Kirkepiscatoid

Job Chapter 7:

“Do not human beings have a hard service on earth, and are not their days like the days of a laborer? ²Like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages, ³so I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me. ⁴When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I rise?’ But the night is long, and I am full of tossing until dawn. ⁵My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt; my skin hardens, then breaks out again. ⁶My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope.

⁷“Remember that my life is a breath; my eye will never again see good. ⁸The eye that beholds me will see me no more; while your eyes are upon me, I shall be gone. ⁹As the cloud fades and vanishes, so those who go down to Sheol do not come up; ¹⁰they return no more to their houses, nor do their places know them any more. ¹¹“Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. ¹²Am I the Sea, or the Dragon, that you set a guard over me? ¹³When I say, ‘My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint,’ ¹⁴then you scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions, ¹⁵so that I would choose strangling and death rather than this body. ¹⁶I loathe my life; I would not live forever. Let me alone, for my days are a breath.

¹⁷What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them, ¹⁸visit them every morning, test them every moment? ¹⁹Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle? ²⁰If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity? Why have you made me your target? Why have I become a burden to you? ²¹Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I shall lie in the earth; you will seek me, but I shall not be."

Everyone--EVERYONE has had the "Job Moment" at least once in his or her life. Me, I've had several. But I'm sure you know this moment when I describe it--those moments in our lives where something has made us so miserable that our heart hurts, our hair hurts, our spleen even hurts from having vented it over several days! Those moments where either we've felt we've committed an unpardonable wrong, or have been victimized in a cruel, unforgivable sort of way, or our life situation is so seemingly un-livable at this point we don't even want to get up in the morning and face the day. We lie awake in our beds and we are even afraid to dream, because all we dream are gruesome nightmares. We begin to feel our whole reason to exist in the universe is to be someone's personal ass-kicking target--maybe even, it seems that God is using us for ass-kicking practice.

Sometimes, we lie in our beds and feel utterly clueless--we think, "What did I do to deserve this?" Sometimes it's aimed at how someone has wronged us and we think, "Why does so-and-so despise me so much she/he would do this to me?" Other times we put the blame squarely on ourselves and yearn for a do-over: "If only I had/hadn't (fill in the blank)! Why can't I just (fill in the blank) and make everything right again?" Sometimes it's all of the above!

We, like Job, feel ourselves living in the middle of a holding place of equal parts sorrow and anger. Some of this anger is directed at God, and oddly enough, half of is is because God seems to be absent, and the other half is He is "too present" and won't leave us alone!

Yet--here's the catch 22. I realize, in my case, when these "Job moments" come into my life, where the anguish actually comes from. It comes from the fact I realize that I cannot exist for any long period of time in a stagnant place of equal parts sorrow and anger--in fact, that I WILL not, for any long period of time--it is simply not possible. I realize God is going to move me to the next place--a place I call "Ignatian indifference"--and I am not ready to leave either the "sorrow place" or the "anger place." I am kind of wanting to still be angry, to still be anguished, and in my usual "terrier with a rat" fashion, I am not totally willing to drop the dead rat.

You might be wondering what I mean by "The place of Ignatian indifference." One of the things we learn if we study the life and teachings of St. Ignatius is that, when we read his Principles, we discover that the first Principle is to accept what God's desire for us, and in essence, become "indifferent" to all created things. Now that doesn't mean to be apathetic or to withdraw. It simply means that we give up our preferences and delusions of control of our world. For instance, if, in my prayer time, if I were fretting about "the higher paying job" vs. "the lower paying job", and God's desire for my happiness seems to be leading to the job with less pay, then that is the one I choose, because I don't care about the money--I care about being an instrument of God's will.

I realize in retrospect, that when I moved to Kirksville, I followed the path of Ignatian indifference at a time I didn't even know what it was. It seemed like a stupid career move at the time, and my colleagues were more than happy to tell me about it--even my closest colleague M. He told me "I can't go home again. I don't get it. You are SO smart, and THIS is the absolute dumbest thing you have ever done." Some told me I was "throwing my life away." I had many, MANY "Job moments" as my decision grew closer to "the day it would happen." I was miserable. I spent the first year here hypervigilant and bound and determined that maybe I HAD ruined my life. More Job moments. Then, one day, I just sort of stopped worrying about it, and looked around and thought, "Huh. You know, this is pretty good."

