letters from barabbas

foul weather writer

2007-03-05T15:17:00.000-05:00

I can't write anymore. It's not just my blog, either. My last substantive journal entry dates August 5, the day we got engaged. And my correspondance has become spotty and shallow. I just don't have that much to say. I go through these seasons--silent seasons--every few years. If you flip back through the archives of this site, you'll begin to notice that most of my posts are rather negative, or at most somewhat positive reflections on pain or confusion. I write when I need to figure things out, or when I don't believe things can be figured out.
In all truth, I have stopped writing because I've stopped thinking critically. This is because I'm just so happy that I don't have any reason to move. It's not complacency or disgusting self-contentment (I hope!), it's just a new beginning. It's the hope born of a grand commitment, of a dozen huge surprises.
And yet, all week I've been feeling this indescribable urge to write something...anything. I want to, I just haven't been thinking about anything, really. So what could I write about?

I suspect (and pray) that I will return to meditative introspection in the coming months as I prepare to become a father. This might mark the beginning of a new tradition for myself: writing that is based in joyful contemplation. I don't know how to write happy without writing cheesy. To write in order to encapsulate the awe of my blessings and growing wisdom, instead of trying to scribble myself out of a hole. What would that be like?

I'm afraid it'll never sell.

unaffected

2006-07-20T14:56:00.000-05:00

Because Calla Maria is something of a legend in the Sunnyside childcare circuit, I've been getting a lot of babysitting gigs myself. I have a lot of experience with kids between 5 and 8 years old, but most of the children I've been around lately are between 2 and 5. It's different somehow. There's a solemness in these kids I never would have expected, and it's rubbing off on me. My whole time in Portland has seemed tinged with urgency, or longing, or something like that, subtle under the skins of events and places where I walk. At first I thought it was because I was only here for a few weeks, or because I've essentially completed moving away from my family, in the becoming-an-adult sense of the word, or because I'm getting married soon, and everything is changing and all of that. But I think these children also have something to do with it.

I think of the girl from last week, staring down at the floor and shaking her head as she told me the story of Joan of Arc, which she had just heard the night before. "...And when they found out she was really a girl, they were so mad that they tied her to a log, and she caught on fire, and she died." And her brother, who freaked out when I took the mail from the mailman (in Sunnyside, the mail is delivered from satchels held by people walking house to house) instead of letting him take it out of the mailslot. Everything matters so much to them--where they put their shoes, what they have for lunch, who is holding which toy when. I've never seen as many tears as I have this month in Portland (I hope that doesn't just mean I'm a lousy babysitter!), and it's starting to wear on me.

If everyone was this sensitive their whole lives, we'd probably only live for thirty years. But maybe our experience would be deeper and more true, and maybe it would feel like longer than the seventy we're promised as is.

At what age do we grow tired of being disappointed?

attachment inhabiting

2006-07-19T17:55:00.000-05:00

Calla Maria and I just realized on Monday that we'd be leaving Portland in four weeks. I only got here four weeks ago, so this seemed very sudden. We have begun to feel moving anxiety.

Fortunately, the family she currently nannies for adheres to the attachment model of parenting, and I think we'll be taking some key concepts from their philosophy to help us with our next move.

See, we've been moving a lot lately. Last summer, I moved from one side of Auburn to another, changing apartments and roomates after three years in the same living arrangements. Calla Maria moved from one side of the country to another, moving to Portland to live all by herself in a brand new city. And then in June I moved out here and then in August we're both going to be moving to Connecticut.

So, you can see how we might be feeling a little rootless.

This isn't the first time we've been cut off from something vital to our self-conceptions. When we were young we began the long, painful process of differentiating ourselves as individual from our parents; now, we're differentiating ourselves from our college friends, from the southeast; and, as we start to prepare for marriage, we're distinguishing ourselves from our families all together.

To soothe the child's fears as (s)he begins to detach from her parents, the attachment-style parents spend the child's infancy establishing a close physical and emotional relationship, with the hope that a strong sense of attachment will give the child the confidence to begin going his own way. So that is why some people carry their children around in slings or backpacks, or contraptions like the Baby Bjorn, shown above. In Alabama, these people usually look like hippies; but in other parts of the country it can happen to anybody.

I think this sounds like a great plan. And I intend to enact it for myself as I inhabit Portland for the next four weeks. Portland shall be my mother, and I will spend the summer in a sling on her back, so when it's time to move I will feel like she really loves me and I won't be too sad about leaving her, because I know she'll always be there when I'm ready to return.

I wish I had done a better job of that with Auburn, and my college friends, and everything else in my past. Because it's too late for any of that now.

parturition

2006-05-02T02:41:00.000-05:00

What a strange time to be alive. In ten days it is graduation. My teachers smile sympathetically when they recognize how stressed, how paralyzed I've become.

But I've gotten into a good grad program. I've been dreaming furtively about my courseload, about the winter. I am here in Auburn, Alabama...physically. Home that I love. Spring is here. Azaleas have already gone. But I lay in the hammock and look up at the moon, and forget that I'm not already in Malawi. The moon is the same everywhere. But then I remember I'm still here. Writing a thesis. Over stuff I don't even care about anymore. Spending time with friends I may never see again. Wrestling with decisions that will determine the rest of my life.

Waiting for my bloody graduation. Parturition.
And New England. Trypanosomes. Africa.

concoursive discourse

2006-04-06T12:47:00.000-05:00

Written on the concourse today. Made me laugh.

If you feel the pull of the moon,
be careful. You might be a liquid.

algebra

2006-03-13T00:00:00.000-05:00

In international health near the turn of the twenty-first century, a mentality prevailed that borrowed from the nineteenth-century utilitarian philosophers, from the notion that one should provide the greatest good for the greatest number, and it was expressed in a language of realism. The world had limited resources. Nations whose resources weren't just limited but scarce had to make the best possible uses of the little they had. Other countries and international institutions might help out, but these days, if you wanted money from big donors for health projects in poor countries, if you wanted to be taken seriously, your proposals had to pass a test, called cost-effectiveness analysis.
The general technique was first used in engineering, later on in war and medicine. You calculated the cost of a public health project or medical procedure and tried to quantify its effectiveness. Then you compared the results for competing projects or procedures. But it seemed to Farmer that the high councils in international health often used this analytic tool to rationalize an irrational status quo: TB treatment was cost-effective in a place like New York, but not in a place like Peru.

"Resources are always limited." In international health, this saying had great force. It lay behind most cost-effective analyses. It often meant, "Be realistic." But it was usually uttered, Farmer thought, without any recognition of how, in a given place, resources had come to be limited, as if God had imposed poverty on places like Haiti. Strictly speaking, all resources everywhere were limited, Farmer would say in speeches. Then he'd add, "But they're less limited now than ever before in human history." That is, medicine now had the tools for stopping many plagues, and no one could say there wasn't enough money in the world to pay for them.

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains

-----

Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary society. Complete analogy.
Algebra and money are essentially levelers, the first intellectually, the second effectively.

The relation of the sign to the thing signified is being destroyed, the game of exchanges between signs is being multiplied of itself and for itself. And the increasing complication demands that there should be signs for signs....

Among the characterizations of the modern world we must not forget the impossibility of thinking in concrete terms of the relationship between effort and the result of effort. There are too many intermediaries. As in the other cases, this relationship which does not lie in any thought, lies in a thing: money.

As collective thought cannot exist as thought, it passes into things (signs, machines...) Hence the paradox: It is the thing which thinks, and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing.

The spirit, overcome by the weight of quantity, has no longer any criterion other than efficiency.
Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.
This is true even with material things: fire, water, etc. The community has taken possession of all these natural forces.
Question: Can this emancipation, won by society, be transferred to the individual?

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

lucid dreaming

2006-02-13T19:25:00.000-05:00

My friend Emily dreamed she had a pet octopus that sang like Jim Morrison. It didn't have to be underwater, as long as it had a tentacle in something wet. It made her feel better about her life.
I keep having nightmares about my research going horribly wrong. Animal resources shuts us down. Someone guts my birds like a savage. I set them all free on accident. It makes me feel worse about mine.
Emily asked if I was a lucid dreamer. When a friend of hers realizes that she is dreaming, she takes control. She flies, takes over countries, makes out with boys.
If I could control what happened in my dreams, I'd invent a cat that would stand guard over my birds during the night. He wouldn't want to eat them, obviously. Then I wouldn't have to be anxious about my little pretties while I'm resting. And maybe I'd grow wings and fly back and forth with my goldfinches in their cage.

A lecture is a waking dream, in its own way. This realization has renewed the joy of learning for me: Four days a week, Dr. Wit makes his laser pointer dance on the wall as he sings to us the Songs of Innerspace. And then, Dr. Roberts turns the lights down low as she tells a tale to make your cytoplasm quiver.

self-effacement

2006-01-27T19:54:00.000-05:00

“What do you want the most?”
“What do you mean, like, physically? Spiritually?”
He laughed, “What’s the difference?”
I didn’t laugh back. “Well, the first is what I really want, and the second is what I want to want.”
“Whichever. What do you want the most?”
“I guess what I really want is peace. To stop feeling at war with myself.”
“And what do you think that will take?”
“Oh, surrender, I guess.” I kicked a swath of pebbles out ahead of me as I walked, adding hastily, “That’s the church answer, anyway.”
He stopped to examine the bamboo around us. “Did you know that bamboo shoots can grow a foot taller every day? It’s amazing, isn’t it? Straight up into the sky.”
“I wish I were that desperate.”

That is a piece of a conversation in the story that I brought to Dr. Troy to read during our first conference this semester. She said she liked it, "Good fiction is the careful compilation of tiny surprises." But she never says anything negative, so it's hard to tell.
Then she looked hard at me and asked if I was doing okay. I said yes, not to worry. Because I am doing quite well, more or less. I asked for her advice on how to weave ideological beliefs into a story without sullying the narrative, and she brought down a novel she had written in which she had incorporated the writings of Simone Weil, a 20th century French Jewish-born Catholic mystic.
I was so impressed with what I heard that I went to the library and checked out some of Weil's books. This is the excerpt that Dr. Troy quoted. I think it's beautiful, and perfectly resonant with my present mood.

I cannot conceive the necessity for God to love me, when I feel so clearly that even with human beings affection for me can only be a mistake. But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am. But I act as a screen. I must withdraw so that he may see it.
I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves. It is tactless for me to be there. It is as though I were placed between two lovers or two friends. I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed, but the unwelcome third who is with two betrothed lovers and ought to go away so that they can really be together.
If only I knew how to disappear, there would be a perfect love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear....
What do the energy, the gifts, etc., which are in me matter? I always have enough of them to disappear.

May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.

I do not in the least wish that this created world should fade from my view, but I do wish that it should no longer be shown to me in person. To me it cannot tell its secret which is too high. If I go, then the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets.
To see a landscape as it is when I am not there...
When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.
--Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

purpose statement

2006-01-27T19:49:00.000-05:00

This is what I told the admissions committees at Yale, Tulane, UAB and Boston U. In case you wanted to know why the hell I'm doing this.

As I have progressed through the pre-med program at Auburn, the vision I hold for my future has shifted from a strictly clinical focus to a much broader conception of my place in the medical community. My current interests lie in cooperative community approaches to preventing disease. I am particularly interested in exploring innovative, culturally conscious methods of controlling disease within developing nations. My next step in this new direction is to obtain an MPH in Epidemiology, focusing on infectious diseases of Sub-Saharan Africa.

My experience with undergraduate research has been the greatest motivation for my shifting away from traditional medicine towards Public Health. As an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Sharon Roberts’s lab, I spent my junior year helping graduate students with the culture and molecular analysis of Mycoplasma gallisepticum for an ongoing study of Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis in house finches. Because Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis is an emerging infection in the eastern house finch population, it provides an excellent model for studying the evolution of host-parasite relationships. As a senior, I have had the opportunity to take on my own projects that examine the disease not only on a molecular level but within the whole organism as well. I am currently conducting two projects: a natural transmission study in live birds that I captured from the wild and the genetic analysis of Mycoplasma gallisepticum isolates that I collected from wild birds last summer. When Dr. Roberts explained the classical transmission study’s further applications to medicine, I started taking a more active interest in Epidemiology. I found myself more excited about preventing the transmission of disease throughout a community than in treating infected individuals. My primary research interests for the graduate level include both international field work and laboratory analysis of tropical parasites and vector-borne diseases.

I have wanted to work overseas since high school, though at first I only expected to be reproducing traditional western medicine as a traveling medical doctor. As I have learned about the history of Africa, however, I have begun looking for ways to integrate novel prophylactic measures into preexisting value systems while seeking to understand their cultural assumptions as deeply as I may communicate my own. Rather than using medicine as a means for disseminating western culture, I hope to enter into the campaign for social justice by leveling disparities in the quality of healthcare across the globe. My talents and passions will best be served by devoting my attention to the understanding of specific host-parasite relationships and working cooperatively with a population to adapt appropriate methods for overcoming its unique health barriers.

While I have always been moving towards a career in healing, I have felt constricted by the limitations of modern medicine. Unimpressed by a purely scientific approach to human welfare, I began taking English classes as a sophomore to acquire a fuller understanding of the human condition. When I began volunteering as a counselor at Alabama’s oncology camp, Camp Smile-A-Mile, I was introduced to a whole community of health care professionals beyond the doctors and nurses. I realized that my contribution to patients’ well-being depended on more than my acquisition of an MD. I finally came to understand medicine as the cooperative treatment of whole families by whole communities. Dissatisfied with the sciences but unwilling to simply switch to humanities, Public Health offers me the opportunity to pursue scientific understanding while working within the whole spectrum of human experience.

void and compensation

2006-01-25T23:25:00.000-05:00

Human mechanics. Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering (either by ill-treating someone or calling forth his pity) in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. In the case of a man in the uttermost depths, whom no one pities, who is without power to ill-treat anyone (if he has no child or being who loves him), the suffering remains within him and poisons him.
This is imperative, like gravity. How can one gain deliverance? How can one gain deliverance from a force which is like gravity?

It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm, if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.

To harm a person is to receive something from him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.

A beloved being who disappoints me. I wrote to him. It is impossible that he should not reply by saying what I have said to myself in his name.
Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God.
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

well, maybe there's a god above
but all i've ever learned from love
was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
it's not a cry that you hear at night
it's not somebody who's seen the light
it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

he remembers that we are dust

2006-01-23T01:06:00.000-05:00

As far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

And yet I still long for them, the lusts of the flesh--flesh which has been removed from me. I have been cut off from my old self, made naked, but I have not got my New Man yet. I am disembodied. But I should be glad for that, content that one day I may be further clothed in Righteousness and Truth. Instead, I am chasing after an old sin that is always as far as the horizon. It is an attempt to reunite my soul and body, to resolve the tension and to settle on some tangible existence. It is understandable, and even natural, but it is in error. It is betraying the way of things, chasing in the wrong direction, towards a home that no longer welcomes me. I cannot fuse future and past to condense my distilling breath. I must wait for both to explode, for only in timelessness will I be fully present. In the meantime, I must refrain from following the flesh, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner without sin.
Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner without sin who would it were otherwise.

oh, mourning dove; oh, weeping god

2006-01-13T01:27:00.000-05:00

i have not seen this day before

If I could, I would break into flower.
If I could, I'd no longer be barren.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

Oh, mourning dove, we'll go up to my roof.
Oh, mourning dove, we'll go into the sky.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

And the cars are a stream running by me,
bending away to a place I don't know.
This day is filling up my room,
is coming through my door.
Oh, I have not seen this day before.

