Merrys Cloister

Charity

2012-01-19T18:35:00.004-05:00

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

I got home this evening with enough time before dark to shovel the three inches of snow that had accumulated during the day. Armed with shovel and broom, I made my way outside.

About five minutes into the job, a woman came by with a shovel and started talking my ear off.

“I’m just coming by to say hello, know what I’m sayin’? What a pretty dog you have there! I have a dog too, a little terrier named Pepper. She got a brown patch by her eye and a red one on her back, you may have seen her. There’s quite a lot of snow isn’t there? I came home today and had to do just what you’re doing here now. Now I’m just going around and saying hello, preaching the word ya know, and I got this shovel here, but I don’t mean to shovel no snow. I’m just going around spreading the message. I live over on Portland near the Mayor’s house, but my real home is over at Bethel Baptist, at all the Lord's churches really. You can ask anyone there, they all know Sister Mini. Have you ever seen my dog? Her name is Pepper. That way if you ever see her running around you’ll know who she is...”

As she proceeded and I wished she’d hurry up and ask me for money so I could get back to work, I had time to prepare my response.

“...so I’m wondering if I could shovel your sidewalk for a little money,” she finally finished.

“I got this under control,” I told her. “But ya know, the folks next door are two single mothers with a ton of kids, and I’m sure they’d appreciate it if someone would shovel their place for them. I'd pay you for that.”

“Oh, I can do that!” Sister Mini beamed. “I’ll get their driveway and porch and shovel the sidewalk on both sides so the kids can get to the bus.”

“How much do you want for that?” I asked, quickly assessing that it was about a half-hour of work.

“Ten dollars,” she chimed right away. Ten bucks, huh? I decided not to be stingy, and agreed to the price. It was more than I’d expect to earn for a job like that, but I’d consider if a gift to my neighbors and to the Sister Mini at the same time.

Finally able to get back to work, I proceeded to shovel my porch, sidewalk, and driveway in the amount of time it took her to do the neighbors’ driveway. As she worked, she rattled on and on about her ministry and children who were all in higher education (though one was apparently in jail, which is why she needed twenty dollars to send him) and about how she wouldn't normally do this except that she could help a sister in need, allowing me occasional moments to say nothing more than “Yeah” in response to her “Ya know what I’m sayin’?” Her work was delayed every couple minutes when she stopped to talk to anyone who walked by.

When I was finished with my shoveling and she was just getting to the porch, I decided to shovel the empty lot beside me to be social. Finally I went inside as she was just starting the sidewalk.

In a couple minutes the doorbell rang. “I’m done,” she announced. “I’m ready for my twenty dollars.”

“It’s ten dollars,” I said. “You’re done already?”

“Yes ma’am I’m done,” she said. “But look ma’am, that snow on the porch was real deep, and I need twenty dollars. I gotta send it to my son, ya know what I’m sayin’?”

“We agreed to ten dollars,” I maintained. “You really did both sides of the house? You got the other side too?”

“Yes ma’am, I did,” she maintained. “Look, I really need twenty dollars.”

“Let me go see,” I said, walking over to the corner while she rattled on about what a good job she had done and how deep the three inches of snow had been. When I arrived at the corner, I saw that she had not touched the other side. “We agreed to both sides of the house,” I said. “You haven’t done the other side like you said you did.”

“Oh, my bad,” she said as she headed around the corner. “I got it.”

I returned inside, not at all amused (or surprised), and planned my response to her inevitable demand for a double-payment, twenty dollars for a job that took 45-minutes.

When she returned asking for her twenty dollars, I was ready. “We agreed to ten dollars...” I began before she cut me off.

“Yeah, but that snow was real deep,” she insisted. “How ‘bout we split the difference and call it fifteen?”

“We agreed to ten,” I repeated, “but ya know, the house on the other side is abandoned, so no one’s gonna shovel that sidewalk. If you get the sidewalk from the alley to the other side of the house, I’ll give you twenty.”

“I see you’re a sharp businesswoman,” she complemented me. “You got yourself a deal.”

Not too sharp a businesswoman, I grumbled as I went back inside. She gets an extra ten dollars for an extra ten minutes of work? She’s making a killing on this. I don’t even get minimum wage.

I had hardly sat down and picked up my books when she knocked on my door again. “I’m going home,” she proclaimed. “I want my twenty dollars.”

“You already got that sidewalk?” I asked dubiously, knowing it was impossible to have done it in two minutes.

“Yes ma’am,” she said firmly, “and I’m going home now to let my dog out. I didn’t want to shovel no snow at all today, I was just doing it to help a sister and proclaim the word.”

I looked at the sidewalk and saw that she had managed to clear a shovel-width path. It was not at all worth what she was getting for it, but at least it was something. By this point I was too annoyed to argue, and thought it worth paying the full price just to get rid of her.

“Here,” I said, handing her the money with obvious frustration.

“You’re welcome,” she chirped with deliberate cheerfulness, adding a bow for dramatic effect. “This isn't Egyptian slavery, ya know? Ya know, I wasn’t even plannin’ on shovelin’—I just came by ‘cause I always admired you. Have a nice day.”

“Thank you,” I said too late as she left.

“Goodbye,” she called to my dog. “You know, I always liked that dog of yours better than you.”

“Bye,” I said with the edge having left my voice now that the damage was fully done. “You really did a nice job at my neighbor’s house. Have a great evening.”

After she was gone I sat on the porch and admired her handiwork next door. I hoped the neighbors would appreciate it, which would salvage at least the other half of my ill-fated ‘good deed.’ Whatever point it was where I went wrong, it was clear to me that as far as Sister Mini was concerned, I had given a gift without any love behind it. It was also clear to me that she had known it. And it profited me nothing.

Off the beaten trail

2012-01-17T21:06:00.000-05:00

For those of who have heard of Edmund Spenser, the first association we have with his name is The Faerie Queene. Probably the second is some vague notion of terrible things happening in Ireland. Almost nowhere on the list are his Fowre Hymnes. There is, of course good reason for that, involving the fact that The Faerie Queene is a masterpiece and the Hymnes aren't much to write home about. Nevertheless, I was reading his "Hymne of Heavenly Love" the other day, and found myself delighted with the last two lines of this stanza. For the sake of giving credit where credit is due, I thought I'd pass it on.

Before this worlds great frame, in which al things
Are now containd, found any being place,
Ere flitting Time could wag his eyas wings
About that mightie bound, which doth embrace
The rolling spheres, and parts their houres by space,
That high eternall Powre, which now doth move
In all these things, mov’d in it selfe by love.

For some reason, the image of God before the dawn of creation moving in himself by love sent chills down my spine.

Blessed are the who now?

2012-01-14T12:14:00.001-05:00

I poked around some of my blogger stats and learned that some people have found my blog because it is the #1 hit on google for “ireland work ethic,” which gave me a chuckle. Of course, I also learned it is the #2 hit for “mildew conservatory” and the #3 hit for “can screaming at the top of your lungs cause a miscarriage,” so I can’t be too proud.

We don’t always get to choose what we are known for.

This lesson was more apparent to me last week when I received a card from an old friend, one of the seminarians (who is now a priest) who studied Latin with me in Ireland nearly four years ago. Among other nice things he said, he told me that he admired my “constant spirit of prayer,” and I was immediately struck by two ironies.

The first was whom it was from: I’ve mentioned this friend before as one of the people whose frequent promises to pray for me and requests for me to do the same made me realize how little I actually pray for people other than myself. A “spirit of prayer” was an odd thing for him of all people to “admire” in me.

The second was whom it was to. Seriously? Not to invoke a false humility, but his assessment of me was objectively untrue. I had just been reflecting about the way I had entirely neglected prayer for the past couple months, how the few times I did manage to pray seemed entirely vacuous, how I can hardly believed that prayer was even efficacious. My constant spirit of prayer? Of prayer?

But we don’t always get to choose what we are known for.

In a sense, this is the irony of the Gospel all over again. The poor get remembered as the rich. The weak get remembered as the strong. The small get remembered as the great. And somewhere out in Rome there is a young priest who remembers me by strengths I do not possess, by strengths I was humbled to see in him, and I don’t have the energy to argue.

It’d be just like God to rewrite my story while I’m in the middle of it, to redefine my very weakness as my gifts. Go figure. I guess if he sees us through Christ’s righteousness anyway, I may as well get used to it.

Holy Innocents - A Lament for Haiti

2012-01-12T11:54:00.002-05:00

In commemoration of the anniversary of the the earthquake in Haiti, two years ago today, I thought I'd repost the poem I wrote at the time while my cousin-in-law was among those shaken. We are still a needy, broken people. Come, Lord Jesus!

Holy Innocents
a lament for Haiti

We seek the living here among the dead,
But may we find you.
Where we discover our decay instead
And cannot find you,
Then be at least the cold that slows disease
And slithers through the shelter of debris.

I heard that Herod made a careful search
And could not find you,
But in the blood of Innocents the Church
Still strains to find you.
Be never as elusive as before
And more tenacious than the shattered floor.

We asked you for a king but found his fist—
Now may we find you—
For life, but found a Cross behind the mist—
There may we find you.
And to the slave-girl when the dust is clear
Unveil your presence that was always near.

Mysteriously joyful

2012-01-08T19:18:00.006-05:00

Christian devotional practices from the Middle Ages have included meditations of the “mysteries” around the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. The specific scenes selected for emphasis are called the “Joyful Mysteries,” “Sorrowful Mysteries,” and “Glorious Mysteries,” respectively, with five in each set.

Yet at the close of the Christmas season, I was suddenly taken aback at the name of the mysteries of this season—the "Joyful Mysteries." Perhaps we who read the story of Christ’s birth retrospectively in the light of his later death and resurrection can call these events “joyful,” but to the people involved, to Mary in particular, joy does not seem the most obvious common thread.

The Annunciation: An angel greets a young teenager and announces to her that she will bear a son. The betrothed virgin is troubled, as any mother with an unwanted pregnancy can imagine, but humbly submits to what she knows will be a source of shame. A mystery, yes, but joyful?
The Visitation: The pregnant girl travels eighty miles to visit her pregnant cousin. When she arrives, the baby in the elderly woman’s womb tips his mother off, and the secret is out of the bag. I wonder about Mary’s fear in front of her cousin. Her Magnificat may have expressed relief as much as joy.
The Nativity: The long journey to Bethlehem climaxes when Mary goes into labor in the streets. There is no place to stay, and so the couple takes refuge in a barn, and Mary suffers the pains of childbirth on dirty straw among animals. Joy could only have come on the heels of fear and pain.
The Presentation: The couple presents the poor-man’s sacrifice at the temple, and Mary hears Jesus’ screams as he is circumcised. An old man and woman recognize the child as the awaited Messiah, and Simeon gives a chilling prophesy that “This Child is destined to be the downfall and rise of many in Israel, a sign that will be opposed.” Then he turns to Mary and foretells that a sword will pierce her soul as well.
The Finding of Jesus in the Temple: Mary and Joseph only discover they have left the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem after traveling for a day, and their panicked return must have been plagued by anxiety and grief. When they find him on the third day, the boy chides them for their fear and identifies his higher priorities.

I don’t know if I’m treading dangerous ground to say I don’t imagine these events being times of great joy for the Holy Family as they unfolded. Yet the Church calls them joyful: joyful for humanity, certainly, and thus by extension to the actors involved, however fearful and humiliating and painful they might have been at the time. Perhaps that is part of what is so mysterious about them.

I once wrote a (slightly controversial) post about God rewriting his own story in Hebrews 11, declaring against our available data that various men and women were heroes of a faith that they often did not demonstrate possessing. Perhaps the Church has done that here as well, pointing to this awkward union of God and humanity and declaring it “joyful.” The pain and fear of our human experience is not nullified by the Incarnation; it is heightened, and then redefined.

Only with a God who can enter a human womb can joy enter our human pain. As we close the Christmas season, that is still as much a mystery to me as it ever was.

Tale of Two Grandmothers

2012-01-02T20:04:00.004-05:00

My two grandmothers could not be less alike. There is the short, nearly-deaf, one-armed Polish woman who hardly says a word and is characterized by extreme frugality; there is the tall, nearly-blind, stylish, Southern belle who never stops talking and is characterized by finicky taste. Somehow, I am baffled to realize, I am made up of pieces of both these women.

One night last week as both grandmothers were visiting for Christmas, after the Southern Belle had pulled herself feebly up the stairs for bed, the Polish woman sighed and shuffled her way to me, cradling her stub of a left arm.

“That is one woman I feel so sorry for,” she projected into my ear, unaware of how loud her voice was to healthy ears.

“What’s that, Gramma?” I shouted loud enough for her to hear, startled a bit to hear her speaking at all, and startled that it was pity she was communicating.

“Your grandmother,” she explained. “I can’t imagine losing my eyesight. What would you do with yourself if you couldn’t see?”

And while I agreed with the sentiment entirely, I was surprised by it. After all, Gramma has seen her fair share of hardship, between starting school in America without knowing any English at all, growing up during the Great Depression, losing an arm in a factory accident and a baby a couple months afterwards, giving up family members to World War II, raising nine children with one arm, and surviving a husband who flew into a rage when drunk. All the while, I’ve never heard a complaint, and I almost developed an assumption that her stout, silent 4-foot-10 frame didn’t even identify suffering anymore.

Yet as both my grandmothers shuffle their way into their 90s treasuring whatever faculties their weakened bodies have maintained, none of the differences in their background seemed to matter. None of the Southern Belle’s good looks or social graces that earned her four husbands mattered, none of her descriptions of wealth and yachts, none of her stories of befriending Winston Churchill at a horserace in England. She can hardly see, and that is enough to elicit the sympathy of a woman who has never had anything she deemed worthy of bragging about.

And as the days of their visit progressed, the Southern Belle matched the Pole’s pity with extreme admiration. She raved about the little woman’s “accomplishments” (though she never identified what any of them were) as if she were Winston Churchill himself. For the feeble blind woman, I suppose, money and social graces had suddenly become less flashy.

Her blind eyes saw the strength in the little woman’s silence, just as the other woman’s deaf ears heard the pain in the tall woman’s elegies. Sometimes we need to lose our eyes and our ears a little to find them.

"Here are my mother and brothers!"

2011-12-27T13:01:00.007-05:00

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?

A Dominican friend of mine once explained the fascination with the Virgin Mary to me this way, which made sense even to a Protestant who grew up with sola scriptura on her tongue:

“What is it that makes a saint, Em? What makes a person truly holy?”

I pondered for a minute, knowing to avoid an answer that had anything to do with holy actions, as if the fruit of a holy life were the cause of the holiness. Faith could have been a viable answer, but it seemed a bit vague and would cry for further description, and I knew that I Corinthians 13 had declared another virtue superior even to faith.

“Love,” I finally concluded. “Love of Christ is what makes us holy.”

“Absolutely,” he answered. “And assuming that some of us grow further in love for Christ than others, who do you think loved Christ the most?”

When he put it that way, the answer was obvious. I love my nephews something fierce, but I know my sister-in-law’s love for them trumps mine from the beginning; I love my mother something fierce, but I know her love for me trumps that as well. And it was with that love, the intimate love of a mother that finds its object within her, that Mary loved Christ.

The rest of us are learning to love, some more quickly than others, some more purely than others. My own growth in love is often severely neglected, taking a back seat to other more pressing demands of teaching and research and homeownership and social demands, and now Advent has come and gone almost unnoticed in the bustle of my superficially significant pursuits.

Yet like the baby in Mary’s womb, Christ has been present all along, present within me and bursting out into the world around me. Maybe what is so fascinating about Mary is not what is unique to her—that she carried the physical body of Christ growing within her own body—but the mysterious sense in which she is an archetype of what is happening to all of us (though in our case, in a much less obtrusive, more ignorable way). Mary could not ignore him like I have over the past few months, yet even in my case he is present, spiritually and (sacramental theology would insist) physically.

There is grace to me in that reminder, grace to remember that, whether or not I have been aware of it, Christ has come within me and without me. My own journey of holiness will be a process of learning how to love the Christ who is already there.

Unless the Lord builds the house

2011-12-18T14:55:00.004-05:00

Today we read the great twist in the story of Advent, the great wrinkle as we have been preparing the way for the Lord. David wants to build God a house of cedar, and God comes back to him and says:

“Who are you to build me a house? I built you a house. Look around you at your palace, David: I built this for you when you had been living in the fields with your sheep.”

It is God who builds houses, it is God who chooses the place of his dwelling, not David. David thinks he can make a place for God’s dwelling, but all along God had been building one for David.

Moreover, God does not stop at building David’s palace that can be destroyed a couple generations later when the nation is divided, or a dozen generations later when the Babylonians destroy the city. God responds to David’s well-intended desire to build him a house by saying:

“Furthermore, not only have I already placed you in the very house in which you are living, but I will build you a house that will not fall. From your body, not your cedar, I will build your house, my house, that will never be destroyed.”

From David’s home in the fields, God built him a palace. From David’s loins, God built Solomon. From David’s son Solomon, God built a temple. From David’s children, God built a dynasty. From David’s daughter Mary, God built his Son.

And as we begin the fourth week of Advent, having spent three weeks responding (such as we have) to the call to prepare the way for the Lord, we realize that it is God who has been preparing places. God prepared the way for himself, not in a house of cedar, not even in a tent, but in a womb. God prepared the house for his dwelling within his people, within a woman, within me.

I take comfort in that, as I know my preparations for his coming this year have been no better than that of the people of Bethlehem, as I know I have no palace nor even a tent to give him, as I know my own sleep-deprived, mal-fed body has been too absorbed in exams to prepare a place for him to enter, as I know my own soul is not even a tent but a dirty stable: God has prepared a place for himself despite me and my weariness, without me and my ambitions, within me and my dirtiness.

Advent calls us to prepare, yet we are preparing for the one who has already built his home as he had already built David’s palace, as he has already entered Mary’s body, as he has already entered our own in the Eucharist.

And now, humbled by so subtle a builder, we can only wait.

There be dogs

2011-11-25T21:14:00.001-05:00

There’s a house on my regular walking route with a chain-link fence that contains several dogs whose sole purpose in life seems to be to alert the world to the existence of any passersby. I have long since given up being annoyed at them. They’re just dogs, after all.

Their owner, on the other hand, I find to be unbearably annoying. An otherwise nice old lady, albeit a bit eccentric with her dozen animals and cluttered yard and eagerness to chat your ear off about as much as you’re willing to listen to, she has a frustrating impression that she can get her dogs to stop barking by yelling at them. Were this true, I might not mind so much. Yet as it is, with her dogs to alert her of my presence, she comes running to the sidewalk to chat with me whenever I pass by, yelling at her dogs to shut up every couple seconds while she has me stuck there, even telling me to wait there while she goes to the fence to yell at them from at a closer distance. The dogs, of course, never respond.

There be dogs inside my head, as impossible to silence as these lady’s backyard barkers. I never noticed how incessant they are until a friend started a weekly contemplative prayer group in one of the chapels on campus.

“This is not a time to articulate prayers or come to deeper understandings,” he explained. “The monastic tradition holds that God is beyond understanding, and we find him past ‘the cloud of unknowing.’ This is a time to learn the posture of waiting before him, listening, receiving.”

As an academic who spends my day accumulating and interpreting information, I find silence to be a harder a discipline than any I have tried.

“Inevitably, you’ll find yourself thinking,” my friend went on. “Don’t be upset at yourself for doing so; just gently push the thoughts away and return to silence. Sometimes it helps to have a particular word like ‘love’ or ‘Jesus’ to say to push the thoughts away, but don’t meditate on those words; try to quiet yourself before the Lord.”

In these weekly gatherings, I find my attempts to silence my mind to be about as fruitless as the lady’s attempts to silence her dogs, my silencing words about as ineffective as her yells.

The contemplatives call us to let “your thought of self be as naked and simple as your thought of God, so that you may be with God in spirit without fragmentation and scattering of your mind.” My mind is fragmented and scattered indeed, but there is a longing in me to be whole, to be unfragmented, to be listening, to be in his presence without the constraints of my own understanding. One day, I might learn to be silent long enough to begin that journey.

However long it takes

2011-11-20T14:54:00.005-05:00

Over the summer, the small African-American parish I attend near my home had their annual youth vs. adults Father’s Day flag football game. The event was a fundraiser for the youth group and a generally fun time for all.

They had been preparing for months and, when the day came, it was cloudy and drizzly. As one would expect, the priest prayed in mass that morning that the rain would stop for the game, and I returned home rather dubious.

Yet in an hour when I drove to campus for the game, the sun was out, the grass was nearly dry, and the temperature had gone up to the upper 80s.

“We couldn’t have asked for better weather,” I commented to Deacon Alvin.

“Well, of course,” he said with a joyful laugh. “We did pray about it, after all!”

I was startled for a couple seconds, remembering how I had brushed the prayers off earlier that morning. “Funny how we prayer for things and are surprised when they actually happen,” I mused mostly to myself.

Deacon Alvin stopped in his tracks. “Oh, don’t be surprised,” he insisted. “You gotta believe that God is listening to our prayers.”

But truth be told I was surprised, and more inclined to interpret our amazing Father’s Day weather to Mother Nature’s finicky Midwestern temperament than to the intervention of God in response to the prayers of a little urban parish. I had lived in too many farming communities that had prayed for rain in times of drought to imagine that controlling the weather was as easy as asking God, even in times when people’s livelihoods were on the line. I had prayed for homeless friends or urban teenagers who later ended up in prison or back on the streets. If we want to insist that prayers are efficacious, I’d have to do some mental gymnastics to come up with how they could be.

So months later when it was not for good Sunday afternoon weather but for a friend’s safety from a murderous ex-boyfriend that I was praying for, I found myself with as little faith that my prayers were being heard than I had had back in June.

“We pray for so many things that don’t happen,” I cried to Deacon Alvin. “I feel like when I pray, ‘God, please may my friend not get murdered,’ I need those to be the prayers he hears.”

“He will,” Deacon Alvin assured me, with the same confidence that he had about the weather back in June. “You gotta have faith that the God who is hearing your prayers is a loving God who cares about your friend.”

Flashbacks of seemingly unanswered prayers crowded into my memory. “What if I can’t make myself believe that?” I asked with trembling voice.

“Then pray. Keep praying until you do believe, however long it takes.”

I wish I could end this post with a strong note of confidence in a God who is lovingly hearing and acting upon our prayers, especially the seemingly unanswered ones. I have to admit I still struggle to imagine God is acting in the places I have seen raw evil more obviously at work. In the mean time, all I can do is continue to pray “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” until the first part is true, to prepare the places for faith and entreat God to enter. As Deacon Alvin told me, all I can do is to keep praying until I do believe.

However long it takes...

Prayer of Padre Pio

2011-10-08T23:45:00.000-04:00

Stay with me, Lord, for it is necessary to have You present so that I do not forget You. You know how easily I abandon You.

Stay with me, Lord, because I am weak and I need Your strength, that I may not fall so often.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my life and without You I am without fervor.

Stay with me, Lord, for You are my light and without You I am in darkness.

Stay with me, Lord, to show me Your will.

Stay with me, Lord, so that I hear Your voice and follow You.

Stay with me, Lord, for I desire to love You very much and alway be in Your company.

Stay with me, Lord, if You wish me to be faithful to You.

Stay with me, Lord, as poor as my soul is I want it to be a place of consolation for You, a nest of Love.

