I live in the shadow of Happy Valley, even though State College is a four hour drive from Erie. We’ve all been processing the meaning of Paterno’s life and we’re a conflicted lot.

Some still call him Joe Pa. These folk have stories of his personal generosity. They watched him generously pour his affections back into the campus. I have a friend who played for Joe PA during the Rose Bowl winning season and is now mourning the loss of a loved mentor.

I know others that will never call Paterno by his nickname again. Paterno  is the man who willfully allowed a sexual predator to roam the campus and to freely victimize innocent boys. I’d heard multiple stories from sexual abuse victims who’ve involuntarily had to re-live past horrors; the recall triggered by ten-minutes of listening to ESPN. Their version of Paterno is a man who turned his back on innocent boys and knowing let a monster do the unthinkable in order to protect something far less valuable.

This debate subsided for a few weeks, but bubbled up as we all watched the coverage of the funeral. Coach’s legacy has become a Rubric Cube and we’re unsure what combination of tumbled squares brings clarity.

Paterno is our Citizen Kane.

Amy bought me the 70th Anniversary Edition of the movie for Christmas and I watched it again for the umpteenth time over break. The movie tells the story of a journalist assigned to learn the meaning of Kane’s last words. Like Paterno, Kane, was both loved and hated and larger than life.

The movie ends and the reporter is stymied. The viewer is left to conclude that it is impossible to truly know what’s in the heart of a person. This is, perhaps, doubly truly if you are wearing the skin of the person being studied. Citizen Kane is an Every Man.

…

When I left college, I fell in love with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Story by story, Dostoevsky chipped away at my tendency to catalog people into my two boxes: Villains and Heroes. His characters were all divided selves. The heroes had dark sides and the villains all possessed beautiful nobility. He populated his world with people who were an impossible mix of oil and water.

Citizen Paterno was both JoePA and Joe Paterno. Oil and Water. A divided Dostoevskian-self.

And I believe there’s hope in seeing both him and ourselves in this light.

For starters, we’d come a little closer to understanding the Gospel. God’s story isn’t one of coming to earth to reward the good people and damning bad ones. That story was taken by Santa. And we all know, deep down, that’s there’s no such thing as wholly good or wholly bad children. We’re all just divided selves, broken by the Fall, and unable to do a darn thing about it.

It’s the story of a Christ who came to earth, and died to begin to heal the damage of sin, including the human duplicity found in all of us.

Like Citizen Kane, Joe Paterno was a larger-than-life Every Man, reminding us all of our dived condition.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m in therapy sorting how out I managed to slip in a deep depression and how I can keep from returning there. Part of the puzzle is the ways I’ve misunderstood God’s personality.

In my late adolescence, I worked at a Christian camp as a counselor. I want to be careful with my words here. I truly love those people and believe they have a deep love for God. A few of them taught me spiritual disciplines that continue to deepen my faith to this day. In spite of the beauty of the people and the undeniable good that camp from the place, there was a brand of rigid spirituality taught there that I can only describe as ham-handed and destructive.

The leadership at the camp venerated Bill Gothard, the ultra-conservative leader behind the “Institute of Basic Youth Conflicts” which was later re-branded the “Institute of Life Conflicts.”

Grandiose, for sure.

My therapist wasn’t familiar with Gothard, so I tried my best to quickly explain the book as being the DSM for fundies.

The DSM, for the uninitiated, stands for “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” Think of the DSM as the hypochondriac’s L.L. Bean catalog. It’s an encyclopedic volume of every recognized mental malady under the sun.

Bill’s red book was a catalog of sinful behaviors, a diagnosis of the root sin, followed by a three to five step procedure to redemption. Seven steps if you fouled things up in royal fashion.

Becky asked me if I still had the book. I pitched it years ago,  which is a shame. I think there’d be value in walking through it page by page and identifying the distortions I cut my teeth on.

