Ye are my. . . ?

A little while back, I read a lovely piece by the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, “Ye are My Friends.” It got me to thinking about the difference between viewing ourselves as friends of God or servants. To be both is hard. Am I facing tension or something leaning towards the mutually exclusive? I know, I know, we are supposed to “live in the tension,” according to our post-modern friends. Yet, it’s not tension that bothers me, it’s things that seem mutually exclusive. I have long wondered at the varying flavors of doctrine which Christians seem to gravitate towards: taken individually they are okay, but together they seem, at least a bit, inconsistent.

“The keyword of the Christian gospel is not service but friendship,” asserts Macmurray. Indeed he goes on, “I believe, we have been thinking too much in terms of ... service of God and of the world.”

We have!?

This seemed nearly blasphemous to me.

The main trouble Macmurray has with service is that, to him, it is inexorably bound up with the idea of duty.

As any devoted fan of words would, I stopped there and started rifling through the OED for the word “duty.” Here are the primary meanings:

The action and conduct due to a superior; An action due to a feudal superior or lord of a manor; That which is owing to any one (i.e. legally due); Action, or an act, that is due in the way of moral or legal obligation; that which one ought or is bound to do; an obligation.

After getting back into the text – and dare I say that duty isn't looking particularly friendly according to the definition! – Macmurray asked his readers a similar question which I am going to ask you.

Suppose you are sick, not just sick with the sniffles, but ugly sick; the kind of sick that makes all food and drink repulsive (thus you become a fast friend with the toilet bowl and its pleasant and soothing coolness). Now suppose in the middle of a particularly tenacious retching session, you hear me knocking at your door downstairs and telling you in a drawling voice that I had just come from a church service where I was reminded that it is my Christian duty to sacrifice my Sunday plans of fun and merriment and, instead, out of my pious obligation – born of Godly duty – offer my precious time to you.

Now after this charming and inspiring speech which has included the right words, do you feel like graciously stumbling down the stairs, a trickle of sick running down your un-wiped chin, to accept my “sacrifice”? I think you would tell me to go and take my “duty” and “sacrifice” somewhere else – maybe even the hot place. And of course nearly everybody would agree! We would concur, Macmurray suggests, “in friendship the personal things—warmth and intimacy of feeling—must be the springs of action.” Otherwise, such dutiful actions are mere impersonal and cold obligations. One does not help the sick friend out of duty. That’s not what friendship is.

Actually, here is the OED definition of “friend”: “One joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy (not necessarily lovers or relatives).” Duty hardly fits in there.

“The fact,” says Macmurray, “is that in friendship we are beyond law and obedience, beyond rules and commandments. ... [In fact] the more deep and real our friendships become, the more what looks like sacrifice from outside is found to be the free and spontaneous expression of our own soul’s necessity.”

So back to my pondering on servanthood versus friendship when it comes to God: Jesus calls us friends, yet Paul signs off his letters with “the servant of Christ.” What’s more desirable? Maybe Paul was able to remove the duty part of servanthood? Or maybe he was living in the tension, too? I wish Macmurray was here.

(Photo by Elliott Erwitt)

Wake Up

The heat waited till the end this year, but it’s started now. It’s already hard to breathe when you step outside for the paper at dawn. Deep, soupy humidity in September is no more pleasant than it is in June, but the days are noticeably shorter already, and we know fall is coming, with its TV pilots and ankle boots and gallery openings and pumpkin spiciness.

The actual new year begins in January, I know, but this is when I mark the passing of the old and the start of the new. I see children on the sidewalk in their uniforms en route to their new classrooms, and last week I printed new syllabi. I notice the leaves on the still-verdant trees beginning to get crispy. I remember this week as the one in which, eight years ago, I lost my father and married my husband in the space of seven days, where I changed my life status irrevocably.

All this makes me want to make resolutions, to change, to make a new beginning, to clean the windows and see everything more clearly. My Pinterest feed is full of encouragements to be the best I can be and get out there and make my way in the world and become a better me. I can do it, with enough elbow grease. I can claw and scrabble toward the light.

But I’m not so sure anymore that trying is the point. In Ephesians 5, Paul quotes an early hymn from church tradition: “Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Or, as Eugene Peterson renders it in The Message, “Wake up from your sleep, climb out of your coffins; Christ will show you the light!” And in his song “All Things New,” Andrew Peterson sings, “Rise up, O you sleeper, awake! / The light of the dawn is upon you. / Rise up, O you sleeper, awake! / He makes all things new.”

So I guess what I need to do is wake up. The renewal part, the new light of the new year’s dawn, is not coming from me.

(Photo by Mikko Lagerstedt)

Monday Silent Lunch: Learning How to Taste and See the Real

L’Abri Fellowship has the unpredictability, fragility, and sacredness of conversation —real conversation— at the heart of its day-to-day life. But every Monday, the L’Abri community pushes a pause button on its traditional daily “discussion lunch,” and we all eat in silence. Together, but in silence. Monday also happens to be the international L’Abri day of prayer. So from 1-2 p.m. in a Manor House in Greatham, England we try to still our racing minds and anxious movements in order to just “be.”

