I’ve been thinking lately about support networks.
Today, as I type this entry that I hope I will be able to post, I’m waiting for a response from the WordPress support team, as I cannot connect to my blog or my blog’s dashboard. I get this long delay where my computer is supposedly “connecting….” and then I get nothing. Dead.
You know, technology imitates life.
It was a warm day in July. I was a nanny in Wiesbaden for an American military family (friends of my parents) for the summer. I was sixteen. The family had a close friend (who became a good friend of mine, too), whom I’ll here dub “B”, who greatly enjoyed spelunking, short wave radio, and going on what nowadays would be called “extreme” history excursions.
B and I spent many hours, standing outside by his car evenings, discussing novels, poetry, philosophy, and Monty Python. 
And he took me spelunking through Maginot Line fortresses (highly illegal, but fascinating, and the best possible way to personalize history). We climbed WWII ruins—giant bridges that were bombed to still-impressively towering rubble—and ate tinned rations atop them, while listening to cassettes on my boom box and laughing over “Bloom County”. We radioed my family via three or four other short wave radio operators, relaying a ‘howdy’ from faraway Germany (this was long before cell phones and the internet, during the reign of the Commodore 64 and small BBS networks). We watched Bastille fireworks reflecting on a lake beside which we camped.
On this day in July, we (the C family, B, and I) were all in the middle of a weekend trip that included visiting the only two Maginot Fortresses that were legally open for exploration. On this day, we were on the return trip, and stopped in Bavaria, hoping to catch the Oberammergau Passionspiel. That was a no-go, so we wandered around Oberammemrgau and Garmisch, then headed to Dachau to absorb the Konzentrations Lager. 
I was undone. We spent the greater part of a day wandering the grounds of the camp. Two days earlier, I could “hear” the cannons, the machine guns, the explosions of the war, as I picked my way across a farmer’s field beneath which tours were exploring the Hackenberg fortress. I about jumped out of my skin as the gun turret I was sitting on began to rise, like it would whenever a French soldier was ordered to fire on advancing troops. Today, as I stood long before the ovens, I could smell death. I walked through the “showers,” meditated over the firing range, and absorbed every photograph and monument as if through my pores. I counted the steps from the huge platz where roll call was taken, along the long tree-lined avenue, to the back of the camp where monuments to Jews, Protestants, and Catholics were now standing. This was a smaller camp, but was itself immense, a ghost town for a city of death.
How many of my family died here? I wondered. How many killed here? I’m primarily German with a small branch of Jewish heritage. How many walked through here in open-mouthed horror, as they liberated the camp? Every part of my being resonated with the might of the atrocity. Continue reading
It was long in the coming, actually. It all began when I was 25, standing on the tar-black roof of my apartment building in Browne’s Addition, where we would often go to breathe in a spectacular view of a Spokane night. It was an evening in July, I bet, since we could get a fantastic view of the fireworks shows (either on the Fourth, or for the annual Royal Fireworks Concert), and I had brought my friend M up to hang out with a couple coolers (I still had bad taste in alcoholic beverages, merci).
Here begins a series of meditations, or better, recordings of meditations, that I experienced on my now ended two-week trip to Spokane.
Preface—the necessary details that come before the good parts
Imagine the mountain-fed river. The winter was very hard: snow depth was at historic levels, and its endurability was more than that of many Spokanites. The mountain (just a foothill in the Rockies) still boasts her white peak, but the sudden heat fought to overcome that. And the river always carries the brunt of these annual competitions. She was, as she always tends to be during these times, magnificent.
I was staying with a couple of friends in Browne’s Addition, and from their balcony, I could see the Spokane bend through the ponderosa forest, as she raced past the new River Run community and (unseen from the balcony) SFCC, off towards Riverside State Park. If the sliding door was open, we couldn’t but hear, throughout the entire apartment, the rush of her rapids, intermittently punctuated by the “Chicago!” cry of the resident quail—a reminder that I was just on vacation here from the Midwest, and would have to return all too soon.
Pain hurts. A lot.
For these past few months, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around chronic pain and how it’s found its way into my daily life. I have long believed that everything in life is potentially meaningful. And I want to find a meaning to glean from this.
To be frank, I’ve been thinking about pain when I should be thinking about other things—like how well a certain student answered the prompt on the final exam I’m grading, or how a certain thinker interprets Paul Grice’s theory of meaning (for my dissertation), or how I can be there for a couple of friends who are undergoing a painful divorce.
