the secret gnostics

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."

This quote, attributed (probably falsely) to C. S. Lewis, is the best summary of American Evangelical Dualism I've found.

Yes, we are physical, but that's only temporary.
Yes, we have a physical existence, but that's our "mortal coil" which must eventually be shuffled off in order to find freedom.
Yes, we appear to be physical in nature, but that's the very residue of original sin, the simultaneous evidence and petri dish of depravity.
Yes, we have physical bodies, but we would be holier without them.

If you were raised in an American Evangelical church, these statements probably don't sound that absurd to you. To tell the truth, they still don't sound absurd (or even outrightly false) to me.

But they are false.

If they are true, God declared something good that was not (Gen 1:31).
If they are true, Jesus became sinful on account of being human (John 1:14).
If they are true, the apostles were irresponsible in their priorities (James 2:15-16).
If they are true, it's kind of an insult to refer to the Church as the Body (1 Cor 12:12-27).

And if you were raised in an American Evangelical church, I hope you know immediately that these things are absurd and outrightly false. They cannot be.

We deny, even adamantly reject, these obviously-heretical ideas. But we all the same embrace, even promote as essential truth, teachings that stand on the same logical basis.

We say that the desires of the body must be not only kept under control, but disregarded and discounted.
We say that the position of the body has no influence on the quality of our prayer.
We say that the shape of the body causes sin.
We say that the actions of the body are meaningless except when connected to deep, fervent, and above all pious affections.

I wish I could believe those things. They are nice and comfortable thoughts. They cut out the necessity to look at and understand a part of myself which, despite being the most immediately obvious to everyone around me, is still mysterious to me. They allow me to leave it a mystery because it is inherently bad, sinful, etc, and to engage with it would be to fraternize with the enemy.

Yes, my body is my enemy.

Imagine my shock when I realized that, not only do I have a body, I am embodied. And not only am I embodied, but I will be so for eternity... that is, if I believe that stuff about "the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting."

This is also when I realized that this makes me really uncomfortable. It is engrained in the way I see myself and the world to think that the physical and emotional is lesser, the spiritual and mental is greater.

I am one of the Secret Gnostics. Our heresy is so deeply hidden within ourselves that we ourselves don't see it.

But now I've seen it.

Can I even read all of those parts of the Bible that talk about "the flesh" as referring to anything other than my body, anymore? And what about all of those statements? Those things I've always believed about the desires of the body, the body and prayer, modesty, and the use of physical action? Thats 20+ years of thinking to re-think.

The hardest part is this: my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
And this means that I should not only be grudgingly reconciled to my physical nature, but joyful in it.

I was glad when they said to me,
“Let us go to the house of the LORD!” (Psalm 122:1)

We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house,
the holiness of your temple! (Psalm 65:4)

I can no longer be a Gnostic, Secret or otherwise.

Advent & fullness

Hey friends.

3 months later, I am back. I'm "home" now, which means less busyness and more posts.

This is a reflection I gave at ISI Christmas a few weeks ago. You may notice I stole a few sentences from another post earlier this year, but this is a different context, and I can do whatever I want with my own intellectual property, right? :)

***

Recently I’ve been struggling a bit with something. It’s this ineffable desire, a longing, a yearning… and a lot of times on the way out it phrases itself as “I want to be perfect.” It says, “I want to be loved, and I want to be worthy of love.” Like Eve in the Garden, it sighs, “I want to be like God.”

This is difficult for me because I am not perfect, and the end of the semester makes that abundantly clear. Everything is stressful, no one is sleeping enough, I can’t produce the kind of quality work I think I ought to, and there is a large number of things I need to do to prepare myself to live in Russia for 6 months that I just can’t seem to do on time. My desire, my longing, my yearning gets desperate this time of year, and I’m sitting in the middle of it right now, and there’s not much I can do to satisfy myself.

But if there’s anything Advent is good for (hint: there is a lot of things Advent is good for), it’s remembering that longing is a part of life, and that our yearnings often are, unbeknownst to us, ones placed there by God to lead us to Him. And so I sing with full conviction, O come, O come, Emmanuel. Come.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth… And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.

