Brucie, the Black Lazarus

 

I thought I’d take things in a different direction this time and write about our cat, Brucie.  We picked her up from my uncle’s farm late last summer.  We named her after the Bruce Penninsula, and Bruce Cockburn.  Since she will never understand English, we felt alright giving her a masculine name.  Brucie comes from spurious beginnings, likely conceived in a dirty barn by an unknown father with a questionable sense of duty and responsibility.  Either that or by immaculate conception. 

This is Brucie

I’ve been surprised by how many lessons I’ve learned from her in the last 6 months, most of them humbling.  What follows is a list of annotated observations.

 

Number One: Our cat is a monk of sorts.  Like a monk in his cell, she likes to sit in her cardboard box for hours at a time doing seemingly nothing but stare at the walls.  I have no idea what she is thinking about, if anything.  She doesn’t appear to want anything, need anything, pay attention to anything.  She’s content with doing nothing in a way I will never experience.  My inner life is plagued by a profound restlessness.  Ever aware of my impending mortality I’m perpetually given over to distraction or ambition.  In other words, when I have a few hours off I’m either feeling guilty for not achieving something, or become so overwhelmed by the possibilities that I grind to a halt end up doing nothing. 

 

I think I expressed the second thought better in a comment on my friend Geoff’s blog, so I’ll repeat it here (is it silly to quote oneself?):  “Lately I have been in this no-man’s-land of doing nothing while attending to nothing. When I have time off it’s as if I am overwhelmed by the possible activities, but can’t bring myself to do any of them because it would mean missing out on everything else I could be doing. In the end I just “waste” the time, not attending to any one thing, my mind fleeting between many things.”

 

In another post I commented on Beldon Lane’s idea that our poverty is how we try to say “yes” to all the possiblities available to us, and in doing so are attentive to nothing.  In that chapter of his book, he quoted a Zen Proverb that said (I’m paraphrasing): It is better to climb the same mountain a thousand times than to climb a thousand different mountains.  Even climbing a thousand different mountains would be better than what I’m doing now; half-climbing one, then stopping half way to try another.  I am in a pathetic state constant motion, lamenting the million other experiences I could be having, oblivious to where I am.

 

Brucie escapes this problem by having very few possibilities available to her.  There are only so many things a cat can do, and 90% of those things involve lying down and doing nothing.  I’ve been thinking more and more about spending some time at a monastary, and I think this is precicely why:  If I’m unable to say no to all the possibilities, then I need to go to a place where there simply are fewer possibilities available to me.  

 

Number Two:  By watching her long enough, I have seen what hell is like.   In one of my all time favourite books, “The Great Divorce” by C.S. Lewis, he describes hell as a town where no one can tolerate being around anyone else. The borders of the “The Grey Town” keep expanding by millions of miles every day as people move further and further away from each other.  In this imagined description of heaven and hell, Lewis writes that the people who live in hell are there because they want to be, because “there is always something the prefer to joy” (p66).  

As an aside, my favourite part of the book is when a prominent theologian who lives in hell is invited to come up to heaven, but refuses because he runs a little theological society down there, and replies that they have a very important meeting that evening that he doesn’t want to miss it.   

To expand on observation number one, not all solitude is life giving.  I think Bruce spends a lot of her time in The Grey Town.  She has a nearly insatiable desire to be alone.  She prefers to sit in places that are as far from us as possible in our small apartment.  Sometimes it’s under the chair in the far corner by the window, or under a pile of blankets beside the couch, or even in the large drawer of my desk.  This isn’t a cute game of hide and seek; she really does not want to be found.  When I finally discover her hiding in my desk drawer and pick her up, she gets angry, sometimes even hisses at me.  When I put her down, she runs off to another hiding place out of sight.

I want to offer her my company, but she rejects it.  She could be a  happier cat if she would more easily open herself up to the companionship of Ave and I, but like the characters in The Great Divorce, she prefers to live in The Grey Town; there is something she prefers to joy.  I occasionally wonder if when hiding in my desk she is imagining she is in a bigger desk in an even bigger apartment that is so far away that no one could find her.

How often I behave like Brucie.  Why do I waste an evening surfing the internet or playing video games when I could be having a conversation with Ave, or reading a good book?  I know the latter will bring me joy but I inexplicably prefer the distraction and pointlessness of the former.  When I am under stress, I hide from the world like Brucie does.  I construct psychological walls around myself and refuse to let anyone in, basking in despair and loneliness.  It is true that we don’t need to die to experience hell.  

Number Three: Brucie reveals my dark side.  I have an inner violence generally lies deep beneath my subconscious.  I am, for the most part, a passive, agreeable person.  I’ve never physically gotten in a fight with anyone in my life.  In a violent situation, my “flight” response dominates the “fight”.  

