The Excesses of God

While 20th century American poetry is generally not my forte, I did manage to find some occasional gems when I took a class on the topic last summer. Among them was Robinson Jeffers.

Yesterday I stumbled upon one of his books in a used bookshop near campus, and as I flipped through it I reencountered a poem that makes a few of my recent blog posts seem unoriginal (but, after all, how much of what we say is truly original?). Since Jeffers beat me to three of the illustrations I used (stars, rainbows, and reproduction) to illustrate God’s gratuitous beauty and mundane magic in these fourteen lines, I suppose I should give him some credit for the idea as well.

The Excesses of God

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

Why hast thou forsaken me?

One day, if I ever become a great writer, I’m going to write a short story about my grandmother. This story, genius though I am not, will aim at reading somewhat like Absalom, Absalom!, in that it will be made up of listening to the same story told at different times and unfolding in such a way as to make the actual facts unclear (and, truth be told, irrelevant).

Were I a genius, these stories would fill the air of my grandparents’ living room like the smell of stale tobacco and cat urine that a child’s brain could not isolate as a doctor isolates a disease but rather enters into unquestioningly every Christmas knowing that unlimited television privileges and brightly-wrapped cheap cardboard boxes await inside. My grandmother’s voice would reign in the dingy air of the dark family room like the royalty she knew she was by the proud merit of her suffering, of the mistreatment of her parents and the humiliation of their reputation that made her almost as low as the colored people, of the doctor who eloped with her on a cruise but was too much a coward to stand up for her before his mother’s demands for annulment of the marriage he would never know was already incarnating itself in her first daughter, of the navy men who pledged their troth to the belle with the babe until an explosion years after the War took her second husband who left her with her second child whom her second mother-in-law would likewise wish away as a monster under a child’s bed whose existence is dependent upon acknowledgement, of the last navy husband who drove her daughter away but gave two more in return along with bruises and a lost fortune and social humiliation by his drunken antics. My grandfather might enter and make a fondly sarcastic comment as he placed his weathered hand on hers to be harshly shooed away as a housefly my grandmother could never hurt no matter how horrifically repulsive, and would inhale another pack of Camels into his puttering lungs as she continued on with her recommendations to the world to sterilize all the poor people in Africa who couldn’t support the multitude they were breeding under the scorching sun of a god who had his chance and abandoned her like another ill-fated husband.

I am not Faulkner, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to weave those stories quite so seamlessly into the ones that follow as he would have. Perhaps if I could, it would not be true to life, because the old stories didn’t evolve as I grew up; they never existed. Instead, there would be stories of the man whose love for her could outlive her other marriages and his own engagement and survive long enough to give her some gold on their 50th wedding anniversary right before his faithful heart quietly stopped one afternoon as his spirit rose to be with the God whom she had always known would never let her down. Gramma does not learn from the past; she rewrites it.

“And what do you think of our new president?” the old Southern woman would ask me this Christmas, not as a question that suggested a response but more as a statement of intention to announce where the conversation was heading.

I might say something meaningless like “He seems like a decent fellow” that might as well be nothing more than a nod or a “Yessum” that allows her to continue.

“See, Sweetie,” she would chide me as if it were a point she had been trying to teach for years, “not all colored people are bad.”

And I would listen with mixed emotions, emotions that would never have the consolation that the Halleluiah-praise-Jesus-I’ve-been-delivered! of my grandfather provides its family but must instead stand amazed that a woman’s spirit could be large enough to encompass these two separate worlds, one in which colored people need separate bathrooms because they are naturally dirtier and another in which the first African American president is the best thing that happened to the country since Roosevelt himself, one in which she is married to a monster and another in which she is married to a prince, one in which she cries with the psalmist “My God my God why hast thou forsaken me?” and another in which she declares with the same psalmist “I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken.”

Just like in Faulkner’s novels, I am not sure what the actual story of my grandmother’s life had been. But unlike Faulkner’s novels, I am sure it is redemptive, if only because the flavor of the past she writes has sweetened over the years, because the world she can hardly see anymore through her failing vision is so much more beautiful than the one she saw when her eyes were younger. The redemption that for my grandfather was a matter of the will as he put the bottle away and praised the God who delivered him is for my grandmother no less a matter of the will as she changes the past in the world she can no longer see. Or maybe in neither case it is a matter of the will at all.

