Transformers,Marshmallows and Bricks

Do you remember the first time you saw a transformer? Do you remember the funny shape of it? It came out of the box with a dozen movable limbs, bearing the name the JAZZGI. I remember thinking, “Why would a child want a toy with such a square jaw and oversized boots on its feet?” Soon I learned about the talents within JAZZ. James, a youthful magician, turned away from me with the toy and I heard a few clicks and the sound of parts of JAZZ shifting left and right. Seconds later an armored car appeared where a hulky hero had been. By sleight of hand James showed me what the gimmick was all about:

There is More than What Meets the Eye

Isn’t that the truth? I have the privilege of helping individuals and couples unearth what is underneath what meets the eye. I also have been married almost nineteen years so I know first hand that even after many times of messing it up and then restoring my relationship to Al through forgiveness, my marriage is always a bit unknown to me. A few relational patterns nudge towards the light.  Usually the growth is imperceptible.  I know my husband just well enough to know that I know nothing about him at all.  He is still a frontier. As a couple we are both old on the journey and as fresh as newlyweds.  Nothing confirms this more than when we disagree.  That is when I hear the awful sounds of the shift, the click, and the abrupt turns inside my soul.  I find that like Jazz-GI I transform from marshmallow to brick.

The Hardening Process

Contempt, which is a fancy word for strong anger with a pinch of derision, is a hardening process. As Dan Allender wrote in The Intimate Mystery, (pg.33) “sadly the differences that should unite us are allowed to divide us.  Our differences provoke contempt and not wonder.”   I have found that I can go from marshmallow to brick in a matter of seconds.  What is going on?  Marriage is the primary place where my character is going to be seen.  It also is the place where the risk of being missed trips off an alarm within me.  I know a great divide within my heart called ambivalence. I am drawn to show Al my longings and to offer my soft smushy side at the same moment that my heart wants to defend or withdraw.  I feel crazy inside.  I can give intelligent assent to the fact that the hardening is going to place me far outside the chance of being known or enjoyed but like a brick I hold to the hard edges. It is insane that I offer Al sandpaper shards of broken clay and bits of rock that are abrasive. But if you have ever really looked at a marshmallow you understand how hard it is to stay one!  Marshmallows compress and fit in tight spaces.  They melt in our creamy hot chocolate. They sweeten and disappear like cotton candy. They shape change under pressure and remain pliable. In short, they are open on all sides to being changed by heat, light, pressure and desire.  Sounds like the way of the cross, doesn’t it? Yet on most days I morph into a brick at the slightest provocation. Isn’t that battle of marriage for all of us? Maybe we should all wear t-shirts that say, “Big heart protected by sharp tongue.”

The Yoke is Easy the Burden is Light

The way of the cross is a long obedience in one direction. The obedience is not designed to be hard labor but it does cost everything to remain vulnerable and undefended.   When I read of Jesus not swearing  at the soldiers mocking him and cursing him I get the idea. I can remember that He died outside the gate and found the power within to forsake the fight that Peter fights when he takes up a sword and cuts off the centurion’s ear.  He was a sinless sheep and you hear no bleating. No repetitive defending or hating. No counter punches.  Why? How? How did He stay centered within his identity and yet offer up all that looks like personhood to cruel men? How did He refuse the rock mentality? How? I do it and my husband is not a cruel Roman soldier or a Pharisee. I believe Jesus resisted contempt by knowing the whole story.  He knew the setting of His life was a defenseless manger and and powerless politic. He knew the hours of suffering were small hours in light of eternity.  He knew the vulnerable love He gave by example was more potent than the forces He could rally to match violence with violence. He also kept a joy set before His eyes.   Dan Allender writes, “No one on earth has wounded me more deeply than my wife has. No one has ever, or will ever, woo me to the pleasures of heaven more than my wife has and will.” 1 That sounds like a plan. To know that the wounds of life also carve out deep ravines for joy to rush in at the same intensity. What a stubborn clinging to the joy set before you when the most tempting thing is to fade out of your marriage. Can you capture a glimpse of restoration of who you are? Can you see mirror of heaven? Maybe a short flash of splendor that comes from staying open to your spouse?

