Friday, December 29, 2006

The Things (and People) I Love

Tonight I'm listening to a cd a friend of mine has given me and compiling some of the blogs I've written over the last two years (85 pages). The site I used to write for will soon be no more, but in it are a lot of memories and a reflection of the journey I made, and we made, together. I guess that's fitting toward the end of another year.

Next to my computer is a picture of this girl--the one who made the cd for me--and it's one of her from around the first time that I got to know her almost three years ago. The picture, the music, and the blogs remind me of another time, when all these things were new and I was nervous, and not sure about falling in love.

Sometimes we forget what made us fall in love in the first place: with a person, a place, a song, an idea. To let you know where I was three years ago, I had just moved to Michigan after living in Illinois for ten years. I didn't know anyone, and I was stepping out on a great adventure I thought. Life would never be the same, and the words I had been waiting for had finally come: "It's time to go."

With fear and excitement I went, not knowing what the next day would bring as I met new people and learned more about myself. I had found my desert, but I was more emotionally raw and dependant on God than I had ever been in my life. My writing reflected it. My thoughts about relationships reflected it.

But then we get used to things. We grow comfortable with ritual over the first moments that drew us to realize our need for God. We begin to accept the other person in our life as a certainty, and forget what it was like to have not had them in our lives or what it would be like to lose them. The new places we stop seeing, and the new streets and routes become familiar, well worn, even contemptible ruts. Tonight, with new music and rereading some of the thoughts when things were new, it's becoming fresh again, only more than I even realized then.

Tomorrow I leave on another journey, to pursue seeing again through fresh eyes and remembering some of the things I have forgotten. I hope I find it; I hope we can take the journey together and share what we find along the way.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

The Desert

The desert. A harsh, barren landscape that strips everything down to its bare essentials. There's beauty here--tall mesas, rolling hills, red and brown clay--but it's a beauty that's been hammered, beaten down, refined, and is unforgiving of any false steps. Roses and willow trees do not live here, nor the blossoming reds, yellows, pinks and oranges of tulips, roses, or pansies. Instead, there's a dull gray to the sage, scrub brush and cacti as they cling tenaciously to the rocks and thin soil. You could drive for hours without seeing another living thing. If you were on foot, it could take days. The silence could be maddening, and the days and hours blur into each other until all that seems to be or to have ever been is the desert. Defenses are ripped away, and the possessions and relationships and comforts--resources that made life easy--are no longer available.

Deserts are dead places, and deserts are places where people are sometimes tested and reborn.

Joseph, sold by his brothers into Egypt then falsely accused of hitting on his master's wife, spends over two years in prison. Abandoned to his own desert and forgotten, he continues to dream of someday feeding a nation.

Moses, educated by the greatest civilization of his time, privy to the comforts of the palace, kills a man and flees into the desert for forty years, only to return to lead a nation of slaves to a land of freedom.

The Israelites, former slaves who prefer the security of slavery to the risk of freedom and something more, are tested, broken down, and reshaped in the desert.

John, sensing the winds of change and a new order, goes into the desert to prepare the way.

Jesus, before his ministry begins, goes into the desert for forty days where he's tempted, but doesn't give in.

There are also the Egyptian monastics, the Irish monastics, and others who go, willingly or unwillingly, into the desert. Sometimes it's to escape, sometimes it's to die, sometimes we're prodded and goaded into these uninhabited wastelands.

* * *

It's a literal landscape, and yet it can also be an apt metaphor for the journeys we find ourselves on. Last summer I spent a couple days in southern and eastern Oregon, driving up and down mountains until I lost sense of direction, then I crossed over into the desert and drove around mesas and through valleys for hours. The lakes, the sand, the landscape was breathtaking, but after a while I became uncomfortable with the silence. I began to wonder if I'd ever get out. I began wondering about whether I had enough gas, or what would happen if the car broke down. My cell phone didn't work here, and I began to wonder what trying to survive out here would feel like.

Deserts are spiritual places. It takes bringing us to uninhabited wastelands, away from the noise and comfort to strip us down and make us realize our dependence, our animalness of being human. We sense something bigger when we're not constantly distracted by ourselves. Rock stars, entertainers, politicians tell us how great they are, and commercials tell us how great we will be if we use their products. In crowds, we tell ourselves we're better than that fat slob, or that greasy haired girl, or could be as good as that prima donna if we practice, or that model if we lose another ten pounds, or that guy if we have this girl. We have none of that to rely on in the desert. Instead, we ask "Where will I find water, where will I find food? How can I get away from this pounding sun? God, help me!"