Anyway, if David doesn’t have a problem declaring that he has never seen the righteous forsaken as he himself had cried out in anguish that God had done to him years before, I suppose my grandmother is in good company. That is enough for me.

Costly Grace

Yesterday was my little brother’s 21st birthday, which he celebrated by (among other things) waiting at the grocery store check-out at midnight to buy a cart full of drinks. Somehow that is my excuse for posting this story.

An old college friend recently contacted me. I was delighted. She and I had had a rocky friendship toward the end of my college years, and I had always imagined that if our friendship survived beyond college, it would last the rest of our lives. Once she graduated, I lost contact with her for almost three years, and I had almost given up hope that I would find her.

But there she was on my computer screen, and over Christmas break on her trip down South she swung over to my city to visit me. I was delighted, and (truth be told) a bit nervous.

“So, what about you?” I asked after some introductory framework about my current life as a student. “How has grad school been for you?”

“It’s good now,” she began. “Three months ago I joined Alcoholics Anonymous.”

Over our brunch that gave way to a walk around campus that gave way to tea in my cottage, she painted some broad strokes of the lost time, getting me up to speed with the past three years that led to her joining AA. In all the years I had known her, she had never looked so beautiful to me.

I mean that quite honestly. I had recently used the same adjective to describe a visit with Benedict (my formerly-homeless friend I’ve mentioned again and again on this blog), when I noticed that there is a brightness in him that I don’t see in many others. I think there is a beauty that comes from reaching out with frail arms from the pit of ones lowness, a beauty that doesn’t come any cheaper way. Benedict has that beauty, and my college friend is beginning to as well.

“Alcohol is not the problem,” AA tells its members; “it was the solution, until it stopped working.” Thus when the members introduce themselves as alcoholics, they are really admitting to their failure to find a solution; they are admitting their brokenness in addressing problems that the rest of us may find less visibly destructive (but equally ineffective and perhaps equally destructive) means of dealing with. And in that brokenness, in that frailty and failure to fabricate healing, is the door for the Grace we all need. In those cases, to the people who say "Hi my name is Em and I'm an alcoholic" at the beginning of an AA meeting, Grace costs every shred of dignity they once had had.

So here on the twelfth day of Christmas, I want to raise a glass (of coffee) to my beautiful friend. May we all learn to receive Grace as she is learning, even if it likewise does not come cheaply.

Brokenness and Grace

Rich Mullins, who no doubt influenced my adolescent faith more than was good for it, once said in a concert:

But my theory is that for those of us who are too weak to remain single, God gives us a spouse. For those of us who are too hung up to handle marriage, God gives us celibacy. So, pick your weakness. Pick your poison, I guess. But anyway, for those of you who do choose to be in love and stuff, go for it. And I think it's a good thing - I've heard a lot about it.

I thought about those words yesterday as I attended a wedding of some old college friends, looking at a small cross-section of my college friends represented in the ones who attended (and in some way the ones who didn’t). I found myself surprisingly struck by our brokenness, brokenness that showed its face in different ways among the different people represented.

I thought of the brokenness of those of us with too many grandiose dreams of serving a God we slowly realize we do not believe is gracious, and the brokenness of those of us who give up those dreams because we realize we are too lonely to serve God the way we wanted. I thought of the brokenness of those of us with too much idealistic cultural rebellion to slip easily into what looks like a pre-packaged life, and the brokenness of those of us who take the package and hope the ideals can fit inside. I thought of the brokenness of those who lose the girl and keep the friends, and the brokenness of those who get the girl and lose the friends. It made me want to weep.

And as we took communion, I thought about the Incarnation, about Christ entering the broken places of our lives and making them holy. Christ’s life sanctifies the broken pieces of the single life, and his first miracle sanctifies the broken pieces of marriage. Since we have been given a Messiah who takes on our pain rather than destroying it, perhaps in some ways he pronounces goodness over it. Far from simply healing our brokenness, he sanctifies it.

