The Princess and the Pen

The Girl Who Won't Go Away

2012-01-24T18:44:00.000-05:00

I did eventually start seriously considering a career in music. We had moved back to the greater D.C. area where the piano studios were more competitive, and it turned out that I was a good pianist. I started saving up for a grand piano when I was around 12. It was difficult for me to explain to people why I was saving for an instrument rather than for a car or college. Also, why not buy an upright instead, which would be less expensive? But I stuck to my goal all through my teen years, even after I finally decided to pursue writing as a career rather than music. When my zero coupon and CD matured, I dropped the cash into my piano savings account. When I look back on the girl who did all that, part of me is amazed. But part of me is just ashamed, for wanting so much, for being different, for lugging around a dream that was way too big for me and stuck out of my life like a sore thumb.

Becoming Me

2012-01-18T20:47:00.000-05:00

Third grade was my first year of piano lessons, the year my parents bought the piano, my first year being homeschooled. I had also decided by now that I wanted to be a novelist. I had started scribbling stories after discovering the American Girl books. I loved playing the piano as much as I loved writing, but I didn't think about pursuing it as a career. The idea simply didn't occur to me. Playing the piano was personal, beautiful, fun, a way to express myself without words. My favorite things to do, I decided, were reading, writing, and playing piano. And they still are. I was only 8 years old, but I had already defined my identity - who I was, stretched out as rigid as steel wires on a cast iron frame.

The First Piano

2012-01-12T20:39:00.000-05:00

When I turned 6, my grandfather died and my family moved to another state. One Christmas, my grandmother gave us an electric keyboard. Eventually I started taking piano lessons with a local piano teacher who was in a wheelchair due to an accident when she was a missionary in Africa. It was okay practicing on the keyboard, but I needed a real piano. My parents heard about an estate sale nearby with a piano being sold, so they took me there. We picked our way through the clutter of a dead person's furniture to an imposing upright piano, paneled with solid, dark brown wood. I played "Do, a Deer" on the discolored ivory keys. The people standing around clapped as though I had done something amazing. The piano was $25. "We'll take it," my father said. I'll never forget seeing his hand holding out the payment to the estate agent. I felt like I was being given the universe.

Once Upon a Time . . .

2012-01-07T22:00:00.000-05:00

. . . there was a little girl who wanted a piano. My grandfather, a bald man with a big round belly, played the piano. He had a sophisticated-looking black console with wide, heavily weighted ivory keys and a mellow sound. I loved the feeling of pressing those keys. I remember my brother got in trouble for driving a matchbox car across the keyboard, but my grandfather didn't mind me playing the piano, as long as I was very, very careful.

Preface

2012-01-06T19:39:00.000-05:00

I've decided to use the next few posts to tell a story in installments. The story is about a particular thread that has woven through my life since I was around 4 years old. It's a story about something solid and tangible that reminds me day in and day out of God's true nature. Because this story is about specific facts, it's more personal than most of what I write. But because stories are universal, you can find meanings of your own in it. It will happen in installments because I set myself a challenge a few months ago to write single-paragraph blog entries.

Person of Interest

2011-12-24T19:57:00.001-05:00

This season, in addition to New Girl and Madmen, my friends and I are hooked on Person of Interest. We joke that this is the show with Jesus in it (Jim Caviezel from The Passion of the Christ), and boy is he a sexy Jesus - I mean ex-special forces guy who now stops crime in a truly criminal manner. His costars, Michael Emerson and Taraji Henson, are equally classy actors who play a computer genius and a detective respectively. It took me a few episodes to get into the show (Caviezel's acting was a bit lethargic, and the premise takes some getting used to), but now it's literally one of my favorite shows ever. It's not a simple crime drama. The episodes build on each other, and they contain an inner cat-and-mouse plot involving Detective Carter and Reese (Caviezel). One of the most sophisticated elements of the show is its cinematography. Instead of using cliched skyline shots and glamorous landmarks, all of the cityscapes are achieved with traffic-camera-style angles. Honestly, have you ever watched a scene set in the Bronx (stop right there), where you know you're oriented toward the south but can't actually see Manhattan? This is the real New York. And the soundtrack is excellent. Watch this show!

Regretting the Summer Palaces

2011-12-18T17:01:00.000-05:00

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

~ T. S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi"

I've gone too far to turn back. My world was a complex system of social, religious, and family rules. I started tinkering with it, asking questions, thinking that the final result would be a refined and polished version of the original. But I pulled out one loose brick, and then another, and a wall came down, and there was dry rot everywhere and before I knew it the whole building had fallen about my ears. I'm standing in the ruins, a big sky overhead, the world around me large enough for a human soul. But a little part of me is grieving the loss of something that wasn't all bad. People with good intentions built it. They wanted safety, comfort, tidiness, like in a Thomas Kinkade painting. I wanted all that, too, for a while.

Third Sunday of Advent

2011-12-11T21:36:00.002-05:00

It's the day we light the rose candle, the symbol of joy, and the homily was about suffering. How strange, and yet, the more I think about it, how appropriate. For it's only as the question of suffering grows ever greater, a gaping hole in the universe, that we demand anything like a suitable answer. Have you ever peered into the abyss? Have you ever faced the chasms of fear, shame, and loneliness that live inside you, or gazed at the ugliness that surrounds you? Flee from these realities and a mere household idol will be enough for you. You will only need a god who satisfies small needs and petty questions. Admit your suffering and you will have to ask the agonizing question of whether a bigger God exists. The more I've come to terms with my pain, the more I've demanded a God who knows what to do about it. My worst fear was that He didn't exist. But He does - and He speaks an answer so infinite it shakes the earth and floods it with rivers of light.

Lighten Our Darkness

2011-12-05T19:47:00.002-05:00

This evening, I ask my hands to say what my heart is too battered to believe. In the corner of my room between the windows is a small Christmas tree that I cut down myself, and around it I've wrapped a rope of gold-colored beads. So tonight I hang a few more of the ornaments from the pile of silver balls in different sizes and styles on the windowsill, next to the scrawny wire hooks. After I've turned out the lamp at that end of the room, the soft darkness of the tree harbors frail light. The silver balls turn into luminous half-spheres, the rope glimmers faintly, the gold tree skirt gives off a dull sheen and one or two sparkles. It's the only light we can find, but it's better than nothing.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T19:54:00.003-05:00

I have a lot to be thankful for today, and I don't mean in a shallow thank-God-for-the-air-you-breathe kind of way. I'm thankful that God is real and good and that love means much more than I ever thought it did. I'm thankful that pain wakes us up from the lethargy and numbness of despair and teaches us to look for something better. I'm thankful that God puts escape routes in place before we even realize we need them, and that we can change and grow stronger and suddenly discover hope inside us. I want to tell you something, dear friends: we weren't made to live with gaping holes inside. Half of you don't even realize you have them because of the layers of denial and defenses that scab over your wounds. Sometimes I go crazy, seeing the sadness in your eyes and hearing the real story behind the words that you say. The other half of you know that something is wrong, and feel the pain and questions eating you alive. What I want to say is this: be brave and face your pain. It is telling you that there is something better for you. It takes courage to go down the path of finding that better thing, but it is a worthwhile risk. You will be okay.

Shieldmaiden

2011-11-19T17:41:00.002-05:00

I love the part in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years where Don Miller is describing a very painful time in his life, and he says, "I didn't want to get well, because if I got well, nobody would come and save me anymore." That sentence describes me and, I think, a lot of other Christians. For years I waited for God (or someone) to rescue me. It was partly because that's what I wanted. It's always easier when someone else does the work. It was also partly because my theology described God as the only one in the universe with the power and the right to act - all of us humans must submit mindlessly to His bidding. The way this worked out for me was that I waited and I waited to be rescued and things kept getting worse, and God just sat there for some reason. Finally I decided that I cared enough about my own survival to try rescuing myself. I guess that's what God was waiting for because after that it's been like a journey in which He says, "Here's some options you could try," and I say, "Well, I'd really like to go in this direction," and He says, "That's an interesting idea." Eventually I discovered that instead of me being the princess riding behind a prince on a white horse, I had my own horse and a sword and shield and everything. It's really fun. Maybe this is why Eowyn is my favorite Lord of the Rings character.

A World That Says Welcome

2011-11-16T20:06:00.002-05:00

Through the screen, golden light atop the lamppost

Glints along autumn sidewalk, tiled with wet leaves

Exhaling a breeze damp with rain

Now I Know

2011-11-15T20:52:00.002-05:00

Depression still comes. Dark days feel darker, my skin feels like it's being pulled off, my heart races in panic. Sometimes I'm afraid to leave whatever room I'm in, or venture out into town. Old patterns play out again, old triggers and symptoms that return and fight against my health and peace. This time around I let myself into the dark place to see what was there. I've changed. Fear and shame may still express themselves in my body and my emotions, but there is something certain deep inside. I believe certain truths now. I can tell you beyond the shadow of a doubt that these things are true, because I've lived the learning of them. Let me tell you what I know: That God loves us, that each one of us matters. We care more about rules than He does. He doesn't look at women as less, or single people or sick people. He wants us to grow up and make choices and be brave and learn to enjoy life, to have fun and get hurt and try again. Every minute He comes up with a new way to turn our lives around.

Theirs Is the Kingdom

2011-11-12T17:13:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, coming home after a hard day, I have to look at myself in the mirror just to be sure I'm real. All day I dance between and through rigid social systems devised by people who have to define me, put me in my place. They tell me who I am when I follow the rules and also who I am when I do not. I realize this is a reality of the world in general, but within Christian communities it is a shockingly prevalent dynamic. And the failure of love hurts worse where the potential for love should be so much greater. All day I interact with people who paste smiles on their faces and spout biblical phrases, but I see the truth. I can read your faces, I hear what you are really saying, I look between the lines of what you write. Our rules are corrupt and our lives corroded. This is not what God intended, but before you can find what He really meant, you have to admit there's something wrong.

Perfect

2011-10-15T15:53:00.004-04:00

I used to think that if I wasn't perfect, then it was my fault if the world fell apart. All the time I needed to be beautiful, clean, smart, capable, moral, in control, because that meant I was worthy and deserved to be loved. Ugliness and messes and emergencies scared me because of what they said about me: you deserve to live in a world like this. Yesterday, after a week that started out with a best friend in town and then a flareup and then a severe cold, I wandered around the house missing another day of work, smelling terrible, just proud of myself for doing laundry. My hair stuck out all over my head because I've been too tired to get a haircut on any weekend. The roses my friend bought me before she left were in a vase in the living room. And then suddenly heaven, as I stood in my bedroom watching the curtains waft inward on the clean, cool breeze and the swish of branches. The autumn sunshine made the leaves glow ruby-red. The touch of God was everywhere, in the crickets chirping, in the sunshine that cast not just light but shadow, in the silence and the rustling. My brother called and arranged to visit me that evening, which made my day. I don't know why I don't realize this until I'm at my worst, but it turns out God doesn't care if I'm at my worst or my best. He's good with me the way I am.

The Last Beautiful Day

2011-09-25T15:03:00.003-04:00

Fall came too early this year. I was dreading it because I dread winter. With the end of summer curtained by perpetual downpours and clouded skies, fall snuck in and the sun seems so shamed by this coup that it refuses to appear at all. It's wet and dark, day after day, and I feel, honestly, a little angry about it - if I wanted this weather, would I be living in Virginia? It seems you should get what you pay for. But a couple weeks ago, there was a short chain of delicate, early-fall days that acted like propaganda, enticing us to submit without fear. Driving with a friend, I saw strokes of color on the trees, colored leaves lying on the ground, falling to the ground. The air turned dry, and the sunlight's new angles took on that hammered-gold warmth signalling the equinox. One day, on my way to work, a crimson leaf with dark edges, doubled back on itself, wafted across my windshield. It was actually a butterfly.

