Sin, be not proud.

“But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea.”
–William Langland

On waiting and resting.

Life is never a straight line.  Even when you know your heading, you are often off course.  This is not a time to panic.  It is also not a time to swing the wheel at random, hoping to fall into line with another traveller, or to be caught in a current.  Movement seems reassuring, but we must make sure we are moving in the right direction.  Sometimes stillness is the thing.

 

My friend Adam quoted Brother Lawrence to me today, who said that if God is calling him to wash the dishes, it is in doing the dishes that God will meet him.  It doesn’t matter if he spends hours reading his Bible, praying, meditating, calling out to God.  God is waiting, patiently, for Lawrence at the kitchen sink.

 

So with rest.  God met Elijah in his rest, and ministered to him there, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.”  If the Spirit of God is calling us to rest, it is no good to work all day and night, even — perhaps especially — in God’s service and in his Name.  God is patiently waiting for us in our beds, prone and unmoving, our posture as helpless and as trusting as a baby’s.  There are sermons to be written and preached, there are people who haven’t heard the gospel, there are hungry people who need to be fed, and lonely people who need to be noticed, but if God has said to us, “rest” we will not find him in the sermon, in the witnessing, in the hungry and the lonely.  He is in our own bed, where he told us to meet him, if we would only listen.

 

Good night.

Almost Two in the Morning, or When I Frown, I’m Happy

I just have a few random things to share. One, I want to confess that I secretly love the words “car keys,” and say them often to myself, with a Russian — rather than a Spanish — roll to the r. “Carrkeys. Carrkeys.” Try it, it’s fun.

Also, I just flew OVER a lightning storm. It was probably a thunderstorm as well, but we couldn’t hear it on the plane. Just silent flashes of light below that illuminated mountains of white clouds. Darkness out the tiny window, then LIGHT, suddenly a whole landscape outside, then a darkness.

I told my twelve year old self about it. She is very easily impressed. “Jessica, you live in Boston.” She is in awe. “You take the subway almost every day.” A tremor of suppressed joy. “Your job is to hang out with people from all over the world and talk to them about Jesus.” She can hardly believe her luck. And this one always knocks her off her feet: “You get to fly on an airplane ALL THE TIME.” She frowns, and her gaze becomes unfocused. Don’t worry, this is just her way of experiencing deep joy. To let the laugh out is to diminish it, to allow it to mingle with the everyday air and be diluted. But to hold it in keeps it safe and treasured: A warm glow in your belly that belongs only to you. Yes, I was an odd child. But one that knows the honor of flying above a lighting storm, even at 34, and feeling the warm glow of inward joy.

Thoughts on feeling

I’ve been wondering lately if some people are wired to feel things more deeply than others.  I have always thought that we all feel the same amount of psychic pain, though we have vastly different coping mechanisms.  Me, I have NO coping mechanisms, or maybe poor ones, but at least I’m not repressing my emotions.  I would LOVE to learn the skill of compartmentalizing my feelings (though my friends who can say it’s not that great), but no, I feel what I feel, when I feel it, and then I have to process it until it’s processed.  I haven’t even found a way of shortening that process.

Well, not really.  I’ve found ways, but they’re hard work.  Prayer is one way, and actually maybe the only successful one, though I do find that deep breathing along with prayer can be useful.  Lately my prayer word has been “trust.”  Someone suggested “trust” on the inhale and “God,” or “the universe” on the exhale.  I rejected the latter on the grounds that the universe conjures images of swirling galaxies, black holes, supernovas and endless black, airless miles — not really something I find trustworthy.  “God” is certainly the object of my attempted trust, but somehow it feels better to just say “trust” on the inhale and exhale.  Maybe even the word “God” has extraneous connotations for me.  But of course it’s God whom I trust, and it is God who is praying through me, the Spirit in me calling out to the Father, a process which is always happening, whether I’m aware of it or not.   “Trust” takes me out of the driver’s seat, a place that I’m terrified to be but always jumping into, and reminds me that Someone else is driving, that I can close my eyes, put my feel up on the dashboard and just wait to see where we’re going.

But this needs to be repeated, ad nauseum, and it takes a lot of mental effort.  I don’t know why I’m surprised.  Brother Lawrence would pause every fifteen minutes to acknowledge God’s presence, which works out to 96 times per day, not counting sleep which I don’t think he did much of anyway.  I’m no good at this kind of discipline, but I’m getting better at cutting short the whirl of anxieties in my head with a good deep breath and “trust.”

