The Doctors Say A Friend of Mine is Dying
He’s nearly my father’s age and his body just can’t take much more of his life.
When I came to this church he knew we would be friends. He was always a fish out of water. He had a degree from Berkeley in anthropology but he spent with all sorts of people. He had highly refined tastes in books and music, loving the life of the mind but was surrounded mostly by people who didn’t share those tastes. He saw quickly that I was someone who loved ideas, books and while I didn’t share his love for opera we would have lots of interesting things to talk about. He was right. We became friends. Today on his death bed he declared me to be his best friend in the world. He does like drama.
A Life of Beauty and Tragedy
He was never a private person. He was always willing to share his thoughts and feelings if you were his friend.
He was always an excessive person. After getting his degree he would marry and have a child. His excessive personality drove him to drink, excessively. His alcoholism wrecked his marriage and nearly his career. After a night in prison and a warning from a judge he became as he always told me, a “friend of Bill” (not Clinton), worked his 12 steps with the same excess he expressed with the bottle and achieved sobriety. Today when we offered him a beer he said “I’ve kept my sobriety this long I’m not ditching it at the end.”
He found love again, remarried and began to build his life once more.
His excessive personality drove him to not be fully satisfied with a slim “higher power”. He wanted to know God. He was a Christian and wanted to be a serious one, so he sought out a serious church, a Christian Reformed church where the children were made to behave and the men were serious too. His wife wouldn’t go with him for a year. “Those people don’t smile or talk.”
He found that CRC pastors were lovers of thought and theology and he could work his mind around doctrine and learning and teaching. It was the church for him.
Even after he had beaten the bottle his excesses didn’t stop. He loved music and so drowned in the excess of tens of thousands of records and CDs. He loved pipes and so collected hundreds. He loved books and filled his home in those too. When I introduced him to the Kindle he was hooked.
He also loved food and his excess in that area would give him hundreds of pounds and hours of inactivity, bringing on diabetes and ruining his knees. While alcohol would never again be a problem for him he needed pills to keep his bodily systems in balance and ease his joint pain.
What he most loved, however, was friendship and so what little money was left over (he wasn’t excessive about making money) from his other excesses he’s lavish on his friends. He loved going out for lunch and would never let me pay.
He was a deeply sensitive man but tried to keep that hidden. He could never have enough friends but when someone wouldn’t call or follow up he’d quietly hurt.
He’s dying now, in some ways the result of all of his excess. It’s a miracle he’s lived as long as he has.
A Religion We Can All Agree On
When David Brook’s Moral Bucket List posted I knew it would be a big hit. It’s similar to a speech he recently gave and probably a preview of the book his about to release. Part of me loves this stuff. This is a non-sectarian moral life, beautiful, selfless, noble. Safe enough for the whole family yet urbane enough for the city. It is able to be embraced across sectarian lines. If there is a common secular space that religious and non-religious can gather within while we tear each other up over gays and religious liberty isn’t this it? I’m far more comfortable with David Brooks as priest of our common virtue than Oprah. Me, my friend, and David Brooks can find a lot of common ground.
Virtue is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. Like many of God’s gifts virtue requires effort, cultivation, protection. Virtue is also gloriously non-sectarian. We find it all over the world, in so many religions and cultures. We want our children, our neighbors, our leaders and our gods to be virtuous.
David Brooks better than most can lay out a vision for virtue for middle and high culture Americans today. He describes meeting truly virtuous people, let’s call them spiritual. They are generous, they are secure, they are honest, they are the kinds of friends, neighbors and citizens we know the world needs. While in our naivety we imagine that we can cheat on virtue in our private lives we want to look and be virtuous in public as we demand our neighbors to be. What the world needs now is virtue, more virtue.
Paul in Corinth Continue reading →
David Brook’s Moral Bucket List, My Dying Friend and the Cross of Christ
The Doctors Say A Friend of Mine is Dying
He’s nearly my father’s age and his body just can’t take much more of his life.
When I came to this church he knew we would be friends. He was always a fish out of water. He had a degree from Berkeley in anthropology but he spent with all sorts of people. He had highly refined tastes in books and music, loving the life of the mind but was surrounded mostly by people who didn’t share those tastes. He saw quickly that I was someone who loved ideas, books and while I didn’t share his love for opera we would have lots of interesting things to talk about. He was right. We became friends. Today on his death bed he declared me to be his best friend in the world. He does like drama.
A Life of Beauty and Tragedy
He was never a private person. He was always willing to share his thoughts and feelings if you were his friend.
He was always an excessive person. After getting his degree he would marry and have a child. His excessive personality drove him to drink, excessively. His alcoholism wrecked his marriage and nearly his career. After a night in prison and a warning from a judge he became as he always told me, a “friend of Bill” (not Clinton), worked his 12 steps with the same excess he expressed with the bottle and achieved sobriety. Today when we offered him a beer he said “I’ve kept my sobriety this long I’m not ditching it at the end.”
He found love again, remarried and began to build his life once more.
His excessive personality drove him to not be fully satisfied with a slim “higher power”. He wanted to know God. He was a Christian and wanted to be a serious one, so he sought out a serious church, a Christian Reformed church where the children were made to behave and the men were serious too. His wife wouldn’t go with him for a year. “Those people don’t smile or talk.”
He found that CRC pastors were lovers of thought and theology and he could work his mind around doctrine and learning and teaching. It was the church for him.
Even after he had beaten the bottle his excesses didn’t stop. He loved music and so drowned in the excess of tens of thousands of records and CDs. He loved pipes and so collected hundreds. He loved books and filled his home in those too. When I introduced him to the Kindle he was hooked.
He also loved food and his excess in that area would give him hundreds of pounds and hours of inactivity, bringing on diabetes and ruining his knees. While alcohol would never again be a problem for him he needed pills to keep his bodily systems in balance and ease his joint pain.
What he most loved, however, was friendship and so what little money was left over (he wasn’t excessive about making money) from his other excesses he’s lavish on his friends. He loved going out for lunch and would never let me pay.
He was a deeply sensitive man but tried to keep that hidden. He could never have enough friends but when someone wouldn’t call or follow up he’d quietly hurt.
He’s dying now, in some ways the result of all of his excess. It’s a miracle he’s lived as long as he has.
A Religion We Can All Agree On
When David Brook’s Moral Bucket List posted I knew it would be a big hit. It’s similar to a speech he recently gave and probably a preview of the book his about to release. Part of me loves this stuff. This is a non-sectarian moral life, beautiful, selfless, noble. Safe enough for the whole family yet urbane enough for the city. It is able to be embraced across sectarian lines. If there is a common secular space that religious and non-religious can gather within while we tear each other up over gays and religious liberty isn’t this it? I’m far more comfortable with David Brooks as priest of our common virtue than Oprah. Me, my friend, and David Brooks can find a lot of common ground.
Virtue is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. Like many of God’s gifts virtue requires effort, cultivation, protection. Virtue is also gloriously non-sectarian. We find it all over the world, in so many religions and cultures. We want our children, our neighbors, our leaders and our gods to be virtuous.
David Brooks better than most can lay out a vision for virtue for middle and high culture Americans today. He describes meeting truly virtuous people, let’s call them spiritual. They are generous, they are secure, they are honest, they are the kinds of friends, neighbors and citizens we know the world needs. While in our naivety we imagine that we can cheat on virtue in our private lives we want to look and be virtuous in public as we demand our neighbors to be. What the world needs now is virtue, more virtue.
Paul in Corinth Continue reading →