I wasn't THAT offended...

A couple weekends ago Meg and I were laughing in her living room over the absurdities of coworkers.

"...and she got STUCK in the bathroom!" I said.

Doubled over on the leather furniture, we gasped for air and she began telling me the latest horror story about her new supervisor, a man who appears to think that in the workplace a woman's job, regardless of her title, is to make his copies and clean his coffeepot.

"I hate that," I said. "You know what, he offends me."

"Oo, that's a new one," she said. (I liberally hate things, but am rarely declaratorily offended by them.) "Watch, he'll have a heart attack or something."

So my curse was born. Our conversation moved from coworkers to charitable donations contributed to local nonprofits by local businesses, and we swapped stories of the worst ones. We found we shared a resentment toward a certain pizza parlor who declined simple donations to nonprofit events. (It's perfectly within their right to do so, of course, but these particular folks were unnecessarily rude about it.)

"Yeah, they were horrible when I worked at the Center," I said. "You know what, that place offends me too."

So a couple of weeks passed, and I forgot about being offended, and wasn't offended by anything further, except a house down the road from Meg and Phillip which looks like the Wicked Witch of the East dropped the top half of a house on the ground and maliciously painted it purple.

Then yesterday as Meg and I rode with Josie into Mishawaka to visit the honorable Mssrs. Barnes and Noble, we pulled up at a stoplight and she gasped at the wreckage of a restaurant across the road.

"The pizza parlor burned down?" she said.

"Yeah, it was on the news a week ago or something," I said. "Total loss."

She turned to me. "Sarah..."

"Wait," I said. "Was that the same place I said offended me the other weekend?"

"Yes..." she said faintly.

We both stared at the blackened beams.

"Um," I said. "And you know, it was a weirdly specific fire." I pointed to the restaurant next to it, its walls not six feet from those of the former building. "The only thing that burned was the pizza parlor; that one just had some smoke smells inside. They commented on it on the news."

The light changed and we turned left and drove slowly past it.

"I wasn't that offended," I said.

"You scare me," she said.

We pulled silently into the Barnes and Noble parking lot, me hoping fervently that her boss wouldn't die and the purple house would remain standing.

As Meg shut off the engine and went to open her door, she turned to me and said, "Did I ever mention that I really, really like you?"

"Ha," I said.

I've been Facebook-friended by a Jedi.

One who was born in 1987 and can't spell "cloak."

He looks like a very tall Jawa.

I'm amused.

bah

There's no way you can subpoena someone without making them hate you.

At first this constituted its primary appeal: Yes, jerkwad, you're getting a subpoena. You want to be all mean? See you in Court. Mwahahahaha.

Now it's just...ugh. Particularly when I have to subpoena doctors and psychologists who really get shirty with me for interrupting their schedules. I understand their perspective perfectly. I just don't have an option, and neither do they.

The poor office manager with whom I spoke today thought that I was asking if Dr. X could attend this upcoming trial.

"He's seeing four patients that morning," she said.

"Oh," I said, and then told her, as nicely as possible, "Well, you see, the question wasn't so much whether he'd be willing to attend; it was whether he'd accept service of the subpoena by fax."

Cue shirtiness.

I ducked the blows by telling her I'd check with Boss-Man and find out what the next step was, and then let her know. Fortunately by the time he told me, "Serve it anyway," the office manager was gone for the day and I left a message with what I strongly suspect was an answering service (I didn't know they had those anymore). Hopefully she'll see the call in the light of my intent -- professional courtesy -- and not rubbing her nose in her powerlessness against the Court system.

But I doubt it.

as the light wind lives or dies

You know how, sometimes, you get this feeling? It creeps into your bones like running sap through the maple trees in February, this feeling that slowly wakes you up from your long frosty sleep, this feeling of deep anticipation, the steady beat of a coming, unspecified change.

Most people, I think, count their years by the calendar, starting January First. This is normal. And although I too feel the change that comes with each New Year's Day (and usually hate it -- New Year's for me has historically been a source of burdensome guilt as I feel obligated to review all the things I didn't get done the year before, and how little progress I seem to have made, and all my unfixed bad habits -- I mean, gosh, don't we get enough pressure from St. Paul without adding secular self-improvement too?), my years really start in September, on my birthday. I feel in September a thrill a little different from, a little more intoxicating than, the guilt-laden one which I associate with Janus: a newness, a freshness, a chance to start over, or go forward, or both. The time to reflect, recollect, gather forces for what's to come, and look around in bright anticipation.

I don't know what a birthday is like for someone not born in the fall; I imagine there are wonderful seasonal implications to every birthday. For my part, I love an autumnal celebration. I was born at the close of summer and the beginning of fall -- the doorway season, the dying time, the sharp tang of resurgent life before the slow settling down of the world toward winter. Maybe that's why it's my favorite season -- fall brings back memories of homemade cake on the picnic table under the turning leaves in an air spiced with ripened grapes.

There's also the rather beautiful paradox of birth in the time of death, extending not only to the whole realm of nature but also to me: While the rest of the world began to sink toward sleep, I woke up. Perhaps because of that, and because of the anticipation of exciting things to learn every September at the start of school (freshly sharpened pencils! an array of virgin pens! unbroken binders! textbooks to cover in brown paper!), fall carries for me a strong sense of newness. When the leaves lose their green, they aren't dying; they're becoming what they are. Only in the absence of chlorophyll can they reveal the colors worked into their DNA from the moment of their sprouting. Apples come to their fruition. The air cools. The days fade more quickly. And, near my birthday, I can usually be found walking as close to the woods as I can get, in a beat-up red jacket with my pockets full of Cortlands.

I don't mind being indoors in summer, when the outdoors tend to bake and broil; but in the autumn I can't stand to be inside. I want to see, hear, smell, touch, taste everything I can. I want Walt Whitman's oneness with the universe on crisp or misty fall days. I want to let the rest of the world, by which I mean my consciousness, fall away, and exist, for a short time, only in the here and now, with no past and an exciting, but nebulous and therefore happily unthinkable, future. In fall, more than any other time, I love the present.

Autumn is change. As I leave behind the dog days of August and look forward to the ruddied, frosted Indian summer days of September, I feel that running of the sap in my bones. One of these days I would love to "go on walkabout," some "cold and damp white morning"-- shoulder a backpack, zip up a jacket, and start walking, heading nowhere in particular, leading a hobo-esque existence for awhile, just to lose myself in the season.

