Christmas Carol Review

When I walked off the hectic San Francisco streets to watch Disney’s 200 million dollar take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I thought I was in for a slapstick-laced bore. Turn my slightly skeptical mood up to an official “out of place and cynical” level as I grab my chic pair of 3D shades. Donning my new accessory and pulling my hood over my head, I sat back in the nearly empty theater, in for quite an impactful surprise. Perhaps I had forgotten the power—at once disturbing, absorbing (especially in 3D), and inspiring—of Dickens’ familiar tale.

Jim Carrey’s famously expressive acting style brings Ebenezer Scrooge vividly to life as the striking effects render the story almost tangible. I got unmistakably acquainted with the infamous miser, all the way down to the little hairs protruding out of the tip of his nose in his old age, and the pimples of his teenaged complexion during the foray through Christmases past. While this palpable rendition of the holiday canon staple takes liberties in order to literally flesh out the intimate details of the characters and setting, it remains quite true to the original story.

Taking a hairpin turn away from the light family fare that I anticipated based on posters and previews, this film whisks the audience through a tumultuous series of supernatural nightmares designed to rouse Ebenezer Scrooge’s dark and hardened soul. The hauntings trace the crooked alleys of the past (guided by an impish, flickering ghost in the shape of a candle), introduce disturbing truth about the present (with the help of a burly and eerie-yet-jolly hulk of a red-headed ghost), and violently project the horror of what is to come (under the ominous direction of a boney grim reaper, accompanied by hellish red-eyed horses). While all of these well-known plot elements are no surprise, I must confess that in the highest pitches of intensity, I actually closed my eyes once or twice, realizing that twenty years ago, this might have terrified me out of my six-year-old skin.

The icy London winter comes alive with shiver-inducing detail as well, complete with puffs of steam escaping with each breath, slippery ice underfoot, and chilled calluses on Bob Crachit’s fingers as he quills through the hours near a pathetically dying fire under Scrooge’s sharp-nosed and tempered watch.

Creating a convincing depiction of frigid, harsh reality was no stretch for Dickens. Born in 1812, the son of a financially unstable Naval Pay Office clerk, Charles found himself working a grueling factory job at the age of twelve as the rest of his family endured debtor’s prison. Upon the family’s release, Charles’ mother insisted that he continue his work at the factory. Charles’ father finally released him from his miserable occupation and sent him back to school at the age of fifteen, but the experience inflicted a dark scar that Charles quietly carried for the rest of his life. He rarely spoke of this suffering or the sense of betrayal at the hands of his mother, yet his writing lets on, through knowing and empathetic detail, to the indelible imprint it left upon him.

The story of Scrooge and that of Dickens’ own childhood highlight the human yearning and need for generosity and togetherness, unified against the toils of winter, and of life. Transforming a spirit of isolation and “humbug” into one of “goodwill to men” and Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one,” is an age-old endeavor.

The practice of coming together for hope and warmth in the coldest season dates back thousands of years. For ancient pagans, winter was marked with the Yule festival, celebrated around an open fire (presumably without chestnuts). For the Romans, the rowdy festival of Saturnalia included familiar elements like decorative holly and an inkling of “goodwill to men.” Then Pope Julius in 320 AD transformed Saturnalia from a celebration of the invincible sun god, Mithras, to the Feast of Christmas in celebration of the invincible Son, Jesus. The Pope knew he couldn’t stop the Romans from observing this festival, but he could appropriate it.

Such mixed history behind the December celebration of Christ’s birth incited controversy that far predates the political-correctness debates that surround our current holiday greetings and festivities. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas. In Boston, from the years 1659-1681, anyone caught celebrating Christmas was fined five shillings. The Puritan disdain landed upon multiple facets of Christmas: the name’s Roman Catholic root (mass of Christ), the date of the celebration (not the true day of Jesus’ birth), and the nature of the festivities (Puritans weren’t much for feasting, drinking, or wassailing as it turns out). Scrooge might have thought the Puritans quite sensible.

Even after the ban was lifted, negative connotations lingered around Christmas. The 1843 release of A Christmas Carol played no small role in a sort of holiday re-branding campaign, emphasizing family, goodwill, and compassion. Bound with determination to publish promptly, Dickens wrote the novel in just six weeks’ time and funded the expensive illustrations himself. Though it instantly grew to popularity, the high production cost kept monetary profit minimal. But the influence of the story helped to coax the celebration of Christmas out of the shadows of Puritan disapproval. The new face of Christmas embraced merrymaking, family love, the delights of home, and taking the time to look at strangers as “fellow travelers to the grave” with whom we share the tempestuous human experience. These are the cherished traditions that we continue to associate with Christ’s birth.

…So after a tempestuous night indeed, Scrooge awakens in his bed on Christmas morning to find himself alive with a second chance. In light of his nocturnal realizations, he sees the treasure in his possession. He leaps from his bed into a jig that channels the beloved over-the- top Jim Carrey charm, slides down the banister, swings his housekeeper in a reeling circle of a dance (which sends her shrieking away thinking he has gone mad), and sends the prized turkey to the needy Crachit family.

The retelling of this yuletide favorite provides a renewed invitation by Dickens (to Ebenezer and the rest of us) to be people who know how to keep Christmas well. Merry Christmas!

 

I Dream of MUNI?

Last Friday night, I accomplished quite a lot…an incredible half-marathon-night’s sleep after which I found myself at La Boulange over a vat of a latte recalling with sharp clarity some of the unconscious meanderings of my mind.

Somewhere amid the cycle of REMs, I found myself on some sort of sailing vessel in the San Francisco Bay watching a commuter ferry shuttling a batch of people away from the city after a day’s work. As the boat, packed with blasé-expressioned nine-to-fivers, neared a bridge (which according to my calculations must not be really the Bay Bridge or the Golden Gate since the ferry seemed not to be able to simply pass below its lower reaches, which leads me to wonder if my bridge was very low or ferry boat very tall), it became engaged with a system of pulleys that dropped down from the top of the bridge. For the sake of the passengers, let’s just hope that the bridge was in fact somewhat lower than average.

But I digress…so the cable-pulley contraption secured to the front of the boat and proceeded to hoist it up onto the bridge so that the bow pointed straight into the sky. I stared in disbelief as I watched travelers tripping over one another and their belongings as elderly, pregnant, and all, they jumbled on top of each other as the once-side of the boat became the floor and vice versa.

The spectacle was not yet at its worst. Instead of gently setting the boat down on the other side of the bridge, the pulleys placed the boat into another piece of machinery something akin to a giant catapult and gave the sorry vessel an undignified shove to send it tumbling over the other side.

Truly aghast at this point, I gaped in dumbfounded shock as the grey mass careened and flopped its way through at least two somersaults (inducing all kinds of adverse effects to its passengers as you might expect from such a mess of gravitational experiences). I turned to some companions (whose faces have blurred into the anonymity of dream-fog) and exclaimed in horror. The thing that struck me was that none of my fellow witnesses wore evidence of any surprise or concern. They just sort of sighed, nodded and went about their way with a resigned sort of annoyance at the run of the mill plight of the commuter.

From the distance to the now still and settled ferry, I saw the somewhat discombobulated and mildly frazzled people fussing with their belongings and fixing their out of place hairs in the most routine sort of way. (I think nobody was worse for the wear aside from a few getting sick over the side, an assortment of bruises, and a few lost personal effects.)

And that is where the strange mental screenplay ended as I woke up for a moment.

Perhaps it was the enormous cup of coffee at 11am that got me going, but I began to dig back to try to unearth the sources of these ideas. I find it an amusing thing to follow the bizarre but creatively insightful path traveled by dream logic from time to time. Here are the sources I deduced:

#1 Before going to sleep, I finished reading C.S. Lewis’ fantasy book, Out of the Silent Planet, which vividly depicts the adventures and misadventures of Dr. Ransom and his dubious companions through “space” to “Malecandra” and back in a decidedly rickety ship. A brief excerpt:

“It was as if the metal chamber in which he found himself was being bombarded with small, tinkling missiles. Random was now thoroughly frightened—not with the prosaic fright that a man suffers in war, but with a heady, bounding kind of fear…he was poised on a sort of emotional watershed from which, he felt, he might at any moment pass into delirious terror or an ecstasy of joy. He knew now that he was not in a house, but in some moving vessel. It was clearly not a submarine; and the infinitesimal quivering of the metal did not suggest the motion of any wheeled vehicle. A ship then, he supposed, or some kind of airship…(23)”

#2 A ride home from work on the 41 MUNI bus (on Friday, December 4^th), packed like a sardine can, resonating with the recurrent loudspeaker announcement warning that, “service changes on more than half of MUNI’s bus routes and one rail line will take effect on Saturday, December 5.”  Just what we want from the madness of the clanking, confusing city buses is a shake-up of the routes to keep things exciting…nothing like talk of a “sweeping overhaul” to conjure images of acrobatic ferries (or broken, swinging cables on the bay bridge to suggest a commuter catapulting system…perhaps they can try that next if the bridge repair thing gets old).

Maybe I should switch careers. I think I am a natural at this civil engineering stuff. I’d better get to sleep to keep dreaming up new ways of getting around.

