The Humanist Exposed

I share a Netflix account with my boys and Samuel has a sneaky way of moving his movies to the top of the que, so when I saw the email message "We have recieved..." I panicked and took the first recommendation I could find. The result was this AMC production called "Mad Men," which, as the show tells us on screen 1, is a term coined by Madison Avenue Advertising executives to describe themselves.

Although the production standards, and the writing, are quite simply beyond belief, I don't recommend this show for families. The world view is vile. The morality is beyond contempt. It doesn't appear to descend to the Sopranos brand of epidermis and blood, but it's no less evil in its own way.

The odd thing is that it makes an argument for God without appearing to know it--at least if the first three episodes are any guide.

Normally I absolutely cannot stand story lines which depend on a shared presumption about our collective take on cultural and political events. When "Mr. Holland's Opus" urged me to get weepy about John Lennon's death, I thought, "oh, please, why ruin a perfectly good story by hitching it to a pop icon?" Nabakov called this sort of thing "topical trash," and it's an easy trap. On one level, it's as simple as telling an old joke instead of a new one. Story-tellers have an urge to use known material, but however much we want to succeed as raconteurs, we can't do it by using old material. It always has to be, on some level, new.

Mad Men does have a topical angle--the response of the advertising world to the nation's realization that smoking tobacco could be dangerous to your health, but it makes the dilemma real by creating a credible character--(M)ad Man Don Draper--who has to figure out how to keep selling cigarettes to a world that knows better.

Don's real problem, however, is more sinister, and more revealing of the humanist's blind, arrogant, and ultimately childish rage.

Don senses there is something false about a 1960s American gentry that appears to worship suburban homes and suburban routines. The occasion of a neighborhood party has Don drinking beer all morning as he builds a playhouse for his daughter's birthday. The divorcee invited to the celebration is made to appear more "centered" than the married housewives gossiping about her inside the kitchen. Don, a shameless lothario, is made to appear more wise even though, and perhaps because, he doesn't believe in anything.

The reality here, of course, is that the very blessings God doles out, across generations, to those who believe in His word can be the very source of the soul-sickness thinking people sometimes feel when they sense the white picket fence isn't worth worshipping. The God who made the white picket fence is worth adoration, not the other way around. When suburban respectability becomes worshipped for its own sake, it becomes both a farce to the moral degenerates who ridicule it, and to the unthinking traditionalists who live it out of form's sake. I've always cringed when people make fun of the "Ozzy and Harriet mentality." I like Ozzy and Harriet. I wish there were more Ozzy and Harriets around today. The world would be more civil. I do think, however, that Ozzy and Harriet would have had greater dimension, and a more certain defense against the reviling of Hollywood low-lifes and tenured cynics, if we had come to understood the Nelsons' spiritual world-view. Ozzy spent a great deal of time giving basketball advice, and making fun of himself, but I can't recall him ever praying. The root of their family's basic decency was never explored. God was the silent, and un-credited, accomplice.

The Bible-illiterate, the latch-key child of Western Civilization is represented well in Mad Men's Don Draper. He doesn't like the rules, and so he breaks them, but when he sees his children, asleep in their beds at night, there is something about home, hearth, wife, and child that provides him peace in a way he can't understand, because he spends so much time ridiculing the world's rituals, he doesn't have any time to look up towards the heavens.

It is Finished! (Well, sorta...)

Even Grandma Riley has watched a sneak preview of "Courage, New Hampshire." It's actually rough cut right down to the final scene, and it looks pretty good in my over-exposed way of thinking about these things. This editing process has re-affirmed a new lesson over and over again. Yes, I hate Hollywood. You can certainly deposit a great deal of our society's cynicism right at its doorstep, but I do have to give credit to the art directors. When you watch a major motion picture, in one sense you're seeing a rolling montage of stunning post-cards. Every frame of the movie has that lush, complex simplicity of a dramatic photograph. Think of the backgrounds in the hobbit's lair in "Lord of the Rings" or the flock of sheep grazing on the English country estates in "The Duchess." Sometimes, the beauty of the images hold you, even when the dialogue is just unloading freight and moving the story from here to there.

Of course, art direction is just one of the many hats a film wears. I have new respect for sound men, lighting crews, hair-dressers and casting directors. The question before the story-telling world, as I see it, is whether the new technology will make it possible to break the hide-bound largesse of the average film production. I believe even small film these days is defined as something that costs less than $3 million. Could a dramatic TV show, worth watching, be made for $50,000 an episode?



