Out on the town with students

 

Full moon over the Bosphorous

 

Uskudar from Toni & Jerilyn's place

 

Uskudar

 

Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque

 

Kelli and Jack, June 28th, 2008

 

Christyn and Jason, June 15th, 2008

 

Marcie and Zach, June 8th, 2008

 

"For how to the heart's cheering
the down-dugged ground-hugged grey
Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing
Of pied and peeled May!
Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night,
still higher,
With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,
What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed
what for the hearing?"

(Gerard Manly Hopkins, from "The Wreck of the Deutschland")

Tunes for road-tripping

I just downloaded the soundtrack from Into the Wild in anticipation of cranking the tunes on our trek up into the hills this weekend. It's full of banjo and ukulele goodness, and should match our fresh-air-seeking mood. How about you, dear readers? What are your favorite road trip albums or mixes?

Like salmon heading upriver

The Chacos are freshly scrubbed and the camelback aired out. Friends are flying in Friday afternoon. The kayaks await our return. Yay for friends with a cabin up near Leadville/ Buena Vista!

A brief retrospective on my month... May 13th, 2008

Not an insignificant day. Notice the line for "Country of Residence" - I haven't written that for quite a long time.

May 16th, 2008

At my cousin Hollie's wedding in Denver, with Olivia, my sister-in-law.

May 22nd, 2008

So, um, yeah... the tornadoes that pummeled Windsor passed our house by 1/2 a mile and left these as a calling card.

Not dead, just reorienting. In the meantime...

"Poetry rejoices..."

Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies,
over the girl with her first electric, how her high,
thin voice, amplified many times
over by the loudspeaker, is like a giant's
in the green grass of the festival site.
Over the fragile bells of digitalis, how they hide
the pistil and the pollen inside.
Rejoices over rain on the Faroe Islands,
over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysees at evening.
It rejoices over Japan, over Korea,
over arts refined over a thousand years --
the art of swordsmanship, or of drinking tea.
Rejoices over the poet, that his heart still beats.

- Hakan Sandell, Swedish poet, trans. by Bill Coyle

Application

[Ok, so since in my most recent phone conversation with my mother, she threatened to put an ad in the newspaper in order to find me a date for one of the numerous weddings I have to attend in the next two months (presumably a want-ad conveniently positioned between “Found Dogs” and “Massage Therapist for Hire”), I have no choice but to take matters into my own hands. As I promised earlier, I present the following:]

Application to Be My Wedding Date

Part A: Fill in the Blank

Name ____________________________
(if it’s Bubba, Brock, Cody or any two-word variation along the lines of Billy Bob, continue no further)

Age ____
(between 23 and 37 preferred. Younger and I appear cougarish, older and I feel like I’m dating my uncle)

Availability: _______________________________________________
(days of service requested: May 16, June 8, June 15 and/or June 28 in the Colorado area)

Special Skills: _____________________________________________
(You may elaborate or attach a Resume. And yes, I know all about your nunchuk, bow hunting and computer hacking skills.)

Last book you read well enough to converse politely about ______________________
(Dude, if you say the Bible, you’re just trying too hard and I will see right through it)

Part B: Check YES or NO to the following:

Able to find Europe on a map? YES/NO
(I was going to say Lithuania, but hey, that is asking a bit much, even for Europeans)

Will raise an eyebrow if I have a second piece of cake? YES/NO

Willing to create a diversion while I escape the flower bouquet toss? YES/NO

Will you match my dress? (Periwinkle)
YES/NO

Part C: Musical Taste

Circle the types of music you could be cajoled into dancing to
AND Put a Star next to the types of music you would join me in mocking
(some genres may result in more than one possible answer)

Disco
80s Power Ballads
Celine Dion
Michael Jackson
Country Western
Bluegrass
40s era pop (al la Sinatra, Billie Holiday)
Oldies
Anything from the Dirty Dancing Soundtrack
Zydeco
Soft rock songs about daddies watching little girls grow up
ABBA
EuroPop
Clay Aiken
Swing
NeoSwing
The Chicken Dance

Part D: Essay Answer

In a well-organized and fully developed essay, please discuss the influence of 17th century Welsh metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan, upon 1980s TV hero MacGyver. Reference to Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans and details of the complete oeuvre of MacGyver’s seven year run is expected for full credit.

One friend I will miss very much...

from Six Recognitions of the Lord (2.)

Lord God, mercy is in your hands, pour
me a little. And tenderness too. My
need is great. Beauty walks so freely
and with such gentleness. Impatience puts
a halter on my face and I run away over
the green fields wanting your voice, your
tenderness, but having to do with only
the sweet grasses of the fields against
my body. When I first found you I was
filled with light, now the darkness grows
and it is filled with crooked things, bitter
and weak, each one bearing my name.
-- Mary Oliver

This is what I'm counting down toward

This morning even before I opened my eyes I knew that it was raining. The gray light managed to leak under my eyelids enough to tell me it was raining. And cold. And windy. And winter-like. It's April.

So, for a few brief moments I decided to lay in my bed with my eyes closed and imagine the very best place I would rather be. Here's what I got:

That moment when you awake in a tent, the sun warming the dew-sided nylon, and you shift enough to see the pillowy forms of a friend or two still drooling into their mummy bags. Your nose and cheeks cool from the blue mountain air that's filling your tent dome. Your hips bones remind you that you're now an intimate friend of this particular spot of ground. Brushing your hands along the tent-side, little droplets soak through and dampen your fingers. Necessities nest around you - socks and shoes and bags and headlamps and sandals and blankets and friends. And the sun comes through the zippers. If someone has woken before you, the dim smoke of fire begins to rise in pale shafts over the site, and if you're even luckier, they've started the coffee.

"Do something pretty while you can
Don't fall asleep"

here

“I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”

Um, yeah, so after my 48-hour imaginary fling with the handsome, young, Kierkegaard- and-critical-theory spouting Irish philosopher guy who spoke at our academic conference this weekend, I'm feeling sheepish at how precisely this article pegs my kind!

Sunday kinda felt like this

"Experts estimate that, by 10 p.m. Tuesday night, Blume had survived exposure to approximately 1,700 advertising images of epic banality, at least 35 emotionless interactions with complete strangers without making any real human contact, and more than 25,000 moments of soul-crushing inner emptiness throughout the almost day-long struggle. In addition, he also surmounted the onslaught of more than 150 separate anxiety-producing forces, including credit card debt, weight gain, hair loss, sexual inferiority, loneliness, a dead-end job, geographical isolation from extended family, virus-laden spam, the need to keep his cell phone charged, in-store Muzak, mortality, mounting laundry and dishes, his cable bill, indefinable longing, fear of terrorism, online gossip, the unavoidable certainty of his own unimportance, nostalgia for a past that never was, severe lower-back pain, and general ennui."

Thanks, Onion, for keeping things in perspective!

This just makes me laugh

I got this from my newest link friend, Amanda, - bringing my total of links to people teaching high school English to 4, not counting my two non-blogging high school English teaching buddies. Man, maybe I should expand my friend circle.

Thoughts on Politics, inspired by my Rhetoric students

Since, despite all my better judgments about keeping my blog a neutral space, I've already begun to show my political colors a bit, I am going to venture out on a limb and share some of the thoughts I've been thinking about this past month or so. As Jane Austen once disclaimed, take these as the thoughts of "a partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian."

Much of what's influenced my thinking is that my Rhetoric class these days is decidedly not a politically neutral zone. This week we dive into analyzing political language (I admit my grateful indebtedness to Hugh Rank's materials on the subject), and talk about nationalism, patriotism, propaganda, and language. If you think these are theoretical subjects, I dare you to have these conversations in rooms with students, some of whose grandparents were deported to Siberia by the Soviets, sitting next to other students whose grandparents were the deport-ers, but who now constitute a scorned under-class. Students who are passionately pro-West Ukrainians sitting next to their own countrymen who'd rather see Ukraine maintain close ties to Russia. This is the environment in which it is really interesting to ask, "what is the difference between having a healthy sense of national pride and ethnic identification, and crossing the line into propagandistic rhetoric?"

Like 21st century citizens everywhere, most of these students are already entrenched in cynicism toward elected officials. (And I can't fault them, given the levels of corruption and mismanagement that many of their home countries have endured). However, I'm not sure if it's a logical outgrowth of this cynicism, but this same group of students also tend to approach social problems with the argument that "the government should..." (fill in the blank). Maybe it's an outgrowth of our continually globalizing culture, but the answer to most of the issues they are currently writing about (global warming, evil plastic surgery, the death penalty, euthanasia. Sigh.) is that ALL people EVERYwhere should DO something. This means "the government should..." (fix everything!).

I have been trying to get them to think about what problems are actually LOCAL, and perhaps even solvable/approachable without waiting for national or transnational governmental agencies (the almighty EU) to intervene. In short, I want them to see themselves as full-fledged political agents. As citizens.

This is old, old fashioned thinking. This is belief in self-determinism and self-governance. It is not something that has not been in the vocabulary or mindset of people in this part of the world for very long. Heck, I think it's probably not much in the mindset of folks in large federal representative republics (*ahem*). Wendell Berry puts it this way:

"Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have 'thought globally' (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of though. Global thinkers have been and will be dangerous people... Global thinking can only be statistical. Its shallowness is exposed by the least intention to do something. Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something expect locally, in a small place. " ("Out of your car, Off your horse" in his book Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community)

Whenever I am tempted to get cynical about American politics (and talk radio can get one there fairly quickly), I remember that this concept of self-determinism (not the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" individualistic notion, but the collective will of communities working together) IS still remembered and occasionally practiced in American society. It is a very simple idea that, if something is wrong and we don't like it, we can either elect different people to do the job or simply take care of it ourselves, make change, and evolve.

So, in the end, my current attraction to a certain candidate running for president right now grows out of this old fashioned value. A good essay I read about it recently puts it this way:

"[Obama] is engaged in something not seen on the national stage for a very long time. Yet it is also a deeply familiar endeavour that most Americans would find recognisable from school history lessons. Obama emerges directly from a powerful radical tradition in US politics which is embedded in its founding ideology - classical republicanism....

The core of republican philosophy is an appreciation of the need to constantly restore and return the locus of sovereignty, of power, to the people themselves, away from those institutions and interests that capture and hold it, and thereby keep the body politic, and freedom, alive.

This, the very essence of democracy, is not secured by elections but by the activities and associations through which citizens engage in the public sphere. If citizens wish to live as a free people, the struggle to obtain (or simply maintain) political freedoms must be engaged on anew by each generation"

And if you don't think that "the locus of sovereignty, of power" NEEDS to be returned to the people (and the Congress itself), I challenge you not to listen to this broadcast and not feel the hairs on your neck rise up in defense of "separation of powers" and "the rule of law."

Both politically and spiritually speaking, I want my students to learn what it is to live as "free people." And inasmuch as I am congregational in my theology, I am anti-authoritarian in my politics. It's been fun to see these ideas cohering across conversations, readings and thoughts in the past few weeks. I'm hopeful that the result of all this, for myself and for my students, will be, regardless of elections and campaigns, lives that are more invested in the communities around us and dedication to serving the needs of our neighbors.

Quite possibly the best news I've heard in awhile...

Considering my orbits around Denver and Msp/St.Paul, odds are looking up. (Thanks)

"Is she bright, so well-read?
Are there books, are there novels, by her bed?
Is she the sort you've always said
could satisfy your head?"

- "Jealousy", Natalie Merchant

In honor of April being National Poetry Month (as if I needed an excuse)

Briefly it Enters, and Briefly Speaks
By Jane Kenyon

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years….

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper….

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me….

I am food on the prisoner’s plate….

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills….

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden….

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge….

I am the heart contracted by joy…
the longest hair, white
before the rest….

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow….

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit….

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name….

Happy Birthday to my friend Marcie!

"Prepared in the Sight of all Nations"

I got to spend Easter Sunday last weekend in Stockholm with my parents. I'd looked online for an international church to attend there (this is perhaps my favorite thing about traveling right now - going to English-speaking church!). Thus, we celebrated the resurrection of the Dead and the defeat of darkness with the singing of an African, Asian and European-voiced choir, a church full of visiting tourists, European government and NGO workers, North American pastors and musicians, Swedish pianists, and British scripture-readers. I love these churches (Immanuelskyrkan in Stockholm felt like the close kin of Union Church in Istanbul) - the powerful sense that these are my people, my family, my home, overpowers me completely when I'm traveling and displaced. I cannot imagine a better tangible reminder that we are all of us aliens and strangers on the earth than to worship in communities made up of expats and immigrants.

After church, I drug (accompanied? persuaded?) my parents to the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm's modest but impressive fine art gallery. It was a bit odd to leave church and go look at art, but it also reminded me keenly of what I like most about art museums. They're some of the only places left in the world where secular people realize they should be reverent, in which they recognize that they don't fully understand what they're seeing, in which we know we are standing in the presence of works and of persons who are larger than us and will outlast us. They're what churches and cathedrals used to be.

Coming around the corner of the second floor gallery, I saw brush strokes I thought I recognized. I bent my head closer to look at the plaque beneath the frame. Yup. Here was an entire wall of Rembrandts.

