patty kirk

we are but dust

2012-02-22T19:24:00.000-08:00

Today is Ash Wednesday. Yesterday, my university’s onlinedevotional had the headline, “RememberThat You Are Dust.” I automatically translated the phrase into thewording of the last Ash Wednesday service I attended after an ash-smeared childhoodof Ash Wednesdays: We are but dust.

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

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

Later in the day, my daughter Charlotte called me up fromher college in faraway Boston,and we got to reminiscing about that Ash Wednesday service. It was the only oneshe’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 soundedwistful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it's a lesson in something

2012-01-30T15:03:00.000-08:00

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

Anyway, we do have a television, which my husband and I useto watch movie videos. And, recently, the first season of a TV show we watchedwhile out in Californiavisiting my dad: The Good Wife. Inthe episode we watched last night, “Boom,” a pastor praises the eponymous heroine—acuckolded wife who stays by her (imprisoned) man—for the Christianness of herbehavior:

“I’verespected the way you’ve stood by your husband,” Pastor Isaiah tells her. “It’s a lesson inChristian 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 adecidedly different word to me. Not so much about genuine the acceptance of another’srepentance and resultant relinquishment of rancor or hate that I call “forgiveness”but rather something more like having the stamina to put up with somethingunbearably 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 “Christianforbearance” Pastor Isaiah so admires seems to be that she can stand to stay with her creep of a husbandafter learning the increasingly salacious details of his adulterous exploits.

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

According to The NIVExhaustive 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, throughthe shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstratehis justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committedbeforehand 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 apreacher in the popular media—must be using another translation. The word had aKing Jamesian feel to it, so I tried the KJV. There, too, the word onlyappeared 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 forbearanceis, in short, rare in scripture and only ever occurs in reference to God’s not punishingus for sins we committed before coming to faith. I find it curious, then, anddisturbing, that this fictional TV pastor (speaking for many, I reckon) notonly uses the term prescriptively for humans but seems to understand thisbusiness of forbearing to be synonymous with unconditional forgiveness: stayingwith an adulterous spouse who would probably never even have repented had henot been publically outed. In other words, a “good wife” will forgive her manand stay with him no matter what. (I was going to say a “good spouse,” but Idon’t think the expression “good husband” connotes anything like forbearance.)

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

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

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

it's like poetry

2012-01-23T06:57:00.000-08:00

The past couple of mornings, my husband Kris and I have beentalking about that first, theologically gigantic sentence of John’s gospel: In the beginning was the word, and the wordwas 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. Justthe sound of the words—the repetition of the word word and the same plain syntax (three reversed was statements joined by and)—operatesas an invitation into mystery. John’ssentence is the only passage of scripture—except maybe “Jesus wept”—that I havememorized without expressly setting out to do so. Something about it isfundamentally appealing and simple. Indeed, it’s so straightforward that,unlike most of scripture, it's is pretty much identical across thetranslations. Somehow, the words just seem to want to be said and kept.

That said, the sentence has always frustrated me. The wayphilosophers often frustrate me. And some artists. And manytheologians. 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 sayJesus? It would make things so much clearer. Jesus existed from the beginningand was with God and was God. Done. No consideration of the variouspermutations of the word logos inbiblical Greek. No long discussions of the timeless Greek form of the repeated was, as compared to the poor simple pasttense in which we must house it in English. Instead, a clear-cut declaration ofJesus’ participation in the creation of the universe.

Or maybe it doesn’t mean that at all. Maybe, as somesuggest, this is just John’s way of introducing the big story of Jesus on timeon earth. Forget the sentence’s reverberations with the first words ofscripture: In the beginning… Focus,instead, on the vagaries of John’s next words—“Throughhim 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 voicecall 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 themeaning that matters as how it makes you feel.”

The students in my poetry workshop are of the same opinionabout poetry. I told them the other day that part of their job in responding toone 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 makesense,” one of them remarked.

I tried to differentiate bad lack of clarity from goodambiguity—with my usual lack of success. This fight happens in every poetryworkshop 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 moststeadfastly dedicated to everyone else’s right to be vague and abstract andmeaningless.

I had my students' upcoming first poems in mind as Kris went on about the poeticquality 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 existedfrom the beginning. His plan. That Jesus was God’s plan all along.”

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

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

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

at first I didn't see anything

2012-01-16T04:25:00.000-08:00

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 withhim—roaming the Irvine Ranch’s strange and wonderful expanses of wilderness, stillnestled in the midst of suburbia. Bommer Canyon, miles of hillydesert grown over in cacti, grasses, sage scrub, wild artichokes, and fennel anddotted with decaying working pens and other cattle equipment. Various parks andnatural areas of Turtle Rock, the community where my dad lives. The marshy SanJoaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, an estuary sporting numerous ponds and a localchapter of the Audubon Society. Crystal Cove, a 1930s movie set on the sandjust south of Newport Beach that was squatted by well-to-do beach bums untilthe 1970s, when it was acquired by the State of California and has, in additionto its old beach huts—some of which have been renovated for use as hotels—tidepools and a thriving wildlife refuge.

Needless to say, we saw lots of birds, and I was in birdwatcherheaven the whole time I was there. We saw ospreys on two different occasions, atern 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 twoof the four local species of hummingbird: Anna’s (green with a brilliantmagenta hood) and Allen’s (orangy-glinted green with a thin white collar and vermilionthroat).

My dad was, at first, only mildly interested. He couldn’treally see differences between them, he said, and he had never been able to usebinoculars to his satisfaction. He liked the ospreys. They are large and easyto recognize, and one of them sat on top of a pole eating a flopping fish. Butthe tiniest birds of all, the hummingbirds, when I pointed them out to mydad—sitting motionless, as hummingbirds do for long periods to digest, atopreeds and the upthrust limbs of small trees—were the ones that finallyenthralled him.

