Thoughts about community:

(or, how my mind has changed)

For at least the past year my lifestyle has demonstrated an increasingly individualistic bent. I have subconsciously tried to cut myself off from my communities, both here in Chattanooga and at home in Michigan, by consistently rating my desire for autonomy and independance ahead of my relationships. The idea of being accountable to or beholden to others, the fear of drama, of the messy obligations that go with the territory of a community, these things have motivated my retreat into myself, a retreat so gradual and tame that I've had plenty of opportunities to rationalize it, to distract myself from the outrageous selfishness that it displays. Only recently have I begun to question my attitude, and seen how radically false it is. Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk helped open my eyes. Through her, I was able to see how my individualism reflected one of the worst aspects of American culture: one that elevates self-reliance to an ultimate virtue, that encourages people to look out for themselves first and foremost.

I diagnosed myself as inhospitable at the soul level. My refusal to be vulnerable expresses itself in a staunch closed-heart policy--toxic and flagrantly unloving. It denies my need (yes: need) for community and fellowship. It makes true, powerful, transformative love impossible.

I am so tired of prideful possessiveness, of love limited by self-aggrandizing paranoia. Miserly habits of soul.

I came across this poem by Madeleine L'Engle that expressed the way I feel quite aptly.

Pride is heavy.
It weighs.
It is a fatness of spirit,
an overindulgence in self.
This gluttony is earthbound
Cannot be lifted up.
Help me to fast,
to lose this weight!
Otherwise, O Light One,
how can I rejoice in your
Ascension?
[Ascension, 1969]

Self-absorbed individualism is just that: overindulgence in self, fatness of spirit, spiritual gluttony. Indeed, help me to shed these earthbound pounds, O Light One.

Help me to, in those difficult but transforming words of Scripture, take up my cross daily, die to myself, follow Christ.

after reading "Night"

A friend of mine has been urging me to read "Night" by Elie Wiesel since freshman year of college--five years later, having finally complied, I understand why. It's the sort of book that compels you to write about it, if only to process it, to exorcise some of the horror that soaks into your heart during the brief hour and a half that elapses as you read through it. After I finished it and sat in my living room with a cup of tea, enfolded in the creature comforts of my happy golden life, I sought to come to grips with the truth that those pages had revealed: that to be a human being means to have within me the hideous potential that created Auschwitz. Somewhere amidst the qualities in my heart that Christians label "the image of God"--creativity, rationality, volitionality, morality, community--is this nightmare, this evil, waiting to be unleashed. It's chilling indeed to come to grips with the fact that I also, in my fallen humanity, have Satanic likeness, a resemblance to that brightest star of the morning whose fall introduced evil into the cosmos.

It is important for me to reflect on this, from time to time, because it's so easy otherwise for me to think that life is about being comfortable and on good terms with everyone, or achieving certain goals. It is too easy for me to forget that there is a deeper narrative beneath the surface and seeming of things, that each ostensibly minor choice I make has powerful implications in that supernatural realm, which is more real and true than the one that I so often delude myself into regarding as "reality."

"Night" took my hand and led me through the world as I so rarely allow myself to look at it: a wasteland of sin and despair and torment and night. It left my heart gasping for Light, and made me realize that, were it not for the presence of that Light pouring through me, igniting my heart, being breathed to flame by the wind of the Spirit, my existence would be that hell.

I am about to make some coffee this morning, about to venture into another routine day of three square meals, of familiar tasks and familiar faces, of comfortable comforts and comfortable discomforts. But I know that, at least for a time, I will be conscious of how precarious my little world is as I do these things. And I hope that this change in perspective will bolster my faith and remind me of how great my salvation is...and will help me be a light no matter my circumstances.

everything's going my way...

Usually I am fast asleep by 11:17 pm on Thursday evening. Tonight, however, my nerves are positively acrobatic, jubilant from the combined influences of a reckless McKay's book-buying binge, four brimming mugs of City Cafe home brew, and an entire evening of heart-lifting conversation. So here I sit on my living room floor, my back against the footrest of our decrepit orange armchair. My new books are heaped on the floor around me, their price tags already unpeeled and wadded up, my name already scrawled on their inside of their covers. I must go to bed, but I just need to scan one last time the juicy array of names: Hass and Cisneros, Chabon and Morrison, Erdrich, Woolf, Hawthorne, Wiesel, Munro, Ishiguro, Sams, Joyce, and Jones.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the waiting room of my mind. Oh, I cannot wait to get to know every single blessed one of you.

And don't worry, Jonathan Safran Foer. You will be joining us soon, via the United States Postal Service.