Four Children on a Subway

In Manila, she handed it
to me wordlessly, and
I blushed:

a little hand-held fan
to preserve my image—
to make space for me,

Me. All of twenty-five and
invited to speak about what runs
deep, underground, half-found.

I bought one in turn: huge,
lilac, with tan fronds.
I wanted to make space too.

And I did. In Tito’s bunker-turned-arthouse;
a grounded airplane with a broken AC;
the New York subway.

When it snapped, I cried over
the splinters, buried in a drawer
in a home no longer mine.

I found the next one in Barcelona.
Cheap, neon green, a Cubist print
full of sideways faces.

Six months later—yesterday. Back
in New York, finally unrestricted,
I got back on the subway

and after more than a year
of six feet of space, I had none.
Feeling myself bleed into the crowd I

planted my feet and stood,
fan clasped in hand as a little
talisman, in the middle of the car.

I meant only to stand and stake
a space, but soon I felt them:
three sets of little eyes, watching.

None, I think, were older than three:
two little Hispanic children on one side
and on the other, a little black girl,

staring without reservation at me
and the fan I was waving, unthinking.
Tiny Jamila, fearless, complained aloud

of the heat to her mother and I got the memo:
I fanned her too, and in exchange she told me
her favorite toy: her Barbie. Square deal.

Too shy to speak, the brother and sister
talked in whispers and twinkling eyes when
I fanned them too, their mother watching fondly.

Later, I watched another, drowsing
into her mother’s side: cornrows with beads,
wide-leg jeans, soft blue-furred sandals on dainty crossed feet.

Little pilgrims, little loves,
you embody what we grown ones
both long for and are afraid of:

You grant us the tremendous courtesy
of space. In your eyes we lengthen
and expand, stand tall and alive–

something most of us forgot how to
extend to others; we lost it
in the fear of passing disease, or

in protecting our inner lives.
It is an art, maybe, that most of us
are no longer big enough for,

But you, paradoxically.
You see with sharper eyes. With
deeper; you see enough.

Though mine have seen more, you
humble me, little pilgrims. May
there always be those to see you

along your way and grant you space:
to fan your golden flames
into a bright and

unquenchable light.

(Summer 2021)

James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

James Cone asks a powerful and convicting question in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree: How can we miss the deep and profound parallels between the cross and the lynching tree? Racial violence in America, he argues, will continue to exist until we reckon, as a church and a nation, with this deep connection. Cone, one of the main founders of black liberation theology, had to wrestle with an identity that was simultaneously black and Christian growing up during the Civil Rights era in the South and spent his life working out a theology that was accordingly both black and Christian.

In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he fleshes out the parallel. There are a few things to keep in consideration while assessing this book. First: it’s not a theological treatise or devotional. He takes a tone far closer to that of an academic (which he was, and a heavyweight one at that) than a spiritual authority or Christian believer or sociocultural critic, though he makes points that are relevant to all these positions. So his claims are not meant to be taken as dogmatic statements but rather as thought-provoking ideas that readers should bring an open mind to (meaning, don’t read this like you would, say, Charles Spurgeon.) As such, I wouldn’t extrapolate all Cone’s personal beliefs solely out of this book (I wouldn’t dare, having only read this one.) There were certain theological statements that didn’t seem to match up to Scripture for me, but this book isn’t the place to interrogate him on those statements; that would be missing the point.

And yet, it would also be wrong to think of it strictly as an intellectual exercise. His intended audience is American believers, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be addressed as such. Given the deep historical link between American government and Christianity, I’ve been trying to work out an idea that American believers, especially when addressed as such, are doubly responsible as American citizens and Christian believers simultaneously, and are responsible to be fully alert to the responsibilities of both. It means we are accountable to God and to one another as Christians and as citizens called to the highest standards/witness in each.

That said, that elicits a question I’ve been struggling to articulate about Scripture and its applicability. Ken Wytsma touched on it in the last book I read too. I think that we focus on the central message of Scripture (the message of forgiveness and salvation) to the exclusion of practically everything else, except maybe for a few pet issues. It’s like – reading Hamlet over and over again, and feeling no need to read the rest of Shakespeare’s body of work. Or maybe more strongly: that Hamlet is all you need to know to qualify you to speak on Shakespeare (and Measure for Measure is apocryphal.) Does that make my point, or is it too obscure? This makes it easy to dismiss things like social justice issues out of hand as being unrelated to matters of faith (and explains, I think, why some of us get so up in arms about the idea that it is.) Personally, I think that’s the answer to Cone’s question.

Cone, I expect, is controversial because he doesn’t let us get away with it.  By framing the book the way he does, he inseparably links responsibility in faith and citizenship and forces us to think through the repercussions of the Cross through black American history. That’s what makes the book so powerful – and made this white girl cringe more than once.

Cone sets up an interesting dialectic between black and white Christianity, showing how the Cross’ paradoxical inversion of the world’s value system (where the weak are the strong, and where redemption is achieved through brokenness) was an unbreakable affirmation of the value of black life. Jesus’ suffering redeemed the world, providing an unshakeable source of hope that black suffering then also had some role to play. Jesus had solidarity with them in their suffering, and his resurrection gives black lives meaning beyond history. The actions of white Christians against them, to the point of legal murder, bespoke a false, unbiblical Christianity that sought out power at any cost rather than emulate Jesus’ sacrifice of it.

Cone spends some time reflecting on Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the preeminent white theologians of the time and someone whose theology, on the whole, Cone appreciated very much. Nevertheless, he elucidates Niebuhr’s less than stellar track record on race with a degree of clarity and grace that I (this wasn’t the point, but hey, I’m trying to learn to do this in grad school myself) was really convicted by. Against it, he juxtaposes the story of Martin Luther King, and the sacrifices he made living out his calling. He brings out King’s deep cross-centeredness and his hope of the value of sacrificial suffering for his people.

Writing about the black artists who celebrated and elaborated on Christ’s deep kinship with the suffering black people, Cone brings up the idea of a religious imagination (and in fact Makoto Fujimura in yesterday’s Trinity Forum was just speaking about the necessity for the same. For believers, a religious imagination is the necessary counterpoint to rationalism.) Intriguingly, it was the artists, not the religious leaders, who established the parallels of Christ and his suffering to the black people: Countee Cullen, W.E.B. DuBois, Robert Hayden, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and others. It was convicting to see this rich understanding of Jesus codified into their poetry – and devastating to see white believers dismiss it offhand.

Cone takes the same tactic with what he calls “the womanist challenge.” Giving due respect to black women, Cone takes us through accounts of the faith of black women amidst the burdens they bear – watching sons and husbands get emasculated and lynched and doing their best to hold families together, wrestling with profound faith amid profound doubt and anguish simultaneously, and stepping up to advocate for black rights politically and intellectually. Ida B. Wells, Billie Holliday, Fannie Lou Hamer–all these women were titans.

