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.

The German's Silly Sermon

Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I love Kurt Vonnegut!!

I got this from the library not realizing that it was non-fiction and a sort of autobiographical collage (kind of like a blog before they existed). So it wasn't a tight, neat, clever story like Cat's Cradle, but I couldn't help totally loving this guy's writing, and much of his perspective on the world.

Some theological highlights:

-"I don't think anybody ever dreaded hell as much as most of us dread the contempt of our fellowmen. Under our new and heartfelt moral code, we might be able to horrify would-be evildoers with just that: the contempt of their fellowmen. For that contempt to be effective, though, we would need cohesive communities, which are about as common as bald eagles these days."

-"The nuclear family doesn't provide nearly enough companionship."

-"Be warned: if you allow yourself to see dignity in someone, you have doomed yourself to wanting to understand and help whoever it is."

-"It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness."

For someone who calls himself at various times an atheist, a Unitarian,a skeptical Free Thinker, and a Christ-loving agnostic, Vonnegut is pretty spot-on with much that I love in Christianity. He named his book "Palm Sunday" and finished it with a sermon. He quotes Bertrand Russell and Jesus in the same breath. And it's a really, really refreshing breath that I find myself never able to get enough of.

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Guilty Pleasures

I'm home alone for the weekend, so it's Risky Business time! I haven't hired any prostitutes or danced around in my underwear (I live in a glass house!), but I have indulged myself Devon-style with:

Apple Cider - I'm working on my third gallon in as many weeks. Hot, cold, sometimes with a dash of caramel sauce. Has single-handedly put an end to my coffee addiction.

NPR - It's pledge drive week, and I still listened for like four hours straight.

Dancing in the kitchen, singing in the shower - One of the only drawbacks of living in community is the lack of opportunity to dance in the kitchen and sing in the shower audience-free. When I spot a chance to do either one, I seize it.

Baking - I'm kind of disturbed by my own increasingly-visible domestic streak. This one hasn't manifest itself yet this weekend; I'm biding my time before busting out an apple pie.

Shopping - Despite regularly touting my disgust with consumerism, I think a small part of me still inherited the joy-of-shopping gene. It only works when I buy stuff because I CAN and not because I need to, and when it's really CHEAP. Yesterday I got a bike lock on sale and four articles of clothing for $30. It felt good.

Convenient Store Cappuccino - I don't like it because it's all that good, or remotely resembles coffee, but because it's comfortable. In Camden, we girls used to trudge over to 7-11 whenever we were feeling down and drug up on French Vanilla. Still makes me smile.

Puzzles & Games - I've wasted a lot of my life on Scrabulous, Farkle, Word Twist, Scramble, Sudoku, and crosswords. And I probably won't stop anytime soon.

Chick Flicks - Most of the time I'm not wallowing in loneliness - I just genuinely like them. The vast majority are horribly written and completely unrealistic, but I guess I like the assurance of a happy ending. Usually after a weekend-full, I'm done for a few months, though.

Christmas Music - Perhaps the guiltiest pleasure of all: I busted out the Christmas music today! Granted, it was in the 30's when I woke up, so it definitely feels cold enough. I'll try to take a break for a few weeks, but honestly nothing beats the blues (or just makes me feel at home) like a good dose of "Silent Night" or "O Come all ye Faithful." **sigh**

A Generous Orthodoxy

A book "review" pasted from Goodreads...

A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, ... anabaptist/anglican, metho by Brian D. McLaren


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
All the concepts are good. I think I'm with him on about 95% of his theology. But sometimes this book was a little tedious to read. The first chapter of disclaimers is annoying - most people know they can put down a book if they don't like it. I forced myself to persevere till the end, though, and I have several really profound points tagged...

-(Quoting a mentor) "In a pluralistic world, a religion is valued on the benefits it brings to its nonadherents." (111)

-"When Scripture talks about itself, it doesn't use the language we often use in our explanations of its value...authority, inerrancy, infallibility, revelation, objective, absolute, literal...hardly anyone notices the irony of resorting to the authority of extrabiblical words and concepts to justify one's belief in the Bible's ultimate authority...I've never heard of a church that asked people to affirm a doctrinal statement like 'The purpose of Scripture is to equip God's people for good works' (from 2 Timothy)." (164)

-"The Bible is a story, and just because it recounts (by standards of accuracy acceptable to its original audience) what happened, that doesn't mean it tells what should always happen or even what should have happened." (167)

-"As so many species slide closer to extinction, the rare species known variously as 'Christianus environmentalis' or 'Disciplos verde' is making a comeback." (233) HA! I heart puns.

