Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Old Way

My great grandmother, Birdena (Healey) Flint, was born in 1901 near Wolcottville, Indiana, where she lived most of her life. She worked on a farm, raised her children, served as her church treasurer and taught in a one room school house. I never knew her husband, Truman, who died months before I was born. But she I was privileged to know. She died at the age of 106 just two years ago.

I remember visiting her home as a kid in the 1980s. Some of the things I saw just didn't fit into my thinking. Her ways were weird. Most of her front yard was taken up by an enormous garden (what a waste, I thought). She saved Ziploc bags, and even stored used Saran Wrap in her unused dishwasher. You couldn't eat from the boxes of cereal she had, because it had been in the cupboard for so long (probably left from the last person who had visited). And strangest to me, she would only use one square of toilet paper per "sitting." Somewhere along the line someone explained to me that a lot of her ways could be attributed to the fact that she lived through the Great Depression.

My thinking has wandered towards the depression lately. More accurately, I've been thinking about how we have framed the depression. I've wondered how people who knew life before the depression thought, especially those who hadn't migrated to the cities yet. I've wondered if, without the roaring 20s, the depression would have felt like much of a dip in rural America, where life had always been very hard. I've wondered if people who entered those years, having endured many other hardships, chalked it up as something to be expected. If we thought of our nation as bi-polar, could a depression be one swing, whose opposite is a manic episode? Will the past few years of indiscriminate waste be looked upon by our children as the Great Mania?

These are all wonderings, mere meanderings. They started with Wendell Berry, who started on me right before my Great Grandma's death. Berry has instilled in me a deep appreciation for the "old way." He has given a rudimentary understanding of the patterns and necessities of life that produced in my great grandmother, her ways.

The most recent novel I have read is called Andy Catlett: Early Travels. Others of Berry's novels (Memories of Old Jack, Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter) tell the whole life of one person who is a "member" of the life of Port William, Kentucky, and in so doing, tell the story of the changing of America through eyes of these lovable characters. In Andy Catlett: Early Travels, Berry takes a snapshot of one week in the life of a nine year old boy at the end of 1943. Andy is Berry's alter-ego throughout his fictional series.

Thoughout the week, he goes to visit his two sets of grandparents, and joins as much as he can in their way of life. The grandparents' way of life, is the way Berry refers to throughout his writing as the "Old Way." Andy is coming from Hargrave, where he lives with his parents; a world given to the new way. Narrating as an old man looking back on the change from the old way to the new, Andy says,
"That those two worlds were in mortal contention had never occurred to me. When in a few years one had entirely consumed the other, so that no place anywhere would ever again be satisfied to be what it was, I was surprised, and I am more surprised now by the rapidity of change than I was then. In only a few years the word of pavement, speed, and universal dissatisfaction had extended itself into nearly every place and nearly every mind, and the old world of the mule team and wagon was simply gone, leaving behind it a scatter of less and less intelligible relics."

More valuable to me than his social commentary, though, this book is full of descriptions of the old way. You can see and hear how everyday life was before electricity and cars. Not only in the patterns of doing, but in the patterns of thinking. And he paints it as beautiful, as I'm sure it was.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

a clash of titans

Andrew Peterson went to Wendell Berry's house, and wrote about it. Nothing could interest me more. He wrote about it in the Rabbit Room in this post. I have a review of Berry's Andy Catlett: Early Travels in the works, but I think both titans would agree that it's more important that I spend time listening to my wife. Maybe tomorrow.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

A review of Capitalism: A Love Story

I watched Michael Moore's latest, Capitalism: A Love Story a few weeks ago. If you know Michael Moore at all, you'll probably guess how he handled the matter. He blamed all of our societal problems on Republican presidents, the Right-leaning, fear-mongering media, and Wall Street fat cats. He oversimplifies and over-vilifies; he twists facts, and uses strategic camera angles and loud music to underscore his points.

Knowing all of this before sitting down, I still find his movies entertaining and thought provoking, even if I do disagree with him time and again. Plus, there are a lot of people watching his films, and it's good to see first hand how the far left (often over-vilified themselves) thinks.

Before I get into the film, a few words on capitalism.

I like the system, in theory. On paper, I see how more real wealth is created when people and nations have the ability to specialize their efforts and provide the goods or services that are most advantageous for them to provide. Capitalism has tremendous potential to fight world poverty and inequality. What plays out, though, I think is deeply damaging to the people who benefit from the competition and those who lose. On one side we have people rewarded and encouraged towards greed and selfishness, and on the other we have people either poor or dependent on the rich.

