End of Break

I’m back. Actually, I’ve been physically back for a cuppla weeks, but have had no gumption to write. Got a bit of reading done for fun, as well as for the now-defunct plan to travel to northwestern NoDak for my January term. (Incidentally, while I was kinda looking forward to the trip – spending time with a farm family, doing farm things – I am exstatic NOT to be in or near Minot, which is now rating the lowest temperatures in the lower 48. Whew! Dodged that bullet.)

To recap my past month:
* Did well in the semester. Could’ve been better, but that whole balancing-home-life-with-academics thing prevented all A grades. It was a good trade, as far as I’m concerned.

* Had fun at Christmas

* Got my CPE slot arranged for next summer. (Aside: I’m really looking forward to CPE in a lot of ways, even though it scares the pants off of me. I’m now feeling a bit more anxiety, since one of the chaplains I’ll be working with seems determined to push my buttons. In the interview he asked me, “Do you ever get angry?” I responded that, yes, of course I do. He said, “I think it’ll be interesting when you explode.” “Maybe from your side,” I said. “Precisely!” was his enigmatic reply. “Oy fookin’ vey!” I said – to myself, of course.)

* Started getting in some of by second semester books. I’m really looking forward to Systematic Theology and to my Loss and Grief class. The others I can kind of take or leave, but these two hold the most interest for me right now. I’ve already begun looking into the loss & grief texts, since the subject matter is so relevent to my current situation. So far, it makes a lot of sense.

* Managed to read Tillich’s “The Courage to Be,” Barbara Brown Taylor’s “When God is Silent,” Philip Gulley’s ” Hometown Tales,” Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and John Elder Robison’s “Look Me in the Eye: My life with Asperger’s.” Could take or leave Gulley, but the rest were very enjoyable.

* Never found the dog-snarfed Flash drive. (Background: two weeks prior to Xmas, The Mrs. wanted to get some pics taken of us to send to our respective familial units. A friend from school who dabbles (marvelously) in photography offered to test out her new camera on us. She put the pics on a flash drive so that we could transfer them. Same said friend and husband also agreed to catsit for us while we were gone. They came over the day before we left in order to meet the felines and learn the routines. As I was handing friend’s husband his flash drive back, Large Black Dog decided that I must have been passing a cookie to that guy instead of to her, leapt into the air and snatched the drive out of my hand. Despite my cries of “Gack! No! Durrrrrrr!” she swallowed the sucker whole. I offered to buy a new drive for our friends, and they assured us it was not necessary, but they definitely did not want that particular one back once the dog was done with it.)

* Attended a huge-ish non denominational church service/performance on Christmas Eve. There was lots of contemporary (i.e. crappy) music and the service was a bit too entertainment-focused for me, but the pastor’s message – which he addressed mostly to those in the seats who wouldn’t be there had it not been Christmas and/or had their friends/relatives not dragged them there – was (as far as I can tell) perfectly delivered. Good News proclaimed. Bravo, sir.

* Attended a Nazarene mega-church the following Sunday. Again, a bit too much performance and some of the music was – to me – theologically unsound (and musically boring), but the sermon was very, very good and seemed authentic. I couldn’t complain. Especially when their choir – consisting of home-grown talent (which was surprising to me, because a) there were LOTS of people, b) they were really good and c) a & b are pretty scarce in the Lutheran churches I’ve attended) – performed Handel’s Halleluiah Chorus. Brought a wee tear to me eye, it did.

* Caught Marley & Me, which ought to be outlawed. I managed to tear myself from my own watery-eyed inwardness long enough to observe that the Dolby Sound system was the only reason I was able to hear the last 20 minutes of the movie over the sounds of sniffling and nose-blowing. What a sad, sad movie! All the more so, cuz you knew from the start that it was coming. It was good though. It highlighted how animals can serve a very important role in binding family relationships. As I think of my own family, sometimes the animals were the ONLY common ground, genetics notwithstanding.

* Relaxed.

