The Emergence of Hope

For months now, I have said nearly every day that I should start blogging again. I have gotten up every morning, reflected on my coming day, and thought "Maybe today I'll get a chance to sit down and write something." Some days (many days) I have chuckled (audibly) at the ridiculous notion that even three entire minutes would coincide to be empty at the same time for a moment to write. Other days, the moment seems possible - even guaranteed - but somehow it slips through my fingers.

I quit writing because I felt like I had nothing to say that anyone would want to hear. I spent at least sixty hours in December walking and walking and walking; through the Christmas lights and along the railroad tracks, Riker and I walked the miles, watching the icy breath hang in front of our faces. Thinking. I was (and am) uncertain about my career goals and dreams (both immediate and long-term) so I spent a lot of time asking myself what I am passionate about.

Sometimes, on my walks, I listened only to the vast silence of a winter's night, but sometimes - in an effort to understand my passions - I listened on my iPod to lectures by Muhammad Yunus and others on ending world poverty and social entrepreneurship. (Yes, a dork, I know.) I have no answers for myself (I continue to fly by the seat of my pants.) but somehow, through my walks and the lectures and my reading, I find myself moving in a certain direction with a certain drive (though without a known goal).

What's the direction? Well, Wednesday night, I wrote the previous three paragraphs on a legal pad while sitting in on a panel on social entrepreneurship at an event called "Act Local, Think Global." I think UT may have hosted this event for a couple of years, but I - who am hard-pressed to go to any kind of event anytime - never felt any desire to go. And I was astounded at how many people were there!

The Texas Union Ballroom was completely packed with representatives from dozens of social action groups from Teach For America and the ONE Campaign down to Ten Thousand Villages and Eastside Community Connection. I'm now on a dozen mailing lists because I feel like I am entering a place in my life when it will be important to know what action is happening around the city.

The weird thing for me is that it seems like a lot of people I know are hitting this place; a lot of people I know are feeling this urge to stand up and say "This, I will not tolerate."

I went biking yesterday on the Greenbelt and it was the first time I've gone biking since before I posted last (which is probably not a coincidence) and I went partially because it was a beautiful day, but largely because it seemed like the RIGHT day. I had just finished reading Dervla Murphy's Full Tilt, about biking from Ireland to India and was feeling an extra-strong urge to knock off some miles, but for a while yesterday afternoon I sat on my couch almost paralyzed with indecision. I had homework that I really needed to be doing, and I was thinking about biking, but in that moment, what I really wanted to do more than anything else was take a nap. Earlier in the day, the desire to ride had been almost worth skipping class, but in that moment, I just wanted to sleep. I was sitting on my bed, pulling off my shoes for a nap, when something in me snapped, and I said, "To hell with this, I NEED to ride my bike today," and did it, and the trail really kicked my butt (quite literally) but it was as awesome as I knew it would be.

The amazing thing to me is how many other bikers were on the trail! I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never seen as many bikers on the Barton Creek Greenbelt as I saw yesterday. It seemed like every minute I was having to pull aside to give oncoming traffic the trail. (Why I always had to pull over is still beyond me.) At one point, I stopped to talk to a hiker who complained about the amount of bike traffic on the trail, and she agreed that she had never seen that many bikes either. Together, we tried to figure out what the deal was? "Were we all together?" No... "Is it the weather?" I've seen more pleasant days with few people. "Maybe people are getting in a ride before the cold front comes through tomorrow?" I said, What cold front? "Maybe it has something to do with Valentine's Day?" Maybe, though the thought never occurred to me.

The truth is that hundreds of individual bicyclists individually decided that yesterday was the RIGHT day to hit the trail, for their own reasons, and somehow, everyone chose the same day.

This kind of spontaneous random emergence is what I think of when I think of my own desire to act toward social justice in the world. It seems to me like the RIGHT time to act, just like yesterday was the RIGHT day for a ride, and somehow, many people I know and - I believe - many people around the country and around the world are also somehow deciding that now is the right time to act. It is not a generational thing or a class thing or a regional thing. This new hope thing is so much bigger than that, and - though I hesitate to presume - I think this is a God thing.

And so with this burning in my gut that isn't bad seafood and that needs somewhere to go, I am back to writing.

Also (though probably not unrelated), my dad has started blogging again the competitive side of me (the side that motivates so much of what I do) demands not to be left behind.

RE: "Is Sexism Less Offensive Than Racism in Politics?"

