Founding Fathers ... of Self-Improvement

It has been said that America is a place for new beginnings and second chances. Americans, more than perhaps any other people, are obsessed with the ideal life, with the improvement of their very selves. The Europeans first to land in the new world, and the waves of immigrants ever since, have been people who were by definition looking for the grass to be greener on the other side … of the ocean in this case.

It should be no surprise then to find elements of this nationally characteristic – self-involvement? - fixed from the very beginning, evident even in the hearts and minds of the framers and founders. But reading David McCollough’s superb biography of John Adams recently, I was pleasantly surprised and somewhat amused to find the honesty and vulnerability of the subject as portrayed in his own diaries and letters.

“Oh! that I could wear out of my mind every mean and base affectation,” Adams once vented to his diary. And “conquer my natural pride and conceit.”

McCullough goes on to describe Adams’s frustrated state of mind: “Why was he constantly forming yet never executing good resolutions? Why was he so absent-minded, so lazy, so prone to daydreaming his life away? He vowed to read more seriously. He vowed to quit chewing tobacco. ….

On July 21, 1756, he wrote:

'I am resolved to rise with the sun and to study Scriptures on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other three mornings. Noons and nights I intend to read English authors .... I will rouse up my mind and fix my attention. I will stand collected within myself and think upon what I read and what I see. I will strive with all my soul to be something more than persons who have had less advantages than myself.'” (McCullough, p. 41)

Then, the next day, as one just might expect, Adams records that he had slept in late and accomplished nothing.

Oh! That this portrayal did not ring so true and cut so deep!

I don’t know how many similar reading plans and lists of goals I’ve formulated, but I do know roughly what percentage have met a fate similar to Adams’s. It’s pretty near to 100.

Perhaps it’s poetic then that this book has inspired yet another attempt on the part of yours truly, and only fair that I record it in this space – also being a product of an attempt at refocusing energies. This time, I’m renewing my goal to read more thematically, less sporadically. Yes, if you’ve been in my house lately and perused my shelves, I am already aware that I have stacks of unread books, representing half a dozen different reading programs, strewn about and gathering dust. But this one has inspiration.

I’ve already stated that McCullough’s biography is superb, and indeed it is. The story is transporting and the writing is transfixing. But that is just the means, the result is an in-depth look at the conversation of ideas alive in this one time and place told through the (mostly) men who moved them, and it is beyond fascinating. It’s, well, inspiring. Inspiration enough for a new reading plan of my own at least. Besides, I have needed for some time to return to study the Enlightenment so famously moved past in this day of obsessive ‘post’ prefixes. What better vehicle than a companion study of one of the clearest and most relevant outcomes: the society and government of the United States?

In this still-first week of the New Year, with resolutions everywhere already waning and falling by the wayside, I lustily and fool-heartedly toss my hat into the ring. Let it be resolved, therefore, that I do commit, here and now, to read at least one dozen books on, about or written during the 18th century having to do with the philosophy, politics or history of the time before reading anything else … much … anything else much. That is, maybe I could allow one or two books on the side, if need be and occasion arise.

(I already have a list of 20 and have started number three. Anyone care to take odds?)

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Scripture, Church, Service: Personal Disciplines III

I have done next to no reading of scripture on its own over the past few years. I read a lot of theological books that quote scripture or reflect on stories or themes from it. There are of course scripture readings and sermons every Sunday. There are scripture readings in my prayer book. My church small group has done studies of a book or two of scripture. But on my own, with Bible in hand, I have done very very little. I have spent more time reading books about books about books of the Bible than I have reading the Bible. I don’t know why this is.

Part of me feels that I need to know a certain amount more background, context or theory to be adequate to the task. But those are all just so many excuses. Maybe I just think it would be less enjoyable reading, that it would be just harder. But that’s not necessarily true either. There is no doubt this is something I need to change.

Church: I began attending my wife's church, Church of the Servant, from time to time as a matter of familial obligation before, and then during, our first years of marriage. We were also married in her church more or less because she wanted to and I didn't have any other ideas. The Sunday-morning ritual had its pleasures though. The preaching in the church (now ours) was (and is) incredible. I enjoyed the beauty and intellectual stimulation of the sermons even when faith wasn't anywhere in my sights.

When things started shifting in my head and heart (who can say which was first?), I began to want to go more often and soon every week just for the reminder of what was so exciting about the faith and for seeing it come together in a worshipful setting. I was, and still am, torn at times about denominational and congegational affiliation. Fretting about theological subtleties and various mixed motivations for staying or going alternately. This conversation, like so many others, plays endlessly in my head lists of all the various bad reasons I could have for doing the right thing and good reasons I could have for doing the wrong thing.

What eventually convinced me that I should join this church as an adult member, and what convinces me to stay committed, was that it felt like home for me. To the extent that home is where family is, and family are those whom you do not get to choose, I would say that I felt this congregation's claim on me before I felt I could claim it. It seemed to both speak to me where I was, being part of the denomination I was raised in, but also to challenge me the way I was ready to be challenged since it is a unique congregation within the denomination. So i feel like it is a place to both put down and discover old roots.

