I've been trying off and on for a year and a half now to write a post about letting go of expectations about what God "should" be like. It's a difficult task for those of us who were raised with very specific ideas. It was going to be called "forgiving God," because in spite of the blasphemous sound of that phrase, that is often what it feels like. But that post isn't going anywhere, in spite of my long-term efforts. So maybe that's all I need to say about it, or maybe more will come up later. So... moving on.

What I've been thinking about recently is atheism. The word has such a slanted, loaded meaning in our culture, especially because of the very vocal appearance of a number of prominent atheists in the last few years (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc). In some circles it seems to mean the same thing as being un-American, immoral, and a devil worshipper, which is absurd, of course.

But honestly, their take on it is not particularly appealing to me-- in part because while their stated ideas are provocative and often convincing, their motivation on a personal level often seems to be something like an inability to forgive God for not being what they expect him to be, and perhaps more obviously, an inability to forgive believers for believing in God anyway. I'll confess that's a pretty biased statement about their work that is based on a very limited reading of their books, and hearing a few interviews. But read the first chapter of God is Not Great and see if you don't find that the prevailing sentiment is not so much the freedom of letting go of religious ideas but anger--even bitterness--at the (perceived) stupidity of people who complacently accept meaningless ideas about God. They seem both angry and gleeful to point out the ways in which God cannot possibly be like what is advertised by the religious establishment, but at the same time they are unwilling to acknowledge that God might be something entirely other than that. In the end, I find them unconvincing. Trumpeting that the God of Sunday School piety doesn't exist is so self-evident as to be boring, if you ask me.

But it doesn't change the fact that atheism has become a viable alternative for me in the past few months. I don't think I mean the term in the same way that they do, because when they use it, it seems to have an automatic pejorative meaning toward religion and spirituality, and I don't feel that. I still can't deny my own experiences with spirituality-- both in the past and present. But neither can I deny the part of me that just doesn't think there's anything out there, and certainly not anyone.

It's almost like two separate compartments in my brain: the part of me that believes implicitly in the spiritual experiences I've had, and the part of me that thinks it's all utter nonsense. I'm going to assign this to right brain and left brain, respectively, just because I need something to assign it to, not because I have any proof that's really what it is. It's just what it feels like. When I'm thinking with my right brain, spirituality and connectedness and a wholistic approach to my experience feels completely and utterly right and natural. When I'm thinking with my left brain, that right brain thinking seems absurd. Even silly. Which is one of the reasons I've had a hard time posting recently. It is becoming more and more difficult to overcome that "This is DUMB" feeling.

But I wrote a paper a couple of weeks ago for my Bible as Lit class about the Book of Job. I argued that the reason why God approves of Job at the end of the story is because Job refused to stop asking questions until he was satisfied. He held onto the contradictions until he felt them resolve. Like a Zen koan. And God was pleased with him.

So I'm trying to do the same, and my right brain is trying to trust that God (or What I Think of as God) will be OK with that, because he/she/it was OK with it when Job did it. while my left brain wrestles this out.

AB
Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being... (Psalm 51.6, NASV)

link to shane claiborne column

just like riding a bicycle, right?

It's been so long since I posted that I'm feeling a little intimidated by sitting here in front of a blank screen. But I'm by myself in a hotel room, and I purposely didn't bring a book to read so that I would have to study, so I don't have anything else to do. But I don't want to study. So this is a good excuse, right? Usually I love staying in a hotel room by myself. It feels so decadent-- a whole room to myself, all clean and shiny, and I don't have to make the bed or do any laundry or feel compelled to do any of the dozens of things I feel guilty about not doing when I'm at home. But for some reason, it's not quite working tonight. I'm feeling a bit blue and lonely and wishing someone else was here. And I really, really don't want to work on the paper I should be working on.

So I've got my i-Pod plugged in and I'm listening to mellow music and thinking of all the things I've halfway wanted to blog about in the past couple of months but just never quite got around to posting. I know I have two new readers this week, so I'll say one thing that I've been meaning to say: please don't subscribe to this blog. Not because I don't want anyone to read it, but because of my really nasty habit of editing posts over and over again, sometimes a dozen times or more. If you subscribe, you'll get each and every version of each and every post--and sometimes it's just a matter of fixing typos or re-wording a sentence. Yuck. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, especially not someone who is kind enough to want to read my blog.

So... let's see, what else. I guess there is something I could get out of the way and that is to fill in the background of what's been going on since school started. (start up cheesy elevator music and cue voice-over: "When last we saw our plucky heroine...."). Well, OK, I'm not plucky. but anyway. So you knew I was headed back to school. They still haven't admitted me to grad school, but they're letting me take a couple of classes, I think just because I was so obnoxious that they didn't know how else to get rid of me. But by the time I got all that worked out, the classes that I wanted to take were full. So I ended up taking two classes that I would never have dreamed of taking otherwise: "Dante" (yup, the 14th century Italian guy), and "The Bible as Literature." Can you believe it? But I have to admit, they are both fascinating, with interesting professors whom I like very much. And even better, they are fascinating to take together. The overlap is amazing, and sometimes a little eerie. For example. In the Dante class, we started the semester reading 13th century Provencal and Italian troubadour love poetry. Today, the Bible as Lit prof went off on a digression about 13C Italian love poetry and its influence on the Western idea of romantic love. Another time they both talked about Zoroastrianism on the same day.  So I'm happy. It has been a great experience, except for writing papers, which I always hated and probably always will. Let me just say for the record, though, that when you haven't written a paper in 25 years and you were and are a bit of a perfectionist about them, it is not a pretty picture. If you haven't done it, I don't think it's possible to describe how absolutely terrifying it is to turn in a paper when you haven't written one in more than two decades.

OK, so now I'm caught up, I think, so maybe now I will start posting again and maybe the next one will be more interesting. Because (of course) both these classes have brought up lots of things to think about. The lack of posts has definitely not been due to a lack of things to post about!

AB

As has happened before, I typed a setup post and then found myself with nothing to say. Maybe later.

WITOAG

Before I go off on my next idea, here's a bit of housekeeping, a defining of terms. I want to be able to use the word "God," but of course, when I use that word it may mean something entirely different to me than what it means to you, leading to some confusion. It certainly means something different to me now than it did when I blithely told a young Jewish man I met at an icebreaker in college how happy I was that God was my best friend. (Yes, I really did do that and it gives me shudders down to my toes to think about it now).

I didn’t use the word “God” at all for a long time—I avoided it even in my head when I was just thinking. What the heck does it mean? I’ve said this before, but is “God” some kind of sentient, all-knowing, all-seeing Being in the Sky? Is it a cluster of ideas shared by a community that takes on a life of its own in the collective mind of the group? Is it something individual to each one of us? Is God, as the new age folks used to tell me, within me? And what the heck would that mean? Is God a Higher Self, a Divine Source, a Deity Within? I don’t know. I really, really don’t know. Further, I don't think it's possible to know. But I sort of tentatively decided about a year ago that I had been at this long enough that I could go back to using the word God to describe a certain force in my life for which I have no other name. I don’t really understand what that force is, (ouch, I just remembered Star Wars and The Force and that’s not what I mean here, but how else am I going to say it?) but it is convenient to have a name for it whatever it is, and God works as well as anything else and also conveniently fits into a number of other ideas. It also enables me to have conversations with other believers without endlessly saying “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” Although in that instance, it may unfortunately give them the idea that I agree with them about the nature of God when in fact I probably don’t. How could I, since I don’t really know what God is?

The point that I’m so convolutedly trying to make here is that when I use the word “God,” what I really mean is “What-I-think-of-as-God.” But it would be entirely tiresome to type that out every time I want to refer to “What-I-think-of-as-God.” I did briefly consider using a cutesy acronym (WITOAG) but thankfully I gave that up quickly. So, that’s all I'm saying. Just don’t take the word “God” too literally-- here, or anywhere else, come to think of it. And I'm still capitalizing it. I considered not doing that, but it just didn't seem right.

AB

prepping for school

Lo these many years ago when I was in graduate school—we’re not saying how many years, but over twenty anyway—you had a choice of taking “History of Literary Criticism” (LitCrit) or linguistics. I had taken linguistics my senior year of undergrad, and the syllabus was so nearly identical to the class that was being taught at my grad school that they waived the requirement. I didn’t get any credit hours for it, but they checked off the box that said I had taken either linguistics or LitCrit. So I have no idea what was covered in LitCrit. My impression was that we were going to read Aristotle, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, all of which I had read in courses covering the relevant era, so I didn’t think it was a big deal to skip it.

