Despite herself

My elegant grandmother, a relic of an age gone by with the Old South dripping from her accent and syntax, never saw my sister’s fiancé. 

“Now Sweetie Pie,” she had crooned to me across the breakfast table when I was about twelve, “what would you think if your brother came home one day and said, ‘Hey look y’all, I got married!’ and had a colored girl on his arm?”

The scenario confused my tender, adolescent brain, and after staring stupidly at her regal poise that awaited my response, I stammered the only reply I could articulate for this outlandish hypothetical.  “Well...” I hesitated, “I’d be really upset that he didn’t invite us to the wedding.”

There was a delay in Gramma’s chortle before she finally seemed to determine that I was joking.  “I mean, Doll Baby,” she winked good-naturedly, “what would you do if your brother wanted to marry a colored girl?”

I still blinked my innocent confusion, not feeling like I had been given enough data to determine a response.  “Do you mean,” I asked again, “without us getting to know her first?”

Finally Gramma seemed to determine the conversation would go more smoothly if she simply told me what she wanted to say.  “No, Baby Girl, I am just trying to point out that it is wrong for the races to mix.  There are many lovely colored people out there, and they should marry each other and have other lovely colored babies.  If the races mix, pretty soon there won’t be anymore races and we’ll all be a bunch of mongrels.  You wouldn’t want your brother to have a bunch of mongrel babies, would you?”

Dumbfounded, I had honestly not realized this was still a thing.

But my grandmother never saw my sister’s fiancé.  Oh, she met him several times in the past year before she died; she laid her frail, dignified hand in his caramel fingers, she interrogated him with regard to his life goals across the breakfast table, she offered him her litany of proverbs interspersed with her ever-changing anecdotes form her own life.  Essentially blind for the past six years, she could drill her sharp blue eyes into his sepia face without ever suspecting the nice young man to whom she spoke was one of the mongrels she had feared we might all become. 

Gramma’s blindness tortured the last years of her life before she died this summer, and in no way do I suggest that it was a good thing or that she deserved it.  Nevertheless, there was a bit of a poetic justice to the fact that her agonizing debility gave her access to a relationship that would have been barred otherwise.  Because she couldn’t see his face, Gramma could recognize him to be a nice young man for her granddaughter to marry.

I like to think that my perception of the world will become clearer as I age.  But until my heart is healed of its hardness, it is good to know that my debilitations can break down the barriers I have put around it.  I welcome the healing, even when it must come through ailment.  May we all find healing despite ourselves.

Blessed are the who now?

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.

Surprised by unrefinement

“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.

A Southern Welcome

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!

And there was a great calm...

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 trees of the field

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 rested

Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
-From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday

Today we have been sitting with the death of Christ, the great, deep silence that will not be broken until tonight (not to get ahead of the story).

If I had posted on Thursday, I would have mentioned something about the New Testament reading in Hebrews 5 that says “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (a peculiar use of the word “heard,” I would say). I mentioned before that this seems to be Christ’s credentials as the Great High Priest. Rejoice, he tells us; we have as a mediator a man who similarly prayed seemingly unanswered prayers. What kind of a high priest is a man who begs God to let the cup pass from him but willingly drinks it anyway?

But he did drink it yesterday, and it is finished. Now, on the seventh day, God rests. At morning prayers we read from the previous chapter of Hebrews that “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.” Christ has offered his prayers to let the cup pass, he has drunk from it anyway, he declared his work finished, and today he rests. This is our high priest. This is the mediator of the new covenant. This is our model of suffering.

I read yesterday in a sermon of Melito of Sardis:

It is he who endured every kind of suffering in all those who foreshadowed him. In Abel he was slain, in Isaac bound, in Jacob exiled, in Joseph sold, in Moses exposed to die. He was sacrificed in the Passover Lamb, persecuted in David, dishonored in the prophets.

Now, it turns out, he is also prefigured (or postfigured) in everyone who has or will ever offer seemingly unanswered prayers, anyone who has ever tasted suffering he longed to avoid, anyone who has ever faced the silence of God.

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest.

Feasting in our Fast

As Lent approaches its climax in Holy Week, we are suddenly celebrating the Feast of the Annunciation (nine months before Christmas). For some reason, in this strange celebration at the height of fasting, this commemoration of the Incarnation right as we prepare to walk through the Passion, I am remembering a poem by Mark Jarman whom I discovered almost two years ago in a 20th century American poetry class. Here in the ancient cycle we imperfectly try to follow as Jarmen imperfectly follows the sonnet form, we celebrate feasting in our fast, Alleluias in our Lent.

