Waiting Games

Waiting in line.  Waiting for a call from a friend.  Waiting to hear from a job or school prospect.  Waiting for that crush to like you back.  Waiting for a grade or a score or a raise.  Waiting for a plane or in traffic when you want nothing more than to be home.  Waiting for a child to be born.  Waiting to hear from God.

In a nutshell, waiting is not fun.  Then why, if Advent is the season of waiting, do I love it so much?  I decided that it's because waiting is something I can relate to.  Very intimately.

Waiting, like wandering, is the story of my life.  It might as well be my middle name.  Or you could just put an elipses: Devon...Parish.  That's me.  Just one dramatic pause after another.  I've also varyingly phrased it as "eternal hunger" and "holy dissatisfaction".  But if you boil it down, the essence is that I'm searching, hoping, and waiting for something more to bust into my life and into this world, bringing love and joy and peace and meaning.

What's great about Advent is that it models the painful waiting and expectation, but then, magically, it ends.  There is resolution.  Every year, four weeks after Advent begins, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day roll around.  Baby Jesus is born, bringing love and joy and peace and meaning to our world.  And though it is really only a beginning, we are reminded that the waiting is worth it.  Just as daybreak follows the night and spring follows the winter, His kingdom comes.  Hope does not disappoint.

One of the most poignant moments I've ever had was at "Lessons and Carols" my junior year of college.  The service is a holiday tradition in which Bible verses pertaining to Advent are read aloud with Christmas carols sung or performed by a choir between each passage.  That year, I did the first reading from Genesis, and then I sat in the front pew of the chapel as we read and sang the whole Bible story in an hour - from Creation to the trials of Israel to the desperate cries of the prophets to the answer to those cries in the person of Jesus.  Suddenly it became very clear to me that this story was Truth.  I could see that all the pains of my day to day life, all the doubts and anxieties, were wasted investments.  The only bet worth taking was the one that said the promises of scripture would all come true.  After sobbing in the front row for the entire service, I approached the Chaplain, red-faced and weary, hoping for a hug.  "What happened?" she exclaimed, "Are you okay?  You had me worried!"  "I'm okay," I said, "I just had an epiphany, that's all."  I'd been waiting for that for a long time.

This Advent, I'm learning another lesson: that epiphanies are rare.  Even when the answers finally come, they don't usually come all at once.  One period of waiting yields to another as promises are fulfilled in stages.  This week, I finally got a job.  After nine long months of applications and interviews, after trying desperately to listen to where God was calling me, a door has opened!  Now I have a chance to start anew in what looks to be a better scenario for me from every angle.  But there are still a lot of question marks.  Where will I live? and with whom?  How long will I stay?  Will I like this job?  Where will I dance and go to church, and who will my new friends be?  How does this fit into the one true story that Advent tells?

As I dive into another dramatic pause, hoping impatiently as the direction of my life unfurls at the speed of chilled molasses, I will try to remember what those shepherds and wise men and scholars and rabbis must have been thinking when they heard that the Savior was born in Bethlehem: "Hallelujah!  He has come at last!  Our messiah is...a baby?!  If he can't speak or walk or feed himself, how is he going to redeem our people??!  I'm going to be dead by the time he gets around to building a kingdom!" 

I guess it's only human to ask "What now?" the minute something good happens.  I blame our Creator.  In the words of the Psalmist, "I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits..."


Consult God’s instruction and the testimony of warning. If anyone does not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God. Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness. Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those who were in distress. In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the nations, by the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan—The people walking in darkness have seen a great light... (Isaiah 8:20-9:2)

What if...

...I never again made a decision governed by fear?


I just returned from a lovely reunion of old college friends in Seattle. Among them was Kitty, my roommate of two years, who has been living with stage four kidney cancer for a year and a half now. Saturday night, as we were all seated around a cozy dining room table drinking tea and eating pie after a feast of grilled chicken and veggies, somebody asked Kitty how cancer had changed her outlook on life. She said this: "Cancer has made me realize how many of my decisions are rooted in fear. I've vowed to try not to let fear hold me back anymore."

Whoa. On the one hand, this is not all that different from what we hear on movies like The Bucket List and Last Holiday: folks with a terminal illness decide to live out their last days fearlessly by going skydiving, taking lavish vacations, and even reconnecting with estranged family members. But somehow it sounded different to me coming from a twenty-six year old and a good friend. I knew she wasn't referring to a reckless "I'm going to die anyway" attitude, but rather she had just begun to perceive with extra clarity how fear can really chip away at your everyday quality of life. Kitty's comment hit me like a brick in the face, because though I don't have cancer, the battle against fear is one I've been fighting for as long as I can remember.

Suddenly I started to imagine what my life would look like if fear had no place in it. What would be different? It wasn't too hard to spit out a relatively long list.

Money would never matter. It has taken getting older to realize that money is a big deal whether you have it or you don't. It preoccupies the minds of the rich and the poor alike, and at certain times and in certain ways I have been both. If fear about money were absent from my life, I would never work a full time job again. I might work full time, but not at the same job. I would dabble in each of the things that I love - dance, writing, the environment, social work - and avoid the things I do solely for my daily bread (and to pay off the college loans). I would live minimally, with others, but I would travel often and eat well. I would live where the land and the culture make me feel at home, and not just where the jobs are. I would still go to the library for my books and movies, but I would own every song I ever listened to and liked. I wouldn't put things off till that mythical moment when, at long last, I reach the edge of the ocean of debt and step out onto the shores of economic freedom - I'd just do them.

Loneliness would never matter. I pride myself on not being one of those girls who thinks of nothing but boys and relationships. But I suffer from my own breed of codependence. I don't feel adequate to pursue ambitious exploits on my own. If the fear of loneliness were not a factor in my life, I would be happy to hike the Pacific Crest Trail by myself. I would not feel the need to pre-cast an entire organization before starting one. I would go to the church I like rather than the one my friends go to, or even the one my friends are starting. I would not wait to be invited to be roommates with people I love; I'd get my own place and invite them to follow me. If I were not afraid of stepping out on my own, my Christian hippie commune idea would have become a reality five years ago. And when I am honest with myself, if loneliness didn't matter, I wouldn't care that most of my friends are married and that I'm a perpetual third wheel. I wouldn't secretly wonder whether every decision was taking me closer to or further from my future mate.

