Category: Uncategorized (Page 5 of 6)

“It’s a gift to not know what to say,” was my writing teacher’s response to my whining about the weekly grind of producing a Sunday sermon. I was looking for an escape from being caught between the wall of what I am supposed to say and the ocean of silence of what I can say with conviction. When Diana Goetsch, our writing instructor, met with us the first night she said that, “writing is not self expression. It is other expression.” She explained that the goal of the workshop was to slip the noose of the ego because “the lease creative force is the human ego.”

I like being told that my writing is good. I enjoy likes on Facebook and praise comments on my blog posts. During class Diana would give us writing prompts and we would write for five or ten or fifteen minutes. If we wanted we could what we wrote. But we didn’t give feedback. In the silence after sharing what we read I could feel the little ego inside of me jumping up and down and asking, “what did you think? Was it any good? Am I any good? Do you like me?” But writing, or any art for that matter, that is motivated by the ego’s need to be admired will never tap into the holy.

And that’s not the only way the ego gets in the way of art or revelation. The ego likes to be in control and thinks it has the right answers. We can’t truly explore if we already know where we’re going.

During one class we spent a significant portion talking about “negative capability,” a phrase coined by John Keats in a letter to his brother. He writes, “…several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

Negative capability is demanded by true spirituality and so often squashed by the church. We like our doctrines and our disciplines and our clear understandings of right and wrong. We like to pin God down, and stick him behind glass where we can point at him with admiration and pride and say, “see what I found.” Negative capability invites us to understand the Holy as a hummingbird that flits into and out of view in the same moment.

“Melissa, I’ll be right with you,” said the service agent as he finished with the customer in front of me. Oil, gas and tires mingled into toxic incense that smelled like work. The clang of tools and hoists and forced air filled my ears. And then it struck me. He knew my name.

I had spent the morning trying to submit bills to my insurance company for reimbursement. Their diligence to protect my identity left me feeling like I was nothing more than a username and account number. After multiple attempts to log in I called the help number and was connected with someone I had trouble understanding. Irked by the digital world and embarrassed by my parochial hearing, I was more abrupt than necessary with the person on the other end of the line. I hung up wearing the scratchy garment of righteous indignation to cover my guilt at misdirected irritation.

I had spent the work week wading through the mud of bureaucracy. Writing reports that no one would read, filling out forms that asked the wrong questions, and sitting through meetings with little purpose had all drained my soul. Attempts to connect meaningfully with friends had been thwarted by their busy schedules. And now I was spending a chunk of my one day off a week getting my car fixed.

And then Reggie called me by name. He had been my service agent for my last oil change and I recognized him by where and how he sat. Instead of standing like his coworkers at his counter high desk, he sat on a low office chair. The bottom of the computer screen was level with his eyes. He hunted and pecked for keys, his arms as high as his ears. He listened without interrupting while explained my questions and concerns. Not only had I been recognized, I had been heard.

When Reggie called a few times during the day to give me updates, he called me, Mel, a nickname I hadn’t heard since Julie and Vickie called me Mel when we met in Spain. He was as happy to tell me the good news – I wouldn’t need a new clutch – as I was to hear it. When I came to pick up my car, he walked me to the cashier and asked, “What’s it like to be a pastor.” He had remembered my work from a previous exchange. I had been seen, heard and now I was just a little bit known.

I started felt like a person. An honest to God person. Not a number or a username or an account. I wasn’t a means to an end, a bother to be managed, or an item to be checked off someone’s list. In being seen, heard and known, I was able to shed my irritable self. I asked about his weekend and thanked him for all his help. Reggie became more than the guy at the service desk, but someone who spent his weekend cleaning his condo, connecting with friends and maybe grilling a steak if the weather stayed nice.

I wasn’t lost but I didn’t know where I was.

I was driving from my house to dinner with a friend in a different city. I typed the address into Googlemaps and obeyed the voice in my car.

Turn right on Green-wood Road
Turn slight right onto Mil-wau-kee Avenue, Illinois 21.
In 600 feet turn right onto N. Harlem, Illinois 43.

I drove through neighborhoods I didn’t know, passing tidy houses and brick bungalows, likely built in the post WWII era. Each one distinguished only by the curtains in the large front window and the saint statue in the yard. I drove by large stately homes that had gravitas and history. Was that a Frank Lloyd Wright?

Where was I? I knew where I had been and where I was going. I knew in one quarter of a mile I would turn left. I felt like had been “beamed” somewhere and was caught mid-transport. I wasn’t really anywhere.

I missed maps. Real maps. Those large, unwieldy accordions of paper that are impossible to use while driving. But they show how cities, towns and neighborhoods are situated in relationship to each other. And which communities are divided by interstates. With a map, I could almost always figure out where I was.

I used to want a GPS for my life – some voice to give a clear direction in the moment of a major decision.

In 6 days accept the new job.
In 300 feet turn toward that relationship.

But now I want a map. I want a bird’s eye view. I’d like to see now what I can only ever see in hindsight – how the various pieces and parts of my life fit together.

