Sundry Verities

The View from the Window

2012-02-16T14:44:00.000-05:00

The edges of the houses lining the street seem impossibly clear and sharp today as I look at the world, my vision mediated by three layers of glass. The first layer is so near to me that I almost forgot to count it: the lenses of my glasses. How blurry and blundering my life would be without these, and how glorious the sudden clarity of my surroundings when I slide my glasses on! I should thank God more often for optometry.

The second layer is the window. Here too, the glass is almost unnoticeable, it is so clear. This I do remember to give thanks for, because it contrasts so sharply with the windows in our previous home. Between their double panes was a fog of water droplets and grime that made it impossible to forget the presence of an impermeable barrier between inside and outside. Miserable and uncleanable. The windows here are quite the opposite, new and fresh and well-nigh invisible. They are perfect. They even afford me a view of the sunset every evening.

The last glass in the series is a gigantic mirror. Left for us on the landing by our landlord, it stands now in the living room, in what we intended as a temporary location. We may well keep it here though, forever reflecting the window and the world outside it. This way, the room has windows on three sides. Sitting on the couch, I am surrounded by sky. I catch glimpses of movement out of the corner of my eye. When I startle and look up, I see pigeons wheeling by.

Today, the sky is a blank. Its clouded surface is clean and colorless, like the part of the paper the artist left untouched. At best, today's sky holds one layer of watercolor wash, a blue-grey too faint to really notice. The bare tree branches are inked on, behind the real subject matter of this still-life--the silent houses, their crisp lines, roofs and walls and chimneys and windows, standing patiently, perfectly defined.

Bread

2012-02-15T19:20:00.000-05:00

The bread is singing on the counter. Even from the living room I can hear it crackling as it cools. This loaf came out bulbous. It rose so high that even its bottom is round, not flat, and the loaf lolls sideways, lopsided.

The warm smell of bread fills the house.

In the bedroom, the laundry is folded and mostly sorted. The kitchen sink is empty, the dish drainer full. The floors are cleaner than they were this morning. The spare bedroom is more orderly than it's been since we moved in here. Everything is done, ready. And I am waiting.

I am waiting to eat the bread. I am waiting for O. to come home. I am waiting for companionship, I am waiting to come to life. For while I am, absolutely, alive here when I am alone with God, there is a different life to be had with O., or with other loved ones. There is a different life, when I am not waiting. When O. arrives, I won't be traveling toward a moment: I will have arrived.

In that moment, we will sit, and take the bread, and break it. We will give thanks, and we will take and eat. And there in the warm kitchen, we will remember, and the newly broken loaf will be the bread of life.

Bayfront Park

2012-02-13T15:29:00.003-05:00

A memory from last week, when I was home in California:

Eucalyptus trees, tall golden grass; a blue sky, a deluge of sunshine pouring through broken clouds. I am walking in the lap of the earth, among small hills. The hills close the horizon. They keep out the sounds of the rushing world, and the sight of its straining. Here, in this quiet park, peace descends upon me. The quiet creeps into my soul. For the first time in--how long? is it days, weeks? months?--my mind is blessedly empty. I look up, and the lingering clouds are radiant, splendid with diffuse light.

Across a field of dry grass, the geese are grazing. They are placid as cows this morning. They have all the time in the turning of the world. They have chosen what is best--tranquility--and no one shall take it from them.

Of course, the geese are not thinking such thoughts. But then, neither am I, really. I am not thinking, my mind is not spinning out ideas. The images and words grow of themselves. I merely gaze upon them, and see: this is home, this is peace.

I climb a hill, and the world unrolls before me. I see: marshlands, pickleweed, Pacific shovelers, sandpipers; cell phone towers sprouting from the marsh, boardwalks I wish I could explore; beyond these, the bay like a distant mirror, and the sky open above it, and the buildings of all the teeming humanity that lives here, toils here, runs and laughs and worries here, breathes here, under the vast sky, and the wheeling white gulls, and the eternal possibility of peace.

Accusation

2012-02-03T10:44:00.004-05:00

This week, I've been accused of many things. By default I react with fear mixed with guilt, which sends out roots to squeeze my conscience. This unhealthy seed produces sickly fruit: self-justification wrapped in a rind of indifference. Inside the fruit nestles the same seed that sprouted the whole plant--guilt and fear. The fear of man, which must be the beginning of folly.

What I need is the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom.

When I spoke to a wise friend about these feelings, she said, quoting a recent sermon, "The devil attacks people in two ways: temptation and accusation. Accusations are never from God. 'There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.'" When she said this, I felt the relief of truth. Do you know that feeling?--when a truth settles over you and your chest opens up and you breathe in deep, involuntarily, and your shoulders drop and your jaw relaxes. "... Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free," Jesus said (John 8:32).

Accusations are not from God. --Of course, I thought. Satan is called the Accuser. God is not an accuser. God judges, God convicts, God speaks the truth, but He does all these things in love. I have an Advocate, "one who speaks to the Father in my defense--Jesus Christ, the Righteous One" (1 John 2:1). I have a Counselor, "the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father and testifies about [Jesus]" (John 15:26). And "God is light: in Him there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5)

I want to be free of accusations, to know the truth, to be set free in the truth. How? How?

"If you hold on to my teaching, you are truly my disciples," Jesus said. "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

What does it look like to hold on to Jesus' teaching in the midst of accusation? How do I love my enemy? What do I pray for the person who persecutes me? In high school when everyone condemned me for being a Christian, I thought I learned the flavor of persecution. But that was nothing. This is what it feels like to have my character condemned. This is the place from which I must pray for my persecutor, and love the one who attacks me.

This is what I've been memorizing and this is what I pray for you, my accuser:

that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and in depth of insight, that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ--to the praise and glory of God. (Philippians 1:9-11).

O God, give her love. Give her knowledge and depth of insight. Enable her to discern what is best. Make her pure and blameless, all the way till the day of Christ. Fill her with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Your Son. Transform this situation into one that brings praise and glory to Yourself.

Amen.

Mortifying Fear

2012-02-02T19:16:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, I heard a (great) sermon on Romans 8:13-14: "If you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death [mortify] the misdeeds of the body, you will live, because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God." Convicted and inspired, I resolved to put to death the sins God has been speaking to me about lately--especially fear of man. I resolved to kill my fear, to execute it, to exterminate it. I resolved to show no quarter, "have no sympathy" with my sin, as the pastor put it.

Sunday I resolved this: I must fear God rather than man. And then Monday morning came, and I had a terrible fight with O. And then Tuesday morning came, and my phone rang with an unknown number, and when I answered, the voice on the other end was the familiar voice of accusation. Prime opportunities to fear--or to mortify my fear.

I do not have to sympathize with my fear. By the Spirit I will put to death the misdeeds of my body, and I will live. This was my resolution, this is God's promise.

The promise and the resolution have both been tested this week, and I don't think it's a coincidence, the timing of the resolution and of the testing. It's been hard. But it's also been good, because God is good, and His mercies are new every morning. Every morning: Sunday morning when the truth flows, God's mercies are new; Monday morning when your heart breaks, God's mercies are new; Tuesday morning when you hang up the phone, Wednesday morning when sleep leaves you hours before dawn, Thursday morning when you wilt in the gray-scale world--His mercies are new, new, new. O Lord my God, your mercies are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.

Wild Geese

2012-02-02T18:50:00.000-05:00

Heart pounding, blood rushing, I hunt through my heart, searching for the peace I felt this morning, the wonder I felt, when I heard overhead the trumpeting of the wild geese. In this city, where the street lights veil the stars and turn the night sky creamsicle-colored, and on this road, where the acrid air burns in my nostrils, here in this place, the wild geese are still flying. They are still singing. I turned my face upward and thanked God.

Now my body is in the same place but my heart has gone elsewhere. It is not with the geese anymore. Where is it? Lost among the streetlights. Yet the geese are still nearby, floating perhaps on the water in the abandoned reservoir. It is quiet, where the geese are. I will quiet my heart and listen: for the song of the beautiful wild geese, for a word from my Lord.

What are all these churches? : Introduction to Christianity (part 3)

2012-01-30T14:10:00.000-05:00

A brief history of the church (the collection of all Christians), starting with the birth of Jesus Christ:

About two thousand years ago, Jesus was born to a devout Jewish family in the Roman-occupied and governed territory of Palestine. As an adult, Jesus traveled Israel (Palestine) with a band of disciples, proclaiming the nearness of the kingdom of God, teaching about Scriptures, healing the sick, and forgiving sins. He claimed to be the Son of God. Huge crowds followed him, though he appalled some followers by prophesying that he would die and be raised to life after three days (see Matthew 16:21 and following). Many Jewish religious leaders opposed Jesus, threatened by his claims (and demonstrations) of authority; eventually they succeeded in having him crucified by Roman authorities. Jesus died on the cross and was buried (as he had prophesied); three days later, his disciples found the tomb empty (as he had prophesied). Christians believe the tomb was empty because God had raised Jesus back to life; skeptics believe the tomb was empty because someone stole Jesus' body and duped everyone.

After Jesus' death and resurrection, his disciples spread the good news (gospel) that "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16) throughout the Roman empire and beyond. Followers of Jesus came to be known as "Little Christs", or Christians (Acts 11:26). Christians believe Jesus to be the Anointed, or Christ (Greek), or Messiah (Hebrew)--the Savior who had been promised long ago in the Jewish Scriptures (which Christians encounter in the Old Testament of the Bible). The earliest Christians were all Jews, and in fact Christianity was originally considered a sect of Judaism, and as such was protected under Roman law as a legitimate religion.

The number of Christians grew, despite persecution, and Christianity eventually became a recognized and established religion. The body of believers, or church, came to have centralized, organized leadership, with the Pope as the very top of the human hierarchy, and ranks of cardinals, bishops, etc. below him. As the church grew, doctrinal disagreements and confusions sometimes sprang up; many creeds, such as the Nicene Creed discussed in this post, were composed in response to these controversies.

After about a thousand years, in 1054, this giant organization split along east-west lines corresponding to the east-west split in the Roman empire, in what is known as the Great Schism. The eastern branch became the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the western branch became the Roman Catholic Church.

Hundreds of years later, the Roman Empire had expired but the (Roman) Catholic Church was still going strong. In fact, it was a powerful political force, with a great deal of wealth. Unfortunately, many people sought positions in the clergy for the sake of wealth and power, rather than for spiritual reasons, with the result that corruption and theological drift were rampant. One of the more egregious problems was the sale of indulgences, a practice which essentially claimed that God's forgiveness of sins could be bought with money.

In 1517, German priest Martin Luther began publicly condemning and protesting the sale of indulgences and other practices of the Catholic church. This was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which lead to the birth of the Reformed, or Protestant, Church. Unlike Catholics, Protestants today are split into many different denominations, and have no single central leadership. (Some of these subgroups within Protestantism, in no particular order: Baptists, Evangelicals, Lutherans, Charismatics, Presbyterians, Pentecostals...)

What are the differences in beliefs between these three major branches of Christianity, you may ask? Unfortunately, I know a lot about my own branch of Protestantism but comparatively little about the Catholic church, and next to nothing about the distinguishing doctrines of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I will just write briefly about major differences between Catholics and Protestants, and leave it to you, dear Reader, to learn more by talking to (or reading from) persons who are better informed than I.

What are the differences in doctrine between Catholics and Protestants? Historically, Protestants have focused more than Catholics on personal/individual devotion to God and on reading the Bible for one's self. Protestantism holds that the Bible is the ultimate and only real spiritual authority, whereas Catholicism teaches that tradition is a spiritual authority as well, and that priests and other clergy members have a distinct kind of authority to interpret Scripture and tradition, which unordained believers (laity, or laypeople) do not have. The pitfall of the Protestant perspective is a tendency to excessive individualism, leading to division and uncorrected misinterpretations of Scripture; on the other hand, the pitfall of the Catholic perspective is a tendency to excessive authoritarianism for the clergy and passivity for the laity.

The other two highly visible differences in doctrine stem from this difference in the roles of Scripture vs. clergy. The first is that Protestants give the virgin Mary little attention; she is honored as the mother of Jesus and as a good woman, but not seen as dramatically different from other Christians. Catholics, on the other hand, see Mary's role as far greater; she is important enough to be prayed to. This doesn't mean she is considered to be a second god, though; Catholics sometimes pray to a variety of saints. (Protestants, in contrast, don't even have a process for recognizing saints.) Honestly, I don't understand Mary's role in Catholicism. Ask someone who believes if you want to know more.

The other highly visible doctrinal difference is in the interpretation of Communion. All Christian churches practice the sacrament of Communion (as far as I know), which is a commemoration of the final meal that Jesus shared with his disciples at Passover, on the night that he was betrayed and then crucified. At that Last Supper, Jesus

took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. (Luke 22:19-20)

Christians symbolically re-enact this scene (take Communion) to fulfill Christ's command to "do this in remembrance of me." Catholicism teaches that, in Communion, the bread and wine are miraculously transformed to become, literally, the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. This doctrine is known as transubstantiation. Protestantism teaches, instead, consubstantiation, the idea that the bread and wine of Communion, while sacred, do not physically become flesh and blood, but symbolically represent the flesh and blood of the Lord Jesus. This difference in interpretation of Communion leads to different practices as to its implementation in Catholic vs. Protestant churches.

Despite these significant differences in doctrine and practice, Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as Eastern Orthodoxy, agree more than they disagree. These three branches of Christianity, flaws and all, are still unified spiritually as the Church, set apart for God. They have Christ in common, and at the end of time all the differences and disagreements will be sorted out in His light.

Hiding

2012-01-30T13:21:00.000-05:00

I've been talking with a friend lately about his habit of hiding. Not answering the uncomfortable questions, avoiding work by reading things online, using chocolate as a quick-fix: hiding, hiding from the truth.

I confronted this friend about his hiding. I berated and exhorted him, I explained why it's harmful, what kind of priorities it reveals (self-worship, at the bottom: refusal to face the truth about one's self). It was a long conversation, and my friend went away chastised. I took for granted that I had the higher moral ground. Then the next day, I noticed myself hiding, exactly the way my friend does. There was an uncomfortable truth or several lurking under the surface of my consciousness, and I knew I ought to dig it up and give it up to the Lord of my soul, "who forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases" (Ps. 103:2). But I didn't want to.

I've been confronting this friend about a number of his bad psychospiritual habits, and I keep noticing the same tendencies in myself shortly after those conversations.

Honestly, it is so stinking hard not to hide. There are a million ways to do it. I hide my fear by being angry, or I hide my anger by being afraid. I hide my disagreement by asking questions instead of speaking out, or by not speaking at all. I hide from despair by doing "fun" things--watching T.V., reading books. I hide from all my feelings by doing "productive" things--assembling furniture, working on my resume, researching nutrition. I hide from O. by not answering his emails and text messages. I hide from feelings of disconnection by hugging him and ignoring my anger or sadness. I hide from the demands of my body (food! water! exercise!) by engaging my mind or my emotions; I hide from the demands of my emotions by feeding and indulging my body.

The trouble is, hiding from truth is hiding from God. This is folly. In the Garden, Adam and Eve, ashamed, refused to come when God called them. They deluding themselves into thinking He couldn't see them. I tell myself this is totally different from what I'm doing, but that too is a delusion. I keep avoiding truths, and the Truth. But what I really need, underneath it all and above it all and beyond it all, is the Truth: Jesus, the Way, the Truth, the Life.

"Surely You desire truth in the innermost parts." O my Lord, cleanse me. I pray in faith with the Psalmist: "Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean; wash me and I will be whiter than snow." (Psalm 51:6, 7) O God, help.

Nicene Creed: Introduction to Christianity (part 2)

2012-01-30T12:55:00.000-05:00

In the last post, I wrote about the definitions of "Christian" and "Catholic." The dictionary defines a Christian as someone who follows Jesus Christ and his teachings. Who is Jesus and what did he teach?

The answers to those questions lie in the gospels, accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus written down by eyewitnesses within the lifetimes of other eyewitnesses. To know Jesus, you should read the accounts we have of him; the gospel of Mark is the most concise and fast-paced. (Link is for The Message version.)

But it takes a while (at least a couple hours) to read the gospels. Moreover, as accounts written two thousand years ago in a totally different cultural context, the gospels can be seriously disorienting. It doesn't work well to read the gospels trying to quickly extract principles and instructions of Christianity. The gospels are not full of convenient lists of ideas, because Christianity is about a Person (God), not an idea, and the proper "container" for a person is a story, not a list. While incomplete in itself, a list or summary can be a helpful orientation before (or during or after) reading the gospels themselves. For this, a creed is helpful.

So, for the person interested in a summary of the essential points of Christianity, here follows a discussion of the Nicene Creed, which summarizes the major doctrines of Christianity* in three paragraphs. But be prepared: Even the creed is more like a story than a theory.

Here is my paraphrase or adaptation of the story/list that is the Nicene Creed (Brackets indicate points that are not directly in the Nicene Creed), expanded into six paragraphs:

(1) From the beginning of time, before there was anything, there was God, the Almighty. God created everything else that is: the physical world and the spiritual world. [One of God's creations was humans, whom He created to love and serve Him, but who rebelled against Him in mistrust. Ever since the first rebellion, humans have lived in a broken world and in broken relationships with each other and with their Creator and Father, God.]

(2) For the sake of us fallen people, God sent down to us His Son. This Son is not a biological son, or in any way less than God as Father, but, mysteriously, has always existed (rather than having been created) and is one Being with God the Father and is just as much God as the Father is, so that the Father and Son are distinct but unified, two Persons but one God. This Son, Jesus Christ, took on a human body and being to walk among us and live a human life but a perfect life. He started where we all start, as a baby. He was born to Mary, a virgin, having been conceived by the Holy Spirit instead of by physical means. [He went through childhood and adolescence and grew up. As an adult, he traveled around Israel with a band of students (disciples), ministering to huge crowds by teaching about God's kingdom, healing the sick and forgiving sins. Jesus' teaching and claims infuriated the religious authorities of Israel, who conspired against him.]

He was tried in a Roman court under Pontius Pilate, who sentenced him to death by crucifixion: being nailed to a cross and dying the most shameful death available. The human agents at the time didn't realize it, but they were fulfilling God's plan for the world, the purpose for which Jesus, God the Son, had come into the world in the first place: dying to save us from the power of sin and death.

And so Jesus, the Son of God, died and was buried--and then on the third day after his death, He rose again to life. This fulfilled the prophecies in the Jewish Scriptures and in Jesus's own ministry. After rising again to life, He returned to Heaven in glory, where He has taken up his position of authority, at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to Earth, at an unknown time, for the final judgment and the end of time and the restoration of the world.

(3) In the mean time, followers of God are helped and guided by the Holy Spirit, who is the third Person of God, of one Being with the Father and Son, and as such is worshiped and glorified as God in the same way that God the Father and God the Son are worshiped and glorified. The Spirit speaks to God's followers today, as He spoke through the prophets whose words are recorded in the Bible.
God's followers form the Church, which God has made holy.

Despite the divisions and brokenness in the human institutions that represent the Church, there is one unified and holy Church which the many churches strive to manifest and to become. Also, despite the various manifestations and interpretations of the sacrament of baptism, there is one baptism which these different versions all represent. Baptism itself is connected to forgiveness of sins. Members of the Church live in hope, believing God's promise that He will restore life to the dead and bring about a new and fuller life in a new and restored world.

*These doctrines are all accepted by the Catholic church, most Protestant churches, and the Eastern Orthodox church. (Where did all those different churches come from, you ask? See part 3...)

Catholic vs. Christian: Introduction to Christianity (part 1)

2012-01-26T21:55:00.000-05:00

What's the difference between a Catholic and a Christian? A friend, raised Catholic, asked O. this question recently; I'll try to answer it here.

