run for all that is holy!

today i got off the couch, put on my running gear, shoved my ipod into a sock, and ran out into the rain.

here is what happened when i ran further than three miles for the first time in two years, and here is what i learned while i ran them.

mile 1: eeeeeeeeeh i am so wet and so cold and so slow and damnit, tim is passing me because he is running too and he's running so faaaaaaaast eeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhh.

mile 2: waaaah, i'm blind because my glasses are all wet and my ipod is playing "i will walk by faith, even when I cannot see" which makes me suspicious that jesus is laughing at me.

mile 2.1: glasses off. useless anyway. i will go for three miles and then i will go back home and go back to bed.

mile 2.4: more ipod mockery. "god of creation, take my breath away.' mr. crowder, when your breath is literally taken away, you will not sound so smug about it.

mile 2.5: tim is passing me again. WARNING! "that crazy black dog that's chained up by the dip in the road is untied today!" oy vey! i will run in the other direction with great alacrity!

mile 3:  i like running without my glasses! i am in a running super zen. i can't really see anything, but i'm running. i can feel myself moving, and i don't think i've noticed that before. i'm in a weird running zone where nothing really exists except me and my heart and my legs and cold rain on my hot face and lots of fuzzy, beautiful colors everywhere. there are so many sensations and so very few thoughts. i am going to go for 4 miles today!

mile 4: "your love flows like water rushing over me" - another phrase sounds a lot better in a song than it feels in real life.

mile 4.5: wherein i learn that no matter how hard it rains, you still can't catch enough water in your open mouth to stave off dehydration.

mile 5: well, now i have done five miles. but this is not as far as i could go if i kept running. if i keep running, then i''ll go farther. logically, it's valid.

mile 6: road feet rain dry mouth wet hair thump thump jennifer knapp road feet breathe in breathe out road rain WOOF WOOF! wet hill mud road rain thump thump isthatstumpabear? road feet rain

mile 6.5: oh. holy. son. of. road. can't. oh. crap. oh. crazy. legs. come. on. COME. ON. FOR. THE. LOVE. OF. ALL. THAT. IS. BEAUTIFUL.

mile 7 - i am queen of all that i behold. 


mile 0: on the couch. they can bring me my food here all weekend. pretty sure i won't ever move again. three cheers for recreational running: running neither to something nor from something! the heights of ridiculousness and the pinnacle of meaninglessness! but it seems like the act of conquering the body - reigning it in, harnessing its often surprising amount of power, and using it -  seems to have meaning in and of itself. Bring it.

"If you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do... The body is never tired if the mind is not tired." -General George S. Patton

words

if some nice old lady tells you that "You're real stout! I used to pack that much, too!" she is really saying "You're real strong! I used to be able to carry that much, too!"

Some other nice Kentuckyisms:

"Tomorrow it'll pour the rain for sure" = It'll pour

"Call me if you don't care" = Call me if you don't mind

"You'uns" = South: "Ya'll," New England: "Everyone"

's a small world after all

"Jim Scott is coming to do the plumbing inspection later this week,"

"Jim Scott, family runs that store on the edge of 89 and 2004? His brother-in-law was just by my place cleaning the gutters,"

"Yeah, his daddy and mine used to hunt together back in the day,"

"Mmmhmm, way-uhl, get that inspection done and I'll have Mac's dry-wallers come by later on then,"

"Mac's a great guy, married my wife's li'l sister back in '89,"

"Yup, that was a great wedding, over on the Grady farm, they'uns sold that years ago,"

"Yessir, think they sold it to Derek John's uncle if'un I recall,"

"Shady deal, that was a shady deal, I told Derek not to touch that place, but ever since he caught up with my niece he's been impossible to talk sense to,"

"Your niece and Derek? I thought your niece was still going with Jim Scott."

quietness

"in repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and rest is your strength."


quietness is my word for 2012.

