Roads Are Made for Traveling

Today was spent in an embittered battle against a statistics program on my computer. I have a love-hate relationship with SPSS. There is something satisfying when you make a few selections, press a few buttons, and a printout tells you that your results are significant. Oh, how we love to feel significant. However, the lover can be cold when a wall of numbers stares unemotionally back at you, defiant and obstinately refusing to interpret themselves in a way a normal human being would understand... (Reminds me of women sometimes... zing! ;)

Thus, after a long battle in man vs machine, I am tired. But tired is a good place to be when honesty is something to be sought after. After all, gone is the strength to find another distraction.

A friend mentioned to me that she just returned from a retreat with the outgoing class of HNGR interns. Juniors, doe-eyed and hopeful, waiting to change the world in just 6 months. New eyes for the least of these... jumping in with both feet already wet, their dreams and anxiety, palpable. I remember tasting it in my mouth as we tried to remember that nothing would be as we expected. Junior year with so much on my heart and mind. It was where I needed to be. Trust in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

I commented to my friend that I now feel less hopeful, not quite as young, and certainly less impressionable. "Oh for sure. Graduating changed everything," was her response. Did it? What changed between cramming for our last test and starting our first day in this entry-level job? What is it that left us, subjectively, when we left that square mile encompassing College Ave? What was it that we were so afraid of when our eyes were wider and our knees more calloused? The tyranny of 9 to 5. The wailing of a monday alarm and the anxious glances toward a friday clock. The passive withering of our 4 year $150,000 brain cells. The loss of our hearts in the slow exchange for the subtle American dream, slipped into as quietly but as surely as the sun bows out to the dark. It smelt of death in our nostrils, and we staked our passion as collateral, that "we" would never be like "them."

It's been a while since my knees have gotten dirty. When the rain stops, all sorts of unintentional things start drying up as well. I took a break from thinking. I've sought a reprieve from feeling. I'm growing a new hobby to scratch my aesthetic itch and to feed my money to. I'm putting on some snow treads and road tripping to the great state of Mormons and National Parks in hopes for something new. Something communal. Maybe I can find Someone in places with names like Eureka(!) and Freedom and Zion and Jericho. Yes, I'm sure of it, the Mormons were looking in the right place for God.

"Let's come back as better people."

[For the full sensory experience, this is to be read while listening to “Homecoming,” by Kanye West :)]



I’m under the impression that transitional periods of life, artificial time markers and cultural rites of passages are wonderful excuses to reflect, refocus, and redirect. (Perhaps to reduce, reuse and recycle as well?)

A quote was given to us upon receiving our HNGR certificates:

"Remember your Creator during your youth when all possibilities lie open before you and you can offer all your strength intact for his service. The time to remember is not after you become senile and paralyzed! Then it is not too late for your salvation, but too late for you to serve as the presence of God in the midst of the world and creation. You must take sides earlier - when you can actually make choices, when you have many paths opening at your feet, before the weight of necessity overwhelms you." -Jacques Ellul, from "Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes"

As I crossed over the bridge to Jersey, it felt as gangster and skank as ever. My home felt countless hours of silence and thoughts away, scattered with the ones who shared the bread and wine of my brokenness with me. A flurry of hasty packing, subdued looks, and a few unvoiced grievances later, I drove across lines that were more than just state borders.

[Now, how can I pretend to be an adult?]

All I have figured out is this: Grow where you are planted.

I could ramble on about chasing dreams and being true, about being thankful and living with no regrets, but you have pop-psychologists and crappy Christian authors to parrot those truisms for you. Instead I will ask myself to fight the lies of individualism (in community) while resisting thoughtless acts of conformity (apart from the world). I will remind myself that life is a process and that we are omni-nothing. Faithfulness is valued above whatever shackles the world calls success, and that people, whom we are called to minister to, loved and breathed in God’s image, are found in every corner of life. We are placed where we are for a reason. There are no shortcuts here. We might as well learn to thrive.

Trust, amidst the uncertainties and paradox, because there are many.

“I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.”

When I jumped out of an airplane with a piece of fabric to save my life, I realized that I wasn’t afraid of death. Death is easy. It’s quite passive. What I’m afraid of is a passive life that is more disheartening than death. Living life to the full is what’s hard. Remember the Beatitudes, the upside-down Kingdom, and the beauty of loving Jesus more than you love your husband or wife, your job, your children… “For your heavenly Father knows that you need them… Seek first His Kingdom…”

“Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, ‘I find no pleasure in them.’”

