Ostensibility

Chile: Capítulo 1

2010-06-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

I won't begin to assume anyone cares enough to know every detail of my time in Chile. To be honest, I don't care enough to write it all. But if anyone wants to live vicariously through me in a more moderate way (yes, I just used "me" and "moderate" in the same sentence), I'll drop a few lines from time to time to offer some highlights. I'll also toss in a few Spanish words and phrases here and there for authenticity.

Para comenzar [to begin with], after about 16 uneventful hours of planes and airports, I landed in Santiago to be collected by the family with whom I'm staying. When I didn't see my name on any placards (and after being accosted by a host of cabbies), one demure and avuncular taxi driver offered to let me use his cellphone to call Jaime, el padre de la familia. It seems there was traffic, so I waited in the café a bit longer until he arrived. I stopped by to thank the nice taximan one more time - oddly enough, this is almost exactly how my trip to Ireland last year began - and we walked to the car. Jaime paid for his parking, but lost the ticket walking to the car. After we looked for it for a while, he found it, only to lose it again on the drive to the exit, where he apologized and paid again. I could already tell this was going to be an interesting trip.

The family I'm staying with consists of three generations: Abuela, Jaime (her son), and his son Andree (her grandson). After helping me get settled in, they told me where I could find the nearest shop to buy toiletries. I walked down to the pharmacy to get the necessities, but for some reason I couldn't find facewash anywhere - apparently los chilenos get the job done with good old jabón [soap]. Later in the evening, Andree came to tell me he had to take his shoes to the shoe shop to be repaired and that I could come with him if I'd like, just to get a feel for the area. Of course I obliged him, and we walked a few blocks to a busy street called Irarrázabal. Say that five times fast. He asked me if I needed to change money over, so we did that. He also told me I should be very careful with my possessions, as there were often pickpockets about in that area. I didn't bother to tell him that he could have told me that before I left the house with over $1,200 in my wallet. So I'm a bad traveler. So what?

The next day (yesterday), Alberto and Maria Paz, a couple of law students who met and fell in love while working at the Supreme Court, came to show me around the city and teach me how to get around using Santiago's public transport system. Turns out Santiago (which would be the fourth-largest city in the U.S. behind Chicago, bumping Houston to fifth-largest) has the best public transit system I've ever seen, a system that makes Chicago's CTA look like a fleet of rickshaws. We went to the Universidad Alberto Hurtado, where I'll be working and studying this summer, and it's incredible! It looks something like a castillo [castle], with stone walls, heavy doors of madera [wood], but with ultra-modern architecture woven in on the inside. It's not a huge place, so it should be fairly navigable, and I don't think there's much danger that I'll get lost. One quick story though. As we were walking along the street in front of the university, I heard a ping-pong ball bounce on the street. I looked up and saw a boy standing three stories up, who called to us to throw his ball back. I crossed the cobblestone street, gave it a few tries, but eventually had to apologize and tell him that I'd leave it safely at the doorstep for him. I'd been in the country for less than 48 hours and I'd already crushed the hopes of an innocent child. We also passed a protest that was making its way through some of the more important and symbolic (and heavily populated) parts of downtown. Alberto explained to me that the government wants to build a hydroelectric plant, but that the plant would require a dam that would result in the flooding of several villages and surrounding farmlands. I guess I'd march, too, if I were them.

So we saw the city: the presidential palace, the halls of government, the cathedral, a few plazas, and eventually ended up in an amazing (and very seedy) neighborhood bar. Inside, I had a cold pork sandwich, a drink called chiche made from grapes, and the Chilean equivalent of Old Style or Lone Star. Alberto and Maria Paz drank the popular local favorite, oddly called El Terremoto or The Earthquake, which was a mixture of several alcoholic ingredients topped with a few scoops of pineapple sherbet. Very strange, but whatever, right? Oh, and did I mention I ate a cold pork sandwich? Right. We went to a museum (see photos) and saw a few more awesome parts of town - including an old, winding street full of cafés and bookstalls - ate a nice dinner where I tried another drink called a pisco sour, and made our way back home. I did some grocery shopping, then read part of a Graham Greene novel at a nearby café (which serves a drink that I did not try this time called "gin con gin").

Well, that's good enough for now. I went to Mass this morning at Santa Gema, which was not much to write about. But we'll see where the rest of today finds me. Hasta luego.

Pleats and Pleadings

2010-06-02T22:25:00.000-07:00

As I prepare to leave for Chile tomorrow, two things dominate my thoughts. First, I have seen enough pleated pants today to last anyone a lifetime, which makes me hope that people in Chile have never heard of them or this could be a long six weeks. Second, I have no idea what to expect from my time there, which I think is a good thing. People who go in expecting the worst may always be pleasantly surprised, but they are insufferable to be around before the payoff. And everyone who saw Matthew McConaughey in Sahara knows that if you go into a thing with high expectations, you're virtually assured to leave disappointed. (Sidenote: Why isn't the opposite of "disappointed" just "appointed"?)

And while I can't do anything about people who see any sort of value at all in wearing pants with pleats, I can temper my expectations by keeping them somewhere in the middle ground between optimism and indifference. In doing so, I have two powerful allies: books and people. In books, the characters are often more alive than most real people. This is, I presume, because characters in books watch less TV than real people. So my plan is simple: read a book, then have a little human interaction. Book, human interaction. And so on until my six weeks are up. It's foolproof, really.

So I'll be doing my part, and you can, too. I'll be back in six weeks. That means you have about a month and a half to toss out any pleated pants you may currently own and exchange them for flat-front pants like the ones that people in the modern era wear. And while I won't get my hopes up too high, I would like to come back and be appointed.

Murray's Morning

2010-06-02T14:08:00.000-07:00

Saxon Murray walked the jetty silently, almost reverently, edging along the jagged brace of boulders just as he did every morning about daybreak. He was an old man, contemplative, not weak. A retired life offers little cause for hurry, and Saxon chose slowness, slowness did not choose him. Within the violet light of the pre-dawn sky he recognized a heavy truth, a middle way that governed his life. The day offered little surprise, the night too much, and the dusk left him anxious. But at this hour, in this light, was all hope and life and rest. Reaching the end of the breakwater, he paused to take in the air, salty and ageless, as he removed the satchel he carried slung over his shoulder. Without looking, he removed the bottle, hefted it, empty and scrubbed bare. Except for a curled, scrawled scrap of paper, the scurf of his pre-morning industry. Still gazing eastward toward the purple, pursed lips of the horizon, he sighed, let his eyelids fall, and lofted the bottle out into eternal Atlantic. Now he looked. He heard the bottle plash, watched it resurface, flag, bob. He looked on as another piece of his life broke away, albeit with his help. There is no pain like the pain of not knowing happiness, and there is no happiness like the happiness of being broken open and emptied out, he thought. He said it aloud, like an incantation. He was old, but he had enough bottles to see him through. So many that when we was gone, there would be just enough to curl up. And toss out to sea.

My Year in Review

2010-06-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

Let's be honest, years that end in December are boring. And since I'm officially a student again, the only year that really matters to me ends, well, about a week ago. So let's get misty-eyed and look back on what was, for all intents and purposes, a pretty unremarkable year.

I moved home from my cushy, if arid, job in Baghdad for a quick couple of weeks in Houston before packing my car to the gills and driving to Chicago for law school. On the drive, I took lots of pictures, including one of a very fat man in a cowboy hat on a scooter, as well as about 40 adult video store signs. I got to Chicago on a Saturday night and stayed in some girl's apartment while she wasn't there, but I left her a note and left her apartment smelling like tacos, which is all a girl can ask for really.

Over those first few weeks, I moved into a room the size of an Escalade, dropped salsa in one roommate's suitcase, and walked in on my other roommate playing Naked Chef. I met some cool people in the dorms, taped leaves to their door, swiped their snowflakes, and played the purple dragon card on them. I read a book on a boat, played ping-pong until I felt moderately good about myself in general, and showed up for every class, sober or not.

I had one teacher who dressed like a suitcase, one who answered his phone in class to tell his teenage son that, yes, he could have a bigger allowance, and one who wore velvet pants and track shoes. I skated on ice for the first time in my adult life, got offered some woman's daughters, and wore flip-flops in the snow. Over the break, I drove from Houston to New Orleans and back for no reason, went to a random party when I got back - a party that involved a fruitcake the shape of Texas - and, after the break was over, I drove back to Chicago in a car packed with books, stopping for a week at a monastery in Dallas where they drink beer at dinner and teach Latin to some of the smartest kids in the Metroplex.

The spring started well, but I don't remember much of it. I know our classes were awful. I know I spent an inordinate amount of time at the library. But that's how life is. You have to spend a lot of it in the library or you will end up working in a bar for the rest of your life. Fact.

The year was a wash. That's what it comes down to. But it was my wash, for what that's worth. I'm sure I've forgotten the most important parts of it, but that's also how life is. I'm leaving for Chile tomorrow, not because I don't like Texas with all its women with big hair and men (and some women) with fire-print bandanas, but because it's something. I'll let you know how it goes.

White Flight

2010-05-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

It's not "white guilt" I feel. That implies shame or a misplaced sense that I have done something wrong by being born white. That is impossible. I had no say in what color I was born. No one does. But I do have a stake in what color I stay. I don't mean literally, of course. But I understand that, in my country, being born white automatically affords me certain privileges (Insert privileges here), privileges I did not ask for, privileges I do not need or want. That is what I mean by the way I feel. Do I think it is unjust that I am given these privileges without having earned them? Perhaps I do. Do I think it is immoral if other people have no qualms claiming them? No, that is for them to decide. Do I think that I could ever renounce the entire privilege? Surely not. Not in this country. Not in many countries, even countries where someone with my skin color is an oddity. Only in a country where there is open hostility, or at least extreme indifference and inconvenience, could I understand what it must be like to live as a minority in the United States.

Red-Handed

2009-11-22T15:56:00.000-08:00

“I’m leaving,” blurted Harrells as he planted his fork to the hilt in hash browns. Had there been anyone seated next to him, or across from him, or in the café at all, that person may have fired back a few well-aimed questions. As it was, having no human target nearby to absorb the blunt force of his outburst, his words glanced off the saltshaker, wound around the neon sign flashing “OPEN”, and deflated like a balloon in the wheezy, filtered light of a mid-November morning. Even as the two lumps like lead dropped from his rain-gutter lips, he had already begun to doubt that he had said them, that he had even been capable of saying them. Some internal damage control team had been thrust into motion as soon as the rogue signals hit the first neuron.

But it was out, he had said it, and like a voodoo incantation it held sway over him with a power more extraordinary than he had ever known before. In fact, Harrells had never once experienced – even seen – anything extraordinary in his life. When pressed, he would tell you of a time he shot a deer, a deer that bounded over a fence and landed dead in a heap. For a split second, he had felt the sick thrill of a battle to the death, and in the heat of the brief god-like fever he had prayed for resistance like a criminal prays for capture. But as the deer wheeled and leapt the barbed wire, something primordial and unnamable bounded out of Harrells and breached a defense designed, most likely, to keep him in.

What gets to Harrells isn’t just that the deer never noticed him. After all, the sign of a sly hunter is that the prey never knows that it’s prey, but for Harrells there is always something more. He took it as a slight that the deer never looked at him, didn’t see him shoot, didn’t turn his head when it was hit, even died with its eyes closed. The idea that it was unfair or uneven, one-sided, never surfaced; that he was merely exercising his God-given dominion over the earth had never occurred to him. Instead, he felt he was denied something, something was taken from him, something he wanted back desperately. The dumb look of cool indifference, the glassy gaze that declared oneself indomitable, belonged to him and not to the damned deer; the sting of victory rightly belongs to the victor, not to the trophy.

Harrells would tell you that he still dreams about that day with the deer. He dreams the sounds like colors: the footsteps golden-wheat, the report bright blue, always ending with the low moan, a burnt umber. What he won’t tell you about his dreams, what he’ll deny even to himself, is that, after field dressing the deer, instead of throwing it over his shoulders like the good shepherd, he lifts it by the antlers and steps into it; he wears the deer like a suit. But these are only dreams. And isn’t it normal to dream about the only extraordinary moment of one’s life?

As Harrells rises to pay his tab – feeling uncommonly generous, he leaves eight dollars instead of the usual six – he feels a peace like warm blood wash over him. With two words, he has altered the course of his life, and he has done it himself. From the stifled stillness of the café, into the golden glow of the day, Harrells finally feels his victory. It’s in his eyes, gleaming blue, and they shine with it. Swaggering, full of life, he half-marches to his old Ford pick-up – Brownie, he calls her – slams the door behind him, and drives.

For the Saints

2009-10-25T21:38:00.000-07:00

There's no question that I spend so much time at law school, I feel like I live there. As if that wasn't enough, when I do finally go home at night, I lie in my bed and look out my window, only to find that it dominates my view from here as well. Living in a high-rise across the street from the law center, my bedroom is actually closer to my classroom than it is to my own lobby downstairs. So I may as well live there.

But someone already lives there. In the lobby of the law school is a statue of Mother Teresa of Kolkata. Her eyes are wide and pleading, her arms are outstretched. If you know her at all, you know that she's not begging, she's not asking for anything from you. On the contrary, she wants to give you something: her love, nothing less than her very self. Of course, it's just a statue, and a statue can't love you. But it's a memorial to a woman who spent her entire life (literally spent it) loving the unloveable. And the fact that they let her love them at all goes a long way to suggest that they're one step ahead of me.

I rode a bus today after dropping my car back off up north. It was only later that I realized I must have touched the same handrails and handholds as a hundred other Chicagoans who rode that bus before me. I looked at my hands - actually looked at my hands - as if I could see the germs I had caught from some sick mother, some coughing kid; as if I had just taken some foolhardy sortie out into the masses of natives and was sure to come back ravaged by some exotic malady.

Then I thought about Mother Teresa, about how she would hold the sick, the suffering, the dying, how she would bathe their bodies, trying to give them peace through the cool water or through her simple human touch. I thought about how she had it all figured out. She wasn't afraid of the disease you can pass from touching; instead, she worked her whole life combating the disease you pass by not touching. "Death is not the enemy, gentlemen. If we're going to fight a disease, let's fight one of the most terrible diseases of all: indifference." - Patch Adams

Our lives are still so distinct here, still segmented and closely guarded. We're still afraid we'll catch something from someone, something we can't see, something there's no immunization from. But what kind of life is that? What kind of lonely, self-protectionist existence awaits us by holding ourselves apart from people? Mother Teresa knew something we still don't know. And so did the suffering wretches she cradled in her arms as they died smiling. Life without the most basic love for the human standing next to you is hollow and shallow and void. This love is what I see in her eyes each morning and each evening, even as my own are bleary and clouded. This love is written on her tomb in these words:

"People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God;
It was never between you and them anyway."

That's the life I choose.

-JM

"Now, we must all fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men." - Monsignor, The Boondock Saints

Chicago

2009-08-28T02:48:00.000-07:00

I stood tonight on a balcony, perched on top of the city, and imagined another city, grooved like this one, the same rivers of light and squares of motion, with softer sounds and sounds I knew, and rain that didn't fall into my gin. I thought of vanity and how I've become a part of it, like this city, with its whitewashed walls and its fierce aversion to looking too deep, with its anxiousness to keep the conversation moving at all costs, with its long nights and its short memory. So this is the real world; this is the gleaming city of Hope; this is the glittering jewel in the center of a nation, which itself is the glittering jewel in the center of a world, which itself is alone with itself.

I had a dream tonight that I was being chased by a bear. Not a big bear, and not fierce. And although I knew I was in no real danger - it was more of a nuisance than anything - I didn't know when the bear would give up its hunt, nor could I induce it to do so. I dreamed that I came home and found packages waiting for me, packages that I couldn't open because I had a bear chasing me, and because they were full of things for leisure: a guitar, a book, a flute. I don't even play the flute. But maybe that's the point.

My professor mentioned Bleak House in class today, which might as well have been called Bleak Face by the way people looked at him when he mentioned it. I almost raised my hand and asked if I could go read it straightaway and be excused from class, but I knew the bear would chase me there, too, and I would have no peace. I wonder now why the bear didn't follow me onto the balcony. Bears climb trees, after all. But maybe it would feel too foreign, the mountains of concrete and plaster and salaries under his feet. Maybe he would see the city I saw and realize that he too was vanity. I've never seen a bear cry, but I imagine it's a terrible thing.

An Inordinate Amount of Skill

2009-08-07T12:25:00.000-07:00

As I get older, I realize more and more that...well, that I'm older. And after spending the last 15 months in Iraq, I can now personally blame George W. Bush for the only casualty of his war to hit close to home: my original hair. Okay, okay, technically your hair falls out and is replaced at something like the speed of a flying squirrel, but I think the recession has even caught up with the forces of nature, like the folicle shop ran out of everything even remotely flattering so it's scrambled to muster even blank hair. Or maybe Helicopter Ben has requisitioned all available hair pigment in the world to use as ink to help print money, in which case I am nothing less than proud to serve my country.

People say that getting older is hard, like there's an inordinate amount of skill involved, like all your previous life experiences are collectively the mechanism that winds the watch face for the future. But these people are the crazies. It takes less effort to age than it does to get hit by a bus. Raising (stable) children is hard, being a Catholic in the Bible Belt is harder, drinking instant coffee is torturous. But getting older requires only that you not die. If I came up to you and said, "Hey, mac. Do me a favor, would you? Don't die," you would laugh and say that you could do that blindfolded. And you could, that is, until I radioed for the bus.

But, sure, these people mean well, they mean you to feel good about yourself, like you are in control of something - and perhaps you are. After all, there is some degree of effort in remembering exactly how old you are (a skill I have yet to master), just as there is no small amount of national industry expended in appearing younger (e.g. Greta van Susteren, etc.) or older (e.g. Miley Cyrus, etc.) than you really are. Here's an example for you: you probably still have the fake ID you once used to get into clubs while you were still in high school, and you probably keep it right behind your college ID which you still keep so you can get student tickets at the movies. It may not seem like it, but being ridiculous is exhausting.

On the other hand, I believe that choices are overrated, and difficult choices even more so. It's been scientifically proven that Americans lack the gene responsible for telling the future, and I believe it was Jesus himself who said that hindsight is 20/20, so what's the use in making any decision without using a magic eight-ball? It will never be right. And on that note, being right is overrated. What if, at the end of your life, you realized you had been wrong about everything your whole life? What if you realized there really was a state called Delaware, or that pleated pants really are for rejects, or that Jew jokes probably did cost you the promotion at NBC?

One thing I will never be wrong about: grey hair is sexy as all get-out.

Into the Silence - Part II: Time

2009-08-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

I used to have a professor whose lectures were lessons wrapped in one long story, a bedtime story told by a warm omniscient grandpère type, never dull for a moment, or slow, or irrelevant. Each day after taking roll he would ask, "Where did I leave off last time?" and would continue the thread from there. I always admired him as a maven, because life is like that, or should be. One should wake up in the morning and ask oneself, "Now, where was I?" and go from there.

To live in the slow rotation of the world around its axis, inexorable and invariable, is to live a life of continuity and of repetition. Like dancers under blazing banks of lights, we turn and swing and tire, each in turn and all in time and rhythm, each song new and old, each dance the first and the last. Like a coin spun on its edge, we flash and then fade, we shiver and are still. But the rhythm, the cycle, the continuity within the repetition is the essence of life, the unbroken thread that coils about itself until it reaches its final frayed end.

Just so are our days, governed by the revolution of spinning discs, themselves spun coins, no more eternal than ourselves, only larger, needing more time to slow and stop. So why does man live as long as he does? A mosquito lives a matter of days, a redwood for generations. But why do humans live longer than other animals our size? Did we do this to ourselves? Why all the emphasis on survival, which is really a form of domination? Does survival make us feel less like the mosquito and more like the redwood? And then what have we won but a longer spin, and what good is a longer spin when the disc still has two sides and no amount of surviving can change that?

Take the first chapter of Genesis, where the cycle of the creation story reminds us that everything about time is circular. A round earth spins around an axis which revolves around a round sun, around which other round bodies revolve in round orbits. Long and short hands rotate across a round watch face marking hours, minutes, seconds, the same seconds every minute, the same minutes every hour, the same hours every day. From there we rotate through the week and through the month, with the seasons reminding us that we are captives of the process, and that we have become incorporated into the very process.

Not only are we inside time (we submit to it every time we set our alarms, or check the mail, or wish someone a happy birthday) but time is inside us. Our hearts beat, our lungs pump, our stomachs tell us when to eat, our backs tell us when to call it a day. Every piece of us lives at the behest of time: it is the most human song, and the softest.

As Mass is about to begin in the abbey, I am reminded that the Church transcends time: there is always a Mass being said somewhere in the world. Our culture tells us that we need to defeat time or master it, cheat it, maximize it by beating it at its own game. So we make machines that do an hour's work in a second so that we can "buy" time, but then we call a man lazy who doesn't use the time he has bought to buy some more, or at the very least he is a bad businessman. So it would seem that the richest man is the one who has saved up the most time before he dies, who has finished all he has needed to do and who now glories in the riches of the time he has laid aside for himself.

Why is it that we don't live like this? Why don't we set tasks for our lives, try to complete them as quickly as possible, and once the work has been done, enjoy the balance we have managed to accrue? Is this the rational way? the worldly way? the godly way? Surely, none of us knows when he will die, so doesn't it make that much more sense to get on with our business as quickly as possible so that we can rest assured that it was completed to our satisfaction and nothing was left undone?

But inside the monastery, there is no race to the finish. Even during Mass there is no crunch for time, no need for expediency or for efficiency (thought there is that, if for no other reason than that the monks are very well-practiced). In fact, I've noticed that the pace of the common prayers and recitations is markedly slower than that of any outside congregation I've known, so much so that the average "Amen" lasts almost an entire breath. I like the slowness immensely. At one point, I found myself bounding up the stairs only to remind myself on the first landing that I need to slow-ify myself...

The Fate

2009-07-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

Stirring her coffee counter-clockwise, she taps her heel against the wooden leg of the cafe chair and clicks her teeth, all in time with what she perceives to be the beating of her heart, the effect being something between that of a one-man-band and a large, living clock. She likes the sound of the spoon as it grates an orbit round the bottom of the ceramic cup, the occasional gristle of sugar granules staving off dissolution reminds her of men in chains in the holds of boats. The heady smell, too, seeps into her morning like a cloud of bees, and she the queen. She feels powerful, impenetrable, as she swirls and clicks, as she rules her world with fistfuls of irony, while the shackled men do their damnedest to escape her notice. "Roll over me, ma'am. Roll over me. Leave me be!" She is stirring her coffee, she is making it turn, and for an early minute, it is all that exists in the universe.

Murray's Light

2009-07-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

When Saxon Murray died, he left behind an answer and a question. For as long as anyone could remember, he had lived alone in a small house on Fendler's Landing, with no family, few visitors, and was seldom seen in town, so that he became something of a legend, a myth in the town and its quiet port. His house, though small, was always welcoming to those of the townspeople who traced their way down the long wooded drive to the shoreline where it broke into sea and sky. Inside were stacks of books, papers, journals, but nothing haphazard that would suggest absent-mindedness. On the contrary, one felt not awkwardness but awe in the stillness and gravity of the small living room in the house that stood like a fault line on the edge of the elements.

In its general warmth, he offered tea or coffee from the kitchen so that one felt quite at home under his roof. And just off the living room facing the woods was a small bedroom, clearly Old Murray's room, which a guest might see into as they walked about reading the titles and backs of books. The guest within would wonder at none of this, save for the lack of windows and natural light, which had given way to walls of volumes and taper candles, respectively.

But anyone passing by on the swells of the sea that was his backyard would see his own sails in a wall of windows, heavily-curtained, immovable as the sea itself. Yet the reflection of the ocean was all anyone ever saw from the windows while he was alive, for on the inside these two halves of house seemed never to communicate, at least not in view of visiting eyes. Not one townsperson could ever discover another who had been inside that room of the house, a room that held perhaps - "Surely!" - the most commanding, the most breathtaking view of the ocean in that entire stretch of coast.

The answer came one day in August as the postman knocked to deliver a new shipment of literary journals. With no answer to his knock, he opened the front door with the intention of setting the package just inside when he noticed the room lit more brightly than he could ever recall, almost as if from the sun. It was then he saw the open door to the hidden half, and he followed, drawn to the light. In awe, he stood in the doorway for minutes on end, unable to cross the threshold into the room, struck by a fear that he was stepping out into the ocean itself. The windows seen only dimly from the passing vessels now stood with curtains drawn to the wide, white sea, and he was struck speechless and still for a length of time he would have trouble recalling in later retellings of the story.

The door opened onto a finely furnished room, deeply luxuriant and eight shades of green, with a red Turkish carpet beneath a grand oak four-post bed, all of which seemed untouched, unlived in, but ready at any moment to receive whomever it was designed for. Against the pillow rested a book, old but without dust, and bound in calf-skin. As he turned toward the opposite corner of the wall of windows, he saw Old Murray seated on a chest, slumped against the wall, facing not the ocean but the door, as if he were waiting for someone, as if he had waited as long as he could before giving way to the end of his life.

In his hand was a letter. Thinking it might contain the name of a relative, of which there was no firm knowledge among those in town, the postman removed it and read only this: "My love, I kept my promise."

Your Country

2009-07-10T13:32:00.000-07:00

I watched your life tonight
some scenes
and weighed my own
with yours up against it
flat out and spread
and watched
as yours subsumed me
in my self tonight
some rooms
their doors blown open
find the one
belongs
shut forever
and in you walk

Into the Silence - Part I

2009-07-02T08:03:00.000-07:00

From the journal...

So I'm in Ireland. That's still pretty new. I'm also exhausted and delirious, but tonight I'll sleep like a rock, a large, chiseled chunk of granite. Wait, it's limestone, I think.

Anyway, I didn't come here to trace - as so many others have - my ancestral roots. They are - with the help of a few cosmetic name changes - completely lost, I'm sure, along with the records that link them to me. And even if I could find them, so what? We become Facebook friends? No, in a sense I came to find my spiritual ancestral roots, the footprints of my religious heritage, both as a Catholic and as an Irish-American. Just as the voices of the brothers and the strains of the organ still echo in my ears, so the footfalls of my spiritual forefathers still echo in me, louder now as I pursue them in earnest.

It made me chuckle this morning to think of how culturally selective people are at times, myself included. For example, many American families call themselves Irish - not avidly perhaps, but Irish - and claim that heritage, but what is an Irishman if he is not Catholic? Who is he if not a member of the Church? I'm sure many may choose to gloss over the fact that as early as three or four generations ago there were Catholics as fathers and grandfathers in their families. But I've come to find them: not their bones or their documents, but their spirit.

I just had a thought. Fr. Laurence just asked me, in our conversation, whether I had considered or researched any of the American houses. Of course, I know Gethsemane from Merton, and also Mepkin Abbey, one of its foundations, from Paul Wilkes' book. But I had not pursued any of them as places to join; I hadn't even thought of it. I told him that for years now I have not been particularly attached to America, so that I had always assumed I would live elsewhere; thus it wasn't a foregone conclusion that I would look there for my eventual home, but abroad. But that's not the thought I had, just the background.

The thought is this: I assume that my ancestors came from Ireland - as did most other immigrants in their position - to pursue a better economic situation than the one to be found presently at home. So it could be argued that I'm simply returning home now that the situation has improved. I like that thought.

I want to give some thoughts and impressions about the trip so far. I met George and Anita on the flight from Houston, and they actually flew on with me to Dublin to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. He's an attorney in a town south of Houston, and they are also Catholic, and their two children were to meet them in Dublin to spend a week together touring around. We got to speak for a short time on the plane, and I told them why I was going to Ireland. Anita then remarked that her church had prayed all last month for new vocations and that she would pray for me specifically as I journeyed in pursuit of my own. I hope to see them again, and I'll certainly write to them when I get home; nice people they are.

I didn't get to speak with them after de Gaulle. In fact, the next person I spoke to at all was the immigration clerk in Dublin, who asked what I was to be doing in Ireland. When I told him I meant to visit Mt. St. Joseph Abbey, he asked me further (out of curiosity, no doubt) what I was going there for. "A possible vocation," I returned, at which point he smiled and said something assuring, if not encouraging, or at least benign. I just take it for granted that everyone here is Catholic.

