faith and fragility

April arrived full of thunderstorms.  We had hail storms every other day.  The morning would begin sunny and, by noon, the dark clouds would roll in.  The sky would loom yellow and threatening, before pelting down its weight of ice and rain. About a week into the wearying onslaught of storms, a fresh bloom of purple caught my eye on the way home: irises.

My garden of dirt and rocks in which nothing will grow miraculously held a hundred irises that seemed to appear overnight. Having just felt the sting of the hail on my own body, I wondered how a fragile iris could withstand the relentless sky's stoning.  Each petal looked so delicate, as if it would dissolve at the first sign of trouble. As I watched and days passed, more and more irises bloomed, despite the continuing storms.

It felt like my own private wonder: some strange, inner strength that contradicted the apparent vulnerability. Something that seems so utterly fragile can not only survive, but bloom, through wind, rain, hail, lightning...  Where does this steadfastness come from? Oddly, now that we've had some bright and sunny days, the irises have withered.  Their time has passed.  It's as if they lived only to soften the time of spring storms. It made me wonder why God would create such hardiness, clothing it with such exquisite vulnerability, only for it to pass on so swiftly.

I'm not sure why or how, but seeing the strength of the irises imparted a degree of faith to me. I'm discovering a new kind of simplicity to believing in God's sovereignty.  We may feel vulnerable and seem vulnerable and wonder at how we can keep going, but the God who speaks each iris into its stormy existence also grants each iris the ability to stand and even to bloom for its appointed time. And the blooming may just somehow soften the gray and the weight of the surrounding storm.

I fell into the new school year. Literally. Tumbled head over heels down a concrete staircase, somersaulting twice and banging everything that could be banged on the way down. This is how tough I am (let us forget the clumsiness for a moment): Injuries?

1. A scratch on my back.
2. A major bruise on my leg.
3. A sore shoulder.

"Ha! Bring it on," I say to the slippery monsoon cement experiences life throws my way. Just give me a bit of a rest first.

In all seriousness, the first couple days back to school were rough. In combination with the fall, I moved office, had my external hard drive crash and burn (well, not burn, exactly, but it might as well have), had a teacher quit before she arrived, and scrambled to throw together the many bits and pieces required by staff and students to successfully start a new year. I've spent the last week wondering what else would or could go wrong.

God has been gracious to redeem the difficult moments and to inspire me through students and colleagues.

1. My new office is lovely--a departing colleague left me two soft paper lamps that infuse the office with a warm and fuzzy glow that has almost everyone who enters sighing in satisfaction. Makes me smile.

2. The hard drive? Already replaced, thanks to my generous parents and some former colleagues who are visiting. I'm piecing together former versions of the files I lost and realizing that it's just not that big a deal.

3. The new teacher quit, yes. This opened the way for the return of an old Woodstock hand who taught here for a number of years. He's just the man to breathe some much-needed wisdom and experience into the Social Studies Department (which includes me!)

4. The scrambling has paid off, at least, temporarily. Every teacher has a desk. There's a staff handbook and a student handbook. We're starting to use our online course management system more thoroughly. We had an inspiring (if, yes, a little too long) first assembly.

Most significantly, the students are back and that makes everything look different! Desks are filled with shiny, new faces and lockers are already spilling their contents into the hallway. Several hundred new shoes squeak down the hallway every hour. We even have ambitious rhesus monkeys who aspire to join our elevated community, or perhaps simply dig through our trash. They now open and shut the doors of the building all on their own.

I'm back introducing AP European History for (gasp!) the twelfth time. And today closed with a first: we were playing a game to review terminology from the world of medieval Europe--words like fief and vassal and serf and chivalry. The four teams had grown competitive. The prize? Cadbury's eclairs. These are 17 and 18 year olds we're talking about. Trust me: chocolate works. After a long day of school, the final bell rang. Unbelievably, the entire class came out with a collective, "AWWWWWW" of disappointment. These are the days we teachers remember!

