My new milk cow

In one of my favorite scenes of Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye is obliged to visit Lazar Wolf. Tevye assumes that Lazar Wolf is going to ask him to sell him his new milk cow. We the audience know that Lazar is really after Tevye’s daughter. It makes for a hilarious scene.

Tevye,...

Yeah?

I suppose you know why I wanted to see you.

Oh, yes, I do. But there is no use talking about it.

Tevye, I understand how you feel. But after all, you have a few more without her.

Ah, I see. Today you want one. Tomorrow you may want two.

Two? What would I do with two?

The same as you do with one.

Tevye. This is very important to me.

Why is it so important to you?

Frankly, because I'm lonely.

Lonely? Reb Lazar, what are you talking about? How can a little cow keep you company?

Little cow? Is that what you call her?

But that's what she is!

What are you talking about?

Don't you know?

Of course I know! We are talking about my new milk cow. The one you want to buy from me.

A milk cow! A milk cow so I won't be lonely? I'm talking about your daughter. Your daughter Tzeitel.

It’s hilarious in the scene. I’d like to hope that there exists a perspective that makes the similar misunderstandings we encounter in life funny as well. There are times I have stood back and watched competing sides fight each other down without realizing they are talking about two different subjects. There are times when I have hurt and been hurt, and discovered months later that I and the person in question were talking about different things.

I used to think that the way around that problem was to keep a balanced perspective. But maybe, since our perspective is always more tilted than we realize, we are in a more detrimental position when we imagine we are searching for balance. Maybe, as a humorous anecdote from French class once indicated, the only viable approach to the situation is to expect it, admitting that our own perspective and judgment may be faulty. (Speaking of French class, La Rochefoucauld could contribute his delightful cynicism to this discussion: “Everyone complains of his memory; no one complains of his judgment.”) If we expect these sorts of misunderstandings, the only appropriate reaction to our frustration in the middle of them is grace.

Grace… and, as Fiddler on the Roof may suggest, a good hearty laugh afterwards.

The Driver Bearing Down Behind

I don’t really experience the sensation people call “road-rage.” But I have nevertheless experienced what this poem describes. In the prologue to Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets, a mostly unrhymed sonnet begins with the fury of Donne and the humility of Herbert (sorry of that was esoteric). I read it this morning after a fairly frail night, and I had my first moment of connecting with a living poet. Maybe Jarman will be my man.

Please be the driver bearing down behind,
Or swerve in front and slow down to a crawl,
Or leave a space to lure me in, then pull
Ahead, cutting me off, and blast your horn.
Please climb the mountain with me, tailgating
And trying to overtake on straightaways.
Let nightfall make us both pick up the pace,
Trading positions with our high beams glaring.
And when we have exhausted sanity
And fuel, and smoked our engines, then, please stop,
Lurching onto the shoulder of the road,
And get out, raging, and walk up to me,
Giving me time to feel my stomach drop,
And see you face to face, and say, “My Lord!”

Somehow it was a comfort to learn that others out there experience road-rage with God. It was also a comfort to imagine the road-rage is actually part of the redemption, a redemption with the vulnerable tenderness that can only come after a struggle.

A Raid on the Inarticulate

I don't know how many of my readers are also writers or may be interested in thoughts about writing, but at this point in my 20th century American poetry class, most of what I have to listen to is about the topic of writing. From what I can tell by his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot is the writer I want to become. Here are some highlights:

Tradition involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

For now I can't say it any better than he does, and if I did it would not be in keeping with a listening-blog, so I'll just include another fragment of "East Coker" that touches on some of the highlights of a writer who is in conversation with the heritage of writers who have come before.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The Long Wait

Some friends of mine and I went kayaking and camping on an island off the coast of North Carolina last weekend. It sounded like a great idea.

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

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

I finally got on my feet (blistered from a previous ill-executed adventure) and walked along the shore. I found that if I kept moving quickly enough, the bugs would not bite me. It was clearly going to be a long night.

So my friends and I, before an exhausting day of sea kayaking, wandered the beach for an ambiguous number of dark hours, waiting for the sun to bring relief. We felt like we were in purgatory.

As we waited and walked on our tired and blistered feet, we watched the stars and horizon slowly fade outside a thick shield of fog. By the time the longed-for sunrise would have come, we could only guess its existence from the blue glow that finally allowed us to see the red welts that covered our skin and the air thick with tiny gnats that continued to torture us. The sun had risen, but we were still waiting.