But when Brucie meets my affection with defiance, it evokes a deep anger.  I remember one time when I picked her up and gently rubbed her belly only to have her hiss and spit in my face.  In that moment I was murderous.  I could have thrown her through our 8th floor window onto the pavement below.  (Don’t worry, I restrained myself and Brucie remains alive and well).

In hindsight, I’m glad this happened.  Similar situations have happened with her over the past few months, and each time she becomes a mirror reflecting back at me my need for approval and respect.  She may only weigh 2 kg, but she makes me feel small.  Upon further reflection, I have become aware of how much my self esteem relies on the approval of others.  Even the disapproval of my cat brings me down.  

This last observation reminds me of a gospel commentary I read on a website called “Today’s Good News”, written by a group of monks in Ireland, on the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man.  For those who don’t know the story, Lazarus is a beggar who sits outside the gates of the rich man.  The rich man walks by Lazarus each day without noticing him.  When they both die, Lazarus is in Heaven and the rich man is in hell.  The writer then explains that in life the rich man had everything he needed, and Lazarus was tormented, so in death they each receive what they never had in life.

Rather than praising the virtues of poverty, the commenter suggests that this story is about how God is only interested in our “essential selves”.  The rich man constructed an identity for himself from his posessions and popularity.  When he died, and all of these things were taken away, so his whole self was destroyed; he had no identity apart from his material wealth (it’s interesting how in the story Lazarus has a name, but the rich man does not).  The commenter astutely points out that the Rich Man’s relationship with Lazarus is neutral.  He doesn’t actively persecute Lazarus, he just walks by him every day without noticing.  

I am that Rich Man.  The words of this parable accuse me.  I have clothed myself with the praises of my friends and the desirability  of my possessions.  I begin to feel like I am naked in the streets of downtown Toronto just before sunrise, frantically trying to find a place to hide.  

And so it begins to make sense.  When Jesus told another rich man to give half of his posessions to the poor, he walked away feeling sad because, in a way, Jesus was asking the man to kill himself.  At the end of one of my favourite movies, Fight Club, the main character realizes that he suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder, and that his enemy who has been wreaking havoc in the world is actually his own alternate personality.  At the climax of the movie, he puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, but much to the viewers surprise, he is still alive and his alter ego is shown lying dead in the chair.  He quite literally “died to himself” in order to be born again.  

If I need anything, it’s the courage to shed my false identity and to endure the nakedness of losing this contrived “self”.  Only then will I be able to discover the true self that God has created, the only self that is able to relate to Him.

At the end of the Lazarus story, Abraham visits the rich man in hell, and he asks Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers so they won’t end up like him.  Abraham refuses, saying they have Moses and the prophets, so if they don’t listen to them, they won’t listen to anyone.  Perhaps I am actually one of those brothers, and in his mercy God has decided to send send Lazarus to warn me in the form of a grumpy black cat named Brucie.

Thanks again for reading.  I’ve got another post cooking that should be up in the next few weeks. 

Hope

If I were to give November a theme, it would be hope. . . and of course its antithesis: despair. Then again, perhaps the theme really was despair and hope was like the chocolate chips scattered throughout a burnt cookie. A very burnt cookie. Well, maybe the cookie was actually baked out of shit.

I’m getting carried away, but it was a bad month. I can still hear the Neurosurgical senior residents shouting at the vegetative patients at 6 am in the ICU: “move your leg . . . your LEG! . . . NO THE LEFT LEG!!! . . . WIGGLE YOUR TOES!! . . . YOUR TOES!!!” . . . and so on for each one down the line. I can still re-live those horrible nights on call by myself in the middle of the night with critically ill patients rolling in one after another while I felt like I was drowning. Help was supposedly a phone call away, but when all I heard from the voice in the receiver was a lecture about how I should be seeing the patients faster and a reminder that nobody would be coming to help me, I would sink into despair. I remember distinctly at one point feeling so overwhelmed that all I could hear was static and I felt like I had left my body and everything was moving in slow motion.

But as bad as my situation was, I was not the only one who tasted despair last November. I also remember the car accident victims with their brains falling out of their heads onto the resuscitation tables. I remember the young father who I had to tell he had a brain tumour, and the new mother with a massive stroke who will probably spend the rest of her life paralyzed in a nursing home. And how could I forget the man who could not remember? The man who had to re-experience every day for the first time the news that his brain cancer would kill him within the year.

And then there was that message on my cell phone. It was my father. “Zak, call me back as soon as you get this. It’s important”. Gerry had died.

