law, aesthetics and liturgy

The greatest works of art are those which follow a certain law. It’s not an eternal law, but more or less historically determined; a Mozart sonata, written so strictly according to the form, has a beauty entirely other than that of an ancient chant which follows the aesthetic laws of its own day. Why do they both evoke such a sense of rightness and quality? Hundreds of composers were writing sonatas according to that form in Mozart’s day who don’t even touch him. It must be because, in great art, the law is transcended, given new meaning, or better, fulfilled.

Laws provoke disobedience and thus The Law ‘reveals sin’–the objective state of this world. St Paul tells us all about this but anyone who has seen a three year old react to the laws of the house will know. It’s as if the law is there just to be broken and we have an insatiable inertia to free ourselves from it. So there are two true things here about law: it is true because it teaches us the “real state of things,” and it is true become is reveals to us our freedom. Law and freedom are made to coincide and when they are brought together tastefully, completely and truly, beauty shines forth. In art, in ethics, even in politics. Freedom fulfills the law; they tell the truth about each other in harmony.

A texual or ritual-critical approach to Orthodox liturgy with reveal almost nothing about freedom, but only about law (this is the basic standpoint of anthropology/sociology of religion, which assumes rituals are performed in each society to “quell the anger of their gods”). This is especially true for the modern worshipper, who equates spiritual freedom with spontaneity. Even when attending a strictly performed Orthodox liturgy, the observer will see only law, formulas, manuals. We are bombarded with “form.” But here is where liturgy breaks between the cracks of aesthetics, ethics and politics–it is only by participation that freedom is injected into the law. Of course, I mean participation in two senses, first, actively “doing something” (hopefully something like praying) during the actual time of the service, and second, participation in the metaphysical sense–communion with God in Christ and through him with each other in a broader, both contingent and eternal sense. In this way, beauty is shines forth not only as something that we see, but something that we ourselves become and are. It is participation in the Beauty that Christ is, the beauty we see in the saints. This is the real “liturgical aesthetic” (not just the pomp, gold and sometimes almost Wagnerian drama) and, if this is the basic locus of Christian experience as Christian, it is also the real beginning of theological aesthetics.

 

Laws and statutes

“Blessed art thou O Lord, teach me thy statutes.” Ps 119:12

Laws and statutes—the common goal between these two is the satisfaction of justice. The memories I conjure related to these two words suggest two types of justice: the justice of men and the justice of God.

The Hebrew chok, statute, is normally a juridical pronouncement made by God without or beyond reason, as opposed to mishpat, those laws given with reason or in reference to an intelligible event in history. One could suggest that the mishpat of God, are the gift of divine power to humanity: reason, and the capacity to carry out mishpat, ultimately unto chok—the black-letter law of God, unknowable and transcendent. It is not through reason alone that one ascends, mystically or otherwise (as in, say, Plotinus or Hegel), or rather, experiences the con-descension of the presence of God, but through reason’s bringing justice about. Levinas writes, “Presence and absence attained not by the mystic gifts of the soul, but by the just conduct of a tribunal. What a striking association of divine life with the institutions of the Republic!” (1993, 133).

In these just judgments, the chok are revealed or taught to us. Ps. 82:1 “God standeth in the congregation of God; in the midst of the judges he judgeth.” God is present in the just judgment of the laws of the congregation of the reasonable. Now, when mishpat is not carried out, God “arises” and departs from the congregation “of God” on behalf of those oppressed: “Before the oppression of the humble, the sighing of the poor, at that time I arise, saith the Lord” (Ps. 12:5). When unjust rule, the presence of God is taken away from the congregation of reason.

So when we ask, “teach me thy statutes,” there is already a dictate upon us—carrying out the mishpat which is within our power. Through the deliverance of the oppressed, the judgment of God, chok, becomes the peace of divine presence in our midst. We are taught the unknowable statutes of God through justice. Conversely, when we fail to carry this out, abusing our power, God arises, judging the “earth” (I think of the Holy Saturday refrain during the scattering of the bay leaves, “Arise, O God, judge the earth! For to thee belong all the nations!”) with absence, encircling rather the oppressed with his presence, cutting himself off from the congregation of judges. Not the way you’d prefer to be taught some statutes.

