Preparing Places

My little brother’s best friend at the international high school he attended in France was a delightful kid from Norway whom I always appreciated for getting my little brother into poetry. The two boys shared the best parts of themselves with each other, I suppose; the Norwegian gave his sometimes-macho friend a love for poetry, and the American gave his European-atheist friend his faith. By the time both boys moved back to their respective motherlands for their senior year of high school, the former atheist was returning to blaze a new trail as a Christian in an a-religious country. It was quite beautiful.

Which is why it broke my heart when he visited us in the States three years later and broke it to me that he had given up trying to be a Christian, and was back to being as staunch an atheist as ever.

“I really did try for years,” he explained to me. “I prayed. I attended church. I read my Bible. But after two years I looked back and realized I still didn’t even believe God existed, and I could no longer try to fool myself. If I could believe, I would have. It’s not a matter of whether or not I want to believe; I just don’t.”

Had I been a healthier Christian, it might have shaken my faith a bit to hear his account of God not showing up, or at least God not showing up in a way that the young man could identify, not showing up in a way that mattered. Instead, that anecdote went onto some running list of why God is frustrating to me and sat there for a few years.

And then this week my little sister brought it up again, and her words resonated with the seminarians’ thoughts about the middle voice of faith this past summer.

“I was thinking about how he tried to believe for years and then realized that he still didn’t believe,” she mused. “But I wonder if maybe trying to believe is believing.”

Maybe she is right. Maybe, all those times this past spring that I tried to believe God was redeeming the hell of my Muslim friend’s life when I didn’t understand it or feel it or know what to do, maybe trying to believe was believing.

If my friends are right and faith is a gift rather than something we can conjure within ourselves, then maybe the call to have faith is a call to make space for it. Our part in living a life of faith perhaps involves preparing the places where faith would be living if it were there. For me last spring, that involved being a part of my Muslim friend’s life when everyone else seemed to back away. For my brother’s Norwegian friend, it had involved his prayers to a God he didn’t know existed.

Perhaps that is why the Church throughout the centuries has been praying the Liturgy of the Hours. At regular intervals throughout the day, whether one is feeling holy or profane, whether he is happy or sad, whether he connects with the words or numbly reads them off like a grocery list, he prays. If faith were to make its home in a person, I suppose that might be one place it would live.

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.

Hazing

There is an ancient form of hazing practiced among a peculiar tribe of creatures from the land of Academia (if the name sounds like a nut, all the better) that we have come to call a “thesis defense.” The ritual involves the victim being forced to endure sundry humiliations for approximately one hour. Some examples are as follows:

Questions about a central point of ones thesis: The victim will assume the interrogator has found a hole in the main argument, some key issue that was not explained well enough in the carefully crafted thesis, and will fumble to formulate a new answer on the spot as if it were possible to say in one minute what he had not said in one year of meticulous research and writing. The interrogators will watch him sweat through his fumbling answer for a while, no doubt inwardly grinning, and then end the torture by saying, “I think you actually answered this question quite nicely on page 12. Let me read your words.”

Questions about complex issues in the broader scope of the cosmos that the thesis innocently provoked: The victim will stare blankly at the interrogator for a few panicked moments, hoping there was some mistake and the interrogator will realize he had meant to say “Thomas More” (who was the subject of the thesis) rather than “Ben Jonson” (who wrote a century later). When it is clear that no such relief will come, if the victim has the presence of mind to refrain from asking “Do you want me to answer that?” (which he may not always have), he will fumble through an elementary sort of answer before finishing with the only definitively true thing he can say: “…but I haven’t yet done the research necessary to speak confidently on the subject.” The interrogator will nod and interject pointedly, “Well, you’re going to need to look into that,” a message that seems to have been the purpose of the question in the first place.

Questions of the softball variety: These questions often come from the kind, outside-the-area interrogator, and are essentially to the effect of “Can you define that word you keep using?” The victim will feel the sudden ecstasy of being given an easy question, ecstasy which is quickly subsumed in panic when he realizes that the other two scholarly giants in the room had defined that very word countless times in his sophomoric youth, nuancing it ad nauseam in rich ways they would no doubt want to hear replicated by their academic progeny. The victim may indeed catch the softball, but do such a sloppy job of it that he may as well have dropped it. No doubt the interrogators feel that their years of teaching the victim have been wasted.

