Why I Like Rodney McKay

Rest assured, I am not seeing anyone. Here is a photo of Rodney McKay:

As you can tell, he's a character, on a sci-fi TV show, that hasn't been showing for several years now. Yes, I'm geeky! I confess! The truth is out!!

But bear with me anyway. I am not going to use this post to talk about some random TV show, nor about my preference for sci-fi over chick flicks. Actually, McKay is just one example of a larger trend: I don't care as much for the main character as I do for minor characters in a show.

I prefer Eowyn, and Peregrin Took, to Frodo Baggins. I prefer Han Solo to Luke Skywalker. I am more interested in Hermione than in Harry Potter, and I like Luna and Neville better than both of them. My favourite characters are almost always the minor characters.

Why?

I don't think jealousy plays a role in my preference for minor characters. In other words, I don't think I invest in the minor characters because I am too jealous of the adventures and advantages of the main character to be truly interested in them. Main characters don't actually have much in the way of advantages. If a reader is going to be envious of anyone, one of the minor characters would actually be a better target for envy - for example, Eowyn, who gets to fight in a battle and meet Prince Charming. Best of both worlds, yes? Certainly better than poor Frodo's fate. Frodo spends two whole books trudging through flat gloomy fields and meeting gigantic spiders.

So, why? I have two reasons, I think, but first, a note: I realize I am addressing a narrow window of literature, all within the sci-fi and fantasy tradition. My musings here do not apply outside the window, but that doesn't meant that the musings themselves are worthless. Here goes:

Minor characters are more relatable.
In college, a professor of mine pointed out that Dante's Purgatory, of his three books, best represents life on this earth. Years later, some of my favourite passages and scenes are in Purgatory, and certainly that book, more than the other two, is peopled with likeable and relevant characters.

In fiction, minor characters work the same way. Major characters, like Dante's Inferno or Paradise, are far enough above us (or, in rare cases, beneath us) that we don't find much to connect to with them. Harry spends the bulk of the later books in angst over his own fate and that of the world; Hermione reads books. Guess which one I at least relate to more? For an even better example, Harry worries about failing the world, while Neville worries about failing his classes, and Luna looks for friends. The world might be more important on a larger scale, but we connect with smaller battles, such as succeeding in classes or with a social life more easily.

Minor characters make more mistakes.
Although the wording is similar, this is a new point. As main characters tend to be involved in grand, world-changing schemes, they also tend to make fewer mistakes, or at least be called out on fewer mistakes. Sure, Frodo makes mistakes (such as suspecting Sam); Pippin is the one who gets yelled at and chastised for his mistake with the Seeing Stone.

My Sci-Fi character is my best example here. McKay is an arrogant, unobservant and slightly whiny character; my father calls him flat-out "annoying" and is deeply frustrated with his character. I, on the other hand, find something of myself in McKay. Like him, I completely miss it sometimes when I hurt people, or when people around me are hurting. It's easy to be whiny when I'm facing something I don't want to do, or when I'm in pain.

But McKay changes. This is perhaps the best thing about his character. He is, for most of the show, a stuck-up scientist and computer genius, but when the pressure is on, he admits his mistakes and tries to forge relationships with the people around him. Though he'd never 'fess up to it, McKay is, deep inside, a considerate and courageous person.

And so, McKay and characters like him - the feckless Han Solo, the carefree Pippin, the despairing Eowyn - give me hope that I too can change.

So What?
In the end, this hope for change is why this post matters. Literature is supposed to be about change, about reshaping the way we see this world and the way in which we live in it.

The main characters are there for us to thrill to their adventures and cheer at their ultimate victory: the downfall of Voldemort, of Lord Sauron, of the Sith Emperor.

The minor characters, however, are there for a yet more important purpose: to remind us ordinary people are too are part of, as Tolkien put it, the "Great Story", although we may not have the starring role. Like Neville, and Eowyn, and McKay, we too have our own battles to fight, and we too have the chance for redemption as we fight those battles.

So, Dante.

At last. My last blog post was followed by a week and a half of busy life (including teaching about Dante, among other things), and I did not have the time to write about Dante. 

