You Keep Using That Word

... I do not think it means what you think it means.

This is one of those topics that has bothered me for a long time.  To be perfectly honest, it's one of those topics on which I feel like the church lied to me, and that made me pretty mad.  I am speaking of the issue of lust, that bugaboo of American Protestant Christendom about which we harangue our young people from puberty until about the age of 30.

I think America in general cares far too much about morality, and American Christendom is certainly not immune to this peculiar cultural defect.  And I suppose, if one is going to focus on morality, one might as well focus on sexual morality - since, for better or worse, we as a species seem to be obsessed with it (Christianity hardly being the only religion, and America hardly being the only people, who have made veritable fortresses of rules to protect our sexuality from ourselves).  But that doesn't stop me from feeling like the church lied to me about it.

Specifically, I feel like the church lied to me about lust.  I don't think anybody did it intentionally.  They just ... left out a really important piece of information.

APC teachings on lust generally begin with Matthew 5:27-28, with the better sort ending at verse 29 instead.  My favorite commercial translation (the NKJV) renders it thus:

[27] You have heard that it was said to those of old, "You shall not commit adultery."  [28] But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  [29] If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you, for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.

I say that "the better sort" include verse 29 because I think that makes it pretty clear (if the preceding verses were not clear enough) that there is ample Biblical support for the notion that the problem is with the luster, not the lustee.  That by itself gets lost often enough.  It doesn't get lost in the teaching, precisely.  Frankly, you have to be a fairly incompetent teacher not to get that point.  Everybody I know teaches that it's my responsibility not to lust.  But it gets lost in the overall messaging mix, because everybody I know is also deeply concerned to let people know how they can help me not lust.  And the next thing you know well-meaning older women are teaching younger women in their women's groups (no men involved!) about what to wear and not to wear, to "help" their brothers, and girls are getting sent home from proms because their dresses aroused lustful thoughts in the chaperones, and even I am deeply, genuinely upset over what a girl is wearing who is trying to convince me to date her.

I don't think that the APC obsession with lust is to blame for all of America's sexual dysfunction.  But I think it drives - granted, oftentimes from many removes - a lot of it.

And there really is no problem with the desire to help me avoid what is, quite clearly, something Jesus thinks I should avoid.  "It's your problem, not mine" can (and should) live hand in hand with, "How can I help?"

But.  Before we get there ... what exactly is the problem?

Matthew 5:28 starts off simply enough.

Egô de legô humin, Jesus says: "But I say to you all."

hoti pas ho blepôn gunaika, "that everyone who is looking at a woman."  Still pretty straightforward.

pros to epithumêsai ...

... and here is where I think insufficient attention is focused, in APC practice.  Pros is a preposition that, like most prepositions, can have a variety of meanings - but they all have to do with the idea of directionality.  Epithumêsai is an infinitive (specifically an aorist infinitive, I know, but I don't think that's relevant to my present argument), here being coupled with the accusitive article to, to make it clear that pros (whose meaning, like most Greek prepositions, is shaded by the case of its object) is being used in the sense of motion or direction towards the object - in this case, the infinitive epithumêsai.

Epithumêsai is conventionally translated as "to lust," but I think we have a tendency to forget what that word means - and since it is the thing Jesus is exhorting us to avoid, I feel like that is a significant oversight.  Ancient Greek is a language that is in love with compounds, and this is one such.  There is a danger in getting too reductionist with foreign compounds, since sometimes they don't literally mean what their compound would suggest (idiom is a thing!), but in this case, I think the lexicon is on the side of a reductionist reading.  So what is this word?

Epi is another preposition, also with an overall idea of directionality, but in a much more pointed way than pros.  If I walk pros to you, I am walking in your direction.  If I walk epi to you, I am headed in your direction with a more distinct purpose.  Thumos is the "soul," if you want to put it that way (but English-speakers tend to be used to thinking of psyche as the soul); it's the part of you that houses your strongest passions and feelings.  Epithumêsai, therefore, is to "set one's heart upon," to drive your desire towards something (in this case, the aforesaid woman) with great purpose.  So lust is ... not a bad translation.  "Covet" is equally good.

No matter how familiar one is with grammar, it should be clear by now that there is a lot of directionality in this prepositional phrase.  In fact, as much as I like the NKJV generally, this is one area where I feel like it drops the ball.  "To lust" is an adequate translation of epithumêsai, by itself - both are infinitives.  But it does nothing to render pros to - we are not just lusting here, we are looking pros to lust.  We are looking in order to lust (or, if you aren't particular about translating the infinitive literally, for the purpose of lusting).

There are two small points that just got made, both of which have what I believe are outsized significance for real-world morality.

Point the first: Jesus is not talking about lust in general.  He's talking about looking, for a specific purpose.  Why is this significant?  Because all too many young people in American Christendom (myself included, and I feel like I generally had a higher-caliber of theological teaching than most) are worried about the fact that they just lusted after someone.  We twist ourselves into real knots about this, as a community.  We have gender-segregated groups to talk about "struggling with lust."  We form awkward partnerships for "accountability."  We wring our hands about pornography because of it (depending on the pornography in question, there might be other valid reasons to wring our hands about it, but in my experience, those are never the actual reasons hands are wrung).  In a million and one ways, we feel ... guilty.  Dare I say it, we feel condemned.  And that is not something we should ever feel.

And all over ... well, what?  Because we had some sexual thoughts about a person, or our sexual response cycle started.  I'm going to avoid the secular cop-out of saying that there's nothing wrong with that; there can be.  But let's start with the text: did you look (even if we're defining "look" pretty broadly, for instance to include imagination) for the purpose of lusting?  Or was it something that happened?  It makes me almost want to giggle uncomfortably just typing that, as if lust is something that can happen by accident, but ... well, look, that's what the text says.  We are not talking about lust.  We are talking about looking for the purpose of lusting.

Universities, high schools, and youth groups are filled with young people wringing their hands about lust, and the nation is filled with adults who never really stopped, but how many of them - how many of us - actually do that?  How often do you really take a mental step back, and deliberately cast your gaze upon someone to lust after them?  I won't say it never happens; it does.  But it happens a lot less frequently than one might infer from the amount of play this issue gets with our young people.

Point the second: what is lust, anyway?  I can't recall a single sermon, or discussion, of this point that has bothered to ask that question, let alone answer it.  But I can say that, even in my generally high-quality theological environment, the never-actually-discussed, de facto, assumed answer is that lust is sexual arousal.

This is a lie.

Epithumêsai is not describing getting aroused, or finding someone sexually appealing, or having an orgasm.  There is a reason that the Septuagint uses it in the ninth commandment ("Thou shalt not covet").  It is describing a state of mind in which you have an object in mind and, like Sauron, all your thought is bent on it.

Now, this can be sexual, yes.  But it is a very particular part of a person's sexual life.  A person can find someone attractive, initiate a sexual encounter, and have sex, all without lusting after his or her partner in this way.  Most of a person's sexual life, I daresay (most of mine, anyway), occurs outside of this focused, laser-like, I-must-have-it-and-it-will-be-mine state of mind.

How often do we bother to explain this to the generations of people who have grown up wringing their hearts into knots about lust?  How often do we actually ask, "Have you ever felt that way?"  I have, but not often - and when I first started hearing sermons about this passage, I definitely had not experienced what it is actually talking about.

But let us finish Jesus' thought.  Êdê emoikheusen autên en têi kardia autou, he finishes: everyone who is looking at a woman in order to covet her already committed adultery with her in his heart.

I mention this final phrase because I think it nuances what Jesus is talking about in a way that I think is incorrect misunderstood to the sorrow of whole generations of Christians.  I think the most common understanding of this verse is that looking at a woman in order to lust after her is morally equivalent to having sex with her.

If we understand pros to epithumêsai in what I believe is the vernacular way, we might translate the verse like this: "Everyone who is looking at a woman and finds her arousing has already had sex with her in his heart."  And this would indeed be a terrible challenge, one so difficult to meet that it could well justify all the effort and, frankly, broken spirits that the American church has sacrificed to meet it.

But that's not what it says.  The looking must be with purpose.  And the object of that purpose is not mere arousal, but hyper-focused desire.  Again, to covet is a perfectly good translation here, and one that I think is helpful.  What I understand Jesus to be saying is this: If the only thing stopping you from having sex with someone is that you have not, in fact, had sex yet, then in your heart, you have had sex.

And this does happen.  But again: how often do we ask our youth groups, in all of our earnest discussions, "How many times has this happened to you?"  In my experience, this verse is taught (with due solemnity by our elders, who presumably know what it's like to be a young person) as something that every young person struggles with, pretty much all the time.  That is certainly how it was taught to me, and I left a lot of sweat on the ground struggling against what everyone assured me as a daily struggle.

And ... well, I feel like the church lied to me.  Sexual arousal is a daily occurrence.  Looking at a [person] for the purpose of lusting after [him or] her, quite frankly, is not a daily occurrence.