 

Knowing my place

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I’ve never been poor. My family, reaching all the way back to my tall, humble, Dutch ancestors, farmers in Groningen, has never been poor. Simple, yes–the Roosiens and Vredevoogds are and always have been eminently simple folk. Silent, straight-laced, God fearing, independent and responsible. But not poor.

Max Weber says there are 3 strata in our modern regime but it’s probably more like 5, and I’m right there in the middle, just like a Roosien should be. Even though I just got my W-2′s in the mail and I’m well below the poverty line, I look at what I’m wearing: sweater from H&M (on sale), thrift store button-up, Old Navy slacks (also on sale), some nice thermal socks I got for Christmas a few years ago…I’m surrounded by hundreds of LP’s, books and cd’s stacked to the ceilings, couches, slippers, nice soft light. I’m only a little chilled in this brutal Chicago January. I’ll go flip the thermostat up a degree or two, casually, without a thought.

The Abbott Smile practice space is located just off Paulina and Kinzie, and every night we’ve driven over there this winter there’s a barrel fire (barely visible from behind the gloved hands) under the bridge or ugly black smoke and lingering smell of burnt plastic–evidence of one of the many extant problems within the Chicago Police Department. There are several mattresses which are sometimes occupied and the “ceiling” is heavy with ashen, urban stalactites.

This isn’t supposed to be a sanctimonious “oh my god those poor poor people we have to help them” post, but probably more like something of a cry for help.

Fr Moses Berry, an Orthodox priest in Missouri who’s an African-American writes, “When blacks started thinking that we could be anything in this country that we wanted to be, the confusion began because, in fact, we couldn’t…We lost the world-view of our elders, and forgot ‘our place.’…Nowadays we have forgotten how to be poor–how to make the best of what little you have without resenting not having everything that’s put out in the market.” (An Unbroken Circle, 68)

This quotation may strike some skeptics as being in the same vein as St Paul’s supposed “justification of slavery,” but like Paul, Fr Berry is recognizing the immense dignity of the second-class citizen. Of course the abolition of slavery was like sweet-smelling incense to the Lord’s nostrils, of course the efforts of people like MLK were ‘apostolary’ (Berry says as much in the same essay, as would St Paul), but in every victory there is the threat of an even greater defeat. In this case, Fr Berry points out, the road to defeat is dotted with billboards featuring unneeded products, celebrity party-boys and their scantily-clad female counterparts, Cadillacs, etc. Whenever members of a class are given the go-ahead to the next stratum, the tendency for entitlement looms its ugly head. That’s probably somewhere in Weber, too.

But, as Fr Berry points out, the world has bestowed a certain dignity upon, as an example, African-Americans. It has bestowed a different dignity upon me. In reality, this is quite fixed; it cannot be changed in the foreseeable future–the immediate past has been too gruesome, too devastating, too utterly memorable. Make no mistake, however, I desire no less than Fr Berry too see the black community break the chains they still wear around their ankles, imposed from the outside or from within. But without sounding disrespectful, I hope, I think their position is enviable.

It’s enviable because the truth of the matter is that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. Which is to say, true dignity is found not in which window your class occupies in a strict system of stratification, but in the pure acceptance and thankfulness of and for the mercies of God. It’s precisely those that do that are the poor in spirit, and this poverty is much more easily grasped when one’s worldly position is lowly. Our Lord says as much.

But what about me? My position is not lowly and it probably never will be. To “put on” poverty like a jacket, I mean serious poverty, would be something of a farce. And yet, the image of reaching down with my two white hands on the third tier to “help” the brown and black hands on the fourth and fifth represents a fetish of another sort than that paltry American dream.

I guess I’ve always know how I’m to act in “my place” as in any: with humble gratitude, generosity and above all, thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, the cure-all of pride, malice, envy, and greed. Thanksgiving, Eucharist, the locus of solidarity, that solidarity that comes with awareness of the world in which we all really belong. Because in it we, from strata 1-5, are invited to realize the depths of our sins, repent, and feast gleefully, one with the other, on the food gleaned from the endlessly abundant fields. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that this is easily reached or in any way automatic, but rather get to work on its realization, within ourselves and amongst each other.

