theo|digital

Well, although the seminary still has one more official week, I’ve got to be done today. A little intimidating, although I think I’m okay. I’ve been relentlessly chopping a the academic task list, and today means one more five page exit essay for Ethics. That typically wouldn’t be a big deal, but I don’t even have a faint idea yet of how I want to approach it, and I woke up late.

I’d love to think that the finish line is gonna be tonight at 5pm and I can celebrate, and while I do have plans to hit dinner with friends, I don’t get any celebration or respite—I’ve gotta clean and pack and plan to leave for Colorado LT, not to mention actually be on the job to get our student leaders assigned and good communication with the YMCA of the Rockies established. The task list seems pretty overwhelming that already.

So, God, walk me through one more day of being faithful today. I don’t need to write a genius paper or make crazy LT waves—just need to be faithful.

Thanksgiving evening is a weird feeling.

I spent the day out with family. My aunt hosting, crushed olive hors d’oeuvres, red wine, great uncles, football on Direct TV, and not few Republican laments about Obama.

And after pumpkin pie, I did go back for apple crisp. And then coconut cream pie.

There’s the fake kisses, long small talks, phone calls from out of state, and then my drive back to the city, a little less than an hour with no traffic. I stopped at Walgreens on the way home cause I had run out of Dial, and I expressed sympathy with the cashier for having to work ’till 6:30pm on Thanksgiving. “Now it’s gonna be 7:30,” her boss walked up and joked.

There’s the return to the apartment and the kicking of the shoes and e-mail check and the casual browsing on Amazon.

But these aren’t the weird part.

It’s that time about 7:45pm when I identify what’s been bothering me for the last thirty minutes.

I’m hungry.

Really?!?

I ate today! I ATE today! White meat turkey (two ladles of gravy), green bean casserole, mashed potatoes thick enough to stand up, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and raisins, soft rutabaga, dips, and oven-baked dressing in the middle to keep the wrong juices from flowing together.

I’m hungry.

The weird part is admitting that it could be true. That me microwaving some leftover soup and snacking on corn chips while the last 45 seconds count down isn’t something dreadfully immoral. That six hours from the last meal really is a biologically acceptable time to return to the feeding. But I still I feel gluttonous. Who needs more food on Thanksgiving?

These past months I’ve felt pangs when I notice how little I’m writing reflection. This is a genre that’s helped me sort through years of confusing moments and big-grin highs. But school has tended to suck the writing and creative contemplation right out of me into critical book reviews and take-home exams, leaving scarce left-over words for text messages and terse to-do lists. So tonight, as I think, I’ll take it as the grace of God on a late November evening.

And on Thanksgiving, spiritual is where I’ve gotta go. But it’s not to rehash my necessary gratitude for extravagant American wealth in contrast with a poverty-clasped world; my three desserts to a cross-ocean family’s hunger. This is not because this thought is not strikingly true (to whom much is given…), but that it is not striking enough.

Maybe instead I’m noticing the inescapable similarities between reheating leftovers and choosing turkey from this afternoon’s candle-heated silver tray. Between the ordinary and the celebratory. Maybe it turns out that what we counted at 2pm as Food To Die For is the same substance I’m eating tonight as I’m Hungry Just Like Every Day At This Time. That I make much of something that isn’t special. That the consecrated isn’t remarkably changed from the plain.

Sure there are some special foods that I don’t often eat (my grandma makes cranberry sauce with orange rind bits that could solve Mideast peace). But for the most part: food is food. And I don’t emphasize this to desacralize the holiday as much as to bless the ordinary.

Sure, I’m struck by the wealth I live in that I “take for granted”; the vegetables I ate in early life because Mom’s rhetoric included those starving African children. But if I’m taking anything for granted, it’s that the Spirit is the one who animates my life, not the food. That special-ness (and there should be that) is brought by the same overlooked One who runs circumstance-independent throughout my life, mundane or not. The Blessings, the Right-ness, the Peace That Makes No Sense–comes from my citizenship in a kingdom is built by wine I don’t stock.

The prayer of thanks said in tired corners of the world over Too Little is the same dependence on the same food from the same God who both gives and takes what we need for life.

Meaning a beeping microwave—if moved by the King Who Gives—can be more a holiday than anything else I’ve experienced today. Extra-Ordinary Thanksgiving at 7:45pm. Weird.

One week since we arrived in Colorado (granted, our midnight arrival was probably technically Tuesday).

I’ve never seen it so rainy here, so dark. The surrounding landscape is hidden completely. Even Eagle Cliff has a cloud like a sheet partially draped over its top. And I’m trapped in it, the dampness in my lungs un-comforting to the dryness in my throat, and the aches elsewhere. I’m definitely sick. I spent the morning in my room before venturing to the Pondo for an early lunch (they had egg drop soup, but it had left-over peas in it from the night before) and then back home again exhausted from an hour out. I was able to get some e-mail done, but then let the sleep take me for two hours before five.

And now I’m feeling like I often feel when I’m on sick day: lazy. Like I should have gotten more done. Frustrated and guilty that daylight is almost ready to drop away, but my task list isn’t shorter.

I can convince myself that that this was an opportune time to have to take a break. And it was—I finally completed my full project leaders and coaches orientation late last night, and many of my initial major tasks for launching things seem to be complete. But to work in this kind of self-talk is to miss the point; staying within the confines of the assumption that if I am productive, I am valuable.

Sunday haven’t been the easiest day for me, since being up in Chicago.

