hoped his son would pick up the dream where he had had to leave it. Medicine—being a doctor—remained his passion, long after he had left it behind.

Once you know or understand what your passion is, what Todd Henry in Dying Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day your “productive passion,” much becomes clear.

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

St. Jerome in his study

All I did was remove a thorn,

and now that lion follows me

everywhere, I’m not sure if

it’s gratitude or the prospect

of the next meal. He watches

as I search the texts and scrolls,

seeking the word, the phrase,

the understanding to transform

the Greek into Latin. The Latin

of Virgil led me to the Greek

of Jesus, Greek and Aramaic,

and so it seemed right to bring

Jesus to the Latin. The word

is still the word, even without

a translator. The lion still

roars, with or without

the thorn.

Painting: Saint Jerome in His Study, oil on canvas by Vincenzo Catena (about 1510); National Gallery, London.

Snapshots and Fragments

My earliest memories come from when I was in the vicinity to two-and-a-half- to three-years-old. My family lived in a duplex in suburban New Orleans, a neighborhood called Azalea Gardens. It was solidly middle-class modest, the kind of neighborhood you began on your way to the next economic step up. Most of it is still there.

My father worked for a company that published trade magazines, like “Shrimp Boat” and “Work Boat.” My mother was a housewife; my half-brother (older than I was by almost eight years) was a pain, like all older brothers.

The memories are like snapshots, disconnected photographs, fragments imprinted ona child’s mind.

The elderly couple next door, giving me a square of Kraft’s fudge, sometimes vanilla and some days chocolate.

The washing machine in the garage, with its roller apparatus.

A stash of black licorice on a shelf in the garage; one taste was enough to convince me I didn’t like it.

Wearing my Davy Crockett coonskin hat.

Our dog, a Boston terrier, the one I snuck into the house and then hid when my mother came looking for him. “He’s not in the oven,” I said.

Playing with the boy next door through the fence – he had measles.

My father coming through the front door, home from a business trip, carrying a jack-in-the-box. I learned later that he had searched toy stores all over New York City until he found one.

My mother making root beer floats with vanilla ice cream, in tall glasses with a red-and-green floral design.

I don’t remember the story my mother often told – that I had poured black shoe polish on the fabric soda.

The first family vacation dates from this time – going to Biloxi on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The only thing I can remember about it was the sulfur-tasting water that came from the tap.

Why do I remember jumping from the back of a pickup truck, yelling “Bombs away, Tokyo”? My father was a World War II veteran, serving in the Navy in the Pacific. Perhaps that was the reason, or the desired connection.

While the memories are simple snapshots without a connecting narrative to sustain them, all during this time my attitudes and personality and thought processes were being shaped, molded and directed.  I still don’t like the noise of vacuum cleaners; my mother says the only way she could keep me still was to turn on the vacuum, forcing me to take refuge on the sofa, perhaps the one with the black shoe polish.

These were the early years of my parents’ marriage; I arrived just over a year after they had married. Certain themes were established in these years, family themes, that I would come to understand only much later, when I was older. From the fragments is a mosaic fashioned, and a mosaic discerned.

Over at Tweetspeak Poetry, there’s a discussion going on about Claire Burge’s new book, Spin: Taking Your Creativity to the Nth Degree. In one of the sections for this week’s discussion, she challenges the reader to descrive a childhood experience that especially surreal or dreamlike in its unfolding. I can say what I’ve written here is either surreal or dreamlike, but this is what the challenge brought to mind. Check Tweetspeak Poetry for more discussion. At the time of these memories, I would have been about the age that my oldest grandson is now.

Photograph by Amateur Pic via Public Domain Pictures. Used with Permission.

Literature as National Consensus

This article was first published at The Master's Artist.

For years I regularly haunted used bookstores and book sales. I generally looked in the fiction and poetry sections, but for quite some time I bought books of speeches, speech textbooks, and books about rhetoric and oral communication. This has to do with the fact that for a long time, speech writing was a significant part of my career.