“At first I didn’t see anything, but then there was this hummingbirdwith 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, butI thought about it. Especially that where God displays his sovereignty andpower to Job—Who are you to question me?!—by cataloguing, at length, the greatvariety of his creation. Mountain goats. Wild donkeys and oxen. The ibis andthe rooster. Hawks. Eagles.

God’s funny celebration of the ostrich came to mind severaltimes, as I watched the phoebes loop out from sprinklers and the sanderlingsskitter drunkenly back and forth, like miniature Charley Chaplins, after thetide.

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 thinkof his doing in this speech to Job—“Who is this that obscures my plans withwords without knowledge?” (38:2 TNIV), it begins—but I can’t. God has, by thatpoint in his diatribe, softened, so much so that soon he is imagining puttingwhales on leashes as pets for his daughters.

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

I didn't know he was like that

2011-12-26T08:36:00.000-08:00

Siloam Springs, Arkansas—located just across the stateline from our Oklahoma farm—is wherewe 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 calledHarps, 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 babiesat the hospital there, and our family practitioner, who cut both of them out ofme when they refused to come out on their own, has his practice there. We setup the family cell phones there and thus all have Arkansas area codes and Siloam Springsprefixes, even though not one of us has ever lived there. Every other month, Ilead a book discussion group at the tiny Siloam Springs public library, wherewe shift beat up armchairs and couches into a circle back in the video section.

Although Siloam Springs has a small university and itspublic schools, unlike those my daughters attended, are housed into separateelementary, middle, and high school facilities, it has no mall and only themost minimal of restaurant options outside of fast food: a couple of caféspopular with college students, a place that serves Venetian-style wood-firedpizzas, 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’twant to know about since I cherish being able to grade papers there whilesipping 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? SalemSprings?” my sister Dorothy asked me on the phone the other day. "I never understand when you say it." Dorothy has livedher whole life in California.

“No. Siloam. S-I-L-O-A-M. You know, like the Pool of Siloamin the Bible, where angels supposedly stirred the waters and people went to gethealed. 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 orsomething—lying on a mat—who complains that he can’t get down to the waterwhile it’s being stirred because other people get in his way and no one willhelp him. And Jesus is like, ‘Do you want to walk, or what?’ And he says, 'Iguess 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, butthere are a lot of places in the gospels where he’s definitely not. Like there'sthis woman who keeps following after him and yelling that she wants him to healher daughter. But she’s not a Jew—Phoenician or something—and the disciples want tosend her away, and Jesus tells her, ‘I only came to the Jews. It’s not right togive 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 lickup the crumbs under the table.’ So Jesus gives in to whathe 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 thinkhe is.”

the worst possible sin

2011-12-19T07:46:00.001-08:00

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

Joanie and I moved quickly from the subject of our dad to hernew 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 Lordhates,
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 versewhen she first referred to it; so, since I was sitting at the computer as wetalked, I googled around till I found the passage she seemed to be talkingabout and then read it back to her in the default translation I had open in oneof my browser tabs, the TNIV. Joanie translated each item in the list into thewording 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) asI read, confirming that each one meant the same thing.

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

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

In reality, Joanie is as much a victim as a causer of discordin our family—as, indeed, all the rest of us are or have been at various pointsin 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 toothers’ goodness as to their needs—along with the last. I hope to improve in bothareas: to be less dismissive of others and to sow love, not discord, in our fracturedfamily. And, as I have learned from my recovery from PTSD, the first step incorrecting a problem, perhaps the only step needed, is becoming aware that itexists.

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

"since there is no other metaphor—also the soul"...mourning Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T08:34:00.000-08:00

My husband is on a business trip, so I spent breakfast reading thoughsome of the BBC’s offerings this morning of “pithy aphorisms, wise reflectionsand wounding one-liners” of Christopher Hitchens, who died last night, aged 62,of esophageal cancer.

The first listed in the article referenced the Bible and encapsulatedin a phrase what I always liked about Hitchens—namely, his consequentiality andunflinching determination to bash and shatter anything he perceived as a falseidol: He called the New Testament "a work of crude carpentry, hammeredtogether long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts tomake things come out right."

That said, though, I have to say I have always found the man,like many an idol-smasher, mean-spirited and unlovable. A man smitten with one faultlesshero (George Orwell) and countless irredeemable villains (everyone else). Alwayson the attack.

I mentioned Hitchens in one of my own books, A Field Guide to God, in which I explorethe difficulties inherent in sensing the presence of an invisible, inaudible,and intangible God. In a chapter on Mother Teresa’s heartbreaking struggle to senseGod’s presence, I wrote,

Could she haveactually lost her faith? I wondered as I read her confessions. Or never had faith to begin with?Perhaps she was simply the manipulative hypocrite that her main detractor—heratheist counterpart in fame, Christopher Hitchens—presents her as in thebook-length attack on Mother Teresa he wrote during her lifetime. In a reviewof Come Be My Light entitled “Teresa,Bright and Dark,” Hitchens diagnosed Mother Teresa’s spiritual dilemma as “theinevitable result of a dogma that asks people to believe impossible things andthen makes them feel abject and guilty when their innate reason rebels.” Hesummed up her work as “a strenuous and almost hysterical effort to drown outthe awful fear of ‘absence.’” He mocked even the anguish of her letters andfound in her loss of a sense of God’s presence gleeful support for his own viewthat “the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.” In another review, he dismissedher as a “fraud.”

The BBC’s list contains many similarly dismissive sounding one-liners.We should dismiss scripture: "Literature, not scripture, sustains the mindand—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul." We should dismissChristianity’s or anyone else’s claims on the individual: “Do not live forothers any more than you would expect others to live for you." We shoulddismiss even our selves: “Suspect your own motives, and all excuses.”

