The Storks' Nest

This is all it took today

2011-10-21T13:46:00.004-05:00

Dear Gmail: I would love to consider including David Gillner. More than anything in this world, I would love to do that. In fact, that is all I think of. I consider including him at the dinner table when I count the plates. I consider including him when I find a piece of great new music, and when I hear Danish on the train and wonder what it means. I consider including him in the group of us traveling together, and in the list of Christmas presents, and the people who should be wishing me a happy birthday. I consider including David Gillner in choosing the names for my children and writing my eulogy. I consider including him in the tally of who should ride in which car to the funeral, only to realize it is his.

The thing these days, however, is that I can't include him. I wish your fancy algorithms were right this time, but death does not figure too well in your formula. How about if you consider fucking yourself.

Lord Have Mercy

2011-09-05T23:39:00.002-05:00

I have been speaking to a very godly man recently, much to my frustration. He is very rational and intelligent and has a very systematic and air tight theology that is very difficult to penetrate if you disagree with him. In fact disagreeing with him often ends, for me, in feeling unintelligible or irrational. I admit that I do have an irrational streak in me yet I reject the negative associations with that word. I have come to realize that there are two different types of folks in this world, those who are lovers of beauty and those who are lovers of logic. Now I believe that neither of these are inherently better than the other yet both have a lot to learn from one another. My wife ,for example, is a lover of logic and I am a lover of beauty. She needs to understand the systematic rationale for believing in a certain idea before she will believe it where as I will often use my intuition to determine whether something is true or not and then possibly come up with rational reasons afterward( or not, much to the frustration of lovers of logic) The goal, I believe, is to attempt not to look down on one another's orientation yet learn from one another.

However, I have noticed in my conversations with this godly man that we both are very set in our ways. He with his arguments and I with my intuitions, and we come to very different conclusions on matters. Despite being confident in my beliefs I find that after talking to this man I start to wonder how one of us, if not both of us, are wrong and how on earth are we going to be able to change if we are both so stuck in our ways? At the present moment I don't have any inkling of changing my positions and I am pretty sure this man is not going to change his mind. So it seems that we are at an impasse. Which scares me. I think in some sense we all think we are right about what we believe and it seems like it would take a miracle for either one of us to change our beliefs. There is probably no argument that I could muster that would change this man's mind and I have to admit I have my doubts whether he could show me any beauty that would sway me. So how then do we change? Do we simply wait for the resurrection and the Deus ex machina? Or God, do you have any miracles up your sleeve? Lord have mercy on us and our deeply held convictions.

Why I don't blog about academia

2011-01-27T22:04:00.004-06:00

Somebody asked me today why I rarely blog about my graduate program or the work that I do at the university. It is a fair question - I have the rare privilege of studying something I truly care about, and I get paid to think and write about these things in my job... So why not write about that?

Reason #1: I have a pervasive fear of turning into a boring academic whose friends flee at the very mention of the words "dissertation" or "research findings." I realize that many of my friends and family still shake their heads in disbelief at my choice to stay in school for any longer than absolutely necessary, and it would just not be fair to bore you with the details of university governance structures or strategies for graduate employability.

Reason #2: I stare at a computer and write academic papers for my job. Then I go to class, where I listen to academic lectures, or write assignments for these classes that require more intense thinking and staring at a computer screen. When I get any time in between these activities, I think and write and tear my hair out over another big academic paper called a dissertation. In the rare occasion when I have it in me to stay at the computer screen just a bit longer to write a blog post, theoretical frameworks or research paradigms are about the last thing I want to think about.

That being said, I have recently been inspired to chip away at this self-constructed wall between work and life by two distinct sparks. One of them was an article by C.W. Mills on the sociological imagination, which is academic in nature and so will remain undiscussed until my inspiration turns into reality. ;) The second spark is my new friend Thomas, who is a political scientist and an expert on the Middle East. He has a vast and deep knowledge of his subject area, and he consciously breaks outside of academic circles by writing for newspapers, submitting corrections about untrue press reports, posting headlines and commentaries on Facebook, attending protests, etc. He has perfected the ability of bringing his knowledge to bear on the life that goes on around him every day, be it the protests in Tunisia, unrest in Egypt, or the arrest of a Chechen man in Austria. He has inspired me to bring my daily work to bear on what I see in the news or talk about with friends. My field, after all, is education, which affects pretty much everyone. So I conclude this post about why I don't blog about academia with the concession that it is perhaps only right that I should.

Rachel getting pregnant

2011-01-22T22:11:00.002-06:00

My friend Rachel is pregnant. She and her husband Darren are the first in our immediate group of friends to pass this big milestone, and Rachel is the first close friend whose pregnancy I've gotten to witness in a day-to-day fashion. We used to joke around about who would have kids first, but it was always rather obvious it would be her - my labor phobia combined with our itinerant life plan pretty much guaranteed that. We even once went to an art fair together, and I bought a card especially for her that said in big letters "I'm glad you're having a baby," and in small letters "and I'm not." After the card gathered dust for a few years, I finally got to dig it up a couple of weeks ago, and I had a moment of profound awe as I placed it in the mailbox. I've had a similar feeling every time I see Rachel with her tummy slightly bigger than the week before. While the message of the card still holds true, and I do not feel anywhere close to ready to join in the club, I find it moving and, well yes, sort of epic, that my friend is becoming a part of a story that will reach so far beyond her and be told long after she is gone. To her little baby boy, she will be the first Woman. She will be somebody's mom, that defining figure he will associate with warmth and love; the mysterious force he will one day try to describe to a partner or decipher in therapy like I still try to decipher my parents. Maybe one day he will say to me: You knew my mom before I was born. What was she like back then? And I will answer - yes, I knew her. I saved a card for her for three years before you were born, saw her belly grow each week, and helped paint your baby room in their first house. Let me tell you about the art she made everywhere she turned, from stationery to food. In fact, let me tell you about the time...

I know kids don't usually ask these sorts of questions about their parents, at least until all their parents' friends are dead; I know these sorts of narratives are more common in literature than in real life. Yet I can't help but realize the good fortune of having friends close enough that the birth of their kids is a major event in my own life, inspiring dreamy and tender thoughts about their future as well as my own.

Happiness for Benjamin

2010-12-30T16:16:00.003-06:00

My brother is working in the Netherlands for a couple of months, and he feels lonely there all by himself. Today he asked me to send some happiness his way, so here is my best attempt. Dear Benjamin:

Remember the long summer days when we were little kids? Even though mom could hardly get us out of bed on school days, as soon as school was over, we jumped out of bed at first crack of dawn, and we ran down to the back yard to play. Remember how we used to make soup and magic potions out of the berries that grew on the hedge, and soak in the old metal tub when we got hot? Once when you were just a toddler, your sisters and I dressed you in one of our old bathing suits. It was hot pink and very girlie, but you thought it was the greatest thing in the world to look just like your big sisters. We still have a picture somewhere of you in the pink suit, splashing in the tub with a big grin on your face. Those days were nothing but happiness, and it didn't matter that rust was peeling off the old tub or that our family was poor.

Growing up, of course, robs us of the utterly carefree joys of childhood. But its glimmers are still around you in the simple things - the rays of morning sunshine, the satisfaction of a good meal, a hearty laugh with a friend, the way humans still fall in love despite thousands of years of heartbreak. In a way, your ability to feel dissatisfaction or emptiness is the other side of a coin that has a happy face. Until very recently - and in many parts of the world it hasn't changed to this day - all but a few people have experienced heartache and toil as such obvious aspects of daily life that they know little else. You, my brother, feel the loneliness of this season because you have known many other, sunnier ones. The best way I can send you some happiness in this cold time of year is by stating it loud and clear that this too shall pass - so you might as well get out there and earn yourself a better next season. Remembering this is how I survive in this dreadfully frigid place with six-month winters - and you know just how much I hate the cold. Winter is much easier to live through if it's in the shadow of the coming summer. It's not endless, so I might as well enjoy some sledding or snow fights! So think of the warm summer days in our back yard when it gets cold, and I hope they warm you up on the inside so you can put up a snow fight or two before it's all over.

Couch time

2010-12-27T23:02:00.008-06:00

Today marked the beginning of a highly unusual week. In fact, I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a week such as this one.

I am not working or going to class, and I don't have any plans for the next seven days.

When I realized this today, it gave me an odd feeling. I couldn't remember the last time this happened! Of course, I remember the last time I was off work for a week: my friend and my sister were visiting, and I was showing them my new home on this side of the Atlantic. The time before that, I took time off to travel to Poland to work at an arts festival. In the last two years, there have been a few week-long research trips or visits with family. But as much as I rack my brain, I can't remember the last time I was home for a week with nothing urgent on my to-do list.

Before I moved to America, week-long periods of rest or mere inactivity seemed a lot more common. It may have had to do with the fact that I lived in the world of academia, but I live in the same kind of world here. It may also have to do with being in a doctoral program now, so perhaps what I say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Yet when people ask me if there is anything that surprised me about life in this country, the pace of life is usually the first thing that comes to mind. Americans work a lot more and take less time off than people in Poland. While I admire the work ethic I see here, I find that it sometimes goes too far - people seem to take pride in always staying busy, never missing a day of work, or giving back paid vacation days, which creates a whole culture of overwork-ness. What gets lost along the way is time to just be, to sit back and reflect on the purpose of all that frantic activity, be silent enough to pray, to remember friends and think new thoughts.