Christmas is, at its core, about the Incarnation of God. When God came. When we celebrate “Jesus’ birthday,” we are celebrating the day that the Word became flesh, the day that God became Man, the day that the infinite became finite… and not just finite, but really, really small, and probably a little red-faced and crinkly too. It’s a mind-boggling image.

But maybe even more baffling is what the passage from John says here about the Incarnation. When the Word became flesh, we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth. And from His fullness we have all received.

Friends. We saw God’s glory. And God’s glory is full to the brim with grace and with truth. And then we received that fullness. When God became human, he shared with us out of the immeasurable abundance of grace and truth that are inherent to God.

What exactly does it mean, though? What does it look like for us to receive of the fullness of God?
Let’s look at Mary. She was the first, the original, the prototype of what John is telling us about. For months before anyone else knew she was even pregnant, Mary knew Jesus Incarnate.

And this is why Mary is admirable, why so many people love and revere her, probably why the University I attend is named after her: not because she worked extra hard to be extra holy, not because she followed all the rules, not even because she behaved admirably under the stress of being pregnant without being married. No, it’s because of what she had inside of her: Love. As in, the Person, in-the-flesh Love who also happened to be God. Jesus.

Mary carried the fullness of God within her. All of Who God is lived inside of her.

And friends, we’ve been offered that same thing. Can you grasp that? Do you understand what that means? It means that, in much the same way as God lived inside Mary, He is willing to live inside of us. He is Love, and He offers Love to become Incarnate in us as it did in Mary.

This is the call we have been given. Make Love physically present on earth. It is just as radical for us as it was for Mary. It’s bizarre. To love is to pour yourself out for the sake of another. To receive God’s fullness means to become empty. This is… impossible, it seems. Very difficult at the least.

But the angel Gabriel said to Mary, “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” Jesus says to us, “I will send the Holy Spirit to you.” All things are possible with God—even making God physically present on earth.

We have been offered this gift. But how will we respond? “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

We see that God has offered us His fullness. And in doing so, He has answered my longing. I might not be perfect, but He is perfect. I might not always think I am worthy of love, but in pouring love out of myself I become full of love. And instead of asking with Eve to be like God, I can ask with Mary to be with God and full of Him.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to this living hope.

O come, O come, Emmanuel.

mind of the maker + art

When you create a work of art, that work possesses a bit of yourself.

Whenever I write, I draw a bit of my reputation out of the safety of freezer-sealed bag to thaw, vulnerable to the elements and the opinions of the air... Your impression of me is somewhat reliant on what you see. In that respect, my creation is an extension of myself. Of course.

But my reputation is not the only part of myself that I expose in creation. There is a something that sits inside me and grows, and develops, and strengthens, until I give birth to it, and it becomes a force in the world beyond me. It will not appear to all the way it appears to me. It will not speak to all the way it speaks to me. It will not have meaning to all the way it has meaning to me. But it will be, independent and separate from me though still carrying some of myself.

In the case of man, that which he creates is more expressive of him than that which he begets. The image of the artist and the poet is imprinted more clearly on his works than on his children. (Nicholas Berdyaev via Dorothy Sayers)

I think I have always felt, and if not always at least for a long time, that there is something almost mystical about art. About literature. About God, and man, and man's creations, and how the only way my life makes enough sense to keep living is as a work of art.

Beauty will save the world. Dostoevsky said it.* Beauty is, from one perspective, an overwhelming sense of order that pierces the heart. Beauty and meaning walk hand in hand.

When I read a well-written novel, I am flooded by the impression that everything in it has a reason. It has a place. It is part of a Story. Isn't that the desperate desire of the human heart? For reason, for purpose, for order, for Story?

Meaning is necessary. That discrete objects and events in succession would say something is necessary.

It's necessary in art, and it's necessary in life, and it's necessary in God.

And then Dorothy Sayers goes and paints the most lucid and vivid picture of the Trinity I've ever seen, based on what we already know about the creative process. It's brilliant, in the actual meaning of the word. Read it.

