what we did.

...this past week when it was windchill -30...

we stayed inside and baked, watched Lost (and old Disney movies), knit, read, and I managed to get started on the mounds of grading already piling up this semester.

knit these fingerless gloves (easy pattern) during a Lost marathon...

some of the reading...my college roomate's debut novel An Uncommon Crusade (review post coming soon!), Gladwell's Blink,The Sabbath World, Judith Shulevitz's interesting meditation on time.

committed part 2--live and let live

More humor and insights from Gilbert. In order to make sure that her soon to be husband knew "what he was getting--and getting into," she presents him with a list of her "very worst character flaws." She calls it a "prenuptial informed consent release," (possibly my favorite line in the book!)

When both she and Felipe have exchanged lists and affirmed their acceptance, Gilbert writes:
There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves. I say this because listing our flaws so openly to each other was not some cutesy gimmick, but a real effort to reveal the points of darkness contained in our characters. They are no laughing matter, these faults. They can harm. They can undo....If we are at all self-aware, we work hard to keep these more dicey aspects of our natures under control, but they don't go away. 

Regarding trying to change each other (consciously or subconsciously), she says:
Also good to note: If Felipe has character flaws that he cannot change in himself, it would be unwise of me to believe that I could change them on his behalf....And some of the things that we cannot change about ourselves are mirthless to behold. To be fully seen by somebody, then, and to be loved anyhow--this is a human offering that can border on the miraculous.
The result of such mutual acceptance in the dailiness of life, she continues, is to experience in the giving and receiving an act of transcendence, "....that very earthbound, domesticated, dirt-under-the-fingernails gift of difficult, long-term, daily forgiveness."

committed

This sequel to Eat, Pray, Love, Committed (subtitled "a skeptic makes peace with marriage") chronicles Gilbert's  "forced" exploration of this ancient agreement. Forced because both she and Felipe, the man she met and loved at the end of her travels, committed NEVER to marry after both experienced devastating divorces. That is until Homeland Security denied entrance to Felipe. Their only option if they wanted to live in the US was to get married. Because her terror of losing Felipe surpassed, just barely, her terror of matrimony, she left the US with him, traveled SE Asia, and waited on paperwork to marry and grant Felipe entrance.

She writes: 

...the two of us having effectively been sentenced to marry....perhaps it would be wise to put a little effort in to unraveling the mystery of what in the name of God and human history this befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage actually is. 

And that's what she did.

 ...the only thing I thought about, the only thing I read about, and pretty much the only thing I talked about with anybody was the perplexing subject of matrimony....What I really wanted,, more than anything, was to find a way to somehow embrace marriage to Felipe when the big day came rather than merely swallowing my fate like a hard and awful pill. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought it might be a nice touch to be happy on my wedding day.


What follows is Gilbert's reflections on what she learns

•  from a historical study of marriage 
•  from listening to as many people from various cultures as she can about their views of marriage
•  from her own 21st century western biases.  

Her intelligent,witty, self-deprecating voice engages you immediately in her story and study. Even her segues are a delight --such as this one on being laughed at by Hmong women in the highest mountains of Vietnam:

Of all the women, it was Mai's grandmother whom I found most immediately intriguing. She was the laughingest, happiest, four-foot-tall toothless granny I'd ever seen in my life. What's more, she thought me hilarious. Every single thing about me seemed to crack her up beyond measure. She put a tall Hmong hat on my head, pointed at me, and laughed. She stuck a tiny Hmong baby into my arms, pointed at me, and laughed. She draped me in a gorgeous Hmong textile, pointed at me, and laughed.
I had no problem with any of this, by the way. I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It's the least you can do, really, as a polite guest. 


I'm halfway through this book in less than 24 hours and loving every part of it.

Bonhoeffer's this-worldliness

We ended the year in my World Lit. II class with writings by D. Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was involved in the plot against Hitler's life and was killed just before the defeat of Hitler's Third Reich.
In his Letters and Papers from Prison, he writes:

During the last year or so I've come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not a homo religiosus, but simply a man...I don't mean the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the busy, the comfortable...but the profound this-worldliness, characterized by...the constant knowledge of death and resurrection....
...I'm still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman..., a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world... (p. 369)

Similar to Buber's "I and Thou," Taylor's paying attention, and Metz's open eyed mysticism, "living unreservedly" is beautiful. There is something disarming about it--especially in the context of taking seriously the sufferings of others.

