A Try

I was recently listening to a Radiolab podcast that featured writer Elizabeth Gilbert (yes, that one).  She spoke about inspiration, and how she has remained creative and productive as a writer.  Earlier in her career, she had learned to talk her to inspiration–as if it were outside of her. “TELL ME YOUR NAME,” she had demanded of  her book, “Eat, Pray, Love” when at the final stages of preparation before publication, the completed manuscript had no title.  After yelling at it–literally–for days, she woke up one morning and there it was: the answer, the title.  ”I can feel the difference when something is produced purely from my own sweat and blood, and when something is given to me,” she said. A writer has to do the work, she confirmed, of course. But those moments of pure inspiration, those creative gifts that seem to originate from outside of oneself, those are the moments that interrupt the rest of the writing process and make it great.

Last summer while studying French, I learned that the word “essay” is an adaptation of the French verb, “essayer.”  Plainly, “essayer” means “to try.”  An essay–a try.  These linguistic connections are some of the simple pleasures of language study: with the acquisition of a single foreign word, even the most native term can take on a whole new depth of meaning.  An essay–a try.  It made so much sense to me.

And I think it resonated with me because of the creative process that Gilbert described.  When I sit down to write, I am trying–trying to write well, yes–but really, truly, I am trying to be open to that something else…that something “given” that Gilbert describes as inspiration.  In that sense, I am trying not to write at all.  The best stuff on the page doesn’t originate from within me. It hits me, smack in the head, while I’m mid-way through a sentence at my keyboard. I can feel that it arrives from a different place.  From where?

Theologian Gordon Kaufman describes God as Creativity.  I’m not sure it’s God, but I do think, whatever it is, it helps me to believe in God.  There is something deeply sacramental about this experience within the writing process: in the relationship between a writer and her words, something good and beyond interrupts.  Mystery interrupts what is otherwise mundane and laborious. Isn’t that precisely the experience of the world the compels me toward the Divine?

It is the end of finals here at Harvard–and the completion of my Master’s degree, at that. And this is the time of every semester when we find ourselves asking, “Why do we do this to ourselves?” All the pressure, all the essays, ALL the essays.  Still, I keep trying and trying and trying–because, when I ask myself “Why do I do this? WHY do I do this?” I realize I am still waiting, crazy like Elizabeth Gilbert, for the mystery to interrupt. I want to keep waiting, to keep writing. An essay–a try.

Sabbath

“I haven’t written on the blog in so long,” I told my partner a few weeks ago. “I feel bad about it. But it just wasn’t coming to me–and lately, when the words come, I simply can’t get myself to sit still and write them. I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”

“No reason to feel bad about it,” he said, matter-a-factly. “Even God took a break.”  Even God took a break.

Indeed, at the conclusion of the first creation narrative in Genesis 1, God takes a break–a seventh day sabbath.  Surely, God’s break warrants my own respite from the creation process, right?  This was consoling for a time…until the guilt began to encroach upon my psyche again.  ”God took a break after doing something,” I told myself. “I haven’t done any writing at all lately!  And what’s more, God didn’t just create something. God created something ‘very good‘!” This logic only brings me right back to where I began.

This swirling mess of self-justification and degradation so often frames my daily reflection on life–not just my blogging life. If I’m not bemoaning my lazy writing practice, then it’s my inability to keep up with my growing email inbox or to-do lists, or my desire to work harder or fast or better, or harder and faster and better. The more I indulge this mindset, the more I find myself trapped in a world of insatiable demands.  This cannot be the “very good” world that God created…right?

“I feel like I’m drowning,” I recently said this to someone on a particularly overwhelming day of tasks. It’s something I have said a hundred times before on a hundred other days like that one, but on that day the figurative image flashed before me: my arms flailing about, splashing water everywhere, grasping for air.  Suddenly, I said to the drowning image of me, “Don’t you know that once you stop, you will float?”

It takes great courage to float–to believe that our survival does not depend on our own capacity to sustain ourselves.  Such a risk stands in opposition  to the myth of the self-made man that dominates the “American dream.”  That is a dream of insatiable demands. But that’s not the “very good” world I want to live-into anyways.