Homeroom Devotion from this morning: The Context? A monsoon like I've never seen before, with water coming down in sheets every day. It's finally tapering off, but it still feels relevant:





So this summer, I got to visit Angkor Wat in Cambodia. As you can see, it’s beautiful. I braved 100 degree weather to climb all over these thousand year-old temples. But as I walked around, something interesting happened: I got totally distracted from the buildings and totally fascinated by the sheer power of life itself—the force of nature.






I mean, look at this. It’s a tree that somehow pushed its way up through the stones and grew to this enormous height. At some point, this huge tree was a tiny sapling battling heavy rocks for survival. And it won.



Here’s the same tree from inside the temple. Look at those roots. They’re truly magnificent, aren’t they? I mean, look at them! They look like they’re pouring and melting over the temple.



Walking around, I saw all sorts of signs of how tenacious life can be. Look at this spider surviving suspended between a few orchids. How fragile life is, but how strong. Just like the huge tree was once a tiny sapling, this spider’s web was once one fragile silken thread.



But what I really want to focus on this morning is one flower: the lotus. I saw lots of exquisite lotuses floating in the moats around the temples of Angkor Wat and I took way too many pictures of them. Watching the lotuses made me curious: How do they grow? Why are they so important in Eastern religious thought? What’s special about a lotus?

So I did some research. Lotuses are actually quite remarkable. Did you know that their seeds can lie dormant for 200 years with the potential for life still sealed inside? Then, when rain comes, the shoots spring up immediately and buds form.

That’s why I want to talk about lotuses: they grow in water. This is a lesson we all need to master as we try to survive what feels like an endless monsoon. How do we bloom in all this gloom? Sorry for the rhyming. I don’t know about you, but so much grey and so much rain can start to make it feel like our problems are totally insurmountable, like there are no possible solutions. Maybe you feel like you can’t possibly finish all your work AND prepare for SATs AND fill out college applications AND actually spend some time with the people you care about in your last year here. How can it all get done? I want to give you some concrete hope today by looking at the lotus.

Lotuses grow up through muck and mud. That’s where they plant their roots. Look around you. You’ve got plenty of muck to start planting in. Then, lotuses have strong, firm stems that work their way up through the water.



As you can see in this photo of a cross-section of a lotus stem, the stems are filled with air spaces. This makes the lotus stem buoyant. The air in the stem keeps the leaves and the bud afloat above the water. The stem can sway back and forth with the force of the water and remains remarkably sturdy. What is our equivalent? How do we remain buoyant when the forces around us seem ready to drown us? I hope this will make sense to you….air fills the spaces in the lotus stem, right? Air is not the lotus itself. Everyone with me so far? Air is also not emptiness, right? It has substance. In the same way, we have spaces inside us that need to be filled by something that’s NOT us, if we expect to remain buoyant. We require more than just our own strength to survive, in the same way that the lotus requires air. I believe that the spaces inside of us are filled in multiple ways—through everything from quality music to reading good books to friends who bother to actually listen and encourage us. But most importantly, I believe some space remains unsatisfied until we know God. I do—I believe this and experience the strength that knowing God brings.

Finally, the lotus flower itself. The bud. In Buddhist and Hindu thought, the lotus bud symbolizes endless potential in the way that it keeps opening. It is said that the lotus has a thousand petals. They keep opening further and further, exposing more and more layers of beauty. This is what I believe: when the spaces inside us are filled with strength, we are able to open up more and more from the inside and reveal more and more of the beauty of life, more and more of the power of life. Who knows how many petals you have left to show us? The lotus is a flower of potential.

Even more than that, the lotus is a symbol of resurrection. The flower dies and the seeds fall. The water dries up and life appears to be gone. Then, one day, maybe even 200 years later, miraculously, life re-emerges when the water returns.

As a Christian, as bizarre as it may sound to some of you, I actually believe in a bodily resurrection. I believe that Jesus really did rise again in an actual, physical body. That’s weird, I know. Even more weird is the belief that death here is not the end—just like the initial dying of a lotus flower is not the end. My core hope is something very material, the hope of a new life. Paul says it a lot better than I can, in the book of Romans. He looks around at the world and all the problems that seem insurmountable and after talking about the hope of life and resurrection and healing, he says, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit of God helps us in our weakness. (See? God fills the spaces inside us and makes us strong.) For we do not know what to pray for, but the Spirit of God himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words."