Which is why I wasn't surprised, upon entering the town of Roscrea on the bus, to be let off at a church - St. Cronan's, to be exact - a beautiful church that could hardly be more Irish if it tried. I hadn't called from Dublin to alert them of my exact time of arrival, so I wasn't sure how I was going to get to the abbey, though I knew it had to be close. Taking advantage of the moment, however, I did take a few pictures of the church and the grounds before finding a patron outside to ask how to find the abbey. I asked him if he knew of a phone I could use, and he let me use his mobile, saying something about the charge. Knowing the polite thing would be to offer to pay him, I did so, only to have him clarify that he meant the energy, not the cost. So we both laughed a bit at that.

I called the monastery guesthouse and the director rang for a taxi from there. The driver, Sean, was a perfect example of an Irishman: greying and weathered, but warm and friendly, full of questions and stories, with a twinkle in his eye. When I told him I had flown from Texas, he said he knew someone who had flown to Texas once - "or was it Mexico?" - that that person had stopped in Singapore on the way, and that the whole ordeal had taken 28 hours. The story was as surreal as the geography it contained, but I took it all in as part of the larger surreality of me being in Ireland in the first place.

He then asked me - honestly - if I had ever heard of an old singer called Johnny Cash, who once wrote a song about Ireland called "The Fohrty Sheds of Greean" (or something). Sean went on to tell me the weather was to be nice on Sunday; I told him it had been raining in Dublin when I landed, but that it soon cleared to make way for the sun to shine through it. To this he replied, "Oh, so ya brought th' sun whi' cha, ya did." He wasn't the last person to tell me as much.

Another boarder at the monastery guesthouse called Tom also told me I brought the sun; granted, he also called me Simon, for some reason I can't begin to imagine. He was a vegetarian and wore track pants and trainers, so that could explain it. Another boarder called Bill was an old man who, it seems, spends his days as an Irish Catholic pilgrim of sorts. He was only staying the night on his drive from Dublin to Kerry - a drive that can't take more than five hours, I later confirmed with a few locals. But when I asked him how long the second leg of his trip would take, he looked around nervously before managing, "Oh, a good half a day, I suppose." Bill wore a threadbare navy sweater over a white tee, black fleece pants, and a motley smattering of white hair about his face.

There were another several ladies who were boarding during the week, and it always struck me how of a type they were: tea-sipping, inflection-laced Irish-British biddies, sweet as demerara but something akin to hens. Every conversation at table began, ended, and was permeated by a single-minded discussion of the weather and of a singularly earnest disposition to agree with one another as frequently and as ardently as possible. There were a few gems though, which I will write about later.

Cut: A Short Story

2009-06-30T11:07:00.001-07:00

"One."

"He back again?"

"Looks that way, don't it? Now stop jerking your head, or I'm liable to cut your ear clean off."

"Well, I don't understand it."

"What don't you understand?"

"Something's not right with him. I got this sense about it."

"Two."

"Why's he walk back and forth like that afore he comes in? It ain't natural."

"Maybe that's the way he likes it. As long as he pays for his haircut, I don't much care how many times he does it."

"Listen, Pete. The man comes once a week, every Friday, and every Friday he walks up and down the street for no reason, back and forth in front of the window five times."

"Three."

"Five times! Like he likes being seen or something. Like we's needing to get ready for him or something."

"Come on, Roy. He's not troubling anyone."

"Well then, he should just act normal-like and come right up through the door instead a lollying back and forth like a re-tarded beagle. And why's he come every week? Most times he don't even need it."

"Some folks just like it, like to feel presentable. I tell you, the other day I looked up at the mirror - just for a sec - and I coulda swore I saw tears in his eyes. You don't know most times, Roy, do you?"

"All I know's that he better have someone looking after him or he's liable to get run over one of these days. Or forgotten somewheres."

"Four."

"Jesus, Pete, I can't take him today. Hurry it up and I'll go out 'round the back."

"Why don't you talk to him? You come here just the same as he does. It won't kill you none. Might do you some good, you old stump."

"No sir! I don't want nothing to do with that limp fish. He ain't normal and it ain't right and I know better. Just turn me loose."

"Have it your way, Roy. See you later. Close that door tight behind you, now. It sticks sometimes."

"I will. You keep your eye on him, you hear? I'll holler at you later. Bye."

"Five."

Friday Finking

2009-06-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

- Why did I wake up this morning singing "Edelweiss"?

- Sounds I heard today: the roar of generators, the sputtering of the coffeemaker, sneezing, gunfire, "Namaste!", and way too much about Michael Jackson.

- I don't think I've ever heard an entire Michael Jackson song from start to finish.

- Today I gave a presentation to my office group about the six proper (and one improper) urinal stances.

- Why is it still taboo in America to criticize the vaporization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki over 60 years ago?

- I enjoy steak and shrimp of a Friday night.

- My first law school study session at a coffeeshop went well enough. I could get used to it.

- Perhaps I should stay on the Cape for a month so I can scope out a place to live in person. A warm place, preferably.

- It's been too long since I've seen "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid".

- Christ taught many lessons to the Earthlings in his three public years; yet how did he manage to leave behind no guidance about what to do when people are insufferably absurd?

The Tempest

2009-06-24T00:25:00.000-07:00

(NOTE: The Tempest is a song I wrote some eight or nine years ago. Some friends and I recorded it as a gift to the girl who is the subject of the song. I've played it on the piano in my living room, in empty churches, in crowded restaurants, and even at a few weddings - it never gets old for me. I just hope it resonates.)

Here I stand on the cliff tops and shout at the ocean
I beat on my chest with a fury unheard of
I cry in frustration, I can't face the notion
that the God who created her could be
the Lord of her baby and her dreams
How crazy it all seems

I kneel in the surf as the waves crash around me
Trying to tame my elusive emotions
But I too was fallen before Jesus found me
And she needs my love even more than my sympathy
Help her find peace in the midst of the raging sea
Keep her from sinking and let the waves rock her to sleep

She sits on her boat all alone on the ocean
Desperately searching for land on the open horizon
She needs You to watch every motion
Don't let her forget that she can't give up hope
on her baby and her dreams
How crazy it all seems

Oh, shine on her, Lighthouse, and keep her from danger
Reach out Your hand, Lord, and calm the commotion
Shelter her face from the tempests of anger
and meanwhile I'll be here to comfort and care for her
She needs more than I can give: come, Jesus, carefully
Keep her from sinking and let the waves rock her to sleep
Keep her from sinking and let the waves rock her to sleep...

The Farce II: A Dialogue

2009-06-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

As I said before, you are no good to anyone as long as your world makes sense. That is the surest sign that you are insane.

- So does that mean I'm insane?

The very fact that you are able to ask that question suggests that you may not be, that there's hope.

- Hope? For my sanity?

The one who loses something and finds it again has everything, and is unlikely to lose it a second time. But the one who never has it to begin with, he is the worst of all.

- And what about you? You sound insane.

Maybe I'm insane, but it's not because I'm living a lie. It's because I'm living nothing until I can figure out exactly what the lie is.

- Do you think I live a lie?

I don't know. Maybe you do. I can't answer that.

- If you don't know what is or is not a lie, how do you know that you are not living one?

You search. You don't go too far into anything until you've searched. But you certainly don't do anything blindly. Or "just go with it".

- So what is it that you are searching for?

Meaning. The point. You can't discover simplicity, you can only rediscover it.

- The point of life?

Yes. But not just of my life. All of life. It's not your "time" that you spend, it's your LIFE. I don't want to think that I have ever "wasted" any of my life.

- Well, no one does. That's why you should get out there and live! Try new things, get hurt, find happiness, make mistakes, feel the joy of finally getting it right.

So life is experience?

- Experience is part of life, but it is not everything.

Then what is life?

- There is no single definition. Each person has to answer that for himself.

Then we should each choose the best way to live our lives?

- I can agree on that.

No, you can't.

- Yes, I can.

Just a few minutes ago you told me how to live.

- That was my opinion.

Fair enough.

(NOTE: This dialogue is a faithful representation of a true life conversation I had this morning, with only a few embellishments. My thanks to the other party for it and for all that follows from it.)

The Farce is Strong in This One

2009-06-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

It's true. My life (life itself!) is a farce. My job is a farce. My going to law school is a monolithic farce, albeit one I'll continue to entertain (should I say 'perpetrate'?) because I find it so alluringly grotesque. And the idea of my being an attorney is an absolutely, cripplingly preposterous farce, like being a park ranger in Detroit or a bookseller in the South.

I recently stopped in a "Christian" bookstore to find a decent Catholic Bible, and after needing a clerk's help to even find the Catholic section, discovered that there was only one Catholic Bible in stock - not one edition, one actual Bible. I almost left it, to be a remnant, a noble dissenter, even a token; but I bought it anyway, because it read "Catholic Bible" in bold letters across the front, and I liked how that made me feel. I liked that when I paid for it that day, in that farce of a bookstore, that I was standing up for my faith, the only thing left that is not a farce.

I will tell you what else is a farce: details. Yes, details are one big farce, or a billion tiny ones; it's all the same. It's as if there are people out there who are paid to confuse and bore the hell out of people by saddling them with an unfathomable amount of details, and whoever flourishes the best in this morass of farcelets receives the mantle of Success. And that man is a monkey.

The road to law school is full of details; you have to fight off vast hordes of them before you can even step foot in a pretentious classroom. It's enough to make you want to be a Trappist. Or a trapeze artist.

Jesus said, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." And I continue, "It is not the man who knows everything who lives to learn it, but it is the man who understands that he can't know anything who stumbles upon it by chance and by patience."

You are no good to anyone (least of all yourself) as long as your world makes sense. That is the surest sign that you are either insane (at best) or that you have no clue what life is (at worst) and that you have missed the point entirely. If you don't wake up every morning and accept that everything you know could be proven wrong in a matter of minutes, then you are already dead and there is no hope for you.

But if you walk through the world trying to see it instead of to seize it, then it will take shape for you. And in that shape you will find your own, and you will begin.

Thoughts on Quotes from "A Burnt-Out Case" by Graham Greene

2009-06-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

"The more bare a life is, the more we fear change."

The woman who gave her last two pennies was a hero, a martyr, because she gave everything she had. But try and take away those two pennies by force and you will see a different sort of martyr. It's true, I believe, that the more you have, the more you dilute yourself in order to appreciate all that you have. Thus, the woman was much more "herself" with two pennies than I have ever been "myself", and even more so when she gave them away of her own accord. What good is it, then, to crowd your life with things that serve only to crowd out your true self? You risk more (i.e. "Foxes have holes, etc."), which is the point Greene (or M. Querry, who says the quote in the book) may be making, but he clearly just wants to be left alone.

"Sometimes I think that the search for suffering and the remembrance of suffering are the only means we have to put ourselves in touch with the whole human condition."

The difference between the nature of love and of suffering is that love - lasting love - is a daily choice within, while suffering (though there may be some volition involved) is often a burden foisted upon one from without. Both are purifying, both are essential for a complete surrender to God (and thus a complete discovery of one's true self), and both can (and often do) draw on something in the nature and substance of the other. That suffering is often chosen (when it is chosen) as a result of love, however, does not alter the fact that when one chooses love, one also always chooses suffering on behalf of, and in return for, that love. Perhaps they are inseparable, but while it is difficult to imagine love without suffering, it is one of the most common afflictions of our age that so many suffer and there is nothing of love in it.

"She was one of those who would never admit that when an emotion was dead, the memory of the occasion was dead as well."

The converse is also true. That memories don't die, that they linger and haunt and tantalize, is merely an indication that the emotion still lives inside us. This is also why memories can't be surpressed. They will appear in your dreams, they will find a way out. It's the emotion that needs tending to. I, for one, cling to old emotions the way others cling to old postcards or baby blankets, because I am unwilling to approach a house, a house that used to be my home, in which all the windows have been darkened.

"They use the phrase 'make love', don't they? But which of us are creative enough to 'make' love? We can only be loved - if we are lucky."

I, like M. Querry, have never understood why people refer to sex as "making love". Newton taught us that you can't make something from nothing, and most people bring exactly that to the table (or bed or sink or wherever): nothing. If anything, it could most properly be called "taking love", because these days not even babies are being "made" with great frequency. Of course, people in love have sex, even if there are several different loves to be "made" along the way. But I reject the notion that sex is a particularly enlightening experience. That's why it has often been referred to as consummation, the summing up of things in one act together. Love is not the goal, it is the fuel, just as sex is not the means, but the expression aloud, like a word that was already true before it was spoken. Let us all be so lucky in love.

"...routine, the familiar within the unfamiliar."

On the surface, there's no question that a physical routine has a domesticating effect. But what of the emotional routine? Can't that fit the bill as well? We approach the people who come into our lives in much the same way that we approached the last one, and the one before that, sometimes learning from our mistakes (which are a routine in themselves), and sometimes stubbornly imagining that this time we can - given the right circumstances - produce the long-awaited result where we have previously failed. That way we are sometimes consoled when the situation goes awry by telling ourselves we did it the only way we know how, which is often mistaken for doing our best.

"He had the kind of face which seems worn away by weather and patience."

I wonder if this is my face. I think it's better than my face, but I can hope, right?

On the Way

2009-05-08T01:48:00.000-07:00

Having grown up in a quieter, more pastoral corner of East Montgomery County, one of the most unforgettable memories of my childhood is of walking with my family the half-mile to church on Sundays in the spring.

When the weather was nice, the whole troupe of us would amble up the street in our Sunday best, through the wooded clearing and into the parking lot, where we would scuttle off to our respective Sunday school classes before straggling into “big church.”

Apart from a few washed-out pictures of a European Jesus and echoed fragments of King James, those days conjure images of sunshine filtering through oak branches and the whine of cicadas, the rich smell of pot roast and the clink of ice in tall glasses of tea, the murmur of reverent idleness and the sleepy past.

Just this January, I was able to take a short leave from my job as a cost analyst for a defense contractor supporting the troops in Iraq. Before meeting up with some close friends from college, I was honored to pay a visit to a few missionary friends I had made who run various missions projects in Bangladesh – the world’s poorest country, they explained – including a children’s home called Home of Joy, a women’s center, and a pair of clinics, all bursting at the seams with Bangladeshis both giving and receiving faith, hope and charity.

A few days into my stay, it was arranged that I would spend my last day in the capital, Dhaka, where I would go with Peter (a Home of Joy boy, now a young man off at college) to the Sunday school that he had begun in the slums of the city.

Twenty years have passed since the slow days of my youth, but somehow, 9,000 miles distant, I found myself on the way to Sunday school again, only this time the way looked much different. Instead of holding my father’s hand and wending our way down a quiet lane in a Robert Frost poem, Peter and I wedged ourselves into a local bus as we jostled and jolted along a raucous and pitted market street straight out of a W. Somerset Maugham story.

It was a way unlike any I had ever taken before. But, then again, I had never taken the Bangladeshi way.

For one, there is no church in the slums, only a rented room the size of a typical American dining room that, except for its bamboo frame, tin encasement and a floor that no doubt has its own patron saint, bears only assorted colored posters (I even saw one of the food pyramid) to help brighten the atmosphere.

It didn’t take long to realize, however, that the kids themselves – usually between 50 and 60 of them in that small room – could provide all the color and energy needed to make life happen there. They greeted our arrival through the doorway with a volley of cheers and a shower of bright orange flower petals, a moment I will never forget as long as I live.

To begin the Sunday school, Peter and the children sang worship songs a capella, mostly in Bangla, some in English, and almost all with hand motions, while I took photos and listened to their voices carry throughout the narrow alleys and stooping doorways of the slums. After the music followed the lesson, read by Peter from an illustrated book of Bible stories, told captivatingly and listened to with more attention than any children ages 5 to 12 that I have ever seen.

Perhaps they paid such close attention because Peter always winds down the lesson by handing out prizes, any items (this week there were blankets) that he can get donated from his church. He even revealed to me that when he started this Sunday school, most of the children had no clothes, but they showed up anyway. And now, thanks to Peter’s Sunday school, they have been given more than just clothes and blankets.

The most astonishing quality of the whole program is not that it has no building of its own, no curriculum to speak of, no organized financial or publicity support, but that – besides Peter – it has no Christians. One need only land at the airport in Dhaka and walk through the terminal to note that nine out of every 10 Bangladeshis are Muslim, far more than Iraq or Iran by population. And all of these children are from Muslim or Hindu families.

The magnitude of the work Peter is doing sunk in with me when I fully grasped that he is not merely entertaining the local remnant of Christian children, but that he is bearing the living water of Christ to those who have never heard the Good News: that we are all God’s children, adopted into his family, because he loves us.

And who better to teach me that than my new friend, Peter, who grew up in Home of Joy with a huge extended family of Christian brothers and sisters.

Along the way, I had been faithfully chronicling my travels in a journal, but in that moment I found that everything worth saying was already being said. It was a time of gathering and storing, of spiritual slowness, so as not to miss anything.

On the ride back, crammed next to Peter on the local bus, I stood overflowing with the joy that only the agape form of charity can evoke. And in that moment, as I closed my eyes, I was holding my heavenly Father’s hand on a spring morning teeming with life, grateful for all that he shows us on the way.

Dear Allyson,

2009-05-07T11:56:00.001-07:00

Please write some more.

Your loving (and slightly off-balance) cousin,
Justin

My Memory

2009-04-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

I have an appalling memory. I do. I've grown accustomed to it though, like a bum leg, or an ugly kid. But it's my ugly kid. It's not selective, as some would suggest, and I've swallowed enough guilt for a lifetime thinking that was the case. No one would ever choose to remember the way I do. No one. Some things I remember so clearly, so vivid and lifelike they seem when I need them; some things I remember in a sort of lurid, liquid half-light, full of doubt and art in equal measure; still others I remember in a strictly chemical way, so that I know they exist, plausibly, because I was told as much, or that they happened because I take my own word for it, because it would be even more absurd and garish to suggest they didn't, or hadn't.

Some things are beyond reclaiming, and I accept that. With the stoic resignation of a newspaperman or that TV Indian, I accept that. You fight it at first, you fight knowing that it isn't fair, like a cat in a bag in a river, like the first irrational protests after a diagnosis - or a sentencing - as if there were a difference, as if protesting could make a difference. But denial is exhausting, even more than the effort expended in the good fight, and nobility is a funny joke in an empty bar.

I remember the frosty color of sunlight in the flat on Urquhart Street, how it was colder in the kitchen - the light, I mean, was colder there. I remember waking up first and doing the dishes, quietly, almost reverently, as I peered down at the lone tree in the courtyard, at the calendar on the wall, at the soap on my hands. I don't remember being lonely then. Cold, perhaps, and alone, but not lonely. I remember a young woman in a window seat writing about a frightened girl lost at a fair. She wrote herself down that day, wrote herself on paper, as if to show me - but not to give me just yet - herself. I wrote her down, too, that day. I wrote her adventurous when she was afraid on paper, while the mud dried on her boots, and the tears steamed on her cheeks. I don't remember where those papers are now, but it doesn't matter. I know where the stories are, and they are safe. I remember that much.

I remember the curve of her street, hard and flint-colored, like the teeth on a sprocket, or the spine of a dragon. The smell of instant coffee. The sound of a hefty key in a heavy door. The passport in the pocket of my pants in the wash. I wonder if they wonder, the people who stamp it, in Dubai, or Bangkok, or Amsterdam. I wonder if they look at me and know that it was my fault that I have a tattered passport. I remember too much, and not enough sometimes. A lifetime of memories and non-memories, all vying for an audience, imagined or otherwise.

I wonder how many of my memories are imagined, impostors, stowaways from the hundreds of books I have read since I was cold in the kitchen, how many of them never happened, and never will happen. Do I read so that these adopted memories can supplant my own? Do I get lost in the stories I read or do I read so that they can get lost in me, lost with my own story, indistinguishable, alone but not lonely? There is so much and no more to write. A life full of characters, of which I am just one.

Shine

2009-04-04T04:08:00.000-07:00

The girl at the arch window
and the clock on the corner:
time and mankind shuffle past;
shadows like scars mar their faces,
wound as they look on in silence.

The priest in thin cassock
and the statue in the square
stand for peace – for quiet –
as their worldly wishes pool
like the rubbish at their feet.

The civilest servant bobs and shakes
like a busted weather vane, or
like a lighthouse out at sea
calling ships away from the shore
with a soundless, sightless squint.

The life-laden mother fights to stare
dead ahead as she troops her way on,
marshalling a fierce love for those
who are favored by fate, who will
go on to bear her name, her grandchildren.

We watched as they were branded
while our complicity shone like a star.
We stood like statues as they were moved
and now we move to escape the stillness.
We wanted peace and quiet
yet were given only this silence.

Pod-Shaped

2009-03-22T23:33:00.000-07:00

I wear my grandfather's coat, a brown blazer, corduroy, big in the waist and short in the arms. It's a sort of mould I'm hoping to grow into, I guess. Pod-shaped. That's his nickname: Pod. I've worn it for years now, since college at least. I used to have his blue one too, but I gave it away to a Young Republican named Phil (not my cousin Phil - another Republican) because he said, "Hey, man. Nice jacket," and I said, "Here, you want it?" When I took it off and threw it to (an incredulous) him where he stood waiting for an elevator, I felt I had gained something by it, not lost.

But the brown one I treasure, and have since long before Granddad's cancer arrived; now, it is all I possess of him. Once, when a button came off, I saved it in the pocket for over a year until I got around to sewing it back on. Another one I kept under the seat of my car (where it fell, admittedly) for months as well, until it eventually ended up in a vacuum cleaner somewhere, I'm sure. So I transplanted a few from the sleeves to the front, like pitchers called up from the minors, and I don't feel a bit off balance for it. A few months ago, the lining on the inside became threadbare in places and I worried that, in the interest of preserving it in the long run, I had better store it away in a closet.

I ended up taking it to the alterations shop here on base instead, in the hope that they could work some magic, but they said that I would need scraps of similar material in order to patch the holes. A jacket is not a body, there are no skin grafts; but he suggested the tailor next door may have some material. I showed the tailor the jacket lining and he grimaced and scratched his head. At that moment, I looked up at the walls covered with bolts of polyester and pinstripes and saw nothing remotely similar to the copper-colored satin I needed to bring this Lazarus back to life. The tailor, turning toward a box under a table, came back with a fist full of scraps and a gleam in his eye. The material was very similar, though a little thicker than I had wanted, and it was something of a chocolate brown, but if it meant the jacket could live on, I would take it. When I asked him how much, he said it was mine for the asking, so I stuttered something like, "My grandfather thanks you," to which I'm sure he furrowed his mental brow in puzzlement even as he received my handshake of gratitude.

I took the scraps and the coat back next door to the alterations shop and showed them the places that needed patching, a pocket that needed mending, and which buttons I wanted where, and I told them that they could do whatever they needed to if it meant they could save it. Twenty-four hours and eight dollars (deal!) later, I was me-Pod-Frankenstein again, feeling more complete and secure than I had felt in a long time. I felt in the pockets and saw that they had returned the remaining scraps to me in case I should need further repairs in the future, and was even more grateful. It doesn't take much, I guess.

Also in the pockets: one of Kate's bobby-pins (rescued from the innards of my gear shift), a paper scrawled with Bangla phrases given to me by Shameem while standing at the salad bar at my old base, a packaged wet wipe from a Delta flight I took last April, and a blue ink pen (taboo for government paperwork) I keep because it looks classy. For months I kept a small stack of movie ticket stubs paperclipped together from the flurry of indie films I saw (mostly with Keesh) during Oscar season last year, but I can't entirely account for their whereabouts now, so I'll just assume I relocated them somewhere more practical. Also, when I went to see Erika (this is beginning to sound like a Lou Bega song) in California last, I had collected a few small sand dollars and sea shells in the pockets which left behind a grit that I never fully banished. What I kept longest, arguably, was the smell (affectionately known as "the funk") of Chuy's that lingered in the fabric as long as several months after I had stopped working there. Kathy would always tell me not to wear it to work for that reason, but I was stubborn; I was its Linus.

Two days ago, a newcomer arrived: a new navy cord blazer from J. Crew. Granddad('s jacket), as usual, didn't forfeit an ounce of his composure. It is, by all accounts, a beautiful new jacket, but it is as little alive to me as I feel alive in it. It is too light on my shoulders, too straight in the arms, and it doesn't have the right smell. My mom has often been good enough, when I begin to feel too much like Pip, to admonish me to remember where I come from, that my identity, like my appearance, is half-given and half-made. I may grow into things just as I grow out of others, but it is all just reupholstery, as I will always retain the thread of my self no matter what material my shell is made from.

It's a jacket, it's growing up, it's making a troupe of fools out of yourself. It's never just about staying warm. Never.

The Lord is My Refuge, and I His Refugee

2009-03-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

I am a refugee. It may not seem that way at first glance. I may not show battle scars or a distended belly. I may not travel in the hold of a boat or the trunk of a car. I may not carry a load on my back or a price on my head. But I am fleeing; fleeing from something, to somewhere, and for my life.

Tonight was the last night of RCIA, or rather, it was the nightcap on the teaching that officially ended last week. There was no lesson like usual; we just talked our way through the program for Easter Vigil, where we will be officially accepted into the Catholic Church, and we looked forward to whatever that would mean for each of us. At the end, after a short time of prayer, Father Joe asked if anyone would like to talk about his journey, how he got here, where he came from, why he was becoming Catholic. Since our group is mostly soldiers (and since I therefore see myself as a sort of guest) I listened first to their stories, stories of growing up in the Church but not joining in fully, or falling away and returning joyfully home. I heard (and saw in my mind) proud parents, pious grandparents, beaming wives and housefuls of kids, proud of their fathers for becoming like children again in order to pass through into their lives as men.

As it came around to me, I spoke of envy and of gratitude, of "the long loneliness" as Dorothy Day puts it, and of wandering in streets and in deserts. The deeper I continued, the more I felt how desperately my heart has been - and is still - clinging to the cross of Christ. Though my journey to the Catholic Church has been slow and steady, a true sojourn, it has never been ponderous or aimless, never without purpose or hope, and certainly it has never been with the slightest misgiving. I am a spiritual refugee, and that sort never longs for the home it has left behind, but for the home to which it is bound. If one looks back, it is only to weep at the desolation.

I told the story of the elevator last night as a parable for my faith journey now. The church of my youth could have very easily been the church of my maturity, even of my old age. I could have waited the four minutes, boarded the lift, put in my time at the office, and rapidly descended at the end of the day to meet a car and a city and a cafe full of friends. Instead, I felt like I should climb, like there was an other way, one that spurned the status quo of the burgeoning paunch and the outsourced mind, a way that was meant to be taken, not by which one was taken in.

I began my ascent (and my dissent) in earnest when I chose to leave the Baptist Church for good. I had already stayed longer than I should have, partly out of the guilt foisted on me by those who suggested that I was a "leaver", and partly out of a desire to stay behind and effect change, change that would only come from within, if at all. And though this is not meant to be the chronicle of my faith journey (that will come in full later), it is enough to emphasize here that my journey to the Catholic Church was equaled in steadfastness only by my determination to leave behind the religion of my evangelical Protestant childhood.

Like the security guard who opened my way onto the 49th floor, most people are confounded that someone would take the stairs when there is a perfectly comfortable Otis elevator waiting to take you wherever you want to go. The other day my boss, when I told him that I grew up Baptist but am now Catholic, even blurted, "Isn't that kinda...well...backwards?" I genially laughed, donned one of those Oh-God-please-get-me-out-of-here smiles, and wondered as I made my way back to my office if the cross I am called to bear is to climb for the people who won't, who are still upside down, for those who would rather stay behind, like Lot's wife, and for those who are willing to take the stairs provided their footsteps aren't echoing alone in the stairwell.

So you can see, I am a refugee. But with the celebration of the resurrection of Our Risen Lord Jesus Christ coming in a few short weeks, the first sign of land is within sight. Then I will be home.

Two Flights

2009-03-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

One morning I got to work at the law firm before the elevators came on (by 4 minutes) so I decided to take the stairs instead. Only, when I got to my floor, I found that the doors to the individual floors are locked from the outside, even my own. So, rather than walk the 49 floors back down to ground-level, I decided to use the phone to call to be let in. I explained to them where I was ("No, not 42nd, 47th!"). The man was amazed that I climbed that many stairs. I was amazed that they led nowhere. We both just looked at each other incredulously.

Being here is the same, I think. It's like being marooned on an island where everyone thinks that everyone else on the island is a foreigner and where the goal is to stay as long as possible.