Broken is Beautiful II

A couple of weeks ago I posted a video titled Broken is Beautiful. It is of a young woman who makes art out of x-rays that reveal some sort of brokenness, some hidden pain, some deformity.  I've been thinking about brokenness and beauty...Is there really beauty there or is it just a cover up? Surely we all know the ugliness of brokenness. We live with it every day in our own hearts.

My students and I have just finished Les Miserables in my World Lit. II class. It is a story about a convict...a man so broken, so ugly, so hardened he almost kills the only one who takes him in and feeds him. And when that one, that priest, enters into the ugliness with him, he is undone: “Jean Valjean, my brother: you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I am withdrawing it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I am giving it to God!"

The rest of the 1000+ page novel portrays the result of one man's seeing and touching and transforming the ugliness. But not just one man...because Jean Valjean then becomes the one who touches the broken and brings hope. He not only touches, he enters into it. One of the most powerful scenes in the book depicts Jean ValJean entering into the sewers of Paris carrying an unconscious "enemy," his daughter's love, to save him from arrest. He is up to his neck in slime, baptized in excrement, while he holds the wounded Marius above him.  Talk about entering in....

So I asked my students what makes a beautiful life? Here are some of their responses:
      A beautiful life can only be lived by someone who places the well being of others above themselves. Whether it be giving ones crying friend a hug, to living in Africa and teaching kids English; that is a beautiful life.


      [to live] a life to it's fullest... that [is] beautiful.
     A beautiful life has struggle and heartache, like every other life. Beauty comes from pain, a beautiful life is one where suffering is overcome, and joy is brought out of it.

     To me, living a beautiful life goes hand in hand with living a meaningful life... if you surround yourself with people that you love and care about, and strive to protect and take care of them, than you've lived a beautiful life, and you go on living in the hearts and stories of others. My view of a beautiful life is surrounding myself with the people that I love, and people that love me back. 

     What makes a beautiful life for me is knowing there is only one of me, in the world and in my existance, and living every moment so perfectly in my mind creates a sense of beauty.

      For me, I think it comes from looking beyond yourself to something more. Looking beyond clothes and popularity and money and weight to something greater. "Something more" is different for each person walking this earth, but most of the time it includes family, friends, hobbies, or religion. Like finding something you love to do and doing it. Or spending time making meaningful relationships with the important people in your life. Or helping others. Or searching for God.

     To me, the beautiful life is the one I live....I have known no better and no worse. Therefore I have nothing to compare to. The beautiful life is the one that is mine, to me anyway. my beautiful life entails a given meaning, an importance that I didn't have to create for myself, and that in itself is beautiful enough for me. 

     I find beauty in life when people triumph over their struggles and become closer to the people around them through it. 
When I read their responses, I noticed how much they mentioned people and relationships. Which brings me back to my original question: Is there really beauty in brokenness?  And is our brokenness only beautiful when someone else enters it with us? really sees and loves anyway? If relationships bring beauty to brokenness, they also have the potential to make it ugly, we have the potential to make life ugly for others...it is part of our brokenness. So what do we do? I hope that we enter in, that we choose (when we have a choice) to bring life and beauty to others, even when it means that we get covered in crap, others and our own, because surely that's when we experience beauty the most.
(This paradox of beauty in brokenness reminds me of my daughter's experience when she was holding the hand  of a dying woman in Calcutta. You can revisit her post here...amazing, powerful story--an unexpected glimpse of beauty).

I and Thou

     In the previous post, I highlighted Taylor's writing about encountering your neighbor as the main character in her or his own story. Her ideas remind me of Martin Buber's book I and Thou. Buber (1878-1965) was a professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Palestine and wrote in the early 20th century about similar ideas.
     He noted how we tend to treat the world, whether objects, animals, or people, according to their function, according to what they can or would do for us. He termed this way of relating "I - it". Such interactions are characterized by self-protection, by preconceptions of response, by expectations of getting something from the other. Taylor would say by making them a supporting character in our story.
     But when we place ourselves fully in the moment with another, when we are vulnerable and mask-less, when we release preconditions, we might experience "I-Thou" moments with another person. They are moments of enlargement...when both are enhanced by the being of another.  The result is pure dialog, even without words, especially without words. 
     For Buber, God is the "Eternal Thou," and so our relationship with him, like our encounters with other persons, shouldn't be preconditioned or self-protective. Rather we should remain open and available. Buber wasn't necessarily a mystic. Like Taylor, he believed that often the most profound I-Thou relationship with God occurrs through an I-Thou relationship with other people and the natural world.

