Dear ol' Dad

My father is convinced that he is book material.

I became an English major in the fall of 2005, and since then my dad has decided that it is my fate to write a best-selling novel – about him – and make lots of money so that I can provide for him and Mom in their old age. Mom just rolls her eyes at him and says things like, “She doesn’t want to write about us, you twit! Who would want to read it?” And he, ignoring the rhetorical nature of the question might answer “Me!” and grin goofily with a flutter of his eyelashes as if this were the most ingenious comeback of all time.

In fact, he believes this so wholeheartedly that I am going to write this famous book that every time something funny happens he’ll say, “There you go, Wessy. Chapter fourteen. Write that down.” Obviously it is not my writing skills that are going to sell this book, but his witty remarks and crazy antics. The whole family just sighs. All we need is for the whole world to be exposed to the weirdness that goes on in the Mowry household. But the thing is, as we all know and refuse to let on, Dean Mowry really is book material. He’s quite a character, at the very least.

* * * * *

One of my earliest memories of Dad includes him a full leg cast. My little sister Whitneigh was born when I was two, and our parents were exhausted from having to work full time and raise two young kids. The same week Mom went back after maternity leave Dad fell asleep at the wheel on his way home from work, and his car drifted into the cement beam of an overpass. No one else was hurt, but the crash shattered his eyeglasses, leaving awkward cuts on his face, and left him with a broken leg. For the next few weeks he was at home, bandaged leg up on the couch, taking care of me and the baby while Mom was at work. I was immediately enlisted as Daddy’s Little Helper, and was sent to do things since I could get there faster than he could on crutches. I would get bottles of Whitneigh’s milk out of the fridge, put it in the microwave, hit all the proper buttons, and deliver it. I was also sent after diapers and had a special stepstool to reach the red wall mounted telephone when it rang. I felt immensely important for being allowed to answer the real telephone. Usually it was one of my grandmothers calling – they would always know it was me and give me a message to pass on to Dad. Anyone else, though, wouldn’t realize I was there and Dad would have to hobble out to the kitchen to talk to them anyway. We spent our days together, the three of us, sitting on the avacado shag carpet in the living room, Dad with his white cast leg sticking out stiffly, the baby lying on her back on a blanket on the floor, me playing with them and running errands. We were quite a bunch. Mom cites this period of Dad’s medical leave as the reason why Whitneigh is so spoiled. Looking back, I realize that this must have been when I was ingrained with the ‘love language’ of servanthood. At only two years old I knew I loved my father and sister, and would gladly do whatever they needed, even if it meant talking to strangers on the red phone.

Blue Jesus

Lately Christianity has been pissing me off. 

I'm not trying to offend anyone by saying that; its just how I feel right now. I consider myself a Christian, I go to church every Sunday, I attend a Christian university - understand that I am not saying any of this out of spite or ignorance, I am saying this out of experience. 

Anymore when I look around me all I see is superficial religiosity. I see Christianity that has evolved from being about Jesus to being about replacing 'secular' music with 'Christian' music, pushing beliefs onto others, and tattoos in Hebrew that prove you are a 'trendy' Christian. I hate it. I hate the fakey, gimmicky, materialist version of Christianity that is popular in the US today. The profound love of God and the sacrifice of Jesus have been cheapened by WWJD? bracelets and ScriptureMints and horrible paintings of Jesus taking the shot of heroin so that the addict doesn't have to. 

What has our faith come to? It is no wonder that Christianity has replaced sex as the taboo in literature today. A religion that used to be known for its genuine love, unconditional acceptance, and eagerness to help the downtrodden has disintegrated into a cult for the goody-two-shoes. It is as if we think so highly of ourselves that we believe Jesus must love us. He's going to forgive us anyway, so we may as well have fun while we can. 

And as if to top off my annoyment with Christian merchandise, at the drug store today, while I was waiting for a friend to fill a prescription, I found a book in the "Inspirational" section about Christian pirates. Pirates! I couldn't make this up.  Amazon has the whole series. It just baffles me where we will strategically stick the name of God in order to convert people. Not only that, but we have the audacity to change Him into whatever is the most comfortable. Trying to reach the teenage punk scene? Shirts pop up saying "Jesus Loves Me And My Tattoos". The aspiring business men? Say the Prayer of Jabez and "enlarge your territory". Kids into action figures? Buy them the new plastic Resurrection Playset. I could go on. 