In the era of digital reproduction, in which we get most of our visual information through glowing pixels, I'm not sure I can convey the mucky tangibility of that paint on canvas. Rembrandt's brush strokes make me think of Jesus's miracle in John 9. Jesus has just told the crowd, "While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." Then he spits on the ground, makes mud from the dusty ground and smears it on the blind man's eyes. The man washes off his eyes and "came home seeing." First mud, then sight.

Working my way slowly down the row of paintings ("The Apostle Peter," "The Kitchen Maid"), I looked deeply into the eyes of these characters and thought about the familiar story they all played a part in. Then I came to another painting and I stared at it hard, felt my insides clutch and my breath stop. Eyes soften and well up. How can I describe the feeling of being pulled in, of scales falling off the eyes, of being witness to real point in time? Easter morning, sun bright outside over the bays and islands of a beautiful, magical city... but inside, I was suddenly far, far away. Deep in the past.

This is Rembrandt's last painting, Saint Simeon in the Temple with the Christ Child. It is listed as unfinished, though I can't see how. As I stared at it, all the words from the advent Bible study I'd been doing with some girls back in December came to mind: "My eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel." (Luke 2:25-32)

Simeon's eyes in the painting are not looking at the child, but somewhere far away and interior. Rembrandt captures the wrinkled squinting of an old man whose eyes have been worn by years of looking for, and not yet witnessing, the promised light of God. Here, this moment is Simeon's completion. My eyes have seen your salvation.

I think about him as one of the remnant of Israel, among whom are Zachariah, Elizabeth, Joseph of Arimathea, all those who God kept through the years "waiting for the consolation of Israel." Through darkness and waiting and destruction of the temple and the scattering of the Jews. But on this canvas, Simeon's form emerges from the darkness of the paint, the darkness of the Old Testament and its as-yet-unfulfilled promises, into this fragile ray of golden light, the salvation embodied by the child bundled in his arms.

I know that Easter messages usually center on the cross and the characters present in Jesus's last days. I couldn't help but feel, though, as I looked at Simeon and the light falling across his face in Rembrandt's final painting, that this moment is also Easter. As a whole story, the gospel narrative is not divisible into thematic units. Christmas is Easter is Pentecost. Light coming into the world; light defeating darkness. The whole story contains every moment of the story simultaneously. The dark mud that Simeon emerges from is the dark earth that Christ rises out of; the darkness of the past without revelation gives way to the present in which we can walk by the light of the Spirit.

Happy Easter friends. Walk in that light.

Kierkegaard

Really good program here, from the always yummy BBC "In Our Time."

Spring Travels

Stockholm

Birthday Clock
Riga
Ma and Pa visit Klaipeda

A More Perfect Union

I have been trying really hard to restrain myself from posting political musings here. More than once I've had a post ready to go and have instead chucked it into the "save as draft" folder. My political opinions don't matter a snit in comparison to more important matters of how I love those around me, try to listen to God, and try to work on the planks in my own eye rather than the specks in others.

Today's been an interesting day though. I happily found myself back in the classroom with my amazing students after a few scattered weeks of holidays and my parents visiting and days off. Today's the day that I get to start what is my favorite unit with my Rhetoric class - analyzing persuasive and manipulative messages. We listen to political speeches, watch parts of the Nazi propaganda film "Triumph des Willems," take apart advertisements, admit our infatuation with and write about products that hold iconic status. It is great fun.

Because today was the first day, I got a chance to preach at them a little bit. Having just spent 10 days touring my parents around this country (which I think of as having a history that includes no good guys to root for: first Germans, then Russians, then Germans, then Russians again. Even if you root for the Lithuanians themselves, you have to factor in their pogroms and anti-Semitism that preceded Hitler by decades)... but anyway, having mucked around in this history with mom and dad for the past week, I returned to the classroom with a renewed sense of the radical propositions offered by democratic government. With a renewed sense of the magnanimous freedom that can come with critical thinking. I told the students that learning how to recognize the ways in which the world/leaders/advertisements/etc/etc are trying to mold and manipulate them is an essential part of being a free person. Only if we recognize the ways in which we're influenced can we ever hope to move beyond "sheep" status. (And yes, I know, critical theorists, that recognition of one's constituted self position does not immediately enable one to move beyond it, however...). It's a great soapbox to get up on. And in a region of the world in which political oppression and ethnic division are not distant, hypothetical concepts, I caught a new sense of the ways in which the thinking we're practicing is imperative for its citizens' future survival.

I wish I could communicate to you all the weight of history here. In light of the endless back and forth of hatred and oppression between nationalities and social classes and ethnicities over the centuries, I have to tell you that this speech made me a quivering mess of tears.

Do any of you remember the radicalness of what we are trying to do in America? Do you have any idea of the insane miracle of the unity that America is striving for? I think it would be unthinkable here. Europe is like a segregated graveyard that everyone keeps digging up. This kind of speech, about race and history and oppression and subliminal anger, confronts people at their most basic primal and tribal identities. I sometimes think that Americans have forgotten just how difficult an experiment we're conducting. I'm telling you, it is amazing. Do not forget that. It's an experiment I cannot imagine much of the world I live in is ready for, or even desires to undertake.

On Writing for Children

"There are five hundred reasons why I began to write for children, but to save time I will mention only ten of them.

Number 1) Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics.

Number 2) Children don't read to find their identity.

Number 3) They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation.

Number 4) They have no use for psychology.

Number 5) They detest sociology.

Number 6) They don't try to understand Kafka or Finnegans Wake.

Number 7) They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.

Number 8) They love interesting stories, not commentary, guides, or footnotes.

Number 9) When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority.

Number 10) They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions."

- Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Acceptance Speech

Tired of Auditioning

Today I rediscovered the perfection that is Norah Jones’s first album during a rainstorm. It’s March rain – not freezing or blowing, but dripping slowly down the glass, cool enough to leave the windows open. Though it seems impossible after so much barrenness, every day this week the green puckers of buds curl slightly more open on the trees in the courtyard.

If only my own thoughts were budding with as much patient inevitability as the trees! Honestly, I had some pretty grand ambitions about all the writing and blogging I was going to do with 5 uninterrupted days of down time. Um, yeah, so, not so much.

It astonished me how much effort it took to get my mind to slow down these past few days. As my earlier posts suggest, February was a whirlwind, full of weighty tasks and weighty thoughts. I think it’s taken four days of simple mental emptiness (and The Office season 2 – ah, PBJ - on DVD) to even begin to think clearly and release the weight of the past six weeks. Basically, you can’t just shed the weight all at once.

This annoys me. I’m impatient. I don’t think I have time to let the ground lay fallow.