Part of what makes our "Job moments" painful, when we are people who truly WANT to hear God's wills and desires, is the realization that God is changing these things anyway, and it doesn't matter "what we want." You've all felt them sometimes. Maybe after the end of an intimate relationship with someone, we realize we simply are becoming indifferent to the things that used to hurt us like red-hot pokers. Maybe in the midst of a job crisis, we realize we WILL be doing something else for a living whether we want to or not. Maybe in a family estrangement, we recognize that we are going to have to exist in a different way in the family dynamic. Maybe in a situation whether substance abuse has been involved, or there is a legal ramification to the dynamic, it is the true knowing that there is a reckoning, and a proper response to that reckoning that is going to be a lot of work and hassle and life-long commitment to change. Change will happen and much of it, we will not be in the driver's seat.

In this chapter, Job is doing the only thing we humans can ever do and survive it--simply live it and feel all the emotions that go with it. Simply live it out. It's all any of us can do in our own Job moments and survive. The miracle is that more often than not, we do better than survive. Eventually, we thrive.

Counterlight had a recent post that gave me pause. One of the earliest depictions of crucifixion is not a sculpture, not a fresco, not a work of religious art, but a piece of schoolboy graffiti. From Counter's post:

It dates anywhere from the 1st to 3rd centuries. It was discovered in 1857 on the Palatine hill in Rome in the remains of a boarding school for imperial page boys built by the Emperor Caligula. It reads in crude misspelled Latin, "Alexamenos worships his god," and shows a figure on the left looking at a crucified figure with a donkey's head seen from behind. It could well be that Alexamenos was a Christian and this other anonymous boy was mocking him for his beliefs. It could be that Alexamenos may not have been Christian at all, and that showing him praying to a crucified donkey headed god was just another way of insulting him. Alexamenos worships something so low as a crucified donkey man, associating him with foreigners, slaves, criminals, and work animals; the timeless stuff of adolescent insults. I think this bit of vandalism sometimes gets over-interpreted (some scholars go so far as to try to identify it with certain mystery or gnostic sects). What I think it usefully reveals for our purposes is the powerful sense of shame attached to crucifixion in ancient times.

Now, for me, one of the most important windows (and the one that makes me smile) to ancient culture is through "the things that folks weren't necessarily proud to leave behind." When my former associate and his wife returned from Pompeii on their European vacation, I was absolutely captivated by their tour of some great "graffiti sites" that were uncovered in the city. Some examples are here. (WARNING--NC-17 rating for a lot of this stuff!)

But what these things have made me realize is that graffiti may be one of the most powerful forms of human expression going. We still insult people over the same things we insulted them over thousands of years ago--religion, sexual behavior, bodily functions, looks.

I have thought about all the news flap in both religious and non-religious circles about folks like Richard Dawkins. How is a single thing he's said, any different than the ancient person who taunted poor Alexamenos with his "crucified donkey god?" Not much, really. So what's the big deal? How is all the stuff we see on Faux News about the "defense of marriage," or "family values" any different than the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii? Again, not much.

This old world keeps a-changin', but the graffiti pretty much remains the same.

Parshat Noah from G-dcast.com

More Torah cartoons at www.g-dcast.com

My lesson last week in EFM was "Noah and the Flood in Genesis." I had worked on my very nicely prepared learning objectives, including expounding on how Noah was a "righteous" man, and even talked a little about how the Hebrew word for "righteous" as it refers to Noah, tsadiq, "one who adheres to the whole of the law." Best as I can tell, it is derived from the Hebrew letter tsade; in the ancient pictograph style of Hebrew, the letter looks a bit like a trail, which makes sense, as another way of interpreting the word tsadiq is "one who walks the correct path."

All my totally "righteous" thoughts about Noah went out the window when I watched this video that was shown during class. Suddenly I went, "Hey...come to think of it, if Noah was so righteous, how come he didn't convince his friends and neighbors to build their OWN ark? Or, at the very least, stuff a few of his friends in there? He followed the law and letter of what God asked him, but maybe he should have gone one step beyond the law and the letter. How righteous is a guy who let his friends drown, when he had first=hand knowledge of what was going to happen?"

Suddenly my perfectly crafted "righteous" Noah didn't seem so terribly righteous. In fact, a part of me kind of saw him as a pious schmuck. He was so concerned with the law, but he didn't bother to go one inch beyond it. He didn't bother to look behind it, either. The story in Genesis tells us that God had told him to do these things because the world was becoming more evil. But did Noah do a thing to try to make it "less evil?" Well...no.

So it is with good and evil, saints and sinners. Sometimes the motives that eventually lead to "good" were rooted because of an evil act. In the core of "evil" is often "misguided good." Sometimes we discover the "saints" in our lives have pockets of their psyche entrapped in the dark. Those we cometimes see as "sinners," in the right circumstance, are capable of incredible good, and provide healing moments to others. Nothing in this world is "pure."