The L’Abri worker who heads the table always plays a CD of music — usually sacred, often choral — that lasts the entire lunch hour. Some of us read a book, some of us pray, some of us just sit, wondering, thinking. Although we are free to sit elsewhere on the property, as long as we are silent for an hour, I enjoy it most when the majority of students stay in the large dining room; a community of 30-40 people sitting together in silence is something so intimate and fragile and beautiful. And as I sit in the beautiful dining room, sunlight spilling onto the faces of those sitting near the windows, the entire scene becomes somehow more Real.

Immersed in crowded solitude, I am forced to be present, forced to notice. This forcefulness is gentle, not violent, and it comes from simply making a space to be still, to look, to listen. As the scene is filtered through the rich compositions of Tavener, or Part, or Preisner, I see things that I have not seen before, such as the simple, stunningly beautiful red skin of strawberries sitting in a bowl before me. It’s almost like I momentarily gain the attentive eyes of the artist, and I see, as Wordsworth says, “into the life of things.”Looking around at the dining room’s four crowded tables, I am amazed by the diverse beauty, the life, the animating “Image-of-God” soul of each individual. The only response to the overwhelming fullness this gift of seeing brings is a simple “cup runneth over”prayer: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

The director of English L’Abri, Andrew Fellows, often speaks about how contemporary Western culture has become “utterly banal” because the capacity for experiencing “things that are rich and profound” has become dulled. We are dulled down daily by repetitive excess consumption, by an endless desire for frenzied entertainment, by the lack of any ability to slow down, contemplate, and savor the present moment like a steaming plate of lovingly made food from a friend’s garden.

Fellows’ comments and my own frequent inability to “see” reminded me of a conversation that I recently had with my doctor after I had started a diet devoid of any sort of processed food or sugar. He told me that once the artificial has been cut out, one can actually begin to really taste again. Fruit will become much more sweet and delicious and we will lose our cravings for the false surrogates.

We all know that the “banal” world of artificial stimulation can dull our taste buds. And it can take away our sight. I am amazed that just by stopping to pause for one hour during a Monday lunchtime, I could taste — and see — again.

Breathing Patterns, Part 2: Exhale

We go to wilderness places to be restored, to be instructed in the natural economies of fertility and healing, to admire what we cannot make. Sometimes, as we find to our surprise, we go to be chastened or corrected. And we go in order to return with renewed knowledge by which to judge the health of our human economy and our dwelling places.

~ Wendell Berry, Home Economics

In Part 1 of this post I introduced you to my morning coffee partner, Joe. We met at the Glen Workshop West in Santa Fe, New Mexico and set out early each day for coffee and fellowship. Dr. Joe Gascho is a cardiologist. He focuses his skill on the cardiopulmonary system, the intertwined inner-workings of the heart and lungs. Joe says that his work relies on “seeing to the limits of the slim spectrum of human vision and knowing what to do.”

Joe looks at echocardiograms –images of the tissue and function of his patients’hearts and by the course of years of practice can distinguish the slightest anomaly from the patterns of health and make the right diagnosis for therapy. “A healthy heart pumps out the exact measure it takes in,”Joe says. As with breathing in and breathing out, there is a moment between those movements when everything changes. In the lungs, oxygenated air is exchanged for carbon dioxide to be expelled. In the heart, blood is pumped to the lungs to be enriched with oxygen the body needs. All in live-giving economy.

Against the perception of his industry, Joe sees his work with two sets of eyes. He watches his patients who trust against the alien context of the medical facilities, the probing tests and the unsettling truth-telling about their condition, in hopes their bodies might be healed and their lives enhanced. So, in addition to the professional, clinical rigor, Joe remembers that each “echo”he views is embodied in a person. He sees the thumbprint of their lives outside the body as it impresses upon the body. He sees them from the inside out as a gift, then transforms the data into poetry, the therapies into image, and bears it to us who too often presume too much about life, health and happiness. As doctor and artist, Joe helps us see how fragile and wonderful we are. He sees hearts as both muscle and part of the poema, or “workmanship,”as “the gift of God”described in Ephesians 2. Echoes that were once nameless, backlit mylar become name and soul –the pathos of broken bodies asking to be restored, and in an imaginative turn, the inspiration and flourish of art.

The week flew and then we said goodbye to the Land of Enchantment. Among the many serendipitous occurrences of my week in Santa Fe was Lewis Hyde's “The Gift” as reading for the plane-ride home. Hyde says, “We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies.”An epigraph quotes this Czeslaw Milosz poetry, “There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor Earth.”

Such inspiration cannot be hoarded, but instead must be breathed into the rhythms of life until sunset and sleep when sunrise calls again. The art of gift practiced within these few breaths and heartbeats given is what it is to be transfigured –the in-breaking faith becomes faithfulness in gratitude –the gift of its fruit to give away.

By what art, calling, and inspiration will you give the gift you have been given?

(Photo by Jerry Uelsmann)

There Likewise is God

The heart is but a small vessel; and yet dragons and lions are there. There likewise is God, there are the angels, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace; all things are there.  ~ St. Macarius the Great

The human heart: deceptively replete with dragons and lions, but also the raw material of heaven—angels and the treasures of grace. I wish I’d had a little plaque with St. Macarius’s words at the head of my babies’ cribs when they were tiny. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have been so caught off guard later on, when angels seemed in short supply and dragons appeared to rule.