So I’d like you to bow your heads for a couple minutes and just think about the problems you face and the spaces inside you. Where are you finding strength beyond yourself? If you pray, ask God to help you know what you need and to give you strength to solve today’s problems and face today’s battles. Ask him to hold you up in all this water around you. I believe He will.

I had a different devotion planned and then I ran into an article this weekend about how facebook is trying to trademark the word face and it got me thinking. About faces.

Faces are special because, unless you live in an Islamic nation and you’re a woman, they’re the one piece of ourselves that we can’t hide. Think about it: your face is always exposed to other people and you’re never fully aware of what your face is showing. There are some voluntary facial expressions, but there are also a host of involuntary facial expressions. We don’t always choose what our face communicates, but we can't prevent communication. Psychologist Paul Ekman has done a number of studies on facial expressions and has found that they are universal: looking at photographs, people everywhere around the world recognize disgust as disgust and sorrow as sorrow. So, we may not be able to communicate with language always, but we can communicate with our faces and the expressions they make.

This communication through our faces is key for two reasons:

1. I believe that humans have a core desire: we want to be known. We want people to really see us. And love us. Our faces allow this.

2. I believe that humans have a corresponding core fear: we are afraid to be known. We are afraid people will reject what they find inside us. Our faces allow this, too.

So...we are stuck. We want to be known but we are afraid to be known. In fact, the weirdest thing is that since we can’t see our own faces most of the time, we can’t even know ourselves unless someone else is there interacting with us. I’m going to use an old word that doesn’t get used much anymore: beholder. We need a beholder, someone to see and know us, in order to fully know who we are.

In our wider culture, we often hear messages about being yourself and knowing yourself and achieving your dreams and, and, and...and what I’d like to say is that you can’t just be you all by yourself. In fact, you can’t even know who you are by yourself.

On the other hand, you can’t let others define you. Other people can’t make you who you are. If you allow that, you live in frustration constantly.

So we are faced with a constant tension between what’s inside of us and what others see on the outside of us. Our faces act as some sort of lens, the point of connection. Jesus talked about the eyes being the window of the soul, and I certainly believe that eyes communicate a great deal.

What do we do, then? Is there any practical value to recognizing this tension?

What do we do about the fact that we need a beholder to help us know ourselves, but we also need a sense of identity from within? I want to give you a few quick points I’ve learned:

First: I know what doesn’t work. I have tried two really bad strategies: hiding my face, which only causes whatever is happening to fester inside. And I’ve tried making my face into whatever it is other people seem to want from me. We all do this. I notice it most obviously when I look at the contortions people go through to create the right image of themselves, the right face, for something like facebook. This also causes frustration and anxiety, because I am never quite sure I’ve hidden my true self or whether I’ve met other people’s expectations.

Second: I believe that only one beholder really matters, God himself. Think about it. If God made you and your face, He, more than anyone, can tell you who you are and who you’re meant to be. More than that, he knows all of you, every little dark corner of your mind, and I believe He has decided to love you anyway. The Psalmist says,

“O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.”

So God fulfills my desire to be truly known and loved. He does not deny or erase my flaws, rather he demands that with and through his love, I continue to become more of who he intended me to be.

Third: This knowledge brings me peace. I have learned that the road to peace, or at least part of the road to inner peace, lies in authenticity. I consciously reject veils and masks. There’s something freeing about realizing that I don’t need to hide. My identity will continue to form and mold as I interact with the beholders around me. My face will change as I take on lines of laughter and worry and happiness and anger. I recognize that some of the beholders I meet will see my true face and will think me weak or proud or any number of other negative characteristics. I think they’re right to point these out, and with their help or with God's, maybe I can change my face and become strong and humble.

Fourth, and most importantly, if I recognize this deep desire in me to be known, truly known, and loved, and if I recognize that God knows and loves me, then I can extend that same kind of love to others. I, too, am a beholder. I can seek to see and know other people for who they really are, to go behind the veils and masks that we all put up. I believe people need this. And I don’t want to deny the dark corners that I find in others. Rather, I want to follow the model I’ve been given in God and simply decide to love no matter what I see, and to continue to believe that change is possible for anyone.

