Damascus Discoveries

This weekend the baby finches that were nesting on our front porch took flight. I hadn't noticed their mother building the nest or when they took flight, only that she was there one day on her nest, suddenly she had babies, and then they were gone.

Life has been like that recently: beautiful surprises in unexpected places. Maybe it began with the transformation of our lean-to into a garden. A major step on this newly trodden path occurred this past weekend.

I went to a conference for graduate students in English. I was speaking on a panel about the profession. I was the weird one. I said it's OK to stop at the Masters degree and that maybe they should consider if they really want to commit to the academic life before going into a PhD program. I said that maybe they don't have to take every job interview if they can't see themselves living in a certain place and they have other options. I said teaching first-year students wasn't that bad. For what it was worth, ultimately they had to turn inward and know and trust themselves.

But then a high-level administrator from another college said, "interview everywhere," lie if you have to, or at least stretch the truth about how you fit into the job exactly. Along with him was a non-tenure instructor, a full-time well-published professor, and the head of a writing-tutoring program, all talking, and most complaining, while the job-hungry grad students hung on every word.

When I left the session, I realized this: my job is a good one, and my stresses are not that monumental, if I only shift my perspective in viewing them. I may not have planned to be where I am, but what a wonderful place it is, even beyond the job.

Way beyond the job.

Conversations online and over coffee, the way the sunsets paint the skyline of our otherwise unexceptional little Georgia town, a sermon that quietly surprises by building on a tiny verse, new visitations and discoveries of things I just have not been able to notice, all of these are wonders and signs. Through trust, slowing down, and really looking for and listening to the still small voice, I am re-discovering a world of beauty.

For the world online and in the news, Susan Boyle has become the embodiment of surprise, beauty in unexpected places but why? What do we expect to hear when she walks out on stage? How does she change for us and how does she change us?

At work and in life, stress and societal expectations blind us. I know they have me. It is only by stopping and connecting with what is beautiful and outsides of ourselves that the scales can fall from our eyes, and we can truly see.

A Serenity Prayer

On my way to work this morning, running late, I was backing out of my driveway, trying not to hit my husband's car parked behind me when I destroyed our St. Francis icon in our garden. Considering my morning (OK my year), it is more than ironic that the icon had The Serenity Prayer written on the back:

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. "

While my car is untouched, the icon, is in pieces on my driveway. What a weird synchronicity, a tangle of metaphors for the way my life has been the last few weeks.

As you can see, Dear Reader, from my more recent post(s), my faith has, of late, been dinked up a bit.

As I said in my previous post, so much is out of our control--the economy, the college budget, others' attitudes, all things I have let affect my faith. I have been running through my mental habitrail of worst case scenarios: what if we lose our jobs, get cancer, my friends abandon us, our parents get sick, does that mean God does not care? What does it mean that God never gives us more than we can handle? Job certainly got it heaped upon him. If I had an eighteenth of what he experienced, I'd probably be somewhere in a corner, in a fetal position, rocking back and forth, counting down ten minutes to Wapner.

Driving home from dinner Friday, I told my husband about a friend I had lunch with that day who seemed, unlike me, strangely unworried about the changes at work and in the economy. She has a real possibility that her position could be cut as a result of the pressing re-structuring going on in our college. She didn't say, "God will provide," but I know her well as a sincere person of strong faith, so I know that is the source of her ongoing strength.

"Is she crazy?" I wondered, while feeling this nagging tickle that maybe she wasn't. I told him I felt ashamed that I lacked her calm, her faith. He said, "Well, God is not supposed to give us more than we can handle."

Now let me be clear than my rational husband is no bible-thumper, yet I wanted to protest with a litany of terrible examples, some real, some hypothetical. He then added that he didn't think that meant we'd be sheltered from all harm.

Well duh, I thought.

"It means God helps us to be strong during the hard times," he said.

Oh.

Right.

Faith--what I've been lacking.

Well then what is faith?

Is it, as Thomas Paine argues in "The Age of Reason," hooey, a belief in hearsay.

Is it as Joel Olstein thinks, if we have faith, God will give us a house, a Hummer, and happiness? (http://emotter.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/22/)

Is it Job-like resolve, in the face of cosmic horrible, that we can still hold fast to God?

Is it the ability to delude ourselves?

Is it faith in other people to act as God's angels?

Whatever it is, unlike Job, most people (of faith and otherwise) lead pretty mundane lives, with the day-to-day trivialities, to paraphrase Chekhov, making us crazy, testing our faith.

Most of us don't face off juntas. Rather we run through our own little mental habitrails convinced that every turn is a plot against us by some cosmic force, or worse other people.

Maybe that's why we are in need of Lent, a time to sacrifice, give up those habits that, whether they feel good or bad, are comfortable because they are what we know.

So this year I'm going to try to give up and live for 40-days free from negativity, cynicism, stress, and judgment. Those are the things I'm at least trying to give up.

