Flashback: Monastery Week 1

April 2011. The last week of Lent before Holy Week begins.

A monastery in the South of England. 

I've been here for a week and will be here for three more.

Today John cornered me after chapel.

“Are you doin’ all right?” I’m not so great at UK accents, but he’s either from Northern England or Scottland (later I’m confirmed that yes, he is from the north of England). “Because ah I keep seein’ you and hopin’ you’re doin’ all right.”

I hope I don’t like lost, confused, and overwhelmed. I am trying exude “peace,” but I guess that I’m not doing so well.

John follows me to the cells, keeping up conversation. The monastery is observing its daily “Greater Silence,” from 5pm at night until 9am tomorrow morning, and I know that I’m supposed to make a graceful and polite escape from any conversation, but it’s nice to hear a voice that isn’t chanting. Honestly, it’s nice to hear my own voice as well. Even in the Lesser Silence, from 9am-5pm, only necessary speaking is permitted.

John has been here since January – a long term visitor like Susan and that “tubby” guy who is identified by everyone, even Brother Peter, by his roundedness. It seemed rude at first, but I think that the nickname stems from simple amazement rather than meanness. Food here is healthy - but scarce.

“How about the food,” John asks, “how about 2 slices of bread for breakfast?” I’m fine with the food, but “there’s a village just 15 minutes away,” John whispers, “over the wire fence in that direction,” gesturing through the woods. I must look shocked, because he reassures me that “we all go out for food, even Susan!” Susan is a lovely middle-aged lady who has been here a year, and Brother Lewis tells me that they have “hopes” for her permanent residency.

“How about these hours!” he presses on. “God, I never get used to these hours! Have you been to vigils yet?” I set my alarm for 4:50 this morning, but shut it off and went back to sleep. “God! It’s not natural! Psalm after Psalm after Psalm! Seven Psalms or more! They say there’s something in the Bible about praying 6 times a day. But I tell you, I look at these old men, standing in the cold, hour after hour – times change!” He won’t stop shaking his head. He’s still whispering.

“If you need anything, you let me know. The password for the internet computer in the library is 'one great tradition.'” I really do look shocked now. “Oh, this whole place is rigged with wireless, too” he assures me. “They’ve got it everywhere. And if you need to get into the library after they lock it,” at night and early morning, “just ask Susan, she’s got a key”.

I feel vaguely like I’m hearing a teenager at a restrictive boarding school share his secrets. I guess if you’re here for six months, you could go stir crazy. Six days in for me, and the spoken word has already turned into a novelty. So why is John here? And for half a year? Questions.

Kentucky Driving

Kentucky road are like New England roads except younger and more confused. I feel like New England roads are curvy in a much more peaceful, old sort of way. I guess that I get the vibe that NH curves make sense.   They seem more gracious to the average driver. Kentucky curves never made it out of adolescence. They just JERK and LEAP and go BACKFORTHBACKBACKFORTH like they just can't. make. up. their. MIND! "I wanna go RIGHT nonono LEFT OH! NO! I MADE A MISTAKE RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT!!!" The roads are incredibly hysterical. Also, all speed limits are 55mph, so the roads demand that you careen across them, while they screech at you to GO RIGHT MORE RIGHT MORE MORE MORE WATCH THE RAVEEEEEN!

And also there are a lot of stray dogs in Kentucky and they have their cool kid parties right in the middle of blind curves on the edge of mountains. Yeah.

Besides this, the people that drive on Kentucky roads (trans: Kentucky drivers) also do the darndest things. Last week, T and I got all jammed up behind the funniest motorcade. It's pretty normal to get stuck behind someone who has been intimidated by the berserk highways and is plugging along at 25mpg, but the line was getting super long and we were going super slow. Finally we see that there are some cop cars, with their lights flashing, somewhere near the front of the line. How exciting! Something really thrilling must be going on!

As the road straightens out, we see that there are four cop cars, and they're surrounding a school bus driving at about 15mph. Now speculation is really running high. My bet was that some kid pulled a knife on the bus, and was holding the bus driver hostage until Jackson County succumbed to his demands. Why else would there be four police cars trailing along with this bus?

Well, we finally we see what's going on. The full-size school bus, well covered by its police escort, was empty and being towed.

By a Jeep Grand Cherokee.

This place is really weird sometimes. Awesome, amazing, funny, fabulous... but really, really weird.

Green Wool Coat

I found a winter coat that I really wanted a few weekends ago. It was a beautiful dark green wool coat, and it fit perfectly. When I tried it on, I felt like Audrey Hepburn, and I should have moved to New York and worn cute vintage heels and had a real job doing something that required showering before work instead of after work, and wearing purple eye shadow, and also getting a paycheck.

Unfortunately, a paycheck was exactly what I needed to afford the coat, which, despite being ON SALE 50% OFF! rang in at $119.99. The little green coat was not to be. Neither was the little blue dress for contra dancing, or the previously mentioned vintage heels.

I'm mopy that I can't be super wealthy, and buy delicious fresh produce every day, and look fabulous, and have a new car that doesn't shake, rattle, and roll over 50mph. I'm really, legitimately frustrated that I can't just apply to graduate schools like Yale or Boston College and know that all I have to worry about is whether I'm smart enough, not whether I'm rich enough. I'm pouty that I can't just be a Harvard-type Zooey Deschanel vegan living in a gorgeous in-town loft, a walk away from an ocean somewhere.

So here's my pep talk that I give myself when those particular voices in my head get really loud.

You, Laura, live in Jackson county, the 33rd poorest county in the United States. You work in Owsley county, the poorest county in the entirety of the United States. (By annual median household income). The state of Kentucky contains 29 of the top 100 poorest counties, trailed by Mississippi at 13 and Texas at 10. Fully a third of the poorest counties in the country are in your state.

Last week you put flooring into a house that had holes in the bedroom floor and snakes in the walls and one wall that was a foot lower than the other one because the wood had rotted out.

You put a wheelchair ramp on a house with no doors inside, with a sheet hung between the toilet and the living room.

You have walked around dog poo on a living room rug.

You dismantled a front porch and discovered the seven full trash bags stuffed underneath.

You've jammed yourself into a 8 inch gap to drill on porch railings while an able-bodied homeowner watched and provided commentary, and you've nailed on siding next to a well-dressed, high heeled homeowner, who wielded a hammer better than you (even with her manicured nails) before she ran off to work for the day.

You've met Mrs. L, who keeps hinting at all the other work we could be doing; and you've met Mrs. Mary J, who feeds us and bandaids us and takes pictures of us.

You worked for Mrs. H, who called the office every day to see when we would come back and "finish up what we started here." And you've worked for people like Mrs. Julia D.

Mrs. D's house had burned down a month ago, and her husband and her had built the new one, by themselves, in 24 days. When they ran out of insurance money, they were short a porch, siding, and insulation under the house. CAP was there for three week with church groups, working next to Mr. and Mrs. D. when they weren't at their jobs. The house was decorated completely from Goodwill and yard sales, but was still color-coordinated and shiny-new looking. She made us baked beans and mac 'n cheese for lunch, and when she found out that you were living with 9 other people on a budget, she sent all the leftovers home with you. Oh, and she also taught you how to make little flowers for cakes out of frosting.

You have seen some poverty and despair, and some poverty and ingratitude, but mostly - mostly - you have seen poverty and thankfulness, and toughness, and generosity.

So, Ms. Zooey Deschanel wannabe. What do you really want the world to hand over to you? Who do you really want to be at the far end of life?

I'd rather eat Mrs. D.'s baked beans and climb roofs in ratty jeans than eat organic and wear Audrey Hepburn coats to an office job. I'd rather be like Mrs. D. than Audrey Hepburn, anyway.

Sometimes I just forget.

Bloodstopping

I cut my knee last week at work, and Mrs. Mary J, our participant, loaded me up with sympathy, bandaids, and some Appalachian advice to stop the bleeding: recite Ezekiel 16:6.

Some Wikipedia background on this:

Bloodstopping refers to an American folk practice once common in the Ozarks and the Appalachians, Canadian lumbercamps and the northern woods of the United States. It was believed that certain persons, known as bloodstoppers, could halt bleeding in humans and animals by supernatural means. The most common method was to walk east and recite Ezekiel 16:6, a Bible passage which reads

“

And when I passed by thee, and saw thee wallowing in thy blood, I said unto thee: In thy blood, live; yea, I said unto thee: In thy blood, live;

”

For the interested, here's some more stuff about healing from North Carolina's Appalachian hills, and some information on handling in Appalachia from National Geographic. Haven't been to a handling church, yet, but would like to visit one before I leave. It's so strange to be just two days drive South from my home state, but to be in such a completely different culture. I flew 3000 miles to get to England, and the culture there seemed closer to New England life and times than it does down here.

To quote Sweet Home Alabama, "you should need a passport to come down here!"

Otheriness

Mrs. Mary J needed insulation blown into her roof last week.

Something happened while I was standing there on the ladder, peering into the attic, holding up the plastic tube, while my co-volunteer shoving insulation into the air blower on the ground and Steve bumped around in the roof, blowing lint and whatever else they make this dirty, gray, blowing insulation with. Something funny was going on in that roof.

Something holy.

The attic had a vent across from me, and the sunlight crossed through the dust, the beams, Steve's bent over body, leaving streaks across everything as if wet paintbrush had taken a swipe at them. The lines of the attic and the lines of light were this ridiculously beautiful geometric cross, like it had all been planned out from long ago that here, now, there would be sunlight, and dust, and the roof, exactly like it was in that minute. The dust and lint and bits of paper filled up all the light beams, and the light looked thick and heavy, and I wanted to reach out and pick it up, except it looked so heavy that I didn't think that I would be strong enough if I tried.

At the monastery in England, the incense would cloud up around the skylight and the beam of light would take on the same illusion of weight and tangibility. Everything seemed more deeply real and everything seemed to cross over from where it belonged - the light had weight, the noise of the bells sounded three dimensional, the smell of the incense was tactile.

I think of holiness as a word to describe the other. Tom Wright says that it is wherever the "thin partition between spheres becomes transparent." "We are called to live at the overlap of heaven and earth," he says, "where God's future comes rushing into the present." Where light and smell and music all dig deeper into our senses until each one encompasses the other. This is holiness, or magic, or the weight of glory.

I'm glad that there is holiness under an attic roof in Kentucky with your ears full of lint, just as much as at a monastery in Europe.

 thanks to Tamara for the picture

Strictly Vegan

Two months ago a vegan moved into my community house. A panic attack hit the house (most particularly, hit our gourmet chef in residence, who was halfway through making his sauted apple/pork loin dinner). Discussion ensued! (what exactly does she mean by "no animal byproducts"? Forget animal byproducts - what's a byproduct???) Questions surfaced! ("so can she eat eggs?") And I decided to go on a Vegan Adventure! Since we'd have to be shopping for vegan food anyway, and cooking a separate meal for dinner, it seemed the perfect time to experiment. I've been vegetarian on and off for the last three or four years, and this seemed a natural next step. I decided to take a month and be strictly vegan and see what happened.

Here's what I learned.
  
The fewer the options, the better the fun.
For serious. When all the main roads are shut down for construction, you get to learn and love the twisty, windy back roads. (Who knew that chick peas were the most versatile bean on earth?!) 

Food is on my team now.
When I walk into the kitchen, I feel like I'm going on an adventure with food, not against it. Food wants me to succeed and wants me to be healthy and wants me to party with it. I feel very connected to my food now, and with it, the world and the earth.

Everything fun revolves around food.
Eating differently from your community is like being a leper. Getting ice cream with friends? Out. Eating Erin's birthday cake? Out. And if you do join the community, it won't make it better, because if you join but don't partake - people are sad that you can't eat with them, and sad that they cooked something that you couldn't eat, and talk about it a lot, and you end up feeling crummy that you've made them feel crummy. This reason alone is enough to make me want to drift back towards omnivorism.

There is no substitute for spinach and feta omelets.
This speaks for itself. 

People have opinions about food.
Strong opinions. Almost every day, I get to decide if I'm going to have a strong opinion back, or just chillax, let them have their opinion, and quietly go my way, doing what I believe is healthy and right. Sometimes it's too exhausting to put up a fight ("Yeah, you're right, I don't get enough protein. Or B-12. Or iron. Or Omega-3's. Yeah, I'm wasting away. One foot in the grave, the other in the 5K."). Sometimes it's too exhausting not to. ("YOUR BODY IS JAMMED WITH PROCESSED CRAP AND CHEMICALLY ALTERED ANIMALS AND YOU'RE ASKING ME IF I GET ENOUGH PROTEIN?  IS THIS A SICK JOKE?") I think (hope?) I'm finding a gracious balance of the two. It's sort of the same balance I've had to find with Christianity ("whaddaya mean, Christians don't have any fun???") 

Metamucil producers must be engaged in a world-wide coverup of veganism.
It's the only theory that makes sense!!! 

Everything comes from somewhere.
I had never thought about this very much before. When I started looking at ingredients on the back of cereal boxes, I started seeing objects as a collection of their parts - a collection of parts that compiled somewhere (China?) by someone (a child?) out of something (an animal?). My desk was made somewhere. My shoes, my lightbulbs, my yogurt, my car - everything was touched by so many people before it got to me. Who are those people? Where do they live? How were they treated? Everything I'm touching right now has a story - from my computer to to my chocolate bar. The Amish say that "one must accept all personal moral and spiritual liability of all harms done at any distance in space or time to anyone by one's own choices". I don't know if I can do that. But eating vegan, and thinking about where my stuff comes from, is a start. 

My body needs to be treated kindly.
 For me, it comes down to loving my body, living in it entirely, and treating it gently - it's been through a lot, and it's done its best for me in some tight spots. C.S. Lewis said that "You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body." My body isn't an inseparable "me," but something that "me" has charge over. (Philosophically, this idea has some huge holes, but they're all really boring holes, so I won't take the trouble to patch them up here.) I want to encourage it, coax it to be good, reward it when it succeeds, be understanding when it fails. All in all, having a body is like having a puppy - a lot of patience, flexibility, and kindness are necessary when dealing with its very unruly ways. My soul has been charged with taking care of my silly body, and I need to be kind to it and treat it with compassion, and veganism helps me be more aware of my body, the types of food that I eat, and what my body needs in order to thrive. Poor body. It really does try.

So. My one month trial of eating vegan ended two weeks ago.  There were definitely some cons. I'm not sure how long I can live in community and be a pre-hibernating bear, eating berries and nuts while cheesecake is being passed around. But I also don't know how long I can live with myself with questions like "where did this come from?" and "what is this doing to my body?" So for now -  

the vegan adventure continues! Long live plant life! Long live tofurkey! Long live Ghirardelli chocolate bars! Viva La Veg!

Rainy Day

I got behind in posting some of these, so the next batch of posts are a bit old.

It rained today in Kentucky.

