The Co-Conspirators

I have no doubt that I had let Andrew see me at my most ridiculous several years before he reciprocated with a spectacle of his own. By any account, most of my early-adolescent embarrassments fell within the orbit of my obsession with rap music, a seven-year period from the end of elementary school to the year after graduation that roughly encompasses the years of our friendship. Andrew, along with my younger brother Graeme, had been witness to (and sometime partner in) various attempts to breakdance on his basement floor, to lip-synch “Ice Ice Baby” and even, on one occasion, to successfully approximate hip-hop fashion. A few family photographs and videos have enshrined some of these moments, and though upwards of twenty years have passed I still shrink at the memories.

It could be simply because at that time Andrew was only twelve years old, or that he shared my interests and was glad to have a slightly older cohort in this undercover world we were investing in, but it astonishes me now that he didn’t see the absurdity of my suggestion the first time we cleared the concrete area in front of his parents’ fireplace to create a tiny dance floor. Boyhood friendships are always group endeavours, and I was certainly not the lone participant in most of the foolishness, but because I was a year older than both Andrew and Graeme, I wouldn’t deny that the lion’s share of any shame belonged chiefly to me as their putative leader.

In time, though our preoccupation with rap continued, there were fewer potential family-video blackmail tapes, and my friendship with Andrew moved out of the basement and onto the roads with drivers’ licenses and our parents’ vehicles. During the summer after my graduation from high school, I had my first opportunity to ride as a passenger in Andrew’s car. I was only agreeing to a four-minute drive home from church, so I assume no fault for trusting myself to his care for those three and a half kilometres.

We had travelled no more than three hundred metres when, still on the little court that is really no more than the driveway to the church, Andrew reached over to retrieve a cassette (rap, of course) that had fallen to the floor on my side. From my own long experience of having been licensed for eleven months I should have known better than to cast my own eyes to the place at my feet where he laid hold of the tape, but for those moments both our sets of eyes left the road.

The ditch was very soft when we landed in it. In the instant when we looked up I am sure Andrew was as mystified as I was concerning the gentleness of the transition we had made from road to ditch, in which we now lay exactly parallel to our previous course, and in that moment we had both also learned why in driving classes we had been taught that keeping our eyes trained on the road ahead was the only way to ensure the wheel would also remain aligned with the path before us.

It was only moments until the next parishioner approached in our rear view mirror and offered us his help, but that was all the time Andrew needed to voice every teenage boy’s first thought in such a situation:

“My dad is going to kill me.”

Andrew of course survived both his fear of facing his dad and the mortification of standing beside him as they watched the tow truck set the car back on the road, and he was even permitted to take it out again in little time. I don’t remember giving it conscious thought, but nervousness may have contributed to the long interval that passed between that Sunday afternoon and my next session in Andrew’s passenger seat. A year and a half later when three of us went to the Star Wars re-release it was only the third time I had occupied that seat.

The drive from our neighbourhood to the theatre was fifteen minutes at the outside, and we arrived with plenty of time to tackle the enormous lines that plagued every showing of Star Wars that cool weekend in late January. Entering the parking lot we estimated we were there early enough to be close to the head of the line for the show we had decided on, and we knew we’d have plenty of time to load up on snacks. Everything was going our way.

Before we could go inside there was the small matter of parking. The lot was fairly full, but in Andrew’s scan of the area nearest the theatre he spotted a perfect space about thirty steps from the door along the outside wall of the building. As he slowly pulled in, we allowed our excitement to build, got our gloves back on in preparation for an onslaught of frigid air, and waited for the car to come to a stop.

But then it didn’t. We watched in a kind of blank horror as our driver and friend slowly, gingerly, but unswervingly, proceeded to drive his father’s car straight into the stippled rock wall before us, completely miscalculating the location of his front bumper. It wasn’t much of a collision, but the sheer surprise of meeting any obstacle in that circumstance was enough to provide a logical shock if not a bodily one.

Did I speak first? What could I possibly say? I had been Andrew’s passenger three times, and twice he had treated me to crashes, however laughable and miniature, in exchange for my trust. I don’t remember what reaction I finally settled on. I do, however, have a fresh and clear recollection of his response. It rolled off his tongue carrying the measured inflections of an echo:

“My dad is going to kill me.”

Wisdom seemed to advise against enlisting Andrew as chauffeur again, and that was the last time I drove with him. Within a few years and with as little cause as that of most other retired childhood friendships, we hardly saw each other. My brother, who worked with Andrew for a few years through university, kept a close enough friendship to include him in his wedding party, but Andrew and I travelled paths that only rarely converged. A round decade of sharing each other’s red-faced moments was now an episode in our history.

For the past five years I’ve been slowly assembling a new collection of witnesses in anticipation of the looming humiliations of middle adulthood. Despite the relative stability and calm of these years when set beside either the turbulence of adolescence or the rollicking indecision of the twenties, I know myself pretty well: if it isn’t breakdancing or Adidas shell-toes, it will surely prove to be something. Whatever it is, I need witnesses, if only for protection. Because it seems to me that that is a serviceable definition of family: the people who know your embarrassments and conspire to shield them from exposure to the rest of the world.