Nouwen tells me that “a seed only flourishes by staying in the ground in which it is sown. When you keep digging the seed up to check whether it is growing, it will never bear fruit…. This growth takes place even when you do not feel it.”

Am I growing? What will the next season be like? Is this winter almost done? – These are the weighty questions that the past month has held. Essentially, I feel like it’s been a month of auditioning. Of preparing a “face to meet the faces that you meet.” I had two job applications due, for very different types of work, which required major tweaking of the CV and much wrangling of the cover letters in hopes that I might spin these last three years of unpaid “experience” into something that will pay the bills. It’s so psychically taxing to write cover letters, I have to say. Essentially, I feel like I have to get myself emotionally to a place where I totally believe I am perfect for the position, that they would be fools not to, at the very least, interview me. I have to create the imaginary life that would accompany that particular job. Then I can sit down and actually write something persuasive, that conveys my enthusiasm for whatever the position might be.

And then I have to do it again. For a different job, in a different city, with different qualifications!

I’ve begun to feel like sending out job applications is not unlike going on a blind date. There’s a lot of preparation beforehand. You try to find out as much as you can about the particular person/job, then you spin your interests/credentials in the way that will be most enticing for them to call you again (i.e., interview you). I remember one date I went on with an architect (sweet, boring) in which I managed to drudge up pretty much everything I knew about architectural styles, and talked convincingly the whole night about what is, at best, a pretty small circle of knowledge and interest on my part. Does this make me manipulative? Or just a decently accommodating conversationalist?

All I know is that, for me, it’s pretty much the same skill set required for dating and for job applications. And unfortunately, that means that it comes with all the same potential for big-time disappointment. For the inevitable hopes-getting-dashed bit.

I know this sounds insecure. And, truthfully, I feel insecure about the future at the moment. It feels heavy. Not the least of which is because of websites like this one, which detail the horrors of the higher-education world presently, with its system of adjuncting and marginal pay (like, qualifying-for-government-cheese marginal) for professors (particularly in the humanities, particularly in composition, and particularly for women). Righteous anger starts to well up in my chest reading about these kinds of things. Then it flares out, and I become convinced that the only logical thing to do is to pitch my career path entirely and happily go back to working at the bookshop I loved so much during grad school. Become happily downwardly mobile.

Weighty thoughts.

And then there was the “auditioning” required of our English department last week. A fancy panel of experts from universities around Europe came to examine our program, conduct interviews, and skim through piles of reports we’d all been putting together for over a year. All that was at stake was, oh you know, the future of the institution and its ability to offer accredited degrees.

Weighty.

There’s the daily auditioning for friendship, for community, for workplace and social approval. Who will I hang out with this weekend? Why hasn’t my phone rung in days?

It’s these kinds of thoughts that make me wonder if anything is growing in me, other than yawning self-pity and anxiety. I’m anxious to dig up the seeds that the years here have planted and see if they’re going to bloom into something good, or something rotten. Impatient.

I know that I need to be more like the farmer described in Wendell Berry’s amazing “Mad Farmer” poems, one who says:

“Don’t worry and fret about the crops.
After you have done all
You can for them,
let them stand in the weather on their own.

If the crop of any one year was all,
a man would have to cut his
Throat every time it hailed.

But the real products of any year’s work
are the farmer’s mind
And the cropland itself.”

In all of these insecurities and anxieties and flyings back-and-forth across continents, and striving toward excellent work, and striving toward approval and worth, I know that the real cropland is heart-land. And even if this week it’s felt fallow and empty, even if this year it’s felt fallow and empty, I can still rely on the fact that something is growing, is planted deep. I don’t know what the next whole year holds. I want things to be simpler. I really just want to be as content as the roses that Mary Oliver describes saying: ”the[ir] answer was simply to rise/ In joyfulness, all their days.”

I want that to be enough for me. I believe in a God who provides for and guides us, who eagerly accepts whatever we offer to Him, big or small. I really want my joy-fully-lived life to be enough, and to let go of striving and anxiety. I realize so deeply that all these weighty thoughts, this self-doubt reigning in my head, is a result of having lost perspective and a correct sense of God’s faithfulness. Moreover, it’s a forgetting of what is eternal. Simone Weil, in her essay “The Mysticism of Work” suggests that “slavery is work without any light from eternity, without poetry, without religion. May eternal light give, not a reason for living and working, but a sense of completeness which makes the search for any such reason unnecessary.”

Eternal light. Like sunshine, this heart-land needs it desperately.

SOO funny, and sooo accurate...

"When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention"

..they went on, "Listen,
the heart-shackles are not, as you think,
death, illness, pain,
unrequited hope, not loneliness, but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,
selfishness."

~ Mary Oliver
from Thirst

This is all your fault

Here I sit, nearly paralyzed by sheer number of projects I need to do between now and our department's accreditation visit next Tuesday, trying to focus on the task at hand, not to think about the lessons for tomorrow that are barely sketched out. My fingers are tripping along so quickly as I type this that I keep having to hit the backspace because my brain is outpacing my typing. I am trying to breathe, and take it "bird by bird," as Anne Lamott might say.

But right now, the iTunes shuffle fairy has decided to grace me with Loreena McKennitt's rendition of "The Lady of Shalott," and I start thinking, "this is all your stupid fault, Tennyson."

YOU are the reason I am plowing my way through this ridiculously under-valued, unprofitable, marginalized field of study, the English teacher. YOU are the reason I labor away at words day after day, the reason I'm stuck at school at 9 p.m. on a Thursday trying to put together a PowerPoint presentation for regional English language teachers, entitled, "What is Good Writing?" I can trace my entire career path (besotted and rewarding in equal measure) from those fateful minutes in the opening scene of Anne of Green Gables, the 1985 PBS production that I saw as a 7-year-old, where Anne is wandering in the woods, mouthing your lines like an incantation:

"Willows whiten, aspens quiver
Little breezes dusk and shiver."

This, Tennyson - my life and devotion to language, my committed laboring to teach others (and myself) how to wield and honor words - this is pretty much all your fault.

Shameless Self Promotion

Incidentally, I'm not such a fan of the flannel-graph-looking Joan accompanying the text, (or the font for that matter), but, what can ya do? (Who am I kidding, I'm thrilled this is finally out!)

Music I Can't Get Enough of This Week

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova on the Once soundtrack, plus The Swell Season.

Sondre Lerche on the Dan in Real Life soundtrack. (I loves the soundtracks).

Oh, man, and I can't forget about Priscilla Ahn too.

I guess I'm feeling lush and folky, as usual.

