Writing in Someone Else's Language

I often roll my eyes at the grammar structure of my department head's memos. English is not her first language, and my snobbery conveniently ignores the fact of my own mono-lingual status. Holy Solitude, my study for Lent, describes the biblical book of Revelation written by John of Patmos as being written in "clumsy, almost illiterate Greek" that was clearly not his first language. Maybe his choice was an attempt to reach out of his banishment to the largest possible audience for his anger and despair. Apparently it was not because he had a gift for the craft of writing. The reflection question asks us to consider the creative power involved in writing in someone else's language. To take it beyond writing, what medium would we choose if we wanted to explore a personal experience through some kind of art?

Sewing is my mother's art language. The whir of her Singer (what an appropriate brand name!) is the defining soundtrack of my childhood. She was flabbergasted by "bought dresses" in which someone didn't even bother to match the plaids, and she didn't mind saying so. In almost every other aspect, she was unusually meek. Maybe the reason I turned to sewing as therapy during a bleak period of my own life is because it represented her strength. Hmmmm. But anyway, when our children were small, we moved from a home and career that I loved to a place that turned out to be a great disappointment for me. It eventually worked out, but for a year I was in a serious funk. One day, mired in the middle of the funk, I picked up a bunch of scrap material and started putting together a rough picture of the front yard, stone walkway, and garden that I had left behind. I cut out pieces and arranged and rearranged, then started stitching by hand and throwing in a little decorative embroidery. It was a marvelous distraction, and looking back in light of this study, a healing time of solitude. Here's the finished product....

 It's not anything special, but it might have kept me sane enough to function day to day. Mom helped me finish it and she put a loop on the back so it could be displayed as a wall hanging. I've never done that, but I might someday. When we were monogramming the tree with the address and the names of our family members and pets who had lived there, my daughter Elizabeth put in her dog Lucy's name as "Loozey." I corrected it and I've regretted it ever since. It was better art with the misspelling.

Writing in someone else's language or sewing in your Mom's language (as the case may be) may let your heart tell you more than your head ever could.

Payback

"It would be wrong for me not to come out here and help after I was helped...I plan to work until I drop or run out of diesel." (Jacksonville resident David Williams)

The Lent study has a lot to say about almsgiving. In the aftermath of the tornado, the questions for reflection take on another dimension. Does giving make us feel rich or poor? How do we decide where to give? Is it meaningful or just an inconvenience? Some disasters (cancer, nature's fury) bring out the selfless best in us, while others (mental illness, poverty) repel us. Why? Jesus also had things to say about giving. Although it's usually stated as a harsh pronouncement, the Old Testament "eye for an eye" rule was generous when compared to the typical response of escalating retaliation. The idea of equal reparation is appealing, but it's so hard to balance a revenge equation. How can we hurt someone in exactly the same amount that they hurt us?  We can win for sure by giving a little worse than we got. Or.... we could respond by turning the other cheek and giving a warm coat to our cold enemy. A generous idea exploded with grace!

Oddly, payback escalates in our response to good gifts too. When my friend's son was starting an egg business, I intentionally overpaid for eggs to help with his startup costs. He responded by throwing in a bag of his organic garden bounty along with my egg purchases. His payback far exceeds my own overpayment. If he was Whole Foods, I would be out some serious cash. The guy I quoted at the beginning was helped on the night of the storm and responded by helping others until he was exhausted and depleted of fuel for his machinery. For the record, I intend to steal that quote at the first opportunity, so when you hear me say that I will do something until I "drop or run out of diesel" you will know exactly where I lifted it.

We all know that payback is hell, but sometimes payback is heaven too.

