endings & beginnings

by my rough calculation, I've spent 12% of my life in Harrisonburg. today's my last full day in the shenandoah valley for the forseeable future, and I'm finding it fitting that it's sort of grey and dreary outside. it's hard to leave things behind, places and people; my internal landscape is tending towards grey, today. and yet some of my favorite people in the world have already begun to scatter from this small town. and some are remaining here, staying in Harrisonburg, to see what else can be gleaned from this place outside of the university doors. and I am heading home to lancaster, and then on to the NIH.

my facebook news feed has been full, recently, with friends and acquaintances three years younger than me. they're coming to the end of their first year of college, and are talking online about all of the things they'll do over the summer, the people they're excited to see back home, the friends they're leaving for the long summer break. see you soon, they say, and they can say it to either group of people and it will be true.

I feel ages older then my first-year college self. it all feels much harder, now. much more real. much scarier.

* * *

beginnings: also appropriate for a damp and clouded day.

"But faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark."

I don't know where I'm going, I wrote in a book earlier in the semester. It would be nice to have a map. I still think that, some days. but I am also starting to feel eager - to do, to try, to see if I can make it in the real world that is out there, outside the safe bounds of my childhood, out past the walls of EMU. Jayber was right: it isn't a resting place, exactly. I am not calm or still when I think about the next year of my life. I feel a bit like I've been thrown onto a river in a little boat, in the fog, in the dark. but I also feel the truth of this other thing he said, which is that I have been led. I feel the truth of that down in my bones, which I guess is the faith that is causing me to stay on the raft (in the fog, in the dark), paddling with the certain thought that it will be alright.

“If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line...But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will.” 

* * *

12% of my life in this place, though. Harrisonburg, a second home; the site of so many mistakes, so much growth.  Ah - I will miss you. The ugly grain elevator, even. 

May the Lord bless you & keep you, dear small city; dear, lovely EMU community. Until we meet again - because, Insh'allah, we will. 

my housemates keep telling me...

...that I haven't updated my blog recently. So I'm trying to remedy that.

The problem is that everything in my life seems simultaneously too large and too small to write about. What am I doing but homework, sitting through lectures, finishing my fourth year of lab work, long Tuesday and Thursday mornings? And housework, doing dishes, sweeping the floor, making sure rent is mailed on time, visiting the Comcast office in Harrisonburg when we're charged too much for our internet?

In short, small things; the things that make up an ordinary life; the things that aren't so interesting to write about.

And yet, at the same time, I move through this semester and come to those moments of finality: the last hymn sing. the last Easter chapel. the last birthday in Harrisonburg. I am coming up on the last morning at Early Church, and I am mourning this loss already.

These are things that loom large in my life, and that I don't know how to start to explain.

Last night was the last hymn sing, full of Easter songs and finishing out with call-out requests. As we stood in a circle in Martin Chapel, I thought - I will miss this - I was standing between two friends with strong voices, soprano and alto, and I thought about how I learned to sing my part in four years of circles like that one. I learned a bit about what it means to belong, and about how to articulate my theology, and about loving place and people.

We sang the two best Easter hymns, Low in the Grave He Lay and Lift Your Glad Voices, and they were beautiful. At the beginning of Lift Your Glad Voices everyone sings the same four notes and then splits into four parts, and when we reached that moment in each verse it felt like the room was alive.

The best thing, though, was maybe when we sang the song about Christ making all things new; the lyrics are lovely words to meditate on in light of graduation:

(Chorus) Christ is alive, and goes before us
to show and share what love can do.
This is a day of new beginnings;
our God is making all things new.

This is a day of new beginnings,
time to remember and move on,
time to believe what love is bringing,
laying to rest the pain that's gone.

For by the life and death of Jesus,
love's mighty Spirit, now as then,
can make for us a world of difference,
as faith and hope are born again.

Then let us, with the Spirit's daring,
step from the past and leave behind
our disappointment, guilt, and grieving,
seeking new paths, and sure to find.

birthday

i'm 22 today. (strange. when did that happen?) some things i've done in the last year:

moved into a rental house
learned about paying bills
worked with adults with developmental disabilities
kept going to early church
taught some super cool kids to play Settlers of Catan
read a bunch of theology texts
learned more math
visited friends at camp hebron
heard Julia Kasdorf speak, twice
went to a Josh Garrels concert in D.C.
wrote a bunch of poetry
started writing fiction
learned how to ice skate
cooked red lentil coconut curry
learned how to bake really awesome sourdough bread
celebrated a 5th birthday in a trailer
kept in touch with friends in china, guatemala, lancaster, and oregon
wrote some letters
made a bunch of mistakes
laughed at myself
failed to laugh at myself
watched many sunrises over massanutten
biked through many cold mornings to school
biked through rain
biked through snow
bought some cacti


today i walked through the world wearing my black boots, my owl shirt, with twin french braids. i felt strong & beautiful & happy to be alive. i went to the little grill for breakfast with thia, and had chocolate pancakes and orange juice, and i was telling stories about my life, and the world felt almost unbearably lovely.

it is, isn't it? we live in a world where there are 22nd birthdays that have chocolate pancakes and friends to eat with. where there are days and days of sunrises, made more beautiful by the days of snow and rain.

yes. it's a lovely world. & i'm happy to be here.

it was only the beginning ~

ready for spring

I'm tired of it being so cold all the time; this morning when I was biking to church the air felt like spring. It was still cold but it smelled damp, like growing things.

Everything starts to feel so much more alive when green things are growing. I'm looking forward to coming out of my emotional hibernation.

a tiny thing that made me laugh today

thinking about writing a lot, recently (obviously), and so today was thinking about an article I had read online somewhere about kurt vonnegut and a term paper assignment he once gave students. I found the link (here) which was as lovely as I remembered, but in the process I also found an image of a letter vonnegut wrote to one of his peers back in the '60s. He was writing to someone hired to teach at the Iowa writer's workshop. My favorite line: "Every so often you will go nuts. All of a sudden the cornfields get you."

humans are so interesting, all the time. a challenge for this day - pay attention.

"it's really scary to be alive and to be human"

"I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it's really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid. And that the reasons...

That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we're so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we're here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we're not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion.

Well for me, as an American male, the face I'd put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing's enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there's a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff. And my guess is that that's been what's going on, ever since people were hitting each other over the head with clubs. Though describable in a number of different words and cultural argots. And that our particular challenge is that there's never been more and better stuff comin' from the outside, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole.

Personally, I believe that if it's assuageable in any way it's by internal means. And I don't know what that means. I think it's fine in some way. I think it's probably assuageable by internal means. I think those internal means have to be earned and developed, and it has something to do with, um, um, the pop-psych phrase is lovin' yourself.

It's more like, if you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do this."

- David Lipsky, quoting David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace