Sunday, December 28, 2008

320. not being lazy...

Just wanted to let you know that the lack of posts isn't entirely because of laziness.

I'm actually trying to finish up two essays that I need to write in order to finish my application for Mars Hill Graduate School where I'm hoping to get into their Masters in Counseling Psychology program.

I have until January 15th to get my application in but I want to do it right and knowing my penchant for procrastinating, I've set a goal for myself to have both essays done by January 1st. That way I can do some actual proofreading, as opposed to the half-assed proofreading I do in my blogs. Speaking of my blogs, I've noticed that I've picked up a lot of bad habits because of my blogging.

For example, I don't know if you've noticed but I sometimes start sentences with conjunctions like "and" and "but." I don't think that's technically wrong, but I'm pretty sure that it's not going to look good in an entrance essay for grad school. I tend to play fast and loose when it comes to grammar in my blog and it's been harder than I thought it would be to go back to writing properly.

My bad.

And (see, I did it again!) so it's taking far longer than I thought it would to get my essays done.

And so, it might be another week or so before I get back to posting regularly again.

And I want to because I really want to continue my thoughts on the whole Bob thing.

Thanks for your patience and I'll see you next year!

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

319. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Here's to a safe, fun, and happy Christmas.

SnowManSkillz

And yeah, that's right, I built that snowman!

Friday, December 12, 2008

318. found another one

[preface]

A few months ago, I created a new tag for my blog called Christians (see entry 303). The basic idea is this: I’m becoming more and more convinced that the work of Christianity has as much to do with redeeming the world - building the Kingdom of God here and now - than it does with getting people to pray a salvation prayer or understanding a set of spiritual laws. And so when I find a link that illustrates the kind of work that christians should be doing, I’m going to post it up and label it as “christian” whether the person featured is a christian or not.

[end preface]

It's been a while since I've put one of these up but I'm convinced I've found another "christian" - someone doing the kind of thinking and work that christians and the church should be doing. This time, it's a farmer who produces the best foie gras in the world. And I know there's a lot of controversy surrounding foie gras because of the way it's produced (geese or ducks are force fed far more grain or corn than they would eat otherwise which causes their livers to swell and get extra fatty and it's that abnormally large liver that becomes foie gras) but the way this guy does it, there's nothing forced about it.

Back in Genesis when God told Adam to subdue the earth, I don't think God meant the kind of unsustainable corporate farming practices we use today. I think God meant for us to do something like what this guy Eduardo is doing - working with nature to create something amazing. And for that, I'm slapping the "christian" label on him.

Check it out, it's a fascinating talk.

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

317. let me introduce you to Bob

Something strange happened last night.

My church held the first of a two-part seminar titled, "Space to Breathe: Worship and the Arts." It was one part experience (they made us do stuff) and one part discussion (they made us talk about stuff), both meant to help us explore what worship is or what it can be. Because worship is so much more than a (sappy) musical genre.

I went in not quite knowing what to expect, but excited at the same time because I have lots of questions about worship and I'm always excited about any way to get the arts back into the church. Having both in one seminar sounded almost too good to be true. And while I did learn some great things about worship and art, I also learned something far more profound and important about myself.

But I'll get to that further down.

Well the night began with a kind of improvised labyrinth. The chairs (we don't have pews) were arranged in such a way that they created paths that led us to three stations, each of which had a kind of spiritual focus. There was a tidy little handout that led participants through the labyrinth with one page guides that provided hints and suggestions as to what to do at each station. I forgot to bring my handout home with me so I may get this wrong but I believe the three stations were rest, reflect, and respond.

The first station, rest, was the simplest. It was just a little corner of the sanctuary where we were asked to sit and wait and acclimate ourselves to the spiritual nature of what we were embarking on.

And thats when the strangeness began.

I think I knew I was in trouble the moment the darkness and the quiet began to envelop me.

It wasn't a voice, it wasn't the awareness of the nearness of the Holy Spirit, it wasn't anything that felt at all spiritual. That is to say, it wasn't something outside of me that I felt. Rather, it was something really deep down inside of myself that was making itself known. And when I say "deep down inside," I don't mean physically because I'm only 5'5" so there's not a lot of deep to go down into. I mean deep down in my spirit/psyche/soul - whatever it is that makes me me and not just a sack of proteins and enzymes.

