Learning to Lie

When I was young, my mom paid me to read books. She would pay me by the page, and so I tended to pick either thick books or mounds of thin books. On one particular occasion, I piled up a stack of books and proceeded to negotiate with her for a new mountain bike. We came to an agreement, and I began reading through the rather tall stack of books. It was slow going, slower than I would have liked. That new mountain bike remained at the forefront of my mind the entire time. After making some progress through the mountain of books, I came upon an idea, a simple idea with a high reward. I decided to lie. I decided to wait another week or two and then to tell my mom I had finished reading all the books.

My plan worked smoothly and without a single flaw or suspicion. I had my new mountain bike and nobody was the wiser. Everything about the bike was perfect. It had the gears, breaks, and shocks I wanted. I rode it all over the place, and one day a friend and I raced on the country road between my house and our church. The road was about a mile long and was really rough. It was mostly just tar and gravel. We raced down the first big hill and kept going faster and faster, and we continued peddling as hard as we could down the next hill.

Then a fateful thing happened. My right foot slipped off the pedal and into the spokes of the front wheel. The front wheel came to a lurching halt. I was sent hurtling over the handlebars, and I imagine my legs were flailing as my body flipped in the air. I landed face first onto the knife-like gravel and tar road. I blacked out, and I barely remember any of it. When I regained consciousness and began to get up, I couldn’t feel my lower lip. I turned to my friend and asked, “Am I bleeding? Is my lip still there?” I panicked and began scanning the road for my lower lip. I didn’t see my lip on the road, so I got back on my bike and pedaled as hard as I could back up the big hill and back home.

I burst into the front door, and I am sure blood was dripping everywhere though I do not remember much about it. I went to the bathroom to look in the mirror to check my lip, to see if it was still there. My mom came in wondering what was going on. She saw blood everywhere and the imprint of the road on my forehead. I had a split from my bottom lip down to my chin, not to mention numerous other cuts all over my face.

My mom began to bandage me, and I felt guilty. My stomach was in knots, and I felt a lump in my throat. It was difficult to get around the lump in my throat, but I managed. I cleared my throat, and I told her everything, though there was not much to tell. I told her I had lied about finishing the books. I had read about half of them and lied about the rest.

It was the perfect opportunity for my mom to teach me about the consequences of lying. It was my first new bike, and though I do not have that bike anymore I still have a scar right below my lower lip.

A Jewish rabbi whose name currently evades me said, “Bad guys don’t get away with what they do. We all pay for what we do with one currency or another.”

Les Miserables: “the immense”

Like War and Peace, Les Miserables is a book that many people reference but few people read. Both books each seem longer than Webster’s dictionary, which is reason enough for people to avoid them. To compare them would perhaps be a temptation, but they are as different as they are long.

In recent weeks, I have trekked through the fields and allies of Les Miserables, and I am beginning to think that even if people begin to read it they will not finish it simply because Hugo spends so many pages providing “back stories” for the characters. This, however, does not detract from the narrative; in my opinion, it adds layers to the story.

It would seem that the twentieth century would have us believe that there is one way to go about writing a novel: showing the story that the reader might eavesdrop. Hugo, however, has reminded me that there is a real art and beauty in telling a story. Layer after layer, Les Miserables unfolds divulging events from various persons’ lives that converge into conflict, terror, and redemption. It’s a five-act play with all the drama and irony Shakespeare could imagine.  

It’s no secret that I enjoy reading novels and that Dostoevsky is my favorite novelist. It would likely make sense then that I make a smattering of comments contrasting Hugo’s Les Miserables with bits of Dostoevsky’s corpus. First, however, a few notes of similarity are in order. Both seem to focus on the underbelly of society, and this focus sets a variety of trajectories that color the complexions of their respective narratives. In this bleak context of criminality and moral ambiguity, both paint poignant pictures of abuse, neglect, and deliverance of women – consider for a moment the tragic stories of Fantine in Les Miserables and Sonya in Crime and Punishment. This is especially appropriate considering it is most often women’s abuse that is ignored. There are numerous other similarities, but that will suffice for the moment.

Their respective anthropologies are no doubt a point of departure. For Hugo, it would seem that people are basically good and that it is society that grinds people into the sort of corrupt people that would commit abominable crimes. This would almost seem to be the case in Crime and Punishment, but Dostoevsky does not quite give us the luxury. Because the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, is a destitute student at the end of his rope who then commits murder, we might be inclined to deduce that like Hugo Dostoevsky shows Raskolnikov to be a product of a system that failed him. However, as the story builds, Dostoevsky shows Raskolnikov’s motives for crime to be sundry and inscrutable (in a letter to a friend, Dostoevsky admits that even he does not know why Raskolnikov committed the murder). Unlike Hugo, for Dostoevsky humans are not basically good. For Dostoevsky, rich and poor alike are prone to crime and/or immorality. Dostoevsky’s anthropology of rather cynical ambiguity and depravity seems to be at a different point of the spectrum from Hugo’s. It may prove illuminating for future considerations if Hugo’s focus on systemic complicity and Dostoevsky’s focus on personal complicity are held together.

