On Taking Note

One summer, my family spent an afternoon riding bikes on Mackinac Island. During the eight-mile ride, I noticed several piles of rocks ranging from just a few stones to almost three feet high. I learned from the brochure I carried in my bike basket that these are called “cairns,” and they’re used to mark trails by hikers and bikers; mostly at points where the trail isn’t obvious or there’s a sharp decline. However, the cairns on Mackinac Island weren’t on trails. In fact, they were scattered over the shore. The Mackinac Cairns, I learned, served “as a memorial for having been somewhere or as a simple art form.” I laughed at first, and thought, “simple indeed” as I watched my six- and four-year-old daughters pile rocks on a break from riding bikes. I wondered about the memorial part of this practice as well. What was seen or heard, what was the weather like, and what else happened while rocks were being piled up? I was annoyed that I didn’t know the story, and instead, had to look at the lake, the sand—nature—and wonder what in the world would make someone get off her bike and stack four or five rocks in a pile.

The idea of taking note of something in one’s day with little to no reflection is explored in an essay titled, “Rambling Round Evelyn,” in the book The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf. Throughout the essay, Woolf examines the diary, which could also be thought of as a memorial for having been somewhere, as well as a simple art form. Woolf uses the diary of John Evelyn to show that while simply taking note might seem tedious and perhaps unnecessary, it also can spark wonder and imagination of those who are left behind to observe it.

John Evelyn was meticulous about recording the events of his days, but it was the event he was focused on, not his thoughts and feelings about it. Woolf doesn’t consider this writing. In fact, in her own diary, she writes, “this diary writing does not count as writing, since I have just re-read my year’s diary and am struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.” Woolf thought that the real task of a writer is not just writing down the facts, but to help the reader see something beyond those facts, and Evelyn does not do this in his diary. He records, and he moves on. Almost all of the work is left to the reader to decide whether what he saw is worth noticing too.

However, this is not to say what Evelyn did didn’t have merit or that keeping a diary is a waste of time. While Woolf might’ve not thought it was writing, she wrote about her own diary keeping: “The advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are diamonds of the dustheap.” Further, Woolf explains that the reason Evelyn kept a diary was because it was, “as if the look of things assailed him.” What Evelyn saw attacked him and the only thing he could do to manage this fierce sensitivity to the world was write them down.

“Evelyn was no genius. His writing is opaque rather than transparent; we see no depth through it, nor any secret movement of mind or heart,” Woolf wrote. But more than 300 years later, his diaries still exist and if we are to read them it will be up to us to see “these scattered fragments—like relics of beauty in a world that has grown indescribably drab.” I think it is this active participation on the part of the reader that makes diary writing an art form.

If I wanted, I could add stones to the existing piles scattered around the island; a symbol to show I noticed, I saw something beautiful or startling, too. But that is all. I could not say what it was or why it gave me pause. All I could do is pick up another rock and place it on the pile to mark my spot, hoping it didn’t crumble.

The Interior Geography of Merton's Mountain

I had intended to finish Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain before I wrote this piece, but alas, he makes me think too much, and when I think it yields writing, and writing works on me from the inside out. I think Fr. Merton would be happy with that. In his preface to the Japanese edition published twenty years after its initial release, he says, "I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both."

I read as a Protestant with Catholic sympathies, as one who lives in and too often of the world, and as one in a continuing search of the One who speaks. So, when I learned that the title derives from an allusion to Dante's Purgatory and the notion of working one's way through the seven deadly sins into Paradise, my Presbyterian skin bristled. The whole five solae thing, I suppose... But it also compares with L.R. Rambo's seven-step theory of conversion including content, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment, and transformation.

Whatever it is, there is a self-conscious reversal of geography of his story-telling that demonstrates the delusion of intellectual ascendance and the humiliation of spiritual discovery. After the deaths of his father and close family members, he is sick with what might be compared to Hume's “melancholy of the philosopher.” He moves on to Columbia to study and while happy, becomes suspicious of education. After an illness, he visits monasteries, reads The Divine Comedy and The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy and experiences a growing spiritual crisis. At this point, Merton returns to Queens and the Episcopal Church where his father had been the organist. “I think the reason for this was that God wanted me to climb back the way I had fallen down... He wanted me to do away with what there was of pride and self-complacency... He would not let me become a Catholic, having behind me a rejection of another church... [which is an act] sinful in itself, rooted in pride, and expressed in contumely.”

Even in the monastery, Merton matures further into his decision to enter. “The fact that I was hurrying and ran into people only indicates that I was much less of a contemplative than I thought I was.” It comes when his beloved younger brother visits him at The Abbey of Gethsemani that Merton affirms, “Once you have grace, you are free.” He shares Communion with him in this—it would turn out to be their last meeting, as his brother dies in WWII.

In his 1953 The Sign of Jonas, Merton admits he barely recognizes himself in The Seven Storey Mountain, saying, “[It] is the work of a man I have never even heard of.” But I recognize my story in his as it unfolds, though it is in many ways an opposite one. How much of your story is authored by you? How much do you recognize of yours in others? How much in Christ?

The Current

27 Cafe

A few years ago I was asked to write an essay on the importance of poetry in our time and place. I did not accept right away. The task was daunting; my impulse was to say no.

At the same time, however, I’d been teaching improvisation, and the first rule of improv is to say yes.

And so, though I felt panicked, I said yes, and the moment I did, an extraordinary thing happened. I felt like some Midwestern Robert Burns, composing a tune: “My way is: I consider the poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then chuse my theme … [and] I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom…”

With the theme I’d been given playing always in the background, I experienced the world differently. The news of the day, the way my daughter turned a phrase, the words of a student’s essay: everything felt charged with meaning with which I wanted to connect. I extended every conversation with my wife. I read more. I took walks.

I was seeking what T.S. Eliot sought: “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work,” he writes in “The Metaphysical Poets." "[I]t is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”

I started to feel what Wordsworth longed for us to feel: a sense of a consciousness that experiences the world and its inhabitants not as commodities to be gained and spent but as possible occasions for the marvelous:

Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

And when some unforeseen experience—receiving W.S. Merwin’s Migration as a Christmas present from my wife and daughter, or hearing a young couple in a coffee shop discussing Kierkegaard’s sense of irony—chimed with what I was trying to discover, I felt the jolt David Kirby felt when composing “Get Up, Please,” one of his witty poetic fugues:

“Anybody can stitch a bunch of parts together to make a creature—the secret is to know when to apply the current. In this case, the limbs and torso of my poem were just lying there when a stranger slipped them the juice.”

Throughout the Christmas holiday and well into the New Year, I grew more attentive, and so my relationships flourished. Because I was compelled by the rules of play to say yes to writing, I came to love the world more. I came to love life more.

“So here’s to music, poetry, and chance encounters that give you exactly what you need,” Kirby continues, “especially when you don’t know it’s coming your way.”

Taking Advice From The Police

“I’m so tired, and I have so much homework.” In the space between ballet and rehearsal, I asked my student how she is doing, and I receive a diatribe about the hardship of being eleven. I’m tempted to tell her to wait until college when she tells me that that she has track and field day tomorrow.

“What?” How has this ridiculous tradition survived years of educational advancements? I am convinced that there is no day more pointless than track and field day. For one day in grade school, we were bussed to a school with a proper track, and, under the guise of testing our fitness levels, we spent the whole day running around it. Of course it was more involved than this, there are races of various lengths and styles and a long-jump competition.

My saving grace came in high school when the dreaded day came during rehearsals for Nutcracker. My ballet teacher called my high school and told them that her students wouldn’t be participating. With her aggressively animated South Philadelphia sensibilities, she explained that we danced for five hours, six days a week and didn’t need to spend a day running in circles to prove that we were physically fit, and with that, track and field was over for good.

I tell my own student this story when the subject of fitness testing comes up. “Lucky,” she says as she ruffles through her dance bag.

***

Sting, and the Police by association, serenade me on my way to work more often than any 20-something should admit. It’s “Roxanne” that they sing on repeat today. Sting tells her that she can change her life by changing her mind. It's a cliché piece of good advice that the band has set to musical excellence of the ‘80s.

My college classmates and I used to joke that a table is just another kind of stage and that a pole is just a different kind of barre. It was one of those jokes birthed from fear that we were only good enough for academic dance and not good enough to be actual artists. With that fear always in the back of my mind, it isn’t hard for me to insert myself into Roxanne’s headspace and see her as someone who could only see her obligations and not her options. What happens to a student loan payment deferred seems far worse and costly than a dream that suffers the same fate.

On a literal level, I think what I love most about this song is the advice Sting gives her. He could have easily told her that she was lucky to have some form of income, to use these humiliating experiences as fodder for her artistry, or that all of the bad things she was experiencing were necessary parts of the path to greatness. That is what we tell artists after all. The fact that Sting had to cross a street of prostitutes on the dimly lit walk from his sketchy hotel to his performance at a nightclub suggests that it was the advice he had received, but it is not the advice he gave.

There is value in persevering. There is honor is making a commitment and following through. But, as any non-athletic student who had to participate in track and field activities will tell you, sometimes the only thing you get for finishing what you started is a urine-colored participation ribbon that you’ll drop and forget on the mud-streaked floor of the school bus. As the song suggests, sometimes quitting can be the best and wisest course of action. Sometimes the best advice you can give someone is “You don’t have to do this anymore.”

***

 “Miss Chrysta,” my student asks changing her shoes for her next class, “can you write me a note so I can get out of track and field day?”

I’m tempted to tell her that the complete waste of her life that is track and field day is a rite of passage and an opportunity for growth not only as a student of the public school system, but also as an artist subjecting herself to artless standards, a fish being judged by its ability to climb a tree, so to speak, but I remember the grace that was given to me.

“Who do I make this letter out to?”

Boyhood, Birdman and the Problem of Existence, Part 1

Birdman and Boyhood shared more than the race for the Best Picture Oscar last year. Though the two movies were as different as can be imagined in tone, form, subject matter, pace, and just about every other movie-making category, they were unified in pushing to the forefront a philosophy that goes back some fifty years, but seems to be gaining momentum as a philosophy of life: existentialism.

Existentialism is known best at the popular level as the theory that the only meaning one can find in life is by living authentically, i.e. passionately and sincerely, in the moment. The “now,” not the “then” on either side of it on the timeline of existence, is the only part of reality that is relevant, and an existentialist is responsible for creating meaning in that “now.” That meaning, however, does not transcend the “now,” but rather requires the doer to live in a series of disconnected moments as authentically as possible to achieve significance. All of this is predicated on the universe being meaningless, there being no God, and therefore no revelation of where meaning for the human being is to be found.

The conversation that shows how serious Boyhood is about its existentialism comprises the last scene in the film. Mason, Boyhood’s main character, is on a hike on his first day of university. He has typically skipped orientation and has met a new girl, Nicole; they are hitting it off. At a beautiful moment of sunset with the rocks glowing that soft red they do in the Texas desert, Mason and Nicole are sitting together, enjoying a brief rest, awkwardly trying to continue the conversation they’ve been having during the walk. Suddenly Mason’s roommate, a crazy extrovert, yells out from down below: “This moment’s having a falsieful whoregasm! It’s like as if all of time has unfolded before us so we could stand here and look out and scream, ‘Fuck yeah!’ Wooo!”