Adult duties hold me in place, of course, but there's always the dream, something fanciful to fix on as I make copies or write letters at work in a windowless office. The change is coming, and in my mind I'm out and jumping in piles of whispering fire, I'm eating apples and swinging my feet over the emptiness below the branch of a tree, I'm following a creek to nowhere and watching for herons, I'm crunching my way through a forest shimmering with falling leaves, the bared branches a ragged tapestry patched by the incredible blue of cirrus-brushed sky. I might dutifully answer the phones, smile and chat with clients, but I'm not really here. I'm out and exploring a world vividly alive and filling my pockets with pebbles and leaves. I'm roaming stubbled fields and examining every bird and salamander, every ripple of water, every turn of the light, secure in the knowledge that what's coming is only better than what's now. In autumn, I am expansive and immortal, recreated and free.

misty morning coming down

I woke up warm and snuggly, having yanked the comforter up to my chin in my sleep as the night air cooled, to a purring cat hitting me in the head asking for breakfast. (He really does hit, by the way. Curls his paw into a little fist and punches. For such a small critter, he packs a wallop.)

It was early when I first opened my eyes, and I briefly entertained the notion of rising then and there, to have a little extra time; but laziness won and I dozed for another hour until the alarm blared, by which time Simon had convinced himself of his imminent death by starvation and rivaled the alarm for sounding...well, alarming.

Mist covered the world when I left my porch and walked to the car, having spent most of my morning journaling and praying, and ten minutes actually getting ready (I used to require two hours to prepare in the morning. I used to drive my father nuts. Now? Ten to twenty minutes, depending on the routine). I breathed in the strange tang of cloud and wet grass, I drenched my sandaled feet in dew, I looked around at the vague and hazy world, and everything was new.

the promise

The past couple of weeks were pretty bad with depression. I'd been doing so well for so long; I suppose my time had come for another round.

It was different this time, though. As awful as it was, as overwhelming and inescapable, I felt underneath it -- or perhaps encapsulating it -- the current of the presence of God.

A lot of things have turned themselves over in my mind lately as I've processed this. I remember a decision I made, my senior year in college, reading the works and the biographies of Faulkner. He, like a number of brilliant artists, suffered depression and never let it go, because (if I recall correctly) he saw in his psychological misery (which he liberally inflicted on his family) the source of his genius.

I read this at the large central table in the English Department suite, surrounded by books and light and quiet, some bland weekday afternoon. I thought about my own life, and how through my teenage years I had said something similar -- that my best work came out of my horror. I thought about the real plunge into desolation when I nearly lost my sister, and the difficulties that followed with my family, though which I was still struggling at the time. I thought about the presence of real despair, which I had never encountered as acutely as I did in college, and I made a decision: If I had to choose between being the greatest writer the world has ever seen, with the constant void as the price, or living a simple, anonymous life in quiet unmarked happiness surrounded by people I love, I would choose the latter. I would give up all ambition and all hopes of eternal recognition, I would give up my art, in order to live free of the fear, the anxiety, the lethargy, and the nothingness. I would settle for being nothing of significance, if I could be happy.


That decision changed my life. From that moment, I sought not just survival, but health and wholeness. I did give up writing for a little time, and, when I took up the keyboard and monitor again, I discovered that my best work might glean from the horror, but came from my stability. Now, when I go through the periodic round of suffocating melancholia, my writing temporarily dies, and when I come through the tunnel, or break the surface of the water and crawl back to shore, or both, I feel tremendous relief at the ability to return to my art. I think in some ways the promise of being able to write again is like the needle of the compass, pointing north, drawing me forward, keeping me fixed on home.

I realized, too, through conversations I've had, that I can persevere through a lot. I've always had a remarkable amount of strength, and for years I took pride in it, and viewed my psychological affliction with shame, because it rendered me impotent, who had always been strong. I've never had any resources but my own, and coming to the end of those resources has terrified me in the past; I didn't know to whom to turn. My theology has always insisted, God, but in practice I've had a lot of difficulty asking for divine help. I didn't know how. And I hated my weakness.

I don't mistake that attitude for a commitment to health any longer; a lot of that was pride. I've found, in the people I've known, that those with great virtues have correspondingly great flaws, and this particular flaw is mine. I still strive to be healthy, to take care of myself, to push on through those dark days and white nights, when waking is a nightmare and sleeping worse, and I've come to have faith that those bad times will pass, because they always have. But this time around, there was a difference. I finally laid down all pretenses of self-sufficiency and told God, simply, "I can't do this."

And found myself flooded with hope. The bad moments were no less bad, but they were more bearable. And I learned what countless others have before me: that in my admission lay the key to my restoration. And it wasn't till I came to the end of my strength that I was forced to lean on God's.

I'm sure all of this is old hat to people who learned it long before I did. It's taken me awhile to get there; at my core I'm not a very trusting soul, and I do have reasons, but for a long time I haven't really trusted God either. Didn't He let these things happen to me? To my loved ones? As Lewis once said, I believe in A Grief Observed (and forgive the bad paraphrase), "We don't doubt that God is good. We only wonder how much His goodness is going to hurt."

But I have a different idea now. I don't know if I will ever be fully free of depression; I am learning, though, how to live through it, and past it. And I have come, this time around, to a deep gratitude for it -- because without this significant weakness, without this thing that robs me of all the strength I take such pride in, I would probably be an enormous, self-important, self-righteous jerk. Instead, I'm learning humility, and the relief that comes from letting go -- that comes from leaping off Kierkegaard's cliff and finding that there is, after all, a ledge to catch me, which, though I believed it, still surprised me.

And even my strength, before I exhaust it, is something for which I can take very little credit. I have made excellent choices throughout my life and in regard to my affliction, but at its deepest root my strength was given to me. As a man whose opinion I hold in high regard has told me, "My capabilities really had very little to do with me and were, in fact, blessings and gifts from God...I was not a 'self-made man,' as I liked to believe, but 'God-made,' and instead of pride I should be overwhelmed with gratitude toward Him for choosing to bless me so greatly." So my strength is a gift, something I didn't earn; and many times it takes my weakness to remind me of that fact, and to cause me to fall into grace, and find my strength and comfort there. And for that I must be grateful; a life lived only inside, and by, and with, and for myself is more constrictive than I had realized.

I don't love my depression. The times when I go through bad stretches are miserable, full of nameless horror, a loss of something I can't put a finger to, and I would dearly love to be rid of them forever. I've asked to be rid of them. To be rid of it. But God has said to me, these last two weeks, when I've cried about it, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," and I have echoed Paul in realizing that instead of wallowing in grief and shame, I should "boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).

I'm still leaning on that strength. Things are improving, I am coming back to health, which I have still and again chosen; but the recovery period from the kinds of weeks I've undergone takes about as much time as the bad stretches themselves, and requires a great deal of rest.

Having been dragged under the water by the millstone of despair, though, and been towed to the surface, I can now survey my life and all the things about it that I want to change. These difficult times usually pave the way to some great freedom, some new and unimagined vista (another cause for gratitude), as if I needed a period of painful refinement to prepare me for what's to come. And I long for the change. I'm excited for newness, for restoration, for regenesis.

