all important nothings

A Promethian Moment

2009-06-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

Social media has vastly altered one's ability to not simply observe and absorb but now even experience and help shape events. There is no longer the filter of institutions or editorial oversight, and this has vastly altered how we understand the world and the nature of information. With the recent protests in Iran and the Twitter response, we've seen many of the positive powers of this sort of revolution. This isn't a people's movement, this is a global people's movement. Are all revolutions going to be like this in the future? Are they going to incorporate cyberwarfare as a major tactic? Will they be similarly transnational and non-governmental? As a historian of foreign relations--in other words, of how America, broady defined, interacts, broadly defined, with the world--I am fascinated by these sorts of developments from an academic level. As a human being, I am moved and hopeful at the democratic power such tools represent, and hope that we will see them used in ways that will further the common good.

Such technology, however, also holds frightening possibilities. We are beginning to hear that the Revolutionary Guard, for example, is creating fake Twitter accounts and writing tweets meant to spread disinformation. The same tactic could be used to lure large groups of people into stings organized by the IRG or Basij. And that's where the lack of oversight or editorial control stands to inhibit the ability of social media to truly replace "traditional" news sources. If everyone is a reporter, and everyone a critic, and everyone's perspective legitimate and newsworthy, how do we filter the wheat from the chaff? How do we know what is real and what is simply opinion or worse, fiction? What does credibility mean in such an environment? Accountability?

I fear the risk of democratizing information to the point that the internet becomes the world's largest echo chamber. Someone says something, and it will be nigh on impossible to check its credibility, because legitimate sources of facts, ways to check the veracity of an idea disconnected to a quote on the internet, will have dried up. For example, Shane Fitzgerald's recent test of media accountability was telling. He put a fake quote on composer Maurice Jarre's Wikipedia page a few hours after the man's death, and it ended up in news outlets of varying types, from individual blogs to major newspapers, in the US, Britain, France, and Australia. This even despite the fact that Wikipedia's fact checkers removed the quote twice because of lack of attribution. Is this where we are headed?

This isn't to say that social media is all bad (not by any means!), but the challenges it poses to how we treat knowledge in our society are massive. As someone studying for my doctorate, I will have had to read hundreds of books, go through numerous exams, and take as well as teach many courses on my field before I achieve a degree that is meant to convey that I have a specialized and significant knowledge of something (in my case foreign relations). But in reality, my opinion on a blog, or worse, in a book will possibly matter exactly the same to the average reader as Joe Blow (or, to be political, let's say Joe the Plumber), who graduated high school but doesn't have any specialized knowledge beside what he sees on TV, but who has a snappy turn of phrase and writes a popular blog. Maybe this sounds totally petty, given my investment in the system, but shouldn't my opinion, my knowledge of American history, be given more credibility than Joe's? I was tried, and proven credible, he was not. (This isn't to say that academics can't lie. They have, do and will. But I would argue an academic has a greater onus to be meticulously credible than Joe does.) The difference is one of editorial oversight, if you will. I fear we will lose the idea that education matters, that specialization matters, that expertise counts for something. This matters less for things like Iran, where mass corroboration of events serves as a pretty strong safeguard for the truth. I am worried more about the more refined type of news and information services. We can already see it with the grassroots Right's abuse of the term "socialism" to mean, essentially, any policy of the Democratic Party.

I think we are sort of having a Promethian moment here as a culture. We've been given fire, are we going to warm ourselves or burn the house down around our ears?

(This was original a comment I wrote on a friend's blog post, but I thought I'd post it here for my own posterity.)

yowm mu'ataad

2009-06-17T04:50:00.000-07:00

I know. I know. Believe me, I know. You go exotic places, you tell me, and then you never update!

In my own defense, there has been precious little to update about here once I got settled in. I get up. I study Arabic. I go to bed. The routine would bore you, but for the fact it is Cairo, and therefore at least something is catching my eye. But more often than not they are just fleeting thoughts I have in between diagramming sentences. Thoughts such as, I wonder if the boys who carry trays of tea to and fro on the streets to waiting groups of men are paid for their effort, or if they are just gofers serving their fathers/uncles/brothers/family friends. Or, where does the muezzin live? In the mosque? One wonders these things. One could try to find them out, but that would take the mystery out of life.

So I thought I would describe my neighborhood here in Zamalek. What it is like to wander around here, on my walks to the store, or church, or down to the bank in the Marriot to cash a travelers check.

Zamalek has always been the cosmopolitan part of the city. It is an island in the middle of the Nile. Khedive Ismail named it the Jardin des Plantes, and proceeded to build an enormous palace on the east bank of the island and make the place a giant greenhouse for exotic plants from all over the world. The Khedive's opinions on those pesky issues of East-West and modernity can probably best be summed up in this quote: "My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions." He said this in 1879, the same year the British kicked him out when he refused to listen to the European bankers who effectively owned his country, so when he said "we are now part of Europe" it was not just in a metaphysical sense.

The Europeaness of Zamalek has stayed, despite the number of transformations the place has undergone. From being the hangout for pashas and European dilettantes and colonial elite to a lower middle class neighborhood post-1945, to once again becoming one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the city, the area has seen a lot of social change, and it doesn't bother to cover the scars from those changes. Imagine St Germain, the Parisian neighborhood, if you dipped it sand and let it bake in the desert for one hundred years or so. There are houses here that one is tempted to describe as once having been palatial--certainly their enormous size suggests a sumptuous past--but now lie in ruins. Their windows are boarded over or broken, various debris lie in their yards, the wrought iron gates ineffectual against decay and disuse. Miss Havisham could be living in some of these places.

Not all of the old colonial hangouts are wasting away. Many have been converted into apartments or schools, or, as is common here in Zamalek, art or music academies. There is an art academy on Mohammed Thakeb, the street my old AUC dorm is on, that has a lovely garden filled with all sorts of odd sculptural odds and ends for the students to draw or paint or whathaveyou. I think this is also the reason for the seemingly large number of art supply stores that are here on the island. There is also a very large music academy a block or so up from the church that I go to here. I'm never there during school hours, or I suppose I could hear people playing.

Zamalek also feels European in both its planned street grid (it has far fewer rabbit warren-esque patches than other areas of Cairo) and in the trees. Paris is again a good comparison--there are trees everywhere. Go to Google Earth and type in Cairo Egypt. Zoom down a little so you can distinguish Zamalek in the middle of the river. Compare your birds eye view of it to the right bank of the city. The island is green, the right bank beige. The trees are lovely, and make it very nice to walk around here, and are also a sign of the wealth of the place--who else but the wealthy would have the means to ensure that this many trees could grow in the desert? We are, I suppose, in the river, but nevertheless. The trees were a 19th century status symbol for the Khedive. Now it seems that sod has become the new status symbol for the well-to-do here. I passed by a house the other day, on Mohamed Mazhar, the street I live on, that had the most vividly green lawn I have ever seen. I only caught a glimpse of it behind the very tall ivy-covered iron fence surrounding the house, but it was so green it looked like it was in Technicolor. There were flowerbeds, and a little brick pathway leading up to a white house, all set off by this electrically green lawn. There were a few people seated around a wrought-iron patio table in the shade on this lawn, talking, and no doubt drinking something cool. Not four feet of actual space separated the dusty, baking sidewalk where I stood from this deep green cool carpet. Just a giant fence.

White is also a symbol. Who would try to build a white house in a country so perpetually covered in dust? I suppose there might be a heating/cooling reason behind it, but the mansions in Islamic Cairo, the places where the uber-wealthy medieval traders dwelt, are not white, they're brown and tan, and those were houses built to stay cool with no air conditioning (and having been in one in the middle of July I can attest to the fact they do indeed stay cool with no air conditioning). The white to me smacks of pretension. Much like the deep green lawns. They are building this big complex down the road from the grocery store I go to. I have no idea what it is. It is fairly large, and has these odd brown canvas tents stretching from its roof to the ground, but has a very modern look to it. And it is blindingly white. It is so white it almost hurts to look at it when the sun is shining on it. To me, when I pass it, it seems to gloat. How pristine I am, it says to my dirty dusty self. Again, to stay that clean in this climate is a sign of status, and of money.

Zamalek is also a place of embassies. Hundreds of them. I live across from the Jordanian embassy. When I walk to the 26th of July St, the island's main thoroughfare, I pass the embassies for Saudi Arabia, the Vatican, Iraq, Armenia (which looks like it was built by a group of nostalgic Bavarians...a more German looking building I could not imagine), Latvia... The list really goes on. I can't even recall them all. Bahrain is building a new embassy on Brazil St. The presence of all these embassies means that there are guards everywhere. This seems like it might be intimidating, but honestly, these are some of the most bored young men I have ever come across in my life. They have these tiny little wooden huts they sit in, really no more than a phone booth-sized ply wood creation with a shelf low enough to sit on, or sometimes a chair. And there they must sit, or stand in front of, all through the long hot day. Some of them make cat calls at you as you pass, but most look as if they were busy counting the grains of sand blowing by their feet. It must be an awfully tedious job. They have these ostentatious guns, guns that look like modified AK-47s, but if you look closely many don't have a trigger mechanism. Toy guns for toy soldiers.

I pass untold numbers of these guards on my way to any given place. Any walk is also likely to take me pass old men in white turbans and galabiyyas, long dress-like garment that covers you from your neck to your wrists and ankles. It has a slightly Islamic connotation, I suppose, but here it is mostly signifies lower class status. Many younger men wear these too, but it is almost exclusively wizened old men who wear the turbans with them. Even during the day the vast majority of people on the streets are men. When you see a women, she is almost always wearing hijab, although there are more uncovered women in Zamalek than other places, because it has such a high proportion of Europeans living there, as well as a sizeable Christian community (Coptic Christian and otherwise). Often times these men are sitting together, in groups of two or three or more, chatting in front of stores or apartment entrances. Or they are gathered around a car in the middle of the road with its hood popped, discussing the finer points (I assume, I don't speak much 'Ammiyya) of how it could be fixed. But men, groups of them, all over the places. And often groups of young boys (shebab) playing soccer, or riding bikes around. Men, everywhere. And many of them stare. The catcall is fairly rare (although I got one the other day). Much more common is this weird "hiss" that Egyptians do. It has lots of meanings. Sometimes it just means, I am approaching you from behind, usually with a large cart or on a bike or I am carrying something, so be aware. Sometimes it just to get the attention of someone. And sometimes it is done at women, as an attempt to get their attention and like a lesser version of a wolf whistle. Zamalek is not very bad for this, especially compared to places like Downtown around AUC where the men would just STARE at you, but it is still noticeable at times.

I wish I could adequately convey the dirt in this country. A fine layer of dust is over all outside things, which is to be expected. But there is also a decay that it is a bit hard to convey. I mentioned the decrepit buildings intermixed with the still vibrant stores and shops and galleries and restaurants of this neighborhood. But the sidewalk will often be cracked and broken, which large chunks missing in places, filled in with piles of dust. Glass is often on the sidewalks. Piles of garbage are here and there. It is just the way it is when you live in a country where the state has so thoroughly failed to take care of its citizens the way it should. Egypt's economy choked on its bureaucracy years ago, and everything has stayed in this state of disrepair. I read a wonderful book last year, The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa al-Aswany, an Egyptian author. In it, the author uses a few characters to voice his own sadness and anger at how Egypt has decayed. It used to be gorgeous, the downtown rivaled Paris, says a character. And now everything stands on the edge of ruin.

And amidst all this dirt and decay and ruin are people, masses of people, vibrant and loud and living. Cars are everywhere. Even on quiet streets there is a line of cars on either side of the road, sometimes two deep. One is just as likely to see a Mercedes or a Toyota parked next to a Volkswagen circa 1960. Cars so old and thin and seemingly rusted through you wonder how they still run wedged in next to newly bought Peugeots and older little Fiats. A melange of machinery. And the cars are not shy here. They don't stop for you. They don't swerve around you. You simply must walk, sometimes trot, and they will miss hitting you, in sha allah. Crossing the 26th of July is like going through a gauntlet, but I am getting pretty good at it again. If they are honking at you you know you are doing it correctly. The big streets are always a little amazing. Lanes are non existent. People weave between oncoming traffic as if death were not hurtling at them at 40 miles an hour with no intent to break. The lights at some intersections are more like suggestions. White and green city buses whizz along stuffed to the gills with people, mostly young men, all of whom seem to stare at you as they go past. And the honking. Always the honking. And the occasional screech of tires. And the smell, of gasoline, and exhaust, all vaguely heated by the sunshine.

The 26th of July is not like the quieter backstreets in the residential area. This is an artery, in every sense of the word. It carries people going from one side of the river to the other for work or home or pleasure, men on motorbikes delivering everything from groceries to fast food orders to important documents, yet other men, carrying boards on their heads piled high with flat bread while riding their bicycles down this riotous thoroughfare in a seemingly impossible feat of balance and skill, the occasional horse cart, and, as always, the black and white taxis, as mobile and as ever present as gnats. On either side of this road are all sorts of shops--shisha places, kushari places, many clothing shops and toy shops (I passed a place that had Hannah Montana and HSM3 posters in the window), upscale antiques shops, electronic shops, fruit and vegetable stands, cell phone stores, butchers' shops, gas stations. Like any big city, but unmistakeably Egyptian. If for no other reason that the little children who wander around selling packs of tissue, or the little cart selling roast nuts, or the newspaper sellers who, unlike any other city I have been in, line their papers up in a swath on the ground so that you have to look down to see the headlines.

There are mosques about, although fewer than in other areas of town perhaps. I live across the street from a pretty mosque, of a fair size, with a dome and minaret that look old although I have a sneaking suspicion they are more recently built impostors. There is also a very tiny little mosque that I pass on my way to the store. If you wander around here on Friday before jumu'ah (Friday prayer) you will see the men rolling out carpets and setting up canvas tents for people to come and pray outside. The streets become mosques. It is quite a cool thing, actually.

And with that I will end with the ahdan from my apartment window. The zooming that occurs during this video was me attempting to get the camera to pick up on the river that I can see just through the trees, but I am not sure how well it came out. I live a block off the river here. There is a line of apartment buildings, and then a big road, and then the river. I can look on to Cairo's real skyscrapers through the gap in the buildings.

shaqa ashraf. aydan, la uhibu an akuna mareeda.

2009-05-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

So not long after writing the end of the last post, things took a turn for the better. Ashraf called and offered to meet me during his lunch in order to let me into the apartment so that I would not have to stay in the sketchy hotel for the afternoon and could have internet and non-sketchiness. So luckily I had not really unpacked, because he called and said can we meet in half an hour at Sequoia? and I said yes! and then realized I had to check out and get a cab and get over to Zamalek, and that was not necessarily going to be the quickest process. But I went and checked out (do you know how much an international phone call costs? A LOT) and then the clerk at the desk asked if I had sent for a car. I responded I just wanted to take a taxi, and he so he sent the clerk out to the main street (the hotel was on a bit of a non-busy side street) and he came back after maybe 10 minutes with a nice cabbie. A cabbie who did not make me put my suitcase on the roof of his car, like most cabbies! He had a functioning trunk, wonder of wonders. I ask (in Arabic) if he knows the Sequoia restaurant, where we are going, but he does not, so I can see it is going to be another case of giving the cabbie directions around Zamalek (this was the case in, oh, every single cab ride last summer). With my directions (I spoke in Arabic to him, he chuckled and spoke in English to me) we managed to get to Sequoia, the restaurant a few blocks away from the apartment where Ashraf was meeting me.

Deposited safely at the apartment, I spent most of the day chilling--sleeping, catching up on internet type things that I could not do when I got in because of the lack of internet at Salma, and more sleeping. A little after 5 I went out to get a new sim card for my cell phone, and decided to go once again with Mobinil, the service I had last summer (because I always seemed to have better coverage than the Vodafone users). So I wandered down Mohammad Mazhar suddenly recalling how a walk is never ever boring in Cairo. There are so many things go on in the streets that there is always something to catch your eye. There are also many many men to AVOID catching the eye of. On the way there one of the security guards in front of the Vatican Embassy totally called out to me (in Arabic, so I am only maybe 75% certain this was what he said) where do you live? Yeah, buddy, keep dreaming.

Anyway, cell phone achieved not too long after, I decided to go grocery shopping. I could have stopped at Saudi market on Maraashli, it was closer, but I decided to wander down to Metro market instead, mainly because I like them more, and also, I wanted to wander past the old AUC dorm. The only funny grocery story I have is, a kilo is apparently absolutely meaningless to me. I got 1/2 kilo of hummus from the deli thinking this would be, oh, a medium container of hummus. Nope. TWO medium containers of hummus. Sheesh. 1/4 of a kilo next time I think. Silly metric system. But I did manage to employ my lessons from living in London--do not buy more groceries that you can lug across town to your apartment! In London this was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I could take a bus from my door to just down the street from the store, but the first few times I went up to the Sainsbury's, before I had really learned the wonders of the 73 bus, I bought way too much food to comfortably carry back, and ended up killing my hands. Using reuseable canvas groceries bags actually helps, because you have a visual sense of how much carrying space you actually have, and thus tend not to overshop. Anyway, I remembered this lesson fairly well, and didn't die carrying my groceries back to the apartment (which was maybe .6 mile from the store). Although I did get hit on by this guy, who offered me the creepiest line I have ever heard from anyone, this summer or last summer: "I could have you if I want?" Yes, it was a question. No, that does not make it any less sketchier. La'a, dude, la'a.

Once back at the apartment I just chilled, ate a little dinner, showered (oh glorious shower) and went to sleep. My beauty rest was interrupted by waking up at 5:30 shaking and really nauseous. Joy. I was sick all morning, until I was finally able to fall back asleep around 10 AM. I lay in bed, alternating between what felt like fever and chills (do you know how weird it is to be freezing when it is 80 degrees?) and thinking, great, I probably have some sort of exotic flu now and am going to die. I literally felt that awful. I don't know what it was that made me sick. I really do not believe it was either water or food, because if those are going to make you sick they make you sick really quickly, not 8-9 hours after the fact. I just hope it does not happen again.

