Sep
21
Dreams of transformation started every August with a visit to the neighborhod department stores to select five new outfits and a new pair of shoes for the school year ahead. Skin golden, limbs lithe, long hair as nearly blond as it would ever be without the help of foil and chemicals, I combed the racks for the clothes that would change my life.
The year I remember best, I brought home, among other things, a red pleated skirt and softly-striped red and white blouse, along with a large red bow for the back of the hair that grazed my shoulders. I was weeks away from being 12 years old, a seventh grader.
More so even than most years, I thought, “This is the year!” The year of popularity. The year of brilliant accomplishments and being beautiful (or at least cute). The year when I would peel back the cocoon and stun everyone with my unfurling wings.
Alas, every year my hair was still mousy brown; I was still too shy to raise my hand and venture out with a potentially wrong answer; and I never became the attention-magnet whose friends urged her to try out for cheerleader. In fact, the year of the red pleated skirt was the same year I couldn’t even get elected hall monitor. I marched in line like everyone else, never daring skip a step and aching to experience life with those wings I could almost imagine.
Every year was just another year of the caterpillar.
But as August melted into September, oh, didn’t I dream.
Sep
11
If I loved my neighbor as I love myself, here’s what it might look like:
- I might snap out an unkind comment before I gave it much thought.
- I could judge everything she does by impossible standards.
- I would make impossible demands on her time and energy.
- Too often, I would withhold approval, warmth, the benefit of the doubt.
If I loved myself as I love my neighbor… family members… best friends… co-workers, here’s what it might look like:
- I might acknowledge it when I’ve been a positive force in someone’s life.
- I would cut myself some slack when I’m overworked and overwhelmed.
- When I’m discouraged, I could remind myself that I’m loved.
- I could point out the abundance and grace in my life.
Sep
5
There are some people I just wouldn’t have expected to be Christian. One of them is Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey bridged the Beat Generation and the hippies, two cultural movements that took many in my generation far from the faith of our parents.
Kesey appears to have been the kind of Christian I like — the kind who knew he didn’t have all the answers.
In a recent issue of The Missouri Review, I read a thoughtful article on Ken Kesey by M.C. Armstrong. The article quoted from a 1994 Paris Review interview in which Kesey talked about his Christian faith. Kesey said: “I’m for mystery, not interpretive answers. The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answers, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
That reminded me of a newspaper column written several years ago by Jody Seymour, pastor of Davidson (NC) United Methodist Church, in which he said the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. His words said to me that having doubt and having faith weren’t mutually exclusive. Armed with that, I came to understand that all I can really know with certainty is that I don’t have a clue.
A teacher of meditation from the 1970s whose name escapes me called it “don’t know mind.” He said it is the place where we are empty of preconceived notions and have therefore become teachable.
If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking.
Of course, even being too attached to the idea of mystery dances me closer to the edge of thinking I have the answers. All I can do if I want to always be seeking is to keep planting a garden where those mysteries can bloom.
Sep
1
Long before the Internet – before telephones or telegraph or radio – global communication took place.
I recently watched ”Cosmos,” a 30-some-year-old series on the mysteries of the natural world. One of the episodes visited the world of whales. I learned that decades — centuries — ago, whales were able to communicate at distances up to 15,000 kilometers via deep channels in the ocean. I had to look up kilometer because I had the measles the week my class learned measurements and measurements have been a mystery to me ever since. My dictionary says a kilometer is .621 mile. So 15,000 kilometers is…well, my calculator is across the room, but I think 15,000 kilometers can be rounded off to “a long way.”
In other words, whales could manage the equivalent of global texting when humans still needed paper, ink and weeks on a boat. Over the last couple of decades, humankind has finally developed expensive technology that can do what whales are capable of naturally.
By the 1970s when “Cosmos” came out, damage to our oceans had reduced the deep channels by which whales communicated; at that time, those the whales’ long-distance capability had been whittled down to a few hundred kilometers.
I wonder if whales can communicate with each other at all today.
If they’d been graced with earth’s most marvelous brainpower, would whales or lions or elephants or camels risk destroying their world? Are we really as smart as we think?