what is quietness? not silence because silence is a negative thing. you're silent when you have nothing to say or when there isn't any music on or when the lawnmower next door finally shuts off. silence is absence. quietness is presence. the presence of active waiting, active stillness, active peace. quietness is what is created after silence is carved out. sometimes quietness even has noise in it.

i think that quietness is Spiegel im Spiegel  with a cup of tea and How Green Was My Valley.

quietness is walking with a friend and listening to spring with each other instead of talking.

quietness is turning off the television.

quietness is listening without judgment or fear when you're being criticized.

when you're rejected by people, and you take the time to breathe and understand that it's them, not you - you are quiet. when you have good news that other people don't have, and you keep it inside because that's OK, too, you're quiet.

quiet happens at night when you stop worrying and give your mind permission to fall asleep. quiet happens when you stop letting other people define and identify you, and sit at peace with the identity that Christ has stamped on your forehead. quiet happens when you know who you are.

I Say Philosopher, You Say - Evangelical!

"Switching denominations is anti-ecumenical" - Utopian Dreams

If you really believe that denominations all point to Christ, and you switch denominations, then you are searching for something besides Christ.

I flirted with a lot of different denominations last year, and fell in love, particularly, with the concepts behind Catholicism and Anglicanism. I spent a month in an Anglican monastery and ooooh my goodness, it was beautiful.

So I went to an Episcolean church here for a month, but -

Kathleen says regularly that we need to listen to God's voice wherever God speaks to us. So I waited patiently for God to speak to me in a brilliant, historical Episcopalian service - I waited for God's spirit to move in me in during the liturgical worship - I waited for the theologically intricate message to reveal deep, unspoken truths to my soul.

I spent a lot of time waiting.

Then I visited a Pentecostal Evangelical church. And damnit, if God didn't speak to me during some silly, dancing in the aisle, anti-intellectual song that repeated the chorus 14 times and said "I FEEL! I FEEL!" again and again, and was everything that I have trained my philosophical brain to hate.

So God speaks to me through Evanglicalism. So what?

Maybe we are called to grow where God places us. I want to go to a "cool" church that I can murmer "mmm! mmm! Yes! We can't discard the historicity of the Trinitarian belief any more than we can move on from our pseudo-Germanic roots as a nation!"

Called to Evangelical.

I disagree with so much of the Evangelical church. I feel antsy when they talk about church history, evolution, politics, Biblical interpretation and literalism, women, and homosexuality. 

But the truth is, I've found that the Evangelical church is full of love, grace, and compassion. I believe that the tenants of Evangelicalism - rooted in absolute personal devotion to the person of Jesus Christ, absolute belief in the reality and importance of the Bible, and the centrality of being involved in the world socially and politically - are beautiful and true. Sure, I disagree with how many Evangelicals believe "absolute authority" translates, and I disagree with how many Evangelicals have chosen to become involved in politics. But the spirit, intention, enthusiasm, and purpose is there. And I'm a Christian because of Jesus, and Jesus finds me in the stadium seating of a carpeted mega-church.

Maybe those of us that are raised in denominations that we come to hate and reject need to think about what "ecumenical" means to us. Maybe we are called to where we are placed, and maybe we are called to transform it. I read The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, and when I finished it, I felt confirmed that I'd never go back to the Evangelical church.

But what happens to the church if all the philosophy majors leave Evangelicalism for Catholicism and Lutheranism and Episcopalianism? For that matter, what if the charismatic worshipers leave Anglicanism for Pentacostalism, and what if all the anarchists and revolutionaries leave Catholicism for Unitarianism, and what if the feminists leave the Baptist churches and join the UCC?

I guess that sometimes people have to get out of an oppressive place (I'm not exactly sure what a feminist would do in a Baptist church, quite frankly), but I think that it should be the last case scenario. Instead of going where we're most comfortable, maybe (maybe) we should try and bring our perceptions and ideas into the church that God placed us in. I think of my activist anarchist friend who is steadily fighting for justice in the Catholic church, and I praise God for him. And I think of my gay friend who is quietly fighting for equality in the Evangelical church, and I praise God for her. Would it be easier for both of them to boot it over to a denomination that already accepts their POV and identity? Sure. But I think that both of them bring grace and truth into the denominations that God has placed them in, and that that grace and truth can only be brought by them.