-"For pop-Evangelical eschatology to proliferate...prophetic visions of reconciliation and shalom within history...had to be pushed beyond history, either into a spiritualized heaven or a millennial middle ground...they also had to marginalize Jesus with all his talk of the kingdom of God coming on earth, being among us now, and being accessible today." (238)

-(quoting Chesterton) "Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate...real love has always ended in bloodshed." (143)

-"So here's the tension (referencing a Chesterton quote): we must always be discontented with our portraits of orthodoxy, but we must never, in frustration, throw the Subject of our portrait out the window." (297) This meets me right where I am...thanks Brian!


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Your Love is Like 10,000 Mosquito Bites

**an oldie but a goodie from the Trail**

July 16, 2008
Day 16, Mile 155.2 (2021 to Springer)
Pierce Pond Lean-to

During my sophomore year at Middlebury, one fateful night probably somewhere near 2 AM, my roommate Renee and I decided to spontaneously pray together before bed. At some point I must have dozed off – still speaking – and uttered the senseless praise, “Your love is like 10,000 mosquito bites.” I don’t remember who noticed first, but it was a good indication that our bed time was long overdue, and it has gone down in history as one of the dumbest things I’ve done.

If I may take the liberty, though – I think there may be an ounce or two of truth to be taken from my sleep-deprived babbling. True, perhaps God’s love deserves a better metaphor than mosquito bites, though I’m the first to admit that his is a tough love. But I think the phrase is even better suited to this thing – this idea – known as the Appalachian Trail.

As we were starting out, Default passed on some wisdom she’d heard from her brother Music Man, who hiked SOBO last year: “Hiking the AT is like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer – it feels so good when you stop!” Who knows how we will feel in 500 miles or so, but that has definitely been the case so far. Here are a few of the pains we have endured 150 miles in: sore knees, hips, calves, quads, feet, backs, shoulders and necks, blisters, ingrown toenails, strained achilles and ankles, poison ivy, headaches, period cramps, stomach aches, black fly bites, at least 10,000 mosquito bites, sunburn, broken shoes, lost packs, dirt-caked clothes, sopping clothes and gear, falling in rivers, stepping thigh-high in mud, getting caught on a mountain-top in a thunderstorm, extreme hunger, thirst, water flavored like iodine, bleach, or with floating dirt, sleeping on uneven boards, roots, rocks, or puddles, innumerable cuts, scrapes and bruises, slugs on our packs and in our shoes, missing shelters and hiking 4 miles after 4 mountains to the next one, sharing a shelter in the rain with lots of obnoxious boys, smelling your own B.O. day in and day out, waking up to mice scurrying all around you, having flies attack your bare bum in the privy, and stepping in your own crap.

It’s hard not to get bogged down in the bad stuff and remember why it is that we’re doing this. We’ve been reading a copy of Into the Wild together that we found in one of the shelters. Like the protagonist, Chris McCandless, we must each be endowed with a little bit of masochism to choose to undertake an expedition like this one. But also like Chris, I think we want to be reminded of the things that matter most in this world, and we know that Nature is a good place to go for that reminder. It puts you in a place of forced humility, where you have no choice but to relinquish control and accept that the world is a heck of a lot bigger than you and your needs and desires. I think this hit me first when I found myself praying – after a long, wet, gross night – that it wouldn’t rain again. NO, I realized, no, God isn’t going to stop the rain just because it makes me uncomfortable. It’s not too small a request – it’s just too selfish.