The great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The world was brought into being in the six days of creation, yet its survival depends upon the holiness of the seventh day.”  I’m trying to live like this–to live out the belief that my creation, my own hard work, will not alone sustain my survival. Sometimes, we all need to rest–to float–until the gentle current pulls us into another space of creativity again.

Ecstasy (and in the meantime…)

You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.
You have waltzed with great style,
My sweet, crushed angel,
To have ever neared God’s Heart at all.
Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
And even His best musicians are not always easy to hear.
So what if the music has stopped for a while.
So what
If the price of admission to the Divine
Is out of reach tonight…

…Have patience,
For He will not be able to resist your longing
For long.
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to kiss the Beautiful One.
You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
O my sweet,
O my sweet, crushed angel.

-Hafiz

My friend Chuck and I meet once a week to study for the GRE.  We know we wouldn’t glance at a single analogy this summer without the accountability.  Even then, our plans to plow through a few more drills during our time together are inevitably amended for the sake of rousing discussion about theology and our vocations as educator-artist-theologians.

Last week we were musing about good theology–about the nature of it, the courage and creativity of it. I confessed to him how badly I crave to write something honest and beautiful like our favorite scholars and theologians.  Like Foucault, or Simone Weil.

“There are these rare moments of ecstasy when I’m playing with my band–” Chuck told me. He is a musician, and you would know it by hearing him mention a few words on the subject; you can hear it in the reverent tone of his voice. “These moments of beauty and ecstasy–I think they’re like the beauty of theology you’re talking about.” I nodded, encouraging him. “When I’m with my band I can’t force that, you know? It’s a combination of too many things–it’s the way the musicians are playing together that night, it’s the space, it’s the crowd and their chemistry with us.”

Remembering the rush of a great concert, I affirmed, “Yes, that’s what I want, and I know it is about more than just me. When I write I am working so hard, but God doesn’t always show up, ya know?  That energy and beauty doesn’t always come.”  I paused, and then confided to him, “We’ve been working on these applications to doctoral programs, Chuck, and I feel like there is so much riding on this performance. It’s like a show with an audience full of the most brilliant musicians, all of them scrutinizing you, expecting to witness greatness…”

“I’ve been at shows when the ecstasy didn’t come.  When the performance never reached that perfection,”  he told me. “But you know, I could tell how much the band wanted it. And sometimes that’s enough for a great show. It’s not the ultimate; it not ecstasy, but sometimes it’s enough for audience to just witness that hunger within you.”

Hafiz says that even when we do not dance so badly, and even when we waltz with tremendous style, God does not always appear there on the dance floor. This does not mean that God is not watching the beautiful dance, I am sure. “So what?” Hafiz says, writing so affectionately of this angel as she dances. So what? So what?  Perhaps the performance can be beautiful, even as her partner still pauses at the edge of the dance floor.

Perhaps I can create something beautiful, whether or not perfection takes me for a waltz today…

Just Say the Word

When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed and in terrible suffering.”  Jesus said to him, “I will go and heal him.”  The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes… (Matthew 8:5-8)

There are many things about this section of scripture that make me squeamish.  In principle, I dislike charges of absolute authority, even as they are ascribed to the human incarnation of an omnipotent God.  I am especially uncomfortable with authority analogies related to the military, or any other institutions that employ violence as a means of enforcement, for that matter.  There is something about the centurion’s claim of unworthiness that gets me, too.  Perhaps I’ve seen too many well-intentioned Christians transform “humility” into unproductive guilt.

Despite all this, I cling to that declaration: But just say the word, and my servant will be healed.

This man knew the power of a word.

