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.

Yesterday, when I arrived home after toiling away at the phones until 8 pm, an envelope was waiting for me on our dining room table. My roommate, Kelsey, had left it there to greet me as she went out and enjoyed her Friday night. This is a rather normal occurrence, and normally wouldn't be worth noting, except that it was one of the large, official looking envelopes, and the return address was Louisville Seminary.
Immediately, my heart started pounding. I saw the next three years of my life potentially decided by what was contained in that envelope. I knew the admissions committee at the seminary had been meeting this very week. Could they have come to a decision so early? In trepidation, I opened the envelope to find....
A housing application. Oh well - I guess this dress rehearsal for next week helped me prepare for the affect, right?

ashes

Last night, after travailing the Louisville bus system, I fought my way to James Lees Presbyterian Church for Ash Wednesday service. I was late because I didn't recognize my bus stop. As I arrived, harried and upset because I had missed the opening, I saw the table in front of the sanctuary covered in candles. I learned later that there was one lit for each of us in the service.
We were each handed a small piece of paper, on which we were to write down those barriers that keep us from being close to God. Phil, my minister and one of the officiators, quoted a Sufi mystic who spoke about how there are 10,000 veils between us and God, but none between God and us. We bent them in half, and placed each one in front of our individual candle, to shine light upon and through that which we keep between us and our creator. Then, one by one, the Phil and Judd (the other officiator) burned each of them to supply the ashes we would be using. Instead of tracing a cross on each of our foreheads, we dipped our hands in the ashes, covering them. As we felt the grittiness under our fingertips and over our palms, we contemplated how similar this is to the conditions of our own lives, spotted and speckled and coated with a grit that keeps us from revealing what we could be to each other and ourselves. We were charged to go about cleaning up our souls with the same desire we had to clean our hands. It gave a new, deeper theological meaning to Ash Wednesday for me, that I had been missing.
I was also left with a strong desire to keep my hands dirty, not because I didn't want to expose myself, because I felt a yearning to keep on the work of tearing down those barriers. I dipped my hands in the rubble that came from burning up those veils, and I wanted to continue that act of purification. I don't feel that I have done anything significant since I left Cincinnati in August. I have figured a few things out, healed some scars, and restored my emotional state, which is good, but not satisfying. That said, I am anxious to get back to the working for the kingdom of God; I am antsy to get my hands dirty again, helping restore our world and burn up those things that keep us corporately from being that which we are intended to be. I can't wait to get back into full-time service. It's just a matter of time.

We need a prophet

Last night, I watched the State of the Union Address. Once again, I was left indignant about the leadership of our state. I watched THAT MAN started verbally attacking yet another country, in preparation for yet another unjust war, in this case Iran. I heard the sweet-as-molasses-and-just-as-sappy stories he told about those involved in Iraq, which sickened me. He is trying to justify our culture of violence by speaking about the Iraqi elections and their rise of democracy - but true democracy cannot come when we batter people into supporting our causes. He's following the same pattern his predecessors (Reagan, etc.) established in Nicaragua and the rest of Central America. How many countries can we subjugate before we ourselves collapse? We're building something instable - both abroad and at home - because these elections are coming out of weariness, not any belief that the system can work. It's the same reason the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were kicked out of power, though they truly were a people's government - the Iraqis think that maybe if they simply play the game, they'll finally be able to be rid of the violence WE are perpetrating against them. THIS is a crime against humanity.

The Democrats make me just as angry. I listened to them, as they refused to stand up against THAT MAN'S totalitarian tendencies. They spoke about the need to come to the center, and work together to rebuild social security, etc, without actually speaking out against anything except for some privatization scheme that no one really cares about. How I long for a national leader who has the guts to stand up and call this dictator what he is, to stand in the prophetic tradition of Nathan, Hosea, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Daniel Berrigan. One thing we have learned from this election (horror that it is) is that waffling doesn't get you votes. Speak the truth! Get out there and say exactly what is wrong with our situation - that we are oppressors, and our cultural, structural and physical violence needs to stop to ensure our own survival. No one stays on top forever - we need to build a more equitable society, for our own benefit, because when we're toppled, we'll be treated in the same manner that we treated those below us.

The worst part about it is this talk of faith. The Conservatives co-opt it as if Christianity belongs to them. However, they have forgotten phrases like "Blessed are the peacemakers," and "He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble." It is not following Christ to kill and subjugate others for your own gain; there is no such thing as a "holy war." This is a violation of our biblical mandate to love our neighbor and work for the peaceable kingdom.

The true state of our union is in transgression. I can only hope that we see the light, and work to repair and restore our relationship with our neighbors after such destructive behavior.

A cataclysm is defined by Webster as a flood or deluge; a momentous and violent event marked by upheaval and demolition; at the root of it is the Greek word kataklyzein, to wash or inundate.
I've always been taken with the sounds and meanings of words. As an avid reader and a former foreign language student, I am intrigued by the levels one word can have; in three syllables, cataclysm captures the rushing and tearing apart that happens so often in our lives. You can hear the waves crashing down on you. You can feel that overwhelming presence of chaos. You can see all that you know being carried away from you on the currents.

Within it, however, is that same feeling of cleansing and rebirth. Yes, all is washed away by the deluge, but the flood waters also leave you stripped of the grime and salt that has built up and coated you. You are left fresh.

In the Biblical creation accounts, we hear a story about the earth emerging from the deluge and flood. We see chaos as that powerful creative force that is there even before the land and the air. It is that first thing from which everything else is formed. So being, this cataclysm is at the center of each of us, the essence of who we are as created beings.

I consider it appropriate that the sounds of the words cataclysm and catechism are so similar. In a world whose very beginning was inundation; of water, of light, of creative force; we find a need to steady ourselves. In the midst of chaos, we discover answers that we know to be constant. We have been cleansed of falsehood, envy, and sundy other temptations that fall away when we re-examine who we hope to be. In this process, we discern answers about our very nature. For us, these become catechism - what we know to be true, day in and day out, while the deluge of life surrounds us.

As I considered starting this journal that would expose my daily thoughts and concerns to anyone who fancied a peek, the act of naming was my gravest concern. In one phrase, I needed to allow people to identify what they would find; I needed a catch phrase that would give them a glimpse of my reflections, and be the key to whether or not they chose to delve deeper.

I find that these two words capture the essence of what I wrestle with; that constant struggle to remain afloat, knowing that in the middle of the cataclysm, as all is crashing around, I can take solace knowing that some things are constant - those answers about the essence of who we are, our catechism.