This affliction has taken so much from me. These years of blindness, of wandering through the wasteland, seem sometimes to have robbed me of the joy I was supposed to find in my youth. But the joy, perhaps, that I discover in my adulthood is all the greater for knowing its cost. And there is a promise. There are many promises, in fact, but the promise I hold to my heart, as I emerge with wet and shivering wings from the eyeless coccoon, comes from Joel:

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my geat army which I sent among you.

And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD your God, that hath dealt wonderously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed.

And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the LORD your God, and none else: and my people shall never be ashamed. (2:25-27)(KJV)

"And I will restore to you the years the locust hath eaten." All of my "affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall" (Lamentations 3:19) will forge in me something new, something deeper and purer, and God will redeem the time, and I will have in plenty what I have long lacked, and will receive back from God's hand what I have considered lost.

The whole experience from life to living death to life again has awakened me to something greater which holds me in suspension, which permeates my being and my consciousness and lifts up mine eyes to the hills I hadn't seen were there, to chariots and flame, to purposes that I in my collapsive isolation couldn't recognize: That something greater is Love. And in the aftermath, the prelude to a further metamorphosis, a further becoming, I am able to realize that, as Eliot has said in East Coker, my favorite of the Four Quartets,

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

And so I am beginning.

glazed

Mondays are always acclimationally difficult.

We have a new part-time receptionist at the office, and it seems that she has a brain which she knows how to employ, and I think she's going to be great. So for a few months anyway (she has a baby due in December) I might get a little bit of a break, and go home at the end of the day feeling somewhat better than zombielike.

I need some time off, though. The budget is grim, particularly with moving expenses coming up in a few weeks (I can't wait to get out of The State of Denmark. Can't. Wait), so I'm going to see what kinds of pennies I can pinch and maybe head out Grove City way for Homecoming toward the end of October. I don't know how many people will be there whom I know, but something about fall starts a fire in my blood for road trips and red maples and leaves falling on the stony ground of the Pennsylvania hills. I want to roam the small patch of woods below the Chapel again, see what's left of Wolf Creek, breathe in the pines (there aren't that many around my little corner of Southwest Michigan), listen to the crows, bask in shallow autumn sunshine.

And talk to old friends and catch up with professors, of course.

It's not a set-in-stone plan; again, it all depends on my finances. But I'd like to. I need to get me out of Dodge for a couple of days, and looking forward to a long weekend in October is tantalizingly refreshing. I get restless in the fall -- I want to migrate somewhere. I want new vistas, different horizons. I need to move.

Speaking of moving, I have been told that I move more than anyone -- this coming October will be four times in as many years, and I'm planning on moving again next year. It's kind of biting my credit in the back, so I think I'll get a P.O. Box and at least have that as a facade of permanence for now.

It's weird -- I never planned on leaving after I moved into the Ivory Tower; in fact, I believe I blogged something to the effect of not moving unless/until I married or left the Midwest. Ha. I didn't want to leave it, but I had to; and I detest The State of Denmark so much that I can't wait to move. I am looking forward to it -- fresh, unmarked wall space, like a lawn of pristine snow! To decorate however I wish! A whole new adventure in feng shui! New arrangements of old crates, more space, a change!

I'm positively antsy for change. All things new. And a new apartment appears to be falling into place...if I can scrape together the deposit money. Time to live off what's in my freezer.

pinch of this, touch of that

This weekend I reversed an old trend and got up by eight or nine o'clock each morning.

It made the days seem longer -- delightfully so; most of my weekends whiz by without giving me any sense of restoration -- and I had plenty of time to clean up the house and potter around in the kitchen, and still have lots of time to sit around doing wonderful nothing -- which has the most curative force for the stress-strung soul I've ever experienced.

At a yard sale on Friday night (I was on my way to pick up dinner for me and Meg, saw an old chest with its lid up in a yard, and basically slammed on the brakes -- there's no hope for me) I purchased a box of ceramic tiles for two dollars, picked through them to find the interesting ones, and this morning (thanks to Meg's tip) stuck soft round Velcro tabs on the bottoms to turn them into coasters. Because I have no sense of proportion, I now find myself with twenty coasters -- but they're all super cool and I couldn't narrow down the collection any further, so...yup, twenty coasters, all mismatched, fun and clacky: my favorite kind of hodgepodge decor.

Landlord Larry finally came and nailed rigged screens over my windows, which, shockingly, don't look as horrible as I thought they would. He also took on the yellow jacket nest colonizing the exterior wall of the front porch (I made myself scarce -- he stood in a cloud of glowing yellow bees like some kind of woodland faerie), and, although a few got into the house, I made short work of them with a few sprays of Comet. (Yes, it works on bees and hornets too -- huzzah!)

So here I am, having had forty-eight hours of relaxation, nipping into the office to set down a few words and pin them to the ether. Yesterday broiled the world, but last night the rain tore down the curtain of heat and today has been mild and cool. I anticipate that tonight will be excellent for sound sleeping -- perhaps I can even leave the fan off in my bedroom, which blows across the foot of the bed, so that I can wake up to a furry little bedfellow piled on my feet. He hates that fan, and my feet have missed him...and my dreams go softly with a nearby Simon.

Time to go home, vacuum dead bees off the carpet, and wipe cloudy dried Comet off the windowpanes. Then it's an exciting solitaire tournament, followed by a breathless bout of dish washing, then an awe-inspiring round of pillow-propped book reading before blazing across the finish line of the light switch heralding the prize of good night.

TGIF

It's been a week of Mondays and I can't wait to go to sleep tonight. Can't. Wait. The handyman is coming early tomorrow to take a look at the tub faucet in the bathroom -- a few weeks ago the tab that converts the bath to the shower fell out, so I've had to regress to the age of two in order to get clean. (Simon finds this new process fascinating. I don't know what it is about the tub that he loves so much.) But things do come full circle: When I first moved in, I could only take a shower.

I'm not looking forward to lurching to the door in pajamas and scary hair to let Dave in at eight o'clock tomorrow, but after he's gone I can go back to bed.

In other news, I ordered Black Sun, Kristeva's work on melancholia and depression. I've wanted it for years but never felt I could justify the purchase. Now, however, I'm thrilled to add it to my library. I can't wait to read what my favorite thinker has to say about the subject (the excerpt available on the Amazon website was phenomenal), and it's about time I did something with my brain besides set it down in front of every TV show I own.

I just wish I had it now. Even expedited shipping is too slow.

Our Father (Re-Dedications)

(This is an old one, written in college for Modern Poetry with Dr. Potter, from my project imitating Adrienne Rich.)


Our Father (Re-Dedications)

I know you are praying this prayer early, before leaving your home
of the half-exhausted kitchen light and the brightening window
in the stupor of a neighborhood clinging to its quiet
just after dawn. I know you are praying this prayer
against the ache of arthritic knees far from your birthplace
forgetting the gray cold in the warmth of candles burned
under the dark stained glass in memory of those like you.
I know you are praying this prayer
in your daughter’s empty room where she cut herself and cried
where her rebellion hangs in shredded words on the wall
and your shoulders bear your tension
but you will not leave her bed yet. I know you are praying this prayer
as the car grinds into second gear and before turning down the street
toward the oldest love
you almost wish you could leave.
I know you are praying this prayer in the noise
of the blunted radio where bodiless chords whirl and crash
while you slump on the sofa in the argument’s eye.
I know you are praying this prayer in the checkout line
of the tired cashier’s routine questions, of your sudden spurt of tears.
I know you are praying this prayer by hospital light
in the arrested anguish of the living who are forgotten,
who forget themselves, in their wait for the dying to die. I know
you are praying this prayer through your abandoned faith, the heavy
need expanding the old words beyond clear meaning yet you still pray
because even the faintest pulse of hope is precious.
I know you are praying this prayer as you pace beside the bed
asking questions, an anxious dog at your hip, the phone in your hands
because he has not come home and you wonder why.
I know you are praying this prayer which you have never tried before
disbelieving some words while others pull you on
and I wonder which words grasp your arms.
I know you are praying this prayer waiting for something, torn between acceptance and dread
opening your eyes to the day you cannot deny.
I know you are praying this prayer because there is nothing left to pray,
there where you hold together, unanswered as you are.

cat got it

Rrrrrr. As a general rule I don't blog about work troubles, for many reasons.

Today, that personal stricture is killing me.

One day I'll write a great big essay about it and have it published. Then it won't matter if I make an enemy out of a coworker, because I'll be famous.



*For the record, this has nothing to do with either Boss-Man or Boss-Lady.*

fixin' what i broke

Still tired. Good weekend, though -- I spent the majority of it with Meg and Phillip, till about yesterday at noon when I rolled up my figurative sleeves (I was wearing a tanktop) and tackled the rottenness of The State of Denmark for which I held myself responsible. I'd let things slide considerably around the house, and I was tired of living like a troll.

Eleven hours of cleaning later, the house looked as good as it's ever going to. Even clean it looks moldy, but I've done what I can do, and the goodness of turning off all the lights on a tidy dwelling last night, and of waking to the quiet peace of an orderly home, made everything seem better.

I'm learning how to cope with this, better and better each time the wave rolls over me. For the first time I'm refusing to sink into a blankly lethargic isolation; I made myself call my mother when the tide hit, and last night forced myself to call a couple of my childhood friends who've been with me since all of this started -- and found that it's not as difficult to talk to people in this state as I'd thought. Rather, conversation is a welcome distraction from the tiredness, the pain and the effort of living past it.

I also put a call in to my doctor at the onset to get some temporary medical relief, and made myself stay busy all weekend. Those are old tricks, though; it's the actual talking to people before I'm completely better that has me almost dizzy with the joy of reaching a new pinnacle in a long hard climb.

The old tricks are good because tried and true -- a determined busyness during the days, and a calculated application of favorite movies while wearing favorite PJs and sipping a favorite drink during the evenings, combined with plenty of sleep and the company of trusted friends, always take the edge off. So does a careful simplicity -- easy meals (last night was Burger Night) that I still create myself, paper plates -- making the necessary tasks of daily living as small and uncomplicated as possible. (These "bad stretches," as I call them, are very different from bad moods -- in bad moods I love to fling together complex recipes and focus the power of my rage into producing truly awesome food.)

This recovery phase is always marked by hope. I'm "gettin' better -- every day," and it's exciting to see a little growth as I do. It's a minute by minute process, requiring attention to the smaller details to ground myself in the present and in my external, rather than my internal, reality, and the effort makes me tired and quiet...but I'm getting there. I don't know how long I'm going to have to deal with alterations in my biochemical balance, but looking back on its history from my preadolescence until now, I've come so far, and I can only echo better writers than I in saying, "hither by Thy help I come," and " 'tis grace hath brought me safe thus far," and

Day by day, and with each passing moment
Strength I find to meet my trials here
Trusting in my Father's wise bestowment
I've no cause for worry or for fear.
He whose heart is kind beyond all measure
Gives unto each day what He deems best
Lovingly, its part of pain and pleasure
Mingling toil with peace and rest.

Every day the Lord Himself is near me
With a special mercy for each hour.
All my cares He fain would bear and cheer me
He whose Name is Counselor and Power.
The protection of His child and treasure
Is a charge that on Himself He laid.
"As thy days, thy strength shall be in measure" --
This the pledge to me He made,

and

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Amen.

rain dance

I tend to "float" at work. Technically, my office resides down the hallway, just around the corner from Boss-Man's, so that I can hear him when he hollers for me; but on the days when the part-time receptionist has off, or during her lunch hour, I cover the front office and perform as many of her tasks in addition to mine as I can.

The best part of this hassle is that the front office, as one would expect, has a window. A large, frontal one. My office has no windows at all. My office is a cave -- or, rather, a den. The den of a bespectacled, skirt-wearing animal who makes a living flinging papers into the air, condemning recalcitrant machines in a quiet snarled language of her own invention, and occasionally hurling pens at the walls, while sounding as calm and unruffled as the Enterprise's central computer as she does all these things answering the phone.

She likes to get out every once in awhile, and so enjoys seeing what the day is actually like when viewed through a window. She peers out through my eyes, momentarily pacified by the uncaged outdoors, and I glance out the window frequently, for her benefit. It only overlooks a small side street in a small railroad town whose only center is the tracks; but the Midwestern sky is big and the clouds tell a lot of stories.

The other day as I was fidgeting toward the end of the receptionist's lunch hour, wanting to get back to my office where I could focus better on my work, I saw the semi-annual sight that strips away all sense of age and dignity: the village man flushing the fire hydrants. While I have learned, in many ways, to stifle childhood inclinations like pigtails, an eschewance of shoes and the compulsive need to climb the trees lining other people's yards, the sight of white water surging into the street demands the attendance of my worshipful feet.

But Boss-Lady was on another line and wouldn't be able to juggle incoming calls, and D. still hadn't returned from lunch. All work forgotten, I stood with my nose nearly pressed to the glass, quivering with impatience, my thwarted desire causing me physical pain. Cars whooshed gently past, tossing back arching sprays of water; the sun was out; and I was going to die, trapped in a boring adult world from which I couldn't break free.