 

MLK and Makarios

I didn’t realize this when I decided to choose (if you could call it that) St Makarios as my patron saint when I was baptized almost two years ago now(!), but his feastly (an Orthodox word if their ever was one) celebration is right around the time of MLK Day. Last year, in fact, the 3rd Monday in January fell on the 19th. Such wonderful coincidences tend to lead any man to blog, one of those passions that rarely spring up within me and are usually defeated easily. This time, however, I’m succumbing.

I pondered in the shower (where I often go to have a think) on the morning of Martin Luther King Day: why are these two, so inspiring to me the both of them, so utterly different? They seem to represent two mutually exclusive poles or “models for the Christian life” or something, and implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) each argue for their own way’s superiority. A cursory glance at each man’s approach, especially from our modern point of view, could easily lead to the conclusion that MLK “engaged,” whereas Makarios simply “fled.”

Not only is this characterization fallacious, if not for its utter shallowness, but I think it misses the point. The shallow characterizer also runs the risk of pharisaism on either side.

But at what point do these fellows “kiss each other” as in Psalm 85? They share the classical virtues of courage, justice and certainly wisdom, but seem to direct them toward different aims, that is, physical and spiritual powers, respectively. One fought for the liberation of the oppressed and one for the liberation of his soul from sin. Yet there is a virtue that they share, I submit, and that is directed toward the same end: timeliness.

Timeliness is a tricky virtue because not only does it subsume the others, it also includes a perhaps more elusive one: self-knowledge. Knowing when to do what you need to do requires that you know, you. Knowing yourself might (and, for the vast majority of people does) preclude any ‘greatness’ you hope to achieve: you’re simply not the right person, in the right place, to do it. And there’s a greatness in knowing that.

Timeliness must be in relation to something, some goal or event in time or standing in relation to time. For the Christian, this thing is something like the coming of the Kingdom of God, not the revolution, not retirement, not even death. And this is doubly tricky, for where does the Kingdom of God stand in relation to time?

Fr Alexander Schmemann, one of my gurus of course, talks about the Kingdom of God as the future breaking into the present, most especially at the Eucharist. This paradoxical present/future relationship finds a fulcrum at what the ascetic fathers and zen masters might call, “the now,” or in a vertical as opposed to horizontal time-relationship to God and his kingdom. Living in this way is the primary mode of the timely man.

These two men were timely because their lives stood in a proportionate relationship to the Kingdom of God. They knew themselves, what they had to do, and how and when to do it. For Makarios, timeliness was manifested in patience and prayer. Fleeing to the desert to pray was, by testament of history, exactly what he was to do, for his role in the coming of the Kingdom of God was played well:

“They said of Abba Macarius the Great that he became, as it is written, a god upon earth, because, just as God protects the world, so Abba Macarius would cover the faults which he saw, as though he did not see them; and those which he heard, as though he did not hear them.” -The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Likewise, MLK was aware of his position in relation to this extra-temporal goal, and that was to be a man of impatience and action, bringing about the justice required in such a kingdom. Here’s a rather lengthy quotation from Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

Patience and urgency, engagement and flight, these are not exclusive because the goal is not simple, but is rather like a symphony–flutes move in and out and can’t reach low A’s, trombones play both fanfares and chorales, violins both soothe and slice, but when the whole comes into view, the contradictions seem much more like compliments.

 

Nietzsche the dogmatist?

So here’s an interesting and sort of backwards thought from history’s foremost critic of (everything, but mostly) Christianity:

144–”Religious Wars.”

“Religious war has signified the greatest progress of the masses hitherto; for it proves that the mass has begun to treat concepts with respect. Religious wars start only after the more refined quarrels between sects have refined reason in general to the point where even the mob becomes subtle and takes trifles seriously and actually considers it possible that the ‘eternal salvation of the soul’ might hinge on small differences between concepts.” -from The Gay Science

Today’s workaday atheist is befuddled. For this quotation by a man he presumably would hail as the “prophet of the death of God” reveals our Dawkinses and Hitchenses to be nothing more than all liberalism ever promised: soft, doe-eyed, melancholy, “scientific,” casual peaceniks who turn up their white noses at any nobility of mind and will. The mind and will of, say, Sts Athanasius or Nicholas in their determination to prevent the iota in homoiousios. Emperors’ thrones were gained and lost on these letters, and families were divided.