I've been here since May, and today was the first "Rainy Day" we've had. Apparently it takes a hurricane's sideswipe [Lee's]  to get some all out rainy days. It does rains here, but usually loud and demanding and short cloudbursts - "GET OFF THE ROOF, SHE'S ROLLING IN!" - that take you from blue sky with white clouds to purple sky with green lightening in under 3 minutes. From the time that we first spot the darkness rolling in, sometimes there's barely time to get all the power tools under a porch. There are some days that we wait out the cloudburst sitting in the truck ("Is she passing?"..."Maybe.".... "Is it lightening up?".... "Could be"...."Could you scootch your leg over a bit?".... "Sorry."....). There are some days that it's gone from sunny to hurricane back to sunny in under half an hour.

It started raining Sunday night, and rained all Labor Day, and when I woke up this morning, I got to listen to rain on our metal roof for awhile before rolling out of bed. Three months of sweltering, humid, sun-blasting work days had conditioned me so effectively that I am now unable to make common-sense clothing decisions, and I deeply regretted my choice of shorts for every minute of our freezing cold, soaking wet afternoon.

Well, maybe just chilly and damp.

So we did what we do on rainy days in Kentucky - which is actually the same as what we do on sunny days in Kentucky - which is build us some houses! We did a (mostly) inside job today - ripping up old flooring in a kitchen and putting down some new stuff. There was some water damage on the kitchen floor, so our plan was to rip up the first layer and put down some linoleum. We ripped off the first layer - imitation wood - and found that the plastic tiles underneath were destroyed, too. So we ripped up the plastic tiles, and found that the plywood underneath the plastic tiles was rotten, too. So we ripped up the plywood and found out that the 2X6 supporting beams under the whole house were rotten as well...

So we spent a rainy, Kentucky day in a wee little broken down kitchen, ripping up floors for what seemed like all eternity. Ogres are not the only thing like onions.

Kentucky

For the first time today, I loved Kentucky.

I was up on the roof, 95 degrees out, wearing my cutoff t-shirt and a 10pb tool belt. Sweat was beading up and rolling into my eyes, and I could feel my arms getting a sunburn. I'm crawling around on all fours, holding an electric drill in one hand and a fistful of screws in the other, dropping twice as many screws as I get into the roof. My fingers are having trouble with the screws - the tin roof is so hot from the sun that I'm wearing super bulky leather gloves to keep from burning myself. My sneakers are damp and slipping, just a bit, on the metal.

And I stand up, and just look. Old cracked sheds on the property and across the street. A lame beagle trotting unevenly, aiming for the shade of a cluster of old trees. Chickens running loose across the one lane dirt road. A tractor in the back yard, just finished digging up the lawn for the garden. Hazy, light gray-blue sky that's thick and muggy. Cicadas and grasshoppers buzzing and buzzing and buzzing, mixing with the noise of air conditioners.

Just over the edge of the trees, I can see the hills - the pseudo-mountains of Kentucky, like moss-covered, mellow boulders just gently breaking the surface of the world, going on and on as if there is no world but this world, no country but this country, nothing but Kentucky hills forever and for always. And right then, on top of the roof, I knew that I was where I supposed to be, when I was supposed to be there, and that I love Kentucky and I love her people and I love her land.

This is good country.

Groups

A discarded article I wrote up for a CAP publication. It was a little too negative towards the group people for 'em. I thought I'd share it here.


I had a lot of expectations coming to the Christian Appalachian Project. They were all good, hopeful expectations that propelled me with lots of joy and excitement down to Kentucky. I expected that I would learn how to do useful things like install windows; I expected that I would learn how to interact gracefully and lovingly with a houseful of diverse people; and I expected that I would have meaningful relationships with the people that I’d serve in Kentucky.

The problem with expectations is that it’s hard to gracefully accept it when they aren’t fulfilled. I assumed that most of my time in Housing would be helping and loving the participants that CAP serves. I assumed that when Jesus said to “love my neighbor,” that my neighbors would be the rural residents of Appalachia. My expectations about who God was calling me to love were so clear that they might as well have been in Technicolor.

Most of all, I assumed that I knew the answer to the question “who is your neighbor?” I was wrong

I landed in Kentucky and in the CAP Housing program just about bounding out of my skin with excitement. I wanted to learn how to build things, and here I was, in Kentucky, 2,000 miles from my home state of NH, building things! Every day was (and still is) a small adventure. I love learning how to use caulk, power saws, and crowbars, and I love stepping back at the end of the day and seeing that I made something. Going home exhausted, sweaty, dirty, and sometimes bloody, brings with it the peace and satisfaction of a good days work. There have definitely been bad days. But even when I’m frustrated and confused and tired and it’s 113 degrees, I’ve still put up siding for a family that just had a burn out, or built a wheelchair ramp for a chair bound man with cancer. What I’m doing matters, in a physical way, to the people that I serve. If my Housing experience was limited to this kind of day, then there would be only beautiful days.

But having meaningful, sweaty experiences isn’t the only thing that happens on the Housing crew. Approximately every other week, five to fifteen well intentioned, pleasant high schoolers, parents, pastors, and teachers flood the jobsites. They are armed with cameras and brand new shiny tool belts. For one week, the Christian Appalachian project is the home of their church, youth group, or college mission trip. Like all people on missions trips, they are eager to help, eager to learn, and eager to make new friends. It is an awful lot of eagerness to encounter at 7:30am.

