I committed two highly avoidable (and highly costly, for a working family) blunders in the last six months.
However, my frustration did not reach its fever pitch until yesterday. I arrived late for my morning class because: a. I encountered snarls of traffic after dropping the girls off at school and b. I then still took the time to pick up some miscellaneous hardware at the local Screwfix. In my frenzy, I wretchedly parked on a double yellow line, a fact I was not fully cognizant of until I got out of class three hours later, whereupon I found a menacing yellow clamp on my front driver’s side tyre.
After paying the 60-euro fine, I had to wait nearly two hours for ‘yer man’ to come de-clamp me, by which time I was twenty minutes late for my afternoon class on another campus. My English language students were patiently waiting and greeted me with pleasant smiles. I gave them an impromptu lesson on the words clamp, de-clamp, and government overreach.
That was actually the final lapse of judgment in a series of three. I haven’t even told you about the first two:
- I hastily put some kind of inferior, off-road fuel into our brand-new lawnmower. Obviously, I was trying to save money, but I had to pay 60 euros to have the fuel lines drained. Just like the de-clamp: 60 euros. That must be my default stupid tax.
- Then, the other day in the final lap of the final mowing of the season, I was mowing too close to the conservatory window, which caused a stone to ricochet up and shatter a significant portion of the same.
Esther says it only goes to show I’m not really a fully-functional adult but only posing as one. Actually, what she said was, “This means you are spinning so many plates that a few of them have to shatter.” I said, “Thank you, dear wife, that’s a very charitable reading of the situation.”
But I also think I have absorbed the lie that I am infallible and infinite. The reality is that I am profoundly limited. My plan for the next few years is to earn and learn (finishing a degree in English and Religious Studies, yay!). Moreover, I am trying to pour my attention into my daughters before they cross the Rubicon into adolescence, not that I expect all communication to be cut off at that point, just that it might become more complicated. All these endeavors require serious energy and time and I don’t have much left over.
At any rate, last evening as I did the examen*, the Lord said, slow the ____ down! John Mark Comer, citing Dallas Willard, said that the only spiritual advice we really need to follow is, “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry.” I try to take that onboard, more because Willard said it than Comer. Somehow, he comes across as superficial, but I know that’s a harsh evaluation. At any rate, I did read Comer’s book on ruthlessly eliminating hurry–albeit on 1.45 speed!.
Several specific actions I could take to train me to slow down:
- Set the timer for one minute and do nothing.
- Ride out the impulse for checking my phone. Time how long the impulse lasts. Work on building the concentration muscle.
- Say out loud several things that could go wrong in any given situation. It sounds stressful, but I think it might help me close the loop between what my subconscious is trying to tell me and the realm of the fully conscious.
* No, I don’t have elite spiritual practices, the examen is just something I stumbled across through an odd sequence of events, i.e., reading the above-mentioned J.M. Comer, as well as his holiness, the Bishop of Waterford, recommending it. It really does work. Surprise, surprise, right? It’s not like it hasn’t been around for 5 centuries.
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The other morning I read a news headline out loud as we ate breakfast: “There were three executions in the US in the last week.”
My 10-year-old daughter’s instinctive response: “How are the bad guys ever going to learn if the government kills them?”
My 7-year-old daughter’s equally fast rejoinder: “Yeah, and don’t cops know the murders have a bad mental illness!”
I smiled paternally but could not help agreeing. The catalogue of explanations for their responses surely includes the following:
- They are speaking from the God-given sense of right and wrong.
- Their parents indoctrinated them;
- They have lived in western Europe for too long.
Sorry for all the lists in this post.
This is what I read: “I have basically as good a life as you get, my problems include parking mistakes, and lawnmower catching a stone and breaking a window”, and, “my fortune includes an interesting nonphysical job where I’m valued and respected, higher education, a mentally normal wife who doesn’t look for opportunities to rip my head off at my first sign of weakness, and cute little kids. ” Oh, and God talks to me, and wants me to slow down.
There is a saying, “nobody is sad to see his friend fall from a high horse” – for me, Gideon, that’s absolutely untrue, but I think for many people there may be plenty of truth to it. I think all this is great: that you, for example, have some good that I don’t, is neither a source of internal sadness or jealousy from my perspective. But then again no doubt it could have gone the other way. The only time I’d cough into the hankerchief is where someone has all this good and then chucks mud down on say all the Americans and Western Europeans whose wives would and did rip their heads off, who don’t see their kids, who work hard physical jobs keeping the city running and get contempt for it, and then criticises these people as sexist beasts.
But I’d also like to face the logic – if an interventionist God wants you to have an awesome life, and also wants to fine-tune along the way to get you to slow down good. Sounds good to me. Did the same interventionist God want Eileen Wuornos to be raped by family members as a child, be promiscuous at 12, and have stones thrown at her after school by boys she had been intimate with so she wouldn’t associate with them, be thrown out of home by her alcoholic grandfather in her mid teens, and then the inexorable descent until she herself turned into the natural and correct product of her experiences – that is a volatile, angry, crazy, bitch murdering innocent men who sought to help her travel as a hitchhiker? And then get executed.
If we want to be fair, I think we have to accept there is either not an interventionist God, or there is an extremely unfair interventionist God. Marcion of Sinope and a whole tradition, that you can see in the Askew and Berlin Codices as well as in Nag Hammadi, that survived the endless book and heretic burnings of the Catholic Church, thought the the latter – Jesus came from the Alien God not Yahweh.
You’re certainly right about shots in while they’re still kids though – time being present helps, though it’s insufficient – if in doubt, get a room full 1/3rd with French teenagers, 1/3rd with American, and 1/3rd Chinese, and explain why the descendants of those who lived the Century of National Humiliation are the normal ones.
There is some truth in what you say. No matter what situation we’re born into, some days it can feel as though our lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote Thomas Hobbes. Or as Macbeth said in his soliloquy, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
For them it’s every day, and they’re not few in number. And if the Greco-Roman Jesus movement hadn’t been hijacked, at least these people wouldn’t have hated themselves even more because it was all their own fault they weren’t enjoying the perfectly created world. If the true God never meant for any of this to happen, but the malign or deluded God of the Old Testament created the material system, as eg. the Apocryphon of John indicates, then people whose lives suck because shit happens wouldn’t need the extra dose of self-shame that canonical Christianity provides free at no extra cost.