It was through this mess that I rediscovered the centrality of hope. For a lot of people in my life, November kicked us all in the guts. I was steeped in the bitter tea of death and watched as others were forced to drink it, sometimes being the waiter delivering it to the bedside. Like a coin that shows tails on both sides, I experienced death as a detached professional and also as personal loss.

I never feel particularly hopeful during funerals. I almost always look at the casket and picture myself lying in there with my eyes closed, hands crossed on my abdomen. When I was a teenager I used to compose eulogies for myself in my head. “It’s coming” I told myself. I looked around the church and saw a room full of future corpses. We are grass, some of us flowers, some of us weeds, but in the end we’re all the same.

One of my best friends once told me religion was an invention created solely to fabricate a false hope to enable us to deal with death and loss. That may be, but at the very least my faith embraces my weakness and my humanity. I would rather profess a false hope than a false strength. I can live without being strong (in fact I prefer it). I cannot live without hope.

So what of Gerry? As paradoxical as it sounds I experienced him more strongly by his absence than I usually did when he was present. Where were the loud crescendo stories? Where was his cackling laughter that would cut through a room full of people? Even if you were on the other side of the building having your own conversation, you simply could not avoid being a part of Gerry’s conversation as well. But at the funeral, he was just gone.

So I ask again, where is the hope? Where is God in all of this? (I bet you knew I was going to ask that question). Honestly, I don’t know (I bet you knew I was going to say that as well). God was as absent as Gerry was that day, present to us only as a profound silence that cut our ears. This is via negativa, I thought.

What I do know for sure is that people need hope. Whether it’s picturing the dead literally watching over us, or the promise of everlasting life, or Nirvana, or re-incarnation or simply ensuring that the memory of one’s life will be preserved, we all need hope. If not for hope, we wouldn’t have had a funeral, we would have met at the local bar and drank ourselves unconscious. Hope is what drives us and without it we can do nothing. It was the sole reason I got through November without collapsing in a heap.

Gerry’s funeral was a collective statement that although we’ve had a part of us torn out, we haven’t lost hope. We resolved to face our loss head on, publicly. We literally stared death in the eyes and in defiance continued on living right in front of it. As shown on one of Bruce Cockburn’s album covers, we are all Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws.

As much as I hate to admit it, my friend’s comment makes a lot of sense. I’ve seen a lot more death than most people my age, and it isn’t glamourous. It’s plain, ordinary, cold, senseless. A person is suddenly replaced by this compartment that almost mocks the being it once represented. It defies explanation. As improbable as it sometimes seems, I must believe there is something more, that there is something redemptive at the end of it all. Anyone who can accept death as a meaningless event is truly strong indeed.

I’m going to miss Gerry. I already do. As his life slips into the shadows memory I especially think of Sylvia who is enduring a nightmare I can’t even imagine. I pray that she will not lose hope.

Thanks for Reading.

Zak

Waiting in the Airport

I love to travel.

Visiting new places is exciting, but mean it’s the traveling itself that I enjoy.  I love waiting in airports, sitting on a plane for hours.  I’m writing this right now in an airport.  There is something magical about being forced to sit in one place with nowhere to go, nothing to accomplish while simultaneously anticipating the mysterious and seemingly endless possibilities of a new landscape that awaits.  For me, this inevitably leads to a profound state of refocusing and contemplation.

For example, it is in airports that I finally listen to music for its own sake, tasting it, letting it speak rather than turning it on at dinner to fill the gaps in conversation like commercials during a daytime talk show.  In the airport I’ll read that book I’ve been meaning to start for months rather than check my email for the 14th time.  Here I am freed of the compulsion to be multitasking, achieving, worrying.  I enter a state of Zen-like tranquility, content just to be and to exist.  (I should add that I’m also learning how to do this better from our new cat Brucie).   Belden Lane describes this compulsion aptly:

We cringe from the idea of relinquishing in any moment, all but one of the infinite possibilities offered us by our culture.  That is our poverty.  In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing.  One can only love when one stops to observe.  ‘Nothing is more essential to prayer . . . than attentiveness’

 -From The Solace of Fierce Landscapes p. 189

I almost need the “airport experience” of decimating the variety of possible activities in order to be attentive to just one thing.  The airport waiting area becomes, in this way, a type of desert landscape.  It is here that I realize my poverty as I sit in my apartment browsing the internet while listening to music and thinking about work, occasionally glancing across the room at Avery, as indifferent to the miracle of her life as I am to my own.

When I get home I will warm myself by the hidden flame burning deep withing her, reuniting myself with my love and the One who kindles and sustains her.  I will remind myself that I still believe in miracles.

