In some ways, the Old Testament reading is perfectly timed.
Today was the Cue to Cue rehearsal for The Sound of Music. For non-theatre people, that's a supremely strange rehearsal that is SUPER intense for techies and super annoying for actors where we run every light, sound, projection cue and every transition repeatedly as we try to find the right levels and get everything just right.
It's the perfect rehearsal to come home and read about a man who refused to do the simple thing because surely surely salvation must be more complicated than that. Surely, surely, it couldn't be that simple.
No, Naaman. Really it could. No, actors. Really we can.
In some ways, however, this reading is poorly timed, because I'm a little too exhausted to really go down the rabbit hole of unraveling the gospel.
Here is what I think might be a key to something that has gotten in the way of a point of my faith -- belief in physical miracles. I confessed to my mother recently that I don't. Because I can't.
I can't believe in miracles. Because when I prayed for one most, one didn't come. And because I can't think of any trite little reason that could possible counterbalance the harm done by refusing the miracle.
To be clear, I believe that prayer affects spiritual strength and that that can have profound effects on the world. But reversing the physical laws of nature? I can't. I feel somewhere in me that it's wrong or a flaw in my faith. But I can't.
I'm saying I understand why saying that to those people would make them want to throw Jesus off a cliff. Why the hell DIDN'T Elisha save the "many lepers" in Israel? What was so special about Naaman? More accurately, what wasn't special about all the rest of them?
Why DIDN'T Elijah save all the widows? Why not the deserving widow one town over from the one he picked?
It's a bitterness. Why not my loved one? Why not my precious person? If miracles come for good or even just some people, why NOT Tom Mulvaney? Beloved, wise judge in a key position to do so much more good than most of us will ever have the chance to do?
Are we really meant to blame ourselves for not believing it could work? Is that truly the message here? That we are too complacent with Jesus's presence among us and go away without believing properly?
Jesus wasn't kidding about His message being hard to take. I confess, I'm still struggling with this one. And I'm weary enough from the busyness of my day that I am going to sleep without having solved it now.
Monday, 29 February 2016
Sunday, 28 February 2016
Food for the Soul
I've written so extensively about the gospel of the Samaritan woman at the well (which my parish didn't see fit to read today) that I wondered if I would have anything left to add this evening.
But there was a new verse I hadn't ever thought much about. I've written about what the woman says, what Jesus's acceptance and knowledge means to her, and how deeply impressed I am by her choice of single question to ask God when she meets him by the roadside.
I pretty much glossed over Jesus's explanation to His disciples that He doesn't need food and water because
I noticed the pattern in my day Thursday of things feeling awful when I was focused on myself and turning wonderful when I began to focus on others. And again, The Sound of Music is helping me along. I realize only when I'm describing it to others or looking objectively or looking at taking on clerical duties, how exhausting my Sound of Music schedule is and has been. I'm sure it's taken a toll.
But the truth is that I don't feel it. Not when I come home from rehearsal soaring on the joy of having coaxed performance and cast fellowship and joyful singing out of teenagers. It's not what, perhaps, I would have chosen in a vacuum to do, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a better-spent Saturday than this past one with 11 hours of errands and painting and tie-dying and a thoroughly disorganized rehearsal or a Sunday with a long Skype call to the Biesels, paper tech, programming the lights, and finally buying a ukelele because I loved the Biesels' music so much.
I have food. I am well fed and sustained by the love I get to be a part of. By teaching, by sharing my love of theatre, by talking with students about this love-filled show, I am fed well enough that I can subsist on what remains in my kitchen after several weeks of being too busy to go grocery shopping. I can work 11-12 hour days and still have energy to burn.
Jesus reached out to someone with a lot of love to give but no clue how to direct it. He accepted her completely, and He talked about the most important matters to His teachings with her. He filled her -- and Himself -- with living water in doing so.
I tend to accidentally fall into my living water moments, but perhaps I'll start to choose them properly now that I can recognize them.
But there was a new verse I hadn't ever thought much about. I've written about what the woman says, what Jesus's acceptance and knowledge means to her, and how deeply impressed I am by her choice of single question to ask God when she meets him by the roadside.
I pretty much glossed over Jesus's explanation to His disciples that He doesn't need food and water because
“I have food to eat of which you do not know...My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work."Having just talked about the living water, it's easy to see this as a purely spiritual reference, but I think what Jesus is really doing is demonstrating for us just how to get the living water He told the woman about. It's by sharing His word, by caring for people. By taking care of others.
I noticed the pattern in my day Thursday of things feeling awful when I was focused on myself and turning wonderful when I began to focus on others. And again, The Sound of Music is helping me along. I realize only when I'm describing it to others or looking objectively or looking at taking on clerical duties, how exhausting my Sound of Music schedule is and has been. I'm sure it's taken a toll.
But the truth is that I don't feel it. Not when I come home from rehearsal soaring on the joy of having coaxed performance and cast fellowship and joyful singing out of teenagers. It's not what, perhaps, I would have chosen in a vacuum to do, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a better-spent Saturday than this past one with 11 hours of errands and painting and tie-dying and a thoroughly disorganized rehearsal or a Sunday with a long Skype call to the Biesels, paper tech, programming the lights, and finally buying a ukelele because I loved the Biesels' music so much.
I have food. I am well fed and sustained by the love I get to be a part of. By teaching, by sharing my love of theatre, by talking with students about this love-filled show, I am fed well enough that I can subsist on what remains in my kitchen after several weeks of being too busy to go grocery shopping. I can work 11-12 hour days and still have energy to burn.
Jesus reached out to someone with a lot of love to give but no clue how to direct it. He accepted her completely, and He talked about the most important matters to His teachings with her. He filled her -- and Himself -- with living water in doing so.
I tend to accidentally fall into my living water moments, but perhaps I'll start to choose them properly now that I can recognize them.
Saturday, 27 February 2016
My Heart Wants to Beat Like the Wings of a Bird That Flies
When I talk about why I wanted to do The Sound of Music, I talk about the plethora of parts I could offer the girls, my attempt to compete with West Side Story in attracting people, the ability to show off our particular sets of talents, or the blended family portrayed as good and hopeful.
And that's because I didn't really know or like the musical until I chose it. Until I saw these incredibly loving, enthusiastic students put the musical on.
Yes, it's happened to me with plays before. Julius Caesar happened years before I staged it at my current school, but it was a similar moment. The cast's love and the way the details of the show come alive in a rehearsal room give me love.
But this seems like something different. And today's gospel really helps me zero in on why. Because The Sound of Music is the exact opposite of the prodigal son's brother, which is always the part of the story I obsess about.
He is resentful that his brother is forgiven. That his broken brother who has caused so much harm is welcomed back with joy and feasting.
In The Sound of Music, the moment when little Gretl hugs Captain von Trapp and he starts to sing...I mean, I've seen them do it a couple of times now, but I started ugly crying in the audience this past Thursday all the same. Captain von Trapp has ignored and bullied his children for the last few years (play von Trapp, not historical von Trapp), taking out his grief for his wife by denying himself and them joy and music.
When he turns the corner (in 16 bars that he doesn't even sing), there is a group hug, Maria cries in joy, and everybody immediately welcomes him back to his role as a parent. The next bit of action is officially getting him together with the woman who facilitated his repentance and forgiveness.
He is accepted back. Maria is instantly forgiven for leaving the von Trapps in a panic that hurt them all deeply.
When people turn the corner, when they have an epiphany that leads them to genuinely change who they are -- that is honored, welcome, celebrated. They are forgiven. It isn't treated with suspicion. They aren't held hostage to who they were or told that they will surely revert to their old ways. The hard work they did to come back to their families, hat in hand, and say that they were wrong but they love you -- that's all the von Trapp family wanted.
It's an incredibly forgiving, loving show. It's a celebration of lessons learned -- and forgiveness granted in honor of that lesson.
Everyone in this play is the father of the prodigal son. And no one is his brother.
I feel for his brother, most days, but I am so full of love from this show. I've spent the last 8 weeks living with the prodigal son's father.
And that's because I didn't really know or like the musical until I chose it. Until I saw these incredibly loving, enthusiastic students put the musical on.
Yes, it's happened to me with plays before. Julius Caesar happened years before I staged it at my current school, but it was a similar moment. The cast's love and the way the details of the show come alive in a rehearsal room give me love.
But this seems like something different. And today's gospel really helps me zero in on why. Because The Sound of Music is the exact opposite of the prodigal son's brother, which is always the part of the story I obsess about.
He is resentful that his brother is forgiven. That his broken brother who has caused so much harm is welcomed back with joy and feasting.
In The Sound of Music, the moment when little Gretl hugs Captain von Trapp and he starts to sing...I mean, I've seen them do it a couple of times now, but I started ugly crying in the audience this past Thursday all the same. Captain von Trapp has ignored and bullied his children for the last few years (play von Trapp, not historical von Trapp), taking out his grief for his wife by denying himself and them joy and music.
When he turns the corner (in 16 bars that he doesn't even sing), there is a group hug, Maria cries in joy, and everybody immediately welcomes him back to his role as a parent. The next bit of action is officially getting him together with the woman who facilitated his repentance and forgiveness.
He is accepted back. Maria is instantly forgiven for leaving the von Trapps in a panic that hurt them all deeply.
When people turn the corner, when they have an epiphany that leads them to genuinely change who they are -- that is honored, welcome, celebrated. They are forgiven. It isn't treated with suspicion. They aren't held hostage to who they were or told that they will surely revert to their old ways. The hard work they did to come back to their families, hat in hand, and say that they were wrong but they love you -- that's all the von Trapp family wanted.
It's an incredibly forgiving, loving show. It's a celebration of lessons learned -- and forgiveness granted in honor of that lesson.
Everyone in this play is the father of the prodigal son. And no one is his brother.
I feel for his brother, most days, but I am so full of love from this show. I've spent the last 8 weeks living with the prodigal son's father.