Jesus responded to the centurion, saying, “Go! It will be done just as you believed it would!” I’d like to believe that “Go” was the word with all that power.  I want to believe that because it is often the smallest words that heal me.  Last semester I took a seminar that required students to circulate written reflections on the assigned readings before class. While reading the first reflection paper of the semester, written by male student, I was touched by the care with which he employed one little word. “When one does this, she experiences that…” Every non-specific pronoun he utilized in the essay was gendered female—a stark contrast to the ubiquitous male-gendered pronouns that filled the theological texts we studied all semester. With that little word—“she”—this colleague extended a powerful message: language so often excludes people of your gender, and I am invested in changing that.  This gesture brought a little bit of healing.

Big words and long phrases have power, too.  I keep a stack of blank note cards next to my bed; you will find me frantically reaching for them while reading Nouwen, Teresa of Avila, and Foucault when I have come across a line or a paragraph too precious to forget.  I scribble them down and pin them to the bulletin board hanging on my bedroom wall where they remind me that so many others out there share the truths that I have unearthed in this short life. These are healing words because they remind me that I am not alone in my search for sense and meaning in my strange encounter with this world.

When I think of being “Christlike,” I dream of bringing words that heal.  This is how I make sense of a life of so many books and computer screens. I am searching for the Word.  The Word that heals.

Wide White Margins, And A Few Words

On the days when I particularly overwhelmed–when I am convinced that any reform in my church will require at least 10 million perfect words, when I am sure that nothing I can think or say or write will ever make any difference, when I am tempted to think that the countless number of books in Harvard’s theological library may actually make so little an imprint on the world–on these days you will probably find me cross-legged on the floor of the Harvard Bookstore.  I will be hunched over barren pages held together by thin bindings in the poetry aisle. Their words belong to people that most people do not know, people I do not know.

I don’t just come for the poems; I come for all the white space that fills these poetry books.  The white space actually comforts me more, I think, reminding me  of two things:  First, reminding me of the arduous silence–all the wordless thinking–that accompanied very worthwhile word I have ever written.  Wordlessness can be precious and productive in its own ways.  Second, reminding me that I do not need to say everything–I do not need to say everything–only a few beautiful, dangerous, honest-to-God, true things.  Poems are so captivating because they say so much with so little.

I am so little, and I want to say something worth so much.

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/kokjebalder/366508847/

If Your Voice Is Shaking

“Speak your mind, even if your voice is shaking.”  -Maggie Kuhn

I have memories of being a typically-gregarious little girl who was afraid to speak in class.  Maybe it was more self-consciousness than fear. My young male peers taunted me on the basketball court at recess and inside the classroom walls–”like children do”–because I was a young female with something she wanted to say.   They told me this.   They explained to me my boundaries “because I was a girl.”  Even though I sensed that all of us knew these were untrue, these young men said all this because it had power.  It had power because we all knew it had once been thought to be true.  And that was a powerful reminder.  (Where do second graders learn this?  Probably Nickelodeon sitcoms).

Generally speaking, I imagine these situations evoke two types of reaction: Either young females learn not to speak up in class; studies have confirmed this.  Or, they start talking louder.  With the impassioned cursive script of a second grader, I decided to report gender confrontation after gender confrontation in our class “Conflict” notebook, which my teacher read aloud once a week before facilitating a detailed lesson and class discussion concerning conflict resolution skills.  I started talking louder.

And I’ve been loud ever since. I’m the kind of person who steps out into the middle of Boston traffic to yell at taxi drivers who spit out racist and homophobic slurs in moments of senseless road rage.  I have this intense moral compass (undoubtedly learned from my mother) and I will simply shatter if I don’t speak up sometimes.

That’s why I don’t know what to do with the trembling voice and unsteady pen I have found myself with in recent times.  In moments like these, I don’t recognize myself.  I ask myself, “What happened to that little girl with that strong, loud voice? The young woman who believed in the potential power of her voice?”  I am second-guessing my words, projecting onto myself the presumed judgements of others.  I doubt whether anything I have to say could possibly make any difference for the causes I address.  My voice trembles when I speak, and I struggle to silence its shaking doubt.

I keep speaking, though. I keep writing, clearly.  One of my favorite quotes reads, “No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.”  It’s from Rilke, the writer who told a young poet to keep writing when he doubted himself.  I think my voice shakes these days because I have given myself to a sort of danger–to the danger of a challenging academic environment, to new friends and brilliant peers, to a world far from the comforts and tangible love of home.  It feels vulnerable. But it is getting better.