I don't think the problem is the fallen-ness of man, selfish business people or bad politician. I think the problem with our current system is its size. The world economy as we know it is too big for conscience or neighborliness to enter our thinking as we make economic decisions. I could envision capitalism working for many if we knew and cared about the people who we were trading with. But we don't know them, and we can't know them.

In my neighborhood there is a coal-powered electrical plant run by a large corporation, Midwest Generation. The electricity the plant produces does not even power the homes in our neighborhood. It powers homes in Michigan, I've heard. This article explains, "A 2001 study by professors at the Harvard School of Public Health correlated emissions at nine Illinois coal-burning power plants with health data. The study estimated that the plants in Pilsen and Little Village together are responsible for 41 premature deaths, 2,800 asthma attacks and 550 emergency room visits per year." ( The article also explains that due to recent pressure, the plant claims to have recently cleaned up their act). The problem here is that the good people who are running their air conditioners in Michigan have no idea what their actions are doing to my recently born Rozalie's lungs.

And it is a safe bet that every time we buy anything from a large corporation, whatever they're selling, that somewhere along the supply chain, profit, efficiency, leverage, and competition is put above humanity and creation. We can buy almost nothing with a clear conscience. Did capitalism do this? I don't think so. I think it's more capitalism + globalism + isolation of individuals that has exploded the system into something that subtracts thoughts about our fellow man and the earth from the equation. The marketing industry has taken the sum and made us fully trusting buying machines, thoughtless of our consequences.

Capitalism: A Love Story has a simpler bent. Throughout the film, Moore shows eye-popping disparities of income and lifestyle between rich and poor. He makes the case that our society will be judged by future societies because of these disparities. He shows real estate vultures and how they go after properties that they can flip for massive profit, without a thought for the people involved. And a story of a privatized juvenile home that bribed a judge, who would sentence youth to stay there to the home's immense profit. He did a segment on Dead Peasant Policies, which are life insurance plans that many large companies buy and then collect from when their everyday employees die. He actually used the Bible to make the point that care for the poor and care not to become rich are of deep importance. I was pleasantly surprised that he did a nice job with the Bible (not taking verses out of context, not saying more that it does).

He showed this story.



I appreciated his depiction of these and other very real issues. All results, at least in part, to our current system.

The solutions he offered, though, were far too simple. From what I could tell, Moore thinks that if our businesses are run as co-ops and if we elect politicians who will put limits on free trade and distribute the wealth a little more, we can all sit back and watch society mend itself. Moore is sort of a populist, in that he doesn't blame anything on the decisions that common people like you and me make.

It seems to me, though,, that our problems run much deeper than politics and business, and right into our lifestyles, which create our daily economic decisions. We cannot become a responsible society in spite of ourselves. There is no short cut. We must make responsible decisions each day, and in so doing engage in the long and grueling work of mending our world, deeply frayed though it is.

Monday, August 23, 2010

work

My pastor sent me a link to his friend's blog, which discusses work in relation to Christian discipleship. After reading a few (good) posts, I wrote these thoughts about work. I saved this post to expand further, but never got to it.

One major problem with work is that in the post-industrial revolution world is that home and work are now separated. When people used their homes and land as work space, both places were of utmost importance, to keep orderly and maintained, fertile and healthy. People depended on the land they owned to provide for their existence, so of course they took great care of their workplace. Maintenance of one's house and one's outbuildings and fields was all in a day's work.

Now our work has very little connection with where we live. Home is an oasis; a place of leisure, where the real enjoyment of life is supposed to take place. "Home is where the heart is," and because the two are apart, people don't put their heart into their work. Our workplaces are burdens; a price to pay for getting back home to the real stuff. This mentality can only result in shoddy workmanship - only doing our best on that for which we are held accountable; doing just enough to not get fired.

In agricultural days, many people owned, lived, and tended small pieces of land. Today, most everyone works for someone else, and people do not "own" their work. Lack of ownership is a problem for which I see little end in sight. If you are not doing work that you want to last for years to come, but just getting your paycheck, your mentality of work will be treating it as something inferior, to be rushed through.