Denominational lenses

2011-09-28T13:08:00.003-04:00

Since I seem to be doing a bad job contributing to the blogosphere this semester, I thought I'd at least pass along a delightful chart that I have seen circulating it. As someone who has walked among people in each of these camps, I find it delightfully accurate.

Almighty and merciful God, you willed that the different nations should become one people through your Son. Grant in your kindness that those, who glory in being known as Christians, may put aside their differences and become one in truth and charity, and that all men, enlightened by the true faith, may be united in fraternal communion in the one Church. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

I had a dream

2011-09-11T19:16:00.003-04:00

A little over ten years ago, as I was preparing to go to college, I had a dream. In this dream I was given an unjust traffic ticket (by an officer who was played by David Spade, for some reason), and managed to go to court and get it thrown out. Officer Spade, who had never lost a case before, was quite enraged because the whole situation made him look bad and made him lose his perfect record, but justice was served.

Then in this dream, I was visiting local churches in my beginning weeks of college, trying to find a community of believers where I could be at home. I settled on a vibrant little church with an active college group, but soon ran into a serious problem: Officer Spade was also an active member of the group, and he refused so much as to look at me.

Apparently, in my dream, this went on for some time, and it soon became clear that the tension was getting unbearable for me. I would never be at home in the church if there was no peace. Finally, perhaps during a Sunday school discussion when we were all sitting in a circle, I got out of my chair and got down on my knees before Officer Spade, who kept his face turned away from me.

“David,” I said, “I know you’re hurt, and I’m sorry. I wish there was anything I could do to make it up to you, but I know I can’t. All I can do is beg you to forgive me. I was wrong [a lie, interestingly], and I am greatly sorry.”

From where I knelt in tears, I heard Officer Spade say my name, and I looked up to see him standing up and extending his arm out to me. I stood up and met his embrace, and the hug that the dream ended with made me feel happy for hours the next morning when I awoke.

Justice was not served in the dream, but peace was. As a young, idealistic eighteen-year-old, I decided peace was enough. God was in the justice department; he had called us to be a people of peace.

A month later, of course, “justice” and “peace” became rival buzz-words in the political chaos that erupted three weeks into my freshman year of college, ten years ago today. The world seemed to go mad in these first ten years of my adult life (maybe it always was), and I found myself unable to think clearly in the no-man’s-land between all the entrenched armies I was fluttering between: the small Southern town where I was from and Paris, France where my family moved, the evangelical Christian organization I was a part of and the African American political organization I joined, the intelligentsia in my classes and the homeless folks I met on the street. Justice and peace became equally unreachable ideals.

But today, ten years later, I remembered that dream this morning. There’s still a young idealist buried in me somewhere who wants to believe that it is still possible to be a people of peace, even when justice is unclear.

Oilithreachta

2011-07-31T15:36:00.005-04:00

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my first sestina. My apologies if it's a bit abstruse... the form took over, and I could only try to keep up with it.

The Summer breathes in rain and limestone crumbs
And nestles in the nettles for a rest
Beneath wool blankets of her heavy peace.
I sought her once, but found my eyes were blind
And feet too young to tread her ancient stones,
The incarnations of the stuff of Time.

But Summer’s chief possession is her time,
The time it takes for sprouts to grow from crumbs
Or walls to churn the weight of their own stones.
So in the pilgrimage that she calls “rest”
I rubbed my muddy eyes that lingered blind
And let her redefine the Irish “peace.”

And on the way I met a man, a piece
Of tender paper passing like the time
Between his brittle fingers with his blind
Routine of ritual tobacco crumbs.
He grinned a “Tóg go bóg é”—take a rest—
And perched to smoke his sculpture on the stones.

And as a child I might have cast some stones
Or at the least recited off a piece
Of dime-store jargon hoarded with the rest
Of my resourcefulness I lost in time.
Yet now I sat a spell to cull his crumbs,
Just old enough at least to know I’m blind.

For if there’s grace enough to heal the blind,
It tumbles down like execution stones
Beneath the slab where dogs can gather crumbs.
And on the coast of Inis Oírr there’s Peace
That soaks the rain of Irish summer-time
And trembles in the wind just like the rest

Of us. And we who take the yoke of rest
And find that mud and spittle leave us blind
May learn to see trees walking over time
(If trees could grow in Cheathrú Rua stones),
Or pass the sacramental sign of Peace
As if the dust were Eucharistic crumbs.

For here time passes like the pilgrim’s rest
And falls like sandwich crumbs that tumble blind
On stones that catch as many grains of peace.

Caoineadh Phádraig Shéamais

2011-07-31T09:51:00.006-04:00

The story is told of a father and son in a small village outside of Galway who were crossing a channel late at night to get barley to make poitín, Irish moonshine. When they loaded the small boat and prepared to return home, a storm started to gather and they decided that the boat, laden with the barley, would not make it to the other side with both passengers. The father told the son to cross in the boat and walked several miles alone to a place he could walk across. When he reached the place the boat would have landed, he saw neither son or boat. The next day they found the shattered pieces of the boat and the dead body of his son.

For the next week as his wife and daughter sang keenings over the body of the young man, the father was entirely silent, eating nothing and talking to no one. His friends and family worried that he would follow his son to the grave in sorrow, but they could do nothing to ease his pain. Then one day as the daughter was walking by the river, she heard her father singing this song:

An chéad Mháirt de fhomhar ba bhrónach turseach mo scéal.
Lámh thapa a bhí cróga ag gabháil romham ar leaba na n-éag.
Ar charraig na nDeor is dó gur chaill mé mo radharc
Is go dté mé faoi fhód is ní thógfad m’aigne i do dhéidh.

Tá do mháthair is Niall faoi chian ‘s is fada leo an lá.
D’fhág tú osna ina gcliabh nach leigheasann dochtúir nó lia.
Ar sholáthair mé riamh is bíodh sé ‘lig cruinn i mo láimh,
go dtabharfainn é uaim ach fuascledh—Paidí bheith slán.

The first Tuesday of September sad and sorrowful was my plight:
The brave able hand going before me to the bed of death
On the Rock of Tears I lost my sight.
Till I go to my grave I’ll not lift my spirit after you.

Your mother and Niall are sorrowing and the day is long for them.
You left them a heavy heart that no doctor or physician can cure.
All that I ever earned, were it all gathered in my hand,
I would give it in ransom—that Paddy be safe.*

Never having heard her father sing before, the girl worried that his grief was driving him further from his sanity. She went to a friend of his and related the tale.

“Oh, don’t you worry,” the old man assured the girl. “If he’s singing, he’ll get better.” The father’s song, painful and agonizing though it might have been, was a sign of life in him, evidence of healing.

“When I heard that story,” the Irishman told me, “the pain of the father was so fresh in the words that I assumed it was a recent incident. I asked the storyteller if he had known Pádraig Shéamais or his father. The man shook his head, and I later learned that the incident had happened in 1811.”

*Text and translation by Breandán Ó Madagáin, author of Caointe agus Seancheolta Eile: Keening and other Old Irish Musics

Notes from the Gaeltacht

2011-07-23T20:58:00.004-04:00

If anyone has been wondering about the recent lack of posts, be aware that I’ve been in the middle of another summer language course, again in Ireland, this time for a living language that actually makes sense to study here: Irish. Oh yeah.

When my brain settles down a bit I might write something more interesting. For now I’ll just throw out some brief anecdotes from the Gaeltacht:

The Irish for “I’m sorry” is Tá brón orm, which literally translates as “There is sadness upon me.” I find it a lovely image.

The Irish for “Hello” is Dia dhuit, which means “God be with you.” As the Irish never like to be shown up in anything, even a greeting, the proper response is Dia ‘s Muire dhuit, “God and Mary be with you.” If more greetings are required afterwards, it continues Dia ‘s Muire dhuit is Pádraig, Dia ‘s Muire dhuit is Pádraig is Bríd, and Dia ‘s Muire dhuit is Pádraig is Bríd is Colmcille. I’m not sure what you do after using up the major Irish saints.

As the weather is generally terrible (a dhiabhail! – “Oh the devil!), one cannot comment on the rare beautiful day without inserting a buíochas le Dia! (“Thanks be to God!”) for good measure to avoid jinxing it. I imagine this involves a good healthy combination of devotion, superstition, and thoughtless convention, but it’s fun for a stranger to the language for sure.

A person with dark hair (like me) is called a dubh (“black”) person. To describe a person of African ancestry, on the other hand, they would use the word gorm (“blue”). Having always found the terms “black,” “white,” “red,” and “yellow” to describe skin color to be a bit ludicrous, I find this extremity almost delightful.

And, most illuminating for my fourth summer in Ireland, the Irish language does not have the words “yes” or “no.” The general rule seems to be: Ask a simple question, get a long-winded response. This also seems to explain the almost universal difficulty the Irish seem to have for committing to or refusing anything.

That’s all for tonight, but until next time always remember, Is minic a gheibhean beal oscailt diog dunta! (“An open mouth often catches a closed fist!”), a good reminder for people of any culture!

Eyes of Redemption

2011-07-08T17:16:00.003-04:00

Right before I went out of town last week, a year into home-ownership, I got a hefty check in the mail from my mortgage company, along with an explanation that my mortgage was going down a considerable amount due to a correction in their prior over-estimation of my property value. According to the state, it seems, I live in a rather worthless area of a rather worthless city. It was a striking assessment because, a year into home-ownership, I still find myself quite charmed with the neighborhood.

“I think you have a rather idealized image of the neighborhood,” one of my more disillusioned friends once suggested. I didn’t argue. All is reasons for disillusionment (e.g. here and here) seemed equally valid as mine for fondness (e.g. here and here), and I didn’t feel that I had the right to assert my optimism over his pessimism.

I also didn’t argue because I’ve been told that with regard to another little city in Ireland many times before by various less enchanted friends. Three years after my first visit to Cork, I returned this past weekend for my fourth summer visit, and the residents cannot believe I would willingly spend so many vacations here. I seem to have a history of falling in love with odd places.

I don’t want to discredit the suggestion that I may over-idealize certain places, but it may be that (ideally, at least) the Christian does so in general, not because he is delusional but because he sees the world through eyes of redemption. Perhaps there is a way that my neighborhood can be seen in the light of the original goodness of creation and the hope of the New Creation that has begun already and will be completed in the future Resurrection. Perhaps in that light the robberies and drugs and even the gunshots cannot dampen its beauty.

Either way, I returned to Cork last week with a smile on my face, and I’m sure I’ll return to my neighborhood in five weeks time similarly smiling. If these be eyes of redemption, the world sure looks lovely through them.

Stones

2011-07-07T11:45:00.002-04:00

Flow gently, stream where heroes gathered stones
And I a rock or two to throw; for there
Be giants in my soul, and I have thrown
The first of many stones and stumbled where
The saints once fell as Saul looked on and smiled.
For waters cure the cripple, spittle eyes,
Yet I have stumbled on the very wild
Stones I threw, blind after seven tries.

So flow from hidden springs I cannot see
And wash the mud or scales that still remain,
And if I don't have faith enough to part the sea
With budding rods, then be at least my cane.
For you provided blindness to the ones
Who otherwise would cast a thousand stones.

Et tu, Brute?

2011-06-28T21:39:00.002-04:00

One of the great advantages to being a single person living alone is that you get to feel like a mostly good person. It’s great: when your only interactions with other human beings are by your own volition in the times you’re feeling most on your game, it’s quite easy to be generous, friendly, and hospitable. The single life is a fantastic nurturer of oblivious pride and almost inevitable self-centeredness, and you can look like a saint in the midst of it. It’s quite the ego-trip, let me tell ya!

Married people, on the other hand, have to work their schedules and desires around another person, and their selfishness is bound to bump into the selfishness of the other person. By the time kids come around, there is no longer the faintest vestige of that rather appealing facade that the single person takes for granted. As a loving aunt, I remember holding my infant nephew in my arms as he wailed with colic, and I found myself filled with an inexplicable urge to throw the miserable baby across the room. It’s amazing what other people’s needs bring out in generally amiable people. Seriously—parents never cease to amaze me!

But recently, due to a hapless whim of generosity a couple months ago, I have been finding my single-person facade begin to crumble from beneath me.

It all started on a(n unseasonably warm) Sunday in April when I sat on my porch to enjoy some Sabbath rest in the midst of crunch time. A chorus of neighborhood girls on the porch next door were singing a gospel song and choreographing a rather involved dance to go along with it. I rocked on my rocking chair and enjoyed the sunshine and song, smiling at them whenever they looked my way, and it suddenly dawned on me that I had a package of Oreos in the kitchen that someone had left at my house. Never a fan of Oreos, I decided to offer them to the girls in appreciation for the performance.

I was swarmed by vultures as soon as I did. The five girls shouted into the house and a veritable army of (about ten) children emerged. I allowed them each two cookies, and returned to my house feeling generous.

What I had not planned on was the inevitable change in my relationship with my neighbors that came as a result. I went from the nameless lady next-door to a vending machine, and when any of the children saw me outside from that point forward (and with ten children in the small house, several are always outside), my presence would never again go unnoticed. Eventually I gave them all my Oreos. Then I came up with a few boxes of granola bars I had bought on sale but didn’t like. Then as the attention continued and I neglected to refill my pantry, I had to start getting more creative. I made Chinese tea for them, cringing as the squirmy kids precariously handled my fragile pottery. I invited them inside to make brownies or popcorn. I got out my colored pencils and let them draw. I let them “help” me mow the lawn and weed the garden. And sometimes, my hospitality quotient waning, I merely let them jump around on my porch while I tried to continue reading.

One evening last week, contentedly finished with my Greek homework, I made some couscous and put it over a bed of salad greens, contemplating taking my dinner out to the porch to eat. When I heard the shouts of rambunctious children on three sides of the house, I thought better of it and decided to eat inside. But before I could sit down, the voices unmistakably congregated on my porch, and right as I was deciding to pretend they weren’t there, the doorbell rang.

I identified the ring-leader as a girl who lives around the block whom I had met the day before via the kids next-door. She was distinctive in my memory because she was always filthy—filthy like a country girl, almost caked in mud. I also remembered her because she had tried to keep the neighbor girls from telling me that she hadn’t had dinner because her mom was too drunk to cook. This evening four equally filthy children were with her, and I was not in the mood to be compassionate.

“Can they see your house too?” the dirty girl asked with hardly any greeting.

“No, not right now,” I tried to say in a friendly voice. “I’m just about to eat dinner.”

“Oh, well, we haven’t had any dinner. Is there anything we could have?”

“No, I don’t have much of anything.” It was close to the truth, unless they wanted the last of my salad and couscous that I was trying to stretch for another week.

“Do you have any other snacks?”

“No, I haven’t been to the grocery store, and I don’t keep many snacks on me normally.”

“Can we have some tea?” She was clearly getting desperate, and there was no way I could claim to be out of tea. But I was not in the mood to referee another tea party with my fragile Chinese pottery, so I turned her down again.

“Can we sit here and have you read to us? Can you play some Irish music?”

In my college years I used to fanaticize living in the intercity with children gathered around me, reading and drawing and cooking and playing music. But that evening, with the muddy children gathered on my porch and my dinner getting cold on the table, with the next day’s homework entirely finished and with no other looming projects, I turned them down. I could not pretend not to have tea or books or Irish music or time. This time, it was generosity that had become depleted from my shelves.

The image of the children peering through my porch windows as I began my dinner until I closed the blinds haunts me. The kids next-door have provided many opportunities in the proceeding days for me to exercise my weakened muscles of hospitality, but the dirty kids from around the block have not returned. I hope I get that chance to read to them on the porch one day, but in the mean time the memory haunts me.

Husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, you have my undying respect, as I slowly learn the humility that you can’t sneak your way around. Ironically, hospitality is one of the best teachers of ones own selfishness, and I too am selfish. Here’s to the hope of redemption, redemption that requires the gift of humility to begin.

El Roi - the God who sees me

2011-06-24T22:06:00.000-04:00

I sought thee as the magi sought the star—
Be found by me—
For heaven is so high and earth too far
For ants like me.
But in these pebbles where I often crawl
I smell the crumbs of children. Let them fall.

And I have probed the annals of the wise
To find out thee,
But only saw the mirror of my eyes—
Be found by me.
We cross the globe and chase the setting sun
And find our end is where we had begun.

So in the hollow of my empty hands,
Be found by me,
Like springs that burst within the thirsty land
That’s found by thee.
And in my desert thou hast dug a hole
To be thy hermitage within my soul.

Old School

2011-06-20T22:59:00.002-04:00

When I bought my home last year and took on the responsibilities thereof, I decided I wanted to find a old-fashioned, reel push-mower for the lawn. My mother, a veritable magician when it comes to second-hand shopping, found one at an estate sale a block away from my new home, and the owner of the antique machine was shocked that anyone was purchasing it. I think she paid ten bucks for it.

The old contraption always elicits a reaction from passersby:

“You need to get a power mower!” is a common reaction, which always makes me feel insulted.

“You need help with that?” one fellow asked when I was nearly done mowing one Saturday. Clearly, I don’t.

“That’s the old school!” brings out a smile on my sweaty face.

One neighbor flexed her biceps as she passed, and I responded by thumping my chest. Yes, I am strong!

“Can I try?” children always ask, which gives me a short break whether I want one or not, but does not save me any of the work.

But one interesting reaction this past weekend came from a neighbor who has a push-mower herself. “Wow, that one is pretty heavy-duty! Ours has a hard time handling this grass. Look how low it cuts too!”

It was an interesting reaction because it made me look differently and my ten-dollar estate-sale find. Suddenly, it went from a useless item from someone’s basement to a gem of push-mowers, a vestige from a time when people built machines to handle real work, machines that last.

It was especially interesting because it made me react differently to the next comment, made by old Harold who comes by from time to time asking if he can earn a few bucks with odd jobs. “That cuts really good!” he exclaimed. “Can I borrow it when you’re done?”

Things walk off in the neighborhood. In my first few days here, I had already had my little garden statue of St. Patrick stolen from my front yard (who steals statues of saints?!). I don’t know what antique-gems-of-push-mowers go for at pawn shops, but suddenly, by his mere proximity to my discovery of the merits of my specimen, Harold seemed like just the type to try to find out.

Nevertheless, when my doorbell rang a couple hours later and Harold appeared, asking if he could borrow my mower, I reluctantly handed it over, saying a quick prayer that I would see it again. I knew that the fact that he was poor was no reason to suspect vice of the old man, and I felt a little ashamed of myself for being worried nonetheless.

While I waited, I got back to my reading:

He that sheweth mercy, lendeth to his neighbour: and he that is stronger in hand, keepeth the commandments. Lend to thy neighbour in the time of his need, and pay thou thy neighbour again in due time. Reap thy word, and deal faithfully with him: and thou shalt always find that which is necessary for thee.

Many have looked upon a thing lent as a thing found, and have given trouble to them that helped them. Till they receive, they kiss the hands of the lender, and in promises they humble their voice: But when they should repay, they will ask time, and will return tedious and murmuring words, and will complain of the time: And if he be able to pay, he will stand off, he will scarce pay one half, and will count it as if he had found it: But if not, he will defraud him of his money, and he shall get him for an enemy without cause: And he will pay him with reproaches and curses, and instead of honour and good turn will repay him injuries. Many have refused to lend, not out of wickedness, but they were afraid to be defrauded without cause.

But yet towards the poor be thou more hearty, and delay not to shew him mercy. Help the poor because of the commandment: and send him not away empty handed because of his poverty. Lose thy money for thy brother and thy friend: and hide it not under a stone to be lost. Place thy treasure in the commandments of the Most High, and it shall bring thee more profit than gold.
-Ecclesiasticus 29:1-14

Harold did come back with the mower within half an hour. By that time I felt sufficiently humbled for having been hesitant to lend to my neighbor in the time of his need, for being tempted to send him away empty handed because of his poverty. After all, I knew that the fear of losing the thing lent was more old-school than my mower itself, and was taken into account when we were commanded to lend nevertheless. After all, I was reminded, I shall always find what is necessary for me.

I pray I become more willing to lose my money for my brother and friend, and that I learn to place my treasure in the commands of the Most High. In the mean time, I’m glad to get the mower back.

Language Barriers

2011-06-18T10:42:00.002-04:00

A teacher at the local elementary school was once given a large donation of hundreds of bicycle helmets to distribute to her students. She was grateful for the gift, but was unsure of how many of her low-income students owned bicycles in their quickly-shifting lifestyles that often found them attending three different schools in a given semester.

“How many of you have a bicycle?” she asked a classroom of students. In response, a mere two students raised their hands. Though she was prepared for a non-universal response, the paucity shocked her.

“Are you serious?” she asked incredulously. “None of the rest of you have a bike?”

“Oh, you mean a bike!” the stupefied students responded. “You didn’t say a bike!”

A long-time teacher in this neighborhood, she was shocked at the language barrier she had just stumbled upon between her and her students. How many times had she unknowingly spoken over her students’ heads? How many times did they dumbly nod, chirping “Yes, Ms. Smith” without any idea what she was saying, too embarrassed to admit they were entirely lost? It was a sobering realization, one that still brought her to tears years later when she related the story to me this week.

Having learned from her error, she went into the next classroom prepared to meet this new challenge. “How many of you have a bicycle or bike?” Still, only one or two students raised their hands.

“Are you serious?” she asked again. “You mean that none of the rest of you have a bike?”

“We don’t have them here!” the students responded. “We took the bus!”

Obstacles to communication are endless, even outside the context of some of the drastic cultural and educational barriers she was facing that day. God give us the grace to learn how our words sound to those on the other end of them. God give us graciousness to handle the confusion that mounts in the mean time.

Cornrows

2011-06-16T13:43:00.003-04:00

“I will be found by you,” declared the Lord,
But all I saw were lines of cornrows in
A child’s hair that glistened as she warred
The heat with mud, and so I looked again.
Her brother’s hose created seas upon
The shattered sidewalk as if on earth’s third day,
And her shrill screams outdid the birds in song
To chime that it was good. And who’s to say
That they won’t touch you with their muddy toes
While my well-educated fingers hoist
A heavy page, or that they chose
The better part who never got a choice,
While he who hovered on the waters and on men
Has giggled off for me to seek again?

Two Kinds of Gentry

2011-06-16T13:37:00.002-04:00

“Why don’t we talk about the meeting last night for those who weren’t there?” a neighbor suggested as eight of us sat in her living room after a community dinner. My feelings about the event in question were still rather jumbled, so I passed the torch to another neighbor who had also been there.

The night before, over 25 people had crammed into a small nearby living room to discuss the kids of our urban, low-income neighborhood. As the various teachers, professors, non-profit workers, and councilors introduced themselves, I realized something: not only were only three of them male, but only two of them were black. As a white woman in the room, I felt like a statistic.

Many ideas were shared—a summer ceramics class, more publicity for our community garden, some kind of Saturday school—but I had an eerie sense that we were crippled from the start by our status as outsiders, a bunch of white women who sit around eating hummus, teaching art classes, and wondering why these urban kids aren’t flocking to our community garden.

“...There was a lot of good energy in the room,” my neighbor concluded as I was jerked back into the postprandial dinner conversation. “There are good people moving into the neighborhood, and I think they’ll do a lot of good.”

“Speaking of that,” another neighbor interjected, “did you hear the neighborhood association is considering raising the income requirements?”

“No!”

“I know. I hope it doesn’t happen. I don’t want to see gentrification happening here. I want it to keep its native culture.”

