My son graduated today.
His older brother graduated about a year earlier, so this might seem anticlimactic.
Neither were the kind of graduation that involves robes, tassels or folding chairs.
But it mattered to Matt, the younger of my two sons. Just like it had mattered to Ben a year earlier. And it mattered to me, because I'm their Dad. And little moments are what make up the fabric of our lives.
Matt is 16. He's had his driver's license since shortly after his birthday in April.
He'd learned to drive on our Toyota Sienna — a mid-size van that's far too easy to drive. He passed his driver's test with few warnings.
But he got that license when I wasn't around. (He's always been good at working the angles.) He got his Mom to take him. The deal I'd set with him, and his brother, was that they wouldn't see the Department of Motor Vehicles until they'd proven to me they could drive a five-speed clutch (on my Corolla.)
That meant me in the driver's seat guiding them toward easing off the clutch and onto the gas at stop signs, stop lights, and in bumper-to-bumper traffic. There was a bit of bucking. Motorists either smiled or cursed — usually depending on if they were behind us or not.
So now it was August. School would begin soon for Matt, and I knew he needed to be competent on our second vehicle. We'd need his taxi services — for him and for his 13 year-old sister.
The day before, I'd told him he couldn't go to a pool party unless he drove the Corolla. Mom had the van and I made it his only option. But Mom showed up and bailed him out.
So today, Mom had the van again and Matt wanted to do another friends outing. I told him the Corolla was his only option.
Now Matt had been practicing with me several times with the clutch and basically had it down. What was missing was confidence. The barrier was in his head. And that barrier could only be removed by him, at the wheel, in traffic.
He asked if he should practice first — on the steep hill that runs through our subdivision. I told him to do that hill three times.
He came back a while later and said he was headed out to the mall.
The mall he had in mind was about 10 miles away and at the base of a fairly steep hill. I knew he'd do okay on the way there. But uphill would be a challenge.
Three hours later, he called me.
"I made it," he said. "I'm parking the car." The boy was calling me from the driveway. The Eagle had landed.
I went out and opened the garage door for him and told him to leave it in the driveway. I didn't want him to have to figure out backing into the single-bay opening. Our older son had sheared off the passenger-side mirror that way.
As he got out of the car, he said, "I can do it. Now I can drive this car whenever I want to." I didn't correct him. The title and insurance bill still had my name on them.
But he'd done it. He'd graduated.
I can't remember if I told him I was proud of him. But I did tell him congratulations — that I knew he could do it.
Like most graduations, it didn't last long. He promptly forgot it and went in the house.
The world around us moved on, most never knew it happened. But it did. And the second of my two sons had taken another step toward life preparation that can come in no other place than hard pavement.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Somebody stick a fork in it. We're done — at least for a while. The mercy of the academic calendar gives us a moment to step back and try to figure it all out.
Something is wrong with what we're doing in our colleges and universities in this country.
I'll admit it. And I'll say that evangelical Christian colleges and universities (I teach at one) aren't immune from missing the significance of moments like this. All of higher education is a journey — one we're frequently too busy to look at critically. Death among our students has a way of slowing us down.
At no time in recent memory was this more clear than the day — was it just weeks ago? — that an angry English major at Virginia Tech put a high-powered handgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Prior to that gun blast, this strangely quiet young man had systematically, calmly, silently killed fellow students and professors in ways that has put all of American higher education on notice. John Dewey was wrong. So was Walter Lippmann and others in the 1920s Progressive Movement who said the answer is our minds, not our souls.
Train up the children, Dewey believed. Do NOT depend on parents, and definitely avoid the influence of people like pastors or other clergy. No, train kids up to be thinking, reasoning adults — let them experiment, do not ever tell them they're wrong because they need to find that out themselves — and they will, ultimately choose well. They'll do the right thing because deep inside, they know what's good and their default is to choose what's best. (What's ironic is how many commencement speeches in the next couple weeks will have spouted this kind of drivel despite the looming clouds of Blacksburg behind them.) Where the whole thing falls apart, Dewey believed, was when moralistic adults step in and muck up the mix with admonitions about God's place in all these decisions.
Lewis P. Lipsitt, profesesor emeritus of psychology, medical science and human development at Brown University, last month in the Providence Journal reminded us again that there's just something about people — something deeply dark. He put it in terms perhaps only a biology-trained scientist would: "The human animal can be more destructive of its own species than and its living environment" than any other.
The truly frightening thing about Cho Seung-Hui was not his guns but his ego. This was a young man with the kind of mental focus necessary to plan a mass execution and time it in such a way that he layered his killing with ground-transport mail of his video, still-photo and written explanation for it all.
In an odd way, I look forward to the scholarly analyses of what happened in Blacksburg that snowy day. But what will be hard to take are those who will be claiming that this young man was a shy, unassuming person. No, he was an egotist
of a proportion that far surpasses those he called his egotistical persecutors — people he railed against for their wealth and self-love.
C.S. Lewis calls self-hate a kind of egotism that can be as destructive — perhaps more darkly forceful — as arrogant self-love.
"Deeply egotistic," Lewis says, "now with an inverted egotism, it uses the revealing argument, 'I don't spare myself" — with the implication "then a fortiori I need not spare others."
Something is wrong with what we're doing in our colleges and universities in this country.
I'll admit it. And I'll say that evangelical Christian colleges and universities (I teach at one) aren't immune from missing the significance of moments like this. All of higher education is a journey — one we're frequently too busy to look at critically. Death among our students has a way of slowing us down.
