Selling the New Job to Men

I read in the New York Times the other day that it is still hard to get men to do their share of the work at home and I want to think about that a little today. Just to give you a sense of how this is going to line up, let me say that as a political scientist, I have studied power relations for many years. Since “micropolitics” was just getting popular when I was just starting doctoral work, I studied a lot about power between persons. Also, I have been attracted for some years now to gender studies. The fact that some persons are men and some women makes a huge difference in how problems come up, how they are defined, and how they are resolved.

Now I want to start somewhere else. Imagine that this is a “sermon” on power and gender and that I am going to start with three important texts.

Text 1: Vaseline makes skin products for men and for women. They are advertised separately to men and to women, which suggests to me that Unilever knows something about how products are chosen than ordinary mortals do. The Vaseline products for women claim to make women’s skin soft. The Vaseline products for men claim to make men’s skin strong.

Text 2: John Gray has developed a special relationship with gender. Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus was first published in 1992. Today, nearly twenty years later, it’s hard to tell whether he is changing any minds any more or whether people who like the way he handles gender—different but complementary—eventually find his books. In any case, Gray knows what Unilever knows. Men buy products—and arguments—for different reasons than women do. Not all kinds of arguments, probably, but arguments that bear on values or behaviors that are associated with being a man or being a woman.

Here’s Gray: “The instincts that sent warriors boldly into battle to defend themselves and protect their loved ones come into play when a modern man tries to listen to a modern woman. To prevail, he must learn to duck and dodge.” [For context, the issue here is how men should respond when they are receiving blame and criticism from women. In this setting, he probably has husbands and wives in mind.] “Instead of reacting to blame and criticism, a man learns to hear the correct loving message in her words and responds in ways that diminish friction and conflict. Ducking and dodging allow a man to keep his cool and respond respectfully to a woman’s need to communicate.”

Just to make this easier to visualize, picture the “blame and criticism” as a rolling pin. The woman is beating on the man with the rolling pin—this is her blame and criticism”—but he is not getting hurt because he is ducking and dodging. This is something evolution prepared him for, you see. Going boldly into battle and surviving requires that you learn how to duck and dodge. Nothing is said here about counterthrusts. And if you duck and dodge successfully, you will “prevail” just as your warrior ancestors did.

Text 3: Let me introduce the author first this time. This is Peter N. Stearns, Heinz Professor of History at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1979, when this book was published. Here are the beginnings of several consecutive paragraphs. “While men returned to the family in a real sense in the twentieth century, they did not return in traditional male style for several reasons. It was obviously difficult to regain control over children who were substantially trained in school and lured by the company of their peers.” And a few lines later: “A rethinking of paternal purpose was almost inevitable when the continuity in work between father and son was disrupted. And in the larger setting it was easy to think of one’s sons, and daughters as well, as people to woo.”
“The renewal of familial interest among men inevitably encountered the entrenched position of women in the home. Even women dissatisfied with their domestic role or those who had entered the workforce could attempt to exclude the husband from the day-to-day authority in the family—including, of course, authority over the children—that served as their power base and the most obvious source of their self-definition.”

Those are the texts: Unilever, Gray, and Stearns. Let’s take as the problem to be solved, the problem Stearns describes. In the modern era, the men “come home” from the previously exclusive focus on their jobs, and find that they don’t know what to do. The men are now “sharing the breadwinning function” in a sense. He works at Nordstroms and she at Weiden and Kennedy. And the women are now “sharing the homemaking and childrearing function” but this is at the same place. One place. The breadwinning business takes them apart, but the homemaking/childrearing business throws them together. And on this field, the women are the home team, complete with loyal fans, and the men are the visitors.

The women aren’t any better prepared for the presence of the men than the men are to define themselves by their time at home. At a retirement presentation, either mine or Bette’s—I’ve forgotten now—the speaker warned the women that when their husbands retired, they would have “twice as much husband and half as much kitchen.” There was laughter throughout the crowd, but it wasn’t uproarious laughter. The women’s first reaction is to be delighted to have the help. The work is set up as it had been, the decisions are hers (as they had been) the standards to be used are hers (as they had been) and the manpower is doubled. Does anything about that definition of the situation look unlikely to you? No? Then wonder whether it would look unlikely to a man who had spent his adulthood studying gender relations and the uses of power.

Two questions remain: what are the options and how can they be sold?

The question of options looks simple at the beginning. If the question is about what work—from here on out, “work” will include both maintaining the house and raising the kids—is to done at home, then he decides or she decides or they decide. It’s easy to look at that list and pick “they decide” as the best one, and it might be. Even so, there are good decisions and bad ones and if “they” decide by compromising their separate standards, the result will be ugly.

