In his cult classic The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky writes:

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”

This is a very powerful line. Hugely insightful and profound.

I know, for my part, this is the very cause of my life’s struggle to understand God’s love and God’s grace: I don’t think I am wholly worthy of it.

And when we feel unworthy of love, we reject it.

We act out against it.

We begin resenting those who do love us, thinking them fools for loving someone as unworthy as us.

This doesn’t happen consciously, of course; rather, it happens in that deeper, unconscious place that drives everything we do as human beings.

In Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, his first-person narrator Tom Wingo says of his wife that the one thing he simply could not forgive her for was loving him. He explains that this was the very root of all of his marital problems—he believed her too good to love him, so he hated her for it.

This seems counter-intuitive from the outside looking in, but it is true of our natural inclination as human beings. In both our earthly relationships and in our faith relationships, we often feel unworthy of being loved and therefore we reject and/or resent those who try to supply us with that very thing.

Or as Chbosky writes, “We accept the love we think we deserve.”

It strikes me that until we are willing to understand that grace is the unmerited favor of God, and that true love is the unconditional favor of a spouse, we will never be able to move forward in our faiths and in our lives because we will be too busy resenting the very ones trying to supply us the very thing we know we want but feel we don’t deserve.

In other words, we must be willing to accept the love we think we don’t deserve.

I wrote yesterday of Pete Rollins’ new book Insurrection.

Pete posted the introduction and first chapter of the book on his blog last week, and in just those first thirty pages, one can find an inordinate amount of wisdom.

In the first chapter, Rollins calls into question our motivation for believing the things we believe.

Not what we believe, but why we believe it.

This is a very scary question for us, if we’re willing to face it square on.

Because when we’re honest with ourselves, we realize how much of what we believe was originally decided for us by our parents or our family members or our closest friends. Take it from a high school teacher who sees countless papers written by young minds adamantly espousing political, religious, and social ideas about which he or she clearly knows absolutely nothing about.  

It would be nice to think that this is normal and that, as we mature and become adults and grow more socially and politically conscious, we begin bending our ideas to conform to the new information to which we have been exposed, but this is, for the vast majority of people, untrue.

Instead, most people find writers and TV hosts and news pundits who provide intellectual backing to align with and bolster their own pre-existing beliefs.

At least this is what Rollins contends in his new book, and I am inclined to agree with him.

Says Rollins, “We see this play out in the way we tend to read books and watch programs that agree with our already existing worldview. We often use the information we have just learned to pretend to others and ourselves that we have chosen our beliefs because of that information, instead of admitting that we believed beforehand and simply used the information to back it up.”

This was an especially powerful thing for me to read, because it clearly articulated something I realized five years ago about myself: everything I watched and read—which was a lot—was all information coming from people with whom I already agreed.

Consequently, I made a pact with myself several years ago to divide my television and my news media equally. Since then, I have read the New York Times each morning and watched Fox News each night. I listen to NPR on my way to work in the mornings, and I Iisten to Sean Hannity on my way home in the afternoons. I visit both the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report each day on the web.

And here’s the most important thing: I go into each of these—at least, as best I can—with an attitude set neither to agree nor disagree with what I’m about to consume.

Because of doing this, I have seen my beliefs and ideology slightly shift over time. I have been forced to face certain things I once held true and admit them for false beliefs. In other words, I found there were things I only thought I believed because I’d been too scared (or too lazy) (or both) to look at the root of the belief itself.

This all reminds me of what Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay “Intellect”:

“God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, – you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets, – most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.”

So Emerson says we have two ultimate destinations:

Repose.

Or truth.

Now, this isn’t to say that, after challenging them, we won’t find that our pre-existing beliefs and ideas still ring true for us. But it is to say that until we are willing to face them, to challenge them, then they aren’t really beliefs in the first place. They are just things we’ve spent our lives pretending we believe.

Or as Rollins says, “We… seek out evidence to support the already existing belief and then pretend that our belief arose from the evidence.”

In a culture oversaturated with opinion media, this has become the easiest thing one can possibly do.

Thankfully, though, there are people out there like Rollins and Emerson who have the guts and the smarts to challenge us to challenge ourselves.

And in the challenge, Papa Emerson tells us, we will find truth.

Oh, how I prefer truth to repose.

Yesterday I wrote about the novels I’m eager to read this fall.

And while, yes, autumn is my season for fiction, there is also a work of nonfiction being released next week about which I am equally excited.

