a member of the greatest generation (on steroids)...
About a year ago my grandfather passed away at the age of 84. I grew up with my grandparents frequently visiting, staying in touch, and, particularly in the case of my grandfather, conveying their life stories so that they could be passed down. My grandfather grew up in the depression, dealt with an untimely death of his mother, took care of both his alcoholic father and blind sister, started his own business, and served in the pacific theater in World War II all by the time that he was my age. To sum it up, just imagine a Tom Brokaw "greatest generation" story on steroids and you have my grandfather. Grieving my Grandfather took on a unique shape. Usually death is made hard to deal with because of a sense of untimeliness, or an undue amount of suffering, or some sort of unfinished business. I can say that, for my own part, I had none of these things. My Grandfather took heaven for granted and spoke of it quite candidly, was at an age and health which made an imminent passing something that was expected, and he spent his retirement nearly constantly visiting his seven children and twenty-eight grandchildren. (I did say seven children and twenty-eight grandchildren. My grandfather, like many WWII vets, was a proud shareholder in the baby-boom.) None of the above issues, for me, presented themselves in the stages of grief. The difficulty I had is learning how to remember him. How could I remember and tell his story in a way that was relevant to people like me who are in a generation in which values, affects, sensibilities, and culture has been inverted from the time in which he grew up?
Essentially, my grandfather was a hero. World Mythology expert Joseph Campbell defines a hero as someone who chooses to act based on the authentic demands that are in his soul and psyche at the expense of things that their culture has deemed as norms. They risk, and indeed face, rejection. They embody a faith and authenticity with a shelf-life that outlasts creature comforts, and upon the birth of this faith return to the world from which they came offering it the blessings which came at great expense. For Campbell, this process that makes a hero mirrors the process of the coming of age to adulthood. Interestingly enough, many young men my age (myself included) would say that both embodying heroism and maturity are the holy grail that lies perpetually beyond their grasp.
Stories of this caliber have existed at all places and all points of history from Jason facing the Argonauts, to Luke Skywalker and the Imperial "Dark Side" to my Grandfather and a hurting, lost world. The odd thing is that my Grandfather's story is true. He really existed. I can show you pictures if you want. For some reason, I did not have the generational empathy to really understand this until after my Grandfather had passed away. While my Grandfather didn't embody the gut-spilling transparency that seems to be the virtue-du-jour in modern Christian circles, but I've began to see that he did embody something more fundamental. My Grandfather understood the heroic identity of what it means to joyfully and contentedly embody Jesus in a world of hurt.
My grandfather's conversion to Christianity came at the end of the war. There were a series of events beginning with a miraculous survival of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, and culminating by an incident with a young, Korean orphan boy at the end of the war. My Grandfather saw this young boy on the street and upon being solicited for help, told him that he would take him to go get some food. While they were walking they were swarmed by an entire group of orphans who unlike the previous boy were asking, not for food, but for whiskey and cigarettes. When my grandfather refused to give him these things, the first young boy asked him if he was a Christian. This was a question that my Grandfather later said was echoing in his head for months. My grandfather articulated this in a very accessible way, being from a blue collar, midwestern background. But in retrospect, I think that he had an existential crisis. He stood at the end of a long, sacrificial, tour of duty and began to ask himself what the underlying motive was for what he did.
This brief season culminated in him visiting a chapel service in which a Presbyterian missionary who happened to share my Grandfather's Swedish heritage, happened to be presenting the gospel. My Grandfather, through the rest of his life, would repeat what this evangelist said. "There are two kinds of people in this world: sinners and sinners that Jesus saves." Upon hearing this distinction, my Grandfather didn't have to put a whole lot of thought into which type of person he wanted to be. It is at this time that my Grandfather began his life as a fanatic Christian. While this has pejorative overtones, there is no other word that seems to quantify his degree of zeal. There was a new Swedish missionary in town, and he had a story to tell.
Upon my Grandfather's return to America he had a bank account that consisted of most of the money that he had been drawing during his different tours as well as an ice business that he had sold upon enlisting in the military. I don't know what the exact dollar amount is, but an uncle of mine explained that it was enough to buy a car, make a down payment on a house, and start a decently comfortable life. In an overture of divine affection, he decided to empty his account out and literally give all of his savings to different Christian missionary and humanitarian organization. My grandfather had a particular soft spot for Korean children and heard about a man named Everett Swanson (another good Swede) who was starting a ministry providing food, shelter and schooling for 35 Korean orphans. He decided to give $1,000 to this man. I found an article on the Web that told about this event:
Evangelist Everett Swanson travels to South Korea to preach the gospel to the troops in the Republic of Korea army. During his visit he encounters children orphaned by the war. Rev. Swanson is challenged by a missionary friend: "You have seen the tremendous needs and unparalleled opportunities of this land. What do you intend to do about it?"
