I have already read what you are about to, and it is earnest, incoherent, and unresolved. These characteristics do not complement each other very well. Plus, while I wholeheartedly agree in theory with what is written here, in practice my approval is less enthusiastic. Trust me, this irritates me more than it irritates you. Looking back at my posts for the past few days...I seem bi-polar...why am I so extreme?
However, I need to confess something.
I tend toward mediocrity. There are moments where the bushel that I have placed over my light lifts ever so slightly and a few gleams escape into the world. These are guilty moments, overwhelming moments, moments where my awareness of both the amount of pain in the world and my total failure to diminish it becomes visceral. Intellectually I am mostly conscious of this fact, but rarely do I see evidence of my heart breaking because of it. It should likely break more often.
Last night I went for a couple of beers with a couple of friends and we got to talking about what you might expect: the meaning of life. We talked about how Jesus tells us that the central motivations of our lives should be to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbor as ourselves. But this only partially gets at our purpose here. Love is a concept that, for me, is easy to be cerebral about, but to make it tangible is something altogether more difficult.
I remember when I read about my first martyr: Polycarp. I was 15 years old. Since then, I have wondered how one gets from an intellectual understanding of the requirements of the concept of loving God and one’s neighbor to a life where these are the motivating principals for each word and act. Christian history is full of people who understood that to love God with their whole being meant to literally forfeit their lives. Before Archbishop Oscar Romero was martyred, he said, "If they kill me, I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people." I don’t know very much about Archbishop Romero, but what I know tells me that here was someone who understood, viscerally as well as intellectually, what his purpose was.
Part of me wants to understand my purpose like that. Part of me is terrified. Part of me reserves the right to have fun, to watch Gossip Girl (I know, shamefully pathetic), and play dominoes. Can I reconcile these parts?
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Well, something has been happening to me over the past few days. My past few posts seem to be a tangible progression of sorts. I have to get it out right now or it might not get out, so this is going to be sincere with a capital S. I love Adam Sandler by the way. I always have. It’s not very intellectual of me, I know, but I loved dumb Sandler and I love nice Sandler and I love serious Sandler. Anyway, about what is happening to me. I am being redeemed. By God. I know, that’s old news, but it’s new news too. The world is brighter somehow, my capacity for joy is greater. My life is less certain, yet I am more sure of the things I know. I know that I cannot feel this way forever, but that is fine, because I know that this development is more than a feeling. My essence is changing. My molecular structure is being rearranged somehow. I am not quite "there" if you know what I mean. Occasionally in my life I have caught glimpses of the person that I am becoming, or should become. Lately those glimpses have been more frequent. I wrote in my Law School application that "the highs are less frenetic and the lows are less desperate." That sort of begins to explain how I’m changing. I should interject a disclaimer here. I am not suggesting that I have anything more than a minor role in this transformation. When I say it is happening to me, that is more or less what I mean. It’s like growing up, physically I mean. I never decided to get taller, it just happened. I never decided to turn 27, but I’m going to in a couple of months. This process feels a lot like that in some ways. The only difference is that I can interfere with this process in a way that I couldn’t with the others. Look, it’s like Paul says, now we see in a glass dimly, but then we shall see face to face. That scripture seems to be stalking me lately. I know who God wants me to be. Right now, in this moment, I can see that person. Tomorrow or next week or in five minutes, even that glimpse might be gone. But right now I see her. Pray for me. That I may become who I should be. I will pray for you. I am losing my momentum so perhaps it is time that I wrap this up.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
woot woot
Where my troopers at? Where my hus-tle-ahs? Where my boosters at?
I am not writing in real time. I did not write in real time. What you are reading has been constructed. (I would say crafted if I were better at it.) This is not the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions. I have been writing this since yesterday, and will likely continue to write it tomorrow, adding and subtracting until I find some sort of textual equilibrium between what I write and what I mean to write.
I have one chapter of If on a winter’s night a traveler left to read. The chapter is actually only one page. Ok, really just one paragraph. Ordinarily I would not put a book down with the resolution so near, but this novel is different. I started this one in my last week in Korea YEARS ago and I hesitate to break off such a concrete link to my surrogate home. If you’ve read it, you might agree that not completing it would be an appropriate way to conclude. This is only a mildly profound dilemma, I suppose. A bit over-dramatic really. You’re welcome to stop reading anytime. Does that offend you? Sorry. Don’t go. I will be conciliatory, deferent even. I promise.
