On Providence

Today my feet were cold. Which was my own stupid fault: I'd elected to wear flipflops on a forty degree day. But it's been winter much too long, and I'm tired of wearing my winter clothes and my winter skin and my winter mood. The sun was out, so, in a fit of misguided hopefulness, I put on sandals and went about my business with very cold feet.

As I scuffed across campus on my way to class, I happened to look down. A pair of neatly rolled tube socks were laying smack in the middle of the sidewalk. I didn't stop and pick them up and put them on. But I did laugh out loud like a crazy woman.

In church on Sunday, we read a portion of Christ's "Sermon on the Mount," found in the Gospel of Matthew:

Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

This passage has always annoyed the crap out of me. Really. I just want to pick up a slingshot and go after those smug, self-satisfied little birdies. Birds don't reap or sow--or make big student loan payments or struggle with their career aspirations or google their medical symptoms obsessively. All they do is fly around and poop on windshields.

Trusting God doesn't come easily for me. I lie awake in my bed and gnaw my lips and run over worst case scenarios. I take baths and go for long runs and try to pray. But, mostly, I worry.

In the strangest moments, though, come these flashes of faith, these small acts of grace. I sigh over my cold feet and see a pair of socks and am struck by the incalcuable scandal that just maybe I'm cared for beyond my reckoning and that on days when I go out with my chin stuck out against the world I'm held small and secure in the palm of a great hand. And that knowledge is a giddy as the promise of spring.

The Minor Fall (the major lift)

The thing about my life outside of the city I miss the most is the music. I miss smudging on too much eyeliner and putting on my shoes and going out to see bands play. No one much comes through this corner of the midwest on tour, and I miss the way music can somehow lift up the top of my skull and carry me away somewhere.

I have a perfect concert scenario. I like a small venue, perferrably one with an interesting history, with around a hundred enthusiastic but not too enthusiastic people. I like to drink two and a half perfectly poured drinks over the course of the evening--an amount that produces a pleasant buzzy sensation but no worrisome drunkeness. I like the band to be very, very good, and the air to be freely circulating but not super-cooled. I like to be cutely dressed and wearing comfortable shoes. I like to stand in the ideal spot, which, of course, varies with venue but is usually centered and around ten feet from the stage. And, although I do not, I like it when people can smoke. It's a configuration I crave like good chocolate or good conversation.

Tonight I saw David Bazan play with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. The show was not an expression of my perfect concert scenario. There were chairs. Folding chairs. I hate those, especially when I arrive too late to stake one out and have to stand, in heels, looking over the shoulders of those lucky comfortable shoe wearing bastards. I was with my sister, who had ignored the assortment of "do you think you'd like this?" links I'd sent her to agree to an evening with unfamiliar music, was grumpy. I was refusing to acknowledge her grumpiness, deeming it her own damn fault. There was beer, but it was suspicious and unfamiliar beer, and I did not drink any because it looked piss-colored. The levels were wonky. It was stuffy. The crowd bordered comatose.

But it was a really lovely evening just the same. I hadn't had a drink and I wasn't with my friends or with a boy I liked and I wasn't, really, where I wanted to be. But there's a bit of transcendence in music that I struggle to find as regularly or as readily in the other arts. That I struggle to find generally. Some doorway out of myself and into something else. I stood around, alone after my grumpy sister gave up and found a couch in another part of the gallery, completely sober and in my less than comfortable shoes and had a wonderful time listening to music I enjoy played very well.

Transcendence is a difficult thing, a thing I chase after often and through often foolish means.

When I was a kid, I always learned in Sunday school that God forgives us if we ask, that all our smudgy sins are erased from that big, heavenly blackboard. But that forgiveness doesn't necessarily free us from the more immediate, corporeal results of our sin. In this way, I managed for years to get around some of the scandal of grace, the utter nonsense that is Christ's redeeming love. Remember Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon? Remember the way the great righteous hand of God dangles us like spiders over the fire? I always think of that image, the vengeful God who wants me to take my medicine, to burn out all my unrighteousness while my many legs shrivel and curl over the fires of The Consequences. That'll teach you to fuck things up. Somehow I've made the world into my own private purgatory, the place where I get to suffer for the things I do wrong. Sure, God forgives sin, but that's all sort of in heaven and far away from me.

