I’ve always been very proud of my two boys. Just lately, I’ve found even more reasons to be so. My youngest, Joe, spent all day with me on Wednesday at the rescue mission in Nampa, helping me with paperwork and redesigning some forms. After that, we went over to volunteer for the huge Thanksgiving feast at the First Church of the Nazarene. We stood outside in fairly cold weather for almost four hours, unpacking boxes and then stacking the contents on the sidewalk.

They feed somewhere around 3000 people annually at this event. Anyone who shows up is given the opportunity to pick up a food box, and they’ve got the distribution part down to a science. It’s basically a drive through, and cars go past the sidewalk while volunteers put the boxes in the trunks. I supposed it might have been a little disillusioning when it seemed that half the vehicles in the line were a lot nicer than what we drive, but there were enough very appreciative people who made us realize that at least some good was getting done that day.

Anyway, the Christian school that Joe attends requires him to put in 10 hours of community service every semester. I remember doing community service myself when I was in high school (painting racquetball courts at the YMCA), but that was “alternative sentencing” and another story altogether! Joe had already spent five hours helping at the harvest party in October, but apparently, it didn’t count. Even though it is intended to be a community outreach event, it was sponsored by our church, so it didn’t fit the school requirements. All of that it just to say that I never heard a word of complaint from Joe about having to start over. He jumped in with both feet and volunteered again. More reasons to be proud.

My oldest, Max, who is a freshman this year at Boise State, was getting frustrated because his ’76 MG would never pass the emissions test. Maybe that’s not too surprising given its vintage. What made it worse, though, is that no one in town would agree to work on it. The guys at one shop didn’t have a clue what Max was asking them to do to his car. We finally did find one guy, but even after he got done, the MG still would not pass.

Max has a wooden plaque on his wall that says, “It can’t be that hard!” It’s a phrase he used to say all the time (still does, in fact). He decided to take matters into his own hands and fix it himself. Personally, I wouldn’t recognize carburetor jets if they bit me, but he ran down to the VW auto parts place and got a couple of them that were a smaller size (the fuel mixture had been too rich). OK, it didn’t hurt that the guy down the block was a mechanic and he was looking over his shoulder a little, but Max gets points for even daring to touch the carb when no one else seemed willing to. Apparently, it wasn’t that hard, after all, at least for him. The MG passed with flying colors. More reasons to be proud.

Writer's Block

Somehow I’ve managed to put off writing this book not just for weeks, not just for months, but literally for years. I have outlines for it that will turn five early in 2009. At the moment, I’m sitting in a coffee shop trying to make an anagram out of The Brothers Karmazov as a way to avoid figuring out why I have yet to commit pen to paper.

I can remember the exact moment the idea first came to me. I was standing in a checkout line before Easter one spring day, and I saw all the videos they had on the rack of Biblical films: The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Story Ever Told, etc. It struck me that, since I was on the faculty of a Bible college, I ought to teach a class that simply put those films in chronological order, to see what they might have to say by way of understanding the Scriptures a little more deeply.

What followed was a massive amount of research. I’ve got entire file boxes full of books, articles, and photocopies all related to the Bible on film. I guess it’s one of the things I’ve always been good at. I applied for the Westinghouse scholarship when I was in high school and I did the same thing. I ended up with extensive notes that went all the way back to the turn of the century, but not a single experiment by the time I was done. It happened again this year when I was looking up information on a high-frequency antenna for ham radio, and I convinced myself I should seek a patent. All I have to show for it now is a binder full of articles, but not one single prototype.

These experiences should probably tell me something but I’m still not quite sure what. I’ve thought that maybe it means my real calling is to become a librarian, and that way I’d be able to do research all the time (supposedly), but it just doesn’t seem to be the right fit for me.

More to the point, I seem to have “blockage” somewhere, sort of like a clogged artery. I was thinking that I can’t convince myself anyone would want to read what I write. But it’s worse than that – I’ve got myself completely convinced that no one ever would. Thus, no book.

Even more amazing is the fact that I have so many new tools at my disposal now. I’ve got a voice recorder much smaller than the palm of my hand, and I can play it back into a program that will instantly transcribe my words. I’ve got other software that will read back to me any text in an amazingly realistic human-sounding voice. The speed at which I can do online research now, and the databases I can access, was only a geek’s daydream when I first taught the Bible on film class. So what’s the problem?

