Reflective Listening (Literal Edition)

Yesterday, I invented a new technique for communication in our marriage: the hand-held mirror.

The need for a mirror arises from the fact that people are not always aware of what their facial expressions look like. We may not even be aware that our facial expressions have deviated from neutral and relaxed. In these moments, it may be helpful to literally reflect the face to the face-maker. Enter the hand-held mirror.

O. and I are both guilty of making daunting faces without realizing it. For instance, I sometimes make faces that seem condemning or judgmental to O., and scare him. But it's more common for O. to inadvertently scare me with his face. I believe this is due to O.'s expressive Mediterranean features: eyebrows that like to spend a lot of quality time snuggled together, nostrils that take in all the scents of the world. Strong jaw. Any tension draws O.'s eyebrows together, flares his nostrils, and tenses his jaw. From his innocent inner perspective, he is making Stone Face, which is stiff but not threatening. But the outward reality is that this facial expression would be, for anyone else, an Angry Face. And actually, since O. tries not to scare me by making Turkish Angry Face ("I kill you now!") when he is angry, the face he makes when he is angry is typically the so-called Stone Face. In other words, Stone Face is Angry Face, even if that's not how O. intends it.

O. found it hard to believe that Stone Face was scary looking. So I whipped out the hand-mirror. Hilarity ensued as O. tried to construct his typical tense face. I was focused on the eyebrows, which can be quite terrifying by themselves, but O., perceptive man that he is, remembered the contribution of his nose. "Do I usually flare my nostrils at you?" Adding the flared nostrils, O.'s countenance became truly fearsome to behold. Up came the mirror, and O. beheld Angry Face.

"Wow, that is scary!" he said.

Then Angry Face collapsed and was reborn into Laughing Face, and we burst into giggles together.

Thank God for mirrors. We're going to keep this one by the couch now, and in scary parts of the conversation, when I am choking for words because my body has gotten too tense to think anything except shhh-- be very quiet-- don't move-- maybe he won't see you-- (a reaction which only makes O. more upset), I won't have to think of words. I will grab the mirror and let it reflect O.'s face to him, and then I'll just listen for the moment when he realizes how scary his face has gotten, and laughter replaces tears.

We'll see how this goes.

[p.s. The Angry Face is compounded by way O.'s voice drops an octave when he gets angry or defensive. Unfortunately it also drops when he is nervous or concentrating hard, giving my Anger Detector a lot of false positives.]

Accusation

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

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.

Life Questions

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.

Mountain-Biking

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.

Enemy

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.

Speak Up

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.

Resolutions

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.

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

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.

Disenchantment

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.

[Tuesday is Fireday in Japanese]

One unfortunate word, and a handful of ill-starred incidents; one frightened girl, and a hundred conversations that burst into flames when her eyes were closed. She doesn't dare blink anymore, and her eyes are drying out.

But eventually, she has to sleep, and when she does, she dreams.

She sees the wildfires through her eyelids. Before she even wakes up, she is running. Before the spark is even struck, she is running: all it takes is the tinderbox, the flint. The grass on the golden hills is dry. It rustles and cracks as she passes through. She sprints across the slope, staggers, sobs. The heat of the sun is strong on her skin. Summer is stuck here, caught in the long grass. The sun is a hole burnt through the hard blue sky.

She doesn't look back, the girl who keeps running and tumbling, squeezing her eyes shut. She doesn't want to see. She hears the roaring of the conflagration in her ears, though she's not sure: is it her blood pounding, her heart crackling? The merciless sky doesn't soften. She feels it glare down on her, and she won't meet its gaze. This is another reason she keeps her eyes closed, when she can.

Finally she falls. Scraped palms, scratched knees, lungs grabbing the air, she finally opens her eyes. Heat waves squiggle over the hills behind her, and a haze of cloud drifts there. She is too far away now to see if the cloud is smoke, if heat is streaming up from licking flames. She is too far away to tell if the fire she saw with her eyes closed ever burned through her skin to set the hills ablaze.

She blinks, and the flames kiss her again, and she vows never to sleep anymore, or at least not to dream. But you can only watch for so long. The spark will fly in her mind again soon, and she will wear her feet out running.

Prosaic, Poetic

Poetry has been eluding me lately, or I have been eluding it--avoiding its stare, not answering when it calls my name in the dark.

Sometimes I don't feel like talking to you, Poetry, my friend. You have known me so long that I am afraid sometimes of what you will say to the person I have become. Or is it, more charitably, that I assume you know already everything in my heart?

But I need the illumination of your images--I type this in the dark, eyes shut. See, even now I will not meet your gaze. I am bent over, forehead on my feet. I have folded myself like one of those paper cranes I have been making since I was four years old--angles, creases, flattened and reshaped. Like them, I am a simple square, if you unfold me--creased, maybe, or crinkled, and patterned with colors and designs. Still, unfold me and smooth me out and I am just this single layer of paper. A square is clean and crisp, but meaninglesss.

That is what I fear, when I avoid you, Poetry. I am afraid you'll unfold me and reveal that my inside is a void. What if, inside, I am just hollow?

I don't want to be empty.

When I trust you and listen to you--when I sit down and sip tea with you in the comfortable chairs that offer to swallow me in their huge embrace (instead of turning away from your voice to run through the corridors of other people's stories)--when I hand over the keys and the combinations to all my locks, and you open the doors and cupboards and boxes and drawers, one by one, and shine your lamp inside them: they aren't really empty. Even if they were, you would fill them with good things, Poetry, my generous friend. You are light, not darkness. I forget sometimes. Forgive me.

I will come sit at your feet once more, and listen to your stories. You will sing me the songs of my heart, the music you hear through your stethoscope. You'll show me the snapshots of my journeys, pictures you took when I thought you had abandoned me, now arranged and preserved, ephemeral moments captured for my perusal. You'll feed me a hot meal, with plenty of vegetables, and make sure I'm satisfied. Yes, you are my friend, I do know this.

I'll come visit soon, I promise. Wait for me. Answer the door when I finally knock. And for the moment, remind me of the directions to your house.

"Walk with me quiet, walk with me slow"

Incoherent negotiations, a hug goodnight, and I'm out the door, down the stairs, pulling on my jacket. Night soaked up the day's warmth while I was inside, and, still thirsty, it sucks heat from me. The campus is deserted at this hour on a Monday, and the unexpected chill of the air matches the unexpected unease that seeps into me. Here I am alone, walking in the dark. The streetlights cast my shadow on the ground before me, a slight figure fringed by the shades of my hair fluttering in the cool.

Under the lamps, boys in baseball caps and backpacks wait for the bus. My road leads away, half a mile between the trees. I shiver, and wish you were with me. Irrational, but I feel abandoned. What's the use of a warm hand on my back when we're inside in the light? Now that the cold has wrapped around me, I need a warm arm, a solid presence. But you are back there in the building, so I walk home alone. I feel so small in this vast night.

But I get back safe, and later you apologize for not looking out for me, and I know that in the bright morning, the fear I felt walking tonight will seem as distant, as inconceivable, as the darkness that permeates the world now.