I’d make note of the Chinese finger trap of authoritarianism. It was impossible to question the party line without discovering that one had “a broken and wounded spirit.” The questioner was marginalized as a rebel and incapacitated from doing further harm.

I’d doodle a picture of Mary Poppins dancing on the “Umbrella of Authority” to childishly poke at a brand of patriarchalism that makes Mark Driscoll look like Alan Alda.

But its Bill’s diamond illustration that I’d take careful aim at. Gothard teaches that we are all like diamonds being formed under the pressure of suffering. However, he argues that when we sin its like discoloring a portion of the uncut diamond. It’s irreperable. All that is left for God to do is chisel that section of the diamond off and discard it.

Translation: The wages of sin are permanent, diminishing, and irredeemable. Yes, forgiveness is there. But so is permanent smallness.

There’s something about me, and I can’t blame this one on Bill, that has difficulty differentiating between sin against God and failing myself or others on an emotional, instinctive level. Last year, I did the later. Flamboyantly. And despite the truth I know about God, that big, red book sat open in the corner of my mind, open to the page with the clip art illustration of the diamond, telling me that my life would forever be permanently smaller.

Meanwhile, the God of scripture inspired words like “fall down seven times and get up eight.” He turns murderers into heads of state and his personal ambassadors. He tells adulteresses to “sin no more” while leveling his worst anger on the Pharisees and their damned red books.

Last week I mentioned that I received my the first feedback for my work in progress. One of the most challenging things to hear was that the three central characters all had the same voice. This was especially disturbing when I realized that all three characters shared my personality. My novel, in its current form, is a collection of mini-me’s. I couldn’t stand the thought of subject readers to that.

I grabbed my e-reader and reread a few chapters from Gloria Kempton’s Write Great Fiction- Dialogue. She recommends grabbing a book on the Enneagram as a tool to flesh out the nuances of each character. The Enneagram is model for understanding human personality that predates modern psychology by  centuries. (Yes, the Enneagram has some roots in the Kabbalah  and Islamic Mysticism. I tempted to record myself reciting the Apostles’ Creed and embedding itself in this post to calm fears that would only bloat the size of this post. A little trust, then).

The model has a tremendous insight: That each personality has a signature fear that leads to a missing of the mark. Moses and King David referred to this as “transgression” and used the same work to describe an arrow that missed the target. The day after the AFC championship game there’s not a Baltimore fan who would object to that word being used to describe the final play of the game.

I read the book and worked to find which personality trait fit my protagonist. He’s the prototypical Number 3: “The Achiever.” Not coincidentally, so am I. The “Passion” or “fear” that comes with being an Achiever is deceit. Riso and Hudson define deceit as a drive that”causes us to put all of our efforts into developing our egos instead of our true nature. We could also call this passion Vanity, our attempt to make our ego feel valuable with without turning to our spiritual source.”

My Evangelical Decoder Ring translates this to mean “I’m prone to relying on performance instead of God’s grace and love to measure my worth as a human being. I’m not above subverting Christianity and even Jesus into pawns for my own spiritual DIY project.

This is my signature sin. It’s what I do.

God must appreciate my tendency to be a slow learner. My church is studying a book by John Ortberg, The Me I Want to Be. Last week I read these words:

We do not get tempted by that which repulses us. Temptation rarely begins by trying to get us to do something that is 180 degrees in the opposite direction of our values. It starts close to home with the passions and desires that God has wired into us and then tries to pull them a few degrees off course. The result is enough to pull them a few degrees off course. That subtle deviation is enough to disrupt the flow of the Spirit in our life, so coming to recognize the patterns of sin most tempting to us is one of the most important steps in our spiritual life. (p. 147)

Pastor John says that the pattern of each person’s sin is like a fingerprint and its always connected to our strengths.

Ortberg pulls a list of strengths from a book that draws from the Enneagram. He goes on to suggest that Achievers are prone to become preoccupied with success and are even willing to manipulate others to secure praise. It’s insights like this that keep me from inviting Ortberg over for parties.

