Christmas Art

I just discovered a Christian artist the other day named Daniel Bonnell. His work is incredible. Take a look here.


Seeing Shepherds

Another poem about poetry...

This poem is about itself
and how it cannot speak.
It might as well be Danish or
a dialect of ancient Greek.

Its words lift off like air balloons,
each basket all aflame
with revelation's flickering tongues
contained within each lettered frame.

Before these baubles reach the heart
they mean to kindle, each
one's lines snap, baskets drop,
the motive force behind their speech

is lost. The poet even now
while writing feels despair
deflate her. "Mediocre," hiss
infernal whispers in the air,

"expendable, inferior,"
and with a downward gust,
they snuff out truth flames fluttering
until there's nothing left but dust.

I wrote a poem.

I haven't written one since I started dating Edwin, which is more than a year. Therefore, the poem is about trying to write poetry and not being able to, and the process of self-doubt, etc.


I am going to write a poem.
Idon'thavethewisdomforitIdon't
thinkit'sgoingtobeanygoodandwhoamI
tobewritingthisanywaywhoamIanyway,
the words clunk at my feet.
Where is the wind to carry them
heartwards where they might be lodged
like guests or bent nails in a fencepost
to mark that I have made a difference like
the sunset, for now the sky is velvet
where it was fire and there is no going back?

I am a carbon-based organism, nucleotides dancing.
I am a soul blown through with Trinity.
I am a daughter, sister, wife, warming
house, husband, and children someday. I am
a teacher to open ears and tongues. I am a member
of this glorious squalor of a species that
in less than half a century birthed and killed
its Creator. I am, and I have the right to write a poem.

Yes, I have the right, as I stretch out my fist
to seize it like a Berkeley protester. Shall I
clasp it to my chest and say "Mine, mine, no
one shall take it from me!" as they do? I become
a shallow ditch in Palestine, where many years
ago a frightened man buried his gift. Take the earth
of my hole, mold it into a jar of clay that I might not
fester but break, spilling sweet myrrh at your feet.

Broken Open Jar

For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.

So, it's been almost 5 weeks? More than? I haven't had a chance to blog about surviving vs. living (see previous blog). In this case, it has nothing to do with not thinking a lot about it. For some reason, tonight, God has really put this passage on my heart.

I got this image on Sunday of a broken open jar. The jar was made of some kind of ceramic and seemed very fragile. It wasn't shattered to tiny pieces, but was broken beyond real repair--maybe three big pieces and several small ones. Each piece lay outwards from the center, as if the jar broke from the inside out. Hovering slightly above the center of this broken open jar was a light shining brightly. Intensely. The whole sight was... beautiful.

That image was an answer from God. He was pointing me to what it means to live... what life is really about. That image led me to this passage. I had already been thinking a lot about how Paul talks about "to lose your life is to gain" and how Jesus repeatedly talked about the paradoxical idea of "to gain your life, you must lose it."

Living, and not just surviving, then is ironically about dying. This isn't revolutionary. I've known it for a long time. The question is what does this mean--what does this feel like.

Tonight, I had a very real experience of this so-called 'life'. I was verbally abused, disrespected, and, in some sense, persecuted because of certain moral beliefs in doing what's right--in choosing the moral path. At that moment, I had a chance to lash out, or to talk back. I could have brought up powerful counter arguments and proven my point. I could have been petty and just left or even struck back in a powerful way. But instead, I took it. I remained silent. I accepted the beating out of love for those who were abusing me.

It was one of the worst experiences in my life. Afterward, I was so distraught. I couldn't speak to anyone . There were no words to express what I was feeling; I think I was dumbstruck to really understand what I felt my heart go through. All I could do was busy myself, stop listening to the words of others, and try to move on. To be honest, everything in me just wanted to run--to run far far away from all those who had hurt me.

I guess that's why I'm here, writing. I suppose God really knows how to get me to reflect (I've been putting it off for way too long). This is... life? Is this what it feels like to be given over to death for Jesus' sake?

God, I cry out to you. I hope that your life was revealed in that instance. I hope that your love was displayed. They don't get it, Lord. I know they don't. Help me continue to trust in you--to trust that this life that you have given me, this life of being a broken open jar, is indeed... beautiful.