...and then I find a quote from Solzhenitsyn that makes me want to cry because he says in a few paragraphs what I didn't-quite-succeed-in-saying in 20 pages in high school. Emphasis added.

'One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: Beauty will save the world. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes - but whom has it saved?  

There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.  

Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition - and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.  

It is vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.  

But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force - they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through - then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing will fulfill the work of all three?  

In that case Dostoevsky's remark, "Beauty will save the world," was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all, he was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination. And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today?'   ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture

*At least, he said that his narrator said that Ippolit said that Myshkin said it. See The Idiot.

time and again (and again and again and again)

Well, if I didn’t already know that the modern age is BEYOND HOPE OF REDEMPTION, Jack Finney's time travel novel, Time and Again, would have proven it to me. It criticizes 1970s America for the same problems we have now (plus a few degrees of severity, thanks to the Internet Explosion).

It seems the faddish thing to do these days... that is, to criticize these days. Kids nowabout are illiterate. People just don't know how to talk to each other anymore. The millenials are going to ruin America. Nobody even tries to do anything before they turn 30 anymore. And on, and on, and on.

Maybe they have a point.

Finney's narrator observes of the people in the 1880s (where he has traveled):

There was an excitement in the streets of New York in 1882 that is gone. ... The faces [of the people] were animated, they were glad to be just where they were, alive in that moment and place. ... Above all, they carried with them a sense of purpose. You could see that: they weren't bored, for God's sake! Just looking at them, I'm convinced that those men moved through their lives in unquestioned certainty that there was a reason for being. And that's something worth having, and losing it is to lose something vital.

I mostly appreciate what he's saying. 

To be glad for the sake of life, and not in that sappy 'well, I guess I can be happy to be alive' way, but really grateful for the things around me... that's beautiful.

To know definitively that there is reason behind the story of my life... that's beautiful.

And without these things, yeah, life is going to kind of suck.

Finney implies pretty heavily that we've lost the 1880s' sense of life. And I think that is very unfair.

I've been listening to Tim Keller in the mornings for the past week or so (I swear nobody's paying me to endorse him. I just want to share the awesome), and the one thing that comes through almost every sermon is: When I place my hope in Christ, I change; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control begin to spring up in my heart in a way impossible before.

So when I look at a group of people utterly changed by the love of God, they look like the people Finney is describing. Even if they are Modern to the utmost, they maintain vitality and beauty.

And what we have now that the people in the 1880s didn't have? Separation. The margin between the Joyful and the Despondent is wider; there are fewer people caught in the lukewarm soup between them... which means that people shouldn't have to figure out time travel to see people whose radiance they envy. That should be us.

Even though it would be cool to dress like this... and really. The Third Great Awakening. Charles Spurgeon!! etc.

This post is brought to you in part by Tim Chester, Steve Timmis, Tim Keller, and probably other things that aren't Jack Finney.

story of a soul

Friends, this makes one of my Top 10 lists. I'm not sure which one yet. I plan to start working on making those this week.

Probably 10 Most Life-Changing? 10 Most Challenging? 10 Most Revolutionary? (The point is, it's amazing, and you should read it.)

I briefly touched on this book in my post about learning to be a child. The little way that Therese puts forth is so ridiculously, unbelievably attractive even in its unremarkable-ness. Because of its unremarkable-ness.

I've been struggling the past few weeks with the unremarkable-ness of my own life. I'm rebelling against it and trying to change it... how can I make my life exciting again? How can I be at the center of action and making amazing things happen for the Kingdom of God? I will never take the bubbling kind of life at school for granted again; I will harness its every power and make something fantastic. Just let me be remarkable.

But oh, isn't the remarkable getting kind of commonplace?
Is being useful not sometimes a roadblock to being truly valuable?

One of the things Therese talks about is the part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus tells us to 'lend, expecting nothing in return' (Luke 6:35). She brings up something interesting... sometimes it is so much easier to give than to lend, especially when you do not expect something back.

If you could just make a gift out of your time/energy/money/whatever, you could feel some sort of virtue in it. It's sacrifice, right? Very noble. But if you're lending, the other person gets to feel like they'll pay you back (even if they won't), and you don't get any of the glamor or perceived virtue out of it. All you've done is lend. It's a much quieter virtue, and therefore a much harder one.

And that's what family life is like. I lend my sister a buck or two for Starbucks, but I know I won't get that back unless I bug her for it. Or I go with her to dog-sit overnight, and I know I won't get a cut of the money unless I bug her for it. But at the moment at which I'm giving her the money or sleeping on a bed with two snoring dogs, the understanding is that I am lending the money or lending the time.
(Confession: in both of these instances, I did bug her later.)

Or it's like my tutoring. My GED student is paying me $100 for the whole summer. It comes out to something like $4/hour, which is not very much at all... especially for tutoring, which usually goes more like $20/hour... but I also can't call my work with her 'volunteering' now or get the satisfaction of my gift of goodwill.
(Confession: I tried to do it for free.)

And my whole life is like this! I get so many opportunities for acts of half-charity, or what feels like half charity, and I either snub my nose at it entirely or try to force it into 'whole-charity.' I'm coming to understand that both of those are the same thing.

Sometimes the remarkable thing might be to actually remain unremarkable.

Again, read this book. It's a beautiful view of what Chesterton's 'The Paradoxes of Christianity' looks like played out in the life of a young woman in the simplest setting possible. It's threatened to change the way I think about things. Read it. Did I say that already?

why I'm thankful for my commute

Allow me to say it up front: I hate driving. I don't think it's that much fun, and I'm not naturally good at it (which means that often I AM that terrible driver you probably curse at sometimes. I sincerely apologize).

This summer, I have been blessed with the chance to live in a neighborhood that is a 25-40 minute drive from everything: from my sister's school in one direction and my dad's work in another... from my VBS in one direction and my church in another... from the actual city in one direction and the community college in another. In fact, there are three community colleges in my county, and I live 25-40 minutes from all of them.

What this means is that I spend a LOT of time in the car. Every morning I drive 30 minutes to the college, and every afternoon 30 back. Sometimes I hit rush hour both ways, which makes it longer.

And I'm so grateful.

My commute means that I pray daily, whether I mean to or not. I was struggling a lot the first few weeks of summer to hold myself accountable and seek God when my life was so mundane that I was neither drawn to Him by overwhelming joy nor driven to Him by difficult circumstances. But put me in the car and oh boy. Every day I get to work in one piece is a miracle, and every minute behind the steering wheel is a minute of active reliance on God. People are stupid when they drive, myself included--with as many close calls as I've had and as few accidents (zero), I will never underestimate the ability of God to use the same thing to draw AND drive you to Him. Every day if need be.

Speaking of stupid drivers, my commute means that I see my sin. How in the world can I be so ungracious as to mutter at the person going 2mph under the speed limit? But I am. Once upon a time I thought I was patient; I don't kid myself any more. Also, interacting with people when we're all in enclosed metal vehicles means that my self-centeredness is totally unveiled. I am the only person on the road I know about. I know my needs and my story, and everybody else may as well be a computer player in MarioKart. They are vehicles, not people. ...except that they are people. Oops. As long as I am driving, I doubt I will ever ascribe perfection to myself.

So, when I turn off my inner analysis-monologue? My commute means that I can practice silence. Silence. Focus. Complete distance from Facebook, texts, and (in a car with a broken cassette deck, no CD player, and no radio stations I like) music... there is exactly one task at hand, which is getting where I'm getting safely. If I'm doing other things, that first one is in jeopardy (which is usually the case, but there are few things that motivate you to singlemindedness like the choice between 'distraction' and 'death').

But sometimes my commute means that I can listen to Tim Keller every day. In the mornings the traffic is usually tame enough that I can handle a sermon podcast on my phone. And there is nothing like a theologically sound discussion of the Lord's Prayer at 7:15am.

And if I decide against both of those, my commute means that I can sing as loud as I want, up to an hour a day. And there's not a lot more to say about that.

Finally, my commute means that God really does turn our least favorite things into incredible blessings, which I probably should have figured out sooner... but driving? Who would have thought? How silly.