First, let's consult the dictionary:

Christian: a follower of Jesus Christ and his teachings
Catholic: a member of the Roman Catholic Church

So the Oxford American Dictionary defines a Christian according to his allegiance to Christ Jesus, and a Catholic according to his membership in the Roman Catholic Church. Since the RCC is a Christian religious organization, one might expect all its members to be Christians. However, as a human and communal institution, the RCC brings in many people who come for reasons based in family, culture, or tradition, rather than for theological or spiritual reasons. Whether such attenders are members in a formal sense or not (my understanding is that they often are), they are likely to consider themselves Catholics, and the dictionary definition affirms their perception that the essence of being a Catholic is membership in the RCC. The theology held by the person in question doesn't directly enter into the question of whether they "qualify" as a Catholic (so to speak).

A similar situation may prevail among members or attenders of other Christian churches. For instance, suppose my parents are Baptists and they have taken me to a Baptist church all my life, starting when I was an infant, and my primary community is with the members of this church. I might well consider myself a Baptist, even if I don't believe all the things taught in my church.

Now, in contrast to the definition of "Catholic" which depends on institutional membership, the definition of "Christian" is rooted in the individual's beliefs and actions. A Christian follows Christ and follows his teachings. One could be a Christian all alone on a desert island, never having set foot in a church, if he believed in Christ Jesus.

So the terms "Catholic" and "Christian" are really speaking to two orthogonal characteristics. One deals with membership in an institution, the other deals with personal beliefs and allegiance. Thus, a person could be both a Catholic and a Christian, or be a Catholic but not a Christian (as in the case of a person who is associated with the RCC but doesn't believe), or a Christian but not a Catholic (that is, a person who believes in Christ but isn't associated with the RCC).

In the U.S., historically there have been more Christians who are not Catholics than Christians who are Catholics. Most of these non-Catholic Christians were and are Protestants:

Protestant: a member or follower of any of the Western Christian churches that are separate from the Roman Catholic Church and follow the principles of the Reformation, including the Baptist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches.

These Protestants have sometimes claimed for themselves the term of Christian in opposition to the term Catholic. In some cases they believed that Catholics aren't Christians because they seem to worship gods other than the one true God by praying to Mary or to various saints. In other cases, the distinction drawn between "Catholic" and "Christian" is the result of defining "Christian" on the basis of institutional membership, in parallel with the definition of "Catholic" or "Baptist."

How does this happen? Suppose I grow up going to a Protestant church that isn't affiliated with any particular denomination (non-denominational or inter-denominational). My parents are Protestant Christians, but I never hear them use the term Protestant; they just call themselves Christians. I may get the impression that what makes a Christian is having Christian parents, or just going to my church, or at least my kind of church--that is, I may think the definition of "Christian" is "a member of a (Christian) church"--and maybe even think that I can be a Christian without believing in Christ or actively pursuing his teachings.

And so there are competing ideas of what "Christian" means floating around in people's minds. But the meaning, the definition, the essence of being a Christian is following Jesus, and it has nothing to do with membership in a human organization. Meanwhile, being a member of the Catholic church makes you a Catholic regardless of whether you follow Jesus.

Of course, the Catholic church is a Christian church, so presumably the system for becoming a member is intended to ensure that its members are indeed following Jesus. That is, from a theological perspective, Catholic should imply Christian: follower of Christ. Catholic and Protestant Christianity do differ, in both theology and implementation, but they agree far more. They have Christ in common (plus everything in the Nicene Creed)!

A last note: The definition of Christian doesn't specify some key things. What does it mean to follow Jesus Christ? What did he teach? Without answers to these questions, it is impossible to know, concretely, what it means to live as a Christian and think as a Christian. I'll address those questions, as well as some of the differences between Catholic and Protestant theology, in part 2.

Clothes & Stuff

2012-01-24T21:24:00.000-05:00

Today I counted my clothes. Inspired by the Twenty Pieces Project, I have been going through my clothes and trying to pare down. I've eliminated two trashbags worth already. Today I counted what's left after a couple rounds of filtering.

I was rather disgusted by the results. I think of myself as not having too many many clothes or shoes (at least, by the standards of my upper/middle-class American female peers). I also think of myself as not being all that attached to appearance. I even consider myself somewhat of a natural ascetic.

Well, it turns out that, counting by the Twenty Pieces rules, I have seventy pieces of clothing. Seventy! A piece of clothing for every day for ten weeks. This isn't even counting socks, underwear, swimsuits (I have two), scarves, or pajamas.

Ascetics do not own seventy pieces of clothing. People who are living in simplicity do not own seventy pieces of clothing.

This is an unpleasant wake-up call. I am remembering now the fervor with which I used to cling to my old favorite pieces of clothing as a child. I would outgrown them or wear them out, but to me they remained important and valuable by virtue of their familiarity. My mother would insist I give them up, get rid of them. I found this process frustrating and traumatic. I liked these clothes! I loved them! They were still comfortable, so why did it matter that they supposedly didn't fit right or look right?

It's been years since I had to go through such a purge with my mother looking over my shoulder. Today the freedom of having only a few things appeals powerfully to me. Moreover, I understand now my mother's perspective on clothes. Grown up, integrated into a society that will pigeon-hole me by my appearance, I have internalized society's perspective on clothing. (This is probably a bad thing. I must be judging people without even noticing it.) Old or inappropriate or unflattering clothing is easier to let go of now. So why is it still so hard to cut down my closet?

It's hard because I invest sentimental value in my clothes. The prom dress. The tie-dye "gypsy" dress my sister saved up money to buy me as a Christmas present after I had sighed over it in the What On Earth? catalog. T-shirts from exotic vacations, one each from Alaska, Washington D.C., Ecuador, ... Latin Convention shirts from high school, designed by one of my best friends. I am reluctant to part with these items, as if I'll lose the memories by giving up the physical objects associated with them.

It's hard because I also afraid to get rid of clothes that were given to me, especially if they were gifts from relatives (or worse, in-laws). Will they be insulted? Even if they don't find out, am I insulting them by getting rid of their gift?

Worst, I balk at getting rid of clothes that people talked me into buying. Once upon a time, I deliberated and concluded that it was worth buying item x. If I now decide that item x isn't worth keeping, that means I made the wrong decision when I decided to buy it in the first place. So goes my "reasoning"--the logic of my innards.

All that to say, it's hard for me to get rid of clothes. What if I need that later? It's even hard for me to acknowledge that it's hard for me to get rid of them. But here I am acknowledging it. And I am committing to getting rid of more clothes. At minimum, I want to pare it down to 50 pieces. I will be happier with myself if I cut it down to 30 or 40 pieces.

There may be ascetic tendencies in my personality, but stronger than my asceticism is my craving for thoroughness, for collection, for security. I'm a Five on the Enneagram, in my fallen nature a hoarder of information and of things. God is calling me to take my security only in Him, and to count Him as my greatest, my only, Treasure. "Store up for yourselves treasure in Heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." I want my heart to be hidden in Christ, not collecting dust in my closet.

Finally, Winter

2012-01-21T21:31:00.004-05:00

This morning I woke to gray light. Where is the burning sunrise? I wondered, and looked out the window, and it was: snow! This new window, in this new home, looks east into on a narrow yard where a tree stretches twigs across the sky. All the green had gone out of the yard. Snow was still falling, large soft flakes. The sky was white, the yard was white, the tree black, the light cloud-gray.

We dragged ourselves out of bed, put on hats and coats and boots, and tumbled out into the falling white. Later we ate scones, drank tea, played Pictionary. I played with the landlord's Labrador in the backyard while my husband shoveled snow in front. When he sprinkled the salt, small dark circles blossomed around the grains where they landed.

So winter has really come here, at last. I hope the snow stays, to remind me that this is a season, which is bound to come and to go in its time, and that it is a season of softness as well as coldness.

Rest/less

2012-01-20T17:31:00.001-05:00

I spent my day failing to rest and, in the process, also failing to be fruitful. I accomplished some things but I neglected the state of my soul. When will I learn? If I don't have truth, I have nothing.

Refreshment comes when I look reality in the face. Doing and doing gets some things done, but it leaves me barren. Now the sun has set, and the day is gone. Good things happened in it, but on the whole I think I got in the way, rather than being a channel of peace.

"God be merciful to me / on Thy grace I rest my plea."

Bloggistential Crisis

2012-01-18T20:21:00.000-05:00

Lately I have been wondering about purpose. What is this blog for? Is it accomplishing what it should? Should I be doing something different? something better? Ever since reading two or three blogposts about how to make your blog better, get more readers, increase traffic, etc., I have been intermittently paralyzed from blogging, or writing at all, with the perpetual question: is this any good? Will anyone want to read this?

Often I treat this questions like flies, swatting them away without much thought. They are annoying but short-lived. But these are flies that hover around the "New Post" button on blogger, and, as I do with any pest-infested place, I have been avoiding that "New Post" button, and even more, the "Publish" button. This is a problem! I'm not a blogger if I don't blog. I'm not a writer if I don't write. I want to live in my identity as a writer: I need to write. And so I need to face my fears.

I have been noticing more and more that the unexamined fears are the most troublesome. They nip at my heels, they growl at me from behind. They are always behind me, you see, because I never look at them. I studiously avoid eye contact, because in order to look at them, I would have to acknowledge their presence. Unlike wild beasts, these threaten me more by the fact of their presence than by harmful actions they could take against me.

In truth, when I look my fear in its yellow eye, it wilts like a scolded dog. It turns tail and disappears under a car like a stray cat. Simply by acknowledging that I have been afraid, I diminish my fear.

My fear here: I am afraid of being judged and found wanting according to some unwritten standard. I am afraid this blog will be a failure. --But when did I sign a contract subjecting myself to the judgment of the internet? The internet may judge me (most likely by ignoring my existence), but its judgment has no real force in my life. Why am I allowing it to have force in my heart?

The problem is, I have no idea what the purpose/mission/goal/raison-d'etre of this blog is. Or rather, I have several ideas, and sometimes they get along but sometimes they fight each other. Sometimes I think I keep this blog so that people can read my writing. This is scary because what if no one does read it? What if it's always just my parents reading? Sometimes I think I keep it because I write different kinds of things here than I write in a journal or an email. This is less scary. I am the only one I have to satisfy. Other times I think other things. It gets messy in my head and then I just stop writing, for a while. But I come back. I come back because, even though I can't tell you exactly what my purpose in writing here is, I know I have a purpose, or a hundred fragments of purpose, and I also know this blog doesn't have to be a mere means: it can be its own end.

My purpose in keeping this blog is to write, and to write well. Goodness is its own justification, and I don't have to write the best, the most, to write well. So here I am, and here I'll be.

Writing

2012-01-05T14:09:00.001-05:00

I cannot write without living. This is what I must keep remembering, when I grow anxious about not having written poems, about having instead squandered time in going to the zoo, reading technical books of linguistics and psychology, cooking, selecting produce at the grocery store, sitting at the dinner table, just being, being with my husband. (That word still astonishes me.) Life is experience. Life is learning and attention and presence and activity. Life is light and noise and heat. Meanwhile poetry is a pause, a stillness, silence taking shape as words. Poetry is thought, incarnate: a thought become word become flesh. And thought is darkness and silence. But it is a darkness full of stars, and a silence surrounded by music.

Perhaps one may write poems without loving life. But those poems are not the poems I love. Those are poems that do not touch my skin or ring in my ears, and so they do not touch my heart. They do not make me live, they suck away at my life. I shut their books and walk away, hoping the wind will wake me up. I do not want to write poems like that.

I want to write poems that, like the wind, wake me up. Poems that splash like the sea, and make me shout. Poems that taste, that burst on the tongue like pomegranate seeds and then crunch between your teeth.

And so I will live and rejoice in living, and I will not grieve about not writing. The words will come in their time. I will not sit still, sadly, waiting for them. The words will creep out into the world where they will find me chasing lizards and being bitten by a parrot and eating mangoes and getting sunburned and building sandcastles and getting sand in my fingernails and toenails and hair and swimsuit and underwear. When the words find me, and I stop to write them down, I will still have sand in the crevices of my ears, and the hand holding the pen will be sticky with juice:

This is my New Year's resolution.

(Also, I resolve to write 100 posts before the end of 2012. But I will not worry about writing them: this too I resolve.)

100 Things

2011-12-06T14:06:00.001-05:00

For four months, I've been weary and congested. It is easy to disintegrate into gloom and grump, especially as the days shorten. The light dims early, and by the time O. gets home, I can barely keep my eyes open. The antibiotics I finally started taking two weeks ago have suppressed but not expelled my sinus infection. Mild despair is a constant temptation.

My home remedy today: gratitude list. I recently encountered from two disparate sources (one of them The Good and Beautiful God) the suggestion to make a list of one hundred things you are grateful for. I am keen on lists, but the idea of a 100-item list is somewhat daunting, and I've been putting it off. But I think today is the day! So...

Today I am grateful for...

the return of my sense of smell
the smell of orange and the fine spray that bursts from its rind as I peel the orange
a super-comfy sleeping bag to curl up in
the Persian carpet I'm sitting on--the most extravagant-feeling item in our apartment
how most of the things in our home were presents from friends, and came accompanied by well-wishes and expressions of affection
the hundred friends at our wedding
all the other friends who couldn't be there: for loved ones scattered across the continent and globe, for such an abundance of relationships that it's impossible to gather the whole network into one room
God's provision of new relationships in this new place
the way that God often waits for me to realize I need something before He gives it to me
O. & our relationship (marriage!)
that miserable programming class where I met O.
O.'s amazing persistence in pursuing me
my mother's cooking lessons
Douglas Hofstadter and his beautiful & fascinating books, especially Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
having read GEB, without which I probably would have remained another silly/stupid Christian in O.'s eyes
parents who read me bedtime "stories" up through high school
my father's love of mathematics and ideas, and his audacity in starting to read his thirteen-year-old daughter an 800-page tome that is packed with propositional logic and number theory (GEB)
the pain of my mistakes with IJ the spring before I met O., without which the lessons of IJ would not have stuck.
the lesson of my sin: God is merciful and I need His mercy so very badly.
the book of Ephesians which changed how I see myself and my God
the sermon on Ephesians 1 and God's riches, generosity & abundance, which turned me to the book of Ephesians in the first place
the university library which provided me with so many books: educational, edifying, entertaining; informative, influential, inspiring
three years of leading a Bible study / small group with Intervarsity
my co-leader, my brother in Christ: without you I couldn't have led, certainly not for three years
God's faithfulness in keeping me at Intervarsity even when all I felt toward my chapter was disappointment, frustration and pain at how I couldn't fit in
my brothers and sister in Christ who showed me the love of the body of Christ and made me see for the first time that the body can't say to me "I don't need you."
the joy of running barefoot across a lawn, chasing a frisbee, surrounded by friends
dandelions like little suns in the green grass
planetariums
the night sky, the million billion stars
the internet
Google, which helps me find so many things online, provides the software for this blog, and pays O., thus providing our food, shelter, savings, health benefits, etc.
electricity, especially for lights
candles and the freedom to burn them here whenever and wherever I want
fresh bread on the counter and sharp cheddar in the refrigerator
being able to walk everywhere I need to go in this town
money for groceries, including the "luxury" items: clementines, apple cider, goat cheese
ready access to the Bible in my own native language
the several hundred books O. and I own between the two of us
my sister's paintings on our walls
my sister & the shape of our sisterhood
free phone and video calls between here and Vietnam (where my sis is): thank you, Skype
ice cream
O. spontaneously buying ice cream for my benefit
the dozen roses O. sent me once upon a time, which I still have, sere and somewhat shriveled but still scented
antibiotics, decongestant, allergy med.s
medical insurance
the way the light marbles when it passes through our glass pitcher, leaving a pebbly shadow on the painted wall
minuscule air bubbles inside the glass sides of our water glasses
the look of the naked winter trees--like so many veins and capillaries, the sky a lung and the earth the heart
such a good high school education, in science and writing and math
having graduated college; the end of homework (for a time).
washing machines
central heating
hot water
the current absence of mice and mouse-droppings
how cute and small mice are, with lovely round eyes
glasses that let me see clearly
eyes that see
the ability to read quickly and easily
an upbringing that taught me to look for the effects of personality, culture and personal history
how friendly and approachable the Bible (usually) feels to me
the relative ease with which I believe the vast majority of the time that God is good and trustworthy
God's trustworthiness
God's love of beauty
Christ's saving sacrifice: that now "in him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence" (Eph. 3:12)
the parable of the Good Shepherd: that it's okay that I'm a sheep and I can't take care of myself, because I have a Good Shepherd (John 9)
the bread that came down from Heaven (John 6)
the gospel of John
language, words, speech, writing
the diversity of languages
Tim Keller, particularly his talk on marriage, given at Google
my intuition for spelling which I really can't take credit for but which makes my life so much easier
poetry workshops and the cool people in them
Kevin Kim, whose presence in the MPPC leadership tells me it's okay to be Korean, it's okay that I only partially resemble an Anglo-American (in both looks and culture). He also gives fantastic sermons.
being biracial, neither one thing nor the other
knowing what it's like to not belong and to stand out on the street as a stranger, because without that experience of exclusion and isolation, how could I empathize with the stranger and foreigner?
having someone to belong with and to, and who accepts me & wants deep intimacy with me: O.
a place that feels like home
the beaches of northern California: the color of the cold, cold sea against the shining blue sky; the grit of the sand under my feet; the green anemones in the dark tide pools; the flocks of sea gulls white against the sand and sky and sea
small groups at church here
free time in abundance
the story of Elijah being fed by ravens as he hid in the ravine for three years: sometimes God calls us to long periods of inactivity and non-productivity
not having any food allergies
the widespread availability of soy milk that actually tastes good
free access to the Oxford English Dictionary through my alma mater's website
art and art galleries and art museums, accessible to me
professors who spent time with me & loved me
a pastor who knows my name and takes time to meet with the people of the congregation
Latin classes in high school, so much etymology just under the surface of my mind (congregation has as its root "grex, gregis: a flock or herd")
a God who is Love and who is Three in One: "God is the opposite of solitude" (Letham in Holy Trinity)
peace when I'm troubled
being called to hope (Eph. 1)
the sky which is visible wherever I go, beauty freely given
cameras and photographs
my memory, a healthy brain
legs that can climb stairs and walk for miles
not being discriminated against because I am a woman
being here to be a person and a story, not a machine or a formula (thanks, Thomas Merton)
freedom in Christ. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." (2 Cor. 3:17)
chocolate*

*N.B.: These are in the order in which they occurred to me; there is no other ordering principle. :)

Flip Flop Weather

2011-11-30T16:16:00.001-05:00

Today I walked to the laundromat in my flip-flops. No scarf, no hat. The clouds disapproved, and the wind made sure I noticed it. But there was just enough sun to justify my bare feet, and my toes rejoiced for one more experience of freedom before December snaps shut around them and they hibernate for three months.

Restless

2011-11-29T20:01:00.001-05:00

I love this song:

This is the place I am. Restless, restless, unsure of my path, unsure of where I'm running. Why? I keep wondering. Switchfoot tells me what I should know of myself: "I'm looking for You."

Life Questions

2011-11-29T16:19:00.001-05:00

Lately, I've been asking myself a lot of questions. Life-changes (especially those in the box of surprises we call marriage) seem to generate these questions--or perhaps it's the conflicts created or revealed by changes that give birth to these questions. The questions come in flocks. They descend from the skies, their wings clattering. They leave the ground a mess of droppings and feathers.

One flock is the color of money. Its birds sing about saving, about future expenditures, about how I spend too much. They demand to know why I need so many things, why I want them. They remind me, people are starving in other places. Children are shoeless in the Russian snow, and here I am, my closet floor full of shoes, considering whether I "need" a pair of boots.

When that flock drifts away, another flock settles around me. It pecks at me. It caws about newer clothes, more make-up, a different purse, more care in putting together an outfit. It tells me I am not doing things right.

Like sparrows that fill every bush and peck every square of sidewalk, questions twitter at me about chores. Has the laundry been done? When are you going to do it? What's for dinner? How about breakfast? Is there granola? Is the bread dough going to go bad? Are we getting enough vitamins?

There's a bird that shrieks that I'm not accomplishing anything, that I'm going nowhere. When will you apply to grad school? Why do you expect anyone to accept you for a PhD program? Why haven't you sent out any poems yet?