The Craziest Week of My Life (I hope)

I don’t even know where to begin. I think I’ve passed through at least 4 distinct emotional phases since my last post, with all the attendant impulses and inspirational moments. Now, I seem to have landed on impatience and restlessness, which is not where I set out from. And, since I’m not sure how to distill the emotional magnitude of much of my thinking over the past 2 weeks, I’m just going to opt for a semi-spare telling, with inevitable follow-up posts that'll spin out some of the thoughts I collected on journal pages.

Leaving Lithuania for Budapest and ending up in Denver:

February 10th, I took the 7 a.m. train to Vilnius, the 2:30 flight to Prague, the 5 p.m. flight to Budapest, and the late minibus to my friend’s Buda apartment. It was a long day. Monday was packed with class visitations, observations, lunch, info gathering at Central European University. It wasn’t until about 3:30 that I got a chance to sit down and check email, only to find a 20-hour old message from my mom telling me that Grandpa Stewart had been brought into the ER and was now in hospice care, not expected to survive the night.

I immediately shifted into crisis-planning mode, pushing back the panicky “I can’t believe this is happening NOW!” thoughts, and by the grace of God, was able to go right away to a travel agent (on campus at CEU) and have him book me on the noon flight out of Budapest on Tuesday. I had to cut my visit at CEU short, but only by about 5 hours shorter than originally planned.

With my ticket in hand, I was able to take a mind-clearing walk around Pest that evening, through my old neighborhoods, and then a frosty morning walk the next morning on the Buda side, near the favorite cafés and churches. On my way to the airport, I stopped by the university Tuesday morning to pick up a couple things and to check my email. That’s when I got the final news.

Glen Charles Stewart, my grandpa, passed away at 4 p.m. Monday afternoon, February 11th.

I took that news and got on the metro out to the airport, checked my tiny 3-day backpack, and crossed the ocean for the 15th time in 3 years.

I could go on and on and on about God’s blessings to me and my family that week. About the signs and provisions and comforts that we experienced through it all. The best I can say is that grandpa’s was a good death. I had been praying on my knees in my room in Budapest Monday night that, because Grandpa had been faithful to God his whole life, that God would be faithful to him now at the time of his death. And He was. Grandpa was 93, diagnosed with bone cancer that had begun to spread. And yet, up to the end, he subsisted on 2 ibprofen for pain and was still driving his own car. He didn’t have to undergo debilitating hospital treatments, or move out of his independent apartment into assisted living. He didn’t have to endure a long, slow decline. God just came and took him Home.

And, if there is a family anywhere capable of putting the “fun” in “funeral,” it is ours. Saturday night after the funeral, me and my cousins played card games late into the night. We watched embarrassing VHS family videos of Christmases and camping-trips past. We laughed SO hard that our abdominal muscles cramped. We sat up late into the morning in the hot tub, talking about Grandpa, and our family, and Dietrich Bonhoffer, and faith, and marriage, and singleness, and funny movies, and…. The whole time felt like another gift passed onto us by Grandpa. He gave us many things – passion for travel, love of the outdoors, the curse of car trouble, a trove of funny sayings, a ferocious faith in Our God – but last weekend it felt like the greatest gift he left us was each other.

Proof that God loves me and wants me to be happy

Actually, Martin Luther said that beer was proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. But, I'm going to take the sunshine-soaked, 65 degree, mountain-ringed day I received upon my arrival home as such proof. Well, that and a great Fat Tire microbrew on tap.

The chain bridge and winter trees

Backpack // Wings

Near the Lizst Ferenc Music Academy, Pest

Budapest, Margit Sziget, the Duna, from Fisherman's Bastion

Here I go again

The backpack is packed. The passport is ready. The Ipod is charged.

Tomorrow, I get a little piece of grace. Frederick Buechner said "loving someone is grace," but I think lots of things are grace. For me, journeys are grace. And this one in particular is a beautiful little gift, a little sacramental sip. I get to come full circle.

Since I'm on a never-ending mission to narrativize my life, it's hard not to see this trip to Budapest as a really fitting experience to have during my last semester at LCC. I've been here for 2 and a half years, but until now, I haven't had a chance to get back to the city where Eastern Europe first crawled under my skin and up into my psyche. I first went to Budapest when I was 16, between my sophomore and junior years of high school; it was our first destination on our way to camps in Romania. But Budapest imprinted itself on my brain cells the way it only can for 16-year-olds who read too much and long for a life amongst grandiose architecture.

I went back 6 years later to teach high school English. And then 2 years after that for a summer of work in a refugee camp during the first year of the Afghan/Iraqi wars. But I haven't been there since, despite having been "in the neighborhood," for several years. Budapest is why I'm in Lithuania. Budapest is why I've lived fully half of the past decade outside of the United States. This shocks me sometimes.

Friday in class, I just happened to mention (and it surprised me again when I said it) that I spend most of my time in a part of the world that I would not have been allowed into when I was growing up. I told them how I used to have nightmares about nuclear war when I was seven, waking up stark-eyed and unable to calm down my heart rate, climbing into my parents bed for comfort. I reminded these 18 and 19 year-olds, who were infants or eye-twinkles when the Berlin wall fell and when students in Vilnius were shot by Russian army officers for protesting at the TV tower, that, once upon a time, I could not have been their teacher, we could not have been friends. (and we would NOT have been speaking English). I looked into the classroom - at Ona, and Tomas, and Konstantin, and Nikita, and Aigul, and Laurynas, and Aiva, and Sergei, and Nastija, and... and I could not imagine how this could have EVER been true.

Budapest is why I'm here, now, doing what I do. So as I face only three more months of life in Europe (for the time being anyway), it's a good time to go back and visit her. I'm struggling against trying to make too much of events. To see it as an ending, when it's probably just a touchpoint. Nevertheless, to be able to go back is grace. And I'm grateful.

"The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of the inner journey. The inner journey is the interpretation of the meaning and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both." - Thomas Merton

Friday's Festival of Randomness

I have determined, through precise scientific study, that Mika songs can be played a maximum of 10 times over a 24 hour period before losing their hypernetic, brain-buzzing effect. Except maybe "Lollipop."

I'm sorry, dear student. No fancy plastic sleeve on earth is going to compensate for that paper you just turned in.

The Hungarians, indeed, are the only language family (the quirky linguistically-islanded Finno-Ugrics) to have two words for the color red. Piros for most things; Voros for blood, the flag and wine.

And, lastly (warning, extreme snarkiness ahead):(Atsiprasau uz mano labai blogai gramatiska, bet, man reikia kalbeti. Prasom, klausyk.)

