I was just opining that the day of gigantic national parks had passed, that there are no new Yosemites to be set aside, and that today’s John Muirs would be well advised to find a new strategy. I should also have said that there aren’t any more Teddy Roosevelts to do the setting aside. If I’d said that, I ‘d have been even more thoroughly wrong.

President Bush just created another gigantic state park, in the ocean. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument covers 140,000 square miles, making it the largest protected marine area in the world. Jacques Cousteau’s son talked Bush into it with a documentary, and in order to get the territory preserved Bush invoked the 1906 American Antiquities Act. That act was put in place by Congress under, you guessed it, Teddy Roosevelt, exactly 100 years ago. It says

the President of the United States is hereby authorized, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments…

I assume this is all intentional symbolic action from the White House: 100 years later, biggest marine preserve ever, famous conservationist, etc. Even if it’s unintentional, it’s pretty cool. So it turns out that in this one particular case, today’s John Muirs can stick to the old strategy, new Yosemites can be found, and there’s still a Teddy Roosevelt to get the job done.

Spinner dolphins! They are the only species that do aerial stunts without any training. They just leap out of the water and spin around in mid-air, naturally, whether you’re watching or not. They’re doing it right now.

John Muir (1838-1914) deserves the title of “founder of the conservation movement.” He found his voice at a strategic time in American history and was remarkably effective at getting land preserved. He invented a whole range of rhetorical strategies which captured the public imagination and persuaded politicians to take action. When Muir made a case for saving old growth redwoods, he held nothing back: He appealed to morality, religion, financial self-interest, aesthetic sensibility, concerns for physical and mental health, and national pride. Any argument would do if it would keep the ancient trees standing and the wilderness in pristine state. With a writing style shaped by his early immersion in the King James Bible (and a little bit of Plutarch, though his father worried about letting him read a pagan author), Muir wrote like a man on a mission. He even used humor:

Now some millmen want to cut all the Calaveras trees into lumber and money. But we have found a better use for them. No doubt these trees would make good lumber after passing through a sawmill, as George Washington after passing through the hands of a French cook would have made good food. But both for Washington and the tree that bears his name higher uses have been found.

What exactly was it that Muir wanted to accomplish? His major strategy was to persuade the federal government to set aside big sections of land as protected areas, national parks. His timing was impeccable: those decades around the turn of the century were excatly the right moment for a central government to grab wilderness regions and declare them public trusts. Fifty years earlier such a move would have been irrelevant, unnecessary, and unenforcable. Fifty years later would have been too late: much territory would have been destroyed or compromised, and the human cost to residents and industry would have been much higher.

Muir also found a chief executive who was ready to hear the argument and take action on a grand scale. Teddy Roosevelt doubled the number of national parks during his time in office, extended the borders of some of them, and brought about 230 million acres of American territory under public protection (as parks, national monuments, sanctuaries, reservations, preserves, etc.). Roosevelt understood Muir’s appeal and took up the cause himelf with characteristic zeal:

In utilizing and conserving the natural resources of the Nation, the one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight…. The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.

Around 1900, the perfect strategy for conservation was to have the federal government grab land and declare it protected. Big man Roosevelt running big government USA sets aside big parks. Massive state parks and monuments (like the Muir Woods, which I got to visit a few weeks ago) bear witness to this being an effective and appropriate strategy for that time. Just after the middle of the twentieth century, the best way to conserve natural resources was for the will of the people to be made known, and the now cliched image of protesters standing between trees and bulldozers made perfect sense in its time. Public demonstrations got the voice of the people heard, and much urban greenspace has been preserved because of micro-movements of this nature. If John Muir were working in 1960, would he have hugged trees to show they are loved. No doubt.

What if John Muir were doing his work today? His fluid and flexible wit would surely not let itself get bogged down in strategies appropriate to 1906; there just aren’t any more Yosemites or Crater Lakes out there. Rainforests in somebody else’s country aren’t really candidates for National Park status, so that bag of tricks wouldn’t apply. He probably wouldn’t even get snared in 1960 strategies, marching and protesting and laying down in front of bulldozers. That strategy always leads to a deadlock: the will of the people is equally expressed by protesters and by the free market’s drive to development. The will of the people is on both sides of the bulldozer.