It is perhaps a mark of my advanced acculturation that the first thing I thought of today was making a to-do list for my week off. There is laundry to be done, my heinously messy closet, shelves I got for Christmas last year still waiting to be hung, heaps of unanswered emails, a Christmas letter that is already late... I didn't make a list though. I sat on this couch for most of the day, at times immersed in a novel about nothing academic whatsoever, and at times mildly uncomfortable in the silence. Tomorrow shall worry about itself - today I had the good sense to leave the worrying to the couch.

Photo courtesy of Becca

A Day in the Life

2010-12-18T12:30:00.004-06:00

For one day in November, Billy and I had a chance to participate in an amazing art project made possible by our dear friend Becca. It all started a couple of months ago, when I was looking at our wedding pictures and the thought occurred to me that the photos most of us have in our albums are taken on extraordinary occasions that represent a departure from what life is normally like on a daily basis. There are pictures of weddings, vacations, Christmases, graduations - important days that happen just once. Most of our life, meanwhile, happens between those times, monotonous and undocumented. Yet it's those repetitive days full of repetitive activities that constitute most of our lives, and those things often go undocumented. In five years, will I remember the shape of the leaves on the sidewalk on my way to the bus? Will I be able to picture our first apartment, the look of my bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth every morning, the slant of afternoon light through the kitchen window?

Some time later, I was talking with Becca, who is an amazingly talented artist and the owner of a small business called Liminality Photography. She was telling me about a wedding she had shot, and I shared my recent thoughts with her - how it's a great thing to have a record of the grand days, but I'm sad that we don't capture the mundane ones. That conversation was how the idea of a Day in the Life photo shoot was born. For one day in November, Becca followed us around for an entire day - waking up, walking around our neighborhood, going to work, having late night drinks with friends. It is a record of not just one day, but a unique season of life turned into art. We're so grateful to Becca for creating this, and our hope all along was that these photos would inspire others to document the precious details of our daily lives.

All photographs copyright of Liminality LLC

Two Sides to Every Story

2010-11-06T22:24:00.003-05:00

I recently received a phone call from a client's father who was irate about something I discussed in session with his son the previous evening. I explained to him my rationale for saying what I had said and how it was beneficial from a therapeutic standpoint yet he was adamant that I was in the wrong and demanded I apologize to him and his son or I could no longer work with their family. I could not in good conscious do what he asked so I was fired from that client. I was of course comforted and supported by a number of fellow therapists and friends who said that I was right in my actions and my therapeutic stance and that this man was just a big bully. I am not going to say that I didn't make any mistakes yet am confident in the piece I held my ground on. Yet what disquiets me is that I am guessing this man also has a number of therapists and friends surrounding him telling him how right he is and how I am a horrible therapist. I run into this dynamic often where there are two sides of the story, often in the context of relationship, and it amazes me how both can be equally convincing and for all intents and purposes both can be "true". It is a myth that if we only apply the same laws and measures of reason that we can make a definitive judgment of Truth and all come out with the same conclusions. (Thank you modernity) We live in an age of reason like no other in the history of the world yet there are still just as many arguments between people and just as much hurt caused due to different perspectives that do not accept one another. And I think this is how things are going to continue. It makes me wonder what it would be like after the resurrection when the lion lays down with the lamb? I imagine there are still going to be differences of opinion as we will, I am guessing, still be subjective beings with different likes. (I hope so at least. or maybe everyone will finally realize that Green is the best color and Chipotle the best burrito!) I think the difference will be that we will recognize that there are different perspectives and that those are valid and worthy of respect. Love will cover over a multitude of perspectives. But in the meantime that is not always the case and leads to so much sadness...

A Short History of Patriarchy

2010-10-01T20:33:00.007-05:00

Being the enlightened and emancipated couple that we are (well, and strapped for money as well), Billy and I decided this year to take turns cooking.

Before that, I made most of the food for two simple and related reasons:

1. I'm better at it
2. I genuinely enjoy cooking
(As in, I admire vegetables at the farmer's market like some people admire sculptures in a museum, and there are few things I enjoy more than hosting a feast of a dinner party for friends)

So for as long as I had time to do it, I gladly reigned over the kitchen.

The time condition changed radically when I started my doctoral program. Being the enlightened and emancipated couple that we are, we both thought it was not fair for just one of us to do all the cooking when we both work about the same. So we decided to take turns - he cooks for a week, I cook for a week, and that way we can shop for whatever ingredients we need for the whole week. By the end of the first month, I began to feel like the bones of patriarchalism that I thought I'd buried a long time ago were sticking out of their shallow graves right and left.

It was not Billy who dug them up, either. As soon as his schedule got a little busier and preparing meals became an extra stretch, I was overcome by a sense of guilt and responsibility. Whenever it appeared like cooking was causing him any stress, I jumped right in to rescue him and say that it was ok, I could just do it, don't worry about it. Somewhere deep down, I had it ingrained in me that even though it's great that he's "HELPING", it is ultimately MY job to feed the household. I kept doing this even though it left me tired and at times bitter that "I do more of the work around here". It took a few long conversations to make me realize that my constant rescuing did not help either one of us - it actually made Billy feel terrible about not doing his part in our house.

All this made me think again about the meaning and relative novelty of domestic equality. My deep-seated sense of responsibility is probably a thousand years old. It took birth in a cave or shack, at a time when the roles of men and women were defined by their physical attributes and how those translated into their ability to survive in a hostile world. Over time, these differences were translated into timeless roles sanctioned by deities of all sorts and shapes. At one point in the past, this role division allowed our species to survive, so it became entrenched as the ultimate norm.

It reminds me of something I noticed about my grandparents a while ago. To survive the war and the hard times that followed, they went into a kind of survival mode - a total focus on the basic necessities of life that cut out marginalities like emotions for the sake of overcoming external threats. That strategy probably saved their lives, but when the war was over, they were so used to functioning this way that they went on in the same way, bringing about alienation and lack of intimacy. In survival mode, there is often only one right way to go, unanimous action is crucial, and dissent can be fatal. This is how you function in crisis - but if it becomes the long term operating procedure for a marriage, for raising children and sustaining a family, the same thing that once saved your life becomes deadly. I can't help but think it's the same with patriarchalism - it's a strategy that once worked very well for us, but in a changed reality it threatens to erode the well-being we've fought so hard to achieve. That is what happens, for instance, when a woman is expected to still take care of the home and raise children even though she works equally to the man outside the home.

I've found that the adaptation of operating procedures to new realities can be especially difficult for people with strong religious beliefs. As people of faith, we believe the Divine Being revealed Him/Her-Self to humanity, and if He/She did, isn't it reasonable to assume that the Revelation was singular, unchanging, and once-and-for-all? If so, both men and women working equally outside the home a shift to a post-industrial economy don't mean a thing, because gender roles have been defined once and for all by God.

Within my own religious tradition, I find two strands that delightfully subvert this gateway to fundamentalism. First is the underestimated and underinterpreted biblical Wisdom literature, where we often see two contradictory statements right next to each other. Which one is right? Which is the divine will? It depends! Wisdom is not a once-and-for-all formula, but rather the ability to choose the right formula for the right situation, God's redemptive gift for fundamentalizing humans. The second is the Incarnation itself - the ultimate act of Revelation was not a holy rule book or codex, but a Person - thoughtful in solitude at dawn in the Galilean hills, tongue-in-cheek at a wedding in Cana, mad as a hatter at the cleansing of the Temple. Proclaiming a message that notoriously throws our expectations upside down - last being first, poor being rich, humble exalted, the Kingdom all unlike what we're used to.

This incarnate wisdom of God (incidentally or not quite so incidentally personified as a woman - Sophia - in biblical wisdom literature) is ultimately why I continue to practice taking it easy on the couch while Billy cooks, and telling myself it's ok. It's not as hard as it first looked.

None Are Righteous

2010-07-04T13:52:00.007-05:00

I am personally not a believer in the concept of "inherited sin" in the sense that all humans are "born sinful" and therefore deserve to die for their inherited ontological sin. This idea has its roots in Augustine's view that sin was transferred biologically through sex, which in turn was borrowed from the gnostic idea that the the body is evil and the curse of physicalness was past on through procreation. Yet this morning I was thinking how we are all born into sin. We were having a discussion around breakfast and hypothesizing whether it was sinful or not to own a cappucino machine. (My father in law was railing against material excess) I made the statement that I thought it was sinful to own an iPhone (or any cell phone for that matter) due to the Coltan necessary to make the device, which comes from war torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and is used to fund dictators, warlords, and rapists. My anti-civilizationalist friend would make the argument that we are constantly complicit in the rape and murder and deforestation around the world, not directly but by virtue of supporting a system that facilitates these crimes. In fact, being born in the United States is to be "born into sin", that is, born into a sinful system that you cannot help but be a part of. (What do you think of that Augustine?)