One of the things I was most scared about for this summer has turned out to be one of the things I'm most thankful for. But (let's be honest) I still hate driving.

a mind like that

I am downright gluttonous for amusement. From the moment I wake up, I need to be pulled out of myself somehow. Thanks to the smartphone, that's not too tall an order--with one swipe I turn off the alarm, with the next three I can open the Bible verse of the day, quickly followed by email, Facebook, and the Words With Friends game I'm winning against my mom.

Eventually I can pull myself out of the tiny screen in favor of a larger one (laptop, or sometimes TV), and then onto the printed page (where I can flatter myself to be not enslaved to instant-gratification-entertainment).

I've finished three books in the last 36 hours. Now I am 30 pages away from finishing a fourth. Expect words on Brideshead Revisited this weekend, after my Skype conference with Molly. The other two that I read cover to cover the recently are more reasonably squished into such a short time frame-- A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, both by Madeleine L'Engle, in a series with her more famous A Wrinkle in Time. 

Every time I read those books (and I have done so at least 6 or 7 times), I am amazed at the way Ms. L'Engle's mind works. How is it that she creates such a complex world of interwoven threads of physics, biology, literature, history, mythology, and what-if-that-happened is utterly beyond me. How she then knows that world so intimately that the complex becomes simple and approaches the story with so little drama that children can grasp it is UNFATHOMABLE. 

Hers is a mind capable of focus. Hers is a mind capable of creation. Hers is a mind capable of persuasion.

I don't think I know anybody who functions on a level remotely close to hers, and I wonder-- what does this kind of story-making have to do with my way of life? Am I relient on constant occupation and fast-moving information input because I am incapable of creating anything real enough to engage me? Or have I failed to create anything this real because I have grown so used to exercising the fast-twitch muscles of my brain that I don't want to do anything else?

'Not everybody is able to see me,' he told her. 'I'm real, and most earthlings can bear very little reality.'   (A Wind in the Door)

This goes beyond trouble focusing on a task without getting distracted. This is an issue of directed entrance into a problem, a story, a world, a question that is not inside my control. For me, I feel challenged in this way most often in literature. It calls me out of myself, but not into a void of flashing screens and vapid plots (like much of my phone-flipping and some of my book-reading), but into a world somehow solider than I am. It's all kinds of scary, but at the same time necessary. Because I want a mind like Madeleine L'Engle's.

learning to be a child

These days have been exciting for me. Physically boring, maybe, but my brain is barely still for a moment.

Friends. My spirit is waking up.

I blame Therese, i.e. St. Therese of Lisieux. Also Evelyn Waugh, the Apostle Luke, and Tim Keller. That motley crew.

While there are some things that I can barely put into pictures in my mind, let alone words in a blog post, I think what it comes down to is set up quite nicely in Luke 9:46-48...

An argument arose among them as to which of them was the greatest. But Jesus, knowing the reasoning of their hearts, took a child and put him by His side and said to them, “Whoever receives this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives Him who sent me. For he who is least among you all is the one who is great.”

I speak with the very opposite of pride when I say: I think I have always been sort of a large person. Growing up, I was the one who would do big things.
A very certain way to please me is to remark on how fit I am
for grand works of intellect,
   for leadership,
      for respectable places like Notre Dame,
         for public performance,
            for speaking to adults...
and honestly, you might be right. With the exception of the first, these are places I have been and thrived. I come alive at the opportunity to direct, to organize, to plan, to conduct, to achieve. And not just anything, but things of monumental significance. If something I have to do does not immediately appear to be of such significance, by gum I'm going to twist it so that it is.

This year I started to learn that I am perhaps not so fit as I might like to think. And I have started to learn to rejoice in my insufficiency for truly great matters, like the turning of a soul towards God. --but many times I don't bother to look for joy like that, and instead go back and lean on those things in which I know I'm competent.

I want to be great. I want to do great things.

