I know two people, each with a parent who made a choice that severed the parent-child relationship. In one case, a father disappeared from his son’s life for a decade. In the other, a mother chose to stay with the man who was sexually abusing her daughter. All four of these people are now professing Christians, and both parents have asked for forgiveness. So these two relationships should be fine now, right?

Christians are commanded to honor our parents, after all, and further, to forgive those who trespass against us. Something I’ve learned about sin, however, having committed more than my share of it, is that it scars those around us, sometimes even cripples them. If I run over you with my car, it doesn’t matter how repentant I am — you’ll still be in that wheelchair. Likewise, if I abdicate my responsibility as a parent, though I may grieve over it in later years, my repentance doesn’t produce the trust and communion that parents and children are supposed to have. Understandably, neither of these parents is close to his child.

But there are significant differences, and as I observe these relationships unfold, I am learning something about repentance and healing. In one case, the father has come to his son more than once, and offered his sorrow for not being there. He has been in his son’s life, and in the lives of his grandchildren, as much as his son will allow. His son, not the most openly emotional person, has slowly begun to open his heart to his father. They have a future, these two — I am pretty certain of this.

In the other relationship, the mother has grown insistent that she be honored by her daughter. She doesn’t like that her daughter treats her like any other friendly acquaintance. She seems to want deference when she expresses an opinion, and to have her daughter call more often, and visit more often, and choose her over other relatives when she does come to town. This mother seems to think she is owed something, and that her daughter is not providing it.

When she apologized to her daughter, it was not specific, as in the case of the father with his son. I think a specific apology means a lot, don’t you? It shows evidence that the sin, and its consequences, have really been considered. It’s easier to believe someone’s repentance, I think, when her apology is specific.

This daughter struggles, because most of her Christian friends don’t seem to understand. You’re supposed to honor your mother, they tell her. You’re supposed to forgive.

I think many of us confuse forgiving with forgetting. My friend can’t forget the choice her mother made. And her mother hasn’t done anything to make her believe that, if a time machine brought them back to that same place, she wouldn’t make the same terrible choice again. So whereas the father and his son show hope of growing closer, the mother and daughter seem to be drifting apart.

When we damage a relationship, we have to take steps to help repair the damage, if we want the relationship to be what it was, or what it was supposed to have been. “I’m sorry” is an important step, but it’s only the first step. It’s funny and sad that when celebrities get caught in a sin, they apologize and then go into some kind of rehabilitation, as if they are the ones in need of repair, rather than the families they have wounded.

All of this has made me think about the ways in which I have hurt people, and where I have succeeded or failed in helping repair the damage. It’s certainly hard to say I’m sorry. It’s even harder to live like it. I wish more of us, myself included, could live I’m sorry, not just say it.

After George Müller got his heart into a place where it had “no will of its own in regard to a given matter,” he remained on guard against feeling as a means of decision-making. When I think on how love drove him to care for thousands of orphans, it seems odd that he would not want feelings to reign. A friend of mine who is a philosophy professor would wholeheartedly approve, despite being an atheist; whenever his students begin a sentence with “I feel,” he nips them in the bud. “Think your way to truth,” he tells them, “don’t feel.”

It’s certainly an odd notion, in an age of irrationality and sentimentality, when you’re supposed to listen to your heart, as a pop song goes, and when learning to love yourself, according to an older pop hit, is the greatest love of all. Aren’t all the movie heroes, after all, people who lead with their hearts?

Yet Müller distrusted his own emotions when it came to decision-making, because he knew what the Bible warned, that the heart is deceitful, and dreadfully sick. When emotions are in charge, such that they govern actions, they are more likely than not to extend first to the self, and to others only insofar as they propel one’s self-love. We’ve all met parents, for example, who tell themselves they doesn’t discipline their children because they love them so very much, but who in actuality love themselves too much, and see their children only as extensions of themselves. The heart can be beautiful, the heart makes us human, but the heart is a lousy decision-maker, because its prime object of affection is so frequently itself.

So Müller, that committed Christian and caregiver to lost children, worked to keep his feelings in check. Only then, he must have believed, could he reflect the love of God, which is always borne out in action, not sentiment. It’s been quite often, in my ten years as a Christian, that I have let my emotions make decisions for me, while I told myself that the whisperings of my deceitful heart were in fact the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Ironically, it’s only as I’ve learned to try, at least, to put my own wants in check that I have found my actions more infused with genuine love, as opposed to sentiment, with self-sacrifice, as opposed to self-centered martyrdom, with courage, as opposed to bravado. It’s one more way that He is strong where we are weak, which is something I learned to pronounce early in my Christian walk, but have only recently begun to understand.