Because of my odyssey with illness this morning I didn't go out today. I mean, it's Friday, so nothing is open before 2 or so anyway (listening to noon prayer from the nearby mosque was fun), but I didn't want to push going out in the heat and making myself sick again. So I've been a bum today, and studied up on my Arabic a little. Tomorrow is travelers cheque cashing and more Arabic. And apparently the carpenter is coming to put together our bed frames, although I quite like the boho chic I have going in my room at the moment, with my mattress on the floor.

Al-wasool

2009-05-28T03:10:00.000-07:00

This is the most absurd country. I'm calling it. Other countries maybe just as hectic or crowded or bureaucratic or any number of other things that you can call Egypt, but they are not Egypt. TIA. This is Africa. It is more than a motto, it is a truism.

After killing several more hours in Heathrow (changing some money so I would have some EGP on me when I got here, which, as things ended up I am VERY GLAD I did), reading a bit, surfing the internet. As you do. My flight finally got a gate around five and I went down to wait to board.

I sit down at the gate. Within two minutes every seat around me is filled with Arab men. Fun! (That was slightly sarcastic.) They are all friends, apparently, and the guy who is sitting next to me, Walid, speaks the most English of them, I gather. He was apparently studying in Edinburgh to get his TOEFL degree, and now is moving back to Cairo. Walid was very friendly, as you might expect him to be. He asked me what I was going to be doing in Cairo, I explained about school and how I had been there last summer as well. He asks me how many hours I will be doing at school, and I say five days a week, about five hours a day. And he goes, oh, that is a lot, too much to do anything else other than study. And I was like, yes, it is. And he goes, too bad because I was going to offer you a job. I didn't bother to press what type of job he was going to ask me to do. At this point I was a little weirded out.

Anyway, since he knows I have some Arabic now, he has me read the warning page on his Egyptian passport, in Arabic, and then has me translate it. He was really nice, actually, and helped me with the Arabic, and I knew a bit more than I remember. And one of the older gentlemen sitting next to him complimented me on my Arabic reading, but I think he was just being nice. Anyway, then Walid gives me his phone number. And then he asks if I have a cell in Egypt. Now, I lied and said I didn't, because I thought that my Mobinil SIM would still work in Egypt, not knowing then that it seems to have shut itself off during the nearly one year that I have been out of the country. Anyway, he asks if I have an email address, so I give him my school account (like hell I was giving him my actual gmail address). At this point, I am now like, you are too nice! You can't be this friendly to random Arab men! But anyway, all he has is my email address, so I can ignore him easily enough if I want.

The flight was uneventful, once again there was no one in the middle seat (I sat on the aisle), so I could stretch a bit. I watched Transformers. Good Lord is that movie not very good. I felt dumber after having watched it. Seriously. And then I watched the first 45 minutes or so of Twister and I had no idea how many people were in that movie! Like every single bit character is someone you recognize. TWO of the random bit players went on to be on LOST--yes, both Daniel Faraday and the guy who played the security guard that Sawyer trapped in his house for a few days (he was also on Mad Men) are in Twister. With, seriously, A TON of other people.

We finally arrived in Cairo, about twenty five minutes late (which wasn't terrible considering we left London an entire hour late). I managed to get off the plane very quickly. It was odd, actually, I was seated in this upper little section of coach, that was maybe 5 or 6 rows, located before the galley and just after Club World. This section was, with two or three exceptions, entirely Europeans or Americans. Then the whole back section, separated from us by the galley and another set of curtains, was the rest of coach, which was where everyone else was, and it was heavily Egyptian. I couldn’t figure this out. My only guess was maybe all the people in my section are savvy with the online check-in feature at BA.com? I am not sure, but it felt slightly weird, sort of segregated in a way. Anyway, by virtue of sitting really close to the front, I managed to be out before most of coach. I also bobbed and weaved through slow people in the corridors, and was thus among the first little clutch of 15 or 20 people to get stopped by the swine flu medical officer people. This was a prime example of somewhat pointless Egyptian bureaucracy. We were handed a little blue card and told to write our name, address in Cairo, and our nationality on it. We then handed it to one of three or four harassed guard type people, who read it and then collected it, assuming you were satisfactory. I assume that to be satisfactory all you had to prove was that you weren’t Mexican? I have no idea really. Through a little turnstile thing, and then we were stopped again by these people who were… well I really have no idea what they were doing. At first I thought they were taking digital photographs of us. There were these camcorders set up on tripods, and everyone had to step up to this little yellow line and stand in front of the camera for a few moments. But I don’t think they were taking our pictures, I actually think that the camera was a heat sensor, and it was a way to tell if someone was running a fever. Really, I know that sounds crazy, but I think that is what they were doing. There was no flash, no movement made as if to snap a picture of us—we just stood for a few seconds, the dude operating the camera looked seriously at the little view finder screen, and then cleared you to pass. I am so glad I managed to get by that before the rest of the plane descended on the two little camera lines.

My luggage actually came out in a timely manner this time around (unlike last year where, honest, my bags were the dead last ones to come out on the carousel. I suppose they were the first into the hold or something). I threw everything onto a cart and walked out to the arrivals line (oh wait, I went through customs, which involved me smiling at the man in customs and him waving me through) and saw the driver holding my name on a little print out. Success. He takes my cart and we load onto the little parking lot tram. While on the parking lot tram he introduces himself as Mohammad, and I am a little confused, because my driver was supposed to be Karem. Then Mohammad tells me that I am staying at Hotel Salma. No, Hotel Longchamps, I correct him. He looks at me a moment and says, No Salma. We go back and forth on this for a few minutes, and then he pulls out this printout that has my pick-up info on it, and it does indeed say Hotel Salma. Well I am not sure what is going on, because I had a reservation with Longchamps (two, actually, because ILI said they made one for me, and prior to that I had made one for myself!) I decide not to bicker with this guy who is very kindly carting my heavy bags around the airport at 1:45 in the morning. We get to his car, which I am shocked to see is only a few years old and in really good condition (I was expecting something that was more beat up—like, you know, it was actually driven around Cairo). As we set off from the airport, I bring up the hotel issue again. At this point I feel bad for Mohammad, because he doesn’t quite have enough English to get what I am saying about the other reservations and he just keeps saying he has to do what is on the sheet. It turns out that Mohammad is Karem’s son. He drives people around the city (tourist stuff) in his own right, and he was actually the best driver I think I have ever had in Cairo. Not once did I fear for my life, which is a little shocking, really. He also very nicely kept telling me what roads we were on. He was totally lost and didn’t know where the hotel was, which resulted in us driving up and down Gama’at al-Duwal for ten or fifteen minutes, but eventually he dropped me off at this Hotel Salma. It reminds me a lot of the hotel AUC put us in at Mt Sinai. Actually, a step or two up from that. But very much a midrange Egyptian hotel, which is about the level of a non-chain motel in the States.

The only thing I was really annoyed about was that in switching my hotel reservation (and not notifying me about it) the ILI didn’t really put me in a comparable place to the hotel I was going to stay in. Longchamps: very nice, small European-esque place, internet, modern amenities. Salma: shabby, very old, run-of-the-mill mid-rate Egyptian hotel. Sketchy? More than a little. My biggest problem though? No internet!

So I manage to sleep for something like three hours (I couldn’t get to bed until 5:30 or so, and considering I got here around 2:30, this was a lot of time bouncing off the walls in this little room…silly jet lag), get up, and attempt to connect to the spotty unprotected internet that is range of my computer. I have an email from Ashraf, who says, give me a call, I’m in work until 5, but we can talk and have a time to meet up. I call the number, but not before having to make an excursion down to the reception desk to ask if I was somehow dialing the mobile number incorrectly, because the line kept disconnecting. Apparently a “local” line is different from a “mobile” line, and when you call down to the reception people, who probably are sick of me at this point, you have to ask for specifically a mobile line. Anyway. Once I learn this trick, I manage to place a call to Ashraf’s cell but no one picks up. At this point, I can feel myself getting supremely frustrated, so I take a moment to center myself. I pray. I take deep breaths. I realize that things could be much worse. And then I go to send Ashraf an email, and the internet works for a few blessed minutes and allows me to do so. I give Ashraf the hotel I am staying in and the number, and receive a phone call within a few minutes.

So, Ashraf is a boy. Surprise! I have absolutely no idea why I thought Ashraf was a girl’s name (damn my faulty Arabic!) but I am glad that I discovered this fact over the phone rather than in person where it would have been totally noticeable that I was shocked at his gender. Anyway, he is a very nice sounding guy, and had to run into a meeting, but is going to call me back in a bit and we can work out what’s the what with the apartment for the evening. It is looking like I am going to need a place to be (well, more importantly, my luggage needs a place to be) until 5PM or so this evening. Check out is at noon, but I am hoping I can stay here for the afternoon. Even if I have to pay. I seriously do not feel like having to wander the streets of Cairo for five hours. I would much rather stay here and sleep for the day. That will probably totally screw up my time adjustment, but I have to ease myself back into the city, and having to wander for several hours is not how I feel like doing it. Sleep and decompressing here, even in this dingy room, is better I think.

The pilot actually said Cheerio. I wonder if he meant it jokingly.

2009-05-27T03:35:00.000-07:00

I update from London. My flight was uneventful. I managed to watch Revolutionary Road (oh dear Lord don't ever watch that movie on an airplane. It is one of the saddest movies I have ever seen, and the ending was gut wrenching, and not the sort of thing you want to watch when you can't express emotion freely). I also "watched" Valkyrie, by which I wanted to see how absurd it was, but fell asleep maybe five minutes and woke up exactly at the moment that Tom Cruise and all the other random non-Germans playing Germans put the coup plan into action. So I saw maybe the coolest part of the movie? I don't know. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't all that great either. I then watched Bride Wars (if you could not tell by now my airplane entertainment philosophy tends to be either things I wanted to see in the theaters and missed or things I would never pay to watch but can view now for free in order to see how bad they are). That movie was not as horrible as I expected it to be, although, it was not really funny either.

Interestingly, we had some sort of weird European band on our flight. I don't think they are actually a famous band, or even a band that makes music for a living, but it was definitely six or so guys, who spoke very little English (but did speak French, although only to the stewardess, to each other they spoke something that sounded possible Eastern European?), and who had various instruments of different types, a few guitars, a keyboard thing of some sort, and cymbals. They were sitting in the rows across from me on the plane, and then we ended up going through the security checkpoint to get into the departures area of Terminal Five together. I wish I hadn't lost them coming out of security because I really want to know what language they were speaking. But I decided that washing my face, brushing my teeth, and generally trying to feel human again after a seven hour trans-Atlantic flight was more of a priority than stalking random European bands.

It did not help that it was, quite literally, 80 degrees in Heathrow when I got out of security. Why? Given the fact I was wearing two shirts, and that I had managed to spill orange juice on both of these shirts during breakfast on the plane, I decided to change. Once I did this, and the aforementioned face wash/teeth brush, I felt human again and not perturbed at the general population of England for their freakishly hot airports.

So I have many hours to kill until my onward flight to Cairo. I think I will catch up on email, eventually get lunch, wander through the WH Smith's. Soak in the last bits of relatively normalcy before I depart for the lunacy that is Africa...

Setting sail...

2009-05-26T11:33:00.001-07:00

I leave my apartment in about a half an hour to go to my friends' condo, from whence (oh, yes, I said whence) we drive to Washington to deposit me at the airport. And then begins the 26 hours of international travel fun! That was slightly sarcastic.

It is raining here, we shall see how it is in Washington, and if it will delay my flight at all...

Here's hoping for smooth sailing. Inshallah!

T-minus 4 days

2009-05-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

I leave, once again, for the Middle East in four short days. I have not retained enough Arabic. I feel this in my bones. What do I do in an attempt to remedy the situation? Write a blog post? Sure. Why not? Am I really going to re-learn inna and kanna and their sisters in the time it takes to write this? Well, possibly, but I became quite good at procrastination this semester, so I am going to continue the trend a bit longer.

I was very bad at updating last summer while I was in Cairo. This I attribute to a few reasons, mainly that I was going through a lot of personal issues last summer, and two that the program I was on was incredibly intense. Have you ever been to summer camp? You know how everyone seems to bond at warp speed because everyone is thrown in together in very close quarters and is spending pretty much all their time together? Imagine that experience, but you are also learning Arabic and living in the Middle East for the first time. That was my summer last year. It was wonderful and amazing and there were precious few bad moments, but everything was experienced at the extreme ends of the spectrum: very high highs, very low lows, and a great depth of feeling on everything that happened to fall in between.

I called last summer's experience "Middle East with Training Wheels," because we were held in the warm (and by the end somewhat stifling) embrace of AUC, where you can never feel too divorced from your American-ness, and where you experience Cairo from rather rarefied atmosphere. We lived in the AUC dorm, were taken to school every morning by the AUC shuttle, were within the little island of tranquility that is the AUC campus for 6 hours or so a day, and at night we had the run of Zamalek, the pretty island in the middle of the Nile that is possibly home to more expats than it is Egyptians. Cairo is not an easy city, even when you have the comforts of Western wealth and privilege supporting you, but nevertheless, it was a very coddled experience in many ways.

My experience this summer I am expecting will be much much different, but hopefully in ways that will make it easier for me to actual document the experience and will help me more in my Arabic acquisition. (Which, after all, is the whole point of the exercise. Supposedly.) I will not be living in a dorm, but rather sharing two apartments over the course of the summer. I won't be going on out-of-town trips every weekend (with city tours on the odd weeks we stayed in Cairo), but rather staying put in the city more. (Although I am hoping to make it to the Western Desert. And maybe Dahab. And there are tentative plans for Rome and Jerusalem at various points over the summer. And this is STILL less travel than I did last summer.) I will be attending a private language school, but less exclusive than AUC, and far less coddling in how they treat students. This, in short, will be in the Middle East without Training Wheels, but I am more prepared for it after last summer, and I am going to be in a far less intense emotional state (hopefully!) and thus able to blog the experience.

Saying I am actually going to blog something seems to be the kiss of death to my actual blogging it, but I kept up (for the most part!) the Lent blog, so I have hopes I can keep up the Cairo blog as well.

I post this because I think it is one of the better encapsulations of the chaos that is Cairo. The traffic as a metaphor gets old, but it works. The cars, the buses, the random horse cart... I think my favorite part of the video starts at 1:29, when you can watch the guy walk across all the lanes of traffic totally unfazed. Need to get back in the habit of doing that...

Easter Vigil

2009-04-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

So this post is only sixteen days later than I expected it to be. That is about par for the course as far as my blogging skills are concerned.

Vigil was beautiful. Despite the fact that all my cathechumen wear was obviously purchased at the Big and Tall Catechumen shop, and I was afraid of tripping over my hems at some parts of the evening, everything went very well. Considering that the Vigil mass includes giant fires, candles, total darkness, baptism and, in our case, flaming arrows, this was quite an accomplishment!

Yes, flaming arrows. In perhaps the best evidence I can give for the fact that my parish is run by relatively young priests, we had a most excellent medieval-esque lighting of the Pascal fire. Vigil mass starts outside, where there is a big bonfire set-up; the Easter candle is meant to be lighted from this fire (after it is variously blessed and marked by the priest) and then all the candles of the parishoners are meant to be lit from the main candle (well, one candle is lit, and then that light is passed along, in a nice combination of symbolism and practicality). One might expect that the bonfire that starts this fire lighting procession would just be lit like any other bonfire--some lighter fluid doused on a pyramid of kindling, and then a flame applied to the whole thing. Ah, but we have young priests, and one of them used to be an engineer. So instead we lit our pascal fire with a flaming arrow. After our pastor had said the necessary prayers over the candle, the altar attendant made what looked like a signal up to the roof of the church with his flashlight. Being in the front row (catechumens get a place of honor in the procession), I could see all this quite clearly. Then, in a very efficient way, the person on the roof lit the tip of an arrow. The arrow was attached to a thin wire cable that ran from the roof to the top of the bonfire kindling structure. The arrow was then propelled (I couldn't see if he shot it with an actual bow or it was simply "pushed" down the line, but it went very fast) from the roof down to the bonfire, where it struck its target, which immediately and dramatically went up in a very nice blaze. Seriously, outside of an amusement partk, I have not seen fire lighting happen so easily, or with so much dramatic flair. Our priests were so pleased with themselves, you could tell.

The candles lit, we then processed back into the totally darkened church. Once everyone was in their pews, and the opening prayers had been said, our pastor had everyone extinguish their candles (point of order, the catechumens carried unlit candles, since we were not yet baptized). The whole church (and our church can hold over 800 people, so it is not a small structure) is plunged into darkness, but for the small flashlight up at the lectern for the people who are doing the readings. The readings begin with chapter one of Genesis. If you have not heard the creation story read (by my friend Danny, who has a lovely deep voice) sitting in a church in total darkness, you have not heard the creation story properly done.

After many readings and psalms, the lights come back on with the Gloria, which is a grand affair (only the second time we have heard it during Lent, the other time being Holy Thursday). The church, which had been totally bare--purple cloths covering all the crucifixes and statues, no vestments on the altar or the lectern, no flowers, no candles--is decorated over the course of the three minute Gloria. We also unfurled a giant banner over the baptismal font, which was a pretty awesome effect. Our pastor gave a nice homily (not as good as the one on Good Friday, I think, but that is just me) about how we can't really appreciate the salvation and triumph of Easter unless we know deeply how much we need to be saved. And he proposed the interesting theory that Mary Magdalene is the first to see Jesus after he rises because she is the one who, at that moment, needed Him the most, who recognized how much she needed Him.

Then came all the formalities of Catholic initiation. I was not fully immersed for baptism (I don't think Catholics do that, actually), but I did kneel down in the font, so I was soaked from just above the knee all the down. My pastor is a little funny in how he baptizes--he cups his hands and fills them with water, but then instead of tipping the water out over the person's head, he plops his hands down physically on top of one's head. And in that very lovely and tactile way, I died and was reborn.