So I guess that I'll keep being a philosophy major noisily fighting for intellectual discourse in the Evangelical church. Can you be a non-Biblical-literalist feminist philosopher and survive in a Kentucky Pentecostal Evangelical church? I dunno. The Evangelical tradition has a lot to teach me still about grace, humility, patience, and Jesus Christ, and I would hate to leave it now. Even as a philosopher feminist.

Back

My New Years resolution was to blog three times a week. I've started late, but I want to keep it up this time. I've disconnected my blog from Facebook, so this is the last time I'll link from the FB. I'm changing my blog again - it was too stressful pulling work anecdotes out of thin air, and storytelling isn't really my favorite thing, either. So I'm just going to ramble, for my own sake, to keep my writing veins from freezing. I want to keep it up until May, when I leave Kentucky. It's my thirty minutes of exercise, except it's for the words in my word cupboard. If I keep them in the cupboard all winter, they won't be very good for hiking in the summer - totally out of shape, flabby thighs and all.

Hope some of you are still around! Love hearing from you when you are.

Monastery Reflections: 11

Monastery Reflections from my time there last April

There's no entertainment here. So little things are delightful. While we stood silently behind our chairs before breakfast this morning, we saw rabbits outside on the hill. It was lovely! I could have watched for hours! And this happens every day - yesterday there was a sunset, the night before the moon was out. There's a tree, there's a bird, there's a ladybug on my blade of grass. How have I never seen any of this? 

Monastery Reflection: 10

Monastery reflections from my time there last April


 Prayer is five times a day. I only go to three. But I add up times, and it comes to the exact amount of church services that I've missed in the last full year of not attending church at all. God gets last laugh.

Monastery Reflections: 5

Monastery reflections from my time there last April.

What a charming little old kindly looking weathered priest, visiting for the weekend. He's simply lovely looking - round face, wrinkled eyes. But I think that I’m gotten too attached to silence. I’m irritated out of all reason when he laughs aloud to his lunch book - during our daily silent lunch (all meals are silent at the monastery - like pretty much everything else). Today after chapel, he walked behind me back to the cells, singing pleasantly some hymn or other. And I was supremely pissed. As I’m writing this, I hear him in the room next door, blowing his nose with a lot of gusto. 

Maybe acclimating back to society after a month here will be harder than I thought.

Monastery Reflections: 4

Monastery Reflections from last April


It's hard not to get the giggles in services sometimes. Examples:

- when the we pray to the "Adorable Holy Spirit." I know we're using the ancient sense of adorable. But... the image is stuck. I'm trapped with a cozy, cutesy third person of the Trinity.

- the old monk struggles with his hearing aid and everyone just plunges on through the Eucharist with abandon - "tick tick tick tick!" - his hand wiggling in his ear, it's whining and ticking at intervals, and Brother P. is rolling his great and mighty voice onward.

- Easter week we're inundated with guests unused to our diet at the monastery, and chapel is interrupted, intermittently, by airplanes overhead and the guest's stomachs growling. Loudly.

Monastery Reflections: 3

The monks look so different outside of chapel. In services Brother P. is majestic, with a deep, strong, mighty voice inside a beat up and lame body. The lines of his body are sharp and defined. He looks and sounds regal. When he's in the role of priest at services, he's so intentional: hands lifted, bread up, never a smile, chants faster and with more purpose than the other monks.

I bump into him outside the kitchen and didn't recognize him. He has little glasses that I didn't see before. I’m taller than him. He speaks really low and mutters, and I can’t understand him at all. He has a sad, needy sort of smile all the time that's asking for to me to smile back. In the chapel, he is Christ to us. At the kitchen, he’s the cook. He's wringing his hands, twitchy, can’t meet my eye. He's very pleasant, soft-spoken, looks a little lost and like he’s trying to remember something that he’s forgotten. 