I scratched my head again. Had no one else noticed that of the eight white people in the room, all were college graduates, most had masters degrees, and several were working on PhDs? I assumed whatever was meant by “gentrification” involved a different class of folks, ones with larger paychecks who wanted lower taxes, not our over-educated selves who taught ceramics classes and planted community gardens and experimented with vegan recipes and bought energy efficient appliances.

Either way, I knew both kinds of “gentry” were equally far culturally from the kids we longed to serve, and I didn’t know how I could point my finger and cry “gentry” at other folks. I will try to help my neighbors serve the kids who walk our streets, but I know we do so rather perilously: we respect some aspects of the urban culture, but to serve the neighbors with the tools we have we unknowingly call them away from that culture.

We are of course well-meaning, and can only give what we have to give. For now, that’ll be ceramics classes and community gardens. I hope we can meet our neighbors somewhere in the middle.

Rejecting the Rules

2011-06-14T16:31:00.003-04:00

During my first semester of college, I attended a discussion between an Evangelical campus minister and an agnostic Religion professor (who is now a Unitarian pastor). After answering the question of what drew him toward the person of Christ, the professor was asked to explain what drew him away from Christ. A mere two months after 9/11, the issue of the suffering of the innocent came immediately to his mind.

“I understand all your arguments about free will and sin,” he interjected when dozens of hands shot up around the room to respond with their attempts to justify the ways of evil to man. “I understand that if the rules demand an option of evil to prevent us from being puppets, then a good God would give us the option, and that the choice of evil hurts all of creation, even the innocent. I understand retributive justice and atonement theology and eschatological justice at the world’s end. If those are the rules, then I guess that’s just the way it is.”

He paused, and then said something that still haunts me ten years later. “But... God made the rules. If something seems terrible, we have to accept it as the way the world works, but God made the way the world works. I know you’re going to tell me it wasn’t the way he intended it to be and explain a comprehensive system to understand evil, and I couldn’t necessarily tell you a different way it could have been. But I imagine that God could have. I don’t actually reject God; I just reject those rules, and I suppose if you equate them with God then it would look to you that I am rejecting him.”

Though I wouldn’t recognize it until years later, there was something of Job’s challenge to God in his words, and something of his friends’ rationalization of suffering in our theological responses. It was fitting that it came from someone on the outside, as it were, just as Job himself was outside the people of Israel. In any case, I started to wonder on that November evening if the professor’s demands for God’s goodness were more in keeping of faith than our canned acquittals were.

I bumped into that old professor this week in cyberspace. I don’t have the answer to those questions of ten years ago, but I am grateful for the way he helped me distinguish between my faith in Christ and a closed system of rationalizations that looks cold from the outside.

Amen, Go Lord Jesus?

2011-06-04T14:46:00.004-04:00

There was a song that was popular when I was in high school among the Christian circles in which I was walking called “Trading My Sorrows.” The jist of the song was quite simple: we trade our sorrows to receive the joy of the Lord. Other common trades we would talk about include trading our sin to receive Christ’s righteousness, or trading our death to receive his life. These are all a bit unbalanced as far as trading goes, and in each case we seem to get the better end of the stick. Perhaps that was supposed to be the scandal of the gospel. (I’m not going to attack these happy trades right now, though I have taken the first one to task in an earlier post.)

There was one passage in particular that confused me as a college student that did not fit neatly into the trading rubric. While Luke’s version of the beatitudes says logically enough, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh,” Matthew’s much more quoted version renders it, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted,” a strikingly less triumphant trade. Even if those who mourn have comfort to look forward to, I would ask, wouldn’t it be better not to have mourned at all? What is blessed about receiving comfort, at least as opposed to not mourning to begin with?

Moreover, the Ascension seemed like the worst trade of all. When Jesus is explaining to his disciples that he will be going to the Father and they will see him no more, he anticipates their grief and asserts, “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” How is it to their advantage that he go away in order that he may send them someone to help in his absence, I would wonder. Wouldn’t it be better for him to stick around so that they wouldn’t need a helper? It would have seemed a rotten trade to me.

Thus there is a mystery we celebrate this weekend on the Feast of the Ascension, a mystery that looks ahead to Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit, the mystery that the comfort for the mourners and the Comforter whom the Father sends the disciples is not mere consolation: it/He is further blessing. It is for our good that we mourn, for we will receive his comfort. It is for our good that we seem to be bereaved, for the Spirit has come.

It is good theology to be certain, a theology that says that God will not abandon his people nor allow their weakness to triumph over his redemption. Half the time I don’t believe it; half the time I think mourning trumps comfort and human frailty trumps the Holy Spirit. Thus this weekend the biggest act of faith I can muster is to rejoice.

Go on up to your Father, Jesus, in order that we can receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Alleluia, I suppose.

Jokes that had once been funny

2011-06-03T10:31:00.002-04:00

“I may be 62,” my dad said with a wily twinkle in his eye after he blew out his birthday candles on Sunday, “but I can still pass for 61.”

The joke is always funny to a few non-family members in the room as it might have been to us the first several times we heard it many years ago. At this point for the family members who have heard him say it year after year, however, who have adapted it on their own numerically smaller birthdays (after all, though I am 28, I do not feel a day older than 27!), the joke is not funny as much as it is comforting. It is part of the liturgy of the family, the repeated phrases and jokes-that-had-once-been-funny that let us know that, while so much has changed around us over the decades, some things have remained the same.

“I’m deathly allergic to zucchini, and anything else I can’t spell.”

“It’s as I always say: feta makes everything betta!” (my joke, to which my dad’s response is “Gag me with a spoon!”—he is allergic to a great many things).

“Ahhhhhhhhh...choo-choo train!”

Once upon a time, these jokes had been funny in their own right. Now they produce laughter not because of the joke, but because of the teller. We laugh because the words have somehow molded into our image of the speaker himself, because the words have combined vacuous ideas with a living, breathing person whom we love. We laugh because we love.

And as we grow in the faith of a God who has revealed himself to us as the Word made flesh, the rereading of Scripture and the repetition of liturgy has every bit as much vitality as my father’s predictable jokes. We repeat words we have spoken when our hearts were breaking or when they rose in exaltation, and we are connected to the person from whom we first heard them, the person who spoke them to us time and time again, the person of Christ and his Church. The Word was made flesh in the Incarnation, and words are still a part of the person from whom they are born. Repetition becomes an expression of love.

The family in Asia

2011-05-30T12:43:00.003-04:00

My brother and I wove our way down narrow, dirty Asian streets on which neither of us had been before, hoping almost against hope that we were following the vague directions correctly. Finally we made our best bet as to the correct side ally out of the furniture market, hung a right, and began up the hill, unable to see beyond a couple buildings ahead of us.

And suddenly, there it was: a small building tucked in the ally with a makeshift wire cross on top. No wonder our taxi driver had been unaware of the building’s whereabouts; had we not known exactly where to look, we would have never found the tiny Catholic church.

At 8:15, the room was not yet too crowded, and my brother and I managed to find a seat in which the altar was partially blocked by a large pillar. In many ways, the room felt familiar, as if I had been there before in America or Canada or Ireland or Italy: there was the same holy water by the door, the same kneelers on the pews, the same altar in front, the same statues of Mary and Joseph on either side, the same crucifix in the middle, and the same silently praying parishioners as the congregation gathered. Yet there were other indications that I was most definitely “not in Kansas anymore”—the flashing lights around the crucifix, the florescent, cheap plastic flowers that decorated the corners of the arches in place of marble carvings, the bright red paper Asian characters that adorned various prominent places on the stucco walls.

An old Asian woman on our pew got up and retrieved some prayer books from the back of the room, handing the useless items to us with good-natured hospitality. I smiled and whispered my thanks, one of the few words I knew of her language, and made a mental note to follow along in the completely unintelligible characters in order to be a gracious guest. The Asians made it clear that this pair of light-skinned Westerners were more than welcome in the parish, and their hospitality transcended the language boundary.

When the service began everyone knelt and remained in that posture for the next hour, chanting in the bouncing strains of their tonal language. It could have been a pagan rite for all I knew; it certainly sounded like the ritual of a foreign religion. Of course, it was not, and as the minutes wore on I eventually identified from the particular patterns of repetitions that they were chanting the rosary. After that they moved on to a litany as the room filled up, the old women from the beginning making room for the families that were gathering. Finally, when mine and my brother’s knees were crying out for relief while the old women around us were seemingly unaffected, the congregation sat down.

Rather than a service, the congregation moved on to readings that my brother identified from his rudimentary knowledge of the language were from Luke. They read straight through a lengthy passage, alternating between readers and gaudy recorded renditions with background music, and it became clear to me that there would be no mass at this parish. The reading continued for nearly half an hour before we had to leave to get to my brother’s team meeting, both a little disappointed that we would not have the chance to speak with the parishioners who had exchanged many friendly words and glances with the pair of visiting Westerners.

“She told us, ‘You are family,’” my brother had translated after the first old lady had greeting us in our pews. And I left knowing she was right, that we were family members in this strange mixture of foreignness and familiarity, in that intersection of the West and the East where we could share in their prayers for nearly two hours without knowing the words, underneath a spread of plastic neon flowers and Asian characters and Western statues, in a culture of religious persecution that stripped away any need to distinguish between Catholics and Protestants (considered different religions in that part of Asia) and varying levels of communion with the Vatican and language barriers since there was apparently no priest to celebrate mass anyway. In that small, crowded room that morning, as we knelt on aching knees and listened to prayers we could not utter, we were simply family.

The tallest building in the city

2011-05-19T12:03:00.003-04:00

We left the pub that night and made our way to the cars, stopping in front of my car on the street.

“Is that the tallest building in the city?” my visiting friend said with a chuckle, pointing to a laughably short version of a skyscraper. I smiled and shrugged, the handful of tallish buildings not having merited my close attention in the months I had lived in the little Midwestern city.

“No,” another friend mused, cocking his head awkwardly at the other buildings in sight, “it’s not that one. I forget which one of these it is.”

“Is it that one?” I asked, pointing to another of approximately similar height to the last, suddenly engaged in the scavenger hunt now that I didn’t have to be the authority.

“No,” he hesitated, turning to scan the horizon the other direction. “The tallest building is obvious when you see it. I don’t see it.”

“Well,” I challenged, “it’s gotta be right around here. The city’s not big enough to have its skyscrapers distributed beyond a couple blocks.”

He turned his body in one final 360 around the city. “I don’t know why I can’t see it, but it’s not any of those.”

After the failed attempt to find the building, the three of us said our goodbyes and the skyscraper-authority walked toward his car, leaving the visitor and me to climb into my vehicle. Suddenly, from where he stood a half-block away from us, our friend shouted, “Come ‘ere, ya’ll! It’s right above you!”

Sure enough, we walked out to where he was standing and saw the skyscraper above us, obviously taller than any of the others we had been assessing. The five-story lobby attached to it had prevented us from seeing it as we stood directly next to it. As it turned out, we could not see it because we were so close, not because we were far away.

“It’s like the tallest building in the city,” my visiting friend said a few nights later in a conversation about the presence of God amidst our doubts, about his presence in the Church and the world and the sacraments, about Mary and other sticky theological points for me and my friends who grew up in a church tradition that made his theology seem so foreign, about the kingdom that was apparently in the already-but-not-yet as if the “not yet” did not nullify the “already.”

I looked at him dubiously.

“Really, Em,” he insisted. “We couldn’t see it because we were so close to it, not because we were far away. I think you are much closer than you realize.”

“You really think so?” I challenged flatly, absolutely skeptical about the dubious suggestion that I was missing so many things my friends of greater faith were seeing because I was just so “close” to them.

“I do,” I said unblinkingly. His faith seemed firm enough for the two of us.

All is not well

2011-05-02T19:42:00.005-04:00

Late at night on the Thursday before Easter, a young man was shot on my street. I heard six gunshots and went outside to see him lying on my friends’ yard. We will probably never know why he was killed.

The night after Easter, a little ways south of me, a long-standing feud between two neighbors finally led to one stabbing the other with a kitchen knife.

The next night I heard a gunshot in the house behind me and called the police. I’m starting to think I should put 911 on speed-dial.

Yesterday evening I learned that a cousin who has struggled for years with infertility just had a miscarriage.

And then late yesterday night while I was finishing up a Latin paper, I heard the news that a man who killed a lot of people ten years ago in an event that would characterize world politics for the first decade of my adult life was killed in Pakistan. There were messages of celebrations being sent around the ciber-waves between my friends around the country.

But there was no celebration in me. I don’t have it in me to celebrate death—not this week. Yet in the middle of all those brushes with death, we commemorated the Lord’s death, the only hope we have that our tragedies have meaning. If there is any hope that death is redemptive, it is not because of its perceived justice, but because of its lavish grace. I hope to learn to see that one day.

At any rate, I can’t process my thoughts about death right now in crunch time, but I thought in commemoration of the events of yesterday I’d throw up an old poem from that day three weeks into my freshman year of college when I walked into my freshman composition class and learned the world was changing. Pardon the angst and the melodrama (but honestly, it was an appropriate day for it); I’ve changed as a poet since then, but in many ways my spirit is still screaming in the same way.

God have mercy on the souls of those who died in New York and DC ten years ago. God have mercy on the souls of those who died in Pakistan yesterday. God have mercy on us all.

* * *

September 11, 2001
I.
You normally spend your time kicking the ground
Because he is the only close person around
To look up at you as you trample him down.
For the dirt is the only one who’at least understands
The feeling of crushing, the sickening sound.
Though you don’t always like all the mud on your hands
At least it is someone who’ll always be there.

Does anyone care?
You go to find love
But find only tolerance there.

And you finally scream at the top of your lungs
But the world is so big and your voice is so small
That your cries seem to add up to nothing at all.
And you cry “Hey, can you hear me?
All is not well.
Hey, can you hear me!”
But nobody hears ‘til you speak with your guns.

II.
And wrong has become all you see anymore,
And life has become just one cankerous sore.
Will the wrongs that were done by the rich to the poor
Justify what you do now to get your word said?
You might learn not to hate if there was any more.
Well, if her god is love then he must be dead,
And your hate must be fine ‘cause at least you can feel.

Is anything real?
You sing when you hear
She’ll also have pain in the deal.

And you finally scream at the top of your lungs
But the world is so big and your voice is so small
That your cries seem to add up to nothing at all.
And you cry “Hey, can you hear me?
All is not well.
Hey, can you hear me!”
But nobody hears ‘til you speak with your guns.

III.
Well I don’t have the answers; I’m only a child,
And the wrongs have become so incredibly vile
That thoughts of true peace are exceedingly wild.
But still I have faith—you can call me naïve—
That there’s power in grace and in love through this trial.
At least I have chosen what I will believe.
Maybe I’m chosen; I’m chosen to give.

A way to forgive?
I hope he can show
Us a worthier life we can live.

And now I will scream at the top of my lungs
Though the world is so big and my voice is so small
And my cries seem to add up to nothing at all.
So I’ll cry “Hey, can you hear me?
All is not well.
Hey, can you hear me!”
Perhaps they will hear when I speak with my love.

This is the night

2011-04-25T09:30:00.004-04:00

I wish I had time to write, to process the events of the past week--from the six-hour procession around the city with the Bishop on Palm Sunday, to the night tainted by a murder on my street between leaving Christ weeping in the garden on Thursday night and observing his death Friday at noon, to faith in the resurrected Christ on Sunday that begins the new creation even on the very street on which I saw a dead man lie three nights earlier. You may get a lot of Easter posts as I process it all over the summer (if survive [academically] the next two weeks).

In the mean time, as we are still in some ways living in the night that the resurrected Christ has nevertheless entered, as the empty tomb still confuses us his friends who cannot always see him in a way we would expect, I thought I'd copy the words from the Easter vigil service on Saturday night, the night we celebrated the resurrection before even Mary Magdalen had discovered the empty tomb. These words take more faith than I can muster sometimes—try saying O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer! while a warm-but-dead body lies on your friends' yard, for example—but the Church says them nonetheless, and stands together in the faith that his Resurrection gives us.

Rejoice, my friends; rejoice, my neighborhood: Christ is risen, even as the night lingers.

* * *

Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God's throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!

Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!

Rejoice, O Mother Church! Exult in glory!
The risen Savior shines upon you!
Let this place resound with joy,
echoing the mighty song of all God's people!

It is truly right
that with full hearts and minds and voices
we should praise the unseen God, the all-powerful Father,
and his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

For Christ has ransomed us with his blood,
and paid for us the price of Adam's sin to our eternal Father!

This is our passover feast,
when Christ, the true Lamb, is slain,
whose blood consecrates the homes of all believers.

This is the night
when first you saved our fathers:
you freed the people of Israel from their slavery
and led them dry-shod through the sea.

This is the night
when the pillar of fire destroyed the darkness of sin!

This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.

This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.

What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.

O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead!

Of this night scripture says:
"The night will be as clear as day:
it will become my light, my joy."

The power of this holy night dispels all evil,
washes guilt away, restores lost innocence,
brings mourners joy;
it casts out hatred, brings us peace,
and humbles earthly pride.

Night truly blessed when heaven is wedded to earth
and man is reconciled with God!

By this we know love

2011-04-06T17:15:00.001-04:00

Late one night last month, a few days after the earthquake in Japan, my phone rang. It was my dear friend Benedict, the formerly homeless man I met in college. My heart leapt a bit, worried that a late-night phone call might forebode an emergency, and Lord-knows he’s had more than his share of those.

“Hello there!” I answered with masked cheerfulness, bracing myself for the worse.

“Hi,” his voice on the other end was serious, his gravity unburdened with pleasantries. “Em...” he struggled, and couldn’t continue.

“What is it, Benedict?” I asked, my voice sinking to match his somber tone.

“I was just watching the news tonight,” he explained, “and I saw what’s happening, and I remembered...” he struggled again... “what country was it where your family moved?”

A rush of relief flooded me. “Oh, Benedict,” I assured him, “it wasn’t Japan. They’re far inland in Asia, nowhere near Japan. Don’t worry, they’re quite safe.”

His voice on the other end let out an immediate gust of relief. “Ahhhhhhhhh! Okay, that’s what I needed to hear. I just couldn’t remember, and I was so afraid. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight until I knew they were safe.”

And after we chatted for a few minutes about the whereabouts of my Asia-residing siblings and nephews, family members whom he has met only a handful of times in the past seven years of our friendship, I hung up the phone feeling quite humbled. In his love for me, Benedict has adopted the trials of my family as his own, despite his host of ever-gnawing trials.

Indeed, John tells us, “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, as we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” And though the opportunity to die a hero’s death does not present itself to many of us, I suppose that just as Christ showed us love by entering into our sufferings, we also ought to enter into the sufferings of others. Benedict at least has been willing to enter into the potential sufferings of my family as if they were his own.

That, coming from a man who knows what it is to suffer, was one of the most startling expressions of love I have heard in a while.

Earth felt the wound

2011-04-03T20:37:00.004-04:00

(Apologies for the long blogger silence as I prepared for my recent conference in Montreal and entered the long push at the end semester. Posts will likely remain scarce as I work on final research and prepare for a trip to Asia.)

On Friday I had the moving experience of reading through all of Paradise Lost aloud in one marathon sitting with a group of students and faculty at the university. All morning and afternoon we moved through some of the most stunningly beautiful lines of English poetry, and I found myself shocked by the wonder of creation in Book VII as God separated the waters from the land:

over all the face of Earth
Main Ocean flow'd, not idle, but with warme
Prolific humour soft'ning all her Globe,
Fermented the great Mother to conceave,
Satiate with genial moisture...

But as the evening approached and we moved into Book IX, my professor retrieved his basket of apples, passing them out to all the women as Eve reached out “her rash hand in evil hour” and directing us to eat when

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.

The men of course were not off the hook, and they were directed to follow as Adam “scrupl’d not to eat” and

Earth trembl’d from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan.

It was a moving experience, the first time my heart has ever been quite so grieved to consider the Fall in which I myself am complicit.

I too have taken. I too did eat.

The season of Lent reminds us of our part in this great epic of human history: not the part of the hero, not even only of the victim. Indeed, we who have committed to fast during this season and have found our vigilance waning over the weeks may have questioned such apparently arbitrary strictures to be “suspicious, reasonless,” and may have found our appetites to get the better of our piety. We may have also slighted

that sole command,
So easily obeyd amid the choice
Of all tastes else to please thir appetite,
Though wandring.

Lenten fasting may indeed be an opportunity for penance, but this year I have also found it to be a canvas on which I have painted my own sin. I am the woman who has taken from the tree. I am the friend sleeping in the garden. I am the disciple who has denied my tortured master.

I too need a savior.

To Patrick

2011-03-17T23:20:00.002-04:00

You wear obscurity like Joseph’s coat,
Meandering your way from history into myth
As if they were the same, as if you wrote
It on the wind and dared us probe its width.
For what is harder: banishing the snakes
From where they never were, or gathering them
Like sheep on Slemish, ‘til our memory wakes
Embedded in your verdant clover stems?
Walk on, as if it were the same to light
A fire on Slane as in our hearts or from
Your fingertips, and carve your crosses right
Where we would wrap our arms around the sun.
And where we can't sift form from matter, smile
Like a schoolboy, besting us in guile.

St. Patrick's breastplate

2011-03-17T10:59:00.007-04:00

For my birthday, my parents' gave me a weekend of spring back down South to remind me of what will eventually (I hope!) arrive in the Midwest.

I'd love to write a lovely, inspirational anecdote to celebrate some obscure aspect of Irish culture. But it is my birthday, and my family calls, and the trees are budding under the warmth of the March sunshine. I'll have to settle for the tried-and-true, well-known "St. Patrick's Breastplate" that any ol' google search will assure you was "most certainly not" written by Patrick as if it matters, as if a possibly 8th-century hymn is not connected to the life of its 4th-century generator in this living body we call the Church.

And now I must arise in the light of sun...

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through the belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness
Of the Creator of Creation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with his baptism,
Through the strength of his crucifixion with his burial,
Through the strength of his resurrection with his ascension,
Through the strength of his descent for the judgment of Doom.

I arise today
Through the strength of the love of Cherubim,
In obedience of angels,
In the service of archangels,
In hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In prayers of patriarchs,
In predictions of prophets,
In preaching of apostles,
In faith of confessors,
In innocence of holy virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.

I arise today
Through the strength of heaven:
Light of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.

I arise today
Through God's strength to pilot me:
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's way to lie before me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptations of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone and in multitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel merciless power that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul.

Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me abundance of reward.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness,
Of the Creator of Creation.

He remembers that we are dust

2011-03-09T00:18:00.003-05:00

In the two years that constituted my M.A. program, my sister had a frightening brush with death, my sister-in-law had a miscarriage, my three-year-old nephew had heart surgery, a friend from undergrad was shot, a grad-school friend was diagnosed with Leukemia, a friend from church lost her two-year-old, and two friends from former eras lost newborn babies.

Remember that you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.

But this year, before I could prepare to enter the season that reminds us that sin and frailty ravage our bodies like my friend’s cancer, I was startled by the hope of the resurrection that awaits us on the other side of death. Old friends who have struggled for years with infertility just picked up their new son in Ethiopia. Two of the friends who lost babies are holding another in their arms, and the other is holding one in her womb. The frail bodies of my sister and nephew and grad-school friend have made it through the ailments of their blood and heart and bone and found life at the other side. My family just celebrated the second birthday of my nephew who was born nine months after his brother or sister passed imperceptibly out of the womb.