Failure would never matter. Perfectionism runs deep in my veins. I want to be good - I want to be the best. I am obsessed with doing right, making the right choices. The phrase "'A' for effort" basically incites a gag reflex. But as we all know, perfectionism has its drawbacks. If I were not afraid to fail, it would never have taken me a year and a half to return to dance classes after moving to Chicago. I would not be afraid of sports, or video games, or anything competitive, ever. I would write a book. I would start a dance company. I would learn an instrument. Heck, I'd at least lead that current events Bible study I've been thinking about. I'd confront my boss about being given more responsibilities. I'd try negotiating a salary for once. Who knows, maybe if I weren't such a snob, I wouldn't scare the boys away. Nobody likes to be measured against an infinite standard. And one thing is definitely true: if I were not afraid of being less than perfect, I would dance for anyone who asked.

This imaginary person is not me. At least not the earthly me. An annoying little voice in my head insists, however, that it's who I was created to be: my "Garden of Eden" existence, or my heavenly one. And that means it's my responsibility to embody this fearless heroine or at the very least die trying. Otherwise, how much of my life has been wasted on fear? When I think about it, all the people I admire the most are the ones for whom money, loneliness, and failure don't get in the way. I ogle at the uninhibited.

Knowing myself, I'm probably not going to be able to quit fear cold turkey. I have to lower my dosage though. (Do they have a fear patch? Fear gum?) I have to learn to question my motives... to ask "What if?" with Kitty in mind. And maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to slowly sap fear's power day by day by day.

"God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and a of sound mind." -2 Timothy 1:7

Thin Places

In her second memoir, Bittersweet, Shauna Niequist describes a phenomenon she calls “thin places.” Thin places are moments or spaces when the membrane that separates the earthly from the divine is especially thin, or transparent, or porous. God breaks through, and you get a pure taste or glimpse of heaven right in the midst of everyday life. It's the “kingdom come,” the “something more” - technically if we are really in tune with the Spirit we are supposed to feel this way all the time, but for most of us, it's not an everyday thing. Of course, thinking in terms of thin places does help you keep an eye out for them, maybe catch a few you might otherwise have missed...

So, thinking back over my last year in Chicago, here are a few of the thin places I remember:

• In the pool, fully clothed, at Meg and Tyler's wedding. I remember hearing thunder and thinking I couldn't care less if I were struck by lightning and killed at that moment. I was surrounded by my favorite people in the world, singing and dancing and full of joy.
  
  
• The Point, in Hyde Park. Last fall, I met God there while my roommates were at choir practice, and a few weeks ago, I rode my bike down and met Him again. It's beautiful!
  
  
• Some amazing one-on-one conversations with wonderful people...
  • Pillow talk with Nicole in Switzerland.
  • Sushi and grapefruit juice and chocolate with Harts in the park.
  • Catching up with A at our condo.
    
    
• Moments of tragedy and fear that brought people together, forced us to trust...
  • Kitty's diagnosis, sudden surgery, each tiny miracle.
  • Watching the marriage of two beloved friends dissolve.
  • Hearing that an old friend's younger sister took her own life.
    
    
• Looking into the faces of babies and brides.
  
  
• Standing on the “L” platform, feeling the air change from summer to fall. Last year I was standing at Fullerton, this year at Wellington. Closed my eyes, felt the crisp breeze, and smelled the changing of the seasons.

Called to Singleness

Asking someone whether they are "called to singleness" or "called to celibacy" definitely makes my list of Top Ten Pet Peeves of Christian Culture (for a few hundred more of my pet peeves, check out the Stuff Christian Culture Likes blog).  Not long ago I got into a conversation with a girl after our small group meeting that went like this:

    Girl: "So, are you dating anyone?"
    Me: "Nope."
    Girl: "So, you're not looking to date?"
    Me: "Since when are those the only options??!"

Not long afterwords, the leaders of that same small group passed out a spiritual gifts survey, which each of us was supposed to pray about, complete, and share with them.  One of the gifts listed was Celibacy, defined as "the special ability that God gives to some members of the Body of Christ to remain single and enjoy it; to be unmarried and not suffer undue sexual temptations."  First of all, special ability?  Ha!  I've had the special ability to remain single my whole life without even trying!  As for enjoying it - well, it has its moments.  Second of all, what qualifies as undue sexual temptation?  Sure, if I looked at porn all day or thought of nothing but sex it might be a sign that I wasn't content in my singleness.  But what about noticing cute boys on the subway?  An affinity for Jane Austen novels?  Craving a good cuddle now and then?

To my utter horror, Celibacy ranked relatively high on my list of God-given gifts once I tallied the numbers.  I decided to look up the verses that were cited as evidence that singleness was, indeed, a so-called "spiritual gift".  The first was Matthew 19:9-12:

I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery." The disciples said to him, "If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry." Jesus replied, "Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.

In other words, if you can't be monogamous, don't get married.  If you're already a eunuch, make the most of it.  And if you have renounced marriage because God is your lover (aka the religious life), good for you - that's one less sin to worry about.  The second passage from Paul is more well known (1 Corinthians 7:5-9):

Do not deprive each other except by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

Paul does undeniably name staying single as a "gift from God" here.  He also says that Satan likes to use our lack of self control to tempt us, and that "coming together" with your spouse (sex outside of marriage is not an option) can hold the devil off.  (Insert mental image of God crooning The Beatles' "Come together, right now, over me" with Paul fittingly on bass, John the Baptist with backup guitar, and Jesus on the drums.)  Marriage and sex, according to Paul, are a "concession" allowed to those who would otherwise disrupt the kingdom-building effort by being perpetually twitterpated and "burning with passion".

