for your consideration

(cf II Corinthians 2:14--"We are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word...")

"As peddlers, we may tell stories about ourselves as well as about other people, but not, for the most part, our real stories, not stories about what lies beneath all our other problems, which is the problem of being human, the problem of trying to hold fast somehow to Christ when much of the time, both in ourselves and in our world, it is as if Christ had never existed. Because all peddlers of God's word have that in common, I think: they tell what costs them least to tell and what will gain them most; and to tell the story of who we really are and of the battle between light and dark, between belief and unbelief, between sin and grace that is waged within us all costs plenty and may not gain us anything, we're afraid, but an uneasy silence and a fishy stare. So in one way or another we are all of us peddlers of God's word. And so it's to all of us that Paul speaks. 'We are not,' he says, 'we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word; but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God in the sight of God we speak in Christ.' That's the whole point of it, he says: to speak in Christ, which means among other things, I assume, to speak of Christ. And when it comes to storytelling, that is of course the crux of it. If we are to speak, as he says, with sincerity--speak as we have been commissioned by God to speak, and with our hearts as well as our lips--then this is the one story above all others that we have in us to tell, you and I. It is his story.

"The story of Christ is where we all started from, though we've come so far since then that there are times when you'd hardly know it to listen to us and when we hardly know it ourselves. ... The story of Jesus is home nonetheless. You belong to it. It belongs to you. ... It is the story of a mystery we must never assume we understand and that comes to us breathless and broken with unspeakable beauty at the heart of it, yet is by no means a pretty story, though that is the way we are apt to peddle it much of the time. ... We are apt to tell his story when we tell it at all, to sell his story, for the poetry and panacea of it. But 'we are the aroma of Christ,' Paul says, and the story we are given to tell is a story that smells of his life in all its aliveness, and our commission is to tell it in a way that makes it come alive as a story in all its aliveness and to make those who hear it come alive and God knows to make ourselves come alive too. ... You and I are here in this place now because of what little life this story dealt us, because each of our stories is in countless ways different from what it would have been otherwise, and that is why in speaking about him we must speak also about ourselves and about ourselves with him and without him too because that, of course, is the other story we have in us to remember and tell. Our own story.

"We are commissioned by God to speak in Christ, and to speak in Christ is to speak truth and there is no story whose truth we are closer to than our own, than the story of what it's like to live inside ourselves. The trouble is that, like Christ's story, this too is apt to be the last we tell, partly because we have half forgotten it, pand partly because we are uncomfortable with it and afraid of sincerity. But tell it we must and, before we tell it to anybody else, tell it first of all to ourselves and keep on telling it, because unless we do, unless we live with, and out of, the story of who we are inside ourselves, we lose track of who we are. We live so much on the outer surface and seeming of our lives and our faith that we lose touch with the deep places that they both come from. We have the story of our own baptism, for one--if not by water, in a river, then by fire God knows where, because there isn't one of us whose life hasn't flamed up into moments when a door opened somewhere that let the future in, moments when we moved through that door as Jesus moved out of Jordan, not perfectly cleansed but cleansed enough, with the past behind us, we hoped, and a new sense of what at its most oultandish and holiest the future might become. And God knows we have all had our wilderness temptations too--not the temptation to work evil, probably, because by grace or luck we don't have what it takes for more than momentary longings in that direction, but the temptation to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one, to settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of for holiness; to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead for truth.

"Two stories then--our own story and Jesus' story, and in the end, perhaps, they are the same story. ...We have it in us to be Christs to each other and maybe in some unimaginable way to God too--that's what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another's pain and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoicing at another's joy almost as if it were our own. And who knows but that in the end, by God's mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and his story will come true in us at last.

