real quick

tonight was a turning point for research, i think. resident d came to the writing group–a skeleton group tonight at the outset–with a sheaf of papers in hand. another resident, one staff member and i were treated to three of his poems, all part of a chronicle of his 113 days in a wilderness recovery program. entrancing. d is a wordsmith taught by the old-timers: wallace stephens is his favorite, but he alludes to whitman, crane, eliot, and so many more. his long bit driven poems were intense, invigorating, heart-rending, and so deeply painterly. through the lens of north carolina wilderness came images of drug abuse, gestures at mental illness, and some of the most complexly and carefully identified emotions i’ve heard lately–this coming from a place where emotions are expressed daily, sometimes hourly.

this points to so many things i want to do with my seminar. spider-webbing imagery and allusions, including some of my favorite broken writers–some who ended up fixed and some who didn’t–and some whole ones, picking apart language and vocabulary, even the story arc of d’s experience, and i suppose maybe his life, depending on how intimately exposed and vulnerable he’s willing to be with his writing. i need to ask him a lot of questions.

also: informed consent? need to take care of that. shiiit.

 

barbara brown taylor

I’m about halfway through Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World, and I must say, I feel like I’ve found a friend. Throughout the book, Taylor discusses various spiritual practices she’s encountered and loved, and right now, her words are fitting like puzzle pieces into my own life. Drawing from her experiences as a pastor and then as a professor of religion, Taylor takes the ritualistic parts of religion and applies them to everyday life, breathing new life into actions that so often fall flat. She fills with color these simple acts: doing laundry, grocery shopping, being in our skins. She talks about churches, too, but only peripherally–and I’m more interested in the rest of the world, anyway. (The ratio of church time: everywhere else time in my life is a little bit sad sometimes, but this book is a nice reminder that when we say God is everywhere, that can mean that worship is everywhere, too.)

The chapter I finished last night talks about “the practice of encountering others.” Taylor talks about our need for others and the power of recognizing others as just as human as we are. “If you have ever spent a Saturday volunteering at the Special Olympics, taking Meals on Wheels to the elderly, or picking up trash with the Riverkeepers, then you know you can arrive back home dirty and tired but also oddly refreshed, with more lift in your heart than you could have gotten from a day at the beach” (91).

This one feels particularly familiar to me. I’m the kind of person who makes friends with the third shifters at the local diner, who knows her bank tellers, and who cracks jokes with cashiers everywhere. I like to think I’m good with people, with carrying on conversations, and with engaging perfect strangers in the tiny kinds of conversations that make people smile, even at the ends of their shifts. (I definitely get this from my dad.) I like to talk to people (most of the time), finding some way  to connect and see a glimmer of shared humanity–but that sounds kind of inflated, doesn’t it? Really, I like to make people laugh. People checking out my groceries are rarely in their dream jobs, and the hours I keep mean that they’re rarely excited to see my face. But I like being reminded of how many individual people are walking this place we call home, and I like that this reminder makes me smile at fellow customers even when I’m feeling kind of crabby.

I’m a creature of community as much as I am of habit. My own favorite spiritual practices have been those that are centered on community, wrapped in other people, and yet still full of the stillness of God. Singing in a sanctuary full of voices, reading scripture in a group, or even finding just the right tenor of discussion in class can create within me that holy feeling Taylor talks about seeking out in our own lives. I value the power of a community, especially as it provides an atmosphere for study and discovery. The Divine Office, a weekly practice of prayer and scripture read in litany I’ve come to love, provides this communal quietness for me lately. Since we don’t have to discuss our opinions about each verse, and since the incense we light serves as a symbolic denotation that this time is holy, I’ve yet to leave this time or space feeling as empty as I sometimes arrive. The permission to delight in the Word and hear verses given voice is something the rest of my life sorely needs.