As I stared longingly into the submerged street channeling water like a canal, I thought of an evening a couple of years ago when I walked Notre Dame campus with a gentleman friend. My joy in that day had nothing to do with him; in fact, he was the only thing that marred the perfection of that walk. As we strolled by the Lakes, far from any shelter, suddenly the floodgates of heaven cracked like an egg and dropped a thundersheet of rain on our heads.

We ran for the trees, which failed to shield us; we fled to the side of one of the monastic dormitories and pressed against the gritty bricks, trying to take advantage of a foot-wide eave five stories up; we failed utterly to keep dry in any way, and in moments were soaked to the skin. While he groused about getting wet, I danced on my feet a little, then flung myself away from our meager hideout and beelined for the puddles. Nothing could be heard above the roar of the deluge but my feet slapping the water and my incomprehensible companion yelling at me from the side of the building. He said something about the puddles being dirty -- "you don't know what's in that water" -- and in that instant I decided his grandmotherly soul had no sympathy with mine, disregarded everything he had to say, and began twirling around with my arms outstretched.

I can't dance. Most of the time I'm far too self-conscious to perform in any physical way in front of others, and adulthood has gripped me enough that on an ordinary day a rain shower will send me scurrying for the nearest doorway to keep my glasses dry. But that day, with nowhere to go and no one else nearby, face lifted to the downpour, cheeks running with sooty mascara, I laughed at the hammer of rain on my teeth and abandoned myself to the joy of spinning, caught in a gravity of my own making, the most graceful woman in the world.

When the sky finally subsided, my fussy companion left his square footage of soaked wall and we walked back to the main part of campus, toward a car and dry clothes; but while he sputtered and squalled like a cat in a rain barrel, I skipped ahead with my sandals in my hand to catch the deeper puddles -- and jumped a little harder than necessary to splash him when he kept chiding me. "I have to," I said, when he told me to stop my puddle jumping and act like an adult. "And I want to. Why don't you?"

He never gave me a satisfactory answer, and didn't seem to comprehend my own. It probably didn't make much sense, but I love the rough squish of mud between my toes, the drenching of puddle spray, the tide of water surging around my ankles, that one moment, looking down, just after your feet pierce the surface and you're standing like the children of Israel on dry ground. Nothing quite compares to the pure happiness of frolicking in shallow water.

So the moment Boss-Lady got off the phone, I sprinted down the hall and arrived at her door out of breath, begging, "They're flushing the hydrants, please can I go outside and jump in the puddles?"

She laughed. "You're so weird. Go for it!"

I didn't wait for another syllable. I kicked off my shoes and charged out the door.

Adulthood kept enough of a grip on my consciousness that I didn't stay long. But I made that thirty seconds count. I caught my skirt around my knees and jumped like there were springs in my feet.

A student driver slowed to a fumbling halt so as not to run me over, the men at the sharpening shop lined up across the street to stare, and as I cavorted in a circle I heard a knocking from one of the windows above me. I looked up to see Josh, my fourteen-year-old tutoring subject, staring down at me from his apartment. I waved, grinned, and jumped a few more times.

What struck me was the look on his face. Amused, endeared, forbearing -- adult -- he shook his head with a little smile quirking one corner of his mouth while I tapdanced in the water, for half a minute the youngest child on the block.

the pills stopped working

(This is actually a pretty funny song by Hem on their album Funnel Cloud.)

I've fallen under the tiredness of the dead these past couple of weeks, and I blame it on a minor switch in medication. The old pill had some rather unpleasant cyclical side effects (I'm talking hormone therapy here -- not antidepressants; those are working fine) which led me to seek the switch to something different, but the something different contains a lower hormone dosage and I just don't think it's workin' on my head space here. I've had indications most of my postpubescent life that my hormones are pretty strong, and I think they're reasserting their strength without the appropriate reins.

So I'm going back to the old one. I should probably consult the doc again before I switch it up, but all the medical changes I've made in the past year have been the suggestions that I made to my doctor(s), not new revelations which they bestowed upon me, and I've been right every time. So why spend the money? (Yes, SG, and I'm sorry. I'm cheap.)

If it comes down to it, I'd rather experience a week of physical unpleasantness every month than three weeks of Bad Head Days. No contest.

In the meantime...YAAWWWN...where's the coffee?

stupidhead

I go through these phases...these No One Else Will Volunteer So I Will phases. They're really stupid phases. I'm improving at overcoming them, but the compulsion still seizes me from time to time. (It comes, in part, from being one of the only two people in Sunday School class willing to answer every vapid question that my peers were too sullen or hungover or stoned to care about, and I answered, not because I wanted to, but because I felt sorry for the teachers.)

So now I find myself, having made a promise, committed to an event that I really didn't want to do at all, and which I now dread. Fortunately it will all be over in about three hours. (This event also involves a nice little confrontation with a girl who won't take it well, however diplomatically I say what needs to be said. I don't mind confrontation -- I've trained myself to be very good at it -- but this one isn't going to be any fun; it's going to be headachey and annoying. Maybe I can make it fun -- but it's a church-related confrontation and I really, really hate church-related confrontations. They're so...middle schoolish, as a general rule.)

Bah. What's so hard about saying no?

the secret place

So exhausted. In this particular professional dance of monkey chasing weasel, I'm not the cobbler's bench. I'm the monkey AND the weasel. And maybe the cobbler too. We're all very tired.

I'm envisioning a creek in the Allegheny Mountains of New York, winding through an obscure valley fifty miles from humanity. As the slopes of the mountains rise the deciduous trees predominate, but here it's all pine without undergrowth; ember-shaded needles swathe the ground beneath the trees, sharpening the emptiness and muffling all sound but the running of the creek and the rough cry, here and there, of the crows. It's an overcast early autumn afternoon, barely breezy, not too hot, and the clear-dark water reflects the deep fox colors of the boles, the secretive green of the branches, all shadow, with the quickened dart and drift of minnow wavering underneath.

I have come along the thin deer trail to the handbuilt wooden bridge lying low over the water. I'm sitting with my feet in the swift and frigid current, trying to catch the skips and rills from the half-risen rocks, resting my forehead on the stripped-bark rails of the bridge and feeling the slow cooling of my skin. I can finally think of nothing, here in the simple dusk of the pine-tree afternoon, surrounded by noises that have nothing to do with me, and in the empty solitude all I know is God.

balm

One of my favorite parts of church involves nothing of particular overt significance. I don't know when the tradition began, or how; but I love that, when the congregation prays the Our Father, everyone holds hands.

I surmise that it began when the church focused on community in the late 60s. Whatever the cause, on the rare occasions when I find myself sitting in the pews, as opposed to standing solo leading the singing, I absolutely cannot wait for that one moment.