While I have contemplated whether or not to break off one of my last physical ties to my second home, I am trying to make another one here. I found a basketball in the parking garage last week. There are courts near the hospital, at least within a block of my office and I imagine myself playing more or less everyday, so let this serve as a note of warning to all you quote unquote ballers. I’m coming for you. Today I played three-on-three (well, sorta) with a bunch of people who were wasting time while waiting for the bus. I may not have unleashed all my fury, but it was GT’s all around nevertheless. Pretty Good for a little break when one has to go into work on a Saturday.
After dinner with a dear friend last night, I went to Starbucks to read.
I took the lid off of my coffee because I don’t like drinking through lids. I read an underline-able (I believe I just made up this word) passage and sharpened a pencil into the lid. After a few minutes I realized my coffee was getting cold, so, without looking up from my book, I put the lid back on. Who can guess what my next sip tasted like? Have you ever laughed out loud by yourself in public? Try it sometime.
The second-last person I hugged goodbye before leaving Korea was Olivia. Before the hug she gave me her favourite sweatshirt which, as I found in Vancouver on my 2 week vacation/CIU reunion with Nick Dental and Josh Chestnut, contained a note and her grandmother’s pendant. One line of that note has stuck with me since then. She told me that I am good at adapting to new situations. She wrote that she wasn’t worried about me moving back because of this. She told me I shouldn’t worry either. Each day is easier than the day previous.
The last person I hugged goodbye was Chris. When I got on the plane I found, in one of my books, a bookmark that he made when he was 5 years old. It has a Bible verse on it, and a picture of a butterfly. The verse says, "Behold, I make all things new." It was as though God was telling me that my adaptation will (or should) transcend adverse-culture shock, and that it needs to have a spiritual dimension.
My dad once wrote a critique about the common conception that we need to leave home in order to find ourselves. I agreed with him at the time, but now I feel that I need to qualify my agreement. We don’t need to leave home to find ourselves, what we need to do is do what we should do. "When I became a (wo)man I put childish things behind me." "Now we see in a glass, as though darkly. Then we will see face to face." All this to say: do what you should, become who you are becoming. And I will try to do the same.
I am not writing in real time. I did not write in real time. What you are reading has been constructed. (I would say crafted if I were better at it.) This is not the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions. I have been writing this since yesterday, and will likely continue to write it tomorrow, adding and subtracting until I find some sort of textual equilibrium between what I write and what I mean to write.
I have one chapter of If on a winter’s night a traveler left to read. The chapter is actually only one page. Ok, really just one paragraph. Ordinarily I would not put a book down with the resolution so near, but this novel is different. I started this one in my last week in Korea YEARS ago and I hesitate to break off such a concrete link to my surrogate home. If you’ve read it, you might agree that not completing it would be an appropriate way to conclude. This is only a mildly profound dilemma, I suppose. A bit over-dramatic really. You’re welcome to stop reading anytime. Does that offend you? Sorry. Don’t go. I will be conciliatory, deferent even. I promise.
While I have contemplated whether or not to break off one of my last physical ties to my second home, I am trying to make another one here. I found a basketball in the parking garage last week. There are courts near the hospital, at least within a block of my office and I imagine myself playing more or less everyday, so let this serve as a note of warning to all you quote unquote ballers. I’m coming for you. Today I played three-on-three (well, sorta) with a bunch of people who were wasting time while waiting for the bus. I may not have unleashed all my fury, but it was GT’s all around nevertheless. Pretty Good for a little break when one has to go into work on a Saturday.
After dinner with a dear friend last night, I went to Starbucks to read.
I took the lid off of my coffee because I don’t like drinking through lids. I read an underline-able (I believe I just made up this word) passage and sharpened a pencil into the lid. After a few minutes I realized my coffee was getting cold, so, without looking up from my book, I put the lid back on. Who can guess what my next sip tasted like? Have you ever laughed out loud by yourself in public? Try it sometime.