I used to think of this song as a simple expression of joy. A release in the tension of a very dark album--the bright spot. But perhaps it is not strictly so. I have not seen this day before: "It must be a sunny day, a good day for once," I thought. But maybe it's just another day, one we haven't seen yet. And whether it is sunny or stormy, it is here, and we haven't seen it before, and it is filling up our rooms whether we want it or not. Jump in the stream and fill it up (surrounding the stones gracefully, if you are able), because you have no other choice.

I've been thinking a lot about how God works--how wrong it is to assume that God ought to do good things for us, though He often does. The "How could a good god let bad things happen?" dilemma is getting old for me. The Israelites were on a wild ride with an incomprehensible Guide, who had a plan though it often didn't seem so. The indication of any sort of plan didn't make it seem any better, at least. "Step in that river? What, and drown?" "Slay that whole village over there? Where is Your compassion?" "Four hundred years of captivity? Do we really deserve that?" They went with the flow, did as they were told, yet there seems to be the sense that the Lord, omniscient and all-powerful though He was, was always weeping with them. He was on their side--so who could be against them?
Yet they wept, and He wept with them.
And if His Spirit filled the tabernacle, and our hearts are now that tabernacle, then He must be filling up our rooms right now, and so the day with all its tears and all its small surprises really is coming through the door.

If I could, I'd no longer be barren. Who knows whether this day will change that? But what choice is there for me but to live it?

I'm not trying to preach this. I'm not hoping this will comfort anyone's pain. But I'm hoping that typing these words out and publishing them on the internet will somehow make them real for my life. It's a last-ditch effort to go into the sky, you might say. Because all around me people are dying and losing their faith. And in many ways I'm doing both myself, because maybe that is what it means to be alive.
I have not seen this day before. And the Lord is for me, and weeping too.

skywriting

2005-12-22T18:19:00.000-05:00

This past semester I devoted myself to writing serious fiction for the first time in my life. I took Fiction Writing with Dr. Judy Troy, and I got a lot more than I bargained for. You learn a lot about yourself when you really try to write a story that you will show to someone else.

One of the most annoying things about what I've been writing is my dependence on the weather as a narrative device. We all understand how deeply the weather affects our lives, so it's a great tool to call upon when we need to describe a situation precisely. Good writers use this subtly in a way that I admire and desire to emulate. But for me, so far...
It's easy to explain a situation by explaining what the sky is doing. But to actually explain what the characters are doing--to have someone start crying rather than have it start raining; to describe someone's anger rather than pointing to the hot August sun--that's something I haven't mastered.

I don't know how to describe an emotional response without feeling like it sounds contrived. So I write around the characters, lofting the narrative into intangible clichés. This robs the story of its specific climax, so there's no resolution.
And I'm worried that I do this when I write because I do this with my life.

reticence & regeneration

2005-11-15T05:20:00.000-05:00

Rivers knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

--from Regeneration, by Pat Barker

I am writing a paper on this book, right now, at 4:30 in the morning, about the ways masculinity was constructed during the First World War. I am using the word phallus a lot. I can honestly say I wouldn't rather be sleeping. Though I do wish I had finished the assignment a week ago.

I would like to apologize for my reticence this month.
Hee hee. I'm also using the word reticence in my paper, because silence is a form of resistance to the language-driven power structure of western society. Don't worry, though. My silence has nothing to do with my desire to subvert the authority of anyone who may or may not be reading this post.

Next week heralds a much needed break from my studies. I hope to share some words with some of you, when that time comes.

sage advice

2005-10-23T17:27:00.000-05:00

It is not birth, marriage, or death, but gastrulation, which is truly the most important time of your life.

Lewis Wolpert, 1986

Well, that's good to know, eh? Takes the pressure off of all the other developmental decisions I've got to make in the next four months.

latter days

2005-10-22T00:11:00.000-05:00

Sorry that most of my posts this month have been lifted from other people's thoughts, or just recycled paragraphs from old stories and journals of mine: I've been too restricted by my educational servitude lately, and worried and confused about my life, and I just don't have much left to say. But I couldn't keep from directing you to this jewel, because I think you might need it:

Over the Rhine Radio

.....sigh. It never fails. If you aren't drawn in by the first song, and couldn't care less about this music, at least do me a favor and skip to the 9th song, Latter Days. Listen to it. I mean, really listen to it:

What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be.
Lord knows we've learned the hard way all about healthy apathy.
And I use these words pretty loosely.
There's so much more to life than words.

There is a me you would not recognize, dear.
Call it the shadow of myself.
And if the music starts before I get there, dance without me.
You dance so gracefully. I really think I'll be o.k.
They've taken their toll these latter days.

Nothin' like sleepin' on a bed of nails.
Nothin' much here but our broken dreams.
Ah, but baby if all else fails, nothin' is ever quite what it seems.
And I'm dyin' inside to leave you with more than just cliches.

There is a me you would not recognize, dear. Call it the shadow of myself.
And if the music starts before I get there dance without me.
You dance so gracefully. I really think I'll be o.k.
They've taken their toll these latter days.

But tell them it's real. Tell them it's really real.
I just don't have much left to say.
They've taken their toll these latter days.
They've taken their toll these latter days.

I'm not really convinced that Tim LaHaye is writing out of urgent prophecy rather than blasé politics, but oh, God, this is the truth. Whether the moon turns red tonight, we are perishing in the desert every day, with nothing left but broken dreams. But we're okay. It's really real.

Apocalypse doesn't mean ruin, or even judgment. It means unveiling. We will see Him face to face, if we love Him.

someone else's skin

2005-10-13T17:56:00.000-05:00

Today, in a brief and unexpected moment of clarity, which perhaps began somewhere in the empty slate blue sky, I understood exactly how it really would be a sin to kill a mockingbird.

being conspicuous

2005-10-10T10:28:00.001-05:00

A chapter from Lilian's Story, an excellent novel:

I had looked forward to reading all the wisdom ever written and to thinking deeply about important things. I had planned serene hours with fearless minds who would help me resolve problems of good and evil, and what everything might mean. I had been excited about my future.
In the lecture hall, I watched the men in tweed mouthing, smothering a yawn before turning to the next page in their notes. F.J. Stroud and I stared down at so many heads bowed over tricky considerations of philosophy, so many pens flying across lined paper. In the first row, right in front of the man in tweed, was the deaf boy who was going to go far in philosophy in spite of his handicap, and the pretty girl who did not know that she did not have to work so hard at understanding. She pressed hard, putting words into her book, pressing each word into the paper as if otherwise it might run away.
But what did any of it have to do with me? Did any of it have to do with the stars that hung low near dawn, or the way the sun came up dripping out of the sea? The notes I took meant nothing: a few facts about enclosure laws, a list of the dates of battles. My notebook did not fill like other people's, and what was in it was largely illegible. Even when it could be read, there did not seem to be much sense in these lists of denuded facts, dates, names. Descartes was a man with a ball of wax, I knew that much, and Philip of Spain had died an unmentionable death, but what else? Even Napoleon seemed boring.
Here up at the back of the hall, where the hot air gathered, and the smells of ink and feet, the fat girl with the red cheeks sat beside the thin ugly boy in black. The man in tweed had not wondered for many years what all this had to do with God, but he was annoyed by so much whispering in the back row. He that has ears, let him hear, he boomed out suddenly, to his suprise as much as his students. The pretty girl dropped her pencil, the deaf boy showed his teeth with the pleasure of having heard for once, and the thin boy and the fat girl stopped their whispering to stare.
I often wanted to stand and yell down into the ring. Where is size? I would have liked to shout. What have you done with the grand and ineffable? Where is the life all around us? I stood in my place, balancing against vertigo with a hand on the bench. The men in tweed stopped what they were saying and stared up, waiting. There would be a long silence which gradually filled up with shuffles, titters, things dropped with a bang or tinkle, during which I struggled to formulate one of my questions. The men in tweed became embarrassed. My formulations evaporated as I stood with my mouth trying to open on words, and watched them toss chalk from hand to hand. One pushed a long hand into his trouser pocket and drew out a gold watch on a chain. He laid it in front of him on the lectern as gently as a souffle. Yes? They would ask, their faces turned up to me in a moonlike way. Yes? The silence would deepen and finally splinter with a snicker from somewhere. The men in tweed prided themselves on their poise and silver temples, and smoothly turned to the board when they had waited long enough.
On the board they enumerated a few more facts about the movements of centuries or battles or philosophies, and when they turned back to the class they continued speaking as if the tall girl was not still standing, her mouth ajar, blocking the view of those behind, but still full of undelivered questions. They would learn to expect her and would finally look around at the beginning of the lecture to see from which bench she would rise, and would recognise her in the quadrangle, and nod, and smile a watchful smile to show they knew but that they would not be impressed.
It is a shock to me, I confessed to F. J. Stroud, who continued to be willing to be made conspicuous as the boy in black beside the standing girl. I expected something else. F. J. Stroud sneered, but did not intend cruelty. What did you expect? he wanted to know. Wisdom? The bedlam of the lunchtime bells strained after a melody--it might have been "Greensleeves" or just as well "Ye Banks and Braes"--but could only produce clamour. Wisdom, he said when we had passed out of the quadrangle. You will not find it here.
I was not sure that anything as complete as wisdom, or an answer, was what I was after. Even one satisfying question would have done me.

say cheese

2005-10-04T22:57:00.000-05:00

I always hated school pictures. Your teacher would hand you that black plastic comb, and your smile got phonier as the line shrunk in front of you, your eyebrows raised like you just won the raffle at the end of the dance and your teeth clenched tight so your jaw jutted out over your knees. And your mom always made a big fuss about it and mailed wallet sizes to all her friends and hung up an 8 x 10 in the hall, and you didn't even recognize the kid staring out at you. And that's who'll be remembered. Not you, alive and lonely, but that stiff-necked little stranger.

Godsend

2005-09-27T12:55:00.000-05:00

He's out there again today, right in front of the Mellow Mushroom, where a month ago he was improvising a song that went, "What we need is a universal love song, in a language everyone can understand." But this time he isn't singing or strumming his electric guitar without an amp. He's curled up in a ball on a bench in downtown Auburn, I can only assume he's praying for me.

no, not one

2005-09-22T21:18:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I was eating dinner alone at the Barbecue House, waiting forty-five minutes for an experiment to run so I could get home and wind down, stressed out from a hard week at school and depressed as hell watching people on the news wade through the toxic wasteland of New Orleans. I had revealed my own self-absorption when I started worrying about my chances of attending graduate school at Tulane next year, and I still didn't know what to do with all that self-disgust. I was fed up with all of us talking smugly from five hours away, nothing constructive or even sympathetic. So close, yet so far.

Six locals in the sunny restaurant had been interviewing a family from New Orleans through the steam coming off their Brunswick stew: whether they knew if their house was still standing, when they would get to go back and see, what they would do in the meantime. A woman with a loud political southern accent showing engagement rings to a sorority girl motioned to the television in the corner saying, "You know, watching all this, I almost feel selfish talking about diamonds in here."
I shook some more hot sauce into my stew and tried to think of something nice to say.

As the family rose to leave the woman said to them, "I'll give you a great deal. I get calls from people from all over the south who've heard about me from friends."
The sorority girl agreed emphatically, "Oh yes, she's the very best!"
The family smiled politely and walked out the door, driving off in their minivan to god knows where. I stared at the diamond hawker bitterly through the fizz coming off my third refill of Diet Coke and walked, pious and complacent, back to the lab to finish my procedure. That night I spent hours in Taylor's studying rather than going home to unwind, drinking down the dark roast like it was the Eucharist blood, sucking on my pencil like unleavened bread.

But it didn't cover my sins, nor hers, and my studies have done less than her diamonds for the people of Katrina.

wisdom of björk

2005-09-11T14:14:00.000-05:00

The last three songs on Björk's Homogenic have been surprisingly motivating to me lately. It's a really angry album, about finding indepence after a bad relationship, but it ends with a sort of release, an acceptance of life's inconveniences and a move towards embracing humanity in its flaws, opening oneself up to love in spite of everything.

(favorite line: the less room you give me, the more space i've got)

Alarm Call

I have walked this earth and watched people
I can be sincere and say I like them
you can't say no to hope
can't say no to happiness

I want to go on a mountaintop
with a radio and good batteries
and play a joyous tune
and free the human race from suffering

I'm no fucking Buddhist
but this is enlightenment
the less room you give me
the more space I've got

this is an alarm-call so wake up wake up now
today has never happened
and it doesn't frighten me

Pluto

excuse me
but i just have to
explode
explode this body
off me

i'll wake up tomorrow
brand new

a little bit tired
but brand new

All is Full of Love

you'll be given love
you'll be taken care of
you'll be given love
you have to trust it

maybe not from the sources
you have poured yours

maybe not from the directions
you are staring at

trust your head around
it's all around you
all is full of love
all around you

all is full of love : you just ain't receiving
all is full of love : your phone is off the hook
all is full of love : your doors are all shut

all is full of love

stones from the river

2005-09-10T01:04:00.000-05:00

As she lowered herself to a log, she could see how the pattern of the water changed as it made its way past a rock that jutted from the river. The river did not stop at its base, wailing, blocking all the water coming after it. No, it continued to flow, parted, foamed, but then became whole again after it had passed the rock, leaving its impact on the rock, just as the impact of every hour she had lived was still with her, shaping her like the people who had fed her dreams. All at once she felt as if she were the river, swirling in an ever-changing design around the rock, separating and coming together again without letting herself get snagged into scummy pools. Over the years, she had learned more from the river than from any one person, and what she'd been taught had always come with passion--intense pain or joy. It was the nature of the river to be both turbulent and gentle; to be abundant at times and lean at others; to be greedy and to yield pleasure. And it would always be the nature of the river to remember the dead who lay buried beneath its surface.
What the river was showing her now was that she could flow beyond the brokenness, redeem herself, and fuse once more. If that rock was her love for Hanna, she could let it stop her, block her--or she could acknowledge the rock and have respect for it, alter her course to move around it. She had to smile because, for a moment there, it looked as if the water were trying to crawl upstream, back across the surface of the rock in dozens of small hands, reaching against the stream, defying the current. And that was good. Over the years the rock would be transformed, just like the countless stones at the bottom of the riverbed, stones you couldn't see; they affected the flow but didn't impede its progress, its momentum, its destination. She could see how she had it in her to start out loving and become vindictive--and how she needed to take a look at her love and make sure it was whole before she could offer it to anyone.