My whole life I have loved human contact. I grew up in a very physically affectionate family, and made physically affectionate friends in college. Whether it was linking arms with a comrade to skip along the Quad, squishing four girls onto a three-person couch to watch Eddie Izzard, or dancing around the dorm rooms in moments of joy, I always had friends to lend a quite literal hand.

Adulthood has brought its challenges, which I have loved in that persevering through them I have continued to grow up, and have witnessed a divine faithfulness directing my footsteps. The hardest part, for me, isn't paying the bills, or budgeting, or cleaning house, or coming home tired from work; it isn't even sitting alone in my living room clicking the remote to the next episode of Buffy. It's the lack of human contact.

I've made do, of course; one does. I have my delightful Simon to cuddle with, and have cultivated a little extra stamina between the times when I visit with my sister or my parents. I keep myself busy, and I don't often think about it. I'm never given more than I can handle, right? And on the whole I "handle" very well. Most days it doesn't feel like that big a deal; it's just life, and, for the most part, I very much like my life.

But I love that moment in church. I love feeling the pressure of fingertips on the back of my hand, the living heat of a human palm crossing my own. I love the individuality in people's grasps, and I love that one of the ways in which God's love is made manifest to us is through the unity of His children.

I doubt that salving touch-starved spirits was what the church had in mind in instilling this small ritual. But the weeks when I stand surrounded by other believers, even though most of them are still strangers, clasping the warmth of human hands, give me just a little more strength, and a little more joy. I keep the sensation imprinted on my skin and in my mind, like the chapstick in my pocket, to apply as needed to the drier days, to remind myself that I am a member of Christ's body, and that, since it gives me such comfort, I too can serve by reaching out -- again, literally -- to the people in need who cross my path, because, as U2 says so well, "to touch is to heal."

It's a beautiful thing.

why did the turtle cross the road...?

I'm one of those saps who tries to brake for small animals stupid enough to run out into the road. I'm not stupid enough not to hit them if there's no other choice, but if I have a few seconds, or a bare empty road, I'll certainly swerve. Maybe the world suffers from an overpopulation of groundhogs, squirrels, raccoons, skunks, opossums and deer, but I hold the slightly old-fashioned opinion that if I'm going to bring about a wild creature's demise, it should come as a mark of my skill and not the fact that I'm driving a thousand pounds or so of unwieldy metal.

I'm also one of those saps who persists in believing that goodness exists among people -- that there's something good in almost everyone, even if that something might rival a mustard seed in size.

Oddly enough, one of the continuing occurrences that boosts my sappy opinion of people is their sappy behavior toward animals in the road. I've never in my life seen anyone gun his or her motor with the intent of mowing down a little critter. (Maybe people only do this at night when no one else is watching -- our morality, after all -- or at least its reinforcement -- is largely social in nature.) Instead, I've seen traffic backed up for ten minutes while people wait for a family of geese to dawdle from one side of the road to the other.

Last week as I returned to work from lunch, I saw the cars ahead of me performing all sorts of stunt maneuvers, and as I approached I saw why -- a tiny loose miniature pinscher was racing all over the road, barking savagely at the cars, and the traffic slowed to a stop as people tried to inch past it without crushing it. This might sound pretty run-of-the-mill, but the dog was so small that barely anyone could see it, and all the drivers on both sides of the road had their windows rolled down and were calling out the dog's location to each other. The air was filled with directions and whistles attempting to distract the dog.

"You're clear, he's behind you," a woman called to me when it was my turn to stop and wait forever hoping he hadn't crawled under a tire.

Moments like that make my heart glow a little bit with how organized and careful people can be in such trivial situations.

But when these little thoughtfulnesses toward animals come from children, it really makes me shine.

"Sarah, I meant to tell you this story earlier," Meg said last night. "It gave me hope for the future generation."

She recounted a drive she'd taken a few days before on one of the back highways of Michigan, heavily trafficked but largely unsupervised by police. As she came around a bend, she saw ahead of her a large turtle making its slow way across the road. She and I have both seen the remains of turtle roadkill, which has always saddened me; you can think the squirrels are dumb and have bad senses of direction, but they're fast enough to get out of the way if they don't lose what little wits they were born with; turtles don't stand a chance.

What really caught her attention, though, wasn't fear for the turtle. It was the two little boys, about eight and ten years old, flanking the turtle and facing down traffic waving their arms and wearing desperate expressions. Stop! they were yelling. Watch out for the turtle!

Meg said, "I figured their mother would probably kill them for running out in the road, but I couldn't help feeling so...proud of them."

"Well, when you think of little kids, you generally think they'd be throwing sticks at it, or waiting by the roadside to see how long it took the turtle to get hit," I said. "It's really, really good to be wrong."

It was one of those warm moments. People -- myself included -- like to enumerate the many ways in which you can tell the basic ugliness of humanity by watching the brutal inclinations of children. But so much of the time it's the children who care most for other helpless creatures. I think of two little country boys so intent on keeping a reptile from harm that they left all fear of traffic, and all thought for their own safety, behind them on the roadside to rush to its aid. I think too of their implicit confidence that, although someone might hit a turtle, no one would hit them. And, like Meg, I smile with a little more hope in the small goodnesses of which humanity is capable, the small goodnesses that can make all the difference in the world.

lights

I sat on the back deck with P. in early June, sipping cabernet and watching the day’s slow metamorphosis into the blues and purples of dusk. She and I had just lapsed into an easy silence after more discussions about work; the troubles of the office couldn’t compete with the lazy settling of the evening, after a hot day, into a cooler quiet.

Her backyard, staring west, stretches past a watchful maple into a broad semi-mown field, curling grassy fingers around the roots of the woods bordering its three sides. Over the dark strip of trees poised on the edge of the sharp bank that tumbles into Christiana Creek blazed the remnants of a seashell-colored sunset, reflecting the sunken light in streaks of fading cloud.

It was that startling time of evening when the sky still holds the day, but the trees and fields have already yielded to night. As the darkening light crystallized into stars, P. and I rocked absentmindedly on the bench, holding our wine glasses, and picked out the condensed shadows of browsing deer.

"Look at all the fireflies," she said.

Michigan boasts a number of beauties, but my favorite by far are the vast, uncountable numbers of fireflies that limn the fields in summer. Like scattered strings of Christmas lights they hover over the grass, flashing the softness of their bioluminescence in an erratically orchestrated rhythm. As the bench creaked under our rocking I shifted and waved my hand at the field.

"It's all about mating," I said.

"Really?" she said.

"Yeah. The males fly, the females hide in the grass. Each kind of firefly has its own particular pattern, and the males fly around looking for a female whose light pattern matches theirs. Then they go at it, and get back to searching."

We watched the strewn web of sex-crazed insects arranging themselves at counterpoint to the stars, and I laughed and told P. about the tricksy females who, bored and hungry, imitate the pattern of another species to lure a male in and eat him.