But, especiallyas he neared death, Hitchens’ voice sounded less secure about such dismissals. “Itcould be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possibleto live one's everyday life as if this were so,” he once seemed to lament. Later,though, undergoing chemotherapy, "My main fear is of being incapacitatedor imbecilic at the end. It's not something to be afraid of, it's something tobe terrified of." Oh, let it be a joke!

Hitchens didn’t dismiss Mother Teresa, finally. He went onand on and on and on about her in books and articles. He talked about her somuch that the Catholic church chose him as the best possible naysayer required—who knew?—in itscanonization process as Teresa made her first post-death steps toward sainthood.

And that is the hope I take on his behalf. That, finally, hecouldn’t just let the hope for something better lie.

As the writer of Hebrewspoints out of the Canaanite prostitute Rahab and Sarah—who laughed derisivelywhen told that her lifetime of prayers for a son had been answered—and many others who predated Jesus:

They did not receive the things promised; they only saw themand welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners andstrangers on earth. . . . [T]hey were longing for a better country—a heavenlyone. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared acity for them. (Hebrews 11:13, 16).

my first complete prayer

2011-12-11T06:21:00.001-08:00

My dad told me the other day, in his first week of chemotherapy, that, althoughhe was “not good at praying,” he had just prayed “the best prayer I ever prayedin my life,” and it was this:

Thank you for giving me cancer, because it gives me time to make peace withmy neighbor.

It’s such a thrilling prayer, I think, simultaneously expressing acceptanceof, even gratitude for, the horrible reality he’s been given and a plea for thepromise of the season: peace on Earth, goodwill towards men. He called it “acomplete prayer.” Although I don't know what he meant by that, exactly, itseemed right.

I’m not much good at praying, either—particularly, strangely, about such bigscary things as my dad’s cancer and my mother-in-law’s Alzheimer’s—so I decidedto just pray his prayer with him. I have tried it various ways.

Thank you for giving him cancer because it gives him time to make peace withhis neighbor.

Thank you for giving him cancer because it gives me time to make peace with myneighbor.

Thank you, Father, for time. For my neighbor. For your promise of peacebetween us.

Whatever way I tried to pray it, though, the only thing that would come out of me—my first complete prayer, perhaps—is Come, Lord Jesus!

I have never really prayed this prayer before, and, though it is a commonphrase, the wording strikes me as odd. Odd coming from me, that is. To pray Come, Lord Jesus! is to pray for the endtimes, it seems to me. It is to pray the book of Revelation, not my favoritepart of the Bible. It is a plea for God’s authority in all things, his will,which seems in my messed up brain to be at odds with his love. To pray, Come, Lord Jesus! is to pray to theLordness of Jesus—his power, his differentness from me—not his humanness.

I was talking to my colleague Jake about my weird new prayer the other day.

“I’ve never called Jesus 'Lord' before,” I told him.

He looked shocked. Then he caught himself and made some joke. Surely she must be joking, I heard himthinking. Then he got serious again (Jake is Presbyterian, a preacher’s son,etc.) and said, “Well, it’s that you can’t deal with authority.”

Which is true.

“I mean,” he went on, “you’ve told me you don’t like the whole set up ofchurch: some man standing up above everyone else, literally, and telling themhow it is and everyone else just having to accept what he says without anychance to say anything back.”

Which is also true.

But my surprise at praying Come, Lord Jesus!—my surprise at praying anything at all to this LordJesus—was not about welcoming the sort of authority I object to in churches. Norwas it about authority, really. Rather, it was that Jesus was Lord: not merely God's son but God himself, the creator and provider and ruler. In praying Come, Lord Jesus!, I was welcoming the Jesus Paul was talking about when he wrote that “by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him” (Colossians 1:16 NIV). Somehow, in spite ofmyself, I was suddenly seeing God’s power and God’s love as synonymous in aword.

Lord. A word we no longer use much, except for things religious, and then onlyin reference to power. Etymologically, though, it comes to us from the MiddleEnglish “ruler of the household.” And, before that, “guardian of the loaves.” Ilike that homey conflation of God’s power and love.

Praying Come, Lord Jesus! is aboutpraying to the Maker and Giver and Guardian of the Loaves, all in one.

Come, Lord Jesus!

God’s purpose for us, if he has one

2011-12-02T07:08:00.001-08:00

Last night on the phone with my sister Sharon, she told me, “God’s purpose isn’t for people to be happy. Everybody thinks it is, but it’s not. God’s purpose for us is that we do the rightthing.”

It seemed a grim way to go about doing God’s work—that is,believing in the One God Sent—but I left it at that. I didn’t want to get in afight. I’ve been thinking about that sad conclusion ever since,though.

It was my first thought this morning, as Idithered around the house, reluctant to go down to my mother-in-law’s house towash and dress and feed and spend time with her. (Mamaw’s caretaker’ssister-in-law died yesterday, so we’re without our morning help for the nextfew days.)

Perhaps Sharon are right, I thought. Perhapsit is God’s purpose for me, this doing the right thing. This reluctance.

When I think about Mamaw, though, I know it’s not. She issomeone who has always done the right thing, as far as I can tell. Sure, she hasher faults. Back when she used to leave her house, she never failed to point out to me that any person she met or sawanywhere was “large,” as she put it. She herself has always been tiny. Andthere were other things.

But, in the main, she has been always selfless andkindhearted all the years I have known her. Motivated, it has always seemed tome, by a keen desire to be helpful. And always cheery about it. Nonetheless,her prayer at meals—the prayer she will pray at breakfast when I go down therein a minute or two—is for forgiveness:

Dear Lord, please forgive my sins and help me to do theright thing.

And even now, her brain frayed by Alzheimer’s, she seems,above all, happy.

God’s purpose for us, if he has one—Do I have a purpose formy daughters?—is to be like Mamaw, I think. Helpful. Sweethearted. Aware of our own failings. Doing the right thing, but happy.

That’s God’s desirefor us, anyway, in everything we do. Certainly it’s my desire for my ownchildren: that they do the right things and that they be happy.