He ends with discussing Delores Williams, a womanist black theologian who asserts something I can’t in good conscience agree with, but still find much value in thinking about. She doesn’t think Jesus accomplishes salvation by dying in our place, but shows us redemption through a ministerial vision of righting relationships (149) – which I take to mean, giving the poor back their dignity. Similar to what he did with Niebuhr, Cone grants the notion a thorough consideration, writing that he finds “…nothing redemptive about suffering in itself. The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat…as revealed in the biblical and black proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection” (150). However, he also pulls back a bit, saying that he more closely agrees with more cross-centered theology.

While I don’t think that idea holds biblically, I think the value in granting serious consideration to it is this: if God really is omnipotent, then yes, he could have chosen to work redemption another way. Why didn’t he? What does that mean for his followers? For black Christians, whose lives have historically been marked by suffering? We don’t have to adopt it, but seriously wrestling with its implications can be a way of God extending grace to us and causing us to really reckon with what we believe and why.

I particularly appreciated the conclusion of the book, which sounds more like a believer grappling with the Word of God. He writes, “The Christian gospel…is a transcendent reality that lifts our spirits to a world far removed from the suffering of this one,” and a paragraph later, “And yet the Christian gospel…is also an immanent reality–a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst” (155). Each, he argues, needs the other to keep it in balance. To see the redemption in the cross requires both that powerful religious imagination as well as “the imagination to relate the message of the cross to one’s own social reality, to see that ‘They are crucifying again the Son of God’ (Heb. 6:6).

“The cross needs the lynching tree to remind Americans of the reality of suffering–to keep the cross from becoming a symbol of abstract sentimental piety…Yet the lynching tree also needs the cross, without which it becomes simply an abomination” (161).

Disagree, if you wish, with Cone’s theology – I did in places. But grant him no less serious a consideration because of that. What he calls out we need to be accountable to, not just as believers but also as American citizens.

 

“Atlantis,” by W.H. Auden

Being set on the idea
Of getting to Atlantis,
You have discovered of course
Only the Ship of Fools is
Making the voyage this year,
As gales of abnormal force
Are predicted, and that you
Must therefore be ready to
Behave absurdly enough
To pass for one of The Boys,
At least appearing to love
Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.

Should storms, as may well happen,
Drive you to anchor a week
In some old harbour-city
Of Ionia, then speak
With her witty sholars, men
Who have proved there cannot be
Such a place as Atlantis:
Learn their logic, but notice
How its subtlety betrays
Their enormous simple grief;
Thus they shall teach you the ways
To doubt that you may believe.

If, later, you run aground
Among the headlands of Thrace,
Where with torches all night long
A naked barbaric race
Leaps frenziedly to the sound
Of conch and dissonant gong:
On that stony savage shore
Strip off your clothes and dance, for
Unless you are capable
Of forgetting completely
About Atlantis, you will
Never finish your journey.

Again, should you come to gay
Carthage or Corinth, take part
In their endless gaiety;
And if in some bar a tart,
As she strokes your hair, should say
“This is Atlantis, dearie,”
Listen with attentiveness
To her life-story: unless
You become acquainted now
With each refuge that tries to
Counterfeit Atlantis, how
Will you recognise the true?

Assuming you beach at last
Near Atlantis, and begin
That terrible trek inland
Through squalid woods and frozen
Thundras where all are soon lost;
If, forsaken then, you stand,
Dismissal everywhere,
Stone and now, silence and air,
O remember the great dead
And honour the fate you are,
Travelling and tormented,
Dialectic and bizarre.

Stagger onward rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps
Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse
With all Atlantis shining
Below you yet you cannot
Descend, you should still be proud
Even to have been allowed
Just to peep at Atlantis
In a poetic vision:
Give thanks and lie down in peace,
Having seen your salvation.

All the little household gods
Have started crying, but say
Good-bye now, and put to sea.
Farewell, my dear, farewell: may
Hermes, master of the roads,
And the four dwarf Kabiri,
Protect and serve you always;
And may the Ancient of Days
Provide for all you must do
His invisible guidance,
Lifting up, dear, upon you
The light of His countenance.

How to Travel Well

Somehow people are more beautiful when they’re removed from you in some way: a different language; a different shape. Make sure you really see them. Don’t be blind to the marvel of the person in front of you. Be he the toothless, chatty guy on the bus or the girl too shy to speak but beaming a megawatt smile, see them. Look him or her in the eye and smile. You’re a miracle. Jesus died for you. You’re beautiful.

Be flexible. Be ready to change plans at a moment’s notice–expect plans to change at a moment’s notice. Don’t resent it when they do. It makes life so much easier and more pleasant.

Be still. In front of difference, be still. This is related to #1. God speaks through stillness. He will teach you how to appreciate the world around you; to be just the right amount of “whelmed” at the whatness of it all. He will teach you how to care for it; how to give it your heart, and how to see him in it.

Be present. Recognize that you aren’t at home any more, and that people do things differently here. Sometimes, really really differently. Learn how to appreciate life the way the citizens do, and you just might learn how to value your own culture and country in a different light.

Appreciate solitude. For the first time in my life, this time around in China I realized that being an extrovert isn’t always easy, after hearing about an acquaintance be absolutely miserable abroad because she didn’t have anybody to talk in English with.  In solitude and silence, you can actually process your experiences. You can, like daffodils, pull them out and look at them, touch them, nudge them apart, taste them all over again.

 Understand that people want to eat good food. Don’t be afraid. It’s fun – and you might get pleasantly surprised! On that note – go to grocery stores! I love grocery stores. I went to one earlier tonight: a 3-story labyrinth of a Carrefour in Beijing – a riot of colors, sounds, smells, sights, and people. Grocery stores tell you so much about the people of a city.

Expect that getting from A to B will take longer than anticipated. Enjoy it. If you get lost, find yourself. Look around! Nothing will increase your confidence like knowing that you can take care of yourself. Explore. Landmarks, history, culture – they’ll wait long enough for you to get there. Don’t be stupid – but don’t be afraid.

Let go of the needs for personal space. There is something – remarkable – in the bonhomie of piling into an elevator, 15 people neck and neck, pillowing up against down coats and getting fluff from hoods in your face, for example. You may not understand one another, but you come intractably face to face with one of the most incredible truths of the universe: we are all made in God’s image, and the things that make us alike far outweigh the things that make us different. (The things that make us different, though, say far lovelier things about our Creator.)

Let go of the need to be understood in your own language. This is hard, but this is crucial to communication – more even, I think, than online translators. I hate online translators – usually they just lead to stressing people out. Just smile, say yes to whatever is asked of you, and roll with the punches.  I had one of my favorite encounters a couple weeks ago when I bought some apples at the grocery store. I took them up to get weighed and the cashier spoke at me in Chinese. I spoke back in English, both of us laughing at not being able to understand one another. As we left, my friend whispered to me, “He just said you are more beautiful than the other girls!”