Editor’s Note: Here’s a link to Tony’s first post in this series, “A rule of prayer.”

I’ve had reason of late to consider George Müller’s thoughts on prayer. Müller was a Prussian-born evangelist credited with caring for over 10,000 British orphans during his lifetime in the 19th century, and educating a good many additional children. Müller was known for never accepting government assistance, and for never requesting money of anyone. His earnest faith was that if he did God’s will, God would provide. As the story goes, there was a time in the early years of his orphanage when the food ran out. He had the children arranged around the dinner table regardless, in order to give thanks for the food God was going to provide. Soon there was a knock at the door; a bread truck had broken down outside, and the owner offered it to Müller rather than let it go to waste.

Rather than thanking God for what He will provide, I am usually asking Him not to take away what He has given. I wonder if I ever will come close to the assurance that seemed to inform Müller’s life. For some time I have been taken with his guidelines for prayer, which are at once so practical and so difficult to follow. The first thing he did, he explained, was to strip himself of his own will. That doesn’t mean that he adopted a stoic indifference to the outcome, but rather that he got himself to a place where he was willing to embrace the outcome, even if it’s not what he desired.

That, Müller implied, was more than half the battle. It certainly is for me. I am a want-filled creature, hopeful and fearful all at once, and prone to ignore God until something I want or something I fear is directly in my field of vision. How strange, when prayer is so frequently the consequence of our immediate wants, to begin by praying that our own wills be sublimated.

In his exhaustive Civil War trilogy, Shelby Foote writes how Jefferson Davis, upon learning that his young son had plummeted to his death from an upper window, closed himself into a room, and could be heard pacing the entire night, saying over and over: “Not my will, but thy will.” It was a prayer for the ability to submit, I’m sure, as much as a statement of faith. Maybe that’s all our statements of faith ever are, prayers that we might be, if only for a short while, faithful, and faith-filled.

I have several friends who are in the midst of trying to discern what they should do for a living next. They are all successful, and many have been on the corporate treadmill. Each is capable of running faster on that treadmill, and earning high six or even seven figures. Yet each has chosen to step off.

I believe God is calling, as He always has, men to turn their hearts homeward. That is what these men are doing. They have determined that training up their children isn’t something they can farm out to other people. They have realized that there is a difference between earning a living, and living to earn. They have abandoned the value system that assesses people according to how much they earn, and how much they are admired by others. These are all very difficult things for men, especially, to do.

I know plenty more men who are scurrying ever harder on the treadmill. They work 70, 80, 90 hours and more per week. They have fancy cars, palatial homes, expensive private schools and sports camps for their kids. They live to work, and they are good at business because they can avoid the self-deceptions that doom many companies. They see business opportunities where others can’t, and so they are well compensated.

These very same men, however, don’t seem to evaluate their own lives with the same perceptiveness they apply to business. They tell themselves that they never see their children because they are working to support them, as if the alternative is that their children starve. They tell themselves that their relentless work is for their families, and not the admiration of other men. They pretend that they are good parents, because they have some occasional “quality time” with their alienated youngsters.

I wonder what would happen if they scrutinized their own lives with the same acumen they apply to a struggling company. What if the “profitability” of the home wasn’t the size of the bank account, but the spiritual strength of the family? Who among us would be rich then, and who poor? I admire my friends who are changing their lives, because it takes courage to go against the world’s standards. And yet the world needs them, and their children, because the world is overfull with the other kind of men, the ones who sacrifice their children on the altar of business success.

Always there is the choice: God or Mammon. Every day, in a thousand ways, we choose one or the other. Which are you choosing? I’d be a liar if I told you I always chose God. Which is why I’m doubly glad I have these friends struggling to find their way, and to do the right thing. They inspire me to be better than I would otherwise be.

My wife and I come from homes without much in the way of admirable traditions. We both became Christians as adults, and now with four boys to raise, we find ourselves casting about during occasions like Easter, trying to develop a set of traditions that are meaningful. We don’t want our children to associate Easter solely, as we did, with hunting for eggs, any more than we want them thinking Christmas is all about presents.

There’s something oxymoronic about trying to start a tradition. But that’s where we are. Some churches are rich in tradition and practice, making it easier for people like us to bind ourselves to meaningful habits. We find ourselves in a Protestant church, however—the very label connotes a casting off of habits. So we have to inaugurate our own traditions.