We don’t become who we are in isolation. In the end, our identity develops through interaction with others. We were made for community, for communion with others, so I hope you’ll take the time today to really look at your friends, find out what’s actually going on behind their faces, and decide to love what you find.

Cambodia: Spiriting Away the Past

In old times, you do bad, bad come to you. You do good, good come to you. Now, in modern? People say you do bad...you get money. You do good, you die. Yeah...iss trrooo...yeah.



Driver Phae Soh of the tiger-striped gloves has strong, mixed opinions about the way Cambodia is catapulting into the 21st century. Signs of modernization abound. So do signs of the past, and the two are inseparable. After the elimination of a generation of intelligentsia under Pol Pot, tiny international schools with names like "New World" and "New Hope" and "Tree of Life" now line the roads out of Phnom Penh. Out in the countryside, tracts of jungle disappear overnight, replaced by gleaming new garment factories stocked with hundreds of eager young girls from the provinces. In a roundabout on the outskirts of Sihanoukville, a statue of Buddha walks hand-in-hand with a young schoolboy. The message is not subtle.

Cambodia's past continues to press in, demanding an accounting. Dinner at the ex-pat haven of the Foreign Correspondents' Club (FCC) requires walking by a series of horrific black and white photographs from the early 1970s. Piles of skulls, the faces of frightened children, the aftermath of American bombing raids, scenes of massacres...and beyond sits Phnom Penh's foreign population, under the circling ceiling fans, sipping their gin-and-tonics and watching the World Cup.

Fashionable boutiques surround the FCC, along the Tonle Sap riverfront. Each one sells handcrafted silk handbags, silk scarves, silk clothing, some bamboo bits and pieces. The Khmer don't shop here. Instead, most boutiques are operated by foreign-run NGOs. Turn over any tag and the product has been made by widows or orphans or victims of landmines. The customers seem to be workers of other NGOs, for the most part. It's a strange echo of Cambodia's colonial past. The foreign aid organizations--full of good intentions--have mostly created a new Cambodia to match their own desires. But what happens when the foreign aid dries up?



All this modernization has banged right into a host of Cambodian traditions that were just beginning to reassert themselves after Pol Pot's attempts to outlaw religion. Predictably, Phae Soh has a lot to say about the perplexing process at work around him. The conversation began as we drove past a hilltop crowned by a small pagoda and several dozen spirit houses. After whispering a short prayer and ducking his head, Phae Soh said, "In old times, everybody stop here to pray for safe." The hilltop marked the border between two territories, and a spirit called Kaeng Mah (Black Grandmother) guarded the border. Phae Soh explained that in these modern times, many people don't stop at all. Black Grandmother doesn't seem to care about foreigners. She doesn't harass them. But when Cambodian people forget to pray as they pass, maybe they have an accident. He added that many Khmer believe that followers of Black Grandmother murder people far away, in cities like Phnom Penh. They bring the bodies back to the hills as offerings to appease this "strong spirit."

The discussion of Black Grandmother (who sounds much like the Indian goddess Kali) led Phae Soh to reminisce about his childhood in the area of Cambodia known for its rich mineral resources. He says that gems would come up through the ground during the monsoon, so that the unpaved road sometimes glittered after the rain. Then people got greedy and began taking the gems out of the province to sell. The spirits are very strong and resented the loss. Every time a man would make a fortune off of selling gems, he would die. Still, all the gems are gone now.

And why didn't the strong spirits stop Pol Pot? Many people ask this question, and Phae Soh has asked this question with them. Why would the spirits allow Pol Pot to kill two million of his own people? Phae Soh's answer to this question was simple and somehow heartbreaking: Pol Pot's army was modern. They had guns, and the spirits are powerless against guns. That also explains why big mining and lumber companies have been able to come into Cambodia and exploit her resources with impunity. The spirits can do nothing against what Phae Soh calls "The Modern."

Modern medicine also brings confusion: do the spirits still require the sacrifices of bananas or a chicken to bring healing? Phae Soh has pondered this, as well. Once again, he has an answer: people in rural areas continue to offer sacrifices because there are no hospitals nearby. People in cities cease their sacrifices because they have access to hospitals. The safest, of course, is to sacrifice and to go to a hospital. Still, mysteries persist. "When I hear spirit heal someone, I think this doesn't happen. The nice doctor in the hospital learned many, many things. They can go all over inside you and fix things. Can a spirit do that? But then I see with my own eyes, I believe...yeah, iss trrooo, yeah."

Actually, maybe Cambodia is not so unique. Modernization and the deification of science have challenged the way all of us see the world. Maybe the American response is a little different--we conduct studies to determine the exact role that prayer plays in healing and studies to determine the exact factors that create the mystical, magical result we call happiness.

Underneath, though, we all have these same pressing questions about why we hear only deafening silence from the heavens in response to genocide, exploitation, or the sex trafficking in young girls and boys that wears no mask in this part of the world. How can I believe in a God that would permit the scale of atrocity that has plagued Cambodia in the last forty years?

My answer is not Phae Soh's. I don't believe that our guns scare God, or that he is powerless against The Modern. Rather, I believe God is love, and that he has chosen to show his love for people through people. Instead of asking where God was and is, we should be asking where will we go? What shall we do to end all of this? How do we bring hope?

Phae Soh's conclusion, and I buy it: Many people say in The Modern, you do bad, you get money; you do good, you die. I say I do good, I die, no problem. Yeah, iss trrooo, yeah.

From James Agee's brilliant Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

(In 1936, he spent two months with three tenant farmer families in Alabama. The book gave an account of their lives. These passages come from his chapter on Education)

In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again: and in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility towards human life; towards the utmost idea of goodness, of the horror of error, of God.

Every breath his senses shall draw, every act and every shadow and thing in all creation, is a mortal poison, or is a drug, or is a signal or symptom, or is a teacher, or is a liberator, or is liberty itself, depending entirely upon his understanding: and understanding,* and action proceeding from understanding and guided by it, is the one weapon against the world's bombardment, the one medicine, the one instrument by which liberty, health, and joy may be shaped or shaped towards, in the individual, and in the race.

...

But let what I have tried to suggest amount to this alone: that not only within present reach of human intelligence, but even within reach of mine as it stands today, it would be possible that young human beings should rise onto their feet a great deal less dreadfully crippled than they are, a great deal more nearly capable of living well, a great deal more nearly aware, each of them, of their own dignity in existence, a great deal better qualified, each within his limits, to live and to take part toward the creation of a world in which good living will be possible without guilt toward every neighbor: and that teaching at present, such as it is, is almost entirely either irrelevant to these possibilities or destructive of them, and is, indeed, all but entirely unsuccessful even within its own 'scales' of 'value.'

...

'Literacy' is to some people a pleasing word: when 'illiteracy' percentages drop, many are pleased who formerly were shocked, and think no more of it. Disregarding the proved fact that few doctors of philosophy are literate, that is, that few of them have the remotest idea how to read, how to say what they mean, or what they mean in the first place, the word literacy means very little even as it is ordinarily used....Or to say it in another way: I believe that every human being is potentially capable, within his 'limits,' of fully 'realizing' his potentialities; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can accuse itself; and that the discovery and use of 'consciousness,' which has always been and is our deadliest enemy and deceiver, is also the source and guide of all hope and cure, and the only one...I only know that murder is being done, against nearly every individual in the planet, and that there are dimensions and correlations of cure which not only are not being used but appear to be scarcely considered or suspected. I know there is cure, even now available, if only it were available, in science and in the fear and joy of God.

...

It would be hard to make clear enough the deadliness of vacuum and of apathy which is closed over the very nature of teaching, over teachers and pupils alike: or in what different worlds words and processes leave a teacher, and reach a child. Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.

*Active 'understanding' is only one form, and there are suggestions of 'perfection' which could be called 'understanding' only by definitions so broad as to include diametric reversals. The peace of God surpasses all understanding; Mrs. Ricketts and her youngest child do, too; 'understanding' can be its own, and hope's most dangerous enemy.

