Human Touch in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

I read a lot of books and have forgotten more about them than I thought was possible, but some scenes stay with me no matter how many books intervene. Maybe because I’m a dad, the scene in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road when the father shoots and kills the man who has grabbed his son will not leave me. It’s not the only scene from the book seared into my brain (“the things you put into your head are there forever” (12) after all) but when I picked up the novel this year to re-read it, I was thinking about it before I’d even reached it.

It rose to the top of my thoughts with the first line of the novel, where the father reflexively reaches out to his son: “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping before him.” It occurred to me that in my previous readings of the novel, the only other person to touch the boy was the man his father killed. The contrast between the two men’s touching of the son struck me–they both aim to possess, but one is for the sake of consumption and one is rooted in love.

What role, I began to wonder, does touch have in this bleak world McCarthy creates for us?

Touch, I realized with this first line, has maintained credibility in a world where so much language is useless, its “sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality” (89)¹. At no time in the book does the father say I love you to his son, yet we never doubt through all their Okays that he loves his boy. How do we know this? How are we so convinced about this father’s love for his son?

No novelist wins a Pulitzer Prize by being sloppy, and having read a few of McCarthy’s other novels, and having read The Road a couple times, I knew nothing extraneous had sneaked into the text. Every letter and comma serves a purpose, advances some kind of idea. What if, then, I spent this year’s reading monitoring McCarthy’s use of human touch? What might I discover about the role McCarthy assigns touch in The Road? What insight might that deliver to me about the nature of touch?

I therefore read with a pencil close at hand and marked each referral to one person touching another person and then jotted on a note card the pages where I found those moments (I can therefore assure you that 99 pages of the novel contain instances of touch). Obviously, most of these depict exchanges between the man and the boy, and in that basic sense most of the touch connotes something positive. My next task–which I have yet to finish–is to categorize each incident in a chart so I can determine which kinds of touch are most common (is a touch of guidance more common than one extending warmth?).

But while I have not completed my chart, I can already see how this touch stands in direct opposition to the meaninglessness of the world the man and the boy inhabit. While the bonds between humans have burned like the landscape–the boy and the man’s primary mission, after all, is to check for and avoid contact with other human beings–and while concepts of goodness and love make no sense anymore², the primacy of human touch has defied reason and meaninglessness. So opposed to the mother’s argument that there is no reasonable defense for living, the man continues to kiss his son (e.g. 82), to hold him when he needs comforting (e.g. 62, 85), to intervene when the boy cannot do something for himself (e.g. 39, 66), to guide him (e.g. 61, 85), to warm him (e.g. 29, 36, 67), and to keep him safe (e.g. 67, 77). Thus, when this dragon of meaningless evil breathes its fire, burning every word of reason propelled at it to destroy it, this simple and fundamental sensory expression withstands its conflagration.

In this preponderance of love expressed through human touch–and, admittedly, the punctuations of hatred, also expressed through touch³–exists the concrete reality of love (and hatred). The abstractions of language and morality have burned away, but goodness and love exist. People can say what they want–can name themselves Ely if they want–but the boy carries the fire, and we know he carries the fire not because of what he says, but because of what he does; we have seen him and we know he is the one who worries about everything, who has to worry about everything because no one else will (259).

In the end, this human touch shows us what the man and the boy do, and what they do is good. If we agree that McCarthy’s portrayal depicts a true aspect of our world, then no matter how bleak our world appears at times, no matter how much evil pushes against the ideas of what we think is right, goodness and love still reveal themselves through their actions, like touch.

In this way, I’m convinced McCarthy’s novel is a parable for a reality I confront frequently. Its insight is stunning.  When darkness is overcoming the world and I can’t find words to confront it, I can hold my son, rocking him back and forth, and know in this is a spot of grace, a place where light shines in this world.

---

Notes

1. Thus the man can say to his son, “I’ll be in the neighborhood” but to his son, born in the world after the incident that destroys it, the phrase means nothing (95). The same thing is true with his stories about heroism and even names–see the conversation with “Ely.”
2. See the mother’s defense for suicide and her point that the man has no way to answer her because there is no reason to live (57). See also the depiction of “absolute truth” as “cold” and “relentless,” “darkness implacable,” and a “crushing black vacuum” (130).
3. Hence the man the father kills and the father’s vow to kill anyone who touches the boy (77).

Considering how small groups can be an appropriate way to structure church

Through the past few years I have come to believe that small groups are the best way for local churches to structure themselves for ministry in their communities, and my reading of Larry Kreider’s book, House to House, kicks off a bit of a formal study of how I might utilize the small group model with my own family and within my local church. I thought I’d share a few things regarding small groups I am increasingly convinced of, and Kreider’s book, while not perfect (particularly in his Biblical explication, which at times I found lacking), brought many of these things into sharper focus for me.

Small groups appear to be the church’s best bet for reaching out to unbelievers.