There is a rooster that crows some mornings: What do you have to contribute? What could you possibly have to say that is worth reading? (This started after I read a couple of posts on how to get more readers for your blog, which introduced previously unconsidered goals and standards into my brain.)

There is a vulture circling overhead, asking, What are you forgetting?

And I keep hearing the questions, Am I a child or an adult? What makes me happy? Why am I here? But at least those questions are asked by my own soul, not by insecurities and fears and the polluting influence of a materialistic, narcissistic, workaholic, kaleidoscopic society.

I constantly need to remind myself: I am not what I accomplish. My worth is not measured in statistics of any sort--in fact, it isn't quantifiable. I am a person, a story, a poem, a picture: not a machine. In solitude, in silence, in stillness, I still exist.

I breathe in deep, and blow out. I blow away the birds.

Things a sick person is grateful for

2011-11-22T08:41:00.001-05:00

This gratitude-list is perhaps not very dignified, but it is entirely sincere!

lotion-enhanced tissue
Ricola cough drops
a husband to bring home the cough drops & take out the trashbags full of dirty tissues
herbal tea that tastes of cinnamon
honey in the tea
the microwave (or the stove & kettle) to heat the water for the tea
decongestants recommended by the doctor
the doctor
insurance to pay the doctor
a furnace
the furnace being on and working properly

I have essentially been sick for four months straight--ever since marrying and moving here. At the same time, I've been struggling with questions about whether it's okay for me to be here being absolutely unproductive (by external standards), for months on end. What does rest mean? What does it mean for me to rest? Who am I when I'm not doing anything?

I think this sickness, annoying as it has been and continues to be, may be God's way of making sure I know it's okay and even good for me to rest and to do nothing. In the ordinary course of life, I believe rest is good but I don't necessarily believe it is good for me to rest. When I'm sick, though, I know I should rest, that it's the right thing to do. I tend to see that as a temporary state of affairs, though: the sickness departs, and at that point I ought to go back to doing and doing and doing. I've never been sick this long, and I've never rested so much. I'm learning. I just hope it won't take lifelong sickness for me to absorb the lessons of lifelong rest and an identity dependent on relationship, not accomplishment!

But thanks, God, for teaching me.

Baseboard heater contents

2011-11-21T11:17:00.001-05:00

For your combined amusement and horror (or perhaps simply sympathy, if you have lived in a brownstone yourself), a list of things I have vacuumed out of our baseboard heaters in the past week:

3 leaves, of a shape that does not match the leaves on the trees outside, whose highest branches end ten feet below our windows anyway
1 green thumbtack
a round plastic thingy that goes on
several lumps of plaster, presumably from when these walls got replastered, almost certainly from the previous millennium :P
1 feather, dark brown and crumpled
at least 100g of what looks like sand. What it actually is, I really can't say. I've vacuumed it up before but it keeps coming back...
15 cents in pennies and dimes
copious spiderwebs
plenty of what appeared to be cat hair but may have actually been (a) dog hair or (b) more spiderwebs
dust
dust
dust
and more dust
[update:] ball-point pen
[update:] at least 3 screws

How most of these things got into our heaters is a mystery. I can only hope that now that they're out, my allergies will go down and maybe the chronic fatigue will dissipate.

But let me stop a moment to be grateful: for a vacuum cleaner, for the narrow pointy attachment on the vacuum cleaner, for electricity; for heaters, for the pilot light on the furnace finally being lit, for the furnace working properly, for the expansion tank on the furnace not leaking or blowing up; for an apartment; for private space.

House Perspective

2011-11-16T14:15:00.001-05:00

Today I started vacuuming the living room while the toaster oven was heating up my lunch in the dining room. It worked for a few minutes, and then suddenly the vacuum cleaner went silent. The air filter five feet away in our bedroom was still puffing away, so it took me a bit to figure out that the circuit had blown out... Yup, no light in the kitchen, bathroom or dining room.

Oh well, I thought. Last time, when I stupidly ran the microwave and toaster oven at the same time from the same outlet, the electricity returned to us in about 30 minutes, seemingly not connected to anything we actually did. The circuit will fix itself after a while, I figured.

An hour and a half later, the situation remains the same. Half the outlets in the living room still work, though, as do the ones in the bedroom. For this I am grateful.

And as I wander the house, frowning as I flick light switches and see no results, the thought occurs to me: I should be grateful that I can still heat water and cook things (thanks to our much-maligned gas stove). Yes, I am grateful for the gas stove/oven, and grateful that there is still running water, and grateful that normally there is electricity throughout the house, and grateful that there is a house at all.

Thank You.

Reflections on Place

2011-11-11T13:37:00.001-05:00

Having moved recently to this new city, place has been on my mind lately. Actually, place is on my mind by default, because I am a person who does not have an obvious geographic home (which is also to say I don't have an obvious cultural home). I was born in California, but we moved to Japan when I was four. During our six years there, my identity was: American, gai-jin, foreigner. Then we moved back to California, and I found I was not a normal American. I certainly didn't fit in with the kids in my classes, some of whom were living in the same house they'd been born in, and who would still be in that house until they moved away for college. When I was fifteen, I spent five months in Nîmes, France, where I became, again, American, only to return to my high school where I knew I was not the same kind of American as the others. It wasn't until I moved across the country to Long Island for college that I came to call myself a Californian and to realize that, yes, California feels like home (Northern California, anyway). And now here I am, living in technically-New-Jersey,-practically-Manhattan, married to a Turkish man, and I a Californian who is simultaneously sort of Japanese and, deep in my blood, half Korean, while somewhere down in my genes I am German. Where is my place? What is my country?

This apartment, with all its quirks (the slanting walls, the mold in the bathroom, the exposed water-heater, the leaking furnace): this is home now, this is my place. Home is where my books are, home is where I cook, home is the place I have to clean, home is where I am the one who changes the sheets on the bed. Home is where O. is. Yes, this is my place.

But my place extends only as far as the front door. Maybe out onto the landing, on a good day. This city is not home, not mine. I still worry if I stand out on the streets. I am still busy watching the other people, wondering how I should dress, walk, move. Then the Spirit moves in me and I remember that it doesn't matter what those people think of me.

Still, I would like to know what impression I am emanating. I think home is the place where you don't have to wonder about that. You know already.

Will this place ever be home to me? I should give it time. It's only been three months. But we're only planning to stay here two years. Yes, we've planned to uproot ourselves again, soon, soon. Is it worthwhile? Is it right, to act as if this place is just a brief stop?

Every place is a brief stop. Home is not on this earth. Home is where my Father is, and I'll be there someday, regardless of how much I move around this continent, this planet, during my three score (or four or five score, God willing) sojourn here.

[Thoughts in this post catalyzed by this fine essay.]

Reading Poetry on the PATH Train

2011-11-07T14:45:00.001-05:00

We hurtle through the earth.
Water above us. Fire beneath us.

Within us, poems
twisting       to breath--,
                 to wind--,
                                   to air.

Today I am grateful for...

2011-11-03T22:57:00.001-04:00

... O. getting the oven pilot light re-lit without any explosions or injuries! The smell of gas, a flurry of "what now?"; a prayer, a decision, a protracted moment of terror; and a flood of relief.

IJ

2011-11-01T17:38:00.003-04:00

Once upon a time, we sat by the window in the third floor of the library and watched a hawk chasing a swallow. We were young, and I was unbroken. Later, night fell. You came for me, and I could not drive you away, and I could not dip and soar like the swallow to escape. Your hair was the color of night. I should have known the sun would leave me, and like the silent owl, you would arrive.

You left. You left me, broken; you left me broken. You left my space, my time, my thoughts, but I could not leave you. I keep finding you, a splinter in my heart. You are still exactly the same as when we soared over the island and the waves diminished into minute wrinkles below us, and between us the silence roared so I could scarcely hear the music that still calls up your ghost for me, when I hear it, these long years later.

It is November, a season I never saw you in. Yet I find you living in my memories, as you have lived with me since that single rainstorm.

In a few hours, my husband will come home, and I will live again, in the beautiful present. In a few years, these memories will be buried under more strata, starting with the autumn leaves of today. When I die, they will die with me. And when I live again, there will be no more tears, no more secrets, no more death, no more night.

Territorial

2011-11-01T17:08:00.000-04:00

[I've been going through the drafts I wrote but never posted, and found this specimen from 2010, when I was living in school housing with girls I didn't know. Reading this time-capsule account, the scene (or one of a host of others like it) resurrects itself in my mind. I am so glad I am not there any more. I am so glad I am here, in this apartment, in this marriage, in this new time and space, where I the only invasions come through the internet, or come very small, beady-eyed, through holes in the wall, and O. and I can catch them and send them away.]

I came home tonight to find a strange guy lying on the couch, playing with some device from the iPod family. He didn't look up at me when I came in, though I stared at the back of his head. I bristled inside, but held back the desire to bark or growl. I did lock the door though: keep out any other wanderers that might try to invade. And then I marked my territory by collecting my scattered dishes and washing them all, and starting a baking project.

The guy on the couch kept his eyes bound to his phone/toy/iPod, as though so secure in his position that he needn't observe anything in the environment, because there was no way that any of it could possibly have any bearing on him. Nothing would dislodge him, and nothing would threaten him. That couch had become his.

Well, the kitchen would remain mine. I measured and stirred, poured and sprinkled.

A few minutes later, someone knocked on the locked door, and the couch-occupier opened the door to another unknown male, this one an Asian in a red baseball cap. This guy, too, walked in, as though this were his apartment. My suitemates, meanwhile--the people who do actually live here--were nowhere to be seen. I couldn't stop myself from glaring at the two guys, but they didn't seem to notice anyone else was in the room. But the newercomer soon went to my suitemate Y.L.'s door, and disappeared inside.

I returned to mixing. Half an hour later, with midnight around the corner, the guy on the couch was just as well-settled in his new territory. Hostility rushed over me again--rage that my home had been invaded, terror of who this person might be, what he might do--and I spoke.

"Hey, excuse me," (and he finally looked up.) "What are you doing here?" Suddenly anticipating the answer, "playing with my iPod/etc.", I elaborated, "Why are you here? What are you doing?"

"Waiting," he said. "For that guy."

I know how the dogs feel.

Lunch (a post with pretensions of being a poem)

2011-11-01T15:45:00.000-04:00

Bell-pepper bright red,
goat cheese pure white, pesto glowing
emerald with olive oil. Brown bread
still steaming from the oven.
(Softer than usual: too much water?
Who's to say?)

Japanese mothers strive for three colors on every plate.
I throw together lentil soup, eggplant curry,
grilled cheese sandwich: nothing but brown.

But today's lunch was
fresh, bright, raw,

like this snappy autumn day of leaves still green on the trees,
of snow drifts stubborn in the sidewalk-shade,
of a sky so blue I almost believe

it's still summer, and I'm at home
in California where the clouds retire at noon,
and the joys and pains of these three months are distant
as my memory of the Atlantic, unimaginable
as this wintry cold
during that summer simmer.

For K.

2011-10-27T13:17:00.000-04:00

Phone fragments       (135/160)

form our friendship     now
Words so freighted     a decades memories
hang from                   a bright screen
small as my palm       A pocket stone 
sings                          days gone by

Chrysanthemum

2011-10-26T13:56:00.001-04:00

The air is crisp now, and cold, and the flowers are all flame-colored. These are chrysanthemum days. They burn against the cold. They wait for winter.

They bloom among leaves like stretched hands, peach-fuzzy. They grow on stems whose innards are dry and spongy. They are gold and ruby and topaz.

Here on our dresser, they are amethyst. Here they are concise, precise, with pale centers glowing like the cool sunlight of today. Here they face ceilingward, skyward, heavenward, looking up from the ends of their long, long stems. I tied them with a silver satin ribbon, one of many that wrapped around gifts to us from our friends. The glass vase is from our wedding, too.

Three wedding things in one simple arrangement of hope: symbols of ceremony, communal blessing, a celebration that continues, punctuating the passage of months. Frost is on its way, but flowers are still opening.

Quote from many days ago: Ballet as Religion

2011-10-24T20:57:00.000-04:00

From this NYT article on Natalie Portman training in ballet for the movie "Black Swan":

Ms. Portman’s experience gave her a taste not only of the physical sacrifices, but also the mental ones. “It was very religious in my mind,” she said. “The ritual of, like, breaking in your point shoes and getting them soft, all of that, it’s almost like tefillin wrapping in Judaism, this thing you do every day, this ritual.”

Portman's comment evokes for me the ideas of Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. In this book, Alva Noë argues that consciousness and self are more deeply intertwined with bodily existence, physical action, and the surrounding environment than we typically admit. Identity doesn't reside in our skulls.

There are two connections here to ballet as religion. The first connection is dance. Noe says that "dance [is], for me, the perfect metaphor for consciousness" (see this interview). The second connection is religion--not that Noë speaks specifically about religion (as far as I remember). The connection is in Noë's ideas and the claims of religion. I won't try to speak for all religions since I am only immersed in one, but Christianity at least has been telling humans that their identity doesn't reside solely in themselves, much less solely in the way they think or worse solely in their brains, for thousands of years. Rather, it resides in our relationships, to each other and to our Creator.

Mountain-Biking

2011-10-24T09:20:00.004-04:00

Temptation: to bury the confusion in my heart under a layer of television; to cut consternation off from my consciousness; to shelter my mind from the visceral knots by thinking hard about other things, or by not thinking at all--

(Somewhere along this road, I stopped being the stable person I thought I was. Maybe my bike got a flat tire. Maybe it's a cobblestone road now, and I was only good at riding on asphalt. Better yet, I'm biking down a mountain trail. Rocks lurk under the dust and sand, and the trail writhes back and forth between tree roots. The trees themselves are prickly, the live oaks and pines of my hometown hills. I careen down the hill, occasionally falling off my bike and into a bush. So far I've avoided the poison oak, thank God, but I've gotten some nasty scrapes. I am trying to get out of these hills by sunset, when the mountain lions prowl.

(I am not accustomed to riding alone. My partner keeps disappearing around bends, and I keep thinking I am about to be left behind, if I haven't already been abandoned. Maybe the momentum is just too much for him, and he can't wait for me. I skid and scramble to catch up. So far, we are still on the same trail, anyway; we will come out in the same place, may it please the Lord.

(I would like to get off this bike, and walk, slow, taking in the sights. I know there are birds here, and deer, and at dusk there are rabbits. And even sunset's scarlet, with your hand in mine, could be the flame of the rose, and not the blood of the pumas' victims.)

--Always I expect peace to sprout from understanding, but the lesson keeps coming to me, persistent: peace transcends understanding, and I must surrender to not knowing. I must accept the place where I am, before I can walk safely out of it.

Home-making, or Nest Building

2011-10-21T20:23:00.000-04:00

Three months ago (give or take, depending on how you measure), I moved into this apartment, which O. had been sleeping in for two months already. I can't really say he was living here, since he didn't eat here or spend his weekends here. This explains--or perhaps is explained by--the fact that when I arrived, the floors were too dirty to feel good about walking on barefoot, and towers of boxes loomed in the center of the living room and the corners of the dining room. At the edges of the living room, misplaced furniture awaited its new home. In every corner, boxes of books languished. Furniture that was in use was: a bed, an air mattress, a plastic set of drawers which complain alarmingly every time they are pushed all the way in, and a card table littered with mail.

Anyone wondering if I am a neat freak would have received affirmative proof had they been present for my initial arrival into this labyrinth of boxes and dust balls. I groaned, I yelled, I cried. I went silent. I shoved the boxes around, restacked them against the wall, stacked the mail into precarious piles. Space: I breathed again.

The weeks passed and we acquired furniture and unpacked boxes. (Most of their contents went on the bookshelf, no surprise.) The furniture has come from a variety of sources, not all of them entirely orthodox. Below is a graph for your amusement:

Packaging material? Yeah... That's cardboard boxes.

We also considered making a couch out of the super-bubble-wrap from Macy's, whose chambers are interconnected so that it's almost impossible to pop them without a sharp object. It would have been too slippery, though--unless we used duct-tape. :P

Quote of the Day: Real World

2011-10-21T19:57:00.000-04:00

From this long but insightful and interesting interview with travel-writer Pico Iyer:

I try not to think too much about writing as a business. For me, all the joy comes at the desk and what comes after is a kind of sales tax and is what you have to do to pay admission to this otherwise wonderful career. So I live in rural Japan, and I have never really been on the world wide web, and I live very far from New York, and, from, I suppose, the day-to-day real world details of publishing. But that’s a conscious choice. It was almost a choice between, I won’t say happiness and success, but between being very plugged into that world or being plugged into the real world, and I figured I didn’t have enough energy for both, and I got more satisfaction from the real world. I did, after all, move from a 25th floor office in Rockefeller Center to a Zen temple on a backstreet in Kyoto when I was in my late 20s.

I'm glad he didn't use the words "authentic" or "experience", which are all glossy and plastic now from being mass-produced. Real world: he goes for the jugular. "Authentic experience" is marketable and inoffensive. "Real world" is a judgment and a challenge.

What is the real world? It is not the world where you worry about paying your credit card bills on time, or the world where you have to know how to tie a tie properly to impress the right people, or the world where no one will look out for you and you have to take care of yourself by yourself, or the world where being 15 minutes late will ruin your life. That is the world people here mean when they say, "In the real world, that just isn't going to work."

No, the real world is the place of life. Depth. Breathing slow. Green leaves, a wind untainted by exhaust. Light on the water. Peace in your heart. One thought at a time.

I wish I lived in the real world all the time. I don't. I live like a squirrel, chittering and skittering, collecting acorn after acorn, burying them, forgetting where they are. Sometimes I am so happy as I run and leap. Other times I am frantic, and I can't make up my mind which side of the street I should be on as the car zooms closer.

But there is peace, there is joy, there are full stops instead of restless commas. I can end my sentence; it doesn't have to continue with a semicolon--a dash--one more thought. . . I can slow down. Isn't that what this time is for? For rest, not restlessness. Peace of mind, not a mind in pieces.

Breathe. Breathe. This is the real world.

In which an unknown blogger/author expresses my thoughts for me, and I add a barely related parenthetical post-script

2011-10-20T14:29:00.000-04:00

From this blog post on Sci-Fi and the Technocratic Impulse:

When we pursue advancements through technology we surrender something in the process. It’s obvious that a device such as the iPhone is more than just a communication tool. It is a culture-shaping tool that can easily master its user if not used carefully and reflectively. It has the power to disconnect and isolate as much as its power to connect.

EXACTLY. I have been thinking this thought for ages, but in an inarticulate way--like a cloud of feeling-droplets condensed around motes of ideas. Every time I attempted to express it (especially in the face of O.'s spiffy smart phone), I ended up sounding like a Luddite. Perhaps I am a Luddite--but I don't think so. I think I just end up overstating my case when it seems like the other party, or perhaps the whole world around me, is rushing headlong into a tech-enabled dystopia. Thank God for other people's writings that say what I want to say but can't!

Another comment as counterpoint: I usually speak in technology's defense when I hear people saying things like "Facebook prevents people from having in-person interactions" and "You can't have a meaningful conversation over IM." I don't think those statements are true--not because I think Facebook and other tech-enabled communicational media don't have inherent limitations (on the contrary, they absolutely are limited) or that they are inherently good. Rather, it's because I think all the agency still resides with us, the users and abusers of technology. Technology doesn't create in us character-traits ex nihilo: it only exposes and fertilizes what was already there.*

(In that sense, technology is like suffering. It is a test of sorts. Suffering exposes weaknesses in my character, and seems to be bringing them into existence. In reality, those problematic beliefs were there in me all along, and it's not the fault of my circumstance (suffering, technology) that I am full of fears and doubts and lies (or shallow communication, self-absorption, etc), but the fault of the sin in me. I should give thanks for the light that comes through the cracks made by the blows of suffering, instead of screwing up all my energy into experiencing the pain.)