Roles.

Monastery Reflections: 2

During the Eucharist we pass the peace. I am next to the ancient monk today, bent up double in his chair. I reach for his hand to shake it and he pulls me down, just beaming through all his wrinkles – then KISSES me, smack, smack, on each cheek. 

“Christ is in our midst,” 

“He is and always will be.” 

I hold on to how old and silky smooth and thin his cheek felt for the rest of Eucharist. Christ is in our midst.

Monastery Reflections: 1

I found all my writing from the monastery, and I'm going to post a few thoughts a day for the Christmas season to get these out. They're pretty short. Hopefully they give a taste of my time there.

“You don’t mind the silent work?” Brother A inquires.

I am still finding the silence really restful.

“Good. The usual procedure, is to talk, only when necessary for work, and as briefly as possible.” Brother A's voice falls every few words, and draws out the last word – “as briefly as possiblllllllle.”

When he leaves me at the hen coup to get supplies, I indulge in a little breaking of the Lesser Silence to have a chat with the hens. “Heyo, little ladies,” I cluck, “How’s it goin’? Ready for dinner?” I feel a little bit guilty and I keep an eye out for Brother A.

It turns out that the urge to chat to hens in irresistible. “Hey hey hye, biddies,” he murmurs, “time for dinner! Time for walkies!” Then, sheepishly, “I always let them ouuuuut, give them a chaaaaaance, to stretch their winnnnnnnngs!”

I’m not sure if this talk is strictly necessary for work. (Maybe just necessary for sanity?)

winter

it's snowing, just a little bit, at the job site. when i'm sawing wood, i can't tell if it's sawdust or snowflakes that are blowing all around everywhere. it's freezing cold. i'm wearing seven layers (count them - long underwear, t-shirt, plaid cotton, plaid flannel, wooly sweater, plaid lined jacket, windbreaker) but it's so windy and so freeking damp that you just feel chilled all the time.

---

noisy day. steve is running the circular saw; t is whamming at the nail gun; there's a dirt bike flying by on the road; dogs somewhere are barking. the truck radio is running christmas tunes (it's not really christmas until you sing along to the christmas shoes!) and that makes it totally ok that... it's just started to rain.

--- 

there's a thick frost on everything this morning. it's 23 degrees (eight layer day) but it's a bright blue sky and very sharp cold - not the awful lingering damp that seeps into your gloves and socks. everything is glittering. i want to shake all the trees on the hills because i think that they'd tinkle like bells. even when the sun hits everything, it melts really slowly. when it does start to melt, you can hear the water start to move everywhere, little trickles at a time. we have the studs up for the walls of our new house, and the sun is melting the frost in stripes across the floor.

---

christmas is coming!

coffee shop at christmas

nobody is in the coffee shop yet this morning. it smells delightfully like pine trees and coffee and weed. the guys behind the counter are swapping stories about finals preparation. the christmas music is slow and jazzy and i am cuddled up on a squishy leather couch pretending to write another Statement of Intent but really soaking in a warm bubble bath of smells and sounds and tastes.

i love coffee shops and i love christmas and if only it was snowing!

dear jesus,

they should have an AA equivalent for spiritual things.

love, me


dear you,

they do, hon. we call it church.

even more love, jesus

Guttering and Baseboarding

Why do some days seem so long and others so short?

Today went by soooo slooooowly! We got a lot done, but it just seemed to really drag. T and I started to go all crazy at 3ish (highlight: T telling me "lean on her!" and then when I did... dropping me, and herself. Quote: "That wasn't leaning! That was your whole weight!")

There was another day, too, that was even worse. We all wanted to eat lunch at 10am, and by 2pm, it felt like we had been in Mrs. Sandra L's kitchen for at least a week. When you're so disconnected from time that the morning of the same day seems like it happened at least three days ago, it's a bad day.