You would think it wouldn’t be that hard, but each of these adults is used to making decisions. And each comes from a history in which certain tasks were done in certain ways and belonged to certain roles within the family. It doesn’t make any sense to think that will all go away, particularly if the two central options—the ones on the basis of which the compromise will be crafted—are my way and your way.

Fortunately, there is another kind of compromise. The man and woman can set aside their own ways, as best they can. It won’t be very good. Then they can devise a problem that needs to be addressed. The crucial characteristic of the problem is that it is over there. We are here and “it” is there. The problem no longer lies between us, as if the game were tug-of-war. It is now a problem of our devising and we will succeed together or fail together.

So that’s how to decide it. The remaining question is how to sell it. At this point, I’m going to collapse the question and deal with only one side. Since the original question had to do with housework, I’m going to say that the man is the one it is going to have to be sold to. Part of the work has already been done. Women who are eager to have their husbands share the work must be willing to share the power.

Let’s say the question involves cleaning up the kitchen. I pick that one because Bette and I have had some conversations about it. The questions that follow haven’t been culled from any transcript of our conversations; they are just things I thought of at the time. By when does the kitchen need to be clean? Within half an hour of the end of the meal? Before we go to bed? Is tomorrow morning good enough? What is the value of clear counters as opposed to clean counters when only one can be done? How clean is “clean?” What products are going to be used to get the job done?

Sharing the power and sharing the work are two aspects of the same transaction.

The gender problem Stearns addressed has these elements: men respond to the new definitions (new since the end of the Industrial Revolution) of work and domesticity by coming home to a setting they don’t understand and with highly suspect skill levels. The children have nothing to learn from him so the traditional power base is gone. There are “peer groups” now. He is going to have to sell himself to his own children as a “good guy” and hope they like him. He is going to have to either negotiate a power sharing with his wife or withdraw from the work at home so he won’t have to be dictated to.
What does Unilever know that would help us? They know that men, by and large, will not buy a product that promises them softer skin. They are hanging on to their masculinity with one hand already; they don’t need softer skin. Stronger skin, now, is another matter. It’s not too hard to persuade a man that being strong is a good idea. Nor would it be that hard to define any number of tasks by the strength they take rather than by the skill they take. I remember when men started carrying babies in “backpacks” as if they were burdens. Men are all over bearing burdens. It might be the woman’s job to “carry the child” but it is the man’s job to “bear the burden.” I expected any day to see a baby carrier with racing stripes.
What does John Gray know that would help us? The same thing, really. The reason I treasure Gray’s picture of the husband/warrior ducking and dodging so that he is still in the fight when his wife has worn herself out with the rolling pin is that it is so terminally silly. Men need to be smart enough and strong enough to absorb whatever punishment their wives are going to dish out in the first fifteen minutes. Knowing that accepting it without hostility and without retaliation will allow their wives to say what they really want to say, makes it worth doing. This woman has important things to say, she just isn’t able to say them first and if her husband goes away or turns it into a contest, she will never get it said and he will never hear it.
Listening to her long enough to hear what she has on her mind is the smart thing to do and the loving thing to do. What Gray has decided is that smart and loving aren’t enough; it has to be “the manly thing to do” also and if it is the manly thing, a lot of husbands will do it who would not do it otherwise. The warrior/husband seems way too much to me, but I would be a fool to put my notions of what will sell the product up against Gray, who has, after all, sold a lot of product.

SGO: Dog Poop

This leg of the Small Government Odyssey was suggested by an article in yesterday’s New York Times. Here’s the article, but the dilemma itself doesn’t require a lot of thought. Local dog owners are thoughtlessly leaving their dog’s excrement on your lawn or sidewalk.
I call it a dilemma because, in the context of the SGO—in which the game is to retain conflicts within the society or the economy and not let them bleed over into the polity—you must make a choice of solutions. The social sector solution would include things like caring about your neighbors or anticipating that if you do that to them, they will do it to you. From the standpoint of keeping the issue safely within the social sector, the one is as good as the other.

This might be the time to do away with the alternative that is superior to all others: character. If you lived in a neighborhood where people simply wouldn’t do that kind of thing to their neighbors, the issue would be resolved without any further fuss. Except that you have to ask where people of that character would come from. They come from families that teach good behavior toward the neighbors; and the families live where what they teach is generalized and amplified by the community. And, of course, the neighborhood takes steps to keep “outsiders” safely “out” because who knows whether the ethics of passersby match up with the ethics of locals.


The rules of SGO have, to this point, precluded an appeal to character so that the focus will be on keeping the conflicts at home, rather than allowing them to drift toward national government. Theoretically, there would be nothing wrong with passing an ordinance against allowing your dog to poop on your neighbor’s property and providing the necessary enforcement. I’m thinking of Poop Police (local police: I’m not thinking of adding another task to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) and maybe a culture of snitching, so that the police could be assured that the dogs who were not caught in the act would nevertheless be apprehended by vigilant neighbors.

That passes muster technically, because it doesn’t engage the national government. It does require local governments to use the law and its enforcement to prevent canine crime, however, and that really isn’t in the spirit of the Odyssey.

There is a way, though, to solve this problem without vigilant neighbors and without political interference. It is to export it to the economy. Here’s how it works.

Everyone who owns a dog in her complex, Timberwood Commons in Lebanon, N.H., must submit a sample of its DNA, taken by rubbing a cotton swab around inside the animal’s mouth. The swab is sent to BioPet Vet Lab, a Knoxville, Tenn., company that enters it into a worldwide database. If Ms. Violette finds an unscooped pile, she can take a sample, mail it to Knoxville and use a DNA match to identify the offending owner
.
Called PooPrints, the system costs $29.99 for the swabbing kit, $10 for a vial to hold the samples and $50 to analyze them, which usually takes a week or two. The company says that about two dozen apartment complexes around the country have signed up for the service.


Now, no one has to live at Timberwood Commons. But it you do and if you have a pet, you do have to have the pet’s DNA registered. Ms. Violette finds the offending pile, sends the sample in, determines the culprit, and fines the culprit’s owner. Unless the culprit’s owner sues (juridifying the issue, if you recall Frank Heard’s categories from the first SGO post), there is no governmental involvement at all. There are no neighborhood vigilantes because there is no need to catch the offending pet in the act. Well after the act is still plenty of time for PooPrints.

The angry neighbors are transmuted into knowledgeable onlookers. They need only wait for justice to be done. The “bad neighborliness” is turned into an economic opportunity for the BioPet Vet Lab. The offending pet’s owner knows he has only himself to blame and in order to avoid future penalties will comply with the rule. The hope of getting away unidentified is now a forlorn hope.

Again, good character is a better solution in every way except adding to the Gross Domestic Product (such an apt name in this instance). Good character would have the residents at Timberwood Commons take care of their animal’s scat because it is the right thing to do. It is but one instance of a robust regard for the good opinion of the neighbors and a willingness to be a community-affirming member rather than a limits-testing member. But failing “good character,” there is PooPrints.

When the Light Comes On

There are so many physical feelings we have no names for at all. What does the interim feel like between the time you stub your toe and the time it starts to hurt? What is the feeling you get just before a muscle begins to cramp? What’s a good name for the way the oak flavor of a red wine differs from the last little burn of the tannins?

I have some mental events I’d like to have names for. What do you call it when you almost remember something? What is the little signal you get when you might have reversed the digits in a number and you have to look to be sure?

Since I like puns, one of my favorite “mental events” has to do with available meanings. Since this matters to me, I have had to call it something. I have invented a way to describe this event. I don’t know what relationship it has to the actual mental event. They both have a sequence, I guess. One thing comes before another. One thing predicts another. That’s probably all.


I call it a red light. I think I have in mind something like the “Check Engine” light on a car dashboard. Something like this picture, but without the speedometer. The value of it is that I can tell when it is on and when it is not. If it is on, the word I will need at the end of the sentence—the word that will hijack the meaning the sentence would otherwise have had—will be there by the time I get to the end of the sentence. There is nothing about this light coming on that tells me what the word is. The light tells me that it will be there when I need it.

Over the years, I have come to trust it. I don’t remember that it has ever disappointed me. Still, I do feel the tension of it. I have to overcome something to keep myself lurching toward the end of the sentence without knowing what the word is. I remember dealing myself into a conversation about fishing, for instance. I didn’t know when I started that I was going to borrow the “unreasonable sturgeon seizure” clause of the Fourth Amendment to talk about fishing. I just headed down the path, knowing something would be there for me at the end of it, and when I got there, I heard “unreasonable sturgeon seizure” at the same time everyone else did. It felt like hearing a joke told by someone else.

I haven’t ever had an “out of body experience.” This mysterious red light is likely as close as I am going to get. Still, it’s pleasant. It may very well be unique. After all these years I do trust it. Part of that trust, I am sure, comes from the fact that I have no control over it at all. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know when it will come on. I don’t know whether it will be a witty or an atrocious pun.

But when the red light comes on, Ihave faith.

Speaker for the Dead, Part II

Vivid, isn't it?

In Part I, I told about Orson Scott Card’s idea of a Speaker for the Dead. I liked it very much, but in order to work for me the way it worked for him, I would need Andrew Wiggin, ancient in the way only time travel will allow, and a top of the line computer system. I don’t have either of those, but I do share Card’s idea that a memorial service ought to involve the telling of the dead person’s story.

