ich liebe dich

Last night I was Facebook texting with my daughter Lulu, who’s away at college. We communicate mostly via texting nowadays, our relationship devolving into an exchange of quips, symbols, commands, and the briefest of news updates. Upcoming tests. Dinner plans. Arrival times. Did you floss?

Facebook is so stressful! An onslaught of pictures, news, that 55-year-old mom perpetually regressing into a 25-year-old, in-jokes between people I’m not connected with like that.

I’m not connected “like that” with most, since I accept whoever friends me. It seems unfriendly not to. In addition to my daughters and their friends, there are my own friends, friends of theirs, current and former students, their friends, even total strangers who’ve read my books and tracked me down. A nightmare of names and faces, as if I’m at a massive party where everyone knows everyone else, but I know no one.

Compounding the confusion, Lulu and I text in German, so she can practice. Though my German is rusty and hers still developing, we lapse into English only for emergencies.

Last night our conversation went like this:

Hallo Loopers. Wie gehts?

Gut. Du?

OK. Wir haben gerade The Descendants gesehen. Es war gut. Jetzt gehen wir ins Bett.

OK. Ich liebe dich. Gute Nacht.

Ooooooooooops....Come back!!! I just now posted Ich liebe dich and a heart on a former student's wall!

Hahaha. No worries tho. You can delete it.

How???????? Tell me quick. People’ll think I'm in love with her or something.

By the time I figured it out, it was too late. The former student had already responded, in the ambiguous way of former students, with a smiley face.

In bed, I reflected on how few people I exchange the word love with. My husband. Charlotte. Lulu. A few siblings. My dad. Never with even my closest friends.

Not so Jesus, it occurred to me. He uses it, repeatedly, in a conversation with his buddy Peter.

“Do you love me…?” he asks. Three times.

Peter responds—hurt, we’re told—“Yes, Lord, you know that I love you!”

It was so hard for me to get there, to the intimacy of this relationship between two friends. It could be a cultural difference—like how my male students in China used to walk around completely intwined in one another's arms. Or maybe that business of there being three Greek words for love. But I suspected that wasn't it.

Kris lay half-reading, half-dosing beside me.

"Could you ask a friend if he loved you, like Jesus did?" I asked him. "Like, could you use that word? Could you say it to anybody besides me or the girls?"

"My mom, I guess," he said after a while. His voice sounded wobbly and remote, the way it does just before he falls asleep.

So, having, as usual, not gotten to the bottom of this scriptural mystery, I clicked off my bedside light and then reached over him to click off his, and we hugged each other to sleep.

we are but dust

Today is Ash Wednesday. Yesterday, my university’s online devotional had the headline, “Remember That You Are Dust.” I automatically translated the phrase into the wording of the last Ash Wednesday service I attended after an ash-smeared childhood of Ash Wednesdays: We are but dust.

I searched for the phrase online and finally found it, in the King James Version. It was Abraham, wheedling God not to destroy the city of Sodom because there might be a few righteous ones in it: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?” (Genesis 18:27-28 TNIV).

Who am I to speak? I am nothing but the dust out of which you made me. Nothing but the ashes I will someday become but for your intervention. Nevertheless, I will speak.

Later in the day, my daughter Charlotte called me up from her college in faraway Boston, and we got to reminiscing about that Ash Wednesday service. It was the only one she’d ever attended, during her last semester of her last year of high school, the last year she’d lived at home.

“Maybe I’ll go to an Ash Wednesday service again tonight,” she said on the phone. She sounded wistful.

We had gone that time to the Episcopal church, she and I. It was not our usual church but one Charlotte was finding increasingly attractive. I have always been skeptical of churches founded by people who had murdered their wives—who, in fact, founded churches in order to get rid of problem wives more easily—but I was supportive of Charlotte’s choice. I was supportive of anything that might boost her interest in the faith in which I had attempted to raise her. Indeed, what church she attended didn’t matter to me at all. I just wanted her to love the God who had made her and to recognize and appreciate the One God Sent as her way back into God’s presence.

The Episcopal church was better than any other, Charlotte told me on the way there, because they believed that taking care of the less fortunate was more important than fighting over gay rights. It seemed as worthy a cause as any I could come up with. And as astute an assessment of any church’s central aims. And so we got dressed up—another part of the appeal of church for Charlotte, I suspected—and we went, she and I.

I think Ash Wednesday must be the Episcopalians’ favorite holy day. The service, in any case, murmured and chanted on. And on. I felt nothing. Thought nothing. This happens to me a lot during church services these days, despite my love for God and deep desire to share it in worship.

It doesn’t matter what you feel, I scolded myself. It just matters that you’re there. Obedient. Present. Available to God, however inadequately.

Several times during the service, we echoed Abraham in a repeated choral response: “We are but dust.”

“We are but dust,” I whispered to Charlotte at one point. Instantly, unintentionally, the words became “butt dust”—We are butt dust!—and we ducked into each other’s necks to muffle our laughter.

“We are butt dust!” Charlotte repeated on the phone today, two years later, laughing. And it occurs to me that this, too—the humor, the boldness of it—is what faith is about: sharing the words of scripture as we would a box of malt balls. Feeling them implode in our mouths, then melt into our tastebuds. Enjoying them together.

it's a lesson in something

We don’t have TV in our house because, if we did, I’d be watching it all the time and never get anything done. That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to do self control: 100% avoidance.

Anyway, we do have a television, which my husband and I use to watch movie videos. And, recently, the first season of a TV show we watched while out in California visiting my dad: The Good Wife. In the episode we watched last night, “Boom,” a pastor praises the eponymous heroine—a cuckolded wife who stays by her (imprisoned) man—for the Christianness of her behavior:

“I’ve respected the way you’ve stood by your husband,” Pastor Isaiah tells her. “It’s a lesson in Christian forbearance.”

“Well, it’s a lesson in something,” she responds.

I was struck by this word forbearance, clearly intended as a synonym for forgiveness, although it’s not a word I’d ever use for that. Forbearance is a decidedly different word to me. Not so much about genuine the acceptance of another’s repentance and resultant relinquishment of rancor or hate that I call “forgiveness” but rather something more like having the stamina to put up with something unbearably noxious. Although the Good Wife is probably not a Christian—she rolls her eyes at husband's newfound faith and mocks the Good Pastor at every opportunity (Might this foreshadow some future misdeed on Pastor Isaiah's part? If so, don't tell me! We're not there yet.)—the “Christian forbearance” Pastor Isaiah so admires seems to be that she can stand to stay with her creep of a husband after learning the increasingly salacious details of his adulterous exploits.

Anyway, I felt that the fictional pastor, here, was clearly initiating a scriptural discussion with me, so I went to the Bible to find out where all this forbearance business was coming from.

According to The NIV Exhaustive Concordance, the word is used only once in my usual translation: in Paul’s letter to the Roman church, where he writes that “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus” (3:25-26). The Greek word in the passage—ἀνοχή, anochē—is used only twice in the entire New Testament, translated here as forbearance and in Romans 2:4 as tolerance" and in both cases praising God for not punishing believers for sins committed before their conversion to faith.

Not much to go on here, so I decided the Good Pastor—and, his seeming sexism notwithstanding, he is a refreshingly “good” guy for a preacher in the popular media—must be using another translation. The word had a King Jamesian feel to it, so I tried the KJV. There, too, the word only appeared twice, for the same Greek word, exclusively in reference to God.

In a few of the other translations I looked at, ἀνοχή in these two passages is traslated as righteousness.

The word forbearance is, in short, rare in scripture and only ever occurs in reference to God’s not punishing us for sins we committed before coming to faith. I find it curious, then, and disturbing, that this fictional TV pastor (speaking for many, I reckon) not only uses the term prescriptively for humans but seems to understand this business of forbearing to be synonymous with unconditional forgiveness: staying with an adulterous spouse who would probably never even have repented had he not been publically outed. In other words, a “good wife” will forgive her man and stay with him no matter what. (I was going to say a “good spouse,” but I don’t think the expression “good husband” connotes anything like forbearance.)

