Ruminations on Ruminations at Oxford

The year at Oxford wasn’t what I expected it to be, and I’m OK with that. In all honesty, I don’t quite remember what I was expecting my time there to be like while preparing myself last summer, reading up on the differences between American and British English, talking with friends who had spent time at the University, buying jars of peanut butter to stow away in suitcases...just in case. We often hear people say that things we’ve yet to experience rarely meet our expectations, and I often understood failed predictions invariably as disappointed predictions. There wasn’t breathing room in my life-philosophy for surprise, or at least a conscious embrace of surprise, “surprise” defined as the flouting of what we had expected. Certainly, there is a range of pleasantness to surprises: the flat tire on my bike that greeted me a few weeks ago deserved a grimace and accompanying “ugh.” Disappointment is a real thing. However, what matters is the posture with which we approach the betrayal of our expectations, whether we choose to play along with the new direction or respond with bitter reluctance. Wallace Stevens saw life as a stream down which we ought merrily, merrily, merrily row our boats, whistling a tune as though life were but a dream in which we were whisps of smoke.

This notion of “choosing our response to life’s circumstances” tended to strike me as the kind of pitiful, embarrassing guidance you might find in a spineless self-help book. I held a philosophy that valued grief and disappointment as somehow more poignant than joy and gladness, seeing the latter two as exhibited by the slightly ignorant and/or delusional. I had unwittingly adopted a kind of scholar’s melancholy: the realest feelings are the heaviest feelings, and levity is mere flippancy in the face of the human condition. An irony of my year at philosophical Oxford is that, of all places in the world, this was the one where my imagination began to thaw as I discovered and embraced the “joyful laughter that echoes through Creation” as some theologian put it. I had not expected this, and celebrate the surprise.

CS Lewis played an integral role in this spring awakening, as though his mirth reached through heavenly spans into my life. Other’s words can do that, can reach across generations and personalities to meaningfully grace our lives. One of my tutorials was on Lewis’s writings, which meant that I was in constant , if pretend, conversation with him – my mind was always full with his thoughts, words, delightfully witty prose, and insight. A central theme I discovered in his work was his notion of a jovial reality: at its core, the universe in which we live springs from beneficence and love, that it isn’t the victim (or result) of meaningless, destructive chaos. Having matured during the height of the Modernist movement, Lewis recognized a disconcerting cultural trend that assumed the latter perception about reality, which was undoubtedly influenced by the two World Wars. This notion bothered Lewis, who had fought in WWI and lived near London during the Nazi bombing raids of WWII, for he saw it as an alarming and unreasonable turn from belief in a loving God who cares for each of his beings, flaws, virtues, and peculiarities included, yet who allows them to act of their own accord.

For Lewis, grief, disappointment, and pain were real things, and each had significant weight in his life. Yet he found a deep conviction in providence, in “the laughter of things beyond the tears of things,” as Frederick Buechner puts it. The laughter of Sarah at the news of her pregnancy, her son who she ends up naming Isaac, Hebrew for “laughter.” The laughter of the lame man made healthy near the pool called “Beautiful.” The laughter of a mangy, broke street performer when you plop your bag of loose change at his feet. The laughter when you feel the embrace of a loved one after months apart.

It seems to me that Lewis’s confidence in a joyful reality came from his belief that when we pray “Thy Kingdom come,” God’s Kingdom really does come through into our world in the midst of our loneliness and confusion and sorrow and helplessness. We often imagine God’s Kingdom coming as a shocking, publicized, international political overthrow, something that declares itself in flashing lights, yet Jesus talked about it differently, describing it as like finding a buried diamond, or as yeast working in a loaf of bread. It’s a surprise when we notice it, yet it’s happening all around us, inside and outside of church walls, through Christians and nonChristians alike. It’s happening in particulars. It isn’t happening in a way measurable by our mechanical standards, as though we could post time lines that measure incremental Kingdom-arrival like donations for building projects: Creation will always be groaning until the end of time.

Until then, God’s Kingdom – his rule, his way of doing things – is sprouting up like fresh grass through cracks in a city sidewalk. It has taken some time for this notion of God working his redeeming, restoring way into our world to sink in, probably because my imagining of his Kingdom is so influenced by stories of coercive, heartless, industrial and capital expansion that deal in abstract numbers and impersonal aims; our imaginations need re-training to recover realities of God’s character and love and joy.