*Not to imply that technology is crap. :P

Kitchen Gratitude

2011-10-17T15:09:00.000-04:00

Some things in my kitchen that make me happy every time I use them:

garlic press
attachment for garlic press that pokes through the little holes and cleans it
stainless steel strainer so I can drain pasta and not worry that the plastic is going to melt like the plastic spoon that my sister stirred hot rice with and which, curved in ways not intended by its designer, is now part of an artwork on our wall
ladle for the soups that are half my diet
actual hot pads, crocheted by my aunt
a wok that is finally developing its non-stick coating, now that I know not to wash it with soap, as per this advice
a proper set of silverware, rather than the mismatched collection of yesteryear
cooking chopsticks, long enough to save my bare arms from flying oil drops
a second mixing bowl, which I originally did not appreciate but which I now rejoice to use, especially when the first one is already full. I especially appreciate that it is large enough for four pounds of bread dough!
a sauce pan: I've been cooking for myself for 3 years with only a stewpot, a wok and a cheap frying pan. This little sauce pan charms me every time I use it, whether for rice (which really doesn't belong in the huge stewpot), sauce (which spatters all over the stovetop if cooked in the frying pan), or hot chocolate.
steamer that is prettier and more effective than steaming things in Tupperware in the microwave
bamboo cutting boards with little feet, the wood sleek under my fingertips, natural and almost alive
orange heat-resistant spatulas! in three sizes! [added 10/21]

Refrigerated Rice and Its Redemption

2011-10-17T14:31:00.001-04:00

My father has always spoken of refrigerated rice with sorrow in his voice. Fresh sticky white rice is ambrosia, as well as a necessary accompaniment to any true meal. Refrigerated rice, however, is a dessicated record of what once was: still food, but to be endured, not enjoyed. If at all possible, rice should be consumed within 24 hours of being cooked, such that it is never desecrated by the cold and dryness of the refrigerator. Refrigerated rice is irredeemable.

So it was with sadness that I contemplated my rice options for lunch today. Having tarried overlong in looking at papasans (my new favorite word!), I was already hungry when I started to stir-fry string beans and green pepper. As the aroma of fish sauce and curry paste rose from the wok, I suddenly realized that to have fresh rice, I'd have to wait almost half an hour to eat. On the other hand, the cooked rice on hand had already been frozen once, and since being defrosted three nights ago, it had been sitting in the refrigerator. Surely it would be barely edible.*

Nonetheless, my impatience trumped my rice-snobbery. With some trepidation, recalling the last time I combined refrigerated rice with a fresh stirfry and regretted it, I toss the old rice into the wok and stirred it in. To my delight, it soon absorbed enough soy and fish sauce to turn it a warm brown, and it plumped up, probably because of the excessive olive oil** in the wok. When I ate*** the whole concoction a few minutes later, everything was delicious. It is with no regrets that I say: I ate month-old rice today.

*This sentiment: only one of the many obvious indications that I am part of the "first world."

**I know this is the wrong oil for a stir fry because of its smoke point or whatever, but it's all I had after the (mostly failed) falafels consumed my meager supply of canola oil!

***Using chopsticks at first, but quickly succumbing to the convenience of a spoon.

Waters

2011-10-11T15:23:00.000-04:00

[something I wrote a week or so ago and forgot to post]

Having breathed water into my lungs in the deeps, have I retreated, choking, to the shallows? So much writing, reflecting, weeping, last week. And this week? watching "Castle" and researching monarch butterflies, making multiple trips to the grocery store each day. But no, this week has been phone calls and emails, Skype and Facebook, dinner with the pastor, discussions of Nahum and Ruth, meeting new people. The water temperature has changed, but I am still treading water. My feet never touch the floor. But even if I tire, I will not drown. There are hands to hold me up, there is a voice to call my name and bring me back to life.

Things I love about living here

2011-10-11T15:20:00.000-04:00

[Thanksgiving is coming up, and I am going to start making lists and lists of things I am grateful for. Because of my compulsion to be thorough, they are all going to be themed so that I don't get overwhelmed trying to cover everything.]

I love...

the toaster oven and its broiler pan. Lunch today was a taste from my childhood--the tuna melt. Multi-grain bread best eaten toasted; half a can of tuna left over from putting tuna in my mac and cheese*; thick slices of a tomato that had been begging to be eaten; extra-sharp cheddar on top: stack 'em up, stick them in the toaster oven, broil for 10 minutes. The cheese boils and bubbles into something supremely delicious, and the hot tomato and bread with a layer of tuna hiding between meld into meaty succulence. At SBU, toasters and toaster ovens were contraband, to be hidden under a bed or even in the bathroom during the monthly dorm inspections. Not so here!
shutting off the smoke alarm. It is such an immense relief that the smoke alarm's hypersensitivity doesn't result in the building being evacuated and the fire department whirling in in a blaze of sirens. I can just slam on the button to shut the thing up, and knock out its batteries. (It's brutal treatment for an object that is trying to save my life--but hey, I don't need to anthropomorphisize the smoke detector.)
the freedom to be unclothed. When I come home sweaty and sticky, I can close the curtains and peel off my clothes. There is no one to see me walk to the kitchen or the bathroom, or when there is someone, it's my husband, and that's even better than no one.
the sound of church bells ringing the hour, calling me to worship. The song drifts across the rooftops. It floats over the engine noises and the exhaust. It softens the chatter of the crusty Italian men across the street. As my sister says: The bells remind me I'm not alone.
striking matches and lighting candles. I love candle-flicker and scented air. I love wax melting into clarity, spilling like a waterfall, pooling and cooling, reshaping itself.
the panting golden retriever that lounges downstairs. He lives with the landlord's nephew in the basement apartment. Today when I came home, the dog was sleeping in the sun in front of the building. He smiled at me and waved his tail a little, though he didn't come to the fence when I called him.
the roof with its sprouting chimneys. I slip out the window on to the fire escape, then climb up the rickety ladder, praying it holds together. And then I stand on the sloping silver-painted roof. I feel like Mary Poppins up there. The setting sun makes the sky blush. As darkness drifts down, a hundred windows light up, golden in the blue twilight.
having the refrigerator to myself. O. and I have the whole refrigerator! Not just one shelf and one drawer. All the food there is ours, and no one is going to steal any of it. If something is going bad, I can make sure to use it up in time; or I can throw it out, without having to ask five other people if they know whose this is.
using all the cupboard space, all the counter space, all the pantry space. I loved living with friends in college, and I even loved sharing the kitchen with them and cooking together, but I am definitely loving how I have this whole space to myself. As I realize more and more that I can't tame my emotions and have them happen at convenient times, I appreciate the areas of predictability and control more and more. The kitchen is one.
our huge bookshelf. After four years of stacking books to unsafe heights on my desk, now I have them arranged, orderly, vertical, alphabetized, categorized, looking happily toward me when I walk in the front door.

There are more things I appreciate, I know, but ten is a good number for the moment. Much as I flinch when I notice how the walls and ceiling slant at various angles, much as I groan every time the mold resumes its conquest on the shower tiles, I am still so grateful to be here, and to be here with the best person, and to have a place to make our own.

*Another nostalgic meal, this one recalling nights with a baby sitter while my parents snatched some couple-time. I only recently found out during college that other Americans apparently don't combine those flavors.

[Added 10/17/11]
For anyone concerned about the safety of my rooftop explorations: I hereby inform you all that the roof being walked about on is neither steep nor slippery, but on the contrary is sticky and flat, if somewhat slanted (estimated slope: 10 inches of vertical change over 30 feet of horizontal space). Moreover, said rooftop is surrounded by a low wall, such that falling off accidentally would be a challenge. This is a rooftop begging for a garden and a lounge chair (and possibly a new paint job).

Theme

2011-10-07T13:58:00.001-04:00

From Ten Thousand Questions:

If you had to pick one of the following words to serve as the central theme of the next chapter of your life, which would you pick: tranquility, prosperity, triumph, or healing?

Healing. I didn't recognize my sickness, my scratches and scars, until this season started. When did it begin? At the altar when we vowed forever and evers? That winter evening when I made a promise? A year ago, when I was crying every weekend and it seemed for a time that there was no way out?

How far from that I feel. We are in a different place now: married. Time together is still a limited resource (that, if nothing else, I learned at breakfast today), but we aren't suffocating for lack of it. We are thirsty for more but we are not parched, and the rains fall regularly.

Yet it was in that time of stress and distress that I found myself vulnerable: woundable, and in fact wounded. It forced me to see my wounds, so that I could begin see my healing.

I had learned, once upon a time, not to rely on Another. I learned this so long ago that I cannot say what book or teacher told me. Was it stories, was it disappointments? my mother, my father? the very nature of the world? --was it whispered to me by leaves dying from the cold, then by the melting snow? I used to think I could preserve myself by growing in the right shape, with a shell around me like an oyster, or like an insect with its jewel-hued armor. I used to think I could have everything I needed by taking so little from each one that none would run away from me. I used to think you would all run, if I leaned too hard: or if not run, then fall; or if not fall, then attack.

I am trouble. This also I learned, and I locked it up inside and then I lost the key. How can I take it out of myself?

Healing. Already this has been a season of healing. I had to be healed and I had to unlearn and be sliced open by truth till I bled relief and I knew myself anew.

I have oozed other things, along the way. Self-pity, self-hatred. Condemnation, anger, judgment. Confusion. But I am coming clean. This is the season, the season of healing, the season of soothsaying.

Say to me forsooth, the truth. Pull away the supports that have me leaning all the wrong ways, and settle me on the firm foundation. Unbandage me, and let the sun sterilize my skin. This is the season of straining and growing. Let this be the season of healing.

Reading Poetry

2011-09-29T15:02:00.001-04:00

The mystery is alien to you, you
dislike the veils and fog
that conceal what would
in sun or firelight
blaze like trumpets
and like tears.

Cold in the mist, you turn away
bewildered, you call
for a storm to sweep the world
clean and clear. Breath
comes easier to you
when the air is alive. I

rest in this understanding--
that silence speaks
not of stillborn meaning
but of stories so laden
with feeling
words cannot carry them.

Thunder

2011-09-29T12:44:00.002-04:00

I can't get over the thunderstorms here. Just past noon, and suddenly the light has been swallowed up. A roaring tears through the clouds and bursts through the open windows. The wind whirls inside, swinging the venetian blinds inward, knocking over bottles, snatching up scraps of paper. The serene sky has stretched itself into a lion, roaring as it stalks the city. Rain runs through the streets like many small feet.

Now the drops sprinkle the window panes. Now they batter against the glass and they burst through the screens. The rain is trying to get in. I close two windows, and return.

Listen, the water is drumming on the tin window sill, drumming on the AC unit. Listen, a lion is roaring in the clouds. The streets turn silver, and the people hide in their boxes and holes.

Name

2011-09-22T13:48:00.000-04:00

"What's your name?" asked the lady on the phone.

I paused. When did this become a difficult question? My name is now J------- B-----, but not all of my identification documents say so. I'm going to have a bank card with the new name in a few days, but three weeks ago when I made the online order being discussed, the debit card I was using had my old name on it, which in turn is not the name that I ever introduced myself by, since I have always called myself by a shortened form of my first name.

In reality, only a fraction of a second passed by while I hesitated over how to name myself. (In retrospect, it was a bit of a White Knight* moment.) But it was another reminder of the confusions of being a new wife.

*From Ch. 8 of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass:

`Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying tofeel interested.
`No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a littlevexed. `That's what the name is called. The name really is "TheAged Aged Man."'
`Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called"?'Alice corrected herself.
`No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song iscalled "Ways and Means": but that's only what it's called, youknow!'
`Well, what is the song, then?' said Alice, who was by thistime completely bewildered.
`I was coming to that,' the Knight said. `The song really is"A-sitting On A Gate": and the tune's my own invention.'

Granola

2011-09-21T17:40:00.003-04:00

I always make granola by hand, but this time I stuck my hands in the oats and mixed them with my fingers. Cinnamon breathed out of the mixing bowl. I smashed the walnuts in my fists and let them infuse my skin with their oil and grit. Scooping raisins into the bowl, and then coconut, and mixing it with my hands, I felt like I was experiencing the granola in a deeper way... Despite having made it so many times, there is always something new to be learned!

Thinking lately about how humans are defined by relationships--with other people, with God, and also with creation, a.k.a. the physical environment: from the mouse in the kitchen, to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, to a painting on the wall, to the raisins in the granola that swell up so surprisingly in the oven. Even this granola is part of who I am.

Social Life

2011-09-20T14:57:00.000-04:00

From David Dobb's feature story in the Oct. 2011 National Geographic, "Beautiful Brains":

"This supremely human characteristic makes peer relations not a sideshow but the main show. Some brain-scan studies, in fact, suggest that our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply. At a neural level, in other words, we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence. Knowing this might make it easier to abide the hysteria of a 13-year-old deceived by a friend or the gloom of a 15-year-old not invited to a party. These people! we lament. They react to social ups and downs as if their fates depended upon them! They're right. They do."
(David Dobbs, National Geographic, Oct. 2011 issue. )

--But do they?

On the one hand, the statement that "we perceive social rejection as a threat to existence" resonates deep inside me. I didn't experience that level of wild oscillation as a teenager, but now that I am in the most vital human relationship of my life (this thing called "romance," which has become "marriage"), I know in a new way the feeling that something in me will die, is dying, when the relationship is damaged. I never depended like this before, I never hurt like this before (& I never rejoiced like this before).

Which brings me to the other hand: though humans are meant to live in society/community, and to be defined by relationship, I don't believe our existence (as the essence of ourselves) is meant to be threatened by social rejection, no matter how severe. I think we're meant to feel threatened by it, and that that sense of threat should shake us into realizing: this isn't my life. Or rather, it's my life, but it's not my Life.

--if that makes any sense. Let me be more explicit.

As a Christian, I am at the same time profoundly dependent and connected to the people around me ("one flesh" with my husband, "one body" with the rest of the Church), and radically independent from them because who I am is who Christ says I am, and Christ is life, light, truth, salvation, and hope for me. He is the Bread of Life. He is my Refuge. No one can snatch me out of his hand.

Cooking

2011-09-20T14:30:00.004-04:00

I started cooking when I was small enough to need a stool to reach the counter, but only for the past two years have I been cooking my own meals. Going across the country for college was a major step away from childhood and my parents' house, but it didn't particularly feel like a move toward adulthood and maturity until I moved into an apartment and, for the first time in my life, had my own kitchen. It was still school housing, and there was still a cleaning service, but suddenly I was cooking my own meals. Grocery-shopping, cooking, keeping track of left-overs: it required so much more forethought than deciding which cafeteria to go to.

This made me feel like an adult in a way that no number of good grades or 15-page papers could. Hadn't I been doing homework and projects for school since I was six years old? If anything, I was less responsible about my schoolwork in college than in high school, because I had finally figured out that success isn't predicated on perfection. In contrast, hadn't my mother (or father) always served a good dinner at the proper time?

Feeding myself three times a day was totally new. No one was going to provide dinner for me if my program was full of bugs and I lost track of time trying to hunt them down. Also, if I wanted to eat something other than grilled cheese sandwiches, lentil soup, or stirfry, it was up to me to find a new recipe. Feeding myself required initiative and creative thinking, above and beyond the organization and time management skills that school requires.

So in a way, I grew up in the kitchen.

I came to recognize and understand the spices whose names I had heard all my life, but who had always been strangers, the friends of my parents. Yesterday, I truly made the acquaintance of the noble bay leaf for the first time, when I made my second batch of split pea soup ever and found it radically better with the contribution of the bay leaves.

I began to understand my mother's enchantment with unfamiliar ingredients. Today I wandered the aisles of the organic grocery store with an attitude of meditation more commonly found in book stores than grocery stores. Celtic Sea Salt, Thai Wok Oil, Sucanat: so many mysteries waiting to be experienced.

And I recognized anew my weakness. When my mother was feeding me, when the school was feeding me, hunger was an experience I consciously chose at times, always accompanied by a promise of good food to come. Now that I cook for myself, I stumble into hunger at unexpected moments, and I find myself grumpy, despairing, insecure. It feels like the world is ending when I expect food and I don't get it. Perhaps I am still a child after all, crying when the milk doesn't flow or when my candy falls on the floor.

I am more than what I eat, but I am what I eat. In my own kitchen, it's a self that I am cooking.

Dust

2011-09-19T13:59:00.002-04:00

I don't know where it comes from. The windows opened to the dirty street? The walls and ceiling, slowly disintegrating? Our own skin? Wherever it comes from, it goes everywhere. The white sink basin in the bathroom wilts to grey. The floor grits under our bare feet. In the tassels of the rug, my long hairs are tangled like kelp washed up on the sand. A colony of dust bunnies grows up in the shelter of the shed hair. I wonder if by sweeping, sweeping, sweeping, I am thwarting the emergence of a new and microscopic civilization that lives off of dirt and discarded skin.

When the broom goes back in the corner and the rag goes into the bucket, the floor reflects the afternoon light, unclouded. I close the windows and study the walls, wondering when the next dust-storm will come. I think I can smell it in the air, on my fingertips.

Enemy

2011-09-01T13:30:00.000-04:00

I want so badly to run away from this conversation, situation, hesitation, devastation. Email leaves such a distance between our spinning minds, a space measured in light years. It will be years before your mind seems a source of light to me, before mine seems a star to you. Right now, you look like a black hole, endlessly devouring. At the bottom, do you twist into an alternate universe, full of unexpected life? or are you what you appear to be: a gravity that compresses even souls into a point of zero dimensions?

Who are you that I should fear you so? I should not, should not fear. "I will not fear the day, I will not run from night. I will hold onto You for life."

Black holes cannot tear me out of His arms. You are no threat to me, while He stands between us.

Free Time

2011-08-17T16:37:00.003-04:00

This is my second week as a homemaker. There are many things to do, but few firm deadlines. I need to buy vegetables and soy milk and a strainer for the kitchen sink--sometime soon. (Today? Tomorrow? It could wait till the day after.) I need to find a laundromat, and haul our dirty laundry and a couple dozen quarters there--before we run out of underwear. I need to research grad programs in linguistics--sometime in the next year.

Astonishing how hard it is to have my schedule completely amorphous. Time is a liquid. It returns, like water, to the lowest place. It settles into low spots in the vinyl floor. It pools under the dusty baseboard heaters. In the summer heat (top-floor bonus), it evaporates and steams up the windows and condenses on the ceiling.

As the days pass one minute at a time, two years stretches before me into eternity. I can't seem to imagine that far in the future. My foresight extends to this weekend, and not much beyond. I have never been so deprived of vessels to pour time into: schedules and meetings and activities. My calendar is a field gone fallow. I wander through it, blowing dandelion seeds and picking wild flowers.

What is this time like? Not like school, though I am learning things. Not like childhood before school's tyranny: I do have responsibilities, and I cross the street without holding anyone's hand. Not like summer vacation: I cannot go to the beach and I am not with my parents or sister (which is no longer to say that I am not with my family); also, if I don't cook dinner, then there will be no dinner. Not like work, where someone else set my goals and told me when to go rest.

If it is like anything I have experienced, it is like writing my thesis last year. My own project: defined by me and executed by me, refined by me and scheduled by me; dealing with whatever interests me, but needing a focus; a source of pleasure and confidence, but also of anxiety and vulnerability; and built around a relationship.

When I read my poems to my mentor, I exposed myself. Criticism stung, while praise surprised me again and again. His approval made me stand taller. It gave me courage to call myself a poet. I prepared poems around the scaffolding of our meetings. I waited for those conversations.

Here, I am not arranging words that will speak into eternity. I am making dinner that disappears within a few hours, I am cleaning a floor that will be dirty again tomorrow, I am emptying a laundry hamper that fills up a little more each night. But here I still have my uncertainties, my fears. Approval still makes me glow, disappointment still makes me shrink. I wait for the reunions. I wait for the connections, the conversations.

I could be a little more stable, more driven, more independent in my heart. But I think this time is about waiting, about resting; about leaning on O. and on God, trusting and depending in a new way; about opening myself wide; about taking down the fences, about letting the wind blow through and plant what seeds it wills.

