amateur believer

word

2011-01-24T11:11:00.000-08:00

When the devil counsels Jesus to turn stones into bread after those forty days in the wilderness without eating, Jesus remarks that “People do not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4 TNIV). Or, in the King James Version—which I’m trying to make a habit of visiting this year to commemorate the 400th anniversary of its publication—“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”

It’s such a strange and, for me, unsatisfying statement, especially when I consider it in light of the physicality of the description—wilderness, stones, bread, hunger, mouths. It’s hard for me to imagine not eating for forty days. I’m guessing that long of a fast in a rocky wilderness would make every stone a loaf in one’s imagination. How can mere words allay such a hunger?

For us, the meaning of Jesus’ temptation story may be largely symbolic—or, in any case, not directly applicable to actual hunger, actual rock-fantasies, actual bread, but rather temptations of a more general and less physical nature. After all, who among us is likely to end up starving to death in a desert littered with stones? If you are like me, you have probably never experienced genuine hunger, and, even if you had, your temptations would not lie in the realm of feeding yourself. But, for Jesus, who was 100% man—emptied out of his divinity, if I understand Philippians 2:7 aright—and actually in these circumstances, without food for forty days in an actual wilderness littered with stones, this sentence means differently.

So, I was thinking about that. About words from God’s mouth assuaging the direst hunger, feeding a person—indeed, engendering and nourishing and sustaining life itself. And so I got to thinking about the whole concept of words as food—specifically, the detail of our original design that words exit from the place where food enters—and the startling image of being fed directly from God’s mouth. Mouth-to-mouth feeding, so to speak, a method of nourishment that mothers of small children practiced in prehistoric times and still do to this day in some cultures but that, in contemporary Western culture, many find disgusting (even though, interestingly, we have no objection to kissing and other mouth-body exchanges).

In any case, the first thing that came to my mind in reflecting on our food coming from God’s mouth was not mothers prechewing their babies’ food but, of course, the mouth-to-mouth feeding that I witness every spring and summer in my yard. The barn swallows that build their nest in the eaves of our house feed their young in exactly that way. The little babies sit waiting all day with their enormous mouths wide open, while both parents bullet back and forth across the yard: foraging frantically, racing back to the nest, dropping a bit in each mouth, going for more. This goes on for weeks, right up until the fledglings swoop down from nest themselves and fly away.

I often see male cardinals feeling full-grown female cardinals. It’s called mate feeding and is a common practice in many bird species. Scientists disagree about its purpose. Some suppose it provides food while the female is too preoccupied with the activities of childbearing—building a nest, brooding, and raising her young—to have much time left over to get food on her own. Others say it provides needed additional nutrition as her body prepares to produce offspring. Still others argue that, since mate feeding occurs not only when the female is nesting but throughout the breeding season, it may help the female decide on a mate: the male that provides for her, or perhaps finds the delicacies she likes best, is the one she will choose. It may, on the other hand, be a courting ritual that keeps the two birds together longer—and thus likelier to produce more and healthier offspring. And it could also simply be in certain male birds’ genes to feed others in general—babies, eligible girlfriends, mates, whoever.

I once saw a male cardinal feeding a full-grown female brown-headed cowbird. The weirdest thing ever. She just sat there on a branch while he went back and forth to the feeder, got her another bite, and another, for close to an hour. If they hadn’t kept it up for so long and if I hadn’t Googled and found others describing the same amazing event, I would have thought I imagined it. (The explanation, in case you aren’t up on your birds, is that cowbirds lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, so females—and, presumably, pairs—grow up thinking they’re of the same species and thus viable mates. As far as I know, though, cardinals and cowbirds can’t produce offspring together.)

Back, though, to being fed words from God’s mouth. To summarize, the notion of eating anything that, as the KJV rather graphically describes it, “proceedeth out of” another’s mouth is a bit repellent. But the birds have shown me the implicit caring—love even—at the root. God’s Word—or God’s words, as I like to undo this expression for the Bible—becomes actual nourishment that enables me to grow and leave the nest and, eventually, share words with others.

In the passage from scripture that Jesus is quoting from while he is being tempted, Moses, having just issued the Ten Commandments (words), reminds the Israelites of an important connection between wilderness, hunger, bread, and words. “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years,” he tells them. “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that people do not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 8:2,3 TNIV).

Although Jesus quotes the passage using a word for “word” common in the Greek of the New Testament, the same word in the original Hebrew passage (מוֹצָא, motsa—it rhymes with matzoh, the Jewish unleavened bread, but is not the same word) is relatively rare, appearing only twenty-seven times in the entire Old Testament and translated as the English word word only in this one instance. Everywhere else it means something along the lines of “that which comes out.”

We don’t live from bread—or mannah or matzoh or any other nourishment we think essential to life—but from that which comes out of God. God’s breath, originally. God’s words, thereafter, which culminate in God’s son, the Word.

The prophet Jeremiah previewed what should be our response to this mystery. He says to God,

When your words came, I ate them;
they were my joy and my heart’s delight. (Jeremiah 15:16)

Like those baby swallows in the nest, he sat open-mouthed, hungry, desperate to be fed.

so

2011-01-17T04:55:00.000-08:00

Every so often I start out on a new plan of reading the Bible daily. Usually, such resolutions last a couple of weeks or months and then peter out. Then follows a spiritual dearth, eventually jolted into vibrancy by some close-by tragedy. Then a renewed resolution to read daily.

I can never seem to get the bookness of The Book out of my head, and I always start at the beginning. Consequently, I have read the first chapters of Genesis probably a hundred times, always with the same desire for new enthusiasm. And the story of the beginning of everything never disappoints me. I cannot exhaust this book, not even the first chapter. I always find something new and important in it.

Today it is this. God rests on the seventh day only after he has completed his work of creating. Rest, in other words, follows directly from the completion of work. Here’s the passage: “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” (Genesis 2:1-2 TNIV, my emphasis)

It would be nice if I could argue the causality evident in this and a few other translations—that God was finished working, so he rested. Unfortunately, however, most translations that I have looked at translate that so as a mere and. Also, I did some research on the word used here—actually the ubiquitous Hebrew morpheme waw, which, added to a verb, links it to a previous verb—and I discovered that Hebrew linguists (read: biblical researchers with agendas) fight wrathfully over whether the word actually implies causality or mere sequentiality and they use their theories to argue such hot theological topics as evolution vs. creationism and what, exactly, God's promised rest is and other questions of importance to them. In this particular passage, for example, the waw-question is whether God ever finished resting and moved on to some other work or rather, as a passage in Hebrews suggests, having finished his work, continues to rest to this day. I don’t want to get into that waw stew, nor am I equipped to do so.

Let me say this, though, from my entirely unschooled reading of the Genesis writer's overview of the creation story (which for me begins in the first chapter and ends with the third verse of the second chapter): God only rested when he had finished his work.

This is a totally new idea for me. Revolutionary, even. And worth looking at closely.
Not having finished my work is my main resting deterrent. I wake in the night worrying about some part of my current work that I have yet to do or that I forgot to do or that I was in the middle of doing when I went to bed.

Also, I have an abiding sense of never being finished with my work. Never. As soon as I have finished some consuming project—grading a pile of essays, for example, or writing a chapter of my current book—I am suddenly overwhelmed, it seems to me, with all the other things I wasn’t able to do while I was working. Exercising. Grocery shopping. Taking my mother-in-law grocery shopping. Buying Charlotte a steamer so that she'll feel more motivated to eat vegetables (her idea). Patching the pair of jeans Lulu wanted me to fix for her. Gardening (spring is on the horizon, and for spinach and peas, it's now or never). Spring cleaning. Soon, within minutes, I think, I am making to-do lists and seized with stress. How will I ever get it all done?

Judging from the number of books out there on the subject of rest, I suspect many share my problem. Not long ago I read one such book called Sabbath Keeping, by Lynne Baab. It was a good how-to book on the Sabbath: inviting, rather than prescriptive, for the most part, with exercises at the ends of the chapters that really made me examine the stress of my life and desire opportunities for respite. I found it particularly challenging that the sort of activity Baab recommends against doing on the Sabbath was accomplishing anything—that is, getting something done, even if it’s something you enjoy. If you find yourself thinking, I just need to finish..., then whatever would finish the sentence is a bad choice for the Day of Rest. Sabbath keeping, for the most part, became another job, of sorts: the daunting task of sacrificing one’s desire to get done.

I don’t know and honestly don’t care if God has finished his rest and moved on to another project—although my guess is that, in the spirit of Ecclesiastes, God’s rest and work come in spells, seasons, a time for each. But I do know this: God did not get stressed immediately upon completing the creation of the world and everything in it. He rested. Ceased, as the word is translated in some versions of the Bible. He stopped working. Stopped thinking about it—about the plants and animals and creatures of the sea and sky, each according to its kind. Stopped looking at it. Stopped talking about it. Stopped blessing it and calling it good, probably, since those actions appear to be key elements of God's creative work.

God could have taken naps here and there throughout the process. He could have slogged through it, as I often do at the computer, making himself a cup of tea with which to pretend to rest while he continued working. Instead, he finished his work completely. And then, for some unknown period of time, he stopped. Totally. Entirely. Gloriously.

Think of it. Stopping. It is hard for me even to imagine. I envision a sensory deprivation tank, in which I am forcibly prevented from accomplishing anything, and the thought nauseates me. Not just the forcible part or the nasty microbes and fungi that probably live in those tanks. Not the claustrophobia or the metallic smell of the water or the dark. Simply the inactivity. The helplessness of it.

Some part of me longs for it, though. For resting that comes as a natural consequence of being done, rather than as an artificial or sacrificial activity of its own. Resting that is not something I do, but something that just happens, like how, when we were first married, Kris and I used to sink into the most refreshing sleep at night after a long day of weaning calves and trucking the bulls to the sale barn. Or after raking and baling a field. Or after spearing the bales, one by one, onto the bale trailer, then toting them off to wherever we were storing them that year and, one by one, lining them up in tidy rows for the winter.

Something about farming was conducive to the kind of rest I’m thinking God takes. Getting done. Perhaps it’s because the tasks of farming are so much like God's work in the first place. Globbing everything together into a formless dark mass of cattle or cut grass. Separating them into male and female, young and old, fescue and good clover, windrows and bales, square bales and round bales, each according to their kind. Looking at them. Blessing them. Pronouncing them good. Getting our check at the end of the day, or knowing the cows would have plenty to eat when the weather got cold.

Getting done, totally done, I'm thinking, is the key to rest. Not just stopping. Before we can honor the Sabbath—an act of holiness so important in the old law, mind you, that not honoring the Sabbath was punishable by death—we have to actually finish what we're doing. How to do that is my next struggle, in the area of rest. But for now, it’s just good to be finished thinking about it.

placebo

2011-01-12T04:57:00.000-08:00

I have been marveling over—which is to say, doubting—a bit of recent health news: 59% of people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome who knew that, as part of a study, the doctor was merely giving them sugar pills for their condition reported relief from their symptoms. There are so many ways to interpret these findings. That merely being paid attention to by a doctor has a curative effect. Or that taking action about a medical problem—even if the action is merely participating in a study in which one is given sugar pills—tells the body to heal, and the body pays attention. That, by extension, taking action about any problem, no matter what the action is, has a potential curative effect. Or, the doubting side of me says, maybe Irritable Bowel Syndrome is not a physiological condition at all but a psychological one. Or maybe it's indeed a physiological ailment that tiny amounts of sugar somehow addresses. The only real conclusion I have so far come to is that the brain is a mystery. Such a mystery.

Somewhere in the course of my ponderings, though, I looked up the etymology of the word placebo. Whoa! It is the first word of a response in Latin that mourners repeat in a traditional Catholic service for the dead and came to refer to the whole service. The response itself is the Latin Vulgate translation of Psalm 116:9, “Placebo Domino in regione vivorum,” which in English is “I will please the Lord in the land of the living.” This is also how the line was translated in the Douay-Rheims, a Catholic Bible translation based on the Vulgate that was published around the same time as the King James Version. In most other translations—all Protestant translationsi as well as the New American Standard version currently popular among Catholics—the verse reads something like “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.”

How the word placebo came to mean what it means today is a curious tale. Apparently, people crashed funerals in medieval times, and these people came to be called, derisively, “placebo singers,” because they sang that repeated response in simulation of mourning in order to get at the food the mourning family provided. From there, with help from Chaucer, the word came to be used more generally in reference to flatterers and freeloaders and eventually to any pretence designed to “please” someone else—which in medicine would mean, as placebo is defined in my American Heritage Dictionary, “A substance containing no medication and given merely to humor a patient.”

I’d like to commit a semantic anachronism—a bad habit of people who preach, for example, that since our English word hilarious comes from the Greek word for cheerful, hilaron, then it must be that God loves a “hilarious giver” in 1 Corinthians 9:7—and read that weird Douay-Rheims translation of Psalm 116:9 as “I will humor God in the land of the living.” Such an odd idea, putting one over on God, but I kind of think that’s what I’m often trying to do. Singing placebo. And God knows it. And, incomprehensibly—as incomprehensibly as knowingly taking a placebo can cure Irritable Bowel Syndrome, as incomprehensibly as our brains work—God interprets my song as all the righteousness I’ll ever need.

Indeed, singing placebo is the essence of the verse on which I sailed into faith—“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1 TNIV). As in this verse, when one knowingly takes a placebo, hoping and knowing become synonymous, and—inexplicably—we are cured.

choose, choosing, choice, chosen

2011-01-03T06:25:00.000-08:00

Last night my 17 year old daughter Lulu and her friend and I discussed wealth. I had heard part of an NPR broadcast on the subject and was intrigued when some wealth scholar discussed historical differences in how wealth worked. Previously, people used to amass wealth and then live from it. So, as I pointed out, in Jane Austen novels, people were routinely described in terms of how many pounds a year they lived from. Their base income defined them, but they seemed to live pretty nearly the same lives as those with less. The broadcast went on to say that the wealthy these days, by contrast, must keep buying more and bigger houses and yachts and so on. These things—not the money they live from—define them. These things also place them outside the life of ordinary people. They live a life removed.

Another expert on the broadcast pointed out that, though the U. S. is so wealthy that even our poorest would be seen as rich by global standards, nevertheless, no matter how much money they have, Americans generally consider, not themselves, but only those who make twice as much as they do to be wealthy. Thus, none would refer to themselves as "wealthy."

I told the teenagers that from now on I was going to regard myself as and call myself rich. After all, I enjoy a house, daily showers in hot water, virtually any food that I can think of (and find ingredients for, here in the Oklahoma countryside), the leisure to run 21 miles a week, a gorgeous vista of fields and trees and birds from my living room (aka office) window, several dependable sources of income (jobs, husband's job, savings), and so much more that I can’t begin to list it all.

To my surprise, Lulu—who, like most teenagers and many adults in my acquaintance, seems frighteningly acquisition-minded—ardently agreed. In her Western Civilization class—which she disparagingly referred to as her “Bible study,” because her Christian professor often discusses matters of faith—she had studied what she called the “seven cardinal virtues,” companions to the seven deadly sins. One of them, she said, referenced just such views on wealth as I was expressing (who knew?!) but she couldn’t remember the word for it, so this morning, while she slept, I did some research.

Temperance was probably the word she was looking for, and it’s a good one. But my research brought me to a broader expression of the notion as one of the more encompassing “four cardinal virtues,” prudence. The word has a history as meaning not caution but something more like practical wisdom and was seen by Greeks as well as medieval Scholastics as the root of all virtue: the ability to choose wisely.

Choose is such an interesting word. It is about what we take from what is around us. It speaks of lesser and greater options, of freedom. Things that are especially luxurious are called choice. And, beneath the surface of all chooosing lies rejection. In the context of faith the word choose references all those meanings and more.

I think of Mary’s stressed out sister Martha versus Mary herself, listening and resting at Jesus’ feet, having, as Jesus said, “chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42). Mary was certainly prudent, a good steward of her wealth.

But then there’s the term “God’s chosen people” and how offensive that sounds to any who do not regard themselves as such—the rejected. Also, there's the whole concept of election—a fancy theological word for some Christians' belief that the saved are "chosen" by God and cannot choose God for themselves, sort of the spiritual opposite of seeking—and Jesus’ cryptic parable of the king’s son’s wedding banquet which those who were invited were all too busy to attend. So, the king sends for the people of the street, “the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests” (Matthew 22:10). Everything sounds good up to this point, but then, of these new guests, one forgot to wear his wedding clothes and is bound hand and foot and thrown “outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22:13). For, Jesus explains, “many are invited, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14). I get really worried about what I'm wearing (at this moment, still, to my shame, my nightgown and housecoat—more evidence of my great wealth!) whenever I think about this story.

“I chose you,” Jesus is always reminding his twelve main followers, emphatically reminding them in John 15:16, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” The rest of the followers, though, seem to choose Jesus on their own, by my reckoning, sometimes going out of their way to do so. Zacchaeus climbs a tree. The Roman centurion (an officer in charge of one hundred soldiers, in case you’ve always wondered, as I have, what that word meant exactly) sends a servant. The Canaanite woman with the demon-possessed daughter runs after Jesus and wails, so embarrassing and outraging the disciples that they want to send her away. Even after Jesus himself rejects her, saying “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 15:24), she kneels in the dirt before him and begs and reasons and counters his own arguments and eventually gets what she wants. And Jesus describes her behavior—the wailing and begging and reasoning and arguing; in short, her persistent choosing—as “great faith” (Matthew 15:28).

sanctimonious

2010-12-29T15:12:00.000-08:00

One of my most pernicious sins—aside from plain old meanness, to which I'm prone from time to time and for which I have myriad rationalizations, which I won't go into just now, though I'm tempted—is sanctimony. Defined in most dictionaries as feigned piety or righteousness, the word has nothing to do with pretense in my private lexicon. Rather, it is the overwhelming sense of my own moralness, often in the face of someone else's misery or despair.

I will lay it before you. When confronting a tragedy of some unknown unfortunate, my default inner response appears to be not pity or compassion or even that most generous of pomposities, indifference. Instead, a sticky, unswallowable sanctimonious ooze of fills me, collecting like snot in my sinuses in the night. However arduously my soul within me moves and twists, however hard I gasp for a breath of genuine love, sanctimony oozes and seeps, filling the passageways of the spirit and choking me with the unlovable lovelessness of thinking others’ miseries earned and myself—for not being like that—holy by comparison.

The word sanctimony is a strange one. In English, it is used almost exclusively in its adjective form, sanctimonious. Etymologically, it derives from the Latin cognate sānctimōnia, which means, simply, sanctity or holiness. The English word sanctimonious was used that way for many centuries, until it acquired, notably via Shakespeare in Measure for Measure, its current disparaging sense as not sanctity but hypocritical sanctity, not holiness but holiness feigned, not righteousness but a show of righteousness.

Many words that once denoted sanctity have become similarly disparaged in contemporary usage, but sanctimonious is the worst of all. Few these days like to be called "pious" or "righteous," but none want to be called "sanctimonious."

And rightly so, I would argue. The sense of one’s own relative holiness is poison to every holy impulse. And hypocrisy seems lamentably inherent in every conscious holy act.

Nor is sanctimony constrained to those who wcall themselves Christians. Many of my nonbelieving friends and acquaintances wax sanctimonious in matters of social justice or green living or animal rights or whatever happen to be their personal holinesses.

As for my own sanctimony, I wish there were some solvent to dissolve it or at least break it up some and let it sink below my breathways to join the other wastes I produce until the glorious day when it all passes from me entirely.

selah

2010-08-09T16:14:00.000-07:00

I really like that there are untranslatable words in scripture. For one thing, they make you slow down and speculate and consider—which is, in fact, one of several ways scholars propose we understand the biblical word selah, an untranslatable word used 71 times in 39 of the Psalms, many of which begin with reference to the musical nature of the psalm, and 3 times in the song that concludes the short book of Habakkuk. (That Habakkuk’s final prayer was meant to be sung is clear from a concluding reference to the director of music and intended instrumentation.) The term may have some musical meaning—like “pause here” or “descendo” or “insert bridge”—that has since been lost. Or it may mean always, which is how it was translated in certain key ancient translations. Its meaning may also draw upon its apparent etymology in the Hebrew word for hang.

All these possibilities come together, it seems to me, in the way I—and, I’m guessing, many modern readers—hear the word as they read through one of those unsung songs of scripture. Selah sounds like exhaled breath, a musical suspension meaning “Hang onto that thought.” Selah seems like the most wise and natural commentary one could make on the nature of the things of this world. It reads like a sigh.

That’s, in any case, how the word seems to operate in reggae songs and in the nostalgically apocalyptic songs of Leonard Cohen I’ve been listening to of late—that is, as sighs or groans in response to a world beyond understanding.

Scriptural sighing also calls to mind, for me, Paul’s intriguing depiction of the Holy Spirit translating the groans of all creation “through wordless groans” (Romans 8:26) as well as Jesus’ frequent exhalations—in his interactions with those around him and in breathing his last upon the cross. In a favorite passage of mine, Jesus sighs in prayer:

Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of
Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis. There some people brought to him a
man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged Jesus to place his hand
on him.

After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his
fingers into the man's ears. Then he spit and touched the man's tongue. He
looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, "Ephphatha!" (which means
"Be opened!"). At this, the man's ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and
he began to speak plainly. (Mark 7:31-35)

Ephphatha. Try to say that word aloud, and you will hear that deep sigh that housed it—a different sound from selah but somehow the same. Selah. Ephphatha.

And that’s the biggest reason why I like untranslatable scriptural words so much. They mimic the wordless, word-hostile nature of our deepest prayers. Groans, as Paul says, “as in the pains of childbirth” (Romans 8:22). I remember those exhalations as simultaneously buoyant and unbearable, a joyous agony, an explosion of wordlessness. I felt opened.

test

2010-08-04T17:40:00.000-07:00

Abraham’s spiritual journey was not the steady climb from unbelief to ardent and abiding faith and holiness that I expected to enjoy when I first became a Christian. Not the ever growing devotion to God that seemed likely to make me into one of the “godly” men and women of the congregation—ancient and tireless workers and greeters and “prayer warriors”—that the pastors of churches I attended in those days were always pointing out to the rest of us sinners. Rather, for Abraham, as for me, the journey Godward comprised a series of miniscule ascents in his direction interrupted by deep descents and long flat periods of not paying attention and getting lost, the whole forming a course as jagged as an electrocardiogram.

Abraham’s moments of faith are provisional at best—and far less compelling, story-wise, than his frequent excursions into faithlessness. When God initially tells him to leave his country, his people, and his father’s household and go to Canaan, Abram responds with the partial obedience that characterizes his whole story. He leaves, but he takes his people and father and his father’s household with him. They head for Canaan, but settle in Haran before they get there. When Abram’s father dies, Abram does finally go where God directs him, but he leaves soon after—for Egypt, for the Negev, or for wherever it is wily Lot decides not to go when the land can no longer support them both. Abraham seems, in fact, to allow anyone but God to direct his wanderings.

Abraham meets God’s other promise, that his descendents will outnumber the stars in the sky, with similarly qualified trust. Despite his wife Sarah’s barrenness and advancing age, he fleetingly believes the promise that she will yet bear children. Or, in any case, that’s what the text says, and God believes he believes it. But no sooner do we read those words on the page than we find Abraham attempting to choreograph the miracle by his own methods. He apparently doesn’t trust God to keep him alive long enough to father the promised children and instead tells lies that the beautiful Sarah is his sister and pimps her to the lusty Egyptians—a trick he later repeats to protect himself from the people of the Negev—to keep potential suitors from murdering him to get her. He also goes along with Sarah’s attempt to preempt God’s plan by having him sleep with her servant, Hagar. And, as if these indications of faithlessness are not enough, when the Lord’s angel announces that the promised child will arrive within a year, he snickers to himself—surely the most compelling gesture of unbelief imaginable, one for which Sarah is sternly reprimanded.