So, here we are in our relationships. On most days brick–ish–ness is the path we take. I am aware that the way of the cross is what I wish was my default. I want it to be reflexive and I imagine it to be when I am seventy. Why is it that today I leave room for it not to be when I am battling with desire? Most days you can find me giving in to hiding or fighting intimacy off with my sword. Allender says that God has given us marriage to “deepen desire, call forth courage and plunge us into the war of redemption.”2 I guess today I will put a marshmallow on the lazy susan in the middle of my kitchen table and see if I can remember even once that a block of sugar fluff takes more faith and courage than a block of weatherproof clay.

¹ The Intimate Mystery by Dan Allender, page 76.  InterVarsity Press. 2005
2 The Intimate Mystery by Dan Allender, page 106.  InterVarsity Press. 2005

Speak Silence to Arrogance

tower of babel

Speak Silence to Arrogance

This morning I was thinking about the new and very cool buzz phrase “speak truth to power.” It always comes into play at the pivotal moment in an interview when a rock star wants to sound immersed in the cause of justice worldwide. It is a perfect period at the end of a rant about the abuses of power in governments worldwide. I have a wee problem with this: It is so easy to say and yet I don’t often see these folks knocking on the doors of the bad guys in power and giving them a piece of their mind. Aren’t words easy to throw around?

I can’t talk. I can be guilty of dropping a profound tidbit just as criminally. Some things sound so profound and edgy they are hard to pass up in a conversation.

So, today is no exception. Except that I am inventing the new buzz phrase. My 2009 version of the pithy one liner, which is free for use by celebrities and the like, is: (drum roll) SPEAK SILENCE TO ARROGANCE. Please add that to your Late Night with David Letterman discourse. Twitter this one to Bono for me.

Let me explain. Everywhere that I researched set forth the idea that silence is a very active sound. We need to think of it as just another modality of sound. It can be seen a way of speech as much as yelling. It is full and potent in its own right.

Today I have been thinking about silence and the contrast of God’s silence with the three loudest events in the Bible. Take a minute and come up with your list before you read mine. Here are the three noisy affronts to beauty that I believe are the worth examining. First, is the tower of Babel, second is the noisy rampage of Pharaoh’s army to the Red Sea, and third is the crowd yelling “crucify Him.” just days after Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem where they had called out, “Hosanna, be blessed!”

The three loud moments all have some things in common. Wendy Brown writes about loud public scenes in Edgework. She describes it this way: “the situation is so crowded with humanity that one’s own humanness becomes a question.” In each of the three loud moments in the Bible this is true as well. The mob is pushing in. They share one mind, bent towards aggression. There is no pause toward silence or sensibility. Think of the violent Egyptian soldiers after the plagues. They feed off of the lust for revenge and blood while chasing Jewish slaves on horseback. They are a deafening and impersonal force. As is the crowd wanting a spectacle at the feast of the Passover. They remain anonymous; faceless and nameless individuals. A powerful crowd calling for the blood of the innocent.

Soon in each of the three scenes God causes arrogance to drown. I am amazed by this pattern. I had never seen it before. This overwhelming experience brings humanity back from the brink of its arrogant self destruction. The funny thing is: Silence is the tool God uses.
God speaks silence to arrogance. For the image of man to be lifted back to its status as a glorious ruin some loud noise must be cut off. With noise we are just a ruin and we are incapable of empathy or sacrifice for another.
Primo Levi, writes in The Drowned and the Saved, that there are places in history “filled with a dreadful sound and fury signifying nothing; a hubbub of people without names or faces drowned in a continuous, deafening background noise from which, however, the human word did not surface” The human sounding word. Isn’t that what your heart wants to hear at a family table? Isn’t that what we want to hear of the negotiating rooms within the United Nations? How different would it be to have a world leader that listens to God in reverence and lets his power be a shelter for humanity instead of a war zone. A man of silence could be that shelter. Maggie Ross has written eloquently about the power of silence. She describes our initial fear of being reflective. She says that we use our busy and loud lives to”bark at the angels.” We fear the mystery that might captivate us as we listen so we choose to scare any unknowns away from sight. Do you agree? have you known times that you deliberately loaded your schedule so that you would plug your ears to keep from hearing any whispers from God? I have. As I face that my mother is in the care of hospice I catch myself saying “yes” to things that keep that reality of her death at bay. I say “yes” and get moving into a chaotic life before I realize what my yes was actually accomplishing for my spirit.