I'll Risk Saying This

2011-09-15T17:03:00.003-04:00

There's an article going around that was originally published in the member magazine of the Home Educators Association of Virginia. It's called "Exposing Major Blind Spots of Homeschoolers" and you can read it on Josh Harris's blog here. It's a pretty brave article with a lot of good points. But I find on element of it particularly upsetting, which is the idea of parents "having" their children's hearts. This is a popular idea within the homeschool community. It gives me the creeps. It's basically the idea that if parents love their kids just right, the kids will feel so secure and trusting in their parents' love that they will offer an extreme allegiance - allow their parents to "have" their hearts and therefore have control over their beliefs, emotions, and behavior. I know that some of you are going to think I'm exaggerating the meaning of this idea, and I might be, but not by much. I've spent most of my life in the homeschooling community and this particular idea is as dangerous as legalism or over-sheltering - it's just more subtle.

Architecture and Artifacts

2011-08-31T18:45:00.003-04:00

Sometimes the intangibility of my life is driven home to me. It's not just that I'm a daydreamer; there's a good role for the imagination in creating a better reality. (And it's not that my vocation is words, either - words are real things, palpable objects.) It's that I've lived in my head, clung to mindless routines, and insisted that I was happy in order to escape a reality that I found very confusing and frightening.

I'm a more real person now, trying to live a more real life. Last summer I got rid of over half my belongings (clothes, books, furniture) in order to be ready to move on to whatever was next. Now, my possessions barely fill up a quarter of my massive bedroom. To me it stands for the fact that I've started over, but also the truth that up till now I never thought it was okay to fully invest in my own life.

I want to build something. I lie in my bed and stare at the windows, framed by gorgeous curtains, a tiny picture frame on the windowsill and a half-burnt votive candle. Through the glass I see the sky and trees and the top of a lamppost. This summer I've been thinking about goals, refining old ones and polishing off rough new ones. I imagine myself as the architect of my life. Today I'm just framing it; one day it will be rich and solid.

The only way I know of to counteract a feeling I sometimes have that life isn't real (when it happens all the pictures in my head become instantly two-dimensional) is to have a life I can touch. I'm going to decorate my room with things that are meaningful to me, keep pushing toward an editing career, plan adventures, be with my friends. One day I'll look around and my life will be built with tangible objects. I won't be able to doubt it then.

Real Christianity?

2011-08-27T17:06:00.003-04:00

I grew up being told that God loved me, but I really didn't believe it. Certain things about my life just didn't make sense. My heart was broken by pointless loneliness during my teenage years, and then, at about the time when life seemed like it was really becoming possible, I got so sick that I couldn't reach for what I wanted. I couldn't get out of the trap. It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that God sat outside guarding the exit, whip in hand.

I believed that God was perfecting me through suffering. (Which meant He cared more about my perfection than my happiness.) I also believed that I was receiving the greater gift of Himself in place of lesser gifts. (Which meant I had to pretend I loved Him and was grateful even though it hurt like hell.) I believed God wanted me to demonstrate faith by looking past the circumstances of my life to some strange reality beyond that I sometimes caught a glimpse of. (Even though my very life and identity were dissolving.)

You have to pull apart these Christian answers, look at them from the outside, to realize how awful, even abusive, they are.

* * *

In the religious world I grew up in, words do not have actual meaning. Love is not a real thing; it's an empty concept. God's "love" means perfecting us at whatever cost to ourselves. And if we really want to be perfect, we have to submit to that perfecting process without ever saying stop. We have no power. In fact, we are told that it is good to be humble and submissive. We are told that we are so evil, so fallen, that we couldn't possibly understand when to say no anyway. Our hearts are deceitful. Instead, we are supposed to exercise "faith" - saying it's okay even when all the evidence screams that it's not.

Story People

2011-08-20T18:54:00.003-04:00

I'm one of those either/or, black-and-white, all-or-nothing people. I'm not saying this is always a bad thing, but at this time in my life it's not the best way to find emotional, spiritual, and mental balance. Dismantling the faultily built areas of my internal structure requires a steady mind, not one given to extremes.

So, it helps me to think about life, and myself, in terms of stories. When you're thinking about stories, you can't deal in extremes. For example, the Calvinist/Arminian debate goes out the window, because who can really sit around quibbling about fate versus free will when both are so clearly in evidence?

This weekend I started musing over one way to categorize the various personalities involved in a story. Here are the categories, and how they bring clarity to various personal conundrums:

Me (a.k.a. protagonist). While it's true that God is telling one big story about the history of the universe - the super-story, if you will - it's not true that each of us is only a little piece in this big story. Each of our lives is a story with intrinsic meaning.

We are not the story tellers, but luckily, as any author will tell you, characters do take on lives of their own. In other words, although I'm not the one creating the story, I have a say in how it goes. I have free agency. I may not be able to choose all the circumstances of my life, but I can decide what to do with them. I can decide, for example, to walk to Europe. Of course, I will have to turn around once I'm in over my head in the Atlantic, but at least I drove all the way to the beach. I got somewhere.

God (a.k.a. the author). This is the guy who actually sets up the story. He decides, for example, what the setting looks like and who the people in it are, and He calls some of the shots. A good author kinda lets things go at that point, sees where the characters end up next. However, I've never read a truly good story where there wasn't some kind of miracle at the end, just where you thought things couldn't turn out right. I'd like to believe God steps into my life, too.

One thing characters can't do, because they're imaginary, is interact with their authors. So I have to be careful about identifying too much with this author/character analogy. I may be a character in a story, but I'm not a powerless, voiceless victim of the author's pen. I can talk to Him about the story, get His perspective on it, tell Him my perspective.

Other people (a.k.a. supporting characters). The most important thing, here, is not to get the other characters mixed up with the author. None of the other characters can rescue me in the ultimate sense. None of them is perfect, so none of my relationships with them will be perfect. Also, although each person is the protagonist of his own story, none of them is the protagonist of my story. My story is uniquely about me. I can't depend on or allow other people to define my story or make it happen.

But if I realize that the perfect, powerful Creator is a distinct person from the imperfect, yet important and valuable, creatures, then I can interact with each of them as appropriate and not demand the wrong things from the wrong people.

Sheer Silence

2011-08-07T14:27:00.003-04:00

In church today, the Old Testament reading was the story of Elisha hearing God not in the wind, earthquake, or fire, but in the "sheer silence." I found this phrase particularly beautiful (other translations render the phrase "gentle whisper"). It makes me imagine God as so gentle and loving that when we need to talk to Him, He sits there quietly, patiently, really listening to us.

There are people who can't listen because they're making so much noise, externally or internally, that there's no room for your voice. And other people exhibit a dead silence, like a wall of snow that muffles you and protects them.

"Sheer silence" is something different entirely. It's like the silence you hear when you park your car at one of the overlooks on Skyline Drive, and no one else is around, only you know that all the trees and plants and leaves are growing and all the animals are scurrying about, and the Shenandoah Valley is scooped out before you like huge hands holding everything up to the sky. Or the silence you hear in a piece of music by Aaron Copland.

* * *

Back to my old blog name! Half-Life was the right name for the past 15 months or so, but I think I'm done with that part of the journey.

* * *

From a quotable book: "It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it" (Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer, ch. 15).

Knight in Shining Armor

2011-07-31T18:18:00.002-04:00

Okay, I promise someday soon to stop writing so much about Lyme. I feel like I'll be ready to move on soon; it will still be a part of my life, but I won't need to think about it so much. However, in the meantime, something I've been pondering.

Over a year ago when I first started meeting with my counselor, she had me draw a diagram of my extended family, describing each person in a few brief words. She was struck that I described myself as "burdened." I had no idea at the time how significant that word was when applied to me.

I was always the girl who had it all together. I was perfect. I followed the rules. I was smart, funny, capable, understanding. A good listener, encouraging, always had the right word at the right time. I was a good writer and a talented musician. I took care of kids like a pro and adults loved me. I could solve problems. I never lost my temper. I was mature, responsible. I was everything to everyone. I didn't complain about sickness or sorrow. I fit into the landscape so well that I might as well not have been there.

I was so busy helping other people with their lives that there was no time, no energy for my own life. And I was so stubborn, so tough, so committed to remaining this girl everyone could rely on, that I would have continued living this empty life indefinitely - probably until I died. I knew somewhere deep inside that if I failed, if I let things fall apart, certain people in my life would be angry and disappointed with me.

You don't think of God rescuing you with suffering. It almost seems obscene to say it. But if I hadn't gotten so sick and depressed that I literally couldn't function anymore, I would never have given up. I wouldn't have paused long enough to see the lie I was living, the horrible emptiness of it, the desperate settling for scraps of happiness.

I had to abandon the me that had created that life. To live something better, I had to let God remake me from the ground up. And He did. He's pretty awesome that way.

It Is Not Real

2011-07-23T20:14:00.003-04:00

Somewhere on the continuum between doubt and trust, I have discovered a place where truth has taken root deep inside and begun to grow toward the surface - but doubt, like old layers of skin, still clings to the outside. It is weakened and thinned out, but still there, a shell that covers me.

I still react to life in the old ways. When I have a bad encounter with someone, a voice inside my head still tells me I'm worthless and talks destruction into my ears. I'm cagey with people I'm just learning to trust, welcoming them one minute and putting up walls the next. On some days I feel a darkness leaning on my shoulders. I want to give up, quit fighting.

When you don't have any reason to hope, these reactions make perfect sense. I would never tell someone who was in a place of real doubt and fear that they just have to hold on, believe, stay strong. I was at that place for many years. The right thing, at that time, was to admit exactly how terrified I was and do whatever was necessary to protect myself from life and God. And God took care of His side of things, began the discussion, came and reasoned with me, told me stories and worked miracles, spoke my language and showed me love.

So now the evidence all points to something very different from the evil universe in which I previously existed. I truly believe in something and Someone better. Gradually that fragile belief is becoming stronger. I have a sense that I'm crossing a great divide, that I'll never go back.

But in the meantime, I'm still crossing. And I'm learning to carry myself through the old emotions. I'm realizing that even if I feel afraid or circumstances are repeating horrifyingly familiar patterns, that doesn't mean the story is going to end badly. I can't stop the emotions, but I can identify the truth that I know and I can believe it, even if I don't feel like it is true.

I Know How This Guy Feels

2011-07-18T19:06:00.002-04:00

"Our conversation turned to the supernatural and Dr. Gottlieb was saying, '. . . a man of my age knows that events have a logic of their own. Above all, they are the product of causality. Your mystics feel insulted if things happen in what we call a natural way. But to me the greatest and most wonderful miracle is what Spinoza called the order of things. When I lose my glasses and then find them in a drawer which I thought I hadn't opened in two years, I know I must have put them there myself and that they were not hidden by your demons or imps. I also know that no matter how many incantations I might have recited to retrieve them, the eyeglasses would have stayed in the drawer forever. As you know, I am a great admirer of Kant, but to me causality is more than a category of pure reason. It is the very essence of creation. You may even call it the thing in itself.'

"'Who made the causality?' I asked, just to say something.

"'No one, and therein is its beauty.'"

~ "The Missing Line," Isaac Bashevis Singer

Timeless

2011-07-09T18:45:00.002-04:00

People tell you to "live in the present," but I've never been able to - not from lack of trying. My present was often a painful attempt to retreat into the past or launch into the future. It was exhausting. Finally I gave up, stopped making plans or dreaming or even making wise decisions, because it didn't seem to matter, but that meant I had no hope.