Education as Essential

2011-08-11T14:05:00.004-04:00

Two days ago, a young man with a British accent and a clipboard stopped me as I was walking through Manhattan after having lunch with my husband (! (Two weeks of marriage is not at all enough time to make this word mundane.)).

The young man was fund-raising for an organization that claims to "punch poverty in the face!" by provide basic care and education to children in impoverished countries. He asserted, in the course of his spiel, that education is the most important thing to get people out of poverty. When I looked skeptical, he demanded to know why. I didn't have a good answer. I mumbled about the primacy of food and water. It wasn't until I was walking away that it occurred to me that I believe knowing the true God is the most fundamental precondition for true success.

Anyway, I don't instinctively think of education as something that nourishes the human soul. "Learning," yes. "Education," no. But today I read this interview of a philosophy professor who teaches a course on hope in modern philosophy--at a maximum security prison! (Good read.) At the end of the interview was this exchange:

This program that you were doing is part of a Bard College Program to make a bachelor's-level education accessible for prisoners. Based on your experience, what do you think of the role of education for our prison population?

The facts are pretty compelling. The recidivism rate goes way down when people are involved in these kinds of programs—60 percent, I think, is the normal rate for people coming out of maximum security context, and it goes down to below 15 percent for people who've been involved in the Bard Program, and the ones who actually get the B.A. are even lower than that. For the ones who will get out of the prison someday, it becomes much more likely that they'll live productive or at least not-incarcerated lives in the future.
(From the Veritas Riff "Hope Unbound: A Philosopher Goes To Prison.")

If I had known those statistics, maybe I wouldn't have made such a face at the volunteer on Tuesday!

I wonder what the impact of more specific classes like the philosophy course discussed in the interview might be, statistically speaking...

Christian Identity / a quote I want to be able to find later

2011-07-06T12:35:00.004-04:00

As I was eating breakfast this morning, I picked up a book I found lying on the counter. Reading a few pages, I was struck by this:

Some Christians base their identity on being a sinner. I think they have it wrong--or only half right. You are not simply a sinner; you are a deeply loved sinner. And there is all the difference in the world between the two.

Sin is a corollary to our primary status as greatly loved children of God. First we were loved into being, created in the good and sinless image of our Creator God. And although sin damaged that which had been utterly good, it allowed us to discover that God's love is directed toward us just as we are, as sinners. The sequence is important. We must never confuse the secondary fact with the primary truth.

Real knowing of ourselves can only occur after we are convinced that we are deeply loved precisely as we are. The fact that God loves and knows us as sinners makes it possible for us to konw and love our self as sinner. It all starts with knowing God's love.

(David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself, p. 64-65)

This is so well-put! Yay!

[... And that's all I really need to say about this. But here follows some of my thoughts/recollections that have to do with why I love these paragraphs.]

(1.)

I heard a distorted version of this argument a couple years ago when missionaries from a Korean Christian-esque cult (Good News Corps) interrupted my Bible study preparations when I was sitting outside at school. Their English wasn't very good, so it took a while to see how much of the confusion and expressed disagreement was due to language issues versus theological differences. They asked me if I was a Christian and if I believed that I am sinful and if I believed that I was saved, and then they kept saying that if you're a Christian, you can't/don't sin, because you've been brought out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of God's light. I had a really hard time figuring out how much of what they said actually lined up with what I believe. In the end, I realized that I don't believe their central claim (saved people never sin). But I couldn't articulate what I actually believe (and what I believe the Bible teaches) without overemphasizing the fact that Christians do continue to fall short even once they've come into God's kingdom.

I think what I said to them was something along the lines of:

I agree that the identity of the Christian doesn't reside in being a sinner
and instead the identity of the Christian is as a follower of Christ and a child of God and as forgiven and redeemed
but that doesn't mean that we already live entirely according to that new holy identity.

Our primary identity is as holy people, but our behavior (which in my definition covers thoughts and feelings as well as external actions) is still a work in progress. In conclusion, Christians do sin, and so it is true to say that I am a sinner.

I think I put my point across, but it's not good communication to pin such a freight of concepts onto a verbal distinction between sinner-as-identity vs. sinner-as-behavior. I'm really happy to have discovered Benner's passage which articulates the Christian (& human) identity so much more clearly, and then explores its significance--that "it all starts with knowing God's love."

(2.)

That last paragraph also connects with something I've been telling a friend who is a young Christian and who is deeply concerned about his sinfulness. He is extremely impatient to become a better person, and he is frequently frustrated at his slow growth. As a result, he is perpetually looking for things to do that will make him better.

And so I keep telling him that his focus is in the wrong place. He isn't going to become a better person by trying to be a better person. Doing good things does have good effects, but it doesn't change your identity. Transformation requires time and the uprooting of lies. (c.f. Grace + Truth + Time => Transformation, the sermon series from which this great sermon on Hosea comes) Focusing on our selves and our sin will not fix things. I told him he needs to lift up his eyes to Jesus and worship Him by giving Him his attention, because by focusing on his own sinfulness he is ultimately still being self-obsessed and self-worshipful.

I still think what I said to my friend was true. But again, Benner says it better. "It all starts with God's love." "God's love is directed toward us just as we are, as sinners."

(3.)

This passage of Benner's writing also speaks to a third thing in my life: Paul Washer's theology. I can't speak for exactly what Paul Washer actually believes, because it's possible that he is just using language in a much less precise way than I would like, and in a way that promotes some untruths. So I will address the things he says, and not worry too much about whether he really means exactly what he is saying.

Paul Washer preaches radical depravity (for instance, in this discussion), and his definition of the doctrine states that there is no good in humans whatsoever. I can't agree with that statement, because no matter how messed up a person is, a person is still a person. A person is created in the image of God, and even when that gets horribly distorted, that image is still there. I agree with Paul Washer that people cannot save themselves, and that we need provenient grace even in order to turn to God, but I can't agree that humans are completely devoid of goodness on their own--although, as my father brought up when I asked him about this, all goodness comes from God. "Every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of the heavenly lights..." (James ?:?), especially life, so maybe it's absurd even to speak of being alive without God. I don't think that's what Paul Washer was talking about, though, because the question he is addressing in that clip is about election and whether God has picked out you, you and you to go to heaven, and you, you and you to go to hell. Ugh.

Anyway! I think Benner's second paragraph really speaks to the question of human goodness. On our own, entirely without God--well, we wouldn't even exist, much less be alive. Christ holds everything together (Col. 1:17), and "in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). These things are true of all of us, Christians or no. Also true of all humans is that "we were loved into being" (Benner)--Christians or no. There is no human who is utterly and totally devoid of goodness, because there is no human who is not made in the image of the perfect and good Creator.

Truth: it's a good way to start the morning. Thank God.

Persecution

2011-07-06T02:53:00.003-04:00

"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." I don't remember when I first heard this verse. I must have been a little girl, curled up in bed, my father reading to me and my sister by my side. I remember thinking, long ago, that I didn't have any enemies. I remember asking, long ago, what "persecute" meant.

These days, I know what persecution is. We recognize each other, persecution and I. Persecution is the acquaintance I run into every so often. I know its face, though I can't always bring its name to mind in time. We are not bedfellows; many people know persecution much better than I do. But I do know persecution.

I know its flavor: raw, bitter, tough, like kale just pulled from the ground. No amount of chewing dissolves it. When swallowed, it sticks in my throat. It fills my mouth with sand.

I know its color: by turns scarlet and green, depending how the light strikes it. At dusk, it looks black. By night, it is as dark as the rest of the world.

I know its sound: my name, screamed in a voice like nails. Rocks grinding together--or it might be teeth grinding--it's hard to say. You see, we don't know each other so very well, persecution and I.

But I know its name: Pain. The different parts of a person pronounce pain differently, but body and heart and mind, they all say the same name. I hurt, and what am I to do?

Love my enemies. Pray for the one who persecutes me.

Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief.

Advice

2011-06-24T18:11:00.003-04:00

From linguist Deborah Tannen's You're Wearing THAT?:

A daughter reveals something personal in the spirit of closeness. Her mother, wishing to protect her daughter and to see things go well for her, offers advice; the metamessage she intends is caring. But the daughter hears a different metamessage: that her mother disapproves of what she is doing and therefore of her. This implication hurts the daughter's feelings, so she lashes out, hurting her mother's feelings in turn. Both are tied up in the knots created by the double meaning of advice: while it offers to help, it also implies that you're doing something wrong; otherwise you wouldn't need advice. The knots are hard to untangle because, more often than not, the threads that form them are found not in the messages, which are easy to pinpoint, but in metamessages, what the words imply.

Linguists know all the answers. If only that meant we could solve all the problems.

Still summer

2011-06-23T12:27:00.002-04:00

For a moment
as my bike bore me
along the road
the smell of California summer
captured me: dry dry dirt,
warm in the sun, sending up
little wafts of dust,
oak leaves, old weeds.
Then a car swooshed by,
and exhaust invaded.
But the sun was still
warm through my t-shirt,
and the moment was still
summer in California

Change

2011-06-16T00:19:00.003-04:00

I have been sadly neglecting this blog, but I don't really feel bad about it, because my life has required a lot of tending to, and I have been staying away from computers. Now that I'm back, what am I to write?

It's summer again. I'm in California again. I'm in the bed I've slept in since I was four years old again. I'm living under my parents' rules again. But after this summer, never again.

It's June again. D. is climbing Mt. Shasta again. I went to the beach with friends from high school again. Again, we are all home. But after this summer, this will not be home again.

The addresses I know are expiring. My room will soon be in boxes. The illusion of being back in high school, of traveling back in time when I travel west in space, is about to dissipate for the last time. Everything is falling apart.

And all the pieces are being put together in new shapes. It's not like a mosaic, because the pieces are not fragments. We haven't been shattered or shredded. It's just a rearrangement. The elements are intact, really. Chemical reactions alter substances beyond recognition, but deep inside, the atoms remain unchanged, though the molecules have been destroyed. Change: life transitions are not nuclear fission or fusion. They are just rearrangements of the atoms. Bonds break, bonds form. Sometimes the product is purer than the reactants; sometimes the new bonds are stronger than the old; other times, the reverse is true.

I don't know what is being produced in this complex series of reactions. There are flashes of light, sparks sometimes. I feel the heat. I see colors changing. I am sitting here, watching, and I am counting the crystals as they form. One. Two. Three.

Speech: "About how it's good to know things"

2011-05-10T22:05:00.003-04:00

[My professor friend asked me to give a speech at an induction ceremony, with the very vague topic of "Yay liberal arts! Yay knowing things!" And here's what I wrote! I'm speaking it tomorrow, wish me luck!]

Not quite four years ago, I arrived at Stony Brook as a freshman. I thought I would learn everything. Four years is a lot of time, right? I would pick up four or five languages, satisfy my curiosity about geology and botany, take all the classes in the linguistics department and still have time for computer science, art history, philosophy, writing, psychology, multivariable calculus...

Seven semesters have sprinted by, with me chasing after them, perpetually surprised at how fast they run. And now the eighth semester is slipping out of my grasp, and I still haven't learned half the things I hoped to.

In retrospect, it was absurd to imagine that I would leave my undergraduate education no longer hungry to know more and more and more. For this seems to be the nature of learning--that the more I know, the more I want to know. The more answers I hear, the more questions become possible, in a cycle that evokes Meno's paradox. How can I seek something of which I am wholly ignorant? If I don't know the shape of the things that are unknown, how can I look for them? and if I don't even have the vocabulary to formulate a question, how can I ask it?

But these are the things a liberal arts education provides: words like paradigm and instrumentalization, shapes like top-down and bottom-up; the ability to ask questions, peers who are also seeking wisdom.

We speak of the pursuit of knowledge, as though understanding were a deer stalked in the woods by a solitary hunter who carries the scientific method like a lethal weapon. But maybe learning is more like constructing a house, or a temple. We work together to build a framework of ideas to dwell in. When confusion rains down, these walls of knowledge will keep out the storm.

Or maybe learning is like tying knots, or like weaving. After all, text and textile come from the same root. What can I possibly have in common with Achilles, the brutal warrior? And yet when I read the Iliad, I can see myself in him. We are connected. Literature weaves us together.

Or maybe learning is more like farming. We aren't just hunter-gatherers, roaming the wilderness to collect disparate bits of data to add to a collection which, we hope, will sustain us through a winter of meaninglessness. Rather, we are planting ideas and watering them. We are weeding out false dichotomies and over-generalizations. Sometimes we cross-pollinate (psychology with literature, or computer science with linguistics).

When spring comes, the flowers are glorious. Then summer arrives, and we find ripening in our fields a harvest of connections and causalities, proofs and poems, paintings and paradigms, criticism and creativity. The whole university turns out to reap.

The fruit of learning is good to eat and pleasing to the eye. Knowing history makes the future less daunting, the present more intelligible. Knowing pragmatics brings order from the chaos of an argument. Knowing Shakespeare's sonnets makes falling in love less terrifying. Ideas that seemed at first hopelessly abstract, upon approach become surprisingly relevant; they bring comfort in confusion, they equip us to face the unforeseen.

This knowledge is a good fruit. But we don't climb the tree of knowledge hoping to fill an empty stomach. Hungry for understanding, we don't expect that understanding, once plucked, will eliminate our hunger. We expect only that there will be pleasure in eating the fruit of knowledge.

The pursuit of knowledge is not a quest for satiation. Rather, it is a quest to touch things that were once unattainable, to connect bits of data like broken twigs and build a tree that, astonishingly, blossoms, grows leaves, bears fruit. The pursuit of knowledge is a quest for greater understanding and for a greater hunger for understanding.

College has given me knowledge of many things--which is to say, college has connected me to many things. When I arrived at Stony Brook, I was interested in everything but each subject seemed to stand apart from the others, like a mountain peak separated from other mountains by an ocean. I thought I needed a boat to get from one idea-island to the next.

But now I see that all those peaks grow from the same mountain range, and that ocean is just fog that clears up when the sun comes out. Everything is connected. I know a few things, and if I just follow those things I do know, they will take me to all the others.

[I essentially wrote this speech all in one piece without an outline, and yet it came out pretty coherent and orderly. I don't think I would have been able to do that if I hadn't been keeping this blog for the past three and a half years. Yay for writing regularly! Looking forward to having time to blog properly soon...]

In which I feel sorry for myself

2011-05-05T23:11:00.006-04:00

I never really thought I'd be here. Here, this state of mind.

Here I am, though, pouring time through my fingers like sand. The dishes in the sink are sitting unwashed, and the paper I meant to write is untouched, and I am unrested.

Un un un. I am unwell, unwise. And for no reason--unreasonably--I am feeling unloved.

Neglect. Loneliness. I don't feel those things often, especially not these days. I remember being small, though, sitting in the corner of the storage room, snuffling by myself while my family finished eating dinner. It was cramped, in an almost-comforting but almost-stifling sort of way, and it was dark, and I thought maybe I would never come out and no one would care that I had gone. Maybe I would just stay there until someone came to find me--I'd stay overnight if need be, or for days, weeks. A month. A year. When the family was packing everything up to move again, they'd find me, still curled up, wrapped in this quilt like it was a kimono.

I need a quilt again. I need a small corner to stuff myself into. But really, I need a shoulder to cry on, and I need a reminder that it's all okay.

It's okay. It's okay.

It's okay. I'm okay.

(Maybe what I am really saying, have really been saying all these years, is: Please don't forget I exist.)

It's okay. It's going to be okay.

Time Runs Out

2011-05-04T17:13:00.003-04:00

I've seen the days sneaking away in the twilight. They think I'm not looking, that I won't know they've gone, but I see them. They slink away like cats in parking lots. They swoop away like sparrows on a breeze. They dissolve. Silent.

I never counted the days or even the weeks, when they were all here. Now I can't say how many of them have escaped.

I sit inside, surrounded. The tasks are piled around me like Jenga blocks. I keep my eyes focused on the sector marked out by this one hour. When the hour passes and I am still alive and that one region is now clear, I am surprised to open my eyes to the mountain of to-dos in the area of the next hour. Occasionally I peek at the block-towers for the succeeding days. This is invariably an exercise in being overwhelmed.

Eventually my body reminds me: it is time to sleep. I gesture frantically at the things that ought to get done, in vain. I am carried, kicking and screaming, into rest. As the dream-key locks my eyelids shut, I see the tail of a day flicking as the day waltzes away, never to return.

Spring is capricious this year

2011-04-25T23:15:00.002-04:00

Has it really been twenty days since I posted anything here? How sadly I have neglected thee, o my blog.

Spring came, and spring left, spring leapt away like a deer vanishing into the trees, irretrievable. Chasing after it does no good. Like a child crying at every inevitable loss, I cried when spring abandoned me to winter again, and I whined and whined about the rain.

But like the deer who returns at dusk to nibble delicately and destructively at your garden, spring has returned, again. Spring has come bounding in so many times, and then has gone bounding out just as many times... But I think spring is here to stay this time. I really hope so. (Spring, did you hear that? Don't leave me again, don't break my heart by only staying one day. You have my hopes up now: two days of sun, light, warmth, the promise of sweat.)

It's almost May and the tulip trees are blossoming. The dandelions are out, biting my bare feet. The grass is still a swamp from yesterday's thunderstorm, but it shone in the hot sun all day today. I have high hopes for tomorrow.

[Thesis abstract] A Lyricist Responds to the Iliad

2011-04-05T22:27:00.002-04:00

[Here is the 330-word abstract of why I only made one post during all of March.]

Art refers back to other art, and literature is no exception. The Iliad belongs to the body of literature that has deeply shaped English writing. A knowledge of this poem and the mythology that accompanies it enriches a reader's experience of a much greater body of literature, from the Roman masterpiece the Aeneid, to Dante's revolutionary Inferno, to modern books such as James Joyce's Ulysses. Moreover, deep engagement with this poem, as with any great piece of literature, enriches a person's life by bringing a consciousness of its lasting themes into quotidian existence.

For this project, I lived with the Iliad. In reading, I first inhabited the Iliad as poetry and story and human experience, then tried to capture my emotional and intellectual reactions as lyric poems. Some aspects of this experience were familiar and easy to accept as relevant to who I am and what I believe. Other Homeric attitudes, though, are diametrically opposed to my beliefs; dwelling within those perspectives during my reading was emotionally challenging. The mix of intuitive familiarity and utter foreignness of the Iliad was fertile ground for reflection. The fruit of this meditation was a body of close to a hundred lyric poems that respond to the Iliad.

These poems first reflect my deeply held beliefs about the subjects treated in the epic, then proceed to explore my own emotional experiences from outside my reading of the Iliad. The Iliad is a war poem, taking place within a polytheistic spiritual/religious framework. Its characters belong to a patriarchal society whose culture relies heavily upon the externalization of emotion and identity, defining a man by his reputation among his peers (and defining a woman by her value to the surrounding men). My reactions to these characteristics of the Iliad fed the themes of my responsive poems. This paper discusses my poems and their relation to the epic, approaching my experience of reading the Iliad from an analytic rather than poetic perspective.

[I now have an extremely rough but relatively coherent 23-page paper as well as 75 pages of ordered and clustered poems. Huzzah! There is a lot left to do but this feels like a major accomplishment as is.]

Medicine

2011-04-05T21:56:00.003-04:00

This morning I woke up 45 minutes before my alarm actually went off, but I hallucinated that I'd woken up to my alarm, and I never did get back to sleep. A headache and a new batch of colored nose-fruit greeted me. On the other side of the window, the trees were writhing. Rain battered the glass and the wind sounded angry.

My morning improved once I got out of bed: Tulsi tea, Nutella sandwich (I need to find a fair-trade alternative to Nutella), comfort from John 17. And it was better when I got back in bed and read Poetry 180, and journalled, ink bleeding through the lined paper, the notebook almost full.

But before I actually got out of bed the first time, and in flashes of sorrow throughout the morning, discontentment pervaded me. Sick sick sick, and all alone. I wanted someone to take care of me, be with me. Actually I didn't want just any someone, I wanted the person who holds me, the person whose presence reminds me--life is sweet. I thought: I am tired of sleeping alone. I want to wake up with O. (109 days...) I want hugs in the morning.

And I thought: Waah, I don't want to be sick.

But I got through the day (cancelled almost everything but made it to my German test; drank at least 5 cups of tea).

Then around 6pm, O. called. "I was partly calling to ask if you've had dinner?"
Me: "No..."
O. "I was thinking about coming by and making you dinner and trying to take care of you."
<3

So he did. He improvised dishes from ingredients I'd been worrying about cooking before they went bad, and it was all very unplanned and it was all very sweet, and much better than chicken soup or Tylenol or breathing steam or all the honeyed cups of tea.

Trusting Judgment

2011-04-01T23:50:00.003-04:00

If I say I trust you, what does that mean? I think of it has having two dimensions:
1) I trust that you have good intentions toward me.
2) I trust that you have good judgment.

(1) is fairly self-explanatory: I believe that you mean me well.

As for (2): If you don't have good judgment, then I don't believe that you have the capacity to discern what is actually good for me. In that case, your good intentions are not particularly reliable.

But what does trusting someone's judgment mean?

Let's start with what it doesn't mean. When I say, "I trust your judgment," I don't mean that I believe everything you say must be absolutely right. I don't mean that when you talk to me, I forfeit my right and responsibility to think about what you are saying. I don't mean that if I disagree with you, I will assume that I am wrong and you are right and discard my ideas without a second thought.

But when I say "I trust your judgment," I do mean: I believe you are intelligent and rational and well-informed. I believe you have good morals/values/priorities (in whatever area we are talking about; or if I say I trust someone's judgment without any qualification, I mean I believe that person puts God first in their life). I am biased toward believing that your decisions and beliefs are well-founded. If you say A and I believe B, my belief in B is likely to be shaken; I won't just abandon B, but I will question it, and I will operate under the assumption that you have good reason to believe A; I will ask you what you mean by A and why you believe A.

And often when I say I trust someone's judgment, I mean that I am biased toward believing that they are more likely to be right than I am. For instance, I trust my father's judgment. If he were to tell me (heaven forbid) that he thinks I am too young to marry after all, I would be really shaken up, because I am strongly biased toward believing my father is more likely to be right than I am, but I really wouldn't want to believe he was right in this case. I wouldn't immediately conclude that I should cancel the wedding in July, but I would immediately ask him why he thought this, and I would listen very carefully and with the expectation that what he said would be well-founded.

I should note that I have a bad habit of assuming that I am right and people who disagree with me are just wrong and not thinking clearly. I say it's a bad habit because I know it grows out of arrogance on my part, not because I think I have poor judgment (which I don't think). Being aware of this habit helps me deliberately counteract it; but what I really need is not another filter on my thoughts, putting another layer between my mind and my heart. What I need is a change to the way I actually think/feel in the first place. What I need is an attitude of humility.

In some circumstances, I already have the humility that allows me to truly listen without assuming that any point of divergence from what I think must be a divergence from what is correct. The trivial case is where the person I am listening to is an expert and I am not. The significant case, though, is where I trust the person I am listening to. If I respect and trust him, then it is natural for me to set aside the assumption that any point of divergence is him being wrong. If I respect and trust her, then it is easy to learn from her. If I respect and trust her, I can accept correction from her.

On the other hand, if there is no one whose judgment I trust, then there will be no one who can effectively correct me, which is a bad situation to be in. Moreover, there will be no one whose reassurance I trust, because if I'm worried and someone tells me things are going to work out, I won't be able to absorb that comfort because I will assume they are wrong because they are disagreeing with me. Clearly this is maladaptive.

In order to truly live in community, I need to trust. I need to trust people's intentions and at times I also need to trust their judgments. "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." Submitting to someone means placing myself in their hands, and it makes a lot more sense in the context of trust. Granted, it's possible to submit to a person without trusting that person, but that requires trusting Christ. In fact, I think that trusting Christ enables trust in other people. Why? There are two major hindrances to me trusting trustworthy people: pride and fear. Fear keeps me from trusting their good intentions; pride keeps me from trusting their judgment. But trust in Christ eliminates fear, because I know that He is taking care of me, and trust in Christ eliminates pride, because I know that God is God and I am not.

Trust is a risk, like love is a risk, like hope is a risk. But we are called to trust and to love and to hope, because they are worthwhile risks. Trust doesn't mean checking my brain at the door; trust means entering into the full range of relationships.

Simple things that are suddenly complicated

2011-03-04T21:58:00.004-05:00

I went to a conference on human trafficking during January. And now:

I want to make chocolate chip cookies. Or maybe I just want to always have the option of making chocolate chip cookies. But I can't buy chocolate chips at the regular grocery store because they are slave chocolate. My cookies are not worth supporting slavery. I'm trying to find fair-trade chocolate chips, and I'm thinking I'm going to have to order them online... Maybe I should stick with oatmeal raisin for the moment. I wonder if cinnamon is a slave product.

Also, complicated things that have become more complicated. Was my wedding gown made by slaves? (Apparently David's Bridal does better a lot of other major clothing companies--with its score of C- instead of D- or F. Sheesh.) What about all the things that I might put on a wedding registry at Target? (Can I even shop at Target anymore?) Where can I order a fair-trade blender??

Justice is so inconvenient.

"All I need is You, Lord"?

2011-02-24T22:06:00.003-05:00

"The Christian who has a solid relationship with God doesn't need anyone/anything else." True or false?

[My answer, when this question came to me in an email:]

There have been solitary monks who found fulfillment only in God, without human company. But as far as the Bible says, we are supposed to be in community. For the Christian who does have the opportunity to spend time with people, it doesn't make sense to distinguish between getting fulfillment from a solid relationship with God and having good relationships with other people. If you have a solid relationship with God, that will draw you into deeper and more meaningful relationships with people. A solid relationship with God makes you more and more the person that He made you to be. And as in the quote you cited, "It is not good for the man to be alone": humans were made for community. So in general, it doesn't make sense to imagine being in a close relationship with God but not being in community with other Christians. We are called to become "one body"!

Read 1 Cor. 12. We need each other.

Speak Up

2011-02-17T17:01:00.003-05:00

What is it that drives me not to speak, to hold back the naming of my desires? Whose role am I playing? When did I pick up a script, when did I memorize these lines so thoroughly that, speaking them, I don't even realize I didn't write them myself, am not making them up on the spot? Speaking them: there are the things I say, and the things I don't say, and the things I don't even realize I'm not saying.

I hold back out of fear, but what am I afraid of? Is it you I fear, your judgment, condemnation? I remember: past reactions, upsetting you without intending to, the delicate work of smoothing things back over, finding out where we diverged. So much retracing of paths, such wanderings in the woods.

Or is it my desires themselves I fear? They grow out of my own self, yet when they are born, I am reluctant to acknowledge them. Sometimes I disown them, like children whom my tendrils of communication cannot reach. "Never come home again," I tell them. Yet they lurk just outside on the sidewalk, and their faces haunt me.

Then I blame you for not asking me, when the truth is, you've asked and asked, and I have refused to speak. The truth sticks in my throat, it catches in my teeth. I am afraid to let it out so it flaps and flutters in my mouth. A few feathers fly from my lips. If I just open my mouth, it will burst forth and escape, and then who knows what it will do? I'll never catch it again. If it flies at our faces, if it attacks our eyes, what will we do? I will cower in a corner, I will hide under a table.

To speak is to be alive, to be a person. It's so much safer to be a statue--silent marble, gracious and inoffensive. But it is so cold. O Lord, teach me to be human.

Comfort Food [Question of the Day]

2011-02-16T22:54:00.002-05:00

Today's question: What foods do I turn to for comfort?

It's funny that they should ask that particular question on this particular day when I ate about 8 squares of dark chocolate with roasted almonds, accompanied by several dried apricots. I normally don't eat more than a square or two of chocolate, but I decided to finish the rest of the bar today.

Even after my original desire for chocolate had been sated, I continued to melt square after square in my mouth. When the chocolate succumbed to erosion, the almonds remained like rocks, sitting on my tongue, until they were crushed in the rapid geology of my mouth.

(More pertinent to the original question: tea. That is my go-to for calming myself. Chocolate, though, is the thing I turn to before I realize I need to calm down.)

Sonnet-esque

2011-02-15T21:18:00.002-05:00

Elegance/Increase

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
when timid leaves, pale green or red, do sprout
from tree-tips stretching skyward as the cold
winter withdraws—Spare elegance, I leave thee.
Grace of branches bared to the blue sky,
I leave thee. Leaves shall clothe me:
chaos of foliage, riot of increase, of life
profuse, protruding—extending, exploding—
growing greener, greater, and singing in the wind
and sun, as spring comes, comes out shyly
from the tender tree-tips. Crisp blank snow,
silent still ice, I leave thee; creeping greening
bursting beginning rustling hustling
falling flying Spring, I greet thee.

[2/12/11]

I'm taking a poetry workshop, and for this week's assignment, I ended up writing three independent poems in the process of trying to express the idea I had landed on--singleness as "that which I must leave ere long." As given away by that quotation and by my poem's first line, Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 was echoing in my head as I wrote this. And then it worked out that it has the requisite 14 lines to be a sonnet.

I didn't bring this poem in to workshop (it was draft 2 of 3), but I showed it to my professor and he called it "good exercise," which (like his lavish compliments of draft 1, not posted here) was an unexpected reaction. He says writing to the seasons is something that one should do, especially if one is a Californian living temporarily in a place with real seasons; but he seems to think that seasonal poems are not poetic/personal/ownable or something in the same way that properly lyric poems are...

Anyway, there is my spring poem, rippling along the surface of my feelings about the major life changes that are coming, as surely as the seasons.

Transition Point

2011-02-11T15:12:00.002-05:00

When does a meal with a few friends turn into a meal with an entire group? They say that two is company and three is a crowd, but I don't think of three as a crowd. Three is a small group, but it is still intimate; four can be very close too, though there is a potential for two conversation threads running in parallel and never touching. But five... Five people is definitely a group. It can still be good, but it takes another level of involvement for me.

I like people, I love my friends, I enjoy spending time with them. But innately, I don't like groups. Or rather, I can and do enjoy groups, but they do not feel natural to me. I get overwhelmed. My focus shifts from the specific people I am interacting with and being intimate with, to the overall dynamic of the group--what kind of conversation we are having (not who we are), who is talking more or less (not what they are saying), how the different members in the group are connected, and who is more closely connected to who... It's hard for me to be fully present in a group (without some activity going on).

[still more things I just don't want to lose]

2011-02-10T18:13:00.002-05:00

"Duty is a choice." --PM, on the Aeneid.

And then I wrote this which is totally unedited but here it is anyway:

Duty is a set of strings
taut with my weight
as I dangle, my feet
just off the floor
In that empty space
so much feeling teems
But the strings shift
and I dance
to music not my own.

--thinking of Aeneas's line as he abandons Dido: Italiam non sponte sequor, "I follow Italy not of my own will."

More quotes: Snake

2011-02-10T18:03:00.002-05:00

I was about to throw away the aforementioned piece of paper when I found more things written on it that I want to keep/remember:

        The snake is deeply troubling because it has no form.

Scrawled next to this, the word protean. PM also said that the snake evokes for humans our own viscera, and thus distresses us:

        What should be on the inside and hidden [guts, intestines] is,
       in the snake, on the outside.

This exposure, this violation of boundaries, disturbs our sense of security and stability.

Hm.

Writers...

2011-02-10T17:47:00.004-05:00

I've been trying to restore order to my life by restoring order to my room, which entails clearing off the layers of paper from my desk and making all the books stand up instead of slouching everywhere. One of the papers had, amidst a bunch of messy syntax trees from when I was tutoring last semester, a quotation that I wanted to preserve. For your enjoyment and my future ease of finding, here it is:

    Writers
      make it possible to bear sorrow,
      make evil intelligible,
      make justice desirable,
      make love possible.

My thesis professor cited this in class during a lecture last semester. (He mentioned the original speaker as a colleague whose name sounded something like Rosenblatt but whom I can't really identify, so... Original author, please don't be offended or feel plagiarized. I just want to remember what you said and share your insight with ten or so people who read this blog.) My professor applied these claims to Paradise Lost, saying the poem aims to make it possible to bear the sorrow of the Fall, to make Satan's evil intelligible (a task at which it is perhaps even too successful), to make the justice of God's intention desirable, and to make the love between Adam and Eve seem possible.

I don't want to be Milton, but I hope I can be this kind of writer.

Time

2011-02-10T00:39:00.003-05:00

All my time lately is with people. It begins to feel as though time in class is downtime. Classtime is when I don't have to be fully engaged, when I can think some of my own thoughts. Classtime is when I can explore someone else's ideas without any thought for their emotions or personhood, because that someone is not present and very likely not even alive anymore, and their ideas have taken on their own life and they stand before me, strong on their own two feet, and they talk to me whether or not I listen. I don't have to encourage them, to ask the right questions, to offer to pray for them. I can check in and out, and hear enough, and my professors will still think I am a great student and I will still learn.

Meanwhile, as the professor talks about the stages of compilation (lexical analysis, syntactic analysis, ...), I am writing a poem about Andromache weeping on the walls of Troy. As Herr Bloomer chatters on in Deutsch, I am writing about tears running down the armor of the Greek soldiers. As vocabulary about the types of deixis flies around me, I am planning: how many books do I have to read this week, how many poems do I have to edit? As I hear, for the thousandth time, detailed instructions on how to format an academic paper, I am writing about the shorn hair falling on the corpse of Patroklos, about Achilles dreaming of his lost friend, and the spirit vanishing into the earth, like vapor.

And as soon as the lecture ends, the ghost of solitude that has accompanied me vanishes like vapor. My classmates speak to me, I smile back. We walk together, I ask them how they are, where they are going. I meet someone for lunch, someone else for Bible study planning, someone else for a programming project. All the while, a list of things I have to get done is clattering around in my skull and the wind is trying to freeze my ears off and draw frost-patterns on my scalp. And then it's off to small group, and we. Pause. Pray. And then talk talk talk. And then it's a ride home in a crowded car and I hear myself chattering but I can't stop it.

When I get home I shut the door to my room and it's time to write. Count the words (249 of them), make every point (all the reasons I am "excellent"), collect all the supporting documents: I've been nominated for an award, apparently it's significant, I have to "hold up my end," as my professor said. As midnight creeps closer, I wrap up those cumbersome sentences, the boasts wrapped in gauze and tied with pretty ribbon. Finally I throw it out into the internet-void and hope it flies.

And now it's long past midnight and I haven't had a free thought since... How many days ago?

When will I slow down? My suitemate claims solace and solitude are related. I can't speak for the etymology but I have to agree about the semantics. Silence must be a close cousin, and slumber.

Melt

2011-02-06T22:39:00.002-05:00

A few days ago, everything was ice. The snow was a sheet of glass, icicles dangled from the streetlamps. The sidewalks were scarred with salt.

Today, everything is melting. "It's spring, and the world is puddle-wonderful." Mud smiles everywhere. For the first time in months, the grass sees the sun. The snow is naked again. It is disintegrating into heaps of lace.

It's still weather for a wool coat, but it's time to throw it open and welcome in the wind.

Ring

2011-02-06T00:36:00.004-05:00

It felt strange at first. My fingers are used to being free. Even nail polish is a burden. And this, could this really be mine? This shiny thing, this sparkle ring? Me in my thrift-store clothes, my five-year-old shoes, jeans with the hem rolled up: everyone will wonder at the incongruity. It was too big for my ring finger. It wasn't that it didn't fit me but that I didn't fit it. It was beautiful, gorgeous, fantastic, and I was an unpolished little girl. It caught in my hair, on hand towels, on stockings. I couldn't decide if I should take it off to wash my hands and to cook and to do anything, really, with my hands. What if I damaged it? But I didn't want to keep slipping it on and off, as though a promise and a dream could slide on and off again.

(The sun fell on it, and sent pricks of light dancing on the page, and even on the walls and ceiling. I could see the rainbow condensed into a point within the diamond.)

My hand didn't know what to make of it. As my feet carried me about, every so often my finger would comment again to me: I'm encircled by a ring! Sometimes it was just a comment, sometimes it was a complaint. Let me out!

Eventually, we took it to be resized. We handed it over to a lady behind a glass counter, and walked out of the store full of flashing stones.

My left hand had returned to its old, familiar state of ringlessness. My hand was exactly as before, but now it felt naked. What had happened?

School started, I carried books, I cooked for myself, I walked back and forth on the salted paths between snow mesas. Every so often, in the midst of the movement, my finger would comment to me again: I'm not wearing a ring. Something is missing. I feel unclothed.

And now, the ring is back. It is snug on my fourth finger. Now it just feels right, like it belongs there--which it does, the way I belong in the circle of O.'s arms.

Smoke

2011-01-15T12:25:00.004-05:00

In that place, everything tasted of smoke. The fire was always burning there, and the windows rarely open. Rather, the fire was always smoldering inside of her, and her eyes were rarely open to let in the light, let out the smoke. The smoke leaked out through her joints, through elbows and knees where bones ended and began, through seams in her memories where one anxiety ended and another began. In those seams, there shone a brief crack of blissful uninvolvement. Yet even from those seams, the smoke leaked out. Everything in that place was being smoked, gradually. The couches, the bedclothes, even the wooden furniture: they all looked like people who had been sitting forever around a campfire.

The fire inside was always being fed. Papers, news from outside, words spoken by enemies, words spoken by friends who might become enemies, these were all fuel. She ate them up, barely chewing. They must have scraped her throat on the way down. Despite the damage done to her throat by the smoke and by all the rough edges that she swallowed almost-whole, she talked and talked.

The smoke poured out through her flapping, fidgeting mouth. The smoke got in the eyes of the people around her. She could see through the smoke; she'd been practicing for years. She hardly noticed it anymore, and in fact when she felt the fire burning low, she would frantically rebank it. (If it burned out, how would she keep warm? Would she even be alive?)

But the people around her were not used to the smoke. They squinted and couldn't see. All the food tasted of nothing but fire. They lost their appetites, but they never told her. They could see her building the fire, tending the fire. Sometimes this made them angry. Sometimes it just made them sad. One by one, they went away. They needed the open air.

Every time that someone came or went, wind would blow through the open door. The fire would flare up in the sudden rush of oxygen, but the smoke would dissipate for just a moment.

And then the door would close, and the fire would keep burning.

"Voyage of the Dawn Treader"

2011-01-14T17:49:00.003-05:00

My mother requested a blog post about the differences between the recent movie of "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" and the original book by C.S. Lewis. I am simultaneously well-equipped to write about this, because Dawn Treader was my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia, and ill-equipped, because it has been years since I read it... I might have to go read it now, actually... But I'll comment now on the biggest differences I noticed (and fact-check after I reread the book).

First, let me note that the reason I loved Dawn Treader the best is that it is one of those voyage/adventure books that feels like it could go on forever. The general structure is of traveling from island to island on the ship the Dawn Treader, sailing the uncharted seas on the outskirts of Narnia. In my recollection of the book, the various island episodes are fairly unconnected. In fact, in the book-on-tape version that I listened to (over and over) as a child, several of the middle islands were simply omitted, to be replaced by the line "And they had many more adventures." So when I eventually read the book for myself and discovered the Dufflepuds and other characters, I was thrilled to find more new story hidden inside this familiar book. This is perhaps the reason that I feel the book could just keep expanding, and why it is so clear to me that the island episodes in the book are relatively independent.

In the movie, however, this is not the case. To closely connect the islands and, I suppose, create a faster pace and more suspence (Heaven forbid there be a movie that actually takes its time in this day and age!), the movie added an overt villain: the Scary, Creepy Mist. At the first set of islands that Caspian and his crew visit, they find that the Mist has been menacing and kidnapping the Narnian inhabitants of these isles. Moreover, the Mist is getting increasingly powerful. The message of "Soon, it may be too late" hangs in the air. This discovery increases the urgency of their quest to find the Seven Lords, because the way to defeat the Mist (rather bizarrely, to my mind) is to lay their Seven Swords on Aslan's Table. They learn this and are commissioned by the sorcerer at the second island that they visit.