Bless the LORD, O my soul…
who heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit…

Despite the beauty of life and healing in the previous paragraph, the mystery of the Christian story is that it holds both paragraphs together: Christ does not destroy death; he enters into it, paving the way for us to follow into life. Isaiah says that “He will swallow up Death forever”; he will consume it until “Death is swallowed up in Victory,” until it becomes the nutrients broken down and digested in Victory’s stomach.

As we enter Lent, we are not rewinding the story to an earlier scene before Christ’s Resurrection; we are progressing deeper into the story of the renewed creation. Our sin and frailty that we meditate upon for these next six weeks is the place Christ has chosen to enter; we go there to meet him. Lent is a time of grace.

As a father shows compassion to his children,
so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him.
For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust.

March dawns

2011-03-06T09:57:00.002-05:00

Spring creeps in on elvish toes, imperceptibly magical, an enchantment that takes root in thawing earth beneath the snow long before its victory is revealed to weary eyes. But the victory is already complete, a subterranean furnace that silently chuckles at Winter’s empty domination. The tyrant with his weight of frozen oppression twitches uneasily, tossing his near-exhausted darts in groundless pride, trembling in anticipation of the assassin’s knife.

Yet the usurper’s final insult is his disregard, his ambivalence toward the emperor he has already defeated. Winter reigns on his throne of bleeding ice within a palace of straw, and Spring declines to waste his breath to huff and puff and blow it down; he would rather infiltrate the crags and caverns where Life has crouched in fear, shedding his vitality to melt the rigid hibernation. Hope stands poised to welcome his inevitable reign.

And here I am supposed to be preparing for Lent, yet the season of repentance has waited until Hope is undeniable to appear. It is another of the innumerable graces of the Church that sorrow is never divorced from Hope, that we are never called to enter utter darkness. Death is already invaded by Life, before we even have time to contemplate its dominion. Death may do his worst and it is terrible indeed, but he afflicts us like the Winter on an early March dawn, while Life lies laughing beneath an inch of slush.

True Fasting

2011-02-20T23:00:00.004-05:00

This is a bit of an early Lenten post, but since it’s about time to start preparing for Lent, I thought I’d share some thoughts.

“Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
For day after day they seek me out;
they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
and seem eager for God to come near them.
‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
and you have not noticed?’

“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
and exploit all your workers.
Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
and expect your voice to be heard on high.
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
The LORD will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

“If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the LORD’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
then you will find your joy in the LORD,
and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.”
For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

* * *

A few weeks ago I was up late working on a paper when my doorbell rang. As a woman living alone in a rough neighborhood, red flags immediately went up, and I froze for a minute or two, hoping whoever it was would leave. When the doorbell resounded I decided to go downstairs and see who was there, though I did not open the door.

“It’s Johnny!” I heard from the other side.

“What is it, Johnny?” I asked in a friendly tone that disguised my sinking heart and cringing face, knowing very well that this homeless man was looking for money.

“I noticed the snowplows left a pile in your driveway, Ma’am,” he said. “I wanted to clear it off for you.”

“Oh, that’s okay Johnny,” I reasoned helplessly. “I’m not driving anywhere tomorrow.”

“Well, it’s just that, I can get it out of there for you for five dollars.”

“Johnny,” I insisted with an exaggerated cheerfulness, self-conscious of the fact that I had no intension of opening my door, “I can take care of it tomorrow. It’s a little late for shoveling.”

“But, Ma’am,” he struggled painfully, “I don’t have anywhere to stay tonight. For a couple dollars, I can stay with a man down the road.”

It was a familiar enough story I remembered from my college days with my homeless friends by campus. But I was no longer a college student in a well-lit, well-patrolled campus; I was a single woman living alone in a high-crime neighborhood. And thankfully for me, I had no cash on me.

“I’m sorry Johnny,” I yelled with that exaggerated pleasantness that felt quite hypocritically thin that night, “but I don’t have any cash on me here.”

There was a pause. “Well, do you have just a little change?”

I realized I did have some outside in my car, but I wasn’t about to announce the fact. “No,” I lied, “I don’t have any. I’m sorry, Johnny.”

The incident disturbed me for the next 24 hours or so. I do not know a single person who would suggest to me that I should have done otherwise that night, and I didn’t necessarily think I had made the wrong decision to keep my door locked as “the least of these” stood outside in the cold (don’t worry, Mom!). Perhaps all I could have done that night was to turn Christ away in the form of a homeless man, but there was no way I could have felt good about it.

And now, as we prepare for Lent, I am remembering some words my rector’s wife shared with the women of my church last year. A healthy season of repentance is not only characterized by a time of fasting, she explained to us: the Church has historically understood the discipline of repentance in terms of fasting, prayer, and alms-giving.

As I prepare for Lent and think about ways to include fasting, prayer, and alms-giving into my lifestyle, I am remembering that night with Johnny. We do indeed live in a time that generosity is plagued with the concern of enabling addictions and unhealthy lifestyles (not to mention personal danger). Indeed we do. So did the people to whom Christ initially spoke the radical words from the Sermon on the Mount.

Remembering that night with Johnny outside my locked door, I plan at least over the course of Lent to have cash on me, and to be prepared to “give to the one who begs from you,” as Christ commands us. I rather hope Johnny comes back (during the day!); I hope to be ready for Christ when he does.

History's Single Purpose

2011-02-17T20:31:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to put my finger on something that frustrates me about a lot of modern scholarship and politics (and that of former times as well, but times of yore feel tamer since I'm not in the middle of them), and I finally remembered this strip. Calvin parodies it better than I could explain anyway.

Throughout history, the narrative goes, people have been wicked fools (I haven’t figured that one out—it seems that our enemies could be evil or they could be idiots, but if they are both at once they would hardly be daunting). Nevertheless, we have slowly learned, through a long process of wars and travesties and protests and movements, to recognize that evil and stupidity. Finally, at the climax of human history, we have entered the stage. Wisdom has been made flesh and has become... us.

I don’t have a firm grasp on the alternative narrative I would propose instead, but it certainly involves lynch mobs and concentration camps being operated by people like me, that acknowledges that the twistedness and the beauty of human history is within me as much as it is within the people whom I study in history classes.

May I never lose the humility to see myself as a part of this horrific and magnificent humanity I hope to learn from in both a negative and a positive sense.

Frozen Ash

2011-02-13T02:25:00.004-05:00

On Wednesday evening a dear friend from my M.A. university lost her mother after an abrupt chain of health issues that began with the flu. She was 58.

Thursday morning a plane went down at the Cork airport that has grown familiar to me after the past three summers. My dear friends whom I lived with knew two passengers among the victims and survivors. There were six survivors and six deaths.

Thursday afternoon a gunman (or gunkid, more accurately) entered a bank in a town down South where I have three dear friends in the police department. After the hours-long siege, the teenager tried to leave with a gun to the head of a hostage, and was killed by police snipers. He was nineteen.

This weekend has been tainted with the awareness that these beloved places of my life have been invaded by death, leaving us vulnerable and violated. For indeed Christ, who is the only one who has ever subsumed the death that subsumes us, did not annihilate death; he walked through it.

Perhaps then, if he stands above time looking on at the whole thing as one unit, then in a way he is still in all of it at once, and therefore still in the dying part. That is, at any rate, the only sense I can make of rejoicing at a time like this: if Christ right now is weeping at the tomb of Lazarus or suffering on the cross, then I suppose we can right now rejoice that the Resurrection is beginning, even as we are tasting death.

The New Creation has begun. It has begun in the resurrected flesh of Christ, who still offers his bleeding flesh to us who are still bleeding.

Spring sleeps in winter under reams of ice:
The cold can’t claw the germ of life away,
Nor life reduce the cold of this our slice
Of Illinois all bundled up in grey.

But now the daffodils, long decomposed,
Sleep silently, embalmed in frozen ash,
A crystalline memorial to those
Elusive germs among the burglar’s stash.

For you who stand above our one-way train
Of time have entered in this ice to give
Its April repercussions; our pain
Still kills you as your life yet makes us live.

And in the Valley of our frozen bone
The harvester will reap the flesh he’s sown.

The Blows of Boreas

2011-02-06T15:59:00.004-05:00

Last week I enjoyed my first blizzard (honestly, I enjoyed it). Though it tore up other areas of the region more than mine (I’ve seen some rather shocking pictures), there was certainly plenty of excitement in my corner of the Midwest as well, and the university canceled classes for the first time in ten years.

Even before the university had announced the cancellation (which they didn’t until fifteen minutes before I normally walk out the door in the morning), the atmosphere around town reminded me of snow days in the South. There was an almost festive sense of expectation, a feeling of camaraderie among perfect strangers since we were all in it together for better or worse, and a startling sense of helplessness. The latter I found most interesting.

There was a blizzard coming, and it was anyone’s guess how bad it would be. My concerned mother emailed me from down South asking if I had back-up plans to keep warm if the power went out, and when the snow began falling in all directions at once (including up), there was a buzz of excitement in the library. The blizzard had arrived, and for the next twelve hours we could only wait to see what became of it.

We were all reminded, if only for a day, that we are still connected to the planet Earth, no matter how highly developed our insulation and snow-plows and salt and snow-blowers are. We cannot control the weather, nor can we always brush it away like a bug. That day, even in the Snow Belt where we feel proud of ourselves for our hardiness to endure the blows of Boreas, we could not continue life as we knew it. The weather had halted us.

Life as we know it has returned (though I was grateful for the snow-day since it took me almost three hours to clear the heavy blizzard snow from my driveway and sidewalk), but the reminder lingers as the city plods on through one of the worst winters on record. We do not sit above the planet looking down upon it as God does; we are subject to forces we cannot control. We would do well to remember it more often.

Busting the Myth of Originality

2011-02-03T21:53:00.002-05:00

I remember one spring day, as a college sophomore who spent most of her time pondering ideals and trying to understand the way the world worked, when I stumbled haplessly into a history class. My professor lectured about Plato, explaining his analogy of the cave: we were all in a cave which we could not see out of, but into which a light from above was shining and reflecting on one of the walls. From the shadows it made, we could get a glimmer of the true reality, but the reality we saw was only a shadow of the actual world that was outside, shadows that gave us an idea of the true reality which was always mediated.

I remember listening to him, a nineteen-year-old who had never been exposed to Plato before, and being enormously frustrated. It wasn’t his idea itself that frustrated me, but the realization that I hadn’t come up with it. I had been developing a similar notion myself in all my philosophical ponderings, and had felt rather original about it. But alas, it turned out that I wasn’t original after all:

Plato had beat me to it by well over two thousand years. Drat.

As I recall that feeling of disappointment, I realize that it stemmed from two misconceptions, one of which was corrected in that class, and the other of which I would only learn to correct slowly in the next decade:

One, I was under the misconception that my ideas were my own. True indeed, I had not studied Plato before, and thus I couldn’t say I had been influenced directly by his writings. But I had certainly read C. S. Lewis, who had read and absorbed plenty of Plato’s ideas. Even aside from Lewis, I had been influenced by a church that had been influenced by a church that had been influenced by a church that had been influenced been Plato somewhere down the line. Despite what my 20th-century American culture had told me, I was not an original in that sense. My ideas were not my own.

Two, I was under the misconception that originality was an ideal, that it would have been better for me to have come up with a notion myself than to have learned it from the generations that had come before. We shoot ourselves in the foot and bite the hand that feeds us (to mix metaphors) in an effort to come up with new ideas, when we have a copious abundance of wisdom handed to us like a wrapped gift for us to unwrap and use.

Thank God for all the people who have passed their wisdom down to us, whether we have directly acknowledged them or not. And thank God we do not have to invent the faith on our own. It was always too heavy a responsibility for a nineteen-year-old to manage on her own, even if she thought she had to.

Cowboys and Indians

2011-01-30T16:29:00.003-05:00

When I was about three or four, my older brother and I were playing with our plastic Cowboys and Indians in the sandbox.

“Wawawawawawa!” I cried as I held the rigid body of an Indian to his horse, threateningly aiming his arrow at the kneeling cowboy in my other hand.

“Bang, bang!” I shouted as a response from the crouching Cowboy as his otherwise stiff figure shook from the backfire of his weapon.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” I gasped from the equestrian native, who began sliding off his mount in defeat.

Suddenly my older, wiser brother interrupted my reenactment. “Em, what are you doing?!” he scolded me in alarm. “Do you realize what really happened in the New World? The Indians didn’t do anything wrong, and then the cowboys came and took away their land!”

Confused, I looked at the plastic toys in sadness, trying to allow this new information from my six-year-old elder to sort itself out in my shaken worldview. Their rigid figures had become strangely complex, and an afternoon adventure in the sandbox had been robbed of all its simplicity.

Suddenly, in a burst of inspiration, I put the cowboy on the horse, repeating the same scene in inverse.

“Hahahahaha!” shouted the evil settler as he charged toward the innocent native, and “Twang, twang!” fired the arrow of his foe. A potentially confusing afternoon was saved.

All that to say, I remember when the world was simpler, when there were clear-cut good guys and bad guys, and all a kid had to do was figure out which were which. I remember being able to talk about political issues without ever knowing anyone on the other side, or being able to talk about theology when I had only ever been in one kind of church. Like I had been that afternoon in the sandbox, I was as confident about evil as I was of good, and confident that I knew how to identify both.

On the other hand, I also remember developing some kind of a Christian agnosticism in which one could never know anything for sure beyond God, Jesus, and the Bible (the interpretation thereof, of course, was anyone’s guess), and I would not suggest that position either, at least not to anyone with a similar propensity to despair.

But I do need to keep reminding myself, as I slowly gain the courage to believe God has not left us to muddle through moral and theological ambiguity alone, that confidence divorced from humility creates travesty as monstrous as the one I enacted in the sandbox. May I learn the courage to believe in knowable truth, but never lose the humility to imagine I might be mistaken about it.

Feast of St. Guasact

2011-01-24T11:23:00.003-05:00

Since I've done a bad job posting during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity but have intended to do so in order to encourage my readers to pray, as Christ prayed in John 17, that we may be one as he and the Father are one, I thought I'd at least repost something here at the end. Today is the feast of the good St. Guasacht, part of the throng of Irish saints for whom there is almost no historical evidence, as happens on an island with little recorded history and much oppression. Please use this post as a reminder to pray for forgiveness and reconciliation in all the many factions that have divided our family over the millenia.

* * *

Today is the feast day of St. Guasact. As the story goes, unreliable and erratic as all the best Irish tales are, after Patrick was kidnapped from his home in Great Britain and sold to Maelchu (or Miluic, if you prefer) in northern Ireland where he spent years in slavery tending sheep, he grew up beside Maelchu’s children, St. Guasacht and the two Sts. Emers (feast day December 11). Why history remembers only one name for the two women I do not know, but since it barely remembers anything more I suppose we should be grateful. Beggars can’t be choosy, after all.

Patrick, as we all know, receives a vision while tending sheep on Mt. Slemish, miraculously escapes Ireland, reunites with his homeland, hears the Irish people calling him in his dreams, and returns to the land of his captivity where he proceeds (from what I can tell) to found churches in virtually every town and to convert personally nearly every fourth- and fifth-century Irish saint (and believe you me, there are many!).

But the first priority is the very family who had enslaved him, and, while Maelchu burns himself alive in his home rather than see Patrick again (evidently those are his only two options?), his three children receive the faith, dedicate themselves to mission of bringing the gospel to the druidic people, and became some of the first bishop/nuns. As Patrick puts the veil on his two foster sisters, their feet sink into the stone beneath them, and the marks are visible to this day.

So today from a less fantastical land of parking lots and laborious rearranging of 1s and 0s where nevertheless the scars of bitterness run just as deep and the power of grace trumps them just as conclusively, I thought I would venerate Patrick’s slave-owners-turned-sisters. Pray for us slave-owners, St. Guasact; pray for us slaves.

With both lungs

2011-01-17T11:55:00.001-05:00

I learned once that Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. had been good friends, and that they had originally thought of going into ministry together. For whatever reason, whether for disagreements or mere differences in vocational leanings, they did not. “You stay in the stadiums, Billy,” King (or “Mike,” as Billy called him) wrote to Graham, “because you will have far more impact on the white establishment there than you would if you marched in the streets.” Perhaps he did. Perhaps.

But their divergence was not only strategic; it was certainly somewhat ideological. Graham was unsure of King’s methods of civil disobedience, saying that “No matter what the law may be—it may be an unjust law—I believe we have a Christian responsibility to obey it. Otherwise you have anarchy.” King responded with the words of St. Augustine: “an unjust law is no law at all.” Over time as King began to speak out against the Vietnam war and poverty in a time when Communism was a looming threat, the divergence between him and his old friend became more pronounced.

Nevertheless, their friendship remained intact, and Graham took some radical stances for desegregation at his crusades. He invited King to join him on the pulpit and paid his bail to have him released from jail, and King’s famous declaration that “Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America” is actually a quotation from an article of Graham’s.

Years later Graham confided to some Civil Rights leaders that he wondered what would have happened if he had taken to the streets with his friend, and I suppose we cannot know the answers to questions like that. What indeed might have happened if the iconic figures of liberal and conservative Christianity, figures whom both sides respect even if they disagree, had found a way to share their ministry? What kind of ministry would it have been? It might of course have been a loss to the great good that both of their ministries accomplished, but I cannot help but wonder if it might have muddled some of the sharp distinctions between liberal and conservative Christianity that I have grown up among.

Pope John Paul II, when calling for reconciliation between the eastern and western divisions of Christianity, spoke of the need for the Church to “breathe with both lungs.” Here in America, I am reminded of our lop-sided breathing in every walk from my poor neighborhood to my rich university, every transition from conversations with my Mennonite friends to my Catholic, every Sunday morning stroll by a white church to a black.

I’ve been told many times that Church unity is something we will not see “until heaven” (as if “heaven” were so ephemeral as to be identified by a time rather than a physical place). Today on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which happens to come the day before the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity begins, it seems as good a time as any to remember that our Lord has taught us to pray that his Kingdom come and his will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Amen. Come Lord Jesus!

The Intersection of Peril

2011-01-12T18:19:00.005-05:00

The day after a record-breaking snowfall, I asked a friend if I could make socio-economic assumptions for why the city had not even begun plowing the roads in my neighborhood. After another day had passed, he said I could consider those assumptions to be conclusions. By the fourth day, I had ceased to care.

“Do you think she’ll make it?” I asked my friend as he slowed his car as we approached the intersection before my house. A car was swimming in the snow in front of us, thick and gelatinous after the three feet of snow we received four days earlier which the city had still not gotten around to clearing from my neighborhood.

“Well, she’s still moving...” he observed, wavering between his choices to stop his car or veer around her. “No, her tires are just spinning now,” he finally concluded. “Do wanna help her?”

“Yeah, let’s do it.” My friend stopped his car in the middle of the road before the slushy intersection and we got out.

After a few unsuccessful attempts to push her car either backwards or forwards, I volunteered to run home and grab my shovel, and my friend moved his car away from the chaos.

By the time we started shoveling under her tires, another stranger approached on foot and joined our rescue attempts. The three of us shoved, pushed, slid, sunk, and shushed for several humorous minutes, and eventually the hapless car was free.

Of course, by that time, another vehicle was stranded in the same intersection, and our makeshift rescue team turned to investigate. “You have four-wheel drive!” a man in a van behind her laughed. “How can you get stuck?”

“I don’t know how, but I sure am suck!” she retorted. Before we could help her, the fellow in the van behind her offered to bump her with his vehicle, and we watched the heroic effort. While he did manage to free her, our cheers turned to laughter when his tires spun to reveal that he was now stranded in the intersection of peril.

“Are you gonna help me too?” he laughed.

That afternoon, after I had said goodbye to my friend and my collection of rescuers and rescuees and was nestled on my couch getting reading done, I learned to identify the sound of spinning tires out my window. Each time another car got stuck, I looked out the window to see a collection of passers-by helping the victim. I remembered my experiences of Irish hospitality and Southern hospitality, and was warmed to find that it had followed me out to the cold Midwest.

The city did get around to plowing my neighborhood that night, though by that point I had learned that good neighbors are more reliable than public service. I am grateful to live where people are simple enough to have time to be good neighbors.

'Tis better to give than to give

2011-01-09T21:06:00.005-05:00

In my last year of undergrad I spent a lot of time with the homeless people near my campus. I knew many people’s names and alleged stories, had given many rides to church or doctors or grocery stores, and had even been a guest in one woman’s tent. I bordered near despair in those days, knowing that my greatest service to these new friends of mine was hardly more than a drop in the ocean, but began to imagine that the sanctification of my own soul was on the line as much as theirs, and that culturing a giving spirit was only Christian way I could think to respond to poverty.

On Valentine’s Day as I was on my way to my coffee shop to get some studying done, Barbara heralded me. “I want to ask you for something,” she said, and my heart sank (as it always did) as I prepared myself for another of her elaborate expensive tragedies. “It’s Valentine’s Day,” she said; “I was wondering if I could have some money for some candy.”

Without going into any detail about the host of mixed emotions and conflicting values that went into my interactions with Barbara, I will say that I was straining to come up with a way to be generous when candy was a luxury I didn’t even buy myself in those days. Fortunately, I didn’t have to strain for long; I remembered that my parents had sent me a box of chocolates that I happened to have with me, and I gave it to her without another thought.

It’s probably all for the best anyway, I consoled myself as I walked away, bereft of my little luxury. Now she will get to feel special on Valentine’s Day, and I will not fill my empty stomach with chocolate.

But then I saw Benedict standing at his usual corner, and my heart rose (as it always did) to see him. After our usual joyful greeting in which I asked him if he had had anything to eat and he insisted he was fine even though I knew he wasn’t, he announced that he had something for me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Here,” he said, handing me a small bag of healthy treats—granola bar, apple, raisins, nuts—along with a homemade Valentine’s card apparently made by a school child. I assumed it came from the homeless shelter. A homeless man was offering me food.

“Benedict, I can’t take this!” I protested. “This is for you.”

“I want you to have it,” he insisted.

“How ‘bout I just take one thing,” I compromised desperately, reaching instinctively for the raisins because they were my least favorite item.

“No, I want to give it to you,” he insisted. “Please take it.”

I did take it. All these years later, I remember that as the day that I learned that, because it is indeed better to give than to receive, part of compassion involves giving others the chance to give. Benedict did not want my money or my things (as indeed Barbara did); Benedict wanted friendship, which for him in particular required an opportunity to give to me. The only loving thing I could provide him that day was to receive from him.

In the six years since that day, I have tried to culture a receiving spirit to match the giving spirit I’ve always been urged to have. I allow the generous friend to cover the meal without immediately planning a way to pay her back. I accept whatever odd gift my grandmother finds for me at a garage sale. I proudly display the doll my poor neighbors give me because it reminds them of me even if it was not what I would have chosen for my dining room. True friendship, after all, cannot be one-way, and the only gift I really know how to give anymore is friendship.

It is indeed better to give than (then?) to receive. Let me not be greedy with that gift.

Leading out

2011-01-02T01:07:00.005-05:00

I stumbled accidentally into academia a few years ago (much to no one’s surprise but my own, as it turned out). After a year of living in an intercity commune, I listened to the wise counsel of some of my housemates who suggested, after living beside me for a year, that I may find the logistics of a public school teacher (the vocation I had been pursuing actively for seven years) to be stifling to my flexible lifestyle. They suggested I consider teaching community college instead, and, after a teary conversation, they encouraged me to leave the commune to pursue my master’s in a nearby city, assuring me that the doors were open to me should I decide to move back after my quick M.A.