The Pharoah of Egypt was equally clueless about his barking at the angels. Ten times you wait for Pharaoh to sound human when God says, “Let my people Go” and over and over again he refuses shelter and spends the lives of those under him like worthless coins. His noise was finally stopped. Can you imagine the silence when the boisterous army about to catch their prey is swallowed up by the walls of water? The Red Sea closes over them and there is no battle cry heard over the desert sands. Golden.

What about loud Babel? Like children with a miniature chemistry set they decide to play God and break their way into the top place. What is the gift God bestows on that bad idea bunch? They find quickly that the linguistic order is lost. Each person drowns in a sea of words that they cannot interpret or use to communicate. It is loud but not for long. To fight off insanity each person disperses to remote corners of the civilized world. Soon the magnificent tower of human ingenuity falls strangely silent.

Have you ever felt insane because you were assaulted by a barrage of words? Talk radio? The View? Advertisements that broadcast two steps louder than your setting on the TV? These are bad but words of my own invention some times are even harder than these to untangle and clarify.

Why is it terrifying to be adrift in a sea of words? I can only guess at how it would be for an adult to be illiterate in the US today. How would you feel to be lost in a sea of words that you can’t decipher? A world of advice that you cannot heed? Confusion is the end result of deafening noise. You are adrift and not sure how to find solid ground because there isn’t a centering weight. This is the anxiety that is a restless master. We have fears of others, fears of death, and fears of fears rummage through our minds without fences or filters. Everything is laid waste. You are loud and clambering after solutions that are no solution at all? At midnight you might cry out, “who can deliver me from the body of this death?”

Recovery by Drowning

My thought is, accept the drowning of your arrogance. That is the first step out of the mess.This drowning will have some component of silence. A new kind of listening to God.

And finally.. It will have some kind of return to individual work instead of the big public push. When the big crowds cried out “Give us Barabbas” in the loud New Testament event they showed how politically they were pinning their hopes on a big answer. Babel is a big tower looking for a big way to be God. Egypt’s Pharaoh and his army is a big enforcer with a big stick outnumbering the Jewish slaves by thousands.
So.. Big didn’t win and loud didn’t convince heaven to bend an ear. In the scene on a hillside as the quiet darkness falls on the area around the crucifixion you only hear of individual responses. There isn’t a mob anymore for either the good or the evil. It is one brother, one mother, one thief and one soldier. One Pilate, one Joseph of Arimeathea. They have names and faces. They quietly decide where their loyalties will be given. God always works in singular decisions. Not nameless or faceless mobs. He offers a still point of making a humble decision even to Pharaoh. T.S. Eliot wrote.” Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” I really believe that. The reason God wants to stay stronger than our noise is actually so we can be more fully alive. More human. Not less.

We may hate that we cannot hide into a group and make a loud splash politically or even with our proud and orthodox beliefs. My hope is that before I run to the loud options I remember how God will flood me until I stand alone relating to Him and listening. My fears can look to Him and be radiant in that flood light. My name and face are out of hiding. It is safe in the shelter of God’s silence; a depth that is the only shelter for true power.

Traditions Arrest Time

I have been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and thinking a bit about the choice I have to view food differently. For as long as I can remember, I have called the hour of homework and cooking the dreaded ‘bewitching hour’. In Kingsolver’s book I was challenged to look at dinner with new eyes. (Granted, with toddlers underfoot it is a meal miracle to plop some grub down on the table. In those years if some creature wasn’t yelled at or burned I counted the dinner a raging success!)

