Partial Poem

I'm not so sure how I feel about posting poetry on the internet...I don't really want to be bad poetry girl, but I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of friends to discuss poetry last week (they all live in CA so I skyped in) and we have the assignment of writing more poetry to share with the group.  I'm half done with one about our crazy car accident 2 years ago.  Just good to get it out there while I work on the second half.  It doesn't have a title yet!

We are a tumbleweed
car.  Somersaulting away
from the hustle of highway 40.

Bouncing yo-yo's --
Dangling like ridiculous
spiders caught
in our own webs.
Then falling,

in slow motion,
arms and legs floating
gracefully.
An involuntary wave.

Three flawless rotations,
we stick the landing
(four wheels firmly planted)
stuck
in the victorious ditch.

Hello Poetry

The creative bones in my body feel dusty.  I think a lot, but haven't created in awhile.  So it's going to be a creative summer for me, starting with a daily haiku.  Because let's face it, you can't just dive back into poetry.  My perspectives have to be reset first.  Here's yesterdays:

Poetic summer
starts with one haiku a day
good, bad, or ugly.

We'll see how it goes!

A Philosophical Question

Maybe one day I will be good at blogging (my good I mean consistent)...but seeing as how my immediate future includes moving to a new city and submerging myself once again into the academic world, I'm not holding my breath.  But here I am, today, for now, to flesh out a comment that has been nagging me since my class at church a week ago.  This won't be the promised sequel to "Who's time is it?" Not yet anyway.  I can't wait to sit down and write about that class and its monumental awesomeness, but today is not the day.  Last week Rob, in passing, declared that idealism, as philosophical movement is one of the most detrimental influences that philosophy has managed thus far.  Big statement, but perhaps a short review will be a wise beginning here.

Idealism, made popular by Plato himself, maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is based on the mind or ideas.  Plato wrote about perfect forms or ideals that our lives were mere shadows of, and Kant asserted that "only what is within ourselves can be immediately and directly perceived."  The external world is at best secondary to the life within and at worst, may be a mere figment of our own imaginations. (Think the Matrix).

It's easy enough to see the implications of this kind of thinking for our lives as Christians.  If the ultimate nature of what is REAL and TRUE is based on the mind and ideas, than to be "saved" we have to come into a right belief (or idea?) about God and Jesus.  To worship we sit through our weekly Sunday lectures (sermons?) and to "spend time with God" we let our mind dwell on stories from scripture.  Because knowing is the most important right?  At least according to idealism, if we know what is right, we will be right and if we know what is true than our actions and desires will follow suit.  But since when does life ever work out that way?  How many times a day do I decided to do something, I make the conscious commitment to follow through on something or other and forget, or don't find time or just change my mind?

Okay let's try something else.  Idealism says the mind is all powerful, but what does God say about us?  He is, after all, the one who created us and truth and the relationship between the two.

The first thing that strikes me is that God created us as physical beings, to inhabit a physical world, that he created us to change and grow in that world and to only last a hundred years or so.  I often hear Christians say that we are not created for this world, earth isn't our home, and we were made for eternity...is that really true?  God created the world, saw it was good, but needed something more and then he created us in his image FOR THE WORLD.  Certainly for himself, and for eternity as well, and for a relationship with him, but earth was our home from the beginning was it not?  Idealism, and ideas in general also present us with a sort of timelessness, as ideals are not affected by time, but God made us creatures that exist in time, that change with time, that succumb to time.  He sent his Son into a time and place. 

So here's the questions nagging me.  We fight against time, like it is our enemy, but is it?  Or were we created specifically to be creatures of time.  And, we cling to ideas and make truth about our heads, but is that enough for us, the creatures that we created as physical earthly timely beings? 

That's just about all I have time for today!
Love.

Who's time is it?

Yet another post for Bekah, and the beyond is uncertain.  Julie may find this interesting but possibly repetitive.   But that's just the disclaimer!

Okay first things first...I LOVE THE CLASS I AM TAKING AT CHURCH!  Yes, please imagine me shouting that from the rooftops, because if it wasn't snowing, and I had a ladder, that is exactly what I would be doing. 

Part of this love comes from the very core of my dorky heart that just loves to learn and discuss and deepen.  I get an emotional high from classes in general, I draw energy from them, when I walk out of the room I wish I could be dancing out instead.  But this class in particular is above and beyond.  It's not anything new exactly, as it is a class called "life and liturgy" taught by an Anglican priest, and hello, I am that girl who owns at least a handful of books on liturgical theology (and I actually read them and like it!).  This is a kindred spirit sort of thing.  I have always loved the liturgies of the historic church, and though I have read a lot about said liturgies I have never felt myself well equipped to explain their power or convey why the MEAN so much.  This class is full of people like me.  People who have found Wellspring, this Anglican church that is full of life and spirit and Christ, and also full of tradition, and they can't quite explain what it does to their hearts and why. 