Now I don't mean to break the narrative, but it's going to be difficult to continue writing this if this "something" that I'm referring to isn't named. And so I'm going to call it Bob. And if you're wondering why I'm doing this, try reading the rest of this post substituting the words "this something" every time you see the word "Bob," and you'll understand.

Bob was down there wanting to push through to the surface and make himself known. I knew this was happening because for some reason, Bob was trying to go through my tear ducts. And maybe that makes sense because if the eyes are windows into a person's soul then if something from within that soul is trying to make its way back out, well why not through the window?

And I didn't fight it. I knew this labyrinth thing was a spiritual exercise and I wanted to experience whatever it was that was there for me to experience. I let myself shed a few small tears but somehow I knew that wasn't going to be enough for Bob.

I spent quite a bit of time at that first station. I knew part of the exercise was to rid ourselves of our need to rush from thing to thing. And I wanted to give Bob a chance to do or say what he wanted. After I felt as if I had given myself and Bob enough time, I moved on to the next station - the reflect station.

This station was set up at the front of the sanctuary. On stage were a bunch of candles - big ones, small ones, lots of those tiny tea light candles. It was quite an array. But I didn't get all that good of a look at them. At least not at first because Bob started using my tear glands as punching bags. And I let him wail away. I cried that kind of hearty, convulsive cry - the kind that babies cry because they have no other way of expressing what they don't know how to express. And I didn't know what I or Bob was trying to express either but it must have been important because it wasn't going to wait for words.

I told a friend once that unexplained crying episodes were kind of like taking a shit for the soul. Sometimes we stuff things down and do our best to keep it down but then we get all constipated and the soul can only hold so much in before it starts getting ill and so it gives us the teary version of diarrhea. All that nasty shit that we didn't want to deal with at the time, all that stuff we thought was over and behind us, it all comes spilling out through our eyeballs and our nostrils.

I covered my face and wept into my hands. I didn't want to make a spectacle of myself and disturb the other worshipers and so I wept in silence. And of course I wasn't expecting this so I didn't have any tissue on hand. Once I was done with my little crying fit I realized I had two handfuls of tears and snot. I suppose the normal course of action would be to get up, go to the bathroom and wash myself off but although I didn't understand what I had just been through, I knew enough that I wanted to stay where I was as gross as I was. I wiped a bit of my messy onto my pants and spent a lot of time just looking at the candles on stage.

I switched back and forth between just being there in the moment and trying to analyze what had just happened.

Normally after a crying fit, a kind of peace descends because, to return to my shit analogy, the bowels are empty and clean. But that's not how I felt. I still felt broken somehow. I knew that Bob wasn't done with me yet, not by a long shot. And so I waited and tried to analyze and when I realized that though there was still work to be done, that Bob was done for the night, I moved on to the next bit of the labyrinth.

I never really made it to the last station - the response station. I mean, I walked over there but saw that it was set up as a kind of makeshift painting studio - there were paints and brushes and heavy paper and the floor was covered with tarp. But I didn't feel like painting. I thought about just grabbing a brush and some paint and letting loose on the canvas but I'm no painter. If I had gone that route, most of my time would have been spent thinking and hemming and hawing and not putting anything down. And so I went to the bathroom, cleaned myself up and went back to looking at the candles.

After a while, I and everyone else made it over to yet another part of the sanctuary where we finished up the discussion part of the night. It began with talking about what we had experienced in the labyrinth. A few people shared their thoughts but I kept mine to myself - not because I didn't want to share but because I had no idea what Bob was trying to do or say to me.

And I still don't.

But I have a few ideas about what Bob might be trying to get at.

This has been a really strange year for me. Lots of ups and downs (to put things into perspective, losing my job was probably the least of my downs). I think part of what Bob is trying to relay to me is that I've spent far, far, far too much time trying to help and fix others and not nearly enough time on myself. Another thing I think Bob is trying to get me to deal with is my spiritual life. I need to work things out with God.

