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life: unmasked — red moleskine prayer

May 3, 2012 in life: unmasked with 1 Comment

Today, I share a post about life: unmasked, a blog meme started by my sensational friend, Joy.

—

I make a choice on Tuesday to stop reiterating to every moving creature willing or unwilling to listen to me tell them that I don’t pray enough and, finally, buckle down, stop talking about it, and try to actually do this praying thing.

The first few minutes prove highly ineffective.

Lately (read: the past year), when I start to pray spontaneously, without guidance, what comes out is a series of personal reflections directed mostly toward myself and ever so often broad sweeping enough that they might bump against God. As a writer, I tend to have characters floating around my head and often what should be prayer is really personal litany, discussing the day with fictional characters I have invented to fill the silence. They are interesting people, who tell me about the fire they just survived and the divorce they’re contemplating, but they are not God. I avoid God, because He makes me work out my emotions. If I work my emotions out, then I don’t get to be angry about that one thing or bitter over that other.

Tuesday afternoon, after a few minutes of flailing in prayer, I interrupt the fascinating conversation I’m having in my head with the young boy holding the blue balloon who describes the sky as the butterfly net that has caught us all–a trite metaphor, but he’s a child–and force myself to return to focusing on God.

I pull out the Book of Common Prayer, because I need the guided words to help anchor my own; I pull out a red Moleskine and pen, and begin to list.

These are the things that need praying for, these are the things I need to, somehow, bother to bring up.

I use the order for Evening Prayer and, when it comes time for the intercessions, I pull out the list, stare at it, and slowly work down each line.

For imagination, for rebirth of creativity, so that I can write this book that I don’t know how to write.

And down I go. Line by line. This focus forces me to communicate with God, to take the time to be attentive and present to Him as He is always with me. There is no magic, no sudden epiphany, but there is the abiding sense of feeling rooted, feeling anchored, of knowing the things needing to be prayed are in fact prayed.

For friends without jobs, looking for work and worth.

On Wednesday, I do it again. I use the liturgy, which reminds me to pray for my neighbors, which I often neglect.

For C, who believes that God is evil and spiteful.

Today, I shall get up and do the same. I’ll make the list, add to it throughout the day, and then set aside the time to pray. I am not one of those Christians who have reached that place of praying continually. I’m barely a Christian who remembers to pray every day. But this is beginning, me and this red Moleskine; this is a start.

And this, friends, is but a bit of life unmasked.

—

It is my joy, with Joy, to share here words that expose life honestly, openly, and messily. Some days my posts for this meme are about this chaos of being, other days I manage a bit more gentle words.Would you join us in sharing the vulnerable times, the unordered times, the unkempt rooms? 

 Life: Unmasked

life: unmasked — when your thesis is “passable”

April 26, 2012 in life: unmasked with 28 Comments

Today, I share a post about life: unmasked, a blog meme started by my sensational friend, Joy.

—

I lay on the floor of my room, knees pulled to chest, dry eyes blinking slowly. “In,” I whisper to myself, “Out.” I repeat it three or four times, keeping my eyes fixed on the pile of clothes–dress shirt, brown belt, dress pants, Toms–that I had pulled off when I had gotten back, feeling like I was so constrained I couldn’t breath. “In,” I whisper again, “Out.”

A piece of stationary slides beneath my door.

I hate this day.

No one has to know. No one ever has to see this paper.

My thesis director tells me this as he hands over my defense form. There’s a bend in it, down the center, and he doesn’t even write the word “Passable” in the blank, which is what the other readers had called it, this thesis of mine that lies in slashed ribbons on the floor around us.

It wasn’t like a shot. There was no quick pull of a trigger. It was a bloodletting. Slow wounds. Slow, harsh cuts. My project had not been entirely understood or comprehended, in spite of the many caring and encouraging words I received from my director, an internationally renowned scholar and strikingly faithful man, the outside readers had not been amused by my attempt to be an exegete myself. We did not spend much time speaking about Scripture, but genre, form, categories. We spoke about everything I don’t much like talking about and spent no time on the things I think matter more than anything.

And I watched all that I thought was solid melt into air.

By the time the hour was over, I knew it had been a loss. On the sliding scale of thesis grades, I had come out with the lowest possible ranking just above outright failing and having to rewrite the entire project.

“In,” I kept whispering to myself, “Out.” At some point, I began to cry.

I’m supposed to be writing a book about reading the Bible well. How am I supposed to do that now?

For nearly a year, I had worked fingers to the bone trying to write what I thought was an exceptional blend of scholarly consideration and personal creativity in conversation with the Tradition. But it had not been seen as that; it had been seen as something cute, something trite, something common.

At one point, I tried to defend myself by explaining it was a form of prayer. Because, for me, the monks taught me to pray well. They taught me to form my imagination by the Scriptures.