Sometimes I think I try and keep my sanity by losing it on my own terms. At least that way I can smile at it while it goes.

Inside (A Song)

2009-03-05T22:55:00.000-08:00

In softer shades and shallow tones
between the space beneath the bones
for you alone I’ve saved your place
and made your home inside me

I’ll lock you up in longer arms
and stay with you until the day comes
I’ll kiss your face and not wake you up
we’ll say that we’re in love

A tattered frame, a faded note,
a battered name can be made whole
again and over all my shame
you lay your soul inside me

I’ll lock you up in longer arms
and stay with you until the day comes
I’ll kiss your face and not wake you up
we’ll say that we’re in love

It’ll be alright
It’ll be alright
If we could stay inside
It’ll be alright

I’ll lock you up in longer arms
and stay with you until the day comes
I’ll kiss your face and not wake you up
we’ll say that we’re in love
we’ll play like we’re in love
we’re alright as long as we stay…

And I’ll lock you up in stronger arms
and stay with you until the sun
I’ll kiss your face and sing you to sleep
we’ll say that we’re in love
we could be so in love
…we’re in love

This Mountain

2009-03-04T00:04:00.000-08:00

Ignorance is poverty of the mind no less than malnutrition is poverty of the body, penury the poverty of the pocket, despair the poverty of the heart, and depravity the poverty of the soul. If the poor, then, will hold out their hands for bread money, even if they are happy in their poverty, why do the ignorant treasure their know-nothingness with more iron-fisted pride than the most learned professor esteems his own lifetime of knowledge? Who is intimidated by a full stomach or a large income? Even those who despair desire joy but fail to believe in it, just as the depraved desire goodness but fall short of themselves. But the ignorant...they are mountains!!

And I will move them.

From the Ashes

2009-02-25T01:02:00.000-08:00

Today is Ash Wednesday (I can say that categorically now since it just became Wednesday in Alaska) and I've been to one Mass, with another this evening. So, yes, I've been ashed upon. I was actually ashed upon whilst playing the piano, and during the ashing I missed about seven notes, for which I was thankful, because seven is a holy number. And, since today is the beginning of Lent, it would be appropriate to write about the things I am giving up. But I won't. Instead, I'm thinking today about things I have already given up, because today I miss them. They are:

1. Baseball games - I was never the most avid fan, but there is something home-ish about them. The drawn-outness, the languor, the collective apathy that leads you to talk on your phone or tell stories until you hear the crowd react. It's almost like paying to entertain yourself while watching the kids play on the playground. (I should say here that of all the memories I have of being at baseball games, zero of them are actually "baseball" memories.)

2. Restaurants - Most people consider it a luxury that our soldiers and those who support them here are able to eat at Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Burger King, even Cinnabon. But I never went to these places in the States (Taco Bell, once in a blue moon) so I see them as a sort of white noise. Having spent so much of my time working in restaurants or studying at cafes, those are the not-so-little things I miss. Not super value combos and cardiac arrest and horsey sauce.

3. Hoar-frost - I'm not even sure that I know exactly what this is, but it sounds nice after being out here for so long. This is especially the case after it struck me that most of my boxers have either snowflakes or tiny snow shovels on them.

4. Butter - Mike was making fun of someone the other day for being from Indiana, asking her if she still churns her own butter. Which made me think, "When's the last time I even ATE butter? or SAW butter?"

5. People from Indiana - Only kidding.

6. Making fun of people from Indiana - This one...now this one...I live for this.

7. Singing patriotic songs - Like "O Canada!" and "God Save the Queen" and ... "Kokomo". And when I was in Bangladesh riding on the back of a rickshaw, Sohel taught me the first few lines of their national song. He said, "If you ever get into trouble here..." I practiced hard.

8. Indie films - I'm thankful that the Oscar season before I came to Iraq was so jam-packed with incredible movies and that this year was a shocking abscess of inartistic hoo-ha, because I was able to retain my faith in the independent film while not feeling like I really missed anything by being over here. Oh, and yes, they do show movies over here for the soldiers and civilians, though I don't think a single one of them hasn't had Bruce Willis in it.

9. Mom's piano - Again, I am thankful that I got to play Faith's piano in Bangladesh (even if only about 72% of the keys worked - including zero F-sharps - thanks to the humid climate there) and that I get to play for all the Catholic Masses here at Victory, but there's something about my piano at home, the one I've grown up with. Surely you understand. It's like using someone else's retainer. Or going to your friend's house when the only refreshment she has to offer is box-'o-wine.

10. Wine - Duh.

11. Coffee - I know, I said I wouldn't talk about what I've given up for Lent, but it's been almost 24 hours now and it's excruciating! Goooooo, Jesus!!!

1/23/09 - Nepal: Holy Kathmandu! (Part One)

2009-02-18T22:28:00.000-08:00

After a quick but tasty breakfast at the hotel restaurant (your choice of American, Continental, or International breakfast!), Govinda and I took the city map we were given by the front desk and chose a few sites to visit. When we went down after breakfast to book our sightseeing tour, however, the manager thrust his own map down on the table and, with a boardroom swagger, he circled three sites, slammed his (expensive) pen down with gusto on the glass-topped desk, and, smiling a used car salesman's smile, declared, "These are the sites included in the package!" Gopi and exchanged a quick glance, shrugged, and said we were ready whenever they were. The manager said he would contact the driver and that in the meantime we should walk around Thamel for a half hour until the driver arrived. (Apparently, the hotel owns the car but hires one or two drivers for jobs as needed.) When the driver appeared, I realized it must be the brother of the crazy driver from yesterday, who probably passed the job off to his brother because of the paltry tip I had given him. Little did he know that I had planned to make up for it today, so I just gave it to his brother anyway to spite him. Onward!

Our first stop was a Buddhist temple, called a stupa in Nepali, set off in an arcade with a circular walk of red brick ringing it. The people, all sorts of people, walked around the ring clockwise (like they would drive), though I never learned if this was convention or some sort of religiously significant rite that tourists felt compelled not to disrupt. (Looking back at pictures, I can see beads in some worshippers' hands, which makes me believe the unidirectional walking was, in fact, part of the worship somehow, and not just a method of staving off chaos.) The most obvious and unique feature of the temple was a pyramidal column (shaped something like a Happy Meal) at the peak of the temple, on the four sides of which were painted four identical sets of eyes, with the effect of suggesting that Lord Buddha watches over all (or that he sees all and knows all, which is something quite different altogether). I suppose that, while the concept is not entirely foreign to Christianity, the imagery certainly is, especially with the exotic, almost seductive expression in the eyes - though I'll admit that it was neither unpleasant nor alarming.

Another unique feature of the stupa is that I'm not quite sure it even qualifies as a building, owing to the fact that it is not a structure one may enter through a door or doorway. Instead, one must climb a set of stairs, past a few old biddies selling incense or begging alms, and walk about on what seems to be the roof of the outermost level of the stupa. On this level, however, there was a room of sorts that proved to be a central shrine, the hub of the whole apparatus in fact, filled almost entirely by two massive wheels or cogs, tall revolving pillars with short handles all around like spines at waist level, which the pilgrims pushed in unison as they circled the narrow space around the walls. A bell tinkled with each complete revolution, which, while giving the whole process a bit of a hamstery feel, made me happy nonetheless. Along the walls were various smallish images of the Buddha, with one very large gold idol in the middle of one of the longer walls. A few unfortunates gathered here, including a tiny wee small-person worshipping seated pacifically in one corner. Gopi and I entered and walked round once, rang the bell, and smelled the incense; there was certainly some powerful and sensual aesthetic force at work, if not a spiritual one.

Continuing around the edge of the "roof" we disturbed a flock (covey?) of pigeons - which rose to obscure us only momentarily from the purview of the eyes - when we passed above a group of worshippers bowing in rhythmic progression: palms together above the head, in front of the face, the chest, then bow, kneel, prostrate. Repeat. Striking among the supplicants was a white man, not much older than myself, and faintly Jesus-looking, the sort I guess you'd expect to picture as a Buddhist in Nepal or across the border in Tibet. I remember thinking that his presence was not so strange at all, and in fact I felt a tinge of guilt at the relative fervidness of his piety, as I had not prayed since Dubai. So I crossed myself and said an Our Father, as if that could ward off the shame. (I then prayed that I would not be such an idiot as to be an unholy idiot.)

Having taken a good few pictures from this elevated level and looking across the walkway into theatres and workshops, we descended back to the street and joined the great revolution. As I looked back at the wall of the stupa, I noticed that it was alive with hundreds of small wheels, like tiny Buddhist barber poles, turning on oiled gears and driven by some unseen force. Do the pilgrims turning the big wheels act as mules, as hamsters that power the smaller wheels? Are they powered by the prayers and incense of the worshippers? Or is this colossal dynamo the reason the rest of the city goes dark twice a day?

On the other, outer side of the whirlpeoplepool was wrapped a chambered husk of monasteries, art centers, tongkha schools, and gift shops, most of which seemed as crypt-like as the pulsing orb of people was raucous, as if the eyes themselves were sucking the surrounding life up into their seductive irises. A large constituency of the peripatetic satellites were saffron-clad Buddhist monks, many looking particularly wretched and destitute, though some of the more fortunate, it seems, sported almost-saffron puffy coats, the marshmallowman kind. It seems that outside of Denmark and Denver, nowhere is the North Face logo more ubiquitous than in Nepal. (Disclaimer: I been neither to Denmark nor Denver, so there is admittedly the chance that everyone in those places wears something entirely different, like beaver, though I doubt it.)

As we drove to our next location, I made Govinda sit in the front seat and I sat in the back (my first ride from the airport left me feeling a bit too much like both a spectacle and a spectator) so I could lie low and casually watch this bizarre world pass by my window...

On Social Justice

2009-02-13T20:15:00.000-08:00

When I heard that the topic of discussion last night in RCIA would be social justice, I knew that the usually lively discourse could turn contentious, since, though the Catholic Church's teaching on many of these issues is pretty explicit, the issues are close to people's hearts and deeply woven into their experiences. As we began the discussion, however, I realized that Father Joe would take a different tack: he asked us to identify not individual issues but the definition of what constitutes an issue of social justice. Together we broke down the definition: social (affecting or arising at the societal level) + justice (the duty of the state to ensure, using the mechanisms of power, the basic rights of its citizenry). Of course, having been "raised" in InterVarsity, my thoughts immediately went to such salient issues as poverty, racial reconciliation, and laboring on behalf of the oppressed, especially since we had just read the passage in Matthew 25 about doing "unto the least of these".

I soon realized, however, that it is a particular byproduct of Western democracy that people perceive the struggle for equality and justice to mean fighting for one's own rights, to ensure fairness of opportunity and the sovereignty of the individual, in short, to make each man a king and each king an equal. A clear indication of this is that one of the first topics we covered in this newly-defined "social justice" was none other than health care. Health care. Does the state have the responsibility to provide health care to its people? Is private or state-funded health care more convenient or desirable or efficient? On which followed a tip-of-the-iceberg discussion about the merits of capitalism versus socialism. But the entire discussion was rooted in the premise that every citizen should have the same responsibilities as well as the same considerations from the state. I wonder what the apostles and the early Church fathers would have thought if they too could have sat round that table. They all would have gotten up and followed St. Benedict back to his cave and never come out again.

It reminded me of a paper I presented in my Political Theory class at UH, a report on an essay by Iris Marion Young on what she called "special rights". Her assertion is that, for our American society to attain true equality, it is not enough for everyone to have the same "chances", since some of us are privileged to begin with; it's like a race where everyone runs at the same speed but starts at a very different place, and no system like that would be considered fair in any serious sporting circuit. Young goes on to state that certain disadvantaged groups should be able to petition the state for these "special rights" that would allow them to be elevated to (or closer to) a sort of level playing field, that equality isn't a practice, but a goal; it's an end, not a means. This is what I defended.

Before you recoil in revulsion and indignity, let me suggest that it is a very limited view of equality when one looks at one's neighbors to make sure they are not being treated with any special preference. This is the sort of selfish equality that asks a very small "Why?": "Why am I not being given what they are? We should be equal." Frankly, I cannot think of an example in the entire Bible that would even relate this concept of social justice, much less support it. On the other hand, the biblical representation of social justice is, by definition, the strong providing for the weak, the one with much giving to the one with little, the secure meeting the needs of the insecure. In this way, God is not only helping us construct a stable society, but more importantly patterning us to follow His character. Thus, I suggested that - as far as the example about health care goes - the state should provide health care to those who cannot provide it for themselves, and no one else. I will pause for effect as you imagine the looks I got upon making this statement.

Nevertheless, the real aim of social justice, I maintain, is first to ask the big "Why?" questions: "Why was there ever injustice to begin with in our country?" "Why do some people not have even their basic needs met?" "Why is the aim of the American dream based on the glorification of the individual instead of the good of society?" "Why do Americans become, in fact, suspicious when they hear the term the common good?" And, just like acknowledging my own hunger doesn't fill my belly, so the answers to these questions are only the first step and must be followed by some remedial action. It is arguably more inexcusable to detect injustice and fail to act than to be ignorant of it altogether. Thus, the courageous ask the difficult questions knowing that some measure of commitment will be required of them when the answers are divined. But the crucial cornerstone is that we see, like Mother Teresa once wrote, that justice isn't something we seek for ourselves, but something we fight for on behalf of others. And if Mother Teresa was an effective example of this, Christ was one better, the perfect example.

The apostle Paul tells us that, though Christ was fully God as much as he was fully man, "he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped". Instead he came to incite us all to a fervor of unselfhood, of compassion and humility, and of the advocacy of the orphan and the widow, the foreigner, the poor and the oppressed. There is no room in the kingdom of God for the self, since everyone in it has already died to himself. There is no place for any center of being except in the One who is the I AM, for all of creation revolves around the Son. And there can be no consideration for anxiety regarding our own needs, since God has assured us that if He provides for the humbler elements of His creation, He will surely take care of those who are worth much more to Him than birds or plants. Christ gave his life helping to meet the needs of others in love, and he died doing the same. What better definition could we ask for? What more prompting do we need?

1/22/09 - Nepal: Brave New World

2009-02-11T20:47:00.000-08:00

Hot towels on the plane?

I don't know what "numinous" or "mastic" mean. Will have to look them up.

From Netherland: "as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted."

Made it to Delhi; definitely not for the glitz and glamour. Also, I'm exhausted. Also also (or also too), I finished Netherland, though it may take a while to figure out what I think about it. Especially since I'm quite exhausted!

Delhi has been sad! Flight was an overnight with an almost four-hour layover, then it was delayed three more hours. Nobody explained anything. The guards were rude.

There's nowhere to look when you're at an airport (hence all the shameless adverts): a man's wife, a fat woman, a gay man.

Finally on the plane! Bad weather in Kathmandu, it seems. Or fog rather. There's a girl on board who has a nose like a dorsal fin. And the male flight attendant who showed me to my seat in the very back of the plane told me, "Excuse me, sir. I just want to appreciate your wearing very nice attire."

Flying over the Himalayas now. It's beautiful. No snowcaps just here. Look like big chocolate molars. On the peaks and ridges are the carved steppes, green and loamy; plays tricks on your eyes. How poor!

So after all the delays, I finally made it! First impressions - some I've already written - are that poverty has taken on a new definition, and I haven't even reached Bangladesh. My first thought upon landing was that the Kathmandu airport looked very much like an old high school converted for the purpose, a red-brick structure, cold and airy like an English train station. Part of the scholastic impression is the grass growing in the small courtyards between the buildings. It's not an unpleasant impression, and quite disarming really, to see a different sort of airport, one that, though lacking in amenities, is also lacking in gaudy advertisements. That's probably because the gaudy bit was to come when I walked out of the airport.

Enormous crowds of people were pressing against barriers apparently waiting for people to arrive, though there were probably more people waiting than arriving. Before I collected my bag and left the terminal I changed $100 into Nepali rupees at 1:76. I spent a couple hundred rupees having my picture taken as part of the visa requirement, then paid $25 US for the 15-day visa. The girl in front of me in line (the dorsal-fin girl) being told she needed a picture for her visa, went and took it in the booth, but was told they only accept rupees. So she went to change her money and then paid for the picture and got back in the visa line, at which point she presented her picture and was told that they only accept US dollars for the visa fee. So she went back to the money changer and (I'm sure, at a loss) changed her money back into dollars and paid for her visa. I'm sure she had to go again to change her money back into rupees for pocket money! I learned a valuable lesson from her, at least: always be second in line!
Walking down the stairs to the arrival area, I passed a man-sized hand-painted sign, a list of item limits, over which a passenger must declare said items in Customs. One that caught my eye about halfway down: one tricycle. Yes, passengers with two tricycles must declare them both or face the wrath of the Nepali police force.

Since my flight had been over three hours late, I wasn't sure if the hotel rep would still be waiting for me, but it seems he had checked on the flight and had been patient. How I saw my name amid the sea of people is beyond me still.

The adventure really began at that moment though. The two young scalawags took my bag and half-ran with me to the car (though I'm still not sure why this was); the one who carried my bag asked me flat out for a tip: "American dollars. 5? 10?" When I told him that I had nothing between a $1 and a $50, he looked in my wallet and said, "Oh! Dubai money!" (For my extortionately-priced tea at the airport, they had given me change in dirhams.) So I gave him the change, which I realized later amounted to a $15 tip for carrying my bag from the front door of the airport to the car. When he scuttled away triumphantly, I hopped into the front seat (the left one!) and reached for the seatbelt. The driver, seeing my confusion as to which part goes where, laughed and said with a pirate-like gleam in his eye, "Don't worry! In Nepal seatbelt is not necessary."

This is an appropriate time to say that a seatbelt has never been more necessary than in Nepal. Granted, there is often an accompanying exhilaration when one feels his life is at risk, but there are much more glamorous ways to die. Wending our way down from the airport, we drove through some of the - if not the - most destitute areas I have ever seen. Beside the narrow, tortuous roads - and in them - were sweeping swathes of rubbish like snowdrifts, among which some people (and a buffalo) were picking. Small cars weaved and honked as a swarm of motorbikes seemed to parody them by weaving more boldly and honking more loudly and profusely, as the motoring became a sort of anarchized tribute to the national chaos and carelessness.

We passed hovels with low doorways and crouching ceilings, regiments of pleading hawkers and peddlers, sad-eyed mothers and quite-crazy old people. One thing easily noted is the proud beauty of the Nepali women and the eager vigor of the men. It seems, at times, that everyone in the city who is not old and mad is between the ages of 18-28. Even Govinda admitted that there are a lot of young people. I could state the obvious - that there are no jobs here - but even the idea of jobs as things solicited and strived for is not a very functional definition here. It seems like most people have nothing to do, and those who do are selling things.

When we finally reached Thamel (the bohemian tourist district), you could see the surroundings wax more reassuring, the houses more inhabitable, the businesses more solvent. The general air of industry and action gave meaning (if not form) to what had previously been a raucous blight. And though my face relaxed, the fervor outside the car remained at fever pitch as shopkeepers replaced vagrants, schoolkids replaced urchins, colored wares replaced kaleidoscopic rubbish floes.

As we passed the royal palace, my driver grimaced as he told me that there is no more king that lives there (which, thankfully, I already knew). "Prime minister?" I tried to recall. "President!" he beams, and, like a real estate agent, assures me that in four months the palace will be completely renovated to open as a museum. I remember being surprised that he even knew the word "museum". So, naturally, I asked him which sort of head of state was better, because for all his pride in his country's development (a museum!) he must have an opinion. I guess I should have realized that he would be too young, really, to know how corrupt the monarchy had become, and democracy was still too young to have taught him how corrupt it can become.

We arrived at last at the International Guest House, where I took out my wallet and tipped the crazy driver 200 rupees (!!) which felt like a lot at the time, until I later realized it was less than three dollars. It seems like he was disappointed at the time, but how should I have known better? The next day I tipped a different driver 500 rupees for driving us sightseeing around the city and Gopi assured me that was two days' pay for him! So God save me from my (justifiable) ignorance!

As I opened the door to get out of the car, an old man dressed like a WWII veteran shuffled over, took my bag, and followed me into the lobby, where the three of us (including the receptionist) walked up the stairs to see the room. It seemed much like I had remembered it from the website, and I was pleased, so I set my bags down in the room and looked around the hotel a little before calling Gopi to come meet me there. Oddly enough, when I called at the desk, the girl told me that someone had already come by to see if I was there. I asked with my best deadpan face, "Was he really ugly?" before breaking into a laugh, which she shared.

I called Govinda to the hotel, and we went up to the roof and sat at a table like in "Spy Game", looking out over Kathmandu; we took some pictures and talked about our lives. After a while of catching up, we went down to the desk and moved my booking into a twin room so Gopi could stay in the hotel too. We moved our bags and, with our little maps, set out into Thamel to look around.

Dodging all the honking cars and swerving bikes we traipsed lazily along the broken sidewalks, through the marketplaces, all the way to the royal palace, when I started to get hungry. We walked back through the streets, into an alley, and up a set of stairs to a rooftop cafe. It guess it should have been no surprise when I saw only foreigners at the tables, but the food and the service were surprisingly great! From our table we could see down into the T-shaped intersection and even across into the second- and third-story windows of a few indoor cafes, also frequented mostly by tourists.

It was at this cafe that I was introduced to Nepalese food, but it was at another cafe later that night that (after a nap and an email home) I got my first taste of momo, a type of meat-filled dumpling eaten as a finger food with hot sauce - a Nepalese staple. This one we had with chicken, and the red chile dipping sauce was so hot that we both went through two glasses of water and still felt the burn.

It was upon our return to the hotel that we learned a quaint little quirk about our abode: the power came and went in eight-hour cycles at the mercy of the city authorities. Thus, all throughout Thamel (all of Kathmandu, I would later learn) lights went off and came on in a glacial, city-sized blink, and those left in the dark were about as surprised as when the sun sets. Thankfully, the power came on as were talking about taking our showers, so the closing hours of the night were passed in unhindered illumination.

In the bathroom, I took stock of the ablution situation: a tiny bar of soap the color of holly leaves and smelling like citronella, toilet paper made of crenelated manila paper, and towels that would have made John the Baptist shudder. What's more, the shower was fed with hot water by a solar network of pipes on the roof, so after about two minutes of shivering, teeth-clinching avoidance, the water flowed warm enough to stand properly under the shower head. In truth, even with its quirks, the hotel was well nice enough, and what the rooms lacked in amenities (or regularity) was made up for by the restaurant and the service.

Gopi and I clambered into our beds and, yes, turned on the television, on which we wrapped up the night with WWE women's wrestling, the last two minutes of a Scrubs episode, plenty of news on BBC about Barack Obama, and some Indian sitcom that looked like a soap opera on hasheesh. Actually, the last thing we watched was a ten-minute blurb of news and adverts on what I eventually realized was al-Jazeera.

I fell asleep in the City of Frenzied Idleness. Oh, and Abject Squalor.

1/21/09 - Dubai: The Adventure Begins

2009-02-11T02:20:00.000-08:00

Landing in Dubai now. 12:10pm local time. Civilian life begins now. Dubai is full of squares, no slanted roofs. I look at the city and think of solving problems: urban planning, climate crises, or intractable political problems. And I realize that, though the prospect of applying myself to them is stimulating, I only want peace and holiness.

What now in Dubai? To the hotel for a shower, a shave? Coffee (yes!), lunch, a nap? I need to check my email for any last minute updates. It scares me almost not to be connected, but that is part of the adventure, part of the unknown: but this unknown is a return to the distant past.

Also reading Netherland. Not sure what I think yet. He’s unabashedly reminiscent, but there’s something else there.

Things I wish I could teach people not to be: gaudy, tacky, sloppy, pretentious, cliché-invisible, ridiculous.

I just bought a bottle of Scotch, but what for? Was it for the freedom? the relaxation? Can I even take it with me? Best to drink what I can now and worry about the salvage later. The adventure begins!

It is beautiful in Dubai, sunny, clear, breezy. Even with all the bustle and glitz, today is a day that begs one to slow down, to stretch time a bit, like a day in North Africa from a Camus novel. As usual, I feel encumbered, like I’ve brought too much for this journey. I wonder why. I think I should be a cost analyst in Dubai. That would be nice.

It unnerves me to hear Americans – usually in a southern drawl – say Doo-buy, instead of Dubai. They don’t mind that they are wrong, and that is the root of it.

The bus to the hotel is no better than waiting at the airport except that you get to watch the city go by. And the storefronts, shabby and half-hearted, remind me of Mexico, or at least LA. And grass. Grass! Palms, of course. And…shrubs??

Will Dubai ever shake the blight of construction? It’s like a woman getting herself ready for a party, but who will never be ready enough. (I just passed a “24-hr Hypermarket”!)

At the Star Metro Hotel in Dubai for a quick stop-off before the flight on to Nepal. Nepal: even to say that, it doesn't mean a real place, really. More like an idea. More like an intention. The news says that a 'wistful' Bush says goodbye to the White House; they didn't even need moving vans. It just goes to show that the president is a man (or woman!) just like everyone else. Eight years! Really?! Obama is dancing his way into office (and the hearts of the world) as my shoes squeak like a latex man wringing himself out. The nice Kenyan young man just brought me my coffee - after two doubles and a walk - and asked me if I was from The Netherlands. "No," I returned stupidly, "but I would like to go there." Not false, I suppose, but it made him say that we have a lot in common!

And why do they call Barack Obama black? He is half-American and half-African, so he is African-American, but neither of his parents was African-American. Won't someone wake up someday and realize that it is a bit racist to call him black when he is only as much black as he is white?

From Netherland: "mystery is treasurable, even necessary; mystery...is...space." "I still have no firm idea, not least because I have no firm idea whether my own descent into disorder was referable to an Achilles' heel or whether it's a generally punishable folly to approach life trustingly."

I wish I had a book in which I could write down the scraps of memories that come back to me with time. I would remember the time (since I'm using Splenda in my coffee) when Spandex told me that I should start using Splenda because it would help my forgetfulness, or at least stem the loss from using other synthetic sweeteners. Or the time I had a dream about cereal made from Splenda, and then seeing it (in my dream still) for sale at Sam's in large quantities; sitting at David's coffee shop in Alvin - Barista's, before it went under - talking about cereal made of Splenda, while David sings "Michelle" by the Beatles, and we play Scrabble without keeping score.

I see a commercial about tourism for Greece and I think of you - Oh, You! What a mess I made of you, of us. How happy we could never have been, I think. But I will always remember you. It is embarrassing, even soul-destroying, to think that I may always long for you, even if I never have you. Have you...what does that even mean? To have but not keep? To have and to hold? Goodbye...

Sitting at Costa in the Dubai Airport, drinking a $4 cup of chamomile tea. Had a good chat with Dan (DS Maintenance at JBB - I think we processed together), another good chat with Mike (from HQ) before running into Heath at dinner. I really surprised myself because I know I'm not much of a chatter. I do want to love people though. By the way, between the three of us in the hotel room, we polished off about 2/3 of a bottle of Laphroig! Woot! Everything's going magically beautiful so far - knock on wood!

More from Netherland: "clouds like rats ran across the sky..." "He is, in memory, weighty. But what is the meaning of this weight? What am I supposed to do with it?"

A Sort of Immortality

2009-02-09T22:22:00.000-08:00

It is perhaps no great secret that I am, where true charity is concerned, a miser, tight-fisted and impassive, quick to illumine the most superficial traces of treason in others, rooting out betrayal to some greater Understanding, while keeping my own face - equally subject to the most sinister of upheavals, any one of which would belie profound weakness, like a lurid mural painted on a lighthouse lens - securely shrouded in a fog of general disdain.

I have often been disquieted by the bleak prospect of anyone having anything to say that was not abjectly inane, but I have lately realized that I have been wrong and the problem is really that there is simply nothing to say. Surely that can't rightly count as an increase in charity, though, to realize merely that the limitations of others are also my own, that my kinship with them lies most deeply in our shared incapacity for ever achieving individuality, distinctness from one another. "My ability to love you is rooted in the deconstruction of the fear that you could be superior to me, since neither of us will ever amount to anything, or the illusion that I could be superior to you, since we all amount to everything."

