of diapers and documentaries

As I prepare for my next job, I am painfully aware that I have a lot of catching up to do: all the reading I've been doing about eco-parenting, infant pottying, child development and breastfeeding is wonderful, but it won't help me during my deployment to Afghanistan. Lately, I return home completely fried from working through lunches, endless reading and analysis, and the last thing I want to do is read anything. All I can say is: praise the Lord for the digital age.

My burgeoning Audible account is primed with audiobooks on the region for my daily commute and imminent roadtrips, and this helps me gain the needed momentum to tackle the stack of physical books I have amassed at home. It will be a miracle if I ever finish all of them, despite my customary bibliophilia. Another outlet for research on tired evenings after baby is in bed, collapsed on the couch with a plate of hot supper my husband has made and the laundry for me to fold, is our instant DVD queue. While the minimal selection for my area of interest makes me wary of biases my film sample might contain, I watch documentaries serially for perspective on what Afghans think, the balance of power in Asia and the Middle East, and the Global War on Terror. Even exploring Wild China can heighten my geopolitical awareness.  The documentaries and storytelling movies currently on my list?

National Geographic's Talibanistan
PBS's Motherland Afghanistan
Restrepo
Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan
Camp Victory, Afghanistan
PBS Frontline's Obama's War
PBS Frontline's Bush's War
PBS Frontline's Rules of Engagement
Kabul Transit
Behind Taliban Lines
Afghan Star: The Documentary
No One Knows About Persian Cats
Operation Homecoming 
The Kite Runner
The Stoning of Soraya M.
Persepolis

Please let me know if I have missed anything. I am sure there are many more of these out there to be discovered. In the meantime, I spend my evenings folding laundry and watching the documentaries I can find on Netflix. It is an odd pastime, but one that increasingly gets my mind prepared for the months ahead.

The more I watch, the more I am forced to recall how fallen our world is. I watch Motherland Afghanistan and I weep with a mother who has just lost twin babies several weeks apart for lack of neonatal intensive care equipment, proper nutrition and sanitation. As the light goes out of the obstetrician's eyes, I cry like it is my daughter I have just lost. I watch Restrepo and I put myself in the shoes of a dedicated, but culturally naive company commander whose lack of historical knowledge about the battlespace undermines his sincere efforts to fight insurgents in the Korengal Valley. I can taste the sweat and dust, my face heats up with frustration. I watch the swelling ranks of Afghan Star viewers cheer and vote for their favorite singer, even though I have only watched two episodes of American Idol and its spinoffs in my entire life. I feel the first-time thrill of democracy: texting my vote from a low-cost cell phone. I watch the story of a wealthy Pashtuni boy and his family's Hazara servant unfold through the flying of kites. It stings my eight-year-old self, way back on the playground, when the boys' friendship is threatened by violence and intolerance. I watch Soraya M. martyred by her husband's slander, and shudder as the village becomes party to his lustful pursuits of a girl half his age. I hear electric strains of underground music from Iranian musicians and I smile and think, rock on. My dinner churns in my stomach as I weigh the claims of Brave New Foundation that our actions in Afghanistan have not made the region more stable or the United States more secure from terrorism. I wonder what the history books will say about Operation Enduring Freedom at the end of my life...and after.

What C.S. Lewis famously wrote about reading great literature in his Experiment in Criticism is true of watching a good documentary for me: "...I become a thousand men and yet remain myself...I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see." The ancient Greek playwrights would nod approvingly at my cathartic moments in watching the human drama unfold. Vague awareness that these things occur and recalling them to mind everyday are two different things, and even when I allow myself to forget about all the suffering and evil in the world, the prophet Jeremiah  (chapter 17) reminds me,

⁹ “The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick; 
Who can understand it?
¹⁰ “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind,
Even to give to each man according to his ways,
According to the results of his deeds. 

I pray that I will not be complicit in deceit or injustice. I pray for the fortitude and honesty to bear these secondhand experiences intelligently, and without being slavish to my own biases. I pray for spiritual insight beyond the purview of analysis. I am not sure how anyone can be certain of what the ground truth is in any human endeavor--especially a war against an insurgency--yet I hope for wisdom. St. Paul reminds me in 1 Corinthians 2:

¹¹ For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. ¹² Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, ¹³ which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. ¹⁴ But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. ¹⁵ But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one. ¹⁶ For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, THAT HE WILL INSTRUCT HIM? But we have the mind of Christ."

