No one thought about private possessions until they started raising crops and claiming land. Then a wife became just a thing, he says, citing the 10th commandment as evidence for his conclusion: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that [is] thy neighbor’s.”

Monogamy is an agricultural accident, he claims:

Research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy and psychology points to the same conclusion: A nonpossessive, gregarious sexuality was the human norm until the rise of agriculture and private property just 10,000 years ago.

That’s a lot of research. And it’s also a lot of nonsense.

Sexuality is still gregarious. Infidelity is still the norm. And I’m not sure a shared woman was better off than a monogamous one, since the real problem has always been the self-serving heart. A nonpossessive sexuality is not a human one. There has never been a man who couldn’t turn a woman into a thing, regardless of how many were available to him.

Monogamy has never been “natural” anyway; it’s just been necessary. It’s a discipline that keeps our demons at bay. But marriage is more than that. It is an office, not an instinct, an office that represents God’s covenant keeping love for his people.

When Jesus was questioned about divorce he points back to creation itself:

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

Ryan comes to a different, and much less satisfying conclusion:

Just as we can choose to be vegans, we can decide to lead sexually monogamous lives. But newlyweds would be wise to remember that just because you’ve chosen to be vegan, it’s utterly natural to yearn for an occasional bacon cheeseburger.

A divine ordinance vs. a bacon cheese burger? It’s a choice between lasting significance and short-term satisfaction.

It’s a choice with consequences.

Or not. Although Jesus himself said he didn’t know the hour, he was holding out on us since he knew the date. Either that or he was bad at math, unlike the people over at The-Latter-Rain ministries, who, by the way do not request, nor accept, donations.

No need, I suppose. According to the countdown calendar there are only 295 days left. They count the hours and minutes based on sunset in Jerusalem, if you need to set your watch.

In his brief book, This Momentary Marriage, John Piper unpacks this interesting but overlooked text. It has some bearing on matters of modesty, which I’ve discussed elsewhere. But it has something to do with marriage too.

Their lack of shame was not because they had perfect bodies, Piper says. There are lots of things to make us self-conscious, despite our perfect nose. Even my perfect in-step, clearly the subject of another conversation, fails to offset my many flaws.

But being ashamed requires having someone to shame us, even if it’s ourselves. Not being ashamed is a consequence of the leaving, cleaving and holding which the previous verse says causes us to be “one flesh.” This is much more than merely a physical union. (Paul refers to a union that is merely physical as prostitution in 1 Corinthians 6.)

No, Piper argues, it is our covenant commitment that creates the context for a shame-free marriage, not our physical beauty or acts. Thankfully.

This commitment pictures, of course, the relationship between Christ and the church, where the church as Christ’s bride has no fear that he will shame her or condemn her. This is the heart of the gospel itself. And the purpose of marriage.

Adam and Eve, however, could no longer trust each other after the fall. What will he say? What will she think? That ability to be naked and not ashamed was lost forever. Or maybe not. Because marriage, I think, can still be that one place where we are vulnerable but still safe.

It might take years, but we can come to a place where our spouses can trust us not to shame them, even when their flaws are obvious and their sins are great. As are our own.

I’m not saying we can do this without supernatural help. A lot of grace is required. And a lot of prayer. But it seems to be a worthy goal—becoming that place where our spouse has confidence that our love will cover a multitude of sins, the place where we can be naked and not ashamed, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Where to start? I think we start by not using public and family pressures to manipulate our spouse, almost always a form of shaming. I complimented a neighbor for doing her laundry the other day, suggesting that Katie was falling behind in ours.

This is not the way to become a refuge. Shame and guilt are the easiest weapons in the arsenal of manipulation, but they have no place in a marriage. The battle of the sexes is a poor metaphor for covenant keeping love.

When Adam and Eve realized they were naked it was loaded with emotional freight, as sex always is. They hustled around making clothes for themselves, even though no one else was around.

Lots of marriages are like that, filled with homemade coverings and deceits hastily assembled. It shouldn’t be like that. It wasn’t God plan before the fall, and it still isn’t. That’s why any effort we make to build and restore trust with our spouse is a step back toward the garden.

We won’t get all the way back, but we will get closer. That’s because being naked and not ashamed is more than a description. It’s a blessing as well.

—————
Art from a third century fresco. Catacomb of St Piretro and St. Marcellino, Rome.

