The Vastness of Open Plains and Grey Winters

I have changed my mind. I now believe that I thoroughly enjoy conversation. It has been two very long weeks since I wrote last, and if I were to summarize the best parts of the past two weeks, I could do it in a single word: conversation. A series of personal, face-to-face, one-on-one conversations has been all that kept me out of the pit of despair in the past several weeks.

In fact, the last two weeks might best be described as polarized: one moment of overwhelming chaos followed by one moment of intimacy followed by one moment of stress. More than once, my emotions shifted so suddenly and so extremely to leave me wondering if I might be bipolar. I guess it was last Monday that I was on the phone talking to a friend and almost literally felt a sense of despair hit me in the face. A sense of isolation. (The phone, by the way, is no longer my friend.) I jokingly said, "Well, I'm going to go shoot myself in the face. Have a great night," and my friend thought I was talking about homework I had to do, and I did nothing to correct the mistake. Somehow, the nameless and faceless despair stuck to me throughout the week.

In stark contrast with these dark moods stood the brief shining moments of real closeness with another person, and there were a surprising number of these. I went to the Renaissance Festival the weekend before last and was pretty unhappy to have to go, mostly because I was tired of always being out of town and felt overwhelmed by other stuff going on, but I ended up staying up late into Friday night having one conversation and spent Saturday lazing around the campsite talking with several other people! From my brief experience, the Renaissance Festival is okay, but the campground outside is pretty cool.

Sunday night, I was up until after 4 arguing the war in Iraq with my roommate. That was not exactly a good conversation, mostly because it felt so pointless. If you have ever seen Richard Linklater's films Slacker or Waking Life then you know what I'm talking about: conversations that sound profound and feel important, but really amount to random words thrown around like spaghetti in a food fight.
"The worst mistake that you can make is to think you're alive when really you're asleep in life's waiting room."
"I mean, I'm not saying that you don't know what you're talking about, but I don't know what you're talking about."
~Waking Life
However, despite the seeming pointlessness of these conversations, they mean something to me. It has been a long-standing practice for me not to talk openly about politics or religion, and I find myself more and more talking about both. My same highly-political roommate also asks a lot of questions about theology and what I believe, which - I'm embarrassed to say - are not questions I think about usually.

I do not like the idea of regularly staying up most of the night arguing about politics, but I am glad to have a roommate who disagrees almost across the board with everything I believe, with whom I can politely debate and against whom I can test my ideas and beliefs.

The alleged reason that Michael and I stayed up until 4 talking was to be awake when the cold front came through, which we thought would be at about midnight. So at about midnight we stepped outside and talked. Neither of us had a watch or a cellphone with us, and our conversation was so animated that we were surprised when the storm finally came through to find that four hours had passed.

The storm did finally come, however, and somewhere in the pounding rain and howling wind, winter fell on Austin. I like what Don Miller said in Blue Like Jazz about Texas winters:

"In Houston, where I grew up, the only change in the weather came in late October when cold is sent down from Canada. Weathermen in Dallas would call weathermen in Houston so people knew to bring their plants in and watch after their dogs. The cold came down the interstate, tall and blue, and made reflections in the mirrored windows of large buildings, moving over the Gulf of Mexico as if to prove that sky holds magnitude over water. In Houston, in October, everyone walks around with a certain energy as if they are going to be elected president the next day, as if they are going to get married.

"In the winter, it was easier for me to believe in God, and suppose it had to do with new weather, with the color of leaves clinging to trees, with the smoke in the fireplaces of big houses in opulent neighborhoods where I would ride my bike."

If you have not yet, go right now and read everything Don Miller has ever written.

I'll wait.

Okay, now that we're on the same page, I also love winter. I love the terrible, cold, rainy, grey days because the world seems so very immense and so very holy. I love the beautiful, bright, biting, cold days because the world seems so very small and people so alive. Either way, in Texas, you look up when it gets cold. You look at the sky and at the trees and at the faces of everyone around you. When its hot, you look down, shuffling, trying not to let the weight of the universe push you into the steaming ground. In the heat and humidity, the air is impossibly thick, too thick to reach through to another human.

I got locked out of my car yesterday for the first time since I bought this car. I bought new glasses and had an hour to kill while the glasses were made, so I went to a nearby theater hoping to sneak into the last 45 minutes of a movie. (I feel okay not paying if I'm only staying for part of the movie.) However, there was already someone checking tickets, so I turned around to find that I had left my keys in my car. Luckily, the rain had stopped, but it was still cold and windy, and I stood by my car, my hood pulled tight around my face like Kenny from South Park, and it was beautiful.

It was fiercely lonely, but a good lonely. Not a summer lonely, driven indoors into our artificial cool by the oppressive heat, nostalgically wishing for the days when summer was carefree and heat's cure was a packed swimming pool. Not the loneliness of a crowd, sitting alone in a crowded lecture hall, unknown and never to be known. Not a bedroom lonely or a television lonely, sitting or lying bored in a dark, silent room, praying to God that someone will call who wants to talk or (even better) wants to be with you, but knowing that call will never come. These are tragic, hopeless lonelinesses.

