unfinished conversations…

This line from the Royal Tenenbaums surfaced in my mind the other day. It makes me laugh just to think of it. Spoken from the mouth of Owen Wilson’s character Eli Cash, an author of American Western novels, it goes like this:

Eli: Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is… maybe he didn’t.

The line is perfectly Wilson, which makes me think, as the co-writer of the movie, he wrote it in himself, knowing that the absurdity of the statement when given to a gaggle of reporters and fans, would be made all the more absurd by his straight delivery, and all the more comic with the intellectual posturing of the wannabe genius, wannabe Tenenbaum, Eli Cash.

See what I’ve done here? I’ve created a charming little segue into my own off the rails train of thought today. And in there, my little allusion to entertainment, I’ve got two warnings that run in exact accordance with the following rambling. First, I am constantly taking myself very seriously, God help me, and consequentially what I want to write I often eek out in some sort of consternated anguish about all the deepest things. God I hope it’s obvious once and a while that I’m still a bit of a fool for it all. And readers who know me can recognize the air with which I write something sometimes comic in light of the person who is actually doing the spouting.

The second warning is this. It involves the word presupposes. I can’t write it without smirking, but here I go about to use it. Everything I write, I think, I hope presupposes the reality of Jesus. However disorientated my beliefs have been and are succeptable to becoming, I cannot write from the other side. It’s impossible for me, and I recognize that I’ve been wired this way from early on. And I say this not to say I have lived a beautiful and faithful life in complete accordance with God’s desire. I say it as someone who cannot see things from the other side, from the inexistence of Jesus, or his inexistence as the Son of God. I say at as a warning to all reading. That I will write from the perspective that he is true. Knowing the small circle who actually read this pulp, I know that won’t come as any sort of shock. But any who wander through here and find offense, or mutter, “He sure talks a lot about God.” I’m sorry, ‘I can do no other,’ (another great line and points for the first to identify the author). For a lighter blog, with more pictures and less contemplation there is this: mexicani.wordpress.com.

I guess, I also hope that in blogging here, I’m not having a conversation with myself. This makes me think of Neeraj’s recent post on his wife Erin’s thoughts on blogging, “For the last 10 minutes Erin has been on a diatribe about the futility of blogging and how it just emphasizes the disconnection we have with others in the world, not the connection. We surf the web “eavesdropping” on others as she puts it…..”

In the first place, she’s right.

In the second place, probably without her knowing it I feel like there are times when I’m in a conversation with Erin Mehta when she posts about how she should spend her time, just as much as I’m in a conversation with James Alison when reading his book on theology, just as I’m in conversation with Tom Williamson and his friend “Iron Mike” when Tom drops me a short and profound email regarding Mike and his life.

I understand this is not a normal mode of conversation, maybe not even natural, but one I find myself well suited for, since if it were live in ‘real time’ I might just find myself mulling over and over in my head something that someone just said, trying to muster a thoughtful and engaged response, then realizing the conversation had already moved on to something unique or evolved from the previous line. So for Erin, Tom, Mike, James and anyone else, I hear what you’re saying, and what a conversation I think it is.

Recently Erin posted this, “Do people just know when they want to do something? I have no idea what to do. I feel like there are so many me’s which allows conflict to arise and leaves me with so many questions. I love my job. I love the stimulation; I love venturing into my community work and feeling like I’m closer to my thesis project; I love working in human rights; I love my brilliant coworkers; I love that my job is the coolest! But, I also love thinking about turning my yard into a farm; canning (or attempting to can) applesauce and tomatoes; I love the idea of mommy and me time at the Walker to see Frida Kahlo; dreaming of community during the week days. What to do? A ball of confusion amidst generations of wise teachers. I live with these “contradictions” every day. How do you make a decision?”

So I don’t have a job right now, and when I did, would never have said ‘I love that my job is the coolest!’ But I understand Erin completely, the other part, the part where current states, current interests and current options can be just as much gifts as they can be means of confusion, or contradiction. Even in my temporary solution of stepping back from it all, the worst, and most stress bearing answer to the question of what to do has been the ‘I don’t know.’

On one decision, ‘making a living’ I casually write to Tom about what that might look like he responds with this beauty:

‘Went to the Artist’s Quarter this past Monday with Maja. Saw a guy we call “Iron Mike” there…last I heard he was on his death bed with esophageal cancer (5% of people who get this don’t live). He told me he did 168 hours of chemotherapy. To wrap some context around this a women who has breast cancer will average 20 hours of therapy. Anyway, he was sick for 1.5 years, has lost a ton of weight (looks like a skeleton) and had to stop practicing law (used to run a law practice in St. Paul). In talking with Mike he described the experience as “the best, worst thing that could have happened to him in his life.” No more pretending for Mike…he has talked with the antithesis of reason and he tells me the conversation is more engaging.

It’s that…that makes me feel like I need a disease, disability or disadvantage to live, properly (whatever that means). Maybe another way to look at it would be in order to live…I should give up the idea of making a living. As if it needs to be created rather than explored.’

Mike, rightfully, could look at the lot of us and say ‘I didn’t have the privilege to run this course of thinking. Cancer happened to me. Stripped everything away. All options.’

And we can presume others of us, those from different generations, from different socio economic statuses, from different countries and circumstances most likely don’t have the like privilege. But from Mike, for Mike and for all of us, first the grace of his living and then the grace to shed this insight (as Tom so eloquently writes it): [Mike] has talked with the antithesis of reason and he tells me the conversation is more engaging.

There’s so much more thought here that I have to leave unexplored for the moment for the constraint of space and time. Because the post is getting so long. But maybe I can set up a case for further conversation using some lines from Alison, another description of grace as it runs antithises to what is so familiar to us and our nature, ‘God is bringing into being a visible sign of a completely different imagination, one which is not based on death and its fear, or the distortion of death into various forms of conflict, and which enables all humans to dwell together with each other as enriching each other and enabling each other to share God’s life and God’s goodness, starting now.’

Are the questions any easier, upon glimpsing this other life? Not at the moment, I will say, for me. But in Erin’s questions I sense and I’m thankful for her imagination for participation in the unfolding creation, in Mike’s survival story I hear the echo of something from beyond those norms were supposed to behold, and, well, with God an opening into to be made ‘alive to meaning and goodness,’ which he Himself ushers in.

on sayings old and older, cathederals and priests.

If you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say it all. Sometimes truth isn’t nice and still should be said, she said.

Maybe the saying is just trite — an easy way to sum up another sentiment, something more like maybe if it’s not edifying it shouldn’t be said, is what I said. Maybe if it’s impulsive and without foundation, or vengeful or mean, or prideful it shouldn’t be said. It’s not so unlikely that our instincts in speaking out loud are without wisdom.

Here’s me…informed by James Alison’s ‘Undergoing God,’ reading it, feeling it click somewhere and trying again to relay it. It doesn’t work, easily. My instinct is to try and carry a bucket full of water pulled from the book and carry it to another source. Only somehow my bucket has a hole. By the time I reach my destination all the water, all the real substance is depleted. Maybe you need just read the book. Or maybe I’ll just quote him direct here and there. I wonder, if I can’t make sense of it apart from the book, should I even bring it up? If I don’t have anything right to say, should I even say it at all?

Yesterday I visited the Catedral de Guadalajara. There is more to be said about the Catedral itself, but not by me, here. My time there was observing the exhibit of crucifixes that seem to have been brought — perhaps salvaged from churches throughout Mexico. In the moment I was sadly underwhelmed. I’m sure it was in part my mood (not overtly pious). And if I’m honest in part that Protestant inclination to not even be slightly worshipful in the general direction of depictions of Jesus. The whole graven images thing and all. When we grew up, our crosses were just bare.

Others were deeply moved. Crying. Kneeling. Reverent.

Understandably.