I am not necessarily ready for a feast today, but I pray that as the cycle of the Church calendar forces some celebration in a time of sorrow, my spirit can receive joy that Christ has entered the world through the door of the human womb, even today as we near his entering of Jerusalem on Sunday.

I cannot actually explain what this post has to do with Jarman's poem, other than imperfection and cycles of the Church year, and perhaps the fact that it begins with the Incarnation that we celebrate today. At any rate, Happy feast day!

Cycle

Everything around the central meaning,
Whatever grips that something in the womb
And, when a door slams, looks as if it’s leaning
From all the objects in a startled room;
Everything that passes through the puzzle
A spider glues together or is caught,
And bends the whisker back until the muzzle
Twitches, and tugs, then loosens the square knot;
Everything surrounding everything
That’s going to happen, even the manger’s planks,
The barn’s stone lintels, poised as if to sing,
The angel choir of matter giving thanks;
And all that made the world seem passing strange:
Everything is about to know a change.

Everything is about to know a change,
For someone will appear and say a word,
And someone else will hear and rearrange
His life as no one ever thought he would.
And something like an earthquake or a storm
Will happen somewhere like a little town,
And that place, although nothing but a stem,
Will snap off and the tree will tumble down.
And the about-to-be, a secret cache,
Will smoulder like a spark inside a couch,
And those who sat in darkness, dropping ash,
Will see a great light. Everyone will touch
And be touched by the change no one can stop.
A single leaf will speak. A voice will drop.

A voice will speak. A single leaf will drop.
And the whole tree will wither where it stands
And never bear again, though he could help,
As he has helped the withered bones of hands,
The corneas of clouded over eyes,
The blood and breath of loved ones, dead and dying,
And even water, calming frantic seas,
And even water, turning it to wine.
The poor world must have fallen with the fall
For him to curse a fruit tree, out of season,
For giving nothing, like an unborn apple,
And then to make up, for some obscure reason,
A lesson on the power of faith and prayer.
Perhaps to understand, you had to be there.

Perhaps to understand you had to be
Alone with the absent presence he called father,
Alone with the dysfunctional family
Of stars and darkness, deaf and dumb together,
And in that interaction see a sign,
The way a bedside watcher will believe
A twitch or flicker—almost anything—
Is proof the injured sleeper will revive.
Perhaps to understand, you had to die,
Having acknowledged with your body’s pain
That everything does, unmythically,
Knowing only that it won’t happen again,
And then to wake and find your death the proof
Of an abstraction that the world calls love.

The abstraction that the world calls love
Appeared to grieving friends and cooked them food
And walked with them a way and let one shove
Fingers into his wounds and take a good
Look. And then he turned to wind and fire
And pieces of his clothes and eyelashes
And thorns and rusty nails and locks of hair
And red letters on a few translucent pages.
He took on flesh and then he took it off,
Or else he kept it for a souvenir,
Or else—but why keep going back and forth?
He dwelt among us, then he disappeared.
And we are left to be and keep on being,
Like everything around a central meaning.

-from Mark Jarmen's Unholy Sonnets

The very best Idol ever (reposted)

Today after a Bible study in which we reflected on Gideon's downfall and the rise of Abimelech in Judges 8 and 9, I found myself reflecting once again on humanity's need for a tangible God, a need that incarnates itself on our constant slippage into idolatry. Though this is Lent and not Advent, I found a lot of hope in rereading a post I wrote in the early days of this blog, comforted to remember that God knows our frailty and has met us accordingly. Knowing that many of my readers are new, I thought I would repost it.

* * *

Yesterday I sat through Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, which is quite an intense fete: not only are 1950s operas characterized by harsh tones and absence of melody as a principle, but I had to follow the various strands of antimelody with German subtitles.

In the Jewish composer’s interpretation of the brothers, I was surprised to be given another submersion into the thrill of the Christmas season we are celebrating. Schoenberg characterizes Moses as a Platonist, who opens the play by chanting, “Eternal, omnipresent, invisible and unimaginable God.” Throughout the opera he refers to God as “the Idea,” and writes triumphantly upon the wall “I think God.” He comes across very harshly, loathing fleshly depravity and holding to God’s intangible holiness.

Aaron, on the other hand, is the man who knows how to work the crowd. He sings the closest thing to melody Schoenberg composed, and writes “I love God” upon the wall. When the Israelites reject Moses’ intangible God in favor of their Egyptian gods who have image and substance, Aaron gives them tangible signs and wonders that they can see and touch. If Aaron is the spokesperson for Moses’ God, the people finally conclude, we will follow him into the desert.

The opera spins out of control when Moses does not come down from Sinai after forty days, and the people cannot keep following this unknown, unseen Idea that Moses had declared to them. Aaron gives in to their demands and gives them an Image that they can touch and hold and love, something that meets their present needs and cares: in Schoenberg’s interpretation, he gives them a golden ICH, the German for “I.”