At no time in recent memory was this more clear than the day — was it just weeks ago? — that an angry English major at Virginia Tech put a high-powered handgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Prior to that gun blast, this strangely quiet young man had systematically, calmly, silently killed fellow students and professors in ways that has put all of American higher education on notice. John Dewey was wrong. So was Walter Lippmann and others in the 1920s Progressive Movement who said the answer is our minds, not our souls.
Train up the children, Dewey believed. Do NOT depend on parents, and definitely avoid the influence of people like pastors or other clergy. No, train kids up to be thinking, reasoning adults — let them experiment, do not ever tell them they're wrong because they need to find that out themselves — and they will, ultimately choose well. They'll do the right thing because deep inside, they know what's good and their default is to choose what's best. (What's ironic is how many commencement speeches in the next couple weeks will have spouted this kind of drivel despite the looming clouds of Blacksburg behind them.) Where the whole thing falls apart, Dewey believed, was when moralistic adults step in and muck up the mix with admonitions about God's place in all these decisions.
Lewis P. Lipsitt, profesesor emeritus of psychology, medical science and human development at Brown University, last month in the Providence Journal reminded us again that there's just something about people — something deeply dark. He put it in terms perhaps only a biology-trained scientist would: "The human animal can be more destructive of its own species than and its living environment" than any other.
The truly frightening thing about Cho Seung-Hui was not his guns but his ego. This was a young man with the kind of mental focus necessary to plan a mass execution and time it in such a way that he layered his killing with ground-transport mail of his video, still-photo and written explanation for it all.
In an odd way, I look forward to the scholarly analyses of what happened in Blacksburg that snowy day. But what will be hard to take are those who will be claiming that this young man was a shy, unassuming person. No, he was an egotist
of a proportion that far surpasses those he called his egotistical persecutors — people he railed against for their wealth and self-love.
C.S. Lewis calls self-hate a kind of egotism that can be as destructive — perhaps more darkly forceful — as arrogant self-love.
"Deeply egotistic," Lewis says, "now with an inverted egotism, it uses the revealing argument, 'I don't spare myself" — with the implication "then a fortiori I need not spare others."
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Hate
Matt. 5:43-46
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you in order that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax-gatherers do the same?
Hate is bondage.
God calls us to break the cycle of violence and the prison that hatred can become. Righteous indignation is not hate. Righteous indignation is grief over sin. And God has that. But He does not hate. He is merciful to the unjust and persecutor. He might stop them from their acts, but He does so for their sake. And He is as tender to them as He is to you or me — because He wants everyone to be saved. He knows our frame. He knows we are dust.
One of the ironic drawbacks of hate is its intimacy. When you hate, you drive yourself closer to your enemy; you find yourself imitating him. Your hatred feeds off his hatred. In fact, history shows us the hatred of one enemy will likely outgrow the hatred of its nemesis. Nobody really wins when hate’s driving the motivation. Hate becomes a cancer that eats at us and saps our strength, our sanity, even our ability to rest. You don’t know what real stress is in your life until you’ve lived in hate.
God knows we are drawn to hate. He understands it. (Why are we so tempted to think God is surprised by sin or the worst atrocities of human history?) But look at the Psalms. The Davidic Psalms have many examples of angry emotion, but it’s a rage that David took to the Lord. And He found peace there. When we take our rage to God and ask Him to release us from it, then take it a step further (which we don’t see often in Psalms but which we see in the New Testament) we release ourselves from a dark intimacy with evil.
Some have accused the American news media of being purveyors of hate. In cases where that has been true, its worst forms have been those in which journalists and media professionals have allowed their passions to prevail over a reasoned pursuit of Truth. It is possible to cover evil, and even clear acts of hate, without glorifying it or becoming infected by it. May we, and our students and alumni, be those who bring healing in these days when hatred seems at fever pitch all around us.
Matt. 5:43-46
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you in order that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax-gatherers do the same?
Hate is bondage.
God calls us to break the cycle of violence and the prison that hatred can become. Righteous indignation is not hate. Righteous indignation is grief over sin. And God has that. But He does not hate. He is merciful to the unjust and persecutor. He might stop them from their acts, but He does so for their sake. And He is as tender to them as He is to you or me — because He wants everyone to be saved. He knows our frame. He knows we are dust.
One of the ironic drawbacks of hate is its intimacy. When you hate, you drive yourself closer to your enemy; you find yourself imitating him. Your hatred feeds off his hatred. In fact, history shows us the hatred of one enemy will likely outgrow the hatred of its nemesis. Nobody really wins when hate’s driving the motivation. Hate becomes a cancer that eats at us and saps our strength, our sanity, even our ability to rest. You don’t know what real stress is in your life until you’ve lived in hate.
God knows we are drawn to hate. He understands it. (Why are we so tempted to think God is surprised by sin or the worst atrocities of human history?) But look at the Psalms. The Davidic Psalms have many examples of angry emotion, but it’s a rage that David took to the Lord. And He found peace there. When we take our rage to God and ask Him to release us from it, then take it a step further (which we don’t see often in Psalms but which we see in the New Testament) we release ourselves from a dark intimacy with evil.
Some have accused the American news media of being purveyors of hate. In cases where that has been true, its worst forms have been those in which journalists and media professionals have allowed their passions to prevail over a reasoned pursuit of Truth. It is possible to cover evil, and even clear acts of hate, without glorifying it or becoming infected by it. May we, and our students and alumni, be those who bring healing in these days when hatred seems at fever pitch all around us.
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