Ninety

A smart, older person, trying to help me discern future vocation, asked me the following question: 

When you are ninety years old, what do you want to see when you look back upon your life?

  

A few pictures--some clear, others blurry--arose unbidden in my mind's eye.  To start with the clear, I (for reasons yet unclear) remembered a particular day in South Africa in which half of our student group trooped down to Itipini, "place of the dump," a village built on top of a trash heap.  With sunglasses pulled over my eyes I stared out the window of our moving van trundling happily along to Trash Dump Town, certain that whatever I was about to see would incite sorrow, anger, discomfort.  We arrived at Itipini and tiptoed over a path made of dirt, pig shit, and broken glass to the door of a clinic and community center begun by Jenny McConnachie, a British surgeon and ex-patriot.  I pulled off my sunglasses, stepped inside, and promptly returned the glasses to the bridge of my nose because I had begun to cry.  The clinic was nondescript, white, bare.  Jenny was plain, simply dressed, quiet; it was all so unexpectedly peaceful.  We floated through the center, touching pictures, neatly stacked papers and sharpened pencils, breathing in the hard won stillness carved out of a discordant place.  

Outside the clinic black, barefoot children swarmed to our white sides.  Their mothers (sixteen, fifteen years old?)  watched in the wings.  This isn't hard, I thought, and touched a face here, smoothed a brow there, marveled at hardened feet that ran so carelessly over trash.  

As I contemplated the scene before me in the shade of the clinic roof, now free of children and feeling dazed, a professor stood beside me and tapped my shoulder:   

"Could you see yourself doing something like this?" he asked. 

"Yes," I answered.  

Though I don't know why.  

As for the more blurry pictures, wisps of images float to the surface like bubbles rising from a deep, underground spring.  A solid, gracious house.  A front porch.  A long, wooden dining table with people around it.  Lamps lit late into the evening for conversation.  A writing table. A window.  And my own face, looking startlingly like Jenny McConnachie's, with a gray braid coming apart around my shoulders and eyes that are like falling into a well.  

To Whomever Was Playing the Steel Guitar This Evening on the Roof

thank you

for reminding me that i 

(sometimes as stiff and unbending as a  strip of cracked leather)

may still be moved to tremble with sound

loveliness

the deepening evening

or quiet gratitude

as surely as a steel string thrums under the fingers of a master 

Valley of the Shadow

A friend of mine has been walking through a great darkness, for longer than expected and with no sign of reprieve; some days the darkness actually seems to expand and deepen, yawning ahead in terrible monotony.  

So I have been reading the Psalms with a cynic sitting on my shoulder that digs its sharp little claws into my skin when the psalmists exclaim over God's comfort, nearness, mercy: 

"I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry"

(maybe You haven't heard me yet?)

"For I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God"

(but how do we praise what we can't find?)

"He rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes who were too strong for me"

(Maybe You just haven't gotten to my friend yet, is she next on the list?)

Why, when we need the solace of the Almighty most, do we seem to walk alone through the valley of the shadow of death?

Rabbi Harold Kushner came up with the conclusion that God in fact is impotent, in Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.  That solution doesn't sit well with me.  Scratch that off the list. 

Another option is that God perhaps removes himself purposely, that we might learn to have faith.  To a degree, it is certainly evident that we are purified and refined by suffering.  However, I detest the idea that God might withhold Himself in our time of need just so we might toughen up.  (Is that crass?  There is probably some value to this line of thinking, but I still don't like it.) 

Or perhaps it is our fault.  Perhaps like the hardened Israelites, we fail to have eyes that see and ears that ear; we do not recognize the manna, the pillar of fire, the water from the rock.  This has some merit.  Humans have a history of blindness. 

But still.  When this friend tells me that faith seems inadequate to answer the deep questions of life and that God seems far away when she needs Him most, do I tell her it is her fault?  Do I tell her God is teaching her a lesson? Do I tell her He actually cannot do anything to help?

I doubt Brother Lawrence intended his book title to help me answer my questions, but nonetheless, Practicing the Presence of God seems an apt description of how we might approach our suffering.  If I take God's Word, written and Incarnate, seriously, then I must believe God is with us in the valley.  If I believe that He was born as a man, crucified and resurrected, defeating sin, death and the devil... well, then.  He is certainly there amidst the shadows.  I am borrowing from Karl Barth when I say I think there is an objective Truth that God is near, even while we somehow subjectively experience His absence.  So we practice.  We practice His presence.  We practice trusting.  We resolutely cling to God-With-Us even though our circumstances indicate otherwise.  

Rainer Maria Rilke writes in summary better than I can.  

"So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do [...]  You must be patient as a sick man and confident as one who is becoming well, for perhaps you are both."

-Letters to a Young Poet

Glory

"Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!

Christ our King is risen, Alleluia."

It is hard to believe "Glory fills you!" when you have coffee breath, a dirty ponytail, and are wearing green cutoff sweats and linty wool socks, as I was the morning I read this from my dog-eared copy of Celtic daily prayers.  But no matter what you are wearing, it is hard hard hard to believe the weighty beauty of Christ's resurrected glory dwells within us.  Harder, I would contest, than accepting the apparent truth that we are as dirty and linty as our clothes indicate, and sorrowful and mean and weary to boot.  

How difficult is it to recount stories of our failure?  For that matter, how difficult is it to tell the story of humanity's failure?  I think it is even trendy nowadays to talk about how shitty we all are. Excuse the language, but I did use the word purposely, because it reflects a blase, comfortable colloquialism toward our depravity.  We are used to depravity, because it presents itself to our senses every minute and every day, such that many agree with the famous summation of human existence written by Thomas Hobbes: it is, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."  (Ever the optimist, that Thomas Hobbes.)

