Storm watch in Texas

The sky is white and low, and the day is dim, like early morning before sun-up.  There is no breeze to move the leaves. All is heavy and still. I imagine it will rain soon and dissipate yesterday’s heat. Storm weather.

Yesterday Philip left school in the middle of the day to drive four hours due west to a tiny town called Bellville. A friend had recommended him to an engineering firm there, and there’s a possibility of a summer internship. We messaged him to check the car before he left: oil, tires, gas. He called us on the road and mentioned rain. A few minutes later he exclaimed, “That is some rain!” We forgot what that can mean in Texas.

The interview went well as far as we can tell. They said if he got the job, maybe he could find a sublet in a nearby college town. I try not to imagine this—my son shopping around for shelter while I’m too far away (Ireland) to be of any help.  At four thirty, Philip called to tell us he was on his way back to Longview. He should be home by nine, ten our time. It wasn’t stormy in Bellville.

We didn’t hear the phone ring at ten. Or hear the chirp of the three messages. When we checked at ten thirty, we read: “Tornado hit. Roads blocked. A car fell on my tree, but I think it’s fine.”  We call and call and call, but there is no answer. We imagine him sitting in his car, in the dark, covered in tree. Robert asks me if I’m worried. And believe it or not, I say no. Philip hasn’t given any indication that he’s in immediate danger. I trust his judgment. “I wonder if he knows about flash floods and to stay out of dips in the road,” Robert adds. This is not comforting.

After another half hour, he calls. He’s had to backtrack and backtrack again to find a detour around the fallen trees. Robert reminds him about the dips and asks him if his Garmin is helping him along, and he says, no, the Garmin is useless. Once he takes a detour and finds it blocked, the unimaginative device that doesn’t understand natural disasters just directs him back onto the original road he’s just abandoned. He has to keep track of what roads he has already tried and found blocked so that he doesn’t try them again. As he’s talking, I’m wondering what his gas gauge is reading since he’s a few hours off his original ETA. He says that now another tree has fallen on the car, but it’s small, so he keeps going, and he tells us about the dirt track that he just took where his car was sliding around in the mud, making him wish he hadn’t attempted this short cut. I’m wishing the same thing.

We want to keep him on the phone, listen to him talk, gauge the situation by the tenor of his voice, keep him company in the wet dark. We wish our wishes could carry him home safe. But this is his own east Texas tornado to ride, and he needs to save his phone battery, just in case.

We stay up reading, waiting for the phone to ring. It chirps. He’s home by midnight. We fall asleep, relieved. Someone had said something earlier that day about flooding and tornado watches in Texas. Little did we know (horrible phrase), here in North Carolina, it was our watch, too. It is one of the two great themes of our lives: little do we know. 

Sheila and the gong

Yes, Agnes, a week ago I banged the gong with all my strength. The waiting room erupted in applause. When I sat in the chemo chair that day, I was thinking I might not do the gong. It was just me and Robert and the two nurses in my pod. It would be embarrassing. But Sheila took care of that. Sheila is the friendly, highly competent, unempathetic nurse who put in my pick line a year ago, took the pick out after chemo, told me I had really good veins for poking after the nurse in Imaging couldn’t find them, and was now the nurse to give me my very last IV infusion of Herceptin. Appropriate. Thanks, Sheila.

Sheila has a loud, commanding voice, and when she yelled, “We’re ringing the gong!!! Anyone coming?”  she gathered a crowd so big it didn’t fit in the chemo lounge hallway, and we had to move to the outside waiting room. So I had a lot of nurses, and some fellow patients pushing their IV poles, and a number of those waiting in the waiting room, and Robert, and my four good friends who showed up to surprise me, filling the room. Sheila gave me a butterfly sticker (!) to add to the chart (I was number 1042, I think), a tacky poem with terrible rhythm but perfect sentiment, and a short speech.   I gonged. Everyone cheered. I got hugs from all the nurses and all my friends and rode off into the sunset, never to return to that waiting room and that set of people again. I wonder what psychologist taught chemo clinics to send off their graduates with such flourish. I wish to thank her. Because those quick, simple, tacky (a sticker? Most of those patients hadn’t seen a reward sticker in 50 years) rites of passage help us take a deep breath and move on to whatever comes next. It reminds us that everything we experience comes in waves, seasons, stages, and that our job is to turn to the next one at hand.

