So, I’ve been dating this girl for about eight months now. Fantastic woman. The only problem is that she’s in an master’s program, and what she wants to do can only possibly be done in Waco.
And so, the dilemna: I want two things with all my heart: 1) for her to stay in Waco, and 2) for her to be able to do what she has both been trained to do and what she wants to do with all her heart. I’ve told her 214 times that I don’t want her to take a life-sucking job just to be able to stay here, and that we will make it work if she moves to Ft. Worth or Bryan, and these are true statements. I love this woman, and I think “foolish” is the word to use for doing otherwise.
And so, the rub: to love her means to do that which is absolutely fricking killing me. Her parents are in town this weekend and her roommate, another grad student, moves Monday, and so the question of moving came up again. She’s had interviews Ft. Worth and Bryan, and we’ll see how this all shakes out in the next two weeks. If you’ve been watching The Office the last few weeks, I feel like my life has been paralleling Jim’si internal struggle as Pam applies for a job that will actually be something other than a receptionist. By the way, last night’s episode was brilliant.
Michael Scott is everyman. I digress.
So, I stand at this crossroad and trust that God knows where this goes. There’s only one way to do this: to do it.
To the six of you who still peruse this site on occasion…
The birth of new writing has begun. I am done with my preliminary exams, which means two things:
1) I’ve forgotten more in the last week than I will possibly ever know again.
2) I have, within reason, permission to start thinking and writing about exactly what I want to think and write about.
The latter begins now.
**
The moment came in the midst of prelim preparation when I couldn’t stand to read one more theological text, one more rumination on the meaning of the incarnation, one more ruinous attempt to relate God to the world: I was completely and utterly done. I was completely and utterly done not only because 27% of the stuff I read for my exams was a complete and total waste of time, except for purely historical reasons, but because in the midst of studying, I was losing myself. I was losing my friends, my bounds, my connections.
They say that the most damnable part of torture is the loss of one’s identity, in terms of time and space. By denying the tortured access to the outside world, the victim is at a loss of the past or of the present. By walking them under death’s ladder, they are denied a future. By keeping them alone, in darkness, they are denied knowledge of even their own bodies, until in the throes of physical exhaustion, they reach out to the torturers to save them from even their own bodies, looking to the one who can stop the anguish to give them a touchstone of any kind. Thus, the Stockholm Effect: when the tortured start to identify with their captors, for in the world of captivity, it is only the torturer who effects the pain, and only the torturer who can give the victim any sense of who they are.
I can’t possibly compare four months of exam prep to torture, but the Stockholm Effect is true. First, you break under the burden of the material, growing to loathe it. Second, you become broken under it, and want it to stop. Finally, you become completely apathetic to it, except for the fact that this stuff has now become, over four months, your primary way of relating to the world.
One night, as I sat on the front porch with a roommate telling me about a terrible day at work, for the first time in months, an image of my studies came to me as a comfort, and I knew something was left: that the studies weren’t destroying me, but carefully reforging my thinking in all kinds of ways–disorienting the oriented, subverting the careful, loosing bonds, breaking chains, scrambling eggs.
She told me about a family who had been selling their youngest daughter for sex. Six years old. And I could listen. I couldn’t offer anything by way of explanation, for evil is the one thing that cannot be explained: it can be crucified and buried, but never explained–where it comes from, where it begins–the human heart? bastardized desires? jealousies? spirits and palpitations? And so, I gave an image from Karl Barth:
In describing what it means that Christ came in our place, Barth describes the humanity of Christ forever taken up into the Trinity, so that in all eternity, the resurrected Jesus is with his scars, his pierced wrists and ankles. And so, all the terrible things that people do to one another, all the infidelities and hatreds and malices, all the burdens and broken glass, all the death is taken up by Christ and is not forgotten, but remains visible for all eternity, overcome as a reminder not only of what our true destiny is, but of what our true destiny denies: that the crap we do to one another is the last word.
In one week, I leave for Vancouver. I can’t wait for a week of cool weather and sushi.