God himself, despite having acknowledged Abram’s faith early on, appears to doubt it later in Abraham’s life. After the visions and the smoking firepot with which God makes Abram “know for certain” (15:13) that what he says is true, after the name change to Abraham (“Father of Many”), after the household circumcision instituted as the covenantal affirmation of Abraham’s faith, after the miracle of Isaac’s birth, after all these signs that should have fortified and confirmed the faith that God has already acknowledged, God “tests” Abraham—that’s the word used in the text—by demanding in burnt sacrifice the very child he has said will engender the countless descendents he has promised. Then he waits to see what Abraham will do. And it is here, in an intricate story embedded in the intricate story of Abraham’s faithlessness, in a sentence or two liable to slip right past the inattentive reader, that we can glimpse what God must have seen in that moment early on when he commended Abram’s faith and accepted it in exchange for the righteousness we humans seem incapable of putting into practice.

Abraham tells his servants, at the end of what must have been the terrifying journey to sacrifice his son, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you” (22:5). Skeptical reader that I am, I understood Abraham’s promise to return, at first, to be mere subterfuge designed to prevent the servants from knowing what he was up to and perhaps interfering with his plan. What else could he say? “Stay here with the donkey while I go over there and sacrifice my son”? Abraham knew, I reasoned, that he would be returning alone, but he would surely not want to reveal his horrific plan to anyone else, not even to servants. So he lied. And after all, it’s not as if we haven’t already witnessed him lying.

Similarly, when Isaac, who is made to carry the wood for his own sacrifice and is probably a bit suspicious about the whole undertaking, asks, “Father. . . The fire and wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” (22:7), Abraham replies with what seems like another white lie: “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son” (22:8). I can imagine Abraham’s rationalization: Well, God did provide me with my little lamb of a son, Isaac . . . And, anyway, I can’t imagine what else he could have told Isaac, under the circumstances.

It’s instructive to consider the whole undertaking from God’s perspective, though. To look down from above on that miserable journey to a mountain in the region of Moriah that God said he would tell Abraham about: the funeral march there, sighting the spot in the distance, the horrifying ascent. Indeed, we can’t forget the other Father, watching, waiting, as Abraham struggled to believe and not to despair. “Against all hope,” Paul writes of our faith-father, “Abraham in hope believed” (Romans 4:18). Against all hope, he hoped himself forward. Step by step. Moment by moment. And God looked down on that hopeful, hopeless march from above, and he hoped, too, as any parent would, and forgot all of his child’s previous failures—the lack of trust, the misplaced fidelities, the weird attempts to take control. Listening and hoping from above, God heard only Abraham’s promises—that he and Isaac would both return to the waiting servants, that God himself would provide the sacrificial lamb—and he recognized them not as lies or even as the wistful hopes they probably were but as pure, solid faith. Faith as great as anyone could ever muster. As great as that of John the Baptist, who, while in prison and soon to be beheaded, sent to Jesus asking, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” Here is Jesus’ response to John’s question, to his endgame travesty of faith: “Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Matthew 11:11).

In other words, as tiny and imperfect as our faith might be, as weak our hope, God leans in and listens—not for our failure, not for yet more proof of our faithlessness, but for the realization of his own hope for us—that is, for the faith he himself provides, just as he provides everything else we need to be happy and healthy and safe. And when he finds it, he credits it to us as all the righteousness we are capable of accomplishing.

doing

2010-07-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

I am usually under stress, I discovered years ago when I went on sabbatical. It took the experience of rest to make me recognize its opposite.

In all of the jobs I have had, most of the women I have known have figured out when they are going to retire. They know the exact year, without having to figure it up when you ask them. Perhaps the men do as well, but it is the women who talk about retiring. They fantasize about it—fantasies I like to call job-icidal ideation, the primary symptom of a mental illness whose name I have not yet invented. It is a common mental illness, I think. Perhaps the most common of our culture.

Once, in a meeting of other professional women, I mentioned a sick fantasy I have about lying in a hospital bed, rendered suddenly stress-free by cancer or paralysis some other act of God. Probably some of my listeners were struggling with loved ones laid low by illness, I thought as I spoke, and I was regretting the words even as they emerged from my mouth. I often do this. Especially under stress. But the response of my listeners surprised me. They nodded. Vigorously. Several women said that they had had the very same fantasy. The hospital bed. The silence. The IV drip sustaining one effortlessly. Visits from family and friends only during visiting hours. The hushed messages of encouragement.

Perhaps the stress of reconciling the demands of home and work is not a gender thing, but I have read somewhere that working women, contrary to men, typically eat at their desks, still working, or else don’t lunch at all, and I have noticed that this is true of most of the women I know. They can’t stop working long enough to sit and joke around in the school cafeteria with our male colleagues and eat a decent lunch. I also don’t see them walking around with gymbags, as the men do. A few women work out, of course. They give up lunch to fit in aerobics or body pump. Or they get to school early early to join the morning class. I know because I have joined them, lunging and thrusting half awake through driving songs about love and power. What’s love got to do with it, do with it? Often I would find myself singing it as I rushed to class and then a core curriculum meeting and then back to my office to be there for the two hours we are required to set aside for our students each day. By then I am starving, so I make some microwave popcorn and eat it as I grade papers or prepare class for the next day.

Two of my female colleagues do go home for lunch. Both are about to retire. They go home for lunch, I like to imagine, in anticipation of the time when they will be able to rest and enjoy life every day.

While I was on sabbatical, I ate lunch. Outside, if it was nice weather. A salad fresh-picked from my garden, most times, dressed with the merest teaspoon of olive oil, a scattering of salt and sugar, and vinegar. I could see our dogs in the outer reaches of the yard, lounging in the sun.

“Here, Tessi! Here Erica! Moe dog, come here!” I called to them. But they just lay there, or loitered a bit nearer to my iron table and dozed off again.

Who knew that dogs spent the day sleeping? It’s true that all the aphorisms say they do—a dog’s life, let sleeping dogs lie—but I knew our dogs, before that year, only in attitudes of frenzy. Jumping up at me. Wanting fed. Tripping me in their excitement at getting to accompany me to the mailbox. In my year at home, I learned the secret of their perpetual good nature, and it is this: Dogs spend their days AND their nights at rest. They live, I have come to think, as God would have us live. At rest. Worry free. Not waking at 3 a.m. to write an essay, as I am at this moment, or fantasizing about having terminal diseases, but at peace with the world, saving their frenzy for something worthwhile. Fellowship. Food. A walk in the sun.

Kris and I have been reading Isaiah. It is a grim book, mostly, hard to enter first thing in the morning, which is when we typically do it: a list of bad things that will happen to this people or that, to us, if we don’t live the way God wants us to.

For the first twenty books or so, I understood this living right as the usual sort of righteousness we are called to follow: not worshipping idols or intermarrying with idol-worshipping foreigners, not staggering from wine or reeling with beer or being “heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks” (5:22—it’s really in there!), not making widows our prey or robbing the fatherless.

It was hard to get convicted by anything Isaiah said, I found. This is nothing new, though. Isaiah’s own listeners had the same problem. Even after Isaiah took to preaching in the nude, which you’d think would make anyone perk up and pay attention, his listeners just mocked his words.

Then we got to this electrifying passage in Chapter 28. Isaiah’s listeners are mocking him, babbling his words back to him like little children, just words in meaningless-sounding streams:

Do and do, do and do,
rule on rule, rule on rule,
a little here, a little there.

In Hebrew, the jumble of words sound even more mocking, like the meaningless sounds we make when we are mimicking someone we think a fool, as indeed some scholars think is what Isaiah is recording in this passage:

sav lasav sav lasav
kav lakav kav lakav

The passage is evidently difficult to decipher, as the various English Bibles come up with wildly different translations—but Isaiah’s response to his audience’s mockery clears it all up, to my view. “Very well then,” he tells them,

with foreign tongues God will speak to his people,
to whom he said,
“This is the resting place, let the weary rest”;
and, “This is the place of repose”—
but they would not listen.
So then, the word of the LORD to them will become:
Do and do, do and do,
rule on rule, rule on rule,
a little here, a little there.
So that they will go and fall backward,
be injured and snared and captured. (28:10-13)

And that is precisely what has happened. Here was genuine prophecy. Having rejected God’s offer of rest and repose, we do and do and do and do, following our rules, adding a few more tasks and a few more rules each day, until we are injured and snared and captured in a web of doing, no longer even capable of rest, despite our best intentions. In lunging forward, we fall backward. Our best attempt to grasp the old promise becomes a dream of hospital beds and then death, the ultimate rest.

evangelical

2010-07-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

The other day, on a bus trip, I sat down next to a chatty man in his sixties who had just been dumped by his third wife.

“Is someone sitting here?” I asked him, and he said, no, he was as alone as a person could be.

He had an unusually loud voice, and the people sitting around us all laughed. We were all on our way back to the Orlando airport to fly home after grading Advanced Placement exams for a week at a cavernous Convention Center in Daytona Beach with six hundred other professors and teachers. When the man asked me the inevitable question about where I taught, I lowered my voice and told him the name of the school, and then, when he didn’t recognize it, I said it was a private Christian university in Arkansas.

I waited for the usual pause that had followed this announcement all week whenever I got into conversation with someone new. I’m guessing many of my fellow academics there regarded Christian higher education as an oxymoron. Or perhaps it’s that something about me—my clothes or the way I talk—failed to prepare them for the fact that I might be a Christian, and they needed a couple of seconds to realign their thoughts. Everyone was too polite to tell me what went on in their heads in that pause, and afterwards, they typically changed the subject.

This man, however, went straight after it.

“You mean, evangelical?” he shouted. He twisted in his seat to stare at me—sternly, it seemed to me—and to see my face when I answered.

I have always been uncomfortable with the term evangelical, I have to say here. The adjective it used to be has been bandied around in the media so much of late that the noun Christian that it used to modify has been knocked off. Now it’s one of those attributive nouns that means something different to whoever uses it.

In the mouths of the people on NPR and on the pages of Time and The Atlantic Monthly, my primary sources of news and information, the label evangelical appears to be synonymous with politically benighted or bigoted or stupid, depending on the context. At best, ridiculously naïve. Time has taken to capitalizing the word, which makes it look even more embarrassing, somehow. Admitting I am one is tantamount to revealing that I am married to a man who spends his free time, together with a bunch of equally besotted men in his model railroad club, decorating expanses of plywood with spray-on grass and watching in glee as miniature locomotives pull empty cars around a circular track to return to where they started out. Worse yet, although I teach at an evangelical college and attend what most would call an evangelical church, whenever I meet fellow Christians who go out of their way to identify themselves as evangelicals, I find myself disagreeing with them on most of their pet subjects. To say I am an evangelical, in my mind, is to be the kind of push button believer my most arrogant inner self scorns any association with at all.

But, when this stranger asked so directly, so stridently and sternly, some vestige of [my] old dedication to godly embarrassment rose in my throat and demanded that I admit the truth.

“Yes. Evangelical Christian,” I said, in my softest possible voice above a whisper. I was sure all of my unseen colleagues around me on the bus were overhearing every word of what we were saying, and I sent up a little prayer, which the Holy Spirit no doubt edited out of my daily offerings to the Father, that the man would dismiss the topic and move on to something less threatening, such as what essay question I had been scoring or whether this was my first time at an AP conference.

“That’s great!” he said at the top of his voice and pounded me on the knee. “I’m an evangelical too.”

~excerpt from Confessions of an Amateur Believer (Thomas Nelson, 2007)

restore

2010-07-11T13:32:00.001-07:00

In the early days of my adult faith, . . . I saw God everywhere. I spoke of God all the time. I bored and alarmed others with my preoccupation with matters of the spirit.

Soon, though, the business of living—which has its own jealous demands—resumed. I had two toddling daughters, a widowed mother-in-law living on our farm, a new teaching job at the local school followed by another new job at a nearby university, an additional part-time job helping my husband with big seasonal farm chores—haying, weaning, selling animals, calving assistance—and all the claims on my attention that attend such responsibilities. Soon, . . . I stopped noticing God’s presence as much, stopped looking for it. I read the Bible less frequently and nodded off at church.

Before I knew what had transpired, I found myself in another place, spiritually speaking--. . . a place of spiritual oblivion. I simply stopped perceiving all the evidence of God’s presence that I had come to cherish. Gradually, unintentionally, I began to live from one day to the next in just about the same way as I had lived before I became a believer, except that now I tacked a little prayer onto this or that worry. Father God, I prayed, help me know what to do about Charlotte’s thumb-sucking. Holy Spirit, please speak for me when Lisa and I have our talk about class scheduling. Oh, Jesus, let Kris not be so stressed all the time. As soon as I had prayed my little prayer, I was done with God. Most times, I didn’t even notice, or rejoice, when my prayer was answered. By then, another worry had already laid claim on my relationship with God, and the old one was forgotten.

I forgot not only yesterday’s problems and prayers but the very core of my own faith history: the longing, the relentless seeking, the daily discoveries of God’s involvement in my life that had made me a believer in the first place. Somehow, my faith, over time, shrank to empty habit, something I should be doing or feeling rather than the daily fulfillment of my desires and hopes.

. . . Sometime during this period of oblivion, . . . I came across a journal I had briefly kept back when my faith was still new. A fellow teacher named Mitzi—younger than I was but a lifelong believer—had given me a blank book for Christmas. Its cover was a field of watercolor wildflowers—lavenders, pinks, greens—and Mitzi had labeled it “A Blessing Book” on the first page. Although I found the book was a bit cutesy, I nevertheless used it to keep a detailed account of three weeks of my life from that time. My disagreements with my husband. Our money troubles as farmers. Childrearing difficulties. Conflicts at work. My night worries. Eleven entries just like those in the diaries I had sporadically kept as a teenager, but with one big difference: I repeatedly compared the events of my days to what I was reading in the Bible. The entries were about as far from blessings as they could be. Rather, they recounted struggles, worries, discord—doggedly accompanied by strangely peppy-sounding efforts to see meaning in my grievances. Or, more exactly, to see the direct intervention of God in the everyday details of my life.

In one entry, I interpreted my boss’s micromanagement of a program I administered as evidence of my own unwillingness to submit to authority, and I found hope in Peter’s promise that “the God of all grace” would “restore” me and make me “strong, firm, and steadfast” (1 Peter 5:10). The word Peter used for restore, I noted—I’ve no idea where I found this out—was the same Greek word he would have used for mending the holes in a net. In another entry, I considered how best to confront a coworker’s misbehavior in light of Paul’s counsel to “restore”—the same word Peter used!—fellow sinners “gently” (Galatians 6:1). Meanwhile, my husband and I were having one of those convoluted early marriage fights involving potty-training issues, his mom’s constant involvement our day-to-day routine, and whether or not to get out of farming entirely, and I blithely wrote, “I should be wanting to do God’s will in this. I still too desperately want God’s will to be the same as mine.”

If there were no record of this admonition to myself, no record of those three weeks of living by faith, they would be gone forever. In the period of spiritual oblivion in which I found myself in the years that followed, I could not even recognize the earnest person who wrote those eleven entries. Time had transformed me into a person inexplicably unaware of my constant need for God and incapable of desiring God’s will over my own. Incapable, even, of recognizing God’s ongoing involvement in my life. Although more mature in every other way—older, wiser, and by then the conscientious moral coach of my own children and whole classes of befuddled students—I was a spiritual adolescent at best. I lived in the moment. My life was too hectic to admit much of a future beyond a scribbled to-do list, and I had not yet cultivated one of the primary skills necessary for distinguishing the presence of an unseen, unheard, untouchable God: remembering.

~excerpt from A Field Guide to God (Guideposts Books, 2010)

name

2010-07-05T12:49:00.000-07:00

I'm still thinking about genealogies today. My Bible’s notes say that Noah's name sounded like comfort in ancient Hebrew and was thus likely a reference to his father Lamech's hopeful—or prophetic—remark that his son would “comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed” (Genesis 5:29). It seems a stretch to me, even for the ancient Hebrew reader. In any case, if Lamech was prophesying about his own future comfort, it was a limited sort of comfort at best. The comfort of the survival of his lineage, despite his own inevitable death and, in this case, the death of everyone else in the world.

Names.

Almost every time a name is mentioned in the Old Testament, the biblical writers go out of their way to impress upon us the rightness of that name to that story. And then the study Bible note writers and commentators give us their take on the name. Biblical scholars say Methuselah meant either “man of the dart” or else some grammatical permutation of “when he dies, someone will send it”—the latter leading some to think that, Methuselah’s death coming at the same time as the flood, the “it” might have meant the destruction of humankind. Or maybe—if you're a glass-half-full kind of reader—"it" might refer to the comforting survival of Noah and his crew.

There is, in other words, much meaning to be found in biblical names, and also much confusion. Focusing overmuch on them can hang you up in the kind of biblical research that makes me nervous—the kind involving totting up the years between Methuselah’s birth and the flood or the generations, corrected for the unusually long lifespans of the ancients, between Adam’s birth and our times and figuring out just how old the world is. This kind of biblical research does not seek what the actual words and sentences and paragraphs have to offer as much as what we want to find there: the sort of certainty that passes for knowledge in our half-darkened world of science and reason. Numbers. Data. Answers so tightly crocheted that you can build a house with them, a whole worldview. This is the sort of research that mires us in denominational debates and in that murky smudge in the text that lies between how liberals and conservatives vote. I will not go there.

That said, just for fun, and perhaps to get something of the flavor of how scripture may have read back when names were still direct products of their language of origin, I would like to offer here a rewriting of the genealogy in Genesis 5 with the names' meanings (insofar as they can be ascertained by biblical scholars) substituted for the actual names. Here goes:

This is the written account of Human Being’s family line.

When The Gods created human beings, he (or they?) made them in the likeness of The Gods. He (or they?) created them male and female and blessed them. And when they were created, he (or they?) called them “human beings.”

When Human Being had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Granted. After Granted was born, Human Being lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Human Being lived a total of 930 years, and then he died.

When Granted had lived 105 years, he became the father of Man. After he became the father of Man, Granted lived 807 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Granted lived a total of 912 years, and then he died.

When Man had lived 90 years, he became the father of Sorrow. After he became the father of Sorrow, Man lived 815 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Man lived a total of 905 years, and then he died.

When Sorrow had lived 70 years, he became the father of Blessed God. After he became the father of Blessed God, Sorrow lived 840 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Sorrow lived a total of 910 years, and then he died.

When Blessed God had lived 65 years, he became the father of Shall Come Down. After he became the father of Shall Come Down, Blessed God lived 830 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Blessed God lived a total of 895 years, and then he died.

When Shall Come Down had lived 162 years, he became the father of Teaching. After he became the father of Teaching, Shall Come Down lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Shall Come Down lived a total of 962 years, and then he died.

When Teaching had lived 65 years, he became the father of When He Dies, Someone Will Send It (also called Man of the Dart). After he became the father of When He Dies, Someone Will Send It, Teaching walked faithfully with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Teaching lived a total of 365 years. Teaching walked faithfully with The Gods; then he was no more, because The Gods took him away.

When When He Dies, Someone Will Send It had lived 187 years, he became the father of Strength. After he became the father of Strength, When He Dies, Someone Will Send It lived 782 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, When He Dies, Someone Will Send It lived a total of 969 years, and then he died.

When Strength had lived 182 years, he had a son. He named him Comfort and said, “He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.” After Comfort was born, Strength lived 595 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Strength lived a total of 777 years, and then he died.

After Comfort was 500 years old, he became the father of Name, Hot, and Enlarged.

The meaning of Shem, the name of the son of Noah through whose lineage Luke will later trace Jesus’s own pedigree, is name. God's human self, in other words, derives—as, in some sense, we all do—from all the names in the genealogy: from Human Being and Granted, from Man and Sorrow, from Blessed God and Shall Come Down and Teaching. From When He Dies, Someone Will Send It. From Strength. From Comfort. From Name.

genealogy

2010-06-27T16:45:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Then trees and animals and such. Then people, who, sadly, didn’t love him as much as he loved them. In fact, they didn’t pay him much attention at all and went through many generations at a stretch before they acknowledged his existence or proclaimed his name.

So, to punish them perhaps, or maybe to nudge forth a like-kind exchange of sorts, God created genealogies: list upon list of people’s forgotten names that God crammed into an anthology he was busy editing that, through the voices of other forgotten people, told the story of his relationship with humankind. Thus it is that, having forgotten all these people, the tellers and the ones whose existence is recorded in the anthology, we can nevertheless not escape their names: Enosh, Kenan, Mahilalel, Eliud, Eliezar, Jeconiah, Peleg, Esli—as worthless and unrelenting as socks whose mates were lost in the wash. Nor can we escape the abiding worry that maybe these forgotten names and people and their unrecorded deeds were important, somehow, else why were they included in the Bible to begin with? That, perhaps, for some unfathomable reason, God had had these people in his sights all along—that he had loved them and kept on loving them and yearned for them, even now, centuries after their deaths.

None of which makes biblical genealogies much fun to read. The typical response is to skip over them to the stories of those among the many who by faith still speak, as the forgotten writer of Hebrews writes, even though they are dead. Abel. Enoch. Noah. Abraham. Their names appear in the genealogies, too, sprinkled among the forgotten. Rahab. Jacob. David. Jephthah.

Today I glean this from the “written account” the writer of Genesis offers us of Adam’s line. First off, unlike most genealogies undertaken in modern times, this one makes no attempt to be exhaustive. Indeed, it is highly selective. Adam had lots of kids, but only one son figures in his official line: Seth—a son “in his own likeness, in his own image,” as the Genesis writer remarks, echoing both the words and the emphatic repetition of the creation song of Genesis 1. Just as humans were God’s special creatures, made in his own image, in his likeness, so this one son of Adam is also special—mirroring Adam’s sinfulness, as my Bible notes point out, yes, but also special in that we can follow this particular vein in the genealogy of Adam (as Luke does in the genealogy he includes in his gospel) right down to Jesus, the Son of God. And of that one son of Adam’s many sons and daughters, only one grandchild makes the list. And so on. This singling of one child out of the many makes the people in the biblical genealogies significant, at least by association. Many many are called, but only a few are chosen for the written account.

The biblical genealogies are, as I have pointed out, written accounts. Presumably oral accounts—probably recited or sung in some sort of rhythm to aid memory—predated it. This selective account is, in other words, archived, not intended to be forgotten, as I imagine many oral genealogies were in the old days. And as, in fact, many written genealogies are these days, despite the arduous efforts of self-appointed family genealogists. I know, at least, that the two fat books of genealogical research taken up by relatives of mine—plus the genealogical results of my own efforts to establish my Choctaw lineage—lie amouldering in the closet.

A few names do come accompanied by enough story to arrest the modern reader. It doesn’t take much. About Methuselah, for example, all we’re told is that he lived for 969 years, which happens to be the oldest age recorded in scripture. So he lives on in all manner of hyperbolic expressions of longevity as well as in the names of a scientific organization dedicated to the reversal of aging and of a much revered bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California believed to be almost 5000 years old.

Adam’s line in Genesis 5 also includes Enoch, my mother-in-law’s favorite Bible character for no other reason than that, rather than dying like the rest of us, he was taken away by God. I would take Mamaw’s fondness for Enoch to be the wishful thinking of an eighty-five year old who has outlived ten siblings and a husband and surely seen much suffering, except that she also told me that she has always envied Enoch. Since childhood. And so I hear in her longing the voice of my daughter Lulu and my own voice as a child, the voice of every child who has contemplated death with fear and considered and ranked the ways that one might go. A pain-free dying in one’s sleep is hands down the best, but the worst can rank from long and slow—like, say, the skin cancer of the husband of an acquaintance whose name I have forgotten that rotted him from the inside out—to fast and violent. A fall from a height. A thorough car crash. Gunshot to the head.

love

2010-06-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t been a believer for very long before I started struggling with what exactly the biblical writers meant by the word love. That is, what God meant. I’m rather slowwitted when it comes to things spiritual. In any case, I started studying the word love in the biblical passages I was reading and soon discovered that there are two Hebrew words commonly translated as "love" in English translations of the Old Testament: ahab and hesed.

The first word, ahab, seemed more like our English word love and was applicable in a lot of the same situations in which we use the word. Parents and children, spouses, and lovers all ahab each other in scripture, and, in the Law, God commands his children to ahab not only their neighbors as themselves (Leviticus 19:18) but also strangers: “The foreigners residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt (Leviticus 19:34). In the most important passage of the Law to the Jews, a passage that they traditionally commemorated on doorways and gates and bound to their wrists and foreheads, Moses exhorted them to ahab God as well: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength (Deuteronomy 6:4).