Confirmation pales to baptism, but it was nice after being formally welcomed in to the church and sealed with oil to turn around and be cheered by the congregation. I've been on this path of formal initiation since the beginning of September, so it was nice to have all of these formal rites marking the end of the intiation and the beginning of the rest of my life.

Also, a word about (finally!) being able to receive the Eucharist. The Eucharist was one of the most powerful things that drew me to Catholicism. The first time I had ever been to Mass, everything was a bit foreign to me, but penetrating the unfamiliarity of the rituals was the feeling--and that vague term is not fitting but all I can really come up with to describe it--that I was in the presence of God. The bowing and the kneeling and such made sense because God is there. As Catholics like to say, "Our Lord is in the tabernacle." Upon being able to receive, I now can experience the fullness of that mystery. I say experience and not understand because no one will ever be able to totally understand it. But I gained an inkling of understanding sacramental grace when I received the Eucharist. It is a confirmation of faith. And it was transformative.

Finally, after a very long mass (near to three hours!), we were sent off in peace. And our going in peace led us across the hall to our big community room where there was a very nice reception with tons of food and cake and champagne. It was funny, as I was handed champagne by a volunteer, one of the older men who had been helping with the RCIA program passed me and he stopped to say, "Now see, if you had joined the Baptists, there wouldn't be any alcohol. Reason enough, right?" It was funny. Catholics do know how to have a good party.

At last, a few pictures. Sorry they are blurry, I was not the photographer.

See how wet I got?

With our newly lit baptismal candles.

Yay! Baptized, welcomed and confirmed.

Lent Day 40: Triduum Day 3, Holy Saturday

2009-04-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

I am being baptized tonight. Hopefully there will be pictures both of me and of the church to accompany my post recounting the Vigil service. But for now, I will post this selection from America, a really excellent Catholic blog. It is written by Father James Martin, S.J., blogger/writer/Colbert Report pundit extraordinaire. I thought it was a really nice meditation on Holy Saturday. (The original post is here)

Holy Saturday

"We spend most of our lives in Holy Saturday.

For the most, part our daily lives are not moments of sheer, abject terror—like Good Friday. Nor are they moments of delirious exaltation—like Easter Sunday. Rather, we are often in the “middle time,” as the disciples were. Disappointed, confused, worried, sad, anxious about all sorts of things. Waiting.

I’ve always wanted to know more about what the disciples were doing behind those closed doors on Holy Saturday. What were they talking about? Could they even contain their worry? Certainly they were frightened of the Roman authorities. If they had killed our leader, they probably asked themselves, could we be far behind? If even Jesus of Nazareth, with all his powers and all his followers, could not escape the cross, what hope is there for us?

Perhaps they were arguing over the meaning of his death as well. How could things have gone so terribly wrong? We saw him do all the miracles! We saw him still the sea and raise that little girl, and even Lazarus from the dead! How could he die like that—like a common criminal? Perhaps they were even sniping among themselves. You let him down! You betrayed him! You ran away!

Were there among the disciples, though, any who were searching for meaning in his suffering? Were there any who read through the Scriptures? And were there any—any?—who expected what would happen the next morning? Did they even know that they were waiting?

I like this George de la Tour painting of “The Penitent Magdalene” for that reason. Now I know that Mary Magdalene has been one of the most maligned women in all of Christian history. She was not a prostitute, but instead a woman from whom Jesus cast out “seven demons.” (Later writers—and a pope—conflated her with a prostitute in the Gospels.) So she may not have had much to repent at all. Still, I like de la Tour's painting as an emblem of waiting. She is clearly thinking back over something. Perhaps, I like to think, the disciples on Holy Saturday were not just terrified, but pensive. What did it all mean?

Most of our lives are spent waiting and hoping. But we are in a different position than were the terrified disciples on Holy Saturday. We in the midst of our waiting know the end of the story. We know that our Redeemer lives. We know to expect Resurrections great and small in our lives. And we know that our waiting will never be in vain."

More to come following the vigil tonight.

Lent Day 39: Triduum Night 2, Good Friday

2009-04-11T09:12:00.001-07:00

Good Friday. The saddest day of the year for Catholics (for all Christians, really).

I went to two services yesterday, one of them Stations of the Cross and the other the memorial service in the evening. The last was not a mass, since Good Friday is the one day of the year for Catholics that we do not hold mass.

Stations of the Cross is a nice prayer, but I was more moved by it yesterday than I had been before. We have the stations themselves at the back of the church (they are small bronze placards mounted against the wall depicting each station), and our pastor led us through each of them up to station 11. At station 12, we (the hundred or so people who were praying the stations) followed our pastor out into the main hall of the church, where the crucifix had been set up. The version of the stations that we use at my church features the Good Friday reproaches at the twelfth station--if you haven't been moved by the reading selections that attend the other stations, which are from books like Isaiah and Lementations and the Psalms, the Reproaches are really gut wrenching, especially when you are kneeling before a crucifix. "O my people, what have I done to you? How have I hurt you? Answer me."

The altar servers then took the picture that we have representing the 13th station (Jesus's body is removed from the cross), and place it on holders, and carry it down to the courtyard where we have a mock tomb set up. The lay the painting in this little rectangular open-topped box constructed of cinderblocks and under a white tent in the courtyard. Then we say the last station, which is the laying of Jesus in the tomb, and all the congregation throws red and white carnations into the cinderblock box on top of the painting. Again, the tangibility of the whole thing, the acting out of the final stations, makes it all very immediate. Especially since the crucifixes have been covered for two days (apart from the ones used on the station), and there is no consecreated host in the tabernacle. Placing the picture in the little makeshift tomb and covering it in flowers, just as you would do at a funeral, gives you a little bit of the feeling of what it may have felt like for the apostles and for Mary and the other disciples. It feels like you have buried Jesus.

The Good Friday service is a very somber affair. The church has been totally stripped of everything. There is no cloth upon the altar. There are no banners or coverings hanging at the lectern. There are no flowers, no candles. All the statues and pictures have been covered in red cloth. The doors of the tabernacle are left hanging open, because there is no consecreated host. There is no entrance hymn, there is no Kyrie. Most disconcerting is that the priest never says "The Lord be with you." Because for the purposes of commemoration, we are recalling the day when it seemed like He had left and was not coming back. There are readings, including the reading of the Passion, which according to Dominican tradition is chanted at my church (this is just like what we did on Palm Sunday, but it was chanted not spoken, and it was from a different gospel).

Then one of our priests (yet again, not our pastor...I suppose he will give the homily at Vigil tonight) gave a homily, which was very simple, and short and beautiful. It was really just a prayer. He began by asking us to imagine what the crucifixion must have looked like at Calvary. Then he posed a series of questions, to Christ. "Did my pride increase the pain as the crown of thorns dug into your head? Did my rage make the sting of the peoples' hands as they beat you hurt all the more?" A litany of sorts. All to the point of making us understand that we are the ones who are the cause of Christ's suffering. We are all the Jews of Jerusalem. We are Caiaphas and Annas. All of us. All of humanity. Yes, is the answer to all of his questions. Yes.

Following the homily the priests bring in our big crucifix for veneration. They very slowly pull away the red cloth that is covering the crucifix until it is fully revealed, and the slowly progress with it held high above their heads down the main aisle of the church. They they hold it up before the altar and all the priests (we had four yesterday) venerate it (kneel before the cross and kiss it, if they so choose), followed by all the altar servers. Then everyone in the church comes up to venerate the cross. If you were wondering how long it takes 700 or so people to venerate a cross, the answer is quite a long time. Following the veneration is communion, but it is done with hosts that had been consecrated the day earlier, so there is no Liturgy of the Eucharist.

And then following that very somber service you are disbursed. It feels disconcerting, as it should. Good Friday is the day that we commemorate our worst fears as Christians, those sorrows and the terror felt by the early apostles. That Jesus is not here. That he was killed, and that ended everything. That it was simply three years of an earthly rabbi. That it was all for naught.

Lent Day 38: Triduum Night 1, Holy Thursday

2009-04-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

So these are late in coming, but I am going to split up Holy Thursday and Good Friday into two separate posts, because otherwise they would be really long.

The Mass of the Lord's Supper is really a beautiful one. For the first time since Lent began, the Gloria is sung, and in honor of that we had a special longer Gloria, done in multiple parts between the choir and the congregation, and the altar boys had hand bells that they rang, and it was in general the definition of a joyful noise. We only have maybe 15 or so people in our choir (maybe a few more than that) but when they sing full voice they really fill our entire church. The sound just reverberates around you, and it is truly moving.

One of our priests (although not our pastor, interestingly, although he was there) gave his homily on the Eucharist, and it was a good one, although, as we will see, it was not as great as the Good Friday homily. But he did get a hair cut and brush his hair back for the service, so that was a nice change. This particular priest is a bit of an odd duck...he goes about on his motorcycle and doesn't always tidy his hair after his excursions, so at times he looks rather flaky, although he is a very nice guy and good priest.

After the homily there was the foot washing ceremony. I love that Catholics do this, because in my old church we always did it on the first night of Passover, and it is a nice tradition I think. The priest washes the feet of the 12 altar servers, and again, like much of Holy Week, in a tangible way this makes you understand Peter's discomfort at having Jesus wash his feet rather than the other way around. It is odd to watch a priest wash the feet of the altar servers, because we are so used to seeing them serve and assist him during mass. It drives home the fact that we are given Christ's grace although we have done (and can do) nothing to deserve such service.

After communion is given is the really neat part of the Holy Thursday service. The ciborium is filled with the uneaten host, but not returned to the tabernacle. Instead, the priest takes the ciborium and the altar boys follow him with candles and the covered crucifix, and they process out of the church. The congregation follows, and they gave us candles on the way out of the church so that we formed one big candle-holding mass of people following Father holding the ciborium. As we walked with our little tapers we all sang, first in Latin then in English, Pange lingua gloriosi (the one written by Aquinas, our patron saint). As we exited the church we processed along a path lit by luminaries that led us down the side of the church, and the back and through the courtyard and up back inside the building again. We walked outside around 9PM, and the moon was just rising above the trees. It was a full moon, and there was bright halo around it. I know that this is caused by diffraction through the clouds. But it reminded me of what Harry, one of our RCIA helpers, told us catechumens about Lent. That Lent is our preparation period. And that we get two full moons during those forty days, and that those are our full moons. So it was a particularly nice moment to walk out, with my small candle burning, and look up at the giant haloed moon in the sky casting light down on our little procession, and realizing that everything is coming to fruition. To fullness.

We processed inside, but not back up into the church proper. Instead the ciborium was laid in a makeshift altar inside our big meeting hall across from the church, where adoration was offered until midnight. It took a while to get inside the hall because there were a lot of people there, but once I managed to get inside I stayed there for about an hour, praying, and reading from my (awesome) Arabic/English New Testament. I wanted to try to stay up until 11, when our priests were going to come in and read the Last Supper Discourse from John and then pray Compline (the last set of daily prayers from the Liturgy of the Hours), but this whole giving up caffeine for Lent thing, and the fact that I teach three sections on Thursdays, meant that by 10:30 I was fading fast. But I managed to stay an hour, so that was good. (Matthew 26:40: "Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. "Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?" he asked Peter." The tradition of doing hour-long adoration comes from Jesus admonishment of the disciples in Gesthemane. Let me tell you, it is an eerie and wonderful thing to realize that you are keeping up those same traditions as they were two thousand years ago.) The makeshift tabernacle looks something like a kuppah. There are four long tent poles holding up a white cloth, and a table underneath that has the ciborium on it, flanked on either side by a small candlabra. The only lights in the room are the candles and what comes from outside. I also never realized before how hard it is to truly just meditate, or concetrate on one single thing, for an hour. I supose that is a sign of how distractable I am, and how the Internet has ruined concetration skills. But truly, try it. Try to just sit still and focus on one thing, and empty your mind of anything but that one thing, for an hour. It is immensely difficult.

So, my adoration finished, I proceeded home, the first night of the Triduum done.

Lent Day 35, 36, 37: The children of the Hebrews

2009-04-08T14:06:00.000-07:00

"The children of the Hebrews
welcomed Christ the King
They spread their cloaks before Him
and loudly praised the Lord.
Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"

This was one of the antiphons sung at the Palm Sunday service this week. It is one of the traditional antiphons for Palm Sunday, and it is quite beautiful when sung a cappella by a full choir. The Palm Sunday Mass was really lovely and moving. It began outside, in our courtyard, under a really gorgeous blue sky and the first over-70 weather that we have had here for a long time. It is a beautiful bit of synergy when the environment aids in telling the story. It was exactly the sort of day, if you were a Jew, that you would have wanted to dance outside the gates of Jerusalem, cheering the entrance of the man you believed was your Messiah. One of the things I love about Catholicism is the material side of it--you don't just hear that the Jews welcomed Jesus with palm fronds, you are given palm leaves, and sing hymns of praise. And you are taken outside of time. You are connected in that moment down all the centuries of people who have worshipped the Lord this way. You feel it. And you feel that God is pleased.

The Mass itself was a little different. We read the Passion, which I suppose is something that happens during many of the Holy Week services (this being my first Holy Week, I did not realize this). The way the Passion is recited is incredibly moving, becuase it involves everyone in the church. The text is divided in to four parts, the Narrator, the Voice (which is any single speaker in the story), Jesus's words, and the voice of the Congregation. The two lectern readers take up the roles of the narrator and the voice, the priest obviously reads Jesus's lines (I never really felt in persona Christi as I did on Sunday), and the congregation reads the crowd lines. This means that you as a parishoner are reading out the lines given in testimony against Jesus before the Sanhedrin, and the taunts thrown at Him, like "Aha! You who would destroy the tempe and rebuilt it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross!"

It is one thing to read the words to yourself, and one thing to have them read to you. It is entirely another to perform them, as it were, to have yourself placed in the role of those who condemned Christ. It makes you realize, in an immediate and intense way, how complicit we all are in Christ's crucifixion. It is one thing to phrase it as "Christ died for our sake." He did. But when you flip it around--"You are responsible for Christ's death, because you have sinned and He died that sin might be forgiven," it hits you in a different way. (This is an oversimplification, of course, but bear with me). It makes you realize that although you have never said these words, that you were not there standing before Christ, mocking him and condemning him to death, that every single human has done exactly this in their lives. Acting it out, saying the words, brings it home. It brought tears to my eyes. As Eleanor said, if you don't cry at least once during Holy Week there is something wrong with you as a person, emotionally. I understand what she means now. It is very hard to experience these Masses and not be deeply moved.

Tonight is Passover. I like that Holy Week and Pesach nearly match up this year--Passover starts tonight, and tomorrow night is Holy Thursay, the commemoration of the Lord's Supper. God brought the Hebrews out of bondage in Egypt; Christ then brought the entire world out of the bondage of sin on the cross. Thus we are all the children of the Hebrews, in a way (although the Jews, of course are still special within the chosen people). Why is this night different than all other nights? Because the Lord God brought us out of bondage.

"And when your children ask you, 'What does this ceremony mean to you?' then tell them, 'It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.' " Then the people bowed down and worshiped."
~Exodus 12:26-28

In thinking about sin and delivering, I will end with a U2 lyric that I think is appropriate. It is about redemption and sin, and how hard it is to realize what it is we are being offered, and how more often than not we reject it and purposefully push God away. Like the crowds in Jerusalem, we see what is good before us, and then we condemn it. We have all been set free, but some of us prefer our chains. Grace is a hard thing to understand.

I have a lover
A lover like no other
She got soul, soul, soul, sweet soul
And she teach me how to sing

Shows me colours when there's none to see
Gives me hope when I can't believe
That for the first time
I feel love

I have a brother
When I'm a brother in need
I spend my whole time running
He spends his running after me

When I feel myself going down
I just call and he comes around
But for the first time
I feel love

My father is a rich man
He wears a rich man's cloak
Gave me the keys to his kingdom coming
Gave me a cup of gold

He said I have many mansions
And there are many rooms to see
But I left by the back door
And I threw away the key
And I threw away the key
Yeah, I threw away the key
Yeah, I threw away the key

For the first time
For the first time
For the first time

I feel love

~The First Time

Lent Day 34: Song of Zachariah

2009-04-04T22:54:00.000-07:00

The Benedictus, also known as the Canticle of Zachariah, sung by John the Baptist's father. It is a blending of Jewish tradition with what we would now say is Christian sentiment. It is a praise hymn to God for John, who would show the way to Jesus through baptism. As I prepare for my own baptism a week from today. I'm trying to keep my mind attuned to these sorts of thoughts. Salvation through forgiveness of all their sins. A week of an old life, then death and the beginning of a new one.

Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel!

He has visited his people and redeemed them.

He has raised up for us a mighty saviour

in the house of David his servant,

as he promised by the lips of holy men,

those who were his prophets from of old.

A saviour who would free us from our foes,

from the hands of all who hate us.

So his love for our fathers is fulfilled

and his holy covenant remembered.

He swore to Abraham our father to grant us,

that free from fear, and saved from the hands of our foes,

we might serve him in holiness and justice

all the days of our life in his presence.

As for you, little child,

you shall be called a prophet of God, the Most High.

You shall go ahead of the Lord

to prepare his ways before him,

To make known to his people their salvation

through forgiveness of all their sins,

the loving-kindness of the heart of our God

who visits us like the dawn from on high.

He will give light to those who dwell in darkness,

those who dwell in the shadow of death,

and guide us into the way of peace.

Lent Day 33: Simplicity

2009-04-03T21:55:00.000-07:00

The Magnificat. Because sometimes when you are overwhelmed, it is nice to recall the BVM.

My soul glorifies the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour.

He looks on his servant in her lowliness;

henceforth all ages will call me blessed.

The Almighty works marvels for me.

Holy his name!

His mercy is from age to age,

on those who fear him.

