Automotively Challenged

“I drive a BMW but my dream is to one day own a Hyundai and still be happy.”  This is a line from one of my oldest friends.  Wisdom that amazes me.  Yeah, that’s what I want – what I truly want – too; to spend my life learning how to have more by wanting less.  

For most of my senior year of college, I drove a white 1987 Nissan Stanza.  It was a funny little car that made deafening scraping vacuum sounds, randomly stopped while in motion (usually just as I cut in front of oncoming traffic making left turns across PCH), had no radio, and had monstrous grey-blue sheepskin seat covers that complimented the royal blue velour interior.  All of the fixtures were held together with Velcro.  I inherited it when my grandmother passed away. 

It replaced an old 1991 Chrysler minivan my parents bought when I started kindergarten – I remember being pretty excited when we got it when I was five, but I guess I didn’t imagine at that age that it would still be my mode of transportation at age twenty-one.  The ceiling liner had come completely unglued and it hung like a drapery on the whole roof of the car.  Often some electronic connection would falter and all the electric mechanisms in the car would go wild – the gauges would fly back and forth across their trajectories, the electric locks would compulsively flip back and forth, the windshield wipers would wildly scrape and stutter across the dusty cracked glass, and all of the lights would start flashing.  The passenger’s door wouldn’t fully close (at times I had to rig up something with the seatbelt to keep it from flying open in turns.  The sliding side door wouldn’t open, so everyone in the back had to climb out the trunk.  If the RPM dropped too low, the oil pressure would plummet and ran the risk of seizing the engine.  The entire family got in the car together to celebrate 350,000 miles on the odometer.   No air conditioning.  The steering wheel had begun to melt and would leave a greyish residue on your hands about the viscosity of pine sap.  Embarrassed doesn’t come close to the way I felt about that van.  Mortified comes closer, but still doesn’t capture the sickness that reverberated within my entire rib cage anytime I passed someone I knew.  My friends called it “the immigrant van.”  It was funny to them, but somehow could not be funny to me.  Do we call that pride?  I think that’s the word. 

There was lots of sorrowful begging for my parents to think of another automotive option for me, but it just wasn’t going to happen and that was that.  My mother used to tell me that as soon as I didn’t want a new car anymore a new one would somehow show up in my life.  Every time she said this I would excuse myself and go release my fury into a pillow.  I don’t know why this was such a big deal for me.  I am not an otherwise materialistic person, and while I love clothes I wouldn’t consider myself terribly image-conscious.  But anytime the car conversation started, my body would tighten with anger and hatred in a manner no other occasion has ever given it cause to do. 

When my grandmother was no longer able to drive, the Nissan passed to me.  It was blissful.  Anything to get rid of that van.  I think the two were really equal in awfulness to the outsider’s eye, but for some reason the Nissan cracked me up where the minivan had made me angry.  Perhaps it’s because I chose to take the Nissan where I did not choose the minivan?  Perhaps it was the connection to my adored and departed grandmother?  I don’t know.  But I was fond of it, and didn’t care who saw it or drove around in it or what.  No more anger, no more looking for a way out. 

And then one weekend my father just up and announced that we were going car shopping.  Graduation was a couple of months away, but I already had my graduation gift planned and picked out.  We looked at some great used cars, and then for some reason my dad decided to spring for the brand spanking new Mini I’d had my eye on for years.  The decision was made in about two days.  I guess my mom was right – it just somehow appeared the second I stopped caring. 

A roommate once told me about a theory of hers that we long most to be the one thing we can never be. 

She said this while we were sitting inside that Nissan in the carport of the mobile home we lived in on Point Dume in Malibu our senior year.  We liked to do that periodically, to sit in the car and talk, go for a quick drive around the Point to look at the moon over the glittering Bel Air Bay, somehow create a physical barrier between ourselves and everything we had established that we were inside the house we’d chosen, decorated, and lived in.  Our best conversations happened on those drives.  This comment referred to a theme that ran through all of the papers I wrote in my English classes. I had this subconscious fascination with nuns, cloistered women, anything in or of a monastery, ascetics, any character who renounced worldly things for a higher spiritual path.  

It’s like that Frost poem I included in my last post.  My life is running straight toward the varied and exciting land, and I am excited about that.  It is where my gifts lie and where my energy comes from.  And yet there’s a longing to not care in the least about it.  I love the things the world produces, but (while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that in the least bit – it’s what we were meant for) I wish I didn’t.  It’s not the sort of longing that will make me alter my life plans, but the sort that will maintain the incessant tension and tug that will always keep me asking, wondering, yearning, and seeking.  And, as I've said before, these are blessed, for what worse thing could there be in life than an end point?