And to resist believing this, I’m thinking this Adventmorning—to supplant God's desire for us with some heavy imagined duty or undesirablepurpose—is to resist the coming of the One God Sent to teach us otherwise.

My yoke is easy, my burden light, he tells us. If we strivefor anything, I think, it should be for the fulfillment of that promise.

it's all about blood

2011-11-30T15:15:00.001-08:00

I’ve been telling everyone who appears in my office doorwayabout my family’s health crises over this Thanksgiving break. The worst: my dadwas officially diagnosed with really bad lung cancer (for which I entreat yourprayers: he starts chemo on Monday).

Then, my husband Kris came down with this dramatic versionof vertigo—dizziness, falls that bloodied his poor face, and the inability to getout of bed, walk, bend over, or even move his head without throwing up. It’scalled labyrinthitis—not because it makes him lurch around like a drunken oldman lost in a labyrinth, although it does, but because it involves an infectionor blockage in his labyrinth, a part of the inner ear that is like a littlelevel in which calcium stones roll around on top of the hairlike receptors thattell the brain which way is up. So he’s laid up.

And we took my mother-in-law for her yearly check-up to beofficially told what has been clear for some time now—she can no longer be lefton her own for eighteen hours a day—so that we could start making plans forwhat to do next.

Kris resists his mom’s diagnosis—not because it isn’t truebut because telling her he’s taking her to a nursing home is unimaginable. Butwe can’t afford 24-hour in-home care, and, even if we could, we could never getthe quality of care she’d get in a nursing home. Caretakers for the elderly—atleast out in the country where we live—are largely untrained young people workingfor hardly more than minimum wage. Desperate, in other words, with no otheroptions. Having gone through a number of caregivers, we feel very fortunate tohave now an uncommonly capable and kindhearted woman about my age who’s in it,she says, because she loves old people. Saint Betsy, I call her. But she canonly work 33 hours a week. We need 168.

So it was that, when my colleague Jennifer appeared in mydoorway, we got to talking about how, dying on the cross, Jesus consigned his probablywidowed and possibly ailing mother Mary to the care of his best friend John:

When Jesus saw his mother there,and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here isyour son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, thisdisciple took her into his home. (John 19:16-27).

“I love that he did that!” Jennifertold me. To her, it contrasts favorably with another scriptural story whereMary and her other sons show up and Jesus asks,

“Who are my mother and my brothers?”
Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:33-35)

According to Jennifer, Jesus’audience—and even modern day audiences—would find that passage shocking. Tothem, as she put it, “It’s all about blood.” But to Jesus, it’s about somethingelse. Nevertheless, he looked after his blood.

I have nothing but questions aboutJesus’ giving away his mom to John, though. Was Jesus taking care of his mombefore that moment? Why don’t we see any of the details of that? And where are Jesus’brothers? Why aren’t they at the cross? And why aren’t they taking care oftheir mom? Where, especially, is James, the brother of Jesus who biblical scholarssay authored that scary eponymous book in which he argues that “people arejustified by what they do and not by faith alone” (James 2:24)?

And what, for Pete’s sake, is theright thing, the loving thing, to do with an elderly mother with dementia whowants to keep living on her own in her own house long after she has become adanger to herself? Jesus is silent about that.

a simple sentence

2011-11-29T07:04:00.001-08:00

I just sent my student Sam a paper back all marked up in trackedchanges. It was a powerful little essay on the subject of Sam’s regret overnever having shared the good news about the One God Sent to a friend who diedan atheist. “[P]erhaps a simple sentence could have changed his fate,” Samconcludes.

A simple sentence.It is so interesting to me, as a teacher of writing, how resolutely we resistsimple sentences. Most writers will do anything to avoid them, complicatingthem with clauses and qualifiers and all manner of rhetorical hesitations andjoining them to other sentences in every way possible, habits that land them inthe myriad punctuation errors that are the pests of college writinginstruction.

Case in point: Sam.Though only in his first year of college, he already has a strong voice as awriter. He’s insightful, funny, genuine, interesting. Occasionally evenconcrete. He has an overwhelming aversion to periods, though—an aversion towhich many of my brightest students are prone. In lieu of periods, Sam lovesthe old-fashioned semicolon. (An idea: Figure out some way to force him to readSartor Resartus or some other Victorian monstrosity over Christmasbreak. That will surely cure him.) He also joins sentences together withcommas—a punctuation error called a comma splice that plagues many beginningwriters. In a nineteen-sentence essay, Sam joined four sentences unnecessarilytogether by semicolons and four incorrectly by commas. Goodness me.

In any case, I spentthirty minutes or so of my breakfast hour trying to convince Sam to embrace thesimple sentence.

“[L]earn to love periods,”I summarized at the end of his paper, after commenting on semicolons and commasall down the right margin in track changes before emailing the paper back to him:

Consider thepowerful sentence in John 11, “Jesus wept.” Would it have been better if Johnhad said, “Jesus hung his head and cried long and loud, making the Jews thinkhe loved them”? Or if John had written it this way: “Jesus wept; thenthe Jews said, “See how he loved him!” No. Instead, John separates thesesentences, not merely with periods but with paragraph indentations. You need toseparate your sentences more, not join them.

I love that simple sentence, “Jesuswept.” In two words—an unadorned subject and verb, the most essential sentencethere could be—John encapsulates the whole story of the One God Sent: God sent himselfas a human like us. Knowing the whole truth of existence and capable of raisingothers and himself from the dead, Jesus nevertheless cried, as we do, to lose afriend. Wow.

what's up with that?

2011-11-25T18:02:00.001-08:00

In the assignment I just handed back from a course inwriting from faith, several students lamented that they often failed, as one ofthem put it, “to love others more than myself.” Why do so many of us think thatloving others more than ourselves iswhat God has called us to do in the commandment to “Loveyour neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39 TNIV)?

