lions

This was written by Fr Vincent Donovan, Catholic missionary to the Masai tribe in Africa during the late 60s and early 70s.

I can sympathize with and feel with young Americans, whom I have met, who are going through the agony of unbelief. I used to think that faith was a head trip, a kind of intellectual assent to the truths and doctrines of our religion. I know better now. When my faith began to be shattered, I did not hurt in my head. I hurt all over.
Months later when all this had passed, I was sitting talking with a Masai elder about the agony of belief and unbelief. He used two languages to respond to me – his own and Kiswahili. He pointed out that the word my Masai catechist, Paul, and I had used to convey faith was not a very satisfactory word in their language. It meant literally, “to agree to”. I, myself, knew the word had that shortcoming. He said “to believe” like that was similar to a white hunter shooting an animal with his gun from a great distance. Only his eyes and fingers took part in the act. We should find another word. He said for a man [or woman] really to believe is like a lion going after its prey. His nose and eyes and ears pick up the prey. His legs give him the speed to catch it. All the power of his body is involved in the terrible death leap and single blow to the neck with the front paw, the blow that actually kills. And as the animal goes down, the lion envelops it in his arms (Africans refer to the front legs of an animal as its arms), pulls it to himself, and makes it part of himself. This is the way a lion kills. This is the way a man [or woman] believes. This is what faith is.
I looked at the elder in silence and amazement. Faith understood like this would explain why, when my own was gone, I ached in every fibre of my being. But my wise old teacher was not finished yet.
“We did not search you out, Padri,” he said to me. “We did not even want you to come to us. You searched us out. You followed us away from your house into the bush, into the plains, into the steppes where our cattle are, into the hills where we take our cattle for water, into our villages, into our homes. You told us of the High God, how we must search for him, even leave our land and our people to find him. But we have not done this. We have not left our land. We have not searched for him. He has searched for us. He has searched us out and found us. All the time we think we are the lion. In the end, the lion is God.”

love letter.

Love Letter

I hate you, God.
Love, Madeleine.
I write my messages on water
and at bedtime I tiptoe upstairs
and let them flow underneath your door.

When I am angry with you
I know that you are there
even if you do not answer knock
even when your butler opens the door an inch
and flaps his thousand wings in annoyance
at such an untoward interruption and says the master is not at home.
I love you, Madeleine
Hate, God.
(This is how I treat my friends, he said to one great saint.
No wonder you have so few of them, Lord, she replied.)
I cannot turn the other cheek.
It takes all the strength I have to keep my fists from hitting back.
The soldier shot the baby
the little boys trample the old woman
The gutters are filled with groans
While pleasure seekers knock each other down
I'm turning in my ticket
and my letter of introduction.
You're supposed to do the knocking. Why do you burst my heart?
How can I write you to tell that I'm angry
when I’ve been given the wrong address
And I don’t even know your real name?
I take hammer and nails and tack my message on two crossed scraps of wood:
Dear God, Is it too much to ask you to bother to be?
Just show your hindquarters
and let me hear you
roar.
Love, Madeleine.

Madeleine L'engle.

The Things I Hang.

I remember reading one time in some teen magazine a letter from the editor to the parents about what she had learned about their tweens, teens, and teeny-boppers while she was the editor of this magazine. She said that one of the things she had learned was that the bedroom was the seat of the soul. I always remembered that because as soon as I read that I immediately believed that was true. At that time I had several bed spread/curtain combinations and had painted my room several different colors and then plastered those tear-out posters from teen magazines of Jonathan Taylor Thomas and BradRenfro and Shawn from Boy Meets World. I took full advantage of that tiger beat. But I remember feeling so excited to 'redo my room' as if it changed anything practical in my life, when actually it didn't change life, it just changed the space in which I did life. When you're a kid, your bedroom is really all you've got to give you degrees of definition and identity. Even now, with the magazine posters off the wall, my idea of interior design has evolved from the Tiger Beat boys to pictures of people I actually know, but the motivation of definition and idenity has basically stayed the same. That these things I decorate my space with are all things that I loved or things that reminded me of people that I loved, books I read, quotes I both stuck to a bulletin board and ingrained in my mind, all these things made up a collection of myself or the best version of myself.