The book is called Insurrection, and it’s by Christian thinker/philosopher Pete Rollins.

I first became aware of Rollins through Besides the Bible, a book to which we both contributed essays. After being impressed by his essay in BTB, I popped by his blog to have a quick look-see at what he was all about. I’ve been frequenting the blog ever since.

Last week, Rollins posted the introduction and first chapter of Insurrection on his website, and I devoured it. He really is one of the most challenging thinkers in the Christian world today.

In the opening portion of his book, Rollins wrestles with something I’ve thought about quite a bit in my life: the motivation behind desire.

In other words, Rollins asks whether we desire something because we desire it, or whether we desire something because we desire others to know about what we’ve done.

Rollins uses the example of Aaron Sorkin’s Social Network to frame this idea. He points out how everything Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zuckerburg) did–everything he created along with all of its attendant success– happened because he wanted to impress a girl who had dumped him.

I remember when I first was confronted with this philosophical idea. I was fifteen, in my old jeep, driving down Westwood Avenue in High Point, thinking of something I’d recently done, when suddenly, a thought occurred to me: did I do this thing because I really wanted to (as I had originally thought), or did I do it because I wanted my friends and people at school to know I did it?

Though only fifteen at the time, I became haunted by this thought, because I suddenly knew in my heart that I cared more about what people thought than I cared about what I actually did.

Rollins says of the people whom we want to impress: “The spectator is often little more than an image we have in our mind (for instance, this person could be long dead in reality), but he or she is the one who invests our fantasies and achievements with their excessive pleasures (i.e. the pleasure we get that is beyond the mere satisfaction of basic needs).”

I concur wholeheartedly with what he is suggesting.

Rollins is saying that, as we move through our formative years, we naturally begin wanting to impress certain people. Most often these people are our parents and family members. Or perhaps they may be first crushes or first lovers or people who first inflicted pain upon us.

Then, as we grow older, we go through our lives doing things, accomplishing things, all the while unaware that we are, in the present, trying to impress people from our past.

This notion is one of the central themes of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and it is why he concludes his masterpiece like this:

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Fitzgerald is here saying that everything we do—that all of the hardships we encounter, that all of the obstacles we overcome, that all of the successes we have—are mere exercises in trying to recreate our pasts.

I think Fitzgerald was right.

And based on the introduction and first chapter of his new book, I think Pete Rollins agrees, too.

For some reason, I associate autumn with good novels.

This makes very little sense, I realize, seeing as it’s just as possible for one to stumble upon a good novel in any other season. In fact, if anything, most people are likely to associate summer with good reads.

But for me, it’s all about the fall. Always has been, always will be.

Last fall was especially kind to me, as I read Ethan Canin’s America, America while on our honeymoon in Jamaica. Canin is one of my favorite writers, and America, America was a real treat for me, since it was the first time—at least, the first I am aware of— that Canin has ventured into political territory with his fiction.

Next I read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, the much anticipated follow-up to his 2001 National Book Award winning The Corrections. I’d loved The Corrections and had, like the rest of the reading universe, been eagerly anticipating Freedom. I wasn’t let down, either. Freedom, with its exquisite prose and its lifelike characters, was the best book I read in 2010.

Finally, I read Richard Russo’s Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls. I had owned the book for several years but had not, until last fall, felt the necessary compulsion to take it from the shelf. What I mean by that, I think, is that the book had not yet picked me (I have written elsewhere on this blog about how I believe books choose us rather than us choosing them). Ultimately, it was well worth the wait; Empire Falls was a wonderful novel, one I come back to in my thoughts quite often.

This fall, I have reason to believe it will be an equally exciting year on the book front.

Yesterday, I picked up a copy of Chad Harbach’s highly touted debut, The Art of Fiedling. The book has been praised by both Franzen and John Irving. Seeing as these two, in my opinion, are among the top 5 living writers, I needn’t hear more on the pitch front. I’m now 50 pages in and loving it.

Meanwhile, next month will see the release of Chuck Klosterman’s The Visible Man and Jeffrey Euginedes’ The Marriage Plot. Klosterman, a pop culture writer who came to national prominence with his 2001 essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, always writes compellingly on the question of “what is reality?” Klosterman is one of my favorite writers—SD&C had a considerable influence on my own book of essays—and it will be interesting to see how he approaches this question through this novel.

