7 posts from December 2008

"[T]he thought pierced him [Sam] that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach."
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

"The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." - Isaiah 11:9

"Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!...
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen." – Romans 11:33,36

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From Faith & Theology

“But what does it mean to take the place of man, to be Himself a man, to be born of a woman? It means for Him, too, God’s Son, God Himself, that He came under the Law …, that He stepped into the heart of the inevitable conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of man. He took this conflict into His own being. He bore it in Himself to the bitter end. He took part in it from both sides. He endured it from both sides. He was not only the God who is offended by man. He was also the man whom God threatens with death, who falls a victim to death in face of God’s judgment. If He really entered into solidarity with us – and that is just what He did do – it meant necessarily that He took upon Himself, in likeness to us, … the ‘flesh of sin’ (Rom 8:3). He shared in the status, constitution and situation of man in which man resists God and cannot stand before Him but must die” (II/1, p. 397)

Like Barth, Torrance stressed that there is no system (no ontology) by which such affirmations can be explained. They are either understood out of themselves or not at all.

-Barth

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I've done enough.

[my friend Chris]

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The Art of Disappearing.

When they say Don't I know you? say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say we should get together.
say why? It's not that you don't love them any more.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees.
The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished. When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

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I sleep, but my heart is awake.

-Song of Songs 5:2

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At least four different people in the last 24 hours have said to me "I have done enough" -- said by way of a conclusion reached regarding something they did or said that was in some way incongruent with the normal patterns or actions of their lives thus far. It was an announcement that they weren't going to do the thing that they usually do.

I have had this thought as well - a kind of exhaustion of resources, or maybe thinking, "Can't a person get a little bit of help here ?" So that maybe it was a call or cry to the universe for some help, a clue, a tip off, a course correction, a confirmation that all is not in vain. Something. A sign? Can I get a witness ?

Or else it's something childish like, "I just walked away with new free shoes -- and those shoes should have been better."

I have made no preparations for Christmas - no gifts, no anything to speak of and there is no 'because.' I have done enough. In that sense, it seems to me that I have come to the end of that path. That it's time to do things in a different way. It's time for something to move forward, and I can't move it forward. The only way for that to happen is for me to fall back. I hate that. Falling back, I mean, retreating. I want to be large and in charge and move it forward. But it's down to surrender. It's laying down the weapons and disarming.

I dropped a [heavy] can of dog food on my foot last night. Ouch. I hate that when that happens. I tend to take things like that as a sign, then decide that that's stupid. When I discount my own signs and portents its usually that -- my little concerns and disappointments are little, minor, silly and petty compared to the needs and passions of the world. This makes mine a matter of shame and embarrassment and not worth the trouble to look beyond them to that which the signs point. The little and the insignificant IS the season, is it not? It's a sign because it's minor, unimportant and easily passed over. You don't need a voice from the sky to tell you to listen up.

I am no longer expecting the temperature of the room to suddenly lower or there to be wavelike energy emanations announcing an inner truth that is about to be revealed.

"In my heart, I know it was true." God is breaking down old hardness of heart. [maybe] The past-memory-flashes of old failures are perhaps an incipient recognition that I am not that person now, that I might be able to acknowledge and be responsible for what my younger earlier self has done , left undone , done out of stupidity, lack of reflection lack of awareness of childishness.

I have done enough. I have done and now my doing needs to be different.

I taught a yoga class somewhere on Sat that I don't usually teach. As I began the class (not knowing exactly what I was going to do, trying to 'read' the room,) I thought "I've done this for so long now" -- meaning, I guess, that I have come through a lot of digestion of yoga as a means, as a path. I have to teach now out of my own being, not out of a formula or out of how others teach. I have to be the master. I have to own what I know and give it away.

"I have done enough" might be that the desire for more, always more is in conflict with the fact that I do indeed have everything that I need. I have done enough and now a different kind of learning and service might be in store for me. Who knows what enough means in this sense?

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Last Night As I Was Sleeping

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

Antonio Machado
Translated by Robert Bly

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Okay , it's cookie time. I love cookies more than candy more than cake, but I don't bake them anymore because I'm trying to not eat sugar or calories or fat of anything that tastes good, for that matter. But a person can dream, can't they?

MAGAZINE

Tough Cookie

By AMANDA HESSER (NYT)

Don’t even talk to Jean Scardina about all the Christmas shopping and baking you have to do. She will humble you with the hand-knitted dog sweaters she made for her daughter’s rat terriers, gingerbread houses and marzipan figurines of Santa’s workshop she makes as decorations — oh, and the 6,000 cookies she bakes as gifts.

I had heard from a friend that Scardina makes 16 varieties of cookies. All petite and neatly decorated, they vary from Maida Heatter’s chocolate shortbread to Anisscheiben, a German anise meringue cookie that sits out overnight before baking, to Pfeffernuss to molasses crinkles to chocolate pinwheels to delicious Yugoslavian squares, layered with cookie, jam and crushed meringue.