Expect beauty. It’s everywhere. It’s in the faces that bashfully replace English with smiles that spill over with welcome. It’s in the tentative touch of a new acquaintance’s hand taking your arm, wanting both to look after you and to include you with the girls. It’s in the thoughtful quiet on your friends’/colleagues’/translators’ faces as they listen to what you are saying, understand it, and put together a response. It’s in the crisp lines of the security guard’s uniform as he stands to attention bundled up in the cold. It’s in the faces of the little kiddos bundled up like marshmallows in the cold as they waddle, giggling, next to their equally well wrapped parents. It’s in the careful rules that dictate good food. It’s in the absolutely mind-boggling generosity that makes it hard to shut your luggage for the trip back. It’s everywhere.

“I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Psalm 27:13

China: Kaiyuan, Craby, and CC

I’ve traveled enough and met enough people from different countries to know not to set too much stock by American ethnic stereotypes; even when the stereotypes aren’t unkind, they are usually smaller than the real thing. China was no exception. Sure, some of the stereotypes are accurate to an extent: Chinese people are reserved (at first, and even when they get comfortable it’s not as loud and chaotic as American comfort can be.) for example. The differences between the cultures of the East and the West are real and endlessly fascinating; they were particularly noticeable to me as a teacher.

But the people of China are just lovely. We don’t do generosity and hospitality the same way they do, and the nature of their kindness is just different from ours. Steadier and quieter, somehow. There was a core group of three postgrads who constantly moved me by the depth of their kindness, humility, and affection: Kaiyuan and his girlfriend CC, and Craby (who also has a darling girlfriend who was absolutely swamped with her nursing school program).

I met Craby first. We were connected through one of my students, and he messaged me to ask if we could meet to practice his English. I admit, the first time I met this good-natured and smiling man I had no idea what a dear friend he would become to me. He later brought Kaiyuan to a class I was teaching, and Kaiyuan later introduced me to CC. I then introduced them to Anna (the only other woman foreign English teacher and a wonderful sister in the Lord) and her boyfriend Godfrey, and together we did a lot! I have probably thousands of pictures on FB documenting nearly every moment.

What follows are some of my favorite memories of our times together.

_______________

Kaiyuan, CC, and Craby take me to a Chinese barbeque restaurant at the mall. Afterwards, Craby buys me a mango drink and then the three of them corner me.

Kaiyuan: Mary, can I ask you a private question? Maybe you will not want to answer.

Me (expecting a question about any boyfriends I have, or salary): Sure, I trust you guys. What’s up?

Kaiyuan: Does Anna have a boyfriend?

Me (amused, but uncertain if it’s my place to say): … Ye-es. Why do you ask?

 Excited gasps.

 Kaiyuan: Is it Geff? (pronounced phonetically: G as in grand!)

Me: How do you know??

Craby: Because we saw Anna driving his e-bike very fast, and he was sitting behind her like this! (Mimes Geff with his arms wrapped around Anna’s back and his face down)

Me, giggling, caught: yes, he is!

More laughter and excitement. After more discussion:

Kaiyuan: but Mary, we think Anna has betrayed you!

Me, confused: betrayed me?

Kaiyuan: yes, because you used to go together to places all the time, and now they go together!

Me: wait, but that’s not a betrayal – I like Godfrey and Anna together, he is very nice—

Craby: Don’t worry, we will take care of you now.

Me, suppressing laughter: Awww you guys! Thank you!!

_______________

Kaiyuan and CC, Craby, Anna and Godfrey and I hung out a lot in the weeks before I left. Anna and I both had everyone over on separate occasions and made American food (enchiladas, salsa, banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, frittatas, and more) for them and played games. Godfrey, an excellent cook, also made delicious Filipino foods: lechon, a purple pudding that was both lovely and delicious, and some other foods whose name I forget.

CC: Mary, before we met you and Anna, I thought Americans only ate pizza and hamburgers!

When we were at Anna’s house, we played a game where everyone started out a handful of paper. For the first round, everyone writes an idea down on their paper (like, say, let’s go fly a kite!). Then, for the second round, you hand your stack of paper over to the next person. They will read what you wrote, and then draw it on the fresh sheet behind it. You keep alternating until your original stack comes back to you, and you get to see where your original idea went.

We played several rounds, and quickly descended into hilarity: giggles at failed sketching attempts, apologies to those who were going to receive our failed attempts, tongues stuck out in concentration, and adorable CC, falling over into me with laughter at the results. She would alternate uncontrollable laughter with practicing her English pronunciation with me: frittata! Rhinoceros! (we’d gone to the Beijing zoo not long before). Hippopotamus!

____________________________________

Baiyangdian was another special memory with the gang. It’s a lotus lake in the wetlands, and it is breathtaking, one of my favorite places in China. Here are some pictures.

The tour we took included transportation to the lake plus boat transportation to two islands: one that featured dozens of kinds of lotuses and one that was a sort of amusement park.

The second one was a bit bizarre. It had a theatrical performance that we were told was about Chinese and Japanese battles in World War II. We sat down in the amphitheater for what turned out to be a bizarre variety show featuring fireworks, gun shots, jokes and laughter, people dancing on one end of the stage and dying on the other. We couldn’t stomach being jerked from one extreme to the other, struck by the inappropriateness of it all. Anna later said, “It felt like whiplash!”

So we had time to kill before the show ended and our tour guide was ready to take us back. We ended up standing outside by the gate and teaching Kaiyuan, CC, and Craby the Chicken Dance and the Macarena.

We felt quite proud about bringing American culture to China 😛

On our way back on the boat we played musical chairs. Not on purpose – we just didn’t want Anna to turn any redder from the sun, and because the guys were all gentlemen. Then, this happened: 

One of the most impressive things I saw in China was actually thanks to Craby on our way back from Baiyangdian. We had gotten back into our tour bus and sat down together, but the tour guides (who were a couple of girls still in college) had permitted tourists who had not originally come with us to return on our bus, and these new girls kicked up a gigantic fuss about not sitting together – to the point of stopping the bus, yelling, glaring, and making a bus-full of around 40 people uncomfortable. We foreigners had no clue what was going on, but Craby (who is Chinese) stood up, spoke to both the tour guides and the girls in an effort to resolve things and calm things down. Eventually, they did and we were able to continue back, but poor Craby gave up his seat and ended up being the sole person reduced to standing up for the approximately two hours back. He did it without complaining and went out of his way to make excuses for the girls with the gentlest, sweetest demeanor ever. That is the type of person I would like to be.

After we got back from Baiyangdian, we ate dinner together at a bbq place. One of the things we ordered was grilled enoki mushrooms (they are the small stringy mushrooms that grow together in a bunch.)

Kaiyuan, deadpan: You know, in Chinese, the name translates to “see you tomorrow.”