In the confrontation between Moses and Aaron at the end, Aaron insists to Moses that people will never be able to follow an intangible God, nor could they ever love him. They need images. They need idols. They need to touch God. Moses is left in despair, on his knees, still clinging to his defeated Platonic notion and pleading for “the Word.”

Enter the Incarnation: the Word became Flesh.

We are a weak people, as Schoenberg’s Aaron argues to Moses. We people demand signs in the desert; we worship the bronze serpent on a pole; we demand a king to Samuel. The astounding thing that God does is that he ultimately meets their demand for an idol. Christ is the very very best Idol ever, the best tangible Image of the Idea. The people demand to Aaron that he give them a god they can see; God finally enters the world and says “Here I Am.”

I expected to come away from the opera ashamed of all the ways I have bowed down to various bronze serpents when God didn’t seem real and tangible enough to me. I find instead that I walk away bewildered by Love. God has met my frailty by providing the idol I require; when I bow down and worship relationships and feelings and ambitions, it’s really more ridiculous than depraved. God has not condemned my idolatry as Schoenberg’s Moses would expect: God has sanctified it.

The Word became Flesh, fashioned in a virgin’s womb into a crying baby. This is your God, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!

If you want to

“Auntie Em!” I heard the five-year-old call from his darkened bedroom after I finally managed to get his sick baby brother to bed. “Come here!”

With the two hours of soothing a crying baby behind me in the back room and a stack of unattended work before me in the living room, I made a short detour into the boy’s bedroom. “What is it?” I asked.

It became apparent from the munchkin’s difficulty in coming up with an answer that he had merely been bored. The poor kid cannot turn his brain off at night, and normally lies there for hours before he can get to sleep.

“Sweetie, you need to go to sleep,” I interrupted his nonsensical descriptions of his blanket. “You have school in the morning.”

“Well, there is at least one more thing,” he interjected in his adult tone.

“What is it?” I asked softly, somewhat dubious.

“Well... you can lay with me for a while, if you want to.”

I smiled in the dark, charmed enough by the invitation to consider foregoing my self-inflicted projects in order to help yet another nephew get to sleep, and amused by his lack of decorum. “Are you asking me to lie with you?” I asked like an annoying adult, supposing that if I were going to sacrifice the last bit of my unproductive babysitting night, he may as well ask me directly.

His polite tone developed a bit of a frustrated edge. “You can do whatever you want,” he insisted. “I am just telling you that you can lay with me if you want to, that’s all!”

Good thing for him, I did want to.

My efforts to teach manners having failed, I climbed into his bunk bed in the dark, tucking him in and lying beside him. As I listened to his breathing, I knew that I had melted to his non-request because it is so familiar. So rarely do I ask directly for things I want, even to those who love me most, even to God who has graces aplenty to spare. So rarely do I risk being turned down. So rarely do I venture to reveal my neediness. So rarely do I expose my longing to be loved.

The boy’s body broke the silence as he shifted his position and, as if an afterthought, flung his hand out toward me in dark.

“You can hold my hand, if you want to,” he informed me nonchalantly.

Yes, Little One, I do want to. I want to very much indeed.

Manna

Sometimes I need God to show up physically. I have always imagined that if I were a better Christian I would be able to sustain my faith with the ephemeral knowledge of God's presence in my soul. I would be able to be joyful when life crumbles, to feel content in pain, to feel God's presence in isolation, all because of an intimate knowledge of God's friendship in my spirit. Whether or not that is true, I don't seem to be that Christian yet. I rather doubt I ever will be.

On Wednesday I crashed. I went home that afternoon and begged him to be near me, to let me know his nearness, to meet my physical needs with more than an ephemeral hope. A God who would take on our flesh and resurrect it must, I hope, intend to redeem the flesh and blood of our world. Banking on that, I scribbled down a prayer.

And you were always near as air
When I was battered in the war—
But I am broken flesh, and your
Ephemeral love won't mend this tear.
You may have spoken in the wind and tongues
But I would have you feed more than my lungs.

And I have loved you, in a way—
The way a cripple loves his staff
Or as a slave his master's laugh—
At least I limpingly obey.
But lest I feed your sheep here with a cane
I'll have to ask you firstly for the grain.

And you had hinted there'd be rest
Though I have only found your yoke;
But souls that never slept awoke
To find the thief become a guest.
And you would dine with me despite my fear
That I have only loaves and fishes here.