I had a friend in graduate school who plotted his life like the person who gives me directions from inside my iPhone. He knew how long he would work in his first position post graduate degree and what the next job would be. He knew where he would land in five and ten years. I used to feel inadequate because I didn’t have an equally structured plan.

I make decisions one at a time without the benefit of knowing if they are getting me any closer to my destination. I’m don’t even know what my destination is. For now I’ll work on focusing on where I am without knowing where I’ll end up.

GPS works if you can type in exactly where you are going. With a map you can explore.

I’m up before dawn and sneak out to the patio by the beach. I sit at a white plastic picnic table that will become a kite in a violent storm. Today it’s clear. I can see the outlines of the mountains across the bay. They are layered cutouts of translucent paper, grey, purple, blue. Every detail articulated.

The waves fall on the beach like a child tired from playing. The pleats and swells of the water roll past each other. It’s a cat crawling under tightly tucked sheets. The ocean breathes, a sleeping giant.

As the sun rises the mountains become less precise. Haze blurs their lines. The surf is angrier now. The tired child pounds his fists on the floor. There is no embarrassed parent to bribe or beg.

I can the hear the ocean from inside at night, and from the restaurant and from the little shop where we bought cafe, cinco bottles of cerveza, and huevos that we carried home in a plastic bag. When I wake up long before daybreak I come and sit on the deck and hear the ocean that I cannot see.

It constantly sends its waves to the shore, and then pulls them back. Push and pull, give and take, cast and reel. Does it ever get tired? Burned out? Where does the ocean go for vacation?

It is not work or living that depletes me. When I think and sweat and create, when I speak the truth, when I push my body on a hike, when I connect deeply with a friend, I am more alive. My body grows weary and my brain tired. But low tide is different from burn out.

It’s holding back that wears me out. It’s carefully measuring words, weighing them on the scale of acceptability. It’s picking through feelings to choose only the ones fit for public consumption that drains my life away. It’s being quiet when I want to shout, treading carefully when I want to plunge in.

The ocean doesn’t worry about what we think of it. It doesn’t care if its tides are too high or too low for us. It doesn’t silence its crashing so that we aren’t bothered by what it says. It expects us to accommodate its storms. It is a leviathan and not just the home for them.

The average adult woman is 55% water. We are half ocean.

Before their jewelry and gold and silver was stolen, before they were commanded to wear yellow stars, before they were moved into ghettos, before they were shoved into cattle cars, before they were taken to Auschwitz, before they were starved and frozen, before Elie saw his father beaten, before an old man’s bread was stolen by his grandson, they were warned to leave.   That’s the heartbreaking truth that Elie Wiesel tells in his book Night.

A first hand witness came back from the dead to warn them. Moishe the Beadle, was taken in the round up of foreign Jews. He escaped. Moishe believed he was spared by God to warn his neighbors of the camps and the trenches. His neighbors could not believe that such evil existed. That such evil could happen to them. It wasn’t just evil that did them in. It was being blind to it.

We are capable of great evil. All of us.

The baptismal liturgy of my church asks the initiate to “renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world and repent of their sin.” It sounds so anachronistic. Aren’t we are too sophisticated to talk about spiritual wickedness? It’s in fashion to talk about love and acceptance and mercy.

The world is good. But evil is real.

We avoid the trap of accusing whole populations of being evil because of the actions of a few just to fall into the pit of denying evil exists.

Volkswagen executives commit fraud and convince themselves it’s good business. They poison the air. Government officials in Michigan do not follow federal regulations to save money in a struggling city. They poison the water.

Air pollution caused by Volkswagen executives. Lead poisoning caused by officials in Michigan. All perpetrated by people who are probably good to their families, keep their lawns mowed and their sidewalks shoveled, and return their library books on time. They are “good” people.

Did Cain kill Abel because he didn’t see the evil that lurked at the gate of his own heart?

It’s National Novel Writing Month and I’m frantically trying to write 50,000 words on a novel by November 30. I’m at 26,724 words as of Monday, November 23 at 5:37 PM. Yikes! Here’s what ‘ve learned so far:

1. It’s really hard to write a novel – even a bad one.
2. The amount I don’t know about driving from Chicago through Mexico to Guatemala is astonishing.
3. Sometimes it’s simply easier to make stuff up instead of do research.
4. The first rule of writing is to put your butt in the chair and write.
5. When you put your butt in the chair and write, sometimes the story surprises you. That’s when it gets fun.
6. Checking Facebook does not help you write.
7. It’s really hard to not use adverbs. But your writing is better when you don’t. (“sputtered” vs. “said haltingly;” “trotted” vs. “walked quickly”)
8. It might seem like a good idea to pour yourself a glass of red wine to sip on while you write in the evening. It’s not.
9. You have to write a lot of crap in order to get to write anything remotely good.
10. You can’t tell when you’re writing if what you’re writing is total crap or if any of it is remotely good.
11. You will feel inadequate. Accept it and write anyway (remember number 4).