 

A Present Nostalgia?

In the nostalgic reflections of an elderly person recounting the adventures and misadventures of their youth, there comes a safely rosy tint of quaintness projected by the safety and security – a product if knowing how it comes out in the end…here (for instance) in the arm chair, recounting a thrilling tale to an enraptured youngster. The untouchable confidence of having read the last page first makes the terrors into thrills, heartbreaks into inspirations, and failures into forgettable bumps, fading in the rear-view mirror.

How easy it is to begin to long for the simplicity or stability of a time passed as we face the necessary uncertainty of the tumultuous present moments. We grope our way into the shadow of a future looming large with any and everything – every permutation, place, and experience (most of which will never occur, we will never be, and will never exist). But has not the present always taken this trying and exhilarating form: sometimes pointed and sometimes amorphously foggy?

As simple actors in the “Big S Story” being ever-woven by the Author and Creator, the truth is that we have seen the last pages of the script (even parts of the epilogue) revealing broad strokes of the epic that is in progress and what parts we are to play within the drama-stranger-than-fiction.

Yet in every scene, interchange, and intermission, it feels impossible not to wonder “What does my part matter in this story?” or “Why must I stumble around this darkly lit stage?” or “What sense can be in this hectic  and tragic ensemble? How do these mundane in-between moments, uninspired costumes, and disparate props coalesce?”

Our actor’s angst makes us bored in sameness and waiting, yet insecure in dynamic flux or spotlight moments when we are called upon to speak our lines. We cannot see or grasp how our piece fits in although we think that we ought to. How humbling to find that is task enough to keep straight the next place for the right foot as not to get lost in the dance. What dedication it requires to train our little vocal chords not to squeak on the climactic high note, or our fingers not to flounder and shake in the midst of the run that blends the woodwinds’ harmony into the key change? What great moments these (it seems) will someday make, from hindsight.

My wondering: is the confidence and stability that warms nostalgic thoughts available in an even more brilliant and resonant quality when applied to the aliveness of the present? Could not these moments take on these qualities as we realize that they are the playing out of the most glorious epic ever to be told…one to which we have been whispered the “ever after”?

 

 

The Odyssey Years (a NY Times Op-Ed)

By David Brooks

There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood.
During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.
Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don’t even detect a clear sense of direction in their children’s lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed.
They see that people in this age bracket are delaying marriage. They’re delaying having children. They’re delaying permanent employment. People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.
In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.
Yet with a little imagination it’s possible even for baby boomers to understand what it’s like to be in the middle of the odyssey years. It’s possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions.
Two of the country’s best social scientists have been trying to understand this new life phase. William Galston of the Brookings Institution has recently completed a research project for the Hewlett Foundation. Robert Wuthnow of Princeton has just published a tremendously valuable book, “After the Baby Boomers” that looks at young adulthood through the prism of religious practice.
Through their work, you can see the spirit of fluidity that now characterizes this stage. Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.
Dating gives way to Facebook and hooking up. Marriage gives way to cohabitation. Church attendance gives way to spiritual longing. Newspaper reading gives way to blogging. (In 1970, 49 percent of adults in their 20s read a daily paper; now it’s at 21 percent.)
The job market is fluid. Graduating seniors don’t find corporations offering them jobs that will guide them all the way to retirement. Instead they find a vast menu of information economy options, few of which they have heard of or prepared for.
Social life is fluid. There’s been a shift in the balance of power between the genders. Thirty-six percent of female workers in their 20s now have a college degree, compared with 23 percent of male workers. Male wages have stagnated over the past decades, while female wages have risen.
This has fundamentally scrambled the courtship rituals and decreased the pressure to get married. Educated women can get many of the things they want (income, status, identity) without marriage, while they find it harder (or, if they’re working-class, next to impossible) to find a suitably accomplished mate.
The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives.
Rather, what we’re seeing is the creation of a new life phase, just as adolescence came into being a century ago. It’s a phase in which some social institutions flourish — knitting circles, Teach for America — while others — churches, political parties — have trouble establishing ties.
But there is every reason to think this phase will grow more pronounced in the coming years. European nations are traveling this route ahead of us, Galston notes. Europeans delay marriage even longer than we do and spend even more years shifting between the job market and higher education.
And as the new generational structure solidifies, social and economic entrepreneurs will create new rites and institutions. Someday people will look back and wonder at the vast social changes wrought by the emerging social group that saw their situations first captured by “Friends” and later by “Knocked Up.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/opinion/09brooks.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

 

Think About These Things

 ⁸Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

 

A Time Between

Abruptly still, the quiet early
Falls to find my body weary
Emptied of the day’s companions
Comings, goings, thoughts, distractions

In between of sleep and hurry
None to enter, flight or flurry,
Lay these strangest interludes
Too big to miss, ignore, refuse

Hard to know, still yet to say
How in this place to find a way
Without a force, design, or strain
To be, release, abide, remain

When talk and action, work and book
Repel another worn-out look
So here it is Lord, you and me
How now I seek your company

And guiding, lively breath and touch
To soul and skin that long so much
And blind, yet grateful, now I see
How here, alone, you hold me free.