The other Hebrew word for love, hesed, was more puzzling. A key word of interest to Jewish theologians over the centuries—the root of a word used in Psalms for the especially devout and of the name of a group of especially pious Jews, the Hasidim—hesed is used almost exclusively in passages describing not our love but God’s. Within the translation of scripture I read in those days (the NIV), hesed was translated into many quite different English words: not only love but mercy, kindness, loyalty, faith, devotion, approval, favor, glory, and grace as well as subcategories of these like loving-kindness, unfailing love, and acts of devotion. Other Bible versions, I discovered, were just as varied in their translation of the word hesed.

Jesus himself refers to the word hesed when he quotes Hosea 6:6, a rare biblical instance when the word is used for humans. "[G]o and learn what this means," He tells his audience of hecklers and disciples alike: "‘I desire mercy’—hesed—‘not sacrifice.’" (Matthew 9:13).

In recasting the Hebrew of Hosea 6:6 into New Testament Greek, Matthew uses, possibly echoing the Aramaic word Jesus actually used in speaking, not one of several Greek words for love but eleos, which means mercy. Having studied and puzzled over for years Hosea’s and Matthew’s choices of words for what God was saying, here’s what I think God means.

Yes, I have given you lots of rules to follow, God was telling the famously obedient prophet Hosea and tells us to this day. I have demanded sacrifices to atone for every disobedience imaginable and even for behaviors I never specifically told you were forbidden. But what I really want from you is not merely that you obey my rules but that you love me. And not in the feeble way you love one another. Not ahab. I want you to love me the way I love you. Hesed.

~excerpted from my current writing project, tentatively titled Easy Burdens: Doing the Stress-Free, Guilt-Free Work of God

eyes

2010-06-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

The Bible offers us many kinds of eyes—eyes that see clearly,
eyes overflowing with tears, eyes with scales on them, eyes with
planks in them, eyes darker than wine, eyes that should be gouged
out, eyes that are lamps, eyes that hate the hands or the feet or
secretly envy other body parts, eyes that cause us to sin, eyes too
small for a camel or a rich man to pass through, and lustful eyes,
painted eyes, eyes that offend us, eyes with barbs in them, eyes
that see treasure, eyes that see destruction, eyes that are on all of
creation from the beginning of the year to the end. People make
covenants with their eyes. They open their eyes, close their eyes,
wipe their eyes, and lift up their eyes to the mountains. The blind
are made to see, and the sighted become blind because of sin or
drought or sheer stupidity. Both good things and bad things are
pleasing to the eye, and seeing is metaphorical for everything from sinning to repenting to understanding. Ironically, there are blind watchmen, as well as blind men, who are the only ones who can see. Through our eyes we are enlightened and also led astray.

What are we to make of it all? How, as Christians, do we take
on this burden—described by Jesus as “light”—of seeing the way
God would have us see? Is seeing through the eyes of faith the
same thing as what many Christians tell me they are trying to
do—that is, seeing ourselves as God sees us? And how is that,
exactly? Does he see me as I see my own children, as flawed, horrible even, but utterly lovable because they are mine? Or does he see only our sins, those bloody rags we drag after us? Does the All-Seeing One see only the part that doesn’t offend him, the purity of Jesus in us? I have been offered each of these possibilities. Just how do we go about being students of God? What do we look at? And what should we do about what we see? Is closing our eyes a correct or faithful way of seeing?

~excerpt from Confessions of an Amateur Believer (Thomas Nelson, 2007)

yoke

2010-05-31T18:54:00.000-07:00

The yoke is a powerful image in scripture, used almost always in the same way as it is most commonly used in contemporary English: metaphorically, namely, in reference to domination and subjugation. The Old Testament writers bewail the yoke of oppression and the yoke of slavery, and the Lord these prophets write of frequently threatens the yokes of slavery and oppression as punishment for disobedience and just as frequently promises to break the yokes of those who obey. The Law warns against unequal yoking, and later the Apostle Paul echoes this warning. There should be no pairing of an ox with a donkey—presumably because the variance in their strength and shoulder heights would make the sharing of work more difficult—and likewise no pairing of believers with unbelievers, who are, according to Paul, as antithetical to one another as light and darkness, virtue and sin, God and idols. In the biblical perspective, the yoke is the metaphorical antonym of freedom. So, while Paul counsels “All who are under the yoke of slavery”—that is, actual slaves—to accept their lot and “consider their masters worthy of full respect” (1 Timothy 6:1), he elsewhere declares, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1), by which he means our slavish devotion to evil.

Scriptural yokes are intriguing in any discussion of God’s work since the real world purpose of a yoke in the farming culture of biblical times was to make it possible for two or more draft animals to join their efforts on the same task, thus rendering the work easier for each of them than it would be if one were doing the work alone. In other words, yokes benefit both farmer and farm animal by spreading, or equalizing, work, rendering it possible to get more done while reducing the toil and stress of those yoked. This understanding of the word yoke is seen in cultures today where water is still carried, balanced from a yoke in two manageable buckets rather than lurched along in one unwieldy one. Yokes make work easier, and yet, semantically, they suggest anything but ease. The yoke has thus evolved from biblical times onward from a means of sharing labor with another and lightening one’s load to become the quintessential symbol of enforced labor—and, by extension, of resistance to enforced labor. No one wants to wear a yoke.

All of which serves as a paradoxical back story to Jesus’ invitation, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The One God Sent is not our taskmaster or subjugator, and the yoke he speaks of is not the yoke of oppression or slavery or even toil. Indeed, we are invited to take this yoke upon ourselves not for work at all, but for rest from work.

The yoke of the One God Sent—metaphorically, the work of God—is thus unlike anything we might normally think of as "work." It is not a burden. It does not make us weary. It does not enslave or oppress. Rather, it is the antidote to stress and toil: a source of relaxation and pleasure. What God wants of us in the way of work is more akin to what we think of when we hang up the “Gone Fishin’” sign on the door: something fun, an escape from the unpleasantness of our jobs, rest.

~excerpted from my current writing project, tentatively titled Easy Burdens: Doing the Stress-Free, Guilt-Free Work of God

Grant the Glad Surprising!

2010-02-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

I've been doing radio interviews about my new book this week—three back to back on my days off from teaching—and the discussions I've had have reignited my enthusiasm for the scriptural passage that forms the center of A Field Guide to God. In it, Paul summarizes all of scripture to a crowd of Athenian philosophers gathered to discuss the newest ideas: "From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:26-27 NRSV).

I just can't get over the promises so efficiently offered here. That all of human history, that everything that seems to divide us, that everything that happens to us, however perplexing or upsetting, is part of a divine plan to make us seek God. That God greatest desire of us is to be sought. That God is always near us, waiting to be found. Inherent in the promises is also a clear plan for what God expects of us: namely, we should not merely seek but grope for God.

In remeditating on this passage anew, it occurred to me how much God's desire for us is like the desires imbedded in any relationship. I thought of how I have gone through days, weeks even, waiting for one of my daughters to get over some perceived injustice on my part, how I long the whole time for her, how I nudge opportunity after opportunity for reconciliation into every encounter.

I thought, too, of how, when my husband Kris is depressed or when he and I have had one of our rare fights (usually these occur sequentially: he gets distant and down, and I flip out and try to fight it out of him), afterwards I get in bed next to him and feel about as far away from him as it's possible to be. Far away in my frustration and hurt, in my inability to solve his stress and dread. Far away in my inevitable anger. Far away in my regret. Far away, even, in my underlying desire to repair what I have damaged and make things right again, which I know to be impossible.

Simultaneously, I know that it is possible for us to restore our usual love, that we will get okay with each other again. We always have, after all. I know that we could even now be on the road back to each other if I would just reach across the great chasm of sheets and blankets and coldness between us, reach up across his back and pull him toward me.

But I can't do it. Can't force myself. But he..., I lie there thinking. It's his ... He should.... And so it goes until one of us gropes past anger or hurt or self-righteousness for the other. Maybe not that night. Maybe not the next day even. Each of us wants and waits and just about makes that move, while the other is never far away, wanting, waiting, just about to move, too. And eventually, in a moment of "glad surprising" I sang about in a hymn this morning at church, love is restored.

It seems to me there is no greater thing in my life than those moments of restored love. Toward a husband. Or a daughter. Or a relative or a friend or a colleague or even a stranger who happens to displease me. What a joy it is to rediscover in myself the capacity to get beyond my own meanness, if only momentarily.

From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth and allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for and perhaps grope for and find God—though indeed God is not far from each one of us. What delightful promises from our creator and father and lover. What a call to action.

Spring, Birds, Lent, Tiger Woods, etc.

2010-02-19T09:42:00.000-08:00

"We saw a red bird," one of my students told me in class yesterday.

"It was a cardinal," I told her.

"No it wasn't. I know what a cardinal looks like, but this one was different. Its body was orange. And it sang this amazing song."

She commanded another student, the other half of the "we" who saw and heard this bird, to "do the song." He had a good memory for bird voices and made a convincing twiddle that ended in a falling whistle.

"Cardinal," I said. I knew for certain now. But the students were skeptical. "First off, there's no other red bird around here this time of year. Also, the immature ones range from brown to orange. Plus, that was the cardinal's breeding song you just heard."

Spring approaches, although it's still cold. The cardinals have quit their feckless cheeps of winter and are singing with purpose now—as, indeed, everything seems to be doing this time of year. Students linger before class in pairs, leaning toward each other. Despite the yellow ratty grass, despite the chill yet in the air, they yearn to go outside, as my girls used to when they were little: I'd look up and there they'd both be—having stripped naked when I wasn't looking and escaped—sitting in the mud puddle at the end of the drive with our dogs.

It always impresses me how spring motivates people. Suddenly, they're touching, dieting, exercising, cleaning, noticing birds, whistling, attending church services they've neglected for a long time, practicing disciplines—fasting, sacrificing, setting spiritual goals for themselves—that would never occur to them the rest of the year. It is as though the desire for renewal is built into us, just as it is in the color-tipped branches of the trees, in the surprising downpours of spring, in the woodpeckers I see chipping away at the trees to make their nests this time of year. Somehow, in spring, we all want to be new.

Charlotte called me from school on Ash Wednesday to lament that she had already failed, ten hours into the first day of Lent, in this year's goal of no texting.

"I got a text from one of my teachers, and I had to answer it. So it's not going to work. You have to help me think of something else!" she whisper-wailed. I tried to envision where she was at that moment. In the hallway between classes with her friends? In some class where the teacher let them use their *&#^^%!! cell phones? In a bathroom stall?

I suggested adding, rather than subtracting, something from her life, and she said she was already planning that, too. She had counted up the chapters of the four gospels and decided she could read it all during Lent at a rate of two chapters a day.

"I can't give up rich foods," she confided, "because I know I'd be doing it for the wrong reason—to get in shape. But what else is there?" After some more whispering—I felt as though we were planning a murder—she decided to scale down the no texting plan to the hours between 7 and 9 at night, during which time she'd read her two chapters.

I just now listened to Tiger Woods' speech of remorse to his friends and fans. Generally speaking, I have little interest in sports or celebrities and their flashy troubles, and, without a television in our house, my only way of even knowing what's going on is in the summaries of our weekly news magazines. I'm interested in apologies, though. So, when Woods' apology headlined in the Google news as I turned on my computer, I clicked on it and cried my way through the whole sad speech, his halting words doubly halting because of our slow dial up connection.

For the record, despite what the experts in matters public seemed to think, it sounded like genuine remorse to me. And, more movingly, genuine desire to be a new person. As I listened, I heard the voices of others I think about this time of year: Peter, Judas, Pilate. I savored, through this golfplayer's regret and hope, the sweet regret and hope of us all, as we grasp at new selves in the springtime.

A Recommendation for Lent (coming up in mid-February)

2010-01-31T07:22:00.000-08:00

I'm snowed in. Eight inches of snow, uncommon in our area, have shut everything down, and there's a deep freezing fog. I can hardly see the birds at the feeder beyond my window. My family has abandoned me. Kris has risked icy highways to travel to faraway Oklahoma City to help Lulu with her calculus, mechanics, electromagnetics, and chemistry homework, (I'm no help there!), and Charlotte and friend, who'd been snowed in with me, finally got sick of the entertainments of this house (and me, probably) and were fetched away from here yesterday by the friend's dad, who has four wheel drive and knew not to drive into our hockey rink of a driveway, where his daughter's car was moored.

Alone. An uncommon pleasure, although not without its boredoms. For lack of anything else to do, and because Charlotte and her friend baked cookies and left behind all kinds of teenager food, I've been stuffing myself, just like the birds at my feeders and all the rest of the animals around here, who have gone into reckless food foraging mode, apparently expecting weeks of frozenness ahead will prevent them from getting food. The yard last night was full of deer, brazenly sniffing at the ice-glazed bedding plants, and, returning through the woods from my mother-in-law's house yesterday afternoon, I came upon a fresh pile—still steaming and rank smelling!—mountain lion scat.

Just before the beginning of the storm I started listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber's rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. I hadn't listened to it in many years, not since I returned to faith in the story it narrates after many years of atheism, so it has been a revelation. Not surprisingly, the work's overwhelming focus, the stress and hectic and desires and terrors and confusion surrounding Jesus' teaching for everyone involved—for Judas and the other apostles, for Mary Magdalene (seemingly a composite character of a number of women in the gospels), for Pilate and Herod, for Jesus himself, and for the crowds that followed him everywhere—has been impressing itself upon me from a number of other sources. I've been writing about John 6, where Jesus keeps trying to escape the crowds, into the mountains and out onto the roiling waters of the Sea of Galilee, and chastises them for just wanting things from him—food, healings, magic tricks—and not really believing in who he is. Not one of them believed he was who he said. Their collective refusal to believe him seems to make him doubt himself in an interesting reading of his begging, in Gethsemane, that God take the cup from him. The turmoil and misery of Jesus' human situation is so overwhelming and convincing in Jesus Christ Superstar, I keep finding myself sobbing at different parts of it.

I told Kris on the phone that I thought I'd assign it in my English 102 (Intro to lit.) classes as a drama, since we had only short plays in the syllabus. I want them to hear it. Kris seemed to think my mostly Christian students will be offended that Jesus doesn't rise from the dead in Jesus Christ Superstar, which I thought was an interesting. Of course, I would want them to be offended by something, the better to have something to say or write about the piece. But the fact that Kris is probably right—indeed, since he hasn't himself listened to Jesus Christ Superstar in eons, I'm guessing he remembers that this was the actual Bible Belt response to it back in the seventies when it was being performed—makes me think of it as the perfect literary experience for Lent: to coexperience the rejection Jesus must have suffered from, the abandonment and aloneness he must have felt even as he was surrounded by hectic crowds of people.

I'm entering Lent early this year, I realize. It begins 17 February this year. I got all off schedule as a result of working on a Lent article for Guideposts during my Christmas break, before I was even properly in the Christmas mood. I was working through Jesus' death even as I was trying to fold my mind around his birth as one of us.

One of us. Born like us. Being loved by parents, growing up, learning, having friends, disappointing parents, hoping like us, worrying like us (It says nowhere in the gospels that Jesus never worried, and I'm certain Andrew Lloyd Webber is right that he did!), surrounded by turmoil and stress like us, alone like us. Suffering and being misunderstood like us—surely worse than most of us. Confronting death as we all will. Dying.

How I came to listen to Webber's masterpiece is this: Kris has been reading Paul's letters to me in the morning, and the word apostle keeps coming up. Paul repeatedly claims to be an apostle himself, just like Peter and the rest of the twelve. He warns against false apostles—who apparently lurked about the early church believers, trying to get them to return to their Jewish obeyance of the Law or else believe something else entirely—and even seems to disparage what the NIV Kris reads from translates as "those 'super-apostles'" ("the very chiefest apostles" KJV; "these super-apostles" NRSV), which I take to be, contrary to what the notes in my NIV Study Bible say, the big churchy names of the times: Peter, James, John, etc.

Certainly Paul puts a lot of effort into locating himself among the real apostles, I have been thinking, but he also conflicts with them on several occasions. In any case, as always with me, it was a word, apostle, that baffled me. Why were the twelve referred to as "apostles"? It's used more frequently in the post-Resurrection narrative than in the gospels, where the twelve are often presumably lumped in with the rest of the disciples.

Judging from what my American Heritage dictionary and NIV Exhaustive Concordance have to reveal, the word appears to derive from the Greek word for send and means messenger. The twelve were Jesus' messengers, sent out to tell the world the wonderful news of the Messiah's arrival and departure from this world, and the false apostles were probably also sent by someone—Satan? Herod? the Romans who persecuted the early Christians?—to deliver a different message.

As I speculated about the word, a song from my teenage years sailed into my consciousness and remained there for days. Always hoped that I'd be an apostle. Knew that I could make it if I tried. Then when we retired we could write the gospels, and they still talk about us when we died. I don't remember attending a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar in those days or listening to the song (was it on the radio then, along with Mary Magdalene's haunting "I Don't Know How to Love Him"?) or ever speculating about it. Certainly it's not one of the more memorable pieces in Jesus Christ Superstar. Nevertheless, I woke up with the wistful melody in my mind, those fame-obsessed words on my lips as I drove to work and home again. So I rummaged around until I found a copy of the CD (here it is on Amazon.com, with previews and MP3s available, in case you want to hear precisely the version I've been listening to) that I vaguely remembered someone had brought into the house some years ago.

In Jesus Christ Superstar, the senders of the different messages are some of the main voices we hear, and they are convincing and articulate and heartbreaking. They are Judas, distraught that Jesus isn't more of a people's hero for the Jews. They are Mary Magdalene, wanting Jesus to be "just a man." They are Pilate, perplexed and impressed by Jesus but too smug and afraid and angry to acknowledge his own assessment. They are the crowds of poor and sick and unhappy, shrieking out their miseries and expectations of him. They are us, confused one-time or would-be or current God-followers, each one of us determined to discover in Jesus not who he is/was/will be but whatever it is we are looking for. To be fed or healed. To be loved in whatever way we understand that difficult word. To be confirmed in our craziness. Jesus Christ Superstar is a caution to me, to us all.

So, it's my recommendation for Lent. Go out and buy it and let me know what you think. It's a great investment in a Lenten rethinking of what all was and still is involved in what Jesus identifies as the God-follower's work: believing in the One God Sent.

Resolutions of a Yum-Yucker

2010-01-15T06:14:00.000-08:00

The other day my daughter Charlotte called me a yum-yucker. I just googled this term and got, amazingly, no hits, so I'm guessing it's original to one of my colleagues, who also used it some weeks ago—the first and only other time I've ever encountered the term—in response to my response to his going on about summer sausage. It was the second or third time he'd mentioned summer sausage in a week. How he craved it. It was the season.

"I can't figure out why it's called summer sausage, though," he told me, "since it's only available in winter."

“I can’t figure out why you like it,” I told him. “It makes me feel a little sick when I eat it. Like those bottled salad dressings that have that weird aftertaste . . . ”

That’s when he called me a yum-yucker.

And Charlotte inherited the term from my telling the summer sausage story at dinner that night. I can’t remember what we were talking about, but she went even further.

“Your colleague was right. You’re a yum-yucker. You’re always yucking on people’s yums.”

Her supportive example (parenting tip: I always demand these from my girls, when they assert their views. It has made them both formidable arguers.): “Well, like, we go in a store, and I say, ‘Look at this skirt! Isn’t it cute?’ and you’re like, ‘Eeewww!’ That’s you. Totally. A yum-yucker.”

She refused to acknowledge the fact that, when we’re shopping and I like something she points out, I get all excited, in the positive direction. Or that I frequently find things I like and say, “Here, put this on. It’ll look really good on you.” And she does, and I’m right, and she buys it.

I call it being enthusiastic and honest. I’m just not into empty praise. Or vacuous or openly dishonest pep talks, like the ones my mother-in-law once told me she used to give my husband as a teenager whenever he left the house. “You look so handsome!” she’d croon, especially if he looked, as she put it, “down in the mouth”—her euphemism for depressed, a word she hates and refuses to use. I admire the impulse—to lift others up, an ambition that pretty much defines Mamaw—but, ever since she told me about those routine remarks, I’ve never trusted as genuineany word of praise she’s ever offered me.

Indeed, her praise often makes me suspicious she actually means the opposite. “Your car looks so shiny and clean!” she’ll tell me, and I’m suddenly aware that it’s way past time to do something about the salt and grime that’s been building up for months.

All this to say that my new year’s resolution—and my plan for Lent, which is coming up in a month—is to work on yumming others’ yums. To consciously seek out role models, rather than focusing, as I'm prone to do, on others' failures.

Not surprisingly, having made this resolution, I've gotten two lessons on the topic over the past few days, as the semester has started up again. One was from the head librarian at my university. I was telling her about the next book I’ll be working on, tentatively called Easy Burdens, on how the life of the believer really is supposed to be delightful, not a trial. Yoked to the powerful One God Sent, our burden, however heavy, should actually feel light. I started the book in response to an ongoing series of pep talks I’ve been giving to a beloved former student—possibly the most spiritually devoted person I've ever met, a woman whose every action seems imbued with the desire to love God back—who is crippled (as, secretly, I often am) by the worry that she doesn’t do enough as a believer. (In the book, in other words, I hope to convince myself as much as her of what I believe to be true about what God expects of us but nevertheless struggle to embrace.)

“Yes, I know a lot of Christians worry about not doing enough,” the librarian told me. “But I never feel that kind of guilt. I think it’s because of my father, who was always so encouraging and positive. There was nothing I could do that didn’t impress and please him.”

The next day, I was asking another colleague how he came to have the goal of being available to whoever walks in his door. Whether it's a student or a colleague or an utter stranger or just me, he drops everything, always, with a smile on his face. So inviting. I guessed he had been the victim of someone—probably a parent, such important formers and deformers—who was saliently unavailable to him in his past. Always too busy. Or too negative and closed. Perpetually yucking his yums. I figured he had made it his life goal to never be that way to anyone else.

“It was my dad,” he said. “He was a pastor.”

“Ah,” I commiserated. My father wasn't a pastor, but I could imagine that life: the endless flow of needy sheep, the neglected sons and daughters.

“You know,” he went on, “his door was always open—to me and to anyone else. ‘Nothing is more important than being there for someone who needs my attention,’ he always told me.”

“It’s hard sometimes," my colleague continued. "I mean, I get behind in things. But I figure, a lot of what I do”—he gestures at his computer, some open textbooks, a pile of papers—“is just fluff, and people are more important.”

I want to be like this man, the pastor’s son—and a pastor himself, though he may not know it. And like the librarian—Miss Mary, I call her, which is what my daughters called her in Sunday school—who not only never suffers from guilt but never causes it. I’m certain of this. I want to be like Mamaw, who prods and primps everyone around her out into the world with the confidence that things aren’t so bad. And I want to inspire my daughters to be like these people—to keep their doors open, to feel no guilt, to enter the world without suspicion but only buoyancy and blithe confidence.

Which is not to say we shouldn’t be wise to the dangers ahead of us. Like those potato chips coated in an oily powder that purport to taste like sour cream and green onion and that, if I break down and eat the one Charlotte thrusts at me in her enthusiasm, will make me burp artificial onion taste for days afterward.

Eeeewww yuck!

'Twas four days after Christmas . . . .

2009-12-29T09:29:00.000-08:00

. . . and I'm finally making my first Advent post.

I just haven't felt it, this year. Funny, because Advent has always been such a God-rich time of the year for me. But here it is, on the eve of the new year—the Christmas music and present buying and tree decorating and yearly six o'clock tumble of my almost grown girls into the parental bed on Christmas morning all behind me—and God has yet to arrive for me this holy season as a wet, slippery, screaming reality. I haven't felt Hope moving within me. Nor my usual yearnings or even the near despair I typically suffer in the days before Christmas. Just empty contentment.