But today wasn't really a bad day. We put up gutters around the whole house, just in time for it to start raining, and for us to get to see if they worked (they mostly did. More leaks than were anticipated.). We ate at DQ for lunch, which was a super exciting adventure (also hard to tone ourselves down for going out in public - we laugh a whole heck of a lot at work, and when we get around people, we have to remember to Get Normal for them). And then we put in baseboard everywhere. Kitchen, living room, hallways, bedroom - and I got to caulk a lot of things. I'm covered in white goo still. So we got a lot done, and felt productive, but - oh my, we were putting up gutters and putting down baseboard for a long, long, long time. A couple years, at least.

Ode to Kentucky Mud: A Journal

We're building a new house! I'm super duper excited. This is what I wanted to do in Kentucky - learn to build houses. So here is how we lay a foundation in Kentucky.

Monday: We ripped up the old foundation with a backhoe, then dug out the new one. I got to use the little thingy that checks if you're level, and use my thumb to tell Steve, on the backhoe, whether the hole should go deeper or stay put. So we hacked out the footer and went home, tired and happy.

Thursday: We got to the footer and the sides had sort of collapsed. So we dug out the collapsed dirt, which wasn't much, and then put in the rebar - long round metal pipe-things that you put in a pair all around the inside of the footer. We also put in rebar stakes in every corner, and spent a lot of time hammering them down, pulling them up, and then doing it again, trying to get every single one exactly level with every other one. We got sort of muddy, but enjoyed ourselves. Next up - call the inspectors, get inspected, then pour the concrete!

Monday: The inspector couldn't come before Friday, and it rained over the whole weekend. The footer has a foot of water in one side, and the other side is filled with collapsed, fine Kentucky mud. This is less fun than the first time. It's heavy, caught up in the rebar we had planted so studiously. The mud is so deep and thick that it keeps pulling our boots off when we move. Spleltch, spleltch, spletlch. My neck hurts, T's back hurts, and Steve is still good humored (is he ever not good humored? A question) but has started complaining - good humoredly. Plus, the rebar is getting in the way, and the stakes are sinking deeper (all that careful measuring!) and it's just a mess. But it's DONE!

Tuesday: Inspector comes. He says that we need to "get the mud out of the footer." But we did that! We did it yesterday! Waaaah....

Wednesday: We dig more mud out of the footer. This is REALLY not fun. Also, I notice that the station that plays "Hits from the 60's, 70's, and 80's!" has never played a Simon and Garfunkle song! What's with that? Bigots! Small-minded Stones fans! Lennon-lovers!

Thursday:I wash my pair of jeans from yesterday twice, and they still crackle when I bend them. It looks like Kentucky mud is in this relationship for the long haul. (No comment on my boots. I think I'll have to toss them. Now accepting: Boot donations!)

Friday: Cement arrives. Cement truck gets stuck in the mud on the side of the hill. How many wheelbarrow loads does it take to fill half a house foundation? Seven hours worth.

Tuesday: Show up to level out the dirt around the outside of the footer, and guess what? The sides had collapsed into the cement foundation! Shocking! Guess what we did? Shoveled Kentucky mud out of the footer.

Wheeee!

fragility

"how do you keep from being preachy?" - rolling stone

"the key is not to contrive it - don't bring the same level of indignation to things you don't feel. as long as you keep it as honest as you can to your own feeling, then you hope it doesn't become a pure parlor trick" - jon stewart

it's hard to be loving towards people when you are very concerned with your own identity. in particular when you are keeping careful track of what offends you, so that you can be offended at the right time and show everyone how clever and deep you are. you can be offended about equal rights or discrimination or animal rights or logging or pot legislation or actually pretty much anything.

so then you are offended, and get to defend something, and feel really good about how indignant you are. but everyone sees that you aren't really indignant, and everyone knows you're just being self-righteous (or at least, everyone that matters).

