So. Frelling. Tired.
The rest of the visit with the relatives went well. I really enjoy talking to Cousin John, and we covered a lot of intellectual ground, though not nearly enough (everything keeps enforcing my need to return to academia; anytime I have a really great conversation I realize how hungry I am for the stimulation). When he thanked me for spending so much time with the girls, he told me, "You're a great role model for them. I want them to realize what it means to grow up to be a strong, articulate woman who reads and is well-adjusted and normal." He added, when I thanked him, "I know you have a lot you're dealing with right now, but you really have a lot going for you. I think everyone knows how fantastic Sarah is except Sarah."
I almost cried.
The girls were fun; they both were in awe of my iPhone, so I played chess and a few rounds of Tic Tac Toe on it with Jenna, and showed them the "Simon's Cat" videos on YouTube. (The new one, "Fly Guy," had me in stitches. And my very own Simon is at this very minute embracing fully his current identity as Sleepy Sunday Simon, curled half on his back with his eyes closed and his fangs poking out in a smile. As soon as the company left yesterday he looked ten million shades of relieved, although he was really good with the kids, and I don't think he's ever been around children before. If a cat can look giddy, he has looked giddy. My house! No kids! No baying beagle! Just Mommy! So naturally he has done what a cat does best and spent the rest of the weekend lounging on the bed, the picture of indolent contentment.)
They were pretty demanding, and it was good exercise for me to tell them No every once in awhile, which I did pretty adamantly yesterday morning as I staggered around with a mug of coffee and they bugged me to play tag before they left.
"Sorry, girls," I said. "I'm tired, and I've been tired for weeks. But we'll see each other again."
That was when Anna, the youngest, really cracked me up.
"We'll never see you again," she said. "I really wanted to play tag with you." Then she looked up at me and widened her big blue eyes and quivered her bottom lip and said, in a low voice, "I've never played tag with you before."
I laughed. "Wow!" I said. "You're pulling out all the stops!" At which she slumped back and pouted, and Jenna asked, "What do you mean?"
Oh yes. So much my little sister and I at that age. Laura the manipulative, the strategizing and calculating; Sarah the straightforward and oblivious. Both earnest and loveable. But twenty-odd years of dealing with my sister's craft has served to develop an immunity in me, so I comfortably said, "Hopefully next time I see you I won't be as tired."
Before they left Cousin John extended an open invitation for me to visit them anytime; they live close to the DC Metro area, and I do enjoy that city.
But after they left I crashed. Not in a weepy devilfish kind of way -- talking with Cousin John has made me wonder if all the internal horror stuff I write on the blog makes me sound worse than I actually am; I did mention, a few posts ago, that I don't spend my time not-blogging draped over furniture like Dali's wilted clocks; there's more to me than meets the blog, but the blog is useful because these internal horror things I don't really discuss very often, and they may not be my only reality but they're still a part of my reality, and a significant part at that, although maybe not as significant as I've come to believe (I'll have to talk to Jeff about that) -- but in a tired, I-have-no-resources-and-I've-still-managed-to-dredge-a-little-bit-after-all way. I went directly to bed and didn't get up until 8:00 p.m., where I threw together a strange meal composed of what I could find in the fridge, watched an episode of Bones with my parents (I love I love I love I love I love that show), tackled writing a bit more of my story again (with the result that it's now messier than it was before; I've never done "short" with stories, but this one keeps wanting to be longer and more detailed when I try to curtail it, so now it looks kind of like a sweater that you can't tell if it's being unraveled or knitted) and passed out at 12:30.
The thought of going anywhere and running into anyone makes my mind go blank, so I exercised my freedom in Christ and staked a claim in the unconditionality of God's love and the nonnecessity of performance and skipped church (see, doesn't that sound defensive? It's defensive. All right, I skipped church because I felt like it but God isn't mad at me, so why should anyone else be? That's defensive too. I wasn't up for it so I didn't go). I've only left my room to let the dog out and get more coffee, and spent the entirety of today (all two hours of my consciousness) sitting on my big beautiful bed with my laptop and the lovely wooden lap desk Meg and Phillip bought me, working on my story, working on this blog post, reading Dragonhaven and starting to pre-order season 4 of Bones and season 5 of The Office. (My parents delete the DVR eps as we watch them, and anyway, the digital signal really, REALLY sucks in the airing of Bones, and only Bones. NCIS, which my parents love and which I tolerate the way you tolerate your senile great-aunt, always comes across perfectly. Is it FOX? Or just the sniggering cruelty of fate? So I can't wait for the DVD release.)
It's hottish today, and muggy, and we have no air conditioning, but the whole-house fan is running and my parents are out, which means I can minimize the layers of clothing and try to stay cool.
I did learn something interesting this weekend. I've been starting to rant more openly about how much I hate the culture of niceness that has infected Christian society in America. Suddenly being "nice" is this huge value, but it comes from society, and not the church, although the church has sucked it down like a dog devouring chocolate and now it wonders why it's sick. (If it wonders why it's sick.) It's bothered me for a long time, but it really bothered me and started to turn itself over in my mind over the 4th when I visited my sister, who doesn't adhere to any belief system but who has such an unshakeable integrity forming the bedrock of her character that I have long maintained that she has faith but doesn't call it that. She's banking on my being right.