"I've met women like that," she said.

"How 'bout it," I said.

I stared over the field, wondering how the human dating scene would look if everyone had glowing rumps. Compared to the pushme-pullyou games of modern mating hunts, the fireflies' ambitions looked simple and old-fashioned. For the males: Light rear. Take to the sky. Scour the earth for a female just like you. Do as God intended. For the females: Light rear. Send out signals. Wait for the male to come along who matches you. Do as God intended.

Sitting there on that porch, looking back on my past blunders, I envied the little buggers. If people have a light pattern, they don't know it. For people, the system looks more like, Guess. Get it wrong. Guess. Get it wrong. Try again.

It's often brutal, often ugly, often boring, and seldom pretty. But it's the system we have, rather like language, and we use it because it's the only way to get to the other side of the field. The best aspect of humanity's long history of lovelorn heartbreak, and the unspeakable joy of love found and returned, is its art. We can take our experiences and forge them into books and poetry, paintings and sculptures, strains of music. For us, the beauty comes, not so much from the search, but from the aftermath of the search's results, from the touch and the go, the losing and the finding, and, often now, the losing again.

But these uncomplicated insects are art. They don't sing, they don't dance, they don't write. They merely do what they were made to do, and in the doing create some of the most striking panoramas of the Platonic Form of Summer.

There's value to the process. There's learning, and becoming, and continuing, there's the development of a resilient determination that proclaims, as Sufjan Stevens writes, I'm not afraid to get it right; I turn around and I give it one more try. There's a certain gladness in the knowledge that nothing is wasted as we cast about looking for the things we want most.

I couldn't help but feel a little swell of hope as I leaned forward and stared into the dark, my eyes fixed on the rippled cadences of color enlivening the field, the thousand breathing lights making the hunt for reproduction beautiful.

old faces, strange places

Last week I ran into my old landlord.

It wasn't the kind of place you'd expect to meet your old landlord. Nope, if you'd asked me, I'd have told you that the GYN's office was the LAST place I'd expect to run into an old landlord.

Nonetheless.

I was paying my bill, surrounded by glowing pregnant women and baby toys and laughing children and men who looked surprisingly relaxed and cheerful and kindly receptionists, when I heard, over the nurturing sound of a family-rearing TV channel, my name.

"Sarah. Hey. Sarah!"

I turned and beheld, resplendent in his over-cologned glory and overabundant hair wax, the AL.

"Santos!" I said.

He's still the biggest gossip I've ever known. Immediately following an impatient "How are you," he leaned forward with a conspiratorial grin and whispered loudly, eyebrows waggling, "Are you pregnant?"

"No."

I loved the moment of awkwardness that followed. It completely made up for the absurd inappropriateness of his question. He couldn't ask, "Oh, then what are you here for?" because there's only one other answer, and it's not, "I broke my arm." I grinned a little bit while he scrambled to regain his dignity.

He gave up after a minute and started erupting with information about my former fellow tenants -- most of the news wasn't good, but neither was it unexpected; the woman Lu who'd been scarier than the scary people that frequented the house, and so had kept me safe, fell off the deep end a little after I left, and now she's gone. Jim's alive and well, however, still residing in the apartment below where mine used to be, and according to Santos, who is probably the worst judge of character I have ever met, there's a very nice quiet couple living downstairs in the other apartment once inhabited by Pslightly Psycho Kevin.

He didn't say who was living in my old apartment. I didn't ask. He said, sort of hintingly, "You'd really like it there now. It's nice and quiet, good people there."

"Sounds like," I said, smiled, wished him and his wife well as they awaited the arrival of their second child, and went to retrieve my credit card.

I miss that apartment. Like a lot of things, it's now a closed door; but my memories there, except for the ones toward the end, throw off a soft-lens shimmer when I pull them out. It was a lovely little home, with entertaining neighbors, and for a long time, I was very happy there.

rare finds

This morning as I drank my customary cup of coffee on the porch, I surveyed the rain-soaked yard and saw a strange movement under one of the trees at the end of the driveway.

It looked like a pair of huge yellow leaves, flapping without wind. My first instinct was, Moth. But I'd never seen a moth that size before, so I thought, wounded bird? And made my way barefoot across the yard to investigate.

It was a moth, the biggest I'd ever seen, with a good six-inch wingspan. A delicate yellow with patterns of lavender running across two pairs of ragged and damaged wings, it flipped and rolled under the attack of a yellow jacket.

I hate yellow jackets, and while I know that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" and that a true naturalist would have quietly observed this unusual display of savagery, I picked up a stick and entered the war on the moth's behalf. I can't stand seeing a helpless thing suffer. I probably looked insane, jabbing at the ground and leaping backward, but I addled the bee enough that it landed to try to get its bearings, and I cut it in half with the stick, drove its body into the dirt, and bent, crooning, over the moth.

It looked like a goner -- last night's thunderstorm must have taken a merciless toll. It was too wet to fly, and in places all color and wing dust had been wiped clean to reveal the shimmer of translucent veins. I coached the moth onto a stick and lifted it free of the ants swarming the dirt.

Something about it nudged a memory I never had -- like so many of my memories, it came from a book. I thought, suddenly, I'll bet this is a Yellow Emperor. As a child, and now an adult, I cherish the book Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter, a nineteenth century northern Indiana naturalist who also penned beautiful fiction. This particular book features the Yellow Emperor moth as a key plot point, and a thrill ran through me as I looked on my dingy, but rare, find.

There's something miraculous about seeing a beloved piece of fiction spring to life. I carefully transported the moth to one of my porch chairs, to keep it as safe as possible from foraging ants and other reasonlessly violent hornets. I doubt it will make it, but, bedraggled as it was, it was still beautiful.

about time

Today when I stepped onto the porch, coffee in hand, to sit at my little patio table and savor both the caffeine surge and the newness of the morning, the whole world had stopped breathing.

A heavy cloud cover had been flung across the sky, rising, like the snap of a clean sheet arrested at its highest point before settling over the mattress. The trees across the road seemed to crouch lower to the ground, and suspended in the solvent of gray air under gray sky drifted a waiting hush. Nothing moved. The only sound came from the traffic slinking past on the road, and as I sipped, the air grew heavy and the weeds in the yard trembled. The scent of water curled around my hair.

"It's gonna storm big," my neighbor Gordon called across the lawn.

"When?" I called back.

He pointed to the sky. "Any time now. Supposed to be real high winds too."

I glanced along the line cast by his gesturing finger. To the south a blackness had begun to spread, rippling over the lighter gray, the reaching of an incoming tide.

As I walked across the grass to the car, I felt the sinews of the earth tense, and I grinned at my own flicker of adrenaline as I heard, far off, the muscular shudder of amassing thunder.

goodness v. righteousness

I’ve been turning this one over in my mind the past week. On Monday I stumbled across this well-known passage in Romans:

"You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (5:6-8).

