The runaway baby

More napping songs for Samuel:

We’ve been to church twice. Samuel won’t sit still. During the service, Karin & I allow him to roam the back hallways; we take turns supervising him. Afterward, when we wish to mingle with the other Christians, we have to keep him from dashing out into the parking lot. It’s like a game of “capture the flag.”

I wonder if his diet is a cause. I’ve started giving him peanut butter and jelly toast in the mornings. It puts him in an ecstatic mood, and he runs up and down the house, for about an hour.

The other night, we found The Runaway Bunny, one of his favorite books, behind the couch: it had been missing for several days. “Bunny! Bunny!” he said. Then he sat on my lap and paged through that book while I also read.

Presently, I realized that I, too, was reading a treatise of leporine theology: Rabbit, Run.

Fathers and sons

Samuel is still a shrimp, but not such a shrimp as he was. This week he graduated from his three-to-six-month onesies to his six-to-nine-month onesies (he is nine months old). And today, Karin brought him some large pacifiers. We’d worried that he would swallow one of his older pacifiers; he’d begun slipping them entire into his mouth. Samuel also did his first crawls today. He’d been standing on hands and knees without moving, but this week he took a few crawls forward. I hope he walks soon so I can let him wander around the back yard.

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I’ve finished reading Book 2 of C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series. Nine more books to go. This particular novel used to be called Strangers and Brothers, but for the omnibus edition it was rechristened George Passant. This month, I’m reading Book 3, The Conscience of the Rich.

I also am reading John Stott’s IVP Romans commentary which I used to notice my dad assigning to his seminary students. (They’d usually read it in Spanish.) I’ve put off studying Romans long enough. And now that I’m beginning, I’ve resolved to limit how much I study it. Some people get sucked in and read dozens of commentaries on that epistle. That isn’t for me. If I find a tidy 400-page Reader’s Digest Condensed version that makes sense of Romans, that will suffice.

Today, coincidentally, Samuel and I were having a video call with my parents when my dad, who was writing study notes on Romans, gave me an impromptu presentation of his worked-out theory of the Atonement. Indeed, he presented it several times in response to my clarificatory questions. He is the same father who used to sit with me in the middle of the night when I was too afraid to sleep, answering questions such as What is faith, questions upon which salvation hinges.

Under the bridge

At work, Karin earned two tickets to a local minor league baseball game, along with two free ballpark suppers. To avoid the $7 parking fee, we rode the bus; upon arriving, however, we found we’d left the baseball tickets at home.

We would’ve eaten elsewhere downtown, but the heavens opened up a torrent. We ended up staying at the bus station for about an hour. Then we rode to a McDonald’s near our apartment.

After our supper, as we were walking home, it started raining again – very hard – and so we took shelter under a bridge. I was busy explaining why extant theories of bodily resurrection leave a great deal to be desired. Karin snapped this photo of me:

It’s a bit dark, which probably is a good thing, considering my disheveled state.

Once more to the camp

With stops, our drive to the “thumb” of Michigan took six hours. It was quite tiring – we’d stayed awake late the previous night, due to Barcelona’s victory over Palmeiras in the Copa Libertadores – and when we arrived at the camp, we wished to rest. Alas, our cabin was filled with Brianna and her noisy teenaged retinue.

One grubby youngster, Noah, unknown to us, is Brianna’s new boyfriend of some few days. The other teenagers look ganglier and greasier than last year.

“Let’s turn around and leave,” said Karin.

“Yes! Yes!” I agreed.

But we didn’t.

Instead, we went to the church service. The speaker posited a “social trinitarian” conception of the Godhead, on the basis of which he argued for the value of community – and, by extension, against leaving the church. He showed Andrei Rublev’s famous painting of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit seated together at a table. “This is a picture of God,” he said.

I was glad to view that lovely painting. But I recalled that other pictures show the Godhead as one person with three faces. The “social” doctrine isn’t the only account of the Trinity.

(Not that the speaker needed that doctrine to make his point. Community can be important even if it doesn’t exist within the Godhead.)

After church, everyone lined up for ice-cream, which was served in heaping portions. This photo shows me eating a “single.”

The end of camp-time

Brianna is quite the little Queen Bee. She has so many friends at Brown City Camp that they have to compete for her attention. Sometimes she and just one or two of her friends come into our cabin; but then the others locate her, and our cabin is filled with teen-aged girls (the boys are too polite, or too shy, to join us).

Inevitably, feelings get hurt. There’s only so much of Brianna to go around, and she doesn’t always distribute herself most equitably and lovingly.