When I in college, I met a girl.  She was amazing.  She was ... well, I haven't discussed this with her, so I won't give any more details than that.  But she was intoxicating.  From pretty much the instant I saw her, I wanted to jump her bones and do things I didn't even have names for with her.  The attraction, we quickly discovered, was mutual.  We flirted not just outrageously, but intensely.  When she was anywhere near me, I could barely keep my hands off her, let alone think straight.  We weren't dating, but the sexual tension between us was so thick that a knife would barely have made a dent.  We planned a date in my room to watch a movie we both thought was sexy and had no plans to watch the movie, except maybe as foreplay.  Leading up to that day, we both texted and IM'd each other to drive each other even crazier (this was before that was cool).

That is looking at a woman for the purpose of lusting after her.  It's intentional, it's consuming, it's directed.  Sex is a part of it, but its defining features are not actually sexual at all.  The critical thing - the thing that left me with such an indelible impression that now, for the first time, I had really seen what Jesus was actually talking about - was that I wanted her (and she wanted me) in a way I had never wanted anyone before, and we both took deliberate steps to encourage that desire in ourselves and each other.  We both came to our senses before "anything happened" (if you'll forgive me the use of such a mealy-mouthed phrase), but for a few weeks, the only way in which we hadn't had sex was ... well, we hadn't gotten around to having sex.

Contrast this with a more typical scenario.  I am walking down the street.  I see a woman wearing pants.  Like many women's pants do, these pants show off her legs to advantage.  I find this sexually appealing.  I maybe even get the start of an erection.  We go our separate ways.

In that second scenario, while there is certainly a bit of attraction, I think it is plain that the intensely directed experience of coveting is missing.  I don't actually want that woman at all, and if she offered to have sex with me right then and there I'd not only say no, but be kind of repulsed - despite the fact that I find her attractive.  And while I did look at her, I certainly didn't do it for the purpose of coveting her (which I didn't do, in any case).

This leads me to suspect that one of the greatest lust bogeymen of the American church is actually a paper tiger.  I speak, of course, of pornography.  The principal use of pornography, in my experience, is to arouse.  It may have many ancillary uses (comfort, relaxation, a sense of safety, stimulation of the sexual imagination, whatever), but I think one use is almost always missing: desire to be in the scenario depicted.  People don't use porn because they want to have sex with a particular actor or a particular character.  In my experience, there is almost never any wanting involved at all.

Now, there are many reasons why we could wring our moral hands about porn.  It may be professionally exploitative (but it doesn't have to be).  It may be morally destructive for the actors involved (but I'm not sure it always is, and there aren't always actors involved to begin with).  It may just be an artistic travesty (which, let's be honest, most of it is).  But is it looking at a [person] in order to covet [him or her]?  I see no way to make that argument with a straight face.

I don't think that what Jesus is talking about never happens (nor, I should probably state for the record, is it always bad).  It happened to me in the story above (and it's happened to me since).  But it's a lot rarer, and a lot more recognizable, than I think it is generally given credit for.  I don't think this verse should never be taught, but neither do I think we should teach our young people - by our words and by how much time we spend dealing with "lust issues" - to be constantly looking over their shoulders to make sure they haven't lusted after someone.

Phoenix Earth

This weekend at Fechtschule New York somebody asked me, again, what my phoenix earth patches are about.  I've been asked this a bunch of times since adding them to my HEMA gear, and I always chicken out.  Yeah, I guess part of it is that I don't really know how to explain, but mostly ... I chicken out.  Usually I say that the phoenix earth stands for me, or that it's been my coat of arms since I was fifteen or so (when my sister first designed it).  And those things are true ... sort of.  But that isn't what my patches are about.

My phoenix earth patches are representations of my arms as they have existed in my mind since some time in late undergrad: On a circular shield gules, a diminished bordure, a phoenix earth Or.  The circular shield recalls a hoplite aspis, and symbolizes faith (a shield) that benefits others (in the hoplite form).  The red field is for strength and magnanimity, and for honoring a father (or, if you will, the Father).  The gold is for faith, obedience, gentility ... and for vengeance.

Which ties into the phoenix earth itself.  The phoenix earth represents Earth after the end times, the New Jerusalem.  It is the new beginning after the resurrection of the dead, after whatever tribulations the end times may bring, after the reign of a thousand years (if there is such a thing), after the last rebellion of the adversary, after Judgment Day and the second death, after earth, after heaven ... when all that is over and done with and life begins.  I saw a new heaven and a new earth, says Revelation 21, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.

And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God.  And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.”

When I look forward to an "afterlife," this is what resonates with me: when there is no more heaven and no more hell, when the brokenness of the human condition and the glories it can produce in adversity are replaced by a better human condition, one utterly free of the brokenness that haunts every corner of our existence and yet produces better glories, in ways we, who have come to depend upon darkness to let us distinguish and appreciate the light, can hardly imagine.  When we get our bodies back, recognizably flesh and bone and yet transcendently better than before, and live in a physical world that is recognizably our own and yet so much better that it may as well be an alien planet, when the source of all joy and satisfaction is closer, and more present, than any human being has ever experienced.  When all things - all things, everything that makes life the bittersweet mixture of joy and sorrow that it is - are made new.

This is, as I said, the afterlife that resonates with me.  I do not care for heaven.  In heaven, I am still dead.  Not obliterated, perhaps, but my body and soul are sundered, and that is just fundamentally wrong.  The Biblical descriptions of heaven, if that's what they are, sound either dreadfully dull or eye-wateringly intense yet dreadfully one-dimensional.  Give me a body, give me an earth ... give me the promise of the wild, unfettered and alive life that my [probably metaphorical] ancestors experienced.

But it is not really the afterlife itself that motivates me.  It is what this new life - this New Jerusalem, this phoenix earth - represents in the here and now.  For me, the [Biblical] phoenix earth is the ultimate expression of the promise that God makes things better.  That he is not the god of consolation prizes, nor the god of jury-rigged solutions held together with duct tape and a prayer, nor a god for whom some things are simply broken beyond repair.  If the earth - the human condition, life itself - can be fixed in Christ, then anything can be fixed in Christ.  And not only fixed, but made better than it was before.  No matter how bad a marriage is, it can be better than it was before.  No matter how broken a friendship, how sundered a family ... it can be made better.  It may involve a phenomenal amount of effort, soul-breaking vulnerability and hard work.  But in Christ it can be done.  Whatever it takes to get there, it's not impossible.  Knowing that makes all the difference to me.

So what do my patches say?  They say, I believe in a God who not only can, but wants to, make all things new.  I believe he will come in indomitable strength to have his vengeance upon evil itself, not only to fix what is broken but to make everything better than any human being has ever experienced it.  I believe in creating that kind of world through self-mastering forgiveness and unconquerable gentleness wherever I go.  And I will hold this trust in the face of the slings and arrows of life, for my sake and for yours.

That's what my phoenix earth patches are about.

Fechtschule New York 2014

This past weekend was Fechtschule New York 2014, which was my first "formal" tournament since beginning KdF almost exactly one year ago.  By "formal" tournament I mean one in which every match in the tournament was judged and refereed according to rules that had been prescribed beforehand.  I had competed in one tournament before this, at an event called Shortpoint 2014, but that was a very informal gathering of fencers and the "tournament" was simply the result of every match that a fencer happened to have during the course of the day, be it a friendly sparring session or "in the ring."

At FNY, I was competing in both the paired forms competition (in which teams of competitors performed specified techniques from a particular fencing treatise, each team competing to present the technique as cleanly and "ideally" as possible), and the beginner's longsword tournament.

I didn't advance beyond the first round of either tournament, but I feel very differently about them.  My partner for the paired forms tournament got her left little finger broken earlier during the event, so I competed only sort of by accident, at the last minute - another fencer from my school also found out he needed a partner at the last minute, so the two of us practiced ten techniques for about an hour and then threw ourselves into the competition.  That's about six minutes per technique, which isn't exactly a lot of time to polish things even if we did know most of them already.  Given that, I am proud of what we were able to present to the judges, even if we didn't make it past the first round.  And the people who did go far really did deserve it; their fencing was clean, exacting, and accurate.

The beginner's longsword tournament was a different matter.  Competitors were divided into three pools of five fencers each (I think one of the pools might have had six), and each fencer fought every other fencer in his or her pool.  The two best fencers from each pool went on to a bracket system for the semi-finals and finals.  The rules for the tournament, and the judging procedure, had been refined at Shortpoint and in my opinion were excellent.  Not only did matches run very quickly, but judging felt very accurate (i.e., few instances where the fencers thought one thing had happened, but the judges thought another), and the incentives for the rules felt very good.  In a nutshell, they discouraged people from taking shots to easy targets (such as the forearms) unless they could also defend themselves while doing so, and encouraged people to make technically strong hits to the head and torso, preferably while simultaneously controlling their opponent's blade (and, thus, defending oneself).  While no tournament rules are ever going to be perfect, and no tournament will ever be a very good simulation of a real fight - even a real duel - I have nothing but good things to say about these particular tournament rules.