This still leaves some of us stuck between a rock and a hard place.  At this particular moment, I am not necessarily "burning with passion," per se.  I can't even remember the last time a guy asked me to dinner.  But if a good-looking gentleman called me tomorrow wondering if I'd be up for a boat ride on Lake Michigan followed by a picnic, dancing, and a walk under the stars, would I be obligated to turn him down because Celibacy ranked highly on my spiritual gifts survey?  Heck NO (says my gut)!  Thankfully some of my favorite Christian thinkers back up my gut (who is nevertheless a trusted theologian) by describing some different ways to think about singleness and calling.

Lauren Winner, in her fabulous book, Real Sex, which everyone must read, writes this on the subject:

Perhaps we ought not to fixate on the call to lifelong singleness. Some people, of course, are called to lifelong singleness, but more of us are called to singleness for a spell, if even a very long spell. Often, our task is to discern a call to singleness for right now, and that's not so difficult. If your are single right now, you are called, right now, to be single – called to live single life as robustly, and gospel-conformingly, as you possibly can. The problem comes when the assumption that these are lifelong callings creeps in – panicked single folks think they must discern, at some given age on some given date, whether or not they are called to singleness forever. Again, consider professional callings. We are often called to certain vocational or professional paths for periods of time – one is called to be a doctor or a teacher or a waitress, but to discern a call to go to dental school at age twenty-four is not to assume that one will be called to work as a dentist forever. Perhaps at thirty-five, one will be called to stay home with small children. Perhaps at forty, one will be called to open a stationery store. Perhaps at sixty-three, one will be called to retire. Indeed, even calls to marriage are often not lifelong – not because of divorce, but because of death. Jane may be called to be married to Peter right now, but if Peter dies, she will find herself called, for a season, to singleness – to widowhood. (139)

Aaaah.  What a refreshingly sane thought.  Of course callings and gifts come and go!  We are dynamic individuals, responding to constantly shifting circumstances, and God made us that way.  Things are rarely as black and white as some would have us believe.  (DELETE any mental images of God as Michael Jackson.)  Even Shane Claiborne - who wrote in The Irresistible Revolution that God was his lover and that "We can live without sex, but we can't live without love, and God is love" - later adopted Winner's language about "seasons of calling" when he found himself with a serious girlfriend.  The change in his relationship status didn't render his earlier words untrue, but it definitely added some shades of gray to his understanding of 1 Corinthians 7 and Matthew 19.

Speaking on a "Singles in Ministry" panel at a conference, Claiborne also suggested asking yourself this question: What will allow me to pursue Jesus with the least distractions?  This, if you ask me, is a very helpful flip-flop of questions like Do I suffer undue sexual temptations? or Is this burning passion allowing Satan to tempt me?  Instead, we should be asking how we can best glorify God in our current situation.  Singleness, like marriage, is not a sentence to be dreaded or endured.  It is a lens through which God shows us - in part - the character of the Divine.  In another delicious (albeit long) passage from her book, Lauren Winner writes:

Of course, premarital abstinence is different from fasting, because when you fast you know you will eat again. Premarital abstinence is different from keeping vigil, because during your vigil you can be confident that you will sleep again. Unmarried Christians have no guarantee that they will ever get married. They have no guarantee of licit sex. Thus to practice premarital chastity is at times to feel as if you are being forever forbidden the satisfaction of a normal appetite […] Of course, the desire for sex is normal and natural, but many spiritual disciplines center on refraining from something normal. One who keeps vigil is abstaining from sleep in order to abide with God; one who fasts is abstaining from food in order to see that one is truly hungry for God; one who spends time alone forgoes the company of others in order to deepen a conversation with God; one who practices simplicity avoids luxury in order to attend more clearly to God. And the unmarried Christian who practices chastity refrains from sex in order to remember that God desires your person, your body, more than any man or woman ever will. With all aspects of ascetic living, one does not avoid or refrain from something for the sake of rejecting it, but for the sake of something else. In this case, one refrains from sex with someone other than one's spouse for the sake of union with Christ's Body. That union is the fruit of chastity. (128-129)

So, there you have it.  If "real sex" is union with Christ's Body, the chaste among us are one step ahead of the crowd.  And if one more person decides that I either need prayer for a nice husband or the calling card for the local convent, I've got an answer ready for them: I'm called to singleness...until I'm not.  I'm fasting from sex...for now.  I'm pursuing the path of the least distraction in an attempt to follow Christ.

I believe that God will always provide the tools to carry out his will. That means if I'm meant to be single, he'll satisfy my hunger for love, and if I'm not...he'd better introduce me to Mr. Right!  Mr. Right, if you are out there, I leave you with these words of a song by Alexi Murdoch:

So if I stumble, and If I fall
And if I slip now, and loose it all
And if I can't be, all that I could be
Will you? Will you wait for me?

 

Brain Pain

Perhaps the one thing worse than having a migraine is feeling like you are alone in your pain.  In the words of the ever-prophetic songwriter Don Chaffer, “the worst is my being alone.”  But alas!  I am not alone!  Today I learned that there is a special word for those who suffer from migraines, so there must be more than one of us.  And even better than this news is the word itself: migraineurs.  Makes us sound classy, like connoisseurs or chauffeurs or coiffeurs.  So without further ado, I shall dive into a survey of history’s most famous migraineurs, both real and imagined.

There are several artists who are believed to have suffered from migraines: Monet, Van Gogh, and Georges Seurat.  Apparently what we thought was “impressionism” is really an epidemic of headaches!  Pointillism is not just a creative style of painting where things are blurry close up and come into focus as you get further away; it is what Seurat was really seeing!  He was suffering from the well known migraine aura, or scintillating scotoma, which interrupts your vision in all kinds of fun ways.  And by fun I mean vomit-inducing, oh-crap-I’m-going-blind, get-me-to-a-dark-room-with-no-stimuli type stuff.  But if you are a stronger person, you might also take advantage of this visual anomaly to paint a timeless masterpiece.
 
