Trying to let my life speak

"By surviving passages of doubt and depression on the vocational journey, I have become clear about at least one thing: self-care is never a selfish act - it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others."
- Parker J. Palmer 'Let Your Life Speak'

When I read these words, they didn't lift me from the despondence I have been feeling in my search for calling. His phrase "good stewardship" took my mind to the parable of talents where the servant who keeps his talent buried, unused, and away from the world is rebuked and thrown out. After a second reading of the story I realized it wasn't the undiscovered dormancy of his one talent that was the sin meriting the master's displeasure - it was his fear and unbelief which tied him down. "And I was afraid, and went away and hid your talent in the ground..." This seems to say that it wasn't his failure to immediately find the perfect place to invest his talent, it was that he was not actively seeking one. I am afraid, too.

But there is time.

When demons are right...

C.S. Lewis writes of a demon mentor named Screwtape who advises his protege to remember and take advantage of the weak human nature in the face of minor annoyances. We can be easily swayed from seeing the body of Christ by focusing on inconveniences in ‘the stream of real life.’ When the people sitting next to us at church have double chins, or odd clothes, or sing out of tune, we don’t look at them as fellow saints that each have a different story of redemption, we only see a group of people that grate on our nerves by their mere proximity. Over the last few weeks, I have inwardly resented one of my classmates in a music class for the way that he dominated the discussion with off-topic tangents accompanied by awkward commentary. If I’m truly honest, I might not have been as quick to judge if he hadn’t been wearing socks with his Tevas, and a tee shirt tucked into jeans that were slightly too short. Yesterday one of my girlfriends mentioned his name in passing, and I was about to unload some of my comic negative complaints about his personality when she said, “You know, he has come such a long way. It’s really amazing how he has overcome the challenges of Asperger’s Syndrome in social situations and in the classroom.” A ball of guilt and remorse formed in my stomach. I had judged him for something that he not only couldn’t help, but also had worked hard to overcome. Screwtape would have been proud. Instead of extending the hand of friendship, and asking about his story, I was distracted by his clothing and turned away from his uncomfortable conversation. May God give me the grace to avoid this smug condescension that changes my faith into hypocrisy.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is a day to remember. This is a poem in memoriam by Czeslaw Milosz, born in 1911 in Lithuania and a survivor of WWII in Warsaw.

Album of Dreams

June 17
And that snow will remain forever,
unredeemed, not spoken of to anyone.
On it their track freezes at sunset
in an hour, in a year, in a district, in a country.

And that face will remain forever
beaten for ages by drops of rain.
One drop is running from eyelid to lip
on an empty square, in an unnamed city.

August 14
They ordered us to pack our things, as the house was to be burned.
There was time to write a letter, but that letter was with me.
We laid down our bundles and sat against the wall.
They looked when we placed a violin on the bundles.
My little sons did not cry. Gravity and curiosity.
One of the soldiers brought a can of gasoline. Others were tearing
down curtains.

November 23
A long train is standing in the station and the platform is empty.
Winter, night, the sky is flooded with red.
Only a woman's weeping is heard. She is pleading for something
from an officer in a stone coat.

Goodbye, Leah Davis!

Traveler, pay attention
to the hardships of the road,
to mysteries on the walls.

I know this at great cost,
that all life is not outward
nor all death within,
and that the age writes letters
with water and stone for no one,
so that no one knows,
so that no one understands anything.

-Pable Neruda

Recurring Dream

An aisle strewn with white flower petals, and a tall man in a black tuxedo waiting at the end - I'm the center of attention. And then he gives me the ring, but instead of putting it on my finger he places it in my hand and says, "You aren't who I thought you were. I'm sorry." Then I run, and wake up out of breath.

This dream seems to like my memory pool at night, why is it back?

Disillusion

Lewis has said that the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing is not an easy one to make. I think this appears in whatever undertaking we begin, from a little kid who is excited with the new found ability to read who then meets a textbook to a pair of enamored lovers entering the ups and downs of marriage.

Disillusion preys on the idyllic visions that play in our heads. By changing my major from piano performance to music therapy, I thought I would be cultivating a more meaningful way to change the world and minister to people in pain. Music therapy was a romanticized picture in my head of working with children in the hospital or connecting with adolescents. For Music Therapy Practicum I was not placed with kids, but in a nursing home. Walking into the facility on my first day I felt so uncomfortable – it didn’t smell very nice, loneliness seemed to be a blanket on every person’s lap, and the group of wheelchair-bound patients in the therapy room was unresponsive due to advanced Alzheimer’s. Only one lady in the group could actually talk, and she kept asking where her husband was and saying he was due for a visit anytime because she missed him. The therapist pulled me aside and said that her husband had died two years ago, but since her memory could only retain that fact for five minutes they refrained from telling her so that she wouldn’t have to re-live her grief on a daily basis. This first session did not match up at all to the ideal in my head, and I was so heavy with the loneliness and hopelessness in the eyes of the seniors living there that I began to cry when I got to my car. After thirty minutes in the car, I had almost decided that music therapy was definitely not for me - too uncomfortable, too hard, too emotionally draining. When I told this to my best friend, she didn't give me the affirmation and understanding that I expected. She said, "What if the right question is whether or not this is where your gifts meet the world's deep need? I don't think vocation's path is exactly strewn with daisies." Completely taken by surprise by this faithful question (everyone else probably would have simply agreed with me) I realized that my decision in the car was dependent on emotion and therefore lacking any desire to find God's intent when he made me.

Sometimes I wish that God would carry me to the goals that he sets before me. I hope that in the struggle with free will and disillusionment my decision will be strengthened with conviction.

Christmastime

The Nativity by C.S. Lewis

Among the oxen (like an ox I’m slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which, with the ox’s dullness might at length
Give me an ox’s strength.

Among the asses (stubborn I as they)
I see my Saviour where I looked for hay;
So may my beastlike folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.

Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;
Oh that my baa-ing nature would win thence
Some wooly innocence!

Slow, stubborn, and the tendency to stray - so much of my personality is found in this circle of animals, but thankfully redemption of these traits is found within the manger that they are gathered around...