Let's See

A few years ago, my dad gave me a newspaper article during Christmas break that he had found while I was away at school, and I have kept it since. It is a short piece (link) written by Garrison Keillor, and the wonder and loveliness of it have haunted me to this day, a sentiment no doubt woven with my quiet surprise at my dad having read and kept a writing that met me in such a real way. In the article, Keillor describes traveling on a bus in Manhattan during a chilled December night, sitting behind a couple he judged to be in their “early 20s:”

“She was a pale-skinned dark-haired beauty, perhaps an Egyptian film star, perhaps not, and the way she laid her head on his shoulder said that they were sweethearts, but he was so cool toward her, so blasé."

He didn’t kiss her once though she clearly wanted him to. I hear him say, ‘I was over at Larry’s when you called. Sorry I didn’t call you back.’ ‘What were you doing?’ she said. ‘Just hanging out.’ His hair was much nicer than a man’s hair should be. Too much time spent on that, and why would you hang around with Larry when you could be with her?”

This glimpse reminds me of how it is to return home from college after months spent away from home, away from the smell of my closet, a soft blend of laundry and old books, from the quiet murmuring of one of my parents talking on the phone downstairs, from the stairway that is so built into my muscle memory that I now only trip one out of fifteen times when skipping a step on the way up to my room. And, of course, the people: the smell of my dad’s aftershave as he hurries about a breakfasting kitchen, my mom leaving the nearly-finished Chicago Tribune crossword puzzle like a fresh footprint, my younger brother’s indecipherable grumblings chosen over distinct “yes’s” or “no’s” or “I’m at a tumultuous stage in my life and, though I desperately desire to relate with others, the effort is too much right now and you, family, will simply have to wait while I remain in my adolescent-cocoon.” These things I have grown accustomed to, that I see but don’t see, in all their humanness and loveliness and peculiarity.

I begin to wonder, What else am I growing accustomed to? What else is becoming familiar, so familiar that it annoys with its sameness, fulfilling the adage, “familiarity breeds contempt?” Why is it that we desperately desire to know, and be known, yet start to feel stale in our own home, in our own skin? Perhaps it is not so much new people or new places that we truly desire, but fresher, realer ways of seeing all that’s around us. Like Keillor,

“I don’t want to be like that young man, in the presence of magnificence and oblivious to it. His life has been too easy for him to understand what a miracle her love is. Mine has not.”

When we know love, it’s easy to forget what loneliness feels like - what homelessness might feel like because homelessness is the essence of loneliness - its weight and suffocation, how seems inexorable. It’s easy to forget our deep need for one another, for love, when we are with those people, and perhaps this is sometimes a good thing to forget. Yet, it is our quiet, or frantic, sufferings that remind us of all that’s inside calling out to love and be loved. This is a level worth connecting on, the realest level there may be. As Frederick Buechner writes, in his work "Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain,"

“We are never more alive to life than when it hurts – never more aware both of our own powerlessness to save ourselves and of at least the possibility of a power beyond ourselves to save us and heal us if we can only open ourselves to it. We are never more aware of our need for each other, never more in reach of each other, if only we can bring ourselves to reach out and be reached."

If absence, longing, makes us realize our love for others, how can we live with this awareness of their beauty, of their loveliness and depth and humor and holiness? How can we not fall into well-worn paths of being with one another that, because of the familiar footfalls and cracks and ridges, blind people with a gauze of mundanity? We need constantly renewed eyes, hearts, as Jesus put it in Matthew 9.16,

“Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

How then, to engage in this restoration? Far from a conclusive answer, Anne Lamott writes an idea that points toward this renewal in her book Bird by Bird:

“ [Good] books help us understand who we are and how we ought to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They [teach]…quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pat attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded. I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”

I’m not sure if Jesus read literature, or if half of America even does. That’s not really the point, though. The point is learning to pay attention. To listen. To see others, really see them. I wonder if Adam and Eve had this problem of distraction or boredom before the Fall – probably not. It’s something we need to practice, to re-learn. We need wake-up calls. We need “eyes that see and ears that hear," and good art, good conversations foster this. What if we lived with the growing attentiveness to a God whose silence fills the earth: whose unspoken truth is everywhere, who came down to earth “delivering signs and dusting from their eyes,” as Sufjan Stevens sings? It is an ongoing pursuit, this awareness endeavor, and I wonder how much of it is us seeking to see something, and how much is grace-filled discovery. They mystery, however, is what pushes, lures, and tickles me onward.