When I postulate things like my own salvation, there is no doubt "my sins are ever before me." I realize some of the things I've done to other people, both inadvertently or on purpose, I realize to those people I am an incredible sinner, maybe even an agent of evil. Yet to others, I'm a saint because I did that one right thing for them at the time they most needed it. Those who wrong me or hurt me deeply, can become targets of my anger and disgust.

It's just too simplistic for me to dump it all in the "all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God" trashcan. It doesn't comfort me a bit for my sins to be diluted out into the trash bag of corporate imperfection. It doesn't make the pain others have caused me any less painful. I can't always put those things behind me. Yet I have come to realize that, to become a more "righteous" person, I have to at least attempt seeking a balance in those things in which I must do more than take carpentry discussions on arks and assume animal husbandry duties; for my salvation, I must look "behind the rules" and figure out what additionally has to be done to live a life "behind the rules," not "smack dab in the middle of every dotted "I" and every crossed "T".

My blogfriend Elizabeth tells a story of a man who looked behind the rules in order to show God's love to another in a situation when the rules don't tell the whole story. Yet his life was cut down prematurely by someone, who, at the time, probably felt in his own mind, this good man wasn't so good.

Good. Evil. Saints. Sinners. They are all one and the same.

I have been reading a little this week on the concept of "praying using fantasy." The examples given used images such as a lump of clay, or "falling into the sun." In the exercise, you start by imagining you as the object in the fantasy, imagine something being done to it, what happens, how it feels, etc. Then you switch gears and imagine yourself in the presence of the Son of God.

Well, gee whiz, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what I would use as my fantasy object--a stick of wood in my chiminea! (DUH. That was easy.)

So I sat, as I made a fire in my chiminea today, and started to just let what was happening in real life drive the fantasy. The wood was a little damp, and the fire needed "tending" to really get it going--lots of smaller twigs and sticks to get a nice base of coals before I could put the "big stuff" in. I tended my fire and imagined.

I am a stick of wood. I have splintered spots, knots, and rough places. I am a little damp from being rained upon for three days and have only gotten to dry out a little in the sun. The fire seems so inviting. I want to be put in the fire right now, but I know I cannot enter just yet--it is not hot enough and not ready for me. I wait. I'm impatient. The fire is getting warmer outside the chiminea, and it's almost torture not to go in.

Finally, I am picked up and placed on the fire. I begin to smoke and sputter. My bark catches fire. I am so different from the coals below me. I want to be white hot like they are, but part of me is ablaze and part of me is warm. Water bubbles out of me and hisses. Sometimes there's a big pop.

As the flame begins to burn within my core, I can feel myself transforming. All the rough spots, all the impurities begin to dissolve from me and go up in the smoke to be carried away. As the non-essential parts of me burn off, I get smaller, but hotter. Hotter and hotter, smaller and smaller, until I am red hot glowing coals. I am one with all the glowing coals in the pile. We are one white hot glowing pile of energy...and then the next stick of wood is added, and it will become part of all of us, just as I became part of this cluster of pure heat and warmth.

Now...switching gears like the exercise says...

I am awaiting being in the presence of the Son of God. I have splintered spots, knots, and rough places. My sins are ever before me. I feel His warmth and see His light, but I realize that all the cares of the world, and all the tribulations and scars of my life have made me feel that I am capable of becoming part of him, but I am separate somehow. His light seems so inviting. I want to run up and be next to Him right now, but I know I cannot enter His presence just yet--it is not my turn, and I have to consider all these scars and dings and defects in me. I wait. I'm impatient. I feel myself desiring so much to have these flaws transformed, and it's almost torture not to go in.

Finally, I am led to him and allowed to bask in His radiance. I see others are there with Him, those who have been led to Him before me. I feel the surface of me begin to warm to His presence, but I still am aware I am so different from the substance of the others near Him. I want to be white hot like they are. I want to be one with everything that is His substance and light. I start to feel those flaws slowly melt away.

As the Light of Christ begins to burn within my core, I can feel myself transforming. All the rough spots, all the impurities begin to dissolve from me and seem to be carried away, far away from His heat and light. As the non-essential parts of me burn off, I get smaller, but hotter. Hotter and hotter, smaller and smaller, until I am red hot glowing light and truth. I am one with all the glowing smaller lights in His presence. We are one white hot glowing pile of light and eternity and Truth...and then the next person is brought to Him, and will become part of all of us, just as I became part of this cluster of pure heat and warmth. All there is that is left of "me" is the desire to be part of Light and Truth. In us are all the prayers that He hears of those on earth, all the good deeds of those still living, all the love and kindness that humans try to emulate to "be like Christ."