--Stones from the River, by Ursula Hegi

It seems I'm in a constant state of self-improvement. To God's unending annoyance, no doubt. I've been thinking a lot about pain, and my problems that have resulted from that pain. I've also been watching some of my friends make decisions in response to their pain that I would not like to make for myself. I have felt the weight of vertigo begging me to fall into my pain with them. My college friendships have served to show me many things, and one of the most valuable lessons I have learned is about the many subtle ways in which I am selfish. I learned at Camp SAM that it really isn't that hard to love someone after all: even a total stranger, even if you're totally dysfunctional, even if you're the most selfish person in the world. You just make a conscious effort to get over yourself and look at the needs of that total stranger. No greater love than to lay down one's life for a friend. I succeeded, for the most part, in doing so for a week, with strangers that I never have to see again.
Back in the real world, however, I found myself less successful. The truth is, it is hard to make that decision. It's the hardest thing we'll ever have to do. But it's the only thing worth doing. Outrageously.

We were discussing anorexia in Reading the Body when someone called it, passingly, a "selfish problem." I was surprised by her wording, although she was getting at something else, and I got distracted by a tangent: all problems are selfish. I have these painful things that have happened in my life, that have messed up the way I see things, at times causing me to turn inward, retreat into well-defined defense mechanisms, exploit other people for my own desires. Everyone does. Ectopia cordis. We have these problems, caused by pain. As long as we think about ourselves, hold tightly to the pain, we are prisoners of the problems that the pain has caused.

To gain your life you have to lose it.

Not that we're supposed to reject our pain, act like it didn't happen, tell ourselves someone else must have felt something worse. Nor can we say that our pain is greater than another's, that what happened to us differentiates us, excuses us from the generous forgiveness Christ demonstrated. Hegi makes that point clear. "Ah, but we can't do that--compare our pain," says the Jew hiding from Nazis in the main character's house. "It minimizes what happens to us, distorts it. We need to say, yes, this is what happened to me, and this is what I'll do with it."

So, what am I going to do with it? Am I going to hold on to the painful experiences I've had to go through, and allow them to shape the way my life turns out? Or am I going to let the waters of life run around them, embrace them, softening them and transforming them into something positive, enriching, human? If you ever ask someone to pray with you for deliverance from some sort of sin pattern, that person will probably lead you, right from the start, through a prayer of forgiveness. Before you can be free from a real problem (we call this a "stronghold" in Christianese), you have to let go of the grudges you hold towards the people and circumstances who have caused you to develop the problem. I've done this, several times. But the ultimate choice remains mine every morning: will I fold gracefully around the stones in the river of my history? Or will I fight against them until I'm snagged in scummy pools, stagnant and stinky and alone?

an august ending

2005-09-08T15:01:00.000-05:00

September is a difficult month, because the sun beats down from that funny angle with all that it has, but the humidity is gone and you just know that this is its last effort. All around campus this week I've been coming across the dead bodies of locusts, white bellies to the sky and delicate wings disassembled by ravenous ants. That characteristic drone that provides a summer day its special air of comfortable oppression has grown softer, but somehow more desparate. The dwindling survivors must call louder to their few remaining friends, and every day someone else fails to call back.
September is like that.

look and see

2005-08-24T22:27:00.000-05:00

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

--from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes I forget why God gave me glasses--to remind me that I can't see much ahead of me: I can't even see past my elbow when I hold my hands out. I can draw connections between the aspects of a moment. I'm good at that. Very analytical and all. And I'm learning how to see things (through those corrective lenses first), to capture an instant's subtleties with my parents' dusty Canon. It's thrilling, but, it's not really seeing. Not how I'd like to. I'm too often looking back, when I'm feeling particularly good. But mostly I'm just staring squarely at my feet. How does one see (and not just look) outside oneself? I wish I knew what was going on. Not just in my little existence, but in eternity. This moment here is pretty useless, severed from the flow of time. I hardly ever remember exactly when I took a specific picture, and all those sloppy journals seem like someone else's artifacts. What's really going on, is what I would like to know.

2005-08-24T14:41:00.000-05:00

Epicurus said that eating alone is the life of a wolf. He thought that the whole point of life was to enjoy yourself as much as possible, but that it was pointless if you don't have a few good friends to enjoy it with. So he moved into a big house with a lot of other intellectual types to eat good food and drink good wine (in moderation, of course, for he abhorred over-indulgence) and form a whole philosophy out of it. The part about pleasure being the meaning of life is pretty much bullshit, as far as I can tell, but he's on to something with the part about the friends.

I passed a guy sitting cross-legged on the floor of an off-to-the-side hallway in Parker this morning. He was hunched over a tupperware bowl eating something that looked like sawdust, his face reflecting up at him in the shiny brown linoleum. He glanced at me as I passed the way a dog will shift a little when you get too close to his food. And I thought, "Are we animals without each other?"

2005-08-18T23:14:00.000-05:00

No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.

-Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)

They've started referring to the London bombings as "7/7," presumably to mirror the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, what we now refer to euphemimstically as "9/11."

I was a senior in high school on September 11, 2001, and we turned the television on in the middle of Macroeconomics just in time to see its greatest monument collapse. In between first and second periods, my classmates and I discussed whether they might be reinstating the draft for the war that would inevitably begin the next day. I'm still ashamed that, of all the possible reactions to such a situation, I was most concerned about whether I was going to be required to do anything about it.
Over the next several weeks, the football stadium turned into a rallying point of freedom, as the crowd rose together before the kickoff to sing enthusiastically, "I'm Proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free." In the mornings, my economics teacher would educate us on the secret workings of the world using charts and formulas and specialized jargon. She once led us through a deliberation over whether defending this machine would be worth her own students' lives. She couldn't say for sure. This was the semester that I lost my faith in my country, in countries altogether.
Shit, I lost my faith in people as a species.

September 11th was so horrifying to me because thousands of individuals died for something that they personally had nothing to do with. Autonomous moral agents with distinct lives they had created for themselves were reduced to a category. Americans.
This sacrifice of individual lives for the sake of a political statement is how I choose to define terrorism.
But pay attention to the rhetoric we're using in the west to retaliate. It's the war on terror. It's the Americans (or the west or democracy or Israel or whomever) versus the Terrorists. Us and Them. We have conveniently reduced these depraved or brainwashed or tormented souls (but souls nonetheless) to a faceless group of evil that we have the duty and the right to eradicate. The irony of this reverse "terrorism" aside, fighting back with this sort of attitude seems savagely disrespectful to the victims. Terrorists are not so much bad because they kill people as they're bad because they dehumanize the individual. So in responding as a nation--singing patriotic songs at football games as we did, and now adopting a formated dating system--we are accepting the dehumanization of the individuals who died. We are right and they are wrong. And we are even embracing it: adopting it in order to dehumanize the individuals who started it.
This isn't a medicine we'd like to give them a dose of, is it? How dare they defy democracy? is absolutely the wrong question. How dare they defile humanity?

We can't handle mentioning the actual event. The tragedy is too painful, so we speak of it in terms of the date on which the event occurred. But after five more years of this will we not only refer to 9/11 and 7/7, but 5/18 and 1/22 and 12/25? Will these dates of terrorist attacks come to reflect the act of terrorism itself--individual bombings causing the deaths of individuals lumped into a political/historical/analytical anonymity?

But here's where the really terrifying part comes in, as the quote I opened with brought this whole topic to light in my mind: I can't conceive of any better way to solve the problem.

Go ahead, then. Nuke 'em all to hell.

2005-08-16T01:10:00.000-05:00

The words I would unearth within within myself are as thick as tar. I will be fossilized in them, preserving me as a specimen for distant times and cultures. They are black and vile and will sting you at the back of your throat, composed of the decaying flesh that's falling from my back even now. You wouldn't want much to do with them, because they would be petrifyingly honest.

I'm waiting for the archaeologists to dig them up.

2005-07-20T23:39:00.000-05:00

The fundamental problem with the study of microeconomics is this: Even if I were to determine the decision that best maximizes utility under a given set of circumstances, the phenomenal embarrassment at having sacrificed my intuition to calculus would decrease my happiness by at least 75 utils.

escaping the tourist trap

2005-07-17T23:50:00.000-05:00

Tour day while in Rio was interesting for me.
I felt better about being such a grouch all day once I remembered how much I hated touring. I don't know why, exactly, but there's something that always depresses me about focusing on the places that are set aside specifically to focus on. The view from Christ Redeemer was breathtaking all the same, so the nausea of the train ride up the mountain backwards was quickly dispelled by the brisk smoggy breeze. I took some shots of the city from above, trying to see it the way Jesus must. He Himself looked very intimidating, 28 meters tall and more glowering peevishly at the tourists at his feet than gazing lovingly upon the city. I don't suppose it's easy to make a detailed face in a giant soapstone sculpture, but I'd expected more. This looked an awful lot like the cheap plastic idols they were selling for a hundred reais in the gift shop underneath his giant sandals.

All week long as we had seen it from across the bay and debated whether we would have time to go up the mountain, I was filled with excitement at the prospect: it would be such a spiritual experience! But I felt more emotion at Mt. Rushmore, for God's sake. Why? I blame myself. I could have sought the Light a bit more earnestly. I could have put away the camera and prayed.
But.
I just hated moving with the group all day. The white, monoglot group flanked by two patient Brazilian brothers, Celio and Tony. I wanted to melt away into the streets, talk to the girl selling the earrings instead of the girl trying them on, experience the city from the inside out. Tour stops are like living room furniture, which exists solely to satisfy the curiosity of those who wish to--but never will--be welcome in the kitchen.

This is why I feel compelled to live abroad. Not to "travel" but to emigrate. To implant myself into another society. To understand not just its monuments but its symbols, to learn not just its language but its mythology. To not just perform a service, but to serve. To not just show love but to love.
This can't be done in one month, or even in one year. It'll take time, and probably a couple of miracles. But it's my heart's desire.
For this year, anyhow.

allergic reaction

2005-07-14T23:13:00.000-05:00

I recently remet a girl I keep running into (college is full of people like that). When we asked simultaneously, "How have you been?" I was surprised she didn't reflect my patent answer (good, good) but said, "Allergic to everything! I just found out I'm allergic to wheat, egg whites, everything." The details were sketchy. I'm not sure if she's just recently developed these allergies, or if they have only just now pinned them down as the cause for her perpetual hives. I'm assuming the former, though I didn't know you could spontaneously develop an allergy like that.

As we spoke more, though, I got the strong impression that she hadn't really "just developed" the allergies naturally, but that they were an outgrowth of something more significant in her life. You may not agree with me, but I believe that oftentimes our ailments are less physiological than they are spiritual. If sex is the embodiment of spiritual love, then why couldn't allergies be the embodiment of spiritual rejection? Your body detects something harmless--nourishing, even--and overreacts, sends out all its defenses to ward off something that only wanted to help. Our immunities, like our cynicism, are designed to protect us; but when they are damaged or malformed, they target the wrong things. She who had a bad reaction to wheat germ might first have had a bad reaction to friendship. Self-preservation rejects any trace of the offending substance, even if the offence was just a fluke.

I was prompted think about my own life, and the influx of Grace that's been rocking my world this past year. And how much I've embraced it but how much it has hurt. Like chemotherapy, I suppose. And maybe that's why this week has been so violently regressive. My spirit just can't take any more of this substance called grace. It's starting to reject it.
The flesh in me smarts at things like unconditional forgiveness, indelible grace. They seem foolish, dangerous. I'd like to make my own way, provide my own salvation. That's what we're all trying to do, one way or another, don't you think?

Confession: I'm failing miserably.

Some people's throats will swell shut when they catch a whif of peanut butter from across the room. Others' hearts will skip a beat when they sense the promise of Life Abundant.
Both leave you helplessly gasping for breath.
The only difference is: you can find alternate sources of protein.
There is only one fount of forgiveness and grace, only one Way to Truth and to Life.

descent into cloudiness

2005-07-12T09:47:00.000-05:00

Of course, it never seems to do much good. Your newly realized self--I don't say "new self" because I'm firmly convinced the self is newer every day--is shocked to see the buildings are the same as you left them. Your friends, though new themselves, are nonetheless new within old circumstances, as are you, and you resign yourself to reality. You settle for an average of newness and oldness, something different but only slightly so, in ways you'd least expected.

You don't actually pierce through the layer of clouds into the normal atmosphere. Rather, you simply enter the fog of everyday life.

This is why conferences and getaways and things of that nature are so disappointing. We are looking for miracles. And they come--more readily than we could ever imagine. We just don't know how to see them. Or see beyond them.

ascension always seems to bring clarity

2005-07-11T23:01:00.000-05:00

As the plane lifts above the globe, the weight of the world is lifted from my ears and the clouds obscure my understanding of the terrain I've been walking through. I sip my shiny ginger ale from a tiny plastic cup and my life becomes perfectly clear.

It always seems like I need to travel somewhere to reach my next epiphany. But it isn't that I'm not evolving right here in Auburn, in my every day. I'm just too blind to see the change unless I look at myself from another angle. Or someone shows me who I am. The hours in the stratosphere are time enough to marvel at the new length of my hair, the subtle changes in my walk, my posture, my smile. Time enough to breathe recycled air and realize I don't have asthma, never have, and the gasping sounds I've been making were a bit melodramatic.

Of course, as soon as we pierce the clouds and I regain my bearings, atmospheric pressure returns (leaving my ears feeling groggy and annoyed) and I feel the thump of tires on the runway jolt confusion back into my brain.
I don't drink ginger ale unless I'm flying. It doesn't have the same effect. But I have notebooks full of scrawls of struggle and regeneration. I can't begrudge them their wonder, their hope, their naiveté. I can't deny I wrote them, and I can't deny they're true.

Ascension always brings clarity. Traveling feels so right because it's what we're doing all the time--even when we're not. We're climbing mountains, passing through the valley of the shadow of death, bridging gaps between two hearts, running from the truth, hiding out in deserts until the shadow passes over. It feels right to travel because we always are.

We're traveling miles in the abstract every day.
We just have to act it out in the literal world in order to really grasp it.
Is everything that way?

sarah redentor

2005-07-07T22:32:00.000-05:00

more pictures

18 bullet holes

2005-07-07T10:57:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, God, I feel like I’m living in a bone grinding mill
And every time I hear the sound I can barely stand still.
It’s a thing I can’t quite make out sometimes but it seems to keep getting louder-
One more body from the valley of the dry bones getting ground up into powder
Against Your holy will

Oh, God, it hurts so bad to love anybody down here
Oh, that’s right, You know so well
One thorny crown, three nails, and a spear

--waterdeep

a thousand words

2005-07-06T20:04:00.000-05:00

This is an essay I had published in The Auburn Circle last year. The Circle is the university's general interest magazine, it's really cool and I was super excited to be included in it. This is for those of you who didn't get to read it in print.

