"When Lilacs Last on the Roadside Bloom'd"

Staring at my four-month-old got me thinking about brains. That and Monday Night Football tonight (as lame a match-up as it's likely to be) made a good argument for recycling a post from one of my early attempts at blogging....

"When Lilacs Last on the Roadside Bloom'd"

One afternoon, a few years back, I learned to see lilac bushes. My father-in-law, a world-class talker, pointed to a bush and said, “That’s a lilac.” It was the first time I’d ever really looked at one, so I listened as he said that it was a favorite, that it was the most spring-ish of spring-time flowers, that it bloomed in white, red, purple, and—naturally—lilac. And that was all. It was a discourse of about one minute, and I planned on forgetting it.

But then a miracle happened. Overnight, across the state of Michigan, along highways, driveways, back roads, and backyards lilac bushes sprang up full grown and in bloom. For days after, I could hardly turn my eyes to any familiar stretch of countryside without seeing a lilac bush where there had certainly not been one before.

The miracle, of course, was in my own brain. That the new information about a flowering tree should so quickly change the way I saw the landscape was to me, and still is, miraculous. And it’s an every-day miracle. Scientists believe—and good ones, I presume—that a baby can’t see things until his brain learns that such things really are. So a newborn may see the shape of a face, but not the nose. He can’t (or doesn’t) see nose because there’s no corresponding knowledge, no nose file to refer to. As he has more and more experience of nose, his ability to see it fills in, slowly, like a lens bringing an image into focus.

Maybe you’ve heard the eye described as being an extension of the brain; it's a helpful notion for seeing how closely the two work together to bring our world into focus, to make of it something solid and navigable. Until there’s enough input, we simply don’t see whatever it is our brain is making sense of. You can test this yourself. Look at a page of text written in an unfamiliar language—say, German. You see nothing but letters broken up into what seem to be word-sized chunks. But there’s no recognition beyond that. You see no patterns, nothing familiar. Now glance at a page of English text, and it’s all familiarity, like the faces of friends. The content is the same: German and English use the same alphabet. But it’s the patterns of letters and their correspondence to known words that make up the seeing as we read. Knowledge here literally gives sight.

So what was there before, there in the lilac-bush place of my mind’s eye? There’s no way to know now because the lilac bush is one place in the scene to which I, apparently, paid no attention. I don’t remember it being a blank or a gray smudge in the picture, but maybe it was. Maybe it was filled in with some stock photo from my head called “bush” or “nondescript shrub”. And here’s fascination for you: that our vision is always filled with something. Our page of German, indecipherable as language, is still filled with clear black and stark white, with letters and punctuation. It’s filled but waiting for more.

My brother-in-law can see deer in the woods. That may not seem like a feat unless you’re with him, unless he’s pointing at a curved piece of gray-brown lump pressing out from a thick tree trunk. And no amount of squinting and straining, no trick of the imagination will allow you to see what he sees, not until the lump moves and either disappears behind the tree or materializes into a deer. His brain has long been trained to see forest patterns and therefore breaks in the patterns. And those breaks, at certain heights off the ground, in certain un-tree-like curves and colors are often deer. But, like learning a new language, it takes years to see that way. And yet always, at all points in the education of our eyes, the forest is full of something.

I’m only now learning to see the trees that hide the deer. Four years ago, I bought a house that has a wood stove, so I’ve spent some time in woods, felling, splitting, and hauling a variety of hardwood and not-so-hardwood trees. I’ve learned to see maple and cherry and oak and beach and poplar and elm. They look different, these trees. Their bark, leaves, limbs, and shapes are different. And I’ve learned this so gradually that I can’t remember what woods looked like when they were filled only with tree. So how do I know that I’m seeing more now that I once did? Because I narrate. I walk the woods and practice the vernacular. “That’s dogwood…old beech…maple there…nice cherry tree…beautiful sycamore.” I didn’t do that just a few years ago because I wasn’t really seeing different trees. I had not the vocabulary for it. And now, as my tree vocabulary grows, so does the variety and complexity of what I see.

And I’m just a neophyte. If I leaned in close to a biologist in the woods, would I hear the synapses pop and crackle as his eyes sweep across a field of vision packed with pattern and familiarity? No, I don’t think so. The brain seems to have an inexhaustible capacity for more and finer detail—I doubt that a biologist's head makes any more noise than mine does. But in the woods he must see more than I do, just as the German speaker must see more in the written language.