And the purpose of the ritual? That though the victim may walk away initiated into the tribe of Academia with the new title of “Master of Arts,” he will know that he ain’t mastered nothin’ yet.

But ya know, I’ll take the title anyway. You may all call me Master Em now.

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?

Grace to the Gracious

I have a general policy about kindness and friendliness to strangers on the street that goes a good bit beyond most urban American standards. I may be wrong about this, I freely admit, but at some point I decided it would be better to err on the side of too extreme an adherence to Christ’s warning “Whatever you did to the least of these my brothers you did to me” than on the side of over-caution. Somehow, I think the damage that over-caution could do to my soul is worse than the danger to my body everyone imagines is waiting behind the stranger on the street.

As you can imagine for a young woman, this has gotten me into quite a few sticky situations over the years. I admit that the caution that my friends in the conservative-right and the liberal-intelligentsia alike have tried to instill in me over the years would have saved me from many an awkward situation. But what I have also found is that most awkward situations are, in their strange, awkward ways, windows for grace.

Take today for example.

As I walked down a small, empty side-street around the corner from my regular coffee shop at 7am, I was hailed by a man in his 20s or 30s.

He says (politely enough): Excuse me, can I ask you a question?

I say (pleasantly, pausing my walk): Sure.

He says: I’m not from around here; is there a tattoo parlor on that street?

I think: You’re looking for a tattoo parlor at 7:00 in the morning?
I say: I feel like there’s one down that way, but I couldn’t tell you for sure.

He says: You’re not a tattoo person, I guess?

I think: Already changing the subject?
I say (maintaining my pleasantness): Nope, not so much.

He says: It’s for my girlfriend. She wants to get her belly-button pierced. [Face becoming contorted as if pondering a vexing issue] Do you know anyone with a belly-button ring?

I think: I should probably be wrapping this conversation up soon...
I say: Yeah, lots of people.

He says: How does that work? She’s an inny... can they pierce an inny?

I think: I don’t think he’s thinking a lot about his girlfriend right now...
I say: Yeah, they just pierce the skin on top, and the ring hangs down over the belly-button. It works. [Beginning to step away as if the conversation is ending.]

He says (quickly): Wait, it doesn’t make sense to me. Are you an inny? Can you just show me on your belly-button?

I think: Abandon ship! Abandon ship!
I say: Nah, it’s pretty simple... they just stick a needle right above it. [Making feeble hand motions to illustrate the phenomenon]

Right then, as if on cue from out of nowhere, my thesis director (a well-established Renaissance scholar and Catholic intellectual who always wears a suit with a hankie in the pocket and a hat over his gray beard like a proper gentleman) walks up to the post office that is right behind us.

My thesis director says (jovially): I just can’t get away from you!

I say (relieved): Nope, apparently not!
I think: [Grasping for an academic question that will involve walking away from the stranger] How thankful I am that I was not showing this fellow my belly-button right now!

To all of you out there who don’t find the balance between wisdom and grace toward the stranger on the street as easy as it seems to be to others, I empathize with the tension. But I am learning that there is an abundance of grace out there waiting to be poured back out on the gracious.

I mean, what if I had been showing that guy my belly-button right as my thesis director walked up? That’s one catastrophe I could do without two days before my defense!

Today in the Divine Office

Perhaps because I've been thinking so much about forgiveness this year, perhaps because I just stayed up until 3am grading papers that were anything but forgiving when it came to issues of American racial struggles (the most shocking moment was when a student declared that Huck Finn's father should be grateful that the government had not only allowed him to vote as an "ignorant drunk," but even to reproduce), the concluding prayer for this Sunday struck me. This is a beautiful picture of why forgiveness is tied to our salvation, and it also strikes me as an interesting parallel to the passage when the risen Christ tells his disciples, "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld":

Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
in your unbounded mercy
you have revealed the beauty of your power
through your constant forgiveness of our sins.
May the power of this love be in our hearts
to bring your pardon and your kingdom to all we meet.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.