Never has my heart been struck by a desire to be small. Or if it has, it's recovered rather quickly. I see passages like the one above and try to brainstorm up ways to be dramatically childlike and GREAT. This, obviously, is stupid ('dramatically childlike' being an oxymoron), and I usually burn out after about five minutes.

But... a lot of my reading/listening lately has been very focused, and very confrontational.
It is impossible to reflect on the Lord's Prayer through the lens of Our Father without feeling the need to be a child.
It is impossible to read the words of Therese without desiring the simplicity, awe, and love she breathes.
It is impossible to be proud of the way of grandness when one is shown the value of littleness.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God. But what if poverty of spirit is not something you achieve through great works of discipline and penitence, but something you are born with or not? The character I see in Therese, and in some people I know personally, is not the sort of thing that can be worked for oneself. That would defeat the point.

Jesus... said, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?” But He said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”   (Luke 18:26-28)

This is kind of life-changing. It's thrilling what Jesus is saying. 'You think you're rich? That wealth is to your detriment, it is poverty, when you are trying to obtain the Kingdom. --But wait! That's perfect: I desire your poverty. I want to give you a pearl of great value, to make you Beautiful.'

What is impossible with man is possible with God.

I am utterly dependent on His love.

Somehow, in the desire to become small, poor, and childlike, I have known myself to be just that.

teaching & me

Somehow I have gone one month/eleven blog posts without really talking about the only semi-legit thing I'm doing this summer... that is, doing [stuff] in the ESL program at my local community college. Yeah, I said it was only semi-legit.

Basically what I do:

• Observing Reading & Writing 3 for the whole semester (8:30-10:10, for 10 weeks)
• Observing Grammar 2/Grammar 3, alternating about every two weeks (10:30-12:10, also 10 weeks)
• Email-tutoring one student
• Conversation-tutoring two students
• Intensive-GED-reading-tutoring one student

I don't get paid for any of it (except a nominal fee from my GED student), and out of the 20ish hours a week that all encompasses, I'm only guaranteed to be doing anything for 7. The rest is just sitting in a classroom, listening, taking notes, doodling, and occasionally walking around the room and helping students with independent exercises.

But recently, the Grammar 2 professor gave me one of the greatest gifts I've received yet, and offered to let me review the class' latest test with them AND teach a whole hour and forty minute class on comparative adjectives. 

The class will come next month. The test review was Thursday. And oh... friends, this is hard work.

I've known since about sixth grade that I probably shouldn't be a teacher. Back then I thought it was because I understood things too easily, and I would expect my students to be as brilliant as I am (and that expectation would 99% of the time be false). Yes, I was quite a wonderful sixth grader. And humble, too.

Anyway. In recent years, I've stuck to my conviction that I shouldn't be a teacher, but for slightly less annoying reasons--mostly just because I don't know if I'm gifted that way. I think education is one of the most important structures in society, and it bothers me a lot when people say things like, 'Oh, I don't know what I want to do with this degree in [    ]. I'll probably just end up teaching it to high schoolers.' 

Just because you know something doesn't mean you can or should teach it. 

And that is being reinforced quite thoroughly into my head this summer. Do I know English? You bet. Can I work with one student to make them understand it? Sure. Can I teach it to a class? Questionable.

It's funny... I think I'd take teaching small groups of Catholic high schoolers about the Sacraments (as I did last summer) over teaching classes of international adults about English (as I am doing this summer). In the first case, I (being Protestant) knew less than my students did, but I had a different perspective, a different angle... and some real humility to boot. Here, I know a lot more than they do. I ought to. I'm a native speaker. And there is only one possible perspective, one possible angle. I have it; they don't. But they need to, and I need to get them there. And somehow manage to stay humble.

It doesn't just have to do with right and wrong answers. Teaching is about getting the students to think in a way they don't naturally think. Once you get them started in the right place and moving in the right direction, the answers will come. And, again: this is hard work.

And it makes me wonder... is teaching just a gift you have? Or, like theology or the English language, is it the sort of thing that I could arrive at just by starting in the right place and moving in the right direction, with a little guidance from somebody who knows what they're doing?

regarding sherlock, and thresholds

[no spoilers! no worries.]