Whenever I’ve heard this passage discussed, the emphasis is generally on that last sentence. We’re supposed to, if we haven’t heard it too many times to grow a callus over the eardrums, sit struck with wonder: such a wonderful God, to love horrible us.

But that verse contains very little power without its preceding statements. This is the problem with lifting pithy verses out of their context and steaming them onto T-shirts: Any buildup of argument, any progression of power, evaporates if you focus merely on the conclusion. And Paul is all about argument.

So we hear, While we were still sinners, Christ died for us, and think, maybe, Neat. It’s a jaded, bored reaction, mostly the jaded, bored reaction of Gen-Yers raised with a Bible tied around their heads or put in tape players on repeat until the words have lost all meaning; and ours is a generation marked for its distaste for triteness and unthinking acceptance of ideas, and for the value it places on genuineness.

So handing out tracts with Romans 5:8 on it (this is a verse on "The Romans Road," isn’t it?) doesn’t really get our attention; nor does pasting it on a bumper sticker. Can you blame us? What does that statement really mean on its own? Of course it’s true, but it’s overused to the point where it’s like a strip of reused masking tape. (This is, by the way, mostly due to the judgmentality implied in its use; most people of my generation hear the word "sinner" come out of someone’s mouth and immediately – and usually correctly – identify the speaker as a hypocrite grandly passing judgment on someone else and ignoring his or her own glaring faults. Did I mention that we hate hypocrisy?)

So with passages like this one you have to read the preceding, not just verses, but chapters, to understand what Paul is getting at. Romans has a bad rap for being judgmental and full of doom, by the way. Tucked into the first two chapters’ recounting of man’s condition are plenty of interesting, thought-provoking little gems.

But none of that is what I actually wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about verse 7. So I will. Because in this verse is a really fascinating distinction between two remarkably different concepts, and it really makes me wish I knew Greek so that I could find out if the difference exists in the original language the way it exists in the English translation.

I still have some passage searching to do to verify all of this, in order not to sound like an ass. But I thought Paul’s distinction between righteousness and goodness is fascinating.

He writes, "Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man..." True that. Nobody wants to sacrifice his life for a person who obeys every letter of the law; such people are usually boring and self-aggrandizing, and think they’re better than everyone else because they’re so good at following the rules. Nobody loves a righteous person; righteous people love themselves more than enough for the whole world. When the chips are down – or up – a righteous person, to paraphrase Firefly, "makes people feel guilty and judged." And who’d die for that?

"...though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die." Goodness gets you farther. This is hilariously cheesy, but when I think of someone dying for a good man, I think of Spartacus. Everyone died for him. Why? Because he was a good man. He certainly wasn’t a righteous one; he murdered and stole and (gasp) fornicated. But he was a good man. And you don’t have to be perfect, or righteous, to be good. Goodness is something that relates man to man; goodness implies kindness, helping out others, showing a little compassion, a little love, a habit of putting other people’s needs before one’s own. Goodness implies an embodiment, not of the letter, but of the spirit of the law. And that kind of person breeds a little more loyalty in his fellowmen.

It made me think. It’s something that has occurred to me before, but not quite so explicitly. In the evangelical churches in which I was raised, righteousness, as a concept, and as something to strive for, was bandied about rather generously. Along with the other children I knew since grasshopper age, I was encouraged to seek righteousness, to be righteous, to follow the letter of the law, and to press my righteousness on others. It was never comfortable – I could see how much people hated it, and it never felt quite right to me, but as I understood it at the time, I had to go through with pushing my righteousness around ("No, I don’t drink"; "no, I would never smoke"; "please don’t swear, God doesn’t like it") because that’s how people knew I belonged to God, and they should know that their lifestyles were wrong and mine was right(eous).

Paul demolishes that whole concept in Romans 4, when he identifies righteousness as something we attain by faith. Not by being dedicated to the law. Not by never sinning (as much as possible). Not by throwing rules in everybody’s face. Not by being better than everyone else. By faith. In chapters 1-3 he paints a pretty clear picture of how generally impossible it is for people to attain righteousness on their own, because we tend to screw it up (not always a lot, sometimes just a little), and so God grants us righteousness by our faith in the justification offered by Christ.

So. Righteousness is a package deal with our faith, an eternal constant in our fluctuating lives, something we cannot accomplish but which is ours nonetheless. It means we don't have to worry about divine condemnation. It means we can stand confidently clothed in those white robes while we go about our work of being better people and leading better lives. (Oo. See that? "Better"? That’s the comparative form of "good." Not of "righteous.")

Righteousness, interestingly, is not one of the famous Fruits of the Spirit; but goodness is. Peter doesn’t urge us to add righteousness to our Christian lives; but he does goodness (2 Peter 1:5). Goodness, it seems, is one of those qualities toward which we must strive, as goodness reflects the active nature of God, and tends to relate, not to how we ourselves stand (as righteousness does), but to how we treat others.

I don’t know if I’m alone in this connotation of "goodness," but when I think of the term, I think of someone who does the right thing however much it might hurt him; of someone who sticks to his convictions; of someone who is kind – who is good – to others. It’s about more than tally points on the moral scoreboard; it’s about love and humility and strength of character – and those qualities matter in how we’re supposed to live. Since our righteousness didn’t originate with us, we might as well take it as a given (though not for granted), and as something for which we can take no credit; and instead of being all wrapped up in our righteousness and treating our fellow man like poop (which a "righteous" person might, but a good person would never do), we should strive to be, not more righteous (I don’t think there is a "more righteous"; it seems like you are or you aren’t and there are no degrees), but better, people. Righteous is what we are through faith in Christ; good is what we become as we live out that faith in, as the end of the Mass says, "the service of God and our fellow man."

Like I said, I’m still in the preliminary stages of checking up on this. But I liked the way my mom put it, when we were discussing it the other day:

"So, righteousness is about justification," she said, "and goodness is about sanctification."

"Yes," I said. "That’s exactly what I meant. Yes."

By the Mark

This song by Gillian Welch is just absolutely beautiful. I sing it in the car on repeat a lot (made even more fun because I've determined a third harmony part for it -- makes me wish I could find a couple of people to sing it live. God, I miss singing with people).

By the Mark

When I cross over
I will shout and sing
I will know my Savior
By the mark where the nails have been

Chorus:
By the mark where the nails have been
By the sign upon His precious skin
I will know my Savior when I come to Him
By the mark where the nails have been

A man of riches
May claim a crown of jewels
But the King of Heaven
Can be told from the prince of fools
(Chorus)

On Calvary's Mountain
Where they made Him suffer so
All my sin was paid for
A long, long time ago
(Chorus)