In Christian tradition, there is a well-established theme of self-sacrifice. Christ's warning to his disciples perhaps best captures this theme. "If anyone desires to come after Me," He says, "let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it" (Luke 9:23-24). A disciple's life, according to this passage, is defined by consistent self-sacrifice. All that the believer loves in this world and all the believer thinks themselves to be must be exchanged in a sort of commercial transaction in order to know Christ better. In modern parlance, no pain, no gain. 

At the same time, however, there is a fairly well-established, if unspoken, concern about the potential danger of self-sacrifice. In a postmodern, post 1984 world, people fear giving themselves up to an organization - even a beneficial one such as the church; these people see the sacrifice of the self as a dangerous and life-denying act. An extreme example is that of the FLDS women. Like Christianity, Mormonism stresses the virtue of surrendering to a higher good; the women in the Fundamentalist branches of the church do surrender, and then spend the rest of their lives popping out baby after baby after baby. Gone are the talents and vibrant personalities that God endowed them with. Of course, the Christian surrender of human desires (the desire for food, for good drink, for sex and for companionship) and personal talents is nowhere near as extreme as the surrender required of fundamentalist Mormon women, but the fear is still there: Will my surrender to Christ and to His church cause me to lose the personality and identity that God has given to me? Will I become someone else?

It's a legitimate question, one that deserves a fair answer. It deserves an answer more complex than, "You will find joy in the path of discipleship". At the doctor's, children are told that having a shot will make them feel better again, but the nebulous concept of "feeling better" doesn't make them any readier to sit still and stop squirming. Likewise, the vague idea of "joy" is often not enough to overcome a concern about the loss of our very precious self, should we step onto the road of self-sacrifice.

In Dante's Inferno of all places lies a surprisingly affirmative and biblical answer to this question.

Background: Like most medieval writers and even classical philosophers, Dante believes that everything  exists for a specific purpose, referred to as telos. An object that fulfills its telos is successful; an object that does not, unsuccessful. For example, a book is meant to be read and understood. A book which looks beautiful but is never read does not fulfill its purpose. It is a bad book, because it has failed in its reason for existing.

Another background note: The medieval theologians believed that sometimes sin was only an excessive love of an originally good thing. Sometimes sin was love of a bad thing too, but that's beside my point. For instance, love of food taken to excess is gluttony. Food is not a bad thing, but the good thing that food is has become fascinating to an inordinate degree and replaced God at the center of the affections.

Okay, back to Dante's Inferno. In the Divine Comedy, Dante operates from the assumption that human beings have a specific purpose: to know and enjoy God and to be like him insofar as humans can. His assumption is, of course, grounded in the final creative act of God: "Let Us make man in Our image," God said, "according to our likeness" (Genesis 1:26). Biblically, humans are made to be in the image of God.. In Dante, this purpose - this telos - takes the form of exercising power, wisdom and love in a way that clearly depicts God's own power, wisdom and love. Incidentally, each of these three virtues is associated with one member of the Trinity. This, then, is the human telos: to depict, in day-to-day actions, the image of the Trinitarian God.

In the Inferno, sinners do have the option of denying telos; this action is always associated with a sin. Perhaps the best example is the most famous pair of sinners in Hell: Francesca and Paolo, damned to the level of the Lustful for their affair. Francesca's story moves Dante to tears, but he is clear that Francesca no longer has any interest in God. Even if she could, she assures Dante she would not pray from Hell and instead elects to cling to her lover throughout eternity. Like other sinners, she has loved a good thing - in this case, Paolo - to excess. It is her love which prevents her from meeting telos, from depicting the image of God.

And Francesca suffers for her decision. As she chose to live in pursuit not only of sexual desire but also of tender romantic relationships, so those desires come to dominate her life completely. Francesca will never be separated from Paolo, a situation which smacks as much of pain and frustration as it does of pleasure. Nor is she in control of her situation any longer. Like the other Lustful, Francesca is swept hither and thither by hot winds across the plains of Hell; the winds represent her own hot desires and thus suggest that her entire existence - indeed, her entire identity - is reduced to the demands of a lustful spirit. Francesca, in choosing to indulge her natural desire beyond the bounds of virtue, has lost herself utterly in this desire. In other words, Francesca's decision not to meet telos undid her.