Several months ago, I started making bad decision after bad decision. It doesn't matter exactly what those bad decisions were: but they were little, broken attempts at transcendence, at a way out of my own head for a a while. They were bad decisions that ought to have had some obvious and unpleasant consquences. But those consequences somehow never arrived and reminded me anew and instead that the business of Grace is so much more than I imagine, more than a heavenly tally kept and then sponged out upon request. I'm not saying we should sin that grace may abound. I'm not saying that all the other times I've fucked things up and they've stayed fucked up weren't for my own good. I'm just saying that I deserved much worse than I got and in some small and paltry way it reminded me that the love of Christ is so much bigger than I am and more mysterious than I can imagine.

I taught a Sunday school class of first graders, and not long after I realized that I was off the so-called hook, my first graders and I talked about the Baptism of Jesus. At the moment he came up from the water, the Heavens opened and the Spirit of God descended like a dove. We were learning about God's purpose for our lives that morning, a subject I don't really feel qualified to broach with anyone, even first graders.

We drew pictures of what we thought it looked like, pieces of Heaven poking out of the ripped open blue sky. One girl drew these remarkable black piles of birds, the Holy Spirit imagined by Alfred Hitchcock. Another girl drew a huge swirl of a sun. We talked about the pictures as we drew them.

You know how the sun is, you know, up there?

Yeah.

You know how it's pretty and yellow and warm and stuff?

Yeah.

Well, I think maybe it was like the sun, pretty and nice and all, but it could, you know, hurt your eyes if you looked right at it.

I told her that's mostly what it says in the Bible: Moses on the mountaintop, able only to look at a wee slice of God's backside and only for a second or two. The prophet taken up to heaven and recognizing himself as a man of unclean lips and a citizen of a nation of uncleanliness with wet, black horror in the dazzling presence of holiness. The disciples watching in slack-jawed wonder while their Teacher begins to glow like an incandescent bulb.

Then we drew pictures of ourselves, of what we want to be when we're grownups and of ourselves serving that bright and good and holy God right now. The boy who sits next to me drew himself small against a teal-colored sky, an army solidier guy with six fingers on each hand and a comically oversized gun. When his dad came to pick him up, the boy put his messy head against my shoulder for a quick second and muttered something I couldn't understand.

Tonight I thought about those children and their pictures for a minute or two. I thought about the swell of birds and the swirl of sun and about six-fingered army soldier guy, and I thought about being small and filled with faith.

The show ended with a Leonard Cohen cover--a song that's also been performed by Jeff Buckley and Bon Jovi and a few dozen other acts in between--but it somehow still sounds good to me.

I heard there was a secret chord
That david played and it pleased the lord
But you don't really care for music, do you
Well it goes like this the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall and the major lift
The baffled king composing hallelujah


Fall 2007

Tell Me, Mister Love

In the sixth grade, I was, not withstanding the braces, kinda hot. There's no way to describe the hotness of a sixth grader without sounding unbelievably creepy. But I was thinner and tanner but had exactly the same bosom I have today. It was more impressive then, let me tell you. And I wore short shorts.

My mom was an elementary school teacher, so my younger sister and I spent every afternoon after school hanging around her classroom or on the playground. One afternoon we were playing a half-assed game of horse when an older boy, maybe in highschool, came around. He started to talk to me. It was one of those vivid and ridiculous moments of adolescence, as if life's suddenly become a Roy Lichtenstein stereotype. He was handsome and dangerous-seeming. There were small beads of sweat on his upper lip and the faintest beginnings of a moustache. He asked me my name. I was wearing short shorts.

Annie Hall, I said. Like in the Woody Allen movie. My name's not Annie Hall. I didn't even see that movie until I was twenty three. I don't know what the hell I was thinking.

Oh. He didn't say much else and, before long, loped off toward the kickball fields.

Shit, I said. I was into swearing then. Even more than I am now. Who the fuck'd want to date a guy who's never fucking heard of Woody Allen? My sister shrugged her small shoulders before sighing and tossing me the basketball.