I put on my short, tight shorts to go to work. I'm painting my parents' house, and I'd do it in my nearly-dead, the-crotch-is-made-entirely-of-patches Europe jeans, but this is Florida, and it is hot, and I had to borrow one of Anna's pairs of shorts the other day when I was at her house just to survive the humidity; so, since I only own two pairs of shorts here, and can't afford to spatter any of them with paint, I've borrowed my dad's painting shorts which, on anyone except my brother or I when we were seven, would be considered much too short, and much too tight. Even Sasha the white dog fixes me with a mixed look of awe and shame.
The deck falls under my brush before it can even know what to expect, serenaded by all Coheed and Cambria and all sorts of screamo and prog rock my mom just hasn't wrapped her mind around yet (though I've myself tested whether the sound from my little, portable speakers can penetrate the Florida underbrush between our lot and the one adjacent and adjusted the volume accordingly, she still comes out, turns it too low for me to even hear the words ten feet away, and says, "I just don't want to disturb the neighbors"). Honestly, though, getting my mom's reaction to things is half the fun of playing that kind of music.
Originally I thought that this blog would have to end in Jacksonville, then begin again in the same place as we dip our rear wheels in the Atlantic Ocean for Bike and Build next month. Yet, if I am to be honest, this is not home. I have rich relationships here, have seen many of these stores and shops since I was born, then moved away, then when I came back in Kindergarten (aside from the Publixes -- or Pulices? -- that have all seemed to tear themselves down and rebuild on the other side of the street, which totally threw me off). I left here to dive into the places I felt God wanted me to be, and as such fell in love with other cities, monuments, bicycles, poetry, foreign countries, and more. Rather, I'm here (and I'm writing) because I'm here like I've been at every farm and monastery and church that I've been in this past year: I'm here to serve, to make a difference, however small, and to share; though in this particular case I'm sharing with people who have the same accent, culture, common history and familial bonds and a whole host of stories and commonalities that, like all of us, will take my entire life to unravel.
So far, there has been adventure, service, romance, spirituality, culture, creativity (there's even an impromptu poem), and very short shorts. Now there is a new addition: exercise; or, whipping this slightly-padded body into shape into something that not only seeks to make the world a better place but also rides a bicycle 60-110 miles per day. Watch out, straight, flat streets of Jacksonville, because you've got mad business headed your way.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Late posts #4: Noel
Knowing my love for cows, she drives us past a little haven of magnificent Brahma bulls, little calves, and several other great additions to the sum of all joy in the world. Being with her, I remember a girl I met ten years ago at camp, days early in my faith, before I liked poetry, metal, before I'd ever dated anybody or really made my own decisions, and days when folding people into my world with pen and paper was a fond dream practiced only by us as we traded ideas over a long, electric correspondence.
Strange to think of how similar we are, in our opposing Florida water towns on either coast, and how we can be old enough to have a relationship of a decade when I feel I've only lived, as my own person, for the past four years. She's going back to college and will finish in 2011 with dreams of owning a bookstore in the colloquial shade of North Carolina, connecting people with a slower form of literature, one with margins and other spaces to step in and walk among, without the special effects and cuts of film, a medium that requires you to work at it, to dive in with part of yourself.
As much as I love film, I can't ensconce someone as well with it as one can do with a novel or choice poetry. There's just something about those empty spaces, with no need for surround sound, although popcorn helps, and, as always, we should pay close attention to our consumption of Sour Patch Kids, you know, for our teeth's sake.
Strange to think of how similar we are, in our opposing Florida water towns on either coast, and how we can be old enough to have a relationship of a decade when I feel I've only lived, as my own person, for the past four years. She's going back to college and will finish in 2011 with dreams of owning a bookstore in the colloquial shade of North Carolina, connecting people with a slower form of literature, one with margins and other spaces to step in and walk among, without the special effects and cuts of film, a medium that requires you to work at it, to dive in with part of yourself.
As much as I love film, I can't ensconce someone as well with it as one can do with a novel or choice poetry. There's just something about those empty spaces, with no need for surround sound, although popcorn helps, and, as always, we should pay close attention to our consumption of Sour Patch Kids, you know, for our teeth's sake.
Late posts #3: Bay City
Florida greets me with a broad, oven sun and cordial passerby decked with college sports regalia, the pervasiveness of which I always seem to underestimate. I have three days here before my dad road-trips to see my play and we head back over the flat state toward the other coast. Yet for now I am in the comfortable expansiveness of the Bay City, which is to say Tampa and its surrounding estates along the crab claw of the bay: Tampa and St. Petersburg and Manatee and Brandon and Plant City (where they grow strawberries), all traversed easily by the low bridges that span across the green Gulf waters where it would not be surprising to see a dolphin at eye level.
We spill out of the plane quickly and ahead of time, and I catch Mr. LaBrant just outside of the terminal train. Things are much more speedy here without passport control and, when the Border Agent looks me in the eye and says, "What's up?" I issue a polite, cursory reply and "Happy Easter," then, as we do, I turned the question around. "What's up?" I ask, thinking I will be asked what I'm bringing into the country (even though I just flew in from DC), my purposes here, if I have any plants or vegetables or monsters that are not native to this area... Instead, she cracks a big, weary smile and says with humor, "I'm tired. I can't wait to go home." Then we're off. That quickly. And I can't believe it. In fact, even the tollbooth attendants are cheery.
Staying with the LaBrants, or Mr. LaBrant specifically, is a history lesson. They are Keri's parents, a friend from college who is taking the world by storm in her own way at Duke. She's a friend who's perhaps most patient with me, listening and offering feedback on all of my film ideas, whether conventional like the myopic look at a student in DC and his community and the way he subtly exerts influence on big things, or the more... um... visionary sorts of films, like when zombies rise up, but they're really all Canadians and nice unless you mess with them or make fun of hockey... This is Keri, patient and encouraging and fun, and her parents are likewise awesome.
But there are three days here, and too much to take you beat by beat. Suffice to say, Mrs. LaBrant has to work, so Mr. LaBrant and I hit the road the next day, whipping around his old shrimping grounds -- where one can walk, shallow, almost all the way across the big inlet to the bridge -- Eckerd College, which he attended in its very first year; the once-Bohemian neighborhood with a view of the beach that contained their first home together and, in typical Florida fashion, is not postage-stamp-thin, five-story condos; and where he could catch stone crabs and where he carried Mrs. LaBrant in from a boat so she wouldn't get wrapped in the seaweed and dolphins decide to show off for us on the pier. It is a good day.