Friday, 26 February 2016
Half Measures
The Old Testament reading today is the plot of Joseph's brothers to kill him. The eldest, Reuben, is against the violence. So he convinces his brothers to just leave Joseph in a position to die. He convinces them -- not to forego murder -- but not to sully their hands. And he plans to sneak back and rescue his brother when no one is watching.
It goes topside when the brothers -- having been invited to think of less murderous plans -- come up with the even less murderous but definitely less convenient to back down from plan to sell him into slavery.
And I can't help thinking about politics. And the idea that a virtue in politics is being able to trick and find back door deals and otherwise ease people into doing the right thing or the wrong thing. Sneaky politics. Sneaky good deeds.
It's hard to actually condemn Reuben. He probably thought if he pushed back too hard against his brothers they would just exclude him from the plan. Maybe he even feared for his own life. Maybe he didn't want to kill Joseph but also didn't want to die fighting off the brothers he liked better most days of the week anyway.
He didn't stand directly up for his brother Joseph. He didn't stand up directly to challenge and correct his very lost other brothers. He didn't pull them back from the brink. He didn't save them from what, even if they repented, would never change: that they had committed murder.
He was thinking in terms of actual damage rather than motive and spiritual health for all the family. He found a clever way around a messy, violent direct confrontation. But his plan also would have only delayed the violence. He would have shown them up and made them feel even smaller and more inadequate.
It didn't address the root problem. And so it was doomed to fail.
It can be so easy to think that we can find some clever little trick. I find them in teaching all the time, but that means that I haven't really taught my students how to arrive at the right answer on their own. I haven't really trained a stage manager, for example. Or if I give a list of Do's and Don'ts to my Comm App folks, I haven't really taught them to judge and evaluate speeches when they don't have a checklist handy.
Morality is too important. All the people the New York state politicians had to cajole and pork barrel-bribe and back into a corner to get the gay marriage bill approved -- they did so much good for so many couples, but did we really solve the underlying problem? I'm not saying that legal recognition should wait for the end of bigotry. I'm just saying any such victory is hollow. Unless we change hearts and minds, any victory is hollow.
As hollow as Reuben and Joseph would have both felt as he helped his brother out of the cistern. As hollow as their bellies would have been when the famine came without Joseph there to interpret pharoah's dream.
It goes topside when the brothers -- having been invited to think of less murderous plans -- come up with the even less murderous but definitely less convenient to back down from plan to sell him into slavery.
And I can't help thinking about politics. And the idea that a virtue in politics is being able to trick and find back door deals and otherwise ease people into doing the right thing or the wrong thing. Sneaky politics. Sneaky good deeds.
It's hard to actually condemn Reuben. He probably thought if he pushed back too hard against his brothers they would just exclude him from the plan. Maybe he even feared for his own life. Maybe he didn't want to kill Joseph but also didn't want to die fighting off the brothers he liked better most days of the week anyway.
He didn't stand directly up for his brother Joseph. He didn't stand up directly to challenge and correct his very lost other brothers. He didn't pull them back from the brink. He didn't save them from what, even if they repented, would never change: that they had committed murder.
He was thinking in terms of actual damage rather than motive and spiritual health for all the family. He found a clever way around a messy, violent direct confrontation. But his plan also would have only delayed the violence. He would have shown them up and made them feel even smaller and more inadequate.
It didn't address the root problem. And so it was doomed to fail.
It can be so easy to think that we can find some clever little trick. I find them in teaching all the time, but that means that I haven't really taught my students how to arrive at the right answer on their own. I haven't really trained a stage manager, for example. Or if I give a list of Do's and Don'ts to my Comm App folks, I haven't really taught them to judge and evaluate speeches when they don't have a checklist handy.
Morality is too important. All the people the New York state politicians had to cajole and pork barrel-bribe and back into a corner to get the gay marriage bill approved -- they did so much good for so many couples, but did we really solve the underlying problem? I'm not saying that legal recognition should wait for the end of bigotry. I'm just saying any such victory is hollow. Unless we change hearts and minds, any victory is hollow.
As hollow as Reuben and Joseph would have both felt as he helped his brother out of the cistern. As hollow as their bellies would have been when the famine came without Joseph there to interpret pharoah's dream.
Thursday, 25 February 2016
The Turn Around
I was going to make some labored, somewhat self-important comparison to Lazarus here, but then I reread the Old Testament reading, and I'm just going to reproduce it here.
It's the unpredictability that makes it such a torture to trust in human beings, I suppose. But they've also done a lot for me today. And I end today in the last place I would have guessed this morning: a place of deep thankfulness.
A lot of the great things from later that happened were in the works earlier in the day, but after a VERY difficult morning, I had to go grade a bunch of presentations. And I struggled hard neither to cry not grade to harshly. I shut down students who were trying to help because I couldn't deal with the issues at the moment. I was in a not-make-a-scene place as a teacher and not able to do much more.
Until my second class of the day. When even my stupor couldn't fail to recognize a fight brewing during group work. So I sat down with them and talked calmly at them and about them until they were either in a better place or were so tired of me using Emotional Reconciliation tactics on them that they agreed they'd rather get along than listen to me anymore. I swear, sometimes I think that's a legitimate tactic to use.
I wasn't done freaking out, but that moment was followed by students planning impressive projects, by my uncles and a production mom moving a couch up to the school for me, a plan being finalized without my intricate involvement, a warm seventh period class that ended with a student thanking me for keeping my attention on them rather than the business with the projectors on the stage (which was so the best, really), a student being VERY into Shakespeare's Richard III, the new music director making the chorus better and a few key soloists shine, and the sweet moment between Captain Von Trapp and Gretl legitimately make me cry in the audience.
I have reached a calm place of safety through the storm. And it all began with an opportunity to help someone else. That's precisely when my day was good -- when I was focused on and talking about other people. It was bad when I was thinking about myself -- which even in hell the rich man from the Lazarus parable was doing. Even when it felt understandable -- fear for my job, anger and dismay at the reaction to my work, etc. -- focusing on myself made things hard and sad and awful.
Thinking of my students or my friends and family helping or my new able assistants made the day so much better. The show isn't ready, and frankly, I'm terrified it won't be. But that too is faith. That too will be better thinking of others.
Trust not in human beings to come through for you. If you watch them, you'll see how much of a miracle it is that they do so so often. There is a great chasm of fire and terror between so many people. It's amazing we reach each other so often and with such seeming ease.
Thus says the LORD:A lot of my day actually contradicts the first part about being cursed to trust in human beings. A lot of people came through for me today as some very key people did not. As human beings responded in ways that blindsided me and made me fear for my production, my job, and my ability to get through the day without sobbing in plain view of my students.
Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings,
who seeks his strength in flesh,
whose heart turns away from the LORD.
He is like a barren bush in the desert
that enjoys no change of season,
But stands in a lava waste,
a salt and empty earth.
Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose hope is the LORD.
He is like a tree planted beside the waters
that stretches out its roots to the stream:
It fears not the heat when it comes,
its leaves stay green;
In the year of drought it shows no distress,
but still bears fruit.
More tortuous than all else is the human heart,
beyond remedy; who can understand it?
I, the LORD, alone probe the mind
and test the heart,
To reward everyone according to his ways,
according to the merit of his deeds.
It's the unpredictability that makes it such a torture to trust in human beings, I suppose. But they've also done a lot for me today. And I end today in the last place I would have guessed this morning: a place of deep thankfulness.
A lot of the great things from later that happened were in the works earlier in the day, but after a VERY difficult morning, I had to go grade a bunch of presentations. And I struggled hard neither to cry not grade to harshly. I shut down students who were trying to help because I couldn't deal with the issues at the moment. I was in a not-make-a-scene place as a teacher and not able to do much more.
Until my second class of the day. When even my stupor couldn't fail to recognize a fight brewing during group work. So I sat down with them and talked calmly at them and about them until they were either in a better place or were so tired of me using Emotional Reconciliation tactics on them that they agreed they'd rather get along than listen to me anymore. I swear, sometimes I think that's a legitimate tactic to use.
I wasn't done freaking out, but that moment was followed by students planning impressive projects, by my uncles and a production mom moving a couch up to the school for me, a plan being finalized without my intricate involvement, a warm seventh period class that ended with a student thanking me for keeping my attention on them rather than the business with the projectors on the stage (which was so the best, really), a student being VERY into Shakespeare's Richard III, the new music director making the chorus better and a few key soloists shine, and the sweet moment between Captain Von Trapp and Gretl legitimately make me cry in the audience.
I have reached a calm place of safety through the storm. And it all began with an opportunity to help someone else. That's precisely when my day was good -- when I was focused on and talking about other people. It was bad when I was thinking about myself -- which even in hell the rich man from the Lazarus parable was doing. Even when it felt understandable -- fear for my job, anger and dismay at the reaction to my work, etc. -- focusing on myself made things hard and sad and awful.
Thinking of my students or my friends and family helping or my new able assistants made the day so much better. The show isn't ready, and frankly, I'm terrified it won't be. But that too is faith. That too will be better thinking of others.
Trust not in human beings to come through for you. If you watch them, you'll see how much of a miracle it is that they do so so often. There is a great chasm of fire and terror between so many people. It's amazing we reach each other so often and with such seeming ease.
Wednesday, 24 February 2016
How Are They Not Getting It?
The shortened reading at daily mass today really lessens the degree of disappointment you feel in Momma Zebedee for asking for a prominent place in Jesus's kingdom for her sons.
The previous verses are Jesus explaining to the disciples how He will suffer and be sacrificed. And then you follow that up with a request for glory and power?
It feels like a teacher moment. The "How are they not getting this?" moment. Sometimes it's your fault -- you haven't been as clear as you think, you've taken some foundational knowledge they don't have for granted. And sometimes it's just the sheer frustration of not being able to take the leap of intuition for them.
That one happens a lot in theatre. I've come to the place where I've given them everything I can -- right about this time in a production, actually. I've given them blocking and character and now, well, they'll take the leap, they'll do the work...or they won't. And we'll have a mediocre show.