Along the same lines, it turns out that authors Miguel Cervantes, Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll were also members of la Société de Migraineurs.  Imagined windmills, nonsequitor streams of consciousness, and visions of rabbit holes and jabberwocks are not the products of insanity or drug-induced hallucinations, but migraines.  Or perhaps the distinction between those is not so clear.  What others see as Lewis’ jibberish, a fellow migraine sufferer might read as a poignant effort at describing her pain:

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

[…] And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

Emily Dickinson, too, is said to have tasted the scourge of the invincible headache.  A large number of her poems address the dark battles being staged within the confines of her own skull.  When I look back at these works after having experienced hundreds, if not thousands, of migraines myself, I cannot help but see them in a new light.  Check this one out:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My Mind was going numb—

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space—began to toll,

 

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here—

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—then.

Monet and Seurat might have been a stretch, but Emily is certainly not.  Also on the list of real world migraineurs are Caesar, Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, both commanding generals in the Civil War: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Freud, Nietzsche… and Elvis.  Interpret those as you will.  Of those alive today, some stars who have admitted to migraines are Whoopi Goldberg, Lisa Kudrow, the woman who plays Bree on Desperate Housewives, the guy who played Farmer Hoggett in Babe, former NBA player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Terrell Davis of the Denver Broncos, who had to sit out the second quarter of Super Bowl XXXII due to a migraine.

Migraineurs can also be found in the pages of literature, though some – like my insurance company – might argue the diagnosis.  Nevertheless, I find it comforting to hear my pain named, described, and shared by a character.  We become kindred spirits.  As a migraine sufferer, my first kindred spirit was Mrs. Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.  A whole chapter is devoted to her thoughts and sensations as she lies on her bed in a dark room and waits for the “furry beast” in her brain to retreat.  She is awake, occasionally hearing noises in the house and interpreting them, but her eyes are closed and you hear the dialogue in her mind between hopeful peace and raging fire.  If McEwan’s details are not a product of his own experience, he definitely did his research.

Another kindred spirit from literature is the infamous Harry Potter.  Though his pain is never explicitly referred to as a migraine, Harry’s lightning-shaped forehead scar often burns, giving him a hell of a headache.  A few headache doctors picked up on this and actually published a study about it.  Here is some of the evidence Drs. Sheftell and Steiner cite that Harry’s pain is migraine-induced:

• Harry did not have headaches prior to the age of 11, a common age of onset for primary headache disorders, especially Migraine.
• The onset in Harry’s case seems to be some time prior to puberty since the first evidence of headaches in the series was apparent when he was 14.
• Although Harry’s headaches haven’t been frequent, they have periodically left him temporarily dysfunctional, thus significantly impacting his life and activities.
• All of Harry’s attacks strike without warning.
• Harry’s primary (and perhaps only) trigger is proximity to “He Who Must Not Be Named” (Lord Voldemort).

Unfortunately for Harry, his primary trigger is also the man he is called to destroy, so he can’t exactly steer clear of him.  I can relate, since my triggers of coffee, red wine, stress and hormones are equally unavoidable!  Even when Harry is taught the art of Occlumency, which is supposed to prevent Voldemort from invading his brain, he wrestles with whether or not to succumb to the episodes.  On the one hand, his scar aches makes him miserable…

“It was pain beyond anything Harry had ever experienced...his head was surely splitting along his scar; ...he wanted it to end...to black out...to die...” (Goblet of Fire)

“His scar seared and burned...the pain of it was making his eyes stream...” (Order of the Phoenix)

“His forehead hurt terribly...it was aching fit to burst. He opened his eyes...he felt as though a whitehot poker were being applied to his forehead...He clutched his head in his hands; the pain was blinding him...he rolled right over and vomited over the edge of the mattress.” [And soon after] “The pain in his forehead was subsiding slightly...He retched again...feeling the pain recede very slowly from his scar.” (Order of the Phoenix)

…and on the other hand, his migraine aura consists of visions that help him track what his enemy is up to.  Friedrich Nietzsche and author Joan Didion share this dichotomous view of their migraines; both wrote about how their headaches released deeply buried art and wisdom by interrupting their normal, distracted trains of thought:

“In the midst of the torments brought on by an uninterrupted three-day headache accompanied by the laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence.” (Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, 1888)

“I'm a writer, and I've found […] I often have my best story ideas while in bed in pain.  My migraine seems to occupy, or preoccupy, a part of my mind that is usually taken up with self-criticism, self-censorship, stress, etc., allowing this other authoritative voice to speak.  In effect, the migraine behaves as a circuit-breaker:  when all that pressure gets too heavy, it interrupts the action so that authoritative part of me can function again, uninhibited.” (Didion in “In Bed,” 1979)

So far this blog post is my greatest effort to channel my pain for good.  But who knows – maybe the migraine curse will yet turn out to be a blessing.  In the meantime, I will echo the closing words of Dr. Sheftell and Dr. Steiner’s paper: “We applaud the efforts of the paediatric subcommittees of both the International Headache Society and the American Headache Society to raise awareness of these issues, and appeal for assistance to the world of Magic.”

On Wandering

One of the greatest rhymes ever written:

          All that is gold does not glitter,
          Not all those who wander are lost;
          The old that is strong does not wither,
          Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

          From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
          A light from the shadows shall spring;
          Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
          The crownless again shall be king.

It's clear that this poem of Tolkien's is a frequent prayer of mine, because when I went to name this post "Not All Who Wander Are Lost," I realized that I already had a post by that name.  What can I say - until that day when the crownless again becomes king, I will keep returning to these words of hope.  Ashes, shadows, withering, brokenness, frost, and wandering are so much of reality...I need to be constantly reminded that they are not all of reality - they are not the whole picture.  The whole picture - when we no longer see through a glass darkly, but clearly, face to face - rewards our patience with glittering gold, flourishing life, found souls, and justice renewed.  Oh, I crave that day!

