Une Autre Epoque

Sometimes people say that they feel they were born in the wrong time. You hear this from girls sighing at the end of a Jane Austen movie, just wishing that people still spoke so elegantly or dressed so well or knew how to court a lady. Those were the good old days. People had dignity then. Class.

It’s not so much the courting rituals that I covet. Certainly not. I consider myself fully appreciative of my modern freedoms: of dress, of speech, of study. Whisk me to a world with any kind of caste system, and I would flounder. John Locke runs through my veins. Put me in constrictive clothing and I get jittery and exhausted. I like people to say what they mean. Don’t give me the poetic runaround.

But there is something about a former age that I long for. There is a big part of me that mourns the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment. I feel at times that I am drowning in information and argument. Authority used to be in scripture, in hierarchy, in what one was told and what everybody just knew. Truth was looking up at the night sky and seeing pieces of heaven leaking through the blackness of earth’s blanket. God was physically up there, just far enough away, and all one had to do was to complete the work his or her role required and look up at night and know they were doing God’s work, and that they’d be with him someday.

Of course, there were myriad problems with this. When all people know is what they are told, they can be conned, they can be kept down. There is immense value into seeking one’s own solution to something, to equal opportunity. The monopoly on knowledge faded. Now everyone was responsible for figuring out the truth. It was a human responsibility, and the answer was found through experimentation, reason: human faculties.

And then the world exploded into more and more denominations, schools of thought, political parties. Separate groups, all claiming authority. This is what I mourn. The bright, affirmative concepts of “freedom” and “individuality” and “reason” lead to more and more divisions, people barking at each other. This is not the world as it is meant to be. Don’t tell me that it’s a positive, natural thing for me to be separated from my brothers and sisters by a sea of differing authorities and interpretations. My heart longs for unity. Not mindless conformity. But harmony. A sense of peace with one’s place in the world, with the piece of truth that everyone could grasp, a sense of community.

And now I am told we live in a postmodern age, where we can no longer bark at each other. We have been so divided for so long that we have given up. We can’t figure out who is right, so, everyone is. It’s not unity, it’s not harmony. It’s endless dissonance. Is it childish of me to want a resolution? I’m not hoping for utopia. I’m not proposing we join hands and sing “Imagine.” But there is something in me that aches for an authority. I feel that there must be real answers to the questions that everyone is trying to hack answers for. I admit that people are free, and that they should have the right to seek those answers. But I hate the divisions that those freedoms have created. And I don’t buy the dissonance.

Gosh, I must be religious.

Utopia (or, the worship service)

How easy it is to gather a throng and get them to sing. They come from everywhere, some eager, some grudging, but all end up in the same big room like a cathedral and look up at the same north star. Some start in with heart and gusto, and some feel separate and unsure. But the music plies them all, and there is a sway that sneaks in and stays. The music leaks into the lungs of them all, and slowly the air becomes condensed with the hopes and beliefs and good intentions of those hundreds. In the course of an hour, they have laid down their burdens and reservations and taken up with song.

And they believe that this song will change them and carry them through their days with this melody propelling their steps. They believe that their voices will have changed for singing this song, that their mouths will be from now on full of kind words they didn't know existed. They look around and see hands raised, bodies pulsing to this newly known rhythm. They see backs of heads; no faces, but how easy the faces are imagined-- joyous, benevolent, beautiful. In this room, there is a grace that makes everyone believe everyone else is beautiful.

Life makes sense here. One is alone, but surrounded, lifted up by this bright communal breath, full of sharp temporal understanding. The congregation is an ocean, united, crashing, making the same noise. A warm silence descends, and all pray, hoping and believing that their neighbors' prayers have the same voice, the one they sang the songs with.

Everyone walks away. Their walk home is full of lovely thoughts, thought hard. And then one phone call, one errand, one item on the checklist shakes off the pixie dust; bugs crawl back in the brain, the callous on the heart starts itself over again, and where has Utopia gone?