Two checks are presented to Rev. Swanson ($50 and $1,000) upon his return to America to help the orphans of Korea. "This was conclusive proof to me that God was in it," Swanson said.
What was a relatively small but sacrificial gift became a ministry that we are now familiar with as Compassion International. Their website, from which the above quote was taken says that this man's ministry has outlasted him, now helping half a million children in over 50 countries. Interestingly enough, I never heard my grandfather articulate his giving as sacrificial. My grandfather looked at the relationship of his belongings to people in need the way that I would look at receiving a $100 gift card to itunes. It wasn't sacrificial. It was recklessly indulgent. He was a grace junkie looking for another fix. When my Grandfather died, some of my Uncles were going through his checking account records and they said that it seemed that donations were outweighing the bills. My grandmother had never even heard him talk about a lot of the people and organizations that he gave to. I'm sure that many people who face the loss of a spouse discover "little secrets" on the bank ledger of the deceased: fast food binges, online gambling, fishing gear, maybe even something elicit. My grandfather's secret was his generosity towards others. It was more than one would expect--even his own wife.
The hard part about remembering my Grandfather has been in comparing and contrasting his world and mine. He came from a time when expectations were more clear, where there was still the black and white distinction of good guys and bad guys, and where it seems that those in power could be more trusted. Maybe I'm wrong, but I always had an impression of his world that was less fragmented and complex. In the world that I am in, it is much more difficult to be heroic. But when I think about the story that I just told, I am reminded of the heroic virtues of contented generosity, and I know that this is even more possible in the world that I live in. I have not realized this in my own life, but I'm sure that God smiles and Satan shivers at the thought of churches filled with heroically generous people.
Picture of Elmer Rund (my Grandfather) being presented with an award by a man named Colonel Sanders. Not to be confused with the guy with the secret delicious chicken recipe.
My grandfather on the right with the 1948 James Dean Look-alike champion.
My Grandfather on far left (half cropped out) , again being honored by someone who is apparently important, as demonstrated by the mismatched hat.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Murder
this is actually a piece that i wrote quite some time ago. it is, however, relevant to what we spoke about this week: murder.
My neighbor, Rich, is a public defender in the next county over. The other day we were sitting on his porch and I asked him about the most intense cases he has ever had. One of them was an attempted homicide case in which the defendant stabbed his girlfriend 13 times with a steak knife. The defendant, who was unfamiliar with our legal system, and didn’t speak English, insisted that the only reasonable defense he would use is that he “is not that kind of person.”
Obviously we approach murder with some emotional baggage. Other moral shortcomings—lying, stealing, cheating, blasphemy, coveting, treason, rebellion—all of these can be undone or at least pacified by some degree of restitution. Murder isn’t like that.
Rich also told me about another case in which he sat in on the selection of a jury for a man who was facing the death penalty. The main idea of this process is that the prosecution has to make sure that all of the people who make it through have no problem sentencing people to death. In other words, they have to support the death penalty (at least in some cases) and have no problem deciding that it should be administered.
On this particular occasion, one of the final people in the screening process was an old blue-haired lady from the south. She was wearing a flower print dress and had skin that looked like a freckled catcher’s mitt. She was every grandmother who lived below the mason/Dixon. The prosecutor was unconvinced that she would be the right person for the job because of her evidently sweet disposition. The prosecutor looked her in the eyes and asked with Matlock-esque intensity:
“Ma’am, we are trying to find out if you would have a problem putting the defendant to death. Could you do this?”
She looked puzzled. “Well that depends, will he be sent to Rayford prison if he is found guilty?”
“Why, yes ma’am he will.”
“Will it take place on Sunday?”
“It usually takes place during the week.”
“Well it will be a long drive, but I suppose I could make it up there and pull the switch, or whatever you do.”
The prosecutor then realized that this woman was under the impression that she would personally pull the switch. “Ma’am, you don’t have to actually kill him. You just decide if he gets the death penalty.”
“Oh.”
“We’ll take her.”
It was a funny story, but it was kind of grim thinking about an old lady from this cracker county in central Florida, strolling into the room with the electric chair and flipping the switch. It is hard to picture a human with the moral hardware to make a decision of that magnitude with that kind of certainty.