I do have very critical things to say about my own fencing.  It was timid, overly intellectual, and restricted itself to a smaller range of techniques than I know.  At Shortpoint I felt like I fought about as well as I knew how, win or lose.  At FNY I did not feel like I fought as well as I know how.  I found myself discomfited by the incentive to go for the vitals, but did a poor job of defending myself when going for my preferred strikes against exposed hands and forearms.  I let myself believe that my opponents were better than they were, and as a result forgot to fight with basic good technique, which foreshortened my range and made it even harder to fight at a good distance from my opponent.  That belief also restrained myself from doing what I knew was the right thing in many situations.  "I'm not especially good at what I know I should do in this situation," I might think.  "My opponent will probably counter it."  But that is no way to fight.  Everything can be countered, but counters are generally harder to pull off successfully than the things they are counters to.  And in any case, if one isn't willing to attack, one might as well throw in the towel.  Attempting to substitute techniques that I knew I was better at, but also knew were sub-optimal for the situation, did not go well.

This is why I am not pleased with my fencing in the longsword tournament.  I certainly would have liked to win more matches, but mostly, I feel like I did not fight with my all.  I have been brooding over this for the past couple of days; it's taken me that long to break down what exactly I did wrong in terms that are specific enough that I can work on them but broad enough that I can draw generalizable conclusions from them.

I've decided that I need to own this failure.  On the one hand, this weekend was not the best fencing I have ever done, or even the best fencing I know how to do.  But it is the fencing I actually did, and that makes it part of me as a fencer.  It's something I need to face if I'm going to get better.

It's also, despite the pain of giving a poor showing, a reminder for me of what kind of fencer I want to be.  It might be nice to say that I lost because tournament fighting is not real fighting.  But in fact, the opposite is true.  The event as a whole demonstrated that the best way to become an excellent tournament fighter is to learn real, martially applicable skill.  And you know what?  While I'm perfectly happy to hew into somebody's forearm to win a fight, I don't want to be someone who can't attack and defend.  The elegance of the longsword that I find so appealing is precisely in using it both to attack and defend.  And I don't want to be the kind of fencer who wins fights by nickel-and-diming my opponent to death in the legs and arms.  I want to annihilate them.  I want those head shots - one of the most oft-repeated phrases in the treatises we study is "stab him in the face."  Yes, it's scary to close that extra few inches to be able to hew or stab the skull, or the collar area.  I want to face that fear and conquer it.

Because that's what fencing is about to me.  Force without is force within, and vice versa.  I'm not interested in killing because I have any particular desire to kill people.  I'm interested in it because it's a form of authentic force, and I believe that authentic force is what is necessary for real self control or self possession.  And that - to hold oneself in the grip of one's own will - is something I prize very highly.  So I will get better at fencing the way I want to fence, and I will get better at being me, and I will remember that most of all, this is something to learn.  More than twenty years later, Alanna still calls to me to work, even at the things you aren't good at, to bend myself to my will through sheer bloody-mindedness:

“Sacherell was well enough.” Coram yawned. “He’s a bit of a natural. Ye’re just not a natural with a sword, Master Alan. Some are born to it, like me. I never knew aught else, and I never wanted to. Now, some—some never learn the sword at all, and they don’t survive their first real fight. And then there’s some—”

“Yes?” Alanna asked, grasping at this straw. She was obviously not born to the sword, and she had no plans for dying in her first fight.

“Some learn the sword. They work all the extra minutes they have. They don’t let a piece of metal—or Aram Sklaw—beat them.”

Alanna stared at the forest and thought this over. “It’s possible to learn to be natural?”

“It’s just as possible as it is for a lass t’ learn t’ beat a lad, and the lad bigger and older than she is, and in a fair fight."

Loathe Entirely

When I talk to people about New York, I try not to focus on the negative.  It's unhealthy and unworthy to do so on a regular basis, and also quite possibly rude, since odds are good I'll be talking to a New Yorker.  Instead I try to focus on the positive, such as the fact that I have a job (and a pretty decent job, taken on its own merits), AHS, or my church.  This may give the impression that really, I don't think New York is that bad, or that I only don't like it because Thayet and Meshparjai are not here.  This is untrue.

I hate this town.  I hate it with an incandescent fury.  I hate it with such passion that its very existence offends me.  I hate its understocked little stores.  I hate its endless, green-less stretches of concrete.  I hate its weather.  I hate its smoke-shrouded sidewalks.  I hate its wretchedly cramped apartments, and the fact that even nice neighborhoods can't be counted on to have basic amenities like free laundry facilities, or level floors.  But most of all, I hate the subway.

I am writing this instead of sparring right now because I just spent two and three quarters hours not getting to fencing, due to subway delays and reroutes caused by construction.  I suppose I could have called a cab, but this infuriatingly self-absorbed town is expensive enough as it is.  Eventually, I gave up and turned around, never having gotten more than a third of the way to my destination.  You might think it's kind of ironic that I didn't make it to fencing when I could clearly stand to hit something right now, but fencing isn't really good for expressing anger, so I guess that's something.

I understand that the New York subway system is an attempt to make a public service out of what was originally a collection of for-profit proprietary networks.  I understand that it runs 24/7.  I understand that it is over one hundred years old and desperately needs renovation.  I understand that it is still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Sandy.  I understand that I hate public transit in general, because you can't sing on it and it runs on the opposite of lawyer hours.  And I freely admit that, miserable as it is, the New York subway is far superior to BART.  Nevertheless, the New York subway system has got to be the least reliable system of transportation I have ever experienced.

And it is the backbone of New York transportation.  There is no comparable method of transportation available out here.  I cannot simply go places in New York; I must subject myself to the vicissitudes of a public transportation system that is as reliable as it is pleasant.  There is something deeply, personally offensive to me about a city that tries so very hard to prevent me from going wheresoever I please, but if it must, it could at least make its precious little miniature Niles run reliably.

So yes, there are good things to be found even in this swamp of human misery - even things that, individually, I will miss when I finally shake off the dust of this terrible cesspit.  And I try to focus on the good things, because for now - for now - the alternative is a breach of duty, and that is unacceptable.  But let there be no doubt that I hate, hate hate hate hate, this waterlogged trash-compacted smoke-impregnated railroad-dependent wretched excuse for a town.

I Noticed Something About "Submission"

I think a lot of people learn ancient Greek in order to read the New Testament for themselves.  That wasn’t my primary motivation, but it was certainly on my mind.  For the most part, I haven’t found any great insights into Scripture by reading it in the original.  I suppose that’s to the credit of our translations.  The other day, though, I did notice something that I found rather interesting.

Ephesians 5:22, as we all know, says, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”  That’s the New International Version.  The New Revised Standard Version says, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.”  Both the English Standard Version and the New King James say, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.”  Translation after translation carries the imperative: submit, submit, submit.

It’s the sort of thing that we often find embarrassing, and many a sermon has been preached on just what Biblical “submission” means, and how it really isn’t that bad.  The exegete might grab onto the phrase “as to the Lord” to differentiate this submission from abject subjugation.  Or the sermon might focus on the later verses, about how husbands are called to “give themselves up” for their wives.  I’ve grown up with these sorts of sermons all my life, and while I think they are morally sound as far as they go and on firm textual footing, there’s something I noticed just recently that I don’t think I’ve ever quite heard before.

Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t say, “Submit.”

I don’t mean that in the original, “submit” isn’t in the imperative.  I mean that the word “submit” isn’t in the verse at all.  In point of fact, Ephesians 5:22 doesn’t even have a verb.  What it actually says is, “the wives to their own husbands as to the Lord.”  This is not a sentence in Greek any more than it is in English.  This should give the reader pause, and perhaps put him in mind that Ephesians 5:22 is not an appropriate place to begin a citation.

So where is an appropriate place to begin the citation?  I don’t actually think that’s very clear.  This may be surprising, and lest we think poorly of our translators, I think a short digression is in order.

The issue of how to break up sentences is not quite so trivial as it might first appear.  Ephesians was written prior to the adoption of punctuation, so we must infer punctuation from content.  Oftentimes this is reasonably straightforward, but there are times when it isn’t.  Ancient Greek is also fairly fond of embedded clauses and phrases and the like.  For instance, you might encounter a sentence with a structure like this: 

“Hesitating on the front stoop, holding each option in his mind and considering whether to knock or to leave, he entered the house.”

Even without the punctuation, this is fairly obviously a sentence.  If you know enough English, you can identify that by the presence of the verb (“entered”), and you can infer that the preceding clauses and phrases relate to the main clause.  But suppose you had a sentence like the following:

“hesitating on the front stoop holding each option in his mind and considering whether to knock or to leave he entered the house with trepeditation looking this way and that trying to make as little noise as possible he crept through the empty rooms”

 Is that one sentence?  Is it two?  Is it two, with a fragment of a third?  There are multiple ways that you could punctuate the passage above that are equally correct, even if the actual meaning of the passage is quite clear.

