we cannot live, except thus mutually; or, reflections on PAPA Fest

It's a little strange being back in civilization.

For the past week, I've been out in the middle-of-nowhere PA, helping to organize and participate in PAPA Fest.* 

It's a little hard to explain our little festival. When people ask, I call it an "arts and music and learning festival," but that's just a part of it. When the organizers met in the fall to start planning, we went through a ton of drafts of vision and mission statements because we had so many different ideas. To give you a feel, here's what we came up with as a vision statement:

"PAPA Festival seeks to continue to be a national volunteer-run, donation-based event that gathers a dynamic group of Christians and others to form a little village where we celebrate, support, and empower one another. Motivated by the Spirit of God, we foster the development of DIY, earth-sustaining, and relationship-building skills that we take home to create a more compassionate and just world."

Yeah. That's long and complicated. And perhaps a little (a little, you say?) idealistic. But that is our vision. We're volunteer-run: no one gets paid. We're donation-based: we ask for about $20 per adult for admission, but if you can't pay that, we'll let you in, and if you want to give more, we'll take it.

We're Christians, most of us. And that's certainly a connecting point for us. Most of us are on the fringes, in our lifestyles, our theology, our politics, whatever, and we feel disconnected or alienated from the church as it exists in the US and from our society. We had people who weren't Christians who came, and while it was a very explicitly Christian festival (we had morning liturgy and afternoon and evening daily prayer), I hope that they felt welcome.

The festival originally came out of a couple of intentional communities, like the simple way in Philly and the Camden Houses (where I lived for a year), but we've broadened quite a bit since then. Most of us who organized the festival are not formally connected to a community. And although we say we're a "convergence of communities and movements," we're also a convergence of individuals.

We're not monolithic, and that's what I love. We come from a broad swath of lifestyles and theological backgrounds. If you looked around at our little village, you'd see big families and you'd see single people, old people (the oldest participant was 81) and young (we had about 80 kids in our Children's Village). A lot of people who come try to live "off the grid," but a lot of us also come from cities and are just trying to make our lives a little more sustainable.

We had a group of folks come from New Jerusalem, an addiction recovery community in Philadelphia. We had anarcho-primitivists. We had people who live in intentional communities and people who were coming out of the intentional community movement. We had people who were white, black, Asian, Mexican. We had people like me, who live a relatively normal life but try to push back at the dominant, oppressive culture in small ways. There was a photographer there who was covering the festival, and she said that she'd covered a Neo-Pagan gathering a few weeks before that seemed similar. I said we should connect with them. I think we'd find more common ground than not.

Mainly, we're a weird bunch of folks.

One of the biggest things we try to do is to build from the ground up. The festival switches places every time. In 2006, it was in Tennessee. In 2008, it was in Illinois. This year, it was in PA. We built a stage and a chapel in two days. We had composting toilets (our "Pootown") and asked people to bring their own dishes and silverware to minimize waste. We had communal recycling and compost bins. We wanted to be easy on the earth, because (as my friend Joy's t-shirt says), it belongs to our great-grandchildren and we should handle it unselfishly.

It's a learning festival in a lot of ways. During the day, we have "learning workshops" and "skill shares." I went to a learning workshop on Christianity and Feminism and one on militarism and pacifism, and to a skill share on permaculture. But there were many more. A lot of them had to do with living in community, but not all. My friend Lauren (whom I met there and whom I now consider a friend) led a workshop called "Queering the Beloved Community," trying to provide a safe space for LGBTQ folks and allies. There were workshops on peacemaking and reconciliation, on ethnicity and racism. There were skill shares on jewelery making and on drumming, on the circus, on gathering food from the forest.

As the Volunteer Coordinator, my job was to make sure the day-to-day things ran smoothly. The whole festival ran on volunteers: we asked all people who came to volunteer each day--to take out the trash and compost and recycling, to help out with the kids, to help direct parking, so on and so forth. It was exhausting because I coordinated and managed all of that, but it was wonderful. I loved my "job" (I did it at the '08 festival, too) because I could see firsthand how much people loved being there and how much they were willing to lend a hand.