I fold diapers, I take deep breaths, and I watch. I pray to have the mind of Christ.

a debt of gratitude

There are a few phrases circulating throughout military senior leaders' speeches that have almost lost their meaning for me. "Train as you fight," "We need to nest our mission with higher," and "I would offer to you" all have begun to ring false in my ears as the leaders who use them often deviate wildly in action from their words, much to the harm of their subordinates and the organization. Perhaps a time will come when I can write about these experiences without bitterness or resentment. Today, however, I feel the overwhelming desire to redeem one such phrase: "we owe a debt of gratitude."

As I face the prospect of two more years in the Army, and the experience of deployed motherhood, there are days when I believe I can do it all with panache...and then there are days when I am tempted with despair. I have been fairly certain for most of my life that my true vocation lies outside the Army and in a high school class room. This keeps me looking for a light at the end of the tunnel during dark days, when the organizational culture that gives context to my task and purpose seems oppressive or futile. On brighter days, I believe that everything I do is contributing to some future endeavor, that nothing learned or experienced in uniform will go to waste.

In college I encountered the concept of Christian vocation, due to a project funded by the Lilly Endowment, expressed in the words of theologian Frederick Buechner: “Vocation is where your great joy meets the world's great need." These words rang true for me, and kindled a focused search for my personal calling. A combination of natural interest and ability, research and study, and the dire need in our educational system for good teachers have led me to conclude that teaching is my calling in the highest sense. I came into the Army both to finance that goal and to ensure that I would have experiences to draw from within my pedagogical practice. The privilege of serving my country and the joy being part of something bigger than myself were also motivators. The Army has not disappointed me in this, but the road has been fraught with disillusionment and burnout that I did not anticipate.

There was a time when my energy and enthusiasm for any task set before me were limitless, and I believed I could do "anything for two years." I used to say as much, varying the quantity of time by the commitments I faced. My boundless optimism seemed confirmed by performance evaluations and initial job satisfaction. By a severe kind of mercy, I reached total burnout during my third year of service, and this was strange because I had not yet gone to war. My frustration fed itself despite repeated attempts to reign in my angst, producing brutally candid--and at times disrespectful--communication with my superiors. Perhaps the most confusing was that my performance evaluations continued to glow with the highest praise. A part of me wanted them to lose confidence in me so that I wouldn't have to continue the sprint I'd begun as a bright-eyed lieutenant. If I couldn't have meaningful work in a synergistic command climate, I wanted to rest; to work like a mindless drone from 0600 to 1700 (from six to five) and go home. It was too painful to care about work I hated: I didn't want to be asked to lead special projects or put in any extra effort, since I had realized that a lack of boundaries at work had partly fueled my burnout. I both found the voice of advocacy for my troops and damaged their loyalty to the chain of command with my vocal feedback, and as I look back I wish I could erase the collateral damage of my learning process. 

Although the Army has currently embraced "resilience" as a watchword that nods at spiritual fitness as a factor, there has been little in the way of practical, functional advice of how to become resilient when all the odds seem against you. I find my best examples in my Soldiers and in my peers. The answers I sought for stress management, resiliency, and coping with authoritarian bosses are still emergent, but I am now grateful to have had the experience of burnout so young. I have the opportunity, in the context of Christian, family, and military community, to avoid the road to despair in future tough assignments. My next job promises to be sleepless and grueling, and I am unsure what the rewards will be while I am separated from my family. Of course, I want to do my part to ensure we all come home without violating rules of engagement, with our values and consciences intact. I want to help Afghans in a situation where it is increasingly unclear how we can have any lasting positive impact. I have few answers for how to tackle this next challenge, but there is the seed of something that I intend to cultivate more of: gratitude. I have this gut feeling that it might be the antidote to despair. 

The insight came to me while listening to Dr. Andrew Weil on the radio, and because I believe that all truth is God's truth, it was easy to appropriate what a secular source had to say about gratitude. After all, "the skies proclaim God's handiwork," so why shouldn't neurochemistry and health research do te same? Dr. Weil's latest book called Spontaneous Happiness highlighted two concepts that are staggeringly Biblical: the first is that "happiness" in the modern sense of feeling elated all the time is a misnomer that is unsupported by millennia of human experience. Instead, Dr. Weil suggested, we should focus on contentment as our goal, because it is our choice in response to a myriad of circumstances. The second was the idea that the expression of gratitude has measurable positive effects on patient health. Dr. Weil reported drastic improvements in patients who kept a gratitude journal, for example. 

Scripture is replete with verses about thanksgiving, but this morning I need one that addresses two different visions I have--one is on the other side of deployment, a triumphant and energetic overcomer in that high school classroom of my future--the other, of a dusty deployment full of tired computer-screen-eyes and the presence of real human suffering, both Afghan and Coalition. This is what I found in Psalm 69:

 ²⁹ But as for me, afflicted and in pain—
   may your salvation, God, protect me.
 ³⁰ I will praise God’s name in song
   and glorify him with thanksgiving.
³¹ This will please the LORD more than an ox,
   more than a bull with its horns and hooves.
³² The poor will see and be glad—
   you who seek God, may your hearts live!
³³ The LORD hears the needy
   and does not despise his captive people.

