I KEEP FORGETTING TO REMEMBER

Tonight, I am writing my way through some final essays, personal statements, job applications, etc., and I ran across something I wrote in an essay for my English Senior Seminar class back in February. It's something I keep forgetting to remember.

I think that living through fear is one of the easiest ways we can destroy our creatureliness. God did not create us to be creatures of fear; and so I think part of vocation is dispelling the fear of messing up and simply choosing, trusting that God will find you on the road you are walking.

...

I really do believe God can use his servants to do meaningful work in any context, after any choice or blunder or weak-kneed move, but it is good to remember that “Maybe [God] just wants you.”

...

Maybe it is because of [our] rude understanding that the only thing that seems really right is to turn everything over. We can theorize and calculate and drive ourselves nearly mad trying to figure out what we should do or trying to get to the depth of a mystery, but in the end, maybe we just have to hold on to the truth of giving ourselves up entirely.

I really believe these things; I just don't feel them today. So I am glad to run into this reminder. And I'm glad for people who remind me. (Thanks, friends.) There is too much to hold in my own hands, and I need you. Also, there is so much I cannot understand, and this is okay, and I need to be better at trusting.

That is all for today. Thanks for reading.

(!) LOVE

Some people are easy to love and you love them.

Some people are very difficult to love and you love them anyway.

Mostly, you love very badly.

I love very badly.

(It's this thing we do.)

So let's keep trying, okay? Okay.

That's all I really wanted to say just now.

THE THING IS,

Something true that I've been rediscovering and reimagining with friends and writers of many faith traditions:

faith is carnal.

If you look the word carnal up in the dictionary, you get these definitions:

–adjective

1. pertaining to or characterized by the flesh or the

body, its passions and appetites; sensual: carnal pleasures.

2. not spiritual; merely human; temporal; worldly: a

man of secular, rather carnal, leanings.

You get these synonyms:

sexual, sensual, erotic, lustful, lascivious, libidinous,

lecherous, licentious; physical, bodily, corporeal, fleshy.

You get this antonym:

spiritual.

The thing is, I'm not so sure that dictionaries contain complete definitions, and I'm not so sure that carnal is supposed to refer only to lust and lecherousness, and I'm not so sure that carnal is not spiritual.

When we write definitions of words, they get clarified and burdened and hindered by context, cultural connotations, the biased reasoning of the editing team, and, well, imperfect understanding.

Sensual. Not spiritual.

Hm.

The thing is, the central story of my spiritual life is pretty carnal.

God screaming out of a birth canal, God drinking wine at a friend's wedding reception, God hugging lumpy, leprous people, befriending prostitutes, God getting thirsty. God snot-nosed from weeping, God getting dirt under his fingernails, God laughing. God stooped down and bloodied up and stretched out on a cross, dying.

The story is pretty sensual, pretty scandalous.

The dictionary writers got something right then, but just that one thing wrong: the antonym thing.

But then, maybe we don't really want that term—carnal—following faith is.

Maybe we don't really want a carnal faith; because it's a little scary, and a lot scandalous, and maybe we just don't want to feel or risk that much.

The thing is, I'm not so sure we have a choice. It's a carnal faith or none at all. And, the (last) thing is, I'm a sucker for stories. So I'll take the carnal one. You?

NOT BLOGGING FOR TWO MONTHS IS LIKE...

not blogging for two months is sort of like holding my breath underwater—until the oxygen is mostly depleted from my brain, and my eyes start to bug out (which doesn't feel great but is sort of exciting), and i finally let go of the tightness, the potential energy of holding it all up inside, and come up with this result: i suck in salt water and seaweed and splutter to the surface to gasp for a while in the air.

that's a bit what it feels like.

what i have been holding tight and thinking over these past two months:

-how remarkable insects are (watch life on the discovery channel. sunday nights.)

-how the christian reformed church (not just the entity but the individuals, myself included), has often over-fetishized the mind/intellect and has devalued or been apathetic to the body

-how i would really like to have a kaleidoscope again

-how art is not excessive or unnecessary

-how ants sometimes seem more purposeful than human beings (again, life, as well as psalms and proverbs)

-how we should tell the truth. also, how we should stop pretending like we can ever have the entire Truth in our finite state. this might keep us from wielding it like a sledgehammer to smash through people's heads and homes.

-how i was created with an able body an able mind and, however flawed they may be, what God wants me to do with them

-how i need to live in sunny places

-how "man is a vast deep" and we rarely get to the depths of ourselves or others or what we were meant to be and do (borrowed phrase from augustine, confessions)

-how learning more never makes the world or people or God smaller, but only more infinite and mysterious. i know so little. i want to know so much.

-how good it is be still

-how badly we need children's literature to save us from our smallness...to save us from being over-critical, overworked, overbearing, over-rational, overcautious, over-categorized, over-arrogant, overstudied, over-independent

-how i want to have a mud fight in our backyard

-how being kind or humble is sometimes better than being right (especially for those of us—ahem, leah—who really really really like to be right)

-how good and necessary it is to rest, and also to laugh (which are often the very same thing)

-how often i use parentheses

-how i love school and probably will forever

-how i want to write stories and poems that people can enter by multiple paths/realities and leave with more conclusions than i can anticipate. in other words, ones that expand and not restrict.

okay. those are some things. there will be other things. thanks for reading these things.