I remember the first murderer that I ever knew. He worked in a restaurant that I used to work at while finishing up college and for a few months after. It was a Pizza place in Tallahassee. He was a dishwasher. His name was Dwight. This was hard for me to forget, because he had “Dwight” tattooed in cursive on his neck. This restaurant was open until four in the morning and we would close together on three nights a week. A lot of our dishwashers were on work-release from prison. I assumed this was the case with Dwight. I would try to ask him questions while we were closing the restaurant and he would only answer with single words. His voice was barely above a whisper, but had the qualities of a yell. The words seemed to sever the air in front of him. Single words moving like a slow motion replay of a boxing match: “Yes.” “No”. “Soon.” “Good-bye.” Within ten seconds of knowing Dwight, I knew he was a badass.
He would strip down to his wife-beater undershirt and sling through the dishes while mouthing the words to rap music that was playing in the dish pit. He would move with a certainty and force that I wished I had when I played sports in high school. The dishwasher was always the lowest paid person in the restaurants, but Dwight seemed to own the job with an uncanny sense of pride. He seemed to say with his action to everyone else, “if you want to be where I am, you’ve got to earn it.” But it was a statement that I believed. That is the only way that I could think to describe it. In a way he embodied our cultures idea of masculinity—very distant in his words and very present in his actions.
After Dwight and I had worked together for a couple of weeks, he asked me for a ride home. It was past four in the morning and I didn’t want to be anywhere besides my bed, but I didn’t want to tell him “no” either. I also kind of liked the idea of him riding shotgun in my old, beat up Honda Accord. I would pretend it was a ’64 impala with fins and custom suicide doors. I would pretend that we were out at 4am with our night just beginning. I would pretend that we were John Trivolta and Samuel Jackson in Pulp fiction.
He said he lived near me. I could already picture where it was. It was around the corner. Down Macomb Street. Right on Alabama. Right on Joe Louis. He would live in the back of a dilapidated public housing development. He would have a Rotweilder with a scar on its face. He would offer me a quart of domestic malt liquor from his fridge and we’d sit around for a little while before I went home.
Dwight was a different person than I imagined when he was sitting in my passenger seat. I had never heard him speak in complete sentences. The boxer started his combination move:
“So are you in school?” The combination move felt more like a pirouette.
“Yeah. I’m a religion and classics major.” I assumed he wasn’t in school, but I decided to go with the reciprocal conversation format. “Are you in school?”
“Yeah. Business major.” Dwight was in college. “Turn right here.” Dwight lived in a set of luxury condominiums.
There was some sort of mistake. I had figured Dwight out, and he was messing it up. He spoke up again.
“That would be good to study religion. If you studied enough of them you could probably find out which one was right.” Dwight was a simpleton.
“Yeah. I guess that’s why some people are there.” I decided to answer with accommodating diplomacy.
He sensed some of what I thought about his idea in my response, and I could tell this. He looked down and he turned his head towards the passenger window. Dwight was intimidated by me. As horrible as it is to admit this. I found this exhilarating. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s because I found him so intimidating initially.
I gave Dwight rides home a couple more times after that. We still didn’t really talk a whole lot.
He quit in June. Tallahassee was sweltering. I was sweating so much that I would have to put on a new T-shirt in the middle of the day. It was the suffocating, greenhouse heat of the deep south. Around this time they found a body in the retention pond of an apartment complex near FSU campus. Now you have to realize that Tallahassee hardly ever has homicides. You hear about one maybe once a year. By the time they found the body, it was impossible to identify. It had been rotting in the heat and had been chewed nearly to the skeleton by the fish in the retention pond.
That week, an investigator came into the restaurant and questioned a manager. The murder had been linked to Dwight. They found a gun with his fingerprints on it.
Evidently someone owed Dwight money. The events were sketchy, but Dwight shot this guy twice in the chest and once in the head, wrapped him in a bed sheet, dragged him down a street and through a parking lot to a retention pond. This had happened sometime around the first time I gave Dwight a ride home.
I won’t pretend I knew Dwight well. I won’t even pretend that I liked him all that much. But, from what I did know, Dwight (much like my neighbor Rich’s client) “wasn’t that kind of person.” He wasn’t a calculated, heartless, killing machine. He was a shy lummox. A kid scrubbing dishes to get through college. A young man in a world that was bigger than he thought.
