Advent and Advent People

Advent and Advent People

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            In the 2016 science fiction movie “Arrival” twelve alien space ships land on different places on the Earth. Doctor Louise Banks (A leading linguistic expert, whose character is presented by actress Amy Adams) is called upon to try to communicate with the visitors. One of the discoveries Doctor Banks learns is that while we move from our past to our future, the aliens move in the opposite direction from what is our future to what is our present. The visiting aliens have been visited by us in their past, during a crisis time; and now are reaching us in our present during a time that is a critical period in our human civilization. Doctor Banks understanding of time becomes less certain as she finds her life being informed by the impressions of her future presented to her in her contact with the visitors who can give her impressions of the future they know concerning her life.

            The Latin originated name “Advent” means to come. Our Christian season of Advent focuses on the twin focal points of Christ’s coming into our world. He has come in our past, to be born of Mary, to live, to suffer for our sins, and to be raised from the dead, conqueror of sin and death on our behalf. Advent, however, also focuses on a second coming of Christ when Christ, having interceded for us in heavenly places will return to complete the work of our redemption and salvation in that coming day. St. John gives us a wonderful sense of what shall take place, and also what it means for our lives in the present time between a past and a future coming of Christ. We are given the promise in I John 3:2-3 “Beloved we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him and shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hoped based on him, makes himself pure as he is pure.” (New American Bible)

            In the “Arrival” film, Doctor Banks sees glimpses of her future, conveyed to her through the aliens who are reaching into her world from their past which is part of Doctor Banks’ future. Doctor Banks sees beauty in the life being presented to her. She also sees trials and sufferings. The beauty she sees is so wonderful in its human beauty that she can accept the great sufferings she believes to be interwoven as a package with what will be her future life. I find in our participation in the season of Advent that what God has done for us in Christ in the past, and how he shall complete it all in the future is essential for our understanding how we are to embrace our place in the middle. We, who had fallen into sin with our lives lost to both God and ourselves, were granted to have Christ come on our behalf to enter our lives and redeem them though both his sufferings and his resurrection. The Serpent bit the son of the woman’s heel, while the long awaited Son crushed the serpent’s head. In the yet future great day of salvation our dear kind patient Savior shall arrive to bring to happy conclusion our triumph through him over sin and death forevermore. He shall wipe away our tears and the former things shall be no more.

            We are still in waiting for that final day. We do not wait passively. We wait both in suffering and great expectation. The Apostle Paul encourages us to recognize the suffering that is part of our redemption. He speaks to us as people in the middle, between the two comings, encouraging us to conduct ourselves in a matter worthy of the Gospel of Christ whatever is experienced in this life. (Philippians 1:27) He encourages us to remain steadfast in our Gospel centered lives telling us – “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him.” (Philippians 1:29) There is great pain to be experienced in our future until he comes again. We should not expect to escape this experiencing of suffering. It is part of the redemption granted to us in Christ who both suffered and overcame both sin and death on our behalf. His life for us, becomes his life in us as we believe and follow him in the middle between his two comings. This is not us earning a works righteousness, but us being made alive to participate in the work of our own redemption.

            Despite the suffering we also find in our lives lived out in the middle, the growing confidence that he who began a good work in us will bring it to perfection. We shall see him and when we see him, we shall be like him. Knowing this is part of our future, we delight ourselves in seeking to be pure as Christ is pure. We embrace the painful sufferings of this middle season, encouraged by our knowing the beauty of that as we shall be purified we now seek to grow in grace in the beauty of the redemption Christ has granted us in our union with his life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension.

            Advent helps us know that all time is in God’s hands. The future and the past have been transformed to speak to us who live in the middle and to encourage us in our sufferings and in our ambitions to grow in grace and to hunger and thirst for righteousness knowing that when we see him, it shall not have been a fruitless task of living in the middle, but we shall see him and shall be like him. So here in the middle we prepare ourselves for grief and pain and suffering. Here in the middle, we prepare ourselves for the great joy of seeing him and being brought to be like him.