Of course, the mere divisiveness of these ideas does not guarantee their importance or the nobility of their adherents, and war and strife is never, ever to be praised, for the Orthodox Christian. But, in moments, one longs for the day (did it ever really exist) when the common people, the “mass,” in the public square spoke with conviction of matters high and lofty, and not the glossy, syrupy past and future mistakes of our cultural soap opera stars.

 

Sloth and Truth

I’ve become convinced of late that most of our problems in ethics, philosophy, being bored, to name a few, stem from our inability to be attentive. The inability to pay attention, I think, stems itself from Sloth. I suffer from this constantly.

Because I suffer from this, or rather am a perpetrator of this, I lack the ability to apprehend the truth in all moments and in all things. The problem with most all philosophical epistemology is that it takes as granted subjective and extra-subjective structures which are supposed to simply ‘work by themselves.’ The person and the world are, in other words, passive entities with respect to their relation to each other when it comes to knowledge, particularly knowledge of the truth.

I’m not suggesting that the intellect itself does not act upon the data that it is given (in the two greatest epistemologists, Kant and Heidegger, the mind transforms and shapes the data that is given–for Kant it’s “judgment” and for Heidegger the general structure of one’s being in the world), but what is often ignored in epistemology is that more fickle part of the human soul, the will. And the will makes all the difference, if one is interested in knowing the truth.

There’s a nifty etymological proof for this. In the Greek, as we know, the word for truth is aletheia. Heidegger’s great achievement (or crime, depending on how you look at it) was to disassociate “truth” from what he calls “the metaphysics of presence.” For him, truth is not something one can merely deduce from, say, 2+2. He thinks there are more questions to ask about this problem, e.g., “what is the ground of numbers?”, or “do two and two always make four? What if I tie two ropes with two knots each together?”, or better yet, “what makes 2+2=4 meaningful?” It’s just not so easy.

So he takes a word like aletheia and refuses it mere idenfication with what we understand to be truth, for even the word itself is more complex. We have the negative particle a- modifying lethe which, according to Heidegger’s understanding has connotations of “hiddenness” or being “concealed.” Literally, truth, which in normal circumstances is “hidden,” reveals itself in those rare moments of “ah! I get it!”–thus, truth is un-concealment.

However, that still leaves me, the knower, a passive observer. Truth reveals itself; big deal. What is my active participation, that lovely Christian word, in the Truth? Am I deified by simply standing there and consuming? Well, no, I think. Lethe is also known to be the river of forgetfulness. Here I’ll quote from Florensky, who was the inspiration for this little thought:

“Connected with this later nuance [forgetfulness] of the root lath are: lethe, the Doric latha, lathosuna, lesmosuna, lestis, i.e., forgetting and forgetfulness; lethedanos, i.e., compelling one to forget; lethargos, i.e., forgetting and, therefrom, lethargos, a summons to sleep, Schlafsucht, as the desire to immerse oneself in a stage of forgetting and unconsciousness, and, further, the name of a pathological sleep, lethargy.”

So there seems to be an interaction here between myself as a knower possessing an intellect and my ethical and volitional actions which include attentiveness, and the truth “out there” to be known. I guess that’s why they say the best theology is written by saints.

 

The Ascension-what’s the deal?

Over the past year or so, I’ve sometimes found myself thinking: Was Christ playing a dirty trick? It’s a simple thought, really. With a certain perspective and orientation to the world, one can find it easy to accept the birth, death and resurrection of our Lord. But then He up and leaves.

Of course, it’s not that simple, you know. Reading on, our Lord makes clear the function of his ascension: sending the Spirit in order to reveal things to us he sort of can’t say right now. But for some of us sinners, those of us for whom, out of our own inattentiveness, the Holy Spirit is not as evident or present as the God-man in all his physical splendor and lovely ordinariness. So still, why did Emmanuel go and replace his presence with someone so elusive?