This juvenile moment prompts the much more thoughtful, yet still feeling-her-way Nicole to turn to Mason tentatively and volunteer, “You know how everyone is always saying, ‘Seize the moment!’? I don’t know. I’m kinda thinkin’ it’s the other way around, you know, like, the moment seizes us.” Mason responds, “Yeah. Yeah, I know. It’s constant. The moments. It’s just, it’s like it’s always right now, you know?” She agrees. They look at each other, again in only that way two young people can, who aren’t sure of the future, but are thinking, “I really like this girl/guy; do you think he/she is the one?” They look away, then look back, and the movie cuts to black, ending.

As if this weren’t enough, as the credits roll, a lone voice begins singing, “Here, at my place in time, and here in my own skin, I can finally begin. Let the century pass me by. Standing under my sky, tomorrow is nothin’.”

One couldn’t find in modern film a more existentialist way of viewing life. “It’s like always right now, you know?” But Boyhood cheats because it ends hopefully. The viewer feels Mason has his whole life ahead of him and sees it as an adventure, filled with moments, some of joy, some of sadness, some of reward, some of punishment, but all to be embraced and simply lived until the next one comes. Classic existentialists, on the other hand, could not get over the loss they felt at the knowledge that we create our own meaning in every moment. It made life absurd, random, without any ultimate significance. This newer popular form of the philosophy simply chooses to ignore the consequences of the future, particularly the looming specter that so terrified Sartre, Camus, Becket and others: death.

That specter dominates, in some ways, the other movie, the one which won the big prize: Birdman. Stay tuned.

Fritz Eichenberg

One of my favorite pieces of visual art is Fritz Eichenberg’s wood-cutting from 1951 called The Christ of the Breadlines. I have a print of it framed and hanging on the wall in my house. It depicts Jesus Christ standing in line at a soup kitchen, waiting with the rest of the down-and-outers for His turn to be served. In front of Him and behind Him are other raggedy people, hands in their pockets, wrapped up in shawls, anxiously waiting for food, a meal they couldn’t prepare for themselves. They’re all together nomads, riff-raff, vagrants, human dreck, homeless.

I like this piece simply because it’s not a very typical depiction of Jesus. Other artists, Peter Paul Reubens for example, who portrayed Jesus’ death and resurrection on more than one occasion, gleefully inserted muscle upon muscle into the Jesuses of their paintings. Doing so achieves a certain effect: Jesus, the All Powerful One, retains His strength even at the most vulnerable point in His life. What can keep Him down? Not even the Cross. Reubens’ canvases are also very busy with action and motion, with the twisting, straining bodies of Jesus’ friends and family, Roman guards and servants. The same could be said for Michelangelo or any number of other Renaissance painters. But Eichenberg’s Jesus is weak. He’s wrapped in rags. He’s entirely in shadow. No bulging abs, no mountainous biceps. And the figures in the painting with Him are still. They stand, with the Lord of the universe in their midst, motionless in their deep poverty and hunger, wanting the same thing He wants—rest, fulfillment, an end to suffering.

The wood-cutting is very dark. In fact, Eichenberg’s only light source in the entire image is Jesus’ halo, central to the composition. By it and only by it does Eichenberg permit us to see that there are even any figures in the etching at all. Whereas artists like Reubens composed their paintings so the figures and action draw the eye to Christ, whether He is on the Cross or on the ground just after His death, Eichenberg gives us a different kind of composition. The figure of Jesus is literally in the middle of the piece, but the details—the stuff that Eichenberg pays such close attention to—are of those in the soup kitchen line with Jesus and not Jesus Himself. However, they can only be seen by the light of His crown.

God, Guideposts, and the Modern Miracle

Sometime in the early 1990s, I sat in a barbershop while my brother’s hair was trimmed and read a Guideposts. As with all barbershop and waiting room magazine selections, the Guideposts were outdated and incomplete, a scattershot of the 1980s.

Earlier that year, from my sleeping bag pitched on a friend’s living room floor, I watched “The Towering Inferno.” I saw the skyscraper catch fire. Wonderment turned to fear as a family trapped in their room soaked towels in water from the sink in an attempt to escape the blaze. Several floors below, a posh party was in full swing. It was the partygoers' ignorant bliss that frightened me.

Unbeknownst to me, the roof over my head could be consumed. What we believe to be true—i.e., that the struts and beams supporting the weight above us are in fact solid and weight bearing—could come down at any minute.

To sate my fear, my parents bought a fire ladder that could be unrolled and hooked to a windowsill. On the front of the box a photograph showed a girl, her brother, and mother calmly descending the metal rungs as bright orange flames snapped from the window they had just escaped. When I woke up in the middle of the night, sure that I smelled smoke or heard the distant crackle of a fire, I would look at the picture on the box—the calm face of the girl in the footed pajamas, the fire stilled by the camera’s shutter.

I read about Bud Ward’s miracle photograph in the barbershop that year, the year my fear of fire was beginning to take shape.

Bud Ward, a retired New Jersey fireman, took several photographs of a burning shed. When he developed the film, he was amazed to discover Jesus in the flames. People flocked to the shed, praying and taking home shards of burnt wood.

Guideposts included the photograph.

I was too young to know much of modern-day miracles, but I could recount most of the biblical miracles. Water from stone, loaves and fishes, parting seas, plagues and manna. The veil between the world I knew and the miraculous was thin.

But I couldn’t see Jesus in the flames; I could only see the fire. In the black and white photograph, the fire is a pure white light. Bare tree branches jag through the image as if they could escape. The miracle to me was not the figure, but the fire’s slow destruction—flames billow out of the doorway and surround the roof in a halo of light. In the photograph, the shack, despite the fire and heat and smoke, is still standing.