Me: What? Why?

Kaiyuan, mildly embarrassed: Well, because you see them again the next day.

Me: I don’t get it.

Kaiyuan: in the toilet! They’re indigestible!

I am usually pretty good about keeping it together with language differences, but I laughed until I cried, and giggled the rest of the night. I hadn’t come across any sort of humor like that in China, and hadn’t expected to: they are so polite and unflappable, and this completely broke my paradigm.

Then, Godfrey pipes up: It’s the same in the Philippines (he’s Filipino.) We call it, “I’ll be back.” You know what Macarthur said when he left the Philippines, right? “I’ll be back?”

Me, giggling: So does that say something about what people think of him?

Godfrey, good humor glinting in his eyes: Weeeeeelll……

____________________________________

Before I left, I wanted to figure out some way of expressing my thanks to Kaiyuan and Craby for the countless ways in which they had helped me and made my time in China so pleasant. Besides cooking “American” food for them, I settled on giving them Bibles. I took the time to write each of them letters outlining Scriptures and to put in sticky notes at key and favorite Scriptures.

And they had expressed interest in the Bible in one of our earliest times together – Kaiyuan asking me about the Bible, telling me he had bought one online, asking me what it’s all about, Craby listening attentively and commenting now and again. Later, Kaiyuan showed me his “Bible:” a beautiful DQ illustrated coffee table book with historical and archaeological background to the Bible.

Once I gave it to them and explained, Craby said, in his dear and accented way: Wow! I will save this letter to read later because if I read it now, I am afraid I will not be able to contain my emotions!

(I nearly cried then.)

Later, when I left China, he came to see me off a little earlier than everyone else, a little shy. “Mary,” he said. “I wrote a letter for you that I want to hide in your luggage for you to read later!”

It turned out to be a lovely, warm-hearted letter that I will cherish as a symbol of friendship for the rest of my life.

___________________________________

Oliver is Anna’s cat. She rescued him her first year as an itty bitty kitten. Now, he is a fat and feisty orange furball who is just as happy to bite you as to cuddle with you (and if he wants to cuddle and you don’t, he’ll bite you.) CC and Kaiyuan adore him, coming regularly to visit him and bring him “pudding.” Anna and I were relieved to discover that cat pudding is individual sealed plastic cups full of cat food.

Oliver usually can be found lounging around outside the Teachers’ Flat.

CC: Mary, Mary! Did you know Oliver has a girlfriend?

I got the news not long after a new teensy orange kitten appeared on the scene. He frolicked with Oliver every chance he got. CC, noticing how Oliver allowed the kitten to roughhouse with him, christened him Little Oliver. (They chortled to discover that Oliver had had a special “surgery” that made it highly unlikely Little Oliver was actually his progeny.)

Me: Oh really? No, I haven’t noticed any new cats?

CC points out a pregnant calico cat lurking in the distance. “Do you know what her name is?”

Me: No, what?

CC: Jimmy!

Oliver, little Oliver, and Jimmy. What a family.

 

Dear Academia

We read Robert Creeley’s “The Rain” in poetry class I taught last semester. I can’t remember if we got around to discussing it, but I do remember the way the sense of it would begin to coalesce, and then fade away untranslated. It was a group effort to put meaning together. But it popped up in yesterday’s “Poem of the Day,” and when I opened it today it came with startling clarity, and now I’m kind of unsettled and not ready to give in to sleep yet, even though it’s nearing midnight.

All night the sound had

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

That is it, isn’t it. The nagging patter tugging ceaselessly at my lungs, itching up my throat sometimes: last year unresolved, making me feel weighted down and restless, like the sudden rain squalls in Virginia used to.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,

insisted upon

so often? Is it

Yes, I did that. I’m really wary of being ungrateful, but more often than not it was me against all of you. Was that right? I’m not entirely sure. I didn’t mean for it to be like that, but you pull in different directions and don’t believe in the ground beneath your feet, and me – me I am too aware of the roots that pull down and the limbs that reach out heavenward in supplication.

But I tried. Didn’t I? I tried. You told me that faith is childish, and I looked – I did, I swear I did – but I couldn’t find anything worthy of replacing human sorrow and divine grace. What am I to myself is a sinner, but also I am beloved – he ate with Zaccheus, after all, and he forgave Peter. I insist on that. I insist on atonement, and nothing less. I need it for being. Nothing less will do.

that never the ease,

even the hardness,

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

I know that the answer is yes. Creeley did too; the question isn’t a question. Did I not know before? No. Something of naivete is gone now, and I rue the cynicism that edges in, too sharp sometimes and needing reprimand, needing – sacrifice.

No, I don’t rue it, though these contradictions exceed me. Or at least, I don’t rue the sacrifice. I knew I don’t belong, and now I feel it too. This final uneasiness. Let it rattle my convictions. In daring to insist on atonement, I’m claiming real reality.

Love, if you love me,

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

My idea of it isn’t real enough to lie next to me. The “real” is no better – there are heart sore and heart hungry among you, but you are proudest of your children who are content with small worlds. It isn’t fair of me to call you fatuous, but tired yes and intentionally indifferent yes.

You do carry yourselves with that elusive well-educated air. It’s attractive, I grant. Sophisticated – the maddening kind, like Fitzgerald without his hidden grief. Daisy-like. Maybe I’m not being fair. But being wet with a decent happiness is alien; it’s too gauche.

I’m sorry. You’re okay, but you’re not okay too. You could be more, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe I have to learn to sacrifice my ideal for the really real. Other echoes inhabit the garden.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Eliot, not Creeley.

I wish I could take you with me. I wish I could pull the whole edifice of it all along with me. I wish you could feel the ground solid beneath you, and that it could give you a decent happiness. A giddy happiness, even, sometimes.

But that’s not my role. He came down for that, and you have to see him on your own.

In the waiting, then, Lord, here I am.

The Philippines

When Pastor Leo invited me to speak in the Philippines, I felt really honored. If it worked out that I could visit during the winter school break in China, I figured I would probably speak once or twice, go to some church functions, do some sightseeing, and that would be about it.

Well, I spoke seven times, was overwhelmed by how deeply the church and the students welcomed me in, and had a truly “culinary” tour of the Philippines!

Lord, I wish I could describe how excited I was to get Pastor Leo’s emails suggesting topics for my lectures. He offered these: the value of reading good books, the spirituality of reading (in 2 parts), and words of delight – with a lecture on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in honor of February, and a devotional I did on Psalm 84, one of my very favorites.

To be honest, I completely underestimated how long it would take me to write each of the lectures. For my classes in China, it takes me about half a day to pull a 2-hour class together. However, my China classes usually center around a basic topic or informational video, with games and discussions thrown in. I don’t really lecture. Each lecture for the Philippines, on my calculations, had to be around 6700 words, and I’m still far too much a novice teacher to feel confident in my ability to talk for 45 minutes based on an outline. So yeah, I completely scripted each lecture. Each one took me hours, because they weren’t about “pre-set” topics like, say, the powerpoint on American politics I just spent the afternoon putting together.