What I immediately notice is that God is not like a capricious boss out to make a name for himself, but takes more pleasure in our songs of thanks than in our sacrifices. This assures me that while my blood, sweat and tears do not go unnoticed, the condition of my heart is the focal point for pleasing God. If I can recall this more often, perhaps I can avoid getting on the hamster-wheel of pleasing others through my hard work and accomplishments. If my work offerings to others are really just a way to give thanks to God, I might be able to renew my best energies rather than depleting them with little to show for it. What I notice next is that this burst of hope comes in the middle of a litany of corruption, societal vice, disillusionment and failed human relationships. The psalmist knows all too well what life in a fallen world is like. It is just possible that my deployment will be different than this, but it is likely that it will be a very mixed bag.

I have decided to explore how gratitude can inoculate me against the most toxic things I might experience. Today, I will focus on the fact that I will deploy with my sister, that my daughter is healthy, that my husband is my best friend, and that as he carries out the duties of full-time dad, he will enjoy the support of our family and friends, as well a Reserve job he loves while I am gone. I will be glad that I get paid to get back in (and stay!) in shape every morning, that there are always a handful of people to really enjoy working with in every organization, and that we are going to wear the more practical and comfortable MultiCam uniforms and not the stiff Army Combat Uniform we currently endure. Today, I will start a "Gratitude Wall," where among the mail I need to answer and the ink cartridges I need to recycle, I will write or add anything that makes me glad to be alive. I will go to the wall and meditate on something to add regularly, and any time I feel defeat at my shoulder. I will let nothing be too small a cause for thanksgiving. I will see if remembering that God is on the throne and that I have much more than I need to survive will lead to thriving in difficult places.

the riddle of the sphinx

Few things are so joyfully disarming as a baby trying out her first glottal stops under the Christmas tree. On picking her up to bury my face in baby fat, she broadcasts a wide, toothless grin. Sometimes she smiles so hard, it looks like it hurts. Her smiles proliferate, it seems, the better we get to know each other, the less we have to guess at what comes next. More often than not, we look forward to bedtimes and to waking, to baths and sweet potatoes and grass and crawling...there is much to look forward to, and plenty to grin about.

At other times, she looks at me quizzically, one eyebrow cocked, both eyes wide. She seems to be wondering if I know what I'm doing, or if this is some kind of rookie parent mistake. It is the same face, I think, that I make when sizing up a new commander or boss: she is both impressed and wary, and she'd love to chat about all her thoughts on how we could improve our organization! The trouble is that she only has about four phonemes currently at her disposal.

It has been said that the reason we don't remember our first months of life is that they can be traumatic--our sojourn in a strange, new world begins almost before we are ready. With only a range of cries, flails, reflexes and stares, we are left to communicate with often unexperienced interpreters. It is the beginning of an arc that can take us to an eerily similar end-of-life experience. Like the ancient riddle of the sphinx suggests, we are strange creatures who go from four legs to two and then three. Whether we go out with a bang like St. Peter, or we quietly fade from disease into shadows of our former selves, Jesus' words to Peter describe the phenomenon so well: "...I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." (John 21:18, NIV)

So much of a baby's life mirrors this feeling of helplessness, even as we watch her strive and gain her autonomy by increments every day. How strange to reflect, gazing at a baby, on the end of her life...even stranger to imagine all the ways that adult life can still script and array our waking hours to lead us where we do not want to go. For me, more precisely, that means being led away from where I most want to be: I recently learned that a deployment to Afghanistan is on the horizon.

Predictably, any eagerness to put professional training to good use is muted by my anxiety about long-distance motherhood. What will I miss, while she is tripling her vocabulary every day, and I am searching for succint and diplomatic ways to render difficult news...while she is learning to dress herself and I am donning the same uniform every day? It is impossible to know how we will both feel about the experience afterward, but during this anticipation, I watch her a lot for clues. She is, after all, the person I've most recently watched undergo a transformation, and I wonder what secrets of bravery and contentment I can learn from her that might help carry me through this separation.

My best thought so far is expressed in Psalm 3: "To the Lord I cry aloud, and He answers me...I lie down and sleep, I wake again because the Lord sustains me. I will not fear the tens of thousands on every side." (verses 4-6, NIV) Because I know too many combat veterans, new parents, and babies alike who cannot sleep through the night, this verse has become my special prayer. Beyond my obsession with getting enough good sleep, this verse is a picture of secure attachment between child and caregiver, God and God's children.