This idea that seeing is powered by knowledge brings me to more questions: what am I missing right now? What parts of my nascent vision are comprised of stock footage? And am I even able to detect such blindness? It gets very tricky here. To be able to see a blur, a lack of pattern, requires first a recognition of pattern. So no, I can’t detect the blindness. I can’t look around at the landscape and say now there’s a lack of clarity and detail just waiting to be filled in with knowledge. I can’t because there’s too much detail already filled in around it, the detail exactly matching the knowledge beneath. I can’t see potential patterns anymore than a child can see the inches he has yet to grow or read the language he has yet to learn.

But that’s part of the nature of God’s creation and our experience in it. The visual detail keeps up perfectly with its growing, corresponding knowledge. I learn that the difference between the black maple and the silver maple right next to it are its smoother bark and fewer leaf lobes. And then vision! From that point on, I see them differently. I watch a rugby match, and it’s all chaos and confusion. But a friendly hand points out the patterns in strategy, and the game becomes something new. Knowledge comes and makes vision possible. It differentiates and brings order.

So where there was once at the side of the road a passing blur of white or red or purple, there is now a lilac bush, syringia in all of its deciduous detail. I’m still calling that a miracle.

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.                                           ~ Walt Whitman

Called it!

In case the grid ever goes down--I mean really down, as in complete societal collapse, no wifi, cannibalism, that sort of thing--and in the aftermath we’re reduced to small, tribalistic, local agrarian economies, I call brewer!

I could go a few ways with this. I could explore the simple, beautifully efficient parliamentary procedure of calling. I could break down the various ways the "grid" could go down and the harrowing events that might follow. I could examine the economic implications of the industrial and post-industrial ages. Or I could talk booze. 

I think the choice is clear. 

God seems to have made the world in such a way that it just wants to ferment. Wine practically makes itself. Expose grape juice to the air, and yeast will find it and do its thing. Beer’s a little more complicated, but not much. Barley right from the field needs only to be soaked and dried a few times, and it’s ready for yeast (some Belgian beers are still made using open-air vats. The wild yeast that comes in on the breeze does the work). Let’s face it: where there's cultivation, there's fermentation.

I’ve thought about this, and I’ve thought about the other jobs I’d like to have: the village blacksmith, the village baker, the village cheese maker (that’s right, cheese), but I keep coming back to village brewer. Here’s why...I think: making your own adult beverage out of something as commonplace as juice or grain has magic to it. It’s alchemy, and it makes me say wow. There's no wow in bread. I like bread. It's just that it makes plain sense to me. You mix stuff together, heat it up, and it cooks. It, or something like it, happens every day in most kitchens. Cheese, now that’s a little more interesting, but not much. It's still a process that seems to be in the cook’s hands the whole time. Separate curds from whey, add a little flavor, you got cheese. But beer...Beer’s mysterious.


It also spans more disciplines than mere cooking. Yes, at first it’s culinary. It’s mixed like soup--grains and hops are steeped, spices are added, yeast is pitched. But then it goes in another direction. It goes scientific. You have airlocks and fermenting carboys, surgical tubing, and hydrometers. Your wort (the malted barley, grains, hops, and yeast mixture) sits in a dark, cool place for weeks where chemical reactions change sugar to CO2 and alcohol. Then the bottling. The process has now gone from culinary to scientific to industrial so that different apparatus is needed--bottles, a bottle capper, a bottling bucket, priming sugar for carbonation. Your kitchen’s an assembly line. A week or two later, you have something that should not have come from a kitchen or basement but from a pub or a 7-11.


I’ll say it again. It’s magic.


A long time ago, before cities became the centers of culture, there was the expectation that if you got good at something, you really could be the best around. Of course, the around was much smaller, no bigger than your village. But still, you could ply your craft or trade and be appreciated by those who found value in it. Yeah, it still happens today, but not on the same scale. You get good at something now, and maybe the people in your department or on your floor or branch will notice, but odds are there’s a guy in the next cubicle doing the same work. And odds are real good that the work you’ve gotten good at is the work that offered the best prospects for a paycheck.