Peggy gets me from a mall Starbucks and we go rather quickly to school. I haven't spent much time in community colleges, where she is getting her AA before going on to study historical anthropology (yes, she's that awesome), apart from filming with a group of students who needed extra hands in Jacksonville. We learn factorials, which are exciting because they are illustrated by an exclamation point (2! = two factorial!), and then the prof takes some time with Peggy and me to tell us about the play he is writing about the two thieves on either side of Jesus. Random? Yes, as is our dinner, too late for Sonny's -- I had been craving milkshakes, which we got at Steak n' Shake, and good ol' I'm-about-to-go-work-in-the-fields-and-hence-will-burn-off-all-this-fat-that-is-smothered-in-delicious-sauce Southern barbecue -- so we go to the local Scottish pub, "The Tilted Kilt".
It turns out to be more of a British Isles pub, before the 1916 Easter Rising and Ireland's subsequent independence (see my earliest posts for that history), by virtue of alliterative names like "Killarney's Killer Baby Back Ribs" and such that I doubt hail from our immigrant ancestors' family recipes from the old country. Nevertheless, they have a killer barbecue sandwich, and Peggy and I have much to catch up about, like the fact that she usually takes on the whole world with multiple jobs and does well, but now she's squarely set on the future, finishing school, and getting excited about anthropology. It's good to hear it. I'm distracted a good bit, though, by the tilted kilts that the waitresses are wearing, a type of kilt that William Wallace might have only worn if he was in Bermuda, or about to go to the tanning bed. Yes, it's that short, and tight, and they wear another, even smaller kilt on top. Not usually my kind of place, or Peggy's, but it's open, and our waitress is a young mom who went to high school with Peggy and sat with us for a bit and needed to talk. In my crew days, I used to walk around in Spandex, and I will be living in biking shorts this entire summer. I'm not a Hooters kind of guy, but people are people, no matter how, um, breathable their clothes.
We spill out of the plane quickly and ahead of time, and I catch Mr. LaBrant just outside of the terminal train. Things are much more speedy here without passport control and, when the Border Agent looks me in the eye and says, "What's up?" I issue a polite, cursory reply and "Happy Easter," then, as we do, I turned the question around. "What's up?" I ask, thinking I will be asked what I'm bringing into the country (even though I just flew in from DC), my purposes here, if I have any plants or vegetables or monsters that are not native to this area... Instead, she cracks a big, weary smile and says with humor, "I'm tired. I can't wait to go home." Then we're off. That quickly. And I can't believe it. In fact, even the tollbooth attendants are cheery.
Staying with the LaBrants, or Mr. LaBrant specifically, is a history lesson. They are Keri's parents, a friend from college who is taking the world by storm in her own way at Duke. She's a friend who's perhaps most patient with me, listening and offering feedback on all of my film ideas, whether conventional like the myopic look at a student in DC and his community and the way he subtly exerts influence on big things, or the more... um... visionary sorts of films, like when zombies rise up, but they're really all Canadians and nice unless you mess with them or make fun of hockey... This is Keri, patient and encouraging and fun, and her parents are likewise awesome.
But there are three days here, and too much to take you beat by beat. Suffice to say, Mrs. LaBrant has to work, so Mr. LaBrant and I hit the road the next day, whipping around his old shrimping grounds -- where one can walk, shallow, almost all the way across the big inlet to the bridge -- Eckerd College, which he attended in its very first year; the once-Bohemian neighborhood with a view of the beach that contained their first home together and, in typical Florida fashion, is not postage-stamp-thin, five-story condos; and where he could catch stone crabs and where he carried Mrs. LaBrant in from a boat so she wouldn't get wrapped in the seaweed and dolphins decide to show off for us on the pier. It is a good day.
Peggy gets me from a mall Starbucks and we go rather quickly to school. I haven't spent much time in community colleges, where she is getting her AA before going on to study historical anthropology (yes, she's that awesome), apart from filming with a group of students who needed extra hands in Jacksonville. We learn factorials, which are exciting because they are illustrated by an exclamation point (2! = two factorial!), and then the prof takes some time with Peggy and me to tell us about the play he is writing about the two thieves on either side of Jesus. Random? Yes, as is our dinner, too late for Sonny's -- I had been craving milkshakes, which we got at Steak n' Shake, and good ol' I'm-about-to-go-work-in-the-fields-and-hence-will-burn-off-all-this-fat-that-is-smothered-in-delicious-sauce Southern barbecue -- so we go to the local Scottish pub, "The Tilted Kilt".
It turns out to be more of a British Isles pub, before the 1916 Easter Rising and Ireland's subsequent independence (see my earliest posts for that history), by virtue of alliterative names like "Killarney's Killer Baby Back Ribs" and such that I doubt hail from our immigrant ancestors' family recipes from the old country. Nevertheless, they have a killer barbecue sandwich, and Peggy and I have much to catch up about, like the fact that she usually takes on the whole world with multiple jobs and does well, but now she's squarely set on the future, finishing school, and getting excited about anthropology. It's good to hear it. I'm distracted a good bit, though, by the tilted kilts that the waitresses are wearing, a type of kilt that William Wallace might have only worn if he was in Bermuda, or about to go to the tanning bed. Yes, it's that short, and tight, and they wear another, even smaller kilt on top. Not usually my kind of place, or Peggy's, but it's open, and our waitress is a young mom who went to high school with Peggy and sat with us for a bit and needed to talk. In my crew days, I used to walk around in Spandex, and I will be living in biking shorts this entire summer. I'm not a Hooters kind of guy, but people are people, no matter how, um, breathable their clothes.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Jacksonville
Poster child suburban river town, sunrises and eastern tides flowing through the North Florida finance buildings as it did in the days of the Timuquan. Half-Georgia, half-Florida, we are both hick and intellectual, hunter and socialite, rock musician (this is the birthplace of Lynyrd Skynyrd, after all) and symphony-lover. We are dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and quieter, moderate Democrats. We are beach bums and fisherpeople, rowers and Frisbee players. We have a professional football team, but the streets these days are colored with Gator blue and orange, if not because we love the team, then in honor of Tim Tebow, our native son. We are Navy-types who yearn for a new aircraft carrier to bring prestige, and a hundred thousand people, to the city. We are the home of silent movies, of a disparate population of immigrants old and new, legal and illegal, spread over so vast a terrain you don’t have to bump into anybody you don’t mean to. We are the Hollywood of 1920s silent movies, where Colin Farrell came to fame (in Tigerland, check it out), and Limp Bizkit and Shinedown played their first shows. We are the gateway to Florida, our old buildings consumed in the Great Fire, our new ones tearing down and down again as we spread more and more outward. It is a car city, it is a boat city, it was the railway city, before Henry Flagler decided to build the railways further down Florida’s jungle peninsula and take our business to Tampa, Orlando, Miami, etc.
We are an old city of impressive beachfronts and nice restaurants. We are a young city with Art Walk and Riverside and other pleas to get young people out and together. We are a family city, with the space, the cost, the comfortable middle-classness, some of the best schools in America, not too far away from the Northside’s violence and schools that are some of the worst. We are a supermarket city, we are a dog city, and though we are not a biking city, all of the bikers that shoot by will gladly raise their hands back at you in a kind, reciprocal salutation.