Perhaps, if the photo was taken with a better exposure, the miraculous Jesus would return to the flames. If the distinction between black and white was more decisive, the photograph would be evidence of nothing but a fire and a roof withstanding, if only for a little while longer, the inferno.

Now, when I am alone in the darkroom agitating the developer and waiting for the photographic image to burn into the paper, I always think of Bud’s photograph. As the blacks darken and the lights pull forward, I look for a figure to appear. A Jesus in the threshold, a figure present for the burn before the collapse.

Reading at Fall Out Arts Initiative

The Fall Out Arts Initiative is hosting a reading Friday, April 10th. The reading will start at 7 p.m. and doors will open at 6:30 p.m. The even is hosted at the Urban Art Center, located at 2609 Stevens Ave. S, Minneapolis, MN. For further information, see their website.

Love Your Neighbor

Living in my antique apartment has its share of quirks. The high ceilings and drop-pane windows are beautiful, but they make heating and cooling extremely inefficient. The location is within a ten-minute walk of my job, my friends’ house, and my favorite bars and restaurants. My taps have two temperatures—“tepid” and “lava”—and I have a comedically small oven. The hardwood floors are original to the building, but I have become very well-acquainted with my upstairs neighbor and his habits because of those floors.

My neighbor is an ongoing reminder of the old commandment “love thy neighbor.” Now, nothing the man above me does is particularly inconsiderate. Yes, there were mornings when I woke up to (mercifully unused) condoms on my porch (he apologized for making a mess the night before). And yes, there has been the occasional shouting match with who I assume is his girlfriend. But those are the hazards of apartment living, and, seriously, who hasn’t had a fight with their significant other before?

No, working to love my neighbor is more of a struggle for me when he is doing 100% normal day-to-day activities. It’s when someone comes home and walks across the floor wearing high heels that I can hear clearly as I lie in bed trying to fall asleep. It’s when his girlfriend’s young son picks up and drops the same ball over and over and over again. It’s when he’s vacuuming and bonking into furniture when I’m writing. THOSE are the times that I find it hard to love my neighbor, even though he’s innocently going about his life like a normal human being. He’s not doing anything wrong—I’m just being selfish.

My upstairs neighbor doesn’t know me, and he doesn’t know I’m writing this. He certainly doesn’t know that he is an ongoing reminder to me to learn patience, to practice empathy, and to meditate on what it means to love my neighbor as myself.

Even when he’s vacuuming.

Wendell Berry and the Prophetic Voice

I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it.  “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer”

 One thing I am passionate about is reducing my carbon footprint in the world, and I want not only other individuals to reduce their footprints, but I also want our society to change its course before we irreparably harm the earth. Many voices are urging us to do so. One voice in particular belongs to Wendell Berry, whom Bill McKibben and others have called a prophet. In a 2013 interview, Bill Moyers named Berry a visionary, who is “calling for immediate action to end industrial farming and return to the sustainable farming methods of years past.” But more than this, Berry audaciously tells us we need to return to an agrarian society, not only for environmental reasons, but also for social, moral, and spiritual reasons. I am with him on this.

Historically, we don’t treat our prophets well, especially the ones we don’t want to hear. Yet sometimes with all the bickering that goes on in the public sphere, it’s a monumental task to figure out whom we should trust in the first place. Even among the ancients, prophets’ words often went unheeded and the people suffered for it. It’s a bad habit we have.

When we hear prophet, the first thing most of us imagine is someone divinely inspired, who reveals God’s intentions to the people. We’re stuck on that definition, and we’re afraid to call anyone else a prophet because the bar appears too high. Often we don’t designate a person “prophetic” until after a great calamity—then we realize we should have listened to the prophet, and we should have taken action. Remember the individuals who tried to show us that we were headed toward the 9/11 tragedy or toward the recent collapse of our financial institutions? We didn’t recognize these voices until after the fact. Could we think of prophet in another way, as a person with extraordinary insight, an inspired person? Would we be more apt to listen to a prophet then, or more willing to act?

Early prophets of environmental stewardship, including Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, tried to tell us about the cost of industrial, quick-fix solutions to our problems. Wendell Berry, I think, speaks with the clearest voice today of one who understands not only the physical, but the spiritual cost of earth’s demise. He has said that it is important for people like him, “who have no power,” to speak about the madness of our industrial lifestyles because most politicians and highly positioned officials cannot and will not speak so plainly. He calls his way “leadership from the bottom,” and he is passionate that all of us start doing what is right for our earth: “We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?” Quite simply, if we see a problem, we need to start doing something about it. That is all Berry asks of us, in the same way that other prophets have asked us to change our ways.

Celebrating Patterns

“The patterns/Of any starry summer night might be identical/To the summer heavens circling inside the skull.”—Pattiann Rogers

I started reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest twice. Shortly into the second attempt I got distracted by some intriguing quotes from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It’s far less dense than Jest (with the added bonus of making me feel less dense) so I’m now ankle deep in its rising waters. But before abandoning Infinite Jest again, in the hope of piecing together its mystifying puzzle, I spent some time reading about it and watching some video interviews of Wallace. Something Wallace said gives me a slight grasp of how to approach it (you know, the next time I try to read it). He said the structure of the book is based on a Sierpinski triangle, which is made up of many triangles, and in a static file looks like this:

You can see it animate here. This visual explained a lot about the shifting images in Jest, and why my more linear and 2-dimensional brain has trouble processing it. Before I waded into Karamazov, Jest had me thinking about patterns.