I have seen many evangelistic and outreach attempts and I admit to holding my breath and sighing inside for almost every one of them. The one I sigh at the most is Kirk Cameron’s Way of the Master, a strategy that guides believers to accost non-Christians in public places and corner them into admitting they are sinners in need of a savior. If the strategy has worked, then praise God, for ultimately I echo Paul’s conviction that as long as Christ is proclaimed, then so be it (Philippians 1.15-18), but I chafe at it because it seems to me a cheap rhetorical trap, not a way to guide a person into a forever-relationship with Jesus. It strikes me that what most people in today’s American culture want least is to be cornered by some “crazy Christian” and told they’re sinners. What they want, as far as I can see, is to see a faith that works before they consider it for themselves. In a world of scandals and hypocrisy, a world where people’s impressions of Christians are often defined by what Christians are against, politically, they need to see something different for themselves before they’ll come close.

Enter the small group, a place where people can enter and check out what these Christians are really like. If Christians are interacting with non-believers and loving them (which would mean, by extension, wanting them to know Christ), then the small group becomes a way to offer someone a closer look at what the Christian life is like. (As a side note, I appreciated Kreider’s firm comment about what a Christian should do if their circles of acquaintances are filled only with Christians: “When this is the case, steps need to be taken to develop new circles of relationships” (94).) Essentially, the small group gives a Christian a comfortable place to invite a non-Christian. A non-Christian might not want to go near a church—all that singing and preaching, all those memories of hating church as a kid or of not knowing what to do at the right time—but they might go to a small group gathering if someone they respect invited them over.

To my mind the small group is a better opportunity than some outreach event the church may conduct, like the classic Easter service where everyone tries to invite a non-believer. The small group’s consistent schedule allows a person to extend an invitation when it is natural and sensible, and it allows a guest to come and check it out on more than one occasion without having to feel pressure. The Christian, too, can relax and feel no pressure, as he doesn’t have the sense that this is his one chance to invite that buddy of his to an event.

When a guest does come, what she sees is not a room full of people listening to some guy talk about something she may or may not believe, but a group of Christians truly living the Christian life in connection, supporting and encouraging and praying for one another. That is what we believers wish people knew about when they judge us according to political debates, and the small group gives us a chance to show them.

Small groups are the best way to move people into living out their faith and holding them accountable for doing so.

Sitting in a church on Sunday morning for a service, attending Sunday school, helping at AWANA or youth group—these are a few traditional activities of church, but for most believers on this schedule, these activities never truly challenge us to live out the kind of faith that John and James describes as being full of clear, righteous fruit. Actually, that sentence doesn’t quite capture it: they challenge us to do so, but if attending those activities is all we do, the church is powerless to confirm whether we do so. When we attend a small group and within that group ask each other difficult questions and hold each other accountable for growing in obedience in our faith—then we are confirming whether each of us is living out the faith. But in the structure of church as we typically do it, this rarely occurs. We meet, we go out to lunch, and we listen a lot to teachers, but we have no vehicle to confirm response.

Further, when you read the New Testament, particularly the epistles of Paul, so you encounter a myriad of commands to encourage, love, care for, and submit to one another (and the actions go on and on). How many of these things can we actually accomplish by sitting in church singing and listening to a sermon? Very few. If we intentionally enter into committed relationships with one another (and in our culture this means we have to block out a slot in the week’s activity-filled agenda), we can actually live out the faith with each other in a way that resembles the commands of scripture.

Small groups can be done in many ways.

When you begin to think openly about small groups, you realize that the ways they are done are almost endless. Some can meet every week. Some can meet every other week, and on the off weeks the group can get together for something more informal, say to do yardwork for one family in the group. One week the women could go off by themselves and pray and talk in-depth while the men watch over the kids, and then next week it could be reversed. The group could have dinner together all the time, some times, or never. The group could watch a video series together and hold each other accountable to improving in such a way, or the group could simply discuss the week’s sermon in practical ways. Precisely what is done is flexible, as long as the group is focused on challenging one another to live out the Christian faith.

Small groups allow increased diversity in the local church body.

In a large church there are a plethora of opinions about how to do things, yet there is only one service each week, which means many people won’t have it their way or any way near it. That is fine—we must submit to one another—but when we separate for additional times together, it allows others a put their fingerprints on the ministry of the church in creative ways they otherwise couldn’t. Krieder, concerning the structure of the church, nicely points out the importance of this expression: “No matter what the structure, we believe the key is that the structure that is created must allow for the free expression of the creative abilities of God’s people within that structure. The most efficient and effective structures are those where the individual can be seen and utilized, rather than disenfranchised or ignored” (258).

Heck, I am even naive enough to hope that small group structure could be the way to move churches to become less racially segregated, as the small group settings could allow for understanding and respect regarding the vastly different ways we worship in our country.

Small groups must be held to the vision of the local church.

Kreider points out that, for him, (and I tend to agree with him), “The primary focus of each small group . . . should be outreach and discipleship, rather than fellowship. Fellowship, then, will be a healthy by-product of the small group that is constantly reaching out to others” (89). This is a particular view of small groups and can easily be ignored. Thus, if the church is attempting to use small groups as a tool of outreach and discipleship with a main aim at connecting with non-believers, then that vision has to be shared.

Only with that accountability can a goal of outreach be realistically held. Kreider is of the opinion that “to trust the Lord for at least two people or families to come to Christ through our small group or house church each year is certainly not setting a goal that is too high” (190). I am challenged by such a goal, and, to be honest, if I am not encouraged and reminded of such a vision, I too would stray away from it. Thus, my church would want to hold and remind me and my group of that vision, so we do not subvert our purpose. Without that vision being firmly agreed upon and enforced, the groups can easily turn into more entrenched cliques or groups of friends.