So at every island the Dawn Treader visits, and even while the ship is at sea, the Mist keeps tempting its crew. Lucy, Edmund, Caspian and especially Eustace Clarence Scrub are each tested (I won't say who passes and fails). Lucy's test has to do with envy; Edmund and Caspian are tempted by greed and status; and Eustace must outgrow his selfishness. Meanwhile, the themes of courage and self-acceptance keep surfacing. "Love yourself as you are" and "Have courage, take risks for the greater good" come across as the lessons of the movie.

Courage and self-acceptance are both good messages, but they are not the messages of the Dawn Treader that I remember. In refocusing on those two ideas, the movie reshapes many aspects of the book. The order of the islands is changed, two islands are combined into one; the Mist becomes the enemy to defeat; the voyage of the Dawn Treader becomes a quest to save the world, in which the actions of individuals hold great weight; and the power of Aslan is diluted.

That last assertion might seem like a bit of a leap. Let me explain.

Both the book and the movie explore the idea of transformation. The most powerful instance of this is Eustace's transformation, as physically enacted in his turning into a dragon and eventually regaining his humanity. The book and movie treat this episode very differently. In the book, as long as Eustace is a dragon, the whole crew is stuck at the island where he was transformed. He helps them repair their damaged ship during the day, and at night he mourns his plight. After many days (I believe), he is somehow led to a pool, and has an encounter with Aslan. Eustace scratches off his dragon skin, and wriggles out of it. He feels lighter, freer. But when he looks in the pool by the light of the moon, he finds he looks just the same. He is still a hideous dragon. So he peels off another layer. And another, and another. I can't remember how many he has to remove, but each time it feels less pleasant, though he can see himself shrinking and shriveling, getting closer to boy-size, leaving dragon-dom behind.

But at the last, he is still wearing a dragon-skin and he can't bring himself to score it deeply with his claws so that he can finally writhe his way out. In the end, he needs Aslan to lift his heavy paw, and slash this deeply hidden dragon-skin wide open. It hurts, it hurts, but when the skin peels back, finally, Eustace emerges as a human again. Victory has come to him, and victory has made him small and weak and naked. When he returns to life as a human, he lives differently. He has been humbled, and he has had to see that he needs Aslan.

So the lesson of the book's dragon-transformation is surrender and dependence and reliance on Aslan (God). Transformation takes time and pain and the deliverance of a higher power.

But in the movie, Eustace is redeemed from dragonhood only after he saves the ship and its crew from the Mist, by fighting the seamonster/dragon that the Mist makes itself into. Eustace has to demonstrate that he has learned courage and confidence (largely from Reepicheep) before he can be returned to his true form. When he is changed back into his boy's body, the transformation does happen through Aslan's intervention, but the process is full of flashing light, fire, red and gold, and triumphant music, and brilliant daylight. It's not darkness and a hidden moonlit pool, it's not humility and pain and labor. Instead, it's magic. Aslan doesn't even actually touch Eustace; he just makes scratching marks on the sand and suddenly swirls of gold and bright sparks surround the dragon-Eustace and lift him up and spin him around. When the cloud of glory disperses, Eustace has become a boy again. Abracadabra!

In the movie, Eustace earns his humanity by fighting the dragon. Then, like clockwork, Aslan appears in the middle of the sunlit sandbar, draws runes on the sand and bam! Eustace is a boy again. Here, transformation or redemption is not initiated by Aslan/God, but rather by the good deeds of the one to be transformed. Moreover, the process is fast and sparkly, instead of slow and almost tortuous, as though it's just a superficial change in appearance, rather than a deep inward change created by Aslan's redeeming work.

This episode captures the fundamental difference between the book and the movie. In the book, everything depends on Aslan. There will be no fatal consequences if the humans fail in their mission to find the Seven Lords. Aslan is what really matters. In fact, I believe that in the book, a major reason for their quest is the search for Aslan's country. This does not feature at all in the movie as a motivation.

In the movie, you see, human effort is vital and effective, and transformation comes through willpower and courage, and you earn it, and ultimately it depends on you. Saving Narnia from the evil Mist also depends on you. If you fail, it could be the end of everything. Aslan has his table and his country, but he's not doing anything to help you out along the way. You are on your own.

Ok, that last might be an overstatement, but it's not far off. Let me just put this really succinctly: the book is about grace, the movie is about effort. That is the difference, and that is why Voyage of the Dawn Treader is one of my favorite books, but "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" is not one of my favorite movies.

p.s. Please comment and correct me if I got facts wrong!

Hearing vs. Control

2011-01-12T17:09:00.004-05:00

Chasing butterflies through the internet led me to an essay about listening/hearing/mystery/paradox, containing this paragraph--

I, too, am a schemer, a performer anxious to have something to say that will impress. I, too, have said too much, using words to wound instead of heal, to manipulate instead of to free. “The simple fact of being able to express an opinion,” Henri Nouwen says, “to set up an argument, to defend a position, and to clarify a vision has given me, and gives me still, a sense of control.” A sense of control over the conversation, so it can go where I am most comfortable, so it can remain where I like it, so that I never have to admit I don’t know. This is one reason I am more apt to talk than to listen. If I talk, I can remain in control. If you talk, who knows where we’ll end up? “I like to do all the talking myself,” Oscar Wilde wrote. “It saves time, and prevents arguments.” (Denis Haack, "On Learning to Hear")

which cut me to the quick. Control: I'm addicted to it. Sometimes I look to words and arguments and self-expression to be my savior. Only a few hours ago, I sent off a very long expression of my opinion. It is full of vulnerability but it is also full of criticism, and though it is an admission of my lack of control of the situation, it is also an effort to exert control over it. Twelve days ago, I set out to write a brief confession/confrontation, and it grew, as I wrote it over the course of several days, into a monstrous essay, over 5,000 words long. Today, I brought it into the light again. I cleaned it up. I trimmed some scraggly parts, I sharpened a few edges.

And now I have unleashed it, I have sent it flying and flapping out into the world. I sent it to one particular person, and I don't know whether she will welcome it or do battle with it. Will it be to her a dove of peace, bearing an important message? or will it be a dragon, whose purifying fire threatens to destroy?

Having spoken, at great length, now I will be still, and silent. "She who has ears to hear, let her hear." I am listening for the sound of wings, feathered or scaled. I am waiting to hear what comes next.

Anger poem

2011-01-04T12:02:00.004-05:00

Since the questions blog is asking about anger right now, here is a poem I wrote on the subject. But it's from Achilles's experience as recounted in the Iliad. This is *not* how anger feels for me. At least, I don't think so.

Like honey dripping so slowly
from the golden comb
onto my waiting tongue
extended, reaching for that sweetness
to fall – I need
just one more drop of
anger: it is so sweet.

The bees arrive
buzzing, and they zoom into my
open mouth, down
my gullet, buzzing endlessly,
and they swarm into my unguarded
ears, shooting into
my brain, where they buzz and
buzz until they recollect
every drop of sweet honey.

My sis thinks the last stanza is too much, too much. The bees go too many places, she says. What do you think?

The lines, from Lattimore's translation, that sparked the above poem:

“that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man's heart
and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.” (18.109)

I hope you believe me that this poem happened because of the Iliad, not because of any event or feeling in my life. It's part of my thesis project.

Resolutions

2011-01-01T21:30:00.003-05:00

Two complementary ideas in my New Year's resolution(s): trust and fear. This semester was a season of being forced to acknowledge my insecurities, one by one. They popped out of corners and slid out of shadows. They nosed me from behind, like shy dogs; they crashed against my windows. And this semester was a season of finding myself held, soothed, brought inside.

Big changes are coming in 2011, in my external life. In my internal life, I want to see big changes, too. Having realized I am so dominated by fear (fear that floods over me, fear that drenches me, fear that knocks the air from my lungs), I have begun to want freedom from fear. I want to lie in the sun of security, and finally dry off, out of the reach of the waves. I don't want tidal waves of fear happening at the drop of a word, at the twist of a smile. I want to live in love, not fear: "Perfect love casts out fear. She who fears is not made perfect in love." I want to trust, instead. I want to trust O. more, trust my fellowship more, trust my friends more. I want to trust God more.

Freedom from fear, freedom to trust. For 2011, I resolve to graduate out of fear into the liberty of love.

On one way of reading

2011-01-01T21:13:00.002-05:00

When I read your words of lament and sorrow, they are dyed silver-blue, deep purple; they are gray like clouds; they shift like rain that falls like pinpricks and darkens the world so slowly, slowly. Every raindrop chills. The fallen water shines in the cloud-filtered light; the fallen words echo in my fog-veiled mind.

"Bought at a price"

2011-01-01T13:24:00.002-05:00

Like the last post, this is the body of an email I wrote, replying to a friend's question about Scripture.

The question:

"The verse 'You are not your own; you were bought at a price' really struck me. What does it mean?"

Let's start by taking a look at the pieces of this verse. What are they saying?

"You are not your own." You don't own yourself. You are not your own master; Someone else is. This means you are not in charge of deciding what is ok and what is not ok (like how you are not your own judge; only God is the Judge), and you are not in charge of deciding what is important or deciding what to do with your life. --Which raises the question: Who is my master? Whose am I?

"You were bought at a price." Someone bought you (which is why you don't own yourself) and the purchase was costly to the buyer. Someone wanted you enough to pay the price to say to the world, "This person belongs to me; this person is precious to me." --Which raises the questions: Who bought me? What was the price?

Note: I've been writing "you" because that's how the verse is phrased, but of course this is you && me && O. && all the Intervarsity kids && all the people at our church && just everyone who is following Christ.

Ok, so those questions: Who is my master? Whose am I? Who bought me? What was the price?
Clearly they are connected. The one who is your (our) master and the one you belong to and the one who bought you should all be the same person. This is the person who paid the price for you. So who is that?

You probably have a pretty clear guess already that this Person is Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for our sins, who is the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep. Death is a pretty expensive price to pay...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To really know if the Owner/Master/Buyer is Jesus, we should look at the context of the verse. "You are not your own; you were bought at a price" is verse 19-20 of 1 Corinthians 6, so... what's going on in the rest of the chapter?

And actually, we should also ask: What's going on in the other parts of the verse? "Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies." (v. 19-20).

Two chains of reasoning here:

v.19: The Holy Spirit is in you => Live as though your body is a temple (holy).
v.20: Someone bought you => your body doesn't belong to you => honor God with your body. [implication: God bought you => your body belongs to Him => honor Him with your body]

So I think from that context it's pretty clear that the one we belong to is God. Verse 19 specifies that the Holy Spirit (who in theological terms is one of the three Persons of God) lives in us, and we are temples of the Spirit, i.e., we belong to the Holy Spirit. But what about Jesus? and what about the "price"? Where does that come in?

If we look earlier in the chapter, it's dealing with several topics that might not initially seem related (lawsuits, food, sexual immorality). The connection is that the argument explaining what's wrong with all of the wrong behaviors. This argument is essentially the same as the one in v. 19-20: we are belong to God, we are united with God, so we need to act like it! In explaining this idea, Paul first states is in a much more expanded form than what we were first looking at. Verses 9-11:

"Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor [other sinners] will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God."

Verses 14-15 deal with this idea also. We are united with Christ, so how can we not live like Christ?

So, even though the chapter is addressing various behaviors, actually the ideas are all about who we are, not about what we do. The ideas are about identity, not about laws. The fundamental problem when we sin is not that we are breaking rules, but that we are acting totally out of sync with the real identities that God has given us. Our identity lies in belonging to God. "You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God."

This is like how our identity is also as the sheep that belong to Jesus in John 10. "[The shepherd] calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice." On our own, we are lost and helpless. But we are not our own anymore; Jesus has found us / bought us / freed us from sin / brought us into the family (compare: John 8:34-36).

I could keep writing for pages and pages about what it means to belong to God, but I think this email has gotten long enough! :) But really, most of the Bible is about exactly this topic. What does it mean that we do not belong to ourselves? What does it actually look like to obey God? For what price did God buy us? Why would he want to buy us in the first place? So keep reading, and it will gradually become clearer and richer. In particular, you might want to read Romans 6, which also uses the metaphor of being slaves to sin and then becoming "slaves to righteousness" because of Jesus. And then if you read on through Romans 8, Paul moves beyond the limited slavery metaphor to the truer image of us being adopted into God's family.

OT/NT

2011-01-01T13:08:00.004-05:00

This post is essentially the body of an email I wrote to a friend who asked about how to reconcile these verses:

"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." (Old Testament law, somewhere in the Pentateuch)
"You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you." (Jesus speaking, Matt. 5:38-42)
"Scripture cannot be broken" (Jesus speaking, John 10), "For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven." (my friend misattributed this to the apostle Paul, but this is Jesus speaking, Matt. 5:18-19)

My friend's question:

"So what does this mean? Does this means Scripture can be broken? Or is the New Testament self-contradictory?" (I would also add: Does the NT contradict the OT?)

My reply: First off, both of the NT verses you quoted are actually things that Jesus said. So if there is a contradiction, Jesus would have to be contradicting himself. In fact, when Jesus says, "until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished" (Matt. 5:18), he says this immediately after saying that his own relation to the Law is not that he is going to destroy it but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17). From there, he goes on to make those statements, "You have heard X was said, but I tell you Y." (Matt. 5:21-22, 27-28, 31-32, etc) So if Jesus is contradicting himself here, he would have to be totally crazy and not credible in any way at all (in my opinion), because those "You heard X but I tell you Y" statements look like they are actually supposed to be the evidence for and the explanation of his comments on the Law and Prophets in general.

If you haven't already, now would be a good time to read all the way through Matt. 5 and if you want the fuller picture, all through Matt. 6-7 as well.

Even though it may look like Jesus is invalidating various Old Testament commands, he's actually expanding upon them. He is actually explaining their full significance, their true meaning, the spirit behind them. For instance, let's look at the one you specifically asked about: "You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also." (Matt. 5:38-39). Is Jesus contradicting or overruling the original commandment?

No. He is actually making a stronger command, in the same spirit as the original. This is easier to see if we look at some other examples:

v. 21-22:
"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother will be subject to judgment."
Obviously Jesus is not telling them that murderers are no longer subject to judgment. He is not saying that murder is now ok. What he is doing is deepening the command. The original law was about an action (murder), but Jesus says, "It's not enough to refrain from killing someone. If you are really following God, you won't even get into an emotional state where you would want to kill anyone." The new life is about the spirit, the heart, the thought.

v. 27-28:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Again, Jesus is clearly not saying it's okay to commit adultery. He's saying it's just as bad to be in the frame of mind where you want to commit adultery. You could be following the old rule against adultery, even while violating its real meaning every day. Again, the way of Jesus requires a change in your heart, not just in your actions.

So, what's going on in verses 38-39? The answer has to do with the real meaning of "Eye for an eye": This is actually a limit on the severity of revenge or punishment. In the surrounding culture when the Old Testament law was given, it was common to take a revenge that was vastly disproportionate to the original offense. For instance, your brother lost his eye to someone, so you go out and kill the person who caused your brother to lose his vision. The law here is meant to say: Your brother only lost an eye, so the punishment given to the one who hurt him can only be as severe as taking an eye from him. No worse. (This is pretty much like the Code of Hammurabi, I believe.)

We could express this in mathematical terms: the OT law requires punishment to no greater than the original offense or damage. It does not require the punishment to be equal to the original offense.

Jesus's reframing of the law, then, is telling them: Don't just refrain from going overboard in taking revenge. Instead, don't take revenge at all! Do good to your enemies instead of repaying them evil for evil. (Compare: v. 43-45, about loving your enemies.)

In conclusion, Jesus is not contradicting himself, and he is not contradicting the OT either. Instead, he is explaining the real meaning of the OT law. He is explaining what God's kingdom looks like. It's similar to John 4, where Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman, and she asks about the correct place to worship. That's like asking which is the correct rulebook to follow. Jesus tells her, "The time is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth." That's like saying the right way to live is not about the rules, but about the Person behind the rules and the Spirit that the rules try to describe. To be clear: the Sermon on the Mount isn't meant as a new set of rules but as a portrait of life with God. What does it look like to actually fulfill the law, what does it look like to truly follow God, what does it look like to worship God in spirit and in truth?

Winter Break

2010-12-30T13:05:00.003-05:00

This is the tangerine time. The orange is burning through the green in the tangerine rinds that are still wrapped around the fruit, which is still hanging on the tree. The frost polishes the fruit, wearing away the green. At least, that's what it looks like to me.

This is the mucus time, the mucky time. We are all coughing, choking, sputtering. The phlegm leaps out of my throat, or it threatens to explode my skull. The words do the same thing. They take possession of my tongue and spray out into the kitchen or the living room. Sometimes they collide with someone's face. Sometimes they look like tears when they land on skin.

This year they seem to dry quickly though, and it seems more and more plausible that the words were never actually visible, that I am imagining them, that in fact the world is quiet and still.

With the cold, peace is burning through the murk and muck. Delusions and deceptions are being ground away, leaving the truth to gleam in the winter sun. The pile of dirty tissues is getting higher and higher, but someday soon, I will be able to breathe. I believe.

Perspective

2010-12-15T01:28:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I see myself through your eyes. I stand straighter; I move like a leaf or a tree, blown by the wind. My skin is smoother, softer. I smell like spring, like flowers pushing through the dirt, like the soft rain. My smile comes like the sun bursting through clouds. It dazzles.

Or my smile is the horned moon when it has slipped sideways--light through the latticed trees. And when I look away, I am an image like a painting on the wall in a museum, in a gilded frame. My face is the object of admiration, not analysis.

And all of this is a reflection of a reflection -- the reflection in your eyes, reflected in my words. I see myself in a dark window-pane, as I sit inside this lighted train, speeding through the night.

Winter Air

2010-12-15T01:16:00.002-05:00

[This is from last week, actually. I wrote it into my psych notebook after thinking through it as I was walking to class.]

I have to shatter the air to breathe. The crystalline shards pierce my nostrils and lungs as I inhale. (I wonder, will one find my heart?) The sun slices through my eyes, and through the few remaining leaves. The naked trees stand bravely, but I tuck my chin into my scarf and scurry toward shelter.

Winter has descended, turning all things sharp: the tree branches, the blades of grass like swords; the passage of each minute as we tumble toward the precipitous drop from this year to the next; the rays of the brilliance from our star; the crescent moon; my words. Each movement crushes a thousand frozen structures, the dirt, the air. The wind moves in unison, an army of air, marching in perfect step, even running, graceful as dancers who have been practicing together for thousands of years.

[Some rambling reflections:] Sabbath, fear, trust, humility

2010-12-13T17:45:00.006-05:00

From the last page of this article in Veritas Riff about Christian politicians and sex scandals:

"Practicing Sabbath rest is one way of exercising humility, but we do it very, very poorly in this country."

I've never thought about it that way. Sabbath as tithe, Sabbath as discipline, Sabbath as a fast, Sabbath as simply following a rule; Sabbath as gift and blessing, Sabbath as "joy-day" (in John Ortberg's parlance); Sabbath as breaking the bonds of putting faith in work and achievement, even Sabbath as an exercise in trusting God, which comes closer. But not Sabbath as an act of humility.

My relationship to the Sabbath has gone through a lot of different phases. When I was little, I never thought about it. Then there was a long period where I fasted from novels on Sunday (though I didn't think of it as fasting, at the time). Then I went through a phase where I tried to get all my homework done on Friday and if necessary Saturday; then some time after getting to Stony Brook, I started counting the day of rest as being from sunset Saturday to sunset Sunday, with the result that I would end up staying up really late Sunday to get homework done. I was keeping the Sabbath rigidly, in a practice that was still good but definitely tainted by a mix of fear and pride.

