Who Made Me?
I'm still making my way through Frasier's run. During season eight and continuing in season nine, the writers are occasionally able to mix in forays into the depths of their characters along with witty repartee and engaging slapstick. To their credit, the romance between the title character's psychiatrist brother Niles and his in-home physical therapist which has been building throughout the series brings complications of its own. Daphne is so consumed with whether she can live up to eight or nine years of being idealized in the mind of Niles that she develops an eating disorder.
This is more than the stuff of television, exaggerated for effect, I'm learning. Katharine Graham's father firmly established the Washington Post. She grew up accustomed to the newspaper business and was educated in elite institutions. Still, her autobiography and my other mental food for the week, Personal History, shows a woman with doubts very similar to Daphne's. Both lost their identities in a lover's claim and expectations. Graham wrote of her brilliant, charismatic, and correspondingly demanding husband Phil, "I had learned so much from him that I felt he had created me."
A surer sense of one's origins and identity is necessary if character, fictional and real, is to emerge without being crushed to meaninglessness by the pressure to conform. Toby, the Communications Director on The West Wing understood that on a presidential scale. Contemplating that a candidate should need to be invited to succeed his boss and withstand the expectations of the Oval Office, Toby insists, "The man in that job shouldn't have to be presented with anything! It's for someone who grabs it and holds on to it, for someone who thinks the gods have conspired to bring him to this place, that destiny demands of him this service!"
Although he references gods and goes on to say that leadership requires a kind of hubris or pride equating humans to gods, Toby isn't that far from a healthy biblical self-definition. In Psalm 22, the praise of men that can so often define us has been stripped away. The psalmist writes in Psalm 22:7-8 (All Scriptures are in the New King James Version), "All those who see Me ridicule Me; They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying “He trusted in the LORD, let Him rescue Him; Let Him deliver Him, since He delights in Him!” Accused of being different because he delights in God, the writer's retort in verses nine and 10 is priceless, and ties into Toby's definition of the foundation a mature person or president needs. The psalmist anchors himself in the reminder to God, "I was cast upon You from birth. From My mother’s womb You have been My God."
The capital letters can at times distract us from the original wonder of this song preserved for centuries before Christ walked the Earth. Before Jesus claimed it and pointed His disciples to it from the cross, there was a writer rejected at least in part because he didn't quite fit in with people's expectations. He took, it seems, too much delight in God. This writer's recourse when meeting human expectations fails, the recourse for all the Daphnes of the world, even for those as formidable as Katharine Graham, is a bold declaration to one's self and one's God that He created us to be different. From that ultimate origin, before the people we care about every got a vote, Psalm 22 proclaims a different progression. After all, many of the oddities that don't allow us to blend in with the rest of the world are a result of the distinctive work God has been doing in us. This psalmist says, in essence, "Of course I'm weird, Lord in the eyes of the world. My birth was different, and every subsequent experience has been different."
NOW to those capital letters… If, in the original context, the otherwise bewildered author of Psalm 22 can discern a God ordained plan that makes him a weirdo in the eyes of the world, how much more can we after seeing Jesus identify with this psalmist with one of His last breaths in His earthly ministry? The psalmist was cheeky in claiming that his isolation was ultimately God's responsibility, and he based this comeuppance only on his own life experience with God. The Christian, having heard Christ from the cross take ownership of the same plea, also believes in the ultimate validation of that claim, Christ's Resurrection. Our standing, then, doesn't depend on our ability to increasingly please the people who say they love us. Our standing, given our sure membership in the Psalm 22 tribe of misfits, is, by association, with Christ who came through His own Psalm 22 chapter victorious
This is more than the stuff of television, exaggerated for effect, I'm learning. Katharine Graham's father firmly established the Washington Post. She grew up accustomed to the newspaper business and was educated in elite institutions. Still, her autobiography and my other mental food for the week, Personal History, shows a woman with doubts very similar to Daphne's. Both lost their identities in a lover's claim and expectations. Graham wrote of her brilliant, charismatic, and correspondingly demanding husband Phil, "I had learned so much from him that I felt he had created me."
A surer sense of one's origins and identity is necessary if character, fictional and real, is to emerge without being crushed to meaninglessness by the pressure to conform. Toby, the Communications Director on The West Wing understood that on a presidential scale. Contemplating that a candidate should need to be invited to succeed his boss and withstand the expectations of the Oval Office, Toby insists, "The man in that job shouldn't have to be presented with anything! It's for someone who grabs it and holds on to it, for someone who thinks the gods have conspired to bring him to this place, that destiny demands of him this service!"
Although he references gods and goes on to say that leadership requires a kind of hubris or pride equating humans to gods, Toby isn't that far from a healthy biblical self-definition. In Psalm 22, the praise of men that can so often define us has been stripped away. The psalmist writes in Psalm 22:7-8 (All Scriptures are in the New King James Version), "All those who see Me ridicule Me; They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying “He trusted in the LORD, let Him rescue Him; Let Him deliver Him, since He delights in Him!” Accused of being different because he delights in God, the writer's retort in verses nine and 10 is priceless, and ties into Toby's definition of the foundation a mature person or president needs. The psalmist anchors himself in the reminder to God, "I was cast upon You from birth. From My mother’s womb You have been My God."
The capital letters can at times distract us from the original wonder of this song preserved for centuries before Christ walked the Earth. Before Jesus claimed it and pointed His disciples to it from the cross, there was a writer rejected at least in part because he didn't quite fit in with people's expectations. He took, it seems, too much delight in God. This writer's recourse when meeting human expectations fails, the recourse for all the Daphnes of the world, even for those as formidable as Katharine Graham, is a bold declaration to one's self and one's God that He created us to be different. From that ultimate origin, before the people we care about every got a vote, Psalm 22 proclaims a different progression. After all, many of the oddities that don't allow us to blend in with the rest of the world are a result of the distinctive work God has been doing in us. This psalmist says, in essence, "Of course I'm weird, Lord in the eyes of the world. My birth was different, and every subsequent experience has been different."
NOW to those capital letters… If, in the original context, the otherwise bewildered author of Psalm 22 can discern a God ordained plan that makes him a weirdo in the eyes of the world, how much more can we after seeing Jesus identify with this psalmist with one of His last breaths in His earthly ministry? The psalmist was cheeky in claiming that his isolation was ultimately God's responsibility, and he based this comeuppance only on his own life experience with God. The Christian, having heard Christ from the cross take ownership of the same plea, also believes in the ultimate validation of that claim, Christ's Resurrection. Our standing, then, doesn't depend on our ability to increasingly please the people who say they love us. Our standing, given our sure membership in the Psalm 22 tribe of misfits, is, by association, with Christ who came through His own Psalm 22 chapter victorious
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