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