I have made church-attendance fairly important. We don't miss too many Sundays unless we're out of town. Most Sunday mornings church is just where I want to be. I think it really does re-focus me, at least for a little while and I of course have a growing number of connections to people that I don't want to go another week without seeing. While we don't attend the night service like I did as a kid (few do these days) it could be that I'm just falling into the behavior of church-attendance I was raised for. I don't know, maybe that's not necessarily anything to be ashamed of anyhow. The view of Sunday worship I've tried to live up to is as a weekly training in seeing the world rightly, in getting priorities right, and of course as a time of learning through proximity from those further along in the way. Again the tension arises: do I force my will to do the action even when it is disagreeable, trying to keep the real goals in mind, or do I avoid the pitfalls of pride and Phariseeism by doing whatever I feel like at the time?

Service: I do not really do anything in the way of disciplined service. As I mentioned, I try to be more serving in my daily work and family tasks, or at least see them more as service. (Maybe the two are reciprical: seeing something more as service increases one's ability to serve through it, and serving more increases the ease with which the service in something is recognized.) But I'm not someone you'll see serving in a soup-kitchen line or other obvious do-gooder role these days. I idealize those stereotypical heroic front-line roles as the epitome of Christ-like service but have never really participated in them. I resented the near coercive ways these activities were encouraged in school for example, finding it easier to stay home with pure, though self-serving motives than to serve others with mixed ones. I suppose though that the recipients of aid don't much care about the motives of those bringing aid.

I have tried, especially over the last year, to start serving in and through the church itself, the place I think should be the focus of a Christian's service anyhow. So I started volunteering for whatever for whatever responsibilities advertised a need for help within earshot. I currently help out running the sound board one Sunday a month, I've taught a few Sunday-school classes and I just started a three-year term as Deacon. I don't know if any of these things are specially suited to any gift of mine, but they are all things that the Church needs done and I feel good in general about contributing to the daily running of or the institution that has and continues to do so much to serve me.

There are dangers, I think, to being active in the institutional life of an organization like a church. It is easy to either lose sight of the goals of the organization and focus too much on control and management or to become jaded by seeing the nuts and bolts operations and the flawed human beings who are trying to come together in the service of something beautiful; trying to be something beautiful. I think seeing the behind-the-scenes operations of my childhood Church contributed to my disenchantment with that Church and maybe religion in general. Though probably even the most sincere and humble Church in the world wouldn't have allayed my omnivorous doubts at the time.

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Hermeneutical Headaches or, Why Libraries Make Me Dizzy

I love to read. I also find reading excruciating. I'm usually reading a number of books at a time which is nothing unusual, but what might be different about me - and which my wife, Marie, at least finds insane - is that I usually know how many pages I have left to the next chapter and to the end of each book. It's a cliché for avid readers to say they're sad when a good book comes to an end. I do have that experience, but usually I can't wait until I finish a book so I can start another one.

The root source of my impatience (let's call it what it is) arises from the combination of my wanting to read every beautiful, informative, clever, important, in short: every worthwhile book, while, having worked in bookstores for seven years, being pretty well aware of just how many worthwhile books are out there. It's a lot. But this is only the beginning. The main reason libraries (my shorthand for the sum of human knowledge) are prone to having deleterious effects on me is that not only do I want to read so many books, but I want to already have read them.

Mark Twain said that "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read". I take his meaning to be that people want the cachet of having-read the classics: showing off a degree of education, name-dropping esoteric authors and making highfalutin literary references (I think 'highfalutin' is the language Huck would use - [that was a shameless ploy to show I've actually read Twain]). I may be as guilty of this literary snobbery as the next person but that's not the real reason I want not just to read, but to have-read, well, everything.

The first reason is that what I enjoy even more than reading a book is discussing an already-read book with another. The opportunities for that are few and far between these days though, so that's not really it either. More than anything else, what makes my head spin around stacks of books is the hermeneutical circle involved in making one's way through them. The hermeneutical circle as applied to a particular work is the idea that one understands the work as a whole in terms of its constituent parts, and understands each part in terms of one's understanding of the whole. If we take a book like the Bible for example, we would obviously say that one doesn't understand it until one has read the whole thing. The concept of the hermeneutical circle would add that one can't have a full understanding, even of Genesis, till one has gotten through Revelation. But once we've done that, we have to re-read Genesis in light of our new understanding, which changes our view of everything else, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Suffice it to say that if we read through a book once, we've only just begun.

If this picture isn't daunting enough, we have to add in all the knowledge outside of the book that is required to read (understand) it more fully.( Notice I didn't say outside the text! [Oh shame on me, another "look-at-how-smart-I-am" reference.]) So let's say I want to read a certain novel I've heard great things about. So I read it. Then I read it a few more times, studying all angles, the beginning in light of the ending and vice versa etc. Then I think, I should read it in the original French. So I learn French and read it again. But the novel is set in the Sixteenth century, so I should read everything I can about that period. But the author wrote it during World War II, so I should read everything I can about that period to understand the author's context. But what if I'm not sure how this whole reading and learning thing works at all? I need to read books on linguistics, hermeneutics, the philosophies of language and interpretation, learn those work's original languages, historical contexts etc. etc. The rabbit hole goes pretty far down.

Tentative Conclusion:

Perhaps if one were able to fully read any one text, one would by definition have read every text; one would be - omniscient.

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