To prove my case I shall endeavor to meet people, "interesting" people, and draw them out of themselves a bit, for the sole purpose of making characters of them. (Isn't that what Joyce did so well?) I don't mean to do this in an insidious way, for though it is admittedly a bit utilitarian, it is in the most unselfish of ways, since I mean to solicit from one in order to give to many. (And isn't that what Robin Hood did so well?) It is something like mining the world for people and then mining those people for anything that is remarkable. Perhaps some will even be flattered to become characters, either because they want dearly to believe themselves remarkable or because characters achieve a sort of immortality in written form. They are sure to be disappointed, then, to find that I don't mean to write anything at all, but that my life is the novel, my autobiography - my memoir; they will find it a blow to their inflated self-hoods to know that their remarkableness will expire with my final breath - or my final moment of lucidity, which often precedes the other by a startling margin - and that they are less immortal than those who never lived at all.

There is no love without understanding, no understanding without the desire for it; there are no secrets in love that are not closely guarded, and its sentries ask only for a movement, a particular inclination of the head, signaling an openness, a willingness: they guard the most ferociously not against ferocity but against guardedness: they are most offended by a defense. Just as rage is disarmed by meekness, so is love dismantled by the pretext of lovableness that is really a wall built with the sole intention of having someone try (and fail) to scale it. He is not capable of love who declares, "Love me, if you dare!" as if love were a mortal challenge, a duel, and we each an Achilles or Hector. This is not to say that love must not be earned, but it must indeed by mutual love be earnable. This then is the key to love: that love is itself the key and not the chain or the barred door.

Leaving Bangladesh

2009-01-30T01:58:00.000-08:00

I had dreamed of doing a travel blog (I hate the word blog, by the way) but I soon found that those things work better in places WITH lots of computers. Not that I don't love more natural countries, because I do, and maybe it's better anyway because I spend less time on the computer writing about my experiences and spend more time making them. I will do something of the sort, though, when I return to Iraq. But for now I just wanted to say (to my imaginary, non-existent audience) that before taking a trip like this one must be ready to come home changed. I always knew that, I think, only it's becoming more real with every one of the endless experiences of a foreign (in more ways than one) world. That's enough for now. I think. Out.

My Body Broken

2009-01-16T20:48:00.000-08:00

Being a civilian on a military base is like being a dad at prom. I don't mean someone who became a dad at prom. I mean someone named Stu or Lou or Gus, someone who looks like a bank manager even if he is a firefighter or a sniper. And not only does Stu have no kids at this prom, he never was a kid, or at least not like any kid he sees around him now. He doesn't understand the lingo, doesn't get the fascination with texting across the room, across the table, and has no use for angst of any breed (or brood, rather).

Of course, this is not entirely the case. The ex-military guys swagger around like the star quarterback, the one who cemented his legacy by becoming the special teams coach who also taught history. Or the girl who probably feels more like a dad at a Chinese buffet than anything, the way she eyes soldiers like egg rolls in camo. But for the teeming masses of us who pointedly feel the absurdity of our presence here ... on second thought, I don't know that most people feel that way at all. What if it's just me?

Some Christmas Thoughts

2008-12-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

The real reason for Christmas is to give everyone the chance to tell everyone else what the real reason for Christmas is. Otherwise people would have nothing to talk about for two weeks in December.

Also, I don't understand why many Christians object to the occasional shortening of the word "Christmas" to "X-mas". They seem to think it blasphemous, they think that people "take the Christ out of Christmas" - and I would agree with them...if it were any other letter. But the first initial of "Christ" in Greek wasn't C (which they didn't have) or even K (which they often used the way we use C); it was X. The early Church would very often replace the full name of Christ with the initial X or XR (chi rho, a symbol still used in religious imagery). Granted, not everyone who writes "X-mas" is thinking about the Greek, much less knows Greek, but at least Christians should realize how much more powerful it is (and consistent with Church tradition, no less) not to anathematize a cultural symbol, but to co-opt it. Besides, that's how we have the holiday of Christmas in the first place: Emperor Constantine commandeered a pagan feast day and Christianized it. Transcend, Faithful of God!! Transcend!

Finally, I realized that Santa won't get my Christmas list until Jan. 11 because of the slow mail here. That is, if the North Pole isn't melted by then...

Ten Things That Depress Me

2008-12-22T07:57:00.000-08:00

This is the first Christmas I will be spending away from home (or Scotland) so, in that spirit, I've here decided to list a few other things that I find utterly depressing. Commence!

medication packaging - I'm convinced this is why I don't get sick, because it would ruin me. Even worse is when people take the pills from the little perforated foil-and-plastic squares and don't tear them off and throw them away. It's awful.
ketchup packets - I offer no explanation for this one. If you don't feel it, I certainly can't explain it to you. It's like postmodernism that way.
the tremor in one's voice when he is deeply angry - I overheard this today from a man on the phone and it is exactly soul-destroying.
platitudes of death - Especially the ones people use to fill empty space (and the emptiness in their hollow souls) because they are terrified of conversation, or intimacy. Things like, "Oh, well, you know," and "It is what it is," and "What are you gonna do?"
self-imposed illiteracy - The intentional choice NOT to read when one is fully capable of doing so.
television - The drone, the flicker, all of it.
leprosy
marketing - Especially the holiday variety.
fine print - Depression distilled.
covers of pop songs by country artists - Shameful.

(to be continued...)

Disjointed

2008-12-07T06:30:00.000-08:00

Got my Old Navy today. Sweaters, socks, a hoodie. A few other things. Now I can sleep. Let me explain. My roommate likes the cold. Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy. He just thinks he's a penguin. Like last night. I had to get up a few times. Too much coffee, you know. And the bathroom is far, about a minute away. Unless I use the porta-john. And then it's about ten seconds. Well, it was warm out, but not really warm. Just less cold than my room. Do you see? But now I'm good. I can dress for the next day. Really layer it on. Just peel off the top layer every morning. Off to work. Brilliant.

This guy is heading off to work, too. Because today is Pearl Harbor Day. Or whatever it's called. The day the Japs killed 2,402 of us. It took them 353 planes. But, listen. Four years later, we killed 220,000 of them. And it only took this one plane. Does that mean we won? And what does it mean when people say we should remember? What does that mean? Remember what? Remember who? The 2,402 or the 220,000? How about the number 15? That was the number of planes the US built like this one to drop atomic bombs. Or 3? That was the number of those 15 that flew to Hiroshima that day. One dropped the bomb. One took pictures. One measured the blast. So it was a military strike, a photo shoot, and a science project all rolled into one. Handy.

Also, I read a Chekhov short story last night that disturbed me so much I sat for a minute or two with the book closed just staring at the wall. It's called "At Sea". It's about four pages. And if it had that effect on me, I can only imagine what they thought when it was written over 100 years ago. I can picture Chekhov writing it, then sitting in silence for a few minutes. He would have shown it to a friend who was familiar with his work, who would have read it and felt a shiver go up his spine. He then would have sent it to a publisher, a literary magazine maybe, and the editor would have opened the envelope and immediately felt the warmth begin to drain from him; he would have read, lowered the folded pages, and stared at his paperweight. The phone would have rung, snapping him like a whip. It was Chekhov, asking if the editor had received his story! If I could write a story like that it would go something like this:

A poor woman is hungry and desperate and alone. She is huddled in a dark doorway in a city, shivering and shabby. She prays to God that He would send her an angel. As she opens her eyes, she sees a light across the street that hadn't been there before. She rises to follow it, certain that her prayer has been heard. As she stumbles across to the light, a door opens and she sees that the light is not an angel, but the tip of a lit cigarette in the hand of a pimp. She freezes, confused and lost, and falls to her hands and knees on the wet cobblestone. The pimp watches as a moving van runs her over. He coolly snuffs out his cigarette on the brick wall, crosses himself, and steps through the door.

Something like that, yeah.

Count the Hours

2008-11-24T22:36:00.001-08:00

If you're not familiar with the Liturgy of the Hours, you may have heard of it referred to by its more common name, the breviary. The Liturgy is the daily prayer and devotional book (actually, a set of four books) used by all Catholic priests, bishops, monks, nuns, and laypeople, and it progresses through the Church year from Advent to the feast day of Christ the King. It is a beautiful and instrumental guide to daily worship, both personal and communal, that allows one to stay centered on God throughout the entire day through a patterned structure of prayers, psalms, Scripture readings, writings of Church fathers, and other meditations. Intended to be the framework for the daily life of the religious (those who live in monasteries and convents) and the clergy, the council of Vatican II strongly encouraged the Catholic laity to participate in this daily devotion as well. I can say firsthand that it is nothing short of transformational.

Having been raised in church, I have bought my fair share of devotional books that have helped me in my daily "quiet time". The catch-phrase of InterVarsity in college also centered around this notion of a time set aside each day for God, though it was certainly observed less frequently than, say, brushing my teeth or doing my homework. I do remember one point in my early teenage years when, living in our attic, I kept by my bed a stack of books that I would go through bit by bit each night, including devotional works, Bible commentary, and the Bible itself; I would journal and pray and call it a night. Those times were certainly quiet, and definitely educational, but I never understood the concept of becoming centered on God until I visited the convent near U of H after college. There, in those sheltered grounds in the midst of a monster city, and among holy women who had left their "nets" and had offered their lives to Christ in matrimonial devotion, did I understand that God desires our hearts more than our brains, our stillness more than our actions, our submission more than our accomplishments. What good is it to become educated in the things of God and never to have communed with Him in my most inner place? What good is a body that is a temple if Jesus is merely the traveling rabbi and not the High Priest? What good is a spiritual resume when the job requires that you only enlist?

So each day at 6:00, 9:00, 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00, my Outlook calendar pops up to remind me to stop what I'm doing and refocus on Christ. I take the Liturgy outside to the bunker, which is in itself a symbol of simplicity and poverty of heart, and spend a few minutes in the silence and peace of the presence of God. Today, for example, I read passages like the following:
- "We offer God our gift of self in union with the Spirit."
- "Surrender to God, and he will do everything for you."
- "Turn away from evil, learn to do God's will; the Lord will strengthen you if you obey him."
- "Wait for the Lord to lead, then follow in his way."

Doing this has made each day an entire quiet time. Prayer greets me when I rise. Prayer sustains me throughout the day. Prayer sends me off to sleep at night. Living in a world that bombards us with the daily blitzkrieg of stimuli, a million cares vying for our attention, it is crucial to abide in Christ. What a comfort to know that I am praying the same prayer as thousands and thousands of Christians each day as I say: "Protect us, Lord, as we stay awake; watch over us as we sleep, that awake, we may keep watch with Christ, and asleep, rest in his peace."

Christ the King

2008-11-24T02:17:00.000-08:00

Walking over the uneven gravel to the restroom last night, I saw a man just outside the door of the latrine. He had a white handlebar mustache and a W.E.B. Griffin novel which, being open in his hands, led me to ask if he was waiting for the men's room. "Nope, just reading."

I don't know why these strange things surprise me anymore, or why I even look for things to make sense. And as strange as it seems here at times, I don't imagine it's any different "out there" in the real world. Kids shoot their own parents or off themselves via web-cam, parents lock their kids in cellars and have babies by them. The same extremists that kidnap and terrorize in Somalia are fighting piracy as our allies; and while rich Western business interests are paying $20M in ransom, millions of Africans all across the continent are being raped, bullied, murdered, and starved for the sake of power.

Less violent battles - though no less contentious - are being waged in our own country to ensure that Americans can marry who they want, end their lives when they want, and dictate that morality where they want in the world.

Yesterday was the feast day of Christ the King, a feast day founded in the early 20th century to remind us of the sort of kingdom he reigns over: the spiritual. In the age of presidents, emperors and dictators, the Church decided to recall the promises of Christ to be our King of Kings. Looking at my self-destructing world, I too long for Jesus to come and deliver us, to reclaim the throne of the world and set things right again. That is the misguided messianic hope, however, that caused Israel to miss her true King when he came to save her.

He stormed into the burning building of the World to rescue her but she would not come. Instead they tied him up and fiddled as they all burned together. After the ashes had cooled, Jesus stepped out into the daylight and didn't even smell of smoke!

I pray that we all can let Christ reign in our lives before it is too late. We were never meant to rule over our own lives: we are not gods. We're ridiculous, small, weak people. We can't forget that. We can't miss him again. God is not our President; we did not elect him. Instead he is King and elected us to be his countrymen. A bad king is worse than the worst president, but the best president could never compare with the true King, the King to whom alone we should pledge our allegiance, the only King who can offer true freedom and liberty.

We often remember Jesus' words when he says that we should give to Caesar what is Caesar's. But in this inverted world we often forget the rest of his enjoinder: give to God what is God's. To turn an upside-down world upside-down is the only way to set it right.

On Attraction

2008-11-06T21:10:00.000-08:00

Why does man (i.e. unredeemed human nature) place so much stock in attraction? I guess, in truth, it's less a human phenomenon than an overarching animal one. Most male animals - though I am no zoologist - seek to attract the attention of females in their life-groups by boisterous displays of their masculinity or virility, in essence making the argument of dominance by an open airing or broadcasting of their features or abilities. They beat their chests and toss their heads, they roar and snarl and look menacing, or some may simply display their bright plumage in silent majesty. In some instances this same instinct can be identified in man: guys at the gym comparing gaudy biceps, on the roads driving monolithic (and, yes, phallic) ozone-killers, in the pub (or lacking that, as here, the office) bragging about their various seedy exploits to those they think are of like mind. But there is a distinctly human permutation of this natural attraction that is both mutual and mystical.

In animals, it seems there are the alpha and the others. Of course, there are deviations, even matriarchal animal societies, but there is very little evidence of dejection in animals as humans know it. That is to say that animals, it seems, do not feel the need to search for acceptance, to prove their worth as individuals, either to the group or to other individuals. Animals that live in society, on the contrary, fill some understood role in the life-group to which they belong, and their struggle is of the survival and subsistence of that group. Humans, however, while operating loosely within the parameters of the family and various other tenuous communal associations, have identified (or derived) some more elevated (degenerate, really) need that goes beyond a static belonging in the physical sense to a desperate striving for validation, a validation not merely natural or socio-ecological but intensely personal and purportedly spiritual. Man, at birth, is saddled with the burden of proof to give justification for that very birth. Thus he asks the question, "Why was I born?" and is dissatisfied with any answer that is not his own. At the very least man requires a validation of the integral self as a discrete candidate among humans.

It is in this way that I say the human indulgence in attraction is mystical, for, being distinct from that of other animals, it cannot be traced to genetic makeup or scientific analysis (though it has no doubt been attempted). It is also mystical in the sense that it represents a state of being, for it is not enough for man (base man) to have been attractive, but instead he must perpetually be attractive, be validated and given his sense of worth from without, like nourishment, however he may attempt to find it. One can easily see how defeating and hopeless - at the very least exhausting - life in such a prison must be. And it is even more pronounced - and more insidious - regarding physical attraction of the romantic type. That is not to say that physical attraction cannot be a critical or necessary link in the forging of a romantic relationship that leads to a faithful marriage, but that most often it is tragically wielded as something much less hallowed.

For most people, I would venture to say, attraction is the vanguard of all romantic forays, primarily in the critical physical sense, but to a lesser degree in the intangible "chemistry" often divined between oneself and another. But let us not confound the elementary with the fundamental, for those impulses of the body are to be governed by the soul (i.e. the mind, the will, the heart, the conscience) and not to rule over it. How ironic, therefore, that the one distinction that elevates man above other animals (the soul) is the one he most absurdly misunderstands, and even injures through his unwillingness to develop beyond his animal nature. And, in truth, even animals exist according to their natures, which are neither good nor bad, but merely animal. Humans, however, cannot claim such ambivalence, for they are only living within their true, complete natures when they are able to reconcile both body and soul in one balanced unit.

One can easily see, since the operative word is "balanced", how attraction exists as one of many elements of a single whole, and that not even the dominant part. To be attracted to someone merely because of their outward beauty is redolent of the moth flying into the flame, because to pursue beauty singularly is just as blinding - and as fatal - as the flame is to the moth, though he will never know it until it is too late for him to know anything. Similarly, to be found attractive and to be pursued because of it, while initially flattering to our needful soul-stunted ids, is nothing more than being judged as a book by one's cover - and equally bound to disappoint the indiscriminate reader. This human equivalent of window-shopping does nothing but increase in intensity the hunger for acceptance that can never be found in the consumption of others.

I speak as someone who has learned this lesson not only from being burned, and not from being tossed aside after the last page, but from perpetuating the human self-slavery by compelling others to doubt their own self-worth because of my own incontinence. That is to say that I have seen the damage firsthand - from my own hand - and it is devastating. When I have been unfaithful in my heart, it has caused the one that loved me to ask, "What is wrong with me or lacking in me that would make him seek it elsewhere?" It is something akin to a radioactive leak or an oil slick in that, while it may be cleaned up in time and with great effort, there is no way to account for the loss, and no way to repay it.

Attraction is, I suggest, a blessing when it exists in its proper place, an energetic vibration that stimulates and enhances the true love between one man and one woman. But that does not mean it only exists in that place, or even mostly in that place. It is an impulse, a voice that beckons. But to where does it beckon you? Is it a voice that leads you to cherish the other, that leads you deeper into the mystery of love? Or does it whisper rebellion in your heart, a supplanting of innocence with experience in the name of the glory of the self? of humanity? Does it call you deeper into the Truth that is the Way to Life? Or does it say to you, "This above all: to thine own self be true"? Does your affinity for another draw you to the Truth that sets you free? Or does it enslave you by bending your will to its, a single-minded pursuit for something elusive and anti-gratifying? "Her feet go down to death," reads Proverbs 5:5, a reminder that there is no such thing as being true to the self, because the self only knows one thing: to obey.

God is Love, and just as God has many names, so does love. But the love that satisfies is not the love that seeks to be satisfied, but the love that gives out of pure love for the other. To indulge in or nurse attraction because it is gratifying is to gratify only the animal nature. And though flattering, it is too fleeting, for it seeks not the completion found in contentment, but the pacification of a passing hunger. It is this that Jesus stressed to the Samaritan woman at the well. We were not created to consume one another, but to commune with one another, sitting at banquet table, eating the Bread of Life together; only then will we never be hungry again.

...before you go

2008-11-05T02:11:00.000-08:00

Five things I wish to say before you go
four of which pertain to you and me
three will make little difference
two may come as a surprise
one is this: I was wrong.

Sunday Simmering

2008-11-02T01:33:00.000-07:00

I'm kinda bummed because there was no RCIA again today, for the third week running now. Well, I should say that there was no official RCIA since our priest has been traveling to outlying bases most of the past month. A layman major has been facilitating discussions in the meantime but it's hardly the same, so much so that I left early a few weeks ago, didn't go at all last week, and left today before it even started. Mass was so great last night, too. The younger Irish priest officiated, which is great because he brings youth and enthusiasm. He even spoke to me on the way in and after the service, asking me what my story was. (He had asked me before why I came only to receive a blessing during the Communion, instead of partaking in it - which I can't yet.) The music was great - next week I actually get to play the piano! And I've been reading in about six different books almost every night this week when I get off work, continuing my Catholic journey with every spare minute I get. So it's disappointing when - instead of what used to be the highlight of my week - I end up thwarted in my desire for more knowledge and understanding. But I understand that the entire reason the priest isn't here with us is because he is out at many of the much smaller bases sharing the Eucharist with those who only participate in it once every month or two. How they must long for that much rarer opportunity! Ah, how selfish I am.

You, in List Form

2008-11-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

1. You are a sad song I put on repeat.
2. You are someone I made up so I could feel more alone.
4. You are the number three.
5. You are the purest memory I have left.
6. You are afraid of the light within you because you are your own shadow.
7. You are too far away.
8. You are in the bathroom smoking while I muster the courage to ring your bell.
9. You are the city where no one sleeps.
10. You are a warm pair of shoes on a shirtless man.
11. You are the Twin Sorrows.
12. You are coming with me to Australia.

Wise Words

2008-10-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

Peace by way of war is like purity by way of fornication. It's like telling someone murder is wrong and then showing him by way of execution. - Derek Webb

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time, the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thus says the LORD: For three crimes of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke my word; Because they sell the just man for silver, and the poor man for a pair of sandals. They trample the heads of the weak into the dust of the earth, and force the lowly out of the way. - The Prophet Amos

From the Mantle

2008-10-27T04:09:00.000-07:00

There is a garden
full of things said and unsaid.
In cages are locked
all truths and love-whispers,
quiet and downcast,
while around them dance blithely
wicked lies and insults,
mocking and taunting,
exulting in their freedom:
for they were the things said.

A Small Truth

2008-10-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

The sharpest injury in being a failure is that one is given as consolation only those few decent memories salvaged from the wreckage of one's life, without which it would certainly be more bearable to begin again unburdened. Thus God, in His mercy, makes being a failed man unbearable by weighing him down not with his many catastrophes but with his few successes.

Come Together

2008-10-24T00:15:00.000-07:00

So I was reading in my Catholic theology books last night about the sacraments, and something really beautiful stood out. Regarding the Sacrament of Reconciliation (which until the 1970s was called confession), the Church teaches that sincere penitence necessarily flows out of the authentic desire to be forgiven, a desire which manifests itself in two ways, a greater and a lesser. The weaker way, called attrition, is the desire to be forgiven so as to avoid negative consequences - namely, to escape hell. While still valid, it is from a base part of man's spiritual psyche: the desire for self-preservation. On the other hand, the higher path, the path of contrition, stems from the realization that sin ruptures one's relationship with a loving and gracious God; it's the desire for restoration to the covenant relationship established with the Father, through Christ, in the Holy Spirit.

How much of American spiritual history has been rooted in attempts to save men from the fires of hell! I cringe when I think that all this time we have been offering mankind a second-hand salvation, a Machiavellian admixture of fear and destitution that lasts only for the moment and is not rooted in love at all. Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." He did not say, "Blessed are the piles of worthless scum, for they shall escape hell only by the skin of their teeth." Then why do we offer them this message?

The Bible asks us to fear God not hell, to love Him not ourselves. He asks us to have hope in a future that begins now, not to live in a present anxiety that our past will dictate our future. In the same vein, when we repent of our sins God desires us to feel genuine contrition, a loss of Him, a destitution or poverty of soul that demands of us that we drop everything and fix the rupture, close the breach. That's what love does. It heals what is ailing, repairs what is broken, and seeks out what has been lost. That's why it's call Reconciliation. And that, my friends, is beautiful!

Something About Mary

2008-10-20T22:33:00.000-07:00

I talked with a guy here a few months ago who told me he met his wife on the Internet. They talked for months before she took the leap and moved down from Ohio. They lived together in Texas until they got married and he came to work here in Iraq. Actually, I've met two couples who did that same thing. Personally, I'd be TERRIFIED to do something so risky, something that could go so horribly and irrevocably wrong. Personally, I think it was hard enough dating someone on a different continent for almost two years, living with the anxiety that finally living together in the same place would be entirely gangly and awkward at times. And personally, that's exactly what I did - I realized last night - for the first 25 years of my spiritual life.

Let me explain. I spent last night reading in five different books the various chapters they offered on the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Having been raised Protestant, I inherited a cast-iron suspicion of any talk of Mary that elevated her beyond a hapless young woman chosen at random to do the messy work of birthing the Christ. We are taught that she is no one special, that she didn't do anything special, and that it is blasphemy to afford her any special attention that may impinge upon that honor which we owe to her Son, Jesus. Besides the fact that none of that makes any rational sense, it struck me last night that it is the spiritual equivalent of Internet dating. It's like saying that your wife is beautiful but that you've never seen her except in the dark.

The Revelation of St. John refers to Mary as "a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars" (Rev. 12:1). Yet in the Protestant tradition she is the mother we lock in the attic, dressed in a black dress, and referred to only in euphemisms and only at Christmas. I don't intend this entry to be an apologetic outline in defense of Mary - there is too much incredible material already out there - or as a polemic against Protestant ignorance, but I will correct a few flagrant - and stubborn - misunderstandings about the Mother of God.

First, she is just that, the Mother of God. She is not just the mother of Jesus, the carpenter, the human, but the mother of the person of Jesus Christ, who existed in nature as both fully man and fully God, indivisibly one person, two natures. (Frank Sheed's Theology for Beginners is a great reference work if this theological idea is confusing on its face.) She didn't give birth to a mere human who God then invaded and made deity the moment he breached the womb. Furthermore, Mary did not simply sit and let Jesus gestate inside of her and then send him off into the world after Bethlehem. Much more than that, she was chosen! (Luke 1:28, 30) Imagine that: God chose who His own mother would be, chose Mary because she was the best fit for the Son of the Father. Of course, God is eternal and was not born at all, but the second person of the Trinity, Jesus the Son, was both fully eternal (as God) and born of the Virgin (as man). He chose Mary out of every other woman in the world - in history, really - to give her motherly love and guidance (and her DNA) to the Messiah.

Second, and most important in Marian devotion in the Catholic faith, she is a model - the model - of obedience to God's will, as is illustrated by her answer to the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word." She devotes her life to raising Jesus to manhood, and he lives with her until the time of his ministry, at age 30. At that time, she becomes his servant, following him as a disciple even to the foot of the cross (Jn 19:25). Even after, in the early church, she was given a special place among the faithful. In Acts 1, "Mary the mother of Jesus" and the apostles are the only ones mentioned by name, while everyone else is included in "some women" and "his brothers" (Acts 1:14). She is special!!

Finally, what makes the most breathtaking impression on me is the radiant beauty of God seen through what Timothy Gray calls "the window of Mary". He suggests that Jesus is the light but that Mary is the window through which we see him in fully human form: just as Jesus showed us God in human-divine form, Mary showed us Jesus in fully human form. That's why Peter Kreeft calls her "the crowning glory of the human race" and the English poet Wordsworth writes that she is "our tainted nature's solitary boast." And yet, just as Jesus never sat on an earthly throne, Mary lived with a singular devotion to Christ and the humility he adopted as his own. Thomas Merton even refers to her as the human personification of hiddenness and poverty.

How is it, then, that Protestants can feel comfortable with Joel Osteen's face on a billboard or Joyce Meyer's face on a million TV screens, but shiver at the thought of Mary's face being seen anywhere except on a two-inch high ceramic nativity doll? How can we tell Jesus that we love him but don't care so much about his own mother? Would we do that with our own spouse? Never.

So here it is:

- Catholics don't worship Mary, they hold her in the same high regard that Jesus held her. In treating Mary with great respect, they are following the example of Christ, which is what we are all asked to do. Furthermore, they don't idolize her. She is not a god, or any form of deity. Images and icons of Mary are there to remind us of her and her example, in the same way that the picture of my granddad in his Air Force bomber jacket reminds me to live up the standards he taught me.

- Catholics don't pray to Mary instead of God, they pray asking her to pray for them, to intercede on our behalf to her Son who loves her still as his mother, just as we ask others to pray for us when we especially need it. And just as we hope to see our loved ones in heaven and recognize them for who they are, so Mary is still Jesus' mother in heaven and he still recognizes her as such. At the wedding in Cana, the site of Jesus' first miracle, it was Mary that interceded to Jesus on the behalf of the hosts, and it was Mary who urged total obedience by the stewards: "Do whatever he tells you" (Jn 2:1-5). Catholics aren't just making this stuff up.

- Catholics don't exalt Mary because of her splendor and greatness, but because of her humility and lowliness. Don't forget that just as Jesus was born in a manger, so it was Mary that gave birth to him there, in a stable, in a cave. That's humility. Furthermore, she gave her life to her devotion to Jesus, never standing in his way or trying to force on him her own ideas of what he should be, not even trying to interfere with his death on the cross. She loved him as her only son, but she worshipped him as the Son of God. Just before his death, Jesus irrevocably and eternally fused her with His Church when he instituted the bond between her and the beloved disciple, John, the only apostle that followed Jesus to the cross that day. Through Christ's will, because of his love for her and her devotion to him, and on behalf of the whole Church, she became our Mother. So she is still. Present tense.

Keats got it half-right when he wrote in Ode on a Grecian Urn: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." The truth is beautiful; it sets us free. If nothing else, turn the light on and see your Christian faith in the full light of its glory - through the immaculate window of Mary. Or continue to be content bedding your wife, your husband, in the dark, never knowing the fullness of grace and beauty given to us by Christ. Either way, you'll meet her sooner or later, if not here, then in heaven. I just hope you recognize her. She'll be the one with the twelve stars in her crown and the moon under her feet.

A Who-Shaped What?!

