We begin with a video from St. Stephen of Colbert (snatched from the jaws of the Ordinary Gentlemen blog):

In this clip, St. Colbert does an intro about how church attendance swells during severe recessions and then interviews Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit who joined the order and took a vow of poverty after leaving what sounds like a very lucrative position at GE Finance. Here’s a snippet of their exchange at the end:

FM: If you tie yourself to your possessions, your possessions start owning you. I think it’s more about freedom. The vow of poverty that we Jesuits have taken is more about being free, following Christ, being free to serve other people, and also identifying with and having compassion with the poor. So it’s mostly about freedom… It’s more that we keep God at bay. we have these defenses – our status, our possessions, things we hold on to – and when they’re not there anymore, it’s easier for God to break in.

SC: He [God] says “I am He whom thou seekest.”

FM: It’s not that God is any more present, it’s that we’re just more open…

In the comments a few posts ago about winter, Bob and Stephen had this to say:

Bob: Today I am seeing in the mirror’s reflection a man visibly marked with earth and ashes – a man more humbled than yesterday, a man reminded of the winter of his soul, the chaos of what he is when left to his own devices, the breakdown of his character and values through the press of daily living, and… the hope for renewal that Springs forth new every Easter.

Stephen: Every winter is an invitation by Nature (one of the many faces of God) to look directly at oneself without the gloss of external delight available in other seasons to protect the eye from itself. While this may be painful, to look deeply and steadily is to become free from the monkey mind — it is no more complicated than that.

Lent is a type of forced spiritual winter for the layman – a season of willingly administered want, searching, scrounging, exposure to a vast, cold, clear-eyed truth with an aching soul. For a culture like ours, suckled from the moment of our births and hounded to the last of our days by the largely unconscious assumption that we can and should have everything we crave when we crave it and that it’s a fact of life that we will be stroked and prodded in almost every waking minute to crave things we didn’t know about when we woke up that day, the idea of Lent is ridiculous. Why deprive yourself of anything when there is no need? Lent, shallowly understood, is just another easy to stereotype example of self-flagellating religious folk who can’t, and determinedly won’t, have a good time and “enjoy life”.

I think what Fr. Martin, Bob and Stephen all point to is the necessity of the Lent experience, especially in Western life as we know it. Whether it is adopted by choice or forced on us by times of want, deprivation or intentional withdrawal from our craving and automatic pleasures has the paradoxical effect of creating room for delight and discovery in our lives.

By inserting lack and want, it hones our senses and makes our pleasure palate more sensistive and discriminating. By eliminating the frenetic buzz of searching for and consuming what we crave, it creates a keen stillness and strengthens our ability to wait and observe. By compelling us to sit shiva on our self-righteousness and gaze silently and steadily on our weaknesses, failures and small and large cruelties (and our subsequent shame and overcompensations), it opens a cathedral in our shadowed soul that is filled with the ever-present light, compassion and generosity of God.

I read a fascinating post on Slog the other day. They’ve been doing a series on jobs people have taken after losing their old lives to this Great Recession (as some call it). In one post, “Chastity”, a former technical writer (and a great writer in general), is talking about her experience in her new role as a part-time porn production assistant. After overseeing a shoot where five couples copulate in various ways in front of a live studio audience, she writes these fascinating words:

Most surprising to me is that the some of the girls who do this work very regularly seem to have their fuses blown out, sexually. There isn’t much they won’t do, but they never orgasm. Not really, anyway — and they’ll cheerfully announce this fact when the cameras aren’t rolling. Nor do they frequently have sex at home. For those who actively choose sex work, this creeping sexual numbness seems to me the greatest tragedy of this way of making money. The loss of my desire would provoke a fundamental shift in my character — my sexuality is my sixth sense. The sensual and the erotic make up a considerable portion of my interior life: they are private — to put them on display would be to capitalize on my most fragile and vulnerable self. The irony, however, is that for me to work in this business, I have to be a little numb, too.
…
I can’t shake the conviction that pornography is exploitation, however much everyone involved insists it isn’t. As long as it remains the last viable resort for a young woman, I don’t know how it can be anything else, and I don’t know how I can be anything other than complicit in Jenny’s eventual sexual anesthesis.

(Read the entire post.)

When I read this, I was reminded of a quote by Frederich Buechner:

Lust is the craving for salt of a man dying of thirst.

Porn, like all human sexuality, is a complex topic (one I’d love to write on and one that, given my new employer is a Christian-based company, I’m not sure I’m feel free to be bluntly honest about). But what struck me about “Chastity’s” vignette is that how these sensitive physical, emotional and spiritual organs at the edge of our human experience – sex, appetite, the instincts for belonging and approval, security and safety, a framework of meaning – get scraped raw or blunted or even hopelessly damaged by a habitual, unthinking aquiescence to our own cravings.