Take Passover, for example. I know, it’s a Jewish holiday. But it’s also the night when Christ broke bread and drank wine with his disciples, and when he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. I’m not the first Protestant to think perhaps this deserves some commemoration. I did a little reading about how other Christians do this, but we were mostly on our own. We settled on lamb chops (the last fresh lamb our butcher had), with, among other things, a side of horseradish, commemorating the bitterness of captivity (to sin), and a side of cooked apples, to signify the sweetness of deliverance. We had bread and red wine as well, and talked with the children about the significance of all these things. Probably all they’ll remember is that they each got a sip of wine.

I read Psalm 113 to them before we ate (”Who is like the Lord our God/Who is enthroned on high?”). After dinner I read Psalm 115 (”The Lord has been mindful of us; He will bless us”). The children listened politely … and asked for another sip of wine. I suppose a tradition doesn’t take root in one sitting, especially among little heathens.

Today they’ll have light meals, their way of walking alongside me as I fast. “Why won’t you eat?” asked my oldest. I told him that Good Friday is a day some Christians fast, as a way of repenting and remembering what the Lord did for us. He asked if he could fast, too. Later, I told him, when you’re older. That’s the other challenge with tradition, to keep it vibrant by remaining connected to its purpose, rather than letting it become the dead grip of a forgotten past.

A good Protestant could explain why all of this is balderdash. We’re liberated from these rituals, etc. As I teach my children other things, however, I’m struck by the efficacy of coupling theory with practice. It seems like we learn best when we are doing. We are practical creatures that way. So I fast, as a way of “doing” repentance, even though I know full well that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, and a broken and contrite heart. A physical practice like fasting, for me, strengthens my spiritual practice.

I’m curious if others have had the same experience and what, if anything, you do during the season of Passover and Good Friday and Easter. What do you do, if anything, to make this time more meaningful to you and your family?

In my last post, I raised the possibility that modern, self-professedly Christian books, movies, and songs are in fact less faithfully Christian than art which would not be deemed appropriate for Christian bookstores. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, for example, would be considered by many to be sacrilegious. Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, a New York Times bestseller, doesn’t follow the formula of lost but not terribly wicked people finding Christ, and godless atheists getting what they deserve. “Sling Blade’s” profanity alone would keep it from most Christian stores’ movie shelves, though you’ll likely be able to purchase the dreadful “Left Behind” movie.

Good art, in short, is excluded from the Christian domain if it depicts depravity, while terrible art is included so long as it is explicitly Christian and purges itself of realism.

I want to acknowledge that there is plenty of bad secular art as well. For every “Omega Code,” there are twenty “Superbad”s. This may be part of the impetus for self-consciously Christian modern art, in fact. But bad secular art and bad Christian art are wicked, I contend, for the same reason: they do not reflect Truth.

I wrote last time that I wondered if there might be some harmful consequences to bad Christian art. I can think of a couple:

First, bad Christian art denudes our aesthetic sense. A benefit of a very fine book, movie, or song is that it either helps us see truths about the world that we have not seen before, or it articulates — if only indirectly — a truth we have always known, but could never put our finger on.

Bad books, movies, and songs, on the other hand — ones afflicted with clichéd imagery or lyrics, or characters who don’t behave and speak like genuine people — have a dulling effect on our vision. They flatten the world and drain it of color, working violence on God’s creation.

Second, bad Christian art cripples our compassionate imagination. When the bad guys practically have signs in a novel or movie labeling them as such, and the soon-to-be saved characters are similarly cordoned off, we lose sight of the wickedness that inhabits saints, and the despair that inhabits the hearts of the lost.

Instead, we have our natural tribal mentality bolstered, that pernicious instinct that prompts us to think in terms of God’s saints on the one hand, and hell-bound heathens on the other, which is always accompanied by the delusion that we can spot them easily.

I’m still thinking this through, and so I’m wondering, what do you like about the art you enjoy, and what do you dislike about the art you avoid? What art, in any form, do you look back on as having the most edifying effect on you?

I’ve been re-reading Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, which is filled with her essays on the craft of writing, and in particular, writing as a Christian. Her stories were notably violent, and filled with depraved characters. She constructed a milieu of fallen men in order to reveal the grace of God in a sin-stricken world. Nonetheless, she didn’t sit well with many good Christians. She tells of receiving a letter from one of them, who:

“…informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read.”

It’s the same reason, I suppose, Christian-themed bookstores do such a booming business, offering music, movies, and stories free of the depravity that seems increasingly to define secular culture. O’Connor, however, rejected the notion that all depravity in fiction serves the same function. Her grotesque characters, she felt, illuminated the truly grotesque qualities of sinful man, as opposed to wooden characters who briefly struggle with sin that is not so embedded in their flesh that they can’t come neatly and completely to Christ a hundred pages later. “I think that if her heart had been in the right place,” O’Connor said of the complainant, “it would have been lifted up.” In another essay in this volume, she writes almost by way of explanation:

“Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels that they don’t have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit.”