It is pretty overwhelming once you start to think about all the ways in which you support an unjust system and how no matter what you do, you are supporting the death, pain, and destruction of thousands of people. This I think is where the need for grace comes in. God knows that we are hopelessly mired in injustice and She understands that. That doesn't mean that we are "off the hook" and don't have to do anything about it. It means that He frees us from apathy and the feeling that we have failed before we start. She wants us to do our best to bring the kingdom of heaven to this plot of land and spread it like mustard seed. Lord Have Mercy On Us.

The Discipline of Happiness

2010-06-22T22:49:00.003-05:00

I have been thinking lately how happiness is really a discipline. If you are not happy or feel unbalanced in life right now, these things are not going to magically appear in front of you someday. We often think "If I can just get that new job" or "If I can just move to a bigger house" or "Once I retire", "Once the kids are out of the house", "Once School is done", "Once I am promoted", "Once I am (Fill in the blank)", THEN oh yes, THEN...I will finally be happy and content and balanced. But this magical moment never comes. Happiness and balance are things that need to be started right now and cultivated as well as sustained by hard work and discipline. I have realized the real need for myself to set aside time during my week for things that I enjoy to do and that give me life. I have found that if I do not set aside time for these things and fight for them, they will always allude me and even if I were to switch jobs, I would find myself in the same position, gasping for breath and wishing I had the time for the things I love. For instance, I would love to write a novel. But this novel is not going to write itself and I doubt that a situation will come along where I will have a few months of free time (unless I get laid off: Knock on wood) to spend on it. If I want to write it, I am going to have to start today, and set aside 10 minutes or 30 minutes and grow space for this hobby. And I will probably put it off until tomorrow (which really means a few months) which is fine, but at least I will know that it is my own choice and I won't be able to complain about how I don't have the time or don't have any hobbies.

Samson

2010-05-28T13:46:00.003-05:00

Samson is the name of the new raccoon in our backyard. I have seen him twice now hanging out in the bushes near the fence, just staring at me. This time instead of trying to speak his language ( a mix of squirrel and swahili ), I spoke to him in English in hopes that he has picked it up over the years of living among us. I told him that I mean him no harm and will allow him to remain here in peace, provided that he not eat the pumpkins I am trying to grow this fall. It is funny how I just read an article yesterday about how we humans anthropomorphize animals and impose morality upon them. We try to tame them and try to find a kindred spirit within them yet all that is present is the empty and cold eye of nature staring back at us. Killer Whales with cute names turn on their trainers after years of working together, Chimpanzees maul their owners faces after they treat them like sons, and grizzly man's grizzlies eat him and his girlfriend after years of "friendship". We think that sharks are evil and wicked for doing what they are made to do. Yet here I am feeling that same desire within me to talk with our new resident, to connect to the wild as if I had a supernatural power and ability to be understood by the savage beast. I will even name him Samson (It could be a girl for all I know,:) ) And I dream of one day inviting him into our home for tea. Maybe one day I will hear a knock on the door and it will be Samson wanting to come in and talk about relations between our species and the politics of the animals living in the alley. We will wax long and eloquently about the divide between Man and Beast, the prejudices on both sides, the unfair profiling (not all raccoons are thieves of course, they can't help it if they were born with a mask), and of course we will touch on our abuses of the planet, how plastic is causing cancer in so many raccoons these days and how the young ones are getting hooked early, how more and more coons come to the city in search of jobs because their forests are being developed into upscale housing and of course global warming. Yes, we will talk late into the night about the world's problems, decide that there is nothing that we can do about it except live a good and simple life, and then...He will bite my face off.

Animal Arithmetic

2010-04-27T17:53:00.005-05:00

Since seeing Jonsi in concert on Sunday, I've been listening to his music non stop, and found this song an exceptionally fitting soundtrack to my thoughts on human mirrors. It is dedicated to my spiritful friend Elizabeth with beautiful feet who composed many a great soundtrack for my wanderings.

Wake up, comb my hair
Making food disappear
Riding bikes, making out
Elephants running down

You and I ran away, got lost in the eve
Saw the most colourful fireworks

Every time, everyone, everything's full of life
Everyday, everywhere, people are so alive

We should all be (Oh Oh Oh) alive!
We should all be (Oh Oh Oh) alive!

Horfandi, þegjandi, tala við, skríðandi
Dreymandi, strjúka af, koma við ekki má
Mála á líkama, spilað á renglandi
Hlaupandi! Leikandi!

Get it on, get it on, fucking on, spúandi
Get it on, bring it on, fucking it, kæfandi

We should all be (Oh Oh Oh) alive!
We should all be (Oh Oh Oh) alive!
We should all be (Oh Oh Oh) alive!
Let's not stop, let's go and live!

I see you're colourful : I see you in the trees
I see you're spiritful : You're in the breeze
I see it in your hands : Tree fingers through a bean
I see you in the sand : Roll down the stream

I see you in the trees : I see you're colourful
I see you in the breeze : You're spiritful
Tree fingers through a bean : I see it in your hands
You're rolling down the stream : You're in the sand

I see you're colourful : I see you in the trees
I see you're spiritful : You're in the breeze
I see it in your hands : Tree fingers through a bean
I see you in the sand : Roll down the stream

I see you in the trees : I see you're colourful
I see you in the breeze : You're spiritful
Tree fingers through a bean : I see it in your hands
You're rolling down the stream : You're in the sand

I see you're colourful : I see you in the trees
I see you're spiritful : You're in the breeze
I see it in your hands : Tree fingers through a bean
I see you in the sand : Roll down the stream

Human Mirrors

2010-04-26T21:40:00.001-05:00

A few months ago, we participated in an art show for our dear friend Jayme . Partly by virtue of our friendship and partly because of the character of her art, it was the most personal and touching experience with art that I am likely to ever have.

Over the period of almost a year, Jayme listened to the stories of eighteen individuals and painted what she heard - abstract portraits of their inward journeys and movements of soul. I walked around the room covered with goose bumps. Many of the people she painted were friends and community members, people with whom I eat, laugh, study, party and generally live life with on a weekly basis. Yet Jayme's art opened a window to their inner worlds that seemed all the more sacred because it involved her own response to what she saw.

Jayme's gift to her subjects was that listened to each person for as long as they chose to talk, and then reflected what she heard through artistic expression. Here is you, she said. Here is what I saw. It was her gift of truly seeing these eighteen unique people that gave me goose bumps. Here is you, she said, and you are beautiful. Not in a rosy, pretty way, but in a messy, sometimes bloody-red, sometimes pitch-black way. Glorious. Magnificent.

Ever since Jayme's show, I've thought a lot about truly seeing people. The bursting life and glory of her paintings surrounds me every day, if I look deep enough. Even without looking deep enough, the glimpses of human beauty regularly cause me to catch my breath. Not only artists see others from more angles and in more colors than those others see themselves. Some may disagree, but I'm inclined to believe that we all construct our mutual identities through the spoken and unspoken messages we communicate to one another. We become what we are seen for - from the kid who flunks out of school because he keeps hearing he is stupid to the woman who radiates from the inside because her lover can't stop saying she's beautiful. You know the saying that behind every successful man is a woman? I'd say that behind every successful, happy, fulfilled person is someone who thinks that person is wonderful - and tells them so. I wonder sometimes if this is a big part of why people crave romantic love and partnership - to be truly seen and well-reflected, to be the hero of someone's narrative, to look into a human mirror and see a character we may want to identify with. So what does it look like to pick up the paintbrush and mix some colors? Could it begin with something as simple as saying not just "thank you" but "I think you are"?

Retirement

2010-03-23T21:22:00.006-05:00

My wife and I have been pondering recently the feasibility of the American cultural value of retirement. Specifically the idea that one is supposed to work hard and pay their dues so that when they reach 65 they can retire and not work for the rest of their lives. We have been meeting with financial planners in the last month who have been trying to sell us this dream and give us their best advice on how to get there. We have come to think, however, that there may be some flaws in their assumptions. First of all the amount of money that would be required to cease working after 65 would be unrealistically large if one were planning to live off of the interest alone. In order to keep up our standard of living with 1 car in a 2 bedroom (really 1) apartment with all the trappings of daily life we would need around $500,000-$750,000, assuming that we would earn a 6% return each year.(My parents suggest I would need 1-2 million) And that would not be the kind of retirement that many Americans dream of which includes living in florida, eating out, traveling when they feel like it or buying big toys. Many people I would assume have discovered that this is not realistic and have saved up equity in their home enough to sell it off and, with the interest on that plus supplements from social security, eek out a living. Another method of retiring is by doing what my father is doing and working at the same job for 30 years and getting a pension for the rest of his life. Neither of these last options sounds appealing for us since Social Security may not exist by the time we retire and neither of us is planning on working at the same job for 30 years.

Yet despite the lack of feasibility for us to save enough, this dream is based on recent cultural assumptions that have been lacking for the majority of human history and for the majority of current cultures around the world. A major factor behind this manner of retirement is due to the cultural value of not burdening our children with caring for their elders and conversely valuing not having to care for your elders. I can see the appeal of this sentiment since I would neither enjoy changing my parent's diapers or having my children change mine. Yet, I wonder if something is culturally lost if we follow this idea. Does this create more distance in our families? Does it teach us to not take responsibility for others? The rest of the world seems to take caring for your elderly as a matter of course.