The Lenten season is an antidote to that slow poison of numbness, just as winter is Nature’s antidote to the exertions of spring and summer. We must contract, let our concealing foliage and fineries fall away to reveal the contours of our internal landscape, so that the warm light of God’s benevolence can begin to tease out the new life of roots and seeds that have long been hidden and dormant.

Thanks for the comments, bretheren and sisteren. Lovely thoughts all. Bob, I have some thoughts about Lent, porn and Stephen Colbert that I’ll try and share share tomorrow. Those all go together, right? In the meantime, I have a grab bag of random goodies to throw at you.

Just how good of a political ninja is Obama? This good. First from Al Giordano, a little gem about the pseudo-State-Of-The-Union address last night (which I’m going to nickname SOTU-Furkey):

I didn’t hear a single TV pundit last night or today pick up on what Obama is really up to here. It’s in the bold type: “This budget builds on these reforms.” He was talking about the budget he is about to propose. The next steps in creating national universal health care will come not in separate legislation which requires 60 out of 99 US Senate votes, but, rather, as part of the budget bill that, according to Congressional rules, needs simply a majority – 50 votes – to be passed and which cannot be subject to opposition filibuster.

That was exactly the point in the speech when Senate Republicans got those long unhappy looks on their faces. He had just ripped from them their only obstructionist power. They shifted nervously in their seats and scrunched their “holy crap” scowls. Skilled politicians all, they knew their goose had just been cooked. It was at that point in the speech that, after a couple of minutes of coming to grips with the new rules, they began to make a show of applause and standing ovations for the cameras. If you can’t beat Obama, join him. It was a beautiful play to watch.

Nice. And how about the moment at the Fiscal Responsibility Summit where McCain foolishly tried to bumrush Obama about some embarassing expenditures from the Bush era for new Air Force One helicopters and got a suitcase full of the same pwnage he suffered during the primaries:

This is Obama at his most appealing. He makes a gracious introduction of his rival, who in turn tries to stick in the knife by painting him as wasting taxpayer dollars on needless luxuries. Obama, rather than sniping back, turns around and agrees with McCain while making the point that he’s hardly accustomed to extravagence. The man is just a very, very skilled politician.

After watching Obama tackle the enormous D.C. tangle of egos and divisiveness at the Responsibility Summit, Booman had this to say:

… honestly, we all have to learn from this just as much as the Republicans do. We’re all so jaded and scarred from the last thirty years of politics that we don’t know any other way to operate. We are suspicious of the very concept of a Fiscal Responsibility Summit that puts entitlement reform on the table. We don’t want to work with Republicans and we consider use of any of their ideas to be something between foolishness and cowardice. It’s a reflection of decades of ever-increasing political polarization. But, I’m telling you, Obama is going to keep putting us in the sandbox together until we start changing our behavior. Even if turns out that we can’t work together, the whole spectacle is unlike anything I’ve seen in my life, and it’s pure political gold.

It’s kinda disorienting to have this kind of Jedi mindpower on our side for once. “These are not the droids you’re looking for….”

Christian seclusionist fashion: Janece found this site while researching home schooling. As I understand it, home schooling has become much more diverse and interesting over the last few decades, but every area has its flavor and this semi-rural area we live in is apparently still heavy on the Christian fundies wanting to keep their kids away from The Nasty Ol’ World. All I can say is if that’s what they want, these clothes should do the trick.*

Sweet Fancy Moses. It’s hard to describe the visceral reaction I get from seeing these pics. This kind of Thomas-Kinkade-meets-Little-House-On-The-Prairie throwback retro sensibility was all the rage in the fundie cult-level church I grew up in. Flower prints that look like they came from someone’s drapes, nighmarish pleat-and-gather lines, and lace dolloped on like too much icing on a mushy birthday cake — all in the single-minded attempt to protect young swains from having naughty thoughts about the womanly form. And you know, it really doesn’t ever work. One of the first things I said to Janece was “I wonder how many of those girls will have early pregnancies”. I don’t know what the stats are nationally, but I heard tell that at my fundie church, there was plenty of hanky panky going on under those shapeless virginal sack dresses, at least three of which ended in shotgun weddings. Forbidden = hotter. I can’t understand why fundies never get that.

* At least, at first. See above.

Steel Mother, or The Jungian Myth Of The Female Robot That Will Destroy The World. Tonight Janece and I watched the Japanese anime version of the movie Metropolis.

Now, I swear I’ve never seen or heard the plot of this film. I’d seen stills from the 1930 classic, but that’s as far as it went. But in a serious Jungian twist/coincidence, I had a full dream about this very subject in, like, 1996 or something – one of the most vivid I’ve ever had.