Right as I put the finishing touches on my poetic demand for God's tangible presence like the Israelites had in the wilderness all those years ago, transcribing it from my journal to my poetry book and reading it through one last time there in my cozy green cottage God provided for me almost three years ago with a green picket fence, my phone rang. It was the graduate director of one of my number 1 schools from that bleak application season. It was a long-shot school that I wasn't particularly sure accepted anyone, offering me a position with funding early enough in the season that I hadn't even had time to start getting nervous.

I don't know if the saints and martyrs had been able to get on without physical reminders of God's presence. I'm grateful that so far God does not seem to be expecting that kind of sainthood of me.

The work has been done

Once upon a time, I decided to write a master’s thesis. This was, in fact, entirely optional for my MA program which had recently decided to eliminate the thesis option in favor of a smaller “capstone project,” but never one to take the easy way out I wanted to go for the throat.

I chose for my director one of the most intimidatingly smart and well-read professors in the department. I played around with a couple different ideas for a topic, not wanting to research anyone too overdone to be approachable nor too obscure to be interesting, and finally decided on Thomas More. My director advised that I avoid More’s larger, more famous works like Utopia or his Response to Luther, and pointed me in the direction of his poetry. He recommended that I explore what influence his poetry might have had in the development of the English epigram. Armed with a topic I knew almost nothing about, I set out to begin my research.

Well, actually, first of all I set out to learn Latin for two months in an intensive Latin boot camp in Ireland. Then I returned home to begin my research.

Now, I didn’t exactly know what an epigram was, nor was I aware that Thomas More wrote any. Nor was my university library aware of this fact, for though it housed the definitive Yale edition of the Complete Works of Thomas More, it had neglected to purchase the volume of his Latin poetry. But after procuring a copy, I read the text along with some letters in the appendices, and was ready to begin exploring their influence.

I read the first-century poet Martial to get a feel for the Classical background of the epigram tradition (and discovered among his thousands of epigrams one that More had used as a model!). I read Ben Jonson's epigrams to see what the quintessential English epigram had become (and discovered one that seemed to be based off of one of More’s epigrams!). I read books about the English epigram tradition (because other than Jonson and now More, I had no idea who else might have even written them), and discovered a couple references to translations of More’s epigrams. I read volumes of Renaissance epigrams by obscure epigrammatists. I discovered an entire journal devoted to Thomas More, and read every article it had published about the epigrams in the past thirty or so years. I searched the collections of various rare books libraries for obscure collections of epigrams in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to see what they might have included of Thomas More.

Months later when I had done enough research to get a feel for how gargantuan a topic I had chosen for the thesis and how impossible the task of doing it well really was, my director told me to go ahead and start writing it. “This is not your magnum opus,” he reminded me. “It is not your first book. It is not even your dissertation. Just think of it as a scholarly exercise and begin writing.”

Feeling like an impostor for pretending I could say anything about the topic before I had read every epigram ever written and every scholarly book and article on the topic, I nevertheless wrote the thesis with the mere scraps I had managed to discover. Then I defended it, and despite the hazing I’m told I did well enough. They gave me my degree at any rate.

And now, months later as I prepare to write a talk for a frighteningly prestigious Renaissance conference, I picked up that volume of epigrams I succeeded in getting my university to purchase and read through them again. While flipping through the volume, I happened to notice something for the first time:

The endnotes and appendices.

The former included information like the Classical sources behind each epigram (like Martial). The latter had a chart I had instinctively ignored that listed every time in the sixteenth or seventeenth century More’s epigrams had been reprinted, quoted, translated, or discussed. There were certainly all the sources I had "discovered" in my months of research, and many many many many more. Oops.

My research had already been done for me. Some people can receive the grace to realize that the work has already been done before trying to take on the giant alone with their bare hands. There is a lot of grace in that, I imagine, but I don't seem to be one of those people. At least not this time around.

But even for me, there is another grace to receive as I realize that I had just spent months gathering information that had already been gathered by better, more able scholars. I reflect on my director’s reminder to me that no one had ever expected me to write the definitive work on More’s epigrams. No one had expected me to discover anything, per se. The telos (the end, the goal) of the project had never been the actual thesis: it had been me. Through my intensive research on a topic that had already been done in order to write a thesis that no one would ever need to read, I was becoming a scholar.

I don’t think there is generally a lot of grace among us arrogant academics, so I’ll take it when I can!

Bless me father for I have sinned

During my time in college, the American racial struggles that had always seemed truisms slowly and definitively began to change. As I shared laughter, tears, and bread with people of other races, racial violence was no longer merely wrong, a sin against humanity; it had become personal, a sin against my brothers.

One of those brothers grew closer to me during my sophomore year, and eventually my roommate pointed out that I saw more of Kyle in a given week than of her. Kyle and I had a tendency to find ourselves in the thick of conversations about theology, sociology, history, the church, and our purpose in the world, and when we had to pause the conversation for an inconvenience like class it was not unheard of for one of us to invite the other to join.