Had Francesca chosen otherwise, her fate might have been much different. According to Dante, natural passions such as Love, Francesca's downfall, are not absent from Heaven. In fact, the higher he ascends into Paradise, the hotter Heaven's flames grow, not only with love for God but also with love for other believers. In Heaven, everything is already pure; therefore, these desires such as love are also pure and are part of telos. As human beings let God make them into His image, so they will also be made into someone who can enjoy love and give love in return.

And so, Francesca's error is tragically ironic: In placing romantic love over telos, Francesca lost the ability to feel and to give the true, pure love for which she longed.

Yet in her tragedy lies in the answer to the Christian problem of self-sacrifice. As difficult as sacrifice is on this earth, such sacrifice does not ultimately destroy the self; sacrifice upholds and nourishes the self. That which the self desires stands ready for us who seek to be made "in the image and likeness of God", if we are willing to endure necessary but short-lived privation. Francesca desired love, and had she been willing to briefly check her lust for Paolo, she could have had love unending had she been made "in the image and likeness of God".

Yes, Christ calls us to self-sacrifice. But as Dante reminds us, this call is not ultimately a self-denying one, but a self-affirming one: Everything that we are and wish to be, we can find in the purpose for which He has made us.

I leave you with Augustine, to make my point for me:

All these things [the good things of this world] and their like can be occasions of sin because, good though they are, they are of the lowest order of good, and if we are too much tempted by them we abandon those higher and better things, your truth, your law, and you yourself, O Lord our God.

My next post will be about Dante.

I'm not ready to write that, though (9:45 PM on Sunday night is not the best time to work out tangled thoughts), so tonight, something less literary. Yes, you can draw a sigh of relief, wipe the sweat off your forehead. 

Last week, I flew out of Chicago for Spring Break in Dallas. Travel by flying is always a tad stressful for me, given how many hoops the dear ol' system makes me jump through: present my boarding pass at security, smile at the guard, figure out how to respond when he flirts, strip off belt and coat and shoes, stand with my hands above my head in the full-body scanner, find my gate, and present the exact same boarding pass again. Perhaps more stressful, though, this trip marked one of the rare times I actually flew out of Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Usually I just fly through it, but this time, there would be an entirely new system, in a very big airport, for me to navigate. I ended up doing a lot of guessing. 

In Texas, half the flowers are on cacti. 

At 7:15 AM, I bundled myself into my car, bought a hot cup of coffee and popped Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air into the audio cassette player in my car and set off for Chicago. By mid-morning, I paid my last toll and drove into the small city that is the Chicago O'Hare Airport. Its streets were a maze of arrival and departure lanes, rental car centers, a curiously named Kiss-And-Fly lot, and the economy lots for which I was searching: all a maze that I had to navigate with the clock for my departure ticking.

I recall doing a fair amount of guessing: I guessed which parking lot to turn into, I guessed that I was in the correct lot, and I guessed that the bus which pulled up was indeed the bus I was supposed to take to arrive at the airport. I almost lugged my bags right back off the bus when it pulled up to the Chicago Metro stop; the driver checked me, fortunately, and we kept going to the elevated trains that run from the economy parking into the airport. 

At the train stop, I guessed some more: The train that pulled up seemed to be the only one available, so it must be my train; to be sure, I asked a janitor resting with her cart right next to me and tried not to get mop in my mouth when I spoke. I guessed that I was in fact heading to the correct terminal. Once there, I actually did lug my bags up an escalator and watched the other passengers: A few people headed towards bag check; others punched in at unmarked kiosks; I checked the unmarked kiosk as well. Turned out, I could reprint (for the third time) my boarding pass. I guessed that empty bottles go through security okay (they do in Europe, though they don't make passengers strip there), and sure enough, I toted an empty orange juice bottle with me through security. 

Look, more flowers on cacti!

If traveling makes me a tad nervous, it also makes me philosophical, so here's the lesson that I took away from all my guessing. 