A twenty-first century conservationist who wanted to be as effective as John Muir would, I think, undertake a strategy appropriate to this era. He would bend all his wit and persuasiveness to make the case that the best interests of the free market are served by conservation. Instead of clouding the issue by striking faux-heroic anti-capitalist stances, John Muir 2006 would enter the belly of the beast itself. He would generate an unstoppable host of arguments proving that natural territories are more valuable than what can be developed on them. He would calculate the actual cash value of a tree or a forest and demonstrate in market terms that no rational capitalist could afford to trade this resource for another one. With Muir’s resourcefulness, he would probably itemize the cash value of a forest all the way down to the leaf. Is there a calculation that captures the way natural spaces appreciate in value while anything build on a developed space inevitably depreciates? Wouldn’t that be a magical equation to turn the head of any economist?

Instead of persuading a president (1906) or amplifying the vox populi (1960), John Muir 2006 would go up against the market itself and win as big as he did 100 years ago. But it will take some creative rhetoric, with statistics, dollar equivalents, and long-term extrapolations to get the invisible hand of the market to set down the chain saw and pick up the watering can. Many conservationists operate with a naive model of political economy and think they can keep their hands clean of market concerns. Equipped with a more realistic sense of the way the free market functions, wouldn’t it be nice if conservatives took the lead in conservationism?

Here’s one way to think about what Paul’s doing in Philippians.

Having prayed for the church in Philippi to “know which things matter most,” he calls them to re-direct their attention from What Doesn’t Matter Much to What Matters The Most. The argument form is basically “don’t look over there, look over here,” which is a hard argument to win. Consider a time when you’ve taken a problem to somebody for advice, and instead of solving your problem they have told you, “your real problem is that you are paying attention to this thing; instead, try just ignoring it and paying attention to something else more important.” Even when they’re right, it’s hard advice to follow.

In the ancient world, one version of this argument was the consolatio genre. Writing in the mode of consolatio (as Cicero, Seneca, and later Boethius did, for example), a writer would persuade his listeners to seek comfort in the midst of affliction by performing two actions simultaneously: avocatio and revocatio. People who were suffering needed to have their minds called away from (a-vocatio) the affliction (which gets worse the more you think about it), and called toward (re-vocatio) something greater and more fruitful. Avocatio plus revocatio produces consolatio: don’t think about that, think about this. (If you’d like to follow up with some real scholarship on how this ancient genre informs Philippians, here’s a good book, the one that alerted me to these categories.)

In the hands of hedonists, this argument could be pretty facile. Epicureans, for instance, used to argue that when you were in pain you should do a little hedonistic calculus and set your mind on future pleasure. Another way consolatio could go wrong is by being a mere strategy of escapism (though come to think of it, if you can’t use escapist literature in prison, where can you?).

In Philippians, however, Paul is doing something nobler. To begin with, he has identified something special as the highest good: the progress of the gospel. He is especially excited about the way the church at Philippi has shared his labor of spreading the gospel in new territories. With the gospel as the highest good, he freely re-interprets everything in his experience and assigns it to its proper place under the sway of the highest good. This is where, I think, Paul begins to marshal some paradoxes and shocking reversals. He’s not doing this just to be puckish or to be a paradox-monger. He knows he has a hard argument to make (”don’t think about that, think about this”), so he brings out some illustrations that turn the world upside down. If I had no sense of history, I’d say he’d been reading some G. K. Chesterton, because Chesterton was the master of these stunning inversions which forced his readers to consider his point of view.

Here’s how Paul works it out:

I pray that you would learn what matters most. Whatever is good, think about that.

What’s good? The progress of the gospel, that’s the main thing.

In light of that, everything you know is wrong. For example:

Here I am in prison. That’s bad, right? No, that’s good. It’s turning out to be good for the gospel.

Another example: I have an impeccable religious pedigree. That’s good, right? No, that’s bad. Pure skubalon, in fact. Doesn’t matter one bit. Might even get in the way.

Again: Feckless folks are preaching Christ for lousy reasons like envy, just to hurt me. That’s bad, right? No, that’s good. Because, like I said, the gospel is going forth no matter what’s in their motives.

A big one: To do the work of the gospel, you have to behave like a slave and take a place at the bottom of the social hierarchy. That’s bad, right? No, that’s good. Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who became obedient to the extremes of shameful death, for which reason he has been given the highest name.

Paul follows this “everything you know is wrong, we’re through the looking glass now” strategy pretty insistently in Philippians. It’s the back-and-forth that’s necessary to jolt his readers into a new way of evaluating everything. The only place he seems unable to do the inversion trick is when he tries to figure out whether death is good or bad. Looking at it from the point of view of the gospel, neither his life nor his death seems clearly better. Death is better for him (go be with the Lord), but contination of his life and ministry is better for the churches. Paul doesn’t achieve mere stoical indifference, but he does reach a serene objectivity regarding his own destiny.

Philippians: Read it standing on your head.

Here is the latest song by Terry Scott Taylor. He played it at a small concert last week and I can’t get it out of my head. He’s written dozens of songs that show him to be a Californian with deep roots in this region which seems rootless and placeless, and I know he’s been reflecting on the Californian mythos more intensely in the past few years. His 1998 album John Wayne (named for the Orange County airport) was subtitled “Orange Grotesques,” for example, and his 2000 solo album was about the Avocado Faultline. But in this latest song, “Broken Like Brooklyn” from the soon-to-be-released Lost Dogs Album The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees, Terry has set himself the task of thinking about his native California from a long way off: from New York. Having given himself that assignment, he has fastened on the perfect way to carry it out: by pondering the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and singing from the point of view of a New Yorker who feels the dislocation deeply. California’s big with myth in this song: not only do rivers get lassoed as in tall tales, but the Rose Bowl gets filled with guacamole! And an east coast soul yearns for the golden land of California boosterism, where everything’s new and big and unsullied. Instead of deflating California hype from within, this song draws you in to the melancholy of the western dream and makes you feel the whole country’s midcentury complicity in it. It also manages to make me nostalgic for a New York baseball team I have never cared about, and links it back behind the twentieth century with the “trolley dodging” line.

I make no guarantees that these lyrics are perfectly accurate, but I wanted to be the first to break the lyrics of a new Terry Taylor song on my blog. So here’s what I heard of “Broken Like Brooklyn.”

Once I dreamed I was Ponce de Leon
I’d grown so bitter and cold
You whispered, “Baby, I am Eureka
Without any redwoods or gold.”

So together we packed up the Airstream,
With Pepsis, Pall Malls, and Moon Pies
We lassoed the San Joaquin River
And I went along for the ride.

I dreamed faith was our precious cargo
Determination our boat
We sailed straight on through troubled waters
And around the Cape of Good Hope

Then we dressed ourselves in fringed buckskins
Having leveled that brownstone of ours
Beneath the Palos Colorados
We slept ‘neath a blanket of stars

Woke up broken like Brooklyn
The year the bums left
In the Bronx on a cold day
While our boys tan out west

Now we fly over junk yards and factories
Denny’s and transient hotels
Above the churches and bars and video stores
Black smoke and slaughterhouse smells

Touching down in the golden Sierras
We ate spinach quiches grown there
I wove a crown of boysenberries
Through your lemon-scented hair

While girls in bikinis and snow skis
In the desert cashed in their chips
Then filled the rose bowl with guacamole
We took our clothes off and went for a dip

Thought that we might go trolley Dodging
After reading a policeman his rights
Then we followed the Duke of Flatbush
And scaled the Boyle Heights

Woke up broken like Brooklyn
The year the bums left
In the Bronx on a cold day
While our boys tan out west

Always broken like Brooklyn
After losing the best
Old sunbleached bleachers and pennants
Stole the hearts from our chest

I lived in Berkeley from about 1995-1999, and enjoyed the wackiness of it all. Moving here from a seminary town in Kentucky with a cross atop the municipal water tower, my wife and I experienced the kind of culture shock usually reserved for overseas relocation. We knew the red state/blue state thing was going on before it polarized the electoral maps. But the culture shock was eased by the fact that most of the people in Berkeley are pretty nice, and nearly all of them are passionate about their thing: whether it’s vegetarianism, no nukes, community organizing, gay liberation, advocacy for the lesbigay/transgendered/queer/questioning, the plight of migrant workers, advocating a recreational drug of choice, breast liberation day, home childbirth, or music or art or whatever it may be, these Bay Area folks tend to be zealous about it. Everything’s a movement in Berkeley; it’s where all the movements are born and where they all go to die.

I made my share of “Peoples Republic of Berkeley” cracks, and thought of the place as Berzerkeley. Watching the city council “at work” was always amusing as they thought globally and acted yokel-ly. I witnessed protests aimed at keeping NPR from continuing its work as a corporate shill.

And the punchline was always the Naked Guy. What better symbol could there be of the whole regional attitude than nudism in general and the naked guy in particular? Here was a guy who just went about his business as a UCBerkeley student, but naked. He didn’t write manifestoes or attach his actions to any available agendas. He just went around naked. As a sophomore in 1992, he attended classes naked. He went jogging naked. His behavior was vaguely connected with free speech and subverting the dominant paradigm, but he never got much more articulate than “What? I’m just a guy who happens to be naked. I do normal stuff in normal places, but naked.”

Hence the appropriateness of the name that stuck to him in the media: The Naked Guy. He sounds like a recurring character on the David Letterman show. And though his public statements weren’t especially clever, he had a kind of knack for symbolism and a good punch line: arrested for jogging naked, he was all set to receive a minor rebuke from a judge, until he showed up for his court date naked. That’s funny, in a Naked Guy (”What? I’m just going to court, naked”) kind of way.

But The Naked Guy had a name: Andrew Martinez. And he had a life and a history. And if you think of being naked in public as a problem (not to be judgemental or anything), it was not his only problem. he suffered from mental illness that took apart his life gradually, more markedly as he got older.

Last month, he committed suicide in prison in San Jose, California. He was in prison following a fight (battery and assault with a deadly weapon) in a halfway house where he had been living.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “after his days as the Naked Guy, Martinez spent the next decade bouncing among halfway houses, psychiatric institutions, occasional homelessness and jail, but never getting comprehensive treatment,” and quotes his best friend as saying that in these last few years he alternated between periods when he was his clear-minded self, and times when “his mind seemed to be commanded by an alien spirit.”

It seems so obvious to say, “In retrospect, his mental problems may have first manifested themselves back when he came to a college class without any clothes on.” Did that occur to anybody at the time? Sometimes, apparently, subverting the dominant paradigm is a cry for help. But the outlandish and symbolic cry for help went unanswered: it was considered a noble gesture of protest and empowerment by some, and a punchline for Berzerkeley jokes by others. I’m not recommending forced institutionalization for everybody who opts for dropping their laundry, flying their freak flags, or otherwise cultivating alterity and liminality. I am well aware that when the going gets weird, the weird get going. But I’m sad for the Naked Guy, sad that he was profoundly unfunny and died so unfunny a death at his own hands.

This week I attended a small concert by Terry Scott Taylor, my favorite singer/songwriter. Terry’s been recording since the mid 1970s, with his serious band, a joke band or two, under his own name and various pseudonyms. These days he’s spending a lot of time writing music for animated cartoons. How’s that for versatility?

But it’s not all boings, wokka-wokkas, and kersplats for the creative dynamo that is Terry Taylor. He’s just completed a new CD with one of his bands, the Lost Dogs, a kind of supergroup built around a team of guitar-playing lead singers from various successful bands. The new CD, entitled The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees, will be released before the summer’s over.

The CD is going to be great, and everybody ought to go straight out and buy it. Terry Taylor is a mature songwriter whose work consists of one honest line after another, linked together in artful narratives that always orbit somewhere around Christian faith. He’s a wounded veteran of the Jesus Music scene and the Christian Music industry that followed it, but he’s outgrown any bitterness, opting instead for forgiveness, genuine affection, and a wisdom that could only have been gained by coming through all those reversals with the integrity of an artist.