Jesus is doing everything He can to prepare His disciples not only for His own suffering but for their own. And they don't get it. Jesus is so patient. So patient His title of Teacher was well-chosen indeed. Because sometimes there are things they don't get until they happen.
It feels strange to be sympathizing with Jesus in this human, teachery way. But I suppose that was a large part of the point of Him coming down to join us.
Plus, to give the apostles credit, Jesus is completely breaking the code of not just the false messiahs running about the place at the time, but also of the true prophets throughout the Old Testament. He is trying to teach us that the world is different than we knew. The world is better than we knew, or at least God is. But even so it's a hard lesson. We've done a lot of work, literally since birth, to get a stable picture of the world in place.
Boy do we fight back when someone challenges it. Even for the better.
The previous verses are Jesus explaining to the disciples how He will suffer and be sacrificed. And then you follow that up with a request for glory and power?
It feels like a teacher moment. The "How are they not getting this?" moment. Sometimes it's your fault -- you haven't been as clear as you think, you've taken some foundational knowledge they don't have for granted. And sometimes it's just the sheer frustration of not being able to take the leap of intuition for them.
That one happens a lot in theatre. I've come to the place where I've given them everything I can -- right about this time in a production, actually. I've given them blocking and character and now, well, they'll take the leap, they'll do the work...or they won't. And we'll have a mediocre show.
Jesus is doing everything He can to prepare His disciples not only for His own suffering but for their own. And they don't get it. Jesus is so patient. So patient His title of Teacher was well-chosen indeed. Because sometimes there are things they don't get until they happen.
It feels strange to be sympathizing with Jesus in this human, teachery way. But I suppose that was a large part of the point of Him coming down to join us.
Plus, to give the apostles credit, Jesus is completely breaking the code of not just the false messiahs running about the place at the time, but also of the true prophets throughout the Old Testament. He is trying to teach us that the world is different than we knew. The world is better than we knew, or at least God is. But even so it's a hard lesson. We've done a lot of work, literally since birth, to get a stable picture of the world in place.
Boy do we fight back when someone challenges it. Even for the better.
Tuesday, 23 February 2016
Student Choice and Voice
I have trouble connecting with the more condemnation side of the Bible. I accidentally skipped right over it this morning and remembered the reading as more about losing and restoring.
But the line that really struck me is Jesus telling His disciples to let no one called them "Rabbi" which means "teacher" because they are all brothers and have one rabbi.
I think that might be the least followed piece of advice in the whole of the Church. Or maybe it just seems that way because the Theology teacher I am teaching a class with is covering the hierarchy and the duties of the different ranks of the ordained -- and one of the three duties mentioned across the board is to be a teacher.
Strangely enough, it lines up in many ways with a lot of current theory on education: letting the students be partners in the learning, student voice and choice. I teach not giving the students rules but trying to get them to see for themselves what does and doesn't work. I try to teach them to evaluate a speech rather than check off a list. I try to manipulate them into seeing what I need them to see -- give them challenges like only 3 words per slide so they stop insisting on putting titles on every single slide.
Much like Jesus set us a challenge, spoke to us indirectly so we could see what they mean for ourselves and thus have it really stick when He told the parables. Because if we figure it out for ourselves, if we own it and it's meaningful to us, it becomes a part of us in a way that someone else telling us what to do doesn't.
It's not just a matter of pride to style yourself a great Rabbi or Teacher, although Jesus goes on at length about that. It's less effective. It's not how you get good done in the world. How you change hearts and minds. For that, you have to help people to do the work for themselves. Which is why I'm loving my Advanced Theatre classes right now.
But more importantly, that's where the temple leaders really seem to have gone wrong. It's not just pride and peacockery in itself that is the problem. It's prioritizing those things over being effective in doing good out in the world. Whenever we let anything be more important to us that our ability to do good for other people, to serve God, then we are doing a different version of gilding our tassles. We are straying from the path.
You can be the humblest soul in the world and still be true proud of the reputation you've built to help people if it means you renouncing one of your Lenten restrictions. Refusing to watch a bit of TV with a friend having a terrible day who asks you to sit with them because you gave it up for Lent -- how is that making you a better force for good in the world? Going to Mass with a 100 degree fever and putting others at risk...what Mass does for you in a wonderful thing, but what are you doing to others?
Our ability to do good in the world is what counts.
But the line that really struck me is Jesus telling His disciples to let no one called them "Rabbi" which means "teacher" because they are all brothers and have one rabbi.
I think that might be the least followed piece of advice in the whole of the Church. Or maybe it just seems that way because the Theology teacher I am teaching a class with is covering the hierarchy and the duties of the different ranks of the ordained -- and one of the three duties mentioned across the board is to be a teacher.
Strangely enough, it lines up in many ways with a lot of current theory on education: letting the students be partners in the learning, student voice and choice. I teach not giving the students rules but trying to get them to see for themselves what does and doesn't work. I try to teach them to evaluate a speech rather than check off a list. I try to manipulate them into seeing what I need them to see -- give them challenges like only 3 words per slide so they stop insisting on putting titles on every single slide.
Much like Jesus set us a challenge, spoke to us indirectly so we could see what they mean for ourselves and thus have it really stick when He told the parables. Because if we figure it out for ourselves, if we own it and it's meaningful to us, it becomes a part of us in a way that someone else telling us what to do doesn't.
It's not just a matter of pride to style yourself a great Rabbi or Teacher, although Jesus goes on at length about that. It's less effective. It's not how you get good done in the world. How you change hearts and minds. For that, you have to help people to do the work for themselves. Which is why I'm loving my Advanced Theatre classes right now.
But more importantly, that's where the temple leaders really seem to have gone wrong. It's not just pride and peacockery in itself that is the problem. It's prioritizing those things over being effective in doing good out in the world. Whenever we let anything be more important to us that our ability to do good for other people, to serve God, then we are doing a different version of gilding our tassles. We are straying from the path.
You can be the humblest soul in the world and still be true proud of the reputation you've built to help people if it means you renouncing one of your Lenten restrictions. Refusing to watch a bit of TV with a friend having a terrible day who asks you to sit with them because you gave it up for Lent -- how is that making you a better force for good in the world? Going to Mass with a 100 degree fever and putting others at risk...what Mass does for you in a wonderful thing, but what are you doing to others?
Our ability to do good in the world is what counts.
Monday, 22 February 2016
Example, Not Discipline
Today was a rough rehearsal. Not just because it had been longer since we rehearsed a lot of the scenes and they had gotten a bit rusty, but because I was trying to do not just double but, in reality, triple-duty at once.
Which even more unfortunately means being less open and caring and encouraging and more abrupt, matter-of-fact, and even having to plainly tell students to wait and not talk for a minute while I deal with the other students' issues.
In some ways it feels like a betrayal of the warm atmosphere I try to create in rehearsals, and it wasn't fully dampened. For most students, not by a long shot. But that's why I hate this part of rehearsals. I have to be more drill sergeant than creative guide and guardian. Not just because I'm trying to track down 10,000 prop and costume pieces and personnel, etc.
So it's a good day for me to reflect on how to lead as a Christian teacher. As the New Testament reading exhorts leaders in the Church to do. Not as a burden but eagerly. Overseeing but not by constraint. With joy and encouragement -- like I recruited the stage hand in the hallway with a quick word of thinking she'd be good at it, rather than the way I had to order and re-order my costume designer's hard work.
Because the best theatre is like the faith that Jesus outlines for Peter. It's not something you come to on your own. It's something given to you by God, by your fellow castmates, by the collective efforts of those working.
All of this is to say that I wish I'd read the day's readings at the beginning of the day so that they would be on my mind as I negotiated group work issues I didn't really solve so much as hope for the best and watch God mostly resolve. And tried to direct a bifurcated rehearsal with a possibly unnecessary sacrifice of gentleness for clarity.
Real leadership doesn't look like that. Relationships built up can take a day or two of that. That's the entire premise of tech week in theatre. But they need to be based on mutual trust and love. Leading through example and guiding of eager willingness.
It's a good time for this reading, as has been the case throughout Lent. To remind me that there's always the time to be my best self.
Which even more unfortunately means being less open and caring and encouraging and more abrupt, matter-of-fact, and even having to plainly tell students to wait and not talk for a minute while I deal with the other students' issues.
In some ways it feels like a betrayal of the warm atmosphere I try to create in rehearsals, and it wasn't fully dampened. For most students, not by a long shot. But that's why I hate this part of rehearsals. I have to be more drill sergeant than creative guide and guardian. Not just because I'm trying to track down 10,000 prop and costume pieces and personnel, etc.
So it's a good day for me to reflect on how to lead as a Christian teacher. As the New Testament reading exhorts leaders in the Church to do. Not as a burden but eagerly. Overseeing but not by constraint. With joy and encouragement -- like I recruited the stage hand in the hallway with a quick word of thinking she'd be good at it, rather than the way I had to order and re-order my costume designer's hard work.
Because the best theatre is like the faith that Jesus outlines for Peter. It's not something you come to on your own. It's something given to you by God, by your fellow castmates, by the collective efforts of those working.
All of this is to say that I wish I'd read the day's readings at the beginning of the day so that they would be on my mind as I negotiated group work issues I didn't really solve so much as hope for the best and watch God mostly resolve. And tried to direct a bifurcated rehearsal with a possibly unnecessary sacrifice of gentleness for clarity.
Real leadership doesn't look like that. Relationships built up can take a day or two of that. That's the entire premise of tech week in theatre. But they need to be based on mutual trust and love. Leading through example and guiding of eager willingness.
It's a good time for this reading, as has been the case throughout Lent. To remind me that there's always the time to be my best self.
Sunday, 21 February 2016
Hard to Explain
There's something about the Old Testament readings this year. They seem to me like the key that opens all the other readings -- the psalm, the sermons of the New Testament, and even a new angle on The Transfiguration -- the Bible story about which I've written and thought the most, second only to The Samaritan Woman at the Well.