I want to write about cluing into the liturgies in our lives, as they are all around us and are a powerful force in shaping us both as individuals, as people in culture and as the people of God, and about time (that's the part Bekah will love) but alas, I spent too much time this evening setting up the new TiVo box so that will all have to wait, but I will post this as a teaser.  You should be excited about what is coming next, because I certainly am.

Love

Doubt

So I have been reading a very interesting book the last few days called, Jesus Girls.  It's basically a collection of essays on a very wide variety of evangelical experiences, and though I resonated with a lot of the authors, the one that seemed to stick closest to my heart was written on the topic of doubt.  I friend in my small group has lately struggled a lot with something like doubt, maybe it would be better defined as simple questioning and wrestling with the more complex ideas of faith and divinity, but still a form of doubt.  We all hate to be unsure of anything.  It's so...well scary, in the way that it makes us so painfully aware of our human limitations.  If you will bear with me, I'd like to share a section of this chapter that helps redeem our propensity to doubt by shedding some new light.

"Doubt is born from disappointment and disappointment is born from longing and longing is a mechanism of Imago Dei, the intention of God within us.  C.S. Lewis says in his preface to Pilgrims Regress, " The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given --nay, cannot even be imagined as given -- in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience."  If that is true, this too is true: My doubt was my desire, to touch the untouchable, to possess the presence of God...then my doubt is not a form of rebellion, but rather a strong, catalytic longing, a desire to broach the distance between a finite human being and an infinite God, and my faith is a form of homesickness, a burden of desire that effectively defeats me in the fight that says to me, there is more that what I see, more than what I know, more than what i am.  This is what the poet Czeslaw Milosz means when he says, "The sacred exists, and it is stronger than all our rebellions."  It puts doubt and faith in perspective.  They are two roots born of the same seed: a desire to dig down, to get my hands dirty, to reckon with the deep, subterranean truth of humanity's search for meaning.  

 How often have I feared that doubt is an enemy, a weakness to be shook off with deliberate fervor?  I have always felt that somehow, the presence of doubt in my heart pointed to a much more significant weakness, like a flawed faith, or a hardened heart.  But if my heart was hard, would the distance I have felt from God really bother me?  The angst of doubt can only be felt by those who are in tune with their God-given desire to commune with the divine, it is the sensitivity of the divine spark we all carry within us.  Doubt is the manifestation of the hiddeness of God, doubt alerts us to the incompleteness of our hearts, and of our understanding of God, but we assume that it may alert us to something more debilitating, namely the possibility that incompleteness is a characteristic of God rather than of ourselves.  But if we know who God is, we know that we are the ones who are incomplete, and searching for the answer to the longing in our hearts.  How bout a Robert Browning poem to round things out?  This is one of my favorites.

God, Thou Art Love

If I forget,
Yet God remembers! If these hands of mine
Cease from their clinging, yet the hands divine
Hold me so firmly that I cannot fall;
And if sometimes I am too tired to call
For Him to help me, then He reads the prayer
Unspoken in my heart, and lifts my care.

I dare not fear, since certainly I know
That I am in God’s keeping, shielded so
From all that else would harm, and in the hour
Of stern temptation strengthened by His power;
I tread no path in life to Him unknown;
I lift no burden, bear no pain, alone:
My soul a calm, sure hiding-place has found:
The everlasting arms my life surround.

God, Thou art love! I build my faith on that.
I know Thee who has kept my path, and made
Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow
So that it reached me like a solemn joy;
It were too strange that I should doubt Thy love.

A Labor of Love

A blog begun for Bekah, but hopefully continued for a myriad of devoted readers?  Maybe not so much, but perhaps a for a few?

This morning, while preparing Ryan's oatmeal, I discovered the latest "reorganization effort" in the house of his constantly rearranging parents.  Today it is silverware.  For the year that I have worked in this house the silverware has rested peacefully in its little silverware separator tray in the following order: small forks, big forks, small spoons, big spoons, knives.  Not an especially ambitious or innovative arrangement, but it seemed to work fine to me.  So imagine my surprise this morning as I reached into the drawer, in search of a spoon for the stirring of the oatmeal, when I extracted a large fork instead.  A new order has been mandated in the silverware drawer!  Big forks, small forks, small spoons, big spoons, knives.  For whatever reason, it has been demeaned that this is the new improved, and more user friendly way to arrange silverware, but I can guarantee that I will be pulling forks when I want spoons for at least the next three days.  At least they keep me on my toes!