While preparing to head to Oxford, I imagined that I would meet intelligent people, read and write overwhelmingly much, and learn a different culture. These things all happened, in one way or another, yet I could never have predicted the conversations I would have, what I actually would read and write and learn, how I would change. These particulars invariably surprised me. I grew thankful of the surprises, and began to trust what I had known all along, that God loves us, that he works to fill our lives with joy as we seek and honor him. It’s a continual process, marked with uncertainty, fumbling, and grace, this seeking to live in relationship with God, yet, as we do, we learn that, beyond all religious jargon and institutionally-general assertions of God’s love from churches and churchmembers alike, God knows our hearts and our stories. He knows what we need to discover life, real life, and leads us to these sustenances. Discovering the reality of this particular love is a perpetual epiphany, one that confirms in our souls the best thing: it’s good to be who we are, where we are, alive. We need reminding. A quote from “American Beauty:”

“…That's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things and…this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in.”

And this picture of a hot air balloon above the University:

Welcoming May in an Oxonian Way

After a substantial hiatus, here is something I've written about the recent past. Over the last few months, I've traveled about a handful of countries, Britain included, and plan to write on those soon. Soon, of course, is a relative term.

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May Day in Oxford has traditionally been one of its biggest festivals: local pubs remain open all night on April 30^th (normally they close around 11.30), people dress in all types of folksy outfits, and the atmosphere is one of communal jollity, all culminating early the following morning when the town (at least those who wake up, or fortunately, and maybe a bit drunkenly, find their way, in time) congregates in front of Magdalen College’s chapel tower to hear the boys’ choir sing hymns to the rising sun. Afterward, Oxford students traditionally attempt to jump off of the Magdalen bridge into a branch of the Thames, though police have attempted to quell this effort in past years because numerous youth have broken legs on the riverbed – Oxford students, mind you. Whoops.

Though I opted for a few hours of sleep instead of the typically-collegiate all-night romp, I greeted the morning before sunrise and biked over to the bridge with my pajama shorts under a pair of jeans and a fleece to cover my sleep-drowsy head. The morning cold woke me enough to keep my balance on the bike, a welcome aid.

Weaving through the people sardined in front of Magdalen’s tower was a strange experience in itself: though I often hear people, and philosophers (who are people too), wonder if they have experienced something in reality or a dream, I could never honestly relate. Dreams were always weird or recognizable enough to be easily delineated from reality. However, this morning was slightly different, as I was still drowsy from rising, and the most of the people I saw were drowsy from the evening’s activities. Thankfully, I had my camera along with me, and can verify that, yes there were two girls and a guy fighting one another with blow-up rafts while sitting on the shoulders of friends and, yes that kid was wearing a white, three-foot hat and strumming half-hearted songs on guitar.

The choir arrived on top of the tower around 6.30, an hour after the sun had officially risen (I checked the national sunrise charts the night before to determine when I really had to wake), evidenced by the small, robed arms waving through the stone fences 44 meters (Oxford’s tallest building) above the restless and weary and merry heads. Though the morning had been mostly cloudy, the sun began peeking through blue sky at this time, and it seems that the choir director wanted to wait for this visibility for the song to start. On this morning, he gets to determine when the day begins, and it felt like we were all waiting for a new year to begin, waiting for the angelic melody to declare the day to our ready ears.

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The song the choir sang sounded similar to those I have heard at the Evensong services, those hauntingly beautiful services often sparsely attended and usually only by older members of the community that have attended from the days when their parents would bring them each evening for the daily rituals of traditional English Anglican services, who know when to kneel and when to turn and when to begin to pray: I know. I watch and follow them.

Hearing the choir sing on this morning was different in the chilling morning breeze, squeezed in the crowd of delirious and delighted and rude and hilarious strangers gathered to celebrate at an ungodly-made-Godly hour, awaiting the sun and glad at its arrival. We weren’t hearing the hymns in a silently melancholy chapel, careful not to stir, self-conscious to see if we conformed to the established rituals, isolated in our pews. People heard the Medieval Latin hymns carried clear from above the hush of the crowd, people who have heard the Christ-story so many times from Christians desperate to reach this tired, post-Christian culture that the mention of Christ sets them either to laughter, defensiveness, or exasperation. People who have stopped going to Church, or people who go to Church because it’s so embedded in their lives as a norm that they don’t think about it as Church, as meeting for worship, but as What You Do on Sunday Morning.

We listened to the hymn as humans, weary and glad and alive, united for a moment in upward-looking thankfulness that the day had arrived, and in that moment something snuck past those “watchful dragons,” as CS Lewis puts it, those criticisms or questions or hardnesses that guard the hearts of people from God’s beauty and love and risenness.

After the first hymn, Magdalen’s Dean of Divinity read a benediction during which his congregation returned to their day, to their friends, to stories from the night before, to questions of where breakfast will be had and where Mike’s shoes might be: liturgy broke the spell.