I wrote about my daughter’s dramatic expression of her deep unhappiness as a teen (“Law of Universal Gravitation”) a couple of years after the fact. For months I could hardly think about that day without the superstitious foreboding that by recalling or playing over the events in my mind, the awful thing might be set in motion all over again. Once I finally applied good, solid words to my nebulous grief and fear, the thought occurred to me that what had happened could not kill me, nor would it. Neat rows of words that made fair sense helped dissipate my own self-condemnation and my terror of the dragons my daughter was fighting.

The change in perspective I got from the writing reminded me of the time as a kid after I’d seen a particularly traumatizing vampire movie and kept the covers up to my chin every night for months. Then a very hot summer was upon us, and I could no longer bear this ritual. I threw back the sheet and told the vampires to come and get me, because I no longer cared. It was only after this relinquishment the imaginary blood wraiths finally dissipated.

The man who wrote of the human heart as a habitation of the evil as well as the godly ought to know of what he speaks. A disciple of St. Anthony (father of Christian monasticism), Macarius spent years in the arid Wadi of Egypt doing battle with both internal and external demons, as was the wont of the Desert Fathers in general. Here was a Christian clearly not in denial about himself.

Tradition has it that when Macarius first arrived in the desert, he heard the words, "God has given this desert to you and your [spiritual] sons for an inheritance." Most people don’t think about parenting in terms of a desert. The contents of a T.V. commercial for the latest family SUV is more to our liking, with plenty of seaside getaways, putt-putt golf in coordinated outfits, and endless camaraderie and laughter to fill our days. But I’m beginning to relax with the idea that when it comes to learning the ways of our children, a desert of mystery is more to the point of reality. And though the scary animals are present, there likewise is God.

(Painting by Paolo Uccello)

- Read Jean's essay, "Law of Universal Gravitation," in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.

The Voice: Faith is by Hearing, Not Seeing

I have never watched the music competition The Voice, though my favorite would always be whoever Usher coaches, since I had the privilege of knowing his grandmother, a dear Christian friend whom we all miss. Such is the extent of my musical knowledge and my interest in musical competitions. The only way I would root for anyone other than Usher’s protege on the show would be if Bob Dylan was one of the other coach’s contestants. I don’t think that likely.

But I am intrigued by the title of the show and of its original set-up. Apparently, the coaches are all seated with their backs to the contestants and vote to take on one of the acts purely on the basis of hearing them sing. Interesting.

“Seeing is believing”has become an oft repeated idiom derived apparently from the story near the end of the Gospel of John in which the Apostle Thomas, not present when Jesus first appeared to the disciples in the upper room, declared that he would never believe unless he saw the nail print in Jesus’ hand and could thrust his own hand into Jesus’ side (where the Roman soldier had pierced Him with a spear while He was being crucified). Jesus graciously accommodated Thomas later, but mildly rebuked him, too, by stating that he believed because he saw, but blessed are those, who, not seeing, still believe (John 20:29).

I don’t think the apologetic concerns behind the phrase “seeing is believing”are generally legitimate. Yes, Mary encouraged Peter and John to come see the empty tomb for themselves, and they came, saw and believed. But they went right back and locked the doors for fear of the Jews. It wasn’t until He spoke Mary’s name in the garden and declared“Peace be unto you”to the disciples in the upper room that they were changed forever.

Gather together all the evidence you can, marshal all the arguments for and against, study them, analyze them. We need such things to understand what it is we have already believed. But faith only comes by hearing the Voice sing. And when you have heard the Voice sing your name, there is no turning back.

Living with the Fragments

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”  ― Flannery O'Connor

There is a picture circulating on Facebook of a gray ceramic bowl that has been broken and repaired, its cracks filled with gold. Kintsukuroi. The caption reads: (n.) (v. phr.) “to repair with gold”; the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

The sentiment resonates. We have all been wounded and broken, and we all can, at least most of the time, acknowledge some blessing. More than that, kintsukuroi marks an event in the history of an object. It tells a story. And the story ends in restoration.

But this feels too neat to me. It feels dishonest. There are wounds that can’t be painted smoothly over with gold. What about the fractured parts that will never be put back together, will never take the same shape again?

Over and over in a million different ways we learn the heaviness of the world, learn to navigate its depth and its jagged edges. It is an act of faith to live with the fragments, even the ones unrepaired by gold, even while there is no resolution, not yet.

---

Paintings above by Daniel Barkley: “Vincent B, Arms Crossed,” “Study for Golden Boy,” “Vincent, etude pour Golden Boy,” arranged in this sequence by the author.

Do we often stand outside of life?

“... the only way of ‘mastering’ one’s material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant. If he tries to wrest life out of its true nature, it will revenge itself in judgment, as the work revenges itself on the domineering artist.” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, 186)

In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers makes the intriguing point that our modern culture typically approaches life according to a scientific or analytic “problem and solution” paradigm rather than what she calls a “creative” paradigm. As she states, modern man views life “as a series of problems … which he has to solve with the means at his disposal. And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of — such as machine power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity. This is particularly disconcerting to him, because he has been frequently told that the increase of scientific knowledge would give him ‘mastery over nature’ — which ought surely to imply mastery over life” (185-6). In short, we try to take a method that’s applicable to a small subset of human experience and try to apply it to all areas of life, indeed to human life itself.