Despite the unusual blessings this Christmas has brought with it:

no PTSD symptoms whatsoever and very little anxiety about buying presents, spending money, getting it all done.
getting to have Lulu home from her boarding school with not a bit of homework and all As after her first semester taking all difficult classes.
my girls' satisfaction with their gifts, each other, and the season in general.
getting to see my first pileated woodpecker. (If you’ve never seen one, you need to. He was amazing: gigantic, with a luminous red pointed head and white-and-black art deco looking body, just like Woody Woodpecker but more handsome. He flew incredibly fast and laughed loudly whenever he did. Such a cut up!)
super presents: a gorgeous, raggedy-looking scarf from Charlotte that makes me look like the beggar girl Anastasia in that old animated movie; three bird books from Lulu, one of which is a birding journal; silver earrings from Kris that look like a stellar body being orbited; and a whole slew of pricey youth elixirs from Mamaw.
the promise of a visit from beloved former students in a few days.
a gift from a hunter friend of four pheasants, which I will make into pheasant fricassee (I've posted the recipe) for the visiting students.
a successful running year of 21 miles per week, plus 14 banked miles, here at year's end.
my newest book—A Field Guide to God—all done, the publishing process trustworthily and congenially overseen by my new editor, who's a gem and who overnighted me a copy the second it came off the press, two days before Christmas.
two more books on the horizon. (My new publisher is going to bring out the book of Christmas essays that I took back from my previous publisher plus a book I recently started called, tentatively, Easy Burdens, about how God never intended the life of faith to be the burdensome task or unpleasant sacrifice many of us make it.)
getting to hear the chapter on home from The Wind in the Willows read aloud by Jennifer Mendenhall on NPR. (Here's the link to go to if you want to hear it, too. Be advised, it will make you moan-cry.)
SNOW! (On Christmas day, no less, which, according to Kris, is only the second time it's ever happened here in recorded history.)

Oh, there was much more, but I don't want to make those of you who received less unduly envious, so I'll stop listing.

Why, then, does God feel so, well, uninvolved in any of it? (Except for the woodpecker. I definitely sensed God's presence as I watched that bird clutch the tree and hammer away.)

I've been speculating that it's maybe because I've been out of tradition, in the months leading up to the Coming. One member of our small family is prematurely absent from home, and another has been crazily filling out college applications in preparation to leave, too. I haven't had my usual Advent angst, which I listed as a blessing—and it is one!—but which is also an important prayer (i.e., writing) catalyst. Also, because of Lulu's absence, we've spent a lot of weekends gone from home—especially Kris, who helps Lulu with her masses of math and science homework. Away from home means, for us, not attending church services, which, I'm discovering, play an crucial role in keeping me aware of God. (Who would have thought?!)

Whatever the reason (accidental quote, here, of Dr. Suess's summation of the Grinch's very similar sentiments), I just never felt Jesus' birth this year. Not the excitement. Not the pain. Not the realization that my lifetime of longing was answered.

There's still time, though. Because of a family tussle over what to eat on Christmas Eve this year—the traditional turkey, you see, also fell away, somehow—and our upcoming post-Christmas visit from old friends, we have decided to extend Christmas for the full 12 days of the traditonal Christmastide, ending on the eve of January 6th, the traditional Feast of the Epiphany.

That makes today, in Orthodox tradion, the Feast of those poor little boy-children Herod ordered killed to prevent there being any other King of the Jews than himself. Such a self-serving and absurd order—reminiscent, to me, of Mao's calamitous attempt during the Great Leap Forward to kill off all the sparrows in China to save the crops, which ended up backfiring, since there were no birds to eat the locusts that subsequently descended on the fields. Anyway, according to Matthew's account of the good news, Herod's order fulfilled Jeremiah's prophechy that “A voice was heard on high, weeping and much wailing, Rachel beweeping her sons, and she would not be comforted, for they be nought” (Matthew 2:18, quoting Jeremiah 31:15, in Wycliffe's translation)

I'll leave you with that sad thought. Babies killed in response to the coming of the God-baby.

And this little tribute to the brown winter sparrows that flock the feeding stations in my yard:

There are the White-Throated Sparrows (Zonorichia albicollis), which first got me interested in birds when they started singing their sweet but sad little song that mimicked the melody of the words "are coming" of Green Day's commemorative song "The Saints Are Coming," which was on the radio everywhere I went right after Hurricane Katrina. It was such a beautiful little bird song. I had to find the bird that sang it, but it took me a while. It's a shyish bird, with yellow spots behind its eyes and a white tuft under its chin.
Then there's the White-Crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys), with its black-and-white striped cap. (The females' caps are tan and brick-red.)
We get the occasional House Sparrow (Passer domesticus), which is actually a European transplant, fifty pairs having been intentionally released in Central Park in 1859 for reasons I have not been able to discover. Evidently, bird releases were common in the 19th century. Passer domesticus (yes, its scientific name is exactly the same as its common name, which is so nice) has bright white cheeks, a ruddy cap and shoulders, and a black mask.
And then, there's my favorite, Harris's Sparrow (Zonotrichia querula), named after Edward Harris. Its scientific name describes the black on its face, which radiates like soot from around its pink bill into irregular speckles onto its white breast and tan head. It looks as though something blew up in its face, and it behaves that way, too. It runs shrieking at the other sparrows at the feeders and even at some bigger birds, like cardinals and jays. A funny little hysteric.

Thoughts on the Current Lapsing Trend

2009-03-10T06:39:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a sudden rash of interest in faith loss of late. Recently, I was invited to talk informally with students about doubt, and many more showed up than had been anticipated. Then I started getting emails from various people on the topic of doubt and faith loss, including a some marked with red "High Importance" exclamation points from a student writing a paper on the subject. And then, in scanning the news recently, I found that the same interest not just among the mostly ardent believers surrounding me but out there in the world. Here are a few headlines from yesterday: Americans Becoming Less Religious, Study Shows (LA Times). Most Religious Groups in USA Have Lost Ground (USA Today). Study: Fewer Catholics in New England (MSNBC).

Having just finished the manuscript of a book on faith loss and strategies for sensing God's invisible presence , I'm excited, of course. Maybe more people may buy my book! (A Field Guide to God, due out in early 2010.) [The book's subtitle—always a difficult part of the publishing process for me—is still under consideration, for which, pray that I'm not talked into anything dorky or cutsey or otherwise offensive or embarrassing. In fact, pray that they let me call the book just A Field Guide to God, which in my view is plenty pfiffy to sell it.]

But there's a deeper level on which the problem, if it can be called one, interests and excites me. All these people leaving the church are, after all, going somewhere else to look for God—potentially somewhere better, if church wasn't where the excitement of God's presence was for them. They're moving. Not just leaving, which sounds so much like an end, but going somewhere. I'm guessing they're not just going home to watch TV and eat potato chips and forget about God altogether. Historically, the death of religion always brings faith growth. This leaving or lapsing or loss is, has got to be, the opposite of complacency and stagnation—both of which worry me more than whether or not people are attending one or the other church.

Not that church is bad. Or necessarily a place where faith stagnates or becomes complacent. Often quite the opposite.

But the biggest danger to true believers, in my opinion, is not that their faith will disappear but that God will. In their perception, at least. They'll start taking God's presence—and all evidence of it in their experience, in nature, in their interaction with others, and in the miracles that fill our days—for granted. Or, as my students write in their papers, for granite. For an edifice, or a set of rock hard traditions, and stop caring much about the divine parent behind it all. Invisible and inaudible and intangible, but, as Paul reassures the Athenians in Acts, "not far from any one of us" (17:27 TNIV). As believers, we can have faith, but lose a sense of God's presence. And that, I think, is a worse place to be than simply questioning or rejecting the practices of this or that group of believers to which they had previously belonged.

I lost my faith entirely, as I saw it, for over a decade of my life, and that was a hard thing. But, as a result of that loss, I think, I later came to believe in a bigger and more relevant way. More questioning and doubt laden. Less accepting of pat answers. More appreciative of God's involvement in my life. More aware of the listener on the other end of my worries and longing, the invisible arm across my shoulder, the silent shuffle of another's feet as I walk in my garden.

Doubt, as I see it, is good, perhaps the best thing that can happen to a believer. If you doubt, you are searching, trying to find God. And God hovers nearby, having designed all of history, every boundary between us, every division, as a way of causing us to notice and come. Or so Paul sums up all of history for the people of Athens, whom he describes as "extremely religious. . . in every way." He told them that "From one ancestor" God "made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:26-27 NRSV).

So that we would search. And perhaps grope and find. I love this verse.

Grope. God wants us to grope, expects us to have to grope—and planned it that way, in fact.

Anyway, that's where I am with this business of doubt and lapsing, in case you want to know.

[There, now, I've spent the entire morning blogging after a year long hiatus while I worked on my book. For me, it's all but impossible to do both well. That's another problem with blogs—in addition to bloggers' tendency to misjudge tone and audience and end up sounding like asses—that I neglected mention in class when we were talking about blogging the other day: You either blog or you write.]

Radio Blues

2008-03-24T19:35:00.000-07:00

I was interviewed today regarding my post of 28 February—about allowing my daughters to watch The Hills Have Eyes—on a Christian radio program called John and Stephanie. Stephanie was clearly outraged that I would let Charlotte watch again a movie that had given her nightmares and then that I would let her even younger sister watch it. I explained my miserable parenting as a preference for permission with discussion over prohibition and simply relenting to teenager pressure. And I tried to talk about the other part of my post: the fact that equally creepy stories are found in the Bible, and I see this as evidence that we are to confront and talk about such matters, work them through, even with our children, and not simply forbid the topics altogether and deny their existence.

As is to be expected in any discussion of objectionable or graphic material undertaken among believers, Stephanie quoted Paul to the Philippians: "Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things" (4:8). Then she asked me if I didn't think allowing my kids to watch the movie with discussion wasn't tantamount to letting them have sex in the living room or use drugs in my presence. She also wisely pointed out that, while the Bible was made for teaching us how to be, movies were made for entertainment. Her parents had forbidden such movies, she said, so she had never seen them and never wanted to see them. The few glimpses of scary scenes she had caught in her life had stayed with her and damaged her.

I felt bad afterwards. I suppose it shouldn't have been any surprise that my parenting looks exactly as bad to others as I always feel it is. Parenting, I've said many times, is the hardest work I have ever done, and I always feel like a failure.

For the record, though, here's what I'd like my parenting to look like: I seek to be an engaged parent by being aware, really aware, of what my girls are thinking about. I want my daughters to like and trust me enough to keep me in the conversation, so that they will later talk to me openly about more difficult and personal issues—issues that I kept secret and dealt with entirely on my own at their age. I want to allow my children to gradually grow up and away from me. At the same time, though, I also want to have the kind of relationship with them that permits me to retain some small input in their decision-making.

Currently, I am the cool parent among my daughters' acquaintance. Not cool in the sense that I allow my kids to do anything I consider dangerous or immoral, like having sex or using drugs in my livingroom. And not cool in terms of being on top of the latest fashions or able to sing along with the popular music they like, as some of their parents can. Just cool in the sense that I am open to any discussion. I am frequently stern and preachy and demanding, even toward children not my own. I forbid language that they blithely use that, even in jest, belittles and hurts others, and I hold them accountable for racist and sexist views. They have to, in other words, talk nice. But just about any topic, as long as it's seriously considered and not raised purely for the sake of shocking me, is allowed in my presence. So we talk, and because we do I am cool, and my coolness—as well as the fact that my girls like spending time with me—is my main hope in this business of parenting my kids out into a pretty scary world.

My Christian students at JBU often intimate to me that I must be glad not to have been a Christian when I was their age because I got to experience, with impunity, all the stuff they missed or are missing out on. They think my life before I became a Christian must have been, in other words, more fun than my life afterward—and, more importantly, they think that a life without God is probably more fun than their own Christian lives are. I think this sort of skewed thinking comes from never really talking with their parents or other experienced people about depravity. My students grew up believing that sin, however true it might be, was something you just didn't talk about. As a result, they romanticize sin and don't realize such simple truths as that foulness really is foul and feels foul and that immoral behaviors never result in happiness.

There wasn't time in my discussion with John and Stephanie for me to go on about the thinness of the line—if there is a line at all—between teaching and entertaining. I think all art—and I include among it, somewhat reluctantly, even the often bad art of popular culture, even movies like The Hills Have Eyes—has the capacity to teach. Indeed, that's what I think the unconscious goal of most writers and filmmakers and painters and composers is: to teach while entertaining, or, to use Horace's words, to delight and instruct. I think the biblical writers have the same goal, otherwise there would be no complicated organizational schemes, like arranging a psalm's lines in the order of the Hebrew alphabet—no word play, no verse. The stories of scripture, Jesus's stories, would not teach as well if they had not been designed to entertain, and entertain well.

Anyway, I'm somewhere way off topic and must to bed. Sleep well, all.

An Intercessory Prayer of Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester

2008-03-18T11:37:00.000-07:00

I really like this prayer—the specificity of its generalities, especially. I also like how the selective capitalization—reminiscent of e. e. cummings and Thomas Carlyle—throws emphasis on certain words. The prayer is excerpted from "Prayers for the First Day of the Week," from the private devotions of Lancelot Andrewes, originally composed in Greek and Hebrew sometime during Andrewes' lifetime (1555-1626), here translated and abridged by Florence Higham in her biography, Lancelot Andrewes (London: SCM, 1952). I've become a fan of the biographer, who wrote a number of books about 17th century religious thinkers. I'm also reading a translation of Andrewes' devotions by John Henry Newman, but I don't like it as much.

I covet Andrewes' ability to pray outside of his own experience—to think of farmers' concerns and nursing moms and those who, surely unlike him (he was known for his sweet cheerfulness of temper), are tempted by suicide. Anyway, just thought I'd share it, as it seems as though this wonderful little biography doesn't get checked out much. Here it is:

O Thou that art the Hope of all the ends of the earth,
remember Thy whole creation for good, visit the
world in Thy compassion . . .
O Thou that wlkdest in the midst of the golden candlesticks
remove not our candlestick out of its place,
Set in order the things that are wanting,
Strengthen the things that remain.
. . . . .
Grant to Farmers and Keepers if cattle good seasons;
To the Fleet and fishers fair weather;
To tradesmen [I'm sure Andrewes and Higham meant traders], not to overreach one another;
To Mechanics, to ursue their business lawfully,
even to the meanest of work[ers],
even down to the Poor . . . .
Do Thou arise and have mercy
on those who are in the last necessity.
. . . . .
All in extreme age and weakness
All tempted to suicide
All troubled by unclean spirits,
the despairing, the sick in soul or body,
the faint-hearted.
All in prisons and chains, all under sentence of death,
orphans, widows, foreigners, travellers, voyagers,
women with child, women who give suck,
All in bitter servitude, or in mines, or in the galleys,
Or in loneliness.
. . . . .
O Lord I commend to Thee,
my soul and body,
my mind and thoughts,
my prayers, and my vows,
my senses and my limbs,
my words and my works,
my life and my death;
my brothers and my sisters, and their children,
my friends, my benefactors, my well-wishers,
those who have a claim on me;
my kindred and my neighbours,
my country and all christendom.

That's it. And I agree. Amen.

My Daughters Have Eyes

2008-02-28T08:41:00.000-08:00

My fifteen-year-old daughter, I recently discovered, has been watching at her friends’ houses teen horror movies that my husband Kris and I would never think of renting. She’s seen the Saw series, whose storyline follows a murderer who makes his victims hurt themselves—saw off limbs, for example—in order to avoid being killed in some other way. Most recently, she saw The Hills Have Eyes, a sci-fi film about cannibalistic mutants murdering and, in one scene, raping their human victims.

After Charlotte saw it, she had trouble sleeping for a while and one night turned the heat way down, despite the icy weather, so that she could sleep with the covers up over her head to protect herself from dream attacks, metaphorically speaking, without getting too hot. Nevertheless, she begged and begged to be allowed to rent the film and watch it again, this time with her younger sister Lulu. Her trump cards—that viewing it would promote sisterly bonding and that Lulu was liable to see it on her own one of these days with her friends—eventually wore me down. On the way to the video store, though, we talked about why she liked it so much and why she wanted to watch movies that scared her so badly she couldn’t sleep.

“It doesn’t have anything bad in it besides the rape. Just violence,” Charlotte reassured me as I pulled the DVD from the shelf and scrutinized the case—The Unrated Version!, it touted—and balked yet again as we approached the checkout line.

I returned the DVD back to the shelf twice before I finally broke down and rented it, thinking, as I usually do in this sort of parenting dilemma, that anything that causes my daughters and me to talk seriously about problematic issues like rape and evil “others” (mutants) was probably worthwhile in the end. I remembered, too, the movies I had snuck off to see in my teens—Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and, the most disturbing film I have seen in my life, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, a frankly erotic and profoundly creepy movie in which young boys not only dissect a live cat in horrifying detail but spy on the widowed mother of one of them having sex and eventually murder her lover.

Charlotte was right, I decided as I laid my dollar bills on the counter. My daughters’ exposure to such monstrosities was inevitable, and I would rather be able witness their response and thereby, hopefully, help shape their evolving beliefs.

Later that night, after the girls had watched the movie and Lulu had pronounced it “not that bad,” we talked about the rape scene.

“You couldn’t really see anything besides the mutant guy spreading her legs, and that was from behind him,” they told me.

“And anyway,” Charlotte said, “after seeing that rape scene, I know I don’t want to be raped.”

“So then, before you saw it, you thought you might want to be raped?” I asked her, trying hard to keep my voice flat.

What if she really did fantasize about rape?, I worried silently. What if rape was as desirable for girls of their generation—influenced as they are by rap music values and parented by mixed up Baby Boomers like me—as all the other creepy things they seem to like? Body piercing. Tattoos. Hooking up. Shaved pubic hair.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I just mean, rape really looks like a bad thing in the movie. Like, I’d rather be killed than raped by one of those mutants.”

It was the qualifications that did me in each time. Not that bad. Rape really looks like a bad thing. Rather be killed than raped by one of those mutants. I groped for what to say, how to reply to my daughters’ unconscious exposés of what it means to be a teenager in our time.

I wonder, though, if things have really changed that much. Consider the rapes of scripture. The Levite’s concubine, gang-raped to death and then dismembered and sent to all the parts of Israel. Lot’s virgin daughters offered up to the rapists at the door. Tamar—raped by the least “strange” of all rapists, her own brother. Bathsheba, sexually harassed and eventually widowed by the devout king of Israel—a man, we’re told, after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22). Somehow, although they happened thousands of years ago, these rapes seem more real than a cannibal mutant rape and the twisted relationships they portray more horrific. Interestingly, too, the scriptural rapes and the movie rape offer same grim story: rape happens, our world is depraved, and honest consideration of these truths—and of the escape God offers us—is our only hope of getting out of life alive.

My daughters and I will have much to discuss in the coming days, I’m thinking, as they enter the horrors of human existence laid bare in popular culture and in the book on which we base our faith.

The Other Side—A Lamb Chop for Spring

2008-02-21T11:40:00.000-08:00

I will not begin this post by apologizing. Suffice it to say I have been busy. I turned in the mss. for book three last week—a book of essays called The Gospel of Christmas: Reflections for Advent; look for it at Barnes & Noble in October or November—and I have been recovering and trying to get myself to go out in the garden to dig up the dirt and plant peas and spinach. No success. It's so freezing cold and has been raining on and off for days. I haven't even managed to go out for my run today. After getting up to 9 miles every other day culminating each time in a visit with my mother-in-law and then having to lay off for a while due to an injury incurred, I've decided, from not warming up or stretching before a run in 9º weather, I'm now at 7 miles every other day. (Please applaud.) No visit with my mother-in-law anymore and not as far as before, but still. Today not, though. Too cold.

The book is really cool, I think. (The intended transition here, in case you're wondering, was cold...cool.) I had to work really hard to get it done in one month. Most of the essays that make up the chapters were already written, but I hadn't looked at them in years (I write new ones every Advent) and three were brand brand new. The biggest challenge—as always for me, since I tend to write pieces that work independently of one another—was putting the whole lot together to work as a book. Once I managed that, it was such a delight to work on. I LOVE revising. And I love the whole idea of the Incarnation—God coming to us as an embryo in his human mother's uterus, drinking her blood (as my daughters used to say), and emerging from a part of her body she probably wouldn't mention in public, covered in blood and other bodily goo, and stuck in a feed trough. What a way for God to start out his life in our world!

As it happens, I am participating in a Bible study on the other end of the divine visit right now at church. (Yes, I have found, to my amazement, a church of which I can say, so possessively, "at church." It's Presbyterian, even more to my amazement, given my unenthusiasm for certain Calvinist preoccupations. Anyway, more on church some other time.) We're studying the Suffering of Jesus (my word for the Passion) in the weeks leading up to his Resurrection. Everything I'm learning about Jesus' suffering and death seems to be informed by everything I'm learning about his birth in working on the Christmas book. So odd.

Something the Bible study leader—Robbie Castleman, for those of you who know her from JBU—said moved me to do Lent. Really do it—with the idea in mind of coming up on the other side, like Jesus giving up his earthly life knowing that 1. he would take it up again in a few days, and 2. he would resume eternal life after that. So, I'm approaching Lent as a temporary giving up not for the sake of suffering along with Jesus, as I saw it in my Catholic childhood, so much as for the sake of getting to enjoy—as he enjoyed and is enjoying—the resumption of pleasures after the period of suffering is past. Probably that's obvious to all of you and how you've always thought of it, but it has been somewhat transformative for me. I can't tell you how much I am going to enjoy that big, medium-rare steak and glass of Cabernet in a few weeks here!

Which brings me to Spring's promised lamb chop: The other day, a man on NPR's Fresh Air—the author of a bestseller called Misquoting Jesus—was going on about suffering, all the ways in which it can't be reconciled with an all-powerful and kind-hearted God. He lost his faith over it, he said. None of the explanations of suffering offered by Christianity or the Bible obtain, according to this man, and he went through them all fairly systematically: suffering is punishment for sinfulness, God's ways can't be explained, suffering makes you a better person, who are you to darken my counsel with stupid questions?, and so on. Anyway, afterwards I thought of a reason he never brought up that I'm thinking, this Lent, is worth considering. Suffering—which can pretty well be reduced to pain and/or loss, I think—causes you to value more highly the absence of pain and/or to honor the thing lost. It causes you to look forward to—I mean really look forward to—the time, on the other side, when you will no longer suffer pain and when you will be reunited with whatever it was you lost.

I have always thought it terrible for people to long for the next life. I have only personally known of a few people who said that they did. One was a woman (not my mom) who had led a grim life as a prostitute and then became a Christian and not long thereafter was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. She opted not to do any sort of chemotherapy or treatment that would prolong her life. She also withdrew from friends who tried to encourage her, as they saw it, that she might live longer than the prognosis. She didn't want to talk about that hope at all. "I just want to be with Jesus," she said.

Another was a woman—again a Christian—who, in a fit of biological timeclock desperation, had married a horrible man who was mean to her. All she ever talked about was how wonderful it would be in heaven.

Longing for heaven, it has always seemed to me, amounts to giving up and despising the life we've been given. It seems a wrong focus, like loving Revelation above all the other books of the Bible (excuse me if I have dissed your pet book) or obsessing, as Jesus' disciples were wont to do and countless others have done since his time, on the end times. I guess I'm too much of a hedonist to be able to get to the hating-this-world point of view. Or—shudder!—I just haven't suffered enough yet.

At church (there I go again) the other day, though, the pastor mentioned several times an elderly woman in too poor health to attend the service. She had been a member of the church since forever and had sent us all a cheery greeting in the bulletin. "She's ready to go," the pastor told us more than once. He encouraged us to pray toward that end—not your usual prayer request, unless it's for a person lingering unconscious in the hospital while the family awaits the inevitable death. I have been thinking about that woman a lot, although I don't know her. I have been thinking that such a desire is not necessarily a deathwish, as I have always thought, but maybe a longing for how fabulous it will be to take up life on the other side.

When we rise again, we will be real, Robbie was telling me the other day in her office, where I had gone to apologize for asking too many questions in the Bible study and keeping us from getting as far in the material as she had wanted. Somehow, while I was there, she got on the topic of the Resurrection and started talking about how, contrary to what many think, heaven was not some puffy fantasy place peopled by spirits but the real world, renewed, where we would be solid, in our own bodies, real. She leaned toward me and, to emphasize her point, punched me in the arm. "Like that," she said.

It was not Robbie's punch in the arm that moved me to reconsider heaven, I think, but rather that overlarge wine glass in my imagination, about a third full of Cabernet. Or perhaps a jammy purple Zinfandel in a globe-shaped glass. I haven't quite decided.