The Music Plays at the Back of the Almighty

As per my previous post, I’ve waited until I’ve had something worthwhile to say before writing.  This time it took me 3 months.  As I’ve been mulling over my thoughts deciding what to call this entry, I originally wanted to call it: “Why residency is hell; or why I should have dropped out of medicine and become an accountant”.  Instead I have settled on “The Music Plays Behind the Back of the Almighty”.  I’ll explain that more later.  And just to give things context, I wrote this about 4 weeks ago but didn’t get around to polishing it until tonight, so when I write “yesterday” it does not literally mean yesterday.

When describing my experience of residency, I am reminded of a line by Morgan Freeman in the movie Glory where he recounts his life of slavery saying: “It may not be living, but it sure as hell ain’t dying”.  I’m currently in the middle of a 120 hour work week.  I was up for 30 hours straight one night last week praying that I would develop an appendicitis because it would be a relative improvement in my situation.  I have spent the entire week at the hospital except for 3 half days which I got off after I was on call.  This is why doctors get divorced and become alcoholics.

When I hear people tell me that this is just how medicine is so accept it, I want to scream.  Just because something has been done for a long time does not make it right.  The same basic idea propagated slavery for thousands of years even though it must have seemed intrinsically wrong to at least some people.  And come to think of it, the slavery metaphor seems quite appropriate.

To be fair, I have been learning a lot as well.  These past 2 months have taught me to make decisions and to deal with serious problems independently.  A big turning point in my confidence level happened last week when I dealt with a patient who began projectile vomiting blood all over the wall at 4:30 am.  I assessed the situation, formulated a plan, managed the patient appropriately all on my own, and went back to bed confident I could deal with anything.  Well maybe not quite, but you know what I mean. . .

But now for the point of this post.  I was at a bit of a low point yesterday.  I had just spent 30 hours straight in the hospital (again), and now had an afternoon off.  The night previously on call I had a couple of hours of down time and went for a walk just outside the hospital.  I remember praying, somewhat incoherently, for a glimpse of the glory of God as I had been drowning in the endless tiring drudgery of my work.  As usual, I didn’t expect to see much.

During my afternoon off, I decided to go for a bike ride to the east part of the city to peruse a board game store I hadn’t yet been to.  Even going on the bike ride in the first place was a strange decision as I was exhausted.  A couple of weeks before I had read about an upcoming concert by a couple of guitar players named Don Ross and Andy McKee, but had since completely forgotten about it.  It just so happened that on that bike ride to a part of the city I had never been to before I serendipitously biked past the small venue where they were playing . . . that night.  I walked in and they had about 5 tickets left for the upcoming show in 2 hours, so I bought two for Ave and I.

The first comparison that comes to mind when I think back about that concert is the account of Moses asking to see the glory of God, but only being permitted to see His back as He passed by:

The Lord said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favour in my sight, and I know you by name.’ 18Moses said, ‘Show me your glory, I pray.’ 19And he said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, “The Lord”;* and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20But’, he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.’ 21And the Lord continued, ‘See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; 22and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; 23then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.’  – Exodus 33:17-23 NRSV

The concert was the most inspiring experience I’ve had in the past 2 months.  I went from a place of exhaustion and despair to one of hope and joy to be alive.  Their music simply blew me away.  I remember thinking: “how can anyone hear this music and not (at least inwardly) fall to their knees?”.  “Don Ross must believe in God”, I thought, “or else he is a hypocrite every time he picks up his guitar”.  Few things in life, music being one, love being another, can escape my ability to explain them away in scientific or evolutionary terms.  But if everything we do and make and experience is simply an end result of natural selection and our drive to survive and compete, then music like this simply should not exist.

In this space I originally had a long paragraph about how the explanation of music as understood through anthropology and evolutionary  biology is grossly oversimplified and inadequate . . . but realizing now it was a bunch of drivel I deleted it.  I think my point was that we need to let some things (such as music) bring us to the end of reason because sometimes the end of reason is actually the beginning of revelation, where Truth must be felt and tasted and can only be known subjectively.

Going back to the Exodus reference, I see again that God actually listens and responds.  I never saw God’s face, but in my cleft of rock two rows back from the stage, I heard over and over again the name “The Lord”.  I cannot be sure, but I imagine that when I walked out of the concert hall, my face was probably shining just a bit.

Well, that is all for now.  You have read my blog entry, and have intellectualized the content, but all truth is dead until we relate with it and experience it; so I’ll end by encouraging you to head over to Rylynn – Andy Mckee to listen to one Andy McKee’s songs called “Rylynn”.  As the psalmist said: “O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him.”

Thanks for Reading.

