Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

I use a slide board to get myself in and out of bed, and it’s a deliberate process.  I get myself on and off the bedside commode I use as a toilet, and it’s hard work. Sometimes
transferring isn’t such a big deal, and sometimes, for some reason, it is, and I get shaky.  Sometimes I get so shaky I have to hold on because I’m afraid I may fall. Then all I can do is breathe, breathe some more, and try again, very carefully. Sometimes I have to take something to help me get through it.

There’s another kind of slowing down, the kind I find when I keep working on a photograph. I’ll adjust the brightness first this way and then that, crop it one way and then change my mind, decide it’s finished—and days later adjust the right border, for example, just a tad and come to the conclusion that maybe a bit less brightness is called for. And I still may not be finished. One word for this is editing; I’ve come to think of it as slow—and more thorough—seeing.

This slow seeing has opened up the possibility of dealing differently with the shaking that slows me down and frightens me. I can’t necessarily make it go away but I can at least try to see it with the same eye I bring to my pictures.

Once upon a time (well, OK, about 400 years ago) the hurricane of Puritan religious enthusiasm swept over the eastern seaboard of North America. When the water receded, we were left with a sense of national Providence—the idea that we might be collectively meant for Something Grand. Don’t knock the Puritans too much either, as fashionable as that might be today...you could say that they were the originators of the idea that “the personal is political,” except that they would have lumped both those categories under the general heading of “the religious.” They were by no means a joyless bunch of people, either, since it’s pretty exciting to think that you’re actually on a mission from God. They were most fond of the Song of Songs.

By and by (and a lot sooner in England than in America, for reasons I could describe but won’t), they ran into the predictable crisis point, and the crisis was that there was no crisis. The Second Coming was running late. Getting stuff done was less urgent after a few decades of the waiting game, although they were very good at waiting, too. So I’m thinking of them, as I work my way through Advent ("the waiting room of Christmas") with fear (of not getting my work done on time) and trembling (oops, too many coffee drinks).

The more I write, the more I think that there really is something to this notion of providence, although I do not subscribe to the idea that it should have anything to do with the United States. When writing, there is always the temptation to hold off committing to actual words just a little longer, until that moment just around the corner when I shall have (BANG!) perfect knowledge of my subject matter. When that happens, I will have a spotless, glowing microcosm of information in my mind, like a snow globe, and then my only task will be to describe it. This would not be so tempting if I did not, in fact, actually have this experience from time to time on much smaller projects. My sneaking suspicion is that the effect benefits greatly from hindsight. What I’m writing now, though, is currently about 300 pages long, and I don’t totally know where it’s going (like this blog entry, skeptics may say). But I have learned, with the help of providence, that I don’t have to know the exact nature of my goal in order to make real progress. It is not waiting, but it is like waiting.

As some of you know, I teach a section of 20th century art philosophy at the Academy of Art University (yes, the school that drives its 5000 buses and vans around the city and has nearly a thousand part-time instructors like me). My class is completely online-- readings, videos, discussions, assignments, everything-- which presents its own challenges in terms of keeping the students fully engaged both with the material and with each other (they’re more willing to engage me, which I suspect has a lot to do with my role as Source of Grades).

My students come from all over the world, literally and figuratively. They can log in in Japan and comment on Foucault and spatial discipline. Each week I post a topic that usually makes some reference to personal experience (guess where I picked up that trick!) in connection with philosophy, and the answers I get back are all over the map. Moreover, I think the semi-anonymous nature of the medium encourages them somewhat to write more boldly (if not always well) on various things they’ve seen or done.

They are required to comment on each other’s posts as well; one student who read someone else’s post on the Folsom Street Fair began her own post by stating that she had lead a sheltered life, but then she proceeded to describe typical weddings where she lived, which routinely feature all-male ‘rodeos’ with human riders and ‘bulls’. And then she posted a picture of the bride, hoisted on someone’s shoulders, drinking beer out of a well-worn boot. Uh-huh. Very sheltered. You’ll be hearing more about my students in weeks to come.

Notes from the Borderline

I’ve noticed lately that my photographs seem to be getting more direct. The compositions are more focused, often there’s a limited range of colors, and I find myself tending to explore either the simple or the decrepit. Common to all the subject matter is that it lies close at hand, right up close as part of everyday experience. The pictures themselves seem as appropriate for this blog as would any commentary about them--what they “mean,” what I “felt” or “intended.” All I know is that the world seems crisper when I’m taking pictures and my eye, more alive.



Cocoa and Rose

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” - Mark 13:33-37

In 1999 I spent Thanksgiving at my brother’s house in Austin.  My brother is a good man, but he does fall prey to his enthusiasms.  Like making beer.  We enjoyed the produce of his brewer’s enthusiasm with our Turkey dinner - he made a strange but not bad pumpkin flavored beer.  Other enthusiasms include auto auctions.  He went to an auction once and came home with a ‘51 Bentley.  Not that he needed a car, but as he says, “It was such a good deal.”