In C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra, the planet Venus is awash in sweet-tasting seas with myriads of islands floating on the waves. You ride on friendly fish from fibery shore to fibery shore and the land undulates beneath you. You need sea legs for dry land. There is a lady being tempted toward a fall in this landscape, tempted to ignore Maleldil’s one command not to stay overnight on the one fixed land on the planet’s surface. Part of the Temptor’s argument involves rejecting the next wave that is coming and trying to hold on to what has already been. This green Perelandra lady lives in Oz, and her tornado is a watery one that moves her daily to new scenery. Sometimes she wonders what it would be like not to have a life shaped by Maleldil’s waves. We do not want her to know.

Obviously, I have no wish to stay in cancer treatment. That is not a wave I will miss. But I will miss the younger body I had before treatment , and the homes I’ve had (with a farm outside my window; a train track; azaleas; a Bruce trail), the events (a Christmas wedding and three houses full of guests!), good food (Marg’s cooking; peaches every day!), and the friends who saw me through (do you have time for one more round of Quiddler?) I see the dark swirl of the tornado outside my window, and I hold my breath and grab the reins in preparation for another ride. I think of those riding tornadoes of their own: Leslie, Bob, Sam, Evelyn, Caroline, Annette.

These rites of passage are those in-between moments that give us one last chance to catch a breath and grab the reins. We’re not sure whether to whoop or grimace. We do a little of both.

Dream of heaven

So…heaven. You knew I couldn’t stay away from this one. Gail’s first question was…where? Here? Up there, somewhere? We have little more than hints in Scripture about this and a lot of bad paintings portraying imaginings that have very little to do even with those hints. I think we can do better than that!

One of my favorite verses of the Bible says, “God hasn’t shown us what we will be like when Christ appears, but we do know that we will be just like him…because we will see him as he really is.” Death kills these eyes, this way of perceiving and processing things. When Jesus walked with his disciples to Emmaus, they didn’t even recognize him, and only their hearts burned inside them. Their eyes had to be opened, and it’s always so hard to keep them that way. So soon we lose the vision. But death ends that poor vision and somehow frees us so that when we next see Jesus, our eyes stay open forever. His existence must call us forth from the nothingness in the same way he called the heavens and the earth from nothingness (I don’t believe like the old Greeks that we have an eternal, disembodied soul wondering around, causing trouble. No, I believe death ends it all. Then Jesus, body and soul, quickens us, body and soul, forever.)  Like a bell, or a gong, or a trumpet call, his resurrection must resonate through the nothingness and call us to life, bones connecting to bones, sinews to sinews, body to spirit. Jesus already lives this new life, but we can’t see it. When he disappeared, his body rose in the air. It didn’t just vanish. He went somewhere. And he comes back visibly from somewhere to call us home. But he’s not far away. His Spirit lives in us now. The kingdom of God is already at hand. So I think that heaven is here already, all around us, but we don’t have the eyes to see or the ears to hear that gong yet. We have not yet been purged by death of poor eyesight.

And what could it be like? John, as well as the writer to the Hebrews, pictures heaven as a city. Not a paradise garden anymore, from where one forlorn couple trudges off alone, dressed in pelts.  No, this is a gathering of people, a great city of people, an organized, crafted, man-built structure that houses everybody. This is Babel in reverse, a city coming down from heaven with its mighty gates open on all sides for all those dispersed tribes and nations and languages and tongues to come back to and enter freely. This is a place showcasing what man can do under the rule of a good king. The walls are crafted, squared off, thick and gleaming. The gates are each made from a single pearl (there is no ocean, so where did such giant oysters lie?) This is the work of many artisans, a perfect team, an organic organization, building this architectural wonder. And people are free here. They come and go. And no one discriminates against them, and no one makes war or builds walls to keep them out. Everyone is welcome in this city. It is a source now, not of pollution and corruption, but of healing and life. Clear rivers flow through its center and strong trees flourish along its central avenue, and nothing threatens them. There is no garbage, no choking air, no offense against the earth.  This is humanity living as it was meant to live on the earth, not primitively, but in full mastery of all its trades and skills and giftedness. Listen to its swelling music. You’ve never heard music like this before. Wonder at its advancing technology. You’ve never seen science like this before. Admire the scenery. You’ve never seen creation free from cursing and groaning before. Look at the people. They are working together and loving it. Finally. It’s globalization and beyond, but without selfishness.

Night in this great city is gone, and sleep, those previews of death, because we’ve come up on the other side in Jesus’ wake. Been there, done that. We are too busy for night now. Or death. We have too much to do for the King and one another now. Too much to learn, to build, to share with one another. We have a city to create. It is Utopia. Come, grab your tools!

Talking to my future self

Some friends took us out to a nice restaurant here in Winston-Salem. We sat in the sunroom, wide with windows, green ruffles and deep booths. I ordered the lunch special, a salmon Florentine on mashed potatoes with some kind of sauce with just the right amount of tart. Oh my goodness, was that ever good. So good, I contemplated (for a few minutes) actually asking what it was called and going online and trying to learn how to make it. But never fear. I gave up. It would be impossible. I’ve been trying to bring half of these kinds of meals in take-home boxes so that I can (1) enjoy them twice, and (2) not eat so much, but the next thing I knew, my plate was clean. That Florentine had just disappeared.

Which is fine. Except that the meal had slipped past my best intentions and spooned itself right down my discerning palate. How does that happen? War! We are at war with ourselves. Someone described it as having our Present Self shrugging off responsibility onto our Future Self, which is not around yet to defend itself. So today’s “I” decides that tomorrow’s “I” (which is a different “I” than the one actually speaking right now) will exercise, or stop eating so much, or save more money, or take a missions trip. It’s pretty easy to lay responsibility on someone else. We’ve been doing that since the days of Adam (“You see, Lord, “that woman you gave me…”). I mean, think about all the things the “I” of yesterday did, which today’s “I” wishes, wishes she had never done. If only…if only… You can get so mad at that “I” from yesteryear that has got you into so much trouble. Just look at where “I” am now!

And the funny thing is that there is not one thing wrong with that Florentine meal. I was just reading James this morning, and he kept insisting that every good and perfect plate of Florentine salmon is a gift from God. And God doesn’t tempt people. No, it’s my wanting stuff that gets me into trouble every time, even if what I want is just another bite of perfect Florentine. We think of being tempted by wrong things and we try to steer clear. But I bet that more often than not, what gets us is wanting more and more of the good stuff.  You know, just the little things. That add up. Around the waist somewhere, or the schedule, or the house, or the heart. Treasures. Hmm. Where are those good things now? Where did I lay them down last? Let me check.

Too much of a good thing. Even books and studying and good food. James says that when we pray, we shouldn’t be wavering about who we’re talking to. God or Someone Else. Are we asking for something he wants to give us, or are we asking for something it would sure be nice to have? I wonder what our prayers today would sound like to our spiritual forefathers? To James leading a persecuted church in Jerusalem? To John living out his days, isolated on Patmos, dreaming his dreams and writing his revelation? To Jesus himself, kneeling in that garden, “Father, not what I want…?”

Too much of a good thing. That’s how John described the city of Babylon in Revelation. That’s what’s going to get us in the end.

Talking to Gail about heaven

When we left Canada, the plum trees in front of the house still looked like a bundle of pitchforks threatening heaven, and the yard had been white with snow a few nights before. There was no green in the trees yet. As we drove south, mile by mile, we watched Spring dress the woods in fast forward. First the emerald jewelry flashing occasionally against the brown-skinned limbs flanking the highway. Then the fluttering green umbrellas against the sky. Then trees fully clothed and shimmering, and finally, in North Carolina, the accessories—flowers in all the reds and pinks my heart could wish for after several sorts of winters.