I hadn’t really considered this before having a series of conversations (of the late-night/early-morning, half-drunken sort) with a friend of mine last year when both of us were working on our respective theses for philosophy degrees. (I realize now that I’m never going to be able to keep my promise to myself to avoid discussing pomo philosophy at all costs on this blog. And it’s only post 2! sigh.) His was something hip and pomo like, “Envisioning and Mapping a Postmodern Understanding of Prayer”–looking at Derrida’s and Lyotard’s books on Augustine’s Confessions. (Mine was far, far less hip and pomo, and far, far less good.) A major theme of these angst-ridden Frenchmen is absence. ‘Woe are we! Meaning is absent, being is absent, and of course God, too!’ they pout.

But this is what got me thinking. Couldn’t Christ have just stuck around? Anyway, wouldn’t it be sort of fun to walk through walls and have x-ray vision and stuff, and play really great practical jokes?

At some point I resigned this problem to my mental Faith Bin to return to when I have some more virtue and prayer under my belt (which is to say, it’s going to get real dusty, along with the Mary’s Perpetual Virginity and the What Makes the Sky Blue? and the Why Israel?? problems that have been sitting in there for years). The reason I’m writing about this now is because I found some new insight this morning via one of my gurus, Hans Urs von Balthasar–my favorite Catholic theologian. Here is a couple of excerpts from his A Theological Anthropology (1963; English 1967).

“The Ascension is the final ‘divinization’ of the completed mission, its passage into the eternity of the Father. It is the lifting up of the whole cycle of actions and suffering into the potency of God, apparently in distancing it from earthly events. But the Ascension is not a turning away or an alienation from earth; rather, it is a regular relationship to earth, but one no longer bound to specific times and places, and high enough to relate all times and places to itself…If there had been no Ascension it would have seemed as if those people were privileged who happened to be the contemporaries of Jesus, or who stood nearer in time to early Christianity, because the historical working-out of an idea is a wave moving out concentrically, spreading, but slowly losing its force as it does so” (292).

“This extraordinary continuation, this passage of the Word into something even greater and ultimate, the surprise of the transfigured end becoming a new beginning, the sending of a new divine person, outshines anything that might suggest an ‘atmosphere of the end.’ In God there is no end, only a breakup of what appeared to be final and finite, showing that it is really infinite; and it is to be understood not only backward in time, but forward, prophetically” (294).

Voilá. In the Ascension, our Lord rises to the Father like a helium balloon, growing larger and larger, bringing with him all the stuff (ουσία) of the world, being of this “stuff” himself, and thus creating the possibility for the great Athanasian formula, “God became man so that man might become God.” The Ascension is Christ’s divinization and expansion of space and time, making space spacious and time timeless. The Ascension is no leave-taking, but an imbibing, a soaking of the world through the Spirit, and thus, through him, “we live and move and have our being.”

 

Canticle for Betty

I’m going to go ahead and skip the obligatory introductory blog, except to say Hello to all of you, my friends.

Let’s get down to business.

“The humble are like nightingales that hide in ravines and spread joy to the souls of men with their sweet songs.” -Elder Paisios

I can point to a place in my past, maybe four years ago–it’s like a chasm separating thoughts I can remember having, and this other self that I barely recognize. Cursory glances at my writings before this point, private or otherwise, betray the thoughts of an almost embarrassingly enthusiastic and emotional effigy of myself. It’s pretty painful. That pain, like most of our experiences, is probably much more common than I think it is. And I still think I’ve got something of that self in me left.

Anyway, in seventh grade or so, we had to write an essay in response to the prompt, “Who is your hero and why?” Most of my classmates wrote about their dads, or their athletic idols, or their Harriet Tubmans and MLK’s. Why did I write about Charles Schulz, the pen behind Peanuts?

My primary source for this essay was an obituary that had just been written, telling of his battle with colon cancer, the disappointment of being robbed of the ability to continue with his work, his love for his wife, Jeannie (who would herself die later that year), and an introductory essay to the first Peanuts collection published in Italian, written by Umberto Eco, analyzing Schulz’ Freudian and Adlerian projections that obtained existence in the beloved characters, Charlie Brown, Linus, the Red-Haired Girl, and the curious absence of identity ascribed to adults–very high-minded stuff.

