Christmas Poem

Creeping in the narrow streets of Bethlehem were shadows
And creeping in the shadows were the people of the town.
In all the hearts of Bethlehem and Israel, lurked shadows;
They waited for a King to bring the long awaited dawn.

Weeping in the dark of night, the people wrestled shadows
Weeping in the silent world outside the city wall
And crying in each helpless heart was rage against the shadows
And crying in a stable was an infant in a stall.

Could you but see in Bethlehem, what wonders chased the shadows!
What lights, what haunting music, leaping heart-songs, flying feet!
While all the weary people slumbered waiting in the shadows,
The shadows all were fleeing from the dawn-light in the street!

This strange, this shocking story bursts upon us from the shadows
A wailing child and wistful girl make earth's foundations shake.
No longer will the world be left despairing in the shadows
For Light and Life came squirming in a manger at daybreak.

And blinding light comes flooding now to chase away the shadows
And blinded eyes are opened, and the blind man meets the day,
And joy is pulsing in our hearts, set free at last from shadows
As all the power and love of God lies sleeping in the hay.

Euthyphro Problems

Note: This is a draft from February 2012 which I decided to publish

I can't believe, and I can't not believe.
Whenever questions like this were brought up in Sunday school, Bible study, etc... I always received the impression that everyone was approaching them like this: "Here are the arguments non-believers are making/questions they have, and here is how we address these arguments/questions in order to bring them into the fold/refute their wicked anti-Christian agenda." I see nothing wrong with looking at things from this perspective, it's just that I can't think of any cases in my own experience (unless one counts encounters with authors such as C.S. Lewis as personal experience) when serious concerns like these were raised as something sincere Christians might themselves seriously struggle with.
The impression I received is that only arrogant skeptics and those hovering on the verge of apostasy, or perhaps the occasional oversensitive intellectual genuinely give credence to such questions and doubts. But actually, I don't see how these ideas aren't a consuming topic of discussion for Christians. How can we claim to have faith when we hide like ostriches from everything that challenges our assumptions? At least, that's what I feel like I've been doing for the past several years. At what point do we stop saying 'It's impossible to know that.', and acknowledge that we feel the desire to know as though it were a physical hunger? At least many of the skeptics and seekers are trying to find answers, and willing to have honest discussions. To be honest, I want to believe that the Bible is perfect and infallible, but I feel more and more that there are inconsistencies which can't just be glossed over. That is, I'm tired of nervously avoiding seeming contradictions to protect the comfortable security of my belief in the Bible's infallibility. Logically, it seems obvious that God's word has to be perfect and infallible, and the minute that this is no longer assumed, textual anarchy reigns. Who is to say what is true, and what is human error? I am seized with terror at the thought of a universe no longer governed by absolute principles and judged by absolute truth, I am convinced that no such universe is possible, yet am careening head on into the possibility that whatever is true, (and something must be!) I can't completely know.
The most intelligent response I've ever absorbed from all my years in church and parachurch functions is:
Start from God, and work backwards, assuming that everything makes sense whether it does or not। This is, to me, the most acceptable answer to the problem, and the one that seems to fit most closely, but I find it less and less satisfying. I'm tired of trying to pretend all of the uncomfortable questions don't exist, or just avoiding everything I can't bring myself to accept. Example: This ____seems to me to be brutal, evil, and unjust. But I know from x, y, and z that God is perfectly loving, good, righteous, and just. Therefore I can rest assured that my corrupt human instincts are leading me astray, and that God's thoughts are higher than mine. It's ok to not understand. If God did it, it was right.
This, for me, leads to a very uncomfortable confrontation with the Euthyphro problem: Is God good because he conforms to an objective standard of goodness, or is goodness defined by whatever God is? If God commands genoicide, does genoicide in that specific instance become goodness, or is the destruction of innocent human life always wrong? Why, if the blood of one Abel was so vocal does the blood of a thousand Canaanite children not cry out from the ground? Obviously it's true that actions of parents/leaders have consequences which extend to their descendants, but why is it alright? Why should the fourth generation suffer for the first? How can one group of people be commanded to massacre another down to the last newborn child and frolicking lamb, carry out orders, and not be horrifically warped? Agreeing that human sacrifice, temple prostitution, torture, and sexual perversion are wrong and deserve punishment, how exactly is mass murder more acceptable, or a viable solution? Agreeing that God is concerned with our character, not our circumstances, and that a slave should serve Christ as humbly and wholeheartedly as a free man, how is it possible for one man to 'own' another created in God's image as he might a dog or a cow, and to, theoretically, exercise the same control over his fellow's life? When is it ok to stand up, say 'This is wrong', and give the full fire of your passion and energy to abolishing it? Was William Wilberforce deluded by rampant humanism, or was he serving Christ well by attacking cruelty and brutality? Based on the Bible's description of God's vision for mankind, how are periods in church history when the church nearly ceased to exist, or became entirely corrupted (The Avignon papacy, pour exemple) explainable? What happened to the warm fuzziness of overpowering love and personal relationship with the Creator? If the Bible is true, God is not arbitrary, therefore, if something seems arbitrary, I must assume that my perception is at fault. But at what point does this simply become a cop out and catch all? If it doesn't satisfy me, what am I supposed to do? Is there something horribly wrong with me? Is no one else tortured by these things?
I don't want to ask this, and I can't help asking. It makes me miserable, because the questions create doubt, and the doubt coexists uneasily with my belief, and somewhere in the wilderness of believing, and doubting, rebelling and repenting, I feel like a traitor- like a woman who is forced against all her inclinations to doubt the man she loves, yet wracked by guilt for her distrustfulness. Saying in the same breath "I'm sure he could not be wrong! How could he have done this thing?" Hating herself for accusing, hating herself for so nearly hating him for the intolerable situation in which she is placed. I'm quite sure that it's somehow my fault, but I can't quite see how, and unquestionably, that must be my fault as well. My conscience is inexorably accusing the Person and institution from which I have always believed my conscience and moral boundaries to be derived.And if I have to ask? If the answers I find are not the acceptable answers? Where do I go? Where do I belong, where find truth? What wilderness of terrifying moral freedom might I find myself in?
Can I say, like Peter 'Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.' when my questions are drowning me overwhelming me, dragging me away from what I once considered my rock and my security as a hot air balloon might pluck away a small child unfortunate enough to be grasping its basket when it lifts off? It's only another question I can't answer. And I'm afraid. I'm floating away.

Forsaking Utopia

Note: This is a draft from April 2013 which I decided to publish 

This semester has presented me with an alarming, and hitherto unsuspected dilemma.
I'm not going to be a college kid forever.
(shocked silence)
Realizing that my time here is ending, and that something else will need to begin, has been a thought provoking, exciting, and sometimes terrifying theme of the past few months.
I'm trying to understand what exactly I've gained and lost in the past four years, what of enduring value I've learned, who I've become that I wasn't before. Also, I'm struggling to understand where I should go from here, what I'm equipped, and called upon, to go out and do in the world.
It's complicated. Truly.
But, maybe because I thrive on philosophical grey regions, or maybe because I'm the product of a bewildering post-modern society and educational system, I find that my answers to many of these important questions are hazed with doubts, and rich in paradox.
We live in a funny, cruel, dazzlingly eccentric world. I'm endlessly startled and fascinated by it, and the past four years have been an agonizing and glorious indulgence of this fascination. Yet the more I study, the more I feel the sameness, the repetition of human experience in the past, and what surrounds us in the present. We've been doing the same things over and over by different names. And this has been true as much of 'Christianity' (speaking of the institution, and not of historical individuals) as much as of any other group or ideology in society. What troubles me, is that in every instance I see, both among Christians and non-Christians, the people who were wrong have been loudest and most determined- and often, not only dominated, but won the debate. For every Francis of Assissi who passionately opposed the Crusades, there were a thousand 'true believers' to instigate and passionately defend them. Humanity, as a mass, is consistently blind to its own blunders. And in every case, our stated intentions are magnificent.
The frightening thing about evil, is its insistence upon defending itself, upon being cloaked in noble aims and acceptable language. Crusaders didn't butcher, rape and rob Jews and Muslims, they liberated the Holy Land. The Inquisition didn't terrorize, dehumanize, despoil, and torture Spanish citizens, it purified and protected true Catholicism. The Reign of Terror didn't turn a civilian population into a bloodthirsty animal mob, it redressed grievances and protected the fragile liberty of the French common man. Hitler didn't murder the weak and defenceless, he purified his nation of unwanted and hostile elements, striving to give her the prosperity and glory she deserved. Americans and Brits didn't violate human rights by firebombing civilian populations during the second World War, killing thousands of defenceless women and children for the purpose of terrorizing and demoralizing the enemy- we defended liberty and democracy, took out the bad guys, whatever the cost. [Little matter that among the 'costs' were the lives of hundreds of thousands Japanese and German civilians, and providing Stalin with the resources which he turned against his own people and Eastern Europe during years of far more horrific bloodshed and oppression.] Slavery, colonialism, oppression of women... how do we step out of our own cultures, assumptions, and time period to see things as they are? Why have so few even attempted it in the past? How can I know that my very obsession with culture and time, and the blinders they place on our worldview is not in itself a subjective assumption instilled by my culture, and region, and the period I've lived in?
(crickets)
Yet this is clear: whenever mankind behaves wickedly, he attempts to justify himself. And when we behave wickedly as a group, or as a nation, we're all the more foolish, all the more easily satisfied with moral platitudes and evasions, all the more vociferous in our own defence... and all the more deadly. It frightens me, because it's happening at every level of society every day, here, and I don't trust myself to see it clearly. It frightens me, because I frequently feel that I'm alone in my understanding of what's right and wrong. It frightens me because, surrounded by so many fine, opinionated, vociferous people, whom I passionately disagree with, I have less and less faith in my chances of arriving at the correct answers. Also, because I don't clearly understand yet what the proper, loving, Christ-honoring response to these situations is, what conscience may demand of me. But that's a question for another day, and for a different jumble of run-on sentences.
I realize that I don't have anything particularly original or brilliant to say about any of this. If you're bored by this repetition of tiresome and threadbare questions, and my clumsy struggles to address them, I can only apologize, and encourage you to go read something more helpful. I'm not a philosopher, and I can't claim any particular wisdom or enlightenment. I'm simply interested, and concerned, and trying to understand. I want a response to Schaeffer's question 'How should we then live?', and I don't fully trust the accuracy of any of the teachers and theologians who, over the years, have attempted to answer it.