As for Eugenides, this is his first novel since the 2002 Pulitzer-winning Middlesex, which, much like the aforementioned Empire Falls, has been sitting on my shelf unread for the past five years. I plan to go out of sequence on this one, reading The Marriage Plot before Middlesex, but should I enjoy The Marriage Plot—which I have a sneaking suspicion I will—perhaps it will be time for Middlesex to finally jump off the shelf and choose me.

So there they are: the first three books on my autumn reading list. This is all, of course, subject to change at any time. One never knows when and at what times a book will choose him.

How about you? What books are you planning to read this fall? And what books have you already read that are worth recommending to the rest of us?

One year ago today I tricked one of the smartest, wittiest, funniest, most beautiful women in the world in to marrying me.

Now, a year into our marriage (after four years of courtship), if I were asked to summarize what effect April has had on my life, I’d have to harken back to a line from the film As Good As It Gets.

In it, while sitting together at dinner, Jack Nicholson’s character, the exasperating Melvin Udall, tells Helen Hunt’s character, Carol Connelly, that she makes him want to be a better man.

This is the same way I feel about April.

You know how the Tim McGraw song says, “I may be a real bad boy, but baby I’m a real good man?”

Well, all my life I’ve been the opposite: I’ve been really good at being a boy, but I haven’t always done a bang-up job at being a man.

I’m, by nature, irresponsible, forgetful, unorganized, and, quite often, aloof.

April makes me want to change all of that, though. Not because she tells me to, but because, for her—because it’s what she deserves—I want to.

Please don’t misunderstand; it’s still a work in progress. I still have my boyish tendencies. But I’m getting there.

And one year later, on our anniversary, I am happy to be able to look at my wife and thank her for it.

I’ve written in the past about The Gator Pup and how, prior to April rescuing her from the kill-shelter to which she was otherwise headed, I’d never owned a dog.

I’ve also written about how, even though she is a menace, I adore the Gator Pup and can no longer imagine my life without her.

Well, prior to Gator’s arrival, I was somewhat resistant to the idea of having a dog.

And by “somewhat,” I mean “very.”

Fortunately for me, though, over the course of our courtship, April dropped subtle hints here and there that she wanted one.

For instance, this picture I found on my screensaver– designed by April, personally–the day after we saw Marley and Me in the theater.

Subtle, right?

Barring an intervention by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, Troy Davis, a man accused of the 1989 murder of a Georgia police officer, will be executed in less than a week.

It is a case fraught with inconsistencies and bearing little substantial evidence. Consequently, there are numerous politicians and citizens calling for the state to grant Davis a stay of execution.

Should the state give in to these pleas, it will be the second stay of execution Davis has received. (He received his first in 2007.)

You can read here about the case and draw your own opinions—I personally feel that, given the extreme lack of evidence, the state should grant the stay of execution—but what I am interested in discussing is the psychological mindscrew this situation must be for a human being.

Again, this isn’t about whether he’s innocent or guilty. In fact, for the purposes of this post, it is perhaps most effective to assume he is innocent.

That said, look at it this way:

The guy is told at his 1991 sentencing that he will absolutely die. Undoubtedly, unequivocally: “You will die… and here is when.”

He then goes through sixteen years awaiting his certain death.

Then, suddenly, in 2007, he is given cause for hope. (Bear in mind this is an emotion he has not known in sixteen years.)

Then, in 2010, that hope is again taken away.

Now, suddenly a week from his execution, Davis is made aware that a movement is afoot to grant him clemency.

Therefore, we now have a human being sitting in a room facing down this certain future: I will either die at an exact time next week, or… I will not.

Knowing you are going to die in a week has to be psychologically challenging enough. In fact, Chuck Klosterman wrote an entire essay about what it must feel like to know the exact day and time you are going to die. About how different this experience is from the normal death experience. In  other words, no one, other then the sentenced criminal, ever knows what it’s like to live knowing exactly when he’s going to die.

Considering this, now compound that piece of psychological torture by adding this element: knowing exactly when you’re going to die, but meanwhile, having cause to believe there’s a chance it won’t happen.

This has to be psychologically crippling.

This is what Troy Davis currently has on his plate. And in less than a week, he could very well face the ultimate psychological torture: he might have to eat his final meal, make the long walk to the electric chair, sit down, watch the guards begin the necessary preparations, all the while holding out hope that they will suddenly call the whole thing off.

Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin talks about this exact scenario in The Idiot, about how he watched a man facing execution be granted clemency at the last minute.

Myshkin says that the hopelessness he saw in the man’s eyes prior to dying was the greatest horror he’d ever seen.

I submit that sitting on the chopping block knowing you are about to die—but also knowing there’s a chance, no matter how slim, that you might suddenly be pardoned—is even more horrific. I think it might just be the most difficult psychological challenge one could ever face.

A strange and existential thing to think about today, I know. But I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the matter.

In teaching my students the concept of a thesis the other day, while trying to convey that a thesis is more than a sentence but is instead an overarching statement of what the whole paper will be about, it occurred to me to have them write a six word memoir about their lives.

The idea came from a book I stumbled upon several years ago. It’s called Six Word Memoirs, and it is both brilliantly clever and startlingly profound. In it, numerous famous writers are asked to sum up their lives in no more and no less than six words.

For instance, in it, two of my favorite writers said:

“Fifteen years since last professional haircut.” – D. Eggers

“Nobody cared. Then they did. Why?” – C. Klosterman

There were hundreds of other equally clever sentiments in the book.

I figured that allowing the students to think of how six words could sum up their lives could show them how a thesis can sum up a paper.

Now, whether it will work for their theses, I don’t know.

But I do know that I got some clever six word memoirs out of them. Very clever.

Meanwhile, they kept asking if I had ever written my own.

Which I hadn’t, actually. But I promised them I would.

And after thinking about it—for quite some time actually—I finally came up with this:

“Nothing scares me more than silence.”

I discarded several others along the way to that one. Ones that were more God-and-faith heavy. I liked them, but they felt more contrived somehow. I meant them; but still, they felt less honest and vulnerable than the one about silence.

So there you have it, my six word memoir: “Nothing scares me more than silence.”

How about you? What would you say about your life if you only had six words with which to say it?

For close to a month now I’ve been watering dead flowers every afternoon.

The flowers were beautiful once, but because I failed to water them a few times, they soon withered and died.

I am acutely aware that they are dead, aware that they are never going to be beautiful again, but I won’t stop watering them. I keep doing it over and over, hoping that sooner or later they will come back to life.

Something about this practice makes me think of what the addict faces when wrestling his addiction. Of how he loses the “high” of whatever once pleased him—drugs, alcohol, money, sex, possessions—but how, in his emptiness, he clings tighter to the memory of how they used to make him feel, how he keeps coming back to them in hopes that—against all odds—they will suddenly, magically, please him once again.

It all reminds me of a passage from Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe when Edmund has been tempted by and has eaten the magic Turkish delights and, though he now has the option of good, solid food, has left in search of more Turkish Delight.

Lewis says, “There’s nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food.”

It is the memory of what was once beautiful that keeps the addict from turning his back on that which has been killing him; it is the false hope that it will miraculously return that keeps him watering dead flowers.

Dear Montana, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Alaska,

Today, September 13th, marks the one month anniversary of this blog’s comeback.

And to date, according to my trusty Google analytics, you are the only four states who have not stopped by to say hello. This saddens me. It also leaves me wondering:

Have I done something? Perhaps offended you in some way?

I think so highly of each of you (especially you, Montana) and it would kill me to know that I have somehow fractured our relationship.

So, please stop by this coming month and say hello; assure me that there is nothing wrong between us. It would mean the world to me.

Meanwhile, I’d like to extend a big thanks to those of you who’ve been hanging out with me so regularly—especially you New York, California, Georgia, South Carolina, and—of course—North Carolina. Y’all were the five most represented at my party this month.

Also, a big thanks to you outside of the United States who have been such frequent visitors this month—yes, I’m speaking of you Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Poland, and India; y’all were the five most represented this month. (Also, a quick hello to the one visitor from Macedonia; very cool of you to stop by!)

I really am thankful to all of you who have stopped by. I’m even more thankful for those of you who’ve stopped by, left, and then stopped back by. I’m most thankful for those of you who’ve stopped by, left, stopped back by, and then told a friend to stop by.

Please keep at it; and if you happen to talk to anyone from Montana, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Alaska, tell them to come by and say hello.

It just doesn’t feel right here without them.

Update to post: As of 8:30 this morning, Google analytics shows that New Hampshire has come by to make ammends. It really is comforting to know that we are back on good terms, New Hampshire. I look forward to hanging out more often from here forward!