Now imagine that what I have written is not actually English but another language, one in which my stringing together so many gerund phrases is not bad style.  If asked to translate that, you might actually take some of my gerunds and turn them into verbs.  For instance, you might render it like this:

“He hesitated on the front stoop, holding each option in his mind.  Considering whether to knock or to leave, he entered the house with trepidation.  He looked this way and that, trying to make as little noise as possible, and crept through the empty rooms.”

 And that might not be a bad translation at all, at least for general purposes.  Even though it isn’t exactly “word for word,” it flows much better, and that’s not a quality to be despised in a translation when none of the meaning has been lost.

In the case of Ephesians 5:22, though, I submit that this practice has resulted (all inadvertently, I am sure) in some meaning being lost.  So let us return to that passage.  Let me back up to what I think is the clear start of a sentence and refuse to impose any punctuation after that.  Keeping the verb forms as close to their original as possible, I would translate that block of text (Ephesians 5:15-30) like this:

“Look extremely closely how you walk not as unwise but rather as wise buying out the moment because the days are painful through this do not become foolish but rather understand this the will of the lord and do not become drunk with wine in which is wastefulness but rather be full in spirit saying to each other psalms and hymns and spiritual songs singing and strumming your hearts to the lord thanking always above all god the father in the name of our lord jesus christ submitting to each other in fear of christ the wives to their own husbands as to the lord because a husband is the head of his wife as christ is the head of the church himself the savior of the body but rather as the church submits to christ so also the wives to their husbands in all things husbands love your wives just as christ loved the church and himself gave for her in order that she be cleansed purified in a bath of water in the word so that he might stand her esteemed the church not having either spot or wrinkle or any such thing but rather so that sacred and blameless in this manner the husbands must love their own wives as their own bodies he loving his wife as himself for nobody ever hated his own flesh but rather rears and warms it just as christ the church that we are limbs of his body …”

 And so it goes on.  You can probably see several places where you might put punctuation in that block of text.  One thing I don’t think you can get around, though, is this: “the wives to their husbands as to the lord” is grammatically tied up with “submitting to each other in fear of Christ.”  That is where our translators feel they have license to insert the word “submit” into Ephesians 5:22, and you can see that for most general purposes it isn’t a bad translational choice at all.  Moreover, all translations are careful to keep Ephesians 5:21 reading something like “… submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.”

What I think is particularly noteworthy, though, is that the omission of the verb from 5:22 makes it clear (to me, at least) that this whole notion of wives submitting to their own husbands is simply an illustration of the larger point about everybody submitting to one another.  In other words, while it is true that wives are told to submit to their own husbands, it is equally true that husbands are told to submit to their wives, and in fact that all Christians are told to submit to each other.

I am hardly the first person to have noticed that, but seeing where the verbs are (and are not) casts the various teachings I have heard about submission in a new light.  In light of this new, more nuanced reading, I think it is clear that when we exegete this passage by pointing out that the “submission” referred to cuts both ways between married persons, we aren’t just making frantic excuses for an inherently misogynist text.  We are instead correctly pointing out that the thrust of the text is not on wives at all, but on the entire body of believers living in a state of submission.  And that too makes clear that when we talk about “submission” in lofty spiritual terms and pooh-pooh the notion of a wife being subject to her husband’s reign as a mere strawman, we actually aren’t just whistling in the dark.  If the entire church is supposed to be submitted one to another, then the “submission” being referred to really can’t be some misogynist subjugation.  Everybody can’t be subjugated to everybody else.  So if everybody is “submitted” to everybody else, then clearly something less literal than subjugation must be going on.

And although it’s been said many times by other people, I suppose at this point it might be appropriate for me to offer up my own short exegesis about what this “submission” is, if the context of the passage precludes it from being literal subjugation.

The main thing I get from this block of text vis a vis “submission” is that it is a desirable state for the entire church.  But what else can we tell about it?  It seems to be contrasted with the wastefulness (dissipation, if you like) of being an alcoholic.  Rather than that, Paul says, we should be filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to each other, singing and making our hearts thrum (psallontes the heart, playing it like a stringed instrument), giving thanks and submitting to one another.  To me, all these gerunds, with their musical imagery, sound like they are being arrayed to describe the same thing, a sort of spiritual harmony among persons.  But what has submitting to do with music, or harmony?  At this juncture we might safely observe that the word “submitting,” hupotassetai, means “arraying under,” as one might “array” things in an orderly fashion, such as a body of troops - we might observe this etymology without fear of being told we are simply making excuses for the obvious misogynist meaning of the text (we might also observe that another use of this verb is "to place in the shelter of").  This idea of arraying ourselves under one another strengthens my opinion that the concept Paul is trying to get across is not subjugation, one to another, but rather harmony and interleaving with each other.

Still, of course, Paul does say, “the wives to their husbands as to the Lord, because a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church, himself the savior of the body.”  So very well, we might object - insofar as husbands and wives are a subset of everybody, clearly husbands are told to place themselves in harmony with their wives.  And then wives are told to place themselves in harmony with their husbands, because a husband is the head of his wife.  What are we to make of that?  We might observe that the very next words (in the same sentence?) are, “But rather as the church submits to Christ, just so also the wives to their husbands in all things.”

We are starting to get far afield from the point of this post, which is that “modern” interpretations of submission as some sort of spiritual harmony rather than misogynist subjugation are in fact much more grounded in the text than they might first appear.  But to carry things through to conclusion, at this point we really must confront the issue of just how the church submits to Christ.  If we imagine that Christ is the head of the church in that he gets to tell the Church what to do and what not to do and sets punishments for the church when it contravenes his words, then I suppose we really are in trouble.  But I don’t think that is either a textually or historically correct view of Christ’s relationship with the church.  Paul does not define Christian morality in terms of obedience to Christ’s dictates (not that Christ had a great many moral dictates in the first place, so far as we know), but rather in terms of reaction to being.  We are the church, and therefore we act in a certain way.  I don’t want to further digress by backing up that assertion with other examples from the Pauline corpus, but even the text before us, which has a certain moralistic cast (talking about how best to live life in the moment), has nothing to do with what Christ tells the church to do.  If the reader can accept this morality-from-status assertion for now (cf. Ephesians 5:1-14, the lead-in to this whole thing, which also ties direct exhortation towards specific moral behavior not to the command of Christ, but to the status of the believer), we may observe that this is a perfectly unobjectionable way for a married woman to model her life.  She alters her behavior, to the extent that she alters it, not because her husband tells her to do anything, but simply because she is married to the man she chose to marry.  We might object if he were ordering her about, but it would be quixotic if she chose to marry him and that choice meant nothing to the way she acted.

And yet, I think, the egalitarian (feminist, if you like) objection to this passage is not so much that it envisions a husband as his wife’s dictator so much as that it envisions the husband as superior to the wife at all (even if that superiority doesn’t involve subjugation).  The response I am used to in sermons to this objection is essentially incredulity: a reader who seriously thinks that Christ, or even Paul, teaches that men are superior to women must simply not be very familiar with the whole body of our extant texts.  And I do think there is something to that.  It is difficult to imagine that the man who wrote that there is neither man nor woman in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28) believed that in the proper Godly order of things, men were superior to women.

Still, let us consider the text before us in light of this objection.  It must be admitted, for one thing, that Paul uses different language towards husbands and wives.  Even if we don’t believe those exhortations to set up an inherent superior-inferior relationship, they aren’t literally the same.  Neither does Paul say, "... submitting to one another in fear of Christ, husbands and wives to each other ..." or something like that.

On the subject of sameness, however, we might observe that the principle relationship between Christ and the church in this passage is that the church is the same flesh as Christ: “That we are the limbs of his body,” it says; and earlier, “himself the savior of the body.”  Paul is not here just trotting out his familiar turn of phrase for the church, “the body of Christ.”  He spends some time discussing how, through Christ’s sacrifice of himself, the church becomes to Christ as Christ himself.  “Loving his wife as himself,” he says, “for nobody ever hated his own flesh.”  Again, the theme of spiritual harmony - and, significantly, of equality (indeed, identity).

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the church is Christ in all respects, indistinguishable from God himself.  Rather, I want to point out what Paul is pointing out.  Paul is plainly using Christ’s relationship with the church as a metaphor here, and I think it is an uncontroversial assertion that when one uses a metaphor, one intends only to highlight certain similarities and not others.  When Lincoln used the metaphor of birth for the American War for Independence in the Gettysburg Address, he did not mean that the Revolution was like birth in all respects.  Figuring out in what respects a metaphor applies and in what respects it does not (for instance, presumably Lincoln did intend his birth metaphor to express the idea that a new entity was created through a tumultuous, blood-soaked process, but did not intend to express the idea that the new entity was incapable of existing on its own and would in fact be dependent upon its mother for a very long time, or that the new entity was incapable of rational thought) is something we have to do from context.

