For years, people have bought into a lie.
A picture is not worth a thousand words. The person who said that was wrong.
When he was much younger, my older brother claimed that if a picture was worth a thousand words, then a memory was worth a million. But, that, too, is flawed.
Too much worth is placed on the picture. Can you hear a picture? Can you smell it? Taste it?
Right now, I hear these words inside me as I type them. Do I hear them in my head? Or, my heart? Their gentle cadence propels their soundless music. Whose voice do I hear? Is it even hearing if you do not use your ears? Perhaps it is better to say that I feel these words as I type them. Maybe I know them as I type them as I might know to move my arm when I will it.
Our voiceless inner narrators entertain us every day. At least mine does. I hear my “inner monologue” as I shop for groceries, wait in line at the Post Office, or sit on my couch and watch a football game.
A picture cannot capture a moment the way that words can. A picture is two-dimensional, flat, a diversion—a broken mirror, containing only a bit of what was happening during its conception.
Words—these little black specks on this glowing “page”—they can transport, invite, welcome a person into a visceral world alive with senses untouched and unseen that exist only in the deepest core of our beings.
When I was an undergraduate, my father said that the blank page was my canvas. But, I corrected him. My canvas is someone else’s imagination. The words, I said, are the brush strokes.
Indeed, writing and reading are intimate acts. Writer and reader must merge and, in some ways, intertwine each other as my writing voice sings in harmony with your reading voice.
A picture can be worth a thousand hours of contemplation, but a picture is not worth as much as one word. A thousand words are worth so much more than a picture. They are the only things that can come closest to approximating the very weight of our souls.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
The Mean Innkeeper and His Witchy Wife
Mean-spirited, cold, cruel, uncaring, apathetic, dismissive, judgmental—for as long as I can remember, this is how the innkeeper and (often as a shot at nagging women) his wife were depicted in movies, church plays, and sermons that focused on the Christmas story.
In fact, during one church play, I think I portrayed that very same obnoxious wife who gets to spout the now infamous phrase, “There’s no room at the inn!”
I remember the moment when I reread the story for myself and found that there was no description of the inn, no mention of an innkeeper, and the entire incident—only found in the Gospel of Luke—was only a sentence long.
Here it is:
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
Apparently, scholars dispute the translation of the word “inn.”
On the Christianity Today website, there is an article by Ben Witherington III that claims:
When it came time for Mary to deliver the baby, the Greek of Luke's text says, "she wrapped him in cloth and laid him in a corn crib, as there was no room in the guest room." Yes, you heard me right. Luke does not say there was no room in the inn. Luke has a different Greek word for inn (pandeion), which he trots out in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The word he uses here (kataluma) is the very word he uses to describe the room in which Jesus shared the Last Supper with his disciples — the guest room of a house.
What Witherington goes on to claim is that it was Joseph’s family that was turning the young couple out—perhaps out of shame because of the couple’s apparent shotgun wedding or because there were already too many people in the house.
The Gospel of Luke says that Caesar Augustus made a decreed intended to squeeze out some tax money, so everyone had to trudge back to the city of their lineage’s origins. For Joseph, this meant Bethlehem. So, some scholars posit that Bethlehem, like many other cities, would’ve been hopping and bursting with cousins upon cousins.
If it was family who had “no room” in their guest room, then at least the family did what they could. Certainly, the stables would’ve provided shelter.
Just because there was “no room” does not mean that someone had to be “the bad guy” or the “obnoxious wife.”
And, the same can be said even if a person wanted to view the inn as one of our modern day hotels.
What’s wrong with depicting the innkeeper as compassionate and doing what he could with what he had? He set the young couple up in the stables.
Or, better still, why invent someone at all? Maybe Joseph and Mary went and stayed in the stables on their own accord—without invitation?
To me, the line is only an explanation for why Jesus was placed in a manger to sleep, but, these days, it has become a cliché.
The fundamental principle, though, remains.
And, as I bustle through the stores, which are glutted with fake Christmas trees and red and green and Santas and merchandise and customers muttering and scowling and cash registers chiming, it’s easy to see how those less fortunate might not find much “room.”
I buy the things that I buy every year for people—things that most people on my list admit that they don’t really need. Yes, we like our toys, but, lately, it feels a little perfunctory.
Instead of buying presents for each other, we should all donate to charities.
In the Christian story, Jesus was God’s “gift to the world.” He was born into simplicity. Yes, the birth in the stables shows a lowly and humble birth for a king, for a deity, but it also illustrates that a manger can serve as a crib. Jesus didn’t need anything more than what he had.
And, in my opinion, it shows a problem inherent in Christianity today. There was no mean innkeeper. There was no intolerant wife. So, why invent them? Why create these two cold-hearted characters when it seems that it is, in fact, many Christians these days who are telling people marginalized by society that there is “no room at the inn.” Some Christians seem to embody these two caricatures of mean-spiritedness. We should be the ones offering what we can with what we have.
To me, what I take from this account in the Gospel of Luke is this: we should strive to embrace simplicity and compassion and humility, not just at Christmas but in each day of our lives.
In fact, during one church play, I think I portrayed that very same obnoxious wife who gets to spout the now infamous phrase, “There’s no room at the inn!”
I remember the moment when I reread the story for myself and found that there was no description of the inn, no mention of an innkeeper, and the entire incident—only found in the Gospel of Luke—was only a sentence long.
Here it is:
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
Apparently, scholars dispute the translation of the word “inn.”
On the Christianity Today website, there is an article by Ben Witherington III that claims:
When it came time for Mary to deliver the baby, the Greek of Luke's text says, "she wrapped him in cloth and laid him in a corn crib, as there was no room in the guest room." Yes, you heard me right. Luke does not say there was no room in the inn. Luke has a different Greek word for inn (pandeion), which he trots out in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The word he uses here (kataluma) is the very word he uses to describe the room in which Jesus shared the Last Supper with his disciples — the guest room of a house.
What Witherington goes on to claim is that it was Joseph’s family that was turning the young couple out—perhaps out of shame because of the couple’s apparent shotgun wedding or because there were already too many people in the house.
The Gospel of Luke says that Caesar Augustus made a decreed intended to squeeze out some tax money, so everyone had to trudge back to the city of their lineage’s origins. For Joseph, this meant Bethlehem. So, some scholars posit that Bethlehem, like many other cities, would’ve been hopping and bursting with cousins upon cousins.
If it was family who had “no room” in their guest room, then at least the family did what they could. Certainly, the stables would’ve provided shelter.
Just because there was “no room” does not mean that someone had to be “the bad guy” or the “obnoxious wife.”
And, the same can be said even if a person wanted to view the inn as one of our modern day hotels.
What’s wrong with depicting the innkeeper as compassionate and doing what he could with what he had? He set the young couple up in the stables.
Or, better still, why invent someone at all? Maybe Joseph and Mary went and stayed in the stables on their own accord—without invitation?
To me, the line is only an explanation for why Jesus was placed in a manger to sleep, but, these days, it has become a cliché.
The fundamental principle, though, remains.
And, as I bustle through the stores, which are glutted with fake Christmas trees and red and green and Santas and merchandise and customers muttering and scowling and cash registers chiming, it’s easy to see how those less fortunate might not find much “room.”
I buy the things that I buy every year for people—things that most people on my list admit that they don’t really need. Yes, we like our toys, but, lately, it feels a little perfunctory.
Instead of buying presents for each other, we should all donate to charities.
In the Christian story, Jesus was God’s “gift to the world.” He was born into simplicity. Yes, the birth in the stables shows a lowly and humble birth for a king, for a deity, but it also illustrates that a manger can serve as a crib. Jesus didn’t need anything more than what he had.
And, in my opinion, it shows a problem inherent in Christianity today. There was no mean innkeeper. There was no intolerant wife. So, why invent them? Why create these two cold-hearted characters when it seems that it is, in fact, many Christians these days who are telling people marginalized by society that there is “no room at the inn.” Some Christians seem to embody these two caricatures of mean-spiritedness. We should be the ones offering what we can with what we have.
To me, what I take from this account in the Gospel of Luke is this: we should strive to embrace simplicity and compassion and humility, not just at Christmas but in each day of our lives.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
And To That End
Obituaries tell nice, neat little narratives about each of our lives. I've been thinking about them a lot lately, since the death of my grandmother a few weeks ago.
In them, there is probably information about our parents, where we were born, where we worked and for how long, our children or grandchildren (if we have either), where we went to church (if we did), and any activities or hobbies that we enjoyed: stamp collecting, volunteering, crocheting, sitting on our couch and drooling as we watched movie after movie. Of course, saying that we sat around all day, wasting our lives by munching chips and watching movies probably wouldn’t score a place in an obituary. They aren’t necessarily the place for such honesty.
An obituary is the summary of a life in five paragraphs or less.
Usually, it seems that the longer the obituary, the more important the person. The lucky people get to have pictures included with their obituaries—that’s how we know that the person was really important, or at least really missed. My brother’s obituary did not include a picture, and it was very brief. I don’t suppose the family wanted to call any undue attention to the nature of his death. Suicide has a stigma and a strange tendency to be contagious.