Rarely anymore do we hear our daughter sound the panic alarm, as she has expanded her repertoire to include monosyllabic chants, moans, and whinings that tell us she is trying to soothe herself as she drops off to sleep. Once in a while, she can still sound the sorrowful note we first learned to swiftly comfort--the one that sounds like she has surely been abandoned to starvation and the elements. It is horrific to hear, and it is a pleasure to alleviate her fears with our presence. In a very real sense, we sustain her between waking and sleeping, and in doing so mirror all the duties of our Divine parent. It is easier to feel oneself washed, wrapped, fed, and warmed by the Creator when you see a baby's panicked or peeved face give way to pure contentment.

So much of our daughter's infant angst seems to stem from being so alert--she has always been just aware enough of her surroundings to be very concerned, unable to filter out what is easily overwhelming. A combination of swaddling, shushing, rocking, and sucking would interrupt her panic enough to help her withdraw into a private, restful place where she could tune out what was bothersome. As I consider this new irritant in my environment--the prospect of a long separation from my daughter and husband for the first time--I am reminded that this month's happy crawler under the tree has never really started from scratch as she adapts to her world. She always falls back on the raw materials and parameters given to her: the limits of a room, the waking hours in a day, the genetic makeup she inherited, the now-familiar responses she can trust from her parents and other caregivers.

She also is a breathtaking example of cognitive development, situating new knowledge in meaningful ways within the context of what she already knows. When she acquired her first xylophone mallet earlier this week, it went first (predictably) into her mouth, under the acute visual scrutiny of one raised eyebrow, and then finally into repeated contact with the colored keys to replicate the sounds she'd seen her dad make. I am taking a page out of her book: like a securely attached infant, I am deciding to tackle this new problem as I have tackled others in the past--with hope, with prayer, and in the context of community. Like a late-night diaper change or a protested snot-clearing operation, it will certainly get worse before it gets better, but God is responsive, loving, and knows what to do. This week I will rest in that, and be glad that most deployments are down to nine months nowadays. Happily, I have living, low-crawling proof that I can do just about anything for nine months.

seeing spiders

A friend of mine says that in many cultures, spiders are associated with the act of writing. I have been seeing spiders all month, and having the urge to write, as well. With a 3-month-old in my life, this doesn't seem especially feasible most days, but occasionally writing is simply the overflow of a full heart: it feels harder to avoid it than to sit down and begin.

I have been back at work for a month now, and military motherhood has left me, as Mary, with much to ponder in the solitude of my own heart. First, there is the hard reality that my mother would probably not have approved. Faithful to traditional models of what it means to be a woman, my mother advocated strongly for staying at home with little ones, and for the art and science of full-time homemaking. This made my childhood wonderful, and I can appreciate that raising five daughters was a full time job. On one occasion, my father related to me that an insurance adjuster advised him to increase my mother's life insurance policy, as he would not be able to afford to pay anyone to do all that my mother did for us in the event of her untimely death. My father wisely listened to this counsel, and used the discussion as a humorous way of explaining how much he deeply valued all our mother did during long years of sea duty in the submarine force. It also made me aware that the unpaid work of homemakers is easy to underestimate, until you attempt to quantify it. Then, it becomes glaringly obvious that the role is often taken for granted.

I had always thought I would follow the path my mother took, and am still surprised to find myself on active duty in the Army while raising our first child. My husband, a Reservist and full-time graduate student, is also navigating a much different experience than he anticipated for much of his life. To say that he is "Mr. Mom" seems demeaning, for he is not playing at being an excellent full-time care provider for our daughter--if anything, he is "Mr. Dad," the genuine article. Though his approach to various baby-related problems differs vastly from mine, he finds ways to meet her needs I never would think of, like the night he jogged her to sleep to the song "Heartbreaker." Who would have thought that blasting classic rock records would soothe a baby so completely? I saw it happen in my own living room, and rejoiced that God made us both, male and female, in his image. Still, there are pangs of guilt when I steal away to physical training each morning, and then again to work after breakfast and feeding the baby. What kind of woman am I, to choose such a demanding profession during my childbearing years? How will my choice to stay in the Army for a few more years affect my relationship with my daughter, and with my husband? Is this really the kind of work I was born to do long-term, or is this a detour on the road to my true vocation?

I do not have bulletproof answers for these questions, and there are better women than I who have chosen either to be professional Soldiers or to be homemakers. What I do know definitively is that the Army has made me a better mother in a few tangible ways. First, I am a far more persistent person than I was before active duty service. Somewhere between the first 20-foot rope I had to climb (with a weight vest on), and the last late night at the office poring over PowerPoint slides, I gained a kind of visceral self-reliance that I never knew I had. I learned that I could outlast the Army's demands on my time and energy, and that even when I felt myself to be at a breaking point, there was always a little bit left, if the mission required it. I am reminded of St. Paul's words to the Corinthians: "And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed." 

