“…Till you’ve worn the lobster out.”

Inspired by something I read here. I liked it so much I wanted to add it to my blog. It’s especially poignant for me at this particular time of my life. Aside from the challenges faced by all fathers, it seems a few more are poking their heads up for a look, much like a prairie dog. This afternoon I shared a ride back to the mechanic as a passenger in my own car where I’d taken it yesterday to have some brake work done. A young man named Angelo was my driver (and one of the mechanics) and as we drove by Centennial Mall downtown due north of the state capital he asked me why there were a smattering of tents as well as a large teepee in the clearing. “The teepee is new,” I said. “About half of the tents are gone since the weather hit single digits. I guess they had room for the larger teepee once that happened.”

“But why are they doing this? Is it some sort of contest?” he asked. I briefly explained the Occupy Wall Street movement to him as best I could. How the movement originated, some of its original intents, and the mess it turned into. I walked the straight and narrow, leaving my own opinion out of it as I had no idea where Angelo stood on these matters. When I mentioned the calls by some in the OWS movement to waive and forgive all student loans on the part of the government, he shook his head. “That’s not right at all! I work hard. I make my money. I pay my bills. No one forced them to go to college. Sure if I decide I want to make more money I will have to look at going back to school, but that’s my choice. No one put a gun to their head and told them they had to go to school or take out those loans.”

We talked more. He a mechanic, and me the son of a mechanic; discussing a range of things. “When I get hurt in the shop, I don’t rush to the hospital for a band-aid or aspirin so that someone else can pay for it. I take care of it myself. Kids today are soft. When did that happen?” This led to our discussion in how we’ve both treated deep, clean cuts from the workshop: rubber cement and masking tape. We compared shop/factory-related injuries…both of us having shorn skin off of knuckles when a socket wrench slips under the car hood (though my dad’s instances of this were much more common or severe than my own). But I understood where Angelo was coming from.

We covered more in our twenty minute ride, of doing without when necessary…and making sacrifices, but those were the highlights. We arrived back at the shop where he returned my key and we shook hands, going our separate ways but along the same path. I went back to the office and remembered the Grantland Rice poem I had read a few hours before. My new friend Angelo has little inkling of campus life, or of college coursework or football Saturday (other than what he watches on tv, he said). But I suspect that had he chosen that path in life or had the opportunity, he’d have been a pit bull and “punted out of the rut” successfully.

Strike that. I bet he has.

*****

Alumunus Football
By Grantland Rice

Bill Jones had been the shining star upon his college team,
His tackling was ferocious and his bucking was a dream;
When husky William tucked the ball beneath his brawny arm
They had a special man to ring the ambulance alarm.

Bill had the speed—Bill had the weight—the nerve to never yield;
From goal to goal he whizzed along while fragments strewed the field;
And there had been a standing bet—which no one tried to call—
That he could gain his distance through a ten-foot granite wall.

When he wound up his college course each student’s heart was sore;
They wept to think that Husky Bill would buck the line no more;
Not so with William—in his dreams he saw the field of fame
Where he would buck to glory in the swirl of life’s big game.

Sweet are the dreams of campus life—the world which lies beyond
Gleams ever on our inmost gaze with visions fair and fond;
We see our fondest hopes achieved and on with striving soul
We buck the line and run the ends until we reach the goal.

So, with his sheepskin tucked beneath his brawny arm one day,
Bill put on steam and dashed into the thickest of the fray;
With eyes ablaze, he sprinted where the laureled highway led—
When Bill woke up his scalp hung loose and knots adorned his head.

He tried to run the ends of life—when lo—with vicious toss
A bill-collector tackled him and threw him for a loss;
And when he switched his course again and crashed into the line,
The massive guard named failure did a two-step on his spine.

Bill tried to punt out of the rut—but ere he turned the trick
Rick-tackle competition tumbled through and blocked the kick;
And when he tackled at success in one long vicious bound,
The full-back, disappointment, steered his features in the ground.

