Rain

Well, we didn't get twenty inches of rain like south Texas, but we have gotten enough in the last few days that dams on ponds and lakes are in danger, basements are flooding, and roads are closed all over northeast Missouri. One of the little towns I pass through on my way to work appeared to be on a hill in a large lake. When I reached Kirksville, the highway patrol had a roadblock setup and sent me back down the road to find another way into town due to flood fears.

I would say I have about a 50-50 shot of being able to get home from work tonight. Ugh.

Pooh, the sage

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "What's the first thing you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.

"It's the same thing," he said.

--from Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne

Maturity

"Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults."

--Peter De Vries

Chicken soup for the Luddite soul

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

--Swiss playwright Max Frisch

Audacity's Reward

A few weeks ago, Amy had a two-day class in Jefferson City for her position as a breast-feeding peer counselor at the health department. I tagged along for a mini-vacation. While there, one of the things I had the chance to do was visit the Missouri capitol for the first time. I admired the solid construction, the attractive statues and decorations, the elegant interior (one of the nicest public restrooms I've seen!), and visited the museum that fills the central hall. From all of this, I came away with three strong impressions: the beauty of the capitol building, the predominance of weapons and war in the museum, and the shame of the legacy of slavery in Missouri.

In particular, I was struck immediately by the juxtaposition of violence and slavery in the museum. The most common exhibits were guns, uniforms, models of ships and cannons, and other remembrances of the war and death, from battles with Native Americans, the horror of the Civil War, and the immense machinery of the World Wars. The most moving exhibit, on the other hand, was easily the room that was filled with both written and oral accounts from former slaves of their everyday lives, a room which I left blinking back tears and filled with horror at man's ability to hate. Could it be that there is some relationship between a culture that has so embraced violence and a culture that found it possible to justify the atrocity of slavery?

I happen to live in a small, rural community with almost no ethnic minorities. As recently as eight or nine years ago, I had neighbors who referred to all black people using the "n-word." Rumor has it that many people in town opposed bringing in new industry (there really isn't any "old" industry) because they didn't want "those damn Mexicans" coming in to work the factory. My older son came home from school last year with stories of his teacher talking about "the black people trying to take over our country who should all go back to Africa where they belong." Amy and I were livid when we heard this and spoke to the teacher. It turned out that the teacher said nothing of the sort, and that he heard it from some students in his class (who doubtless heard this from their parents). We were relieved...sort of.

All of this makes me by turns sad and angry and ashamed. It also makes me worry a bit since our youngest son, adopted from Kazakhstan, has dark skin and Asian features. This may not be the easiest town for him to grow up in. In general I'm somewhat of a pacifist, but the mindless hate that sometimes rears its head here brings me as close to considering violence as anything., and yes, I see the irony in that. Of course, most of the people of this town are welcoming and more tolerant; but even some of them unconsciously use language that is demeaning to minorities without realizing it.

Considering the legacy of hate that lingers so stubbornly in our hearts sometimes makes me almost despair. Amy had a conversation with someone in our area last fall who said they thought the country might be ready to have a woman president, but surely not a black man. Last night, Barack Obama leaped the first hurdle to prove them wrong, and I felt a swell of pride. Whatever you think of Mr. Obama or his politics, I agree with the post my brother-in-law wrote: I am thankful to be alive to see this happen. I am thrilled by the thought that we can rise above our past, that we can make our hearts bigger than they were, that we can say no to bigotry and hatred.

Barack Obama is just a man, with all of the failures and frailties common to our species. He is not the savior of America, and I don't expect him to make everything turn out right if he wins. Even so, I am immensely proud of him. He has managed to overcome the race barrier that is part of our nation's shame, and he did it not through recrimination and anger, but through reconciliation and hope.

Good for him.

A poor excuse and a good poem

I'm afraid it has been a ridiculously long time since I have posted here. I have no other excuse than that I just haven't felt like it. Now, I'm breaking my long silence with someone else's words. In this case, a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that I heard on the Speaking of Faith program on Approaching Prayer. I don't know that it really describes how I'm feeling right now, but I find it very beautiful all the same.

I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

You, the great homesickness we could never shake
off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us,

on the day you made us you created yourself,
and we grew sturdy in your sunlight…

Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now
and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

At the Lake

There were no chanting Tibetan monks,
Only the wind whistling overtones
Through the corrugated metal roof
And whipping the surface of the water
Into a thousand white, frothy peaks,
Each one an eye blinking in the midday glare,
Watching as the waves tried to shake the
Dock off the lake into the bottomless blue sky.

Lost Things

I lost my bottle early on,
Followed by my wordless innocence.
Hard on the heels of this tramua,
I lost the services of those
Who bore me effortlessly
Wherever I needed to go.

I adapted, of course;
I'm nothing if not flexible.
I ate; I talked; I walked.
But it didn't end there.
I lost countless days in the
Forced pursuit of education.

It never stops, you know,
This continuous litany of loss.
Toys and friends,
Money and jobs,
Certainty and delusion
All get misplaced eventually.

There's more to come,
Or so I've heard--
Memory, eyesight, bladder control--
Until, finally, my last breath
Escapes me, and I find
I've misplaced myself.

