Category Archives: Journal

Lessons, Formal and Informal

Like all college reunions, this one provoked nostalgia, but it tied my student years to events of the present day, too

As we shared past experiences, I developed a new appreciation for my professors in that southern Christian college. The place was, I now realize, an island of growth in a sea of a less than Christian time and place. We could ask questions, express doubts, and be stimulated by a faculty remarkable for a combination of intellectual toughness and Christian transformation.

If our professors exemplified the best of Christian scholarship, the college’s administration taught me another lesson. We southern young people, brought up to be polite and courteous, rebelled against the food served in the cafeteria. Rather humorous in the light of the social ills we could have chosen to rebel against.

Nevertheless, I learned what happens when two sides of an issue face each other, especially when one occupies an inferior position, as we students did. The college administration insisted on meeting us with cold logic, irritated that unformed students could question their assertion that the food was acceptable according to institutional norms.

The deeper issue was not the food but our desire to be taken seriously, to be listened to.

I think about that time when I study the youthful (and not so youthful) protestors of today. I am not much of a protestor. I’d rather dialog with those with whom I disagree. Protests tend to encourage a them/us atmosphere, even lead to violence. Nevertheless, those protested against, usually the stronger side, can seize it as a chance to dialog, not yielding to the temptation to name call or label or dismiss the protestors as the worthless ignorant. Better if both groups learn respect for the other, even journey toward a bridge that both may cross, a bridge formed by two opposing views coming together in a new and stronger joining.

Vespers

The setting for much of my novel Quiet Deception is a college campus. The campus is fictional, as is the story, but my own college experiences cast the mood.

Those experiences, and others barely remembered, surfaced when my husband and I visited my college for an alumni reunion, my first visit since my graduation. Old friends jogged memories. A stroll past my former dorm room whispered of bonds shaped during midnight talk sessions. Bitter sweetness, too, as we passed students, their decisions yet to be made, possibilities before them, as they once were for me.

The college vesper service knit these disparate musings into a small epiphany, the kind that bless us from time to time. The symbols of my religion, rock solid, touched centuries of Christian faith through times of growth, decline, and resurrection.

Vespers, the service of transition from the day’s activities to a time of rest, spoke of God’s presence in all of life’s transitions.

Day is done, but love unfailing dwells ever here;

Shadows fall, but hope, prevailing, calms every fear.

God our Maker, none forsaking, take our hearts, of Love’s own making,

Watch our sleeping, guard us waking, be always near.

(“Day is Done,” James Quinn)

The Unwired World and Victor Hugo

My husband and I accidentally became part of the unwired world. On a recent trip to my college reunion in Birmingham, Alabama, we discovered that we had left behind not only our laptop but our iPad. We gazed in horror at ten days ahead with no internet connection other than what we could snatch from those hotel lobby communal computers.

No access to instant maps, weather, and the news. And what about my blog posts? Overseeing a contest I was involved in?

Well, I wrote the blog hurriedly, but the Hampton Inn computer sufficed. I learned to dart through my email. No dawdling when another hotel visitor paces on the other side of the glass door waiting his turn.

But how would we exist without our internet fix? None of that early morning time shaping my latest work in progress, either.

My husband contented himself with the only print novel we had brought along. I jealously guarded my Kindle, on which I had recently downloaded our next book club selection, Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. I had thought its old-fashioned prose would turn me off, suitable only for releiving bordom on the cramped airplane ride. Instead, as I took the time to savor it, I relished the beginning chapters that set the atmosphere with its naration of the old Bishop’s care for the vulnerable ones. When Jean Valjean finally appeared on the scene, I eagerly turned the electronic page to savor the Bishop’s handling of Valjean when he was caught with the Bishop’s silver service.

I lost myself in the story when the Bishop told the authorities that not only had he given the silver to Valjean, but that he had meant to give him some silver candlesticks (which the thief had missed in his hurried departure from the Bishop’s residence) and handed these over as well. I’ve never seen a piece of fiction illustrate Jesus’ instructions to give to those who take from you. It exemplified the Christian ethic: giving instead of hoarding, forgiving instead of retribution, loving instead of despising those who have broken society’s rules.

I may have grasped the story reading it hurriedly between my time on the computer, but not with the delight that this leisurely read allowed me.

 

 

The Strength of Tension

As an American Christian living in Saudi Arabia, I found clues to my own people.

