letters from barabbas

Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows, and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

--Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Isn't this so true?!?!?
And isn't this why he said that peace passes all understanding?
Give it up and find yourself in him, and he'll speak for you in groanings which cannot be uttered.

It rains liquid methane on Saturn's moon, Titan. It flows in lakes and rivers.
Must be yucky--methane is what makes our farts stink.

Learn to use chopsticks.


This is my friend Danielle. She's the coolest. She doesn't really like Chinese, but Calla Maria and I both do. She was gracious enough to go with us to The Golden Buddha (Calla Maria's favorite restaurant as a child) when we went to visit her over Thanksgiving. I drank a lot of tea, and the waitor made a funny contraption with a roll of paper and a rubber band to help Danielle learn to use her chopsticks. We took several funny pictures.

Well, they're funny to us.... :)

--Rainer Maria Rilke

The thin whisps of steam rising from my Taylor's blend form a lazy contrast against the earthy green paint and leave me with a strange impression. Something reminds me of Rilke's Duino Elegies:

For our part, when we feel we evaporate; ah, we breathe
ourselves out and away....
Like dew from the morning grass
what is ours rises from us, the way heat rises
from a steaming dish. O smile, going where? O upturned look:
new, warm receding surge of the heart--;
alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic space
we dissolve in taste of us?

And when we could boil and phase out into the atmosphere in one terrific concerted blast, why settle for this subtle, slow loss of water and the unappealing fate of an animal's excretory system? Sometimes I feel like I'm just sitting on the table in some boring cosmic coffee house, waiting for someone to drink me up, and I'd rather he just poured me over some hot asphalt to watch me fizzle away in one glorious burst of fog.

But I guess it's up to Him. He paid for me.

Hey, check this out: IT'S FREE!!!!!

e-Sword

I love how humanity is so diverse. Just as variety is the spice of life, one of our greatest treasures is our diversity. We say that personal preference is a source of diversity, and should thus be celebrated as a cardinal virtue. But what if we were wrong about that? What if personal preferences weren't what made us each lovely and diverse, but what drove us apart?

I'm going to draw a hasty parallel between food preferences--a minor concern--and cultural segregation--a much larger issue. I'm not talking about diversity between countries, but diversity between subcultures: the hip hop scene and the emo scene and the Christian scene, etc.
We say we don't like the taste of vegetables and we never try another dish with the offensive ingredient. But vegetables are good for you, and no one likes them at first. Your parents have to teach you to eat them. And for that matter, infants really only want milk. They are taught to eat. Children generally start out with very selective tastes in food, gradually expanding their diet to include more and more grown-up delicacies. But it seems the exact opposite with music and art. Children will dance to anything with a beat, and they can fingerpaint without even thinking about it. But as they grow up they start writing off certain expressions as lame or boring or out of their range, until they have very selective tastes in art.
I used to answer the question about my musical tastes with a fairly safe, stock answer: "I like pretty much everything, except for country and hip hop." [Translation: Country is too twangy and embarrassing because I'm from the south, and I don't get rap because I'm white.] But then I heard Lauryn Hill sing "To Zion" and then I learned about folk music, which is kind like country, and I had to change my tune. I learned that it is a grave mistake to ignore someone because they don't speak your jargon. And I learned that it is also a mistake to lend someone too much credit simply because they do speak your jargon. "It's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes" is a vapid waste of a valid form of poetic expression, but so is some of the careless, self-absorbed junk that's coming out of Nashville's contemporary christian scene. If you just want your cd's to provide background music that doesn't challenge your opinion of the universe, that's fine. Go ahead and listen to whatever. But if you want to really learn something about life, you had better hold it up to a higher standard than what genre it's filed under at the record store.
And so the emo kids miss out on the themes of social justice that permeate good rap music, and the hip hop crowd never hears the voice behind the passion in the emo-screamo-hardcore kid with a slight post-punk folky edge....or whatever. And the clubs are right next door, so why the sound-proof walls?

I'm beginning to think that our preferences really don't make us diverse, after all. We've all got something unique to say about the world and with personal creativity we're going to say it in a special way. God makes us diverse--not our tastebuds. What preferences do, though, is prevent certain valid forms of expression from reaching our minds. Think of how frustrated you get when your dad refuses to listen to your favorite cd--the most profound musical statement you've ever heard--because the rock's "too hard." Think of how frustrated he must get when you turn off some amazing old country hymn to listen to the fiftieth update of Shout to the Lord. We get so comfortable experiencing the entire world in a way that caters to our tastes that we forget what tasting is all about!