I always feel challenged when writing here. In fact, though my time in Europe is done, and the time on the bike – officially, as we set the country ablaze on two wheels – is yet to come, and the fact that I can use the phone, and am now again used to its familiar grip on my soul (seriously, sometimes we think we feel it ring to realize we aren’t even carrying our phones), and that I can access the bank, and make money, and send less-expensive postcards, all of this is reality, but nonetheless, Jacksonville is one of the hardest parts of my trip. In earlier travels it has been a struggle of redefinition, the idea that a prophet (to use a biblical allusion) is not welcome in his own town. This is no longer the case. The play has been put on, people have seen it; people understand and support that passion, even if they don’t really get it. Before it’s been helping the parents. The parents are helped: I enjoy painting the deck Navajo white and scrubbing faucets untarnished and sweating unduly in the Florida sun.
This time it is the dichotomous challenge of having much to do, and having little to do. I am full up on work, gracious for any support that friends can give on Bike and Build, pouring into the unknowns of financing and living within graduate school, novelizing the play so that I can look at the needed changes with new eyes, rather than the ones who created a number of its verses four years ago. Yet, I cannot help but notice that J-ville lacks the central-ness of DC, the idea that if you are in DuPont Circle, you are in the middle of something, a cross-section of cultures; or, more simply, the downtown of any European city, where people come to stroll, play checkers, listen to music, see what’s going on. We have these events in Jacksonville, but they are so far away. I can go to the St. Johns Town Center – the “Town Center” concept basically designed so a mall can create the “city centre” feel that we have mostly lost in suburbia – but it takes a while. Some crave this disparate-ness, for the solitude of a plot of land and space, but this is not me, quite possibly has never been me.
So the challenge becomes, how to feel inspired in a place that seems, on many levels, uninspiring? Certainly we all face this in our day-to-day lives, even in places that we love. A place, even a place with Smithsonian Museums, does not alone make us inspired, excited people. I’m tying this on Word, but with a picture of our Bible Group from Taizé in the background – I’ll copy it later to put online – but for now I gaze into the faces of loved ones, remembering now to thank God for how far the Father/Mother has brought me, and that I’m here because I need to be here, in a spread-out city that grows families, in a grand, old house needing minor repair, not here for myself, but to serve, as it has been all year, just this time to serve in a place I know well, with parents’ whose eyes – like yours -- light up like hummingbirds through no doing of our own, overjoyed simply in our being there.
We are an old city of impressive beachfronts and nice restaurants. We are a young city with Art Walk and Riverside and other pleas to get young people out and together. We are a family city, with the space, the cost, the comfortable middle-classness, some of the best schools in America, not too far away from the Northside’s violence and schools that are some of the worst. We are a supermarket city, we are a dog city, and though we are not a biking city, all of the bikers that shoot by will gladly raise their hands back at you in a kind, reciprocal salutation.
I always feel challenged when writing here. In fact, though my time in Europe is done, and the time on the bike – officially, as we set the country ablaze on two wheels – is yet to come, and the fact that I can use the phone, and am now again used to its familiar grip on my soul (seriously, sometimes we think we feel it ring to realize we aren’t even carrying our phones), and that I can access the bank, and make money, and send less-expensive postcards, all of this is reality, but nonetheless, Jacksonville is one of the hardest parts of my trip. In earlier travels it has been a struggle of redefinition, the idea that a prophet (to use a biblical allusion) is not welcome in his own town. This is no longer the case. The play has been put on, people have seen it; people understand and support that passion, even if they don’t really get it. Before it’s been helping the parents. The parents are helped: I enjoy painting the deck Navajo white and scrubbing faucets untarnished and sweating unduly in the Florida sun.
This time it is the dichotomous challenge of having much to do, and having little to do. I am full up on work, gracious for any support that friends can give on Bike and Build, pouring into the unknowns of financing and living within graduate school, novelizing the play so that I can look at the needed changes with new eyes, rather than the ones who created a number of its verses four years ago. Yet, I cannot help but notice that J-ville lacks the central-ness of DC, the idea that if you are in DuPont Circle, you are in the middle of something, a cross-section of cultures; or, more simply, the downtown of any European city, where people come to stroll, play checkers, listen to music, see what’s going on. We have these events in Jacksonville, but they are so far away. I can go to the St. Johns Town Center – the “Town Center” concept basically designed so a mall can create the “city centre” feel that we have mostly lost in suburbia – but it takes a while. Some crave this disparate-ness, for the solitude of a plot of land and space, but this is not me, quite possibly has never been me.
So the challenge becomes, how to feel inspired in a place that seems, on many levels, uninspiring? Certainly we all face this in our day-to-day lives, even in places that we love. A place, even a place with Smithsonian Museums, does not alone make us inspired, excited people. I’m tying this on Word, but with a picture of our Bible Group from Taizé in the background – I’ll copy it later to put online – but for now I gaze into the faces of loved ones, remembering now to thank God for how far the Father/Mother has brought me, and that I’m here because I need to be here, in a spread-out city that grows families, in a grand, old house needing minor repair, not here for myself, but to serve, as it has been all year, just this time to serve in a place I know well, with parents’ whose eyes – like yours -- light up like hummingbirds through no doing of our own, overjoyed simply in our being there.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
We are all searching
An anonymous journal from a friend at Taizé. Worth reading. Search, friends, because I don't want to ever have things completely figured out. What life would there be left if that were the case?
http://christianarchist.wordpress.com/
http://christianarchist.wordpress.com/
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Late posts #2: Paris
I meet Deborah at the appointed time, near the empty buses that crowd the Oyak parking lot like remnants of a faster-paced, larger-scale world. I don’t know her all that well, but her status as fellow traveler and pilgrim to Taizé ensures a positive correlation of trustworthiness, genuineness, and fun times. She is going to Paris too, to meet a friend, and, when she heard my plans, said, "Why don't you come along? My friend can show us around." So I'm at the bus, a little unsure of whether the city bus is operating and wondering why she has booked us travel on a gigantic charter bus just to get to the TGV station thirty minutes away.
"This goes to the Mâcon train station, right?" I ask as I sling my rucksack the size of a middle schooler into the crowded luggage space. "No," she says, looking confused, "this is going to Paris." I think about protesting for a minute -- I mean, I have a train ticket and won't be able to get to the station to get my money back, but Deborah has done all of this work booking us travel on a bus full of Germans... Whatever. To be with a friend headed to parts unknown is more fun. We thank the bus driver in three-word French and take our seats.
Soon, the bus begins to fill, and its occupants look at us with a mix of surprise and congeniality. I can't help but notice there are no dudes boarding, and that their language doesn't sound like any German I've ever heard. As we start rolling, and their good-humored chaperones finish a small spiel – that by the sound of it is quite profound – all of the travelers begin to sing, and I learn the answer. Instead of German, it is French, and this is a French girls' school.