narratives and the practice of encountering others

Taylor (in An Altar in the World) titles her chapter on community "The Practice of Encountering Others." I found the chapter particularly insightful. She writes:

What we have most in common is not religion but humanity. I learned this from my religion, which also teaches me that encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get -- in the eye-to-eye thing, the person-to-person thing--which is where God's Beloved has promised to show up. Paradoxically, the point is not to see him. The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery. The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead (p. 102)

How often do I turn other people, from my family and friends to those I may encounter in my daily life, into foils in my story? Every time I get mad because the person in front of me is driving too slow or I get frustrated because a family member doesn't see the dishes that need to be washed or the floor that needs to be vacuumed (as opposed to my asking for help) or every time I try to convince someone else that my thought on an issue is the only thought or the "right" thought, I become that fiction writer.

Taylor is not saying (and neither am I) that we should allow another person to turn us into a supporting character or a foil, to become a nominal character in someone else's made up story. We tend to call such behavior co-dependent or passive aggressive and actually de-values the humanity of both of you.

Rather, Taylor connects the ancient commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself to this practice of encountering others. If we value others as protagonists in their own narratives, we are loving them as we love ourselves. The goal, Taylor says, is to "love the God you did not make up with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and the second is like unto it: to love the neighbor you also did not make up as if that person were your own strange and particular self."  In other words, a valuable and unique main character, just as you are, just as I am, just as we all are.

Easter-- paying attention

--from German theologian Johann Baptist Metz on the practices and teachings of Jesus:

In the end Jesus did not teach an ascending mysticism of closed eyes, but rather a God-mysticism with an increased readiness for perceiving, a mysticism of open eyes, which sees more and not less. It is a mysticism that especially makes visible all invisible and inconvenient suffering, and—convenient or not—pays attention to it and takes responsibility for it, for the sake of a God who is a friend to human beings.

                                 A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, ed. and trans. J. Matthew

--and well known words from Pedro Arrupe, the beloved Jesuit priest known for his passion, his heart, his work to see and relieve suffering :

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything.

    --and from Daniel Berrigan:

It all comes down to this: Whose flesh are you touching and why? Whose flesh are you recoiling from and why? Whose flesh are you burning and why.

in Barbara Brown Taylor's  An Altar in the World. 

(thanks to Dr. Beck's post "Love will Decide Everything"  for the reminder about Arrupe).

Food Rules

One of the blogs I love to read is PreacherMike because his interests are as varied and random as mine. You can find sports updates, theological reflection, adoring grandpa, travel, humanitarian issues, excellent book reviews, and this last food! (combined with a book of course, Michael Pollan's Food Rules: an eater's manual). Here are some of my favorite rules...they are not only true, but  funny! 

From Section 1: What should I eat? (Eat food.):

• Rule 13 -- Eat only fodds that will eventually rot.
• Rule 21 -- It's not food if it's called by the same name in every language. (Think...Cheetos...)

From Section 2: What kind of food should I eat? (Mostly plants.)

• Rule 24 -- Eating what stands on one leg is better than eating what stands on two legs, which is better than eating what stands on four legs.
• Rule 36 -- Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

From Section 3 -- How should I eat? (Not too much.)

• Rule 57 -- Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.

And speaking of healthy eating, how would you like to attend one of these dinners? (link from a cup of jo)

Palm Sunday

Encouraged to practice paying attention by Barbara Brown Taylor's beautiful book, An Altar in the World: a Geography of Faith, this spring break I determined to devote my body and mind to the space around me and the people who inhabit that space. To notice and open fully to the touching, the seeing, the hearing, the smelling, the tasting--what Taylor calls the "practice of wearing skin."

So this spring break at the dmv where my 16 year old was applying for her license (every 16 year old in the city wanted a license that day...of course! it was spring break!), I minded the people there. But not how I usually mind. On that day, my habit of irritation when I have to wait or feel claustrophobic with strangers was forgotten in the minding, in the mindfulness of the space and the people there. Like the white haired man taking information and typing it into his computer. While Lynnae answered his monotone questions, I watched his weathered and gnarled fingers hunt and peck at the keyboard. That day, I wondered what those hands had done in another era, who they had touched or what they had made. And on that day, he looked up and smiled at last when we thanked him and noted that he pronounced Lynnae correctly.