Poustinia

This was a new word for me, but not a new place. I've been going on an Advent spiritual retreat in the middle of Nowhere, Mississippi for over 20 years with some of my friends. The location is actually Brooksville, MS, but it's mostly a massive pasture,  populated by some charismatic nuns and a few Mennonites who who run a bakery that is almost worth the trip all by itself. There are hermitages for individuals, but my friends and I stay together in the Umbria guest house. It has 4 bedrooms and a common area and a kitchen. No TV or dishwasher, and until recently, no cell phone service.

I guess all catholics know each other or they must have heard of Catherine de Hueck's poustinia description, because it pretty much describes Umbria-- bare furnishings of two twin beds in a room with a desk, chair, table, and Bible. The icons honor St. Francis and the Poor Clares. We have good Mennonite bread, but we supplement with lots of snacks too, because we are Southern girls and it's Christmas after all. Is group solitude a thing? I had the deepest spiritual experience of my life here with two of my friends while we were walking the stations of the cross. We think we're hilarious, so we laugh a lot. I always go home with what Rob Bell calls a "happiness hangover," emotionally drained and fulfilled at the same time. What a luxury to "just be and let yourself be loved by God" and some amazing women. Some years we are all spiritual and deep, and some years we cry together over someone's personal loss, and some years we're all tired and we just rest. If that's not "having a cup of coffee with God, " I don't know what is.

Thirsting

Heidi: Decide if you can realistically go without caffeine.
Me: Nope

I was in graduate school the first time I ever saw someone drink a room temperature beverage by choice. As a kid I sometimes drank out of a garden hose (which we called a hose pipe) because we were afraid if we went inside to get a drink someone would make us stay there and we wanted to keep playing outside. There was also the occasional grown up who deemed us too dirty to come in the house and said if we were thirsty we could get a drink from the hose. These were the exceptions though. No southerner that I ever knew would drink a Coke or tea that wasn't iced or coffee that wasn't hot. It just wasn't done. The first people I saw drinking a tepid beverage were not southern or even American. It was just more proof that the rest of the world was strange. I'm not sure when this changed for me, but now I really don't care about temperature at all. I enter my office every day carrying hot coffee for the morning and iced tea for the afternoon, but as one cools and the other warms, I just keep sipping. I don't know why I bother heating and icing them in the first place. So, the suggested practice of "drink only water, without ice and without flavoring" was not the hardest thing ever. Well, except for the caffeine. I could quit drinking coffee (really) but I don't want to, and I didn't have time to deal with the headache. I did, however, spend time thinking about Heidi's real question.

What am I truly thirsting for in my life right now?

I am a teacher, and it's all I ever wanted to be. I've been teaching for 37 years, and I love it every day. Lately, though, I've been wondering if there is something more or different. I like the Quaker saying, "Proceed as the way opens." I'm trying to be open to other possibilities without doing something drastic that I might regret. Is there another teaching option at JSU? Is there a way to work with students and teachers that doesn't take place in a classroom? It's a good spot to be in because if no way ends up opening for me to proceed into, I'm happy as is. But I'm looking. And waiting. And thirsting.

Here We Sit Like Birds in the Wilderness

Did you ever sing that camp song? It was the go-to when waiting for something important. Like lunch. Here we sit like birds in the wilderness, waiting for this ________. It's a silly song and absolutely not worth remembering, but it rolled around in my head today after I read Thursday: The Wilderness this morning. Beyond silly, the song doesn't even really make sense because wouldn't birds be at home in the wilderness? Heidi says, "Lent is a wilderness set in time" (Forty days to be exact. Actually 46, but who's counting.) and it is "less a time to suffer and more a time to grow in wonder and vulnerability." Wilderness might be as subjective as one's interior castle. I tried to sketch it as suggested, but it didn't go well. Maybe I'll try again. But the point is that solitude in the wilderness can be peaceful or stressful. I learned today that good, happy excitement and sheer terror both result from the exact same chemical that the body sends to the brain. Somehow the stress gets interpreted correctly by whatever system is flipping the switches. Context, and all. Anyway, this reminded me of some cactus that my friend Diana gave me from her garden in San Antonio. They thrived for a while and even bloomed the first couple of years.