If that is the case, I suppose all the places that looked like brokenness become openings for Grace. Perhaps just as marriage can be an opening for Grace to those of us who are lonely, singleness is sometimes an opening for Grace to those of us with too many hang-ups. One way or another, there is Grace to the overly-strong, Grace to the weak, Grace to the idealists, and Grace to the idealess.

If that is the case, it is reason to rejoice, here on the eleventh day of Christmas.

Collect for the second Sunday after Christmas Day

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Mundane Magic

This year I spent all of Christmas trying to help my sister-in-law while she was in labor: supervising the nephews’ opening of presents while her contractions were already nine hours in the making, taking walks and counting the increased contractions after the boys had been shipped to Gram & Grampa’s, walking up and down stairs at the birthing center, and being the delivery-room errand-girl. I feel like after watching a baby boy being born on Christmas Day, I’m supposed to have some inspirational words, maybe imagining doing that in a stable, or maybe musings about the humanity of Christ. I don’t know how Christmasy my thoughts are, but I’ll give it a try.

* * *

My oldest nephew once came and spent the night with me at my cottage when he was three. Among the activities I planned for him was popping popcorn on the stove. I heated the oil, added the kernels, and put on a glass lid that allowed us to watch the process. When small, hard, brown seeds suddenly transformed into large, puffy, white popcorn, my nephew exclaimed,

“Aunty Em, is that magic?”

Slightly amused, I nevertheless maintained my commitment to answer his questions honestly. “No, it’s not magic; it’s just he way God made it.”

But my nephew’s face grew more intense and awestruck at this response. He asked more earnestly, “God made magic in the world?!”

I was tongue-tied for a second, but finally determined the most honest answer to his question. “Yes... yes he did.”

* * *

After all, what else did I witness over the course of the past nine months that clamaxed yesterday when from my sister-in-law’s agony emerged a beautiful child whom no one had seen before (what beauty does not come from agony, after all?), who was made from half pieces of her and half those of my brother? Does our knowledge of some of the gears of that magic trick make it less magical?

Does it with any of the magic God made in the world? Is a rainbow any less magical because we know that light carries in it the entire spectrum of visible color that glass and water may unpackage for us? I know light does, but why should it? With the best of our rationality (another miracle; where did we get that from?), we can eventually learn some of the nuts-and-bolts of how things happen, but the question of why approaches the miraculous.

So yesterday I watched the climax of another daily, regular, run-of-the-mill miracle. And it was on Christmas day, no less, a day we associate with the magic of miracles, and suddenly the question of whether or not I believe in the virgin birth or the physical incarnation of God seems ridiculous. Of course I do. I’m a scholar, after all, and many of my dear friends are scientists. We should know that there are miracles written into the workings of the world; we observe them every day. If these mundane miracles happen by the truck-load every day, of course there may be greater ones.

And the miracle of redeeming the broken places of my soul, the miracle of healing the broken places of the world... perhaps I may be slowly coming to believe in those as well.

God rest ye merry, on this second day of Christmas!

...all in the waiting

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 the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
-T. S. Eliot

One interesting thing about trying to submit the rhythm of ones soul to the Church calendar is watching it be thwarted. This year, for example, I’ve already written about God pouring out Alleluias on my Lent, and about an illusive Easter that never seemed to arrive. When my spirit is in a posture of repentance, perhaps I am more able to hear surprising news of God’s favor.

And now, as I begin the second Church year with this listening-blog, as I try to catch up with Advent after a month filled with papers and grading and trips, I’m realizing that my season of waiting and longing that I am normally so good at is being thwarted. This year, the triumph of Christ the King Sunday has stayed with me through Advent, and redemption feels so tangible I can’t help but believe it has become incarnate.

Maybe Advent isn’t only about waiting and longing; maybe it is also about expectation, as if all of creation, “the angle choir of matter,” stands “poised as if to sing” (to use phrases from one of Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets). Maybe I always missed that piece of the puzzle as the posture of my soul seemed naturally inclined toward long, enduring waiting. Maybe waiting for a God who takes delight in saturating gratuitous beauty into the laws of creation, who reverses entropy and makes everything fall together, is by definition an expectant...even joyful...wait.

