Camassia

Let’s see, where was I? Oh yes, I had just left Santa Barbara. I went on up Highway 101 to the picturesque seaside town of Pismo Beach.

Let me say that, until this trip, I had never gone camping by myself before. My mother had always handled these things as I was growing up, and as an adult I’d never particularly wanted to camp. I like being in nature, but the camping part of camping — pitching a tent, sleeping on the ground, and worst of all, having no plumbing — had never particularly appealed to me. But I knew that traveling for three months on no income could get awfully expensive, so I called upon the PMC network and borrowed or bought the equipment, up to and including the tent.

The tent was loaned to me by a man approaching middle age, who had used it years earlier on his bicycle trip to Alaska. (Such jockitude is remarkably common at PMC, as bookish as everyone is.) When he’d first offered it to me, he was careful to set low expectations for it, saying, “Well, it’s a tent. It’ll keep the rain off.”

When I first left L.A. I stopped by his house and picked it up. He wasn’t there, but his wife was, and she attempted to show me how to put it together. Except it had been so long since she’d done it that she couldn’t really remember, and her five-year-old son was “helping,” which only made things more confusing. I was filled with dread when I tried to pitch it at Carpenteria Beach, but somehow it went up quite easily. It was a sort of modified umbrella design, with two curved rods crossing over the top and two supporting rods that bowed out sideways. I only put in three of them, but it seemed like enough to hold up the tent, so I slept in it peacefully enough, given the trains and all.

So I was pretty confident when I got to Pismo Beach. Although my first problem was finding the campground. Unlike in Carpenteria, there were a number of them to choose from, in varying degrees of development, and some were already full. But eventually I found one, which I think was also in a state park, separated from the beach by a row of trees. It was also pretty busy, and I felt a bit self-conscious walking by the other campers in my Starbucks-in-Santa-Barbara outfit. But I found a bare site, looking rather open and exposed but habitable enough.

I decided that since the first raising of the tent was so easy, I’d try to do it the proper way, which was to put in all four rods as it lay flat and then pop it up. That was how the tent’s owner had done it, his wife told me; he could get it up in five minutes. So I figured I should be able to do that, and as usual, pride goeth before a fall.

I got lost in the confusion of sleeves that ran across the tent, and had to pull rods out and try again. It grew darker. My wrist started to itch. I realized mosquitoes were buzzing all around me, and that patch of thick grass behind the campsite must be swamp. Perhaps that was why no one had claimed my spot before. And then I heard a train rumble by. After the previous night I had sworn that I would not camp next to railroad tracks ever again, but here they were deviously hidden by trees.

It kept getting darker, and harder to see what I was doing. I did not have the means to light a fire. And so, with a mounting sense of humiliation, I forfeited the $20 entrance fee, gathered up the tent (I would not realize until much later that I’d left a rod behind) and headed into town to look for a motel.

I was still conscious of cost, so I sought out a slightly run-down motel that was off the main road, with the requisite Indian guy manning the counter. I asked him if he had a room available, and he asked me how many people were in my party.

“It’s just me,” I said.

He gave me the strangest expression, which I’ll never forget. He stared at me and drew back slightly, looking shocked and almost … disgusted. As if I’d put in a special request to stock it with wall chains and Vaseline. But he recovered himself and checked his computer, and told me all he had left was a room with two beds for $85.

That’s about as cheap as it gets in these California tourist towns, so I told him I’d take it. He asked me if I wanted to see the room first.

I hadn’t expected that question. (It’s not unusual with cheap motels, as it turned out.) “Um… sure.”

“I’ll meet you there,” he said, and disappeared out the back door.

I was getting freaked. Why was he acting so strangely? What had I done wrong? And for the second time that evening, I fled the scene. I jumped into my car and drove off without meeting him, which turned out to be just as well because I was illegally parked.

I found another motel, this one rather nicer actually, for the same price. I lay down on the bed and tried to reassure myself that this whole comedy of errors didn’t mean that I was a total idiot. I was just learning, I told myself. You make these mistakes, you pay the money, and that way you learn not to do it again.

This came to be a theme on the road, as much as anything else. By leaving my routine life I was in some ways liberated, but I was also leaving my field of competency. I had come to L.A. as a northern Californian, a business reporter who didn’t know anything about business, and later a churchgoer who didn’t know anything about church. But after nine years, I had earned a certain seniority, not a high station in life but respectable enough. Now — I saw clearly for the first time — all that was gone. I was back to the beginning, learning everything anew.