Small groups disable many of the structural restrictions to how we typically do church.

I have come to realize that one of the most important aspects of a small group is that it allows people to take on the real challenge of serving others. Too often we say there is work to be done in our church and we issue a call for volunteers, and the opportunities are things like constructing sets for vacation Bible school, attending budget meetings for committees and teams, serving sandwiches, and babysitting in the nursery. Even leaders are tapped for what might be called governing responsibilities rather than ministry tasks. These things need to be done, for sure, but it strikes me that spiritual gifts don’t exactly apply in many of the aforementioned activities. It’s like organizing a baseball team and then only having the players arrange helmets and set up the field—they never get to play. Why not extend a real challenge to people, a challenge of discipleship? A challenge of serving one another? Kreider makes a couple interesting points in this regard, and the first involves deacons. He observes that the responsibilities of a deacon, as conveyed in scripture, align quite closely with those of a small group leader. Thus he says with conviction, “We are fully convinced that literally thousands of deacons need to be released to prepare for the coming revival” (247). The deacons need to be released from governing and chores to minister, and leading small groups is something they can be released to.

A second point of Kreider’s regarding structure that I particularly appreciate is more general:

Karen Hurston, who has spent many years of her life studying churches, told me once that many mega-churches are more like teaching centers. This is a bold analysis, but in some cases she may be right. One of the difficulties that many mega-churches have is that many believers are bench warmers and never use the many gifts that the Lord has given to them because they get ‘lost in the crowd.’ (255)

I am not as restrained or soft as Kreider in my own thinking. When I think of a typical church—not just a mega-church—it strikes me that almost all of its activities consist of education. Education is important, to be sure, but when the church’s structured time consists only of education, it is an imbalanced picture of what the Christian life is.

In another era small groups likely weren’t necessary. A Puritan community apparently did not need formal small groups to encourage people to live out their Christian walks. But what one generation and community can take for granted, another has to intentionally create, and community is something our culture lacks. We put up fences around our yards and hide behind garage doors, and if we do not make an intentional effort to get behind these walls and invade these modern cocoons, we can’t encourage each other in the ways previous generations and other cultures of the church were able to.

I admit I am a bit daunted by the time and effort involved with small group ministry. I am intimidated by the idea of someone asking our group whether anyone has become a Christian in the previous year due to our loving ministry. Yet I am also excited by the idea of living out my faith along with other people, of working beside them instead of simply sitting beside them. I am excited to think that I could be involved in challenging, interesting, and important conversations about faith and not just chit-chat.

No matter what my hesitations, a small group structure is the best idea I’ve seen for a church to encourage believers to follow Jesus, and ultimately, that’s something I am excited about.

• Kreider, Larry. House to House. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2008.

How my attempts at Advent spark liturgical longings

I really like my church. I go out of my way to say this because there is a sense in which I am not a great fit for it. If you were to sit me down and ask me to map out my ideal Sunday worship service, for example, I probably would not create something all that similar to the service in which I participate every Sunday. The general differences would involve what is often called liturgy–those scripted or formal elements of a service that are repeated or structured in a particular pattern. I’d utilize more of a formal liturgy than my church does, creating in all likelihood a service more similar to a Presbyterian or Anglican service than my Baptist church would ever desire.

This discrepancy between my ideal and my real church experience is okay, I am convinced, and I refuse to entertain thoughts of changing churches. My wife had ties to our church before I moved here and when I arrived to marry her I was quickly enveloped into the social fabric–or, more accurately and appropriately, into the fellowship–of what is our church. Once in that fellowship, I was part of the church, all preferences aside. These were people I had considered and been stirred by to love and good works, people from whom I had received and to whom I had given encouragement. Whether I particularly liked the service or not struck me as a lesser concern, so I held that preference at bay in favor of loyalty and fidelity to a particular group of people.

But like many preferences, this one lingers. Christmas is one time I tend to note my divergent views, as my church has never emphasized Advent all that much. I like Advent, with its weekly theme and Old Testament readings; I like the way the Advent journey reminds me about our world’s need for justice and judgment, about my need and longing for a Savior, before announcing the news of Christ’s arrival. Anyone can remember that Christmas is about Christ, but with an Advent focus I can better remember why I want to give back the song which now the angels sing.

I should note, however, that my love for liturgy is not a love built from long experience. I did not grow up using the Book of Common Prayer, for example, and cannot navigate it competently; neither could I answer questions about morning vespers or other such exercises of corporate devotion. What this means is that when occasions like Advent come along I tend to strike out on my own to recreate a liturgical devotional structure–and what I create is a strange and inadequate amalgamation. Metaphorically, I would hope for the experience to be like my hopping out of a ship and independently exploring the waters nearby in a kayak, later to return to the ship in which I have committed to riding. Instead, my attempts are much closer to jumping out of the boat with no kayak or life vest and flopping around for a few minutes. After climbing back to the deck, wet and sputtering, I am forced to admit I am more a product of the boat in which I ride than I might think.

