J. Brisbin's Blog

My oldest (sixteen) made plans to go bowling with friends tonight. His good friend (also 16) was supposed to come by about 7:45. At 7:50 he calls and says he's missed our driveway, drove to the end of the dead end road we live on, and ended up in the corn field that road leads into.

After the massive deep freeze we had a couple weeks ago (it's the global warming, I'm telling you, it has to be), the ground is a gooey sponge for about the first 18 or so inches. He had his four-wheel drive Jeep buried to the axle in cold, sticky mud. My son and I drove down there to see how we were going to get him out. I knew I couldn't do it in my truck. The tractors we have are small and I didn't think they would be able to pull him out.

This is a small town, of course, so everyone knows nearly everyone else. The kid who was riding shotgun in the Jeep called his dad, Stan, who I worked with when I was 16 and we were building my mom and dad's house. He's got an F-350 with a superduty transmission--and about 100 feet of log chain. The other friends who they were supposed to meet at the bowling alley caught wind of what was going on and figured they'd bring everyone out (all the bowling lanes were full and there was about an hour wait) to see what was going on. Half a dozen teenagers pile out of daddy's SUV, including the daughter of a neighbor who happens to be a distant relative of my wife. They all had a good laugh. Stan shows back up, having borrowed four or five lengths of chain from his grandpa, who lives a couple miles away.

We dragged all that chain through the mud and pulled him out.

It's not my idea of a "good" Saturday night. I really didn't want to be out there. But Stan said something profound (and I paraphrase): "I've gotten myself in trouble before and there was always someone around to help pull me out, so I figured I better help you."

If you can find this somewhere other than a small town in this Postmodern, text me when you get a chance, some lady pulls out from the bank parking lot and nearly runs you off the road because she's paying attention to her deposit slip and not you, world, I'd be interested to hear about it. Would this world also include co-workers from 20 years ago who would spend an hour on a Saturday night in the drizzling rain, slogging through the mud, pulling your Jeep out because you made a serious boo-boo?

I hope this letter finds you well and celebrating this joyous time of year. 2009 was a busy year for our family. Never a dull moment, however much I wished there were.

Jon is still working hard at NPC, where he has been for 5 1/2 years now. He is also still taking classes at Pitt State. It goes slowly when he only takes one class a semester. He has had some continued success with his writing. He was again chosen Editor's Choice in Relief literary journal for another short story. That story was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize, which is a literary prize for small presses and literary journals. Jon has also been busy building websites and taking photos.

We always sit in the same general area of the bleachers. I bring the girls in with me since my wife is helping get the concession stand set up. They're frying funnel cakes and pretzels (have you ever had a big pretzel fried crispy on the outside and served with cheese to dip it in?) The line is always four or five people deep outside their stand. The girls and I sit down on the south end of the bleachers three rows up from the front. The bright, aluminum bleachers extend from about the 20-yard line on one end of the field to the 20-yard line on the other. The sun is going down and stringy, patchy clouds sit in the east and reflect the red-orange glow of the evening. The breeze is perfect. The massive lights are on and the bugs are already gathering around the glow. As it gets darker, bats come out to eat all the bugs around the lights.

More people stream onto the bleachers while we wait for my parents to get there. A few minutes before the game is ready to start, the band marches onto the south end of the field in time to the rapping of a single snare drum, beating out a rhythm (brrrr-ump...brrrr-ump... brrrr-ump-ump-ump). At 7:00, the band marches into position, covering about a quarter of the football field and the drum major waves her arms for the band to get ready. The instruments come up and everyone stands, takes off their hats, and faces the American flag flying on a pole whose base is a monument to the veterans of World War I. The band plays the national anthem and everyone stands in silence, watching the flag waver in a slight breeze, the backdrop being the sky at sunset. We can't have an official prayer over the loudspeaker any more because the ACLU has decided for us that we shouldn't do that. So we thumb our noses at the ACLU every Friday night we have a home game because we have a "student-lead activity". One of the high school students prays over the loudspeaker instead of a local pastor.

The sun is getting lower and has almost set. The eastern sky is a very deep, dark blue as the other team kicks off. Our Tigers play hard and make several good plays. One of the boys that my son has played with on the basketball team is also a running back. He's very fast and can weave in and out very well. He makes several touchdowns for us. It's great to see him succeed like that. He and four or five of his siblings live with their grandparents, who raise them. Their mother is in jail and I don't know that their father is involved with the family at all.

Our hometown boys wins the football game. All 66 kids on the team, the various coaches, and about 100 parents and friends meet in the middle of the football field after the game. The kids kneel down, helmets off, and the coach walks around, bent over, slapping shoulder pads and yelling words of encouragement and the entire team yells back in unison. It takes us a little while to round up the kids. My wife helps clean up the concession stand so I take a couple kids with me. The rest want to stay and run around on the field with some of their friends from school.