The experiment was really about what happened when the researcher left the room, supposedly to get a survey for the students to complete. The ones who were paid to do the puzzles were distracted, looking at magazines and other items in the room. Those who were not being paid, however, continued to try and solve the puzzles.

In his book Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation Deci describes this and similar research, arguing that rewards and punishments may actually work against parents, teachers and employers in the long run.

I’m inclined to agree, especially since such motivators reinforce external rather than internal motivation. If you control your kids by offering them rewards for everything they do, you don’t get good kids—you get greedy ones.

In learning, too, curiosity goes a lot further than coercion. And creativity often withers on the vine of expectation.

This focus on internal motivation is the thinking behind much management theory today, although most businesses still function on command and control, rewards and penalties, just as they have since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

So do many homes.

But relying on rewards and punishment is not biblical just because we’ve been doing it for a couple of hundred years. The carrots and sticks approach of behavior modification may insure well-behaved kids, but not necessarily well-motivated ones. Or employees either, for that matter.

I struggle, however, with new motivational teaching that focuses almost solely on personal autonomy. This popular “I’m in charge of myself” approach is not consistent with the clear biblical teaching that we’re not.

Or is it?

Real change comes from the inside out, as Christ clearly taught. But can autonomy, connection and purpose, the key components of modern motivational theory, coexist with authority, accountability and awe?

I think so. They do in the church, for example, where every believer is a priest and Christ is Lord of all. And they do in theology, where we accept that God is fully sovereign and we are fully responsible.

Freedom and responsibility are complementary, not contradictory. But awe in particular gets us outside ourselves, while much motivational literature turns us inward.

The fear of the Lord is still the beginning of wisdom.

And love is still the best motivation of all.

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See also Parenting in an Age of Incentives

In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. — John 14:2

When I was born my parents lived in a little apartment in North Naples, Florida, but when they were evicted we moved to Augusta, Georgia. My dad got a job as a used car salesman and we lived in a little flat over a drug store.

Mom’s dad gave them a piece of land, so we moved back to Naples where we lived in a small RV, then a two room cottage, and then what became the family home, a decent two bedroom house, all on the same lot near the bay. I had a room of my own, and my dad, a sign painter at the time, painted life-size Pogo characters on the wall.

Then Dad decided to go to Bible college. We moved to a small rental house on S. Kelly in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and then, after a year or so, to an apartment on Missionary Ridge, where I kissed the landlord’s daughter in a cherry tree. I was seven.

When Dad graduated we moved back to Florida and stayed at my grandfather’s farm near Marco Island. Then Dad took a church in Ft. Myers, Florida, so we lived in two different parsonages, one of them next to a skating rink.

When he left that church we moved back to my grandfather’s farm and then back to the house near the bay. Then it was back to Fort Myers where we rented a house on Sunset Place with a big rubber tree in the side yard. I was in junior high and lived in the garage.

When I was 16 I went to college, back in Tennessee, and my folks rented a duplex on German Town Road and then bought a four room shanty with no siding on the side of Signal Mountain. We fixed it up, even added an in ground pool, and I lived there until I got married, at 21.

Katie and I rented a house and then bought a small bungalow in North Chattanooga. When I decided to go to graduate school in Knoxville, we lived in a garage apartment there until we sold our house in Chattanooga and bought a modular home off Blacks Ferry Road. Katie didn’t like the house but she loved the road.

After graduate school we moved back to Chattanooga where we lived briefly in my parent’s home on the mountain before buying a place on Missionary Ridge, practically in the shadow of the cherry tree.

If you are keeping track of the math, I was 25 and had moved 21 times. Katie was afraid to throw away a cardboard box. A few years later we moved to Michigan and in the 25 years we’ve been here we moved four more times, 3 of them to houses no more than 100 yards apart.

Most Americans (56%) never move out of their birth state, but a new study indicates that those who do move a lot have fewer friends, less satisfying relationship, and are more likely to die young.

“Residential Mobility, Well-being and Mortality” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology was published last month, and reported in the Wall Street Journal. I have to say I’m glad I’m not dead yet.

Or that somebody else isn’t. According to the National Institute of Trauma and Loss in Children, “ “Sometimes children who kill are children who had to move to a new school, or a new state or neighborhood, resented it, and lacked the coping skills to adapt or fit in.”