But it appears in the years intervening that either the study of literary criticism has entirely changed, or I was dead wrong about what it was. Literary Theory, as it is now called (and apparently it is more accurately called simply “Theory” since it is a multidisciplinary approach), is a complex and nearly infinite field of study which involves calling into question every assumption you ever had about opening the pages of a book. Does it matter what the author intended? Does it matter what kind of attention the reader pays to the work? (which reminds one vaguely of Schrodinger's poor cat, alas.) Does the historical context matter? Can you assume certain things about the nature of gender, race, or social class, and/or is it even possible to speak objectively about these topics? What exactly is literature, and how is it different than any other printed matter? All this and more awaits if you enter the exciting world of Theory. I started with a brief 130-page introduction aptly called “A Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory” by Jonathan Culler and all I can tell you so far is: it's a mind bender. I’ve always thought of myself as an intelligent reader, but apparently I’m just one of the masses of the literary ignorant. I love it when I learn new stuff that totally turns my previous ideas on their oblivious little heads, but I have to say I’m a little worried this time. If I keep reading this stuff, will I get to the point that I can’t just sit down and enjoy reading a novel? Will my head be so filled with reader response theory and intertextuality and foregrounding that I can’t get sucked in to the latest Tres Navarre? Because that would be a real problem for me. I’m not sure I want to go there, but if I’m off to grad school (they still haven’t let me in), that’s what’s ahead.

We were on a long hike this past weekend, and there was plenty of time to talk about all kinds of things. I mentioned that I was re-reading the sixth Harry Potter (which does get considerably better after the first 100 pages, btw), and as it turns out, everyone who was in earshot--none of whom were under the age of 18--had read them. It quickly became apparent that I was the only one who had been disappointed with the seventh book. So, since I haven't read it in two years, I am eating my hat. I'll reserve judgment until I've read it again-- but since my summer reading list is chock full and I'm only about a third of the way through it, that will be at least a month or so.

I thought about some good stuff while hiking (one of the best reasons to hike is that it provides excellent thinking time), but my son and I are leaving to go out of town in a couple of days so I doubt I'll get to type it out before I leave. Maybe later.

AB
(who dearly loves summer)

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for awhile that I am a fan of genre fiction. ("Genre" fiction being novels which fall into one of the genres--science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, etc-- as opposed to "literary" fiction, which I am in no position to define, but is generally regarding as being of higher quality and greater literary value than genre fiction.) I love all of it. In spite of being impossibly geeky, I survived junior high relatively unscathed because what was happening between the covers of the books I was reading was more important to me than what was happening at school. And the books I was reading were science fiction--Asimov, Bradbury, Andre Norton, Ben Bova. I devoured them, sometimes reading a new one every day. And I've had a lifelong fascination with fantasy, starting with the fairy tales of childhood and continuing on with Narnia, Ursula LeGuin and Edward Eager in grade school, Stephen Donaldson in college, and Guy Gavriel Kay and Tolkein in grad school. I spent nearly two years after the birth of my son reading nothing but mystery novels, in spite of having read barely a handful of mysteries before. And I've already confessed to my sudden obsession with romance novels last summer.

I like to think it's because I enjoy stories, and genre fiction tends to have good stories. Of course I've read dozens of literary novels that were terrifically good, but I've also read more than a few where nothing ever happens. Those books tend to be all about the writing, the Art, the construction of beautiful prose, but I keep waiting for a plot. At its best, literary fiction gives you that moment of recognition, that feeling of "I've had exactly that experience" but here it is so beautifully worded that it is both uplifting and appeals to one's inner sense of beauty, of things done/said exactly right. (And might I add that my own power of words --such as it is-- is escaping me as I'm trying to describe the experience.) But at its worst, it's downright boring.

Sometimes I just want to escape from my own boring life, or to be entertained, and if escape is what I'm after, I want a really good story in which to lose myself. One where you're turning the pages to find out what happens. I don't necessarily think that having a good story precludes good writing, or realism in the details of character development and experience. But the tidy endings and neat resolutions of most genre fiction are perhaps something that not many of us experience in real life, and maybe that's exactly what I enjoy, especially when I'm just reading for fun.

The book I read on our last vacation-- Maps and Legends, which is non-fiction-- has a number of essays in it that amount to a defense of genre fiction, so I've been thinking about this a fair amount recently. It seems to me that there are two levels of really good genre fiction: books that are the "best of" their genre but that probably still wouldn't appeal to anyone who isn't a fan of the genre, and then a very few that transcend their genre, that are just flat out good novels. In the "best of" category, it's easy to just list my favorite authors. In mysteries, P.D. James, Rick Riordan and Martha Grimes come to mind; in science fiction, the authors mentioned above plus Dan Simmons and Neal Stephenson; in romance, Jennifer Crusie, Loretta Chase, Elizabeth Hoyt and her alter ego Julia Harper. I should say here by way of apology that though I love genre fiction, I haven't read it very widely, and there are almost certainly other authors that should be on this list that I've never tried (particularly in mysteries).

But the list of genre novels that "transcend" their genre is really short, if you ask me. Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons' masterpiece (published as two separate novels but really one book), would absolutely be in that category. I remember thinking at the end of one of Grimes' Richard Jury novels, "wow, that was just a good book," although I can't remember which one it was at the moment-- probably the fourth or fifth in the series (which seems to be where all series peak and where nearly all of them begin to fall off, if you ask me, although maybe that should be a separate post). And after months of reading romance novels, I've read only one that comes anywhere close to that level, Crusie's Fast Women, which reads like one of the British comedies of manners (Oliver Goldsmith, maybe? or even Oscar Wilde? It's been so long since I've read any of them I'm not sure which one is apt) with its witty dialogue, elements of farce, and snide, complex commentary on the manners and mores of the age. Though based on the reviews on Amazon, I'm not certain many other readers would agree--it has one of the least likable heroines of any romance novel I've read.

I've also started to think that young adult fiction (YA) is really its own genre, which brings me around to what prompted me to write out all these ideas after having them knock around in my head for several months now. I've been re-reading the 6th Harry Potter book before the movie comes out in a couple of weeks, and finding it somewhat disappointing. Of course, I'm only about a hundred pages into it at the moment, and it is well over 600 pages long, so maybe I'm just being impatient. But previously I would have included the Harry Potter novels in the list of books that transcend their genre-- books that could be read and enjoyed by anyone with enough of an open mind to give them a try. But now I'm not so sure. Maybe they are just good examples of the genre, but still unlikely to be appreciated by someone who isn't already a fan of YA lit. When we were reading and re-reading the series as they came out, I think I was at least partly enthralled by the ongoing mystery of what was going to happen, how all the little details were going to work out. Now that the 7th book is out and has been for some time, that bit of magic is no longer part of the equation, and I'm finding the series is a little flat. Partly because I found the 7th book to be a little disappointing-- it did a more than adequate job of tying up all the loose ends, but what can you say about a seven-novel denouement where the two main participants spend several pages circling each other and explaining in detail the magical theory behind what is happening? shouldn't we already know that? (I should definitely save this for another post, after I've read the 7th one more recently, which should be later in the summer.)

So what would I consider to be YA books that transcend the genre? "Best of" but not transcend is easy-- Tiffany Aching, Percy Jackson, and Harry, among recently published books. Of course there are dozens if you're going back over the years. Transcend?? I'll have to think about it, but I'm not sure Harry makes it.

AB

So I listened to an interview with Bart Ehrman last week. I've mentioned him before, he wrote Misquoting Jesus, among other books, and I've listened to several interviews of his now. We have a lot in common. He, too, is a former Evangelical. When I read Misquoting Jesus, I believe he still considered himself a Christian, although no longer an Evangelical. But he has subsequently published another book, God's Problem, and is now an agnostic. The parallels are obvious, so of course I find him interesting. I haven't read his most recent book, but I listened to a podcast of him on Fresh Air where he discusses it thoroughly enough that now I feel like I don't need to. ;)

Ehrman's point of departure from Christianity is over the problem of suffering. He discusses it so well that I won't bother. Listen to the podcast, or read the book. It interests me the things that provide that break, that point of departure, for different people. As I've said before, for me it was prayer, and the inconsistencies in the theology of prayer and my experience of it. For him it was the problem of suffering. Doubtless someone will come along and write an eloquent defense of why what Ehrman calls "God's problem" isn't really a problem at all (as Timothy Paul Jones did with Misquoting Jesus), but I don't think being able to prove or disprove your point is the point, if you'll forgive (as usual) my convoluted grammar. The point is that at some point (sorry), if you are open to it, Evangelical theology breaks down as it bumps up against your experience of the world. As any theology would, no theology is perfect. And you either accept that, put it behind you and keep believing anyway, or you can't ignore it, and you leave your old belief system behind (sometimes slowly). Ehrman and I and a few others I know of are in the latter category. It's a pretty small group, and I'm grateful every time I find someone else who has made similar decisions.

Ehrman no longer attends church. He stopped when he realized that he could no longer say the creeds, and he began to feel that his continued attendance was almost a slap in the face to those who are true believers. I've felt this before, but I still go to church. This may be partly because of the nature of the church I attend. I don't talk about my beliefs very often: I don't enjoy controversy and I have no desire to stir it up. But it comes up occasionally and I don't lie when it does (although I do word things carefully). And no matter how outrageous the things I say, no matter how surly I become about (what I perceive as) people's complacency about the contradictions of Christian theology, the people of our church still seem to accept me and want me to be there. I've said things in my women's group that I thought would get me tossed out on my ear, but they still seem to like me. And miss me when I'm not there. It's remarkable. And humbling.

AB

I have several things that I want to write about, but I'm not sure exactly where to start, so I'm going to sidetrack briefly and post something unrelated, that I've been meaning to post for over a year now. It's nothing spectacular, just my two favorite stories. Or parables. Or "illustrations," as we used to call them when we were "helping" my dad with his sermons. which I believe I will relay with no comment.

A Baptist preacher is sitting on the roof of a house during a flood. It's quite a flood, and the water is rising rapidly. The preacher is praying loudly in a voice meant to carry, "Oh, great and loving God, look down on me, a poor sinner, and have mercy! Save me from the terrible waters of this flood!" A man in a canoe comes by, and stops to pick him up. But the preacher waves him off. "Don't worry about me, God will save me!" the preacher shouts. A few hours later, the water has reached the roofline. A woman in a motor boat comes by and stops to pick him up. But he waves her off, crying loudly, "Don't worry about me, God will save me!" The water continues to rise, until finally it is lapping at his feet. About this time the Coast Guard comes by, and stops to pick up him up, but the preacher waves them off. "Don't worry, God will save me!" he calls after them as the boat motors away. And he continues to pray loudly as the water inches up. Finally, he drowns. When he gets to heaven, he stands at the pearly gates with his hands on his hips and says to St. Peter, "What happened? My faith was strong! I prayed! Why didn't God save me?" And St. Peter says, "What were you waiting for? we sent a guy in a canoe! we sent a woman in a motor boat! we sent the Coast Guard!"

The other story is, I believe, Hindu, and probably everyone has heard it. But it's worth repeating.

Three blind men stand before an elephant. They have never been near an elephant before, although they have heard it is a fearsome beast. The first man touches the elephant's tusk. It is smooth and hard and cold. And curved. The man thinks, "Ahh, an elephant must be solid, and long and smooth and as hard as a diamond!" The second man reaches out and touches the elephant's hide. It seems to be tough material, pebbled and rough, and is warm to the touch. "Ahh, an elephant must be made out of armor, hard and leathery! He must be nearly invincible!" The third man reaches out and touches the end of the elephant's tail. "Ahh," he thinks to himself, "The elephant is not big and tough at all! He is soft and feathery! He is like a brush!" Were any of the blind men entirely right? were any of them entirely wrong?

So, to pick up a story that I barely started a few weeks ago and then let lapse..... I was so taken with Michael Chabon's book of essays Maps and Legends that when we returned from our vacation, I decided I would try to read some of his other stuff. I confess I've tried before. Years ago, I read approximately the first chapter each of Summerland and The Final Solution, but neither convinced me to keep going. But (obviously) I never really gave either of them a chance, so I was willing to give him another shot. generous of me, yes? I also wanted to find books by his wife, Ayelet Waldman. Somehow I knew from before that his wife was a lawyer turned mystery-writer, although I can't remember how. I think I might have read an interview with her in some magazine. I had thought the pair of them intriguing at the time, and since she is mentioned several times in Maps and Legends in ways that intrigued me further, I decided to check her books out as well.

So at our local library, they had on the shelf Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and a more recent one which is something along the lines of The Yiddish Policeman's Union. So I came home with those, plus The Jungle Book, so I could read that before reading Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book in context (more about that in another post). They didn't have any of Waldman's mysteries checked in, although they did have her more recent literary fiction novel (the name of which is escaping me, but it's about a mother dealing with the death of her child), which I decided to pass on since it sounded too depressing.

But I was still taking classes, and time was at a premium, so the books just sat there for a couple of weeks. Then, through a series of odd coincidences which are at the same time quite bizarre but utterly uninteresting, I found myself the winner of a Facebook drawing to receive a free copy of Waldman's new book of essays, The Bad Mother. Waldman has created a bit of a stir with her bracing honesty about her experiences as the mother of four children. So my autographed copy of the book arrived on Tuesday of the week when I had a take-home exam due on Wed, another one due on Thurs, and a gazillion other things to do. I left it out on the counter, as my reward for making it through the week. When I woke up disturbingly early on Saturday morning, finally done with school and (of course) unable to sleep, I started reading--about 6:30 a.m.

And by 11:30 I had finished it. Waldman is amazing. First of all there are her refreshingly candid stories about being a mom, wrapped in none of the cotton candy that most maternal stories are, and yet still managing to convey her utter devotion to her children. Even though I haven't had an abortion and I'm not bipolar (yet), her experiences more closely match up with mine than any other mom-lit I've read (possible exception: Anne Lamott). And on top of that, she's a terrific writer. Or at least, the kind of writer of non-fiction essays that I enjoy reading: funny, sympathetic, argumentative in a garrulous sort of way, occasionally snarky, always intelligent. I loved the book. Of course I had to send her an e-mail thanking her for the autographed copy of the book, in which I was entirely too gush-y, and to which she replied quite kindly and graciously. So, I will be finding more of her books as well. Maybe I will even attempt the depressing one.

But none of that prepared me for starting The Mysteries of Pittsburgh last Thursday. It was a revelation. I haven't read many good novels recently, so maybe this isn't saying much, but it is the best contemporary novel I've read in years. How had I never heard of it? I knew about Kavalier and Clay, and the Wonder Boys, and I'd seen the Yiddish one, but until I saw Pittsburgh on the shelf at the library, I didn't even know it existed. It's the story of a summer told from the point of view of a young man who has just graduated from college. Much of the novel is taken up with his sexual coming of age, but that makes it sound more lurid than it reads. You ache for the narrator, a sweet, somewhat naive Jewish boy, who is at the same time a brilliantly verbose storyteller and an oddly laconic keeper of secrets (do laconic and lacunae come from the same root? I tried to fit both in here but couldn't pull it off). Chabon has the most amazing facility with language. On nearly every page, there was some turn of phrase, or some image, or some extended metaphor that had me shaking my head in awe. It's not a perfect novel; it's uneven, for one thing. And it loses momentum toward the end. I immediately started reading it again, and on second reading, already what sounded original and fresh the first time through was sounding a bit over the top and self-conscious. But it's still astonishingly good, especially considering that it was his first novel and he was barely out of college himself. I'll put a few excerpts in a comment, but they don't do it justice. You'll just have to read it. And re-read it. There are certain details that just aren't apparent the first time through (e.g: toward the beginning, he describes a picture of his girlfriend; toward the end, he mentions taking the picture. I didn't catch it the first time through but it's a lovely single moment with a gap--lacunae!--in between).

geek nirvana

Star Trek and I go way back. I'm not quite SO old that I saw it when it first aired in prime time, but when I was in the 10-12 year old range, we would come home from school and turn on the TV and watch reruns. We'd catch the last ten or fifteen minutes of the Flintstones, then the Brady Bunch, then Gilligan's Island, and then Star Trek. And if Springsteen's "Glory Days" is playing in the back of your head right now, you're in the same age range as me. (although of course that song didn't come out until the 80s).

I loved Star Trek. The tribbles, and Joan Collins dying in soft focus, and the Vulcan wise woman saying in her croaky voice, "Sometimes having is not so good a thing as wanting" while bells chinked in the background (my spouse and I can actually do a pretty good team imitation of that scene)(it cracks us up, even though no one else is laughing). In fact, ten years later when my spouse and I met during our junior year of college, one of the things we bonded over was watching Star Trek reruns at five o'clock every night in the lobby of the row house where we lived. We slogged our way through all the movies (and still joke about things--like Star Trek movies and children-- that are better in even-numbered years than odd), made our peace with the Next Gen after boycotting it during the first two seaons (then watched it just as avidly as the original version), watched some of DS9, and then sort of petered out, although we did see a few of the last series.... which I can't remember the name of at the moment.

So we were pretty excited to go see the new Star Trek movie last night, and for once, it did not disappoint. We had four boys ages 10-12 with us, and they liked it, which is remarkable since with one exception, none of us Trekker parents have ever been able to get our kids hooked on the show. But those boys weren't in Trek nirvana like the four of us forty-something classic Trekkers were. I admit to even getting a little misty eyed when they played the classic theme at the end. It was great. And didn't you just know the guy in the red jumpsuit was gonna die? I'd say it's easily the best Trek movie ever, but that 's not saying much since the movies have never been very good. Sure it had some improbable plot twists, but what Trek tradition is more time-honored than that? I loved it, and I'm hoping that (in another time honored Trek tradition) sequels will abound.

I got over my grad-school-application-induced panic attack after just a couple of days, and now feel like I have interesting things to say again. Well, moderately interesting. But unfortunately my teachers have forgotten to leave me enough time to write interesting blog posts, so I don't think anything will actually get posted until the semester is over next week.

But I thought I sounded a little too pathetic in my last post to just leave it hanging. Apologies for perhaps being a bit too "all-roads-lead-to-Rome" here, but it did occur to me that my fundamentalist background might have something to do with how easy it is too intimidate me into feeling like my opinions aren't worth expressing. more on this later. I think. Right now I have to get back to programming Battleship. Sounds simple, doesn't it? But it's surprisingly complicated.