Figuring out what it means to be a Christian is funny: I feel like I am constantly in a state of becoming, never of having arrived.

After a year and a half of searching for spiritual life here, I have found it in what many see as a colonial relic. Picture an old lemon yellow church with gun racks in the pews. There's plenty of dusty stained glass and candles in brass. A typical Sunday morning might bring twelve congregants. Every hymn becomes a battle of tempo between the beleaguered, elderly organist and the belting, white-robed Reverend who insists on holding the last note of each line long after the rest of the group has moved along. The Reverend's wife is also a Reverend. She delivers the homily from carefully handwritten sheets of rustling paper. She looks like a grandmother, strangely incongruous against the marble pulpit. But she is not afraid to speak Truth. In the simplicity of each Sunday's service, in the constancy of the liturgy, in the knowledge that I am uniting myself with two millenia of Christians, I find life. Each week, I am reminded of the whole hope and love and faith to which I cling. And I don't care about the packaging.

The fact that the music is not trendy or that the service is not "Indian" (though I'm not sure what that means) does not bother me. I am simply hungry, by Sunday morning. I am so tired of people trying to sell God. I only want to know my Creator, and worship him wholeheartedly--Sunday and every other day. I want to see Christ working around me, bringing hope from despair, life from death, belief from cynicism.

Good Friday found me walking to an even older, yellower, dustier sister church tucked in among the bustle of the bazaar. The service, as usual, was simple. We read seven passages of Scripture, each followed by a meditation from Rev. Anita. She looked at the people around Jesus at the time of his crucifixion. What did each of them do with Jesus? What does their response mean for us?

Ever since I was a child and our pastor did a monologue from the perspective of Pontius Pilate, he is the figure who has most intrigued me in the story of the Passion. Specifically, it's one tiny question he asks that catches my heart each time I hear it: When Jesus says that he came to testify to the truth, Pilate asks world-wearily, "What is truth?" To me, the question more than echoes, it booms down through the centuries. We never stop asking it. And to dare to seek answers takes courage. Pilate lacked the courage to stand even by the truth he knew--that Jesus had done nothing wrong.

What seems most likely to me this year, reading the story, is that Pilate couldn't be bothered. If you think about it, his question to Jesus is ridiculous. Can you imagine a trial for murder in which the judge asks the accused to please define truth for him? He has some inkling of who Jesus is--he even orders a sign, "King of the Jews," to be placed on the cross, over the protestations of Jewish leaders. "I have written what I have written," Pilate says. Yet he can't be bothered to risk his position for the sake of this man. I can just see him finding the whole ordeal messy, distasteful. I see him wishing the Jews could handle their own bizarre religious problems without his intervention. I see him mildly regretting the death of an innocent.

Did he ever figure it out, though? Could he rouse himself even to investigate seriously the claims made about the resurrection? Or was he afraid to investigate? When he shrugged his shoulders to truth, did Pilate simply give up on knowing? Was his a life of resignation? Or does the tiniest chance remain that, when Pilate asked about the nature of truth, he asked because the question burned in him? Did he dare to hope that this strange teacher might be able to connect Pilate to the truth? We can't know Pilate's motives, I suppose.

But we know our own motives. Weary myself of all the theatrical antics that Christians use to package God to a disinterested world, I am profoundly drawn to Pilate's simple question and Jesus's simple statement of purpose. Humans seek to know what truth is. Jesus came to show it. Either he did, or he didn't. Either he conquered death, or he did not. Being a Christian means holding daily, hourly to the hope that yes, Jesus came to testify to the truth--the truth that only he has power over life, because he created it.

I do not set aside my rational self to hold to this truth. My entire self still burns with Pilate's question, "What is truth?" Christ's answer that he testifies to truth, that he embodies truth, burns in me equally.

This is how I feel both hungry and fed, both full of faith and doubting. Being a Christian here on earth means facing Pilate's question directly and walking into it. It means trusting that, as he did with Thomas, Christ can mercifully provide the means of faith. He understands our struggle to believe, which makes me love him more. And today his means of faith came through Reverend Anita. I am thankful.