Here, Paul spends all of his words highlighting one particular similarity: that Christ went through a great deal of personal trouble vis a vis humanity in order to bring about a state of such harmony between man and God that humanity could be, as it were, Christ’s own flesh.  We might expound on other similarities between Christ-and-church and husband-and-wife, but this is the similarity that Paul is expounding, and I submit that if we take it farther than that we are simply riffing on our own.  To bring the metaphor home, the text here is saying that husbands should love their wives in such a way that they expend great effort, and brave what hazards may be, in order to bring about such a state of harmony with their wives that they are as inseparable as a person from his own body.  Is that something that only a husband can do, while the wife simply waits to be integrated?  I don't think so.  As every married person knows, after all, the process of altering your identity in light of your spouse - that which "the wives" are called to do - is not only an exceptionally active one, it is the very means by which two spouses harmonize with and become inseparable from each other.  The metaphors used when talking about wives and husbands are different, but the actual activity described is the same: husband and wife achieving a state of profound harmony, a metaphorical oneness.  So I am not really very comfortable saying that the text here is setting up some kind of second-class citizen status for wives.

So what are we left with?  We begin with a depiction of “submission” as an example of the mystic sort of harmony that is supposed to hold sway among all believers, which should put us off the idea that “submission” means subjugation right away.  Paul then goes on to give two more particular examples of what this sort of submission looks like, or perhaps applications of the principle.  It is, he says, the sort of thing that causes wives to care that they are married to their own husbands (and here I think we perhaps see why the text bothers to say “their own husbands,” instead of simply “their husbands,” as some translations have it - implicit in this profound, life-shaping recognition of choice is the fact that this man, and not just any man, is the one that I married).  It is, he says, the sort of thing that causes husbands to chance any consequences in the goal of achieving profound marital oneness.

As I said, these are far from original thoughts, and I hope that they are old hat to anybody who reads this.  But I also hope that, having read this, the reader may feel more confident that these are not attempts to dodge the real thrust of the passage, motivated by a modernist or feminist desire to twist the words of Scripture away from their original antiquated misogyny.  They are the real thrust of the passage, and it is those who have attempted (and attempt) to use the text to justify misogyny who do the twisting.

In which Silverway finally reaches its heroic tier finale

The heroic tier finale of Silverway has finally come and gone, after much delay and party-winnowing.  I was pretty happy with it.  Unusually for me, this encounter had been in the planning for several months, and its final iteration was quite different from the original conception.  Instead of fighting through a giant map of a ruined university quad, the entire finale ended up being nothing but talking.  I thought this was fitting, since we’ve had a lot of combat set pieces in Silverway lately.  This has been driven by the fact that the D&D rules continue to be better at making a combat game than making any other kind of game - I figured that since I was running a D&D game (and I actually like the D&D 4e combat game), I might as well embrace it.  This is also a significant departure from my other current game, Skyfall (which follows a more traditional Natalian mix of lots of character work occasionally punctuated by very short, very sharp combat), so it offers me personally a nice balance.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think that roleplaying is about fighting.  It’s about storytelling.  As a DM, that means manipulating the emotions of your audience (the players) while they are at the table in order to guide the production of a desired experience.  As a player, that means inhabiting the headspace of the game in order to experience the collectively shaped experience.  So much of the essence of the game takes place in the players’ heads (which is one reason I like to talk to my players about their experience - even as the DM, there is much of the game that I am not directly privy to).  Sitting at a roleplaying table merely as an observer, even for an entire session, is like hearing about a Broadway play from your friend who just got back from New York.  Hearing about a roleplaying session after the fact is like hearing about that play from your friend’s friend.

While the D&D combat game is fun, it is not particularly good at facilitating different emotions (in fact, I would highlight this as the key difference in design philosophy between Silverway/D&D and Skyfall/PhE combat).  Indeed, one reason I’ve had so many set pieces in Silverway is that I’ve been experimenting with different ways to make the D&D combat game an emotionally resonant experience.  For the finale, though, I ultimately decided to go with something more purely in the players’ heads.

Ironically, this meant throwing out months of half-baked encounter plans, so virtually the entire session was improvised.  This too was a throwback to my usual style of DMing, which I think was a nice touchstone for me.  For me, improvised sessions and well-planned sessions are like the difference between social dance and choreography.  The one feels natural and spontaneous, and there is the thrill of touching and adapting to something vital and alive and instant.  The other can be technically impressive and may be artistically affecting for the audience, but feels dead to perform.  So it was nice to gin up ten ghosts’ worth of plot-critical conversation on the spot (including two new ghosts whose presence had not been foreseen until literally seconds before they appeared in the narrative).  Then I had to gin up an audience/interrogation with the pantheon, which harkened back to an experience in my very first D&D game with Twilight, and was even more improvised than the university encounter.

This conversation with the gods was probably the biggest moment of player choice I have ever managed to pull off.  The party was presented with two stark options, and they actually pretty much stuck to those two instead of trying to find a hidden third, this-was-not-actually-hidden-and-it-destroys-all-the-plans option (I held pretty much all the cards in the scenario, but then again, the DM never holds all the cards).  I have had lots of player choice in my campaigns by now, but I have never before had a single choice that so defined so much of the game.  This choice determined not only the goal/narrative arc but also the setting for the next ten levels.  And then I all but told the party they would have to give up their classes.

Whenever I need help planning Silverway I turn to Twilight, Ayudaren, and The DM, and I had a lot of conversations with them leading up to this moment.  Class is fundamental to the D&D game.  The challenge of the game is built around a proper mix of classes.  It’s baked into the way players design a character, and is often the most important decision a player makes when designing a character (even dominating such seemingly non-mechanical choices such as personality and motivations).  In fact, many character concepts in a D&D game begin with class: “I want to play a paladin,” or even just, “I want to play a character who casts spells.”  If the party made one choice - the choice they made, as it happens - they would find themselves cut off from all magic (I wouldn’t even have let Neani become a psion, except that I really could find no way to make a martial incarnation of her character that felt right).  This would invalidate virtually all of the class choices my players had made, and force them to play new versions of their characters as interpreted through the lens of a brand new class.  It gave mechanical bite to a momentous roleplaying decision, and clearly marked a major transition in the mechanical progression of the game with an emotionally memorable event.  It was the right decision.  But would they go for it?

I guess you never really know what’s going on in your players’ minds, but I think they really did.  It was angsty, but it was supposed to be.  These moments are among the most satisfying for me as a DM - when you do something that requires you to trust your players, and they go with it.

Merry Christmas to Me

Well, Christmas has come and gone, without a holiday post from me.  This year the big present not under my tree was my Albion Liechtenauer trainer, which I’m not expecting until about April.  Since so many people contributed to it, though, I thought it deserved a post.

I thought a lot about what I wanted out of my first blunt.  The ideal training tool, of course, would basically be a sharp sword that is incapable of hurting people.  It would flex as much (or as little, depending on how you want to look at it) as a sharp, and when its edge met another training tool it would “bite” and stick at the point of contact, just as two sharps do.  It would have the same balance and percussion characteristics, with an identical crossguard, handle, and pommel.

Of course, such an object does not exist, and I’m not even sure that creating one is technically possible at the moment.  The main problem is the fact that the edges of a blunt sword must not only be un-sharpened, but thick enough that they won’t cleave when swung with force (a blunt sword can still cut; heck, even a round wooden dowel can cut - think of the wounds a caning can leave).  This obviously throws off the mass distribution of the trainer, although clever use of a fuller (a channel down the center of the blade) can help with that.

The thick edges are also smooth (obviously they can’t be serrated), which means that when two steel trainers contact each other there is nothing to prevent the blades from sliding up and down each other.  This can cause a technique that would have worked with a real sword not to work, and that obviously makes it harder to learn than it would be with a real sword (though it has compensatory advantages, of course, such as little to no risk of dismemberment).  It also presents a risk that one sword will slide down the other and bang into the fingers.  Historical training swords (what are now often called federschwerts, though the use of that term to refer to a training sword is a neologism) had a flared shield called a schilt (“shield”) at the base of the blade to help prevent that - but this, of course, further throws of the mass distribution of the blade, and adds a radical enough amount of metal that the whole blade has to be reshaped.

Then there is the issue of thrusts.  Many longsword techniques involve thrusting, which is obviously not safe if one’s training sword has a pointy tip (as many longswords did, a trend that became acute during Liechtenauer’s probable lifetime).  A pointy tip on a trainer, obviously, is not safe to thrust into a sparring opponent, so the tip must be blunted in some way.  Some trainers simply use a spatulate tip rather than a pointy one; others actually roll the point back or flare out at the tip.  Even with a theoretically safe tip, though, most real swords are too stiff to safely thrust into an opponent (even with the flexibility that is characteristic of European swords in the late middle ages).  A training sword must therefore be somewhat more flexible than a real sword, or at least on the flexible end of the spectrum.  Too flexible, though, and the blade doesn’t resist another blade the way it should.