Finding a Place for Common Grace

If I am honest, and I hope to be, the times I have felt closest with God, most loved and full of joy and hope and peace, most myself, are moments outside of church walls. As a Christian, how could this realization not come tinged with a shade of guilt? Sorry, Mom and Dad, other members of the congregation-it’s not you, yet it’s not me, either. It’s others I know, friends, full of faith or not, who I talk with, who share stories about books, movies, conversations, quiet walks in an arboretum, ear-numbingly loud concerts, moments that, though they don’t use the same language, have an air of transcendence about them. Instead of critiquing the church, for there are too many voices already doing that, I’d like instead to look at this idea of knowing God, of relating with him, of understanding how he speaks to us as individual, unique, strange, lovely people.

Discussing what it means to “know God” evades our lingual abilities deftly, leaving us to phrases such as “I sensed…” or “It felt like…,” or, sometimes, “God seemed to be saying…” In the past, disregarding the stories that followed these introductions was as easy as deleting spam from my inbox. However, the more I am convinced of God’s interaction with humanity, the slower I am to jump to incredulity. Hearing a nonChristian friend speak like this can be even more wonderful, for it is as though they are coming to a roundabout, a real and idiosyncratic understanding of God. He doesn’t love just Christians, and he certainly doesn’t work his love in their lives only, either.

In The Four Loves, CS Lewis’ graceful and candid collection of discussions on the nature of love, he prefaces his essays by distinguishing between two types of “nearness to God,” meaning the ways in which humans are either endowed with or cultivate Godlike qualities. One type of nearness is “likeness to God. God has impressed some sort of likeness to himself, I suppose, in all that he has made,” which draws on Genesis 1.27: “So God created man in His own image” (4). The second type of nearness he calls “nearness of approach,” which is akin to one trying to live as God would have it, presumably by following the life of Jesus: “the approach, however initiated and supported by Grace, is something we must do.” Thus, “likeness” is something “built in, that can be received with or without thanks; can be used or abused,” whereas nearness is the active pursuit of godliness (6). This “likeness to God” corresponds, it seems, with Romans 2.14:

“When outsiders who have never heard of God’s law follow it more or less by instinct, they confirm its truth by their obedience. They show that God’s law is not something alien, imposed on us from without, but woven into the very fabric of our creation. There is something deep within them that echoes God’s yes and no, right and wrong.”

The thread connecting these excerpts from Scripture and Lewis’ distinction is the notion of God having embedded himself within all of humanity. There is something in us that calls out to him, that wants to connect, that responds to that connection and causes us to say “I sensed…” It seems more and more real to me that we, us humans, all of us, know God in actual ways – yet we often don’t know him in the divisive “us – them” context of the reductive language that contemporary Christianity tends to speak with. In a recent interview, when asked what recognition of God remains after largely leaving Christianity, David Bazan said, “When I’m listening to the radio and there’s this story about a leader of a town against odds doing the right thing, when [I] see justice happen in a profound way, I [have a sense that] this is good, this is right, can we just keep doing this? I know that you know this is right [too]. I have joy, I feel peace” (Interview with rednoW staff, 8 April 2009).

In high school, I was part of Young Life that was often led by our area director, a thoughtful man named Bob. He knew and trusted that our inherent likeness to God was what would draw us into truer relationship with God. There was no “special information” to bestow, or prescribed formula to follow – the God inside us simply needed stirring, amplifying among the myriad voices inside that conspire to drown it out. Too often I sense a focus and call to stoically apply oneself to Christ’s ways, as though we are to try to force our circular souls into a square hole that we might not even be made for, as though his yoke was not easy nor his burden light. Yet Bob, and others I have crossed paths with (David Dark, Eugene Peterson, Frederick Buechner) focus on the wonder and mystery that is following God and trying to know him – trusting that communication with him is what we are made for, what gives us life.

So many are dissuaded from pursuing how God encourages us to live, as he did in becoming a revolutionary, subversive, brilliant Jew, because of the pressure to “repent,” too often portrayed as a feeling of deep guilt with oneself that ought lead to new behavior instead of a newer, better way of living, of loving. Buechner writes in his sermon, “The Kingdom of God,”

“Biblically speaking, to repent doesn’t mean to feel sorry about, to regret. It means to turn, to turn around 180 degrees. It means to undergo a complete change of mind, heart, direction…turn away from madness, cruelty, shallowness, blindness. Turn toward tolerance, compassion, sanity, hope, justice that we all have in us at our best”

The call to repent is a call to a greater, freer way of life, to seeing life in newer, realer ways, to fitting Jesus’ easy yoke, the burden of which is light. (Matthew 11.30). Pressure to feel contrite for who I am has yet to lead me closer to God, let alone want to be closer to him. Too often I walk away from sermons feeling pitiful and weakened, despite a pastor’s concluding, incongruously positive prayer. While our sin is what keeps us from God, and while we are truly pitiful and weak when contrasted with him, I’m not sure that the best way to lead others to God is convincing them of their brokenness. If only we would listen to the voices of our culture, voices in song and literature and movies, we would see that all of us, all faiths or lack thereof, know emptiness, hurt, the need for love, the God who is love (1 John 4.8).