Today I drive a Mini that I adore.  My dream is to someday drive a 1991 minivan and love it.

Beach

Neither Out Far nor In Deep
Robert Frost

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be--
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?


It is interesting in this poem how Frost describes the people on the beach. He points out that while everything “important” going on happens on land, people somehow can’t stop staring at the ocean. It’s a big, limitless void. Whether we’re supposed to be attending fastidiously to the cares of the world or standing in static contemplation gazing into the blue horizon, there is something about the water that pulls each of us to its edge and asks.

Frost points out that the people standing here staring do not look out far into the future or into the heavens. They do not look deep within themselves, deep within our society. They just sit and watch, unutterable hope, anguish, joy, sorrow, and concern churning within each one, never to find the “local habitation and a name” Shakespeare wrote about. Without words, our “unutterables” remain such, and so we just keep standing on the beach looking out.

There is nothing about our human experience that requires this. There is no job that demands looking out far or in deep. We will never face a task that cannot be done on the surface level. And the longings within us can stay there. Certainly they will manifest themselves in part in the events and choices that compose our lives, but the ache that alternately blesses and tortures writhes unceasingly in a realm over which words exercise no authority.

And yet we are still drawn to believe that “out far” and “in deep” are somehow important. I’m one who can’t seem to tear myself away from the pull of the watery nothingness/everythingness to embrace the world. Frost explains it so well here – to face one it seems we must turn our back on the other.

“For you created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” – St. Augustine.

Deeper Still

I spent a good part of this year immersed in a project about the relationship between C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot.  In case you don’t know, and few people do, the two maintained a close relationship for decades – the majority of which was more than unfriendly, and almost all of the coldness was, contrary to the expectations of many, initiated by Lewis. 

When one compares the creative works of these two writers, the tone, mood, and subject matter of Eliot’s poems put him in the same camp as the modern poets whose graphic descriptions of despair and decay would make my stomach turn.  I remember so well the modern poetry segment in English classes in high school.  My face would contort as I skimmed the pages, lips folded inward between my front teeth, brow wrinkled, eyes intently focused.  I don’t remember exactly which poems made me feel this way – probably Ted Hughes and his talk of crows and abortions, DH Lawrence and his weirdness, and, among the most startling, Eliot himself with his sick insistence in “The Hollow Men” that “This is the way the world ends./ Not with a bang but a whimper.”

The word “sick” is probably my best descriptor here.  The world these moderns described resembled the one I knew and loved, and yet it seemed diseased, as if someone had taken a ghastly syringe and withdrawn the marrow from the bones of our collective life here.  The word “apocalypse” comes to mind Eliot taunts in “The Waste Land,” “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”  It’s about the end.  Death.  The one toward which we're all racing. 

I once heard a lecturer compare the death of Socrates to the death of Jesus.  Their deaths are similar in circumstance, for they were both sentenced to death by powerful governments for feeding rebellious ideas to society.  Interestingly, the ideas were about humility, which, one would think, would make a people easier to govern.  When he drinks the poison ordered upon him, Socrates eases into eternal sleep completely at peace, believing that this was indeed the right time for his life to end and that he would be better off dead.  Jesus, on the other hand, writhes in agony on a cross for three hours, pleading with God, “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?” even though he knew he fulfilled a prophesy that had been ordained for millennia.  Now, it’s hard to compare drinking a cup of poison in perfect comfort to the physical torture Jesus endured for days, but I believe there is still room to compare their two reactions to the final moments. 

I raise this issue because I believe we are prone to withdraw from circumstances, literary or actual, that do not bear the emblems of our creeds.  I want my faith in Jesus to surround me with a force that keeps evil and death far away from me.  At an Easter service this Sunday, I sang in “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (a favorite hymn) the line, “Where, oh death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!” 

I’ll show you were thy sting is, oh death. 

It’s here.  It’s all around.  Recently I had a conversation with a Christian who fully expected death for believers to be sweet and easy, much like the death of Socrates, and was undone by the savagery of a body falling apart when a relative died.  That’s a sting. 

Eliot’s early poems jump right into this deep pit and throw it all on paper.  Then Eliot became a Christian.  And while the redemption of his soul is apparent in some writings, despair was still there.  There was a misty solution to the sorrow, a center point was found, and peace was blissfully within his reach, but much of his writing still depicted bleakness. 