The commercially available trainers all vary with respect to these safety-necessitated features, as well as others such as blade and handle length, grip material, and style and size of crossguard and pommel.  It’s a lot to consider, especially for a practitioner just starting out who doesn’t have (and doesn’t expect to have, at least for a long time) an arsenal of different training tools with different characteristics.

What ultimately governed my decision was this question: what kind of fencing do I want to learn?  I’ve talked before about the level of martial authenticity I want in my fencing - what the masters sometimes call ernstfechten, fighting in earnest (as opposed to fighting to win a tournament, for exercise, or even in self defense when you are actively trying not to kill your attacker, which at least in some historical contexts was quite common).  I haven’t talked a lot about the historical side of things, though.  In part this is because I did not actually know a lot about the sociohistory of KDF, but I feel like I now know enough that I can set my sights on a firm enough target to guide my gear acquisition.

Insofar as we consider Liechtenauer’s art of fighting a distinct martial tradition (which we do, more or less, not least because Liechtenauer’s students considered it a distinct martial tradition and extant sources from competing traditions with a different view are thin on the ground), it arose or was codified in the mid- to late fourteenth century (the late middle ages), as an art to be taught to and practiced by knights - men whose job was, at least in theory, to be professional martial artists.  The tradition was apparently successful enough to survive into the Renaissance, and eventually became democratized enough to be taught and practiced by non-artistocrats (an evolution that can be viewed, I expect, as merely part of the larger democratization of violence during the Military Revolution).

Within KDF, the longsword was, as almost all swords have been at almost all times, a sidearm.  It was, in particular, an aristocrat’s sidearm (lower social orders generally preferring the sword and buckler).  To my knowledge, no historical sources ever directly discuss why this was so, although one suspects it had at least something to do with the fact that aristocrats can generally afford better body armor.  Of course, a longsword is perfectly capable of killing a person stone cold dead with a single attack, but it was not likely to be the weapon of choice for truly serious, premeditated violence.  Nobody would feel fully armed going to war armed with nothing but a longsword.  It’s a backup weapon, or a minimum level of weaponry, to which one might strip down when traipsing about in body armor and armed to the teeth might be considered not quite the thing.

Modern people tend to draw the lines between “longswords” and “greatswords” (both words that were used historically, though not in the way we now use them) as the line between about 40” of blade length and longer, and between a balance and handle that can be used with one hand at need and one that cannot.  Within the family of weapon characteristics that we presently recognize as a “longsword,” blade lengths seem to have bottomed out at about 33” or so.  A very short longsword might be useful in a variety of circumstances, particularly remembering that it was (i) a sidearm (enormous sidearms tending to defeat the purpose of carrying a convenient backup weapon in the first place) and (ii) an aristocrat’s sidearm (a somewhat shorter longsword being, so I am told, handier to use as a sidearm on horseback, when one must worry about hitting the horse’s neck with one’s sword).  I have also heard that shorter longswords seem to have been popular in the Italian tradition, though I’m getting that rather secondhand.

The final piece of the buying puzzle for me was a reminder in training that modern HEMA practitioners generally (including AHS) have three legs to our training: cutting, drilling, and sparring.  One cuts to understand how a sword works.  One drills to learn how to make a sword work when the opponent is not cooperating.  One spars to practice what one has learned in the drills.  No one leg is complete martial arts practice.

With all these thoughts in mind, I looked at the commercially available steel longsword trainers and settled on the Liechtenauer, for the following reasons.

First, it has no schilt.  There is an argument to be made, and I think it’s a strong one, that a schilt is useful compensation for the fact that blunt steel does not bind in the same way that sharp steel does, and is thus more apt to bash fingers.  On the other hand, we use more robust hand protection than historical practitioners did (in our unarmored fencing, that is), and I actually want the challenge of learning to protect my fingers in a suboptimal environment.  Moreover, all the blunts I’ve handled with schilts have a balance point that is quite near the hilt.  This makes them feel very lively in the hand, but I would like to train with a weapon that is slightly less nimble.  This is because I know that I already have a natural tendency to want to leave the bind in situations where I know I should not, and the faster one’s sword is the easier it is to leave the bind and land a successful follow-up cut.  This is the opposite of the sort of fencing I want to encourage in myself; despite my natural aversion to it, fighting from the bind is one of the parts of KDF that I like the most, and I want to get good at it.

Second, the blade is about 36” long.  The overall length of the sword is not too long for me, but it is also not a short longsword.  Perhaps Italian fencers or mounted fencers could make good use of those, but as I am unlikely to train in either art, a longer sword seems appropriate for me.  At the same time, it is not as long as many other commercially available blunts (the current “trend” being towards longer blades).  I am fine with this, since 36” is about the length of my Pentti, Shereshoy, and about the length of the sharps I am most interested in (in fact, there does not seem to be a corresponding trend towards longer sharp swords).  This is good, since even though I don’t own a sharp sword yet, I would want my wasters to resemble my sharps as closely as possible - the sort of fencing I want to learn, after all, involves a real sword.  I don’t want to learn to fence with a 40” blade unless I actually own a 40” live blade.

Third, the overall weight is about 3.5 lbs.  This is on the heavier end for a longsword (though by no means unhistorically weighty), on the heavier end for a commercially available blunt, and probably a shade heavier than any of the sharps I am likely to buy.  Since this is a training weapon, though, I’d rather err on the side of being heavier than the real thing than being lighter. 

Fourth, and finally, the handle is not particularly long - pretty much just enough room for two hands without gripping the pommel.  There are some fencers, and some historical masters, who prefer a long handle, as well as some fencers, and some historical masters, who prefer gripping the pommel.  This appears to have been a matter of personal preference historically.  I, however, am being taught by somebody who prefers (and primarily follows historically texts that prefer) shorter handles and no pommel gripping, so it makes sense to me that I should prefer a weapon that encourages that.  Moreover, a short handle makes sense to me for a sidearm - a really long handle undoubtedly does have many positive attributes, but it seems to me that it would also tend to make the sword rather clumsier when simply being worn.

The Liechtenauer does have some negative attributes (to my mind), but I decided that these four were more important to me as a training tool.  On the negative end of the scale, the blade is somewhat less suitable for sparring.  The edges are thinner than most other blunts, and the blade is somewhat stiffer as well.  These mean that I will probably have to use more care when hitting and thrusting with it in sparring than I otherwise would.  I ultimately decided that this was an acceptable tradeoff for a few reasons.  The first is that any steel sparring requires an artificial measure of control - the safety gear simply doesn’t exist to permit full-power steel sparring without turning it into armored fencing.  The second is that I couldn’t find any commercially available blunts that had a better combination of advantages and drawbacks.  The third is that it may not be a “tournament legal” weapon at bring-your-own-sword steel sparring tournaments, since it doesn’t have a schilt.  On the other hand, steel longsword tournaments are generally only for more advanced fencers, and BYOS tournaments are not necessarily going to become the norm.  If they do, and if I regularly compete in them, and if this blade is still not tournament legal, I can always get a “tournament sword” at that time.

And the fourth is that, frankly, I already have a sparring sword for full power (or closer to full power).  Shereshoy fills that role, and probably better than any steel waster ever will.  The role of my steel blunt should be to provide a more accurate drilling experience, and secondarily to provide a sparring experience that trades speed (and all the things that fast sparring can improve, like proper form under pressure) for increased weapon verimisilitude, and this - for the sort of fencing I want to practice, and in my judgment - is the best available tool for me. 

Now the thing just has to arrive.

Remembering Scott Bauer

Death has been much on my mind lately, and every time that happens I think of Pastor Scott.  There have been other deaths in my life (not many, thankfully), and some of them have resulted in absences that I regret very much.  But a fresh death, or the prospect of a fresh death, always brings me back to Scott in a way that those other deaths do not.  I think it is because none of the others were so shocking to me, have felt so ... unfair.

I never wrote much about Scott on this blog, or about his death (I checked, and I can only find this post, this one, and this one.  That's fine.  As a record of my life, this blog quite intentionally has some very large holes in it.  But today I think I need to fill that hole in a bit.

He died ten years ago today.  He would have been 59.  When I got the news, all I could think of was Whitman's "Oh Captain! My Captain!"  I remember Chariessa asking me in the dining hall if I was okay.  I was not.  I had plans for Scott!  He was my pastor - the first person I ever felt was my pastor, who really cared about me.  He was supposed to meet my wife (he died two years before I met her).  He was supposed to watch me grow up.  Oh, how I valued his approval!

I remember him as a man full of prejudices - against videogames, against Catholicism, against Latino people.  When I had been going to Chaminade for a while, we visited his house once.  He stopped me in the foyer to ask me, in front of my parents, to do something Catholic.  He was teasing, but only sort of.  He was worried - genuinely, compassionately worried - about me becoming Catholicized.  I wanted to die.  I'm not sure I would have felt more uncomfortable if he'd called them Papists.  I wasn't really around when his son started dating a Mexican girl, but I hear it was ... uncomfortable.

But I also remember him as a man who overcame his prejudices.  He learned Spanish - painfully, but doggedly - to better connect with the woman who would become his daughter-in-law.  He built one of the largest Spanish-speaking congregations in Los Angeles.  And in 2003, when I was wrestling with the challenges posed by Reformed theology, I wrote to Scott.  I wish I still had the e-mail he wrote back to me.  It was the last thing I ever heard from him.  This was one of the men who taught me to be academic about my religion, and I can't do this final letter justice without the actual text.  But the gist of it was that he didn't hold with Reformed doctrine himself ... but if Scripture truly foreclosed either possibility, we wouldn't still be discussing it 400 years later.  I don't know if I can express how profound an impact it made on me to hear him say that.  Hopefully you can see it in me.

I remember the way he lead worship.  I remember the way he was able to make church satisfy the heart and the mind without actually being about either of those things.  I remember him being just square enough to be embarrassing (and that's coming from me, so ... you know).  I remember his focused intensity.  I remember the way everything was about Jesus to him, and how he could do that without being creepy.  A little square, maybe.  But he had the sort of faith you sometimes read about in books, the kind that you cannot engage with except by taking it seriously.

I remember the way he looked at me one Sunday evening at our youth group and I realized that the man actually cared about me, personally.  To my knowledge it was the first time a pastor had ever cared about me except in a general way.  At his memorial services one of his sons said that Scott was a great man because he cared about people.  This is true.  He cared.  He cared like Honor Harrington.  He cared so much that it transcended adverbs.  Scott simply cared.

I think that is what I admired most about him.  But what I remember most about him is the way he changed.  As I said, as I child I remember him as a man full of prejudices.  By the time he died, how he had changed in those regards!  What impurities in that irrefutable care of his had he excised!  But to say that he had excised them would be untrue.  Scott is the reason I believe that people can change.  He is also the reason I believe that people do not change people.  God changes people.  I have seen it.  I never told him how absolutely clear it was to me that those prejudices were worked out of him not through the proximity of other opinions but through his continual, fumbling, earnest, consistent pursuit of communion with Jesus.

When I was a younger man, I wanted Scott to look at my choice of bride and tell me I'd done well.  I wanted him to be the one who married me, because I wanted him to know that I wouldn't have been the sort of person a woman would want to marry without his influence.  These desires are a little embarrassing to remember - the sort of thing a young man is wont to imagine before he has quite realized that the young lady in his imagination is going to be a person, too.  I don't know if Thayet would have liked Scott.  Maybe not.  I think he was the sort of person whose faith and general goodness sort of demanded respect, but certainly not to everybody's tastes.

One thing about that is not embarrassing to remember.  I do think that much of my problems with Thayet can essentially be attributed to a certain ... smallness of heart that my lady knight found rightly repellant.  My prejudices are not the same as Scott's were, but I certainly had a lot of them, and Scott's example proved to me that authentic engagement with Jesus enlarges the heart.  You can phrase this in a lot of ways.  Some people would tell me that a person can't change unless they want to.  Others would point out the influence of other people in my life in that time, or point to the seeds they had sown years before.  Those things are all true.  But what I would say is that none of it would have mattered without the work of the Holy Spirit.  And I would say that I wouldn't have been open to that if not for the example I had seen in Scott Bauer.

I wish he had known that.

There are many like it ...

There is a long tradition in historical European martial arts (well, as long a tradition as there can be for a practice that is really only about thirty five years old) of modifying equipment.  Mostly this is because even after thirty-five years we are only just getting commercially produced practice gear specifically for HEMA, so for most of the past four decades people have had no choice but to repurpose other equipment.  Sometimes this results in less than satisfactory work-arounds.  But what is satisfactory is the way in which even small modifications can imbue a piece of gear with totemic significance.

A few weeks ago my studio went to a tournament for the first time (I should post more thoughts on tournaments later).  In preparation for the tournament, we had school patches ordered to put on our fencing jackets.  I sort of expected to dismiss this as a cynical marketing ploy.  I was surprised to discover that I didn’t.

Like a lot of my fellow students, I own an Axel Peterssen Pro fencing jacket, which incorporates a leather plastron in the front.  This poses certain difficulties from a sewing perspective, as the whole point of the plastron is to resist penetration by a sharp object (for instance, a steel trainer that breaks in the thrust rather than flexing like it’s supposed to).  Some students decided to glue their patches on.  Others decided to take it to a tailor.  But I found that it mattered to me a lot that I do it myself, the hard way, with needle and thread.  This wasn’t just free advertising for somebody’s business.  This was an expression of who I am as a fencer, and I needed to make it.  I am a student of the Akademie des Heiligen Schwertes, and the crest of that school has pride of place on the chest of my jacket.  Through Tristan’s teaching, I am associated with the New York Historical Fencing Association, and the crest of that school belongs on my left arm.

And then I realized that one day there might be others, and the order of patches might need to change.  As much as I love the Akademie, it might not be my school forever.  This is really a pretty disquieting thought, because I actually do love the Akademie a lot, but I am … well, me.  Whenever I leave, if I ever join another school, it will be important to me that the crest of that school take its place on my chest, and the AHS crest move to my arm.  Which of course will mean that the NYHFA crest move, and so on …

So I bought a leather needle and some upholstery thread, bought or borrowed some Velcro, and I lovingly added Velcro to my patches and jacket.  The stitching is not fabulous, but it is mine.  And now my fencing jacket is not just protective gear.  My jacket says, This is me.  This is where I come from.  These people have supported my development as a martial artist, and I honor them.

If my jacket describes who I am as a fencer, my waster - my, well, my sword - describes what fencing itself means to me.  When I went to fencing last week, my waster had a bright orange grip.  It got a few looks.  Of course there is a story behind it.

When I moved to New York, Blue Rose and Karyai gave me a month’s worth of fencing lessons as a going-away present.  I turned this into a Pentti+ Type III nylon waster, which for a variety of reasons I am quite happy with both as a solo drill and as a sparring tool.  The only thing I don’t like about it is the grip, which is more rectangular than oval (KDF requires a loose grip on the sword that can slide easily around the handle, and which rather awkward when the handle isn’t, you know, round).  As far as I can tell, nobody likes the grips on the Penttis, though they have enough other positive characteristics that they are still the international standard in synthetic wasters.  Some people (including some of my fellow students) are of the opinion that since tournaments don’t allow you to compete with your own Pentti, you might as well get used to the square grip.  But most of those people have steel trainers with much more realistic handles that they can use for drills.  Since I’m not likely to have a steel sword for a while, I decided to modify my Pentti’s handle.

The grip tape on mine was shredding anyway (nobody told me you aren’t supposed to fence while wearing rings), so I decided to insert some cardboard shims to round out the grip, and then rewrap the whole thing.  And then I thought, since I was going to be exposing the nylon of the handle anyway, maybe I should inscribe something on it.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe I was inspired by Shanah Van’s love tattoo.  Or maybe there’s just a universal impulse to inscribe things that are important to us.

I decided on a tennis overgrip for my new wrap, which in turn meant I needed to decide which color I was going to get, because apparently tennis overgrips come in a bewildering variety of colors.  Naturally, this decision could only be made from a heraldic standpoint, and naturally, the heraldry in question could not just be classical.

I had recently decided that whenever I finally get my steel trainers (I can only use one at a time, of course, but many people eventually acquire two, to train with a partner) I wanted one to have a green grip and the other a blue one.  In classical heraldry (much of which is surprisingly modern; of course I am aware medieval and even Renaissance heraldry was much more practical than the symbolism-laden construct that we have inherited), green is associated with hope, joy, and fidelity in love; while blue is associated with truth and loyalty.  In Mandalorian armor, green is associated with duty, while blue is associated with reliability.  These are fitting reminders for something that supports me as an absent father and husband and as a lawyer.  So I resolved to own a trainer with a green handle, named Ijaa’bora - Duty.  After that, eventually, one with a blue handle, named Ruusaan - Reliable One.  But with green and blue taken, what color should my Pentti be?

Ultimately I decided to answer that question by asking what my Pentti means to me.

Drilling with my Pentti is calm.  Even if I am tired and cranky from my run up and down the minor hills of Prospect Park, when I am on the knoll or in the hollow where I drill my mind is quiet, like it is when I am painting.  At the same time, it is deeply invigorating.  When I wield it during warm-up cuts in class, I feel my muscles awaken and my breathing deepen as my whole body looks forward to what is to come.  It is satisfying.  The end of a sparring session, when I have withstood an hour’s worth of sweat and blows and know that I could keep going, feels like the end of a dance.  And it is a symbol of my friends’ love for me.