A lot of the festival is about interdependence: learning to live with and lean on each other, learning to see each other as Christ would see us, and learning to love the world because God made it good. "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other," Mother Teresa once said--and I think we're trying to relearn what exactly it means to belong to each other.

I'm going to post pictures soon....once I buy a new camera cord. I lost mine.


*People Against Poverty and Apathy. We've wanted to change the name for a variety of reasons (we feel like we should stand for something, not just against; we'd like to be more inclusive by using a non-masculine name; so on and so forth), but no one's been able to agree on another name. It is, however, kind of fun because the majority of the organizers are women; I like to call us the PAPA mamas.

yes i said yes...

I missed Bloomsday because I was in the middle of nowhere. But to those of you who celebrated, I hope it was wonderful and that you pondered things like the ineluctable modality of the visible and non serviam and, of course, yes I said yes I will Yes. 

Also, it's officially summer. Happy solstice!   

More later.

in the category of "head hits desk..."

Huh. So apparently there's been a rash of (straight, white) dudes pretending to be (gay and, in one case, Syrian) women on blogs? And on Facebook as well?

Did someone say "appropriation"?

Lemme just say: I'm straight and white (so I have those things in common with the real people behind those blogs), but I'm a girl, not a guy. Just so's it's clear and all.

In better news, tomorrow I am headed off to PAPA Festival until Sunday, where, as the Volunteer Coordinator, I will undoubtedly be running around like a chicken with my head cut off. It'll be glorious.

Here, take a look at PAPA '08:


(This video was not taken by me, but I'm a fan of the fire-playing.)

My next post will be far more fun. I promise.

where we go from here

I went to the Philadelphia City Planning Commission's meeting last night. It was a special meeting, open to the public, to adopt Philadelphia2035, a "citywide vision" that splits the city into 18 different districts and then focuses on ways to improve both the districts and the city as a whole.

The meeting itself wasn't too exciting. I was hoping for more details about what they were actually going to do, but it was more of a general overview (as well as a lot of mutual back-patting). From what I heard, the plan has a lot to do with improving transit (hell, yes), industrial and economic development, and development of green spaces and vacant lots. That's a very truncated version.

My particular "district" (West) is scheduled for development in four years. I haven't read the final plan, so I don't know exactly what they're planning on doing in my neighborhood--which, by the way, is a strange little bit of a neighborhood. It's too south to be Parkside or Belmont, too west to be Mantua or Powelton Village, too east to be Mill Creek. The neighborhood maps I've found call it "Haverford North," but I've never heard anyone call it that.

Anyway, after the meeting, I was with my housemate Emily and two other friends, Vicki and Troy (we went to Dock Street Brewery--so much more fun than a meeting), and we were talking about things we'd like to see in our neighborhoods. Here are some of my thoughts. Not all of them have to do with city planning in particular, but they're things I've observed in my neighborhood:

1. Trash. Oh, God, someone get rid of the trash on the streets! We all agreed on this one: the city would be a whole lot nicer if we just picked up our frakking garbage. By my bus stop, for example, there are two garbage cans at the corners of the street, and I still see people throw their trash on the ground. And it piles up and is so disgusting that no one wants to touch it (including me). Vicki suggested a citywide street-cleaning service. It's basic Broken Windows theory: if people see trash lying on the ground all the time, they'll think that's how it should be; if we keep the streets clean, people will understand that it's inappropriate to throw their garbage on the ground and will seek out the nearest trash can. It'll take money (to form a service to clean the streets) and time (for people to get used to the idea), but I'd say it would be worth it.