Dear Lithuanian Pool Guests/Brangus Lietuvos Basainos Kviesti

I would like to take this opportunity, upon the 17th anniversary of your independence, to introduce you to an amazing practice known as
The Circle Swim
wherein, a small swimming pool lane may be utilized by up to 6 persons, if appropriately spaced. This requires, however, acknowledgment and awareness of the actual, physical presence of another person in the lane. It also requires attentiveness to the varying speeds and intentions of those with whom you share said lane. So, for example, if you are a strapping, hairy gentleman who desires to impress the females of the pool, (particularly if they are young western women whose European fore-mothers stopped taking memos on feminine delicacy and deference somewhere around 1883) you should make sure you can successfully out-swim them lap after lap. Or get out of the way. Or if, for example, your body mass and circumference are, say, the size of a young elephant, you may want to go ahead and choose the leitai linea with the other aerobicizing babushkai.

I mean no disrespect, brangus Lietuvai - I love your fried bread, your potatoes as haute cuisine, your soft white beaches, your pine-lined bike trails, your folktale wood-carving tradition. But, over time, this "circle swim" practice might even come in handy in opportunities such as, boarding and exiting buses, walking on the sidewalk, or circulating through the grocery store. It could, in short, be revolutionary.

Myli,

Your American Cousin

Going here on Sunday...

This is freaking me out...

Today's reading from "My Utmost for His Highest," Oswald Chambers:

February 5th: ARE YOU READY TO BE OFFERED?

"Are you willing to be offered for the work of the faithful - to pour out your life blood as a libation on the sacrifice of the faith of others? Or do you say - 'I am not going to be offered up just yet, I do not want God to choose my work. I want to choose the scenery of my own sacrifice; I want to have the right kind of people watching and saying, 'Well done.''

It is one thing to go on the lonely way with dignified heroism, but quite another thing if the line mapped out for you by God means being a door-mat under other people's feet. Suppose God wants to teach you to say, 'I know how to be abased' - are you ready to be offered up like that? Are you ready to be not so much as a drop in a bucket - to be so hopelessly insignificant that you are never thought of again in connection with the life you served? Are you willing to spend and be spent; not seeking to be ministered unto, but to minister? Some saints cannot do menial work and remain saints because it is beneath their dignity."

In recent weeks, I've been re-opening up my decision to leave Lithuania this year. Re-probing my reasons and justifications. And then this reading. "Am I ready to be offered up... to be abased"?

Absolutely not. I do 'want to choose the scenery of my own sacrifice.'

Ouch.

Comments

Good movie conversation going on in the comments back here.

Also, Annie, Dawn and others of you who've asked, as part of my Tuesday writing routine, I decided to reinstate my poetry blog, Branches, at least for a little while, to motivate me!

Thoughts from today's Shabbat

If I go [back to the States in May], am I saying no to the crucified life?

No, I think. Even nuns had the convent, and sisters. An anchorite barnacled herself onto the home of the Church. To my knowledge, there were no desert mothers. No woman, however chaste, can long endure a cave.

"...I gotta know the Bible front to back. You can't help nobody if you can't tell 'em the right story."

Jack Cash, in Walk the Line

The Pastor Praises the Creator

Dearly beloved, I mean today
to praise the God who gave the tribes
wine, the crisp flesh of suckling pig,
then told them, "Thou must not."

Who gave them swords and ploughshares,
lambs and lions, demons and redeemers.
Who made half of them like pestles,
half like mortars, then told them

in themselves they were complete.
Cool soothing fingers and fevers
between the legs. Reason and gooseflesh,
curtains and candles, lightning and oak,

seven days to live and as many sins,
lungs and mold, books and blind men, veins
and age. Who fashioned them a harvest home,
then created wanderlust and roads.

-David Citino

today's assortment of random thoughts

I notice I'm not the only one who smiles at cats while walking to work.

The piano interlude in Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares for Me" is the surest way to clear out any residual Monday negativity.

Sometimes my skin quickens as much to sunlight as to a kiss full on the mouth.

Even imaginary friends can be good company.

Sometimes making just that one bright student smile bewilderedly during class is worth all the getting out of bed in the morning.

Apparently, you can't freeze onions.

"grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days"

old familiar words

I'm thinking of changing the blog's name to "unmitigated navel gazing." Thoughts?

Report: 2 weeks back

Ah friends…

First, let me say that I will never cease to be amazed by how much wholeness I feel simply from washing my dishes and gazing at my clean counters.

I’ve been back two weeks already and no doubt you faithful readers will have noticed the dramatic uptick in my frequency of blog posts! This may have something to do with my amazing open teaching schedule this semester, which I’m afraid has given way to somewhat obsessive blog-surfing, linking and general rabbit-trail-following that I’ll probably need to curb here soon (no doubt sometime around when I collect the first set of essays!). I do take refuge in the fact that, as my friend Karen put it yesterday, “if you were doing the same reading in book form, would you feel as guilty?” Thank you, Karen.

A feeling passed over me last night as I wrestled to put my brain to sleep, and I think it felt like hope.

There have been scores of blessings this first week and a half, all of which remind me that God has not forgotten me over here in this windy Baltic land! I am blessed by my new colleague Karen in the office next to mine, for walking home from school with, with whom I have a standing weekly date to sit down and write on Tuesday afternoons. I am blessed by laughter over lunch with Janis and Charlotte and Karen after church on Sunday. And by the deliberate, honest reading of Psalms with Maja and Keith beforehand. (And that I actually went to church for the first time since September.) Blessed especially by the prayer that I'm praying every morning and night, by the fact that my teaching load is precisely HALF what it was in the fall, and that I get to teach creative writing again.

Yesterday, I was sitting at my kitchen table (hence, all my kitchen table posts!) looking around my apartment, thinking, “this is the life you want.” Oh how I rush and grumble toward some imagined future when all my social, intellectual, physical and emotional needs will be poised in perfect balance. But now, I have work to do, enough of it, but time to sit and drink tea and talk with friends. Time to bake bread, to make dinner and set a full table. I even have enough time to plan travel in March, and friends to go with.

Even beyond this present well-being, I feel the metaphorical dark clouds over my future back in the States beginning to part a bit. I am invited to teach in Turkey again this July and August, which is not only adventure but the hope of a modest paycheck after 3 years of volunteering. I’m excited and heartened by the engagement of yet another close friend this past weekend, continuing the life-game of Red Rover we all seem to be playing. This brings my May/June wedding slate to five, yes five, and I can be home for all of them! (Applications to be my date will be posted soon. !)

As I think about work I might do next year, a process that was giving me anxiety episodes back at home, I realize that what I end up doing is so much less important than who I continue becoming. Part of me thinks that sounds like a cheesy Hallmark statement, but more deeply I think this is the essence of being a disciple. Faith seems to have resolved itself to a very simple, simple core – to be faithful in trusting that what God says about the world is true, and to actively rest in His mercy.