God’s fascination with patterns is seen in galaxies and in a mind that can build the structure of a book on an intricate series of triangles. The Sierpinski triangle is just one of an abundance of fractals that are found everywhere. Wikipedia defines fractal like this: “a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale.”

The Sierpinski triangle is a geometric fractal. There are algebraic fractals which are simple equations calculated exponentially that yield infinitely complex, and breath taking, symmetrical designs (as in the cover photo). I was familiar with some nature fractals—sunflower centers and cabbage leaves, for instance—and the algebraic fractals. I hadn’t thought about trees and rivers as being fractals in the way they produce a continuous pattern of branching. But with all these patterns spiraling through my mind, what surprised me was the realization that the church has a fractal influence on our lives.

I used to think church was where we go to be refreshed for a new week. Where we lean into God through the teaching of someone better equipped than we are to see how the gospel is or isn’t permeating our lives. And where we praise and thank God, soul to soul, with others on a similar trajectory. But more than anything, now I see it shows us, by weekly repetition, that these are daily patterns for us to inhabit, no matter in what part of the intricacies of the design we find ourselves. The Wikipedia definition reveals our fractal relationship with the church as it establishes “a repeating pattern that displays at every scale.” Church’s rhythms repeat themselves in our natures, at every scale of our lives: from our center, to our family, to our extended family, friends, coworkers, ad infinitum.

Fractals, when termed “self-similar,” also point to God having made us “self-similar” to him. He repeats the patterns of his nature in us, as Pattiann Rogers says in her poem “The Origin of Order”:

Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind Has been obligated from the beginning To create an ordered universe As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.

Fractals, and the fact that someone can write a book that imitates this mathematical architecture, boggle the mind. What do these permeating and far-reaching patterns hint about the mind and heart of God? Can we contemplate the scope, the beauty of even one attribute of God fractalized in a never-ending exponential pattern?

The Stream of Time, Measured Two Ways

It was balletic—or that’s what some other parents suggested. My daughter had left her feet, had thrown a two-hand, over-head pass down the court to her waiting teammate who had made a layup.

“That was dance!” said the couple, who knows that my daughter has been taking dance much longer than she’s been playing basketball. “That was all because of dance!”

As a person who has almost always felt athletics and the arts at considerable odds with each other, I couldn’t have been happier with that comment.

Even though she’s fourteen, I still can’t help but feel like we’ve thrown our daughter into athletics the way I imagine some people throw their newborn infants into water: because we have heard the instincts are there and we want to put our children in touch with those instincts, force them to adapt so that they’ll be stronger and better in the end.

However, I choose this sink or swim comparison for another purpose as well: the water imagery. In general, athletics engages time differently than most art forms. Athletics is about the moment, the immediate; it’s about instantaneous perceptions and reactions; it compresses weeks and months and years of training into moments; it “squeeze[es] the universe into a ball.” In my daughter’s basketball game, she was thrown into the stream of time and the score measured her team’s reactions—valuing reactions certainly over reflections—against that stream as compared to the other team. Even clockless sports, such as baseball and golf, boil down to instantaneous reactions of the smallest fractions of seconds that make for achievement or defeat.

Art engages time rather differently. Often, art means to give us perspective, a wider view from which individual moments get their meaning. Art might attempt to create or recreate or freeze a moment in time, as in the crisis of J. Alfred Prufrock alluded to above, but even then the point is often that moment’s relationship to history or to the forces or character that produced that moment, preserved for us in art where it might impact history for hundreds of years.

We can see this time difference clearly in art works about sport. Sports films do better with story than they do capturing the sport itself: Rocky’s neighborhood and character are interesting; his fights are anything but “the sweet science.” Even “The Triumph of Death,” Don Delillo’s fictional retelling of “the shot heard ’round the world” that opens his novel Underworld, succeeds not because of the way it captures Bobby Thomson’s homerun but because of its wider vision of the event, more for the way it takes the variegated experiences of American life and coalesces them into a timeless moment than for the way it recreates the homerun itself. DeLillo himself knows this. Before the event, Russ Hodges, the actual radio announcer and DeLillo character who will himself momentarily call a piece of history, reflects on a Jack Dempsey fight he saw as a kid, “When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history” (16).

Then again, maybe time is exactly what art and athletics share. The sweetest moments in both are when time seems to fall away, when time’s shallow stream yields to transcendence, or when we simply become aware of ourselves in relation to time in a way that puts everything back into perspective.

Both can do this. Yet my fear for my daughter, ballet-passer, is that, as the pressures of a sports culture loom on the high school horizon, the immediacy of athletics will predominate, that the slower truths and wider picture of the arts will get shoved to the sideline.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishin’ in,” wrote Thoreau in Walden. “I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

In this month that attempts to house both March Madness and Lent, this is my prayer for my daughter: that she both swim in the stream, the whitewater of time that is athletics, and crawl out to the banks of the arts and know that eternity remains.

Believe

A few years ago, in an effort to drum up some American business, the French advertising agency Soleil Noir came up with a promotional campaign. They called the campaign "Believe" and it opened with these words: "In 2012 if you don't believe you won't make it happen."

Believe in fashion. Believe in health. Believe in work. Believe in entertainment. Believe in your ideas. Believe in yourself.

Believe.

Very early in the history of the church, shortly after a time of persecution, bishops, priests, monks, and theologians gathered together to formulate a very different list of beliefs. Historians speak of these churchmen as a motley crew. Many came with severed limbs, gouged eyes, and marred faces from torment they had endured for the faith. The document born out of this council came to be known as the Nicene Creed. We recite it to this day:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, The only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God; Begotten, not made, Being of one substance with the Father, By whom all things were made…

So, I wonder about the competing creeds in my life. After all, each creed compels me to stop, and to reorient, and to catch my breath, and to get my bearings, and to rediscover where "north" is located.