It occurred to me that this might be harder than I thought.

1. Sometimes beginnings aren’t so simple.
Linkin Park, “Shadow of the Day.” A song getting a lot of radio play at around the time I left, about leaving your life behind and … doing what I’m not sure. Maybe killing yourself, who knows?

2. You give and take away.
Matt & Beth Redman, “Blessed Be Your Name.” I think the version I heard was by the Newsboys, but I’m not sure. A good song for traveling when you don’t know where you’re going.

3. And when we meet — as I’m sure we will — all that was there will be there still.
Dido, “White Flag.” A song about (to steal a phrase from a different artist) all that you can’t leave behind.

4. I dream of gardens in the desert sand.
Sting, “Desert Rose.” I spent a lot of time in deserts on this trip.

5. I blame it on the Cuervo.
Carrie Underwood, “Last Name.” As advertised, once you travel into Red America, you hear a lot more country music (at least in the southern half of the country).

6. Freeway like a river cuts through this land.
U2, “Heartland.” A song I’d owned for 19 years but didn’t think about much until I was doing what Bono was doing when writing the lyrics, namely roaming the highways of the U.S.

7. It was summertime in northern Michigan.
Kid Rock, “All Summer Long.” I never got to Michigan, but I sure heard this song a lot.

8. You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet song.
Third Day, “You Are So Good to Me.” Like Rilina, I’d first heard this in church, but going out into the land of CCM stations I also heard it covered with actual production values. I associate it especially with Interstate 84 through the Columbia Gorge, which is one of the most beautiful places on God’s green earth.

9. My traveling companions are ghosts and empty sockets.
Paul Simon, “Graceland.” Which I in fact visited, but that’s another story.

10. I won’t give up if you don’t give up.
Train, “Calling All Angels.” My trip involved a lot more death than I expected. That calls for a good lamentation song.

11. I had a dream last night. The world was set on fire.
Oingo Boingo, “Just Another Day.” A somewhat different response to the deathiness of the trip was listening to this album, Dead Man’s Party, which regards death with morbid whimsy.

12. If it was up to me, I’d show it every day.
Darryl Worley, “Have You Forgotten?” More country music, this one a pro-Iraq-war song. It gave me one of those definite “Gee, I’m not in L.A. any more” moments.

13. A million miles, a million miles.
Cracker, “Low.” A song that actually came out in 1993, but seems to be having a radio revival this year.

14. Her eyes are swimming-pool blue, dumb bells on a diving board.
U2, “Miami.” I never got as far south as Miami, but it makes a good mood piece for all of Florida.

15. No more cold iron shackles on my feet.
Albert Brumley, “I’ll Fly Away.” I heard Jars of Clay cover it while I was driving through Pennsylvania.

16. The men I knew ain’t seen me since I left the sheets and hit the Strip.
Luscious Jackson, “Sexy Hypnotist.” A song about Las Vegas.

17. You’ve got the universe reclining in your hair.
T-Rex, “Jeepster.” Probably my favorite radio station that I stumbled across was WXRT in Chicago, partly because they played oldies that I’d never heard before.

18. Why wait any longer for the one you love, when he’s standing in front of you?
Bob Dylan, “Lay Lady Lay.” The radio format you’re most likely to hear out in the middle of nowhere, even more than country and CCM, is classic rock. So after somehow not hearing this song all my life I got to know it pretty well.

19. If you’re not really here, the stars don’t even matter.
Sam Sparro, “Black and Gold.” Showing that Euro disco can be about searching for God too.

20. You talk about your searching, but I think it’s all for show.
Stephen Stills, “Know You Got to Run.” A line of which I occasionally accused myself.

Sorry posting has been sparse lately. I see that Rilina has revived the lyrics meme from a few years back. I still don’t really have an iTunes library, but while I was traveling I listened to a lot of music in a lot of different radio markets, as well as my own collection, and there are some songs that I know I’ll forever associate with this trip. So here are some quotations — see if you can identify the title and artist. I do mean to write more about the journey, really I do…