I have written a whole book on this sort of misreading of somany believers—even of those who, as I am, are thoroughly convinced thatsalvation is in no way dependent upon behavior. Still, every time I reencountersuch thinking—in others, in myself—it unsettles me anew. Why do we have thisurge to outdo what God expects of us by burdening ourselves with holy acts wecan’t possibly achieve? Why can we not accept Jesus’ assurance that his burdenis easy and his yoke light? Why don’t we concentrate on the one work God does expect of us: to believe in the OneGod Sent—that is, not merely to believe inJesus (or to believe on him,whatever that’s supposed to mean) but to believe simply believe him when he says such things?

I am reminded of the disciples asking Jesus to teach themhow to pray “just as John taught his disciples” (Luke11:1 TNIV). The disciples they’re wanting toemulate, mind you, are the followers of John the Baptist, an Extreme Holinessdevotee if there ever was one. John’s disciples likely lived in the wilderness justas John did, dining on grasshoppers when they weren’t fasting and praying nightand day.

“Shouldn’t this be harder?” Jesus’disciples seem to be asking. And John’s disciples themselves wonder the samething in Matthew 9:14, where they comment that, while they themselves “fastoften,” Jesus’ disciples never do.

“What’s up with that?” they askJesus.

He answers that his disciples willfast when he’s no longer with them, but then he says something else:

“No one sews a patch of unshrunkcloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, makingthe tear worse.”

He emphasizes this aphorism withanother:

“Neither do people pour new wineinto old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out andthe wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, andboth are preserved.”

There’s going to be a new way of goingabout the business of faith, in other words. Sacrificing and fasting and burdeningourselves and others with impossible rules was the old way. The new way is awholly different experience. Easy. Light. Delightful.

even in our least loving moments

2011-11-21T09:09:00.001-08:00

Today at breakfast I recounted a story a colleague told methe other day when I ran into her at Panera, where we both go to grade papers. Wehad gotten to talking about the ways our teaching experiences have grown usspiritually, and my colleague told me about how a former student of hers hadfailed her class twice as a result of absences and lack of motivation. Againsther judgment or inclination, my colleague had been pressured into allowing thestudent to retake her class a third time. At graduation, the student thankedall the professors who had made similar concessions and singled outspecifically my colleague for, as the student said, “believing in me.”

“I have never felt so humiliated,” my colleague told me. Icould remember many such instances in my own career, when I had struggled tolike and even totally written off a student who later returned to thank me formy teaching. My colleague resolved from that moment never to give up on astudent again.

“That’s just like what Ron said that time about the goatsand the sheep,” my husband Kris commented.

Apparently, some fifteen years ago, our friend Ron hadfilled in for our regular pastor and preached about the passage where Jesus recountshow, at the last judgment, he will damn the goats who saw him hungry, thirsty,lonely, and imprisoned and did nothing about it and commend and welcome homethe sheep who did. (Kris has an astonishingly explicit memory for things peopletalked about long in the past. It’s like being married to a tape recorder.)

In any case, Ron had been impressed with the sameness of thegoats’ and the sheep’s response: “Lord, when did wesee you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or inprison…?” both groups wonder (Matthew 25:44 TNIV). And neither group has anymemory of helping or not helping those in need—evidence, according to Ron, thatthe loving acts believers do may not be the ones they expressly set out to do somuch as the ones God does through them unawares. My colleague, according to myhusband, had believed in that student without even knowing it.

It’s a comforting thought: thatGod recoups what we mess up. That, even in our least loving moments, God mightbe using us to carry out some worthy task of love.

enjoy your current miseries while they last

2011-11-16T06:02:00.001-08:00

The first year students in my Writing from Faith course—freshpeople,as I like to call them—have just turned in short essays about biblical truths lifehas taught them and are reading them aloud.

In one, Kara first took us to the Teacher’s counsel against reminiscing:

Donot say, "Why were the old days better than these?" For it is not wise to asksuch questions. (Ecclesiastes 7:10 NLT).

Then she compared her current life asa college student—long nights with her books, receiving text messages from herdad saying “Missing you!”—with remembrances of her family’s Friday nighttradition of renting a bunch of movies and buying tons of candy from the DollarGeneral and then watching movies and eating candy until late in the night, sheand her siblings often falling asleep “on the couches.”

“What I wouldn’t give to burn the books and settle in for along night of movies and candy with my wonderful family,” Kara laments, beforetaking us to her dad’s response, “I remember those days. Enjoy it while itlasts!” and to her own memory of having said the same in response to heryounger sister’s complaints about high school.

So much fond memory in this piece. So much envying ofothers’ current misery as one’s own golden day. As Kara read, I found myselfenvying not only those family nights and her wonderful family, those images ofchildren asleep on the couches, but that dad—texting his daughter to reminisceabout his own college days—and Kara herself, as an older sister, counseling ayounger sibling straight out of the weary nostalgia of a college student.

It takes some effort, in these days of caring for age-and-sickness-crippledparents while my girls embark on mysterious lives off at college in a farawaycity, to remember past my current emergencies to halcyon moments like the onesmy student describes. To looking out the window after a rain and discovering Charlotte and Lulu,naked, lolling in a puddle with the dogs. To that day, one long ago November,when Charlotte gorged on so many sugary persimmons from the trees in our woods thatshe got diarrhea and couldn’t eat them again for a long time. To Lulu at two orthree, solemnly gluing Red Hots, one by one, to the roof of a gingerbread housewith tiny fingers sticky with icing.

I can’t quite get to Ecclesiastes’ dictum against thinking thosedays better than these—better, indeed, than most days I can think of. Withoutthose days to look back on, I don’t know if I could do these days at all.

Yet, when younger friends tell me of their family woes, I findmyself coaching, in the spirit of Kara’s dad and Kara herself, “Enjoy yourcurrent miseries while they last! Things only get worse: your kids moredemanding, less able to take care of themselves not more, your worries morecomplex.”

What is it that blinds us to the bright beauty of thecurrent moment, rendering it unreachable except in hindsight? Surely it wouldbe wiser, sweeter, to seize time, moment by moment, and devour it, as the poetMarvell invites, and so proceed in ecstasy through this life. That is, I think,the crux of Ecclesiastes’ counsel.

please go ahead and kill me

2011-11-12T06:35:00.001-08:00

Kris commented at the breakfast table this morning, aproposof nothing, that it was surprising that the Bible didn’t contain that story,common in myths, in which someone prays for—and gets—something that turns outto be a curse, not a blessing.

“You know, like Midas’ touch turning everything, andeventually Midas himself, to gold. That sort of thing happens a lot in myths.”

I thought immediately of how I hated being told to “becareful what I pray for” by fellow believers and wondered where in scripture,if anywhere, this enthusiasm-dampening sentiment might have come from.

“What about the Israelites in the desert telling Moses,‘We’re sick of this manna! We want meat!’”? I asked Kris. “So God made quailrain from the sky, so many quail that they couldn’t eat it all and were buriedin rotten, stinking meat.”

And we talked about how that story functioned in about thesame way.

Later, I looked up the story of the quail—found in Exodus 16and Numbers 11—and found it better than most myths I’ve read. Listen to Moses’spectacular complaint about the job God has given him:

“Why have you brought this troubleon your servant? What have I done to displease you that you put the burden ofall these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth?Why do you tell me to carry them in my arms, as a nurse carries an infant, tothe land you promised on oath to their ancestors? Where can I get meat for allthese people? They keep wailing to me, ‘Give us meat to eat!’ I cannot carryall these people by myself; the burden is too heavy for me. If this is how youare going to treat me, please go ahead and kill me—if I have found favor inyour eyes—and do not let me face my own ruin.” (Numbers 11: 11-15 TNIV)

Wow! And God’s response is even better. As Moses it to theIsraelites,

“The Lord heard you when you wailed, ‘If only we had meat to eat!We were better off in Egypt!’Now the Lord will give you meat,and you will eat it. You will not eat it for just one day, or two days, orfive, ten or twenty days, but for a whole month—until it comes out of yournostrils and you loathe it—because you have rejected the Lord, who is among you, and have wailedbefore him, saying, “Why did we ever leave Egypt?” (Numbers 11:18-20)

The story is also interesting inits instruction. The Israelites’ error is not so much praying for the wrongthing or praying injudiciously as it is rejecting the Lord, who, Moses reminds them, is among them.

an amusing sermon

2011-11-09T20:37:00.000-08:00

I reread Malachi in Wycliffe’s medieval translation—somethingabout reading early vernacular Bibles like Wycliffe’s and Luther’s excites meand makes me feel connected to what must have been the excitement of theirfirst readers—and got moored in the very first, previously innocuous seeming phrase:“The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel, in thehand of Malachi, the prophet.” (In Luther’s 1545 translation, if you’reinterested, it’s a Last, which meansburden or load.) In the TNIV and most other contemporary translations, it isnot a burden but a prophecy or a message.

“What do you make of this?” I asked Kris after I investigatedmy Exhaustive NIV Concordance and googledaround and discovered that there are, supposedly, two different words in Hebrewthat are spelled exactly, exactly, the same: one meaning prophecy and the other meaning burden.According to biblical scholars, the only evidence that shows which one is meantis context. And, in a couple of passages, both meanings obtain.

“Well,” Kris said, “a prophecy can be a heavy burden.”

“Yes, but what I mean is, if the only way you can tell whichone is meant is by context, why do they think there are two words in the first place?"

I showed him a passage in Jeremiah where one scholar said thateither meaning could work and that Jeremiah, who liked to play around withwords, probably intended both. A gnarled read even in the NIV, it basicallysays that you should reject anyone who tells you, “I have a message from God.”In Wycliffe’s translation, the crux of it reads “Thereforeif this people, either prophet, either priest, asketh thee, and saith, What isthe burden of the Lord? thou shalt say to them, Ye be the burden, for I shallcast you away, saith the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:33).

This business of burdens fromprophets and priests—and the fact that the whole segment of Jeremiah begins “Woeto the shepherds, that scatter and draw the flock of my pasture, saith the Lord”(Jeremiah 23:1 Wycliffe)—landed us, of course, in the mouth of Jesus, whoprobably spoke Aramaic (a patois of Hebrew and other Semitic languages), likelyread scripture in Hebrew (although there were Aramaic texts), but whose wordswere recorded in Greek, in which language burden and message are two entirelyunrelated words.

Jesus began his famous “Seven Woes”sermon with these words: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit inMoses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do notdo what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy,cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselvesare not willing to lift a finger to move them” (Matthew 23:2-4 TNIV).

Which to me means Jesus wasreferencing both the opening of Malachi—a common opening of prophetic books ofthe Bible—and this burdensome passage from Jeremiah, in which he burdens hisreaders with the burden that they shouldn’t say God has burdened me to say x or trust someone else who burdens uswith such burdens.

Just saying.

The take-home? Kris: “It wouldmake an amusing sermon.”

I’ve lost my capacity to believe in coincidences

2011-11-08T06:24:00.000-08:00

This morning I read a bit further in Malachi, one of the last books of the Bible written before the New Testament, with the goal of launching myself into the mindset of those longing for the coming of the Messiah. I hadn’t gotten very far when my husband, who’s on a business trip in Oklahoma City, called to remind me to go by his mom’s on my way to work to drop off her Alzheimer’s medicine.

