The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.
- Archilochus (Greek Poet ~640 BC)
The fox is clever and multi-skilled. A jack of all trades.
The hedgehog is a master of one discipline.
A frustration I see in a lot of people, places, and also in myself is the tension between these. Life demands that we be excellent (or at least decent) at a long list of things: parenting, computer skills, car mechanics, lawn care, cooking, reading, socializing, and so on. But it seems nearly all the great people that have gone before us were hedgehogs. They did one thing super well. They made a real difference in the world because they poured their life into one passion and discipline. We KNOW deep down that we could do something just as great, if only we were “allowed” to specialize.
Beethoven was brilliant, but he wouldn’t have written those piano concerto’s if he was busy painting his house. Einstien probably would have never published his works on physics if his job demanded he figure out how to format his data in Excel 2007 and attend that faculty meeting. Itzack Pearlman can play violin like no other because he was still practicing when his fellow violinists were working out at the gym, walking their dog, or what have you. A lot of these “greats” have horrible track records with relationships. They were often lousy husbands, wives, and parents. But if they HAD put the effort in to be a good parents, you and I would not even know they existed. They likely wouldn’t have ever made it to their magnum opus. Your 8-year old daughter inspired by watching the Olympic gymnasts on TV last week? Sorry. She should have started training 5 years ago for it to be anything more than a hobby.
People hoping for a career in high academia especially feel the heat of this. But Rene Girard chuckled when other philosophers scorned him for diving into too many subjects:
People will accuse us of playing at being Pico della Mirandola - the Renaissance Man - certainly a temptation to be resisted today, if we wish to be seen in a favorable light.
(Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p. 141)
My thinking has been all wrong on this though. Comparing ourselves to others does not bring glory to the Lord. It is a wellspring of despair. Instead, I think we CAN be foxes and still make a difference in this world. We must open our eyes wider. Go kick it hard at work today then come home and fix the mini-van, play with your kids, and do something special for your wife.
…In particular, and related especially to the part of the world where I now live - Great Britain - the last generation has seen a sudden upsurge of interest in all things Celtic. Indeed, the very word “Celtic” is enough, when attached to music, prayers, buildings, jewelry, T-shirts, and anything else that comes to hand, to win the attention, and often enough the money, of people in today’s Western culture. It seems to speak of a haunting possibility of another world, a world in which God (whoever he may be) is more directly present, a world in which humans get along better with their natural environment, a world with roots far deeper, and a hidden music far richer, than the shrill and shallow world of modern technology, soap operas, and football managers. The world of the ancient Celts - Northumbria, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Ireland, and Scotland - seems a million miles from modern-day Christianity. That is, no doubt, why it is so attractive to people bored or even angry with official religion in Western churches.
But the real center of Celtic Christianity - the monastic life, with great stress on extreme bodily asceticism and energetic evangelism - is hardly what people are looking for today.
-N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, p. 23
Wrights hits the nail on the head here. I find it attractive for these very same reasons. It’s still Jesus, but it’s a thousand light-years away from suburbia. I’ve been praying the office of the Northumbria community for a while (on and off). It’s simple daily liturgy and scripture reading schedule. From the comfort of your chair and laptop. No need for a cell at Skellig.
I’ve been thinking about jealousy quite a bit lately. Along those lines, here is one more piece by Billy Collins before I have to return the library book.
The Rival Poet
The column of your book titles,
always introducing your latest one,
looms over me like Roman architecture.
It is longer than the name of an Italian countess, longer
than this poem will probably be.
Etched on the head of a pin,
my own production would leave room for
The lord’s Prayer and many dancing angels.
No matter.
In my revenge dream I am the one
poised on the marble staircase
high above the crowded ballroom.
A retainer in livery announces me
and the Contessa Maria Teresa Isabella
Veronica Multalire Eleganza de Bella Ferrari.
You are the one below
fidgeting in your rented tux
with some local Cindy hanging all over you.
A long or medium term plan for your brand or your blog or your career or your project?
You can have grand visions for remodeling your house or getting in shape, but if there’s a fire in the kitchen, you drop everything and put it out. What choice do you have? The problem, of course, is that most organizations are on fire, most of the time.
I gave a talk the other day, all about the unstoppable slow decline of interruption (traditional) media and the opportunities for rethinking how we communicate with people. At the end of the talk, someone came up and had very nice things to say about what he’d learned. The he leaned over and asked me to help him brainstorm about his brand’s upcoming ad campaign, because it was due to his boss on Friday.
Add up enough urgencies and you don’t get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.
I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more urgent than today’s emergencies. Break them into steps and give them deadlines. Measure your people on what they did today in support of where you need to be next month.
If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent.
I’m thinking about how we are approaching our moving houses and putting things away. Urgent things, one box at a time. I think it’s working well. That’s a medium-length goal of a few weeks though.