I'm discovering that living time-bound is all about balance. Aiming toward the future is important. Having dreams and goals (the more precisely expressed, the better) gives me movement and direction, and it seems like God can't do much with a life that isn't moving in some direction. A lot of times I don't get to where I planned, but at least I get somewhere and that's a whole lot better than staying stuck.

But it's also important to have a life that's livable now. I have friends who are always saying, "As soon as this happens" or "As soon as I do this." Usually these people are pretty miserable in the present, but they're convinced that doesn't matter because eventually things are going to be perfect. I had a pastor once who was always talking about how great heaven was going to be and that's how we could get through our troubles on earth, and I would think, "That's great, let's go there now." One of the worst things about being a Christian is when other Christians tell you to just hold on till you get to heaven, and all you can think is, why is God making you go through this crap in the meantime? What kind of God is that?

What I'm seeing now, just from the way my life has gone, is that how I feel about my life in the present really does matter. God isn't a sadist who wants us to suffer without remedy. So if my wonderful future plans are causing me misery in the present, or if I'm using the future to distract myself from the present, then it's time to do some repair work on the everyday. With the right balance, my view of the future can enrich my present, and my present can give me the strength to push toward the future.

This is an unforgivably long post, but allow me some random closing thoughts. I just unclogged two sink drains all by myself (generations of women have had this master bathroom before me), and would you believe I found a safety pin and one of those plastic covers for a razor cartridge in one of them. Thanks to my previous landlord for giving me painstaking instructions in the art of drain clearing. Two blogs I strongly recommend: Don Miller is incredibly hard hitting and thought provoking, pretty much the sanest and most balanced voice that I know of in Christianity today; Kelly at A Restless Heart has been blogging about Lyme recovery and she's verbalizing many thoughts that express my own experience, but the words are so difficult for me to find. I've been reading Isaac Bashevis Singer; he grows on you until you're almost dependent on him - I'm reading a collection of his short stories literally straight through, with the same what-happens-next anticipation that I felt when I first discovered novels as a child.

"Jacob stood in front of the granary

2011-06-30T20:23:00.003-04:00

and watched the snow falling. Some of the flakes dropped straight to earth and others swirled and eddied as if seeking to return to the heavenly storehouses. The rotting thatch of the roofs was covered with white, and the clutter of broken wheels, logs, poles, and piles of shavings was decorated with fleece and the dust of diamonds. The roosters were crowing with wintery voices."

~ The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer, ch. 4, section 2

Snapshot

2011-06-19T16:03:00.004-04:00

I haven't posted in a while - my life has gradually become interesting enough to me that I don't actually need to sit down and write about it. But for what it's worth, here's where I'm at right now:

In the church year, today is Trinity Sunday.
Reading Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend - a clear and organized distillation of the things I've started learning over the past year.
Rereading Sense and Sensibility. I think I understand now why I never liked it before. Elinor is such a goody-two-shoes! I'm enjoying this novel more now that I'm responding to the story honestly, and I'm curious to see where Austen takes it.
New website in my blogroll: tylerstanton.com. This guy is very funny.
Flowers on my dresser: lavender mums.
At work I was recently upgraded from a cubicle to my own office. And it has a window!!!
I'm moving into a new apartment at the beginning of July. Actually, it's the same townhouse where I lived a couple years ago, before I moved back home for a while. This time, I'll have the master bedroom instead of the basement. Movin' up in the world! I've started packing up my room and looking into furniture purchases. I've always enjoyed moving, but this is the first time in a long time that I'm not actually running away from something, and I'm making mature decisions. Way too much fun.

It's weird how God has brought me full-circle, back to where I was a few years ago - and yet it feels like a totally different me. I like myself better now, and I like life too. It doesn't feel like a half-life anymore.

The Question Behind the Questions

2011-05-22T15:30:00.003-04:00

This was one of my tired weekends (they're rather common). What I've achieved - grocery shopping, coffee with a friend, cooking, reading a bit and watching TV - has happened in snatches between naps, and even when I'm awake my brain is so foggy I don't really feel conscious.

I've learned the first lesson of illness: to accept the stripped-down existence, the inability to distract myself with activity, the impossibility of guaranteeing that I will be able to do anything on any given day. It's a stern and yet freeing reality. I can sleep all day because I know - as a fact, through experience - that God provides generously for both my needs and my desires, and that He gives me exactly the strength required for whatever He wants me to do on my own.

A lot of times I start asking myself, why me? Why this illness? Does it point to some kind of calling? Is there something I'm supposed to do or be for God, some way I'm supposed to help people because of what I've experienced?

That's where I come to a second lesson. The first lesson strips the mask off a deeper fear - that I don't have value to God unless I do something super-spiritual in exchange for His bounty. I cry out against my nothingness with churchy phrases and ostentatious submission. I try to find a way to guarantee that He'll always love me.

The Christian-sounding questions that I ask really mean, "Will You always be here?" The second lesson means to ask that question instead of the other ones. To ask to be taught, in the face of my daily fear of betrayal, that my mere existence is proof that I am created and loved.

Easter Sunday

2011-04-24T08:52:00.004-04:00

The body in the tomb was deader than dead,
for not only had the flesh rotted away and the bones turned to dust,
But the soul had died also -
passed out of memory so long ago that she had forgotten who she was,
Having lived so long only as an image in other people's minds.

Come to think of it, even in her heyday
she had been rather insubstantial - a sort of shade among shadows
Desperately reaching for proofs of her existence;
but strangers buried her; picking over her small horde, they didn't know
What this pot meant or why that ornament -
And tossed some of it in with her and the rest consigned to oblivion.

Poor soul: every molecule dispersed
to some far corner of the universe

So He died that Friday and
appeared to that nothingness in her tomb

Within His eternity He had long years
to sit there, calling back the fragments of her existence,
And wrestle that angry soul back into life,
long years in that tomb with her stinking carcass, remembering gently
Who she had really been and could be.

Let us wait reverently by this tomb,
awaiting their emergence, wondering what He tells her
When finally she breathes on her own.
No day was lost because I saw each one, remembering you
Better than you did yourself.

We lost nothing,
didn't even waste anything

Even when you had disappeared
I lived for you in this empty room.

The tree outside my window

2011-04-17T18:35:00.002-04:00

is sprouting tiny, crumpled leaves. I was enjoying that fact today, and suddenly realized that the tree had finally shed the dry red leaves that it had worn all winter. I remember wondering just a week or two ago how those dead leaves could cling so tenaciously, through wind and rain. Now they've disappeared, seemingly at the last possible moment.

Pointillism in the Air

2011-04-16T19:09:00.002-04:00

This spring is emerging atom by atom - coming so slowly we can see everything growing in slow motion. Today I drove in a rainstorm, staring open-mouthed at the trees delicately dotted with closed buds and tightly furled leaves. There are three shades of leaves: green, yellowish, and reddish, and some of the trees have opened a little more than others, the leaves unbinding themselves into tiny ruffles and frills. The buds are emerging by color: pink first (magnolias waving pink globes, cherry trees so pale they're almost white); the white trees came early this week; on Friday I started seeing purple. The full-blown cherries are weighed down by rain; the flowers have a heavy, fruitful look as they pull down on their branches. A weeping cherry I glimpsed today looked like a waterfall of blossoms.

The Substance of Things Hoped For

2011-04-10T17:27:00.003-04:00

It's a slow, messy spring. It's been teasing us with hints of warm weather and sunshine (such a very little bit of sunshine) blown away in wind and rain and chilly air. Every few days I catch a new flower in bloom or tree awakening. One by one new birds add their voices to the morning chorus.

This is the year reborn in the real way: messy and ugly as childbirth, and just as full of hope and delight. Painfully (and painstakingly) slow - the carefulness of a scattering of reddish buds emerging on a bare wet tree. And yet the tactile beauty of these words, and the loveliness that exists already. This is what I looked for so long. Can it really be true?

In my world God has always meant rules and love has been a sham, something people use to get you to do what they want. Words like love, salvation, goodness have the meanings sucked out of them by people who don't believe the real thing could possibly exist. Anything worth having is turned into an abstraction.

Where is love? How do I find it? Sometimes I catch a glimpse of it, but I'm too scared to hope. Because I know how the story ends: the way it always has.

Too Good to Believe

2011-03-20T14:58:00.002-04:00

I bought waxflowers at the grocery store yesterday - tiny petaled cups of pinkish-purple and white, with dark centers. I'm no flower arranger. They stand in a clear glass vase on a corner of my dresser, the mirror to the side of them, blossoms floating atop a plume of tall evergreen stems. The dresser is honey-colored, situated where the two corner windows, like sluice gates, let sunlight flood in. The walls are pink. Thus the light around the waxflowers is bright and light and clear, causing a physical sensation of lightness when you look at them.

Sitting in Bed

2011-03-06T13:48:00.002-05:00

I regret to say that I've been watching a lot of 21 Jump Street lately, but today the real show is happening outside my window: the luxurious sound of rain and a wet tree with reddish-brown autumn leaves still clinging to it. The damp air comes in the window and wraps me in the outdoors.

I just read Collected Stories of Carson McCullers, and the two stories you always hear of - The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and The Member of the Wedding - are as brilliant as they say. I'd like to see the play version of The Member of the Wedding that brought McCullers so much critical acclaim. It must be stunning. Does anyone ever produce it nowadays? McCullers is buried in Nyack, New York, which is where I used to live.

It's rare to find well-written literary criticism. I have stumbled upon it in the introduction to W. H. Auden's Selected Poems (expanded edition), by Auden's literary executor Edward Mendelson.

"The Samurai" by Shusaku Endo

2011-02-26T13:10:00.002-05:00

I broke out of my habit of reading only literature that was originally written in English to read something translated from Japanese. Shusaku Endo was a modern Christian author who has been called "a Japanese Graham Greene" for his deep explorations of Catholicism. The epithet is unfair to both authors, since the only things they had in common were their religion, their willingness to ask painful questions, and their consummate skill as novelists. Their styles and perspectives are completely different.

In other words, I read this book with as much enjoyment as I did any of Graham Greene's stories. Endo's art as a novelist shines through translation, since his structural balance and precision with symbols transcends particular words. The emotion contained in this story is very deep yet restrained, making it feel characteristically Asian.

Endo's Christ is a man of suffering who can identify with the poor in spirit, and in The Samurai, suffering is the gateway by which humans begin to desire God. It is an extraordinarily thought-provoking and meaningful novel.

Waiting Together

2011-02-26T12:43:00.002-05:00

"I wish I had known. I wish I could have just sat with you," commented a friend on a previous post in which I described a time of great darkness in my life.

She expressed what Henri Nouwen describes as key to our spiritual lives: waiting together. Nouwen recounts that after being visited by Gabriel, Mary visited Elizabeth, who also was waiting on a promise from God. The two women spoke God's words to each other and together experienced joy and awe at what God was doing in each of them. Nouwen says:

By being together these two women created space for each other to wait. They affirmed for each other that something was happening that was worth waiting for. . . . Christian community is where we keep the flame of hope alive among us and take it seriously so that it can grow and become stronger in us.

Does your Christian community allow space for your fears and questions? Does it listen quietly, intently, for God's voice spoken into your life? Does it accept the existence of times in your life when you are not alright? Does it sit by your side as you wait, just being with you, a warm presence when the world feels dark? Does it affirm the promises you have heard, expecting to see God's goodness expressed tangibly to you?

It's very rare to find Christians who can wait with us, but it is a good desire to have. If you are waiting alone for something, don't feel ashamed if you have to look outside of your current community to find people who can truly help you in this way.

There's a lot more in Nouwen's "Path of Waiting" that I didn't discuss in these blog posts - specifically a big section on God's waiting for us - so go read it yourself now!