But one day when across the field of fame the goal seemed dim,
The wise old coach, experience, came up and said to him:
“Old boy,” spoke he, “the main point now before you win your bout
Is keep on bucking failure till you’ve worn the lobster out.

“Cut out this work around the ends—go in there, low and hard—
Just put your eye upon the goal and start there, yard by yard;
And more than all—when you are thrown—or tumbled with a crack—
Don’t lie there whining—hustle up—and keep on coming back.

“Keep coming back for all they’ve got and take it with a grin
When disappointment trips you up or failure barks your shin;
Keep coming back—and if at last you lose the game of right
Let those who whipped you know at least they, too, have had a fight,

“You’ll find the bread-line hard to buck and fame’s goal far away,
But hit the line and hit it hard across each rushing play;
For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name—
He marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”

*****

Image Source

More excellent poetry of this type may be found at The Nomad. Check it out.

The Flight from Failure to Redemption

This morning at The Catholic Thing I read a piece by Ashley McGuire about writing that really struck home. She writes:

As a little girl, I found it infinitely frustrating that I could not fly. Sure, people can fly in planes, but we can’t fly. It took me a couple of decades to gradually discover that, in fact, humans can fly. Writing is flying. Flying looks like this: keyboard before you, wrist arched from the weight of an eager index finger hovering above a letter. Any letter. Lower and click. And you’re off!

Suddenly you are restrained by nothing. The stars are letters and punctuation. They collide into fantastic supernovas. Your imagination has an engine. Eventually you are pulled back in as everything comes together on a page, leaving ink smudges on your fingertips or crisp black lines on a bright screen. The sweet assurance that your flight was not a dream.

McGuire’s right, and in those moments when the flightpath is clear there are few things as exhilarating as the transfer of lucid thought to paper or screen. Ah, sweet lucidity.

I’ve been in a rut lately when it comes to writing. Last week it seemed my plane would never come out of the clouds. This week I couldn’t coax the plane away from the gate let alone taxi down the runway. This isn’t to say I’ve tried. I’ve written more than one rant or screed but have stopped halfway through them all. I was unable to keep on any discernable path and they all just meandered through the narrative. And what was that narrative? The anger and sadness that is the state of things at Penn State. When I first heard about the grand jury report on ESPN Radio’s Mike & Mike In The Morning on my drive to work last week I could hardly believe it. I felt sick to my stomach. So naturally during a slow part of my morning I read the actual grand jury report. And then I walked outside to a bench at the corner of 13th & O Streets and sat in the autumn morning sun to catch my breath, trying not to throw up. Like many people I suppose I then read too much…too many commentaries and articles and opinion pieces. I tried to write my own. I failed, because my indignant and righteous anger kept my shaking hands from conveying any coherency at all to my keyboard.

The targets of my disgust were of course the alleged perpetrator of these crimes, as well as those who covered for him including the head football coach himself. I tried to write about assigning blame to anything I could: the worship of football, the promotion of deviance in our culture, and on and on.

And then there was of course my main target: Mike McQueary. I still have to pause while typing to ensure I stop myself from going off into the narrative weeds once more. Instead of pouring all of that bile onto the screen I am choosing another path.

I know how the Penn State community as a whole feels. Not those who covered this up. Not the few hundred morons who were rioting when Joe Paterno was fired or chanting his name in blind allegiance at the PSU/Nebraska football game a few days later. I’m talking about the over 44,000 current students and over 500,000 alumni and supporters of that university. I know how they feel because I, and a billion other Catholics, lived through it a decade ago. We are still living through it.

We know what it’s like to have the name of the institution to which you belong dragged through the mud because of the actions of horrible men living a double life. We know what it’s like to be further horrified as the scope of the coverup by other men in a position to put a stop to the crimes are exposed. We know what it’s like to dread another day’s newspaper, or the cable news, or the internet, as the wound continues to grow and to bleed. We know what it is to be “guilty by association” even though we had nothing whatsoever to do with the crimes.