Helping to lead groups was unexpected, and quite frankly, at first completely unwelcome. I’m not much of a teacher, and it’s even harder when I don’t feel like I have a strong grasp of the material. Instead of spending my time on roofs, cutting timber, and caulking windows, I spend most days helping pleasant Sunday School teachers hold a drill, or teaching a 15 year old how to cut siding… all while praying fervently that I’m doing it right in the first place. Worse than groups without experience are groups with experience – and I get to feel all my insecurities and pride and fear well up as the kindly, slightly bossy Southern carpenter corrects my grip on a drill or tells me off for cutting porch railings “the wrong way.”

I retreated into a hole of judgment and complaining, overwhelmed by a lack of knowledge (when teaching) and a lack of humility (when being taught). I was frustrated that I wasn’t spending more time connecting with the participants, and frustrated that my emotional energy was going towards church groups instead of towards people who “really needed it.” I was particularly frustrated that my work in Housing wasn’t living up to my expectations. I came to Kentucky to love people, I told God in a wave of self-pity, not to herd wealthy high schoolers around on their first Mission Trip. Why am I here at all, God? And God said,

“To love your neighbor as yourself.”

And I said, “But who is my neighbor?”

The command and the question always seem to go together, even right at the original parable. Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, and we fling back in his face “who is my neighbor, anyway? Who exactly am I supposed to love? That condescending friend of my parents who questions my career choices? My micromanaging boss? The girl who undercut my relationship with my best friend? Are those my neighbors?” And Jesus’ answer is always – your neighbor is the person you least expect. Your neighbor is the one who confounds expectations.

My expectations coming into CAP lead me to try and contain my love, to ration it out to people who needed it, and to only use it when necessary. Love that is contained, though, just isn’t love. You don’t run out of love. The more you give, the more you have. Loving is a capacity, not a possession. When I love the people that comes in these groups, I expand my capacity for love, and when I refuse to act in love towards them, it becomes harder and harder for me to love anyone. But when I start to open up to the people that come down to spend their summer vacation or work holiday building homes in rural Kentucky, I start to see something that I didn’t before. They didn’t have to give this week to service, but they did. They come with joyful hearts and just as many expectations as I did, and what they learn in Jackson County for the four days they spend here may go with them for the rest of their lives. Because of my work with these groups, they will have an experience of Christ through the participants and my fellow volunteers. Not only can I help them experience Appalachia and CAP, but they begin to teach me about grace as I learn from faith background different from my own, and humility as I learn how to graciously accept opinions from a passé of experienced carpenters.

Who is my neighbor? It turns out that my neighbor is right next to me, trying to dig a 23 inch post hole with a pickaxe. It turns out my neighbor is behind me, telling me that I’m using the level incorrectly. It turns out that my neighbors are the lades who sits in the shade with their cameras all day and the fourteen year olds who compete for distance in hammer throwing competitions.

My neighbors are all around me. By the grace of God, this year at CAP my soul will be expanded and I will grow in humility, patience, and compassion as I continue to discover, against all expectations, who my neighbor is, and to discover how God is calling me to love them.

Three Years of Manna Hunting

I found the first half of this poem saved from 2008. I wrote the second verse this morning.

My manna dries up overnight - I collect it
relentlessly, stuffing worn canvas bags
until my back and hands and legs are raw
from the desert sun. And then in my tent,
I finally rest and let the flaky bread
melt on my thirsty tongue. And I sleep
satisfied.
The sun rises over cold
sand and my empty stomach murmurs. I
riffle through my bag
fingers scraping canvas
nothin’ but net.

---

Years and years
feeling sweat gather
in the crooks of my elbows
and watching blisters turn to
pus turn to flapping
skin turn to armor.
Years and years of
sleeping hungry, waking up
hungry gnawing sticks and sucking
stones and choking on dust
Years and years
collecting.
Every day, every
morning grasping only
cloth.
Years and years of only
canvas as the sun rises.

Years and years,
and still
the manna won't last.

but my legs are getting stronger.

Trust God, Be Free

Angry and disillusioned with evangelism. I'm particularly frustrated with evangelism to our friends. The people that we love the most are the people that we objectify as salvation targets. And even more frustrated with the fear that arises in a religious community when someone starts to "question". Oh God! She's reading Dawkins! He's taking a class on quantum theory! He's experimenting with drugs! She's visiting the Buddhist center! Quickly! Give her a C.S. Lewis book! Bring him to church! Treat them to coffee and fix them! Our voices fill with fear, our backpacks fill with apologetic materials, and our Bible studies contain hushed conversations about the black sheep who is "questioning."

People we used to go shopping with and eat curry with are now people on The Prayer List. You used to talk about Audrey Hepburn and the upcoming German exam, but now when you meet up you know that this is your chance, that if you don't fix him now he may be "lost" forever. She used to be a full, 3-D person: now she's unsaved. He used to like longboarding and painting: now he's a project.