An enjoyable moment occurred in the middle of my (solitary midnight) reading last night as I absorbed new but familiar words and noted marginalia. I like borrowing books from friends, if only to see which lines they couldn’t leave unmarked. This book is my mom’s, and I’ve enjoyed seeing how similar our note-taking styles are and stopping to savor the lines she liked best. One of these: “What we have most in common is not religion by humanity. I learned this from my religion, which also teaches me that encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get” (102).  It wasn’t a line I might have picked out on my own, but something about seeing a thin pencil line below and knowing that my mother likely underlined it at a similar hour, with a similar feeling in her chest–that feeling was exactly the kind Taylor talked about, but this one had nothing  to do with eyes and everything to do with words.

It’s easy for me to forget that my parents were vital, vibrant people before my siblings and I came along and made getting out the door take so much longer. Considering how each passage in this book reaches into my own life, into my own problems, and makes me catch my breath–and then considering my mom having similar-but-such-different experiences–is a whole different kind of “encountering,” and I love it.

It’s refreshing to find a writer that reads as simultaneously completely familiar and completely innovative, and to discover that the reader before me has left her own palimpsestic touch is just one more thing for me to love.

 

Beasts of No Nation

I’m reading a book about a child soldier in an unnamed African country for War Lit. It’s our last book, it’s fairly short, and it’s pretty easy to read, linguistically. What I keep getting hung up on is the imagery: a twelve-year-old kid, if that, hacking a mother and daughter to pieces. With a machete. Men killed for disagreeing. Legs shot off so people can’t run.

I guess I’m glad I can still be horrified. I hope that I never lose the deep sense that this is wrong. It’s easy to become desensitized to violence and gore, and as a lover of zombie movies, I’ve worried before that I’m too comfortable. Even my affinity for tv shows about dead people is sometimes a little disconcerting. But while I know that, cinematically, I love explosions and the undead, letting these images be real, in the “real-for-someone” sense (this book is a work of fiction), that’s heart-wrenching. I know that, personally, it’s the addition of children to this formula of dehumanization and brokenness that really brings it home for me.

War is always horrendous. (I know, Tim O’Brien; that’s a generalization.) But there’s something intrinsically different about twelve-year-olds than even nineteen-year-olds. I know that the youngest soldiers in other wars have been closer to twelve than twenty. Maybe this serves as a reminder that I should be this horrified at all war, even as I try to understand it. Even as I look for the hope and the beauty in it. Even as I learn to see it from different perspectives–even those of usefulness, pride, and glory. Through all that, I need to remember this sinking feeling that makes me have to close my book and breathe slowly. It’s so very human, to identify with another. And so vital to understanding this world we live in.

 

The ethics of friendship

Have you ever tried so hard to do the right thing–even when no one else is–that you begin to lose sight of what you want, on the most basic level?

It’s easy to understand Jesus’ edicts about turning the other cheek when wounds are physical–though not necessarily easy to follow through–but when wounds are emotional, things get sketchy. Social alliances are so tenuous, and the power of language is almost always underestimated. When does being tolerant and compassionate turn into being abused? And once we’ve decided for ourselves that the line has been crossed, does it matter if anyone agrees with us?

I suppose I would only bring this up if I believed that no, it doesn’t matter. My assertion herein is that, at some point, I have to be able to trust myself in these seriously gray areas. I believe in unconditional love, as a rule, but it’s hard to really live it in unbalanced relationships. I believe strongly enough in my choices that I don’t mind being blasted by “the opposition,” but it sure doesn’t make it any easier.

This is about as public as I’m gonna get about details, but the issues it brings up for me are fascinating, especially as I head into the world of psychology. There has to be a point where you “give up,” but it’s not giving up, really. It’s a recognition of an efficient use of resources, emotional or otherwise. When we follow Jesus’ teachings, must we be crucified by friends, retaining our loyalty despite everything they throw at us? No, I don’t have a Messiah complex; thanks for asking. I just mean that sometimes, the “right thing to do” is painful and doesn’t make sense when you’re in the middle of it. It is heartbreaking and awful and right now, it makes me feel like these friendship things are thinner than blown glass and so easily broken.