It was criticism that could have easily extended to Protestants in her day, though not perhaps in ours, because it’s far easier to immerse ourselves in sterilized entertainment. Starting with the assumption that what comes into our minds can infect what comes out of our mouths and hands, we seek to neither see nor hear evil.

Unfortunately, this instinct, in the realm of art, carries us toward artificial truth — which is to say falsehood — in the form of sentimentality and unreality. Following that line of reasoning leads me to conclude that many of the novels labeled as Christian are sinful, because they portray the world of God falsely, with dimensionless characters, unrealistic dialogue, and pat resolutions.

O’Connor said of the Christian writer:

“An affirmative vision cannot be demanded of him without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God.”

And observing what man has done with the things of God, it seems, is essential to understanding, in turn, what God has done with and for the likes of man. There is not redemption, in other words, without a fall, nor grace without sin. For O’Connor and other serious Christian writers, this reality led them to write books that would never be allowed on the shelves of a typical Christian bookstore.

This leads to an interesting possibility: that our local public library has more genuinely Christian literature — which is to say books that tell a truer story of the fall of man and his redemption by Christ — than most Christian booksellers.

If that conclusion is true, I wonder what it means for modern American Christian culture? Might our self-insulation — intended to protect our hearts and minds — actually be harmful? In my next post I’ll explore the idea that Christianized art can undermine Christianity. In the meantime, I’m curious about your reactions. What ought Christian bookstores be selling, and where do you draw the line with what you read, listen to, and view?

We’ve been house-shopping, off and on, for the last 18 months, while at the same time trying to sell our own house. This came about from several gradual realizations: that four boys need land on which to play and work, that being rooted in nature is an essential component of the lives we want for ourselves and our children, and that living in an accidental community is in some ways worse than living where our nearest neighbor is half a mile away. I have allergies, I hate snakes, and I don’t know the first thing about heavy machinery, but somehow I’m still convinced we need to live in the country.

This process has afforded me some interesting insights into what prospective home buyers want, and into how many prospective home sellers live. Today’s home buyers want luxury–palatial bedrooms, and everyone with his own bathroom and cable connection. It would hit too close to the truth for each family member to live in his own tent on a piece of property, so instead we build bigger houses and pitch the tents inside. Big bedrooms, big garages so that everyone has a place to park — because everyone has somewhere separate to go — and smaller dining rooms, because family meals are a declining feature of American life. Nowadays people eat when their schedules permit, often standing at the bar that has become a ubiquitous kitchen feature in newer homes.

Perhaps because I am a writer, the thing that grieves me the most, when I wander like a cultural spy through other people’s homes, is the paucity of books. When there are bookshelves, they are more likely to be filled with pictures, decorative plates, fake flowers arrangements, trophies, and other modern tchotchkes than with books. Where once families proudly displayed whatever small quantity of leather-bound books they could afford to own, now people display rows and rows of DVDs.

The DVDs are essential, you see, because the centerpiece of many homes I’ve seen is the television. Most homes have at least a couple, many have more than that. Nearly every “living” or “family” room has a television that is taller than most of my children, with all the furniture oriented toward it like pews before an altar. It’s strange what we call these rooms, given that their primary purpose seems to have so little to do either with living or families. But we have made the television part of our family, without realizing it. I can look outside my window at any time of day or night, and see my neighbor’s big-screen television playing, often cartoons, because he has small children. When I drive past his house, I can see another big television playing in an upstairs room. These chatterboxes are part of the family, I suppose, just like a cat or a dog or a child might be. If you think I exaggerate, call your local cable company and ask a customer service representative how panicked and furious people are when there’s an outage.

So we’re looking at a house on twenty acres, ten miles outside the city. The house needs a lot of work, the property is covered with trees, and I don’t even know how to work a chain saw. Maybe we won’t buy this property, but I think we’re going to buy something like it. It will probably lead to a series of hilarious disasters, and any number of injuries. I’ll make a darn fool out of myself to boot. But for all my inexperience, I have the sense of moving toward something more real, something my children need. I’m willing to be a fool for that, and for the hope that maybe, by virtue of being spared some of the luxuries of modern suburban living, my sons will emerge better men than me. Any number of experiments are worth that, don’t you think?

