Thursday

Grizzly Bear

Church Lady stops by. She's going to her cabin for a week in the woods somewhere.  Some place where there are bears.  "Don't look a grizzly bear in the eye," she says.  "You look one in the eye and you're dead.  As soon as you look a grizzly bear in the eye, you're a threat, and they won't hesitate."


I go back to sitting at my desk and working on my essay. I think this piece needs a violent rewrite.  I'm going to go at it like I'm a grizzly bear, and it just looked me in the eye. 

The people from Children International are roaming the intersection of 5th and Broadway again.  They act like they know you and they don't have clipboards, but don't look them in the eye.  They're like friendly, attractive grizzly bears, and they want your money. 


I've got a professor, who is trying hard, but having some trouble getting the class to talk.  She's got a class full of introverts (no surprise there, it's a class full of writers).  She wanted to know why we don't speak more in class.  I looked her in the eye.

Like a grizzly bear.

Tuesday

A Spacious Place

Sit in your apartment in your underwear eating cheerios.  Watch this video of automobiles smashing into each other for much too long.  Remember that moment, a moment in the dorm bathroom that smelled like the pink cleaner they kept under the sink and the cold tiles under your feet.  You're brushing your teeth and staring at yourself in the mirror with all those angry questions in your head and God so very quiet.  Imagine that this was the moment the world you built out of words and faith began to crumble.  You probably aren't getting enough sleep.


Burn the past like an old notebook.  No, don't do that.  If you're not the story you tell yourself then who are you?  When you sing on Sunday, sing this: "I must tell Jesus all of my sorrow, I cannot bear these burdens alone," and feel that bit of relief inside, like something opens up, just a little.   "We went through fire and through water," the psalmist says, "yet you have brought us out to a spacious place."

Friday

Ronald

Ronald thinks I'm lying when I say the priest isn't in here.  He's friendly enough, dressed professionally, doesn't smell like alcohol.  He wants to see the priest, he says, but I think he wants money.  The priest really isn't in his office, and I'm just sitting on a bench trying to eat my lunch in the sun before the garden is engulfed in the shadows by the skyscrapers again.

"Ok, I'm going to stop playing games, here.  Can I just have three dollars?"

I look in my wallet.  It's empty.  "Sorry, I don't have any cash on me." 

"Sorry.  What's there to be sorry for?  I just don't believe certain people.  Certain people who say they're believers but can't even spare three dollars."

I am pretty sure I'm one of those certain people.  Ronald leaves and I think of rude things I could have said as I write down his words for later use.

Tuesday

Imaginary Hipsters (and some other links)

I think you should read this post  by Linda Holmes (who is always intelligent and amusing), which confirms my recent suspicion that there's no such things as hipsters. Hipsters, my friends, are imaginary. They are straw men, the skinny-pants-wearing monsters under the bed that never come out.  The real reason we love to hate hipsters is because "hipster" is just a really fun word to say. Can you think of a word with more than four letters that is quite so satisfying to say with a sneer on your face? I didn't think so.  Linda Holmes says some other, more intelligent things that I could repeat but it won't take you too long to read her blog anyway.  (I think she might be a graduate of Rice University, too. 10 points to the Owls.)

Would hipsters like the stuff below?  I don't know, but I do, and you should read or otherwise put them on your list of stuff that is great.:

Episcorific!  New Easter Issue is out. 

The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff.  This is a good memoir.  Sometimes the author finds just the right voice to tell his story.  And it's a pretty good story. 

Magicians' Secrets Revealed (via The Rumpus)

And finally, a feel good band that I love, Fang Island.  Pitchfork said something about post-punk something or other, and I'm not sure what that means, but I know that I like the harmonies and the crunchy guitars - pretty much the happiest guitars ever.  Best listened to really loud.

Monday

Funfetti

Church is over now.  We ate some pasta with artichoke in it (I love artichoke!) and we prayed and sang some psalms and it was a little intense but good.  Now upstairs someone is playing show tunes, someone else is talking about Bill Clinton and his pants, I think, and I'm eating something called funfetti cake and thinking about this essay I'm writing about faith.  Really, it's about doubt.  The funfetti cake looks alluring but a little frightening - alluring and frightening like a costume party is alluring and frightening.  It turns out the cake is delicious with whipped cream.  I'm anxious about my essay because it's due tomorrow and it's a mess.  I've quoted my high school physics teacher and an epistemologist and Campus Crusade for Christ's  Four Spiritual Laws in my essay and there's a section about church camp and yeah, it's a mess.  I go out for a drink anyway.  I've spent the majority of my weekend in my apartment writing and I just want to hang out.