Take my own job--teacher. Today you couldn’t throw a copy of the best-selling and widely-acclaimed Dragon Haint across a room and not hit a teacher. But in a little, post-apocalyptic village, you’d have just one, probably teaching in a one-room school house, and everyone around would know exactly who the teacher is. They’d probably call him or her “Teacher.” And next door to Teacher would be Smithy who lives next to the Millers who are neighbors with the Masons and the Bakers and the Treecutters (whose name might change in later generations to Wood or Sawyer). And just up the rode, in a brown wooden house would live the Brewers. No more Beals. I’m Brad the Brewer now, and when my boys marry, they’ll be raising little Brewers, expanding the shop, carting our brew all over lower central Michigan. And someday my great, great grandson will make brew commercials on the moving picture screen.

Or, maybe my sons decide to be the village something-else. If the village is still small enough, that is. That’s one thing we’ve lost to modernity--the chance to be the village something. But maybe we'll get that chance back. 

Go ahead, Heidi, roll your eyes, but the grid’s going down some day. Better call your job now before someone else does. 

I call brewer.

the 3 most disturbing words on TV: "Move That Bus!"

If you have in your head a picture of my big wooden house and it's anything other than a drafty, leaky, ergonomically hazardous eyesore, please discard it. Yes, it's big. Almost three times the size of our last one, but it's low-end big. It's pole-barn big, not Pottery Barn big, if that makes sense. It's squat and brown and cedar sided. I often refer to it (privately, as H doesn't like me to say it out loud) as "the turd." Don't get me wrong. I like my house. It serves my family well. But it's just a house.


I was reminded of that last night as I watched water drip from the ground-floor bathroom ceiling. I was reminded for the next hour as I crawled through the space above trying to sort out the maze of pipes--water, drains, and roof vents. And I'll be reminded again over the weekend when I re-grout the boys' shower. It's just a house, just a temporary place this side of eternity to spend our days out of the weather. But it's sooo easy to make it something more. Mike Cosper of the Gospel Coalition speaks to this tendency to make our homes, and other "lesser things", idols to be worshiped:  http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2010/11/22/the-3-most-disturbing-words-on-tv/

It's also a good follow-up to Kevin's sermon on holiness from last Sunday. And Kevin's blog post for today is a good summation of that sermon: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2010/11/23/the-hole-in-our-holiness/

whatever you do, don't open your Bible

Yesterday, I had one of those magnifying mirrors that women use for make-up shoved into my face, and I was shocked. I’m getting old, but I had no idea I was that old. Wrinkles gaining ground. Pores of my skin big as smallpox scars. Nose getting bigger—no one told me about that! And double bags to go with my double chins.

My first reaction? To shut my eyes tight and think of something pleasant.

OK, this is what we in the profession call a metaphor (from here on, I'll try not to use any more technical, highly-sophisticated Greek terms like metaphor). It wasn’t a mirror in front of me. It was the Bible, 2nd Peter. And the one holding the mirror was my pastor, Kevin DeYoung. Throughout the book Peter admonishes his listeners (it would have been read aloud to the church) that though we are elect, chosen by God, we must still be eager to make that calling and election sure. In other words, though God chooses and keeps us, we must strive (by grace) to live holy lives.

And that's hard. Actually, it's much more than hard—it's absolutely impossible. No wonder people don’t want to open a Bible or go to a church where someone else might open one. And by people, I mean unbelievers and Christians both. Unbelievers don't want to be shown God's holy standard because deep down they know it's an impossible one, so they know they're doomed. Their logic goes like this: God is holy. I'm not; therefore, I'm doomed. Better to kill God by atheism or indifference. But believers also don't want to be shown the standard, not because they know they're doomed, but precisely because they know they're not. They know the Gospel, so they know it is possible, if not to live it out perfectly, then at least to move toward that standard. Their logic goes like this: if God commands it, and if I have his Spirit, I can obey it. But I don't want to change, so I'll just shut my eyes and ears to it.