Dunno. I guess we'll find out. Years ago, the "desktop publishing" promise seemed to hold that everyone would be able to publish their own books and newspapers--and of course they can, but much of it isn't worth reading. John Updike correctly predicted that the "information highway" would be mostly roadkill. Quite a bit of YouTube, and even Cable television, bears this out. In an age where literally anyone can create their own daily news show, the world is still subscribing to the shrill preening of Keith Olberman and the school girl posturing of Rachel Maddow. Why? Because it's slick. There's good theme music, studio lighting, writing-teams, and the weight of network legitimacy behind it. The key will be mastering budget-lean versions of those production assets if we are really to see a content-rich transformation of programming. Certainly, there are departments (lighting & sound) that can't really be cut, but years ago I was watching a commercial film shoot here on the farm. There was a dolly-grip assigned for the day, with no dolly-shots planned, and no dolly on site. In some European countries, you have to hire a native cinematographer, even if you don't use him, to please the unions. (People wonder why we're having a global economic crisis?)



Most industries that become wildly profitable during the firsts, second, and third generations wind up accumulating fat. The American auto, steel, and film industry come to mind. Whole systems will need to be re-thought in order to keep making products that really meet human needs, without making consumers pay a ransom for jobs that are no longer (and perhaps never were) required. I hope the starry-eyed kids in the Obama Administration learn that lesson: it's not about protecting "jobs."



It's about making something worthwhile. Our economy, and our story-telling, will recover when we start thinking more about serving the needs of the market, and less about protecting our careers.

At the Movies, Over and Over Again

We have been making steady progress on our pilot television/film festival version of life on the New Hampshire colonial frontier. We have a few final scenes to edit, a fair amount of color-balancing and sound work, and then a few transitions to engineer. I mean to make a systematic study of the "flash-back," since I haven't settled on any match of color and/or sound filtering that give it a fresh look. Even flashbacks inside a historical film still have to flash "back" somehow. We also need music, and we need some way of making up for something I didn't learn on the set. Movies need to give a character a chance to just look out across the valley and think. You need to show the militia captain polishing his musket and saying nothing. This movie has a lot of talkers. We need to show them working up to their speeches, so to, er, "speak."



I can say there is some genuinely good entertainment, and education, throughout, and I remain excited about where we might sell this. It has an adventurous, frolicsome, and yet dramatic and redeeming tone, which is more or less the target at which I was aiming.

I have come to realize that the way we watch movies is very dependent on the way in which we've been conditioned to watch movies. MTV changed our expectations abut the number of cuts-per-minute. The steady-cam made it possible to walk and talk with the characters, so we expect a camera that can glide in and out of a crowd, taking in everything the character sees. Stanley Kubrick, when he made Barry Lyndon, forever changed what we hope to see in the way of period lighting. If you watch old Hollywood epics, the 18th century is brightly, lavishly lit up like a car-dealership showroom. And even though we rarely have this perspective in life, for some reason we even want to see the top-down God-view of the action, with a camera pointing straight down from the sky by way of establishing shot.



Without having a Hollywood budget, we acknowledged some of this, but we didn't dumb down the story either. We use period language, and we focus on period realities. We hope teenage boys and girls watch this, but it wasn't made for them either. Frankly, I worry that the story's straight-forwardness, and its more or less transparent moral contours will violate another assumption we have about watching film: cynicism and nihilism snuck into our movie-going experience along with the steady-cam and the three-cut-per-second edit. We have a generation idolizing a Johnny Depp femme-pirate, instead of the royal navy that is purposely made to fail in his capture. Audiences don't expect any clear virtue anymore. Even a film I enjoyed very much--The Patriot--began with a war hero's tortured memory of his combat experience. Try as I might, I have yet to read any 18th century warrior regret at anything other than cowardice. Valor was coveted, not shamed, and the urge to disbelieve-at-any-cost would be more symptomatic of a post-Sartre film-grunt than a South Carolina militia colonel.



The American heart, and spirit, is bruised. That might explain why we fall for political snake oil so easily--and why we expect less from the characters on the big and the small screen.

Chop, Chop

In the digital age, you can cut a movie, send it to your friends, endure a little electronic work-shopping, and get back at post-production--all without setting up a projector in a screening room at MGM, without, in fact, even sitting up out of your tilt-back office chair in remote Oak Glen.

That's pretty much what I'm doing these days--making a movie, or a television pilot. (There's a thin line between the two.) To me, it looks bully good--even after hearing the same dialogue over and over and over again. Parts of it still make me laugh out loud. One part got me weeping, but if you know me, that's pretty easy to do. (The same scene got Mallory crying, and that's not quite as easy to achieve.)

I've learned a few things: never cut a scene so that a character laughs at his, or anyone else's, funny line. If you let a character laugh, on screen, that cues the audience to laugh, and it's not really honest. I know that sit-coms depend on a laugh track, but that's something like taking aspirin when you don't really need it. It mutes the senses. To be honest, I violated this rule a few times, but only when the available material demanded it. I still have one painfully long, five minute talk-talk-talk scene in the dreary cavern cage, which is very authentic looking but still in need of art direction (lesson #2). I have to figure some way of chopping it, but the rest of the production--if you're even remotely curious--looks like it has at least as much potential as the standard network pilot-season mock-up. (lesson #3: never compare yourself to Hollywood; the big studios have enough money to put out some really boring stuff and still sell it: if you want to make it as an independent, it's got to be so great no one would dare reject it.)