Contra Mundum

The electricity of activism

Shoots through me, shoves out

Thrilling tears;

I think I am here

For such a time as this.

Hot anger hits my limbs

And I feel as if

the strength of ten has filled me up,

So I can rip the hearts

Of those who rip them from my sisters.

Cut me open, and you'll see

Justice-waters gushing;

Turn my body inside out

And I will rescue you.

But all I am is a soul in a sea,

Swept about, dispersing,

Tears melting in swirling mass.

"What villainy is this!"

Here I am, conta mundum,

Not yet knowing my enemy,

But railing all the same,

And mostly waiting for the dawn.

Forêt

Perhaps the central issue of my life is that I can't see the trees for the forest. I spend time looking down at the forest, contemplating it, drawing pictures of it. And then I spend far more time planning my point of entry, and then the path I will carve out once I get inside. Then comes the fear, the doubts, the frustration that I haven't gotten a handle on the exact shape and nature of the wood before me. I don't want to walk in until I understand.

Sometimes you just have to wander on in and look up at the trees that are right around you. You have to see the beauty in the veins of one leaf; and maybe that's what helps you figure out what you always wanted to understand about this big untamed thing.

Ecclesiastes 11:4, 6

He who observes the wind will not sow,
and he who regards the clouds will not reap...

In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.

Sprout

I haven't written anything since I've gotten here. I've thought a lot of things, but none of them have been focused into anything productive or meaningful.

The truth is that, since I have been in college, I consider it an accomplishment to get out of bed. I'm proud of myself for getting through class. After a late night of work, I reward myself with a weekend full of sleep. If I can hold one conversation with a floormate, I consider myself socially adequate. It's like I've been sent back to square one.

It's such a reversal from high school. There, I was in control of my social world. I knew everyone and had many good friends. I could strike up a conversation with practically anyone and feel at least some comfort of history and understanding. I had been in the same school for 13 years, and I had become accustomed to the academic expectations. I was good at school. I was a leader in theatre and mock trial. I had a huge network of supportive friends and family in my life, available by car at any time. I've been living in a small world of known quantities for the last 18 years.

And in that environment, where pretty much everything was safe, I ventured out on artistic and spiritual adventures on my own time. I had a safety net. I knew which spaces in my life were for creating and branching out. But now, I don't have that. It seems like I expend all my energy on sustaining the fragile sprout of my new life.

Which, practically, means getting out of bed. Taking showers. Doing homework. Slowly, slowly making friends.

Still, ridiculously, I feel some weight of responsibility. I have never been able to shake the feeling that I ought to be doing something great and important. People have given me lots of advice about this through the years, along the lines of either "Yes, do great things! Go for it!" or "Stop thinking the world revolves around you."

So, basically, I've been living in my usual limbo between laziness and high aspirations. But the condition is hugely aggravated when everything around me is so foreign. The world is conspiring to keep me in my room. This is the first big change of my life, and I am definitely feeling stagnant.

But, ultimately, it's not about me. It's not about making something of myself. Maybe it's okay if it takes me months to get my feet on the ground. I'm not the team captain anymore. I'm not the "most likely to succeed." I'm just one lonely girl trying to carve out a place for herself. And I think that's an experience I need to have. I need to know that God sees me as valuable, even if I am just a lonely girl in the cafeteria with no accomplishments to her name.

Still, it hurts an awful lot sometimes. I miss everyone.

Luke 12:24

Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!

Ceinture Noir

I’ve been cleaning out my closet in preparation for leaving. Of course, one anticipates poring over old photo albums and diaries. But one doesn’t necessarily expect to find an item as curious as a black belt in Taekwondo. I got it in eighth grade. Of course, it’s exactly the kind of thing that doesn’t mean anything in eighth grade. But I got it, all right.