Spin

Today I ran across a blog entry entitled The Sustaining Narrative on a blog I had never read before, Crunchy Con. Here is an excerpt:

I heard a very sad report on the BBC over the weekend. Their correspondent visited a Vermont family that backed the Iraq War foursquare. They had lost a son in the fighting, and the young soldier's mother said she hoped Americans didn't forget what our troops were sacrificing so that America could still live free.

This is heartbreaking. We're not asking young men and women to die in Iraq to protect American liberty. But this grieving mother needs to believe that so her son will have died in some greater cause. When I contemplate the possibility that my brother-in-law might die in Iraq -- a member of his unit was killed last week by an IED -- I can't hold on to the thought for more than half a second, not only because it's so painful for obvious reasons, but because I can't see the moral justification for it. I mean no offense to you who do, and God knows the courage of those young men and women is unquestionable. It's those who sent them to Iraq in the first place I question, and I don't see why we have to pretend the war is about American liberty to justify the decisions those leaders (with our support, it must be said) have made.

What the author is getting at is the way we construct narratives around social or political issues to help cover the tragedy that would otherwise threaten to overwhelm us, the way we sometimes become good at lying to ourselves about (or at least distracting ourselves from) uncomfortable truths. Of course, politicians have long made use of "spin doctors" to make the truth seem better than it really is, but this sort of thing is not limited to politicians.

I remember the funeral of a friend I had in college, a young woman who had been married for only a year when she was killed in a car accident. At the funeral, the preacher went on and on about how my friend had died for a reason, standing up for what was right, a martyr of sorts for the Christian faith, an example to all the sinners in the room who had better take notice of her sacrifice for their sakes. I'm guessing the preacher didn't know how, when all her fellow Holiness church members were away, my friend and her husband would put on their forbidden wedding rings, turn on a little forbidden music, and dance the night away together. If she had known, maybe the funeral sermon would have been about the danger of worldly pleasures that lead you to an early grave.

Either way, I resented the preacher's need to use my friend's death for her own ends, to bolster her appeal. My friend had not died for the audience's sake, and she hadn't died for her sins. She had just died--a wonderful, vivacious, happy life snuffed out. Maybe there was a bigger reason, but it just seemed arrogant to me for that preacher to pretend she knew what it was in order to get a response from her listeners.

Looking back, farther away from the grief of that moment, I wonder if that preacher might have been overwhelmed with grief herself--she might have been related to my friend for all I know. Maybe like that mother who lost her son in Iraq, she felt like she had to attach a deeper purpose to her tragedy so she could stand the pain, weaving a concealing narrative around the hurt to distance herself from it. I think we all do this, with our meaningless platitudes when someone loses a family member, with our sour grapes when we don't get our way, with our excuses when we fail.

And so I have to say, as my looking outward turns back inward, that, no, this isn't healthy, that it isn't helpful. Some things cannot be allowed to hide behind the protective coloration our invented narratives provide--self-pity, arrogance, hatred, prejudice, greed. If we hide these things, if we deny them to ourselves and others, we risk acting out their stories over and over again. But this propensity for spin that I find inside myself also serves to remind me of the humanity, the ache, the loss that is often behind it. It is all to easy too despise in others what lives comfortably in me, to see the lie but forget the pain that created it. This too is a kind of spin.

I am reminded of a verse from the Bible:

Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed. --Psalm 85:10

I don't know exactly what this would look like, but it is what I think is needed: compassionate truth that is able to pierce the lies we tell ourselves and others without piercing the broken heart mourning within. Perhaps generosity to our own hearts and those of others is where we must start in order to strip away the tangled narrative threads we have wound around the truth. Only when we can look unflinchingly at the painful realities we so fear can we deal with those realities and turn from the stubborn pain that imprisons us in the failures of the past to find hope and redemption in the present.

Analog

One of my favorite NPR programs is This I Believe, a program where people from many walks of life share their beliefs or core values. One of my favorite essays on This I Believe was entitled The Imperfect Traces Left by Human Hands, by T. Susan Chang. Here is a short excerpt:

I am a child of the digital age, but I believe in analog.

I love the hiss and pop of vinyl, and the black splotch in the corner when a movie changes reels. I enjoy the hushed, uneven ticking of a windup watch. I love handwriting.

I believe in analog because it captures the imperfect traces left behind by human hands — smudges and echoes that can't disappear with the touch of a delete key.

My job involves responsibility for computers, networks, database reporting, and the software we use for medical practice management and electronic medical records. In spite of this--or maybe because of it--I find myself drawn to "analog" living outside of work. Yes, I use email; yes, I blog. But I do most of my personal writing, note-taking, and scheduling using pen or pencil and paper. I am strangely delighted by sending and receiving actual letters. I love physical books, the way my memory of the story is somehow tied to the spaghetti sauce stain on the upper right hand corner of page 112. I gravitate towards acoustic instruments; it's not that I haul them to mountain tops for impromptu unplugged cloud concerts, but I could.

Ms. Chang has captured it perfectly--analog is an antidote to perfectionism, a manifesto of humanity, a record of the touch of actual hands. It's also the possibility, the inherent unpredictable nature of real life in all its messy, complex, surprising glory. Analog contains the truth that reality isn't always divisible into discrete categories or bits of information; everything is intertwined and interdependent, a continuous whole. Most of all, it's a reminder that we are all connected; and, if no one can claim to be completely in control of their lives, neither must anyone feel completely alone.