It was a confusing time for me (incidentally, the time I started this blog), a time when I was slowly realizing that I had no place for Grace in my worldview, that I related to God like a slave to her tyrant, that I didn't know how to think of myself when I wasn't trying to single-handedly save the world, that I was motivated more from a hero complex than from love, that I didn’t know how to distinguish my voice from his or the million other voices clamoring around me. In that time, oddly enough, academia became a place of refuge for me, a place where I felt the closest thing to healthy I had felt in quite a while. Part of that reason may be because it was the right fit, certainly, but I had an inkling that the primary reason was quite simpler:

Academia gave me something to analyze other than my own mind.

This comment must not be interpreted as a criticism of self-examination or psychology or other forms of understanding oneself. On the contrary, I assume I still have a life full of inner probing in front of me. What I needed for a time, however, was time; I needed to learn to leave my unanswered questions unanswered for a while, to gain perspective that was outside myself, to listen to voices other than my own.

At any rate, I remembered all that as I read the closing chapter of At War With the Word, a book about liberal education by a scholar who has meant quite a bit to me over the past three years, R. V. Young. For any of my readers interested in scholarship or education (from either the producing or receiving end), I am including it.

The Latin educare means to “rear or bring up (children or young animals),” and it in turn derives from educere, “to lead forth” or “to lead out of.” Implicit in the term is the idea that education consists in leading the young out of something, and the something out of which everyone must be led is the peculiar, self-interested ego; for to be self-centered is the common predicament—that narrow, stifling subjectivism that is the universal prison of all human beings. A great work of literature is, then, a book that extends our horizons, that alters our perspective, that makes us take notice of something beyond our immediate needs and desires.
-R. V. Young

May I never leave the journey of knowing myself, and may I never lack for people to lead me out of myself!

Three stages

2010-12-28T22:12:00.004-05:00

A few years ago when my nephew was four, he pontificated to my brother from the backseat of the car:

There are three stages to life, Daddy. The first stage is when you are kid and you do what your parents tell you to do. The second stage is when you are an adult and you have to do the things adults have to do. The third stage is when you get thrusters on your feet and can fly.

The little fella had quite a sophisticated eschatology, I must say. I can't say much about the third stage yet, so I have no room to correct him. But now is as good a season as any to rejoice that the God who has seemingly entered all three of my nephew's stages of human development is preparing the way for us who are caught up in the second to enter the third. I'm looking forward to my thrusters.

God speed the day, Little One.

The woman I am

2010-12-28T22:02:00.005-05:00

In order to guard against the graduate student tendency to write scathing, sophomoric criticism of other scholars, one of my professors gave us a rule of thumb for writing literary reviews: “Always pretend the author is sitting beside you as you write it,” she told us, “and that he is in a wheel chair.” A good rule of thumb.

For Christmas this year, my family (the few of us who are not in China, at least) are hosting my two elderly grandmothers: the frail Southern lady in her late 80s who could talk the ears off of an elephant and the short Polish woman in her early 90s who could keep Armageddon a secret. It’s been one of the strangest Christmases I’ve ever had.

And somewhere in-between the occasional “yes’um”s I inserted to punctuate the stream-of-consciousness tales that went from her father’s scandalous affairs that were ironic considering he had initially joined the KKK because he thought it existed to beat up men who walked out on their wives when he was a cruel man anyway and forced her to drop out of high school so she could work at his firm and make money for him to pocket while he told her that all she would ever have going for her was her good looks, which she used to the best of her abilities anyway at least four times over beginning with the blond teenager whom she married because she was getting a little too old to be single and whom she convinced to joined the marines because she liked their uniforms the best until she sent him a “Dear John” letter when he got shipped away during the War because she had never been all that crazy about him anyway, not anymore than the man whose marriage produced her first daughter right before it was annulled, not like my grandfather who nevertheless wouldn’t initially sell his car to buy the particular ring she wanted which almost cost him her hand in marriage because she determined he didn’t value her enough to show her off as the high class person she was, the high class of person she declared us all to be which my brother’s nice car and new job demonstrated.... somewhere in-between these stories and the lite suggestions for selective breeding of humans that ironically harkened to the eugenics that I associated with the Nazis her various husbands had been fighting.... somewhere in-between all this I realized two things:

One: that my grandmother is not unlike the various girls who had made my life miserable when I was in high school and who I strove tirelessly to avoid becoming.

Two: that in her withered frailty I could not criticize her the way I had spent my adult life criticizing those women.

It made me reflect that every one of those cheerleaders who hurt me in high school will all be old frail women like my grandmother one day, unable to see the make-up they still put on their face every day and the wig that covers their bald heads, unable to color coordinate their clothing that is still important even if they can’t see it anymore than they can control their bowels or taste their food. We are called to forgive our enemies because the eugenics that Hitler organized is not unlike my frail grandmother’s suggestions for selective breeding at the dinner table, because the arrogance of the prom queen is not unlike my grandmother’s haggard dignity.

Then I reflected that I will be like my withered grandmother one day as well.

Then I reflected that I already am. In contrast to the woman I was created to be, I am that frail woman trying to maintain a dignified poise while wearing Poise panty-liners. In contrast to who we have it in us to be, we are walking on brittle bones and can hardly make it up the stairs. We are called to forgive demented autocrats because we ourselves suffer with dementia. Sin is an ailment we all suffer through together, like old folks at a nursing home sharing the latest news of our recent medical disorders.

Rejoice, Christmas reminds us: Christ has taken on our osteoporosis. He is sharing our dementia and our irritable bowel syndrome, our blindness and deafness and shriveled skin. Rejoice; if he could cross from radiance into dung, there is hope that we may cross from our dung into his radiance.

Any hope I have to be reborn into that radiance is the same hope my grandmother has, and that those cheerleaders have, and that my great-grandfather who may have been a Klansman had. What is there to do but to forgive?

The Nativitie of Christ

2010-12-24T17:07:00.005-05:00

A Christmas-Eve word from Robert Southwell, the sixteenth-century English poet, Jesuit priest, and martyr under Queen Elizabeth I:

Beholde the father, is his daughters sonne:
The bird that built the nest, is hatched therein:
The olde of yeares, an houre hath not out runne:
Eternall life, to live doth now beginne.
The word is dunne: the mirth of heaven doth weepe:
Might feeble is: and force doth faintly creepe.

O dying soules, beholde your living spring:
O dasled eyes, behold your sonne of grace:
Dull eares, attend what word this word doth bring:
Up heavie hartes: with joye your joye embrace.
From death, from darke, from deafenesse, from dispaires:
This life, this light, this word, this joy repaires.

Gift better then himselfe, God doth not know:
Gift better then his God, no man can see:
This gift doth here the gever geven bestow:
Gift to this gift let each receiver bee.
God is my gift, himselfe he freely gave me:
Gods gift am I, and none but God shall have me.

Man altered was by sinne from man to beast:
Beastes foode is haye, haye is all mortall flesh:
Now God is flesh, and lies in Manger prest:
As haye, the brutest sinner to refresh.
O happie fielde wherein this fodder grew,
Whose tast, doth us from beasts to men renew.

-Robert Southwell

Chosen to Choose

2010-12-23T14:05:00.004-05:00

In the first conversation I had with my Irish priest in Cork, Father Padraic mentioned some of the disputes between various parties during the Protestant Reformation dealing with predestination and free will.

“The Catholic Church has never found that a divisive issue,” he told me, “because we have always looked at Mary as the example of what happens to us all when Christ enters us. She was chosen and she said ‘Yes.’ She was predestined and she freely obeyed. The same happens when Christ enters any of us.”

This is not intended to be a Marian post in particular, not one that goes from her being “highly favored” to the Immaculate Conception or from all generations calling her blessed to the role of Mother of the Church. But since the readings from the Book of Common Prayer for today depict her meeting with Elizabeth and her song of rejoicing afterwards, I remembered Father Padraic’s words over two years ago, and found comfort in the paradoxes of the Incarnation: the Creator is created in creation, we are chosen to choose.

Rejoice, my friends: as the Word has been made flesh in the womb of a virgin, he has entered the womb of creation, sanctifying the ground he treads. The Creator is in the womb, and creation will be reborn. As with her, so with us; he enters the world through his people, and we await his bursting forth from us. Blessed are we whom he has chosen; blessed are we who have chosen him.

Sonnet XXVI of Advent

My soul declares his greatness, for he’ll do
What he has done before: yea, he will stir
His might just as he stirs the barren womb,
And look upon the sojourner like her
Who served in lowliness. The Mighty One
Has done his wonders while our hearts were far
Away: He gives the rain and hides the sun,
He spreads abundance as he spread the stars.
Soon Lebanon will be a fruitful field
And fields be forests; we who dwell in night
Will live in light; the nations will be healed,
The hungry fed, the blind receive their sight.
And blessed is the chosen for her choice
To bear the ripened word and to rejoice.

Psalm 80, 147, 148
Isaiah 29:13-24
Revelation 21:22-22:5
Luke 1:39-56

Lake Effect

2010-12-10T09:32:00.001-05:00

Last year I mused about the magical quality of snow in the South. Here in the Midwest it is not quite so ethereal, but it does provide the opportunity to bring neighbors together.

I saw her from across the street through the cloud of snowflakes. She was crouched over her plastic snow shovel as if it were a cane, and she inched forward slowly as if she were walking through ankle-high glue rather than fresh, fluffy snow.

“Would you like me to shovel that for you?” I called out to her.

She stood hesitantly and looked me over, seeming to determine I was safe. I suppose my neighborhood is one in which little old ladies might need to be cautious. “How much?” she asked guardedly.

“What?” I asked, a bit flabbergasted at the thought of charging an elderly woman for such an easy task. “No, not for money. It won’t take any time at all; I’m just on my way back from church, and I can shovel this for you in no time.”

She looked at the job before her, such a small job for me, such a large one for her. “Well, yeah!” she finally said, handing me the shovel and backing up. In no time I had finished her walkway and was beginning the sidewalk. “Just get up to the driveway and shovel a space for a car to pull in. There is a man on his way to pick me up for church, and I wanted to have a space cleared for him.”

I looked at the woman’s frail body and the walker she had abandoned on the front porch when she began her shoveling. There was something beautiful and pitiful about her, about her haggard dignity that would go to great lengths to ensure that the able-bodied fellow who was picking her up for church would walk to her door on a shoveled sidewalk.

“He’ll think I did this myself!” she said with a devilish twinkle in her eye. “He’ll think I’m quite a frisky lady!”

As it turned out, she was able to enact no such deception; when I finished the job, we kept talking up until the fellow arrived (who did not pull into the freshly-shoveled driveway nor walk down the cleared sidewalk at all). But I had the feeling that she appreciated the conversation more than the potential rouse.

* * *

It was my first weekend of Lake Effect snow: I shoveled my sidewalk Saturday night, Sunday morning, and Sunday night, but was in too much a hurry to shovel it before going to school on Monday morning. As I watched it pour down while I was in class, I wondered how packed the sidewalk would be when I returned home that evening. As I walked home after dark over some rough sidewalks and saw what became of well-walked places that were not shoveled, I dreaded what I would find when I got home.

I needn’t have worried. My sidewalk, including the stretch of empty yard beside me that I doubt the owners will shovel, had been cleared for me already. Someone had taken care of me while I was at school, doing what I was unable to do as I had for the little old woman the day before. (I later learned that it was the man next door whose fiancée works at the abortion clinic. They hate the neighborhood, but they are nevertheless becoming good neighbors.)

I don't know how well I'm doing preparing for the coming of Christ this Advent season, but in my neighborhood we are at least beginning to prepare places for one another.

Waiting in the Middle Voice

2010-12-09T08:30:00.002-05:00

As another partial repeat to keep this blog active through to the end of finals, I'm posting another article I wrote for my church's Advent devotional last year. This is partially derived from a discussion on this blog the previous summer that compared faith to the Greek middle voice, but since that was one of my most popular entries I thought you wouldn't mind the thematic repeat.

* * *

I spent the past summer in a brutal Classical Greek boot camp, fighting in the trenches of grammar complexities like the infamous middle voice (not active, like “the boy at the banana,” or passive, like “the boy was eaten by the banana,” but somehow between the two in a way that English cannot articulate). In that dismal struggle, classmates became trench buddies, and I found myself soliciting their aid for difficulties that went beyond grammar.

I remember one particular conversation I had with a seminarian. It had begun with a minor theological point and had moved into the realm of the very nature of faith. After months of doubting God’s attentiveness to redeem a particularly dark situation in a friend’s life, this was a sensitive topic for me.

“What do you mean by faith?” I asked him. “What does faith mean when you can’t understand?”

“Well,” he puzzled, “faith is not at all an intellectual exercise. Sometimes faith involves seeing your doubt and despair as your own deficiencies and trusting other Christians to get your bearings.”

“But then what is faith?” I repeated. “Is it a feeling?”

“No, it certainly not a feeling,” he quickly asserted. “Feelings come and go, and I don’t think they would commend or condemn you. Your faith can’t rest on feeling good about God anymore than it would be hindered by feeling frustrated with him.”

“So is faith simply action?” I asked, feeling like we were running out of options. “Is faith acting as though God were good even when you don’t feel that he is or understand how he is?”

My friend pondered a bit as if we were trying to articulate ideas in slightly different languages. “No,” he struggled, “I think faith is different from all these things because it is not something we do at all. Faith is a gift; it is something God does. Faith is something we receive.”

“So faith is passive?” I asked, a bit surprised and unhappy with that answer.

“Well, it looks that way...” he struggled. “But it’s active as well because we have to receive it. It’s more like...” he glanced down at his textbook as he tried to articulate his response...

“The middle voice!” he suddenly exclaimed. “Just like in Greek: it looks passive, even though it’s meaning comes across as active. It is somehow neither and both.”

And on the off-chance that there are other people with the ability to find comfort in complex grammatical points, or on the far-more-likely chance that there are other people who struggle to maintain faith when understanding and feelings and actions all fall short, I thought I would share this conversation. If my friend is right that faith is the middle voice, then perhaps all I can do in times of doubt and despair is to prepare places for it, to dust out the corners where Faith would be living if it were there and wait for it to arrive.

Indeed, perhaps Advent embodies the entire posture of faith: the posture of preparation and waiting. Perhaps faith in the midst of doubt and despair, or even in the midst of simultaneously mundane and busy lives, is the act of creating the places for it and waiting for it to arrive. That may involve carving out places for prayer. That may involve holding out in the lives of those we cannot save but can only love. One way or another, it certainly involves preparation and waiting, and perhaps a little hospitality when it arrives.

“I am going there to prepare a place for you,” Christ said to his disciples on the night he was handed over to suffering and death. And as we are left wading through our fluctuating emotions and ideas and disasters, perhaps faith is the posture of preparing places for him. Take heart, then: faith can neither be conjured nor killed; it can only be welcomed.

Veni, redemptor gentium

2010-12-07T12:38:00.003-05:00

Today in celebration of the feast of St. Ambrose, my Latin professor had us translate a fourth-century Ambrosian hymn. My Latin is far from expert, but I thought in the spirit of Advent (and because I'm doing a poor job posting anything for you this semester) I'd give you my best shot at a translation. Better Latinists out there are welcome to correct me for the benefit of all.

* * *

Intende, qui regis Israel,
Hark, King of Israel,
super Cherubim qui sedes,
who sits above the Cheribum,
appare Ephraem coram, excita
who appeared to Ephraim, stir up
potentiam tuam et ueni.
your power and come!

Veni, redemptor gentium,
Come, redeemer of nations,
ostende partum uirginis;
show forth your virgin birth;
miretur omne saeculum:
let all the ages rejoice:
talis decet partus Deo.
for such befits the birth of God.

Non ex virili semine,
Not out of the seed of man,
sed mystico spiramine
but out of the Holy Spirit
uerbum Dei factum est caro
the word of God is made flesh
fructusque uentris floruit.
and the fruit of the womb blossoms.

Alvus tumescit uirginis,
The womb of the virgin swells,
claustrum pudoris permanet,
the seal of chastity remains,
uexilla uirtutum micant:
the standards of virtue shine:
uersatur in templo Deus.
God is turned within his temple.

Procedat e thalamo suo,
Let him advance from his chamber,
pudoris aula regia,
from the royal courtyard of chastity,
geminae gigas substantiae
the giant with twin substances
alacris ut currant uiam.
keen to hasten on his course.

Egressus eius a Patre,
Going out from the Father,
regressus eius ad Patrem;
returning to the Father;
excursus usque ad inferos,
going out even to Hell,
recursus ad sedem Dei.
returning to the seat of God.

Aequalis aeterno Patri,
You who are equal to the eternal Father,
carnis tropheo cingere,
gird yourself with a trophy of flesh,
infirma nostri corporis
strengthening the weaknesses of our body
uirtute firmans perpeti.
with your eternal virtue.

Praesepe iam fulget tuum,
Now your stable gleams,
lumenque nox spirat nouum,
and a new light shines forth,
quod nulla nox interpolet
where no night corrupts
fidesque iugi luceat.
may perpetual faith shine forth.

The Long Wait

2010-11-30T08:22:00.005-05:00

I don't expect the semester to lighten for a bit, so rather than leave my blog untouched I thought I would post an article I had written for my church's Advent devotional two years ago, which is itself an adaptation of a post I had written here the previous summer. Long-term readers may receive my apologies for the partial repeat, and I hope to return to the land of the musing soon.

* * *

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
-T. S. Eliot

This past summer, I went with some friends kayaking and camping on an island off the coast of North Carolina. It sounded like a great idea.

Among the many well-conceived, ill-executed adventures, the camping escapade is the primary reason we classify the trip as a great experience we would never repeat again, nor wish upon our worst enemies. We all drifted off to sleep sometime around 10 or 11, the four of us in sleeping bags lying side-by-side on a tarp we placed over the cacti and other prickly brush that carpeted the island. The stars were brilliant, satellites and meteors moved, and the Milky Way shone in its full splendor.

I don’t know how long I slept, but eventually I woke to stings of pain piercing my face. I rubbed my skin with my sandy hands, but whatever manner of carnivorous insect inhabited the island remained. I tried to suffocate myself inside my sleeping bag to find refuge, but to no avail. I told myself that perhaps if I didn’t think about the pain it would prove only a minor annoyance, but my skin kept twitching with startling stings. There was no going back to sleep.

I finally got on my tired feet (blistered from a previous ill-executed adventure) and walked along the shore. I found that if I kept moving quickly enough, the bugs would not bite me. Through the long night we wandered the beach for an ambiguous number of dark hours, waiting for the sun to bring relief, feeling like we were in purgatory.

And though we expected the waiting to end with the dawn, the knight faded into a murky glow from a thick shield of fog. By the time the longed-for sunrise would have come, we could only guess its existence from the dim light that finally allowed us to see the red welts that covered our skin as the tiny gnats continued to torture us. The sun had risen, but we were still waiting.

The entire Christian journey is a long narrative of waiting. Job waits for a hearing. Abraham waits for a son. The Hebrew slaves wait for deliverance from slavery. Suicidal prophets wait for God’s presence. And by the time Advent rolls around, we stand with captive Israel waiting for a Messiah.

But the waiting is not exceptionally Christian. Even pagan mythology bears themes of the Fall in the decline from the golden to the silver to the bronze ages, and nearly every tale is infused with grief, sorrow and loss. David’s cries of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are not unique to the Christian story, even if they are fundamental to it. We stand among the company of all creation “groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”

Beyond that, we as Christians tend to forget that the story of waiting is still our story. When the Messiah comes, after all, he is only a baby, and we are left waiting. When he begins his ministry, he does not bring the deliverance we have been longing for, and we are left waiting. When he reaches the climax of his ministry he dies, and we are left waiting. After he trumps death and rises again as the first fruit of the New Creation, he ascends to heaven and tells us he will return, and we are still left here waiting.

Let us take heart as we wander the shore; the sun has risen, and the fog is not forever. Sometimes faith is not a glorious adventure; it is a long walk that we wouldn’t have the option of quitting if we tried. Let us remember that the posture of waiting, through often excruciating difficult, is also fundamentally Christian. We would do well to practice it.

Rejoice the Lord is King!

2010-11-21T17:28:00.005-05:00

As I’ve had the chance in recent years to participate in the Church calendar, I’ve appreciated the profundity of living into the Gospel story year after year, experiencing the same traditions that Christians have been practicing for century upon century.

Christ the King Sunday, incidentally, is not one of those. On the contrary, it only began in 1925, the period l’entre deux guerres, between World War I and II, when Pope Pius XI was concerned about the growing threats of nationalism and secularism that Christians were swept up in.

And so here at the end of Ordinary Time, we remember that it is Christ who is King, not our party politics of choice, and that he reigns now over our oblivion. And unlike the forces that tore through Europe during the 20th century, Christ enters his glory as he is lifted up on a cross; and though James and John had campaigned to be on his right and left as he entered his kingdom, those places were reserved for two criminals. The Kingdom has come as the King is lifted up, and we are welcome to follow.

Your kingdom come, Lord, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Come to the waters

2010-11-17T09:21:00.005-05:00

I ate a lot of popcorn before bed last night and woke up quite parched in the middle of the night. I got up to get a drink of water, watching eagerly as the cup filled and gulping the water down with great fervor.

However, I realized with every gulp that my thirst was strangely untouched by the water, and as soon as the glass was empty I began filling it up again, hoping a second glass would do the trick.

This process was repeated several times before I began to put the pieces together and figured out that I must be dreaming. Annoyed that I was spending my few precious hours of sleep so miserably, I tried to wake myself up to no avail. Quite a bit miffed, I filled up another glass of water.

And as Christ told the woman at the well “Whoever drinks the water I give him shall never thirst” and cried out within the temple in Jerusalem “If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink” just as God said through the prophet Isaiah “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters,” there is quite a lot of room for a Christian analogy here. Indeed, Christ did promise that “Whoever believes of me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Streams of living water will flow from within him.’” We have passed through the waters, we have entered into that rest, and he has met our thirst.

But there is another way that I am still guzzling water like I was in my dream, still carrying a thirst that water is meant to fill, still drinking the memories of water or the hope of water, still waiting for the fullness of the ultimate water. To whatever extent I can say that, it seems dangerous to me to emphasize the thirst-quenching nature of Christianity without an acknowledgment that we are still waiting for the eschatological fulfillment of our longings, still waiting for the full quenching of the thirst that has already been met in a preliminary way.

As we approach Advent, we remember that we are lonely, longing, wandering, expectant people. How could we not be? We have tasted the beginning of a fulfillment that is still in progress.

All Souls

2010-11-03T18:50:00.004-04:00

Beloved, I would grasp you like your weight
In water, or as many grains of sand,
But you would let me go;
For my own liquid fingers, as of late,
Have slipped like Time around your fleeting hand
And yielded to its flow.

So fall then like these precious autumn leaves
And dance around in winds I cannot chase—
For we’re not solids yet.
Yea, fall like tears along the heart that grieves,
For even tears will not maintain their place
But always leave it wet.

Ephemeral, we have found that Love alone,
Whose fixity we’d seek to imitate,
Is solid—like a soul—
Extending farther than the winds have blown
To gather grains that crumbled through Time’s grate
Into her greater bowl.