A little over four years ago I stood beside a beach with forty family members and friends watching as I attained in the eyes of both God and the government the first member of my little protection league. When she and I exchanged those vows, one of the unspoken promises we made was that we would stand there and watch whenever we each made fools of ourselves – sometimes intentionally, sometimes not – and stick around anyway. She’s never seen any breakdancing, but our life has not been without its share of theatrics from which the world is best sheltered.

Now in our children we’ve added two more members to the collective. And from exasperated running commentaries about dirty diapers to toddler-mollifying conversations with inanimate objects around the house, every day there are more reasons to keep some parts of our life to ourselves. As every parent of a distraught infant knows, there are few limits to the inanities one will adopt in order to appease these diminutive but powerful rulers. Mercifully, children’s memories are very short. The weaponry they would possess against us in any other case is unnerving to imagine.

The trouble with enlisting children as co-conspirators in our schemes is that not only are they potential breakers of the society trust, more often than not they are the chief cause of our more egregious displays of shamelessness. In these instants the whole structure threatens to collapse in on itself, leaving the world to gape in wonder. On a recent family trip back home we came face to face with this problem when both children fell asleep minutes before a planned pit stop. No sooner had we noticed they were out than I confessed to my wife that I really needed to go. The look she gave me in reply reflected every painful vision she could summon of two car seat-bound little ones whose much needed naps had been rudely cut short by their father’s lack of fortitude.

“I know they just fell asleep, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to pee anymore.”

She was plainly crestfallen at the hitherto unplumbed depths of her husband’s weakness. “You can’t hold it?”

“No.”

In the cup holder on my side was an empty bottle of orange juice that was probably most to blame for my present distress. She looked at it hopefully and I knew what she was thinking.

“There is no way,” I insisted.

She was immovable.

There are times when my wife displays persuasive strengths that aren’t even hinted at by her gentleness in calming our daughter when she wakes from a nightmare or the buoyancy that characterizes her play with our son before bedtime. A few minutes later, in capitulation to her will and for the sake of the children’s naps and a peaceful final two hours on the road, I had done what previously I had refused to believe really happened outside the world of Jim Carrey road movies. Everyone was happy: my wife relaxed her threatening stance, I no longer had to resist her request, and the kids were innocent of what their father surrendered to in order to secure their sleep. Membership in our circle required only a reassurance of her silence on the matter. It was my secret to share or keep.

The rest of the drive home and the days that followed were peaceful in equal measure. In addition to the shopping trips and meals with grandparents that figure in all of our visits to Halifax, one morning we spotted Andrew working outside the store he now manages. It was a common sight; in recent years we’ve become accustomed to seeing him on many of our trips home. On those occasions he comes over for an hour or two to visit at my parents’ place, to catch up on our family life and bring us up to date on his. The old friendship has come out of retirement, or at least it appears that way a few times a year.

This new phase of our friendship began around the time of my wedding. Perhaps Andrew understood instinctively the nature of married life, that it was basically concerned with the same issues we had entrusted to one another as children: witnessing embarrassing moments and then promising not to tell. Maybe it was the instinct that we were up to the old business again that brought him to the door that first day he dropped over again after such a long time. Maybe it wasn’t that at all.

Though it’s been many years since Andrew and I stood by and witnessed each other’s early humiliations, the humanization that resulted from those embarrassments has made a deep impression. He knows me better for it, and I him. The same can be said for my family, and I’m beginning to think that in those kinds of relationships it’s not that we love each other despite what we’ve seen, but that the strength of our love actually depends on the happy shame of it all. Could we really be what we are without it?

The Value of Mediocrity for the Life of the Church

Years ago a musician friend told me the story (possibly apocryphal) of how R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe claimed that the Monkees had been more of an influence on his career path than the Beatles.


The Beatles, he said, were perfect: everything was right, no one could match them. It's a truism in rock writing that they are the greatest rock band of all time. That's great for a listener, but there's no inspiration in it for a young band; all you can do is sit back in awe, despairing of ever equaling them. The Monkees, on the other hand, were mostly a sloppy mess by the time they started playing on their own recordings. A fun, sloppy mess, but still a mess. Looking at the Beatles you were shamed into putting your instrument down for good. Listening to the Monkees would evoke in almost any aspiring musician the encouraging thought, "Hey, I could do that too..."

The very fact of the Monkees' mediocrity meant they could inspire people to join in the adventure, to buy a guitar, to pick up pen and paper and start to write. Apparently we owe the Monkees a debt of gratitude for the very existence of one of the 80s' best bands.

It has become common in the North American church, especially those that aspire to megachurch status, to envision the Sunday worship service as a blank canvas on which to display "the best of the best" in the church. Everything is styled, prepared, and presented with the shimmer of a Hollywood awards ceremony (but with more attention to time constraints). The music sounds just like the radio, the speakers come across like talk show hosts, the singers dress like models; you get the picture.

What this means is that "church" becomes great for the viewer/listener, but there is no inspiration to get in on the action, no feeling of having one's life pulled into a greater reality in which participation is not only possible but also desirable. If you don't have what it takes for the stage, you are not part of worship; you can only watch.