I read an essay for world history that claimed the development of the written word during the urban revolution caused a shift from an auditory to a visual society. In today’s world of hyper-communication via the Internet and television, this principle has flourished. From fine art to paparazzi, formal events to casual outings, photography permeates every aspect of our culture. When treated responsibly, this captivity of instants is the perfect preservation of our history: a personal fossil record, if you will. When used carelessly, however, it begins to pose a problem.

We hold onto our lives’ defining moments by stamping sensations into our minds and building memories around them. But the memory is more than a mental image—it’s an event that’s been processed to produce a truth about life. These days everyone has a camera, and we’re often content to let Kodak make the images for us. I fear we may be losing the skill that the invention was meant to supplement. It’s become more about the image than the event, as if we might someday require proof that our lives really happened. But our recollections only blur together in page after page of hasty snapshots void of any personal revelation. This is why holiday gatherings with my family are always interrupted just as the fun is really starting. Warm conversation and contented smiles give way to “Say cheese” incantations and fidgety, plastered grins. The memory doesn’t match the image, and those portraits come back seeming stale and contrived, giving the whole occasion a false appearance of tedium and disinterest.

When my roommate and I sat down at the computer last year to research the best route for our trip that summer, I was participating with a skepticism that reminded me of a teenager smugly ignoring his younger sibling’s latest scheme. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go. I just never expected to have any real adventures in my lifetime. I had conditioned myself to confine my experiences to the inside of my cranium, never expecting to actually live life…you know, like, within the actual space-time continuum. But when it became clear that this was more than just another youthful daydream, one of my chief concerns involved the acquisition of a good camera with which to document this living of life I was planning for the summer. While John was content to carry along a handful of disposable cameras, I excavated my parents’ old Canon from its flaking leather case and taught myself the basic functions, snapping candids of friends and flowers and furniture.
For three thousand miles I abducted scenery and wildlife into my little black box. Stone presidents and prairie landscapes were jammed indiscriminately into tiny parcels and stored for later review. It was a desperate attempt to document what I knew to be a one-time experience. When we got to Yellowstone ten days into our expedition, I was a picture-taking machine. I eagerly encapsulated intricate lichens and stately firs, endearing little prairie dogs and intimidating bison, canyons and cascades and mudpots and hot springs. Yellowstone is an amazing place—everyone’s a photographer within its boundaries.

We didn’t make it to Old Faithful until the end of our second day in the park. I must admit I was less than excited about it. Maybe I was just depleted after two weeks of being constantly on the move, with 3,000 miles of asphalt behind me and 3,000 more ahead. There’s only so much wonder one pair of eyes can behold in a lifetime, and I wasn’t rationing mine out very wisely. I trudged sullenly past the lodge and visitor center, following the signs with total indifference. When John called out from ahead that the next eruption was expected to occur within ten minutes, I perked up and started walking faster. I began to run when I saw the steam, camera clunking heavily against my chest, but I stopped short a hundred yards from the viewing platform when the first big column began to unfurl. I raised my camera to my eye only once, matter-of-factly clicking the shutter with little attention to centering and lighting. I knew instinctively that this was something bigger than film.
It was a rare moment of clarity. For the brief duration of the eruption, I wasn’t vying for the perfect shot or brewing up some elaborate dissertation on the experience: it was simple, silent awe. This plume of shimmering white emerging from the wasteland was an image I’d always longed for—I’ll never again struggle to imagine how it might have looked to the Israelites when God appeared in the wilderness as a pillar of clouds. The torrent subsided quickly, and I turned around to join the tide of excited tourists which carried me to its logical breaking point: the gift shop. I have never been more pleased to fork over eight bucks for a cheeseburger. I was famished! Living takes a lot out of a guy.

My second day back home I ran to the one-hour photo center to claim the trophies I had stored away in those little black canisters. Apparently, though, I’m not the camera whiz I’d thought I was: of the six rolls I had used, only one-and-a-half actually turned out. But God works in mysterious ways, and I think He wanted to clear my mind of all the hype that surrounded the trip and force me to reflect on the important things I had learned. I tried my hardest to preserve the experience with pictures, but of the forty prints I got back, only five or six actually do justice to the emotions I was feeling at the moment of the film’s exposure. I’ve since learned that a camera is not a substitute for good old-fashioned living. It is only a tool, harnessed by wisdom, good for summoning the power of a moment that has slipped into memory. We need that defining moment to provide the narrative that will breathe purpose into the image.

I’m not a photographer, so I can’t evaluate this little snapshot’s technical quality. But I do have good eyes for searching out the beauty in even the plainest things, and something really strikes me about it: something in the posture of the onlookers and the glowing boardwalk beneath them, something in the sheen of the waterspout against the mellow backdrop of the sky. I can just hear the distant sputtering, that singular stench is stinging at the back of my throat, and the silent wonder that’s surrounding those tourists threatens to consume me as well.
We all know the old cliché. A picture is worth a thousand words. But really, for most of us, that’s only true for a few rare gems out of dozens of disposable 35mm’s dropped in a bin at Wal-Mart. This is one of mine.

How to live richly #9

2005-07-05T17:28:00.000-05:00

Wear it out.

If you've spent at least a week with me within the past five years, you have seen me wear this shirt. Charity, one of my most cherished friends, mailed me this shirt from Hawaii after she had moved away. I have loved it as Joseph's many-colored coat ever since, regardless of the holes in the back from too much bleach and the stains in the pit that no amount of bleach could ever renew. This shirt has seen it all.
The manual labor in Brazil was more fun than any I've ever known. We were digging a flat area to lay cement for the construction of a garage for the ministry's new bus. I worked harder than I knew I could, having a blast just not having to worry about how strong or weak I might seem. In the same way that my spirit was free to be itself that week and commune with God because my mind had let down its reflexive barriers, my body was able to do its thing without constant griping from my piercing inferiority complex. Once it started to rain--a cool, soft, refreshing tropical shower--I (shirt included) got astonishingly dirty.
While I came clean in five minutes under a cold shower, the shirt proved far less resilient. I tried my best to wash it by hand in the sink at the mission, only proving further how little I really know my own strength. You'll notice that the B in "Best" is completely missing. The shirt was a goner. Muddy and shredded, I took a final picture before tossing it in the trash.

I can honestly say don't I regret it. How could such a pathetic packrat like me say that and mean it? Didn't I throw away a piece of my soul when I took it off the clothesline?
Well, but I wore it with all my heart: one of my few possessions I didn't patronize and overprotect, I actually treated it with respect for what it was and what we could do together. It's an amazing feeling, though you're probably thinking I'm very silly. Try it, though. Take something you love and actively cherish it by letting it live up to its full potential. And then, once it has known its purpose, let it rest in peace.

jessi wessi

2005-07-03T00:08:00.001-05:00

Her parents came over tonight, and we all sat around the living room joking about relationships, joking about her dad's new dentures, joking about her. Calla Maria played an hour of videotape from last summer, most of it an interview with Jessi about relationships and beauty and self-image. In all the disruption of life, I had forgotten how good it's been to live, and how much I appreciate these people who have knitted me into their tapestries. It was tough to hug her neck goodbye, but we're all so excited that she's going to NEW ZEALAND for a whole semester, we can put our feelings aside for her sake, right?

no other fount i know

2005-07-02T15:55:00.000-05:00

The week before I left for Brazil, John asked me what were my expectations, with the assumption that if I didn’t specify any then I couldn’t reap their potential benefits. I shrugged and kept on eating, with the assumption that my expectations would be broad, inaccurate, based upon past experience, and pointless. And anyway, I honestly didn’t know of any to specify. But an hour before landing, looking out the window at the Amazon River winding through verdant wilds, I thought resolutely and unexpectedly, “I expect this trip to be a reference point for the rest of my future.” It is odd how the mind and the will may remain separate until an emotion fuses them together.

What to say of Rio de Janeiro? We worked with evangelist Rick Bonfim throughout the Rio area, traveling with him to churches and praying for people at the altar after he preached. We also helped with various improvements at the mission in Niteroi. He spent a lot of time teaching us how to pray for people and how to listen to the Holy Spirit, and he spent a lot of time ministering to us personally. Short term, I got a lot more out of the trip than I put in. Long term, the things I received will empower me to pour myself out abundantly.
How to explain what I’ve experienced?

I have alluded occasionally on this blog to my struggles to move beyond mind processes and rational thinking into walking in the Spirit and my confusion about gender and masculinity, but in my journals and private conversations these two problems have consumed the bulk of my emotional resources for a very long time. It is amazing how much light has been shed on these things in the past year, and the breakthrough I experienced in two short weeks was astounding.
There in the makeshift office where each team member met with the leadership team privately for healing prayer, He spoke deeply to me. Where wounds of past rejection had taught me to hide behind impenetrable defenses from both God and man, withdrawing into a sharply honed cycle of analysis, self-absorption and resentment, fifteen minutes of the Holy Spirit pouring on my head was enough to reverse much of the damage.

It’s called ectopia cordis. Something went wrong in my development, I became a product of psychology, too much soul and not enough spirit. Walking around with a hole in my chest, how could I breathe life into empty spaces when the sucking wound in my lungs wouldn’t even let me catch my breath? Calla Maria was right—I couldn’t give that shit to anyone.
But He penetrated, somehow, deep inside of me, and was even so good as to patch up the hole. The tears that floated to the surface were replaced by holy winds, cleansing water—fuller and deeper and surer than ever. My puny spirit, so long smothered by a tyrannically analytical mind, was refreshed by the Comforter Himself, allowed to step out in faith and find himself in holy communion. And I saw myself in Technicolor, a reservoir for wellsprings of life, no longer gulping approval in desperate hope of filling the void, finally full enough to spill something out.
But is that all there was to it? I confess I am reluctant to lay claim to wholeness this quickly.

I’ll wait to ring the bells awhile,
till all the light and color
have stayed the whole of spring,
until I believe it.
And if, and if I count on you,
oh do not fly away.
I dare not count on you,
it is too early to say.
-the innocence mission

But it isn’t too early-—and that in itself is terrifying to me.

Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10:19-23 NKJV

It is strange to feel so much different, having crossed the equator only twice.

prayer request

2005-06-16T11:44:00.000-05:00

I will be spending the next two weeks below these arms, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Please pray for my trip.

song of songs

2005-06-13T16:49:00.000-05:00

By night on my bed I sought the one I love;
I sought him, but I did not find him.
"I will rise now," I said,
"And go about the city;
In the streets and in the squares
I will seek the one I love."
I sought him, but I did not find him.
The watchmen who go about the city found me;
I said, "Have you seen the one I love?"

Scarcely had I passed by them,
When I found the one I love.
I held him and would not let him go,
Until I had brought him to the house of my mother,
And into the chamber of her who conceived me.

I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
By the gazelles or by the does of the field,
Do not stir up nor awaken love
Until it pleases.

Who is this coming out of the wilderness
Like pillars of smoke,
Perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,
With all the merchant's fragrant powders?
Behold, it is Solomon's couch,
With sixty valiant men around it,
Of the valiant of Israel.
They all hold swords,
Being expert in war.
Every man has his sword on his thigh
Because of fear in the night.

Of the wood of Lebanon
Solomon the King
Made himself a palanquin:
He made its pillars of silver,
Its support of gold,
Its seat of purple,
Its interior paved with love
By the daughters of Jerusalem.
Go forth, O daughters of Zion,
And see King Solomon with the crown
With which his mother crowned him
On the day of his wedding,
The day of the gladness of his heart

--Song of Solomon 3, NKJV

what i learned at camp

2005-06-12T15:12:00.000-05:00

I just spent eight days at Camp Smile-a-Mile at Children's Harbor on Lake Martin. Friday through Sunday I was a counselor at sibling camp, a weekend retreat for siblings of cancer patients. Monday through Saturday I was a counselor at June camp, pediatric oncology camp for ages 5-12. A doctor and nurses from Children's in Birmingham comes for the week and administers their chemo right there and we have a great time.

It's weird how much of a personality you already have at age 8. I was sitting to the side one evening after dinner early in the week, watching them all play together, and I was blown away by how many adults I recognized in their childishness. They already are who they'll basically become, both in their giftings and in their weaknesses. I began to realize that my role as their counselor wasn't to fight with them for dominance, and it also wasn't to submit to their every whim and treat them like little gods for a week. But it was to speak life into their giftings and discourage their selfishness, make counterstrikes against their adversities and show them that they are valued and valuable. And the more I began to put this into practice with my campers, the more confident I became in my ability to love.
Because this is what fatherhood is. And husbandry. And friendship. Perfect love is speaking life into one another, spurning on faith and pruning out sinfulness. Not power struggle, but sacrifice.

Dusk was collecting over the lake Friday night and beginning to creep ashore when I finally saw my campers--three six-year-old brothers of children with cancer--in their entirety. The disruption that has torn apart their lives, the way they've been overlooked by parents worried sick, the emptiness in the one whose sister died last year and the relief of the one whose sister just finished her final round of treatment. The fragile strength and sweet patience, the pure faith in pixie dust and angels and a God who loves everybody equally. Darkness threatened to take over as it wrapped itself around the camp, but flashes of light from all around held the darkness at bay. Fireflies and flashlights and sparks off of the campfire were sparkling through the trees down the hill. Stars looked down approvingly as the beam from the lighthouse swept diligently across the water to the shore where silly songs and s'mores banished the darkness so that we could get on with camp.

I read somewhere that clinical depression isn't so much a constant sadness as it is an inability to carry out an emotion to completion before moving on to the next. Rather than mourning for pain and rejoicing in blessings and feeling like both sides of life have been experienced fully, you are overwhelmed, unable to shift your focus from the pain.
Thursday night after dinner we walked down to the beach for the memorial service. Those sweet, afflicted children held their candles solemnly to mine, with their hands and backs breaking the wind that would have extinguised them, and dug holes in the sand to leave their flames to die. And we all walked to the lighthouse and cried, mourning while the waves pounded the shore just below us.
But slowly we picked ourselves up and made our way back to the amphitheatre to have our talent show. Because life must be lived: the darkness explored, engaged, and released, and new joys discovered every day.
And live we did.

night fishing

2005-06-01T23:34:00.000-05:00

right now i'm so restless that even the coffee is calming

performance anxiety

2005-05-16T19:48:00.000-05:00

It’s been a long time since my last incident of “stage fright.” It happens to every man from time to time, but I thought I had grown out of it. My first Over the Rhine concert at a bar in Atlanta was certainly not the ideal time to have to deal with it again.
After the opening act finished playing, I was second in line for the bathroom, and, well...there was only one urinal, out in the open right by the sink, and the line of guys went out the open door impatiently, all of them in a hurry to get to the bar for another beer before the music started, and I just couldn’t get it to flow. So I zipped up and left, ashamed.