In her creative paradigm, life isn’t a problem to be solved, nor the mystery of the universe an equation to be worked out; for one thing, these imply the ability to master life. Rather, in this view (as Christine Fletcher summarizes Sayers), “life presents a series of opportunities to make something new” (The Artist and the Trinity, 96). The artist, for Sayers, doesn’t stand outside life as an engineer, but, open-endedly, within life, working with the elements of life according to their nature, in order to make something out of them in harmony with their nature, essentially in an ongoing process of being fruitful and multiplying, that is, in all the various aspects of human life and human interaction with the world. Sayers applies this creative paradigm not just to the artist in the narrower sense, but to the fabric of human nature itself, indeed suggesting that “creative mind is … the very grain of the spiritual universe” (Mind of the Maker, 185).

Thus, central to what Sayers is arguing seems to be that modern man does not want to live life (this ongoing fruitful process); he wants to master life. Modern man seeks to overcome even the deeper problems of life through, e.g., analytic or machine techniques, seeking to conform the world to human will. But the creative paradigm doesn’t seek to master nature. It works with the materials received, according to their nature, to bring forth yet new things. Therein, even “the pains and sorrows of this troublesome world can never … be wholly meaningless and useless.” The artist will seek to “make something of them” (192-3). In short, they are the materials for a new creation or a new synthesis. This, Sayers argues, is the pattern that Christian theology provides as well. And there is a striking parallel, e.g., in the Incarnation. The problem of the Fall isn’t simply “solved” in the sense that problematic elements simply disappear by force of will and reason. They become themselves part of the very elements out of which something brand new is brought forth. God enters within the context of human life as things stand and creatively engages with all the factors involved according to their nature (taking on the “likeness of sinful flesh” [Rom 8:3]). Thus all the materials of the fallen order are employed to create something new. To be sure, God “adds” new materials — the supernatural breaking into the natural — but the old materials are integrated into the new, having been transformed into something glorious through God’s creative work. One is reminded of C. S. Lewis’ analogy, in “The Grand Miracle,” of discovering the missing, central passage of a symphony or chapter of a novel, which, when plugged in, transforms and transvalues its whole meaning, making new sense of all the other parts, forming a masterpiece. Thus, though life is often, in large part, made up of tragedy we can rest in God’s promise and his creative power that he can take all of those elements — the scars, pain, loss, and all other seemingly useless material — not simply erasing them or resetting everything to zero, but creatively forming out of them a new creation of unforeseen glory (how else could a crucifixion be the creative means of glorifying the Son of God?).

Do we perhaps often stand “outside” life, seeking to engineer our lives and thereby gain mastery over it through techniques, or (similarly) get lost in imaginary scenarios that could have been but are not? If Sayers is correct, should we not rather stand “within” life, as its servant, imaginatively interacting with what is there, engaging with life in media res, seeking to create new forms and re-integrations of the good, the beautiful, the true (in all walks of life)? While also, of course, admitting to the tragedy and the brokenness and the longing of life that cannot be assuaged by human ingenuity.

(Painting by Frida Kahlo)

In Praise of Boredom

My daughter spent the night with a friend, swam at the pool the following day, and came home to play video games—and drums—in the basement with three neighborhood boys. After dinner, she met other friends at May Lynn’s ice cream trailer down the road, in the parking lot across from Starbucks. She came home and, still smelling of chlorine, sat on the daybed in pink and white headphones thumbing away at her cell phone. Not thirty minutes later, she tromped into the sunroom where I was reading and pulled her headphones down around her neck.

“I’m going to take a walk with David,”she said.

“Why don’t you take a little break,”I told her. “You need some down time.”

She made her teenage-girl face at me and said, “But I’m bored.”

I’m bored. It’s not just a teenager’s gripe. Boredom is a bad thing, leads to trouble. Keep the kids busy with sports and band, the conventional wisdom goes, and they will not have time to fall in with the dope smokers out behind the high school. In my own childhood, I heard the phrase “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”too many times to count. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes that, “boredom is the root of all evil,”The Apostle Paul has some things to say about the dangers of being idle.

But what of our current attempt to cure our boredom with frenzied multitasking? Haven’t we conflated the idea of being still and alone with being idle? We have become a culture of unremitting busyness, are proud of it, addicted to it; however, as much as it is an addiction to busyness, it is a flight from boredom. We cannot stand to be alone with ourselves. We do not know how to wait through boredom into creative activity, so we slide into ennui. The problem is that we no longer take our boredom alone. We are connected by multiple devices to an endless stream of stimuli. We are not alone and yet we are still idle. We know this isn’t working so we try yoga —I hear it works wonders, though I’ve never done it myself.

Pascal famously said that all of humanity's problems come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. When Kierkegaard writes that boredom is the root of evil, the cure he offers is not keeping busy. As Daniel Boorstin explains it, the only true relief “is to stay home, where the existing individual bores itself into inventiveness.”

When I get a little free time I’m going to try it.

(Photo from Fellini's La Dolce Vita)

Edge Effect

“Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying,” ~ Pablo Neruda

Life liquefies at the shore. The apparent boundaries of unique eco-systems collide in powerful, beneficial exchange. In landscape architecture we call it edge effect. It is primordial. In Genesis, it happens in three acts of separation: dark from light, water from water, and the lower waters gathered from the ground. The waters are called sea, and the dry ground, land, and it was good. It was good. The dynamic shore. Edge effect.