It’s a prayer journal.

That’s what they called it in response. And not in an uplifting sort of way. In a common way. In a passable way.

“In,” I hissed, through clenched teeth, “Out.” The tears blurred my eyes as the second piece of stationary slipped under my door.

Passable.

I tried not to let it be personal, to receive it like an academic. But what I had constructed was a kind of art, not an article, and the word passable felt like a pronouncement over my life and its work more than it did this thesis. Because my thesis was an extension of myself. I left a piece of my soul within its pages.

What are you doing?

I stop reminding myself to breath. I reach a hand up to heaven, unsure of what to say. It’s one more thing. It’s one more feeling of being outcast. One more misunderstanding. One more time in which I feel completely and undeniably other.

And I don’t have an answer for Him beyond that, beyond that I feel as if my soul has been stabbed because, once more, I am not good enough to be in the circle.

Get up. Get up. I formed your hands. Get up.

I hate this day.

“I hate this day!” I breathed into the void between me and abandoned clothing.

After a moment, my outstretched hand caught my eye. “He formed my hands,” I whispered, blinking through tears.

And something clicked. I pulled myself off the floor and wiped my eyes. I looked over to find two pieces of stationary from my best friend, two encouraging reminders of how I am seen, even when I don’t feel that I have been. I went to the bathroom to wash my face, then changed clothes.

What do you do when your thesis is passable? When you feel that your life, your academic career, has been pronounced passable?

You remember your thesis presentation, in which you felt more affirmed of your life and calling than you had in years. You remember that you knew you were taking a risk with the kind of project you wanted to pursue, but that you pursued it under the most extraordinary of directors. You remember that He formed your hands. You remember that this day you hate is the day the Lord has made, that the gates are to be entered with thanksgiving in your heart, the courts with praise.

And you remember why you wrote it in the first place, why you write at all:

This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord.

You wash your face. You change clothes. You pick up a pen and you start the slow, tenuous process of writing your way back into confidence, back toward Mystery, back beneath the banner of joy.

Because it’s not for or about you, ultimately. It never has been.

Even when, right now, each step forward feels like a knife puncturing your lungs.

And this, friends, is a bit of life unmasked.

—

It is my joy, with Joy, to share here words that expose life honestly, openly, and messily. Some days my posts for this meme are about this chaos of being, other days I manage a bit more gentle words.Would you join us in sharing the vulnerable times, the unordered times, the unkempt rooms? 

Life: Unmasked

life: unmasked — i forget that i’m sick, too

April 12, 2012 in life: unmasked with 7 Comments

Today, I share a post about life: unmasked, a blog meme started by my sensational friend, Joy.

—

Sometimes I say damn.

I’m not proud of this. I’m not proud that even when I think I’m having a good day, one pot-shard sliced open left thumb is enough to make me curse deep under my breath. I’m not proud when I swear. I think it’s ugly and lazy. I think it’s used like neon colors on a pastel landscape–a bit of shock to an otherwise trite picture.

(But I have friends who curse and they don’t feel this way. And I have friends who curse that I love. And I’m not asking them to stop any time soon because of that whole they-talk-to-God-and-hear-Him-too thing.)

Of all profanities, damn really gets to me. It’s a power word. It’s a word that means to be cast from God. It is the word that refers to that space where He is not. And when I drop it on an accident, a fumble, a ridiculously minuscule portion of my life, sometimes I catch myself, stop short, and realize that I have just wished away God from a space, have authorized myself to put it beyond His reach.

It’s because I forget.

It’s because while I go to church every day of Holy Week, cross myself, pray through the liturgy, I don’t spend much time praying on my own. I get content with all the spiritual that I have surrounded myself with that I coast the rest of the days as if it’s enough to keep me going.

I get busy with thesis, homework, and myriad other little nuisances and slowly it slips from mind that reading the appointed Scriptures for the day or praying the office or simply praying outright is what keeps me balance. Then I’m near the end of the day, work piled in stacks around me, and I find myself dropping a few silent profanities over frustrated printers and that girl with the peroxide hair who talks too loudly and pronounces her Ls like they have their own syllable.

There they drop, a little rejection of God here and there, a tidy little line as I press feet hard against the hallway floor and pace down it as if the cosmos turns on my will.

It’s because I forget.

It’s because I get caught up in my own spirituality, this person who writes on this blog who seems so put together and nice and gracious. It’s because I get bound up in the idea of me, the one who prays all the hours and actually can focus long enough to get past an Our Father and at least five people interceded for. It’s because I have fallen in love with the idea of me more often than I have with the reality of Him.

It’s because I forget that I’m sick, too.

I’m just as sick with sin as the next person. I’m just as sick with all this mortal longing to be swallowed up by life. I’m just as sick with this fragile being that wants the service to hurry up and the profanities, the little damns, to not matter.