Active Waiting

2011-02-20T11:21:00.007-05:00

My last entry about Nouwen's essay said that it's okay not to be some kind of spiritual hero while you wait for something. But I do believe there is a practice of waiting - things you can do to draw out the meaning and purpose of your particular situation. Here is what Nouwen says about this:

If we wait in the conviction that a seed has been planted and that something has already begun, it changes the way we wait. Active waiting implies being fully present to the moment with the conviction that something is happening where we are and that we want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, believing that this moment is the moment.

Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, and Anna were present to the moment. That is why they could hear the angel. They were alert, attentive to the voice that spoke to them and said, "Don't be afraid. Something is happening to you. Pay attention."

I try to be present to the moment by thinking in terms of the following questions:

What is happening inside me?
What is happening around me?
What might God be saying to me?

For nice little Christian girls like me, asking myself what is happening inside is difficult. It means identifying how I actually feel - whether that means admitting that I actually feel sick and therefore can't follow through on a particular commitment, or admitting that I feel angry or fearful or some other emotion that I have learned to suppress as evil. But when I allow myself to just listen to what's going on inside, I meet myself on a deeper level. And it's the real me that God cares to interact with.

What is happening around me? is the fun question. Instead of fleeing my current situation or feelings, I bring myself to the moment and engage all five senses. I look out my window or listen to the wind, or I pay attention to the people around me.

And then I use the information I have gathered from within and without to see where it points. Sometimes the beauty outside my window reminds me of God's gentleness and the fact that He is taking care of me no matter what happens. Other times I see something to be done - something simple and practical like eating lunch, or something more longterm and complex, like seeking counseling. (Again, this is hard for me. Over the years I've somehow developed the mentality that suffering is merely to be endured, not addressed.) And other times, nothing happens. I stay there on my bed with my headache and nothing changes, and I try to be patient, and sometimes I am and other times I get grumpy, but eventually the headache does go away because life never sticks at just the one place forever.

"'If people can live all alone,

2011-02-10T19:44:00.004-05:00

why do cries of grief fill every corner of the world? You have travelled through many countries. You have crossed the ocean and circled the globe. Surely all along the way you must have seen that those who lament and those who weep are seeking after something.'

"What he said was true. In every land, every village, and every home they visited, the samurai had seen an image of that ugly, emaciated man, his head bowed and both his arms extended.

"'Those who weep seek someone to weep with them. Those who grieve yearn for someone to lend an ear to their lamentations. No matter how much the world changes, those who weep and those who lament will always seek Him. That is His purpose in living.'"

~ The Samurai, Shusaku Endo, ch. 9

When You Don't Know What You're Waiting For

2011-02-05T18:00:00.002-05:00

Those who were waiting [Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, and Anna] had each received a promise that gave them courage and allowed them to wait. They received something that was at work in them, a seed that had started to grow.

What if you don't have a promise? Nothing's happening and nothing's changing, and you're just hanging on, barely holding on and perilously close to letting go.

I have been there, so I don't write this flippantly. I have waited so long, such an agonizingly long time, for things I wasn't sure I would ever receive. In the summer of 2009, just before I was diagnosed with Lyme disease, I gave up hope that I would ever be healed from chronic illness. I had waited so long that my soul was emaciated with it.

I wasn't waiting on a promise, like the people Nouwen mentions in the passage above. I had no idea what was in store for me. I couldn't count on something good happening. In a way, my waiting wasn't waiting at all - it was a day in, day out struggle. And I don't fault myself in the least for that. I got tired of spiritualizing my misery, trying to exercise some sort of superhuman faith that had no relation to the reality of my existence. I got tired of pretending, or of putting the real me to death so that I could look all churchy.

We don't always know what we're waiting for.

* * *

We too can wait only if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. Waiting . . . is always a movement from something to something more. Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Simeon, and Anna were living with a promise . . . that nurtured them, fed them, and enabled them to stay where they were. By their waiting, the promise could gradually unfold and realize itself within them and through them.

Just because I didn't know what I was waiting for doesn't mean that God wasn't bringing it to pass. I can look back now and see the "promise unfolding," God laying the paving stones of the path I would walk on to freedom. It was all happening in those years of devastation. When everything inside was dark, the little dead seed was getting ready to grow. Things were happening; everything was happening.

God doesn't need our help with this stuff. He doesn't need our false patience and our empty faith.

* * *

So you don't have a promise. All you have is dreams of a better life, of real love and living beauty - a vague dream of heaven. And it's a heaven you aren't even sure exists. You aren't sure about the God (god?) that lives in it.

We are all so wonderfully human, with that ghastly survival instinct, that stubborn will to live. Something in the tangled darkness of our hearts keeps breathing, makes us fight for air. It's horribly selfish and yet beautiful too, because that's the life that God fans into flame. That's the promise when we don't have a promise.

Fear

2011-02-02T20:12:00.002-05:00

Nouwen rightly identifies fear as a main reason why we don't want to wait. "As fearful people we have a hard time waiting, because fear urges us to get away from where we are. If we find that we cannot flee, we may fight instead. We are aware of the many destructive acts that arise from our fear that something harmful will be done to us."

Take my mid-afternoon slump at work, when I want to bolt across the country. What fears am I fleeing? I am afraid of a meaningless existence, a life in which no adventure happens. I am afraid of never getting married. I am afraid the difficult things in my life will never improve. And these are not small fears. To fear meaninglessness is to recognize that as a human I was made for splendor, and to wonder if the God who made me this way will also satisfy this need, which is the same as wondering if He is good.

I may not be aware, as I sit there in my cubicle, that my agitation results from an uneasiness about God. But in my restlessness, I might do some pretty destructive things. I might be unproductive because I can't concentrate. I might go and have a stupid conversation with someone, a conversation in which I don't really love the person I'm talking to, because I'm trying to silence my fear. I might spend a panicky half-hour planning a particular future for myself that I'm never going to follow through on.

The alternative is to wait: to sit with my fear for a while, hold onto my questions without answers.

A Walk

2011-01-16T17:33:00.003-05:00

In case you are wondering if the things we are all looking for can really be found, let me say that this afternoon I took a walk, arriving in a roundabout way at a big park near my house. I sat on a bench looking down a hillside that swooped down and then up again with two people walking their respective dogs in the distance, and behind them the tree line and then very, very far off were blue mountains on the horizon. Although I am sure the bench is not far above sea level, I feel like I'm sitting on top of the world there. The wind was cold and as it blew it made a singing sound. My ears were so cold they hurt, but the wind felt like it was sweeping the world clean, blowing in something fresh and new.

On my way back home, I passed the pond, with mallard ducks playing in the shallows. Most of it was frozen. Some of the ice was churned up where the waves had frozen stiff.

We All Wait

2011-01-15T13:37:00.005-05:00

In our personal lives, waiting is not a very popular pastime. . . . In fact, most of us consider waiting a waste of time. Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, "Get going! Do something! Show you are able to make a difference! Don't just sit there and wait!" So, for us and for many people, waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. We do not enjoy such a place. We want to move out of it and do something worthwhile. ("The Path of Waiting," Henri Nouwen)

I think the reason most of us don't think too much about waiting is because we don't realize how much we wait. I hear Christians talk about waiting as if it's a once-in-a-lifetime event, like a solar eclipse. It's easy to identify waiting in the life of someone with an illness, or a long engagement, or a military deployment - but the fact is there is a terrible lot of waiting in the ordinary human existence. After you graduate from high school, life becomes a series of interminable periods: college semesters, eight-hour workdays, singleness, marriage, pregnancy, child raising, retirement.

These big chunks of time are periods of waiting because every day is the same; nothing exciting is happening. After three or six months we realize we haven't arrived anywhere. Every day we wake up and shoulder the same burden; every night we go to bed and contemplate picking the burden up again in the morning and carrying it through another day. We start to panic and we look for things or people to rescue us, take us to a place of love and meaning.

For example, I get this way in the afternoons at work. Even though I love my job, it's full of challenge and variety and tons of different writing opportunities, and I work with interesting, entertaining, and very kind people - right around 1:30, I want to get out of there. It's because I don't want to wait. I don't want to cross the afternoon wasteland, push through the boring or difficult parts of projects, stay awake instead of napping, bathe in the gray office lighting, have one more flippant interaction with people who all go home at the end of the day to their separate lives. The part of me that was made for better things rebels.

The point is, we all wait. And that is why Nouwen says at the beginning of his essay, "Something that has been on my mind for the past few years, and which I sense is of importance to our lives, is the spirituality of waiting."

"The Path of Waiting," Henri Nouwen

2011-01-09T10:26:00.002-05:00

With the coming of the new year, spent in new settings and with newfound confidence, I'm thinking a lot about where I was this time last year. It was not a good time for me. The first week of 2010, I woke up from the three-month fog and illness associated with the beginning phase of Lyme disease treatment, and discovered that I was actually feeling better. Hope, which had been pretty much squashed into the ground, began to perk up a little. But almost simultaneously, my personal life fell apart in an incredibly gruesome way. A wound opened up in me, pouring out agony that couldn't be stanched.

One of the things that was happening at the time was a grieving process for all I had lost to illness. As symptoms began to drop away, I tried to figure out when was the last time I had really felt well, and realized it was sometime before I went to college. That's right, a fair estimate of how long I had had the disease was ten years - the entire span of my twenties. During that decade, I had watched many other people my age pursue careers, get married, have children, go to graduate school, and buy homes. Meanwhile, I had quit school, stopped full-time work, abandoned plans to finish my undergraduate degree, and moved back in with my family. And I really had no way of estimating when I would feel well enough to have a "normal" life again.

The other day I happened upon a chapter in Henri Nouwen's Finding My Way Home called "The Path of Waiting." Over the past few years, I have thought a lot about the theme of waiting in my life (along with other important themes like silence and listening). Nouwen's thoughts about waiting in this brief essay helped to catalyze some of my own ideas. Over the next few blog posts, I want to move through Nouwen's essay to discuss waiting a bit more deeply.

Forgive me

2010-12-11T12:15:00.003-05:00

for not being all you wanted me to be:

the missing pieces in your puzzle,
the strength in your weakness,
the solution to your problems,
the happiness you could not find in yourself.

And I forgive you
for not letting me be me

"O God of peace,

2010-12-05T20:53:00.002-05:00

who hast taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength: By the might of thy Spirit lift us, we pray thee, to thy presence, where we may be still and know that thou art God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

"Here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies,

2010-11-28T12:46:00.003-05:00

to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee . . . .

"And though we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Grace in the Structures

2010-11-26T13:23:00.003-05:00

The spiritual tradition I grew up in doesn't allow for privacy, for internal space. Without symbolism, we can have no boundaries or interiors, and thus the outside (which can't really exist, as with a Mobius strip) comes in. We implode and are violated. There is nothing real inside.

Pastors tell us that Christianity must take over our lives; thus, we lose our grasp of who we really are. Appropriate and distinctive relationships are blurred into gray by the term fellowship. We are told that the Holy Spirit within us guides our consciences so that we know what is right; guided thus by three abstract, vague, and invisible concepts, we give way to the pressure of outside definitions of goodness.

My life has been a perfect expression of gnosticism.

***

My friend lent me a fascinating book once. Those Terrible Middle Ages addressed common misunderstandings about the Middle Ages, and pointed out that with Christianity came gradual emancipation for women, children, and slaves. That concept has stuck with me. Christianity brings freedom; it allows us to be individuals, self-directed people with the power to choose and to act.

Individuality is only possible with boundaries. I need a place within myself that is only me.

***

If we do not believe in physical space and in the matter that subdivides it, we will have no internal boundaries either. Even Aristotle knew that the mind can only grasp what is similar to it.

