I dread Sundays with a special dread.
For at times, quite suddenly, in stillness, in music, the realization of a love betrayed sears across my heart in a flash of unexpected pain.
I sing mechanically, entertaining myself with the task of finding a harmony, or perhaps merely the sound of my own voice. And suddenly I find myself shaping the words to a song which I have sung just a few years or months ago in a passion of adoration and trust, and the stabbing sense of loss brings tears.
I think as little as possible about religious faith during most weeks. I generally succeed in focusing on things that have more pressing interest or import to me right now. My marriage, my job. Things I need to get done. Creative hobbies- gardening and homemaking, cooking and planning special meals, writing, painting, homesteading, sewing and collecting antiques- dreaming the life I want to live and create for my family, trying to forget the things that hurt or worry.
Yet there's an internal voice which won't be silenced entirely ever, which raises itself at moments of confusion like this to wonder if everything that passed before, my whole life, my whole way of viewing the world, can really have been only a shadow and a dream built on a false system of belief.
To describe the Christianity I remember as a 'system of belief' seems so sterile.
Mustn't there be, somehow, somewhere, existing in some form, something that is God?
Can't we find Him, know Him? Does He care about us?
Will I ever trust again, ever 'worship' again, ever find any concrete meaning in the Universe greater, more noble than myself to demand sacrifice and loyalty, to give hope and serenity in exchange?
This beginning Advent season is the worst, the most agonizing, because so recently I loved it so dearly.
How can it move me, still, so powerfully- the beauty, the harmony, the exquisite balance and detail of the great Story? It bathes the history, literature, art of my culture, of all Western Civilization, in the reflected brilliance of its colors and light.
Not long ago I was a Christian repulsed by my religious community and its practices, wracked by doubts. I think now that I am an agnostic in love with Christianity.
At this season of the year the wonder deepens- the joy, the solemn mystery of this faith attain their climax.
Into the darkness and the cold, across the miles of silent snow, through the heavy gray clouds and mist or the icy brilliance of our million stars there comes the soft glow of candlelight and the glad sweetness of their singing, growing in strength, pushing back the night to the very blackest edges of the universe. And the old names seem to shine with a new radiance- Adonai, Emmanuel.
Messiah.
This year, for the first time, I stand apart entirely, outside in the barren dark. Without, an icy wind rakes through the emptiness, and the windows of their churches, bright with candles, vibrating with song, throw this new grief into stark relief.
For unto us a child is born. For unto us a hope is given.
There is such a hopeless sadness in this loss of faith- so much weariness and confusion, even anguish in this journey out of Christianity. That vanished faith, imperfect as it was, immature and at times self-serving was built upon a sincere and hopeful love.
There is excruciating loneliness. A lifetime of relationships are in flux- changing, fading, vanishing entirely. I can't replace the friendships, don't know how to plough through the distance and experience community in new and meaningful ways.
The beloved, familiar melodies of Christmas make this isolation tangible, make the solitude a humming in my ears and a bitter taste in my mouth.
I forget my frustrations with the churches and Bible studies, forget their blundering and lack of nuance or compassion, their ignorance and incurious complacency, their distrust of art and intellect, their click-bait religious and political screeds on Facebook that murdered the last vestiges of my respect and I feel only a desperate envy.
I envy the simplicity of their belief.
I envy their sense of belonging.
I envy their joy, even as I doubt its sincerity.
I envy their Savior, their God-Man, their God With Us.
I envy their Christ Child, snug in his manger.
I no longer believe in Him, but at moments like these I am forced to accept that I love Him, still, with an absurd and tortured love.
Lord, to whom shall we go, when there are no words of eternal life?
Monday, November 30, 2015
Monday, November 16, 2015
The tossed empty space/ Of cloud rack when the moon has passed away
At first it was a relief- the freedom- the release of that long, fierce intellectual tension between what she believed and what she knew to be true. At last she could gaze with quiet eyes on the shouting and posturing from pulpits, the forced intimacy and saccharine emotionalism of flocks and know herself to be utterly apart from them all without the old guilt, the old surge of confusion.
They repulsed her, exhausted her with their heartiness and jocularity, the strained smiles and artificial sympathy or agreement they demanded of one week after week.
But there were other moments, heartbeats of still beauty when she was alone and the world had ceased to jostle and roar around her when she felt keenly the depth of her loss. At these times she was caught, as always, by the delicate coloring of the sky, the arched loveliness of cedar boughs stretching overhead, and the emptiness of it hammered at her heart.
Before, there was the glory of gratitude, the delicious sense of complicity with a creative God, this artist God poised always in exquisite concentration upon each detail of His world, who spread His treasures before her in the solitude and silence as though he were gladdened by her gladness and her wonder.
She was lost now in this pathless maze of uncreated beauty, this blur of art without its artist. The joy was gone.
There was a weight in this new, tired cynicism which dragged at her with a dull ache. She couldn't un-see what she had seen- that her lifetime of dogged faith in rigid, carefully crafted doctrine- all her finely tuned dogma, the passion, the tenderness, the repentance, all these triumphant centuries of church history with its tales of shining heroism- were built on nothing were all insubstantial and unsubstantiated as air. Only her belief in them had imbued them with life, and this earnest belief had faded and then vanished entirely.
The betrayal cut so deep, was so rooted in pain and abandonment, that its aftermath was paralyzing.
She could not rebuild, could not construct a new framework of faith. The world was empty of magic of symbolism- only its bewildering, meaningless loveliness remained.
Impossible to revel in her liberty. Empty to accept the smug congratulations of those others who had wandered, like her, from the fold, many of whom seemed to wriggle and gambol like puppies in the excess of their delight in their own cleverness, their assurance that only their keen intellect and deep wisdom had made possible their escape.
She turned to the familiar landscape, the gentle trees with their lace-like intricacy, their tracery of twigs as fragile and dainty as the bones of birds. The exuberance of flowers, the ecstasy of light and shadow in a grassy field were waiting, unchanged. She clung to their beauty in her anguish of loneliness and found at times more agony than solace. They seemed so distant and lifeless, so separated from the warm and living personality which had once seemed to animate the universe.
The isolation only seemed to grow in intensity.
Each day she lived the same shock and despair as she realized that her hypocrisy and silence were the last links with the only world she felt at home in, as the weight of her deferred unmasking crashed in upon her. She despised the old world and loved its inhabitants. She cringed at their triteness, their clumsy speech, their absurdity, but she could not bear to break loose definitively from their warmth, their stability, their familiar reassurance. She still craved their approval and respect. The world she saw outside, its materialism, its secular citizens, its vivid scorn for her roots repulsed her no less than her past. She stayed, utterly alone, and the thought of escape remained one of utter loneliness.
She had always felt a deep core of quiet, a silent watchfulness within her. In the old days, it was a vibrant silence, a source of strength and compassion, an inner rest.
Now she was trapped in the quiet in a kind of mute despair, choking back any expression of the grief that throbbed in her head and writhed in her belly. There were all the things which must not be spoken aloud, not to him, not to them. There was the futility of speaking unheard, unwanted words. There were long nights of strangled tears and the harsh, frantic days when she longed for merciful darkness. She clung to silence, curled up protectively upon herself, desperate to hide her tapestry of naked nerves from further torment. In the end, the silence bound her, left her crouched hopelessly cradling a dark and secret shame, a tired disillusionment with existence. Life was strain, every muscle tensed against a coming rejection, a final separation from the only friendship and community she had known.
Her very body mocked her, betrayed her, bled her into utter weariness. Its brokenness locked her behind new walls of isolation, separated her from the comforting physical world. There was no god whose passing cloak she could clutch at in the midst of a crowd, no hope that faith in divine mercy would restore her.
Even suffering was meaningless. She felt an object of ridicule. Self-pitying, melodramatic, absurd in a world of shifting allegiances and doubtful honor.
She dreaded their pity and their prayers.
There were words for the gathering darkness, the plodding misery, the raw emotions, the exhaustion. Depression. Anxiety.
They twined themselves inextricably throughout the fabric of her lost faith, but the weaving was still too narrow, too recently begun and too haphazard for her to discern any pattern.
They repulsed her, exhausted her with their heartiness and jocularity, the strained smiles and artificial sympathy or agreement they demanded of one week after week.
But there were other moments, heartbeats of still beauty when she was alone and the world had ceased to jostle and roar around her when she felt keenly the depth of her loss. At these times she was caught, as always, by the delicate coloring of the sky, the arched loveliness of cedar boughs stretching overhead, and the emptiness of it hammered at her heart.
Before, there was the glory of gratitude, the delicious sense of complicity with a creative God, this artist God poised always in exquisite concentration upon each detail of His world, who spread His treasures before her in the solitude and silence as though he were gladdened by her gladness and her wonder.
She was lost now in this pathless maze of uncreated beauty, this blur of art without its artist. The joy was gone.
There was a weight in this new, tired cynicism which dragged at her with a dull ache. She couldn't un-see what she had seen- that her lifetime of dogged faith in rigid, carefully crafted doctrine- all her finely tuned dogma, the passion, the tenderness, the repentance, all these triumphant centuries of church history with its tales of shining heroism- were built on nothing were all insubstantial and unsubstantiated as air. Only her belief in them had imbued them with life, and this earnest belief had faded and then vanished entirely.
The betrayal cut so deep, was so rooted in pain and abandonment, that its aftermath was paralyzing.
She could not rebuild, could not construct a new framework of faith. The world was empty of magic of symbolism- only its bewildering, meaningless loveliness remained.
Impossible to revel in her liberty. Empty to accept the smug congratulations of those others who had wandered, like her, from the fold, many of whom seemed to wriggle and gambol like puppies in the excess of their delight in their own cleverness, their assurance that only their keen intellect and deep wisdom had made possible their escape.