In O'Hare, almost every guess I made was right (with the exception of almost boarding the Chicago Metro). This was not due to lucky chance: O'Hare has their airport system laid out clearly and well-marked with signs, and I had done my research in advance. I knew which parking lot I wanted, I knew that I'd use a combination bus and train to reach the airport, and I had toted empty bottles through airport security before this. 

At the same time, I didn't actually know what was coming next in airport maze or even exactly what it would look like when I arrived. In fact, the near-fail of the Chicago Metro indicates the uncertainty: I knew that I would take a train to reach the airport itself, but I did not know what the train would look like. So, the Metro station kicked my brain into "Train!!" mode and almost sent me off the bus and into the heart of Chicago via the Metro. In more successful situations, I thought, "Oh, so that's what this step of the maze looks like!", breathed a sigh of relief, and moved on to the unknowable future. 

Texas has more to offer besides cacti, thankfully.

So, application: As travelers move forward, hesitantly and step-by-step, through their journey, so we too move forward, hesitantly and step-by-step, through life. I wonder sometimes whether we approach life with an overconfident attitude, telling people to choose what job to take or what person to marry or where to live as if they can know from that perspective whether the rest of their lives will be happy. As an example, I used to fear that, if I chose the wrong college, I would put myself out of the will of God forever; I approached decision-making and in fact all of life as though I could know what the rest of my life would look like if I could only find the golden key. 

Life isn't like that at all. C.S. Lewis tells us that, from within time, "all answers deceive"; nothing about the future (and even about the past) can be known for certain. Life is instead much like a trip through a new airport. Yes, we can do our research and look for signs and use good, sound wisdom and common sense. Still, we can't know for certain what comes next. We can make a perfectly good and rational decision, and find that life hits an unexpected rough patch; on the other hand, we can make a horrible decision and find goodness blooming like a spring flower even in that rocky soil. 

It is a frustrating exercise to attempt to know or secure a certain future. It was terribly frustrating and stressful for me to believe that the success or failure of my life hung on whether I chose the correct college; it is equally frustrating to try to 'guess' what will happen to us next even without making a decision. Will gas prices keep rising? What about food prices? Will I ever find someone to marry, or will I find a job? What would happen if I went on for more education? 

Had I tried to know my airport route for certain, I would have been stuck at the side of the road, slightly off the interstate. The only way to conquer the maze was to move forward, with uncertainty. That is the only way to go about life: to move forward, with uncertainty, with God.

Last Sunday I headed off to church with two books in my bag: my Bible (of course) and (of all things) Dante's Purgatory. I held my Bible on my lap during church service, leaving Purgatory in my bag, spine-upwards, its title blindingly obvious in bold navy letters against a teal background.

I wondered what my fellow church attenders, all very Protestant, would think if they glimpsed the title in my bag. I got to find out.

Immediately after the service, the woman behind me introduced herself and told me that she and her husband had been wondering about Purgatory in my bag. A few days back, she continued, she and her husband had been taken aback by a radio broadcast on Purgatory, in which a Catholic priest described the purifying of sins after death. This message, of course, did not jive with their Protestant belief that Christ wipes away all sins at the moment of conversion.

How could a Protestant, then, read a book titled Purgatory ?

Turns out, my Christian Classics students (all two of them) had the same question on their mind. So far we have read C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. In both texts the authors send their characters on a trip through Purgatory, a trip crucial to their spiritual purification and renewal.

"Why," my student asked, "are Christian authors so obsessed with Purgatory? Why does it keep showing up?"

For Dante himself, the answer is simple: He was a good Catholic and really believed everything he wrote about Purgatory. For Eliot and Lewis, the answer is more complex. Anglicans instead of Catholics, they use Purgatory in their works in basically the same way that Lewis uses Narnia: an imaginary, deeply symbolic place where people can connect with God more visibly and directly than in this present world. Still, both of them go out of their way to emphasize that their symbolic Purgatory is in fact more real than this present physical world.

Its theological existence aside, the realm of Purgatory is a deeply meaningful one. Authors recognize in Dante's description of Purgatory not only a spiritual fact but also a metaphor for the Christian experience - a metaphor that even Protestants should appreciate.