Lesson #4: the exterior world, even in the country, is not quiet. It's full of wind, airplanes overhead, screaming u-pickers, and delivery trucks on the highway. Just film it and do the dialogue later. Hollywood calls this ADR (automated dialogue replacement) or looping. The actor comes back into the studio and re-speaks his lines, a phrase at a time, until they match the original production. They say Marlon Brando preferred looping, and would even mumble during the original shoot, so that he would get a chance to perfect his performance voice later. When you're filming out in the hot sun, waiting for a plane to pass by, you can understand its merits.

Lesson #5: telling a story is its own best reward. Take up the fiddle. Learn the piano. Memorize a few lines of Byron. Sing your own song. Otherwise, you'll just be out in the cold, in a crowd somewhere, buying political souvenirs, and hoping for a glimpse of the latest false-prophet.

And that is just too depressing to contemplate.

Cult-Like Devotion...

True religion, in one sense, has never really been "respectable." If twelve or thirteen men, with no visible means of subsistence, followed by thousands of hungry followers, took up residence in your community center, or in your church courtyard, or in the hills just outside of town, some people would be tempted to call code enforcement. If their leader was in the habit of calling the town's pastors and spiritual leaders, "vipers" and "hypocrites," others would conclude they were all heretics and renegades. If they all shared each others burdens and took care of each other, they would be labeled, very quickly, a "cult."

To be certain, there are dangerous cults in the history of the world, or else the accusation wouldn't have any sting. The word "extremist" is used the same way, not because it necessarily applies, but because it has a way of ending the conversation. People worship the middle. The cows like to make sure they are at the center of the herd, even if the herd is walking right into the slaughter house.



Martin Luther King, in his letter from the Birmingham Jail wrote these lines, about the modern American church:

"If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust."

King was lamenting the failure of the established church to be confrontational in the face of evil. After all, if a black Christian woman couldn't sit next to her white Christian sister on the same bus, wouldn't we expect the church to speak up? The Bible tells us in Amos 5:15, "Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate.." Dr. King specifically applauded the evil-hating, confrontational spirit of the early church, whose followers, according to King, "brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide..." (DNC, are you listening?)

Well that same modern church--the one King lamented--has indeed become "an irrelevant social club," because "confrontational" pastors are few and far between. We don't "hate" evil anymore, because hate--no matter how well directed--is too alarming for the cud-chewing middle. If a church speaks the truth, if it takes care of its flock, if it reads scripture as honestly as it can, if it preaches against sin among the congregation and in public office, someone will be hell-bound, literally, to call it a cult, and the resulting emasculation of the church makes for a happy hour in hell. Nothing pleases evil more than a limp-wristed, consensus-seeking "man of God."

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine was having some real trouble. He was literally asking friends for financial help. We both came to the same conclusion at the same time. I said, "wouldn't it be nice to be able to have nine or ten families gathered together in house churches across the land--real churches, that tithed to each other and preached the truth without bothering to build a seeker-friendly semi-fellowship of semi-Christians?"

"Amen," he said.

If you're tired of taking little dips into the pond of spiritual nothingness on Sundays, ponder this: House church, anyone?

A Sense of Urgency

Years ago, prior to my present incarnation as an 18th century farmer, I watched one of my colleagues (we'll call him "Chad") shut a computer system down in the middle of the day--to tinker with it. Upwards of 40 people in that office had very little to do while they waited, through lunch, and the next morning, as "Chad" doodled around with their system software. He even left early on the day in question, "to avoid traffic." I watched the business owner pacing and I looked on, helplessly, as Chad took personal calls, played with system settings, ordered lunch and appeared to give every indication that he didn't know what sort of havoc he was causing.



A few months later a supplier in that industry took me into his office, closed the door, and and tried to take a breath to control himself before blurting out a necessary truth about my colleague "Chad."

"Here's the problem," the man said, "that little snot has no sense of urgency."



Among the world's various kinds of villainy, a delayed sense of obligation can be the most irritating. It's not as though you are dealing with a profane crank or price gouger or an utter incompetent. They might even be pleasant. Heck, they are likely to be very pleasant people, because, frankly, nothing bothers them. The work always gets done. Someday. But the pain isn't just the procrastination with these sorts of people; it's the sense your very pressing problems, deadline problems, don't really matter to them. It's something like people who stop their car in the middle of a parking lot, blocking traffic, just to talk to friends. There's no real emergency for them, ever, and so if their own emergencies mean nothing to them, yours mean even less.