I should give a narrative aside: everyone oohs and ahs when I mention "a French girls' school", but when it comes to high schoolers, I automatically put on the “counselor cloak” which loves their company, but skillfully deflects any romantic notions into vines of the rapidly disappearing French wine country. We meet friends, talk about rugby, and watch Zorro in French, although the movie keeps its random bits of un-subtitled Spanish.
Emmerich is soft-spoken, with kind eyes and a legendarily-thick – but still professional – dark beard. He is a student in Marseilles, I believe it was, but was born and bred in Paris, coming home to visit his parents and house Deborah. He knows I’m coming… well, he heard it yesterday or so, and Deborah is confident he can tell me a good – and cheap – place to stay; this is good, because I never hear stories of a “cheap” stay in Paris. Yet when we meet him he tells us there is no need for a hostel: “There are lots of rooms at my parents’ house,” he says. So for three days I live with a French family with my-age kids and dogs, eat French food, drink good, complex French wine, and otherwise feel incredibly blessed at the doors that have opened when, just earlier that day, I felt great anxiety about going alone.
We Lourve it up on the first day, venturing beneath the glass pyramids to the first home of Louis XIV, the Sun King, the short man who invented high heels. It used to be a castle or fortress before those times, surprising some of the archaeologists who have now dug it out so that we can walk, inside and air-conditioned, through the moat. I wonder if, for cardio, soldiers ever had to do laps around the castle. Emmerich says no, because what if there were crocodiles in the moat. It is a good point… even though we know there were no crocodiles in France, especially during those times, imagine the fear of attacking a castle suddenly compounded with the double fear of seeing crocodiles in the moat one has to cross… and crocodiles would have been unknown to the attackers and look triply fearsome… the thought goes into my strategic notebook for when I eventually have to defend the royal keep in a land where there are no crocodiles; yeah, it’s gonna be big.
The Mona Lisa is there, too, smiling at us from behind slightly green, photograph-proof glass. She’s in the huge corridor full of brilliant Renaissance paintings, though I am puzzled by one of St. Francis receiving the stigmata where Jesus is flying and supposed to look like a cherubim, but really looks like a six-winged eagle shooting laser beams out of his wounds into a fainting Francis’ wrists and feet. Impressive too is the Code of Hammurabi downstairs, the famous beheaded Nike statue of Samothrace, and the miles and miles of exhilarating corridors, some transporting you into ancient Assyria, others to their own well-preserved worlds.
Deborah is not happy, however, when we visit the mummified cats, or when we bring it up later. And later. And later. But the mummification process is interesting and well-documented, and I see more species of mummies here than ever before. Usually museums stick to people, dogs, and cats. But at the Louvre there are scarabs, crocodiles (whose skin is so tough you don’t need to wrap it, just remove the vitals and put them in jars), and so on. Of course, this isn’t all you’ll see at the Louvre, just as the characters in The Night at the Museum movies are only a very tiny selection of all of the collection pieces that come alive at night, but if you want to see the world’s first piece of art – two reindeer swimming, carved on reindeer bone – then I guess you’ll have to go. I would live there if I could, for never have I seen such a fantastic jungle of art, people, and history, where you can pluck culture out of the air like unfortunate flying squirrels.
The next day is my last full one. We have a choice of Versailles or Paris, since Versailles, Louis XIV’s second palace – built to be the grandest in Europe, because the Louvre had been recently surpassed – and we choose Paris. It’s difficult to chronicle this part of the adventure, because there is just so much seen, from the church of the Sacred Heart (Sacre Coeur) with its incredibly bright mosaic of Christ with, literally, a heart of gold – perhaps my favorite church in Europe – to Notre Dame minus the hunchback (the bells are all automated now, with no new Quasimodos, which makes both me and Victor Hugo sad inside). We stroll through many other churches and neighborhoods and all with Emmerich’s detailed description of artistic styles and where Gothic and Romantic blend in these features… the Eiffel Tower and how it was meant to be dismantled after the World’s Fair, but has persisted in all its simplicity to symbolize Paris to the world… and the whole city is preserved to an extent that it doesn’t seem that people have ever touched these statues; occasionally we see a toe chipped off of a statue on a façade of a building, but for the most part they look untouched, brilliant, as if a society of statue-protectors has been watching them for centuries and is watching us now…
We head home after a great day talking about how we will go about catching a cat to mummify. We should have done it yesterday, when we had energy, but hey, we could just try and use a net or something. Deborah squirms, we men smile mischievously.
I wanted to end it there with that image, but I can’t. By virtue of being a late post, things have percolated some, and I realize things I didn’t then. I was anxious, scared even to go to Paris by myself, especially when I heard about the price and availability of hostels, but then Parisian doors, like doors in so many places across the continent, opened, and instead of being anxious, indeed, anxious at all, Paris became one of my favorite cities in the world. Conscious of being a third wheel, I made sure that Emmerich and Deborah had friend-time to catch up and stuff, and made every effort to help his kind mother and father in the kitchen, writing them a very gracious letter as I left, but never once did I feel like an outsider, or even a surprise. I have to write this because of my surprise, and how this reminded me of something that Peter Cross said to me back in September, when the trip was still a dream beginning to wake up, when we had just barely heard from South Lincolnshire. I’d written him about my shock at seeing how doors opened with Colin and South Lincs, how surprised and blessed I felt that we looked to be something they could really use. He wrote: “We shouldn’t be surprised about the way God works really. He has his plan and purpose and he shows it to us as and when we need to know.” Amen, brother, amen.
"This goes to the Mâcon train station, right?" I ask as I sling my rucksack the size of a middle schooler into the crowded luggage space. "No," she says, looking confused, "this is going to Paris." I think about protesting for a minute -- I mean, I have a train ticket and won't be able to get to the station to get my money back, but Deborah has done all of this work booking us travel on a bus full of Germans... Whatever. To be with a friend headed to parts unknown is more fun. We thank the bus driver in three-word French and take our seats.
Soon, the bus begins to fill, and its occupants look at us with a mix of surprise and congeniality. I can't help but notice there are no dudes boarding, and that their language doesn't sound like any German I've ever heard. As we start rolling, and their good-humored chaperones finish a small spiel – that by the sound of it is quite profound – all of the travelers begin to sing, and I learn the answer. Instead of German, it is French, and this is a French girls' school.
I should give a narrative aside: everyone oohs and ahs when I mention "a French girls' school", but when it comes to high schoolers, I automatically put on the “counselor cloak” which loves their company, but skillfully deflects any romantic notions into vines of the rapidly disappearing French wine country. We meet friends, talk about rugby, and watch Zorro in French, although the movie keeps its random bits of un-subtitled Spanish.