You will arise and have pity on Zion;
it is the time to favor her;
the appointed time has come.

Gratuitous Beauty

Last night I walked out of my parents’ house in the country with my little sister, and saw a magnificent canopy of stars... getting less magnificent every year as the city encroaches closer on the horizon, but magnificent nonetheless.

“Thank you, God!” she shouted to the cold, clear December sky on the eve of her seventeenth birthday. “What a great present!”

I smiled, and joined the applause. It was a gratuitous display of beauty, there for the two of us to enjoy, but there whether or not we enjoyed it.

* * *

Last week I was driving down the interstate, returning home on a three-and-a-half-hour drive to visit my grandmother. I was just in the process of noticing the lovely beginnings of a golden sunset in the southwest when it started to rain above me. Knowing what happens when sunlight and rain converge, I stole a quick glance behind me.

The rainbow was amazing. It covered the whole northeastern sky in a giant semicircle, beginning itself again right below.

For a moment, I connected to the promise to Noah made in Genesis. Apart from the issue of worldwide floods that scholars may argue about, the rainbow spoke of goodness, beauty painted across the heavens just for the hell of it. God gives us light like a wrapped present that the particles of water unwrap into colored brilliance, for no apparent reason other than that he likes it that way.

I immediately turned on my turn-signal so I could pull over and admire the masterpiece, but the rain stopped as suddenly as it began, and the rainbow was gone.

Another gratuitous display of beauty, only there for a moment.

* * *

And I sit here and try to articulate what this beauty does in my soul, what it would do to my theology if I let it in there, but I can’t get much farther than my little sister’s exclamation. What can be said of a God who integrates beauty into the intricacies of his handiwork, who can make gargantuan balls of burning gas glorious or bent light in the rain gorgeous? Just that he did a good job of it, I suppose.

Yay God! Bravo!

A great Shadow has departed

I had planned on reposting the psalm I posted last year on Thanksgiving. It’s a good one; feel free to read it anyway.

Instead, a passage from The Return of the King that my pastor read on Sunday grabbed me this week, and I want to get it written here at the very end of the Church calendar-year, between Christ the King Sunday last week when we celebrated Christ’s ultimate victory in the epic of history and the first Sunday of Advent this next Sunday when we begin waiting for his coming.

Frodo and Samwise have destroyed the ring, and with it their lives. They are beside the erupting Crack of Doom, knowing they are about to die.

“I am glad that you are here with me,” said Frodo. “Here at the end of all things, Sam.”

“Yes, I am with you, Master,” said Sam, laying Frodo’s wounded hand gently to his breast. “And you’re with me. And the journey’s finished. But after coming all that way I don’t want to give up yet. It’s not like me, somehow, if you understand.”

“Maybe not, Sam,” said Frodo; “but it’s like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes. We have only a little time to wait now. We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape.”

“Well, Master, we could at least go further from this dangerous place here, from this Crack of Doom, if that’s its name. Now couldn’t we? Come, Mr. Frodo, let’s go down the path at any rate!”

Frodo and Sam do go on a bit, without hope, and finally collapse. Sam, his beautiful, simple soul remaining consistent to the end, wishes to hear their own tale told, and loses consciousness beside the erupting mountain as he daydreams about the story.

Then he is in Rivendell, having been saved from the mountain by the eagles, and he slowly awakes as if from a dream and sees his 9-fingered master beside him.

Full memory flooded back, and Sam cried aloud: “It wasn’t a dream! Then where are we?”

And a voice spoke softly behind him: “In the land of Ithilien, and in the keeping of the King; and he awaits you.” With that Gandalf stood before him, robed in white, his beard now gleaming like pure snow in the twinkling of the leafy sunlight. “Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?” he said.

But Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listed the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count...

Is everything sad going to come untrue? So let it be... let it be.