Second, the Army reinforced the value of camaraderie, especially that of other women, in a way that few other experiences can. While I have grown to value and rely on good collaboration with my brothers-in-arms, it doesn't give me the pleasure I experience in the company of good, strong women who can push and encourage me toward my best self. This is the kind of fellowship St. Paul recommends to Titus that women can uniquely offer each other, when he says that older women should, "teach what is good" and "urge the younger women to love their husbands and children." In other times, this meant that women helped each other to manage their households while their husbands won the bread, but the support that women offer each other in the daily self-sacrifice of family life is timeless. While I value and seek the mentorship of older, wiser women both inside the profession of arms and outside, I have found that my peers often astound me with their insight, their problem-solving, and their desire to be faithful to their calling as wives and mothers. In one sense, as the oldest of five girls who grew up replicating the comforts of sisterhood in my friendships, making female friends was second nature to me, and was always much easier than my friendships with men. But I also was privileged to be part of a group of newly married female lieutenants at my first unit who confirmed for me that sisterhood was as necessary to my professional life as to my personal life. As we learned how to operate and excel in a world heavily influenced by men, we enjoyed the lifegiving camaraderie that kept us afloat even on the toughest days. It is little surprise, then, that we have one by one leaned heavily on each other as we entered into motherhood, easing the most demanding calling any of us has answered yet. If I can teach my daughter one thing about the company of other women, I hope it is to seek its encouragement and never to play the lone ranger.

Finally, Army life has given me an unexpected set of roles to explore that, while unconventional by some standards, usher me into the fullest experience of womanhood I have known. The medieval Christian mystic Julian of Norwich is well known for her meditations on the motherly, nurturing aspects of God. When I first read her work in college, I did not connect with it and felt it strange and foreign. My first week back at work after maternity leave, I experienced the costume change from Army uniform to nursing wear and back again, and I was broadsided by the wonderful feeling of providing for my daughter and my family in so many different ways. I could then identify with Julian's vision of God: "A mother can give her child milk to suck, but our precious mother, Jesus, can feed us with himself. ...With all the sweet sacraments he sustains us most mercifully... in these blessed words, ...'All the health and life of the sacraments, all the virtue and grace of my word, all the goodness that is ordained for you in holy Church, that I am." (From Revelations of Divine Love, circa 1393) 

Persisting in my efforts to breastfeed is something my mother would have championed, even if she disagreed with my going back to work, and I was struck by the total, physical takeover that motherhood is. All my waking moments were suddenly geared toward provision and nurture, and even my combat-ready exterior could not obscure that warm, gentle reality. My friends and I have joked that being a woman in the Army means constantly "getting in touch with our masculine sides," but going back to work after having my baby was the most thoroughly feminine experience of my life. I have experienced God as all-sufficient, in the name El Shaddai: "El" indicating might and strength, "Shaddai" derived from the word for breast, "Shad," indicating sufficiency and nourishment ("Shad" and "dai" may also be a contraction meaning "one who is enough,"). This side of heaven, we often experience lack that leaves us unable to provide for those we love perfectly. How appropriate, then, that Christ modeled God's all-sufficiency for us even while limiting himself to the frailty of human experience, saying through St. Paul, "My grace is sufficient for you: for my power is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me."

By virtue of an Army connection, my husband and I recently had the privilege of entertaining an Afghan officer who is attending school here in the states. I wondered, of course, how to achieve the right balance as a woman in my interactions. If I were in his country, for example, I would not reach for a handshake during a greeting, and would probably cover my head. He was in mine, however, and this was a unique opportunity to model what it means to be a woman who wields the full power of her own choices in a society that permits her to do so. As the evening progressed, my husband and I exchanged the baby, the dishes, and the components of dinner, I watched our foreign guest relax: initially he had not even wanted to make eye contact or speak directly to me. Ensuring that I did not wear revealing clothing, participating in the making of the meal, caring for the baby, and taking great interest in stories about his family and country, I stumbled through the cross-cultural encounter, as did he. He asked me several questions about my work and how I felt about leaving my baby, and about my husband taking care of her during the day, and he kept revisiting this theme as if it were magnetized. I, similarly, asked repeated questions about women in his family and culture. He asked me for a blanket and took it outdoors to pray twice during the evening, and laughed when I warned him to look out for the tarantulas in our yard. When we broke fast with him at sundown as part of his Ramadan observance, he saw that the delicious meal had been made more by my husband than by me. Still, at the end of the evening, he reached for my hand as he left, and said, "Thank you, my sister," and wished us both a "long, good life." I wished him the same, my heart running over. He had heard me say that I enjoyed my work, but that I loved being a mother, and that it was a difficult problem to solve, wanting always to be in two places--and I think he understood that this choice was something I'd rather struggle with than not have at all, and I hope he saw it as part of my relationship to God.

It is with fear and trembling that I work out my vocations of military service and motherhood, searching for how best to reflect the imago Dei and to imitate Christ's supreme sacrifice and example. I only know that this is the most joyful, and the most complicated, phase of my life so far. Because of that, I believe--if God gives his saints anything particular to do in his heaven--my mother who departed for glory before she could satisfy her eagerness to be a grandmother is ideally positioned to intercede for me in this endeavor. Because motherhood itself is, like the rest of creation, groaning in its imperfections and radiant in its triumphs, I would not be surprised to find that the fellowship of Christian women spans the "already and the not yet" of the kingdom of heaven in this way. The thought of what my mother would say, think, or do in my situation spurs me forward in a pursuit of excellence in motherhood, joining the examples of my friends and mentors, and helping me to find inner resources I never knew I had. Whether or not I have a military career in front of me, it is my hope that I can blend the best of my mother, the best of my many sisters, and the best of the self God gave me into a gift I can give to my husband, my daughter, and hopefully future children, too.

seven stanzas at easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter
by John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the
molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta*, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

A friend sent me this a few Easter seasons ago, and I have been saving it until I could make sense of it. When I received it, my mother was dying. It was awful to think she would die just when the world was about to erupt with new life. The humid Louisiana air was brisk every morning, but warm and sauna-like most afternoons, though it could change very quickly and threaten cold, harsh rains. When the weather whiplashes us this way, I am reminded of the opening lines of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland (Burial of the Dead):


APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Very close to that time, I attended a Sunday service with my husband of two months, at a small local church that had been recommended to me by a friendly stranger in the DMV. I was suspicious, since I knew the denomination did not allow musical instruments or women's speaking during their services, but my husband reminded me that each denomination has regionally different expressions, and that the a capella singing might be phenomenal. I agreed, and we went. We entered a small church building where only four of the twenty-some pews were occupied. I knew better than to judge a church on the size of its congregation, and proceeded with open mind. A black family filled nearly the whole pew in front of us, by far the best-dressed in the room. The service began, and the singing left much to be desired. Apparently, the song leader was tone deaf, which, added to the lack of instrumentation, did not lead us well through the chosen hymns. It was music that felt like a death, not a coming to life. A boy in the family in front of us looked questioningly at the man I assumed was his father, stifling a grin, while his father did his best to get the twinkle out of his eye and look grave and severe. They seemed to say to each other, shrugging, "These white people just can't sing...oh well." I began to misgive.

During communion (on EASTER SUNDAY, when normal churches hope for and expect an influx of visitors), the crackers and grape juice ran out at the second row. Flustered, the man distributing them disappeared somewhere in the front of the church, leaving us in painful silence. We could hear him clattering around to produce more of the elements. When he emerged, he had forgotten where he'd left off, resuming at our row, leaving the black family in front of us to turn and gesticulate wildly, trying to get his attention. As we started to point him in their direction, the mother cleared her throat, "ExCUSE me!" and the man, realizing what he had done (and how it appeared), turned three shades of red and fluttered back to serve her family communion. I turned to my husband, appalled, and whispered, "I need to leave. I don't know what this is. But it's NOT Easter." He gestured that we should wait until a more opportune time, so we took communion. With no musical interlude to buffer our escape attempt, we found ourselves bracing for the first few logical fallacies of some drivel the preacher apparently intended as an Easter sermon. We left quietly, if conspicuously. The day outside was incongruously bright and beautiful, compared with the silence and cardboard behind us. We didn't know what to do, so we headed to Blockbuster and rented "The Passion of the Christ." That was the most redemptive thing we did that day.

Happily, Easter is usually a much more joyous occasion, and this year the week coincides with my due date, so we may celebrate a new life as well as the Resurrection. I am grateful for John Updike's piercing thoughts on Easter, which remind us that there are so many ways to miss the miracle. I want to be shocked by it, to revel in it, to be left without words and perhaps let go some tears of profound relief. I want to be scared senseless into realizing just how severe, how physically jolting--and how unsafe it is for the status quo of our failed world order--that Christ has risen from the dead.