I've known for a while that I needed to find a TV show to like. Avoiding TV because it's TV is like saying that all books are boring, or all internet articles are useless... and then never reading anything. So first I thought about 'Community,' because I'm basically living at a community college and all... but instead, I went for 'Sherlock.'

What an idea that was.

So I have a problem with audio-visual media. I am extraordinarily sensitive to movies and television. Somewhere along the line when normal kids learn that What Is On The Screen and What Is Real Life are two different things, I skipped class to have a tea party with my teddy bears. As a result, I am one of those annoying people who leaves the room when a movie gets too sad, too scary, or just too awkward. And sometimes? I'm just overstimulated. There's so much going on, and I can't handle it all.

'Sherlock' about did me in.

Most crime shows I've seen do something to diffuse the tension... to give you a hint as to what's coming next... to pepper the action with random comic relief*... to give you a break. From the very first episode, this show refuses to do that. And then there were six of those.

During the first one, I thought my brain was going to explode. There is a lot of action, and the director uses a lot of jump shots, so you have to be constantly on your toes just to get a picture of what's happening. And once you get that picture, you have to work pretty hard to decide what to think about that picture. Is it reality? Is it some great farce? What's happening behind that door? Why is the screen going black? My adrenaline was pumping for all 90 minutes. I felt like I had just lost a few weeks off of my lifespan because my heart rate was permanently altered. This was not just an emotional reaction... this was physical.

But 5 episodes later after that first one (of increasing intensity, no less), I stand before you, alive. My heart rate has gone back to normal. In fact, other than some slightly embarrassing pillow-squeezing during the last episode, I made it through relatively unscathed.

I didn't react as much to the (ridiculous) sixth episode as I did to the first.

Why?

Something in me changed. It's different now, and I find it very odd... my I Am Certain This Will Kill Me threshold is a good bit higher. My tolerance for Trauma-Induced Adrenaline is higher.

Does this mean I need lots of action and suspense to keep me satisfied, to keep me interested? I don't think so, yet. I think it could. But I read The Screwtape Letters yesterday, and now I'm reading Story of a Soul (the spiritual autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux), and neither of those are particularly intense. But I wonder... after a while, will raising the Amount Needed To Kill Me necessitate raising The Amount Needed To Impact Me?


*Edited to add: given, this show is hilarious. I think when I wrote this I was more reeling from Reichenbach Fall than I wanted to admit, and hence was casting that terror back more than I ought to have. But I hold that any of the comedy is not 'relief' in the usual sense. Good grief. It's all intense.

every good endeavor

Where do I even begin with this book? I will admit, I took forever on it... My friend Sam once told me that he had spent so much time reading philosophy books that he forgot how to read novels. I have the opposite problem, wherein I can't remember how to read books that don't have a plot (and therefore take two weeks to read 250 pages).

But regardless of my slowness getting through, I highly recommend Tim Keller's latest... Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work. It covers a lot of material and is useful even to the lowly non-working workers (i.e. students) among us.

As usual, the most convicting parts of the book had to do with work and its relationship to rest. Keller says,

'If we can experience gospel-rest in our hearts, if we can be free from the need to earn our salvation through our work, we will have a deep reservoir of refreshment that continually rejuvenates us, restores our perspective, and renews our passion.'

I'm sure I know what you all are thinking. 'Katie, you don't have a job. Why in the world do you need rest? Your whole life is rest!'

False.

I find myself even more immediately confronted with my lack-of-rest now than I did when I was a full-time student with a schedule that looked, on a nice week, like this:

Because now that I am objectively not working, I ought not to feel tired. I ought not to feel anxious. I ought not to feel overworked.

In reality, I spent the first month of this summer rather stressed out and totally exhausted. I wasn't working then any more than I am now, but I was a wreck. I had this 'need to earn my salvation through my work,' a sense that my value comes from my work, and I wasn't working.

bad work = little value

no work = no value

That's a problem. I think they call that 'legalism.' Now I'm not saying I subscribe to some weird works-based soteriology... I've spent enough time with The Five Solas to know intellectually that I cannot work my way into Heaven, etc etc.