Then my attitude changed a lot, because I was absorbing the truth of my freedom in Christ. I think I was reading Hearing God and maybe also Celebration of Discipline or Into the Depths of God, all of which discuss listening to the Spirit instead of being tightly and mindlessly bound by rituals (which is what my personality drives me to). No longer knowing how to motivate Sabbath-keeping, I stopped altogether.

Then I went to IVCF's missions conference, Urbana, and read Mudhouse Sabbath, which talks about how the Jewish Sabbath is a day of celebration and community and good eating (not of austerity and fasting and constraint, as in traditional Protestant practice). That was an eye-opener, and it built the bridge in my mind between the teaching I've heard about taking a "joy day" and the Bible's descriptions of the Sabbath.

Lately I haven't been consciously practicing a day of rest. I have effectively been keeping a day of rest from work, because I spend almost all weekend with O., talking and reading and eating and cooking and sometimes watching movies (and last weekend, our (dating) anniversary, going to the Guggenheim and being enthralled by Kandinsky's colors). But I hesitate to call that time a Sabbath because it's not time devoted to God per se. Moreover, I'm not sure I can even call it a day of simple rest, because this semester, Saturday has often brought some emotional stress. Relationships are not about work, but they do require work. (So many intense conversations: sorting things out, finding out how much fear colors my emotional experience.)

Trusting God: that theme keeps coming back this semester. Trust and fear, the opposites that push me back and forth. I'm afraid of judgment, afraid of failure, afraid of being a bad person--and so I keep the Sabbath as an attempted good work. Or: I trust God to take care of my work, I trust God to know what's best for me, I trust God to give me good gifts--and I keep the Sabbath as an act of intimacy with my Father in heaven.

If anxiety is really about arrogance ("this has to happen my way, and what if it doesn't?" in Oswald Chambers' model), is there an element of pride in all my fear? Is my fear the fruit of trusting my own understanding rather than God's revelation? Maybe all trust is predicated on humility. To trust someone else, even God, is to submit myself to their reasoning and decisions, to believe they know and speak the truth. To trust God means to believe His statements about Who He is ("the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness"), rather than believing the lies about Him that my own faulty understanding spews forth.

Every Month

2010-12-08T22:07:00.003-05:00

I consider writing this poem every four weeks, and last month I actually figured out something to write, and this month I will actually post it, since I rather like it. But do understand, this is pretty much a first draft. Comments?

Like the smell of the grey sea when it races
up the shore, when it throws uprooted seaweed
onto the sand, when it sprays the cold boulders
and the sea gulls float on it, white birds buoyed
up and down, but not carried by the waves--

and like the smell of the damp earth
when the spade crunches into the soil
and lifts a dark mound into the sunny air
and the dirt tumbles down, black, and the worms
hide themselves futilely, as the gardener loosens the roots
of a chrysanthemum to plant it like a flame
burning against the black earth--

and like the smell of animal fat in the fire,
a sausage smoking and the grease dripping--

like salt and seaweed and decay
and like roots and earth and growth
and like fat and flame,
persistent as smoke in my hair and clothes--

Like that, crimson, the smell
of the moon's rule.

Waiting.

2010-12-05T13:39:00.003-05:00

The sun is glorious through the ragged edges of the clouds, as I wait for you. The cloud have deep gray bodies, soft and thick, tinted blueish, or maybe lavender. At their fringes, the light blazes through, burning the gray away to a brilliant white. The trees burst into twists and tangles of twigs closer by me, but the sky shows pale gold behind them. Hours of daylight remain but sunset is already hanging in the sky.

Inside, I am hanging, too, suspended in time, not space. When I feel this alone, I am not sure who to tell. When will you come? This is Sunday, but for me it is a cloudday. My tears have dried. My face, like the ground outside where the rain has not fallen, has clouds, fringes of sunlight, cracks of blue sky. But there is salt here, and the seed of a headache.

And finally, you have come, and now I do not know what to do.

Sleeping on the red-eye flight

2010-11-30T23:39:00.004-05:00

I am not a child
anymore
but in your arms
I am a baby still
and sleepy

When I cry out
from my dreams
I know you
will be here
to wake me

Catholicism's "deep puzzle" (Part 1)

2010-11-30T16:43:00.009-05:00

"Why sex plays such a large role in Catholic doctrine is a deep puzzle."
(Richard Posner, "Contraception and Catholicism")

Posner makes this comment in a blog posting that deals with Catholic policy & doctrine regarding contraception, and which treats the Catholic church as a "corporation" with "customers." In his essay, he remarks on several aspects of Catholic policy of sex: prohibition of contraception; belief that procreation is the primary reason for sex; requirement of abstinence for priests, nuns and monks; prohibition of "unnatural sex." He analyzes the development of Catholic doctrine as having evolved purely out of economic pressures, i.e., pressures to compete, attract and retain "customers," etc.

Posner's take is an interesting way of looking at it. But from my perspective as a Christian, it ignores the central fact that motivates Christian doctrine: the reality of God and of His revelation to humankind. Of course, the other dimension to my perspective as a Protestant Christian is that it seems totally plausible to me that many of the areas where Catholic doctrine diverges from my own beliefs have human/economic motivations behind them.

That said, I'd like to address the comment that I quoted at the start of this post, in which Posner makes the following claims:

Sex plays "a large role" in Catholic doctrine.
This large doctrinal role of sex is "a deep puzzle."

I find both of these claims a bit mystifying. First off, does sex really play a remarkably large role in Catholic doctrine? Secondly, if sex does play a large role in doctrine, is that really puzzling at all?

One way to look at the first question is to reframe it as: Is the role of sex in Catholic doctrine unusually great? So Catholics have many constraints around sex. Protestants do too! (The conservative ones, at least.) Jews do too! Hey, if we're going to complain about the Catholic endorsement of the "rhythm method" of contraception (avoid pregnancy by only having sex on infertile days of the month), what are we going to say about Orthodox Jewish laws about "family purity"? Would Posner say, "Why sex plays such a large role in orthodox Jewish doctrine is a deep puzzle?" I have no idea. Moreover, Muslims also have a great deal of doctrine related to sex. Ahem: Does Catholicism promise 40 virgins to the martyr in Paradise?? If we're talking about larger-than-average doctrinal roles for sex, don't you think that using sex as a motivation for martyrdom and entry into heaven is more remarkable than putting sharp constraints around the implementation of sex during life on earth? It seems far from clear to me that the role of sex is greater in Catholic doctrine than in other religions. (Which is not to say that the religions I just listed are a representative sample. They are the religions I am most familiar with. Feel free to comment on the role of sex in the doctrines of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Scientology, etc!)

In fact, the one standpoint from which it seems most clear to me that Catholicism's doctrines of sex would seem notably important, and surprisingly so, is the perspective of modern secularism. This is the perspective from which any doctrine pertaining to sex seems strange, intrusive, a relic of another era. This is the perspective in which sex between consensual adults is no one else's business. This is the perspective in which sex is all about personal pleasure and fulfillment--by which I do *not* mean that sex in this perspective is only about the physical; the pleasure and fulfillment could also be about emotional and social experience. The point I mean to make is that modern secularism provides the perspective in which sex is dramatically divorced from the family and from God, and thus the perspective from which sex seems irrelevant to religious doctrine.

[I wrote this all yesterday and then didn't post because I hadn't dealt with the 2nd issue: of whether it is "puzzling" for sex to play a large role in Catholic (or really, in any) doctrine. But I'm going to just post this now and write up the rest of my thoughts in a separate post.]

Dreams [Question of the Day]

2010-11-17T11:08:00.003-05:00

From the Questions blog:

Do you sometimes dream about your own death, or about facing life-threatening situations? What deadly perils turn up most often in your dreams? Do these dream perils overlap with your daytime worries, or do your dreams have their own special dangers that don't occur in the dayworld?

YES. All the freaking time. Scary people are constantly chasing me in my dreams, and I don't appreciate it!

Last night's dreams weren't nightmares per se, but there were definitely some nightmarish bits. For instance, I and some other people were being taken into the bowels of an aquarium because some friend who worked needed us to help him out with some unspecified thing. So we were walking through dark corridors, and passing through exhibits, and then we came to the exhibit for a giant spider. Why the aquarium had a giant spider, I have no idea. But there was the huge room for it, filled with a web made of ropes, thick black cables, and it was all dark, and we all just walked in.

The spider never actually made an appearance, but we stood around there for quite a while, and everyone else was totally nonchalant about it, but I shifting nervously, peering around but seeing nothing in the darkness, starting whenever the air moved.

And then we walked out without closing the enclosure behind us, and I encountered a magic lamp thing and a bunch of ink that had to go in it, and an eye-dropper, and a strange guy in a top hat who was associated with the lamp somehow, and it turned out that one of my companions was pretending to be someone she wasn't, and ...

So yes, that's how my dreams go. The perils in them are decidedly dream-dangers, though they never fail to convince me of their terrible reality.

It makes waking up a pleasant surprise, anyway.

Rhetoric, in global politics and in Paradise Lost

2010-11-10T19:04:00.004-05:00

"Part of the problem is that as countries go their own way, they are each arguing that they are acting for the greater global good." (From the NYT, "Challenges Await U.S. at Group of 20 Meeting")

Isn't that what we always do? We need to claim we are doing the right thing to draw others to our cause; we need to claim to be doing the right thing even to fully believe in our own cause. Justification is the foundation for any rhetoric, isn't it? Today in my English class, we were looking at the first book of Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Satan is rallying the fallen angels to "awake, arise" from the burning lake, and he announces his purpose to never do any good, only evil. My professor pointed out that in using the pre-established language--English, in Milton's poem--Satan can't help undermining his own argument. The language reflects the position (the reality) that God is good and Satan is choosing evil instead. Satan would be more insidious if he camouflaged his goals. Deceptive idealism is more potent than honest evil, methinks.

There's another issue with Satan's rhetoric, too. Satan says he is choosing to be always "contrary." This undermines his authority: if your identity and decisions rest on doing the opposite of what the other side does, then you are effectively still passive. This is an idea I've thought about quite a bit on my own, so it was great to hear it articulated by a professor in connection with literature! (I believe I've made the point before on this blog, with regard to stereotypes. If I refuse to do something purely on the grounds that it fulfills a stereotype about women, then I am still being controlled by sexism.)

Aaaand I have to go back to working on my thesis and reading the newspaper and buying groceries so I will conclude this rambling commentary.

Cameras [Question of the Day]

2010-11-08T19:55:00.005-05:00

The question at the Ten Thousand Questions blog today asks about your attitude toward being photographed. Funny they should ask that today, because this weekend I was photographed in a rather unusual way.

To clarify: it wasn't an unusual way for a photographer to take a picture; it was an unusual way for me to have my picture taken. You see, my darling sister is taking a photography class, and I was visiting her this weekend.

"Can I take photos of you?" she asked me.
"Sure!" I said.
At which point she added, "--naked?"
"What?"

As it turned out, "naked" meant 'shirtless but covered with a shawl.' So it wasn't the scandal she initially phrased it as. My innocent little sister, talking about naked photos and asking her subject if she was ready to strip...

We were in the studio at 10pm on a Saturday, after watching an artsy and quite lovely show on campus ("Dead Man's Cellphone"). The little college was quiet, and the first door we tried for the arts building was locked. When we did get inside, S. flicked on lights as we walked between walls covered in photographs, paintings, prints. In the studio, she turned on the lamps like giant flowers, unrolled a black backdrop, attached the camera to the tripod. Shirt off, scarf on; door latched, overhead lights off. It was cold, the air on my bare back. The black scarf was softer than I expected, and it draped nicely. I couldn't see too clearly with my glasses off, and perhaps oddly, this half-blindness made me feel more naked than my half-dressedness.

So I clutched the scarf, and peered around, watching my sister fiddle with the camera, and not quite being able to see what she was doing. Click, click, click. "Turn... Can you... Oh, right there." Click. Click. The studio and the set-up were foreign, but my sister with a camera? Entirely familiar. So, shirtless and scarf-wrapped, a camera capturing my naked back, in the winter studio, I was still at home. S. was taking pictures, and I was just the subject. The photographs would not be about me, but about the pictures they portrayed.

Disenchantment

2010-11-02T10:44:00.003-04:00

I have a passion for God and a passion for what God is doing with the small group(s) I'm leading/guiding and a passion for God to save the people I talk to. God has been leading me in new ways, and I have been listening in new ways. I just came back from a great weekend where God was so clearly present and working through Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, through the body of Christ gathered together, learning together, worshiping together.

And yet it is so hard for me to have faith in my chapter of Intervarsity. It is so hard for me to expect that I can receive or give anything at the large group gatherings. Why do I go to them? Is is routine? others' expectations? a sense of higher obligation? I can't say. Surely it's some combination of those, and other factors I can't really pin down. But as I have been freed, subtly and gradually, from the crushing sense of duty that circumscribes my actions so often, I have come to see how little I believe in the large group meetings. The fact is, I don't trust them. I don't trust that I will meet God there, I don't trust that the teaching there will be sound, I don't trust that I will even have meaningful interactions with people there.

I persist in believing and proclaiming that it is good to go there, and yet I can't say what I am so sure is good about it. Going to IV large group is an obligation for me. It is the Law: fellowship and corporate worship are good. But the Law is a burden, producing fatigue and resentment. I am not under the Law but under the Spirit, and yet the Spirit certainly has not transformed my attitudes and feelings in this area.

I used to feel that large group was good and enjoyable and that I learned things there. Now I am disenchanted with it and I can't really pin down why. I am afraid of the crowd of people, afraid of not knowing my place, afraid of judgment. And so I am afraid to give, lest everything be taken from me, and I don't even want to pray for God's blessing on the fellowship because I can't find it in myself to believe that He is present there.

Yet I know God is present, and I know He works there. I can't find it in myself, but all things are found in God. Help Thou my unbelief. Lord, teach us to pray.

Autumn

2010-10-28T17:23:00.002-04:00

The wind has scattered
oak leaves like hands
all across the sidewalk.
Shadows of the arching leaves
strain away from the sun
like desperate fingers.
The wind is still sighing.

Entertainment Tech.

2010-10-24T19:51:00.001-04:00

This product (from Microsoft!) sounds like pretty impressive tech. But it's ironic how the better technology gets, the more it resembles regular, real life that doesn't require technological mediation.

Sappho

2010-10-20T17:51:00.005-04:00

I've been reading a translation of the scattered fragments of Sappho's poetry that remain to the modern world, since my thesis mentor (who is a wonderful person) recommended Sappho to me, along with a volume of commentary on her. He said my poems reminded him of Sappho's, and that he thought I would like her. He was right, of course.

Many of the poems are striking. Some of them are particularly evocative because they are damaged. The manuscripts were burned or broken or otherwise maimed, so the translations have brackets everywhere--all along the left side, for instance, or sprinkled liberally throughout, as though the speaker were too shy to say everything out loud. Here is Guy Davenport's rendition of one fragment (§85):

heart
altogether
I can
[_______]
may be for me
throws back the light
[hand]some face
[_________]
caressed
[_______]

There is so much mystery in the ellipsis, like the mystery in a haiku. Reading these fragmented poems reminds me of trying to form an impression of person by overhearing snippets of their conversation, and by glimpsing them as they go about their day, but never sitting down with them to hear their story. Through the fragments, we see Sappho moving back and forth through life. We hear her cries, as though hearing a neighbor through the wall. We see her spinning and leaping, but only through the gaps in the fence. We can't see the pattern of her steps, and we can't ask her why she is celebrating. But we can see that she is dancing.

And then there are a few poems without any holes torn through their text (I think the introduction said we only have three complete poems of Sappho's), which are like brief, brutally honest conversations with a stranger who will tell you exactly how she is feeling right now, but doesn't trust you to actually care. Or they are like conversations with a dear friend who leaves out all the explanations and cuts to the chase, because she knows you know exactly what she is talking about.

I love them all. Some of them scare me, some of them charm me. Some of them tell stories that I don't have the courage to tell for myself. §65 from Davenport:

I.
Percussion, salt and honey,
A quivering in the thighs;
He shakes me all over again,
Eros who cannot be thrown,
Who stalks on all fours
Like a beast.

II.
Eros makes me shiver again
Strengthless in the knees,
Eros gall and honey,
Snake-sly, invincible.

How clearly she speaks! And yet her gods are not my gods, and she doesn't speak my language. She is a wild sister I can never meet.

TBA = to be absorbed

2010-10-20T10:58:00.002-04:00

"If God is for us, who can be against us?": If I'm in the right place with God, does it matter whether I do well on my Arabic quiz? I've been great in language classes all my life, but that doesn't mean that who I am is the person who does well in language classes.

"You, however, are controlled not by the flesh but by the Spirit... Those who are led by the Spirit are sons of God." There isn't supposed to be a Spirit-led part of my life and a self-led part of my life (or rather, an anxious part of my life). If I really let the Spirit lead me, God will also lead me about how much sleep to get, whether it's really a good time to cook dinner, how long to study for Arabic quizzes, and whether to hang out with someone when really all I want to do is get some time to be still.

"Just a closer walk with Thee"--All I need is You, Lord, "and all these things will be added to me as well."

[This blog gives such a bipolar depiction of my life... Oh well, it's the nature of a fragmentary record.]

Slippery Slope

2010-10-19T22:49:00.003-04:00

How do I do this to myself? With a few words, the slide begins. Soon, I've slipped and skidded down an hour, or two. The time melts as I slide down, like snow under a sled (like snow that creeps into my clothes and melts inside). I flail my arms, kick gripless feet, and keep sliding. Past the stark black trees, past the evergreens, I spin and roll. When I finally land at the bottom of the slope, I fall immediately to sleep.

[Arabic HW:] Fez

2010-10-18T20:42:00.002-04:00

[I had Arabic homework to watch two YouTube videos about the street food in Fez, Morocco, and comment on various things mentioned. For whatever reason, I felt like posting what I wrote up in a place that someone would actually read it... Is it strange that I do a better job on the writing for assignments like this, which assuredly isn't going to be graded on its writing quality, than on assignments like my psych paper (well, a 2-page summary & reflection) where it seems like the writing quality should actually matter?]

These two video segments introduced a number of Moroccans from every walk of life: from the professor of linguistics and gender studies (Dr. Fatima Sadiqi) to the man who started selling street food because he couldn't find any other job (Nourdine Alyazami); from the women supporting their families by working in bakeries (such as the bakery run by Soumaya Benkirane), to Jean Pierre Dehut, the largest wine-producer in Morocco; from Danielle Mamane, a Jewish woman whose family fled the Inquisition in Spain, to the Sufis who sit in a circle representing the universe, with the couscous they are all sharing placed symbolically in the center.

Each of these inhabitants of Fez showed some distinctive Moroccan dish, whether it was Lahcen Beqqi's lamb tajine (which looked delicious), the Sufi gathering's couscous, the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal (chickpeas, potatoes with eggs, two or three types of meat, rice or wheat), or the dried meat topped with grease that the rapper Adil Idrissi pointed out to the video's hostess. These diverse encountered illustrated the rich variety in history of Fez, a city where ancient and modern mingle. Fez was established at the end of the 8th c. by the great grandson of Mohammad, and it was the capital of Morocco until French colonial authorities relocated the central government to Rabat. Today, Fez is considered the "culinary capital" of Morocco, as well as its "spiritual heart," according to the video.

Despite its rich heritage, however, Fez today is economically strained, with a very high unemployment rate. Some inhabitants of Fez have found a source of income from food: they sell street-food, or they work in bakeries, or even in the incongruous wine-industry. Others work in the foul-smelling but high-paying tannery, where cow hides are softened with pidgeon dung and dyed with mint, henna, saffron.

The comment on gender-roles was very interesting to me--that women are breaking out of their traditional confinement in the home, but without breaking out of their traditional role as preparers of food, nurturers. This struck me as a graceful transition, contrasting with the aggression and discontentment that seem to me to characterize American feminism. (Granted, there wasn't an extensive discussion of this issue in the video.)

The Sufi circle around the round plate of couscous was also very interesting to me. I thought it was really poignant that they feed each other. The symbolism is its own spice and savor, I think: if I were to taste just one of the dishes in the video, I'd like to try that couscous.