A Call to Die

2010-10-27T10:32:00.005-04:00

In fact, every command of Jesus is a call to die...
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

On Sunday I concluded fall break by saying goodbye to six members of my immediate family who will get on a plane tomorrow for four years of service in east Asia. I will miss them tremendously.

Calling is never divorced from loss: Abraham gives up his country and his people (and even the child of the Promise himself!), Israel gives up their firstborn sons and the firstfruits of the flock and field, the prophets and disciples give up father and mother and brothers and sisters. Never is there a suggestion that these sacrifices were easy for those who made them, and never does it seem suggested that they will be for us.

It is part of a greater story of redemption, I know, part of a story wherein God redeems the world from the inside using the resurrection he has already begun in us as his Church. It is part of the story of my own resurrection, I know, part of uniting my soul to Christ who likewise gave up everything so that I can likewise share his resurrection.

But this week is not that part of the story. This week is the part wherein my brother and sister-in-law and three nephews and sister give up everything, and where I and my mother and father and brother give them up. This is the time of loss, and it would feel wrong to pretend otherwise, a disservice to the intense love we have for one another.

Christ said "Take my yoke upon me and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light." I know it is true. But he said it to people who would die martyrs' deaths, who would give up their families to similar deaths, and it doesn't seem to me that the yoke is "easy" the way we understand the term. Now, at any rate, is the time to die, to unite ourselves with Christ who died before us and paved the way to resurrection. One day, I'll be able to tell ya what it looks like on the other side.

The space between our houses

2010-10-22T21:42:00.003-04:00

It took a while to get to know my neighbors next door on the west side of the house. Eventually I managed to find one them outside long enough for me to say “hi,” but it wasn’t until the second such meeting that I managed to pull out a conversation with the fellow. We chatted about a number of things: how long he had been in town, how much he hated the neighborhood, and our respective occupations.

“And what does Veronica do?” I asked, referring to his fiancée who evidently owned the house but whom I had yet to meet.

“She’s a nurse,” he answered.

“Oh, over at the hospital down the road?”

“No,” he hesitated with a bit of a controlled pleasantness, “at the abortion clinic.”

I don’t remember how I responded; I probably managed to act naturally enough, straining to think of what I would have said if she said any other profession. In reality, I realized that, while I’ve managed to render my brain tied into too many knots to be useful regarding every other political issue, abortion was still one that did not have any ambiguity. And though I’ve counted plenty of pro-choice people among my friends and acquaintances over the years, I had never met one who actually performed the abortions we disagreed about.

I suppose they have to live somewhere, I found myself musing, as if it would have surprised me less if the entire staff resided in the abortion clinics whose insides I had never even seen.

Over the next few weeks in which I managed to meet Veronica at least once, I wondered what she and I might agree on, where we would be able to find common ground. Could I see her as someone who cared deeply about the plight of the abused or confused woman, someone whom—but for our difference in understanding the other human life at stake—I might be fighting beside rather than against? I did not know. I had no idea what I would say if the conversation came up. I almost hoped I wouldn’t get the chance.

As it turned out, the chance came on a Sunday afternoon, the day after I had attended a Saturday morning mass outside the local abortion clinic (hoping desperately that Veronica wouldn’t be going to work on a Saturday morning, which she indeed did not). I was doing some Sabbath pleasure reading on my front porch, and Veronica came out to put her dogs in the yard. I walked over to her yard, and we talked for quite a while—about why she hated the neighborhood, about her previous marriage, about my research, about the town.

“So are you Catholic?” she abruptly interjected with no lead-in twenty minutes into the conversation. The question was common enough so near a major Catholic institution, but I held my breath before saying yes.

“Yeah, it ended up working out that way,” I said awkwardly, treating the question as if related to the university rather than (as I assumed) the pro-life movement. “I didn’t come here for that reason though; I applied to 10 schools, and most of them were state universities.” By bringing school into it, I managed to change the subject quickly enough.

But as Veronica had introduced the topic without a lead-in, she did not have any trouble returning to it when we were wrapping up our afternoon chat.

“I want to thank you for talking to me, even though you know about what I do,” she said (she had evidently been upset at her fiancé for telling me where she worked, assuming that I would not speak to her as a result). “I didn’t realize when I moved here what a lion’s den I was moving into. Most people when they find out where I work don’t talk to me anymore.”

And after spending weeks wondering what I would say if the topic came up, I suddenly found my response came quite naturally, especially in a conversation in which I had squirmed a bit to admit my faith.

“Oh, I can imagine how hard it is,” I empathized. “Sometimes being a Christian in academia feels like that: it’s not anything I’m ashamed of, but I normally worry that if it’s the first thing people learn about me it could cut off some friendships before they start.”

“Huh,” she pondered, looking out into the yard thoughtfully, “I can see that...”

I didn’t have to strain to find common ground after all; as it turned out, we were two women with undisguisable allegiances that put us at odds with opposite halves of society. In that common ground of the no-man’s-land between the two entrenched armies, we both knew that we were on opposites sides, that we both believed our respective side was right, and that neither of us wanted to shoot each other. That afternoon in the space between our houses, our fear of alienation had united us.

My dear angry Lord

2010-10-11T14:10:00.005-04:00

Posts are going to stay rather sparse this semester, I am afraid, while my class load is higher than it ever will be again (I hope!). But as I begin a project that compares John Milton's Paradise Lost to the book of Job, I am pondering the theme of wrestling with God that seems rather central in the story of the nation of Israel (so named because Jacob had "wrestled with God and won," whatever that means), and then by extension of the Church. I don't know what to do with the strange ending of the book of Job (and I feel pretty certain that Milton did not either), but it does seem clear to me that Job's faithfulness and his wrestling went hand-in-hand, even if his questions were not answered with words but with God's power. And in the light of these questions, a poem of good ol' George Herbert has been coming to mind:

Bitter-Sweet

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

The Slow Work of God

2010-09-28T18:23:00.005-04:00

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown,
something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
—that is to say, grace—
and circumstances
acting on your own good will
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser.

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(bonus points for any of my readers with enough time on his/her hands to hunt down the original French)

Hidden Valley

2010-09-22T08:34:00.004-04:00

When I was a little girl, I dreamed of being an explorer. In fact, I remember the day when I sadly realized, like the scene in The Truman Show, that everywhere had already been discovered, and there would be no secret continents hiding in a corner of the ocean. Instead of continents, my explorations would have to remain where they had always been: the 80-acre forest that surrounded my childhood home, owned by the old widow Mrs. Obadiah who refused all offers to sell family land.

Though there were lovely glens where the river (read: creek) would cascade (read: trickle) over boulders that were family favorites for woodland adventures, I preferred to find my own havens, precisely because they would be my own. I found a place where the honeysuckle vine hung as a thick blanket over overhanging branches to create a sweet-smelling hollow. I found an old trail left by loggers that made me feel like a character from The Lord of the Rings on my way through Mirkwood Forest. I found an old stump that kept more bark than tree and shaped itself like a throne, and I imagined it the throne where God would sit during his similar strolls through Mrs. Obadiah’s forest. And my crowning discovery was when I found the stumps that stood at the top of a cleared hill in the middle of the forest, giving me the sensation of standing on a mountaintop. I named it Hidden Valley.

The first time I stumbled on my private mountaintop was exhilarating enough to keep me coming back with a strangely sacramental assurance that God was really present at Hidden Valley in a more tangible way than he was on my walk there, and it became a favorite pastime for me to tote a lunch there, sharing a meal with the God I knew would join me for the simple reason that he had once before. The very contours of the ground declared the glory of God, and the sloping valley (such as it was) proclaimed the work of his hands.

Soon after my discovery of Hidden Valley, I dragged my childhood best friend out to see it on an afternoon when she was unfortunately tired, hungry, and about to go home. She didn't want to cross the long field to get there (a prairie in size, as I recall), but I described the view vividly enough to convince her to come.

"There," I said when we arrived. "Stand on this stump to get the best view."

"This is it?" she asked incredulously, her tone betraying her utter disappointment, as if I had promised wealth and delivered a penny.

"Uh..." I hesitated, noticing that my mountain seemed to shrink before her gaze, and feeling suddenly quite foolish. "Maybe not. I must forget how to get there. We can go back home." I had suddenly developed a desire to be anywhere other than Hidden Valley whose magic had become temporarily invisible, even to me, knowing that I did not possess the power to make the magic return.

"Well, we already came all the way out here," she conceded with needless graciousness. "We can look around for it if you think you can find it again."

"No," I struggled in a brief panic, forced to lose face by admitting this was the place I had described so superlatively. "This is actually it, but it looks different now. I think some trees must have fallen and blocked the view." (It probably commends me that I was such a bad liar. It evidently didn't occur to me that we would have to see fallen trees for them to be obscuring our view, not to mention that trees are more obtrusive when standing up.)

At any rate, I never took anyone else out there, and the sacramental magic of the place from that time on remained more in the memory of what it had once looked like than in my future views. It was as if God had once removed a veil to reveal the splendor of his creation that he wondrously created and even more wondrously restored, and I knew the secret afterwards even if the veil had returned.

According to GoogleEarth, there is a subdivision now in the places of my childhood explorations. I suppose that must mean Mrs. Obadiah is dead, and that I might have been the last person to experience that hill as a place of wonder where God's glory may choose to dwell for an afternoon. I like to hope at least that some family's driveway is paved over it so that some kid can get the raw exhilaration of riding down it on his bike and thereby experience a bit of the wonder I felt, if that is not a profane use of what is surely sacred ground. And two decades and 700 miles removed from my afternoons at Hidden Valley, I pray that God may lift the corners of the veil again from time to time, and that my desire to save face never allows even a friend to put it back. In the mean time, I will keep looking for him in the meadows he has strolled with me before.

Diverting Apologetics, II

2010-09-20T08:28:00.004-04:00

I was invited again to write an article for the theological blog of a few friends of mine, this time touching on the understanding of sainthood from a Catholic perspective. Feel free to give it some feedback, whether or not you are sympathetic. Any qualms would be helpful for me to ponder because a) I am hoping to write a follow-up article about Marian theology in a few months and I want to make sure these bases are covered first, and b) I have been invited to help with a project in the relic chapel of the local basilica and multiple perspectives would be helpful for my own ponderings. I promise to listen!

While Waiting

2010-09-17T14:05:00.006-04:00

There was a photo on the cover of the April, 2004 edition of Touchstone Magazine that depicted a girl looking wistfully toward the clouds with a pained expression on her face. Below her in the background you can make out the outer edge of the architecture of Mont Saint-Michel in northern France, and above her hangs the heading “While Waiting for Heaven.”

The girl was my little sister, who, as I recall from when I snapped the photo, was not waiting for heaven but for lunch.

When my family moved to Paris, my sister was ten years old, an age almost ideally selected to be as traumatic and disorienting as possible (admittedly not quite as ideal as when they moved back when she was thirteen). I remember the day she and my mom arrived in the city and the three other family members who had preceded them by a month showed them around the city. There was a rude juxtaposition of one of the world’s most popular tourist cities and my tortured sister whose life had just been shattered.

“Our apartment is down that street about a kilometer-and-a-half,” I pointed from the top of L’Arc de Triomphe with tourists all around. “That’s a little more than a mile, so it’d be about the same distance as the walk from our old house to Food Lion…” I realized too late my error of bringing up the home she had just been torn away less than a day earlier, and I gave her the privacy of pretending not to notice her tears.

It was a mocking irony: the girl’s agony set against the glow of Europe. Paris is a genuinely lovely city, but there was no conceivable way she could have enjoyed it that day.

In order to compound the irony, her health was a little spotty over her three years in Europe, and she always seemed to get sick whenever my family took mini vacations in the surrounding area: Belgium, Rome, the Italian Alps, Greece, Egypt, Prague. She was in a place of wonder whether she could enjoy them or not, but it is hard for anyone to appreciate an alpine ski resort or a Grecian cruise ship while throwing up.

And I wonder if I am there with her, lying on a hotel bed in Cairo with a stomach bug or dragging myself through the streets of Venice with a migraine. It is undoubtedly a world saturated with the miraculous: whether in the Sacraments of the Church or the sacramentals erupting from a world brimming with life that enters the world “trailing clouds of glory” (as Wordsworth says) and still bears hope of glory’s fulfillment, God is oozing from his creation.

Like my sister, I am incapable of appreciating the wonders that are nevertheless present around me, that I trip over just as certainly whether or not I appreciate their presence. I think part of the purpose of various disciplines in the Church, regular prayers and sacraments and fasts and celebrations whether you can engage or not, is a matter of conditioning our souls to appreciate those very mysteries. I pray that as I approach something closer to health, heath of body and heath of soul, I’ll be able to enjoy these mundane wonders a little more. I’m waiting for it, at any rate.

They shall not enter into my rest, II

2010-09-13T08:30:00.004-04:00

It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.
Psalm 127:2

Thursday evening I celebrated the end of an exhausting week (in which I learned that keeping up with five courses that utilize three dead languages, one of which I haven’t learned yet, might have been a bit ambitious for my first semester) by having a dear friend over for dinner. Toward the end of her visit we found ourselves in a conversation about contemplative prayer, a spiritual discipline my soul has been quite slow to learn.

Ever since I was first introduced to the Divine Office, I have become increasingly aware both of the value of contemplative prayer and of my great deficiency in it. Prayer was always something I did, whether that was journaling (by far the most natural form for me) or talking casually on the way to class or venting in a fit of angst or fasting from food or sleep or any other bodily need I could think of (asceticism was also quite natural for me). I have never learned prayer that was not an intellectual exercise or a willful discipline, prayer that was found outside myself rather than inside, prayer that involved uniting myself to something and someone else rather than exploring my own mind.

But that night in a strange intersection of my academic weariness (I had turned in two papers and took a Latin quiz that day) and my soul’s deficiency in finding communion with her maker, I realized something as if it were a novel concept:

I was tired.

I was always tired. I had lived on sleep deprivation since I discovered books as a young girl, and exhaustion became a matter of principle by college. Dualism, the heresy that separates spiritual matters from physical matter as if they are distinguishable, had been so pervasive in my thinking that rest still feels overly indulgent. But if dualism really is a heresy after all, then it may be that a neglect of my body is not only damaging to my body; it may be damaging to my soul.

At any rate, on a sudden impulse soon after my friend left, I went to bed hours before it was absolutely necessary, and I let myself sleep an hour past my alarm.

When I awoke my soul was refreshed, as if it had just spent eight hours communing with God. I began to wonder if my tired body was connected to my restless soul. I began to wonder what it would be like to wake from eight hours of sleep more often.

...for he gives to his beloved sleep.

The porch next door

2010-09-06T09:11:00.005-04:00

I’m sure any faithful readers out there thought that either I or my blog had given up the ghost. Not so: the latter simply went into hibernation while the former went into the hyperdrive of moving across the country, settling into her first home, and fighting through the first two weeks of a PhD program. The former now hesitantly yawns awake...

Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else’s water lily.
-Presumably a Chinese proverb, taken from a fortune cookie

I fell in love with my neighborhood the first time I drove through it in late February on my way to the university recruitment day. I loved the colorful century-old houses, each its own unique design. I loved the front porch culture that reminded me of my beloved South I would be leaving behind. I loved the eclectic assortment of neighbors, from grad students to pastors to Wal-Mart employees to social workers to those whose cases they worked on. There was no doubt in my mind: if I were to accept the offer to the university, this would be the neighborhood for me.

My suspicions were confirmed three weeks ago when I finally moved into my cozy little house. My mother, sister, and I pulled in a little after sundown and prepared to move the mattresses and suitcases inside to hunker down for the night. Before I could get working, I was heralded with a “Hello, neighbor!” from the porch next door.

It was apparent right away that I would not have to work to get to know my neighbors, especially these ones whose porch was constantly occupied with a steady stream of friends and family members shouting similar greetings over the sound of their music. They keep my block a bit noisy, but they also keep it warm.

But this weekend when I had my first chance to try out my guestroom on two friends who drove up to attend the first football game of the season, I was struck by the difference in their reaction to my neighborhood.

“I was kind of worried when I drove up and saw all those people outside,” one of them said with concern. “Are they always out there?” Apparently what had been a selling-point for me was a worrisome deterrent for him.

Avoiding the temptation to make any racial or socioeconomic speculations about the reason for his doubts about my neighbors (as if I wouldn’t be caught doing the same in different circumstances, or as if initial concern is never valid), I will end with the mere observation that there was a difference. The neighborhood that had impressed me with its warmth and personality repelled him with its noise and activity (some of it, admittedly, being dubious actively).

It seems to me that the Christian story makes room for both responses, for the glorious and the terrifying sides of human potential, for my neighbors to gladden my soul for my six years in this house or to rob me out of house and home. But we are, even at our most terrifying, a twisted form of glorious, saturated with beauty and oozing with hope to return. I pray for the grace to see my neighbors through those eyes.

Surprised by unrefinement

2010-08-11T10:24:00.004-04:00

“I can’t remember his name,” my 90-year-old grandmother grumbled at some point in our conversation. “I tell you, when you get to be my age, your brain just starts slipping away.”

The woman is of course the sharpest 90-year-old I know, so I didn’t take her momentary memory lapse very seriously. “Well Gramma,” I absolved her stupidly, “at your age, you’ve earned the right to forget a few things.”

The 4-foot-10, one-armed Polish woman looked at me with her silent eyes where the struggles of the Great Depression and World War II were long buried, and she raised an eyebrow that indicated her wit had spotted a opening. “Well,” she retorted gruffly, “I wish I coulda earned something I’d enjoy having a little more.”

No Gramma, I wanted to counter, your brain is clearly intact.

But she was right: we don’t always earn a particularly enjoyable trophy for all the hardships we endure to arrive at the other side. I always want to punch the people who say “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (except that it would probably make them stronger). Sometimes whatever doesn’t kill you makes you crippled or makes you bitter. I always hope to come out of adversity with confidence; instead I tend to come out of it with a limp. Yes, Gramma, I wish I coulda earned something I’d enjoy having a little more too.

Here on this process of sanctification, we don’t always get to choose our curriculum, and we certainly don’t get to choose our lessons (after all, they wouldn’t be lessons then, would they?). I would rather have the curriculum that involves turning me into someone a bit more stable; instead I get the one that turns me into a twitchy dog. I often want to question God’s pedagogy.

And when we limp our way to the finish line on aching joints and reach for the railing with our shriveled hands, surprised by our own unrefinement, I hope we will learn whatever it is that takes us 90 or more years to realize. Reaching sainthood is not about becoming superheroes. I rather wonder what it is instead.

Kids these days

2010-08-08T22:35:00.005-04:00

In on one of my last weekends before setting out for my PhD, my siblings and I found ourselves visiting the city where my little brother was finishing an internship. It was our last "sibling weekend" before we scatter: my older brother and his family-of-five to east Asia as missionaries, my little sister to nanny their boys for a year before she begins her freshman year of college, my little brother to his first job after he finishes business school, and me to my new home in the Midwest after the dust has settled from my academic adventures in Ireland and Italy.

On Saturday night we baked some cookies, which drew a crowd of young, undergraduate business interns, most of them loud and self-absorbed enough to make me think kids-these-days thoughts as if I were five decades their senior rather than five years. One young woman who tended to dominate the conversation and take it to places no one over the age of 22 could follow asked us if we had seen Arrested Development. We all answered in the negative.

"Ohmygod!" she gasped. "You have never lived!"

By "lived," I suppose, she meant "lived vicariously through those particular characters."

I was too flustered to respond.

Feast of the Transfiguration

2010-08-06T09:26:00.003-04:00

The Pentateuch ends rather anticlimactically. As a cohesive narrative, the five books of the law could be read as the life of Moses rather than the history of Israel: after Genesis sets the background for the nation and how they got into Egypt, Exodus begins with the birth of Moses and Deuteronomy ends with his death.

Moses reluctantly accepts his calling to lead the people out of slavery, brings them out of Egypt with many wonders, enters the cloud of smoke on Sinai to receive the books of the law, leads the people to the Promised Land only to have them rebel, intercedes for them when God wants to wipe them out, and wanders through the wilderness with them for forty years. Then in Deuteronomy he delivers his farewell speech as they prepare to enter, walks Mt Nebo to look on the land, dies there, and is buried by the Lord in an unknown grave.

Though we know that the people do enter the land in the book of Joshua, as far as Moses is concerned (and as far as the Pentateuch is concerned), it ends there. The great work is left unfinished, unaccomplished, and the people are never at rest—not after Joshua conquers the land, not under the judges, certainly not under Saul, not even under David himself. The land is never at peace, though prophets continue to call out:

Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, “They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.”
As I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.” (Psalm 95)

Today, however, is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Christ takes his disciples up a mountain like the one on which Moses died with his work unaccomplished, on which Elijah hid ingloriously as he was hunted like a criminal after his victory over the prophets of Baal. Mountains are a place where God appears to prophets, but they are also a place of refuge in defeat.

And there on that mountain in the presence of Christ, Moses enters the Promised Land. The long awaited time of rest has come in the arrival of the Messiah who would proclaim from the height of his apparent defeat, “It is finished,” before he himself rested in the tomb on the Sabbath day. Christ reveals today what remained unfinished after 40 years in the wilderness, the elusive kingdom that brings rest for the people of God.

For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. (Hebrews 4:8-10

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest...

Abide with me

2010-07-28T23:41:00.004-04:00

Continuing on the theme of comfort in the midst of transitions, departures, and death, this hymn struck me today:

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

Not a brief glance I beg, a passing word;
But as Thou dwell’st with Thy disciples, Lord,
Familiar, condescending, patient, free.
Come not to sojourn, but abide with me.

Come not in terrors, as the King of kings,
But kind and good, with healing in Thy wings,
Tears for all woes, a heart for every plea—
Come, Friend of sinners, and thus bide with me.

Thou on my head in early youth didst smile;
And, though rebellious and perverse meanwhile,
Thou hast not left me, oft as I left Thee,
On to the close, O Lord, abide with me.

I need Thy presence every passing hour.
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

-Henry F. Lyte, 1847

Death is not our home

2010-07-26T17:34:00.006-04:00

As I mentioned once when a friend was shot, I have a tendency to respond to death by railing against it, which ought to strike me a bit like railing against the ocean for lapping up on the shore. “Death is natural,” people would reason with me. “Death is just a part of life.” “This world is not our home.” “Our citizenship is in heaven.” “He has gone on to a better place.” (Etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.)

I was never sure what exactly I was protesting. On the surface, after all, these adages were true, and I certainly had no argument against them other than the fact that my spirit kept rejecting them like a failed organ transplant. If death was indeed as natural as it seems to be, why would it shock us as it does? If this world was not our home, why would we have to keep reminding ourselves of the fact?

It didn’t help that Scripture is not half as clear on the topic as we make it out to be. It was downright frightening to imagine all the unsatisfying sorts of resolutions that could fit within the vague descriptions of the afterlife that were given to us by a God who never seems to spell the future out as clearly as we expect him to.

If this were a theological blog, that would have been a great set-up to introduce N. T. Wright, whose eschatology (theology of the end times) regarding the New Creation and the Resurrection (of us) I found to be quite healing after my years of railing. (He infamously says that “Heaven is not our home; we’re just passing through”—as we wait for our coming bodily resurrection in the transformed earth.) For now at least, I am friends with too many Biblical scholars to feel comfortable presenting Wright’s eschatology. Let’s just say that I have found great hope in the belief that just as the material creation fell (not only our souls) and just as Christ’s material body was raised from the dead (not only his soul), we are awaiting the restoration of the material creation (not only the spiritual), the resurrection of our material bodies (not only... well, you get the idea).

