Category Archives: Journal

Community at Christmas

 

This year, the electricity stayed on. The forecast remains stuck in rain mode rather than snow. A few years ago, it snowed, and the power was off for days before our advent concert. We came anyway and huddled together in our winter coats and blankets, listening to a program powered by a generator. Regardless, the blessings are the same, the songs are heard and absorbed. The old story, is as precious as ever in a still-dark world, where innocents cannot be protected.

Our end of the island, about an hour north of Seattle by ferry, is home to around 15,000 citizens. Older islanders have been here for generations, farming, logging, and fishing. Newcomers join, desiring a slower pace. The island ambience attracts artists, who stay full-time or part-time between work in other places. Writers, sculptors, painters, dancers, musicians, dramatists, and others ply their craft.

The holiday season calls on much of this artistic talent, creating so many gatherings and performances that one has difficulty attending all of them. For our church’s advent concert this year, we knew to come early, for seats filled up quickly with islanders, not all from the church. We hardly breathed during the performance of musicians and readers. Where did all this talent come from? How blessed we are.

We know we are blessed. We have our computers, iPhones, iPads, Kindles, and Nooks, but they work only as long as we have electricity. We marvel at another blessing that our country struggles to keep—that of community.

Serendipity in Marseille

 

A serendipity can be defined as an unexpected happiness. During a low time in my life that seemed endless, the playing of the Pachelbel Cannon on a Sunday afternoon charged my inner being with the certainty that, eventually, all would be well.

Years later on an afternoon in Marseille, France, my husband and I searched for a place to eat. We had arrived in the French coastal city to spend one night before heading out early the next day on a ferry. It would take us across the Mediterranean to the historic city of Algiers.

We wanted only to eat and collapse in bed back in our hotel. I was a newly assigned junior economic officer at the U.S. Embassy in Algiers. I wandered in the anxious space one inhabits before entering unknown territory. Could I handle this assignment? What about the threatened insurgency in Algeria? The Embassy had recently evacuated all minor dependents because of terrorist threats.

This being Europe, not many restaurants were open in the afternoon. We stumbled onto a McDonald’s that, like its prototypes everywhere, was open all day.

We went in, bought our food, and settled upstairs in the almost empty restaurant. Then we heard the sounds of classical music. The McDonald’s may have been American-franchised, but this was France. A classical pianist played below. We enjoyed our Big Macs within the pleasant atmosphere of Mozart and Beethoven.

Yes, in a couple of days we would climb the hill out of Algiers’ Casbah and follow the narrow streets into an uncertain future in that troubled land. But for the moment, the music calmed my anxieties and prepared me to cope with what lay ahead.

Leaving Home: Scribblings From Exile

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor executed by the Nazis in World II, wrote: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow Him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.” (from The Cost of Discipleship)

The reason I title my blogs, “Scribblings from Exile,” is that I believe Christians, even in America, are in exile. The blessings of democracy compel us to perform earthly citizenship duties, but we are, as the apostle Paul called us in one of his letters, ambassadors from another kingdom. Jesus rebuked his disciples for supposing he intended to be a political king.

A theme of my story Singing in Babylon is the understanding of this calling into exile. Kate and Philip, American Christians, feel themselves in exile when they journey to work in Saudi Arabia, a Muslim majority country. On returning home to the United States, they realize they are still exiles. They do not belong to the consumer culture of the West any more than they belong to the Muslim-majority Middle East.

If we Christians in Western countries understood the call to die to our culture, as we might if we understand Bonhoeffer, would our message be listened to rather than ignored or ridiculed?

That Human Trait: To Demand Meaning

 

From all indications, U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens dedicated his intellect and talents to serving his country and the cause of peace. Yet he died, asphyxiated in a burning building set on fire by citizens of a nation he tried to help. Three other Americans died in Libya as well, victims of riots caused by an obscure video none of them had any connection with.

News stories interrupt our days with other reports of rampages by sick people who kill and maim innocent strangers. In the Middle East. In our own neighborhoods. How do we respond? How do we find direction?

Viktor Frankl in his classic Man’s Search for Meaning did not believe one should seek suffering. A survivor of Nazi concentration camps, Frankl did believe that when suffering was unavoidable, we could find meaning in it. His book is a witness to his beliefs.

When we face times of suffering, Frankl indicates, we are better able to bear them if we have purpose, a reason for living. During such times as these, those of us who are Christians renew our commitment to our faith in a purposeful God. We do not worship suffering—Christ teaches us to love life—but suffering is a part of our story. Our salvation came through suffering. We may be lost in confusion for a time, like the disciples who stumbled through an awful Friday and Saturday. As author Tony Campolo’s book title states, however: It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Comin’.