2. Sidewalks. There are a ton of broken-up sidewalks in my neighborhood. Let's repair them.

3. Abandoned buildings and vacant lots. No one knows quite how many abandoned homes and vacant lots we have, but the number hovers somewhere above 20,000. My street's got a few--not as many as some--and there are a couple of vacant lots near us as well. I realize it's complicated, finding out who owns these properties and figuring out how to buy them or transfer ownership or whatever, but I'd love to see someone--government or otherwise--take this on mass-scale. Along with this, I'd love to see the city create green spaces and playgrounds.

4. Access to healthy food. There's a corner grocery store around the corner from our house, and it's actually probably better than most corner stores (definitely just used "corner" 3 times in that sentence). It's got fruits and vegetables, but not all of them are fresh. Also, it's a crapshoot. You may find broccoli, or peppers, or apples, and you may not. I go there when I need something quick, but we could never do all of our food shopping there. And we have access to transportation and the money to buy good food, whereas a lot of people in our neighborhood, and in the rest of the city, don't have that luxury. 

5. Improved schools. An entire post could be spent on this, but I don't want to rant. Suffice it to say that the Philly school district is a hard place to get a good education. And it shouldn't be that way. A kid in a Philly neighborhood school should get the same level of education as a kid on the Main Line, and we shouldn't have to force parents to decide between living in the city and giving their children a good education. I think that should be a no-brainer.

6. Improved public transportation. I know this is on the city planning list, but a reiteration is always good.

7. Affordable (and decent) housing. PHA has been under a lot of strain, and a lot of scandal recently, and even if they did manage their resources properly, they most likely would not be able to help all of the people who need housing. In any case, we need to give people affordable housing--and good housing, too.

8. Revitalization without gentrification. We've seen this all over the place, right? A neighborhood improves, property values go up, and all of a sudden the people who used to live there can't afford to live there anymore. I don't want this to happen to my neighborhood--or anyone's neighborhood. I don't want my neighbors to move out (and really, I don't want my neighborhood overrun by students and hipsters; I like my families and old people, thanksverymuch).

The thing is, Philly's become home. And I want my home to improve and to be a place in which people can live lives that aren't continually affected by things like poverty and violence. Of course, all I've said above is rather idealistic, and I don't think we can, say, improve the schools with a snap of a magic wand. But we can work and push and try to make things a little better, yes?

what I think about when I think about faith, part 3

Part one is here. Part two is here.

And at long last, here is part three.

I graduated from college in 2006, which makes this year my fifth year out (holy crap, that's scary).

During my first year out of college, I joined the Capuchin Franciscan Volunteer Corps (CapCorps for short). They placed me at N Street Village, a nonprofit that serves homeless women. N Street started out of Luther Place Memorial Church in the 70s, when the church decided to open its doors and let people sleep inside. It's grown into a multi-services organization open to people of all (and no) faiths. I was in the day center, where anyone could walk in off the street and find a safe place to spend the day.

I'd already spent a bunch of time hanging out with people who were homeless, but I never had to enforce specific rules or boundaries other than my own personal ones. But suddenly, here I was, this 23-year-old kid who had to tell women twice her age that they couldn't get more than one shirt out of the clothing closet or had to do one more chore in order to come inside during the weekend. Add race to the whole thing, and I was a rather confused mess.

The women told me that they liked me because I treated them like people, not clients. I was bad at my job for the same reason. I had a hard time putting my foot down because my head got in the way. My boss, the day center manager, was probably a saving grace here: she was formerly homeless and a recovering alcoholic who'd gone through N Street's program herself. She could pick out bullshit a mile away. She often picked out my bullshit a mile away.

"No one's crazy 24/7," she'd say to us. Even our most mentally ill clients had stunning moments of lucidity. We had one women who was schizophrenic who rarely ate; we used to coax her with peanut butter and jelly because for months, that was the only thing she would eat. Then, one day, out of the blue, she looked up at us and said, "Why are you giving me peanut butter? I don't want peanut butter."

I have tons of stories about N Street (at least one ends with bruises up and down my arms). But that was only part of my year. There was also my housemates (who are wonderful) and the Capuchin Franciscans, with whom we spent a lot of time.