Two weeks ago Jake and I stacked up, packed up, gave away our stuff and moved out of our little apartment. When we were organizing ourselves, I told him to save the pictures for last, as if it made sense for some reason, but the truth was I didn’t want to see them come off the walls. These were the pictures I had taken of people that I loved, I had hung on the walls of the apartment that I loved and for the past two years they watched me live the little life I loved. Taking these down meant that we were indeed leaving this little nest to move to a different little nest meant the end of this chapter. So Jake did eventually take this pictures off the wall of our old apartment (so he could then go about doing the manly work of spackling) and two days ago we moved me all downtown to be a fellow. Knoxville Fellows is a community building, faith based, God seeking, ten month urban monastic program where six girls and six guys live, work, play and pray in Market Square. Myself and 11 other jolly good Knoxville Fellows packed up our pictures and our lives and trudged up 3 and 4 flights of stairs to unpack and spread out together in 4 Market Square. Jake and Murphy helped me move into this place, my new nest, with white walls and empty drawers and an unmade bed. Just as this room is new, stark and white, the relationships with the other 11 people beside and below me are new too. I’m anxious to know my new friends and to be known and begin to build relationships out of this newness like old, lived in rooms. Old friends have drawers filled with memories and inside jokes and secrets and other things that makes their life together. I become anxious and impatient at the beginning, ready to know and be known and stop this silly baby bird hobbling and really fly together. And then it begins, the figurative jet engine I get stuck in, what Anne Lamott calls radio station K-Fucked, what I call Chicken Little. This is to say that occasionally my brain tunes into a voice of criticism and insecurity streaming through my head telling me awful things about myself, how my little sky is falling, and how my job might now work out and I might not fit in and what if our friendship room is always bare and there are never walls filled with embarrassment and affection. And occasionally whenever would scan across this station this summer, these things were my fears. And I swear that every time in my life where I’ve experienced change, leaving, going away from a home to make a new home I’ve felt just like a little baby bird who was leaving for the first time hoping I could remember how to fly and make a a nest before and find other birds of a feather to flock together. This is all apart of starting out, like birthing pains, this voice is something we all here but it’s the unreasonable, self deprecating and the opposite of hope. As Murphy and I start unpacking my room and one of the first things we did is hang pictures. We got a vision for the bare walls around my bed and my dresser and went to work to make my nest. And as these went up on the wall the anxious demons started to lie down. I was reminded of my family’s and friend’s faces looking back at me.

I remembered that I, like Andy Warhol, thought everbody should like everybody (and also thought bright colors were important).

I knew that We all want Peace and that Jesus loves even me.

I also hung a Langston Hughes poem and a Caedmon's call song and a picture of my Grandad's old hand. And Michaelango quote, "I'm still Learning." (Age 87)



These things that I hang reminded who I am and who I love and of what brought me here and brought me away from worry and back to hope, back to reason, and patience. And remindedme that God tells about nesting, about how he feels about all the little birdies and flying things:






Enter New Testament:

Matthew 6:25-27
25"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?




So why do I worry? Why do I freak out?


Enter, Jon Foreman:

Heavenly Father

You always amaze me

Let your kingdom come

In my world and in my life

You give me the food I need To live through the day

And forgive me as I forgive The people that wronged me

Lead me far from temptation

Deliver me from the evil one



I look out the window The birds are composing

Not a note is out of tune Or out of place

I look at the meadow And stare at the flowers

Better dressed than any girl On her wedding day

So why do I worry?

Why do I freak out?

God knows what I need

You know what I need

So why do I worry? Why do I freak out? All of these things are more than just things, these are about nesting, about fake sunflowers and things torn out of magazines and all the things we hang reminding us that we are "much more valuable than the sparrows".

Pose, Focus, Click.

As I sit typing this here blog, I am in Savannah GA, Tybee Island, on the patio of our condo. I’m writing by the light of my lap top and listening to the rhythm of the drip of the rain and cicada’s and the ocean on the shore. Tybee again, version 7.0. For the seventh year we’ve made to long hot car ride and finally arrived, road nasty and exhausted and driven underneath the Spanish Moss, (or the ‘furry trees as Julie called them several years back) and over the marshes and to the same three story flat roof condo that overlooks the Atlantic. For seven years. We’ve had different people come with us each year and you can track the season’s of my family’s life by who came with us, who wondered in a few days late and had to leave a few days early. And throughout all these years we haven taken pictures to document these lazy savannah beach days. And I love how good pictures can do that. I wish I had a real eye for it, that I could really tell a story and capture moments poignantly the way this girl can: http://www.morgantrinker.com/
(check it out) Even when I was in England the first couple of days I was so homesick that I took pictures halfheartedly because my camera loves my friend’s faces more than it loved London architecture. I got over that, though, pretty quickly on account of Big Ben and Big Jen, the Eiffel Tower trick photography, and the random group of UT students who quickly became my friends and who my camera really started to love. I had already posed, focused and clicked my way through beach shots for 6 years of posing on the patio before we at dinner, looking down at the cobblestone on river street, writing words in the sand, waking up early and padding barefoot down to the beach to take pictures of sunrises, playing dress-up on Broughton, Pose, Focus, Click, Click Click. I love these pictures, and love pictures in general, and think whoever invented the camera deserves a freaking nobel prize for figuring out how to freeze moments in time to give us a tangible, visible moments to hold, posed or candid. It fills in where memory can be thin. It’s really remarkable. And if I had a superpower I would have a secret camera that would let me take pictures of little things all the time,I would just look at strangers and cute little babies and ordinary things and I would turn into the secret paparazzi of beautiful things and just take little pictures all the time. But because this superpower has not yet been realized and because my camera is being a little beligerent and because I already have six years of smiling sunkissed faces, I didn’t pull my little camera out of it’s little sock at all this year. NO more 3x5's as Mr. John Mayer sang. Instead of the, pose focus click pictures, but I summoned my superhuman camera and tried to catch things a 3x5 really couldn’t. Basically God posed these little candid moments and focused my attention and I clicked a little memory.