I once saw an episode of Fear Factor where the contestants sat around a soundstage campfire roasting the penises of large land mammals like they were hotdogs in a competition for a large sum of money. The nice girl had an elk, and the one who talked the most trash ended up with the water buffalo. She gagged the whole way through--violent, horrifying tremors that started in her diaphragm and travelled in waves off of her tongue--but she never threw up. She freaked out the next morning on some high-rise obstacle course and went home empty handed, but she sacrificed a lot of pride to win that money.
And I'm thinking, if she can eat that for something as useless as a million dollars, then can't I put aside my personal preferences to obtain good health, or enlightenment?

Just one foot to the left, and everything finally feels right!

--I saw 50 First Dates recently. It was pretty good.

--My Adam Sandler tolerance is kind of low.

--It's a cute movie--a lot like Groundhog Day. Imagine having to make this woman fall in love with you every single day.

--It's a clever concept, I suppose, but...

--The deeper meaning, of course, is that you really do have to do that.

--Ha ha ha, touché!

I can feel some sort of monumental shift occuring in the way I view existence. If I were to assign a theme to the past year of contemplation, it would be The Destruction of All Prior Concept of Wisdom, and the Infancy of its Proper Reconstruction.

I've had many self-satisfactions scorched beneath the burning eyes of Love, who does not fear the Truth. I have squatted, terrified, as the walls around the secrets of my heart came crashing down while my loved ones marched valiantly with trumpets and a loud cry, setting me free to walk in the light towards healing and forgiveness. I have clutched to dying misconceptions for as long as I could stand the stench, hoping I wouldn't have to leave the comfort of my narrow mind to search out the rugged, deadly beauty of Reality. And, in learning how it is we lay down our lives, I've wrestled with the devil as I've moved towards that far-away yet fast-approaching something called Life More Abundant and Free.

As my life underwent these drastic changes, my worldview changed along with it. Things I once took as Truth without question were now becoming less clear to me. The black-and-white sorting bins I'd shoved everything into had been refurbished with a whole spectrum of color. Life became more than the choosing between one of two simple options (good, bad; right, wrong; Christian, secular; Republican, Democrat) but a living, breathing organism! God became bigger than human logic, international politics, and America's Christian subculture.
During this time I have often felt confused and ill at ease, reluctant to speak too much. There were too many questions that didn't yield immediate answers. The logic trailed off in the middle of each dilemma. It wasn't so much that I was thinking of things I'd never considered, just that I was considering them in a whole new way. Some questions I've been wrestling with:

--How am I to love others?
--Am I arrogant? or, What is humility?
--How do I share the Gospel relevantly?
--How do I honor only God and never myself?
--What is the Church's role in government activism?
--Where is the line between legalism and hedonism?
--Will I ever know God's will for my life? Do I need to?
--What are my giftings, and how do they fit into the Body of Christ?
--What is art, and how should it be used? When does it become harmful?

I found this quote on a blog I like a lot, and felt God using it to speak further into something I've been thinking about a lot, reading Donald Miller and the Gospels and trying to get to the heart of what it's really like to have a relationship with the Living One, to live my life completely alive, without acquiescing to the unnecessary weights of this world and my own false preconceptions, to embrace the doubts along with the faith and hope in the love of the Lord to lead me through it:

***
All sanctity is born of conflict--of contradictions resolved, finally, into union. Logical reasoning has limited usefulness. For the landscape of human-kind’s spiritual world, the world in which we realize our most noble accomplishments and in which we suffer our most crushing defeats, is a landscape of virtually intellectually unresolvable dichotomies. Freedom vs order; self-help salvation vs grace, or even predestination; tradition and innovation; the simultaneous fallenness and exaltedness of human nature; eternity and time; the one and the many; stability and change; justice verses mercy. (Saint Thomas Aquinas observed that justice without mercy is cruelty, while mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution.) Imagine trying to have a debate about whether God’s nature was immanent or transcendent! In his many wonderful paintings entitled The Peaceable Kingdom, the Quaker artist Edward Hicks charmingly symbolizes for us an ideal of sanctity which involves the reconciliation of such opposites. The logical mind is offended by these dichotomies and seeks to come down on one side or the other of them; the same dichotomies provoke and stimulate the higher human facilities, the spiritual facilities, the facilities without which human beings are nothing but very clever animals. People of great sanctity somehow transcend these dichotomies without abandoning the truth on either side of them.
Humankind’s particular vocation, then, is a precarious balancing act. It is a vocation that can be carried out successfully only with wisdom and love. It is a vocation which cannot be guided by dogmatic assertions, which by their nature tend simply to prefer one side or other of these dichotomies. The gospels have in common with the techniques of Socrates and of Zen masters the fact that they question us, rather than tell us things. Legalism, lawyerliness, and literalism are the enemies of all true spirituality. Poetry and parable are its friends. When spiritual discovery is reduced to lawyer like debates, everyone loses.
***

More on this later, perhaps. More on the questions and how I've been thinking about them, certainly.

Well...I guess, secretly, I've always sort of wanted a stalker. 

I get this daily definition thing in my email. A word a day: AWAD. Each week the words are themed, and this week I thought the theme was really cool and informative, and I thought I'd let you in on the secret code we all puzzle over in the dark. Here's the whole week of words, complete with snazzy intro and an inspirational quote, to boot!

-----

What does it take to make a movie? A producer, a director, actors and what else? Lots of money, of course. Often overlooked are hundreds of other people who work for months or often years behind the scenes to help create a couple of hours' magic.
If you ever stay behind at the end of a movie (or stay tuned on TV) to read the rolling credits you'll see many funny sounding titles. They describe people who are essential to the movie-making business. Without them no movie would be possible, no matter how good the actors or director. What do those titles mean? This week's AWAD defines them.

grip (grip) noun
A general assistant on a movie set responsible for handling production equipment, such as setting up and moving camera dollies, lighting, etc. The head grip is called the key grip.
[From English grip since the task required firmly holding bulky material.]

gaffer (GAF-uhr) noun
1. The head of the electrical department responsible for the lighting setup on a movie or television set.
2. An old man, especially a country man.
3. A foreman, supervisor, or boss.
[Contraction of godfather, influenced by grandfather.]
Sense 1 comes from the fact that in the beginning longshoremen were employed to move heavy lighting equipment on a production set. They worked in a hierarchy and the one at the top was called gaffer as a term of respect. Sense 2 and 3 are chiefly British. The feminine equivalent of sense 2 is gammer (contraction of godmother).

best boy (best boi) noun
The first assistant to the gaffer (head electrician) of a film crew.
[Apparently borrowed from the sailing terminology.]

foley (FO-lee) adjective
Of or relating to the sound effects.
[After Jack Donovan Foley (1891-1967) who pioneered the techniques of adding sound effects during his three decades at Universal Pictures.]

stuntman (stunt-man) noun
A man who substitutes for an actor in scenes involving dangerous feats. Also known as double.
[From English word stunt (an unusual or dangerous feat) which is of unknown origin.]

-----

So there you have it. Most weeks the words aren't quite so applicable to everday life, but they're still fun. It's nice to know I'll always have one non-spam message in my inbox every weekday. This way I don't have to feel like a loser for checking it every day. :)
If you'd like a free subscription, fill out this form. Then we can elevate ourselves above our peers by utilizing our superfluous vocabulary in everyday conversation.

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Here's the quote I promised (every AWAD email also comes with a quote to make you think or laugh):

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.
-John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

I'm not sure if anyone's been utilizing the links I've put up in the right column, so I have to give a plug for Engrish.com, because it makes me laugh every time I go there. So, the humor probably won't appeal to everyone, and I won't look down on you for not laughing. But if you want to laugh, know I'm laughing with you.

So, you know how people will buy t-shirts and stuff that have Chinese or Japanese characters on them, and we don't know what it says but we think it's cool? Well, they do the same thing over there with English, with some very interesting results...

Hilarity ensues:

Don't watch so much television! 


I know I was just typing about the truths I'd learned from mass media, but if you notice, I could really only come up with two. Television isn't the devil. But it doesn't have much good to say, either.
Whoever said that religion is the opiate of the masses had obviously never seen a satellite dish!


[transcript:]

I'm bored. Perhaps television will provide distraction from my wholly wasted existence.

"Tonight! Middle of the road comedies created by mediocre minds, and then stripped of any artistic vision through creation by committee! And be sure to tune in tomorrow night, where real people compete to see who can be exploited most, and definitively prove there is no hope for our species."

"That's a mighty big fire where our house used to be."
"The fire is justice."

we are all shocked silent
(save the windbags on tv)
by the arrogance of the sea
and the frailty of man
by the tragedy of death
and the absurdity of life

and the futility of numbers
when trying to calculate
death tolls and relief funds


if only the human condition
could be capitalized



The shock of the earthquake actually accelerated the planet's orbit, shortening the length of the year by a fraction of a second. This isn't what they had in mind when they prayed, "Hasten the day," sick of living in this pre-existence. But how many more will perish eternally on that great and terrible day, so we can see our Jesus face to face?
I say, "No, Lord, we need more time!"
"Life is too precious," He's telling us now.

I love visiting the homes of people I know from school: seeing them interact with their family, riding through their old stomping grounds, being pampered by mothers whose instincts extend to everyone the same age as their children. Such experiences always flesh out the people I've known so shortly and only within the context of Auburn's alternate reality.

There's something sacred in the transformation of a couch into a bed. Whether it folds out to poke your back with springs or is simply covered with sheets and slept lengthwise, it's a sacrament. It's the addition of beds beyond the bedrooms. It's extending the family beyond its nucleus.
I almost feel more honored on the couch than in a guest room.

It might have seemed like a rash decision to an uninformed observer, but tonight I quit with the silly ambivalence (which, if you've seen Girl, Interrupted, is the perfect word for what I was feeling) and decided to pick a path and stick to it. I feel like I just finished the second basket at an all-you-can-eat wings night someplace, and I don't have to ask for a third because I've realized that I don't need anymore, and so I don't want anymore. That's a very exhilerating feeling, if you've never felt it--to say "I've had enough," silently taunting your consumerist subconscious in one brilliant moment of independent thought. I feel so relieved, so fulfilled, so pleased with myself (to run the risk of sounding over-excited and a little self-important) at having finally made a decision.

I dropped Spanish Conversation and picked up Later Shakespeare.
I can hear you asking, "What's the big deal?" Well, I'll tell you...
It's the end to two-and-a-half years of vacillating ambitions, grovelling in either/or's with very little concept of The Grand Scheme. It's the release of the idea that I have to pick one passion and run with it and leave all other interests to whither in the walls between pipe dreams and fools' hopes. It's embracing the reality that life is more complex than 1)major 2)career 3)retirement 4)hobbies 5)death. It's admitting that God's plan is FAR more complex than I give Him credit for, and to say I've discovered it and am now enrolled the proper prerequisites is a very foolish and tragic announcement indeed. It's personal permission to live my life haphazardly, outside of the western world's obsession with control and predetermination. It's revelation that God is not an American, and when He took my flesh He took my nationality, so I'm free to do things His way, and say screw-it to Uncle Sam's. It's forgetting words like tuition and curriculum in favor of concepts like enlightenment and exploration.

I'm called into a medical career, so my major is Microbiology. Simple, rational decision. However, ever since I started college I've been trying to pick a minor. A subspecialization.
I love literature and feel I have a gift for writing. I wanted to explore that, so I declared English as my minor during my second semester and signed up for Early Shakespeare in the Fall of '03. It was my favorite class, and, incidentally, the only A I made that semester, amidst three boring sciences and Music Appreciation in an 18 hour academic overload I'll never try again.
But then I took two semesters of Intermediate Spanish in response to my more specific calling into a medical career in Latin America: learning Spanish is essential for my destiny. I've loved the three semesters I've had in Español thus far, and so I was signed up for Spanish Conversation in the spring. I had decided to take three more Spanishes and get a Spanish minor.