All of us together, are "the energy of prayer." We are the core that makes prayers answered on earth, we are the tears of the lonely calling to God, we are the smiles in the eyes of children...and wow...it feels SO good.

You know, this is not a bad eternal "job description!"

This showed up on my Facebook page today (thanks, Rex!) and it was too good to pass up...

Enjoy!

Genesis 3:17-24:

And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; ¹⁸thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. ¹⁹By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

²⁰The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living.

²¹And the Lord God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.

²²Then the Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— ²³therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. ²⁴He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

Here are two images we discussed in EFM this week on the topic of "The fall and the banishment from Eden." They both gave me great pause. I thought back to things in my life where I discovered what seemed idyllic and perfect were not, and I had to deal with the reality of what these things were, that I now had knowledge of good AND evil, not just good.

In the first image, it appears the "big bad angel" is the cause of running Adam and Eve out of Eden--sort of a "get out of Dodge before sunset" image. You can't see any part of the garden in the picture--what "was" is now all cloudy. They are wearing the outfits made of skins that God had made for them before they left. Adam and Eve are expressing both halves of grief--the sadness and the determination to move forward.

In the second image, Adam and Eve are still naked. You can still see the garden--but it is what lies ahead that is dark and cloudy and unknown. They are carrying a large supply of fruit (fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil?) with them. Adam and Eve seem very "juvenile"--Eve has bows in her hair like a little girl, and she is pulling a wagon. They embrace--all they seem to have is each other now. God seems absent in the darkness ahead.

I thought about how in those times we discover our own Edens "aren't perfect." Somewhere along the line, we gained knowledge of evil along with the good. It messed up our notions of the beautiful garden. At first, we often want to blame others for gaining this knowledge. We wish they had never given it to us. The perfect garden "disappears" and we suddenly feel "banished" from the world we once knew. We don't want to accept its loss. We can no longer see the beauty that was there--somehow we feel the new, more troubling knowledge "took it from us."

Then, at some point, we must step out into the unknown, realizing we need more of the same fruit that shook our world, for the journey. In order to be more mature about what lies ahead, we weill need MORE knowledge of good and evil--not less of it. By this time, we might even begin to see a little again of the garden we can no longer inhabit. We become sad to leave it, because what lies ahead seems so uncertain. But ultimately, we all have each other.

I thought about this concept a lot during class. I used to think this story in Genesis was one of rejection and abandonment. But it is not, in many ways. God clothed Adam and Eve in warm, sturdy clothing made of skins. He cared for Adam and Eve, even when he could no longer let them stay in Eden. He allowed them to take a last look at the garden, perhaps in the hope there is another garden like it out there in that dark unknown. He let them take food for the journey. But he made it very clear that they could never go back--only forward.

So it is with the times we are forced to leave Eden in our own lives. But we have each other, and we have the ability to mature and develop fuller understandings of these exiles in the hope we find new gardens, and food for the trip. We have His care, also, even though at the time it may not seem like it. I think about things like when parents have had to let their adult children find their own way, make their own mistakes, when family difficulties arise. They can no longer be enablers. They still love, but it's "tough love." They can never go back to their family life "the way it was."

The Edens we leave in our lives are not prison sentences, even though we may feel that way. they are simply a means in which we recognize we must go forward and never go back.

Matthew 6:25-33:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? ²⁸And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. ³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ ³²For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Now that fall is well underway, it's nice to reminisce about the summer, and one of the things I'm going to miss for a few months are the wonderful orange day lilies in my yard, and a few "volunteers" along the roadside. So let's "consider the lilies" a little bit.

1. Lilies don't have much of a choice where they grow. As far as I know, we don't get any votes on where we are born, who are parents are, who all grew up in our house, and what kind of people they are. We have no control of what century in which we come into being, the affluence of our family of origin, or what color our skin is. We have no ability to change the culture of the towns in our childhood lives or the attitudes of a community at that time in history.

We are planted, whether those seeds or bulbs are on fertile ground or rocky ground. One of the things I admire so much about the orange day lilies that dot the countryside around here, is that you see them thriving everywhere--whether they are in my yard, or in the yard of a house much more palatial than mine, or in what was left of what is now an old dilapidated farm house, or even growing feral by the roadside. They seem to grow--and sometimes even thrive--in the oddest and seemingly most inhospitable places.