Writing out these lectures was an enormous task. These topics are topics I adore and have been exploring and building up as major pillars of the way I look at the world since I started to read. But this was the first time I had to move it all from its nebulous place in my mind onto paper – I had to give it a heart, and a soul, and a body. I had to articulate what turned out to be my personal theology of reading.

As a side note, I was kind of surprised by how much all this stuff is linked to Scripture for me. I understand now why James says “let not many of you be teachers.” It’s easy to tell students to use quotations as evidence to back up your claims, but it’s different with Scripture. We are in submission to, or implicated by Scripture, which means that we have to tread very carefully when using Scripture as a teacher. Nevertheless, it startled me to see how thoroughly Scripture has taken over my philosophy of literature and learning, like those broken Japanese vases that are repaired with gold.

All that, and I didn’t start until almost three weeks before my trip to really start writing. Basically, I spent probably around 6-10 hours daily all that time writing. Now, I’m neither a fast writer nor a creative one, so I wasn’t able to complete all my lectures before I left, and ended up finishing the last one while in the Philippines.

Finally the day rolled around to fly out to the Philippines and the flying experience was awful, but frankly, I don’t want to be rereading this in ten years and relive all that nonsense so I’ll just leave that part out 😉

I got a grand welcome when I finally arrived at the Philippines. The Galanzas are very dear family friends, but the way things panned out, I was always at school or abroad when they came and stayed at my parents’ home in California. Because this last year my visa to China was so delayed, we overlapped and I was finally able to see for myself why my parents refuse to let them stay with anyone else when they’re in California and why even my resolutely solitary younger sister gets a sparkle in her eye when she talks about them. We don’t even call them “Pastor Leo” and “Hannah” anymore – they are Kuya Leo and Ate Hannah, which is Tagalog for big brother and big sister.

They remind me in a lot of ways of the family I stayed with when I was in England a couple years ago – significantly, also a pastor and his wife, moved and motivated by the love of the Lord. The pastor takes care of all the people stuff, and his wife is his rock and the paragon working behind the scenes. He is a scholar as well as a pastor, and she is all elegance and grace. They can talk about tricky issues with tact but know how and when to laugh and not take things too seriously. They are both kind and warm and crazy generous – and their kids mirror all their best qualities. They really took me into their family and made me feel like another daughter to them.

Also Kuya Leo has a personal library that makes me drool. Thousands of neatly stacked books on theology, philosophy, history, and more have pretty much taken over the whole house.

My stay got off to a running start. By the time my flight, which had been delayed, came in  and we made it back to the house and to sleep it was nearly 2AM Sunday morning. We had to be downtown early in the morning for church, and I would be giving my first lecture, on the value of reading good books, later that afternoon.

I was looking forward to church. I don’t have a church in China, but I have been missing more than consistent preaching. I’ve been missing being part of a community specifically in service to Christ. In China I’m either the subject of stares and curiosity, or I’m left entirely alone. In either case, I’m a sovereign nation, so to speak. Or the Harvard grad.

It was good, in the deepest sense, to be able to sit next to Ate Hannah and be included in the worship and the preaching. Mt. Holy Church is deliciously inclusive, but I don’t mean that in the politicized sense. It was more like a day-long family get-together, with everyone extending the warmest attention to Pastor Leo and Elder Wilbur, who in turn made sure to give everyone space at the table, so to speak. All of us made one through the love of the Lord. I loved hearing the preaching too. Everyone talks, at least seemingly naturally, half in Tagalog, half in English, and it was just enough for me to get the big ideas and to be able to pay attention to the speakers themselves.

I love it when the love of the Lord animates people; it’s unmistakable because of how full-hearted and sincere it is. It means we wear our hearts on our sleeves when God is the topic of conversation, and I think there are few things more precious and beautiful than that. It meant the world to me to be able to see that again before going up and revealing my heart to a hundred people who were all strangers.

Lord, there was actually a lot to sort through emotionally and mentally before going up there. I knew what I had to say was solid, so I wasn’t nervous on that account. I was and am convinced that what I had to say was something that God has given to me specifically -but while the content was good, I had my doubts on my execution.

I am weirdly aware of my being only 25. I don’t think I’m lacking in self-confidence, but in all honesty, how much credibility would you give a 25 year old lecturer? Perhaps I’ve done more than some 25-year-olds, but I’d still take what I say with a grain of salt. Not to mention, most of the people I spoke to in the Philippines would be about my age. I expect, too, that the ideas I talked about are still pretty germinal. I fully expect that these are things that I’ll be exploring and unpacking for the rest of my life, and I’m really excited about that. But at the time I was putting them on paper, I was praying that God would give me the right words so that I could express just how deeply these ideas informed my way of looking at the world and how lovely and precious they have been to me as a part of my identity.

To express something so deeply rooted in my heart, though, it was necessary to make it absolutely clear that I wasn’t speaking as a Harvard graduate. I have said this before, but I still resent how thoroughly Harvard has taken over my reputation. In fact, honestly, I’m actually angry about it. Harvard has nothing to do with my identity; it is a thing I did, a blessing that God gave me, an impressive enough couple of words on my resume. But it doesn’t make me me; and to share what God has been building in my heart it was imperative to me that I didn’t stand on my reputation, but on the reality of what God has done in my life–a reality that I thoroughly shared with my brothers and sisters there.

I can’t describe the relief, the “hole that felt filled-ness” I experienced – like cracking your back, or taking a hot shower after a long and tiring day, or a headache dissipating with a ripple off the back of your neck; something eased, there in the Philippines.

They took me at my word.

I felt it, the way the atmosphere flexed and shifted without a sound. I never felt the slightest bit unwelcome, but just the usual response anyone would have to a stranger (never mind a baby-faced American with a Harvard degree!): reserved expectation, a bit of wariness. I told them that I didn’t want them to look at me and think Harvard; I wanted to stand before them only as a sister in the Lord and they took me at my word. And I felt it in my bones, and there was an attendant shift in my own apprehension. I moved onto solid ground; I forgot about being impressive, and felt the way the words I’d written still resounded through my bones – how I meant them with everything I’ve got. At the end, after a bit of initial shyness, I was rewarded with people showing me how what I said moved them, sometimes in spite of themselves, with questions, comments, and responses that, just a little bit, at the very back of things, were a little bit giddy. I recognize that giddiness – it’s a river of joy that spills out over its banks every now and again to cleanse your eyes and to reenchant you with the loveliness of the Risen One. I get it too.

It was such a treasure to sit at the edge of the pew, neck craned forward, watching the conversation continue, and to realize – Lord, you did what I asked. You took over, and people are coming into contact with you through what you taught to me.