The Father

by Elanor

Dang it, I can't manage posting more often than once a month!! It's so strange how fast the weeks go by.

Monday nights I'm helping to lead a women's Bible study on Knowing the Heart of the Father, by David Eckman. In this study, we're discussing how family upbringing, specifically the relational patterns that are formed between us and our parents within our first decade, create misconceptions of God's character that are hugely difficult to overcome later in life. No father is perfect except the one in Heaven--and, more importantly, we as children are self-centered and immature--so no matter how affirming and loving our earthly fathers are, we are going to emerge from our childhoods scarred to various degrees with the belief that we are unlovable.

I say this to preface a revelation I had last night as Edwin and I were driving home from Bible study. Edwin led the men's group discussing the same topic, and he did an exercise with them: 1) List characteristics that describe parent-child relationships (loving, domineering, reward-punishment, etc). 2) Name all the roles of God that you can think of (The Teacher, The Punisher, The Father, etc). 3) Which role best describes who God is to you?--not the way you know He should be, but the way in which you actually relate to Him.

We talked about the guys' different responses to these questions. My attention was not fully on the discussion, since I was a little bit distraught because of a conversation I had had with my own father after the women's group was over. My dad had been critiquing one of the Joint's logistical policies, and although he was doing so in a completely respectful way, I resisted--I always resist when he critiques. In the car with Edwin, I tried to examine my instinctual, illogical reaction--but the only way I could do so was by indulging it. I said, "I don't like it when my dad critiques everything." And then I made the connection: because of my dad's tendency to analyze the world, I see God as The Corrector. To me, God sees things that are wrong and shows how they should be right.

There are MANY good things about growing up with this being my instinctual view of God. It means I believe God is good, God is always right, God knows what is best for me, God is interested enough in me to teach me when I am doing something wrong, God will take the time to show me how to do the right thing. I am intensely grateful to have an earthly father who has made it easier for me to know all these things about God, because knowing them has enabled me to live my life by faith.

And I was intensely glad to realize how my view of God falls short of the Father He wants to be to me. If I see God as The Corrector, I expect Him to always be critiquing things. And, the funny thing is, even though my dad never critiqued me when I was growing up, I think the fact that he critiqued so many things made me afraid he would critique me, too. It is this fear that I carried over to my view of God: I subconsciously act as though God, The Corrector, is constantly critiquing me. And so in my mind, I constantly critique myself. I am always looking for perfection, and I always see its lack.

My challenge in knowing the heart of my Father is to realize that He does not critique me. He looks at me and sees, not a wrong answer that needs to be made right, but a radiant daughter that He would give His life to claim as His own.

I experienced the love of the Father today in the way that it should be. After class, I met Winnie at a Boba cafe. We had an incredible conversation about class, church, and God. I got to know her so much better in only an hour and a half. The best part of this conversation was that I felt we spoke to one another as equals. She was not meeting with me in order to minister to me, nor was I to her--because we both knew the other one did not NEED our help. We both have our own individual communities and support systems; we both are growing in our relationships with God; this one conversation over Boba was not going to be the difference between life and death. We met together because we like each other. We enjoy spending time together. God wants to spend time with me like that. I keep going to Him with an agenda: "God, teach me this, help me with that, correct my life here and here and here!" And that is good, and some of my most cherished memories of God are when He has corrected me in some way or another. But God wants to spend time with me because He likes me. He wants to take walks down Telegraph Avenue. He wants to grab coffee in the morning before class. He wants to sit on the couch with me and not even need to say anything. He wants to be with me because I am His daughter.

Visions

by Elanor

I want to share a new vision for myself and blogging, and that is, to share new visions. I just realized half an hour ago that the thing I like best about Christian writers is when they present a picture of the world that I would be incapable of seeing on my own. Those new pictures place in me a longing for the perfection of the future, but they also remind me of the pictures I have been given. So what I intend to do with this blog is to share the visions God has given me—not of how-the-world-should-be-but-isn’t; visions of how the world can be: Earth’s crammed with Heaven / and every common bush afire with God (Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

I want to start writing poetry again. I haven’t for the longest time, because I got to the point where I was sick of how the whole process was so self-conscious. I had confused artifice with being artificial. I had to get away from doing it so I could breathe for a while without looking to see if there was a poem in the way my lungs expand and contract. Today I’ve been looking back at some of the things I’ve written, and I like them more than I expected to. I want to participate in creating beauty again.