My wife and I are an it. We are in our thirtieth year of it-ness and will celebrate this year in Booth Bay Harbor, Maine, and with thanks and hope, we will contemplate the mysterious lobster. Blessing and prospect are clearer at the shore. A few Saturdays ago we went to Indian Rocks Beach. As we walked from the public parking lot and crested the dunes I was astonished by the hundreds and hundreds of us already gathered, sunning, running, sheltering ourselves from the bright sun. We all looked helplessly bipedal ambling north and south on the shore. The birds and breezes moved where they would. But we were fixed within a ribbon of sand and shallows as far as we could see. The flat, wet land accentuated our lengths, walking foot to foot with our reflections posted beneath us as if on the sky. We walk for a time, though we'd swim like fish if we had gills, fly like birds, given wings. Edge effect attends to prospects.

Pelicans are the ungainly gods of Indian Rocks. Everything about them is other. Clumsy on land they are made for water, and there they are lightly buoyed, bill to breast, resembling some sea-born monk, bobbing. Then convulsing, thrashing the water with fearful wings, they break with physics and glide the currents. The one I watched saw beneath the water to fish, folded itself and scissored violently into the gray waves, rose to the surface, clapped its bill and swallowed, bobbing again. I made some frantic notes. How shall we be convinced of a transformation we can taste except in the desire exposed by a force of limits? How shall we imagine it without strange beings that transgress those boundaries before our eyes? Edge effect glimpses the imagined place.

The Spanish word for pelican is alcatraz. Alcatraz Island was named for its pelicans. In 1827 a French Captain wrote "...running past Alcatraz's Island [it is] covered with a countless number of these birds. A gun fired over the feathered legions caused them to fly up in a great cloud and with a noise like a hurricane." The eponymous prison would have been the right place for a penitentiary, but it was a prison with windowless cells. It housed the least penitent of those in the Federal prison system. As was said, “If you break the rules, you go to prison. If you break the prison rules, you go to Alcatraz.”Inmates lost their names to a number. The last inmate to leave when it closed was AZ-1576, Frank Weatherman. He said, “It’s mighty good to get up and leave. This Rock ain’t good for nobody.”Today, even the pelicans are gone. Edge effect has its limits.

As Saturday ends the earth hurtles eastward toward the dark. Gulls chide in last flights and the tide licks our feet. We sit quietly on the sand, listening, and watch the western sky.

Intercessions

At 4:30 a.m., the respiratory therapist wheeled his apparatus through the open door. The order called for medicated oxygen to be forced into our five-year-old daughter’s lungs. For the treatment to work, the seal of the mask over her mouth and nose would have to be airtight.

“No, thank you,” Maddie murmured as he tried to fix the strap behind her head. She pulled away, and broke the seal again and again. By then, she’d been awake for eighteen hours. A failing lung had made her breathing shallow and rapid.  Sleep was all she'd wanted, but strangers kept breaking in, jolting her awake: red strobed light, motion, punctured skin.

The technician grew impatient. Again he held the mask against her skin; again she wriggled free. He straightened his back and let out a breath, which was when my wife snatched the mask from his hand, clambered through the tangle of tubes and wires, and huddled close to her daughter’s body. She drew the mask toward her own face and held it there. She breathed. She smiled. She placed it back upon the air between them. “Please,” she said. "We need to do this.”

My daughter’s eyes were wide with recognition. She nodded. The seal held.

She was not cured overnight. We remained in intensive care for two more weeks, including the ten days and nights she lay intubated beside us, forced asleep as the ventilator breathed. There were, to use the word that doctors do, many interventions to come. But the one my wife performed that morning — the one compelled by love so selfless and savage it cannot help but interpose between life and death — is the one that taught our daughter not to fear.

Earlier that year, my senior class and I had read a Raymond Carver story, about a couple who lose their child in an accident, and, disoriented by distress and misplaced anger, find themselves in a bakery, where the owner, a relative stranger, absorbs their anger and takes them in. He offers them a place to sit, a shared space in which to be still, and a warm loaf of bread. “You have to eat and keep going,” he tells them. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.”

And then those same seven seniors from our small school appeared at our door at St. Francis, with a bag of pears, and coffee, and handmade cards.

And all of this comes to me now, intervenes, when something in me wants to wallow only in the wounded part of time, wants to feel that life is made of loss and the fear of losing. It wakes me from my torpor and turns me toward my daughter, reading here on the patio with me, seven years nearly to the day when her lungs were proven clear.

(Painting by Edward Knippers)

Jesus as Teacher

During Lent, on the advice of a friend, I read my way slowly through the book of John. I had told her I wanted to meditate on the mystery of the cross. I found a short commentary -- A Simple Guide to John by Paul J McCarren -- and tucked it into my bag along with my Bible, and I read passages during my light rail commute to downtown Portland, where I work as a language teacher.

Unexpectedly, I found myself meditating on the role of Jesus as teacher. Again and again, the sensitive writer of the commentary drew my attention to the many ways in which the book of John is the story of Jesus’ tireless, endless work as a teacher. John is the story of Jesus’ brilliant success, in his triumphant lesson on the cross, but it is also the story of his many failures. True, they are not his failures so much as his students’ failure to learn. Yet as a teacher myself, I found profound comfort in knowing that Jesus had mostly hard days in his classroom on earth.

Reading the gospel of John sent me into my own classroom each day with new eyes. I’ve often prayed before class, asking for Jesus to calm my nerves and keep my focus on him and on my students—not on myself. But with the words from John fresh in my mind, I started seeing teaching itself as an act of faith.

On page after page, I was seeing Jesus with new eyes. Jesus learning (learning, like us!) at the wedding at Cana. Jesus repeating the same lesson over and over again, with infinite patience. Jesus using stories and miracles to teach—metaphor both physical and verbal. Jesus teaching without degrees, without permission, without accolades and publications. Teaching in the midst of danger. Teaching in the midst of his own grief, loneliness, fear.

Over and over in John, Jesus invites those who would learn from him to admit their ignorance, and then to pay attention to their lives and their thoughts. He invites them to notice the gap between who they are and who God is, between their behavior and what they say they believe. “If you want to learn from me, you’ll have to follow me,” he says (12:26). In this way, though he is human like us, Jesus is the perfect teacher. Who he is and what he teaches are one.

Since March, I’ve continued to reflect on Jesus as teacher. I think about the slow apprenticeship of my own hard heart, the years of my wary approach to the cross and to Jesus, and how at first, I protected myself from the painful beauty of the cross by regarding Christ as one teacher among many. “I think he was a great teacher, like Buddha or Ghandi,” I said then. “He was one in a long line of prophets and teachers.”

It seems short, small, the distance between these arrogant, fearful words and the confession of faith I made years later. But the distance is huge. A canyon, a chasm. It’s an impossible journey I could not have made on my own. Grace carries me across this distance daily, nestling me into the strange reality of Jesus as both teacher and lesson, as both God and human. How grateful I am to be a perpetual student of Christ.

The Same Boat

In Florida we embark on summer's long, liturgical Ordinary Time as a voyage on the strands and foils of a variegated sameness–sun-buoyed air that yields ninety by noon, storms by five and somber evening skies. Part clockwork, part kaleidoscope, we navigate the elements laced around the odd hurricane and accrete the heartbeat of a six/eight seaborne shanty. After twenty-five years its rhythms return like a friend who reminds you of your best self. You sail, you smell the salt, you chart by stars and passing islands. Even down below, out of the sun, you feel your feet. But in this story, Ordinary Time is still three days away.

“I want to go to a movie,”I said to my wife. “The Tom Cruise flick. Edge of something.” The residual emotion from an argument with my son had short-circuited my recall.

“Tomorrow,”she said.

“It opens tonight,”I said as I walked away, at once glad she either did not hear or restrained from engaging. The demand to see a movie was a self-prescribed distraction after the phone tilt about a car repair, a car that seems irreparable and the onset of guilt. An instance overblown into raging crisis by the expectations of a father for a son who is so much like him. We go and it helps. Cruise is infected with alien DNA that allows his days to recur postmortem. He dies a thousand deaths and with each new life remembers better where the beast is hidden. It saves the world. That was Friday. Saturday morning I reviewed a script for Sunday about Pentecost wind and fire and three thousand births and I went adrift on something that felt like Melville:

“…for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.”¹

Ordinary Time is winsome and resists particular answers. It blows out of the west and is the flash of the morning sun. It is the fump and skush of oars in a dead calm and the groan of rigging tacking into a gale. It is form, via negativa, by elements both unsubstantial and powerful. It is the strange exhale of letting high ceremony unfurl into open life. You need room to take it in. By Monday I texted an apology about love that is too often too loud. His answer returned like the wind in my sail. “I am grateful for every day,”he said.

¹ Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick

(Painting by Edward Hopper)

Proximity

I leaned in, only inches from certain death. A thin slab of glass was all that separated me from nearly five hundred pounds of claws and teeth. It was a rush standing there, stared down by a creature of immense power. Even with the many safety precautions that zoos maintain, it’s hard to avoid a visceral apprehension when confronted with an animal that could easily take my life. Though I understood well the security of my position, my recognition of and respect for this potential remained.

When you think of the word “awe”, what does it bring to mind? The situations that come to my mind almost seem disparate. Viewing lions at a zoo, getting lost in the wonder of the night sky at 13,000 feet, peering through the crowd at a tiny portrait of a faintly-smiling lady in the Louvre. Awe seems a malleable notion, here hinting at grandeur, there delving into mystery. But certainly it stirs something in us. It can give a disquieting glimpse of life much grander and more fantastic than we could know, or a world beyond our control.

Perhaps this unease is what leads us to attempt to limit the experience of awe in our daily lives. We direct industry and technology toward reducing anomalies, preventing chaos. We channel our experience of awe into culturally acceptable forms - particularly in entertainment. We are ever more able to engage in “armchair awe”, carefully positioning ourselves to disengage at a moment’s notice should the experience start to get overwhelming.

With this pattern comes an increasing resilience to awe. The underlying “threat”, the power that grounds our awe, tends to deteriorate as we become more and more removed from it. Any impact an awe-filled experience might have is eroded.

The effects of this awe-resilience can be seen in relation to modern spirituality. The notion of worship has been widely blighted by a lack of awe. Dulled by the insular illusion that we are masters of our own fate, we have little interest in dwelling on fearful things. This insidious pull leads us to focus on God’s love so exclusively that He turns into the spiritual equivalent of a stuffed animal, meant only to be hugged.

That day at the zoo, I was awestruck by my position. The proximity to such ferocity grounded my gratitude for the protective glass, the barrier apart from which my life was forfeit. It is the sort of tension displayed in the final verses of Hebrews 12, where the author juxtaposes grateful worship with reverent awe. Do we take for granted our position behind the barrier, or do we recognize that beyond the unshakeable kingdom lies a God of consuming fire?