"Truly I tell you," Jesus said at his last meal before his death, "I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God" (Mark 14:25). His words, I'm thinking now, were not so much a lament, as I have always thought, as they were a preview of future pleasures. He took up his suffering, his voluntary loss of an earthly life I am convinced he actually loved—a life which, fully human as well as divine, he was built to love—not with wretched despair, but in the excited anticipation of life beyond the grave, its treasures and delights, of which this world's joys are only a foretaste.

Some Thoughts on Blogging

2007-12-14T06:23:00.001-08:00

For their final exam the other day, the students in my Composition Theory course read aloud brief analytical accounts of their own writing histories. I always love it when students read their writing aloud—which I have them do in most of my classes, often at the end of the semester—and I also love it when they tell stories from their lives. I learn so much, not just about them, but about life.

In recounting what they had learned about writing and how they came to learn it and how their writing had changed over the years, my students typically began in early childhood, back before they could write at all and their concepts of writing were determined by the writing in books their parents read to them or that they read themselves. That was my first surprise: the attention they paid to the writing of others, often before they even entered school. They retold or added to, in stories of their own, the stories they had liked when they were younger.

One student perpetuated the Narnia series for a child she often babysat. Another wrote detailed notes just like the love notes her father left lying around for her mom. That student also wrote miniature research papers, sometimes just a couple of sentences long, in which she retold information she found interesting in books and newspapers and such. (In her paper for my course, she referred to these works as micro-essays. You elementary school teachers out there need to consider assigning such essays in your classes!) Another woman told of how, in middle school, she was asked to write from another person's point of view, and she chose the point of view of a fictional character she still loved from a series of chapter books she had read when she was younger, Junie B. Jones. She wrote in first person, but took pains to tell her life in Junie's voice, and she returned repeatedly to check and make sure she was getting it right. Unconsciously, these women, as children, taught themselves to make art via a method that is not often practiced among writers nowadays: mimicry. I found this so interesting.

It may be a gender thing—the class is all women, with the exception of a student who was taking the class via independent study because of a time conflict and stuck his head in the room from time to time—but almost all of them wrote about journaling. For some of them, it was a brief flirtation with writing in which they wrote for a few days in a diary—they remembered and described these in minute detail, the picture on the front, the color of the pages, etc.—and then abandoned it. They felt bad about this. Guilty. There is something about a journal that makes you feel obligated to keep it up. One student returned to the same abandoned journal on occasion throughout her school years, beginning in elementary school and continuing on through high school. Imagine it, that Bildungsdiary. The voice maturing with the events depicted. The focus narrowing to comprise the gestalt of the woman before us. In their papers, my students wrote about how journaling archived the emotional minutia of their lives: their friendships and crushes, their fights with their parents, their reflections on matters of faith, their thoughts about the future.

To a woman, they summed up the essence of journaling in one word: private. A diary was a safe, private place to explore dangerous topics you wouldn't want made public. It was a place to confess, to fantasize, to hope.

One student, in sixth grade, was asked write an imaginary page from her journal that was representative of who she was. "One page from your journal has come loose and fallen out on the floor," her teacher told them. "What would it say? What glimpse would it give of you?" The eleven-year-old incarnation of the student before us wrote, of course, about the boy she liked, and she was aghast when she was asked to turn the page in. You don't turn in journal writing, my student reasoned. Journals are "private property"! Turning them in makes them public. (For the writing teacher these days, by the way, the current and absolutely appropriate lingo for turning writing in is "publishing"—that is, "making public.") The teacher commented on the crush in the margins of the student's journal, counseling her that, at her age, it was better to be "just friends" with boys. That is, the teacher judged the student's confession. And, to make matters worse, years later, she even made mention of it to the student. She joked, at a public event, with others present, about the girl's youthful feelings for the boy. She called him by name.

What's all this got to say about blogging? I know you're wondering. I think my students' way of looking at journaling says everything about my struggles with blogging. The trouble with blogs—and perhaps in some ways it is also their appeal—is that they are like journals: emotionally-laden, but only minimally processed stuff from one's life. Stuff that typically remains private—at least until some potentially smarter, healthier editor-self has a chance to have a go at it. Blogs are the private made public. Boringly public—as boring as a teenage girl's journal is likely to be most of the time. Embarrassingly public—as embarrassing as one's crush, once outed. Self-consciously public—as I often find my blog-voice to be. Careful. Half-squelched. Cramped, like a diary entry, by the date at the top of the page, the inadequate number of lines, the emphatic date on the next page, reminding you that you must do it again soon. Often, it seems to me, my blog-voice as false as the little lock on the outside of my own childhood diary—a chinzy little decoration of a lock that never really felt secure. I opened it with a bobbypin whenever I couldn't find the key.

Perhaps journals, I sat thinking as my students read, should remain private. For the students' sake, at least. Teachers shouldn't give journal assignments, I decided. (I've never liked assigning journals, which I find students often do all at once, at the last minute, as they do their papers but with much more license to say whatever.) Or rather, teachers can give such assignments, but they shouldn't collect them. Shouldn't grade them. Certainly they should never read them or comment on the entries or censor them or in any way stand in judgment.

Assigned journals threaten the privacy of students, but, at the same time, there is this sense that the teacher really isn't reading them at all. The other day my daugher Charlotte was telling me how, in a reading journal she had to keep about In Cold Blood (She's fifteen, and it's a pre-AP literature course, and they're reading true crime—go figure!), she wrote in all caps and wrote, in gigantic letters in the margins, READ THIS!!!, to be sure that the teacher actually took note of some joke she wanted to make.

The voluntary divulgers among us—and, if you haven't guessed, I am one, as are you, if you blog or even comment on this or any other blog—are a mystery, even to ourselves. READ THIS!!! we shout, without thinking much about what that entails. We are blind to all that goes along with the publishing of the private. The boredom. The embarrassment. The falsity. Consider: Blogging is like sending that ill-advised email that, once sent, can never be erased. The email written in a hot moment. The kindly meant email (or so one tells oneself) in which one's real nature is revealed in a glib remark. The email that defines one, as surely as a page torn from one's journal and dropped on the dirty floor.

That's blogging, I think. Much as I try to fight the natural contours of the form—despite my fastidious editing and even though, from habit, I set out to write each post just as I would set out to write an essay that might go into one of my books—I never feel quite in tune in my blogs. Never entirely me. Or maybe it's that I feel too much me: the glib me, the ill-advised me, the messed up me, the pushy preachy arrogant me, me in all my meanness.

I have written here or somewhere—that's another thing about blogs, you lose track of what you said where in them—about this odd thing that happens with my blog posts for Today's Christian Woman (http://blog.todayschristianwoman.com/walkwithme/, if you would like to go there). I write what are supposed to be posts on the subject of spiritual formation—I think of them as little essays in which I report on my own struggles to grow in faith—and the people who comment frequently give me advice and try to solve me. I think that, too, is symptomatic of blogging. In blogging, you are submitting your thoughts to the democratic urge out there. You become a project for others. Your secrets become the stuff of the people—solvable, fixed, known—and your voice potentially the Junie B. Jones of other would-be writers out there. Or not.

Anyway, that's what I have been thinking today about blogging. It's funny, too, how bloggers often blog about blogging—resultant from a self-consciousness that, again, has something to do with the public-private tension of blogging, I think. Anyway, as I say. Anyway.

Back Again!

2007-11-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's been two months. I've been busy with other writing tasks—not the least of which, by the way, is my monthly post for Today's Christian Woman that you might want to have a look at if you have been missing the comforting voice of the fellow struggler and amateur believer. It's here: http://blog.todayschristianwoman.com/walkwithme/. You can also give me advice there, as those who comment frequently do. This initially bothered me. I guess I thought, Hey! I'm the one who's writing this blog; I should be the one doing the advising. But I have come to find it amusing. And often encouraging. A kind of advice column in reverse, where the messed up columnist details her doubts and struggles and questions and her savvier readers write in with counsel. And it brings the added benefit of all these people out there praying for me—people much more secure in what they believe and surely much better at articulating to God what it is I need. I usually don't know. I'm pretting much of a groaner, when it comes to prayer.

Anyway, I reenter this blogspace with new resolve to write shorter, bloggier posts on a more regular basis and thus enjoy it more. We'll see if I am successful. It's part of my New Year's resolution (yes, I know it's early for that; I'm all messed up in my schedule this season) to try, in the context of some or the other daily event, to do unto others what I would have them do unto me. My husband routinely lets this mandate direct his encounters and most mundane decision-making, and it has always impressed me. I want to see if I can make doing what I would have others do in similar circumstances into a habit, as it seems to be for him. And so I thought, what kind of blog posts would I like my friends and former students and current students and interesting strangers to write? I decided each post should be small and succulent. Like a lamb chop. Or, rather, like several little lamb chops, since one is never enough. In their little puddle of that wonderful vinegary mint sauce that the British eat on lamb.

Okay, so that's one new thing. The other is that I have been running. I don't know if I have put this in past posts (and I'm too lazy to check), but I started in the early summer and I now run 9 MILES three days a week. Added up, that's a marathon a week. I don't know how this happened. I could barely get to my mother-in-law's house at first. It is some sort of miracle. I run, in any case, on a straight, hilly road near my house. I still dread it—I am writing right now when I should be running—but I love it once I get out there. I get to notice so many things I never would have noticed—deer, bird songs, a neighbors' buffalo herd, this black mule with a dusty mouth I've fallen in love with that I have named Beautiful. The other day I found a young-looking owl lying open-eyed on the roadside. Seemingly uninjured—just dead. I've never seen one up close before. And I have all sorts of ideas for writing. I've planned so many books that I will never be able to write them all. Something about running unlatches my thoughts. I'm not fast (I go around 12 and 1/2 mintes a mile) and I'm not getting a bit skinnier, since I can't seem to shake the notion that with all this running I should get to eat whatever I want. But it's a great stress reducer, which I especially need at Christmastime, which triggers all my post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

I always have some song at Christmastime that kind of takes over my brain. Whatever I'm doing, from the when I wake up, it's there in my brain. An Ohrwurm, as the Germans call it— earworm. Or, like the Jesus prayer that Eastern Orthodox train themselves to repeat constantly. It's usually a melancholy, almost hopeless song that speaks to my Christmastime misery. Amy Grant's "Breath of Heaven." Or Pedro the Lion singing Longfellow's anti-war carol, "I Heard the Bells." ("There is no peace on earth, I said!") Or that James Taylor version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" that came out right after 9/11, in which he reverts to the original lyrics of the song in lieu of Sinatra's cheerier take, singing "Until then we'll just have to muddle through somehow" instead of "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough." This year, my inescapable Christmas song is Sufjan Stevens' "Sister Winter," with lyrics just shy of maudlin about trying—unsuccessfully—to be grateful and merry in the wake of a love relationship that failed in the previous summer. The central line is "But my heart is returned to Sister Winter," and he repeatedly tells his friends, "I apologize, apologize." It reminds me of that scene in one of Lulu's favorite movies, Notting Hill, where Hugh Grant apologizes to his friends for having been depressed for so long. That's a really captivating thing about that movie: that healthy, supportive group of friends. I wish us all a group of friends like that this Christmas. Anyway, that's what's in my head these days: But my heart is . . . apologize, apologize. It's there when I lie down and when I get up and when the girls make me take them to the mall. It's enscribed on the lintel of my door. The only place I hear other noises is when I run.

There. That's four little lamb chops worth of my thoughts, five morsels for your reading delight, in their little puddle of vinegar. Advise away, friends. I'm off to run.

Rethinking the Gospel

2007-09-07T13:24:00.000-07:00

Chapel at my university the other day featured a guy named Dieter Zander, the speaker for our semesterly Spiritual Awareness Week. He’s a former pastor at Willow Creek Church, about which I know nothing except that it’s massive. Currently he leads a church of just 300, the second biggest church in San Francisco, a city of 750,000—only 4% of whom, according to Zander, profess any religious belief at all, Christian or otherwise. Zander is, in other words, something of a missionary there.

He began with a story about one of his San Francisco neighbors—a man who had never really met a Christian before—who asked him to explain what Christians believed. Zander enthusiastically launched into an account of the gospel—or “good news,” he etymologized—that was essentially the message that had saved him as a boy: that Jesus died for so that he wouldn’t have to go to hell for his sins but could be united with God in heaven. At the end of of this explanation, the neighbor commented that this didn’t sound like very good news to him. In fact, it could only be good news to those who felt bad about themselves and were worried about going to hell, but he felt pretty good about himself. Zander was upset by this answer, comically reporting that he found himself trying to find some way to make the guy feel bad about himself, before he finally gave it up and decided to go back to the Bible and see what Jesus himself had to say about the gospel that he hadn’t managed to communicate to the guy.

What he found was that virtually every time Jesus mentions the “good news,” it’s that the Kingdom of God is at hand. I had never noticed that before, although I had recently noticed, in writing an essay about Jesus’ parables, that just about every one of them is an extended metaphor that starts out, “The kingdom of God is like…” Zander took us to a representative passage to back up his claim, Jesus’ first words in Mark’s gospel:
After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

Zander went on to talk about this kingdom of God, which was a call to action more than anything else, in his view. And he could be right. (I have been taking to heart Kimberly’s warning, in response to my last post, against holy navel-gazing.) Zander also talked about the need to “repent” his previous understanding of the gospel and remarked that we are all called to such repentance. The word repent, he hurried to explain, literally means “rethink,” by which I think he must have meant that the word repent is derived from Latinate morphemes meaning again and think (an etymological detail that I had never noticed before but did find interesting). And he also explained that, in this rethinking process, his old gospel became a part of his new one.

But it was too late. I was already thinking the thought he wanted to squelch: that my current concept of the gospel was probably wrong or at least incomplete—or, worse, outright sinful and in need of repentance. I’m always so susceptible to others’ faith claims.

In any case, I decided, I needed to figure out what my concept of the gospel was to begin with. Early on in Zander’s sermon, he had talked about the Christian message as being like a jigsaw puzzle. He put a picture of one on the overhead screen and asked us to picture a puzzle box that depicted the gospel as we knew it. It was part of an elaborate metaphor he was constructing that he probably carried through his subsequent Spiritual Awareness Week sermons (I missed them). I won’t try to reconstruct the metaphor here. Suffice it to say that my mind wandered at this point, as it often does when preachers use cutesy analogies and audiovisuals.

Was my gospel even depictable as an image? I wondered as I stared at the blank jigsaw puzzle on the screen. I thought of it more as a story than a picture. One or the other episode of it might be depictable, but it would be hard to get the whole thing into a single frame. God walking with us in the cool of the day. Us hiding from him in shame. Him half pursuing, half chasing us—to Canaan, to Mount Sinai, to Ninevah, to the cross—like spooked cattle he was trying to pen in a storm so that they wouldn’t get under a tree and be killed by lightening, as cattle sometimes are around here. (We once lost a couple of cows that way, and a neighbor lost a dozen.)

The cow-chasing God was maybe depictable, I decided, but it was more than that. He didn’t just want to protect us. He wanted more from us. It is my conviction, which I find supported in just about every chapter of scripture, Old Testament and New, that God loves us as parents love their children—not quite how we feel toward our domestic animals—and, like a parent, he wants something from us in return: namely, to be loved back.

I didn’t get this far during the sermon. I kept trying to, but then I’d overhear, in the midst of my musing, another shocking remark and lose track of where I was. Or else I’d be led to look at a passage in scripture that took me off in an entirely new direction. The last such passage that I remember was this comment, in John 5:17, in which Jesus is defending himself against accusations that he was working on the Sabbath: “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.”

It was all over, then. I was off thinking about my favorite subjects of spiritual inquiry: work and rest. What is rest? And what constitutes God’s work? Is it, as Jesus says soon after in John’s gospel, merely “to believe in the one he has sent?” Or is it, as Zander seemed to be suggesting, something more strenuous?

At one point in his sermon, Zander took us to Ephesians 2:8-9, a key passage for those preoccupied with the filthy rags gospel that Zander’s neighbor had found so unattractive: “For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith…not by works, so that no one can boast.” If you read on to the very next sentence, Zander pointed out, you would find something quite different than the anti-works gospel he had been preaching for most of his adult life: “For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” So, we’re not saved through our good works but in order to do the good works God had planned for us. Inexplicably, when Zander went told his neighbor this new understanding of the gospel—that we called to work, right now, in God’s kingdom—the man proclaimed this to be truly good news.

What, exactly, is God calling me to do, now that I’m a Christian? I was left wondering. Me precisely. There are so many possibilities, each one as compelling as the next, and so many people surrounding me claiming to know what I should be doing rather than write books or teach or cook dinner and raise daughters. Am I already doing whatever it is God has planned for me? Or am I shirking? Should I be worried about this at all?

Clearly I had a lot of “repenting” to do about these matters.

Locating—and Loving—My Circle of Influence

2007-08-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

My daughter Charlotte just got back from camp a couple of weeks ago. It was her first summer in leadership training, and she came home bragging about all the work she had done. In addition to washing dishes nightly and serving the other campers their food, she was part of a work group that hauled and split logs, scraped the rust off of outdoor furniture, collected trash, and spent fifty hours doing community service which amounted to clearing out a vacant lot full of probably toxic junk and weeds so overgrown they had to use machetes to get through them. She came home with blisters and scrapes and bug bites and bruises and an enthusiasm for hard work that was entirely new to me. "I want to find some more community service to do!" she planned out loud, as she hummed the camp theme song for this summer, which was something about being consumed.

This glow, this enthusiasm for hard week, lasted just long enough for me to manipulate her into cleaning her room to welcome her friend from Atlanta, who spent last week with us. By the time the friend left, so had Charlotte's sweet desire to serve, and now she's back to her old teenage self. Her shoes are piling up inside the front door, her room cannot be discussed in this public place, and her freshly washed clothes waiting to be hung up to dry are starting to smell moldy.

Just the familiar story of the camp high that goes away when you've been home a few days, I'm sure you're thinking if you've ever been to church camp. (I haven't, but the youth leaders always talk about this phenomenon at the chapel to which we parents are invited when my girls go to camp.) Today it occurred to me that there's another problem at issue here, though. Not the problem they warned about in the camp chapel in an effort to fix it, but rather one that church camps—and, frequently, churches themselves—cause in the first place. Namely, the mistaken belief—common to all sort of missionaries, religious and secular—that service to others is primarily to be accomplished by going out of one's sphere of influence, rather than deeper into it. Evangelism and service to one’s community are thus appropriately called, in current church lingo as well as the social services communications of the secular community, “outreach.”

My family and I have recently been visiting churches with youth groups—our old one had none—looking for a spiritual home with more appeal for our daughters. The kids in these youth groups plan expensive mission trips to Mexico and Uganda and return with glowing reports of how they painted a community center somewhere or helped pour a church foundation. But not one kid has approached either of our girls at church and said, “Hey, you want to hang with us?” As far as I can tell, none of the adults leading these youths has told them that it is just this sort of inreach—to the lonely and churchless and needy and damned within their community—that is likeliest to reach the goals they are purporting to set in doing mission work in the first place.

Yes, I am aware of the Great Commission. And that even in the Old Testament God was forever telling his chosen people to "go out" somewhere. And that Jesus told us, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even life itself—such a person cannot be my disciple.” But Jesus, we know, was being hyperbolic here to emphasize his own importance over fidelities we are probably already honoring. He didn’t mean we were to hate those around us any more than he meant we were to hate life by committing suicide on his behalf.

I'm ranting, I know—and I was going to give that up, I think I reported in a recent post. But this isn’t just about my daughters. And it isn’t just about the missionary kids—frequently among the neediest of my students at the Christian university where I work—who were raised in boarding schools instead of at home with their missionary parents. The business of outreach—of mission work and social justice and volunteerism—is becoming increasingly a topic in the news and, correspondingly, for me as well.

Here’s the thing. Although I have a longstanding love for other cultures, I believe our first mission work—our first calling—should be to address the needs within our communities. Not the aliens in some other place—They aren’t even aliens there!—but the aliens in our midst. Not orphans in Russia or China, but our kids’ friends—maybe even our own kids—that come home from school to empty houses and microwave Hot Pockets for dinner. Not even the widows at church—though they are certainly worthy—so much as the widows God has selected for our very particular notice—my mother-in-law, in my case. Over those close to us we have more influence than we have over recipients of our charity that we see for the space of a morning or a week or even a year and certainly more influence than we have over someone we never meet at all but who simply receives a portion of the check we sent to some organization we hope is trustworthy.

My particular widow, at 85, increasingly needs help with daily activities like shopping, driving places, visiting doctors, but she’d never accept help from anyone but one of her own family. Although Mamaw—as we all call her—is undoubtedly lonely and her days are long, she locks herself in her house and longs only for the company of Charlotte and Lulu or Kris or me. She hangs on every sentence that drops from my mouth, listens to me read my essays aloud, and tells me only complimentary things. She’s conveniently located—just a quarter of a mile from my house—and it doesn’t cost me a thing besides time and patience to assist her. She’s also the recipient of my notice likeliest to appreciate and remember it. She is the widow I should find easiest to love.

But in other ways she is the hardest to love. She calls me perpetually, stays on the phone longer than I want her to, repeats herself, can’t hear and won’t get a hearing aide, and generally gets on my nerves. She needs more and more, the older she gets. I have no doubt about my call to mission work in her regard. She is definitely the one God intended me to think about when he told me to look after widows.

Some of my more socially just friends—with whom I like to argue on this topic—tell me, Yes, but why not do both? Love your widow and widows at large! Your aliens—like the international students in my classes and the Vietnamese checker in the grocery store—and those in other countries. Your orphans—those kids who have never eaten squash before and blithely throw trash out my car window when I take them somewhere—and the child prostitutes of Thailand and the Walking Boys of Sudan (who are now men) and and and. You see the problem. It’s overwhelming how much good work there is to do out there. And the time and effort you spend on one area of service, necessarily takes time and effort away from another. This is an aspect of charity I have never heard discussed in church.

The poor will always be with us, Jesus said. And the widows, he might have added. And the aliens. And the orphans. The best we can do is focus in on, as he did, the needy ones we encounter in our daily lives. Love them. Touch them. Minister to them. And above all, get to where you enjoy them—instead of viewing them as a hated chore that slips further and further down the to-do list and then, thankfully, off the page and past your notice entirely.

Dickens’ appalling character in Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her many children in her devotion to the “natives” in Africa, and, similarly, the Suffragette Mrs. Banks, who ignores her children in the Disney adaptation of Mary Poppins (in P. L. Travers’ novel she is a much more sympathetically rendered feminist who does not return to her childrearing duties at the end of the book) demonstrate well the kind of faulty prioritization I am objecting to here.

And the mispriorization of love that I, unfortunately, too often end up emulating. Even as I type these words, the neglected waif Lulu stands behind my chair, trying wistfully to get my attention. I have been working, she says, all day. Now it’s her turn.

So, with that, I will end this weird little mission work of ranting that I am doing here and make dinner or ferry the girls down to their Mamaw’s house or do whatever it is that she’s wanting. And then, in the spirit of inreach, I will go hang Charlotte’s damp clothes before the mildew sets and I have to wash them all over again.

Faith Envy

2007-07-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

I have finally begun—for the third time—Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and I am l-o-v-i-n-g it. I don’t know why I had so much trouble getting into it the first two times. Must not have been ready for it.

I am having a curious reaction to the book: I am beset with a bizarre faith envy. I keep comparing my faith to the main character’s faith, which I suspect mirrors Marilynne Robinson’s. I wish I were more like the two of them as a believer. More relaxed in my faith. Less squinchy-eyed about everything. And, above all, more just plain kind.

Both Reverend Ames and Robinson, I fear, would disapprove of me as a Christian, especially with my long-held view—which I’m starting to question, the book is so convincing—that spiritual development only occurs through struggle. On page 24 of the paperback, the Reverend reflects, “It seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled.”

That’s me, I keep thinking. Worrying. But he’s talking about people who get all bent out of faith by reading Feuerbach, whom Ames characterizes as an atheist. (Feuerbach called himself a theist, but he pretty much believed we make God up to address our needs.) The Feuerbachs of the world are not what unsettles my faith. Rather, it’s a struggle with myself, mostly, and with what it appears to me the Bible is calling me to be and do. I struggle with God, in fact. Maybe that’s an okay way to struggle. Jacob did it and won a blessing. Not that Jacob is someone I want to emulate. I'm probably not alone in finding him one of the least likeable God-followers in the Bible. Right up there with Lot.