 

Flight Thoughts

My thoughts took off along with the plane as I headed back to SF from a weekend visit to SD. At one time, I would have convinced myself to muzzle the ponderings before they emerged thinking it silly to gaze out the window and find an exultant reaction, set off with a spark of triumphant energy, as I surveyed the jutting angle of the wing slicing into the expansive blue backdrop. I just couldn’t help but see the flashing bursts of sunlight sparkling and shimmering on the dynamic liquid fabric of the ocean as something that I might indulge myself to call aloud a “sparkle show” more entertaining than any movie, if I were speaking to a young child—but I spoke it silently (without the move of a muscle) since I addressed only my 26 ½ year-old self, still with a strange internal blushing. The branching patterns on the ocean shifted into “roots” that looked like they might at any moment sprout a flowering bloom in who knows what direction, in who knows what radiant color. Maybe the motion and activity I watched was a result of the light or the angle of my view.

Were I to obey the training of my environs and the sneering preference of the wrong sort of “sophisticated” company, I would quickly dispose of the marvel and flatten my reflection into the realm of “how” and “what” precisely I observed. I might be compelled to throw away all the silly fancy and thrill that played out across the stage of my mind, sacrificing these to the mechanical principles at play: the devices of the plane, the behavior of the light waves, the voice of the flight attendant requesting that we give the drink menu a once over so that we might be prepared to offer a speedy order for a complimentary soft drink or a beer, wine, cocktail, or low-carb Monster Energy Drink for a small charge to be collected via certificate or credit card…cash no longer accepted.

But I am more and more convinced that the materialist tunnel vision that would deprive me of my flight musings, and all humanity of its innate (if latent) sense of wonder, is unnecessarily deprived—flat out wrong. The truth is that the human spirit once longed to soar into the great expanse of the sky, and now we can. They seek to deny a dimension of experience that is an enduring and transcendent part of what makes us unique and invaluable.

After takeoff I began into Woodrow Wilson’s Essay “On Being Human” where I discovered a gem of a poem from William Wordsworth that described so truly…

“The joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things.”

 

With Love for Aunt Jackie

I count myself blessed by the moments I got to share with my aunt Jackie. I sit here in a moment of quiet and solitude finally and find that my mind and heart are spinning with impressions, sounds, texture, and beauty that mingle together to form what it is that I knew of Jackie. She knew me before I knew her. I just learned that she was there with my mom the night she learned that I was on my way.

The vividness of the sound of her laugh, the image of her sitting atop a New Mexico mesa, blending in artistically yet easily with the big sky and red earth scape, makes it strange to know that we said goodbye to her on Friday afternoon.

Jackie always had an insightful mind, deep faith, and a unique aesthetic – an affinity for the garden and the city – from the colors of Santa Fe to the urban landmark of Grace Cathedral. Her spirit somehow fit with equal grace into all of these places.

I know that Jackie has always been a powerful presence in my “corner,” beginning long before I could know it. I owe her thanks for the comfort and grounding she provided my mom through the trials and joys of my earliest days. And, up to the last days of her life, she was looking out for me – as her body failed her, she tracked the story of my roller-coaster with concern and hope. I flatter myself to think that there was something kindred between us, and that she was cheering me on from a place deep identification.

We are once and always woven together by The One who knit each of us together from the first – yet she will be missed by the rest of us still on this side – enduring the half-light. We know her joy is now complete – and are privileged to be part of the eternal fabric that keeps our fail-safe connection. I think of her with all my love. She dwells in my thoughts.

 

A Slice of Ordinary

Perhaps this is one of those developmental corners that I have rounded, nothing more than the next step in the journey that has uncovered a number of (at the time shocking) facts such as: Santa’s true identity; mom and dad’s fallible human nature; how much of the paycheck we don’t get to keep. Whatever the case, I feel compelled to take notice of the extremely ‘unordinary’ nature of my long-held concept of ordinariness.

Maybe what I am calling ordinary would be more accurately characterized as the state of things that I spent a long time taking for granted—a foundation of unconditional love and purpose, the kind of joyful accountability that comes from the realization that what I do matters deeply with regards to my own integrity and to the people in my life, and a network of people who “throw in together” to ride out the roller coaster that life invariably takes us on.