“Kyle,” I said one night as I kept him company on his midnight shift in the residence hall office, “you realize if we had lived two hundred years ago, we would never have been friends?”

Kyle nodded sadly. As a black man who spent significant portions of his week involved in a mostly-white campus organization, I suppose he was used to this fact that was somewhat jarring to nineteen-year-old me.

“What if I had enslaved you?” I asked him, something deeper than guilt stirring in my conscience. “Or even if I didn’t have slaves, what if I mistreated you when I saw you on the street, or didn’t even notice that you existed? I know there were plenty of abolitionists in the South and I like to think I would have been one, but there’s no way to know that about myself. Maybe I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with slavery. Maybe I would have thought that was just the way the world worked. Maybe I would have enslaved you.”

It was deeper than guilt because I was struggling with sins that neither I nor my ancestors (at least half of whom were too busy starving to death on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time) had committed. I was struggling with the depravity that I knew was within me, waiting for opportune times to emerge. If those opportune times never came, the depravity would be just as present.

And rather than brush off my sins on the mere technicality that I hadn’t committed them or suggesting ways to ensure the monster inside me could never emerge, Kyle’s response shocked me, enough that I still remember it seven years later.

“Yeah,” the mused humbly, “I wonder about the same thing. If I had been given the chance to be a house slave, would I have taken it and looked down on my brothers sweating in the field?”

Momentarily, I was jarred as if Kyle had responded to my confession by changing the subject, ironically prefacing the subject-change by calling it “the same thing.” It was almost laughably comic: I had made a heart-felt confession that I might have oppressed him, and he echoed my confession by saying that, had he been oppressed, he might have accepted a lighter load. These were in no way congruous.

But slightly older than me and much more familiar with this kind of depravity that I was encountering as if it were foreign territory, Kyle had the grace to see the monsters living in his chest as the same monsters in the hypothetical oppressors. Rather than forgiving my depravity, he empathized with it.

He stumbled simply and casually upon a profound truth, like one who kicks a stone and finds oil pouring out of the ground. Not only did he manage to treat depravity as no less depraved for its being common, but he treated the common sin of humanity no less universal (and thus no more startling) for its being depraved.

Beyond that, I wonder if in his empathy he stumbled on the nature of Christ. While Christ may not have shared our depravity, he shared our frailty (perhaps different forms of the same thing, or at least near cousins?), and the author of Hebrews spends a lot of ink on the point that Christ is the Great High Priest because he sympathizes with our weakness, our temptations, our tears, and our unanswered prayers.

I wonder if Christ hears my confessions of frailty and depravity, actual or potential, and responds as Kyle had: “Yeah, I felt the same thing...”

Joy-makers

I once promised that esoteric Greek posts would cease as soon as Greek boot camp ended in August, but I’ve already broken that promise several times. Now I break it again.

I stumbled on the word χαρα today in Philippians a verse or two after I had correctly identified the word χαρις as being “Grace” (non-readers of Greek, all you need to notice is that the words are identical at the beginning; Greek words change their endings depending on how they are used in sentences). I assumed it was a different form of the same word, and tried unsuccessfully to connect the words on any declension charts I could remember. Of course I was wrong, but only slightly: I was wrong because they are indeed different words, but only slightly wrong because they are etymologically related.

χαρα is the Greek word for “joy” or “delight,” and is related to χαρις, the Greek word for “grace.” Literally then, you could say that Grace, one of the most fundamental words to the Christian vocabulary, simply means joy-maker or delightfulness; in other pre-Christian contexts, it is often translated “sweetness.” This strikes me as quite different from the understanding of Grace I tend to have as being an abstract ideal involved in the cosmic matters of salvation. Somehow, the understanding of “sweetness” or “joy-makers” feels a bit more tangible and much warmer, and I wonder what it would do to my theology.

“Joy-makers to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”?
“It is by sweetness you are saved through faith”?

That amazing sunrise I saw on Saturday morning that brought me so much delight was a grace. That surprise meeting of an old friend, that bowl of Mom’s fantastic barley soup, that Sunday evening thunderstorm, that afternoon of throwing rocks on an icy pond with my nephews... these were all graces. The cosmic matters of salvation and the morning cup of hot tea are connected, and God’s grandiose dealings with humanity and his provision of a Sunday afternoon nap are part of the same motion.

It is by graces that we are saved.

Superfluousness

Albert Einstein* once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler,” and, trusting girl that I am, I believed him. After all, there is quite a beauty in the simplicity of the profound laws that govern the universe, in the seemingly dissimilar properties of autumn leaves and planetary rotation that are both dictated by the “simple” law of gravity.