One of the many mistakes that the dreadful Christian music industry has made over the past decades was to think that everyone with Jesus in their heart and a banjo on their knee ought to be put into conventional pastoral ministry, doing altar calls, providing youth ministry, taking up offerings, and setting themselves up as spiritual examples. Taylor is from the generation that tried not to go stark raving mad under those expectations, and he led the way for a handful of musicians who found their way through the confusion and defined themselves as artists first and foremost. At times he’s had to stake out some territory as someone who has the right and responsibility to pursue art for art’s sake. So it’s ironic - - wonderfully, graciously, ironic - - that now in his fifties his craftsmanship has matured in a way so centered on Christ, so committed to the things that matter most for a believer. In spite of it all, Terry Taylor is a man with a ministry. The stuff he’s writing right now is solid gold. Nobody else is doing work like this.

The recording sessions for Lost Cabin and Mystery Trees was only a couple months ago, so this little concert in Berkeley was the first time Terry Taylor has played any of the songs in public. Here’s the set list, with links to lyrics for the songs from earlier albums.

As for the brand new songs from the forthcoming Dogs album, take my word for it: prime work from an artist at the peak of his powers. “Broken Like Brooklyn” is a careful, probing travelog of the American soul; “This Business is Going Down” is as funny as it is twisted; “Only One Bum in Corona Del Mar” drove the audience over the edge with its light-opera buffoonery; and “That’s Where Jesus Is” is the show-stopping album-closer anthem that manages to be instantly accessible and several layers deep at the same time.

1. Startin’ Monday
2. The Lust, the Flesh, the Eyes, and the Pride of Life
3. Honeysuckle Breeze
4. Ten Gallon Hat
5. Broken Like Brookyn
6. This Business is Goin’ Down
7. Capistrano Beach
8. Moses in the Desert
9. Only One Bum in Corona Del Mar
10. Papa Danced on Olvera Street
11. Angels Must Smile Like That
12. Bad Indigestion
13. That’s Where Jesus Is
14. You Lay Down
15. Crushing Hand
16. Joel

A high-flying knight superimposed on a high-stepping horse. The horse’s battle dress features the patented angry eyebrows which strike fear into the hearts of any tiny little archers that dare to raise a longbow against him.

I’m spending this month with a group of about three dozen students who are reading Philippians over and over and over, trying to reach a point of saturation with this short letter (four chapters and not much over a hundred verses). My starting point for Bible study of this sort is always that the Spirit who inspired this text would inspire our reading of it, that the God whose word this is would speak to us in power. Anybody can contrive to master such a short text, but we are praying for divine action to take place in our reading.

One way to take that plea seriously is to pray, with understanding, the prayer which Paul opens the letter with. He lets his readers know in Philippians 1:9-11 that he is praying for them as follows:

[I]t is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

The basic prayer is that love would abound, or increase. But Paul immediately adds two fascinating nouns, translated here “knowledge” and “discernment.” He uses an intense word for knowledge (not just gnosis but epi-gnosis), a word more common in later epistles like Colossians and Ephesians where he is conscious of imparting the revelation of “the mystery.” Then he goes on to add “all discernment,” and the appearance of this second noun sets up a dialogue with the first: What’s “discernment” that makes it distinct from knowledge? Is this a contrast, like “information” and “application?” True principles on the one hand, and their specific fit with experience on the other? Theoretical and practical? Understanding and experience? What is the act of understanding which Paul prays for here, consisting of deep knowledge and all discernment?

From that dialogue my mind snaps back to the main point of the prayer: abounding love. It is this love which is the thing that is to abound in knowledge and discernment. Paul is praying for smart love, for love that grows (more and more!) by knowing and discerning. At this point, I desperately wish there were some more nouns (love for God? love for others? love in the abstract? knowledge of what? etc.), but in their absence it still seems possible to say, in a preliminary way, what Paul is after.

When love gets smarter and more discerning, it loves the right things the right way. It does not fixate on the wrong things, alienate its affections from proper objects, does not undervalue the good nor overvalue the trivial. Knowledgeable, discerning love is love that knows what matters and what doesn’t. This love grows by knowing, and knows by tracing outlines and telling differences between objects.