Thus, this Advent I thought I’d at least read Isaiah, which seemed like a good way to remember the anticipation of the Messiah.Things started out well, I think, as God’s words in Isaiah recalled to my mind how powerful and encompassing is the peace which the Messiah brings:

He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide disputes for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore. (Isaiah 2:4)

Later I shared with my children what I’d been reading in Isaiah 11 about the same radical peace of God, which, with the coming of the “shoot from the stump of Jesse” would bring about the impossible. Their favorite images of the impossible were these:

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. (v. 8)

But then my wife and I began staying up later and later getting ready for Christmas–cleaning the house for company, putting the lights on the tree, addressing Christmas cards–and I found reading Isaiah a bit more difficult. The words kept spinning on the page, sending my eyes rolling into the back of my head and me closer to the edge of sleep. I’d work with what energy I had and focus on particular images, like the imagery of God’s criticism of Assyria, that country that boasted of its accomplishments as if God had not been involved:

Shall the axe boast over him who hews with it,
or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it? (Isaiah 10:15)

Thinking on such an image was feasible, because I could hold it in mind and connect it to other scripture without having to focus my eyes, which in my exhaustion were close to useless. I recalled how I’d seen so often in Psalms that the Psalmist would praise God by telling others what God had done for him, and I realized that Assyria’s sin was essentially the absence of this praise. What a good reminder for myself, I thought, to speak clearly and gratefully about the ways God has blessed me. The devotional potential of reading Isaiah remained strong, as it always does in any book of the Bible when I read earnestly.

Yet the problem with such reading, Advent-wise, was that I certainly would not progress through Isaiah by Christmas. I’d be lucky to get half-way there, and the closer I got to Christmas, the slower my pace became; instead of reading four chapters a night, I was reading one, and some nights my reading was so useless and confused that I’d have to re-read it the next night. I read chapter 22 about the valley of vision three nights in a row and finally moved on with an embarrassingly low handle of the imagery.  It was not overly surprising, then, that I found myself the night after Christmas slogging through just the 28th of the 66 chapters in the book and becoming increasingly discouraged by my efforts.

At age 17 I began reading the Bible just about every day, and I am comfortable with the basic outline of the history it relates regarding Israel and Judah. I’ve read the entire Bible a number of times and studied it formally in a few contexts, including college. Yet my insight regarding Isaiah was laughable and my comprehension was dismal. What was going on in this text? I didn’t know.

This is probably how my literature students feel much of the time, particularly when we read poetry. I put Ezra Pound in front of them and they look at me as if to say, “I’m sorry, did you want me to know what this poem is about? Because I understand zero of it.” When I was their age I was determined to overcome that phenomenon. I wanted to pick up a poem or a book and “get it.” I wanted to not need a teacher to explain to me what it meant; I wanted to figure it out myself.

Thus I made a vow not to read the introductions to books. I’d just read the book and experience it myself and over time I figured I’d become capable of getting it. Plus, reading what other people said the book meant felt like cheating; it felt like reading Cliff’s Notes, and I had steadfastly resisted any hint of such a strategy. To read what other people wrote before writing my own interpretation for the ubiquitous essay smacked of scandal. To put a spiritual spin on it, I later heard some well-meaning Christians say they thought one should read the Bible without any commentary, that you should read the Bible and pray and find out for yourself what it means, and perhaps because this echoed with my other convictions about literature, I gave the idea more credence than it deserved.

Life is strange. Why I assembled these various tidbits of influence the way I did is a mystery to me, and why I followed them as advice the few times I did is also a mystery. What I do know is that I have become about as convinced as I can be that I was completely wrong about consulting outside sources. While reaching for commentary as a substitute for reflective reading is certainly objectionable, interacting with commentary is quite often essential for understanding.

For my students with those quizzical poems and stories, the reality is that they can understand them, and while sometimes all they need is a bit of prodding to read more carefully, oftentimes it really requires that I give them some background information. Mark Twain’s satirical focus in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, becomes clearer when we read an article about the honor code of the South. We don’t want to limit all Twain’s criticisms to the honor code, but knowing what the honor code was and how much it bothered Twain gives us access to his text; it helps us to orient ourselves and realize what spurred a few quizzical but emphatic scenes. Essentially, it gave us a clue.

A clue is exactly what I needed as I read Isaiah 28. Putting down my copy of the Bible, which is a basic English Standard Version with no commentary (I like it for most reading as it is thin and easy to hold), I borrowed one of my children’s study Bibles. A quick reference keyed me in to the nature of the chapter–Isaiah’s criticism was of Jerusalem’s confident reliance upon Egypt for protection and part of the chapter I could not understand was a parody or mockery of Israel’s gleeful reporting of their alliance. The next part of the section, I learned, described the Assyrian army coming upon Jerusalem. That knowledge and a further note helped me to understand seven verses at the end of the chapter that, to that point, had struck me as completely random; now they made sure sense.

Consulting the outside source takes time, of course. Reading in this way is more what we label studying than what we label reading. Yet to read well, and particularly to read challenging texts well, we have to do more than breeze over the words once. We have to study them.

Perhaps this is part of what I find beautiful about Advent and liturgy. There is a sense in which the liturgy and traditional, recurring structures are guides that give pilgrims like me a clue about what we are supposed to focus upon as we travel this road. Not that a clearer liturgy would have helped me to comprehend the 28th chapter of Isaiah; but perhaps my own foray into interpreting Isaiah is a bit of a metaphor for my own liturgy-less experience: I plowed through it on my own a few times and came up clueless, but a short consult with a trustworthy source transformed the text to a meaningful prophecy. In this sense, a liturgy strikes me as one way to place a framework upon our devotional life, a framework that can keep us from being quite so clueless. I have full confidence, of course, that my non-liturgical fellowship and I are traveling down the narrow road that leads to the small gate; sometimes I wonder, however, if we allow the journey to become more confusing than it needs to be.