[THIS IS A COMMENT THAT I POSTED IN RESPONSE TO A CNN.COM ARTICLE ASKING WHETHER RACISM OR SEXISM IS WORSE IN THIS ELECTION. I LIKED IT ENOUGH TO SHARE.]

I agree that sexism and racism are both equally bad factors to use in deciding how to cast your ballot. It seems that the Democratic Party is in a place of wanting to right old injustices and start fresh by saying, "See? We are no longer white males only; in fact, we are willing to entrust our highest office to this once-oppressed group. Let's put that old day behind us." I think this is an incredibly powerful desire on the part of the American people. Electing a woman tells the world that we are willing to let a woman rule our country the same as electing a black man tells the world the same message.

However, without in any way discrediting the past and current injustices committed against women, no injustice has so torn our nation apart and threatened to destroy this country as the injustice committed against African-Americans, through slavery, during Reconstruction, and for the decades after. Nothing divides our nation now and disempowers the American people now as much as racism - both ongoing and its repercussions from two hundred years of blatant and destructive discrimination.

While that is the kind of statement that matters most as a declaration by the American people to itself, as a sign of unity behind an ideal, it is also worth thinking about how the rest of the world will view this election, and from that perspective, imagine what statement we give in a President Barack Hussein Obama. Our enemies gain credibility by describing America as a vanilla-white society who suppresses people different than ourselves whose goal is to homogenize the world under the banner of McDonald's. Obama is an American through-and-through and - though Christian - has a Muslim-sounding name. By electing a black man whose life story rings true with people from the very parts of the world who feel the most alienated by Americans we are not only healing the wounds of our own domestic injustices, we are showing the world what American democracy really truly is all about, and we are proving Osama bin Laden wrong and showing that we are more than our mistakes.

As a country, we are being put in an intimidating position of responsibility: choosing which wrong we want to right first. The injustices against women need addressing (as the blatantly sexist remarks this election season have proven) and I believe that a day is coming soon when these injustices will be addressed, but the defeat of the racism prevalent in this campaign is as significant a moment for democracy as Americans are ever likely to see.

Accepting the Discrepancy

I heard someone say recently that our fear of death motivates so much of what we do irrationally as people and that we can't really develop or move on until we learn to accept our own death. I heard this in a message about "radical acceptance" of the good and the bad elements of life.

Accepting the good and the bad elements of life has really been weighing on me a lot lately, because I've been trying to decide whether it's better to view life as basically bad and spoiled (with some positive surprises) or better to view life as basically good overall (with some negative surprises). I basically came to the conclusion that every single moment and aspect of life is filled with good things and bad things. I think that calling life good OR bad is creating an artificial image that isn't often (if ever) really true and it's an easy lie that we want to tell ourselves. Life sucks. Life is beautiful. We want to create that definition for life because it's easier and it's easier because if we can define life, then to some small extent, we are in control of life; we know what to expect, so we aren't quite so out of control. It is much harder to just accept every part of life that happens to you, and let it happen to you, recognizing that most things are really out of your control. It's harder, but I'm realizing that in the end, it's a much better life.

So I've been thinking a lot about this radical acceptance thing, and about looking every moment in the eye, good or bad, and letting myself really feel it and embrace it, and then give it to God.

In another talk this week, I heard someone talk about a sense of inner conflict that is almost an emotion, a not-rightness, and how this pain always comes from a real conflict - I think he used the word 'discrepancy' - so instead of complaining and bemoaning the melancholy and trying to fix the emotion, we should accept the emotion and take some time to sit down and ask ourselves what the discrepancy is.

I've been struggling with a strong, almost-overpowering sense of inner conflict for several months now. I have wondered if I am again dealing with depression, and I don't rule that out, so my response has been not to let myself slump, not to fall into myself, as it were. I tell myself that I have no reason to feel conflicted, because - in nearly every way - my life is better right now than it has been in a very long time. I'm doing what I want to be doing, and - though there is more financial frustration than I've ever had before - there is not really anything that I think, "If I could change this, I would be happy." So I've done exactly what maybe I shouldn't do, which is to combat the sense of melancholy without even stopping to ask the source of melancholy.

When the speaker talked about stopping to find the discrepancy that needs to be fixed, I did just that, and have spent the past three or four days trying to figure out what the discrepancy is, with no luck. Last night was particularly intense and unpleasant for me, so this morning, when I listened to a song by Joanna Newsom called "Monkey and Bear", I suddenly had a sense of what the discrepancy is, and I realized that they were right: fear of death - unwillingness to accept death - pervades everything, even if (like me) you don't really see yourself as afraid of death.