After we heard what happened, some of us sat around at the restaurant bar after work and talked about it. Some of the waitresses said they always hated Dwight because he would stare at their bodies and not their faces. One of the bartenders said that he was used to reading people and they could tell that “something was wrong” with Dwight. One of the managers said that they knew that the cops were going to ask questions about Dwight. We all sat behind the bar and circled around the drama of mortality like vultures...and somehow I knew that they were all lying.
I knew that they would never have guessed that Dwight took someone’s life. That they were as shocked as I was. I also knew that they were trying to reconcile the fact that Dwight was a person who was a lot like them. I knew this because that is what I was doing. Dwight faced the same chaos as we did. Dwight was in a world in which decisions came at him to quick—like a game of three-card monty. Not only were the decisions too quick, but the interests were all conflicted and messed up. He found himself in the mess that we all find ourselves in, and he chose wrong.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn said this:
“If only there were people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
I am made up of the same stuff as Dwight. So are you. This is a grim reality. We are all tempted to draw the “dividing line” outside of ourselves.
This is the reality that I think of on this “good” Friday. In our identification with the “bad guys” lies our hope of transformation. This is the night when Christ himself, willfully went to his death between two thieves. This is the grim backdrop behind the hope of Easter resurrection. This is the guilt that must be acknowledged for another to carry our cross, and, with this acknowledgement, comes the passion to carry others’ crosses ourselves.
My neighbor, Rich, is a public defender in the next county over. The other day we were sitting on his porch and I asked him about the most intense cases he has ever had. One of them was an attempted homicide case in which the defendant stabbed his girlfriend 13 times with a steak knife. The defendant, who was unfamiliar with our legal system, and didn’t speak English, insisted that the only reasonable defense he would use is that he “is not that kind of person.”
Obviously we approach murder with some emotional baggage. Other moral shortcomings—lying, stealing, cheating, blasphemy, coveting, treason, rebellion—all of these can be undone or at least pacified by some degree of restitution. Murder isn’t like that.
Rich also told me about another case in which he sat in on the selection of a jury for a man who was facing the death penalty. The main idea of this process is that the prosecution has to make sure that all of the people who make it through have no problem sentencing people to death. In other words, they have to support the death penalty (at least in some cases) and have no problem deciding that it should be administered.
On this particular occasion, one of the final people in the screening process was an old blue-haired lady from the south. She was wearing a flower print dress and had skin that looked like a freckled catcher’s mitt. She was every grandmother who lived below the mason/Dixon. The prosecutor was unconvinced that she would be the right person for the job because of her evidently sweet disposition. The prosecutor looked her in the eyes and asked with Matlock-esque intensity:
“Ma’am, we are trying to find out if you would have a problem putting the defendant to death. Could you do this?”
She looked puzzled. “Well that depends, will he be sent to Rayford prison if he is found guilty?”
“Why, yes ma’am he will.”
“Will it take place on Sunday?”
“It usually takes place during the week.”
“Well it will be a long drive, but I suppose I could make it up there and pull the switch, or whatever you do.”
The prosecutor then realized that this woman was under the impression that she would personally pull the switch. “Ma’am, you don’t have to actually kill him. You just decide if he gets the death penalty.”
“Oh.”
“We’ll take her.”
It was a funny story, but it was kind of grim thinking about an old lady from this cracker county in central Florida, strolling into the room with the electric chair and flipping the switch. It is hard to picture a human with the moral hardware to make a decision of that magnitude with that kind of certainty.
I remember the first murderer that I ever knew. He worked in a restaurant that I used to work at while finishing up college and for a few months after. It was a Pizza place in Tallahassee. He was a dishwasher. His name was Dwight. This was hard for me to forget, because he had “Dwight” tattooed in cursive on his neck. This restaurant was open until four in the morning and we would close together on three nights a week. A lot of our dishwashers were on work-release from prison. I assumed this was the case with Dwight. I would try to ask him questions while we were closing the restaurant and he would only answer with single words. His voice was barely above a whisper, but had the qualities of a yell. The words seemed to sever the air in front of him. Single words moving like a slow motion replay of a boxing match: “Yes.” “No”. “Soon.” “Good-bye.” Within ten seconds of knowing Dwight, I knew he was a badass.
He would strip down to his wife-beater undershirt and sling through the dishes while mouthing the words to rap music that was playing in the dish pit. He would move with a certainty and force that I wished I had when I played sports in high school. The dishwasher was always the lowest paid person in the restaurants, but Dwight seemed to own the job with an uncanny sense of pride. He seemed to say with his action to everyone else, “if you want to be where I am, you’ve got to earn it.” But it was a statement that I believed. That is the only way that I could think to describe it. In a way he embodied our cultures idea of masculinity—very distant in his words and very present in his actions.
