Taking Off and Landing

Truer words were never spoken
You picked them up when you were young
Maybe woven in a story
That goes back to where you’re from
Truer words were never spoken
And for an audience of one
But where you’re healed is where you’re broken
And God knows your native tongue

–David Wilcox

**

Been thinking a lot about prayer and salvation these days, partly in response to reading this woman’s work for my last big paper. I won’t dive into a lot of it now, since I’ll be mulling these things over in more concrete ways when I go here and here in about two weeks. Salvation and prayer are two things which we should never talk about in the abstract, since the incarnation was anything except an abstraction. Prayers effect change in time and space; salvation is worked out in the contingencies of flesh and bone.

I’m almost to the point of saying that I can confess that Jesus saves, but the ways in which Jesus saves are an utter mystery. I think Scripture points us in the right directions, shows us the shape of life which salvation consists of, tells us of the God who saves, and forms us to believe rightly about that One who saves. But the ways and means which this long road of salvation comes to us? Complete mystery. It would be blasphemous for me to say that I could write them out. Two examples from Scripture:

1) Joshua goes into Jericho and slaughters an entire town.

2) Stephen speaks to the Sanhedrin and is martyred.

Both of these are spoken of in Scripture as examples of faith, of lives oriented toward salvation. I’m remind of Flannery O’Connor, who uses horrific images of violence, of drownings and hermaphrodites and car wrecks to facilitate “moments of grace”, in which one of the main characters is sacramentally lifted up out of their sin and transformed. While I appreciate her art, I can’t get past the violence. Grandmothers shot in cold blood. Children drowned. Car wrecks that leave the occupants dead on arrival. Can these be modes of salvation–could it be that the very modes of civilization are the modes of salvation, that the way in which we mangle one another are the ways in which we get out?

Maybe.

That’s as far as I’m willing to go. I’d love to say an unqualified No, but the Scriptures tease me. For what it’s worth, I think, as David Wilcox says, our “native tongue” is like a stroke victim learning how to talk again. We speak in slurring sounds, whispers, mauled ‘r’s and ’s’s. To celebrate the violence and brokenness of the world as part of our salvation seems to be overstating the case. Only when these common images are turned upside down can they be part of the solution, it would seem: when violence is abjured in favor of defeat, when suffering is embraced as a joy. In this way, we are indeed part of the world and our natural ways, but our natural ways become transfigured into something supernatural–the end for which they were always meant.

Last night was another night of ample tossing and turning. Some nights are like that. When I’ve got oodles on the brain, it’s a rarity that I’ll sleep through until the morning. Last night, I was reading a portion of Brothers Karamazov for class, and consequently, the night antsys visited me.

The first time through the Brothers, of course, as a naive 22-year-old, I identified squarely with Alyosha, the brother everyone loves, the one who leaves the monastery to be immersed in the dysfunction and morass that is his own family. He’s the confidante; he’s beloved by children; women adore him–who doesn’t want to be Alyosha? He’s the one you see in public and say something to the effect of: “there goes that Alyosha–nice kid, too bad about his family, but nice kid.” There’s something to be loved in Alyosha, not simply because he’s a monk, but because he reunites the broken, or tries to; he takes it on the chin for his family, suffers willingly, and above all, doesn’t judge. He doesn’t judge.

That’s who I’d like to be. But this time through, the Dostoevskean light has shone through the ambient lighting and I find myself lining up with an unlikely soul: Ivan. Ivan’s the rationalist brother, the cold-calculated one who lives in his books, whose examples of suffering are not drawn from real life, but from newspapers and literature. His objections to God are purely theoretical, and his mantra for life–”Everything is permissible”–plays itself out in horrible and beautiful ways. While I don’t see myself as someone completely detached from people, it’s a strong tendency when the semester’s on; I duck upstairs, immersed in work and the deep shit of the semester, and rant to myself about perceived wrongs and their likewise perceptible solutions. But that’s not why I find Ivan in myself.

Ivan has a dream toward the end of the book, which I’ll not spoil, but it’s a dream which shatters his isolation, pulls him toward the world, and causes him to become a totally different character. Toward the end, his stoicism becomes a babbling brook; his posture becomes sheer emotivism, dribbling forth with confessions and admissions and apologies. He is a transfigured man, having come face to face with the devil himself, and cracked wide open.