Leaning against the back of my car, bracing against this cold wind, this strange and unusual cold wind, staring at a vast gray sky, so gray that it turned the whole world gray... That loneliness is not a bad feeling, though it can hurt almost as much as the bad loneliness does. The loneliness of a grey winter day in Austin, Texas, is like the arctic wind sweeping down from Canada, across the vast white plains. See the Coen Brothers film, Fargo, for an example of this moment. The vast loneliness is like stopping for water while hiking into the Grand Canyon with my closest friends and catching my breath at the complete silence in the middle of that huge place. Vastness. It's like going to the Davis Mountains in West Texas, the darkest place in the Western Hemisphere, and staring at the sky and trying to wrap your mind around the immensity of an accelerating universe. Vastness.

Sometimes, even the good loneliness hurts like cold fire. In the bad loneliness, you feel like you should matter but for some reason, you don't seem to matter, and no one seems to care. In the good loneliness, you realize that you should not matter, and all evidence suggests that there is no way that you even begin to matter. ("By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." Genesis 319) Somehow, however, you feel - in the face of the odds - that you do matter. Maybe it is because you realize that nobody matters exactly and therefore we are all in this together. When the earth is so large compared to a human and yet the earth is so very small compared to the universe, you want to clump up with other dust mites. Maybe it is a sense of connectedness: the world is bigger than me, but - however small - I am a part of it, and on that scale, what makes Bob Dylan's accomplishments any more significant than my own?

Whatever the reason, the experience works something like this: Bam! Vast world. Right in my face. So much bigger than I am. So much older than I am. So much cooler than I am. And then an afterthought: but that's okay. That's holy.

So all of this to say that as I leaned against my car in the cold gray afternoon, waiting on a spare key, I was intensely alone and it way wonderful. I thought about what I want my life to be about. What meaning I do have. That was when I realized how much conversation has meant to me lately. I decided that I want to talk to people. And I want to convince them to talk back. I want to meet people at cafes for lunch and coffee shops at midnight and invite them to my house for dinner. And I want to spend all the time between conversations being completely lonely (in the good sense), wandering the streets and staring up at the stars and trying to wrap my mind around an immensity I do not understand and letting it change me. I short, I want to be the best kind of career slacker. So please let me know if anyone is hiring.

It is sunny now - the other kind of winter - and by afternoon it will warm up to autumn again, but that's okay. Honestly, how much vast lonely weather can a person take in one sitting? Especially right after a long summer.

An Oceanic Feeling

I went to the soccer fields at Zilker Park today with my dog, Riker. After a brief and meandering walk, we settled down on top of the Rock Island, my back against a scraggly tree, the dog reclining to my right like a lion.

I read the chapter in The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, called "Why God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist".

I read two chapters in my cosmology textbook about the formation of stars and the formation of galaxies.

I read a chapter in Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, by Rob Bell, called "True" about sensing holiness in great moments, ordinary moments, and tragic moments. Rob Bell tells the story of being speechless when he held his newborn son in his hands. He also tells the story of sensing holiness while holding the dead body of a friend's one-day-old child.

Two weeks ago, I went to Zilker to read and the grass was all dead, burnt by thousands of hot bodies during the Austin City Limits Music Festival, and the fields were covered with rows of trash bags, filled with plastic bottles, cups, and debris. Today, however, the grass was beautifully green and lush.

When the wind stilled, a little sweat would trickle down my nose, but the wind was rarely still; a gentle cool breeze slipped across the surface of the rock and between the trees, rustling branches and sending leaves to the ground around me.

Thousands of birds and locusts screamed from everywhere around me. Dogs barked sometimes, and if they got too near, Riker would bark back. I decided to leave my iPod off so that I would not miss the music.

Rightness. Holiness. A sense of something bigger than me, greater than me, flowing around me, part of me but... apart from me. Holiness. I cried a little while reading Rob Bell just at identifying so immediately with the immensity in his stories.

Once the sun started to sink below the horizon, I packed up my books, and Riker and I strolled back across the fields to my car. My air conditioner is broken, so I never go anywhere without all my windows rolled down.

The radio is broken in my car, so I usually put on my iPod, but I decided today to keep listening to the other music around me. My car makes an almost imperceptible, rhythmic squeaking noise when I'm not braking that makes me a little nervous, whi-whi-whi-whi!

Austin is growing these days, so the sounds of construction are almost all-pervading. I sat at a stoplight and listened to the sound of metal-pounding-metal. Riker sat in the passenger seat with his head out the window and his tongue hanging from his mouth, smiling.

At some point, I put my headphones on and listened to Joanna Newsome tentatively singing, "Joy! / Landlocked / In bodies that don't keep / Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being / Until we don't be," over the majesty of a full orchestra.

The windows were still open, and when I pulled into a neighborhood, I passed a sprinkler in someone's front lawn. It made a sound, one of a trillion sounds that cannot be reproduced in words, but that every author wants to capture, because the sound is just. so. right. Ra-ta-ta-ta-tat! Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat!

I have read the arguments Richard Dawkins calls his most convincing. I have read Freud arguing against God. And yet, as I crawled out of my car, and whistled to Riker, who jumped out and ran a little circle around me, I thought, "Do some people just not have this feeling? This oceanic feeling of rightness?"

It has been a good day.

A Warrior for Peace

I heard a talk this weekend about Christian men as warriors, which created a lot of thought and discussion between Joe Ricks, Bryon Hance, my dad, and myself. The three of them shied away from the metaphor and were a little disappointed with its use. Their reasons are pretty good: the militant metaphor is hard to use practically. Either you take it literally, which is a terrifying thought and suggests fundamentalism, or you take it as a metaphor, which risks leaving the image meaninglessly impractical for our daily lives. Sure, you can get hyped up at the thought that "I am a warrior for God!" or something like that, but if it doesn't really tell you how to live on Monday morning, it is useless. Dad says that an intense connection to the practicality of an ideal is a big part of 'emergent' Christianity. (Shudder. I hate that word almost as much as 'postmodern'.)

While I agree that focusing on the Monday-morning practicality is a great idea, because it takes spirituality out of the theological realm and into real life, I have to say that I believe a warrior image - or even better, a defender image is desperately needed these days.

The quote below is from the website for The Defenders:

“We are joined together to take a stand, declaring that the sexual exploitation of children, using pornography, and buying sex is not something real men will tolerate. Real men guard themselves and protect children with dignity."

I’ve heard a lot recently about how there are more people enslaved in the world right now than ever before in history, and that the vast majority of these slaves are women and children. This includes a huge number of sex slaves, child soldiers who are kidnapped and forced to kill, and “simple” economic slaves, who run restaurants, salons, etc., around the world. I don’t know if you remember, but there was actually a bust just out of Austin only a few months ago where hundreds of women and children were being kidnapped in Mexico and brought here where they were forced to work without pay in American restaurants.

I agree with Joe that we do NOT live in a time of universal moral decay or debauchery like a lot of Christians think. In some ways, our culture is morally better than ever; in some ways, the situation is the same as always; and in some ways, the situation is worse. I also understand the great care that has to be taken about not creating a militaristic image to outsiders, but I do think that a warrior image is still a useful thing to stress. And we can leave “Christian” out of the title to avoid misinterpretations. When a culture wants to (rightly) stress equality of men and women in the home, workplace, and society, it is awkward and difficult to admit that it is men who are a big part of the problem (even if one's role is as small as buying pornography that might feature underage or slave actresses.) and therefore it has to be men who take a role in fixing the problem.

“Real men” have to be proactive and passionate about defending the women and children around them. If we take the religious overtones out of the equation (but keep the spiritual leaning), then we are not warriors against the forces of Satan, but defenders against the forces of evil that really truly do exist. From that perspective, ancient customs like a knighting ceremony (very macho) mean something as a practical metaphor. Imagine the scene from The Gladiator when the evil emperor Claudius forces the hitherto anonymous gladiator to reveal himself by asking, "Who are you?" The gladiator replies, "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next." Maximus is driven by an all-encompassing purpose in his life (be it vengeance) that tells him who he is and defines what he wants to do with his life. The emotion I get out of that is intentionality and aggressive proactiveness against the less savory elements of life.

We are not philosophers in an ivory tower talking about how to achieve inner peace and tranquility. If we achieve inner peace and tranquility, it is because those are skills we need in our fight.

Many of older Christians have probably heard the military metaphors so much that they are burned out on it all or else simply can no longer hear the metaphor at all. However, young people like myself who have grown up in churches that stressed peace and personal happiness probably do need to hear, I think, that they actually have a purpose in this life and it is not just to become happy. Our purpose is to be a defender of the helpless. And I wonder if the older men and women might not benefit from a reminder that only those who sacrifice their own happiness for someone else get to be happy.

And so, with this whole discussion in mind, I watched 300 this evening, and thought about it as a metaphor in which it is not about fighting the Persians or the 'infidels' or Satan. It is about fighting brokenness and wrongness. I thought about the grueling process by which boys are transformed into soldiers in the movie. About how the first and possibly greatest battle that a defender of wholeness must fight is the battle to make oneself whole and how it's a process that you never finish but you cannot begin to fight brokenness in the outside world until you have begun to fight it in yourself. Apparently that whole inner peace and happiness thing really is an important tool to becoming warriors of wholeness.

This is a metaphor that I imagine being especially powerful - at least in our culture - to men, but I suppose it is not meaningless to women also, who are commissioned as much as men are to fight brokenness and hurtness in the world around them.

And so what's the practical implication? (Since - in the long run - practicality trumps poetry.) Well, that's a little harder to say, and I'm still thinking about that. But I think that it is worth keeping the emotional sensibility of the warrior image for as long as it takes to figure out what that means on Monday morning.