The second-last person I hugged goodbye before leaving Korea was Olivia. Before the hug she gave me her favourite sweatshirt which, as I found in Vancouver on my 2 week vacation/CIU reunion with Nick Dental and Josh Chestnut, contained a note and her grandmother’s pendant. One line of that note has stuck with me since then. She told me that I am good at adapting to new situations. She wrote that she wasn’t worried about me moving back because of this. She told me I shouldn’t worry either. Each day is easier than the day previous.
The last person I hugged goodbye was Chris. When I got on the plane I found, in one of my books, a bookmark that he made when he was 5 years old. It has a Bible verse on it, and a picture of a butterfly. The verse says, "Behold, I make all things new." It was as though God was telling me that my adaptation will (or should) transcend adverse-culture shock, and that it needs to have a spiritual dimension.
My dad once wrote a critique about the common conception that we need to leave home in order to find ourselves. I agreed with him at the time, but now I feel that I need to qualify my agreement. We don’t need to leave home to find ourselves, what we need to do is do what we should do. "When I became a (wo)man I put childish things behind me." "Now we see in a glass, as though darkly. Then we will see face to face." All this to say: do what you should, become who you are becoming. And I will try to do the same.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Shipwrecked!: Message in a Bottle
One night last week I read the entire book of Acts. If you haven’t read it lately, read the last few chapters. Hermeneutics aside, this is an incredible and incredibly well-written story. I would say that the shipwreck account belongs with the great shipwreck narratives in literature, Homer’s Odyssey, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Martel’s Life of Pi (those are the ones I’ve read). I have felt at times this past month that I was in a shipwreck that left me stranded in an absolutely foreign and forbidding place. The survival skills that served me until now were rendered obsolete. I could only communicate through gestures, I had to redefine my diet, perform feats of small, personal, everyday bravery, make friends with a seasick tiger. Since I am now long-committed to this shipwreck motif, let me push forward with a few tenuously connected observations. What strikes me about Paul’s shipwreck is the absence of fear. His voice does not quiver, his faith does not waver. Everything he does and says is done and said with a sense of absolute assurance. Doubt is a valuable tool and I have found this to be true in my own life. But faith is always the more powerful and more necessary. After a two-week storm, when the ship is about to be dashed to pieces on the rocks of Malta, Paul invites his shipmates to have a meal. "Now I urge you to take some food. You need it to survive. Not one of you will lose a single hair from his head." Then he breaks the bread, says a prayer, and begins to eat. If there were a skeptic like myself on that boat he might have pointed out the utter incongruity between what Paul was doing and what was happening outside the ship. But everyone eats and everyone survives. What does Paul have that our skeptic and I are missing? The answer is, a perspective of faith. This perspective says, "To live is Christ to die is gain." It says, "When I am weak then I am strong." It says, "I’m shipwrecked in a foreign place, but I’ve never felt less alone."
It does something else as well and I’ll try to make this connection really quickly. I once heard a sermon where the priest gave us the exhortation that during the hymns we should sing so loudly that our neighbor could not hear himself well enough to feel self-conscious. And during the liturgy, we should shake the rafters and rattle the pews. He said that if our minds believed what we were singing and saying, then our voices should have no trouble doing the same. I can’t connect the dots for you. Perhaps I started in one place and I finished in another. I suppose the best sense I can make of these ramblings is this: what I believe with my mind, I want to believe with my life. I want to err towards faith, not doubt. I want to make it my perspective. I want to make my life a liturgy. I want to believe it. I want to let the pews rattle and the rafters shake in my life.