Esolen, one of the most recent translators of Dante, writes that "[s]urely it is one of the sillier features of modern piety to believe that we can betake our indifferently righteous selves off to eternal bliss as effortlessly as one might enter the pantry" (432).

This is the reason that believing authors discuss and describe and set their stories and poems in Purgatory: its realm reminds us that we humans are but "indifferently righteous" and that this indifference must be purified.

"Indifferently righteous". I can name scads of examples of indifference in the church, and in my life.

This morning, I planned a nap instead of listening to the last fifteen minutes of the sermon.

This week, a few of my students brutally condemned a woman in a story for feeling unhappy about her unhappy marriage, instead of feeling compassion for her.

Years ago, I forced my roommates to conform to college rules, instead of spending time loving them and listening to their stories.

This is indifference: a dominating concern for our comforts, our assumptions, our rules, than for God and for the people that He loves. This is the value of Purgatory: to remind us that we are "indifferent" to God and to purify our "indifferent" selves until, above all, we love God and His people.

Eliot writes of this redemption:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one dischage from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
    Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
    To be redeemed from fire by fire. 

Christ describes the end result - believers who follow the Greatest Commandment.

'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind'. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself'.

In literature or in theology, Purgatory reminds us of the importance of love.

In which I pretend I am Pioneer Woman

Truth: Box-mix brownies are always better, right?

Right?

Right?

Wrong.

I thought box mixes were best. I even had my favourite kind: the Ghiradelli kind. Then I was converted.

A week ago, I met my sister for tea. As I left, she offered me a brownie that she'd made from a recipe; she assured me the recipe was as good as - better than! - Ghiradelli. My policy is never to refuse free chocolate, so I took it. Even while I was clinging to the plastic baggie, though, I voiced doubts that a brownie from a recipe could measure up to a box mix brownie.

I ate it. A few days later, I looked up the recipe and shared it with someone else. Then I brought brownies to work today for the Writing Center tutors.

And now, I share the recipe with you. The original title is "Classic Fudge-Walnut Brownies," but that's boring, so I have renamed them: "Better than Ghiradelli Brownies":

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup flour
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• dash salt
• 1 cup bittersweet chocolate chunks, divided
• 1/3 cup fat-free milk
• 6 TBSP butter, melted
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, divided (optional)

You can, of course, leave out the walnuts if you so choose. Looking back over the recipe, I think I may have even left out the (gasp!) baking powder. Baking is a remarkably flexible task.

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit.
2. Lightly spoon flour into measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour and next 5 ingredients (through salt) in a large bowl. Combine 1/2 cup chocolate and milk in a microwave-safe bowl; microwave at HIGH 1 minute, stirring after 30 seconds. Stir in butter, vanilla, and eggs. Add milk mixture, 1/2 cup chocolate and 1/4 cup nuts to flour mixture; stir to combine.
3. Pour the batter into a 9-inch square metal baking pan coated with cooking spray; sprinkle with remaining nuts. Bake at 350 for 22 minutes (mine were in the oven for 17 minutes) or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out with moist crumbs clinging. Cool in pan on a wire rack. 

Tips:

• Don't leave out the baking powder. Or do. Leaving out the baking powder worked okay for me.
• Cut the brownies into small pieces; they're very rich, so a little bit will give you a quick chocolate fix.
• Don't overbake. I overbaked the last batch of brownies I made; instead of fudgy brownies, I got crumbly, sandy brownies. It's much better to under rather than overbake. 

Happy baking!

As I start prepping to teach Four Quartets to my students, I am reminded (again) of why I like Eliot.

I find him comforting.

The Poetry

T.S. Eliot is perhaps best known for being hard to understand. He deserves this reputation. I find him hard to understand. But even when I was tearing my hair out because of a thesis on his work, his poetry spoke of peace in the middle of trouble. I share his wisdom with you now.

Eliot, having finished a passage that (apparently) describes the end of the world, concludes this about his poetry:

That was a way of putting it--not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected. 

