daddy beats out misogyny in the superbowl

I don’t know about you, but my stomach turned at the number of commercials that portrayed the life of contemporary man as harassed by spendthrift girlfriends and burdened by the horrors of the ordinary. The only way to escape this indignation of family is to buy a Dodge car or man-loofah yourself with some Dove.

Of course the reason these particular commercials were chosen to air, costing in the millions, is that the whole spectacle of the Superbowl is meant to be about the life men don’t have. It’s what that heretic Mark Driscoll is talking about. It’s the life that men supposedly crave – where muscle and battle reigns and women are quite literally silent and overtly sexualized (big breasted and barely clothed).

But if you watched past the dramatic ending, into the celebration of the lauded Saints, you would see a very different image of masculinity. A teary-eyed Drew Brees was holding his one year old son, Baylen, transfixed. In spite of the people hailing his team, when all the attention reasonably should have gone to his amazing game play, Drew Brees wanted nothing more than to be with his baby boy.

I was so thankful for this lovely moment, and for the New York Time’s Motherlode blog writer Lisa Belkin for drawing the contrast between Brees holding his child aloft and the misogynistic commercials that ran the previous three hours.

For the first three decades of his life, you would imagine, football games were all about Drew — fans cheering in high school in Austin, Tex., in college at Purdue, in San Diego with the Chargers and in New Orleans with the Saints. The way the world revolves around pro athletes is but a magnification of the way the world revolves around each of us, and before his son was born, Drew’s only concerns were probably his training, practices, nutrition, contract negotiations and games.

Then Baylen was born on his father’s 30th birthday, just about a year ago. According to his local newspaper, Drew and his wife, Brittany, took Baylen with them to Hawaii for the Pro Bowl when the baby was about 3 weeks old. I shudder to imagine that. Even if they had a team of nannies in tow (and I have no idea if they did), and even if Brittany was doing nearly all the hands-on baby care while Drew focused on football (which I suspect was the way it worked), the trip would have been a major realization of what all new parents learn — it’s no longer only about you.

Somewhere in the past year, game prep for the Brees family has come to include making sure the baffled headphones are packed. It has also probably come to include baby hugs in the locker room and a more personal understanding of New Orleans parents who worry about their children.

The mostly disappointing stream of Super Bowl ads this year included the familiar cute, stock-trading babies and the usual stereotype of shallow, rude, immature males, and also a new and disturbing note — men who are beaten down by their soul-grinding family lives, submitting to hectoring wives in order to drive a Dodge Charger or washing away the indignities of being a husband and dad by showering with Dove for Men.

There have been days when we have all felt like those guys — when the details and the worries and the lack of sleep and the loss of freedom have dragged us down. But there have also been days when we’ve felt like the Super Bowl most valuable player, Drew Brees, who had tears in his eyes after the Saints’ 31-17 victory over the Indianapolis Colts as he leaned toward Baylen and appeared to say, “I love you, little man.”

the biggest loser: trauma and victory

There really aren’t a lot of evening televisions shows I enjoy watching. The Losts and 24s of TV viewing started up when Jacob and I we were living without a set so we never got hooked. Grad school, L’Arche, baby – these all made regular viewing out of the question. Now that we’re back in suburbia with my folks, and life is a little slower, I’m starting to tune in a bit more.

The Biggest Loser has turned into my favorite show. The BL is not a weight loss show. It’s a psychology program that happens to include weight loss. There is very little possibility of becoming as big and unhealthy as those who appear as contestants on the show without an experience of trauma lurking in the background. For one woman on the last season this was a car wreck that killed her husband, toddler and new born baby rendering her primary identity obsolete. For others it is the perpetual slide into depression and self-loathing that buckles back on itself over and over again. Whatever the reason, The BL is about facing those fears.

Additionally, much of the show is developed without plotting or strategy (my guess is much to writers chagrin). It is incredible to see how the contestants, a few who begin with ambitions only to win, are transformed by the mutual experiences of the their trauma and the process of overcoming their pasts. They encourage one another, they cheer each others successes and weep at their failures. On one episode it was fascinating to see how some of the contestants tried to keep on a woman who blatantly told the others she wanted to leave (of the losing team each week the other contestants vote which of the pair will leave “the ranch”). They sensed that more healing and more work could be done, that her regret would catch up with her. They met her at her most vulnerable moment and anticipated her needs when she could not name them. In moments like this The BL is, at its heart, a story of the desire for human flourishing.

To make it even better, there is true victory over evil in the plot. Contestants face their demons, confront the past and work hard for the opportunity to be let lose from sick bodies. And many, many of them are able to do this and to continue to keep their weight off when they return home. Yes, they win money. Yes, they receive the kind of help none of us could expect. But there is more going on here.

There are ways The BL is vulnerable to the foibles that make any show of its ilk a success. The trainers play on the emotional and physical drain of the contestants in order to fabricate a plot and to move the script along. The product placement is garish to the point of eye rolling and I have no doubt that the doctoring of the footage is scandalous. There is also a level of voyeurism in the bearing of the naked contestant bodies before each weigh in that is wholly theatrical as this moment is meant to repel and horrify. Foucault would have a field day. But for all it’s faults, there is something truly gripping about the stories of people who meet victory over their traumas through transformation in community.

Sounds a little bit like redemption to me.

“we will not hide from our children”

Part of my devotional time in the morning includes writing a verse from the daily psalm that sticks out, surprises or brings out a question. Today’s psalm was 78 and I found that I kept writing and writing. Psalm 78 is about teaching children the story of Israel. There’s an introduction (“hear ye, hear ye”) and then a description of exactly what happened to Israel from the beginning of her history up the reign of King David.

I can’t get over the Hebrew Bible’s insistence on repeating the story of God’s people to children. It is mentioned so often. Since I’ve become a parent I’ve wondered what it looks like to write the shemah on our doorposts, to talk about it when we sit down, get up, go out and come in. What’s that actually mean? How did/do Jews do this in their daily lives?

And while I’m not always sure about the precise application, I can see why the story is so important. I’m no apologist but psalm 78 sounds a lot different than how I would have put forth a triumphalist account of my national history. There’s a lot of helpless wandering, many miraculous saves and much provision for a people who don’t act very grateful. God is mostly angry in psalm 78 because of Israel’s poor response to his overflowing goodness. There is also a lot of punishing and smiting, but not always of Israel’s enemies. Egypt is the only other nation mentioned as receiving God’ wrath; Israel gets God’s judgment seven times.

I am sure that this story is not meant for personal application. This isn’t a method of parenting or a way to remind your kids to do the right thing. If anything, sticking personal morality in this psalm cheapens the importance of why we are passing this on at all. It’s not to get our kids in line. It’s to “recount for generation to come the praiseworthy deeds and power of the Lord and the wonderful works he has done.” This praise is justified not because Israel is brought high and her enemies are brought low. This is a story about God being in control of history. We don’t have to be responsible for how it works out because the middle of the story is the cross and resurrection; the end is the war of the lamb.

Teaching our children this story (and even having children) helps us resist the temptation to be in charge because it makes so clear that we don’t even know how to want what we need. It reminds us that we started out wandering behind a cloud. There is no better way to cut back our ecclesial loneliness than to continually be reminded that we are part of this story that traces back thousands of years, to being told again and again that everything that has happened has happened before.

Paradoxically, this also means we must be on the lookout for further reformation as there is always the possibility for “a rediscovery of the past whose pertinence was not seen before, because only a new question or challenge enables us to see it speaking to us” (JoHoYo, Priestly Kingdom, 11). We tell the story because with each generation there is still more to tell.

That which we have heard and known,
and what our forefathers have told us,
we will not hide from our children.

We will recount to generations to come
the praiseworthy deeds and the power of the Lord,
and the wonderful works he has done.

He gave his decrees to Jacob and established a law for Israel
which he commanded them to teach their children;

that the generation to come might know,
and the children yet unborn,
that they might tell it to their children.

putting the material in materialism

Emily sent me these questions in a comment today:

was just reading about the ipad (unfortunate name…) and this post of yours came to mind. How does something like the ipad or the kindle affect materialism? How much of materialism has to do with actual materiality (and how do we balance that with a positive, orthodox view of materiality)? How much of it has to do with what is seen (i.e. is it partly the conspicuous part of conspicuous consumption – wanting to prove something about myself to my guests through my possessions?) – and how is that affected when you can close a whole library up in a drawer? And what does digitalizing what was a material object do to our sense of hoarding? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Here they are: I posted on my problem with libraries a while ago. Kindles/Ipads bring up a range of questions for bookish types. How do you take notes? What about that BCP you’ve had since confirmation that has priceless sentimental value? What are the ethical implications of libraries? Who binds and sells your books? But I think Emily brings up an interesting point: how will we now portray our expertise to one another?