Zak

Mosaic

Hello again. I thought maybe this time I’d take a slight detour from Solace of Fierce Landscapes to do a post about my mosaics. I’m writing this a week before my wedding, but won’t publish it until afterwards as I am giving the mosaic to Avery as a wedding present and want it to be a surprise. For those who did not see it at the wedding, I included the following inscription: “ ‘The Holy Mountain’ For Avery. May I always give you the best of myself. June 2008”.

Creating a mosaic is a long and labour intensive undertaking. I estimate that this took me about 150 hours overall to create. Each piece had to be individually cut and shaped by hand from a square tile. Sometimes the tiles smash or cut improperly. But despite the tedium, or maybe even because of it, I have been using the experience of creating as a kind of meditation. Slowly, piece by piece over a period of about a year, I watched as the scene took shape. Every time I worked on it, I would be brought back to the original experience so that it is now burned into my memory. As I allude to in my journal entry, I experienced in some small way the presence of God hovering over my workbench, taking delight in my creating as He must have in the Beginning.

I’ve included the journal entry that goes with the original experience behind the mosaic, but I want to preface it with a few words of explanation. I first got the idea to create this type of artwork from my Uncle Bob when I visited him in BC a couple of years ago. Out of that came my first mosaic called “The Living God” which I finished about a year ago. The inspiration for that one came during the summer of 2006 when I was working for CLM construction in Floradale, Ontario. I spent a lot of time up on the roofs of portable classrooms for that job, so it’s not surprising that this first experience happened up on a roof.

What is interesting is that almost exactly a year later, I had another epiphany, again while up on a roof. That epiphany, described in the journal entry below, inspired this second mosaic entitled “The Holy Mountain”. I have included a picture at the bottom. Enjoy.

Sunday June 17th, 2007

I had the strangest feeling this evening. I had just finished my first mosaic (which was about a year in the making), and decided to go outside after Ave pointed out the interesting weather. Responding to some vague impulse, I went up on top of the garage to get a better look. Half of the sky was full of dark clouds illuminated partly by the sun that was setting on the other half of the sky where it was clear. I haven’t seen anything like it before. It was sunny and raining at the same time, and the rain was blowing in my face.  I could see the edges of the cold front pushing forward directly at me. There was a full rainbow arcing over the clouds as if strattling the leading edge of the storm. It was about 10 pm, but still relatively bright as it is the middle of June.

The clouds were dark, like looking into a bottomless ocean. It was chaos but it was mysterious and beautiful. The whole time I had this strong desire to be swept up into the storm and carried away. I’ve never felt like that before. It was a foreign and strange feeling, but at the same time natural and comfortable. I felt at that moment that I could die and it would be alright. I had this feeling of completion and contentment. In that moment I was Elijah being carried up in the whirlwind.

Everything was different up there. I could see into the neighbours’ yards and look out over most of the block. There are fences everywhere, so all I see is fences and pavement when I drive in through the back alley.  I’ve lived here on ground level for about a year, but up on that roof everything seemed so new.

Maybe I’m crazy, like one of my schizophrenic patients making bizarre connections between unrelated events. But to me the mosaic and this experience are part of the same revelation. The last few months have been dry. Disorientingly dry, to the point where I wasn’t sure if my life had a purpose beyond my own entertainment. Then I finish the mosaic and an hour later have the most vivid experience of God since the very experience that inspired my first mosaic. I titled that first mosaic “The Living God” because I found God in some soccer balls while standing on top of a portable last summer. I didn’t consciously decide to climb up on the garage today, but then there I was, just like the figure on my first mosaic, standing on another roof, experiencing God in a storm.

My first mosaic isn’t beautiful from an artistic point of view, but somehow all along I felt that God was there with me while I was creating, hovering over the wood and tiles and glue like He hovered over the formless void before speaking the world into existence. That mosaic is probably more of a monument than artwork.

Maybe this will be the inspiration for my next mosaic. I wonder if when I’m 80 years old I’ll have an extensive collection of mosaics featuring a person standing on a roof. Maybe the roof is my Holy Mountain where I go to experience the living God.

Part III: Common Grace and the Ordinary

First off, I would like to apologize for not meeting my promised quota for blog posts.  I’d say it’s partly that I have been busy with moving and wedding planning, but also because I don’t like to write unless I feel inspired to do so.  I usually wait until I have a burst of inspiration and then sit at my computer for hours straight getting it all typed out.  I’m beginning to realize that inspiration does not tend to be dispensed to me twice monthly.

As for my life, my exams are now finished.  I’m now writing this blog on my computer in my back yard, puffing on a Cuban cigar.  Not a lot has changed, other than that my mail is now arriving addressed to “Dr Peters”.  I don’t feel particularly worthy of the title.  To be honest, it feels contrived and begrudgingly respectful like a private saluting an incompetent commanding officer.  Ave and I also just took possession of our new apartment in Toronto.  We’re finally venturing out on our own.  What I have enjoyed most about the weeks leading up to our wedding is living (rather than just knowing intellectually) the truth that what we are doing is good and right.  She is, as my mom once said, one of those rare, truly good people (it sounded better when she said it).

Today’s post actually is partly about Avery, written with permission of course.  I’d like to tell a story about common grace based on a recent experience.

In the chapter entitled “Dragons of the Ordinary: the Discomfort of Common Grace”, Lane introduces the chapter with a story taken from ancient Mandarin mythology.  In this story, the citizens of the city of Wu were being threatened by an impending invasion by wild horsemen.  They prayed for help from the Great Cloud Dragon, but when he arrived in the form of a “small, fat, bald old man” they did not recognize him for who he was until he later revealed his true form and defeated the barbarian hordes.

In his commentary on this story, Lane observes that we often “[balk] at ordinariness” (p.94).  Elsewhere in the chapter, he recounts that theologians used to differentiate special grace, where a person is suddenly and marvelously rescued from danger, from common grace, which is subtle, often missed, and mixed in with the mundane ordinariness of life.  He notes that “common grace falls on the just and unjust alike”, adding that most people never place much value on common grace.

My latest experience of common grace came after Ave finally lost her long and painful battle with statistics.  I’ve never seen her work so hard at anything else before, and irrespective of the outcome I’m proud of her.  Statistics became like a cancer to her, leeching her personal resources to fuel its pointless, strangulating growth. By the end of the term it seemed like she was getting it.  She felt confident, I felt confident, her final exam seemed to have gone smoothly.  But when we corresponded with her transcript, it had no words for us, only one letter: F.  I on the other hand had many words, using that letter as a creative starting point for a tirade of obscenities.

I didn’t give up hope, and emailed her professor (as Ave was away on a field school course) asking her to reconsider, which she refused.  Not ready to give up I asked her again, and she replied with the same answer, only a little angrier this time.  When Ave got back she set up a personal meeting with her professor to discuss the results and got the same answer a third time: you have failed and I will not under any circumstances change your mark.

It hurts to fail, but it hurts more to pour out oneself into something only to find even your best work is unacceptable.  All along I remember praying for grace.  Like the Chinese citizens in the story I was praying for special grace, hoping for God to miraculously change the mind of the unwilling professor, hoping for her to somehow pass the course.  I met Ave shortly after her meeting with the professor in a coffee shop.  She started crying before I could even sit down.  Being the sensitive and perceptive person I am, I tried to cheer her up by telling her it could be worse, citing a woman I saw at the hospital a few minutes earlier with a brain tumor who couldn’t move and needed a nurse to feed her breakfast through a straw.  It didn’t help much.  I wondered where God was in all of this, why He seemed to be denying us justice.  I looked in the sky for our Great Cloud Dragon, and saw only sky.

In a last ditch effort, we went up to the Arts Department to review our options.  In addition to telling us there was nothing more we could do, the lady behind the desk informed us that since we were moving to Toronto, the required courses for Avery’s degree would change before she could graduate, and she may no longer fulfill the requirements.  She was already having enormous trouble figuring out how she was going to graduate as she could not transfer her credits to the University of Toronto, and the University of Alberta did not offer the courses she needed via distance ed.  And now this.  We couldn’t believe it.  First she fails a course she deserved to pass, and then her entire degree is put into jeopardy.  Where was God now?

Just as we picked up the new course calendar to assess the damage the lady behind the desk quietly said; “you know, under the new guidelines, you don’t even need a math credit anymore”.  In other words, Ave had been agonizing over this course for the entire semester, when she didn’t need to be taking it in the first place.  We were hoping for a miracle, and were blind to the grace that was being offered to us all along.

How typical.  Over and over again in history, the people of God become so blinded by their preconceived ideas and expectations that they don’t recognize that He has been with them all along.  My story reminds me of the two disciples at the end of Luke where Jesus appears to them on the road to Emmaus, but they don’t recognize him even after walking and talking with Him for hours.  When they reach the town and share a meal, the eyes of the disciples are opened and they are left saying to each other “were not our hearts burning within us while he was opening the scriptures to us?”.  I love how Jesus is such a gentle teacher, patiently instructing and walking with them knowing that eventually they will see, and it will all make sense.

In the words of Belden Lane, “the sudden, blinding light of divine radiance, as it momentarily appears in human experience, must ever be framed within a context of the utterly mundane . . . ‘moments of splendor’ serve the purposes of justice and responsibility in the ordinary life” (p135).  When I slog through my day to day existence waiting for a thunderous epiphany from God, I have the truth reversed.  The brief overwhelming glimpses of God exist to inspire and inform my plain, seemingly unremarkable everyday life.  I believe that as we learn how to look, we will find that God is all around us, saturating the ordinariness, percolating His aroma throughout the mundane.

Thanks for reading.  I’ll have the next post up whenever something worthwhile comes to me.

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes Pt 2: Paradox

I’m back again. Sorry for the delay. I’ve been busy with comprehensive exams and have now finally found some more time to read and write. In this post I want to talk a bit about my experience of Paradox within the context of faith. Thanks for reading, here are my thoughts:

I’ve come to see paradox (paradoxically I suppose) as both enemy and friend; a force which both draws me deeper into the mystery of Christ, and yet confounds me and pushes me away. In the context of the apophatic or via negativa way of desert spirituality Belden Lane points out many paradoxes that lie at the heart of our deepest longings.

First, Lane repeatedly says that “people are sometimes pulled, both spiritually and geographically, to that which most ignores them” (p.52), later concluding that “we are saved in the end by the things that ignore us”. I’ll be honest and say I haven’t completely grasped what he is getting at here, but it rings true to my experience. People who know me well know I’m not exactly good with children. I gravitate toward adults, and generally don’t pay much attention to any of their kids who may be running around or playing while we are trying to have a conversation. But quite often, the children become fascinated by my indifference to them. They’ll stop what they are doing and stare at me with their wide eyes, and then run and hide behind something when I look back at them and smile. I’ve even had times where they run up to me and start hanging off my arms or holding onto my legs. Even at their young age, they are captivated by my inattention.

I think this alludes well to my experience with God. The less attention I feel from God, the more I search and the deeper I go. In some ways, I worry that if God pays too much attention to me or responds too obviously to my needs He will lose part of that divine “otherness”, and become more an extension of my seemingly endless need to assimilate other beings and things into myself. Maybe God’s apparent absence is continuously saving me from my need to dominate and control.

The other side of this paradox is God’s inattention as a source (or the source) of despair. Never do I feel so empty and hollowed out as when I feel abandoned by God. There is nothing I can think of that is worse than the possible reality that we are utterly and completely alone. The rhythm of my life is an endless cycle between consolation and desolation. My desolation is always that disgusting, inescapable, bottomless abandonment that feels beyond all hope. These are the times when I wake up suddenly at 3 am, suffocating under a clear awareness of my impending mortality and resulting annihilation. These are the times when death becomes as Billy Pilgrim experiences it in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: “simply violet light and a hum. There isn’t anybody else there. Not even Billy Pilgrim is there.”

I wanted to find some kind of smooth transition into the next paragraph, but I think I’ll leave it abrupt. When experiencing desolation, there are no tidy answers that synthesize one’s experience into a cute, palatable life lesson. Desolation feels like I’m carrying around all that is meaningful to me in a wet cardboard box, and the bottom breaks open.

Another paradox that Lane touches on is our conflicting needs for both mystery and revelation. In his chapter on mountain imagery, he remarks that:

the mountain speaks of two things at once: its own fierce, demanding presence as a physical form, and the notion of God’s incomprehensible greatness. The mind struggles, uncomfortably and simultaneously, with these two juxtaposed images. God is the rock of our salvation . . . yet God obviously is not a rock, precisely speaking. The metaphor succeeds in conveying its truth only to the extent that it is recognized as literally false. It “is’ yet it “isn’t”. The mountain discloses the diving mystery in the very process of hiding it. (p. 102)

Peter Rollins in his book How (not) to Speak of God describes revelation as “bringing to light the secret of God in such a way as it remains secret”. In another place he observes that “revelation ought not to be thought of either as that which makes God known, or that which makes God unknown, but rather as the overpowering light that renders God as unknown (p. 17).

I have a deep desire to “know”, but I shudder at the prospect of my life being robbed of the imagination and wonder that comes with mystery. I think modern science has killed some of the mystery that humanity used to thrive on. In a strange way I am jealous of the ancient Hebrews who could look up at a star as being part of the “heavens” rather than a “self-luminous celestial body consisting of a mass of gas held together by its own gravity”. If I could give this phenomenon a name, I’d call it the Scooby Doo effect. When I used to watch this show as a kid, my imagination would be captivated by the ghosts who scared the people away from the carnival, or the vampire who lived at the baseball stadium. I had a need to know what was behind the mystery, but when I found out at the end of the show that it was only the disgruntled grounds keeper wearing a latex mask I felt strangely cheated and let down. I lost interest and changed the channel. In this light I can search after God without fear of being disappointed by the possibility of revelation because as Peter Rollins affirms, “even the revealed side of God is mysterious” (p 18).

