Rhetoric

A friend sent me this quote yesterday. I find it very amusing (and appropriate, perhaps, to me). Why say in a few small words what can be said in many large ones?!:

"It is preferential to refrain from the utilization of grandiose verbiage in the circumstance that your intellectualization can be expressed using comparatively simplistic lexicological entities."

Unidentified bunny

Pictures from the Easter-Feaster now on Flickr - for those who were there or are otherwise interested in looking.

Questioning

It's been one of those weeks - the difficult kind. Not overly difficult, just tiring, head-spinning, confusing. I have felt sick all week, which happens much too often for my liking. We have once and for all determined that I am "sickly". I don't like being sickly. I don't like getting sick so often. It seems that if I were... something - smarter, disciplined, a better person... I wouldn't get sick so much. I need to eat better, sleep more, pay attention to pollen counts, and who knows what else (seriously - help me out here - what else do I need to do?).

Confusing. I went to Wheaton this week to hear an "open forum conversation" between representatives of Soulforce's Equality Ride and Wheaton represenatives about Wheaton's policies regarding homosexual members of the community and positions on homosexuality. Confusing. Not just - or even primarily - on the issue of a Christian position on same-sex partnerships in particular. But in relation to what it means for me to be an evangelical, my ambivalence towards evangelicalism, the freedom - and the danger - of asking questions, the hard ones, the easy ones - the whole thing. I'm not having a crisis of faith, please don't misunderstand me. But perhaps I'm having a crisis of church. I'm not sure - but what frustrates me more than being unsure, is feeling unable to navigate my questions in a community free of fear and the pressures associated with it. I'm afraid to question because my questions will cause others to react to me in fear - I'm not afraid of the questions themselves or of God's desire and power to lead us into all truth. But I'm afraid I'm not a member of the kind of community open to the questions and ready to be led. I have felt so often in recent months (years) that I live in a Christian community that is mostly living by rote, not by following a living God. We don't listen to God, we think we know what he wants to say. Our prayers tell him what to do rather than ask him to speak. It's not that we're disobedient - it's deeper than that; how can we obey if we don't ask.

But I'm trying to not be cynical. Please, though, if you read this - I'm not interested in pat answers or dismissive platitudes. The problem is not simply my cynicism - my cynicism is a problematic reaction, but there is a real problem I'm reacting to.

Something more uplifting in a few days :)

Resignation & Hope... Easter & Esther

After a long - somewhat embattled - conversation with a friend about a current work situation, he had a piece of wisdom to offer: "Whatever the right way to handle this situation is, the one thing you cannot do is give in to resignation." He's right. I have felt recently as if a blanket of despair were draped over me. I'm not sure that despair is the right word, though - resignation is a better description. It feels so difficult to keep hoping - believing - working towards things that seem impossible: true reconciliation in relationships, escape from the sin that I'm tangled up in, radical transformation. Resignation is washed down with the bitter humor of cynicism and enables the apathy that answers the nagging question "should I be doing something about this?". It gets me out of praying, out of speaking the truth when it's hard, out of continuing to care when it hurts (a lot!). It numbs me to life so that I can simply go through the motions. It's so much easier to resign myself. Hope takes so much energy, so much emotion, so much elbow grease. Especially since, unlike the rose-colored glasses of optimism, hope must acknowledge reality - the problems are even bigger than I think, not smaller, and it is impossible from a human perspective. What's more, God's work of reconcilation, transformation and resurrection seems to happen too late and much more painfully than I would like. The cross seems like such an inappropriate symbol of hope - but there you have it.

So Esther wants more of a mention in my blog: Esther is my friend who's a freshman at UW-Madison, a fabulous artist & photographer, talented writer, third-culture-kid and an all around odd woman. You can see why we get along so well :) One of her favorite past-times is taking strange pictures of herself with my phone and camera. Here is a sampling of her work:

How do we love?

Poorly at best... but at least we love.

Tonight was interesting. I had the following conversation with Anna, one of the high school girls I mentor. We were talking about another girl who used to be in our small group but moved recently and has struggled to hold on to her faith and her identity with the pressures of a new place.