AB

I don't have much to say, this is just my excuse for why I haven't written the post about Maps and Legends. I can't remember if I talked about my abortive attempt at grad school in this blog or if it was in the first iteration of Aunt BeaN's blog. But the short version is: it wasn't a very good experience. Not to mention that it was a very long time ago, and in a state on the other side of the country. But for some reason, a couple of weeks ago I got the idea to finally finish my master's in English. It seemed like the perfect thing. I might actually be able to get a job teaching at our community college-- and wouldn't it be one of the greatest imaginable ironies, if I could get a job using my English degree when I can't get one using all my computer skills?

So I started e-mailing the extremely nice and extremely helpful people at our state university, and quickly became overwhelmed by how out of the loop I am. I still love to read, and I still love to read criticism, which I think is something that not many people can say. But I had forgotten about academia. Just reading the course descriptions for the graduate seminars was making my stomach hurt. Do they write those things specifically to make you feel intimidated? Because if so, it was working. I'm now feeling like one of the world's six dumbest people. But I haven't given up yet. If they'll let me in, I'm going to at least give it a shot. It's going to take me six months to a year just to get my application together, because so much of what they require is no longer available to me. If any of my grad school professors are still alive, would they be willing to write a letter of recommendation for someone they barely knew more than 20 years ago? I think not. And a ten-page sample of critical writing? I think my four posts on reading Lolita are not quite going to do the trick.

So I'm no longer feeling competent to comment on Mr. Chabon's Maps and Legends (I did find out how to pronounce his name, though: SHAY-bon. I was sort of hoping for something down in your throat like Chaim, but that's not it). I really enjoyed reading it. It was the perfect travelling companion for some reason that I'm not sure I can explain. I always have a terrible time with jetlag, so I have many hours awake in the middle of the night-- so I usually make sure I have a stack of interesting books, a flashlight and a lot of batteries. This one book, even though it is quite slim, kept me happy through a whole week of sleepless nights-- it was practically a page turner. "The Receipe for Life," one of the essays toward the end, was like finding a kindred spirit at 3 a.m. Beijing time a world away from home. It's such an odd thing to find someone who can articulate so clearly an experience similar to your own, and yet they don't have the faintest idea who you are or that you even exist on the planet. But that's one of the cool things about reading, yes? Maybe I will revisit it later, but that's all for now. Well worth reading, if you enjoy reading about books and writing.

I really wish I were a good travel writer, but I'm not. I'm not very visual, and that's a lot of what makes for good travel writing-- being able to convey what you see. This isn't the first time I've noticed this; I've been on half a dozen really wonderful trips in my life, and I've never been satisfied with my ability to convey the experience. That is my excuse for why I wrote all that setup in the previous post and haven't written anything since. I would love to be able to type out something that would give you an idea of what China was like, because it was an amazing, amazing experience. I wish we could have stayed much longer. But there's just no way I will be able to do it justice.

But there are a few things to say before I move on (in the next post, which I hope will be soon) to the Michael Chabon book I read while we were gone, Maps and Legends. Sometimes you just want to pick up the phone and thank someone for writing something, and that's the way I felt while reading several of his essays. And that's saying something, because I hate talking on the phone and I almost never want to pick up the phone and call someone. But that's another post.

So back to the topic at hand, which is the trip to China. A friend once told me her approach to vacations: rather than expecting the whole time to be a mountain top experience and inevitably being disappointed, try to be on the lookout for particular moments that are good. It's an approach that has worked well for me. So in that spirit, I'll describe a few moments from our trip.

There was climbing on the Great Wall, of course, which happened the first full day we were there. It was far steeper than I was expecting, so it was a lot of work, and since I was with my husband and my son, of course we had to go up the steep side. I sent them on ahead and kept toiling along by myself, but there was no way I was going to stop until I got to the top. My quads were quivering, my knees were aching, my heart was pounding, and since it was quite warm, I was, um..., glowing, as they say. Not exactly the time to expect any great spiritual insights. But about three-quarters of the way up, I sat down on one of the (ramparts? I'm not sure the right word to use) to catch my breath, and got sucked right into one. Not an enlightenment type thing, I won't make any claims to that, but a moment of complete, utter peace. It was lovely. And that was just the first day. :-)

The third day we flew to Shanghai, and then drove to a town called Suzhou. After lunch we visited a former Buddhist temple turned public park called Tiger Hill. It was the only time on our entire trip that I was able to find a spot to be alone while we were out and about. (There are an amazing number of people in China!) I found a low wall to sit on in an out-of-the-way corner and watched the breeze move through the bamboo for about fifteen minutes (we didn't get to stay anywhere very long on this trip). And the same thing happened. As I sat and stilled myself, I was met by a vast sense of peace and deep silence. I wanted to stay right there for a very long time.

That deep sense of peacefulness was something I sensed several times on our trip, and I'm not sure how to explain it. My sense was that it was something to do with China-- the land and the Chinese culture. But I'm not sure. It could also have been as simple as being away from all the everyday chaos and stress of my usual life. But whatever it was, it was lovely. Delicious, even. I would be willing to pay the money over again just to go back and see if it would happen again. But I would want to stay longer next time.

On the downside, the trip was pretty well scripted. It was never outright stated, but it seemed clear that the trip had been subsidized by the Chinese government. They are unabashedly trying to improve the image of China in the world's eyes, as you could tell during the Olympics. So they've arranged these trips jointly with American Chambers of Commerce, and apparently thousands of people have visited China this way. It's not the kind of travel we usually do, but given the difficulties of travelling in China, we figured it was the only way we'd ever go.

My spouse and I had a very interesting conversation with our tour guide about human rights during the tedium of a long bus ride. He is 34, and has been a tour guide for about ten years. He seemed exasperated by the insistence of the foreign press on human rights. "Human rights, human rights, human rights, it's all we hear from them," he said at one point. "But we don't feel like we don't have human rights." His voice seemed honestly frustrated. He was very clear that he didn't like the way his government controls information, but he seemed to think that the human rights issue wasn't as big as all of us wanted to make it. There were more than a few very pointed questions from members of our group about Tibet, Tian'nanmen Square, etc, and he answered them all with what felt like a fair amount of openness, although it was clear that he was wording things carefully on occasion. It was very interesting, and thought provoking. He also spoke with a great deal of pride about the people of China, and how proud they are of how far their country has come. I had a brief but distinct picture of an ancient people with a long, long history, to whom the current government is simply another flash in the pan. They aren't all that disturbed by it, they are just waiting it out. (I got a bit of the same sense when my Chinese teacher told us that he feels many of the government's more repressive policies will change once the two remaining, elderly hardline party members pass away; no one wants to change any of their policies while they're still alive out of respect for them)(which is bizarre by American standards, but makes some sense when you understand a bit about the Chinese respect for tradition, their ancestors, and their elders.).

When I've tried to talk to people about this since we got back, there's been a fair amount of gently disdainful disbelief, as if we had naively succumbed to the propaganda of the Chinese government. And maybe we did. But I did come away from it thinking that the situation was, as seems always to be the case, far more complicated than we would like it to be. We want to believe that a Communist government is necessarily bad, and ignores human rights, and that's that. But like I said, having been there, it seems more complicated than that.

Anyway. I think that's all I have to say that I can put into words. It was a great trip. I knew I would be interested, even fascinated, by the different culture, but I didn't know I would fall in love, if it is possible to fall in love with a country. There is a warmth, a loveliness, that underlies the surface that draws you in, makes you want more. There's also a great deal of cruelty, both in the current government and their past history, but we'd be hypocritical indeed to hold that against them given our own record. I hope I get to go again, and next time stay several weeks.

I have some catching up to do. We went on our spring vacation last week, and I was hoping before I left to write some background as to what we were doing, but it didn't happen. And to explain that requires going back even further, to last fall. I mentioned during November that I was taking classes at our local community college. I finally gave up on finding a good job-- not only are good jobs hard to find in this area, but since I don't really have to work, in the current job market it seemed frivolous to take a good job away from someone who needs to feed their family. So I decided instead to go back to school, which would serve the dual purpose of staving off boredom and also possibly picking up some skills that might come in useful at a later date.

So last fall I decided to take a programming class and a foreign language. The programming class made sense in terms of possible later usefulness-- although I was an English major, my first job out of school was as a technical editor, and when I showed an aptitude for computers, I was quickly adopted by the IT staff. I've done database programming, SAS programming, CAD, desktop publishing, manned the help desk, done phone support, all sorts of technical stuff. But I'd never actually done real programming, and I'd never taken a computer science class-- most of my technical education occurred on the job.

The foreign language was just because I wanted to challenge myself. Up until the night before I registered, I was trying to decide between Russian and Chinese. Russian made more sense because there is a sizeable Russian population in the area where we live and it could have actually come in handy-- schools and the hospital are always looking for volunteer Russian interpreters. But I was intrigued by the idea of learning Chinese, and Russian was only offered at night (which is difficult if you have a family), so I found myself standing in line last August registering for the first semester of Programming in Java and Elementary Chinese.

It was the usual routine, register for your classes first, then go to the financial office and pay up (which at our small community college means walking about fifteen feet across the hall). As I was paying, the woman who was taking my surprisingly hefty tuition check said casually, "So, are you going to go on the trip to China next April?" Which I knew nothing about at that point. "It's an incredible deal," she continued, "Less than $2,000 for an eight-day tour all-inclusive." All inclusive?? Yup, airfare, meals, hotels, bus, and entrance fees at various different attractions. Even my fiscally conservative spouse agreed that it was too good a deal to pass up. So we signed up-- me, my spouse, and my eleven-year-old son. It was such an incredible opportunity that I couldn't quite believe we were doing it.