Emmerich is soft-spoken, with kind eyes and a legendarily-thick – but still professional – dark beard. He is a student in Marseilles, I believe it was, but was born and bred in Paris, coming home to visit his parents and house Deborah. He knows I’m coming… well, he heard it yesterday or so, and Deborah is confident he can tell me a good – and cheap – place to stay; this is good, because I never hear stories of a “cheap” stay in Paris. Yet when we meet him he tells us there is no need for a hostel: “There are lots of rooms at my parents’ house,” he says. So for three days I live with a French family with my-age kids and dogs, eat French food, drink good, complex French wine, and otherwise feel incredibly blessed at the doors that have opened when, just earlier that day, I felt great anxiety about going alone.
We Lourve it up on the first day, venturing beneath the glass pyramids to the first home of Louis XIV, the Sun King, the short man who invented high heels. It used to be a castle or fortress before those times, surprising some of the archaeologists who have now dug it out so that we can walk, inside and air-conditioned, through the moat. I wonder if, for cardio, soldiers ever had to do laps around the castle. Emmerich says no, because what if there were crocodiles in the moat. It is a good point… even though we know there were no crocodiles in France, especially during those times, imagine the fear of attacking a castle suddenly compounded with the double fear of seeing crocodiles in the moat one has to cross… and crocodiles would have been unknown to the attackers and look triply fearsome… the thought goes into my strategic notebook for when I eventually have to defend the royal keep in a land where there are no crocodiles; yeah, it’s gonna be big.
The Mona Lisa is there, too, smiling at us from behind slightly green, photograph-proof glass. She’s in the huge corridor full of brilliant Renaissance paintings, though I am puzzled by one of St. Francis receiving the stigmata where Jesus is flying and supposed to look like a cherubim, but really looks like a six-winged eagle shooting laser beams out of his wounds into a fainting Francis’ wrists and feet. Impressive too is the Code of Hammurabi downstairs, the famous beheaded Nike statue of Samothrace, and the miles and miles of exhilarating corridors, some transporting you into ancient Assyria, others to their own well-preserved worlds.
Deborah is not happy, however, when we visit the mummified cats, or when we bring it up later. And later. And later. But the mummification process is interesting and well-documented, and I see more species of mummies here than ever before. Usually museums stick to people, dogs, and cats. But at the Louvre there are scarabs, crocodiles (whose skin is so tough you don’t need to wrap it, just remove the vitals and put them in jars), and so on. Of course, this isn’t all you’ll see at the Louvre, just as the characters in The Night at the Museum movies are only a very tiny selection of all of the collection pieces that come alive at night, but if you want to see the world’s first piece of art – two reindeer swimming, carved on reindeer bone – then I guess you’ll have to go. I would live there if I could, for never have I seen such a fantastic jungle of art, people, and history, where you can pluck culture out of the air like unfortunate flying squirrels.
The next day is my last full one. We have a choice of Versailles or Paris, since Versailles, Louis XIV’s second palace – built to be the grandest in Europe, because the Louvre had been recently surpassed – and we choose Paris. It’s difficult to chronicle this part of the adventure, because there is just so much seen, from the church of the Sacred Heart (Sacre Coeur) with its incredibly bright mosaic of Christ with, literally, a heart of gold – perhaps my favorite church in Europe – to Notre Dame minus the hunchback (the bells are all automated now, with no new Quasimodos, which makes both me and Victor Hugo sad inside). We stroll through many other churches and neighborhoods and all with Emmerich’s detailed description of artistic styles and where Gothic and Romantic blend in these features… the Eiffel Tower and how it was meant to be dismantled after the World’s Fair, but has persisted in all its simplicity to symbolize Paris to the world… and the whole city is preserved to an extent that it doesn’t seem that people have ever touched these statues; occasionally we see a toe chipped off of a statue on a façade of a building, but for the most part they look untouched, brilliant, as if a society of statue-protectors has been watching them for centuries and is watching us now…
We head home after a great day talking about how we will go about catching a cat to mummify. We should have done it yesterday, when we had energy, but hey, we could just try and use a net or something. Deborah squirms, we men smile mischievously.
I wanted to end it there with that image, but I can’t. By virtue of being a late post, things have percolated some, and I realize things I didn’t then. I was anxious, scared even to go to Paris by myself, especially when I heard about the price and availability of hostels, but then Parisian doors, like doors in so many places across the continent, opened, and instead of being anxious, indeed, anxious at all, Paris became one of my favorite cities in the world. Conscious of being a third wheel, I made sure that Emmerich and Deborah had friend-time to catch up and stuff, and made every effort to help his kind mother and father in the kitchen, writing them a very gracious letter as I left, but never once did I feel like an outsider, or even a surprise. I have to write this because of my surprise, and how this reminded me of something that Peter Cross said to me back in September, when the trip was still a dream beginning to wake up, when we had just barely heard from South Lincolnshire. I’d written him about my shock at seeing how doors opened with Colin and South Lincs, how surprised and blessed I felt that we looked to be something they could really use. He wrote: “We shouldn’t be surprised about the way God works really. He has his plan and purpose and he shows it to us as and when we need to know.” Amen, brother, amen.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Late posts: the Taizé week rolls on
Brother Leandro catches me quickly after Bible Introduction and invites me to lunch with the brothers, from which I am immediately humbled beyond words. Why, out of the hundreds of young men am I invited, he who talks too much in group and is self-devouring in blog entries and, while amazed at so much about Taizé, definitely is not called to celibacy? This question joins the ranks of all of the other things that I cannot possibly know, and I quickly consider myself blessed and step out, after worship, into the sacristy, which leads to all of the places in Taizé that I never thought I would visit.
I follow Brother Leandro and a 23 year-old American brother to the big house where most of the brothers live, and we all gather in a long room with a spread of veg, potato & salmon casserole (it is a Lenten Friday, after all, and there are Catholics), and good. Burgundian wine from the neighboring countryside. The first half is all eaten in silence, with classical music wiping away any of the apprehension and forcing that I put upon myself when I encounter a new community of people, and I cannot help but feel awe among a room of people that have dedicated their lives to peace, healing, and the very experience that is proving so meaningful to me.
The silence is broken by Brother Aloise, the abbot, talking about his recent trip to Rome. The pope is tired, he says, and I can only imagine the hurt wracking that man. To love the Church with your whole life and then to see people who are supposed to represent it destroy it with their actions, and so criminally... But that is my segue. Sitting, waiting for the pope with him, were four Cistercian monks who, to pass the time, began to sing Taizé songs, even though such chants only come from a tiny community in France, and they go through most of the hymnbook. People wonder how Taizé can do such work with young people and with ecumenism, but honestly good work is being done all over the world. In Russia, he says, Catholics and Orthodox have ceased proselytizing amongst one another and instead, the Patriarch prayed [basically], "Forgive us our sin of division, and help us usher in a new period of ecumenism." People are hungry in China, too, grasping a hold of faith in spite of government retaliation.