As difficult as his poetry is, T.S. Eliot is the superstar of modern poetry. Yet even Eliot has his bad days. To him, his poetry (however widely acclaimed) is "not very satisfactory" and is in fact "worn out". Eliot has poured his heart into his writing, only to find that the finished product disappoints in its clarity and creativity. He has aimed for an Oscar candidate poem and produced a Hollywood reboot poem.

Even the act of writing poetry is difficult for Eliot: he calls it the "intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings." To a poet, writing is desperately important, but that doesn't make it fun. Writing is not fun for Eliot; it's "intolerable" - in other words, something akin to self-imposed torture. In Four Quartets Eliot has something he needs to say, and he needs "words" to communicate this "meaning", but the words will not come.

And they don't. The words never come. Eliot simply "start[s] again," editing and re-editing through another two and a half books until the Four Quartets are finished.

This is why I like Eliot.

The Application

Like Eliot, I frequently find whatever I have been working on to be "not very satisfactory." This blog, for instance: I spent more than an hour writing this tiny little devotional-thing on Eliot (and I just used the word 'devotional-thing' in a sentence to boot). And still, this post does not say quite what I want it to say.

Like Eliot, I also find that my projects involve an intolerable, unending wrestle. Teaching, for instance:  I teach the students, they get confused, I re-teach them and they learn, and then in the next unit they get confused again. For me, teaching is perpetually an "intolerable wrestle" to make knowledge clear.

A student today, faced with a lower grade on her summary than she wanted, shrugged and said, "I'm not a very good writer. This is hard for me." She too has experienced what Eliot describes: even to her, what she has written is "not very satisfactory". Writing takes a long time for her; it is the "intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings".

In other words, everybody is disappointed by what they produce. Everybody finds that their projects are harder or more discouraging than they expect them to be. And Eliot, Superstar Poet, gently reminds us that everybody feels exactly the same way at some point. In other words, we are not alone in our troubles.

And then he reminds us to simply "start again" and continue on until we're done.

"For us," Eliot writes, "there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."

Come to think of it, that's a pretty biblical idea:

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12:1-2).

Mawwiage. Mawwiage is wat bwings us togedder toDay. 

At least, it's what brings you to this post. 

A few of you raised objections over the last post. Not everyone is happily married, you pointed out. Married people wish they had the benefits of singleness back, you said. 

I am not trying to argue that marriage is perfect, that we singles should rush out and marry the first person we see. Still, these objections are not in themselves an adequate argument for permanent singleness. A plumbing leak in your friend's house is not a reason for you to rent apartments all your life.

Milton argued in Areopagitica that the "knowledge of good [required some] knowledge of evil" - in other words, that we could not know a thing without knowing something of its opposite as well. Hence, our understanding of singleness (and for us single people, our acceptance of it) requires some knowledge of marriage. And so my last post sought that knowledge, for what marriage should be, if not always what it is. 

In this post, I 'turn the tapestry' to see the other side of that knowledge. As the last post laid out some of the reasons that marriage (trite as this conclusion seems) is so fulfilling, this one will explore the limitations of that view and the value of singleness beyond just a generic command to 'be content'.

A recent article in Christianity Today online, intended to critique the modern church's mixed discussions on sex, pointed out that both single people and married people have a valuable symbolic role in the church: "Just as single people need the image of Christ's fidelity and love that the married give," author Matthew Anderson points out, "so married people need single people to remind us that the 'form of this world is passing away.'"

Anderson makes this as a throwaway statement at the end of a mere two paragraphs on singleness and sex, part of a larger article that argues that Christians should be more discreet in discussions of faith and sex. I want to expand on the assumption in his comment, an assumption that Anderson ignores: Biblically, it is because the form of this world is passing away that singles have the chance to join 'the great web of life' - not human, but heavenly.

In the Psalms David (who was actually married) notes the limitations this belief in Marriage as Meaning. In Psalm 17 he calls upon God to save him

From men of the world who have their portion in this life,
and whose belly You fill with Your hidden treasure.
They are satisfied with children.
And leave the rest of their possession for their babes.

Given David's call for help, I assumed for a long time that the people described here were wicked. Problem is, they have actually received blessings from God: the "hidden treasure" of children maturing in their mother's womb, then growing up to inherent "the rest of their possession" from their parents. Physically, these people are not dangerous to David.