This post is about how to do that with the limited resources at my disposal and imagining myself to be the dead person. I specify that I am to be the guest of honor because, frankly, not everyone would want to have his “story” told in this way. I think I would like it—prospectively, of course—but I also think it could be justified only on the grounds that the people attending the service would be benefitted by it.

That brings me to my two questions for this post. The first is: for whom is the memorial service? The second is: is there a way to approximate a Speaker for the Dead?

There is a cheap answer to the first question. The service is for the survivors. Who else could it possibly be for? Not for me, certainly. But that simple answer leads, as they often do, to a more complicated question: what is it that will benefit the survivors? The service needs to be about my life. That is, after all, why people are there. All the people who come, with the exception of a very small number of young people, will have one eye on my life and death and the other on their own current lives and approaching deaths. So whatever happens in the service ought to be the kind of reflection on my life that helps them appreciate its true significance. (I defer, briefly, the question of what its true significance was.) In that way, it ought to help them think about the true significance of their own lives.

In saying that I would like to help the survivors “think about” their lives, I don’t mean anything teacherish. I mean only that if my story is told properly, it will be richer and more complex than anyone there knew. It will be brighter and darker than they knew will be more vivid and it will feel more “true.” [ Footnote 1:In this point, I am relying on a fairly dicey notion of true. On the other hand, nearly everyone has had the experience of finding out the full story of some event and comparing it unfavorably to the version of that event that was available at the time. When you heard the current account of that event, it was unsatisfying. It felt flat; without adequate features. When the full story comes out, it doesn’t feel flat anymore. The “missing” features—the ones you had no names for—are restored. It is at that point that you realize that somewhere inside you, you had a “feeling for the truth.” You couldn’t give it a name or describe its shape, but you knew it well enough that when it is presented, you recognize it as the “truth” you were missing. That’s what I mean by “feel more true.”

I think people will be helped to understand that their own lives are like that. They themselves are seeing only one face of it and when the fuller story is known it will be more than they could have known it to be. “More” includes both better and worse. No one benefits from a candy-coated life.

So, to review, the survivors will sense as they hear the full and vivid story of my life, that there is a full and vivid story of their lives as well and that they should be open to every intimation of just what it might be. They might want to try to live into it a little.

But, beginning on the second question now, all this relies on my own life being told. The model we are working from requires a Speaker for the Dead and we don’t have one. I think we can come close, though. If the story of my life could be told in a way that took into account the very different perspectives of the people who knew me, that story could rich in a “Speaker for the Dead” kind of way. Again, that sounds easy but if you have ever seen it tried, you know it is not.

Picture forty people, each waiting his turn to toss some anecdote into the pot. A lot of these stories are not about my life, except by distant reference. They are about the life of the teller, who is truly grateful for this opportunity to “share.” And speaker ten said just what speaker twenty wanted to say, so speaker twenty has to wing it. [Footnote 2: There would actually be a delicious irony if that came about. So many of the events of my life have been just like that and, put on the spot, I said things I had never said and had never heard before. Sometimes they turned out to be important for me and for some others as well. To have that happen at my memorial service would be worth a large communal laugh over beer afterward.]
For these and many other reasons, a “you'all come” story fest doesn’t work.

My best solution so far is to have someone whose job it is to shape those materials into a narrative. I asked my son, Dan, some years ago if he would do that for me and he said he would. And he could do it, too. Dan is like a really good tight end. He’s got good soft hands, so the ball doesn’t have to be right on target. And he can take a hit and get up and run that same route again without flinching. Those are pretty rare, together. And, he has known me all his life, which ought to count for something.

Dan would be accountable for the vividness of the story. If you want to think of the story as a tapestry, Dan would actively invite the holders of red threads and blue threads, etc. to make those threads available. He would seek out, if necessary, the black threads. That’s why I need someone who can take a hit. He doesn’t search for the black threads because he wants to emphasize the dark parts of my life. Only an enemy would do that and Dan is a friend. Dan searches for them because he knows I want a vivid tapestry and it isn’t going to vivid without dark threads. So it is friendship that sends him out looking for the holders of dark threads. Dan is lucky, in a sense, because he can find quite a few dark threads withouteven going outside the family. It will be a short commute for him.

I’m not counting on Dan to be my Speaker for the Dead. I am counting on him to believe three things: a) that my “real life” was richer (or at least, more complicated) than any of the participants knows; b) that if he doesn’t actively intervene, his father’s life is going to be presented as superficial and unpersuasive; and c) that he has my blessing to go wherever those threads are that my tapestry is short of. Since his father was a Duck, he will know where to go for the yellow and green ones, but who knows where the burnt umber threads are? The battleship gray threads? The dark and stormy night threads? Who will bring them into the public view, if asked, in order to make a richer and more vivid (and more honest) tapestry?