Schulz was a divorcée and a lapsed Methodist Sunday School teacher whose comics dealt with, above all, disappointment (cf. Lucy’s dirty football trick, which makes me think that the author of The Gospel According to Peanuts should have reconsidered, and written about Schopenhauer instead, or at least Ecclesiastes). What did my seventh-grade mind, revealed to be more melancholic than I remember, find heroic about all this?

I should first recall my own experience with Peanuts. Here it is:

I’m nine. I’m staying the weekend at my grandparents’ place on the other side of town—the quieter, more autumnal side, as I remember it, where the houses are closer together and the grass isn’t so coarse as in our sprawling, country mega-yard–it’s funny that the tight space incited in me just the opposite of claustrophobia. I spend the mornings and afternoons in the basement, and between soccer games and meals (Grandma always used to put sugar on our Rice Krispies, ah!), I read from their assortment of paperback Peanuts collections.

Reading Peanuts was a very sensual experience; not only the beautiful simplicity of the faces and scenery, and the depth of meaning found in the three- or four-panel dialogues (the best ones were without words altogether), but also the smell. That lovely, old book smell. That smell that I can’t have without thinking of my grandma. And this is the heroic part.

You see, my grandma Vredevoogd was a saint. She was a nightingale, hidden in a ravine—grey, weathered and warm. She was most herself when she tucked me in, and when she chastised me. Her sweet songs (coupled with Grandpa’s whistling—always the same, ancient tune that my mother will now also occasionally absent-mindedly warble) were her moments of sainthood in tenderness and in righteous anger, though most often she was even-keeled, steady, curly-haired, tall and wiry. To me, the varicose veins around her ankles, despite her attempts at concealment with dark hosiery, were like purple hearts—the accolades for a life lived well.

These days, as in those days, I have trouble separating Peanuts from Grandma in my mind. She, like Schulz, knew that life, especially life in Dutch West Michigan, is mundane. She knew the “eternal recurrence of the same”—the same football retracted at the same moment, the same futility of flying a kite with a will of its own, the same faceless teachers and uncompromising seasons. The same lawns, the same houses, the same friends, the same children.

She knew all of this, but she beat it. Her death occurred not long before I wrote that essay. It was not a death that she succumbed to. It was an exercise in overcoming. It was graceful, humble, and meek. It was magnanimous and servant-heart shimmered as her body faded and shriveled; it was almost like she prepared the post-funeral ham sandwiches before her death, just so we wouldn’t be bothered. (I think the only way to die, and to live, is magnanimously, but few can.) My essay honored Charles Schulz because he was, in the end, honest about what is, and must be overcome. Charlie told me how great my grandma was, how she had the courage and stamina to accept the grace of God and continue to wade through the thickness of the mundane, finding and receiving those moments of utter harmony that occur ever so often if you can just pay attention (cf. Charlie Brown’s crooked line grin). I didn’t know it then, but I was writing an ode or a prayer to her, hidden beneath what was probably a very dry, poorly written biographical sketch of a curious sort of existentialist that spoke with consequence of his diligence (in his 50-year career he took just one vacation, in 1997) and honorable life as a Christian, and a Sunday School teacher (I must have skipped the lapsed part in my disappointment and desire for him to be the hero I wished he was).

My grandma, Betty, was Schulz’ salvation in my mind. She was the perfect no-hitter, the breezy day when the cumulus clouds creep across the ocean of a sky and the blue hits the red of your kite just as elegantly as the wind. She was the Red-haired Girl’s peck on the cheek, Snoopy’s faithful return of the stick, and the vast, towering hillside of powdery snow just begging to be sledded upon. She was everything that makes a boy feel at home, assured, and supported in the senseless return of the same. And each night I drive on I-196 on the cliff that overlooks the small Grand Rapids skyline, it’s like Christmas Eve after Grandma’s House, and I’ve still got 40 minutes to sleep in the backseat before we get home.

 

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