Now public participation in worship is not the only thing involved in being part of the body of Christ, but the sense of community worship (even and especially from those who would stay in the pew anyway) is viciously diminished by a perfectly orchestrated show approach to worship.

I have spent my life in churches where it has taken very little imagination to think, "Hey, I can do that..." That means for one thing that I have seen my fair share of hiccups during public worship. Maybe that's unfortunate. God deserves our best in worship, though I suspect "best" and "ready for prime time" may not be direct equivalents. But those occasionally shambolic moments also have meant that I have never felt excluded, never felt doomed to be a spectator to God's activity.

If it's true, as George Lindbeck has written, that the Bible is the text that is able to "absorb the entire universe," and if it's also true that our act of community worship is a weekly reminder or reenactment of the high drama of Scripture's story of God's saving activity, then shouldn't we be especially careful to guard against anyone ever feeling as if they stand outside that story? The Monkees may never have topped a critic's list of greatest bands or albums, but they made a generation of kids want to get in on the action. That must count for something.

Hannah's (70 year-old) Child

Today is Stanley Hauerwas' birthday. I've been reading him since my first year pastoring here in McAdam, and he's probably been more of an influence than I've even realized. Now I've gotten to know him, in a manner of speaking, through his memoir Hannah's Child.

It's a disarming book. It's all too easy to succumb to assumptions about Hauerwas based on his notoriously colourful language or his bold pacifism or his provocative way of putting things in his writings (I'm thinking right now of the title of his little article "Why Gays (As a Group) are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group)), or even his being named "America's Best Theologian" in September 10, 2001 (!) issue of Time. Reading the book is in these respects something of a shock for those of us who only know him from a distance. It's sometimes painfully honest, particularly as he tells of his first wife's mental illness and the long suffering of their family during those decades, but also in his descriptions of life on the faculties of both Notre Dame and Duke Divinity School. What I couldn't escape as I read it was that the book itself is a generous act of friendship from one who has done much to emphasize the centrality of friendship for the Christian life.

During the years that Anne's illness dominated our lives, I discovered the gift of friendship. Indeed, I discovered I had a gift for friendship. I love and trust people. My love and trust may at times be unwise, but I prefer the risk. I am not stupid. I do not like fools or pretension. But I love interesting, complex, and even difficult people. Thank God, they often love me. (p. 144)

The church could learn a few things about sharing and bearing burdens through careful attention not just to Hauerwas' advice but now through his example.

The "truthfulness of Christian speech" has been another central emphasis in Hauerwas' writing, and here he again lives that for which he has long argued. This is a book about truthtelling, and it is honest even in its assessment of its own honesty.

It is not easy to see ourselves truthfully and without illusion. The difference between a loving but honest description and cruelty is often not easily determined. Son of my father, I have no capacity for cruelty, though at times I may be stupid. I hope the descriptions of my life and those who have made my life possible are determined by love, but I will have to trust the reader to tell me where I have been stupid. (p. 288)

That quote brings another thing to mind. Hauerwas has always been funny, and he is often hilarious as he reflects upon his own life. A few samples:

"The great benefit of being a member of a fraternity was that I had to learn the Greek alphabet." (p. 8)

"I was put in the odd position of having to argue that American society in 1975 was sane." (p. 124)

"...over the years I have come to the judgment that Southern civility is one of the most calculated forms of cruelty. I do not know if Methodists learned it from Southerners or vice versa." (p. 180)

"...graduate school was that strange place where professors get paid for students to educate one another." (p. 196)

"I cannot resist wanting to run the world, even though I am obviously no good at it." (p. 232)

"I am an academic, but I pray before class and have been published by InterVarsity Press. That is a lot to overcome if you want academic respectability." (p. 256)

Perhaps the greatest gift in the book, though, is the sustained reflection on what it means to be a theologian. The sense of gratitude for the work he has been given to do would, I suspect, help anyone to learn to be thankful for their work, but for those of us who are called, whether in the church or the academy, to speak of God to his people, this aspect of the book is a great incentive to revisiting our sense of vocation. Stanley Hauerwas has kept his understanding of his work rooted to the life of the church on every page of this book. In the course of the narrative, he reflects a great deal on his family, and these lines stand out:

What I hope and pray is that the way I have tried to think and write may in some small way sustain lives as good as my parents. My father was a better bricklayer than I am a theologian. I am still in too much of a hurry. But if the work I have done in theology is of any use, it is because of what I learned on the job, that is, you can only lay one brick at a time. (p. 46)

I could go on and on with quotes from the book (my copy is covered in pencil marks and dog-eared pages), but there would be no point. It's well worth reading.

Hauerwas has said he wanted the book's subtitle to be "A Theological Memoir," but the publisher preferred "A Theologian's Memoir." Both are fitting. The publisher wanted the book to reach and not intimidate an audience. I hope he does gain a new audience for his theological work through what is a really fine book. It's theological, for sure, but it's also a fantastic read. I burned through it in a few days, and found I couldn't put it down.

Happy birthday, Stanley. Thanks for the gift.