a few scattered thoughts on following christ in the midst of power

When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” 

When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” 

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Matthew 19:22-26

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently, and the thoughts that have been circling through my head feel important but also fragmented and hard to articulate. 

1.) When I was down in Harrisonburg a few weeks ago, I was talking with a friend who had just completed a two year term with MCC in the country of Colombia. She brought a Colombian friend with her, a woman who spoke only Spanish. During our conversation, she asked, is it okay if I translate while we talk? I nodded, not thinking much of it, and later she said thanks - I know it probably doesn't mean much to you, but it's important. She doesn't mind observing what's going on, but then it's just sort of watching a bunch of rich kids hanging out; it means so much more for her to be able to be part of it, you know?

I felt startled. What do you  mean, a bunch of rich kids? I'm used to seeing myself as pretty solidly average, like: sure, I have a car and a college degree and I grew up going on vacations and going to summer camp and going boating on the Susquehanna, but - I went to public school! I buy dried beans in bulk! The litany in my head is something like there's never enough there's never enough there's never enough.

So odd, that shift in perspective. A Colombian woman sees me, my average self, and thinks: rich kid. 

2.) I told Thia, that weekend, that I thought maybe Early Church had ruined me for normal life. I was thinking of my home group, of Brian and Rachel, a couple who are married with a year-old kid. They live in a tiny apartment and don't own a car; they don't seem to want much of anything. I don't think I'm any happier than they are, I told Thia. There I was, a week into my new 40+ hour a week job, living on my own in Bethesda, one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S., starting to realize for real that money doesn't equal happiness.

3.) It's strange, I told Meg. It's strange to live and work in a place that hums along just fine without paying any attention to spirit, to soul, to sacredness. I'm not sure what to make of it.

4.) I went to church in Maryland for the first time this weekend. A woman from NIH who graduated from Goshen contacted me and told me about a Mennonite church near D.C. So I checked it out and I like it; everyone was friendly, they invited me to the potluck after the service. It felt familiar, like a blend between CMCL and something from EMU. I felt cheerful on the way home; fond, almost, and I didn't even mind the few miles on the Beltway. It was strange, because usually I hate driving in this area.

What to pull from these scattered threads...I've been thinking, I guess, that the Christian life ought to be seen not as rules, but as a path towards thriving. It is very hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, and I am learning this new each day. I don't think that God means don't have money, but - it makes sense to me, to be wary of it. I think that Brian and Rachel are more free than I am, although they have less. The words of the gospel make sense in their context in a way that they don't in Bethesda. I feel that very clearly. The lives that my friends live in that little community in Harrisonburg don't make much sense in context of wealth and power, in context of this wealthy suburb of Washington D.C. 

[I told Thia, that weekend, that the people I rub elbows with every day might look at people from Early Church and pity them, but I can imagine Brian and Rachel showing up to visit me and pitying the people living in the huge houses around me, thinking they don't understand what life is about. (I am afraid, maybe, of growing into one of those people, of becoming someone, someday, that my friends from Early Church would pity). And so there God is, leveling the playing field, raising the weak to challenge the strong. And yet: how impossible it would be to explain this to anyone I work with!]

How to live with integrity, I've been asking myself. What does that mean? 

In regards to attending church, I guess it's easy to feel like it's an obligation, like it's a rule. Christian? Go to church. But the feeling I had coming home today makes me think, again, that the Christian life is just a path towards thriving. It is not good for (wo)man to be alone. It is good to be connected, to be loved... I was happy to be at church today, and happy on the way home. I will go back, I suspect, because I want to be thriving, because I want my spirit to feel whole.

Who then can be saved? I wonder, looking around at the power and money flowing through the streets of the D.C. area. Me? Can I? Can I be saved?

With man this is impossible, Jesus is saying to me, but with God, all things are possible.

'you could put your life where your faith is'

I have a little circle of cardboard hanging in my room, and that's what it says:

you could put your life where your faith is

It's from MCC, and it's meant to sort of prod you into thinking about traveling to do missions. But it came to mind earlier today when I was well into my second hour of talking to Comcast representatives, trying to get my bill for internet access straightened out.

* * *

Most of what I've written this summer on this blog is about rejoicing in the mundane. I have even quoted David Foster Wallace, which totally came back to bite me today. 

I have to confess - I basically have this speech memorized. Not word for word (except a few parts), but I know the ideas really well. I've read this speech dozens of times. I think that it is brilliant, and it pretty much articulates the way that I want to live. 

So that is the history of this funny, ironic, enlightening moment today.

* * *

I was getting so, so frustrated today when I was talking to the Comcast people. I kept getting transferred around on the phones, and the hold music was starting to drive me up the walls.  The first guy had this really heavy accent, and after that it was like my annoyance threshold had been crossed. Everything else just put me more in the red zone. After getting transferred the third time to a different department, I could feel my anger settling into my body. And then I heard the hold music on the phone, and thought this line: soul-killing muzak or corporate pop. 

And then I was sitting there, thinking are you kidding me? I was thinking - this is where the rubber meets the road. This is my chance to put my life where my faith is. 