But (to take things in sequence), I had to get through fall semester first. Both classes were a great experience, even though (or maybe because?) I was the only student over the age of about 21 in either class, not to mention being older than either of my teachers. I felt like the den mother. In fact, it was so much fun that in January I signed up for the second semester of each class, plus Discrete Math, better known as math for computer science majors. I hadn't taken a math class since I took calculus in my freshman year in college (and you've heard me harangue enough about how old I am to know how long ago THAT was), so it was pretty intimidating. But it had occurred to me that it might be useful to actually have a degree in computer science, and Discrete Math is a requirement, so it made an odd sort of sense as well.

And at our community college, once you get up to a certain number of credits, the next four are free, so I figured what the heck? I might as well sign up for something else as well, since it would be free. Who needs free time? So I signed up for a one semester class in C++ programming. It was nuts. I was busy enough before I took any classes at all, and here I was with my usual life plus 17 credits. Which is why the night before we left for our long awaited trip, I was up until 3:30 a.m. finishing a take-home test for my math class (well, and packing, too) and was unable to write all this out before I left so you, my loyal readers, would know what was up. In fact, things were so nuts that I ended up dropping the C++ class, even though I really like C++. Better than Java, in a lot of ways, but it didn't make sense to drop the second semester of a two-semester sequence. I might be able to pick up C++ again some other time, I suppose. And (hallelujah!) I didn't have to take the C++ test which was scheduled for about 16 hours before we were supposed to leave.

to be continued.....

in honor of a friend's fiftieth birthday

Several years ago, our pastor said something in a sermon that has stuck with me for a long time. I don't remember what the sermon was about, and I don't really remember precisely how he phrased it, but at one point he said that there are two attitudes toward our existence: we can choose life, or we can choose death. We can choose to nurture and sustain ourselves with things that are life-giving, or we can choose to self-destruct in whatever ways work for us. I've thought about this off and on since he said it, sometimes pretty intensely. It's become a good touchstone for me in making certain kinds of decisions, large and small.

In context, if I remember right, he was making the point that to choose Christianity, to choose Jesus, is to choose life. I know him (our pastor) pretty well, and I know that is true for him. But in my past, Christianity was not about life, it was about dying inside, a little at a time, every time someone cut me off, ignored my questions, acted in a way that was patently not "Christian" and yet confidently claimed the label "Christian" for what they were doing.

I don't think choosing life is always exactly what we expect. Sometimes it depends on the situation. Sometimes choosing life might mean ending something-- a relationship, a job, a commitment-- which is a death of sorts. I can imagine a time when choosing life would mean rebelling against repressive authority with a blaze of anger, but another time when that same act would be destructive and deathlike. Maybe sometimes choosing life would mean eating healthy foods that promote physical well-being; other times, choosing life might mean eating a big slice of flourless chocolate cake drenched with real whipped cream and raspberry sauce. (not that I'm prone to do that sort of thing, of course). Sometimes it depends on your personality. Maybe for one person choosing life would mean dropping everything and travelling the world, where for another person, choosing life would mean deepening one's ties with the people where you are, choosing to commit to actions that renew your current situation.

And in a way, I think you can apply "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends," here. Sometimes you choose a "death" of some sort in order to help or support the people you love, which renews your commitment to life.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently in connection with getting older. My friends and I are all approaching 50. Some of us will reach it sooner than others, but we're all getting there at exactly the same speed: one day at a time. There's no doubt here: you lose a lot as you get older. Your knees start to go, or your back, or whatever. Your stamina disappears. Taking care of your skin goes from 30 seconds of slathering on some moisturizer after your shower to a twenty-minute routine that still doesn't do enough.

But the thing that has bothered me most has been the loss of potential. When you're twenty, you can go in any direction. Almost all paths are open to you. But by the time you're in your late forties, the number of paths you can still choose has dwindled to a very few. It has been very hard for me to let go of some of those paths, to realize with contentment that this is it, this is how I've chosen to live my life and many of those other paths are no longer available.

But there are also some things that you gain. When I was in my twenties, and even for the better part of my thirties, I didn't really know how to choose life. I didn't know myself well enough or the world around me. But now I do. I'm still learning, of course, but I have a pretty good idea of what things will feel life-giving to me, what situations will nurture my soul. It's a good feeling. I can't exactly claim that it makes up for not being able to do the treadmill without aching knees, but it comes pretty close.

I typed this last weekend while out of internet range, using notepad. You can tell. on re-reading, it sounds a bit disjointed and lacking in coherent thought. But I'm posting it anyway since it's been awhile.

p.s. Whatever choosing life means, as far as I'm concerned it doesn't have much to do with abortion. I can imagine a situation in which choosing to complete an unwanted pregnancy would mean choosing life, but I can also imagine situations where there are no good alternatives where choosing life would mean ending a pregnancy. just thought I should say that to clarify since the phrase "choose life" is so often bandied about in that context.

The problem with leaving a post in the middle is that when I get around to finishing it, I can't remember why I thought it was going to be interesting. This is not an interesting topic. So here is a quick list of what I was going to say and then I'm done. Here's what I miss: the sense of a shared purpose; the sense that the universe is explicable, that things ultimately make sense (I can't tell you how often I used to think to myself, "when I get to heaven, I can ask God why things are like...insert dilemma here ... and then I will understand")(including wanting to know if Shakespeare really wrote all those plays); and I miss worship. That will sound like the dumbest thing in the world if you've never fully experienced corporate worship (worshipping God with a group of people, preferably a really large group of people), but it is a sensation that I've been unable to reproduce without the requisite belief in God. And I miss it. It's a beautiful feeling. Sometimes I can let go of my cynicism enough to let it flow again (see my posts on going to the Creation music festival last summer) but it is rare. Sheri Tepper has a fascinating novel called Raising the Stones that posits a race of beings whose reason for existence is to be "god" for a given culture, with the corresponding idea that other beings have evolved a need to have a god, and that acknowledging and worshipping that god fills a need that is innate. Sort of an evolutionary extension of the god-shaped hole, yes? (is that Pascal? that's what came up when I googled it, and that sounds right... pensees, right? I have no idea how to do an accent aigu). It's interesting. All of her novels are interesting.

AB

I read an article awhile back about a theory advanced by some prominent sociologist about why people are attracted to fundamentalist religions. His theory is that people are drawn to conservative religions because of the value of the goods and services offered. Fundamentalist religions tend to create close-knit communities where people provide services for each other: covered dishes when someone is sick, help with childcare, I don't know what all else. It's been several months since I read it.

My first thought was that the guy was nuts. Did he even talk to anyone, a single person, and ask them why they go to church? Because my guess is that if you surveyed 100 Evangelicals and asked them that question, less than five of them would mention some service that the church provides. And I'm only saying that many because there are always outliers. Really, I can't imagine anyone would say that. "Oh, yes, I go to church so that when my wife is sick someone will bring me a tuna casserole." Right.

But, on second thought, it does make a kind of sense. If you're an atheist, on the outside (so to speak) looking at the fundamentalist phenomenon, and you've never had any kind of spiritual experience, of course you would look for some kind of answer that makes sense to you. And to someone who doesn't have a spiritual bent, an exchange of goods and services makes more sense than anything else.

Oh, there are so many different directions to go with this, it's hard to know where to start. I'm tempted to get off on the tangent about how people are wired, how some people have a spiritual bent and others don't. But I guess I'll stick with what I was intending to write about when I sat down.

It seems to have not occurred to this guy that someone might go to church because that feeling of connecting with something larger than yourself can be so sublime as to be practically addictive. Or because the lessons learned at church are in many ways the basic lessons of becoming fully human, i.e., a sort of self-improvement program--learning to become more loving, more joyful, more peaceful (and yes, those are the first three fruits of the Holy Spirit, not being anti-choice, anti-gay, and Republican, as some would have you believe)(see Galatians 5:22). And that's not even counting reasons like habit, comfort, honoring your cultural heritage, seeing your friends, and "forsaking not the gathering of yourselves together." None of which has a thing to do with ham loaf or lasagna. Sheesh.

So, it occurred to me that a slanted way of getting at the same question might be to ask, what do I miss about being an Evangelical? maybe that would be a backward way of asking the same thing, if that makes any sense. I've typed plenty about what I don't miss, about what infuriates me and makes me so, so entirely happy that I've left that way of thinking behind. But I don't think I've said much about what I miss. And there is a surprising amount (surprising to me, anyway). There are moments when I'm with my family (practically all of whom are still dedicated Evangelicals) when I'm overcome with sadness about what I've lost.

(more to come, have to go to my son's basketball game)

(continued from previous post) besides feeling the admittedly non-specific feeling of "real," I was also experiencing gratitude, the feeling of being grateful to be alive, grateful to be able to experience the moment.  An interesting thought, yes?  Being grateful implies a benefactor, usually.  Which is not precisely the right word, but you catch my meaning, I hope.  I can accept gratitude without a benefactor, I think; as a state of mind, like feeling content or bored or proud.  After all, you can feel proud of someone when you have absolutely no claim to have helped with whatever is making you proud of them, so why can't you feel grateful to be alive without having anyone to be grateful to?  But still, gratitude of the other sort, the sort that definitely feels a sense of connection to the source of life, is more what I was feeling at that particular moment.  Does the existence of the feeling have any validity as proof of the source?  Maybe not for anybody besides the person feeling it, but it means something to me, anyway.

and after that grammatical and logical tangle, I'm signing off.

AB

Earlier this week I was on the treadmill and I reached the end of the audiobook I'd been listening to before I'd gone the requisite amount of time, so I just switched my ipod to music and put it on shuffle play. There's all sorts of music on there: Dave Matthews, Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, Brent Lewis, Matchbox Twenty, MIA and Imogene Heap (my daughter's influence), Soulja Boy and Skillet (my son's influence), and even Toby Mac, who is an evangelical Christian hiphop artist (not kidding)(actually, I love his music). So at some point a Toby Mac song comes up and one of his backup singers has a spoken bit at the beginning in which he says "I'm trying to reach a place that's real and true and eternal," and I thought to myself, "Aren't we all?" I mean, isn't that it? for all of us who are interested in digging beneath the surface, trying to find some sort of connections or meaning or whatever. The names we attach to it, the ideas we use to explain it, are all window dressing, if you ask me.

Then this afternoon, I had one of those moments, which I don't have very often, where it's just you and reality, staring you in the face, and everything else falls away. It was all in my head, there wasn't any amazing thing happening-- I was chopping up stuff to put in the crock pot to make stew, of all things-- and suddenly it occurred to me, what difference does it make right this minute if I believe in God or not? and I know there are people on either side of the issue who would very passionately argue that it does matter, vitally--how utterly important it is to have the correct theology about God so you can be Right and/or Saved, or how important it is to be rational and not delude ourselves with feel-good ideas of order in the universe, or however else they might want to argue. But I have to say, in that particular moment, I couldn't think of any reason why it would make a difference to believe one way or the other. It was enough to be standing there in my kitchen with the winter sun streaming through the window, feeling real.

no great insights here, just passing along what happened. it's always a work in progress.

AB

Books I read or re-read in 2008 that were worth reading (in the order that I read them):

John Adams - David McCullough

Persepolis - Marjane Sartrapi

Holy Cow - Sarah MacDonald

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Leaving Church - Barbara Taylor

This Book will Save Your Life - A.M. Homes

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

Stranger Things Happen - Link

a couple by Christopher Moore

Agnes and the Hitman - Crusie/Mayer

Kids/Young Adult

Rick Riordan's Lightning Thief series

The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

A bit shorter than last year's list. I almost didn't type it up when I was just thinking back over the year, but when I actually got around to pulling out the back page of the calendar where I keep the list, I remembered these. You'll have to go back to the posts about trashy novels to see the ones I read during that phase :-). Thanks to the anonymous poster for recommending Jennifer Crusie, who was perfect for the beach vacation we went on at the end of the year.

So continuing on... that skepticism, that unwillingness to accept answers that are a bit too easy, is where I've been for the past several months. It's an odd sort of no man's land. I think of it as being in abeyance (I love that word). I have, on the one hand, a set of experiences with spirituality that I can't ignore. I have a number of ideas and opinions, some of which line up with a traditional religious system and some of which don't, that I use to explain those experiences to myself. But sometimes when I hear someone express their own opinions on these topics (as Young does in The Shack), I realize how silly it is to claim with any degree of authority at all that I know what's going on out there in the universe.

And it's part of my problem with The Shack, to be honest. Where does he get the nerve to speak for God? Isn't that really what he's doing, by imagining how God would respond to Mack's questions? How does he have that chutzpah? It partly makes me angry that he would even try; but it also makes me a bit envious. Last year, in my nano novel, my original plan was that the main character, a young woman in her twenties, would have extremely vivid dreams about being a follower of Jesus during his three years of ministry on earth. The narrative would alternate between her normal, everyday life and the dreams that she was having every night. But it completely stalled out because I couldn't do exactly what Young does-- I couldn't speak for Jesus. I could imagine the situation and the plot outline and where I thought it was going, but when it came right down to writing an encounter between the main character and Jesus, I couldn't do it. So whatever chutzpah it takes to do this, I don't have it. And maybe don't want to have it.

and round and round on the spiral of spiritual growth we go.... and I find myself back again at the place where I realize that in honoring one side of my experience (the skepticism and cynicism), I've moved too far toward that pole and neglected the spiritual side. And for that reminder, I am grateful to Mr. Young, as irritating as I found this book at times.

I'm not at all sure that these three posts say what I was trying to say. Usually I spend quite a bit of time polishing them up before I am ready to leave them alone. but it won't happen this time since we're leaving to go out of town in the morning and I'm about to fall asleep at the keyboard here. So if anybody reads them between now and the time when I get back and have time to edit them, my apologies for murkiness.

off to frolic in the sun (I hope)

AB

So... although this is a continuation of the previous post, none of this is really in The Shack.  It's just what I've been thinking about since I read it.  The story addresses the classic conundrum of faith, which can be phrased in any number of ways that we've all heard.  Why do bad things happen to good people?  how can a good and loving God allow evil to exist?  There are a number of different ways to say it.  And there are plenty of proposed answers out there.  Books and books have been written on this topic.  Some of the most remarkable and compelling writing out there-- from the dawn of recorded thought practically-- comes out of human beings' attempt to answer questions like these.  

But of course no one really knows.  The Shack takes a very similar tack to the answers I was raised with:  God's love for us is most strongly expressed through God's commitment to allowing us to exercise our free will, our ability to choose to act in whatever way we want.  True love would never force us into acting or believing a certain way (the argument goes).  So, God cannot intervene to protect us from harm without infringing on our (or someone else's) free will; therefore, God lets us screw up.  It's a creative solution, with enough flexibility and complexity to allow for any situation in which people are hurting people.  And it has the benefit, for Christians, of being grounded in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures.  There isn't any direct reference to free will in the Bible, but it is implied right from the start, with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden-- whether you read it literally or metaphorically.  God didn't have to allow them access to the forbidden fruit, but God allowed them to choose.  God shows his/her love for creation not by preventing evil from happening, but by redeeming the evil that we've participated in through the act of Jesus on the cross.  I think most of my readers are familiar enough with this that I can get away with that shorthand version of explaining something that is actual a very beautiful and complex theology.

But one of the main problems with this beautiful bit of theology is that it only works when you are inside the belief system.  It takes the raw material of our experience of bad things happening, and the basic tenets of the Christian faith, and comes up with a solution that works.  But if you're not inside the belief system, this set of beliefs looks remarkably like a smoke screen that allows us to continue to believe in God when in fact God may not exist at all.  We've come up with a way to explain away God's lack of action to prevent evil, but wouldn't it be just as easy to look at the evidence before us and come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as God?  don't you have to at least allow for the possibility that the emperor isn't wearing any new clothes at all?

I've heard it said, by yet another creative theologian, that it is part of God's nature not to act in any way that would force humans to believe in him (or her, although that seems slightly unnecessary here since this type of belief usually goes along with seeing God as Father).  In other words, God will never act in such a way as to unequivocally prove that God exists, because doing so would force us to believe in him (/her), and that would be an infringement of our free will.  Another creative explanation, which may be true.  But it also might not. 

As an aside and an excuse and an apology, I'll just say here that this isn't turning out to be a linear train of thought, I'm just typing what I've been thinking.  it may not make much sense.

I was not encouraged to ask these kinds of questions when I was growing up, and I don't have the kind of personality that would have forced the issue by persisting in asking them.  I'd much rather get along, smooth things over, and keep everybody happy.  I was more than willing to accept pat answers and go along for the ride.  The problems didn't arrive until many years later when I was deep, deep into a particular religious viewpoint and it no longer explained the things that I wanted explained.  So I am left at this point in my life with a deep suspicion of (and resentment of) ideas and arguments that want me to shut up and stop asking questions.   And that's often how these arguments feel to me.  

have to run.  to be continued.

The Shack

The Shack is a novel by William P. Young that tells the story of a heartbroken father's attempt to come to terms with the murder of his young daughter.  It is also a Christian morality tale.  Mack, the father, receives a handwritten note from "Papa" inviting him to go back to the shack in the woods where his daughter was murdered.  When he gets there, he has an encounter with three Beings who are, well....  God.  A number of interesting conversations take place among the four of them, and Mack returns to his normal life a changed man.  

It's an interesting book.  It brought up for me many of the same visceral reactions I had to Blue Like Jazz, which I reviewed awhile ago.  But many people whom I care very much about have been moved by The Shack, and the person who recommended that I read it is very dear to me.  So I am trying not to see it through the eyes of my cynicism.  It would be easy to rip it apart.  So easy.  But on the other hand, there is a great deal of wisdom in his re-imagining of God, and I don't want to dismiss it lightly.  