But not all creeds are the same.

Which is winning?

Which is dying?

Teasing, Simple Sight

The doctor told me people with my eye condition are odd, a bit off, weird. She added quickly that I was a rarity, a “normal one.” Kerotoconus—the eye condition causing my eyes to bulge out—makes you feel far from normal. It happens slowly, but for a contact wearer, kerotoconus makes the world go soft at the edges. You fuss at your eyes. Rub them. Wet your fingertips with your own saliva and massage them. Develop twitches. Blink, often. Incessantly squint. Anything to try to see the hard edges of things. It drives you mad.

During an “On Being” podcast recently, James Martin talked about Ignatian Spirituality. He exampled one aspect of the practice whereby we press ourselves into a biblical passage. A kind of midrash accomplished through prayer and contemplation. An opportunity for a story to be seen differently and anew, across the mire of time. There I am, standing by the side of the road in Jericho, squinting, wetting my eyelids, begging and pleading for sight.

I have these new hard-shell contact lenses now—lenses that require me to both remove and put them in with something affectionately known as an “Eye Plunger.” The results are astounding. Words emerge from across the length of a room. I stare hawk-like at a computer screen, my child’s face, the foam spilling over a mug of beer. I can see. I have perfect vision.

In “Habit of Perfection” Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark/And find the uncreated light.” One can imagine Jesus leaning in and breathing these very words on that road near Jericho. An incantation for a man viewed as abnormal by the world. Maybe it took the man a few days to get all the caked mud out. To overcome the facial tics. The lifetime of odd quirks you develop when you are trying desperately to see.

Did the once blind man ever return to see Jesus? Jesus who said, “I am the light of the world.” Jesus, who with divine spit and the “ruck and reel” of this earth, “Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.”

Silence and the Prayer of the Heart

“Speech is the organ of this present world. Silence is the mystery of the world to come.” –St. Isaac the Syrian, 7^th century

 An irony of Lent is that too many of us like to talk about the discipline of personal silence, yet practice it little and poorly. Like breathing big city air, we’re accustomed to wallowing in the vague brown pall of noise pollution, sometimes of our own making, unhealthy but familiar. I remember real quiet. I got big pristine doses of it during the years I lived in a largely abandoned hamlet high in the French Alps. In winter, I was sometimes completely alone, and the stillness was intensified by massive, sound absorbing snowdrifts that broke against the old stone buildings of the village like wild ocean waves, muffling even my breath.

The luxury of living within such outward silence is long over. Then as now, I have to fight for the inner stillness I know contributes to spiritual stability, that peace that is more profitable to the soul than mere silence of place anyway. So I practice the ancient Jesus Prayer, the prayer of the heart, that centuries-old companion of ascetics, monastics, and all who wish to draw near to God: Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son, have mercy on me, the sinner.” The Greek word for mercy, eleison, is a derivative of the same one used for olive oil in that language. A common healing agent among the ancients, the Good Samaritan in Christ’s parable anointed the injured man’s wounds with eleison. Supplicating God to visit me with his eleison (and through me, the whole world with the same), I invite his compassion on my brokenness, his restoration of my restless, chaotic person—the anxious enigma of who I am that prompts me to make so much noise in the first place.

As St. Isaac says, “silence is the mystery of the world to come.” Maybe that’s because in that bright, unabridged reality, fully restored souls will know instinctively how to speak beyond the primitive language of the mouth, and human existence will need no sound for its justification.

How to Be Quiet in Other Languages

I have always wondered why Jesus chose the wilderness for his little getaways, but I think I can answer that question with my latest fascination, which is the fact that no one followed him there. Jesus’ disciples and fans followed him across cities and towns and even on water, but it is like He announced that He would be going to the wilderness, and everyone sort of slunk away with a sort of “Have fun with that!” shrug and nod.

With this in mind, I am actively seeking the wilderness. Not the literal wilderness, mind you, but just a place where people will not follow me.

I realize that this little practice may look like I am running away from my problems. Not really. My life as of late seems so plagued with so many problems that I have started to learn from them. I do not mean this in a “Count it all joy, my brothers,” sense, but rather that waiting patiently, then pouncing and crushing, and sinking your fangs and claws into something until you’ve exhausted it into submission might actually be an effective way to get what you want. I would try that except I am the “something” in this metaphor, and I am no match for the problems that hide in the shadows. Retreating to my cave and hiding seem like the most logical solution.

I think of Jesus telling the religious leaders that if the disciples' voices were to be stifled the rocks would start talking. “That would suck,” I think, "If rocks could talk, then every time Jesus went to the desert, He’d have to listen to them too." (There are very clear reasons for why people trust Jesus with their souls and not me.)

It takes a federal regulation to disconnect me from all methods of wireless and electronic communication and these retreats do not start until a flight attendant announces that I am required by law to turn my cell phone off. Then she repeats the law in a language that I don’t understand. The plane lifts, and I am disconnected. I am in my cave. I am free.

I can say three phrases in about five different languages: Is this gluten free? Thank you. Where is the library? I know my lack of cultural initiative makes it seem like I am the typical American tourist who expects everyone to cater to her linguistic needs. It isn’t that at all. I neither expect nor want in-depth conversations with the locals. I am craving conversations made of awkward laughs, smiles, and single words. I need relationships where neither one of us expects anything from the other and wouldn’t know how to ask for it if we did.

Over the summer, I went to Copenhagen armed with my journal, my iPod, and questions about gluten and libraries. I have this practice of leaving a building and asking myself, “If I lived here and needed coffee, which way would I go?” That navigational method has only worked once. Most of the time, I end up finding things I didn’t plan to see.