Sometimes our desert is a broken marriage, losing a job or moving to a place that is strange and foreign to us. Whatever the circumstance, we find ourselves at the end of our strength and resources, ready to die and not sure how to live.

And something changes. A part of us dies. A part of us is reawakened.

We have a need to live differently, to realize that there is someone bigger than ourselves and that the universe moves on without us pulling the strings. In fact, most of the time the natural world could care less whether we won a trophy, a beauty pageant, or a promotion, but notices when we abuse the resources we're given. Solitude and silence have been timeless spiritual disciplines because that's what it takes to see the ways peace has been broken in the world, in our lives, in our relationships with each other and with God. Deserts provide both. But then deserts also require that we leave them and reenter the places where flowers grow, water flows, and laughter fills up the silence.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Home for the holidays

I'm home for the holidays this year, and yet it's been a painful, lonely time. It always is for me when I'm with family, but this year especially. These are people I'm related to, yet they're complete strangers. We spend time in front of a TV to avoid talking.

My parents moved to Florida after my freshman year of college, and then moved again from central Florida to Jacksonville, where they now live. When I come "home," I have no ties to the people or the place, and wouldn't come to Jacksonville, or Florida at all, if it weren't for my family.

I didn't get along well with my stepmom when I was growing up. I still struggle with anger, frustration, and the loss of a relationship I often wish we could have had. My stepmom (called Mom from here on out) had five miscarriages, and didn't have kids until I was ten. As a result, she overcompensated and smothered one of my brothers, and there has always been a rift between he and I. We've been pitted against each other and there's a wall between us that I have no idea how to cross, even though I sense there are times when we'd both like to find common ground. Instead, a heavy silence and awkwardness rests between us. My youngest brother and I get along well in person, though even between us I've felt tension this trip. I won't lie, some of it's been me. I'm wound tight these days and have anger toward something, I don't know what.

I'm 31, my brothers are 21 and 18, and yet we slip into the same roles we did as kids. I hear this is true of most families, whether the siblings are kids, teens, or are in their 30s, 40s, or 50s. How do we redefine roles, begin to see each other again through fresh eyes?

Yet I also know there are millions of people who would love to be with their families this year and can't. A blogging friend of mine writes posts about the war in Iraq. A girl I went out with once sent me an email to write our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whether we're for the war or against it, we all agree that being miles away from home at Christmastime can be lonely and hard, let alone when we find ourselves in another country, and one where people are shooting at us.

Another friend talked to me about Advent, about how Christmas should remind us of an absence, yet this runs counter to our cultural impulses. This year more than others, I've gotten stressed buying gifts for family and friends, have hated the traffic in the city, and have wondered what Christmas is about.

And yet there remains a deep longing for peace, peace in the sense of Shalom, peace between each other (my family), peace within ourselves (freedom from tension, anxiety, anger, despair), peace in our communities (no more flipping the bird), and peace with God and the sense that God is present and that things really were meant for good.

I can't begin to tell you how many times I've wished that Christmas would come crashing down, that we'd have to start over, more simply yet more peacefully. I've found myself sitting in church lately longing and hoping that Jesus is someone who lived in history, that he was who he said he was, and that this truth has power in my life and in every life on this planet. I would love to forego the giving and receiving of gifts if it meant that I could find what I was looking for (and feeling like I was still missing) when I opened presents under the tree. I would love to forego a Christmas meal if it meant feeling full of hope, joy, and peaceful relationships. I would love to forego a holiday from work if it meant that the rest of the year I was part of something revolutionary and satisfying. And I would forego another Christmas pageant, musical, Santa Claus suit, or Salvation army can if I could see God walking among us.

More than anything else, this is what I want for Christmas.

The Riders: Part I

There were five of them: four men, one woman. From a distance, there were similarities. Three of the men looked nearly identical, though one was clearly older than the others, his moustache mixed a reddish white, and lines creased around his eyes and forehead. He also fidgeted in his saddle, and his horse shied behind the others, then went galloping ahead. The tallest of the younger three was lean, had a long nose and small mouth, and his hair spiked up in several different directions. He looked the least like the others. He sat easily in the saddle of his red roan and alternated between telling stories that had the others laughing and then brooding in silence. Another sat a black thoroughbred, his upper body like a barrel. He rarely spoke, but often scowled. Though when the sun broke through the clouds, he would hum a tune, or sing a verse from a song until once again he lapsed into silence. Riding beside him was the woman, on a black mare, and her long hair was raven black, or had been until it became streaked with lightning patterns of white. Her back was hunched, and she sat low in the saddle, sagging, weighed down by some unseen burden. The last man rode a dapple gray, shorter than the others but with a sturdy frame. Its rider nearly matched. He was the shortest of the five, and yet held himself straight, his shoulders thick as if accustomed to carrying heavy loads. His piercing eyes were studying, inscrutable from behind angled brows, as if he were measuring the world around him.