            Here in the middle we see horrible wrongs that need confronted, confronted with the hope of the Gospel. We see children deprived of life as they grow in their mother’s womb. We see children with families fleeing thugs with power, only to be tear gassed as they approach what they hope will be their place of refuge. We see one nation bombing another nation and cutting a whole population off from food and resources so the entire nation is drawing near to a time of mass starvation. We see children plucked from their families to live in virtual slavery in fields where the laborers are seldom paid their due, while their labors bring great profits in providing us with the delicacies we desire. We see children taken from their families and turned into tools for the sexual exploitation of the privileged in an unjust world. This is life in our world. We see it in ourselves. We see our selfishness, our ruthlessness in yearning for our good while making another’s good of no importance. We find in ourselves our own tendencies to Cain’s false religion where he offers is personal sacrifices but refuses to believe he has anything to do with being his brother’s keeper. This is part of the world in which we live in the middle. But we are advent people. We know of his past and future coming. We are moved by his longsuffering on our behalf so we are overwhelmed by his granting us to participate in his suffering. The future speaks to us of the certainty of his future triumph over all the ills we face, and thus we begin to pluck the logs out of our eyes, and begin with humility the search to become pure even as he is pure, to become loving as he is loving, to be gracious to others as he is gracious. In Advent we learn how precious it is, for us to be Advent people, living in the middle with its sufferings and with great joy incomparable. It is a privilege to live as Advent people experiencing simultaneously living out the long loneliness and living in the company of the saints no man or woman could ever begin to count, surrounded as we are by such a cloud of witnesses. Living in the Middle is a painful, joyous paradox that we navigate knowing the ramifications of our Savior's past and future comings.

 

Giving Thanks I am a writer

Giving Thanks – I am a writer

By Dan McDonald

                This week on Twitter @authorTraci retweeted @byMorganWright’s asking readers about what the best writing advice was, that her readers were given. Such a question is probably answered differently by writers at different phases each an author experiences. As for me one piece of advice I received recently speaks perfectly to my present situation.

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            I have viewed myself as a wanna-be writer. A friend challenged me on that. He said that a writer is one who writes, and that as I have written quite a few blogs I am already a writer. Part of me felt like arguing with him. Instead I remained open to what he said, and soon the message began to make sense as I thought about the place my love for writing has had in my life.

            In my first year in my first four years of high school, I was a mediocre student, getting an occasional B, and the rest C’s and D’s. At the end of my freshman year I was in the bottom half of my class scholastically. That was also when an excellent English literature teacher assigned writing essays to our class. A significant number of students grumbled when essays were assigned. My reaction was the opposite. It was as if, school now had one thing for me to do that was enjoyable. I enjoyed thinking about how to write about something. My enjoyment of writing essays seemed to help me participate more willingly even in studies where we didn’t write essays. Well not in geometry, I fell behind there and things only got a whole lot worse as the year rolled on. By the time I graduated I had reached to the upper tier of the bottom half of the class to barely being within the upper one-fourth of the class. Writing essays proved to be my educational turning point. Even so, I never thought of myself as a possible writer.

            In my undergraduate years, I majored in history, minored in philosophy, and took a number of literature courses. These required writing papers. I was surprised when I received a number of remarks on papers saying “excellent writing.” I never thought of these remarks as suggesting I had decent writing talent.

            After graduated from college, and considering the possibility of going to seminary I felt like more academic studies wouldn’t be the best way for me to understand life. I went to work in a factory, then for a construction company, and later I worked as a warehouseman. During that time I often wrote papers that I gave to friends, sometimes they were inflictions upon friends. The one constant activity I enjoyed doing was writing, but I could never think of myself as a writer.

            I have one final story that as I reviewed my relationship to writing, suggests now to me that I should indeed think of myself as a writer. I was visiting New York City and was staying in a hotel where my view of the city was blocked by the Empire State Building in my window, definitely not complaining. I had been to the Bronx and caught a train near Fordham University to come back to Midtown Manhattan. It was late in the evening, with only a few passengers scattered throughout the train. Diagonally seated near me was this young woman, perhaps a college student. She had a writing journal and was writing almost frantically like someone afraid if they don’t get the thought on the paper it would be forever lost. Occasionally she paused between rapidly written sentences. She would look upwards as if asking her brain to come up with the perfect word or phrase. I imagined her in that zone where it is her and her writing and the rest of the world has retreated to a different universe.

            I decided I wanted to say something to her before one of us got off the train. I also wondered if I was just being crazy. Finally as we reached where I was getting off the subway I managed to say to her on the way out the door, “Whether you are writing for you or for another, best of luck on your writing.” She glanced up at me, and smiled slightly and said “Thank you.” I can look back at this now and I realize that at that moment I thought of myself as a writer, and thought of her a member of my tribe; a tribe of writers.

            Ned helped me understand I have been a writer for a long time. If you are a writer it matters if you think of yourself as a writer. As a want to be writer, every weakness in my writing led me to believe I was not yet a writer. As I have begun to think of myself as a writer, those same weaknesses are beginning to be treated as weaknesses to overcome, because I am a writer. I don’t imagine any writer wants to reach a point where they don’t want to pursue improvements in style, substance, clarity, precision, efficiency, and especially writing with beauty. As a want to be writer, each flaw suggested I would never be a writer. As one who has accepted “writer” as part of my description there is a world of flaws to which I am called to do battle, because I am a writer. I hope if you love to write and still can't quite view yourself as a writer, that you will realize you love to write, and whenever you write you will be a writer, and especially that you are a writer if you are willing to give yourself as you are to doing the finest writing you are capable of doing, and accept that if you are a writer, from here on you accept the call to continual improvement.

 

Streator at 100

Streator when it turned 100

Written by Dan McDonald

 

                   Fifty years ago this past summer, Streator, the place where I’ve always said I grew up, celebrated its one hundredth birthday.

                   Our address was route 1 Manville, but Manville had no stores after 1958, had no church after about 1973, and had only 13 houses built near a railroad that had been torn out sometime before I went to college. It was only people living near us to whom we said we were from Manville. To most people we said we were from Streator; about 100 miles southwest of Chicago, and 65 miles northeast of Peoria.

                   The city had started out as a village in the midst of farmers. After coal was discovered in the area, a Dr. Worthy Streator led a group of investors to bring a railroad to the town to help insure that the coal was mined and delivered to locales needing it. Miners from other parts of the United States, as well as immigrants from southern and Eastern European nations soon made their way to Streator to work the mines. The city, after 1868 was named for the investor who brought the first railway to our town.

                   The railroads serving our city began growing in number after 1868. The most important railway, serving our town, was the main line of the Atcheson, Topeka, and the Santa Fe. It became immortalized when the railway was celebrated in this song sung by Judy Garland. Streator was served by as many as six different railway lines.

                   Nearby abundant deposits of silica sand brought glass factories to Streator. By 1960 Streator was described as the glass container capital of the world. The coal mines were no longer being mined, but one glass factory employed three thousand people, and a second employed a thousand people. Other assorted industries included a brick factory, snow plow and lawn mower factories, and numerous shops which served the auto and agricultural implement manufacturing sectors. We weren’t a large city, but if you were willing to work hard, there were decent paying jobs in abundance. We thought that was the way things were and always would be, that 1968 summer we celebrated our city’s centennial.

                   Some of us learned things that year that we had never known. We discovered that for a time George "Honey Boy" Evans had a Streator connection. He wrote show tunes and one of his most famous had became the theme song for our centennial celebration “In the Good Old Summertime”.

                   A beard growing contest took place in the city's celebration of the centennial. Some grew the full sized beards that were grown in 1868, while others chose the 1890's style of handle bar mustaches. There weren't a lot of beards grown in the late 1960's by older people, but there were beards everywhere in Streator in 1968. We were celebrating our city, characterized by the hard work of miners and manufacturing workers. In Streator we believed, as much as anyone believed, that with hard work one could expect to build a good life in our home town.

                   My sister worked for an attorney in 1968. He carried heartbreak in his soul that summer while Streator celebrated. He had long been interested in politics, but a kind of nervous disorder led his physician to recommend that he avoid the stress of political life. The attorney, taking his physician's advice, primarily served his clients in matters of family, corporate, and tax law. He was of Irish descent and Catholic. He lived near both his church and business. He would stop at his church for morning mass every day of the week on his way to his law business. In 1968 he was elected to be a Robert F. Kennedy delegate at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. He was elated when Kennedy appeared to be headed towards victory at the Chicago convention, but then an assassin's bullet claimed the life of the Senator. Few people knew that my sister's employer had worked on a special surprise visit by Senator Kennedy to appear at Streator's centennial. It would have been one of the most exciting events in the attorney's life. While he managed to celebrate our city's first one hundred years, he carried with him in all its celebrations a heavy sorrowful heart feeling in every event what could have been, but wouldn't be.

                   In 1968, we who grew up in Streator might have had dreams of going to other places in the world, or dreams of living the rest of our lives in the place we described as home. It would be our choice. We imagined that Streator would always exist as a place where if you were willing to work hard, you would enjoy a decent life. We didn’t know how the next few decades were going to be different from the first one hundred years of life in our town. Farmers would face crisis years. Farm consolidation would replace the area's hundreds of farmers, with a few dozen. The coal mines were already gone. The railways would soon be delivering fewer passengers and less freight as Americans owned automobiles, flew by air; and the nation's freight was increasingly delivered by the trucks on interstates which bypassed Streator. The vast majority of our thousands of glass factory employees would see their jobs lost to the aluminum and plastic container industries. We would join the names of other cities experiencing the transition of the Great Lakes States transition from that of the nation's industrial center to the nation's decaying rust belt. The streets of downtown, where in high school I cruised when I wasn't at the pizza parlor, would become places where plywood covered windows of shops where people once went inside to buy fine clothing. It would become painful to see that Main Street that once was busy having become a desert of buildings with boarded up windows. In 1968, none of us would have seen those days headed our way. We imagined Streator would always be a place where hard work would allow one to live a decent life. In 1968 we would all have agreed that capitalism worked. In later years, we would wonder if there could be a system which did not come with so much boom when capital entered a town, and so much heartbreak when capital left a town in disarray. We came to understand capitalism not as a force ushering in a utopia, but more as something that just is, like life, joy, sickness, and death. Perhaps there is not really a better system, but seeing a city in ruins when capital has exited a town, those of us from Streator are prone to listen, on occasion for reforms and suggestions. We didn't know in 1968 that our centennial was more of a wake celebrating a past way of life than a wedding party celebrating our future.

 

The Blog Name Panhandling Philosopher

The Name Panhandling Philosopher

Written by Dan McDonald, the panhandling philosopher

 

            I remember only a few reasons for selecting “The Panhandling Philosopher” as the name of my blog site. My college minor had been philosophy, but I always felt I never quite understood what I was reading. I received good grades from the classes but only because I was better at figuring out what instructors wanted to hear than what I actually understood. It took me decades to understand that I habitually read to gain personal insights while I failed to read to analyze and understand what the writers themselves were saying. By putting Philosopher into the title of my blog I signaled that the blog would be in regards to what I was thinking. Adding Panhandling to my title softened the potentially high claim that I accepted my thinking as anything authoritative. I would express my understanding of various topics as a way of speaking my mind while hearing the perspective of others.