Spiritually, they are. Here is what Card misses: People who are "satisfied with children" have their "portion in this life"; they (sometimes, not always) forget that the form of this world is passing away and ignore the much greater riches of eternal life.


Let me never become, David cries out to God, one of those men who is satisfied only with this life: 

As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness;
I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness.

In Shadow Puppets, Card tells us that parents pass on "generation to generation" their own likeness and so become "an inextricable part of the human race". Yet the human race is bound to this material life, and David remembers that the form of this world is passing away. Beyond this world, he expects to be fully satisfied "in the likeness of God".

Here is the meaning of life. It is not "for a man to find a woman, for a woman to find a man," as Card claims. It is for a woman (or a man) to find God and, instead of passing their likeness on to children, to instead receive the likeness of God and therein be truly satisfied.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that we who are single will be automatically content because we have Christ. That response would be shallow; we are in fact flesh and blood and in flesh and blood the desire to become an inextricable part of the human race will not go away. What I am saying is this: As those who are married pass their likeness along to their children, we are instead privileged to receive from God His likeness, to become, in other words, part of a heavenly race.

This, I think, is what Isaiah means when he compliments the single woman:

Sing, O barren
You who have not borne!
Break forth into singing, and cry aloud,
You who have not labored with child.
For more are the children of the desolate
Than the children of the married woman.

Today, believers often interpret this passage by noting that single people have more time to serve in ministry. "Single people," they say, "can work with AWANA. Or with the nursery. Or with the Youth Group. And the kids they work with count as 'the children of the desolate'. Maybe?" Okay, single people do have more time to serve, but given that this is an Old Testament verse, I don't think a demand for single people to work in the nursery captures the essence of Isaiah's message.

Paired with the Psalms, this passage makes more sense. Isaiah has just gotten through describing the coming Messiah and the redemptive act that makes it possible for believers to inherit the likeness of God. The proximity of this redemption prophecy to the command for "barren women" to rejoice suggests a relationship between the two passages. As we receive the "likeness of God" through redemption, so presumably we also will share that likeness with other believers through the Holy Spirit; we who are "desolate" do not have physical children, but across the generations we are an "inextricable" part of a heavenly family.

Again, do not misunderstand me: I am not saying that we singles will or even should feel at peace with our current state. I don't even think we're supposed to. All that David and Isaiah have prophesied is in the future for us: we, like David two thousand years ago, are still waiting to "awake" from this dream called life, and it is unrealistic to expect us to find complete human satisfaction in something we have not yet received. Right now we are yet "being transformed into the same image [as Christ] from glory to glory" (2 Cor. 3:18); we are not yet fully transformed, and so the full satisfaction is not to be had.

Rather, the expectation of receiving, then sharing, the likeness of God is stronger and more obvious (or intended to be) in we who are single. As we wait to receive, and then to share, the "likeness of God", so our singleness reminds the church that we have "seen God's promises] afar off" and we are "assured of them." As Paul goes on to say, the promise of the likeness of God reminds us that we "desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called [our] God, for He has prepared a city for [us]" (Hebrews 11:13, 16).

Put together with the Psalms and with Isaiah, here is Paul's point applied to singles. However much satisfaction married people have in this life, we who are singles recognize and wait for a higher, better satisfaction: the promise of God making us an "inextricable part" of His family, of God sharing His likeness with us and of us sharing that likeness with fellow believers. This desire is not to be fulfilled in this world; it is not intended to be fulfilled in this world. Instead, we who are single trade (and encourage even those who are married to trade) that desire to make a place for ourselves in the human "web of life" for a much greater one: a life beyond life, with God.

Like Eliot, I feel that "it is impossible to say just what I mean." I have spent two and a half hours writing this post (that does not count preparation), and I refuse to spend more, lest my blog start taking longer to compose than graduate school papers. Indeed, my writing is "only hints and guesses" about what singleness means: not a state which must be filled by marriage, nor a state in which we should be content with in this life, but a state which keeps us looking heavenward, expectantly.

What we hopefully look for is just beyond sight
We are pilgrims to the City of God.
~ Michael Card