This time, I ended up in the center of a labyrinth. I liked the way the view of the water poked through the spaces in the bushes, so I sat down and took off my headphones. There was no need to try and cancel out the noise because, for the first time in a while, there wasn’t any. It was just me, quiet and alone, but hardly lonely.

In her book, A Year In the World, Frances Mayes talks about traveling with a transforming angel. “You go out, far out, and when you return, you have the power to transform your life.” I don’t know if I encountered the transforming angel in the center of my Danish wilderness, but the rising moon brought with it a comforting blend of grace and peace. When I was ready, I stood up and followed the winding path back towards home.

Lillies, Birds, and Babies

Sometimes I want to be a lily of the field or a bird of the air. I don’t know what worry feels like for them—I’m sure they worry, too—but I know all too well, these days, what it feels like for me.

Flame retardants in sleepers and mattresses. Hormones in milk. BPA, phthalates, vinyl and other new and under-studied plastics in just about everything on the market, from baby bottles to cloth diapers. Co-sleeper or crib? Moby wrap or stroller? To pump or not to pump?

If you’re a mom or a mom-to-be like me, chances are you understand this vocabulary. It’s an endless rote lesson in the language of fear, and it seems like there are new words invented daily.

My worries these days are like bird’s nests. I weave in strands of information from the Internet and library books, from hearsay and the advice of friends. Sometimes, the nests seem real and useful, all of that information adding up to a place where I can protect my baby from the complicated world she’s about to enter. I am familiar with this habit of my mind, accustomed to the way I distract myself from feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty with mounds of data and to-do lists. Oh, especially to-do lists. It looks like education, but it feels like panic.

Don’t worry about tomorrow; it will have enough worries of its own. Even before I became a Christian, those words resonated with me. My church is making a wonderfully slow movement through the book of Matthew this year, and when one of our pastors addressed chapter 6, I was struck once again by the difference a little context makes.

Jesus is not talking about legitimate, present-tense worries—over a friend suffering from a debilitating disease, for example, or an eviction notice. He wept for His friends’ suffering, and He worked to alleviate the immediate needs of his disciples, feeding them when they were hungry and comforting them when they were afraid. Contrary to the ideas I had as an idealistic twenty-something, when I wanted to sell all my possessions and live the rest of my life out of a backpack, He’s not even saying that money and things are inherently worry-producing.

He’s talking about self-absorbed worry, obsessive concern with appearance and the opinions of others, and worry over potential problems—things that are not present threats. He’s talking about the trap of placing those things higher than our pursuit of relationship with God in His fullness. He wants to set us free from those kind of worries—but it’s hard to tell one from the other when we’re caught up in the swirl of them. When we’re busy adding one more layer to the nest.

This morning I turned once again to my to-do list, rather than the square of carpet on the floor and the early-morning light—the fifteen minutes of prayer I said I’d start with instead.

I haven’t talked to Jesus about my latest worries, but I think if I did He would tell me that this baby is going to be okay. That she will grow up in the same ailing world He walked through, and my best gift to her will be to show her love. To protect her as best I can, yes, but know that striving for some kind of false perfection will only intensify my fear, and lead me further from the path of peace I want so much to teach her about.

I hope when my daughter is born we will spend time looking at real bird’s nests, admiring real flowers. I hope she will know me as a mother who loved her unconditionally, because I have known that kind of love in Christ.

What’s Wrong with the World: Why Chesterton was Right

Sometimes the problem with especially pertinent ideas is that they sound too simple. We read or hear the timeless ideal, whatever it is, and then all too quickly the largesse of its truth is lost to us. After all, it just makes so much sense, and is so simple! “Oh, yes, that is a most helpful truth,” we will say upon receiving it. Perhaps it contains too much truth for us to wrap our heads around? Many axiomatic statements are like that. They are just so replete that it takes a rather large aperture of mind to be able to actually suss out all their import.

In one of his more widely read books, What’s Wrong with the World, G. K. Chesterton makes a statement just three pages in: “What is wrong [with the world] is that we do not ask what is right.” So majestically large a proposition, isn’t it? It’s something like Heidegger’s question, “why is there something rather than nothing.” There is just so much truth in the statement that I don’t know where to start.

So for Chesterton, the first problem is to define what is right. Not necessarily what is wrong, but what is right. At first this sounds rather odd, not? It did to me. Isn’t that exactly the problem in our world—that we don’t talk enough about the troublesome issues? Whether injustice to humans, animals or the environment (thus the great attraction to social justice*), or problems in the community or church, it often seems that we need to spend more time discussing the problems. After all, it is easy to think that these problems are being ignored because they’re not being talked about enough, right? “The squeaky wheel gets the grease”! Not for G.K.

As Chesterton sees it, “we agree about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear each other’s eyes out.” Here is why he wants us to argue about the good (or the right): we all basically already agree about what is wrong. We agree that poverty should be dealt with; we agree that there are problems in the government (whichever country we live in); we agree that there are problems in the church (whichever one we attend); and we even probably agree that there is a problem with prostitution. In fact, Chesterton says that in being able to see such problems, we are unlike doctors. We all energetically nod in agreement “about the precise nature of the illness.” However—and herein lies the rub—we don’t agree about what is actually healthy.

“We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood; but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one,” says G.K. And with a little retrospect—and just consider the various flavours of theology we all adhere to—it’s a good point he makes about us not being in agreement about what kind of religion we want. “We all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity,” he rightly quips. Touché Mr. Chesterton, touché. (I am reminded that in another piece Chesterton humorously suggests that the day on which the Puritans finally left England should be marked as a national holiday.) Even in issues like social justice, we disagree over how to solve the problem. In general, we can all agree on the state of insanity, what we don’t agree on is what actual sanity looks like.