It’s Friday.

Impromptu Community; A Moment of Unexpected Grace

 

Most of us have experienced impromptu community, an unexpected incident that binds us to the people around us. Passengers on a plane bound for the United States on September 11, 2001, had to land unexpectedly in Newfoundland, Canada, when U.S. airspace closed following terrorist attacks in the U.S.

The Newfoundlanders showered unexpected hospitality on the passengers, lodging them in schools and churches, and feeding them. This hospitality, coupled with the horrifying events of the day, bonded the passengers to each other as well as to their hosts.

Perhaps a serendipity, a surprising moment of grace lifts us up. Eventually, the moment passes and we return to our own lives. Yet, that transforming moment pushes us gently toward hope.

A friend sent me a link to such a serendipity. First: a pedestrian square filled with tourists, couples, babies in strollers, children, the bored, the young, and the old. Then it becomes, for an instant, a community through the power of music.

Listen to the music, but watch also the touch of a sudden community.

 

Atlas and the Vulnerable

 

I read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, several years ago. The message, as I remember, is the burden on those who strive and work of carrying the rest of the world. “The rest,” Rand believed, are parasites who live off the labor of the producers.

Ayn Rand was born in Russia and witnessed the horror of the communist takeover there. America became her ideal, and she immigrated to the United States as a young woman. She believed in unfettered capitalism, a complete separation of economics and state.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy may work well for those of us endowed with the blessings of health and self worth. But not all of us are. None of us is immune to a catastrophe that could ruin us. And why do we presume that those with power will always use it in beneficial ways? Without laws, the powerful too often become corrupt.

Years ago I saw a play given by homeless people about homelessness. It taught me some of the many reasons for their condition. Some homeless are shiftless and lazy. Some work hard but make poor choices or are victimized by shysters. Some suffer misfortunes that are beyond anyone’s control like medical illnesses that could strike any of us and leave us helpless.

Vulnerability is closer to all of us than the more fortunate sometimes suppose. If we desire a civilized society, we must provide ways for the widows and orphans to overcome their vulnerability so they, too, can contribute.

The best welfare we can give a person is the means to find his or her gifts that benefit society. For myself, I know that for any success I have enjoyed in this life, I owe much to the parents who raised me. I began with the advantage of a family who loved me, taught me that I am of worth, and gave me confidence to make my way.  They paid for a college education for me that I might have certain skills. They gave me a love of learning. These are gifts that I did not earn.

The Gift of Ignoring

 

Everyday as I boot up my computer, I try to ignore the items that fly at me off the news page. I don’t check my email, either. I look at the weather and ignore the rest. (This is the Pacific Northwest, where weather is as changeable as young love.) I confess to failing occasionally, but I believe the ability to ignore is a gift worth cultivating.

I’m able to write full time, certainly a blessing. However, blessings can be wasted. I must plan my time intentionally, guided by purpose. First I write for several hours. Then I allow myself a brief check of email in case an urgent one requires immediate attention. Otherwise I give only a cursory glance to the digital messages. Then it’s necessary chores: perhaps a marketing task or cooking a casserole or cleaning the house or attending a meeting—whatever obligations I need to meet for that day.

Late in the day, when I’m tired and want to do frivolous stuff for a while, I’ll check email, blogs, maybe some social media sites, eventually the news. I have to work it this way.

The Internet is a bottomless pit that is the best illustration I know of insatiability. You can literally spend all day on it. But if you do, nothing else gets done.

An intentional life requires discipline, including the gift of ignoring even good things until the right time.

 

Clock Time and the Other Time

 

We measure time by clocks and watches and cell phones. We divide time into minutes, hours, days, years. This measure of time is scientific, verifiable.

But when we wait to find out the results of a loved one’s operation, time creeps. When we are on vacation, time flies. The time you spend in a dentist’s chair may be the same verifiable time you spend sharing kindred thoughts with a friend, but they will not appear the same time to you.

To ask which kind of time is the right one is meaningless. They are not in competition, but measure different processes. Our ability to physically order our lives requires the first kind of time. Our inner selves live by the other time.

We are body and we are soul. To each its proper place.

 

A Time of Wildfires

 

In a time of wildfires in much of the country, my husband and I visit a few acres of family land in eastern Washington. As we pass through the Cascades from the Pacific coast and enter the rain shadow, the landscape changes from lush fir and cedar to the pines of a dryer climate.