It was all in gorgeous black and white, like a classic ’50s Hollywood epic. It opens with two scientists in white lab coats arguing next to a stunning Bettie Page type female robot, laid out naked on a table and surrounded by those electric ray gun type tubes all crackling and hissing. One was argues with the other that she poses too great a danger and shouldn’t be completed or activated. He is overruled. The “screen” fuzzes and switches to a social party where the robot is gorgeous, the toast of the town, decked out in furs and glamour, but treated as a curiosity piece – not a being with a soul or dignity. Again a “screen” fuzz and switch to a posh sitting room. A dark haired, classically handsome man in a lounging robe sits on a sleek modern couch staring straight ahead without moving. The robot sultrily slinks into the room dressed in a provocative ’50s-era S&M lingerie outfit and begins a sexually charged “seven veils” dance for the man, offering herself up to him. No response. She cannot break into his narcissistic, self-centered daydreams. Fuzz and switch. Now she sits, darkly slumped down and staring straight ahead on a suburban couch, in a scenario lifted right out of Better Housekeeping ad. Father reads a paper, Mother placidly rocks and works with a needle and thread, Son lays on the floor idly kicking his loafered feet and reading Boys Life. The final jagged fuzz and switch. She sits, still staring straight ahead, but the family is now dead – their agonized expressions and twisted bodies suspended in some kind of crystal-like shell. Suddenly, a swift and silent flush of jet-black liquid shoots out from under the couch where she sits as the camera pulls back to reveal an empty film set that is slowly being flooded. I wake up knowing that the world is doomed.

I wrote a song called “Steel Mother” about the dream (never recorded).

Act 1.
Antiseptic and relentless
Men with plastic, tainted eyes
Drained of color and tasting winter
They twisted wire, their dirty lasers, dry hunger
Drowned in oil
The conveyor crawls
Like a snake, the Steel
Mother comes, the wheel
Set in motion – Building flesh and bone in blind devotion

Act 2.
Blood like a junkie, skin like a heat wave
Eyes like a sea cave, pearly smile
She is silky raw, like an empty room
And they take her, the vampires
Fill her up with ashes
Teeth and paparazzi smiles

Chorus.
The great city’s fallen – The temple of the rational
The great city’s fallen – The temple of the rational
Dances like a whore, in leather on the floor
Desperate for his grace, his empty hollow gaze,
His cold, Apollo face; his cold, Apollo face
Frozen in a self embrace
Frozen in a self embrace
Frozen in a self embrace
Frozen in a self embrace

Act 3.
Dad reads the paper – Mom sews an apron
Bobby reads Boys World – She sits with her hands curled
Stuffed in a sundress – Blind to her distress
Wrapped in their lifestyles – Placid and all smiles
Suburbs in twilight – Slumped in the lamplight
Staring at nothing – Her time is coming
The static whispers
Of the TV to baptize her

Chorus.
The great city’s fallen – The temple of the rational
The great city’s fallen – The temple of the rational
Dances like a whore, in leather on the floor
Desperate for his grace, his empty hollow gaze,
His cold, Apollo face; his cold, Apollo face
Frozen in a self embrace
Frozen in a self embrace
Frozen in a self embrace
Frozen in a self embrace

Finale.
The world ends in winter – The den in disorder
The family in plastic — Trapped in their panic
All their hollow gazes and her empty face is
Frozen in a self-embrace
Frozen in a self-embrace
Frozen in a self-embrace
Frozen in a self-embrace

I know, I know. That’s not enough evidence for a Jungian collective subconcious kinda twist ending to this vignette. OR IS IT??? My jaw literally dropped when I saw the Jamiroquai video for “Virtual Insanity”, filmed about two years after my dream. Watch this video and check out the visuals around 3:10 in the video. What’s that I see? A dark oily liquid shooting out from under a couch? Where did that come from….???

This has happened with me one other notable time. I did a band flyer for Springchamber once that had all five of our heads melded together at the neck in kind of a fleshy ball, like Planet Springchamber or something. And what did I see months later on the brand new cover of Rolling Stone at the studio when we went to record? Eerie.

Bonus extra – Trident Passionberry Twist: In a word… DON’T. It tastes like handsoap. Disgusting.

Apologies to you all for dropping off the face of the planet for almost a month. I get in these moods sometimes, whether from burnout or an overdose of unmerited ennui or just lack of feeling particularly inspirational, and I just drop out. Natalie, as usual, says it well while beating me to the punch:

But. Well, lately all of my posts have been sitting in a draft file. My thoughts, feelings and other musings have been too morose, sad, frustrated, cranky, angry, bitter, funky and junky for daylight. I know, it hasn’t stopped me from sharing before, but I find that even my brilliant insights and reflections on the economy, our government, housing woes and the trials of being a rental rat in a high brow neighborhood are just too depressing to print… Every thing I think of seems to come from someone else who is doing it, or saying it or sharing it better.