1. Sometimes beginnings aren’t so simple.

2. You give and take away.

3. And when we meet — as I’m sure we will — all that was there will be there still.

4. I dream of gardens in the desert sand.

5. I blame it on the Cuervo.

6. Freeway like a river cuts through this land.

7. It was summertime in northern Michigan.

8. You are beautiful, my sweet, sweet song.

9. My traveling companions are ghosts and empty sockets.

10. I won’t give up if you don’t give up.

11. I had a dream last night. The world was set on fire.

12. If it was up to me, I’d show it every day.

13. A million miles, a million miles.

14. Her eyes are swimming-pool blue, dumb bells on a diving board.

15. No more cold iron shackles on my feet.

16. The men I knew ain’t seen me since I left the sheets and hit the Strip.

17. You’ve got the universe reclining in your hair.

18. Why wait any longer for the one you love, when he’s standing in front of you?

19. If you’re not really here, the stars don’t even matter.

20. You talk about your searching, but I think it’s all for show.

I haven’t really had any idea what I want to do about church here in Washington. I really don’t know what I believe any more — I mean, even less than I ever did — yet I can’t really imagine living without a spiritual community. It’s become such a big part of my life. So I guess it was inevitable that I wound up visiting the Unitarian Universalists.

Actually, I’d been interesting in visiting the Universalist National Memorial Church ever since reading the Mystery Worshipper piece about it some years back. It comes from the Universalist rather than the Unitarian branch of the denomination, and its service was in a lot of ways a basic mainline service, with hymns, psalms, the Lord’s Prayer, and communion. There were a few signs that we were in a UU church though. The first reading was from an epistle (I think Philippians) but the second reading, which I would have expected to be from the Gospels, was actually something from a book by a Buddhist nun. Also, when we sang the Doxology the ending was different somehow. (I don’t know exactly what it said, because I was halfway through singing “Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost” before noticing something was off.)

Anyway, my special interest in going on that particular day was the class afterwards, which was on the history of Christian Universalism. This was apparently one of a series, the previous classes having gone through Scripture, while this one covered the history from the patristic era through the Middle Ages. The teacher, a shaggy young intellectual (which made him rather conspicuous, as the congregation was largely middle-aged) gave us handouts that we spent the class reading aloud, stopping to discuss here and there. I thought, after a while, that it seemed vaguely familiar, and I saw that it had been printed from the Christian Universalist website, which I had stumbled across and read about a year earlier. As it turned out, the teacher, Eric Stetson, is the group’s executive director.

Realizing this was interesting and fun, because I got to ask some of the questions that had come to mind when I first read the piece. Since I had just been reading Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine, in fact, I took issue with the article’s way of making it sound like he made some radical break from the past. Eric said that it was true it wasn’t really that simple; the North African church that Augustine grew up in was pretty damnation-oriented already.

Actually, the overarching thing that struck me was that as much as the CU article makes the doctrine of eternal damnation to be a barbaric alien import into the early Church, the Church did not seem to see the disagreement as that big a deal. Augustine converted under the influence of Ambrose, who could read Greek and was a big fan of Origen. And the groups that actually split off in Augustine’s time — the Donatists and the Pelagians — were not liberals by any stretch, and in fact wanted the Church to be rather more exclusive than it was becoming. Universalism did not seem to be a cause that anyone was willing to form an alternative organization for, which seemed to lead to an inexorable decline in the idea’s currency until the Reformation.

Eric suggested that, at the time things are happening, people don’t always realize what will be important in the long run. All the universalists of the patristic era did, in fact, believe in post-mortem punishment; the question was how long it would last. So speculating on what would happen at the end of time maybe didn’t seem worth all that trouble, given all the more immediate issues the Church was dealing with. But Eric seems to feel, as I do, that the finitude of punishment changes the whole complexion of God, and the universe itself. But apparently not all universalists have seen it that way.

I also remarked, somewhere late in the reading, “So the message I’m getting here is that the Pope really is the Antichrist.” I was kidding, but only half. What’s interesting about that particular narrative of universalism is that it pretty much follows the familiar low-Protestant contours of a true Church corrupted by Constantine, Rome, and the powers associated therewith. And like Marvin, I’ve been suspecting lately that that story is a bit too simple.

One of the books I read during my time off was Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace. I may post about it sometime, though without the Cliff’s Notes blog version like I had for Christ and Horrors, I don’t know if I can remember enough about it. However, on a recent thread at the Internet Monk somebody posted a striking quote from it:

But imagine speaking to people (as I have) whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned, and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. Your point to them–we should not retaliate? Why not? I say–the only means of prohibiting violence by us is to insist that violence is only legitimate when it comes from God. Violence thrives today, secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword. It takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence is a result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land–soaked in the blood of the innocent, the idea will invariably die, like other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.