That's a Friday night in the Midwest in the fall. I was never much of a football fan. I still don't watch it on television. But I do like to experience this bit of Americana on Friday nights. I give up a lot to live in a small town on purpose. I don't have the highest-paying job I could. I don't have the fancy stuff I could have if I lived in the city and chased a bigger paycheck and a more prestigious job. But the little things in life that have meaning are more important to me than that other stuff. I hope I can teach my kids to enjoy those little things in life rather than trying to chase down something that fades away when you grab it.

I've uploaded a little over 300 photographs from our week at Camp Sharon Junior I (4th and 5th grade) camp. I was sound guy/multimedia guru so my job was to float around the camp and take as many pictures of the kids as I could manage and show them on a slideshow during meals and other times. By wednesday, the kids were waving at me and yelling "hey camera guy!" and they would actually come up to me and ask why the picture I took of them earlier in the day wasn't up on the screen.

They had a lot of fun with this and I think the pictures turned out pretty well. You can view a gallery of them on my Facebook photos page, or I have the full gallery here on jbrisbin.com:

http://jbrisbin.com/photos/camp_sharon_2009

I've been studying the topic of God's sovereignty versus Man's Free Will lately and Greg Koukl has about the best explanation of how a foreknowing God doesn't automatically imply we loose our free will. I listen to his podcast regularly and I am continually amazed at his ability to succinctly elucidate difficult concepts and deal patiently with sometimes antagonistic callers.

Consider the objection: "If God is sovereign, guaranteeing certain outcomes in people's lives, then there is no free will." This is flawed thinking. It doesn't follow that if God is in full control, then free acts are not possible. What is critical here is the way in which God is in control, the method He uses to guarantee the outcomes. Let me illustrate.

How would you catch a criminal who is on the run? Well, you'd think about where he might go, then you'd try to be there to intercept him. Now, if you had perfect knowledge--if you knew everything-- you'd not only know where he is at any given moment, but where he'll be at any moment in the future. You'd know exactly what time he'd arrive at any point along his entire route.

Would you be able to catch a criminal if you knew the exact moves he was going to make? If you knew the things he was going to freely choose to do--and this is important--at any given point, would you be able to catch him? Sure you could.

If you know he's going down a particular road and will come around a particular corner at a particular time, you could place your men there so that when he takes the route he freely chooses (though known by you), your men would be right there to nab him. You're in control the entire time--you're sovereign. You're able to be in control because you know every move he's going to freely make. Therefore, your plan can be perfectly executed, even though he's making his free choices.

—Bad Arguments against Calvinism

Puts a little perspective on just how little we actually control in this world, doesn't it?

I grew up thinking that the Old Testament was all about God and the Jews and not about Jesus and the Church. That's understandable given the penchant for dispensational, Arminian theology in the Christian Church (an independent "denomination" that disparages other, official, denominations, and who take to narcissistically prefacing "Christian Church" with the adjective "First", implying primacy when none is deserved).

In Exodus, Moses is told to tell Pharaoh "Thus says the LORD, Israel is my firstborn son" (Exo 4:22 ESV) in pleading for their release from captivity. Throughout the Old Testament, no firstborn son receives the blessings that firstborn males were supposed to get. Jacob even purposely blesses his second-oldest grandson Ephraim by crossing his arms and placing his right hand on the younger of the two boys. Joseph points this out but Jacob basically says that he knows what he's doing (Gen 48:14).

Earlier in Genesis, a firstborn son kills his younger brother because he didn't like the fact that God was pleased with the sacrifice of the younger and displeased with his own. The Apostles, after the death of Jesus, point out that it was God's firstborn who killed the younger because Jesus told them that God was displeased with their sacrifice because it was insincere, insufficient, and otherwise inferior to the sacrifice of Himself he was shortly to offer up.

What can explain this if it's not divine inspiration? How can these two seemingly unrelated things be so so closely tied up with one another and have spanned millennia in the telling?

If the Bible is simply a cute little book of interesting stories and antiquated codes of ethics, why is there foreshadowing of the death of Christ in the first generation of humans considering the span of time between Moses and the New Testament?

Secular Humanism is responsible for the sagging sales of books, not declining literacy.

There may or may not be fewer readers today. There are, however, fewer buyers. The explosion of the Internet in the last ten years has certainly altered the reading patterns of literate, connected people (the only people who ever really bought books to begin with), but people have stopped reading novels largely because writers have stopped writing novels worth reading.

Writing programs have largely failed writers (with a few exceptions) because they've become preternaturally occupied with mechanics and the superficialities of writing. Certainly grammar is important to a new writer, but even more important than understanding the purpose of a prepositional phrase is understanding what makes people tick. If you're going to write something worthwhile--something that sells well and speaks to people on many levels--you have to write something theologically and mythologically substantive.

