Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Book 16 of 2016

C.S. Lewis in 1917

There are two kinds of people in this world: 

• Those who think prayer is a monologue. 
• Those who think prayer is a dialogue.

[If you are thinking, 'What about people who don't pray at all?' they are in group one.  If no one is listening, then prayer is a monologue.]

I have been both at different times in my life.  So has C.S. Lewis.  The picture above was taken just before he volunteered to serve in World War I.  He was 19 years old and did not have to go.  Lewis is from Northern Ireland and would not have been drafted.  Lewis had recently become and atheist and would remain one for another decade until he became a believer in 1929 and a Christian shortly after.

At about the same age as Lewis, I volunteered for the Vietnam War.  Lewis served in that horrible war and was twice badly wounded.  He remained an atheist as he recovered from shrapnel wounds.  I never got closer to the Vietnam War than western Utah.  But like Lewis I was injured in an explosion.  His was hit with German artillery fire.  I was close enough to a missile interstage detonator explosion to be blinded by shrapnel and almost lose two fingers.  

We both recovered, but in the course of my recovery, I came to faith.  The experience of blindness, and not being sure I would see again, made the universe look vast and me feel as small as an oxygen atom.  

As I recovered I became a believer and then a Christian.  They are very different.  Over the four decades since I first believed, I have never stopped being a believer, but have had many struggles with being a Christian. It is not belief in Jesus that was a problem, or the basic principles of faith expressed in the Creeds of the Church for nearly 2,000 years.  

My problem was with the culture that has surrounded Christianity in America and through most of western history since Christians took political power.  I came to faith in a Baptist Church in Utah.  The members of that Church saw themselves as a resistance movement against all the sins of the world and most of modern science and philosophy.  The Evangelical Church in America in all of its expressions is anti-intellectual.  And in the past half century it has become almost incredibly materialistic, given the life of Jesus.  

I quickly became discouraged with trying to be part of a culture that seemed collectively delusional.  Just when I was ready to give up completely, a military chaplain on our base in Germany gave me a copy of C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity."  The day I got the book our unit was going to Heidelberg to watch fireworks.  I read the book on the bus, then ignored the fireworks and read the book on the bridge where we went to watch.  

Reading that book convinced me to leave the Army at the end of my enlistment and go to college full time.  I wanted to be a Christian with a brain like Lewis.  

I did go to college and eventually read all of the 40 books C.S. Lewis wrote, many of them several times.  This reading of "Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer" might be the fifth time I read this wonderful, practical book.  

Most of us feel the urge to pray and then feel modern life and thinking fight against the urge.  Does prayer for the sick really make sense?  Could any sane parent keep her sick child at home and pray instead of going to a doctor?  In a series of "letters" to a friend on prayer, Lewis talks about how he prays.  He also talks about how and why he struggles with prayer. 

Of course, the book has nothing to say to people who do not believe in God, but it does show how a sane and brilliant man who fervently believes in God prays.

Book 15 of 2016: Homer's Iliad--One of the First and Great War Stories

The Iliad of Homer one of the first and one of the best War Stories of Western Literature.  It opens with "The Anger of Achilles" and ends with funeral of Hector, the great hero of Troy. Hector was killed by Achilles in the last of many fight scenes.

In this reading, I was struck by how much the combatants "talk smack" to each other. They insult and provoke each other like professional wrestlers before cutting each other to pieces with sword and spear.  Hundreds and hundreds of men die in this story, many of them falling to the ground and "biting the earth" as they writhe and gasp on the way to Death and Hades.  

The meaning of "biting the dust" is just the same for us as when Homer sang his poem 3,000 years ago: fall headlong in the dust, and bite the earth [πολέες δ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ αὐτὸν ἑταῖροι//πρηνέες ἐν κονίῃσιν ὀδὰξ λαζοίατο γαῖαν].

Dozens of times as I read "he fell headlong in the dust and bites the earth" I heard the refrain from "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen.  

With spears, swords, arrows and not a few big rocks, the combatants smash skulls, tear out eyes, rip open bellies, tear flesh and break bones. The poem glorifies combat and bravery.  There is no doubt Homer's audience thought that to die bravely in combat was the best death.

The war that leads to so many deaths of brave men, the 10-years war between the Greeks and Trojans, was unnecessary.  It was the wounded pride of King Agamemnon of the Greeks that started the war.  In the Iliad, "...the face that launch'd a thousand ships" was the bearded face of King Agamemnon, not the lovely face of Helen of Troy. Christopher Marlowe's play Dr. Faustus in 1604 is the first reference to Helen causing the war and the source of the quote in the line above.

The song "If" by Bread in 1971 made the Marlowe's view part of pop culture and echoed in my head as I read Iliad.

Of course, it was her kidnap/elopement by Paris that was given as a reason to fight, but Helen, as all women of the time, was property.  Thousands of men in a thousand ships went to war following a proud and angry king.

The Trojan War is tragedy and loss even in victory.  Agamemnon is betrayed and killed when he returns home.  Achilles dies in Troy.  Ulysses wanders another ten years before his return.  That story is the "Odyssey."

I last read Iliad in the 90s and at the time liked he Odyssey better.  Now that I have served in an ill-conceived unnecessary war myself, I like Iliad better.  All those brave deaths, all that "biting the earth" for no reason in a losing cause is now part of my life.

Every Time I Put My Helmet On, I Could Die

In Michigan earlier this month, a drunk, high or otherwise screwed up pickup driver ran over nine bicyclists, killing five and maiming the other four.

So many cyclists are on social media acting surprised.  They shouldn't be.  Riding a two-wheeled vehicle is dangerous anywhere.  Sharing a road with hundreds of two-ton vehicles makes it more dangerous.  When the drivers of those vehicles hate bicyclists, someone is going to get hurt, and that someone is not the driver of the two-ton vehicle.

And the hostility on the road from the two-ton cowards in pickup trucks is increasing.  The Republican nominee trashed John Kerry last week for crashing on his bike during a State Department trip.  Dumpy Trump told his even fatter fans that he, Donald Trump, would not fall off a bicycle.  Because, of course, Trump would never get on one.  Many conservative talk show hosts have attacked bicycles for various reasons that can be summarized in a fat man's envy of men who are in shape.

Most of the real hostility I have suffered on a bicycle in the last 20 years has been from pickup trucks.  If a driver swerves, spits, hits me with a can or bottle or yells "Faggot!" it is a fat guy in pickup truck.  If there are bumper stickers on the truck, they are Republican/conservative.

In Iraq when we were on the airbase, we did not have to wear battle gear, but when we went outside the wire, we wore helmets and body armor.  In Iraq, putting on the helmet meant leaving the patrolled perimeter of the Ali Air Base and flying to somewhere that we had not "won the hearts and minds" of the local people.

Although we were safe on Ali Air Base, there was on place I felt vulnerable.  I rode the perimeter of the airfield to get everywhere on base.  This nine-mile road was mostly far from the perimeter, but near the junk yard on the east side of the base, the perimeter fence was an easy rifle shot away.  As I rode around the base, especially at night with a red light blinking under the bike seat, I imagined an Iraqi with an AK-47 looking at me like I was an arcade target.  And the Arab aiming his Kalashnikov would not even know that I am half Jewish by birth, so for him I would be a double score target.

In the end I rode more than 5,000 miles in Iraq and have ridden more than 150,000 miles in the last two decades, so I know rationally, that road riding is statistically safe.  But now that I have turned in the camouflage helmet, I am very aware that the greatest routine risk I face is a porcine pansy in a pickup truck.  Sometimes people ask me how I can enjoy riding in New York City or Philadelphia or Paris.  There may be heavy traffic in cities, but there is not the malice of cowards in pickups.

Who Avoids Our Wars? The Rich, The Entitled

Watch News coverage of Trump rallies, and you will see Trump supporters portrayed as white, poor and stupid.

There certainly are Trump voters who are poor and stupid, but I have not met them. I have only seen them on the News. 

The Trump voters I know personally have college degrees, are very wealthy, and believe the world started falling apart in the 60s and 70s when they were kids.  The college degrees of the Trump voters I know are technical and professional.  I have not met a Trump voter with a degree in arts or literature.

I recently met a tall, energetic engineer named Tom. He is retired but still works as a consultant.  He owns a dozen cars, eight of them show-quality American muscle cars of the 60s and 70s.  He has a home that would house a village in much of the world, no kids, and enough garage space for his entire car collection. 

He has lived in Houston for more than 30 years, but grew up in suburban Chicago.  As a high school student in the late 60s he was bussed to a different suburban school as part of affirmative action—desegregation.  He hated it.  He seethes with resentment when he talks about it almost 50 years later.

He says he is a minority in his adopted city of Houston and is angry that cars with Mexican license plates can drive his streets.  He is angry that Houston is not a majority white city. When he says Make America Great Again he means make it white again. 

He is also a very proud, technically trained guy who does not own a cell phone or a laptop computer.  He has two landline phones and a desktop computer.  On that computer, he runs high-tech simulations for his consulting work.  So he is not against technology, he is against people who do not understand technology having access to technology.  He is very proud of not needing the technology that others around him depend on.  He uses paper maps.  He sends email on his desktop computer and does not need to check his desktop constantly as smartphone users do.

Like Trump, he wants America to have a strong military, and just like Trump, he did not serve in that military.  He went to college.  When he graduated, the draft was near its end. He got the deferments he needed and did not volunteer--though he is happy to bomb, drone or invade. He isn't going.

After college, Tom got a good job and started a lucrative career while those who served in the military earned $168 a month and delayed the start of their less lucrative careers.

He mentioned that in 1960s Chicago he was subjected to many Polish jokes. He remembers with some pain what it was like to hear jokes about Poles.  He does not remember the 50s and 60s as an era when every racial slur was part of normal speech.  

Part of Tom’s resentment is that political correctness has removed hazing ethnic groups as an acceptable part of American life.  He was subject to terrible Polish jokes for years.  He should be able to treat the latest waves of immigrants the way he was treated. 

Tom is resentful and without mercy.  Anyone who thinks “education” will fix Tom and people like him is just wrong.  Tom is rich, privileged, smart and is perfectly happy with 11 million deportations, a Muslim ban and overturning any and all civil rights.  Like Trump, the rich and comfortable life Tom has enjoyed for half a century made him more sure that he deserves everything he has.   

Who Fights Our Wars? Volunteers

This week my family and I volunteered at GAIN, a ministry that sends food, clothes, seeds and other supplies to refugees around the world.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I was sorting clothes with a guy named Bill.  He is a retired soldier who enrolled in ROTC the same year I enlisted in 1972.  Bill retired after 22 years of active duty.  He served in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down then went to the Gulf War and retired in 1993.

We talked about living in Germany, eating C-Rations and starting our military careers during the Draft.  Both of us like the draft Army better.  His fist command was a mechanized mortar platoon. Bill told me about one of his draft soldiers who was a math whiz and could set up accurate fire with his "Four-Deuce" 4.2-inch mortars faster than more experienced soldiers.

I told him about my gunner who was a mess as a soldier, but a brilliant gunner.  We both liked an Army with soldiers who did not want to serve, but served anyway.

Bill knew David Petraeus when both of them were young officers.  Bill said Petraeus was known as a problem-solver who could fix anything that was screwed up from the time he was first commissioned.
He was, of course, sad about how Petraeus ended his career.  Bill was also sad when I told him that Petraeus was now leading a group with Astronaut/Veteran Mark Kelley to regulate guns. Bill is both very pro-gun and knows how good Petraeus can be with a tough problem.

Bill drove home to Virginia last night, but will be back to volunteer for GAIN. I just signed up as a volunteer for the Petraeus group.  Bill won't be volunteering for that one.

Ban Shakespeare!!

Open Culture published a funny Infographic about the way people die in Shakespeare's plays.

I shared the image on my facebook page.  A soldier I know who is against any regulation of guns made the comment "Ban Shakespeare."  

When I read the comment, I knew he was trying to be funny, but he is also part of the culture that is slowly wringing the life out arguably the greatest author ever.

Part of his belief that everyone should have guns comes from his belief that he needs to defend his family and himself from invaders, thieves and dangers that lurk everywhere.  

The chart carefully tabulates the means of every death in Shakespeare, but does not measure the how close the dead person is to his or her murderer.  When you summarize Shakespeare that way, nearly al the deaths are by friends, neighbors, family or coworkers--if I can call members of the kings court coworkers.

And then you get to the terrible irony of many gun deaths in America.  The huge number of guns means that accidents will happen in proportion to the number of guns.

My Army friend conceded that neither he nor any member of his rural Pennsylvania family has ever been threatened with bodily harm by anyone.  So many of the gun owners I know who claim self defense is the reason they have guns cannot point to any incident of threat to themselves or their family.

Many, sadly, know of someone who was accidentally shot by their own gun or by a family member.