I wonder why I held on to the emotion of dread as the clock strikes the bewitching hour today. After all, 2008 is about seven years after my boys entered elementary school. Why do I still foster the mindset that cooking for my family is nothing more than zookeeper’s duty? 

The Great Hoodwink of this Generation-

I think I know why I have stayed with the negative ideology about our dinner hour. Kingsolver calls it the great hoodwink of my generation.  I guess I succumbed years ago to the propaganda that cooking was “slaving at the stove” and far beneath my rights as a liberated woman. Really?  She says that when parents stopped cooking this way for their children they received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. What if I looked at “slaving” differently? What if it became inventing?  What if I changed my perspective about it?  Kingsolver reminded me (pg 127) that the fast food that looks like salvation in the short run is an imposter. She suggests that maybe the marketers of fast food are the ones I am enslaved to, and my real liberation might look more like an alternative and creative way to view food. Creative? Joyful? How can that happen at 5PM? Like you, I hear it and I do a double take. It’s funny though; it is only my language and attitude that needs an overhaul. My verbage is what is outdated. It doesn’t match my actions. I have never been one to zoo keep: to bring bland, industrialized food to my loved ones when the bell rings to herald the dinner hour. I have always been a mad scientist with spices and fresh food. If a marinade is involved, Lookout! In that case I view anything as fair game!

I have created years of dinners that tell a better story than drive through ease at McDonald’s or the predictability of a set menu at Burger King. They show my small strivings for beauty much like the creative approach Kingsolver outlines. Last week I made a Thai dinner with ingredients that stretched my sons’ exposure to a culture across a continent. It was full of color and variety in texture and taste. I found them more than willing to love the flavors in the Lemongrass & Rice Noodle, Garlic and Ginger Surprise. So, I guess I’m not a liberated woman after all but a homemaker.  Somehow I want to write an apology for that.

The Measured Pace of Nourishing Routines

 Yet, Kingsolver is retro as well. She believes it is a noble thing to take up the art of “molding our families’ tastes and zest for life.” I agree. I just didn’t know it yet! She speaks of the “measured pace of nourishing routines.” This seems similar to musical orchestration. The composer has a reverence for arrangement, he works within the limits of each instrument’s range and yet there is boundless variation possible within the musical notation.  Routine is the calendar on my fridge. It is the alarm clock that tolls for waking and the bell that rings the kids in from playing outside at dinnertime.  Nourishment is within the tradition but it must be a form that carries an intangible; the element of surprise. It is the spice you cannot name or say you have tried before. As parents we are part of the shaping of taste and setting our children up for a zest for life. We give them this crazy gift, even at 5 pm! It is hard to come in from the busy day and find a way to give, yet it is nourishing at fifty as much as it is at fifteen.

Traditions Arrest Time

Gina Bria, a sociologist, studied the ethos of the family unit in many different cultures and found that traditions arrest time.  I love that! Family traditions have the power stop the ravages of time. Sometimes I wonder what my sons will feel decades from today when the lift the candlesticks (that have been at the center of our kitchen table) out of a U-Haul cardboard box to place in their home. Will they remember their hallowed position as artifacts called in to service for our daily tradition of eating by candlelight?

      When chaos is surrounding the outside of the house.  When loss, change, and the grief of beginnings and endings feel like back breaking burdens, I hope that the extra chives and the sour cream dollop on the mashed potatoes gives a solace to my sons. I hope they ponder the secret hidden in the white lumps: that in one corner of the world beauty will win.  Love can taste familiar for years not just minutes.  Comfort food is good in a crisis and food prepared tastes far superior to food manufactured.

       

 

 

What is a soul?

Definition of a Soul:

1. breath
the breath of life: the vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing

2. of animals and of men
life that in which there is life ––a living being, a living soul

3. The soul the seat of the feelings, desires, affections, aversions

The soul is regarded as a moral being designed for everlasting life. The soul as an essence which differs from the body and is not dissolved by death

A Few Words on the Soul

by Wislawa Szymborska

We have a soul at times
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for a
while 
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
 but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh