as March warms

Through the weeks of deep snow

we walked above the ground

on fallen sky, as though we did

not come of root and leaf, as though

we had only air and weather

for our difficult home.

                                 But now

as March warms, and the rivulets

run like birdsong on the slopes,

and the branches of light sing in the hills,

slowly we return to earth.

by Wendell Berry

Source: Earth Prayers From Around the World

Dust and Water

by Antony and the Johnsons

(conveniently meditative video)

Hi Faith, Meet Justice.

I've written about fasting here before, but as it the season of Lent I stumbled upon something that is uniquely fitting and totally inspiring. The Washington Association of Churches (the WAC) is calling for folks to participate in their fast during Holy Week, April 18-22. The WAC isn't fasting in observance of Holy Week, however. The organization is gathering folks to participate in the fast as physical protest and witness to the Washington State budget plan. Following the example of extremely influential champions of justice such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela (not to mention JC), the WAC describes the fast as having "great spiritual power."

Not into fasting? That's cool too. The WAC offers several ways to join in the protest, from going to the state capitol in Olympia and fasting in community, to simply taking 20-30 minutes to reach out to state legislators and voice concern. Whatever action you take, you can register with the WAC and let them know you are in solidarity with the marginalized Washingtonians that are most greatly impacted by state budget cuts--the homeless, the sick, the hungry, the elderly and the children. This earns some major points in my book for Washington state religious communities.

Lent & Rango: It's About the Desert

Forgot to mention this, but I made another post on The Other Journal back in March. Read it here.

Novena of Grace

Yesterday marked the beginning of the 2011 Novena of Grace, a preached Lenten retreat sponsored by my mom and featuring my dad. If you cannot attend the actual novena, you can pray it at home and listen to the talks that are uploaded on the Ignatian Spirituality Center website. I'm planning on making all of the days (missing the last day as I will be out of town). It's a simple commitment that deepens the experience of moving into Lent, and focuses me on God. Plus, I get to see my folks doing their thing. Win win win. Also, repent repent repent!

It's Lent

"Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep." Romans 13:11

Exhibit "A" is for "Awe"

Worldwide, observers of Judaism are celebrating the "Days of Awe," the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is a time of introspection, prayer and good deeds. The shofar, a ram's horn, is blown at the end of each service of Rosh Hashanah and is considered a wake up call. Rabbi Maimonides, the great Spanish Torah scholar, described the shofar as saying "Awake, you sleepers, from your slumber ... examine your deeds, return in repentance, and remember your Creator." Notably, Maimonides is also known as "Rambam," a virtual onomatopoeia in reference to this quote.


So why am I bothering to write about the Days of Awe, the shofar, Jewish philosophers and onomatopoeias? Well, mostly because inter-religious dialogue remains a theme in my life and work, and because I find Judaism so rich in wisdom, ritual and challenge. And because I believe in an awesome God, so finding myself in the midst of what practicing Jews call the Days of Awe sparks my interest and wonder. Ah yes, wonder. I am curious always about the many ways the Divine finds expression in our lives, and the many rituals and prayers believers of various faiths practice in an effort to articulate the Divine encounter.


Maimonides' words about the call of the shofar strike me as pertinent to the human condition. Wake up! Look at yourself! Are you the human being that you want to be in the world? How simultaneously beautiful and horrifying it is that Judaism brings this front and center each year with Rosh Hashanah. Beautiful, that the faith instructs its followers to turn inward and give an honest, hard look at the life each is living. Horrifying, that each year Jews must come before God and their community with all their dirt and failures. I mean, in theory, Christians only believe in one judgment day in the end times, not a yearly examination of one's self in the world. Perhaps the season of Lent is somewhat akin to this time of inner reflection, but I continue to be struck by the dramatic task of redefining one's self in one's relationships on a yearly basis. How profound, how daunting, how brutal.