Abraham's vision and the process by which he gets it...I don't understand it. It seems arbitrary at best and dangerously close to pagan gibberish at worst.
But then maybe everything mystical seems that way. Not even from the outside.
One of my favorite novels, from an incomplete trilogy by Patrick Rothfuss, talks at length about the difference between the waking mind and the sleeping mind. A teacher trying to awaken the sleeping mind of his students stages a parable by asking them to extrapolate precisely where to place their hand so that when he tosses it, it will fall into their palm perfectly. After giving them almost an hour to perform the task academically, he calls in a page and throws the rock at him and is overjoyed when he catches it. The sleeping mind, he explains, is powerful.
The rest of the teacher's tactics are less clear. They mostly involve trying to be inexplicable in provocative and secretly meaningful ways that will open up his students to intuitive understanding. To push them past the rational and the step-by-step.
I think that's where a lot of young believers fall down. When they can't make sense of doctrines or even more crucial elements of faith. They're always tossing hum-dingers at the theology teachers at any rate. And some of them seem almost desperate about it. Certain they are missing something that would make a seeming contradiction properly clear.
But all of the stories today emphasize that faith isn't like that. Perhaps all rituals are really about waking the sleeping mind or the inner spirit -- something I find myself talking about a lot in my Advanced Acting class with Michael Chekhov's technique.
The birds Abraham uses aren't the point. They're simply a focus point for him to spend an extended amount of time in prayer. The church should never be about worldly, political advantage or honor accorded to the "holy" and "righteous" in this life but about making ourselves better servants of God in whatever way He requires it of us.
And Peter's response to the Transfiguration has always utterly charmed me. Because what else do you say when something that wondrous happens? When you have done the hard work for years of trying to understand God's message and the real, new way of being in the world and then, like a sudden unexpected gift, it comes all unbidden? Clear and glorious but just as beyond your comprehension as ever?
At least of your waking mind.
Because you could never explain to someone how you knew exactly where to put your hand to catch the baseball. You could try, but if they asked any follow-up questions at all, you'd find yourself devolving into gibberish pretty quickly.
And you could never really explain an epiphany and spiritual experience to anyone else. Read the saints' accounts of their visions sometimes -- they sound mad and strange and allegorical and all kinds of bizarre things. Trying to put the spiritual life into the words of this mortal coil.
Rituals and revelations are inexplicable but you understand so beautifully well in that moment. A you know how to act on it, even if you don't know what to think of it or how to explain it. I find myself having to research other reasons for the things that come to me in more spiritual ways. Just so I can explain why I care about it.
We like things explained, especially in the last century or two. God's ways, the soul-changing experiences, have always resisted that.
Abraham's vision and the process by which he gets it...I don't understand it. It seems arbitrary at best and dangerously close to pagan gibberish at worst.
But then maybe everything mystical seems that way. Not even from the outside.
One of my favorite novels, from an incomplete trilogy by Patrick Rothfuss, talks at length about the difference between the waking mind and the sleeping mind. A teacher trying to awaken the sleeping mind of his students stages a parable by asking them to extrapolate precisely where to place their hand so that when he tosses it, it will fall into their palm perfectly. After giving them almost an hour to perform the task academically, he calls in a page and throws the rock at him and is overjoyed when he catches it. The sleeping mind, he explains, is powerful.
The rest of the teacher's tactics are less clear. They mostly involve trying to be inexplicable in provocative and secretly meaningful ways that will open up his students to intuitive understanding. To push them past the rational and the step-by-step.
I think that's where a lot of young believers fall down. When they can't make sense of doctrines or even more crucial elements of faith. They're always tossing hum-dingers at the theology teachers at any rate. And some of them seem almost desperate about it. Certain they are missing something that would make a seeming contradiction properly clear.
But all of the stories today emphasize that faith isn't like that. Perhaps all rituals are really about waking the sleeping mind or the inner spirit -- something I find myself talking about a lot in my Advanced Acting class with Michael Chekhov's technique.
The birds Abraham uses aren't the point. They're simply a focus point for him to spend an extended amount of time in prayer. The church should never be about worldly, political advantage or honor accorded to the "holy" and "righteous" in this life but about making ourselves better servants of God in whatever way He requires it of us.
And Peter's response to the Transfiguration has always utterly charmed me. Because what else do you say when something that wondrous happens? When you have done the hard work for years of trying to understand God's message and the real, new way of being in the world and then, like a sudden unexpected gift, it comes all unbidden? Clear and glorious but just as beyond your comprehension as ever?
At least of your waking mind.
Because you could never explain to someone how you knew exactly where to put your hand to catch the baseball. You could try, but if they asked any follow-up questions at all, you'd find yourself devolving into gibberish pretty quickly.
And you could never really explain an epiphany and spiritual experience to anyone else. Read the saints' accounts of their visions sometimes -- they sound mad and strange and allegorical and all kinds of bizarre things. Trying to put the spiritual life into the words of this mortal coil.
Rituals and revelations are inexplicable but you understand so beautifully well in that moment. A you know how to act on it, even if you don't know what to think of it or how to explain it. I find myself having to research other reasons for the things that come to me in more spiritual ways. Just so I can explain why I care about it.
We like things explained, especially in the last century or two. God's ways, the soul-changing experiences, have always resisted that.
So Be Perfect
I don't think anything could have made Jesus's point that His and God's ways are not the same as the world's ways as the final phrase of today's gospel: "So be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
The Old Testament reading talks about the law and how it sets the Israelites apart from the rest of the world. Jesus tackles it directly with Love Thy Enemy, and a less quoted but almost more lovely sentiment:
So true. So important to remember. The world is here for everyone, not only those we deem worthy of it. God deemed them worthy. That is meant to be enough for us.
But the final verse: Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.
I just: are you kidding me?
I spend a good deal of my day each and every day trying to help students push past their perfectionism. Trying to break them of the idea that there's a right, correct answer I'm trying to trick them into giving rather than truly asking them to form an opinion -- whatever it is.
Didn't I attend a workshop on Monday talking about how physically and mentally damaging the perfectionist obsession is in our culture?
Didn't I make myself crazy many times growing up because I couldn't accept the idea that everyone sins sometimes. Every individual sin is avoidable, thus all sins are unavoidable. It makes no sense to say you can never slip up.
Or so I thought at the time and turned my guilt meter up to obsessive levels for a few years.
Turns out that's what God wanted all the while. Or rather, He wanted me continually improving, not just saying that sometimes we mess up and since everybody does, we don't actually need to change. Because God's ways are not our ways. The saints know this better than anyone. That's why they're always convinced that they're not good enough when they look, to us, like just short of heavenly perfection.
There's a line in The Sound of Music that won't leave my head tonight that promises to resolve this (perhaps a little too neatly). Max Dettweiler is talking about his job recruiting acts for the Kaltzburg Festival and being told not to overworry himself because he always does a good job. His response:
We shoot for nothing less than perfection, because we are bound to fail at what we try for. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. We don't aim for mediocrity or even mere exceptionalism. We aim for never directly harming another person, loving everyone, forming no grudges, even passing things.
We aim for a lot of things I've been particularly bad at this week and things I'll be particularly bad about in the coming week, which will be different, no doubt. We fight to be perfect. Anything else is aiming too low.
The Old Testament reading talks about the law and how it sets the Israelites apart from the rest of the world. Jesus tackles it directly with Love Thy Enemy, and a less quoted but almost more lovely sentiment:
For He makes His sun rise on the bad and the good
and causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
So true. So important to remember. The world is here for everyone, not only those we deem worthy of it. God deemed them worthy. That is meant to be enough for us.
But the final verse: Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.
I just: are you kidding me?
I spend a good deal of my day each and every day trying to help students push past their perfectionism. Trying to break them of the idea that there's a right, correct answer I'm trying to trick them into giving rather than truly asking them to form an opinion -- whatever it is.
Didn't I attend a workshop on Monday talking about how physically and mentally damaging the perfectionist obsession is in our culture?
Didn't I make myself crazy many times growing up because I couldn't accept the idea that everyone sins sometimes. Every individual sin is avoidable, thus all sins are unavoidable. It makes no sense to say you can never slip up.
Or so I thought at the time and turned my guilt meter up to obsessive levels for a few years.
Turns out that's what God wanted all the while. Or rather, He wanted me continually improving, not just saying that sometimes we mess up and since everybody does, we don't actually need to change. Because God's ways are not our ways. The saints know this better than anyone. That's why they're always convinced that they're not good enough when they look, to us, like just short of heavenly perfection.
There's a line in The Sound of Music that won't leave my head tonight that promises to resolve this (perhaps a little too neatly). Max Dettweiler is talking about his job recruiting acts for the Kaltzburg Festival and being told not to overworry himself because he always does a good job. His response:
And do you know why? Because my motto is: never start looking for the people you wind up getting.
We shoot for nothing less than perfection, because we are bound to fail at what we try for. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. We don't aim for mediocrity or even mere exceptionalism. We aim for never directly harming another person, loving everyone, forming no grudges, even passing things.
We aim for a lot of things I've been particularly bad at this week and things I'll be particularly bad about in the coming week, which will be different, no doubt. We fight to be perfect. Anything else is aiming too low.
Friday, 19 February 2016
Done Becoming A Good Person
This is probably the silliest possible way to start, but it's been a weird day, so I'm going to go ahead with it.
In the finale of a brilliant show that went off the rails at the end, a character tells an old love interest making a guest appearance that maybe they'll get back together somewhere down the road, but she's "cookie dough" and then goes on to extend the metaphor to needing to grow up a bit first. To which a critic took issue: you're never "done" growing up, becoming a person.
Heck, I may be the adult in the rehearsal room, but ask me to do my considerably overdue expenditure requests and I turn into a sullen teenager avoiding her homework.
I think there's a similar impulse to "finish" becoming a good person. To have one big gesture or so many years of dedicated service or a strong enough record that if you mess up, you're still overall, in the balance, a good person.