She turned to the familiar landscape, the gentle trees with their lace-like intricacy, their tracery of twigs as fragile and dainty as the bones of birds. The exuberance of flowers, the ecstasy of light and shadow in a grassy field were waiting, unchanged. She clung to their beauty in her anguish of loneliness and found at times more agony than solace. They seemed so distant and lifeless, so separated from the warm and living personality which had once seemed to animate the universe.
The isolation only seemed to grow in intensity.
Each day she lived the same shock and despair as she realized that her hypocrisy and silence were the last links with the only world she felt at home in, as the weight of her deferred unmasking crashed in upon her. She despised the old world and loved its inhabitants. She cringed at their triteness, their clumsy speech, their absurdity, but she could not bear to break loose definitively from their warmth, their stability, their familiar reassurance. She still craved their approval and respect. The world she saw outside, its materialism, its secular citizens, its vivid scorn for her roots repulsed her no less than her past. She stayed, utterly alone, and the thought of escape remained one of utter loneliness.
She had always felt a deep core of quiet, a silent watchfulness within her. In the old days, it was a vibrant silence, a source of strength and compassion, an inner rest.
Now she was trapped in the quiet in a kind of mute despair, choking back any expression of the grief that throbbed in her head and writhed in her belly. There were all the things which must not be spoken aloud, not to him, not to them. There was the futility of speaking unheard, unwanted words. There were long nights of strangled tears and the harsh, frantic days when she longed for merciful darkness. She clung to silence, curled up protectively upon herself, desperate to hide her tapestry of naked nerves from further torment. In the end, the silence bound her, left her crouched hopelessly cradling a dark and secret shame, a tired disillusionment with existence. Life was strain, every muscle tensed against a coming rejection, a final separation from the only friendship and community she had known.
Her very body mocked her, betrayed her, bled her into utter weariness. Its brokenness locked her behind new walls of isolation, separated her from the comforting physical world. There was no god whose passing cloak she could clutch at in the midst of a crowd, no hope that faith in divine mercy would restore her.
Even suffering was meaningless. She felt an object of ridicule. Self-pitying, melodramatic, absurd in a world of shifting allegiances and doubtful honor.
She dreaded their pity and their prayers.
There were words for the gathering darkness, the plodding misery, the raw emotions, the exhaustion. Depression. Anxiety.
They twined themselves inextricably throughout the fabric of her lost faith, but the weaving was still too narrow, too recently begun and too haphazard for her to discern any pattern.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Sunday Window
"Are you born again?"
I am born
Each morning in sunrise
In wet hung grasses
In webs bright with dewdrops.
"We are gathered this Sabbath"- nasal voice
Sweat beads on his forehead, he smiles
A palisade of teeth, and he squints at us
Happy. To be here, voice booming
Echoing into our inertia, strident.
"To worship the Most High-
Let's shout it and sing it.
Amen! Can I get an amen?"
There are echoes and echoes.
"When we sing it, when we shout it together
Brothers and sisters
We chase that old devil-"
But they are chasing me, my ears are retreating
They chase my eyes to the window.
Joyous in purity, the grey light of winter.
Below are highway and billboards and cars
All shouting; my eyes lift
I will lift mine eyes to where
Tree branches against the clouds are stark and lovely; the streets
Cannot mar the unbroken purity of the sky.
"Cry to the Holy Ghost!" and I cry
To all that is holy
Swaying tree limbs, scudding clouds.
"Get down on your knees and repent!" I cannot
The window is lovely
I am on my knees in a wood and the altar
Is fernbank and birdsong, my heart
Too bright for repentance. Leaves
Lie dappled in sunlight.
The silence is worship.
"Softly and tenderly" braying their loud invitation
"Come weep away the sin" I stand
Grim-jawed and quiet, both eyes in the hymnal,
Still seeing the window.
I am born
Each morning in sunrise
In wet hung grasses
In webs bright with dewdrops.
"We are gathered this Sabbath"- nasal voice
Sweat beads on his forehead, he smiles
A palisade of teeth, and he squints at us
Happy. To be here, voice booming
Echoing into our inertia, strident.
"To worship the Most High-
Let's shout it and sing it.
Amen! Can I get an amen?"
There are echoes and echoes.
"When we sing it, when we shout it together
Brothers and sisters
We chase that old devil-"
But they are chasing me, my ears are retreating
They chase my eyes to the window.
Joyous in purity, the grey light of winter.
Below are highway and billboards and cars
All shouting; my eyes lift
I will lift mine eyes to where
Tree branches against the clouds are stark and lovely; the streets
Cannot mar the unbroken purity of the sky.
"Cry to the Holy Ghost!" and I cry
To all that is holy
Swaying tree limbs, scudding clouds.
"Get down on your knees and repent!" I cannot
The window is lovely
I am on my knees in a wood and the altar
Is fernbank and birdsong, my heart
Too bright for repentance. Leaves
Lie dappled in sunlight.
The silence is worship.
"Softly and tenderly" braying their loud invitation
"Come weep away the sin" I stand
Grim-jawed and quiet, both eyes in the hymnal,
Still seeing the window.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Conflict
This past year I've read little and written less. I hardly know why. Confusion, depression, a long and miserable spiritual dry spell lived in no-man's land, perhaps.
I used to be buoyed up by a passionate belief in beauty. In retrospect, I think I may have believed more in beauty than in God, or at least they were so intertwined somehow, for me, that I could never think of separating them. I didn't believe the Bible because it was true but because it was beautiful, and true because of it's beauty. However, the beauty in the Bible sometimes felt like a well too quickly exhausted, a celebratory dish that became dry and bland if I tried to live on it from day to day. So the beauty of the Bible became the beauty of my idea of the Bible, broadened to include the exquisite detailing I found in the natural world, the heady fascination of literature and art. The Bible was history, humanity, falling snow, a lacy black pattern of tree branches traced against a winter sunset. I went to the fields to pray. When I prayed, I addressed myself in a wondering delight to 'God, who created all this' 'God, creator of beauty'. Beauty, beauty, harmony and beauty, beauty that could exalt me to wistful, melancholy ecstasy was the hunger of my heart. When my faith struggled, Lewis and Chesterton bolstered it up. I hardly know now whether it was my faith in beauty they bolstered or my faith in God. The God I still instinctively believe in now, in spite of my bleak sense of futility, the elusiveness, the impossibility of knowing any spiritual truth with certainty is the God of Lewis, of Chesterton- the God of hidden magical kingdoms, music, the God who surprises with joy, who speaks in legends and poetry and changing seasons. When it was impossible for me to believe any longer in the church as I saw it every day, I clung to their vision of a Church stretching across history, glorious as an army with banners, tried to believe that something transcended the petty selfishness, the narrowness, the lazy minds and plodding intellects of myself and those who surrounded me. When the Christianity I found in America bored and sickened me to death, when I had to conquer my revulsion to speak in our trite spiritual phrases and accept the platitudes of those I previously respected, my focus became global. I thought that in China, in Cambodia, in France I might find a higher idealism, a pure flame I could aspire to. I began to immerse myself in international relationships, cultural study, language study. It exhilarated me. It was easy to believe that God's calling was here, that in following him I could escape, live a life of joyous adventure, convert the heathen, mold them into the sort of Christian community I was searching in vain, share in their resultant persecution and somehow vicariously elevate myself to the sort of superior cultural and spiritual plain I imagined Christians of other nations to inhabit. I still occasionally meet younger versions of myself at this stage in the church, and it leaves me with a tired sadness. Perhaps during this period I was more sophisticated, better spoken (and perhaps not), but the raw idealism, the smug cultural assumptions are there. It was an impassioned moment in my life. I'm not ashamed of it. But I'm tired. Tired and sick at the heart and cynical. The missionary girl is dead. She couldn't convince herself.
I didn't leave the church. Emotionally and intellectually I was pushed out of it day by day by a version of Christianity unable to separate itself from a brutal and childish patriotism, a hatred of science, a fear of intellectual attainments and the honest study of anything, by a culture that glorified ignorance and oversimplification. The fundamentalist world I come from was impossibly narrow. During the moments when I felt myself honestly a part of it, when I was able to fit myself easily to that narrowness, trust it in all its invasive dogmatism, I was happy in a way. I was a part of a community. I belonged. I knew what I (we) believed and it was simple and safe. Nearly everyone I love is still there, and happy there.
The world I come from is all or nothing. The world I come from is black and white. In the world I come from, the worst is to be unsure, noncommittal lukewarm. God will spit you out like rotting meat. In the world I come from, one deviation from the accepted narrative, one false step towards independence, and your only options are repentance or hell. I no longer belong in this world, but these patterns of thinking are burned on my brain. I don't know how to find compromise, enjoy exploring possibilities. The anxiety of deviation from the pattern is overwhelming. I live in a gray wilderness, and how can I tell anyone?
'We' don't believe in gray.
I don't know how to find balance in my relationship with a God who seems so far away right now, whose character and identity seem so fluid.
The day I realized that my absolute faith in the Bible as a perfect and reliable way to know God and his will was shattered, something in me was shattered too. I can't go back to pick up the pieces I loved among the ruins, to search for unbroken images, or at least fragments whose beauty is still discernible and reassuring. The voices from my childhood are mocking, won't let me forget the perceived hypocrisy of those who 'pick and choose' what to believe, who take what they want from the Bible and throw away the rest. Maybe I'm too honest to construct a faith I'm comfortable with, maybe I'm only too broken. I can't be sure.
For now, there's a grey world of poetry, of physical realities- sunlight warm on my hair, the peculiar golden quality the light has just before evening, gardens to be planted, the delicate impudence of squirrels and birds in the yard. There's music, and humanity to study and sigh over. There's love, the beginning of a marriage, a home and family to plan for and dream of and create. There's a hesitant idealism afraid to believe too fervently in itself, in anything. Maybe someday there will be more. I think I can wait. I don't feel like having any choice.
The world of Christianity- not necessarily Christianity itself, but my experience of it, the culture of Christianity I've known so far in my life leaves me cold. The secular world equally so. I'm not traveling from one place to another. I can't stay here and there's nowhere else I wish to go. Maybe it's only a matter of learning to accept never belonging anywhere again. Rootlessness may be the price of freedom, may always have been so.
I used to be buoyed up by a passionate belief in beauty. In retrospect, I think I may have believed more in beauty than in God, or at least they were so intertwined somehow, for me, that I could never think of separating them. I didn't believe the Bible because it was true but because it was beautiful, and true because of it's beauty. However, the beauty in the Bible sometimes felt like a well too quickly exhausted, a celebratory dish that became dry and bland if I tried to live on it from day to day. So the beauty of the Bible became the beauty of my idea of the Bible, broadened to include the exquisite detailing I found in the natural world, the heady fascination of literature and art. The Bible was history, humanity, falling snow, a lacy black pattern of tree branches traced against a winter sunset. I went to the fields to pray. When I prayed, I addressed myself in a wondering delight to 'God, who created all this' 'God, creator of beauty'. Beauty, beauty, harmony and beauty, beauty that could exalt me to wistful, melancholy ecstasy was the hunger of my heart. When my faith struggled, Lewis and Chesterton bolstered it up. I hardly know now whether it was my faith in beauty they bolstered or my faith in God. The God I still instinctively believe in now, in spite of my bleak sense of futility, the elusiveness, the impossibility of knowing any spiritual truth with certainty is the God of Lewis, of Chesterton- the God of hidden magical kingdoms, music, the God who surprises with joy, who speaks in legends and poetry and changing seasons. When it was impossible for me to believe any longer in the church as I saw it every day, I clung to their vision of a Church stretching across history, glorious as an army with banners, tried to believe that something transcended the petty selfishness, the narrowness, the lazy minds and plodding intellects of myself and those who surrounded me. When the Christianity I found in America bored and sickened me to death, when I had to conquer my revulsion to speak in our trite spiritual phrases and accept the platitudes of those I previously respected, my focus became global. I thought that in China, in Cambodia, in France I might find a higher idealism, a pure flame I could aspire to. I began to immerse myself in international relationships, cultural study, language study. It exhilarated me. It was easy to believe that God's calling was here, that in following him I could escape, live a life of joyous adventure, convert the heathen, mold them into the sort of Christian community I was searching in vain, share in their resultant persecution and somehow vicariously elevate myself to the sort of superior cultural and spiritual plain I imagined Christians of other nations to inhabit. I still occasionally meet younger versions of myself at this stage in the church, and it leaves me with a tired sadness. Perhaps during this period I was more sophisticated, better spoken (and perhaps not), but the raw idealism, the smug cultural assumptions are there. It was an impassioned moment in my life. I'm not ashamed of it. But I'm tired. Tired and sick at the heart and cynical. The missionary girl is dead. She couldn't convince herself.
I didn't leave the church. Emotionally and intellectually I was pushed out of it day by day by a version of Christianity unable to separate itself from a brutal and childish patriotism, a hatred of science, a fear of intellectual attainments and the honest study of anything, by a culture that glorified ignorance and oversimplification. The fundamentalist world I come from was impossibly narrow. During the moments when I felt myself honestly a part of it, when I was able to fit myself easily to that narrowness, trust it in all its invasive dogmatism, I was happy in a way. I was a part of a community. I belonged. I knew what I (we) believed and it was simple and safe. Nearly everyone I love is still there, and happy there.
The world I come from is all or nothing. The world I come from is black and white. In the world I come from, the worst is to be unsure, noncommittal lukewarm. God will spit you out like rotting meat. In the world I come from, one deviation from the accepted narrative, one false step towards independence, and your only options are repentance or hell. I no longer belong in this world, but these patterns of thinking are burned on my brain. I don't know how to find compromise, enjoy exploring possibilities. The anxiety of deviation from the pattern is overwhelming. I live in a gray wilderness, and how can I tell anyone?
'We' don't believe in gray.
I don't know how to find balance in my relationship with a God who seems so far away right now, whose character and identity seem so fluid.
The day I realized that my absolute faith in the Bible as a perfect and reliable way to know God and his will was shattered, something in me was shattered too. I can't go back to pick up the pieces I loved among the ruins, to search for unbroken images, or at least fragments whose beauty is still discernible and reassuring. The voices from my childhood are mocking, won't let me forget the perceived hypocrisy of those who 'pick and choose' what to believe, who take what they want from the Bible and throw away the rest. Maybe I'm too honest to construct a faith I'm comfortable with, maybe I'm only too broken. I can't be sure.
For now, there's a grey world of poetry, of physical realities- sunlight warm on my hair, the peculiar golden quality the light has just before evening, gardens to be planted, the delicate impudence of squirrels and birds in the yard. There's music, and humanity to study and sigh over. There's love, the beginning of a marriage, a home and family to plan for and dream of and create. There's a hesitant idealism afraid to believe too fervently in itself, in anything. Maybe someday there will be more. I think I can wait. I don't feel like having any choice.
The world of Christianity- not necessarily Christianity itself, but my experience of it, the culture of Christianity I've known so far in my life leaves me cold. The secular world equally so. I'm not traveling from one place to another. I can't stay here and there's nowhere else I wish to go. Maybe it's only a matter of learning to accept never belonging anywhere again. Rootlessness may be the price of freedom, may always have been so.
Monday, November 24, 2014
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Friday, December 21, 2012
Snow Day
We've been hibernating all morning in a house transformed by snow and blanket-covered windows into a charming cave (I was tempted to say cosy cave, but the chill and draftiness won't be forgotten so easily). Reading, listening to Christmas music, cooking, cleaning, catching up on letter writing and bills, listening to Lex grumble at his online chess opponents... well, it's been lovely.
Days like this simply don't come often enough- days of concentrated quiet, peace, and cheer. Certainly, tomorrow isn't likely to be another of the same if we drive to Kansas City as planned. So it's a good lesson in contentment- accepting to be luxuriously satisfied by the present moment, with no grumbling about its brevity. It strikes me that pleasure- especially the transient pleasure of a day which magically falls somehow into perfect harmony with itself- is exquisite precisely because of its fragility, because of the knowledge lurking behind it that it may be shattered from moment to moment.
It's impossible to extend the volume of a fine, rich broth merely by adding gallons of water to it. You've more liquid, certainly, but it isn't at all the same thing you began with- the savor is lost. Rest and comfort must be made of the same stuff- the more you have of them, the weaker their flavor.
Days like this should be held to the light like diamonds to be admired. Such glittering white perfection without- such homeliness and security within...
How wonderful to have a few hours of intense peace, boiled down to an almost impossible deliciousness, undiluted by any threat of longevity!
Days like this simply don't come often enough- days of concentrated quiet, peace, and cheer. Certainly, tomorrow isn't likely to be another of the same if we drive to Kansas City as planned. So it's a good lesson in contentment- accepting to be luxuriously satisfied by the present moment, with no grumbling about its brevity. It strikes me that pleasure- especially the transient pleasure of a day which magically falls somehow into perfect harmony with itself- is exquisite precisely because of its fragility, because of the knowledge lurking behind it that it may be shattered from moment to moment.
It's impossible to extend the volume of a fine, rich broth merely by adding gallons of water to it. You've more liquid, certainly, but it isn't at all the same thing you began with- the savor is lost. Rest and comfort must be made of the same stuff- the more you have of them, the weaker their flavor.
Days like this should be held to the light like diamonds to be admired. Such glittering white perfection without- such homeliness and security within...
How wonderful to have a few hours of intense peace, boiled down to an almost impossible deliciousness, undiluted by any threat of longevity!
Monday, December 3, 2012
Moments in Munich: Part 2
"The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn."
― Sophie Scholl
February 22, 1943- Three ringleaders of the resistance group 'The White Rose', based at Ludwig-Maximilian unversity in Munich were executed by guillotine at Stadelheim prison just a few hours after being given a summary trial for treason.
The crime of which Hans Scholl, 23, Sophie Scholl, 21, and Christoph Probst, 22 were accused?
Undermining the National Socialist regime through the distribution of inflammatory leaflets condemning the passivity of the German people in the face of Hitler's crimes, and advocating passive resistance and active sabotage of the war effort and National Socialist agenda.*
― Sophie Scholl
February 22, 1943- Three ringleaders of the resistance group 'The White Rose', based at Ludwig-Maximilian unversity in Munich were executed by guillotine at Stadelheim prison just a few hours after being given a summary trial for treason.
The crime of which Hans Scholl, 23, Sophie Scholl, 21, and Christoph Probst, 22 were accused?
Undermining the National Socialist regime through the distribution of inflammatory leaflets condemning the passivity of the German people in the face of Hitler's crimes, and advocating passive resistance and active sabotage of the war effort and National Socialist agenda.*
For many, many years, this group- Sophie in particular- have absorbed my admiration, interest, and affection with a great deal of intensity. They represent, for me, all that is admirable and heroic, all that is honest and loveable, as well as the genuine passion and cameraderie one often feels the lack of, here. From their example and writings- from their very seeking and confusions, I've learned more about the purpose, depth and signicance of life on earth than from nearly any other source. When I found myself living in Europe for several months last Spring, my greatest desire, naturally, was to make pilgrimage to Munich, and attempt to see this city as these courageous fellow-students had seen it.
