Anyway, I found a couple of old things there and wanted them published electronically so that I could find them easily. Some aren't really all that interesting, but others have a more catholic application, so I'll publish them here from time to time.
The one below was occasioned by the death of Mickey Spillane and morphs into a an appreciation for pre-Roman Christianity. It's hard to believe I used to write stuff like this.
From the Journal of Educational Chaplaincy, Fall 2006:
Blood, Guts, A Roscoe and You
When I was a college student, I studied literature. Maybe I should say I studied lit-ter-rat-chure, given the culture of most higher ed. English departments. It 's easy to become haughty and precious when one studies lit-ter-rat-chure, and to look down one's nose at the people who studied pedestrian curricula such as Accounting or, God forbid, Business Administration.I didn't quite walk around with a beret, overlong scarf, and packet of Gitanes, [Well, I did have the scarf, I guess. But it was a gift from a girlfriend. Honest. Besides, Gitanes always smelled like burning dog hair] but I may as well have. I would sit and argue fine points of literary criticism with my colleagues, things about the classic construction of the bildungsroman, the essence of the picaro, and how lukewarm the love scene was in Atlas Shrugged [Man, were we square.] What I didn't realize at the time was that most, if not all, of great literature was written for the simplest and purest reason of all: to make money.
I remember hearing of how Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange and other novels and stories, was diagnosed with some form of brain tumor. Realizing that he was going to die, and without the wherewithal to guarantee that his family would be taken care of after his demise, he started writing as much as he could. It turns out, of course, that it was a misdiagnosis. Now much of what he wrote is regarded as art, as lit-ter-rat-chure, including the things that he wrote quickly when he thought he was dying.
So, when I read the other day of the death of Mickey Spillane, I remembered how important he was in shaking me out of the precious undergrad lit-ter-rat-chure world and enabling me to realize something of the importance of pragmatism. Spillane once said that he didn't have readers, he had customers; and his job was to keep his customers happy. So it didn't matter if the critics disliked what they read, or if they found him a simplistic writer of overly masculine, and overwrought, prose. People kept buying his books. They also made movies from them [one starring Spillane himself], TV shows and, I'm told, video games. There are even doctoral dissertations written about the Spillane canon.
Something becomes art after it has been appreciated for some time and its effect on the rest of culture becomes clearer. Circumspection certainly brings recognition, but it can also cause one to forget the initial purpose behind something creative. Often that purpose is wonderfully, if not viscerally, simple and far removed from what it has become.
Take the church, for example. [No, no, no. Please don't compare the church to Mickey Spillane books. -Ed.] While it has become a great, ancient, and noble institution, more often regarded as Christendom than Christianity, its beginnings hardly show evidence of the rigid structure, strict canon, and forced relevance that are manifest in contemporary ecclesia. All Jesus ever seemed interested in, since he did not preach violation of relations with the Temple and did not create any structure beyond the traditional rabbi/student minyan, was to re-define the nature of human relations. Not only relations between people, transcending culture or tribe, but relations with God, who had become to appear a remote dabbler in human history, rather than the "Abba" to whom one could directly pray and relate.
Much of the contemporary frustration with Christianity stems from an ignorance of scripture and early Christian communities. Too many people seem to think that the church was intended to be a social institution responsible for royal coronations or scolding the masses. While movies, TV shows, odd novels and comic books, and even video games have come to portray the church as a secret society looking for ways to coerce the human condition from the shadows, what Jesus taught, lived, died, and for which he was resurrected is something that is before and beyond Christendom; something that is as grand and intimate as what he offered to the rabbinical motley that was before him: a way in which to love and be loved for eternity.
[Okay, a funny memory. The "Mike Hammer" TV show was filmed in part at the seminary I attended. In thanks for using our grounds, the producer gave a showing of a partially edited episode for about fifty seminarians, all of us in the midst of the bizarre ordination process of the Episcopal Church what with its multiple meetings with psychiatrists and psychologists and therapists. The final scene shows Hammer shooting an unarmed psychiatrist in the abdomen. The entire audience cheered.]