More than three weeks later, and I’m still getting misty-eyed over it.

And that was just the first talk, of course. There were six more to go, and they all proceeded in much the same way, with students coming up shyly to me after I spoke to shake my hand and to tell me how they looked at reading differently now. Kuya Leo and his daughter Em had their students all write me feedback, which was an incredible benefit and luxury for this novice teacher. It moved me, how so many of them responded not merely to me, but to the Christ who had graced me with words that actually started to do what I had been hoping and praying for months beforehand that they would: point only to him, and have nothing to do with me (which, bless, they got down 100%. I kept expecting actionable concrete criticism on how to improve my lecturing skills, but they had picked up on my excitement and ran with it, and that is 100% what I want as a teacher, a reader, and a believer.)

One of the talks I did on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in honor of Valentine’s Day. I had never read it in its entirety before preparing for the lecture, and I admit it surprised me. I wasn’t expecting to be wowed, but that was stupid because it is Shakespeare, and you’d think I have learned by now that Shakespeare is usually quite impressive. The more that I studied the play, the more I found in it, and as it happened I ended up cutting out paragraphs of material even as I was up there speaking. I remember thinking at the end of it: Lord, thank you that you are you, I am me, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and I am not Shakespeare. It made me giggle – what a funny thing to be thankful for – but I love that luxuriant feeling of plenty I get when I teach literature written by others, particularly when I’m free to “take it home,” so to speak, and discuss it in relation to the Gospel. The talks that were my own were solid, sure, but I’m still at the very beginning of things. There’s still tons of development to do, even if I think the heart and the bones are mostly there.

That Shakespeare Sunday, the church had something else planned for me. I’ve already said this was a “culinary” trip – I’ve never been on a vacation where so many foods have been brought for my pleasure. Everything was delicious, and everyone’s constant surprise that I liked it cracked me up. “Here try this! You like it?”

“Yes, thanks! It’s good! What is it?”

“WOW, you liked it? Really? Wow, you are so brave!”

EVERY time! Finally I asked, “Do Americans not usually like Filipino food?”

“Oh no! It is too new to them, especially since there are so many new dishes. But not you – you are tough!”

Ahh. Well after having had lamb intestine sprung on me in England, I came to the realization that I can eat anything, and that people want to eat good food.

Now, truly, all the food in the Philippines was delicious, and everyone graced me with it in so many different ways; I’ve lost track of all the restaurants and homes people took me to and the wonderful dishes they made for me. But that Sunday, the church – especially the youth – took it upon themselves to ensure that I did not leave the Philippines without partaking of that particularly Filipino delicacy, balut.

Balut is boiled, fertilized duck egg.

I ate that.

There’s a video on my Facebook if you want proof. The commentary is amazing – one of the teenagers explained, to everyone’s roaring laughter, how to eat the balut (What do you call the yellow? The sunshine!) and you can hear someone say, “Don’t see, don’t see!” The running joke is that you eat balut in the dark, so you can’t see the chick.

Later Kuya Leo told me they had been keeping an eye on me afterward to make sure I was feeling ok after eating it.

(I was.)

And to be honest, it tastes just like an egg. If you don’t see it, you wouldn’t realize it’s any different from a regular hard boiled egg; it tastes pretty much the same.

They had brought other things for me to try too – and then after we went to dinner! Just another example of that unparalleled generosity!

It’s hard to keep track of all the foods I got to sample. Even at the Bible Institute, where we had lunch several times, people were telling me: Stay, stay! We get better food because of you!

I don’t know how much I buy that though – the food was always very delicious!

The day before I left, I got some going away presents, and I still smile when I see them on my bookshelf. We had lunch that day at the school, but before we ate everyone paid attention to Pastor Leo as he called me up to the front of the room. He presented me with a lovely plaque of appreciation from the school and a present later discovered to be a pretty lilac purse from the staff and faculty of the school. And after he had finished, the student body had a gift for me too – another pretty bag of traditional Filipino craftsmanship.

And later, we all took pictures together. What a precious memory of a precious time I will treasure all my life. It was such a privilege and blessing to spend time with you all and to rejoice with you in what God has done for us!

 

Comparing the Philippines with my experiences in China, Lebanon, and the US over the past couple years, I remember what my pastor in Boston said once about the “radical individuality” that characterizes Americans. After going to the Philippines, it strikes me that this concept of radical individuality makes every man a nation. We aren’t one nation, indivisible, heck, we aren’t even a global community or a diverse one. We’re each isolated little islands, and at best what we can do is support other nations’ concepts of sovereignty without ever actually setting foot on those islands, if I’m not torturing the analogy.

This really begins to get at what I felt at Harvard – I know I could depend on others to support my right to be a Christian, but when it comes to actually setting foot on my island very few people dared, ostensibly for reasons of “keeping the peace,” which is well and good until we come to the point where we realize that we don’t actually know each other at all in any real and meaningful sense.

And also like actual nations, there’s always a lot of skepticism about motives for doing things – we second guess one another, we twist each others’ words, we overanalyze them for the slightest hint of animosity. We’re suspicious – nastily suspicious of one another, and this, I have to admit, is true of me too.

While I do think a bit of skepticism is healthy, being in the Philippines showed me just how much this radical individuality has shaped me without my permission. The Filipino people were all extraordinarily generous – not just with stuff, though two weeks after leaving I’m still enjoying the gifts and snacks they showered me with, but with themselves. When I said anything, they took it at face value. They expected me to mean what I said, and they meant what they said. It took me a while to figure it out – it’s not that they are a simple people, because unfortunately today “simple” means stupid, and they most certainly are not that at all, and it’s more than “honest,” because today “honest” can carry connotations of bluntness or poverty (why?) and those aren’t necessarily true either.

Though it carries overtones of simplicity and honesty, I think the right word to describe the Filipinos is generous – in meaning what they say (and the things they say are also always generous), and extending you the courtesy of believing you mean what you say, that idea of individuals as sovereign nations dissipates. You hear a lot of talk of “family” in the Philippines, and from my very first day there that’s what they extended to me. In some ways, that is (or ought to be) true of any church, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I think that you’d be hard pressed to find it done more beautifully or more fully than I did in the Philippines. Now again, my experiences were very limited; I really shouldn’t generalize. But from what I saw, and comparing it to western “radical individuality,” I think Filipino people are really brave in the way they relate to people and ideas. It’s true “open borders,” and the warmth and generosity with which they extend their welcome is beautiful and God-glorifying.

And in the weeks since I closed out that last Word document and have left the community of the Philippines for the sovereignty of China I’ve been coming to realize what a grace it all was, not just because I was able to be a part of the community but also because of the work of writing out the lectures. More than once since then, I’ve run into echoes of the things that I labored to bring out in my lectures – echoes sounded by men and women of God who are my elders in the faith, and I’ve realized that it is just that all of us are fording further up and further in to the oceans of God’s goodness, and getting touched by the waves.

I listened to an old sermon from my pastor in Boston recently, and he called God’s walking with us grace, which electrified me because that’s exactly how I defined grace in one of my lectures – a selfless walking with. Only I had used it in reference to a professor of mine; I didn’t quite make the connection to that being what God does with us. I’d felt a little hesitant about the definition when I wrote it, but not any longer.

I read Peter Hessler’s River Town a couple weeks ago, about an Ivy League educated man who taught English literature in rural China. He isn’t a believer, but he captured and expressed some of the same discomforts and reservations about academia that I have – again, God telling me that my following Him and my youth don’t invalidate my judgments.

I read Ann Voskamp’s A Thousand Gifts after I got back, and was pleasantly shocked to find that what she said about living a life of gratitude is what I told the students in the Philippines is the secret to reading poetry – take all the time a poem needs to talk to you. See with alert and alive eyes the graces of the world around you, don’t hurry. Ann Voskamp showed me how to put two and two together.

It’s amazing to me to see how truly that “In Him we live and move and have our being,” and I love seeing how, without my even being conscious of it, the loveliest and most precious things and ideas I’m built upon–that we as sons and daughters of the living God are built upon–are all intrinsically designed to bring us further up and further in to the outrageous grace of knowing him.

Psalm 27:13

My favorite class at Harvard was actually one I took at the Divinity School. It was called “Holy Ordinary: Religious Dimensions in Modern and Contemporary Fiction,” and it was taught by Dr. Albert Raboteau, visiting Professor Emeritus from Princeton in religion and history.

His class was nothing less than a sanctuary for me – which sounds melodramatic; Harvard really doesn’t merit melodramatics, but it became clear to me very early on that Dr. Raboteau is–I don’t want to say just a firm Christian; I know lots of firm Christians who don’t inspire the same kind of affection and respect he does in me. He is very much at ease in discussing spiritual matters, and perhaps more importantly, he is crucially aware of just how present God is in the world.

When I think of him, the word that comes to mind is holy, the way the old church fathers were holy, I think. 

He is a frail, elderly gentleman with Einsteinian frizzy white hair. When he talks, I have to strain to hear – he speaks softly and gently. When any of us spoke, he listened just as intently. I always felt a little bit startled and on display when he turned his eyes onto me–always with the greatest of gentleness, but his gaze really made me want to say something worth hearing. I’m afraid I stretched it a bit at times, but I wanted him to know that Christ had knocked at my heart, too.

Every book we read was a gem. I’d read some of them before – O’Connor, Eliot, Hopkins, Robinson. But there were others that were new to me – Percy. Bernanos. Baldwin. We started out by reading William Trevor’s Death in Summer, the story of a man grieving the loss of his wife and trying to raise their baby girl.

[Spoiler alert] Encouraged by his mother in law, he decides to look for someone to care for the baby. One of the girls interviewed is mentally ill, though he doesn’t know it, after being abused while growing up in an orphanage. She becomes obsessed with the protagonist and his baby. In the end, she dies offscreen and is lovingly memorialized by a friend of hers in a deeply moving scene. [End spoiler alert].

One of my dearest and most vivid memories from Harvard is Dr. Raboteau’s eyes tearing up and his voice shaking when we discussed that final scene. I remember immediately going to God about it and hoping for that same kind of spirit, that welcomes even flawed and simple characters into the heart and joyfully grants them weight. It’s more than just loving a story; this is an Ivy League professor with years of experience and a life story that is full of real sorrow going to the level of a simple-minded, troubled child as an equal, and entering into her griefs just as completely – more so, even – than she has. The lived out Christlikeness of that still grips me.

Later in the semester, Dr. Raboteau arranged for our class to watch Nathaniel Dorsky’s 2002 silent film The Visitation. I still remember walking into the Carpenter Center feeling a little off-kilter–my philosophy of film/tv is perhaps a bit too shaped by Neil Postman, and I wasn’t sure how a film was meant to fit into the space our prior readings had crafted in my mind. Also, the film was silent, so I had suspicions that I tried to shove to the back of my mind that I would be bored. Of course, I was there early, and we were delayed a bit waiting for classmates to find the place and for the film to get set up, and somehow I ended up sitting next to Dr. Raboteau.

Looking back– I always knew that if I have the opportunity to spend time with someone I truly look up to, I’m not going to know what to talk about. I don’t know why I felt so obligated to make small talk then; I knew Dr. Raboteau was going to welcome silence as much as conversation, but I didn’t know how to stop talking. Finally, finally, the film began.

It took me a few minutes to wrest my attention away from dissecting the inanities I’d been offering. A deep breath, a quick prayer, and then a sinking into the film, like the sea being drawn into the sand.

I didn’t know a film could do what Dorsky’s did. Does. It’s hard to describe the content of the film, exactly. It’s a montage of short snippets of video; each snippet is more or less the equivalent of a still life. You can see a couple of the stills here. Some of them are recognizable scenes; others aren’t. There is no plot, either to the stills or the film as a whole, and no characters either. In fact, people only make a few appearances at all. And of course, it’s completely silent.

It sounds like it should be boring, and pretentiously arty, but it took my breath away. To say that it reflected the beauty and love with which God created the world is as close as I can come to saying why it affected me the way it did, but that still cheapens it somehow. It did more than that–I think it takes the viewer into the mind of a stranger, so the viewer can literally see the world through the eyes of another, and that’s — sacred. And intimate, and made more so by the silence and the grace of the film. Even the lengths of video used startled me; long enough to defamiliarize the familiar, and by doing so, to show the many ways God makes himself known to us.

I was profoundly grateful for the few minutes of silence that followed after the film was finished. I felt like crying, and I wasn’t even sure why. All of us were floored by what we had watched, and I think we all felt a little exposed around each other. Class afterward felt stilted and a little awkward (I had too much words before, and none after!), but that silence was good. The quality of it–it wasn’t a “calm before the storm” quiet, or a deathly quiet, or a bored quiet; it was the sort of quiet that to me feels like bedrock, that’s tied to deep-seated contentment. I love that sort of quiet, but I pretty much only feel it when I’m alone (which is mostly why I’m so jealous of my solitude!)  To experience it with people around was overwhelming, but that’s on me, not on any of my classmates.

I remember being really quiet and really content the rest of the day. I remember walking home late that night, and finding my Massachusetts street, populated with trees and charming old houses, covered in fog that glowed orange-y gray from the streetlights, and finding it breathtaking too, as though it belonged too in the Dorsky film.

Structure

I still don’t know how to answer when people ask me, “How was Harvard?” So what follows will my attempt at working it out. Bear with me.