It’s not enough to convince me of the need for eternal damnation, but it certainly gives me pause before claiming that such a doctrine could only have been invented by the powerful to serve their own interests. And it was certainly in the quiet of the suburb that we were sitting there talking about how the evil Roman apparatus had screwed everything up.

But anyway, I enjoyed talking with Eric. He’s a very interesting guy, and I might go back to his class next month and argue with him some more.

Now, you may notice the title of this post mentions two Sundays. Well, this past Sunday I didn’t go to church, and only one really interesting thing happened, so this story will be much shorter. But for some reason thinking about it endlessly amuses me.

A little before noon I was walking through a mall in Friendship Heights, a few miles from the house. The shops weren’t open yet and it was nearly empty, but I noticed a man in a suit and tie walking towards me. He was preceded by two little girls in full rambunctious mode, and he was trying to tell them in a commanding voice not to run off. As we passed each other I saw his face in the corner of my eye, and I thought, That’s George Stephanopoulos.

I wouldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles that it was him, since I only looked at him for a second before he noticed me eyeing him, so I moved on. But after I went home I googled him and found out that, sure enough, he has two daughters, aged three and six. And, you know, I AM in Washington.

It’s funny, in nine years of living in L.A. I never bumped into a celebrity out in public like that, and here I’ve been in Washington a month and look what happens. Between the malls and the churches, this place is full of surprises.

The discussion in the last post about the sex appeal of villains reminded me that, back when I was in L.A. in August, Wess emailed me this post, called “A Pacifist Ethic of Romantic Love.” I never got around to responding, largely because I had such a conflicted reaction to it. On the one hand, I’ve made similar critiques of our society’s obsession with romantic love myself. On the other hand, it reminds me of exactly what totally frustrated me whenever I tried to talk with Christians about this subject, especially when I was in a relationship myself.

As an ancillary note, I think Halden misunderstands the Death Cab for Cutie song. When I heard it, I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I figured it was a deliberately creepy stalker song, like “Every Breath You Take.” And after reading the post I did some googling, and apparently that was the case. Whether or not the public understands it that way is an open question — a lot of people misunderstood “Every Breath You Take” — but going by online fora like this one, at least, a large number of listeners seem to hear it that way. So while it certainly is a disturbing song, the ambivalence around it makes it hard for me to believe that it’s really “the romantic mythos of our age.” You’d think if it were really that, no one would notice anything wrong with it.

But anyway, my real issue with the post is that it doesn’t quite live up to its title. Yes, it’s pacifist, it’s ethical, and it’s about love, but it’s not really a pacifist ethic of romantic love. It just makes some general statements about love that could apply to any Christian relationship. And while it’s true that all relationships have some things in common, I don’t think you can talk about romantic love without acknowledging what makes it different.

For one thing, it’s a chosen relationship. You can’t pick your relatives and you often can’t pick your neighbors, but you do pick your sex partners. This is true even in arranged marriages: it’s just the parents who do the picking. Either way, this act of choosing must be fueled by some desire or will, again by either the partners in question or by whoever else has an interest in the union (or both).

The thing about desire, though, is that it’s pretty rare for two people to desire each other exactly the same amount at exactly the same time. So we get a chase. It usually isn’t a literal chase, but somebody goes a-courting somebody else. Again, arranging the union just bumps the process up to the level of the parents (which is why such arrangements are often ruinously expensive for one or both families, in cultures that do that). And chases, of course, can go horribly wrong, but generally people really enjoy them. The Bible, in fact, sometimes uses sexual pursuit as a metaphor for God’s quest to win over humanity, and vice versa. But in any case, I don’t see how any sex would ever even happen without a little pursuit.

The thing that’s most conspicuously different about romantic love, though, is its exclusivity. After all, Christians are supposed to be sexually monogamous, in sharp contrast to the general call to spread one’s love promiscuously over friend and enemy alike. In fact, since I grew up around some hippies who believed in free love to varying degrees, I can readily imagine them nodding along with everything Halden wrote and saying, see, that’s why monogamy is the problem. It’s inherently possessive to tell a person to sleep with only you for their whole life! I’m not an advocate of free love, but I can see how the ideal of universal and egalitarian benevolence that we Westerners inherited from our Christian ethics would logically lead to that position. And it’s also not difficult to see why monogamy would sharpen the aspects of choice and pursuit already mentioned. If you only get one shot, you’d really want it to be the right person.