Here are some of those little pictures I took, without my camera.

On the way down Abby and I set out together. From St. John Court in Farragut to Tybee Island. or bust. As usual, Abby was the driver and the navigator, and I was the ipod DJ and the car dancer. I believe I started car dancing on Grisby Chapel and continued onto I-40, Through Knoxville, all the mountain roads, I had moves even I had never seen. If you happened to have passed a jeep wrangler Saturday morning you would have seen one girl calming driving her passenger agressively shooing away a swarm of invisible bees. I wore myself out. I looked at her somewhere in North Carolina and said, Abby I think I’m gonna sit this one out. She said, good. you deserve it. go get a drink of punch from the refreshment table. I took this picture with my mind, of Abby letting me play IPOD commando, laughing at me, half secretly brooding over my mad dancing skills, half wishing I would settle down at 8:30 in the morning. There are few things I love more than a good road trip with my sister so I took a picture and I wouldn’t have car danced like that with just anybody. CLICK.

I took another picture of me telling her something my brother had said and her leaning over her steering wheel and horse laughing. Because they are the funniest 2 people I know, I pointed my camera right at her and clicked.

I went to this little bitty church on the Island literally the size of a chapel. There were about 30 people in the pews and I was the youngest person by about 25 years. I sat down and wondered at what it would be like to live on this little island and be one of this little family of faith and come to the wooden chapel Sunday. The service was totally eclectic, on one hand it was highly liturgal, straight out of the Book of Common Prayer but also had songs out of an African-American Spiritual and we sang “Marching to Zion” after communion. The woman who gave the sermon seriously reminded me of Mimi. All I could think about was Jimmy Hawkins and how much he would have loved her and how much I which he had been there at that moment. She talked about the convention she had gone to recently she described just about every detail, about how she always got to the lecture hall early and always got chosen to administer communion, which was, “such a blessin’”. She took out the apron she got for volunteering at her convention and put it on this bright yellow apron over her white long robe and walk around in it for the rest of service. During communion she started to sway and bounce a little behind the communion table loosely to the tune of whatever was playing on the organ which I can only assume her little jig was to spice up the liturgy. And when it was time to go to the table, I walked up and kneeled at atlar and the old man who gave me communion held the cracker in his old hands and pressed it hard into my palm and said softly, Body of Christ. And I looked up at him into his old eyes, bowed my head, closed my eyes and took my picture.

Abby and I rented bikes. It was one of the first time I’ve ridden a bike since I was a kid in my mom’s neighborhood, probably with the obligatory kool-aid mustache. I felt like this kid:


It was a beach bike riding festivus for the rest of us and we rode every single place. I felt like I was Vada Sultenfuss in My Girl when she and Thomas J would ride bikes or one of the girls in the epic girlhood classic Now and Then. Abby and I broke out into a duet of a bumpy bike rendition of My Girl on that bike path and I gripped my handle bars and pedaled out my picture. Click.
Then Abby said, Well I guess it’s a little harder to bike dance than to car dance. And I rose to the challenge and proved her wrong. And took another picture.

Differnent people have come to the beach with us each year, and this year is no different. This year we had Anne and Margaret, who are two wonderfully Scottish (yet English speaking!) and wonderfully sweet women who have been friends since they both lived in Fargo. Anne is a very young 79 and can stand just about everything but the oppressive Savannah heat, and, frankly, I’m right there with her. She was married to John for 58 years before he died this past June. Anne still talks about him and laughs and makes amazing rhubarb pie and buys purple outfits and takes “moons over tybee pictures” with two other outrageous women. We went up to the condo that Anne and Margaret were staying in a few nights ago to talk and eat pie and interrupt their movie. I walked right in and sat down beside her and looked around, expecting dirty looks from everyone else because I knew I had just taken the best seat in the house. And really it was all I could do not to ask her a million questions, about what it was like to meet John on a train car in Scotland. And what it was like to be with someone for 58 years and move and raise children and how in the world is she so brave to live without him now. But I stayed quiet and sat on the couch and leaned against her and listened to the Scottish hens cluck. and took my picture.