Maybe all of this is like a photo with the light flooding in, where the sun is brighter than it should be, and where the details and difficulties are bleached out in a glowing brilliance. Maybe. You can accuse me of forgetting about making ends meet, of glossing over moribund 9-5’s and of coming home without the strength to hope. I could be guilty of baseless idealism. But this is my point exactly… the Gospel was always counter-intuitively brilliant to me, absurd and unrealistic in this cold world, yet I believe it because of its inexplicable contrast against hopelessness and death.

If we are not light and salt, hands and feet, if we are not the hope we profess or the love that dies to give life, if cynics like me can’t look beyond our naval and hold onto something other than our stark existentialism, well… I would be lost.

Friend, don’t you dare wake up one morning and not know how you got there. And if you ever considered me a friend, don’t let me slide obliviously down that path either.

Faith, hope, and love. Always love.

["Now everybody got the game figured out all wrong. I guess you never know what you got til it's gone.... Do you think about me now and then?..."]

Dear Chicago:

Tonight was my last night with you, wrapped in blankets on the roof of my house, staring at your moon with my friends. It's the second half of May, but you're still so damn cold. I guess some things just won't change.

I sometimes catch myself wishing you were different. That I was different. I sometimes wish humility could have come without the humbling, that friends didn't come with the drama. Sometimes, I wish that your streets were gentler to my thoughts and your songs kinder to my heart. I wish you would have taught me to love rightly and to forget myself more often.

Maybe tomorrow, when I spend my night driving through Ohio listening to Over the Rhine, or next month back under the lights of Tianjin 羊肉 vendors, I won't be so bitter over your painful winters. Maybe, as I look up and see stars under Mongolian skies or neon towers across Victoria Harbour, a smile will greet the thought of my brothers and sisters who all have '08 after their names. After all, however imperfect and odd we were, however fleeting our joy was, you made us beautiful, if only for a moment.

Tomorrow, I'll squeeze the last of Wheaton in my back seat, packed in paper boxes. I'm sure I'll find pieces of you with every familiar face.

I'm leaving you with a broken heart, and I'm not coming back until He fixes it. I'm not coming back until I'm a better person, and your winds no longer cut so deep.

Until then, ciao, buddy. My friends here will hold you down.

Yea, here's to the nights we felt alive.

Love,
Chuck

Remember?

If I slide your picture underneath a frame,
I can grasp within my two hands
the moment we chose to leave our regrets
like muddy shoes at the door,
and let the whites of our teeth,
the creases at the corner of our eyes
select the memories I choose to recall.

Forget
In that moment, anything
but the lilacs lingering on a breeze
that never seems to leave this windy city
Unlike us, who,
with our patchwork hearts,
begin to drive, fly, walk,
RUN.
away from all that we chose not to frame.

If I slide your picture underneath a frame,
We will fossilize our smiles,
reignite our conversations with,
“Remember that time in Chicago...
That night... on spring break...
... Remember?”
We will dance around the demons slain by the Holy Ghost,
and will toast to the amnesia outside the frame.

This is the Way the World Ends, Not With a Bang But a Whimper

What's the point of not drinking if I'm going to wake up with a pounding pain behind my eyes? What's the point of not saying goodbye if I'm still going to think about you?




The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

Praying Our Goodbyes

Here's a prayer that our prof left us with today:

I give you praise, God of my journey,
for the power of love, the discovery of friends, the truth of beauty
for the wonder of growth, the kindling of fidelity, the taste of transformation
for the miracle of life, the seed of my soul, the gift of becoming
for the taste of the little dyings which have strengthened me for this moment
for the mystery of journey, the bends in the road, the pauses that refresh
for the faith that lies deep enough to permeate discouragement and anxiety

I give you thanks, God of my journey,
for all I have learned from the life of Jesus of how to say goodbye
for those who have always stood near me and given me spiritual energy
for your strength on which I can lean and your grace by which I can grow
for the desire to continue on, for believing that your power works through me
for being able to love so deeply, so tenderly, so truly
for feeling my poorness, my emptiness, my powerlessness
for believing that you will care for me in my vulnerability