But how do you choose that person? On what criteria? And for that matter, why bother with the whole thing? This is where these conversations seem to hit a dead end. Most Christians, at least from the branches that I know, don’t want to say that marriage is inherently better than celibacy, or that one person is inherently better than another. And yet, somehow you have to decide whether or not you’re going to get married, and if the latter, whom you’re going to marry. Something about the whole process seems to go against the ideal of universal, self-emptying love that Halden describes.

In his earlier post on the subject, someone asked Halden how dating is supposed to work under this philosophy. He suggests, “I think in some ways we have to view dating with as little seriousness as possible.” Which points up, to me, a paradox underlying this critique of romantic love in our culture: yes, in one way it’s the be-all and end-all, and yet, it’s also strangely trivial. In the Old Testament, marriages are collective affairs involving large financial exchanges, which completely change over the wife’s identity to that of another clan, secure all-important heirs, and are enforced by stonings. In our society, multiple relationships and break-ups are personal affairs that, if they go afoul, people are expected to just get over. Is our society really more serious and more predatory about romantic love than most others? Or is there something deeper in the human condition that keeps haunting us in different ways?

When I wrote that The Dark Knight got under my skin, I didn’t know how true that was. I figured I’d just post about it and move on, but for some reason I can’t stop thinking about it. I suppose that it’s not surprising, given that work is depressing in a financial crisis and home is depressing with a dying grandmother, that I’d crave some escapism. But it’s starting to annoy me. What’s going on here?

When my mother visited me in L.A. last December, we went to the ballet for the first time in many years. (Hang in with me, this is actually not a tangent.) I had been captivated by ballet as a very young child, and having grown into my hyper-analytical self, I started thinking about why. I told my mother that watching it made me think of the Christian concept of a “glorified body” — the body you have after you’re resurrected, which is like your own and yet somehow better. The ballet seemed to offer me the closest vision I’d get to what a glorified body would be like, or at least what I would like it to be like. It’s not really about being always young and pretty and athletic, though that’s certainly appealing. It’s the idea of a body that somehow lives in perfect concord with the mind and soul. In dancing — if it’s done right — thoughts and feelings need no words, as the body simply becomes them. And it can do so freely, without the usual encumbrances of weakness, pain, hunger, autonomic instincts, and finally, death.

Superheroes — which I also loved as a very young child — are even more explicit visions of a transfigured body. Michael Chabon, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek but still lyrical essay on the superhero costume, made this very point:

Here is a central paradox of superhero attire: … it ultimately takes its deepest meaning and serves its primary function in the depiction of the naked human form, unfettered, perfect, and free. … our costume conceals nothing, reveals everything: it is our secret skin, exposed and exposing us for all the world to see. Superheroism is a kind of transvestism; our superdrag serves at once to obscure the exterior self that no longer defines us while betraying, with half-unconscious panache, the truth of the story we carry in our hearts, the story of our transformation, of our story’s recommencement, of our rebirth into the world of adventure, of story itself.

Chabon points out that movie costumes can’t do this as well as comic books, because they are trapped in the literalism of fabric and latex. But I think that movies can still portray the transfigured body. And The Dark Knight, for all its scaling-back of the cartoonish elements it inherited, still draws its energy from that vision.

It probably says something about our time — a time when it is assumed that darkness means realism, and realism means maturity — that the person in the movie who most perfectly gets this rapturous physical transcendence is the villain. Theoretically the Joker has no superpowers, but actually his body does whatever he wants it to do: he can appear and disappear as he likes, call up reserves of improbable physical strength, never miss his target even when he’s not looking where he’s shooting, and, most importantly, never fear injury or death. This is quite a contrast to Batman, who can do awesome things but still has to go home and messily stitch up his wounds, go through the rounds of business meetings and cocktail parties to fund these superpowers, and suffer the pangs of sexual desire for someone he can’t have.

The Joker doesn’t have to deal with any of that, including the last, which makes it all the more interesting that he’s apparently attracted hordes of groupies. The other day I caught up with a LiveJournalist who writes interestingly about fantasy fiction, and she complained that the movie brought a swarm of newbies into the online communities who want to sleep with the Joker. Which is … disturbing, but to some extent understandable. I mentioned in my own post that the Joker had a weird sexual magnetism, but it seemed best not to dwell on it.