Where are we going, though?  Why did we pass that turn back there?  I thought I was supposed to turn there?  Breathe.  Trust.

What if I’m not dressed properly?  What if I’m not prepared?  Breathe.  Trust.

Maybe I should turn on the car radio?  Listen to some tunes?  Maybe I should listen to NPR?  What if something is happening I am supposed to know about?  Breathe.  Trust.

And so on, over and over, not day by day but minute by minute.

I am confused because his yoke is supposed to be easy and his burden light.  This past year has felt far from easy or light.  But Oh the peace in that moment of a deep breath and “trust.”  Someone else is driving.  Today I was trying over and over again to solve a problem in my mind, and it finally occurred to me that all I had to do was ask for wisdom, and trust that it will be given to me .   I need a lot less of a game plan than I thought I did.  My job is to put my feet on the dashboard and run my fingers through the wind.  His job is to drive.

Yours in the journey.

The last turn of the page

There is something wonderful, even sacred, about finishing a book.  My preference is that it be late at night, later, perhaps, than I should be awake, and that everyone else in the house be asleep.  I should be in bed, the book and bed illuminated by a single lamp.  It should be silent, but I had not noticed the silence, as absorbed in the pages as I had been.  Then, I turn the last page, I slow my pace, lingering, savoring the last paragraph as the last bite of an ice cream cone.  Close the book, lay it on my chest and…

Well, if you don’t know what I mean, my explanation isn’t going to make any sense, and if you do understand I don’t have to tell you.  But there is a shock of coming to the end of something that has totally absorbed you, a realization of reality, but a new perspective on that reality.  You return to the world, but you return to it changed.  Even a bad book can have this effect, but, Oh, Lord, the good ones.

Last night I finished The Brothers Karamazov.

In my bed, lit by a single lamp, the rest of the house long asleep.

The house was silent.  I closed the book, laid it on my chest.

And was suddenly in the deepest, truest prayer I had been in in months.

You see how I can’t write about “how” or “why,” or even  explain what it means to be met, to meet yourself, at the end of a book.  But if you know, you know.

And about The Brothers K.

Read it.  That’s all.

Go.

Now.

Read.

Fun with ice

The ice cubes in our freezer had melted and refrozen into one giant block.  I enjoyed melting it creatively with hot water.

Nearing the end

Swiss ice

Stolen from a friend

Lately my friend Mark and I have been talking about the value of hope, and not, unfortunately, in a cheerful way. We both have illness that we have struggled with for a long time (he much longer than I), and agreed that it was easier not to hope than to hope and again and again be disappointed. It felt wrong to me, but that’s where I was. And still am to some extent. What about Philippians, suffering produces perseverence, perseverance character and character hope? Well, I may need character building, I’ll grant you, but I don’t really see that Mark does. Enough already.

Before I share the thing that cheered me (somewhat) up, I want to share the lyrics of a couple of songs that have been channeling my frustration and hopelessness.

“Because the keys to the kingdom got locked inside the kingdom

And the angels fly around in there, but we can’t see them.

But I’ve got a girl in the war, Paul, I know that they can hear me yell.

If they can’t find a way to help her they can go to hell.”

~Josh Ritter, Girl in the War

and

“I wish you would
Come pick me up
Take me out
Fuck me up
Steal my records
Screw all my friends
They’re all full of shit
With a smile on your face
And then do it again”

~Ryan Adams, Pick Me Up

I’m not really sure what that last song means to me, other than a hopeless resignation, but it is somehow very satisfying to hear him sing, “Fuck me up.” Like, I don’t care, do anything to me, it doesn’t make a difference at this point. A lyric from Ray LaMontagne did that for me last year,

“Well I looked my demons in the eye
Laid bare my chest said do your best destroy me
See I’ve been to hell and back so many times
I must admit you kinda bore me”

So this is how I’m cruising along, and I’m not saying that I’m doing badly: I’m getting things done, I’m officially on staff with IV, being paid for my job, and a lot of other things in my life are coming together, too. But there’s that lack of hope, and the feeling that I don’t want to hope. Then Mark finds this:

Let us in all the troubles of life remember – that our one lack is life – that what we need is more life – more of the life-making presence in us making us more, and more largely live. Let us rouse ourselves to live. Of all things let us avoid the false refuge of a weary collapse, a hopeless yielding to things as they are…he has the victory who, in the midst of pain and weakness, cries out…for strength to fight; for more power, more conscious-ness of being, more God in him. (George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons)

I have been choosing the false refuge of a weary collapse, a hopeless yielding to things as they are. I repent. The victory is not in me being strong, the victory is in crying out for strength. More power, more consciousness of being, more God in me. May it be so, for me and for you.