As I rode back to St. Catz on my bike, I wondered if the morning at the bridge would be significant for some of those present, or if it would merely file in line, insubstantial amongst the other happenings of May-Day eve. Recent reflection shows me that it was significant in my life, though only time shows us the experiences that endure and shape us as we gaze retrospectively through our personal and communal histories.

The Redemption of, and in, Cohen's "Hallelujah"

The other day, my dad asked me about the meaning of a song and, loving both the song and discussing meaning, I immediately took the bait and plunged in to the discussion. "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen is a song that has stuck with me for quite some time and, while I often feel the lyrics and recognize it as a beautiful and heartbreaking work, I've never really taken the time to consider it in its entirety, to see how it coheres and how it can be understood as a complete work of art. What is Cohen saying through all of his imagery and allusion? What is he relating to, relating with?

Listening to the song, my dad felt that it's title didn't suit the song - at it's best being a mistake, at its worst being nearly blasphemous. And I suppose I've always seen the song as a somewhat sarcastic proclamation that "God be praised:" "Life are awful, yet God is good," as though a positive proclamation is a pouring of salt into a wound. However, if one approaches the song believing that Cohen means what he says, that there is some irony to the fact that God is good yet life so often isn't, and realizes that the Bible is a story of this irony and of God intervening into lives of brokenness and despair as people seek Him, I think the song takes on an earnestness that isn't evident at a glance, or isn't obvious to a culture that readily dismisses any hint of earnest yearning.

See what you think:

First of all, in reading or listening to the song, I think it's important to remember that Leonard Cohen has deeply Jewish convictions and writes/creates from that point of view (in his poetry he writes G-d instead of God). So the word "Hallelujah" to him means "God be praised," not "Jesus be praised" as a Christian would recognize it.

Secondly, I believe that he is writing a worship song that is very Psalm-like in the sense that it is written from the posture of a broken, confused, frightened person seeking to praise God. For him, this emptiness results from broken love, and he starts with two Old Testament stories.

The first two stanzas:

Now, I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

David committed adultery with Bathsheba, and proceeded to write many of the Psalms from the baffled (bewildered, perplexed) brokenness that resulted from his sin:

"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence...Deliver me from my bloodguiltiness, O God, the God of my salvation; Then my tongue will joyfully sing of Your righteousness" (Psalm 51 - the whole Psalm works to this effect).

And Samson, in a similar way, lost his anointing because of his sin with Delilah in disobeying God by telling her the secret of his strength. Afterward, realizing the disaster, he cries out to God:

"O Lord God, please remember me and please strengthen me just this time, O God, that I may at once be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes" Samson (Judges 16.28)

Sin is simply, and impossibly complexly, separation from God, and I think everyone knows this in some way, though they might never use Christian language to express that. We're all longing for wholeness, for connection, for clarity, and these songs and cries express that - Cohen's no less than the others'.

The third stanza is a bit trickier:

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

In singing this, I think Cohen is recognizing the fact that, at some level, we're all agnostic: we never have complete certainty of who God is, of his name ("We all see through a glass darkly, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13). If we did, there wouldn't really be room for faith, or for trusting him (you haven't anything to seek if you've already found it in its entirety). He does exhibit frustration, though, at this disconnect: "What's it to you if I said your name without believing in You? You decided not to fully reveal yourself to me," and I see that as coming more from frustration than humility. However, he then says that, no matter how "holy" or "broken" our praise is, it doesn't really matter: we're simply trying to praise God, no matter "which word You heard." Ultimately all of our attempts to love God are imperfect, yet there is a "blaze of light in every one," and I interpret that as meaning that our praises of God are charged by the part of God that is in us that wants to praise himself, the image of God in us connecting with Himself. CS Lewis describes prayer as "God speaking to God" in the sense that we become conduits for his love and praise. And sin, separation from our Source, certainly inhibits that.

The last stanza is one of humility:

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

I think the first two lines are a kind of defense as to why Samson and David committed the adultery they did: they couldn't sense God's presence with them, and, ultimately in the wake of that sense of disconnect, "touched," or tried to recreate some semblance of that sense of connection in sleeping with the women in their stories. They didn't consciously think "I don't sense God, so I'm going to give in to temptation," yet on a spiritual level this seems to have occurred. And I think this is ultimately the motivation behind sin: trying to reconnect with God, to mend that disconnect, in ways that aren't God. And it's our struggle, while on earth, to connect with God and help others to do so while existing in the chasm between the proclamation that "God is good" yet "life isn't always great." There is a tension in living there, in recognizing how far we are from God yet imagining what life might be like in complete connection with him. Faith is responding to that might be like, living toward that and from that. It's not an easy thing to assert that life as we know it isn't all there is, that there is a true possibility for restoration and that, I think, is the very definition of hope.

