Nothing deep today.

Well, I finished The Prophetic Imagination last night, only to realize it's probably one of them books I have to read like eight times before I'll really "get" it... I have all the windows and doors open at the moment in an attempt to get a lovely breeze rolling through the house, and I've realized it's time to start adjusting to sleeping with only one comforter instead of three. I'm not sure why, but in the fall, I never have an adjustment period switching back. Ah, well.

The spring cleaning impulse is on me again. I want to unload all my bookshelves and finish staining them, and then reorganize my library. I also want to do something brilliantly artistic with the junky shelf I have sitting out in the garage. As far as replacing the books on the shelves, order is not the issue -- spacing is. I know I'll be continuing to acquire and it's tough to predict which shelves will need more space and which won't. Ah. The agonies of life... :-)

Speaking of acquiring, I saw copies of the "MAUS" graphic novels on sale today and was SOOO tempted, but I knew that if I got them, I'd read them, and I really need to be working on unraveling the Marxist literary hermeneutic/epistemology so I can demonstrate how a biblical one encompasses and supersedes it in my research paper. I know, sounds like fun, but I'm actually really looking forward to it. Correction: I'm really looking forward to learning and understanding. I'm not looking forward to the actual amount of reading I'll have to do in the time frame alloted. Perhaps that's why Maus looked so very appealing.

The quiet, everyday, normal moments can be a pleasant break from the deep tensions -- provided, of course, it's sunny and 72.

Buckle in, y'all -- long and serious post ahead.

Several things have come together in the last few days. I ran across an article talking about how Bono is promoting the One Campaign (known in England as "Making Poverty History") in U2 Concerts. The One Campaign, in their own words, is "not asking for your money, [but] asking for your voice." So I went to their website (www.one.org) and watched the video and added my name to their cause of compassion and social justice, and I encourage you to do the same. Still, as I was typing my information on the web form, I noticed skepticism and not a small sense of futility lurking around the corners of my heart. A question was starting to form in me.

Then yesterday as I was driving to Mora, I listened to a global call-in on NPR talking about the dynamics of globalization. I heard a man from India arguing that economic conditions are getting better overall because even most households in the slums now have TVs and people are considering a second car at the same point in their careers when their parents were scraping for a first. Again that skepticsm rose up and the question became a little clearer. I started wondering if Marx didn't have it backwards -- if materialism and not religion is REALLY the opiate of the masses. {NOTE: Reader, please know that I am PAINFULLY aware that I am typing this on one of my two Apple computers and posting it to a blog linked to my list of 800+ books. Know that I know that if materialism is the opiate of the masses, then I'm a total crack-head.} Is it possible for a person weighing considerations of hybrid vs. SUV to see the neglected child two blocks down? To feel the lesions of an AIDS victim as if they were growing on his/her own skin?

The question boils down to this: what good is compassion anyway? Reaching out to another person may mitigate their suffering for a while, but is a localized, momentary flash of relief even noticeable? Aren't our only true options either numbness or despair?

While I couldn't articulate it that clearly, the sense of the question gnawed at me all night. I didn't sleep well. It was as if my lofted bed was about to tip over, and I was headed for a fall. Then, this morning, I continued reading Brueggeman and hit this land mine of the soul. It's long, but please, read carefully.

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unnatural condition for humanness. In the arrangement of "lawfulness" in Jesus' time, as in the ancient empire of Pharaoh, the one unpermitted quality of relation was compassion. Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion... Thus the compassion of Jesus is to be understood not simply as a personal emotional reaction but as a public criticism in which he dares to act upon his concern against the entire numbness of his social context. Empires live by numbness... Governments and societies go to great lengths to keep the numbness intact. Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion and with his compassion takes the first step by making visible the odd abnormality that had become business as usual. Thus compassion that might be seen simply as a generous goodwill is in fact criticism of the system, forces, and ideologies the produce the hurt. Jesus enters into the hurt and finally comes to embody it... Thus Jesus embodies the hurt that the marginal ones know by taking it into his own person and his own history. Their hurt came from being declared outside the realm of the normal, and Jesus engages with them in a situation of abnormality.

My first reaction to that is an immediate drop to my spiritual knees -- a teary, heartfelt cry from every cell in my body, "HALLELUJAH! My Lord and my God!" That last bit strikes home with me in part because I've never felt "normal," and every life-changing encounter with Jesus has been in the context of my abnormality. I get that. I'm grateful for it. I am struck dumb with amazement at the thought that the one undefeatable force against the spirit of this world is compassion -- not just in a spiritual and individual sense, but potentially in the political and socioeconomic realms as well.

But then comes the sense that I can't do it. That all my comparative material wealth belies my utter poverty in the emotional, mental, and spiritual resources to feel and hold and grieve for the hurts of even my friends, much less the world. When Dan Rather used to list three or four servicemen killed abroad as a segue to commercial breaks (ponder the irony) on the CBS Evening News, I would get teary. And I'm not sure God is calling me to be completely non-functional with grief for the world for an extended period of time. Maybe He is, but then He also has me back in Research Writing on the 31st.

Lord, deepen my compassion. Strengthen my ability to hold the tensions and seek the Answer, not just answers. Only in You is there freedom and life. Help me live in Kingdom, not Empire. Tell Your story in me, and teach me how to live it, speak it, breathe it.