Five riders. Blood related. Yet, behind this loose connection were gaps and voids wrapped in silence. It was a family divided.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Dreamers and Soul Makers

It was the world of dreamers and soul makers. Buddy Carson sat in the back pew on the hot July morning as one after another, people filed past, filling in the spaces in the building as sun filtered through rose and emerald and periwinkle glass, and motes of dust hung languidly in the air, creating beams that rested like halos on gray heads, white bonnets and greasy bald spots.

The room itself smelled like old leather, and like dust that has been pushed and swept from one side of a room to another, and back again, never discarded but left to choke in one's nostrils. Soon old sweat and cheap perfume mingled in with the dust and leather smells, and tiny droplets began to form on Buddy's forehead and under his arms. He'd never felt too secure in crowds, or around people in general, and he stared at the grains of wood on the back of the pew ahead of him as a few looked his way. Some shot him a brief smile, others glared reprovingly, sizing him up from head to toe. For those people, Buddy bit back the urge to stick out his tongue at them or, worse, flip them the bird.

He was from the other side of the tracks, some said. He had holes in his jeans and little grease splotches on the front of his shirt that the washing machine at the laundromat hadn't gotten out, and since it was the second day straight that he'd worn the shirt and had slept in it the night before, it settled on his slightly undernourished body in a rumpled heap. No one knew he'd spent the night under the bridge the night before, near the park where underneath the slide the words "Bill L/S Tammy 4ever" were scrawled in deep by a rock. The stones were smooth under the bridge, and the soft sound of water spilling over the rocks played like a lullaby in the humid July air, and Buddy could almost forget the beating his dad had given him earlier that evening.

But here he sat, on a Sunday morning, and the harshness of life was beginning to beat its way not just onto his chest, back and shoulders, but into his eyes, the way he hung his head, and the dead coldness he felt deep in his chest. Whenever he looked in the mirror, he often saw deep black pools staring back at him, icy depths that had no bottom, and he'd attempt a smile but it often twisted into a half crooked grimace. Rather than risk the people seeing those bottomless wells or that twisted grimace and have them throw him out immediately, Buddy kept his eyes down, pretending to study the piece of paper he'd been given called a bulletin, or bore ever more deeply into those woodgrains on the back of the pew.

He didn't think he believed it anymore. It wasn't possible. He was crossing the threshold between childhood and adulthood at a mature ten years of age, and Buddy was smart enough to realize that you couldn't take what an adult said at face value, that they often lied to you, or told you they cared about you right before they smacked you across the head. He wondered if God was the same. Some said God was dead, others said we created him, others said they loved him, but then they loved the girl in his second grade class in ways that made her shake with fear and cry whenever they entered the room. No, he didn't believe in God.

But what made him miss him so much then? What made him hope against hope that he did exist, and that he wasn't like his dad? He didn't know if Jesus ever lived, but if he did, he wanted him to be someone special, and he wanted to go sit on his lap. Maybe he would understand.

But if he didn't? If he was like all the rest, what then? Where could he go? Who could he turn to? Was there anyone he could trust? He'd decided that if there wasn't, that by the time he was thirteen, he'd hang from the tree nearest the bridge, overlooking the riverbank, the rounded stones in the creekbed, and the gently flowing water that made soft lullaby sounds. He'd give it some time, he thought, these kinds of things needed to be thought through.

The music began from the front corner of the room, an old upright piano that, even to Buddy's untrained ear, was badly out of tune. It matched the sound of the singing perfectly. For twenty minutes on the hot July day, ladies waved fans before their faces, and men wiped their foreheads with handkerchiefs as they sang about bringing in sheep, or ships, or sieves, or something like that, and about glorious days, and called each other brother and sister. Buddy sat in the back, unnoticed and uncaring, drifting between sleep and nonsleep to the buzzing of the sound and the heat.

Then the music ended, and a man with gray hair and a sharp, hooklike nose stood behind a block of wood and spoke gently, softly at first, then with building passion. He talked about caring for each other and forgiving our brothers and sisters, and from the smooth, unlined forehead and ear-to-ear smile on his face, Buddy felt like the man had no idea what he was talking about. He moved closer to the end of the pew, preparing his escape, but his hands felt hot and something was burning his eyes and a tightness constricted the back of his throat. He was hurting, he was in pain, and without waiting another moment for his escape, Buddy ran out the back door and into the side yard, a sob breaking from his throat. He picked up a rock and threw it, as hard as he could, and heard it bounce off a tree and ricochet off the hood of a car. He didn't care. He needed to walk.