But somewhere along the way, while trying to understand the “simple” laws of salvation (I think the one word that was supposed to answer every question and sum up the laws of the Universe was always “Jesus”), I confused simplicity for scarcity. Scarcity seemed to govern the economy of salvation, as if God wanted to figure out how he could efficiently save the greatest number of people with the least effort, and sending his only begotten son to suffer and die seemed to be the best (because it was the only) way to do it.

But as Robinson Jeffers once asked (in a poem I’ve quoted here before), “Is it not by his high superfluousness we know / Our God?” What if the Cross is better understood as extravagance, rather than the last-ditch effort to save the sinking ship of humanity? What if Grace is not the abstract Platonic ideal that saves us from hell, but the lavish graces God gets a kick out of pouring on us? What if the economy of salvation is governed by the excesses of God?

The Catholic Church believes that Mary is the Mediatrix of all Graces (not Grace, interestingly, but Graces), and additionally has quite a legion of mediators in all the saints. I always thought this seemed a bit over-the-top, considering the extent to which the book of Hebrews goes in presenting Christ as the Great High Priest and the Mediator of the New Covenant.

But even without the Catholic troupe of mediators, it strikes me that scripture is not so stingy with its graces: it can assert confidently in one place that Christ himself intercedes for us before the Father and console us in another that the Holy Spirit is interceding for us in our weakness. Actually, it dawns on me that in the simple, stripped-down version of the Gospel that I always assumed was desirable, the Holy Spirit is entirely superfluous; all we need is a God to create us and his Son to die for us (the Resurrection is also superfluous if all we needed was someone to pay the price for our sins so we can go to heaven when we die). Issues of Mary and the saints aside, it seems that there are graces aplenty.

Maybe Einstein is still right out there somewhere, but maybe we tend to make things quite a bit more simple than possible. Maybe the governing laws of salvation are much more lavish than I had ever imagined, and maybe the one answer brings together many more questions than I had been prepared to ask.


*As quoted by internet quotation databases, always a precarious source.

Pixie Dust

There is a mendacious rumor abroad that Southerners should be fixed. How can we help the backward agrarians get on the great progressive bandwagon, well-meaning philanthropic carpetbaggers might have asked. I remember reading a history textbook in my undergrad years that puzzled over the reasons why industrialization took so long to set in and improve the quality of life for the rural poor in the South. The answer to me is quite obvious: the rural poor didn’t want improvement.

Today I sat at my corner of my favorite coffee shop, and something magical happened: large chunks of white powder fell from the sky outside the window, initially mistaken for debris from the perpetual construction that plagues every university I have ever attended (that is only two, of course, but doesn’t the superlative make it sound dramatic?), but soon realized to be the 4-letter-word that has been on everyone’s lips like a whirlwind that cleared the grocery store shelves of milk, eggs, and bread ever since the meteorologists had hinted the possibility days earlier: SNOW.

The barista screamed and ran outside to perform her snow-dance. Every eye in the coffee shop was glued to the window. Adults on the street lifted their faces to the sky with open mouths like five-year-olds. Children, many of whom had been let out of school for the mere possibility of snow, gave the adults a run for their money on glee. Even the construction workers paused and extended their gloved hands. There was nary a smileless face anywhere in the city as the chunks of white powder functioned as pixie dust in an otherwise gloomy day.

And then it was gone.

Later I read a (northern) friend’s blog and heard his (delightfully true) take on the experience of trying to find milk and eggs at the grocery store. Despite the utter appropriateness of his caricature of Southern snow-panic, I felt like something magic had happened, and he had missed it. Yes, as my nephew had once reminded me, God did indeed make magic in the world. I saw some this morning.

And now, as the possibility of bonus winter medleys is on the forecast for tonight and my graduation tomorrow afternoon hangs in the precarious balance of Mother Nature’s finicky Southern temperament, I remember that even now in our high-paced, 21st-century culture, there still remains a Sabbath rest for God’s people. It comes rarely and unpredictability, an unplanned holiday that forces begrudging businessmen and ecstatic schoolchildren alike to rest at home despite the ever-driving forces of the stockmarket and academia, but it comes.

At least it comes to backward Southerners when there is a hint of any form of frozen precipitation. That is, it comes to them after they get back from their panicked trips to the grocery store for milk, eggs, and bread.

My God, good or evil!

In what had surprised me by becoming my most controversial post, I once observed some of the peculiarities of the way the writer of Hebrews goes about telling the story of the great heroes of the faith. I failed to mention one of the strangest ones:

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, "Through Isaac shall your offspring be named." He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.