"What," the pastor later in the episode sermonizes, "does Christian forbearance mean?"

What indeed? What is this perplexing feat of forbearance so esteemed over real forgiveness, the kind accompanied by honesty and occasioned by genuine repentance?

Surely it's a lesson in something. I'm just not sure what.

it's like poetry

The past couple of mornings, my husband Kris and I have been talking about that first, theologically gigantic sentence of John’s gospel: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

I have a love-hate relationship with language like this. I love how it makes me feel to read the sentence aloud: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Just the sound of the words—the repetition of the word word and the same plain syntax (three reversed was statements joined by and)—operates as an invitation into mystery. John’s sentence is the only passage of scripture—except maybe “Jesus wept”—that I have memorized without expressly setting out to do so. Something about it is fundamentally appealing and simple. Indeed, it’s so straightforward that, unlike most of scripture, it's is pretty much identical across the translations. Somehow, the words just seem to want to be said and kept.

That said, the sentence has always frustrated me. The way philosophers often frustrate me. And some artists. And many theologians. Just say what you mean and be done with it, I want to tell them. Or don’t say it at all.

I mean, if John was talking about Jesus, why didn’t he say Jesus? It would make things so much clearer. Jesus existed from the beginning and was with God and was God. Done. No consideration of the various permutations of the word logos in biblical Greek. No long discussions of the timeless Greek form of the repeated was, as compared to the poor simple past tense in which we must house it in English. Instead, a clear-cut declaration of Jesus’ participation in the creation of the universe.

Or maybe it doesn’t mean that at all. Maybe, as some suggest, this is just John’s way of introducing the big story of Jesus on time on earth. Forget the sentence’s reverberations with the first words of scripture: In the beginning… Focus, instead, on the vagaries of John’s next words—“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (TNIV)—where weird preposition use (how, exactly, does one make something through someone else?) and passive voice call Jesus’ actual participation in the creation into question. The word, here, seems not to be the Creator himself but merely a vehicle of God’s efforts. But then, if that were so, how could it be that the word also was God?

Kris likes the ambiguity of John’s opening sentence.

“It’s like poetry,” he told me. “It’s not so much the meaning that matters as how it makes you feel.”

The students in my poetry workshop are of the same opinion about poetry. I told them the other day that part of their job in responding to one another’s poems was to report if something didn’t make sense. 

“But why’s that a bad thing? I like poems that don’t make sense,” one of them remarked.

I tried to differentiate bad lack of clarity from good ambiguity—with my usual lack of success. This fight happens in every poetry workshop I teach, and it only gets worse as the semester progresses. Often, those who write the clearest and most concrete and best poems are the ones most steadfastly dedicated to everyone else’s right to be vague and abstract and meaningless.

I had my students' upcoming first poems in mind as Kris went on about the poetic quality of John’s sentence.

“Then you’re saying it doesn’t mean anything?” I asked him.

“No, I think it means something. That God’s message existed from the beginning. His plan. That Jesus was God’s plan all along.”

“And that Jesus was there with God the Father. At the creation.”

“Well, yes, I guess. After all, Jesus calls himself the Word.”

And the Bread, I could have told him. And the Gate. And the Shepherd. And the Vine. Fodder for generations of theologians and songwriters.

at first I didn't see anything

Just got back from visiting my dad out in California before his chemo starts up again. We spent many hours alone together—longer than I remember ever being alone with him—roaming the Irvine Ranch’s strange and wonderful expanses of wilderness, still nestled in the midst of suburbia. Bommer Canyon, miles of hilly desert grown over in cacti, grasses, sage scrub, wild artichokes, and fennel and dotted with decaying working pens and other cattle equipment. Various parks and natural areas of Turtle Rock, the community where my dad lives. The marshy San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, an estuary sporting numerous ponds and a local chapter of the Audubon Society. Crystal Cove, a 1930s movie set on the sand just south of Newport Beach that was squatted by well-to-do beach bums until the 1970s, when it was acquired by the State of California and has, in addition to its old beach huts—some of which have been renovated for use as hotels—tide pools and a thriving wildlife refuge.