The Real, the Fake, the Virtual, the Remembered and the Imagined

When I was a kid I lived in imaginary places.

My parents built me a rocketship out of a cardboard box from a refrigerator they'd had shipped to their house. They even made me a spaceman helmet out of a paper bag, and a spacesuit vest out of another paper bag. I played in my imaginary spaceship until the next hard rain hit that turned my spaceship into a soggy mess.

My next imaginary place was the world of books: Narnia, Middle-earth, Camelot, the Four Lands (Terry Brooks, in case you don't know). My mom, concerned I'd get lost in this new world, had me read history books and NON-fiction books so I could also be grounded in reality. My dreams were often vivid, and seemed sometimes more real than my life during the day, and I often imagined when I was living in a small town of 800 that someday I'd leave that town and go someplace else and the adventures would begin.

Eventually, I did leave.

Now I teach literature, and give an occasional history lecture, and have been introduced to Umberto Eco and Jean Beaudrillard, the Matrix, eastern and Greek philosophy (and philosophy in general) in addition to being Christian, and most of these areas ask, "What is real, and how can we know what is real? How do we know the difference?"

I went to a lecture once on movies and culture and the lecturer talked about how people reacted to the early silent films. The technology was such a shock that often people who went to see the early films would get so mad at the people on screen that they would stand up and get ready to fight them, or would peer around the screen to see where the people went. Later films took this idea and used it to critique and make fun of itself (in postmodern lit. we'd probably call this self-reflexivity (a work of art being self aware and turning back on itself), or metanarrative, telling stories about stories).

Now we have more than just early film, but high definition film, larger than life IMAX film, "realistic" theme parks thanks to Disney (nods to Eco's Travels in Hyperreality), internet chatrooms and blog spaces where we communicate with people we have to accept on faith exist. We have emotional affairs with people we've never seen, never met, never touched, never smelled, never tasted. The world of writing and blogging, television and film seems more real and authentic than our REAL lives because they include all the best aspects of a relationship or a person's body or a situation. They are things as they "should be" and not as they are, and so the reality seems mundane. We enjoy the play acting of saving the world to the reality of trying to balance our checkbooks and not despair that our life may not be in constant crisis or in need of megamicromanaging or be as sexually ideal as we envisioned it. I'm often less in awe when I read about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea or Jesus coming to life after being dead because the stories in DC or Marvel are more sensational. Can Jesus leap tall buildings with a single bound? Can Moses stop bullets dead in their tracks, stop a train, and rescue a girl all at the same time?

I'm not being flippant or sacriligious here, I'm simply wrestling with the feeling that the world has been through a technological (and therefore social) time warp and I'm still hung over from severe jet lag, trying to hang on to the jet stream by my fingernails.

It's not the first time that change has come hard.

My great grandma was born the year the Wright Brothers had discovered flight and died after the first satelitte had left our solar system. In the Industrial Revolution people's lives changed dramatically. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution took place over 100 years; in the US, around 30, and it transformed our view of ourselves (cultural identity), how we communicated and traveled, it made us wrestle with factories and unions and new forms of social injustice, and made us deeply question our place in the world as a society and as individuals. Some felt irretrievably lost. Others felt it was the best time to be alive.

I had a hard time talking to my parents when I was in high school because they sat glued in front of a TV for 3-4 hours a night. Since college, I have had the same problem with roommates because they do the same thing with Xboxes. Personally, I've developed a jealous hatred of TVs because they seem to disconnect more often than they connect us to each other. We're forced to watch others live imagined lives than be creative with our own. We sit in silence next to friends and family rather than face to face. Yet, on the other side, advocates for TV say that it is the new shared culture and gives us connecting points to talk about (I agree. I like talking Smallville or Seinfeld or the Office or Survivor), and brings people together socially as much as it tears them apart. I don't know which is true, what's real.

I'm teaching next semester on the history of film and the history of TV, but only a couple lectures, so for now I'm thinking out loud. No answers yet, mostly questions, and I'm wondering how I'm going to tell stories to my students across a ten year generation gap that will connect, and I'm wondering how often in my lifetime we'll have to reinvent our stories and reinvent our lives so we don't get lost in change, and what things will stay the same and be timeless. How will we know how to talk about and distinguish from the world of the real and the virtual, pseudo, mirror worlds we create around us? Is it a question worth asking? Does the real world have priority over these other worlds, or are all of them--imaginary, dreamlike, virtual, fictional--permutations of the same thing?