The Capuchins taught me about life together, about being in a place where you (plural) sometimes have disparate views but a common purpose. The Capuchins lived together in a friary, 35 men under one roof. You can imagine that they must butt heads a lot. We'd go over for Sunday evening prayer and dinner once a month or so, and it was sort of funny--barring any other visitors, it would be us four girls and a room full of brown habits.

We had a house friar, Brother Mark (one of my housemates nicknamed him our "frother-brother"), who'd come over once a week, have dinner with us and hang out. If there were conflicts, he'd be the one to mediate; luckily, we didn't have serious conflicts, and we got along well (our program director, Brother Dennis, called us "the walking slumber party").

Being a full-time volunteer teaches you, in some ways, about faith and trust. Room, board, transportation, and health insurance were covered. We were given $400 a month for groceries ($25/week/person), whatever we needed for transportation (for me, it was $44/month for a bus pass), and the program dealt with the rent. Other than that, we were given $100/month for living expenses. Sometimes it was plenty of money; other times, we'd get to the end of the month and have to stretch it out. It put us, in a limited way, in the position of the people we worked with, having to take their checks and make them work til the end of the month.

It wasn't perfect, obviously; most of us had savings we could fall back on, and we had numerous safety nets, like family and the volunteer corps itself. But it wasn't supposed to be an experiment, as, say, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed was. It was supposed to be an experience in service, in life together, in faith.

(A side note: one of my favorite things about the Capuchins is that they rented out part of the friary space to TASSC--Torture Abolition and Support Survivor Coalition.)

The year after that, I moved to Camden, NJ. My main post about Camden is here.

Camden taught me a lot of things--things about race and class, about how the environment is connected to poverty, about the ways in which the powerful can ignore the marginalized without being affected. It also taught me about the beautiful side of the Church, because our community was connected to Sacred Heart. One of the odd things about Sacred Heart is that most of the parishioners come from outside of Camden (most of the kids at the school, by contrast, are from Camden and not Catholic. Fr. Michael jokes that it's a Catholic school for Baptist kids). Yet so many of them chose to spend their free time in our neighborhood: in the greenhouse and the garden, at the school, at Joe's Place, which serves neighborhood dinners a couple times a month. It's not perfect, obviously, because too much and you can create a power imbalance. But there's an element of working together with people, especially kids and their parents, that helps to level the playing field a little.

What it taught me was a continuation of what I learned as a YACHT kid and at N Street about the complexities of human interaction. In Camden, I was there all the time. There was no going home, because this was home. And if we are, as they say, supposed to see the face of Christ in others, then Camden is a great learning experience in that--because what do you say to the woman who shows up at your door, who's strung out on drugs and got every disease in the book? Well, you put on gloves and wrap up her bleeding hands and give her food...and when you turn around, she steals your wallet. That's my learning experience. And what it comes down to is this: what do you say to that woman the next time she comes to your door?


In other words, oh, Sarah. Where are your big ideals now? --I think part of the answer is that I've given up on big ideals (though, seriously, what is so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?), that I've consigned myself to what I can do around me.

I went back to school after my year in Camden. It's a bit like culture whiplash, going from Camden to University City. I work at a college now. In some ways, it feels like selling out, because working at a college necessarily means working with kids who are privileged in some ways. In others, it feels like I'm where I should be--working within my field, and often working with students who are underprepared for college.


The past few years have taught me this: the face of Christ is not pretty. It's often bruised, bleeding, malnourished, desperate, manipulative, angry, mean. Sometimes it tells you hard truths, and sometimes it yells at you things you don't want to hear. Sometimes it's a beautiful child; other times, that beautiful child is throwing a tantrum. Sometimes, it's your best friend; other times, it's your worst enemy.

I cannot separate my faith from the way I look at others. It's a people-trump-ideology ideology, if that makes sense ('swhy I support marriage equality, for example: because to believe otherwise hurts people I know and love). I once said to a friend of mine that my faith often follows my actions, that I can't believe unless I do. I don't necessarily think that that's a bad thing.