After Dwight and I had worked together for a couple of weeks, he asked me for a ride home. It was past four in the morning and I didn’t want to be anywhere besides my bed, but I didn’t want to tell him “no” either. I also kind of liked the idea of him riding shotgun in my old, beat up Honda Accord. I would pretend it was a ’64 impala with fins and custom suicide doors. I would pretend that we were out at 4am with our night just beginning. I would pretend that we were John Trivolta and Samuel Jackson in Pulp fiction.
He said he lived near me. I could already picture where it was. It was around the corner. Down Macomb Street. Right on Alabama. Right on Joe Louis. He would live in the back of a dilapidated public housing development. He would have a Rotweilder with a scar on its face. He would offer me a quart of domestic malt liquor from his fridge and we’d sit around for a little while before I went home.
Dwight was a different person than I imagined when he was sitting in my passenger seat. I had never heard him speak in complete sentences. The boxer started his combination move:
“So are you in school?” The combination move felt more like a pirouette.
“Yeah. I’m a religion and classics major.” I assumed he wasn’t in school, but I decided to go with the reciprocal conversation format. “Are you in school?”
“Yeah. Business major.” Dwight was in college. “Turn right here.” Dwight lived in a set of luxury condominiums.
There was some sort of mistake. I had figured Dwight out, and he was messing it up. He spoke up again.
“That would be good to study religion. If you studied enough of them you could probably find out which one was right.” Dwight was a simpleton.
“Yeah. I guess that’s why some people are there.” I decided to answer with accommodating diplomacy.
He sensed some of what I thought about his idea in my response, and I could tell this. He looked down and he turned his head towards the passenger window. Dwight was intimidated by me. As horrible as it is to admit this. I found this exhilarating. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s because I found him so intimidating initially.
I gave Dwight rides home a couple more times after that. We still didn’t really talk a whole lot.
He quit in June. Tallahassee was sweltering. I was sweating so much that I would have to put on a new T-shirt in the middle of the day. It was the suffocating, greenhouse heat of the deep south. Around this time they found a body in the retention pond of an apartment complex near FSU campus. Now you have to realize that Tallahassee hardly ever has homicides. You hear about one maybe once a year. By the time they found the body, it was impossible to identify. It had been rotting in the heat and had been chewed nearly to the skeleton by the fish in the retention pond.
That week, an investigator came into the restaurant and questioned a manager. The murder had been linked to Dwight. They found a gun with his fingerprints on it.
Evidently someone owed Dwight money. The events were sketchy, but Dwight shot this guy twice in the chest and once in the head, wrapped him in a bed sheet, dragged him down a street and through a parking lot to a retention pond. This had happened sometime around the first time I gave Dwight a ride home.
I won’t pretend I knew Dwight well. I won’t even pretend that I liked him all that much. But, from what I did know, Dwight (much like my neighbor Rich’s client) “wasn’t that kind of person.” He wasn’t a calculated, heartless, killing machine. He was a shy lummox. A kid scrubbing dishes to get through college. A young man in a world that was bigger than he thought.
After we heard what happened, some of us sat around at the restaurant bar after work and talked about it. Some of the waitresses said they always hated Dwight because he would stare at their bodies and not their faces. One of the bartenders said that he was used to reading people and they could tell that “something was wrong” with Dwight. One of the managers said that they knew that the cops were going to ask questions about Dwight. We all sat behind the bar and circled around the drama of mortality like vultures...and somehow I knew that they were all lying.
I knew that they would never have guessed that Dwight took someone’s life. That they were as shocked as I was. I also knew that they were trying to reconcile the fact that Dwight was a person who was a lot like them. I knew this because that is what I was doing. Dwight faced the same chaos as we did. Dwight was in a world in which decisions came at him to quick—like a game of three-card monty. Not only were the decisions too quick, but the interests were all conflicted and messed up. He found himself in the mess that we all find ourselves in, and he chose wrong.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn said this:
“If only there were people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
I am made up of the same stuff as Dwight. So are you. This is a grim reality. We are all tempted to draw the “dividing line” outside of ourselves.
This is the reality that I think of on this “good” Friday. In our identification with the “bad guys” lies our hope of transformation. This is the night when Christ himself, willfully went to his death between two thieves. This is the grim backdrop behind the hope of Easter resurrection. This is the guilt that must be acknowledged for another to carry our cross, and, with this acknowledgement, comes the passion to carry others’ crosses ourselves.
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