You can't imagine theses sorts of people ever looking in the rear view mirror. They wouldn't even look out the front window if there were a way to avoid it. They just don't care about anything but the turns and stops they need to make, when they need to make them, because the rest of the world--for them--just doesn't exist.



About the same time I
was contending with "Chad," I heard a very, very prominent Southern California evangelical minister giving a sermon about a scratch he found on a brand new car. He was annoyed that he hadn't even owned the car for two hours without it being damaged, but then he remembered that, at the great and terrible day of the Lord, "it would all burn." He proceeded to tell the congregation that, essentially, nothing on earth mattered. "It will all burn." He proceeded to talk about the roof he worried about. "It will all burn," he said. The congregation laughed. He worried about his new lawn's watering system. "It will all burn," he said, "even the sprinklers." And everyone laughed.



Certainly, there is great virtue in calming down, and looking at the long-term, eternal picture, but there's a difference between doing that and checking out entirely. If the Lord gave a sermon, explaining the vast importance of the one lost sheep, it would seem weirdly disconnected to respond, "yeah, but it's all going to burn. Why even look for the sheep?"



I run into this phenomenon with phone companies a lot lately. The "business Sermons" I have to give them seem weirdly comical, and utterly obvious, but I might as well be preaching to a square block of pure rubber:

"Do you understand that we have no voice mail system?"

"Yes, I get that."

"And do you understand that we're in business? We actually advertise our phone number?"

"Yes. I understand."

"And do you understand that if we pay a lot of money to put a phone number up on a freeway billboard, it's a little weird having a voice mail system that doesn't work?"

"I understand."

"And do you understand that if we can't capture the customers' messages, we can't make sales?"

"I understand."

"And if we can't make sales, we can't pay you?"

"I understand."

"Really? So you don't mind fixing it right now--tonight?"

"Well..."

I've made this point before, but I'll make it again. The more America "checks out," the less care and love it shows the "here and now," the fewer talents we are going to have to show the Master upon His return.



And we won't be able to say "heah, it's all going to burn, right?"

Correspondence & Survival

Correspondence

First a few very generous letters of support & praise for our wonderful staff, then a little survival news:

Hi, I just wanted to send you a note and tell how much fun my son Johnny and I had on Friday. We always love coming to the farm on field trips. We did the "
Gold Rush"
for the first time. It was so great. Johnny loved listening to Logan play his jaw harp so much, he had to buy one. He hardly put it down all weekend. I also want to thank Angela, at the Inn, for her wonderful service. Johnny ordered a hot dog and wanted potato chips with it. When Angela found out they were all out she had them make up some special chip/fries just for him. He loved them so much he called the "Angela's Fries" and thinks you should put them on the menu. Always a delight,

-- Ilene and Johnny

Jim, Just a quick note of encouragement for all the wonderful new things happening at Riley's Farm! I so enjoy reading your journal - some days rather heavy and dark; others quite light and witty!! Never a dull page any way you look at it! Andy & I and our friends had a wonderful time at Christmas in the Colonies. We know several other couples who would love to attend, but because of the distance from their homes, they're not as inclined to participate - hopefully, that will change when there are overnight accommodations available - would be wonderful to continue in the Colonial mode into the next morning (not sure I could get Andy to wear a nightshirt and cap, though!) One of the couples at our table came from QUITE a distance - Pappy from Venice Beach and his lady-friend flew in from Sacramento to attend the evening! I'm SO bad with names, but the gentleman who served us was also one of the key players at the Girl Scout event that we held at the Farm last May. I couldn't believe that he recognized me and even remembered my name! He made the evening very special (As EVERY ONE of your staff does!) You can tell they really enjoy their work! The music ensemble was especially enjoyable - wish there had been a little longer time period for dancing - maybe without the very young ones, who were getting rather rambunctious! Andy & I also come up earlier in the year (Aug.) for the raspberry picking date night (to celebrate our anniversary). What a relaxing, enjoyable evening - the berry-picking gave us the opportunity to enjoy the silence together in the out-of-doors - just the sound of the breeze and the birds! Dinner was unhurried and DELICIOUS! Plan on doing it again this year! (And I've been telling LOTS of people about it, too). Wish I was available to attend the apple class next weekend - sounds like he's got some hints that would be right up our alley. Our couple of apple trees have been struggling for several years - we just aren't educated in the ways of growing them in the heat of SO. CAL. Anyway, keep up the good work - you've created a safe haven for families to learn about the real America! God bless you!

--Barbara

Our family enjoyed “Christmas in the Colonies” this year.  It was our first dinner on the farm.  I am excited about the future development of your “New England Village.”  I was thinking you may want to incorporate a school house in the future.  It would be a good experience for the children, of all ages, as it was in the days, to sit for 15 or 20 minutes with instruction from a teacher of the times.  I am sure they would see and compare the change our country has gone through, good and bad. Thank you for making a difference. May God bless you and your family.