The posture of Faith

In the group I've mentioned before that meets to listen and discuss the words of different religious thinkers, we just listed to a program about Elie Wiessel, an Auschwitz survivor who lost both his parents in the holocaust. Though we listened to the whole program, there was one quote from the beginning that grabbed my attention, and that seized the entirety of the discussion afterwards:

Some people who read my first book, Night, they were convinced that I broke with the faith and broke with God. Not at all. I never divorced God. It is because I believed in God that I was angry at God, and still am. The tragedy of the believer, it is deeper than the tragedy of the non-believer.

The words resonated with me, and with one of the other "messier" Christians in the room (whose dying father is an atheist and whose mother is a Buddhist). But for the other people in the room, from Christians to unaffiliated theists, the words were anywhere from irrational to repulsive. Why would one be angry at God? they wondered. If it seems like God is not doing his/her responsibility, you must have the wrong idea of what that responsibility is. Change your perception of him; he is beyond anger.

I think one of the best parts of being a Christian is that three-quarters of our Bible is the Jewish Bible, the story of Israel who was named the Wrestler. Abraham barters; Jacob wrestles; Moses argues; David pleads; Jeremiah laments; Jonah pouts; Job demands.

To my Christian friends, that posture often seems dangerous. To my unaffiliated theist friend, it is ridiculous. But I wonder if it is the posture of true faith in a God who claims to be just and righteous; I wonder if anything less is to not take his words seriously. At the very least, God has shown himself big enough to take it; at most, he has specifically chosen the wrestlers who will take him to task about making good on his promises. Certainly he will prove himself right in the end, but that knowledge doesn't seem to keep the faithful from wrestling with him in the mean time.

Let them eat cake!

I wrote a post earlier this week, and then decided to remove it because the situation it involved was too current. Now I feel like the blog has a vacuum in that post's absence, so I thought I'd replace it with an old story about an interaction with a neighborhood friend I once wrote for my church newsletter while still living in my intercity community. This fits into the listening-blog in the theme of listening-to-what-our-words-sound-like.

***

“So I heard you got hitched!” Clayton interjected his normal introductory question as I walked into the kitchen. By now I was accustomed to his dry way of trying get me riled up, and I didn’t even give him a response. Instead I pulled some leftover salad out of the fridge and joined him at the table where he munched on some cereal.

“How’d the great job search go today?” I asked the tower of a teenager.

“Terrible,” he returned with light-hearted candor, shoving another spoonful in his mouth to indicate he was done talking.

“It’s hard to find summer jobs this late in the season,” I tried to empathize. Clayton, one of the few kids from the neighborhood to make it to a university, was navigating what is often the most frustrating season of the college year. Without family, summers were excruciating.

“I’ve already put in 37 applications,” he challenged. “This is beyond hard.”

I nodded my agreement.

“I hate staying on the floor of the Ugadas’,” he continued, referring to the Liberian family-of-nine who had invited him to stay with them in their tiny four-bedroom house. “I hate that I don’t have a family. I hate feeling like I’m running this race as fast as I can with so much going against me, and slowly I look up and notice that no one is cheering… but I have to keep running.” Clayton looked pleased with his analogy peppered with various expletives for dramatic effect, and poured another bowl of cereal.

“I know it’s rough,” I concurred. “I do also know that things get better; nineteen-years-old is thankfully not the end.”

“Oh, I’ve heard that one before!” he erupted. “Things are always supposed to be getting better: ‘Maybe after middle school, maybe after high school, maybe in college.’ They’re always just about to get better.”

I felt like we were suddenly in the middle of a very different conversation. “I don’t just say that because I want it to be true,” I struggled, shuffling the salad around my plate pensively. “I say that because I’ve been coming to know this God who runs the world, and he’s a God of redemption.”

“Are you telling me to have faith?” he challenged. “If I just believe, things will become peachy? I may end up with a terrible life, but one day it’ll all be over and I’ll be in heaven where things will be wonderful? Are you telling me I have a pie in the sky to look forward to one day?”

***

Was I? Maybe I was... maybe I threw clichés at Clayton because I didn't actually have any confidence that God would care for him in the here-and-now. Maybe I can't honestly expect myself to believe that of Clayton if I don't believe it of myself. Maybe step-one of learning to love is learning to be loved.