One of the authors of the mobility report, Shigehiro Oishi, was raised in Japan and never moved as a child. He concedes, however, that moving affects each child differently, and may even result in increased creativity.

This creativity probably comes in handy if you are planning to blow up the school, but also helps explain the resilient pioneers that settled the country in the first place, or the millions of immigrants who came to know it as home.

Apparently moving is tougher on the introverts, and on kids with fewer siblings, both of which describe me. But seriously. I always thought it was good for me. Flexible. Creative. Sensitive.

OK, maybe not sensitive. But I did learn how to pack.

I also learned to live “as in a foreign country,” an important discipline for people of faith who see here “no continuing city.”

You probably don’t have to move 25 times to learn this.

But it helps.

This was an insistently affectionate cat that thought he was a dog. He would follow you around or wake you up about five in the morning wanting to be petted.

Technically the cat belonged to our oldest son, Christian, who disputes his brother Michael’s claim that the cat was only 21. But as every parent knows, no pet ever really belongs to the kids. Whatever they learned about loyalty and responsibility by owning an animal they take with them when they leave home and get married, but not the animal itself.

Over 30 years of parenting I’ve buried lots of animals, but Katie and I decided to cremate the cat. We’ve had pets dug up by various creatures around the farm, and the burial sites are all forgotten and unvisited.

As it turns out, burning a cat is not easier than burying it. I built a funeral byre of sorts, but then I stood by, finding more wood, trying to make sure there was nothing left for the critters to drag away. (I was respectful too, even sad. This was an extraordinary cat.)

But now I can see why the depictions of human cremation involve really big piles of wood. Or a really hot furnace. It takes temperatures approach 2000 °F to get this done, and even then there are bone fragments and such that have to be ground into a powder for the urn.

Katie and I actually have different views on this subject, and I’m going to try not to give my own away. Although almost a quarter of all U.S. citizens are now cremated, for many Christians it is still an awkward subject.

Traditionally the church has opposed it, associating it with pagan practice. The first cremation in the US, for example, used readings from Darwin and Budda for the memorial service.

The list of biblical burials is pretty long: Abraham, Sarah, Rachel, Issac, Joseph, Joshua, Eleazar, Samuel, David, John the Baptist, Ananias and Sapphira, Stephen. You get the idea. And did I mention Jesus? Burial was how God himself disposed of Moses.

The early church felt so strongly about this that they would steal the bodies of martyrs for a proper burial. And from the ancient Hebrews through the history of the church burning people and/or bodies was reserved for witches, prostitutes, heretics and adulterers.

In Amos 2:1: God proclaimed a death curse on Moab because he had reduced the bones of the king of Edom to lime through burning, and burning bodies instead of burying them is clearly seen as something for the bad guys, even at the end of time.

Some say this is because Judeo-Christian burial is rooted in a higher view of the body, as made in the image of God.

Or maybe not. Is the image of God physical in any sense at all, or is it about our nature and our capacity, to love and to create?

Paul describes the resurrection of the dead to a spiritual body in 1 Corinthians 15. After all, flesh and blood can not inherit the kingdom of God (vs. 50). In the end he would prefer to be away from the body and with the Lord.

And as far as the resurrection is concerned, it certainly does not require human dust to make us a new body. Doesn’t the bible say ashes to ashes and dust to dust? Well, actually no. That’s from the Book of Common Prayer.

I’m still sure the resurrection doesn’t depend on the state or nature of human remains, however. Think of all the people who have been buried or lost at sea, eaten by the fish. I could be vaporized and still be resurrected. God’s power is not the issue here.

Unfortunately the answer to this question is not that easy and Katie and I will have to argue about it some more.

Paul doesn’t actually say the body is unimportant, for example. In fact, he says “this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” And a case could be made for burial as a clearer picture of the death, burial and resurrection at the heart of the gospel itself.

However, although the picture of the gospel may be clearer that way, any New Testament references are descriptive, not prescriptive. There is nothing to suggest that saving money or even land through cremation is unChristian in any real theological sense.

It would just be a lot less complicated if we were cats.

Apparently there’s a new way for college guys to meet a girl. Or another guy, for that matter.

Goodcrush.com will let you find out if she (or he) likes you without all the embarrassing trauma of asking. They can let you know without letting you know, too. Finally hope for shy lovers everywhere.