No matter what the calendar says of my age this year (“let us not speak of it,” I’ve been saying!), I somehow feel like I’m about to graduate from college again. The options are open. I can do anything or everything.

What I realize from my vantage point here is that I have to go home with as much intentionality as I came to Lithuania. I need to choose deliberately and thoughtfully where I will live, what I will drive, where I’ll go to church, how I will spend whatever little money I might make – otherwise the cultural default settings will do the choosing for me.

So as I look ahead…

I want to hold still.
I want to stay put somewhere and dig in, and for the time being, stand still when my heart gets hungry for new horizons, more stamps in the passport, more languages.
I want time to read.
A small house with a small kitchen.
Not riches, richness.
Simplicity and quiet.
A very ordered, contemplative life, with time to sit with cups of coffee in my hands, listening to friends.
Time for taking walks, for writing things in notebooks.
My grandparents’ old piano.
Hospitality.
Growth.
Commitment and patience.
Contribution to my neighbor's good as well as my own.
Contribution to my city’s good as well as my own.
Civility.

Good grief, I am so old fashioned! Does anybody actually lead lives like this anymore?

Thanks for letting me ramble on, friends – I am happy to have this outlet for all the processing I know I need to do to meaningfully close this chapter of my life over the next few months. Those of you who have been emotionally tagging along from the beginning of this thing are amazing in your faithfulness to me, even with all my doubts and restlessness! (I feel like I should shout out, “who’s still with me!?”) And when the time comes, thank you for giving me something to come home to.

Calling all eccentrics.

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

- Unamuno

Picture sitting on my kitchen table

(North Michigan Reservoir, Rawah Wilderness, Colorado)
(yes, a repost from June 2006)

"Do you think because you suffered for love
nothing more will be asked of you?"

- David Brendan Hopes, from Winter Birds

Single Girlfriends... this might explain everything...

"Whom you marry depends on where you live, but also on how old you are and what race you are....

What might cause an imbalance in some of these local marriage markets? Imbalances in cities might be caused by unskilled young men rationally deciding to give up and move to the country, or stay there in the first place. But another major reason for men being absent from local marriage markets is prison. There are two million men in US prisons and just 100,000 women; and the men in prison are spread unevenly across age, race and geography."

-Tim Harford, here.

Okay, I admit, his thesis is mostly focused on young black men & women, but I just love the idea of using this explanation at the next family gathering.

The Bride of Christ

"I went through the bookstore Barnes and Noble in the Jesus section... and I tried to think about if I was an alien from another planet and I was trying to figure out what is it that these people who follow Jesus believe the most... I think I would think the most important thing for Christians was to be effective, to find purpose.

But I think the most important thing that God is asking us is "Will you be faithful?"

He didn't say He was going to come back for an effective bride, and you better have a whole bunch of work done when I get back, you better have a factory full of products that you've produced. He just said,
"When I come back, will you look pretty for me?"

- Seth McCoy, Woodland Hills Church, January 2008

I'm going to post this without comment. And yet, my very act of posting is itself a comment. Alas.

Read. Think. Pray.

Sometimes other voices sing it exactly, exactly right

I woke up at 4:35 still jet lagged from another plane ride
And opened my window over bondi beach
Where all the stars seemed out of reach
And recognized none but the southern cross
Sitting on my bed with the light turned off
Till i found a sweet song on the little clock radio and it made me cry
Singing have some faith, have some faith

And i don't know what i want but i know where i want to be
And everywhere i go, i wish you were here with me
Stars hang on tiny strings, my dreams are made of memories
Once everything made sense, now i get so alone that i can't sleep
Will somebody please tell me if this is where i'm supposed to be

Bottles on the table and socks on the floor
Trying to remember what i started this for
When a surfer friend of mine came and picked me up
And we paddled out as the sun was coming up
Talking about how everybody has to find
Something that gives them the strength to be alive
And out laying on our boards in the southern hemisphere, he said to me
Gotta have some faith, have some faith

And i don't know what i want but i know where i want to be
And everywhere i go, i wish you were here with me
Stars hang on tiny strings, my dreams are made of memories
Once everything made sense, now i get so alone that i can't sleep
Will somebody please tell me if this is where i'm supposed to be

(Mason Jennings, "Southern Cross" - yes, I'm on a Mason Jennings kick right now!)

the soup seemed to ask for bread

i'm making soup

words from a Skype chat

there is not one single person on this planet who is totally worth our trust and who will not hurt us

i wish that i could say something that would make you calmer, less scared, because i know that is what you want.

but the best i can say is, just be patient, wait, and pray

none of us can really do more than that

because it is grey today, I remember these moments from home...

And regardless, in the evening
A light is thrown by the setting sun
It speeds along this vast familiar
And silently crosses everyone

It's the light that's changing
It's the light that's changing
It's the light that's changing
It's only the light

Across the schoolyards, across the gardens
Across the chapels where lovers have leapt
Across the table in our old kitchen
Across the cities where our future slept

It's the light that's changing
It's the light that's changing
It's the light that's changing
It's only the light...

(Mason Jennings, "The Light (II)")

Blogging Makes Me Lonely

Well, I'm up at 4 again. Sheesh. Fortunately, I had new stuff to read, thanks to Annie. She got an earful from me this evening, which must have prompted her to think about her sad, sad friend over in Lithuania. Okay, so I'm not sad, sad... totally, but I am perplexed, and confused (and incidentally, really hungry for 4 a.m.). Within 24 hours of my leaving the States, my sister got a new puppy, my sister-in-law got a new job, my best friend got engaged, and my grandpa got a diagnosis that his cancer has started spreading.

(I tried to space those in order of significance.)

Having just been home for three weeks, I feel all reconnected into each of their lives, so it feels ever more like a slam to be just missing out on sharing the joy and the excitement, the pain and the anxiety, the preparations and the LIFE that are inherent in each of these events. Instead, here I am in Klaipeda, having been home for two days and having seen and talked to ONE PERSON since I've been back. (A sprinkling of text messages do not constitute seeing and talking). This is a harsher blow than usual since I've just spent the past week literally scheduling morning-lunch-afternoon-and-dinner meet-ups with friends around Colorado. It was a full friendship week.

I don't really have a point to this post. Talking with Annie, I told her that I realized that blogging actually makes me lonelier, rather than helping me feel connected. I think it's because I can write this from the corner of my blue couch, here in Lithuania, at 4 a.m. You, dear reader, can read it and can know what it going on in my psyche (bitter, twisted and tired as it it), and feel like you are part of my life. I, however, if I don't hear from you, don't have a similar insight into your pains and joys, your struggles and moments of triumphs, but rather feel like I'm on the end of a one-sided relationship.