I knew I couldn’t hold it through the whole show, so I waited for the line to die down before giving it another go. Linford was standing with his arm across the door, and he told me with a twinkle in his eye that the bathroom was occupied. I stood there several minutes, pretending like I didn’t know it was him instead of telling him what I wanted to: Thank you for coming. Ohio saved my relationship, and possibly my life.
Side by side, all nonchalant, we looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor, whistling and tapping our fingers on the wall. Just as I had summoned the courage to show some sign of recognition, Karin bounded out of the men’s bathroom with some clever one-liner, and they were gone. I groaned at my own asinine excitement as I peed in the same toilet as Karin Bergquist!!!

It hadn’t been twenty four hours since she who knows me best had assaulted my desperately habitual deference. When you have to work so hard to establish a connection with someone, the relationship loses most of its sincerity. You go to such an extreme trying to make sure everyone likes you, accommodating everyone, and it doesn’t seem very authentic.
She's got a point. Why am I so afraid to be myself, to say what I mean, to take a piss?

I made it back to my seat right as they were climbing on stage. They looked out at us as they played like it was the most natural thing in the world. Confident of the worth of their music and the validity of their existence, they didn’t seem to waste any time contemplating our possible reactions to their presence. From where I was sitting I could see Linford as he smiled at Karin, which he did often, with a look of pride and adoration. They seemed to be playing for one another, songs born in their relationships with one another and with God, songs of desperation and love. The first song they played that I knew was Born. We scooted close and dreamt of the day.....

I was born to laugh
I learned to laugh through my tears
I was born to love
I’m gonna learn to love without fear

It hurts when the same spot’s hit over and over.
Perfect love casts out fear.

(un)packing

2005-05-13T03:04:00.000-05:00

I told Brandon I was an expert at moving because I've done it so many times, and that I would be glad to help him pack up his stuff. But there's so much I'd never realized....
I didn't help very much. I sat on his bed until three in the morning, hoping he wouldn't be finished, because once someone leaves he can only come visit--and he'll never again bear that feeling of home.
Watching him pack up his stuff was like watching him unpack himself. The way you find things you'd forgotten you'd lost behind dressers and in dusty closets. Going through notebooks and sorting out trash, staring long into pictures and telling their stories, he unloaded his bookshelf into a box. He was meticulous with every piece of junk and every heirloom, as if it were a treasure chest for losing at sea, and not just a rubber tub from Walmart.

I've always held onto everything, silly things, in box upon stupid cigar box, afraid I'd forget what already was blurred from too many transportations. But maybe that feeling of home will always hover around Brandon--and all who I've let feel like home. Maybe I don't need a box full of tickets to nurture a sense of history.
Maybe it's time to unpack.

what he didn't mean to teach me

2005-05-09T23:59:00.000-05:00

Dr. Bradley said in Cell Biology this semester, "Every time there is an oxidation reaction, somewhere in the universe there must be a reduction reaction. Usually they are coupled tightly."

Reminded me of He must increase, but I must decrease.

ministering in the physical

2005-05-09T18:22:00.000-05:00

My aunt Kay has a cat who will be turning 17 this summer. Pepper has been a fixture at their house for as long as I can remember, neutered and lazy and shy, a plump blue beauty with a garbled meow. I hadn't seen him for several years, but when I walked through their garage this weekend he was sleeping on the hood of the Taurus, and I stopped to say hello. He stood up and purred as I scratched his back. I was shocked how skinny and weak he seemed. His hair was matted and dirty, his purr sort of dim and arrhythmic. I stayed there for a long time, singing as much of "Old Deuteronomy" as I could remember and giving him a thorough rubdown.
Our communion brought back memories of my cousin Justin, with whom I spent most of my summers and whose image holds some of my deepest concepts of my self. Since I moved every three or four years, and all my friends did the same, I never kept a friend longer than a year or two, so he was my only consistent peer. More of my formative memories are tied to him than to anyone outside my nuclear family.
Pepper brought back lots of these memories. Rubbing his fur reminded me where I came from, and suggested where to go next. I was thankful for the wisdom in his eyes, thankful for the fact that he knew me and seemed to understand me. Stupid cat that he is. I don't think he'll live through next winter. I was glad to get to talk to him one last time.

My dad's parents died about eight years ago, and being the youngest, he inherited the house. Most of their stuff was divided up amongst him and his five siblings and the house stands mostly empty, but it's furnished enough for us to spend summers and weekends there. Yesterday after my parents left for Prattville, I stayed behind to read on the front porch a while before heading back to Auburn. I felt the strangest urge to spend ten minutes sitting in every chair, take a nap in the back bedroom, use the bathroom and wash some dishes. Let the house feel lived in.
Houses this old decay rapidly when vacant, and before anyone realizes it they're leaning over the side of the road with the posture of the unimposing grandparents who withered away inside. That ever-constant living room was a piece of my history, and has been divvied up equally between six families to leave only a skeletal outline of a significant portion of my past. The remaining furniture waits patiently, slowly slipping from the imprint that was left in my memory by Smith and Iva Boozer. The house welcomes me, invites me to relax in its embrace and remember where I came from, stare out over the pasture into the sunset and listen to my history in the mockingbirds' songs.
Yesterday I wanted to tend to the easy chair my Mama spent her last three years in, assume my Papa's horizontal stature on the red-flowered sofa. And the house wanted to tend to me, remind me who has loved me, who provided the way for my existence, who pointed me to God.

It was my spirit communing with eternal things via physical objects.
Just like I've been asking for!

at the sight of that placid and bland physiognomy
when he sits in the sun on the vicarage wall,
the oldest inhabitant croaks:

Well, of all things, can it be really?
No, yes, ho hi, oh my eye!
My legs may be tottery, I must go slow
and be careful of Old Deuteronomy

--TS Elliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
(...first known to me as the musical Cats)

loosely linked reflections at schoolyear's end

2005-05-05T23:03:00.000-05:00

Looking into faces that have drifted from my inner circle made me sad this week. It's funny how transient relationships can be in college. But, transient as they may be, they're charged with a strange immediacy, an eternal connection that assures me I'll always smile fondly at the mention of a name, of those days when nothing mattered but to know and to be known, to explore what life has to offer in the recesses of others' hearts.
I can trace the arc of my social life plainly. Freshman year John and Kara and I stuck together tighter than siblings. We held each other up. Sophomore year Chi Alpha exploded into my life and suddenly I had a dozen best friends and a hundred buddies. This year I had to tone it down and be selective about where I poured my emotions. Some relationships were deliberate, some serendipitous; some I had to fight to keep and some I couldn't hold onto for trying.
I can't regret how things have changed, though at times I'd like to. I don't wish the arc to come full circle to a senior year of three incredibly close friendships. This will be a year of pouring out everything I have received thus far, to as many as He'll allow me.

*
Something good I read this week on one of my favorite blogs:

No two friends are the same. Each has his or her own gift for us. When we expect one friend to have all we need, we will always be hypercritical, never completely happy with what he or she does have.
One friend may offer us affection, another may stimulate our minds, another may strengthen our souls. The more able we are to receive the different gifts our friends have to give us, the more able we will be to offer our own unique but limited gifts. Thus, friendships create a beautiful tapestry of love.
---Henri Nouwen

*
Two things Josh calls crucibles: leadership and relationships.
Calla Maria has opened up my heart in ways I would've wished she hadn't seven months ago. You never know how ugly (and how beautiful) you are until someone is brave enough to show you.

*
Waterdeep was my only source of music sophomore year, but for some reason Lori's solo album took an extra year and some serious expansion to really sink in. It's a terrifying piece of art: about birth and life and pain and forgiveness and surrendering and being who you were made to be. Beginning and then ending to begin again. 1Beginning, she named it.
Maybe that's why I shrugged it off at first: I wasn't ready to begin.

you will always hurt
you will always sting
because you won't let go of everything
until you're quiet one dark night
and you give up the fight you've fought so long
and find that trust is not a game
that naïve stupid people play in youth
and you let it rain
you let it flood
you let it drive out all the pain
of love

*
This moment came one late October evening:

But it took me six months to get across the table. I was terrified. We're in the same booth now, finally facing forward rather than head-to-head. It's hard to find the balance between overlooking one another's faults and spurning one another towards growth. Some weekends we swing to an extremity, but He's teaching us to lay our lives down--a maladroit approximation of His gorgeous demonstration.

*
It's been good. Does life keep getting better and better? I barely understand those people who long so much to die. I yearn to be with Him, too, at ease in Zion, but that will come in good time--and when it comes, without time. So we must learn to do more than wait resignedly. This isn't purgatory, this is life! It isn't the end, it's the beginning!

fat tires and cigarettes
romeos and juliets
stinging losses deep regrets
that everybody hides
in coffee shops and magazines
choir lofts and college flings
did everybody lose their dreams out on the playground?

you can sing
you can believe
you can be anything you want
all the time
day or night
you can be anything you want

2005-05-05T01:42:00.000-05:00

The fam:

film study: Nobody Knows

2005-05-03T15:49:00.000-05:00

Calla Maria and I blew off some of the finals steam by going to the movies.
We got more than we bargained for. :)
It took a good night's rest for it to really sink in, but we've learned several things:

Movies made in a different culture can't be understood through one's native eyes. Though astounded by the careful attention to beauty in the details, we both had a hard time staying interested during the two and a half hours of quiet observations. But we understood that if they had been speaking English, and if we had an understanding of the silent assumptions about filmmaking they carry on that island and how they differ from our own, we would have been enthralled.

We remembered there was a bridge over this culture gap in an American film shot in Japan a few years ago. We've decided that Lost In Translation was Sofia Coppola's generous attempt to bring the beauty of Japanese culture into a form graspable to Western viewers. (If you have highspeed, go watch this clip to get an idea of why you should see this film as well, and maybe after finals I'll rent it and lots of us can watch it together.) Like the Japanese Nobody Knows, it's full of long, wordless shots and ethereal music, and there is never any real conflict--no antagonist/protagonist showdown or huge moral dilemmas. Two people meet, become friends, respect one another, and learn something. We stare in amazement at the foreign landscape, beautiful and incomprehensible. We laugh at our inability to connect with it. We befriend the characters, respect them, and learn something ourselves.

It's based on a true story--one that made big headlines in Japan in the 80's. The director says, "This headline brought up various questions to my mind. The life of these children couldn't have been only negative. There must have been a richness other than material, based on those moments of understanding, joy, sadness and hope. So I didn't want to show the 'hell' as seen from the outside, but the 'richness' of their life as seen from the inside."

This type of filmmaking is something we need more of in the west. Sit back. Open your eyes. Look for the beauty in everything. This isn't a very pleasant film, though. (How many true stories are?) Four children are abandoned in Tokyo with 10,000 yen to get them through. Their mother sends them letters and some cash once or twice.... They don't fare so well.

The ending is incredible, a testimony to the kind of dirty all our faces get as we're growing up. As the credits rolled, we didn't know what to think. Somewhat saddened, a bit bemused, but strangely encouraged overall.
Then it says, The Mother played by: YOU

We both jumped. Drove away contemplating that final kicker.
Is it hopeful or damning?

These children have no mother, so you--all of you--must care for them now.

...OR...

It's you who is responsible for this sort of suffering. You go through life pleasing yourself, sending your smug little 19 cents a day as if that made any difference. You should know better.

Turns out, the name of the actress who played the mother really is YOU.
In retrospect, such a bold statement seems very out of place in such a carefully NON emotionally manipulative film.
But it was quite a message. :)

The trailer is gorgeous, worth your minute.

Watch it here.

Look at stills here.

holy moment

2005-04-30T12:17:00.000-05:00

When I got back from Our Town in Atlanta my apartment was full of friends.
I've rarely felt so sentimental. We sat enraptured as Benji read the whole book aloud.
While he read, Alex was singing Kevin Prosch from across the room:

There's a cry I have had: that I could love my brothers
Not to look at their race, their religion or their color
You love the Presbyterians, and the gays and the lesbians
You love the Buddhists and the prostitutes
You're not like us--we're always changing
But you see through our sins, and you love us anyway

My eyes welled up a little as Emily's words ran round and round my head:

Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, just for a moment let's be happy. Let's look at one another!
I can't! I can't go on! It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed! Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you! Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?

Alex had finished singing and spread himself across my chest by the last page:

"I am sorry," sighed the tree.
"I wish that I could
give you something...
but I have nothing left. I am just
an old stump. I am sorry...."

"I don't need very much now,"
said the boy,
"just a quiet place to sit and rest.
I am very tired."
"Well," said the tree,
straightening herself up
as much as she could,
"well, and old stump is good
for sitting and resting.
Come, Boy, sit down.
Sit down and rest."

And the boy did.

And the tree was happy.

am i reading in to this too much?

2005-04-26T01:01:00.000-05:00

Today at China Palace I was watching MSNBC on closed captioned big screen, taking tips about post-graduation job hunting (because I'm incapable of ignoring restaurant televisions): interviews, investments, intensity. Oh, and don't be afraid to follow your passions. Lots of people are doing things they care about these days...after retirement, of course. Secure yourself a pension, and then maybe you can actually exist for your last fifteen years. They went on to say that more Americans work abroad than one might think, flashing a website to visit, and just as I raised my eyebrow at the recommendation, I read my fortune cookie:

:) You are always welcome in any gathering. :)

I mean, how can you fight with the implications of this "coincidence"? I've wanted to work overseas ever since high school.
And the final kicker! This was the quote in my word-a-day today:

I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
-Lord Byron, poet (1788-1824)

How to live richly #8

2005-04-22T22:23:00.000-05:00

Make [an idiot of yourself] someone's day.

Oh, don't you wish I had a picture of this one? Unfortunately, nobody could whip out their cameraphone in time to catch the action.
As I was walking down the stairs at the acquatics center, I was watching Maurice stare in wonder at the Endless Pool, so I didn't pay attention to how I was turning. Who puts a big glass panel on either side of the doorway, anyway? Just as he turned around to face me, I smacked it hard, and he doubled up laughing.
A year ago, I would have been mortified, but thankfully we were both able to laugh hysterically at my mistake. I'm pretty sure the chuckle did more for my heart than the thirty minutes of aerobic exercise that followed, so I can't complain.
You should try to be less graceful. In the right company, it can be quite nice. :)

highly recommended:

2005-04-22T21:58:00.000-05:00

After six months of abstinence based upon principle, Miss Calla Maria Davis has finally graced us with her presence in the blogosphere. With Ingrid (her brand new Compaq Presario) close beside, she's now free to post with unprecedented mobility--whenever and wherever inspiration strikes.
Compared to yours's truly, her weblog is twice as nice and unaffected, and probably way more important. For all of you who want to get a glimpse, here's your chance. :)

2005-04-18T13:25:00.000-05:00

Those azaleas are receding today: the ones that sheared my winter wool. But I realized with some satisfaction in the morning's bright blue sky that they hadn't lost their faith in us. Not in the least.
They are the world's wedding party, bedecked in their best beauty to wish us on our happy way, who, after packing up our gifts into the shaving-creamed car, will withdraw for some time into the background, not standing too much out, and smile to see our happiness in full summer swell.
But I think that we can trust them to return again to brighten up our winter gloom, when the time is right.

exhibit A:

2005-04-13T13:07:00.000-05:00

The same wire globe that hung behind my head in the architecture courtyard as I journalled desperately to Him Friday morning has been moved today to the concourse, where I sat quietly this morning allowing Him to speak to me through Ohio. It's propped up and connected to solar panels: rotating free and open and beautiful, no longer stuck silent up against a moldy brick balcony, almost out of sight. It's a symbol of Himself, free to move in mystery through my heart once again. This morning when I opened my eyes, I saw Him staring attentively at the furrow in my brow, smiling in relief as it melted into a sigh of gratitude.