And then this morning I visited Don Miller’s blog and read his confession that he’s tired of being more consumed with his reputation than his character. Like I said,  God knows that in this arena, there’s no difference between the slope of my learning curve and that of a bowling alley. Thee days, three different looks in the mirror.

The next task of the book is to flaw every important character with their signature sins. The heroes will become self-aware and find some level of triumph over these character flaws on their way to resolving the conflict. The villains will be the ones driven by their own passions.

Sounds a lot like life.

We’re sixteen Republican debates into the election season. By November, we’ll have all whipped ourselves into a vitriolic froth and will have convinced ourselves that the very survival of the planet hinged on the result of the election. Somehow we Christians, whether we are on the right or the left, have given ourselves a pass to be more partisan than Christ-follower in the arena of politics.  Christianity Today wisely cautioned us all regarding the endorsement of Santorum last Saturday by 150 Evangelical leaders.

Confession: I found myself mentally disengaged from politics after being sickened by the culture wars and the power plays in which Evangelical Christians get entangled. But this is no good either. If the Gospel is to work itself into every arena of our life that would include politics. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a an alternate model to culture wars in my imagination. Here’s four books that helped me on my way:

“Exclusion and Embrace” by Miroslav Volf: Richard Dahlstrom turned me on to this book. Dr. Volf experienced the devastation of the ethnic and religious conflict in the Balkans and responded with this rich theology of reconciliation. Volf is no Utopian. He’s seen too much. He accurately describes the sociological moves needed for a group of people to feel justified in taking aggression against another tribe.  Then he describes what it would look like for the Gospel to confront misogyny and Patriarchalism, racism, and nationalism. Volf writes from the vantage point of witnessing a literal war, but the truths apply just as sturdily to our culture wars.

“A Public Faith” by Miroslav Volf: Volf’s 2011 release paints a positive vision of what it looks like to be a Christian in the pubic arena without resorting to combativeness. Another 2011 release,  Love Wins opened up a theological battlefield in the afterlife. “A Public Faith” is a field guide for deescalating the ones we’ve built in this one.

“God Politics” by Jim Wallis: This is the book to read understand the case for Christian politics from the left. Wallis methodically works through scripture and forces the reader to see God’s unmistakable concern for the poor and marginalized. Brother Jim concludes that a government submitted to God will reflect God’s desires in this area. I appreciated his willingness to save some critiques for the Democrats as well.

“Politics– According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture” by Wayne Grudem:There’s foreshadowing in the title, kids. For those who don’t know, Grudem is an esteemed, New Testament scholar and systematic theologian. You’d probably file his work under “Reformed/Calvinist.” This volume is a thick reference manual, laid out in the style of a systematic theology. That said, I haven’t read this one cover-to-cover. However, if you want to understand the mind of a Christian who is politically conservative and skip the vitriol, this would be the book to tackle.

“The Myth of a Christian Nation” by Greg Boyd: This will never cease to amaze me: Pastor Boyd preaches open theology and his congregation barely blinks. However, when he preaches sermons debunking “American Exclusivism”  and the mythology that America is somehow a Christian nation, thousands of his congregants walk. I don’t agree with every word in this book, but he makes important points.

How about you, what books have help you work through the thorny issue of God and politics? 

(This post does not reflect the positions of Grace Church or any of my coworkers. We’re diverse like that.)

I asked a handful of trusted friends to beta-read a work-in-progress back in December. Last Friday, I received my first piece of feedback. The beta-reader’s input was affirming, polite, thoughtful… and still hard to read. The reviewer caught missed details, minor continuity issues, and pacing issues. She suggested I introduced some facts earlier. Quick fixes, all.

But then she had the audacity to suggest that I had some work to do on the voices of the central characters. In her opinion, they were too similar.

I knew she was right but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t matter that I chose this reviewer because  I knew she was a reader, a teacher, and a wise person. What I really wanted to hear was “Good job. That year you’ve invested in this book was enough. You’re finished.” I wanted to dismiss everything she had to say.