It does something else as well and I’ll try to make this connection really quickly. I once heard a sermon where the priest gave us the exhortation that during the hymns we should sing so loudly that our neighbor could not hear himself well enough to feel self-conscious. And during the liturgy, we should shake the rafters and rattle the pews. He said that if our minds believed what we were singing and saying, then our voices should have no trouble doing the same. I can’t connect the dots for you. Perhaps I started in one place and I finished in another. I suppose the best sense I can make of these ramblings is this: what I believe with my mind, I want to believe with my life. I want to err towards faith, not doubt. I want to make it my perspective. I want to make my life a liturgy. I want to believe it. I want to let the pews rattle and the rafters shake in my life.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Feasting in a World of Famine
For some reason I have Insomnia. It literally stinks, and I thought it was a side effect of one or a combination of the medicine I have to take, but I fear it is more than that. I am usually a pretty intense thinker and these sleepless nights have done nothing to relieve me of this burden. In fact, they have exacerbated it. There is nothing in my life worth complaining about. I have food, water, shelter, clothes, a job, a car, money to pay my bills, and a family who loves me. Yet simultaneously, and not without hypocrisy, my life feels very void of the things I love. I spend 8 hours a day working at a job in a field I could care less about. I work extra jobs late into the night to make ends meet. I have been back in America a little over 2 years now, and in Columbia for about 18 months, and I still don’t feel like I have a niche yet. I feel like most of the things I do are very much indicative of the life of some else…like I am doing them to feel like a part of something, but all I usually feel like is an impostor. I guess after living abroad for nearly 3 years straight out of college, I thought when I got home, I would have people to live life with again. There were and are thousands of things I’d love to do, but honestly, I am tired of doing things alone. So in lieu of loneliness I just started joining everyone else in doing the things in their lives instead of making a life for myself. I have sacrificed my gifts, passions, and self-expression for community or more accurately, what I thought the absence of loneliness would be, and now I am afraid I can’t sleep.
Ever since as long as I remember I have felt like something inside of me is pleading to be released, to be expressed. I wonder if this feeling, or something like it, is what prodded daVinci to paint or Bach to compose. A man to pursue a woman. A mother to kiss her sleeping child. I have always yearned to be able to communicate this feeling in such a gigantically fabulous form of self-expression such as these, to actively be giving to the world what I have been given to give to it.
There was one very bright star that I could see out my bedroom window when I went to bed as a child. I named it after the boy of my childhood dreams. At nine years old I would sit up in my bed, feeling this feeling and studying this star. I have been in relationships since then and it is close, that feeling that you get, but it is only part of the feeling I am referring to. Being a parent is another, I suppose. Building a house. Writing a book. Sailing. Winning the Nobel Prize. But these moments of inspiration have endings, sometimes sad ones. They are only part of the story. What I am feeling is so much more.
I am constantly perplexed at the suffering of the world. Poverty. Abuse. Neglect. Hunger. Disease. Homelessness. A prayer of repentance puts it this way: "We have not done that which we ought to have done, and there is no good in us." Proverbs exhorts, "Don’t withhold good from those that deserve it." Jesus says, "What you did to the least of these you did to me."
This dilemma recurs periodically, for me, and I think about David, "a man after God’s own heart," who built himself the most elaborate house the world had seen to that point, despite the lepers and cripples and widows and orphans inhabiting the same world he did. Good King Wenceslas didn’t stop feasting when he saw the poor man outside in the snow. He invited him in. I spent three dollars on a cup of coffee today and it was good in the Genesis 1 sense. However, I could have literally saved someone’s life with those three dollars. To write that sentence makes me want to die. I have no idea how to reconcile this tension. Because steak and beer, roller coasters, clothes, vacations, cabins at the lake, surfing trips--these are terribly wonderful things. Could someone please tell me how to feast in a world of famine…?
Ever since as long as I remember I have felt like something inside of me is pleading to be released, to be expressed. I wonder if this feeling, or something like it, is what prodded daVinci to paint or Bach to compose. A man to pursue a woman. A mother to kiss her sleeping child. I have always yearned to be able to communicate this feeling in such a gigantically fabulous form of self-expression such as these, to actively be giving to the world what I have been given to give to it.
There was one very bright star that I could see out my bedroom window when I went to bed as a child. I named it after the boy of my childhood dreams. At nine years old I would sit up in my bed, feeling this feeling and studying this star. I have been in relationships since then and it is close, that feeling that you get, but it is only part of the feeling I am referring to. Being a parent is another, I suppose. Building a house. Writing a book. Sailing. Winning the Nobel Prize. But these moments of inspiration have endings, sometimes sad ones. They are only part of the story. What I am feeling is so much more.
I am constantly perplexed at the suffering of the world. Poverty. Abuse. Neglect. Hunger. Disease. Homelessness. A prayer of repentance puts it this way: "We have not done that which we ought to have done, and there is no good in us." Proverbs exhorts, "Don’t withhold good from those that deserve it." Jesus says, "What you did to the least of these you did to me."