I realized that I love the rain so much because it fills the otherwise empty sky with matter. A dimness that's fuller than sunlight. But I'm learning to see Him in the open sky, too: it's never empty. Curt Harlow speculates that God lives in the gaps between the stars.
Whether or not, I'm more comfortable in the sun than I once was.

Nobody Number One
I'm afraid I've lost the piece of me
I need the most you see
This puzzle is really just about the need
To be somebody
I'm afraid I'm not all that you see
All along the coast of me
I'm camouflaged, a desert mirage
A nobody

But you came so close and I assumed
You were looking
For the piece of yourself that's lost
It is the hiding place inside everybody
And though we love to numb the pain
We come to learn that it's in vain
Pain is our mother
She makes us recognize each other

C'mon now child don't cry
C'mon now child don't cry
Let's give it one more try
C'mon now child don't cry

Sometimes I feel so all alone
Here in this city I call my home
They say, Hey, you're one of us
Funny I should feel so anonymous
But I'm drawn to you
And that still small voice is talking too
And that's the voice that so seldom can get through

You can't put no band-aid on this cancer
Like a twenty-dollar bill
For a topless dancer
You need questions
Forget about the answers
Do you really wanna die this way?

That's the trouble with you and me
We always hit the bottom 'fore we get set free
I'm so far down I'm beginning to breathe

C'mon now child don't cry
C'mon now child don't cry
Let's give it one more try
C'mon now child don't cry
Cuz we're just too young to die

--Over the Rhine, one of my new favorites

exhibit B:

2005-04-13T13:03:00.000-05:00

A girl from my swimming class walked by me as I was panting in the mid-morning sun on a bench right outside the pool after a killer workout, trying to regain my strength.
"How are you? Oh, I'm fine. You have great push-ups, by the way. I was next to you on the mat one time, and I was just really impressed."
And I had worried each time the push-up sets approached, worried that I wouldn't be able to finish, because I've always associated the exercise with a virility I thought I lacked.

taste test: a prelude

2005-04-11T09:07:00.000-05:00

I found this on my memory key, the too lengthy introduction to the first draft of the post about preferences driving us apart, and it made me laugh. It's probably some sort of pathetic blogger disease to think that something I wrote that makes me laugh four months later would also make someone else in the world laugh, but if it is, I don't think they've got any medicine for it yet, so...

When I was in Kindergarten, the class day was over at noon. My mother was a substitute teacher, so some days I had to stay at the school for afternoon daycare. During lunch our caretaker would distribute plates with the main course already prepped, and then circle around to offer each side dish individually. If it was something we liked, we said, "Yes, please," and she would give us two spoonfuls. If it was something we didn't like, we would say, "No, thank you," and she would give us one spoonful. We were required to eat everything they put before us.
It was a private school, you see, so they had the power to require that sort of thing.
I was a very finicky Kindergartener. Although I loathed all vegetables but celery with peanut butter, my least favorite side dish was cooked carrots, especially when mixed with English peas. Blegh! My keen sense of social justice was outraged every time I was not fed a hamburger with french fries and ketchup (i.e. every day but Friday): the only offer to elicit the coveted yes, please from my discerning mouth. I gnashed my teeth as I ate those carrots, and swore to next week eat nothing but cake.
I've grown a bit more tolerant in my old age. Although I'm still not too fond of English peas, I now consider cooked carrots a paragon of earthly delight. What once sent my pharynx into convulsions now sends my palate into exultations. That same year, I threw up all over the dinner table when my dad forced me to eat broccoli. I really did--all over my plate and the salad dressings. But I can put down some broccoli casserole these days, and I can even stomach the raw stuff if I smother it in ranch dip and close my eyes until I swallow.
Why the change of heart? Did my tastebuds mutate after years of standing too close to the microwave? Or, after gaining control of my gag reflex, did I finally learn to appreciate a wider range of sensational experience?

Was my hatred for vegetables a diversifying idiosyncrasy to be embraced, or a sign of immaturity that needed to be erased?

poison

2005-04-10T15:24:00.000-05:00

never swallow the lump in your throat
spit it out

2005-04-09T20:40:00.000-05:00

Born

2005-04-06T23:16:00.000-05:00

wistful hysteria

2005-04-06T14:25:00.000-05:00

azaleas are abloom again.
why are we still wearing winter?

film study: Mean Creek

2005-04-06T14:00:00.000-05:00

I was moved by Mean Creek over the break, and I think you would be, too.
It's a beautiful film, worth even watching on mute.
Every single image, every character carries so much meaning, so much weight.
Representations evolve into allegory as the ugly interiors of the children surface on their beautiful outsides, and yet the conclusion seems as vague as the fog that fills the final shot.
This one asks lots of questions, and leaves you to answer them for yourself. I like that.

Jeffrey Overstreet from Looking Closer has a compelling interview with the film's director that you should read to pique your interest.
Please read it and think about renting the movie. You'll probably be glad you did.

Did the time change, or something?

2005-04-05T02:31:00.000-05:00

Those of you who've been with me from the beginning remember how I lost my sanity when we lost daylight savings, yes? Well, somehow, this month's time-changing fiasco wasn't such a fiasco.
It's because I didn't have a schedule to adhere to for the day! I was out in the wilderness, away from all modern convenience...except for tents, and backpacks, and cous cous, and cheese, and contacts....
I went backpacking with some friends, and you can read their witty summations of the trip here and here, and maybe eventually here, if you'd like. We went to bed at 8 freaking 30 because we were so cold, and we slept until who knows when, because we didn't have anything to do. So, without a clock to gauge what the constraints of my society suggested that I be doing, I was free to let nature remind me of what God said I should be doing. And it worked out marvelously.
Mount Cheaha is the highest point in Alabama, coming in at a whopping 2400 feet. It was enough to destroy all of my muscles for a little while. But it was good to remember that I do, in fact, have a physical body, and I can use it to transport one third of a campsite up a mountain, if I so desire.
Why bother typing about frogs and Rilke when I have mountains to conquer?

A thought tried to pollute me just then: what fools we are to say we've conquered the mountain by walking to her summit. Surely she laughs at us and says, "I'll be here, boy, shrinking an inch a century, and you'll be there, shrinking a century an inch."
Or something.
Wait. I'm doing it again!

So. Now I know to go camping every six months.
I could get used to that.

When it feels like culture gets too much for me, I go outside
Singing songs to alibis, a song is a beautiful lie

A song is a beautiful lie
And they know that one day you will die
And so maybe you will buy, maybe you will buy
But for now I sit alone and say a song is a beautiful lie
--Idlewild, Self-healer

2005-04-05T00:07:00.000-05:00

Where did Barabbas go after they released him? Does Luke tell us?
I mean, he was a real person, with real experiences, not just some parable to be conflated into some elaborate doctrine.
As much as I want to allegorize him, say that he dissolved into the hearts of everyone who looked upon His bloody, bleeding body, seeping into the spirits of everyone who believed upon His bloody, bursting heart to remind us of our own bloody rebellion, and how His bloody, splintered cross brought the weight of murder on each of our heads too, and the bloody, empty tomb transformed our bloody, lifeless carcasses to something guiltless and eternal,
what if he just went out and picked up a whore?

2005-04-01T23:13:00.000-05:00

One phrase drowned out the rest of the sermon Easter Sunday:

"Release to us Barabbas"--who had been thrown into prison for a certain rebellion made in the city, and for murder (read the full story here).

Condemned for rebellion, replaced by Jesus on the cross. It's the Gospel in one sentence!
And all this time I'd spat on Barabbas, hated him for getting off so easy.
Spat upon myself.

Thinking of changing the name of my site to something like "letters from barabbas."
What do you guys think?
--> Utilize the comments button by commenting! :)

interview with the innocence mission

2005-03-31T19:12:00.000-05:00

How could anyone help but adore these beautiful, graceful people?
Play this interview, and take a nap or something.

2005-03-28T21:58:00.002-05:00

Spring break came just in time.
One more day in Auburn, and I may have imploded.
Friday marked the first time I've been defeated by the Triple Lindy.
The loss, I assure you, was due entirely to extenuating circumstances.
I wish I had something more to say about the gap between by brain and my fingers, but I'm getting tired of thinking about it, to tell you the truth.
[Maybe that's the key: stop thinking.]
To give you a feel for the height of the past days' melodrama, I wrote in my journal Saturday:

I don't want to be strong anymore
I want to break down completely

He will rise again at Dawn.
And will I come up with Him,
or have I forty more years to wander?

I have plans for this week, though. You betcha.
1. smile
2.

Little boy,

2005-03-23T00:33:00.000-05:00

You reached down to catch me a frog, and reached up to show me a sleek green joy. Neither of us realized clutching tighter only killed them.
In return, I spoke of fireflies and steel and California. You would ask me what is an enigma, a monument, ambivalence: you'd mispronounce them all. I would ask you what is faith and newness and forgetting. Wouldn't you smile and call me silly, and think I was playing a game?
I'll withhold from you the monuments as long as I am able.
Content yourself to laugh and sing and hide under the table.

If you could read, perhaps you'd quote me Rilke:

And we: Spectators, always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
It overfills us. We arrange it. It falls apart.
We rearrange it, and fall apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this, so that
always, no matter what we do, we're in the stance
of someone just departing? As he,
on the last hill that shows him all his valley
one last time, turns, stops, lingers--,
we live our lives, forever taking leave.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, you know....
And you would quote me Solomon, too:

Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed,
Or the golden bowl is broken,
Or the pitcher shattered at the fountain,
Or the wheel broken at the well.
Then the dust will return to the earth as it was,
And the spirit will return to God who gave it.

"Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher.
"All is vanity."

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:
Fear God and keep His commandments,
For this is man's all.
For God will bring every work into judgment,
Including every secret thing,
Whether good or evil.

[Rilke, Duino Elegies; Shakespeare, Hamlet; Ecclesiastes 12]

Enigma expounded

2005-03-11T16:51:00.000-05:00

"I don't exist much in the physical realm," I said half-sarcastically to John a month ago.
I was restoring an old library book entitled At Ease in Zion, making it into a journal for Calla Maria's birthday. Marvelling at the monument I was establishing, the sacraments of artwork and gift-giving, I couldn't get my mind around the mechanisms of remembrance. How can we engage our bodies in something so intangible as human interaction? How do you wrap up your love for someone and extend it across the space between your hearts?
Fashioning my affection into something tangible and permanent, lost in thought in the living room, John brought up talk of a tentative trip to Philadelphia this May. I want to get a feel for the city because I am considering spending a year there after graduation and working with Chi Alpha. He said he would like to stop and spend a day at Gettysburg. I scoffed, said he could have fun with his history. I'd go hang out with the Amish, something more worth my time. He was surprised at my insolence. I tried to describe how I don't understand monuments, how I'd rather read a book or pray about something than look at a slab of marble, how I can't transcribe spiritual reality into physical reality.
I have a hard time connecting with an abstract concept by focusing on a concrete representation. Somewhere between my heart and my hands there's a gap that I can't overcome. I've been been aware of this dichotomy for years, but pondering it especially much ever since Dr. Gresham made me read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, examining my selves from various angles, trying to seal the gap.

I was trying to explain it to Josh today. He posed the question: Is this something that is a part of your personality, something unique about you that might even be vital to your personal ministry? Or is it just a defense mechanism, the result of twenty-one years of managing sin, chasing approval, Gnostic denial of the sensual?
Whatever it is, I can feel the Holy Spirit drawing my soul out of its prison. He's pressing on the walls of my heart, ready to burst them, so my spirit can flood out into every inch of my flesh: fingertips to toes, mouth and eyes and nose. Perhaps he'll cut the telegram wire that runs between my mind and my heart, forcing them to intermingle, communicate face-to-face.

:So I can hold my girlfriend's hand and feel it draw her near.
:So I can shake an outcast's hand and feel it bring him in.
:So I can squeeze a patient's hand feel it calm her fear.
:So I can take my Father's hand and feel it lead me on.

I'll step into my skin and walk around in it someday. It's part of growing up.
You can help me bridge the gap, perhaps. He's already using my friends. He's using other people's thoughts, others' revelations.
Read this: it's an exercise I intend to try this weekend.
If you know of any other exercises I can try, let me know.
All of this is will just be practice, though, for the day...

when i stand on the edges of Jordan
with the saints and the angels beside
when my body is healed and the glory revealed
still i can boast only Christ
- derek webb

Until then, no matter how sensual I become, I'll never be completely me: existing and eternal and alive, at ease in Zion.

For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.
So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.
--II Corinthians 5:1-8, NKJV

2005-03-07T02:11:00.001-05:00

I imagine you've read this poem at some point in your life:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

-William Carlos Williams

I know I'm really flaunting my cheesiness here, but I love the following, it always makes me laugh. Hope you feel the same:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
And then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave the away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

--Kenneth Koch

What a funny God we serve

2005-02-21T02:13:00.000-05:00

Saturday night's conversation:

Calla Maria: You'll probably never have an accident.

David: You know, I've thought about that a lot. It isn't that I'm a particularly good driver. I don't really pay much attention to what I'm doing. I'm beginning to think God must have some special plan for me that requires a perfect traffic record. I figure, who am I to ask questions?

Sunday afternoon's conversation:

David [singing]: It takes a worried man to sing a worried song. I'm worried now, but I won't be worried long.

God: You wanna bet?

David [rear-ending the truck in front of him]: Oh, fuck!

God: Sure, I've got plans for you, but they're not that special! Learn to tame that tongue, and maybe you'll drive better.

2005-02-21T00:44:00.000-05:00

the bulbs in the garden are growing
the bulbs in the kitchen are blowing

i think that it's time for a change

David's enigmatic quote of the day:

2005-02-21T00:33:00.000-05:00

I don't exist much in the physical realm.

2005-02-17T16:17:00.000-05:00

I actually feel like I learned something today. How novel.

We studied Othello in Shakespeare today. It's all about faith: where do you put your trust and where do you get your identity? Othello's trust in Iago (who only trusts himself) whittles down his trust in Desdemona. He depends upon his observation as every empiricist does--give me the ocular proof--but he fails to interpret his observations critically. Lacking a strong sense of personal identity, he allows self-doubt to creep into his heart, chilling the trust that love should foster and leading to a monstrous jealousy.
But he wasn't jealous until he got around Iago, who speaks in animal metaphors and always asks about moneybags. Iago is earthbound, can't see past the flesh, and Othello the 'honest fool' can't even conceive of such treachery. In taking his eyes off the heavenly realm to look for truth from Iago, he learns to trust in the flesh himself and begins to smell treachery everywhere. A lost handkerchief is thus formed into evidence of lechery. Had he placed his faith in the love between him and his God and him and his wife, he would have seen the truth, and through the truth that is found in love, interpreted correctly what he saw.