Mamaw—as my daughters and I call her—is in the stage of the disease where, with our help and that of paid caregivers, she’s just barely able to live on her own. Kris and I share various duties relating to her care. He doses out her medicine, lunches with her daily, and checks on her in the evening; while I shop for her, keep her in fresh cornbread or biscuits (about the only thing she eats), and deal with anything of an intimate nature, such as bathing and dressing her whenever we can’t get a caregiver. And, of late, dealing with dramatically “inappropriate bathroom habits”—as the Alzheimer’s literature discreetly refers to them—that I’ll leave to your imagination.

Thus it was that what I was reading when Kris called—a passage in Malachi in which priests sniff contemptuously at God’s altar and God responds in kind by smearing the excrement of their sacrifices on their faces (1:12, 2:3)—had double resonance for me. All this talk of smearing and sniffing and excrement in the context of my grudging duty to my mother-in-law, probably the kindest and most self-sacrificing woman I’ve ever known, who now needs me to be kind to her.

I read Kris the passage and asked what he thought it meant.

“Sounds like those priests lost their trust in God,” he interpreted.

“But all this excrement smearing and sniffing. Is there some connection, do you think, between this story and your mom?”

“No,” he said. Decisively. “It’s just a coincidence.”

Since becoming a believer, though, I’ve lost my capacity to believe in coincidences. And, indeed, there is no coincidence here.

“And you say, ‘What a burden!’” the Lord had roared earlier in the morning from the pages of Malachi into my reluctance, my finickiness. “I am not pleased with you,” the God who created me told me, “and I will accept no offering from your hands” (Malachi 1:13, 10 TNIV).

To get to longing, I see now, I, like the Israelites before me, will have to get past my contempt—past my fussy objection to bodies and odors and my self-centered notions of how things ought to be—to obedience. And pity. To the sheer, desperate trust from which longing is born.

where I am on the longing scale

2011-11-06T18:32:00.001-08:00

WithAdvent coming up here soon, I've been hoping to get a sense of the longing thatmust have preceded Jesus’ birth on the part of believers, so I decided to readthe last little books written before the gospels by the so called postexilicprophets Joel, Zechariah, and Malachi.

I started withMalachi, a bad choice, as it turned out, because the book begins by rehashing astory from Genesis I have always found particularly difficult: God openlyproclaiming, “I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated” (Malachi 1:3TNIV).

Kris shared mydiscomfort at the breakfast table, calling the account of God’s love in lightof Jacob’s smarmy deceitfulness a “burr under his saddle” ever since he firststarted reading the Bible as a little kid.

Jacob’s creepinesshas never bothered me much—privy as I am to my own deceits and smarminess—butwhat I can’t get is God’s utter rejection of the other brother. I mean, Esauadmittedly made an ill-advised choice in the matter of the lentil soup, but hewas the victim of way worse meannesses from Jacob later on—such as Jacob’spretending to be Esau so as to stealtheir father’s blessing. It doesn’t get much crasser than that. Yearsafterwards, though, when Jacob is terrified of meeting back up with hisbrother, Esau turns out to be uncommonly kind and forgiving.

I mean, I get God'sloving the sinner Jacob; what I can’t get is God’s hating the niceguyEsau—along with, presumably, other nonbelieving niceguys I have known in mylife.

So we talked aboutthat, Kris and I. Did God’s love really, truly, come down to faith alone—whichEsau evidently didn’t have, however brotherly and forgiving he seemed, butwhich Jacob had in abundance?

We tried to get atwhat it was that God may have liked about Jacob. We considered the wrestlingstory and that Jacob chose wives from his people, whereas Esau marriedCanaanites.

For me, though, itcomes down to that story of when Jacob goes to sleep on a stone pillow andwakes up from a dream thinking, “Surely the Lordis in this place, and I was not aware of it . . . How awesome is thisplace! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven”(Genesis 28:16-17).

That’s what it is thatmakes Jacob lovable to God, I think: his ability to keep on expecting God—evenin discomfort, even in despair, even in sleep!—just as a baby never stopsexpecting its parents to come running in from the other room.

So, by contrast, Esaumust have just given up on God. He let his hunger supplant his longing, hisdesire for peace and contentment supplant acknowledgement of the source ofthese earthly pleasures.

So that’s where I amon the longing scale so far, as Advent approaches. Longing to expect God likethat.

God has made it plain

2011-11-04T07:42:00.001-07:00

On Tuesday, my first year students came into class all riledup because of the chapel presentation of my colleague Dave, an archaeologistand Arabic speaking professor from the biblical studies department, to the semester’sseries on unlikely biblical heroes. He spoke on Balaam, the guy with thedonkey.

“He said that Muslims and Christians worship the same God,” Apriltold me. I love April. She has this ability, rare in first year students, toget right to the crux.

I hadn’t been in chapel and Dave’s message was probably morenuanced than that, but, it being a Gateway to Christian Higher Educationcourse, a goal of which is to explore the faith-relevance of their studies, Idecided to let them duke it out a while before we returned to the theme of oursection of the course, writing from faith. In the course of the duking, thesame-God question spread from Muslims to Jews to Mormons. Several students gotBibles out of their backpacks and read to us. The gist of what they read wasthe centrality of Jesus’ divinity to Christians’ notion of who God is.

I mostly refereed—and babbled a little, as I typically dowhen surrounded by believers defending their views—but I did offer one scripturalpassage I’ve always found exciting and comforting in the writings of Paul, wherehe argues that truth is available to everyone because “becauseGod has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’sinvisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen,being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:19-20 TNIV).

“Looks like you don’t have to knowabout Jesus to know God,” I told them.

No one seemed much impressed withthis promise, maybe because Paul phrases it as a threat: those who reject this readilyavailable truth are thus “without excuse” (Romans 1:20). In any case, they keptarguing and pontificating and leafing through their Bibles a while, then wereturned to the topic of creative writing.

Yesterday, after a tamer chapel,we got immediately to their current assignment. Quite by accident, I used the word epiphany. I meant it in the literarysense and was pleased when one of my English majors, Nate, was able to explainit.