Linen Closet Theology

“‘Do you know I like this room most of all in my baby house,’ added Meg, a minute after, as they went upstairs and she looked into her well-stored linen closet. Beth was there, laying the snowy piles smoothly on the shelves and exulting over the goodly array.”

Long before I had a linen closet of my own, the “snowy piles” of a “generous supply of house and table linen”in Little Women captured my heart. I imagined damask tablecloths, pressed linen napkins, bed sheets with sprigs of dried lavender layered between lace-edged pillowcases, and masses of soft white towels, folded in threes. I had a similar appreciation for a passage in Little House in the Big Woods:

“The little house was fairly bursting with good food stored away for the long winter. The pantry and the shed and the cellar were full, and so was the attic . . . The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.”

More than a century after the Ingalls family, my parents also spent many late summer days growing and preparing food for the winter. Bins in the basement contained bushels of bright orange carrots and homegrown potatoes. Gleaming glass jars of tomatoes, peaches, pears, grape juice, and homemade mincemeat lined the shelves. My mother kept meticulous records of her work, and in one of her best years, she announced that she had prepared over 500 containers of canned and frozen foods. We showed our friends the cellar shelves and smiled with satisfaction at the homely beauty of the neat rows of Mason jars.

I admit to a great love for home and hearth, but I wonder if there is more at work than just the appreciation of the domestic in the resonance of these images. Perhaps it has something to do with abundance. Meg’s linen closet is bountifully supplied, and so is the Ingalls’ attic. The Marches and the Ingalls have what they need—and more. One clean white towel is nice, and necessary, but stacks and stacks of clean white towels and napkins and tablecloths is arresting. One pumpkin is rather ordinary, but an attic full to the bursting with orange pumpkins, “dusty”green spices, and bright red peppers is astonishing. The sheer number of things makes me smile, and, like Beth, I “[exult] over the goodly array.”Is the distinctive sensual appeal of images like these due, in part, to the bounty of the display? We like to see big groupings of the same object: the repetition of a single element in an artist’s design creates emphasis and draws our attention, àla Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans.

Perhaps these images of plenty remind us that that we have been provided for, even that we are loved. Not only will there be enough, but great abundance has been stored up for us as well. This earthly extravagance reminds me of the abundance of love, the “plenteous grace” lavished on us by the lover of our souls. And on the occasions when life’s circumstances dull my perceptions of his great love, reflecting on literary and artistic images of plenty provides a helpful reminder that he has come that we might have life, “and have it more abundantly.”

Something Sacred? God in the Things We Eat, Especially Citrus

Lee Price paints women in private spaces—beds, bathrooms—usually binge eating. A row of ice cream pints along the edge of the bathtub. McDonald’s bags full of fries and burgers spilled on the sheets.

In an interview with The Other Journal, Price says her art deals with “how we give objects of obsession/compulsion (in this case, food) qualities that we should be giving to a higher source (e.g., God or our inner voice). We see food as sacred.”

But in many of her recent paintings, food no longer holds control over the women. They sleep in beds with a serving of sliced peaches beside them. They hold a cup of tea in the bath. In the painting above, “Lemon Slices III,” the subject isn’t even eating. It’s simply the citrus itself in which this woman may be looking for something sacred.

And there is something sacred about citrus.

I moved to Seattle in December and hardly saw the sun. I felt fragile and transient and wanted some kind of comfort, something tangible, a sharp and beautiful detail to emerge from my cloudy anxiety. I called my mom and she told me to go to church, to pray and be in God’s presence. I went to a bakery instead.

I bought myself a “winter fruit tart,” made with slices of sharp citrus that cut through the diffused gray. It was drizzling and I sat in my car, parked on an unfamiliar residential street. The crust crumbled when I bit into the thing.

It was all glazed oranges and grapefruit slices on a puddle of cream. I thought of the way the Eucharist is “fruit of the vine and work of human hands,” and I thought that these bakers working with seasonal fruit were blessed stewards of creation. I thought God must have orchestrated that pastry to comfort me in that moment.

The next day was Sunday, and I went to church to pray and be in God’s presence. I received the Eucharist. The wine tasted sharp and I savored it.

Our Moments Big as Years

 O aching time! O moments big as years!   - John Keats

Tradition has it that after Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, the revived one never laughed again. Except once, while sitting in the marketplace watching a   thief steal a clay pot. He found that hilarious. “Clay, stealing clay!” Ah, the philosophical bent of those whose souls have temporarily stepped out of time and hovered above their own decomposing bodies.

Time is unruly, an elusive commodity temporarily spliced into the DNA of the universe. Whether we’re on time, out of time, or in the nick of time, we measure this invisible bafflement by simple things; the ticking of a clock, our breath, the movements of celestial bodies. Theoretical physicists like Sean Carroll offer visuals like his “arrow of time” that slices through a vast multiverse, where defining terms we recognize—causality, memory, progress, aging, metabolism—are attached to puny time’s events as they hang onto the arrow for dear life.

Yet here we are, mostly non-physicists, shuffling through the present, racking up piles of the past like old sales receipts, anxious about the future, and wasting time like crazy. So few of our recollections seem to inspire the sense that that event/obsession/outlay of energy was worth investing in, back then, when that was the now. We feel as wretched as Shakespeare’s Richard II: I wasted time, and now time doth waste me. If anything in life requires faith, it is the conviction that a worthy tapestry is somehow being woven from it all.