It works two ways. Crushfinder lets you put in five names of people you like and if any of them put in your name too then you get an email. Congratulations! You’re a winner, even if you are a loser.

You can also use the Missed Connections feature to send anonymous, photo-less messages back and forth until you figure out who the other person is and agree to meet. Like this: saw you on your computer by astor place wearing a princeton t shirt on thurs.

And so the game begins. It’s You Got Mail for social media, a cross between Facebook and Match.com.

Like the original Facebook, you have to have a college email to play. About 20 universities are in the network, with requests from 80 more. It’s so hot it’s already a verb, as in “I’m going to goodcrush her before I ask her out.”

Cowards. Why can’t they do it like we did when we were in college and even junior high: ask her friend to ask her if she likes you.

And whatever happened to the humiliation? It was always a vital part of the process. Sure, it kept nerds from asking out the prom queen. But it also forced you to take your time, think of something intelligent to say (maybe) and face the consequences of your choices.

Advocates of goodcrush say it will encourage more traditional dating instead of hooking up, forcing students to take more risks and moving the initial steps out of the bar.

Well, it’s a pretty low bar. It will still lead to one night stands and virtual stalking. It’s already turned into singles ads: one current post asks, “anyone up for a casual one night stand?” If you want an idea where it’s going, all you have to do is read the tagline: connecting student bodies like never before.

Speaking the truth in love is a higher bar. It tests our motives as well as our message. It creates a world where people don’t break up by text messaging and don’t find each other after they each left Starbucks and went somewhere else.

Choices do have consequences. Connections do too. But growing up requires a little courage.

And a lot of responsibility.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Allen Bara says the book may be a lot of things, but it’s not a classic. That’s probably OK with Lee who, even though she has made a lot of money and never wrote another book, says she didn’t expect it to succeed at all. It’s success was “as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected,” she said in a rare interview in 1964.

Bara says the book is not a classic because the characters are not original and the dialogue is artifical. He says Scout’s father Atticus is based on Lee’s father and the character of Thomas More in a play on stage at the time, “the only saint in a courtroom full of the weak, the foolish and the wicked” who is full of “a repository of cracker-barrel epigrams.”

Wow, that’s harsh.

It gets worse, however. The book lacks moral ambiguity, Bara says, citing another critic who calls it “an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious.” He concludes:

It’s time to stop pretending that To Kill a Mockingbird is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park.

But timing is everything, and released at the cusp of the civil rights movement, it became what Sarah McCarry at the Huffington Post called “the only book about race many white Americans have ever read.” She cites blogger Malcom D. who says the book allows white American’s “to soothe themselves with the thought that racism is something that happened in one part of the country, long ago; and, thanks to the heroic activities of noble men like Atticus, all of that is over now.”

And this is the focus of most of the current criticism. Lee just wasn’t black enough and her white characters weren’t bad enough. Or something like that.

But what if it’s not a book about race at all?

One of my favorite Southern writers, Flannery O’Conner, was a contemporary of Lee and said, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they are reading a children’s book.”

If this is true, perhaps it doesn’t have as much moral ambiguity as adults might like. And perhaps it doesn’t need it, either.

Peggy Noonan touches on this in a wonderful essay about the failure of leadership in politics, business and journalism: “Youth has outlived its usefullness.” She writes

In the 50th anniversary commentary this week of Harper Lee’s masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, a book long derided as middlebrow by middlebrows, no one fully noted the centrality, the cosmic force, that propelled the book, and that is the idea of the father. Of the human longing to be safe and watched over by one stronger. And so we have the wise and grounded Atticus Finch, who understands the world and pursues justice anyway, and who can be relied upon.

Here is the last sentence: “He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

Kids need someone like this. So do we. It’s the story of the Bible, a Father who loves us and watches over us: “By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me.”

According to Miss Maudie, “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

I for one am glad Lee got to sing her song.

________________________________

BONUS SECTION

Over at albinoblacksheep.com you can see a video send up of the book, the book report by the kid who didn’t finish the book.

See the trailer from the film with Gregory Peck as Atticus.

Random fact: Sandra Bullock played Harper Lee in the film Infamous, a film about Truman Capote who was Lee’s childhood friend and the basis of Scout’s friend Dill in the novel.