That’s really all I know. As a way of easing my way back down from the limb I have climbed out on, however, let me offer two additional points. The first is that my life has not been all that vivid compared to a lot of the lives I myself have seen or have heard about. I’ve never been famous or infamous; never notably rich or poor; not notably saintly; not notably scholarly. I have dearly loved the life I have had and I have no complaints about it, but when I ask for it to be told “in full color,” so to speak, I need to say that I know it may not take much color to be full color. On the other hand, as one of you is sure to point out, according to my view, I don’t know how colorful it “really was,” no does anyone else, so who would know?

The second point is that as a Christian, I do believe that the whole of my story is known. And I believe that the most truly significant truth of my life is whether I really did consent to play the part that moves God’s story on toward its providential conclusion. And not only did I consent, but I also trained for it and gave it my full attention. I believe that we can’t know those things, so as we remember those who have passed away from us, we ask the best questions we can and give the best answers we can and call it good enough.

Good enough sounds pretty good to me.

What Will Happen in Afghanistan?

This is going to sound cynical. Maybe it actually is; I’ve gradually been losing my ability to tell. But this post really isn’t about Afghanistan. It’s about us and how we talk ourselves into doing what must be done.

Imagine that a father is dropping his son off at the bus station. The son is off on his first bus trip. He looks uneasy. The father is loth to leave him at the station by himself when he seems so uncomfortable. On the other hand, the father has a meeting and really needs to leave. Father and son come to an understanding—ordinarily, this is done without words—that the son will stop looking uncomfortable. This will permit the father to leave for his meeting, even though he knows his son is uncomfortable. The son, as a practical matter, grants his father permission to leave by appearing confident until after the father has left.

There is a lesson here. Whatever must be, will be.

We need to leave Afghanistan. That’s what must be. We don’t want to leave a failed state behind us. We don’t want to have failed in our mission, whatever it was. So we will be hearing the stories that will enable us to leave. Here are six of those stories.

First, the Afghan government is pervasively corrupt. I’m inclined to believe that is true, but my point here is that we need to hear that story whether it is true or not. “Corrupt” means that no additional money or handholding or training of local forces will be “enough.” That means that “staying until the job is done” is no longer one of the options and also that “leaving before the job is done” is not our fault.

Second, we will hear that the warlords are not as bad as we thought. These warlords will become “provincial leaders” fairly quickly, because we don’t want to abandon Afghanistan to warlords. The provincial leaders provide stability, after all. They control the countryside. They are the de facto governments in most of Afghanistan and will be the de jure governments as the grasp of the central government loosens further. Since we don’t want to pull out and leave the Afghan people in the hands of ruthless and irresponsible warlords, we will pull out and leave the people in the safe keeping of “local leadership” instead.

Third, we will hear that the true goal in Afghanistan is to prevent al Qaeda from having “a safe haven” to plot their evil deeds. That means that the Taliban are really not our reason for being there. We will hear that most of the Taliban troops are really just mercenaries. They would become “government troops” or “provincial troops” if someone paid them enough. They aren’t bad guys, really; just for rent to the highest bidder. The Taliban leadership, on the other hand, need to be included in any stable arrangement because they are…well…Afghans and we are not. So the leaders will be invited to “peace talks” where there will be “frank exchanges of opinion,” and the followers will be hired by the government to protect Afghanistan from themselves.

Fourth, we will hear that the war against al Qaeda is going nicely. What with the targeted assassinations of a substantial part of their leadership and a flurry of targeted drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al Qaeda’s ability to plan and carry out attacks on Americans at home and abroad has been limited. So the “war aims” have been achieved and we can leave Afghanistan as victors.

Fifth, we will hear that it is costing a lot to sustain our present effort in Afghanistan. That’s always been true, of course. But now, we will hear a lot more about it because it is the “pull.” The acceptability of the conditions we are leaving in Afghanistan—achieving the war aims and all—are the push. The unsustainable cost of continued war there is the “pull.” President Obama has begun to talk about “nation-building” here at home (which is not seen as something we can and should do) rather than “nation-building” in Afghanistan which is something we can’t do and so, as a practical matter, something we have already completed successfully.

Sixth, we will hear that Pakistan is, in any case, a more crucial ally than Afghanistan, and that our continued hostilities in Afghanistan have put the government of Pakistan in a very tight place. Pakistan has al Qaeda enemies too and what we have done exacerbates Pakistan’s ability to act in its own best interest. So pulling out of Afghanistan is not a step away from Afghanistan so much as a step toward Pakistan, which is a more important ally in the long run and which, in any case, has nuclear weapons.