But also--as I was saying to another friend the other day--we are in flux. We don't stop changing, and perhaps in five years, I'll look at what I've written and realize that I'm completely different.

For now, though? This rambling set of posts hopefully gives a little bit of insight about "what I think about when I think about faith."

But to-day the struggle.

I have about 2/3 of my next "what I think about" post written, but the rest won't seem to materialize. In lieu of my own thoughts, I give you W.H. Auden's "Spain." This poem is interesting to me because Auden disavowed it years later, saying that it was "dishonest" and didn't really reflect what he thought. He wrote it after visiting Spain during its Civil War.

So, without further ado:

W.H. Auden, Spain

Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."

And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river."

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
the photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

among the gods, who brought this quarrel on?

To start, let me say this: I have no sympathy for Osama Bin Laden. I think anyone who plans the deaths of thousands and inspires others to kill is evil.


I think, though, that his death should not be a cause for celebration but a time to step back and reflect on the last decade. Because, really? Ten years and thousands of lives, military and civilian, have been lost. And it makes me twitchy to hear chants of USA! when I think about that. Is this the end (in the sense of purpose) of what we've done in Afghanistan? (Iraq, I s'pose, is a different ball game.) The whole thing seems a Pyrrhic victory.

And then there's the fact that I am, as a Christian, called to "love my enemies." Many other people have written about this. Surprisingly (because I am, at heart, a renegade), I found the response from the Vatican rather appropriate and thoughtful: ‎"Faced with the death of a man, a Christian never rejoices but reflects on the serious responsibility of each and every one of us before God and before man, and hopes and commits himself so that no event be an opportunity for further growth of hatred, but for peace." (Fr. Federico Lombardi)

Other voices that I've found interesting or thoughtful:

No Tears for Osama, No Cheers For US Imperialism:

Let me be clear: I shed no tears for bin Laden, whose murderous beyond-the-State reign, left nothing but death, grief and trauma across multiple continents. But the pursuit of bin Laden was not justification for what has been an escalation of violence and de-stabilization in the Middle East and Northern Africa, by two American Presidents. 

"USA! USA!" is the wrong response

This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory: He has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regrettable-if-sometimes-necessary act into one that finds orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed. In other words, he’s helped drag us down into his sick nihilism by making us like too many other bellicose societies in history -- the ones that aggressively cheer on killing, as long as it is the Bad Guy that is being killed.

Beyond Retaliation

Matt Daloisio, who co-coordinates the Witness Against Torture Campaign, sounded a note that we find far more authentic than triumphal celebration. “10 years,” Matt wrote. “Over 6000 US Soldiers killed. Trillions of Dollars wasted. Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed. Tens of thousands imprisoned. Torture as part of foreign policy. And we are supposed to celebrate the murder of one person? I am not excited. I am not happy. I remain profoundly sad.”

Waking Up in a Post-Osama World

I hope that those who lost loved ones on 9/11 feel some sense of closure from the death of Osama Bin Laden.

I know I am supposed to feel like celebrating, but I just feel a deep sense of sadness as I grapple with a flood of memories from the day the planes flew into the World Trade Center and the events that followed.

So, yeah, I feel sadness, not so much at Bin Laden's death itself, but at the events of the last ten years. I, fortunately, didn't lose anyone in 9/11, but my roots are in New York, and we have family still there. 9/11 happened four years after we moved out of New York, but I remember the panic I felt at the announcement--I was a senior in high school, sitting in English class, and I ran down to the main office to call my mom to see if we knew anyone who worked in or around the Towers. My grandfather, who was a Brooklyn firefighter, lost people he trained. My aunt worked in the WTC for years; she moved in '92, but she knew people who still were there.
A year and some later, people yelled things about 9/11 at me when I said that I was against the war in Iraq. Half of those people had never been to the damn city.