Like a broken record, I find myself repeating the truth that the Christian journey is one of waiting. We spend Advent waiting for God to bring redemption, and when he finally arrives he is a baby in a stable—so we keep on waiting. We spend Lent preparing our hearts for redemption, and when we are finally made to believe it has arrived we find the Romans are still in power and the resurrected Messiah leaves us with a promise that he will return—so we keep on waiting. I have always been ready for faith to be an adventure, but sometimes it feels more like a long wait.

Let us take heart as we wander the shore; the sun has risen, and the fog is not forever. Sometimes faith is not a glorious adventure; it is a long walk that we wouldn’t have the option of quitting if we tried. But, to repeat T. S. Eliot’s lines from East Coker,

there is yet faith,
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Out of the Vermillioned Nothingness

I’m trying to expand the horizons of my education this summer to include twentieth century American poets. With one week out of five down, they are meeting my expectations: I liked Frost a good deal, Stevens a great deal less, and Williams not at all. It’s not looking good for the twentieth century.

But as I’m writing this second entry to my listening-blog in a month that is almost over, God’s silence is on my mind, and Wallace Stevens has a thing or two to say on the matter in his poem “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”:

If there must be a god in the house, must be…
He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed…

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermillioned nothingness…

The Job in me—with her long list of complaints against the God whom she will not rebel against but from whom she had demanded answers—is less inclined to interpret Stevens as laying out a list of rules for God to follow (“Deities must be seen and not heard”) than as deducing his best assessment of how God must function, based on his observation of the silence. But the mysterious Elihu had once asked Job, as he might have asked Stevens or me,

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.

I once suggested in another entry that God seems deaf to my questions because I ask the wrong ones, and that humility comes in allowing the questions to be rewritten. But if Scripture is any precedent (isn’t that a great conditional statement?), maybe half the time God answers with a question. Maybe God surprises the interrogator with questions of his own, and while I maintain my status as the interrogator I will not hear him. Throughout Scripture, God emerges from silences and confusions and pain with questions:

To Adam: “Where are you?”
To Cain: “Why are you angry, and why is your face downcast?”
To Hagar: “Where have you come from and where are you going?”
To Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
To Andrew: “What are you seeking?
To the paralytic: “Do you want to be healed?”
To the crowds: “Does this offend you?”
To the blind man: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
To Simon: “Do you love me?”

To me? I don’t know. Hearing God’s questions would require a different kind of listening than I have done, a listening without the stipulations of my own questions. To quote my very favorite twentieth century American poet, it would be “Wait without thought”:

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

This is not the Kingdom

The setting was sometime in the spring of 2007. I sat on the back porch of my urban home with my eleven housemates gathered around, drinking bottled root-beer, ginger-ale and cream-soda that we could pretend were drinks in our dry household. We were gathered to discuss whether or not I would continue living in the house when I started my master’s program in the fall.

“I don’t want to leave the neighborhood,” I explained. “I don’t want to be that transient person in the kids’ lives who makes them feel important for a year and disappears. I don’t want my life to consist in my own educated middle-class world and become disconnected with the work of the Kingdom in the lives of the poor.”

I was fighting a losing battle, and I knew it. Everyone, including me, knew I needed to allow myself to be simply a student for a while without trying to save the world in my spare time. In an earlier lunch conversation with an old college friend, I had insinuated that it would be my housemates who would urge me stay in the city for the sake of the Kingdom; by now it was clear that the only things holding me there were my own grandiose dreams of serving God.

“I actually understand where you’re coming from,” one of my housemates interjected. “I was always very passionate about wanting to be a part of the Kingdom as well. But there was a time when my similar efforts actually landed me in a mental institution, and I remember looking around there and suddenly realizing, ‘This is not the Kingdom!’ I wasn’t sure exactly where I went wrong, and I had had good Kingdom-focused reasons for doing everything I had done, but it was clear that something had gone off course. That was not the Kingdom.”

* * *

A year later, after I have let go of most of the battles I had once thought were most important, after accepting that if I ever move back into a similar urban setting it may be around the large detours of PhD and tenure, I found myself in a Bible study last night studying II Samuel 7, where David dreams of starting off his reign by building God a glorious temple. Israel is established, the Promised Land is secure, the Lord’s anointed is on the throne, and it is time for God’s glory to have a permanent resting place in the city. David, the passionate man who just made a fool of himself dancing in front of the returning Ark of the Covenant, is ready to build it.

But David is no Saul; he does not assume the ability to call for God’s blessing without submitting himself to the prophets. And the prophet Nathan, who begins by giving the obvious go-ahead to the king after God’s own heart, comes back with a surprise “No.” As much as a temple makes sense, God’s glory does not need a place to rest. God will raise up his own instrument to build his temple out of David’s offspring (and I wonder if David’s assumption that it was Solomon was misguided; Christ, after all, raised the temple of his body, and Hebrews quotes this very passage when God says ‘I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son’ as referring to Christ).