I haven't exactly figured out what the discrepancy is for me except that it has to do with fears so deep I almost can't touch them, so I think I want to just show you the lyrics to the song, which I transcribed as prose since I want to focus on the story of the song more than the lyricism or poetry of it.

I guess I had a moment when I thought, "I am Bear," and then a minute later, "I am Monkey," and a minute after that, "I am both Bear and Monkey," and a red light went off that said: discrepancy!

I guess for me, Bear is the beast who years to be wild and the artist and the believer, and Monkey is the pragmatist, who wants to be fed more than to be free. And yet it's not that simple, because freedom was Monkey's idea, and the story is told from his perspective, even though everyone dislikes Monkey and loves Bear. If I see myself as both Monkey and Bear, it is all directed at myself. My Monkey (that sounds hilarious) is enslaving my Bear, but it's all still me, all of it! And I'm afraid that Bear is dying...

So here I am feeling that. How do I accept that? Where do I go with that?

Down in the green hay, where Monkey and Bear usually lay, they woke from a stable-boy's cry.

He said, "Someone come quick! The horses got loose, got grass-sick! They'll founder! Fain, they'll die."

What is now known by the sorrel and the roan? By the chestnut, and the bay, and the gelding grey? It is: stay by the gate you are given, and remain in your place, for your season, and had the overfed dead but listened to that high-fence, horse-sense, wisdom...

"Did you hear that, Bear?" said Monkey, "We'll get out of here, fair and square. They've left the gate open wide! So, my bride, here is my hand, where is your paw? Try and understand my plan, Ursula. My heart is a furnace: full of love that's just, and earnest. Now you know that we must unlearn this allegiance to a life of service, and no longer answer to that heartless hay-monger nor be his accomplice. (That charlatan, with artless hustling!) But Ursula, we've got to eat something and earn our keep while still within the borders of the land that man has girded (All double-bolted and tight-fisted!) until we reach the open country, a-steeped in milk and honey.

"Will you keep your fancy clothes on, for me? Can you bear a little longer to wear that leash? My love, I swear by the air I breathe: sooner or later, you'll bare your teeth. But for now, just dance, darling. C'mon, will you dance, my darling? Darling, there's a place for us. Can we go, before I turn to dust? Oh my darling, there's a place for us. Oh darling, c'mon will you dance, my darling? Oh, the hills are groaning with excess like a table ceaselessly being set. Oh my darling, we will get there yet."

They trooped past the guards, past the coops, and the fields, and the farmyards, all night, until finally the space they gained grew much farther than the stone that Bear threw to mark where they'd stop for tea.

"But walk a little faster and don't look backwards. Your feast is to the East, which lies a little past the pasture. When the blackbirds hear tea whistling, they rise and clap, and their applause caws the kettle black, and we can't have none of that! Move along, Bear; there, there; that's that."

Though cast in plaster, our Ursala's heart beat faster than Monkey's ever will.

But still, they have got to pay the bills, hadn't they? That is what the monkey would say.

So, with the courage of a clown, or a cur, or a kite, jerking tight at its tether, in her dun-brown gown of fur, and her jerking of swansdown and leather, Bear would sway on her hind legs; the organ would grind dregs of song for the pleasure of the children, who would shriek, throwing coins at her feet then recoiling in terror.

"Sing, dance, darling. C'mon, will you dance, my darling? Oh darling, there's a place for us. Can we go, before I turn to dust? Oh my darling, there's a place for us. Oh darling, c'mon, will you dance, my darling? You keep your eyes fixed on the highest hill where you'll ever-after eat your fill. Oh my darling, dear, mine, if you dance I love you still."

Deep in the night shone a weak and miserly light where the monkey shouldered his lamp. Someone had told him the bear had been wandering a fair piece away from where they were camped. Someone had told him the bear had been sneaking away
To the seaside caverns to bathe. And the thought troubled the monkey for he was afraid of spelunking down in those caves. Also afraid what the village people would say if they saw the bear in that state: lolling and splashing obscenely. It seemed irrational, really, washing that face, washing that matted and flea-bit pelt in some sea-spit-shine, old kelp dripping with brine.

But monkey just laughed, and he muttered, "When she comes back, Ursala will be bursting with pride until I jump up, saying, 'You've been rolling in muck!' saying, 'You smell of garbage and grime!'"

