The Cave of Wonder(ing)

When I started high school, math homework started to actually challenge me. Sometimes I would sit there and could plug things into a formula and get the right answers, but I didn’t understand how the formula worked, and that really bothered me. I would ask my mom for help, and she would give an honest effort, but sometimes, she just couldn’t explain things to me in a way that made it click. For awhile, every time she couldn’t help, I got really distressed. I would lash out at her, or sometimes cry. But I was never actually frustrated with my mom. I was frustrated because I couldn’t understand. I was angry because I didn’t get it. 

Understanding. That’s what drives me. It always has. And not just in math class. I want to understand people. I want to understand why the world is so broken. I want to understand who you are and why you are that way, and to understand what’s been going on inside your heart that provoked you to answer ‘How are you?’ with ‘ok’ rather than ‘good’ today.

I ask a lot of questions and I very rarely settle for an ‘I don’t know.’ At least not for long. There’s always more to know. Always more to understand. 

For awhile now, this desire for understanding has found a home in the realm of God things. Except ‘desire’ seems too placid of a word for what I actually feel; ‘voracious obsession’ might serve better. I am wildly obsessed with understanding God. And I want God to make sense.

But the weird thing is, I feel like I do understand God. When I am with God (I’m not gonna even try to unpack that loaded statement right now), I feel like I know God. I know that God embodies words like embracing, inviting, compassionate, redeeming, and curious. But it’s when we[1] talk about God; that’s what I want to make sense. I hear so many words come off of pages and out of mouths and these words just don’t make sense. There are so many phrases that have such huge implications and complex meanings that are thrown around like toddler’s speech. I feel like a fool when I muster up enough courage to admit that “I don’t think we really know what ‘sin’ is”; it’s almost as if I were to challenge the idea that the red skinned, white fleshed seed-bearing fruit in my lunch bag is actually an apple. Unspoken judgments rain down on me from the faithful bible-quoters: You grew up in church your whole life. Your ignorance cannot be excused. But I feel as though there’s a whole world of people for whom this God that is so casually talked about, with such complex language, does not make sense to. And if these people are anything like me, they are turned off by the huge, silent and hollow cave of Christianity that should be resounding with questions. 

At this point, I feel like I don’t want to be known as someone who dwells in that Christian cave. I want that cave to be hospitable to my own questions and the questions of others, but even though it might be able to receive them, I don’t trust it right now. 

I think I’ve been aligning myself in a curious position over the past few months, where I live in some middle ground. I believe in God and I believe in the redeemability of the Church, but I don’t believe that the Church is very hospitable to the whole group of people for whom the Church’s complex language does not make sense to.  And thus, I want to dwell in this middle ground and build up a new, perhaps temporary, cave for all the questions and angers and sadnesses and apathies of people who have become disenchanted with and unimpressed by the church. 

So I am in this new dwelling and I have lots of questions, and I desperately want answers. 

One thing I’ve really wanted to know lately is what, exactly, does God do? And what doesn’t God do? I want to know what makes things fall into one category or the other. I don’t know why I feel the need to understand that so much. Part of me wishes I could just dwell more in the mysterious and not feel so compelled to understand, but another part of me wants to throw up a little in my mouth every time I hear people say “it’s not up to us to understand God’s ways.” It’s such a common response to questions about judgment and why bad things happen, but I think what bugs me most about it is that it’s only the answer to questions about bad things, never the response to good things. If someone asks “Why me? Why did I survive the car accident?” the answer is much more likely to be something about the grace or love of God, not “well, it’s not our place to understand God.” If someone asks “how do you know she went to heaven?” the answer usually has to do with a correct amount and style of belief and the infamous grace of God. We claim total understanding when God “does” good things. But when bad things happen, it’s like we’re so afraid of what that implies about God that we just shut up our fears with the answer that God is so holy, we can’t possibly have a clue about what he’s up to. Yeah, maybe God is holy (what do we mean by ‘holy’?) and maybe there are things God is involved in that make us raise our eyebrows because we can’t see the whole picture, but I don’t think God wants us to just stop at “Oh well, I don’t get it. I trust you, God” any more than my 10^th grade math teacher wanted me to stop at “Oh well, I don’t get how the formula works. I’ll just trust that it’ll get me the answers I need.” Sure, both situations make it possible to get by alright, but I don’t think God is set on you not understanding certain things about God. 