This dilemma recurs periodically, for me, and I think about David, "a man after God’s own heart," who built himself the most elaborate house the world had seen to that point, despite the lepers and cripples and widows and orphans inhabiting the same world he did. Good King Wenceslas didn’t stop feasting when he saw the poor man outside in the snow. He invited him in. I spent three dollars on a cup of coffee today and it was good in the Genesis 1 sense. However, I could have literally saved someone’s life with those three dollars. To write that sentence makes me want to die. I have no idea how to reconcile this tension. Because steak and beer, roller coasters, clothes, vacations, cabins at the lake, surfing trips--these are terribly wonderful things. Could someone please tell me how to feast in a world of famine…?
Sunday, January 18, 2009
I guess I’ve always been an emotional person. If you’ve ever seen me play organized sports or really anything competitive then you know that I generally wear my heart on my sleeve. Give me a pint and an argument and you’ll find that I am easily animated. That’s why it’s sort of strange how stoical I am in church. I don’t seem to trust my emotions in that setting. I’m not the one with her hands raised, jumping up and down. Not that our faith isn’t big enough to include me and our friend in the front row. Nevertheless, when I play a sport or a game I am a different sort of person. It is the same even with music or art or school. In the classroom or workplace, when creating art or music, I trust my emotions far more than my physical ability or my IQ. I wonder if my faith suffers because I don’t “play” the same way in church that I do in creative venues, academic settings, or athletic events. I’ve been noticing my mood go through sweeping pendulum swings lately. “I love it here." “I just want to move somewhere else." “I love my diabetic restrictive diet." “If I don’t get a cinnamon bun I am going to strangle somebody." “God is good." “Where are You?" Chalk it up to loneliness perhaps, but I have been getting choked up a lot lately, often over really inconsequential or contrived things a la Hollywood. I wonder if my hermit life of over-working is making me look to books and TV characters for that emotional interaction that people who live regular lives experience everyday. I'm pretty sure that I'm the only one of us that never got into Lost when it first came out, but nevertheless, yesterday I was watching an episode and towards the end Hurley (the big guy) gives Charlie (the hobbit) a jar of peanut butter and well, it just got me...lame, I know. Oh, and one late night at work last week, I took a much needed break and decided to watch an episode of West Wing Season 3 where President Bartlett told CJ that he needed her in order to win a second term and I thought, "Man, I wish the President of the United States would say that to me some day" (insert tear rolling off my face). Then again it isn't just happening with TV. Books have been doing it, too. The last paragraph of Orthodoxy is probably something worth getting emotional about. Ironically, the passage points out that Jesus wasn’t necessarily the guy in the front with his hands in the air either. Ironically, for a split second, the passage made me want to be the girl in the front with her hands in the air. It's a long one but it's worth it:
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained his Anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.G.K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained his Anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.G.K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy.
Friday, January 16, 2009
I started writing a story in the shower yesterday. The ink all ran together and the paper disintegrated, so this is from memory, but it was about a girl who is washing her hair in the shower and thinking about a place she has been before, and when she opens her eyes she is in the shower in that place and time. It turns out that she can transport between all the showers she has ever showered in. And each time she does it the next thing she says is italicized. Too bad I didn't have my laptop with me because typing doesn't run together like ink when it gets wet. Oh well, tomorrow morning I'll just bring it with me and then when I open my eyes I'll be back there and I'll type it out before the paper gets too wet.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Ch..ch...ch...ch...changes
I love David Bowie. I love that song by David Bowie.
I am feeling the need- the need for speed. Actually, not speed, but rather, change. For some reason change for me comes in the form of a new hair do. Here are my options before my appointment tomorrow a.m. with the most talented hair stylist ever known, Kristin Rochester at Cline's Salon in the Vista:254-1234...hit her up, my guess is everyone could possibly be in need of a paradigm shifting hair cut and let's face it- she's the best- So vote for your favourite hair cut and then call her to schedule your own appointment!
(the one in the yellow jacket)
Friday, January 2, 2009
2008-A picture essay of sorts
How do you measure a year? In Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children, a year gets sealed, bottled, and shelved as a pickle jar. Ready to age - like wine. The reasons for beginning flavour the fight to the end; the silences ferment with noise and colour spills into grey... measuring a year by the places and people we come home to:
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