It seems you can’t wade through the morass of verbal contortions that pass for speechifying in an election year without stumbling over the word “accountable.” This word is usually issued in the form of a candidate’s declared intention to seize Washington by its woolly hide and bring it to heel. In a speech announcing his candidacy, John McCain promised to hold government accountable for the money it spends. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, believes “no one should be afraid to hold our government accountable.” Barack Obama believes teachers should be held accountable — as well as taxpayers, for not giving them enough money. If you sling a stick — preferably a big, heavy stick — at a Washington politician, likely as not the word you’ll make him stutter is some version of “accountability.”

The fiction is that Washington is in the fell grip of “special interests” (read: those interests which don’t jibe with our own), and only someone pure and noble can seize the sword from the stone and restore our kingdom to its glory. Thus every four years a string of professional talkers whose skeletons are sufficiently stuffed into their closets enter the field to do battle, and the ensuing fray looks like a lunchroom slap fight at a MENSA conference.

It’s enough to make you long for a return to the days of inbred monarchies, when conditions were tougher, to be sure, but at least there was no C-SPAN.

I had a political science professor who liked to quip that the problem with American government is not that it isn’t accountable enough, but rather that it is too accountable. We run deficits because we want our government goodies but would rather have our grandchildren pay for them. We fight a two-front war without any visible sacrifice — outside that of military families — at home, because we like the idea of fending off the radical Muslim hordes, but not enough to do without the latest XBox release. We turn a blind eye to the perfect entitlement storm brewing — Medicare, Social Security, and various and sundry unaccounted federal spending commitments — because we are an Ecclesiastes 8:15 nation, and woe be unto any presidential candidate who would stand between us and our eating and drinking and merrymaking.

Going to Washington to make government accountable is like trying to steer a horse by his tail; it’s a lot of malodorous fluff, and you’re likely as not to get kicked. The people who get there, by and large, are followers posing as leaders, and they know better than to tell voters that we can’t have peace, bread, and circuses without cost. Little wonder that the entire enterprise gives the air of a frenzied game of musical chairs, with the music box fed by a purse whose claimants are growing, and whose contributors are dwindling.

If we would have accountable government, in other words, we need citizens willing to be accountable, and I suspect most of us won’t stand for that until we have no choice in the matter. Until that day comes, we’ll squeal at the mention of any significant spending cut or tax increase, continue to know next to nothing about foreign affairs and everything about American Idol, and blithely wonder, in a decade or a century or however long it takes a great nation to lose its steam, why things aren’t like they used to be.

It puts me in mind of H.L. Mencken’s famous quote: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Only it isn’t just the common people, it’s corporations and tycoons as well, everyone bellying up to the trough that is our national altar to the god whose name is: You Deserve It All.

And for the day when that altar is whittled to a tombstone, I can recommend the inscription:

America: They got what they wanted

In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain tells of visiting a cathedral in the Azores, and surveying the icons:

“…they have a swarm of rusty, dusty, battered apostles standing around the filagree work, some on one leg and some with one eye out but a gamey look in the other, and some with two or three fingers gone, and some with not enough nose left to blow–all of them crippled and discouraged, and fitter subjects for the hospital than the cathedral”

He meant it unkindly; Twain didn’t think well of the Portuguese (or most foreigners for that matter, being a prototype of the modern American), calling them “slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy,” and he thought little better of the Church, Catholic or otherwise.

One doesn’t have to mean well to be right, however, and it struck me, when I read this, that Twain had it right. This is what the path is, for many of God’s most ardent followers. They are worn down, beaten up, poured out, all for the sake of a set of truths that they can no more escape than an atheist can will himself into an obedience to the God he despises. It was little wonder, then, that Paul wrote of the Christian’s life as a race, and his task to persevere.

I don’t know about you, but some days I feel like I’m limping along, battered by doubt, fear, temptation, regret. I think sometimes we assume that a good Christian is one who is always cheerful, energetic, optimistic. Even at funerals, there is this odd effort to rejoice, as if mourning is not something Christ did. But when one reads Paul’s last letter, the worn-down quality comes through. Please come soon, he asks, more than once. Bring my cloak. Everyone deserted me. I am being poured out like a drink offering.

“But the Lord,” Paul wrote, “stood with me.” He stands with us, of course, precisely because we are worn down and broken. Where we are weak, after all, He is strong. And so I think of those battered apostolic icons Twain ridiculed, and think that the truth of the Gospels was there, right before his eyes, perhaps the only time in his life. We are those “rusty, dusty, battered apostles,” because that is what the world makes of many of us, and how it sees the rest of us. We are more fit for the hospital than the cathedral, and yet we are brought in regardless, wounded and unsightly, we battered saints.