Our downstairs bathroom has had problems for quite a while — six or seven years ago, we had a minor flood, which damaged the floor and caused several ceramic tiles to come loose. Of course, those tiles were no longer made, so I couldn’t just replace the things. We pretty much ignored the situation until six months ago, when one of the family put her foot through the floor. Now, I know that there are some home repairs that I’m just not capable of doing well — I don’t have enough obscenities in my vocabulary to tackle certain tasks, and laying a new subfloor for ceramic tile (with those heavy concrete-laced panels) is one of them. So I hired someone to do that job, and meanwhile had Katie figure out what kind of tile pattern would look good and be appropriate for the period of the house. We decided on a pattern, I gutted the bathroom in late April, and the handyman guy laid the new subfloor. And then we discovered the problem with our tile pattern: it was made up of 2″ tiles, and we had to place each of some 2000 of the things one tile at a time, paying close attention to the pattern to make sure it came out right. This process took quite a while — the bathroom wasn’t really usable again until early June. By the way, did I mention that our downstairs bathroom is the guest bathroom? That it has the only shower stall in the house? We have a bathtub, but if you’re a shower person, you get kind of desperate for a shower after a while. Well, I’d like to announce that after six weeks of single bathroom showerless life, the Mendelsohn household has a newly tiled, bathroom. We still have to finish the mouldings, and we need to replace the door (we’re using a curtain to meet the demands of modesty), but the room is functional. Once we finish the last bit of work, I’m tempted to have celebratory event of some sort…
By the way, lengthy home improvement projects are ordinarily a recipe for low-level strife in the Mendelsohn household. Everybody gets out of sorts, arguments happen, and members of the household, particularly husband and wife, end up saying things we later regret. We actually got through this project without it being a cause for sin. Sure, we disagreed on how to proceed from time to time, but even with all the unplanned-for challenges, life went pretty well during the course of the project (other than the lack of sleep — we stayed up really late almost every night that we were working on the floor to make sure that the room would be functional by the time Sam came home from Ireland).
Posted by Lon on July 12th, 2008 in Suffering | 1 Comment »
This meditation was written by James Kiefer, an old friend of mine. I’ve posted it to the church e-mail list every Good Friday for the past several years; this time I’m mounting it on my blog, which is a bit less ephemeral.
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There is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre called Morts sans Sepultre (The Living Dead – literally, The Unburied Dead: one English translation calls it The Victors.) I have not seen or read it recently, but part of it goes something like this: The scene is the attic of a house in France during the Second World War. In the attic are a half-dozen prisoners, captured members of the resistance. It is night, and the next morning they will be taken out one at a time and tortured for information. None of them has any information of value, so they need summon no will power. There is nothing to do but wait, and then suffer, and then die. But now the attic door opens and the soldiers throw another man in. He is the leader of the resistance for that region, but the soldiers do not realize this. To them he is simply someone caught out-of-doors after curfew, and so they are detaining him for the night and will release him in the morning. Now the other prisoners are in a different position. Now they have an active and mot merely a passive role to play in what awaits them. They tell the leader, “Don’t worry. We will hold our tongues.” He begins to say, “I thank you, for myself, for the Resistance, for France. Your courage and your sacrifice will not be forgotten.” Suddenly, one of the others, his fiancee, says, “Oh, shut up. Nothing you have to say could possibly mean anything to us. I am not blaming you. It is not your fault. But the fact is that you are a living man and I am a dead woman, and the living and the dead have nothing to say to each other. Tomorrow you go out that door to freedom and life, and I go out it to torment and death, and that fact puts an impenetrable barrier between us. I do not hate or envy you. I simply do not see you as a meaningful part of my universe. Now go sit down over there, and leave me to talk and hold hands with my brothers and sisters, the people with whom I shall be dying in a few hours.”
It occurred to me, when I read this, that an important reason for the Crucifixion is the breaking down of precisely that barrier between God and us. Without it, many of God’s demands on us would be simply infuriating. Consider a driver seated at the wheel of a car as his associates try to push it out of a mudhole. He keeps saying to them: “Push harder! Put your backs into it! Don’t give up. You can do it if you try. Oh, come now, you can do better than that. Keep at it. Two or three more good pushes and you’ll have it out.” And so on. They may remind themselves that it is essential to have someone steering, and that it is therefore unreasonable of them to resent his being where he is, but they would be other than human if they did not feel an overpowering urge to pull him out of his seat and send him sprawling face down in the mud. Note how different it would be if he were himself standing thigh-deep in the mud, shoving the car with all his might and gasping out encouragement to his fellow pushers. He might be saying exactly the same things as he was saying behind the steering wheel in the first scenario. The difference is that by getting into the mud and pushing with the others he has earned the right to say them. In just this way, God, by taking human nature upon him and living in poverty and dying in shame and torment, has earned the right to ask us to bear our burdens willingly. By forgiving those who have wronged him, he has earned the right to ask us to forgive those who have wronged us. (more…)
Posted by Lon on March 21st, 2008 in Good Friday, Suffering | 1 Comment »
Our downstairs bathroom has had problems for quite a while — six or seven years ago, we had a minor flood, which damaged the floor and caused several ceramic tiles to come loose. Of course, those tiles were no longer made, so I couldn’t just replace the things. We pretty much ignored the situation until six months ago, when one of the family put her foot through the floor. Now, I know that there are some home repairs that I’m just not capable of doing well — I don’t have enough obscenities in my vocabulary to tackle certain tasks, and laying a new subfloor for ceramic tile (with those heavy concrete-laced panels) is one of them. So I hired someone to do that job, and meanwhile had Katie figure out what kind of tile pattern would look good and be appropriate for the period of the house. We decided on a pattern, I gutted the bathroom in late April, and the handyman guy laid the new subfloor. And then we discovered the problem with our tile pattern: it was made up of 2″ tiles, and we had to place each of some 2000 of the things one tile at a time, paying close attention to the pattern to make sure it came out right. This process took quite a while — the bathroom wasn’t really usable again until early June. By the way, did I mention that our downstairs bathroom is the guest bathroom? That it has the only shower stall in the house? We have a bathtub, but if you’re a shower person, you get kind of desperate for a shower after a while. Well, I’d like to announce that after six weeks of single bathroom showerless life, the Mendelsohn household has a newly tiled, bathroom. We still have to finish the mouldings, and we need to replace the door (we’re using a curtain to meet the demands of modesty), but the room is functional. Once we finish the last bit of work, I’m tempted to have celebratory event of some sort…