But how could this happen with a character who’s not only evil, but totally uninterested in sex? It’s true that Heath Ledger was a good-looking guy, and even though they buried him in splotchy greasepaint and dirty hair, a hint of it still leaks out. The filmmakers also did a great job of making him a Man of Mystery, which usually makes a person sexier, or scarier, or both. But I wonder if the attraction mainly comes from the sense that he has a sort of magical body. Sex is itself the main source of transfiguration in our earthly lives; in the normal course of things, it turns us from children into adults, and then into spouses, into parents, into grandparents. If we decide we’re gay, or polyamorous, or get divorced or take vows of celibacy, this transfigures us in other ways. So even if the Joker probably wouldn’t have sex in the animalistic way it’s been done since the Pre-Cambrian flatworms, he holds out the possibility of something even more transforming.

The fact that this alluring prospect is tied to absolute evil is bad enough. But I think I’m feeling this so acutely because the desire for transfiguration has become so achingly powerful in me. I think I’ve partly absorbed the state of mind of my grandmother, who is so terribly aware of her body’s limits, and who longs for death, and yet still fears it. Death is a transfiguration, but into what? Do we dare hope for a glorified body, that becomes wholly who we are? And if so, will it show us as heroes, or as monsters?

OK, so I’m late to the party. I don’t go to the movies a lot, and with all the traveling of late, I’ve gone to them even less. But yesterday I was feeling strangely sluggish and zonked, so I went off to one of the few theaters where The Dark Knight is still playing (which also usefully taught me how to get to Arlington by rail). And it certainly woke me up.

Overall, I liked it. I haven’t seen Batman Begins, so this was the first time I saw Christian Bale as the Batman, but I dug the choice. It didn’t bother me, as it seemed to bother some others, that he spoke in a weird hoarse whisper as Batman — hey, why haven’t other superheroes thought to disguise their voices as well as their faces? And Heath Ledger was as compelling as everyone says. It wasn’t exactly acting, in the sense of playing a person who resembles anyone from real life; it was more like a piece of performance art embodying something from the deep recesses of the psyche. And he exuded a weird sexuality that was super creepy, given the general loathsomeness of the character.

I do agree with those critics who thought the film was overstuffed. The plot was so complicated that things went by too soon and had to be cut off too early. But I suppose sometime the extended DVD edition is going to come out, and fans can enjoy repeat viewings trying to figure out the curlicues.

The movie does get under the skin, for reasons that are hard to pin down. Probably a lot of it had to do with the fact that the Joker is conceived as more or less an embodiment of pure evil, and it’s always fascinating to see what people think pure evil looks like. After all, most of us don’t run into pure evil in daily life; we run into bits and pieces of it mingled with other things.

The major dilemma the film sets up is between goodness and power. The Joker’s total ruthlessness makes him powerful, while the good guys handicap themselves by having principles. Sometimes the movie makes this convincing, and sometimes not. In real life, I have trouble imagining that someone as nakedly antisocial as the Joker could actually become a criminal mastermind. You’d think that his habit of killing his confederates would quickly become known in the underworld, and he wouldn’t keep finding people to work for him the way he does. And he would need a vast network indeed not just to execute his plans, but to know all the things he knows, and even to attend to his daily needs while keeping his identity a secret. To a great extent you really have to see him as having supernatural powers, such as offscreen teleportation, to believe that he gets as far as he does.

On the other hand, a striking, but totally unacknowledged, source of his power is the fact that he actually serves something greater than himself. The Joker doesn’t care about his own life and seems impervious to pain, which is why when he threatens people with a suicide bomb in his coat, they believe he’d do it. What he cares about is spreading evil. It’s made clear at several points that he actually wants the Batman to kill him, because that would corrupt the Batman.

So actually, when the Joker claims his corruptions are showing that people are like him, this is not true. What he’s actually doing is trying to show that whatever their professed ideals, in a pinch people fall back to their basic animal feelings, such as survival (in the ferry-boat business) or grief (Harvey Dent). However, the Joker himself does not share these feelings. Whatever he is, he is not an animal. He values some otherworldly principle of destruction more than he cares about anything of the flesh.

In that sense, the Joker and the Batman are alike, though in the opposite way than the Joker says. They are the film’s two most perfect idealists. The Joker is willing to sacrifice life, limb and money for his god; the Batman is willing to sacrifice those along with things at least as important to a social animal: loved ones and reputation. And the rest of us, I suppose, have to pray that God is merciful enough that our salvation does not depend on such self-willed perfection.

As many of you know, when I am not in my secret blogger identity I am disguised as a mild-mannered business reporter. And as you might imagine, the job has been rather sobering lately. I don’t post about work — indeed, my paper recently adopted a blogging policy that ensures that — but the meltdown on Wall Street reminds me of a conversation I was in a couple years ago.