Being home and sitting face-to-face with friends was healthy for me, helped me not to feel like I am the only one doing the relating. I does make me consider, though, if it might be better for me not to post here. Better for me to try real relationships. But this does help (particularly when jet-lagged).... so I'm at a loss.

I think I should crawl back in bed now...

Some of my own thoughts (for a change)

(Being a disciple of Jesus is difficult. )

These words formed in my head at 4:30 this morning when I woke up disoriented in a Copenhagen hotel, stuck overnight on my way back to Lithuania. I left Colorado two days ago, and I'm still not home yet. I should be used to all this solo travel, to the anxiety that THIS might be the time they lose my suitcases for good, to the carefully rationed pounds and kroner, eeked out to pay for coffees and bagels. But I am tired of shouldering these kinds of detours, head upheld, forced patience smoothing out my forehead.

But then again... yesterday, I sat in the middle of Heathrow's third terminal, typing away at lesson plans, a cup of coffee at hand, and the entire world's citizens milling around me while I planned my lessons on poetry, sketched out my spring travel... what kind of amazing life I do have! Really. I am doing what I most want - I travel, I read, I write, I teach. On holidays, I wing myself home and ski on the white hills under the bluest sky anywhere in the wide world. Things are not so bad.

I woke up this morning at 4:30, knowing just how much I need to pray. Knowing that I absolutely must get my knees back down on the hard floor, lay face down and raise up my hands, ask forgiveness for my hidden heart, ask forgiveness for my stubbornness that is not satisfied with the gifts I am given. I've always been bad about that - many a Christmas has seen me, rather than thankful, wishing for the gifts I didn't get, caluculating the ones I've been given against those I'd asked for.

But I have this one - this ordinary morning, ordinary, sitting at familiar table in Copenhagen airport, watching the screen tick out the gates, waiting for my departure to be called. I've done all my favorite things, sampled the Elizabeth Arden Green tea hand lotion, run my fingers over the pashminas in Hermes, traced the colorful cut-paper cards with my eyes, lifted the Royal Dutch china and determined it to be too expensive, read the back covers and front flaps of English books with the manner of saying goodbye to a friend - slow and deliberate.

Why are we never happy with the portion we are given? Why has this year in Lithuania felt like such a burden to undertake, instead of the amazing gift it felt like when I first went? I'm thinking a lot about my years at LCC this trip; it's inevitable. I consciously know that this is my last journey this direction. The last beginning to a semester there and I cannot help but feel the difference in my heart to how it feels compared to that first one. Most of what I've felt this past year is how desperately I want my VISION back, how much I lack the enthusiasm and energy that carried me through year one. But I know too much now - I know the kinds of demands that Jesus makes of my heart. I know what it means to submit hopes and fears to him, to give up things and people and loves that distract from him.

I know I'm going to be tempted to regret this time in Lithuania - this Christmas I feel I got a taste of how BEHIND in life I feel having chosen to give these three years to pursuits that don't have tangible monetary or relational results. I see the ugly dragon of materialism slinking back into frame, feel his claws prick at me in reminder that I no longer own anything solid and calculable. Not even a bed. I felt the jealousy of watching financially secure siblings and friends plan purchases so out-of-my-reach that I can't even imagine them. When I start to compare myself and what I have "to show" for my time in Lithuania, it feels like it amounts to a few new wrinkles on my forehead, a busted-up heart and faith that's stretched beyond what it can snap back from.

Paradoxically, I also know I'm going to be tempted to paint the time in Lithuania with simplistic, happy primary colors (red, yellow, green). To try and neatly package what I've been through here, try to come up with some tidy lessons that I can carry around like nuggets in my pocket, applying as needed.

And what have I learned? Maybe only one thing (watch, here comes the package-ing): That the heart's submission to God's will is the everlasting, ongoing, singular task of a discipled life.

There are tangential lessons of course, but this is the sum total of what I will take from my time in Lithuania, that being a "Christian" is not easy or comfortable. I knew this before, of course, but never have had to continually, repeatedly, wrenchingly put to death my own hopes in the practice of following what I believe to be the sake of God's Kingdom. At first, this seems adventurous, like Frodo on a great quest, the excitment of serving a cause greater than yourself. We, as young believers, get high on these kinds of quests (try a jolt of this any time at a conference like Urbana), and often these intial visions can sustain a period of intensity and committment. But pretty soon (soon being relative), the self, the heart, our own desires will announce themselves, and we'll have to do battle. Or the task will seem compromised and unworthy of our time, so we'll quit. Or, any number of other factors will arise. And then we learn what it means to follow Jesus, to be His disciple, His instrument, His hands and feet. It means that we must die to ourself.

I had an atheist friend this summer who said something about believers that I've heard repeated often by writers and philosophers in disparaging people of faith. (Well, sometimes it sounds like they mean it kindly, but to me it always comes off as a slam). They say that belief in God is instinctive, comforting, something we need in troubled times.

I'm sorry atheist friends, but my belief in God is profoundly UN-comfortable. There are many, many times when God's existence, the demands that His reality makes on the life of a follower, are discomforting in the extreme. I think the only way that they must get away with making this argument is that so often believers live as functional atheists, only turning to God when we encounter things we can't handle or deal with on our own.

This may explain my extreme distaste for books such as "Live your best life now" (yes, I know poor Joel Osteen is everyone's whipping boy, but it's just so easy). I think that these kinds of books and beliefs, that propogate the idea that Christianity will bring comfort and peace and fulfillment for it's followers, only further prop up the atheist assertion that we're all in this for the goodies, for the satisfying retirement package. I don't think Christ-following is all gloom and martyrdom, BUT I do believe that serious Christ-following means that we are going to be uncomfortable. Our SELF is going to get KILLED. Dietrich Bonhoffer says, "when Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die." Christ will lead us, not into white-fenced suburban bliss, but into the places where the darkness is darkest.

How do I know this? Because that is where Jesus went. That is how he spent his life on earth, battling against oppression, sickness, disease and fear. If we are His true followers, He is going to take us there too. And we are not always going to like it. Our comfort-seeking selves are going to feel it as keenly as if our skins were being peeled away. (I always love that Eustace-as-dragon metaphor in Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).

So, this is my sermon to myself as I embark on a final four months at LCC. This is my personal smack across the forehead. A reminder that this experience is both a) amazing, fulfilling, and perfect for me, so don't go whining for something easier and lesser, and b) the only way I'm going to be able to accept it as such is through self-denial, through obedience to God.

We'll see how I do. Stay tuned.