2008-10-18T03:26:00.000-07:00

Was it St. Augustine that first mentioned the idea of a "God-shaped hole" within a man, a hole he tries to fill with whatever rubbish he can get his hands on? (Not to take credit away from Jesus' own story of the prodigal son.) But I was thinking today that I don't (at least cognizantly) fit into this category. To me it is less important to be content than to be relevant. In that case, it is more like I am convinced there is a me-shaped hole in the world somewhere that I am searching for, a hole in which to insert myself and become complete. (Then again, maybe I think this because the God-shaped hole within me is already filled with...God.) Of course, as nice as this sounds, it too is a lie.

People have often told me that God has a real purpose for my life, that he is preparing me for something good, something big. Are they prophets? Well, no, but they mean well. They're nice people who like to live vicariously through others because their own lives are cripplingly boring. Or they take pleasure in cursorily doling out blessings like tracts in a public bathroom, leaving them on the soiled seat hoping some of them bloom into souls. The dangerous part of what these people do is to plant the wrong seeds, the seeds of pride and ambition that germinate into explosive weeds. But how do they know that unless they've never been told that?

Ambition is a curse, and anyone who has lived within earshot of its Siren song would know that. (For a visual aid, see every corporate boss now being subpoenaed by Congress.) What I wish they had said is, "Follow Christ. He'll take you wherever you need to go, whether high or low." Solomon's writings in Ecclesiastes make it clear that wise men see a world rife with injustice, see that fools are rich, that good men live in the dirt. Isaiah writes that God's ways are not our ways. So why do we think that being gifted means you have a bright path before you? Doesn't Christ himself say that of him to whom much is given much will be expected? What better example do we need?

No one in history had to deal with this more than Christ. Despite the fact that the people from his own hometown never put much stock in him, most of his followers expected something more of him, something grander. Many were disappointed when his crusade came to its "end" on the cross, and when he died many faint hopes died with him, never to know him as a risen Messiah that conquered death. To them he existed only as a letdown. I'm sure he was tempted to be "more" than the sacrificial Lamb. In fact, I know he was: Satan held it before him after his baptism, dangled it in front of him. One act of worship to the enemy and Jesus could have had all the earthly dominion this world had to offer.

But Jesus showed us that the kingdom of heaven is not about this world and what it has to offer. In fact, Jesus' ministry should teach us that the kingdom of heaven can only be attained when the old world is rejected, the old self is left behind. And there is no room for ambition in the kingdom. Unfortunately, it wasn't only Christ who taught us that, but Satan too. He was hoping to catch Christ in the same trap that he himself fell into, and then was cast into. But Christ rejected his temptation quoting from the Hebrew scriptures: "'The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.'" He wasn't just refusing to worship Satan.

He was refusing to serve himself.

I'm Sorry, I'm Engaged

2008-10-13T03:45:00.000-07:00

My Lord,

I just wanted to drop you a quick line to beg you to excuse me from the banquet this evening. Of course, I'm very excited for you and I'm sure everyone there will have a wonderful time; your son has so many friends! But like I was saying, I am rather busy just now, unfortunately, what with things really heating up at work and all. Surely you know how demanding my work can be. We can't all wander around all day chatting with our friends, can we? In fact, I haven't even had a spare minute to bury my father who - I'm sure you remember how it was with Lazarus - is beginning to smell to high hell! Pardon the crudeness. On the other hand, he always was a patient man, I guess. Aside from that, I promised my wife weeks ago that I would redecorate the den; she's got a wee case of the empty nest syndrome, if you ask me. And as if that wasn't enough, there are all the crops and livestock to tend to, which I've been trying to get the kids to help with, though with little success. They put their minds to it for a while but they can't stick with it for long; I tell them that we can't just snap our fingers and have a full table, but try getting them to listen. They've never been very good at seeing the things that are really important.

Anyway, I'm sure you're busy playing the host, but please accept my apologies. Some other time. Definitely.

Sincerely,
Richard Young

To David of Yuanlin

2008-10-12T01:11:00.000-07:00

In separate streams of severed dreams,
In listing last year's loss,
The scuffle seems to come between
The comfort and the cost.

The stump of shorted time, aborted
Columns carved in lead,
When counted, scored, amount to more
Than mouths will leave unsaid.

Lead back the time, repack the rind
Around the fruit now fallen
Or, sated, saunter farther on
To some more fertile stall.

In time you'll come to find a home
And build a bridge across
The silt-soul stream, the several dreams,
The comfort and the cost.

Good Mourning

2008-10-10T22:55:00.000-07:00

It's cool outside this morning, not quite wintry, decidedly autumnal. Thanksgiving weather we'd call it as kids, or still do, I think. Or was it Christmas weather? I can't remember. For most Americans it augurs the coming of the holidays, the prospect of snow, or in Texas simply the end of the oppressive cow's-mouth summer. It also reminds me of California in May, the good part of California, the part where people go to see the ocean, the proper ocean, where they sit in silence, the thoughtful and ruminating, not the dingy mushroom-people strewn about in the sand, mushrooms marinating in their own insecure vanity, mushrooms that think they are in fungi heaven and will never leave. And, because they are mushrooms, they will never leave, because that is not what mushrooms do. It also reminds me of Croatia, which Croatians don't call Croatia but Hrvatska, which sounds nothing like Croatia and makes me wonder where we got that name from. But whatever you call it, call it beautiful because it is; though I've never been there, I have it on good authority, the authority of people who actually know what their own country is called.

But there is no ocean here - which is not a worthwhile trade-off for having no beach-bathers, to be honest - and neither will there be a Thanksgiving, in the strictest sense at least. But because there is very little humidity here, even the slightest sign of a flagging sun makes my internment seem irrelevant, as I am now free to exist out of doors, cheap government doors that probably cost five-thousand dollars each. The other night in Baghdad I played my guitar and sang in a matchbox concrete bunker for an hour at midnight. Like a wolf like that. In one of those understood but inexplicable ironies, I was celebrating the silence by breaking it - adorning it, I prefer to say - with music. Like an elevator like that.

In fact, it was without a little surprise that I realized upon my return that I had not listened to my iPod once the entire four-day trip back; that was how much I clung to the silence, starved for it after two frenetic weeks of deafening stimulation. Walking back from the laundry today I smiled at the thought of being back in the sequestered silence, back in the meditative stillness of my facilitated existence here, a gift that, while imperfect, serves to compliment the blessing of fruitful (if frenzied) fellowship that comes so rarely now. It reminds me of the Chekhov play The Seagull except that in it everyone hates each other but is afraid to be left alone. So maybe it's the opposite of that, I'm not sure. Yeah, it must be, because I love people deeply - or try to - but I like (I won't say prefer) to be left alone, for the most part.

It also reminds me of the time Lorna and I wrote children's stories together one morning in her flat in Aberdeen, I sitting on the brown leather sofa, she in the window box awash with a frigid, distilled sunlight, not knowing - or not caring - that my eyes were on her more than my own paper. She wrote about a little girl who had gotten separated from her parents at a carnival and had to be helped by a policeman. I wrote about a little girl who would sit in the window box writing stories when she felt lonely, or when her parents fought. She would escape onto paper, in an airplane to the Andes, solving mysteries, becoming important.

Who writes children's stories these days anyway? Talk show hosts? Washed-up politicos? Shriners? Avon ladies? Lorna saw J.K. Rowling lifting money from an ATM in Edinburgh and said she was casually well-dressed. I saw Mike Wallace on Martha's Vineyard and he was just an old guy walking. Maybe we're all washed-up nothings, although I'd rather be a casually well-dressed something, even if I do hate cash machines. They're so proletariat. Or what if we woke up tomorrow and there were no grapes. Or Liquid Drain-o. Or apostrophes. Life is so fraught with distresses!

Speaking of politicos, Sarah Palin said yesterday that America is the greatest source of good in the world. Why would a Christian say that? Maybe because she wants to serve Joe Six-Pack instead of Jesus. Besides, I don't think the Blessed Virgin ever wore lipstick or incited riots, which is what everyone says is going to happen because the Republicans are so whipped up from watching FoxNews all day. One woman stood up and called Obama an Arab; when McCain tried to set her straight he was booed. Yes, booed. People clearly want to believe whatever they want and not be told otherwise. I'm afraid of those people because they have conviction, but the wrong kind, the KKK kind, the McCarthy kind, the Reign of Terror kind. Those are the people that crucified our Lord.

God help us all.

Eines Tages Werde Ich am Mond Fliegen

2008-09-17T23:46:00.000-07:00

God is Love. Algebraically then, Love is God. As I grow in God, I also grow in Love. As my life tends towards completeness in God, I also become more complete in Love. As I surrender my heart to God, however piecemeal that surrender may be, I also surrender my heart to Love. Therefore, a devotion to God that does not result in a corresponding capacity to Love - both God and His Creation, which is a part of Himself and bears His image and is steeped in Him - is neither piety nor purity. It is nothing, God divided by Zero, undefinable. "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love." (1 John 4:8) If, in my increasing ardour for God, I find myself feeling more aversion to His children, it is not God's love that abides in me, but my own death.

I once thought (like many people, I imagine) that to love God meant to see everything as repulsive in comparison to Him. But that view is flawed, because it presupposes that everything exists in isolated competition with God, that God is separated from His creation. I thought that to praise created things meant to detract from God's glory and make Him jealous. But where did we get this notion? From Jesus' command to "hate [our] own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even [our] own life" (Luke 14:26)? Jesus is here claiming primacy, not commanding us to hate anyone. Or is it from Paul's admonition not to be "conformed to this world, but be transformed" (Romans 12:2)? Paul here is not speaking of Creation, but of the world-system or cosmos, the way of Man.

On the contrary, because God is Love, and because all Creation is His and was declared "good" by Him before man even entered into it, our love for all that He has made should grow in proportion to our love for Him. This is for two reasons. First, we are only able to love Him in the first place because he has given us the grace to know how to and to be able to love Him. Therefore, we shouldn't see our love for him as a duty, but as a gift, because it is not from within us, but from Himself. Second, because His work is perfect (Deut. 32:4), and because all creation is a voice of praise to God (Psalm 148), it cannot be silenced even by our refusal to join in the song (Isaiah 55:12).

That being said, it is important for me to understand that I can only love God (and others) as much as He allows me to, as much as he opens the skylight for me to see the light of Love settling on me. But it must be supernatural. Just as I cannot earn my salvation by adhering to rules, neither can I develop love by marshalling any effort of my own. That is why anyone who does not know God cannot love the way love was intended. That is also why anyone who does not love properly does not know God properly. The beautiful mystery is the intertwining identity of God with Love, the inseparable nature of God in Love, and the indescribable power and presence of Love found only in God.

Random condensed spiritual nugget for contemplation: The biggest doors have the heaviest keys.

The Pope at Lourdes

2008-09-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

"The power of love is stronger than the evil which threatens us." - Pope Benedict XVI, on Sunday, Sept. 14, 2008

I just read a story on CNN.com about the Pope's trip to Lourdes and the sermon he gave there. What is most amazing is that the news story (which gives quotes from the sermon) is itself proclaiming the truth of Christ Jesus!! So while 50,000 may have listened in person, countless thousands more will read the story on CNN.com and find themselves reading the life-changing Gospel of Calvary!

(P.S. A few days ago in Paris the Pope met President Sarkozy, a very wealthy and powerful man, but then proceeded to give a sermon condemning the love of money and power - in PARIS!!!! That's like preaching temperance in Dublin or democracy in Beijing - or weight loss in Houston. Talk about a brave man who is not ashamed of the Gospel!)

Who Left the Dogs Out?

2008-09-14T08:36:00.000-07:00

Reading Matthew 15, I came across a very difficult passage in Scripture:

22 And behold, a Canaanite woman of that district came and called out, "Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon." 23 But he did not say a word in answer to her. His disciples came and asked him, "Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us." 24 He said in reply, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." 25 But the woman came and did him homage, saying, "Lord, help me." 26 He said in reply, "It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs." 27 She said, "Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters." 28 Then Jesus said to her in reply, "O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed from that hour.

First, "he did not say a word in answer to her." He did not say a word to her. Not one word.

Second, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Only? So Jesus wasn't sent for Gentiles?

Finally, "It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs." Dogs?

It seems (I stress seems) that Jesus was cold to this woman. At first, it seems that he snubs her. Then he seems to suggest she is not his problem. On top of it all, he apparently tells her - in the midst of her suffering - that she is not worthy to receive the healing meant for someone else; in short, she is of the wrong people group.

One possible explanation is that Jesus was cold-hearted. This is absurd, of course, so we reject it straightaway. There must be some other explanation. We know that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human; just as the Trinity is made up of Three Persons with One Nature, Jesus was One Person with Two Natures. But Jesus, while on earth, made it very clear that even he receives only what the Father has given to him: his self (John 16:28), his knowledge (Matt. 11:25), his works (John 10:32), his mission (John 8:42), his life (John 10:18), his death (Luke 22:42), and when the time was right, God even gave "all things into his hands" (John 13:3). Thus, while God was omniscient and omnipotent, Christ - while on earth - was not.

So, conceivably, Jesus began his ministry (and Jewish history and messianic tradition would seem to support this) with the view of restoring the lost children of Israel back to God, part of the "ministry of reconciliation" Paul writes about (2 Cor. 5:18). In Hebrews 2:17, the author speaks of Jesus not only as the high priest but also as the sacrifice; he, being holy, sacrifices himself so that his Father might restore the nation of Israel (remember he is writing to the Hebrews) back to righteousness. The problem, however, as Jesus relates in his parable of the wedding feast, is that Israel rejected him. That's not to say that every Jew rejected him, but that as a whole the body of those chosen by Yahweh refused to accept Yahweh's most precious gift. Instead, as Jesus told in the parable of the vineyard, they murdered the son of the vineyard owner, himself.

I'm suggesting that Jesus was telling the truth when he said in Matthew 15 that he came for the lost sheep of Israel; that was the covenant that needed fixing. Those people rejected this peace, however, so God established a new covenant, inviting anyone who would come to be a part of it. It seems that at the time this woman came to Jesus, he was obeying the command of the Father to restore the nation of Israel. The Jewish people were the only ones at that time that even knew God, so how could anyone else understand the import of the coming of God's son? How could these Gentiles, who had never had an original covenant with God, be restored to something they never had?

It was clearly God's plan that Jesus minister to the Jews, though God knew that even His own son would be rejected, like many prophets before him, like God Himself on many occasions. So there must have been some point at which the scope of Jesus's ministry expanded to include "everyone they could find" (Matt. 22:10). God knew this all along, knew that Jesus had come to save the world entire, even if He allowed Jesus to know it in time. But God showed great faithfulness to His chosen people by sending His son to them first. Jesus, with this charge from God, saw a faith in this woman - and there are other stories of Gentiles showing great faith in the Gospels - that he found sorely lacking in the Jews to which he had bestowed God's saving message.

Remember also that he had just lost his cousin to Herod and had just been rejected in his hometown by the very people among whom he grew up. And yet he still felt a profound compassion for all men, even when they pursued him to his quiet places in droves. Perhaps Jesus saw in this Canaanite woman the faith that he wished to have found in his townspeople. And perhaps God sent her to Jesus to signal that beginning of a shift in ministry as he began to see that many Jews were infertile soil after all, while many Gentiles were ripe for the harvest.

So, what may seem at first glance to be a startling callousness on Christ's part was really single-minded obedience to God's plan of salvation for the Jews. This woman, however, rocked Jesus's world with her faith (like the Gentile centurion in Luke 7) and possibly helped open the way for the gospel to be extended to all nations. And this woman, by acknowledging Jesus as Lord - and herself as an outsider, a dog - became one of those children in the end, not feeding off scraps but seated at the banqueting table of the Lord.

Just Keep Walking, Just Keep Walking...

2008-09-13T04:10:00.000-07:00

When I tried to read Matthew 13 a few days ago, I couldn't make it past the first verse. I'm not sure exactly what it was that struck me on this particular occasion. It's not a deep theological verse, just a verse. It wasn't difficult or challenging or controversial. In fact, it reads, "On that day, Jesus went out of the house and sat down by the sea." That's it. No Trinitarian mysteries or dispensationalist dogma. In fact, it sounds more like the kind of peas-and-carrots sentence you would be spoon-fed in first grade or in Spanish class. But when I read it the other morning it arrested me.

Perhaps its simplicity had always been lost on me because I saw it as a single unremarkable thread in a vastly remarkable narrative. Perhaps I have always had a bad habit of "consuming" what I read and not processing it slowly to draw out the essence of it (which is the purpose of meditation). Perhaps it's because I miss the sea and feel far away from it here in the desert. The sea has always made me feel close to God, probably because most of my experience has been with the ominous, imposing North Atlantic. I suspect it's mostly the last one, though I am certainly guilty of the first two errors.

(Random thought: The only questions worth asking are the ones too big for us to answer.)

But despite the lack of anything eschatologically substantial, we here find Jesus popping out for a minute to sit by the water and to be alone. What's he thinking? What expression does he wear? These are things too wonderful for me to fathom! And yet his meditation surely does not last long, for he soon finds himself not alone but with "such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat". He just wanted, if my reading of the text is correct, to be alone, perhaps alone with His Father. Instead he was called to serve the people.

Similarly, in Chapter 14, Jesus once more tries to be alone, again in a boat, and again unsuccessfully. He had just been rejected as a prophet in his own hometown only to find out that his cousin John had been gruesomely executed in Herod's prison and his head displayed at a party. With all that on his plate (i.e. silver platter) I can't imagine all that must have been running through Christ's heart in those moments, but I'm sure it is beyond any grief or anguish I have ever experienced. And I myself seek to be alone on many much lesser occasions.

Yet again the crowds pursue him to his quiet place, a circumstance that would both frustrate and unhinge me, I imagine. And yet Jesus not only keeps his cool, but even in the midst of his despair his heart is moved with pity for them. Did you catch that? Jesus's heart is moved with pity for them! He who must have felt incredible turmoil in his heart instead felt his heart breaking for them! I can't imagine a love like that. I'm certain it is beyond me, but I want it nonetheless. I want to be so in love with God that I don't even think to think about myself when he sends me others to love.

And God rewarded Jesus for his faithfulness by finally giving him a chance to spend some time alone in a place where no one could find or follow him: he walked out to the shore, but didn't stop to sit down or even look for a boat; he just kept on walking...

Summary Reflection on Thing One and Thing Two

2008-09-10T05:40:00.000-07:00

I write this to give a final, digested extrapolation of these things that I have seen. I do this without compunction or fear of blasphemy because I am not trying to tell you what God did or why, merely what of Him I have seen by looking at His creation. Many times people have told me why God chose to do this or that thing, as if they were listening at the keyhole while the Trinity discussed His plans. But they are fools. And that is all I will say about them.

I have realized that if God is everywhere then He is in every thing. Notice the distinction between "every thing" meaning every object in space, every created thing, and "everything" which is the total set of that which is comprehensible to the human mind, which includes all sin. And clearly God is not in the action of sin, but we know that He is in the one who sins, whether that person knows He is there or not, or knows Him at all. We, as Christians, are often told as young people to imagine that God is in the room with us when we are tempted to sin, and this will make us feel ashamed to sin in His presence. But if we are Christians, young or old, it is a farce to picture God as a man standing in the corner of a room and to overlook the reality that He is not only in the room, but in our very beings. He is not standing in Heaven looking down on us with dissatisfaction, He is in us; and since we cannot remove him when He becomes "inconvenient" we must take Him with us to carry out our sordid business.

But perhaps that is another conversation. I mean only to exhibit that I do not claim that God caused these Two Things to happen so that I could see them and write about them and look deeply into the mysterious reflecting pool of his Holy Nature. It would be absurd to suggest that God prompted that man to play a trick on his friend, or caused the desertification that leads to sandstorms, for both of these point to serious (I believe) defects in fallen man. But it does not mean that I cannot see God in this man or in His creation, for there He is whether I will Him to be or not.

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After a day of reflecting on the First Thing, I am certain there is a moral lesson in it. It is that man does not always love his neighbor, or even that he cannot always do so, being the fallen creature that he is. But this we already know, this we can see every day over lunch. It is what follows that is more difficult to absorb: God does not always intervene to stop injustice before it happens, though he assures us justice - and mercy - in the End. But we must be willing to accept the truth that justice may not come in this life at all, nor is this world governed by that justice and mercy that we are eventually promised. If I felt the gravity of a broken situation watching a man's drink get ruined, how must God agonize to see millions of souls choose daily to reject His offers of divine mercy! (Note: In a strictly just world this man would one day find himself to be a pillar of salt in a place where there are no drinks...)

And as for the Second Thing, I have already (as Fr. Madden says) "teased that one out a bit." But I realized something the next day that made me reevaluate my initial understanding of the meteorological process of the clash of dust and rain. What I couldn't see at the time was that, while it is true that the rain subdues the swirling sands and empties the air, it is illogical to assume that the rain somehow magically negates the sand or disintegrates or "zaps" it into nonexistence. On the contrary, the rain that falls from the great heights of the clouds must fall through the dust and absorb it into the drops that eventually reunite that dust with the ground to which it belongs and from which it came.

I learned this when I was talking to Faton about the rain; he warned me never to go outside in the rain because it is like "this really gross raining mud." To illustrate his point, he pointed to all the cars past which we were driving, all of which looked as if they had recently endured a chocolate milk shower. At first this seemed completely incompatible with my good-versus-evil theory that the vanquishing rain had triumphed gloriously over the upstart dirt. At first I wanted to scrap the whole analogy, like the guy who almost threw away the first penicillin. But then I began to realize that this new truth, while less absolute, was a far more accurate glimpse of Truth than what I had already understood. The new truth didn't prove the old truth wrong, it merely plunged past it to reach a new level.

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The truth I speak of is that the truth of the First Thing and of the Second Thing are one and the same. Let me explain.

The world was a raging tempest of sin and wrath like the sandstorm. Jesus came down in part to defeat sin once and for all, but in His death he defeated sin not by zapping it into space but by taking it with him down to the grave. It was in his rising again that he defeated sin and death by leaving it behind him in the grave. Now I am neither a theologian nor a meteorologist, but as a simple man I can see God reflected in creation, if even in a way that helps only me understand Him better. I live in a fallen world, a world with no guarantee of justice built into it while it exists. Jesus came to earth knowing that he would not find justice here but sinful wrath. He even warns his disciples that the world will treat them just as it treated him, no less so because they will not have either his pedigree or his perfection.

These are the truths, I believe, of the world that God made. It's amazing how far you can see after the dust settles...

Meditations on Things Seen and Unseen

2008-09-09T23:32:00.000-07:00

Practical thought: If you want to stop people littering, you don't put up signs, you put out trash cans.

Random story about how God can pervade every aspect of your being, even in the bathroom: I cleaned the bathroom today; it really needed it. But as I was cleaning it, I kept thinking I was doing it as a way to show love to Dale, my suitemate, a really nice older guy from Michigan (or Minnesota?). Of course, a small, selfish part of me wanted him to be proud of me or to appreciate me visibly. But as I heard him lock the bathroom door for the first time tonight, I wanted to say through the door, "I did this because I love you, Dale." And that just made me think of how many times God has said those very words (sans Dale) to me in my life, or to us as His children, even to those who are not yet a part of His family. And all this from cleaning a bathroom...

Epiphanous inburst: God did not create me to be important to the world, but to be obedient to the Word.

A Different Thing One and Thing Two: Also too (as Patrick would say), I realized that I long for two things in relation to God: knowledge and love. I thought about these two things disconnected from God and how they can so quickly lead to death. If I sought knowledge apart from God I would only inflate my own self, both with useless information and with a vacuous sense of self-worth; and in that distension I would always crave more and would never be filled. Also, the little I did possess would always pale in comparison with what I didn't know, which would be maddening. The same could be said for love: apart from God it would become a gnawing hunger that can never be satisfied and would always drive me to dissipation and dissolution. Pursuing human love and human knowledge is like paying a mortgage in pennies.---------------------------But in pursuing God in both knowledge and love I am pursuing love, knowledge, AND God. Not to know God entirely is not maddening at all, for my reason tells me I cannot, even for trying; it is a different kind of hunger altogether. My experience tells me that my capacity to know Him is limited to my faith in Him; furthermore, it is controlled by Him as he reveals Himself to me. I could learn more about God in one revealed epiphany from Him than I could in a library in a day! The same with love. God breeds it in me, so that it grows in proportion to His nurturing of it, and in my submission to that nurture. What mysteries are these!

Meditations on the Second Thing I Saw

2008-09-09T22:53:00.000-07:00

I thought about how the dust could represent the things of the world, about how they are transitory, ephemeral, and elusive, always swirling and changing shape. I thought about how the haze kept my world small and stung my eyes so I couldn't see well, how it burned my throat and dessicated my mouth. I thought about how the militants (if there are any left) often use sandstorms as a cover for lobbing mischief over the fences, counting on the poor visibility of the helicopter pilots. I thought about the mess that sandstorms leave behind, the residue, the lingering traces of things in places they don't belong, and things that belong in places they aren't anymore. In short, I thought about how I could think of nothing really good about them at all.

Then I thought about that light rain, and about how what I perceived as hesitance or ineptitude could also have been gentleness. I thought about how I turned my lights off, paused my music, and sat in my room in the filtered dimness to listen to the rain. I sat and listened and felt a thousand things at once: home, grace, purification, peace, refreshing, fullness. Then I thought about how days-full and buckets-full and eyes-full of sand were tamed almost in an instant, powerless to rage against even the lightest rain.

Walking outside I had strode right between the battle lines as sand and rain, earth and water, the world below and the heavens above met in a brief, thunderclap skirmish. In the shelter of the cafe I sat and pondered these things. After Chinese and a chat, I stepped out into the relative stillness as into a room full of chastened children; the wind still blew its empty taunts, as if to say that I had not seen the last of it. But it didn't escape me that the darkening air in the deepening evening was laden not with the scent of dusty water, but of wet earth and the steam of conquering rain.

The Second Thing I Saw

2008-09-09T22:18:00.000-07:00

The second thing I saw was a spirited sandstorm followed (and abated) by a half-hearted rain, the first rain I have seen in almost five months - and barely worthy to be called that. This morning as I left my room to go for breakfast, I could tell from the hazy sky that the dust was in riotous entropy, but the pallid light cast on the world around me signaled genuine cloud cover above the sand-fog. (For those unfamiliar with the local weather, in a genuine sandstorm the entire world turns a lurid tangerine color, like a peach threw up on an old Western.)

Later, returning from lunch, I could have sworn that I felt a single drop of rain plunk my arm. I promptly dismissed the thought, however, as one does so many bumps in the night. (Although our bumps in the night are neither monsters nor burglars, but generous gifts of malevolent fireworks!) The drop, to my surprise, did soon form into a monster (albeit of the Loch Ness breed) when the man in the mail room suggested it looked like rain out, confirming my suspicions and eliciting from my lips an audible "I told me so!" (which drew a bewildered stare, no doubt, as he slid my box slooowly across the counter and backed away).

But the day progressed without any further sign of rain. On the contrary, as I returned to my room from the gym, the dust was swirling and swarming and stinging my eyes, gusting the clothes on my body into strange, angular rhomboids and bowling rubbish down the living rows, like plastic rabbits darting through a rocky, prefabricated garden, or like modern Medinas chasing their philandering husbands through trailer parks.

After my post-gym shower, I stepped out of the bathroom to a smattering of metallic pings outside, which I initially took to be the small rocks that often lace the plumes of reeling dust. A quick poke of my head out the door, however, sufficed to show me that they were, in fact, stray drops of rain! I say they were stray because even they seemed to feel the inappropriateness of their being there, as if to say, "We know, we know! We're just passing through. Now go back inside and stop staring." And so I did. And when I reemerged for dinner I found only a slight breeze blowing.

But walking to the cafe, I began to meditate on this phenomenon of dust and rain...

The First Thing I Saw

2008-09-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

I saw two interesting things today. (This today was 8 Sept., by the way, as if that mattered...)

First, at lunch I saw an Iraqi man (rajulon in Arabic), grey-flecked and slight, about 55, spring up from his table, dart across the aisle, pour salt in another man's drink, then quickly sit back down. He suppressed a grin, but his darting eight-ball eyes slashed the air like swordplay as he rubbed his hands together in grim anticipation, even to the point of neglecting his food. That is the first thing I saw.

I debated whether to warn the other rajulon, although I could not warn him properly without knowing Arabic. I even thought about going up and pouring salt in his drink myself (after he returned, but before he drank), until I realized he would have to understand my action on a deeper level (as would everyone watching). And since we weren't in an isolated environment, I realized this could get misconstrued far from my original noble intentions into something worse than the original prank, which would profit nobody (and get me banned, if not worse).