It is also interesting that it is a recent idea that people would stop working before they were no longer able to. I grant that the increase in the life span has complicated things where people live a lot longer after they are no longer able to work, which gets expensive. Yet the model that most Americans seem to be shooting for is based off of rich CEOs who can afford to not work after 65. This model would not be applicable to most Americans nor I would argue sustainable for our society.

So here is our plan. Firstly, if we have children, we need to teach them that it is our value as a family to care for our elderly and model this with our own parents. (They won't care for us if we ship our parents to the nursing home :) ) Secondly, We plan on working until we can no longer work. Thirdly, we see the need for rest from work as important in order to maintain sanity and quality of life so we propose the idea of a "Sabbatical" every 7 years. After saving enough money over seven years of hard work we would have a year long break to reflect, rejuvenate, and plan the next part of our lives. (And get excited about working again.) If we start this plan when we are 30 we will have 7 sabbaticals before we are eighty. Over this 50 yr span we would need to save roughly $280,000 (assuming $40,000 saved for each sabbatical yr,~$6,000 saved each yr), about the equivalent of a nice suburban home.

One potential difficulty I forsee would be getting hired again after our sabbatical year. We both have fairly marketable qualifications and are in careers where I think it would be possible, yet the older we would get the more difficult it may be to be hired by companies. It would also be difficult to save $6000 per year especially if we had children and limited our income to one provider. Also I have yet to do the math on what would get us more bang for our buck in terms of if we were to invest $6,000 in the stock market every year. We will keep thinking about this one. :)

Paved with Good Intentions

2010-01-23T16:19:00.010-06:00

Over the Christmas break, I read a book recommended to me by a professor in response to a deep sense of unease that I felt in some of my classes last semester. The author of "Dead Aid" Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian economist educated at Harvard and Oxford, and her thesis is far from politically correct: Development assistance funded by the West is doing more harm than good to the African continent. Against the voices that call for more and more aid to the developing world, she shows how the African nations' current dependence on foreign aid for recurring expenses breaks the ties of accountability between governments and their people, shifts the source of incentives from the prosperity of citizens to the whim of international development agencies, and fosters a culture of corruption. At face value, it makes sense that if a government depends on someone other than its own people for much of its revenue, it will not care as much about ensuring that the people live in a climate that fosters the growth of businesses and makes hard work profitable. It also makes sense that in the presence of a large pie of foreign money attracts those who would like to have a slice just to themselves - thus the Swiss bank accounts of African dictators and their aides.

A similar argument was recently put forward by Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist who also wonders how it is possible that since the 1960s the West pumped over $600 billion into Africa, but the GDP and life expectancy in most of the countries who received the aid have actually fallen. While the relationship between the two is hard to establish, especially given the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it is troubling to think that what we consider as goodwill and charity of Western nations may actually be contributing to the plight of countries where life expectancy is under 40, and most people live on less than a dollar a day. It is especially troubling to me given my current field of study, international education development, which trains Western specialists to help solve the problems of the developing world. The ensuing dilemma is not a comfortable one. Do you rush to the aid of people dying of hunger and preventable diseases and by your presence reinforce the deep causes behind these symptoms, so that the scenario is repeated in the next generation? Or do you, as Moyo sugessts, exercise "tough love" and turn off the stream of money that corrupts politicians, risking that your action might cost the sick and hungry of this generation their lives? Whose lives have more value - the sick and hungry of today, or those who will repeat their lot tomorrow if something does not change? And finally, why are the terms of this debate determined on American campuses and not by those whom they most intimately concern?

The older I get, the more questions. I persevere because I hope for a third way that is based neither on guilty charity nor on tough indifference. I don't know quite what it looks like, except that I know that it is harder, and in light of the Way of Jesus, I can't help but believe that it exists.

Forgive Your Brother's Bad Theology

2010-01-10T10:24:00.003-06:00

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive someone who has incorrect theology? Up to seven times?

Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to make sure that all of his servants were spreading correct information about him. As he began his task of interviewing the population, a man who had been spreading rumors that the king was a heartless and uncaring dictator was brought to him. The king ordered that all the man had be taken from him and he be put in prison for spreading untruths about the King.

The Servant fell on his knees before the king. "Be patient with me", he begged, "and I promise I will stop spreading false rumors about you." The servant's master took pity on him, canceled his sentence and let him go.

But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who was telling the people that the king had six toes on his left foot. He grabbed him and began to choke him, "Stop spreading lies about the king!" he demanded.

His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, "Be patient with me and I promise I will stop spreading false rumors about the king!"

But he refused. Instead, he went and had the man kicked out of the village and told the people to shun him. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.

Then the master called the servant in. "You wicked servant," he said, "I had mercy on you because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?" In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured each day until he had made amends to every servant in the kingdom he had wronged.

This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive a brother or sister from your heart.

Mt. 18:21-35 (Revised)

Of Nuclear Warheads and Suicide Bombers

2009-11-22T13:49:00.005-06:00

With this post I will effectively annihilate any future chance I have of becoming involved in American politics.

The other day I was thinking about nuclear weapons. And instead of pondering how soon they will be falling upon my city and my subsequent contingency plans (As is my usual custom), my brain turned to ethics. I wondered why the United States was never tried for war crimes after dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6th and 9th, 1945 two bombs were dropped in two cities, killing 80,000 people in Hiroshima (140,000 total counting radiation related deaths) and 74,000 people in Nagasaki (A couple of hundred thousand more due to radiation) effectively ending the war.

I understand that death tolls of this sort are nothing new in modern warfare and that conventionally firebombing Tokyo itself caused around 100,000 civilian deaths. Yet I pause when I consider the calculation that must have gone into this momentous bombing and the foreknowledge that hundreds of thousands of civilians would die.

At first I wondered if this event would fall under genocide. Surely there have been those even in recent history who have been prosecuted for rounding up civilians and killing them in a time of war such as in Kosovo and Bosnia. Yet after talking to my brother, we decided that the atomic blasts would not meet the definition of genocide because they were not targeted at eradicating a certain ethnic group simply because they were Japanese, but because they were at war with us. (I wonder if this would change if those who planned the attacks hated Japanese people?... Which it is quite possible most Americans did at the time...)

The argument goes that it was justified to kill all of these civilians because it effectively ended the war and saved many more lives than were taken by the blasts. Using a Utilitarian ethic, this makes sense. We kill a couple hundred thousand people to save 500,000 or a million. The greatest good for the greatest amount of people. Yet allow me to pose a thought experiment.

Currently in Pakistan the Pakistani military is undertaking a major offensive against the Taliban in Southern Waziristan. Meanwhile, the Taliban are attempting to break the political and popular support of the offensive by engaging in numerous suicide bombings targeting military officials and civilians, often detonating explosives in crowded markets. There is a chance, as has happened before, that the military will call off the attacks under pressure and make a peace treaty with the Taliban. ("We won't bother you if you stop bombing us") My question is, if the Taliban succeed in stopping the Pakistani fighting through the use of suicide bombers, will they be justified in killing civilians? Many more Pakistani and Taliban lives would be saved than the number of civilians killed in suicide bombings if the fighting stopped. The greatest good for the greatest amount of people right?

So who are more justified? Atomic Bombers? Or Suicide Bombers?

Eating (Or Not Eating) For Others

2009-10-07T12:15:00.002-05:00

Our house church recently went on a weekend retreat at our family's cabin where we spent 3 days relaxing, discussing, playing Farkle, and hearing one another's stories. A very moving moment was when one of our community members shared about her struggle with a medical condition she has had her entire life and the constant battle and mental energy taken to counteract its effects through extreme diet and life changes. After sharing her story some of the members of the group decided to stand in solidarity with her and experience her diet. I went shopping with my wife the other day at the grocery store to prepare for the diet and was surprised at how rigorous the diet actually was. She couldn't eat any meat, dairy, wheat, gluten, sugar, caffeine, or alcohol. 75% of what she eats is supposed to be Raw. (uncooked) And she is supposed to eat a lot of fiber which translates for her into eating ground flax seeds and fiber meal. (Yum!)

To be honest, I told Marta that I don't think I could do this for a month. I am kind of finicky when it comes to food and in general have a hard time sacrificing or changing my daily routines for others. But I am both proud and envious of my wife's commitment to her friend. I am positive that this is a perfect picture of the kingdom of God and beautifully illustrates the love and commitment we should strive to have for one another. So I will let Marta know that even though I am taunting her from across the table with a piece of chocolate or some savory steak and good wine, I greatly respect her.