We need a touchable world; we need to arrange and architect it. We need colors and textures to organize and scatter; we need things to taste and smell. We need objects that matter because they express the life within them - unique objects that don't just "stand for" something, but actually express it, are it.

The Same but Different

2010-11-21T19:40:00.002-05:00

So this weekend I was tired so I

slept in and just did what I felt like
and didn't feel guilty and i

was brave and talked to people and normally I'd be too shy,

and I didn't go to church. and bought a latte even though I'd already had tea
and bought a book for myself. to read. for fun.

And i have places I'm going and I'm going because now i know it's okay,
to do what I want
it's okay
to have a place

and all the things I thought I couldn't have because they were bad

The Happy God

2010-11-16T19:16:00.002-05:00

Lately I have found myself drawn by crucifixes. I've never been the type to talk sweetly of Jesus and all He did for me. I prefer not to think in detail about His death agonies, and I'm tired of drumming up sticky sadness and slavish gratitude by contemplating my sins that held Him on the cross. If I've heard it once I've heard it a thousand times: The cross shows you how much God loves you. He came to earth, dirtied His hands, suffered and died for you, the human worm, so you could go to heaven when you died.

It doesn't make me feel loved. It makes me feel tolerated, sacrificed for, needed, controlled. Not loved.

But I've been learning a lot about love lately. Real love isn't performance based. People who really love you are just crazy about you, and they don't care if you're Hitler. People who really love you want you to be happy and they want you to love them back, but they don't want to control you or make decisions for you.

When I think about God's love for humanity in this context, I get very strange ideas. I picture the Trinity getting together after the fall of man, figuring out how to save us, and they're all fighting over who gets to go to earth as a person. Under the old paradigm I imagined it as this grave occasion where God picked Jesus and said, "You go," and the Son nodded obediently but sorrowfully, and the Holy Spirit wept softly. But now I imagine them all saying, "Me! Me!" and Jesus saying "YES!" when it winds up being Him. "I get to go to earth and have a body and walk around with all the people we made, and touch them and feed them and hang out!" And God the Father elbows the Holy Spirit and winks, because they both know they'll be present in Christ's body, with us.

So when Christ, at Gethsemane, prayed "Not My will but Yours be done," God replied, "Absolutely. My will is to die for them. Let's get moving." Christ was God and when Christ died, God died. It was His will and He did it.

Lately when I look at a crucifix, I get this weird image of Him smiling, arms thrown wide. He's so happy to die. He's thinking, "Finally, I get to do this really amazing, big thing for the people I made. I'm giving them the most valuable thing in the universe - my life." It's not that He isn't suffering terribly; it's that it means so much to Him to do this for us. He gives with abandon, not begrudgingly.

Why Be?

2010-11-06T16:54:00.002-04:00

. . . because I buy flowers. And today one vase wasn't enough for them all, so there's one bouquet on my dresser and another on the shelf.

. . . because I got a new haircut.

. . . because it's fun to write again. So I'm writing a novel. And last night, working on it, I felt happy.

. . . because a friend told me to watch 30 Rock, and Alec Baldwin is flawlessly hilarious.

. . . and live chamber music in the evening and the acoustics were perfect, and yesterday I made a list of the people that love me. And a golden retriever who never gives up hope for an extra morsel of food from the kitchen counter. An autumn-leaved tree, straight-trunked, out my window. Finally admitting all the things that never made sense, and holding my breath, wondering, thinking maybe . . . all the things I once hoped for, could they be possible?

The Silence

2010-10-31T21:05:00.003-04:00

For so long, a deathly silence. Whys piled on whys. Why won't You rescue me? Heal me, love me? Speak to me; give me one moment when I know for sure what You are. But He never spoke.

The whys that I ask myself. Why won't you accept the proofs that you are given? The little things, the "God things"? (How I hate that phrase, said by people who never asked for more.) People stood around me, holding their breath, watching. "Surely she'll see it our way now," they said, "believe like we do." The god in my head was as arrogant and manipulative as them - wanting to control me. So I kept silent, terrified of what it would mean to give in yet again.

I cannot pray. I cannot pretend anymore. I don't even know what I want; all I know is what I need - something real, a word that speaks to my soul.

Layers drop away. Before, did I even know I had a soul? Did it belong to me? Did I know who it was, what it wanted? My life becomes a gleaming silence of not-pretending.

* * *

I've been wondering if God's silence means something different than what my old paradigms claimed. Did He refuse to rescue me, or was it a refusal to coerce me? Was it a refusal to speak, or was He refusing to batter me with arguments? Did He remain perfectly still, knowing that I, with my finely tuned intuition for what the other person wants me to do, would predicate all my behavior on what I thought He wanted of me - would never be myself?

Perhaps His silence is a quiet waiting, a peaceful patience. There are no requirements in it, no limits to it. I am allowed to be safe. I am allowed to make choices on my own. I reach out my fingers to this silence; I weave it around myself. I am in a cocoon of sweetness and color and warmth. A voice within it breathes, "I am here, and I require nothing of you but what you give of your own free will - however little or much."

Thanks be to God. Alleluia. Alleluia.

2010-10-24T18:35:00.003-04:00

I tend to think (along with many other Christians) in terms of questions and answers. I've been framing my current quest in that way - saying I have questions for God, I'm looking for answers. But today I was thinking to myself, it's not so drily intellectual. My questions don't even need words. I could lay out all the objects, the real tangible items, of my case: my body, the facts of my life, the real minutes that I have lived. And these courtroom exhibits would ask, "What were You thinking? Are You crazy?" And like the questions Job asked, these aren't really questions - they're accusations.

It annoys me when people talk as if the Christian life can be settled with propositional truth. I'm fed up with people saying to me that God is good and everything's going to work out, as if their words (which are definitely true, in an empty-shell kind of way) can put back together the pieces of a smashed soul.

So today in church, one of the phrases in the liturgy all of a sudden meant something. After communion, we thank God "for assuring us in these holy mysteries that we are living members of the Body of your Son, and heirs of your eternal kingdom."

The assurance comes not from cut-and-dried logic, but from "holy mysteries." The phrase meant something because I've experienced it. My healing is not coming from doctrine hammered over and over into my head. It's coming from "holy mysteries" like anointing oil and communion elements and statues and stained glass and tiny, gleaming candle flames and music and ancient creeds that my tongue delights to say, because in this tangible holiness my body, heart, and mind are meeting at some mysterious nexus, and my soul is being knit back together.

Against the Darkness

2010-10-09T11:52:00.002-04:00

Who gets to tell you who you are?

The one Who said "Let there be . . ."

You woke up sick and stayed in your pajamas, putting in half a day on your laptop,
And the sunlight burst into every inch of the pink-walled room

and sank into your bones.

And then what else happened?

Ran into an angel at the library yesterday -
An acquaintance really, but somehow she saw
You
And inside her God was carried like an exploding sun inside a lantern.

Some voices tell you to hate yourself;
You'll never be good enough, do it right, deserve good things.

But then when you got out of your car there were more stars
Than there ever were in your whole life put together
Orion peeking over the trees
And stars you didn't see before because it wasn't dark enough or clear enough
There are so many stars.
Big and bright ones, shooting stars, tiny ones,
A little handful of pinpricks suddenly discovered
In an inch of sky
These stars, these stars

Singing into your ears the truth of who you are.

Don't let any other voice drown them out.

I like reading Ecclesiastes.

2010-10-03T17:44:00.002-04:00

It says there is a season for everything. Sometimes things are bad, and sometimes they are good. Different responses suit different events. It's a peaceful thought. I get tired of black and white - things are always this way! Or always that! Always do this! Here's the answer, all the time!

Not so, saith the Teacher. Sit back, evaluate the situation, decide what to do. Eventually things will change whether you want them to or not!

Ecclesiastes Experienced

2010-09-25T20:45:00.002-04:00

On Friday I finished my first full-time work week in over three years, literally. It took effort to get to this place. A year ago I had given up on ever having a normal life; at the beginning of this summer, when all I looked for was escape and survival, my counselor asked me what it would take to get back to full-time work. And here I am. I eked up my hours over the summer - praise God for a boss and an HR department that were willing to work with me on this - and hammered out a weekly routine that would enable me to weather the work hours. At the moment, the routine is roughly half work and half rest. From eight at night till eight in the morning, I'm completely focused on storing up energy for the next workday. Weekends involve trying not to dip too deeply into my energy reserves. This is a reality of Lyme recovery. You don't just bounce back from it like after the flu. It's a war of attrition, or a siege - you either pick off or starve out the enemy, and it takes time.

Nonetheless. Here I am, choosing a life that I want, bravely dreaming for the future, fighting for it - but mostly sleeping and going to work. Those are the humdrum things that will get me where I'm going. I guess the Teacher knew what he was talking about. "A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find pleasure in his work" - that's my task. And by God's grace and more than a few miracles, something is happening. Beauty is seeping back in, sudden floods of light, crazy possibilities and questions and answers.

Coming Back

2010-09-18T17:05:00.006-04:00

Hey there. I have the urge to blog, and that's a good feeling. There are signs of life in me - little green scared shoots, deciding they want to find the sun after all.

There's a lot that's coming together/coming apart for me right now. Good stuff, light surrounding the darkness. Hard to detail each last little bit, so I'll just stick my hand in and see what I pull out for this entry.

I go to an Episcopal church now. To get there on Sunday morning, I drive west toward the Appalachians, and think how soon I'll cross right over them, cross the continent, land somewhere with real mountains. These I'll trample. But for now I'm not there yet. I drive through a pretty little town and crunch into the gravel parking lot and inside is the organ, and the smell of wooden pews, and people wearing vestments. Candles and stained glass and sunlight pouring in. We say a liturgy, kneel to pray, stand to sing, eat His body and blood (gluten-free communion bread for the first time in my life!). Christ is on a cross over the altar. I look at Him and wonder what He would be like in real life. What would He say to me, how would He treat me? My brain takes a break from doctrine. I just need to know what is, not what I have to believe. A heart beats inside each of these symbols, a throbbing flame within a paper-thin shell. Light and life shine through, something real. The rector says I'm absolved, his green-robed arm lifted into the air, and behind him the man on the cross whispers and smiles and says, "Yes, you are absolved."

Contest Entry/Blog Post

2010-08-18T18:13:00.013-04:00

Don Miller is holding a contest over on his blog for a free trip to his Living a Better Story seminar in Portland, Oregon, next month. To enter the contest, you write a blog entry about what kind of story you want to live and how you hope the seminar will help you achieve that. (For more details on the contest, go here -- and please hurry because the contest ends this Friday.) This is my contest entry. It’s doing double duty for my faithful blog readers as an update on where I’m headed next.

First, though, watch this video which explains a little bit more about the conference and makes you really want to attend.

Living a Better Story Seminar from All Things Converge Podcast on Vimeo.

Here is the story I want to live: I am going to move across the country -- from one coast to the other. This is going to happen sometime between January and June of next year (2011), depending on when I am able to find a job. I am looking for a job in book publishing because, in about ten years or so, I want to be a really top-notch book editor and maybe even have my own publishing company. But that’s not the story. The story is me moving across the country. It’s a big move because I’ve lived on this coast all my life. My family and friends are here; I went to college here; I work and vacation here. All my memories are here, and all my ideas of God. I need a new mental landscape.

In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Miller says that a story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it. The conflicts in my story are obviously practical (finding a job, a place to live, etc.), but also emotional. In fact, my biggest conflict is fear.

I’m afraid of getting sick again. My health has improved tremendously since I started getting treated for Lyme disease, but Lyme is hard to treat. I’m afraid of a relapse, either before I actually get the chance to move or after I'm 3,000 miles out on my own.

