Cold Enough For Ya?

I spent the day in a tunnel, but never lost sight of the light at the end of it. I sparked the light myself by posting one of Jen Lemen's posters on my office door. It feels like a grab bag for me - every time I walked into my office I grabbed a word or a color and held it while I worked. The poster is not on etsy any longer, but it looks like these. It's mighty powerful art. I actually sold some psychologically toxic household items on ebay to people who will enjoy them, and used the proceeds to buy Jen Lemen's art, which in itself was a pretty wonderful process.

In the midst of some problems at work that shall remain undetailed, a sypathetic colleague asked ,"Do you regret coming here?" Turns out she or he was projecting just a little (!). I don't regret coming here, and by 'here' I mean this state, this town, this house, and this college. It's nice to live here, but it will be better to have been living here. And there are days when I'm glad I was raised with a pie-in-the-sky-in-the-sweet-bye-and-bye theology, because I cling more to my belief that God called us here than a daily experience of bliss. Have I mentioned that I've been severely sleep-deprived since last March? I believe I have.

I thought I was feeling lonely, but according to wikipedia (which, if you're one of my students, you still can't cite in your papers even though I just cited it here) loneliness is "a feeling of being cut off, disconnected and alienated from other people. The lonely person may find it difficult or even impossible to have any form of meaningful human contact." I have too much meaningful human contact, so I guess I'm out of the lonely club. Oh, they don't join together in a club, do they? I'm not lonely, I'm lonely for. I'm lonely for familiar street signs, for the familiar dining room tables at familiar friends' homes, for the familiar sound of car tires crunching sub-zero snow. Minnesotans, no need to leave a comment about the weather - I've received at least six e-mails telling me how cold it is today!

Good thing I have myself to keep me company. This morning I breathed for about 3 or 4 minutes, and my soul said to me, "This is an OK place for you to live." So I opened my eyes and looked out at the wonderful hill and mountains beyond our small yard. But my soul corrected me saying, "No, this is an OK place for you to live." Oh. Whether I'm breathing in the moist, clean country air of south central Pennsylvania or the barely inhalable freeze of Minnesota, I'm at home in this skin, and it's an OK place to live.

Sometimes You Must Quote Yourself

To quote one of the most thought-provoking questions I've encountered recently, "Is remaining in a difficult marriage a spiritual practice, or just a foolish waste of one's life?" The only easy marriages I know are those I don't really know. Many of the marriages I know most closely, including the long-term, Christian, loving ones, harbor some besetting dissatisfaction -- unmet needs, selfishness, absence of sex, persistent same-sex desire, profound loneliness, mental illness, and the like. Marriage is not much of a vehicle for self-actualization or sexual fulfillment, two of its strongest selling points in the American Christian market these days.

Liz gets divorced because of "bone-crushing isolation, corrosive insecurity, insidious resentment, and [a] complete dismantling of self..." (84). Her mother, on the other hand, stayed married to a man who lived in 'his own peculiar universe of low-grade obligious neglect.' Her mother got her own needs met, and whenever her husband happened to show up for the relationship, received him. In my favorite three pages, 82-84, Liz compares herself to her mother. Mother lived without -- she sacrificed intimacy for a long, stable marriage, an intact multigenerational family, and a measure of self-confidence. Liz acknowledges these pay-offs as 'massive', but for herself won't tolerate the isolation, insecurity, and resentment -- she feels obligated even, to provide better for her self.

There are so many good things to want from the married life, but perhaps it's rare to have them all: intimacy, sex, friendship, an intact structure for one's children, right standing with one's religion. Sometimes I think difficulty in marriage is temporary -- we're both growing, and surely are moving toward health and wholeness in all of these areas. But what if that's not true? What if the choice is not one of patience, but sacrifice? You can have an intact family for your children, but at the expense of intimacy. You can have best friendship, but without sex. Many, many people I know make those choices when they choose to remain married, and I believe the choice to live without is honorable. It's good to be patient and hope for change, and eventually receive a blessing. But it's also good to sacrifice -- to do without and to lose -- because this is also a path of sanctification. Or is it? It's a step of faith to get divorced -- to head into the unknown, alone. But it's also faith to stay married, to believe that the losses and the gaps and the wounds matter.

And even more scary to a legalistic Christian is the possibility of grace falling like rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Liz got divorced for reasons that are not biblically sound, yet she finds herself 'in God's palm' through spiritual practice and falls in love with a wonderful man. As a Christian, the easy way to read Eat, Pray, Love is to judge Liz's reasons for getting divorced, resent her freedom, and denounce her amazing love affair with the sexy Brazilian on the beaches of Bali. The more challenging read, for me, is to acknowledge the reality of the grace she encounters on her journey, and to wish her well. A good marriage isn't guaranteed by following God's rules for marriage and divorce --we all walk by faith, in need of grace.

Are you my guru?

I'm grading 40 papers, half of which are titled "Eat, Pray, Live." Why did the students all choose a title that plays off the book I just happen to be reading? Oh, right, I forgot I had titled their fieldwork assignment "Eat, Pray, Live" -- go to an ethnic restaurant or a culturally unfamiliar church and then analyze the experience with cultural anthropology concepts. I don't think "Eat, Pray, Live" will ever gain the notoriety of Eat, Pray, Love, but that's OK - let's talk about the book. Did you read it? What did you think?

One of my lingering questions is whether Liz Gilbert could have gained the wisdom and balance she did by staying in her marriage? Is remaining in a difficult marriage a spiritual practice, or just a foolish waste of one's life? I'd like to believe our most strenuous commitments -- those that bind us even when we'd rather leave -- pay off eventually. It's hard not to judge her for leaving a marriage just because it made her miserable. And then it's hard not to judge myself for being such a judgmental meanie.