Anyway. There's a sort-of "I don't really know what to think" thing going on with me. I've ended up with it is in pardoning that we are pardoned and lines from Wilfred Owen ("What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?") and Matthew Arnold (yeah, ignorant armies and stuff) going through my head. And then there's hold onto the good and love your enemies, which is funny, because I'm not one for quoting the Bible at anyone, including myself...

Now I'm rambling. I'd love to hear others' responses.

Because, apparently, you really can't take the New York out of the girl.

 Or, I still have my accent.

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

New York City. You are most definitely from New York City. Not New Jersey, not Connecticut. If you are from Jersey then you can probably get into New York City in 10 minutes or less.

Take this quiz now - it's easy!

We're going to start with "cot" and "caught." When you say those words do they sound the same or different?

Same, no wait I mean different, maybe, a little bit different... Different Same

I will not rest until this place is full of sunlight

First off: I wrote something here. 

Second: If you're coming over from the Slacktiverse site, feel free to poke around!

I've also written about Camden here and here. My friend Andrea, who runs the Camden Center for Transformation, blogs here. My friends Chris and Cassie also have blogs.

pointing to the agony of death and birth

Because every day needs a little poetry, and no less Good Friday:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

    Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

    The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

    The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

    The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

-T.S. Eliot, "East Coker" IV

Four Quartets

Reading List, redux

A long while back, I posted a reading list. I just went and looked at it again, and I realized that I've gotten distracted from the original list. Here's the new one.
If you have any suggestions for my 2011 list, let me know. I like new books a lot.

The Waves, Virginia Woolf  - finished
Kindred, Octavia Butler - finished
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison - finished
What are People For? Wendell Berry - have read bits and pieces (it's a book of essays)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin - finished
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon - finished
The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara - um, started but then stopped. I'm not sure why I stopped.
My Invented Country, Isabelle Allende
The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney
Catch-22, Joseph Heller - finished
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch - finished
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
That Noble Dream, Peter Novick
Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond
Looting Africa, Patrick Bond
Chasing Shadows, Lucrecia Guerrero
The Rain God, Arturo Islas
George Washington Gomez, Americo Paredes
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
Wild Seed, Octavia Butler
Contending Forces, Pauline Hopkins - finished
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel - finished
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino - finished
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson - finished
No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July - finished
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark - finished
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee - finished
A Mercy, Toni Morrison - finished 
A Disobedient Girl, Ru Freeman - finished
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri  - finished
Burger's Daughter, Nadine Gordimer -finished
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides - finished
Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose - reading now

I know there's been more, but I can't quite remember at the moment.

A bit of nostalgia for Survey of English Lit

Ever wake up with lines of poetry running through your head? That was me the other day. Funny thing was, I hadn't read this poem since college. Of course, it's a poem every good student of English knows. If you don't know it, feel free to enjoy for the first time...

Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

...And its parody, The Dover Bitch.

what I think about when I think about faith, part 2

College.

After spending 12 years in public school, I decided that I wanted something different. When I started researching schools, I focused mainly on Christian colleges.

I ended up going to Eastern University for a few reasons. The first was practical: I got a full-tuition scholarship from them. I also got into their honors college, which was, in part, a Great Books program. Plus, every other Christian college I visited had some sort of chapel requirement, as in "you must go to chapel x many times per semester." Eastern doesn't have that; whether you go to chapel or to any other group is entirely voluntary.

And then there were the other reasons. Eastern has a reputation for turning out alumni who tend to be on the...I guess you'd call them the radical side. I actually had friends whose churches warned them against coming to Eastern, because it was too "liberal" (I snicker at this now). When I started college in 2002, Tony Campolo was probably the school's most famous alumnus/professor. In any case, they have a focus on social justice and social action, which is what I wanted.

In general, college was tumultuous for me. But, besides that, it shaped me in important ways; I think it would be safe to say that I'd be in a very different place now if I hadn't gone to Eastern.

what I think about when I think about faith, part one

So I started this post about three weeks ago, and, man. It's really hard to gather my thoughts, which is why it's so late. But here you are.