And so Cohen sings from that posture "even though it all went wrong" (even though I completely messed up), "I'll stand before the Lord of Song" (a brilliant name for God) "With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah" (I became lost and hurt in my wandering - yet I only want to praise you, what I'm made to do).

So, that's how I see it. When I first listened to the song, I thought Cohen was saying "Hallelujah" with his tongue in his cheek, yet the more I think about it and listen to it, the more I see it as an earnest Psalm.

Thoughts?

(PS - more on Oxford soon... I haven't given enough time to updates!)

It's Good to do Good

(Back in Oxford! I wrote this the other day, and plan to send it in to the Argus, IWU's newspaper, yet it will probably shortened/edited a bit. The higher-ups probably don't want me encouraging students to shrug off the yoke of their professors. Just kidding. Kind of.)

We live in a world of universal standards, and in worlds of our own self-imposed expectations that linger in our minds and intimidate around every corner. And for many of us, this is especially true regarding academics, having attended school for the past fourteen-or-so years of our lives: Is this essay, this thought good enough? How will my professor find it? Is my work amounting to anything? Studying abroad at Oxford since fall, I find that these standards of goodness have become all the more predominant in my mind, even crippling so sometimes.

Academics here are structured quite differently than they are in the States (it’s kind of fun to refer to the US as “over there”) and most everywhere else except Cambridge. These two universities, since their inceptions in 1167 and 1209 respectively, practice the tutorial system, which means that, instead of frequently attending classes with others, students meet one-on-one or two-on-one with a professor (tutor) in their subject once a week, presenting a prepared essay. There are also optional, and encouraged, lectures to attend. Other than occasional class-like seminars, students largely participate in independent study according to their major and choice of topics. That studying and writing is done mostly in isolation is both wonderful and nearly suffocating at time: the intellectual freedom is refreshing and awakening, yet the independence often makes room for impossible standards to creep in: You’re nowhere near as intelligent as the author you’re reading! That’s not a worthwhile idea – too obvious! You’re probably wasting your time trying. Of course, those specific words don’t enter my mind when I’m trying to think: they stroll in as vague senses, engulfing or subtle, that want to lounge about for a bit and distract.

I don’t think that the desire to do good work is entirely a burdening thing: we wouldn’t have some of the wonderful things in this world if people didn’t respond to that itch inside themselves: Shakespeare’s plays, the pyramids of Egypt, the Mini Cooper. Whatever you look at and think, or feel, “That’s good” was probably created by people responding to the desire to do good, things that could have been created insipidly, to extrinsic standards, yet weren’t. There was some necessity involved: Shakespeare needed to put food on the table, the Pharoah demanded they be built, the British Motor Company wanted a fuel efficient car in response to a 1956 oil shortage, yet the creation of these things within their bounds seems infused with a kind of freedom, almost a joy. Turner’s paintings. Sufjan’s music. Spongebob Squarepants (of course, these are idiosyncratic and claim no universality…).

What, then, about these standards that try to choke off what we would create, say, do? I think that that question leads to another: what makes something good? When can we rest, content, with what we have said, or written, or drawn? Being a rather awful poet, I often wonder, for those who work and think through poetry, how does one know when they are finished with a poem, when they have a sense of its completeness? When can we have any satisfaction with what we’ve done? I think a hint to an answer has to do with the inherent desire for goodness that we have that becomes entangled with others’ standards. And I think we are trained this way when it comes to creating. It’s the difference between solving a math problem and writing an essay: one is right or wrong, the other is good or not good. I’d be wrong to say that anything you create and feel good about is automatically good: we need the comment and critique of those wiser and different from us, especially those we trust. However, when it comes down to it, only we can determine if that desire in us has been satisfied.


It’s easy, incredibly so, to get lost in impossible standards here at Oxford, to grow into a habit of seeing all I write and think as inferior. And yet, I think to how this place probably started: a group of friends eager to learn about themselves and the world. They wanted to read and write and do good things. With today’s ease of publication and communication, there is so much white noise meaningless and detached from real life, especially when it comes to academia. But, in the midst of necessity (that essay is due on Thursday!), there is opportunity to do good work, to do something that means something in your actual life, which means that it will also mean something for someone else, if in a unique way for them. “Good is a social word;” writes Bert Hornback, “its Anglo-Saxon roots also gives us the words gather and together. Good includes self with others.” Listen to that desire. Go into the world and do good. It’s what we’re meant to do.