The Kingdom is Among You

2009-07-15T06:20:00.004-05:00

Sadly, the neighbors across the alley have moved away. (See "Bad Neighbors" post from May) But before they did, something quite incredible happened. Marta was working in the garden one day when the boys from across the alley came out to help her. As they were working the boys began talking about the other children who lived on the block and asking Marta why they never play with them. Marta reminded them of the time that the paintings, which had been hung in the alley by our landlords, had been slashed with a knife suspiciously after a large fight with the landlords over trespassing. She explained how the Landlords were very hurt and angry over this event and told their granddaughter that she could not play with them which in turn caused the parents of her friends to not allow their children to play with the boys either. The boys were distraught, claiming that it was their cousin who had slashed the paintings, and asked Marta what they could do to change the situation. Marta suggested that they could write apology letters to the landlords. The boys instantly became excited and jumped on the opportunity, running up to our apartment to trace their hands and color pieces of paper that would transmit their repentance and hopefully forgiveness. When they were done, Marta had the boys deliver the letters to our landlords and to their surprise they were able to talk to the landlord face to face and explain themselves. After a short lecture and clarifying of the rules the two parties shook hands and parted, at least in part, reconciled.

I have been amazed recently at how the kingdom of God shows up in the most unexpected places. Jesus himself taught that it will not come with "careful observation" but that it is among us. We often try to create the Kingdom of God through movements or programs but it is when we are simply loving people and being the people of God that some of the greatest stories come from. Subsequently, I have never been more proud of my wife. I see in her a true citizen of the kingdom.

Vignette of a Marriage

2009-06-08T22:56:00.004-05:00

Yesterday Billy and I began celebrating our first anniversary. Since we were married twice within one week, the festivities will not be limited to just one day, but we kicked them off in grand style by having dinner at our favorite restaurant in St. Paul and looking back at the first 365 days of our marriage. When Billy asked about my most significant memory, it was not our honeymoon in Greece or surprise weekend at a Victorian Bed & Breakfast...

One night a few months ago, we were lying in bed about to fall asleep, but my heart was troubled with a lingering heaviness. "I don’t know if we’re still connecting like we used to" – I finally said out loud.

Billy must have been tired, but he turned towards me and asked me to say more – what made me feel that way? How were things different than before? I struggled to put my finger on just what it was that troubled me in that vulnerable hour before sleep and followed a few rabbit trails. "I don’t know" – I finally said. "Maybe it’s just that I wonder if we still really see each other... I worry that maybe we’ve grown so used to each other that we only see shadows made up of what we expect to see instead of the real person?"

There was a brief silence, and I grew worried that I’d hurt him with my words or unnecessarily raised his anxiety about the condition of our relationship, and I wished I hadn’t said anything at all. Silly, emotional woman. Of course we’re ok, how dare I wonder – we have a great relationship, why would I ever jeopardize it with silly nighttime worries that I can’t even figure out myself?

Then his soft voice in the silence... Open. Unafraid. Undefensive.

"Is there something you wish that I were noticing about you, sweetie?"

I lay there wide-eyed as these words crossed the silence, tearing up as soon as they reached me.

Instead of moving away, Billy moved towards me. In doing that, he opened some hidden dam that now stood wide open – as open as the stream of tears on my face while I considered his question.

"No, Billy. I think it’s just that I haven’t even been noticing who I am these days. I’m so busy that I don’t even look inside anymore, and I feel so foreign and uninteresting to myself when I’m finally quiet."

Our conversation that night stands out in my memory in a different way than the others – it wasn’t planned, it just happened in the midst of the daily stress of life while neither of us was prepared, rested or Sunday best. It was an unexpected moment of vulnerability, and even in that unguarded moment, Billy's first instinct was to move towards me rather than away from me; to be for me rather than against me; to really hear me rather than build up a defense against the potential danger of my words. What I find supremely ironic is that if he did become defensive or anxious, something completely unrelated to the condition of our marriage would have probably become all about it. I have a feeling that this is precisely how conflict and misunderstanding take root in most intimate relationships. Experiences like that late night conversation have rooted in me a lasting sense of peace and security. It means more to me than I can explain to know without a doubt in my very inmost being that Billy is truly, deeply for me. And that, more than anything else, cuts to the core of my fierce love for the man I married 366 days ago.

Bad Neighbors

2009-05-26T10:23:00.005-05:00

There are new neighbors across the alley. The kind that swear, make lewd comments towards women, don't care if their garbage overflows into the alley and into other's property, and who have a number of 10 minute visitors who always have someone waiting in the car with the car running. We can hear the parents screaming at the kids and see the kids roaming the streets at all hours feasting on junk food and candy. Our landlords have entered into an old fashioned feud with them after they were found jumping on the Landlord's trailer and subsequently banned from the abandoned lot they had made into a playground, which required police involvement to get them off the property. In retribution for this banishing the children slashed about 10 paintings that the landlords had displayed in the alley. Currently, the landlords have forbidden their children from playing with the "bad kids" and are trying to find a way to get them out of the neighborhood.

Marta and I have befriended two of the children and have had them help us with our garden that is on the land that they were kicked out from. They are definitely some rowdy kids but can be respectful and helpful. At a recent neighborhood party we attended we were talking with the landlord and they were talking about how horrible the neighbors were and how they had found out that the owner of the property did not have a renting license and they were in danger of being evicted soon. I made an empathetic statement regarding how horrible that would be for the family to be kicked out so soon and the landlord returned with the reply, "well it would be good for us!" I did not say it at the time (I wish I would have) but in my head I was thinking that it probably isn't good for us in the grand scheme of things.

Everyone seems to want bad neighbors out of THEIR neighborhood and few people actually want to take the time to love them and try to help them be better neighbors. I wonder if it actually helps us to push out everyone in the neighborhood who is an inconvenience or who have issues and leave ourselves with people who look just like us and don't require anything from us. It may "help" us in the short run, but robs us of opportunities to grow and become children of God, bringers of peace and wholeness.

I agree that the landlord of these neighbors could be considered a slum lord- a landlord who is never present and never cares for their properties, but slumlords have a purpose in this society. They provide housing for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to find it due to past evictions, felonies, or inability to speak english. Otherwise these people would end up on the streets. The (understandable) problem is that nobody wants to be near a slumlord's property because of the trouble that it brings. But if no one takes the stand to invest in these people, there will never be any change and their cycles of poverty and issues will continue.

Good News

2009-05-25T10:21:00.003-05:00

As of Tuesday of last week, I have a new job. Calvary Church is one of our favorite spots in all Minneapolis, so when they announced an opening for a newly designed administrative and communications role, I did not wait long to apply - the perspective of biking to work at a place with the kind of impact on our community that this church has seemed almost too good to be real! Calvary is not only one of the few truly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic churches in this state where Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week - it is a community of mature, glad-hearted followers of Jesus who strive to be messengers of justice and good news right here in our neighborhood.

One of the perks of my new job, which some half-jokingly call a crucible, is that I get to work alongside of Calvary's pastor. Jeff has served this particular congregation for the last 24 years, ever since his graduation from seminary, and he might just be one of the most outgoing people you've ever met. He is loud, uproarious and passionate for his flock. He can soothe a crying toddler and fix a broken boiler as well as he can preach, and he knows the name of every single person who raises their hand during our weekly ritual of offering God our praise, pain and protest.

On my second or third day on the job, a woman from the neighborhood walked into our office asking for help. Her weary face reflected a lifetime of struggle and much pain, but she did not come in asking for money. A week since deciding to quit smoking, she had just found out that she has lung cancer. What she came for was for someone to soothe her and tell her that not all was lost. As we sat down, she was so choked up with anxiety that she could barely breathe. "I try my best to trust God" - she said between short, shallow breaths - "but I'm afraid this is His punishment."

Just by the time I managed to soothe her enough to breathe normally, Jeff returned to the office from a short errand and sat down with us. I knew he was having a busy day so I expected a quick prayer and a pat on the back - something like "God is in control of everything and you should just trust Him" - but his response to the woman was nothing like that. "This is not the end, sister" - he told her, "This is an invitation to a new beginning." He told her that she is God's beloved daughter - that God does not look at her as a punishing Judge, but as a compassionate Father. He told her that she needs God's people around her to help her through this time, and to help her see herself through God's eyes which are so different than the condemning eyes of this world. He told her that this time was an invitation from God to enter into a deeper relationship with Him where she would find lasting peace. His words carried no hint of shaming or judgment - they sounded like surprisingly Good News.

Good News - that is the literal meaning of the biblical word "Gospel." In the experience of too many, including myself, "Gospel" has come to mean anything but that - it has in fact become news of sin, condemnation, inadequacy and shame. If you're not a Christian, the "Gospel" message is that you're an abomination in God's eyes. If you are, you should be ashamed of yourself for not preaching the "Gospel" to all the lost sinners you know.

Sin, condemnation and shame are all an inevitable part of our reality on this planet - but Jeff's words reminded me that this is precisely the reality that Jesus came to rescue us from. And if that is the Good News of the Gospel, I might actually want to tell someone about it... In fact, I might actually want to hear it myself over and over again!

Auto Therapy

2009-05-03T08:45:00.011-05:00

Recently, I started volunteering at a local auto mechanic shop that Marta and I had been taking our cars to. About a month ago I asked the owner of the shop if it would be ok if I came by to just hang out and watch as they fixed cars and possibly learn a thing or two. The mechanics were a little perplexed because this was the first time anyone had ever made such a request but they quizzically agreed to my offer in return for helping out where I could. Their only question was whether my virgin ears could stand the amount of swearing I would encounter, to which I replied that they had been deflowered long ago. The first day I was greeted with the proclamation that "The crazy guy is here" but was fairly quickly introduced to the mechanics and taken under their wing.