This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve done contract work for over ten years and had three books published. Editors have dissected my writing more times than I can count. In the privacy of my own skull, I’d questioned their sanity and taste. I’ve challenged the wisdom of being paired up with pre-pubescent professionals. Blood has been shed on the big screen of my imagination.

I’ve been fortunate enough to never voice those thoughts. After minutes or hours, the wave of indignation recedes and I return to my right mind.

Here are some things I’ve learned to tell myself when receiving critique, whether its in writing, work, or relationships:

The human brain is hard-wired to resist critique:

Our brains are designed to be convinced of our own beliefs.  Imagine going to the grocery store and having to decide each time you walked down the produce aisle whether or not you really preferred cantaloupe over apples. Indecision would prevent you from ever finish shopping. Our brains prevent this shopping catastrophe. When we are exposed to opinions which which we disagree, our “fight or flight” reflex kicks in. On the other hand, when we hear an opinion that we agree with, the brain’s pleasure center releases a package of dopamine and gives us sense of well-being.

So the architecture of your brain prevents you from having to re-choose your religion, political affiliation, whether-or-not-those-jeans-make-your-butt-look-fat, and whether or not you like Tim Tebow* every morning. The downside is you are also not inclined to really hear criticism.

The hack: Wait until that surge of emotion passes before deciding if there’s merit to the critique or not.

If you build a reputation for not hearing criticism you will stop receiving criticism.

The calm version of myself knows that I need critique. I have blind spots and inexperience as a writer and as a human being. I’m selfish and sinful. Critique, then, should be as valued as oxygen.

I’m not proud of this, but on occasion I’ve driven Amy to the point where she doesn’t have the energy or will to even try to confront me anymore. I’m in less relational danger when she confident that I’m hearing and processing her input even if I don’t agree with it. I’ve learned to be scared when she becomes resigned.

Rail against enough editors and watch your work-for-hire contracts vanish. Dismiss a beta-reader once and see if he or she ever makes that time investment twice.

You should be more surprised that your work is good than you are that someone thinks its flawed.

I know, the last person to blog about Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “10,000 hours” should turn the lights out. But he’s right. It takes years of disciplined practice to be good at anything: Marriage, writing, fitness, parenting, woodwork, home repair, or sex: Anything. When I’m wise, I remember that I’m simply logging in my 10,000 hours and this criticism is part of paying my lump.

The operative clause is “when I am wise.”

How about you, what helps you receive critique well?   

*I’ve made my gratuitous Tebow reference and will not have my blogging licence revoked. Thanks for your understanding.

“Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life’s common denominator– that something we call death.We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my own death, I think about my funeral. And I don’t think of it in a morbid sense. Every now and then I ask myself, “What would I want said?” And I leave the word to you this morning.

I’d like someone to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others.

I’d like for someone to say that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to love somebody.

I want you to say that day, that I tried to be right on the war question,

I’d like you to be able to say that day, that I did try to feed the hungry.

And I want you to be able to say that day, that I did try, in my life, to clothe those who are naked,

I want you to say, on that day, that I did try, in my life, to visit those who were in prison.

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice.  Say that I was a drum major for peace. Say that I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things won’t matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxirious things of life to leave behind.But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I wanted to say.

If I can help someone as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if i can show somebody he’s traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, if i can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught, then my living will not be in vain.”

MLK, Jr.

I had a few people at church ask if the book we’re studying, The Me I Want to Be, was a self-help book. It’s a fair question. The title of the John Ortberg’s book does smack of life as a DIY-project, doesn’t it?

I’ve made a few laps through the book and I can assure you that the content of the book is nothing like self-a help book. Don’t get me wrong. There are many arenas life where a self-help book comes in handy. Spirituality just isn’t one of them.

Here’s a few ways that God’s renovation of our hearts of heart is nothing like   a self-help manual:

Spiritual change is always a response to a great love.