Robinson’s writing just undoes me. So clean and simple. So many surprises in such plain, straightforward sentences. It’s like getting a beat up package in the mail, wrapped in grocery bags turned inside out, and opening it to find a delicate treasure from far far away, from some person you’ve forgotten, a porcelain bowl so thin you can see light through it. You think, how did it ever survive? The story of Ames trekking out to Kansas during the drought to find the grandfather’s grave. Man. I read it aloud to Kris at the breakfast table yesterday. So real. So horrible. So funny. Or when they baptize the kittens. I keep wishing I had written it, not her. Or, as Jim Whitehead used to say, “I wish I had written that book, and she had written a better one.”

Apropos packages containing delicate bowls. In one of my moves in my traveling years, I sent a bowl I couldn’t part with to a friend in Boston to store with some of my other things. It was pale slick green on the inside and matt brown, almost black on the outside. About the size of a cantaloupe, but more oval, wide at the mouth with a very small footprint—like the bottom of a drip in midair. Just the perfect bowl. Very old. Made by someone with a very light hand: thin enough, as I say, to see light through it, even though it was glazed dark on the outside. I sent it hurry-scurry, in the midst of buying a plane ticket and paying bills and packing, so I didn’t have much time or energy to devote to it, and all my tools—scissors, tape, etc.—were all packed away. Somehow, I got it in a box, with squashed up bags stuffed around it and to the post office, and years later I went to my friend’s house to get my things, and there it was on top of my trunk in the half-darkness and damp of her cellar, this old beat up box tied up with string the way we used to do. The box looked hardly bigger than the bowl in my memory, and I expected to find just shards when I opened it. I opened it carefully, nonetheless, and, miraculously, it was not in the least damaged. I held it up to the light bulb dangling above me to see the light through it, and at that moment I slipped or tripped on wet, uneven concrete, and the bowl dropped. Exploded into tiny black and green shards. I can still feel that moment in my stomach when I think about it—of loss so nearly coincident with such a surprising and delightful recovery of what was precious to me. Ach.

I ordered Anita Brookner’s The Next Big Thing through Interlibrary Loan, so that’ll be next.

I wish I could touch your faces and bless you all, like Ames with those kittens.

Editing, the Rant, a Question, and a Proposal

2007-07-02T06:48:00.000-07:00

By working like a crazywoman and making myself unavailable to my bored daughter (Charlotte went off to a class on the Enlightenment at Duke and left Lulu alone and feckless) and a crank to my patient husband, I got the food memoir edited exactly on my deadline. When I sent it in, I immediately got back one of those automated email replies that my editor would be out of town until 9 July. I would have had, in other words, another week and a half, had I known.

I'm glad, though. It's done. I can—and need to—work on other things. And I like the work I did: Minus the 16,000 words I cut—and the resultant rearranging I had to do to cut so much—the book is a more successful narrative, as a whole, more integrally a book.

It seems to me that ought be a metaphor for something: that cutting about a tenth of the book's length improved it so much. Like cleaning house, I suppose. Or losing weight. Or weeding. All of which has been going on in my life of late. I haven't lost 10% of my weight yet, but I'm past halfway--thanks to my new habit of running (i.e. jogging) 3 miles every other day. And Kris has cleaned out the garage and the two studies. It is interesting to consider how invigorating loss can be.

In the editing process, I learned that I don't like diatribes and that I am given to them. It is something I can now be alert to, like clichés. It's funny to learn this now, so late in my teaching career. And also to learn it right after having read an interesting book—Lad Tobin's Reading Student Writing—in which the author recommends the "rant" as a legitimate form. I had been thinking I would assign a rant the next time I taught English 1. But then I read aloud a chapter from the food memoir to Lulu—she was sick, so she wanted me to read to her—and found myself getting bored not two paragraphs into it, even before Lulu said anything. Rants, I would argue, are never interesting. As essayist Rebecca Solnit writes in "Locked Horns," "Everyone's encountered bad divorces, noise-obsessed neighbors, monomaniacs who let a grievance take over their lives to the exclusion of everything else, a sort of psychological starvation." A rant is an indulgence in just this sort of monomania, resulting, I would argue, in not only psychological but intellectual starvation—i.e., boredom. One becomes, that is, a bore. And, now that I think of it, students of writing, if they have anything to say at all, don't have to be taught how to rant. Ranting comes naturally to the best of us. So I won't be teaching it.

Tobin's book is worth reading, though. It represents what he refers to as a hybrid of academic and personal writing on the subject of teaching writing—or, well, on one aspect of teaching writing: how to think about and value (but not evaluate, mind you) student writing. It's not a terrifically practical book on teaching writing. In fact, more than anthing else, it is a defense of the hybrid writing he practices. Such a defense is warranted in our field, perhaps, but he sounds defensive in making it, which is unfortunate. I've been getting away with a hybrid of academic writing and personal writing since I was an undergraduate and have been promoting it in the classroom for coming up on thirty years (shudder). I kind of wished, as I read, that he would just do it and get on with it, rather than expend so much effort and, well, ranting on how it's a worthwhile way of writing.

Anyway, currently in the garden: every sort of squash, cucumbers, green beans, peppers, and unripe tomatoes. Now to think about Jesus's parables.

(This post feels more like a typical blog than usual, to me: formless, solipsistic, wandering. I don't think I like it. Verzeiht!)

Oh. One last thing. Two matters of usage interested me in revising my book: One is the question of whether or not to capitalize the first word of a complete sentence that follows a colon (as here), and the other is whether or not the pronounced s of a possessive following an s should be included, as in "Jesus's parables." Both usages—which I was taught and which I, on occasion, also mention in class—seem to be in flux, at the moment. What are your thoughts? Although both rules are still found in usage manuals, Kris, a stickler for correct usage, disputes and never even heard of the sentence capitalization following a colon rule, and every source I find on apostrophe usage, even those that promote the phonologically determined rule I was taught, seems to make an exception for Jesus's. It's all esoteric, as my publisher will have its own rules that will be the final word, but it interests me nonetheless.

One last last thing. I'm about to read another Anita Brookner novel, The Next Big Thing, as soon as I can get it through special order at Barnes & Noble or through interlibrary loan. I also have Marilyn Robinson's Gilead on my bedside table and want to reread Housekeeping—one of my favorite books ever—soon. Anyone want to join me by reading concurrently and exchanging thoughts?

Deadlines, Editing, the Flood, Being Edited, and Finding Rest

2007-06-16T09:48:00.000-07:00

Wow, I just noticed it's been a month and a half since my last entry! I'm very busy these days—writing, writing, writing—and barely have time to think interesting thoughts about anything I'm not already writing about, much less write them down. However, since I originally decided that the theme of this blog would be struggle, I have decided to offer here a rundown on the writing projects I've been working on and the struggles involved in each one:

Revising and cutting (hopefully) fifty pages from Starting from Scratch: Memoirs of a Wandering Cook, a food memoir, due out in January. My revision deadline is 30 June, and I'm only on page 146. Cutting my writing is the hardest work I do. Usually—when I'm shortening an essay for a conference, for example—I have my husband Kris do the cutting for me. He has a good ear and is merciless and makes big Xs through whole pages. Then we don't speak for days until I recover from the meanness of it. And later I almost always like the resulting essay better for the cuts. Right now, though, Kris is busy with his clients' tax return extensions and all the handyman jobs around the house that he couldn't get done during tax season, so I'm on my own. The mss. started out at 371 pages and I'm down to 338, so I keep thinking I'm doing sort of okay, but most of the pages I've managed to cut are from a chapter that should have been cut from the mss. before I ever got it. Oh well.
My book on Genesis, which was supposed to involve daily Bible reading. By "supposed to" I mean pursuant to a deal I made with God at the outset of the project that I would read the Bible daily if he would inspire me. The revision deadline for Starting from Scratch has gotten in my way, though. I do keep revisiting where I am in Genesis regularly, if not daily, and I have moved on past Noah, which was a very difficult chapter for me to write. Aside from Noah and his family, God destroyed everyone in the whole world, as well as all those animals! It depressed me so much to think about it—as well as challenged everything I had previously been discovering about God in my reading and writing this time through Genesis—that I could hardly write for awhile. But I've moved on to Babel and am back to loving this book. The Bible, I mean, not my own babblings about it.
A monthly blog for the online manifestation of Today's Christian Woman. You can read my first monthly offering at: http://blog.todayschristianwoman.com/walkwithme/2007/06/as_your_garden_grows.html. Blogs, I find, are hard to write, as I've already mentioned in this blog more than once and as I'm sure you've already noticed. I like to write long, for one thing, and and for the TCW blog I'm limited to 700 words. (The entry you're reading is twice that.) Also, it's hard to find a subject that others will find interesting enough to want to respond to. I'm not very polemical in my writing but instead pretty speculative, and obviously in-process in my views, which makes it difficult for a reader to write a rebuttal or even much of an agreement. And, above all, I find it tricky, in a blog, to strike the right tone. I keep thinking, "Who gives a rip what I think? Why am I writing about these private little incompletely thought out matters in this public place?" I am like those students I had when I taught seventh grade that scrubbed out and deleted way more words than they ever submitted for a grade. I called them erasers. Their papers looked like terrycloth by the time they were done writing.

Anyway, that's one struggle with the TCW post. The other struggle is that, although the people at TCW approached me for a blog—and more recently a feature article in the actual print issue coming out later in the year (see below for details)—I worry that they may not want to embrace who I am as a writer. For the blog post currently displayed, in the final editing someone changed my sentence "Those first fruits are precious treasures you share only with your lover, your children, your spouse" to "Those first fruits are precious treasures you share only with your spouse, your children, your dearest friends." It's a minor change, really. I suppose the impulse was—as a student in a class in which I read a draft of the essay aloud predicted it would be—to eliminate the possibility that the word "lover" might be misunderstood by a conservative audience to refer to an extramarital affair or other illicit relationship. My own impulse in using the word "lover" to begin with was to include in my intended audience someone who wasn't married and had no kids but might have a boyfriend. But I hate the word "boyfriend." It sounds so dippy. And I think "lover" is just about perfect as a word to signify one who loves and who, in the sort of relationship most of us are looking for before marriage, is loved back. No one took the matter up with me before they changed the wording—as I'm coming to expect in this new world of publishing. I have gotten used to editors shortening and in other ways "improving" my writing all the time, and I don't usually take it any more personally than I do my husband's enthusiastic axing of whole pages of my essays. (That is, it takes me about a week to recover and to love—in the Christian sense, of course—my editors once again.) What I really struggle with, though, is being edited for ideological reasons. When, not only as a writer but as a believer, I am silenced. I think we Christians tend to do too much of that: silence the voices of those who say what we don't expect or want to hear.

It especially bothers me to think that my Christian audience has to be pandered to in this way. In my experience at a Christian university where many of my students and fellow faculty and staff are quite conservative, I have found that Christians are able to operate way further outside of the box than many—Christians and non-Christians alike—give them credit for. And, as we all do when we move outside the box even for a moment, they profit from it. Seeing things a new way is always instructive, even if we don't end up adopting the new way. And, the further outside the box we are able to venture and the more frequently we undertake to do it, the more our credibility among non-Christians grows—which is surely good for the spreading of God's message.

Mind you, I like all the people I have so far met through this assignment at TCW. They are smart and competent and kind-hearted. And good editing, as I say, requires a certain mercilessness. And it is, as I have already said, a minor change. By next week I will be over it. And I may even like the revision better than my original wording by that time. But my struggle with this matter does raise some important (and more polemical than my usual) issues for us to consider as believers.
A faculty workshop presentation coming up in August on rest in the context of work. Not doing much yet, but did meet with a copresenter to discuss what we might want to talk about. And the topic does seem relevant to this blog, with its talk of deadlines and work and not being able to find time to blog. Rest, it seems to me, is relevant to every topic.
The TCW article I mentioned above, which is to be about Jesus as a storyteller. I'm really excited about this and have allowed myself to get a little bit started, although I don't really have time right now to work on it and I need to reread and think about the parables before I do. The deadline is 10 July.

So, my current struggles are deadlines—what a dreadful word!—and editing and being edited and getting back to daily Bible reading and, with so many projects going at once, finding rest. Welcome to the world of writing for a living.

Icons, Commemorative Clothing, and Other Visual Prayer Aids

2007-04-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

A habit shared by many victims of violent crime is to obsessively collect information on violent crime and violent criminals, especially when there is a crime in the news. It is my theory that we do this because we think that if we can just figure out what makes a person commit an act of violence, then we can figure out something important about how we came to be victims and thereby gain some sense of control over the traumatic event in our own lives. I call this obsessive data collection “researching.” In my case, as a sufferer of post-traumatic stress disorder, researching inevitably leads to my developing the symptoms of the disorder—clautrophobia, avoidance of touch, abiding anger—that are the legacy of a sexual assault that occurred a quarter of a century ago, when I was in graduate school. All this to say, I have been trying not to do research on the Virginia Tech murders, currently in the news.

The other day, though, I ran into a friend who, I discovered, was also very upset about the murders and had been engaging in the very research I had been avoiding. Or, trying to avoid. Later, in a brief email exchange on the subject, I learned that the friend was comforted by the fact that others were honoring the dead students by wearing the Virginia Tech school colors, and I realized that this comforts me, too—not only to see others wear the commemorative colors but to wear them myself.

I often undertake to wear certain clothes or pieces of jewelry in remembrance of an important worry in my life. I wore a speckled white, burqa-like dress during the grim days when the reporter Jill Carroll was held hostage in Iraq. The dress became my Jill Carroll dress: a way of reminding myself of her by wearing something like what I imagined, from the horrifying videos posted on Al-Jazeera's websites, she was wearing. In one of the videos, she was crying. Wearing that dress, for me, was a way of entering what I imagined to be her pain. A way of grieving and showing solidarity. A way of praying.

I have been thinking about these and other visual aids to prayer: commemorative clothes, flags at half mast, a hat worn when a friend is losing hair due to chemotherapy, my silver baby pendant that reminds me of Jesus’ incarnation and of the fact that I am God’s daughter, the pierced hands and feet I privately envision when I think of Jesus’ suffering and my own. Biblical people tore holes in their clothes to mourn, and people of later generations, in many cultures, wore special mourning clothes, often for years, after the death of someone close.

What is it about the visual that so connects us to the spiritual? And why am I so embarrassed, as I have written in an earlier post, by such habits of prayer—and that's what they are, I think—when I encounter institutionalized versions of them in, for example, the Eastern Orthodox church? Why do icons seems so valueless to me? Or, worse than valueless—actively wrong-headed? Feeling connected to Jill Carroll as I did by wearing similar clothes to those she was wearing in her terror, why does it seem absurd to me for another person to kiss the ankle bone of a martyr?

I have no answers tonight. Only these questions, this recognition of connectedness—in my current grief on behalf of the thirty-two students and faculty dead at the hands of a man whose impulses I will never understand—to practices which I have so recently, in this very blog, disdained. I offer them up to you. My penance. Knuckles against the heart. A cross, traced by a thumbnail, on the lips.

Easter Blues

2007-04-08T20:16:00.000-07:00

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. But this morning, for whatever reason, I couldn’t get to the joy of it.

It began before we even made it to church. It was 25° when we got up, and I guessed that the few eggplants and peppers out in my garden that had survived the previous night’s low temperatures could not have survived a second such night, despite the sheets I had draped over them.

Before I was awake enough to go out to my garden and check on them, Charlotte came downstairs in her strapless, white Easter dress, down the front of which she had spilled some of her “body shimmer”—I don’t know what that is but just report her words when she came to me to have it put right—leaving a blood-colored stain on her left breast that she had already rendered indelible by trying to wash it out on her own. My efforts with bleach on a cloth only made it worse. The dress itself turned yellow where I dabbed at it and the red did not disappear. I didn’t tell Charlotte, but I knew the dress—one of her favorites—was ruined.

To my amazement, she didn’t seem to notice the stain. She kept the dress on and, when we got to church, even took her jacket off, leaning across Lulu to whisper, in response to my raised eyebrows, that there was no reason to wear a pretty dress unless you were going to show it off. So, I spent the first part of the service—while the pianist played and an elder explained what to do if you were visiting for the first time and then another elder led prayer for those of the congregation who were suffering illness or grief or fighting in the armed forces—praying that the Father would remove from my mind all consciousness of Charlotte: the stain, the ruined dress, her embarrassment if anyone noticed, her apparent lack of embarrassment thus far.

“Make me just forget about it so that I can think of your Son, risen,” I prayed.

It wouldn’t have taken much effort on God’s part to answer my prayer: I forget more than I remember these days. And, I reasoned, there would be other ways to address my prayer. God could refocus my attention on some glittering, transforming new discovery of himself. Or he could burn into my consciousness the pettiness of worrying about a stain when we were there to celebrate the resurrection of his Son, our Savior, risen up live out of his dead body and out of our grief. Or he could just make the stain miraculously disappear.

He did none of this. Soon we were directed to greet our neighbors, and every time another person turned around and extended a hand in our direction, all I could think about was, Oh no, now they’re going to notice the red stain and the yellowed place and think, “Why does she let her child wear something like that to church, on Easter Sunday of all days, a dress stained and ruined? And strapless to boot?”

While the choir sang and the pianist played more background music, I studied the bulletin to distract myself from my own pathetic worries. The sermon, I read, would be about the “Rise of the Metachoi”—a word I had never seen before but that sounded interesting—and would focus upon Hebrews 2:5-18. When I looked the passage up, it turned out to be one of those obtuse places in scripture about angels: humans—and Jesus, the Son of Man, along with them—the writer of Hebrews argued, are ranked a little below the angels but nevertheless they are crowned in glory and have everything under their feet. I read through Hebrews 2 twice while the collection was taken and more music played, but I couldn’t figure out what the point was, especially in view of the fact that it was Easter and it seemed to me that the pastor must be meaning to make a resurrection message out of it. The answer, I decided, would be about whatever metachoi meant.

It means partaker—or companion or partner, in a slew of other passages the pastor led us to—and what was partaken of was suffering. The message of the sermon was this: There are believers, and then there are partakers, and even though believers go to heaven, only partakers in suffering are going to get their reward, which is to govern in God’s kingdom someday. Some reward for one’s suffering, I thought—to get to suffer some more as an administrator. I’d rather just get there and do my thing.

What really undid me, though, was the man’s opening comment, one of these throwaway analogies from the news I find pastors are fond of beginning with, probably gleaned from the same CNN website where I had read it last night. The 15 British sailors—whose dinghy had been captured by Iran and who had been terrorized into making false public confessions of error—had caved. Unlike our American soldiers in Hanoi, the pastor said, the British sailors had been unwilling to suffer for their country. Unlike the metachoi, I suppose he meant.

Or unlike Peter—I think he might have said—who denied Jesus on the night of his capture even though there was no one there stripping and blindfolding him or lining him and his companions against the wall and cocking their guns. I guess poor old Peter isn’t going to get his reward either. Maybe we can hang out together when I get to heaven.

I left church glum and not a little angry. And then IGA had no lamb, as I suspected they wouldn’t. (Why is it that bad things you know are going to happen are always so much more distressing than the ones that come as surprises?) And then, on the drive home, I noticed lots of trees whose leaves were hanging down all black and limp from the freeze. My little eggplants and peppers, I knew, would look the same when I got home. I felt out of sorts all day.

Anyway, all this to say I feel in need of resurrection this Easter. From the cold. From the scratched, cloudy lenses through which we observe the world. And from my own petty preoccupation with everything but what matters. He is risen. He is risen indeed. Up, away, to the heavens. And I’m still here.

Church, Again

2007-04-01T18:43:00.000-07:00

This past week my university hosted a writer's festival. We invited three writers in from out of state, and I got to know them a little bit. The keynote speaker—a sweet-spirited husband and father and professor of English about my age—was a poet. He taught my poetry workshop, mainly reading poems with us, and he put me utterly to shame as a teacher. His most recent publication is a spiritual memoir, which I read most of in preparation for introducing him to students at a luncheon.

The memoir is about his search for a closer relationship with God following a spiritual crisis of sorts in his early forties. Toward this end, he sets out for the monsasteries of Mount Athos, in Greece, where he hopes to find a spiritual father who can, among other things, teach him how to go about the business of ceaseless prayer, which he is convinced will cause him to have a more constant sense of God's presence. He seems heartbreakingly young and innocent in this book—as young as I often feel among my age contemporaries who are lifelong Christians. As young, in fact, as I felt as I ate and chatted with him and the other two visting writers. I liked that about him and about his book. Curiously, I had recently been reading Julian of Norwich, who longed similarly for the ability to pray ceaselessly and thereby to sense God's presence more consistently. So, I paid more attention to him than the other two writers.

He is, as he kept referring to himself, "Orthodox," by which he means Eastern Orthodox, and there was much evidence of this tradition in his practices and writing. I was fascinated by his brand of faith, which I have always—rather stupidly, I admit—pretty much equated with the Roman Catholicism of my father's era, with which I am somewhat more familiar. Formal liturgy. Robed priests referred to as fathers. Monasteries. Incense. Fancy church buildings. A high value on church tradition. I have never quite understood why Eastern Orthodoxy is more or less embraced by evangelicals, whereas Roman Catholicism is not. From what little I know of them, both seem to be equally Christian in their essence and equally preoccupied with images and saints, intercessors and formal ritual as pathways to God.

In any case, during the poet's visit, he fasted from meat for Lent and wore a knotted prayer bracelet and a tiny lapel pin geaturing a cross with two additional crossbeams—the standard Orthodox cross, he told me when I asked, and he explained that the extra crossbeams represented the place where Jesus put his feet and the placard above his head. He seemed bemused, even slightly irritated, that I didn't already know these things and had to have them explained. I suppose I should know more about Eastern Orthodoxy. (Certainly I should know more about Roman Catholicism, the faith tradition in which I took my first steps in God's direction.) In any event, I didn't question him further about the Orthodox highlighting of these details of the crucifixion—the foot rest, the placard—although I wanted to. I was sure they had meaning.

All this to say that I was paying a good deal of attention to the man's particular brand of Christian faith, trying to sort it in my head and understand it and maybe understand my own faith a little better. His memoir was mystifying at points. Frequently, I found passages funny that I guessed were not intended so. A story of kissing the relic of a saint—her left foot—and immediately thereafter sensing her sweet presence. Another about feeling for the first time a fluttering about his heart that he knows is the presence of God he has so longed to experience, and then thinking he is having a heart attack. And, more than anything else, his repeatedly believing he has found the spiritual guide he is looking for only to be turned down when he asks. His story reminded me, for all the world, of all those wistful years of looking for love before I married Kris, wanting deeper relationships than I ever found. The same repeated mismatch of desire and commitment.

In the course of his visit, he spoke disparagingly of those—like me, I kept thinking—who don't value tradition or who pick and choose, as he described one community of believers, what they like from this church tradition or that. Although respectful of others' traditions, he had little use for the traditionless. At one point, picking up on my ignorance of church history and probably suspecting a deeper disinclination toward tradition as an element of faith—probably believing me to be someone who rejects old church practices outright as empty ritual, as many of my more conservative fellow Christians do—he pointed out to me that T. S. Eliot revered church history. As if that would convince me.

But what would convince me? I keep coming back to this place in my journey toward God—this landing on the stairway: What is the church? What value its traditions and habits of thinking? How essential is the church—not the global body of other believers, but the particular church one belongs to and its practices—to faith? Why does tradition attract me? Why does it repel me?

Once I read that Martin Luther kept on wearing his priestly robes even after he was excommunicated, and I find that intriguing. Was there something that drew him, too, back into the old habits, despite the impulse to cast them aside?

With all of this in my mind, I returned, this weekend, to two spiritual practices that I have neglected for some time. One was the garden, my thin place, where I turned the last remaining beds and pulled up weeds and planted a few plants I had bought and let the sun and wind and water and dirt do their godly work on me.