Yet Scardina, who at 79 regularly stays up until 3 a.m. baking and knitting and whatnot at her home in the southern part of San Francisco, couldn’t understand why I’d want to write about her and the 500 or so dozen cookies she bakes, packages and gives out to a lucky 85 people every Christmas — a tradition she started back in 1951. After much sweet-talking, she finally relented, but then there was the issue of photographs. None of her would be allowed, and none could be taken while she baked. “I can’t compromise the quality of my cookies by accommodating a photographer,” she said.

Yes, ma’am.

I was beginning to see how she managed it all, raising four children and cooking dinner every night. Did I mention that she also works as a volunteer in the textile-conservation department of the de Young Museum and runs a knitting program at California Pacific Medical Center?

I was instructed to come to her house at 7 p.m., after she finished making dinner for her husband, Vince. I arrived to find a reserved woman wearing mauve pants, a mauve vest and mauve lipstick, her hair clipped in a bun, and her warm but protective husband, who insisted that I sit in the living room for a few minutes, presumably so he could check me out before unleashing me into the kitchen. There was a fire going, a pine-cone wreath above the hearth and, in the corner, a vintage chicken-feather Christmas tree from 1907.

This year Scardina was ahead of schedule — “Not for you people,” she pointed out — but because her department at the museum would be closing early for the holiday and she wanted to be sure that her colleagues would receive their gifts. The chocolate shortbread was one of the last things left on her list to do.

Scardina’s kitchen is like a museum of appliances, beginning with a snazzy Bosch dishwasher and spinning backward through the George Foreman Grill, an original Cuisinart and a G.E. refrigerator with vertical doors. The pièce de résistance is a 1955 white enamel Wedgewood stove that she refers to as her baby. It contains one small oven. “Frankly,” she said, “I couldn’t keep up with a double.” A small butcher-block counter is two steps away. There she rolled out the shortbread dough using — listen up, Cook’s Illustrated — two quarter-inch-diameter dowel rods to guide the dough and make sure she rolled it to the perfect thickness. Then she used a plexiglass strip and a pizza cutter to slice the dough into squares. Not once did she use a timer for the oven. Baking is like breathing for her.

The cookie baking began the year Jean and Vince were married, right after she graduated from Berkeley. “We didn’t have much money, and it was a way to give people gifts without spending much,” Jean said. She started with oatmeal and chocolate-chip cookies, and production ballooned quickly, at one point exceeding 600 dozen. “That was the year we were still eating them in June,” Vince said.

The recipes that make up her extensive repertory today come from friends and magazines and cookbooks, but Scardina has changed nearly every one, reworking the shapes to fit into her boxes and adding, for example, fresh ginger or nonpareils where desired. Each has been typed into a spreadsheet for easy tripling and quadrupling. She also has a shopping spreadsheet, detailing the 41 pounds of flour, 37 pounds of sugar and 11 pounds of butter she needs to pull it off.

During the year, friends collect spent See’s Candies boxes that Scardina then wraps with Christmas paper for packing the cookies. But that’s as close to her kitchen as her friends are allowed to get. “This is my own madness, and I can’t see dragging anyone else into it,” she said. This has meant finding her limits. “Sometimes I would try do to two kinds in a night, but that’s 70 dozen. By that time you’re pretty pooped.” Occasionally Vince would offer to help with the decorating, but when Jean noticed that the cherries weren’t placed just so, he found himself back in the living room in front of the TV.

Recipients, however, have it easy. All they have to do is eat the cookies promptly. No letting them sit around. And there’s really only one way off Jean’s list. “You have to die,” Vince said.

"And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence. How could anyone want to live here? That was the question they asked one another, out of their father's hearing, when they came back from college, or from the world. Why would anyone stay here?

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape ! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne's lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father's hopes, God bless him.

She had to speak to neighbors in their gardens, to acquaintances she met on the sidewalk. Stangers in some vast, cold city might notice the grief in her eyes, even remember it for an hour or two as they would a painting or a photograph, but they would not violate her anonymity. But these good souls would worry about her, mention her, and speculate to one another about her, Dear God, she saw concern in their eyes, regret. Poor Glory, her life has not gone well. Such a nice girl, and bright. Very bright.

That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life.
In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting, and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all."

"Home" p. 281-282
Marilynne Robinson

You continue struggling to see your own truth. When people who know your heart well and love you dearly say that you are a child of God, that God has entered deeply into your being, and that you are offering much of God to others, you hear these statements as pep talks. You don’t believe that these people are really seeing what they are saying.

You have to start seeing yourself as your truthful friends see you. As long as you remain blind to your own truth, you keep putting yourself down and referring to everyone else as better, holier, and more loved than you are. You look up to everyone in whom you see goodness, beauty, and love because you do not see any of these qualities in yourself. As a result, you begin leaning on others without realizing that you have everything you need to stand on your own feet.

You cannot force things, however. You cannot make yourself see what others see. You cannot fully claim yourself when parts of you are still wayward. You have to acknowledge where you are and affirm that place. You have to be willing to live your loneliness, your incompleteness, your lack of total incarnation fearlessly, and trust that God will give you the people to keep showing you the truth of who you are.

-Henri Nouwen

Philosophy For Our Time