Thanks for reading.

________________________

Photo credit:

• Penn, Leah. “Advent Candles.” Flickr. Yahoo!, 30 Jan. 2008. Web. 28 Dec. 2012.

The Livestrong Myth: What the USADA’s report means about Lance Armstrong’s legacy

There’s a scene in The Perfect Game that captures nicely what it is to be a little boy. The team, a Mexican little league squad from Monterey, feels discouraged and begins to doubt itself. To motivate them, the coach tells the kids they’re not a bunch of poor beginners, they’re the Brooklyn Dodgers. He then tells each of them to get back to their positions, one by one, calling them by the name of their Dodger counterpart. The kids eat it up and begin to play inspired baseball.

It’s tacky, but it’s completely true. I remember playing whiffle-ball not as a determined whiffle-baller, but as a mini-Dwight Evans, the Red Sox right fielder whose batting stance was a constant temptation to little mimics like me. Dare I admit in public that I thought it was okay to wear knee pads when I played basketball in fourth grade? How could I do such a thing? Because I was Robert Parish and Kevin McHale, and I lived in Celtic-territory, that’s how. We young boys operated in a world of fantasy and dreams: we clearly dreamed “that he is me” and we wanted to be like Mike.

As an adult I’ve not progressed too far beyond this pretending, though I have adapted it slightly. When I ride my bike, I admit to imitating the cadences and positions of particular riders; on steep inclines I’ll stand out of the saddle and pop the pedals like Alberto Contador, for example. Other times I’ll push myself to maintain a tougher pace on flat stretches, envisioning the determined time trials professional riders can call forth. It’s not quite the same thing as my childhood fantasies since I don’t consciously pretend to be these riders, but I certainly imitate and compare in an effort to bring out of myself a better performance. Of this I’m not embarrassed, as imitating masters is a time-proven technique for learning, whether it’s called apprenticeship or modeling or discipleship.

This cycling imitation is about the last vestige of my childhood imitations, though. I no longer see myself as comparable to baseball or basketball players, for I no longer play those sports. I can’t pretend to be Alexi Lalas scoring headers and stolidly defending for team USA. But I can ride my bike just like I could when I was 10 years old, when I would race it at warp speed around the Village Green, a quarter mile neighborhood loop; perhaps this is why I retain a boyish enthusiasm for professional cycling, an unadulterated fanaticism for road racing.

Since this obsession–let’s call it what it is, I suppose–is well known, a number of friends have asked me what my thoughts are about the Lance Armstrong revelations and allegations. In the end I’ve written quite a bit in emails, and I thought I’d compile some of my thoughts here, making my own public statement about Lance, a man whose riding I have loved to imitate but whose decayed character has finally turned me away.

I must say at first that I am convinced that people like me–that is, cycling fans–were so aware of the potential of all this that it’s hard to see it hurting the sport any more than the sport has already been hurt in the past; yet assuming that it’s all true, it’s amazing to me that Armstrong’s teams (from US Postal to Discovery to Astana) were able to keep all this system locked up so tight for so long. A student asked me the other day how the investigation got started and I realized I had no idea. That in itself is interesting–how does one get going on this? I suppose it begins with a rat like Floyd Landis, but there seem to be so many possibilities, and it is strange that it took this long for an operation so big to come to light. I remember many other teams getting busted during those years, French police raiding team cars and things of that nature, and Lance’s teams were going and going with it throughout it all. That’s amazing.

Regarding Armstrong himself, it has been years since I actually believed he was clean. A year or two back I read an article in Bicycling that convinced me he’d doped. In it Bill Strickland, a self-avowed Armstrong fan, takes us through his conviction that Lance cheated:

I don’t know, if you’re not already there, what might lead you to believe that Lance Armstrong doped. It wasn’t Floyd Landis for me, or the federal investigation, or any public revelation. My catalyst was another one of those statements that was never said by someone I never talked with. It was not from one of Armstrong’s opponents. It was not from anyone who will gain any clemency by affirming it under oath.

It was an admission that doping had occurred, one disguised so it could assume innocence but unmistakable to me in meaning.

I know it’s a “someone I trust told me and I can’t tell you who” admission, but since I don’t know Lance myself, it’s the best as I can do. Plus, it jived with my own judgment on Armstrong, an opinion I built from details I’d read about him, like the one slipped into an Outside article from 2003:

The Suburban’s doors open all at once and five man-boys clad in various hues of polyester pile out. Lance steps down from the driver’s seat—he can’t stand being a passenger, rarely lets anyone else take the wheel—and boosts himself into the back to change.

Perhaps I over interpreted, but I remember at the time I read the article that he seemed a bit impatient and controlling. That’s no big deal by itself, but it matched the feel I got from my reading of his book It’s Not about the Bike, which left me convinced he was exactly the kind of guy who would use performance enhancing drugs (PEDs)–a win-at-all-costs and to-heck-with-you-if-you-don’t like-me type, as I admitted here.