My Army friend is nearly my age so he has read Shakespeare.  It was in high school, but he could vaguely remember "Romeo and Juliet" and possibly "Julius Caesar."  His most recent contact with The Bard was watching "Hamlet" the movie starring Mel Gibson.  Don't sneer.  Hamlet is an alienated loner who sees things in the night and is crazy.  Gibson is perfect for the role.

But my Army friend has not read Shakespeare or any other creative fiction in 40 years.  His life is Guns and Prose.  He wants to restore the Constitution and roll back all kinds of rights that do not apply to white males.  And he is defending his family from a threat that has never happened.

He doesn't have to do anything to Ban Shakespeare.  His whole life has made the greatest writer in English, maybe the greatest in world, just a marginal thing for elitists.  

Great Dad, Ordinary Dad: So Different for Sons

My son Nigel and I walking to Church

Young boys learn how to be men by watching their fathers.

The son of a house painter who works for his Dad during the summers then joins the family business has comfortable relationship with who his father is and what his father does.  The son learns over years of apprenticeship that he can do the kind of work Dad does. Dad is not pushing him to do something "great."  Nor is the son striving to do something beyond his reach.

I sometimes wonder how different my life would have been if I had not tried so hard to be my Dad. I simply did not have the physical ability to do the things my Dad did, so I spent 50 years striving to make up the deficit I felt.  

My Dad, as I have written elsewhere, was a middleweight boxer and a minor-league pitcher for the Reading Phillies.  I have no ability to play stick-and-ball sports, nor did I have any ability to box.  My biggest fight at age 17 was a school-yard fight that sent me to the hospital with several broken bones.  My Dad also dropped out of school at the end of the eighth grade and got a job to help his immigrant family.  When I was growing up, my Dad was a Teamster, a truck driver and warehouseman, who told stories about being a soldier, a boxer and playing ball.  

I knew boxer and ballplayer were hopeless goals for me, but Teamster and soldier were possible.  All through high school I barely passed classes not from lack of ability but because I want to hang with the kids who were not going to college.  My tenth-grade English teacher told me the only reason I passed her class was that she did not want to have me again the next year.  She told me I would never be able to write.  

During that summer, like every summer since I was 12, I swept floors at the warehouse where my father worked, 40 hours a week, Tuesday to Saturday.  During the breaks and lunch, I would sit on pallet and read.  That summer I read a half-dozen popular science books by Isaac Asimov about chemistry and physics and many chapters of Amateur Radio Relay League manual.  Because I was in the lowest level of English courses, it would be a decade before I learned of the magic in The Divine Comedy and 19th Century Russian novels. But if I had known, I would have been reading the Great Books out of love, not for grades.

Though my real interest was in science and literature, I made cars and work the center of my life, knowing that later I could be a soldier and a Teamster.  After high school I got a Teamsters warehouse job.  Six months later I enlisted in the waning years of the Vietnam War. For as long as I could remember, I was sure I was not the son my father wanted, but when I enlisted, a little of the burden lifted.  

When my Dad died 12 years later, I was in graduate school.  After seven years in the military, I got out, went to college, fell in love with Dante and the Russians and finally started the life I should have been pursuing since I was a kid.  Even with a successful career as a writer and a big family, I still felt the haunting feeling that I was not and would never be the man my father was.  I have met other men through my life who felt the same thing.  I know a guy who is a senior editor at the New York Times.  His Dad was leading surgeon, and wanted his son to be a surgeon.  My friend could feel that disappointment until the day his Dad died.  

We talked once about how we could keep from doing the same thing to our sons, and decided it was probably hopeless.  I was very proud of my Dad.  I loved the idea that I was the son of the toughest guy in a Teamsters warehouse with 300 drivers and dock workers.  But I never felt that he loved anything I was doing.

So for my sons, I am cheering when my older son boxes, cheering when my younger son sings and drums, and trying to help them figure out the best school for them to have a job and a life they will like. 

I did not get over thinking about being a disappointment to my Dad until I got home from Iraq.  Until then, I had doubted myself in many ways including personal courage.  But when I stepped off the plane that took us home to America, I decided I had nothing to prove on that score.  

In the 34 years since my Dad died, I have wanted him to meet his grandchildren.  I wanted to tell him about the 30 countries and five continents I visited.  I wanted to convince him I had done something he could be proud of.  But after Iraq, I just wanted to talk to him.  In his words, I wanted to "shoot the shit" about nothing in particular.  Finally, I felt as if my Dad and I could just talk.  And on this Father's Day, I will be thinking about how to make sure my own sons don't have to wait 56 years for that day.