RC Gale

People are in the house and loud music is playing, people are laughing, telling jokes and stories about the day. Suddenly the door opens. It’s a young guy and he yells, “Everybody listen up. There have been noise complaints.” And he pauses for dramatic effect, “Because you guys aren’t making enough noise.” And then he rips off his clothes and starts dancing. And everyone is looking at him.

When he notices that no one is laughing at his joke he asks, “Don’t you get it?” And someone says, “No, that doesn’t even make sense.” And he says, “You know, it’s a line from that one movie where the strippers dressed like cops show up and they pretend like there’s a noise complaint and no one knows they’re strippers until they say ‘Because you guys aren’t making enough noise,’ and they start stripping.” And someone says, “But the joke only works if you’re wearing a cop outfit. The strippers are wearing cop outfits and that’s why it’s funny because everyone thinks they’re cops when they really aren’t.” And the guy says, “Yeah, they’re wearing cop outfits.” And they all laugh at him because he forgot the most important part of the joke. That’s it’s not really what you say. It’s what you wear.

But if we all walked around wearing one thousand dollar suits not saying anything to each other then it’s not what you wear but what you say. So I guess what you say and what you wear have to go together. But it’s not even about what you wear because eventually the strippers just took off the outfits, really what mattered was that they stripped. Then it matters what you do. Because if the strippers said all there lines and then didn’t strip the joke wouldn’t have worked either. I guess when I hear myself say how much I love Jesus and then act in a way that someone in love with someone doesn’t act, it’s as if I’m just one giant joke without the punch line.

The weather man predicts 97 degrees of uninhibited heat. Which means I’ve stocked up on as much SPF 75 sunblock as is sold in the state of Oregon. Be careful out there fellow Oregonians. The sun is not our friend. It is an evil regime attempting to grow cancer causing cells on your pale and precious skin. It’s chemical warfare at its ugliest. I’m going into hiding for a few months. I might not be back until December when the sun is at its furthest point from the earth. Good luck.

This is my new comic series that is about the awkward conversations I’ve had online, re-enacted as if they happened in a bar.

This is my new comic series that is about the awkward conversations I’ve had online, re-enacted as if they happened in a bar.

When I was a kid we had a black lab named Coach whom I wanted to be a sled dog because I’d just watched the Disney movie Iron Will for the 30th time. He never became a sled dog because it never snowed and because The Pound came and took him away and sent him to heaven. He was chasing cattle. I guess that’s a big deal or something. 

Update: My father told me chasing cattle in that county is a capital offense.

Franz Wright’s essay “Language as Sacrament in the New Testament” in Image Journal discusses Wright’s endeavor into meditating on the words of Christ. He found that Christ was a poet too:

 Jesus did speak this way [a powerful and profound way], in poetry—and here is something truly weird: according to the great German Protestant theologian Joachim Jeremias, when Jesus’s sayings are translated back into Aramaic, it’s clear that he favored a certain four-beat rhythm, and that he was especially fond of alliteration and assonance as well as rhyme!

But I guess this shouldn’t surprise us. That Jesus would be a Poet like his father(s).

Links:

Listen to Rick McKinley’s sermon on David being with God.

Second Grader: I love to read.

Me: What’s your most favorite book ever?

Second Grader: I love to read Scooby Doo and watch the movies.

Me: I love Scooby Doo! Did you ever see the one where the gang goes to that one scary place and they see that one scary monster and then they catch the monster and it ends up being the owner of the place trying to scare them off?

Second Grader: Hmmm…Yes. I liked that one.

Me: Yeah, that one’s my favorite.

I remember a John Eldredge piece (I think from Wild at Heart) discussing the average Christian man as weak. He said look around your churches today and the majority of men in them are weak men. I don’t know how to change my car’s oil. I couldn’t hammer a nail with a nail gun. I don’t fish. I won’t buy the tool sets, the big trucks, or the chain saws. But I don’t think that’s what Eldredge was getting at.

We do have this stereotype of the average American male as an idiot. Evidence here (commercial with Dwight Schrute), here, here, and here.

Actually, I think we underestimate the average male. I think we’ve relegated the laymen to the margins and have lowered our expectations so low that we expect next to nothing, save they’re present on Sunday. I also think we’re dropping the ball in building men up into men who take the kingdom of God by force. Matthew Raley, in a recent post, speaks of the men we thought we knew. I think he’s right on.