Yet even then, the things I’ve been reading about the doping ring that the USADA is saying his team ran . . . well that’s a whole new level of dirty. Not only are we talking every kind of drug or procedure available, but I’ve read articles this week (here’s an example) that detail how cycling has gotten into money laundering in order to help riders pay for all this stuff–Swiss bank accounts and the works–and it’s pretty clear that Armstrong’s teams took it all to a whole new level during his run at the Tour. The average person will not take the time to look at all these things, but one article at VeloNews tours part of the USADA document and shows how intentional the work of Armstrong’s teams was, particularly at the beginning of his time with US Postal. This quote from a representative portion of the USADA document is typical:

At the end of the 1998 season Lance had complained to Jonathan Vaughters that Celaya was too conservative in the way he dispensed doping products. Armstrong’s comment about Dr. Celaya was along the lines of, the team “might as well race clean, he wants to take your temperature to give you even a caffeine pill.”

The pressure for teammates to dope seems to have come primarily from Armstrong, which makes sense given that he was the one wearing yellow jerseys. Another article at VeloNews, a shorter one than the one linked above, gives some of the details about how riders may have been pressured into doping and how cycling  wasn’t a level playing field. I waver on my thoughts about the “poor rider” angle expressed in that article and elsewhere: sometimes I have a total lack of pity and and sometimes a real sympathy, depending on how sincere I think the stories are. The most important thing about the article, however, is that it undercuts the little justification for watching cycling that I have been using for the last few years. That is, I’ve told myself that since they’re all doing it, what do I as a spectator care? I might be watching strangely medicated bionic men, but at least they’re all strangely medicated and bionic. I figured, “Hey, they’re on a level playing field, it’s just not the playing field we think it is.” To that thought the article makes this point:

This idea seems laughable, even. The best riders — Armstrong — had the best doctors. Only certain riders on the team got the certain baggies of drugs, while others were rationed lesser tonics. Dope didn’t level the playing field; it created an entirely different game that only a few guys had tickets to.

“When everyone can dope, it becomes a contest of who has the best information, who has the best access, who has the best doctor, and who has the most money. That’s what this contest is — it’s a chess game of information, connections and money,” co-Author  Daniel Coyle told VeloNews just after the [The Secret Race‘s] release.

Obviously, I have to realize, my old justification is a self-deception.  Money and power wins and you can pretty well buy your way to the top. Of course, it’s clear that Lance still had to work hard to get where he did–I wouldn’t win this summer’s Tour de France no matter how many PED’s you pumped into me–but I’m not his competition. Plenty of Lance’s competitors were just as dedicated but not as connected, just as passionate but not as corrupt. Someone like me has to look at such a competition and wonder if what I am seeing is even sport anymore. It feels a little like rooting for a drug cartel. In a scenario like pro cycling during Armstrong’s run, it’s more like The Godfather than Rudy.

Whether this is sport is a crucial question for me, but it doesn’t even get into the Livestrong Myth: how Armstrong has essentially marketed himself as the good guy through his Livestrong foundation and drawn who knows how many millions in endorsements through the years by being the good-cancer-fighter. The whole country’s been taken in by the ruse but our very gullibility is tied closely with our lack of concern for how false the character was.

As far as what Americans will think of Lance, unfortunately I think the reality of our thinking is best captured by The Onion:

According to sources and basic common sense, now that the storied career of cycling’s most prominent and marketable figure has been revealed as a complete and undeniable fraud, there is no chance the sport will ever again receive even one line of coverage from any news outlet in the world.

In all likelihood, most folks aren’t interested enough to find out how bad Armstrong’s actions really were. Since we liked the Livestrong Myth so much, one has to wonder if  anyone even cares whether Lance was dirty or not; after all,it is so inspirational . . .

As an example of this attitude I turn to Rick Reilly, a guy who is usually high on moral uprightness but for some reason has been all too willing to give Lance a pass because of his non-profit work:

I don’t care. I’m wearing yellow just to say thank you. If he cheated in a sport where cheating is as common as eating, then I’m wearing yellow to thank him for everything he’s done since he cheated.

 I’m wearing something yellow for the way he changed cancer in this country from dread to hope. I’m wearing something yellow for everybody who got their chilling cancer diagnosis and said to themselves, “Lance did it. Why can’t I?”

 Want to join me?

I can comprehend Reilly’s sentiment, a sentiment expressed before the public got a look at the gory details of the USADA report, a report far more damning than most folks seemed to think it would be; but to those willing to reexamine the reality of it, the bulk of Lance’s charity work looks more like self-indulgent self-promotion than kind-hearted philanthropy. This old Outside article (also written before the USADA’s report) leveled some pretty heavy criticism of him:

“The issue with Lance Armstrong isn’t whether he has done good for cancer victims,” accounting professor Mark Zimbelman wrote on his blog Fraudbytes, in a post comparing Mortenson to Armstrong, “but rather, whether he first cheated to beat his opponents, then used his fraudulent titles to help promote an organization that appears to do good but also enriches a fraudster.”

I love the clarity of this paragraph:

Much of the foundation’s work ends up buffing the image of one Lance Edward Armstrong, which seems fair—after all, Livestrong wouldn’t exist without him. But Livestrong spends massively on advertising, PR, and “branding,” all of which helps preserve Armstrong’s marketability at a time when he’s under fire. Meanwhile, Armstrong has used the goodwill of his foundation to cut business deals that have enriched him personally, an ethically questionable move.