The fierceness of the emotions roused during the days I wandered with Rita through Munich and Ulm, attempting to retrace the steps of the Scholls, was unsettling. I was haunted by a sense of physical and spiritual closeness to the student movement, awed to walk among streets and buildings which I'd scrutinised in photographs, dreamed of, and reconstructed in imagination for years. I was moved to tears as though the events of sixty years ago had taken place only yesterday. Those days in Munich were fraught with joy and anguish. I understand now why Catholics kneel before their saints. In homage, regret, and gratitude, my heart too weighed me to my knees. There was at times a strange, primitive desire to kiss the very cobbles of the streets. I seemed to encounter the students of the 1940's at every corner- every new sight, and my heart gave a great leap: 'They too saw this- walked by this arch, paused by this church, strode through this courtyard to their classrooms!'
It was with a sort of dread that I at last left this world of the living students and took the train across town to the prison and cemetery where they, and so many others of that generation, lost their lives. I was unprepared for the overwhelming physical proximity of these 'imaginary friends' of my childhood, and with their harsh end. When at last I found myself before the three crosses bordered in shrubbery, I was dumb with the ache and solemnity of the moment, kneeling beside this so dearly beloved little group, and encountering them irrevocably as physical entities as much as symbol.
And it came upon me with strangeness as I knelt there, trembling in tenderness and grief before the grave of my long cherished ideal, that here indeed lay the end of the story, the culmination of my years-long quest. Tears slid and stung- sixty years ago youth, integrity, and beauty were flung here faceless and bleeding, flung here carelessly as seeds, each in their own narrow furrow torn from the suffering German soil. In this twilit forest, Sophie was no longer the laughing, eager girl, the tree-climber, nature lover, the artist, brow wrinkled in concentration, who had led me like an older sister and patron saint through my young womanhood.
Hans, here, was a pitiful remnant of bone- gone was the tall and keen-eyed young man, fierce and piercing in his hawk-like intensity, his life and passion and thought.
Hans, here, was a pitiful remnant of bone- gone was the tall and keen-eyed young man, fierce and piercing in his hawk-like intensity, his life and passion and thought.
Christoph, gentle Chris, marveling at the mountains, carrying his baby son on his shoulders, cherishing his soft young wife, her belly round with his second child, was stripped here of motion, even of flesh.
Feckless Alex with his Russian songs and stories and his sketch pad- hair falling over his forehead, rakish smile clamped around his pipe, charm twinkling ephemerally even from photos- Alex here was nothing.
Earnest, conscientious Willi here was nothing.
Limping, brilliant Dr. Huber here was nothing.
The upheaved German soil had covered all here indiscriminately- the blood of these eager hearts, and, more terrible than blood, the merciless, anguished tears torn from the hearts which lingered after them.
And this was the end of the story.
I will be 22 in October, but Sophie, my darling Sophie, lies halted here forever at 21. And yet, 'The sun still shines.' The April sun trembles softly across the Perlacher-Friedholm, the pitiful mounds of soil lined up in neat rows along the silent earth.
This is the end of the story, and yet, it is a story without end.
This story cannot end, because what these students and their friends represented is not a thing which can be killed, which can wither away into nothingness in the darkness of a cemetery. Those who live ideas intensely- who make ideas the master of their bodies rather than servants of them- such as these, who never stooped to live merely as bodies cannot be reduced to mere bodies in death. To live one's life in the burning core of an idea is to live on as an idea eternally. To live the truth is to live without end within the truth.
Within the truth then, the White Rose lives timelessly. Sophie did not speak lightly when she declared in prison, 'God is my refuge into eternity'. I have come to this cemetery in my quest for these dear friends, and I have not found them, though at last, after so many years of yearning, I stand physically beside them. I have sought the living among the dead. They are not here. They are not here.
My heart is as light in this moment as it is broken. These young lives were discarded here like unwanted seed tossed into the war-torn earth, and look- the seeds have sprung up into life- look, my heart, the dry husks have burst out verdantly as flowers and fragrance- Oh, look, look! Because a little cluster of children laid down their lives in defiant love, un-terrified and self-forgetting love during years of terror and hatred, and now the world is in a tumult of blossoms- the world, the anguished old world is a-bloom with white roses.
My heart is as light in this moment as it is broken. These young lives were discarded here like unwanted seed tossed into the war-torn earth, and look- the seeds have sprung up into life- look, my heart, the dry husks have burst out verdantly as flowers and fragrance- Oh, look, look! Because a little cluster of children laid down their lives in defiant love, un-terrified and self-forgetting love during years of terror and hatred, and now the world is in a tumult of blossoms- the world, the anguished old world is a-bloom with white roses.
Whatever is fine in Germany, whatever is fine, and lovely, and noble in humanity- whatever is honorable, and whatever is strong and vital, I have found it here, and can carry it away with me, conscious of new life and endurance. And Sophie, Hans, Christoph, Alex, all you others who have shown me with such passion how to live and die in integrity, I have not forgotten- and I am grateful.
"Isn't it a riddle . . . and awe-inspiring, that everything is so beautiful? Despite the horror. Lately I've noticed something grand and mysterious peering through my sheer joy in all that is beautiful, a sense of its creator . . . Only man can be truly ugly, because he has the free will to estrange himself from this song of praise.
It often seems that he'll manage to drown out this hymn with his cannon thunder, curses and blasphemy. But during this past spring it has dawned upon me that he won't be able to do this. And so I want to try and throw myself on the side of the victor."
It often seems that he'll manage to drown out this hymn with his cannon thunder, curses and blasphemy. But during this past spring it has dawned upon me that he won't be able to do this. And so I want to try and throw myself on the side of the victor."
-Sophie Scholl
(*If you want to know more of the (magnificent) story of these young people, what they accomplished, and the deep faith and convictions which motivated, them, I recomment Hermann Vinke's biograpy 'The Short Life of Sophie Scholl', 'The White Rose' by Sophie's younger sister, Inge Scholl, and, certainly 'At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl' by Inge Jens.)
Monday, September 10, 2012
From France to 'La Maison Francaise'
Some houses wear eccentricity as graciously as Her Majesty wears a mantle. La Maison Francaise is not one of these houses. Rather, she swaddles herself in eccentricity with the clumsy charm of a gawky colt. Or at least, this is what I would like very much to believe, for since the end of August, this strikingly peculiar little house has been my home, and that of the delightful Stacey Weidemann.
We take a certain pride in our character laden abode.
Permit me to offer you a tour?
Painted a buttercup yellow, and shoved into the side of an embankent, with precarious and spindling decks tacked swayingly onto either side, our house exudes an indefinable aura of 'ramshackle' and 'thrown together'. Enter, and the first thing which will catch your eye is a door.
This door was not always present. It is a recent, and more than welcome addition.
Before the door, there was a gaping doorway, a cobweb hung stairwell, a crooked, neck-breaking descent of wooden stairs, and the shadowy, fearful depths of The Basement.
This gray opening leading to the vast netherworlds of our maison excercised a peculiar magnetic quality, dragging my unwilling gaze each time I passed it, clutching me with vertigo as I stared across the twilit expanse, peopled with shrouded objects which grew in terror and mystery as the light waned.
To be home alone at night was to face all the horrors of that gaping doorway to the basement, through which anything might, at any moment be expected to come. We joked about the basement- about the crazed murderers and mysterious creatures which lurked hidden in its dark recesses, but the joking was tinged with panic. This was a basement, huge and harrowing, which made such loathesome lurking seem to dangerously near the realm of the probable.
The door has brought blessed relief. I could almost caress it with pleasure when I pass through the once perilous hallway to the kitchen and meet no menacing shadows, but rather this sturdy, cheerful panel of polished walnut, securely deadbolted in place.
The basement has many interesting characteristics, but one of the most astounding is The Graffiti room, a half finished room covered with bright yellow posterboard on the outside, with a vast assortment of graffiti applied in sharpie to the cement blocks of the interior. The graffiti appears to have been planned and encouraged, but is difficult to make sense of. On one block someone named Dave scrawls "Whoa! Great bar!", and on another, a childish scribble reads "Thank you grammy and grampa for a great thanksgiving it was a good thanksgiving and I liked the turkey love Tanisha"
On the other wall, is lettered "Mark is in love with Katie!", and beside it, in a different hand, "Katie is in love with Mark, too!"
Perhaps the mystery of this room will never be solved, certainly not by a team of amateur archaeologists such as us.
And now we find ourselves in the kitchen. The upper walls are a creamy golden yellow like blatantly artificial coloring in margarine. The lower, a unique, ephemeral shade of dull pinkish orange which was advertised as 'rhubarb', and which I confess to being intensely fond of.
Artificial brick paneling adorns the more businesslike area of the room, which is growing more pleasant and useful by the week. First, we had a refrigerator, and this was good. Next we had a stove, of which only the gas burners could be used, and this was also good. Then came a strip of countertop propped on two of the sturdier of the old cabinets which once occupied this cuisine. Then came enormous piles of sawdust (which have since gone of to the nearest landfill, and an old porcelain sink hanging awkwardly halfway in and halfway out of a new rectangular hole in the center of the counter, like a portly woman wedged into an innertube. Someday this sink will perform the full duties of a sink, but for now it is merely a sort of promise, or IOU, or status symbol, reminding us that we will not always wash our dishes in the little sink in the bathroom, and that better things are on their way.
Gradually, the screwdrivers, and wires, and boxes of nails which filled our kitchen cabinets are giving way to Stacey's quaint dishes and the various food staples which make life palatable.
The floor is of an experimental vinyl known as 'floating flooring', which is not attached to the plywood beneath. As a result, it's inclined to bubble, and tremendous care must be taken in moving heavy objects. My father advises us not even to scuff our feet.
The laundry room and N'importe Quoi room are a sharp step lower than the kitchen, which they both connect to. I haven't the faintest idea why. The laundry room, sponge painted in baby blue, with a ragged wallpaper border representing clothes on a clothesline, is the new resting place of all tools and construction materials, recycling, filled trash bags, and any other unsightliness which can be crammed in. The reason? It has doors, which close, and latch. Rather closetlike, they are.