In today's Cell Biology lab we took a field trip to the school's electron microscopes. The scanning EM allows you to see the surface of an object in three dimensions, the transmission EM lets you see it in cross-section. We looked through the SEM at the surface of a hypodermic needle. At 1000x it didn't seem so sharp anymore.
The special thing about electron microscopes isn't in their magnification. You can get up to 1000x with a simple light microscope; although you can get much larger than that with an EM, you usually don't need to. It's their power to resolve an image that really makes the difference. Electron beams have wavelengths of 0.05 angstroms, whereas light rays are somewhere around 5,000. The smaller the wavelength, the better the resolution--the distinction between two points. So you can make out the same image with much greater detail, distinguishing between objects at a virtually molecular level.
It helps you to interpret what you're observing.

I shadowed a radiological oncologist today named Dr. Glisson. I was somewhat horrified as I watched him painfully insert an "applicator" into a woman's uterus. But this way, he could guide the radiation directly to the tumor rather than shooting it through her skin and damaging healthy tissues along with the malignancy.
Fine-focused healing destruction.

Get it?
I am learning to see.

2005-02-17T00:55:00.000-05:00

Days like today always let me down. The clouds sat heavily just above the clocktower, letting out a fine mist from time to time. It seemed to be pouring on the horizon. I looked up expectantly with every chime, but I never saw the deluge I was hoping for.

Stargazers must train themselves to appreciate the periphery.
My psychology professor was telling us about the cones and the rods this morning. Cones are concentrated in the center of the retina on what is called the fovea, and they sense bright light and colors. Rods are spread out where light from the peripheral vision hits the retina, and can only sense motion and dim light. They kick into gear when you're in the dark.
You will see a shooting star out of the corner of your eye, only to lose sight of it as you give it your full focus.

Then: for an instant's virtuoso sketch
a ground of contrast is prepared, laboriously,
so we can see it; for they're very clear
with us. We don't know our feelings' contour,
only what shapes it from outside.
The living all make the same mistake: they distinguish too sharply.
The harder you focus when you're in the dark, the worse your perception becomes.
Today left me waiting for the rain.

(poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies)

How to live richly #7

2005-02-11T20:04:00.000-05:00

Notice something.

2005-02-07T02:05:00.000-05:00

a night abloom with symbolisms not quite ripe:
riddles that never unwound:

dark forest journeys and wild coyotes:
courage in the falsest sense:

conceit without fruition is simply simile:
like or as but not is

being understood

2005-02-06T14:18:00.000-05:00

I got this cd my first year at Auburn, and for the whole winter, it was all I listened to.
I was in a dark place. I felt like everything I had done in high school had been a waste and I had nothing left to give. I felt like I had lost all my friends and could never make any new ones. I felt like I had run away from God and might never find Him again.
I thought I might be dying.
This music seeped through my dark bedroom to breathe life into my heart with lines like

Some winters are harder than others.
We are going to take our cameras
and look through at black trees with empty arms
and sled tracks, wandering as we are.

and

Look for me another time,
give me another day;
I feel that I could change

I knew it was only a season, and there was a change coming, someday.
And when it came,

The world at night
could see the greatest light.
Too much light to deny.

It was a process I had to go through, and I internalized these songs so deeply that they became a part of me. I have only done this to such a degree with two other albums: The Cure's Disintegration and Don Chaffer's You Were at the Time for Love. They are pieces of my history, as much as any of my journals or letters, and there is something intensely private about them. I don't just play them casually in the car with a bunch of strangers. When I play them for someone, I'm letting them inside of me.

So when I let Josh borrow birds of my neighborhood, I was really glad that he liked it so much. But when I heard the opening riff of Snow coming over the speakers during the announcements at Chi Alpha's big meeting, I froze. I started to blush. If the 100 people there didn't like it, it would mean that they didn't like me.

It's irrational. I know. It's silly. I know. But it's true.
You understand, don't you?

But the brilliant thing is: people did like it. Because it's good music. And because everyone knows that some winters are harder than others, and everyone could feel that truth resonating in their hearts. Because that's what Art is supposed to do.
Josh was worried that I would be mad at him for playing it for everyone, for spreading it around to all of our friends: people sometimes don't like something as much when it's become popular. (God has delivered me from that affliction, though, hallelujah!)
I wasn't worried about losing my secret. I was convinced that nobody would like it.
I was wrong. As usual.

I hope some other time
I won't care so much about
being understood as I do now.
I will leave myself and go away.
I would like to follow you away.

2005-02-04T11:15:00.000-05:00

whenever i think about breathing
i start feeling short of breath

And then something real--even beautiful--happened, and I wanted to edit myself.
Because reality is like fine wine, and it won't appeal to children, but I've (we've all) got a lot of growing up to do.

2005-01-26T23:42:00.000-05:00

Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows, and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

--Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Isn't this so true?!?!?
And isn't this why he said that peace passes all understanding?
Give it up and find yourself in him, and he'll speak for you in groanings which cannot be uttered.

2005-01-26T21:28:00.000-05:00

It rains liquid methane on Saturn's moon, Titan. It flows in lakes and rivers.
Must be yucky--methane is what makes our farts stink.

How to live richly #6

2005-01-24T18:23:00.000-05:00

Learn to use chopsticks.

This is my friend Danielle. She's the coolest. She doesn't really like Chinese, but Calla Maria and I both do. She was gracious enough to go with us to The Golden Buddha (Calla Maria's favorite restaurant as a child) when we went to visit her over Thanksgiving. I drank a lot of tea, and the waitor made a funny contraption with a roll of paper and a rubber band to help Danielle learn to use her chopsticks. We took several funny pictures.

Well, they're funny to us.... :)

weren't you always distracted by expectation?

2005-01-24T00:15:00.000-05:00

--Rainer Maria Rilke

The thin whisps of steam rising from my Taylor's blend form a lazy contrast against the earthy green paint and leave me with a strange impression. Something reminds me of Rilke's Duino Elegies:

For our part, when we feel we evaporate; ah, we breathe
ourselves out and away....
Like dew from the morning grass
what is ours rises from us, the way heat rises
from a steaming dish. O smile, going where? O upturned look:
new, warm receding surge of the heart--;
alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic space
we dissolve in taste of us?

And when we could boil and phase out into the atmosphere in one terrific concerted blast, why settle for this subtle, slow loss of water and the unappealing fate of an animal's excretory system? Sometimes I feel like I'm just sitting on the table in some boring cosmic coffee house, waiting for someone to drink me up, and I'd rather he just poured me over some hot asphalt to watch me fizzle away in one glorious burst of fog.

But I guess it's up to Him. He paid for me.

2005-01-23T14:06:00.000-05:00

Hey, check this out: IT'S FREE!!!!!

e-Sword

Tomorrow on the Runway

2005-01-22T14:03:00.000-05:00

--listen--
--the innocence mission--

Old days, don't come to find me,
the sun is just about to climb up over there.
'While my heart is sinking I do not want my voice
to go out into the air.'
Did you leave the darkness without me?
You're always miles ahead.
And you're standing in tomorrow on the runway.

Oh be the music in my head,
the air around my bed, oh be my rest.
Replace the small disgraces of
the times and places that I never really left.
Did you leave the darkness without me?
You're always miles ahead.
And you're standing in tomorrow on the runway.

Oh I want to fly, fly forward into the light,
be alive, to come alive,
on the leaf-bright Friday drive,
sudden horses at the red light,
turn around, see clearer ways to go now.

--Don't you feel this, deep inside you somewhere? Like you missed your flight home and you're hoping your lover will come back and get you? And you can't even think because you wish he was here, but you can't see him--you can't see anything. And you're waiting for a moment of absolute clarity to come alive in, to turn around and find the footpath that leads back to Him....

taste test

2005-01-21T12:11:00.000-05:00

I love how humanity is so diverse. Just as variety is the spice of life, one of our greatest treasures is our diversity. We say that personal preference is a source of diversity, and should thus be celebrated as a cardinal virtue. But what if we were wrong about that? What if personal preferences weren't what made us each lovely and diverse, but what drove us apart?

I'm going to draw a hasty parallel between food preferences--a minor concern--and cultural segregation--a much larger issue. I'm not talking about diversity between countries, but diversity between subcultures: the hip hop scene and the emo scene and the Christian scene, etc.
We say we don't like the taste of vegetables and we never try another dish with the offensive ingredient. But vegetables are good for you, and no one likes them at first. Your parents have to teach you to eat them. And for that matter, infants really only want milk. They are taught to eat. Children generally start out with very selective tastes in food, gradually expanding their diet to include more and more grown-up delicacies. But it seems the exact opposite with music and art. Children will dance to anything with a beat, and they can fingerpaint without even thinking about it. But as they grow up they start writing off certain expressions as lame or boring or out of their range, until they have very selective tastes in art.
I used to answer the question about my musical tastes with a fairly safe, stock answer: "I like pretty much everything, except for country and hip hop." [Translation: Country is too twangy and embarrassing because I'm from the south, and I don't get rap because I'm white.] But then I heard Lauryn Hill sing "To Zion" and then I learned about folk music, which is kind like country, and I had to change my tune. I learned that it is a grave mistake to ignore someone because they don't speak your jargon. And I learned that it is also a mistake to lend someone too much credit simply because they do speak your jargon. "It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes" is a vapid waste of a valid form of poetic expression, but so is some of the careless, self-absorbed junk that's coming out of Nashville's contemporary christian scene. If you just want your cd's to provide background music that doesn't challenge your opinion of the universe, that's fine. Go ahead and listen to whatever. But if you want to really learn something about life, you had better hold it up to a higher standard than what genre it's filed under at the record store.
And so the emo kids miss out on the themes of social justice that permeate good rap music, and the hip hop crowd never hears the voice behind the passion in the emo-screamo-hardcore kid with a slight post-punk folky edge....or whatever. And the clubs are right next door, so why the sound-proof walls?

I'm beginning to think that our preferences really don't make us diverse, after all. We've all got something unique to say about the world and with personal creativity we're going to say it in a special way. God makes us diverse--not our tastebuds. What preferences do, though, is prevent certain valid forms of expression from reaching our minds. Think of how frustrated you get when your dad refuses to listen to your favorite cd--the most profound musical statement you've ever heard--because the rock's "too hard." Think of how frustrated he must get when you turn off some amazing old country hymn to listen to the fiftieth update of Shout to the Lord. We get so comfortable experiencing the entire world in a way that caters to our tastes that we forget what tasting is all about!

I once saw an episode of Fear Factor where the contestants sat around a soundstage campfire roasting the penises of large land mammals like they were hotdogs in a competition for a large sum of money. The nice girl had an elk, and the one who talked the most trash ended up with the water buffalo. She gagged the whole way through--violent, horrifying tremors that started in her diaphragm and travelled in waves off of her tongue--but she never threw up. She freaked out the next morning on some high-rise obstacle course and went home empty handed, but she sacrificed a lot of pride to win that money.
And I'm thinking, if she can eat that for something as useless as a million dollars, then can't I put aside my personal preferences to obtain good health, or enlightenment?

2005-01-20T10:54:00.000-05:00

Just one foot to the left, and everything finally feels right!

Taylor's Talk

2005-01-18T03:53:00.000-05:00

--I saw 50 First Dates recently. It was pretty good.

--My Adam Sandler tolerance is kind of low.

--It's a cute movie--a lot like Groundhog Day. Imagine having to make this woman fall in love with you every single day.

--It's a clever concept, I suppose, but...

--The deeper meaning, of course, is that you really do have to do that.

--Ha ha ha, touché!

questions that might not demand an answer

2005-01-18T03:27:00.000-05:00

I can feel some sort of monumental shift occuring in the way I view existence. If I were to assign a theme to the past year of contemplation, it would be The Destruction of All Prior Concept of Wisdom, and the Infancy of its Proper Reconstruction.

I've had many self-satisfactions scorched beneath the burning eyes of Love, who does not fear the Truth. I have squatted, terrified, as the walls around the secrets of my heart came crashing down while my loved ones marched valiantly with trumpets and a loud cry, setting me free to walk in the light towards healing and forgiveness. I have clutched to dying misconceptions for as long as I could stand the stench, hoping I wouldn't have to leave the comfort of my narrow mind to search out the rugged, deadly beauty of Reality. And, in learning how it is we lay down our lives, I've wrestled with the devil as I've moved towards that far-away yet fast-approaching something called Life More Abundant and Free.

As my life underwent these drastic changes, my worldview changed along with it. Things I once took as Truth without question were now becoming less clear to me. The black-and-white sorting bins I'd shoved everything into had been refurbished with a whole spectrum of color. Life became more than the choosing between one of two simple options (good, bad; right, wrong; Christian, secular; Republican, Democrat) but a living, breathing organism! God became bigger than human logic, international politics, and America's Christian subculture.
During this time I have often felt confused and ill at ease, reluctant to speak too much. There were too many questions that didn't yield immediate answers. The logic trailed off in the middle of each dilemma. It wasn't so much that I was thinking of things I'd never considered, just that I was considering them in a whole new way. Some questions I've been wrestling with:

--How am I to love others?
--Am I arrogant? or, What is humility?
--How do I share the Gospel relevantly?
--How do I honor only God and never myself?
--What is the Church's role in government activism?
--Where is the line between legalism and hedonism?
--Will I ever know God's will for my life? Do I need to?
--What are my giftings, and how do they fit into the Body of Christ?
--What is art, and how should it be used? When does it become harmful?

I found this quote on a blog I like a lot, and felt God using it to speak further into something I've been thinking about a lot, reading Donald Miller and the Gospels and trying to get to the heart of what it's really like to have a relationship with the Living One, to live my life completely alive, without acquiescing to the unnecessary weights of this world and my own false preconceptions, to embrace the doubts along with the faith and hope in the love of the Lord to lead me through it:

***
All sanctity is born of conflict--of contradictions resolved, finally, into union. Logical reasoning has limited usefulness. For the landscape of human-kind’s spiritual world, the world in which we realize our most noble accomplishments and in which we suffer our most crushing defeats, is a landscape of virtually intellectually unresolvable dichotomies. Freedom vs order; self-help salvation vs grace, or even predestination; tradition and innovation; the simultaneous fallenness and exaltedness of human nature; eternity and time; the one and the many; stability and change; justice verses mercy. (Saint Thomas Aquinas observed that justice without mercy is cruelty, while mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.) Imagine trying to have a debate about whether God’s nature was immanent or transcendent! In his many wonderful paintings entitled The Peaceable Kingdom, the Quaker artist Edward Hicks charmingly symbolizes for us an ideal of sanctity which involves the reconciliation of such opposites. The logical mind is offended by these dichotomies and seeks to come down on one side or the other of them; the same dichotomies provoke and stimulate the higher human facilities, the spiritual facilities, the facilities without which human beings are nothing but very clever animals. People of great sanctity somehow transcend these dichotomies without abandoning the truth on either side of them.
Humankind’s particular vocation, then, is a precarious balancing act. It is a vocation that can be carried out successfully only with wisdom and love. It is a vocation which cannot be guided by dogmatic assertions, which by their nature tend simply to prefer one side or other of these dichotomies. The gospels have in common with the techniques of Socrates and of Zen masters the fact that they question us, rather than tell us things. Legalism, lawyerliness, and literalism are the enemies of all true spirituality. Poetry and parable are its friends. When spiritual discovery is reduced to lawyer like debates, everyone loses.
***

More on this later, perhaps. More on the questions and how I've been thinking about them, certainly.