And, this morning, my daughters and I went to church. We have been inconstant in our attendance—same old problems of Kris's tax season and indecision about what church is right for us. But when I got them up—Charlotte and Lulu and their friend Kaitlyn, who had spent the night—they didn't protest, as they often do, and so we got dressed and went.

It was Palm Sunday. When the little children ran up to the front of the sanctuary waving their palm fronds, I remembered the Palm Sundays of my childhood—the smell and feel and specialness of those palm fronds, the excitement, the bigness of it—and I embarrassed the girls by crying. One boy—I think he was mentally retarded—was so thrilled by the palms and the noise and the movement that he jumped up and down, flinging out his arms, and his sister had to hold onto his waist to keep him from leaping from the stage. Another little boy stood in the front, his face blank with concentration, and held his frond straight up, like a flag, or like a candle he was afraid might drip or catch something on fire. Others without fronds did the hand movements of the song we were singing: "He came from heaven to earth, to show the way, from the earth to the cross, our debt to pay . . . !" Afterwards the girls commented that they had no idea that there were so many little kids in that church, and they were right. There were a lot of children. They filled the front of the sanctuary.

While I was crying, I had this vision of how it might have been when Jesus entered Jerusalem that last time. By then, the poor and the hungry and the sick, the widows, the rejected, the forgotten, were as excited as children, and it was they who tore branches from the trees and waved them in the air in jubilation. They took off their outer garments and threw them down before the Teacher on his colt. Those in power were, of course, not so excited, and things were just about to turn grim. But, for a moment, there was this joy that expressed itself in this precise way, this grabbing of palm fronds in recognition and worship, this throwing down of clothes, this jubilant singing, and it does seem fit to reenact and commemorate it, to feel its motions.

This is, I think, as far as I can get, today, on tradition: that it is the taking into ourselves of the responses of earlier believers. The followers of Jesus, who heard him and touched him and knew him. And those who gathered after his death around the eye witnesses and, with them, celebrated and suffered on his behalf. Tradition itself does not move me, I think. It has no real value, no notched place in my faith. And yet it seizes me at times, seizes everything in me, and wins—often when nothing else will—my notice.

From the Garden

2007-03-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm finally not sick, I'm trying to catch up on my gardening. It's slow going when you start late. I have lettuce and radishes out, but not yet up, and about 3/4 of the garden dug up for replanting.

I love to dig, although it exhausts me. I dig with a gardening fork, the quintessential gardening tool, in my opinion. We had one in Connecticut when I was growing up, but they are not used much in this part of the country. I can't figure out why not. The fork is the only tool that enables me to dig down really deep into our rather clayey soil and then turn the weeds under. There's something so satisfying in that.

Another part of gardening that I like a lot is weeding—but only when the dirt is still damp from a recent rain and the weeds just sort of slide out into your hand. Another nice feeling. On a day like today in Westville, Oklahoma, after a little bout of much needed rainy weather, it's hard to resist pulling the weeds out instead of turning them under, but the turning under takes care of two crucial jobs at once.

Also, if I start getting down close to the dirt to pull up weeds, I inevitably discover plants I want to save from the fork. New garlics and cilantros growing up from last year. The prettier weeds: wild bluets and violas, both spring bloomers, and what I want to guess are baby black-eyed Susans. Carcasses of hearty plants—fennel, broccoli, Russian sage—that I neglected to dig up at the end of their growing season and that have overwintered and are now sprouting back from their still viable roots. Opting not to notice them is the hardest part of gardening for me. I want to save them all. If I do, though, I will never get to the soil turning part and then the planting of seeds, the part I like least—it's so fiddly—but the part that is most important if I want to have any vegetables.

One year I skipped turning the soil altogether and just planted new between the existing plants. I ended up with a garden of mostly cilantro and elderly crucifers with woody stems and leaves so chewy and insistently cabbagy-tasting that no one would eat them. Usually I break down and allow myself to save some plants—this year I dug up and relocated about a hundred garlics—but in the process of doing so, I rediscover the futility of such acts of mercy: there are just too many little plants that want saving. So, I steel myself and dig.

I hope you're not thinking this is one big metaphor for some sort of cock-eyed message about salvation that I'm trying to make—the futility of it all, so many damned souls out there, some so woody and cabbagy-smelling at the core as to be undesirable even when you do manage to get them saved. But it's not, and I'm not. I'm just cultivating my garden.

Later in the season—once the garden is dug and planted, in the main—I allow myself to save warm season plants that sprout up: tomatoes, zinnias, arugula, basil. And some of the dill. I relocate them to my flower beds. And then, when they get big and scraggly and make my flowerbeds look like old overgrown homeplaces and provide me with more tomatoes and arugula and pesto than I want to harvest and than my family can ever eat, I tell myself, "That was a waste of time, all that transplanting. I won't do that again." But then I do. Over and over. There is something so compelling about the urge to save those little plants, so stout of stem, raising their first fat leaves to the sun.

Sick, Silent, and Surly

2007-03-16T20:24:00.000-07:00

The title about says it. I'm just now getting over the worst flu I've ever had—one of those old-fashioned kind my siblings and I used to get as kids which included gastrointestinal events I won't go into (well, all right, you twisted my arm: one of them amounted to foul, sulfurous belches we used to call "the eggy burps") and fever and upper-respiratory symptoms and wanting to die. When my girls were little, I learned that flus that involve the stomach aren't real flus at all but roto viruses, whatever those are. I think this distinction might be one of those important bits of nonsense—like that tomatoes aren't vegetables, they're fruits—that snobby stupid people like to go around telling everyone. I have decided, nonetheless, to give my flu a name of its own: a retro-virus.

In any case, I had to teach my poetry workshop in the midst of this flu, because we meet only once a week and I am attending a conference in New Orleans on one of the classdays coming up and I just felt like it would be too big of a loss of workshop time not to meet. I spent the day at the university, as I usually do—preparing class all morning and teaching in the afternoon. I got almost nothing accomplished. I was so freezing cold I had to keep going down to my car and turning the engine on and setting the heat and the seat warmer on high, wasting natural resources and polluting the air just to get warm. Then, halfway through class, I had to leave. I was getting delirious. When I got home I had a temperature of 103.5°—the highest I've ever had! My normal body temperature is in the 97's.

Anyway, I got this retro-virus about the time of my last post and then spent the next two weeks in the bathtub, asleep, which is what I do when I don't feel good. That's why I haven't had anything to say yet this month. I've been wellish since then, but in a bad mood—recuperating, I guess. I about stopped talking except to hiss from time to time, "Just leave me alone. Please." Lulu complained that she was going to get a nutritional deficiency from no meat or vegetables because I stopped cooking for the most part, and what I did cook had to be odorless.

Here's what I thought about during this time: How do people who are seriously sick for long long periods of time manage to stay so eager to live and even happy-seeming? I have had three close friends struggle with cancer and horrifying bouts of chemotherapy, and all three, although certainly beset by fear and depression and other sorts of negative thinking from time to time, acted, for the most part, really truly happy to be alive. Speaking out of the experience of my own recent illness, mild by comparison, I am filled with awe.

I thought about all the spiritual commentary I've read on sickness. I remembered a passage in Kathleen Norris's wonderful little book of lectures called The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and "Women's Work" (well worth the mere $5 or so it costs with your Reader's Advantage discount at Barnes & Noble, by the way) where she compares the response to terminal illness on the part of two friends of hers: one turned sweet and the other turned mean. If I were close to death, I am convinced, I would be one of those who turn mean, despite my best hopes to the contrary. Flannery O'Connor, I read once, used to lament on behalf of others that they didn't get to have a terminal illness, as she had, because they missed out on the opportunity that constant pain and suffering and fear afford to make them value life and God as she did. So I figure O'Connor was probably one of those who turned sweet as she approached death, although she said some pretty tough things in her writing and I could also imagine some of the dry, hard-minded things she might have said to her mom toward the end. I imagine she must have had to pray that prayer that the weird little girl in her story "Temple of the Holy Ghost" prays: "Hep me not to be so mean." I pray that prayer a lot; occasionally I have it answered.

And recently, at breakfast, Kris was reading aloud from Julian of Norwich's writings in which she prayed ardently for—and was eventually granted—the opportunity to have and survive an illness unto death so as to become more appreciative of Jesus' suffering. I got the creeps as Kris read and decided she was a bit too much of a crackpot for me. (Sorry, you Julian-lovers out there. She just doesn't blow my dress up. She did have this very nice metaphor of a nut in her hand, but the no amount of pondering could make me understand what it was intended to describe. Worse than the Bible for obtuseness!)

And while I was sick and convalescing, I thought, a little bit, about Lent. Jesus suffering. About to die. Afraid.

Yes, I think he was afraid of dying. Certainly, we know, he was reluctant to die. It is odd to imagine God afraid. Or worried. Or cranky. Or reluctant to do the Father's bidding. Reluctant about anything, for that matter. But there you are. That about sums up the crux—mark the pun!—of the God-man.

What a God. What a man.

Recipes on the Web—A Lament, an Attempt at Obedience, and an Apple Cake Some of You May Want to Try

2007-02-22T11:40:00.000-08:00

My editor told me the other day that they're probably going to want to remove most of the recipes from my upcoming food memoir. The book's too long, I think. They suggested that I post the recipes on my website instead. I'm sort of sad about this. I think that recipes are an integral part of one's story. Or mine, anyway.

And, personally, I prefer recipes in books to recipes on the web. I don't like that there are so many recipes out there in the first place. Whenever I google something I want to make, I get that sinking hopeless feeling akin to the one I get in bookstores when, having gone blithely in for something to read, it suddenly occurs to me that there are so many books. So so many forgettable books. How will I ever choose just one? (Worse, why should I even bother to add my little offerings to the pile?)

That said, I do bother to write, both books and this blog, and my attitude toward them is so different. The web is so ephemeral-seeming. Somehow it seems a waste of time. I keep thinking, I should be putting this in a book. And then, I start a new little collection of essays for some future book. Currently, I'm working on a collection of Genesis essays, which began with my last post.

I also don't like the relative lack of authority of web recipes. Of web anything. Recipes in cookbooks carry with them the personality and habits and voice of the writer of the cookbook. Reviews of cookbooks often include information about whether or not the recipes actually work. On the web recipes are just bodiless, personality-less voices, often without names. Often there is even a disclaimer that no one has tried the recipe out in a test kitchen, so the website is not responsible for whether or not they are reliable.

Then, on top of that, there are frequently comments, readers who have objections or suggestions about this or that. A recipe dialogue it becomes to me, rather than a real recipe, and, while that may sound like a nice thing, like those recipes of our grandmothers and great grandmothers passed down and edited in each generation, for me such recipes start to mishmosh together into something like the food at chain restaurants: a cacaphony of ethnic and personal influences that seems always to include cheese, pleasant sometimes, but in no wise distinctive or personal like the food from a friend's kitchen. I prefer to stop at each new edition of a recipe and get to know just that one entry into the food, before being bombarded with all the ways I could change it from how it was supposed to be. I like savoring not just the culinary instruction of each new voice but the personality and priorities that power it, the life behind the voice that wants things richer or lighter or quicker or more redolent of an almost forgotten memory of childhood.

And anyway, I never do exactly what a recipe says myself—even though I do listen to each voice, do weigh and consider each suggestion. So, having all those tongues weighing in on how the recipe might be better—or simpler, or lower in calories or fat or sugar, or more like some anonymous woman's dead aunt used to do it—makes my own contribution to the evolution of the recipefeel like just another of many, and thus voiceless. Recipes are important, I think, representing—no, incarnating—the evolution of a culture. Incarnating a memory of a particular woman in a particular kitchen. (Yes, I know there are men who cook, but that only really started being the case when cooking evolved from the love-chores of mothers and grandmothers into a profession that could generate glitz and fame and money. In the kitchens of the wealthy, the kitchens of kings and millionares and fancy restaurants where cooks are not cooks but chefs who are known by name, cooking became something I'm not particularly interested in. A confection. A set of rules. An oeuvre. A game for hobby-gourmets. Something with which to impress one's acquaintance and far removed from the homelier comforts found, if we are among the lucky, in the kitchens of our childhoods.)

If I want to use a recipe from the web—to get back on track here—I have to either print it up before I start cooking—a task often entailing copying and editing and pasting the recipe into a Word document so that it will print efficiently—or else run back and forth between my computer and the stove. Both tasks take me out of the kitchen, into the stress and chaos of that other life of mine, where I run here and there and cut and paste and fiddle with email and websites and all the voices of the world. Cooking is the opposite for me. It has always been, from my childhood, an escape from this sort of chaos. An inward act. I prefer to prop up the book right there in the kitchen with me, jotting down the changes I make to it as I go for future reference. A recipe isn't really a recipe, to me—isn't really one to which I will return again and again—until it's been baptised with spatters and rendered transparent here and there with droplets of grease and maybe even burned a bit at the edges, as most of my favorite cookbooks are.

So, I'm not sure where my editor and I will end up in this debate. I'm also not sure how many recipes are too many. But, in the spirit of obedience—or, in any case, a trial run—I have decided to offer you all a recipe for the cake I made for my students today. The class I'm teaching this semester meets only once a week, for two and one half hours, so we make tea and I always bake something.

My friend Susan gave me this recipe as "Washington State Apple Cake. It's widely available elsewhere on the web, and, if you want to google it, you will find versions probably closer to how the recipe started out in Susan's kitchen. Her recipe had a rich cream cheese frosting, but I think that's overkill and also covers up the pretty, crusty, meringue-like top that magically forms on the cake—the best part of the recipe. So, I have omitted the frosting here. I have made other changes to the recipe in my version, such as cutting down the cinnamon significantly. Now I usually leave it out entirely. And I put the nuts on top of the batter rather than in it so that they get all toasty tasting. And I only use canola oil, which lends the cake a curiously intense walnutty flavor. The resulting recipe is, in other words, entirely my own.

Also, to save time and dishwashing, I do the whole thing with my food processor, starting with the apples using a slicing disk, then chopping the nuts, then mixing the batter. However, you can use a hand held mixer to make the batter if you don't have a food processor and then just chop the nuts and slice the apples by hand.

Crusty Apple Cake

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice, sprinkle with the juice of 1/2 a lemon, and spread out in a buttered, floured 9 X 13 pan:

5 or 6 apples, skin and all—or peel them first, if you object to skins

Food process or beat until thick and light:

3 large eggs
2 c. sugar

Add and continue processing/mixing until light and creamy:

1 c. canola oil
1 t. vanilla

Add all at once and process/mix until smooth:

2 c. flour
[1/4 t. cinnamon—I often leave this out, for a purer, nuttier, more intensely apple flavor.]
1 t. baking soda
1 t. salt

Pour, or rather scrape, batter over the apples, then top with

1 c. walnuts, coarsely chopped

Press the nuts down slightly into the batter to make sure they will sink in enough not to fall off as they bake. Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour—by which time the cake will have formed its distinctive meringuey crust. Cool in the pan. Unsweetened whipped cream—or whipped cream ever so slightly sweetened with sugar in which you have stored a scraped out vanilla bean—would be good with this, as a more formal dessert than the baked goods grabbed up in my class.

Hope some of you try this for the people you love through food. It makes a big cake—the sort of cake you might serve at a meeting of your friends or colleagues or at church more than at an intimate family meal (unless your family is huge). Whoever eats it will like the intense nut flavor and the interesting contrast of soft, tart apples with the crusty, nutty topping.

[Don't bother to tell me how it can be improved. I know it can and hope it will be in your kitchen. But let the details remain a matter between you, God, and the people you cook for. Do let me know what you think about getting recipes from the internet in your own experience. I'm not sure I'm on the right track on this. I know getting recipes from the web is widely practiced. So somebody out there must think it's the best contribution to culinary progress since—hm, got to pick just the right cliché here—poached eggs served on a bed of creamed spinach and onions, with a toasted and buttered English muffin on the side.]

Getting Done—Waw!—My Struggles with Rest

2007-02-14T10:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I started on a new plan of reading the Bible daily. Usually, such resolutions on my part last a couple of weeks or months and then peter out. Then follows a spiritual dearth, sometimes jolted into vibrancy by some closeby tragedy. Then a renewed resolution to read daily.

For some reason, I can never seem to get the bookness of The Book out of my head, and I always start at the beginning. Consequently, I have read the first chapters of Genesis probably a hundred times, always with the same desire for new enthusiasm. And the story of the beginning of everything never disappoints me. I cannot exhaust this book, not even the first chapter. I always find something new and important in it.

Yesterday it was this. God rests on the seventh day only after he has completed his work of creating. Rest, in other words, follows directly from the completion of work.

Here's the passage: "Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done." (Genesis 2:1-2 TNIV, my emphasis)

It would be nice if I could argue the causality evident in this and a few other translations—that God was finished working, so he rested. Unfortunately, however, most translations that I have looked at translate that so as a mere and. Also, I did some research on the word used here—actually the ubiquitous Hebrew morpheme waw, which, added to a verb, links it to a previous verb—and I discovered that Hebrew linguists (read: biblical researchers with agendas) fight wrathfully over whether the word actually implies causality or mere sequentiality and they use their theories to argue such hot theological topics as evolution vs. creationism and what, exactly, God's promised rest is. In this particular passage, for example, the waw-question is whether God ever finished resting and moved on to some other work or rather, as some passage in Hebrews suggests, having finished his work, he continues to rest to this day. I don't want to get into that waw stew, nor am I equipped to do so.

Let me say this, though, from my entirely unschooled reading of the Genesis writer's overview of the creation story (which for me begins in the first chapter and ends with the third verse of second chapter): God only rested when he had finished his work.

This is a totally new idea for me. Revolutionary, even. And worth looking at closely.

Not having finished my work is my main resting deterrent. I wake in the night worrying about some part of my current work that I have yet to do or that I forgot to do or that I was in the middle of doing when I went to bed.

Also, I have an abiding sense of never being finished with my work. Never. Even when I have finished some consuming project—as recently, for example, when I sent the manuscript for my second book to my editors—I am suddenly overwhelmed, it seems to me, with all the other things I wasn't able to do while I was working. Gardening. Sewing. Spring cleaning. Inviting students to dinner. Writing thank you notes to endorsers. Planning my next book. Soon, within minutes, I think, I am making to do lists and seized with stress. How will I ever get it all done?

Judging from the number of books out there on the subject of rest, I suspect many share my problem. Not long ago I read one such book called Sabbath Keeping, by Lynne Baab. It was a good how-to book on the sabbath: inviting, rather than prescriptive, for the most part, with exercises at the ends of the chapters that really made you examine the stress of your life and desire opportunities for respite. I found it particularly challenging that the sort of activity Baab recommends against doing on the sabbath was accomplishing anything—that is, getting something done, even if it's something you enjoy. If you find yourself thinking, I just need to finish..., then whatever would finish the sentence is a bad choice. Sabbath keeping, for the most part, was another job, of sorts: the daunting task of sacrificing the desire to complete.

I don't know and honestly don't care if God finished his rest and has moved on to another project—although my guess is that, in the spirit of Ecclesiastes, God's rest and work come in spells, seasons, a time for each. But I do know this: God did not get stressed immediately upon completing the creation of the world and everything in it. He rested. Ceased, as the word is translated in some translations. He stopped working. Stopped thinking about it—about the plants and animals and creatures of the sea and sky, each according to its kind. Stopped looking at it. Stopped talking about it. Stopped blessing it and calling it good, probably, since those actions appear to be key elements of his creative work.He could have taken naps here and there, throughout the process.

He could have slogged through it, making himself a cup of tea with which to rest, after a fashion, while he worked at the computer. Instead, he finished his work completely. And then, for some unknown period of time, he stopped. Totally. Entirely. Gloriously.

Think of it. Stopping. It is hard for me even to imagine. I envision a sensory deprivation tank, in which I am forcibly prevented from accomplishing anything, and the thought nauseates me. Not just the forcible part or the nasty microbes and fungi that probably live in those tanks. Not the claustrophobia or the metallic smell of the water or the dark. Simply the inactivity. The helplessness of it.

Some part of me longs for it, though. For resting that comes as a natural consequence of being done, rather than as an artificial or sacrificial activity of its own. Resting that is not something I do, but something that just happens, like how, when we were first married, Kris and I used to sink into the most refreshing sleep at night after a long day of weaning calves and trucking the bulls to the sale barn. Or after raking and baling a field. Or after spearing the bales, one by one, onto the bale trailer, then toting them off to wherever we were storing them that year and, one by one, lining them up in tidy rows for the winter.

Something about farming was conducive to the kind of rest I'm thinking God takes. Getting done. Perhaps it's because the tasks of farming are so much like God's work in the first place. Globbing everything together into a formless dark mass of cattle or cut grass. Separating them into male and female, young and old, fescue and good clover, windrows and bales, square bales and round bales, each according to their kind. Looking at them. Blessing them. Pronouncing them good. Getting our check at the end of the day, or knowing the cows would have plenty to eat when the weather got cold.

Getting done, totally done, I'm thinking, is the key to rest. Not just stopping. Before we can honor the sabbath—an act of holiness so important in the old law, mind you, that not honoring the sabbath was punishable by death—we have to actually finish what we're doing. How to do that is my next struggle, in the area of rest. But for now, it's just good to be finished thinking about it.

My Ongoing Struggle with Prayer

2007-02-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

I don't know how many friends and preachers have told me that prayer is as much about listening for God's response as about speaking to God. That my words are just one half of a dialogue with God. Still, I continue to struggle—oh how I struggle—with the notion of prayer.

I won’t apologize for this. After all, even the disciples were all about failure to pray. Like us, they had Jesus himself as a model. They saw him go off by himself to pray. They listened to him pray publicly. They overheard those weirdly private public prayers of his in which he told his father stuff like, I know you’re already doing this, but I am just saying this for the benefit of those listening. And yet, they didn’t pray enough—or perhaps the correct way—to cast out demons on at least one occasion. And they fell asleep instead of praying in Gethsemane. And, most importantly, they questioned Jesus about how to pray. They were, in other words, just like me in this. They were worried about prayer. They decided, or feared, or fantasized, that there might be some right way to pray—the way John the Baptist prayed, perhaps, or Henri Nouwen, or the way some dorky self-help book on morning devotions described what the author did each day, or the way some preacher told them was how prayer was supposed to be done—and they weren’t doing it that way. Their prayers felt inadequate, somehow. I know they did. This is how I perpetually feel about prayer.

Don’t get me wrong. I pray. I prayed as a child. Nowadays, as then, I pray on mostly on an as-needed basis. I worry on behalf of others, a kind of intercessory prayer, I think. (I call it pray-worrying, often in emails, as in, Sally, I've been pray-worrying about your insomnia, and here's what occurred to me.) I also get great relief, many nights, from silently talking to God, so to speak, and knowing that he’s listening. (It’s more like thinking than actually talking. If I talked, I'd wake Kris, beside me in the bed, sleeping the rest God promises those who love him. And I don't generally consider what I think to or about others to be actually talking to them.) In my years of atheism, the prayers of my lost faith were what I missed most. Asking. Complaining. Being comforted. Feeling heard.

But. I don’t know what to say here. How to transition from this obvious knowing how to pray that I have had from babyhood—and there is this sense that we all, deep down, actually do know how to pray without being told—to the abiding conviction that my “prayer-life,” if there is such a thing, is somehow faulty? Is it just the influence of the sort of people who use such terms as “prayer-life” that devalues my habits? Or is there really some better way to pray, some more mature way of praying beyond the crying out like a newborn and being comforted?

I keep thinking about this, toying it. It’s a deceptively easy subject, it seems to me. Kris says I worry about it too much. A lot of people tell me this about a lot of things, and they are surely right. Every one of those Fear-not!’s in the Bible was intended for me, I think. Kris, in any case, says, "Prayer is just talking to God. Like in a normal conversation."

But here’s the thing. In most of the conversations I have with anyone else but God, the person responds. Out loud. In audible words. In my language—or at least in a language which I can understand and recognize as language. Which is not how God does it. (Unless, of course, my experience of God really is far more limited than I know about, oh worry, worry, worry. Please, whoever’s reading this, do NOT tell me that you hear an audible voice. It will upset me and cause me to worry even more and covet your greater faith and holiness and such.)