What I am saying is this: it is more complex to understand oneself as an object of grace, a child of resurrection, a creature of glory.  It contradicts our experience.  It requires powerful imagination because it concerns an often-unseen reality.  Accounts of people committing acts of great mercy or justice or loveliness seem rare.  And if it is hard to see beauty in humanity collectively, I think it might be most difficult of all to see it in myself.  I know better than anyone how selfish and small and blind and hardened I can be.  Back to the linty wool socks. "Christ's glory fills me?  You must be joking.  Can you see my socks?"  I am faced with the crucial choice of living in the one-dimensional truth of my dirtiness, or living in multi-faceted tension as one who is filled with squalor and splendor, shame and glory, death and life.  

But mostly life.  After all, it is the Life of God Himself that fills you and I, and if that isn't a trump card I don't know what is.  

Tree Hugger

Is there any thing more patient than a tree?

I have been taking coffee, book, journal and myself to the park across the street as often as possible, sitting at the roots of an old maple hoping that I might absorb its steadfast elegance by some miraculous osmosis.  (The osmosis hasn't worked.  I have, however, gotten a crick in my neck from craning upward to watch the wind play in the leaves, and grass stuck to my sandals and shorts.) 

The glory of a tree is its long memory.  By that I mean the way it bends and deepens over the years, persevering in its slow growth through all kinds of weather, drought, and trauma.  Joy, too, I suppose.  I imagine the tree holding within itself memories of the last storm or the last branch lopped off, so that it doesn't lose heart when the wind starts howling but instead keeps pushing inch by inch into the earth.  

In my current transience and impatience, I resemble something more like a dandelion than a tree: sprouting up when the sun shines and keeling over when the temperature drops, hasty, green and trigger-happy.  Dandelions rarely survive a good frost, much less an entire winter.  Compare this with the old maple who has the wisdom of two hundred weathered storms!  What can shake her?  She is drinking from deep, ancient veins of water far below the frenzied surface.  Do not blame me, then, for asking to borrow from this weathered soul.  In her is the long-suffering Hope of her Maker.  

Blessed is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked [...]

but whose delight is in the law of the Lord

He is like a tree planted by streams of water, 

which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither

Psalm 1 

Receiving, or An Argument for Commuting by Bike

 I agree with the maxim, "Tis more blessed to give than to receive," but for what are assuredly selfish reasons, namely that I would rather be in the empowered position of giving.  Receiving is humble.  

So when I found myself with a dead car and dead battery this morning on the side of the road, I first shuffled through my wallet in order to find my AAA member card, because I figured if I was going to need help I may as well get it from professional helpers, people from whom I would not mind receiving aid.   But I was parked on the side of a residential road, surrounded by doors on which I might knock...around the corner from shops to which I could go... therefore I sat like a bump on a log in my car.  I met the eyes of people driving by, my hood popped open, and dared them to decide to stop.  They didn't.  Small wonder. 

A red Taurus idled past (lost? looking for parking?) and I decided to follow another maxim, "the Lord helps those who help themselves."  I flagged down The Red Taurus.   Krista --aka Good Samaritan-- had the kindness to step out of her car and lend her time and jumper cables, and I was soon able to be on my way.  

Krista seemed honestly pleased to stop and help. Really, I mean, she smiled the whole time and it wasn't because I was smiling at her: I was too busy swearing silently at my car.  It made me think that the neat thing about being in a position of receiving is its reflexive quality; that is, the Giver may also be the Receiver.  In this scenario, though she was technically extending me the gift of time, cables, and a willing attitude, Krista was given the gift of being invaluable to another human being at a particular moment in time.  The outcome of my day depended on her presence in my life.  Krista was made very important. 

A reluctance to receive, then, may in fact be an insult to those around me, sending the message that I am not willing to let them play an important role in my life.  It becomes a matter of control, a question whether or not I have the humility to surrender the reins when it becomes clear I am not enough in and of myself?  Mostly no, I do not.  

C'est la vie.  Back to where I started.  Still, I am grateful to the small kindness of another human and the also small opportunity to practice the posture of receiving.  

Fair Game?

There is a forty-something year old man who comes into my store and acts like junior high boy. That is, he makes dirty jokes, comments on my appearance, tells co-workers he "has a thing for me", tells ME he comes to the store to see me, and then stands by the espresso bar during mid-morning rush and either watches me or tries to make conversation. 

That's sexual harassment, homes.  

I simultaneously feel angry, belittled, and nervous.  Angry because I am a captive audience; he's in my work place where I am stuck behind register or coffee bar.  Belittled because his attention is so unwanted and insensitive that I feel shrunken-- I want to take up less space for him to notice.  And nervous because I am not sure what he will say or do next. 

I am a free, adult woman, and this creep has rendered me fair game for whatever fantasies about nice, blond baristas keep him company at night.  I didn't sign up for the job, but I am nonetheless a participant, even if unwilling.  

On the flip side, I have yet to tell him off.  He has caught me off guard with his innuendo and his pointed interest.  And I am perpetually nice.  It's a bad habit: I am used to seeing sheep and have trouble recognizing a wolf in disguise.  Maybe in someway I have let myself be victimized by not taking a firm stand?  I can either let my co-workers and manager take care of my business while I cower in the corner, or I can muster up my best F-off speech and angry eyes and stand up for myself, refusing to be a part of his perversion.  

I don't want to play into a role that has been played many times before: helpless, harassed female.  That still leaves him in the position of power.  I want to turn the tables and decide whether or not I am an object of a middle-aged man's sexual desire.  I choose NOT.  And when I tell him to start behaving or get lost, I will top it off with a customer-appropriate smile and a damn good cup of coffee thankyouverymuch.