I came into the shop letting them know that I knew absolutely nothing about cars or how to fix them and that I was here to learn. I had been sick of being at the mercy of corrupt auto mechanics who could tell me anything they wanted to and I would have to believe them and pay ridiculous amounts of money to them. I also thought that it might be nice to save some money by learning how to do simple repairs on my own aging automobile. My first day at the shop the guys taught me how to do an oil change and fix a break light. (I felt so empowered with a sense of accomplishment!)

I have found, however, that after a month of volunteering the greater reason I go is for my own therapy. I have found that in working with people change is often a painstakingly slow process if it happens at all. As a therapist one cannot simply "fix" people. Even if change is accomplished there is no guarantee that your work will not unravel with the next week's stressor. With cars, if you see a problem, you can fix it and the job is done. There comes a real sense of accomplishment that does not easily come with working with people. This is my therapy. I have found that it is balancing for me to be involved with something that progresses and can be easily judged as "accomplished".

Even on the days when I do not do much at the shop, it still feels healing to be there. I take in deep breathes of oil fumes and listen to stories of how the mechanics have burned their eyebrows off or been injured in the war. I feel that I have retreated from the world of pain and chronic family dysfunction for at least a few hours during my week.

Makarios

2009-04-08T22:20:00.003-05:00

μακάριος (makarios): blessed, fortunate, happy

It is one of the ironies of my existence that just when I come to live in the Land of Streets Paved With Gold, as we imagined it in my childhood, America enters into its greatest recession since the 1930s. For the last couple of months, hardly a day has gone by without some bad news: foreclosures, bankruptcies, bailouts, record-high unemployment, plummeting GDP - judging by the tones of some experts on the radio, an economic Armageddon. We have not been affected as severely as others, being that we're both young and have no stake in the stock market; but it's sobering to watch how deeply this crisis bites into the hopes and financial futures of many people we know.

As analysts continue to predict doom and gloom, we continue as a house church in our meditation on the Sermon on the Mount - a radical reversal of the idea of who is really well off in the first place. Recently, Billy led us in a discussion of the fourth Beatitude - "blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." As with all the Beatitudes, this one in particular makes me wonder at times whether Jesus forgot to point out some mysterious connection. Blessed are those who see the endless destruction, corruption and exploitation? Who notice the abused kids, discriminated minorities, battered women, hypocritical preachers; the ravaged earth, cycles of poverty and trampled human dignity - who see these things clearly enough to cry out for justice?

"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise" - I thought to myself recently at Disneyworld, where all I could see at one point were the tons of disposable plastic disappearing at the magical touch of minimum-wage "cast members" after being thrown away by crowds who had just stepped off the "Living with the Earth" ride featuring eco-friendly fish farms and sustainable crops. Do you see yet why I haven't blogged in a while? When all you see in "the happiest place on earth" is plastic, you begin to wonder...

I will admit that I do not come at the Beatitudes as a clean slate - they have always made me extremely uncomfortable. I think it started when I was a little girl and sometimes heard the Bible interpreted in ways which implied that God is so entirely different from us that His definitions of good or evil might actually be the opposite of ours - so in God's view, I might actually be "blessed" by being utterly miserable. When you are five years old and hear of a good God who orders the Canaanite men, women and children slain without mercy, textual criticism does not exactly emerge as a possible solution - either the good God or the definition of goodness has to go. Parting with the latter seemed like the choice of a lesser of two evils, and although I gave up this dichotomy a long time ago, it still surfaces as a haunting suspicion that may just lie beneath the surface of all conscious sin - "God, are you really good?"

Imagine my amazement, then, when no one in house church ever brought any of this up. I sat there waiting for somebody else to voice my suspicion, but it never came - what came instead

was a collective insight so simple and brilliant that my suspicion suddenly appeared like the whining of a disgruntled teenager. Of course those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are filled - their appetites are directed towards a healthy and nutritious kind of food, as opposed to empty fast-food calories. The gods of Greed, Consumerism and Security, rooted in the ancient lie of self-serving gain, are gods all right - but gods with no power to fill or save. This is one of my favorite aspects of doing theology as a community - thanks to the company of others on the journey, I'm able to discover my own slant and hidden prejudice, and be faced once again with the unimaginable reality of a God who really desires to give me hope and genuine abundance, even in the midst of crisis.

Render Unto Ceasar

2009-04-05T15:07:00.016-05:00

Marta and I recently watched the movie "Syriana". It is a film about the corruption that comes with America's pursuit and dependence on oil, illustrating the convoluted interconnectedness between the oil companies, politicians, the CIA, oil Sheiks, energy analysts, lawyers, and ordinary Arabs caught up into terrorism. The film left me with a sense of powerlessness, feeling that this problem is so big and complex that there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. What made me feel even more powerless was the thought that the people who are in these positions of corruption and power are not even afraid of this movie. If they really felt threatened by this film, it would have never been made. The thing is that they know as well as I know that the entire nation could see this movie and come out of the theatre saying, "Wow, our system is really corrupt, oh well, nothing we can do about it, unless we want to give up what we have."

There is a quote in the movie by a lawyer who is being sacrificed up to the public as a scapegoat to appear that the system is actually fighting corruption, he states, "corruption is what makes all of this possible, corruption is what keeps us safe and warm instead of fighting for scraps on the street". Our standard of living is supported by these activities all across the globe. If it weren't for the CIA, oil companies, and politicians meddling in world affairs, we wouldn't be able to have cheap gasoline or heating, or have as much money to buy inexpensive electronics (which would then be expensive electronics). Everything would be harder to come by, raising prices and driving many of the superfluous or luxury goods and services (that we have gotten used to) out of business. It is kind of like having a drug dealer for a father. You don't really want to call the police on him because he is the one paying for all of your food, clothing, and video games. Without him, you would be in poverty, or at least not able to buy all the cool stuff you have now.

I used to be really obsessed with conspiracy theories and wanting to uncover them and fight against them. A couple of years ago, my friends and I were serving coffee on the street and I remember talking to this homeless guy who was telling me all about who was behind the Kennedy assassination and how it was really the Defense Department's Intelligence Agency or something and he strung a pretty convincing web of facts and connections, but at the end of it I looked at him and said, "The powerful will always be corrupt but I follow the laws of a different kingdom". Basically, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's".

I don't discount the efforts of those in government fighting against corruption and attempting to bring justice to the system. I just believe that the greatest change will be brought about by planting small mustard seeds that eventually work their way through the cracks of the concrete above. Inviting my neighbor over for breakfast, speaking truth and healing into the lives of those I love, caring for the poor and the sick, living simply with the knowledge of how the distribution of resources affects others, freeing myself from the idols of consumerism and militarism. This lifestyle brings change and works its way like yeast through kneaded bread.

Some would take issue with me at the moment and accuse me of playing right into the hands of the powerful, enabling them to continue to get rich off the blood of others. I understand and empathize with this sentiment, yet I believe there will come a time when they are judged for their deeds, but I will trust in one more powerful than I to do that judging. Meanwhile the powerful are the ones who are fighting for the scraps of power on the floor, unaware that there is real food to be had at the kingdom feast, the appetizers of which we can enjoy now.

Yet I am not so sure that the powerful of this world should be entirely unafraid of those who plant mustard seeds. There is a quote in "The Brothers Karamazov" by a French intelligence officer, rounding up and arresting socialists. "We are not afraid of all these socialists, anarchists, atheists, and revolutionaries. We keep an eye on them, and their movements are known to us. But there are some special people among them, although not many: these are believers in God and Christians, and at the same time socialists. They are the ones we are most afraid of; they are terrible people! A socialist Christian is more dangerous than a socialist atheist." One has to think... Why was Jesus put to death? :)

Ripples

2009-03-25T10:24:00.006-05:00

A long time ago there was a man who lost a great deal of money in the stock market. He became depressed and started to drink, neglecting his own family and treating his children as worthless. The man's son grows older and marries, seeing himself as worthless and in turn treating his wife as he feels, degrading her as often as he can. One day the wife cheats on her husband because she finds someone who treats her with desire and admiration. The man in his sadness and hurt turns to alcohol to soothe his pain, just as he had seen his father do. One day as he is driving while intoxicated, he crashes into a van carrying a family, killing a mother and her two children, but leaving the father alive. This father, destroyed by the loss of what was most precious to him lashes out in rage and jealousy at those who still have children, to the point of kidnapping another's child and killing it. The parents of the kidnapped child sink into despair and numb their pain with Methanphetamines. The drug takes control of their reasoning, they become oversexualized and begin neglecting and sexually abusing their other children. One of their boys grows to be 14 and in his pain and battle against powerlessness rapes a neighbor child for offending him. The neighbor boy's mother cannot handle the guilt that she was unable to protect her son and turns to drugs herself. The boy is removed from the home, placed in foster care and ends up in a session with me.