Are there too many words out there already? Would the world really be a better place with one more book?

As far as the anagram goes, the best I could come up with is: Mark Voz Bothers Her Rat. Well, I’m bothered, too, I must say. I’ve got a bad case of writer’s block.

The other night, I sat down and watched the Marx Brothers in Go West. It’s one of those that I very rarely see – I usually go for Monkey Business or Duck Soup first. It was definitely good for a laugh (I knew there was a reason why I got the entire collection on DVD), but maybe it wasn’t quite as funny as some of the better known films. I owe a lot to the Marx Brothers, by the way. The week we moved to Tacoma (right in the middle of seventh grade) and I had to adjust to a new school, they were having a film fest on public TV. It was the first time I’d seen them and they helped me laugh at a time when I didn’t feel much like it.

Nat Perrin made some interesting observations about Go West in an interview once. Perrin contributed countless jokes to the Marx Brothers over the years, particularly for Groucho. In later years, he was the one who produced The Addams Family on TV. He said, “After [Irving] Thalberg died the people who produced other features for the team thought that because the Marxes were zany comedians that anything goes. Without that strong hand, you had three comedians who paid very little attention to the story line.” Thus Go West, even though it kept to the same formula as Monkey Business, was not nearly as hysterical nor as memorable.

I know there’s a moral there somewhere. Another name that I always associate with my junior high years is Kurt Vonnegut. One of the characters in his novel The Sirens of Titan summed up his existence by saying he was “a victim of a series of accidents. As are we all.” Vonnegut’s absurdist outlook had a certain appeal when I was 13 years old, and certainly Groucho’s did, too. Now, not so much. I find at this point in life I’m at least trying to pay more attention to the story line. The idea that there really is a plot underneath it all, and that it’s not just a series of unrelated sketches (no matter how funny) is what gives me hope.

Thank You, Nampa Police!

It seems as if there’s never a dull moment at a rescue mission, as I’ve said before. Yesterday, right after I got there, we heard yelling down the hall, and I mean, it was someone screaming at the top of their lungs. We started for the door but just as we did, a female police officer warned everybody to get back. One of the guys caught a glimpse of someone who had been forced down to the floor, and half a dozen cops had surrounded him, with guns drawn, as I understand.

It turns out the man was Pete Roberts, who was wanted for the murder of Bob and Idella Young five years ago. I remember the headlines: it was particularly grisly, and the elderly couple was well loved by the community, and especially by their church. Everyone was glad to hear they had finally made an arrest. My friend Roger even got his approximately 12 seconds of fame in front of the TV news crews, as he described how the suspect had run into the mission looking for a place to hide.

Of course, all of the excitement around the place pales in comparison with the sense that there may finally be justice done in this case. Cops tend to be under-appreciated for the most part, in my opinion. I got a verbal warning the other day for improperly changing lanes, and I wasn’t too happy about it at the time. This situation, though, reminds me that we owe them a lot more than we’re usually willing to admit.

Science and the Spiritual Quest

I just started teaching another class in Eastern Religions last night, and in my introductory essay I mention the following story. A few years ago, there was a conference in New York called “Science and the Spiritual Quest” during which evidence was presented that the awareness of a Creator may actually be innate to human beings.

A certain Professor Petrovich tested British and Japanese children to see if they would be able to tell the difference between physical and metaphysical explanations. In one experiment, she showed the children (between 4 and 14 years of age) a picture of a book on a table, and asked who put it there. “Mom!” came the answer. A picture of the sun followed, along with the question “Who placed the sun in the sky?” The British kids said “God.” Interestingly, so did the Japanese kids: “Kamisama [God]! He did it!”

Petrovich observed, “Japanese culture discourages speculation into the metaphysical because that’s something we never know. But the Japanese children did speculate, quite willingly, and in the same way as British children.” A former UPI religion correspondent, in writing about this conference, rightly points out that the Apostle Paul was way ahead of his time when he said “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

A similar experiment was conducted with both groups of kids. They were shown a photo of a dog and asked, “How did the first dog ever come into being.” Once again, both groups said, “God did it.” In an interview, Petrovich said, “My Japanese research assistants kept telling me that thinking about God as creator is just not part of Japanese philosophy.”

