An old poem, still surprisingly apt

Számok és Nevek
(Numbers and Names)

Can I still count to ten
or twenty
in that, my lost language,
with the words I used only as coins,
for bartering?

They’re escaping like socks from
the laundry,
misplaced
in the back of drawers.
Loose change
from a left-over currency.

Words like socks – how wrong
to imagine I was ever so comfortable
in them.
My tongue never slipping around
the “good evenings”
“sweet dreams.”
My feet never flat on the
ground cobbled roughly with vowels.

I walked through the land
a mute
with a sock-full of coins
to drop in the hands of clerks,
flower-sellers.

Oh for a fortune to spend!
a number to name,
a tongue that remembers the commonplace shape
of good morning -

"Feet for those who cannot be"

Rain has come to Klaipeda. Last night, leaving the school late after spending time on the phone with relatives, wind was blowing limbs and leaves everywhere, and misty rain blurring all the streetlights. With the wind whipping my scarf around my face and my skirt around my ankles, I didn't even try to put up the umbrella! As I usually do in my walk from school to my apartment, I put on music and sort of floated home in a bubble of happy sound. Sometimes listening to certain songs, I am struck by an irresistable urge to run. So last night, at 11:30, wearing my high-heeled boots and a skirt, I skipped and jumped over puddles through my parking lot !

The thought that I kept having as my legs propelled me up over curbs and the four long flights up to my door is that, I have to savor this all - this movement, and motion, and time - on behalf of those who aren't able to. I was thinking of my aunt. For a few moments of time, I felt like I was supposed to live for her - to breathe in the beautiful storm, the color of the light, the rain matting my hair against my forehead.

I called my cousin and my uncle last night, hoping to get a chance to just say hello to aunt Carol. She is in the long, tedious, faith-stretching process of learning how to live again. She is making amazing progress, but I cannot even imagine going from a fully-functioning, capable, mobile, self-sufficient individual to the place she's at now. To be immobile, having to practice and practice to learning how to hold a pen, let alone type.

And so I treasure my own fingers as I type this, and wish I could will a tiny spark of my nerve pathways into Carol's own fingers! In my warm apartment last night, I could only think of how much I want to live on her behalf, of how I want to somehow impart just a portion of my life into hers.

Orthodox Church in Druskininkai 

Druskininkai, October 15th 

Sacramental Theology

We don’t experience the presence of God in our minds alone. We can offer an attitude of prayer, to make space in our heads and hearts for His voice. Yet I am not just a spirit, but a body too. I have a voice that emanates from lungs, from vocal chords, from the placement of tongue behind teeth – air pushes its way up from the seat of the spirit, through the lungs, and breaks into the physical plane of our world.

I must kneel, and feel the weight of my body curled into a ball, forehead in fleshy hands, rocking back and forth in prayer. My body is not insignificant – it is part of the attitude of prayer.

This is why Catholics and Orthodox believers cross themselves, kneel at the top of the knave, and touch their fingers to the images of Christ hung on the walls of churches.

So this morning in my kitchen, my hands cooked bread, and washed dishes – all the ingredients of this ordinary world (flour, coffee, water, soap) – they brush against my hands as little prayers. The actions of hands in the world, small, repetitive, simple, these are what God uses. This small act of cooking and eating and sharing is Grace; it is a way God’s presence is manifest. This is eucharist, is communion.

I stayed home from church to take communion, but I cannot take it alone.

I try to clean the spoons, the bowls, the silverware, and imagine the action as grace. This is how God works – we are tools, utensils, in His hands; we get dirty from use; He cleanses us and uses us again. We are made for service. We are not made to sit gleaming in a locked-up cabinet (or a locked-up heart). We are made to be used, and to allow the Master to take care of us.

This is what I learn from putting my hands again and again into dirty water, into bowls full of batter. I have to know and experience God’s presence in these little things. His grace is spilt out over us in tangible blessings all the time - small touches, wafts of aroma, bits of music, smiles of friends, laughter, the taste of wine, and bread.

Who could have imagined a world so full of food for filling? The bright sky after rain is itself a reminder that God is not far from each one of us. We breathe Him in, and He encompasses us. God should be the delight of my days. In Christ there is “the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way” (Eph. 1:23).