I still believe that one day I will open my mouth and the words won’t shake anymore.  I hope they will resound louder and stronger than before.

Until then, I’ll keep talking.

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/manjidesigns/2924530940/

Fire.

Lately each time I enter the gates of Harvard Yard from the concrete and brick of the Square, I am greeted with the opening word from Pascal’s Mémorial. The demanding red foliage of this one large tree declares, “Fire.”

Mémorial is Pascal’s cryptic account of the two-hour mystical vision he experienced one night at age 31. “Fire” begins the montage of parsed phrases, utterings of fear, wonder, reverence, and conviction. Pascal had the text sown into the lining of his clothes, which is where the account was discovered upon his death.  Perhaps he brought it with him because he could not escape it.  I have often found that if you listen closely, you can hear his heart racing between the words on the page.

Sometimes when I am sitting in the library here at school, I look out the large windows at the burning trees, and I think of Annie Dillard.  In one of her essays she describes a moth flirting with the flame of a candle, irresistibly circling its blazing wick.  The moth moves closer and closer, until it is too close; the fire consumes it.  The moth is burning, but it has become the wick of the flame it so desires.  Then my gaze returns to the book over which I hover. Fire.

It isn’t strange to me that God spoke to Moses through a burning bush. Aren’t we all met with moments of fire? “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up,” concluded Moses when he saw it (Exodus 3:3).  There are moments of fire that capture us so much that we cannot cease returning to them.  They are people, and experiences, and visions we must circle around; we must return to them. We must sow them into our clothes.  We must give ourselves to them even if they consume us. Fire.

Fire.

How to Change A Church

Yesterday I sat on the steps of Harvard Divinity School with Tim, a learned, enthusiastic lawyer who has returned to grad school to study church history.   Guided by Tim’s astoundingly well-rounded studies, our conversation weaved in and out of a number of topics, including our faith lives and religious traditions–he, a practicing Mormon, and I, a practicing Catholic.

In an effort to gain insight into my personal convictions, I think, Tim asked me an interesting question: “If you were instantly declared Pope, what would you change about the Catholic Church today?” I laughed along with Paul, another lawyer and fellow Catholic student at HDS who had joined in our conversation. What a question…

My response sort of surprised me.  Had Tim asked me what kinds of reform I would like to see in the Church, I would have confidently recited the well thought-out list. But that is not what he asked.  ”I couldn’t possibly initiate all the changes I’d like to see,” I told him. “And, honestly, I probably couldn’t initiate even one of them right away if I was magically elected Pope.”  I was being absolutely honest, and it was hard to admit this to Tim, and to myself.  

From My Dream of A Common Language

I spent the evening at ArtXchange, a gallery in downtown Seattle dedicated to promoting cultural exchange through the art they showcase. As I studied the featured exhibit by Deborah Kapoor against the captivating, meditative chant of a live Indian music group, I kept thinking about how my love of art is so bound up with spirituality.

In the opening stanzas of “Origins and History of Consciousness,” a poem by Adrienne Rich (it is among my favorite poems of all time), she characterizes the “true nature of poetry” as “The drive to connect./ The dream of a common language.” These simple phrases capture the real quality of poetry like no other description I have ever encountered. I would also apply the description to other mediums of artist expression, including the various mediums I enjoyed tonight. Literary, visual, and performing art captures me because it is a tangible form of our common human yearning for…for something beyond systematic grammar and simple cohesive reason. We need meter, clay, melodies and creativity to convey what our systematic, straight-forward prose cannot: something more. It is out of our dream of a common language that we create and engage art of all kinds.

From the Pews in the Back: My First Reading

Check out my latest post on the blog that accompanies From the Pews in the Back: Young Women and Catholicism, a recently released book to which I have contributed. My post is called “From the Pews in the Back: My First Reading.”

If you are also reading the book, I’d love to know about your “first reading” too!