There it is, y'all. I told you it would be long.

Thoughts from Uncle Walty...

Ok -- so I read the following last night:

"[This] consciousness with its program of acheivable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness, and it has done that to all of us. It has created a subjective consciousness concerned only with self-satisfaction. It has denied the legitimacy of tradition that requires us to remember, of authority that expects us to answer, and of community that calls us to care. [This] program of acheivable satiation: a) is fed by a management mentality that believes there are no mysteries to honor, only problems to be solved. [...] b) Is legitimated by an 'official religion of optimism,' which believes God has no business other than to maintain our standard of living, ensuring [the leader's] own place in his palace. c) Requires the annulment of the neighbor as a life-giver in our history; it imagines that we can live outside history as self-made men and women." -- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

Brueggeman is writing this to define and summarize the prevailing worldview opposed to his "prophetic imagination". Does this sound familiar to anyone else? Self-made men and women? Official religion of optimism? No mysteries to honor, only problems to be solved?

I grieve for the ways I have been that kind of Christian -- that kind of person. For me, it ties back into Judy's call for a theology of beauty, since beauty and mystery are intertwined in my soul in ways impossible for me to articulate. Brueggeman also asserts that the prophetic voice rises from our capacity to grieve, and I've always thought I was impossibly morbid for finding grief almost inexpressably beautiful. But maybe I'm not so far off after all...

Quick Celebration

Hey, all - I don't want to toot my horn, but I got a 4.0 for the second semester running. I share that because I want those I love (this means you, dear reader) to celebrate with me and also because it makes me feel like the fatigue I blogged about last night was at least not in vain. So, happiness... As Ricardo Montalban used to say at the opening of every episode of "Fantasy Island", smiles, everyone... smaiyles........

Danger: Neuroses Ahead

Hmm. Judy writes about needing a theology of beauty. Jan writes on the necessity of deep change. Both of these things smack me upside the head. The change has to move toward beauty and thus toward God, otherwise it's no more than a different pair of jeans. But that deep change has to be motivated and inspired by deep beauty -- the call beyond myself toward the greater.

The problem is I'm tired. Maybe it's just what feels like a month of consecutive rainy days, maybe it's that I don't feel able to rest, but at the moment, I read "change" as "work" and "beauty" just kind of sits there in the middle of my head on a heap of tangled and contradictory associations. I hang out with my friends and just feel like being alone, but being alone seems empty and futile. I start to wonder why the phone's not ringing -- and why it never really has. I think John of the Cross might call this a kind of desolation. Not really sure of who I am or what's happening or where the crap God went in the middle of this mess.

Of course, He's right here, underlying and holding it all together, but that's hard to feel when your spiritual skin feels cracked, chapped, and fragile. I want to find some nice mineral hot springs, rent a scuba tank, and just float for a week or so. Let the scales fall off. Breathe a little. Maybe sit in some artificial sunshine since the real stuff went AWOL.

Anyhow, that's me at the moment -- tired, dry, wasted, unable to recognize beauty if it walked up and bit me in the ass. So, yeah -- get to know me! But don't say you weren't warned.

Finally!

Hey, all -- the library software I use has FINALLY added support for HTML export. I'm trying to streamline it, but at least it's there! All my friends are welcome to browse my library and email me if there's anything you want to borrow. Click on "the Original JeffSite" in my sidebar and go to the library. While you're browsing, you can click on any of the book covers to go to the Amazon description for that book. Email me if you want to borrow something.

More personal information coming soon here in blogland...

Back to happy hair

Yes, ladies and gents, a new color is being absorbed right now! As I type! I've said green for a while, but I found some others on sale today, so.... Anybody got a guess? It's not the world poker tour, but just for fun...?

Results posted soon on my Original JeffSite -- see sidebar -- under "Dyes of our Lives"...

Oh, and be sure to post your guess by clicking "comments" before you go find out -- NO CHEATING!!! :-)~

Last night, when I arrived at work with my Down's Syndrome guys, one of them was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs (split entry). I looked upstairs and said hi to the other two as I took off my shoes. When I looked back down, "Tom" had pulled the back of his t-shirt up over his head and was tottering around saying "Jeeeefff... heeelp... I can't find my head..." I laughed like crazy, then went down and pulled the t-shirt off his head. The picture stuck with me, though...

I know how it feels.

The semester is winding down, things are getting crazy, and I feel like I've disengaged... like I've grabbed the edges of myself and pulled them around and over me in an attempt to keep my world manageable -- small and under control. My eyes fixed firmly on the top of my to-do list. I miss fun. I miss wonder. I miss being fascinated by the radiant glory of God in each individual face and voice and life that I find myself in front of. I miss those things, but I am so tired. I need to get some rest -- more sleep, more time, more inner and outer silence. But for now, that can't happen. Is it OK to disengage a little, to just crank it out when it feels like your only option? For some reason, I feel so guilty about it. I feel like I'm alienating people, like I'm alienating myself. Oddly, though, I don't feel distant from God. I don't think I can -- I'm too busy trying to draw from Him the stamina to make it to summer. I don't know.

I'm confused. I guess I'm just blogging cuz it's one of those things that wound up outside my existential t-shirt. Maybe to resolve some of this by getting it out, maybe just to assuage my guilt. Who knows? All I know is God will get me through. Somehow.