“That’s not faith!” I always wanted to protest. "You're messing up the story! Abraham is our model of costly sacrifice; if he thinks God is going to raise Isaac from the dead, it's no longer costly!" After all, isn’t the story commonly understood as God’s testing of Abraham’s faith and Abraham passing the test by sacrificing even when it was costly? How would it be faith without sacrifice?

But now I wonder... what if the writer of Hebrews was onto something? What if Abraham showed faith not by being willing to suffer for God, but by following a God he knew to be good? I had always assumed we are to follow God simply because of his authority; maybe Abraham showed faith because he insisted on following a God into a place where God's goodness would be tested (and God passed the test! Huzzah!). Maybe faith is not saying, “My God, good or evil.” Maybe Abraham’s obedience was holding God to his goodness.

And on that note, the Psalmist’s words come to mind on this Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. May we all offer to God this ultimate “sacrifice,” like Abraham before us.

Hear, O my people, and I will speak;
O Israel, I will testify against you.
I am God, your God.
Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you;
your burnt offerings are continually before me.
I will not accept a bull from your house
or goats from your folds.
For every beast of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know all the birds of the hills,
and all that moves in the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,
for the world and its fullness are mine.
Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats?
Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and perform your vows to the Most High,
and call upon me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

Bagpipes and Beauty

On Tuesday I was driving my two older nephews, five and three, to a nearby lake to do some plant identification with a horticulturalist friend of mine (a.k.a. Plant Guy). In my efforts to expose my godsons to the finer things in life, I played Celtic music in the car, which to my delight had the boys transfixed.

“This is a bagpipe,” I explained to them during one song. “They play them in Scotland, mostly, but I think there is enough sharing of cultures between the two countries that they play them in Ireland as well. At least, I saw them a few times when I was there, though they might have been there just for the benefit of tourists who don’t know the difference between Ireland and Scotland. They are really funny-looking instruments...”

At this point I began my feeble efforts to describe a bagpipe to preschoolers while I drove. The five-year-old who had developed an early love for musical instruments four years earlier listened intently, my description no doubt giving him a strange picture.

“Oh,” he finally sighed dramatically, “I do hope I get to see a bagpipe in real life before I die!”

I was shocked at his entirely appropriate response. “Well Buddy,” I replied, “I hope so too.”

“Actually,” he continued, “I think everyone should get to see a bagpipe in real life before they die!”

Again, I could not agree with him more.

But he was not finished. “But some people never get to see a bagpipe in real life before they die,” he lamented mournfully.

“No,” I agreed, surprised at the somber turn in the conversation. “It’s very sad.”

“Some people die when they are little babies, and they never get to see a bagpipe in real life. It is very sad when that happens.”

“You’re right, it is quite sad,” I said, never having thought of that particular aspect of the tragedy of infant mortality.

“And some people lived a long, long time ago before there were any bagpipes, and they never even got to hear a bagpipe.”

Again, what could I do but agree?

“But I am still quite young,” he mused, “so hopefully I have a lot of life left in me. I imagine I’ll get to see a bagpipe before I die.”

Well, Little One, I sure do hope so. In the mean time, thank you for the reminder of what I had felt the first time I had heard the bagpipe, and the reminder to love the beautiful things in the world. What a saturated world of gratuitous beauty we live in, full of mountains and skies and the color green and... as if that were not enough... bagpipes on top of everything!

They shall not enter my rest

Moses said to the LORD, "Why have you dealt ill with your servant? And why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give them birth, that you should say to me, 'Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a nursing child,' to the land that you swore to give their fathers? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they weep before me and say, 'Give us meat, that we may eat.' I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is too heavy for me. If you will treat me like this, kill me at once, if I find favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness."

“The story of Moses always breaks my heart,” I remember explaining to a friend across the table at a coffee shop. “He clearly had never wanted to lead the people in the first place, but had led them anyway when God called him. He had a miserable time with it. The people were constantly wanting to stone him, and their stubbornness added another 40 years to the journey. During that time God decides he’s going to wipe out the people, and it is Moses who wrestles with him and convinces him not to wipe them out. And after all that, at some point, God tells Moses to speak to a rock and he hits it instead, and then God won’t let him into the Promised Land. Seems like God’s pretty mean.”

“No,” my friend struggled, seemingly unsure of how he knew this, “God’s not mean. Something else is going on there.”

“Seems pretty mean to me,” I persisted. “And I’m no Moses... if this is what a man like Moses can expect after 80 years of serving God, what do we have to look forward to?”

My friend looked at me sadly, unsure of how to speak words of Grace into the world as I saw it.