There were a number of books published in the eighties, or maybe early nineties, where a Christian author set up a hypothetical debate between various different famous Christian and secular figures, mostly historical.  The historical figures would debate an issue, and of course, the Christian character always ended up trouncing the secular character.  They were entirely irritating to read, because of course it is easy to win an argument when you are setting it up, putting words into the mouths of the people you disagree with, and then skewering them.  I can win an argument like that, too.   But they were very popular among a certain crowd.

The Shack reminded me of this a bit.  It is less irritating than they were, because it is clearly fiction.  Within the story, the author does his best to set it up as being a factual occurrence, but it is marketed as fiction, and labeled as fiction.  No one is trying to say that Mack's weekend at the shack really happened.  And it's a good thing, because that's the only way the story works:  as an author's imagining of what it would be like to be able to confront God with your deepest pain, your most difficult questions.  And then to imagine how God would respond.  Young's vision is compelling in many ways.  He points out, as does the author of the book of Job and many others since, that God is far more vast than our tiny human brains can comprehend, and that what seems painful and difficult to us may be part of something larger that is beyond our comprehension.  But he does it in the context of a story that makes it particularly accessible to someone who has similar questions.  I imagine there are a lot of people who have found a great deal of healing through reading this book.

But the fact remains that of all the multitudes of human beings who have had their hearts broken, not a single one has received a handwritten note from God inviting them to a weekend of direct interaction with the Almighty, much as they might wish, pray and even beg for the opportunity.  And although there's little in the book that I flat out disagree with (since it's fiction, after all-- it's hard to disagree when all the author is saying is "This is what I imagine it would be like to talk directly to God"), there's a great deal that he seems to feel that he has "proven" through this story, when actually he hasn't proven anything at all.  He's just shared his ideas of what such a weekend might be like.  If you read it from that perspective, it's fascinating, and thought-provoking.  I'm glad I read it.  It helped me define somethings for myself, but maybe I will save that for the next post, as this one has gone on long enough.

oh, yes, that would 50,290 words that I just finished writing............. :-)  doing the happy dance around here.

You know, the interesting thing about doing Nano for the third time is how little I care about it this year.  I'm doing way better than I have any other year-- I'm at about 32,000 words with a week to go, and I still have plenty more to write about-- but I just don't care.  I think part of it is my choice of plot.  It's sort of like that movie "Love, Actually" where there are a half dozen plotlines that revolve around people's love lives, which are loosely interwoven (very loosely, in this case).  

It's sort of like writing a soap opera.  It's a great choice for Nano because I always have something to write about, and the words seem to flow (at least sometimes!).  As opposed to the past two years, when I was trying to write something that felt "significant" and nothing was happening.  But on the other hand, since it just feels like fluff, it's hard to care.  What difference does it make if I write it or not?  And of course, it doesn't make a difference to anyone but me. It never has.   I know from experience that I will never let anyone read it.  Not even my spouse has read my Nano novels.  It makes no difference to anyone but me.  This year I'm determined to get to 50,000 just so I've done it.  And then I don't think I'll ever do it again.  

I haven't written much about what I've been up to this fall.  Since I still couldn't find a job, I decided to go back to school.  I wanted a challenge, so I signed on for the first semester of Chinese and a programming class.  I've been having a ball being a student again, although it hasn't kept me from whining about having to study.  I was a really good student back in my "real" student days; you might say it's the only thing I've ever been really good at (which is a bit depressing, don't you think?)  And I still am a pretty damn good student.  What I've lost in terms of mental quickness I've more than made up for in experience, in understanding what the teacher is talking about and having experiences that give me a context for what's going on.  (I'm the only person in either class that's over 20.  Besides the teachers, of course, both of whom I'm older than.  Was that correct grammar?)

That long aside just so I can say:  it is really really obvious how much more I enjoy programming than I do writing.  I love getting a new programming project and having to figure out how to solve it, writing the code, debugging it, and getting it to work.  Makes me wish I lived somewhere where I could do it for pay (do I sound bitter?)(no, not me).  And in direct contrast this month has been trying to write this damn novel, which has barely held my attention at all in comparison.  I always thought I wanted to be a writer, but you know I have to say based on this experience that maybe I was wrong.  Maybe what I've wanted all these years is to give readers the same happiness that I've received from reading-- the wish that I could do for others what my favorite authors have done for me.  I'm discovering that I just don't like to write, at least not fiction.  It's a good thing to know.  Nano has been an interesting experience, one I'm grateful for, all three years of it.  But I don't think I'll be doing it again.

the view from here

You know, I've kept a blog for almost five years now.  Up until last spring, with a few short-lived exceptions, I've never had any problem coming up with things to write about.  Even if I wasn't posting very often, I was always mentally working on posts-- most of which never made it online.  I'd drive around town running errands or doing whatever while typing away in my head.  Sometimes it even reached the point of being a compulsion-- I couldn't sleep or concentrate on anything else until I sat and typed out what I was thinking about.  But I have to say since last April, I've had NO desire to write in this blog.  I've had to force myself to type out the few posts that have made it online.  It's kind of strange.  

Actually, I guess it was the compulsion that was strange.  Since most people don't feel compelled to post their thoughts online, maybe I'm finally hitting normal here.  Whoa.  Scary thought.  A couple of weeks ago I even thought about deleting Aunt BeaN's blog, since at the moment I can't imagine that I'll be writing in it much anymore.  But, NaNoWriMo started on Saturday (National Novel Writing Month, click here for the website), and for the past two years, posting here about what I'm writing there has been pretty helpful.  So maybe I'll post a bit more this month.  (not that anyone really wants to read about my forays into the world of writing fiction, but I'll probably post them anyway).  

So, that's what's up with me.  The first year I did NaNoWriMo, it was a young adult novel.  Last year I tried to write literary fiction, and it bored me to tears.  So this year I'm taking the low road and writing genre fiction, although it won't be anything nearly as steamy as the books I mentioned in my previous post.  I get to the point where they're kissing, and I'm already embarrassed.  But although it would probably be classified as "romance" if anything, the love story is secondary to a lot of the other things that are going on.  (Since this hasn't been written yet, maybe I should say "a lot of other things that I hope will go on...")  And both of the lead characters are older, sort of ummm... plump, and, well... normal, as opposed to the main characters in romance novels, who are always devastatingly handsome/gorgeous, well-built, slender, and amazing in every way.  So we'll see how it goes.  But I've already, in three days, written more words than I did in almost the first week last year, so I think this will go better.  It's certainly more fun.

H&K,

AB

I used to regularly post reviews of the books I'd read. But last spring I realized that my taste in books was going further and further downhill, and that my book reviews probably weren't particularly interesting anymore. And it's only gotten worse since. To prove my point: I spent the last half of the summer reading trashy romance novels. And you know what? I'm not even sorry. I loved it. I hadn't read one in more than twenty years,* and -- while I wouldn't exactly recommend any of them-- I have to say that they are light-years better than they used to be. It was fun. But now my conscience is telling me that summer is over and I should stop with the brain candy and start reading stuff that I don't have to be embarrassed to be seen with.

Well, OK. Just as soon as I finish Three Nights of Sin. (no, I'm not kidding, there really is a novel with that name-- but I haven't read it. Yet.)

Anyway, just to further show you how low I've slunk, I'll tell you the story of my reading list for this summer. Those of you who've been around for awhile will remember that about once a year, I assign myself a reading project-- several books that are related in some way-- and push myself to read through the whole list. One year, I read Reading Lolita in Tehran, plus most of the books her class studies. Another year, I read a collection of the letters of Maxwell Perkins and novels by his three most famous authors--Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe. Then there were Merton, O'Connor, Walker Percy and Dorothy Day another year. (full disclosure: I've never actually managed to read every book on any of my reading project lists. But I give it a pretty good shot, anyway.)

So this year, at the beginning of the summer, I decided that I was going to read Chaucer and Spenser. I'm dead serious. I really thought I was going to spend the summer sitting out at the lake with the Faerie Queene in my lap. Oh, 'tis galling the things we must admit to online. I got online and ordered a modernized Chaucer to go with the original version I still have from college, and also got the recommended edition of FQ.

As you can probably guess, I made it through the Prologue and the Wife of Bath's tale before my attention wandered. I think it's actually a little impressive that I made it that far. Although at the moment I can't remember what the segue was, for some reason I went from that to reading the Satanic Verses, the famous book that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for (seven? eight?) years. It is brilliant, and beautifully written-- if I remember, I'll put a paragraph or two in the comments to this post-- but it doesn't exactly move quickly. Sections of it are very absorbing, but then there are long sections that are.... well, maybe not boring, but slow.

So enter my daughter with Twilight in hand. I'm blaming the whole romance novel obsession on her. In case you've been locked away in a closet for the past six months, Twilight is the first book in a series about a girl who falls in love with a vampire. It's written and marketed for teenagers, but once you know the characters' names, you'll overhear a surprising number of competent-looking adults gossiping away about Edward and Bella as if they lived down the street. There is very little plot or characterization outside the two main characters' obsessive love for each other, but you know-- you just can't put them down. I'm snobbish enough that I have to say that I didn't really read them, I just skimmed through them. But I did, in the space of about two weeks, get through all four books, each of them well over 500 pages. After spending over a month getting through Satanic Verses.