And on this day, the last of spring break, instead of going to church and waving palm fronds, Lynnae and I volunteered to do the food run for the community soup kitchen. This day dawned spring and the Whole Foods Market employees cheerfully directed us to more and more food to fill our van--so much bread--the crusty outside but fluffy inside kind. And loads of organic fruits and vegetables. And it was full to the very top. And on this day, the fresh smell of the store permeated the van as we drove to Shove Chapel, the location of the soup kitchen. When we arrived, several homeless men helped us unload. And they were smiling and one man raised his hand and grinned, "It's Palm Sunday!". Yes, it is. On this day we are glad that those bodies won't be hungry.

And this day I tried two new recipes to serve to my family, Rachel Ray's Taco Pasta Toss, and Monet's Sweet Lime pie.  Thanks to Laura, who tried the pie recipe first and loved it and to Lydia for pointing us to her friend Monet's blog, full of deliciously healthy recipes and interesting book reviews. It is Palm Sunday and on this day I am glad to savor home cooked  food with my family. 

This day I walked behind my husband and held the spool of wire to keep it from tangling as he anchored it to the perimeter of our yard. It is Palm Sunday and this day I savored the sun on my skin and the easy companionship of working with my husband. 

It's a good practice, this practice of paying attention. It's a sacred practice, this practice of wearing skin. Two I think I really need to keep.

Caron Guillo

She's a dear and faithful friend from college days...and here's her new page. Her book, Children of Light, is due out in November. Hopefully, by then she'll be living in Colorado!

you are not a gadget part 2

Another book I'm reminded of as I'm reading Lanier's manifesto is Vincent J. Miller's Consuming Religion. Assistant Professor of Theology at Georgetown University, Miller observes that when his students need answers to a question, they invariably "google" it as do my students, and if you are a teacher, yours too I'm guessing. They are almost immediately granted random access to the little piece of data that answers the question. The information provided, though, is divorced from any of its rich historical context, instead offering "sound byte" answers in effect. The medium provides the glut of information without filtering the important from the unimportant, the true from the false. That type of sifting requires an informed reader or interpreter.   

Shane Hipps has explored similar ideas in his book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture. Hipps says that the hidden message given by the ease which we can access contextless information is that the historical context of information is irrelevant, that, in fact, "truth is entirely idiosyncratic".

Digitally stored "information is alienated experience," says Lanier. Yes, it objectively exists, but it is only de-alienated (contextualized?) if it is experienced: "If the bits [of information] can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information" (p. 29).

And yet the information itself, even if it's experienced, comes to us in an "alienated" form...without context.

you are not a gadget

Some of my favorite lines in A Tale of Two Cities are not the famous opening or closing lines...rather the first lines in Chapter 3: 

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

I thought of that passage recently as I was reading Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget. His book, though certainly a polemic against the mediocre mob mentality Web 2.0 fosters, is also a celebration of the mystery embodied in consciousness, in personhood. His insider perspective (as a Silicon Valley "techie" from the early days of the internet) is definitely provocative. He writes about the design decisions that have become "locked in" -- that have fundamentally changed culture. He says, "the deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits." He lists suggestions to promote intentional individual creativity, "to be a person instead of a source of fragments to be exploited by others." He says:

• don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger
• create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site
• post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view
• write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out

As long as you are not defined by software, you are helping to broaden the identity of the ideas that will get locked in for future generations. In most arenas of human expression, it's fine for a person to love the medium they are given to work in. Love paint if you are a painter; love a clarinet if you are a musician. Love the English language...Love of these things is a love of mystery. But in the case of digital creative materials...it's a good idea to be skeptical.  (pgs. 21-22)

He tells you why in the rest of the book.  Whether you blog or tweet or text, you should read it, even if just for the unique perspective he offers. And while you're at it, pick up A Tale of Two Cities too. 

Wish List

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

by Barbara Brown Taylor

The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle

The Luminous Word: Entering the Mysteries of Advent & Christmas by Jan Richardson

The Prodigal God by Tim Keller

and...

these shoes from a favorite company

and this camera (because my children are growing up and going to graduate school, and getting married, and going to dances, and getting tall and I want to capture it all!)