Like the old idea of indulgences that grant pre-forgiveness for crimes yet uncommitted, which I was not terribly surprised to learn was a myth. Or rather a cunning plot device I never ran through the internal censor to realize the novel was being ridiculous (Phillip Pullman, for the record, not Dan Brown).
And maybe that's natural, especially when you believe in the punishment for tilting in the opposite direction.
But the truth is that the saints didn't have a completely broken sense of their own virtue versus culpability. The ones on their deathbeds panicking about not doing enough good or castigating themselves figuratively, literally, privately, publicly just understood -- you can't just be good in one big gesture or build up enough of a store of heavenly gestures that no amount of sin could burn it to the ground again.
They understood that you had to keep striving, keep doing good, keep working hard. That they hadn't finished the hard work of being a good person every day. The continually raising standard. Who you are now should never be good enough to you. I'm not saying you should hate yourself, feel inferior, never be satisfied with your surroundings.
I'm saying that deep in your soul, you have to know that the work is never done. The Old Testament is blunt about it. The evil one who repents will fare better than the good person who falls. Even if they stayed in their first state longer, which may seem unfair on the face of it. But the truth is that you are judged, each moment, by who you are NOW.
So you can't "finish" becoming a good person. There's always more to do. Always someone to reconcile with, as Jesus tells us. Always some good out in the world that you need to do in order to be ready to offer sacrifice to God. Always a reason to leave the altar, the public altar where you have come for the offered respect you have earned, to do actual, active good in the world. Because that's where it's hard to be a good Christian and a good person.
It's easy on retreat or in church or in the midst of prayer. It's so much harder out the world. But you can't just be done. You have to do the work at all times, not only when it comes naturally.
In the finale of a brilliant show that went off the rails at the end, a character tells an old love interest making a guest appearance that maybe they'll get back together somewhere down the road, but she's "cookie dough" and then goes on to extend the metaphor to needing to grow up a bit first. To which a critic took issue: you're never "done" growing up, becoming a person.
Heck, I may be the adult in the rehearsal room, but ask me to do my considerably overdue expenditure requests and I turn into a sullen teenager avoiding her homework.
I think there's a similar impulse to "finish" becoming a good person. To have one big gesture or so many years of dedicated service or a strong enough record that if you mess up, you're still overall, in the balance, a good person.
Like the old idea of indulgences that grant pre-forgiveness for crimes yet uncommitted, which I was not terribly surprised to learn was a myth. Or rather a cunning plot device I never ran through the internal censor to realize the novel was being ridiculous (Phillip Pullman, for the record, not Dan Brown).
And maybe that's natural, especially when you believe in the punishment for tilting in the opposite direction.
But the truth is that the saints didn't have a completely broken sense of their own virtue versus culpability. The ones on their deathbeds panicking about not doing enough good or castigating themselves figuratively, literally, privately, publicly just understood -- you can't just be good in one big gesture or build up enough of a store of heavenly gestures that no amount of sin could burn it to the ground again.
They understood that you had to keep striving, keep doing good, keep working hard. That they hadn't finished the hard work of being a good person every day. The continually raising standard. Who you are now should never be good enough to you. I'm not saying you should hate yourself, feel inferior, never be satisfied with your surroundings.
I'm saying that deep in your soul, you have to know that the work is never done. The Old Testament is blunt about it. The evil one who repents will fare better than the good person who falls. Even if they stayed in their first state longer, which may seem unfair on the face of it. But the truth is that you are judged, each moment, by who you are NOW.
So you can't "finish" becoming a good person. There's always more to do. Always someone to reconcile with, as Jesus tells us. Always some good out in the world that you need to do in order to be ready to offer sacrifice to God. Always a reason to leave the altar, the public altar where you have come for the offered respect you have earned, to do actual, active good in the world. Because that's where it's hard to be a good Christian and a good person.
It's easy on retreat or in church or in the midst of prayer. It's so much harder out the world. But you can't just be done. You have to do the work at all times, not only when it comes naturally.
Thursday, 18 February 2016
Ask
My second year of teaching, I made the rule for myself that I would ask any question that occurred to me. And that I would never let myself be too afraid or embarrassed to ask the blunt question. To ask them to clarify the premise or explain the acronym (I would have been totally lost if I hadn't had this rule about acronyms).
This year, my first as a theatre teacher, I think I unintentionally made the rule for myself to ask for help. There are key places where I didn't get it -- but crucially, they were the places I ASSUMED I would get help. The people I've asked for have pretty much come through -- come through the best of their abilities.
My cast is trucking along, and I spent until midnight with a good friend hanging lights for five hours.
One of the quotes from C.S. Lewis that I still think about all the time despite my more complicated general feelings about him and his writing is the Pevensie answer to another character's question why Aslan didn't just give help and explain himself: "I think he likes to be asked."
Don't we all? It means you're not assuming that help is offered, that it's a sacrifice on your part rather than a duty that's no big deal. It means you are being asked to contribute, that your opinion and work is actively valued instead of taken for granted. That you have value both intrinsically and to me and my life.
And that last bit is I think why God likes prayer. Why he models asking for our daily bread -- note, not the special blessings but the daily gifts in our lives -- in the Our Father. He doesn't need us to bestow or even acknowledge his Instrinct value, but it reminds us to value our faith and our relationship with God. It reminds us to value God in our lives -- which can only make us better people.
Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened.
In remembering that God is good and can help us, we acknowledge Him as important to our lives, and we live them better.
This year, my first as a theatre teacher, I think I unintentionally made the rule for myself to ask for help. There are key places where I didn't get it -- but crucially, they were the places I ASSUMED I would get help. The people I've asked for have pretty much come through -- come through the best of their abilities.
My cast is trucking along, and I spent until midnight with a good friend hanging lights for five hours.
One of the quotes from C.S. Lewis that I still think about all the time despite my more complicated general feelings about him and his writing is the Pevensie answer to another character's question why Aslan didn't just give help and explain himself: "I think he likes to be asked."
Don't we all? It means you're not assuming that help is offered, that it's a sacrifice on your part rather than a duty that's no big deal. It means you are being asked to contribute, that your opinion and work is actively valued instead of taken for granted. That you have value both intrinsically and to me and my life.
And that last bit is I think why God likes prayer. Why he models asking for our daily bread -- note, not the special blessings but the daily gifts in our lives -- in the Our Father. He doesn't need us to bestow or even acknowledge his Instrinct value, but it reminds us to value our faith and our relationship with God. It reminds us to value God in our lives -- which can only make us better people.
Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened.
In remembering that God is good and can help us, we acknowledge Him as important to our lives, and we live them better.
Wednesday, 17 February 2016
As We Forgive Those
It's all about repentance today. Jonah and Nineveh, with Jesus warning His contemporaries that their generation would fare the worse for having a grander prophet and treating Him with less change of life. Not respect. Jesus wanted action from His teaching.
That's where Jonah went wrong, of course. Wanting respect as he preached doom. Wanting the people he came there to save to also thank him. Or to see them burn for spurning him at the first. Wanting to have it easy as he was doing good and then being discontent with the shade God provided to help improve his mood.
I think the good rehearsal today was the shade covering my head on the hilltop, and I really hope I responded positively enough that a worm is not going to come in the night and devour it.
I was in a MOOD today, though, somewhat justified. And I went tearing around for ten minutes trying to get it out in time to teach my class (14 minutes later) and tearing poor styrofoam cups to shreds. Actually helped.
But I wonder if I faced my real test later that afternoon when the person who caused such a problem with Sound of Music came in trying to help and still being super difficult but actively engaged in helping. Not lazy, as I had feared, but either confused or inflexible (hard to tell which). Trying to do the right thing. Nice about it.
Allowing people to repent or finding that they aren't as bad as you thought -- it does take something to allow them to be that in your mind as well. It takes doing the work of letting your worldview go. And come to think of it, when I retold the story at the weekly Wednesday dinner, I made him sound difficult and a little crazy rather than trying to help me. I may have given a token mention to that, but nothing to turn the tide of my little tirade.
It used to be so inexplicable to me that Jonah would be angry that Nineveh repented. That they did what he asked and he saved the people he came there to save. That he saved a town. And then got angry about its children not dying in fire and brimstone for their parents' sins.
When you're angry enough to walk out on Nineveh in its hour of doom in the first place, it can be incredibly hard to allow Nineveh to be anything but a steaming cesspit of sin in your mind's eye. Imagine your guilt for burning a bridge when it turns out they could have been a nice person all along and will be someday. If you hadn't destroyed their life.
I wasn't anywhere near this scale today, but my worldview is still adjusting slowly to the true facts. Letting go of the anger and frustration best directed into solving the problem.
Nineveh did something remarkable and difficult to see. Difficult to look at. Not only because the moment of emotional repentance is invisible but because even the most visible acts of repentance and making amends are received by people who have already decided the transgressors' guilt.
Because we all forget that we will be judged by the measure we judge others. Forgiven our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
That's where Jonah went wrong, of course. Wanting respect as he preached doom. Wanting the people he came there to save to also thank him. Or to see them burn for spurning him at the first. Wanting to have it easy as he was doing good and then being discontent with the shade God provided to help improve his mood.
I think the good rehearsal today was the shade covering my head on the hilltop, and I really hope I responded positively enough that a worm is not going to come in the night and devour it.
I was in a MOOD today, though, somewhat justified. And I went tearing around for ten minutes trying to get it out in time to teach my class (14 minutes later) and tearing poor styrofoam cups to shreds. Actually helped.
But I wonder if I faced my real test later that afternoon when the person who caused such a problem with Sound of Music came in trying to help and still being super difficult but actively engaged in helping. Not lazy, as I had feared, but either confused or inflexible (hard to tell which). Trying to do the right thing. Nice about it.
Allowing people to repent or finding that they aren't as bad as you thought -- it does take something to allow them to be that in your mind as well. It takes doing the work of letting your worldview go. And come to think of it, when I retold the story at the weekly Wednesday dinner, I made him sound difficult and a little crazy rather than trying to help me. I may have given a token mention to that, but nothing to turn the tide of my little tirade.