My other fear is of loneliness. I hardly know anyone on the other side of the country. My entire immediate family, the people who take up the biggest part of my life, are all here in one state, most of them still in one house. It's hard to think of being so far away.

But I so desperately want to find out if life can be better than it has been for me . . . if things like hope and meaning and beauty really exist, if God really is good. For some reason I feel like I have to go far away from familiar ideas and images in order to answer my questions.

Really, this move is a practice story, not the real story, which I think will come later. A good story starts with a character, and I’m honestly not sure who my character is. I know a lot about what I want to do in my life, but not who I am or want to be. Maybe the only way to find that out is to do something that tests my mettle, helps me see what I’m made of. Hence the practice story. I think the real story is going to happen down the road, in relationships, in decisions.

I want to go to the seminar for encouragement -- to be reminded that sacrificing for something only imagined is worthwhile and that better stories really are possible. And I also want to get some ideas for thinking creatively around practical and emotional obstacles, to help me stop taking “no” for an answer.

Re-creation

2010-06-26T16:46:00.005-04:00

It's as if

the glass was shattered, lies splintered and glittering
at the bottom of my heart
- - - a pile of flaked ice, the shards clinking and scraping one another

i'm picking up the pieces, turning them over
trying to understand and maybe put them back together

but it's impossible. and the edges are sharp.

but still I notice
how they sparkle, how the light i didn't know was here

bends back and forth, makes golden paths and rainbows all around me.

Fun Stuff I've Been Doing These Days

2010-06-12T22:06:00.002-04:00

Reading Winnie-the-Pooh
Riding the bus
Reading Lost Women of the Bible by Carolyn Custis James

Inside Looking Out

2010-06-05T21:38:00.003-04:00

when i stop pretending that all this
(black and sordid little universe,
two-dimensional two-penny-novel ghost-town nightmare
with its flat rainbows and paste diamonds
and petty-dictator god) is okay,

then i know

that outside is the velvety darkness of a bigger universe . . .
the aching glitter of stars and
. . . cool ripples of air, Japanese maples . . .
everywhere the flashing hints of a different God

and frantically i tear down these paper walls surrounding me

to find that light seeping in

Creative Destruction

2010-05-28T11:39:00.002-04:00

"The Destructors" by Graham Greene captured me from the first sentence, as some short stories do, and I reread it every so often, to dig deeper into it and reexperience its events. It's about a gang of children that utterly destroys a townhouse, demolishes it piece by piece - from the furniture to the fixtures to the floors and ceilings and walls to the utilities to the roof and sides - till it is quite literally a pile of rubble. The de facto leader of the gang, T, directs the whole operation with fascinating resourcefulness. One of the boys asks T if he is destroying the house because he hates the owner, "Old Misery."

"Of course I don't hate him," T said. "There'd be no fun if I hated him. . . . All this hate and love," he said, "it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie," and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things.

T's father is an architect, and T understands the significance of this house built by Wren, with 200-year-old panelling and a spiral staircase held up by opposing forces. T's housebreaking is a creative act - a creativity that receives additional power and force from the building's original greatness. Additionally, destroying the house is necessary to set Old Misery free from his prison-like existence within this beautiful home, with its "half things, broken things, former things" and his life savings hid in a mattress (which the boys burn, down to the last banknote).

During high school I studied geology with my dad, who has an inexplicable love for rocks. I resisted this study until I began learning about the rock cycle. Volcanic lava hardens and becomes igneous rock; over time this rock is given new identity by heat and pressure (metamorphic rock), or broken down and deposited into the earth over time to form sedimentary rock. Ultimately any rock is subject to the possibility of being remelted by a volcano or vent and transformed once again. I can't think of anything more savagely destructive than a volcano, earthquake, or flood, and yet these are the means by which rocks are completely transformed into new things. Same material, new identity.

One day I woke up and couldn't pretend anymore, couldn't take it anymore. I wanted to find something better, but in stretching toward hope I pulled the pin from a grenade. The universe cracked open, all its wrongness turned up to the light of day, people went stumbling around into potholes everywhere. Doing the right thing now seems so, so wrong.

Is this what God does - transform our lives utterly by burning away everything, dredging things up from the very bottom, heating and pressurizing and restructuring life's chemical makeup to make a new heaven and earth out of the old? Do we, and the universe, carry within us the very material that will be perfected and beautified at the end of things?

The Void That Is Me

2010-05-08T14:12:00.002-04:00

It sounds dramatic, doesn't it, when I say that I don't know who I am? But notice that sentence. It started off with some self-deprecation and an accusation: You probably think I'm just being dramatic when I say this. Because I expect you to think: Oh, she's overstating the case. How could she not know who she is? She has such a strong personality. She's just having one of those bad days or weeks or years. She'll come along.

One of the ways that I am learning who I am is by taking my own feelings seriously. Trying to leave off disclaimers like, "This probably sounds silly, but . . ." or "You're probably right. I don't really feel that way."

My counselor told me, "I admire you for staying with your pain." Taking my pain seriously is what got me into this mess in the first place. So it must be a good mess. It's a me mess. Somewhere in this mess of emotion and experience and what I've felt and what I was supposed to feel is me. If I take the time to honestly feel and follow my emotions, I might untangle the mess. And in the process I might discover myself.

Honestly, I never would have thought I would say stuff like this. I have always cared so deeply about my identity. I've stood on it, spoken it, written about it. This is who I am. But under that bold statement was this truth: If I don't define myself, then everything inside will be formless.

Diving into that formless void is so scary. But I know that if I go down far enough, my feet will find something solid, a little bit of land to stand on. And that's where I'll build from.

Still Me

2010-05-01T13:59:00.002-04:00

My blog has a new name and lovely new colors, but it's still me posting. I needed a new way to express the questions I'm exploring and the person I hope I'm becoming.

A half-life is "the time required for half the nuclei in a sample of a specific isotopic species to undergo radioactive decay" (American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed.). In other words: At a midpoint in life, enough change has occurred for us to draw reasonable conclusions about something's identity.

I have reached the point of realization that the life I live is not full (another kind of half-life). In looking back and evaluating my identity, I see that much of who I am has decayed in a desperate, involved, time-draining attempt to pretend that everything is okay, protecting the half-truths I know and trying to please the half-God I worship.

Fact: Everything is not okay. Saying so does not disprove the Bible, it's not blasphemy, it's not heresy. Admitting my feelings does not mean that I am about to be swept away on a tide of dangerous self-deception. It doesn't mean that if I die at a moment when I don't like God, He's going to bar the gates of heaven. It doesn't mean that if my sorrow can't be neatly packed away in a box and labeled with an answer and eight Bible references, then my faith is inadequate.

It does mean that I'm finally learning who I am, and I'm trying to speak the truth of my experience without shame.

Seeking

2010-04-16T21:24:00.002-04:00

I am experiencing profound change. Over the past year, I have faced fear and frustration so deep that I didn't think I could go on. All my old coping mechanisms stopped working. Pain welled up in me that I've pushed down for years - since I was 23, since I was 17, since I was 12, since I was 9.

For too long, old questions have gone unanswered. Who am I? Who is God? It recently occurred to me that I have no idea who I am. I've made myself into the Lee Ann that everybody wants to see. When you strip away all those layers woven by compliance and the craving for approval - there is nothing. When I look into myself to see who I am, there is a terrifying emptiness.

But how can I know who I am if I don't know who God is? I am realizing that the God I think I know is boxed in by my own brain. He has been preached to me in church and modeled to me by human beings, and He frightens me. I can't change this image of God in my head. And yet I sense that the real God is someone stronger, kinder, than I can imagine. I seem to hear Him calling to me from very far away.

It's time to go find the real me and the real God. I'm tired of wasting time, wasting my life, my soul. I've started making some pretty drastic decisions about the next few years, but they feel right. Facing my questions means facing my fear, but it also means an incredibly beautiful freedom.

Again you come

2010-03-27T18:29:00.004-04:00

back to the beginning:
to the same center of fear that birthed you, that reels you in
whenever you think you've escaped.

You are ever being returned to the same prison.

Do not struggle, my child --
Pause and consider this place to which I have allowed you to return.

Instead of fleeing, look up.
Instead of rescuing yourself, reach out to Me.

Allow Me to
obliterate your loneliness

For only I can do it.

"For what we need to know, of course,

2010-03-13T12:38:00.002-05:00

is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get."

~ The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner

Read. This. Book.

2010-03-07T16:56:00.002-05:00

In Stumbling toward Faith, Renee Altson describes how the process of healing from a sexually and spiritually abusive background began. A lesbian couple who lived next door to her treated her with great gentleness and gradually she began to know love and kindness. After she attempted to kill herself, the couple got her to the hospital and later told her that they were getting ready to move. Would she move with them? Here is what she says about the decision she made:

I knew in that moment that if I went, I had no chance for redemption. I would have been happy, I would have believed in myself, and I would have known love, but I would not have been redeemed. I would not really have found peace.

All that they offered me, the love and kindness and friendship, was only the beginning of my becoming whole. It was only a birth to my healing, not the completion of it. If I had gone with them, I would never have really found myself, never really found the wounded broken part of me. I would have simply used someone else to cover who I had been. I would have let them recreate me into who I had always wanted to believe I was rather than do the hard work of changing who I had always been. I would never have truly healed.

I had to say no.

How can we have the strength to stay on the path of growth and healing, when every bit of us screams, "I'm tired of this; let me out"? Because what we are waiting for is to become more of ourselves and to know more of God. It is the grace and mercy of God that hedges us in, blocks us, limits our options, because otherwise we would pick the easy road - the road that leads back to the dishonesty and darkness that felt safe for so long, but only ate us alive.

First Things First

2010-02-27T11:46:00.002-05:00

I wonder if, to truly rest and be satisfied in God, you have to submit to Him before demanding satisfaction. I seem to expend so much energy crying out, "Prove Yourself. Before I will trust You with my life, You must prove You are trustworthy, prove You'll do right by me." The problem is, God can't possibly pour Himself into us when we are closed off to Him. It's a lose-lose situation, until we give in and go to the only source that can fill us.

Love and Cabin Fever

2010-02-07T17:05:00.002-05:00

It's the third day of being snowed in. On the first day, I saw the weekend through a sentimental haze: family time, playing in the snow, watching movies, cozily talking and sipping tea. Now I just want out. All our worst qualities are emerging and are magnified.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the two greatest commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. How often I distract myself from them with grand questions. How do I serve God? What is my calling? Who will I marry? What great things should I achieve today? Wonderful questions, indeed. They make me feel important and allow me to focus my energy on my own satisfaction.

It's when I try to answer the real questions that things get painful. How can I love God today? How can I love others? So often that means small things that I don't want to do. Review a Bible verse. Refuse to complain. Help with the dishes. Be patient with my siblings.

Why is it that the hardest things are the humblest, and why is God so adamant that we do them? Maybe because love - true love - is our highest calling, but it also goes completely against our human nature. But how freeing and comforting to know that by choosing to do the smallest things, I am obeying God and allowing Him to continue shaping me into His Son's likeness.

"Can it be that you really don't understand?

2010-01-16T16:39:00.002-05:00

Do you think we mortals will find you gods easier to bear if you're beautiful? I tell you that if that's true we'll find you a thousand times worse. For then (I know what beauty does) you'll lure and entice. You'll leave us nothing; nothing that's worth our keeping or your taking. Those we love best - whoever's most worth loving - those are the very ones you'll pick out. Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse and worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow."

~ Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis, pt. 2, ch. 3

The Minutes of This Week

2009-12-19T17:10:00.003-05:00

Daily schedule: Laid in bed all day. Got up occasionally to eat and put in an hour or so of work. Isn't Lyme disease fun?