O the Deep, Deep Love

It’s amazing how easy it is to become muddled. To lose focus. It happens so quickly. In the rush of midterms and piles of papers to grade and weekend trips and choir practice – all good and worthy things – these past few weeks, I have not had chances to sit down and simply talk with students. I don’t like feeling a tension between all these different activities. I want to be able to view and sense that everything that I’m doing here in Klaipeda is part of God’s work. But it isn’t. The same pressures on my time, on my heart, on my physical body, are present in Lithuania, just as much as they are in the States.

This morning I should be going to church, as I have the past two months. Instead, I am staying home to try to pray my way through these tensions. I hear God asking me to remember my priorities, and to order my days and my time in accordance with His plans for me. This sounds very grandiose, and probably self-important. But if, as a bookmark I keep in my Bible says, “Each small task of everyday life is part of the total harmony of the universe,” then small tasks are worth paying attention to.

My soul is thirsty to be close to God and to have His presence and love shake my world and its duties upside down. I can’t serve and mentor and teach and encourage if I am not receiving my strength from the love of God. I was talking with a girl I have breakfast with on Tuesdays who is also struggling with how to serve – she is heavily involved in some of the campus ministries. She doesn’t feel like she is doing a good job, even though she has been brought up with all the tools and knowledge to be an effective servant. Instead, she is exhausted, and isn’t able to pray, and doesn’t find any joy in what she is trying to do.

This is what happens when we try to serve out of our own strength, rather than out of God’s love. When I try to serve out of my own strength, I spend my time on the things I think I’m good at, when perhaps God wants to enable me to do the things that are difficult and uncomfortable. I want to sink down deeply into the unfathomable depth of God’s love – as one of my favorite hymns says, “O the deep deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free.” Then the fullness of this love will overflow me and naturally, joyfully, completely flow out into the lives of those around me. (“Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all”). I won’t have to “plan” and “prioritize” how to serve others; it will be unstoppable, as a river is unstoppable.

I have wanted to approach this business of prioritizing my activities here as a checklist – where I can easily choose between what is number two on the list and what is number seventeen. But following Christ is not a business plan. Discipleship is not a checklist that can be laminated and kept in a coat pocket. If it were, we would not need the Holy Spirit – we could simply rely on our handy-dandy list to tell us what to do, what not to do. Instead, we must submit every moment, every decision, every thought, to the guidance of the Spirit and the light of the Word. This is so much harder, but it is the way that we grow – that I grow – closer to our Father, as we seek to hear His voice in the world.

Writing out my “priorities” list today, I wrote out the question: “Why am I at LCC?” I had thought to make a list. Instead, this is the best I can figure:

“to love people in any way I can – in all things, at all times, to ascribe the unsurpassable worth of Christ to those around me. To serve them and to love them as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. I am to be like Christ, and to lay down my self daily, to pick up the cross and to follow Him. To die to the old self and its ways of living, its constant searching for worth and wealth; and instead to find my security, my rest, my home, my hope, my husband, my father, my friend, in the fellowship of the Trinity, and the community of the saints.”

The Eyes of Christ

I wish I could say that I see people with the eyes of Christ, through the mind of Christ. For example, staying at a hostel in Vilnius this week, there was a guy in the next bunk over who made a bit of conversation with us. He is traveling around Europe for two and a half months. Later, I heard him making plans to go out and meet up with other backpackers at a bar, as is the life of backpackers everywhere.

My reaction to this guy was one of smugness, and self-satisfaction. “I could never just travel around for that long without a purpose,” I said to a friend, “I’m over that backpacking phase. It’s just so empty and meaningless.” What I didn’t stop to perceive in this individual is the spiritual emptiness in him, which the eyes of Christ would enable me to see. Instead, he was an opportunity against which to measure my own sense of pride and self-satisfaction.

Why don’t I see people with the eyes of Christ? Why is it not my first impulse to be concerned about the spiritual condition of the hearts of my students? I need to pray and ask God for this vision. I was doing this at the outset of my time here – the Sunday of orientation in August, I sat weeping in my kitchen as I prayed over the names of my seminar students, asking God to help me to love them through His love. I have not prayed like this often enough. This is probably because I tell myself I “don’t have time” to walk around LCC crying over the state of souls. But what else are we on the planet to do? Really?

So my prayer is that of Ephesians 1:17 – 19: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know Him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and His incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of His mighty strength”

I want the eyes of my heart to be enlightened by the Spirit of wisdom, and to be strengthened by the remembrance of the hope to which we are all called. I have been so challenged lately by a couple others also walking this path of service to God. Yesterday, my little brother sent me the link to his online journal. Reading it, nearly in tears because of the level of his passion, I could see his intense desire to live his life in service of things of eternal value. He is wrestling with what it really means to be a disciple and how that commitment requires a sacrifice of our dreams and desires (so much of what I too have been encountering here in LT). In his writing, he is just on fire with love for God. It isn’t even a question of prioritizing and planning how to serve. That kind of love doesn’t allow any response but gratitude and a life lived in praise.