What God tells David here is striking. David wants to build God a house, and God turns around and says he will build David a house. The Kingdom will not come by David’s well-intentioned, passionate efforts to build God’s house, even if David is the king; the Kingdom will come by God’s own building of David’s house. It is good that David is the kind of man who wants to do things for God, but the Kingdom is ultimately something God will do for/through/from/to David.

“Is this your usual way of dealing with man?” David asks in the NIV. I had always assumed the question was a rhetorical question with an implied “No,” but the more literal ESV gives the opposite answer in its translation: “This is instruction for mankind.” Maybe this is God’s usual way of dealing with man after all. Maybe it is how he is dealing with me.

What am I hearing from this? Maybe it tells me to feel free to passionately dream of furthering God’s glory, but to submit those dreams to God and to his instruments of authority. It certainly seems to tell me that the Kingdom will not be something I build for God, but something that he builds. He may even choose to build it by building me.

"I will change!" Part II

So far, I’ve only voted once. I was 21, was spending a lot of time traveling between France and the rural South, was a part of a mostly-conservative Christian organization and the by-definition-liberal Black Student Movement, came from a historically Republican family and had a staunchly Democratic roommate. I felt like there was a war going on and I had friends on both sides.

I made the best decision I could, voted, walked back through campus, and found a tree somewhere to sit and cry beneath. It was a terrible day.

That anecdote is meant as a disclaimer. I am not making a political statement. I haven’t even registered to vote.

Yesterday I got a phone call from Russ, whom I’ve mentioned before, my ol’ KKK friend, the only person who has ever called me some of those racial slurs I’ve only heard in books like To Kill a Mockingbird, who seems to be in a race with himself to see if he can kill his liver or his lungs first. I haven’t heard from him since the Eve Carson shooting, when he called to rant about how that foul young fellow might not get the death penalty since he was too young. I don’t normally look forward to hearing from him.

Russ announced my name (he doesn’t say my name; he announces it) and began. “I’m calling to talk about this here election,” he stated. I took a breath and waited for him to continue. I used to think Russ talked to me and my old housemates to get us riled up. Then when I realized he knew we wouldn’t get riled up and talked to us anyway, I assumed he talked to us to convince us or to have an educated political discussion. Finally, I think I’ve concluded that he talks to us simply because we’re the only ones who listen to him.

“I think I’m realizing that, out of all the damn candidates out there, there is only one who is worth anything. McCain is gonna be another damn Bush, and I don’t want to see him giving all our money to the damn Israelis. Hillary…I don’t know what to think about her. I think Barak Obama is the only candidate out there who is worth voting for.”

I wished I had been chewing something so I could have choked on it.

“Russ…” I started, but didn’t know how to continue. “Well Russ, I had thought you had already done all the surprising me you were going to do, but this is about the most surprising thing I’ve heard all year.”

The 61-year-old Arian Nationalist who has spent 30 years in jail continued to talk about how Obama seemed to be the only one who might be open-minded in international politics and keep us from making so many enemies, and I sat dumbfounded.

I know some people who think Obama is going to be America’s savoir. I know others who think he is the antichrist. Both positions seem just as unlikely to me (and I am amused that the former is given so much more credibility), but hearing a former klansman declare his full support behind the first black presidential candidate seems like it could support either case. One way or another, it spoke a simple message to me in this Resurrection season:

People can change.

Russ is nowhere near a full transformation, and Obama is not going to be the man to give it to him if he ever gets it. Redemption is slow, and it is only ever partially complete. But somehow, maybe partially due to 30 years in prison, maybe partially due to his friendship with a group of young idealistic Christians living in community in the inner-city, maybe due to none of those things, the man who was brought to tears as a boy when he saw his city was going to “go down the tubes” with integration was able to consider a black man to be not as hateful as the other candidates.

If Russ can consider Obama as even a possibility, maybe I, little 25-year-old me, am not as permanently flawed as I often believe.

Surprised by Unrefinement

In the middle of end-of-the-semester chaos and after trying to force myself into the spirit of the Resurrection season after a seemingly endless season of Lent, I found myself deciding to read through my favorite part of scripture--the prophets--in the present tense rather than the future. The redemption they proclaim has happened, or so I am trying to believe.

Somehow that put me in the right posture to listen to an obscure passage in Isaiah with fresh ears. In the center of my most frequently-read book of the Bible, God promises that the plowing, crushing and threshing are not eternal. God the farmer has no desire to destroy his crop.