I haven’t written outlines or something on my personal theology of “sabbath. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a set of experiences that have formed my assumptions. ” (I hear “sabbath” as a warm word, btw, not dark. And a word I don’t think requires a link to “Sunday” – but here I’m using it like that).

I think the sabbath rest has to do with God as my maker and me as the one he made. That he understands that I am surrounded by the opportunity for unlimited work—that my tasks are bigger than I will ever be—and being not only creaturely, but stubbornly opposed to that reality, I’ll try to finish the work anyway.

Sabbath is the idea that there is a rhythm to rest that I need. 1 in 7. A time for work and a time to remember I’m never going to finish the list.

And whatever I call “rest” has to involve freedom from spiritual, emotional, physical weight that naturally accompanies vocational accomplishment. So if I sit in front of TV all day but worry about my coming week – I’m missing it. Same if I ban myself from yard work – if my daily load is a life of reading and writing, physical tasks might be exactly how sabbath rests me.

But that’s not the component I’ve having trouble with.

The second part of Sabbath seems to be community. There’s something to resting with others. This is something that my sister Erika’s church back in Moscow, ID understood well: that sabbath was barely palatable without the table-leaf installed, wine glasses full, prayer and laughter mingled. I loved Sundays in the DawgHaus in Champaign because they involved a lot of we. We’d sleep in. Flop on couches and chat for hours before showering. Make breakfast together. This year down in Champaign, it seems to look like a regular home-cooked meal on Sunday evening with a movie after — actually the way we did it for a long time in DawgHaus 1.0.

But here in Chicago, I wake up to an empty apartment. I’ve don’t have the community of friends that thinks of Sabbath as gathering day, a laughing day. And by myself, it’s much harder to believe the first part: that I should be free of my list. With others: easy. Alone: I’m gonna work. Which is why I spent the morning reading research materials.

It’s just how it’s been. :-7

There flashed upon his mind the idea of the difficulty that attended the kind of life he had begun, and he felt as if he heard some one whispering to him, “How can you keep up for seventy years of your life these practices which you have begun?”

Knowing that this thought was a temptation of the evil one, he expelled it by this answer: “Can you, wretched one, promise me one hour of life?”

St. Ignatius of Loyola, in his Autobiography, during his stay at the hospital at Manresa, about 1523. (though it’s an autobiography, he dictates it in the third person).

I’ve has a similar thought many times. My desire to follow hard after Jesus. Can I ‘keep it up?’ for 50 years?

—————-
Now playing: Béla Fleck & The Flecktones – Big Country
via FoxyTunes

Part of what I want to track here (for my own emotional health) is what this feels like to leave so many years of campus ministry position and jump into a seminary. Perhaps a lot of my transitional stresses would be universal to the new friends I’m making here – those of us who are all starting this year and coming from elsewhere. But I’m sure there’s plenty of surprises that are unique to each of us.

There are so many simultaneous shifts happening that I I can hardly categorize them: Theological. Relational. Grocery-store related.

I’m not used to:
…sleeping in a single bed (although it really hasn’t been bad).

…saying “thanks be to God” after scripture readings (seminary chapel).

…the walk to class taking only four minutes (and I thought I was “on campus” in Champaign!)

…regularly hearing about “the call process” as referencing either a) how someone decided to enroll in a degree program or b) the hiring process for being a pastor at a church.

…pastors being hired.

…being assigned the reading instead of doing it myself.

…not having a coffee shop home (still working on it. Only starbucks is a close-by walk).

…being able to play with my roommate’s iPhone (my old roommates just talked about getting them).

…not having a chinese restaurant home (see “coffee shop”).

…formal academic theological Journals (surprise! The “J” section is the largest).

…hearing Swedish.

…feeling like I know less than everyone else (two people I’ve been hanging around have undergraduate degrees in Bible. I haven’t even had the intro courses).

…nobody stopping me on campus asking if we can get together and talk.

…hearing “Covenant College” and it referring to somewhere in Canada, not Tennessee (Covenant Evangelical Church, not Presbyterian Church in America)

…people not being able to understand me when I talk fast and mumble (I miss the Champaign friends who could interpret so easily).

…milk costing a $3.75 a gallon

…sermons instead of stories.

…paper handouts instead of digital (it’s sorta unreal. digital files exist around here but, let’s just say… Gmail Paper would probably get an enthusiastic reception here).

..the NRSV.

that’s good for a start…

ps – 2nd shot is a photo of my flat. I’m on the 3rd floor.

Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults – unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own.

Do you have the nerve to say, “Let me wash your face for you,” when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.

~ Jesus (Matthew 7), translated sans “splinter/plank” with heart-exposing simplicity by Eugene Peterson’s The Message. This got me today.

It seems it’s been so difficult to get my thoughts out. I’m not writing, not creating. I feel less inspired. I feel emotionally tight. Isn’t my inspiration supposed to come during these more shadowed times?

I’ve been excited about recording audio, but haven’t got to trying real editing. I’m not writing. My blog is sitting sorta silent.

It seems like it’s a good thing that I’m not scheduled to speak at SNG this semester. I don’t know if I’d feel inspired enough to speak. I feel taught and comforted by God. But not in the way that overflows out of me into story and truth.

Maybe it has less to do with emotional pain, and more to do with how emotionally tired I am. It takes a lot some effort to put out creative output. And I think traditionally, the pace of Sept/Aug has silenced me.

The adrenaline of life is source of both purpose and pain. It strains my heart, but makes it alive. I wonder if love and purpose – these two streams – run at different speeds. Love is slow, timeless. Purpose is accomplished, quick.

I run at both speeds. I need them both. And any overdose of one tends to hurt me spiritually.