Confuscious says:

2005-01-17T14:50:00.000-05:00

Well...I guess, secretly, I've always sort of wanted a stalker.

Five words in a day

2005-01-14T02:23:00.000-05:00

I get this daily definition thing in my email. A word a day: AWAD. Each week the words are themed, and this week I thought the theme was really cool and informative, and I thought I'd let you in on the secret code we all puzzle over in the dark. Here's the whole week of words, complete with snazzy intro and an inspirational quote, to boot!

-----

What does it take to make a movie? A producer, a director, actors and what else? Lots of money, of course. Often overlooked are hundreds of other people who work for months or often years behind the scenes to help create a couple of hours' magic.
If you ever stay behind at the end of a movie (or stay tuned on TV) to read the rolling credits you'll see many funny sounding titles. They describe people who are essential to the movie-making business. Without them no movie would be possible, no matter how good the actors or director. What do those titles mean? This week's AWAD defines them.

grip (grip) noun
A general assistant on a movie set responsible for handling production equipment, such as setting up and moving camera dollies, lighting, etc. The head grip is called the key grip.
[From English grip since the task required firmly holding bulky material.]

gaffer (GAF-uhr) noun
1. The head of the electrical department responsible for the lighting setup on a movie or television set.
2. An old man, especially a country man.
3. A foreman, supervisor, or boss.
[Contraction of godfather, influenced by grandfather.]
Sense 1 comes from the fact that in the beginning longshoremen were employed to move heavy lighting equipment on a production set. They worked in a hierarchy and the one at the top was called gaffer as a term of respect. Sense 2 and 3 are chiefly British. The feminine equivalent of sense 2 is gammer (contraction of godmother).

best boy (best boi) noun
The first assistant to the gaffer (head electrician) of a film crew.
[Apparently borrowed from the sailing terminology.]

foley (FO-lee) adjective
Of or relating to the sound effects.
[After Jack Donovan Foley (1891-1967) who pioneered the techniques of adding sound effects during his three decades at Universal Pictures.]

stuntman (stunt-man) noun
A man who substitutes for an actor in scenes involving dangerous feats. Also known as double.
[From English word stunt (an unusual or dangerous feat) which is of unknown origin.]

-----

So there you have it. Most weeks the words aren't quite so applicable to everday life, but they're still fun. It's nice to know I'll always have one non-spam message in my inbox every weekday. This way I don't have to feel like a loser for checking it every day. :)
If you'd like a free subscription, fill out this form. Then we can elevate ourselves above our peers by utilizing our superfluous vocabulary in everyday conversation.

-----

Here's the quote I promised (every AWAD email also comes with a quote to make you think or laugh):

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.
-John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

plug for Engrish

2005-01-12T22:02:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if anyone's been utilizing the links I've put up in the right column, so I have to give a plug for Engrish.com, because it makes me laugh every time I go there. So, the humor probably won't appeal to everyone, and I won't look down on you for not laughing. But if you want to laugh, know I'm laughing with you.

So, you know how people will buy t-shirts and stuff that have Chinese or Japanese characters on them, and we don't know what it says but we think it's cool? Well, they do the same thing over there with English, with some very interesting results...

Hilarity ensues:

How to live richly #5:

2005-01-11T16:39:00.000-05:00

Don't watch so much television!

I know I was just typing about the truths I'd learned from mass media, but if you notice, I could really only come up with two. Television isn't the devil. But it doesn't have much good to say, either.
Whoever said that religion is the opiate of the masses had obviously never seen a satellite dish!

[transcript:]

I'm bored. Perhaps television will provide distraction from my wholly wasted existence.

"Tonight! Middle of the road comedies created by mediocre minds, and then stripped of any artistic vision through creation by committee! And be sure to tune in tomorrow night, where real people compete to see who can be exploited most, and definitively prove there is no hope for our species."

"That's a mighty big fire where our house used to be."
"The fire is justice."

jumbled thoughts on a jumbled mess

2005-01-10T17:27:00.000-05:00

we are all shocked silent
(save the windbags on tv)
by the arrogance of the sea
and the frailty of man
by the tragedy of death
and the absurdity of life

and the futility of numbers
when trying to calculate
death tolls and relief funds

if only the human condition
could be capitalized

The shock of the earthquake actually accelerated the planet's orbit, shortening the length of the year by a fraction of a second. This isn't what they had in mind when they prayed, "Hasten the day," sick of living in this pre-existence. But how many more will perish eternally on that great and terrible day, so we can see our Jesus face to face?
I say, "No, Lord, we need more time!"
"Life is too precious," He's telling us now.

home is

2005-01-10T02:20:00.000-05:00

I love visiting the homes of people I know from school: seeing them interact with their family, riding through their old stomping grounds, being pampered by mothers whose instincts extend to everyone the same age as their children. Such experiences always flesh out the people I've known so shortly and only within the context of Auburn's alternate reality.

There's something sacred in the transformation of a couch into a bed. Whether it folds out to poke your back with springs or is simply covered with sheets and slept lengthwise, it's a sacrament. It's the addition of beds beyond the bedrooms. It's extending the family beyond its nucleus.
I almost feel more honored on the couch than in a guest room.

The satisfaction of taking action

2005-01-09T22:46:00.000-05:00

It might have seemed like a rash decision to an uninformed observer, but tonight I quit with the silly ambivalence (which, if you've seen Girl, Interrupted, is the perfect word for what I was feeling) and decided to pick a path and stick to it. I feel like I just finished the second basket at an all-you-can-eat wings night someplace, and I don't have to ask for a third because I've realized that I don't need anymore, and so I don't want anymore. That's a very exhilerating feeling, if you've never felt it--to say "I've had enough," silently taunting your consumerist subconscious in one brilliant moment of independent thought. I feel so relieved, so fulfilled, so pleased with myself (to run the risk of sounding over-excited and a little self-important) at having finally made a decision.

I dropped Spanish Conversation and picked up Later Shakespeare.
I can hear you asking, "What's the big deal?" Well, I'll tell you...
It's the end to two-and-a-half years of vacillating ambitions, grovelling in either/or's with very little concept of The Grand Scheme. It's the release of the idea that I have to pick one passion and run with it and leave all other interests to whither in the walls between pipe dreams and fools' hopes. It's embracing the reality that life is more complex than 1)major 2)career 3)retirement 4)hobbies 5)death. It's admitting that God's plan is FAR more complex than I give Him credit for, and to say I've discovered it and am now enrolled the proper prerequisites is a very foolish and tragic announcement indeed. It's personal permission to live my life haphazardly, outside of the western world's obsession with control and predetermination. It's revelation that God is not an American, and when He took my flesh He took my nationality, so I'm free to do things His way, and say screw-it to Uncle Sam's. It's forgetting words like tuition and curriculum in favor of concepts like enlightenment and exploration.

I'm called into a medical career, so my major is Microbiology. Simple, rational decision. However, ever since I started college I've been trying to pick a minor. A subspecialization.
I love literature and feel I have a gift for writing. I wanted to explore that, so I declared English as my minor during my second semester and signed up for Early Shakespeare in the Fall of '03. It was my favorite class, and, incidentally, the only A I made that semester, amidst three boring sciences and Music Appreciation in an 18 hour academic overload I'll never try again.
But then I took two semesters of Intermediate Spanish in response to my more specific calling into a medical career in Latin America: learning Spanish is essential for my destiny. I've loved the three semesters I've had in Español thus far, and so I was signed up for Spanish Conversation in the spring. I had decided to take three more Spanishes and get a Spanish minor.

But I couldn't stop worrying about whether that was the right choice. Like, seriously: Am I really going to master the Spanish language in three stupid courses that I only half pay attention to, anyway? Why not dabble with the mothertongue while it's available to me, and then spend a year in Peru, learning the language in the only authentic manner: cultural immersion?
And so I took a leap of faith tonight when I saw that there was one spot available in the sequel to my favorite class. Early Shakespeare covered the comedies, histories, and early tragedies and I loved every minute of it. It was such a relief, exploring the meaning of life after Physics and OChem back-to-back, where we didn't care about meanings but only processes. Later Shakespeare will cover the tragedies and romantic comedies. Oh, to truly understand those conundrums we slept through in high school: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello!
I realize that this will significantly increase my workload in an already time-stressed semester. I realize that I'll now have four more classes to take to complete my minor, instead of the three required for Spanish. But I'm doing it. (And if I wuss out, I can drop within ten class days.) I'm gonna be able to take such wonderful courses as The Personal Essay. Fiction Writing. The American Novel.
So, it wasn't a rash decision. I've been thinking about it a long time. And I think God's on my side with this one. He would like me to learn a bit more about this writing business. It may just come in handy some day......

I'm trying to embrace in real life the ideals that I spout out in coffee shops and journals. Things like: Higher education is not a hoop to jump through, a ticket to a wealthy future, a waste of time that everyone has to go through in order to achieve the American Dream. It is possible to attend university with a heart that is hungry for understanding, and to enroll in classes that spark one's interest and sharpen one's perceptions. I will not be one-dimentionalized into a pre-approved curriculum of science classes with a flimsy peninsula of irrelevant, surface-level core electives like Microeconomics and Music Appreciation.
I am here to discover Truth, not get a job. And when I enter the work force, it will be to improve the world, not build a bank account or bolster the gross national product. I haven't reached the age where youthful idealism dies under the weight of social security, and I hope I'll always be too immature to "plan for my retirement" and "invest smartly in stocks and bonds and lots of capital."
I'd rather give freely to the poor and trust God to keep me alive.

So, in that spirit, I'm going waste my time learning the art of good writing. I'm going to revel in the mysteries of the world's greatest literature. I might even spend a year in the Peace Corps streaking feces onto culture plates and saving people from cholera. I'm going to learn a foreign language or two. Then I'll work on that MD thing.
I hope to "be" a lot of things, including a polyglot. And a doctor. And a writer. And a terrific friend. And a tender father. And a spectacular lover. And a connoisseur of coffee and/or fine wines. And an expert on something--Shakespeare or Moses or E. coli or children. And a humble servant of the Lord Most High.

How will my college transcript factor into all of this?
It won't. But classes like Genetics and Shakespeare and Public Speaking and Gross Anatomy should help out quite a bit.

our Dearly Beloved

2005-01-07T00:05:00.000-05:00

This week I've been bonding with my sister over that centerpiece of every good American family: the television. And, in a way, I think I've been humbled out of my self-righteous presupposition that nothing good ever came out of pop culture. Here are some fragments of truth (yes folks: like it or not, it does exist!) about Love that I've spotted in all the lust and product placements:

Tara coerced me into giving The O.C. another chance, and I'm actually glad I did.
It's the most absurd event in all of primetime, but I was touched by the integrity of the central family. In a city full of broken, self-centered addicts (pick your favorite, there's someone to match), the Cohens somehow manage to remember how to love. They sit in the middle of a dozen twisted love triangles, offering sound advice to idiots who rarely listen, actively demonstrating love for friends even in the midst of moral failure, and providing a safe-haven for the children who are abandoned in the wake of these pleasure seeking "grown ups." Hooray for them. I wouldn't have the patience, to be honest.

Meet the Fockers is funny (if only to the sexually preoccupied) and ultimately an affirmation of family. There's a crucial moment where the uptight father-in-law is fed up with the whacko father-in-law, and he calls a family meeting--meaning him and his wife and his daughter. Motioning to the whole bickering cast, she replies, "Daddy, this is the family."
We don't get to pick our family. And we don't decide how they act or what they believe. The only choice we can make is whether or not to love them. Make peace or nurse pride. Giving us the happy Hollywood ending we want, both sets of in-laws learn the arts of compromise and respect. Getting over their own self-importance in the last reel, they get to celebrate the union of their children, who have fought long and hard to make the marriage happen, together.

Why does it so rarely happen this way in real life? Why is compromise and respect considered to be the Hollywood Ending? Why do we hear so many stupid comments about mistrusting our mothers-in-law? And why don't more Christians treat their lonely, hurting neighbors with the same patience and dignity exhibited by the Cohens?

Christmas music

2004-12-23T20:51:00.000-05:00

Here's a different take on Christmas music.

Recommended listening technique: lights out, on your back, eyes closed, hands raised.
Merry Christmas y'all!

the flesh yearns

2004-12-23T19:56:00.000-05:00

I have a friend who has been called to a life of celibacy. It makes perfect sense, once you hear his story and see his ministry. But wow, the human in me smarts to think about it.
I've been pondering the physical realm lately, that whole Soul/Body conflict, what is spiritual and what is carnal and what will last when the earth burns up. I've been thinking about bodies and places and how we interact with them:
How a special place can be so permanent, and we can speak of our homestead with such certain terms, and assign it mental images and link to them indelible impressions, and never have to explain their significance to understand them. And then how a coating of paint or uprooting of tree can destroy the whole feeling of home in an instant. There's something in the image that we need. Even though it's all passing away and even though it isn't our real home at all, we cling to it, and I think we're supposed to.
And I want to tell my friend to drink deep of Jesus and that'll be all that he needs. It's something that always comes out of me, before I can stop myself, "All we need is God. We shouldn't try to fulfill ourselves with other people." But that isn't strictly accurate, is it?
True: we can never be fulfilled without the Lord's presence. But He said of Adam, "It is not good that he should be alone." Like we need an earthly home, we need an earthly helpmate.
And so what of the eunuchs? They forge on without. They hug their brothers. They sleep with Jesus. It's not quite the same, but they know their treasure lies in another place.
Not coincidentally, they are often the nomads of the Church, wandering the nations without much of family or home. They live within the Spirit. They deny their flesh. They walk on. They see God use them in ways most of us could never dream.
They, too, earn that term we sometimes seem to think so paltry: joy.
And so my celibate friend sometime gets lonely and cries and prays. And he understands that this pain is God's way of keeping him grounded to the misery of humanity, who is doomed to unfulfillment for lacking the prerequisite engagement to the Son of Man. And he thanks his Father for writing this story, for providing the means, for never leaving him, and for giving him friends to hug him when he's cold.