And maybe that last bit about me reconciling with God sounds a bit odd or surprising seeing as I've done a bunch of posts about church and Christianity. But that's theology which may be another way of saying theory. A friend of mine (and fellow Quest blogger) recently put up a post where he talked about how the academic study of theology is often far removed from the actual work that the Bible is telling us to do.

In a similar way, it's far easier for me to ponder my own thoughts about what's wrong with the church and Christianity than it is to deal with what's wrong with me and my own Christianity. Part of the way I've been able to get away with this has to do with one of the problems I see with contemporary Christianity. I think far too much of it is focused on individual spiritual development and not enough on the work to be done out in the world. I use that as an excuse to not deal with the junk in my own trunk. It's a classic case of speck versus plank. I busy myself with specks while ignoring the freaking giant sequoia growing out of my own eye.

Bob probably has a bunch of things he wants to work out with me and now that he's made himself known, I'm going to try and not ignore him as much. Because he's not going anywhere. And I probably can't deal with all of Bob here in my blog but I'll cover as much as I can. Because writing is the best way I've found for me to work through issues and because writing for an audience forces me to be real and cogent and it forces me to flesh out the backstory - the history that gave birth to the issue in the first place - and that helps me as well.

And so, I introduce you to Bob.

Bob says, "hi."

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

316. random bits

I've been working on another post in the Layman's Theology series but it's still a work in progress. Give me a few more days on that one.

In the mean time, here are a couple of random bits about me:

  1. I have this thing where I rarely finish books. I don't mean that I start reading a book and stop reading somewhere in the middle (although that happens as well), I mean I read the book almost all the way through but stop just a few pages from the end. This happens with both fiction and non-fiction works.

    Thing is, if I've made it to the end of a book, I'm very invested in it and dread getting to the absolute end where the book will be behind me. I don't want it to end and so I just don't get to the end.

    Of course this poses a problem with works of fiction because while in non-fiction works, you usually have a very good idea about what the last few pages or paragraphs are going to be about (some kind of summary or recap of the author's conclusions), the end of a story is unknown. To get around this, with works of fiction, once I get near the end of the book, I'll flip forward and read the last few pages just to see how it will end. Then I go back to where I was reading and then read forward but still stop before I get to the bit at the end that I've already read (because if I read that far then I'll have finished the book which is what I'm trying to avoid).

    This is one reason I like reading short stories. Because they're shorter, I don't get as emotionally invested in the book and so have no problem finishing. For some reason, I don't have a problem reading the last short story of a short story collection.

  2. I hate my feet so I wear socks almost all the time.

    Living in Seattle, this isn't a problem because the cold weather necessitates socks and shoes almost year-round, and so even though I don't wear shoes in the house, it doesn't look odd if I have socks on indoors. In Hawaii, I got around this by wearing shoes whenever I went to friends' houses and only wore slippers (flip-flops) at home when friends weren't over.

    Why do I hate my feet? Because I have ingrown toenails on my big toes - actually on most of my toes, but it's particularly bad on the big ones.

    I don't think it's bad to the point of being repulsive, but they're far from being properly pedicured (I can't cut them to the proper length anymore) and so I keep them covered up.

  3. I part my hair on different sides depending on what day it is.

    I wake up in the morning, take a shower, and before I style my hair I check my computer or cell phone to see what the date is. If it's an odd-numbered day I part my hair on the left. If it's an even-numbered day, I part it on the right.

  4. And speaking of bathroom habits, here's how I brush my teeth. I squeeze a bit of toothpaste onto my finger (about half an inch worth). I pop this bit into my mouth and mash it into my teeth using my tongue. As I'm doing this, saliva builds up and once things get wet enough I start swishing it between my teeth. After a few minutes of this, I spit out what's in my mouth and then start in with my toothbrush.

    Two reasons I do this. One, while swishing the saliva/toothpaste in my mouth, my hands are free to do other things, like shaving or styling my hair. Two, I like to think that this is kind of a poor man's mouthwash - that it gets the toothpaste into those hard to reach places like back teeth and between teeth.

    And lastly. . .

  5. I once saw three movies in two different cineplexes in one day. But I can't remember which movies.

I have quirks galore, but who doesn't?

Feel free to share your odd habits in the comments section.