When we don’t underestimate the average guy, when we’re able to disciple them, encourage them, and guide them we become a Church that’s willing to think deep about difficult subjects, that wants to go beyond the surface, that challenges and questions. That leads us to Scripture. That leads us to poetry.

As the Warrior, Poet, and King wrote, “Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust…”

The summer of ‘99 I was in Boston for two weeks of hockey camps and a week of touring. I was traveling with my friend and his father and one sunny morning we boarded a ferry out to an island I’d never heard of. We walked along the shore and played in the Atlantic Ocean. My friend’s father noted the unusual presence of newscasters and helicopters headed towards the opposite side of the island. 

That evening we heard on the news that John F. Kennedy Jr. had died when his plane crashed into the ocean on his way to Martha’s Vineyard. It’s believed that JFK Jr. plunged into a graveyard spiral where he was unable to determine up from down. He lost sight of the horizon.

In Franz Wright’s poem “Walking to Martha’s Vineyard” it’s the “horizontal light” that guides the movement.

And the ocean smells like lilacs in late August–how
     is that.

 The light there muted (silver) as remembered light,
 

Do you have any children?

No, lucky for them.

 
Bad things happen when you get hands, dolphin.

 
Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing?

 
There is no down or up in space or in the womb.

 
If they’d stabbed me to death on the day I was born, it
     would have been an act of mercy.

 
Like the light the last room, the windowless room at the
     end, must look out on. Gold-tinged, blue

 
vapor trail breaking up now like the white line you see,
     after driving all day, when your eyes close;

 
vapor trail breaking up now between huge clouds resembling
     a kind of Mount Rushmore of your parent’s faces.

 
And these untraveled windy back roads here–cotton
     leaves blowing past me, in the long blue
     horizontal light–
 

if I am on an island, how is it they go on forever.

This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught
     glimpses of that, often, so often, and never yet have
     I described it, I can’t, somehow, I never will.

 
How is it that I didn’t spend my whole life being happy, loving
     other human beings’ faces.

 
And wave after wave, the ocean smells like lilacs in
     late August.
 

The narrator is constantly losing his or herself to the past, but the reality of the island returns the thoughts. The leaves, the blue light, its tenderness, and the smell of lilacs is contrasted with the shameful thoughts of a wasted and fruitless life. Love is illusive, indescribable, but it’s represented in the concrete leaves and light and lilacs that are infinite, endless like continuous waves.

But where is speaker going on this island? To death? To life? The destination isn’t important because space is replaced with the timeless, the forever.

Can you live in forever knowing you haven’t loved other human beings? That is the question.

Links:

The Pulitzer Prize winning “Walking to Martha’s Vineyward” book of poems.

Listen to Franz Wright read.

The Image Journal has an essay by Wright entitled “Language as Sacrament in the New Testament.”

In scripture the Wonderful Poet expresses his love to us and his desire to be with us through images and metaphors; in Acts Peter calls Jesus the “author of all things”. Edward Hirsch explains that the word poet is derived from the Greek poiesis which means “making” and, “as the ancient Greeks recognized, the poet is first and foremost a maker.”

Poetry, in all its various forms, its depth and dance, is hard to grasp. It’s allusive and fluid. But the search draws us near, its affect is intimacy towards its maker. As Hirsch writes quoting Ted Cohen,

The maker and the appreciator of a metaphor are brought into a deeper relationship with one another. That’s because the speaker issues a concealed invitation through metaphor which the listener makes a special effort to accept and to interpret.

The Maker and the Made are drawn together through rhythm and cadence and words; through desire, through passion, through unending love. Hirsch understands “the relationship between the poet, the poem, and the reader not as a static entity but as a dynamic unfolding. An emerging sacramental event. A relation between an I and a You. A relational process.”

Reading scripture places us within this process with our Creator. As can poetry, literature, film, music, art. As Hirsch proclaims, “The stakes are high: we not only ‘find ourselves’ in poetry, we also lose ourselves to it.” Through poetry, through scripture, through stories, through language, through the Word, The Maker of all things re-creates us into something previously unimaginable. The Maker’s words become our words. And the Wonderful Poet authors the poetical renewal of you and me and the world.