Several years ago, I noticed a friend of mine changing the way she dressed and did her hair. I didn’t think much about it at the time. Within a few months she shared she was engaged. What happened? A guy noticed her and started expressing his love and affection toward her. The changes she made was  a response to that love.

Real Gospel change is like that. God initiates the process by making us the object of his love and there’s something in the heart of a person that responses to it.

Spiritual change is always a reclamation project.

Sean Gladding wisely wrote that the Christian story doesn’t begin at the Fall and end on Judgment Day. It begins and ends in a perfect garden. Every word between Genesis 3 and the end of Revelation is the story of God working to restore Creation and people to their original glory. That’s God’s emphasis.

Somehow our emphasis has become something smaller: Sin management and removal. That’s like a motorcycle mechanic dedicating his life to the study of rust and all it’s colors, and varieties, and shapes. The mechanic becomes a rust-o-logist and forgets the glory of a bike is to be driven fast on the open road.

Yes, Christ died to separate you from your spiritual corruption. Paul said it was a type of dying in Romans 6. But he also talked about being alive to God. Driving fast on the open road.

Spiritual change enhances individuality.

One of the unspoken fears about getting serious about God is that you end up having to give up what makes you unique. I knew a man, now deceased,  who gave up playing the drums in a jazz band shortly after deciding to follow Jesus. Some misguided souls must have gotten to him and told him that the debil was in the back beat. When Roy got to heaven I think he had brief rude shock when Jesus told him, “That was a nice thought, but I never wanted to make you miserable. In fact, the best version of you that I imagined could swing.”

The Apostle Paul said it like this: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

The word we translate as “workmanship” is poemia. It’s the same word the Greeks used to describe a brilliant music composition, a work of art, or a sculpture.

God is not in the cog-making business. He crafts one of a kind individuals. John Ortberg expresses it beautifully when he says, “When God makes you holier he is making you “you-ier” at the same time.” Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly beautiful, but it’s true .

I’m in the process of editing a manuscript. I’m making  my eleventh or twelfth lap through the 65,000 word mess. I have a bad habit of editing my work when I should be generating it, so I decided that I wouldn’t stop to edit once until the manuscript was finished. The result having to start at a landfill of mangled and sloppy sentences, each one needing polished, nurtured, untangled, or euthanized. It took me the dozen passes at the manuscript to get to the point I’m willing to share it with beta readers. But some bad passages turned into solid passages, and some average passages turned in beautiful passages.

I have some friends who aspire to write, who have some fantastic ideas. Some of these friends make the patronizing comment that I must have more free time than they do. When I read the blogs of my other writer friends, they get the same treatment. As if anyone who aspired to write a book secretly mastered the Theory of Relativity and could bend time suite their purposes. Unless I’m close to that person, I simply nod and point out that pastoring, fathering three sons, and being a husband is remarkably easy work and that life handed me an unfair hand. I say that I’d apologize for my luck  but that would only rub salt in the wound.

I admit that I have friends who make me jealous. My piano chops have gotten weaker over the years. My wife, on the other hand, is becoming a solid guitar player to the point she’s landing solo gigs. I have a friend, Al, who can summon to mind the chapter and verse of just about any narrative in the Bible. Mike is reflexively encouraging. And I’m beside myself with jealousy that they found the time to develop these gifts.

My friend Derek talks about the difference between trying and training. Once, during a sermon, he asked for a random volunteer from the congregation and handed him a guitar and told him to play. The volunteer did his best, but all the trying in the world couldn’t tease a song from that guitar. Only training gets results.

Real change happens when we make space in our lives to practice the new skill we want to add to our lives. People who goes through the clumsiness of learning how to pray become prayers. Those who chip away at the Bible and ask questions and find answers– they are the ones who eventually feel comfortable in their Bibles.

Here’s some thoughts for those who are ready to take a “next step” in their spiritual walk:

Be patient with yourself: God uses the metaphor of a parent to describe his relationship with you. As a parent, God is committed to your development. A dad doesn’t berate his child when he stumbles.  God won’t either.