When To Kill a Mockingbird was banned as “immoral” by a school in Virgina Harper Lee wrote a letter to the school board and said, “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that “To Kill a Mockingbird” spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. “

In a chapter reprinted last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he says fiction is difficult to separate completely from reality because the pleasure we experience in both is essentially the same. Perhaps a little less intense, but the emotions it trigger are just as real.

When I growl and chase my granddaughter, she never thinks I’m a real lion. But she enjoys imagining that I am, safe in the understanding that I am not. All kids pretend.

All adults do too, actually. We walk away from a conversation wishing we had said something else, and pretending that we had—imagining how much different or better the situation might have been. Novelist are just better at imagining conversations than we are. And even though we know their stories are not real, part of us manages to believe that they are.

We learn stuff too. As Bloom points out, our knowledge of emergency rooms, prisons and submarines is more likely rooted in movies and TV shows than in actual experience. I know slightly more about particle physics because I read Madeleine l’engle’s Many Waterson the porch with Katie this summer. And I imagined a world before the flood, too.

I admit our capacity for imagination can be excessive. I was in a church prayer meeting one time when a woman requested prayer for a hospitalized character in a soap opera. But the truth is we have a fairly sophisticated sense of what’s real and what’s not.

Bloom claims that even a baby knows we’re not really a lion or whatever we pretend to be. The first time we roar they might pull away from us. By the third time, they know it’s a game. OK. Maybe not. I pretended to pull my finger off one time and made a 3-year-old cry.

Imagination, he says, is “reality-lite—a useful substitute, when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky or too much work.” But through it, I believe, we work out our understanding of what matters. At least that’s what we did as kids when we played cowboys and Indians, or whatever politically incorrect framework at the time helped us think about the good guys and the bad guys.

Yes, fiction can move faster and be more interesting than real life. Sometimes that’s a problem. Not every problem can be solved in 30 minutes, like in a sitcom. And unicorns, or course, aren’t real unless you believe in them.

But Jesus himself told stories, parables that help us visualize and understand things that really matter. Many spiritual realities are understood by “things not seen,” although they are real enough.

This is not a theological defense of imagination, of course; just the recognition that it is a created reality, one so widespread as to be a reflection of God’s image in us.

By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God. Some days, and in some ways, we make worlds of our own. We can’t help ourselves. There is pleasure in this, and there is danger too. We can imagine good and we can imagine evil.

But we can not not imagine.

And we can learn from people who do it better than we do.

And it reminded me again of how I want to love them. I want to love them by loving their parents.

Yes, they will all get the attention they need from me. I will read them books and buy them toys. I’ll even buy them some savings bonds, although it would be nice if there were safer investments. They call me Santa, after all.

But the most important thing I can do for my grandchildren is to encourage their parents, strengthening their marriages in every way I can. I will talk about my faith, and theirs, nudging them gently toward a biblical understanding of God’s sovereignty and grace. When they ask I will give them advice and when they don’t I will give them my prayers.

Katie and I are committed to this important task, supporting our children so they can support their children. This is the way it is supposed to work. One generation declares the works of God to the next.

Yes, grandchildren are fun and lovable. They are also a distraction from the important work of parenting, which never really ends. Long after parents lose control they still have influence and resources, and these should be invested in the foundations of their grandkids’ lives, not their sweet tooth.

Here’s what I want my grandkids to know:

• That I will not come between them and their parents by encouraging their disobedience or disrespect.
• That I will love both their parents completely, not just the one I bore but also the one he or she chose. I will take their calls and keep their secrets.
• That I will come when I’m needed and leave when I should, respecting their parents’ need for privacy and rest.
• That it is not my job to spoil them, but to love them—thoughtfully, generously and prayerfully. And yes, playfully.
• That I will love their grandmother sacrificially and respectfully, providing the best example I can for their dads. I will encourage their dads to seek accountability and accept responsibility.
• That I will offer their parents biblical principles and not rules, counsel and not commands, trusting the Spirit to draw them to the Father’s heart through the intercession of the Son.

This is what my grandkids need from me: Tabitha, Sarina, Timothy and Andrew, and those unborn need me to support Christian, Anne, John, Margaret, Michael, Karina, Pilgrim and a wife unnamed. Being a grandfather is not a game.

It’s just being a father, with extra responsibility.