Playlist for daily rest periods: Billy the Kid and Rodeo by Aaron Copland; The Last of the Mohicans; The Village; Lady in the Water
To ward off depression, listened frequently to the Reba McEntire/Justin Timberlake duet, "The Only Promise That Remains."

WEDNESDAY: Saw The Screwtape Letters - literally one of the best live performances I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot.

THURSDAY: Held a friend's newborn. I had forgotten how cute and cuddly babies are.

FRIDAY: Saw my sister's latest play. Left Alexandria at 11:oo p.m. (snow had just started). Arrived home three hours later due to crippling effect of snowstorms on Northern Virginia drivers. It was an adventure.

SATURDAY: It snowed while my family cut various capers indoors and out, such as digging the minivan out of the snow on the side of the road and relocating it to the driveway, escorting home on foot some friends who had spent the night, attempting to retrieve my sister's car from a nearby neighborhood where it was stranded, and dancing to sad-sounding music. Mostly I just laid in bed, feeling very happy. It's good to all be together.

Book Discoveries

2009-11-14T21:03:00.002-05:00

Yay! Just when I think to myself that there can't possibly be another good author out there, I discover that there is. Here are three series I am currently enjoying:

The Brother Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Peters
Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles: Yes, I have a bloodthirsty side. Okay, maybe not. But I do love Rice's sensual prose and completely unpredictable plots. These stories are truly grandiose.
The Horatio Hornblower series by C.S. Forester: My brother introduced me to these. Splendid writing full of nautical terminology that is so artfully used I can pretend I understand it. Humorous and harrowing adventures. A unique characteristic of Forester's storytelling is his pacing - sometimes crawling along through the moments, other times skipping blithely over whole days or even years. If I could start my life over, I think I'd give more careful consideration to becoming a sailor.

Brain Fog

2009-11-07T19:28:00.004-05:00

"You seem more alert," said a friend the other day. We hadn't seen each other in over six months. It was the first comment someone had made about my Lyme treatment that actually made sense. People keep telling me how healthy I look, and it's a wonderful compliment, really, but healthy is not how I feel. I've been taking the antibiotics for about a month now and I've been nothing but tired. (Although the predictably low energy is an improvement over the wildly unpredictable crashes I was experiencing more frequently over the last nine months or so.)

Despite the low energy, I've found myself waking up earlier than usual in the mornings, and very motivated to work. It's been puzzling. Previously I could lay in bed for days (or so it felt) and not really care that I wasn't doing anything interesting. Now I try to stay busy, because otherwise I feel bored. Now where did that idea come from? I guess my brain isn't tired anymore. All along I thought it was physical fatigue and pain alone that were sapping my productivity, but now I'm thinking that brain fog was a major culprit.

Brain fog is a symptom of Lyme disease. Up to a few weeks ago, I knew I suffered from it, but didn't think it was severe. Only now that it's lifting do I realize the extent of it. It must have crept in on little cat feet over the years, and I gradually adapted to it. Maybe back when I was a college student, humiliated because I couldn't succeed on tests - maybe that was Lyme disease. Or maybe it didn't start until more recently. At any rate, somewhere along the line thinking started to get more difficult, and I just assumed it was my fault or my problem.

The last few days, I've been getting the same headaches I used to get as a college freshman. It extends from between my shoulder blades, up the back of my neck, and around to my temples. This is nowhere near as severe as a migraine; I'm not complaining about that. It just makes me sad because back then I assumed it was because of studying and not sleeping and stress, and I blamed myself. And maybe it wasn't my fault at all.

Companiable Silence

2009-10-31T18:51:00.003-04:00

A friend visited me today, and after we had talked and eaten, she worked on the computer while I did ribbon embroidery, then she took a nap while I read, and then she read while I did dishes. It made me think of the time another friend and I ate almost an entire meal together without speaking (we were each reading something, I admit), and at one point she said, "We would make good hermits."

I think a good friend is someone you can be quiet with.

Large-Family Math

2009-10-24T21:21:00.004-04:00

There are ten people living in my house with four cars among us, two of which are disabled in the driveway (including the twelve-seater); a third has been stalling randomly. My brother just arrived home for the weekend with his pickup (seats three). Tomorrow morning we must all arrive at church at two different times, along with the two fellow churchmembers who ride with us. After the service we must arrive home in time for four of us to depart for various activities including a work shift. If you do the math, you'll find it adds up to an irrational number.

Angel Street

2009-10-10T19:05:00.002-04:00

Here is a review of my sister's latest play.

"Behind November came deep winter . . .

2009-09-26T14:11:00.005-04:00

A calm day had settled into a crystalline evening; the world wore a North Pole coloring: all its lights and tints looked like the 'reflets' of white, or violet, or pale green gems. The hills were a lilac-blue; the setting sun had purple in its red; the sky was ice, all silvered azure; when the stars rose, they were of white crystal - not gold; gray, or cerulean, or faint emerald hues - cool, pure, and transparent - tinged the mass of the landscape.

"What is this by itself in a wood no longer green, no longer even russet; a wood, neutral tint - this dark blue moving object? Why, it is a schoolboy . . . who has left his companions, now trudging home by the high road, and is seeking a certain tree, with a certain mossy mound at its root - convenient as a seat. Why is he lingering here? - the air is cold, and the time wears late . . . Does he feel the chaste charm nature wears tonight? A pearl-white moon smiles through the gray trees . . ."

~ Charlotte Bronte, Shirley, ch. 9

Don't Forget to Dream

2009-09-19T19:10:00.002-04:00

Today, my good friend said that my next step in life should be to plant a garden. "And you could have a chicken," she added. "In fact, you could have a farm."

And a longstanding dream came flooding back over me: the small house with the big garden and the goat or the cow and the donkey and the farm dog and the barn cats and the berry patch and the pond with weeping willows around it and the Easter lily bank and Christmas tree grove. As we talked I added a lighthouse or silo which would be my office where I would write. "And you need an apple tree or apricot tree," said my friend.

It's been a while since I've let myself really dream. I miss it.

The Amazing Charlotte Bronte

2009-09-05T22:05:00.004-04:00

Okay, so I did not like The Professor one bit - it's no wonder Charlotte couldn't get it published during her lifetime. But I just started Shirley, and it's splendid.

The story of Charlotte's own life is like a novel. Her life must have been extremely barren for her to have assigned so much value to the experience of attending school in Brussels, being taught by Constantin Heger, and falling in love with him. But only a mind as rich, introspective, and imaginative as hers could have reevaluated that experience again and again in her various novels, repictured Heger as Rochester, Emanuel, and Moore, and recast over and over that deeply rewarding relationship of intellects. And then to settle down neatly at the end of her life to a loving marriage with an Irish curate who had a sense of humor! (One guesses that laughter is the thing she needed most after all those years of rigid loneliness.)

Strange Turns

2009-08-08T16:21:00.003-04:00

My life has gone in some very peculiar directions. I am contemplating that thought because this week I am house/dogsitting, meaning that I have an entire house to myself and not a whole lot to do. So, what have I chosen to do with my time? That's the peculiar part.

Years ago (before I got sick) I always said that I would rather clean than cook. Things sure have changed. Given my own kitchen for a week, I'm thrilled to be using a convection oven and gas range. I'm picking out new recipes to try from The Joy of Cooking and following them exactly. Yesterday, for instance, I learned how to make a poaching paper that lays neatly on top of a simmering pot of fish fillets, lemon, onion, carrot, and celery. My biggest mistake with that dish was leaving out the salt. (Today I refurbished the fish and vegetables with a brown butter sauce.) I bought portobello mushrooms for the first time. I've learned how to dress a salad, not just slosh the vinaigrette on top. I've discovered that cheese, no matter how luscious, always tastes better with fruit.

Now, part of the reason for all this is that almost all processed foods make me sick, and I'm not yet wealthy enough to hire a cook, so I've had to learn to make everything from scratch. It's sheer necessity. And as they say, when life hands you lemons . . .

Another part of the reason that I now enjoy cooking is that as I've purged all processed foods from my diet, my sense of taste has changed. I eat hardly any refined sugar or additives. Believe it or not, because my tastebuds are no longer trained to look for the flavors of sugar and MSG in everything I eat, I can actually taste layers of flavor. My sense of smell is more sensitive now, too.

Another thing I'm doing with my time is writing - some of it for pay. My health taking a dive has been an odd blessing, in that I now work from home. But I happen to love meaningful work, which means that in addition to my paying jobs, I also have a bunch of projects I'm working on. I just love the fact that even on a day when I'm not feeling well, I can pop open my laptop and put in an hour or two of work. So while I've wanted to be a writer since I was about seven, what's amazing to me is that God actually made it happen. That's what I do now. I'm a writer.

The final thing I'm doing with my time is . . . nothing. This too is a new direction. Because for most of my life, I've put unbearable pressure on myself to produce, to accomplish, to do. And for most of my life I've been tired, go figure. Now I take things slowly . . . not only for my physical health, but for my spirit. I'm trying to learn to listen to God. As I go through the day, I'm listening for these moments: time to take a break and follow a train of thought. I need to pause and ask God about this. I'm worried - let me read a chapter out of that book. I'm tired, and I'm forcing myself to keep busy because I'm afraid that if I stop, I'll feel lonely and out of control - so stop! Now is the perfect time. Now is when I need to rest, to express my trust in Him.

Called Out of Darkness

2009-07-26T18:06:00.003-04:00

I just finished a splendid book, Anne Rice's "spiritual confession." This is one of those utterly beautiful spiritual works that brings me to tears at points. Rice grasps the heart of Christianity.

I have about twenty strips of paper sticking out of the book where I marked meaningful passages. The chapters are arranged thematically, and as a memoir this book is reminiscent of Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings. Here are some themes I found particularly interesting.

Rice sees beauty and art as redemptive. She firmly identifies herself as an artist, as someone who lives a certain way and pursues certain goals out of a belief in beauty and creativity. My favorite description in the book reflects this.

My father listening to the opera on Saturday afternoons was a delightful part of our world. He would sit at a table in the back bedroom working on his woodcarvings, and the sounds of the opera would fill the house. I loved the voice of Milton Cross, who always read a synopsis of the action before each act, with great and elegant expression. And I associate all of this with sheer happiness, with the breezes flowing through the open windows, even with the rain falling, with the windows filled with the green of the surrounding trees.

Her take on gender is wonderful. I don't think I agree with everything she says, but her perspective is freeing and helps to explain some of the struggles I have experienced as a thinking Christian woman. She calls her mind "genderless and oversensuous," meaning that the part of her personality that reasons and feels (and for an artist, these two always become intermingled) is not masculine or feminine. It is simply herself.

Knowledge is another theme. She became an atheist because Catholicism stopped making sense to her. Her moment of return to Christianity was when she realized that even though she couldn't understand everything, Jesus could.

This is really a love story about how God's love - "the world around me was filled to the brim with God" - became inescapable to her, and she found herself loving Him even though she was a professed atheist, and now she wants to love others as much as Christ loves her. Her Christianity is entirely relational. Even though she doesn't agree with major Roman Catholic doctrines, she submits herself to the church out of love for Christ. So be forewarned - you may read this and be unable to see past your doctrinal disagreements with Rice. If so, you're missing out.

In fact, on that note, I'd like to end with this quirky statement: "The more I study the New Testament, the more I see the contradictions enshrined within it. But I see something else there too. We have been a quarreling religion from the beginning, born out of an earlier quarreling religion - Judaism - and in a sense the New Testament enshrines us as such very clearly, with no easy solution as to how we handle our quarrels or the contradictory passages except that we must love!"

More Mysteries!