That and vehicular manslaughter of saints.

Day Two: "The Donkey"

"The Donkey"

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tatter'd outlaw of the earth
Of ancient crooked will
Starve, scourge, deride me, I am dumb
I keep my secret still.
Fools!For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet

--G.K. Chesterton

I have more than my share of pride. I'm learning this. Oh, I'm a progressive academic. I strive to be color-blind, non-gender judgmental, and open minded to all orientations; it’s part of the job description.

What a lie.

I have pride in a multi-pack: Pride in my intellect, pride in my accomplishments, pride in my social class, what I’ve achieved. I write this not boasting, but with an edge of nausea. I fool myself that I'm a nice person. What a shock when I realize that’s not always true.

Tonight after work I went to a charity meeting. I hadn’t wanted to go. I only went out of obligation, a promise made in a moment of weakness.

Once there I sat off to the side, sighing with my date book open on my lap, feeling far too busy for all this, far too important. I looked around at all the "salt of the earth" people and thought, “I am not like them.”

As the meeting progressed, and I heard what many of these people had accomplished for this charity and how they interacted with each other, I realized I'm the one who is lacking here. Not them. I felt my pride deflate, and I felt ashamed.

In “The Donkey,” G.K Chesterton shows us that at our most significant moments the most insignificant amongst us may hold true power. Paul tells us that each of us carries both the death and life of Christ inside us, and that gives us all a great power, but he warns us against pride, telling us we carry this power in "clay jars." By accepting that we are only fragile clay, we learn what grace really is: Not booming spectacle but the still small voice. And if we can quiet the din of our pride, we just might hear it.

Ash Wednesday

I went to the grocery store to buy beer after attending Ash Wednesday services at the local Episcopal church. I stood in the checkout line, knowing that the kids working behind the counter were actively ignoring the fact that I had a black cross smudged across my forehead. I could be a crazy lady who doesn't know she ran out the house with dirt on her face, so desperate she is to buy alcohol! English teachers! In Louisiana the cross and the beer wouldn't raise an eyebrow. In this small southern Protestant town, both raise eyebrows, and combined I lose all eye contact from the good teens working at the local Harvey's.

I'm not Episcopal. I'm not Catholic, but I have attended various Methodist churches that indulged in ashes, or at least a beautifully dour Ash Wednesday service. But First Methodist in this small town only has a Wednesday night fellowship, just like every Wednesday night that I don't attend. I'm usually hanging out at my friends' house. With a Wednesday after-work beer in hand, I watch as my friends (AKA the Man Candy) wind down their weekly volleyball scrimmage, and I gossip with the "better half" of the host volleyball couple and the other women there about work, shoes, who's hotter--Alan Rickman in Diehard or Alan Rickman in the Harry Potter films (an issue still not completely resolved to date).

But we didn't have our weekly game. The couple took off to visit family out-of-state. So I went to church instead.

Lent has historically been that downer post-Mardi Gras time in cold February or early March where everyone I know spends too much money in an attempt to fight seasonal depression (I include myself on that list of offenders). Or more piously, it is the season awaiting Christ's resurrection when believers work on personal penance. At tonight's services, however, I was reminded it is also a time when one may prepare to join the church or even more fitting for me, it is the time when she who has fallen away from the church works her way back.

Am I a prodigal daughter?

How cliché.

When I first moved to Georgia, to a town that is seriously the smallest place I had ever lived or even thought I would live, I was lonely. I would call my best friend who still, at the time, lived in Louisiana, and I would joke, "Jesus is my roommate. I just wish he'd pay rent."

Years later I have many friends, some who have become family, people I choose to love and not because of the accident of birth.

The first step of this return began about two weeks ago with an experience that I still can't interpret. Out of town for a meeting and alone in hotel room, I spent almost three hours one night trying to download my email on the slow hotel wireless while I also absorbed Celebrity Rehab on a marathon run. Because I don't have cable at home--only PBS--and thus no resistance, I was sucked into the prurient human multi-car interpersonal pile-up that is this kind of realty television. I then topped off my binge with a bonus episode of Plastic Surgery Obsession. When I cut off the TV and brushed my teeth, I started thinking about what depressing toilets we have made of ourselves and of the world. But I wasn't even depressed by this; I just felt it like gravity. Then I got in bed, cut off the light, and stared into the darkness.

That's when I felt something. A presence. Something or a Someone who said, "It's OK. I'm here."

I didn't actually hear those words BTW. I just had a feeling that I can only loosely translate into those words.

Since then I have been slowly trying to figure out what that experience meant. I've had a feeling that something more must be with us, but it was never that . . . personal.

But what did that experience mean that night? What does it mean now? I suppose the Lenten season is as good a time as any to try and figure it out.

At least I might learn why I have always loved John Donne's "Batter My Heart Three-Person'd God." http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/sonnet14.php