So, I have decided here to consider the way those other conversations I have had—the ones that did not involve the other person audibly responding in recognizable words—to see what might be found there about the nature of prayer. Aside from mental telepathy, which I can't seem to make it work the way it's supposed to, and talking to the radio, which poses similar difficulties, these one-sided conversations fall into two categories for me. Well, three. Conversations with babies. Conversations with animals (mostly dogs and cows, but also hurt birds and moles I have found in the yard and the emaciated lizard that lives in an aquarium in Lulu's room). And conversations with dying people who are able to hear and process what I am saying but are not able to respond.

In all of these instances—with babies, with animals, and with people rendered mute as a result of disease—I held conversations, first of all, by paying attention to nonverbal responses. Eye rolling. Smiling. A look of request or gratitude. Wailing. The cessation of wailing. “Was the baby wanting Mama? Does she have a poopy diaper? Mama’s going to change it. Yes, Mama’s getting rid of that old nasty diaper. Oh, what now? Does Baby want the keys? Here are the keys. Here they are. Yes, Charlotte likes the keys, doesn’t she?”

Also, as you can see with that baby, I asked a lot of questions. Similarly, a “conversation” with a cow was usually a series of questions—“Does it hurt? Do you want it here, or here? Oh, sweet one, are you looking for your baby?”—followed by a few reassuring answers, or, better, by dragging the hay or the water or the newborn calf where the cow could reach it.

Finally, I typically supplied answers for my silent conversation partner. The best example is with the mortally sick person in the hospital. When my husband’s aunt lay dying, she couldn’t close her mouth, and her chemotherapy-blackened tongue was cracked and dry-looking. I knew she was desperately thirsty. She panted heavily. Every time I caught her eye, she directed her gaze meaningfully at the table by the bed, where, in the days before, we had kept a cup of ice chips to give her. But she could no longer swallow or even keep the ice in her mouth, so the nurses gave me a swab to wet and stroke her poor black tongue with. “You’re thirsty,” I told her. “There, you like that. That feels good, doesn’t it? That’s enough now. You’re wondering where George is. He’s gone to get something to eat. Yes, that’s good. He had your Jell-O at lunch. That was all. He wasn't hungry. Too worried about you. You don't want him to worry, I know. You want me to tell him that. Yes, he doesn't need to worry, does he? It's going to be okay.”

These are inadequate examples of conversations with God, I know. God’s not a baby or a cow or a dying person. And he’s certainly not incapable of responding. He's not incapable of anything, except maybe not loving us. But what I get from thinking about these conversations with the mute is something relevant, I think, to how we, of necessity, talk to a silent, invisible, conversation partner like God.

First off, in praying, we have to pay attention to non-verbal information rather than direct responses. Events. Preexisting evidence of truth. Divine gestures, like awe-inspiring weather conditions, a potted plant suddenly blooming, or an auto accident involving the child of friends that suddenly thrusts one’s pettier complaints into perspective. I say we have to pay attention to these things, but, in truth, I think we often do it unconsciously. Sometimes, even, to an obsessive degree, resulting in superstitions and misguided notions about how God works, or ought to work, in our lives. Nevertheless, I believe God does respond to us in such gestures. This idea especially bothers a non-believing friend of mine, who makes much mock of Christians’ egotistical notion that God would cause rain or redirect the attention to a car wreck or orchestrate a bright pink sunrise just for one person praying. Absurd, yes, but, I think, true. (What a burpy little “sentence,” with all those commas. I like it.)

Second, prayer, like conversation with a mute partner, inevitably involves questions. Lots of questions. Sometimes nothing but questions. Questions one is forced to answer oneself, usually with a reassuring offer to take some action. I’m coming. I’m here. I’m ready to do what you want me to.

Finally, if engaging in more involved discussion with God than the prayer-equivalent of reassuring a baby or offering to swab a tongue, one has to be ready to supply both sides of the conversation. Supplying another’s unspoken response is possible only to the degree that one is familiar with that person and can recreate what he or she is likely to be thinking. The ability to predict another’s thoughts is, of course, dependent on some degree of previous interaction with that person. Knowing what the person likes and despises, what topics are important to the person, what the person has said in the past.

God’s past utterances, of course, are helpful here. And luckily, lots of them are recorded where we can check and make sure we’re right about them. We can look them up and cross-reference them and read them in all kinds of translations, get down to the word level, parse them. That, then—our rehashing, if you will, of God’s side of the conversation, of his gestures, the history of our relationship with him, his words on the pages of our Bibles—is what, for today, I have decided that my more experienced Christian friends must mean when they say that prayer is “just being quiet and listening to God.”

It’s the being quiet I take issue with, in part. I mean, unlike in a real conversation, even a conversation with someone who can’t speak aloud, prayer is usually conducted in complete silence. Neither part—not my speaking to God, not his replying to me—is noisy. Or, if we consider our own wordless input to be the opposite of “quiet,” the noise of the prayer that we must silence in order to hear God speak, then God’s input—that is, his wordless response housed in our own thoughts—is no less noisy. If prayer is to be conceived of as a conversation at all, I think, then it’s all about speaking. Speaking for ourselves and speaking, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, for God.

One last thought. Interestingly, one doesn’t make many requests of babies, animals, or dying people. But prayer does involve requests of God. Or, at least, all of Jesus’ recorded prayers to our Father did.

So, conversely to everything I have written here, perhaps, in praying, it is we who are the mute ones—the babies, the animals, the one who lies dying on the raised bed. We think we are doing the speaking when we pray—casting our thoughts out to some invisible, silent troller of words—but actually we are the ones lying awake and voiceless, listening, trying to respond, wanting to cry out and make our needs known, but, ultimately, silent, while God leans over us and speaks and speaks and speaks and speaks.

Let It Not Be So

2007-01-30T13:23:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday, on the way to church, we found my daughter Charlotte's dog Tessi—the mother of the lab pups who were born in my first post—dead on the road. There is a longer, more distressing version of this story that I won't tell here, involving the family coincidentally being in two cars and us all seeing the body separately and separately concluding that that the fur was the wrong color of brown to be Tessi, and then my husband leaving the girls and me at church while he went back to verify that it was indeed our poor dog. In fact, he never really was able to recognize Tessi from her remains—the accident that had killed her had been too brutal, too complete—but he could see that the dog was female and that she had recently whelped.

Anyway, back at church, before the girls and I knew—or, before we accepted that we knew—I prayed a prayer that had occasioned two dog miracles in the past: Let it not be so. My daughters were praying the same prayer, I'm sure, as was my husband, as he looked in vain for Tessi's collar and then went home to change his clothes and fetch a black plastic bag and then returned to the scene of the accident. Let it not be so. Let it not be so. Let it not be so. As I prayed it, though, I felt pushing up through my words a different prayer, a prayer I didn't want to pray, a prayer I rarely pray unless made to do so, typically at church, and even then not usually in much earnest: Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

What a scary prayer. You are praying against your own interests, for one. And, invariably, if you are sincerely acknowledging God's superior will in a situation, then you know things are bad, really bad, not as you would have them at all, and not likely to change for the better. Thy will be done is a pitiable, last minute plea for order, for sense, it seems to me. It is a prayer that means, Oh Lord of heaven and earth, let there be some good reason for this misery, this evil suffered, even though I can't see one. Once you pray it, Thy will be done repels all lesser prayers for help or healing—especially the mindless, hopeless, breath-holding prayer of Let it not be so. As such, it also relieves you, I suppose, of the tense burden of hope in suffering—the hope that keeps you from embracing pain and truth and thereby, perhaps, getting past their attendant terrors. But Thy will be done is—for me, in any case—the hardest prayer to pray and mean it, whether for a child's dog or for a friend with cancer or some other trouble or for the victims of some atrocity you read about in the news. I’d so much rather just pray the familiar Let it not be so, which takes me on the slow road around my mountain, than enter one of the dark faith-tunnels that hurtles one straight through to whatever unknown safety might lie on the other side.

In any case, someone else’s will was done than ours, this time. Tessi was dead, and we were left to console ourselves with the obvious violence of the accident, which allowed no time for suffering. And with the fact that Tessi had managed to wean her nine pups before she left us. And with what fine pups they are, just now learning to climb their pen and plop, fat-bellied, to the yelping freedom of the yard and the fields beyond.

But Sunday morning at church, in one of those ironic fiats that God seems to enjoy, when I could hardly listen to the sermon for praying my prayer and my daughters’ prayer and my husband’s prayer, the pastor preached on the power of corporate prayer. He made reference not only to the Lord’s Prayer—focusing especially on the line that had by then made it to the back of my throat—but to one of those alluring promises of Jesus’s that seems to invite us to desire that our own will be done: “if two of you on earth agree on anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three of you come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:19-20). And so I was left to reconcile, as always, the sovereignty of a God who thunders, “Where were you when I made this world?” and whose will is done, willy-nilly, with the love of a parent who wants to give his children good things and has granted me countless miracles in the past, many of which I probably didn't even notice.

I am also left with this bleak question: Could it be that the two or three passage is not about the granting of our corporate requests at all but about the futility of our ever agreeing, simultaneously, on what’s important? I mean, perhaps we get so busy praying Let it not be so that we can’t recognize, much less agree to, the larger prayer for life that begets all prayer.

The puppy miracles my family has witnessed in the past—a broken leg miraculously healed, a congenitally non-existent eyeball restored to normalcy—have moved us closer to that life, I think. We saw and believed, at least temporarily. When I spoke of one of these miracles in church, though, a friend of mine was offended. His wife suffers a debilitating illness from which she will eventually die. Why, he asked, would God heal a puppy and not a woman who had been prayed over and prayed over earnestly, by droves of friends and loved ones for years?

I was ashamed of my family’s little miracle, then. Of our sometime need for answered prayer to document and prove God’s love. Were not puppies themselves proof enough? Or daughters? Or the white winter sunshine last Sunday morning? And what of my friend’s complaint? Why no healing there?

I have no answers, no deeper knowledge of the ways of God than this: It will be as he wills it, but he loves us, crazily, with that single-subject doting of the most besotted mother. It seems a puny answer, though, this riddle, to assuage a young daughter’s loss and a friend’s years of fruitless petition for healing.

Church (Continued from Last Week's Struggle)

2007-01-22T19:16:00.000-08:00

Last week my husband and I sat Charlotte and Lulu down and told them we were thinking about just doing church at home and seeing how that worked out. That way, we wouldn't need to get up early. And they wouldn't have to suffer through me singing too loud to suit them. And Lulu wouldn't have to brush her teeth until that night. And we could make the day be about celebrating God in ways suited precisely to us. Maybe take a walk as a family. Maybe invite some of our friends from our old church over for a dinner/Bible Study, which the girls could participate in or not. We would probably take naps.

To our astonishment, both girls looked aghast and agreed that they didn't want to do anything like that.

"That's what atheists do," they told us, as if atheists were a club that not only got up late on Sunday but had small group worship and Bible studies and rested all Sunday long.

But the message was that they didn't want to be atheists, which was good news. So, we discussed some more and decided to try yet another church, one that I've been a bit leery about and starts even earlier in the day than the last one we visited but that has a youth group of local renown.

So we went, and the most amazing thing happened. First of all, the youth group leader—a youngish married man wearing his checked button down shirt untucked and toting a tiny newborn high on his chest—went over to the girls after the service and introduced himself. Then, a girl about their age talked to them. And then, most amazing of all, this guy that had been a counselor at a nearby summer camp they go to—known among the girl campers as one of the hottest guys there—came over to greet them and knew them both by name. That did it. The power of being known by name. By someone goodlooking. So now they want to keep going there, for the nonce.

It's an okay church, from my standpoint, although I've checked and they have absolutely no women in any kind of position of authority. Not even as a deacon. That was a bit disturbing. And the sermon was not electrifying, but it did cause me to go to this place in Matthew where Jesus says, "All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (11:27).

In other words, God the Father is knowable, via Jesus' revelation of him to us, but no one can know Jesus but the Father. So, what I have always found to be the case in my own experience is, in fact, how it should be: that is, I feel like I understand God the Father, sort of, but Jesus typically comes across to me as one big conundrum. What a relief! All these years just about every sermon I've ever listened to and every hymn I've sung seems to want to assert just the opposite: that Jesus (what a buddy, just like us, 100% man, etc.) is knowable and God (omniscient, omnipresent, omnieverything supreme power) isn't. I've always thought there was something wrong with me that I have such trouble really "knowing" Jesus the way my friends seem to, especially compared to my relative facility with understanding God the Dad. I mean, I get him. He's a parent, like me. He loves his kids even though they mess up. And he loves their genuine remorse and gratitude—oh rare delights!—even more than their perfect behavior. His biggest joy is when his kids to get along. I can't tell you how it thrills me when Charlotte and Lulu hug and call each other Sis and spend the whole afternoon playing Viva Pinata. God is like that about us, I think. So, anyway, I am entering this week with something new to consider. I like that.

This is one of those temporary happy ending struggle stories. Like most, in my experience. Except when I'm in one of those temporary unhappy ending struggle stories, which seem to subsume all else.

This Week's Struggle: Church

2007-01-14T19:23:00.000-08:00

Today is Sunday, and we’re not going to church. The world beyond the windows is coated with ice, but that’s not why, although the prospect of an ice storm last night did occasion the happy speculation—on our daughters’ part and, secretly, on mine and perhaps even my husband’s—that slick roads might preclude our attendance at the church we have been visiting for the past few months.

And it is not our tenuous relationship with the church in question that keeps us home. We’re only visiting because we are in search of the perfect church, one loved by the entire family, and we all know this church does not, cannot, exist. Because my teenage daughters require a church that is not boring and speaks on their level, but my husband and I want a church that is not inane and speaks on our level. Somehow these two notions of church don’t, can’t, won’t mesh. The sort of church my daughters would like to attend—and I need to add that, ideally, it should also not entail rising earlier than noon on Sunday—does not appear to exist in a town famous for its abundance of churches, and the churches my husband and I like and force our daughters to attend cause the church experience, for me, to approximate my idea of hell. In my moments of enlightenment, I hear my daughters sighing beside me. If I break my rule and allow myself to look over at them, I find them rolling their eyes or concentrating their surly gazes on the back of the seats before them. If, despite this, a song moves me to joyful enthusiasm, Charlotte and Lulu can’t restrain their embarrassment. “Mom, don’t sing so loud!” they hiss, and the bodies of the other congregants before and beside and behind me shuffle and lurch in commiseration with my lot or pride in theirs, and I am silenced by the horror of life.

In truth, I love all churches. The predictable liturgy of my Catholic childhood pulsed with revelation for me. And the roiling Baptist hymns--every one of them about blood or the sea or both--of the local church I attended when I returned to my faith after years of atheism routinely made me cry. I loved even a church we visited a few years later that my husband and I decided was a cult. They required members to tot up the number of people they had managed to evangelize each week, and they enforced discipling sessions called Bible Talks in which no one was allowed to examine what the Bible actually said. Their members were forever calling us up and wanting us to join, and every time we talked to anyone from the church we discovered a new rule—no musical instruments, no malls, regulated fasting—that made us both suspicious. But their services—the unaccompanied singing, the shared fervor, the bracing message—sucked me into them. The first time I attended I had to go to the bathroom but couldn’t persuade myself to leave. I thought I might miss something. Had it not been for one of those answered prayers that are the miracles of my daily life, I would have had an accident and embarrassed not just my daughters—although they were younger then and less embarrassed by my perceived missteps and in any case absent from the service in the church’s concurrent Sunday school—but the whole congregation.

Recently I figured out, after a summer of nonattendance at any church at all that left me feeling bereft, that what I like about church is not just singing with others, although I do love that, and not just hearing a message that causes me to look inward and to enter the week with a fresh burst of love for God and my neighbors, but getting together with a bunch of people who are very different from me with the shared purpose of considering God in our lives. That, I have decided, after a decade of wondering and worrying about it, is the sole appeal of going to church for me. Getting together with others to share God through dialogue and instruction and corporate acts of appreciation.

Why is this so hard to find? Or, why is the locus of this shared experience so hard to agree upon in families, especially families containing teenagers?

We had it once. Not in an actual church building. Not directed or organized by a pastor or worship leader or deacons or elders. Not in a particular denomination. It was just a couple of college girls who came to our house most Sunday nights and ate with us. The discussions we had were lighthearted, ribald sometimes, about everything but God, one would think if we listed the topics: books we were reading, dogs, problems with friends, funny things we had heard on the news, boyfriends, clothes, marriage, the food we were eating, other countries, stupid jokes, my daughters’ friends and classes, growing up, families, the stuff people talk about over a meal. And yet every word offered was God-infused for the simple reason that he just wouldn't stay out of it. We broke bread together. That too was about God—about our gratitude and luckiness to be his children—although we didn't make much of an ado about it beyond giving thanks. And after the meal, one of the girls got out her guitar and we sang songs together. Old rock songs. Hymns. Made up songs. Songs about ponies and gum trees and putting the pickup in the barn in a storm. My children were sucked in, as I was by those cult gatherings. Or, to use the more churchy term, they were evangelized. And I was strengthened in my faith, ready for the week, once I got the dishes washed and the kitchen put back in order.

Those meals were a preview, it seems to me, of the promised feasts of heaven. My ideal church. Satisfying what one of my colleagues told me the other day—trying to convince me that regular attendance at a church was important—were the four functions of church: fellowship, teaching, evangelism, and worship. Those meals served all four purposes, unorganized, unforced, unled.

But why, you may yet ask, are we not going to church today? My husband says that, contrary to what I have been arguing, it is not because we and our daughters want something that can’t be had. He thinks the girls don’t know what they want in a church, although they have told us many times what they don’t want: a boring experience where the preacher talks about matters of no concern to them. Kris is confident that such a church exists. So we try the church that used to be a skating rink and the church with the gigantic youth group and both halves of the church that used to be the most popular one in town until it split in two a while back. Kris is hopeful that the church of our dreams can yet be found. He would like to try a megachurch—they have something for everyone, don’t they?—in faraway Lowell, Arkansas and has even proposed that the girls’ involvement in any church-related group, such as a Sunday School class or a youth group, be their church for the nonce. But none of these ideas make them happy. Or me. There’s the drive. And that we’d be split up, them in their youth group playing Capture the Flag, and us in an idyllic Bible Study class we have yet to find. And finally, most importantly, there's the fact that we have experienced the church of our dreams, at our own kitchen table, and nothing we could find elsewhere could compare with that.

Maybe I just like misfits, but most of my Christian friends are unhappy with church. They don’t like the music, but they like the message, or vice versa. Or they don’t feel like they belong. The church they attend is too big, too small, not really a family like they want it to be, too much of a family: dysfunctional, predictable, replete with gossip, enforced participation in miserable anniversaries, and the inevitable feuds that cannot be resolved. One of my friends has repeatedly complained that her church doesn’t send flowers when a member of the congregation loses a loved one. And the church troubles of most of my Christian acquaintance—even the churchiest of them readily admit—increased when their children became teenagers. Is it merely that inevitability, the metamorphosis of tractable children into almost adults with wills and tastes and requirements of their own, that accounts for the growing inability of any one church to fill the family's need. Or could it be that for other Christians, as for my family, the memory of some happy gathering of two or three fellow believers in their pasts—maybe it was a feast with friends, maybe it was camp, maybe participation in a former church that figured out a way to make everyone present happy—precludes all possibility of finding a something even close to their private definition of church in the present?

There is always the future. Heaven. That ultimate gathering of believers that we can only guess at from hints here and there in scripture. Our own apartment in a mansion. The dissolution of our meannesses into Christlikeness. Feasts. We will joke and laugh, I’m sure, at that table. Talk. Tell funny stories. We will help one another resolve our problems. Yes, I think we’ll have problems, as here, that will need resolving. If we didn’t, what on earth would we have to talk about? Beyond the windows, the trees will be jeweled with ice, as they are today; we will admire them. And we will sing. Kris, my tone-deaf husband, will belt out his crazy, tone-deaf dog songs without embarrassment, and we will all join in. I will sing loudly, but no one will object. My own daughters will sing. Also loud. Tearful. Ecstatic. We will be church.

My Struggles as a Blogger

2007-01-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

Okay, here's the problem. Audience. I hated my last attempt at blogging, which was—I tried in vain to escape the problem by lamenting it at the end—preachy, teachy, and obnoxiously self-congratulatory when I got to thinking about it and did not really solicit anything but encouraging remarks from kind friends and acquaintances and former students of mine. Which remarks—don't get me wrong—I do cherish. Immensely. But something in me senses that this is not what a blog is supposed to be. So, I'm starting over. I'm not going to give you, as I promised in my last failed blog, a summary of all the wonderful instruction I have to offer on the subject of writing. I know you're sad about that.

Instead, I have thought and thought and come up a new plan. I will write about my ongoing struggles. I was reading someone's blog in which the writer questioned whether struggle and growth amounted to the same thing. I think they do. So, that's what I plan to write about. My current questions about and objections to and general ruminations and research on matters of faith. The usual stuff of my writing—just rawer, less processed, potentially more wrong and cranky and rude than I let myself be in my essays. I invite you to intervene and commiserate and/or set me right.

One more thing about audience and blogging. I find myself saying "you" a lot more than I see the word used in others' blogs. I keep worrying about what you, my readers, might be interested in reading here. This may be my problem as a blogger. It seems that blogs are generally these places that are totally about the writer but that everyone in the world can read. I don't know how to have that sort of voice—how to be that intimate so publicly. Perhaps one of you can give me some pointers. I fear, too, that even if I could figure out how to do it, I would feel as though I were in one of those upsetting dreams in which I am naked in some public place, like the median of a freeway. So, for now at least, I'm letting myself dialogue, clothed, with an imagined—and also clothed!—audience. You, gentle readers, in your snug bathrobes. The result is that my blog voice may sound more like the narrator of a Victorian novel than most, but bear with me. I will figure this out.

A Christmas Present for the Writers on Your List

2006-12-20T07:11:00.000-08:00

I just received the most encouraging email about my writing from a fellow writer--a current blogger seeking to publish--who is reading my book. He was interested in improving his writing and lamented that he didn't live near enough to the university where I teach to take my class on writing about one's faith. I took this wistful remark as an invitation to tell him the few things I have to say to the writers in my classes. It's so hard to pass up the opportunity to give advice!

In my next blog, I'm going to give you part of my response to him, which I thought might interest the writers among you. But before I do, first let me encourage you to do what this man did for me. His encouragement came at a time when I was feeling negative about my writing and frazzled about my upcoming deadline. (31 December: Pray.) Whether you are a reader or a writer, remember the other writers out there--published and especially unpublished--whose writing you encounter and admire, and follow this man's lead. Be a fan of others' writing.

This is as much advice to myself as to anyone else. As a teacher of writing, I have so many opportunities to encourage others in their writing, but I routinely fail, concentrating instead on what all went wrong rather than on what was working. Even though I know they need encouragement more than criticism. Even though I know I need it myself. Even though improving in this area is my semesterly prayer. You know that remark of Paul's about how he does everything he knows he shouldn't do and never does what he knows he should? That's me, in this matter, as in so many others. In any case, the best Christmas present you can give a writer is hearty praise of his or her writing.

Also, if you want to be opportunistic about it, getting in the habit of praising what you like about someone else's writing can help you as a writer, too. You learn what works by examining and articulating what works in others' writing and then putting it into practice in your own.

That's all for now. (And so preachy. Yuck! Oh well.)

The Puppies Are Here!

2006-12-11T19:43:00.000-08:00

Seems to me when there's a birth in the offing, that's all the news there is. So, although this is my first real blog entry and my first book and it seems as though what I say here ought to be about the book or at least a topic of interest to visitors to this site, I have to tell you that there were nine fat lab pups born to us last Friday. We've been waiting and waiting, and even when our good Tessi dog went into labor, it seemed they would never come. And they didn't. It took a trip to the vet and a whole nother day of thinking/feeling/praying, "Veni! Veni!"

But now they're here. Five chocolate and four black. Out in the garage. Safe.

Confessions of an Amateur Believer

2006-12-09T19:08:00.000-08:00

Author: Patty Kirk

Book Description: An entertaining collection of inspirational, gritty, challenging writing that follows an unwilling atheist's first encounters with God, her ensuing struggles and progress as a reluctant believer, and her ultimate discovery of contentment and rest in faith.

Publisher: Thomas Nelson Books

Now available at your favorite bookstore!