The Brothers Karamazov

Is absolutely destroying me once again.  It’s like being hit in the head with a slab of concrete wrapped in a lemon wedge, as Zaphod Beeblebrox once described a certain beverage.  I am absolutely smitten with Alyosha.  More than smitten.  I desperately want to channel his amazing ability to take his own ego out of a situation and be there wholly and unconditionally for God and for others.  Of course I realize that he is a fictional character.  I’m sure Dostoevsky himself was not so winsome.

Media update

The newest Office was really nice. Painfully funny, but not so painful as last week’s, and the sweetest little segment of Jim talking to the camera… You know what I mean if you saw it.

At the request of the inimitable Dub-P I’m reading Pagan Christianity and disagreeing with most of it. I’ll try to post a review when I finish it. Just to clarify, I don’t think Dub-P swallows the book hook line and sinker, but was stretched and challenged by reading it.

Next in queue for reading are a bunch of books on Catholicism that another friend of mine wants me to read, including Rome, Sweet Home and By What Authority. Pretty much the polar opposite perspective of Pagan Christianity? (Incidentally, I don’t think you should have question marks in titles; this may just be my opinion, but it seems stylistically wrong to me. Titles don’t have periods in them, and exclamation points are a mark of the author’s [or publisher's] failure to find language strong enough to stand on its own. IMO)

I am about to hop over to abc.com to see if there is a new Gray’s Anatomy yet. Life has been stressful lately, and I’m feeling the need to get lost in fictional melodrama for a while.

And WHO are YOU? (the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland)

TV’s back! *spoiler alert*

The writer’s strike is over, and new shows are starting to appear.  I don’t actually have a TV, but there are three or four shows that I watch online.  First, and the one I’m least ashamed of is Friday Night Lights, about which David Kern will speak with much more eloquence than I.  Yet.  I highly recommend it, though this season is prematurely finished due to the writer’s strike.   But it has been picked up for a third season, so the fall looks bright.  Second, and possibly my favorite, is the Office, which had a new episode on Thursday (the whole fourth season so far can be watched at nbc.com).  Sadly, the new episode was one of the ones which, I think, are vital to the ethos of the show in that they delve into the sadness of the characters’ lives, yet really too sad to be funny.  Others may find it funny, and who am I to judge them?  ;)  The only two places I laughed - *this is the spoiler alert, kids* - is when Jim realized that Michael had staged the late work day just to get Jim to say he had no plans so that he and Pam would have to come over for a dinner party, and when Jim tried to leave the party without Pam and Pam said, “You wouldn’t leave the party here all by itself, would you?”  Tee hee.  *end spoiler alert*

The new 30 Rock wasn’t all that exciting.  Not much to say about that, except that when they hit the sweet spot they hit it well, but there’s a lot of ho-humming while you wait for that to happen.

The last one I watch is pure escapism, and I excuse myself by telling you that MY PARENTS got me into it.  Grey’s Anatomy.  It’s basically a soap opera, but what keeps me coming back is the very serious struggle of Meredith Grey to cope with her past and her inner demons to accept the love that is right there in front of her on a silver platter.  Unfortunately the last show before the writer’s strike didn’t bode well for this progress.  I think the next new episode to GA is coming in a couple of weeks.

The other show I used to watch is LOST, but I am so hopelessly behind — somewhere in season 3 — that I fear I will never catch up.  Still, the whole thing from start to finish is online, so there’s still hope.  In case I do ever get back to it NOBODY TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS, okay?

I promise to write about deeper things than TV sometime soon.  Don’t leave me, okay?  I have abandonment issues.  I love you!  Don’t leave me!  Leave me alone!  And so on.  Yes, it’s exhausting to date me: I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a ton of patience and think I’m really cute (well, the chemistry helps build the patience, I guess). 

How are YOU?  Seriously, you never talk to me.  What are you FEELING?  What are your hopes and dreams?  I want to know!

JFK