Then they became homesick for Texas and very tired of the Alabama wilderness in which they found themselves. I tried to keep them warm and watered, but eventually the loss of their natural sustenance took its toll.

They don't bloom anymore, and one of them is trying its best to grow itself right back to the ground. If there is a moral here, I suppose it might be that too much wilderness leads to diminishing returns. That's probably what would happen to me in my tiny house too. Fun and blooming for a while until one day I realize I'm a cranky old woman who hasn't bathed in a week. I love the church calendar cycle of fasting and feasting with the emphasis on a time and season for everything. Ok, there's a better song to get stuck in my head... There is a season, turn, turn, turn,......

Holy Solitude in the Interior Castle

I wasn't trying for the award for most pretentious title, but I might have won it with that one. Another Lent has come around, and my chosen devotional is called Holy Solitude: Lenten Reflections with Saints, Hermits, Prophets, and Rebels by Heidi Haverkamp. It seems like every time I pick up a study there is some reference to Teresa of Avila's book, The Interior Castle. I know it's a masterpiece which is why I've read it several times over the past 20 years, but I just don't get it. I'm going to try again. On this Ash Wednesday, the author suggests drawing our interior castle. Here's my attempt.

Maybe I chose this book because solitude is my happy place. It fits my introverted (selfish?) idea of a good day spent alone eating popcorn and reading a book after a nice long walk on the trail. I think the author gets this because we share a fantasy of living alone in a little house. Even as a child, my friend Kim had a playhouse in her back yard that I wanted to move into. It was the mother of all playhouses, with steps leading up to a tiny porch and real windows that opened, but still. The author, (can I just call her Heidi?) points out that that scripture doesn't generally encourage solitude. We're reminded that it's warmer in the bed with two people (Eccl 4:10-11) and that living alone is self-indulgent and lacking in sound judgement (Prov. 18:1), but solitude has its place. If I thought this was going to be easy, I should have read a little further to see that Heidi recommends fasting and almsgiving, too. I tried to fast from last night's supper until tonight's, but a friend surprised me at a campus event with Valentine cookies, and I'm pretty sure that Jesus said that the one rule of fasting is to not be a jerk about it. I don't know if I was really thinking about Jesus, but I decided to be gracious and accept the cookie. It was delicious.

Conversations with the Future -- 1

Millennials have officially overtaken Baby Boomers as America's largest living generation. What a relief. Maybe there is still time to salvage America. My generation had it all. We were too young for Viet Nam and too old for the Gulf Wars. We had cheap health insurance, safe housing, fully funded Social Security, and 70s rock music. Education was so affordable that "working your way through college" meant getting a part time minimum wage job and graduating debt free. So did we climb up on the shoulders of these giant advantages and make the world a better place? Oh, heavens no. We built big houses, filled them with trinkets, and sat around in our big hair staring at TV all day and night. Our response to lingering Civil Rights issues was flight to the suburbs or if our town was too small to have suburbs then we founded small Christian academies for all our educational needs. We said "separate, but equal" like we meant it. We turned church into belief clubs that promised insurance against unpleasant eternal consequences. Somehow this all seemed to make sense at the time, then one day our millennial children looked at us and cried bullshit. We were stunned. They said that black, brown, and mixed people were people. They said that life would go on if gay people married the ones they loved. They snapped a picture of our heirlooms with their cell phones and said no thanks when we tried to pass down our trinkets. They moved into tiny houses. And they left church in droves.

I think they may be on to something.

I'm fortunate to spend much of my time on a college campus. It's like watching the future walk around with a backpack and an energy drink. Hopefully my sphere of influence isn't completely eclipsed, but it's their turn. And I'm glad. I see good things ahead. Lord knows we set the bar awfully low, but they don't even seem to be especially angry about it. They have some interesting things to say, and I'm going to listen.