I talk to a guy from church on the way home who says what everyone says: New York can be a lonely place.  Despite the 8 million people living in this city my life shrunk when I moved to New York.  Suddenly everything is smaller: my apartment, my church, the number of my coworkers, my circle of friends. The only thing that has grown is my confidence in my ability to write and my ambition and, um, maybe my ego a little except that I've got this essay that is really not very good.

Peter Berger, whom I also have been reading for this essay, says this: "Every human society is an enterprise of world-building. Religion occupies a distinctive place in this enterprise...The socially constructed world is, above all, an ordering experience.  A meaningful order, or nomos, is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals...The socially established nomos may thus be understood, perhaps in its most important aspect, as a shield against terror."

Sometimes the only way I know I have faith is that I have doubt. I still go to church every Sunday to fend it off, though, terror or meaninglessness or whatever, with rituals and funfetti cake and beer with my friends.  It all worked out, anyway.  Class was canceled, so I have some more time to figure out how to make sense out of my faith and my doubt.  I'm sure I can figure it all out by next week.  

Thursday

Cat Funeral

Outside they are burying the ashes of a cat in the garden.  "A cat named cat," Bill tells me.  It's sunny and the they stand in a circle while the priest, in an alb and white chausible, leans over the hole they have dug near the church.  All of them have gray hair, and wind blows it up a little while they pray.  "She was very sad about her cat," the priest tells me.

Does a cat really need a burial?  I don't know, but sometimes you need to bury your cat.

Tuesday

The Hours

Oh hello, 3am.  I was hoping you wouldn't show up so soon.  I just saw 2am and was a little surprised, considering how I had just finished up my beer with 12am and got home in time to greet 1am.  And now here I am lying in my bed watching television with you. 

7am can't be far behind.  You and 7am are much too close, really.  It's just not healthy.  I sometimes ignore 7am until 8am bugs me and then I have to hurry so I can meet 9am at the office.  Then it's much too long before I see 5pm.  5pm and I get along well.  I wish 9am and 5pm were better friends, but I just can't seem to bring them together.  I get sleepy waiting around for 5pm.  Today 3pm and I had coffee, and then I had some later with 6pm so I would be awake when I met 8pm or class. 

You're so quiet, 3am, and dark.  I hope I don't see you again for a long time. 

Love is the every only god

This past weekend I went to a Good Friday service in Virginia and saw my friend Chase preach.  He preached eloquently, and read "A Settlement" by Mary Oliver.  The poem begins with these stanzas: 


Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turned
into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come
up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their
curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come
home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,
happiness, music, ambition.
And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to
go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of
this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.


On Saturday we walked down by the basin where the cherry blossoms were blooming in DC, weaving between the crowds and the sunlight and the pink falling petals.  I went to an Easter Vigil in Maryland at a small church with stone walls, wooden pews and red carpet.  The choir sang courageously and the nervous youth minister preached and we all sat with our small candles.  They brought out a banjo, and we sang Dry Bones together.  I almost cried it made me so happy.

The next day I went to church at the St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital where my friend Michael works.  We prayed in a small room on the second floor.  The warm breeze came through the windows and I and a few patients, staff members and priests sang "This is the Day the Lord Has Made." At the peace we "bumped knuckles" as a sign of the peace of God.  
Michael and I then made our way out to Baltimore to have Easter dinner with friends of his in their house on a street lined with more cherry blossoms.  On the way back we talked about work and dating and doubt and God.  He reminded of the ee cummings poem our friend Ron had posted on Facebook which begins like this: 
love is the every only god
who spoke the earth so glad and big
even a thing all small and sad
man, may his mighty briefness dig
That feeling of love comes and goes, relationships sometimes crumble and we hurt each other because we are stupid.  Love is an orientation, Michael said.   I can get behind that.   I think maybe I'm going to get a tattoo and of this on my arm and I'm going to bump knuckles with everyone I meet to show them the peace of God and learn to play the banjo.  
The Mary Oliver poem ends, by the way, with these lines: 
Therefore, dark past,
I'm about to do it.
I'm about to forgive you
for everything.