And here in North Carolina I visit and sing and pray and dream of future plans and debate theology and share my story and eat heaping plates of southern food. These are friend supporters I have not seen for several years, so we must compress our time together into these two short weeks, another kind of fast forward. And I rejoice with my friend Caroline who rang a bell instead of a gong and is waiting for medical clearance to go back to her field of service. She’s hoping when she buys her plane tickets that there will be seats together for all seven of her family. Little baby Salem grins at me and roars her lion roar. Her four brothers teach me how to play Ticket to Ride. And my heart is heavy when Frank tells me his wife Leslie has a rare kind of cancer, incurable, deadly, painful. The church family he pastors prays ferociously for miracles. The chemo is bad. Here spring and winter live side by side.

My friend Gail writes down questions she’s pondered lately about things she’s studying in Sunday School at her Presbyterian church (she’s born and raised Moravian). We look over together the Westminster Confessions she’s highlighted—those troubling phrases that contradict the creed she’s lived by for so long, the Moravian Ground of the Unity, where Jesus is expected to have died for everyone, not just the ones who love him back. And we compare Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 and notice how in Genesis 2, God leaves the work of producing wild plants and grains to the earth itself and to its human managers. He doesn’t use a miracle but a natural providence, a divinely handled, natural process.  He loves the earth’s work. And ours. There is no shame in waiting for God to do his job on earth through natural means.

And today she is coming for supper to talk about heaven. Heaven! Talking to Elai last night (I am forbidden from calling Philip since this is “hell week,” his finals. He interrupted his studies long enough to message about a perfect score on his circuits midterm. The last few messages were about a 104% grade, and a 107%. His dad asked him if LeTourneau was just getting too easy, and everyone was scoring high. He didn’t think so…) Elai wondered what we could possibly have to say on the topic of heaven. I mean, “how do you know?” I said I don’t. Not more than anyone else. And the Bible only hints. Ahh. But I have so much fun imagining. Don’t you? I could imagine heaven for hours. Just get me started. And what I know is that no matter how far I stretch my brain to imagine greater and greater things, God will always outdo me, so there’s no harm in letting my imagination run wild, wild, wild. Run wild with me! Challenge me (and him) with your imagination. There are no losers in this game. We live in winter now. But the emeralds flash against brown-skinned limbs. Winter and Spring live side by side.

A culture I just don't get

Today I am packing up suitcases and boxes. Tomorrow is my last day in this good home (thank you, Bev and Greg!) before my tornado picks me up and whirls me away again. I’ll be staying with Janey for the total of three weeks I have left in Ontario. The rest of the weeks before returning to Mexico I will be in North Carolina and the British Isles. I can’t wait.

Usually I am content to ride the tornado, getting dropped in new cultures, but not always. Some cultures I prefer to ignore because they feel seamy and threatening. I’ve no desire to get intimately acquainted with casino or strip club culture. Or…

Trump rallies. Robert was reading aloud to me an article in the New York Times by Jeff Sharlet, who attended Trump rallies in Ohio and Arizona and described them in detail. I’ve not been to one myself, so I don’t really know if he’s exaggerating. He sounded credible enough. Strange thing to me was that he described Trump as a preacher building a congregation for his version of a prosperity gospel. All the religious fervor was there, the drama, the assurances of salvation from a common Enemy. There was adulation.  Even parables. Was it a fair description???

Sharlet describes the Ohio rally from when Trump’s 757, heavy with gold, filled the hangar doors, drawing oos and ahhs from the approving crowd, to when, in the after party at a local bar, a guy who’d been on the fence before the rally finally converted, yelling over his beer, “I don’t care if you’re racist…if you’ll just bring back one [expletive] steel mill!”