The way forward here, I think, is to find the meaning in what we do, and to work with that meaning in mind. But also, we must abstain from doing work whose only meaning is the paycheck that awaits us; from allowing ourselves to be cogs in meaningless wheels.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Kohl's run!!!

A few years back, Beth decided that she would stop buying clothes from retail stores, and would only get our clothes second hand. This started because we were frustrated and troubled that it is nearly impossible to trace who made our clothes, or in what conditions. The thought of buying clothes made in sweatshops that abuse their workers is repulsive to both of us. There's also the constant frustration and waste of buying cheaply made clothes from clothing stores, and the fact that we could save some money, but the main reason for the change was that we do not want to support the global clothing industry, at least not directly. Well, today we made an exception. I needed a belt and some white t-shirts for work, and Beth had come up empty on her thrift runs, so off to Kohl's we went. Today I was shocked with the world of the department store. And amused and sickened, too by what I found on our trip.

The first thing that struck me was how much extra stuff there is in this country. Rows upon rows of all kinds of clothes, and jewelry, and underwear, and everything, just sitting there unused. If that Kohl's shuts down tomorrow, everyone who lives around it will be just fine. The store is serving no otherwise unmet purpose, except, I suppose increasing shareholder profit.

Then there was the over-the-top signage and displays, all designed to persuade me: back to school displays; stoic or overly happy models; 75% off; extra amounts to take off if some requirement or other is met. There was no respect for me that I was willing to pay what something was worth, or buy only what I need. There is obvious intent from the sign-hangers to manipulate me into buying as much as they can.

Then comes the soothing music, with frequently intermittent interruptions about ways to save even more money. And at the end of the message, just when you think you've heard enough they say it: "The more you know, the more you Kohl's." I won't say more about that.

When we paid for my belt and a pack of white t-shirts, the lady (who had already tried to take ahold of my address and credit rating in exchange for an additional 10% off) informed me that I just saved $24.25. I won't say more about that, either.

On the way to the car, I told Beth that I imagine a shareholder meeting in which one guy stands up and says, "You know, if we spin the truth a little, we sell more product... I wonder if we make our entire store revolve around spin...," at which point some other guy interrupts excitedly and finishes his evil sentence. Beth thought it more likely that the shareholders spend there meetings just sitting around and laughing.

We humans can get used to anything, and we Americans are very much used being controlled by the hangers of the signs. If you've never abstained from going to a department store for an extended period of time, I strongly encourage you to do so. It takes some adjusting, but buying less, buying only what you need, and thinking about where it comes from are habits worth getting used to.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

7 posts in 7 days


I've dropped blogging since my Leeli was born and I started a new job (two days later). Leeli's great and the job is squeezing me. My friend told me that if you squeeze a tube of toothpaste, toothpaste comes out, and when a Christian gets squeezed, Christ better come out. I liked that. Christ hasn't come out, though, but that I need Him has.

So I have 4 blog posts that are half done, and a couple more that are floating around in my head. As a way to kick start this SOB, I'm gonna commit to you, my faithful reader(s), to post these posts, however edited and coherent, one-a-day, for the next week. This may mean not going back to delete possibly offensive swear-word abbreviations; it may mean publishing thoughts offensive to everyone I love; it may end up an offense to the written word. But there's no going back, friend(s). This here, is my commitment to you(s).

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Rozalie Hope Stipp


Here she is.

Rozalie. Beth's grandma on her mom's side was born Martha Rosalie Polka. She was a wonderful, humble mother to her five daughters. Her husband, Joe Dhondt taught driver's ed. and coached football at a High School in East Moline, Il. When she was in her 40s Martha had a stroke that took away her movement on the right side of her body and her speech. Her life that was only half over was to finish far differently than she had expected. She became dependent upon Joe in nearly every way. Joe took on the responsibility of caretaker, cook, communicator, and sole breadwinner, all with the grace and joy of one who had loosed his life and found it. Joe died five years ago, and Martha has kept on, giving the sweetest smiles, the juiciest kisses, and the most joyful laugh you'll ever find.

Hope. We are raising our family in Little Village, a Mexican neighborhood with many good qualities, but a place also where the presence of evil is thick. We stick out here - sometimes like a beacon, and other times like a sore thumb. We came here not because we like evil or sticking out, but because we have sensed from the beginning of our marriage a call to bring light to the darkness that reigns in Little Village. Satan uses all sorts of principalities in here. Alcoholism, cycles of poverty, prostitution, witchcraft, drug abuse, domestic violence, inequitable education and health care, joblessness, marital infidelity, gang warfare, inadequate places for children to play. The list goes on, but what Satan does with these things here in Little Village (and elsewhere, of course) is bring people to their knees in despair. It is against despair in Little Village that we aim our lives. Saying the name Hope will be a reminder to us that darkness does not get the final say here, or wherever she goes.