The question, then, is how do we know God, how do we interact with him and learn that he is not a distant puppeteer, possibly asleep at the handles? Buechner writes, “It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence” (“Message in the Stars). True, “God works in mysterious ways” is not a verse in Scripture. Yet I believe we would be misguided to think that God only speaks through Scripture, that God only speaks to, or through, churchgoers, in their pews on Sunday morning. In A Matrix of Meanings, Craig Detweiler describes the idea of “common grace:”

“The theological term behind learning to look closer is ‘common grace’…exhibiting a sense of humor and playful surprise, the God of the Old Testament speaks through such unlikely means as a burning bush, a donkey, and a dream. Jesus continues the unpredictable, inverted pattern. He chooses tax collectors and fishermen to initiate his kingdom. He befriends prostitutes and defends a woman caught in adultery…common grace subverts preconceived notions of how, when, and through whom God chooses to communicate. It makes God bigger and the evangelist’s burden lighter.”

This is why I cannot read just the Bible, or theology for that matter. A Matrix of Meanings is an intellectually edifying and spiritually liberating work because it exists between the Church and culture, essential aspects in the life of anyone seeking God, believing God to be moving through each. Ray Bradbury novels, Sam Mendes films, Sufjan Stevens albums speak freedom into my life in ways I often don’t experience in church, yet I have hope that the not-so-lofty idea of common grace will be embraced more and more. Works of art like these draw me (or us, depending on your aesthetic inclinations) into a deeper wonder and awe, into a “celebration of life,” as a friend of mine recently put it. And didn’t Christ come “that we might have life, and life to the full?” We ought not think that this relationship with God can be fully understood, as Wendell Berry puts impeccably well:

“[The Gospels are] a mystery that we are highly privileged to live our way into, trusting properly that to our little knowledge greater knowledge may be revealed…reality is large, and our minds are small.”

To know God is to submit to his mystery and to his love that miraculously reaches us through honest conversations, enchanting literature, beautiful films, through connections with others. Perhaps we’ll come to recognize more and more that the God-prints we see in one another and ourselves were fully revealed in a Person who walked this earth two thousand years ago, who asks to show us truer ways of life.

pARTying

This past Saturday I partied. There, I said it. Mom, Dad, younger brother, I hope you are reading.

Walk past a certain suite on campus and you will see a few dozen wine bottles lined up on the windowsill. Before rushing to the nearest RA, however, look closer and see that the wine bottles are, indeed, Welch’s brand ® sparkling grape juice. Still made from grapes, with 100% less alcohol! These are remnants of parties past, obelisks reminding of many a laugh and song sung, a dance move dropped, and possibly a tear shed. Wait, sadness? No, art!

Recently, I have had the privilege of attending a unique type of party on campus with some good friends of mine, who, in their individuality, share an appreciation for many kinds of art. Our conversations often touch on music, movies, books, or other media that elicit enjoyment. From the bold, seemingly pretentious idea of incorporating aesthetic appreciation with the delight that is simply sitting around and talking with friends comes the birth of “art parties.”

Tongues firmly planted in cheek, wine glasses are brought out, filled, and, keeping proper etiquette in mind, toasted. Scarves, sport coats, accents, ties, heels, and other tasteful accoutrements are donned, though the merit of fake glasses, worn in an attempt to broadcast sophistication, is questionable. Cheese and crackers travel about the room, carried restaurant waitress-style by the hostess (a party has yet to occur in a male place of residence) and one might hear such utterances as, “Darling, I love what you’ve done with the place. The bunked beds are absolutely brilliant and inventive!”

The guests find comfortable seats after the greetings and small talk wind down and the needle of the turntable runs out of track on the record. Most have a book, a folded piece of paper, or a song at their fingertips. The art-sharing portion of the party commences, generally, with a volunteer willing to break the murmuring with a poem or excerpt of their own creation or that of an admired artist.

Despite the not-so-subtle mockery of art elitists, the guests of the party give respect and attention to the art shared or performed. They have circled around a grand piano, sat enthralled at an enthusiastic performance of a slam poem, and pensively reflected upon a somber monologue or prose passage. They do not shy away from stark, honest pieces and receive whatever is presented openly. Each piece is a unique, wonderful, shared moment, individually significant and something neat to be shared. Applause, or snapping, depending on the mood, abounds after each work as the performer bows and resumes his, or her, seat among the others in the room, glad to have been able to contribute to the lovely atmosphere. There is certainly a balance of somber as well as hilarious pieces. A spicy Latino interpretation of one of Juliet’s monologues by a theatre major led to a laugh or three.

I have questioned the nature of a “party,” when a gathering of people turns into a “party,” when one is officially “partying,” how many hugs or high-fives or drinks it takes to achieve the state of “partying,” and it is becoming clear to me that to “party” is simply to enjoy the company of others, having fun as a group. For some, alcohol and pyramids of plastic cups seems to be a necessity. For others and myself, shared art provides all the entertainment and enjoyment we could ask for.

(originally published Fall '08 in Illinois Wesleyan's Newspaper, The Argus)

Used Bookstories

I have a rather odd, personal secret to divulge. Nearly every time I walk into a bookstore, I get a tingly, weightless feeling in my stomach – a mild version of that sensation that comes with going over a hill in a car at just the right speed that makes your body thinks you’re floating. I’m not exactly sure what it is, or what it means, and don’t want to diminish the feeling by trying to explain it. All that I know is that bookstores excite me. Especially old, musty, quiet, used bookstores with bells that tinkle your presence to the store when you walk through the door.

Today was a perfectly crisp fall day, which is delightful in itself, and I had the opportunity in the afternoon to bike over to a used bookstore in Normal, about fifteen minutes from the IWU campus. I think that, in the back of my mind, I was rewarding myself for finishing a book for class (Frankenstein, if you are curious) and, presumably, doing OK on a Calculus quiz. Anyway, I arrived at the bookstore, Babbitt’s Books, with the general eagerness one possesses with ten dollars in pocket walking into a used bookstore on a lazy fall afternoon as such. I perused some shelves and found a few books that have been on the list for a while, and then discovered a real treasure. My eyes were attracted as though by a magnetic-eye-force to the top shelf of the poetry section, on top of which was poised a worn, blue hardcover book the size of a dictionary with “Complete Poems” printed above “Carl Sandburg” on the binding. (By the way, I am now beginning to realize that this post will probably be a bit long and tedious, so feel free to jump around from paragraph to paragraph at whatever pace and order pleases you. I’ll do my best to be interesting and entertaining, just like on a first date except that you can’t watch me pretend to get a text message when I flip my phone open for the third time in two minutes pretending to have something to do. OK, enough of this). I was elated! Not only have I been an admirer and reader of Sandburg’s since learning of Sufjan Steven’s appreciation for the writer, but was able to visit his childhood home in Galesburg, IL over the summer and lie in his backyard as I imagined he did on warm prairie-summer nights.

I approached the cash register with a childlike grin.
“Finding this made my day,” I offered to the cashier, who looked like a Mr. Babbitt, rather thin, with a grey beard and rimless spectacles, as I handed him the anthology. He opened the cover to look at the price (six dollars!) and, upon reading the name written inside, turned to a woman about his age working on a computer and said, with a touch of nostalgia behind his words and a subtle, warm smile, “This one belonged to Frances.”
I wore a look of curiosity and he replied, “Frances Irvin was a great member of the community. It’s probably good karma that you bought this.” I gave him another smile. “He taught elementary school, right?” to his coworkers, “And then was retired forever…very well read…he’d approve of a young person buying his book.” I said thanks and walked out of the store with an inner lightness that, in an indirect way, defines joy.

This whole occurrence got me to thinking, as memorable situations tend to do; What is it that I love about used bookstores? About used books? About knowing that someone had turned the pages and reflected on the lines and imagined the images of a book that I held in my hand, not too long before myself, as indicated by a penciled-in name on the inside of a cover? I arrived at an idea, a conjecture, a hypothesis. I think that it is heartening to know that another person, known or unknown, had walked where I now tread. And it’s wonderful to see their footprints on the pages (little notes, stains, smudges, lines, etc.). And wonderful strikes me as the most appropriate word: it fills me with wonder, mainly centering on the story of that person, the previous reader and owner of the book. As a side note, I encourage you to write to your heart’s content in a book. Oftentimes, breadcrumbs of observations in a story won’t distract but lead a reader along the path, in my humble opinion.

If a used book is a home in which a person once dwelt, investing time and thought and emotion and life into its frame, then a used bookstore is a neighborhood, a multifarious collection of stories and experiences simply desiring to be shared. I haven’t begun to read Sandburg’s collection of poems yet but am looking forward to where they will take me and how they will open my eyes to a world illuminated by poetry. And I think that is an aspect of the excitement of stories – they exist because they are shared. Frances Irvin’s way of sharing something he loved, Sandburg’s poems, was to give it away, and that makes me wonder what I will do with all of my books and movies and pictures when I pass away. And, why wait till death to give things away? A Bible verse comes to mind:
“If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you’ll lose it, but if you let that life go, you’ll get life on God’s terms” (Luke 17:33, the Message translation).

I think we’re built to share that which we love, and used bookstores are full of opportunities to fulfill this contribution. Unless, of course, someone is simply trying to get rid of a C-list sci-fi book about evil flying dwarves called “Dante’s Divebombing Dwarves." That might be awful. Might.

(note: nearly a year after buying the Sandburg compilation, I discovered, alongside an equally enthusiastic friend, that Carl’s wrote his signature on one of the pages. What!)