The journalist describes how the warm-up preacher’s shouts of “He is worthy! He is worthy!” meaning both Trump and God, led right back into the playlisted Stones’ song, “Let’s spend the night together,” but no one sensed any contradiction because to this crowd there wasn’t any.

Sharlet says that Trump makes people feel good. They are getting back something they (perhaps) lost. He persuades them that he WILL save them by his own personal power (and he has gestures to show the size of his…prowess) from the Enemies that threaten them.  Like any prosperity preacher, he assures them that if they support him, they will ride his coat-tails to wealth and dominance (“Small Vietnam. Small Japan,” he says. “We’ll take them to the shed.”) It’s all in the power of positive thinking (quoting Preacher Normal Vincent Peale).

Sharlet describes how Trump dramatizes a set of “parables” from his pulpit. There’s “The Call,” where Trump forces American companies back home with a phone call; there’s “The Snake, where he hisses, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!” And there’s “The Bullet,” where he mimes how American General Pershing supposedly smeared 50 bullets with pig guts to execute 49 Muslim terrorists, handing the last “pig-infested” bullet back to one survivor as a warning. Apparently, the crowd in the Ohio hangar liked hearing this. Apparently this “hitting back 10 times as hard” is what it means to win and prosper and make America great.

If anyone has been to a rally, did Jeff Sharlet get it wrong? Is there something about this particular culture I could actually like?

Going to Rhetoric Class with Elai

Yes, I voluntarily read  A History of Christian Thought in One Volume. (The “One Volume” part was a selling point) while I was with Elai in Chicago. It seemed appropriate, somehow, to be reading what looks like a textbook while she was off to her acting class, her Old Testament Survey class, her Rhetoric class (!) Actually I got to go to one of those. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and the day I went, Dr. Chase was giving examples of ancient Chinese persuasion. He quoted Confucius saying: “To fail to speak to a man who is capable of benefiting is to let a man go to waste. To speak to a man who is incapable of benefiting is to let one's words go to waste. A wise man lets neither men nor words go to waste.” (Analect 15:8) Confucius was such  a master of word play. I wonder what he and G.K. Chesterton, the English master of paradox, would have sounded like in conversation. I hoped to go to the next Rhetoric class, which was to be about African rhetoric, but I couldn’t make it, so Elai is sending me the link. I’m such a student!

Which keeps me reading my history book. It’s good because it shows you why your church teaches certain things and not others. You think your set of beliefs came down from antiquity as a package deal. But it did not. Theologians over the ages added bits and pieces, some far longer ago, and some more recently, than you might think. And if you were to read about some of these theologians, you might be dismayed. They don’t match up with what you might describe as a model Christian today. What do you do with this mixed bag of thinkers and doers who are our spiritual ancestors?

Take the Roman Tertullian, a lawyer/ theologian (as most of the Roman theologians were) from the third century, who outlined the doctrine of original sin and first described the trinity as three persons with one substance.  He also gave us the Doctrine of Satisfaction, which tells the story of salvation as a legal business transaction, a payment of debt to free sinners from their master. These are all doctrines that many Christians hold today. But Tertullian also supported apostolic succession, condemned all fornicators to hell, repentant or not, and forbade widows from marriage. He was also not clear on whether the Son existed in the Godhead before creation. What a mixed bag.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, salvation was being described in completely different terms, as a drama of Ransom and Rescue. This was the predominant view among most of the church fathers for the first thousand years of church history until a shift came at the turn of the first millennium, under Anselm of Canterbury, who took up Tertullian’s Satisfaction Doctrine, which has prevailed as the primary story of salvation among both Catholics and Protestants ever since. A writer named Gustaf Aulen  brought back the ancient story in 1931. Truth be told, though both stories describe the exact same event, Christ redeeming us forever through his life, death, and resurrection, I like the Christus Victor account best. It resonates with me—this drama about Jesus coming as the ultimate hero to conquer the enemy and rescue his fallen bride. I am glad that the study of Christian thought has given us back this story. I am glad Justo Gonzalez reminds me that my theological ancestors where (what looks to me now) a mixed bag. It gives me hope.