* In the year nineteen hundred, in the course of purely theoretical (mathematical) investigation, Max Planck made a very remarkable discovery: the law of radiation of bodies as a function of temperature could not be derived solely from the Laws of Maxwellian electrodynamics. To arrive at results consistent with the relevant experiments, radiation of a given frequency f had to be treated as though it consisted of energy atoms (photons) of the individual energy hf, where h is Planck's universal constant. During the years following, it was shown that light was everywhere produced and absorbed in such energy quanta. In particular, Niels Bohr was able to largely understand the structure of the atom, on the assumption that the atoms can only have discrete energy values, and that the discontinuous transitions between them are connected with the emission or absorption of energy quantum. This threw some light on the fact that in their gaseous state elements and their compounds radiate and absorb only light of certain sharply defined frequencies. (Albert Einstein, on Quantum Theory, 1940)

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/quantum-theory-max-planck-quotes.htm

what's in a name?

Reading through Genesis on a quasi-weekly basis with my husband (we fall off the wagon easily, these days, but hope any effort will be taken in earnest by God, who will ultimately draw us more often into the Word that is so familiar from our earlier lives), I am struck by the references to language, specifically the act of naming things and people. It begins with God, of course, naming day and night, but extends quickly to naming Adam, who is given the task of naming Eve and the other creatures of the Garden. It goes beyond this, into each generation of his descendants, and the names they will give their children.

It's a mysterious and weighty thing, the business of naming someone. I can't help noticing that since God gave Adam the task of naming the animals, we have all had some role in the shaping of the world through our use of language. For Adam in the garden it was work, but it was also joyful co-creation. Since the fall, we have the added tasks of co-redemption and co-restoration with God when we name.

As the birth of our first child approaches, we are still wrestling with this responsibility of naming. There are the usual pressures to pick names that are coherent, attractive, not too common but not too strange. All these other considerations notwithstanding, I hope that if we can settle on a name that makes the invitation, "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," we will have begun the task of raising this child well.

experto crede

Experience.

This leads me to the final leg in my four-legged stool: experience. My life so far can be measured in two segments, before and after I went through Henry Blackaby’s study, Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God. Drawing from the examples of Noah, Moses, Mary, and countless others throughout the Bible, the study emphasized not only the uniqueness of each person’s encounter with God, but also the underlying truths that could be trusted whenever God is present. The guiding principles that arrested my attention were that as disciples of Christ, we ought to be taking the time to discern where God was already at work, and joining God there. This seemed a valuable antidote to all our eagerness to do God’s work in our own strength and wisdom. It also reassured me that it was normal to expect interaction with God. It was also the first time I had been asked to reexamine whether I had ever been guilty of presuming to do God’s work without God’s help. It simultaneously whet my appetite, and caused me to relax. In subsequent years, even as I have yearned for God to let me participate in something great in his grand scheme, I have also been able to more calmly recognize the quiet, routine workings of the world God made. Through this less obvious, sustained, prevenient grace, God daily, incrementally draws people into restored relationship with each other and himself, and it is easy to see when you have eyes to see it. The point, Blackaby seemed to suggest, was that it doesn’t matter the scope of the project or one’s involvement in it: the point is to recognize the work of God and participate in it, wherever one is called. In this, he affirmed that any good result of this divine and human co-restoration of the broken world is rightly to God’s credit, not ours.

This did, however, leave me with one empirical problem. If everything good was God’s doing, either by virtue of creating, sustaining, redeeming, or restoring, whose doing was the bad? Similarly, if my Spirit-enlightened reason was responsible for my grasping the good and the true, how could others who did not know God also grasp truth and goodness, sometimes even better than I did? This is where an encounter with the poetry and art of British Romantic William Blake, and his “synthesis of opposing dialectics,” seemed to offer some help. Blake envisioned the world as a kind of yin and yang, where good and evil were inextricably involved with one another for their identity, existence, roles, and actions. In a dynamic, cosmic interplay, good and evil participated in each other, leading Blake to marvel,

Tyger, tyger burning bright
in the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful symmetry?

...Did He smile his work to see?
Did He who made the Lamb make thee?

In the usual slipperiness between thought and speech, it must be said that one could easily interchange destruction for evil, nurturing for good in the images of the tiger and the lamb, and that destruction is not always evil, or nurturing always good. These things depend on definitions, context, and much more. But the principle remained indelible for me: the world is a mixed bag. Because I live in the world, where good and evil are so intertwined, it follows that sometimes I percieve God in the same way. This is my limitation, that I must always compare the Creator to the created. Precisely where one comparison breaks down, though, it seems another begins, and C.S. Lewis’ beaver puts it nicely in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe when he says of Aslan, the lion, “Safe? Of course he isn’t safe! But he’s good.” This, for me, can only describe the God of the Old Testament, of Revelation...and the God who allowed Hurricane Katrina to happen.