It's about hope, really, and how we love others around us. Jesus talks a little about Heaven, but most of his ministry is about ushering in the Kingdom of God here on earth, where the hungry are fed, the poor clothed, where the wolves among us can lie down beside the lambs and we can have peace. This is what I think aches the pope so badly, that this is being undone by several people who have sworn their lives to ushering in this Kingdom. If we are Christians, and we are hoping to usher in this healing, are we scoffing at the Catholic Church or are we praying for them? Are we standing shoulder-to-shoulder and offering healing to the hurting, or are we paralyzed by our blame-throwing?
I follow Brother Leandro and a 23 year-old American brother to the big house where most of the brothers live, and we all gather in a long room with a spread of veg, potato & salmon casserole (it is a Lenten Friday, after all, and there are Catholics), and good. Burgundian wine from the neighboring countryside. The first half is all eaten in silence, with classical music wiping away any of the apprehension and forcing that I put upon myself when I encounter a new community of people, and I cannot help but feel awe among a room of people that have dedicated their lives to peace, healing, and the very experience that is proving so meaningful to me.
The silence is broken by Brother Aloise, the abbot, talking about his recent trip to Rome. The pope is tired, he says, and I can only imagine the hurt wracking that man. To love the Church with your whole life and then to see people who are supposed to represent it destroy it with their actions, and so criminally... But that is my segue. Sitting, waiting for the pope with him, were four Cistercian monks who, to pass the time, began to sing Taizé songs, even though such chants only come from a tiny community in France, and they go through most of the hymnbook. People wonder how Taizé can do such work with young people and with ecumenism, but honestly good work is being done all over the world. In Russia, he says, Catholics and Orthodox have ceased proselytizing amongst one another and instead, the Patriarch prayed [basically], "Forgive us our sin of division, and help us usher in a new period of ecumenism." People are hungry in China, too, grasping a hold of faith in spite of government retaliation.
It's about hope, really, and how we love others around us. Jesus talks a little about Heaven, but most of his ministry is about ushering in the Kingdom of God here on earth, where the hungry are fed, the poor clothed, where the wolves among us can lie down beside the lambs and we can have peace. This is what I think aches the pope so badly, that this is being undone by several people who have sworn their lives to ushering in this Kingdom. If we are Christians, and we are hoping to usher in this healing, are we scoffing at the Catholic Church or are we praying for them? Are we standing shoulder-to-shoulder and offering healing to the hurting, or are we paralyzed by our blame-throwing?
Friday, April 9, 2010
Light of Númenor
I have seen many beautiful things in my travels. I have walked the immense, cow-specked green of Ireland, I have eaten tapas and witnessed the beautiful, bronzed Spanish people eating them, I have walked where Alice and Wonderland and The Hobbit were formulated, even went on a date with a German girl, but none of them, none of them compare to the squirmy beauty of little Luthien Horner.
I meet her awake, two months into her life, but before words; her busy arms and legs pumping like the Spider up the drainpipe, panoramic eyes sweeping left and right as if imprinting the entire world upon her retinas as fast as she can before, again, she has had enough and slides into a peaceful, log-like slumber.
Andy and Tawny, her fawning parents, were expecting when we left, and Tawny tells me of how she is having to get her wedding dress taken in even more, because – sans baby – she is much more slender than she projected. Instead of walking to DuPont Circle trading stories of Starbucks and ecumenism and the anxieties and plans of early 20s life, we walk with a bulky stroller, minding every step, and when we arrive and lay down to read, Andy and Tawny have a precious new relative to join us, one that looks like both of them, whose body seems to lift off the ground when she farts. The breastfeeding, too, is a new development in our friendship, one I suppose never fails to surprise a friend – or, indeed, a parent – when the first child is born.
At night, she awakens with a soft cry that wakes me on my air mattress in front of the TV, and soon rouses Andy or Tawny to her aid, coddling and feeding her, until at last adults and child together slip into a wistful sleep. It is different to hang out with my friends now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. For one, Tawny – whom I have only known since she was expecting – can join us in smoking hookah outside or occasionally forsake a fruit juice for a beer with the dudes. The main difference, though, is the look in their eyes, the responsibility in their hearts that overflows into everything, the new flood of joy and focus onto the most beautiful little creature I have ever seen.
She cries and, as a friend, I want to find the ninja in the room and fight him off until she is either safe or sufficiently amused. I want to talk some sense into the baby boy who stood her up on a date to play with blocks and who needs to know how special that little girl really is. I want to see those little corners of her toothless mouth curve upwards in delight, but alas, there are no ninjas, or boys, and sadly even less occasion for the stories of Europe, of favorite dinosaurs – the iguanodon – or nonfiction of my childhood, like how Paul Bunyan harvested all of the trees on the Great Plains, and how several men used to have to skate grease across his broad, iron griddle just so he could make his famous, Chicago-sized flapjacks. No, this is a time for her parents, and her parents for her, and for this friend to tag along so graciously aside, taking notes on how to deal and adding to my thoughts on children, already positive, now bolstered with a deeply metaphysical richness I had no idea our physics-driven world could withstand.
I meet her awake, two months into her life, but before words; her busy arms and legs pumping like the Spider up the drainpipe, panoramic eyes sweeping left and right as if imprinting the entire world upon her retinas as fast as she can before, again, she has had enough and slides into a peaceful, log-like slumber.
Andy and Tawny, her fawning parents, were expecting when we left, and Tawny tells me of how she is having to get her wedding dress taken in even more, because – sans baby – she is much more slender than she projected. Instead of walking to DuPont Circle trading stories of Starbucks and ecumenism and the anxieties and plans of early 20s life, we walk with a bulky stroller, minding every step, and when we arrive and lay down to read, Andy and Tawny have a precious new relative to join us, one that looks like both of them, whose body seems to lift off the ground when she farts. The breastfeeding, too, is a new development in our friendship, one I suppose never fails to surprise a friend – or, indeed, a parent – when the first child is born.
At night, she awakens with a soft cry that wakes me on my air mattress in front of the TV, and soon rouses Andy or Tawny to her aid, coddling and feeding her, until at last adults and child together slip into a wistful sleep. It is different to hang out with my friends now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. For one, Tawny – whom I have only known since she was expecting – can join us in smoking hookah outside or occasionally forsake a fruit juice for a beer with the dudes. The main difference, though, is the look in their eyes, the responsibility in their hearts that overflows into everything, the new flood of joy and focus onto the most beautiful little creature I have ever seen.