The world has hold of the unbeliever outright, but it still pulls at the believer, and we believers like our shows, our movies, our music, our friends. We've killed the big sins, or at least made them quiet; surely God doesn't want us to be legalists over all the little ones, right? But we forget that obedience is not legalism. To that end, Kevin made this great point: we want to feed the poor, and the Bible has a few verses on that; we want to evangelize, and the Bible has a few verses on that too; but we don't want to live holy, Godly lives, even though the Bible has many, many more verses on that. From 2 Peter alone, Kevin pointed out 20 reasons that Peter gave for his church to be holy. Of course, we don't need 20 reasons to obey. We only need one—that God says so. But God knows what we're made of—dust, grass, sheep matter. He knows it's hard, so in his grace he gives us many reasons.

Here's the good news, both for the believer and unbeliever: the Gospel replaces what we see in the mirror because it replaces the object within it. So while it doesn't make us beautiful, it does show us Christ because a very real exchange has been made, our condemned life for his perfect one. This blows apart the poor logic of the believer and unbeliever alike. In fact, if we submit ourselves to Christ and his word, he will show the unbeliever how he's no longer doomed, and will share with the believer his own desire for holiness. We'll be holy because he is holy (Justification), and we'll want to be holier because he is holy (Sanctification).

But if you can't handle the shock of seeing your un-holiness, whatever you do, don't open your Bible. Instead, just close your eyes, maybe stick your fingers in your ears, and try to think of something pleasant. As for me, it's too late. I've seen myself up close.

"...be holy, for I am holy." - Lev. 11:44

family worship = gov't in action

I’ve been thinking lately about family worship and about government. Not together, but as separate topics. Then I remembered hearing or reading somewhere this propostion: that God’s primary unit of government on earth is the family. If that’s true--and I believe it is--then what God says about the family's role should give us some help in what we think about government's.

And what do we think about government's role? Some smart guys a long time ago thought this:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I have to say first I’m embarrassed and ashamed (both as a citizen and an English teacher) that for my whole life I’ve read this wrong. I had always read it to mean in order to form a more perfect union, we the people do these things: we establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for common defense, promote general welfare, and secure blessings. And on top of that, we write this Constitution.

Not only does that not make sense (how can you do those things apart from the C?), it’s not at all what the grammar makes it say. What it really says is this: We the People do ordain and establish this Constitution in order to...

• form a more perfect union
• establish Justice,
• insure domestic Tranquility,
• provide for the common defense,
• promote the general welfare,
• and secure the Blessings of Liberty

So we the people don’t do the benefits. We the people do the Constitution in order to promote the benefits.

So what’s that got to with family worship? Everything.

As God’s primary governmental unit on earth, the family (I should qualify that: the family with Christ at its center, the worshiping family) effects the same benefits that our Constitution is supposed to. Let's look at each. I’ll save the first for last--you’ll see why.

1. The worshiping family establishes justice. It acknowledges that God is the first and only source of Law and that God is both merciful and just.

2. The worshiping family insures domestic tranquility. When Mom and Dad’s eyes are on Christ first and most, the family does not fall apart. It grows in grace like a tree planted by water.

3. The worshiping family provides for the common defense. Christ teaches us to lay our lives down for each other. Could there be a more effective call to the common defense than Christ’s call to take up our cross, die to ourselves, and follow him?

4. The worshiping family promotes the general welfare. To treasure Christ above all things is to obey Him, which means we love our neighbors as ourselves, we hold loosely to things of this world, which is passing away. To obey Christ is to “work as unto the Lord” with “honest weights and measures.”

5. The worshiping family secures the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity. When we worship Christ, we worship the actual source of liberty. Christ destroys chains, and Christ promises his blessings to those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations.

6. Finally, if the nation were made up of worshiping families, and we were receiving all the benefits of 1 - 5, how would we not form a more perfect union?

Our Constitution, as good a document as it is, is no match for the government of the Christ-centered family. So parents, gather your family around God's word and get to the work of governing.

you root for Vick because Jesus is coming

Did you root for Michael Vick last night? It’s ok. You can admit it. Even dog lovers are warming up to the guy.

There's not a QB in the league I like to watch more than Michael Vick, and last night was as much fun as this pseudo-sometimes sports fan has ever had watching two teams I don’t care about. And though the 3 hour praise-fest was a little gratuitous (it put in mind network anchors gone giddy over Obama in ‘08), I found myself joining in on the superlative heaping.