If you visit used bookstores and especially sales of old books, you will inevitably find old textbooks. I found the textbook I had in my senior English class in high school (longer ago than I care to think) and I immediately plunked down a dollar to buy it.

Another textbook find was the 1940 edition of Prose and Poetry of America, originally published in 1934 and edited by H. Ward McGraw. My find was what two additional editors, Julian Maline and William McGucken, described in the preface as the Catholic edition. They were both Jesuit priests, and found in McGraw’s textbook the basis for creating a Catholic version. From the looks of things, they kept most of what McGraw had included, adding only a few additional writers. (They even commended McGraw for being particularly careful to avoid offenses to Catholic students.)

The 1100+-page textbook is divided into seven sections: short stories, poetry, essays, orations, drama, a long essay on literature influenced by journalism, and the novel. It may be the Catholic version, but what it includes is telling: it’s the canon of American literature, circa 1940.

The names are the NAMES of literature. The text includes short stories by Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, O. Henry, Kate Chopin and Joel Chandler Harris, among others. Typical of the poets included are Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Poe, Lanier, Whitman, Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Frost. The orations include Patrick Henry, George Washington, Lincoln and Henry Woodfin Grady (the Atlanta editor who coined the term “The New South” – I did an independent study project on him in college). The novel included is Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables. Throw in some lesser known Catholic writers (except for Bishop Fulton J. Sheen) and you pretty much know the textbook.

In high school some 25 years later, I was studying the same authors, the same poets, the same speeches and the same novel. By that time, the canon had grown a bit to include Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But we still read William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” and Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” There’s no question that what we studied and read reflected a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America. And in that sense it was exclusionary (as my Jesuit editors pointed out).

Even then we understood that literature was far broader than the literary canon, but it did speak to us of what an idea of America was. And the canon with all its warts existed when there was more of a national consensus about the country, its past and future.

One thing those canonical authors did, however, was to give us a national literature. Many of them are no longer taught in schools (Joel Chandler Harris? Vachel Lindsay? SidneyLanier?). You have to go to used bookstores and book sales to find their works, or access some of the online sources. But they gave us our literature and much of our culture.

And they are still wonderful authors, writers and poets to read.

Illustration, top: Kindred Spirits by Asher Durand - painting of the artist and William Cullen Bryant, and the one invariably used to illustrate the poem "Thanatopsis" in school textbooks.

Some Days, Doubt is Normal

I read a devotional blog three times a week. The blogger can sometimes barely manage three posts a week. Sometimes it’s two. Occasionally, it’s none.

The blogger has a husband who’s going through chemotherapy. He has cancer. He’s in his early 30s. They have children.

She maintains an outward smile in her blogs. She’s always trying to be encouraging. She focuses on joyful things, positive things, likely knowing that her husband is reading what she writes.

Sometimes she cracks. And it’s okay. The people who follow her blog, including me, know that it’s okay to crack. She’s shouldering an enormous weight, and sometimes you have to let the smile go and just crack.

Some days she disappears.

She clings to her faith like a life preserver. Some days it’s not enough.

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge says that “in the thick of my own personal darkness, when it seemed that God wasn’t hearing any of my prayers, I really struggled to find any sort of faith in my heart for deliverance.”

Doubt.

Coldness.

Unanswered prayers.

Some days it’s easy to believe what all the celebrity atheists say. Some days it’s easier not to believe.

Faith can be hard.

Faith can be harder than not believing.

We’ve all had those experiences. We might never admit that; some churches can be notoriously non-understanding. We’re supposed to be living the victorious Christian life, which absolutely has no room for depression and doubt.

And yet Jesus had times when he questioned and cried out, times when the pain was overwhelming.

When John the Baptist was killed by Herod.

In the garden of Gethsemane.

On the cross.

I think of my blogging friend, and I can’t begin to approach an understanding of what she’s going through. I read her words, brave words, knowing she must be crumbling, or screaming, on the inside.

Some days, doubt is normal.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. To see more posts on this chapter, “When the Lights Go Out,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

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