We drive partway up the side of a 4,000 foot mountain on a forest service road and park our ancient Toyota truck. After bringing out chairs, we lose ourselves in the hush. Overshadowing us are 10,000 foot peaks, still snow-capped in late June, the result of a wet, cold winter. The sun warms us now, as it draws out the unique perfume emitted by Ponderosa pines. Once in a while we hear the distant hum of a vehicle on the road far below, but the only other sounds are the wind scratching through tree limbs and the birds chattering from hidden perches.

So far this year, no wild fires have threatened, as in Colorado and other states, but we know it could happen here.

A few years ago, in one of the dry years that haunt us also, a wildfire blackened miles. It spread to this mountain. Yet patches of trees seem almost untouched, and life survives in others, too. They shoot out new growth from darkened trunks. Saplings grow, not only pines, but also maples. The slopes shimmer in glades of green, covering over layers of ashes.

God created a nature that works toward healing. Cannot spiritual and emotional scars heal also, like the renewal that blossoms over the burnt areas of our mountain?

 

Love Covers A Multitude of Sins

 

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in Nashville, Tennessee. I never rebelled against the principles instilled in me by that church, despite living in many different cultures and growing beyond a few of the attitudes that infiltrated that age in the South. Why do the bedrock teachings remain as a part of my belief system? Why, when others, less challenged by change than I, leave the religion of their childhood?

The reason for the endurance of the lessons taught me, I think, is love. The song that mentions “a sweet spirit in this place” could have been written about my church. Why would I rebel against love and caring?

Perhaps some of the members of the church were racist. I don’t know for certain because we, at that time a white church to be sure, were never challenged. Ours was a humble, working class membership and not likely to be noticed by those who challenge institutions.

It came easy for me to change my views about race. The church taught love, and the seed thus planted couldn’t be smothered. One picture graced the wall of my childhood Sunday school class as we sang about Jesus loving all the different colored children of the world. A joyful Jesus held hands with a group of children. One was a fair-haired child. Another was a black African boy. The others were, if my memory is correct, a native American and an Asian child.

Teaching love and living it, as that church did, overcomes human failings and allows for later growth, as the title of this passage from the first letter of the apostle Peter suggests.

Reach of Reason, Place of Faith

 

Reason seeks for truth that it can prove. Religion, some say, asks us to believe things that can’t be proved. But why is it assumed that a search for truth is worthwhile? Why is the truth good? By inference, what is bad about untruth? Are we not making a faith decision? That truth is better than untruth?

This scientific age, based on provable truths, brings us untold medical advances. It also brings us moral dilemmas. An individual facing the decision of when to “pull the plug” on life support systems for a loved one may wish for days when the seriously ill could not be kept alive almost indefinitely.

The industrial age allows unprecedented material advantages. It also allows pollution and ecological damage, especially as millions more in countries like India and China enter a more developed stage and seek trappings of the middle class life. We aspire to a lifestyle that strains our resources. As those scarce resources become more expensive, class differences tend to increase. How we deal with issues like the environment and inequality requires faith choices. Hopefully, we reason as far as we have evidence, but eventually we jump off in faith.

Once in a while, a scientist lies, or twists his findings for his own advancement or simply from carelessness. Reason, apparently, doesn’t eradicate all selfishness and mistakes.

Reason is a wonderful gift, but faith provides a different guidance, related to purpose and meaning.

Forming Communities, Not Always of Kin

 

After my father died, my mother rented out a room in our home to boarders. One of the local elementary school teachers rented our second bedroom until she met, fell in love with, and married our church’s minister of music.

Then Mom turned the upstairs into an apartment. During my adolescent years, she rented it to more teachers from the local schools.

It seemed natural to have an expanded “family” around as I was growing up.

Then my brother returned from college and two years in the army. He took over the upstairs until he married and moved out.

As I left for college and then marriage, Mom rented the apartment to young couples. In her declining years before she died, she rented the apartment to a single, working woman.

Looking back, I realize that our community arrangement benefitted us all. The working singles and couples had an affordable place to live. Mom was not by herself as her children moved out. I gained by having young teachers who were, to some extent, role models for me.

Pausing To Catch the Still, Small Voice

 

The conference went well. A spiritual and  intellectual feast resulted from a fortunate confluence: writers and poets on faith like Luci Shaw and Marilynne Robinson, best-selling books from around the globe, and sensitive readers.

Yet I found myself exhausted physically and spiritually at the end of the second day. Tired. A bit lonely as evening came on. Discouraged with my own writing, which seemed so much drivel. Too trite. Too driven by clichés. I found myself in a Dantean wood of sorts.