Which got me thinking: if Vick hadn't been brought so ignominiously low two years ago, would the announcers—would I—have such enthusiasm for him now? The answer is easy—no way. In fact, it’s the brought low in his story that makes him so much fun to root for. More than that, it’s the fact that he put himself there that makes it work.

We may love the rags-to-riches, by-the-bootstraps story because we love the thought of exaltation, of someone being lifted up out of circumstances that would otherwise destroy. But there’s more than mere exaltation in Vick’s story. It’s precisely the fact that he caused those circumstances, that he did something reprehensible, that he made us all think he was a low-life scrub good for nothing but writing off that makes his story so compelling. There’s no story here without the crime. There’s no redemption without the guilty verdict. Of course we need other things—contrition, confession, a demonstrable change in direction—but it’s the guilt that makes a performance like last night’s such a story.

His comeback is a kind of redemption, and we long for redemption because we all know the original redemption story. At least deep down, a part of us knows it because the Law written on our hearts testifies to it. Christ's redemption of his people, culminating in his return, is the original version of this story. All else is shadow. And when we see its shadow—publicly on football fields, privately when mercy is given—we hear within ourselves, whether we know Christ or not, a corresponding and compelling ring. It reminds us that there’s another very old, but very true, redemption story.

To put it simply, you root for Michael Vick because Jesus is coming back for his people.

good preachin, Pat

Pat Quinn preached from Hebrews last night on Christ being both God's exalted son and our incarnate brother. One part stands out for me, not because it was new, but because it's very, very old, and because I've thought of it many times.

He talked about microscopes.

Actually, what he said was that Christ is Lord over both the macro and the micro, that the creation was spoken into existence through Jesus, and that Jesus now holds the galaxies and quasars together by his power and will. He's the designer, engineer, and maintainer of big things like planets and stars and gravitation and electromagnetism.

But he's also Lord of the small, the atomic and subatomic. He is the strength behind the forces that hold the various parts of atoms and molecules together. After the sermon, as I was talking to the kids about this, I used a spring as an analogy for God's strength in the universe. If I squeeze a spring together and hold it, it doesn't move, but it has energy behind it, energy that would be released if I let it go. In the same way, the universe--at both the micro and macro levels--is being held together by God; and behind everything we observe or theorize, there is great energy. That energy is Christ's hands holding all things together.

The unbeliever looks into a telescope and sees the size and grandeur of the universe and claims that if there is a god, we're too small to merit his attention. But have the skeptic turn the telescope around and look in at the microscopic and he'll see that things go on in that direction in the same way. We're not at the little end of things--we're suspended between, with infinity on either side. It still means we're small, of course, but it makes God something else completely. It puts him beyond size itself, beyond big or small.

Like I said, it's not new to me, but every time I think of it I'm amazed. At any given time, the very atoms of my own body and the world around me are at that moment being held together by Christ because he wills it. How could I not acknowledge such a one as Lord?

Thanks for preaching, Pat. And thanks for the reminder.

does the world need another book?

I've spent the last 15 months writing what I think is a book (it's 106k words cut up into chapters--surely that's a book?) But not once during that time did I ever ask myself if the world needed it.

I mean, who really operates that way? No one I know. We do whatever we do according to what we most need or desire (there's a refutation of man's so-called "free" will in that sentence if you care to look). But I don't think that's bad. We’re made in God’s image, with a bent toward creativity. Much more than that, we’ve been charged--through the Word, through our dna--to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. So we create because God first created and because God gave a tiny reflection of that ability to us. Yes, we mishandle it, pervert it, twist it to our own evil ends, but the original impulse to build and to bring order out of chaos is a good thing. And no, there's nothing wrong with weighing the merits of our works to be sure they're adding value and benefit to the world around us. But we don't first make those choices based on such value. Rather, we pursue our desires first and then we see how they stack up. As much as we'd like to think it's the other way around, it just ain't.

So when it comes to evaluating our desires, the question does the world need it? is probably the wrong one to ask. A better question is does God's word give us the freedom to pursue it? The world may not have needed another book (it certainly didn't need another blog), but as sure as I need to eat and to procreate--and because I'm free!--I needed to write one.

But if we still want an answer to the what-the-world-needs question, there is one--it's Christ. The world, every corner of it, needs Christ.