It used to be so inexplicable to me that Jonah would be angry that Nineveh repented. That they did what he asked and he saved the people he came there to save. That he saved a town. And then got angry about its children not dying in fire and brimstone for their parents' sins.
When you're angry enough to walk out on Nineveh in its hour of doom in the first place, it can be incredibly hard to allow Nineveh to be anything but a steaming cesspit of sin in your mind's eye. Imagine your guilt for burning a bridge when it turns out they could have been a nice person all along and will be someday. If you hadn't destroyed their life.
I wasn't anywhere near this scale today, but my worldview is still adjusting slowly to the true facts. Letting go of the anger and frustration best directed into solving the problem.
Nineveh did something remarkable and difficult to see. Difficult to look at. Not only because the moment of emotional repentance is invisible but because even the most visible acts of repentance and making amends are received by people who have already decided the transgressors' guilt.
Because we all forget that we will be judged by the measure we judge others. Forgiven our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Tuesday, 16 February 2016
Not Like the Pagans
So I think there might be something to the fact that today was awesome and I started with reading the daily mass readings in the morning. Yesterday that's when the day turned around and my thoughts stopped being so mired.
Also, I actually like teaching and working with the kids, and I think having a day without that but still at work was getting on my nerves a little. Not in an active way, just a subconscious "Really, I'm spending my limited sociability on non-students?" way.
This is actually relevant to what I want to talk about from the readings. Jesus talks about how God Our Father is not like the pagan gods, the golden calf and the Egyptians and Mesopotamians and all the others. Romans, most prominently, I'm sure.
Jesus and the Old Testament are in conversation, talking about two sides to the same key difference. Jesus talks about asking for boons, trying to figure out how to convince/appeal to/elicit sympathy from God in your prayer requests. The way you spin your life story to make Venus or Juno or Mars take your side. No. The paternoster will do just fine.
The Old Testament describes God's blessings flowing like rain down to us and then staying to bless us. Will not return to Him until they've done their work. I wonder how much of the water cycle was intuitively understood at the time. Because I think the point here was that the Earth did NOT affect God's powers right back.
It's not the old theory of our prayers or our sacrifices doing anything for GOD. No, our prayers and Lenten observances are about US. They are reforming our own soul. God is pleased by our work, we are continually told. He encourages us to do this work constantly. But not because it builds His power. Not because it benefits Him.
Not because, contrary to a random religious novel I read in high school that won't leave my mind until I mention it, our prayers are needed for God and His Angels to defeat the devil.
We are irrelevant to that ultimate struggle. God in His Infinite love cares about our small, individual struggle anyway. Just because He loves us.
Because we need Him. Not the other way around.
Also, I actually like teaching and working with the kids, and I think having a day without that but still at work was getting on my nerves a little. Not in an active way, just a subconscious "Really, I'm spending my limited sociability on non-students?" way.
This is actually relevant to what I want to talk about from the readings. Jesus talks about how God Our Father is not like the pagan gods, the golden calf and the Egyptians and Mesopotamians and all the others. Romans, most prominently, I'm sure.
Jesus and the Old Testament are in conversation, talking about two sides to the same key difference. Jesus talks about asking for boons, trying to figure out how to convince/appeal to/elicit sympathy from God in your prayer requests. The way you spin your life story to make Venus or Juno or Mars take your side. No. The paternoster will do just fine.
The Old Testament describes God's blessings flowing like rain down to us and then staying to bless us. Will not return to Him until they've done their work. I wonder how much of the water cycle was intuitively understood at the time. Because I think the point here was that the Earth did NOT affect God's powers right back.
It's not the old theory of our prayers or our sacrifices doing anything for GOD. No, our prayers and Lenten observances are about US. They are reforming our own soul. God is pleased by our work, we are continually told. He encourages us to do this work constantly. But not because it builds His power. Not because it benefits Him.
Not because, contrary to a random religious novel I read in high school that won't leave my mind until I mention it, our prayers are needed for God and His Angels to defeat the devil.
We are irrelevant to that ultimate struggle. God in His Infinite love cares about our small, individual struggle anyway. Just because He loves us.
Because we need Him. Not the other way around.
Monday, 15 February 2016
False Equivalencies
Today I spent a good portion of the afternoon fighting desperately not to be in a foul mood and then trying not to say anything negative in rehearsal because of it. And a good deal of the evening trying to figure out what my problem was. Besides being in a waxing and waning level of pain all day from a back spasm that needed a heating pad.
But I've had days of similar or greater pain without my mood turning like that. And I've had students be no-shows for key rehearsals before. Can't recall it happening on the same day, but it's not beyond the pale.
And part of me wonders if I'm not taking more to heart what I passed off as a casual comment in the professional development session this morning. I enjoyed the session tremendously, but after the first twenty minutes, I couldn't stop myself from muttering (I think inaudibly) "Wow, first world problems."
I shared with another colleague my disorientation to no longer be talking about student stressors in terms of family stability, economic pressures, whether or not the kid was eating tonight, whether a parent was in jail, whether there were drugs at the house, whether I would have to call CPS, whether anyone had modeled caring about education, etc.
I immediately jumped in that I didn't mean that over-scheduling and anxiety-induced depression weren't serious. And I do mean that.
But reading the readings today -- especially the Old Testament reading which spells out the things that you must do to be holy -- I can't help feeling like this is something to think about. The actions outlined are all actions taken behalf of the oppressed on the lowest rungs of society.
Or to choose an issue that doesn't just annoy me but makes me want to fight back: you don't spit on those caught in random drug sweeps with questionable culpability as they rot in jail; you fight to reform the system that leaves them there for months because they can't pay $200 bails. Sometimes forcing them out of public housing or high schools, effectively ruining their lives for cases that, if they went to trial, would quickly result in their acquittal.
And then the part that really made me think:
Notice there's no "balance" to it. No false equivalencies. No "don't be partial to the weak nor unfair to the mighty." Because the Biblical authors knew better.
It's not that it never happens. It's not like there aren't people shouting and shouting about things that aren't the boss's fault or, say, demanding to see President Obama's long-form birth certificate just to stir up trouble.
But the boss is the one with the power to fire people. It's a much bigger deal when he is unjust.
Yes, there is suffering and unhappiness in the top tiers of society. There is suffering everywhere. But it is the lowest of the low, the dispossessed, the people in our system (increasingly hampered by voter ID laws no less) least likely to be served by the system as is, who should be our top priority.
Which gives me all kinds of guilt about leaving the job where I was teaching writing skills to the most disadvantaged population I've ever had regular, direct contact with to be the elective teacher and theatre artist to inspire a population that would be just fine with or without me.
I'm not saying I don't do good every day. I'm just asking when was the last time I fed the starving, instead of just bringing cookies to the students who just had lunch anyway.
But I've had days of similar or greater pain without my mood turning like that. And I've had students be no-shows for key rehearsals before. Can't recall it happening on the same day, but it's not beyond the pale.
And part of me wonders if I'm not taking more to heart what I passed off as a casual comment in the professional development session this morning. I enjoyed the session tremendously, but after the first twenty minutes, I couldn't stop myself from muttering (I think inaudibly) "Wow, first world problems."
I shared with another colleague my disorientation to no longer be talking about student stressors in terms of family stability, economic pressures, whether or not the kid was eating tonight, whether a parent was in jail, whether there were drugs at the house, whether I would have to call CPS, whether anyone had modeled caring about education, etc.
I immediately jumped in that I didn't mean that over-scheduling and anxiety-induced depression weren't serious. And I do mean that.
But reading the readings today -- especially the Old Testament reading which spells out the things that you must do to be holy -- I can't help feeling like this is something to think about. The actions outlined are all actions taken behalf of the oppressed on the lowest rungs of society.
You shall not withhold overnight the wages of your day laborer.You shall not punch down. Righteous anger is directed upward at those with power over you. At those who may punish you if you do not convince them or they feel threatened by your protest. You don't mock and swat at college students who feel powerless in the struggle to prevent offensive statements being made by their intended mentors who protest tactless comments they make. You move against college presidents who fire tenured professors for disagreeing with their financial models. One is punching down at people who cannot hurt you but who dare to speak against you anyway. The other is punching up at people who could make you suffer for it but who need to be corrected anyway.
You shall not curse the deaf,
or put a stumbling block in front of the blind
Or to choose an issue that doesn't just annoy me but makes me want to fight back: you don't spit on those caught in random drug sweeps with questionable culpability as they rot in jail; you fight to reform the system that leaves them there for months because they can't pay $200 bails. Sometimes forcing them out of public housing or high schools, effectively ruining their lives for cases that, if they went to trial, would quickly result in their acquittal.
And then the part that really made me think:
You shall not act dishonestly in rendering judgment.
Show neither partiality to the weak nor deference to the mighty
Notice there's no "balance" to it. No false equivalencies. No "don't be partial to the weak nor unfair to the mighty." Because the Biblical authors knew better.
It's not that it never happens. It's not like there aren't people shouting and shouting about things that aren't the boss's fault or, say, demanding to see President Obama's long-form birth certificate just to stir up trouble.
But the boss is the one with the power to fire people. It's a much bigger deal when he is unjust.
Yes, there is suffering and unhappiness in the top tiers of society. There is suffering everywhere. But it is the lowest of the low, the dispossessed, the people in our system (increasingly hampered by voter ID laws no less) least likely to be served by the system as is, who should be our top priority.
Which gives me all kinds of guilt about leaving the job where I was teaching writing skills to the most disadvantaged population I've ever had regular, direct contact with to be the elective teacher and theatre artist to inspire a population that would be just fine with or without me.
I'm not saying I don't do good every day. I'm just asking when was the last time I fed the starving, instead of just bringing cookies to the students who just had lunch anyway.
Sunday, 14 February 2016
Lest You Dash Your Foot Against a Stone
Today on Facebook, someone posted a meme asking, "Who starts a hymn with 'you who'?" which got stuck in my head.
