Louisville and Athens are one and the same

"There’s always been someone missing in my family, Hans Thomas. Someone has always gotten lost. I think it’s a family curse."
Dad, in The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder
Tonight, I long for a sense of satisfaction, a sense of completeness. In one month, I’ll be embarking on a three year journey of Biblical theology and pastoral methodology, a dream of mine that has finally become realized. I know how blessed I am to be given the opportunity to follow the yearnings of my soul as I pursue full time ministry. I know that through this process, and through my future career, I will learn and discover new and exciting ways in which God is being made manifest in our lives anew each morning. And yet, it’s still not enough. There still seems to be one piece missing, something that leaves me feeling unsettled and unfinished.
In the last few years, my relationship with God has become very raw. While I still believe deeply in our very beginning in the Creator, the redemption of Jesus Christ, and the empowerment of the Spirit, I am still very angry and very numb about they ways some things have worked themselves out in the last two years. I don’t understand why, when I leave what I know and cherish to follow God, I end up being misused, belittled, and diminished by the very organizations through which and with whom I was and am striving to further the Kingdom of God. I am scared to enter seminary, though I do sense a calling and a desire, because I am afraid to be irreparably broken if these patterns continue. I don’t know if I can handle another Cincinnati, or another ACORN. Just this afternoon, I broke into tears again as I remembered the bitter and hostile relationship I had with one of my coworkers in Cincinnati, despite my own best intentions.
I remember in high school, going to my Saturday night bible study with my fundamentalist friends, talking about how people would just feel wholeness like they had never understood if they were to just accept and enter into a relationship with God. It all felt so simple. Yes, I knew that there would be hardships, but I believed in an unshakable faith that would enable me to continue to pursue God when the world around me was in chaos. But how do you respond when it seems that it is that same pursuit of God that seems to leave you bewildered and damaged by those alongside you?
Like Hans Thomas, I have left my home a long way away in order to learn and discover how to become complete. Hans Thomas left Norway for Athens, thinking that the woman they would find there would be able answer their questions about why someone was always running away. I left Washington for Cincinnati, and then Louisville, and now am trying to find what I have lost, a faith in and understanding about where I am being lead.

Vulnerable visions

I understand why artists are plagued with emotional difficulties. Expression is an exhausting experience; varying influences and voices merge into a single creation that attempts to communicate one person's understanding of how life intersects within itself. It's an experience that leaves you weak, exposed, and vulnerable in a world where concrete fortresses provide impenetrable barricades between you and those who have power over you. It is to speak truth, and truth inevitably leaves you among the powerless because cloaks of secrecy shroud the actions of our economic and political oligarchy. Fragility and vision are sisters who have been undervalued and repressed amidst the generations of their daughters who were told that an emotional nature made them unreliable in the work place and unable to handle the pressures of public life.

Last Sunday, caught up in the auditory trembling of the Third movement of Dvorak's "English Symphony," in the heat of an under-ventilated gym at the dawn of a Kentucky June, I found myself overwhelmed by the combination of emotional strain, artistic expresssion, and physical proximity that attends playing in an ensemble. I felt as if I would faint because of the physical effect of opening oneself up for an extended period of time in combination with people whose names I am still learning. The easiest culprit to pick out was the heat; however, that was simply one factor in the strain that comes with performance. At the end of the evening, after a program no more physically challenging than a few hours of typing, you fell drained by that same sense of artistic vulnerability that has helped radicalize so many writers, painters, and other cultural revolutionaries.

That same afternoon, I listened as my friend, who has a propensity for tall tales, recounted details of his hometown. Mike described the annual feast when the first calf of the season was slaughtered, when his family would gather around giant mounds of ground beef that they would eat by the handful, celebrating the work that would put home grown meat on their tables through the bitter Pennsylvania winter. He related specifics of the ways that his ancestor’s farm roots were still playing out in his family, including his two bachelor uncles who have parked their trailer on the family property and still use an outhouse a few feet from their home. His stories revealed the way that tradition and modernity intersect in each of our lives. He also spoke with regret about how people refuse to believe him when he talks about his uncle’s outhouse; his reputation as a storyteller has caused those around him to discount what he says as a lie, without listening and delving in to its depths.

I choose to believe Mike’s stories because I know that there is a truth that is greater than fact. I know that storytelling is an art as powerful as symphony, and that like in the case of Rigoberta Menchu, they do not need to be historical to be an honest and open expression about his life. In this act of visioning and believing, we escape our culture’s emphasis on numbers and statistics as the purest way of understanding ourselves. Numbers are cold and easy to hide behind, whereas story is rooted in the human experience. Like music, it leave us open and fragile to our listeners, in that same subversive and fragile action that is inherent within all art.