Why am I admitting this publicly?? Oh, the shame.

But it gets worse. So then, realizing that it had been a very long time since I'd read a good bodice ripper-- at least twenty years, and probably more like twenty-five*-- I started combing through used books and picking them up. I bet I've read twenty since mid-August. Not kidding. Last week I decided I would let myself keep going until October 1st, which would be tomorrow. I've got one more to finish tonight and them I'm quitting cold turkey. Promise. Higher quality reading suggestions welcome, reply here.

AB

* I'm making a distinction here between just regular old romance novels (hard to write a good story without someone falling in love, imo) and trashy romance novels, aka bodice rippers, which have such steamy love scenes that they should carry ratings on the cover. Oh, my. .... After re-reading this, to be fair I should say that the Twilight series is not explicit, but it has enough of the conventions of a trashy romance novel that I was reminded of them.

Two weeks ago, we were in Seattle to move our daughter into her dorm room for her freshman year of college.  It surprised me how emotional I was about it, even though plenty of people had warned me I would be.  I knew I would miss her (and I do-- a lot) but I also knew that it was time for her to go.  She was/is ready, and very excited about it, too.  We'd known practically since she was born that she would be going to college; we want her to be there, and-- well, you know, you don't raise them to stay home.  You raise them to go off and do their thing in the world.  It was time.

So given all that advance notice, you'd think I'd be prepared and the transition would be smooth sailing.  But of course actually going through something is different than preparing for it, no matter how much you prepare.  And it's been hard.  The first week, almost every day some little thing would set me off.  Not that I would totally lose it or become incapacitated by crying or anything like that.  I'd just suddenly be overwhelmed by a wave of sadness and grief that would disappear almost as quickly as it arrived.  This week has been better, but I've still had a couple of those moments.  It's not so much that I miss having her here (though I do) as the ending of an era.  She will never be under our care in the same way she was up until two weeks ago.  We have a number of friends whose older kids require plenty of parenting, so I know we're not done, but it won't be the same as it was having her home and under 18.

So enough going on and on.  I hope this doesn't sound like whining, because she's having a blast and I'm happy for her, and I get to go visit her in a couple of months.  It's just what I've been thinking about the past couple of weeks.

AB

I think it says a lot about me that it's easier and a whole lot more interesting for me to write about questions and than it is to write about resolutions. Whenever I sit down to try to write out some of the things I've been learning this summer, it just sounds so corny. Like the final chapter of a bad self-help book.  And on top of that, as soon as I learn something new, something that feels like a revelation, it seems immediately obvious, as if it had been staring me in the face all along.  Everyone on the planet must know this stuff except clue-less me.  But here is some, mainly because otherwise I don't have anything to write about.  

I have trust issues.  I don't trust much of anyone, and I certainly don't trust that the world is a safe place to be.  I could go into a therapy-style litany of all the reasons why that is true, all the bad things that happened to me when I was a child and along the way, but I'm not sure that's any excuse.  Plenty of people who trust just fine have difficult issues in their past.  I think it just has to do with the way I'm wired.  

But I've been working very hard on the Buddhist idea of keeping an open heart, which involves letting yourself be vulnerable, which means trusting.  It has become important to me for purely selfish reasons-- because when I manage it, when for a few minutes or hours I can drop all my defenses and just be there, it feels so amazingly good.  It's so much better than being hard and cynical and closed up tight like a fist.  But it isn't easy.  It is impossible for me to ignore that anyone can hurt you, even when they have the best of intentions.  Maybe even especially if they have good intentions.  And bad things can happen at any moment.  (Remember the Northern Exposure episode where Maggie's boyfriend was killed by a satellite that fell out of the sky?)  How do you manage this?  How do you stay open and spacious, without feeling like you're leaving yourself exposed to every little awful thing that can happen?  

I have no definitive answers, but some things have helped.  First of all, staying closed up tight doesn't solve the problem.  It might make you slightly more prepared defensively for bad things that might happen, but for the most part, it doesn't stop them from happening.  And you miss out on so much by always being on your guard.  But more important than that, it's occurred to me that the key to trust isn't trusting others, or trusting the universe, or at least not for me.  The key is learning to trust myself.  Yes, this person might hurt me, but I'll be OK.  I can handle this.  Something bad might be around the corner, but I know from past experience that I can get through it.  I'll be all right no matter what.

Ack.  My scared-self is already kicking in again.  It seems so arrogant to say that, like I'm asking to be tested.  There are so many things that could happen that I would not be all right about, that I could never recover from.  most of them involving my children's health and safety.  But the point still stands.  I'm working on it.

Since someone asked me about this the other day, I'll say it here for the record.  You can, if you read this blog, tell anyone you like about it (of course).  It's out in cyberspace, anyone that finds it can read it.  I can hardly claim that I want to keep it private since I'm posting it publicly.  And honestly, I wish I had more readers, and that there could be more discussion.  But, as I've said before, I'm a bit shy about telling people about it-- partly because I don't know how they'll respond, but mainly because it requires an assumption on my part that they'll be interested in reading it, which is difficult for me to imagine.  That may sound disingenuous, but there it is.  The only thing I ask is that if you live here in our town--as many of you do-- be careful who you tell, as some of this stuff would be a bit controversial around here. But if you live here, you already know that. 

I was going to go back and go on and on about "resolutions."  But in the meantime, my cynical side has kicked in and I just don't have that much more to say.  how can you honor and respect the beliefs of your childhood when technically speaking you don't actually believe them anymore?  there are lots of days when that is where I am, and today is one of them.  Days when I think, I can't keep going to church, this is ludicrous.  But:  I would miss it if I didn't go.  I love our church.  It's complicated.  If this were all about logic and figuring things out rationally, it would be so simple.  I'd just leave.

But honestly, as I get older, I'm finding that cynicism is less and less helpful to me.  And no matter how little it makes sense to my cynical self, the mix of belief and unbelief, of meaning and lack thereof, is actually the way I live.  It's what is real for me at the moment.  But subject to change at any moment.

AB

resolutions

A little over a year ago, I decided that it was time to delve back into the religion of my youth and think through my experiences-- much of which has shown up in this blog.  In April, I reached the crux of it, at least as far as my own experiences are concerned, and nearly sent myself round the bend trying to resolve some intellectual conflicts that are not resolvable.  At that point, I resolved to let them be un-resolved. I felt like I had finally come to terms with the opposing forces, if you will, and made a truce.  Not a truce between the issues, but a truce between myself and the conflict.  Is this making any sense?  The conflict is out there, I don't know the answer, and I have to keep living with that.

I've learned a few new things since then that I thought I'd pass on.  One occurred to me on a long driving trip.  It occurred to me that just because the issues can't be resolved intellectually doesn't mean that they can't be resolved in my life.  I can value the meaning behind many of the beliefs of my childhood, feel enormously proud of and loyal to my heritage, and yet still live in a way that honors my own experience.  In effect, the way I live my life becomes the resolution.  

check back, this is unfinished.

It's been so long since I've posted that it feels like I should wait until I have something really significant to say. But then again, maybe I should just plunge back in. We had a great vacation-- two weeks, for the first time in a long time. Part of it was spent with my spouse's family on the East coast, part of it was spent at home. During the last bit, my spouse and kids took off on a church youth group trip while I stayed home. I got to spend several days at our favorite lake, relaxing and reading and watching the breeze move the leaves on the trees. It was great.

In the afternoons, it would get quite warm in the un-air conditioned cabin where I was staying. So after dinner the dog and I would walk down to the lake for a swim. The reason this is my favorite lake is because the water is so clear and cold and deeply blue-green that you can see straight down to the bottom even at fifteen feet. It's not the kind of lake where you swim all afternoon.  No one stays in for long, it's way too cold, even in July. In fact, I don't get in at all unless it's really hot. But it was quite warm last week, and I swam every day.

I think it says a lot about one's personality how you do this-- do you plunge in off the end of the dock? start at the shore and wade in? run in and dive? My own approach is the wimpiest of them all, which is to slowly descend the ladder at the end of the dock, letting each body part get used to it before the next one gets wet. But there is still a moment where you have to push away from the dock and plunge all the way in, and every time I do it, I cringe. I hate that bit. But then you're in, and the water is so .... invigorating, bracing, refreshing-- pick your term. You feel all the heat and dust and sweat dissolving away, and you just chill (giving new meaning to the term, yes?). I paddle around and try to find something, some place within myself that matches that deep, clear, blue-green stillness. It's worth the hated cringe moment, well worth it.

Great metaphor, that. I have several things coming up that I don't want to do, but I need to do, so it's a life lesson all wrapped up with a bow. Just cringe and get the worst part over with. Like posting for the first time in three months.

AB

I really did write a post yesterday, but I was worried it might be a breach of confidentiality, so I deleted it this morning. But I will start posting again when we get back from vacation.

Last fall I made a moderately big deal about taking a break from blogging for six weeks.  Now it's been six weeks since I last posted and I've hardly even noticed.  Plenty is happening, just not much worth writing about.