In short, Ivan becomes what he has always been: a Karamazov in the true sense–a man full of good and evil, full of light and darkness, gripped with the realization that none of us are totally innocent, or totally guilty. He becomes one who understands that for salvation to be had, it must be had in the hard stuff of earth and blood. His abstractions fade; his posturing ceases. He cries. He shouts. He no longer smirks at Alyosha, but is awake at long last.

This time through, it is Ivan that I see–the one who wants more than anything to become a Karmazov–to embrace that life is a matter of struggle and fanastic collapse in the pursuit of great goodness–, and in doing so, to clear the ground for his own salvation.

“And it came to me then/ that every plan/ is a tiny prayer up to Father Time.”

**

The last few weeks have been nuts; one more to go, and then the sweet release of the summer. And hopefully, a return to some regular writing. I’ve missed writing something that doesn’t have to go out to an editor or a professor, something I can toss in the electronic ocean and watch drift off.

On my run this morning, I meditated on the opening strains of the above song–not the words, just the opening piano chords, the rising of the sharp drum beat, the bass line. As I pounded the pavement, I listened to those opening notes over and over. In the course of running, to put my mind off of the need to breathe, or the building lactic acid in my thighs, I find some little piece of music–not a whole song, not even a whole introduction–just a snippet that builds and moves and rises towards the sky. And on the run, I try to inhabit those notes.

Before you worry, it’s not a trance; it’s not a zen-like state or an out-of-body experience, but an opening up to what’s already in the music. But what’s in the music? What is in a series of notes and tones?

As Colin Gunton notes, if we start with creation as the fundamental word in our thinking about who we are in relation to God, then we see that our salvation happens not in a vacuum, but in a world of flesh and bone, with the cooperation and signs of the created world. Music, one of those signs, one of those inhabitations given by God, is not our salvation, but creates space into which the beauty which is the One who is the foundation of the world pours. Jesus is the beauty of creation, and it is in this vein that music flows.

As I ran, the notes poured through my mind, and when the opening line broke through, I thought not of Father Time, but of God, that our days, our plans, are matters of contingency. This is not a confession of fate, but that what we are, and what we do is dependent upon a good and beautiful God. How this plays out in places of great suffering, which I will see in less than a month, I don’t know.

But that’s what I intend to find out: how our lives, founded in a good God who made creation good, is seen in the depths of suffering and division.

And it slightly terrifies me. So much left to be done. Seriously–one more major paper, some other odds and ends, articles to translate, a slate of devotionals to write….I can feel African time calling to me. And by that, I mean the concept of time that doesn’t run on clocks. Namely, the summer.

A few weeks back, I sat on my front porch at drank the better of part of a bottle of wine with a friend over three hours. It was fantastic. Why are these times the exception and not the norm? Why do I find conversations crammed in between weeks of solitude, or in exactly the wrong time, or when I have zero daytime minutes? It would feel like a cosmic conspiracy, if it weren’t for Friday lunches with Will and Chris and Paul–lots of laughing and mac and cheese and okra. That time doesn’t move as quickly, thankfully, a little glimpse of eschatological expanse.

I look forward to this summer being more full of these times, to embrace, to feast, and to sit.

Summer Soundtrack 2.0

1)  7/4 Shoreline–Broken Social Scene

2)  I Turn My Camera On–Spoon

3)  Let’s Get Out of This Country–Camera Obscura

4)  Blinded by the Light–Bruce Springsteen

5)  Province–TV on the Radio

6)  To Zion–Lauryn Hill

7)  Happier–Guster

8)  Headlights Look Like Diamonds–Arcade Fire

9)  Dashboard–Modest Mouse

10)  I’m Always in Love–Wilco

11)  The Wand–The Flaming Lips

12) My Very Best–Elbow

13)  Last Living Souls–Gorillaz

14) When Doves Cry–Prince

15)  When We Were Young–The Killers

16)  Lily and Parrots–Sun Kil Moon

17)  Pachuca Sunrise–Minus the Bear

Sarah Coakley writes on bringing contemplation to jail, and its recreation of life.