In 1999 my brother’s enthusiasm was wrapped up in the whole Y2K thing (remember that?). He had begun storing food in hermetically sealed drums in his garage. “You can’t be too careful,” he explained to me.  And this while he was showing me plastic bundles of sulfur-yellow dehydrated eggs.

For some people my brother’s enthusiasm might be the perfect optic through which to experience the season of Advent. Mark’s Gospel has Jesus telling his audience to keep awake – you can’t be too careful.

The time of which Jesus urges his listeners to be prepared is the end of time.  Jesus fully expected that his generation would see the end of things that had always been.  For us things may have seemed to turn out differently.  But if we listen carefully to the Word of God that is alive in us, we will admit that what Jesus has told us is true.  The end has come, and we stand as witnesses to the beginning of the New Age.

Biblical scholars come down on two sides of this teaching of Jesus.  Some claim that Jesus’ words about the end of time were just plain wrong.  These scholars claim that Jesus (like my brother) was overcome with an enthusiasm.  It was an idea that was prevalent in first century Palestine: many preachers told that the end was near.  But, they were all disappointed.  The world did not end.  So, for these scholars, Jesus was just plain wrong.

I take the other view, which says that Jesus and his young community were talking about the end of the world in a new way.  Jesus taught that everything that was powerful, everything that was in control, everything that deflected glory from God, was ending.  Jesus taught that his generation would see the end of the existing social, religious, and cultic order.  He taught that it would be replaced by a new order of relationships between all people; an order based in self-giving love.  He taught that we would have to consider God anew, as dwelling on the fringes of society. To those devoted to the old order of the world, Jesus’ words seemed like the beginning of the end.

If this is true, then we have to ask ourselves important and difficult questions.  If the end has come for fearing God, then who is God?  If the end has come for winning or losing God’s favor, then how are we to live?  If the end has come for being ritually clean or unclean, then what does our cultic life mean?  These are good questions for Advent.

You see, if we do not come to grips with Advent, it is unlikely that we shall have a very deep understanding of Christmas.  Advent tells us that the One who came in humility as a little baby, and comes to us in Word and Sacrament, comes to claim what is his own.  And in this claim what we find is a world that is full of endings - the end of our heedless exploitation of creation, the end of our self-centered world-view, the end of our control over God. 

In the ending of things promised by Jesus there is only one thing that remains: God’s presence with us.  Everything else will pass away.  Our problem is that we miss this point.  From the human perspective the loss of all things sounds like calamity.  From the divine point of view the loss of all things simply means that there is more room for God’s love in our lives. God comes to be with us, because God loves us and wants to fill the emptiness in our lives. 

Advent teaches us that the presence of God in our lives is worth everything.  To know God’s presence is to be opened to seeing God at work in our lives. Not just as individuals.  God is present to gather us into the Body of Christ, the Church.  The more we are able to welcome the coming of God into our lives, the more we will be ready to live as if God’s presence makes a difference.  The more we welcome the coming of God, the more prepared we will be to take up the work that Christ left us to do: to heal the sick, and hold the lonely, and help the lost.

To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to live continually in the tentative time before the end.  We are to live each day as if the end is tomorrow.  To live fully in the now - yet with one eye cast upward in expectancy.  Not to live as so many others have, plotting what the exact time of the last day is to be.  Instead living with our hearts and minds fixed on the God who fills the expectant emptiness with her presence - just as She did to a homeless girl in a Palestinian village two thousand years ago - just as She will fill the emptiness in our lives with her radical good news of love and peace for all people. 

May God grant us the gift of emptiness, of expectation, of hope, so that when God comes she will find us ready to receive her love. 

Recently I’ve been converting old cassette tapes into MP3s, one of those tasks that can live on the to-do list for a seemingly infinite amount of time despite best intentions to the contrary. There are a number of ways to do this, but they have in common the fact that you pretty much have to listen to the music in real time while it chugs away. For some of the tapes, it’s too late…they have gone on to the magnetic particle afterlife. Many more of them have some murky parts near the beginning or end of each side, but they’re fine in the middle. Some are completely fine. Most of the albums I still have on vinyl, but since those records are in Texas, they’re not very accessible. Several of the tapes were originally gifts, some of them made during ill-advised attempts to date me (like the Repo Man soundtrack I’m listening to right now).

I look at my own handwriting from 25 years ago on the oldest tapes and recognize it as mine, but it still seems like something a different person did, and I suppose it is, in its way. Someone asked me once if going to church had changed my life, and the best I could do was to answer that I didn’t know, but that certainly my life has changed during the time that I’ve been going. Hmm, maybe a little weak in its Christian convictions. Ah, but wait, the song that’s been stuck in my head for days, maybe years now, is currently playing: “Oh the girls would turn the color of an avocado, when he’d drive down the street in his El Dorado…” Why is that one timeless (to me) and other songs are not? I have no idea. I’m not even sure I like it (well, I like “TV Party” more, at any rate, from the same soundtrack, even though it gives a big and relatively unironic shout-out to Dynasty, Fantasy Island, Dallas, and CHiPs) but there you have it.