So, I’ve been in that same no emails, no returning calls or writing posts kinda space. I’m having to strain a bit to re-crank this engine, but it’s nice to know you took the time to drop by and check in.

My post title has a dual meaning, dontcha know. Obama dragged me back out to the blog by providing a great occasion in tonight’s speech for a post, but more than that, of course, he is a tonic that this nation has needed for a sorely long time. He spoke with authoritative bluntness and without sugar coating our challenges, but also not dwelling on them to the point of overwhelm and pointing the nation to exit out of the burning building. I particularly loved his very pointed challenge for these publicly elected officials to rise to the expectations the public has for them, and I thought it was particularly masterful of him to point out that everyone in the chamber was patriotic as long as their efforts were honest – further depriving the wingnuts of legitimacy in their shrill demonization of the other side.

He said tonight what I’ve told people I appreciate about government before – that, implemented properly, it is a “catalyst” that can spur/inspire private enterprise and citizenry on to great things that would not have otherwise been done. What struck me is how he is also a catalyst. His type of synthesizing approach and genuinely cooperative nature has been greatly needed to spark the engine of government that will, hopefully, in turn spark the engine of our nation’s purposefulness and renewal.

Shared communal responsibility is an important aspect to government and one that Obama wonderfully embodies. We taxpayers and citizens have agreed to be governed at the federal level in part to give ourselves the very options we now need – massive government intervention to stabilize our nation and the world at a time when greed and opportunism have overtaken all the already-weakened safeguards and left us vulnerable in a very personal and scary way. We as a national community have built this safety net for times like these, to help ourselves and our neighbors (no matter where they are in the nation) when nothing else can. The actions Obama is taking are an expression of our nation’s commitment to itself, to the propping up or rescue of our most vulnerable citizens, to the reorienting of ourselves towards important shared priorities and responsibilities in the middle of our search for personal freedom.

I shouldn’t, but I feel sorry for the GOP. Watching Jindal try and follow up Obama’s muscular Chicago Sandburg-ian calls for bold and really transformative action, delivered by a diverse and energetic President on an historic occasion and enthusiastically applauded by both political friends and, at times, enemies, was cringe-worthy. It wasn’t because he was overshadowed by the moment or that he now has to live with an incredibly bad political decision to launch his presidential bid with such poor timing and delivery. It’s because he and his party have nothing to stand on or stand for. They simply have no philosophy that can encompass the urgency of the moment we’re in, the quiet tectonic shift in public thinking that burst to the surface in November, the nimble co-opting of a President that is political lightyears ahead of them. All they can say is No. And No, while not big enough even in everyday life, is even less adequate in these times when we need every Yes, And… we can get.

In our last phone call, my dear brother was talking about times of personal winter when we disengage and withdraw and hunker down and our spiritual/mental/relational ground is fallow and still. He used the word “contraction” to describe it. It suddenly occured to me that it’s not accident that it’s the exact word economists use a winter word to describe our current economy – a massive “contraction”, a shedding of surplus and growth and a season of withering and cooling. And of course, “contraction” is also the word for the violent and painful heaves during childbirth.

Winter’s contractions are costly and painful. The majority of a plant’s “body” dies during the process, leaving mostly only root. The leaves on the trees are choked at their roots until they are squeezed off and fall to decay into the forest floor. The season is severe enough to leave a concentric scar in the flesh of the tree. Animals who are unprepared or not strong enough can die, boughs are torn away by snow, ponds and lakes freeze hard, the ground lies fallow.

But winter is not only hard, it’s also beautiful and produces the conditions necessary for the tumultuous and lovely green of spring. Winter’s onset produces the riotous colors of fall and the minimalist beauty of the landscape stripped bare. Right now in the Northwest, daffodil buds are being shivered awake by the cold ground and will soon start to explode in sunny yellow clumps. The accumulation of new nutrients in the soil from the winter damage have begun to feed root systems now preparing to kick back into life as the sun’s rays get warmer.

In biological systems, the cycle of winter/chaos/breakdown is essential for a stronger, more appropriate system to emerge. The same is true for our national system. We are facing big threats, all of our own making, but implicit in those threats is the opportunity, the seed, for something newer, more robust, more expressive of who we are. Just as winter surprises itself with daffodils, so America has surprised itself with Obama and the renewed national image and spirit he represents. With care and luck and time, we’ll see growth again – not the same thing we had before, but something new, unpredictable, more healthy and appropriate for our world and times.