I am a wanderer.  I go through much of life wondering what it would be like if I were somewhere else.  Wanderers are not adventurers (though often we might like to be); we do not delight in travel or change for their own sakes, but endure them as a means to an end.  The trouble is, we don't always know what that end is.  Usually we set off toward some ambiguous "better": an unplottable Utopian dream.  We follow clues when they are obvious, but sometimes we lose the scent of Truth.  We can't help stopping to smell the roses along the path.  And sometimes the path that was once so clear evaporates before our very eyes, like white blazes in a blizzard.  We may very well be headed in the wrong direction, but we're afraid to stop moving.

Constant movement has its place in our society - in fact it is probably the norm in urban Chicago.  Turnover is expected, and young professionals especially are allowed the leeway of being "poor bachelors" (or bachelorettes) for most of their twenties.  But there comes a point when your friends and family start to wonder where your wanderings are taking you.  You are haunted by the spoken or unspoken injunction to "settle down," whether that means finding a mate or just finding a place you can lease for more than 12 months and a job that gives you health insurance.  Grad school might buy you some time, but it also buys you debt that sooner or later must be paid back with interest.  Putting together your life is like putting together one of those torturous puzzles that has two sides, no edges, and no picture on the box to refer to.  Half the time what looks like progress is all a mistake, and other times what feels utterly fruitless ends in a breakthrough.

How do we show the world  - and for that matter, ourselves - that though we wander, we are not lost?  What is our compass, and how can we be sure that its north is North?

Environmental Justice

Watching the drama of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill unfold as I'm reading Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C.S. Lewis by Matt Dickerson and David O'Hara has brought the environment back to the forefront of my mind.  I have been thinking especially about our country's need for a dramatic shift in values - a new worldview - in order to effectively solve our environmental crisis.  I tried to find some old writing that addressed this issue, so here is an essay I wrote at Eastern for a class with Tony Campolo in Spring of 2008.  The prompt was to provide criticism of a chapter in his book, Red Letter Christians.

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The very first issue discussed in Red Letter Christians is the environment. As a long-time environmental advocate, I was a bit shocked to see a topic that is usually considered a secondary concern – especially among Christians, who follow the mantra “love God, love people...then love everything else” - in such a place of prominence. My second reaction was to be thrilled: everything I have seen of poverty in the U.S. and abroad indicates that the fate of the poor is closely tied to that of the earth, a fact the author recognizes and illustrates compellingly. My third reaction, upon finishing the chapter on the environment, was disappointment. While the author's observations of environmental degradation and political commentary were valid and correct, I found the biblical justifications for creation care to be relatively weak. As a student of environmental theology, I know there is more and better scriptural evidence to be had, and in a book about the specific words of the gospel, I expected more.

The topic of creation care is especially relevant in American cities today. Last year, I lived across the Delaware River from Philadelphia in the much-smaller city of Camden, New Jersey, which has a population of just over 80,000 people spread over 9 square miles (City-Data.com). In the first half of the twentieth century, Camden was a bustling industrial center. The home of Campbell's Soup, RCA Entertainment, and the New York Shipbuilding Company, the city was a hotbed of commerce between Philadelphia and New York, and it employed hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers. With the deindustrialization that began in the years following World War II, all three of these corporations shut down their Camden operations, and over a third of the city's jobs were lost. Today, the city is a skeleton of its former self, with poverty and crime rates some of the highest per capita in the country (City-Data.com). What few people are aware of, however, is the extent to which Camden is also an ecological nightmare.

In this small city alone, there are 2 federal Superfund sites, 114 known contaminated areas, 350 polluting facilities, 400 ships at port per year emitting toxic fumes, and 328,500 diesel trucks passing through town annually (South Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance). There is a sewage plant in Camden's Waterfront South district that leaves the heavily-populated neighborhood in a year-round foul stench. The health effects of these toxins are innumerable: respiratory diseases, birth defects, heart conditions, and cancer. Hospital discharge statistics for the state of New Jersey from 1994 to 2002 indicate that blacks are four times more likely and Hispanics are three times more likely than whites to be hospitalized for asthma (SJEJA). High levels of lead in the soil and drinking water mean that 5% of children six months to two years have tested positive for poisoning, which can cause delayed growth, learning disabilities, brain damage, and behavioral problems (SJEJA). How many of the tough behavior cases in Camden schools might be traceable to exposure to lead? Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and hexavalent chromium are also common to industrial sites, and as the movie Erin Brockovich brought to public attention, their presence in the air and ground water can have devastating health effects, most of which take years to manifest themselves. Compared to cities of a similar size, Camden has elevated levels of cancers of the lung, esophagus, stomach, liver, kidney, and pancreas (SJEJA). Though they only scratch the surface, these statistics are alarming.

Camden, like the example from Senegal in Red Letter Christians, is a prime illustration of what is known as an environmental justice issue. For Christians who have trouble putting the wellbeing of a forest, mountain or reef on the same plane as lives lost to abortion, undernourishment or war, environmental justice proves that the two are intimately tied. In addition to industrial wastelands, heavily polluted areas, zones of habitat destruction, and toxic dump sites, global climate change is a major example of this phenomenon. As quoted in the book, a spokesperson for the U.N. Climate Change Impact Report said, “It is the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit” (Campolo). Overseas, this may refer to the farmers in Senegal who are forced to abandon their farms and move to the city due to desertification, the coastal dwellers in Bangladesh whose towns will be underwater with the slightest rise of sea level, or the fishermen in Indonesia whose source of livelihood is vanishing with the bleaching of the coral reefs. It wasn't until Hurricane Katrina, though, that the present effects of climate change really hit home. Many are still skeptical that a single weather event can be traced to a very large scale, slow moving global trend, but causes aside, Katrina was an environmental injustice. The breach of the substandard levees left many in the lower ninth ward homeless or dead, while the wealthier parishes, built on higher ground, were relatively untouched. Whole papers could be written – and have been – on this topic, but suffice it to say that our treatment of the environment and our treatment of the poor are essentially the same, and are equally important to God.