He puts forth his arm in strength

and scatters the proud-hearted.

He casts the mighty from their thrones

and raises the lowly.

He fills the starving with good things,

sends the rich away empty.

He protects Israel, his servant,

remembering his mercy,

the mercy promised to our fathers,

to Abraham and his sons for ever.

Lent Day 32: Judgment

2009-04-02T22:48:00.001-07:00

"Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. ²"Do you see all these things?" he asked. "I tell you the truth, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.""
~Matthew 24:1

I have been thinking of late about judgment. We had our class on the Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell, for those of you who are interested) yesterday, and our religious ed leader made a point that I have thought about on and off for years--namely, what would I do if Jesus were to return right now? You can phrase this in a somewhat alternate way, which is what would I do if I were to die today? The heart of the matter is the same: how would I be judged?

Judgment is not something that people like to think about. It is in our nature to avoid responsibility for actions, to evade, to occlude. We even have the passive voice so that we can state things in a way that obscures responsibility for an action. We aren't meant to live our lives in fear. Indeed, as Jesus says, we are meant to live our lives in the present, to not worry about tomorrow (how Zen of Jesus!). But nevertheless, as Christians, we must live our lives with an eye to this sense of ultimate responsibility. Every one will be thrown down. The quote is in reference to the destruction of Jerusalem. But it is also a reference to the pride of man, to the works of man. We will be judged for everything we have done. And we will have no recourse to our human tendencies of evasion or rationalization. Final, total justice. There is so much mercy and love in the Christian faith. But to use a cliche, the God of the Old Testament still lurks. A reason for humility if ever there was one (imperfect contrition, I know). But it is a thought that keeps one up at night--how do you answer for your life? How do you justify what you have done? In the end I don't believe there is any real way to do so. But that feels incorrect to me as well. It is a ponderous thought.

Lent Day 29, 30 and 31: Easter playlist?

2009-04-01T18:14:00.000-07:00

Two things have spurred me to think about making an "Easter playlist." One is that I bought U2 tickets for October. I am extremely excited about this because after seeing U2 (my favorite band) several times in concert I have finally managed to get a hold of general admission tickets--the tickets that let you stand right up at the edge of the stage. It will be U2 in a totally different way, and I am excited. Their concerts are often transcendent--like church, but with drums.

The second thing was that I heard Springsteen's "The Rising" on the radio on my way to church tonight. I was surprised at how religious the lyric actually is in that song. This prompted me to wonder--what would an Easter playlist sound like? I suppose you could just do songs that focus on the theme of resurrection, triumph, rebirth. But you could also probably make a playlist that progresses through the Triduum. So begin with songs the echo the spirit of the Eucharist--remembrance of sacrifice--then onto the actual passion and crucifixion--songs that focus on pain and suffering (although I don't know that the Ballad of John and Yoko would count here, despite the appropro refrain)--through to the resurrection. I think it could be an interesting effort.

Or I suppose one could listen to Jesus Christ Superstar.

But I like the idea of attempting to do this, because one of the things I love about Catholicism is this belief that we have about Christ baptising the world, our everyday world. The Incarnation means that all of the material things around us, the world of the flesh, has been sanctified in some small way, because God himself came down and dwelt among us. That fact lifts all of us and everything up. So why can't we find in ostensibly "secular" music messages of Christian hope? Certainly not all of it has it there, I'm not arguing that. But I think in there are definitely some songs that have God at their heart. I think the playlist could be an interesting idea...

Lent Day 27 and 28: Litany of Humility

2009-03-28T23:01:00.000-07:00

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, hear me.

From the desire of being esteemed, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being loved,
From the desire of being extolled,
From the desire of being honored,
From the desire of being praised,
From the desire of being preferred to others,
From the desire of being consulted,
From the desire of being approved,

From the fear of being humiliated, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the fear of being despised,
From the fear of suffering rebukes,
From the fear of being calumniated,
From the fear of being forgotten,
From the fear of being ridiculed,
From the fear of being wronged,
From the fear of being suspected,

That others may be loved more than I, O Jesus,
grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I,
That, in the opinion of the world,
others may increase and I may decrease,
That others may be chosen and I set aside,
That others may be praised and I unnoticed,
That others may be preferred to me in everything,
That others may become holier than I, provided that I
may become as holy as I should, O Jesus,
grant me the grace to desire it.

Lent Day 26: Dog days

2009-03-26T19:50:00.000-07:00

The LORD said to Moses, "Go down at once to your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, for they have become depraved. They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them, making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it, sacrificing to it and crying out, 'This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!' The LORD said to Moses,"I see how stiff-necked this people is. Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them. Then I will make of you a great nation."
But Moses implored the LORD, his God, saying, "Why, O LORD, should your wrath blaze up against your own people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with such great power and with so strong a hand? Why should the Egyptians say, 'With evil intent he brought them out, that he might kill them in the mountains and exterminate them from the face of the earth'? Let your blazing wrath die down; relent in punishing your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, and how you swore to them by your own self, saying, 'I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky; and all this land that I promised, I will give your descendants as their perpetual heritage.'" So the LORD relented in the punishment he had threatened to inflict on his people."
-Exodus 32:7-14

This is one of the readings for today. I found it particularly Lent-worthy. We are Israel. We backslide. We forget what we have, what God has given us, and instead we focus on baser things. We swap the mystery for the material. Instead of God's wrath though, we have a chance at redemption. We have an intercessor--here it is Moses, who is prefiguring Jesus--and therefore we have penance, not destruction. We have penance, not destruction. We should rejoice in that, when we consider what our other options are.

Lent Day 23, 24 and 25: Humility

2009-03-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

This is from Romano Guardini's book The Lord. H/t dotCommonweal

"Woe to me if I say: “I believe” and feel safe in that belief. For then I am already in danger of losing it (see Cor 10:12). Woe to me if I say: “I am a Christian”–possibly with a side-glance at others who in my opinion are not, or at an age that is not, or that a cultural tendency flowing in the opposite direction. Then my so-called Christianity threatens to become nothing but a religious form of self-affirmation. I “am” not a Christian: I am on the way to becoming one–if God will give me the strength. Christianity is nothing one can “have;” nor is it a platform from which to judge others. It is a movement. I can become a Christian only as long as I am conscious of the possibility of falling away. The gravest danger is not a failure of the will to accomplish certain things; with God’s help, I can always pull myself together and begin again. The real danger is that of becoming myself unchristian, and it is greatest when my will is most sure of itself. I have absolutely no guarantee that I shall be privileged to remain a follower of Christ, save in the matter of beginning, of being en route, of becoming, trusting, hoping and praying."

Brilliant.

Lent Day 20, 21 and 22: Making one's life a prayer

2009-03-22T19:26:00.000-07:00

Yes, I am not the best model for consistency here with the daily blogging. I try, I fail, I try again. That is a lesson in itself, I suppose.

I received a phone call on Friday from a good friend of mine, whom we will call E. Now a phone call from a friend is nothing to write home about (blog about?) typically, except that in this case my friend was calling me from Ghana. E is in Ghana working as part of a very small organization that helps in rescuing and relocating people (mostly women) who are victims of enforced labor or the sex trade. He has no particular training in this field. He isn't a social worker, or anything like that. He simply cares deeply, passionately, about human suffering, and this issue of slavery/sex trafficking has been something that he has advocated about for a while now. As he learned more and more about the issue, he became convinced that he needed to do something about it. He became convinced that it was not enough simply to advocate for stricter legislation here in the States or via NGOs to world organizations. He cared deeply about this issue, and he wanted to make a difference. So he did some investigating, discovered this group, and organized to go to Ghana for several months and work on the "front lines," as it were. For the past few weeks his group has been giving shelter and support to a group of Chinese women that they rescued from a labor camp in the Ghanaian countryside. They are in the process of working with authorities in Ghana to get these women back to China and reunited with their families.

E (who is Christian, by the by) has done with his life what many people claim they would like to do and few actually manage, and that is to make a real difference in the world. He cared deeply about an issue, and then decided that when you truly believe in something, when you think it is something worth fighting for, when you are convinced that the cause is just and cannot fail, then you commit to it. You fight for it. You disregard what is easy or comfortable because you are doing what is right. You suffer but the suffering means little because you are doing good.

Christ called his disciples to action. This is something that I never particularly understood about some branches of fundamentalism, those churches that believe that this world is corrupt and irredeemable through human works, and that personal salvation, not societal salvation, is the only purpose of the Gospel. I firmly disagree with this proposition. In saving one's soul, one is compelled to act. Christ called us to act. We are called to love as He loved, to forgive as He forgive. Not just personal salvation. Not just to evangelize. To do good.

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'"
~ Matthew 25: 31-45

There are many other verses I could quote here, but I like this one, and it serves my purposes. We are called to act.

In my last post I recounted a question that was posed to us at our RCIA class--you are called to take up your cross, and where does that cross lead you? The answer--Calgary--has many meanings. One is that it leads you to death (spiritual and physical), and one is that it leads you to suffering (and hopefully an understanding of that suffering). But Calgary is also the site of the greatest moment of commitment the world has ever seen. To take up your cross is to commit to something, and not in a half-hearted way. Not in a casual way. To commit to something that you would die for. This afterall is why we revere the martyrs. They did indeed die for their commitment.

My friend happens to be living this in a way that is very tangible and significant to me, but there are many ways to commit. One need not go to Africa to do it. But the lesson that I learn from my friend's decision is that if one is truly convinced, if one truly believes in something, one must follow it through to its end. No partial solutions, no half-hearted attempts will do. If one is truly moved, one acts, with no regard for oneself, with no thought to one's own suffering. That is what it is love. That is what it is to commit. That is what it is to live a Christian life.

Lent Day 18 and 19: God's megaphone

2009-03-18T21:31:00.000-07:00

We had our class on suffering and purgatory today. Our Religious Education director made the very good point that as humans we are adverse to suffering, we don't like it, we don't think we should have to endure it. But as Christians, we are called to recognize the greater meaning of what it is to suffer--it not only unites us to Christ's sacrifice on the cross, but it purges us of sin. Our director discussed the idea of taking up one's cross in a way I had not been presented with before: where does the path of the cross lead? To Calvary. To death, to painful death. So when we are told to take up our cross and follow him, we are literally being told that we are entering into a life where there will be immense suffering. But it is all to a specific end. As C.S. Lewis says in The Problem of Pain "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." The question then should not really be why do we suffer, but why don't we take anything from our suffering? For Lent, which is a penitential season after all, this is a particularly important question. We can't remove suffering from our lives. All we can do is realize what we can gain from it.

Lent Day 17: Spiritual crises

2009-03-16T20:38:00.000-07:00

From the conclusion to Zeine N. Zeine's wonderful book The Emergence of Arab Nationalism:

"Hence the real crisis of the Near East, today, is essentialy a spiritual crisis, in its fundamentals, as that which Christianity had to face in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which led to the rise of the European State-systems and the destruction of the unity of the Medieval Church. All human crises are, in the last analysis, spiritual in essence, if we believe in the existence of a spiritual order to which man should belong. ... No political or economic panaceas exist to provide a solution for the basic problems of the Neart East, if such a solution be divorced from the moral law and from spiritual vision. It is one of the tragedies of the present situation that so few have been able to grasp this fundamental truth."

It is slightly eerie that Zeine wrote this in 1966, well before there were true indicators of what many authors now talk about as the Islamic Reformation (see Reza Aslan). But the thing that I find resonant in this passage, the reason I post it here, is the idea that if a sense of spiritual order is truly present in a society, its political system and its economic system must be consonant with it. Looking at how our own economic system has bottomed out since September, I wonder if our problem is that our system doesn't adhere to our spiritual order, or that we have no spiritual order left to have anything adhere to... Notice I say "spiritual order" and not a specific religion. But is there any grand sense of an order to which man should belong, or of a moral law? Are we finally realizing the profit motive is inherently amoral? Does the West care anymore about these core questions? Will we start to again now that our political economy has collapsed in on itself under the weight of its own arrogance and greed?

It seems to me we've followed the Enlightenment well past its constructive lessons and stripped any sense of the spirit from our world. Zeine wrote about the Near East, and how any solution needs to be able to incorporate Islam. I wonder if he isn't applicable to the West as well. Rather than a solution with reconciles itself to our given spiritual order, perhaps the solutions we create should recognize that we've destroyed any significant sense of spirituality. Again, it doesn't have to be a specific religion here, but should our solutions perhaps start with a call for moral renewal? A recognition of the communality of humanity? We need something or someone to argue for the importance of the spirit of communion, or we are all going to lose our souls.

Lent Day 16: Lenten beer

2009-03-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

Again, using Sunday as my catch-all/catch-up day for the Lent blog. This was an appropriate entry, since I was at a party last night (but I did drink less than I normally do! I abstained!). Apparently, in Germany, Paulaner monks began to make this very strong beer specifically for Lent in the seventeenth century. Pretty funny history:

The first Lenten strong beer was brewed by Paulaner monks at Cloister Neudeck ob der Au in Munich. The Paulaners had arrived in Munich from Italy in 1627. They began brewing beer for their own comsumption shortly thereafter—exactly when is not clear. Depending on which documents one can trust, the year was 1630, 1651 or 1670. The Paulaners felt, however, that such a strong brew with such delightful qualities might be just a bit too much of an indulgence for Lent. So they decided to ask the Holy Father in Rome for a special dispensation so that they could continued to brew it with a clear conscience. The Paulaners dispatched a cask of Lenten beer to Rome for the pope to try and to pass judgment. During its transport across the Alps and along the burning sun of Italy, unfortunately—or fortunately—the cask tossed and turned, and heated for several weeks—a classic condition for causing beer to turn sour and undrinkable. So when the Holy Father tasted the much-praised stuff from Munich, he found it (appropriately) disgusting. His decision: Because the brew was so vile, it was probably beneficial for the souls of the Munich monks to make and drink as much of it as they could. Therefore, he willingly gave the brewing of this new, allegedly rotten, beer style his blessing. Little did he know...!

The full article is here: Doppelbock at the German Beer Institute

Lent Day 15: Al-adhan

2009-03-13T21:34:00.000-07:00

Al-adhan is the Arabic word for the "call to prayer," the recitation that is sung five times a day to alert Muslims when they should head to mosque (or do the prayers at home). It is one of the things I miss about being in the Middle East, actually, because no matter where you are, or how loud and cacophonous the street is around you (and trust me, in Cairo it feels sometimes like you couldn't hear yourself scream), the call cuts through all of it. Sometimes it just joins in the din, but it always becomes distinct after a moment or two. I have some fond memories of al-adhan, like the first time I experienced it up close, my second or third day in Cairo, as I was walking back from Alfa Market (having just obtained much needed hangers) through the streets of my island home in the Nile, Zamalek. The street I was on had few people on it, and the sun was just starting to go down. And the call started up, echoing around me, and it is beautiful and eerie all at the same time.

The reason I write about it here, for the purposes of Lent, is that I was thinking about the call to prayer today, and how it made it nearly impossible to go through the day without recalling God. Granted, the call takes on many other meanings. The mid-day call marked the end of my second section of Arabic every day in class, so hearing it (on those days when we were in the classroom on the top floor of AUC's main campus, one that faced the street nearest a large mosque) always made me smile since it meant only 5 more minutes of Arabic grammar. But it also was always a reminder of God. A reminder to pray. Lent is a reminder to pray, to remember our sins, to draw ourselves closer to God. Al-adhan is a sung version of the shahadah--There is no god but God, and Mohammad is the messenger of God--prefaced by the call "Allahu Akbar" (God is great). Five times a day it echoes through the streets. Five times a day it rings above the clamor, trying to draw people to worship. God is Great. God is Great. Indeed.

This is a brief video someone placed on YouTube of the call in Cairo (in the Khan al-Khalili, actually, I know right where this was recorded). Holy cats, I miss Cairo.

Lent Day 14: Quotes for a lonely evening

2009-03-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

Let us understand that God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation.
~St. Augustine

Suffering is a great favor. Remember that everything soon comes to an end . . . and take courage. Think of how our gain is eternal.
~St. Teresa of Avila

Give me the grace to make my loneliness a prayer, that I might learn humility. That one is me.

Lent Day 11, 12, 13: Alas, alack!

2009-03-11T21:54:00.000-07:00

I fell a whole two days behind on my Lent blog! It is fairly difficult to make time in my pretty busy schedule to blog daily (class, teaching, reading, and researching tend to tenderize my brain until it becomes a nice soft hunk of meat that wants to zone out in front of American Idol and Gray's Anatomy). This is, of course, why I wanted to do this blog, because it is far too easy and common to allow the mundane to overwhelm the spiritual. I will try to get back on track here.

I have been very much enjoying U2's new album No Line on the Horizon. U2 is my favorite band for many reasons, but high on the list is how common the themes of yearning for grace and the desire to know God are to their music. One song on this newest album, "Moment of Surrender," I think is actually a nice meditation on the conversion process. Here's the lyric in full:

I tied myself with wire
To let the horses run free
Playing with the fire
Until the fire played with me

The stone was semi precious
We were barely conscious
Two souls too smart to be
In the realm of certainty
Even on our wedding day

We set ourselves on fire
Oh God, do not deny her
Its not if I believe in love
But if love believes in me
Oh, believe in me

At the moment of surrender
I folded to my knees
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me

I’ve been in every black hole
At the alter of a dark star
My body's now a begging bowl
That's begging to get back
Begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control

I was punching in the numbers at the ATM machine
I could see in the reflection
A face staring back at me
At the moment of surrender
Of vision over visibility
I did notice the passers by
And they did not notice me

I was speeding on the subway
Through the stations of the cross
Every eye looking every other way
Counting down til the pain would stop

At the moment of surrender
Of vision over visibility
I did not notice the passers by
And they did not notice me.