But I couldn't stop worrying about whether that was the right choice. Like, seriously: Am I really going to master the Spanish language in three stupid courses that I only half pay attention to, anyway? Why not dabble with the mothertongue while it's available to me, and then spend a year in Peru, learning the language in the only authentic manner: cultural immersion?
And so I took a leap of faith tonight when I saw that there was one spot available in the sequel to my favorite class. Early Shakespeare covered the comedies, histories, and early tragedies and I loved every minute of it. It was such a relief, exploring the meaning of life after Physics and OChem back-to-back, where we didn't care about meanings but only processes. Later Shakespeare will cover the tragedies and romantic comedies. Oh, to truly understand those conundrums we slept through in high school: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello!
I realize that this will significantly increase my workload in an already time-stressed semester. I realize that I'll now have four more classes to take to complete my minor, instead of the three required for Spanish. But I'm doing it. (And if I wuss out, I can drop within ten class days.) I'm gonna be able to take such wonderful courses as The Personal Essay. Fiction Writing. The American Novel.
So, it wasn't a rash decision. I've been thinking about it a long time. And I think God's on my side with this one. He would like me to learn a bit more about this writing business. It may just come in handy some day......

I'm trying to embrace in real life the ideals that I spout out in coffee shops and journals. Things like: Higher education is not a hoop to jump through, a ticket to a wealthy future, a waste of time that everyone has to go through in order to achieve the American Dream. It is possible to attend university with a heart that is hungry for understanding, and to enroll in classes that spark one's interest and sharpen one's perceptions. I will not be one-dimentionalized into a pre-approved curriculum of science classes with a flimsy peninsula of irrelevant, surface-level core electives like Microeconomics and Music Appreciation.
I am here to discover Truth, not get a job. And when I enter the work force, it will be to improve the world, not build a bank account or bolster the gross national product. I haven't reached the age where youthful idealism dies under the weight of social security, and I hope I'll always be too immature to "plan for my retirement" and "invest smartly in stocks and bonds and lots of capital."
I'd rather give freely to the poor and trust God to keep me alive.

So, in that spirit, I'm going waste my time learning the art of good writing. I'm going to revel in the mysteries of the world's greatest literature. I might even spend a year in the Peace Corps streaking feces onto culture plates and saving people from cholera. I'm going to learn a foreign language or two. Then I'll work on that MD thing.
I hope to "be" a lot of things, including a polyglot. And a doctor. And a writer. And a terrific friend. And a tender father. And a spectacular lover. And a connoisseur of coffee and/or fine wines. And an expert on something--Shakespeare or Moses or E. coli or children. And a humble servant of the Lord Most High.

How will my college transcript factor into all of this?
It won't. But classes like Genetics and Shakespeare and Public Speaking and Gross Anatomy should help out quite a bit.

This week I've been bonding with my sister over that centerpiece of every good American family: the television. And, in a way, I think I've been humbled out of my self-righteous presupposition that nothing good ever came out of pop culture. Here are some fragments of truth (yes folks: like it or not, it does exist!) about Love that I've spotted in all the lust and product placements:

Tara coerced me into giving The O.C. another chance, and I'm actually glad I did.
It's the most absurd event in all of primetime, but I was touched by the integrity of the central family. In a city full of broken, self-centered addicts (pick your favorite, there's someone to match), the Cohens somehow manage to remember how to love. They sit in the middle of a dozen twisted love triangles, offering sound advice to idiots who rarely listen, actively demonstrating love for friends even in the midst of moral failure, and providing a safe-haven for the children who are abandoned in the wake of these pleasure seeking "grown ups." Hooray for them. I wouldn't have the patience, to be honest.

Meet the Fockers is funny (if only to the sexually preoccupied) and ultimately an affirmation of family. There's a crucial moment where the uptight father-in-law is fed up with the whacko father-in-law, and he calls a family meeting--meaning him and his wife and his daughter. Motioning to the whole bickering cast, she replies, "Daddy, this is the family."
We don't get to pick our family. And we don't decide how they act or what they believe. The only choice we can make is whether or not to love them. Make peace or nurse pride. Giving us the happy Hollywood ending we want, both sets of in-laws learn the arts of compromise and respect. Getting over their own self-importance in the last reel, they get to celebrate the union of their children, who have fought long and hard to make the marriage happen, together.

Why does it so rarely happen this way in real life? Why is compromise and respect considered to be the Hollywood Ending? Why do we hear so many stupid comments about mistrusting our mothers-in-law? And why don't more Christians treat their lonely, hurting neighbors with the same patience and dignity exhibited by the Cohens?