--Laura

Survival

If some of you think I talk about survival & the economy too much, just bear with me. Me dear old mother, Bea Riley, was a depression baby, and the images of a whole town full of men out of work spook me more now that I'm one of those grown men, providing for a family. As some of you know, I watch television one night a week, on Sunday, and I believe CNBC had a story on all the Florida socialites put out of the clover by Bernard Madoff. At one point, a Palm Beach pawn broker is interviewed, and he reported the trade in Rolex watches has never been more brisk--that he's never seen so many luxury items turned in for cash during his decades in the business.

"What do you think that means?" the reporter asked.

"Stock up on canned goods," the man replied.

Okay, okay, I know we're supposed to trust the learned heads--those wise men and women who provide counsel in economic matters, (the same ones who were outraged, a few years ago, anyone would criticize Sally Mae and Freddie Mac.) Seriously, if Leslie Stahl calls Barney Frank "one smart guy," who am I to question her judgment? Truly, if there is even a small chance that "tinkering" with the free market (trillion dollar, "classified" capital injections, bank bailouts, auto-company nationalization--you know--"tinkering.") If "tinkering" will work, and Dr. Bernanke really knows how to stave off a major depression without creating hyper-inflation, then I will be the first one to breath a sigh of relief.

It's easy to stand on the sidelines and rant. I genuinely do hope someone knows what they're doing. The trouble is that some very smart people disagree very mightily on the present economic crisis. Some say that government intervention actually extended and aggravated the great depression; others say we should have had more government involvement in the markets sooner. If we don't have any perspective on that crisis, after seventy years, I doubt we're going to have consensus on this crisis, as we endure it without the benefit of hindsight.



So far, here on the farm, our business is up. We may be benefitting from Southern Californians who don't want to travel as far for a day off in the country, but I think it behooves all Americans to begin having a "Plan B."



For those of you have thought about "Plan B," I probably don't need to remind you what happens when things break down, but I will anyway. One of our long time farm friends, Richard Hanna, told me a story about growing up in depression era Pennsylvania. Some days, he would literally go without food, and he would wait for the potato harvesting rigs to drive by in the fields, and then dig around for spuds that were thrown up and cut in half. These days, Americans don't go digging for root vegetables; they wait for FEMA to drop corn flakes from the sky. If FEMA does that, great, but what happens when FEMA runs out?

The "measured" version of a major economic crisis, the "best of the worst scenario" is that widespread economic deterioration leads to soup lines, massive unemployment, and homelessness. Not very fun, but not absolute stone-age chaos either. If greater Los Angeles could manage to keep the power lines charged and the water working, and central valley farms could still deliver food, it wouldn't be the high life, but there would be some form of order. Think, however, of what happened during the Rodney King riots. That "merely" represented outrage over a jury verdict. Imagine what happens when people are hungry. Or don't imagine it. At some point, order would be restored, but do you really want to be downtown, or even in the suburbs when there's a water or food shortage and the new order is being debated?

This is still very much "thinking out loud" material, but it seems to me one version of our long term capital program on the farm could include "survival limited partnerships." In the best case, we raise money to build a New England village, to build a place where Americans can learn from their past. In the worst case, the farm's overnight capacity becomes a survival escape for the investors who would rather have a bunk in the country, and a cow to milk, than a gangland group hug and a resource-sharing conversation with roving, urban youth.

I'll be the first to admit there is something outlandish about it, but the curse of reading history is the knowledge that the story of man is just chock full of the outlandish and the dramatic and the un-heard of and the un-expected. As the boys at Monty Python put it, "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." For some reason, our most cutting, dismissive satire is heaped on people who remind us of previous disaster. "Springtime for Hitler" in the musical The Producers reminds us that evil always has a touch of the ridiculous about it, and because evil is ridiculous, it's difficult to take seriously. No one really believes the messenger. Poor Peter Schiff, when he was predicting the real estate crash and the stock market crash was being laughed off the set by people like Ben Stein, and I suppose if I hint "survival shares" to our corporate attorney, I will get laughed out of the building, but....

Bea Riley, and that pawn broker in Florida, take the present economic crisis seriously. Should you?

Vain Repetitions

I believe it was C.S. Lewis who wrote, with respect to the supernatural, "seeing is not believing." As Dickens affirmed, when he fashioned the quivering, ghost-riddled Ebeneezer Scrooge, we are apt to chalk up what we can't explain to an "undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard.." We are more comfortable, generally, fitting the world into a pattern we find internally reasonable, no matter how much the perceived facts run contrary to our hypothesis.