 

What will it take?

I spent this weekend in my car with four other people to attend a protest in Georgia. Worth it? I think so. Here’s the dilemma:

The School of the Americas Watch protest has been happening for two decades now, both commemorating the deaths of six Jesuit priests and calling attention to the torture taught behind the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga. Out of the grassroots has grown an annual gathering of the activist community, complete with booths, t-shirt sales, and a booming business for fair trade coffee. What began as a group calling for the closure of a school has become a festival weekend, with concerts, workshops, and a full day of liberal hippie “good cause” shopping. (The number of “Fuck Capitalism” buttons being sold was hard to handle.) Being an activist is the “in” thing to do, and though CLOSE THE SOA handkerchiefs are seen everywhere, so much other idea-sharing happens–at least mostly good things, I’m sure–that many first-timers get overwhelmed.

The problem I see is thus: with all this information and the potential for overload inherent in pointing out the ills of our broken world, it seems all too easy to forget our initial reason for gathering. If we could each spend even a work week’s worth of time doing all we could think of to close the school, don’t you think it’d be closed by now? Maybe that’s my wishful thinking, but the power of creative pressure on governmental systems has been proven. We’ve even been close with the house bill–within six votes of passing–but clearly something else needs to be done. I hate to say we should be “giving up” on this, but bear in mind that I mean giving up only with a replacement tactic.

I just wish that torture, brutal manslaughter, and the systemic murder of thousands of people were not the kind of thing I had to convince people into being angry about. It seems like in a country where the religious right often carries the day, this one should be a no-brainer. Why is it that people who are pro-life on issues that don’t concern either their bodies or their tax dollars see a need to speak up and protest and kill doctors, but when unmistakable murder is taking place under the umbrella of US security cooperation, it’s completely written off? Why can’t we make this into a big-ticket platform issue? Why should we care what our senators care about abortion and homosexuality–especially with their legislative ideas are often completely unrelated to such decision making? It seems like it should be like child abuse; everyone’s against it. Let’s just agree now that arguing for torture makes you sound more cold and heartless than most other things, especially if you first read through the lengthy list of children murdered in Latin America. And if it’s just situation that makes it happen, why does abortion matter? Isn’t that just a matter of situation too?

We need another avenue for change. This one’s not working. What used to be pure protest–civil disobedience, legislation, awareness–has devolved into its own marketplace for materials and idea, which, while worthwhile in one sense, gets  us nowhere in the process closing the school in question.

So what are we doing wrong? How can we really change people’s attitudes? And when will we find within our hearts enough love for people outside our hometowns to argue passionately for justice that doesn’t apply to us? When will we really realize, viscerally, that other people live and breathe and suffer and die? What will it take?

 

On having all these emotions

I’m trying to be proactive, this time around. Rather than letting the inevitable stresses I put upon myself during school overwhelm me and ruin my sleep schedule, my eating habits, and my ability to take care of myself, this time I’m going to throw all of my stubbornness in the face of depression and self-pity.

(I’m listening to psalms read by a very authoritative voice with lots of dramatic pauses right now. I feel like it might affect my writing style.)

I know school to be both one of my favorite things and one of my biggest stressors, and I rarely deal with it in a healthy way. I seem to be able to withstand pretty immense amounts of stress, but I keep asking my poor body and mind to take on more. If I treated someone else the way I have treated myself on a pretty regular basis, I’d be the worst friend ever. I’d be selfish and unrealistic. I’d be called abusive and inflexible. When I have more things to do than hours in the day, it’s easy to not sleep or eat or pay attention to my emotions. When I neglect all my needs like that, it builds up and builds up and builds up until it finally explodes, sometimes in the form of depression, sometimes in a week of really disordered eating, sometimes in chaos in my interpersonal relationships. It used to come out as self-harm. It used to come out as starvation.