But the question that lingers even longer is, Who can be my guru? Instead of gurus, American Christianity produces superstars, glossy shiny religious celebrities who so often turn out to have feet of clay. A guru doesn't seem to be morally or existentially better than anyone else -- it's just that they are on the earth to serve a particular social role, that of practicing spirituality and helping others do the same. They are socially recognized and supported in that role -- it's not just their own entrepreneurial charisma and self-marketing that creates their sphere of influence. Maybe it's OK that our Christian public figures operate out of roles that are generated by the culture -- entrepreneur, celebrity, CEO. But let's be aware that those roles, and the strengths and drawbacks associated with each, come straight from the culture and not from the Bible. As long as we're being syncretistic about religious leadership, why not create a space for gurus?

My latest book

I'm nearly finished with my latest book. It is unlikely than more than seven people will ever read it. Due to its small readership, and the fact that it will be self-published, I will leave it off my vita. Why, however, does my dissertation warrant the awarding of a degree and prime real estate on my vita? It was read by only three people (two of the three people on my committee, and my mom). With twice the readership of that which earned me a PhD, Big Burps and Stinky Farts: An Alphabet of Paris Boy Sickness Between December 30, 2007 and January 12, 2008 deserves to be treated as literature. If you want to read it, I'll share it with you, but I won't post it on the blog. It's as gross as possible, so boys who are 8, 10, or 12 can laugh at how sick they were when they were 2.

The first paragraph of the book has a problem - can someone edit this for me? The final sentence is supposed to set up a sense of anticipation, but something is wrong with the grammar. Rewrites are invited.

We thought it was just a one-time thing, but we were wrong; just how wrong, we couldn’t have foreseen.

Teach, Play, Love

Deepak Chopra's Ageless Body Timeless Mind is so 1990s, I know, but it really changed my life. In Christian terms, it's vocation. What is it, that when you're doing it, you lose track of time, your body calms even while excited and working hard, your mind and will focus on a single point? You're enlivened, in tune with life, in love. That's it -- what you were made to do. So do it, and try to do less of the other stuff.

Monkey mind will always tell you there's too much other stuff, so you can't ever get to the real thing, until you finally die having missed the life that really is life. My excuses are flaring up -- I have too many responsibilities to live in the zone. When I picture myself, I see a woman swimming with the water up to her upper lip. Sometimes she slips, and her nose is covered, and she battles to recover, but even a good recovery still has her chin and entire body underwater. I'm just working really hard on a daily basis to keep my nose clear for breathing. I get angry a lot, simply because I don't have the time or space to express the fear and loneliness that animates the anger.

But ageless body timeless mind is there for me. For me, it's teaching and playing with my kids. That's it; everything else is multitasked. And I should be grateful that I get to spend at least 10 hours a week in class, and perhaps 10-12 hours per week of pure play with the boys. Both those things have lots of adiaphora (can I use that word there?) - at work there is e-mail, course planning, grading, and meetings, and at home there is cleaning, cooking, cleaning, and cooking -- and so the long hours of every long day are filled. Perhaps the tedium can also become a discipline of attentiveness - thousands of monks have proved that possibility. But even if I never learn to pluck the stones out of the raisins for Jesus, I get at least an hour or two a day to slip into pure attentiveness, either with my students or with my boys.

What is that for you these days -- that thing that, when you do it, enlivens and captivates you?

Ghetto Paradise

Yesterday I took the twins to a park in one of the focus areas of my Harrisburg Neighborhoods course, an ethnographic research course focused on urban neighborhoods. They played with ghetto kids in a tiny corner park hemmed in by rowhouses on all sides. They looked very naive and very white, which proves that the apples don't fall far from the tree.

For years I was certain I'd raise my children in an inner city, because I was committed to inner city life for a lifetime. The calling lasted only thirteen years, so surely God meant a feline lifetime; I never mishear Him. Surprising even myself, I find my mid-30-year-old self driving in from the country to Harrisburg, the 400th largest city in the nation (smaller in population than the Minneapolis suburb where I grew up). Sitting at the park, watching my own back plus two little backs, I felt good about the agonizing process of letting go of urban life and ministry even before anything else -- my children, this new job, living in Pennsylvania -- was within sight.

It's so fun to teach urban issues again and to explore a new city. Several years ago, one unexpected insult added to the injury of infertility was my unassuagable jealousy toward ghetto girls who walked around the neighborhood with unplanned blessings in their strollers. It was enough to make me want to move out of the city, which I did. Now, instead of triggering pain and hopelessness, urban people light up the energy and passion I felt at 18, when I first discovered there was a place for me in the city.

The life I used to have -- the one in which I lived in an interesting inner-city neighborhood, biking around doing good deeds, reading and researching every single day -- was a good one. I'm in the midst of Eat, Pray, Love, and my strongest response to it is jealous anger -- I planned my trip to Indonesia and couldn't even begin to get all the snacks, onesies, and diapers into the imaginary suitcase. Seeking a life of meaning and balance seems outrageously indulgent and fantastical -- I just try to get the vomit off my pant leg before going to work. Seriously. Much more than marriage, children are the singular factor that alter my life. It's not just that they demand my energy, time, and resources; they compel me to organize every single minute, calorie, and dollar I have around their best interests. It's a compelling life, and I don't wish for any other. But sitting in that ghetto park, a little bit of my graduate school self was reawakened. That physically agile, curious, assertive young woman isn't down for the count; she's just being sat upon by a pile of children for a few years. And even if I live among cornfields and cows, there's still a place for me in the city.