On the contrary, this is still my listening-blog, and yesterday as I sat through a funeral hearing my rector encourage the grieving family with the emphatic hope that the dead man had gone on to his true home where we would eventually spend eternity with him as well, I forbade myself from questioning his eschatology. Instead, I remembered my sister-in-law’s grandmother who died this past spring. When her son talked to her a bit about the possibility of a bodily resurrection, the dying Appalachian woman simply brushed him off by interjecting, “I don’t know what will happen, but as long as Jesus is in charge I know it will be good.” After a long life of walking beside Jesus, she had confidence in his goodness, and it was enough to face the unknowns on the other side of death.

I may not ever be graced with the simplicity of faith that Appalachian woman had, the faith that could find comfort in adages about heaven or that would not care either way. I’m grateful at least that in the Church my overly-intellectual faith can learn from her simplicity, that her confidence in the person of Christ can shed hope on my endless queries. As I learned from my unsettled spirit, a robust eschatology is important; as I learned from that grandmother, intimacy with Christ is more important.

Dwarven Hermeneutics

2010-07-25T00:05:00.006-04:00

In the past two months, I joined the Catholic Church, moved out of my cottage, submitted my first potential article for publication, spent a month in Ireland, bought a house in the Midwest, and enjoyed a week at the beach with my family. My brain has not been able to function more than one or two steps ahead.

Suddenly, as the dust of the past two months settles, the next step is my move across the country to start my PhD at a school I never expected to get into, and I am realizing something for the first time: I am afraid. Though my transition into academia surprised neither my friends nor my family, it still does surprise me, and I have a keen awareness that I have no idea what I am getting myself into or where it will take me.

I am quite a little girl with a finite brain stepping out into a world of intellectual giants. I feel like Bilbo Baggins, stumbling out the door with no hat, no stick, no pipe, not even a pocket handkerchief. But here's to the unplanned adventure, and here's to hoping for some Longbottom pipe weed along the way!

There were days when giants roamed the earth
With minds of iron, hearts of witty fire,
And we have tread their steps, for what that's worth,
Like bumbling dwarves aspiring to admire.
But in the caverns of these footprints, we
Have chiseled half with hubris, half with awe,
And nestled in sophomoric flattery,
Pontifications on the dirt we claw.
And I have trembled half with terror, half
With love, and stumbled on my hobbit toes,
Afraid to find a troll along the path,
Discovering as he nears he also grows.
Be gentle, giant, if ambition's charming
From a midget seeking her disarming.

A Southern Welcome

2010-07-21T14:08:00.007-04:00

After a day of recovering from jet-lag, I drove from my parents’ house in the country to the nearby city to run a few errands (finding that I was never quite sure which side of the road to drive on after five months in Ireland). The South gave me a (literally!) warm hello.

I began my stroll congratulating myself for losing the limp I had maintained for the past four weeks after an ill-fated leap from the ruins of a castle. “Hey,” shouted a construction worker from the roof of a house, “you got a bit of a limp there! Is it a ball injury?” Oh well.

Lest I suspect the alleged limp was only momentary, an hour later another stranger stopped me with genuine concern in his voice. “Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re limping there! Do you need help?”

One of my last errands involved some repair work for my car. I dropped car off and waited in the waiting room for my mom to pick me up. The summer heat was bordering on oppressive outside (or so I thought... those who had been around all summer commented later that the day was rather mild), and we in the waiting room were thankful for the AC.

“Do you want a coke or water or anything?” the man behind the counter asked the three of us as we waited. (“Coke,” incidentally, refers to any carbonated drink, called “soda” or “pop” or “soft drink” in other American cultures.) We all turned him down. Five minutes later another employee asked us the same thing. Again we turned him down. When the third employee offered a beverage, I finally accepted a water to keep them from offering. It didn’t work; I was asked a fourth time.

On our way home, we stopped at a rural produce stand. The owner greeted us warmly and kept chatting us up while we browsed, throwing a couple extra items in for free when we checked out. “Come by anytime,” he told us as we left. “If I’m not here, just take what you want and leave some money in the can.”

As I returned to my parents' house, I knew that the South had welcomed me home, that Southern hospitality was still fit to rival the Irish hospitality I had been enjoying for the past month. In this case, all the hospitality offered came from strangers, all people who had never seen me before and would likely never see me again. Southerners are not hospitable out of self-interest, out of a calculated investment with a hope of return. They are not even hospitable in an enlightened attempt to make the world a better place, to do their part to benefit the common lot of humanity. From what I have been able to tell from the past 22 years, Southerners are overtly hospitable simply because that is the decent way to be.

Oh my beloved South, how I shall miss thee!

Delightful misery

2010-07-15T18:50:00.003-04:00

“Why Padraic, how are you now?” the cheerful Irishman asked as we navigated the isles at Tesco on our work-day at the priory.

“Terrible, terrible,” the priest answered brightly as if he had won the lottery, “but nobody cares now, do they? And how are you?”

“Truthfully about the same, but isn’t that always the case?” came the chipper, polite answer. “But you can’t complain about the weather we have today at any rate. What are you here for?”

“This young lady and myself are getting an apartment ready for some visitors tomorrow,” Fr. Padraic began, and the conversation never returned to their mutual miseries.

The Irish are without a doubt the most delightfully miserable people I have ever met. Their suffering is quite real and never forgotten, but that is somehow not enough to ruin an otherwise lovely day (or even to worsen a rainy one).

As I commented last year, the Irish wear suffering like a well-worn t-shirt. It is unmistakably present, but has become so well-worn over time that it could almost be considered comfortable. After all, there is always tea to greet the morning and beer to greet the night, and perhaps even a few cigarettes to get you from one to the other.

Of course, I don’t mean to minimize their pain and oppression over the centuries, to brush it aside and gloss over the raw evil of it. But they sort of do that for me.

This is the will of God...

2010-07-14T13:17:00.004-04:00

'Tis the season of transitions: graduations, moves, new jobs, new programs, new unknowns. In this season, I am always struck when people declare "God's will" for their (or my) future. Here are a few that have struck me and given me pause this week.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
-I Thessalonians 5:16-18

Yes, it is his will that we see and enjoy everything in love. And it is in our ignorance of this that we are most blind. Some of us believe that God is almighty, and may do everything; and that he is all wise, and can do everything; but that he is all love, and will do everything—there we draw back. And as I see it, this ignorance is the greatest of all hindrances to God's lovers.
-Julian of Norwich.

May you filled with the immense joy of the Lord. May it lighten your steps every day of your life. May you forever be aware that the peace of the Risen Christ surrounds, protects and guides you and that God's will for yourself and all people is quite simple: to be happy, always happy in the Lord.
-Fr. Padraic

But all shall be well

2010-07-11T05:21:00.005-04:00

One day my soul may be wide enough to take in the mystics. In the mean time, I have nevertheless managed to find encouragement in Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, and the intimacy described therein provides balance for my all-too-intellectual approach to the Faith. This paragraph struck me yesterday. I don't know if this is the kind of statement that can start a fight ("Are you saying that sin does not exist?" or "Are you saying God does not hold us accountable for sin?"), and I don't mean to tread dangerous ground. But I at least find it healing to remember that my sin is a twistedness rather than a contrary force of evil, and that God looks at my sin with the compassion of a doctor rather than the sternness of a judge.

But I did not see sin. I believe it has no substance or real existence. It can only be known by the pain it causes. This pain is something, as I see it, which lasts but a while. It purges us and makes us know ourselves, so that we ask for mercy. The passion of our Lord is our comfort against all this—for such is his blessed will. Because of his tender love for all those who are to be saved our good Lord comforts us at once and sweetly, as if to say, “It is true that sin is the cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” These words were said most tenderly, with never a hint of blame either to me or to any of those to be saved. It would be most improper of me therefore to blame or criticize God for my sin, since he does not blame me for it.

Misfit Mortality

2010-07-07T20:10:00.002-04:00

This poem comes from a more melodramatic stage of my writing, but the subject of death is rather conducive to such a style at any rate. I wrote it five years ago when it looked like my mother had cancer; for some reason, the death of my dog reminds me of these lines, awkward and choppy though they may be.

July 1, 2005

It seems our life is but a struggle we
Will lose with death, for but a moment here,
Like grass on rocky crags that fights with fear
Until the mudslide wins supremacy.
“But death is natural,” they say to me,
Like incantations echoing to sear
It on our disbelief. Nay, it is clear
That breath is; death we taste unnaturally.

With spirits that reject what bodies taste,
We fight what Reason knows we can’t defeat.
“This world is not our home,” they say in haste...
“But still it could be,” adds a homesick breeze,
“For maybe once it was,” his heart agrees,
And proves man is a longing piece of meat.

Groaning together

2010-07-07T20:08:00.004-04:00

Rahab was born the summer when I was sixteen, a tiny, blind, black sausage. I was in the room when she arrived. I loved her because she was the smallest of the litter. I loved her because she was the blackest. I loved her because she took a liking to me, and while her wiggly brothers and sisters squealed away, she would nestle in my hands and fall asleep there peacefully. Rahab chose me as much as I chose her.

She was mine, still the only dog I have ever had that was fully my own. I trained her. I slept with her. I took her camping at night and slept soundly in the woods, waking with the alert German Shepherd having hardly moved an inch beside me. I understood her timid, self-conscious personality quirks. I empathized with the way that she carried love and fear together like a hand and glove, with the way she longed for encouragement and shrunk from disfavor.

This evening, less than a week before returning to the US, I received the word that my 11-year-old dog is dead. I don’t know if I’ll ever be old enough to lose an old friend well, but today is not that day at any rate. I will miss my Rahab.

The death of an old dog should come across as an entirely natural event, a regular phenomenon for my strange demographic of humanity that cares for smaller creatures with shorter life-spans. Nevertheless, as my soul utterly rejects the news as if it came from a cheap, tasteless dime-store novel written by an author with no internal consistency or artistry, I can’t help but think that death is wrong, even if it is real.

I wonder if the death of animals is an example of creation groaning with us in the pains of childbirth as we await the fullness of redemption. Perhaps it is. Creation groans, Rahab groans, I groan: Come, Lord Jesus; something has gone terribly wrong out there!

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

Nothing covered up

2010-07-01T15:18:00.003-04:00

Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops.
-Luke 12:2-3

We felt like we were in a war-zone right away. On one side of the river we were welcomed into the city with red, white, and blue and a sign that read “Londonderry – West Bank – Loyalists Still Under Siege – No Surrender.” On the other we were greeted by green, white, and orange and a sign that read “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” to introduce a host of disturbing murals commemorating the victims of Bloody Sunday (1972) and the Troubles. The tension was almost palpable.

I had come to Derry to deliver a gift to a Franciscan friar, and had failed to connect the city I was visiting with the news of the previous week: 38 years after the shootings in Derry that had served as an iconic representation of the Troubles, the Saville Report had just been published a week earlier, and the British government officially recognized the killings as atrocities.

The killings had become burned in the Irish memory, a travesty of justice white-washed by the perpetrators which, even if extreme, was certainly an iconic example of what they suffered throughout the centuries. Over lunch on Sunday I was struck by two things: how present the pain still is (an Irish couple described the sheer terror they had experienced whenever they had to drive through the North and stood the risk of being shot if they failed to notice a road blockade), and how much an apology makes a difference nonetheless. Present pain not withstanding, there were seeds of hope and goodwill.

Though there is nothing pragmatic about it, no tangible removal of consequence, confession is nevertheless powerful. When a party can strip its pride and dignity to say “I was absolutely wrong,” can expose hidden (in this case, quite ineffectively) wrongs to the light, can do so even when they are decades old and even if the admission is not forced, there is a place for healing. Some wrongs cannot be “made right”; they can only be admitted to be wrong. And no wrongs are private wrongs; all are public, and can only be healed publicly.

This past weekend, I was given hope for that healing in Northern Ireland, and it was beautiful indeed.

* * *

A few recommended articles:

BBC - for the raw facts of the Saville Report
The Irish Independent - for reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants
The Irish Catholic - for talk of healing from one of the survivors

The path to sainthood

2010-06-22T12:42:00.003-04:00

Today is the feast day of (among other people) St. Thomas More, the patron saint of my master’s thesis. I’m not thinking much about martyrdom today, nor, despite the fact that Ireland always reminds me of the tragedy of Church division, about unity. Instead, remembering his prayer scroll that he read from the Tower of London as he awaited execution, I am thinking about the ultimate vocation of the Christian: Love.

Those who are the most holy, from what I can tell, do not get there by trying to be holy. They most certainly do not get there by hammering out whatever imperfections linger with them, nor by striving to be better people. The holiest people I’ve met, at any rate, radiate not perfection but love. Love for God and for ones brother does, after all, sum up the law and the prophets, and we are able to love only because he has first loved us, as John reminds us in his first epistle. The path to sainthood, as it turns out, is a path of receiving the love of God.

I don’t have a clear idea of why that seems to come easier to some folks than to others, how I (for example) could have tried to follow Christ for decades without a sense that he loved me. I don’t know how much love (and then sainthood by extension) is a gift we receive passively or actively (the middle voice, as a friend once speculated). But I do know that a call to holiness, a call to sainthood, is a call to receive God’s lavish Grace.

On that note, on the feast of the good St. Thomas More, I will end with the poem the saint read 475 years ago today as he watched John Fisher marched to the scaffold where he would follow two weeks later. We are called like More not as much to martyrdom as to love; in the light of love, martyrdom almost becomes incidental.

Rede distinctely
pray deuoutly
syghe depely
suffer pacyently
meke youe lowly
giue no sentenc hastely
speke but rathe and that truly
preuent youre spech discretely
do all your dedes in charytye
temtacyon resyst strongly
breke his heade shortly
wepe bytterly
haue compassion tenderly
do good workes busyly
loue perseuerently
loue hertely
loue faythfully
loue god all only
and all other for hym charitably
loue in aduersytye
loue in prosperyty
thinke alway of loue for loue ys non other but god hymselfe. Thus to loue bringeth the louer to loue without ende.

And there was a great calm...

2010-06-20T18:24:00.006-04:00

There're Graces strewn like wildflowers that turn
Their gatherer into a child, and all
The grubby roadside violets, she will learn,
Have clutched the very hands that let them fall.
And Grace has wrapped around like ocean foam
That's deeper, fuller, older than Despair, and in
That vastness even sorrow finds a home
In depths extending deeper than the sin.
Be still, my soul, for Home is larger than
Your restlessness. Be still, for Peace is deeper
Than your tears. The runner and the sleeper
Never leave the place where they began;
For we the restless wander to the stars,
Surprised to find our roots extend that far.

The Irish work ethic

2010-06-18T02:53:00.004-04:00

“Is this a good time?” I asked when I arrived at the priory. It was indeed the time we had arranged for me to come help preparing the apartment upstairs for the arrival of guests the next day, but I’m always a bit self-conscious about being on time in Ireland.

“Yes, it’s a perfect time,” Fr Padraic said as he welcomed me inside. “I was just about to smoke a cigarette; would you like to join me in the back?” Since he had been a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work that needed to happen that day (thus my offer to help), I assumed it would be a quick break.

I had yet to learn about the Irish work ethic.

Fr Padraic smoked a cigarette as he checked on the plumbing work being done out back. Then he invited me back inside for tea.

Ready for the mountain of tasks for the day, he went to the office to put some finishing touches on his dissertation he was about to get bound. Then he smoked another cigarette.

Dissertation in hand, we walked to the binders, only to discover upon arrival that the title page had a smudge. We returned to the priory to print out another title page. Then he smoked another cigarette.

We returned to the binders with the new page in hand, and stopped at a department store on the way back to pick up a dresser. Tired from carrying the load, he checked on the plumbers again, smoking another cigarette amid his amicable Irish banter with the laborers. Then we went to a cafe for tea and biscuits.

Then he smoked another cigarette, musing over the great amount of work we had already accomplished, and how much help I had been.

Finally, sometime after noon we got to the main task of the day and walked to Tesco to buy dishes and cutlery for the apartment. Now that I finally had a task that felt useful, I began washing the newly purchased dishes and cleaning out the mysterious collection of entirely random objects that had accumulated in the unused kitchen. Before I had got very far, Fr Padraic interrupted me for lunch. It was a light lunch, but included gin-and-tonic and more cigarettes.

Fortunately after lunch I managed to work quickly enough to finish the kitchen and help Fr Padraic select some curtains online for one of the bedrooms. Then it was time for another cigarette.

As the day waned, we walked to the store to buy the curtains. Upon our return, Fr Padraic bumped into some people he knew and invited them in for tea. By the time that was over, thoroughly exhausted from the day’s tasks, Fr Padraic thanked me for my invaluable help and escorted me to the door. “What a lot of work we’ve got done today!” he exclaimed with all sincerity as I left the priory.

Of course, jokes about the work day with Fr Padraic aside, I know that Ireland has had more than its fair share of brutalizing labor inflicted upon it over the years, so I do not actually intend to imply that the Irish are lazy. From what I can tell, the Irish seem to work as hard as they need to (though there are many places where the Irish and Americans would quibble over the definition of “need”), but no more than that. If they don’t need to work as hard, they don’t; and when they can relax (and enjoy a cigarette), they absolutely do.

It may look lazy to an American entrepreneur, but there is something profoundly healing to me about a work ethic that strives for nothing more than the day’s tasks, that does not try to get 25 hours out of a day nor would work the full 24. Pitfalls of the Irish economy aside for now, there is much for me to learn from it.

“Give us this day our daily bread,” we pray, and ask nothing more. “Give us this day our daily tasks,” the Irish might also pray, and expect nothing more. Fr. Padraic accomplished what his Tuesday demanded, and nothing more. I’m sure he went to bed feeling content... after he smoked another cigarette.

If it had not been the Lord who was on our side

2010-06-16T05:17:00.003-04:00

Every time I hear Psalm 124, I think of Lawrence.

I can almost count on one hand the number of times I saw him. The first was toward the end of my junior year of college when I was twenty one. I was on my way to a coffee shop, and he was sitting on the street with a cardboard box asking for money. On an impulse I asked him if he was hungry. The next hour involved chicken wings with ranch dressing, stories of his struggle with AIDS and loneliness, and plans to share a ride to church in the morning.

The next day involved picking him up in the parking lot where he was sleeping, letting him borrow my jacket when I noticed the wet man shivering in the air-conditioned church, telling him he could keep it since it fit so well, and promising to pray for him over the summer when I said goodbye. I left campus days later and spent the summer in Europe where my family was living. It rained a lot that summer, and I prayed for Lawrence every time it did.

The third time I saw him was my first Sunday back on campus my senior year of college. When the pastor invited us to greet those sitting near us, I turned around to see the cleanly-shaven, beaming face of Lawrence behind me, and I wept with joy and surprise. All summer as I had been offering prayers I didn’t expect to be heard, folks at my church had been helping Lawrence get off the streets.

“I would be remiss,” he told the Sunday school the next week, the week he also told me would be his last week at the large, middle-class, white, Evangelical church where he would never feel that he belonged, “if I did not sing you a song.” His eyes looked into the distance as if he were seeing God himself, and he sang in his clear, rich, gospel voice:

If it had not been
For the Lord on my side
Tell me where would I
Where would I be...

The last time I saw Lawrence was in my second year after graduation. I happened to be walking down the street near my old alma mater, and saw a man sitting on the street with a cardboard box. “No!” I almost shouted when I recognized him, tears welling up in me to see my lesson in answered prayer overturned so quickly. Lawrence’s optimistic promises that he would be off the streets soon rang hollow in my jaded ears, for I knew that while prayer was powerful, drug addiction was as well.

Every time I hear Psalm 124, I remember the whole story as one event: my young idealism, Lawrence’s loneliness, my gifts of raincoat and hopeless prayers, the church’s aid, the light in Lawrence’s beaming face, the joy of his song, and the cold power of cynicism when I saw him for the last time.

And when Psalm 124 came up again in Monday's evening prayers, I started to realize one of the reasons the Church has been praying through the Psalms over the centuries (or rather the millennia, I suppose, since praying the Psalms had been a Jewish tradition from before the time of Christ). In the body of the Church—the Church throughout the world and the Church throughout history—each desperate cry and joyful celebration in the Psalms exists together simultaneously, just as Lawrence’s entire story exists in my memory of that psalm. Thus even when we are joyful, we pray the words of those who are despairing; even when we despair, we pray the words of those who celebrate God’s salvation.

And on Monday evening, even though I don’t know if Lawrence is even alive anymore or whether he got off the streets again like he had promised me when I last saw him four years ago, I prayed “Blessed be the Lord who did not give us a prey to their teeth! Our life, like a bird, has escaped from the snare of the fowler.” In the Church, I know that the words are being fulfilled.

The gospel we profess

2010-06-13T04:23:00.004-04:00

Today in the Divine Office, in my prayers before heading out to navigate the interesting world of Irish Sunday mornings, I read this:

God our Father,
we rejoice in the faith that draws us together,
aware that selfishness can drive us apart.
Let your encouragement be our constant strength.
Keep us one in the love that has sealed our lives,
help us to live as one family
the gospel we profess.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Hear us Lord, between the lovely charismatic and hurt Protestants who will greet me warmly as they declare the impossibility of being Catholic and Christian in Ireland, between the dry but faithful Catholics who will mumble their way through a mass they do not understand, between the late mornings of the hung-over Saturday night revelers who will not be joining me at either church this morning. In your mercy, hear our prayer.

Home from the soaring

2010-06-09T11:06:00.004-04:00

In my first trip to Ireland two years ago, I brought Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours with me to read on the plane. I find Rilke a surprisingly translatable poet, and the poems set an inquiringly meditative tone for a trip that proved to be every bit as much a pilgrimage as it was an intensive Latin boot camp.

I’m headed to Ireland again today on a graduation trip with my sister, enjoying some of my old haunts and exploring new ones before I move to the Midwest and she to east Asia. We booked the tickets six months ago before we knew about either excursion, and thus we booked a longer vacation than we would have had we been aware of the intensity of this summer. I have been tricked into enjoying a long vacation, as it turns out; I have been tricked into receiving some grace.

Anyway, as I head off for nearly five weeks in Ireland, I wish I had my copy of Rilke’s Book of Hours to read again as I return (I gave my copy to my friend Paul as a celebation present last year). But as I posted one of the poems in this blog two years ago, I can at least use that one as my sending off. The words are appropriate differently than they were then.

I come home from the soaring
in which I lost myself.
I was song, and the
refrain which is God
is still roaring in my ears.

Now I am still
and plain:
no more words.

To the others I was like a wind:
I made them shake.
I’d gone very far, as far as the angels,
and high, where light things into nothing.

But deep in the darkness is God…

Sinister brilliance

2010-06-04T18:04:00.007-04:00

Last month when I was in Venice, I happened upon a small stationary store and went inside looking for envelopes. The clerk apologized that he did not have the size I was looking for, but suggested as an alternative that he as an artist would be able to draw my body in his small studio around the corner. I wondered if my request had been lost in translation, but the nature of his alternative translated quite clearly.

“Oh,” he said sympathetically as I struggled to come up with a pleasant way to turn him down, “I see you are shy.” He sounded like he felt genuinely sorry for me.

Shy, I thought. Is that what they call it now?

Evidently any self-respecting, confident woman would take off her clothes for any stranger off the street who asks. Evidently it is only the “shy” ones who would hesitate.

Something strange has happened to our culture. There is a startling reversal that had my college friends protesting the objectification of women by staging skits wherein they present themselves as sex objects. There is a peculiar inversion that had the American lit class for whom I graded reading a short story that portrays prostitution as an act of power that allows women to rise above the slavery of marriage. There is a downright eerie scheme that I watched allow an American authority figure to exploit a vulnerable Muslim friend of mine last year and champion himself as her liberator for doing so.

Seriously folks, it’s brilliant. If we could trace this reversal to a single person, he would be a genius—a sinister, conniving mastermind. If someone can convince a woman that her freedom is found in treating herself like a cheap commodity, that her power is found in being exploited, that those who consume her like a fine wine (or a cheap beer) are her champions, then he would be a more cunning scoundrel than I could ever be.

It is times like these that I would love to write a satire on our culture, and then am saddened to realize I can’t. Our culture is already its own satire; some mastermind out there already beat me to it.

Pentecost, 2010

2010-05-30T22:56:00.006-04:00

Find rest my soul; the work is done,
And you may simply keep the feast.
There's time to rest just as to run
And to receive and pass the peace.
The calling is revealed a grace: the choice
To follow where you're fashioned to rejoice.

The Spirit hovers on the deep
That 'til today had groaned in pain,
And those who sewed in tears will reap
The New Creation green from rain.
You entered fractured, but you found the whole;
So rest, O weary Pilgrim — rest my soul.

The Season of Pentecost

2010-05-26T10:04:00.006-04:00

The very long, six-month season between Pentecost and Advent is known as Ordinary Time. For those who get excited about the seasons of the Church calendar as I do, this is the boring time, when after six months of walking through the story of Christ’s work in the cosmic story of salvation, we simply go about our business as usual with few major celebrations.

This dull picture of Ordinary Time was indeed consistent with my dull picture of our era in the cosmic story of salvation. Christ came, lived, died, rose again, and ascended to the Father, and now we are left in this awkward time between the climax and the ultimate resolution.

But this year I remember that it is also called the season of Pentecost, a season where the Church colors are green because creation is being reborn (not simply waiting for rebirth in the Second Coming). Christ has already been raised from the dead, “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep”— the Resurrection has begun! The Spirit has already been poured out upon us “who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,” just has he had hovered over the waters in the first creation. As the Orthodox liturgy states quite clearly, the sign of the Spirit’s coming demonstrates that the Fall has already been reversed, as those who have been cursed with confusion of language are brought together as the Gospel is proclaimed in all languages at Pentecost:

The arrogance of building the tower in the days of old
led to the confusion of tongues.
Now the glory of the knowledge of God brings them wisdom.
There God condemned the impious for their transgression.
Here Christ has enlightened the fishermen by the Spirit.
There disharmony was brought about for punishment.//
Now harmony is renewed for the salvation of our souls.

So be encouraged, my friends. Creation is being restored, and we the Church already have the firstfruits of the Spirit, who, Psalm 104 reminds us, created and renews the face of the earth. Though we may indeed be living in the “already but not yet,” we are much, much closer to the “already” than I had realized.

And by chance a friend reminded me of Wendell Berry on Pentecost Sunday, a scene from Jayber Crow when the protagonist looks out a flood and is reminded of the Spirit's work in creation. For any Wendell Berry fans out there or those who should be, I will let him end this:

As soon as I shut my eyes, I could see the river again, only now I seemed to see it up and down its whole length. Where just a little while before people had been breathing and eating and going about their old everyday lives, now I could see the currents come riding in, at first picking up straws and dead leaves and little sticks, and then boards and pieces of firewood and whole logs, and then maybe the henhouse or the barn or the house itself. As if the mountains had melted and were flowing to the sea, the water rose and filled all the airy spaces of rooms and stalls and fields and woods, carrying away everything that would float, casting up the people and scattering them, scattering or drowning their animals and poultry flocks. The whole world, it seemed, was cast adrift, riding the currents, whirled about in eddies, the old life submerged and gone, the new not yet come.

And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that had made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly.
--from Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Made Flesh

2010-05-21T23:38:00.006-04:00

I once had a conversation with a friend who suggested to me that allegiance to the Catholic Church was an embracing of a glorified picture of the Church at the expense of Scripture. This impression is common enough, and were it true, it would be a grave error indeed.

“Em, Scripture is given to us by God himself,” she affirmed.

I agreed. “And the Church is not?” I cautiously asked.

“Well, the Church may be given to us by God as well,” she agreed, “but it is not part of the Trinity.”

This gave me pause. “...and Scripture is?” I hesitated.

“Yes,” she affirmed, but did not seem sure of her answer, “because Jesus in the Word made flesh...”

This conversation has spun in my mind quite a bit since it happened. It was not the first time I had heard the notion that the introduction to the Gospel of John means that Christ as the Word made flesh is the incarnation of the Bible, as if the Bible is the second person of the Trinity, the form of Jesus that has stayed with us in the past 2000 years since the Ascension.

Please hear me that I am not making fun of my friend. There are some ways the interpretation might have been hasty, an on-the-spot defense of conclusions she had beforehand, but there are other ways that she might have tapped into imagery that John welcomes us to explore. And to whatever extent I sympathize with the idea that the Bible is the second person of the Trinity, perhaps there is a sense in which the Church is the third, the tangible manifestation of the work of the Holy Spirit that has stayed with us for the past 2000 years since Pentecost.

I won’t take that idea very far (anymore than it would be kind to take my friend’s idea farther than it was meant to go), but I am comforted today to remember (as a friend insisted to me two years ago) that God has not abandoned his Church to muddle through the past 2000 years on her own, that the Holy Spirit will not abandon the Church, that God in his surplus of graces has poured his Spirit on us both individually and as a united body.

As I am Confirmed in the morning of the eve of Pentecost, it is good news indeed.

Like the dew that disappears

2010-05-19T18:02:00.005-04:00

My five-year-old nephew revoked his friendship from me when I was babysitting last night because of my cruelty in withholding additional time on the wii beyond his daily allotment. “You better give me special Auntie-Em-wii-time,” he ordered, “or I won’t be your friend anymore!”

It brought back old memories from the church nursery when my childhood best-friend (except not evidently of that day) revoked her friendship for some now-forgotten crime of mine.

“I won’t be your friend again!” she had threatened.

Always a natural diplomat, I struggled to comprehend this dilemma. “But,” I reasoned helplessly, “you can’t not be my friend, because I’ll be your friend.”

“You can’t,” she countered, “because I won’t be your friend.”

I pondered my quandary. Whether or not friendship would have required a mutual agreement between the parties, we could hardly be enemies if one of the parties continued to extend friendship. She could withhold any benefits of friendship from me that she wanted, but could the friendship nevertheless remain intact if I continued to extend them to her? Beyond that, I wasn’t sure what friendship involved beyond mutual affection, so if my fondness for her continued, the doors to friendship would remain open.

(Seriously, I remember pondering all this, though perhaps not in those terms.)

“Well,” finally concluded triumphantly in the full capacity of my three-year-old articulation, “I’ll still like you.”

And certainly, one of the mysteries of the Gospel is that Christ continues to extend his friendship out to us after we have revoked ours from him like my nephew or my nursery friend. But while I would not go so far as to affirm the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace (at least not in its simplistic form), I have begun to hope that God’s friendship is not quite as helpless to childhood tantrums as my three-year-old capacities had left me.

Perhaps the deeper magic of the Gospel is that his open offer of friendship extends beyond our blockades, even those we maintain until our deaths. Perhaps his very offer of friendship begins the process of healing that our acceptance of it would complete (or at least would expedite). Perhaps healing comes to some extent whether I like it or not, as it does when I skin my knee. Perhaps though (as Hosea says) our love is like the morning cloud and like the dew that disappears, God has already (as Isaiah says) blotted out our transgressions like a cloud and our sins like a mist. Perhaps he hauntingly calls out to us, “Return to me, for I have [already?] redeemed you.”

For those who are not sure what I mean, never fear: I don't either. I just like to think our little tantrums might not have the last laugh.

The trees of the field

2010-05-14T10:29:00.008-04:00

I missed the unfolding of my last spring in the South, which means I missed my last dogwood season. The best of my childhood memories are dusted with these four-pedaled blossoms that descended upon the Southern forest every spring like snow in colder climates. I would decorate my dark hair with their contrasting whiteness. I would weave them into wreathes and wear them like a crown of pure simplicity.

But I was in Italy the entirety of this spring’s dogwood season, and at the end of the summer I will be moving back to the Midwest where I was born, trading the spring snow of dogwoods for the colder fall-winter-spring snow of the flatlands, trading my green cottage for whatever residence I could manage to find at this unfamiliar place.

Not to be outdone by dogwoods or green cottages, God began demonstrating his ability to take care of me right away, and the last week of April found me and my mom hopping into the car for a whirlwind 13-hour-drive to put an offer on a restored, 100-year-old, 3-bedroom house two miles from campus that I can easily afford to buy with my graduate student stipend. My neighbors range from agnostics to theology majors, from pagans to Mennonites to Catholics, from case workers to those the cases they work on to graduate students. My house is fully restored with its original hardwood floors and plaster walls, with newer additions like the windows and appliances and wiring and ceramic tile and vinyl siding. After adding a couple green accents and a garden, this house could be home indeed.

God is not looking for sacrifice, he keeps reminding me; we are mistaken to confuse the looseness of the follower's hold on his possessions with God's alleged desire to take them away. There is a deep mystery woven into every blossoming spring that, despite the brokenness of creation and the suffering of his servants, God does not tease us with goodness that he takes away. Again and again, God reveals his high superfluousness, his gratuitous beauty and mundane magic, and when I prepare places for faith God turns around and prepares places for me. Abraham, I recall, did not demonstrate a faith that declared "My God, good or evil!" but a faith that was willing to step out to where God's goodness would be tested. Again and again, God passes the test.

At any rate, there in my new neighborhood in that whirlwind trip in the last week of April, the dogwoods were in full bloom. I guess they do grow in some parts of the Midwest.

For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

God joins forces

2010-05-09T08:52:00.005-04:00

The most important person on earth is a mother. She cannot claim the honor of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any cathedral—a dwelling for an immortal soul, the tiny perfection of her baby's body… The angels have not been blessed with such a grace. They cannot share in God's creative miracle to bring new saints to Heaven. Only a human mother can. Mothers are closer to God the Creator than any other creature; God joins forces with mothers in performing this act of creation… What on God's good earth is more glorious than this: to be a mother!

Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty (1892-1975)

Sonny, in memorium

2010-05-01T12:02:00.009-04:00

Sorry for a heavy note in the beautiful spring. I remembered this story as I read a freshman’s essay about a meaningful family reunion complete with a brief scare (and there was reason to be scared) when the police drove by.

Sonny was a beautiful boy. In my days in the intercity commune, before my life plans were side-swiped and found me taking a surprising detour into graduate school, I loved living across the street from the 16-year-old and his mother Ms. Carol.

He was a beautiful boy, transitioning into a beautiful young man. He was charming, polite, and welcoming to the white stranger who moved in across the street from him, and I tried to imagine what he was like among his peers. I was sure the girls at school must have loved him: his well-carved form, his gentle voice, his bright eyes, his energy and charm.

It was beautiful to see him playing basketball with the little kids on our block, giving the little African boy rides on the handlebars of his bike on a Saturday afternoon. It was almost more likely for to see him surrounded by children than by teenagers his age. They all loved him.

It was beautiful to hear the brightness in his voice when I passed him on the street corner and he sang his cheerful hello to me, even if it was at night and he was with his friends engaging in questionable activity. I loved him.

It was beautiful to feel the love of Ms. Carol for him depicted in her motherly worry, her sighs when I asked how Sonny was doing, her shaking head and distant looks. She loved him.

“Did you see those police cars driving through the block?” Ms. Carol asked me one afternoon when I came home from work. She was standing in the middle of the intersection so that she could see down four blocks.

“No, what’s going on?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but I’m telling everyone I see to get in the house. Have you seen Sonny?”

“No, but I’ll keep my eye out for him.”

“Please do. I’m staying right out here until I bring him inside!”

A year after I moved out of the neighborhood, I returned from my first summer studying in Latin in Ireland to discover that Sonny had ended up in jail. The charge was severe, the young man was entirely guilty, and I am almost sure that by the time he leaves prison well into his adult years the brightness will be gone from his face. I will miss Sonny.

There is a twistedness to the world: it is not the force of evil that has infiltrated our culture and our families, but a rather a warping, a warping that has Ms. Carol warning the neighborhood of the police like an invading enemy that tears children away from loving mothers and dashes their hopes. Who are the bad guys in a story like this? Sonny? Ms. Carol? The police? The absent father, once a boy like Sonny? Somehow we have all become the enemies just as we are all certainly the victims; creation has been twisted in upon itself.

Yet it is still Easter season, and we rejoice in a God who has come into the very twisted places of creation and has begun it again from the inside. The Resurrection has begun, and Christ is the first fruits of the New Creation. Then raise us with you, Brother; resurrect the families of my students, the protection of the police, the love of Ms. Carol, the brightness of Sonny. Our good has been twisted; come revive it!

As a hen gathers her brood

2010-04-28T18:46:00.006-04:00

Grading high school English papers gives me a new appreciation for the passage in Isaiah where the prophet exclaims, “Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you...” Come on kid, I find myself groaning, just put down anything! I’d give you a decent grade for a wrong answer; I can’t give you anything for a blank!

It makes me understand how my thrown-together papers in high school did so well. I never dreamed that half of the kids might not write papers at all. I feel like Desdemona talking with her servant Emilia after the former has been falsely accused of infidelity in Shakespeare's Othello:

DESDEMONA I have heard it said so. O, these men, these men!
Dost thou in conscience think,--tell me, Emilia,--
That there be women do abuse their husbands
In such gross kind?
EMILIA There be some such, no question.
DESDEMONA Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA Why, would not you?
DESDEMONA No, by this heavenly light!
EMILIA Nor I neither by this heavenly light;
I might do't as well i' the dark.
DESDEMONA Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
EMILIA The world's a huge thing: it is a great price.
For a small vice.

Dost thou in conscience think that there be kids do abuse their teachers in such gross kind? Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?

Indeed, many a highschooler would do (or not do) such a deed, and not for all the world but for nothing. O student, student, the highschoolers that kill the teachers and stone the graders who are sent to them! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!

Buried there like mushrooms

2010-04-26T15:53:00.007-04:00

Once upon a time while I was beginning graduate school, I started an epic. It was roughly around the same time that I started this blog and was written toward the same end: to teach me to listen to the voice of Grace after years of allowing different voices to narrate my life. It was an entirely unpublishable combination of Christianity, pop psychology, and the epic tradition with absolutely no audience but the author, but I had fun with it.

I only got about 400 lines into it before grad school ran away with my brain, and no doubt by the time it is returned I will have other ambitious projects to accomplish, and it will forever remain just a prologue (which I included in a post once before) and 1.1 cantos.

But toward the beginning of that first canto I included my three earliest memories, which all involve my mother: trying (unsuccessfully) to eat dog food discretely without her noticing, coloring on the wall in an altruistic attempt to fill in a place where a painted mural had chipped and being spanked for it, and going through paper after paper in a vain attempt to draw a smile until she discovered me and my pile of frowny-faces and taught me to follow the curve of the chin.

It is an interesting conglomeration of memories: a young woman and her toddler winding their way through mischief, misunderstanding, and love. My mother was the eighth child of Polish and Czechoslovakian immigrants who had learned English from scratch and taught it to their nine children, and she took on the adventure of learning a life of Faith from scratch while teaching it to her four children. This past weekend as that young woman turned 53 and her toddler is roughly the age the mother was in the dawn of my memories, I find myself grateful for that young woman and her quest to nurture four children’s faith from conception to adulthood, and grateful to Love who consumed them all along the way.

This one’s for you, Mom. I love you.

From Grace Regained, Canto 1, lines 33-112

...So Fascination was her founding friend
And wed itself to every future trend.
Ambition grew as Wonder’s alibi
Beyond the corner of her mother’s eye
Where dog-food was a myst’ry unexplored,
And Cheerios were bland until they poured
Across the kitchen, where cherubic hands
Would gather them like well-shot rubber bands
Where they were strewn, before the muraled wall
On which a lake, electric blue, would call,
“Invade the drywall paint, and touch the pine
Trees’ vibrant green, and promenade the line
Of cartoon mountain ridges—beauty’s found
Within adventure.” But one day a round,
Endented hole transgressed her singing lake
With drywall white unsuited for its make,
Exposing vuln’rability of yea
The greatest craftsmanship, whose plight one day
Inspired a stroke of brilliance in her brain,
Unsettled by the awkward, whited stain—
For had she not a marker of that hue
That may disguise disruption of the blue?
But with dismay she found her instrument
Was insufficient to disguise the dent,
Though it was made more subtle now (she prayed)
Due to the scope of her Crayola aid.
And halfway satisfied she walked away
Partaking in diversions of the day
Until a castigating voice compelled
Her back under reproach, where she beheld
Her craftsmanship with helpless shame, the scorn
Of her she longed to please. Her heart more torn
To be considered bad than by the blows
Received, she fled for refuge where her toes
Could feel the grass, and there she saw her dad,
Yet unaware of the office she had
Committed. How she longed to meet his smile
A worthy daughter, to conceal a while
Her careless shame! So sing, O Muse, across
The mem’ry fields oppressed by concrete dross.
Proclaim thine all-sufficiency of care
To favor-craving frail ones, failing where
They long to please; proclaim forgiveness to
The child her mother, built with stronger glue,
Who read herself into her daughter’s eyes
That bore resemblance, and assumed her cries
Were from a fiery will. Forgive the two
Who hurt themselves; they know not what they do.

For thine inclusive eyes had seen the days
The child devoured paper in the maze
Of art, unable to compose a simple smile
Until her mother came and saw the pile
Of sad, discarded frowns of she who threw
Out too much paper, but whose mother knew
The mystery of teaching hands to see
And eyes to draw and will to bend its knee
Enough to parallel the present curve
She had emblazoned there with gallish nerve.
Thou saw’st the unencumbered, raw delight
The girl extracted in her mother’s sight
Because her casual discovery
Upon the deck of broom and energy
To save her mother of the chore bore fruits
Of giddy joy of bringing joy that suits
A munchkin dressed in Love. For Love it was
That strapped the kids on bikes the way it does
The fam’ly to each other, Love that blew
Upon them like Chicago wind; and through
The dampened corners of the forest, Love
Was buried there like mushrooms, treasures of
The eyes that stopped to look, of fingers who
Could bear a little dirt to probe into
The mossy corners and to gather gems
Of fungus into wicker baskets, stems
And all; Love the second language which
Her parents’ nimble fingers learned to stitch
Together fluently enough to speak
It in the home, just as the strongly meek
Bohem’an immigrants with English one
Short generation earlier had done.

Diverting Apologetics

2010-04-19T11:30:00.005-04:00

As promised, I wrote an article for a friend's blog on "Why I am joining the Catholic Church," which provides me the chance to send this link your way without turning my blog into a place for apologetics. The article deals with some basic principles that the more controversial issues are founded on, and I'll deal with the latter category later. It's an ecumenical enough article to allow my friend to write a "Why she is right but I am still Protestant" article for next week, so hopefully it won't be enormously offensive to folks in other camps. He is also inviting me to be a regular contributor to that blog, so if you enjoy the discussion you can keep going back there for more. In the mean time, Merry's Cloister will continue to be reserved for things I hear rather than things I assert.

Sacrament of summer days

2010-04-17T11:20:00.005-04:00

Sacramental theology, the belief that the spiritual realm and the physical realm are in fact the same realm, completely inseperable, came quite naturally to me even though I didn't come from a sacramental background. I did not need the theology behind it to know that God himself is revealed in the eruption of the color green each spring, in the grandeur of the Southern pines that towered over my little head, in the wooded groves and creeks of my childhood stomping grounds. In those sweaty summer days, God was as present as the dirt under my fingernails; I may have been tempted to think he was present in the dirt under my fingernails.

Today after sleeping off some jet-lag after the long journey home that ended last night, I walked out the door of my parents' house in the country and was halted by what I saw: the explosion of the color green. Having been in Italy for two-and-a-half weeks, I had missed the unfolding of my last spring in the South, and instead was shocked by the vibrant brightness all at once upon my return. Though I'm normally not a fan of Emily Dickinson (is that as bad as not being a fan of Jane Austin?), it brought her fitting words to mind.

These are the days when Birds come back —
A very few — a Bird or two —
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies resume
The old — old sophistries of June —
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee —
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief.

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear —
And softly thro' the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.

Oh Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze —
Permit a child to join.

Thy sacred emblems to partake —
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!

-Emily Dickinson

The Lady in Red

2010-04-11T19:15:00.002-04:00

After making our way through the metal detectors and other layers of security and finding our seats near the processional wall, the seminarian and I were looking through the mass booklet that talked about John Paul II, for whom this mass was being offered. It was my first evening in Rome.

“Oh my...” my friend suddenly gasped. “Is that her?!”

I looked up to see a large man in a suit forcing his way to a woman in a bright red jacket two seats down from us in the row ahead. She, like many others with seats against the processional wall, was already standing and leaning against it in preparation for the Pope’s entry.

“Who?” I asked as the man, obviously a security guard, began whispering to her.

“The crazy lady who attacks the Pope!” he answered, seeming to find it difficult to stand still. Benedict XVI, despite the controversy in the Church (one of the scholars at the conference I attended this weekend pointed out that “There has been scandal in the Church ever since the cock crowed”), is quite a loved man, and my friend received the attacks against him like attacks against his father.

Sure enough, it was her. We watched as the large guard finished his whispered conversation with her, removed her chair from against the wall so she could not use it to climb over, and wedged himself against her. Then we all continued to wait for the processional as before.

“They’re letting her stay?” I asked my friend.

“They have to,” he answered with a combination of laughter and anguish in his voice. “They’re not about to ban someone from attending mass if she wants to.”

“Even if it’s a known habitual Pope-attacker?”

“Yep. She needs the presence of Christ in her life as much as the rest of us, and it is not our place to say whether or not she is repentant. We have to let her come.” He continued to squirm uncomfortably at the thought of her leaping over the wall to attack the Holy Father. “But if she tries anything tonight, I’m not letting her near my Daddy!”

The Catholic Church is under a lot of heavy criticism these days for its eagerness to forgive. Certainly, the cases in question are quite different from a lone woman attacking a well-guarded 83-year-old man in public, but it was nevertheless beautiful to see the eager-to-forgive principle applied to physical assaults against the Pope as well.

Sacramental theology (not just a belief in seven or in two Sacraments, but a belief that the physical matter of the world and the spiritual substance are inseparable) will do that to you. Forgiving the lady who attacks the Pope does not merely involve wishing her well, and wishing her well does not merely involve positive feelings. Since the Catholic Church believes the Real Presence of Christ is in the Eucharist physically, they cannot ban her physically from the room. Forgiveness, in this case, involves a severe physical risk that no other tight security of a well-loved world leader would ever allow.

Benedict, in case you’re wondering, ended up just fine that night, and the woman left right after the processional, giving me the chance to take her seat against the wall for the recessional. I don’t know if she showed up for any of the other events that week, but I do know that as far as the Church is concerned, she is forgiven.

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.”
-John 20:23