I have yet to meet a pastor who doesn’t have shelves lined with books. I wonder about this unspoken code, equating trust in the ability to lead a church and shepherd a body/soul with what one has read. In the same way, I’ve had lots of people comment on what is on my shelf and I’ve done my share of sizing up of others by gazing at their books. How will we Christians/students/academics judge one another if not by our books?

I know this has snarky undertones, but I am quite serious. Perhaps we will further develop our virtual library shelves, our goodreads and our blog posts on our current favorites. I’m already painfully aware of the hip and precious choices of a baker’s dozen theology bloggers who posted their favorite albums of the previous year. I now know they are indeed on top of the latest musical trend.

At the same time, I don’t want to denigrate this practice too much. While it does stink of pride, aren’t we drawn to people who are engaged by similar questions, moved by similar books and changed by similar encounters? Books are a way to make a connection, and while my concerns are still strong about library-building, I can see why we want to open our rooms up to the possibility of starting a friendship. It seems like our virtual bookshelves will inevitably take this away. But who knows, maybe the absence of books will force new ways of encountering one another. It might not be bad for someone to escape summarization simply by the presence of Badiou or the absence of Hauerwas. Jude Law’s character discussing an influential book in I Heart Huckabees comes to mind.

I can say, I welcome the accessibility to books from beyond the reaches of the university. I think these kinds of new technologies also make it possible for certain kinds of literature to end up in the hands of people who might not otherwise be able to get at them. Make no mistake, the accessibility of knowledge is a matter of justice, or injustice in this case. That we are living in a world where the richest can get their hands on any book they like while the poorest can’t get on the internet is a conversation in its own right.

breastfeeding a toddler as good theology

Isaiah 40 has a line that goes through my head every time I nurse T-Rex of late. “Comfort, comfort my people.” If you have nursed a toddler, or wonder why you would nurse a toddler, comfort is one of the best reasons to continue past the first year.

I can’t say enough about the joy of being able to provide our toddler this kind of closeness and calming. It’s a gift, one I don’t take for granted because I know not every mama has a life compatible with keeping your milk supply going this long or has welcomed a child in a way that allows them to make their bodies food. Baby girl has been sick this week and I am still amazed by the power of nursing. When any of us is sick, is there anything more we want than to be cared for like a little baby? It makes me wonder about the etymology of medical nursing. Which came first, medicine or the breast?

If we need any further evidence that the Bible was written by men, it’s the absence of nursing metaphors. I can imagine no better way to describe the tenderness and mercy of God’s care for his children, the kind of closeness God wants us to enjoy forever. That God feds us with the body of Christ is lovely, but overly utilitarian (that the meal involves wine does help, I will admit). But breastfeeding makes a much thicker point. God doesn’t want just to feed us, he wants to nurture us, to make us his own. The image of God bringing the orphaned to the breast, that God gives the breast to those who are physically full but spiritually broken, alone and sick: comfort, comfort my people.

made at home

What to do with the countless hours previously spent applying to grad school and studying for the GRE? How about some home care and gift making. Most of these are updates on my Christmas DIY. The creatures are for my sister-in-laws triplets and the banner is for new born baby Lena.

parenting as apprenticeship: why we play with scissors

One of the big discoveries of the early toddler period of parenting is our little one’s lack of interest in toys. She’ll be occupied for a few moments but quickly is ready to get into whatever mommy and daddy are into. Upon further reflection, this seems like a perfectly reasonable transition time. In terms of human development, what toddlers are doing is learning to be adults. They aren’t “fourth trimester” anymore, they can walk and grasp. They’re starting to use words and they love imitation. I know this is one of those “duh” statements, but the idea of parenting as apprenticeship is new to me. So now I’m going to write a book about it and makes lots of money.

Here’s the idea: just do your life and modify what you’re doing to make it accessible to your kid, teaching her the things she really needs to know to create a life that is holy, slow and intentional. Brilliant, yet simple.

To start, I stopped thinking about everything in “age appropriate” categories. If we were living in Kenya or Honduras, T-Bop would be learning to draw water from a well and bring it home in a bucket. She would be getting wet in the laundry with me. She would be learning how to take care of a baby so that by the time she was four or five, she would have the training to take care of that baby’s basic needs. Can you imagine any of this kind of thing happening in white American culture?

There are several ways we are letting this work out in our family. First, I include T in almost all my daily activities. She gets a washcloth and “helps clean” while we’re doing the dishes. She has a stool and hands me plates to put away from the dishwasher. When I sow, I give her scissors and some thread. She pretends to cut and sew along with me. I hold her on my lap so she can see how the sewing machine works. When she’s a little older, we’ll get her an embroidery kit with a dull needle. Everything we do, I talk about how it works and let her try out what I’m doing. When I use power tools I let her push the button and hold the screws.