I want to close with a few thoughts about love. A God who is beyond all language, who is hidden even is His revealing, and of whom none greater can be conceived can never be known in the usual sense. But, as Lane observes, He can be loved. In this way love is supreme. Thomas Merton says that ” love astounds the intellect with vivid reports of a transcendent Actuality which minds can only know . . . by a confession of ignorance. And so, when the mind admits that God is too great for our knowledge, love replies: ‘I know Him’.” Love is our best and only way of reaching out into the darkness with a hope of being embraced by the Divine. As Peter Rollins says:

To love is to know God precisely because God is love. . . Love must be the first word on our lips and also the last . . .and we must seek to incarnate that sacred word in the world.

May we all be drawn deeper into this great Mystery. The Peace of Christ be with you. Thanks for reading.

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

I’m about 1/4 of the way through Belden Lane’s book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. It’s strange how this book came to me at just the right time. My mom asked me to read a few pages to find a quotation for her (I’m not sure if she purposefully did this to get me to read it) and I was quickly drawn in. I don’t read as much as I should or could, but when I do my mind moves faster than I can keep up with. I feel like I have bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, making connections between the bible, other books I’ve read, other thoughts I’ve had, conversations, experiences, images; I’m sure if I wrote it down the way it originally came to me you would be reading the incoherent ramblings of a madman. But I’ve let my thoughts simmer for a few days, so what follows is a part of what I have been thinking.

Lane’s book so far tries to explain why he (and other people) are drawn to fierce environments like deserts and mountains. He observes that:

. . . a craving for the wild splendor of God recurs repeatedly in the recesses of the human soul. When people are drawn geographically to the remote edges of our world, they are carried metaphorically to the edges of themselves as persons, invited to an emptiness as exhilarating as it is frightening. Encountering overwhelming fierceness at the end of all possibilities, they know themselves to be loved in wild and unanticipated grace (p. 50)

Most of the time my inner life is characterized by doubt and uncertainty. I carry around a constant awareness of my own mortality. When I’m honest, I naturally tend toward despair and try to distract myself from the overwhelming feelings loneliness. So often I find myself tiptoeing around the edges of the vast desert within myself, refusing to enter for the fear of looking for God and discovering He is not there to meet me, leaving me utterly isolated and abandoned. Perhaps I am drawn toward desert spirituality because it offers the opportunity to turn my despair into a blessing. In this light, my life suddenly becomes a wild adventure where, like in many good stories, I can come to know the meaning of divine grace and love only after being brought to the absolute limits of my inner darkness, being unexpectedly rescued after losing all hope.

I am impelled into the desert by a deep need to confront my own inner darkness, and to be emptied in order to find myself “speechless before a mystery I’m able to love though never fully comprehend” (p. 59). But rather than wander into the desert, I tend to go to the beach; rather than ascend the mountain of enlightenment, I ride the elevator up to the penthouse. These false gods of comfort and predictability rob me of my solitude, whispering in my ear with hollow voices that all is well. The lesson that comfort and self-sufficiency preclude communion with God is one that I learned well in Africa, but seem to have forgotten in recent years.

In keeping with the desert imagery, I can’t help but say a few words about my recent trip to Las Vegas. It is almost as if we have pushed God so far to the fringes of society that we now naively try to chase him out of the desert as well. For anyone who has not been there, Las Vegas is the epitome of distraction and self-indulgence. On the streets, speakers are placed such that the music and noise is inescapable. My friend and I would sometimes laugh at the cacophony when we walked through the watershed zones between speakers where a different song would be blaring into each ear. Lights and sounds followed us everywhere and hemmed us in like a warm wet blanket, at first comforting, but slowly becoming cold and suffocating.

I suppose it is ironic that a place like this exists within a desert, offering people all the distractions and indulgences from which so many desert contemplatives have fled. All the distraction is necessary to keep the visitors from realizing that they are in fact in a mirage which is more empty than the desert that is surrounding them. And all the while the surrounding desert continues on unaffected, unchanging, timeless. If the desert weren’t utterly indifferent, I imagine it would be laughing.

Testing

Well, I figured its time I start blogging. Not that anyone will ever read what I put up here, but I think at least it will give me more incentive to keep reading and exploring rather than spending my time playing video games. I’m new to all of this, but it seems like a blog is kind of like diary writing for exhibitionists.

Anyways, most of my inspiration for doing this comes from my lovely fiancee Avery who has had her own blog for over a year. Maybe this is also an attempt to invest in something that we can have in common.

Ok, I have to figure out how to make my blog look nice, and also need to come up with some more interesting things to say, so I’ll stop here.

Zak