Anna: 'I just hate to see her hurt herself so much! It hurts to watch.'

Me: 'One of the hardest things about love is to keep caring deeply for someone while giving them the freedom to live their own life - even if it means making destructive choices.'

Pause... Anna: 'That's how God loves, though.'

Me: 'Yeah - that's true; that's exactly how God loves.'

Anna: 'It must kill him, though!'

Me: 'Literally.'

I couldn't help but think how appropriate this conversation was for Holy Week.

It's a bit of a stretch... but since it is my blog... last week we had a Stampin' Up party (yes... stamping... not quite a tupperware party, but as my friend Chris once said, very ...midwestern... of me nonetheless!) and over the assemblage of our beautiful cards some of the women at my table fell into conversation about the usage - or lack thereof - of the word "love". As in, how quickly do you say "I love you" to someone and, while we're on the subject, what is love anyway. Being Lucy, I inserted myself into the conversation - and probably gave it a more philosophical bent than was perhaps necessary :) It struck me how much I chafe against this idea that the "L" word is a four-letter word that should be used sparingly. I mean, okay, I suppose I understand the reluctance to bare ones soul, particularly in a romantic relationship, but really - I just don't think we say "I love you" enough! Where did we get the idea that asserting our affection - even deep affection - for someone was an utterance that somehow committed us to life-long exclusive claims on another person (or gave them such claims on us)? Not that I'm proposing that we glibly substitute "I love you" for our already shallow and oft-meaningless social interactions ("How are you?... We should get together sometime!... Great to see you."); on the contrary, I think we should take love more, not less, seriously. But I wish we would unburden it of the expectations and exclusivity we have given it and instead let it burden us with the weight of responsibility and delight that comes in giving and receiving love. I love my roommate - I love my friends - I love the girls in my small group - I love my colleagues (though now we're getting into harder territory!).

So when the women had left and the stamps and paper scraps had been cleared away, I sat down with Merriam-Webster & my thinking-cap and came up with the following home-spun definition of love. Except I appear to have misplaced it... there's some deep irony in that. In any case, here's a re-creation of what I sat down and wrote! I welcome your thoughts. Love = The persistant desire for the best for someone else. From the Latin meaning "to please", love is always seeking the thing that gives pleasure to another person. Or, as Webster says, it's "unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another."

Perhaps one of my favorite-est of favorite birthday presents ever was this short email from a (very poetic) Belarussian friend, Maxim:

Lucy -

Lovely
Loving
Beloved.

May it be so.

P.S. Could someone tell me, is it's one's or ones? Thank you.

Recently read

As I read a book I dog-ear pages that contain a phrase or sentiment that seems either particularly true or particularly beautiful to me (or best yet, both... I think language, like architecture or design, is at it's best when both function and form are excellent, when it is at the same time useful and beautiful... but I digress). This is a habit borne partly out of laziness because it seems too much of a task to stop and underline or write in the margins of every book I read; if I were more diligent I would carry on a conversation in this way with every book. When I finish the book or perhaps months or years later, I like to pick it up and thumb through these pages to enjoy these words again. Here are a sample from the book I just finished, Take Me With You by Brad Newsham:

The real world does not present itself in easily absorbed, seven-minute intervals, broken by sixty-second commercial breaks; nor in groups of five eight-hour workdays separated by weekends. The real world marches at you head-on, in jerky bursts of color and boredom and trauma, reminding you that you are alive and small and not in control of anything at all.

This one he stole from Henry Miller... but the theft shows good taste:

We move with eyes shut and ears stopped. We smash walls where doors are waiting to open to the touch; we grope for ladders, forgetting that we have wings; we pray as if God were dead and blind, as if He were in space. No wonder the angels in our midst are unrecognizable. --Nexus

Tired

I have much to learn about saying no. But I think the problem goes deeper than that. It's rooted in a misunderstanding - a twisted perspective - of my own finiteness. I am limited. Weak. Unable. There is much that I can do and think and comprehend and effect - but there is an almost infinite amount that I cannot. This is simply an attribute of my humanity, but it is one that my pride rebels against. God have mercy.