The Marxists and Atheists of all stripes that are running our universities simply reject the well-roundedness of a classical education in favor of the specificity of a technical college. Bible as Literature classes are a joke because they bring the Bible in as a cute little plaything, pat it on the head nicely, and tell it to go play with its toys. If you're a writer and trying to write a believable bad guy, you have to understand why people do bad things. Psychology doesn't tell us this because it's not theology so it doesn't care about the "why", only the "how". You can't hope to write a believable bad guy until you've figured out how to distill down what makes some people bad and articulate that back to your audience.

Writers should be, by nature, observers of human nature and curious about people in general. Every writer of consequence I know can reconstruct a situation that draws into focus human behavior that they have personally observed in others. This is the essence and the distillation of writing. It's not nearly so much about sentences and plot and proper grammar. Those things are all important, don't get me wrong. But let's look at Star Wars as an example:

Watching the original movies again this weekend made me realize how horribly-written the first two movies are. The dialogue is largely atrocious and the acting (outside of Alec Guiness and Harrison Ford) is mediocre at best. But anyone who's a student of storytelling knows that George Lucas used Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces as a framework for telling that epic story. Certainly the novelty of the special effects was an element in its popularity, but just like Harry Potter decades later, it's the mythological and theological aspects of the story that made it so phenomenally popular. As a Christian, I can't recommend the theology of Lucas' movies because they are so clearly Eastern in their mysticism. But the fact that they are theological at all is the point here. Of course Darth Vader is dressed in black. He's the bad guy!

Post-modernists may have successfully neutered literature (a la Phillip Roth and Cormac McCarthy) and they may dance around the May Pole in narcissistic adulation for slaying the great dragon of Modernism, but they have only ensured that future generations will forget them as naive naysayers. It's the writers who tap into the mythological and the theological and who do it in a way that's both unashamed and understanding that will thrive in a new literary ecology that demands products be made of hardier stock than the soulless drivel that publishers keep getting back in the form of returns.

If you really want to make your writing career an important one that contributes something to history, go to seminary and get an M.Div. instead of an MFA.

One of the first classes I had to take for my Creative Writing degree was, oddly enough, "Intro to Creative Writing". It was a 100-level class that everyone with a Creative Writing major or minor had to take. Some of us would go on to have all our workshop classes together and several would either drop out or take poetry classes (not to disparage our poet sisteren). In that class, one extraordinarily mediocre writer was a girl right out of high school and a little on the heavyset side. She wrote a short story that was about someone killing themselves and made a point in class to mention how auto-biographical it was. I didn't say a word because what would have come out would not have been helpful to someone flirting with self-destruction and it was obvious she wasn't serious about it but was simply screaming out for attention by writing a "short story".

Our writing isn't therapy.

I realize that several of the greatest writers have had significant mental problems. They likely needed (or had) therapy. But you can't just unload your problems on your readers in a thinly-veiled attempt for validation and expect to call that "writing".

I mention this because I've been tossing this question around in my head. I've recently felt a tad grumpy about not having a soul in the world with which to have the kinds of theological discussions I have with myself. I read and listen to seminary classes on iTunesU and these new understandings pop up in front of me like a whack-a-mole and I just want to share them with someone because I'm excited to learn something new about the world or human nature or both. But people often find me tedious and roll their eyes when I start to speak and maybe harumph a "there he goes again." Then I think I'll just go off and write a short story about these things and that will be a sufficient outlet for me and I'll keep my big mouth shut in Sunday School because I just want to stay quiet and out-of-the-way and let someone else talk but I find I can't in the same way an alcoholic finds it nearly impossible to resist a shot of whiskey sitting on a table in front of him.

But people (and as a writer, our readers) don't really want to hear us think out loud. They want the distilled essence of what we've learned in the form of an allegory or a metaphor. They're not all that interested in listening to us develop our opinions in the same way you might if you were sitting in front of your therapist and she was wringing out of you things you didn't want wrung out but were wrung anyway and lo and behold you felt better afterward though it was like giving birth and then you realize what you actually think about things rather than either not knowing or deluding yourself into believing you think something else.

It's not a wonder, then, that my writing that's a result of this intent to "share" what I've learned feels wooden and didactic. I'm trying to use a bully pulpit as a counseling session and surprise, surprise it doesn't work that way.

Writers are necessarily doomed to trudge along burdened by the knowledge that they're curious about the world and want to learn new things and simply can't share that knowledge with anyone without being written off or talked about when they're not around because no one else but they are as interested in knowing what a writer desires to know. At some point we have to distill that understanding into something like a short story or a novel and maybe that will be sufficient to dig out the canker.

That's a pessimistic and somewhat narcissistic view of the world, I know, but writers are usually a morose lot, are we not?