the alternative sometimes feels like being not human. the alternative means only being indignant when you actually are indignant (i got this from jon stewart so it must be true), which means that you only get to be righteously angry when you actually feel angry, righteously, not just when you know you ought to feel angry because this is a righteous cause. so if you aren't a very nice person, or a very righteous person in general, nothing evil will make you indignant. but if you're also a smart person, this will make you veeeeery uncomfortable, because you'll realize holy crap evil doesn't make me angry i must be evil too. so rather than live honestly with your own emotions, you cue yourself up to be offended when you know you should be offended.

everyone (me) is very fragile it seems like. easily breakable, easily offended, easily induced into a coma of apoplectic indignation. this makes it very complicated to love people, because people that we're supposed to love end up saying things, accidently, that cause us to be offended, and then we chose our own identity (as a righteous condemnationer) over being nice to a nice person.

danny-from-l'abri said that "growing up" meant being more solid and less fragile. this is hard.

A Little Pentecostal Lovin'

Sometimes it seems like the curtain between spiritual reality and physical reality gets pulled back a little bit, and you're allowed to dance in the sunbeams before it falters down again. Last Sunday, before church, Jesus found me at BC&T, while I downed soy chai tea lattes and read old journals. Ideas that I'd been mulling over for months suddenly connected to each other, too quickly for me to record and leaving me chicken scratching concepts on napkins and making little triangular diagrams - "LOVE - TRUST - JESUS -> SPECIAL GRACE!" - which is like drawing a stick figure to try and express "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss".

I bundle up and head out to my new Pentecostal church family. I bounce up to church so enthusiastically that I fell down a small set of stairs in my new heels (Lesson: Spiritual revelations should not be combined with high heels). I even make it through all of the hugging and introducing and the overwhelming touching of the South with grace and good spirits.

I have always pictured worship and prayer as a kind of dance. Dancing can communicate love without language being necessary; dancing also has this sameness of purpose and direction that seems to unify more than anything else. I read somewhere that "dancing is the music of the body;" I think that worship is the dancing of the soul. So through all this, I'm still, futily, trying to get my beautiful spiritual ideas down in triangular diagrams, when one of my absolute favorite songs starts to play. This is a song to dance to! (Metaphorically: I am a New Englander, still.) So I close up all my diagrams and stand up, super pumped about worship...

A hand on my back.

"Jesus told me to pray for you, sweetheart."

Eh?

"I felt, ever since we said hello this morning, that Jesus wants to tell you something!"

A kindly, grey-haired lady is kneeling next to me now.

"He feels your pain, baby, and I'm gonna pray that He re-leases you!"

Wha'? My pain? What pain? Jesus, are you telling this lady something about my unconscious pain that you aren't telling me?

"Jeeeesus, I pray for my sister! She's sad! She's suffering! She's empty! Her heart is broken and bleeding, Lord! It is broken! It is bleeding! May she know that YOU answer her prayers, that YOU hear her cry, that YOU will heal her brokenness! Re-lease her! Re-lease her! Jeeeeee-sus!"

So on, so forth. And then, that was that. Worship wrapped up, The lady gave me a weepy hug. I sort of patted her politely on the shoulder.

We don't do this in New England.

At first I was cranky. Interrupting worship, to me, is like interrupting a dance right in the middle. And not just any dance - it's like trying to tap out the groom on his wedding day: "I know you just got married, but I sure would like to dance with the bride... right - now!"

But the metaphor didn't help me stay cranky, because if Jesus is the groom here, then he knows that this isn't such a big deal, and I'm just overreacting. And then I had this picture of Jesus, in a tux, standing by the potted plants in the corner of the patio at the reception, watching my desperate face as I get sucked into a wild polka with a well intentioned Southern lady ("1 and 2 and! 1 and 2 and!") ... and he keeps catching my eye and grinning, because the sort of person that I give my whole life up to in a Divine Romance is also the sort of person that thinks that things like that are sort of silly, in a good, get-the-giggles kind of way. And knows that this nice lady doing the polka so vigorously really does mean well, and loves Jesus just as much as me - just in a different way. There'll be plenty of time to dance. But this sure has been a hoot, right, Laura?

Right.