And through all this objectification and demonization is fear. Total frenzy. If we don't teach them, if we don't give them the book, if we can't prove God to them - they're gone.

This is ridiculous.

People find and love God because God finds and loves them.

No matter how many obstacles you put up, if God is searching for you, then you hear God's voice in whatever you read and whoever you talk to. Why are we afraid when someone "wanders" away? Aren't we just afraid because we can't see the outcome; because we're not in control; because we don't trust God?

And a thought on wandering: sometimes people need to get away and hear fresh voices and experiment intellectually with new ideas before they embrace God for who God  is. We should be constantly encouraging people let go of what they think they know in order to find truth. These people aren't usually abandoning God - they're leaving their own perception of God, leaving their fuzzy upbringing and theology books and half-baked lyrics behind and pushing out on their own. This is hugely difficult, hugely meaningful, and probably a lot more "spiritual" than the run-of-the-mill, unquestioning acceptance that a lot of people are content with. I'm not saying that everyone needs to play chicken with Truth like this - probably not everyone needs to. I'm just saying that some people do need this, and it's a beautiful and spiritually healthy path to take, whether it goes on for five months or five years for fifty years. To an outsider, it's terrifying, because it looks like that you are "letting go of God" and pursuing truth instead. But the pursuit of truth seem to me like it always leads to the same place.

Trust in God. Let go of your friends, and give the control back to God. Sometimes our questions have to lead away from "God", because we weren't really following anything real at all, just a patchwork quilt of traditions and sermons and formulas that we have to let go of before we can really know the real God.

Don't confuse your concept of God with the reality of God. Don't confuse letting go of your concept of God with letting go of God.

And for pities sake, please stop objectifying people that don't believe.

Money

I want to be responsible with my money, and I want to live only within my means. I also want my "means" to be not "what I can afford" but to give as more than I can afford and live under those means. I don't want to be so tied to buying things and having things. I'm afraid of wrapping myself up in life's junk, when so many people don't have anything at all, and so many ministries need resources, and so many of God's servants need support. I don't want to wrap my heart around things.

But in my headlong, breakneck, out of control budgeting and giving and planning and saving... I've wrapped my heart more effectively around "money" than I ever could have just by spending. Trying to stop stuff from consuming me, I'm consumed by the act of stopping it. I think more about paychecks, hours, what I'm not buying, what I need to save, and where I should give, than I think about anything else. Stuff, and the lack of it, is taking over my mind and heart and life.

This is absurd! All I wanted to do was to live outside this ridiculous bubble of buying and buying and hoarding and needing, but instead I've buried myself deeper into it than any one I know.

I do want to use my money responsibly, and I do not want to buy things that I don't need or that are extravagant, and I don't want to waste the resources of a job and steady income that God has blessed me with, especially when so many people are without either. How do I use my money responsibly, though, without the responsibility itself consuming me? God doesn't want me to center my life around stuff, but he also doesn't want me to center my life around the avoidance of stuff.

To live within my means, but not to dwell on it - to give generously, without fear of running out - to work diligently, but without obsessing about paychecks - to buy only what I need, but once I've made the decision that I need it, to buy without guilt. Work hard, budget wisely, give radically, and then - forget about it! And live a real life that is about loving God and loving people, not defined by what I have - or do not have.

All in Your Head

More thoughts of work and sanctification.

When I work ten hours instead of six hours, the difference isn't working the actual four hours more, it's thinking about working the extra four hours. It's not hard to work from noon to four, but at nine there is a huge difference in my mind between staying for three more hours, and staying for seven more hours.

I guess that this is what makes Chinese water torture effective. It's not what's happening, it's what you think about what's happening.

So God says "whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do it all for the glory of God," and "whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men." This eliminates the pain of thinking about work, and just leaves the work, which usually isn't that bad.

Bathrobe Meditations

I feel like I spend a lot of time praying that God will "use" me. I am always asking that I will be a light at my work, in my classes, and in my friendships, and praying that God will make me useful for His kingdom. It's easy for me to ask to be a helping hand or a word of encouragment when my friends are struggling. In classes, I want to show my professors that Christians not only think well, but also love well. I want to be ready when people ask for an explanation for the hope that they see in me.

I don't remember the last time I prayed that God would destroy me.

Could I ever walk into my job, and instead of looking for a place to be a light, look for a place to not exist - for a place to sacrifice myself and my ego and to live for others? Have I ever asked God to kill me when I go to school, that I will live not for my own accomplishments (including Christian ones) but be blind to my own self-interest and even identity? Could I ever ask God to annihilate my "self" and leave nothing behind but ashes? Have I ever asked to be crucified with Christ, so that I no longer live, but Christ lives in me?

It's so easy to ask for success! It's even easier when I hide a prayer for my success under a mask of "Your kingdom come." The mask doesn't last long, because as soon as I try to pray for death and failure - in the name of God's glory - I am not a "holy saint" any more, with only the best interests of my classmates and coworkers, but a shying, hiding, reluctant Pharisee who will do any job or any service so long as he gets the credit.