It is known to Catholics as The Long Lent of 2002. It has taken a decade to even begin to heal. In time, Penn State will heal as well, but there is still a lot of poison that needs to be expunged from their wound.

We know what it is to continue to be ridiculed and scorned by those with an agenda. To be the butt of jokes. Penn State will learn this as well. It will not be fair. But it will still happen. It does not change who you are as a person. It does not define you or your institution.

There are similarities. Last week we learned of university officials who covered for Sandusky, and we saw students gather around the statue of Paterno and chant and riot. A decade ago, for every bishop who engaged in covering their backsides there were parishes who gathered around Fr. Soandso when his disgusting crimes were uncovered and saying they would stand by him through his unwarranted persecution.

To those of us who will be so quick to condemn an entire university or group of people, whether Catholics or Penn State, I suggest you say to yourself what I finally said to myself a few days ago: “There but for the grace of God, go I.”

When I began to realize that my hatred for a man I’d never met and a man I only knew through a damning grand jury report was burning so white hot that I was losing sleep, that phrase came to me. For while I’d desperately love to believe that had I stumbled onto the scene in the locker room showers that McQueary did I would have become Instant Chuck Norris and dispensed justice, I can’t honestly say that because I wasn’t the one who did. It’s too easy today to be a combox warrior on the internet, thump our chests with braggadocio and SHOUT IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS WHAT WE’D HAVE DONE. But we don’t know. Because it wasn’t us. People do weird things in shocking situations. When an evil is exposed involving someone we don’t know, everybody is so sure that they are a hero who would have beaten the living hell out of the accused and dragged his sorry ass to the local police station. I hope I would have.

In the blogosphere comboxes we are all Dirty Harry. Sadly, history has shown again and again that what the combox warriors say they’d do and the reality of what they do are two different things.

• After sleeping with and impregnating Uriah’s wife Bathsheba, David ordered his commanding officer to put Uriah in the front of the battle and have the soldiers draw back from him so that he would be killed. The commander did nothing. He and David failed.
• When he cried out that he would never deny his Lord, and yet denied him three times before the dawn, Peter failed.

There are too many to list, not all of them biblical of course. German citizens living in towns near death camps. The Chinese populace who walked by the crumpled form of a two-year-old little girl who’d been struck not once, but twice, by passing cars before dying at the hospital. We all fail every day on a massive scale.

Yet redemption can and does come despite all the shame and failure. David and Peter both redeemed themselves mightily. Despite the sneering and the dismissals by its critics the Catholic Church is doing the same. I’m choosing to pray that Mike McQueary, and others at Penn State, somehow do so as well.

The Fall was the result of a simple formula: Pride, disobedience, death. That formula is still at work today.

For those of us blindsided by the events within the Catholic Church, we reminded ourselves that our faith is in Christ Jesus, not in His human messengers, sinners all. When our attention is diverted from the message to the messenger, the object of our faith is obscured and a whirlwind of emotions threatens to upend the foundation of hope we have in Him who saves.

Through it all my foundation never changed because He does not change. I learned long ago to not put my blind trust in men or confidence in man’s princes. I won’t pretend to know who or what the half-million PSU member family puts their trust. It does appear that for too long they put it in men, and in particular one man. A football coach.

“There but for the grace of God, go I.”

The 5th Quarter

I have been meaning to write more about this film, but have not had the time. Yet I wanted to be sure I posted it here just in case someone who had yet to hear of it reads this. I can remember the 2006 season that surprising upstart Wake Forest had. They had been picked to finish last in the ACC yet somehow won the conference championship, went to the Orange Bowl and finished 11-3 and ranked #17 in the country. But I never knew the back story.

The 5th Quarter looks to be a powerful movie. Aiden Quinn…Andie MacDowell…a true story. It is also, however, my worst nightmare as a parent. My getting through the previews and information I’ve read have been difficult enough. The movie may well kill me. Yet I plan on taking my soon-to-be-a-driver-himself eldest son. I don’t care if he watches his dad turn into a puddle of sobbing goo next to him in the theater. Maybe it will reinforce the messages from the film.