But far out, by now, Bear ploughed because she would not drown: first the outside-legs of the bear up and fell down, in the water, like knobby garters. Then the outside-arms of the bear fell off, as easy as if sloughed from boiled tomatoes. Low'red in a genteel curtsy, Bear shed the mantle of her diluvian shoulders; and, with a sigh, she allowed the burden of belly to drop like an apron full of boulders.

If you could hold up her threadbare coat to the light where it is worn translucent in places, you would see spots where, almost every night of the year, Bear had been mending suspending that baseness. Now her coat drags through the water, bagging, with a life's-worth of hunger, limitless minnows.

In the magnetic embrace, balletic and glacial of Bear's insatiable shadow; left there! Left there! When Bear left Bear. Left there! Left there! When Bear stepped clear of Bear.

"Sooner or later you'll bury your teeth."

Dumbledore is Not Gay. Sorry.

I'm sorry, but I have to say something: it is not within J.K. Rowling's rights as an author to declare four months after the last Harry Potter book is published that Dumbledore is gay. I'm not talking about whether or not Dumbledore should be gay or has a right to be gay or even might possibly be gay, but the fact is that once a book leaves an author's hands, it is no longer her book! A writer gives birth to a book like a mother gives birth to a baby, and any writer is therefore intensely possessive of their book. But just as a mother cannot declare that her child is gay unless the child declares homosexuality first, an author cannot declare a character to be gay unless the book itself makes that same declaration.

I have no problem with Dumbledore being gay, except that it makes me wonder about Gandalf.... I heard in a history class once that some historians believe most priests and monks in the Middle Ages were actually gay. I've heard that homosexuality may have been something Paul struggled with. I've even heard it said that Jesus was gay. All of these are interesting to think about and worth pondering while you read church history or the New Testament or Lord of the Rings but in the end, it's all speculation, because it doesn't say that anywhere in there.

There is a reason that literature classes still read and dissect Shakespeare and Joyce and Cervantes, and it is that the text takes a life of its own outside of the writer. Maybe Shakespeare gave an interview in which he completely explained Hamlet, but if he did, we've long since lost it, and we've lost it because we don't care very much about what Shakespeare thought; we would prefer to wrestle with Hamlet ourselves because we know that - for ourselves - we can explain Hamlet's behavior better than anyone. We can explain it better because we are reading it, and the story is really half the writer's creation and half the reader's creation. I read it so it's my story as much as Shakespeare's (in a sense) so I can tell it how I want to. That's the beauty of literature and why we keep reading it.

Were Rowling to say at some point that she had always thought of Dumbledore as gay (but for whatever reason never chose to show directly that in the book) then I would be very interested in reading through Harry Potter and trying to get inside Dumbledore's head and figure out if I think he is gay. That's half the fun of reading, trying to figure out what is going on beneath what is happening on the surface. Of course, Harry Potter is not really that kind of book and its characters aren't really all that complex, so I do not think I would find any indications one way or the other as to Dumbledore's sexual tendencies.

Honestly, in my reading, Dumbledore has no sexuality, because Dumbledore is not a "real" character in that way. He is a hero, a distant idol, and even at the end - when Harry begins to doubt Dumbledore's sincerity - the wizard is still out there, away, not part of the action. He is therefore as sexless as McGonnagal or Gandalf or any other great austere saints. Sexuality is a significant and vital part of life, and I don't want to suggest that the really big important ones don't have it, but as long as they are portrayed as the really big important ones (off there somewhere, only stepping in to lend a hand to the little guy) then there is something good in recognizing that you can be somebody apart from your sex. That you can be Dumbledore and no one ever knows - or cares - whether you like men or women or don't even think about it at all.

J.K. Rowling was at a book signing when some kid asked her whether she thought "Dumbledore would ever find true love." This is a funny question to me since Dumbledore dies, and I would have replied "No, he died too soon," but Rowling replied "Dumbledore is gay," which is also funny because (a) Dumbledore is still dead and (b) it doesn't answer the question unless you assume homosexuals cannot find true love and (c) it seems like something a frustrated author would say to a stupid question.

I blame a media determined to be non-judgmental for picking up on this and declaring in headline after headline: Dumbledore is Gay.

So it is with a heavy heart that I have to break the news: I don't care what his mamma says, Dumbledore is not gay. I read the books. I never heard him say it. Sorry.

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.