If people ever ask me how long it took to get it, I usually say two years. It was really more like a year and a half, but what are you supposed to say to people who are expecting a story of six years’ devoted practice, maybe ten? Their face falls the slightest bit, but they recover quickly, and, hoping to move onto something more fun, ask a question like “So can you do like backflips or anything?” And, with a grimace, it is “No, we didn’t really get into any fancy tricks like that, it was more like getting really good at the basics.”

“Oh, ok. Right. But if I went to attack you, you could injure me, right? I mean, could you, like, kill me?”

I smile to myself. “Well, maybe when I was more in practice.” As in eighth grade.

Then they ask me if I can do a trick, but unfortunately my skirt prevents me from showing off my killer jumping round kick. And then the subject is never broached again.

It’s a silly little scenario, but it leaves a strange taste in my mouth. It’s a joke now, but that’s just it. It wasn’t a trifle at the time. It may have been just eighteen months, but they were hard won. My body doesn’t listen very well, and it was one of the most trying experiences of my life. I have always been a perfectionist, and it killed me when I couldn’t break the board or get the move right. I wept through my sweat, and I learned to love my instructors even more than my beloved schoolteachers. And for all that, I was good, by fragile eighth grade girl standards. It meant the world to me when my instructors would hand me those belts—that I, a girl so easily conquered by feelings and circumstance, had become a conqueror.

And I never went back after they handed me that black belt. The thought brings a tear to my eye even now. I was done with it. I let it all slide down the tube of my memory. The moves and forms that came so easily to me have all melted out of my mind. The instructors haven’t. They remain crystallized, forever associated with certain mannerisms, sayings, kindnesses—the impressions left on the heart of a growing girl. If I saw any of them tomorrow at the grocery store, I wouldn’t know what do say. They wouldn’t remember me.

How many achievements in our lives slip away from us the moment we earn them? How many communities do we abandon, never to see those faces again? How many of us are merely nomads, migrating from place to place, putting all our energies into phases remembered only by mementoes found in moving boxes? Does everybody have a black belt gathering dust?

Sometimes I wonder if human actions are really just like taking photographs to put in a shoe box, where not everything is in order and a lot of things get lost.

Love and Motion

Why does love seem to squelch ambition?

Anyone who knows me knows that I am the first one to run after something, obsess over it, grasp at it. I spend more time dreaming of the future than I spend in the present. Get me started, and I will tell you of all the careers I could aim for, all the things I could study, all the places I could live, all the people I could meet. I sometimes feel as if I am trying to punch my way out of my own skin to get somewhere bigger to contain me.

And then I spend an afternoon in love. The fight in me deflates, pleasantly, until there is enough room inside me for something more than striving. Too much room, perhaps. I often feel dumb and airy in the presence of too much affection. Nevertheless, I feel somehow home. There is simply inertia-- lovely inertia-- so sweet that it is likely dangerous to dwell in. I think that God might have invented being in love to take people out of their plans and outlines and into the bursting present. For there is nowhere else to go-- why leave joy?

Of course, one cannot support this kind of thing. The feelings fade and life cuts in. And then you want somewhere to go. But what I wonder is if the place we are all trying to go is just that lovely inertia, where we don't want to go anymore. I have a feeling that this is not a proper way to look at life, and that striving is a rewarding and essential part of the human experience. But perhaps many people do not feel the same way. Perhaps most people spend their days and their sweat in hopes of a day that they will not sweat, or want anything more than what they have. Perhaps all people want is to be in love forever.

How happy am I to belong to a faith based upon an eternal romance! However, it is not a faith based upon inertia. It moves forward forever. But I believe there is a place for moments of happy paralysis. It is there that we understand the incommunicable. Maybe life is supposed to be moments of paralysis-- happy, sad, angry, confused-- followed by action and choice. There is rest and motion.

Medieval people thought that God was unmoving at the center of the universe. The most real and complete thing in the world didn't need to be moving toward anything. But I believe that God moves toward us to bring us to rest. There is a place for both.