Needless to say, we saw lots of birds, and I was in birdwatcher heaven the whole time I was there. We saw ospreys on two different occasions, a tern dive-bombing into a pond not ten feet from us, every kind of duck, sanderlings and yellowlegs, stilts and avocets, house finches and goldfinches, black phoebes and other flycatchers in abundance, Western jays and bluebirds (so different from the eastern ones I’m accustomed to), kites and hawks, and two of the four local species of hummingbird: Anna’s (green with a brilliant magenta hood) and Allen’s (orangy-glinted green with a thin white collar and vermilion throat).

My dad was, at first, only mildly interested. He couldn’t really see differences between them, he said, and he had never been able to use binoculars to his satisfaction. He liked the ospreys. They are large and easy to recognize, and one of them sat on top of a pole eating a flopping fish. But the tiniest birds of all, the hummingbirds, when I pointed them out to my dad—sitting motionless, as hummingbirds do for long periods to digest, atop reeds and the upthrust limbs of small trees—were the ones that finally enthralled him.

“At first I didn’t see anything, but then there was this hummingbird with a purple head, just sitting there!” he reveled to my stepmother later. Never mind that their backyard is buzzing with them.

We did not talk about the Bible, didn’t talk much at all, but I thought about it. Especially that where God displays his sovereignty and power to Job—Who are you to question me?!—by cataloguing, at length, the great variety of his creation. Mountain goats. Wild donkeys and oxen. The ibis and the rooster. Hawks. Eagles.

God’s funny celebration of the ostrich came to mind several times, as I watched the phoebes loop out from sprinklers and the sanderlings skitter drunkenly back and forth, like miniature Charley Chaplins, after the tide.

The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully,
though they cannot compare
with the wings and feathers of the stork.
She lays her eggs on the ground
and lets them warm in the sand,
unmindful that a foot may crush them,
that some wild animal may trample them.
She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers;
she cares not that her labor was in vain,
for God did not endow her with wisdom
or give her a share of good sense.
Yet when she spreads her feathers to run,
she laughs at horse and rider. (Job 39:13-18 TNIV)

I tried to imagine God thundering these words, as I usually think of his doing in this speech to Job—“Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?” (38:2 TNIV), it begins—but I can’t. God has, by that point in his diatribe, softened, so much so that soon he is imagining putting whales on leashes as pets for his daughters.

There is something so healing, so joyful, about nature. Even God can’t help being thrilled by it.

I didn't know he was like that

Siloam Springs, Arkansas—located just across the stateline from our Oklahoma farm—is where we do most of our business. We refer to it mostly as “Siloam.” Or, for short, “town,” as in “I’m going to town.” I work and buy groceries there—at a small store called Harps, which everyone still refers to by the name of its supplier a decade ago, IGA. I take my mother-in-law to Siloam to get her toenails trimmed. I had our babies at the hospital there, and our family practitioner, who cut both of them out of me when they refused to come out on their own, has his practice there. We set up the family cell phones there and thus all have Arkansas area codes and Siloam Springs prefixes, even though not one of us has ever lived there. Every other month, I lead a book discussion group at the tiny Siloam Springs public library, where we shift beat up armchairs and couches into a circle back in the video section.

Although Siloam Springs has a small university and its public schools, unlike those my daughters attended, are housed into separate elementary, middle, and high school facilities, it has no mall and only the most minimal of restaurant options outside of fast food: a couple of cafés popular with college students, a place that serves Venetian-style wood-fired pizzas, and a Mediterranean restaurant with a bar—the first downtown drinking facility in this dry county, its liquor license likely acquired by political shenanigans I don’t want to know about since I cherish being able to grade papers there while sipping a glass of overpriced but wonderful Earthquake zinfandel.