            Originally a photograph was to capture the spirit of my blog. The photograph would include me, my dog next to me on my leash, and me holding a dry erase board with something like the following written on it – “The Panhandling Philosopher – “We will think and write for fine ales and good ribs.” A friend was to shoot the photograph. Then tragedy struck. My dog, earlier in his life had been inflicted with heart worms, and though he recovered, his heart was weakened and so he died just days before the photograph was to be taken. He was a good dog, well at least quite a character, and I still miss him.

            Recently events have helped me to appreciate the name Panhandling Philosopher in a new way. I live about three miles from where I work. On my drive to work, I drive near some overpasses and under some expressway bridges. Last year, in summer if I recall correctly, a woman began living beneath one of those bridges. I paid little attention at first. Then she remained there the entire summer, into the fall, and on into winter, into this spring, and on into this summer. Seeing her there every day became a part of my driving routine. After a while and never stopping I started to feel more like the guilty Levite that the Good Samaritan. Interestingly, she never held a sign asking for handouts. She simply lived under the bridge, and I am sure took handouts, but never advertised any need.

            I began to think about how one day I would stop and introduce myself and greet her. I wanted to make sure that I did it in a sort of neighborly manner. I figured asking her how she ended up living under a bridge would be something akin to saying “You know this isn’t the way you should be living?” I figured there had to be a better way to say hello to her than doing anything like asking her to give account for why she lived under a bridge.

            I decided on a plan. Following church one Sunday I stopped at a book store and made a few purchases. I bought a set of colored sketching pencils that included an eraser. I bought a sketch pad, a journal and a small set of pens for keeping a journal. I drove near the underpass and parked my car on a nearby street. I told her that I had passed by her living here for several months. I added “I’ve started thinking of you as someone living in our neighborhood. I presented her the items as a housewarming gift. She seemed moved and expressed that this was her first sketch pad in probably fifteen years. If I had been better at what I was doing I would have asked her if she had enjoyed sketching. I fear I acted more to be in repentance for being the Levite who passed her than as the Good Samaritan simply seeking to be kind. I realized in meeting her that she was a genuine human being and not something less or a caricature of a human being. Sometimes I fear when we talk about the down and out, or the homeless or other versions of people we imagine caricatures of a successful human being, rather than actual human beings.

            I intended to visit again a few days later. In the meantime, a man started living on the other end of the bridge. Within a couple of days she and her few possessions were no longer there.

            This experience has given me a new appreciation for being a panhandler. Things happen in life. We lose our sense of direction. Sometimes we do that without losing our jobs, or our houses. Sometimes we lose hope and then almost everything we have, we have only in a most fragile manner. I can so much imagine being the person that has lost my grip on the whole of life. I can imagine living under a bridge and a passerby hands me a sandwich from a downtown restaurant and then I think of another panhandler and offer them my sandwich because sometimes eating with someone is better than eating alone.

            I also realize I have never been an original thinker. Pretty much always I have lived as a panhandling philosopher who has been given something to think about by someone else.

My Birthday tribute to Wendell Berry

Discovering Wendell Berry through

Imagination in Place

Written by Dan McDonald

This quote is not from the book I am reading – but goes with the writing I’m doing.

 

            When, last week, I began reading Wendell Berry’s Imagination in Place I did not realize Sunday August 5, 1934 was his birthdate, and this Sunday his 84^th birthday. I have read only a few of his works, but each book I have read has made me think for a longer time than it took me to read. Today I write of what I’ve been learning about Wendell Berry and his message as I approaching the midway part of this 2010 published book.

            The first essays in this book are mostly about people who have been mentors and friends in Berry’s life. They come from different places than Berry does, but share an appreciation of their lives being connected to place and community.

            I’ve often classified Wendell Berry as a Southern Agrarian writer. However appropriate that classification might be, I am discovering how his writing as a Southerner and as an Agrarian is for Berry something of a starting point in his relationship to place and a broader more universal culture. I am learning that he recognizes an importance in discovering specific local connections if one is to learn how to interact with others in broader abstract universal matters.