* Caught up a little with some old friends. It’s amazing how much good it can do to hear familiar voices. I miss you guys.

* Learned of the death of another old friend. I say “friend,” though I hardly knew her at all. On the other hand, I don’t think Libby ever met a stranger. She was always very good to me, anyway.

* Celebrated my wife’s birthday with Japanese food.

To sum up, it hasn’t been a terribly exciting couple of weeks, but it has been very enjoyable to step back and reflect a bit. After the harriedness of the first semester’s final days, that opportunity to contemplate a bit has been very much appreciated.

O Radiant Dawn

For December 21 (Solstice)

“O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light and Sun of justice,
shine on those lost in darknes -
come to enlighten us.”

O Key of David

For December 20

“O Key of David and Sceptre of the House of Israel,
what you open none can shut -
come and lead us out of darkness.”

O Root of Jesse

For December 19

“O Root of Jesse, Standard of the nations and of kings;
whom the whole world implores -
come and deliver us.”

O Adonai

For December 18

“O Adonai, ruler of the house of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the burning bush -
come and redeem us.”

O Wisdom

For December 17

“O Wisdom, uttered by the mouth of the Most High,
and reaching to the ends of the earth -
Come and teach us the way of prudence.”

Adios.

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for
Georgia Lee?

Tom Waits wrote this haunting song about a young African-American girl who was found dead not terribly far from the Waits household some time in the 1990s. The girl had gone missing, but for whatever reason – institutional racism is a good suspect – the media did not give her case much attention, and consequently, no search parties formed, no neighborhoods pulled together, and nobody found Georgia Lee until it was too late.

This song speaks very powerfully into my life. When I first heard it, the lyrics evoked memories from my childhood – memories that stick with me to this day – of my sister Sharee’s death. The sacred story in the family is that Sharee went to a party, something mysterious occurred, and the next day her naked body, mauled by dogs, was found on a lawn in a nearby town. The true story echoes this except in the following detail: the “mystery” surrounding that night involved Sharee overdosing and dying at the party. I have spoken with someone who was at that party the night Sharee died, and he told me that some bikers dumped the body on that lawn, because they didn’t know what else to do. Calling the police was not an option, given the nature of some things that were happening at that party.

To this day, my mother either doesn’t know these details, or she refuses to believe them. I’m not sure which, and I don’t intend to dredge the story up with her. The “mystery” of that party has been a bone of contention between her and my surviving sister, Desiree for years.

Desiree and Sharee were very close, not only because they were sisters, but also because they both lived through the trauma of living through the horror of their father’s schizophrenia and suicide, through the disorientation of my mother’s remarriage to my father, and through his suicide. Desiree – Desi, as we called her – began anesthetizing herself with drugs when her own father died, and drew more heavily on the pharmaceutical relief they provided more and more over the years, as she lived through further tragedies. The deaths I mentioned were the tip of the iceberg: Desi lost friends to overdose and suicide, she lost my aunt and my cousin, her long-time boyfriend Robert, and a little over a year ago, she lost Tom, whom she claimed was her soul mate. She leaned on drugs to dull the pain of those losses for almost forty years.

A few weeks ago, Desi’s pain came to an end. While making cookies for me with our mom, Desi fell on the floor and never got up again. We don’t know whether she had a heart attack, a stroke, or whether her body just finally screamed, “Enough!” The coroner’s report is forthcoming.

The comforting bit of news that comes with my sister’s death is that, for the last two weeks of her life, she had actually managed to get off the drugs, to get out of the basement to church meetings, to outpatient care, and to normal activities with new-found friends. She was baking cookies for me, for Christ’s sake! This is very comforting on the one hand, but on the other hand it really highlights the tragedy that was her life and the potential that was wasted with all those years of hiding from the pain.

When I first heard that Tom Waits song, I heard him singing about Sharee. Today I hear him singing, “Why wasn’t God there for Desiree?” In so many ways, Desi wasn’t that different from Georgia Lee. Even though she was 52 when she died, Desi was still a little girl – the same age she was when her dad killed himself, maybe the same age she was when they found Sharee – too young to be out on the street, running away from this world, not noticed until it was already too late.

