in search of areté

Back in The Day, when shoulder-length hair on young men wasn’t a fashion but a declaration, people who were not Freaks would come up to us with a genuinely bewildered look on their faces. An exchange similar to the following would take place:

Them: “What are you so angry about? What are you rebelling against?”‘

Us: “Whadda ya got?”

So it went and so it was. There was a lot of anger in the air in The Day, although few of us really had an idea of why. We just knew something was wrong and we were angry about it.

In Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend, Geoffrey Guiliano writes, “In ‘My Generation’ Townshend first released the anger and frustration he would never outgrow.”

I think Guiliano is right about Townshend and about many of us who grew up in the Sixties. We were and are angry; we’ve never outgrown it. A lot of us have, maybe even most of us, seduced by the comforts of capitalism and having made an unholy tryst with an ugly culture and mentality. But not all of us, even though we may have tried to do so.

I’m still angry.

“What are you so angry about?”

Well, I’m angry about Patricia and Anna Moore’s little sister.

I don’t really know how old I was. I was old enough to remember the fire clearly and have vivid images in my mind’s eye, but I wasn’t old enough to know what was going on. I’ll guess that it was 1959, give or take a year.

One of my sisters woke me up in what seemed to my boyish clock to be the middle of the night. All she said was something to the effect that the Moore’s house was on fire.

The Moore family lived almost directly behind us, just across a one-lane dirt alley that separated the two sides of my supersized block in Terre Haute, Indiana. I don’t remember how many children they had: they didn’t have any boys my age so I didn’t pay much attention to them. Patricia and Anna, though, went to school with my sisters and were kinda friends. I knew them and thought they were cool.

When I got to the fire the two-story, wooden house was totally engulfed in flames. I remember the brightness and the heat given off, and a few mothers in the neighborhood who were holding their small children in their arms. It was probably winter but not very cold. Plus the fire was very hot.

I remember seeing Anna and maybe Patricia crying. I remember feeling bad for them: I sure didn’t want to think about my own house burning to the ground.

We didn’t stay long. We’d seen a lot of fires here and there in the neighborhood and the novelty of one so close to home wore off quickly.

I learned the next day that Patricia and Anna Moore’s little sister died in the fire. I don’t think I ever knew her name. A little while later I learned that it had taken the fire department forty-five minutes to respond to the first call. The fire station was one street over and one street down. Two blocks. Forty-five minutes.

A little girl died because the fire department didn’t come when they were first called. They waited.

Did I mention that this was around 1959?

Did I mention that the Moore family was black?

My town was racist back then; it may still be so. But that was one of the first things I remember that contributed to the anger and frustration I’ve pretty much always felt. The THFD took their time because they didn’t feel any sense of urgency to respond to a house fire two blocks away but across U.S. 41, the dividing line between blacks and whites in our town. I lived in a ghetto. I didn’t know it but I did.

It still makes me angry now, almost fifty years later. I recognize that the death of a nameless black girl has become a symbol of sorts for me, and that my anger is not just about her death. It’s about all the mind-numbing horror that has been dumped on people for years and years by people who ought to have known better. People who grew up when the U.S. was more Christian than now.

And I’m still angry because it’s still happening. The groups have changed, perhaps, but the inhumanity and hatred continue. Maybe we call them “illegal aliens” now and think of them as illegal but treat them as though they’re aliens. Non-human. Not capable of love or deep feelings or saving faith or devotion to Christ or any other thing that makes us human but not them.

The churches in my town were silent about the whole thing. Nobody thought it was usual. And what really gets to me even now, what almost brings me to tears as I write this and think about it, is that the black people in my neighborhood weren’t surprised either. They had come to expect it. It had been going on for years and years and years.

And I hated it and I still hate it and I’ll rage against it until the day I die. Or, I hope I die before I stop hating what happened. I’m angry.

“What are you so angry about? What are you rebelling against?”

“Whadda ya got?”

There were giants on the earth when I grew up. Not the nephilim kind of giants, but the larger-than-life-heroes kind of giants.

There are many to choose from but, since I’m listening to him sing Drowned as I write this, I’ll focus on Pete Townshend, the genius behind The Who. The particular version is from The Who Live 2000, which you can watch here or buy here. I’d recommend buying it, which it what I did.

Perhaps more than most or any other group in the ’60s and ’70s, The Who captured the spirit of the age and the angst of my generation. What set them apart, in my mind, is that Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwhistle, and Keith Moon didn’t just play rock: they attacked it with a passion sadly lacking from most others of their time. Or maybe anytime.