“It’s a win-win,” says Daniel Borochoff, head of the American Institute of Philanthropy, a watchdog group. “He builds up the foundation, and they build up him.”

Yet does anyone care? I’m not sure they do. The Livestrong Myth is too good, too simple, to deny: “After coming within an inch of death, Lance fought all the way back to become the world’s greatest athlete. You can battle back too!” It’s my boyhood role-playing all over again, but this time with cancer victims: “Like Lance, if I could be like Lance!”  And while the USADA report and the dropped endorsements may mean the myth will not be peddled so openly anymore, my hunch is it will not be deservedly eradicated. Like The Onion pointed out, people don’t actually care about cycling, which means the onslaught of reporting that went into exposing and debunking the myth of Joe Paterno (see here for an example) will never be unleashed upon Armstrong . . . and most folks won’t know any more than Rick Reilly told them back in September. They’ll never know that the real story of Lance, both as cancer patient and pro cyclist, is that it’s amazing what kind of medical treatment you can get with big money and power.

__________________________

• Ritenour, Anita. “Lance Armstrong -2009 Tour of California.” Flickr. Yahoo!, 20 Feb. 2009. Web. 26 Oct. 2012. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/puliarfanita/3296070443/&gt;.

10 Top Interview Tips for Your Favorite Coworker Who Is Trying to Leave

Have a trusted co-worker who is interviewing somewhere else? Are you afraid they’ll nail the interview get the job? Here are 10 tips that will surely bring about the best thing (for you).

1. Be fashionably late. If necessary, hang out outside the door for a couple minutes to make sure all your interviewers have a chance to get settled before you make your big arrival.
2. Wing it. Researching the company and the position’s qualifications are really not as important as showing them who you are despite what they want.
3. Relaxing is for sissies. If you’re too relaxed during the interview, they’re likely to think you’ll be relaxed on the job—like naps-when-they’re-not-looking and shopping-for-St.-Patrick’s-Day-relaxed. Be tense. It’ll show them you mean business.
4. Put your game face on. Everyone smiles during interviews, but look around a typical workplace. Are they all smiling? Are they friendly? It’s not really what the place wants. Want they want is victory. Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan didn’t win championships smiling nice. Put your game face on, and they’ll know you’re a winner.
5. Don’t look them in the eye. Don’t look an angry dog directly in the eye, or he might attack. You look your interviewer directly in the eye, and the next thing you know, you could find yourself in the bathroom with scotch tape trying to repair your pretty dress.
6. Leave your philosophy at home. They know you have an approach to the job and some sort of experience. You wrote it on the application. Why should you repeat it now? Nobody wants to hire that guy who retells all the same stories all the time.
7. Look different. Dressing nice is fine, but what about making yourself stand out? What about looking so memorable they’re talking about you before they even get to your name in the pile of interviewees?
8. Don’t ask questions. People say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but are you willing to risk your future job on such a maxim?
9. Come Empty Handed. Paper, pen, and the ability to take notes? This interview is not a time for jotting love notes and admitting you can’t remember anything. They see you jotting a note, they’ll automatically think: “This is the kind of person who will go to the bathroom and forget why they got up from their desk.”
10. Don’t say thank you. Saying thank you implies that you owe them something. Your thinking they owe you something means your confidence is too low. You deserve this. You own this. This job is yours, and this interview is simply a formality you have to go through before you take over that interviewer’s corner office with the window. Saying thank you is simply admitting weakness.

• Mother on Flickr by: Mick and Wout

Called to Adopt: Our Growth into a New Ministry

We had barely removed our third child from the hospital’s bakery warmer before someone first asked us the question: “Are you done?” It became the stock question, following on the heels of “What’s his name?” and “How old is he?” We naturally developed a stock answer: if we did have another child, we’d probably adopt. The reality was that neither my wife nor I had really considered adoption. The answer had less to do with adoption and more to do with answering a casual question quickly. No one ever followed it up with inquiries about adoption; perhaps they detected our lack of interest.

Yet even without much desire we knew God was bigger than our imaginations, and we always knew if more children were in his plan for us, he could grow in us a heart for adoption.

I’m no farmer, but by watching my wife garden a bit I have learned the clarity of one thing: if you want a seed to thrive, you have to prepare good soil, and in our yard that requires lots of additives. Looking back on our lives I can see how God prepared the soil for a seed he wanted to plant. Our pastor had preached convincingly on the sermon on the mount, reminding us of the importance of storing our treasures in Heaven. He’d also impressed in us a lesson from the book of Ruth about Naomi, who acted with confident initiative because she knew God’s heart even when she could not know God’s plan. Such insight encouraged our faith and increased our confidence that God in and of himself is sufficient for us and that he is eager for us to move boldly in faith.

With such enrichment of faith occurring, we reacted differently when we encountered the concept of adoption. To stay with the metaphor, our soil was receiving sufficient additives that it could accept and nourish a seed.

Such a seed dropped when I had been reading some things with the kids that caused me to wonder about adoption. It came from out of as close to nowhere as something can come and I didn’t explore deeply, yet the thought that adoption would be a good thing lingered.