In this mood I wandered into the college vesper services.

I listened to “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” by William Blake, sung by the college choir. Readers presented more poetry and a reading from Job. More songs. I soared. Perhaps my words might one day soar as well.

As I listened to poetry ancient and modern, I knew why the church, despite human failing, endures still, lighting the way for uncountable billions.

No, I know my words will never quite reach what I desire for them, but I know it is not hopeless. Tomorrow I will try that new beginning on the novel that now teases me.

Hope. That’s the name of it, I think.

 

Waiting for the Alleluias

 

We did not clap during the Good Friday concert at my church last night. It was a somber concert, about grief over the loss of loved ones, but with a tinge of hope that wove a few colors though the black tapestry. We left silently and went home.

Tomorrow morning, God willing, we will enter the sanctuary, black gauze veiling the windows, as quietly as we left it on Good Friday. We will sit as the children gather around the one light in front, and the pastor will begin the story about Jesus and his death. Then suddenly (I never remember quite how), will come the cry, “He is risen!”

 

We will pull the black from the windows, the lights will come on, and the brass instruments and the violins and the organ will blaze the message, “He is risen!” and we will sing our alleluias for the first time in forty days.

For two thousand years, men and women and children have celebrated this event. It is for us, as Cardinal Donald Wuerl said yesterday on the Morning Joe television program, based on fact, the fact of redemption and sacrifice and the conquest of death and our own propensity to sin and harm our fellows.

We need Easter this year, in the midst of hate and doubt and secular power. But then, we have always needed it.

Merely Chance Or A Work in Progress?

 

Does our universe operate on chance only? One sperm out of millions finds an egg. A tornado devastates one town and spares another a few miles away. Yet we have something called the laws of probability. We can’t predict certain things for an individual, but we can predict them for whole populations.

Some cancers, which a generation or so ago appeared to operate on blind chance, we now find are influenced by whether we smoke or by what we eat. The genes we inherit, presumably by “chance” exert influence, but we have some power to mitigate them. As we have more knowledge, we may push back “chance” even further. We may find that we have more responsibility than we supposed to make right choices.

Suppose a purposeful love is the reason we’re here? A love the Greeks called agape love, not confused with romantic love or friendship love or the attraction someone expresses when they say “I love chocolate.”

It’s a love that begins when we’re loved and thus able to respond with love to the one who values us, then we’re able to love others. We don’t love others better than ourselves; we love them as we love ourselves.

But we can’t begin it without being loved first. Something happens, something that begins with love. Our societies and our personal lives seem created to function through love. When we don’t have love, our societies and our individual lives crash.

The Joys of How and Why

A washing machine cleans clothes by the actions of the soap, water, agitator, spin, and other mechanical features. (The how.) An engineer wishing to invent a better machine or a householder looking for a newer model may profitably study these features. The ultimate reason that the machine cleans clothes, however, is because someone wants clean clothes, loads dirty clothes and soap into the machine, and turns it on. (The why.)

A computer math course taught me that we can have other number systems than the one based on ten. Computer systems, at least when I was studying them, are based on the binary system, the on/off properties of two. You go on up to four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and so on. Presumably you can have a system based on threes or thirteens or three thousand and sevens, if you want to. In other words, the possibilities are endless.

A previous blog discussed systems that we, as yet, have no way to predict. The usual example given is the weather, which we still can’t accurately predict beyond two or three days.(In the Puget Sound region, even the prediction of a few hours can be in error.) The author theorized that these systems we can’t predict aren’t really chaotic, but we lack the knowledge to unlock them. And when we answer one question, we find a thousand more waiting.

The universe amazes us with its complexity. Humankind is equally marvelous. The study of both leaves us in awe and provides useful knowledge, but the ultimate why for these marvelous works is beyond science. That journey begins with faith that sends us in another direction.

Writing and Faith

Writing is a journey of faith. You write a novel, spend months, maybe years, fleshing it out, creating characters, not knowing if it will be read by any but an editor who will reject it. Or you pour your passions into an article that may never be accepted for publication.

But isn’t that the way with all of us who give ourselves to a task? Preaching the love of God to an alienated world, working for a better environment, aiding unwed mothers, building low-income housing, relieving hunger, or giving ourselves to a million other worthwhile causes that captivate our passions and may or may not know ultimate success.

In medicine and the sciences, researchers toil for further knowledge or to relieve human suffering. Others give themselves to political causes that grip them.

The journey begins in faith and gives purpose and meaning to one’s life. Which is not to deny that a cause can be in error, as with the suicide bomber who kills not only himself but the innocent. Misguided faith can mask terrible evil.

Nevertheless, those who live only for themselves without any outside interest are to be pitied. Those who are ignorant of faith are surely little more than animal creatures who have waylaid their souls.

Beneath Diversity, A Comforting Order

Our View!

 

As winter began, my husband and I rented lodging on the far edge of the wild Olympic peninsula. No telephone, no television, no Internet. Out the window a few yards away, the boiling Pacific Ocean crashed onto the beach. We scanned the sculpted rocks and the writhing horizon that took away our breath with its beauty.

We stayed only a few days. To gain the full benefit, I think, one needs at least a week, preferably two or three. A couple of days passed before I accustomed myself to the rhythm of the place, before the thoughts began coming, the words forming.

I didn’t miss the telephone (not even our cells worked) or the television. The Internet was the most difficult to do without. No checking on the weather two or three times a day. No news from the outside, which, these days, is perhaps a blessing.

I think what I came away with (along with a measure of deeper peace) is the sense of God’s infinite diversity. Tides four times a day, but each different from the one before. Ceaseless waves, but each one, like a snowflake, different from any other.

This diversity operated within a dependable order. Without order, we could not check tide tables or know light and dark would succeed each other.

Within this comforting order, one is free to create infinitely and never exhaust the possibilities.

Musings After A Christmas Tragedy

Our island community grieved when a tree fell on a car driven by a family on the way to a relative’s house on Christmas Day, causing death and injury. Could God not have stopped that tragedy? Could have but wouldn’t? Would have but couldn’t?

When I was about four, I was happily walking through a field of clover when a bee stung me.  I had unknowingly stepped on the bee, and the bee reacted as bees were supposed to, but I had not wilfully done wrong, any more than the family had done wrong by driving down a road. Nursing my bee sting, I sought my mother’s comfort. Because she loved me, I could overcome a world in which bees sting small children.

Bad things happen that we cannot prevent, even by our best efforts. Such things are evidence, whatever else they are, that we need a relationship outside ourselves to whom we can go for comfort when those things happen.

The Holocaust surely is a tragedy as evil as ever envisioned. It caused some to disavow the idea of a loving God. I see it as evidence, neither of God’s impotence nor of his lack of caring, but as evidence of human failing. The Holocaust was not sent by God. It happened because we sinned, chose hatred. Directly caused by Hitler and the Nazis, yes, but it also may be traced to choices as far back as the religious wars of the 1600’s, which left Germany a devastated nation and led eventually to more wars and ethnic cleansing. The Holocaust came, not from God, but from humans. It is evidence of our choices, for which we need repentance and confession and forgiveness, the only actions that will prevent more Holocausts.

Why should we expect God to solve a problem that we ourselves have created? Nor should we expect God to change the rules of nature, the reaction of a bee to a threat or the natural fall of a tree when its time has come.

Like This, Lord? Surely Not

God Surprises

If we are Christians, we hear this Bible verse often during Advent: “But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his son . . .” (Galatians 4:4, RSV) Though plans for Jesus’ birth may have begun in eternity, their fulfilment surely hit like a tsunami to those involved.

So it must have seemed to a peasant Jewish teenager named Mary. Mary marveled at what God was asking her to do—didn’t seem possible—but she obeyed.

But really, now—the Jews had prayed for the Messiah for centuries, and this is the way God answered their prayers?

Elizabeth Elliot writes in A Slow and Certain Light of the call that came to her to serve among the Auca people, members of whom had killed her husband. She writes of the call: “And when it came, it was as clear as the sunlight. What to do was all mapped out for me exactly, and I had a matter of minutes to make up my mind to do it.”

Years ago, I passed the exam for the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service, but for over two years, nothing happened, so I chose another job, one I fell in love with.  Then, just before a weekend, a woman called from the Department and said I was eligible for entry into the Foreign Service, but I must decide immediately. I asked for the weekend to decide. That weekend I attended a stimulating conference in connection with my current job. I decided I loved that job and would not exchange it for the unknown of the Foreign Service. But I prayed that I would do God’s will. On Monday morning, I told the woman I would accept the offer for the Foreign Service. I still, to this day, cannot explain why I said yes when I planned to say no. An exciting life opened to me that I have never regretted choosing.

Perhaps the key to finding our path is to busy ourselves with what is at hand: applying for jobs, housekeeping, studying, working hard and honestly. We do well whatever comes to our hand and trust that God’s call can best find us there.