May we all be inheritors of the kingdom, and wear forgiveness like a weird birthmark or other strange family trait that characterizes the children of God.

Speaking Oddities

I grew up in the Assemblies of God church (a branch of the Pentecostals), so it should come as no surprise that at some point in my childhood I felt that God had spoken to me. God was speaking to everyone, after all; the Holy Spirit came upon people regularly during our worship services; some spoke in languages they did not know, and others received the translation. The fact that God spoke to people directly was one of the first things I learned about him.

But when it happened to me, it was not like anything I had seen at church or knew to expect (perhaps that was one of the primary reasons I knew it was him). It was not at church at all, and it was not in a sanctified time of worship.

On the contrary, it was right after one of the most violent fights I would ever have with my brother, and I was feeling about as unholy as an otherwise well-mannered child could feel. That afternoon, it had not been the Holy Spirit who had seized upon my body; it was a rage that was borderline demonic, and I wanted for a few frightening minutes to do nothing other than hurt him. Now, having been caught, restrained, and sent outside to cool down while the adults discussed whether or not an exorcism would be in order, I wandered in the woods to face my own inner demons of shame and isolation.

And I knew it was God who spoke to me then, not because he was loud enough to drown out the million other noises in my head—my unexplainable rage, the severe alarm of the adults, my liturgy of despair that repeated its insistence that I was utterly alone—but because it was so much quieter, and yet I heard it anyway. Suddenly—and I remember the exact square foot of sacred wooded ground where I was standing at this moment—a stillness came over me, a stillness that seemed to say one thing:

“I love you.”

In almost two decades since that day, I have never been so sure of God’s voice, nor have I grown out of the need to hear that inaugural message. In these almost two decades, I have cried out for direction that never came, and I have been certain God was telling me things that later seemed to come more from my own idealism. But as I experienced that afternoon, God's voice rarely says what my spirit is prepared to hear.

Christ said that his sheep know his voice, and will not follow a stranger because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice. Perhaps one way we can identify his voice is by its peculiarity; that afternoon in the woods, I knew that voice of love was God’s voice because it was such an oddity. Perhaps he still speaks in oddities, in the last thing we expect or hope to hear, in the dirty baths to cure leprosy or the seven buckets of water to start a fire, in the still whisper that follows the thunder and storms.

I want God to speak to me loud enough to drown out the other voices; sometimes he only speaks in whispers. Odd whispers, at that.

Why do you contend against him,
saying, “He will answer none of man’s words”?
For God speaks in one way,
and in two, though man does not perceive it.

Our Lady of Sorrows

Disclaimer: I have no desire to alienate my Protestant readers further (who I realize are 100% of my original readership), nor to say anything unknowingly offensive to the Catholic readers that seem to have trickled in recently. But today is the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, and so if there’s ever a right day for this post it’s today. Receive my apologies for all my inevitable heresies, and I’ll try to be brief.

August 15 had been the Feast of the Assumption, the day the Catholic and Orthodox Churches celebrate Mary rising from the dead and being assumed into heaven where she would be crowned Queen of Heaven. I hadn’t been especially looking forward to the prayers of that particular solemnity in the Daily Office, so when I talked to one of the seminarians the day before he recommended I read Pius XII’s declaration about the Assumption in the Apostolic Constitution, and a document Catholics and Anglicans wrote together about Mary.

The former, which was a bit disorganized and written with a different audience in mind, made me ponder some esoteric things about eschatology. The latter, which was kind and carefully written with a mutual longing for understanding, made me sad.

For Catholics, it is a day of hope fulfilled, of the Arc of the New Covenant entering Jerusalem with rejoicing, of the New Creation that Christ began already gathering the momentum of redemption, of the world suspended between the Already and the Not-Yet being ever so slightly closer to the Already. For a Protestant trying to suspend disbelief, it nevertheless felt stupid.