The Calendar is your friend: Block time on your calendar to do practice the change you want to make. Change is the culmination of 100′s of private appointments that you keep with yourself or God.

Use the Buddy System: Find someone who will help you keep your goals. Be selective. You don’t want a drill sergeant, but you don’t want some who is going to turn a blind eye to laziness or a lack of discipline.

Be in it for the long haul: If your goal is worth pursuing, you aren’t going to accomplish it in a weekend. Tell yourself the truth, this is something that you are going to be chipping away at for a long time. And that’s okay. Whoever told us that we could have quick spiritual change was trying to sell us some stupid book or workshop anyhow. Change is slow. Change is not sexy. It’s going to be that way until one of us figures out how to bend time.

I thought I’d repost this. It’s one of my favorite post of last year. And unfortunately, I’ve been given the occasion to think about attack bloggers again. Here we go… 

Dear Potential Investor:

I have business proposal for your consideration that I believe would be of mutual benefit. As you know the publishing world is up in arms over the digital revolution and e-books. This, coupled with the global recession evaporating trillions of dollars, has placed the burden book promotion squarely on the shoulders of authors. From personal experience I can attest to this. The publisher of my last book budgeted the amount roughly the amount of the price of a high-end accordion toward the promotion of my last book.  I spent the bulk of that budget with a single trip to Indiana for a single television appearance. I’m not complaining. Book publishing is a business and not a charity.

It’s become a truism that the author is responsible to build his or her own platform. Most authors have become savvy at leveraging social media and blogging. The downside to this progress is that the blogosphere has become clogged with hamsters, like myself,  spinning the self-promotional wheel. It’s becoming harder and harder to stand out. Last month, for example, I poured kerosene and lit myself on fire in front of a web-cam to raise money for some important cause– the name will come to me. Regrettably, I had to spend the $14.35 raised on gauze and aloe vera gel.  Live and learn.

The recent success of Love Wins had me thinking there’s a better way for an author to get his or her name out there: Attack blogging. Who can forget the way that Harper Collins played the Gospel Coalition like a fiddle and help propel a well written but intellectually disjointed book to the top of the New York Times Best Seller’s list? It was almost if Harper One knew that religious watchdogs act on the bidding of some unseen reflex.

I propose that if Harper One can monetize knee-jerk behavior then so can we. At AttackBloggersforHire.com we’ll offer an array of services including:

1) Having the author’s likeness Photo-shopped into pictures of Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Jim Wallis, the Pope, or Barak Obama. These enhanced photos will naturally find themselves copied at dozens of theological watchdog sites and will lead to countless negative book reviews. This of course will cause readers who detest the attack bloggers to buy copies of the author’s books and to write positive reviews.

You can almost see the book’s rank scale the heights of Amazon.com.

2) The “Why Does __________ Hate America” package buys the author as series of negative posts strategically places on professionally designed faux attack blogs. This posts will demonstrate how the ideas in the author’s book corrode the moral fiber of our nation and fly in the face of the intent of our country’s founders, Moses, John the Baptist, and Jiminy Cricket. For an substantially higher  fee, we can negotiate the placement of the author on FoxNews as a re-occurring character. FoxNews recently lost Glenn Beck and Bin Ladin and are in need of new talent. We can help.

3) When the author purchases the “Emerging Church” package, we’ll place the “Friend of Emergent” badge and and perfectly detailed Pentragram button on the author website. Our new Olfactory-enhanced web servers will release the scent of incense whenever the author’s website is visited. We’ll provide the author personalized coaching to avoid making propositional assertions in their blog postings. Many authors will struggle with this change in their writing voice, but the increased publicity will be worth any pain experienced.

I’m sure by now the financial opportunities behind this model are evident. Let’s set up a time to meet, at your earliest convenience, to discuss a possible business partnership.

Best!

Larry Shallenberger