The N'importe Quoi room is a textured and dusty ivory around its top half, with dark wood paneling around the bottom. Bookshelves are built into one side of the room, and at the other is a door leading to the outdoors, the purpose of which we have never understood. At present, it is a mausolem of dusty and unwanted furniture and abandoned cardboard boxes- little more. If something is neither tool nor trash, yet you're not sure where to set it, by all means, pile it here.
Let us proceed to the living room.
The half nearest to the kitchen is a square alcove outlined in white chair rail, with elegant white panel designs of a classical appearance ornamenting the lower section of the wall. The other, is merely the home of our aged couch, and Stacey's two chairs. The carpet is a dull industrial gray, continuously pilling and shedding, which embitters my existence, and clashes defiantly with every colour in the house. The whole thing is painted in a very soft delicate turquoise shade, which I find charming, but which was less alluring to the man from Suddenlink who installed our wifi.
"This color looks like something my wife would have picked out", he remarked conversationally. "I've never understood her tastes in colors. Me, I couldn't stand to have a room this awful greenish-blue shade. It would make me sick. But my wife just loves that sort of thing- even turquoise jewelry, which I won't buy for her. You know her, she'd wear it, and I just can't bear this color. Not that I'm criticizing of course. My wife's a good woman, and she would have painted a room this awful color too if she had the chance. But it's sure not what I would have chosen."
In the alcove with the wainscoting, which is currently bare of furniture, there also hangs a fanciful crystal chandelier, a relic of the mysterious former occupants, about whom we grow increasingly curious.
Another chandelier, the crystals arranged in a different style, adorns the hallway, which is also painted in 'rhubarb', and one wall of which is covered in majestically textured wallpaper with delusions of Versailles.
The bathroom is dominated by the shower, which is tall and imposing- so tall, that our shower curtain, though the normal height, seems painfully short and inadequate. The shower head can be seen, arching triumphantly high above the sad little curtain. The faucet is jammed in directly under the sky-scraping shower head, and so to turn on the water it is necessary to stretch one's arms to their farthest hight.
We like it here. I like it here.
But to be honest, it's not France. And now that our time in France has ended, I find myself missing it more even than I believed possible.
Missouri is... midwestern. Dingy, commercial, and nearly devoid of sidewalks (Alright, so I'm a bit bitter and shrill on the topic of sidewalks at present)
When I think of France now, I have a dizzying impression of beauty and fragrance, cloudy skies and swaying masses of lilac and white wisteria, lovely, gracious old buildings, and cobbled streets, the shimmering waters of the lake, the warm, crusty, golden charm of the little corner bakeries, the breathless wonder of learning to take refuge in beloved and reassuring arms, the bus moving through the rain in a rainbow blur, the women draped in their enormous scarves, pink roses clambering over warm stone walls, the cold, lofty majesty, the compelling silence, or ravishing music, of the stone churches and cathedrals, with their enormous windows sparkling like a kaleidescope of gems- the nerve wracking noise of the train stations... Oh, France has burned itself on my senses like a brand, and I'm shocked now by the harrowing ache, the tender grief I can't help lavishing on each crumpled receit and faded bus ticket which remind me.
While unpacking clothes last week, I happened upon a shirt which had lain unnoticed in a pocket of my duffel bag since I crammed it there during my last week in Angers. I buried my face in it, and Angers struck me like a wave- it breathed the aroma of the lavender assouplissant I'd washed my clothes in, a bit of the precious rosewater I was forced to discard in London airport, the peculiar odor of the dorm room and its drawers, the sunshiny breeze the shirt had dried in, while hanging from my window, Greg and his mother's sweet laundry detergent... I found myself weeping into the garment, overwhelmed by an unexpected sensation of being physically transported back.
And so, transitioning into everyday life in the U.S. is challenging, because emotionally, there's still a... dizzying gulf between I, and the life I left behind nearly a year ago now. Normal eluded me when I tried to return to it, perhaps because my reluctance to return was so evident. I still feel lost here- curiously disoriented and out of place.
But since life is a continuous pattern of change and uprooting, and loveliness such as the loveliness I so painfully remember, and am dazed in remembering is always fleeting, and frequently illusionary, perhaps none of this is so strange.
And so, I am thankful for the transition, however rocky in spots, back to the world of cows, and corn, and ditches where sidewalks should be, and into our funny and intensely individual yellow mansion, wobbling smugly on its stilts, and demanding to be noticed.
Hopefully now, even you friends who are not lucky enough to have met it, will notice it, with all the humorous and head-shaking attention it deserves. The French house is off and running! Et donc, bienvenue!
We take a certain pride in our character laden abode.
Permit me to offer you a tour?
Painted a buttercup yellow, and shoved into the side of an embankent, with precarious and spindling decks tacked swayingly onto either side, our house exudes an indefinable aura of 'ramshackle' and 'thrown together'. Enter, and the first thing which will catch your eye is a door.
This door was not always present. It is a recent, and more than welcome addition.
Before the door, there was a gaping doorway, a cobweb hung stairwell, a crooked, neck-breaking descent of wooden stairs, and the shadowy, fearful depths of The Basement.
This gray opening leading to the vast netherworlds of our maison excercised a peculiar magnetic quality, dragging my unwilling gaze each time I passed it, clutching me with vertigo as I stared across the twilit expanse, peopled with shrouded objects which grew in terror and mystery as the light waned.
To be home alone at night was to face all the horrors of that gaping doorway to the basement, through which anything might, at any moment be expected to come. We joked about the basement- about the crazed murderers and mysterious creatures which lurked hidden in its dark recesses, but the joking was tinged with panic. This was a basement, huge and harrowing, which made such loathesome lurking seem to dangerously near the realm of the probable.
The door has brought blessed relief. I could almost caress it with pleasure when I pass through the once perilous hallway to the kitchen and meet no menacing shadows, but rather this sturdy, cheerful panel of polished walnut, securely deadbolted in place.
The basement has many interesting characteristics, but one of the most astounding is The Graffiti room, a half finished room covered with bright yellow posterboard on the outside, with a vast assortment of graffiti applied in sharpie to the cement blocks of the interior. The graffiti appears to have been planned and encouraged, but is difficult to make sense of. On one block someone named Dave scrawls "Whoa! Great bar!", and on another, a childish scribble reads "Thank you grammy and grampa for a great thanksgiving it was a good thanksgiving and I liked the turkey love Tanisha"
On the other wall, is lettered "Mark is in love with Katie!", and beside it, in a different hand, "Katie is in love with Mark, too!"
Perhaps the mystery of this room will never be solved, certainly not by a team of amateur archaeologists such as us.
And now we find ourselves in the kitchen. The upper walls are a creamy golden yellow like blatantly artificial coloring in margarine. The lower, a unique, ephemeral shade of dull pinkish orange which was advertised as 'rhubarb', and which I confess to being intensely fond of.
Artificial brick paneling adorns the more businesslike area of the room, which is growing more pleasant and useful by the week. First, we had a refrigerator, and this was good. Next we had a stove, of which only the gas burners could be used, and this was also good. Then came a strip of countertop propped on two of the sturdier of the old cabinets which once occupied this cuisine. Then came enormous piles of sawdust (which have since gone of to the nearest landfill, and an old porcelain sink hanging awkwardly halfway in and halfway out of a new rectangular hole in the center of the counter, like a portly woman wedged into an innertube. Someday this sink will perform the full duties of a sink, but for now it is merely a sort of promise, or IOU, or status symbol, reminding us that we will not always wash our dishes in the little sink in the bathroom, and that better things are on their way.
Gradually, the screwdrivers, and wires, and boxes of nails which filled our kitchen cabinets are giving way to Stacey's quaint dishes and the various food staples which make life palatable.
The floor is of an experimental vinyl known as 'floating flooring', which is not attached to the plywood beneath. As a result, it's inclined to bubble, and tremendous care must be taken in moving heavy objects. My father advises us not even to scuff our feet.
The laundry room and N'importe Quoi room are a sharp step lower than the kitchen, which they both connect to. I haven't the faintest idea why. The laundry room, sponge painted in baby blue, with a ragged wallpaper border representing clothes on a clothesline, is the new resting place of all tools and construction materials, recycling, filled trash bags, and any other unsightliness which can be crammed in. The reason? It has doors, which close, and latch. Rather closetlike, they are.
The N'importe Quoi room is a textured and dusty ivory around its top half, with dark wood paneling around the bottom. Bookshelves are built into one side of the room, and at the other is a door leading to the outdoors, the purpose of which we have never understood. At present, it is a mausolem of dusty and unwanted furniture and abandoned cardboard boxes- little more. If something is neither tool nor trash, yet you're not sure where to set it, by all means, pile it here.
Let us proceed to the living room.
The half nearest to the kitchen is a square alcove outlined in white chair rail, with elegant white panel designs of a classical appearance ornamenting the lower section of the wall. The other, is merely the home of our aged couch, and Stacey's two chairs. The carpet is a dull industrial gray, continuously pilling and shedding, which embitters my existence, and clashes defiantly with every colour in the house. The whole thing is painted in a very soft delicate turquoise shade, which I find charming, but which was less alluring to the man from Suddenlink who installed our wifi.
"This color looks like something my wife would have picked out", he remarked conversationally. "I've never understood her tastes in colors. Me, I couldn't stand to have a room this awful greenish-blue shade. It would make me sick. But my wife just loves that sort of thing- even turquoise jewelry, which I won't buy for her. You know her, she'd wear it, and I just can't bear this color. Not that I'm criticizing of course. My wife's a good woman, and she would have painted a room this awful color too if she had the chance. But it's sure not what I would have chosen."