In truth, I decided to do nothing, nor did I watch the climax for fear of feeling guilty for my non-intervention (now I know how Switzerland feels, if it could be said that Switzerland in fact "feels" anything) and for my complicity with the hoary trickster. Neither did I want to validate his mischievous behavior by involuntarily chuckling, if it indeed came to that.

I'm sure there's a moral lesson in there somewhere, in the first thing I saw.

On Identity: Understanding Who I Am in “I AM”

2008-09-08T03:10:00.000-07:00

“But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for ‘finding himself.’” - Thomas Merton

The Holy Spirit is prompting me to meditate on the notion of “identity”. My heart longs to weep, for it is wrung out thinking about identity and the Trojan horse it truly is – in more ways than one. It is important to seek one’s identity if only to learn what it is not, and I will attempt to formulate my own understanding of the reason behind it and hope it coalesces into something understandable.

I began to meditate upon identity today as I considered it in relation to vocation: I am Justin, I am a _______. These things are important!

If I were to make a list of all the aspects that make up my identity, I would likely consider such things as my name, my family, my origin, my physical characteristics, my personality traits, my vocation, my education, my interests, my ID numbers, my goals, my religion, my political views, what else? So many things! But another way of understanding identity in these terms is to understand the action behind it. Namely, these are the things that identify me. But the question must then follow: to whom?

To myself? It seems unlikely that in making a list of my attributes using the criteria above, I will have a clearer understanding of myself, any more than looking in a mirror will clear up questions I have about my soul. I would argue, in fact, that we don’t stand in front of a mirror to get to know ourselves at all; we usually don’t even “see” the reality of the reflection, any more than I see the true reality of another man when I look at him. Or as Virginia Woolf writes, “Nobody sees any one as he is…They see a whole—they see all sorts of things—they see themselves.” So perhaps there is something very true in the A.A. practice of consciously connecting “My name is…” with “…an alcoholic.”

My aim, however, is not to comment on the sociological conception of identity but the philosophical or spiritual, for even before we have considered all the many identities we are given in the Scriptures we must consider our own originally perceived identity and how to relate those conveyed identities back to it. In trying to find my identity in terms of a list of attributes, I am really doing two things.

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First, and centrally, I am ascribing these attributes to myself in order to identify myself to other people, for I already know which person in the world is me: I am. Thus, in these terms, my identity is not something that exists for me at all, for it comes from my own prior knowledge of myself, and how can I teach myself things I already know? No, my identity exists to clarify – to vivify: to give life to – myself for others; I animate myself for them that they may “know” me. And to some extent this is important, or else we would live in a very confused world. But we can read the stories of the Bible – even the letters and psalms and wisdom, etc. – and still find very little evidence of lists of attributes; we find mostly names and paths of patronage. In fact, the closest we will find to a set of characteristics like we mentioned above is when Paul gives what amounts to his résumé in Philippians 3. But even then, he only lists these characteristics so that he may swiftly and summarily dismiss them as “rubbish” compared to knowing Christ.

Unfortunately, in such a visually stimulated (or saturated) culture, we look for details in the Bible that help us picture the characters we read about, but find few. We can only guess what Jesus looked like, for example, by studying the anthropology and art of his day, and then we find only perceptions roughly formulated.

This reality leads to the second conclusion of the understanding of identity. While my identity is given purpose in its existence for others, the very criteria that define my existence (the attributes) derive from others, from my relationships and interactions with them and their systems. For example, I am Justin, but I did not give myself that name. And even if I had, I did not invent it. And even if I did, it must mean something. And even if it doesn’t, it is only my name insomuch as I am called it by others. If not, it is not a name at all.

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Let us consider, for a moment, Rousseau and his discourse on natural man or “the noble savage” (although Martin Booth’s Islands of Silence would be a better fit, if only more people had read it). Nevertheless, let us picture an island where a human infant is placed, and, for the sake of the exercise, let us presume its survival to adulthood somehow, whether through remarkable natural circumstances or through the Providence of God. (Let us also, for the sake of pronouns, presume that this infant is now a young woman.) Now let us regard this young woman and her “identity” as we have defined it. To begin with, she would naturally have no name: she would have no need of one, nor would there be anyone to have given her one, nor would she be expected to understand the concept of naming without having been taught it, for it is a social thing.

As to personal appearance, let us consider this young woman not as we would see her, but as she would see herself. To that effect, what would flood her mind the first time she saw her likeness reflected back to her? Would she be startled? fascinated? If she had never seen another human, what conceptions would she have of her own appearance? Surely she would not see blonde hair or brown hair, but simply hair; not grey eyes or hazel eyes, but simply eyes; not bronze skin or olive skin, but simply skin. She would not, to be sure, even have a name for these things, and she would certainly have no way of assuming that there were other varieties of the same.

Likewise, she would not think herself tall or short, fat or thin, weak or strong, since these are all relative traits, characteristics that use some vaguely understood social norm as a frame of reference; they are places in which we find ourselves on the spectrum of that segment of humanity that is known to us. Granted, she may begin to wish she were taller when reaching for a coconut in a tree, or thinner when squeezing through a rocky crevice, or stronger when carrying food or fuel, but these would all be contingent upon her ability to develop and reason, and there is no guarantee that she would think such things at all. She may never question why she is the way she is, because she may never grasp that she could be anything else.

Furthermore, without a family she would have no heritage, no history, since she could only be left to assume (or perhaps not) that she came from somewhere, some place, some people group, some process of life-giving. But again, there is no certainty that these assumptions would even materialize in her mind.

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In short, this person - even if she may seem like a “no one” to us - would exist as an “everyone” to herself. She is just as much herself as I am myself; the only difference between us is that, at any given moment, I can sit at a table and write myself down. So what is identity? What is it if this marooned young woman doesn’t need one at all, either to survive or to understand herself? Do we, as social beings, find our value by accentuating the ways that we are unique? Even uniqueness can only find relevance when it sets one apart from another. It must point at another and say, “I am not that person, therefore I am myself.”

And even if I attempt to define myself with words, I am only emphasizing various aspects of my identity in turn, none of which is a complete picture of me. On an application, I am what is asked. On a résumé, I am my greatest accomplishments. In an interview, I am my selling points. And behind an online personality, I am my most interesting self and my most attractive photo. I am constantly defining (if not redefining) myself in fluid terms.

Even when I die, I must again be identified. If I die in a hospital, I will be identified by my chart and plastic bracelet. If I die in a car accident, I may be identified by my license, or that of the car I drove. If I die in a plane crash (and if I am identified at all), I will be identified by my teeth, or by the simple fact that my name is on the manifest and there were no survivors. Or if I drown in a river or in my bathtub, I will be identified by my face-up face beneath a sheet.

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With all these means of identification – and we can be certain to encounter more as technology advances (e.g. universal retina scans à la Minority Report, or a microchip in the brain). With such an abundance of resources and data to help others identify us – and we ourselves – man should know himself better now than at any time in history. (And if he doubts himself, the newspaper can read the stars for him each printing.)

But if this were truly the case, we would simply stop searching, would have stopped long ago, well before existentialism made us doubt whether we are ourselves at all. (Let us hope our island girl never reads Sartre or all will be lost!) But we are ourselves, and we still seek to understand that self, even as we continue to accumulate a data wake, like a cosmic comet trail of personhood. But, like a comet trail, it is all debris and no real light.

Moreover, I imagine that many people who do not believe in God perceive that there is something about themselves that is beyond mere description, some integral, internal thing that defies classification. But what is that thing? Is it consciousness or ego? Is it dharma? atman? Or is it soul? If I (like many others) am striving to “find myself,” what does that mean? And where do I look? Do I look within myself?

Let’s go back to our island friend. Does this isolated (to us) person feel the longing to “find herself” or is she content in her solitary reality? My guess is that she does feel that something is missing. Chesterton, in The Everlasting Man, suggests that man has always taken the existence of God for granted in his nature, it is a part of him; he only ceased to believe in God when he reasoned himself out of it. Man must be convinced into the belief that there is no God, and he must work to silence the inner prompting that naturally tells him there is One.

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But what does my spirit tell me? It tells me that there is no identity where there is no life, and that to find the source of identity I must seek out the source of life, the Creator Himself. Interestingly, in looking back on the creation story I discovered that God never named Adam at all, at least not in recorded Scripture; Adam comes from the Hebrew word for “man” and different translations make the leap from the common to the proper noun at different stages in Genesis (2:19, 2:20, 5:1). Also of interest is that God merely allows Adam to classify (I won’t say “to name”, which would suggest the likes of “Phil” or “Doris”) His creation (2:19-20); God never commanded Adam to, as far as we can read.

It would seem reasonable, therefore, to suggest that the classification of things was more for the delight (or at least the purposes) of man than of God, for God certainly does not need taxonomy to distinguish His creations from one another. He even allowed Adam to call woman “woman” (2:23) and, after the Fall, to name her “Eve” (3:20). Again, I don’t think it insignificant that the first true name was given only when man had fallen from his original state, suggesting that we could no longer know each other perfectly, but through the medium or lens of man’s constructed identity.

It is crucial, central to all understanding of self to remember always that God, as the Creator everything and the Giver of life, is also the Origin of identity. Remember how He Himself identified Himself to Moses through the burning bush: “I AM that I AM,” or “I AM who AM”. Now we can all say, “I am who I am,” but that is mere logic, basic algebra, not a creedal declaration of being. But He is the Great I AM because He is the only entity in history that existed before history, therefore he does not exist in relation to anything, but it is everything else that is contingent upon Him. Thus, we can only understand ourselves by looking to Him Who IS.

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As I was rereading the prologue to Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island last night, I realized that everything I’ve written so far is just a cheap imitation of him, albeit a well-meaning one. Furthermore, I feel I am honoring him by following his admonition: “But neither do I intend to accept points of that tradition [the Catholic Church] blindly, and without understanding, and without making them really my own. For it seems to me that the first responsibility of a man of faith is to make his faith really part of his own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it.” (NMIAI, xiv)

That being the case, I will point you to him who points to Christ and will leave you with these concluding words of his: “Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for in the sum total of my own achievements…It is seen, above all, in my integration in the mystery of Christ.” (NMIAI, xxii)

For Pete's Sake!

2008-09-05T03:59:00.000-07:00

Do you remember in Harry Potter, the staircases of Hogwart's move? That's me, and those staircases hurt. One of the views that the Protestant Me always had of Catholics is that the Catholics supposedly believe and practise many things that aren't explicitly outlined in the Scriptures. In fact, we often called ourselves "Bible Christians" or "Fundamentalists" or something similarly self-righteous; basically, if it's not in the Bible it's extra baggage, dangerous and probably heretical. So I began to think... Where did this notion come from that the Bible is some kind of stand-alone culture market, from which he pick and choose to build our "Christian culture" from? What about building our Christian culture on...Christian culture, the one that has existed for the past 2000 years? Or why is it that the Bible's truth should make it sterile and alone and ask us to discard the work of all the church fathers prior to Luther?

Doesn't the idea of using God's word as a science textbook or a history annal lead to other kinds of temptation? For example, doesn't it stake the infallibility of the Bible on the minutest of details, details that were passed down orally before being copied and translated over centuries to get to us today? And doesn't that risk turning the Bible into something God never intended it to be? Furthermore, I (and many Christians) often recognize the need to frame Scripture in its proper cultural context in order to understand how certain things that seem unimportant to us would have been shocking or inappropriate back then (e.g. Jesus talking with the Samaritan woman, or ANY woman). But until college, and especially until now, I and those same Christians seemed to be the ones who dismiss the literary context in which the various pieces of our patchwork Bible were written. Let me explain.

In an earlier writing, I mentioned that some scholars suggest the first chapter of Genesis was originally penned over 400 years after Genesis 2-10, and that it was written as a priestly hymn; when one looks at the structure and the rhythm of the stanzas it seems quite obvious that it was never intended to be a science textbook any more than "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" was meant to be a treatise on ethics. Now, anyone familiar with literary history, especially of the religious genre, knows that almost every people group or religious segment since man first learned to communicate has some form of written creation story. Man, as the creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein shows us, has an innate desire to know his origin, even to LOVE his origin. That's why orphans search out their parents. That's why people makes trips to the places from where their ancestors emigrated centuries ago. That's also why it's not unrealistic for people who have never heard of Christ to hunger for him, like some missing part of themselves.

Oddly enough, there were creation stories (often called creation myths) well before the Hebrew story in Genesis. Is that shocking? I must admit that I felt a little on edge in college when I first heard the Bible spoken of in its historical context. I always believed the Bible did not have "peers", that there wasn't anything that could remotely compare with the Bible. I felt that, because Genesis was THE creation story it surely had to be the only creation story, or at least the oldest. But in truth neither of those are the case and neither of them matter, because it is the only TRUE creation story. And notice that I don't mean scientifically factual, that the earth was created in 144 hours. In fact, we measure days by the sun and there wasn't even a sun until the fourth day. God himself waited until the fourth "day" to create time: Then God said: "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky, to separate day from night. Let them mark the fixed times, the days and the years." (Gen. 1:14)

The teaching of the Catholic Church (and the urging of mature thought, it seems) is to understand that the Bible is infallible, completely infallible, in its conveyance of religious truth. For example, the other day I was reading in Matthew about Jesus crossing the Sea of Galilee and finding two demon-possessed men among the tombs, the story where Jesus casts the demons into the pigs that run down the hill and drown themselves. Upon reading this story in Matthew, I was confused because I always thought there was just one man; and in Mark there is. Then why did Matthew say there were two men? Looking for answers, I read a comment in the Catholic Study Bible that said that Matthew's gospel relied heavily on Mark's gospel and on "Q" (the source that Luke drew most of his material from in writing his gospel) and that on several occasions Matthew writes "two" where Mark writes only "one". The commentator suggests it is Matthew's way of emphasizing things. Notice he is not being deceitful, but he may have felt the liberty to change a minor detail (or may have forgotten) because the point of the story is not whether there was one man or two, but about the power that Jesus has over Satan and the power he has to redeem mankind. I then looked into a classic Protestant study resource (Wesley, maybe? Geneva? Darby? I don't remember...) and found that the author of that commentary suggested that just because Mark said there was one man doesn't mean that there was ONLY one man, so the numbers don't necessarily exist in conflict. This guy - and I'm sure he was a holy guy, whoever he was - believes that in order for the Bible to be true that he has to make one equal two by propping Scripture up with a semantic technicality!! That, to me, sounds like a contortionist truth, not a beautiful or even plausible truth. It sounds like Bill Clinton wrote the Bible. ("When I say 'two' what I really mean is...")

Growing up Protestant, we were taught to revere the Bible almost to the point of supplanting the Holy Spirit's place in the Trinity with the Holy Bible. We are taught that a good Christian reads his Bible daily, though there is no mention anywhere in the Bible of "the Bible", or about reading anything daily. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't read it daily, it just stands as evidence that we as Protestant humans made God the foundation of our faith only insomuch as he is part of the Bible. What if there were no Bible? Would God disappear? Would we still believe in Him? Protestants bristle at the seemingly heretical idea that the Catholic Church considers the deposit of faith to be made up of both Scripture AND Tradition though their exaltation of the Bible (as it exists now) comes more from...exactly, their tradition rather than from Scripture itself.

Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not at all suggesting that the Bible isn't God's Holy Word - it is! - or that there is any untruth in it - there isn't! I am simply suggesting that "truth" is on a higher plane entirely than "historical accuracy". In short, the Bible would be no less "true" if Legion had a brother, or if God blazed through light but decided to take his time creating the firmament, or if the boy's lunch fed exactly 4,999 people. Do you see the distinction?

The religious truths of the Bible are unassailable and infallible, because those truths were "inspired by God," says Paul, "useful for teaching, etc." But the various pieces of the Book of Books was not dictated by God to robo-scribes. They were conveyed on paper by humans who framed them in their own conceptions, copied many times from material passed down to them orally over a span of years. Do you remember what you ate last Friday? what conversations you had? Precisely so, Matthew wrote his gospel FORTY YEARS after Jesus ascended into Heaven, and in those forty years the church had evolved from the rag-tag band of disciples into the sturdy roots of what it has become today. So surely Matthew's gospel would have looked different had he written it in the weeks following Jesus' death, just as your personal journal would on a 40-year delay.

The point is that God's Word is truth, it is both the chronicle of our heritage and the signpost of the age to come, it is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path in each moment of our present. It is a gift from God to his people, just like the stone tablets he gave to Moses thousands of years ago. When I was young I was told (and believed) that the Bible is the cornerstone of the church. When I matured, I read in that same Bible that that's not what Jesus said. He knew the importance of Scripture, he read it in the synagogues, he quoted it to Satan when he was tempted, to Pharisees when he was tested, and to multitudes when he was teaching. But in Matthew 16:18, Jesus says, "And so I say to you, you are Peter (Kepha), and upon this rock (kepha) I will build my church." Jesus built his Church upon Peter. Why don't we talk about that in our churches?

An Intrusion

2008-09-03T20:51:00.000-07:00

I haven't written much lately. In part, I find more of my time taken up by other things: volleyball, RCIA class (Catholicism for Dummies, the priest jokingly called it), working overtime, etc. And my reticence certainly hasn't been based on a lack of material, if you will. My quasi-exiled 86-year-old Granny died last week in Baton Rouge. The last real conversation I ever had with her was a few years ago, telling her about my upcoming marriage and listening to her urge me to wisdom and caution. In retrospect, I wish I would have given more credence to her admonitions, but that's another story. Or several. Also, I have been contemplating much the beautiful mystery of the Catholic Church and the thousand ways I feel like the pieces of me that were chipped off during my first 26 years have been restored by God through His love and mercy and providence. I have also had a heavy, prayerful heart for my friends who once walked intimately with God but who have left off abiding for now. My heart aches to love them back to fellowship with God.

Another reason I haven't written very much is that every time I sit down to write, I just want to copy down the things I've read from Thomas Merton, so closely does the Holy Spirit through him answer the questions that have been squatters in my heart for years. It is now time for those illegitimate vagrants to move on. For example, I read this in New Seeds of Contemplation and my heart leapt with the truth in it (like John the Baptist leapt inside his mother's womb when Mary came to visit?).

Merton writes,

If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy.

If you write for men - you may make some money and you may give someone a
little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while.

If you write only for yourself you can read what you yourself have written
and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted you will wish that you were
dead.

Stark as that sounds, John Newton implies a similar sentiment when he sings of the grace "that saved a wretch like me." Moreover, I think this may be a truth that applies to more than just writing. I have felt it even when looking at the stacks of books on the desk in my bedroom, all the books that I chose myself to groom and influence me, that now lay unread and unpalatable. Just the other day I bought a circa-1900 copy of the Complete Poems of Shelley and began reading it in my room that night. I flipped through a few poems before finally putting the book down entirely disinterested with odes to Greek gods and fleeting "love". I don't claim to speak for everyone, and I certainly am not suggesting that Shelley wrote poorly, but I have found that as I draw closer to God I am free to see through the pretences of the world system more than I ever have before. As I grow in the knowledge of God, I realize that the world glorifies what is good, but it defines good as "well-done" and sets up poorly-done as its opposite.

Think about it. The world glorifies the talented, the beautiful, the brilliant, the quality. And it suggests that anyone or anything that does not fit this definition is by default, well, bad - or at the very best, negligible. But God defines good as "true" and, as we grow in Him, we come to love the truth and to realize what is truly good. As we do, we also begin to see that the world system can never deliver anything of value, or anything lasting. As Thomas Merton suggests, fame lasts but a moment before the echo of one's life dies out. The prophet Isaiah laments "the fading blooms of...glorious beauty." And some of the most brilliant men and women in the history of the world have gone mad as their minds rebel and betray them.

It struck me yesterday as I was reading Matthew 11 that even John the Baptist had his doubts about whether Jesus was the Messiah because he expected one thing and got another (not purifying justice but loving redemption). In our churches today, it seems that our main goal is marketing: How can we make Christ and his message attractive to those on the outside? In doing so, we elevate the world's standard (beauty) above God's (truth) hoping that people will nibble and get comfortable; we hope they will come to the more difficult of God's truths by and by and somehow be ready and willing to obey when the time comes. But how would you feel if you were sold a house only to find that trains run past it all night? You would feel tricked, wouldn't you? lied to? You would see the trains as troublesome pests interrupting the tranquility of your usual peace.

Trust me when I say that I can offer this without hypocrisy. I live on a military base where the fighter jets don't schedule their missions around my sleep schedule. And at least once during every Mass, Father Madden's homily is drowned out for a good ten seconds as a plane takes off. But we accept these "intrusions" because they are for our own good, because we realize there are things more sacred than our own comfort. (Thought: The parable of the talents is NOT about money!) What kind of a world is it where people would rather live with a comfortable lie than a challenging truth? Where did Jesus say that good Christians go to expensive universities while His children in Haiti die with distended and empty bellies? Who are the people that have built a white picket fence around the cross and tried to do a PR job on the man who died there?

It comes to this: You are either nothing or you are everything. To be one you must try to be the other.

Rest

2008-09-03T03:01:00.000-07:00

What does Jesus mean when he says that his yoke is easy and his burden light? I know that I am supposed to be obedient to Jesus; this was imparted to me as a child. But what I had never considered until now is that it is perhaps more appropriate to be obedient like Jesus. Why is Jesus's burden light? Because the only burden he carries is his obedience to his Father. At the same time, I think about all the burdens I have carried, some longer than others, some heavier than most. Jesus says, "Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." An online study Bible offers this insight: "In place of the yoke of the law, complicated by scribal interpretation, Jesus invites the burdened to take the yoke of obedience to his word, under which they will find rest; cf Jeremiah 6:16."

I will find rest in obedience? Why don't I obey more? Why don't more people obey even a little?

A Short Story Long

2008-08-21T03:42:00.000-07:00

I took a day off yesterday in observance of a local Iraqi holiday called Something-in-Arabic (or Peace Day, in English, though that has to be a bureaucratic joke of some sort). So I slept in a bit, went for a big breakfast, then read up on some Catholic theology until lunch. After a turkey-and-swiss-on-potato-roll I straightened up my room, put away my laundry, shuffled some desk-things around, ran some miles (indoors, glory to God), then cleaned up for dinner. This time it was T-bone and lobster tail, a most appropriate denouement to a day passed extremely contented. However, it is the post-comestible evening about which I now write.

Volleyball was cancelled last night which I didn't mind too much, having strained my right calf a bit on the treadmill (24 miles this week!), so I walked under the moon-morning back to my room and sat down at my desk. Having no idea what to do, but being clearly ready to do something, I pulled out several books of short stories and picked a few at random, little expecting what I would find. What follows is no fabrication, but the pure, literal truth.

I began by reading a short story of W. Somerset Maugham called "The Fall of Edward Barnard" about a man who proposes to his sweetheart just before he moves to Tahiti to establish himself, promising to return for his bride in two years' time. In that time, however, Barnard settles on breaking his promise to his American fiancee when he decides to marry a young Tahitian woman and abandon the industrious life as an enslaving sham. The fiancee, jilted but unsinkable, marries instead Barnard's best friend, who has secretly loved her the entire time, and they set out together chins held high into the rarefied air of Chicago society. It is a very fine story, really, and seems a likely precursor to The Razor's Edge, sharing some of the same themes I appreciated so much (though they are irreligious and misguided, no question) in that book as well.

A quick step backward in time brought me to "Georgie Porgie" by Rudyard Kipling, a story about a man who breaks his promise to his Burmese wife, whom he bought essentially as a housekeeper, as was the common practice then. He bemoans his low station in that remote colonial outpost, however, and returns to England to marry a proper British wife before moving to India and a higher diplomatic posting. The faithful Burmese wife, thinking he is in danger, seeks him out and follows him to India. Discovering him married to another woman, she returns to the jungle where she closes the story with a curtain-fall of hideous moaning and wailing, which the couple mistakes for an animal's, tellingly. This was essentially Maugham's story in reverse, I realized, and abruptly lifted my head to look about, thinking someone was playing a trick on me. But I think Maugham may have read Kipling's story and decided to write his own antithetical, anti-elitist version. Both stories arrive at some vaguely moral conclusion, though Kipling's is an indictment of the insensitivity of his colonizing kinsmen (a common British theme), while Maugham's is a reproach to the ambition of the money-minded business elite and their pretentious wastefulness, especially the wasting of their own lives in a machine (a properly American theme). Still, the eerie similarity doesn't end there.

Another short step back a decade or so offered a Thomas Hardy story called "For Conscience' Sake" (yes, Conscience'), a story about a man who - novel idea! - breaks his promise to his fiancee. This time, though, Millborne moves away to London after getting the girl "into difficulties" in their small country town and remains a bachelor for the next twenty years. As time wears on, he feels overwhelmed by the guilt of his neglect and decides that he will use his remaining years to rectify his trespass by offering to marry the woman at long last. He finds her well-established in the same town and, after some hesitation, she relents; the two are married and begin life together in London, the daughter with her mother and new step-father. The daughter's suitor, however, is a man of unassailable scruples and, upon the suspicion that his lover was borne out of a moment of passion (the story had been that the girl's real father had died at sea before her birth), his ardor cools and the engagement threatens to fall through. Consequently, the mother and daughter blame the father, whose only sin was the original one committed twenty years hence, the one for which he aimed now to atone. In the end, Millborne leaves a second time, moves to Belgium, leaves them all of his money, and drinks himself into dissolution and old age, leaving the women free to live comfortably and contentedly, which they do gratefully. Hardy's tale is certainly less philosophical than moral, and he revels dwelling in, I believe, the ambiguity of man's life (for a perfect example of this in expanded form, read Jude the Obscure). So, you see, the theme continues unabated.

After the three white-haired Englishmen, I sauntered ahead a good twenty or thirty years to a piece by one of my new favorites, the American author Katherine Anne Porter, a short story specialist and native Texan. I read one of her first published stories, "Flowering Judas", about a corpulent Mexican leftist (who sings off-key, to be fair) who leaves his wife to woo a young revolutionist schoolteacher. After a fruitless month, however, he gives up and returns home where, reunited, he and his bafflingly magnanimous wife weep in each other's arms upon the bed. I love Porter's stories for their vivid, dream-like quality, on occasion waxing unapologetically mystical. At the same time, they are incisive and engrossing, and in this she reminds me well of Chekhov. She lures you into a character, like a rat into a trap, or a blind-date, without telling you much about the character (at least in the traditional sense of physical depiction) and then slams the bolt home on you, waking you out of your word-dream with a shivering start. It is no wonder she married four times, cheated death three times, or that she taught at Stanford, Michigan, and Texas without ever having graduated high school. Fascinating woman!

Finally, as if the theme weren't already fully fleshed, I read a 1992 short story by Robert Olen Butler about a Vietnamese man who loses his wife and daughters in an attack on his village, an attack carried out by the V.C., for whom he was a spy. Grieved and angry, he offers his services to the Australian forces against which he had only lately been plotting. In an attempt to take the man's mind off of his wife, a few soldiers invite him to their tent for a "movie". And though they mean well, or at least mean no harm, he is shamed by what he sees on the screen, deeply shamed by its baseness, as if it had taken bodily form and defiled his wife's grave. Leaving the movie with head bowed, he later kills the man who invited him and then takes his own life. So pure was his love for his wife and so unnatural he felt in the broken world that enveloped him.

What a night! It did not escape my notice, however, that the only principal character who remained faithful throughout was the one who consummated his faithfulness in death. Four men left their promised ones behind, and the fifth remained behind himself while his love was taken from him. Three of the men returned to their wives: one briefly after a long time, one lately after a brief time, and one quickly and for all time. It is no surprise that these stories resonate with me, and not just because they cast a shade upon my past, or because they are the story of many men. I am grateful for them, on the contrary, because they shine a light on our feebleness as men, as humans. I, for one, think it is a good thing to be reminded of my nature so that I can choose to surrender it back to the One who created me. That is to say that my story is written in another book, no doubt, but not in these. Yes, they are well-written and engaging, but they are not mine because I reject them. But I pray for those who, in their human frailty, don't.