I was at a seminar that the CFA Institute puts on periodically to help journalists read financial statements. (A very good thing of them to do, I might add.) A bond trader was telling me and another journalist about his company’s past dealings with Enron. Even before the company collapsed, the place frightened him, for two reasons. One, he did not understand what they did. They had a great number of businesses scattered around the world, and reported revenue streams from mysterious sources. Secondly, he said, they were bullies. At one point when he criticized one of the management’s new schemes, the executive office got on the horn with his boss, suggesting that the bond trader might find another occupation because he was “not a believer.”

The other reporter said she’d run into similar attitudes when she was covering dot-coms during the tech boom. In particular, she remembered confronting the management of eToys with their hemorrhaging balance sheets, and being told, “You just don’t get it.”

Now, I know that I can be guilty of reading religious themes into everything; but there are times, like this, when they come and smack you in the face. There is always an element of faith in investing, since you are placing your bets on a future that you cannot know for sure. But what this conversation brought out was how some companies, especially those with shady dealings, demand faith in those with esoteric knowledge. And I suppose those who think they possess esoteric knowledge can even fool themselves; the CEO of eToys, in fact, went down with his ship.

I’d be hard pressed to think of a business more esoteric than investment banking. Although I frequently call on investment banks for research on other companies, I have not covered them as businesses particularly. But when I’ve looked at their SEC filings, they’ve been on a whole different order of complexity than the filings of your average widget-making enterprise. And it turns out that I’m not the only one who finds them confusing. As the Motley Fool pointed out recently, no less a luminary than Warren Buffett read one investment bank’s annual report and “highlighted 25 pages where he did not understand what he had read.”

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about this problem a while ago: that these days investors’ problem is not always failure to disclose, but companies shuffling their money around in such complex structures that only a few people have the time and the expertise and the patience to find out what’s really going on. The first investigators of Enron spent a month or more at their tasks, and that’s not unusual. The accountant who led our seminar, in fact, said he spent a month of 15-hour days digging into the books of Amerco just before it went bankrupt.

But what the conversation between the journalist and the bond trader highlighted for me, which does not really come across in Gladwell’s article, is the psychological component of this obfuscation. Complexity isn’t just good at making people’s eyes glaze over; it’s also good at making them feel dumb. And the fear of being dumb, of missing the boat, may be as much a driving force in investing as simply making money. How can you hold your head up after you missed the next Google?

The same goes for reporters who cover investing. And in my case, I must admit, it’s never been hard to make me feel dumb. My career is itself a product of the dot-com bubble, in a way. When I got my journalism degree in the late ’90s I didn’t know the first thing about the stock market; but because it was hot, that was where media outlets were hiring. Which explains how I wound up in remedial programs like the accounting class. And in all honesty, I probably only survived those early years because — like certain CEOs of certain shaky companies — I was good at sounding like I knew what I was talking about, even when I really didn’t.

I’ve never known an investment banker who bullied me, but I’ve always found them a bit intimidating. It is still an overwhelmingly male business — when I’ve gone to conferences the banks put on, I am so surrounded by men in dark suits I sometimes feel like a flamingo in a flock of penguins. And the culture has a certain machismo. I remember when we were doing field research for organizational psychology in college, two of my classmates chose an investment bank as their subject. When they asked the bankers their probing psychological questions, the most common initial response was a contemptuous snort.

Yet the investment banks, too, hire more during boom times, and end up with their share of bluffers. According to Noah Millman, an investment banker who’s been writing about all this with agreeable clarity, the big losses “were incurred by people who were imitating the super-smart guys, but weren’t smart enough to get off the train before it crashed.” Between the newbie bankers who are trying to look smart and the newbie reporters who are trying to look smart, it’s no wonder bubbles keep blowing up until they splatter.

I read a number of interesting books during my blogging hiatus that I’d like to post about, although since I’ll be going from memory, the posts will necessarily be rather impressionistic. I read Christ and Horrors, by Marilyn McCord Adams, about a year and a half ago, after reading about it on Richard Beck’s Experimental Theology blog. Richard summarized it nicely in three parts, so rather than repeat the description I’ll just refer you to what he said. (He also gives some good examples of her infelicitous prose style, unfortunately. Why, oh why does so much academic writing have to be so clumsy?)

