Penultimate Potpourri Sans Poetry

By the penultimate day (next morning I simply get ready to fly out), I'm tired. I haven't actually slept a full night the entire time I've been here. Who can write poetry in this state? Tomorrow will be another day.

I go to hear Krista Tippett. She reads from her book. I remember the lines even as she says them, perhaps because her writing is so beautifully crafted, and I find myself reciting passages in my mind, along with the cadence of her voice. In a way, this experience sums up my time at Calvin. It has been about people, really hearing them, taking them in, celebrating them, reciting the good stuff to myself so I can remember it.

Similarly, I attend a session where Ed Gilbreath is on a panel, discussing "writing towards social justice." I mostly enjoy hearing him say things I've heard him say before in his book. Again, I feel a sense of celebration.

And then there is Lil. I find her at the appointed time. We meet. We talk literature and writing, though not much about publishing; it is not our main purpose. I find her to be quietly luminous. Short, straight red hair. Almost transparent milky skin. A soft strength. If we never do business together it won't matter. This encounter has also been a sort of celebration at the end of a busy time.

It seems appropriate to finish the day with an actual celebration. Ed Gilbreath takes me out to dinner to celebrate the debut of Stone Crossings. We talk honestly. We talk as peers. It is refreshing, relaxing. A happy time.



[pic: LL and Ed Gilbreath]

After dinner, we come back to Calvin and find a surprising sign (see top of post). Who would expect this at a Christian college? But there it is. "Smoking Area." I simply can't resist taking a picture of Stone Crossings in this unorthodox place.

We walk beside the marsh. I take a video of me reading an excerpt of Stone Crossings. Ed keeps trying to get out of my way as I move the camera, which amuses me even as I'm filming. I wonder if he thinks I'm totally weird. Apparently I don't care enough to let it stop me from doing this little ritual of mine... reading SC in different places and sharing it with you.



Then we walk on a nearby running path, and I try to take a picture of a lemon yellow moon rising, but instead I get the blob below. For a real understanding of what the moon looked like, one could hop on over to Kirsten's.



Night has come. Time is short. We talk just a little bit more, have a cup of tea in the Prince Conference Center, then the day is done. "See you in 2010?" Ed says.

Yes, I'd like that. See you in 2010.


Photos by L.L. Barkat. "Sans" is French for "without."

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LL's Looking for Lil

LL's Body of Water

LL's Solo at the Red Sun

LL's Leaving

Hard Commodity in the Blogosphere

I am still making my way slowly through Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith. It's as good as any story, the way it moves forward through the framework of Tippett's life while discussing science and faith, life and death, doubt and devotion.

Last night, I related to this passage quite keenly...

I have always been invested in ideas, in words, in the presentation of words. The people on Wooster II took me out of my head. They taught me the gravity of nonverbal presence— of eye contact and touch. I learned to accept silence, not to fill it with talk, to respect the immensity of what eyes and hands alone could express. The writings of Margaret Spufford came back to me on that dementia ward— the notion that in the end, the reality of God is most powerfully expressed not in ideas and proclamations but in presence. I sometimes felt that presence palpably in silence and the inchoate, searching bond of raw togetherness between us. p.118

As I considered Tippett's words, they resonated. And they pained me, regarding my blog relationships. What, really, can I do to be present in this way, this raw togetherness way, over a bunch of wires and through signals? Not much. I can only wait for the chance to be together, in some cases again, in other cases for the very first time.

Not that I find no community here. I've said before that I think I do. But presence is a hard, perhaps impossible commodity to truly find in the blogosphere.

Together Photo, by Sara. Used with permission.

LL IN OTHER PLACES:

At the High Calling this week, Don't Give Your Gifts a Haircut

PLEASE WELCOME:

A post on a lighter note, from Long Island Express Girl

Thoughts on silent words, from Janet Collins' OnWords

Jane Emmert at Inspiration and Art

I Did Not Try

The night before I went to Mount Hermon, a dear friend of ours passed away quite unexpectedly— a massive stroke, in a young man. The day I returned, I had news from another friend, whose sister just lost her newborn son. My trip, so life giving in many ways, was bookended by death.

Yesterday, a wonderful speaker, Jason Gaboury, came to our church. He talked about what it is like when we have a bad day, a bad year, or even a bad decade. I realize that when it comes to the issue of death, I, along with my community, have had a bad decade, striated with seemingly senseless deaths (all death of course is senseless in its way, but we more readily accept the passing of a person who has had a "fullness of years").

Gaboury, looking at the book of Daniel, asked us to consider whether we could see God in the midst of dark times of captivity. Indeed, he urged us to listen for God's footfall in the shadows. Somehow this came together for me in the words of Krista Tippett, regarding the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer "just weeks before the collapse of the Reich."

She says, "His death seemed to me a puzzle, a piece of religious irony. Wasn't this a failure of God, a rebuttal of the very idea of God? Yet some irrational aura of triumph— defying my sense of time as flat and contained — surrounded Bonhoeffer's legacy. I could not fathom this... and I did not try." (p.42)

In her words, I realize that I am two-dimensional when it comes to trying to understand these matters. My sense of time is flat and contained. I cannot fathom the whys and hows, the shape of death and the mystery of eternal life that transcends it. And, in her words, I find the comforting thought that it is okay to put my head down and weep. To say, along with Tippet, "I did not [even] try."


Striated Rock photo, by L.L. Barkat.

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Speaking of Faith

I admit I'm only in chapter 2, but I already love Speaking of Faith. The final test of my enthusiasm will be if I finish the book (which as I've mentioned before is a rare thing for me to do).

Tippett grabbed me in the first chapter, saying, "I believe what most Americans want, whether they are religious or not, is for the religious voice in our public life to be more constructive— to reflect the capacity of religion to nourish lives and communities." (p.2)

Though "some say... that religious passions are the cause of our culture's worst divisions, and a threat to democracy here and abroad", Tippett asks us to consider the truth that is "more broadly and deeply rooted in the human psyche and spirit." She describes this truth as a "tapestry unfurled, both ancient and in progress like the whole of creation... that arguments cannot contain." (p.4)

These words resonate with me. I can and sometimes do engage in argument for religion (argument in the formal sense of the term, not meaning "quibble"). Argument has its place. But there is so much more than argument through which to explore the claims and nuances of religious experience.

I think this is why I was so taken with that picture in Chronicles, of the full spectrum of players needed to "show" and "declare" the glory of God. Because, as it goes, some of the greatest speech on faith is not speech at all.


Nature's Abstract photo by Sara B. Used with permission.