I have been crucified with Christ! And I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

Have to Do

Life is full of things that we "have to do." Not just working, but brushing our teeth, washing dishes, taking showers, going food shopping, and sleeping. When I get out of work in the afternoon, I'm not any more "free" than I was when I was being paid to serve people coffee. I still "have" to do a lot of things. Life is just one "have to do" after another. But to do all of the "have to dos" joyfully and to the Lord is freedom. All actions become sanctified.

Not really.

"SECULAR MEDIA FOCUSES ON THOSE WHO TRY BUT FAIL"

"So Mel Gibson's getting flack for having an affair — something that never happens in Hollywood, but newsworthy because he's hardcore Catholic. Meanwhile, Carrie Prejean continues to be crucified — she's a Christian who posed topless to get work. And of course, there's Bristol Palin — unwed with a baby, talking abstinence."

This is a clip from an article I read this morning. The jist of the article you can get from the title. The secular media is busy destroying Christians, because we're trying and failing, while them ol' sinners in Hollywood never have to take this crap because they never even try to be good.

I disagree with that analysis. I think that the media focuses on people who judge others for crimes that they themselves commit. People don't hate Christians because we fail, they hate us because we pretend we aren't failing, and tell everyone around us what to do.

Christians say an awful lot that "we aren't perfect, just forgiven!" So stop pretending to be perfect, then, stop telling other people to be perfect (my old [slighty fire and brimstony] pastor used to say "the job of a Christian is not to make the world behave better on its way to hell"), and start extending the grace of he who has been forgiven much. 

Love

Thinking about love again. Been trying to do the "love your enemy" thing.  Loving people that are difficult to love. Loving people that don't love you back. Loving people that hurt you, or loving people that are bottomless pits of love, or loving people that you'd rather just bash into the ground.

My love doesn't change them. They don't notice my love, or they don't care, or they try to use it to take advantage of me, or it seems to just bounce off of them.

Love can turn into self-righteousness (if you think your love is "helping" someone), or turn into dependence (when what you call love is really neediness of your own) or become hurtful (when "love" becomes a word for "being nice" and niceness isn't what is best).

How do you love someone that doesn't love you? How do you love without it becoming false love?

You're left with a paradox. Maybe love doesn't change other people (or at least, doesn't guaranty a change). But loving other people definitely, and always, changes me. By loving others, I am transformed.

If I am loving because other people need to be loved, than it will turn into self-righteousness, and dependence, and emotional greed. I will let myself be abused in relationships because I need to "love" the person who is hurting me. I will let myself be obsessed with someone, because they "need" me to be "happy" as much as I need them. I will pat myself on the back, because I am lifting up the lonely and the hurt - I, I am their savior.

But if I am loving because God has called me to be a person who loves, then I center my eyes on God, and love away, regardless of the consequences, knowing that I will possibly never see "results" and it may not make anyone "happier", but I will absolutely become stronger, more compassionate, and more capable of love. My capacity for love will expand, and it will stop mattering if my love "changes" the people I meet.

Humanism, Deism, Jesusism?

Adapted from a reflection paper for my Nietzsche and Secularization class. Good stuff in that class.

No one wants to talk about Jesus!

This includes, to differing extents: Nietzsche, Taylor, my Christian friends, my Buddhist friends, my atheist friends, my favorite Christian rock band growing up, and... me. It’s always about God. Or maybe about “Jesus as Teacher.” Jesus as God is either awkwardly ignored (the theological elephant in the room) or outwardly dismissed.

But the central tenant of Christianity is that God became a human being, which is insane, and that this human being lived in time, under the constraints of time, was documented by historical sources (including secular sources such as Josephus, the non-Christian, Jewish historian of the time), died and was documented as such, and then, with grand mythological flare, came alive again and somehow because of this, humans are capable of being freed from being purely human and can be remade as something greater than human. WTF?!? What kind of an odd compilation of mythology, history, and enchantment is that? But it’s what every Christian church service rests on, what every Christian theology has to bend around, and what every Christian life acknowledges. So why does everyone – me included – want to keep the story to just God? Why, even amongst Christians, is it never about Jesus? Is it because it’s such an inherently awkward story, particularly for the 21st century? (“Yeah, so, like, this Jewish guy was God and he came back to life! Like, sweet, right?”). Instead, we talk about God, and when we talk about Jesus, he is stripped of his status as a God-man (if not in theology, than in casual discussion) and turned into a cross between Gandhi and Kant – wandering around Galilee spreading peace and wisdom.

But as awkward a concept as God becoming man, dying, and coming back to life is, it’s absolutely essential to Christianity. The loss of the divinity of Christ is absolutely the central turning point towards secularization.

Once Jesus loses his divinity, two things happen. First, Christianity becomes a moral system based around following a moral teacher. Moral systems are wonderful, but the loss of enchantment, grace, and the supernatural means that it is only one step more to eliminating God altogether (Charles Taylor is big on this - the loss of enchantment, post-Medieval life, is the beginning of the loss of all religion). Once religion is simply moral rules, then why have a God at all? Why can’t we be moral people, living a flourishing life, without God?  If Jesus is a teacher, and not a supernatural savior, then the focus is on rationality, on human ability to “follow rules,” and on human capability to achieve perfection apart from any outside help. All of these things are completely possible without a God-man.