What was common to the crucifixes was that they were gruesome in detail. The bodies of Christ were bruised and bleeding and broken. They were not peaceful, passive, airbrushed. Though some were crowned with metal pieces, there were no glowing orbs circing their heads. In one word they were bloody. In another, violent. The scene of a crime Alison might say. A murder.

You could almost hear St. Paul shouting it, or maybe hear it whispered under the murmur of Spanish prayers, “but we preach Christ crucified.” And again. “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.”

Our Lord here, stripped and bloodied, sunken and broken. Far from any human display of might or kingly authority, satitisfying neither role we so eagerly anticipate, but satisfying another role we’re all too familiar with, all too skilled at creating, victim. The slain.

Alison: Jesus is substituting himself at the centre of what the liturgical tradition was both remembering and covering up, namely human sacrifice, therefore making it possible for us to begin to live without sacrifice.

Hebrews: For if the sprinkling of defiled persons with the blood of goats and bulls and with the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

Paul: What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?

No longer standing in sight of the crucifixes, I write Martin E. Marty. Why not? He seems like the proper one to help sort out this whole wave. What do you make of this victim space? I ask him. The space occuppied now by our Jesus, once crucified, but also resurrected, having satisfied the sinful, victim making world once and for all but also still in approach, forgiving all the while? I’ll wait for his reply and leave Alison with the last word for now.

Alison: We can imagine retaliation, we can imagine protection; but we find it awfully difficult to imagine someone we despised, and were awfully glad not to be like — whom we would rather cast out to keep ourselves going — we find it awfully difficult to imagine that person generously irrupting into our midst so as to set us free to enable something quite new to open for us.

color and texture.

Heather and I ran into an airforce retiree and his family, during our visit to Tequila. We talked a little bit about photography, as he was very much into the medium himself. He told me that during his first year living in the Guadalajara area he’d logged some 16,000 photos. It makes me queezy to think about such a prospect. Then he said you’d be a fool not to have a camera around here. There’s so much color, so much texture. I gather he’s right.

I passed on an opportunity to photograph a genuine caballero near Tequila’s center. I ‘m fearful that however well meaning my own motivations may be, the whole process may come across as exploitative if I’m unable to effectively communicate to the subject himself my interest in capturing a cultural essence. It would be wise to learn some phrases. Or be really sneaky?

For some more words on Tequila:
on a first name basis with jose.

The Ambassador

Each day, even moment to moment, I am further amazed by this daughter of God’s way with people. Having just met a few of her coworkers Saturday and yesterday, it’s very clear how much she is loved. It’s common to hear such sincere compliments, such as, ‘We are fortunate to have her here,’ or ‘She’s so wonderful,’ and even comments on the future like: ‘We hope she stays. We’d hate to see her go.’

Additionally, with strangers, she is uninhibited. Her Spanish is good and getting better. Most importantly it has been perfectly functional in getting us from place to place or through a menu, and in making small chit chat along the way. I confess, I sometimes see great barriers: difficulty with the language, a hyper concern for navigating safely through the unknown, even gazes that I interpret as stern and suspicious.

But H, she just pushes through, charming strangers with her smile, her efforts to speak the language proficiently and the occasional query about their soccer team preference.

But there is still the burning question of ‘What look should she stick to?’

Hairnet?

Or no?

landing.

After a long day of flying, I landed in Guadalajara at 9:30 pm. I gathered my bags on a cart, got the green light from customs, and walked through the frosted sliding doors into a host of waiting welcome parties. I caught H’s smile from further back in the crowd and she strolled up to greet me.

I’ve known how beautiful a woman Heather is for some time now, but honestly, last evening, I was taken a-back at how stunning a sight she was to my travel weary eyes, and how unreal it was to be able to again wrap her up in my arms.

She’s still saying it today: “I can’t believe you’re here.” I’m not sure I believe I’m here. But I will say, I am so glad I am.

cute.

Had the best session with Rich, Molly, little Ava and Karen the entertainer last night.
How sweet is this Little Doll?