In order to make political waves on the issue of the environment – to convince U.S. leadership to sign onto G8 proposals and Kyoto treaties, to shift from oil to alternative energies, to preserve wilderness areas and promote local and organic food, to cut down on the American demand for beef – people will need to be convicted deeply and spiritually about the gravity of the ecological situation. For Christians – and especially Red Letter Christians – this conviction is most likely to come from their faith and from the words of the scriptures they espouse. The book names Genesis 1:26-28 as the “most commonly cited passage” for making the case of creation care, and claims that it is in these verses that God “gives us the obligation to be stewards” (Campolo). Fundamentally defined, it is true that this is the biblical moment when God appoints Adam and Eve (and implicitly, their descendants) to be the caretakers of the earth in his temporary physical absence. The word “stewardship” is not explicitly biblical, though, and I would argue that this verse is in fact more often cited as evidence against the Judeo-Christian case for creation care. In his famous 1967 essay, Lynn White used that passage to blame the Christian religion for the ethic behind the ecological crisis, and his sentiment is picked up by novelist Wallace Stegner, who writes, “Our sanction to be a weed species living at the expense of every other species and of the Earth itself can be found in the injunction God gave to the newly created Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it'” (Bouma-Prediger).

I think it is important to acknowledge that like the Medieval crusades or American slavery, the environmental crisis is a clear case of Christian complicity and misuse of scripture to justify hateful and damaging actions. Before using their faith to diagnose solutions, Red Letter Christians must confess and apologize for their long history of taking “rule over” and “subdue” to mean “exploit by any means necessary.” That said, I am convinced that in the broader picture of the biblical narrative, loving, caring, stewardship was indeed what God intended for humanity's relationship with the earth. In Genesis 1, God proclaimed “It was good” at every stage of creation – seven times in all. In Genesis 2:15, the Lord placed Adam and Eve in the garden to work it (abad) and take care of it (shamar). Adam's name even comes from the word for soil, adamah, just as “human” and “humus” have the same derivative. Later the apostle Paul declares, “From him and through him and to him are all things” (Romans 11:36). In other words, the birds, trees, slugs and sloths are as important to the gospel story as Abraham, Moses, you or me.

Humans, in their infinite wisdom, didn't waste any time in perverting both the gift of creation and their instructions for its care. In the story of the Fall in Genesis 3, the Lord curses the ground because of the poor choice made by Adam and Eve. At their hands, creation too will suffer – it will “wait in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (Romans 8:19). King Solomon is just one example of a powerful politician who is a terrible steward: his exorbitant number of horses and wives and ridiculous volume of riches and food are all forcibly taken at the expense of the common people and the the land itself (1 Kings 4:22-28, 10:14-11:6). The destruction of the forests of Lebanon for his cedar palace is the subject of the prophets' mourning again and again. Just as creation is cursed by the Fall, however, it is blessed by Christ's redeeming sacrifice. Jesus reverses the economy of empire and proclaims the year of the Lord's favor – the Jubilee. Jubilee brings with it the promise from Moses' law of rest for the land and redistribution of resources equally among all (Leviticus 25). The New Testament also speaks of creation's liberation from bondage (Romans 8: 21) and reconciliation, through Christ's blood, between all things in heaven and on earth (Colossians 1:19-20).

In conclusion, the discussion of the environment in Red Letter Christians is for the most part very valuable. As brevity was likely an issue, the author did an excellent job of using statistics and anecdotes to draw the reader into the main elements of the ecological debate. The realm in which I was left hungry for more, however, was that of scripture, of the “red letters” themselves. As it is so often argued that the environment is sparsely mentioned in the Bible and is thus a small concern for God and for Christians, I believe that anyone wishing to argue otherwise must present a healthy dose of creation care passages, exegeted in context. As the case study of Camden illustrates, a disregard for creation is a disregard for the children of God; it deeply wounds a Lord from whom, through whom, and to whom all things are made.

Works Cited

Bouma-Prediger, Steven. For the Beauty of the Earth: A Christian Vision for Creation Care. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1998.

Campolo, Tony. Red Letter Christians: A Citizen's Guide to Faith and Politics. Ventura, CA: Regal, 2008.

City-Data.com. Camden, NJ database. Advameg, Inc.: 2003-2007.

Holy Bible. New International Version. International Bible Society, 1984.

“SJEJA Toxic Tour Factsheet.” South Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, 2006.


**All photos taken in Camden, New Jersey.  Photo credits: Me and Brent P.**

Pathetic Attempts

Though my name - Devon - means "poet", I usually stick to prose. But perhaps I was inspired by Eva (see previous post) to try my hand at a few verses. Or maybe I was just procrastinating...


In times of stress
I find it is best
to stop
and listen
and be thankful.

No migraines – five days
it's small, but it's big
I close my eyes
and it's clear
and that absence
sweet emptiness
is precious.

Warm weather – for now
tomorrow may change
but today is today and just right
inside, outside
in perfect equilibrium
and a breeze
(well, a wind)
ties knots in my hair.

My health – while not perfect
is mostly in tact
been running
too much – not enough?
it's rough
but the soreness is good
and my insurance is not!

My roommates – not here
but I love them to death
I'm blessed
eternally blessed
by this home
our community
of three.

Lightning.
People-watching.
Bikes, hoards of bikes. “Critical Mass.”
A taxi, stopped in its tracks.
Friend dates. BLTs. Reggae music.
Laughter. Prayer. Wholeness. Peace.
DJEMBE!

Pathetic attempts
answered by drumbeats of thunder
and loud, warm, unapologetic rain
typing away on the window.
Thanks.