So, what is the solution? Being able to agree on what is right: thus his statement, “what is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.” Chesterton seems to think that only then will we agree on what the solution is and how it is to be implemented.

*Disclaimer: I actually detest the term “Social Justice” due to its confusing justice and mercy and rights and responsibilities. With that said, for the sake of convenience it is sometimes just easier to go with it.

Rocks and Salvation

I can remember the moment I fell in love with Yosemite. I was 18, standing in the meadow facing El Cap, watching speck-sized rock climbers make their assent. It was sunset. The late red-gold sun was filling up the valley. It was the rocks I loved—their permanence.

See, I grew up with the concept of a very personal God—a find-the-car-keys God, a Jesus who wept if you let your friend copy your math homework. This theology has its benefits. But for a hyper-conscientious kid, it also has drawbacks. Namely: it is really exhausting.

The granite rock faces flanking the valley seemed ambassadors of another God. One whose immovability invited me to rest.

My love for Yosemite has led me to John Muir’s writing. I read him because of the way he captures the park, but also because his works deal with spirituality in a refreshing way.

This is surprising considering Muir’s upbringing. His father practiced a zealous, exacting brand of Christianity: he whipped his son if he did not memorize his daily scripture, and he repressed most of Muir’s ambitions and hobbies, claiming they demonstrated vanity.

Muir broke away from this religion. But no resentment or fear shows up in his spiritual writing. Instead he takes an exuberant, almost child-like tone when he writes of God.

In an essay about a solo climb up a glacier, he describes the whole landscape as involved in worship: “This was the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of the divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.”

In a letter to a friend, describing his return to Yosemite after time in the city, he writes that “all the rocks seem talkative.” Such a lovely, living echo of “the rocks will cry out!”

And, after describing a tough climb up to a view of the valley, he describes the scene, finishing with the meditation: "wholly infused with God is the one big word of love that we call the world.”

All throughout Muir’s work, there is this sense of relief. Relief at the discovery of a tangible God—one different from his father’s, one he could understand and worship.

Some have claimed that Muir’s spirituality is suspect because he renounced the black-and-white language of his father. I remember once being told to “be careful of Muir, because he wasn’t saved,” while watching a sunset in Yosemite.

Ultimately, it’s not my job to determine Muir’s salvation. And if I tried, what a waste that would be! I might have missed what the spirituality of his writing has taught me: Namely, don’t let the wounds of the past rob you of your sense of wonder—be open to beauty, and let that beauty reveal the divine, and let that become your new narrative: a world "wholly infused with God.”

A Song on the End of the World

The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth . . . No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation. —SS chief Heinrich Himmler, October 17, 1944

Here is a poem for Lent that may seem at first counter-intuitive. A Song on the End of the World by Czeslaw Milosz was written in 1944 in Warsaw, Poland in the year of the Warsaw Uprising which saw the city's utter destruction (banner photo) by Nazi forces while the Soviet Army waited on the border for the Polish fighters to be neutralized.

The poem is four stanzas of free verse. The first two stanzas begin with the same line: “On the day the world ends...” and the balance of each stanza is a litany of quotidian life: “A bee circles a clover, / A fisherman mends a glimmering net. / Happy porpoises jump in the sea.”

Foreboding as the subject is, the poem reads with the comforting cadence of a child's bedtime story, idyllic, even as it repeats, “On the day the world ends...” Its very repetition is ironic and a clue that there is something more to the end of the world. Why else would he invoke “the day” twice? Wouldn't “the day”, if it were only “the day”, simply come once?

There is much to consider. Milosz was self-described as an atheist during his college years, but ultimately came to practice Catholicism and spent ten years corresponding with Thomas Merton on all manner of theology and global matters. He moved frequently as a child between city and country, was educated as a lawyer and wrote poetry, worked in the political realm and would not take sides, and staying in Warsaw, he publicly criticized Stalin's provisional totalitarian government. It was on the latter that Milosz wrote his Nobel Prize-winning non-fiction work, The Captive Mind.

Milosz's poems are full of nested references. “And those who expected lightning and thunder / Are disappointed,” begins the third stanza. “And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps / Do not believe it is happening now.” As concrete and pleasant as the first two stanzas are, the third abstracts into cataclysmic images of war and religious eschatology.

The fourth stanza introduces a “white-haired old man, who would be a prophet / Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,” who “Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: / There will be no other end of the world, / There will be no other end of the world.” Is the man mad? Is he singing?

Though not conclusive, there is enough in these verses for the Christian to affirm that life is in the liminal, that life moves from day to night to day, that life has no end. A great deal of secular criticism of the poem hears only lament and madness. But in the middle, at the end of the second verse Milosz affords us this clue: “The voice of a violin lasts in the air / And leads into a starry night.” What comes at the end of this day is a song. It is a song which does not end but lasts and leads. It turns the whole poem on its head. Focus is no longer on “the end of the world” but the song. Moreover, it invokes “The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh in which the moon and stars radiate over a field of grain and a village. He painted it, imagining the village, while in self-imposed asylum. “Through the iron-barred window,” he wrote to his brother Theo, “I can see an enclosed square of wheat . . . above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory."

Lent is a time for retreat from a world that is preoccupied with endings in order to gain sight of the one that is ever arriving. It is a time to see our common acts of waking, washing, dressing and working as a faithful refrain we sing to the sorrowful world affirming a hope for the one that comes.

The book of Lamentations is the weeping lament ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah. It is a book of songs for the people of Israel remembering a grievous time. Jerusalem's Temple and walls are in shambles, but right in the middle of the book is this hope: “Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”