I ask myself, who is to blame for this? Who should pay for the injustice done to my client? Is it the boy who raped him? Or the boys' parents who abused him? Or the kidnapper? How far back do we go? In an amazing session, my client's mother was talking about how she felt tremendous anger over what happened and wanted to kill the boy who raped her son, but then she softened, and said that she also felt compassion on him because she knew that in order to do this, some incredible hurt must have been done to him.

Recently, I was driving home with a strong hatred in my heart for those who have done evil to my clients and the many victims in the world. The hatred was so strong that I wanted to take justice into my own hands and kill those responsible for evil. Two recent and unexpected sources have opened my eyes to the place of hurt in the evils of this world; the book, "The Shack" and the children's book/movie "The Tale of Despereaux". Both struggle with the problem of evil from a creative and empathetic stance, realizing the complexities of the human heart. The frightening truth is that none of us are immune to deep hurt or beyond the possibility of making unloving choices as a result of this hurt.

While I believe that at each stage of the story I have described, each individual had a choice to make, I cannot help but feel more compassion and understanding for the hurt driving the decisions made. I only hope that there is a light more powerful than this strain of darkness, a redemption more glorious than the fall. I know that within my client lies the opportunity to end the darkness, and with God's help maybe someday...

My client grows to forgive the boy who hurt him and chooses to end the cycle of gaining power over others or being stepped on by others, but learns a third way of giving power to others in wisdom and trust and caring for power given. Maybe he will even become a counselor one day and help other children who have been abused. A child that he counsels learns that she is not worthless or permanently stained, goes on to marry and have children, giving her children the childhood and the love that she never experienced. Her children grow up safe and with compassion towards others. Her son travels across the world to work in a refugee camp in a war torn country. He brings healing to those who have been raped, sold into slavery, and have witnessed terrible atrocities. One boy that he rescues from slavery grows up to commit his life to freeing others from slavery and leads a movement of people to crack down on slave traders. An article is written about this man in a newspaper far away, and it is read by another man who recently lost a large sum in the stock market, causing him to put down his glass of whiskey.

Beyond Critique

2009-03-04T21:16:00.002-06:00

A terrifying thought has recently occurred to me. The kind of thought that makes one wonder if the ground they are standing upon is really there or if they are who they believe themselves to be. Recently, Marta and I have been pondering examples in our life of individuals or groups claiming that they are following the will of God. The scary thing is that once someone or a group of people claim that what they are doing is the will of God, they are guaranteed an air tight, waterproof theological barrier around their actions.

For example. Let us say that there is a plot of swamp land down the street selling for really cheap and I am looking to build a house. I spend some time in prayer and ask God if I should buy the land or not (I really want to, it is such a good deal). And then, I discern that God says yes. First of all, no one has any real good reason to deny my claims because there is nothing in his "general will" or revelation against buying swampland. One could maybe bring up that it is not very wise to buy swampland and will be very difficult to build a house but then I would counter that I am the wise one here for getting such a great deal. (I would also say that it worked for Walt Disney :) )

Now let's say that I go to build my house and it turns out that I need to haul in extra rock and soil to lay a solid foundation in the swamp or the house will sink. This puts me back an extra $40,000 but in the grand scheme of things, I am still coming out on top. This is what we would call a "test of faith" or a "trial/tribulation" which could come from God or from Satan trying to throw me off of this amazing blessing God has for us. Then another snag. I find I need to buy a special sewer system for the house that will put me over the amount I would have spent on a house on a normal piece of land. I start to have doubts at this point whether this was a good idea, but they are fleeting and I am at this point, too commited to turn back, besides I have already told my church and all my friends that this is the will of God and my entire reputation would be ruined if I said that I was wrong.

So I keep going. I start to build my house, but it turns out that the foundation I laid wasn't good enough and part of it sinks leaving me with a pretty crooked frame. So I have to pay more money to place more rocks into the foundation and fix the frame again. Clearly, a test of my faith. I have to take out a second mortgage on the house and get another job to pay for it. A friend of mine asks me if I still think it was God's will for me to build this house. First I tell him that I will pray for his lack of faith and secondly, that following God's will is worth more than any amount of money. God judges success not by human standards but by his own standards right?

Now, this story could end in a couple of different ways. 1.) I end up completing the house and have a pretty nice house that cost me twice as much as any other comparable house on the market. I also have the satisfaction of following God's will to completion.
2.) I go into bankruptcy and lose the home. I either blame those brief moments of doubting I had earlier or say that this was merely a test that God had put me through to make sure that I would follow him 100%.

What concerns me here is that there is often not a possibility for someone to admit they are wrong about discerning God's will. Once it has been announced or decided that this is God's will, it seems like it pretty much has to be carried out to completion regardless of the outcome. There is not a lot of grace in our culture for someone who admits that they were wrong, both from others and towards themselves. This individual would face the ruin of their reputation, and mockery from others as well as lose confidence in their own level of faith and ability to discern god's will. But, who am I to say? Maybe there are some times when God does want me to build on a swamp. Yet I suspect there are a lot of people out there building on swamps that don't have to be.

Breadmaking

2009-02-26T22:31:00.004-06:00

Just moments ago, I pulled two loaves of absolutely beautiful homemade bread out of the oven. The delicious smell has been slowly filling every nook and cranny of the Stork's Nest, and now they are finally ready - tall, golden and well-rounded, by far my best looking loaves ever. I'm still looking at them in choked-up astonishment.

If you've ever tried to bake bread, you probably know that it is no simple affair. In fact, my own first attempts always ended up in sullen frustration - the bread would most typically not rise like it was supposed to, yet I would try to bake it anyway, and the result usually resembled a brick rather than bread. I think it was just tonight that I finally put my finger on the secret... As so many brilliant conclusions, it dawned upon me by accident. As I was making the dough, I miscalculated how much time I had until Billy and I were leaving for dinner at our friend's house, so I had no time to bake it and had to leave it alone for a couple of hours. When we came home, the dough had actually doubled - just like it said in the recipe! It had been there in the cookbooks all along; I just never really believed it. In my impatience to finally taste a real sandwich - a desire only augmented by the local prevalence of yucky imitations of the Wonderbread sort - I quickly concluded that the dough was ready to go and tried to rush the delicate process. What I got in return were dense bricks - perhaps still wholesome and nutritious, as Billy c0mpassionately reminded me, but nothing like the deliciously fluffy wonders that came out of the oven tonight.

I'm sure I've made many other discoveries like this one and soon forgot their impact, but this one stands out as an image for a vague inkling that's been with me for some time. The struggle to wait seems like a common malady of our "microwave society." We are impatient to grow up, to get a degree, to get married; impatient for the various pieces of our lives to come together, for pain to make sense, for churches to grow, for the Kingdom of God to come. If things don't happen like we'd hope, we often conclude that the dough needs some speeding up - so we rush through childhood, graduate early, put band-aids over wounds, borrow marketing strategies from business or try to take over the government. Meanwhile, the organism of God's Kingdom operates on an independent schedule - like yeast rising when the cook is away or a seed growing in the soil regardless of whether the farmer is looking. The kind of bread that I long for - as well as the kind of marriage, friendship, community - grows in effortless mystery, but not without my effort of faithful waiting. The beautiful part? Once I give in to the present moment, the bread grows peacefully on its own while I flirt with Billy, notice the full moon on the way to our friend's house and enjoy an evening of lovely conversation.

It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Neighbor

2009-02-12T22:27:00.007-06:00

A man was returning home from a visit to the International House of Prayer via a country road when his Timing Belt suddenly broke, startling him and sending him into the ditch. He emerged with a dazed look and a bleeding forehead from hitting the dash. The man knew that he was in the middle of nowhere and that it could be hours before he saw another car.

Just then he saw what looked like a tour bus driving towards him in the distance. He couldn't believe his eyes - it was the bus of one of his favorite televangelists! He cried out in joy and began to wave frantically at the bus with his shirt but the bus picked up speed as it passed him on its way to the next major city. The man stared in disbelief and sunken hope.

As he swaggered back to his car he again caught the glimpse of a vehicle in the distance coming towards him. It was the unmistakable outline of a 15 person church youth van complete with luggage trailer and an emblazened cross on the side door. The man's heart leaped once again as he waved his shirt and cried out in distress. He slowly lowered his arms as the van sped by him full of teenagers pointing and laughing at his predicament.

No sooner had this van passed when the man noticed another car coming his way. He started to raise his shirt once again but then stopped when he noticed a large rainbow sticker on the front of the car. He momentarily cursed himself for his prominent bumperstickers touting his political and religious views. To his surprise the car pulled to a stop behind him. Out stepped a well dressed young man who, with an effeminate tone, asked him if he needed some help. The man was dumbfounded. The stranger drove the man to the next town and, while he was in the emergency room, arranged for a tow truck to get his car and paid for his hospital bills...

"Go and do likewise"
Lk. 10:25-37

Billy the Bunny

2009-02-11T22:01:00.010-06:00

I just had to share this one - not only the name, but the subversive style fit someone we know whose name starts with a B.!

Counterscript (I)

2009-02-03T12:07:00.008-06:00

Last Saturday, the Storks' Nest once again became a bustling seat of activity as our home filled up with some of our favorite people in the world, gathered once again to remember the story we have all chosen to live by, and to nurture one another as we all seek to follow the alternative scenario of the kingdom of God.