Nowhere is this more apparent to me than in the way the modern church has adopted a pattern of accepted "Christianese," a set of vain repetitions to use in discussing our experience of God, and His Word.

Picture a men's prayer meeting. One man prays, "I just thank you, Lord, that I can let it all go on you, that I don't have to care about any of these problems, that YOU are my master, and YOU have taken care of everything and I just have to get out of the way, Lord."

And the group mumbles assent, and affirmation and amens.

.. churches would claim to follow God's word, but, in reality, they serve an approved extraction from the whole; they dish up a special denominational sauce that only mixes well with certain parts of the Word.

Then picture the next man praying, "..Lord, wicked men have opened their mouths against me...they repay me evil for good and hatred for my friendship... Lord, may their days be few, may their children be fatherless and their wives widows..may they be closed with disgrace..may their sins always be before the Lord, that He may cut off their memory.."

And the group pauses, chairs shift, and an awkward silence announces that this prayer doesn't fit somehow. It's not approved. Perhaps there is even a little awkward conversation afterwards. The second man is rebuked. He is just too angry. "God is about love," he is told, and "forgiveness."

The second man asserts, "I was just quoting the 109th Psalm."

"But we don't think you're interpreting it correctly," someone says.

"I wasn't interpreting it," the man says. "I was just quoting it."

Back to the prayer meeting:

First man: "I want to thank you Lord for taking away my desire for beer."

Second man: "I want to thank you Lord for giving us wine to make our hearts glad."

First man: "Thank you Lord for your kindness and mercy."

Second man: "..and Thank you, Lord, for your justice, for calling hypocrites 'vipers' and 'white washed tombs.'"

First man: ".. help me to understand and serve my wife..."

Second man: "..and, Lord, please encourage my wife to obey me..."

The point here is that most reasonably Biblical churches would claim to follow God's word, but, in reality, they serve an approved extraction from the whole; they dish up a special denominational sauce that only mixes well with certain parts of the Word. It's almost as if the Bibles of America have dim gray type indicating passages that are to be read but not pondered.

In John 12, we are told "...then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment..."

We read this passage, but we keep it at a safe distance--in the Holy Land, two thousand years away. Can you imagine a Baptist pastor having his shoes removed by a woman in the church, that she might anoint his feet with ointment, and wipe them with her hair?

It's a loving image, in the abstract, but in reality, if it were staged in a contemporary living room, it would seem beautiful to some, strange to others, and vaguely scandalous to quite a few. I think we understand much of the Word, refracted through a Victorian prism that falsely shades away an intimacy, and an honest affection, that is improperly called sin. In an age full of abortion, divorce, and sexual indiscretion of every sort, the faithful need to be on guard, but not to the point of preaching a false purity. We have heard tell of some Christian families who have decided their daughters will not even hold hands with the opposite sex until they are married. Not even hold hands.



I suppose my question would be: would washing the house guests' feet with their hair be allowed?

There is a real danger in creating our own gospel, in formulating a code of behavior that has no support in the Word, that strives to demonstrate a holiness that was never called for by God, and that--indeed--makes a mockery of true holiness.



It's difficult enough, in other words, to know and ponder and follow His law, without inventing crazy requirements of our own.

Approved Deceptions

So you walk into a movie theater and you pay $9.00 for the flick and then $9.50 for a medium bag of popcorn and a bottled water. One admission gets you all the rides in a theme park, but a very small tube of sunscreen is $9.95. The cable TV pitchman is willing to sell you the juicer-of-all-time in 3 easy payments of $29.95 a piece. You price merchandise in your own store, and no one will ever let you sell it for an even buck multiple. It's got to be $x.95 or $x.99.

Let's take the movie flick phenomenon. The conventional wisdom is that you have no where else to buy food--you are a captive--so you have to pay through the nose for snacks. Well, first of all, I tend to look at things from the perspective of the business owner. I respect profit--and I like seeing first run movies on the big screen. It's exciting. You catch up with old friends at the show. I do believe--despite my love/hate relationship with what Hollywood produces--that the big old 14 screen luxury theaters are a service to the community, but I'm curious as to why there has to be a pricing con game built into the system. I think it's because people just won't pay $14 for a movie and market rate for snacks. They will pay $9 for a movie and then grudgingly pay more for snacks than they would pay anywhere else. It might have something to with how much people will allow to slip out of their wallet at any one time, or it may be the leverage movie producers have over the theaters that screen them. Whatever the cause, payments over time are easier to swallow--even if that balloon payment is a doozey. That explains the $9.95 sunscreen and the "three easy payment" and the penny-off-the dollar pricing convention. When we buy things, there is a delicate line between feeling served, and feeling mugged.



The strange thing about life is that this systemic, approved dishonesty is built right into the fabric of our existence. Everyone knows--Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative--that the Social Security system is facing insolvency soon, that it is--in fact--a Ponzi scheme without enough new "investors" to satisfy the old ones. But there are so many retirees in this country who vote that no politician in his right mind would ever propose serious reform, if it involved sacrifice across the board. Two opposing ideas--"old people should be get what is coming to them" and "there isn't enough money"--just can't be reconciled. The reckoning is delayed, put on the installment plan, and the eventual disaster looms larger and larger. Politicians who actually want to solve the problem, like theater owners who want to make a profit, have to coax the electorate into giving them authority by pretending the price won't be very high.



Or take education: You are sitting in a class at the community college--taught by an utter buffoon whose principles you detest--but he has the power to certify you, flunk you, write recommendations, move you on or keep you back. Do you write papers which honestly state your claims or do you tow the party line and move on, fake your way into tenure, and eventually speak the hard truths after accepting so many falsehoods you don't know what you believe anymore?

And what about love? There's a field full of deception if ever there were one. You get the guy, ladies, by playing "hard to get." As my old daddy used to say "the boy chases the girl until she catches him." There's a part of our souls that wants what we can't have, so we have to pretend that we're unavailable to make certain our availability is achieved. Consider Genesis 24:

[Isaac] went out to the field one evening to meditate, and as he looked up, he saw camels approaching. Rebekah also looked up and saw Isaac. She got down from her camel and asked the servant, "Who is that man in the field coming to meet us?" "He is my master," the servant answered. So she took her veil and covered herself.

Rebecca's veil wasn't general--not a shield against every man--just the one she had agreed to marry. I imagine several thousand books have been written on the concept of the veiled, or the semi-veiled, female, but the reality is that we always value what we cover up and hide--whether it's the woman behind the dress or the secret that can't be shared or the birthday present that can't be opened yet, or the glowing joy of movie popcorn and compelling cinema, hidden behind the $7.00 matinee teaser price.



A few years ago, I was a real bear about charging for parking on busy fall harvest days. In my mind, it was an utterly reasonable charge. We have to keep the place safe; we have to keep the traffic moving, make sure an ambulance could have access in the event of an emergency; we also needed to save up for eventual hard surfacing of our roads and parking lots. It made sense to charge for parking, but lots of newcomers to the farm had no idea what they were getting. Why should they pay for parking in a farm field? We stopped charging for parking and our food business went way up. Conventional wisdom would indicate we charge more for food to make up for the parking loss, but the idea of a $12.95 hamburger turns my stomach. The $12.95 hamburger, in our case, pays for the guy who won't pay for parking, no matter how reasonable the charge, and the family that won't buy food from our restaurants--and who picnic on the farm, using our bathrooms and trash containers along the way. I think one of the reasons I hate price-gouging on food is that it seems to be a different version of what our federal and state government does: they penalize those who work, to pay extortion, and give make-work jobs, to those who won't.

But who, really, wants to be the picnic-Scrooge? Who wants to stand around and read farm journal entries to customers who don't--or won't--understand? If a theater owner wanted to give honest, market-priced snacks and have his customers pay $15 for the movie, would an empty parking lot console him for being truthful? Imagine if he stood out on the sidewalk and said, "look folks, it's Brad Pitt who charges $5 million an appearance, not the farmer who raised the pop-corn; we're just trying to be honest about what you're paying for." Would that work?



Probably not. I'm not a saint on this score, by the way. There's a part of me that would rather not know what it costs to take six children to a movie--with snacks.



"Please," my inner voice counsels. "Don't add it up. Just enjoy the show."



I'm still not going to charge $12.95 for a hamburger, but if you picnic on Riley's Farm, without buying anything else, I will throw in a farm journal entry, read out loud, absolutely free.

Farm Forecast II

Jeff Hammond's first draft of our craft building design. These structures will house, in the "City on a Hill" a potter, a weaver, a woodwright, and a printer.

My recent out loud musings about our focus inspired these comments from Sharon of Victorville: "...Thank you for your true insight into the state of our nation, both morally and financially. If only the people who need to hear this could. I keep asking myself, where did all the intelligent, moral people in our government / country go?.."



Thanks, Sharon. I wonder too--and I'm even bipartisan about it. The other day I saw the press pictures of five past, present, or future presidents of the United States, and it looked to me more like a crime lineup than a gathering of the great.



I don't just blame this on the men in question, or even the people who elected them. I blame it on bad mythology, bad spirituality, and poor leadership in our churches. With respect to mythology, just consider our transition as Americans from the Horatio Alger novels ("Strive and Succeed" stories of poor boys who work hard to educate and improve themselves) to the "mind" of Stan Lee comic books and movies, about ordinary people who "mutate" into cob-web and fire-spitting freaks. On the spirituality front, we have gone from a nation who repents before prayer to a nation that prays without ever asking for forgiveness--a nation offended by the very notion of seeking forgiveness. On the church leadership front, even the most devoted of American church leaders have turned the church into a kind of drug and emotional recovery center. Jesus came to heal the sick, it is true, but not to chain them to their hospital beds.