So I no longer own just a Pentti+ Type III nylon waster.  I own Shereshoy, whose name means … well, shereshoy.  Openness to what life will bring, and the groundedness to eagerly seek it out.  The desire to live, and the drive forward into the unknown - which is, really, simply another facet of the desire not just to live but to live.  Shereshoy means … I think the best literal translation is to seize life.  But what it really means is joy.

In Mandalorian armor, the color associated with this lust for life is orange.  In classical heraldry, orange is associated with worthy ambition - a fine synergy for this foreign adventure of mine, and coincidentally related to Master Liechtenauer’s characterization of the art of fighting as the art that dignifies.

So I took down my Pentti from its hook on my door and carefully cut out the shims using a pattern cut from paper borrowed from my Brooklyn roommates, from cardboard that came from the chair I bought when I finally admitted in a deeper way that I am here, and not elsewhere.  Beneath the shims I carefully inscribed the handle with orange ink: ner gai cuyi shereshoy - “my name is Joy.”  I wrote it in Mandalorian to remind me of family, in the style of Greek dedications to remind me of friends.  Then I bound that up beneath my cardboard and sealed it with an orange tennis overgrip, and I hung Joy upon my door.

The Things We Wear

 I’ve spoken some about the types of training tools we use in KDF in terms of swords and sword simulators, but I haven’t spoken much about the protective gear we use.  There are different philosophies towards protective gear.  As far as I understand it, there are two arguments in favor of wearing less gear.  The first is that one should train for the combat scenario one is ostensibly training for.  If one is training to fight armored, then one should wear armor; but if one is training to fight without armor (and unarmored longsword fighting is considered the foundation of the whole art), then the more armor one wears, the less realistic one’s training is and the more one’s technique will be distorted.  The second is that we shouldn’t be afraid of getitng hurt.  It’s a martial art, after all - most martial artists expect to break bones and otherwise injure themselves over the course of their training.  Those injuries are thought by many to be a good teaching tool.

In favor of protective gear is the fact that injuries can prevent one from training at all, and that full-power sparring with wasters and blunt steel is really quite dangerous - the moreso because of how many of our techniques target parts of the body that are naturally not very padded, such as the skull.  I’ve cut a partner’s forearm in drills with blunt steel; I don’t care to think what would happen if a full-powered strike in sparring slipped through to hit somebody’s head or neck.  This risk can be mitigated by partners fencing at less than full speed or by pulling their strikes at the last instant, but that too distorts technique.

As with the problems presented by the various types of training swords, I think the answer is to practice in a variety of ways with a variety of gear.  This is the approach we take, anyway.  Sometimes we practice slow, and sometimes we practice fast.  Sometimes we drill with no contact or light contact, wearing no protective gear.  Sometimes we drill with full contact but in a very targeted way (practicing only strikes to the head, say), wearing only partial gear.  We only ever spar at full speed, wearing full gear, which is one of the things I like about my school.  I do understand the arguments for slow-speed freeform sparring in less than full gear, but I personally feel like I have enough issues with aggression that I need to practice at full speed.

So what is “full gear?”  As historical European martial arts becomes more of a commercial market, that definition changes, but here is what it means to me right now.  Here is the full panoply of protective gear that I personally own or would like to own at some point.

The first thing is a fencing helmet.  I say “helmet” rather than “mask” because head protection in HEMA should protect not just the face but also the side, back, and top of the head - any of which might be targeted.  I use a fencing helmet from Absolute Force.  It shares a lot of construction details with a traditional sport fencing mask, but it’s got a lot more structure on the sides, back, and top.  I haven’t taken a full blow to the back of the head yet, but I have been hit pretty hard everywhere else, and while some hits have stunned me, I haven’t yet sustained even a minor head injury.

Most fencers seem to feel that the neck deserves special protection, above and beyond the bib of a fencing helmet and a high-collared fencing jacket with a blade catcher.  I don’t currently own a gorget, but at some point I would like to get one.  I haven’t really identified a particular model I’m interested in.

My torso is protected by a thickly quilted fencing jacket, which is essentially a gambeson with that takes advantage of modern fasterners like zippers and Velcro.  I use an Axel Peterssen Pro, which also has a leather plastron to offer extra protection against accidental penetration.  Like most jackets, mine also covers my arms.  Most fencers feel the arms deserve rigid protection over at least the elbows and forearms (the elbows because they have so little natural padding, and the forearms even though they have somewhat more padding because they are a frequent target).  My jacket incorporates hard plastic plates all the way down the outside of the arms from shoulder to forearm, which have so far prevented even bruising from the hardest strikes I’ve received.

The hands are one area where I think HEMA is still struggling for a really good commercially available solution.  The difficulty is that there are not many sports in which the hands must be dextrous (KDF requires a fairly loose grip on the sword because the grip changes fairly frequently) and yet are expected to take a hefty wallop on a regular basis.  A lot of fencers settled on lacrosse gloves as offering a good compromise between padding and dexterity.  I use a cheap pair of Maverik lacrosse gloves, which I don’t really feel are particularly adequate.  Of course, that’s not really a surprise - one doesn’t grip a lacrosse stick the way one grips a sword, one doesn’t swing or check with a lacrosse stick the way one swings a sword, and targeting the hands in lacrosse is against the rules (it is often considered unwise in KDF, but not always, and it certainly isn’t off limits).  I haven’t broken any fingers in my lacrosse gloves, but I regularly bruise in them even though I am getting better at protecting my hands.  What I’d really like is a pair of five-finger hard-shell gloves, preferably with at least some padding.  Steel gauntlets are one option, though they’re really expensive.  When I can afford them, I intend to pick up a pair of gloves by Black Lance Technologies, which also protect the inside of the forearm (my jacket has no plating on the inside of the forearm, only the outside), and can be bought in a model without a palm glove, so the sword is still gripped more with bare skin but the outside of the hand has protection.  Black Lance is a very new company, but they make the only non-steel fencing glove I’m aware of that fits all my criteria.

I wear a pair of Absolute Force HEMA pants, which I am quite happy with.  They are close fitting but allow my legs to move without binding, and are designed to stop a broken fencing weapon from penetrating the legs.  They don’t have any padding except for a strip of dense foam to cover the top of the hip bone, though, so I’d like to add a padded fencing skirt by SPES to give my upper legs some more protection.  I’ve never taken a truly solid hit to the legs, but I’ve certainly delivered them, and the size and severity of the bruises I’ve seen on legs have convinced me that actual padding around the upper legs is probably a good idea.  I also wear a hard shell cup from Absolute Force, because I never want to hear my doctor utter the words “penile fracture.”

My lower legs are protected by a pair of SPES fencing socks, which offer extra padding around the shins, and SPES shin guards.  I am not entirely happy with the shin guards in three respects.  The first is that the elastic straps that hold them in place need some extra Velcro to really be cinched tight enough around my calves.  I can certainly do this; I just haven’t quite gotten around to it.  The second deficiency is that they don’t offer any ankle protection, the way that, say, proper riot gear does.  Hitting the ankle with a sword is not exactly easy, and perhaps not especially wise in most cases, but I have been hit there, and I’m not really sure why HEMA shin guards shouldn’t protect the ankle.  The third deficiency is that they don’t really cover the knee - they are tall enough to offer some knee protection, but at some point I think I should pick up some actual kneepads.  On the other hand, I will say that I am happy with the level of wraparound protection they offer (not just the front but the sides and back of the lower leg as well), and their slim profile has never given me any problems while fencing.

Because I wear fencing socks with my shin guards, I need something to give my feet some more grip.  We generally drill in bare feet, so I tried sparring in socks for a while, but I found them much too slippery.  There doesn’t really seem to be much need for rigid protection over the foot (and I don’t think there are any commercially available products for any martial art that offers it, anyway), or even much padding beyond the socks - it’s just a matter of grip.  Some people seem to like tae kwon do or other martial arts shoes, which are designed to give grip but have as thin a sole as possible.  I’ve started using my old dance sneakers, reasoning that they’ve always left me plenty light on my feet yet very connected to the floor.  I’m not sure how well that’s going to work out in the long run but I am hopeful.

All this gear - particularly the jacket and helmet - can get pretty sweaty, especially since we generally don’t “gear up” with jackets unless we’re going to spar, which is itself pretty winding.  Even with the gear, though, it isn’t as winding as a good polka (maybe it should be and my form just isn’t quite there?), so I make it a policy not to take any breaks during sparring except to let other students get their time on the floor.  After all, while I do want to get good at the actual art of fighting (four years and nine months to go based on my original challenge to myself), this is also about physical fitness.  This is a martial art, and the foundation of all martial arts is physical fitness.  Then too, even leaving aside the martial arts aspect, it’s simply important to me that I at least be fit enough to spar in full gear for an hour straight - just as it’s important to me that I be at least fit enough to dance for three hours straight, or redowa for five minutes without breathing hard.  As Master Döbringer said, exercise is better than art - for art without exercise is useless, but exercise is beneficial even without art.