2009-07-25T20:22:00.002-04:00

I've gone through the Dorothy Sayers mysteries three times, read every single Agatha Christie in my county library system, and completed the Josephine Tey canon this past year by obtaining To Love and Be Wise via interlibrary loan. What shall I read? Like Cookie Monster, I wandered panicked among the library bookshelves muttering "Me want mysteries," and lighted once again upon Ellis Peters. I'd tried the Brother Cadfael mysteries twice before, and did not find them quite as perfect as Sayers and Christie nor as fetching as Tey. Nonetheless, I am now on a medieval kick and Cadfael fits the bill.

I just finished Monk's Hood and very much enjoyed the vividly described abbey and town.

Here is a helpful and attractive set of webpages by a Brother Cadfael fan, including a bibliography of the mysteries in order.

"The love that qualifies someone

2009-07-04T18:52:00.005-04:00

to shepherd others develops only when suffering persuades us to give up our self-preserving agendas, when dark nights make Christ's presence necessary (no longer a luxury), when trials make us willing to abandon ourselves fully to Christ because we need him so badly. The profound intiimacy with Christ that only suffering can create enables us to enter other people's lives with the Spirit's healing power."

~ Larry Crabb, Hope When You're Hurting, ch. 15

It Takes a Little Getting Used To

2009-06-27T23:41:00.002-04:00

Today was one of those days. Projects didn't get done; I was sick; the house was full of activity and disorienting; there was conflict at dinner and I cried in front of everyone. On the flip side, I went on a beautiful walk this morning, I spent little money on a big purchase, the most important project did get done, I made beets for dinner and beets make me happy, and we watched the first episode of Bleak House tonight.

Let me tell you a little secret. I'm a control freak. Oh, wait, you have that problem too? And days like today drive me crazy. Everything's out of control, including me. The most painful part of a day like today is the moment when I realize that God wants me to let go, not hang on. It feels like I'm loosing my grip on a sturdy branch and letting myself spin down into a whirlpool.

I don't like His way of doing things. It's messy and painful and it's not the way I would do it! But there's a part of me that knows life is supposed to be beautiful and risky, and I'm forced to admit that His way is much more extraordinary than mine. It's like reading a really unpredictable story - you know there's genius behind it.

News Flashes

2009-06-11T15:53:00.002-04:00

Everybody reads Rebecca. Daphne Du Maurier's House on the Strand delivers in just the same way - evocative and slightly creepy.
My sister and I just got back from visiting friends in Florida. We went to the beach a lot, drank way too much tea (is there such a thing? Well, I'm still trying to give up my daily third cup), and talked. And talked. And talked. I think I know what heaven will be like.
Richard John Neuhaus's Death on a Friday Afternoon took me months to read, but it was worth it. He teeters on the brink of universalism and his writing is cumbersome - just ignore all that.
I had to go all the way to Florida to get a motorcycle ride - make that two, since we switched bikes at one point. It was a nice long ride that made up for the four years since my last one. Also, it was my first time on a crotch rocket. It was surprisingly easy to stay balanced, so there's absolutely no excuse for those girls you see clinging like ivy to the backs of their rocket-riding men. They just want to hug someone.
Finding God, Larry Crabb: Read. This. Book.

Psalm 62:5-7

2009-05-16T22:04:00.004-04:00

Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken. My salvation and my honor depend on God; he is my mighty rock, my refuge.

Villette (A Mini-Critique)

2009-05-12T19:23:00.002-04:00

This story is about the inner turmoil of suffering. Lucy Snowe believes she is a sort of cosmic target, so she develops artifical ways of coping - turning off her emotions, hopes, everything that is most human in her - in order to avoid disappointment. She wants to turn herself into an automaton (Jane Eyre's worst fear).

M. Emanuel (aptly named) is a redemptive figure. He begins by drawing out the real Lucy. He discovers what she really thinks and feels. Then he provides for her beyond her highest expectations.

The religious element in this story is unavoidable. Lucy's struggle is with God. Why does He weave a life of suffering for her? The counterargument to her accusation is that He provides for her in miraculous ways - through the priest, the Brettons, the bookseller, and M. Emanuel.

You cannot read this story without wanting to know more about Charlotte Bronte. The psychological portrait of Lucy Snowe is true to life on an extraordinarily deep level. Lucy's emotional landscape is described in vivid images that merge with the physical settings of the story.

Can't Post Now . . .

2009-04-25T21:44:00.002-04:00

I'm too busy reading Villette, Charlotte Bronte's final novel. Yes, it's as good as Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte was brilliant - her style more distinctive than any other English writer, her descriptions of emotion brutally precise. Stop reading my blog; read the book!

The Rest of the Fairytale

2009-04-20T20:43:00.003-04:00

Once there was a girl who thought that God was a dark prince, mean and sneaky, and when she danced with him at the ball she was afraid. When he said "I love you" she didn't believe him, because she knew he just liked to tease and torture her, and how could he love someone like her anyway? She pretended to love him, though, so that he wouldn't put her in the dungeon. She even thanked him for the presents he gave her, even though she was afraid to open them - afraid a hideous insect would jump out and make her go insane.

This went on for a very, very, very long time - enough to make any man give up, but because He was God He didn't. Finally one day He took off His mask, and His face was so kind it made her cry. He was, in fact, the kindest, most honest, most gentle and loving person she had ever met or ever would meet. Everything He said was absolutely true all the time, through and through. And so they lived happily ever after.

Psalm 34, Selections

2009-04-11T22:01:00.005-04:00

I sought the Lord, and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears.
Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.
This poor man called, and the Lord heard him; he saved him out of all his troubles.
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them.
Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.
Fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him lack nothing.
The lions may grow weak and hungry, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

(NIV)

Modification of a Journal Entry

2009-04-04T16:59:00.002-04:00

I've just realized that my fundamental sin is embarassingly childish. On some very early day (before my first memory), I discovered that by being "good," I could work around the obstacles in my world. I became an expert on avoiding pain, especially the pain of a command I didn't want to obey. (Sometimes, God's will leads us where we do not want to go.) If I had been honest with Him, we might have talked like this:

Me: I want this (or that).
God: You may not have it.

And there things would have ended. But I did not want to admit the reality of my selfishness or the possibility that He might deny my desires, so I had to avoid the conversation entirely. I had to invent a different God, one who operated according to strange and manipulative rules. I had to turn my relationship with Him into an abstract, cosmic struggle, when all along it was really this: the Father commanding His child, the child saying "I refuse." Such a simple, everyday event--literally, for I have avoided small daily pains for years by the numbing distraction of big questions, complicated considerations, titanic struggles. All along it was this, so small, so humiliating.

And yet so freeing. "Our Father . . . Thy will be done."

Spring . . . Sometime

2009-03-26T22:01:00.002-04:00

Still cold; cloudy days, and rain . . . every now and then I catch a glimpse of a tree veiled in pale, transparent color . . . or a smudge of yellow or purple on the ground where a daffodil or crocus has managed to bloom. Sheer brushstrokes of color imperceptibly appear. This spring is so slow. Maybe shy, hesitant--scared to come out, scared the seasons will reverse and a black and haggard winter will leap out at her. Maybe I'm scared too.

In Honor of Books Finished Yesterday

2009-03-14T16:31:00.003-04:00

She was barnacled with pieces of popular wisdom.

~ Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, pt. 7, ch. 8

Paradoxically, then, though Christ himself accomplishes the work of our sanctification, the more he does so the more it tends to cost us. The further we advance the more he tends to take away our own strength and deprive us of our own human and natural resources, so that in the end we find ourselves in complete poverty and darkness. This is the situation that we find most terrible, and it is against this that we rebel. For the strange, sanctifying mystery of Christ's death in us, we substitute the more familiar and comforting routine of our own activity: we abandon his will and take refuge in the more trivial, but more "satisfying," procedures which interest us and enable us to be interesting in the eyes of others. We think that in this way we can find peace, and make our lives fruitful: but we delude ourselves, and our activity turns out to be spiritually sterile.

~ Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, conclusion

We must not only see ourselves as we are,

2009-03-07T20:34:00.002-05:00

in all our nothingness and insignificance; we must not only learn to love and appreciate our own emptiness, but we must accept completely the reality of our life as it is, because it is the very reality which Christ wills to take to himself, which he transforms and sanctifies in his own image and likeness.

~ Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, pt. 3, "Flesh and Spirit"

The Real Me

2009-02-28T20:07:00.002-05:00

I still get really sick every few months when I accidentally eat the wrong food, and the weather and other stress factors can exacerbate the reaction. My friend calls it a "flare-up," and it happened this week. I was exhausted, and so stiff I could barely walk. Today I'm feeling better, but it gets worse again in the evenings - another early bedtime; who knew a person could sleep so much?

It's easy to smile and be the nice Christian girl when I'm feeling fine. The world looks so beautiful when I'm healthy! But then I get sick, and I can't do anything that makes me feel productive, and I get scared that I'll spend the rest of my life wrapped in a blanket with only my nose poking out, and I'm impatient with my family because noises make my skin hurt, and I'm angry at God, and beauty makes me choke. I worry, worry, worry and all the ingratitude inside me comes to the surface.

I hate being sick, but it's good medicine. It strips away the veneer of holiness. When I see the real me, I suddenly see how I've trampled God, and my heart breaks. But then I can ask Him to make me well, both body and soul. And that's when I realize how much He loves me, because He already knows how messed up I am but He takes care of me anyway.

Lent

2009-02-24T18:01:00.003-05:00

Yes, I go to a Baptist church, but I'm celebrating Lent this year because every year Easter seems to come with even less warning and less impact. I hope that 40 days of preparation will help me appreciate Easter more.

I am giving up tea--not the first cup of the day (that's necessary to dispel the morning fog in my head), but the second, third, and fourth in which I indulge throughout the workday "to keep the creative juices flowing."

One of these days I will elucidate my personal theology of food (or, what I have learned about the spiritual life through having a digestive disorder), and then you might not find it so amusing that I consider giving up tea to be a Lenten endeavor.

Two Activities Not for the Faint of Heart

2009-02-14T20:02:00.006-05:00

Directing: But my sister is doing an admirable job of it. See this favorable review. (No, I'm not biased or anything.)

Reading England Made Me: It has never been a success. The question is, why is it still being published? Because of Greene-ophiles like me. The style is tortuous, the characters unreal. And yet . . . and yet: Graham Greene captures place and plot with stunning adeptness. Towards the end of this mostly clumsy tale, there is still that delicate moment when we forsee the Farrants' doom and pity them, and so learn to care about them. England Made Me leads to A Burnt-Out Case and The Human Factor and all the rest. This is nascent Greene, stumbling blindly about with a weird faith in what he would become.

Weekend Miscellaney

2009-02-09T10:05:00.002-05:00

You Can't Take It With You, produced by Castaways Repertory Theatre and directed by my sister: Community theater is fun because you always know someone in the cast. This production is especially entertaining because my sister is directing it (oh, wait, did I say that already?) and because it's zany with a little bit of wisdom tossed in. Everyone in the cast shines, no matter what their previous theater experience. That is probably due to the impressive directing, but maybe I'm biased.

Prince William Forest Park: There are 37 miles of hiking trails here; on Saturday I tried out the Laurel Loop Trail. It's easy and goes past the South Fork Quantico Creek. Some of the creek was partly covered with about two inches of ice, and none of the mountain laurel was in bloom yet.

My Three Favorites (So Far)

2009-01-31T21:21:00.002-05:00

The Confidential Agent
A Burnt-Out Case
The Captain and the Enemy

Silence does not exist in our lives

2009-01-26T14:53:00.003-05:00

merely for its own sake. It is ordered to something else. Silence is the mother of speech. A lifetime of silence is ordered to an ultimate declaration, which can be put into words, a declaration of all we have lived for.

~ Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, ch. 16