Think back to the night of your senior prom. You were supple and stunning in ecru muslin and pearls, he pressed a red rose into your hand, you danced to “Colour My World,” then slept within a stand of quivering aspen while sparks from your campfire wafted into open space, where Dr. Carroll’s “progress” or “causality” might or might not be relevant. Question: If sparks from a teenager’s campfire drift across the border from time into non-time territory, and no one is there to notice, is the power of young love strong enough to give the sparks causality?

The Ridiculous Boat Called English

I am teaching more these days than I have at any other time in my life, and every time I walk into the classroom I am visited by the same butterflies. They’re probably the same species of nervousness that visits everyone, but they’re also in on a secret. I’m a teacher, and I have no idea what I’m doing.

When I first began teaching English to speakers of other languages, I felt like a tightly wound ball of rubber bands. I suspected I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know my grammar well enough, and I certainly didn’t know enough of the pedagogy particular to teaching English language learners. Conversations in the staff room only confirmed my suspicions. I didn’t know as much as the other teachers did, and no one could find this out.

So I got myself a good grammar textbook and a survey of contemporary linguistics, and began studying at night. It seemed only fair, since that’s how my students spent their evenings, after five hours in the classroom and however many English-tinted hours they spent commuting home from school. The more I studied, I thought, the better armed I would be in the classroom, against their terribly trusting stares and the questions I was convinced I would be unable to answer. I needed to master English, so I could shake out all its tricks into a smooth set of operating instructions.

The more I learned and continue to learn about this language, however, the more ridiculous the idea of mastery seems. It’s like naming myself captain of an ancient, unwieldy paddle boat and assigning the students seats, then showing them how to operate the vessel.

What I’ve discovered is that learning alongside my students is exactly where I want to be. I don’t want them to be idle passengers, expecting me to shield them from every wave and iceberg. I want them with me at the wheel, figuring it out as we go. While a little bit of protective filtering is helpful, it’s extremely useful for them to see how native speakers wrestle with language, too.

I love this ridiculous boat called English. I’ve made my life in it. Teaching language is just one more phase in my love affair with the words I’ve been drinking in since birth. That’s the only thing I can really say I “have” to teach. I want to keep learning, but I am trying to let that be a means to an end rather than the end.

Bright and Shining

I finished revising my debut novel and graduated from an MFA program in the same month. I am tired. I don’t want to read. I don’t want to write. Of course, one of the first apocryphal rules you learn when you start writing is do it every day. Put that butt in the chair and fashion yourself after the Postal Service. Snow? Sleet? Debilitating fatigue? Doesn’t matter. Put those words down, son.

So when my friend Sara asked me what I was doing for Lent, I laughed. This was the first year in over ten where I wouldn’t be a church worker and I was sleeping in on Sundays like it was my job. While I appreciate the discipline of Lent – I’d taught it how many times? – I was on sabbatical from anything that wasn’t Mad Men or Game of Thrones. And that included God.

Thomas Merton went to Gethsemane to remove himself from the world, to seek God with integrity. As everyone knows, the world came knocking on the doors of his monastery in the way of literary fame. Merton was stuck between his desires for solitude and – this is my assumption – a calling to write. But then, on a routine trip to the doctor in Louisville, he had a vision. Him, being held up by (and inextricably connected to) the world he once hoped to spurn. He described the experience as inevitable, saying, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

I eventually texted Sara back and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll say the Lord’s Prayer every night.” It was something I’d never done. And if I’m being honest – it was a discipline I had no real interest in keeping. But much like the pull I feel every time I walk past my laptop – like there is something I should be doing – once I was lying in bed I couldn’t escape words. Our Father… I don’t claim a Merton-like moment of transformation. Everything I learned was a lesson I already knew. Yet, sometimes it is good to be reminded that the work will always be there when you’re ready. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded that we are bright and shining.

(Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt)

Displacement

I recently walked through my friend’s house a week after it had caught fire. The plaster crumbled from the walls. The windowpanes had cracked in the heat, and smoke had stained the frames. I had lived in that house for two years awhile back, but the fire had made what was once familiar unrecognizable.

The rooms are now only alive in the memories of the people who once filled them.

The summer I was 8 years old, my mother painted my room. It was supposed to be a dark blue, but when she stated painting, she let some of the white show through in layers of cumulous clouds. At night I fell asleep to headlights arcing across the walls/sky like searchlights. She had made what was familiar—four walls—other than what it was.

The Jewish holiday of Sukkot—The Feast of Tabernacles—remembers the forty years of the Exodus. Families build shelters of plywood and cardboard. For a week these shacks are the venue for prayer and shared meals. During Sukkot, everyone is homeless.

I am looking for a house to rent. I have toured houses that are empty, some that are still lived in, others are piled with boxes. Each of these has not just been made habitable; they have been made into a temple, a resting place. But even Solomon’s Temple was destroyed.

After we sold the house I grew up in, the new owner painted the walls of my room white. Even now, the walls of my friend’s house has been reframed, the windows replaced.

The opening prayer of Sukkot both praises God, but also commands us to accept our displacement. We must dwell in sukkah:

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haolam,  asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu leisheiv basukkah.

Our praise to You, Eternal our God, Sovereign of all: You hallow us with Your mitzvot and command us to dwell in the sukkah.