One interesting detail that Richard didn’t mention is that Adams dedicated the book to John Hick, an influential exponent of religious pluralism, of the many-roads-up-the-mountain variety. In her introduction, however, Adams rejects Hick’s pluralism and argues for the central role of Christ and a fairly traditional view of the Incarnation. This seems to be part of a mini-trend of Christians who embrace universalism while maintaining belief in salvation through Christ alone. Two other exponents of this view are Yale professor Keith DeRose, who does a lengthy biblical exegesis on the subject here, and the pseudonymous Gregory MacDonald, author of The Evangelical Universalist.

Adams goes farther outside of tradition than they do, though. DeRose and MacDonald do believe that there will be punishment after death; what they don’t believe is that it’s eternal. Adams, however, seems to reject the concept of post-mortem punishment entirely, and indeed, has problems with the whole paradigm of divine punishment. Her God is a healer rather than a disciplinarian.

This means, however, that she never does in the book what DeRose and MacDonald do at length: address passages of Scripture that seemingly contradict her point. As I said to Dwight recently, I don’t think you can avoid the image of God as an active, violent punisher in the Bible. And the larger difference, I think, is not just a matter of word-parsing but of overall attitude.

It’s interesting, actually, to think about this book again after posting about reciprocity and gratitude in the last couple weeks. Adams’ book is about 180 degrees from the idea that we owe God everything, and deserve nothing; Adams promotes the idea that it’s God who owes us for putting us in a world of horrors. It’s an attitude that certainly resonates with me, but I can see how it seems ungrateful for the good things we do have, and therefore a sort of diss at God the Creator.

In a way, Adams’ argument unwittingly shows how being part of a privileged overclass can actually make gratitude more difficult. If you are conscientious, you realize that every good thing you have is tainted by “horror participation,” as she calls it. Were those shoes made by slave labor in China? Was that food you’re saying grace over raised in an environmentally destructive fashion? How can you enjoy that new iPhone when you could have bought vitamins for 50 kids with the money? When you think that way, horror can seem as overwhelming and inescapable as Adams sees it. Yet it surely cools the relationship with God to be able to thank him for so little.

It’s also significant, I think, that Adams emphasizes the “mothering” qualities of God as necessary for horror defeat, without any special mention of fathering. I realized some time ago that one problem I have with the biblical God is that my idea of love, especially love from an authority figure, was formed largely by my mother, and she isn’t much of anything like the biblical God. I’m not alone in this, I think. E.J. Graff, a historian of marriage, wrote that in the mid-nineteenth century mothers started winning more custody disputes because it “fit the Victorian era’s new ideology of woman-as-nurturer, as caregiver, as naturally domestic and giving and good. It also drew on a new vision of children as malleable angels in need of love, rather than as wild beasties in need of discipline.”

I suspect that mothers had always been seen as the more lenient and approachable parent — that certainly seemed to be going on in a lot of medieval mariology — but the change was that mother’s view of children came to predominate in society at large. I can think of a lot of reasons why that might have happened right then, but in any case, Adams’ book is Exhibit A for that attitude as applied to the ultimate Parent.

Thinking of this issue in terms of family dynamics is actually more helpful to me than the form it usually takes, which is an abstract debate over whether human nature is inherently good or bad. I don’t think that the starting-point of human nature is the whole question, anyway. It is also a question of what we want to become. Adams’ vision of communion with a divine Mother certainly appeals to the part of me that wants to crawl back into the womb, away from the world of horrors. But I suspect that for a lot of people, spending eternity as a sort of helpless infant in the arms of smothering mother is worse than anything Dante could come up with. I wonder if that is ultimately what motivated Dwight’s odd claim that universalism is somehow more “violent” than eternal damnation.

There is certainly scriptural support for the idea that suffering somehow helps us become what we are meant to be — the seed dies and sprouts, the metal is refined, the wheat is threshed, and so on. Nonetheless, I agree with Adams that a great many horrors manage to crush people rather than sanctify them. Are these crushed souls the price we must pay so that some may make it to a saintly spiritual adulthood? I certainly hope not.

I owe Russell Arben Fox an apology. Months ago I urged him to blog through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, because, among other things, I hoped it might help me get through that great cinderblock of a book. And he went and boldly resolved to do just that, at the same time wondering where the heck I was. Well, at the particular time he wrote that, I was in Phoenix. And then I was in Gallup, Albuquerque, Amarillo, Austin… and so on for four months.

But all is not lost! My own copy of A Secular Age arrived in the mail the other day, and I am back online (in more ways than one). So what do you think, Russell? It’s no longer summer, but it’s never too late to pontificate wildly on enormous philosophical subjects…