In the alcove with the wainscoting, which is currently bare of furniture, there also hangs a fanciful crystal chandelier, a relic of the mysterious former occupants, about whom we grow increasingly curious.
Another chandelier, the crystals arranged in a different style, adorns the hallway, which is also painted in 'rhubarb', and one wall of which is covered in majestically textured wallpaper with delusions of Versailles.
The bathroom is dominated by the shower, which is tall and imposing- so tall, that our shower curtain, though the normal height, seems painfully short and inadequate. The shower head can be seen, arching triumphantly high above the sad little curtain. The faucet is jammed in directly under the sky-scraping shower head, and so to turn on the water it is necessary to stretch one's arms to their farthest hight.
We like it here. I like it here.
But to be honest, it's not France. And now that our time in France has ended, I find myself missing it more even than I believed possible.
Missouri is... midwestern. Dingy, commercial, and nearly devoid of sidewalks (Alright, so I'm a bit bitter and shrill on the topic of sidewalks at present)
When I think of France now, I have a dizzying impression of beauty and fragrance, cloudy skies and swaying masses of lilac and white wisteria, lovely, gracious old buildings, and cobbled streets, the shimmering waters of the lake, the warm, crusty, golden charm of the little corner bakeries, the breathless wonder of learning to take refuge in beloved and reassuring arms, the bus moving through the rain in a rainbow blur, the women draped in their enormous scarves, pink roses clambering over warm stone walls, the cold, lofty majesty, the compelling silence, or ravishing music, of the stone churches and cathedrals, with their enormous windows sparkling like a kaleidescope of gems- the nerve wracking noise of the train stations... Oh, France has burned itself on my senses like a brand, and I'm shocked now by the harrowing ache, the tender grief I can't help lavishing on each crumpled receit and faded bus ticket which remind me.
While unpacking clothes last week, I happened upon a shirt which had lain unnoticed in a pocket of my duffel bag since I crammed it there during my last week in Angers. I buried my face in it, and Angers struck me like a wave- it breathed the aroma of the lavender assouplissant I'd washed my clothes in, a bit of the precious rosewater I was forced to discard in London airport, the peculiar odor of the dorm room and its drawers, the sunshiny breeze the shirt had dried in, while hanging from my window, Greg and his mother's sweet laundry detergent... I found myself weeping into the garment, overwhelmed by an unexpected sensation of being physically transported back.
And so, transitioning into everyday life in the U.S. is challenging, because emotionally, there's still a... dizzying gulf between I, and the life I left behind nearly a year ago now. Normal eluded me when I tried to return to it, perhaps because my reluctance to return was so evident. I still feel lost here- curiously disoriented and out of place.
But since life is a continuous pattern of change and uprooting, and loveliness such as the loveliness I so painfully remember, and am dazed in remembering is always fleeting, and frequently illusionary, perhaps none of this is so strange.
And so, I am thankful for the transition, however rocky in spots, back to the world of cows, and corn, and ditches where sidewalks should be, and into our funny and intensely individual yellow mansion, wobbling smugly on its stilts, and demanding to be noticed.
Hopefully now, even you friends who are not lucky enough to have met it, will notice it, with all the humorous and head-shaking attention it deserves. The French house is off and running! Et donc, bienvenue!
Thursday, August 30, 2012
A language manifesto, and a few curious questions...
A gift which is truly a gift is never a gift merely.
It is a force, a fierceness, a drive. It does not bestow itself, it rather demands pursuit- tantalizes, taunts, eludes, rouses its servant to a frenzy of determination, a glow of enthusiasm, an intensity of ecstatic purpose. It is struggle, and it is joy. It is agony and sweat, but only as childbirth is- a glorious agony, bringing life, new meaning, into the world.
To have a 'gift for languages' is in essence this:
To be the thrall of language, enslaved by language learning. To cherish these bonds.
No chains could be more enlivening than those which place all the beauty and mystery of human communication and culture into the trembling manacled hands of a student who strains for them, dizzied with wonder.
In other words, language learning, though work-intensive, is fun. Exquisite fun. 'Deliciously fun', as one of my professors likes to say.
During the four years I've spent studying French, two years of learning Chinese, and three days of tackling German, I've continuously encountered a question which I find utterly incomprehensible. People phrase it in different ways:
"Why are you studying _____?"
"What's the point of learning ________? What are you going to do with it?"
"Why on earth would you want to know ______?"
Confession: People who ask this make no sense to me at all. When I meet someone, and they mention that they're studying a language, I feel an immediate kinship if it's one I'm studying as well, impressed if they're more advanced, envious and gluttonously eager to glean their knowledge if it's one I'm not learning. It never occurs to me to wonder why they're learning it. If they're the 'right sort of people', I already know.
This love of languages is characterized by a certain element of greed. I want them all, can't bear to encounter one without acquiring at least the rudiments of it. Possession for its own sake is a thing I strive for compulsively. So, the honest answer to the questions I continuously encounter is this: I study any given language in order to know it. I'm driven by the desire to master it, revel in it, and bask in it merely for its own sake. I learn languages for the sole purpose of knowing languages, and for the infinite pleasure and challenge involved in acquiring them. What I intend to do with these languages is to know them, and glory in the knowledge- to communicate with the vast new expanse of human beings each new language gives me access to, to read their literature, listen to their radio stations, befriend and adopt them. I never begin the study of a language with any more practical thought in mind than this starry-eyed fascination with people and cultures and words. Foreign languages, and the attendant cross-cultural friendships, are the thud of my heart, the pulse of my blood, the flame, the voice, the motion of whatever elusive quality is 'I'.
I've come up with many practical uses for my habit, primarily as an excuse to continue along this path of linguistic addiction. Language, words, are my catnip, an irresistible lure. To stumble over new words like an infant, gradually growing in confidence, to watch a tiny kingdom of vocabulary gradually explode into a vast militant empire of sentences, and then paragraphs, of which one is master, to begin practicing with native speakers, and shudder under the thrill of the complacent comprehension and casual response with which they increasingly meet one's stammered utterances, to sense the delicious invasion of one's thoughts, and then one's dreams with the seamless transition to a new tongue... This is living, as living should be.
Last year I discovered the magic of teaching languages, of opening up a whole new universe of sound and expression to students.
While in France I fell in love with translation- testing my competency in an adopted tongue by bringing it to life in my native one- striving to retain the subtleties of style and meaning of the original French while producing an accurate, culturally approachable, contextualized text in English. The magic of it catches me like a spell, nerving me to a delicate, painstaking attention to detail. I understand now why translators are compelled to spend hours searching and scribbling until the exact word or idiom, the precise turn of phrase is discovered, and another piece of the puzzle falls neatly into place. I want to do this.
Bref, the thought of spending a lifetime mastering the tools of translation and honing the skills it demands, eventually adding multiple languages to my translating repertoire is enthralling, both in terms of satisfaction derived, and practical benefits such as working from home, a flexible schedule, having a fully portable career which is independent of location, and making contacts with 'language people' all over the world.
Certain elements, of course are intimidating- the massive tech savviness increasingly demanded of translators and interpreters, the aggressive self-marketing and meticulous organization/dedication to deadlines necessary for building up a respectable clientele. Mais peu importe. Je ferai mon mieux, et un tel travail vaut bien le travail qu'il faut pour s'établir.
So, to answer another, more reasonable question which I've received a lot since returning from France, my plans, admittedly loose, are thus:
To graduate at some point in 2013.
To return to the Loire region of France (probably to Nantes or Rennes) for a paid internship, teaching English as a second language, and hopefully taking a couple of French classes on the side. I can't express how eager I am to go back to Europe. Partly because it's Europe. Partly because... translation's not the only thing I fell in love with while in France.
Possibly, to go to graduate school to obtain a masters in French literature or something of the sort.
To go to China (Xi'an?) for a year to teach English and gain immersion in Chinese.
To continue studying Chinese independently, and as aggressively as possible. To self-study or take classes in German whenever possible.
During this time, to research, and study, and make contacts, and eventually establish myself as a French-English translator online and/or in my community. (Eventually, perhaps German-English as well)
At some point in the next six years, to return to China to work and build cross-cultural relationships for an indefinite period of time.
Eventually, to return to the U.S. to raise a family, and homeschool a herd of children.
To have an intentionally hospitable home near a university, which can function as a hub for the surrounding community of internationals, particularly becoming a second home and resource for international students. Perhaps to offer free English classes and conversation groups for ESL speakers. Perhaps to teach French informally as I previously have with our homeschool group.
To keep striving to better understand this terrible, wonderful, frightening, and topsy-turvy world of human beings and solemn mysteries which we inhabit.
Stuff like that. :-)
Those of you who were wondering, AND who read my blog, should be a bit more satisfied, now. Those of you who wonder, but didn't... I guess I'll have to keep answering these questions over and over again for you. And in English, too, which is boring... ^^ Quelle dommage!
It is a force, a fierceness, a drive. It does not bestow itself, it rather demands pursuit- tantalizes, taunts, eludes, rouses its servant to a frenzy of determination, a glow of enthusiasm, an intensity of ecstatic purpose. It is struggle, and it is joy. It is agony and sweat, but only as childbirth is- a glorious agony, bringing life, new meaning, into the world.
To have a 'gift for languages' is in essence this:
To be the thrall of language, enslaved by language learning. To cherish these bonds.
No chains could be more enlivening than those which place all the beauty and mystery of human communication and culture into the trembling manacled hands of a student who strains for them, dizzied with wonder.
In other words, language learning, though work-intensive, is fun. Exquisite fun. 'Deliciously fun', as one of my professors likes to say.
During the four years I've spent studying French, two years of learning Chinese, and three days of tackling German, I've continuously encountered a question which I find utterly incomprehensible. People phrase it in different ways:
"Why are you studying _____?"
"What's the point of learning ________? What are you going to do with it?"
"Why on earth would you want to know ______?"
Confession: People who ask this make no sense to me at all. When I meet someone, and they mention that they're studying a language, I feel an immediate kinship if it's one I'm studying as well, impressed if they're more advanced, envious and gluttonously eager to glean their knowledge if it's one I'm not learning. It never occurs to me to wonder why they're learning it. If they're the 'right sort of people', I already know.
This love of languages is characterized by a certain element of greed. I want them all, can't bear to encounter one without acquiring at least the rudiments of it. Possession for its own sake is a thing I strive for compulsively. So, the honest answer to the questions I continuously encounter is this: I study any given language in order to know it. I'm driven by the desire to master it, revel in it, and bask in it merely for its own sake. I learn languages for the sole purpose of knowing languages, and for the infinite pleasure and challenge involved in acquiring them. What I intend to do with these languages is to know them, and glory in the knowledge- to communicate with the vast new expanse of human beings each new language gives me access to, to read their literature, listen to their radio stations, befriend and adopt them. I never begin the study of a language with any more practical thought in mind than this starry-eyed fascination with people and cultures and words. Foreign languages, and the attendant cross-cultural friendships, are the thud of my heart, the pulse of my blood, the flame, the voice, the motion of whatever elusive quality is 'I'.
I've come up with many practical uses for my habit, primarily as an excuse to continue along this path of linguistic addiction. Language, words, are my catnip, an irresistible lure. To stumble over new words like an infant, gradually growing in confidence, to watch a tiny kingdom of vocabulary gradually explode into a vast militant empire of sentences, and then paragraphs, of which one is master, to begin practicing with native speakers, and shudder under the thrill of the complacent comprehension and casual response with which they increasingly meet one's stammered utterances, to sense the delicious invasion of one's thoughts, and then one's dreams with the seamless transition to a new tongue... This is living, as living should be.
Last year I discovered the magic of teaching languages, of opening up a whole new universe of sound and expression to students.
While in France I fell in love with translation- testing my competency in an adopted tongue by bringing it to life in my native one- striving to retain the subtleties of style and meaning of the original French while producing an accurate, culturally approachable, contextualized text in English. The magic of it catches me like a spell, nerving me to a delicate, painstaking attention to detail. I understand now why translators are compelled to spend hours searching and scribbling until the exact word or idiom, the precise turn of phrase is discovered, and another piece of the puzzle falls neatly into place. I want to do this.
Bref, the thought of spending a lifetime mastering the tools of translation and honing the skills it demands, eventually adding multiple languages to my translating repertoire is enthralling, both in terms of satisfaction derived, and practical benefits such as working from home, a flexible schedule, having a fully portable career which is independent of location, and making contacts with 'language people' all over the world.
Certain elements, of course are intimidating- the massive tech savviness increasingly demanded of translators and interpreters, the aggressive self-marketing and meticulous organization/dedication to deadlines necessary for building up a respectable clientele. Mais peu importe. Je ferai mon mieux, et un tel travail vaut bien le travail qu'il faut pour s'établir.
So, to answer another, more reasonable question which I've received a lot since returning from France, my plans, admittedly loose, are thus:
To graduate at some point in 2013.
To return to the Loire region of France (probably to Nantes or Rennes) for a paid internship, teaching English as a second language, and hopefully taking a couple of French classes on the side. I can't express how eager I am to go back to Europe. Partly because it's Europe. Partly because... translation's not the only thing I fell in love with while in France.
Possibly, to go to graduate school to obtain a masters in French literature or something of the sort.
To go to China (Xi'an?) for a year to teach English and gain immersion in Chinese.
To continue studying Chinese independently, and as aggressively as possible. To self-study or take classes in German whenever possible.
During this time, to research, and study, and make contacts, and eventually establish myself as a French-English translator online and/or in my community. (Eventually, perhaps German-English as well)
At some point in the next six years, to return to China to work and build cross-cultural relationships for an indefinite period of time.
Eventually, to return to the U.S. to raise a family, and homeschool a herd of children.
To have an intentionally hospitable home near a university, which can function as a hub for the surrounding community of internationals, particularly becoming a second home and resource for international students. Perhaps to offer free English classes and conversation groups for ESL speakers. Perhaps to teach French informally as I previously have with our homeschool group.
To keep striving to better understand this terrible, wonderful, frightening, and topsy-turvy world of human beings and solemn mysteries which we inhabit.
Stuff like that. :-)
Those of you who were wondering, AND who read my blog, should be a bit more satisfied, now. Those of you who wonder, but didn't... I guess I'll have to keep answering these questions over and over again for you. And in English, too, which is boring... ^^ Quelle dommage!
Monday, May 28, 2012
In France, we call them Les gens du voyage. It's the politically correct term for all itinerant people. But among themselves they are known as the Tsiganes or Manouches. You may know them by other names. The Romani. The gypsies.
They arrived in Angers a week ago.
When I first saw the horde of white RV's which had descended upon the rugby field turning it, in one night, from a peaceful oasis of green to a clamouring trailor park, I was at a loss. Was it a festival? An unauthorized family reunion? "No," my French friend assured me. "It's les gens du voyage (the travelling folk). I think you in English call them gypsies."
I was consumed by curiosity. Nay, even that is an understatement. I was frantic, squirming, on fire with curiosity. I craned my neck about in passable imitation of a giraffe every time I could think of an excuse to stroll by the encampment. I watched the children frisking about at the edge of the field, their dark eyes flashing, the long black hair of the girls swinging in braids or flowing loose, the women gliding through the caravan with their brightly colored head scarves, the men in grimy t-shirts, their teeth gleaming white from brown, stubbly faces, boys standing around a tent, challenging and magnetic in sleek dark leather jackets.
I wanted to know more.
At night, I lay awake imagining pretexts for beginning conversations in my broken French, the questions, the hundreds of questions, which I would ask. The answers which I might or might not be able to understand.
But no such pretext arose. So I bombarded my French friend with questions instead, though he had no way of knowing the answers.
How many are there?
Where do they come from?
Where are they going?
How do they earn money?
What do they eat?
Where do the live in winter?
How are the children schooled?
Are the caravans made up of family groups? How big are most caravans? Do they intermarry with Tsiganes from other caravans? Do they ever marry outsiders and bring them into the people?
Do they always make the same circuit? Do the same groups come through the same cities every year?
Do they like this life? Are they happy? Do they ever settle down, and could they, if they wanted?
One afternoon, from my open window, I heard music coming from the encampment. A guitarist, and singing- sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. The voices were rich and beautiful, the melodies alternately haunting and lively. My curiosity was at boiling point, unbearable. With half an hour before I had to meet a friend, I threw on my coat, grabbed my keys, and marched off towards the gypsy camp.
I didn't know what to expect. I had vague visions of dancing, fortune telling, and colorfully garbed women, drawn from various literary and film stereotypes of the Romani people.
That is not what I found.
At the center of the encampment rose a large, blue striped tent. A few men of boys loitered at its open door, the collars of their jackets pulled up against the misting rain. And now that I could hear clearly the words of the song they were singing, I realized that it was a hymn. The colorful tent was the home of services held by Light and Life, a French gypsy ministry and the gypsy church which traveled with the caravan.
My friend and I attended two of their evening services, and for days, all afternoon, music and speeches were carried from the field to my window, a lively background to everyday life.
As the gypsies began to leave, and green spaces opened up once more in what had formerly been our rugby field, I was haunted by an unformed sadness and regret. They carried their whole world with them to Angers, and remained carefully detached from us- civil, but serenely indifferent to cultivating long term connections. What good is it to begin a life anywhere, when you belong both everywhere and nowhere? They planted no flowers, built no houses, introduced themselves to no neighbors. One day, inexplicably, a few chairs, a table, some laundry on the line, and some chattering children and their puppy would be whisked back into one of the trailers, and it would vanish around a bend of the street, leaving only a muddy rectangle and trampled grass in it's wake. Often a new trailer, new children, and dogs, and laundry would appear to take it's place. They were among us, but not of us- they left Angers the way the wind leaves branches as it passes through. The way ocean currents leave coral on their way to the deeper waters. The way international students return home at the end of a semester.
I was grieved, because watching les Gens du Voyage- the travelling people- I realized that I was one of them. As spring gives way to summer here in France, my heart aches with an appalling ache. The springtime, the wonder of May and April belonged to me, enchanted me, beguiled me. The summer, I have no part in. June first will find me in Missouri once more.. And I want to see Missouri, want to be with family and friends again, to conduct life in a familiar language on familiar terms. But I don't want to leave Angers. The inexorable necessity of leaving Angers, and all I love in Angers, is (forgive the cliche, friends) breaking my heart.
When I think of France during the coming years, what will I remember? Green fields and little villages seen from the train. A sunset watched joyously from a bluff above the lake. A heron picking his solitary way along the edge of the water at twilight. Roses, roses, everywhere a wealth of roses pouring over walls and fences in the May sunshine. Wisteria dripping from every arbor. Warm light on worn plastered walls, the sun slanting along narrow cobbled streets and alleys. Pain au chocolat with friends in the afternoon. The wonder of two hands meeting and clinging together in unreserved understanding- a caress within a caress. The glorious, unapologetic greasiness of kebab and chips. The moonlit silence of the city at night as we walked home, or the riotous clamor and fairy tale lighting of the city center each evening. The blue, blue waters of la Maine flanked by banks of richest green, or at dusk, a magical mirror of reflections when the rainbow bridge is illuminated. Little dogs mincing obediently after their owners in every street, seen in smug repose at every corner cafe.
The rich inflections of the French language murmuring all around us- at the supermarket, in the classroom, in the bus.
My photos, my short, clumsy sentences, all the words in every language I study are inadequate to tell you this story, the story of this semester in all of its light and color and fragrance, in all of its sound and sensation, in its loneliness and camaraderie, its music and its silence.
The world doesn't give us the freedom to stay where we wish to stay, or go where we wish to go. To occupy two spaces at once is only another of the impossible dreams which men have dreamed since man's beginning. I know there's no profit in dreaming so foolishly thus, but my head is lost in it, fogged with it anyway. Angers is a garden with high walls too steep for climbing, and reality exists outside of these walls, is only heard in a muted clamour of traffic which finds its way in to linger bleakly among the lushness of the flower beds.
Like the gypsies, I came to Angers only to leave it. My caravan moves out toward the open road in less than three days. Yet unlike the gypsies I am bound here by cords which frighten me with their intensity. The French historically failed in their grapples with the Anglais, and in all their imperial ambitions, but in a dazzling blitzkrieg campaign, France has conquered me. I return to the Land of the Free in a shackled, colonial condition, utterly bouleversed by la douceur angevin. But when will I see again the blue slate roofs of Anjou, hear again the strident French sirens, breathe in once more the heady fragrance of their honeysuckle and roses? Gypsy-like, I can only tell you, 'Je ne sais pas'.
They arrived in Angers a week ago.
When I first saw the horde of white RV's which had descended upon the rugby field turning it, in one night, from a peaceful oasis of green to a clamouring trailor park, I was at a loss. Was it a festival? An unauthorized family reunion? "No," my French friend assured me. "It's les gens du voyage (the travelling folk). I think you in English call them gypsies."
I was consumed by curiosity. Nay, even that is an understatement. I was frantic, squirming, on fire with curiosity. I craned my neck about in passable imitation of a giraffe every time I could think of an excuse to stroll by the encampment. I watched the children frisking about at the edge of the field, their dark eyes flashing, the long black hair of the girls swinging in braids or flowing loose, the women gliding through the caravan with their brightly colored head scarves, the men in grimy t-shirts, their teeth gleaming white from brown, stubbly faces, boys standing around a tent, challenging and magnetic in sleek dark leather jackets.
I wanted to know more.
At night, I lay awake imagining pretexts for beginning conversations in my broken French, the questions, the hundreds of questions, which I would ask. The answers which I might or might not be able to understand.
But no such pretext arose. So I bombarded my French friend with questions instead, though he had no way of knowing the answers.
How many are there?
Where do they come from?
Where are they going?
How do they earn money?
What do they eat?
Where do the live in winter?
How are the children schooled?
Are the caravans made up of family groups? How big are most caravans? Do they intermarry with Tsiganes from other caravans? Do they ever marry outsiders and bring them into the people?
Do they always make the same circuit? Do the same groups come through the same cities every year?
Do they like this life? Are they happy? Do they ever settle down, and could they, if they wanted?
One afternoon, from my open window, I heard music coming from the encampment. A guitarist, and singing- sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. The voices were rich and beautiful, the melodies alternately haunting and lively. My curiosity was at boiling point, unbearable. With half an hour before I had to meet a friend, I threw on my coat, grabbed my keys, and marched off towards the gypsy camp.
I didn't know what to expect. I had vague visions of dancing, fortune telling, and colorfully garbed women, drawn from various literary and film stereotypes of the Romani people.
That is not what I found.
At the center of the encampment rose a large, blue striped tent. A few men of boys loitered at its open door, the collars of their jackets pulled up against the misting rain. And now that I could hear clearly the words of the song they were singing, I realized that it was a hymn. The colorful tent was the home of services held by Light and Life, a French gypsy ministry and the gypsy church which traveled with the caravan.
My friend and I attended two of their evening services, and for days, all afternoon, music and speeches were carried from the field to my window, a lively background to everyday life.
As the gypsies began to leave, and green spaces opened up once more in what had formerly been our rugby field, I was haunted by an unformed sadness and regret. They carried their whole world with them to Angers, and remained carefully detached from us- civil, but serenely indifferent to cultivating long term connections. What good is it to begin a life anywhere, when you belong both everywhere and nowhere? They planted no flowers, built no houses, introduced themselves to no neighbors. One day, inexplicably, a few chairs, a table, some laundry on the line, and some chattering children and their puppy would be whisked back into one of the trailers, and it would vanish around a bend of the street, leaving only a muddy rectangle and trampled grass in it's wake. Often a new trailer, new children, and dogs, and laundry would appear to take it's place. They were among us, but not of us- they left Angers the way the wind leaves branches as it passes through. The way ocean currents leave coral on their way to the deeper waters. The way international students return home at the end of a semester.
I was grieved, because watching les Gens du Voyage- the travelling people- I realized that I was one of them. As spring gives way to summer here in France, my heart aches with an appalling ache. The springtime, the wonder of May and April belonged to me, enchanted me, beguiled me. The summer, I have no part in. June first will find me in Missouri once more.. And I want to see Missouri, want to be with family and friends again, to conduct life in a familiar language on familiar terms. But I don't want to leave Angers. The inexorable necessity of leaving Angers, and all I love in Angers, is (forgive the cliche, friends) breaking my heart.
When I think of France during the coming years, what will I remember? Green fields and little villages seen from the train. A sunset watched joyously from a bluff above the lake. A heron picking his solitary way along the edge of the water at twilight. Roses, roses, everywhere a wealth of roses pouring over walls and fences in the May sunshine. Wisteria dripping from every arbor. Warm light on worn plastered walls, the sun slanting along narrow cobbled streets and alleys. Pain au chocolat with friends in the afternoon. The wonder of two hands meeting and clinging together in unreserved understanding- a caress within a caress. The glorious, unapologetic greasiness of kebab and chips. The moonlit silence of the city at night as we walked home, or the riotous clamor and fairy tale lighting of the city center each evening. The blue, blue waters of la Maine flanked by banks of richest green, or at dusk, a magical mirror of reflections when the rainbow bridge is illuminated. Little dogs mincing obediently after their owners in every street, seen in smug repose at every corner cafe.
The rich inflections of the French language murmuring all around us- at the supermarket, in the classroom, in the bus.
My photos, my short, clumsy sentences, all the words in every language I study are inadequate to tell you this story, the story of this semester in all of its light and color and fragrance, in all of its sound and sensation, in its loneliness and camaraderie, its music and its silence.
The world doesn't give us the freedom to stay where we wish to stay, or go where we wish to go. To occupy two spaces at once is only another of the impossible dreams which men have dreamed since man's beginning. I know there's no profit in dreaming so foolishly thus, but my head is lost in it, fogged with it anyway. Angers is a garden with high walls too steep for climbing, and reality exists outside of these walls, is only heard in a muted clamour of traffic which finds its way in to linger bleakly among the lushness of the flower beds.
Like the gypsies, I came to Angers only to leave it. My caravan moves out toward the open road in less than three days. Yet unlike the gypsies I am bound here by cords which frighten me with their intensity. The French historically failed in their grapples with the Anglais, and in all their imperial ambitions, but in a dazzling blitzkrieg campaign, France has conquered me. I return to the Land of the Free in a shackled, colonial condition, utterly bouleversed by la douceur angevin. But when will I see again the blue slate roofs of Anjou, hear again the strident French sirens, breathe in once more the heady fragrance of their honeysuckle and roses? Gypsy-like, I can only tell you, 'Je ne sais pas'.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Moments in Munich- Part 1, Easter
Munich's Olympiaberg, a grassy hill, curving and undulating like the coils of a sea monster up to a domed top, is one of the highest elevations in the city. Beneath the deceptively gentle slopes lie the jagged rubble and refuse of the city in wartime. At the end of the Second World War, the remains of bombed buildings and roads were heaped up here and covered mercifully with earth. A serene and lovely park now blossoms above the broken stones and twisted metal of a world in chaos. At the top, an aluminum cross stands as a memorial to the civilians killed in Munich during the war.
Before dawn on Easter Sunday, my first morning in Germany, I found myself climbing the sinuous track up the Olympiaberg, snow falling like sprays of white flowers, starring the ground and lighting in our hair. Moving all about me through the dim gray light were dark clad, bundled members of my friend's German congregation, huddled beneath black umbrellas. Fog flirted through the trees and along the curves of the hill. The air was damp, and mistily cold.
When we reached the dome, we formed a shivering circle. Johannes, one of the young men from the church, brought out a tiny keyboard, which he managed to play with cold-stiffened fingers, keeping it partially sheltered from the still falling snow in its case.
Before dawn on Easter Sunday, my first morning in Germany, I found myself climbing the sinuous track up the Olympiaberg, snow falling like sprays of white flowers, starring the ground and lighting in our hair. Moving all about me through the dim gray light were dark clad, bundled members of my friend's German congregation, huddled beneath black umbrellas. Fog flirted through the trees and along the curves of the hill. The air was damp, and mistily cold.
When we reached the dome, we formed a shivering circle. Johannes, one of the young men from the church, brought out a tiny keyboard, which he managed to play with cold-stiffened fingers, keeping it partially sheltered from the still falling snow in its case.
And we sang.
The voices were frail- muffled by the snow and fog, quavered through chattering teeth. Below us, all around, the hill fell away until it melted into the sleeping city, shrouded in white. With the cross a stark silhouette in the mist beneath us, and the death and madness of a terribly recent nightmare rolling beneath us, we sang of life.
'Welch Gnad! Er stand auf vom Tod... Welch Gnad! Err kommt zurück...'
'Welch Gnad! Er stand auf vom Tod... Welch Gnad! Err kommt zurück...'
'What grace! He rose from the grave... What grace! He's coming again...'
'Er hat den Tod besiegt für alle Zeit. Der König lebt, preist ihn, der uns befreite! Er regiert in alle Ewig keit...'
'He has conquered Death for all time. The King lives, praise Him who freed us! He reigns over all eternity...'
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