From any angle you look at it, it certainly seems a dark irony that Mary, whom Catholics believe is the one who draws us to Jesus, is the most repellent point of Catholic theology for Protestants. I’m sure someone in a dark abyss out there gets a good laugh out of that one at both of our expenses. Struck by the sorrow of the impasse, I was ready to solicit the prayers of anyone, even if it felt a little stupid. For better or worse, this is what came out of that.

Oh Mother of our Brokenness, please nod
From where you sit as Queen of all our tears,
The junction of humanity and God
From which your children’s rich division veers.
And Mother of our Sorrow, keep in mind
The sword that pierces the mosaic of
Our souls, for we your brood that trails behind
Have never been immaculate in love.
I do not envy you your crown, because
The price of it has been too great, the steel
That still is piercing, for the serpent was
Within our spirit as upon his heel.
But barren wombs have leapt in Nazareth,
So pray for us the hour of our death.

The Miracle

“Well, I’m fading,” I interjected into a pause in the conversation, standing up and making my way across the room to my bereaved friend. It had been over six hours since I had arrived, hours that encompassed a funeral, a potluck, and a walk through the nearby university gardens, and were now dwindling to sitting around her living room with the few family members and friends who were still around.

My friend stood up smiling and met my embrace warmly. “Thanks for coming out,” she said, and then added in a whisper on my shoulder, “Thank you for loving our little boy.”

I realized two things in that moment: I realized that my friend had been comforted in my sharing of love for her son, and I realized that she was right... I did love him. Somehow, I had come to love a boy I would never see or touch.

In some ways, certainly, love is contagious. How could you not love the little guy after watching his parents love him so deeply since their giddy announcement in January, after hearing the weekly updates announcing that their baby was the size of a pea or had developed fingers, after seeing their commitment to love him continue past the tragic day in May when they learned he would not live, after watching slideshows of beautiful photos taken by a non-profit called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep that celebrated the family in the pregnancy and the two hours in the delivery room? The family had been a heartrending monument to love, and no one at the funeral was immune to it.

But while love may in some ways be a gift that we cannot produce ourselves (like faith), I wonder if prayer is an active agent in fertilizing soil that nurtures it. I love that little 3-pound-5-ounce baby I never met because his parents’ love entered into my heart that had been praying for him for three months and especially in the hour of his death. I once mused that prayer is often more a means of opening our own eyes than of catching God’s; now I wonder if it also opens our hearts. Prayer may be as much about our own sanctification as it is the needs of others.

Sometimes the call to love one another and to forgive our enemies feels as much beyond my control as the task of healing my friend’s son would have been. But at least we can pray nevertheless—for our friends, for the poor, for our enemies—and in the absence of the latter miracle, God may surprise us with the former. While the miracle for my friends’ son was not the ex nihilo creation of the bones and organs he was lacking, maybe it was the ex nihilo creation of love in the hearts of us who prayed for him.


Photo taken by Franklin Golden. Franklin is a volunteer with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a non-profit foundation that provides professional maternity and birth photos to parents who are losing a child.

Poets of the Word

Some of my readers indicated an appreciation for my esoteric Greek posts, which I promised were about to stop now that language school is over. Rejoice then, O Greek fans; my promises were empty, and Greek posts will evidently continue. My thesis director gave a delightful anecdote in class the other day, and I cannot help but post it.

In his Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney makes much of the fact that English gets its word for poet from the Greek (ποιητης), which is derived from the verb that means “make, do” (ποιεω). In a literal sense, poets are makers and doers.

For a literary scholar who also dabbles in theology, this is absolutely delightful.

Literally, then, when St. James tells us to be doers of the word rather than hearers only, he is commanding that we be poets of the word (ποιηται λογου). Don’t just be a hearer, he says; be a poet!

After all, we must remember, God himself is a poet. The Apostle’s Creed which Christians have been reciting for centuries declares in Greek, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, poet of heaven and earth” (ποιητην ουρανου και γης). Who could stand on a mountain or stroll through the forest without suspecting that the authors intended the double-meaning?

That alone validates spending a summer in an intensive course to study a dead language!