...But apparently I haven't spent enough time with God to know personally that I have value not based on how much product I turn out, how many people I impact, how much money I make, how efficiently I use my time, how pristinely clean I keep the kitchen, or any other quantifiable measurement of usefulness.

That is the 'rest under the rest' that Keller talks about in the book, and also in actually my favorite sermon ever.

Without it? I will spend this whole summer doing nothing, and being run down by it. I will be sitting on the edge of my chair, springloaded, tapping my feet, waiting and waiting and waiting for something earth-shattering to present itself to me (or at least a job at the Village Cleaners, really)... and that's not rest.

Real rest is better for me, and better for the world, than my constant wheel-spinning could ever be, even if I did have a job. Since I don't, it's that much clearer. I need to learn how to rest, and quit freaking out about working so much that I read 250-page theology books on work when I'm unemployed.

(But seriously, even if you're unemployed like me, I highly recommend this book! And if you're not, I recommend it even more.)

community college, community church

Today, I’m going to take a break from writing about books. Because really, I promise, I have done other things besides read this summer! I have also been observing classes and tutoring in the ESL program at my local community college.

And I’ve realized… ‘community college’ is a terrible misnomer.

Maybe it’s because the college is servicing students from a 15-mile radius. Maybe it’s because it’s the summer and not the semester. Maybe it’s because I’m not actually taking real classes. But there is not much ‘community*’ about this college. 

Frankly, I miss it. I miss Notre Dame and the community I have there. I miss New Covenant and the community I had there. I have always associated school with really intense relationships and a committed Emmaus-walk mentality. I’m not exactly finding that at community college.

I guess it’s not necessary to get at school, though. I do interact with other people besides the ESL folks. I go to church with my family every Sunday! …whatever church we’re visiting that week, anyway. And when Sunday mornings look like that… ‘community church’ is just as misleading a name.

We’ve visited a couple of those. A couple of Baptist churches. An LCMS church. A Methodist church. And none of them, the community churches included, have been very forthcoming with the fellowship. Maybe that’s because we’ve never been anywhere more than twice… but still.

And I miss it. I miss Fulkerson and the community I have there. I miss Mt. Zion and the community I had there. I have always associated church with discipling and being discipled, with life together with people who share my priorities and my loves. I haven’t gotten that in church the last few weeks.

I miss community.

I don’t think I’ve ever gone more than two weeks of my post-middle-school life without community, without good friends and strong spiritual support physically present to me. When my friends at ND used to talk about their trepidation going home on breaks… that it was harder to remain disciplined, harder to see God, harder to feel loved, harder to feel happy… I never got it. Yes, the community available at school (especially through ISI & various other campus ministry groups) is amazing. But I went home to community that was only slightly less awesome, if at all.

I get it now.

I’m wondering about the next few months. Do I choose a place, dive in, and try to ‘create’ community… and all of the accountability, vulnerability, and self-denying love that goes with it… or do I hold out another 11 weeks on my own? The whole make community happen now thing seemed to work last summer, at Vision. We only had 5 weeks together, and we went from strangers to best friends. I’ve got more than twice that amount of time. But somehow it’s scarier now.

So I wonder, what do you do when you’re in a place where

• you have no existing community?
• there are no structures in place to facilitate community?
• you know you’re only going to be around for a few months?

That’s not a hypothetical question. It is very relevant to my life now, and it becomes even more relevant looking ahead at the month I’ll be spending here this winter, the months I’ll be spending in Russia next spring, and whatever I’ll be doing somewhere in the world next summer. Since my family moved in January, I officially live a life-in-transit. I don’t have a stable ‘home’ anymore, and I don’t have any guarantees that the places I’ll be over the next years will be good at faking it. How do I handle myself?

Do I…

• find people and surreptitiously adopt them into what I will secretly call my community?
• find people and ask them to be brothers and sisters to me?
• sit still and wait with anticipation for God to provide people for me?
• render myself (somehow) independent of the need for community?
• do something else entirely?

I don’t exactly know. 



* Click the link. Definitions of overused terms/jargon are good.