The second thing that happens is that the moral rules that Jesus himself gave become irrelevant and impossible. How are the commands of Jesus to “give all you have to the poor and follow me,” his promises that his followers would have “no place to lay their heads,” that the poor are “blessed,” sustainable with the kind of Deism that reduces God's plan for humans to having them “ realize the order in their lives which he had planned for their happiness and well being”? (Some more Charles Taylor). When Jefferson removed the divinity of Jesus from him, what he did was make Jesus absurd (how could he make such radical and impossible demands on people?) and irrelevant (since his actual demands are so high, it is impossible that we follow them in reality, so we can admire Jesus from a distance while being entirely off the hook for any real life-change). Jesus’ actual teachings are so insane if taken literally that it seems that the only way to deal with him is to place him in a specific historical context, “mummify” him as a “good teacher” (even while we do not take his commandments literally) and proceed to live a life that “flourishes”.

 If Christianity is just deism and religious humanism, then its lifestyle demands are too radical. But if Jesus was divine, then his commands aren’t just “do this” into a void of human inability, but empowered by him. If Christianity is actually supernatural, then maybe we can become beings that are capable of immense sacrifice, immense love, and immense freedom. Without supernatural help, however, Jesus was a naive 1st century radical who failed to comprehend humanity. Charles Taylor talks a lot about “transcending flourishing": Living a life that's more than just "the good life." This sort of life is impossible without a reality of Jesus as divine.

Goddamn Existentialists

I am caught in an Enlightenment puzzle of predestination.

Charles Taylor, Catholic theologian, sums up the paradox of Christianity and sin nature: it is “why, in spite of knowing we are born to the highest, we sometimes not only inexplicably choose against it, but even feel that we cannot do otherwise. The symmetrical mystery is that God can act to overcome this incapacity – the doctrine of grace.”

“Double-mystery” – we are unable to save ourselves. Only God can save us. And yet some people remain unsaved.

Therefore...

God damns people to hell just because. He can chose to save everyone, and yet some people are not saved, so therefore those people are chosen arbitrarily by God to be damned.

It makes sense.
It also stands in direct opposition to all of our human inclinations and feelings.

Many Christians are okay with that. Armenianism, Calvinism, and Jonathan Edwards sacrificed human inclinations of fellowship to the alter of reason.

“If God says it is right, then it is right. My sympathy for my fellow man is sin, because I am unaligned with God’s Reason. I do not understand it, but it must be right, because it is rational. If God wants to damn anyone to hell, it is right that he should do so, and I will stifle my sympathy for souls damned to hell because reason dictates I must”.

God gave us reason, and Kant says that means that He is reasonable.

But God also gave us sympathy.

So why assume that our sympathy is tainted by sin (and must go) but our reason is untainted?

Why follow our logic at the expense of our sympathies, instead of following our sympathies at the expense of logic? Who says that reason must always win? What if our reason is corrupt, just like our sympathies? Is the decision to choose logic over sympathy simply... arbitrary?

What if there is logic that we cannot understand because it is God’s, and our sympathies are all we have to guide us at this standstill?

Taylor sees that Calvinists and Arminianists and Jonathan Edwards followed the “logic through to the most counter-intuitive.” Logic lead to a place that didn’t even make sense. The conclusion of Logic produced a God that was entirely different from the God of Logic’s premise.

Taylor’s solution – multiculturalism.

“This wasn’t the only way that the double mystery could be articulated. Eastern fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa, put things differently.”

The elevation of logic over sympathy may not be arbitrary – it may be cultural.

Western conceptions of “truth” – enlightenment conceptions of “reason” – vs. Eastern traditions.

Is the fact that “logic leads to truth” a Western bias?

Can something besides logic lead to truth?

Can our sympathy and logic conflict, and sympathy wins?

But... isn’t that a dangerous idea if one has immoral sympathies?

Why does that seem more dangerous than if one has immoral rationality?

If logic can be as corrupted as sympathy, how else can we reach Truth?

Enter existentialism.

Sheftu isn't coming?!?

I always used to ask, "is this it?" in a horrified, unbelieving tone - getting up, going to work, getting paid, buying what you need, going to church, making friends, shopping for clothes and on and on and on. I read Mara, Daughter of the Nile too many times and honestly could not believe that life would ever be anything other than an epic adventure story where not only does the girl save the day, but she gets the guy at the end.

Then I started to wonder - "is this it?" really? Can't we all go and be missionaries and die for Christ and do wild and wonderful things on the edge of a precipice? Can't I escape reality through my religion? Is this really it? Can't there be more?

And God's answer keeps being - until you do this, here, I will never entrust you with that, there. Until you are faithful with few, I will not give you many. Until you can go home graciously to your parents at night, until you can work industriously at writing papers that you hate, until you can keep your room clean, until you can learn what I want you to learn in this little universe that I have given you, I will never let you loose on to the large and grand and wonderful universe that perhaps one day I will let you play in. Be patient.

Is this it? Well... yeah. Today it is.