That certainly sets the stage for the next phrase, “so that you may approve what is excellent.” Many of Paul’s prayers feature a “so that” construction. The first part of the prayer is a request that God would cause something to happen, and then comes the hinge phrase “so that,” where the prayer turns to the effects which God’s action will have in the lives of its recipients. Paul prays this way: “I pray that God would do this, so that you will experience and manifest that.”

In this prayer, what follows the “so that” hinge is the phrase, “you may approve what is excellent.” When God makes your love bigger by making it smarter and more discerning, you will have received the ability to recognize what stands out as important and worthy of attention. You can devote your time, energy, concentration, and skills to those things rather than to everything else.

There are obvious connections between this prayer and the rest of Philippians: if the readers of the letter develop minds for what matters, they will see disappointments like Paul’s own imprisonment as one of the things that don’t matter much. They will scan the daily news instead for signs that the Gospel of Jesus is making progress in the world, because that progress of the Gospel is, in Philippians, the thing that matters. They will intelligently redirect their attention from what doesn’t matter, to what does matter. And from there, the blessings mount: to be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God

May it be true of all readers of Philippians!

I.

I saw the best cats of my litter destroyed by catnip, clawing yowling shaved,

ripping their way across the shag carpet at dawn looking for a frisky fix,

fuzzyheaded mouseketeers purring for the feline connection to the whiskered dynamo in the overlapping rhythm of the vibrating larynx,

who hairballs and mange and declawed sat up yowling in the fire escape darkness of pet store paper shred carpeted towers contemplating meow mix,

who stretched their sacroiliacs in great swooping arcs of Roman aqueducts over ancient riverbeds,

who squatted the Sphinx over blazing desert books of the dead with Egyptian critter-headed godlings walking crazy sideways hieratic hieroglyph headdress,

who sat in the unrepeatable infinite never-stinking box of pre-fab sand hunkered straining holding aloof four paws down and housecat duty to do,

who hid anywhere table couch back porch bed’s sweet safety from little cousin Murray while the pre-pubescent outrageous brain of mayhem and torment devised mock comedy rituals of feline paw tapings, tail pullings, loud voice fake meow shrillings no end,

who hacked up the hundred holy hairballs of hell’s half acre,

who saw straight through the mouse from the store that was stuffed stitched mass produced and plastic wrapped, but pounced on it anyway,

who took the baby talk with a straight face and a certain quiet dignity mommy’s widow baby who’s a goo boy yes hims is gotta special tweat for sweetums bwess his heart.

II.

What brute of bull and dog chased them around the house and gnawed their haunches?

Bowser! Slobber! Bark! Home security pet! Chewbones and neck chains and throat thunder!

Bowser! Hot breath at the heels! Kittens shivering under the porch! Tabby up a tree! Old Possum not so practical!

Bowser! Nightmare of Bowser! Bitey Bowser! Bowser the not-cat! Bowser the canine!

Bowser! Bad dog! No! Bowser spit it out! Bad dog, Bowser!

Bowser whose teeth make the back arch semicircular, the hair stand up straight in every universal crazy direction of rage, whose wet nose is called the very sign of health!

Bowser who chased me right away! Bowser in whose doghouse I poop at night! Bowser who would swallow me down like rampant belligerent Jonah! Wake up in Bowser! Whiskers going every which way!

Bowser! Bowser! Looney tunes! Merry Melodies! Brick walls, big trucks, catapults! Robot decoys! Dynamite sticks! Round black bombs with fizzing fuses! Bowser!

III.

Sylvester! I’m with you in Meowsy-Land
where you’re a better cat than I am

I’m with you in Meowsy-Land
where canary feathers float from your mouth

I’m with you in Meowsy-Land
tipping trash cans seeking fishbones nevermind the stink

I’m with you in Meowsy-Land
making biscuits on the lap of middle America first with the left paw then with the right, a friend in knead is a friend indeed

I’m with you in Meowsy-Land
in my dreams you stride up the front steps to lay the sacrifice of one slaughtered mouse on the thankless altar of cartoon suburbia