Before I would have never thought it was okay to let our 16-month old hold scissors and screws. And while she never does these things unsupervised, it’s pretty clear that she’s beginning to see these objects not as toys but as tools. They do stuff; they have an end.

This also mean that life must be slower and messier. Things are going to take longer. For instance, rather than relegating T exclusively to play food (she does like to use play food, too), she helps “stir the dinner” and measure the ingredients. Sometimes she doesn’t aim correctly or we have to do it twice or thrice. But that’s part of teaching, part of having an apprentice.

I would love to instill habits in The Bop that teach her that caring for our house, taking time to cook and being intentional about we produce isn’t a “chore.” It’s life. It isn’t something we do at the end of playing, because kids play and grownups do other things, or we’re too busy to worry about the basic things that make up our everyday. Home-creation is what we are to do and be.

news about molly

I feel badly that I haven’t updated those of you (however few) who are wondering what happened to University of Portland student Molly Hightower. I wrote a post about Molly, a recent graduate who was spending a year in Haiti working with orphans. A Fairfax County rescue crew pulled Molly’s body from the rubble of the orphanage where she lived and worked. She died among those whom she had come to serve.

Please continue to pray for the suffering in Haiti. But also remember the Hightowers who are reeling from the loss of their youngest child. One way to honor Molly and the work she did is to give money to Friends of the Orphans, the organization with which she was volunteering. Their building were destroyed and there is no doubt that the number of orphaned children in Haiti is going to jump dramatically, requiring even more support from Friends of the Orphans.

There are many news stories about Molly and you can also read her blog.

the ethics of a Down Syndrome “cure”

The NYTimes parenting blog recently featured a post about research towards mitigating the effects of Down Syndrome and the responses of parents grappling with the idea. A lot of the press around the Stanford University research has called the new interventions a cure. To be more precise, what they are talking about are drugs to help information retention in children (babies) with DS; they are not talking about adding an extra chromosome to a fetus:

Children with Down syndrome do not start life developmentally delayed but rather fall behind as they get older. By using mice that were genetically engineered to mimic Down syndrome, they found that neural memory deficits prevent such children from collecting learned experiences, and that they could improve memory and cognition by medically boosting norepinephrine signaling in the brain.

The response posted on the blog comes from the mother of twin boys with Down Syndrome. I found it fascinating because the mother takes the very standard disability-rights stance, something usually associated with communities and individuals who have physical differences like deafness or who are missing limbs. The disability-rights approach finds its roots in identity politics and assumes the position that it is society, not the disabled body, that creates disability. Therefore, disability advocacy should be aimed towards liberating society to see their response to disability as flawed.

While this has been the line towed for decades by the disability-rights movement, traditionally body politics has had absolutely nothing to say to intellectual disabilities because these are the kind of impairments that often times (though not all the time) limit the ability of an individual to make choices. Body politics is built on the foundation of liberal citizenship, that ultimately our freedom is linked to access: access to the democratic process, to making churches and theology open to disabled and to destygmatizing disability in the public square. It is a movement from within, a movement that people like me, “the temporarily able bodied,” must participate in as observers lest we do violence to the self-representation of those whom we would otherize by speaking for their experience rather than letting their experience of the disabled body speak for itself. You can imagine how this falls apart when we’re talking about a community of people who cannot even provide physical care for themselves, let alone organize inclusion protests. Body politics isolates the intellectually disabled precisely because it depends on the rational will.

And that’s why this is so fascinating. The parent responding in the blog sees a window for participation in the disability-rights movement, a way to reclaim her child’s identity by speaking out against the pervasive theory of normalization. She rightly wants to challenge societies stranglehold on the idea that competency and independence are what ultimately make us human. She rightly wants the world to accept her child for who he is.

Hans Reinders’s Receiving the Gift of Friendship does an incredible job and looking at where this reaction falls short, however correct its sentiment may be. Access to the public square, Reinders says, is not the “hyper good,” as we are sometimes led to believe. We are creatures made for friendship, in particular earthly friendships that mirror friendship with God. That the intellectually disabled have a difficult time making and keeping friends is a true source of impoverishment that will not be mitigated by any amount of norepinephrine treatments:

It is precisely because the profoundly disabled contradict the innermost core our own being – “the reflective self” – that their presence is crucial to a Trinitarian account of who God is and what God does, and consequently who we are and what we should do. If anything important is to be learned from being with the profoundly disabled person, it is precisely to learn how to be human, theologically speaking, without relying on the reflective self as our inner core. As human beings, our vocation is friendship with God, but usually our reflective self gets in in the way of trusting God. Being with an intellectually disabled person teaches us that we can only give friendship after we have learned to receive it.