I can honestly say that I am not the human being that I want to be in the world. Exhibit A: Tonight I made the misjudgment that I am gifted with the ability to art & craft, and I attempted to make candles. I collected the leftover wax from my candles that have lost their wicks and put them all in a pot on the kitchen stove. I put the burner on high. I went into the next room and began futzing around, something I truly am gifted at, only to be called by the panic of the smoke alarm back to the kitchen. The wax was on fire! How something that surrounds flame is suddenly flammable is beyond me. Again, I'm gifted in futzing around, not physics. Or the art of putting out fires, apparently. I lifted the pot off the burner (plus one for using logic!) and blew on the flames (minus ten for being an idiot!). This of course brought the flames to flare up even higher, and let me just say that I am god damned lucky to still have eyebrows. My next plan of attack was to put the pot of ignited wax into the kitchen sink and turn on the faucet. I cannot tell you why, but this caused the flames to flare up to the ceiling and the fire continued to blaze. At this point, the incessant smoke alarm was more mocking me than saving my life, and I grabbed my phone to call 9-1-1. I think I dialed right, but I don't know because the phone wasn't ringing and I think I dropped it when the flames in the kitchen subsided. Dark smoke filled my apartment--not just the kitchen--but the actual fire had stopped. Thank God! I believe I followed this moment with some actual logic, such as opening windows and calling my roommate to tell her I almost killed everyone in our building and can she please come home right now because oh my god I almost burned down the apartment! I was shaking. My hand got burnt.

Photo courtesy of http://ritard.tumblr.com/

This is one of those distinctive moments in a young woman's life. My kitchen is on fire, I'm home alone, and all I can think is that there's no parent to call for help, no adult that can assume responsibility for this disaster and save me ... I am my own adult. This is a devastating realization. This realization almost makes me want a husband to kill spiders for me and solve the problem of the kitchen-sink-on-fire.


I am not the human being that I want to be in the world. I have the sense that the shofar calls to wake us up from our delirium, from the false world we build up around ourselves. Wake up! Look at yourself! Look at that part of yourself, Kelly, that you are not comfortable confronting. The part of you that wants to be saved, that wants the adult to step in and take over, the part that is passive, dependent, immobile, paralyzed by fear. Wake up! Wake up and smell the smoke filling your apartment. Well, it may not have been graceful or logical, but (thank you Jesus!) the apartment is intact, nothing was actually damaged, and I am not harmed. I am awake to the fact that I am my own adult. And as the Days of Awe fall away and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, approaches, I can decide what kind of adult I want to be in the world. Probably the kind that owns a fire extinguisher.

(transformation)

The season of Easter is upon us. Or at least, it's upon me and other practicing Christians. The few and the stubborn. Easter is actually a season guys, who knew! So while Easter Sunday happens for just a day, the season of Easter lasts several weeks and celebrates the time J.C. spent walking around after the resurrection before he ascended into heaven.


I can't speak much to the historicity of this event and I'm not about to get into the various scholarly approaches regarding Christ's rising from the dead ... not because I can't (clearly!), but because it doesn't interest me. Seriously--I've gone down that road and it's confusing, there's very little fact to go off of (not that I'm so stuck in modernity that I need scientific facts to believe something, but come on ... undead Christ?), and ultimately the significance of the resurrection does not lie in whether or not it can be proven. Sounds blasphemous I know, but it's about time I told you (spoiler alert!): I'm a flaming progressive.


In all seriousness, the resurrection means a lot to me. Like any still-faithful Catholic, Jesus' rising from the dead is the basis of my belief in Christianity and the ground of the meaning of life, the universe and pretty much everything. In my limited experience on this planet with those who've trickled into my precious life, the message of the resurrection resonates as a deep, deep truth. Not the undead, zombie Christ message--that's just creepy. The message: Death is not the last word.


According to modern theories of cosmic evolution, in the beginning of the universe there was matter and antimatter, which annihilated each other and created light. From the death of elementary particles came the primordial energy from whence all life arose. Death leading to new life is also exemplified in nature. Think about the cycle of the seasons: from fallen leaves in autumn to the frozen ground and dormant trees in winter, all serve as the fecundation period for the bright mosses and budding cherry blossoms of spring. The most prominent analogy is probably the life cycle of the caterpillar, which closes up into its cocoon and melts down into life-matter as it transforms into its butterfly self, completely different from the plump insect it once was.


I find that in the life of my relationships death is rarely the last word . The people I grew up with fade away as time and distance tumble onward, acquaintances and dear friends constantly swirl into and out of my realm of awareness as their own lives carry them on their journeys. Even those relationships that end in actual death leave a near-tangible space that remains, and I am transformed as much by the departure as I'd been by the presence. I once read that although people die, our relationships with them do not. How does a seemingly one-way relationship between a fleshy, living person and someone who has passed away continue on? In memory only?