All these stories will add up to the boy at the bus station being no longer afraid. Since he is no longer afraid, the father can go off to his meeting having fulfilled the duties of fatherhood. The duty of fatherhood in this case is not, whatever we might like to think, refusing to leave a frightened boy at the bus station—the father actually is doing that. No, the relevant duty is getting the boy to understand that he needs to stop looking frightened so the father can get on with his work.

What must be, will be. We will hear the stories that will tell us that it is a really good idea to do the things that we would have to do whether it was a good idea or not.

The Lord's Prayer: A Dilemma

I have a dilemma concerning the Lord's Prayer. Neither horn of the dilemma is scary, but there really are two horns and I am hesitating between them. Maybe you can give me a hand.

Raymond E. Brown, a noted biblical scholar, has a series of lectures on the beginnings of the church, let’s say from about 40—100 A.D. In those lectures, he talks about how the first Christians, who were Jews with special associations with Jesus, began to learn to pray as Christians. He says they prayed the Jewish prayers with which they had grown up. Then they began to adapt them, very gradually, to the idea that the promised messiah had actually come. And they had the training prayer of Jesus, the “Lord’s Prayer,” to use as a guide. So far, so good.

Brown holds what I understand is now the majority view among biblical scholars, that the Lord’s Prayer is to be understood as an eschatological prayer. What does that mean? It is a prayer that is clearly understood only if you believe that the last times are imminent. So the words that could, absent any particular context of meaning, be understood to mean nearly anything, really should be understood to mean something specific: they have to do with the awful trials and great hopes of the end of time. If the Lord’s Prayer is really an eschatological prayer, then those meanings should be privileged; other meanings should be moved on down the list of “likely meanings.”

With that in mind, the first three petitions make a great deal of sense: God’s name is to be blessed, God’s kingdom is to be realized, God’s will is to be done on earth as it is done in heaven. The verbs that fuel these petitions are what Brown calls “one time acts.” So, in the aorist tense, I suppose. And they are all what are sometimes called “divine passives.” When the text asks for something to be done that only God can do, it is understood not as a hope that it will happen, but as a request that God make sure it happens. So the petitions would have the flavor of: “Dear God, make your name hallowed; make your kingdom come; make your will be done.”

If these are acts, rather than processes, then we may ask, “When is God to do these things we have requested?” The answer, if this is truly an eschatological prayer, is, “Now.” If these are the last times—let’s say that Jesus gave the disciples this prayer around 30 A.D.—then we need to be looking for God to do these things in the immediate future. You would expect the early church, in praying this prayer, to be consulting each other on whether anyone had seen the first signs that day.

The second three petitions follow the same pattern, although the question of what “daily bread” means, is complicated by the fact that the word translated as “daily” appears nowhere else in the Greek language—ever. This is the single use of epiousios. So we don’t actually know what it means. The other two petitions are not quite so daunting. “Forgive us our debts, for we have forgiven the debts of those who would otherwise be indebted to us.” The second presupposes that the end times will be truly awful and that in those times, the Evil One will do to the covenant people whatever he chooses to do. This is the awful trial (pierasmos), which we ask to be spared. So “do not open us to the awful trial” and “deliver us from the Evil One” are parallel expressions. Both of them make immediate sense in the context of the awful last days, the eschaton. If a German Jew in the 1930s were to pray, "Do not allow us to be subjected to the Holocaust," it would have this meaning precisely. The picture I chose to illustrate this can be interpreted several ways, but it doesn't look like any of them are good.

The final petition could mean “that which we need all the time,” reasoning from the ousios part of the word. It could mean “spiritual bread,” the bread that is “above” material bread. It might even mean, following an Aramaic gospel text, “tomorrow’s bread,” referring to the manna that fell in abundance on the day before the Sabbath. In the context of the eschaton, it could mean the feast God provides for his children in the last times. Brown says he doesn’t know and that means that I don’t know either.

But the end didn’t come by the end of the First Century or by the end of the Second. The context required for this reading of the Lord’s Prayer became hypothetical and remote. New meanings, meanings Brown calls “pastoral,” come to the fore. “Give us each day the bread we need for that day.” It is not an eschatological meaning, but it fits very well with Jesus’ instructions not to worry about tomorrow, but to trust God for the meeting of today’s needs. “Deliver us from evil” can be an urgent prayer by any disciple in any era, who feels the world pressing him into its mold. It has no association, now, with “the Evil One,” but “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” still has to do with Jesus.

So, briefly, the “meaning” of the prayer changed. It cannot mean for us what it meant for the disciples to whom Jesus taught it. Now what?