            In Imagination in Place, Wendell Berry spends a good part of the book expressing gratitude for the mentors and friends who helped shape his perspective. Neither of the two I have so far most encountered are Southerners. But they can be described as writers connected to their local places. One mentor for whom Berry expresses his gratitude is Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), a man of the West. Berry tells of studying under Stegner, while only later growing to find Stegner’s impact on his life grew in the years following his studies, while not being a dramatic recognized influence when he studied under Stegner’s supervision. In a chapter entitled The Momentum of Clarity , Berry notices the sort of writer Stegner had become, that would eventually have an impact on him. He reflects on Stegner in the following paragraph:

            “[Eventually I thought there must have been a moment when he decided that he would not be the kind of writer who would look on his native country as “raw material” for his art, and leave it otherwise to take care of itself or to be cared for by other people, but that he would be a kind of writer who would be devoted to his country for its own sake, and do what he could to protect it. And then I thought that perhaps he had not decided – that perhaps there had come a moment, simply, when he realized that he had become that kind of writer. Whenever and however that moment occurred, it was a significant moment; so far as I know, no American writer had been that kind of writer before.]”[i]

            Berry’s use of country in this paragraph intrigues me. “Country” here doesn’t seem to me to equate nation, and yet there is a relationship it seems between the loving of his country and nation. It seems as though country is representative of a more specific, localized place that then is also connected to one’s commitments to life in a broader, more universal manner. I have to think on how I learned love of country in my own childhood way of understanding. I grew up in a north central Illinois farm region. My first thoughts of living in a great America, was to look over the neighboring Prairie farmland horizon and seeing a grain elevator with its peak visible over the plots of land filled with corn and soybeans. That is how I first understood I lived in a great nation. I had this specific localized vision of greatness that served as my understanding of the abstraction of a great nation named The United States of America. Seeing Berry’s debt to Stegner helps me realize that while Berry can be described as a Southern Agrarian, is certainly not one inclined to say to us “You must become a Southern man to discover truth.” He certainly did not see Stegner that way. Stegner was for Wendell Berry a fellow companion connected to place and a localized cultural way of life.

            A second writer, mentor, and friend Berry recognizes, is poet Hayden Carruth (1921-2008). Carruth’s roots were planted in a small Vermont community. In Berry’s essay on Carruth, he quotes a piece of writing Carruth did in honoring a neighbor who operated a small dairy farm. When Berry had visited Carruth in Vermont, Carruth had taken time to introduce Wendell Berry to his dairy farm operating neighbor. Berry selects Carruth’s eulogy for this dairy farmer as a sample of Carruth’s connection to his Vermont place and community:

Notice how many times

I have said “manure”?

It is serious business.

It breaks the farmers’ backs.

It makes their land.

It is the link eternal,

binding man and beast and earth.[ii]

 

            Berry made his own profound remark regarding the poem, saying “[“Cowshit,” then has an eternal value. A “cowshit farmer” is an artist whose art makes of cowshit “the link eternal.”]”[iii]

            Imagination in Place has given me a new appreciation for Wendell Berry. He is a man who understands that perhaps the best way to be a man capable of understanding universal truths is to be a man who has learned to receive from and return to his own specific local place and community. That is why he can be a Southern man who would not expect you to be southern man unless you are a man and a Southerner. He would understand paradoxically but also logically that to understand the universals of life we perhaps need to learn to be preoccupied with the local that we can see with our own eyes. I remember an associate pastor named Robert Haling, where I was once a member of the church. He would often tell us his favorite saying “Bloom where you are planted.” The universal characteristics of life are expressed in thousands of thousands of specific offerings of localized reality.

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[i] Imagination in Place; Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley p. 41

[ii] Ibid., p. 65

[iii] Ibid., p. 65