I ask forgiveness, God of my journey,
for holding on too tightly
for refusing to be open to new life
for fighting off the dying that’s essential for growing
for insisting that I must be secure and serene
for ignoring your voice when you urged me to let go
for taking in all the goodness but being reluctant to share it
for doubting my inner beauty
for resisting the truth of my journey home to you

I beg assistance, God of my journey,
to accept that all of life is only on loan to me
to believe beyond this moment
to accept your courage when mine fails
to recognize the pilgrim part of my heart
to hold all of life in open hands
to treasure all that is gift and blessing
to look at the painful parts of my life and to grow through them
to allow your love to embrace me on the empty and lonely days
to receive the truth of your presence
to trust in the place of “forever hello”

(-Joyce Rupp)

Amen.

One Last Huzzah for Chi-City

To think oneself away from thoughts
is really like
hiring a beaver
to dam[n] Lake Michigan.

The PSI of driving by…
(under the yellow bellies of sliding street lights)
… concrete we’ve kissed with our feet,
coat still laced with our sins,
vaults my liver, lungs, heart, brain
tenuous and shifting
like the shadows unable to stand still.

3:57 AM

I crawled underneath my covers
Just as birds heralded another rotation of this world
Premonitions that should weigh no more than feathers
Are the hardest, heaviest of masters

"The tyranny of the shoulds,"
Bending my body and soul
Soul and body, no dualism here,
Upon my sheets like a vice
Perhaps I may yet wring a drop of wisdom out of the down

"I am who the Lord has made me."

Mantras to wash my trembling mind in truths
Too bland, too dense for me to palate.

Words do not breathe deeply upon my chest
Ideas are not soft upon my skin
The weights of balancing paradox, treading the gray,
Scrambling to hold both story and reality in my embrace...

Warmth is found in your flesh, flushed with life
And the ever haunting holy ghost.

Visions, thus, not so easily forgotten.

It's OK to be not OK.

A month and a half left until graduation. A month and a half left until the end of our college careers. Uncertainties refuse to remain relegated in the damp darkness of our unconscious for much longer. They snarl their threats in grad school rejection letters. They creep behind the masks of questions like, "What are you doing after you graduate?"

We are not our jobs.

We are not our grades.

But we are our community. I won't miss my assignments and papers, but I will miss people who I don't need to explain myself to. I will miss shared experiences that need no words. I will miss my brothers and my sisters who have seen the worst and the best of all I am, who know how I think and have seen me cry.

I remind myself of the ways in which God has worked in my life and how He has directed it, especially in the times He has given me very little choice in the matter. I try to tell myself that this is the case, that if given a choice, I would probably make the wrong one. But the uncertainties ask me if I'm just uttering a mantra to make myself feel better.

I want to actively embrace and prepare for the change that forges toward us like a runaway train. But I don't want it to hit me like one. If I knew how to anticipate the onslaught of frustrations and emotions, I would. But I don't.

My friends tell me that I think too much. (I think it's a control thing).

Henri Nouwen tells me to live in the present.

Where is my faith?

Jesus, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Three Stripes on a Puffy Sleave Means You're Better.

I don't mind driving from Wheaton to Jersey. It gives me lots of time to think.

I was listening to some Talib Kweli when in the middle of his song "I Try," Mary J. Blige sings about the upside down Kingdom. For some reason, those words contrasted so sharply with what I feel like Wheaton can be about sometimes. Achievement, success, degrees and graduate schools, well-dressed banquets, smiles, formalities, and hors d'hoeurvs with movers and shakers... they have their place in this world and culture. They have their purposes and necessities, but they have left me feeling grimy. I bit the hook, got snagged on things like admiring the Prof's gowns and wondering how mine will look, and now I feel like I have to scrape a layer of dirt off myself.

An upside down Kingdom, one that consists of the poor in spirit, mourners, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted. If that indeed is what the Kingdom will look like, why do I feel so far removed from the Kingdom, as if it were only something I could reach through books and biographies? Why do I feel my calling cede ground to comfort, status, and my own interpretation of it?

"Listen my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?" -James 2:5

What does it take for all my misdirected energy, tears, and efforts to be pointed back to my first love and His kingdom?

Until Next Time...

Many of my friends walked today. And others I will not see for the next 7 months, for better or for worse.

So it goes, so it goes.

Blessings, friends. May the Lord bless you and keep you... God knows you'll need it.

Ciao.