To Allyson, My First Cousin

2008-08-19T03:16:00.000-07:00

Our God is many things: Lord, King, Savior, I AM. But I have been thinking lately, especially after reading your Anniversary Address, that He is, more than most roles often ascribed to him, perhaps, a Poet. And while His Earth may be composed structurally of carbon in its various forms, it was not created out of elements, but out of words. With all his power and wisdom, the Omnipotent and Omniscient One chose not to create the sun by bombarding hydrogen with helium; He fashioned it, instead, with a breath, from a verb followed by a noun. Before there could be a world, there had to be a word. In fact, John writes that before the first spoken word filled the formless void, there existed, had always existed, the Living Word, the Noun of Nouns. And from that Word, the first account of creation, the opening page of our human story, was written not as a scientific or historical treatise, but as a priestly hymn, carved out in smooth, shallow grooves, sweeping stanzas of poetry, echoing back in harmonics upon its own nature.

And since you and I, cousin, are created in the image and likeness of God, together with all his children, we too are His poets. He who breathed His words into our human frames at birth, breathes still His Word, that we may breathe Him into the silent lives of others. But words are cheap, some may say. Still others say, Let us create our own universe so that we too may be gods. Both misspeak, and neither voice translates the nature of the power of God's language, for just as the world is made of elements but made by words, those words, though made of letters, are made by love. Letters, like bones, give a word shape, but leave it a corpse; it is Love that gives it life. An empty, loveless word is a kite in a cage.

But you, like Mary before you, have chosen (if praise could ever be called a choice) to magnify the Lord. You sing of His might, but also of His mercy. You tell of His greatness, but also of His regard for the lowly. And because of your love, your words give life and hope to others who have little or none. There are so many, Allyson, that have never heard a word in their entire, stricken, silent lives. How can we wonder that they have never spoken one to us? And how will they hear if they are not told? Because you have chosen to rejoice, both in sickness and in health, and to echo your praises back to the Lord, He has chosen you to speak His words, in your own voice, into the great stillness. I know you will keep speaking. I pray that many will listen.

To Joel and David Joel

2008-08-18T09:43:00.000-07:00

My beloved brothers,

Not a day goes by that I don't feel inadequate. It's not about "self-esteem" or "self-acceptance" or any similar psychobabble, for self-esteem suggests that the best way to feel confident in myself is to change things about myself, things which are not me at all, in order to make me cosmetically or superficially "better", more marketable. "Change something about your appearance, teach yourself Latin, learn to sail, play the oboe: do all these things and you will like yourself more." But how ridiculous is this lie! What if I tried this approach on my friends that I have difficulty liking? "I was thinking just the other day, amigo, that I would like you much better if you flossed every now and then, and used bigger words. Oh, and does e pluribus unum mean anything to you? No, I didn't think so." Or is it that doing all these pursuits distract me and keep me from thinking about the emptiness in my life, thereby bringing me much-needed, if temporary, relief? It may do this, I think. I am probably more guilty of this tail-chasing than I realize. On the other hand, self-acceptance asks me to look in the mirror and to learn to love my inner (and outer) ugly self. It asks me to resign myself, to abandon all self-examination in favor of self-categorization. I begin to think only about what I am (usually, at my worst) and not what I could be or should be; it says, "You are you and you'd better learn to like it. Why keep fooling yourself?" And, finally, it's not the struggle to feel "good enough", and what does that mean anyway? good enough for what? compared to what? In most cases, trying to feel "good enough" leads me to the precipice of "better than", which in turn adds anxiety to misery and has often bred envy and resentment between myself and even the most trusted of my friends.

No, I feel just as I have said, inadequate, as if it was prophesied at my birth that, wherever I would go, I would always forget to pack the one thing that I cannot do without. But that's just it. I am incomplete. And it's a part of my human condition to be incomplete. And if that's the case, and I am created incomplete, then why do I plod through life under the illusion that I am able to make myself more complete through my own devices? On the contrary, God created Adam and Eve both naked and perfect, without clothes but without needs. They had nothing, but yet they lacked nothing. Nothing. He provided everything readily so that they would not "need", and it was not until they tried to take too much that they realized how little they had on their own, how little - how inadequate! - they truly were when separated from God. And later, when Jesus spoke of himself as the vine and us as the branches, he did not say that he would cut us off so that we would bear no fruit. Instead, he said that it was up to us to remain in him, that if we did not bear fruit then he would cut us off. Or, put another way, we feel most like fish out of water when we try to fly.

And that's why I feel inadequate, because I am only a branch, and because I will always be only a branch. No one remarks, when he sees a magnificent apple, "I would love to see the branch from which that magnificent apple came." No, they want to see the tree. I am only lately truly getting to know that tree. How could I really have known God when for so long I have thought I was more like him than I really am? Unfortunately, I am nothing like Him, though I pray to be. I was made in His image, something that should give me both hope and pause: hope because He has given me a part of Himself, and pause because He has given that part to me and not someone else. Nevertheless, He has entrusted me with two things: to cling to Him and to bear fruit. In fact, He makes it even simpler. Cling to Him and I will bear fruit. It's what branches do.

Every time I think of my God, I feel inadequate, unworthy. Because I am. But He is not. He gives me life freely, and purpose, and the joy of bearing fruit in His name. I can't believe it's taken all of my 26 years to feel properly inadequate.

All told, I am proud of you both as my brothers in Christ and exceedingly thankful that we have grown, are now growing, and will still grow together. Now let us bear fruit together.

In the name of the Holy T(h)ree,

Justin

A Diatribe

2008-08-12T22:34:00.000-07:00

This is me venting. Fair warning.

Two things that I cannot bear.

Thing One: Bible-Belt, Baby-Boomer, evangelical-Zionist white men who rave red-faced about the end times in their Texas drawls and their tailored suits. I find it barbaric that the same people who have grafted contemporary Israel's politics into their religious fabric are the same ones who believe that Catholics worship Mary. I pray for the smug, gilt-edged hearts of these blustering men. (And women, if there are any.)

Thing Two: Evangelical missions groups that see their goal as saving people from hell. This is not theology, but an anti-theology since God becomes a secondary necessity, a modal vehicle, the Hummer of salvation. God is not HOW you get to heaven; God does not exist BECAUSE of heaven. Hell and heaven are real but they are not a goal and an anti-goal. On the contrary, heaven is God's home, to which he invites us as a blessing for reaching the goal of following Christ. If God lived in Wichita Falls, I'm sure He would invite us there to spend eternity with him. To make heaven your goal is either to try to arrive apart from following Christ or to use him as a guide until heaven is in sight and Jesus is no longer of any use to you. Likewise, hell is not merely the other side of the coin; it is the consequence of the failure to follow Christ. A faith decided by choosing between heaven and hell as if they were Miami and Milwaukee is no faith. And the people leading others to choose this no-faith are peddling it to them like a magic amulet that will protect them from evil spirits: it will not work, and we become spiritual charlatans and quasi-Christian quacks. To give someone a false faith is to cause him to stop searching, stop following. He is more lost than he knows, and we are guilty of a sin worse than rejecting God ourselves. And the great irony all along is that we call this "saving" people. I pray every day that I may be worthy of God, not of heaven. My confidence is in God, not in my salvation or in Salvation.

These things disgust me. Absolutely disgust me.

Team Yellow

2008-08-08T07:10:00.000-07:00

I woke up today and found myself cycling in one of those huge swarms of cyclists, like bees in Spandex or sweaty starlings. And, like any sensible person who has got somewhere without knowing how he got there, I began to wonder. I wondered where we were going and why we were going there and who was leading this buzzing bike-blob anyway. And as I wondered, I began to look around, searching for any clues I could find. Lifting my head from the dashing road, I saw only our river, the swift revolution of stampeding spokes. No signs or landmarks; no signs of stopping.

Slowly, I began to shift outward (what I could only guess was outward) and for the first time I began to see people's faces. They lifted their plasticked heads to see who was causing the ripple in the flow. I tried to say excuse me but what with the squeaking gears and the zipper-noise of a thousand tires it was mostly in vain. "What are you trying to pull, Mac?" shot one exceedingly perspiring man. Apologetically, I begged his pardon and kept moving out. At one point, two ladies keeping pace with each other closed the gap so I couldn't cross over, so I slowed down and let them pass. The people behind me looked up and yelled for me to keep moving, to go with the flow. "What flow? Where? Who are you people?" I asked to everyone and was answered by no one.

I finally saw the edge of the pack and the very responsible looking people riding there to keep the seam tight. Still peddling, I motioned to them that I was coming through. They looked back blankly, taking their eyes off the road for a few long seconds to see who I was, to take me in, to see what I was about, wanting to leave the flow. "I just need to think," I said. "Drink? You need a drink?" they offered, looking bewildered. "No, I just want to rest. I need a minute." Still not understanding, they braked hard as I swerved between them and out into the open.

"Don't fall behind," I heard one of them yell back to me. "Behind what?" I called back, though faintly, for they were well gone. And so I planted my feet and watched the bicycle sea as they stared and shook their heads and thundered on.

Like a Lodge in a Cucumber Field

2008-07-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

Today I am thinking about names. I have never been a particularly big fan of my own name, it's true, and not because it's not a nice one (Thanks, Mom!) but because I've always found it difficult to equate my identity with a set of three words, any more than with a set of three smells (Oldbook Woodsmoke Sweetpotatoes) or three colors (Cerulean Cornflower Burntumber). Names were originally, I imagine, given to people to give them some frame of reference in which they might exist in relation to everything else in the world. In this quality, names were meant, on the one hand, to link one with others, while at the same time separating that same one from other others. For example, Adam and Eve were given names (Adam by God, Eve by Adam) which were directly derived from the words for "man" and "woman", while later, people began to tack on appendages such as tribal names or "son of So-and-so." As time progressed they became more irrelevant (e.g. the embarrassingly musty names of dead aunts and uncles), more incomprehensible (e.g. any name remotely similar to Kwanisha), and more indiscriminate (e.g. the old androgynous favorites of Terry, Pat, Erin, Jaime, etc.). They ceased to "mean" anything. In fact, the process has become so arbitrary and so trivialized that couples often find it interesting (even telling) to discuss and agree on the names of their children before discussing (or even considering) the reality of actually having them. But back to me.

To its credit, "Justin" was once the name of an early Christian apologist, a famous Roman historian, and a prodigious line of Byzantine emperors, which "prolificity" (a word I think my friend David made up) some people might consider a boon (even if the last Emperor Justin went crazy and began to eat his subjects). Unfortunately, my parents weren't the only parents in the early '80's who had brushed up on their Late Antiquity history, and to my enduring misery, I now share a kind of kinship with a trendsetting pop icon of sorts. The problem - the tragedy - is that about 1% of the population (rounding way up) has ever heard of Byzantium, which happens to be the same 1% that has never heard of SexyBack. Of course, my parents likely considered neither a 1500-year-old corpse in Turkey or a one-year-old baby in Memphis when they named me. In fact, I was more like Pennsylvania.

In 1681, William Penn, a humble man by all accounts, tried to found a colony called simply "Sylvania", but King Charles II (for whom the Carolinas were named, oddly enough) insisted on paying homage to Penn's father, a favorite admiral of his who had loaned him a small fortune. So he gave him a big yellow I.O.U. (called a charter) for a name-tag-shaped tract of someone else's land that would immediately become void if he or his descendants ever: changed the name, drove a motorized vehicle, or had a successful baseball team. In much the same way my parents wanted nothing more than to name me "Michael" (which would have been a foolproof omen of greatness when one notices that I share the same birthday with a legendary Jordan of that same name) but they were worried that a legion of lazy people would take to calling me "Mike". This being also the name of their mascot at LSU (a prodigious line of Bengal tigers) they could hardly stand for their son to suffer the same abbreviated fate. And, for that, I thank them. Men cannot be trusted not to make fools of themselves and ruin the best of things, names included. Best just to take away the temptation.

Finally, and finally, as I have mentioned in an earlier snatch of soliloquy, "McDevitt" is (by snobbish Scottish default) decidedly Irish, a fact of which I would be more proud if it meant anything to be Irish-American these days. In fact, the Irish-Americans (and the Irish themselves) are the only ones who have ever placed any value in being Irish-American (except on St. Patrick's Day when everyone becomes the most tenuous of Irishes, and increasingly so as the night wears on). Perhaps, it would mean more if I was Catholic, something I will be able to judge for myself in a few months once I become one.

It is an odd name, though, Irish or not. It is as often misspelled as it is mispronounced, if not more so, and often comically. But everyone gets it wrong, so at least I don't feel singled out. For instance, the laundry guy today (from the Philippines, I think) wrote down McDavid on my ticket, like the best of my own people back home. And in third grade I placed third in the poetry contest with a piece entitled "Thanksgiving". I was pleasantly surprised, however, to receive my trophy several days after the announcement was made and find that I had actually won FIRST PRIZE! A few seconds later, though, my face fell as I discovered that it was not I who won the top honor after all, but someone named Justin McDevill. And I (in my pre-Faustian innocence) was quick to point out the mistake, at which time one of the other kids was pointing out that her trophy mistakenly awarded her third prize. Since that day I have probably always associated my name in some subtle and perverse way with both being a loser AND burning in hell.

(WARNING: This is the part where I begin to get remotely serious.)

So I don't make much of my name if I can help it. In fact, I wish I didn't have to have a name at all. Furthermore, I think it should be my right to NOT have a name, if I should so choose. Besides, names, being arbitrary, are nothing more than more personal forms of numbers. Names aren't cultural anymore. They don't communicate things. They identify you, like a bar code or a chip in your brain. The government sees a baby and, like it would a new species of slug, names it something inscrutable and Latin-sounding in an attempt to keep track of it in a database so it can someday tax it and sell its information to various magazine publishers. How else could they keep the Postal Service soluble? But imagine if a family of Arkansans were found in the remotest nook of the Ozarks carrying on without names. There would be less of an uproar if they were going on without clothes! But, like Shakespeare insisted (and Timon reiterated), "What's in a name?" Who needs one? I have friends who have named their cat "Cat" and dog "Dog" but even they don't see that it is still a version of selling out.

(FURTHER WARNING: All joking aside...)

I realized something today. I come from a heritage in which naming is a form of domination. If you name it, you somehow own it or control it. A theorem, a business school, a football stadium, a diet, even a star (talk about a racket!). It gives the Namer a godlike feeling of creation, or at least cooption, which is often a potent substitute. Think about it. Our national forefathers sailed from England and, before the mud on their austere black shoes had dried, began to fire off names like so many harquebuses. Names of people (Maryland, Virginia, Georgia), names of places (New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire), names of the natives they encountered (Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts), and one trebly-accidentally-named colony called Rhode Island (which is a non-island, identified mistakenly by a hapless subordinate, and whose name is an Anglicized bastardization of the Dutch word for red, which Rhode Island is clearly not, seeing as I've been there and saw only blue things).

After the settlers named their respective colonies, they set out to explore this lush, verdant land upon which no man (read "white man") had ever stepped (white) foot. They named everything: rivers, mountains, lakes. And when they ran out of things, they built some so they would have more things to name. Never, in their arrogance, did they think that perhaps all these things already had names. Rarely, I should say, since there are quite a few towns and rivers that have retained their "Indian" names, though some of these, like the states, were not named by the natives but after the natives. Nevertheless, historians suggest that native peoples, in some form, had been living in the area of the original colonies since 8000 B.C. - and doing just fine, thank you very much.

What was far worse than the mere commandeering of colonial naming rights, what was more insidious than the simple disregard for the names the previous inhabitants had given to their own natural wonders, was the perverse phenomenon that, at the same time, the early Americans had taken all the names of all the natives and replaced them with one: "savage". At the same time they were anthropomorphizing bodies of water, they were systematically dehumanizing entire populations. They billed "The New World" as a utopia rich in natural resources, while they summarily exterminated (or enslaved) the only people who knew how to appreciate it properly. They arrived, like the children of Israel craving a Promised Land, and they did what the Israelites failed to do: eliminate all trace of anyone already there.

Now I'm not saying they weren't provoked, and I'm not saying I'm personally ungrateful for the present-day result of their labor, but I am saying it's a shame. It's a shame that should never happen again. But it has. All over the world it has happened again and again, this revolving (and booby-trapped) door of hegemony and homogeneity. The most recent example of which that I can think of I am also a part of. Let me explain.

When the "coalition" forces invaded Iraq, we took any of Saddam's bases that we hadn't destroyed beyond recognition and we made them our own, giving them heroic English names (Victory, Liberty, Freedom Rest), intimidating names (Hammer, Dagger, Warrior, Anaconda), and completely alien mind-boggling names (O'Ryan, McHenry, Dogwood, Wilson). It is only now that the army is beginning to transition back to the actual Iraqi place names, the names they had before we arrived, the names they will have long after we're gone. And every day I hear "Iraqi" thrown about as if it were derisive, something to be ashamed of. Even worse, we call them "host country nationals" (HCN's, for short) robbing them of any kind of identity other than the one we give them. We don't tell them thank you for letting us be here because we feel they should be thanking us for being here. We have unnamed them. And, in doing so, we have once again lost our own humanity.

I was thinking...they should make a name for our condition.

Illi Autem Sunt In Pace

2008-07-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Like Hamlet, this is where I am. I've been irritable at work today. I'm not going to say it's God's fault, but it is certainly true that the more you die to the world the more you realize how dead the world already is. If God were like the gods of Olympus, He would be sitting in heaven watching the men of the world make fools of themselves as they try to rival the gods in power and beauty. The tragedy is that God takes no delight in seeing men destroy themselves, to the extent that he let those very men destroy His Son instead, that they might be either satisfied with or appalled by their cruelty, their folly, and turn from it.

I've begun to pray that I might die for the cause of Christ, that I might share in his death and resurrection. Many Christians say that it is more difficult to live for God than to die for Him, but I say do both. That's what Jesus did. He did both.

I keep thinking about my life, the amount of grace that God has shown me, the many blessings He has bestown upon me, and I can't understand how it means anything unless I give it all back to Him. If anyone was to ask me what I want to do with my life, I could now tell them without thinking twice that I would like to live and die for Christ, not because I think it noble or pious or dutiful, but because everything else seems ridiculous and miserable by comparison.

I make a lot of money, and I don't want it. I have the opportunity to go to a first-rate graduate school and make a name for myself, and I don't want it. I am often tempted to make a legion of acquaintances who make me feel significant by simple recognition, and I don't want it.

Estelle Getty died today. I used to watch "Golden Girls" with my mom almost every day of my senior year in high school when my best friend Jeremy and I would leave the school for lunch hour. I read something about her today though that made me realize how wise she was. She had been working really hard to break into acting full-time but found herself having to work a low-paying office job to help make ends meet. Her passion for the pursuit of her dream was so powerfully pure that she asked her boss at the office never to promote her, for fear that she would become comfortable with something other than her heart's desire.

So I may be one of the only living human beings whose prayer life has been shaped by one of the Golden Girls, but like Estelle, Paul understood the same idea. Now I too understand what happens when you truly begin to "count it all rubbish". And there's a reason that Jesus didn't come as a king or as a conqueror: it's not the world that is worth saving, but the people in it like me.

The Loneliest Number

2008-07-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

My name is Nick Mehr and I live at the edge of the world. Believe me, it's not because I'm a loner by nature. In fact, I used to rent a flat very near to the center of the world, but it got so crowded and noisy that I could no longer stand it; and I had to get away. So I took a day - one day - to wrap up all my loose ends, as they say. I called everyone and cancelled everything. I spent hours looking for something and, not finding it, I packed nothing. Then I called the state and asked them to cancel my name, or at least to transfer it to the records of the edge of the world. After a brief gasp, the voice on the other end of the line asked me if I realized what I was doing, if I wouldn't talk to someone about it first. This was highly irregular, she said; she could send someone over by mid-afternoon to help me regain my focus, a right-the-ship sort of job. No, no one, I told her. But that was just it: I was a no one. Why should they fuss over me? In a city teeming with people, I am just another number. And I had spent my best years as a zero standing sideways, hoping that people would see a one. Instead...I became invisible. It occurred to me one day, amidst my many machinations, that I had long since disappeared, that it was now just a matter of the leaving.

So here I am. It suits me, this ascetic life. I feel at home in the nothingness, the zeroness. Only now that I know I'm empty can I begin to be filled.

My Own Mistake IV: Conduct Unbecoming

2008-07-20T03:27:00.000-07:00

"In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live I have to die. The reason for this is that I am born in selfishness and therefore my natural efforts to make myself more real and more myself, make me less real and less myself, because they revolve around a lie."
- Thomas Merton

A few years ago at Urbana, one of the pastors spoke to a stadium full of college students about growing in love for God in preparation for a life of service and ministry. He spoke specifically about his own commitment in prayer, the time spent asking God to give him a partner in life who would also be his partner in ministry. During the long hours spent on his knees, God finally led him to understand that his love for another human being could only exist as an overflow of his heart for God. Seen another way, God loves you so much that he will sometimes choose to save you from yourself.

It's a kind of love that even the great modern poet John Mayer understands, if in his own way. On his new live album Where the Light Is he says this about love: "I don't mean like a Roman-candle-firework-Hollywood-hot-pink love; I mean like an I've-got-your-back love." That's the kind of love that God loves us with, and it is no more acutely evident than when he is moved by his great love to pursue an intervention. Literally, the word intervention means "to come between": God steps between us and something (or someone) else just as if he were jumping into the line of fire of a bullet. Or a cross.

I thank God that he has brought me out of the despondency of the past few years, a numbing oppression that kills by leaching life and stealing joy. It is a slavery that - while not unlike that of the Israelites in Egypt, if I may so flagrantly flatter myself - probably compares more aptly to the exile in Babylon, which was different in that it was a direct result of inner decay. For God to redeem his people he sent them to a place where nothing would save them except their faith. Those strong in faith would endure the grueling trial, while the weak in faith would give up or perish. Only the remnant would flourish after the fire.

The fact that I was delivered from that exile in my own homeland by going to Babylon is not an irony lost on me. In consequence I have come to pray for trials, that my faith may be strengthened. I pray that I can be a voice crying in the wilderness to those that come after me. Some will hear abrasion, a burlap menace. Others will hear salvation, those who, like Thomas Merton, understand that the fulfillment of the self apart from God is the shanty of an existence built on the foundation of a lie. And, forgive the commonplace, but it is a damning lie.

So I want to thank those wilderness voices in my own life. It takes courage to speak the truth out of love, to love someone enough to risk losing them by a submission to the truth of God, no matter the cost. Some people think that it is too heavy for people who are hurting to hear. Quite the opposite is true. If you cannot offer a drowning man the truth that will save his life, you are only throwing him towels.

Reality

2008-07-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

Reality.

I walked out of my room today and, hit with the baked air of the morning, I was reminded of the reality of my situation. Of course, I go through this every day, this cycle of remove-recoil-revolt, more times than even Bill Murray could bear. Inevitably, my first thought on stepping out of the door is more precisely one of regret. I wish I could stay, quiet and comfortable, in my small space; then I would be happy. The heat of the day, coupled with an exterior world that is the aesthetic equivalent of a plantar wart, is enough to convince even the most visionary would-be blue-pill do-gooder to keep eating his steak like a nice boy and not ask questions. So reality is what? That it's hot in Iraq in July? Groundbreaking!

I won't lie, I work indoors. I am outside in the heat for all of 20 minutes every day. Therefore, I acknowledge the possibility that I have no idea what I'm talking about. For all I know, every manual laborer walked out of his door this morning and thanked God that it was cooler than yesterday. Likewise, maybe every unsavory or malicious character wishing to do me bodily harm decided it was too hot to fight today and instead stayed inside and played Grand Theft Auto 4. That's just it. The problem with reality is that I can only see an infinitesimally small slice of it, the part I call my reality.

Therefore, I have defined reality thus: the aggregate of all that is observable, measurable, and knowable. For instance, the reality is that the high temperature today is 114 degrees Fahrenheit. That is reality. But the term "hot" is surely relative, it pegs its existence to a relation with something else; in fact, for it to be reality everyone on the earth (or at least everyone within hearing) would have to agree that it is hot. If there is one dissenter, how can you convince him that it is, empirically and indisputably, hot? You can show him your sweat and he will say that you are fat and need to lose weight, which you will deny, thus bringing the disagreement to a second battlefield of reality. You will say that you weigh only 215 at which point he will say that it's only 114 outside - at which point you will sit outside and cry and sweat, from which you will lose ten pounds before you pass out and get a second-degree sunburn. Next time he walks by you he will say, "Man, it must be hot outside."

So you see my point. Deer can't see in the full range of color and, if they could hold discourse with us, there is nothing in the world that would be able to convince them that there is such a thing as chartreuse or vermilion or saffron. And you've heard that there are sounds that dogs and bats can hear that humans can't. So next time you go outside at night and it seems quiet, the reality is that it may or may not in reality be quiet, only you have no way of knowing without being a bat.

The argument even extends to the political realms. John McCain points to the reality that Americans are suffering financially from high oil prices and he connects that with the reality that there is oil underground off coastal America. Barack Obama, on the other hand, points to the North Pole and lets us see for ourselves the reality that there isn't a North Pole anymore, at least not one you can poke a flag into. Both sides argue and point to the realities that suit them, but the reality is the aggregate, it is everything combined, it exists apart from our ideas of it, like God.

The beautiful irony is that the only thing that is wholly true is also widely disbelieved. Okay, maybe that's more tragic than beautiful, but my point is that, since we as humans can never KNOW the sum of each person's own personal reality, there is no possible means for us to ever know reality. Furthermore, philosophers would argue (and have argued since Socrates) that reality is best discovered not in the petri dish of science but in the crucible of logic. But just as man created thermometers to understand temperature, man also created words to understand ideas. And equipped with these words, man created even more ideas, like the idea of reality, and the idea that reality should be stark.

We have been conditioned to think that "naked" and "real" are synonymous. Why is it that I only began to contemplate reality when I felt the heat of the sun, though the comfort of my room was just as real? Why do we say, "That's life!" the one time we get in an accident coming home from the grocery store, but not the other thousand times when we don't? Why do we say, "I knew he (or she) would cheat on me!" when we find out about it but not before? It only proves that our ability to discern reality is the very picture of incomplete or imperfect, especially in an era where most of our reality is piped in through fiber-optic cables. So sad.

In reality, I am a nobody; initially a perfect creation, I have now become the product of the broken society that has shaped me, that has taught me how to walk, what to say, and when to say it. It has taught me what to wear, who to value, and where the nearest Old Navy is by entering my ZIP code. But it cannot answer any of the questions that begin with "Why".

Or, at least, if it can, I can't hear it.

God's Ethnic Cleansing

2008-07-17T06:13:00.001-07:00

"On that day they read from the Book of Moses in the hearing of the people. And in it was found written that no Amonite or Moabite should ever enter the assembly of God, for they did not meet the people of Israel with bread and water, but hired Balaam against them to curse them - yet our God turned the curse into a blessing. As soon as the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent." - Nehemiah 13:1-3

Yikes. That's all I'm saying. Nehemiah was a pretty devout guy. A purist. If he stood up and said that today, even in Israel, even in UTAH, he would be run out of town. So I asked myself how this passage should (or can) be understood by God's multicultural, new-covenant family of today. I don't know much about history, but it doesn't take much to understand that assimilation on the scale seen today is a very new phenomenon. In the past you could look at a man and tell where he was from and, from that, you could surmise much about his culture. Now with globalization, the end of "frontier", and the decline of nationalism since the height of fascism, people groups live in a melting pot the size of the world. Here are a few examples of where that has brought us:

- The cover article in the August 2008 National Geographic is a study of Iran and the deep cultural roots to which it has held more or less fast for the last five millenia. A fascinating article, though achingly short and shallow, it speaks of the Iranian heritage of Persian-ness (5000 years old) that has caused it to distance itself from and sparked friction with the Arabization of more recent times (1200 years ago).

- In PJ O'Rourke's book "Peace Kills", he writes of the violence - the hatred, really - that has fomented in the Balkan region for the past century and more. He wrote of young Albanian boys that would walk up to the few remaining Serbian women in Pristina and make throat-slitting gestures to these old women.

- W. Somerset Maugham wrote dozens of short stories in his life, many of them based on his travels in the South Pacific. One I read today called "Rain" both scorned and mourned the common practise of Christian missionaries to deracinate native peoples and to equate indoctrination with enculturation. I could (and probably will) write a later article about the dangers of propagating the notion of a separate "Christian culture", but not here. I mean only to state here that it was a tragedy that these myriad people groups were given a new spiritual identity at the expense of (and not in addition to) their cultural ones.