I come now to the dilemma I mentioned. Praying the prayer Jesus taught requires accepting the eschatological context that gave it meaning. That context is unavailable to us as believers. It is possible that scholars could come to approximate it. They could know in some detail what was meant by “end times” among Jesus’ contemporaries; they could dwell in those details until “the last times” became an emotionally significant possibility. Such people could meaningfully pray the prayer Jesus taught. Or mystics. By processes that I know next to nothing about, but which I respect, mystics could so apprehend the sense of the end times that they, too, could meaningfully pray for the climactic establishment of God’s kingdom or pray to be spared from an immediately sensed Evil One. I don’t think I could do either of those, myself. Not, particularly, starting at my age.

But what is the alternative? It is “adapting” the prayer of Jesus. We remove the context of meaning and substitute another context, the ongoing practice of living our daily lives as disciples. So the hallowing of God’s name and the onset of His kingdom are “good ideas” in some general way, but they are not things we look for and hope for. The daily bread becomes just “enough to live on;” the Evil One becomes “pervasive evil.”

That’s not a bad prayer. Nearly every element of it can be found in Jesus’ teaching somewhere. It is a prayer of admirable sentiments. It is a prayer worth praying. But it is not Jesus’ prayer.
I honestly don’t know whether to hold to what I “know”—keep in mind how tenuous my grasp on this is—and come as close to it as I can or to pray for what I need and cut the connection to the teacher of the prayer. I like the meanings of the Lord’s Prayer as I learned it as a child and as I have practiced it all my life. I probably can’t give it up now. Maybe if I just treated it the way I treat some of the early church confessions, I can have a little of each world.

That’s the problem about dilemmas. You really can’t own both sides and you have to choose.

A Speaker for the Dead, Part I

I expect that the process of dying will be a nuisance. And it might be worse than that. But after I am safely dead, there will be a memorial service and I have a glimmer of what I would like to have happen there [Footnote 1 Ordinarily, I would have said “would like to see happen.”] . I would like a Speaker for the Dead to address the people who have come together to remember my life.

This Speaker for the Dead business is going to require just a little bit of explaining, so I’ll start that right away. First, Speaker for the Dead is a marvelous book by Orson Scott Card. It is one of the series that began with Ender’s Game. Second, the Speaker for the Dead is the name of an office. It is the responsibility of those who hold this office to come when they are called, to find out the truth of the life being remembered, and to tell that truth, whether what he says confirms the opinions of the people who knew him, contradicts their opinions, or expands their opinions into wholly new and unimagined constructs which deny nothing and revalue everything.

Finally, in this book, the Speaker for the Dead is Andrew Wiggin. He is an ordinary person, rather than a demigod or demidevil, as some have said, but he has had an extraordinary life (He is Ender, in Ender’s Game and committed xenocide) and he has the worlds’ best computer implanted in his ear. [Footnote 2 Please note the placement of that apostrophe; I am very proud of it.] Wiggin comes to the Lusitania Colony on the planet Baía to “speak” the death of Marcos Maria Ribeira.

It is this “speaking my death” that so attracts me. Here is Card’s account of what the idea meant to him when he first thought of it.

“How did the Speaker for the Dead come to be? As with all my stories, this one began with more than one idea. The concept of a “speaker for the dead” arose from my experiences with death and funerals. I have written of this at greater length elsewhere; suffice it to say that I grew dissatisfied with the way the we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life [Footnote 3 Learning what “the actual life” was is the first job of the Speaker. Saying what it was is the final job. My appetite for “the truth,” although it is lofty, is not that lofty. I am after a new story of my life; one that integrates the things people already know into a larger story, a fuller telling of the pattern of which my friends already know the pieces. It is just a little awkward to call this “my story,” because it is my belief that there is a story so grand and so encompassing that I call it THE story, and with reference to that story, I want only to be a character who appears in it somewhere. In that story, I would be happy to be the guy who shows up in Michael for the sole purpose of missing his train and who is never seen again.] that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived.I had the privilege of giving the eulogy at both my parents’ memorial services. It was called “a eulogy,” but it was eu- = good in the sense that it affirmed their lives and led us all toward a broader appreciation of them. It wasn’t eu- in the sense of proclaiming the nice things and hiding the harder ones.]

I rejected that idea. I thought that a more appropriate funeral would be to say, honestly, what that person was and what that person did. But to me, “honesty” doesn’t simply mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of saying all the nice ones. It doesn’t even consist in averaging them out. No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story—what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That’s the story that we can never know, the story that we never can know—and yet, at the time of death, it’s the only story truly worth telling.”