So it's Lent, which is when I get all contemplative and stuff. Of course, it also means that I'm probably going to ramble, so please forgive me in advance. Mea culpa.

The reason that I tend to ramble when I think about my faith is that I'm usually rather conflicted, and so my thoughts get...complicated.

In any case, some background to begin, because, to be honest, I can't separate out my personal history from the way I think about faith. I was raised Protestant--evangelical, specifically. My parents, by contrast, grew up Catholic. I grew up in Baptist churches, one on Long Island, one in Massachusetts. They were...well, they were very different from each other.

Behold, my writer's block

Guys, I have a post stashed in my brain, and it's half on the page but slow in coming out. If you're reading, bear with me.

Or you can just...talk here. About things. Like...How 'bout them Phillies?

All your troubles, they don't stand a chance

 Here, have some music. Smile. Spring's coming.

"Wrecking Ball," Gillian Welch and David Rawlings with Old Crow Medicine Show.



Brett Dennen, "Darlin' Do Not Fear"



Amos Lee, "Black River"

A Franciscan Benediction

I stole this from my friend Jason, who stole it from his church.

May God bless you wtih Discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships,
So that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with Anger
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
So that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with Tears
To shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war,
So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and turn their pain to joy.

And may God bless you with enough Foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done.


(I'm working on another post right now, but it's taking me a long time to get it together.)

where shall the word be found, where will the word resound?

This is sort of obligatory. Or at least appropriate. 

Ash Wednesday

T.S. Eliot, 1930

I.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II 
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each
other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III 
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair, 
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.


Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy

               but speak the word only. 

IV 
Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke
no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V 
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.


O my people.

VI 
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

a couple of things, perhaps, of note

1. This made my day yesterday:



Slight correction to what the guy says: Victor Hugo did not, in fact, have much to do with this song, though I suppose you could argue that the idea is in the novel. Still, coolest flash mob ever. I really do hope, however, that the protests in WI do not end in the same way as Les Miserables. 

2. So a woman pitches to the Cleveland Indians during spring training. It makes news. Here's an interesting take on it. Here's something that I wrote last summer about being a girl and playing baseball.

And here's Justine Siegel's blog about her own experience.

3. It's March, which in Philly translates to weird weather. It was 55 on Sunday! 55! Best baseball weather EVER, but really weird for end of February. Anyway, I'm still a New Englander in that I feel that winter should last through April, but here's some Shelley:

O Wind,
if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

goin' to hell in a handbasket, that's what we're doing.

This makes me boiling mad. If you don't want to click on the link, here's a sample:

The top choices [in the federal budget] among evangelicals for the chopping block are economic assistance to needy people around the world (56 percent), government assistance for the unemployed (40 percent), and environmental protection (38 percent). In each of these categories, evangelicals were more supportive of decreasing spending than are other Americans. In fact, evangelicals were more supportive of funding cuts in every area except military defense, terrorism defense, aid to veterans, and energy.

I have a rant somewhere in me, but at this point, all I can say is "What part of 'for the least of these' don't you understand?"

Also, this is a sorta WTF on an otherwise okay morning: Georgia could potentially criminalize women who've had miscarriages.  Here's a snippet of this article from Mother Jones:

Under Rep. Franklin's bill, HB 1, women who miscarry could become felons if they cannot prove that there was "no human involvement whatsoever in the causation" of their miscarriage. There is no clarification of what "human involvement" means, and this is hugely problematic as medical doctors do not know exactly what causes miscarriages. Miscarriages are estimated to terminate up to a quarter of all pregnancies and the Mayo Clinic says that "the actual number is probably much higher because many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a woman doesn't even know she's pregnant. Most miscarriages occur because the fetus isn't developing normally."

If that's an accurate picture of the bill...I just kinda want to splutter.

AND, also, Americorps and other programs could potentially be cut. I've participated in Americorps, and so have many people I know, so here you go: Save Service.