But He called me to different. He calls me to different. And on the days where I forget that I’m sick, He is content to let me remind myself that I am.

Slow, says the preacher in O’Connor’s “The River,” the river to that Kingdom of Heaven is slow. Conversion is slow. Transformation is slow. And when I forget that I’m sick, I forget that I’m being healed.

—

It is my joy, with Joy, to share here words that expose life honestly, openly, and messily. Some days my posts for this meme are about this chaos of being, other days I manage a bit more gentle words.Would you join us in sharing the vulnerable times, the unordered times, the unkempt rooms? 

Life: Unmasked

life: unmasked — god of the gaps

March 29, 2012 in life: unmasked with 15 Comments

Today, I share a post about life: unmasked, a blog meme started by my sensational friend, Joy.

—

When I was diagnosed with chronic insomnia earlier this year, I had envisioned a magic moment of transition in which I would begin to take prescribed sleeping pills and suddenly have eight hours of rest a night. I would be this wonderful person who slept, showered, read The New York Times on my iPad, and always had time to make a French press.

Things turned out differently.

The Ambien I take only lasts four hours and wakes me up around hour six because I have to go to the bathroom. Instead of sleeping more, I sleep the same amount as I did before, I just now do it sooner and wake up in groggy alarm feeling like I’m the kid who drinks two liters of Coke on the mission trip right as the bus stops in the line for Border Control on the Mexican-US border.

This semester, I’m taking a weight training class that meets early in the morning. Under normal circumstances, I’m able to exercise well in the afternoons. But lack of sleep and stress exhaustion combined, when I try to lift weights in the morning, my body responds by promptly having me reject the exertion on biceps by doing something infinitely more productive–vomiting.

I’ve tried everything: light breakfast, no breakfast, water, no water, wake up early, sleep in, nothing has helped.

My weight instructor is kind. She recognizes that I have a problem. I’ve reported the sleeping disorder and gone through the medical motions. Every day she sees me, she asks how I am. (As a guy, this is one of the worst questions that can be asked. I already feel emasculated since I can barely keep up, asking how I am is only one more layer of awkward pride stoning.)

But yesterday was different. She asked how I was, then over the course of conversation it became relevant for me to share that I was going to St. Andrews next autumn for graduate school.

“Oh,” she said with some surprise, “That’s a really good school.”

And like a tidal wave, emotion swept over me. I suddenly realized that she only knew me in the context of the class. I was the kid who was unable to keep up, who got sick, who had something as undetectable by observable evidence like a sleeping disorder and could be making the whole thing up.

Where was my tshirt that let her know I was super intelligent? Where was my sign that told her, “I’m really good as what I do.”?

I was sitting in biology last week when our professor asked us to share our opinions on evolution after she had presented her own. A few people spoke here and there, then I went, all prepared words and phrasings, calling myself a medievalist and high church, trying to explain a belief in evolution that does not adhere to a common ancestor, spilling out rabbinic readings and Aquinas. At one point, she turned a phrase just so and I reacted at the most inopportune time. She hurried past and kept talking and I realized, suddenly, that I had given her the impression that I believed that man was made in the physical image of God. My mouth hung open, I wanted to scream, to clarify. But it was too late.

Last December, when I got in a bit of hot water for criticizing the Live31 Movement, I received a lot of spiteful emails and blog comments that often pointed out I was trying to ride their success as a means to boost my own platform. I could not, as much as I wanted to, write emails back that said, “I have a book contract. I don’t care about their numbers. That’s not why I’m doing this.” Instead, I wrote massively long emails about grace and prayer and faithfulness, which were just as much about over-explaining than standing on the book would have been.

I do this all the time.

My theology is so fluid, my opinions so diverse, my wonderings so likely to change, I feel the need to constantly overshare my way into a person’s heart to make them like me. I fear being misunderstood because I fear that people will dislike me if they don’t get me. Me, ontological, wonderful me. I fear that if something is left not clarified, my very important life won’t be understood well and rightly.

This is completely ridiculous. And dare I even mention the egoism involved here?

Biologists refer to the argument God of the gaps as a weak, illogical approach to science in which something that science has yet to explain outright proves God without question. (The obvious problem being that as soon as science does provide an answer, God is, by this logic, disproved.)

I am learning to argue God of the gaps differently: God fills in the spaces where I haven’t given the itemized list of my theological perspective or brain space or graciousness. God fills in the spaces where I haven’t showered that day or had time to make a French press or couldn’t tell you what the cover of the Times was to save my life. God fills in all the gaps.

I hate trite, pithy sayings, but sometimes you have to bite your tongue, accept that you are misunderstood, trust the Holy Ghost and say, “Let go and let God.”