The priest at mass mentioned how sometimes you can read a Bible story over and over again and yet still, all of a sudden, a certain verse jumps out at you. The one that jumped out at him wasn't the same as mine, especially primed as I was to think about "On Eagle's Wings".
Because I never put that together, that the fourth verse, "For to His angels He's given a command: to guard you in all of your ways. Upon their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone" is not about the angels having to turn away from helping you because you have turned from God's blessings like Moses dashing the stone that was giving water in his anger. After all, Moses used his staff, not his foot for that. That's the image I've always referenced though.
And I'm sure "Eagle's Wings" is based on the psalm the devil is quoting in Jesus's temptation...but boy oh boy did it make me wonder about all of the songs in church today about calling on God in distress. "Be With Me Lord" had a moment that stuck out to me. "When I'm in trouble and I don't know where to go."
Jesus tells the Devil that it would be putting God to the test, that it would be unworthy to force God's hand. That going around jumping off buildings because you think God should protect, well, it just makes you that man who's house is flooding. Who dies praying for God's help and goes to heaven to be told that he turned away the news report, the truck, the row boat, and the helicopter that God sent.
What we should pray to God for help with is withstanding temptations. Be they obvious but still seductive, like Jesus endured in the desert, or subtle, fast-moving, and easy to miss like they seem to appear in ordinary life.
Jesus demonstrated in a dire situation that you don't demand that God turn rocks into bread even though He could. You don't demand a boon. That the rules of the world be granted. Yes, He has a history of doing it. But you don't get to set the schedule for your own convenience.
And you don't make a show of His power on your whim or for your pride or to make your job easier to do.
And you don't even pray away the existing structure and nature of the world.
Not because it's good enough.
Because that's our job, our work. Of course God could wave it all away. And sometimes that's all I want Him to do as well. But God and His angels don't run around keeping stones out of my path. I believe they give me spiritual comfort and strength. I believe they've helped me find my peace in moments of trial. To reach for my best self.
With difficult parents or students to make that little mental checkpoint of, "Okay, how would I have responded to that request if they had made it respectfully?"
Praying for strength for yourself to endure the world makes sense to me. And I have been spiritually cradled in God's hand (or eagle's wings if you prefer).
But I won't ask Him to turn the stones in my path into bread or distort the laws of gravity to allow me to float gently down from a great height.
The priest at mass mentioned how sometimes you can read a Bible story over and over again and yet still, all of a sudden, a certain verse jumps out at you. The one that jumped out at him wasn't the same as mine, especially primed as I was to think about "On Eagle's Wings".
Because I never put that together, that the fourth verse, "For to His angels He's given a command: to guard you in all of your ways. Upon their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone" is not about the angels having to turn away from helping you because you have turned from God's blessings like Moses dashing the stone that was giving water in his anger. After all, Moses used his staff, not his foot for that. That's the image I've always referenced though.
And I'm sure "Eagle's Wings" is based on the psalm the devil is quoting in Jesus's temptation...but boy oh boy did it make me wonder about all of the songs in church today about calling on God in distress. "Be With Me Lord" had a moment that stuck out to me. "When I'm in trouble and I don't know where to go."
Jesus tells the Devil that it would be putting God to the test, that it would be unworthy to force God's hand. That going around jumping off buildings because you think God should protect, well, it just makes you that man who's house is flooding. Who dies praying for God's help and goes to heaven to be told that he turned away the news report, the truck, the row boat, and the helicopter that God sent.
What we should pray to God for help with is withstanding temptations. Be they obvious but still seductive, like Jesus endured in the desert, or subtle, fast-moving, and easy to miss like they seem to appear in ordinary life.
Jesus demonstrated in a dire situation that you don't demand that God turn rocks into bread even though He could. You don't demand a boon. That the rules of the world be granted. Yes, He has a history of doing it. But you don't get to set the schedule for your own convenience.
And you don't make a show of His power on your whim or for your pride or to make your job easier to do.
And you don't even pray away the existing structure and nature of the world.
Not because it's good enough.
Because that's our job, our work. Of course God could wave it all away. And sometimes that's all I want Him to do as well. But God and His angels don't run around keeping stones out of my path. I believe they give me spiritual comfort and strength. I believe they've helped me find my peace in moments of trial. To reach for my best self.
With difficult parents or students to make that little mental checkpoint of, "Okay, how would I have responded to that request if they had made it respectfully?"
Praying for strength for yourself to endure the world makes sense to me. And I have been spiritually cradled in God's hand (or eagle's wings if you prefer).
But I won't ask Him to turn the stones in my path into bread or distort the laws of gravity to allow me to float gently down from a great height.
The Righteous To Repentance
Today's gospel is Jesus feasting with tax collectors. He says in explanation, "I come not to call the righteous to repentance but the sinners."
I can think of two ways in which this can be a very hard thing to hear, even though it sounds like it should be so simple and obvious it's hard not to imagine even Jesus the Christ speaking with some annoyed sarcasm. Sarcasm isn't quite the right word.
The first is that Jesus called them to repent, and they are the last who would want to hear that they are not the righteous
The second comes from the reaction I had to an article about an abusive teacher. Boy did I try hard to justify her. A knee-jerk response to the video that there must be some context, some history, or just some terrible terrible day that led to a momentarily losing of her calm.
But then why was the assistant teacher already filming? Like she knew it was coming?
And the more I read, the more I could see that the philosophy of the school is deeply upsetting. Actively terrible.
Even then, I want to blame standardized testing for creating it (which isn't entirely unfair given the culture of the school from appearances).
There's a knee-jerk reaction to protect those like us. A knee-jerk reaction to defend and protect people in our profession, or who live off tax overflow/temple tithes. Even when we demonize them as our opposites, well, you have to have a lot in common to be the "opposite" of someone or something. The opposite of black is white, not aardvark.
I'm not saying there was an explicit kinship, but that knee-jerk reaction to defend ourselves and others -- it gets in the way of seeing grace. Or it can, in any case. How often in politics or the workplace do we want the people who are pointing out the horrors of the world to just shut up?
The Old Testament story is about doing good works and being active in practicing your faith to please God. It's a string in that theory, but this is a list much like the eventual beatitudes and more specific policy instructions than the "Feed My Sheep" story for St. Peter.
I told my mother at our Galentine's Day dinner tonight that I hung a poster in my classroom this semester:
The sinners need repentance. But the sinners also know they need to repent. Those who believe themselves righteous -- no matter how close they are to being right -- are hard to talk to. Because it's so hard for them to hear that they still have a ways to go.
You can't "finish" becoming a good person or filling your life with the work of fixing the world. Until the Second Coming you can't finish cleaning up humanities cruelties. You can't finish feminism or end racism or other forms of prejudice. Can't declare them solved, despite everyone trying (in the last several years especially).
The righteous aren't called to repentance. But we all are. Because we're not there yet, and our world certainly isn't. It's hard to hear that, because we all want to be good people. We all want to be there. We all want to be good people already.
It's more important for us to get there eventually. It's more important for us to work at it.
I can think of two ways in which this can be a very hard thing to hear, even though it sounds like it should be so simple and obvious it's hard not to imagine even Jesus the Christ speaking with some annoyed sarcasm. Sarcasm isn't quite the right word.
The first is that Jesus called them to repent, and they are the last who would want to hear that they are not the righteous
The second comes from the reaction I had to an article about an abusive teacher. Boy did I try hard to justify her. A knee-jerk response to the video that there must be some context, some history, or just some terrible terrible day that led to a momentarily losing of her calm.
But then why was the assistant teacher already filming? Like she knew it was coming?
And the more I read, the more I could see that the philosophy of the school is deeply upsetting. Actively terrible.
Even then, I want to blame standardized testing for creating it (which isn't entirely unfair given the culture of the school from appearances).
There's a knee-jerk reaction to protect those like us. A knee-jerk reaction to defend and protect people in our profession, or who live off tax overflow/temple tithes. Even when we demonize them as our opposites, well, you have to have a lot in common to be the "opposite" of someone or something. The opposite of black is white, not aardvark.
I'm not saying there was an explicit kinship, but that knee-jerk reaction to defend ourselves and others -- it gets in the way of seeing grace. Or it can, in any case. How often in politics or the workplace do we want the people who are pointing out the horrors of the world to just shut up?
The Old Testament story is about doing good works and being active in practicing your faith to please God. It's a string in that theory, but this is a list much like the eventual beatitudes and more specific policy instructions than the "Feed My Sheep" story for St. Peter.
I told my mother at our Galentine's Day dinner tonight that I hung a poster in my classroom this semester:
The world is made up of two kinds of people. People who want to think of themselves as good people and people who are willing to work at it. Never judge someone in the second category for having further to go than you do.
The sinners need repentance. But the sinners also know they need to repent. Those who believe themselves righteous -- no matter how close they are to being right -- are hard to talk to. Because it's so hard for them to hear that they still have a ways to go.
You can't "finish" becoming a good person or filling your life with the work of fixing the world. Until the Second Coming you can't finish cleaning up humanities cruelties. You can't finish feminism or end racism or other forms of prejudice. Can't declare them solved, despite everyone trying (in the last several years especially).
The righteous aren't called to repentance. But we all are. Because we're not there yet, and our world certainly isn't. It's hard to hear that, because we all want to be good people. We all want to be there. We all want to be good people already.
It's more important for us to get there eventually. It's more important for us to work at it.
Friday, 12 February 2016
Fasting
Today, I fasted. I had a baked potato without the barbecue beef that keeps it from tasting uncomfortably of just butter and processed cheese slush. And I lucked out that the Indian place trying to close down as I arrived had one food item left that was potato based. It was excellent.
The first reading is the most blunt today. I suspect the Old Testament is often like that. Jesus's words on fasting today are that the time will come when He is no longer here and then fasting is appropriate. Fasting is inappropriate in times of joy.
Being a party-pooper is not serving the Lord.