This is a difficult thing to manage. It’s difficult for adults. It’s even harder for the young. They’re only beginning to grasp that personal relationships come with duties as well as benefits – that more is expected than a spontaneous reaction of the heart. It’s painful to watch Brianna charm people but not fully embrace all who are charmed.

Still, her uninhibitedness serves her well during a Q&A session about creation vs. evolution.

“Good Christians disagree about this subject,” begins the pastor, and then he spends the rest of his time explaining why Young Earth creationism is clearly the right – the righteous – option.

Brianna is his sole dissenter.

“My name is Brianna,” she says, “and my grandparents are _____ and _____, who have been coming to this camp for many years” (there is a murmur of approval). “And I just want to say that I don’t believe in Young Earth. But when I get to heaven and see Jesus, if he says, ‘The world was created in six days,’ I’ll say, ‘Praise God!’ And if he says, ‘The world was created through evolution,’ I’ll say, ‘Praise God!’” (The pastor glares.)

Her mother and Karin & I are very pleased. I’m reminded of myself, of my own youthful outspokenness. (Whether I was equitable and loving, I don’t recall.)

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The next day, Karin & I return to South Bend. We listen to the Twin Peaks soundtrack, to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and to my playlist-in-progress, “Stalker Songs,” which has melodic, soft music and vaguely unsettling lyrics. (And not all of its songs are about stalking: some are about mugging, or about being mugged.)

When we go into our house, Jasper is very happy to see us. He meows and meows and eats half of Karin’s sandwich and dashes around the house for about an hour.

Karin goes to the Social Security office and changes her last name. It’s her decision. I’m glad she’s doing what she wants, not what I want.

I love Karin better all the time. It’s a delight to wake up next to her.

And I love Jasper, who this morning did the waking up.

Brown City Camp, pt. 2

On our first morning, Karin & I sleep in. We skip the church service. Around lunchtime, we leave the cabin, and I see what the camp is really like.

There are no barracks, no neat rows of same-styled cabins. Rather, the camp is a dense jumble of tents and cabins and trailer-houses, each one uniquely decorated by its tenant (who returns to the same plot of land year after year).

Golf-cart traffic proceeds along the dusty streets. Some of the carts are used by the security guards, but most of them are rented by the tenants.

We stroll. Karin takes me to a section of the camp where there are only trailer-houses. “This was the last area to be built up,” she tells me. “You can see that the trees here are younger and shorter than in the front of the camp; there’s hardly any shade.” Indeed, this back area is like a squatters’ village appended to the better-established “main” section of the camp.

In the “main” section are the great civilizing buildings: the tabernacles (separate ones for grown-ups, youth, and children); the cafeteria; the general store; the bookstore; the ice-cream shop. The line at the ice-cream shop is longer than an airport security line. Karin & I stand in the line for half an hour on Saturday night (ice-cream is not sold on Sunday, and each person is gathering a double-portion). We move up five feet in the line before we quit.

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Our own cabin, in the camp’s posh section, has a pink exterior. It has a large sitting-room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a loft. Karin & I sleep in a double bed curtained off from the sitting-room.

Karin’s mom and Brianna arrive at the camp. Brianna is reunited with her friends. They roam in packs of five or six.

One night, Brianna and her friends come to our door and sing Christmas carols to us.

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It rains. The streets are turned into mud.

The nights are cold. I am getting sick.

The church services occur twice daily, two hours at a time. Usually I arrive late. A famous Jamaican is the main speaker. Ruthlessly he cuts out the heart of prosperity theology, propounds the spiritual necessity of suffering.

May fragments

Mary had her birthday. Stephen and I bought her an artichoke sandwich and a pie, and Martin bought her some cheese puffs. … The upstairs has been rather hot; Bianca, our dear furball, has been lingering in the cool basement. Missing her, we’ve begun conditioning the air. … This week is my week off, between school terms. I wish I could travel. “You could explore the ruins of Detroit,” say Sabby. “You could clean the basement,” says Martin (everyone’s so archaeological).

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I bought The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology. I agree with this reviewer:

While reading [Alexander Pruss’s] very intricate essay [on the Eucharist], it occurred to me that many medieval scholastic philosophers, if brought into the present age and given a copy of this book, would be overjoyed — while the traditional enemies of scholasticism would see most of this book as logical nitpicking.

Pruss is the leading theorist of the Real Presence (and of other Romish oddities). His Handbook essay focuses on how Christ could, at one and the same time, be in different places, e.g. in different communion wafers across the world. This problem has some pedigree; Leibniz and Aquinas offer solutions. But what non-nerd ever gave it as the main reason for doubting transubstantiation? Pruss’s own solution refers to time travel. Here is theorizing which is both inelegant and useless.