What I really want to figure out is how to apply this to taking my wife on a real honeymoon to Ireland someday, actually learning the music I really want to play on guitar, to teaching my kids how to read and play violin, to paying for their schooling, to saving up for stuff down the road. I have these long-term goals, but somehow I must convert them into a little something to do NOW to pull them off. Saving money toward something is one of the hardest to actually do, but at least it’s straight-forward. As for the other things, they needs some thought. And more immediate will.
OK, so it’s been many years since I’ve followed pop radio, but last year I discovered The Weepies after hearing an interview on NPR. They are pop/folk duo with remarkable songwriting skills and melodies. Most of their songs and arrangements are very simple and straight-forward but oh-so-good. I mean, when is the last time you heard an album where every song was good? One after another!
Their latest album Hideaway (recorded in the their house) just came out and I was a sucker to get it. I’ve only listened through it a couple times and can’t say it is as good as their previous effort Say I Am You, but it looks to still have a lot of gems on it.
Here is the lyrics and a 30-sec clip from the opening track “Can’t Go Back Now”.
Listen
Yesterday, when you were young,
Everything you needed done was done for you.
Now you do it on your own
But you find you’re all alone,
What can you do?
You and me walk on
Cause you can’t go back now.
You know there will be days when you’re so tired that you can’t take another step,
The night will have no stars and you’ll think you’ve gone as far as you will ever get
But you and me walk on
Cause you can’t go back now
And yeah, yeah, go where you want to go
Be what you want to be,
If you ever turn around, you’ll see me.
I can’t really say why everybody wishes they were somewhere else
But in the end, the only steps that matter are the ones you take all by yourself
And you and me walk on
Yeah you and me walk on
Cause you can’t go back now
Walk on, walk on, walk on
You can’t go back now
Don’t keep trying the same thing over and over again. If it’s not working, try something else. Don’t keep bashing your head into the wall over and over just to prove you’re not giving up. Maybe you can go around it, or over it. I’m just talking to myself here.
go to work, send your kids to school
follow fashion, act normal
walk on the pavement, watch T.V.
save for your old age, obey the law
Repeat after me: I am free
I’m not sure if this if the writer meant this to be cynical or an appeal to be content.
About a year ago, I heard a brilliant 1 hour interview with N.T. Wright about his new book Simply Christian. It’s meant to be a introduction to Christianity and a basic apologetic in the tradition of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I’m not sure why I put this one off so long, but I finally got a hold of a copy and read through it this week.
My verdict is that Mere Christianity still quite a bit better, though Simply Christian has some very excellent sections. Just like Lewis, Wright approaches spirituality in general and then gradually brings in central Christian beliefs and finally church mechanics. In the middle section on Jesus, Lewis stays calm and concise where Wright gets a little bit too excited and tries to deal with too many things at once. Nevertheless, his chapters discussing our desire for beauty are a really excellent and an angle completely missing from Lewis’s work. His concise overview of scripture (The Book God Breathed) is also quite useful. He doesn’t get hung up on any details.
Anyway, the book is definitely worth reading, regardless of where you are on your journey to or in Christianity. It turns out all of the very best parts were quoted in the interview I originally listed to. Smart guy. This extended excerpt begins one of my favorite parts:
One day, rummaging through a dusty old attic in a small Austrian town, a collector comes across a faded manuscript containing many pages of music. It is written for the piano. Curious, he takes it to a dealer. The dealer phones a friend, who appears half an hour later. When he sees the music he becomes excited, then puzzled. This looks like the handwriting of Mozart himself, but it isn’t a well-known piece. In fact, he’s never heard it. More phone calls. More excitement. More consultations,. It really does seem to be Mozart. And, though some parts seem distantly familiar, it doesn’t correspond to anything already known in his works.
Before long, someone is sitting at a piano. The collector stands close by, not wanting to see his precious find damaged as the pianist turns the pages. But then comes a fresh surprise. Te music is wonderful. It’s just the sort of thing Mozart would have written. It’s energetic and elgiac by turns; it’s got subtle harmonic shifts, some splendid tunes, and a ringing finale. But it seems…incomplete. There are places where nothing much seems to be happening, where the piano is simply marking time. There are other places where the writing is faded and it isn’t quite clear, but it looks as though the composer has indicated, not just one or two bars rest, but a much longer pause.
Gradually the truth dawns on the excited little group. What they are looking at is indeed by Mozart. It is indeed beautiful. But it’s the piano part of a piece that involves another instrument, or perhaps other instruments. By itself it is frustratingly incomplete. A further search of the attic reveals nothing else that would provide a clue. The piano music is al there is, a signpost to something that was there once and mght still turn up one day. There must have been a complete work of art which would now, without additional sheet music, be almost impossible to reconstruct; they don’t know if the piano was to accompany an oboe or a bassoon, a violin or a cell, or perhaps a full string quartet or some other combination of instruments. If those other parts could be found, they would make complete sense of the incomplete beauty contained in the faded scribble of genius now before them.
