Lamar Howell's Weblog

With all the cult-hero worship of Steve Jobs, I thought it was interesting that the Chinese are building his ipads in glorified sweat shops for 60 hours a week making $2 an hour. They live in on-site dorms, or whole families in one room garages built by the factory for their workers. I’m sure the Chinese who look over the balconies of those living quarters are comforted by the suicide nets the company has installed there. Is this the way we want another country to bring us down economically? Ipads…how very touching.

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My name is Dae-Jung Lee. Food is my religion, my stomach is the temple, and if there is a god, hunger is his spirit. I can practice my religion now, I bow three times a day before the offerings, and sometime, I am ashamed to say, I indulge in something sweet. Like cake or ice cream. I sit on a park bench and after I have ice cream I put my elbow up on the bench casually. But it makes me feel arrogant so I put it once more to my side.

My new world is like my old world, except that now I can eat when I am hungry. That is the only difference. Here there are so many kinds of people but in my other life, there were two kinds of people: guards, and prisoners. If you did everything right, you were a guard; if you did wrong things, you were a prisoner.  I must have done many things wrong, because I was a prisoner.

I had a mother whom I saw from midnight to five in the morning. She beat me and I blamed her for my suffering. I had a brother too, she told me, but I never saw him till the day he was shot for trying to escape. My mother they hanged. They beat me for not knowing about their escape attempt.

I thought the whole world was a prison camp, and that there was nothing else. I didn’t know I lived in a country, or that I had someone called a Great Leader.  One day I learned about my country and my Great Leader. I escaped through electric fence into the real North Korea and I thought it was a heavenly place. People had different clothes and they had food to eat. They had families and they could walk along rivers and under trees, things I had never seen or heard of.

When I escaped North Korea and crossed the river into China, I saw strange things that sparkled. People told me about televisions and cellphones. I saw colorful lights in a massive city, but none of these things interested me. I only wanted to eat.

Today, I live in South Korea, among people whose lives are very complex. They are driven to be successful, they dress beautifully, and they do activities together with their friends, then go home to comfortable beds and soothing music.

But, my world is different. I see the lights, the shining things. I hear the music and the laughter. None of this matters to me. Only one thing matters to me – food. I am consumed by the same religion I’ve known all my life.

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A used hat sits on a shelf

Whose head was it on?

Someone who grew weary of that hat

With its felt circle of restriction

and wide brim

and sweat stains.

It blocked the light

and the heat of the sun

and  hid someone’s unkempt hair

I suppose it will keep sitting there

until he comes back for it –

if he does come back

Maybe he traded it in for a better one

A crown of thorns sits on a shelf

Whose head was it on?

Someone who was forced to wear that hat

with its twisted circle of branches

and sharp points

and blood stains

It wasn’t worn for shade

or to block out the sun

It couldn’t hide his unkempt hair

I suppose it will keep sitting there

because he would never come back for it,

when he does come back

I’ll bet he traded it in for a better one.

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When scribes of some new century lift up the fateful quill

To record in novel tongues what good fortune or grave ill

defined our nation’s tenure as the leader of the world,

of the accolades that followed, or the curses that were hurled

and the meaning of the silence when that final flag unfurled

They will tell of those who longed to call her cherished borders home

like ancient generations venerated Greece or Rome

Or will they sigh of how it rotted like a decadent empire

or perhaps, the noble nation, in one final blaze of fire

chose instead to be a martyr among nations, then expire.

They will speak of how two destinies ran strong and parallel

within the country’s psyche, and how both could bode them well:

The first great vein, a love for God; the other, love for gold

two rivers, one pragmatic, one prophetic which foretold

how conflicted we would be as our narratives unfold

They may write of three small clippers, and the isle of Salvador

Sing the praises of Columbus, or his legacy abhor

Will they see the island natives’ thirst for blood at Navidad?

Or call the Spaniards murderers in the name of some new god,

and the gold prospector mixed with priest as normal, or as odd?

They’ll grant the Mayflower Puritans were those who chose to act

with government ordained by God and sealed by their contract

Or will they vilify the Puritans as ‘puritanical,’

and call the Holy Scriptures they obeyed tyrannical

and citizens who tried to hold to those ideals fanatical?

They’ll report on English settlements that bore the Monarch’s name

like Jamestown, where the gentry soiled their tender hands in shame

How their charter to make money from the New World was embraced

yet the part to bring the gospel to the savages erased

and belief in national destiny laughed at and effaced

Will they honor Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening

and mention Wesley’s hymn “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”

and tell of how George Whitefield brought salvation to the slave?

Or will they mock the famed revival as sensational and fake,

its role in America’s revolution, censure and berate?

They will pen the great rebellion from the British motherland

as King George damning those Yankees as a renegade young band.

Or they’ll see the first Americans as patriots and strong

and their independent spirit countering despotism’s wrong,

their triumphs and their sacrifices codified in song.

Will they read the Negro spirituals in the style of Amazing Grace

as the triumph of the essence of a noble, battered race?

Recount the trial of Phyllis Wheatley poems to statesmen of her day

how politicians doubted her to Massachusetts’ shame

or will they use the truth of slavery to justify or blame?

Recorders of the future may well cast our Civil War

as a rip across the fabric of the glory that we wore,

or they’ll paint the American psyche with a dark-pigmented stain

and say that state secession was a cover-up for gain

or call the practice of enslaving our own countrymen insane.

They’ll pen volumes of the global wars our men were called to fight,

conclude that freedom was worth defending and this nation did it right.

Or they will call us “ugly Americans” though all we ever asked

was land enough to bury those who died there in the task

to stop the spread of tyranny, and its evil face unmask.

Will they see this current century as a time of great excess

and its people spoiled by government and enslaved by selfishness?

Or will they see the American fiber that rose from New York dust

preserving our republic by sacrifice and guts,

and carved on granite mountainsides “In Christ alone we trust!”

Well every nation has its destiny, but some more nobly called–

This was our birthright, this our place in time and history’s halls.

This was our charge, our hallowed duty between two vast and distant shores.

We judge ourselves, but our descendants judge us even more

as either those who fought and won, or as those who dropped the torch.

We vow this day, here bound by love for this the United States

that our conscience has been laid bare here, our soul scored and displayed

that we will give our heart, our breath, bone marrow, and our lives

To guard our sacred values so that freedom can survive,

and leave the scorn or the praises for posterity to decide.

When the tides of history ebb and flow then sweep the sands away

there remains the fateful hourglass to measure out the day

There to capture in its curv’ed glass some justice’d roguish grains

and weigh them in the balance, then toss them out again

onto a desert stretch of some forgotten beach and countless sands.

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Last month I registered a prayer in my journal. I asked God to let me be truly alive, to feel deeply and express that toward others, to love people and God like I should.

Here’s what happened. My swimming pool had been drained for about two weeks and I had gotten accustomed to it being empty. I cleaned it out, fixed everything up, then decided to fill the pool.

The day the pool got full, I went walking by it to check on my firebowl. As I saw the water in the pool I had the strangest sensation in my emotions, like a welcoming attitude toward the water, as if I had actually missed it. For an instant, the water was alive, it had personality, it evoked feelings in me. I felt that I was seeing an old friend again.

Does that prove that I am truly coming alive and able to fully feel again. I’m not sure. But I know one thing: it was something I had never felt before.

I’m sure a man lost in a desert would have fantastically alive feelings at the sight of water. Or a man coming home from a dangerous war battle would feel he had come back from the dead when he sees his family for the first time again. Perhaps a woman can feel truly alive after her first-born child takes its first breath and is laid on her chest.

Whatever makes me come alive, I want more of it, and I want to never tire of that thing.

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I was fifty feet behind the truck before I could read it. Even with 20/20 vision I could not read the sign at 200 feet.

What could break my windshield from a gasoline tanker? A driver, angry that I was within 200 feet, could throw a bottle out his window, I suppose.

My question is – and I think it’s valid –why make a sign that can only be read at one’s peril?

I think that symbolizes what has happened in our culture:

We’re in danger of something hitting the windshield of civility because we’ve broken through the 200-foot moral barrier.

THE EIGHTEEN (WHEELER) COMMANDMENTS

Stay 200 feet away from

the broad metal backside of sin

A mile away from immorality

A league away from lust

Give wild urges a wide berth

Keep a safe distance from damnable doctrines

Avoid vanity and forego ego at all costs

Watch for falling rocks of faithlessness

Don’t be adrift in the wake of wickedness

Finally,

Don’t follow any THING if you cannot

See what is in front of the THING!

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I’m just saying that I don’t make mistakes

I don’t have faults or do blunders,

No bad habits or compulsive desires

No neuroses or idiosyncrases,

obsessions, fixations.

What I do though

is sin.

I sin because it is natural

and normal, just like it is for you.

We sin because we are sinners bent on sinning.

But provision for our sins was supernatural,

and our Savior was far above normal.

Let’s stop saying we’re just weak,

only human — the ‘Oops’ Factor.

Jesus didn’t die for our carelessness,

our oversights,

our emotional baggage,

our issues, our stuff.

He died for the sins of many,

and moreover, the many sins of the many,

and actually, all the sins of all.

He didn’t die to make us better;

He died because we can not be better.

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There she stood,

short and dumpy

with her waist-long black tresses.

She always sat in front of the round mirror of the dresser

and wound her jet-black hair mysteriously around her head,

held there by a half-dozen aluminum wave-clamps.

I remember the day I  broke that familiar mirror

by throwing a pan of snap beans at my brother.

She never punished me for my rage,

except for the look of disappointment in her eyes.

Those brown eyes, sparkling

as they reflected a glint from the light

hitting her front teeth,

two of which were set in a border of gold

like two tiny picture frames around square ivory treasures.

She always came into the living room at night

wearing her calf-length flower-print cotton dresses

holding her Bible with both hands,

pressed securely against her rounded pouch.

She wore rows in her wrinkled telling brow,

each one a skin-carved diary of labored years.

We always made room in our line by the hearth

as she stood there to warm herself and sigh.

She worked hard for love of her brood,

and labored on till her legs slightly bowed out

below the knees when she walked,

and her kneecaps were calloused over

from the floor boards by her bed

where she knelt and prayed.

Her back was bowed slightly from reaching down at work

to pull spindles of yarn up onto the spinning machines.

One day, it was at that very mill that her heart bowed till it broke.

I just remembered, there’s a huge broken mirror in my garage

I need to clean up before I get cut.

There’s a small piece of mirror wedged in my heart too, and when I look at it

I see Mama.

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