“I mean,” I continued when he had nothing to add, “he keeps leading the ‘stiff-necked’ people after God tells him he won’t get to enter the Promised Land, and then sits on a mountain at the edge of Canaan begging God to change his mind. But God had some point he needed to make about Moses not showing his name as holy before the people or some ambiguous thing like that. For whatever reason, that was worth more to God than letting Moses enter the Promised Land.”

I concluded strongly, as if I dared him to suggest redemption in a story like that.

“Em,” my friend finally interjected, “Moses did enter the Promised Land.”

I looked stupidly at him, wondering which Bible he had read.

“He did,” he insisted. “At the Transfiguration. Jesus was there with Moses and Elijah. Moses was there.”

I sat there dumbfounded. Truth be told, I was halfway scandalized. My friend was right. My most bleak, grim, hated Bible story had suddenly been tainted with Grace, and my standard extreme-situation trump card had been trumped. While Moses had been cheated out of the Promised Land because of some ambiguous punishment, the Punishment had been cheated out of Moses when Christ came.

And I don’t know why that conversation is coming back to me this week, except that I am being reminded that as much as pain is deeper than the airy, ephemeral sentiments that Christians often confuse with hope, Grace is deeper than the pain.

The Middle Voice of Obedience

During my last week in Ireland, I saw Father Padraic several times: once after mass on Sunday, once for coffee on Monday, once for lunch with the seminarians on Wednesday, and once for gin-and-tonic before I left on Thursday. Over coffee, we talked about (among other things... Fr. Padraic never pushed or even brought up the issue) my interest in the Catholic Church.

“I’m just imagining myself standing next to my little sister on her wedding day,” I tried to illustrate what the thought of being ‘out of communion’ with Protestants looked like for me, “whose diapers I had once changed and who has grown into my best friend, and abstaining from communion just because the Catholic Church wants to make a point that the Protestants’ little crackers and grape juice are not what they never claimed that they were. I understand the issues of Church division that are behind it, but the actual action itself nevertheless feels nasty and divisive. The thought just breaks my heart.”

Fr. Padraic had been listening patiently, every now and then amending my impression of the Catholic view of Protestants with a kinder, gentler (more Irish) view, but at this point he let my difficulty stand.

“Then you’re not ready,” he stated simply and gently.

I was taken aback, and didn’t particularly like the answer. “I’m not ready just because the thought breaks my heart?” I asked dubiously.

“Yes,” he answered confidently, “because God is gentle.”

I chewed over his reasoning a bit. I could never imagine any of the pastors I had known giving this sort of statement to someone knocking at the door of a church wanting to come in.

“God is gentle,” he repeated. “He does not expect all of us to be St. Paul with a dramatic conversion experience that happens all at once. Those exist, but for most of us, conversion—whether that be the conversion from atheist to Christian or from Protestant to Catholic or from Catholic to... Catholic [he chuckled, thinking of his Irish flock]—is a journey. God knows your stamina, and will not ask for more than you are capable of.”

“But Fr. Padraic,” I protested, feeling surprisingly upset at his suggesting I might not be ready to do what he obviously thought was ultimately the right thing to do, “I don’t think the thought could ever not break my heart.”

He shrugged in his happy, Irish way. “Then it might not ever be time.”

I didn’t plan on posting this anecdote (I have no intention of turning my listening-blog into Em’s Catholic Adventures), but it has been stirring deeply in my spirit for the past six weeks since it happened, and applies to the broader scope of how I look at the entire journey of following God. Then last week when I met with the Monsignor of the church back home in the States where I attend, he told me more or less the same thing. Obedience, he insisted, is not enough if it is a mere begrudging obedience; obedience must be coupled with freedom and joy. And, lest I should go out and try to conjure up freedom and joy as if they are the next task on my journey, he insisted that they are the Holy Spirit’s work, and would come at whatever point he wanted. In the mean time, I could only wait.

It’s an entirely foreign picture of obedience for me. I always thought obedience was a matter of seeking out the right thing to do and doing it no matter what at any cost to oneself, believing that even if it was excruciating now it would be the best thing in the end. I never thought to question an action based on anything other than some Platonic notion of whether or not it seemed in keeping with the Good.

But for Fr. Padraic and the Monsignor alike, obedience seems to be something quite different, more passive than I would ever expect something active like obedience to be. Obedience, they seem to say, in my case involves seeking out the right thing to do and waiting for God to prepare the way. That looks almost entirely passive to a doer like me.

Might obedience be conjugated in the middle voice as well, like my seminarian friends suggested of faith over the summer? Might it be the Holy Spirit’s work, not my own?

Might it be, as Fr. Padraic had insisted to me repeatedly, that the almighty, holy God whom I have tried to follow relentlessly for 26 years... is gentle?