I’m using all the stubbornness I’ve got to keep those at bay. I’ve developed some creative coping skills. I’m working on the sleeping thing (it’s kind of an uphill battle), I try to keep myself accountable for going to meals, and I’m nurturing those activities that most feed my soul, like playing with kids and connecting with other people and attending a structured prayer time on campus.

Here we come to the point of this post. I’m toying with spiritual practice, by which I mean, I want to make it happen every day, but when I commit to something that way, it rarely pans out the way I want it to. Basically: I need someone to care for, all the time, and more importantly, I need someone to rely on, emotionally. When I make that person into one of my close friends, it gets stifling for them and unhealthy for me. I flourish when others rely on me, but when it’s not as mutual as I want it to be, I tend to get pretty lonely. So I’m currently working on manifesting a deeply emotional relationship with God.

I don’t even know how to talk about this, much less make it happen. I’ve never had a personal relationship with any deity, so I have no idea where to start. Prayer has often felt empty to me; I talk to myself on a pretty regular basis, and it can be hard to make them feel different. Reading scripture appeals to me, but I read quickly enough to often miss out on a lot. However, structured scripture listening has proved fruitful. In our high school youth group, I really enjoyed Lectio Divina, the few times we did it, and I’ve recently latched onto the Divine Office here on campus. Hearing scripture in our own voices within a community is so different from reading on my own, and I’m hoping it becomes a door into something. (Those psalms I’m listening to are part of the Listener’s Bible that’s now on my iPod, but that community of listeners is key, I think.)

I have no idea how feasible creating emotional reliance is, especially upon someone whose hugs are pretty ethereal, but it’s worth a try, right? Relying on God is far from disorderly; rather, it’s disciplined. God will never be sleeping or stressed out or too busy to listen, and God will never live too far from me to meet for coffee. I’m really hoping this works out, because it’s feeling like a last ditch effort to deal with all these emotions, and after the Almighty, who’s really left to call upon?

[ps. The adorable ladies on either side of this post are the charmers that I laughed with Friday night and Saturday morning.]

 

on child abuse and why I’m sometimes angry about mental illness

So we’ve been talking in abnormal psych about the etiologies (origins) of severe mental disorders, from anxiety disorders to the more exciting. Though it’s certainly not true for all of them, a surprising number of the really scary ones seem to involve the requisite predisposition and a serious stressor. And though it’s true that many stressors–natural disasters, divorce, death of family members–are unavoidable and arguably not all bad, SO MANY DISORDERS are somehow related to systemic child abuse. It’s freakin me out and I just about can’t handle it.

Lisa and I watched Sybil this afternoon, and it was rough. I’ve seen the important parts before, so I knew what kind of abuse I was coming up against emotionally and I knew the story arc pretty well. However, what with all the recent mulling over of the effects of child abuse and what that means for sheer numbers of abusers (!!!), this movie was rough on my soul. I don’t usually cry during movies, so when I say I definitely had tears welling up on multiple occasions, it’s a big deal. Even if multiple personality disorder, or as it’s now known, dissociative identity disorder, is a partial or complete fabrication, just the possibility for this kind of horror to occur at the hands of a parent mystifies and terrifies me. Though the movie is clear to name Mama’s own mental illness, the incredible and violent creativity that comes out of her sickness is horrendous and nigh unfathomable.

My question: what are we doing to stop child abuse before it starts? Dealing with the effects of negative childhood experiences must make up the bulk of psychiatric work (“Let’s talk about your father.”) at this point in time, but is there something we can do to make sure abusers and those at risk don’t go on to abuse? How does this cycle of violence ever end?

Yes, I know many disorders arise without abuse. (I’m a shining example.) The fact remains that child abuse, whether emotional, physical, or sexual (or some combination), has an effect on the human psyche that simple cannot be overlooked. I’m sure there are programs looking toward this question. I know there’s at least one somewhere. I know I’m not the only one getting really angry about this. But seriously; what will it take for our society to change its expectations?