She cries and, as a friend, I want to find the ninja in the room and fight him off until she is either safe or sufficiently amused. I want to talk some sense into the baby boy who stood her up on a date to play with blocks and who needs to know how special that little girl really is. I want to see those little corners of her toothless mouth curve upwards in delight, but alas, there are no ninjas, or boys, and sadly even less occasion for the stories of Europe, of favorite dinosaurs – the iguanodon – or nonfiction of my childhood, like how Paul Bunyan harvested all of the trees on the Great Plains, and how several men used to have to skate grease across his broad, iron griddle just so he could make his famous, Chicago-sized flapjacks. No, this is a time for her parents, and her parents for her, and for this friend to tag along so graciously aside, taking notes on how to deal and adding to my thoughts on children, already positive, now bolstered with a deeply metaphysical richness I had no idea our physics-driven world could withstand.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
New York
I’m in the JFK Airport continuously putting the same four quarters into the payphone and ejecting them as soon as her voicemail comes on. It’s been two-and-a-half hours, and I’m confused, for Melissa isn’t the avoiding type and we wrote about this visit weeks ahead of time. The phone is no longer ringing: it’s off or she’s on the Subway. I don’t want to miss her, unless it’s off. At 10:30 I’ll find a hostel.
At 10:26 she picks up. “Hi, it’s Adam,” I say, “I’m coming to visit you, remember?” “Yeah,” she says in a tone that is surprised, but always warm; “I thought you were coming on the third or the fourth.” “No, it’s today,” I insisted, before ascertaining the details of how to travel the two hours on the Subway to her house in Manhattan where I check my e-mail and…
Ratfarts.
The story changes: after a long day of traveling, good friend Melissa Gail Pancoast kindly invites me into her home, despite the fact that it is past midnight on a work day, and substantiates the peanut butter I’ve eaten on the Subway with Indian food and good wine. Kate Libby is there, another friend from college, basking in the warmth of her friend’s home after a successful grad school interview; she’s leaving tomorrow (April 2nd), right before Melissa is expecting a friend whose e-mail read: “Would you like a visitor April 3-4?”
Yeah, after 24 hours awake in the company of so kind people, I put on my Guatemala pants that I use for pajamas and turn around several times, tamping down my part of the Big Apple, before I curl upon the couch, letting my hound ears down, descending heartily into the ensconcing darkness.
At 10:26 she picks up. “Hi, it’s Adam,” I say, “I’m coming to visit you, remember?” “Yeah,” she says in a tone that is surprised, but always warm; “I thought you were coming on the third or the fourth.” “No, it’s today,” I insisted, before ascertaining the details of how to travel the two hours on the Subway to her house in Manhattan where I check my e-mail and…
Ratfarts.
The story changes: after a long day of traveling, good friend Melissa Gail Pancoast kindly invites me into her home, despite the fact that it is past midnight on a work day, and substantiates the peanut butter I’ve eaten on the Subway with Indian food and good wine. Kate Libby is there, another friend from college, basking in the warmth of her friend’s home after a successful grad school interview; she’s leaving tomorrow (April 2nd), right before Melissa is expecting a friend whose e-mail read: “Would you like a visitor April 3-4?”
Yeah, after 24 hours awake in the company of so kind people, I put on my Guatemala pants that I use for pajamas and turn around several times, tamping down my part of the Big Apple, before I curl upon the couch, letting my hound ears down, descending heartily into the ensconcing darkness.
Popularity
For some reason, I am a magnet of sorts for the German high-school girls. We’re all 17-29 in the young people section (which is the biggest part of Taizé), but there are a number of 17/18 year-olds, and I think it’s my accent that does it. The math is simple:
Brad Pitt = interesting to high school girls
German HSGs = very similar to American HSGs
Plus, BP’s star vehicle, Inglourious Basterds, is a hit in Germany, making BP even more interesting to German HSGs.
BP also = from the American South = traditional American, occasionally southern accent
Substituting the accent for BP, we get:
Traditional American, occasionally Southern accent = interesting to German HSGs.
Yet BP also = 5,000 miles away, whereas Adam = only American at Taizé all week who hasn’t taken the vow of communal life and celibacy
So, in the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, Adam, who has a Traditional American, slightly Southern, often-mistaken for Canadian accent when he speaks clearly, and who talks much too often about films, even though Adam ≠ Brad Pitt, Adam more or less = interesting to German high school girls.
There. That’s math, how physics works.
This is not the point of the story. I don’t come to make friends; I come to shut my mouth and let my past and near future was over me like the consoling warmth of a warm, directional rain. To take stock, if you will, of the cultural limits we have shattered on this trip, to understand that we have come this far, to raise our Ebenezer as the old hymn goes, and to know deep in our bones that God has brought us this far; that by little glory of my own Ryan and I have been a part of some positive difference-making in people’s lives.
So rarely do we take the time to be grateful or, to take it a step further, to sit down quiet for a moment and experience in our bones how incredibly grateful we are. I have to do this before I get back to what I am used to and the rhythm and the status quo that tries to creep inside and tell us that we have nothing good to offer the world. We say that societal structures are too big to change, that some hurts are too deep to heal, that it is frivolous to create things that have never before existed when we have so much history before us and that everything is just recapitulation. We look at things mathematically in the status quo, and not the type of theoretical math that makes what we never thought possible possible; no, we tend to look at life in the status quo as a selfish sort of dollars-and-cents sort of way. If we give any credence to the Holy Spirit, then we understand that life is always new in some way every day, every day is gray, between black and white, and we are tightrope-walking through each day, trying to be the best stewards we can possibly be with the opportunities we are given.
When Peter wanders off to be by himself, no one stops him. We are hanging out as friends and yet no one thinks he is being antisocial. We can be silent together and yet experience together, whether it’s the subtle movements of a vibrant earth or graceful, welcoming countenance of the brothers. Sometimes we leave each other because we are all on the threshold of a new dawn, and sometimes you have to experience the sunrise for yourself before you can come back and tell the world of the beautiful colors you’ve seen.
Brad Pitt = interesting to high school girls
German HSGs = very similar to American HSGs
Plus, BP’s star vehicle, Inglourious Basterds, is a hit in Germany, making BP even more interesting to German HSGs.
BP also = from the American South = traditional American, occasionally southern accent
Substituting the accent for BP, we get:
Traditional American, occasionally Southern accent = interesting to German HSGs.
Yet BP also = 5,000 miles away, whereas Adam = only American at Taizé all week who hasn’t taken the vow of communal life and celibacy
So, in the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, Adam, who has a Traditional American, slightly Southern, often-mistaken for Canadian accent when he speaks clearly, and who talks much too often about films, even though Adam ≠ Brad Pitt, Adam more or less = interesting to German high school girls.
There. That’s math, how physics works.
This is not the point of the story. I don’t come to make friends; I come to shut my mouth and let my past and near future was over me like the consoling warmth of a warm, directional rain. To take stock, if you will, of the cultural limits we have shattered on this trip, to understand that we have come this far, to raise our Ebenezer as the old hymn goes, and to know deep in our bones that God has brought us this far; that by little glory of my own Ryan and I have been a part of some positive difference-making in people’s lives.