My grandmother’s obituary was long and included a picture. She had worked for over thirty years as a loan officer in a local bank. Many people in the community knew her. Her name in the obituaries was probably recognized by more people than who attended the modest memorial service.
I’m not sure about my other grandparents’ obituaries. I think that they were the average length—long enough to explain that my grandparents were vital citizens and worked hard and contributed to society and had children who have had children, fulfilling their obligations to the community and their own lineages.
Sometimes, obituaries are written by the funeral parlor. Other times, they are written by family. How do you even begin to encapsulate a life in words? How can we contain a human life in the horizontal prison bars of sentences? Is a human life ever so linear?
Some theorists claim that we give meaning to our lives in reverse. We look back and attempt to attach meaning to the events in our lives. We think, “Oh, X happened because I chose Y, which led to me to moving to Z and to meeting Q.”
Some belief systems might claim that each life begins with meaning because each life has a special purpose to fulfill. In other words, the events in our lives are not random, and the patterns we may find when looking back are simply the multi-colored threads of a Master Weaver.
How would you summarize your own life in five paragraphs or less? What things would you include or leave out? What do you want your last impression to the world to be?
For my obituary, I want only a single sentence:
Sarah Elizabeth White knew that each healthy breath she took was a treasure, each morning she woke was a privilege, and each person she met was gift.
It seems too easy to take life for granted—life, the breathing in and out-ness of our days. But, all you have to do is stop for a moment and remember those who do not lead a so-called “normal” life like the majority of us. Children die from cancers and defects. People around the world live in Cities of the Dead in such destitution that I am ashamed each time I lament how little money I make but can still afford my various vices and always return home to a warm bed and clean clothes.
What difference do the particulars of my middle class life mean to the world? What difference do my hobbies make to a stranger who might read my obituary? Why should anyone care where I went to college?
What matters, in the end, is that I continually endeavor to deserve what I had been given and try not to squander it.
In them, there is probably information about our parents, where we were born, where we worked and for how long, our children or grandchildren (if we have either), where we went to church (if we did), and any activities or hobbies that we enjoyed: stamp collecting, volunteering, crocheting, sitting on our couch and drooling as we watched movie after movie. Of course, saying that we sat around all day, wasting our lives by munching chips and watching movies probably wouldn’t score a place in an obituary. They aren’t necessarily the place for such honesty.
An obituary is the summary of a life in five paragraphs or less.
Usually, it seems that the longer the obituary, the more important the person. The lucky people get to have pictures included with their obituaries—that’s how we know that the person was really important, or at least really missed. My brother’s obituary did not include a picture, and it was very brief. I don’t suppose the family wanted to call any undue attention to the nature of his death. Suicide has a stigma and a strange tendency to be contagious.
My grandmother’s obituary was long and included a picture. She had worked for over thirty years as a loan officer in a local bank. Many people in the community knew her. Her name in the obituaries was probably recognized by more people than who attended the modest memorial service.
I’m not sure about my other grandparents’ obituaries. I think that they were the average length—long enough to explain that my grandparents were vital citizens and worked hard and contributed to society and had children who have had children, fulfilling their obligations to the community and their own lineages.
Sometimes, obituaries are written by the funeral parlor. Other times, they are written by family. How do you even begin to encapsulate a life in words? How can we contain a human life in the horizontal prison bars of sentences? Is a human life ever so linear?
Some theorists claim that we give meaning to our lives in reverse. We look back and attempt to attach meaning to the events in our lives. We think, “Oh, X happened because I chose Y, which led to me to moving to Z and to meeting Q.”
Some belief systems might claim that each life begins with meaning because each life has a special purpose to fulfill. In other words, the events in our lives are not random, and the patterns we may find when looking back are simply the multi-colored threads of a Master Weaver.
How would you summarize your own life in five paragraphs or less? What things would you include or leave out? What do you want your last impression to the world to be?
For my obituary, I want only a single sentence:
Sarah Elizabeth White knew that each healthy breath she took was a treasure, each morning she woke was a privilege, and each person she met was gift.
It seems too easy to take life for granted—life, the breathing in and out-ness of our days. But, all you have to do is stop for a moment and remember those who do not lead a so-called “normal” life like the majority of us. Children die from cancers and defects. People around the world live in Cities of the Dead in such destitution that I am ashamed each time I lament how little money I make but can still afford my various vices and always return home to a warm bed and clean clothes.
What difference do the particulars of my middle class life mean to the world? What difference do my hobbies make to a stranger who might read my obituary? Why should anyone care where I went to college?
What matters, in the end, is that I continually endeavor to deserve what I had been given and try not to squander it.
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