2. Lilies don't have any control of what grows next door to them. Those lilies, as they sprout and grow, don't know if they are going to be growing in the sun or the shade. They have no control of someone cutting down a tree next to them. They can't make an executive decision on whether to be next to a protected grove of brush or brutally out in the open. If a dog walks by and pees on them, they are just going to have to stand there and take it.

We don't get to choose who lives next door to us. We don't have any say-so in the number or types of people who walk past us or walk into our lives, or exit our lives. We have no control of death. We have no control of what people want to think of us--and if they decide to hike their leg and pee on us for their own reasons while we're just standing there minding our own business--well...we can't really control that either. We like to think we can...but the actual control we have over that is miniscule.

After all, it is what THEY see in a lily that makes them stop and admire it--or ignore it.

3. Lilies don't have much to say about the weather. Lilies do not get to vote on the amount of rainfall that falls on them each year. They do not determine the paths of hurricanes or tornadoes. They do not control the hours of light or dark in the day. They don't know what day the first frost is coming, nor can they predict one of those "March Missouri snowstorms that dumps 6 inches of snow on plants that are starting to bud."

We have very little to say about the "paths of storms" in our lives. We do not know what the sum total of the length of our days will be. Six inches of snow and freeze could befall us at our most vulnerable moments. We could be up to our waist in the rains that can drown us, or be parched from the lack of water for our psyches. We don't determine the light or dark forces in our lives--all we can do is strain to face the light and try to get the sun in our face.

4. A lot of the "health" of healthy lilies has to do with the influence of outside forces. I think about those "feral" lilies I see by the roadsides here in July and August. They look so "independent," so "ruggedly individualistic." But really, they're not. They came somewhere from someone's flower bed, even if it was generations ago, and those seeds were carried by the wind, or birds, or flowing water and they took root in a remote place. They had to come from SOMEWHERE. They are still dependent on the elements to grow and thrive. They need bees and other bugs and hummingbirds to move their pollen from place to place in order to be an established bed of lilies year after year. In essence, they're WAY more "dependent" than they appear.

Our American culture feeds the delusion of "Ruggedly independent" like no other. We admire it. We worship it. The funny part about what those of us who consider ourselves "independent people" and fully "get it," have come to learn that "independence" is really a myth--that it depends on things and people outside of our control, and what we are really doing when we are content in our "independence" is actually saying we gave up the delusion of control of our environment. We have come to an understanding that we will accept the "ambiguous unknown."

In other words, we accept "mystery."

This, of course, doesn't mean we accept mystery every moment of our life, in every psychodynamic in the human spectrum of emotions, but we, through our trials and tribulations, eventually make peace with it. However, this "making peace" can be an incredibly painful process, and frequently exposes two constantly nagging sins--pride and covetousness. Ow.

5. Lilies were born lilies. They can't be irises or tulips, no matter how hard they try. Lilies may well morph over millions of years of evolution, but today, tomorrow, and the next day, they are still going to be a lily. Even after all that "evolving", a million years from now, that lily won't be a tulip. It will be something new.

If someone likes tulips, and thinks a lily is a disgusting trash flower, there is nothing that lily can do to make it be liked better. It can't change its color or its appearance--it can only grow into its full "lily-ness." That person who doesn't like lilies is the one who has to do the changing.

We all are born with so many psychological intangibles. We all know that some babies sleep through the night right off, and others are colicky all night. We might be naturally good at math, but not so great in diagramming sentences. We prefer one color over another, one season over another, one sex over another--we simply have a LOT of innate preferences. We know where we are on that spectrum of "solitude vs. companionship." We know innately what fulfills us and what is toxic to us. Yet sometimes we spend a lot of time either trying to be irises when we are lilies, or trying to make lilies into irises and being frustrated that they "don't change." All of us would be better served if we'd all just try to appreciate the flowers of humanity for what they are--even the ones that make us uncomfortable or even shrink back.

Toujoursdan posted something on his Facebook status today from St. Benedict that says all of this more succinctly than I ever could:

"Live this life and do what ever is done in a spirit of Thanksgiving. Abandon attempts to achieve security, they are futile. Give up the search for wealth, it is demeaning. Quit the search for salvation, it is selfish. And come to comfortable rest in the certainty that those who participate in this life with an attitude of Thanksgiving will receive its full promise."

Ultimately, how much of our life is God's doing, and how much really is "ours?" I am finding that, for me, so many things I thought were "mine," were never mine to begin with, and am spending more time giving them back to their rightful owner--God. I just haven't learned quite yet how to give them up without a fight!