Stipp. Even though Rozalie is as much Polka, Dhondt, Dame, Witt, Flint, Mitchell, and Remole as she is Stipp, she is named Stipp, and I am glad. Being a Stipp will first mean that she is raised in our home with her brothers and sister, who already understand themselves deeply as Stipps. This reality will sink down deep into her bones. She is sure to pick up on our laugh that consists mostly of noisy inhalations, our honesty, our love for one another, and our commitment to Jesus, all of which we Stipps have been given by our forbears. We will all tell her that "Stipps are tough," and "Stipps don't quit," just as my dad told me and his dad told him and on and on. And the name Stipp will be a gift, tying her to the past, and telling her who she is.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Ever feel like skipping church?

One time looking through my dad's bookshelf, a book caught my eye because it was prefaced by C.S. Lewis. The book was "A Faith of our Own," a collection of essays by an English theologian named Austin Farrer. I promptly stole the book. One essay in particular has stuck with me over the years. It's called, "Sabbath and Sunday," and I've never heard the points it makes anywhere else. I think they are important points for everyday, non-pastor type Christians like me. Important enough that I summarize them here for your benefit. (I'd recommend you buy the book, but it's not easy to come by.)


Farrer writes,"When Christ died and rose on the first day of the week, he made a revolution of all things, and among others, of our attitude to time. Before Christ we used to keep the seventh day, but Christ rose on the first and now we keep that...The Jew saw himself giving the seventh day to God, we see ourselves giving the first, and there is all the difference in the world between the two. The Jewish system seems very sensible. Do not indulge yourself, do the slogging first; fulfill your practical duties, get your work out of the way, and clear a block of time for God."

He explains that the Jewish thinking held that once one's house was in order, one could approach his maker. This, he says, is a religion of merits; Pharisaism. "No one's house ever is in order, that is the trouble, and so the time for appearing before God never arrives. If you were an ancient Jew you were at least forcibly stopped putting your house in order, and dragged into the divine presence by the dawning Sabbath. But if you are a modern Christian living that bad old Jewish principle, there isn't even Sabbath, and the day when you have caught up with your conscience and are fit to appear before God's altar never arrives at all."

This is one reason some Christians find it hard to go to church. Their conscience condemns them, and they misunderstand that approaching the Lord has to do with proclaiming a clean conscience, instead of receiving from Him.

"But what are we to do about the yawning gulf which opens between this Christhood of ours and our actual performance - between our laziness, selfishness, uncleanness, and triviality and the painful absurdity of our prayers? This gulf which yawns between what Christ has made us and what we make of ourselves?...What else but the very thing Christ's disciples did from the first: early in the morning on the first day of the week reassemble the whole body of Christ in our community - not a member lacking - when the sun has risen, and have the resurrection over again. In that moment, dead to the past and trusting him for the future, bathed in his blood and strong by his victory, united by his person, loved and forgiven by his Father - in that moment at least we are what he has made us; the gap is closed.

Here, another reason Christians don't want to go to church (or communicate, as Farrer calls it). We don't see the importance of remembering, celebrating and drawing from the resurrection with "not a member lacking" as the early believers did. And we don't understand that something really important happens to us at church - the gap being closed.

So some of us don't want to go because our conscience condemns us. Others stay home because we don't understand the importance of celebrating and drawing from the resurrection weekly. But others skip because of our feelings: either we feel like doing something else, or have real, emotional pain that repels us from "communicating." In most of life, getting in touch with our feelings is a healthy thing. But in regards to going to church on Sunday, discussing our feelings related to church shows that we've missed the point of church.

"What do you think St. Peter or St. Paul would have said if you had told them that you feared always to communicate, lest it should go stale on you? They would not have known what on earth you were talking about. It would have been all you could do to bring them to conceive the possibility of such emotional frivolity, such reckless individualism in a Christian man. What, is the body of Christ to lack a member because you are not feeling soulful? Don't you know that Christ wants you there, that he has died to give you what you there receive, at what is the weekly resurrection of the body of Christ?