In The Hiding Place Corrie Boom writes, “There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still.”

No pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.  Not, “There is no deep pit in God’s love.”  Not, “Be saved from the deepest pit by embracing God’s love.”  There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still. 

C.S. Lewis knew well that Eliot was a Christian, and in spite of the acknowledgment that their common ground was vastly greater than their conflict, Lewis frequently criticized and mocked Eliot in public and in print.  Lewis’ disapprove of Eliot began with the opening stanza of his first big poem in the lines, “Let us go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized on a table.”  Lewis was horrified that one would dare describe something as lovely as twilight in such a grotesque manner. 

And yet it was Eliot who responded to Lewis’ harshness with love.  Not with retaliation.  Eliot never teased Lewis because he was the more popular writer, certainly the better poet.  The two were finally reconciled when they were both asked to assist the Church of England in a project to update the translation of the Psalms.  Surprisingly enough, Lewis wanted to rephrase the beautiful classic verses and Eliot fought to keep them as they were.  In one of the very few recorded instances of Eliot’s feelings for Lewis, Eliot exclaims, “I believe I may have just been the savior of the twenty-third Psalm!

I suppose I conclude this: there is no idea, no subject matter, no question that we must hold in reserve.  I like things that are sweet, pleasant, and holy.  But might holiness gain more power if we refuse to exclude anything from it?  There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.  

Plan A

Choose

                    The single clenched fist lifted and ready,

     Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.

               Choose:

     For we meet by one or the other.

 - Carl Sandburg

I was amazed to find that my recent rejection from grad school did not break my heart.  Quite the contrary, in fact – it thrilled me.  I say truthfully that I have never worked harder on any academic project.  I read books, wrote papers, perfected bibliographies, made friends, and even traveled to Oxford in December to get the lay of the land.  I was pretty sure I really wanted it. 

 

I think the celebration I feel in my soul is testament to the fact that no measure of genuine, hard work is ever wasted.  The direct goal of my efforts was not realized, but the indirect goal (or maybe these should be switched?) – to become a more educated and mindful person in the eyes of God – was.  I fell in love with my topic.  I got to read books about a subject I would have never explored otherwise.  I met people who showed me the sort of kindness that breaks your heart in the way it needs to be broken. 

 

The path is now completely uncertain, but instead of the crushing fear that used to suck hope and energy out of me, instead I see this as a premature opening of the starting gates.  There is something in the uncertainty that makes me deliciously angry.  I use that word because it’s a sensation that shares all the symptoms of anger – blood boiling, mind racing, at-the-ready, and when I go on my evening runs I cover twice the mileage and don’t even know it.  I feel bulletproof.  My imagination goes crazy with all the things I could go out and do with my life, and my muscles flood with adrenaline to beat down anything that will stand in my way.  But….

 

…in my way of what?

 

What’s the goal?  My spiritual side tells me that nothing of this world is of value because it is not eternal.  My human side tells me there are endless possibilities for what I can accomplish, people I can help, ways I can advance mankind.  My mind is able to find endless common ground between the two.  I am primed. 

 

I commonly use the rhetoric, “Coming up with a Plan B” when people ask me what I’ll do when my job ends in a couple of weeks.  I don’t think that’s true, though. 

 

This is Plan A. 

 

Humans have been making great journeys as long as history records.  Many of Western culture’s great foundational texts chronicle the epic voyages of heroes, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Odyssey, the book of Exodus in the Bible, Virgil’s Aeneid, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Hess’ Siddhartha, C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, and so many others.  One of the earliest of these articulates the fundamental question of the wanderer-seekers that followed: What does life mean?  And how should we live it?

 

All of this journeying, though, must be directed at finding something.  We seek so that we may find.  The point of the journey isn’t the journey as some say.  But the point of the journey is seldom the destination – the point of the journey is the thousand destinations we find accidentally along the way. 

 

When I look at the choices ahead of me, Sandburg’s words printed above describe the state of my hands – I can feel the weight of blood in my fingers, the strength of the muscles in my palms and forearms, the elastic readiness of the tendons in my joints.  The most difficult task of my days is to peel my tenacious fingers from the fist that grasps at air – to set it open, asking, “hand held out and waiting,” as motionless as a steel trap set open on a forest floor with springs and cables straining. 

 

As C. S. Lewis says, “I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He is sure it is good for him to wait.”