It is an obvious message, but one I rarely receive. I, unlike God, seem all too willing to thresh the hell out of my soul, assuming the furnace of affliction needs to be awfully damn hot to burn out all the dross. Having come out of some of those fires surprised by unrefinement, I am starting to wonder if God's methods might be a little softer than mine. This passage from Isaiah 28 seems to suggest more moderate methods of refinement. I've never noticed it before.

Give ear, and hear my voice;
give attention, and hear my speech.
Does he who plows for sowing plow continually?
Does he continually open and harrow his ground?
When he has leveled its surface,
does he not scatter dill, sow cumin,
and put in wheat in rows
and barley in its proper place,
and emmer as the border?
For he is rightly instructed;
his God teaches him.

Dill is not threshed with a threshing sledge,
nor is a cart wheel rolled over cumin,
but dill is beaten out with a stick,
and cumin with a rod.
Grain is crushed for bread;
he will surely thresh it forever, but not forever;
when he drives his cart wheel over it
with his horses, he does not crush it.
This also comes from the LORD of hosts;
he is wonderful in counsel
and excellent in wisdom.

"I will change!"

Last year, when my nephew was two, he begged my brother to allow him to join the rest of us in the Ash Wednesday service. My brother explained to his little son that it was a “very serious” service, and if he sat with us he must be very still and quite. The two-year-old gave his word and became the youngest member of the congregation.

He really gave it his best shot and did well during the music, scripture readings and sermon, but by the time the extended prayers of the people rolled around he started getting antsy. At such a somber time in the service, leading up to the extended confession and the institution of the ashes, my brother could only whisper a couple warnings before taking action. He picked up the boy and prepared to take him to the nursery.

“Noooooooooooooo!” the congregation heard my nephew wail. “I will be quiet! I will change! I will be a new boy! Let me stay in the church!”

In a service that emphasizes repentance, what could my brother do? The munchkin repented his way back into the congregation.

I have certainly echoed my nephews wails many times (I once wrote of his longing for “the disobey” to be oooooooooooover… amen to that!). When confronted with my own sin, I am shocked, horrified, and eager to repent. I may not be able to undo my sin, but at least give me the chance to change!

But now I wonder…

What if part of the Gospel, among all the ways it transforms and sanctifies us unaware, is that we do not change? What if those mistakes I repeat year after year will never completely be eliminated, and that is actually good news? When my three-year-old nephew sits in the Ash Wednesday service the following year and requires just as much hushing the second time around, what if that proclaims the Gospel more than his perfect obedience would have?

The resurrected Jesus shouted at his fishing disciples to throw their nets on the opposite side of the boat. They obeyed the potential stranger just as they had three years earlier, and didn’t recognize their Lord until the obedience produced a catch of 153 large fish. I’ve heard many a sermon chiding their continued lack of faith, but Christ (who doesn’t hesitate to chide Peter’s lack of faith that faltered while he walked on water) does not mention it.

Even if they are disciples, they are still fishermen. Even if Peter is the rock on which Christ will build the church, he will stretch out his hands and someone else will dress him and lead him where he does not want to go. Even if my nephew repents, he remains a toddler.

As actors in God’s great drama of redemption, maybe our flaws make us all the better equipped for our roles.

Always Lent but never Easter

I mentioned once that I am much better at Advent than Christmas, with waiting for my Redeemer than rejoicing that he has come. It is even truer that I am better at Lent than Easter, with being broken over my sin than being resurrected in a living hope.

This year Easter didn’t seem to come at all, and I had an overwhelming feeling of being stuck in an eternal Lent. I began to wonder if the redemption I had been awaiting would ever come at all, and for a short horrific moment became almost sure that it wouldn’t. The White Witch has cast her spell as she did in the Chronicles of Narnia, and it is always Lent but never Easter.

In an effort to shift my gears into an illusive Resurrection season at a time when the only thing that seems to be resurrected is my sin, I have been reading the resurrection story from a different Gospel every morning. Today was Luke’s turn, and I read the story of two disciples on the way to Emmaus having heard rumors of a resurrection they had not seen for themselves.

“But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they told the disguised Jesus when he encountered them on the road.

And so did I. I had hoped that he was the one to redeem the city where I lived last year and the flawed soul of mine that stumbles around clumsily into the same shortcomings.

Perhaps when I stumble upon the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus, in the midst of my own disappointments of a redemption that never seems to happen, he may “interpret to [me] in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Perhaps my own understanding of the Messiah needs as much modification as those of his confused disciples.

When he bumps into me, I pray my unaware ears be open to allow my understanding of the Gospel to be rewritten.