Siloam is, in brief, a one university, one hospital, three nail salon town with a pretty downtown park and with a major U.S. highway and an algae-filled creek running through it.

“What is the name of that town? Silent Springs? Salem Springs?” my sister Dorothy asked me on the phone the other day. "I never understand when you say it." Dorothy has lived her whole life in California.

“No. Siloam. S-I-L-O-A-M. You know, like the Pool of Siloam in the Bible, where angels supposedly stirred the waters and people went to get healed. I think people used to come to Siloam Springs to be healed, too.”

“I don’t know that story.”

“Oh, you know. There’s that whiney guy who’s paralyzed or something—lying on a mat—who complains that he can’t get down to the water while it’s being stirred because other people get in his way and no one will help him. And Jesus is like, ‘Do you want to walk, or what?’ And he says, 'I guess so.' So Jesus tells him, ‘Well then, pick up your mat and walk.'”

“Jesus doesn’t sound very nice.”

“No. People always talk about him as being all meek and mild, but there are a lot of places in the gospels where he’s definitely not. Like there's this woman who keeps following after him and yelling that she wants him to heal her daughter. But she’s not a Jew—Phoenician or something—and the disciples want to send her away, and Jesus tells her, ‘I only came to the Jews. It’s not right to give the Jews’ bread to the dogs.’”

“He said that?”

“Something like that.”

“And that’s the end of the story?”

“No. She argues him down. Says, ‘But even dogs get to lick up the crumbs under the table.’ So Jesus gives in to what he calls her ‘great faith’ and heals the daughter.”

“Wow. I didn’t know he was like that.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of weird. He’s not at all what people think he is.”

the worst possible sin

Last night I called my sister Joanie to update her on recent developments with our dad’s health. I have not conversed much with her in many years—we inhabit different worlds—but it is my hope to change that.

Joanie and I moved quickly from the subject of our dad to her new passion for the Bible. In particular, for this list of sins in Proverbs 6:16-19, which she found particularly true and important:

There are six things the Lord hates,

seven that are detestable to him:
haughty eyes,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked schemes,
feet that are quick to rush into evil,
a false witness who pours out lies
and a person who stirs up dissension in the community.

I wasn’t familiar with the verse when she first referred to it; so, since I was sitting at the computer as we talked, I googled around till I found the passage she seemed to be talking about and then read it back to her in the default translation I had open in one of my browser tabs, the TNIV. Joanie translated each item in the list into the wording of her version (she never said what it was and I was never sure: whatever it was, it sounded old-fashioned and included the apocryphal books) as I read, confirming that each one meant the same thing.  

The only sticking point for her was that my translation—and all but two of the twenty or so other versions we visited in the course of our conversation—listed the seven sins as more or less equally abominable, whereas her translation said something more like “and the seventh is an abomination to him” and seemed to highlight the last item in the list as the worst possible sin, singled out by God for special loathing.

Joanie claimed this last sin, the worst sin, as her own. She saw herself as a person who stirs up dissension in the community—or, as her version had it, “discord among brethren.” The NRSV translates it as “one who sows discord in a family.”

In reality, Joanie is as much a victim as a causer of discord in our family—as, indeed, all the rest of us are or have been at various points in our family’s history. It surprised and shamed me that she blamed herself for her suffering at our hands. At mine.

I recognize in myself the first sin—haughty eyes as blind to others’ goodness as to their needs—along with the last. I hope to improve in both areas: to be less dismissive of others and to sow love, not discord, in our fractured family. And, as I have learned from my recovery from PTSD, the first step in correcting a problem, perhaps the only step needed, is becoming aware that it exists.

Such, in any case, was God’s first answer to my dad’s prayer of gratitude for his cancer because it allows him to make peace with his neighbor.