I think there’s a further desire under all of my thirst for understanding. I think I desire to understand so that I can better love. I think part of me wants to understand how God acts in the world – in what ways God is active and in what ways She is passive – so that I know how to ask God for help. You see, I am certain that God is redeeming the world. But I don’t want to just know that God is redeeming it. I want to know how He’s doing it. That way I can be more helpful in the way I’m involved. It’s like in any good organization: a worker knows what the vision for the company is and roughly how it operates; they know what their responsibilities are and what they can expect from their supervisors. 

I struggle with there being ambiguity and both yes and no to what God does, because then where do you draw the line? We laugh at people praying for a parking space and believing it was divine intervention when they found one, but then get on the defensive when someone suggests that praying for healing from cancer is just as nonsensical. Are they really apples from the same tree? Or are these in two different categories – one being magic that God can’t work and the other being magic God can work? What kind of healing does God directly do? What kind of healing does God only do through the use of others? How much more complex and realistic is God’s healing than what meets the eye? 

Perhaps God is limited by some of the same things we are; if a person is not in a proper physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, or communal state, they may not be receptive to healing. And maybe that has nothing to do with how much they want to or don’t want to be healed or how much they believe in or don’t believe in God. 

The reality of it is that people are so complex and the complexity of people plays into how receptive they are to the help of others. I can help an alcoholic who has a lot of drive to get well a lot better than I can help an alcoholic who can’t even get sober enough to occasionally talk to me about his problem while he’s dry. I imagine this is how it is when we ask God for help, too. And when you enter into a scale of how hard people are working or how much ‘faith’ they have it gets fuzzy. And then where is the line drawn? And is that really fair? It seems about as fair as taking a middle class straight white male and a poor homosexual latino woman and saying that if they work hard enough, they can both get whatever they want out of life. 

I am not seeking simple answers, by any means. But I want to understand more of the intricacies of what God does and doesn’t do, and how he heals. Does my obsession with this distinction come from my strong lingering ideas that God is the man behind the curtain, “out there somewhere,” rather than present and moving through the world? 

That being said, as much as I have a deep-seated need to understand more of God, I also have a lesser felt need to dwell in ambiguity and desolation, as well as a need to view the people who say things that peeve me with much more grace. I’m far from skilled at being patiently thirsty and graciously frustrated.

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[1] By we, I mean everyone, but mainly Christians – Christians of the past as well as the present.

Partly Cloudy

Good Things

1. This blog post. -- "That tells me that much of what I was taught in “Christian community” as I grew up — how to protect myself from “the World” — was actually a lesson in how to excuse myself from the hard work of love." 

2. Living, green things. I have 4 of them in my dorm room. And while they can't replace living outside, I think they'll help me survive the winter. 

3. Tuesdays. I don't have classes or work on Tuesdays. I probably won't screw around or anything, but I can actually adventure away from campus to do work. Or take a nap. Or not leave my room on really cold days. 

4. Glen Hansard. I would really be okay with it if he decided to come play me to sleep every night. Except I probably would forget to go to sleep because his passion makes my soul come alive.

5. When life prevents you from using the internet. The internet's great, but when life doesn't get in the way, I use it a lot more than I wish I did. I'm receptive to any technology challenges you might have to throw at me right now, because I'm not doing so well at self-imposed and unstructured self control.

6. Blueberry pancakes. With real blueberries.

Channeling Anger

“We live in a world where people get angry about things that do not matter. While at the same time, people don’t get angry about things that do matter… The truth is, some people are looking for a fight because they aren’t in one. The people I know who are most engaged with the suffering of the world, the people I know who have given themselves to big, beautiful, healing kind of causes – they’re generally free from that irrational, petty kind of anger. They don’t fall into the trap of that low-grade rage that actually increases the brokenness of the world… We were made to give ourselves to a cause bigger than ourselves – a cause that increases the peace in the world. A cause, a purpose, a task, that makes the world a better place. So may you become aware of your anger. May you learn to channel it, focus it, direct it, into something beautiful. And may it fuel sacred acts of healing and restoration.”