* * *

"By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do. "

* * *

 Like he says - like I've put on this blog before - it is almost unimaginably hard to force myself to consider the other person. I am always the center of my own existence, and to try to get outside of that is so, so hard. But today, after a struggle, it happened. When the 3rd (or 4th) person I spoke to on the phone told me I had to go chat with someone on the internet, instead of flipping out (what do you mean I need to USE THE INTERNET! I DON'T HAVE ANY INTERNET, LADY!), I said thank you, have a nice day, good-bye now. And I went and internet-chatted a comcast guy in the EMU library, and he told me that the deal I had signed up for wasn't available in my area (my computer screen clearly showed "available in zipcode 22802," which is Harrisonburg), and though I could feel my blood-pressure rising again, I told him thank you for your help, I see, thank you, goodbye. And I thought about how dismal it would be to sit by a phone every day, answering to people like me who were so annoyed and angry. I thought about the new testament verse that says "in humility, value others above yourselves."  I thought about Jesus living as a servant. 

It seems impossible, sometimes. Impossible to live the way that I know I ought to. But little by little, as I grow and experience grace and meditate on the life of Jesus, I bring more and more of my self in line with my ideals. Little by little I learn to put my life where my faith is. 

Thoughts on Advent; Life is Vast & Wonderful; Thia is home

This past week has been overwhelming: anatomy lab exam (cumulative), biochem presentation prep; finishing ceramics things; Christmas parties, etc., etc.

And on Saturday Thia came back from South Africa. So many stories shared already, so much left to hear.

Today at church we were focused, of course, on advent. On waiting; on what we are waiting for. It was a good morning, and what made it even better was that after the service was over my home group presented me with a basket of food - cookies and an orange and coffee and tea and pretzels - a Christmas present and finals care-package all in one.

I know lots of people who are critical of church & have been hurt by churches; I am sometimes one of these people. But I am beginning to see (and to know deep in my bones) the ways in which it is possible to become part of a family (even when your family is far away) through a community of faith. I love Early Church. I feel loved there. My Advent prayer for this afternoon is that as we wait in expectation for a future redemption we do not settle for anything less than striving to live into the Kingdom of God now.

i'm starting to feel like the only thing i blog about is church

...but i feel like it is more interesting to read about than, say, the hours per week i spend doing organic chemistry or reading paradise lost.

anyway, i was at the early church today and i knew it would be an awesome morning as soon as i stepped through the screen door and heard jason singing Farther Along. (i was completely right. it was an absolutely beautiful church service).

things that i loved this morning:

ron's prayer: help us to hear Your word so that we can be changed.
the paper globes hanging from the ceiling, like multi-colored jellyfish.
an understanding of the necessity of silence - the way that we had time this morning to sit in silence and to greet our neighbors.
the old man with filmy eyes and damp fingers who grabbed my hands when i went to the counter to get coffee.
little children; the boy who played the drum while lucas was singing.
the trisagion remix (love, love, love. holy immortal, have mercy on us).
walking into the service this morning and hearing 'farther along.'
jason praying for oppressed women.
someone prayed for syria during the Prayers of the People.
conversation during lunch with an EMU grad who had taken classes with some of my professors
connections with lessons from my cross-cultural - martin said that we can take risks because we are not afraid of death. he said, i don't want to change what Jesus said, but maybe we can read it like 'You cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless you are like an adolescent.' 
the thought that our waiting for a future redemption should be something full of hope.
singing 'I bind my heart this tide.' mmm hymns.
all of the men with beards. they make me smile; i think because i feel like i'm stepping back in time or something...
beautiful people all around me.

i should be sleeping right now

but it is almost fall break, so whatever, i can deal with a little lack of sleep.

i found an online copy of a C.S. Lewis essay (http://www.audiowebman.org/bbc/books/articles/cslewis.htm) and was sidetracked - i was all ready to go to bed and then while i was drinking my cup of tea i got online and of course i stumbled across something interesting. here is my new favorite quote:

"It would be difficult, and, to me, repellent, to suppose that Jesus never asked a genuine question, that is, a question to which he did not know the answer. That would make of  his humanity something so unlike ours as scarcely to deserve the name. I find it easier to believe that when he said "Who touched me?" (Luke 7:45) he really wanted to know."

Church :)

This morning I biked to the Early Church and got there are few minutes early, just enough to get to have a brief conversation with someone who goes to church there year-round. And then my friend Taylor sat next to me when he arrived, and then we sang the trisagion remix (it is so nice to have people know you), and then the sermon was about communion (the mystery of the sacrament, the miracle of it), and then we had communion and I stood around a table with 8 people I didn't know and recieved the bread, the cup, I passed it on, and then we had prayers of the faithful and I said God, be with my friend Thia who is traveling in South Africa. Reveal yourself to her. We pray to the Lord and all around me voices echoed Lord! Hear our prayer!

The trisagion, for those of you who don't know, is an ancient hymn that is commonly used in Orthodox and Catholic churches. The text of it and a melody is in one of the hymnal supplements. The words are:

Holy God

Holy Mighty

Holy Immortal

Have mercy on us

The Early Church has taken the words and created a new melody for it - if you search YouTube for the trisagion hymn, you will see that traditionally it is a sort of slow chant (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPgT7--3Q0E). I happen to think that the orthodox way of singing it is beautiful - we just sing it differently. A lot of life, hand drums, everyone just sort of adding their own harmonies, sometimes just singing over and over have mercy on us, have mercy on us.

What a mystery it is: that what was unseen and eternal became visible, taking the form of flesh and blood; that Christ invites us to take the mystery and miracle of his incarnation into our bodies; that we can pray to the immortal, mighty God to have mercy upon us. Thank you, God, for mystery and miracles. Amen.