Your Own Personal Times Mirror

October 27, 2010 — 1 Comment

My local credit union provides an added service to its members. While we are waiting in line, inside or in the drive-up lanes, the latest news headlines flash on colorful screens to keep us informed. I guess.

This morning, the first headline I saw told me about a “skeletal body” found in a “rusty barrel” on the living premises of a paroled convict in Texas. The next was about nineteen people missing because their Chinese tour bus was wrecked in the typhoon in Taiwan. My short-term memory apparently overloaded because I can’t remember the details of the third one, something about a catastrophe that stranded a large group of people, maybe factory workers, somewhere else in the world.

After these helpful headlines, the screen flicked to sports scores.

Is this progress? Technology has made it possible for me in my car or house or clinic waiting room to look into another person’s car or house or waiting room practically anywhere else in the world. If my media sources deemed it important, they could show or tell me about a soft-skinned newborn baby peacefully nursing in her mother’s arms in Afghanistan; or a young student from Minneapolis who spent a summer in Nepal and saw the world open up to him in numerous ways; or an autumn afternoon bicycle ride and picnic that was the highlight of a disabled French woman’s year.

Situations like these are not news, precisely because they happen every day, everywhere. And just as certainly, people get hurt in small ways, every day, everywhere. These stories may not be “news,” but they are often little stops on the path to some “big” news story.

“Everything matters if anything matters at all,” wrote Pierce Pettis. What led up to the sensational story about the skeletal body in the rusty barrel? A million “small” details, I’m thinking. A cruel joke on a school playground . . . a child’s choice to reject a friendship . . . a growing volume of hateful voices inside a teenager’s head . . . a thousand little cruelties that grew into the habitual and hateful behavior of the self-loathing now-paroled convict.

Or not. I know that sometimes people do things for no observable reason; there is no painful childhood, no discernable pattern of small details leading up to the scene of the crime. I’ve given up the search for a handy universal explanation of everything. But I wonder if more of us paid attention to the smaller details of our own lives and the lives of those around us – our compulsive behaviors (why, I might ask myself, do I always laugh nervously when someone mentions “x”), the look of pain or numbness in the eyes of a coworker when she speaks (if I take the time to look her in the eyes) – maybe then we could work for change on the level where change most often happens – the embryonic one.

These days, news, like most things, feels like a product to be consumed. It is there to entertain us, to add to our intellectual stores of knowledge, to warn us against danger (and according to the news, danger is lurking everywhere, everywhere, dammit!), to show us something pretty and tender and sweet now and then to preserve our hope in the human spirit (so, yes, now and then we do hear about the French woman’s bike ride and such).

It’s still possible, though, to use news as a tool for information-gathering – not for the sake of simply storing that information and then yanking it out to write up a nifty blog post (hey, why am I laughing nervously right now?); but to ponder that information and its influence on the issues that affect me and my community – and then to act – responsibly – on that information. Reflection on the news can inspire people to live more wisely and compassionately as family members, friends, coworkers, and citizens of communities both local and global.

Am I suggesting everyone seek out solitude as much as I do? Nah. But now and then, it probably wouldn’t hurt to turn off the Blackberry, the TV, the radio, the computer; set aside the paper (or the iPad), and reflect on whatever new information you just took in (you do remember what it was, don’t you?).

HERmitage

October 21, 2010 — 3 Comments

For 48 uninterrupted hours last week, I lived in a little cabin in the woods – alone, and, I repeat, uninterrupted. (Today my children do not have school, and so the “uninterrupted” part feels especially important as I remember my retreat.)

When I started taking solitary retreats a few years ago, I approached them with a sense of lofty significance. I expected a burning bush, a still small voice, a bright light, or some other monumental encounter of biblical proportions. But that has never been my experience. Instead, these retreats have become well-anticipated rest times, and that is plenty.

Attached to the tiny cabin is a screened porch with a solid comfortable Adirondack chair. I sit in the chair and gaze into the woods. A breeze softly shushes through the sleepy trees, who absentmindedly undress, leaf by falling leaf. It is always autumn when I take my retreat, not by my intent, but it always works that way. It is probably the rhythm of my life – summer is large and loud and light-flooded, and usually around the first of October I am ready for a very long nap.