(I'm trying the "You might also like" feature that I've seen on many blogs--but most recently here):

The Gifts of the Jews

Cahill's book is fascinating! It's the second in a seven volume series, The Hinges of History. He offers an important perspective to anyone interested in why we --westerners living at the end of the 20th and beginning of 21st centuries--think the way we do. Got to love a series that has the following as its premise:

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage -- almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

Shantaram

I've just started Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. The first page definitely hooks you. Great action and interesting, complex characters. Then Roberts continues to offer through Lin, the main character, fairly profound observations on human nature. Here's just one --regarding Leopold's, a large club in Bombay:

"Mirrors on those pillars, and on much of the free wall space, provided the patrons with one of the bar's major attractions: the chance to inspect, admire, and ogle others in a circumspect if not entirely anonymous fashion. For many, the duplication of their own images in two or more mirrors at the same time was not least among the pleasures of the pastime. Leopold's was a place for people to see, to be seen, and to see themselves in the act of being seen."

The description reminded me in a way of facebook and social media in general.

Fully Alive

Antistrophes

Ah, women, that you are here on earth, that you

move here among us, grief-filled,

no more watched over than we and yet able

to bless like the blessed.

From what region,

when the loved one appears,

do you take the future?

More than will ever exist.

He who knows distances

up to the outermost fixed star

is amazed to find this,

your magnificent heartspace.

How, in the crush, do you keep it free?

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Jan Meyers says that if you've found someone who has lived fully and is still fully alive, you've found a treasure--learn from her.

Hope II

More from Allure of Hope:


Hope is saturated in desperation, not...proficiency.


Compassion is called out of us when we see situations where there is an obvious absence of something or someone life-giving. It calls us to ache, mostly because we are forced to long for the restoration of whatever or whoever is absent.


God seems to be more concerned with our trust that we're being led somewhere, that He is taking us somewhere because of His love for us, than He is concerned with a flawless record along the way.


Our desire in the long wait reminds us of who we're waiting fo. He is taking us somewhere, and along the way He is creating beauty. Our responsive, sensual, compassionate, forgiving, persevering hearts have the privilege of introducing others to the Glorious Intruder....this one who seeks us out amid our hovering and clamoring false pursuits.

Hope

A book I'm reading, The Allure of Hope by Jan Meyers, is meaningful to me as I look back at 2008 and into 2009. Some favorite quotes from it are posted below, though don't do the book justice:


regarding the Biblical metaphor of labor/birth for hope:

As our desire grows, as the anticipation of the birth deepens, we have to surrender to something much bigger than ourselves....we have to show up, but it is going to happen whether we agree to it or not...we give birth by giving ourselves over to His intentions for us....we start by living our own story....It takes courage to live the story we are given.

and about what we do with other stories when they crash or collide into ours:

Our stories are given to us by God; they are never meant to impact only us. Rodney Clapp says that the New Testament doesn't even imagine an autonomous person....Sue Monk Kidd says of this, 'As the True Self is born within us, the initial movement of soul is from the collective 'they' to the ground of an authentic I. That's holy ground, yet God calls us to a ground even holier; God calls us from the authentic I toward a compassionate 'we'. Relationship with God and people He brings into our lives becomes the door of hope.

Regarding the tension of living fully in the present and yearning for heaven, for what is out of reach, the far off country of CS Lewis and about the losses we experience as we want what is out of reach and surrender to the waiting:

Whether it's the loss of a child, parent, love, or friend, loss...can feel more like the loss of a vital organ: a heart, or a brain, or lungs. To live through such loss is to relearn to feel, to move, to think, and to breathe....Some wounds were not meant to be entirely healed here on earth. Sometimes the wounds are all we have to remind us of the one we love.

Like His story, ours when given over is one of betrayal, blood, asphyxiation, love, resurrection, forgiveness, and restoration.

...which gives me hope!

de/construction

Over at experimental theology, Richard Beck quotes Peter Rollins' How (Not) to Speak of God:

"As we have seen, we ought to affirm our view of God while at the same time realizing that that view is inadequate. Hence we act as both theist and atheist.

This a/theistic approach is deeply deconstructive since it always prevents our ideas from scaling the throne of God. Yet it is important to bear in mind that this deconstruction is not destruction, for the questioning it engages in is not designed to undermine God but to affirm God. This method is similar to that practiced by the original cynics who, far from being nihilists and relativists, were deeply moral individuals who questioned the ethical conduct they saw around them precisely because they loved morality so much. This a/theism is thus a deeply religious and faith-filled form of cynical discourse, one which captures how faith operates in an oscillation between understanding and unknowing."

For more of Rollins and Beck's interesting commentary, read the post here.