In one of our conversations during the course of my visit, she expressed worry about herself and her condition as a person, because she likes ladling out punishment to people that have it coming to them (I call this righteous indignation and a strong sense of justice, but I've thought for years that Satan will take her out any way he can, and using language against us is one of the things he's best at). "I'm not a nice person," she said.
"But you're a good person," I said. "You're a kind person. The people who need help, you help. You give people what they need when they need it, and yeah, sometimes that isn't 'nice,' but the people who change the world, the people who make a difference, aren't 'nice.' Ghandi wasn't nice. Buddha wasn't nice. And Jesus especially wasn't nice. He gave the insufferable, the arrogant and the unloving what-for, He was actually really mean to them, but that was what they needed, so it was kind. And the downtrodden, the vulnerable and the hurting, he helped, but that wasn't nice either; that was kind. You do the same things."
"That makes me feel better," she said.
And then I went off on a month-long internal processing of rage that the concept of niceness as an important virtue has so infiltrated contemporary Christian practice of theology that it has some of the best people I know questioning their worth or abandoning the faith. (Yes, I need to learn to apply this to myself too, but that's a problem for another day.) In an email to a friend a couple of weeks ago, I wrote,
"It helps to recognize the critical difference between nice and kind. Real kindness is rare, and rarely expressed in the format dictated by politeness. (This is where I get really angry with the Christian trend toward 'niceness'; niceness isn't mentioned anywhere in the Bible, much less the New Testament. Kindness is a totally different animal, because it has substance, because it has its roots in love, because it's real. Niceness has its roots in social order, and while that has some merit, sometimes, it's a mistake to think that niceness comes from, or is commanded by, God. Kindness sees; niceness masks.)"
Niceness is all about not rocking the boat, not making ripples or waves, not causing people discomfort. Kindness is about what people really, truly need, and a lot of times that involves giving offense or going against the social grain. This doesn't mean that we get to be rampaging assholes; it's not the kind of "tough love" that goads Christian parents to shun their homosexual child and then pat themselves on the back for their obedience to God's law, for example. Kindness is about truth and love -- withholding judgment from the hurting, and not sparing the hypocrites from the reality of their hypocrisy. (The only people -- I repeat, the only people -- who received Christ's scorn and wrath and caustic addresses were the religious authorities of the day who made finding God more difficult for the suffering and seeking. Listen up, people: We have become those religious authorities. Jesus hung out with the prostitutes and the tax collectors, the dirty and downtrodden, the wrongdoers, the drunkards and sinners, the marginalized. And now we have become the marginalizers, and we think that in so doing we're doing God's work. How can we be proud that when we "comb the whole world for a convert, and when [we] find one, we make him twice the son of hell that [we] are"? How can we think that following God's law has more to do with righteousness than with love? We can't be righteous; that's why Christ became our sin, to become our righteousness. Righteousness is not a fruit of the Spirit -- as niceness is not a fruit of the Spirit. Righteousness is something we have been given, not something we grow into or achieve. If we seek to be righteous, we forget about love, just as if we seek to be nice, we forget about kindness. Yes, we're to be made holy -- but this means being made into the image of God, and if Christ is the image of God...Yes, we're supposed to be like Christ. But do we even know what that means anymore? Do we? Is it about checking off a list of sins we don't commit anymore, or is it about loving our neighbor -- really, really loving our neighbor -- as ourselves? Which means loving our neighbor in our neighbor's present reality, which is often ugly, and messy, and broken, and scared. But we're all messy, we're all broken, we're all scared. And there's so much beauty in that. We get to be in this discovery of love and redemption together. It's not a competition to see who has the most holiness; it's about linking arms and helping each other to the finish line, it's about one enormous spiritual tie, it's about stumbling across other people who are curled up and can't move and bringing them forward with us.)
I was telling Linnéa this week, when she said that people don't go to the Baptist church functions anymore, like prayer meetings or Bible studies, "But nobody wants to. And sure, maybe some of that's laziness and selfishness and that needs to be addressed; but honestly, if I wanted to tell someone something real, if I had a problem and didn't know how to fix it, the last place I'd go is church. Which is sad. Church is supposed to be the place where we can relax our guard and be real, whatever that means, and it isn't always pretty, because God's love is with us in the unprettiness; but instead, it's where people feel the most guarded. People don't go to church to find healing; they go to church to be judged. And who wants to go to that kind of environment on a Tuesday night when they're already tired from a long day at work pretending to be okay in front of people who have no reason to care about them?"
Maybe this isn't a problem in other churches, or other geographical areas. I hear about some exciting things in other places. But here in my hometown, it's a big problem. It's a tragic and sad problem.
So the thing I learned this weekend, as I discussed some of this with Cousin John (mostly the semantics of nice vs. kind, and how I posit that "nice" doesn't appear in the reliable translations of the Bible), happened when Jenna piped up and said, "Don't you have the Bible on your iPhone? Do a keyword search."
So I did. The Bible app that I have on my phone comes in like twenty different languages, with multiple translations per language, and there are ten to fifteen of those in English. A keyword search of "nice" turned up zero results in the NIV, TNIV, English Standard, Contemporary English, American Standard, Amplified, Holman Christian Standard, World English, KJV and NJKV translations; and in the NASB, New English, and New Century translations, "nice" only appeared in a pejorative context, in terms of flattery, deception and self-deception. (I discredit the New Living, the Message and GOD'S WORD translations as meritorious.)
Fascinating, isn't it? Nice is not a Christian concept.
I can't wait to tackle this in action.
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