Those gathered in our living room come from various religious traditions - some have been raised in Evangelical megachurches, some graduated from a Pentecostal Bible college, others grew up Catholic, were part of a house church, watched preachers on TV or attended liberal churches with a strong emphasis on social justice. We've gravitated towards each other not just in reaction to our respective traditions - although we do vary in our level of criticism towards where we came from and openly bring those to the table, open to the realization that we've each been equipped with a set of key questions, commitments and preconceptions.

What pulls us together is a common sense that the dominant scripts of our culture, including the religious ones, fail to deliver the safety and happiness they promise. At the same time, we've all stolen glimpses of a very different story, one which makes my heart sing. It seems implausible, impractical, counterintuitive - and yet it is here that the blind see, the poor inherit a kingdom, those in mourning find their tears carefully counted; it is here that being takes precedence over having or doing, happiness is not an impossible goal but a pleasant side effect, and we find the heavens friendly and near.

The trouble is that those glimpses are fleeting, and we live in proximity to many powerful idols: Consumerism, Progress, Technology, Militarism, Romantic Love, Therapism, Liberal Guilt, Prosperity Gospel - to list just a few of the ones we mentioned the other night. They are compelling and popular stories that we repeatedly give in to, only to come full circle with Qoheleth - "all is vanity and striving after wind." That's when we remember the strange distant music of the Gospel. We gather again in someone's living room to hear the Counterscript, perhaps in the Beatitudes. We hear the truth about the shape we're in, and that truth telling makes us free.

The Beatitudes

2009-01-27T21:11:00.005-06:00

In preparation for attending the play "Jesus Christ Superstar" with a friend of ours who is not too fond of Christianity as he conceives of it, I emailed him this short introduction into the Christian ideal.

Matthew 5:1-10

Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them, saying:

"Blessed are the rich, for theirs is the kingdom they have created.

Blessed are those who are impervious to sorrow and trouble themselves not with the pain of others, for they comfort themselves.

Blessed are the powerful, for they have received their inheritance.

Blessed are those who are self-righteous, they have already filled themselves.

Blessed are those who are unwavering and unbending in their pursuit of justice as to not let a single error go unpunished, the favor will be returned to them.

Blessed are the self-unaware, for they do not have to worry about God.

Blessed are the lovers of war, for they will be called sons of men.

Blessed are those who persecute others in the name of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of this world.

Blessed are you when you insult people, persecute them, and falsely say all kinds of evil against them because of me.
Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward."

Of Rabbits and Men

2009-01-18T20:50:00.009-06:00

With a thick cover of snow covering our back yard, we've recently discovered a couple sets of animal tracks indicating that we may have a couple more neighbors than we thought. We had so far made our acquaintance with a tattered tom cat, the raccoon who occasionally raids our garbage, a family of pigeons who seem to have taken a liking to our bedroom window, a pair of crows in the maple tree, along with their entourage of silly sparrows, and the three boisterous squirrels who chase each other around our alley. We've become familiar with all of their sights and signs, so we knew right away that the long tracks in the snow must have belonged to somebody new. A few nights ago, as I was opening the door, my eyes suddenly met with the frightened stare of a little white rabbit crouched by the jasmine bush. We looked at each other for a good minute, both surprised by each others presence, before leaving each other alone and going our separate ways.

The sight of all these animals in the city still startles me, even after living here for over a year. Where I come from, cities are ancient human enclaves effectively separated from nature over the course of many centuries. The sight of a squirrel in a city park is a rare and celebrated occurrence, and rabbits can only be spotted far off in the country, away from human dwellings. The only time I had ever seen a raccoon was at the zoo - a funny creature who liked things so clean that he meticulously washed all of his food. When I first looked in the dictionary to see if I knew the Polish name for the scary creature that dug in our garbage, I could at first not believe that it was the same thing - in fact, I still wonder if the animal I saw at the Polish zoo as a little girl might be a different type of raccoon than those in Minnesota?

Even if it should be so, I can't hold the same disbelief with regard to squirrels - they are definitely the same species, yet I am about the only person I know who stops at their sight with amazement and wonder. There are, in fact, so many of them here, and they cause so much damage to people's houses, that they are seen as an outright nuisance - much like rabbits, who nibble on people's flowerbeds and gardens. One man's joy is another's pest... We even have a friend a couple of blocks away - if you are a child in Poland you may want to stop reading right here - who regularly shoots squirrels with his BB gun!

The culture of shooting is a subject for a post of its own, but the various connotations of raccoons and squirrels actually made me think of people the other day. They remind me of a man I got to know back in Poland, who came on numerous missions trips with a deep sense compassion for the young people of my country. Shortly after I moved here, we had a conversation about the part of the city where Billy and I chose to live, and I was taken aback by his open hostility towards my new neighbors - "these lazy troublemakers who live off others' taxes and make our streets unsafe." I was instantly struck by his radically different attitude towards two groups of people who live in very similar realities. It would be an understatement to say that Polish cities are no safer than the south side of Minneapolis - the difference is that they are an ocean away, and so the pain does not cut as close; it is not as personal as having your car broken into or a friend's child wounded by a gunshot in the back yard. It's less of a challenge to love broken people and to see their beauty at a distance - like an occasional squirrel in the city park.

I wonder, however, if the depth and transformation that love is really about can ever truly happen at a distance - unless it begins in the back yard, in close community with others different than us who will occasionally eat our lettuce or bite through our roof.

The Poor will Always Be Among Us

2009-01-13T12:47:00.004-06:00

The more I work in the social services arena, the more I come to see the grim reality behind Jesus' words. I often work with clients whose poverty(material and spirit) is a result of a complex web of addictions, mental illness, poor parental modeling, and plain old selfishness. I have recently been thinking about what it would take to end poverty forever.

We all know that just throwing money at poor families will not lift them out of their circumstances or break the deep cycles in which they are imbedded. Let us imagine then that we were able to provide the most comprehensive wrap around services possible. We give the family stable housing in a neighborhood with mixed income so as not to concentrate poverty, we provide them with job training and positions in jobs making livable wages, we provide their children with day care and the best education money can buy, then we have counselors and therapists provide intensive therapy for both the family as a whole and the individuals, we give them domestic abuse training, chemical dependency training and support, life skills education on how to budget and manage a household. We then connect these families with spiritual communities where they can be loved and cared for, and be given meaning and connection. Even if we did all of this, we still cannot account for an individual's choices. A person's unwillingness and lack of desire to change can make all of these lovely programs as useless as giving vegetables to a lawn mower. I have been in many sessions where I bend over backwards trying to come up with new and creative ways to help families and when the dust clears it comes down to the fact that they do not want to change their ways.

Even if every person on the planet was freed from the curse of poverty there would still come along people who make poor choices both for themselves or in regards to others. A mother chooses herself over her child and uses substances in the womb, that child does worse in school, is less equipped to get a high paying job and thus the cycle begins again. A son is born mentally ill and when he comes of age goes in search of a mate, having children, the cycle begins again. Another people group is oppressed because they are different and given less opportunities in society, the cycle begins again. A company lays off a third of its workers to show an increase rather than a decrease in their already large profits, the cycle begins again.

So what is to be done? Should we give up since the end goal is hopeless? Even though I don't believe we are ever going to free this world from hunger, war, poverty, or hate, there are small successes that give me hope. There are people who do desire to change even though they are oppressed by a myriad of issues. There are people who do change. It saves my mind from despair to know that each individual or family that is brought out of the cycle of poverty means that we have not only freed them, but the generations that proceed from them.

A Stork Apology

2009-01-11T12:53:00.006-06:00

Just so we are all on the same page to start out, a few words about storks. I suspect that there are a few of you out there already wondering if this blog is meant to be a chronicle of an imminent parenting endeavor, and a few others, who happen to know about my secret pregnancy phobia, guffawing at the irony. To set the record straight, our association with storks has other sources though - it all began soon after our wedding, when we moved in to a lovely apartment on the top floor of a duplex, high above the surrounding city and accessible through a rickety staircase. Before we knew it, or my phobia had time to get activated, the place named itself the Storks' Nest. As it turns out, it had great insight in doing so... Did you know, for instance, that:

The white stork is the national bird of Poland, my home country. Along with other Slavic nations, Poles believe that storks bring peace and happiness to the family on whose house they nest.
One of the largest stork populations is found in Ukraine, where the two of us first met. There, it is associated with the start of a new family in a new home (!)
Storks are migrant birds - they spend part of the year in Europe, and travel to more tropical parts in the winter. While Minnesota is in no way a tropical destination, the element of migration is a constant in our world - one of us is and always will be living in a foreign country.
Is it any wonder then that Pithagoras thought that storks impersonate the souls of dead poets??

Welcome

2009-01-10T00:18:00.007-06:00

Greetings wanderers, vagabonds, and pursuers of beauty. Welcome to our cozy home among the electronic rush hours and dilapidated telephone poles of cyberspace. We invite you to join us as we take refuge with our thoughts and reflections on life. We hope that our thoughts stir your thoughts - and vice versa.

Best read with a cup of tea with lemon.