I think I have to start with structuralism. We’re big on structuralism at Harvard, and frankly, it provides a lot of insight into the racism wreaking havoc in our country, particularly its schools and universities. Entire systems have been built up with the intent of improving the lot of certain groups, and implicit within that is the denigration of other groups–not always actively or consciously done by the groups in power, but that doesn’t excuse the crime. The work now being done to unravel those structures and provide an equitable playing field is not always done sensitively or well (which of itself provides insight into the contemporary mindset–what it’s trying to achieve, what it’s trying to atone for. Not that I necessarily know how to do it better though!) but it is work that needs to be done, and work that implicates Christians.

Structuralism – I think – also applies to one’s actual structures of thought–the epistemological processes, rooted in our experiences and identities, by which we make sense of the world.

It started with my Philosophy of Education class, taught by a scrappy, razor-sharp New Englander. Throughout the semester we always (ALWAYS!) came back to the concept that we are getting closer and closer to truth through convergences of thought, and though we probably can’t ever get to absolute truth we can trust the process of asking questions (or learning) to keep us on the right path.

Thing is, she took that concept as a first-order principle. To question it would be like questioning that you breath oxygen. It in itself is just not a thing you question.

So if you come from a perspective where it isn’t a first-order principle you get into what I’m calling language issues.

I don’t have it all sorted out, but basically, my hang-up with the idea is what I’m calling directionality. I can back the convergence of truth idea, but how do you know which way is up and which way is down? How can we know we’re on the right path? How can we know if we are ever wrong?

My professor was always a bit biting, but she answered with admirable honesty that those are questions without answers – at least for now. Religion – where I found my answers – was fine for those who were into it, but she personally saw it as a sort of cop out (I’m extrapolating here; she didn’t actually say that.)

After I finally understood that (poor woman. We both irritated each other, I think), I began seeing that same sort of uneasy boundary between the realms of religion and knowledge everywhere. Basically, I realized I could depend on any one there to defend my rights of religion and freedom of speech – but that generosity would not extend to actual engagement with the stuff of my beliefs.

It is really important to me to stress that everyone I met at Harvard was wonderfully kind and intelligent. I never felt any friction over my faith. But as my friend Alex put it, “it’s in the air.”

He’s right, and I think the reason for that is has to do with the ways in which we understand reality.

It is hard for me to embody the immensity of how my faith moves my learning, but on some level I’ve come to realize that I need to stop shoving it into the little boxes of human rationality. Faith is not a product of human understanding. If the Bible doesn’t apologize for being Divine –if in fact the entire Gospel is built upon Divine Wisdom, and not human–then I have no business apologizing for it either (1 Corinthians 1:18). In the words of the formidable Marilynne Robinson, “…there is no justification for applying the test of common sense to what the religious must assume are reality’s deeper structures, the orders and affinities that make human wisdom in its larger sense efficacious, beautiful, vital, and full of satisfactions” (“Proofs,” from The Givenness of Things, p. 156).

If we take faith (or at least, one facet of it) to be a response to the divine work in us, then we have to look at how it affects our inner workings, not just the content of what we believe. How it shifts perspectives, so that I can be fully aware of how and why Christianity is so different from alternative worldviews, and still be so bowled over by the lovely Truth of it that I have to examine every new experience and idea in its light. Its light!

I so love all the Biblical language about God being like light. I truly believe it. He is light, and in him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).

That is the basis of my epistemology, my philosophy of learning. I remember the jolt I felt when I realized in high school that that was the heart of my desire to study Modernist literature–my heart, and my justification wrapped into one. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

When I realized what that verse meant was that Christ has gone into the darkest places and come out through them alive, and himself, I was–am!–struck dumb by the implications. By doing that, Christ gave the dark places value. Not the frivolous monetary associations we place on the word today (oh the tragedy of an ever-evolving language!) but rare, precious, dearly-bought and validated, real redemption.

It changes everything. Dark places are everywhere, literal and metaphorical, physical and emotional, internal and external. But look at it from the point of view of the light. Why would He sully himself with a desolate humanity? Why would He enter into our suffering? Why would He make us this way, and not perfect the way He wants us to be?

And when the light is a Person. 

I won’t quote T.S. Eliot, I won’t, but oh, love.

It changes everything, and there is my metaphysics. Just by virtue of His coming down, the darkness is never absolute. And you know what? By His light you can see what He came down to save.

And so for me learning–literature, the humanities, philosophy, the arts–has become my means of following the light.  And there’s so much light everywhere. Everywhere you look, there’s more grace to discover, if you want to see it.

You’d be right to remind me that I started out talking about structures of racism. How, Mary Sue, can you hold a world with such ugly problems in tandem with the idealized worldview you’ve just articulated?

It’s never that we are excused from working to fix those problems. Ever. Grace, as a professor once told me, does not excuse effort. The thing is, grace transforms that effort so that we are no longer working to correct insurmountable-seeming ugly problems like racism and human trafficking and more, that start with human evil and end with human limits. Grace makes the hard and bloody work about finding the light instead, the countless places and ways of seeing that God shows Himself through, and clearing the darkness around them, and finding that it was just our eyes closed. That our hearts need to be transformed, if we are to fix our problems. That reality is much bigger than we thought, and that God loves us so very much it makes our hearts ache.

Aaah, there’s so much beauty in the way of things. Pt. 2 to follow soon. And, I bet, Pt 3!

 

Dorothy L. Sayers, Introduction from the Man Born to be King

“We are so much accustomed to viewing the whole story from a post-Resurrection, and indeed from a post-Nicene, point of view, that we are apt, without realising it, to attribute to all the New Testament characters the same kind of detailed theological awareness which we have ourselves. We judge their behaviour as though all of them–disciples, Pharisees, Romans, and men-in-the-street, had known with Whom they were dealing and what the meaning of all the events actually was. But they did not know it. The disciples had only the foggiest inkling of it, and nobody else came anywhere near grasping what it was all about. If the Chief Priests and the Roman Governor had been aware that they were engaged in crucifying God–if Herod the Great had ordered his famous massacre with the express intention of doing away with God–then they would have been quite exceptionally and diabolically wicked people. And indeed, we like to think that they were: it gives us a reassuring sensation that “it can’t happen here.” And to this comfortable persuasion we are assisted by the stately and ancient language of the Authorised Version, and by the general air of stained-glass-window decorum with which the tale is usually presented to us. The characters are not men and women: they are all “sacred personages”, standing about in symbolic attitudes, and self-consciously awaiting the fulfillment of prophecies…

Unhappily, if we think about it at all, we must think otherwise. God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own–in the over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen. In a nation famous for its religious genius and under a government renowned for its efficiency, He was executed by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators. His executioners made vulgar jokes about Him, called Him filthy names, taunted Him, smacked Him in the face, flogged Him with the cat, and hanged Him on the common gibbet–a bloody, dusty, sweaty, and sordid business.

If you show people that, they are shocked. So they should be. If that does not shock them, nothing can. If the mere representation of it has an air of irreverence, what is to be said about the deed? It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all.