For my wife, the seed dropped when she met a woman at a local coffee shop who was adopting a baby from Ethiopia. My wife heard her whole story and came home affected by the experience. We talked about it together but did not decide on anything–it’s not like the clouds opened up and we suddenly sold a car in order to adopt.

We did pray about it, though, and after some time I admitted to my wife that the more I thought about adoption, the more it made sense. That metaphorical seed had sprouted.

For me, the sense it made arose from the gospel, which suddenly struck me as an explicit story of adoption. It seemed like every time I returned to consider the gospel, which is just about every time one opens the Bible, I faced the idea of adoption.

Meanwhile, my wife was doing her own survey of scripture, a survey not of the imagery of adoption but of the practical call to it. The thing that got to us most powerfully was what we read from Deuteronomy (10:17-18), a statement of identification that God gives to the people of Israel as Moses descends from Mount Sinai with the second set of tablets showing the 10 commandments.

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.

Essentially, this is the first thing he mentions to make people know the kind of action they can expect of God. The implication is that we know who God is when we realize he executes justice for the fatherless and the widow.

It is one thing to say the Gospel is explained through adoption. It is another to realize that God loves these fatherless children so much that caring for them is the most significant and exemplary action he takes. In fact, sometimes he’s not even called God, but “Father of the fatherless” (e.g. Ps. 68:5). In our thinking verses like this moved adoption from a powerfully explanatory metaphor to a compellingly tangible example of God’s personality and heart.

Then we discovered more than the example. In the verses where we found many of these references, God commanded the Israelites to care for the sojourners (or aliens, depending on the translation) because “you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” In our ears this echoed other responsive commands, like forgive because you have been forgiven, and love because he loved you first, and we began to feel that burden of response with adoption. We are adopted–what would our response be to that act of caring mercy?

For us, we knew that what we were really considering was adoption: extending our arms and welcoming to our life a child in need of a home. As a response to the Gospel, as a reaction to God’s personality, this is what we needed to do.

There are other reasons why adoption makes sense for our family. Family is very important to us– we’ve committed to living off one income, I am committed to being home in the evenings, and we spend our time primarily with one another. Our best ministry, then, is to expand that family structure where we minister best. Yet ultimately these kinds of things are traits, not calls. These things give us confidence that we are fit for what we are doing; they’re not the call itself. The call comes from our understanding of the Gospel of Christ and the heart of God. The one who has made us children of God and defines himself as the father to the fatherless wants us to defend the cause of the orphan, and we are convinced that adopting a little one is the perfect way to respond to his call.

And now we pray that the Lord will bless us with the grace we will need as we respond to his calling.

Thanks for reading.

———–

• The Light Fantastic on Flickr by: ecstaticist

Making Use of a Public Treasure: The Library

Sometimes I stop and consider with gratitude how amazing the library is.

Consider for a moment what it would be like if the idea of a library had not yet surfaced. Then what would happen if an organization put forth the idea of a library and attempted to push it into existence?

I can’t imagine publishing companies would like the idea. “You mean,” they might begin, “you’re going to let your entire town share just one copy of that book?” Such an idea would strike them as ludicrous. It would cut into profits and greatly reduce writers’ compensation by eliminating dozens of potential buyers. It’s understandable how a library would stand for something bad in the eyes of those trying to build a business model around selling books instead of lending them, so thankfully the idea has been around longer than anyone’s ability to outlaw it.

I am no business expert, so as tempting as it might be to survey ideas for adapting the library concept in a digital age, I am not going to attempt to do so. Instead, I feel compelled simply to remember how important a library is.

I should admit that we have a great library in my town and that our family often has between 20 and 50 books checked out at a time. Currently we hold in a few piles by the door most of the juvenile collection about the solar system, and I suggest for purchase likely about six books a year that the library either gets for me through inter-library loan or actually purchases for its own collection. Further, they are the source of all but one audio book I have heard in the last two years (and that is a substantial number).

All this occurred to me today when I read Charles Simic’s article, “A Country without Libraries.” Simic ultimately makes a point about reading a codex, the paper books, but the points that resounded greater with me were the ones that touched our ability to peruse and taste items we would normally never consume:

I remember the sense of awe I felt as a teenager when I realized I could roam among the shelves, take down any book I wanted, examine it at my leisure at one of the library tables, and if it struck my fancy, bring it home. Not just some thriller or serious novel, but also big art books and recordings of everything from jazz to operas and symphonies.

I would never buy a 19 inch tall book about Van Gogh or trains, but I sure would check it out of the library for a few weeks. Neither would I be able to expose my children to Italy the way a huge pile of books and Rick Steeves travel videos could (and did). As I see the way my children and I explore and experience the library, I realize how intimate a piece our library is in the framework of their education, to their exposure to the world. Thus, my favorite line from Simic’s article:

I still can’t get over the generosity of the taxpayers of Oak Park. It’s not that I started out life being interested in everything; it was spending time in my local, extraordinarily well-stacked public library that made me so.

The more I hang around the library, the more I want to read, the more I want to learn. I want to check out a stack of books each time I go there, and when I get home I secretly evaluate my schedule to see if I can eek out a few more minutes of time to read. I can’t, but I want to try, because the library always has something else I want to read next.

Thanks for reading.

• This Alabamiana Library Is A Beaut on Flickr by: libraryman
• New York Public Library on Flickr by: Thomas Hawk