“Anyone know the religious meaningof that term that James Joyce was referencing when he used it that way?”

Another student, Jewel, surprisedme: “Isn’t it the feast day in January, when the Magi visit Jesus?”

So we talked about how the magiwere from the East—and not the typical sort of people to seek a Jewish Messiah.Scholars think they were Zoroastrians, a major world religion that predatedIslam in Iran.Somehow the magi knew, though, that they would find God’s son where that a startook them.

“The word magi,” I told them, “is the root of our word magic. It’s the same word used in the New Testament account of Simonthe Sorcerer that some of you wrote about. Simon was a magus, the plural of which is magi.”

I love how God claims everything,even the crazy tohuwabohu of my courses, and makes things plain to us.

you can't be cheerful when you're mad

2011-11-02T07:52:00.001-07:00

Kris read to me this morning from a Wall Street Journal article by Kathleen A. Hughes entitled “WhenYour Vacation Home Becomes Everybody’s Vacation Home.” In it, rich person afterrich person—people with six-bedroom vacation homes in Tuscany—complain about acquaintances takingadvantage of their hospitality.

Having recently endured an unannounced visit that seemed itwould never end to our barely three-bedroom, all-year house that is also myoffice, I’ve been thinking a lot about hospitality lately. Or, actually,stewing about it.

And venting to my sister Sharon. She attempted to soothe myanger by legitimizing it. “In Proverbs it says, if you stay too long atsomeone’s house,” she told me, “they’ll grow to hate you.” (Afterwards, Ilooked it up. It’s Proverbs 25:17.)

But I was already obsessing about Jesus’ complaint to theinhospitable, in the account of the sheep and the goats: “I was a stranger and you did not invite me in,” he tellsthe unwelcoming goats. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one ofthe least of these, you did not do for me,” and he relegates them to hell (Matthew25:43, 45 TNIV). In an email to my colleague Jake, who teaches an intro tohigher ed course with a theme of hospitality, I complained that the passage wasdistressing. He agreed.

In the Wall StreetJournal article, a guy in Ocean City, Maryland, finallycomes up with the idea of charging friends and family $2000 a year plusincidentals for staying at his “two-level condo with ocean views.” A rather inhospitable solution to theproblem, it seemed to me at first, until I read his concluding words: “Now I'mgetting $30,000 a year of income from the families,” he said, “and I'm not asangry about it as when we were subsidizing everyone.”

“You know,” I told Kris at the breakfast table, “It’s like Sharon says. That’s just whathappens when you feel you’re being taken advantage of. You get mad and feel putupon. And your anger and put-upon-ness undermine whatever love you may have hadto begin with. This guy’s coming up with a way to avoid feeling that way whilestill giving people a better deal than they could get at a hotel could be apractical realization of how to be the kind of ‘cheerful giver’ that Paul saysGod loves (2 Corinthians 9:7). You can’t be cheerful when you’re mad.”

is it about me?

2011-11-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

Lulu, the younger of my two daughters, started college this year and called the other day to brag about getting an A on her first lit paper. After we used up that topic, she asked what was up with me.

“I started a new blog today,” I told her. “You should sign up as a follower, so then I’ll have one.”

“Really? Is it going to be about me? I’m only going to read it if it’s about me.”

“No. You probably won’t be interested in it. It’s about the Jewish shema—you know that passage in Deuteronomy that’s sort of the crux of everything for the Jews? Where Moses tells the Israelites, ‘Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength’”?

“Yeah.”

“Well, after that God tells them to talk about that command—and, by extension, all of God’s words—all the time: to their kids, when they get up and lie down and sit at home and walk down the street. Whenever. With whomever. I’m going to try to do that: talk about scripture all the time to people and then write about what gets said.”

“Well, so, then you can write about me. Cuz you’re doing that right now.”

“What?”

“Talking about scripture to your kid.”

“Oh, yeah!”

I checked today, though, and she still isn’t a follower. Go figure.

have a blessed night

2011-10-30T07:47:00.001-07:00

I stopped at the supermarket on my way home from work the other evening. The checker completed my transaction by saying, “Have a blessed night.”

I babbled something nonsensical in response while I sorted through the lovely surprise of a stranger’s talking Christian to me.

The other day, at a book discussion among women from my university, my colleague Jennifer commented that she always went out of her way to avoid talking about Christian topics when she was with nonbelievers—or strangers who might be nonbelievers—and I recognized in that moment that I tend to do the same thing.

Jennifer’s comment was in reference to a scene in the novel we were discussing: Mischa Berlinki’s Fieldwork, about a journalist in Thailand—also named Mischa Berlinski—researching an American anthropologist’s murder of an American missionary, all three of them engaged in “fieldwork” of a sort. When the journalist starts hanging out with the Christian missionary family of the murdered man, he is surprised that, although family members talk about Jesus all the time—almost as though Jesus were a family member—they never try to evangelize their nonbelieving guest. Later, in a heartbreaking scene recounting the lead up to the murder, the mother of the family flat out refuses to tell the anthropologist, also a nonbeliever, the good news.

Despite these two scenes, and despite the fact that the real Mischa Berlinski is also a nonbeliever, the novel is surprisingly refreshingly congenial toward this missionary family and toward Christianity in general.

It struck me, as I was reading the novel and then later as my colleagues and I were discussing it, that maybe evangelism—that is, literally, telling the good news—isn’t just about telling people how to be saved. It’s about telling the good news that God made us and pays attention to us and loves us. That when we don’t love God back, God suffers pain. That God is determined to win back our love. Evangelism is telling the gospel—another word that means good news—present in all of scripture, not just the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

The Bible is full of gospels. Which is probably why we’re encouraged, in Deuteronomy 6, to talk about scripture all the time—when we get up and when we lie down, when we walk along the road and when we sit around at home—and not just with our own families and fellow believers but with anyone we encounter along the way.