There are a lot of images here--a man folded on his knees, a body so broken its like a begging bowl, two people who followed passion over reason and paid the price for it--but the ideas I like the most are how we are struck when we least expect it by our realization that we are connected to something greater--"a vision" of the infinite that trumps the mundanely visible everyday things. No one notices this moment of personal revelation (or surrender, as it were), but neither does the speaker notice the outside world anymore. We are all trying to get back to the rhythm of our soul, in other words, to the rhythm of God, of the universal infinite. It is inside each of us, and we lose contact with it. It is only until we go through that hell of disconnection and then desire repentance, reconnection, that we can reach that moment of surrender, that moment where we are granted that vision, however fleeting, of God, of Love. We surrender our will, our vision, our smallness, and only then do we begin to see power and mystery and greatness of God.

Maybe all my entries will just be meditation on U2 lyrics from now on. They are always applicable.

Lent Day 10: A meditation

2009-03-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Mike Doughty:

Let me know your enormity
And my tininess
And help me see your infinity
And my finiteness

That's a nice prayer, I think, to end the second week of Lent on.

Lent Day 9: That darn wagon

2009-03-06T16:51:00.000-08:00

I took a small spill off the Lent wagon today. At dinner I totally ordered this lime juice and Sprite concoction and was half way through it when I remember, "Oh, damn, I totally gave up soda for Lent."

Soda and coffee are my secondary fasts, but still. I mean, technically I get an out, because I didn't consciously break my fast. And more importantly, I totally remembered no meat on Friday, so I was proud of myself for that. But nevertheless, I was doing so well with the remembering thing! Well, start again. And at least I haven't broken my primary fast (tea).

Lent Day 8: Singular

2009-03-05T20:50:00.000-08:00

I think one of the reasons it has been easy (so far!) to keep my Lenten fasts is because whenever I have a strong desire for something that I have given up, I remind myself why I am giving something up, and I think of God and His sacrifice, and I find it much easier to abstain than I normally would. I thus also end up thinking about God much more frequently throughout my day than I normally would (a sad but true fact). This is a good trend, I think, and no doubt one of the purposes of Lent. But I wondered, how do I carry this on into the rest of my life, outside of Lent? Continuing to give up whatever you gave up for Lent would probably "wear off," as it were, after a while since eventually you would just condition yourself to not have those things anymore, and it would cease to be a sacrifice. Is the solution to periodically fast? To make new routines wherein you decide something like, say, "Everytime I'm waiting in line I am going to spend a brief moment in meditative prayer." I am not sure. One of the things I am enjoying about Lent is that it is decidedly not (indeed, purposefully not) the routine. It is different, and in its purposeful difference and uniqueness it draws you closer to God. But this also makes me think that it is nearly impossible to "carry Lent on" into non-Lent times. Just a rumination.

Lent Day 7: Thomas Merton

2009-03-04T19:36:00.000-08:00

"Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real."

That's all for today. Of all the brilliance of the Trappiest monk, this one was particularly suitable to Lent.

Lent Day 6: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."

2009-03-03T20:48:00.000-08:00

"Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, "Sit here while I go over there and pray." He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me." Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. "Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?" he asked Peter. "Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."

Matthew 26:36-41

The agony in the garden. Incidentally, the first sorrowful mystery of the Rosary, the only mysteries of the Rosary that Catholics pray from Ash Wednesday through to Easter. Also one of the more moving passages in the Gospels, for me at least. It is one of the truest moments of the Incarnation, for it is Jesus at his most human--begging God to relieve His pain and suffering, pleading that He not have to do something. Of course in the end Jesus ultimately echoes the same words Mary spoke when faced with a similar scary proposition--as you will. But the "moment of doubt and pain," as the Rolling Stones described this scene, is nevertheless significant. Even though the last words of this small passage are directed at Peter and the other apostles--their spirit would follow Jesus but their flesh weakens that resolve--it has some resonance for Jesus, too, I think. Although his flesh doesn't hold him back because of sin, it nevertheless is weak because it is merely human, merely corporeal.

We doubt. We fail. It is who we are. We can't hope to do otherwise--not even Jesus was able to do otherwise! But we can recognize that our moments of doubt, our failures, our missteps, our weaknesses, are moments when we can understand the most intimate aspects of our humanity. They are also moments when he can reach out and touch God.

Lent Day 5: Warm fuzzies, or lack thereof

2009-03-02T21:43:00.000-08:00

From David Currie's very good book Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic:

"There are those who say that people do not care about the truth anymore. I don't believe it. Religious commitment of any sort is too much work if one does not believe it truly answers life's deepest longings.Our relationship to God is rooted in the way things really are, or it is nonsense. Granted that all of us merely "know in part" (1 Cor. 13:12), but people change religious affiliations because they are convinced that the change brings them closer to God and His truth. Most people do not change merely because of warm fuzzy feelings." (Currie, 11)

I think one of the hardest things about conversion is having to explain it to other people. I cannot fully express to you in words how I have come to make this change. I cannot tell you how it felt to suddenly feel as if I was where God wanted me to be. I cannot tell you how it felt to feel that I was more fully in the presence of God than I had been before. I cannot share with you the happiness it gives me, or the grace I feel working in my life, or the strength I gain from it, or the beauty I find in it. Especially when the person inquiring does not believe, describing conversion is a particularly difficult challenge. Especially when the person knew you as you were before.

One of the hardest things has been realizing what it means to take up a cross. I did not make this decision lightly. One need only look at the personal cost. It breaks my heart in small and silent ways to know how much this has cost me.

Why are we so skeptical of change? Is it solely because it is change of a religious nature? Is this why I have encountered so many people who seem incredulous at my choice to be a Catholic? "Catholic? Really? But you're too smart to believe in God!" said a friend. From non-atheist friends the biggest problems seems to be the decision to go from Protestantism to Catholicism, as if I were somehow regressing. But incredulity reigns throughout. Why? Is it because belief of any kind is a disconcerting thing? Is this one of the effects of growing up in a culture steeped in irony and detachment?

I have met some wonderful people who haved helped me through the conversion process. But David Currie is absolutely correct to note there are very often no warm fuzzies associated with the process. For all the amazing things I have already received, I am truly thankful, and it has given me the strenght to keep moving forward. But that didn't make it easy. It was not easy to let go of old errors and accept new truths. It wasn't easy for other people, many whom I love, to understand why and how I was changing. I have begun to understand why the whole process is defined in terms of death and rebirth. It is certainly that transformative. It is also, at times, that traumatic.

Lent Day 4: "To become, not just to be."

2009-03-01T21:38:00.000-08:00

Yes, technically I skipped a day by not updating on Saturday. But I get a free day, in a way, because Sundays do not count in the Lenten cycle (they are outside of time in that way). So hurrah for Sunday! It allows me to update on the fourth day of Lent without getting behind in this project. Oh, you know, also the holiness and all.

Saturday was the Rite of Election held in our diocesan seat in Richmond. This rite is where catechumens (the unbaptized) officially sign their names in the Book of the Elect, which the bishop then signs to make official our intent to receive the sacraments at Easter vigil. All of these Rites are modeled on the original conversion and baptism process from the ancient church. In fact, as the Bishop who gave the homily at the prayer service yesterday noted, the practices of Lent were the catechumens' before they were those of the church. In the final days leading up to baptism, the catechumens set time aside for extra prayer, and did special penances to ensure that they were truly ready to receive baptismal grace. The rest of the church realized that this period of abstention and prayer and mortification was an excellent way to refresh one's faith, and an excellent way to remember the ways in which Easter calls everyone to recall their baptismal promises. And thus Lent was born. I am sure there is more to it that than, but per our bishop, the catechumen disciplines in the days preceding the Eastertide were a direct influence on the rest of the church.

Once the bishop has officially endorsed our intent to receive the sacraments, catechumens become the "elect." Point of interest, were I to die sometime between now and being baptized at Easter, I would be eligible to receive a Christian burial. Signing one's name in the Book of the Elect declares baptismal intent, and were one to die in between the intent and the actual event, the church considers it a baptism by spirit, and you get full Christian burial rites. Just a technical aside I found interesting. Anyway, the Rite of Election service was really quite a nice one, and it was helped by the fact that the cathedral is absolutely gorgeous--very much in the old European style, with some breathtaking stained glasses (luminous even on a rainy Saturday afternoon). It was nice to see how many people are joining the church this Easter, even from just one third of our diocese.

The last hymn that we sang at the prayer service was "We Rejoice to be God's Chosen," which repurposes Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee. There were two parts of the verse in particular that I found moving. One was this:

"We rejoice to be God's chosen,
to be gathered to God's side
not to build a pious ghetto
or be steeped in selfish pride;"

That sentiment the verse warns against is something that I think pervades religion all too often, and Christianity seems particularly prone to it. Christians have a tendency to wall themselves off, to erect these walls of righteousness and declare a sort of "your faith must be this high to enter here" rule. You see it with how people look down on "Chreasters," (Christians who only go to church on Christmas and Easter), or on other denominations. Now I don't mean to say that we shouldn't encourage those twice-a-year Christians to go to church more, or to belittle the very real and really sad issues that divide Christians into rather senseless sects. But we shouldn't let our prejudices or our pride keep us from reaching out to people, regardless of their faith or lack there of. If you truly believe in Christianity, I feel like you have to recognize that Christ called us to act as he did--to love as he did, to minister as he did, to work as he did. And that was without prejudice for status or sin or with any care for his own person. This is why I really love the idea of Lent--the humility that is central to it is such a crucial thing for real faith, and I think everyone would do better to recall that as often as we can.

The second part of the song verse that I really loved was this:

"And because God's love is restless
like the surging of the sea,
we are pulled by heav'n's dynamic
to become, not just to be."

To become, not just to be. That really sums up not just conversion, but faith, at least in my mind. It is a process. We never reach the end, we simply die trying. We should be constantly becoming something new. We should constantly evolve. It is (and ought to be) a constant struggle, a daily fight to transcend. Faith is dynamic. When we forget that, when we begin to wall ourselves off in those pious ghettos, is when we do a disservice to the God who loves us and the Lord who calls us to be like Him. And Lent is a prescription for that. It is a reminder of our mortality, our short time on this planet. It is a call to repentence and humility. And it is a call to action. To remember our flaws and how we must work to perfect them. To love and help others more than we want to love and help ourselves. To tear down the walls of self-righteousness and expand the "smallness of our vision." To become, not just to be.

Lent Day 3: Blacking out the friction...

2009-02-27T22:30:00.000-08:00

I will let someone else do the talking today. Full article from The Charcoal Fire

"I gave my all to the following effort: Make my silence a prayer.

At first, the hush was a bit awkward. My brain was still trained to omnipresent stimuli. By day three I felt more liberated and changed than I ever had before. I wanted more and more of this wonder called silence! It was such a glorious activity!

The most wonderful thing about silence was that it spread through aspects of my life like the incense that once lit in the sanctuary spreads even to the doors in the back of the church. It filled my life more than I ever would have intended or even desired. But I was finding the gift of stillness and contemplation everywhere. This Lent, I hope to return to the majesty of this mystery, because it is like being in the very heart of God."

Lent Day 2: "What you don't have you don't need it now."

2009-02-26T18:42:00.000-08:00

Per Father James Martin, a Jesuit whose writings I very much enjoy on the In All Things America magazine blog, my thought for the day is on freedom. Fr. Martin was on the Colbert Report on Monday, and had this to say in response to Colbert's questioning of the value of vows of poverty:

"If you tie yourself to your possessions your possessions start owning you. And I think it's more about freedom. The vow of poverty that we Jesuits take, and religious orders take, is more about being free, following Christ, being free to serve other people and also identifying and having compassion with the poor. So it's mostly about freedom."

For me, this is sort of the point of Lent. For lay people, we have a chance to commit in a small way to the sort of sacrifices that religious make. But again, just as with the message of mortality from Ash Wednesday, there are two ways to view these sorts of sacrifices. On the one had it seems like a hardship, to not have what you want when you want it, to abstain, to fast. Why is God pleased by our hardship, especially since we are consistently told He simply wants to have a loving relationship with us? But while it is easy, and natural I think, to grumble about things in this way, there is a flip side to sacrifice. It is painful to cut yourself off from things, but in the end, you are indeed more free. You no longer need the things you thought you did. (Hence the U2 line, from Beautiful Day, as the title for this post.) It is liberating.

Pope John Paul II had a line that went something like, "behind every "No" is a beautiful "Yes."" That I think is a way to interpret Lent--it is a series of "no"s, but the goal is that they create in us a greater capacity to say "yes" to the things that matter. Obviously Lenten practices aren't the vows of religious orders--we aren't all called to be St. Anthony, who sold all his possessions and took up a life of asceticism in the Egyptian deserts--but the principle of the ascetic greatly informs the forty days. We strip away the trappings and gunk that fills our daily lives, and in the process, hopefully, discover a new freedom of action, a new power for good. To end with some Dylan, "if you ain't got nothing, you ain't got nothing to lose."

Here's to a sense of liberation.

Lent Day 1: "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return."

2009-02-25T21:29:00.001-08:00

I have decided that to put this blog to use, and to document the final leg of my conversion process, I am going to keep a Lent blog. It will be short, mostly, because I have precious little time of late to do anything other than the grad school grind, but I hope it will aid in my spiritual discernment, and, well, moments of self-reflection are almost always beneficial in some way.

The priest today made the point in his homily that Ash Wednesday is the day in which we are reminded of our own mortality. As the priest (or extraordinary minister) makes the sign of the cross upon your forehead with the ashes, he repeats the words above in the title line. You are going to die, the Church wants to remind you. But instead of a fatalism (although certainly you can see where the "Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" argument would come into play), I think a reminder of our own mortality is useful and can prompt good. As he said in his homily, we are here for such a short amount of time. We have so little time to do good, to love God, to love each other.

Lent is best known for the time when you "give something up." Fasting--of whatever it is you chose, chocolate, coffee, etc--is meant to help you realize that the material things of this world are ultimately secondary to our purpose here. In abstaining, we make a sacrifice that is meant to remind us of our greater call to God and to each other. So I am giving up tea for Lent (soda and coffee as well, but I am sort of using Lent as an excuse so I'll stop frivolously giving my money to Starbucks, and besides this is less of a sacrifice). And every time I wish I could make myself a cup, I am prompted to remember why I am abstaining in the first place, prompted to remember that I am "fasting" in order to strengthen my spiritual sense of purpose. I am giving something up so that I can give everything more freely. I am giving something up because I have such precious little time to here, that I should work to hold on to only those things that truly matter. I am giving something up, because ultimately it reminds me that I will one day, sooner than I probably imagine, will have to give everything up. You are dust and to dust you shall return. The black mark on my forehead, which I had forgotten was there until I went to wash my face for the night, was a jarring reminder. We are all marked for death. We have precious little time.

What are we doing with it?

"I feel my heart start to trembling, whenever you're around"

2009-02-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

I had a dream last night that was quite wonderful. I never remember my dreams. Well, very rarely, anyway. But last night I actually had two dreams that I remember. The second was by far the more significant. I can actually recall quite a number of details about it, but it is difficult to adequately put into words one dreams. I think mainly because of the issue of multiple consciousnesses, or the sense that you have both a dream-awareness of what is going on and at the same time a reality-awareness that you are in a dream...and the convoluted nature of that sentence is why I am going to spare you most of the dream details, but I will recount a bit of the dream, but I have a weird suspicion it could be significant.

Through various convoluted dream-happenings, I ended up with this boy, who was a good friend of mine, at a presentation that the boy was giving. He ended the presentation with a slideshow of pictures. While the rest of the audience was engrossed in the slideshow, I went to stand at the podium next to this boy who was a good friend of mine. And then we had one of those moments, where you look deeply into another person's eyes, and you feel something shift. And then we each leaned into the other slowly, and dream boy friend and I kissed. And what was strange, and striking, about this dream (and remember, I never remember my dreams), was how...visceral the feeling of this kiss was. The tenderness of it, the kindness that radiated out toward me in this dream-moment, the sheer love that burst through just went into my bones. I woke up feeling it. It stayed with me as if I had actually just been kissed like that for a few minutes after I woke up. Even now I can still recall what it felt like, nearly twenty four hours later. The brain is a funny thing in that way. It wasn't a romance movie kiss--by that I mean fierce, passionate, the kind of kiss you get in the blowing wind and rain. Not a Wuthering Heights kiss, you could say. It was much quieter than that, and much gentler, but nevertheless I felt something move within me when it happened.

And I woke up thinking that maybe this was a sign. I know, I know. Padded room talk. But I couldn't shake the feeling that this was significant in some way. That I am going to meet someone. The part of me that knew I was dreaming thought this while I was still in the dream. I had this deep sense of "You are going to meet this person." Maybe it was just my subsconscious playing on my silly romantic side. Maybe it was just the random firing of the synapses. Or maybe it was the sign of things to come? Either way, it made me hopeful.

The Superbowl was... the Superbowl, for me, but I did greatly enjoy The Office episode that followed it, and Bruce Springsteen rocked my world, as per his usual. Jim and Pam are up there as one of my favorite fictional couples, I think. Also, were I to write my own vows (which I would not, because I feel like they don't ever end up as eloquent as people would wish, and besides the traditional vows are pretty great), I think I would include "I'll love you with all the madness in my soul," as one of my promises. Think for a moment on that line. I think there is something beautifully poetic about it.

So here's to kisses that make the Earth move. Happy Superbowl day.

Potluck! Or: A little bit of everything

2009-01-26T17:49:00.001-08:00

Well, so much for my promise to update more substantively and thoughtfully during my winter break. I should know better than to make vague promises to the Internet. A hodgepodge of my thoughts on recent things, that I felt like committing to the void.