In his book Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, William Bridges describes the life cycle in a somewhat counter intuitive manner. Bridges suggests that rather than birth-life-death, the patterns of our lives appear to follow the course of ending-neutral zone-new beginning, or death-life-birth. The question is no longer which came first: the chicken or the egg; the question becomes: what goes on after the chicken? I can refine this analogy even further and posit that the event of the egg is in essence the neutral zone/life that happens after the ending/death that is the laying of the egg, and before the new beginning/birth that is the baby chick--or breakfast, whichever. And Easter is truly about this pattern that Bridges describes. It is the resurrection that shows us that the ending is truly the beginning of new life and that this cycle repeats itself throughout the evolution of the universe and the history of the earth and our lived experiences.


The challenging piece is accepting that the "neutral zone" between endings and new beginnings makes up the large bulk of our lives. Very rarely am I living in constant joy or constant despair, what St. Ignatius refers to as times of consolation or desolation, respectively. For the most part, life happens in the murky in-between times, when what has ended continues to ripple through our lives as a fading echo and when what is coming is yet mirage-like in the distance. In this space of processing and waiting, we grow.


Liturgically speaking, Lent is like this neutral zone in which we take time out to reflect on our values, relationships, motives and longings as we prepare for renewed life at Easter. Microcosmically, the entire movement happens at Easter with Good Friday (death), Holy Saturday (neutral zone) and Easter Sunday (new beginning). On a larger scale I find that death and life invariably accompany each other. It is no wonder the phrase so often heard is "life and death," as if life always came before death. Easter reminds me that all life springs forth from death, hence Lent begins with the ashes of last year's palms and the benediction to Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return. Between dusts life transforms us.


RESOURCES:


William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004)

Statement of Intent

This project begins as an adventure, a challenge I have taken up as millions of Christians worldwide begin to observe the season of Lent. Lent is Latin for “spring,” as in the season in which life sprouts, blossoms, hatches, emerges forth. However, most Americans—Christians and non-Christians alike—are more familiar with the idea that Lent is a time for abstaining. No eating meat on Fridays, give up chocolate or alcohol or swearing, sit and think about what you’ve done. That may sound harsh, but I have to wonder if it’s really so unlike “spring cleaning,” perhaps on a spiritual scale? A yearly organizing of the spiritual house, what stays and what is give-away, what needs to be deep-cleaned or replaced, brought out or put away. Fasting does not quite connote the same sense of betterment that spring cleaning might. But fasting is certainly not unique to Christianity—in Islam the month of Ramadan is devoted to fasting, and Hollywood, Oprah, and the Cosmo Girl all recently embraced the Acai Berry detox diet. I once read that fasting is about giving up something you love (sweets, for example) for something you love more (translate as “God”). Spiritually speaking, this makes sense—every time I refrain from eating meat on Friday, I am subtly reminded that this is because it is Lent, which is God’s time. On the other hand, fasting literally means not consuming, and I am enraptured with the spiritual implications of this.

In this space I seek to engage several questions raised by not consuming during Lent. What connections can be made between Lenten fasting and me as an American consumer? What do I consume? What might abstinence mean spiritually? How does consuming and/or fasting shape my spirituality? My reflections will be primarily based on my own experience as a …
twenty-six year old
Caucasian
Roman Catholic
American
woman
heterosexual
non-handicapped person
upper-middle class lady
current resident of the Pacific Northwest
graduate student.
(Mouthful). I will also be digesting several resources I have consumed for this project, mainly within the area of religion and the media. These will be added as “resources” throughout. Finally, I have included below a glossary of terms which includes a couple general definitions of the key words I will be using. This is in part so I will not be caught up in semantics, attempting to be clear about what I do and do not mean with each entry, wasting breath, screen space, straining further your eyes; but also this is because I find the general definitions best serve my purpose of exploration—I have no interest in using this blog as a soap box to preach my personal conclusions as universal truths. Rather, I seek to explore my own agency of choice as a consumer of media. I choose to read NYTimes.com, I do not choose the stories featured or the images highlighted ... so, what do I choose to ingest and act upon? What does this mean for my relationship with myself, with others, with God?

My hope is that these entries provoke thought, invite meditation, and honor both my own experience and the Divine Mystery …

GLOSSARY OF TERMS:

“media”: the actual or principal means of mass communication, such as the newspaper, the radio and the television. (Jolyon Mitchell)

“popular culture”: those commercially-produced items specifically associated with leisure, the mass media, and lifestyle choices that people consume. (Lynn Schofield Clark)

“spirituality”: relationship with self, others, God, especially regarding making meaning of the human experience.

RESOURCES:

Jolyon Mitchell, ed. Media Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate, editors, The Religion and Film Reader (New York: Routeledge, 2007)

Gordon Lynch, ed. Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007)