"And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all."

excerpts: "The Two Stories", Fredrich Buechner

wise as serpents; harmless as doves

I have been identifying with Lucy Honeychurch of A Room With A View in much the same way that I identified with Lily Briscoe of To The Lighthouse and Katherine Forrester of A Small Rain. Unraveling her character as I turn the pages is an exercise of self discovery as much as entertainment or diversion. Through all of these women, all the characters that I have known over the years, I recieve an ever expanding sense of what it means to be a human and a woman. This sense is invaluable, but I also wonder sometimes if it is misguiding. How true do these characters ring, that I should feel such kinship? What if I "cleverly am being altered" after false images--images that cater to my idea of how things "should" be, rather than how things are? It is so tempting to regard Forster, Woolf, and L'Engle as infallable in their depiction of human beings, and so convenient. If they pen the human nature perfectly, I have a reliable source of information to consult and draw conclusions from. If not, then I must entertain the idea that perhaps my perceptions about humankind, and consequently my perceptions about myself in relation to humankind, are flawed. Of course, they are flawed.

I do believe that the insights I gain through my readings far outweigh the errors I acquire. I would never ever consider reading a step away from the straight and narrow, or a useless empty pursuit.

I would consider it a dangerous one. An occasional reality check into the finitude and fallability of the prophets I so admire is necessary to keep me from a mind unguarded. The act of reading is that of judging (charitably, humbly) and reorganizing one's perspective around the truths that emerge.

Usually my thirst is for an open heart, a pliant mind. My upbringing has conditioned me to be too judgmental and unyielding. However, in my struggle for a teachable spirit I must not forget to discern. And this is yet another tension in a world of checks and balances.

Look: it's spring

I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

excerpt, "A Settlement"
Mary Oliver

meditations

Did you know that Buddhist monks have the enviable reputation of being the happiest people in the world?

This may not surprise you. It didn't surprise me, when my housemate informed me of it several weeks ago. I recieved the information with a nod.

"I guess that makes sense...I mean, simplicity is supposed to make you happier, and so is charity, and passionate devotion to a higher calling. Aren't those things what being a monk is all about?"

Aubrey had agreed, adding, "They meditate, too. Cultivate self-control and tranquility." She poured herself some coffee and stated, "If I wasn't a Christian, I think I'd be a Buddhist monk."

I considered this. "Me too." And I thought no more about it, until last evening. I had returned to a cup of chamomile tea and a house hallowed by rainfall after watching "Confessions of a Shopaholic" at the cheap theatre. The movie had been utterly worthless but amusing: poorly written, unrealistic, forgettable, lacking even the saving grace of a satisfyingly escapist romance, but featuring beautiful people, delightful fashions, and a few humorous scenes. Even so, I felt relieved to be cozily home in my pajamas under my blankets, listening to the small rain in the fresh-scented dark. After a day so fastpaced, I had expected to find sleep within moments, and was surprised to find my mind still on the near shore a half-hour later.

I was thinking the sort of thoughts people think at 11 pm as they wait for the slumber bus: a fairly unregulated gush of memories from the day's thousands episodes, analyzed and overanalyzed, reenvisioned and wished into more favorable but (alas!) only ever imaginary outcomes. In the midst of this exercise, I had the sudden realization of how many hours of my life I spend absorbed in this futile accounting! Evening after evening for most of the years of my life I waste in naval-gazing. Alongside this rather depressing angel of a thought sidled a second angel, resembling a grinning Buddhist monk. The question bobbed into my brain whether Happy Monks ever indulge in such rehashing, and he seemed to shake his shiny bald head.

So I tried an experiment. I relaxed and began to breathe deep cleansing breaths. My mind began to clear. I let go of the cares of my little life: the irretractable moments of self-absorption and immaturity, the burden of being responsible for the images of a thousand selves in a thousands lightings at a thousand angles in a thousand mirrors, the blind reaching forward and obsessive glancing back. In the relieved quiet that remained, I felt my heart beating ahead into a wide and spacious future, my lungs pumping abundant clean air, and my entire body filling with a free and easy peace. It pleased me to think of my mind, well-equipped and with room to grow, and of my personality in all its individuality and sacredness, and of my body in its strength and its capabilities. I laid on my bed and devoted my time to being content and grateful: to praise.

Happiness is really so easy to find, and so freely obtained, if you can keep a strong enough grasp on the perspective that matters. In this distorted world, that is the hard part.