I have always been an introvert. I’m not sure if there is a universal definition for this word, but for me, it means that spending time with people, which is something that is so very good for me (and which I usually enjoy!), takes more emotional energy from me than it does from people we call extroverts. In my young and restless high school and college days, my house was a headquarters for social gatherings, and I loved it. But often I would sleep fitfully after everyone went home, dreaming that all those people were still there, sitting around me on my bed; and I felt I should keep up the conversation, try to be fun and smart and beautiful, but the shy wild creature inside me had already pulled the shades and turned off the porch light.

A solitary retreat, then, is for me a complete pulling of the shades and extinguishing of the porch light, with no expectation from anyone that I will keep up appearances and maintain social graces. I bring my guitar, a pile of books and a few journals (I like to read over past ones and write in current ones). Usually I end up just sitting for long periods, going to bed early, sleeping in late, walking breezy forest trails and sunny prairie ones, and singing quiet songs now and then.

This time I read three books. First, I finished Grace (Eventually) by Anne Lamott, a former addict, recovering G.W. Bush-hater, single mother, pro-choice feminist, and lover of Jesus. Her writing always refreshes me because she is so not me. She sometimes feels like the mirror image of me – child of divorced nonreligious intellectuals, wild background, outspoken demeanor, whose adulthood devotion to Jesus never sat well with her mother. Next, Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm, poetic prose that I enjoy like fine wine or rich baklava – slowly savoring each sentence. I try to set aside my own ambitions of writing when I read either of these Annes, because who needs that form of torture? Instead, I become a wholly abandoned, joyful reader, and it is good.

Then I tackled The Myth of Certainty by Daniel Taylor, a book the renegade professors at my fundamentalist Christian college used to praise. Fifteen years later, I finally got around to reading it. The subtitle is The Reflective Christian and the Risk of Commitment. For those who ask about breakthroughs or “what God did” on my retreat, I humbly and with no certainty but a risk-taking commitment say that I found great comfort and voice for much of my struggle with faith in this book. I’ll leave that for another post.

For now, I feel rested and just a little more practiced at peace, more able to hold a center of calm even on very interrupted days like this, when I hear my children in the kitchen bustling around, yelling, “Mom, we’re cooking!”

What I Woke Up With

October 6, 2010 — Leave a comment

Just for something different, here is an account of a dream I had in October 1998, which I came across this morning. I think I wrote it within moments of waking up, which is why it makes sense in that nonsensical dreamy way, and why there is anything written at all (dreams are slippery memories to recall, that’s for sure).

I dreamed –

A mother (Donna Reed-like) and her baby lying dying in a bed trapped underwater past the tunnel past the Christian bookstore in the mall – they went down there and while they were there someone blocked off the road in the tunnel. Cars come driving through, screeching to a halt where the road seems to end underwater just next to the bed where mother and baby sleep. No one really helps them. I go to rescue them. I am not their husband and father, I am me. Yet their husband and father looks for them, and I am with him but he isn’t there. I find them looking peaceful but I know they’ve been there for hours and I know mother has made several trips out of bed to find help, but was always drawn back to baby and sleep.

Somehow Nathan [my newlywed husband] is tangled in the dream, too. He and two other college men got in a fight over how many fractions of an inch something measured (a pillow fight, not a fistfight). But Nathan is hurt from the fight somehow, and the other men are apologizing, and I am rushing to find him and nurse him.

Quoting Ippolit

September 29, 2010 — 1 Comment

Portrait of Dostoyevsky in 1872

I’m reading The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (thanks for the recommendation, Brian!), and came across this portion of a speech by a character named Ippolit:

“. . . there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you for ever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps, the most important of your ideas.”

We do our best with words, music, painting, dance, touch, and so many more forms of expression, and yet – there is always “something left,” according to Ippolit. Feels like that to me, much of the time. I begin with an idea, I write it in my journal, a blog post, a song; or I tell it to a friend – and in the writing or the telling other ideas sprout, other factors and perspectives become involved, and though I may still be able to experience my understanding of the original idea, I cannot, no matter how I try, exhaustively articulate it. I find this interesting.