So rarely do we take the time to be grateful or, to take it a step further, to sit down quiet for a moment and experience in our bones how incredibly grateful we are. I have to do this before I get back to what I am used to and the rhythm and the status quo that tries to creep inside and tell us that we have nothing good to offer the world. We say that societal structures are too big to change, that some hurts are too deep to heal, that it is frivolous to create things that have never before existed when we have so much history before us and that everything is just recapitulation. We look at things mathematically in the status quo, and not the type of theoretical math that makes what we never thought possible possible; no, we tend to look at life in the status quo as a selfish sort of dollars-and-cents sort of way. If we give any credence to the Holy Spirit, then we understand that life is always new in some way every day, every day is gray, between black and white, and we are tightrope-walking through each day, trying to be the best stewards we can possibly be with the opportunities we are given.
When Peter wanders off to be by himself, no one stops him. We are hanging out as friends and yet no one thinks he is being antisocial. We can be silent together and yet experience together, whether it’s the subtle movements of a vibrant earth or graceful, welcoming countenance of the brothers. Sometimes we leave each other because we are all on the threshold of a new dawn, and sometimes you have to experience the sunrise for yourself before you can come back and tell the world of the beautiful colors you’ve seen.
German week
Holding the whisk, and given a frightening warhorse or Clydesdale, I would be a terrifying sight, towering all in white above heads of disorderly peasants, dangerous, like I could breathe fire. On closer inspection, you would see that my victorious white clothing is actually a lab-coat-like apron, my wild locks held in place by a white hair cap, and the mace actually a lightweight whisk that only looks dangerous, but the Clydesdale would still be intimidating.
We all have jobs at Taizé, and mine is brandishing a dangerous whisk and a giant wooden paddle (or spoon) as I stir your dinner with my German and Romanian comrades. We eat simply, from French bread, a pad of butter, and two sticks of chocolate for breakfast; to the couscous, pasta, and basic etceteras of lunch and dinner, the latter of which I stir in giant vats that I could easily curl up inside.
And yes, after two-and-a-half months of serving with the elderly, I can’t help but notice there are a lot of attractive young ladies here; I’m not saying I’m interested, I’m just saying that God is an artist and I’ve been away from this period of art for a while.
We all have jobs at Taizé, and mine is brandishing a dangerous whisk and a giant wooden paddle (or spoon) as I stir your dinner with my German and Romanian comrades. We eat simply, from French bread, a pad of butter, and two sticks of chocolate for breakfast; to the couscous, pasta, and basic etceteras of lunch and dinner, the latter of which I stir in giant vats that I could easily curl up inside.
And yes, after two-and-a-half months of serving with the elderly, I can’t help but notice there are a lot of attractive young ladies here; I’m not saying I’m interested, I’m just saying that God is an artist and I’ve been away from this period of art for a while.
What new, wondrous place is this?
Watching the young people scamper into L’Eglise (the church), past the signs displaying “Silence” with all of the respect and excitement of students lining up for worship at camp; except without the raging hormones and with the addition of many cigarettes—this is Europe, after all.
My engines are at all-stop this week at the Taizé monastic community in France. My laptop, passport, cards and cash are all tucked away for safekeeping in the office, ostensibly because our dormitory doors are always unlocked, but, for me, because these things always keep my engines moving, and sometimes, in order to take inventory of our selves, we just have to shut down for a week, and get rid of anything that keeps us moving.
We’ve a marvelous sense of freedom, from the simple lentils-and-meat with yogurt and fruit accoutrements and a bowl for water, to the simple floors and wooden benches, the silence of worship and the four-part, repetitive chants that become more and more real to the heart with each multilingual repetition, some of the deepest history of Christianity in these old, Scriptural hymns. There are 700 of us here, mostly young people, and mostly Germans, as this is their Spring Break.
Peter, the only Briton, Soo Tien, a Malaysian studying philosophy in London, Elane, the former-philosophy-professor-turned-United-Methodist-minister-turned-United-Church-of-Christ-minister, these are the people I meet at the train station and then my closest friends. Ramona, a German who though I spoke to her earlier and that I spoke Polish, but I wasn’t and didn’t, and nonetheless, she beckons me to join her in sitting Native American style in worship on the floor and now we are friends too.
I have come hereto wrestle. I’m in at BU. I’m in at Duke. If I’m going to be honest about the decision I’ve got to go all-stop. I’ve got to find the tension where my realities and dreams meet, where my passions can best meet the world’s deep hunger, the radical, hard-to-define place where God wants me to be.
My engines are at all-stop this week at the Taizé monastic community in France. My laptop, passport, cards and cash are all tucked away for safekeeping in the office, ostensibly because our dormitory doors are always unlocked, but, for me, because these things always keep my engines moving, and sometimes, in order to take inventory of our selves, we just have to shut down for a week, and get rid of anything that keeps us moving.
We’ve a marvelous sense of freedom, from the simple lentils-and-meat with yogurt and fruit accoutrements and a bowl for water, to the simple floors and wooden benches, the silence of worship and the four-part, repetitive chants that become more and more real to the heart with each multilingual repetition, some of the deepest history of Christianity in these old, Scriptural hymns. There are 700 of us here, mostly young people, and mostly Germans, as this is their Spring Break.
Peter, the only Briton, Soo Tien, a Malaysian studying philosophy in London, Elane, the former-philosophy-professor-turned-United-Methodist-minister-turned-United-Church-of-Christ-minister, these are the people I meet at the train station and then my closest friends. Ramona, a German who though I spoke to her earlier and that I spoke Polish, but I wasn’t and didn’t, and nonetheless, she beckons me to join her in sitting Native American style in worship on the floor and now we are friends too.
I have come hereto wrestle. I’m in at BU. I’m in at Duke. If I’m going to be honest about the decision I’ve got to go all-stop. I’ve got to find the tension where my realities and dreams meet, where my passions can best meet the world’s deep hunger, the radical, hard-to-define place where God wants me to be.
Museums
I leave Ryan and Nick Walsh at a London tube station with man-hugs and hearty high fives. The town is red, as the coat we’ve painted it, focused in pubs and museums. We’ve seen the Rosetta Stone, Raphael’s School of Athens, and some of the best-preserved Victorian bathrooms at John Wesley’s Chapel, complete with Crapper’s waste disposal systems.
We may sound like nerds, sure, but I recall Rachel Weiss’ character in The Mummy Returns, criticized for her Egyptological interests while doing research at The British Museum—where we saw the Rosetta Stone—and she, with Brendan Fraser and a bunch of bearded guys saved the earth from certain annihilation at the hands of a 4,000 year-old, risen mummy. So please, don’t judge until you see Ryan, Nick, and me give the undead a what-for.
We may sound like nerds, sure, but I recall Rachel Weiss’ character in The Mummy Returns, criticized for her Egyptological interests while doing research at The British Museum—where we saw the Rosetta Stone—and she, with Brendan Fraser and a bunch of bearded guys saved the earth from certain annihilation at the hands of a 4,000 year-old, risen mummy. So please, don’t judge until you see Ryan, Nick, and me give the undead a what-for.
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