To Plant a Garden

Note: This is a draft from March 2013 which I decided to publish 

I want to plant a garden.
As a child and adolescent, sullenly uprooted and dragged from house to house every 2-4 years, grasping at straws of geographic security, I gradually created a chant, half litany, half poem, which often ran, variation after variation through my head, growing over the years:

I want to plant an apple tree and watch it grow
I want to watch it inch its way up until the sapling stretches over my head.
I want to watch it thicken and harden until I can stand in the shade of its branches.
I want to watch the pitiful scattering of delicate blossoms which may come with the 3rd or fourth spring gradually explode into a haze of pink and white fragrance, like the recklessly combined bouquets of one thousand May brides.
I want to fill first bowls, and then buckets with apples, make sauce, bake pies, and inundate the neighbors with the surplus.
I want to stay in one home long enough to know if it's true when bulb-sellers describe their tantalizing packages of narcissus and muscari as 'good naturalizers'.
I want to plant a lilac bush.
I want to plant a fragile scrap of  lilac, or three in a group
French or Persian, or some enchanting Russian hybrid like Beauty of Moscow.
I want to water them through the long hot summers, and gloat over the lovely heart-shaped leaves in Spring, exult when the first infant flower sprays appear, and keep waiting and watching, April after April until the yard is filled with the massive adult bushes and the exquisite fragrance.
I want to plant a climbing rose.
I want to nurse it through its first seasons, wait the extra years for the first bloom, and feel no sense of hurry, because the rose and I have time, and no one is going anywhere.
I want to read manuals about pruning, toss them aside in despair, and train it and twist it, and bemoan it, until it is snaking its green canes over the roof like a flowering octopus, and I'm lamenting its size, vigor and thorns.
I want to plant a garden.

Danse Macabre

"Lie on the floor, children, lie as though you were sleeping."
It is the autumn of the year.
The leaves rustle and heave like the blankets of a restless sleeper.
Drift down in a slow rain.
My grandmother travels the house on fragile feet.
Smooths with feeble hands the flutter of her pulse.
She drifts between waking and sleeping as the leaves glide down.
In class today, we listen to the Danse Macabre.
Children laid low in little heaps turn earnest faces upward.
Through their tousled bright hair gleam eyes wide and interested.
I watch the faces, open and eager, fearless and fresh, wondering at Death's violin. 
These wigglers, these fidgeters, these pokers and gigglers, lying so still.
The little bodies are huddled in pitiful rows, scattered like leaves.
"Listen, children, listen for the rattle of the bones. Listen to the striking of the clock.
For the crowing of the cock."
O childhood, O mortality, why this throbbing ache in my throat?