I finished reading Dorothy Day laying on the beach. In the epilogue she had written, that “We have all known the long loneliness.” And I walked to edge of the water by myself and took a picture. and I knew that it was true. We have all known the long loneliness.

But even these pictures don’t do it all justice. Because you can’t feel the sand in between your toes and the heat on your face. You can’t ride against the wind and watch the sand blow against the shore. You can't hear the old ladies talk in their scottish accents or lay on your back in the ocean and taste the saltwater sea mixed with my watermelon gum. Just like John said, I guess you just had to be with me.

Home.

Ultimately, our gift to the world around us is HOPE- not blind hope that pretends everything is fine. The Church has nothing to say to the world until they learn to throw better parties: Backyards, basements, porches (living rooms, parks, tiny apartment kitchens ..) It is the flow of REAL LIFE, in the places that we live and move with the people that are on the journey with us that we are reminded it is God’s world and we are going to be okay. (rob bell)

..heaven only knows why we love it so.


So I sit, in my big wonderful chaise lounge in what was probably designed to be a breakfast nook of some kind in the apartment. My mom gave us when we moved in, never to put a table . This chair is oversized, micro fiber and, in its former life, used to live in my mom’s bedroom and be a bed/drool cushion for Goldberg our fat bulldog. Now, depending on who you asked, me or Goldberg, the chair has moved on up, literally, to our second floor apartment and sits overlooking the sliding glass door which leads out to the patio for our breathtaking view of the parking lot and one of its many dumpsters. Community trash receptacles aside, this apartment is perfect because of its windows and I love to sit in this spot in the morning and look at the soft morning light and the bark peeling off the trees, or right now, let the darkness look in me. It is night now and the only light one is from the lamp with the kokopelli man on the table beside me. I remember buying the lamp when Jake and I first moved in and I remembered loving it, loving all of this. I placed the on the table beside the chair so the little man can appreciate the view of the dumpster and he has thanked me by playing faithfully on his lamp stand ever since. This little apartment is my home and it has felt like home since my brother and I moved in over 2 years ago. I read somewhere not too long ago that a body is just a ‘soul container’ and this apartment is really nothing more than just a container the little details of this little life of mine. Jake, the kokopelli lamp man and I moved in 2 years ago from my mom’s house into this place. It was the first time Jake had lived away from home and my first apartment in Knoxville and I remember the both the feeling of freedom and the sense of nesting, of finding a place to put up a little temporary white picket fence and park my little black car out front with and have now, this moment of nostalgia with my computer screen glowing blue in the falling dusk. After we’d moved in and set up all our respective things, we invited over our respective friends for a ‘party’. I don’t remember many parties when I was in high school or ever having the pleasure and pressure of hosting one, but this space contained what was to be my hostessing debut. The borders mafia and some other people came to humor the over-excited hostess and christen our humble abode and when it was over, Jake said, Jen that was really fun, lets do it again. So we did again, and again, and again. Basically any excuse- Oscar watch party, Spring break NINTENDO PARTY!, Easter dinner, basketball playoff party, impromtu dance parties, new years, jay’s birthday, Shannon’s birthday, etc, Thuper Thinny Thursday! So this place contained those days and nights and quiet morning prayers and lots of other memories of me coming to love these people on this journey with me during these last 2 years, this time that has been so sweet and the happiest I have ever been. This is where Murphy and Jake met, where I had marathon paper writing sessions, wrapped presents, gave presents, took pictures, posed for pictures long talks on the patio in what are now patio chairs #2, as the first ones met their maker at Bonnaroo last year. I remember sitting on the patio reading Madeline l’engle last summer and laying in my bed with flashlight reading John Steinbeck the summer before that. I loved this place because it helped me contain all that. And now the apartment is quiet just me and the heat lightning outside and I've been writing this blog for so long that the computer is hot on my lap. and cocopeli man and the flowers still here placed by my little morning seat since my birthday. The bouquet placed in a makeshift ‘vase’ of a two liter coke bottle, leaves slowly turning downward and petals have landed all over the table, the cocopeli man, my bible, my old journal, my new journal, and all over the floor. petals have falling off as if the flowers had been playing a game of ’loves me, loves me not’. I found a petal in the fridge earlier. Heaven only knew why I loved that so. I thought about cleaning this up, but a flower bouquet’s love life is frankly none of my business. This space is big enough to contain the both of us.

so I love this place, this space container with the big windows but mostly I love it for how it has helped me contain all of this and all of you people that I carry in my suitcase heart. And I will miss this come July. But sometimes its time for things to slowly begin to end. like the flowers petals on my bible.