That’s Card’s view. My view is a little more modest. I don’t believe in “the real story” as something we can know so no speaker, even a Speaker for the Dead, could tell us. And, there is no one to serve as a Speaker for the Dead. At the same time, I think Card is worth listening to. It is a paltry use of time to gather together to say good things about a person’s life, while everyone there knows that “the truth” is much larger, much more varied, much more interesting, and—in the absence of the new narrative I am hoping for—that life is much more mysterious as well. Now that would be worth doing.

We can see the effects of such a Speaker in Speaker for the Dead. It has taken me a little effort to pull out of comments made about the life of Marcos Maria Ribeira some “kinds of comments.” It is the kind of comment I’m after, not the specific comments, because my life has not been at all like Ribeira’s. Similarly, it will take you some effort to grasp the responses of the people who have gathered to hear the speaker because the value they have are as “kinds of responses,” not as actual responses. Let’s play with that pattern just a little.

Ribeira was accused of beating up on his wife. He did. It puzzled people that he never beat up on his children. The Speaker points out that Marcos had no children; his wife had children. Obviously, someone else was the father. He had had since puberty a disease that made him sterile. Here is the response of the Colony’s doctor:

Dr. Navio was puzzled…then he realized what he should have known before, that Marcos was not the rare exception to the pattern of the disease. There were no exceptions. Navio’s face reddened.

What happened here? Dr. Navio knew Marcos had a disease that should have rendered him sterile. He knew there had never been an exception to this effect of the disease. When Marcos’s wife began having children, Dr. Navio decided that Marcos must be an exception. Now, with the Speaker standing before them all and telling the story, Dr. Navio realizes that he did know the truth about Marcos and that he suppressed it. He must have thought that if he failed to realize it, everyone else would also fail. Now that the Speaker has put the truth before everyone, Navio must face his own failure and his own embarrassment.

Then there is Miro, who has just learned in hearing the Speaker that he, himself, is a bastard. All of his life suddenly appears as false; the love of his life turns out to be his sister; the work of his life is overturned. Here is his response.

Miro clung to the sound of [the Speaker’s] voice, trying to hate it, yet failing, because he knew, could not deceive himself, he knew that [the Speaker] was a destroyer, but what he destroyed was an illusion and the illusion had to die. The truth about [the indigenous species of the planet], the truth about ourselves. Somehow, this ancient man is able to see the truth and it doesn’t blind his eyes or drive him mad. I must listen to his voice and let its power come to me, so I, too, can stare at the light and not die.

Bishop Peregrino objects, on a number of grounds to what the Speaker is doing, telling Marcos’s story in public. The bishop would have preferred to hear it in the confessional. Yet Peregrino felt the power of it. Here is the way Card represents the bishop.

“Yet Peregrino had felt the power of it, the way the whole community was forced to discover these people that they thought they knew, and then discover them again, and then again; and each revision of the story forced them all to reconceive themselves as well for they had been part of this story, too, had been touched by it; all the people a hundred, a thousand times, never understanding until now who it was they touched."

By my time of life, I have been at a lot of funerals already and unless I die pretty soon myself, I will attend many more. I have tried, twice, to serve the function of the Speaker for the Dead. [Footnote 4 I had the privilege of giving the eulogy at both my parents’ memorial services. It was called “a eulogy,” but it was eu- = good in the sense that it affirmed their lives and led us all toward a broader appreciation of them. It wasn’t eu- in the sense of proclaiming the nice things and hiding the harder ones.] I gave it my best shot, but I didn’t know enough to really do it right and also may not have had the courage. I did try, though, and in trying, I got a sense of what it would take to do it well and of how wonderful it would be—what a gift to us all—if it really were done well.

Consider the effects described among the members of the Colony who heard the Speaker. Dr. Navio had to recognize that really, he had always known about Marcos’s illness. That means he should have understood something about the children of Marcos’s wife. But he didn’t and now he is ashamed of himself. Miro hears shattering things from the Speaker, but he can see that the Speaker is not shattered by them and takes from that the hope that he, too, can learn to look at the light and not be blinded by it. Peregrino has the broadest view. He sees his own congregants learning the meaning of their own lives; their complicity in a community tragedy; their blindness to what could have been plain to them had they been willing to see it.

These three responses—excuse me, these three “kinds of responses”— are truly wonderful. They are good for everyone. They begin a reconstitution of a broken and distant community. But they seem to require a nearly omniscient Speaker for the Dead and I am quite sure that such people are in short supply. So what does that mean for my own hopes? At my own memorial service, I am going to have to get along without a Speaker for the Dead. But I still aspire to the goals Card had in mind. They still sound really good to me.

How close could I get to that, do you think, if I got to work on it now? Whose help would I have to ask? Would people be willing to help if they took seriously the value of Card’s sense of what sort of an opportunity a memorial service is?