Obama's Presidential Inauguration
As my early posts would indicate, I am a big Obama supporter. One might say, if one were glib, that I drank the Kool-Aid. Either way, I was quite giddy on the twentieth. I did not have the opportunity to go to Washington (curse the fates and pesky things like seminars!) but I enjoyed witnessing history in my own (less crowded, more bathroom-accessible) way. My university hosted a view party in the arena here on campus, and I went with some close friends. It was nice to experience the event in a large crowd, even if we were simply watching C-SPAN together. It was a "home team" crowd, though--cheers whenever any Democrats appeared on screen, lots of screaming for Obama, adorable children bedecked by their parents in political swag. We also all stood up at the appropriate times, like during the swearing in ceremony. I do believe my exact words when Justice Roberts proved his unfamiliarity with the document he is supposed to be upholding were "I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY ARE SCREWING THIS UP!" The caps are necessary; I was pretty loud. The speech was a nice bit of oratory, not too overwrought (although somewhat indulgent at times). I was surprised at how firmly and harshly it repudiated the Bush years (although certainly not unhappy to hear it), and I thought there were some lovely moments, in particular "It is a not a question of is government too large or too small, but does it work?" and the idea that the United States does not have to compromise ideals for security (although the tension between those two motivations is at the heart of U.S. foreign policy and is the central question to ask when one wants to understand "how 'X' went wrong"). I've been glad to see the overturning of so many Bush-era policies in the first week of the Obama administration, and I am annoyed but not surprised to see the immediate Monday-morning quaterbacking of the Internet and cable news. The 100 days seem to have morphed into the 100 hours. Didn't we use to wait longer before we made judgements? I suppose allowing the jury to deliberate until the defendent has actually made his case would be too much to ask.

Oscar nominations and other filmic items
I was lucky enough to see a lot of movies over break (including Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Marley and Me) as well as in the past few weeks (Doubt, The Reader). Furthermore, many nominated or critically well-received movies just opened up this past weekend here in town (including Revolutionary Road, The Wrestler and Frost/Nixon), so I will be a busy movie-going bee for the next few weeks. At some point I would like to write two entries discussing a few of these films, because I think that two pairs of them make interesting analytical mates. Slumdog Millionare and Benjamin Button represent two opposing life philosophies--the first is about fighting tenaciously for what you want in life, and the ways we carry our experiences with us, while the second is about the impermience of existence and the futility of attempting to hold onto anything. Each film is bound by the idea of fated love, but they take two very different approaches to that idea. Doubt and The Reader each explore ideas about guilt and truth, and each in its own way is a profoundly disturbing meditation on the modern condition. Doubt, as its title would suggest, raises the possibility that it is impossible for us to truly "know" (or rather "prove" anything), that the modern condition, with its emphasis on the inherent truth of each individual perspective by virtue of its uniqueness, has made it impossible to say that we ever fully "know." The Reader plumbs the complexities of knowledge and modernity, albeit in a somewhat different way, by investigating the capacity of the human heart to love and yet be acquiesent to great evil. Just as Doubt wonders whether or not we can ever totally know "truth," The Reader challenges the viewer as to the nature of good and evil and begs us to question the ease at which we separate the two. Hopefully I will get a chance to expound more upon these ideas.

Setting a course for uncharted waters
I will almost definitely be abroad again this summer. The default location will be Cairo (I should come up with a catchy title for a return trip, like "Return to the Mummy's Tomb"...I never said it would be a good catchy title). Other possibilites include Amman, Damascus, and the newest addition to the list, Beirut. Needless to say, many things to consider. We shall see how things progress.

Bring on the horizon

2008-12-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

Hopefully I will be able to post more substantively and frequently in the upcoming month, as the semester has finally ended (mostly successfully) and I have time to see movies and read non-academic books, and generally engage in culture and life in ways that prod my brain in interesting ways and spur me to write.

I had one of those brief flashes a moment ago, where you suddenly realize something in a way that prompts you to stop and appreciate your life a little more. It was recently confirmed for me that my ex has a new girlfriend. It took him all of 4 months to get over 5 years of a relationship. At first I thought this seemed a little fast, but then I remembered that I had been long over this relationship since before I even ended it. It was probably true for him as well. I do not begrudge him the happiness, and I hope that he is with someone who works with him better than I did. But I was feeling a little sad at thinking about it tonight, just because I was contemplating how most of my friends are in relationships at the moment, either steady partnership or marriage, and I was just feeling... a little untethered, I suppose. And so I was thinking about my ex, and his new relationship.

And then I realized, he is in his hometown, living at home, working a non-descript job. Yes, he has companionship, and that probably makes him happy. But there is little hope for a grand adventure in that scenario. Or, to frame it positively, I have no boyfriend. But what I do have is nearly unlimited potential. I have the chance and most probably the means to travel to various exotic locales, and to learn while I am there. I do what I do fairly well, which means that eventually (in sha'allah) I will be paid to teach, to research, and to write, three things that I love to do. And furthermore, that job will take me to different continents, to new cities and it presents me with the opportunity for various grand adventures.

What all this possibility and potential also ensures is that I will have romance in my life again, at some point. I will not always be alone. I will meet people and fall in love, for a day, for a week, and, hopefully, for the rest of my life. I will make friends and companions and share beautiful things with amazing people. And I realized that my solitary status can actually be a positive thing, if only as the mark of this condition of hope and expectation.

Yes, I am yearning, and yearning is painful. But I realized that I am yearning for things that I can actually go out and make happen. I want to travel, and I can. I want to meet new people and I can. I want to fall in love, and eventually I will. I am not tied to a specific ending at the moment, to a specific life, to a specific person. Even though there is someone I very much would like to have, my melancholy at not having him is cut with a rueful sort of optimism. I see how in not having him I am free to dream of the next great love.

I am so young. Nothing is holding me back. I have yet to meet that person, and until I do, I shall relish this freedom. Life stretches before me, and I have the means and the position to make it unforgettable. It is a beautiful feeling.

"I will fight the dizzy spiral of goodbye."

2008-11-20T22:36:00.000-08:00

"Because I have seen insane things
All those grand historic paintings
Morning light on polished swords and burnished pride
Ancient smiles encased in whalebone
Spines of steel from head to tailbone
Cannons poised to blast the turning of the tide."
-Dar Williams, "It's Alright"

The downside of having adventures is that in the quiet moments of your life, when the mundane is the rule and annoyances large and small steal your attention away from bigger things and trials seem to come one after another, it is all too easy to feel quite a bit of melancholy about your current state of affairs. I'm all too prone to want to hit the road when the going gets tough anyway, and instead of having those beautiful memories to thumb through when I am tired, stressed and alone, they simply taunt me. You had more than this, I think to myself. You had grand adventures. You've stayed in the refurbished palaces of sultans. You've walked the path of Moses. You've climbed mountains, swam in ancient seas, stood in some of the holiest places of the world, seen the dust of empires. I've seen so much, and yet in the scope of the world, it is very very little. I've loved and been loved, and yet in the scope of the world, it is very very little.

The thing that I begin to wonder is: is it better to not know what you are missing? If I had never done any of these things, would I be plagued with this sense of sadness and stagnation? No doubt different things would plague me. Regret, which is of another ilk than yearning. But is it better to have loved briefly and then to know its absence? Is the prick of that memory sharper than the sadness of someone who has never known what it is like to love like that?

I grew up watching movies with grand romances. It didn't condition me to expect the happy ending, really. My favorite movie, after all, is Casablanca. That ends with a parting, with a recognition that love does not always mean a happily ever after. I grew up with this silly romantic idea that it would be quite wonderful to have a big dramatic love story. To fall for someone knowing that time was short and that you would not be together. Doomed romance seemed so...exotic? Desirable? But do you know what it is actually like? It is heart breaking. That's what you block out when you see it in the movies. You shed a tear, because, oh, it's so sad! They can't be together! It is the melodrama, the pathos, that moves us. No one would swoon if they could feel this.

When you live it? When you live that ache, day in, day out. When you remember what you had, when those flashes return to you unbidden, unwanted, warm and then choking, it is different. It throws into relief how little you have now compared to how much you had then. "I'll always have this," I thought to myself. No matter what happens afterwards, I'll always have this moment, right now. And it is true, I will always have those experiences. They are burned into me, seared, indelible. But the branding is still fresh, I suppose. Because the picture is sharp, but so is the pain. It hasn't faded yet to where only the lovely warm golden hues remain. I can still see it all in brilliant blinding color and it is so bright it brings tears to my eyes. Eventually it will mellow. It will be saturated by time, and refracted through the lenses of other experiences. And I'll look at it and only see the warmth and the love and joy and the excitement and not the pain and rejection and melancholy that followed. But right now? It serves only as a cruel reminder of a stolen moment, a fiction even as I was living it. It only makes real life that much duller and that much more lonely.

Am I richer for what I have lived? Undoubtedly. And I do not regret anything. But sometimes I wonder if I chose the more painful path. If in the end, the regret would have been easier than the ache. If sometimes, it isn't easier to live not knowing what you are missing.

"It's a beautiful day!"

2008-11-09T10:02:00.000-08:00

Well, since my last post nearly a month ago, I've been swamped with work, written three papers and done major research for a fourth, and gotten to know some new and intriguing people. Oh, also, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States.

I still have not fully come down from the cloud that I've been floating about on since Tuesday evening. I was one of those who did not really think that this could happen. Less because Obama is black, and more because I just truly did not think that America would elect a liberal Democrat. Especially once McCain and Palin began bandying the word "socialist" about, I just didn't think it would happen. Americans don't like to think they live in a country with a powerful intervention-prone state. They do. I have this (admittedly undercooked) theory that people voting for "small government" are practicing a form of cognitive dissonance. That perhaps secretly they recognize how crucial state intervention and power is in their lives, but they don't want to truly acknowledge that we aren't that country of ruggedly individual pioneers taming a frontier unaided anymore (sidenote, we never were!). Anyway, even after the disaster that has been the Bush years, I really thought McCain's attempts to make people afraid of Barack Obama would work. Even after staring at the electoral projections and numerous polls, the highest I was willing to go in my electoral college count was 291. I didn't think we'd win Florida or Ohio. Suffice it to say, I totally missed the boat.

Funnily enough, Jon Stewart was the first person to announce to me that Barack Obama had won. I was watching the returns with a few friends, and we had been bouncing back and forth between CNN and the Daily Show-Colbert Report joint coverage. When Jon Stewart announced, "At 11 o'clock at night, eastern standard time, the president of the United States is Barack Obama." my friend and I screamed. We flipped immediately to CNN, where they had called it on the big screen. We all leapt up, and my friend gave me a hug that was much more akin to a tackle. I was still sort of in shock. I think at one point I might have said, "But what if they have to reverse one of the states they called early like in 2000?" I definitely said, "I won't believe this until John McCain makes his concession speech!" We all just kept repeating, we just elected Barack Obama president. We elected a black man president of the United States.

The glee still hadn't fully set in, however. It kept coming in little waves throughout the evening. Like when McCain and Palin walked onto the stage in Arizona, I turned and sort of shrieked to everyone else in the room, "Sarah Palin is NOT going to be Vice President!!" In my excitement that Obama had won I had not had time to think about the meaning of McCain's loss, namely that I would not have to fear Sarah Palin being in a position of power over me for at least another four years.

I cried during Obama's victory speech. Whoever wrote it, the implicit parallels to key language from the civil rights movement was beautifully done. "Change has come to America," recalled Sam Cooke's gorgeous "A Change is Gonna Come." (Not to mention Obama's own campaign mantra, of course.) And compare the following passage from Obama's speech:

"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year, or even in one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you: We as a people will get there."

To Martin Luther King's mountain top speech:
"I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land!"

The parallel was artful. Not a direct quote, but just enough to evoke King. A reference to the movement that made it possible for Obama to be standing there, president-election, but at the same time a reappropriation of those lines from the specificity of the civil rights movement to a universal promise to lift all Americans to a better place. How could you not be moved?

I've never known what segregation is. I've never known was it was like to be judged adversely for the color of my skin. People who are much smarter than me tell me that despite the fact I did not grow up with economic privilege, by the random chance of my birth I grew up with racial privilege that I do not recognize the extent of. I mostly believe them when they say this, because my whole life I have looked at the people who lead my country and seen people who mostly look like me. That we have now finally broken that long string of old white men, that we have finally been able to elect as our leader someone who looks different than the majority of Americans, that we as a people proved that we mean what we say when we contend that many of us look past people's skin color. The content of their character indeed.

It doesn't end racism (not by any means!). It doesn't solve any of the tangible issues facing African Americans in the U.S. But it does seem to give a new weight to all those strands of American exceptionalism that we are always so loudly trumpeting. From the hypocrisy of our birth, when we proclaimed that all men were equal except for those who were actually only 3/5 as equal, we finally proved that an ideal need not be unachievable. We finally showed, for one brief moment, that America can be more. Coming after the hellish Bush years, where it seemed that the only way my country's leader could surprise me was by finding new depths to sink to, Tuesday evening felt like an absolution. We, as a nation, could purge our past and, renewed, choose a new future. We live by symbols. And Barack Obama will now always be a symbol for the better angels of our nature.

That being said, whether or not he actually ends up being something more than just a symbol, whether or not he actually will be a good president, remains to be seen. I think he will--I voted for him after all! But I think the initial days of the Obama presidency will be closer to Kennedy's than they will be to FDR's--as in a period of adjustment filled with some failure rather than a transformative year for American politics. I think Emanuel was a smart pick for Chief of Staff. It shows that Obama knows how hard he is going to have to fight to achieve his agenda. It also points to the potential for a "team of rivals"-esque administration, where the best minds are brought together to work on problems regardless of how well they necessarily work with each other. Doris Kearns Goodwin used it to describe Lincoln's cabinet, but I think you could also apply it to FDR's White House as well. Obama has the startings of one--Emanuel is pushy, fiery, loud, abrasive. David Axelrod, who has been tapped for the Karl Rove position, is calm, cool, collected, with much less tendency to use brute force. We'll see how Obama fills out his inner ciricle.

I will throw in my two cents (it's my blog, I'm allowed!). So, President-Elect Obama:

Please don't pick John Kerry to be Secretary of State. I just...I don't see John Kerry as doing all that well as SecState. What about Richard Holbrooke? He's a diplomat! He negotiated an end to genocide in the Balkans, experience well-suited to many of your stated goals, notably of withdrawing from Iraq (which will require some tender diplomacy along with the military logistics). He'd also be a great guy to set the tone for a foreign policy which makes use of revitalized diplomatic tactics. He is an old hand, a tough negotiator and a smart guy. Just, please, not Kerry, okay? Or Bill Richardson. Yes, yes, he was UN Ambassador and Energy Secretary and all those things. Was he particularly good at any of them? Similarly, don't pick Colin Powell. I don't know how much credibility he has left after admitting he went infront of the world and lied (that UN speech will go down in history).

Don't pick Tim Kaine to be your AG. We need all the Democratic governors we can get! Virginia needs him more than you do! On this note, do you really want to take a Democrat out of the statehouse in Arizona (Napolitano is said to be a favorite)? What are the odds we will get another one back in there?

I know he's smart and has lots of experience, but Lawrence Summers is also sort of a douche. Remember all those inflammatory comments about women being inherently bad at science and math because their silly female brains are built that way? Yeah, douche. You have many other choices for Secretary of the Treasury. Please pick one of them.

Does Caroline Kennedy have the experience to be UN Ambassador? She's a lawyer whose done work with great causes, but does she actually have any experience on the world stage? Don't get me wrong, I like her. I suppose I am just antsy about putting people with no diplomatic experience in diplomatic positions. Diplomacy is hard! Wouldn't putting a heavier hitting diplomat at the UN signal resolve to work with the rest of the world again? To focus on negotiations rather than war to solve our problems? This position was a joke under Bush, but you could make it revelant, and furthermore a powerful pledge to the rest of the world that you hear them.

Can you just make sure Samantha Power has a role somewhere in your State Department? She'll keep you honest. And she's brilliant.

A general point, from a historian in training. Senators have never managed anything--you should know this, your managerial experience came from community organization and a spectacular campaign, but not from your time in the Senate. Are they really the best choices then to run massive bureaucracies with enormous budgets? JFK picked McNamara to run the DoD because he had reformed Ford, not because he knew anything about the military. That's an extreme example, but nevertheless, pick people who know how to run things. Governors have run states. CEOs (good ones at least) have successfully run large corporations. Deans and university presidents have run large institutions. Also, we still need those senate seats!

Also, anytime you want to pluck me from obscurity to be your historian-in-training-on-call, I'm totally there. I'm just glad we've restored intellectual curiousity to the White House!

Ecce homo?

2008-10-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

Over the past few days it has becoming increasingly clear that there are some John McCain supporters in this country who are so terrified and angry at the prospect of an Obama presidency they go into near hysterics at rallies. The conflation of Obama with "the terrorists" (note the plural the campaign has been using, which is telling as to Sarah Palin's intent, since the last time I checked, Bill Ayers, who they are ostensibly referring to, is just one man) has revealed the wellspring of hate in America. People like to say it is racial hatred that spurs the sorts of comments that have been heard at McCain-Palin rallies--things like "Kill him!" and "Off with his head!" to name a few--but I think that it is a broader and deeper fear than racial difference that is fueling this reaction. No doubt, America's specific history of racism and racial violence colors what we are seeing now, but in some ways I think we are seeing something far more primal, and far more disturbing. Especially since it has been agitated from above.

Republican rhetoric in this campaign has not been racist as often as it has been more broadly xenophobic. And I mean that in the broader sense of the word. Not so much a fear of "foreigners" as a fear of "strangers." It is not hard to trace this sort of thinking in Republican campaigning. It isn't even in the subtext in most cases. Look at how the Republicans defined themselves during the convention. As always, it is easy to define yourself negatively--we are not those East Coast dwellers, we are not big city, we are not big government, we are not timid, we are notafraid to use the phrase "Islamic Terrorism" (thanks Rudy!), we do not apologize for America. All of this was summed up positively by Sarah Palin. From her acceptance speech:

"A writer observed: "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity." ... I grew up with those people. They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and bad, and they're always proud of America."