Reinders tries to help us avoid the temptation to make the lives of disabled intelligible on our terms (e.g., the blogging mama who writes, “Their intellectual ‘impairment’ gives them an insight and an emotional intelligence and maturity that I can only aspire to.”). Not only do we not have to give a reason or an explanation for the particular flourishing or lack of flourishing of a child born severely disabled, we should be willing to confess our ignorance, knowing that this will have no affect on how we respond. “To overcome the need for justifying reasons,” he writes, “we need habits and skills rather than arguments. This is why the task of learning how to be friends with the intellectually disabled is particularly crucial.”

There is a little girl in my life with Down Syndrome and every day I pray that she will make friends. She is one of the rare few born to the kind of parents who see her as a gift, have found access to the medical treatment she needs and can provide for her food and shelter. She has siblings who I expect will care for her when Lisa and Bob can no longer. There is little else I can want for her than deep and abiding friendships. My experience in l’Arche tells me that this will be one of the more challenging aspects of her life. Her mama will fight for everything else, but she can’t fight for that. While my distance makes it difficult for me to cultivate a friendship with Magdalena, I’m hopeful that I can continue grow in friendship with other people with intellectual disabilities, knowing that they cannot choose my friendship, only receive it. I pray daily and live in the hope that Mags will help others know the friendship of God through knowing her as a friend.

This isn’t to say that there won’t be times for parents to rally, laws to be passed and, please God, health care legislation to go forth that won’t prevent Magdalena from receiving care because on her condition. What gets more to the root of what will make her life flourish are people who will simply love her and be with her along the way. An earlier post of the Motherlode blog gives us a hint at life where habits of friendship trump arguments about access. Welcome, baby Cash. May friendship find you.

“You’ve probably already heard, but we suspect your son has Down syndrome.” We hadn’t heard. We are devastated. We are reeling. Hadn’t we been through enough already? Tests are done, literature distributed, doctors talk to us in a language we don’t (or don’t want to) understand. Finally, it’s is confirmed. We are still trying to catch our breath.

Then the blessings come. Can they be explained any other way? The phone call on Sunday to the on-call pediatrician who when Britt said, “We just learned our son has Downs,” answered “My brother has Downs; that’s why I got into medicine to begin with.” Then a Wednesday trip to the ob-gyn where our doctor’s next patient just happened to have a child with Downs and would be happy to talk to us if we thought it was helpful. A call from my sister in Ireland who just had a lovely visit with her husband’s cousin and her daughter who has Downs. All signs that we are not alone in this.

Our son came home from the hospital Christmas Eve. As his brother says, he clearly wanted to join us all in time for Christmas. He is beautiful and loved, and although we know this journey will not be an easy one, we are so grateful for this very special gift we have received.

called to die

I’ve just received news about two University of Portland students working in Haiti as post-graduate service volunteers. One was found in the rubble of a building, alive but with several broken bones. As of today, the other student, Molly Hightower, is unaccounted for.

One of my tasks at the Moreau Center at the University of Portland was to shepherd newly minted graduates into a year of service. I met with so many soon-to-be alums who would fill out a form, sit down to talk with me about options and then go on their way. While I remember Rachel quite well, had I met with Molly? Had she sat down to tell me about her love of French and her desire to work with orphans? Had I said, “how about Friends of Orphans in Haiti?”

Of one thing I am sure, I never told Molly or any of my students that they might die. It’s not part of the marketing strategy. But sometimes I wish it was, or at least that we talked about the consequences of choosing life with the poor in a fragile country. While it is aching for me to imagine Molly trapped somewhere beneath huge rocks, perhaps wondering and waiting, perhaps already gone, my greatest emotion is awe at her obedience.

The other night I was reading “My Utmost for His Highest” before bed and the section for the day was entitled “What my obedience to God costs other people.” This immediately came to mind as I tried to fight off the sense of utter horror and undoing that Molly’s parents are experiencing now. As a new parent I can barely think about this without falling apart. (Looking at pictures of the babies Molly works with everyday, many of whom are likely dead, brought me to tears. God, be their mother and their father now.)

And yet I am reminded: “Beware of the inclination to dictate to God as to what you will allow to happen to you if you obey Him.”