It’s a radical kind of trust. A trust that not all of you needs explaining all the time. A trust that He’s qualified you just enough for the moment you’re in. A trust that even if people misread you, don’t get you, don’t see, that that’s enough for the present. He holds it all.

Just like now, as I look at this post, and I realize it came out all different than I had planned. I had thought of smooth words, warm lighting, and gracious prose, like last week. Instead, you got too much information on when I have to use the bathroom in the morning.

I trust, without as much cheek in it as it may read, that God can fill in this gap too.

—

It is my joy, with Joy, to share here words that expose life honestly, openly, and messily. Some days my posts for this meme are about this chaos of being, other days I manage a bit more gentle words.Would you join us in sharing the vulnerable times, the unordered times, the unkempt rooms? 

Life: Unmasked

life: unmasked — for i trust the hands of the Potter

March 22, 2012 in life: unmasked with 23 Comments

Today, I share a post about life: unmasked, a blog meme started by my sensational friend, Joy.

—

Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?

– Isaiah 45:9

Clay fights you. In ceramics yesterday we entered our second day of throwing on the potter’s wheel, a process that I thought for much of my life was relatively simple. It’s not. It’s quite hard. You wet the wheel gently as it spins, stop it, take a lump of clay and form it with care into a ball in your hands, then trust in the power of angels and God’s providence of gravity that when you smack it down on the wheel, it will be close to center.

It’s never perfectly center.

It takes the handling, slow and deliberate, left hand against the left wall and right hand over the top pressing down, feeling in your arms and thighs the way the clay moves, wobbles and dances, until in the midst of your hands comes the moment of epiphany. Wobbles stop, clay slips quietly against cupped hands, and you have found the center.

Then comes the rest of the work. One finger pokes into the middle to form a hole which is slowly pushed to the bottom. A cup, a bowl, an urn, a vase, all begun by the single intrusion of one finger into the midst of the clay. There’s a trick though, in that the clay fights you. The clay doesn’t want the hole, the clay doesn’t want to be centered. Slowly it starts to warp, push out, and you need your other hand to be against the outer wall as you push in, keeping the clay in the center, always in the center, or else the pot warps. Sometimes the pressure against it must be so soft, you barely feel it. Sometimes you have to press hard, perhaps too hard, and you think for a moment you’ve lost the shape entirely as it groans against your discipline and slashes at your hands.

Once the hole is made, hands are free to brush against inner and outer wall, carefully moving in tandem, pulling out and up, forming interior, exterior, width, height. All the while the clay fights you. It wants to move from its center, it wants to warp itself and spin freely. But it makes a horrible pot if you just let the clay go. You, as the potter, know this; you feel it between your hands, you intimately know the clay even better than it knows itself, because you have in mind what it is supposed to be. But it fights. It wants to be something else. And it’s all you can do just to keep it in the center, never mind all the other myriad shapes and forms you might hope it to take once it gets there and stays.

It’s slow work. Every action is painfully deliberate, quiet, purposed.

And I  am like this clay. The fight is not what I become. The fight is to keep me in the Center.

Because I fight the Potter. Because I think I know. And all this while, I keep straying from simply being Centered.

Interesting thing about throwing on a wheel–there comes a point when you can’t change the clay any more without destroying it. You’ve used all the water you can, opened it so wide, pulled it so far, you have to let it go. Another touch would cripple the whole thing. You step back. You accept it. Off-center, warped, a vessel of wrath. It wanted to be something else, it wanted so badly to not be in the center. Eventually, because it had gone so very far, after you had tried so very gently to keep bringing it back, you have to give it over to itself.

Another thing, a more important thing: it hurts the hands of the potter. Clay has so many disparate particle sizes within it that it cuts against the flesh of your skin as you try to mold it. You walk away chaffed, scratched, wounded by the very beauty you are trying to create. Ever so often, a particularly large particle breaks through and it seems that your hand has been pierced. And it stays with you. The scratches and the chaffing redden your hands and repetitions of lotion only take you so far, can only be repeated so many times.

Because, the hard and simple fact is, you have to accept the hurt if you want to make a pot.

Our Potter accepted the hurt. Pierced hands and all. And His hands are on this earthenware life, pulling back and pushing in, ever and always to Center.

And today, I am leaving so very many prayers and questions behind. I am asking, simply, quietly, achingly–

Bring me back to Center, for I trust the hands of the Potter.

Bring me back to Center, for I trust the hands of the Potter.

Bring me back to Center, for only the Potter makes common clay into art.

—

It is my joy, with Joy, to share here words that expose life honestly, openly, and messily. Some days my posts for this meme are about this chaos of being, other days I manage a bit more gentle words.Would you join us in sharing the vulnerable times, the unordered times, the unkempt rooms? 

Life: Unmasked

 

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