This then sets the stage for another point of difference: the path to redemption. Because Hugo is in the business of disparaging the corrupt justice system, it is precisely the corrupt system that must break down before Jean Valjean can be free. For Jean Valjean good deeds, escape, and the cessation of the system’s pursuit shall pave the road to redemption. However, Jean Valjean still battles with his conscience even when he evades the justice system. In contrast, it is the justice system that paves the road to redemption for Raskolnikov; for Raskolnikov confession and prison shall be the road to redemption. In my judgment, it seems that the breakdown of corrupt systems and confession could beneficially be held together. For both Hugo and Dostoevsky, conscience is a major player in the lives of their protagonists, albeit the justice system is portrayed variously.

Intertwined with their respective anthropologies and their notions of redemption are their exemplar humans or Christ figures. Setup as the exemplar in Les Miserables is the Christ-like bishop who rides on a donkey and who quite literally cares for the poor and disenfranchised. This seems to focus on Jesus’ acts towards the poor – e.g. see the gospel of Luke: the gospel is for the poor. And by the end of Les Miserables, Jean Valjean the convict has evolved into an angel and Christ-figure from the seed that the bishop planted at the beginning of the novel. In The Idiot the Christ figure is a protagonist who basically lacks common sense not because the protagonist is stupid but because the protagonist has not been corrupted by the “common sense” of the world; for example, the protagonist is completely naïve in regards to relations with women. This seems to focus on Jesus’ sinlessness. It seems that their Christ figures bespeak their differing anthropologies: while Hugo focuses on acts of justice, Dostoevsky focuses on innocence.

There are numerous other comparisons that could be mentioned, but these are merely a few considerations that kept cropping up in my mind as I meandered through the shadowy cobblestone streets, dank sewers, and battlefields of Les Miserables.

Les Miserables is a touching story of abuse and healing, and it is no surprise that quite a few movies have been “based” on this story. It’s a story about the evolution of a galley slave becoming an angel, a convict becoming a christ. It’s one of the most memorable stories in world literature. I would like to recommend this novel. However, considering that we live in an age of sound bytes, I suspect almost nobody would be too keen on having such an immense adventure.

Competition: Making Enemies and Friends

“Comparison is the hidden worm that consumes in secret and does not die at least not until it takes the life out of love” (SK, Works of Love).  

Participating in recent soccer intramurals in seminary has reminded me of something Flannery O’Connor said, “Extreme situations reveal what we are essentially” (my paraphrase). The context of athletic competition was not at all what O’Connor had in mind. However, perhaps it is not too far fetched to connect her statement with soccer intramurals because in the heat of the game we discover much about ourselves and others as tempers flare and voices grow edgier. In some cases new friends are made, and in other cases new enemies are made.

In competition we may discover that we are monsters.  

Over the years I have done a pretty good job of competing poorly in so far as I have frequently let my tongue get the best of me. While I was in junior high and high school, ping-pong was a major area of competition between my dad, my brother, and me. On several particular occasions, I remember my brother and me growing so heated and angry at each other that we had to stop playing. In fact we stopped playing each other all together for a long time. From my childhood, I could provide many similar examples particularly from my years playing soccer.

But of course athletic competition is merely one of many sorts of competition. There is competition in academics, reality TV, employment, and dare I say politics. The upcoming presidential election is a sort of competition. And not least among various sorts of competition is that strange leviathan we call capitalism. I do not intend to broaden our understanding of competition to such a degree that it is a useless word, but I would like to point out the propensity for competition in human relations in general.

Competition is something many people enjoy. However, many other people seek to avoid it because either they simply do not have a taste for it or they see how divisive it can be. Obviously, there are usually winners and losers in competition. Winning can be exhilarating, and even losing can be edifying. Some winners, however, do not merely get some sort of trophy at the end; they usurp the place and even the dignity and potential for life of the loser. To make matters worse, some of these losers were not even aware of the competition until they had already been born into the losing team – let your imagination run wild with regard to global politics. What then shall the winning side do to the losing side?

Perhaps, there are some things about which competition is potentially appropriate and healthy, while there are other things about which competition is simply inappropriate.  

A theology that says something about competition is needed lest we continue walking a vague tightrope between the borders of love and hate, morality and immorality.

When I started to write this blog, I intended it to be focused on particular sorts of competition, namely those which are in controlled environments, but as I reflected a bit more I realized that it was terribly insufficient. My brother and I had a scuffle over ping-pong, but that is quite trivial when compared to global politics.  

What then should be a trajectory-setter for thinking about appropriate competition and appropriate participation?

Could love be the standard for good and bad competition? Oh, but what a lofty standard! How could that ever be practiced in competition? Shall we concede to Ivan Karamazov who says, “It’s possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever close up”?

“Love your enemies.” I imagine this probably means something akin to not trampling the other into the ground when such an opportunity arises.   

There are many sides and dimensions to the pervading issue of competition that I have not touched, many of which I have intentionally omitted for lack of space and many of which I have not yet considered. Not least among my omissions is my lack of reference to the canonical witness. Consequently, here I am merely welcoming us to think about competition theologically because there is such a desperate need for us to do so considering we are living in a world so entrenched with competition. It is in the very air we breathe, and we need to be aware of it lest it annihilate any hope of building “ecumenical,” hospitable communities characterized by love.

A few concluding comments are in order to tie together this smattering. First, competition is not inherently good or bad, albeit it may be used for good or ill by those involved. Second, folks who like to think that they have righteously avoided competition should probably reexamine themselves and recognize their potential complicity in bad sorts of competition. Third, something as risky as competition requires a large degree of candid accountability from all sides; no one should be exempt from such accountability.

There is of course much more to say, but this shall suffice for a start, however small a start this may be.