A few links:

The film’s website and official trailer.

A six-minute featurette on the making of the film.

The Luke Abbate 5th Quarter Foundation. As this is a film about the consequences of teen driving as well as the gift of organ donation, this site is an excellent resource for parents.

There’s more. More interviews, more stories, etc. I don’t know why this movie has such a limited initial release, but I’m hoping it spreads to more theaters and areas of the country soon.

I’ll just end here with the extended trailer for the film.

The Stupid Bowl

Tony Esolen, perhaps my favorite contributing writer to Touchstone magazine and frequent blogger over at Mere Comments, wrote almost exactly what my thoughts were regarding the events that sadly surrounded what was a fantastic game. The events of what I speak of course were the commercials. Not only were they the poorest crop in over a decade, they were incredibly offensive. I watched the game with my 13-year old son, our young assistant pastor Fr. B., and my friend Tom and his younger son. Almost immediately from the first commercial onwards, Tom and I were exchanging looks, sighs and were both probably embarrassed beyond words. Why? After all, we’re grown men. I’m certainly no prude. But just because the world has gone this route in accepting the garbage put out there as “edgy”, “funny” and harmless, does that mean I am to blindly accept it and lower my standards? I think not.

Almost immediately, the tone of “hey…isn’t it great when all sexy women have their clothes torn off?” was set. And as Esolen writes, it went downhill from there.

In one, a young stubblechinned guy munches on a chip, and presto! a slinky young lady walking down the street is stripped to her black underwear. Then, presto! bills start shooting out of an ATM machine, and everybody in the street swarms around for the money, in a regular riot. A policeman steps in, but munch! his uniform falls empty to the street, and a little monkey emerges from it. So, lust — with the added zest of violent voyeurism –, avarice, and dehumanization, to sell chips.

Another commercial has a dumb office worker with a glass snow globe, which he calls his crystal ball. He predicts there will be free chips or soda or something in the office today, and throws the ball through the glass of the vending machine, whereupon his fellow workers raid it like ravenous morons. His friend, apparently even stupider than he, uses the globe to try to predict a promotion for himself, and throws it just as a door opens and the boss steps out — to be struck square in the crotch. The old man doubles over. The initial globe-thrower smirks and says that his pal won’t be getting that promotion. Stupidity, glouttony, cruelty, and spite, to sell chips.

In another, a plain-looking female office worker is subjected to public humiliation. “No one wants to see you naked,” says her enemy, another female worker. The last shot is of a badly shaved doofus (all men are badly shaved doofuses), standing over her, saying, “I want to see you naked.”

In yet another, we see a series of stupid men battered by various objects — one of them, for instance, is riding atop some vehicle and bashes his head against a low overpass. Very funny. And then there’s the stallion who sees Daisy the circus mare, breaks out of his pen that night, and barrels right into the performance; at which Daisy rears up and tosses, upside down, buttocks up, a fat lady in silk panties, while a fat clown and a fat ringmaster look on in astonishment. Fat people are, of course, contemptible.

The promos for films are all of them tissues of computer-enhanced violence, bodies flying, buildings blowing up in slow motion, things such as a disturbed fifteen year old boy would enjoy, in normal times, but apparently are enjoyed by everybody now. One of the films is a piece of savage and stupid bigotry, attacking that locus of violence and evil in the world, the Vatican. But not to worry: NBC did nix a pro-life ad bought by a conservative Catholic organization.

So what to do? Be quicker on the remote next year I suppose. Or finally purchase a DVR and in future years just skip the commercials. I’m not sure. But what I saw this year seemed to be a giant leap forward in the area of crassness and it’s not a place I’m willing to go willingly any longer. Yes, we may be sheep, but we have a Shepherd. It’s time to decide which one we follow. He who is the Great Shepherd, or the shepherd of Madison Avenue.