Recently, in my desire to regain and remember the vision that has brought me to Lithuania, I posted a section of my journal next to my mirror in the bathroom. By the Holy Spirit’s power, I am trying to live it out.

“It is a hard principle to hold onto – to want, more than anything anything anything, the Kingdom of God. To want, more than my heart wants what it does, for every person to come to a knowledge of God’s glory. Paramount.
I want to want You first and foremost. Your story, Your Kingdom, Your Glory. (my life a tiny and infinitesimal jot in the great Play, the whirling dance)”

Holy Spirit, have your way in me.

Check it out

Annie's been posting some great stuff at our Expatriate Letters site lately! Check it out: http://www.expatriateletters.blogspot.com

A typical garden in small Lithuanian towns 

A golden day in Kretinga 

The church at the monastery in Kretinga 

An Audience of One

It is early Sunday evening in Klaipeda, and I hate to admit that I am sequestered in my office on what has been an (according to those who know) unseasonably warm and golden autumn weekend. Fortunately, I was able to spend yesterday exploring the nearby town of Kretinga. I had, ostensibly, gone to grade some of the mountainous stacks of papers that are an ever-present feature of my daily life. Somehow, I didn't get nearly enough done, but had a great day anyway!

This past week at LCC has been "Spiritual Emphasis Week," which has meant lots of activities and opportunites to learn about worship practices and traditions. Thursday evening I went to a Taize-style service at one of the big Catholic churches in town. Friday night was an almost-opposite style, LCC student-led worship night. I am thankful that God has given us so many ways to honor and praise Him - and I am more and more aware of what a gift music is. How wonderful is it that God has given us an instrument to praise Him with!

One special thing about Friday night was a song that a student sung. I don't know all the words but one phrase really struck me. She sung, "I want to live my life for an audience of One." So, so often I think about how I appear to those around me - what do they think? What do my students think of me? My colleagues? Do my supervisors notice my hard work? Do people think I'm pretty? Am I making people laugh? Does anyone see things the way I see them? Who can I share this moment with?

What the song impressed upon me was that in my daily living, I should be living with no further thought than, "what does my Father, my Abba, think of me? What does He see?" It was also a reminder that whenever I am alone, and am happy or full of joy, or am crying out or singing or dancing or simply breathing in the world around me, I am not alone - I have an audience. God sees the things I see. He sees me in those happiest solitary moments that I often wish I could share with someone - He is my audience and He is enthralled. Furthermore, I was impressed with the thought that to live any other way - to live as if everyone else is watching, and as if how I appear to them is important - is to be guilty of idolatry. It is to put others' opinions and approval above the acceptance I have in Christ. To live in hopes that others will notice is to offer a degree of power and importance over me that no one but God deserves.

And so, when I walked around beautiful Kretinga alone yesterday, I was able to remember that above me, and beneath me, beside me and within me, my Father, the Holy Spirit, and Christ my Brother are present. I live and breathe and walk under the sky knowing that my God is Emmanuel, with me.

How can I keep from singing?

I have to ask this question because I don’t know if I’m normal.

Am I the only person who can literally feel music in my bloodstream? I mean, does anyone else actually start to quiver in their stomach, and feel tingles shoot up and down their arms, and course up the spine to the top of their head?

Lately, I have been bathed and draped in music, from the top of my head to the tips of my fingers. I swim in sound. Sometimes at night in my apartment, I have had to push back the furniture in my living room and dance. I am so moved – physically moved – by music, that I’m flushed simply from listening.

It has been awhile since I have sung, or have wanted to sing, as much as I have in the past few weeks in Klaipeda. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to let out all the different sensations running through me. I walk around town with my hands open and lifted a little out from my sides - conducting, praising. My feet want to propel me up into the air.

Some days I am singing those wrenching Jennifer Knapp songs about surrender and holiness and brokenness and faith. Other days I am drenched in Bach cantatas, and pulsing with counterpoint. Some days, I am flush with praise songs or with the words of old hymns. Or Handel’s Messiah: “Lift up your heads, o ye Gates, be ye lifted up ye everlasting Doors;” “Blessing and glory and honor and power be unto Him!”

I think I will fly apart, by pieces. How can I keep from singing? Saturday night on the bus home from our staff excursion to Kaunas, another teacher and I sang hymns together for almost an hour, taking turns choosing which to sing and then singing as many verses as we could remember. I had no idea how deeply imbedded those songs are in me. They are still there, those words and melodies from years and years ago. And now I will remember that singing, late at night in the bus, driving into the foggy dark, for years to come.

I know I sound like an emotional basket case, for better or worse, but really I just think I am giving myself permission to live – to be alive at the level that I always desire to be, where everything touches and intersects everything else. Where there is no separation between my skin and the world outside. Poets try to live like this, and usually kill themselves trying. And in the effort to let so much in, there is always the possibility of pain.

So be it.

A bricked-in window at an old church in Kaunas. 

The quay along the river in Kaunas, Lithuania's second-largest city and the former capital of the First Lithuanian Republic from 1918 - 1930s. 

Our group walking toward the old fortress, which dates to the 1800s and was used by both the Germans and Soviets during their occupations of Lithuania 

The Ninth Fort Museum 

At Rumsiske - an outdoor museum showcasing Lithuanian life and folk culture

A Day Off

Some of you may have noticed an uncharacteristic lack of communication on my part in recent weeks. Don't worry, I haven't run out of things to say! School and all its attendant activities usually lands in full force about the end of September, and then I get my customary autumn cold that sets in when the weather begins to change. This year is no different - okay, this year is LOTS different, but not in some ways!

One great and unexpected blessing of life at LCC - which I know I've mentioned before - is the community of young teachers who spend time together after school, at lunchtime, on weekends, at church, etc. This past weekend, a number of us were able to tag along on the staff outing to visit a couple museum sites and the nearby city of Kaunas. I almost didn't go, considering my writing students all submitted their first essays last Friday, but I was persuaded I needed a day off and went along.

The first stop was at an outdoor folk museum called Rumsiske, where we spent more time walking in the beautiful woods toward the lake than actually visiting the model villages! Oh well. Our second stop was lunch and then on to Ninth Fort, outside of the town of Kaunas. The Ninth Fort was built in the eighteen hundreds and has been built up and fortified many times over during the years. It was used by both the Germans and Soviets during their respective occupations of Lithuania. During WWII, the fort was used as a prison and workcamp where Jews from the nearby Kaunas Ghetto were sent to be killed. Over 50,000 people are buried in the fields surrounding the fort, and a large memorial has been set up to commemorate the atrocities committed there.

No one is ever fully prepared to walk into a place like that and feel the reality of what was done there. I certainly wasn't, despite having visited sites like this one in the past and having been to the Holocaust Memorial in D.C. recently. There is a palpable sensation you get when walking into a place that housed so much evil. It makes your skin clammy and cold, and no amount of small laughter can fill up the empty concrete corridors of such a place.

There were several artifacts in the museum displays that have really stuck with me. One was a photograph of an old woman being embraced by a younger woman. This was in the exhibit dedicated to those who risked themselves to protect Jewish families. This older woman was responsible for saving the young woman's life, and the picture is being taken on the young woman's wedding day. I tried to let that story sink in - to imagine what a potent and bittersweet joy you would feel on a day like that, when so many others never lived to be married, to have children. Another powerful display was a collection of keys, rusty and broken, that had been dug up from the mass graves around the fort during excavations in the 60s. Every single one of those keys opened a door to someone's home, to a family, to a favorite room, to a house that that individual never returned to. Every one of those keys had a face and a name and a life connected to it.

I try to be reverent in the face of such anguish. What else can I do? I always walk past such photographs and imagine how I would feel if it were my family story being read by strangers. What would I want them to feel? I would want them to feel something. And to sit for at least a few minutes on a bench remembering that the sunshine on their faces is a gift, that their place in a peaceful moment of history is a gift, that at any moment we might be called on to face the horrible fragility of our human bodies and lives. I would want them to feel a little guilty, and greatly thankful, and to let history settle heavily and unforgettably into their gut.

Then I would want them to get up and walk with friends, and to think about how numbers mean nothing, but how one human life outweighs the whole world. I would want them to cherish and value human contact, and to enjoy the day at hand in whatever form it takes. I would want them to go into Kaunas and walk along the river, to take pictures of churches and brides, and to climb under fences and to stop for cappucinos. And not for one second to take any of it for granted.

Which is what we did.