I find this fascinating but I suppose there’s no reason to be surprised. We do have a conscience, in fact, everybody does. And it tells us that the universe didn’t just happen, and that we’re not an accident. For years, I’ve been meaning to get around to reading The Spiritual Life of Children by Robert Coles. I suppose I should finally get around to reading it.

Grave Matters

“Epitaph” literally means “over a tomb,” and if nothing else, reading them does tend to give us pause. Some of them were unintentionally funny:

She lived with her husband fifty years
And died in the confident hope of a better life

Here lies Peter Montgomery,
who was accidentally shot in his thirtieth year.
This monument was erected by grateful relatives.

Here lies the body of the Reverend T, Henry, M.A.,
who long labored as a Christian missionary amongst the Rajputs.
He was shot by his houseboy.
At the bottom, it read:
“Well done, good and faithful servant.”

A famous musical composer, it is said, had the following inscribed as his epitaph:

He has gone to the only place
Where his own works are excelled

And then there was pyrotechnics manufacturer who apparently had led a less than saintly life, and his read:

Erected by his spouse, to the memory of
A.B., maker of fireworks.
He has gone to the only place where
His own works are excelled.

A cemetery in Indiana has a century old tombstone with this inscription:

Pause, stranger, when you pass me by:
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you will be.
So prepare for death and follow me.

Someone came along and scratched a post-script on the bottom:

To follow you I’m not content,
Until I know which way you went.

As far as I know, every culture, in every place in the world, during every period of history, has held out hope of life beyond this one. The sentiments expressed by the epitaphs are one indication, of course, but the fact that they felt a need to even put up some sort of monument in the first place is also significant. What does that say but life must have had a meaning, and that meaning must go beyond the brief length of years spent upon this earth?

I’ve always liked this one:

Here I take my final rest
Beneath this tombstone wall.
Say that I tried my best and
Was your friend, that’s all.

Life is in the Blood

I’m preaching on Sunday on John 6, about Jesus’ claim to be the “bread of life.” In the sermon, I’m going to discuss His unforgettable words in the latter part of the chapter, in verse 54: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”

Jesus spoke in very graphic terms of eating His flesh and drinking His blood. To say that was shocking would be an understatement. Human flesh was not exactly considered kosher! Consuming blood, any blood, was absolutely forbidden according to Mosaic Law. Leviticus 17:11 says “Life…is in the blood…It is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.”

Some of you may recognize the name Anne Rice, one of the most popular novelists in recent times. She is perhaps most famous for a series of books on vampires and other supernatural characters. Her books have sold more than 75 million copies. She wrote her first novel in 1976, called Interview with the Vampire, and it has sold more than 8 million copies all by itself.

Her fans were stunned when, in 1998, she announced that she had abandoned atheism and was now returning to her Catholic roots. Not only that, but she also refused to write anymore about the “living dead.” "I would never go back, not even if they say, 'You will be financially ruined; you've got to write another vampire book.' I would say no. I have no choice. I would be a fool for all eternity to turn my back on God like that."

What Rice finally came to realize was that the novels she had been writing had essentially been metaphors for her own life. And it had certainly not been an easy one, either. When she was just 14, her mother died from alcoholism. Anne and her husband had a daughter together, but she died of leukemia when she was only 5. That may explain why she turned her back on God, and this was reflected in her writing. Undead characters, obsessed with the darkness, wandering about in a world with no hope and no God, literally sucking the life out of their innocent victims.

One of the most powerful motivators for her turnaround, according to her interview, was a desperate longing for communion. She most needed the body and blood of Jesus. "The Lord came looking for me," she remembers. "Everywhere I turned, I found images of the Lord and His love." I’ve never read any of her other novels, by the way, but I’ve started to read her fictionalized account of the life of Christ. Since her change of heart, she has actually become quite a scholar of the New Testament.

If you read John carefully, you may find indications that he assumed his readers were already familiar with Matthew, Mark, and Luke. If that’s the case, it may make sense why there’s one scene that we never find in his version. There’s no Last Supper! But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t told us something very important about what that supper meant. Our greatest need is to feast, spiritually, on the flesh and blood of Christ, as pictured here in this passage. Life truly is in the blood.