There are loads more examples I could reference, these are just some I've read lately; but the point is that cultures have always existed more or less in some breed of tension; Israel in the time of the exile (or in the Mosaic day or today, for that matter) was no different in that respect. What was different, however, is that Israel was damaged goods, it was in need of restoration, and they needed all the help they could get.

Indeed, I'm not offering a system of apologetics for God's actions, because he certainly does not need one, holy and blameless as he is. Nor am I using God's very focused actions as an example for a similar broad system of application today.

The influences of the Amonites and Moabites were neither subtle nor benign. God's message to his people was the same as if a parent today took away a child's television. He was turning off all the distractions and asking them to focus on him intensely for now until they were strong enough to be released into the world, like a bird healing a broken wing.

Nehemiah ends his story with a difficult, admonitory dusting off of the hands: "Thus I cleansed them from everything foreign." I just thought that was cool. That's a prayer.

Captain Jesus and the PooPoo Brew

2008-07-11T10:29:00.000-07:00

"Lord, what fools these mortals be." - Puck

I took my Independence Day holiday today. As is customary on holidays, I let myself sleep in, waking only when I began to feel the discreet whistling of guilty indulgence that sounded strangely like birds outside my door. Being in no rush to head out that prefabricated door, I took my leisurely time getting ready, which, when balanced nicely by the semi-slovenly disregard for shaving and combing my hair, ended up taking about the customary thirty minutes (including combat shower). Oddly enough, the longest part of my preparation was the ironing of my recalcitrantly corrugated "Republic of Tex-Mex" t-shirt. Donning the ubiquitous tan cap and red lanyard (my friend Melanie calls it a leash) I set off on my short but brisk walk to the office.

I know what you're thinking: why am I going to the office on my holiday? The answer is simple: animal poo. Yes, really. You see, on the famous coffee-producing island of Sumatra live a number of a type of fox-cat animal called the civet. These civets ingest coffee cherries, which their digestive systems are unable to process, and, after a brief jaunt through the pipes, the cherries, partially acidified, are excreted within the fecal matter. Industrious (and courageous) farmers then collect the pungent droppings, sift out the coffee cherries, which are then cleaned, roasted, ground, and packaged in air-tight astronaut-food packets. What comes out (zing!) is the rarest type of coffee in the world. (Shane wouldn't even tell me how much the two-ounce packet cost. Yikes!) How could I miss this?! Especially if it was supposed to be even better than the weasel-vomit coffee we had last Thursday. (No lie.)

With a most spectacular cup of shi-vet coffee in one hand (hazelnut creamer and two Splendas in a black, fat-boy New York Times mug) and my Bible and a novel in the other hand I officially set out on a very relaxing holiday. I read a good chapter or so in the novel while waiting for the southbound bus, giving me enough time to enjoy - no exaggeration - perhaps the best cup of coffee I've ever had in my life. After a quick trip to the computer room in the wellness center, I headed to lunch at the cafeteria (pit ham with apple-pineapple glaze and a bland supporting cast of side dishes - from a can, no doubt) where I sat for a good hour or so reading a play of Chekhov and the first couple chapters of Philippians. The play, "The Sea Gull", was positively brilliant; I highly recommend it, even if you've never had much exposure to Russian literature. He even gives reverant nods to Pushkin, Turgenev, and de Maupassant, which I thought rather nice of him.

But it was the time spent in Philippians (part of "Paul's mail", my religious studies professor would have called it) that really stoked the brain-furnace. I have been making great strides, I meekly pray, in rooting out the vestiges of pride in my heart since I've been here. I have made it a part of my regular prayers and have been getting a lot more adept at recognizing in its myriad forms, thanks to the conviction of the Holy Spirit, no doubt. That's actually why I was reading Philippians. I remembered using the passage from chapter 3 when writing the material for "The Quest" years ago with Ellen and it has always stuck with me as a great warning against potential consuming pride. If you'll remember, chapter 3 is the well-known passage where Paul presents his sterling resume only to throw it all out the window when he compares it to knowing Christ. I've always thought that a pretty bracing reminder of my own paltry accomplishments whenever I start to get a bit too inflated. And it is.

But God had other plans. In fact, I never even made it that far in the letter. I had forgotten that chapter 2 contained Paul's description of Jesus' own sterling resume, which I had read many times before but which contained its own pleasant ambush for me today. Reading the ESV (English Standard Version) that my amazing friend Amie bought me before I came over here, I read verse 8 as if I had never read it before (perhaps owing to a different translation, I'll wager). But here it is: "And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." I've always read that to mean that Jesus humbled himself by dying. But that's not what it says. There's another crucial word sandwiched in there.

I must have read the verse about ten times through after I saw that word: obedient. Jesus humbled himself not by dying, but by being obedient; it just so happened that in his obedience he was asked to die. The point of the verse is not that Jesus' humility was found in his death, but in his obedience. But the drastic concept - for me, at least - is that "he humbled himself by becoming obedient." If I am on a mission to eradicate all the decay of pride from my heart, I must follow the example of Christ, not in his death, but in his obedience. It's not obligation, it's not a set of rules, it's the act of humbling myself by forfeiting my own sovereignty in favor of my King's.

In this verse, God (through Paul) is acknowledging that he understands that he has given to all of us the very potent gift of free will and that he considers it a Christ-worthy act of humility to surrender that free will back to God through our obedience to him. Maybe that's a simple foundation of the faith to some, but to me it was earth-shaking. God has given us free will which we can either spend or return to him in the form of obedience. If only I can have faith enough to surrender it every day and in every situation, to know that my faith is daily tested when I am faced with the temptation to handle matters myself.

It reminds me of when the children of Israel told Samuel that they wanted a king, when up to that point they had been governed by God himself, through the prophets and the judges. It's like every day I wake up and head to the cockpit where God has been flying the plane of my life throughout the night, and every day, when I stumble in, rubbing my eyes, and see him sitting there, he asks me if I want to take over. "Yeah, God, you need some sleep. You look a little worse for wear. Besides, I don't want to get rusty in case I need to fly this thing solo someday. You know? On second thought, you just keep on flying. I'll just get you a cup of this really great coffee. You'll LOVE it!"

When My Concocted Self Strays

2008-07-10T01:43:00.000-07:00

Meditating on the parable of the lost sheep. Living it, actually. I started reading Eclipse of the Sun by Michael D. O'Brien yesterday. (It's the fourth of his that I've read - third since coming here - all beautifully written novels about following God in your weaknesses and letting Him do His will through you. Really powerful and well-written stuff!) So last night, by the time I finally switched off my light at the end of the day, I was on page 534; I read so much that the black dye of the cloth had begun to rub off on my fingertips! Well, because I stayed up late reading, I hit the snooze button a few extra times this morning and took my time getting ready, my mind being full of the images and ideas of the previous day's reading. I walked, deep in thought, to the office this morning, an hour or so later than usual. Right as I was about to walk up the front steps, out comes my co-worker Jeff, who sees me, stops, and says, "So you are alive!" He had come to make sure I was okay, since I'm usually in well by that time. I smiled at his thoughtfulness and thanked him heartily, glad that I live in a place where people care enough to come knocking. And, in truth, he has done this several times when we've been worried about people who come in later than usual. Each time I tell him how awesome I think it is that he does that. But this was the first time he had come to get me. Even my boss asked me if I was feeling okay this morning. I told him I was, thanks, that I just had a lot on my mind.

It was then that I remembered the parable in Matthew that Jesus told about the lost sheep. Reading it again just now, I remembered how much I love this story, even though it is a mere five verses long. I love it for its purity and simplicity, but also for its restraint: there is no blame, no lectures, no disapproving glares or self-righteous sniffs. I know that sounds weird, but what we take for ambiguity or reticence in God, while even frustrating at times, often signals a lesson in faith. The story doesn't tell us why the one went astray, or why the shepherd didn't notice it earlier, only that the shepherd had come looking and, on finding, had rejoiced.

It also invites comparisons with the parable of the lost son (the "prodigal" one, though prodigal means wasteful not lost). But in both of these stories you are meant to find a part of yourself relating to the lost one and another part relating to the "staid" one. Or perhaps the more perverse among us who need a "good guy" and a "bad guy" to keep them from having to use judgment at all will find a dangerous half-lesson in these cases. In any case, or in both cases, the emphasis is not on the sheep or the son at all, but on the One who welcomes him back.

So Jeff was a reminder to me that I - no less than the world we live in - had been a lost sheep looking for myself. I had ceased to look for the herd I had lost or for the home I had left and had begun to listen to the voice inside me that said that true happiness - or rather, true completion - is found in finally finding yourself. But as John Banville writes in The Sea, "Anyway, where are the paragons of authenticity against whom my concocted self might be measured?" We who follow Christ know the answer to that, that our body (and our heart) is God's temple and there are no spare bedrooms in it. Our hearts are poor half-way houses for the Lord until we go to live in the mansions he has built for us. If we spend all of our time looking for ourselves we will never let ourselves be found by the shepherd.

A word about redemption. When you redeem a ticket or a coupon, you are trading in something worthless - economics calls it a fiat - for something of value. That's our story as the redeemed. For the Redeemer, there is always a price, some previously arranged settlement that covers the exchange. In our case, Jesus died to become that settlement and has extended the offer of redemption to anyone who would listen and believe. All we have to do is turn ourselves in. In Spanish, the verb entregar means "to give over, to surrender (something)" and that's what we do. There is no self, no finding, no pursuit, no path to enlightenment. There is only the narrow gate. And the Gatekeeper accepts only one currency: our all.

Abandon Your Life Now!

2008-07-08T11:09:00.000-07:00

Give your life to Christ. Quickly! Give up everything, cast it aside, drop it where it lies, and leave. Walk away. No, run! Leave your job, leave your family, leave your home, leave your life. Lose it! If he says it must go, it must. Rather, if he says you must go and it stay, you must go without a moment's hesitation. Do not look to be on fire for God, for we, being flesh, are poor conductors and will soon fizzle and sputter out. But rather look to have the flame of God burn within you, the flame that consumes without destroying, that refines and renews. You must let His fire devour all that is dead and decaying within you. If you do not, if you wait and waffle and waver, you will yourself dry up and be burned away. If you have cozily nestled your life in the subtle complacencies of "Christian living", cast them aside as well, for life in Christ consists of one narrow but clearly discernible path: the path of Christ himself. If you believe that the world is on fire and that Christ is the only way out, then follow, cling to him, close your eyes to the raging inferno and cry out, that others may too know the way and follow you out. If you, on the other hand, seek to make for yourself a home in this world, you have only to leave off the following and to clear for yourself a space, for you were born into this world: why should you leave it? But remember, Judas bought a field for the dead with his blood when he could have bought life itself had he only recognized the pearl of great price for what it was.

As for me, the choice is clear: abandon my life or abandon my Savior. I have, like Peter, denied him many times, choosing a rightside-up body to house my upside-down heart. Yet I pray that, like Peter, I may someday be crucified with him, I may share in his sufferings, and through them, on the other side of them, I may find my way to safety. Nothing else matters! Now, go!!! And I pray to meet you there.

Thoughts While Dropping Off Laundry

2008-07-06T23:58:00.000-07:00

The gravel crunches under my feet like the bones of the hungry and it's not worth my time to wonder why I cannot walk straight. How foolish we are to intimate that we are creators, that our footsteps fall like blessings upon primitive sylvan pathways, that in sight we lay claim and plant ourselves, shoot-stalk-seed, progeny for posterity. This endless giving is nothing more than the taking of an inverted beneficence and the thrusting of a less charitable inclination. To arrive at the center is not to derive the average from the sum but to bring the aggregate into parity. Far better to be a poor man bound up than a rich man free from all but himself.

The Mystique of Zeke

2008-07-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

I have to tell you: one of my new heroes is someone I know almost nothing about. And, no, it's not Spiro Agnew. Or even Chaim Potok. It's another famous Hebrew named Ezekiel Bodacher. Okay, so I made up the Bodacher part. But that's just it! We know next to nothing about this amazing prophet of God. Doesn't that sound like a great disservice? Sure, he's got a book of the Bible named after him, but it isn't really about him at all. It's a 48-chapter rant on how deplorable the people of God had become. You don't hear anything about Ezekiel's childhood home or whether he was teased in school or how he met his wife.

In fact, the only thing it does say about his wife is that God spoke to Ezekiel one day and told him that He was going to cause Ezekiel's wife to die! Moreover, God told Ezekiel that he wasn't allowed to weep or mourn at all, that it would be a sign to Israel of how desensitized they had become in their wretchedness and sinfulness. And you know what Ezekiel said? "So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded." (Ezekiel 24:18)

WOW! Ezekiel made his mark on the world by being entirely faceless: when people interacted with Ezekiel it was only as a conduit for God. How amazing it would be to live that selfless and, well, empty of a life! I pray for obedience on that scale and I pray that God will do through me a shred of what he did through Ezekiel. I leave you with the thoughts of two men who got the message from Ezekiel and lived the same self-hollowed-out lives as he did.

"Let me keep silence in this world, except in so far as God wills and in the way He wills it." - Thomas Merton

"If thou wilt know and learn anything with profit, love to be thyself unknown and to be counted for nothing." - Thomas a Kempis

The Point

2008-07-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it.
- Psalm 24:1

I gave myself a day (three now, actually) to meditate on this verse and its implications. I don't imagine it's an easy verse to grasp, and the one who says it is has probably got it all wrong anyway. At the very least he has fallen well short of its true and complete meaning. He probably thinks it means only that we are all God's children, "red and yellow, black and white." Or he may, when he hears this verse, think of majestic mountain splendor and marvel at the staggering beauty and grandeur of a gifted Creator. Or, more insidiously, perhaps he takes it to mean that everything that is is good, and therefore permissible, a timeless notion that has brought many men crashing full-tilt into the sharpest jagged cliffs of indulgence and down to the darkened depths of dissolution.

Reading Ezekiel today, I become part of the the lamentation for Tyre, a city that was once the prize of the Mediterranean, now laid low in God's judgment. Through Ezekiel, He laments the impending destruction of the city that once boasted, "I am perfect in beauty." This struck me, that in many other places God speaks only of the great sin, but here He also speaks at length about the great beauty, and the tragedy that He feels as He declares it doomed. My first thought was that it sounds (if one really stretches it) like a reluctant break-up, like God is saying, "Tyre, you're beautiful, you have all these great qualities, but I'm afraid it's just not going to work out between us."

And, to an extent, it is like that. Even in the hour of their destruction, God wants the people of Tyre to know what they could have had, if only they would have remembered God. But that is also what makes it different: God longed for them, as He does for all of humanity, I believe, but they rejected Him. Ezekiel brings them the message that, despite their greatness, they are neither distinct from nor on a par with their Creator.

The tragedy for them, really, is their own backwards view of their history. They credit their rise to themselves and their demise to God, who in an unjust, backhanded, vengeful rage destroyed a thing of beauty. If only they could see that it was God that gave them everything and they themselves who became their own sentence of punishment: they began to worship themselves. Then when Jerusalem was sacked, Tyre revelled in the demise of another great city and moved in to plunder anything they could.

Just a little history about Tyre: After Ezekiel's prophecy, it was conquered by the Assyrians, then besieged by Nebuchadnezzar (as God promised), then ruled by the Persians. Then in 332 BC, the city (part mainland, part island) was attacked by Alexander the Great. This is what Encyclopedia Britannica writes: "He completely destroyed the mainland portion of the town and used its rubble to build an immense causeway (some 2,600 feet [800 metres] long and 600–900 feet [180–270 metres] wide) to gain access to the island section. After the town’s capture, 10,000 inhabitants were put to death, and 30,000 were sold into slavery."

I have often wondered why God allows history to be destroyed, why great cities are levelled by marauding armies, irreplaceable architecture reduced to rubble, libraries burned, records lost to all of posterity: all priceless things should be exempt from such destruction. But then I remembered that God himself, in the form of His son Jesus, was himself destroyed (as the temple) and was raised again in three days.

It was that same Jesus who posed the question to his contemporaries, centuries after Ezekiel wept for the destruction of perhaps the most beautiful city of his time. Jesus asked, "And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?" (Matt. 16:26 NLT) That's just it. That's the point. The earth is the Lord's, His to give, His to take. And you are His to save, whether you will or no. He will try.

My Own Mistake III: Toppled Statues of Ourselves

2008-07-01T21:43:00.000-07:00

"And all the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD; I bring low the high tree, and make high the low tree, dry up the green tree, and make the dry tree flourish. I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will do it." - Ezekiel 17:24

I often refer romantically to my Irish heritage. I wonder if my ancestors hailed from the ramshackle quays of County Cork or from the polished avenues of County Kildare, from the lanes of Limerick on the banks of the Shannon or from the craggy Hills of Donegal on the northern coast. I see them board broad westward-bound ships, funneling into dark, dank holds, weeping with silent strength as they leave their beloved Erin in body, but never in spirit. I watch them shuffle their feet as they filter through Ellis Island, staring at long, brown lines through bleary, but bright, blue eyes. Sometimes I see myself among them, battered valise, battered shoes, and surrounded by a babble of strange, old tongues, the Yankee shouts of men in navy, and soft, dreamlike humming of my mother's lullaby voice.

I wonder about these people even though the most I know, I'll admit, about my true heritage is the names of the two branches of my family: McDevitt and Conner. Using common sense, I can surmise that Conner is derived from O'Connor, clearly Irish; and I am told by Scottish people that McDevitt is "certainly not Scottish", so it must, therefore, by default, be Irish. Thus, I am intuitively, deducibly, and by process of elimination, Irish. (I even have a patch of red hair in my beard to prove it!)

And this means something, I'm sure. It means that there is something inexorable in my blood that will make me scurry to, linger in, and stagger from the pubs after work, quaffing my wages, singing songs of lonesomeness - and in my tepid numbness I will neglect my family, large and bedraggled as it is. It means that I will fight for lost causes, or no causes at all, other than to fight and to be free to fight, for foundness. It means, also, that there is a bit of the fanciful, the mystical in me: the white hart, the woodland faëry, the leprechaun, the "luck". I know all this because it is in my blood, and blood doesn't lie. Since I'm not sure what else is in my blood, I admit there must be other things - spooky, foreign things - things that make me grow hair in funny places and eat spicy food and become nauseated at kissing on TV. There must those things, though they did not come with labels like t-shirts.

And, of course, there is another heritage, much more ancient, that I must also claim, one that runs deeper than the organic pump-and-flow that colors my cheeks to the sometimes-common crimson. It is the heritage of my Father, YHWH, and his children, the sons of Jacob, the tribes of my forebears. This is blood of a deeper hue. No hair dye or straight razor or adopted accent can mute this heritage, for it is shared by people of all colors and idioms. More than likely, you know of the heritage of which I speak, because, more than likely, it is your own as well.

I wish I could say that it was a proud one. It's certainly not. Like many other bloodlines, we had our bright moments, our luminaries, but, in the main, our history is rife with fools and flukes and tyrants. Nevertheless, it is mine.

Millenia ago, God chose my infinity-great-grandfather Abraham to root the new family tree, and, for a short flurry of four or five generations, it flourished and produced some of the most legendary figures in history, even by today's standards; not even the Rockefeller's or the Kennedy's or the Cabot Lodge's can claim such a sustained spate of preeminent progeny. The "good years", however, were ephemeral at best, and they only sporadically and briefly punctuated the centuries of waywardness and depravity that ensued.

And then I was born. Granted, I am but a tiny vein on the most obscure leaf on the outermost branch of the uppermost limb of this monolithic arboreal giant, but I am there. In the cool, still newness of my vein, I can taste the earthy oldness of the roots and the bright bounty of the same sun that established them there. I was chosen to be this vein, on this leaf, on this branch, on this limb, on this tree. I can no more choose to be elsewhere than the leaf I span can choose to fall to the ground.

So I stay where I am,
where I was made.
This is who I am.
But why was I made?

Ambition is the enemy of obedience.

My Savior, 'Tis of Thee

2008-06-30T22:18:00.000-07:00

With Independence Day looming large in a couple of days, I've been praying a lot for my country, and about my own love for that country. I looked up patriotism in the dictionary and here's what I got: "devoted love, support, and defense of one's country; national loyalty." That first phrase, "devoted love", makes me seriously doubt my patriotism. It doesn't worry me that I don't feel that kind of patriotism. It worries me that other Christians do. Devoted love, it seems, is something like the love in a marriage, it requires of us the giving over of ourselves because we believe in the goodness of the other. It also, more importantly, sounds like the love that we should have for God, since it is certainly the love that he has for us, this "devoted love."

I am dubious about the human capacity to be devoted in love at all much less to divide that devotion among several causes. Assuming it is even possible to do so, the Christian must certainly convince himself that His love for God at all times supercedes his love for his country. For what if he is called upon to choose - and he will be - between the two? If that's the case, his patriotism must certainly come with an asterisk or be cast by the wayside altogether, lest he die for his country when he should live for his King.

My Own Mistake II: Recipe for Disaster

2008-06-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

I've begun reading Ezekiel for my time with God in the mornings. I sit on my front porch as the sun rises over Iraq (Babylon!) and read about the struggles of God's people, struggles that crushed his beloved people thousands of years ago, but not very far away from where I now sit. This morning I came across the following passage, one in which God uses a rich, stark symbolism (a form of metaphor) to communicate a harrowing message through his prophet Ezekiel.

4:9Get a large bowl. Then mix together wheat, barley, beans, lentils, and millet, and make some bread. This is what you will eat for the three hundred ninety days you are lying down. 10Eat only a small loaf of bread each day 11and drink only two large cups of water. 12Use dried human waste to start a fire, then bake the bread on the coals where everyone can watch you. 13When I scatter the people of Israel among the nations, they will also have to eat food that is unclean, just as you must do. 14I said, "LORD God, please don't make me do that! Never in my life have I eaten food that would make me unacceptable to you. I've never eaten anything that died a natural death or was killed by a wild animal or that you said was unclean."
15The LORD replied, "Instead of human waste, I will let you bake your bread on a fire made from cow manure. 16Ezekiel, the people of Jerusalem will starve. They will have so little food and water that they will be afraid and hopeless. 17Everyone will be
shocked at what is happening, and, because of their sins, they will die a slow death."

Yes, you read correctly. And it's no wonder this story missed the cut on many of the books of children's Bible stories you read growing up: this is no children's story. But it is the story of God's children, sadly enough. God wanted to shock the people of Israel. He wanted them to feel with their bodies an utter revulsion at the thought of eating something so repulsive, so disgusting and humiliating. But what is more powerful, he wanted them to reach the point where they realize they will have to eat it to survive, the moment they willfully choose to put the bread between their lips, to chew it, and to swallow. And then he wanted to turn the tables on them and show them that their sins to God are even worse than the bread is to them. That way they will feel both the misery of their present condition and the immense sorrow and betrayal God has suffered on their behalf. It's only then that they will realize that they alone are to blame for their abject destitution. Sometimes I think God is the smartest man alive...

I don't imagine God often employs such vivid object lessons today (or back then even), but he certainly does love us enough, both singly and collectively, to guard us from our own desires. That much has always been true. Desires pursued within God's will are fulfillment itself. It is only when we pursue these desires apart from Him that they are sure to lead us to ruin. Sometimes God may feel that we'll learn the lesson better in the long run by suffering a little now instead of losing it all later. Like Jesus said about gouging out the eye to save the face (Matt. 5:29).

That's a lesson the children of Israel could have used 3,000 years ago before the prophets were sent to reconcile them back to God. But the truth is that we are a wandering people. As Isaiah wrote, "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way" (53:6). The difference is that now we are wandering even though we have these shocking stories and these harrowing scriptures to warn us away and to ground us in faith in Christ.

We, as humans, are bound to have human desires. But it is what we do with these desires that determines whether we will be feasting with the King in contentment or eating bread baked over burning excrement. To desire earthly things is to settle for earthly rewards. This is the lesson Jesus taught us by rejecting Satan in the wilderness. It's the lesson that Ezekiel tried to teach his wayward people in Israel. They both agreed on one important truth: man cannot live by bread alone.

My Own Mistake I: The Art of War

2008-06-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

"And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake."

- Thomas Merton

When we speak of life in Christ, we often employ various familiar metaphors that help us to frame our understanding in an easily recognizable structure. This is no new thing, neither for humanity nor for that section of it that labels itself Christian. In the beginning, God created man "in his own image" (Gen. 1:27), the first and perhaps the most powerful metaphor of them all. Jesus himself understood our human need for parallel connections: he told parables or picture-stories, he spoke of his followers as his "mother and brothers" (Matt. 12:47) and the church entire as his "bride" (Mark 2:20). He even spoke so simply as to use various animal analogies: we are his "sheep" (John 10:11), the religious leaders of his day he called "vipers" (Matt. 23:33), men are "fish" (Mark 1:17), and he himself is called a "lamb" (John 1:36). At one point Jesus uses a powerful puzzle of a simile when he tells his disciples to be "as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves" (Matt. 10:16), sending them out into the world to spread the gospel.

One of the most pervasive of those metaphors that come directly from Scripture is the metaphor of battle: we fend off "attacks" (John 10:12) from "the enemy" (1 Pet. 5:8), we are engaged in warfare "against the spiritual forces of evil" wearing "the full armor of God" (Eph. 6:11-12). In our inner human need to relate to and connect with the people and ideas that comprise our spiritual lives, we often manifest these warlike notions in outward ways. In our churches we sing Onward, Christian Soldiers and Victory in Jesus while in the world we serve in The Salvation Army or as "prayer warriors". Even the publisher of the NASB translation takes root in Biblical truth when it uses the image of a sword as part of their commercial logo.

And while these analogies help us grasp important fundamental truths, they are often blunt objects, not equipped to be intricate belief systems. And, because they are meant to be vague, loose pictures of concrete Biblical truths, they can easily supplant the role of critical, engaged contemplation. This is especially true in the metaphor of the holy life as a battle against Satan. We become focused on the "us" and the fight against "them" that two equally tragic consequences occur. The first, which can certainly be spoken of at length at a later date, is that we have an insidious tendency to objectify evil in the form of other humans, though the apostle Paul warns clearly that "our struggle is not against flesh and blood" (Eph. 6:12). Those who have forgotten this have committed some of the most heinous atrocities - and all in the name of God - where they have taken the gruesome liberty of declaring enemies in their own human understanding.

The second dangerous effect of such blanket analogies is that we fail to acknowledge other, more subtle variations on the same theme. We spend so much of our rhetoric on fighting the Satan in others that we often forget that he himself is causing us to be at war with our very selves. James asks us to consider the strife - especially the strife among believers - that often comes "from your desires that battle within you" (James 4:1). Paul speaks of the power of sin that delights in "waging war" against our minds (Rom. 7:23). Any general will tell you that a nation fighting its own civil war stands no chance of fending off an enemy that attacks across its borders. Any doctor will tell you that the most ravishing battles are fought deep within the walls of the flesh. It is no different with us.

In the quote at the top of the page, Thomas Merton is speaking about two things: desires and ambitions. They - as sin - are the root of the battle that James and Paul speak of. And it is a battle worth fighting. The first - and arguably the most difficult - step is truly to see the fight.

More tomorrow...

Standing O

2008-06-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

As I was walking to my room yesterday a song that we used to sing at St. Mark's kept echoing in my head: "All creatures of our God and King/ lift up your voice and with us sing,/ 'O, praise Him! O, praise Him!'" I wondered what it would have been like to be in the Garden of Eden and to have listened to Adam and Eve, all of God's creation, singing as one to our Creator, lifting our voices and singing that song. And then I wondered what it will be like at the end of Time when all the saints and angels will gather around God's throne and sing "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord!" I imagined those two times would probably have a lot in common except that the first one would have been mostly green instead of mostly white, and there would have been caribou and ocelots and such.

And then I wondered what it would be like if everyone on Earth all went to a huge concert where God was performing, and God was on stage doing magic tricks or power ballads or whatever God would do if he were on stage. I wondered what it would sound like when the time came for applause, what it would be like if every Jehovah-lover in the world sang, "O, praise Him!" And you know what I thought? It would be pretty weak.

Of course, there's no way that God (even God in Central Park) would command everyone to applaud him, but that's the point, isn't it? We have the choice to sing that song every day through our words and our actions, through the things that we do in the world. And God is performing miraculous acts every day in our midst. There are - count them - billions of people who would remain silent at that concert because they don't know Him. Like the poet says, "All the world's a stage." Are you a sideshow, playing your own set? Or are you in the crowd, among the world, giving God a standing ovation?