These backdrop elements have a funny way of seeming like air from a childhood perspective—as simple facts of the universe that inhabit the same category as gravity. Give that a few years and step into the teenage phase when the structure, demands, and limits that this horizon defines; the response becomes exasperation fueled in part by a desire to define over and against the givens and, perhaps, in another part by a vague and grandiose concept of what kind of astronomically “anything but ordinary” life is the best one to achieve.

I remember drawing a picture once of what I had in mind for the future. I took pastels to a piece of paper and ended up with an amorphous landscape of colored, floating clouds topped by a skyline of lilac-colored, onion-top towers. There was nothing particular, nothing known, simply a desire to transcend above and beyond even what I was able to imagine (let alone desiring anything that resembled the ‘mundane’ things I had encountered in the all-too-drab realm of experience and reality).

Now I am the last person to put down thinking expansively and dreaming boldly, but there is a world of things wrong with the looming expectations that I could not even express in pastels. In fact – the picture I drew is akin to a black hole that sucks the light, energy, enjoyment and depth out of the layers of real life—past, present, and future. It is simply a recipe for dissatisfaction that incites a constant state of restlessness and a losing battle against the realities of life. It is a prod to run away that allows for no satisfying destination – it is a guarantee that no place, no person, and no-thing will ever measure up. It is limitless, tantalizing, “anti-ordinary,” and hellacious. It is a drug of sorts with an antidote that has come to me through the good old-fashioned school of hard knocks: humility.

I don’t know about anybody else’s experience, but my arrogance-laced, ungrounded, boundless hopes have gotten me about as far as a hamster gets in its wheel—exhausted and thirsty. Thirsty for…what can it be…all the things that I once saw as plain, tap water, vanilla, ordinary. What I now see is that they are effort-ful, good, and more precious and rare than gemstones. It is funny to walk around this bend of the path and discover, from this hard-won vista point that what I seek with the utmost that I have, might be called a simple slice of ordinary.

 

Imitation, Faith, and Love

A particular challenge has been a fixture at the forefront of my mind recently, not to be moved until I paid it honest attention. The allegation of sorts is “of course you believe in Jesus and follow the Christian (Presbyterian no less) faith—you were raised in that environment.” It’s as if the fact that this expression of faith cannot be valid because it was stamped onto me like a blank sheet of paper. How can I, as an intellectually curious and honest person, act so much like an apple falling under the shade of the tree that grew me?

A few thoughts that may seem to be disparate came together before me today and gave me a glimpse of Truth that I hope I can capture at least in part in words. The first thought is about imitation; the second about love, and the combination of the two leads me to an inkling about truth.

Jer broached the topic of imitation tonight in his talk – what do we imitate and why? He reflected that his only child, Ava, is in the midst of an intensively imitative stage – to his delight, and sometimes apprehension. What struck me most was his description of he and his wife lavish and pour “reservoirs of love” into their child. This love that two parents direct toward an only child is the closest analogy hinted at by the language used to describe the nature of God’s love for each of us. As she experiences love and steadfastness, she will imitate these things as she finds herself standing upon a solid sense of her own beloved-ness.

Jer’s description hit home with me in a direct way – as I am the only child of a Presbyterian minister myself. So in his eloquently and tenderly described scenario I am the Ava – the recipient of the most unconditional and faithful love that I can imagine from a set of parents. This experience for me is so fundamental and assumed that I can hardly even see it – it has long been too close for me to appreciate or understand, perhaps because vision necessitates space and separateness. This could explain why I needed to see an external example to reach a pin-prick of clarity.

Ava, in her comfort and curiosity, imitates Jaci and Jer just as I imitated (and in some ways still imitate) my parents out of my trust and regard for them. Their lives have provided constant reminders and expressions of love that spring from the fact that they have been about the business of imitating Christ. I have had an embodied experience that reflects the kind of love that represents who God is. I have been surrounded by the evidence of the life-giving, positive, and powerful consequences of faith in the lives of my closest family members. I have consistently seen with my own eyes, and felt with my own heart, the results of people letting Christ become their center and source of life and love. I know, in my bones, what starts to transpire when two people imitate Christ in an inside-out kind of way – how they love, what purpose they strive for, and why who they are becoming and what they do matters, every minute of every day. It occurs to me that such an in-depth, intimate experience makes the underlying premise and source not more suspect, but more real, more tried, and more compelling. Christ said that his followers would be known by their love for one another. If there is one thing I know, it is the experience of being loved. Perhaps it is through this love that I know Him best.