If our experience of God leaves us often with these strange and disconcerting paradoxes, it also assures us that God will defy our every category, that he will burst out in spring when when we expect indefinite winter, that our prodigalism will find its shocking, opposite reaction each time we come home repentant, and that there is a remedy for each yet unfulfilled longing or expectation, if we will recieve it in God’s time. One of the most delightful shatterings of my own preconceptions about God occurred in college, when I was reintroduced to the feminine imagery of God, who defies gender in a way our language cannot. When I lost my mother and grandmother to cancer in close succession, it was helpful that I could already see God mothering me, and that this did not contradict the more familiar role as heavenly Father that I had been raised with.

“Let us make man in our image,” God said in the act of creation, and “Male and female he created them.” I have experienced the powerfully formative roles of gender in family, in friendship, in the academy and in the Army, but never more powerfully than in marriage. It is no coincidence that the very conversation in which I at first objected to dating my best male friend and future husband in college is the very conversation that continues as we explore and adjust our roles in relationship to each other and the rest of the world. If we have a daughter, she will reap the benefits of our very fruitful debate on the subject of what it means to be a “woman who fears the Lord”--in the form of such empowering freedom that I shudder to think how she might eventually break our hearts with it. However, the same would be true of our son, who, in the process of becoming “a man after God’s own heart,” may veer off and become someone who we don’t even recognize. In this, we undertake the same risks as God does--the risks that come with bringing someone into the world who bears the weight of their own choices, and for whom justice, truth, love, and mercy will mean what he/she makes them mean through observation and experience.

My experience of gender is one of the most defining lenses through which I interpret my faith. Resisting the urge to dwell on the repressive, marginalizing experiences of girl and womanhood (on the larger human stage, not necessarily in my own life), I do identify with Madeleine L’Engle’s understanding of “mankind” as referring to all of us. I can be as expansive and generous about this as the other actors in a conversation are willing to admit their need for. If, however, a they cannot acknowledge the historical subjugation of female experience that blatantly prefers “man-kind” where “human-kind” could have been used, or attaches positive connotations to “bachelor” but negative ones to “spinster,” etc., I feel the need to point out this injustice--as a co-restorer with God--of fallen culture and language. It is my rational conviction, looking at the whole trajectory of Scripture and Church tradition, that we were never meant to fall into the confines of these gender-based, linguistic and cultural roles in the first place, and my experience validates this. (This entire post could have read “s/he” every time I refer to God, and I would have done it in good conscience. I made a decision to presume the most generous understanding of God’s self-revelation of our givenness as male and female, both image-bearers of God. Plus, I feel it’s uneccessarily awkward in English, for our lack of a personal, gender-neutral pronoun.) My reasonable response to the reality of gender is that we do not know nearly as much about it as we claim to. We are discovering every day that both men and women can surprise us by (in a Godlike way) defying the categories in which we place them. We also wrestle with the nature and nurture of our seemingly unavoidable differences, celebrating them where we can.

Approaching women in Scripture, I must take each passage in its cultural context, if I am to avoid a crippling interpretation of womanhood that misappropriates particular messages specific to times and places as transcendent or applicable to us all. As a response to church tradition regarding women, I won’t make the ordination of women a stumbling block for other Christians, but I will always prefer to attend churches where women are allowed the full expression of spiritual service and leadership to which they are called. As for experience, I will hold my own with an open hand, recognizing that any understanding of gender this side of heaven is incomplete and therefore still morphing. I will avoid anything that leads me to be dishonest with myself or others about the woman I am becoming before God, even for the sake of community.

Neatly, this discussion of personal experience in faith leads back to the role of reason, since it is only reasonable to critically examine how one’s experiences might color the interpretation of Scripture, buy-in to Church tradition, and future experience.  In this, we are all captive to our bodily lives--we have only our five senses and one brain to integrate them, which, while impressive its its faculties, still limits us to our unique perspective. Perhaps it is part of the divine comedy that we experience this and work it out in the context of our relationships to the world around us. The constant struggle to discern between substance and shadow, truth and error, beauty and gaudiness, is ongoing, and it requires our utmost, individual awareness, attention to the Spirit and reliance on each other. I am reminded of the logic Bassanio unveils to Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, as he answers the riddle designed by her dead father to choose her husband. Three caskets of lead, silver, and gold each present a riddle to would-be suitors, but only a man who chooses correctly will find her portrait inside the casket and be allowed to marry her:

So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness of fair ornament?

All the arts and sciences we can devise still echo that groaning of creation described by Paul in his letter to the Romans which, like the pains of childbirth, expresses the hard labor of becoming. We struggle to say what we mean, to create and preserve beauty, to participate in justice and peace--but never perfectly. That Christ shared in this embodied, spiritual existence, providing us with his example of redemption in a broken world, and leaving us the help of his Spirit is the most lovely and hopeful news I can think of.