–Rob Bell, Nooma: Store

Spontaneous Plug

I really like reading gutsy and entertaining reflections about the world in all its messy complexity. A Mission Year alum from my year has a really fantastic blog full of that kind of reflection. Maybe it's just because I resonate so much with so many of the things she says that I eat up her stuff when I get a chance to read it, but I definitely recommend checking her writing out. This isn't a planned plug or anything. She may not even remember I exist. Just found myself enjoying her brain and thought it should be shared. Anywho, here's one of her latest blogs on church.

Courage

I would like to get better at speaking up courageously. I would also like to learn how to be better at being simultaneously hospitable, in conversation, to people who come from very different places. 


"I think wisdom is when you want to speak up, but you’re quiet. I think courage is when you want to be quiet, but you speak up." --A friend

My Love Is Greater Than My Anger

 

Oh, how I love storytelling.

Edible Planet

I have to teach a lesson in edible plants next week at camp, and since I have this week off (hallelujah!), I thought I'd take advantage of it and learn something of value that I can actually bring back and engage 12 year-olds with. I thought I'd look up a few things and be done, but ended up diving into a world of edible plants that I can't seem to pry myself away from. The earth is so cool. I'd love to apprentice an herbalist someday.

Anywho, here are some fun things I've run across:

Cattails: pretty much every part of a cattail is edible at some point during the year. In addition to eating them,

• the heads make great torches when you soak them in torch oil,
• burning them wards off mosquitoes and other insects,
• the sticky juice between the layers of the stalk is a great healing agent and antiseptic to put on cuts and abrasions,
• its flour -- which you can harvest from its pollen -- when mixed with water, works well on bites, stings, burns, and rashes, and can be used as toothpaste.
• The flour can also be used as a soup thickener or in baked goods. It's highly nutritious and
• can reduce stress

If you're interested, here's part 1 (out of 6) of a pretty informative video series on different parts of the cattail to harvest and different ways of cooking them. The guy in the video has a pretty kick ass accent, which ups the vid quality significantly as well.

*Note:  Water  Iris  is  a  lookalike  plant  to  cattail  that  happens  to  be  poisonous.  They're  pretty  easy  to  tell  apart  if  you  know  what  you're  looking  for,  but  pretty  easy  to  mistake  if  you  don't.  Kick-Ass  Accent  Man  explains  how  to  tell  them  apart  2  minutes  into  the  video.

 Pine Needle Tea: I just took my last swig of the mug I made this morning from pine needles I picked across the street.

Pine Needle Tea is loaded with vitamin C (more than fresh squeezed orange juice... crazy, right?) and Vitamin A. It's also a good decongestant and it tastes good, to boot.

You can use pretty much any kind of pine needle and each variety has its own distinct flavor, but the thing you need to be mindful of is that not all evergreen trees are pine trees. If you're not an expert in tree identification, a solid way to figure out whether or not the needles are safe is to take a needle and bite into it. If it tastes citrus-y, you're good to go. If it tastes like turpentine (or rather, if the taste reminds you of the smell of paint thinner), then that's a no go. The little taste test won't hurt you, but you don't want to drink a cup full of tea brewed from the latter.

Once you've got your hands on some good pine needles, it's not much work:

1. Gather a handful of pine needles (1/8 - 1/4 cup), removing and discarding (preferably in the ground, not your garbage can) any of the brown, papery material at their base.

2. Wash the needles and chop the finely (to help release the vitamins)

3. Add them to already boiled water (as opposed to putting them in while boiling... this preserves the integrity of the vitamin C) and steep for anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour. You can play around with the steeping time and decide how potent you like your tea.

4. Strain out the pine needles and enjoy. You can use sweetener, but it doesn't necessarily need it, especially if you've used fresh, young pine needles.

Honey:

Pretty  commonly  known  fact  about  honey: It's super good for you. It builds your immune system, boosts your energy, and is a remedy for all sorts of ailments.

Less  commonly  known  fact  about  honey: Putting it in boiling water drastically lessens a lot of honey's health benefits. Hot water destroys honey's enzymes, diluting its medicinal value. It's much better stirred into warm water. This will probably not stop me from putting honey in my tea, nor from telling myself I'm being healthier by using honey as opposed to sugar in my steaming hot beverages, but at least now I am enlightened if I choose to be.