Every day, I make my students recite a phrase inspired by the Marianne Williamson quote:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Make ourselves ostentatiously smaller does not make us more holy.
Joy comes in its season. Grief comes in its season. Repentance comes in its season. That is Jesus's message today.
Sometimes I wonder about the Liturgical Calendar, but then: perhaps we need to force the issue of repentance now and again.
The Old Testament is about what that repentance should look like, and it is unequivocal.
Is this the manner of fasting I wish,
of keeping a day of penance:
That a man bow his head like a reed
and lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD?
This, rather, is the fasting that I wish:
releasing those bound unjustly,
untying the thongs of the yoke;
Setting free the oppressed,
breaking every yoke;
Sharing your bread with the hungry,
sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;
Clothing the naked when you see them,
and not turning your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your wound shall quickly be healed;
Do active good. No exceptions.
You want forgiveness for the harm you've done? The victim isn't willing to accept your apology? Won't answer your 1,001st call to say you're sorry?
Go help strangers. Go help people for no personal gain. Go and do good in the world instead. Fix our broken world so that fewer people have things to repent. Go make forgiveness more common.
Thursday, 11 February 2016
Revenge, Tragedy, and Forgiveness
I finished today a short novel I devoured during my sick days this week. The Gap of Time, a retelling of The Winter's Tale, which is probably my real favorite Shakespeare play. Even though I love Twelfth Night.
The author puts forward a thesis I wanted to explore in this blog, even though I've made a commitment to use the daily Mass readings. But, of course, I found my answer or at least my prompt in the readings today. I really need to trust in the Lord sometimes. If nothing else, I've learned that this week. When I have been cradled in the palm of His hand and feeling like I am just along for the ride.
Jeanette Winterstone posits that there are only 3 real endings: revenge, tragedy, and forgiveness.
There's a kind of balance to it. Tragedy is where everything starts out precious and glorious but delicate and ends in ashes and ruin. Forgiveness is when thing are terrible and broken but then through love and chance everything is better and whole again or at least made new.
Revenge then is something terrible happening and something terrible happening in return. Both sides of the coin are bad.
Can we have a story that is good straight way through? Can we have a life, if not a story? If stories are conflict, and our stories are how we expect the world to be, then what does that say of our lives?
In answer to this query from a novelist, the Catholic Church poses a riddle of juxtaposition. It's a trio contained a pair of contradictions.
Seriously, read it.
First, Moses tells us that we have two choices for our path in life. Life and Death, Good and Bad, Sin and Righteousness, God's favor or God's scorn. We choose by our actions.
And at first glance, the psalm gives us a glimpse of what that life would look like if we made the appropriate choice. God is with us. Our way is easy, our burden so light, our enemies flee like chaff before us.
But the gospel promise reminds us what followed Moses's promise and directly contradicts the psalm. The Way of Life was to start a war to uproot the people settled in the Holy Land. The Good Way, the Easier, Light Yoke involved years of bloodshed and difficulty.
And Jesus tells us that He will suffer persecution and that anyone who would follow Him must take up His cross in order to follow. We don't want to be the easy street that leads to tragedy. So we must take the messy road that leads to the work of forgiveness. It's easy compared to the Revenge Route, which is dark the whole way, and it has a better ending than what might be tempting about the bright path that will descend into tragedy.
But it takes real faith to walk that way. To look at the light yoke we are promised by Moses and the psalm as we live the reality of the cross Jesus asks us to take on our backs, as we fight the battles Joshua leads us into. As we do the awkward, painful, messy work of redemption and forgiveness.
It's so much harder and more awkward and weirder and uncomfortable to forgive. To keep instead of cut. To open instead of shut.
But of the endings we have for choice, it is the best path. We walk by faith and not by sight. One of the three roads looks like the best when you set out. The bright, wide pathway. It takes faith to follow instead the narrow road.
Wednesday, 10 February 2016
Ash Wednesday 2016
I've thought a lot about the central message of the gospel on Ash Wednesday. To pray and, more than that, to repent, without anyone to watch.
And approve. And encourage. And forgive. And soothe. Overall to approve.
A lot of things in the last year have converged in my mind tonight to make me think of how to live it better.
The letter I wrote to two friends trying to explain a guilt for a crime I didn't think anyone else would understand. A thing that was not so much a sin as a failure to do a kindness. A kindness that I knew would look like insanity to my companions but knew in that moment to be right. They only received it months later and wrote back with forgiveness and a question mark, knowing it wasn't really there's to give but wanting it for me anyway.
I told them, lightly, that they wrote just in time to remind me of it. When the sting was gone enough that I could look at it more squarely. Without drowning in guilt I couldn't explain properly.
That's one of the reasons people apologize. They are drowning in guilt. Saying it makes it easier. Putting it in words makes it manageable. What can be spoken can be managed. Probably untrue, but it feels true.
I read a review of Adele's new album that pointed out the problem with a woman who "must have called a thousand times / to tell you I'm sorry / for breaking your heart." Saying simply: that's too many times. They don't want to talk to you. If you're the one who hurt them, then the kind thing, the making-amends thing, is to back away. Not demand reconciliation. That's what a thousand calls is. Not just a woman drowning in guilt, but a drowning woman demanding you give her your life vest.
I'm not saying you shouldn't. But if you're the one who wrecked the boat, you don't get to be self-righteous about who gets in the lifeboat.
There's a television show called Finding Carter that started unbelievably strong and went off the rails pretty quickly and nearly got it back then just took a nosedive. It's about a teenage girls who gets arrested for a misdemeanor and finds out her fingerprints match those of a kidnap victim. Her "mother" kidnapped her, and her real family is taking her back.
But then there's so much drama, and the kidnapper is acquitted, and everyone somehow becomes deeply judgmental that the biological mom and the non-kidnapped daughter refuse to forgive the kidnapper.
You shouldn't have to be kind to the woman who ruined your life and actively put your life in danger. You should be allowed to cut ties. The person who hurt you should give you that kindness.
The last book of the Divergent series described it possibly best.
Asking for forgiveness is inherently selfish. It can be done for the right reasons, and I believe that the majority of people deserve it. No. That is cowardice. I believe that all people deserve it. That is one of my core beliefs, deep down in my soul.
But ask for it quietly. And you must accept that someone might not be ready to give it.
If you can do this, let the person you hurt refuse to take away your pain without fuss or complaint -- without loud lamentation that turns public sentiment from them to you, if you can be that strong and carry that hurt and panic: then perhaps you will glimpse the faintest edge of the truth of how much God loves you. How powerful He is to forgive.
Because we hurt Him so profoundly with every wrong we do. And He forgives us utterly. He bore all our penance. What we offer Him is for ourselves, our own healing, our own reminders not to repeat.
So repent quietly, without asking others to shoulder any of your pain. Ask God what will heal your soul, not what will make you feel less pain for your actions.
And approve. And encourage. And forgive. And soothe. Overall to approve.
A lot of things in the last year have converged in my mind tonight to make me think of how to live it better.
The letter I wrote to two friends trying to explain a guilt for a crime I didn't think anyone else would understand. A thing that was not so much a sin as a failure to do a kindness. A kindness that I knew would look like insanity to my companions but knew in that moment to be right. They only received it months later and wrote back with forgiveness and a question mark, knowing it wasn't really there's to give but wanting it for me anyway.
I told them, lightly, that they wrote just in time to remind me of it. When the sting was gone enough that I could look at it more squarely. Without drowning in guilt I couldn't explain properly.
That's one of the reasons people apologize. They are drowning in guilt. Saying it makes it easier. Putting it in words makes it manageable. What can be spoken can be managed. Probably untrue, but it feels true.
I read a review of Adele's new album that pointed out the problem with a woman who "must have called a thousand times / to tell you I'm sorry / for breaking your heart." Saying simply: that's too many times. They don't want to talk to you. If you're the one who hurt them, then the kind thing, the making-amends thing, is to back away. Not demand reconciliation. That's what a thousand calls is. Not just a woman drowning in guilt, but a drowning woman demanding you give her your life vest.
I'm not saying you shouldn't. But if you're the one who wrecked the boat, you don't get to be self-righteous about who gets in the lifeboat.
There's a television show called Finding Carter that started unbelievably strong and went off the rails pretty quickly and nearly got it back then just took a nosedive. It's about a teenage girls who gets arrested for a misdemeanor and finds out her fingerprints match those of a kidnap victim. Her "mother" kidnapped her, and her real family is taking her back.
But then there's so much drama, and the kidnapper is acquitted, and everyone somehow becomes deeply judgmental that the biological mom and the non-kidnapped daughter refuse to forgive the kidnapper.
You shouldn't have to be kind to the woman who ruined your life and actively put your life in danger. You should be allowed to cut ties. The person who hurt you should give you that kindness.
The last book of the Divergent series described it possibly best.
Not everyone shares my love of Veronica Roth, and especially since the movie it is compared very negatively to The Hunger Games which I actually think is LESS well-written. But didn't she nail this?To me, when someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing - the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself. Caleb's betrayal is something we both carry, and since he did it, all I've wanted is for him to take its weight away from me. I am not sure that I'm capable of shouldering it all myself - not sure that I am strong enough, or good enough.
Asking for forgiveness is inherently selfish. It can be done for the right reasons, and I believe that the majority of people deserve it. No. That is cowardice. I believe that all people deserve it. That is one of my core beliefs, deep down in my soul.
But ask for it quietly. And you must accept that someone might not be ready to give it.
If you can do this, let the person you hurt refuse to take away your pain without fuss or complaint -- without loud lamentation that turns public sentiment from them to you, if you can be that strong and carry that hurt and panic: then perhaps you will glimpse the faintest edge of the truth of how much God loves you. How powerful He is to forgive.
Because we hurt Him so profoundly with every wrong we do. And He forgives us utterly. He bore all our penance. What we offer Him is for ourselves, our own healing, our own reminders not to repeat.
So repent quietly, without asking others to shoulder any of your pain. Ask God what will heal your soul, not what will make you feel less pain for your actions.
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