They were giants, messiah- like figures to those of us caught in the confusion of the day. They had a cause and they were committed to it with a passion fierce and a devotion unrelenting . They were going to do what they did regardless of the obstacles, criticisms, or threats of mainstream culture. They sang what we felt the way we felt it. Fearless. Raw. Powerful. Unapologetic.

The Who was my favorite group then, years before my salvation in 1974 at the age of 24. Townshend, in particular, was brilliant as a songwriter, singer, and performer. For my money, he was the most talented individual to come out of the UK during the British Invasion or later.

When I came to know God – or, rather, to be known by him – I left the music behind for awhile but retained the passion, transferring it from the drug culture and being a freak to my relationship with God and his purposes in our world. I was taught that groups like The Who and individuals like Pete Townshend were worldly, sinful, and bad influences. It was the beginning of my domestication, the attempt to effectually neuter me and, I would discover, assuage my passion for a cause. Any cause.

I went through the usual progression of a lot of new believers but something was wrong and I knew it, although I had no idea what it was. But it grew worse and more troubling as time went on. And I struggled with my anger and fought an insidious depression.

Now, perhaps, I know what was going on in me and in the church and in me in the church, especially. I know why the church lost me – and lost me gladly, I think – and thousands of other men like me. Men who think and care and fight against things that are wrong and shouldn’t be. Men who, having been too near the knife of cultural castration, now refuse to conform to the insipid “manly manhood” that churches present and prescribe. Such men as are not just wild at heart but wild, as a wolf or grizzly is wild.

There is an interesting segment on The Who dvd when they bring current pop stars on stage to sing and play with them. These placid young men – with the thoroughly stark and passionate exception of violinist Nigel Kennedy – are very talented.

And very premeditated. And intentional. Not much spontaneity, power, or ferocity. This may have been unique to this setting but it serves as an analogy for me just the same. That’s what church is like for me now. And that’s why I eschew the lukewarm organization called the church. Not the organism made up of individual believers, but the organization led by people called “senior pastor” or “executive pastor.” “Executive pastor”? What the hell is that?

I’ve referred to the following before, but I think both Pirsig and Mallick are onto something that explains why I’m not in church. Why men like me don’t like church and don’t get much if anything out of it.

“He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time.

“The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.” – Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The thinker challenges current prejudices. He disturbs the complacent. He obstructs the busy pragmatists. He questions the very foundations of all about him, and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives, and purposes which those who are running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate. The thinker is a nuisance. He is a luxury that modern society cannot afford. It will therefore naturally, and on its own terms justifiably, strive to keep him quiet, to restrict his influence, to ignore him. It will try to pretend that he does not exist. . . .

“But the Church is false to itself when it rejects the thinker. And therefore, in so far as it adopts the fashion of the secular world and tries to submerge thought under learning, prophecy under scholarship, wisdom under know-how, it strives to secularize itself; in other words to destroy itself. . . .

“Thus our complaint against the education through which our [pastors] are prepared for their duties might justly be widened into a complaint against the bias of our educational system in general. It is not geared to the production of thinkers. It is geared to their obliteration.” – Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind

I’m a long way from being a Martin Luther, but I wonder if he wasn’t passionate about battling against the corruption and perversion of the church in his day just as I and a lot of other men – and women – are today. Or, for some of us, were.

Church leadership, like successful revolutionaries that come to power, trade their passion and power for control and maintaining the status quo. They have mortgages and kids in college. They don’t want to risk their 401Ks or whatever with an ever-changing, ever-growing church that might get uncontrollable or unmanageable. So they harness, hamstring, and gag it. And the people in the pews are coming and going: coming for something they desperately need and going without it. Eventually, if they have a remnant of the passion and fury of youth, they leave and don’t miss what had consumed hours of sleep, yard work, or motorcycle time on Sunday mornings. They look elsewhere for what ought to be there.

It’s hard for me to know when to stop writing or talking when I get into this subject, as I often do online or with friends. Or with friends online. I could go on for a long time because it is a subject that affects me personally and saddens me deeply. It is sad because of the years or decades I spent try to fit in with a sick church and wondering what was wrong with me when I couldn’t. But, even more, it saddens me because of the empty words that people settle for on Sunday mornings, not knowing that there is more. Form without substance.

But since I’d rather leave people wanting more instead of less, I’ll close after the following.

My passion for Christ remains and remains frustrated. It’s a small audience that really knows or wants what I’m talking about. Some of that is because of age or having grown up at a different time or place. But I hope there are some kindred spirits here, spirits with hearts that are passionate about a god-man who came to save us. And who are not ashamed or embarrassed to express that passion anyway, anyhow, anywhere you choose.