Now for once you have to get at the subtext, although it isn't all that difficult here. The people in small towns are defined positively--they are honest, sincere, hard-working, patriotic, loyal and have a simply human dignity. The implicit contrast in the quote is that people who are not from small towns might not be these things. The construction of the statement invites the listener to define the ommitted with opposing ideas. The implied distinction is that if people from small towns are A, B, and C, people who are not might not be A, B, and C. They could be as good as those small town folk, but they are more suspect. Because they don't come from the place where these qualities are apparently inherent, they have to prove these qualities to everyone. Instead of trusting that all Americans regardless of extraction or hometown are honest, sincere, hard-working, patriotic, loyal and have a simple human dignity, Palin has elevated the provincial above everything else. This is subversive identity politics--I am all of these things, and because you identify with me, you are too. But anyone who opposes me, and opposes you by association, is probably not these things.

The contrast is set. Not all America, small town America. Not the guy who works a job writing computer code, the farmer. Not the peace activists, the ones who "fight our wars." This is an us-versus-them mentality at its most essential.

Now, if this sort of language had stopped with the convention, maybe we could have simply brushed it off as playing to the base. This is the sort of thing you do in a partisan environment, we could argue, Palin and Guiliani and Romney and all the rest were simply rabble rousing.

But what we have seen in the past couple of weeks has indicated that the convention was only the start of an increasingly sinister line from the Republican party, one that has egged on some of the worse tendencies of human nature. The ads that have come out against Obama could have described him as "unprepared" and left it at that. (In fact they have called him many things--"hypocrite" among them--that are low blows, but are not particularly charged.) But instead, the language that the McCain campaign has been using--phrases like "dishonorable," "dangerous," and "risky" in the same sentence as "terrorist"--plays specifically on the dichotomies set up in Palin's convention speech. The implicit charge that anyone not like us had to prove their honesty, their loyalty, their dignity has now been explicitly rendered in the negative. They are dishonest. They are unloyal. They command no respect.

(As an aside, McCain's "that one" comment at the debate was not racist so much as it was disrespectful--this was not a man, this was something else, something other, something to be brushed aside.)

This sort of language, situated as it is within the past two months of the McCain campaign's rhetoric (and the past twenty years of Republican rhetoric, and the past two hundred years of American xenophobia), has primed the pump, as it were, for hate to come bubbling up. The Republicans took Obama, stripped him of human characteristics, and him labeled as a threat. The things that are foreign about him are now appear amplified--his name, his skin color, his parentage. He has ceased to be a person and has instead become the embodiment of all that these people fear.

You only have to listen to the crowds at these rallies to see how Obama has become a blank screen on which people are projecting their fears. He's a socialist. He's a terrorist. He's a Muslim. He's an Arab. In each of these labels we can discern what it is that people feel is under threat--their prosperity (i.e. the capitalist system, under threat from socialsm). Their freedom and security (from terrorism). Their Christianity (from Islam). Their nationality, and again their security (from Arabs, apparently). And, of course, the racial epithets that we are told have been bandied about but which reporters cannot print. They point to white fear.

This is what the Far Right has done throughout the twentieth century and now into the twenty first. Look at Hitler, and the crude caricature he made of the Jews, playing on already deep-seated hatred and amplifying it until the Jews were made the bearers of all the wrongs ever done to the Germans. It is intriguing, actually, to note the similarity of language when people across time and culture speak about the "other"--the Jews weren't "real" Germans for Hitler and his followers anymore than Barack Obama will ever be a "real" Christian or a "real" American to any of these rabid rally attendees. Look at what European politicians like Jean Marie Le Pen or (recently deceased) Jorg Haider, or Nick Griffin say about immigrants threatening the white order in countries like France, Austria and Britain. They all define an "authentic" identity and then place their opponent as outside that identity. Not simply outside it, but as direct threat to it, by direct virtue of their difference. These sorts of fear tactics are all the more likely to work in a time of economic crisis. People are even more insecure than normal, and thus more likely to grab on to these dichotomies of identity when they are placed before them. Again, Sarah Palin is honest, loyal, patriotic. Barack Obama is dishonorable, dangerous, and risky. And now the stock market is crashing and banks are failing and you might lose your house and your kids might not go to college, and it is all that Muslim's fault!

And so we've reached a point where we have people from one party calling "off with his head" about the candidate of the other party. A man yelled out "kill him!" the other day at a McCain rally. Given how they have been stoked and prodded, it is it any wonder we see this sort of reaction at these rallies? The mob mentality is empowering. You are in the embrace of collective identity, you draw strength from the shared sense of self. You are all the more likely to want to strike out at that which threatens you from this place of strength. Pyschologically, it is intoxicating. Now, these people absolutely should know better. The individuals shouting these things cannot be excused. But the mob mentality does not form on its own. Those who incited them to these depths of emotion, who encouraged these beliefs, however indirectly, are also responsible.

Sarah Palin's quote about people in small towns was from a man named Westbrook Pegler, by all accounts a misanthropic bitter man who spewed vitriole at pretty much everyone and everything (except, I suppose, against people in small towns). He lamented Guiseppe Zangara not succeeding in his assassination attempt on FDR. He was an anti-Semite. He advocated at the height of the civil rights movement that intelligent Americans should be bigots. He noted with pride that one day Bobby Kennedy would probably be gunned down by a white supremacist. He got kicked out of the John Birch Society for being too extreme, which, really should strike fear in your heart, because when the JBS kicks you out you must really be on the ragged edge of sanity. Is it any surprise then, with such a man for a source, that we have seen the McCain campaign stumble tragically down this path of a fear mongering and hate speech baiting?

The words we speak matter. Who we reference matters. What we say about our opponents matters. John McCain described Barack Obama not in the way you would describe a political opponent, but in the way you would describe an enemy of the state. Coupled with the language of his Vice Presidential nominee, the campaign has inspired the worst in people's nature. It has capitalized on white America's long-standing fears about racial difference, religious difference and ethnic difference in an attempt to get people to support McCain. But they got much more than they bargained for. Having used the language of a bitter, racist, vengeful man (Pegler) in a strategy of divide and conquer, they are now reaping a whirlwind of anger, bitterness, fear and exhortations to violence.

This isn't just an example of how racism is alive and well in America. These rallies are evidence of how easily those in power can play on our fear and on our pettiness and on our insecurity. John McCain let his campaign employ the worst type of political tactics, the kind the world saw in Weimar in 1932. He pushed and prodded the deepest parts of human nature and the worst legacies of American history in an attempt to win votes. All he has won are angry mobs. If their anger isn't exorcised by their vicious words, if someone enacts his rage, whether against Obama in specific or a black person in general or even just a Democrat, black or white, that act will be partially on John McCain's hands. None of the great enablers of history or literature, not Pilate, not Lady MacBeth, have ever been able to wash the blood from their hands. It is my sincere hope that John McCain brings his party and his followers back from this brink before something happens that would require absolution.

We are facing down some of the ugliest parts of our nation and our nature. We have a chance to transcend. John McCain has a chance to call out these worser demons of our past and person and exhort his followers to be better than this. He once said that he would rather lose an election than lose a war. I wonder if he would also rather lose an election than lose his own soul?

"We cannot allow what happened in America to happen here."

2008-09-30T08:51:00.000-07:00

David Cameron is the head of the Conservative Party in Britain. He is, in some ways, the Barack Obama of the Tories--he came out of nowhere a few years ago, young and energetic, throwing fire at Tony Blair (and now Gordon Brown) and his retrenched Labour Party, promising to lead a new Conservative Party that would correct the meandering course of the past few years of government rule. Of course, the situation in Britain is the reverse of our governing situation at the moment--it is the party of the left, Labour, that has been in power for years (11, at this point), and it is the conservative Tories that are mounting the slow but steady resurgence, crying for change and making the case that new blood is needed to get Britain back on course. Much the way Sarkozy did in France although at a slower pace, David Cameron has won support from many people by arguing that his party is the party of change, of reform, despite the fact that is a bit odd for Europe to be looking rightward in the hope of change.

All this is background, however, for the link I put below. It is David Cameron's speech from the Conservative Party conference held this week in Birmingham. The main thrust is that this crisis is too big for people to be playing politics. He spoke simply and without lobbing any partisan cherry bombs at Labour. His overriding point? Today is a day for compromise. For constructing something that will get us through the crisis. The questions of why and who and how are critical, but placing blame needs to come once things have stabilized a bit more. He specifically said that his party would waive some of their reservations on a package that Labour has put together in order that it will pass more quickly through Parliament, because today is not the day to try score political points, but rather to band together and get a plan that works.

David Cameron's speech can be seen here, courtesy of the BBC

I post this for two reasons. One, this is the speech George Bush should have given this morning in his attempt to get recalcitrant Republicans more concerned with winning an election than saving the country's economic prospects to vote for the bailout. Bush's speech was, like much of the president's addresses, underwhelming. I don't know if it is his salesmanship skills or his speechwriters, or some combination of both, but he has simply not been convincing on the bailout issue. Maybe it is because quasi-socialistic programs sound so disingenuous coming from the mouth of a man who ostensibly believes in the "starve the beast" philosophy of governing. I am not sure the reason, but he needs to overcome the problem, and fast. If he can't get his own party to vote for this, the economic prospects will be bleak.

The second reason I posted this is that this is exemplerary of the sort of politics I wish we had in America. Granted, the British aren't in the middle of an election. MPs aren't staring down unemployment. But nevertheless, the fact that the leader of the minority party, a man who is certainly not known for his bipartisanship (David Cameron can throw some vicious political fire with the best of them--watch Question Time at some point, you'll see), a man who governs within a system where the minority party's only recourse when they disagree is to throw down an alternate plan and discuss how awful the government's program will be--that this man can come out and say look, we are putting politics aside, this is too important to not work together on, well, that is what I wish we could see in Congress.

I am not saying it would be appropriate for McCain or Obama to necessarily do this. I think the aloofness that each has shown towards the bailout deal is the best that each can do at the moment, given the fact that they can't really set aside partisanship in the race for presidency and given that neither was involved in the backroom dealings that went into creating the failed bailout plan. Neither am I saying that it was wrong for Democrats and Republicans to propose changes to Bush's bill. That is democracy in action, and that sort of negotiation is entirely appropriate.

What I am saying that I wish that Congress could recognize the need to put politics aside for the greater good. I wish that these people would recognize we live in a republic, not a direct democracy. We vote for representatives who then are meant to exercise their judgment about what would be in the best interests of the people. That implies that sometimes, the representative will know better than the people what needs to be done. We seem to have forgotten this at some point. We seem to have allowed the partisanship of election season to pervade every season in Congress. This is the consequence of the perpetual election. We have lost people who are willing to band together. We've lost any sense of common purpose. Not even bank failures and stock market dives can wake them up.

At least David Cameron seems to want to learn from our mistakes. And it is one of my biggest hopes that Barack Obama, if he wins, will do the same. But seeing that even in the face of crisis people are unwilling to work together, that will be a monumental challenge.

One of the best parts:
"When it comes to the financial crisis, the economic downturn, what people need is for political leaders to tell the truth, to speak plainly, and to talk about the mistakes that were made and the choices that lie ahead. So we will be critical of the decisions over the last ten years that have brought us to this point, and we will talk about the lessons that need to be learned. That is our task and we will do it. So let us all be clear. We need to understand how this happened and how we are going to get out of this situation. ...But today is a time for us to send a clear message to our political opponents and to our country. Let us not allow the political wrangling that took place in America happen here in our own country. In Britain, we are all in this together. So in Britain, let us stick together, and together we will find a way through."

"At some point, you have to fold the wings of reason and bow to the mystery."

2008-09-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

My lack of an update for more than three weeks is easily explained. It is also a good reason to write something of substance, and I finally have a few minutes to do so, so I thought I would post. I really don't have the few minutes, ostensibly, since I am staring down a past-due deadline for a research paper proposal and have no idea what I am going to write on or whether or not I am going to be able to find sources for said paper, but sometimes you have to take a few moments for yourself.

My mother fell quite ill two weeks ago and I returned home on the 7th of September to take care of her. It is a bizarre story. She had a root canal operation at the end of August, and despite having taken a preventative course of penicillin, the tooth was apparently still infected. Worse than infected, abscessed, which is apparently an awful-sounding word for the awful state of extreme infection. She seemed to be healing up from the root canal well enough, although she did have to be switched to a stronger antibiotic before the swelling in her jaw went down. But other than that, everything seemed fine. Then a little more than a week after the operation, she started having pain in her knee. Over the course of an evening, it went from being sore to being swollen and so sensitive she could not put any weight on it. Over the course of one night--from going to bed to getting up the next morning--it went from being one knee to being both knees. Over the course of two full days it was in both her legs, and her right ankle. She went from being a perfectly healthy woman to one who could not walk in the course of 72 hours.

The emergency room was not the solution we hoped it would be. Their initial diagnosis--Reiter's syndrome, an autoimmune disease--was discounted by her GP in favor of running a huge list of tests to rule out other autoimmune diseases, such as Lyme's disease or Lupus. All the tests have come back negative. The pain, if anything, got slightly worse from its initial level, and the swelling and pain in the joints spread from her legs into her hands and shoulders. Essentially, the initial infection had spread throughout her body, and triggered this intense overreaction of her autoimmune system. The only definite thing the doctors can tell us is the name of for her symptoms--acute polyarthritis. They don't know what is causing it, and then don't know how to make it better. Or if they can. Although they are hopeful that they can get her on a better pain management program and that they will eventually find out what it is that is doing this to her body.

I can't describe to you how quickly you grow up--or rather realize how much of an adult you are--until you have to care for a parent. This is the natural way of things, of course. Parents care for their children, children grow up and return the care given them to their parents when they are in need of it. But normally this process happens over the course of decades. With me, with my mom, it happened over three days. She went from being a perfectly functional human being to someone who can barely walk, who can't raise her arms to brush her hair, who can barely grip a glass of water. It is the natural order to see your parents age. It is not the natural order to see it happen in such an immediate and devastating way. I had never seen my mother so vulnerable before, and it was terrifying. I realized, all of a sudden, that my mother, one day, was going to die. This is a statement of fact, of course. But you don't look at people and think, "you're going to die one day." To look at someone and see that end point is a gut wrenching realization.

Death and serous illness mark our lives with a fatalism that we can never fully shake once it has touched us. On the one hand, such an encounter leaves us with the starkest sense of that word--we are powerless to control what happens in our lives. People often say condescendingly that Arab culture is fatalistic because of its frequent use of the phrase "insha'allah" (God willing). Leaving things up to God, in the eyes of some, is an abdication of personal responsibility, and shows a lack of individual initiative and investment in the outcomes of actions. I would counter that the Arabs have simply recognized, by necessity, that life is unpredictable, and that while you can make promises and plans, in the end, we are unable to control everything. I made this observation to a friend while I was in Cairo and he agreed with me--you can look down on such "fatalism", but is it a bad thing to recognize that as human beings we can only control so much?

This encounter with fatalism has another effect as well. You realize, suddenly, the truth of the cliche "life is too short." I found myself asking myself this question as I took care of my mother: If you woke up tomorrow morning and couldn't walk, what would you regret not having done? I thought about Humpback Rock, this rock formation in the Blue Ridge Mountains just a little bit of a drive from where I live here in Virginia. My friends have climbed it several times over the past year, but for one reason or another I have not gone with them. I've wanted to do it, but things keep getting in the way. And I thought, as I was driving myself back home yesterday, I would regret not having climbed Humpback Rock and seeing the view out over the mountains. And it hit me, with an intensity that brought tears to my eyes, how very short is the time we are given, and how quickly the things we take for granted can fall away.

These are some of our most tired cliches--life is short, once a day is gone you can't get it back, etc. But when it happens in front of your eyes, when you see someone go from being perfectly normal to being bedridden and crippled, the original truth of the idea becomes painfully clear. If I died tomorrow, there are many things that I would leave unsaid to many people, but I realize that there is only one person to whom I really would regret not having said what I truly felt. Maybe I am finding the strength, finally, to remedy that.

So that's my cliche for you, internet. Say what you feel. Tell the people that you love that you love them. Climb the mountain that you want to climb. Because it can and, with a cruel unpredictability that approaches certainty, will all go away with frightening speed.

"We are at our human best when we give and forgive."

2008-08-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

I just recently watched the film Into the Wild. It came out last year, got a bit of awards attention, but I don't think many people have seen it. Sean Penn directed it, and it stars Emile Hirsch (among a ton of other people like Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughan and Hal Holbrooke), who I hadn't seen in anything before this (and who followed this movie with Speed Racer, probably not a great career choice on his part). Anyway, it is based on Jon Krakauer's book about this kid, Chris McCandless, who, after graduating college in the early 90s, bleeding heart and beat generation rage in hand, gives his entire savings to charity and wanders off across America, in search of adventure and a path out of "selfish" "materialistic" "society" and towards "truth." Said path eventually leads him to Alaska, where he lives for several months "in the wild" before he sadly dies after a freak encounter with poisonous berries (it sounds funny, but trust me it isn't). But what you learn over the course of the film is that really he is running from himself, from his own problems of identity, and from the pain of an abusive childhood. The movie would be insufferable if it took McCandless at his word, that he really was on some hippy-dippy quest for truth which can only be found when one sheds material possessions and communes with the natural world. However it persistently, without ever making you care less about McCandless as a protagonist, points out the character's hypocrisies. He is running because he is in pain, and can't deal with being part of a society that he thinks only involves people repeatedly hurting each other. Eventually McCandless meets an old man, Ron, played by Hal Holbrooke, with whom he lives for a while before he finally heads to Alaska. Ron sees through the kid's arrogance and hippy rhetoric to his ultimately selfish and wounded soul. In the best exchange of the movie, Chris attempts to explain his philosophy to Ron:

Chris: "...But you're wrong if you think the joy of life comes principally through human relationships. God's placed it all around us. It's in everything. In anything we can experience. People just have to change the way they look at those things."

Ron: "... But I'll tell you something. The bits and pieces I've put together, you know, what you've told me about your family. Your mother and dad. And I know you got your problems with the church, too, but there is some kind of bigger thing we can all appreciate. And it sounds like you don't mind calling it God. But when you forgive, you love. And when you love...God's light shines upon you."