65 Red Roses

I'm not that plugged into the blogosphere (it's hard enough to keep up with my own circle of friends!) but I just saw this article on CNN and found my way to the blog of Vancouver native Eva Markvoort who died last month at 25 after a lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis.  It will totally have you bawling, but she's an amazing writer, and she is full of life and love, even as she looks death in the face.  Here is a tiny taste...

making the effort this evening to sit up in a chair
good to change positions
stretch different muscles
sending air to different pockets
mum asked what i miss?

i miss walking in and out of buildings
the feeling of air pressure change when you enter or exit a building
i miss getting in and out of cars
how your view changes when you sit at a different height
change really
i miss change
now, it is all the same
seven weeks....
there are no transitions
i miss transitions
from one place to another
which is strange really
because now i hate change
i can't stand change and yet i miss the transitions

i hold onto who ever is near
since when am i clingy?
i grasp onto
annie in the morning
jackie and robin in the afternoon
dad in the evening
maman all the time
episodes of projectile vomiting
hours of gasping for breath
waves of nausea lulling out into
hours of sleepiness once the meds have hit
leaving me daydreaming about stepping out of this room
just getting up
free of tubes and plugs
and walking out the door
pushing open doorways
skipping down the street
breathing free
free

Why I Serve

Last year, when I was applying for Americorps, they asked me to write about "Why I Serve," and I told them the story of a few of the people I had met during my year in Camden, NJ.  A year later, I am confident that I would answer that question the same way.  Why do I do what I do?  Because of David, Shermere, Tim, Angel...now I can add Cynthia, Jerome, Sydney, Reggie...

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David is your average bum. He looks bedraggled, he's out of work, and he sometimes has to beg for food. One day we decided to invite him into our house for a chat. His story told of a cycle of hardship: he couldn’t pay some tickets he'd received for loitering, so he spent time in jail. While in jail, he lost his job. In general, he has trouble getting work because he has a disability. He gets welfare for his disability, but it stipulates that he cannot work for more than 2 hours a day. The welfare and a 2-hour-a-day job are not enough to support his wife and kids, so he actually has to pretend to be separated from his wife and live in a separate house so she can get single parent welfare, too. David forced me to ask myself to ask some hard questions, and I was faced with the words of Martin Luther King: “Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime. Eventually, though, you’ll want to start asking yourself who owns the pond.”

I had the pleasure of sponsoring Shermere, one of the fifth graders from my after school class, in Urban Promise's annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Speech Contest. Shermere tended to be one of my more difficult disciplinary cases. Helping her to write and rehearse her speech, which required quite a bit of one on one time, worked miracles on our relationship, though. Granted, it wasn’t always fun – getting her to put her thoughts on paper was often like pulling teeth. But she accepted my advice, respected my opinion, and trusted me enough to share with me something she was passionate about. In the end, I was incredibly impressed with her final speech. She talked about the courage of Harriet Tubman to fight for the freedom of others, and her delivery was spot on. She was an imposing presence behind that podium, and I wonder if someday she might not be speaking on behalf of justice in front of a far more influential crowd.


When Pastor Tim preaches, people listen. Because he's spent time both on the street and in the Ivory Tower, Pastor Tim can speak effectively to Ivy League academics and Hip Hop gangsters alike. His sermons are provocative: whether the issue is slavery, sacrifice, or environmental destruction, it is impossible to walk away without being challenged to the core. More importantly, however, his sermons take on life outside the sanctuary walls. When an outspoken community organizer disparaged him in the local paper, Pastor Tim met the man for lunch. Soon the two were partnering to start an alternative school for high school drop-outs, and I was invited to help as a tutor. A few months later, we all exchanged teary hugs when several of our drop-outs were accepted into college! Pastor Tim has shown me the beauty that comes from practicing what you preach.

Cynthia has had the cards stacked against her since she was a little girl.  Both of her parents were alcoholics, and she was essentially left to parent herself.  As a child, she had trouble fitting in, and she was sometimes destructive for no reason.  She began drinking at age 10 and using drugs at 16.  When she was 12 years old, Cynthia became pregnant by rape.  She had to raise a child while still a child herself.  Not surprisingly, these pressures drove her further into addiction and violence.  Before long, she had six children and found herself in jail, unfit to care for any of her kids.  Thus the cycle of poverty bulldozed ahead.  On the day she was released from prison, Cynthia was told she was HIV positive.  Devastated, desperate, and tired, she checked into rehabilitative housing.  She laid her dignity aside and asked for help.  That tiny act of courage was Cynthia's saving grace, and now she is almost two years clean, has an undetectable viral load, and is on her way to earning her GED.  Anyone privileged enough to look into Cynthia's kind eyes and be greeted by her soft-spoken "hello" today would never guess that underneath them was a shocking resilience, a woman broken and rebuilt, and a share of burdens and blessings well beyond her years.

Dear Mr. President

This is a letter I wrote to President Obama on February 18, 2010:

Dear Mr. President,

First of all, I want to thank you for making the cause of Health Care Reform a national priority from the moment you took office. I am confident that your dedication and perseverance toward this end will soon be rewarded. There are plenty of stories I could tell about my own struggles with our current health care system, but they all pale in comparison to the story of my college roommate, Kitty. I hope you will take a moment to hear Kitty’s story, because, well, you of all people might have the audacity to hope.

Kitty and I know each other from Middlebury College in Vermont, where I studied Religion and she studied French and Spanish, and we both graduated in 2005. Middlebury is a fantastic but expensive liberal arts school, and both of us were only able to attend thanks to hefty financial aid packages. After moving back home to San Antonio for a year to work and raise some money, Kitty was accepted into the University of Geneva’s graduate program in Translation. She moved to Switzerland in hope of earning a degree that would equip her with the tools to work in the field of international diplomacy.

Three years into her graduate program, as she finished up her thesis while working a job at the International Organization for Standardization, Kitty wrote me an email with the subject line, “When Life Throws You Curve Balls.” The curve ball was this: after doing some heavy lifting one day while moving into a new apartment, Kitty noticed a lump in her abdomen and went to see a doctor. The doctor found a tumor in her kidney that was ten centimeters in diameter, and the tumor was cancerous. At age 25 (30 years younger than the average), Kitty was diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer that had already spread to her lungs and her brain.