A little before the above quote, Ippolit was expounding about Christopher Columbus being his happiest not when he discovered America, but when he was discovering it. He said, “. . . the highest moment of [Columbus’s] happiness was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn’t the New World that mattered, even if it had fallen to pieces. Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all [bold type mine].”

I’ve thought this often, that it seems every conversation, every action, is part of the process of discovery, and it is that process that I enjoy far more than any actual discovery. Once I have made a discovery, it is gratifying, but then I want to move on to discover something more. I thought maybe this was some “postmodern” idea I had absorbed, but there it is in Dostoyevsky’s novel of 1868.

Further Thoughts on Redemption

September 22, 2010 — 15 Comments

Commenting on my last post, Nnox sees no grounds for a redemptive view of things. I said that redemption is not my observation of the way things (usually) work, but my hope. I wanted to add that this doesn’t make me a helpful optimist and Nnox a harmful pessimist. On the contrary, it has been mentioned by others with good reason that many people who believe in “happily ever after” tend to trivialize life (“so heavenly-minded that they’re no earthly-good”), while some who don’t believe or even hope in a happy ending to the cosmos are deeply-committed humanitarians and joyous lovers of life. In their perspective (as I understand it), birth to death is all we have, so we may as well enjoy it and do our best to help others enjoy their lives too.

But it’s painful to know that many – maybe most? – of the men, women, and children who live and have lived and will live on this planet have not, do not, will not enjoy a life like the one I was born to. I expect to eat whatever I want, go wherever I want, live wherever I want and with whomever I choose, have uncensored access to information, stay warm and dry, receive proper health care should I need it, and above all that, find my calling in life and live it out in a fulfilling way. It’s difficult even to make a list like this because all these “basic needs” are met without my really even thinking about it. It could be a book-length list. (When was the last time I felt grateful for the well-maintained streets in my town?)

So why do I get this, and a woman in Haiti does not? It regularly breaks my heart to gaze at my beautiful children, so safe and healthy, well-fed, well-dressed; and see in my mind’s eye pictures of another woman’s children starving.

Do I hope in redemption because it is a good excuse for me to get on with my beautiful life? Otherwise, how can I justify these discrepancies between my life and most other people’s lives? And yet, suffering seems hardwired into existence. If I live long enough, I will inevitably lose someone I love, become terminally ill or injured, or simply experience the pain of aging and the unknown cliff-edge of death as it looms ever nearer. If I don’t live that long, then I will have died young and tragically missed out on living a long, full life.

In earlier years of my life, awareness of the pain and loss and seeming futility of existence would drive me to tears, moodiness, some winter evenings even to what felt like the brink of sanity.

Then I had children, and after the predictable (for me) post-partum blues with my first child, the dark and heaviness lifted. Why was that? Is it a typical survival instinct, something to ensure I bring up nurtured and well-adjusted children – who will at some point learn enough about history and current world affairs to question me about my beautiful life and insensitivity to the suffering of others?

My ready response is, “I am not God. Even if I devoted all of my energy and resources to lifting others out of suffering, it wouldn’t be enough. So I’ll live with the painful awareness of worldwide suffering, and make lifestyle choices with that in mind. I won’t try to shield my children from the truth. And I’ll hope in redemption, because to be aware of so much senseless violence and global inequity, and not to trust in a final remembrance and making-right of all this wrong, will either desensitize me or drive me to insanity.”

And so, perhaps I am a good illustration for those who hold that God is an invention of the human psyche. Maybe this is just the best coping mechanism we as a species have yet come up with. It is certainly a persistent one.

Some people say that God speaks to them often. What do I know about that? I have no grounds for disagreement. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard God speak, but there are three distinct times when I thought it might have been God – and these are the words I heard:

“They don’t own me. And neither do you.”

“Take your time.”

“Don’t be scared.” (yes, “scared” is what I heard, not “afraid;” let the reader decide whether this could possibly be the language of a proper God!)

No tidy conclusion here. Further thoughts tend to lead to further questions, and this post is a prime example.