When we Western expatriates hiked in the desert, we met groups of Bedouin Arabs who welcomed us, women as well men. Often the women did not even cover their heads. In the cities, however, Saudi women not only wore black abiyah robes and head coverings, but often veiled their faces and wore gloves. They appeared to be more isolated than their rural counterparts. Apparently, modern city lifestyles challenged tradition. The more conservative practices indicated a reaction to such challenge.

In times of change, Christians, like everyone else, cling to what we have always known. When our beliefs are questioned, we become like ethnic immigrant communities. We draw in together for protection against a larger society that follows a different set of rules.

Yet we Christians need both those with new ideas and those who would teach us the wisdom found in our core beliefs. Conservatives need liberals to remind them of larger issues, of the need for Christians to clamor for social justice and of the awful price which rampant consumerism exacts. Liberals need conservatives to remind them that Christianity without a crucified and resurrected Christ may become little more than a political party or a social club.

It is the tension of opposite forces coming together, we are told, that gives the arch its strength.

What Is It You Want To Do?

The best guides and teachers do more than pass along information. They enable followers to find their own unique paths.

I once worked as a planner for historic preservation in five counties nestled in the north Georgia hills. I guided community groups who respected their historic heritage and wished to pass that heritage on to future generations. I understood my job not as one who merely gives out information, but as one who enables.

Typically, a group of citizens from one of the area’s small towns would call me in for consultations on historic preservation. The main task I performed was to ask “What is it you want to do?” When we had determined that, I would guide them in brainstorming the best ways to accomplish their goal.

I think the idea of enablement has carried into the writing I do, including this blog. The objectives are wider now than historic preservation. My later job as a Foreign Service officer turned me on to the wider world, its cultures, and how we, especially we Christians, relate to it. An ever changing world calls for Christians to explore new ways of dealing with it.

I would like to enable Christians and seekers to think about their place in the seething globe we now inhabit. I want to help them understand world events and trends, then to find their calling.

We no longer can concern ourselves only with this country or its domestic issues. Christ’s call is to go into all the world.

 

Science and Will

Science is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.

Science gave us antibiotics. We use them to vanquish horrible diseases and save lives. We overuse them and create superbugs.

Scientific advances gave us the automobile, which allows us undreamed of independence. It also leads to increased isolation of the elderly, the young, the handicapped, and the poor, who have less access to automobiles.

Science deals with physical processes. What we do with those physical processes and the decisions we make that lead to good or evil are determined by our morality, by our faith in what we cannot always prove.

Some would say that education and reason are the tools for deciding what is right. But none of us has perfect knowledge. At some point along the continuum, we have to jump off into faith.

And even the best of us react first in our own interest if what we value is threatened. All of us act unreasonably at times as far as the common good is concerned.

We often know what we should do. What we lack is the will to do it. Some process other than the material has to transform our will and give us the ability not just to know right, but to do it.

Love more than any other force I know has the power to transform the will to act for the good of all, not just for ourselves.

 

The Tolling Bell

The latest headlines tell of yet another weather-related tragedy. Over a hundred people were killed by a tornado in Joplin, Missouri. We feel sorrow for the affected individuals and families, as we felt for the victims of tornadoes in Alabama and other states a few weeks ago.

When those earlier storms missed the people of Joplin, surely no one would have blamed them for experiencing relief, but now this second wave of fierce tornadoes has hit their city.

At the moment, I’m sitting in my “safe” home in the Pacific Northwest. So far this year, our main complaint is the cold, rainy spring. But I know disaster could strike here, too. In a moment or two, nature could unleash tragedy: earthquake, tsunami, or perhaps a volcanic eruption.

What’s the message for us when we read of tragedy in another part of the country or the world? The message is that those people are us. Because one day it will be us, if not in some natural catastrophe, then a personal one. No one who lives an average life escapes “storms.”

We help victims with prayers, money, and  other resources as we are able and as appropriate. More than this, we understand our own vulnerability and are inspired to live our short span of life as unselfishly as possible.

The poet and priest, John Donne, wrote:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

 

When the Olive Tree Fails

What are black swans? No, not the movie and not the waterbird. The term “black swan” is the current buzzword for those catastrophes that occur once in a lifetime, or once in a hundred years, or once in a thousand years or maybe even for the first time ever.

Black swans cannot be predicted in any definite sense. They can be natural like the earthquake in Japan or the recent Southeast tornadoes or the Mississippi floods. They can be economic like the Great Recession that began in 2008. They can include violent solar storms on the sun which may interfere with electric grids on the earth.

After a black swan event, the lives of those affected may change drastically. Such a catastrophe can change whole countries, as the earthquake did in Japan.

Some believe that efforts to avoid the natural rhythm of ups and downs make the inevitable event more catastrophic than it would have been. Flooding from the Mississippi River is supposed to occur fairly regularly, these people say. To attempt to prevent all flooding on the great river only assures that eventually a massive flood will sweep away even the flood controls.

The attempt to prevent all forest fires only means that a huge conflagration eventually will destroy a larger area than would many smaller fires.

Attempting to prevent all business collapses only leads to larger business collapses in the future, so the thinking goes.

I don’t have the expertise to judge these ideas, but I do wonder if we have come to believe that nothing bad is ever supposed to happen. We are never supposed to suffer, never supposed to be depressed, never supposed to be denied our wishes. We have difficulty accepting conditions like unhappiness, old age, death.

To accept that we are finite and vulnerable surely is a mark of wisdom. Spending our resources to fight winnable battles is worthwhile. To think we can conquer all misfortune with material wealth, however, is absurd. Better to invest in our spiritual lives and in our relationships with our families, friends, and communities. These will be of value when the next black swan visits.

 

Life and Death and Grace

I recently was hospitalized for knee surgery. It is almost always successful. As a writer, however, I am gifted or cursed with an imagination.

Suppose they damage my brain with too much anesthesia? Suppose I’m cut off from oxygen too long? Suppose they slip while cutting whatever they have to do to fix the knee? And so on.

The hardest is the point of no return. The anesthesiologist has politely explained exactly what will happen. He appears to be competent, but what do I know? I tell my husband goodbye. They wheel me down the hall. I remind myself that friends and loved ones are praying for me. I try to develop one of the characters in my latest novel in progress to keep my mind off what I have chosen to do. Then I fall off the cliff.

The next minute, as it seems to me, I’m waking up. They are cheerily asking me questions. I appear to be alive and in my right mind. My leg is still there, swathed in bandages.

Later, wheeled to my room, greeted by my husband, who tells me everything went splendidly, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. I thank God that I have access to competent physicians and to health insurance that means the access is affordable.

I am grateful for God’s gift of life. Yet, I ponder, as one is wont to do when confronted by unmerited grace, on both death and life, how one is more certain than the other, when we consider our life spans.

One day the operation won’t be successful or one night I shall go to bed and not wake up or I will be in an accident or my health will finally decline into death. When my time comes, I do not want extraordinary measures. In other words, while I rejoice today in my “new” life, I also know that death will be the final result of having been born.

Yes, as a Christian, I believe I shall live eternally but confrontation with my mortality in this life still sobers. God has given me a gift, a gift to be used, not squandered or buried in fear. Used as the good servants did in the parable of the talents, in risk and joy. The time is short.

 

The Cult of Death

Osama bin Laden’s obituary was featured in The Economist this past week. The article mentioned bin Laden’s famous dictum outlining the fundamental difference between his followers and Americans. Americans love life but his followers love death, he said. Apparently he believed this love of death would defeat those who love life.

Are those who love death stronger than those who love life? The signature act of death worshipers is the suicide bomber. Is this activist a type of courageous martyr, who also makes unwilling martyrs of those innocents he or she kills?

Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist, survived a Nazi concentration camp. Like the victim of a suicide bomber, he suffered because of a fanatic’s belief that his life was not of value. Frankl learned much from his concentration camp suffering, but he wrote in his classic Man’s Search For Meaning: “But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning … To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

Jesus did not wish to suffer on the cross. He did so because of love, because he wanted others to live. To die so that others may enjoy better lives, it seems to me, is the only reason to choose death. To love not only our life but the life of our neighbor is the beginning of the strength that defeats evil.

 

Mourning Osama Bin Ladin

I mourn Osama Bin Ladin. Not his death but his life. He wanted to purify the religion, we are told, of his native Saudi Arabia. He thought ideas brought into his country by Western nations were corrupting it. What an awful path he took in his attempt to carry out what in itself could have led to serious discussion and change within his country.

He could have chosen persuasion and a vocation as a peaceful spiritual leader, something like Gandhi. He could have reasoned and debated to bring changes. He could have kept open his own life to spiritual growth and change and listened to others with different opinions.

Instead, like too many people who desire change, he thought he had the right to kill people to bring about those changes. He wasn’t able to understand the rights of others to choose or to understand that no man, however close to God he thinks he may be, is God.

Perhaps humility is the first choice of those who would change others.

 

Meditation on a Saturday before Easter

Theologians may debate the meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice. For me, love is the only force that overcomes evil. Jesus’ willingness to die for us is the love that defeats evil. Love is the action that evil cannot answer.

In the sacrifice of himself, God throws out the challenge for evil’s ultimate defeat.

As we live out that love and compassion, we strike back as part of God’s army against evil.

Recharge

The geography and times in which I live can leave me tongue-tied in the expression of my faith. As readers of this blog know, I live in the Pacific Northwest. Its coffee house milieu is a setting for militant relativism. Speaking within it requires one to learn a new vocabulary. In addition, several friends carry remnants of a childhood religion that bordered on the abusive. Religious phrases that are meaningful to me remind them of intolerance and hurt.

The need to reset my spiritual compass is one reason I attend writers’ conferences that cater to Christian writers. This week I attended such a conference. As in similar professional gatherings, I networked with other writers, agents, and editors and attended seminars on writing. However, this one, set among California redwoods, recharged my batteries and connected me with my center.

On Palm Sunday morning the compass discovered its lost direction. As we sang about love and redemption, I wept as the divine touched me and restraints loosed for a season.

The Danger of Daydreams

Be careful what you dream about, what you wish for.

Once I had a good job as a computer programmer with a large company. The company reimbursed its employees for courses taken toward a college degree. What an opportunity, I thought, to advance my career. The career bored me, but perhaps advancement toward a higher position would vanquish the boredom.

Probably the company had in mind that those studying for degrees would earn them in computer science or business. I dutifully checked out computer and business courses in a local university catalog. Then I made a mistake.

What would I study if I studied what I really wanted to? It seemed innocent enough, thumbing through that catalog. I stopped at the section on geography and examined the courses—maps, other countries and cultures, and the ways different peoples on the globe interact. Before I knew it, temptation sucked me in.

When school began, I enrolled to earn a master’s degree in geography.

“Why are you studying that? What are you going to do with it?” people asked me.

“I don’t know what I’ll do with it. I just like it.”

After the school awarded me my degree, I flipped through a newspaper one day. A career columnist wrote about something called the U. S Foreign Service. The Foreign Service, I learned, was the name of the diplomatic corps of the State Department, the diplomats who serve in embassies and consulates all over the world.

A long shot. But, hey, I can dream, can’t I? So I applied, filled out reams of forms, took the exams, and met other requirements. (The State Department now has a website, making the process easier)

Somehow, (God was in it, I believe) I ended up as a consular officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in places I’d only dreamed of visiting. And changing jobs and countries before I got bored. And continuing to learn in language courses and country studies. And witnessing some momentous events in history. I went to areas of the world I had prepared for without knowing it by studying those areas in my geography classes.

That dreaming’ll get you in trouble. Your heart may take over.

 

Creation of a Villain

Not long ago I entered the “Clash of the Titles,” a contest which matches passages from recent novels to determine the best fictional devices. Events have ranged from the best romantic scene to the best hook to pull readers into the novel. My particular contest called for the best “character description of an antagonist.”

I quoted a passage about Antun, the antagonist from my novel Singing in Babylon. In explaining how Antun developed in the story, I said he wasn’t anyone I actually knew but someone I would both fear and loathe.

Yet, as Antun’s character grows in the story, we learn that his brother was mistreated and killed a few years before. Antun lived to exact revenge. Like many “villains,” he had suffered a wrong. What made Antun a villain and not a hero is that he chose to react to the wrong by committing more wrongs.

As Jesus indicated in the Sermon on the Mount, to treat someone well who treats you well is no great feat.To overcome hurt, even to love the one who does ill to you is the badge of only a few and exemplifies what Jesus both taught and lived out.

 

Logic and Feeding Multitudes

We can’t even predict the weather accurately beyond a few days. The logical world we know as manageable by our current knowledge—math, physics, and so on—represents only a tiny part of the universe, according to something called chaos theory.

But chaos, so I understand, is not really chaos. It’s part of an order we don’t yet understand, like how to predict the weather.

That’s the way I look at Jesus’ teachings. They sometimes seem against our known wisdom. Giving up to have. Serving instead of accumulating. Putting our trust in what we cannot see rather than in this world’s material objects.

I see Jesus’ miracles in a new way, like the feeding of the five thousand. The disciples studied the crowd and wondered how they were going to feed the people, far from homes and fast food restaurants.

Jesus asked them what they should do.

They answered within the context of the world they knew. The money they had wouldn’t buy what they needed, even if they could find something to buy. They had the lunch a small boy had offered, but how ridiculous to think that could do anything.

Jesus had something else in mind. No one went away hungry.

Surely God knows of powers and systems, of universes and infinities for which we have no inkling.

 

Easter and a Novel

I knew it can’t be scientifically proven, but when Easter arrives later in the year, spring also seems to arrive later. So it is this year. Wasn’t it almost a month ago that bumps appeared on the apple tree limbs below my window? Yet they still have not budded, let alone blossomed.

But God, I trust, is there, in the growing, there in the waiting, which seems forever. A hard winter in some respects, or at least a long one. Lots of rain, more snow than the island’s usual vanishing trace.

Our church’s Lenten writer reminded us today of journeys into the unknown, like the Israelites in Exodus.We enter into the unknown and try to do the things we did before to overcome it, as some Israelites did in the wilderness—working more, going out on their day of rest to harvest manna and finding none. Instead, perhaps the waiting calls for more resting and pondering, less activity.

I have an idea for a story. I find it cannot be forced. Like this season, it comes in its own time.

 

Faith in a Time of Starvation

The life of faith, one of our church writers says in a Lenten devotional, is not for the timid. She discusses the seventh chapter of Luke’s gospel. In this passage, Jesus was astounded at the faith of a Roman commander. Across a chasm of cultural rank and religion, this soldier had faith that Jesus could heal someone he cared for.

God’s creation seems to be rebelling: volcanos halt our flying machines for days. Earthquakes demolish both struggling and developed nations with massive loss of life. Floods in Pakistan, droughts in Russia, unusual levels of snow in the U.S., all reveal our insignificance before such upheavals.

The fuel we pump from the earth has not been without cost: the Gulf Coast knew despair as a spill poured the black liquid for weeks on fishing grounds and beaches before it was halted.

The home, our supposedly one safe investment, triggered a huge recession when abuses led to collapse.

Rebellions take place in countries that supposedly would never have them. Will they lead to democratic governments or more terrorism? We don’t know.

I have often returned to a few verses in the Bible from one of the “minor” prophets, Habakkuk:

“Though the fig tree do not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.” (RSV)

Faith in a time of starvation, physical or spiritual, gives courage that sustains and transforms.

 

Thoughts on Japan

So what’s the lesson for us in the horrible tragedy that shook Japan (literally and figuratively )? For me it’s the negation of the idea that life is always upwardly progressive, both personally and nationally.

Who goes through life without problems? Death of a loved one, a debilitating illness or handicap, or a job loss may afflict us quite suddenly. In Japan in a few seconds, the lives of multitudes, including whole families, were wiped out.

Of all people, however, Christians have the resources to deal with these traumas, nor should we act surprised when they happen. Read Jesus’s story in the gospels. It includes torture, crucifixion, and death. But it ends in resurrection and life.

The Christian call is not to a trouble-free life. Yes, we know times when God answers miraculously. But we are not always healed. We may suffer traumatic experiences. Physically, we all die. The best marriage in the world will end.

Yet Jesus, in the midst of a life far from the glory he knew since the beginning with the Father, enjoyed life. He knew what was coming, but he still attended gatherings and feasts. He never condemned having a good time with friends.

Jesus knew how to separate the transient, both joys and sorrows, from the eternal life and triumph that we are made for.

 

Out of Our Comfort Zone

In my current Pacific Northwest home, many do not view Christianity with the favor it enjoyed in my earlier life in the American South. Indeed, the religious landscape has changed everywhere. Judaeo-Christian beliefs are no longer taken for granted. In addition, I landed here through a circuitous route that included several years in Muslim-majority countries.

As might be expected, the journey tested my beliefs and gave me new insights. The process, however, strengthened core beliefs, bolstered by the agape love modeled by Jesus.

Perhaps my journey mirrors the journey of Christianity in America. We Christians were once favored; now we have to earn that favor. We have to compete with other views. Our Christian convictions must stand on their own merit.

In the long run, such a process may strengthen our faith.