This is the position we are in when confronted by beauty. The world is full of beauty, but the beauty is incomplete. Our puzzlement about what beauty is, what it means, and what (if anything) it is there FOR is the inevitable result of looking at one part of a larger whole. Beauty, in other words, is another echo of a voice - a voice which (from the evidence before us) might be saying one of several different things, but which, were we to hear it in all its fullness, would make sense of what we presently see ad hear and know and love and call “beautiful.”
…Beauty, like justice, slips through our fingers. We photograph the sunset, but all we get is the memory of the moment, not the moment itself. We buy the recording, but the symphony says something different when we listen to it at home. We climb the mountain, and though the view from the summit is indeed magnificent, it leaves us wanting more; even if we could build a house there and gaze all day at the scene, the itch wouldn’t go away. Indeed, the beauty sometimes seems to be in the itching itself, the sense of longing, the kind of pleasure which is exquisite and yet leaves us unsatisfied.
Wright goes on to explain how this unmet longing is actually the voice of our creator God calling to us. Goooooood stuff.
One thing that I loved about N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God is how carefully he goes about the discussion, especially when it comes to the language he uses. Before he dives into 600 pages of history, he spends a whole chapter defining some of the words words that we use frequently. This excerpt on “history” was enourmously helpful to me. (I’ve condensed several pages into one paragraph, so this is just a quick summary):
“History” can be used to describe several different things or ideas:
First, history as an event (any old event).
Second, there is history as a particularly significant event. Third, there is history as provable event. Fourth, and quite different from the previous three, there is history as writing-about-events-in-the-past. Fifth, and finally, a combination of 3 and 4: history as what modern historians can say about a topic.
Confusion between these senses has of course bedeviled this very debate about the so-called ‘historical Jesus’, the phrase being used by some to mean Jesus as he actually was (sense 1), by others to mean what was significant about Jesus (sense 2), by others to mean that which we can prove (with a lot of documentation) about Jesus, as opposed to that which we must either doubt or take on faith alone (sense 3); by others again to mean what people have written about Jesus (sense 4). Those who have take the phrase in sense 5 have often rejected the Jesus not only of that sense but, apparently, of the previous four as well.
The pseudo-gnostic historian on NPR last week was mostly interested in history in the 5th sense.
I just finished reading Chasing Francis by Ian Morgan Cron. Cron is an Episcopal pastor with a interesting postmodern/emergent/liturgical slant. In this pseudo-novel, the main character is a successful American mega-church pastor who goes through a crisis of faith. He spends much of the book trekking across Italy tracing the life and thoughts of St. Francis. I appreciate that he admits up front that the book isn’t much of a novel or much of a thought-out piece on ecclesiolgy. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book even if a lot of it was pretty contrived.
One fakey part I have to point out though. During one chapter our evangelical mega-church pastor has a conversation with a young woman who happens to be a professional cello player. This is the vehicle the book uses to discuss aesthetics. Anyway, during the conversation, our hero mentions that he enjoys the music of Arvo Pärt. Wait a minute! Stop the tape! I’ve known a lot of American evangelical pastors. And with almost no exceptions, not a single one of these guys could tell you the difference between Mozart and Beethoven, let alone claim to be a fan of the minimalist Estonian composer. I remember writing a paper on Arvo in university. He’s written some fascinating music, making extensive use of harmonics in his orchestration. I couldn’t find a real nice example to post here. Sadly, I don’t own any recordings of his works. Here is a something though from YouTube. Pardon the cheesy photo montage.
Anyway, I’ve spent the last two years being drawn toward our local reformed congregation. They have a thriving church here. Some of the following I can only see in hindsight now. Anyway, I’m not directly involved with them now. The thing is, it wasn’t that I was enamored with Calvinism, it was simply the higher culture of many of the people in the congregation, especially some of the leadership. I was so sick of hearing every January sermon laced with Super-Bowl references. I was tired of loving classical music and having the only thing on my pastor’s musical radar be the latest Casting Crowns album. Now I know Christ is neither high-brow nor low-brow. He is neither Vouvray nor Bud Light (nor Pepsi for that matter). The pastor who knows Bach inside out is not higher spiritually than the one who loves NASCAR. Frankly though, I don’t really want to hang out with the racing fan all day. I think he feels the same way about me.
I believe groups of people form communities most of the time based upon their interests, things held in common, and how well they get along with various individuals. Doctrinal distinctives just aren’t often as driving of a force as we make them out to be. I am willing to bet that most churches are divided along lines of culture and demographics, not doctrine. Just some of the leaders think it is doctrine and the people follow, as is appropriate. Anyway, I’m still looking for someone that digs the same music I do. But the Lord will build me into his church based on a lot more than that I think!
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