So in a really depressing turn, of course, McCandless ignores Ron's advice, goes to Alaska and dies alone in a rusted out VW bus that he had found in the middle of the forest. In one of the film's last scenes, before he zips himself into his sleeping bag to die, he staggers up and writes in his journal the final lesson that he came to understand from his two years of wandering: "Happiness is only real when shared." And then he dies. ALONE. Not really a happy ending. At all. Certainly not one where God's light shines upon him, although Penn uses his artistic license to theorize that at the very end of his life McCandless in his final thoughts forgave his parents. Still, I really don't recommend seeing the movie alone, as you'll need a hug when it's over.

But the theme of the movie, that it is our selfishness, and our pain, that divorces us from others, that send us searching for other things to fill our life with, be it nature or material possessions or whathaveyou, is really an important one. And the point that Ron tries to make about forgiveness echoes this really wonderful book that I finished reading last week. The book, by Miroslav Volf, a Croatian theologian who teaches at Yale, is called Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (the title of this entry is a quote from it). And while it is many things--a sort of primer on Christianity, a reinterpretation of Paul and Martin Luther, a book about society's shortcomings--it is at its very heart an impassioned plea that we recognize that we are all connected to one another, and that we do ourselves, our society and God a disservice when we break that connection, by either being ungenerous or ungracious.

I could speak indepth about how beautifully I think Volf distills the essence of Christianity, but I think I'll dwell instead on the book's "takeaway," as a professor of mine would say. Ultimately, I think Volf is arguing that we have to overthrow the self. We have to learn to give freely to others, and the only way to do that is to recognize that everything that we have in our lives--material and immaterial, flesh and spirit--is a gift from God, a gift, moreover, that we can't ever repay and didn't do anything to "deserve" in the first place. We have to overcome the selfishness that wonders why we should give to people who might not seem to deserve it, the belief bred by an acquisitive society that in giving we lessen ourselves. We can give, argues Volf, because what we give is not ours, but God's. Generosity makes us perpetuating agents of God's love. We have to give rightly, with as much humility as possible, in an attempt to overcome that selfishness that wants to know what we get out of the "deal." But when done right, we mirror God. When we give, we love.

The same goes for forgiveness, although forgiveness, Volf rightly recognizes, is even harder for humans to do rightly than it is for us to give rightly. Volf is particularly smart in the section on forgiveness, because he deconstructs what forgiveness really entails--it places blame on the wrongdoer, condemns the action, and then announces that the wrongdoing will not be held against the doer. It is inherently a social action, argues Volf, and complete forgiveness entails these actions by the forgiver as well as recognition by the forgivee that they have done something wrong and repented of it. But, critically for Volf, while full and complete forgiveness involves more than one person, as forgivers we should forgive whether or not the person/s we are forgiving repents. In its total act, it is social, but Volf argues that granting forgiveness cannot be contingent on the other person/s repenting for wrongdoings. It is an incredibly difficult proposition--forgive despite the fact that the person/s who wronged you might not admit, now or ever, that they did anything wrong. Volf argues that the only way that we can do this is, again, because God, through Christ, forgave all of humanity unconditionally. God didn't require repentance before he forgave humanity, therefore we shouldn't either. Again, such a process requires letting go of our selfishness--even in the way that we hold on to our wounds. It isn't an easy process. It doesn't seem just or particularly fair, even. But the essential argument is that we have to learn to transcend our own pain, our own pride, in order to truly forgive, and thus to truly heal.

The book I read directly after Volf's book was C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, and in many ways Lewis is speaking to a similar theme. In his allegorical "dream" of one soul's journey from purgatory to the edge of heaven, Lewis discourses on the ways in which people refuse to accept grace. We hold on, tenaciously, viciously, to people or ideas or emotions because we think they are right, or they will lead us to truth, or they give us power or they make us feel good. But Lewis argues that ultimately, what we become attached to is ourselves (or our ideas or how we feel or however you chose to phrase it). Sometimes this is done when we hold on to "bad" emotions as it were. Arrogance in one's own righteousness, for example, loses sight of God and instead focuses on how great a person one is through their worship of Him. Even the pain of losing loved ones can pervert love into obsession, and we become content to feed on our own misery and wallow in self-pity. But sometimes this process of attachment can happen with "good" emotions. We lose what we were originally in love with and become obsessed with how it makes us feel, as it were. We focus on the means and forget about the end. There is a brilliant exchange in Lewis's book between the soul of an artist who is attempting to make the journey into heaven from "purgatory", and the soul of a spirit already in heaven who is acting as his guide. The ghost of the artist has just discovered that he won't be a painter in heaven in the same way that he was on earth, and he won't even reach the stage where he would be able to be this kind of "new" painter for a long time, because he hasn't learned how to truly "see" what is around him. Annoyed, he pesters his guide as to when he will be able to paint:

"The Spirit broke into laughter. "Don't you see you'll never paint at all if that's what you're thinking about?" he said.
"What do you mean?" asked the Ghost.
"Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country."
"But that's just how a real artist is interested in the country."
"No. You're forgetting," said the Spirit. "That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light."
"Oh, that's ages ago," said the Ghost. "One grows out of that. Of course, you haven't seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake."
"One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling, till down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him." (Chapter 9, 84-5)

In vastly different ways, Lewis and Volf--and even Sean Penn--are all saying the same thing. We become self-involved, and we lose sight of what it was we started out looking for in the first place--whether it is "nature" or "freedom" or "truth" or "light" or "love." The self gets in the way, it demands its own due. It forgets about what was given to it, or what was done for it, and focuses instead on what was taken from it, or what was done to it. Volf and Lewis approach it from a distinctly Christian point of view, and argue that the only way we can move past this and actually heal legitimate wrongs against us is by restoring our connection to God through Christ, who allows us to overcome ourselves. Penn's film takes a broader view, but ultimately the point is the same--we have to overcome ourselves, our selfishness. And only until we recognize the gifts we we've been given, the grace we've been granted, and remove the myopia that blinds us to everything except our own pleasure and own our pain will we be able to live up to our potential as human beings. That's how we heal. That's how we give. That's how we forgive. That's how we love.

I'll end with another quote from Lewis, because it's just such a good one:

"It is still 'either-or'. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell." (Preface, VIII-IX)

When we choose to let go, to forgive, to give, selflessly, only then can we love. Only then can we find heaven, to use Lewis's choice of word. When we hold on to that selfishness, that pride, that pain, when we deny what we've been given, well, that's where most of us find ourselves most of the time right? Out in the wild.

The holy rollers just keep rolling along...

2008-08-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched the "Forum on Faith" that Rick Warren held with Obama and McCain. I was pleasantly surprised by Rick Warren, actually. I knew nothing about him other than the fact he had written The Purpose Driven Life, which I have not read. I knew he was an evangelical minister, and that made me suspicious off the bat, as I tend to disagree with a lot of the Christian evangelical movement, at least as it tends to manifest itself politically. This is not to cast aspersions on evangelicals themselves, I just don't tend to agree with how they interpret Christianity. Anyway, I was thus surprised to find Warren, at least in the context of the forum, to be far less strident and far more thoughtful than I was expecting. He was courteous, non-confrontational, and asked straight-forward, important questions on issues that political candidates don't tend to be asked. I'm not even talking about the questions on their religious beliefs, I'm talking about the questions on what they felt was their and America's great moral failing, or what they believed ten years ago that they don't believe today, or what "rich" is in terms of numbers. I thought some of his questions were a bit loaded--the question on whether or not evil exists and whether we should confront it, compromise with it, ignore it or defeat it (or something like that) was I thought poorly phrased and leading. But I thought some other questions were extremely well-put, phrased in way that clearly showed where Warren's own political sensibilities lay, but were nevertheless probing. His question to Obama, "When does a baby gain human rights?" is something that pro-choice candidates should have to define, especially since it has ramifications for things like a comprehensive human rights driven foreign policy, which Obama I think would focus on more than McCain. Overall, I was more impressed with Warren than I thought I would be.

I was also very proud of Barack for how he did in the forum. To make some apropos analogies, Barack attending this sort of event was like Daniel going to the lions' den. For McCain it was like Christ's entry into Jerusalem. Well, that's overstating (the evangelicals have a lot of issues with McCain, of course). But nevertheless McCain was far more the "home team" than Obama. But Obama stuck to his guns. Tempted with what must have been a great desire to pander, he didn't oversimplify his positions or definitions. He talked about how these were complex issues, with gray areas. How, yes, faith-based organizations do a great job, better than the government in a lot of cases, with social work. But nevertheless, we can't get ourselves into a position where the government is directly paying for organizations that hire on the basis of religion. Because the government can't hire people based on their religion, therefore government money can't pay people who were hired under practices that favor specific religious beliefs over others. I also liked how on the abortion issue he spoke about how just because we've had a pro-life president for the past eight years, abortions have not gone down. That what might be needed is a policy that looks at how we decrease abortions, at how we make it easier for women to pursue other options like adoption, how we make it easier for people to get educated about family planning. I think we could add to that list how we should work to increase our services to at-risk women, to decrease things like domestic violence rates, so that women aren't aborting pregnancies because they are in at-risk home situations where having a baby might keep them tied to an abusive partner. This is true social work! This is what it means to care about life--it means you have to care about everyone's life, including the living situation of these women who are getting pregnant and having abortions! That is what so often angers me about evangelicals, is that there is this strident "pro-life" focus but so often they seem to think that it is the government's job to protect the life of the fetus until it is born, and then they seem to believe that the government should never get involved in any capacity in helping that person's life ever again. This went off on a tangent, but anyway, my point was that Obama did well, and his policies do actually speak to ideas that evangelicals claim to adhere to. I just wonder if anyone was paying attention to realize that.

This brings me to John McCain, who obviously built his responses so that they would in no way challenge the 5 second attention span of the average American. I can't tell you how many times his answers were "Yes" or "No." Good job, John. Care to enlighten us with details? Care to add nuance to your position on issues of phenomenal ethical complexity? Or would that cut into your pandering? These are hard issues! You can't solve them with ideas short enough to fit on a bumpersticker! We are choosing a leader, people. Can we man-up, as it were, as a nation? Can we sit up straight, pull our chairs forward, and pay attention long enough to get more than the talking points? Look what happens when we don't. Look where the country ends up when we pick the guy we want to have a beer with rather than the guy who can actually lead. Look what happens when we pick "guts" over "brains" (although I hate that we now think that those two things have to be in opposition, because you can easily be both bold and brainy).

It also annoyed me, on a religious level, that McCain's ideas of retributive justice get such loud support from a Christian audience. When asked the question about whether or not evil exists and what we should do about it, McCain got all Rambo'd up and made a comment about pursuing Osama bin Ladin "to the gates of hell" if he had to to make him pay for what he did to America. I'm sorry, that isn't a Christian position. It just isn't. I think it is a perfectly logical position for the United States government to hold--bin Ladin is an enemy of the United States pure and simple, and we of course would expect a state to wage war against its enemies. But to guise such a position--especially one phrased as it was in such a way that was so clearly driven by a desire for revenge--in the clothes of Christianity angers me. Vengeance is not what we are called to do as Christians. I'll touch on this more in a separate post, because it is related to a book I am reading on giving and forgiving that I'm not quite finished with yet, but suffice it to say that what we are called to do as Christians is to forgive. I'm not claiming that the United States should just make some sort of blanket statement saying it forgives bin Ladin and leave it at that, so don't misunderstand me. The United States seeking punishment for its enemies is completely expected within the international arena, and indeed, some would argue is necessary to ensure the semblance of the idea of international justice or international rule of law. McCain or Obama as president would both pursue punishing bin Ladin. But to confuse this action, which they would take as a political leader, with some sort of religious mandate, or to speak of such an action in a forum whose focus was faith, is to take an action which is distinctly un-Christian and disguise it as one that is. Obama's comment about how we can't ever eradicate evil on our own, because that is a job that only God can accomplish, was dead center. We cannot eradicate evil. We cannot seek out all the bad guys, we can't hunt them all down, we can't end suffering and war. There will always be evil. The most we can do is attempt to battle it with good, and to use every single last tool of good that we have before we fight it with its own tools--death and destruction. When challenged by it, we should answer it with as much grace and compassion as we know how (I think that states can do this as well as individuals, although there are of course limits placed on the extent states should take things). That's what we are called to do as Christians. What we shouldn't do is answer evil with retribution, with a desire to cause as much pain to it as it has to us. While we can accept the mechanisms of punishment in the world system, as Christians we should not applaud the desire for retribution. Cowboy justice isn't Christian. That it so often gets mistaken for it is nothing short of a tragedy.

"But then plays her life back in slow motion/ to keep in touch with that raw emotion"

2008-08-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

"It's a New Year's toast, grab your list to conspire
The last snake hissed as he was thrown in the fire
You've come far, and though you're far from the end
You don't mind where you are,
cause you know where you've been."
-Carbon Leaf, Let Your Troubles Roll By

I heard this song on the radio today on the way back from mass. Some of the lyrics are a bit wonky, but I liked the song. I had never heard of Carbon Leaf, Wikipedia tells me they are a band from Richmond VA that have had some moderate success on the nation-wide level. All I know about them is I liked this song, and that the name of their last album is pretty awesome--Love, Loss, Hope, Repeat. I just liked the sentiment of some of the lines, that sadness, specifically the sadness that comes through reflection of our past mistakes, is part of life, and that ultimately that fact should make us hopeful. Paul says that--suffering builds perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope.

I myself am on the scales somewhere between Hope and Repeat, hoping to find a balance sooner rather than later. My ex moved out for good yesterday, which gave a real sense of finality to this chapter in my life, even though in many ways this chapter of my life emotionally has been over for a long time. My ex had been in and out of the apartment for the past two weeks, packing up his things while he stayed with friends, and now he is formally moved back to his home town in another state. I am formally alone. Not lonely, though, alhamdulillah (gotta keep the Arabic part of my brain working!).

I think this is because I had been alone for a long time, in a deeper sense of the word if not physically so. I don't feel a sudden sense of loss, because I think that I lost what was real and true about the relationship a long time ago. So while I am adjusting to living alone in the physical sense, getting used to it just being me in the apartment, to not having the buzz of another person with me all the time, trying not to go stircrazy in the silence, I had already been alone emotionally. I had already mourned that loss. It took me traveling to another continent and several time zones away before I really understood what that means and was able to come to terms with where I really was, but that is the conclusion I have reached. And although making the break itself was painful, from the moment that I did so, I felt a great sense of calm. This was what I was supposed to do. I had already done it in my heart, I just had to come to terms with saying the words. And now I have to come to terms with the fact that my apartment is very large with just me in it, and very quiet.

But hope remains, and I am trying to remind myself of that fact. Also, in having all of this time to think, I am trying to internalize what I think is the greatest lesson I learned from coming out of this relationship--life is too short to not say what you feel. I was unhappy for such a long time. But I kept it in. I swallowed my pain because I felt the need to keep up appearances. But all it did was cause more hurt, to myself and to others. Every day that we are given is a chance to make things better, to be a blessing to others, to pass on love to others. If I'm not doing that, what am I doing? Why am I wasting time? Because I'm afraid that I'll be hurt? Yes. But life is full of pain, and whether it hurts now or it hurts months from now, the moment of reconciliation has to come. Life is too short to not say what you feel. I just need to build up the courage.

Once more, with feeling

2008-08-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

After multiple attempts at shifting from keeping a LiveJournal to keeping a blog, I think I am going to try again. It is a good point in my life to make a shift, I think, for multiple reasons. I'll attempt to explain.

I am newly single. I just came out of a nearly five year relationship, a change which was of my own volition. This means several things. One it means for a little while at least I am in a more contemplative state than I normally am. Major life changes tend to prompt periods of major life reflection (or at least, they should) and therefore it might be a good time to write some of these thoughts down, in a way that isn't my LJ. The nice thing about a blog is that you don't have to worry about clogging people's friends pages with your ramblings. The bad thing about a blog is you can't make an entry friends only. We'll see how it goes. But a space to be reflective, I think, will be a good thing to have.

I am possibly converting to a new religion. After a long and complex path back to God, I am at the point where I am considering converting to Catholicism from my previous status as "Christian-undefined." The makings and continuing evolution of this decision deserve a post all their own, so I won't go in-depth at the moment. But where the blog comes in is that I will be learning and thinking about a multitude of new things over the coming months, about faith and religion, and I think that again, this space could be a good place for me to work out my ideas, in mediated journal-self form.

I spent my summer living in Cairo, an experience I am still working out. I think it should be required travel for Westerners to go to a developing country. (I also think they should all have to go to Africa and the Middle East, but let's start with a broader category.) Living in Egypt--brief two months that it was and ensconced though I was in the various Western structures of the American University in Cairo and the ex-pat haven of Zamalek where I lived--challenged and changed much of how I view the world. I have yet to fully work out everything that I saw and experienced. To live in a place that is so rife with contradictions, where the best and worst of humanity elbow each other for supremacy in a city that is gasping physically and spiritually to keep up in its struggle to progress economically, socially and politically--well, it leads you to write sentences as overwrought as this one, just in an attempt to encapsulate it. I loved my experience in Cairo, and I have a lot to say about it but I haven't yet found the right words. I think that revisiting my experiences will be fruitful and hopefully enlightening.

I'm starting my second year of grad school, which means for the first time I'll be teaching. This is going to be my profession for the rest of my life, and I think it will be good for me if I chart my progress in this sort of forum. I'm excited to move deeper into my field and my chosen career path, but I'm also, of course, terrified that I'm going to be awful at it. Insha'allah, I won't stumble too many times along the way.

That's sort of my logic behind moving to this new format. Change is good (and we can believe in it!) and I think that if I can keep this up, it will prove a good way of collecting and testing my own thoughts and experiences. We'll see.

"her infinite variety"

2008-01-23T11:47:00.000-08:00

Perhaps a change is in order.