But the thing is, the pain is insistent and impolite. I’ll be in the middle of a particularly difficult passage of meaning theory, a passage that requires at least three careful reads and full mental attention, and there it will be, demanding I focus on it instead of my work. I’ll be listening to a friend who’s coming to terms with his coming out, sharing his burden of powerful familial upheaval, and there it’ll be, insisting I think about me instead of my friend. Yesterday, a friend told me about her recent walking of a marathon, and how the next day, she could hardly move for the pain, and my sympathy leapt instantly into changing the subject about me. I understand because I have pain all the time.
Ew.
Consider the following statements:
(1) She’s a Christian in name only.
(2) She’s an atheist in name only.
It seems significant that (1) makes sense to us, and that (2) seems absurd.
Wow. Jon hit it on the head with this one. If you can’t read it well on my site (I have to resize it to post it here), do go to his. In fact, go to his anyway. Daily.
I was given a thorn in my flesh—a messenger of Satan to beat me—to keep me from exalting myself. Three times I begged God that it might leave me. And God said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I would rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me. So I am content with weakness, with mistreatment, with distress, with persecutions and difficulties for the sake of Christ; when I am powerless, it is then that I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:7b-10)
One way to understand this passage is to infer that the “thorn” Paul had to come to terms with was a sin. It’s certainly possible to take this from the fact that Paul describes it as a “messenger of Satan.” Another way to understand this passage, taken from the same description, is that the thorn is a physical ailment. Indeed, one tradition has it that Paul had eye problems, another epilepsy. But neither of these interpretations are sufficiently supported by the evidence of that description. This is clear if only from the fact that both are plausible, given that hermeneutic.
The ambiguity surrounding Paul’s thorn allows for deep spiritual possibilities. Since we have no idea what this thorn was, we are not clouded by overzealous literalist interpretations that might hinder us from gleaning the truth of God’s nature. We are not thereby hindered from meditating on this divine exchange and gleaning from it how God works in our own lives.
And glean I shall.
In 1997 I went with a group of Christians to Moscow, Russia. It was late January, and we were going to minister to ministers. They were translators and hosts, who hadn’t had a day off for five years. We insisted on going, not to do any outreach program, but to clean toilets, cook meals, and otherwise give these hosts ten days off. When one of them, feeling out of place being ministered to instead of ministering, asked me why we were there, I replied,
“A sheep can only be shorn so many times before it bleeds to death. Go grow wool.”
One of these amazing people was a woman named Olga. Heck, a dozen of these amazing people were women named Olga. In any case, this Olga became, over the years, via email and phone calls, a very close friend of mine. Two years later, she came to the US to attend Bible College, and we were able to finagle a time for her to come visit me over the summer. She was to stay for five weeks.
On April 1, 1989, I lay on a solitary mattress in an unfurnished room, accompanied only by the one suitcase of belongings I had. It was 4 am. Many people had, that day, pleaded with me to stay visible. They had, as as church leaders, forcibly broken my girlfriend and me up. We were all members of the same church, and for right or for wrong, they saw our relationship as unhealthy. It wasn’t a large church. I saw her sitting there, across the room. Torture. She stared down at her feet, puffy-eyed, unable to look at me. Torture for her, too, it seemed.
Despite everyone’s best efforts, we ran into each other after the service in the hallway outside the bathroom. She looked hard at me, and told me to meet her across the expressway that ran beside the church’s building. I snuck away.
Over Spring Break, the weather was sufficiently nice for me to take longish walks almost every day. That means I hook the mp3 player to my head, slip on the tennies, and take off for what I hope will be at minimum an hour and a half long jaunt. I live in an older part of town, and as I’m assuredly not one of the wealthy (doing philosophy? HA!), I live in a tattered old neighborhood, just barely north of historic downtown.
One particularly brilliant afternoon, I set out on my walk, and Kitaro permeated my consciousness like a movie soundtrack. The song was Kitaro’s “Gaia” from the CD Gaia Onbashira. I saw the neighborhoods I walked through as if through a movie lens. And what I saw was grievous.
Last evening, I sat in my La-Z-Boy and read the entire gospel of Matthew in one sitting.
It was quite the experience, really. I first turned on the TV (for which I have no antennae, nor cable), and vaguely through the fuzz noted what looked like might be The Ten Commandments playing on ABC. Two teams I didn’t know (or care much about) were playing hoops on CBS. And the only other channel I almost get is what I affectionately call “The Big Hair Network.” I really wasn’t in the mood to hear some shinola-coiffed fundamentalist preach about how Jesus would heal me if I only sent in for his latest book (only $29.95! Call the number at the bottom of your screen!). So I turned the TV off and opened my Bible to Matthew.
I was originally planning on just reading the Passion, but for some reason began in 1:1, and just kept on reading until the end.
The Unseen Disciple 