Unlike Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, though, this group of gals is not trying to escape human contact. We are not attempting to live off the land, and we’re not trying to prove something. I am just as convinced 150 miles in as I was 15 miles in that this is where I’m supposed to be and I made the right decision coming out here. We are fostering a love for the AT that only 10,000 mosquito bites can bring – one built on sacrifice – literal blood, sweat and tears. Here are just a few of the ways in which the AT has given back to us so far: summiting mountains, unloading your pack when you finally make it to camp, napping on rocks, swimming in lakes and streams, befriending fellow hikers, arising with the sun, learning to appreciate the finest contours of the ground on which we walk, taking note of animal and plant life, eating 1 lb cheeseburgers, taking a long shower after weeks of grime and having a new appreciation for what it means to be clean, stopping for a snickers, reading out loud together, a cool mountain breeze, a cold, delicious spring, a warm meal after a long day, a brilliant view, a silent ponder of the landscape, a well-timed yard sale, some generous Mainers, Bluegrass at the general store, all-you-can-eat breakfast, a short day of miles, a moment – like this one – looking out on a pond and knowing there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

So yes, there is a lot to be jealous of, but there’s also a lot that’s not worth your envy. It’s not always fun and games out here, but that’s precisely why we love it. If you don’t keep hitting yourself with that hammer, you’ll never know the true joy of letting up.

Ciao, and love to all,

Flamebo

Saying Goodbye to Granny

This was written for my grandma's memorial service in August of 2007.

Sooo…Granny…where to begin? I think Granny and I were kindred spirits. She just understood me and loved me in a way that was far below the surface. Now this is not to say that we always wanted the same things. I remember once when I talked about going on a mission trip and she exclaimed, “You know what the worst job in the world would be? To be a missionary’s wife!” First of all, I think I can safely say that my career aspirations go beyond being somebody’s wife, and second of all, I’m not sure it would even be all that bad to be a missionary... But that’s beside the point. The point is that Granny would be there for me no matter what I chose. She was an unconditional lover. Sometimes she would give not-so-subtle hints, like a birthday present of a pile of postcards stamped and addressed to her, but she’d forgive me if I forgot to send any of them or just wrote “I love you” on all of them and mailed them a week before I came home. Anytime you’d tell her “I’m sorry, Granny,” you’d hear back, “You’re the sorriest creature I’ve ever met!” It’s basically true.

Now that I think about it, her one gripe with Christianity was always that she didn’t like thinking about herself as a sinner. I don’t think she thought she never did anything wrong – Granny is probably to blame for 95% of my rule-breaking genes – she just didn’t believe in condemning people. In actuality, she was probably more in step with Jesus than most of us on this point. Flaws weren’t important to her; grace was. True, it’s part of a grandmother’s job to tell her granddaughter that she’s beautiful and amazing and the best dancer the world has ever seen…but as far as I can tell, she meant it. She made me feel like a princess all the time. I wear the title GDG – Granny’s Darling Girl – like a crown. I think that’s how Jesus sees me, too, as his darling girl.

Just like Jesus’ crown, sometimes Granny’s crown was hard to wear in public, though. I’ll just name the first embarrassing examples that come to mind, but they’re innumerable…there was the time I walked with her into a very crowded, very tense doctor’s office the day before Christmas Eve, and she broke the silence by picking up a parenting magazine and asking me very loudly and indignantly, “When are YOU going to start having BABIES??!” Another favorite was Christmas Eve (maybe the same year?) when we were visiting a friend’s church, and Granny leaned over to me during the service and said in NOTHING like a whisper, “I’m so glad YOUR DAD still has all his hair,” referencing the poor man sitting in front of us. And you can’t forget the entire weekend of my graduation from Middlebury, where the highlight was perhaps at the Religion Department luncheon. Two of my professors – a nun and a rabbi – almost spit out their food when Granny told the story of how she wished the “Japs had won” because her hangover was so bad after all the V-J day partying. At least the story had a good moral – never, ever, get drunk. Once was enough.

Well, I don’t feel like I’ve touched much on who my Granny was – someone who loved a lot and spread a lot of joy – but she was so much more. One Christmas, I gave each of my family members a “personal Bible verse” that I embroidered haphazardly on little ornaments. Granny’s was Joshua 1:5: “As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you.” I know that God kept his promise for her – especially in the hardest part of her final battle – and now my prayer is that as we fight all our own present battles and those yet to come, Granny will be standing at the side of the Lord, holding our hands, reminding us that we’re loved in spite of being “sorry creatures,” and never, ever leaving or forsaking us.