Since she learned of her diagnosis last July, Kitty has undergone kidney surgery, emergency brain surgery, chemo treatment, and radiation. She has received top notch health care with one kink: she's stuck in Switzerland. Because of her pre-existing condition, Kitty would not be insurable by any private company in the U.S. In her home state of Texas, she is not eligible for Medicaid without applying first for Social Security Disability, but the state's denial rate for disability is 61% and the average processing time is 544 days – longer than most people with Kitty's type and stage of cancer live. With no insurance options available, she would have to walk into a hospital and hope the taxpayers would absorb the burden, or lie at home without access to medication or care.

Kitty, for the moment, is unwilling to take that risk. As a result, her mother has been forced to resign from her job and move to Geneva to care for her daughter. Imagine caring for your terminally ill daughter in a country where you have no car, no job, no friends and family, and don't speak the language. While some of her friends have scraped together enough money to make the trek to see her, Kitty's own father and ailing grandmother have not been able to make the journey. Whether they will be able to do so before the cancer claims her life is yet to be seen.

I am not normally a pessimistic person, but I have been forced to face the facts about Kitty's illness. Less than 5% of people with her type and stage of cancer live for five years; most survive only a year. She is nearing the point where the only kind of treatment left to pursue is palliative care: keeping her out of pain and helping her to die with dignity. But even that costs money, and Kitty is being shut out of her home country by her inability to pay. The U.S. is exercising its own form of rationed care, while the Swiss healthcare system – which strikes a public-private balance and has compulsory coverage – has welcomed this foreign citizen with open arms.

Mr. President, I'm not sure if there is anything you can do to help Kitty and her family. It would honor her struggle, though, if you continued to fight relentlessly for the establishment of a healthcare system that makes “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” a realistic possibility for United States citizens. I'm not asking for free, but I'm asking for fair. Let us work to redeem a country which has become like the words of Isaiah 59, where “justice is far from us” and “truth has stumbled in the streets.” Please join me in this mission. I love my friend dearly, and I want to bring her home.

With hope and gratitude,
Devon

Commuter Community

Every weekday morning, between 8:15 and 8:25, I step out of my apartment into the blue-walled, blue-carpeted hallway and press the “down” button on the elevator. Sometimes as I wait, I check my reflection in the glass of some stale modern art on the wall just to see exactly how corpse-like I look this morning. On the ground floor, I greet the doorman and the maintenance woman as I tiptoe across the freshly-mopped lobby. Then I thrust my entire body weight against the door in an attempt to plow into the wind vortex that is South Wells Street in winter. Commence the walk.

Having crossed two normal streets and one eight-lane highway, I take the shortcut through the courtyard of the Chicago Stock Exchange. Depending how early I’ve left that morning, the courtyard is either packed with colorfully-vested traders double-fisting their coffee and cigarettes, or it is completely deserted because the morning bell has already sounded. I trot past the newspaper man, imagining how cold and claustrophobic he must be, wondering how early he gets up for this gig, and how long he’s been doing it. Before long, I climb the stairs to the el train – always every other step – flash my CTA card at the turnstile, and step onto the platform. It’s now between 8:23 and 8:37.

The single greatest thing about taking public transportation to work every day is the people-watching. In a city this large, you are bound to see some pretty unique and eclectic things – like two elderly men kissing on the lips, a young man headed to work in a fedora and a waistcoat, or a woman who lives on the train and freely undresses in front of anyone dense enough to trespass on her “personal space.” These cases interest me less, however, than the people I see almost daily – the people who take the northbound Purple Line from LaSalle and VanBuren weekdays around 8:30 AM. These people, though I know none of their names and haven’t spoken more than three words to any of them ever, are my community.

Our cohort is small, since it’s against the grain to travel outbound from the Loop at rush hour. We’ve never had to share a seat on the train, and most of the time we don’t even get onto the same car. Nevertheless, we know each other well. There is Miss Mullet-hawk, whose dyed platinum hair is cut in a mullet, with the short part teased into a mohawk and the long part trailing straight down her back. She is always in a hurry. There is Nancy Nose, who is a young, well-dressed businesswoman with a unique combination of features. Her skin indicates African heritage, but her schnozz is long and pointy like mine (a burden we share). I muse about the various possible scenarios by which our ancestors happened to mate.

There are others, but perhaps most fascinating to me is Elf Boy. We are not talking one of Santa’s elves here, or Keebler’s elves, either. Think Lord of the Rings - specifically, Orlando Bloom’s rendition of Legolas. Tall, wispy, long blonde hair, and other-worldly brilliant blue eyes. Every day I see this kid (he’s probably around my age), and every day I find it near-impossible to avoid staring. To mix literary references, he seems like a refugee from Middle Earth, struggling in vain to blend in to the Muggle world. His misfit image is compounded by the wardrobe: every morning he’s got his 12-foot beanpole legs clad in a pair of tapered jeans from the 1980’s. I tried to justify them for awhile as the skinny Euro cut, or maybe just too small, but this is not the case; they’re unquestionably tapered. I am in love with a Nerd-Elf.

And no, I’m not actually in love with him. We’ve never spoken. I’m not even sure he speaks English (and I definitely don’t speak Elvish). But I like to imagine that we’re friends. If the Purple Line ever burst into flames, or veered off the tracks, I’m sure Elf Boy and I would band together to save our fellow passengers. We would toss each other knowing glances as he carried Miss Mullet-hawk to safety and I calmly reassured Nancy Nose that we were all gonna be okay. Afterwards, we would go out for coffee, dab our wounds with damp towels, and laugh about all those days of silent camaraderie. But until that day comes, we are forced to keep up the ruse. He’ll keep wearing his headphones, pretending to be interested in his iPhone instead of counting the Orcs he’s killed in battle, and I’ll keep burying my nose in a book, looking like a half-asleep corpse when inside I’m ablaze with curiosity.

Fullerton, Diversey, Wellington. Transfer to Brown Line trains at Wellington. Disembark. Doors are closing. 8:52 AM. Time for work.