Cold was the night, hard was the ground
They found her in a small grove of trees
Lonesome was the place where Georgia was found
She’s too young to be out
On the street.

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for
Georgia Lee?

Ida said she couldn’t keep Georgia
From dropping out of school
I was doing the best that I could
But she kept runnin away from this world
These children are so hard to raise good

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for
Georgia Lee?

Close your eyes and count to ten
I will got and hid but then
Be sure to find me. I want you to find me
And we’ll play all over
We will play all over again

There’s a toad in the witch grass
There’s a crow in the corn
Wild flowers on a cross by the road
And somewhere a baby is crying
For her mom
As the hills turn from green back
To gold

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for
Georgia Lee?

I miss you, Des.

Tikkun Olam

Heschel – or at least his ideas of guilt versus responsibility – have been on my mind lately.  It was serendipity that led me to this wee blog post this morning.

http://crossxroads.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/abraham-j-heschel/

Great Googly Moogly, I feel like dancin’!

I just finished up 2 of the 3 papers I needed to write over Thanksgiving break, and I’m outta my skull exhilarated to have them behind me.  Of course, they are utter shite, but they are done.  Actually, I’m not too upset about the Greek paper.  I may have pulled that one off.  The exegetical paper on Mark, though, yeah: shite.  I repeated myself over and over, again and again, ad nauseam, just beating a dead horse…you get the picture.  It’s too bad, because I did discover some interesting things about the text, especially when I compared it to Matthew.

One thing in Matthew that always bothered me was the whole thing about Jesus dissing his mother and his brothers.  “‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’  And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers!  For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and my sister and mother.’”  Comparing that text to the parallel version in Mark (which was one of the sources for Matthew, anyway), I came to realize that Matthew left a rather critical chunk out of the narrative.

In Mark, the context for that statement was that Jesus’ family comes out to restrain Jesus (this is right after he authorizes the 12 apostles to preach and heal and to cast out unclean spirits), because they thought he “had lost his mind.”  When you consider that, sandwiched in between Jesus’ family’s action and Jesus’ statement about who his true family is, you’ve got the story about the scribes who accuse Jesus of deriving his power from Beelzebul.  Well, shit, dude: in THAT context it makes sense, but Matthew just left that whole bit off!

“Well, you could have left that whole story off, R,” I hear you cry.  True.  I could have.  But I am now done writing two out of three papers, I’m not yet ready to dive into number three, but my fingers have the inertia.  I’ve got to write *something.*

OK.  Enough procrastinating.  Back to work.

[Exit: stage left, doing a wee jig.]

Zoinks!

Hi. I’m back. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted. Much zaniness in my personal life (including the death of my sister – long story and lots of difficult emotions associated with that) has kept me away. I’m in the middle of the last academic push before the Thanksgiving holiday, so I really have NO time to be tooling about on wordpress, but for sanity’s sake, I’ve got to put this out there.

Yesterday while taking a break from the insanity that is Exegetical Greek, I passed by the “free crap table.” Everyone is familiar with this concept: you have some crap to get rid of, you put it on the table for someone else to take. You’re in need of someone else’s discarded crap, you go to the table and you take it. It’s a strange system that smacks of Communism, so I’m surprised anyone allows it, yet there you have it.

Anyway, I spied a Scooby-Doo coloring book which someone had deemed as expendable crap. I seized my opportunity. It’s not that I really wanted to color – it’s just that I had a crazy idea to translate the captions into Koine Greek. I still may do that when I have time, but in thumbing through the captions while doing a feasibility test vis a vis the translation, here is what I ran across.

ruh-roh!

What. The. Very. Hell. Were. They. Thinking? Could this be a boner, er, gaff on the part of the artist? Might they not know that their illustration of Shaggy would inspire adolescents of all ages to mentally insert raging wood beneath Shaggy’s frock? Like, shit marie, Scoob. Jinkies, even.