When General Washington inspired his men to cross the Delaware and achieve a needed victory over the Hessians. he didn't get bitten, Stan Lee style, by a radioactive rodent and develop super-human scratching skills.

Where this leads me, with respect to our focus, is to remember that redemptive drama and mythology need to be part of everything we do here. It's not really enough just to buy raspberry preserves off the shelf. The story of how they got there is just as important, if not more so. I believe all of our staff, from farming to living history, need to be willing to tell the story of how the harvest came about, and how America came about. It wasn't by accident. It wasn't by mutation. It wasn't by entitlement either.

When General Washington inspired his men to cross the Delaware and achieve a needed victory over the Hessians. he didn't get bitten, Stan Lee style, by a radioactive rodent and develop super-human scratching skills. There is a cancer growing on the American soul when we shift from a generation of boy scouts seeking to "be prepared" over to a gaggle of creepy boy-warlocks, hoping to be Harry Potter. The story of America is really much more about Horatio Alger than it is about Peter Parker. That may sound like an outlandish comparison, but it sums up the primary differences between America's foundational principles and our present sickness: we were once willing to work for super-powers, now we want them spliced into our DNA by cosmic accident. We were once willing to help our own poor; now we want the Federal government to do it. We were once willing to pay for a doctor's visit; now we want free medicine to fall from the sky.



Of course that's only one of many principles that can come through in the human drama of living historians playing the part of the "former America." Another is simple virtue--politeness, a smile, encouragement, hospitality. When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, I stopped in at a university style shop to get my hair cut. The young woman who cut my hair was winsome, friendly, beautiful. I told a friend, afterwards, "heah, I think she likes me." My friend responded, "Be careful. You're in Iowa now. Everyone's friendly."



One of my proudest achievements, running Riley's Farm, has been the extraordinary level of genuinely demonstrated kindness shown by our staff towards the guests. I tell our people, "I don't want you to be 'corporate customer-friendly kind.' I want you to love our customers. They put the food on our table. While I can't say that we always live up to this virtue, the letter I received just the other day about Logan Creighton is a case in point:

I just wanted to let you know that my daughter, Tara and I came up from Redondo Beach, for a half day at Riley’s Farm on 12-31-08 and had a great time. We signed up for the archery, tomahawk throwing, apple pie baking, quill ink writing, and the music. There were only a few other couples on the farm that we saw and so we were not used to be one of the few. However, we were assigned with “Logan” (not sure if this is his real name) and found that he was so informative and passionate about what he was doing that we forgot we were the only ones around. We had a blast with all of the activities we did and although are last session was supposed to end by 4:00, I think we actually left close to 5:00. Everything we did, Logan was sure to give us the historical context surrounding the activity and had a wealth of information to impart to us. We’ve come to many events- the Civil and Revolutionary War events, Sleepy Hallow, Civil War Ball, and countless others but this was a new experience for us as we’ve never had such personal one on one at Riley’s. I just wanted you to know that you’ve got a wonderfully talented, personable, and historical asset with Logan and we so appreciated all of his talents and passions. Thanks for making this day a grand day indeed! We hope to see you real soon. My daughter keeps talking about our day at Riley’s.

We put a lot into our buildings, and the grounds, and I genuinely like the food in our restaurant better than all my favorite down-the-hill eateries,but it's the connection people make with other human souls that they remember. It's the drama, the smile, the laughter.

I believe that the experience will be more keen, and exciting, and educational, and memorable if we give the staff--on public days--a set of historical realities to solve, in front of, and with, the guests. Suppose a Quaker comes into town that morning and there's a bit of a theological tiff with the local Congregationalist. Imagine a peddler/ itinerant cobbler stumbles into town and a fight breaks out over who gets to entertain and feed him. (There is some basis for this; when news was slow, travelers were sometimes "fought" over.) Suppose the day begins with one of the local selectmen entering the public house, a little bruised and beaten from highwaymen outside of town. Perhaps the independent spirit of shared law enforcement could be demonstrated in the response of the staff, and the guests. (I know, I know; we can't hang anyone, but the drama of remembering swift, reasonable justice might be soul-satisfying in this era of the 10 year death penalty appeal.)

Ideally, the premise would come from an actual incident that was known well enough to have included a beginning, a middle, and an end--after the manner of good drama. The staff could be given motivation, and a few lines to remember throughout the day, and the guests could be given premise, and hints as how to help, but the final re-cap, and the lessons learned, would be hashed out at the 4:00 PM closing bell, with comparisons to the way the incident played out in history itself. We could have a slightly different drama every day.

What say ye?