It will take me a while, though, to get back into the habit of word-art. So for now I’ll just share something I found in my computer archives that made me really happy:

Well, little knot, I’m going to have you undone one way or another. Stop coming between me and my family. I don’t know how you got there. I do remember sitting in the car on the way home from school, maybe even as far back as elementary school. Daddy asked me how my day was, and there you were, tight in the middle of my chest, and you wouldn’t let me answer him. You change all my words, and make them come out like they’re trying to cut to pieces any person they might run into. You keep me lonely, and keep the people around me lonely, too. I’m not going to stand for it. You’re on your way out, just wait.

Sincerely,
Elanor

I wrote this last May, when I was thinking about how over the years of my childhood, I have built up bad habits in the way I relate to my family, habits that are now very difficult to break, even though I am now married. But the start of a new family makes it all the more important that I be aware of the habits of relation that I am forming with Edwin and with our future children, so that I do not allow these knots to get tied up inside of me.

I want to live.

Captain McCrea: Out there is our home. Home, Auto. And it's in trouble. I can't just sit here and-and-do nothing. That's all I've ever done! That's all anyone on this blasted ship has ever done. Nothing!

Auto: On the Axiom, you will survive.

Captain McCrea: I don't want to survive. I want to live.

Taken from Wall-E, emphasis mine.

I was watching Wall-E this morning (while playing WoW... yeah I know, I multitask wayyyy too much), and when this scene popped up, I couldn't help but look up and actually watch it. Quick synopsis for those of you who don't remember (or haven't seen it) **SPOILERS AHEAD**: Eve comes back from Earth having found proof that life is once again inhabitable. Although the Captain wants to head back home, Auto, the pilot's automated co-captain, was given secret orders to never return to Earth again. This results in, what becomes, the primary conflict in the movie.

This got me thinking: Am I just desiring to survive or desiring to actually live?

I must admit, lately, I have become pretty accustomed and happy with just surviving. My days have become super packed, routine, yet well-rounded. I have time to work, time to go to class, time to teach, time to spend with Elanor, time to pray, time to play.... Despite this enjoyable and relatively balanced lifestyle, I still find myself wanting more. It's pretty easy, I imagine, to slip into just being satisfied with all these things. I'm financially secure. I have an incredible job ripe with possibilities. I have an amazingly supportive and loving wife. I have awesome friends and a great church community. Yet, despite all these things, something in me still knows that all I'm doing is surviving.

At first, I thought that this must have to do with simply never having enough time. I miss those days when I had lots of free space to just take walks, to play until I'd much rather do work, to hang out with friends late into the night, to not have to keep thinking about the next thing I have to do. But when I thought about it further, I realized that even during those times, I still felt like I was just surviving. I suppose at first, I would feel more alive, but eventually I would reach a point where I felt the same trudging along.

It's kind of interesting. The world tells us that the more we do, the more successful we are, the more lives we improve, and the more progress we create, the more meaningful our lives will be. As beautiful and as poignant as Captain McCrea's words are, doing something instead of nothing won't truly lead him to life. He'll still be surviving... just distracted enough by the newness of it all that he won't mind the surviving.

Ironically, and unfortunately, the church (read: big-R Religious institution) tells us that the better people we are, the more we love, the more people we help, and the more people we bring to knowing Christ results in true living and not just surviving. Maybe there is a grain of truth amidst these ideas (I haven't ruled it out... yet), but everything inside of me says that if there is some truth, it truly is only a grain.

I am going to spend some time thinking and praying more about these things in the backdrop of my current busy lifestyle. I'll do some reading, some posting, some reflecting (probably over the course of the next few weeks or even months), and I trust that God will reveal more and more about what it means to live and not just survive. I have some ideas about what this kind of living could be related to: the spiritual realm (commonly understood as spiritual warfare), Christ living in us, abiding in His love, storing up treasures in heaven, afterlife... but, as you can tell, these ideas are a mess at the moment, and sadly (as well as ironically), I don't have the time or space (read: determination or focus) to delve in confidently and deeply.

But today is a first step. I didn't even realize that I was just wanting to survive.

Like, Captain McCrea, I want to live.