I'm reading Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children for my Contemporary Lit class right now. It's a fantastic book, and one of the scenes that I cannot seem to get out my head is when one of the Indian women (the book is set when India gets its independence) asks a priest what color skin Jesus has, pink like the Westerners or dark like hers? He answers as he as been taught: blue. "All available evidence, my daughter, suggests that Our Lord Jesus Christ was the most beauteous, crystal shade of pale blue sky," he tells her. The idea is that God is love, and the Hindu god of love, Krishna, is blue, so to make things easier Jesus is blue. 

To make things easier. Christianity isn't supposed to be easy to swallow. It's radical, and crazy, and seems unreasonable. People like Stephen (Acts 6) didn't die so that we could tell people Jesus was blue. 

In the Eye of the Beholder

One of the many things I love about college is the constant flow of things to stimulate your mind. I'm in a class on Aesthetics right now, and it is making me think about things like what makes things beautiful, how do you define art, and what it means to be truly alive. We've been reading a lot of different essays, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hume to L'Engle (of A Wrinkle in Time fame). Needless to say these have brought up more questions than they have answered. Can you create a formula to define art? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or are there some who have better opinions than others? Are things only beautiful because we have decided they are beautiful or would they be beautiful if there was no one to look at them?

In Aesthetics last week our professor had us watch the movie My Dinner with Andre. It's a fascinatingly simple movie, with two men sitting down to dinner discussing what they've been doing with their lives since they last saw one another. They talk of how it sometimes feels as if they are living in a dreamworld, nothing more than zombies, in a world that is nothing more than a play. The question comes when Andre argues that there must be more. Wally, on the other hand, believes that the simple things are all you need. He is happy with an electric blanket and a cup of coffee in the morning, while Andre wants to dive into the world and find everything it has to offer. I suggest watching it, not because it has great cinematography (it doesn't) but because its lack of visual interest will force you to think.

"Comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility."

Andre says this at one point, and I think it's true. I have experienced it first hand. We all have. You get into the routing of something, and the next thing you know, three months have flown by and you have no idea where they have gone. You are so comfortable in your ways that nothing matters anymore. It's like the narrator at the beginning of Fight Club. I freaking love that movie. I'm getting ready to read the book, which I have been told is even better. But I digress. At the beginning of the film, Edward Norton's character has gotten to the point that he can't even sleep at night, he is so discontented. He tries to fill his life with Ikea furniture and support groups but even that doesn't seem to fill the void. He realizes that his life is passing him by and uses Tyler to try and fill it. To some extent each of us have a Tyler.

So I am hearing about beauty and love and art from all different directions right now. The speaker in Chapel on Monday spoke on "the presence and possibility of beauty in our lives" and how being close to Jesus and letting his beauty into our lives can transform us from ugly to beautiful. The Lecture Artist Series on campus included guest speaker Dr. Walter Brueggemann, who was here on Tuesday March 4th. The series this year is on Imagination and the Kingdom of God, and Dr. Brueggemann spoke about the fact that believing in Jesus takes a lot of imagination, among other things. Some other lines of his that I wrote down:

"The kingdom of God is ultimate, and all else is penultimate."

"The real stuff by which we are human comes in elusive artistic form."

"It is hard for us to embrace God's kingdom because we like to think we can do better."

and finally, my favorite line,

"Our society does not need anymore educated conformists."

I love that. A big frustration of mine is conformity. I do not think it is worth it to pretend to be just like everyone else just to be liked by others. And I see that happening around me all the time, especially with girls here on our campus. It is sad how many of them come here not to get an education but find a husband. I actually know young women who are majoring in Family and Consumer Sciences just to learn how to be a wife and mother. That really bothers me. If you meet someone in college that you fall in love with and marry, that's all fine and well, but college is not a $20,ooo a year dating service. Personally, individuality is a big thing for me. I get really annoyed when a girl changes her entire character just to impress a guy. A friend of mine started dating a guy a few months ago and since then has changed her wardrobe, her sense of humor, her whole outlook on life. We, her friends, are frustrated because wanting the admiration of this one guy has completely changed her.

I don't know where I am going with all this, or what conformity has to do with beauty. Maybe nothing, maybe everything. It doesn't matter. I've rambled on long enough.