Rain and Dubuque

I’m still sick, bleach. This morning I dragged myself out of bed for an appointment, then crashed again and spent most of the afternoon asleep and dreaming about airports and motion. I left my laptop on the plane, then when I was trying to find it I couldn’t get off of the moving walkway, until I bumped, literally, into my friend Mark who was also stumbling along trying to get to his flight. We put our arms around each other and started limping toward the flight (in real life we are both fairly fit, but in the dream he was walking with a cane and we both kept falling over). We turned a corner and suddenly there were steep and narrow stairs, going down for a hundred feet or more. We were clinging to one another and to the rail, trying to make the descent without falling. All very symbolic, I’m sure.

When I woke up, it was raining quite hard in Boston. My skylight — a prominent feature in my life — had water pouring down it, almost a river. It was very beautiful and peaceful. I stayed in my cozy bed for another hour before I could drag myself out and get online to start doing some work. Hey, I’m getting over the flu.

The first thing I did online was to book a flight to Chicago for March. I’m very excited, both for the conference itself — my first as an employee of InterVarsity — and because it sounds like I will be able to visit my favorite literary society, Bagshot Row, in Dubuque in the same trip. These are kindred spirits in literature, theology, art, life, faith, wonder, joy, frustration, healing, etc. They are some of my best friends in life, despite the fact that I have never met any of them in person. Yet! But that will be changing soon! I’ll get to visit some of them in March — sadly, on Tyler’s birthday but sans Tyler — and then I’ll be back in May for Riley and Jacquie’s wedding. Now if only David and Bethany could manage to make it…

Now it is rainy and dark, and I should get more work done but I’m dubious that that is going to happen. In an hour or two I will be watching a movie with my housemates — The Machinist, supposedly based on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. We shall see.

He who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet.

The past two days I have been emerging from an intense bout with the flu feeling a renewed burst of energy that I almost don’t know what to do with.  Besides finally doing my laundry and paying my student loan bill (sorry Gordon-Conwell) I have been making phone calls and emails for fund raising (up to 51% and rising), plotting a letter writing campaign to David Kern’s Children’s Literature professor (how hard would it be to let the boy take his exam early so he can go to his friend’s wedding and see all of us who love him?), trying to reintroduce my stomach to its former role of digesting (it seems to still be adverse to this “eating” thing: I think a week and a half of nothing but Sprite has it out of practice), and picking up books that have laid neglected.

The first book I re-picked up was The Inner Voice of Love, by Henri Nouwen.  My housemate Mark gave me this book (technically I bought it myself, but he truly gave me the gift of it) a few months ago and it has been like a direct lifeline between me and God.  It is the private journal of Nouwen, written when he was undergoing an intense personal despair, and it resonates with me as few other books have.  Yes, I have gone fully Bostonian/politically correct/touchy feely, etc. and started using phrases like “resonates with me.”  We all knew it was coming.

The second book I re-picked up was The Brothers Karamazov.  I have been planning on rereading this for eleven years, but saving it as a rare and beautiful treat.  It bowled me over when I read it in my senior Russian Literature course, and I am very excited to be into it again.  It turns out that some friends — Graeme, Aaron and Karen — are reading it as well, so I look forward to good discussions.

The third book — sad that it was not the first, I guess, but that’s what it is — is the Bible, specifically my two favorite passages, Matthew 5-7 and John 13-18.  I have been trying for years to memorize these pieces, but my memory has the habit of lasting only so long as I am daily practicing them.  Still, there is something powerful about reading a passage that you have at least attempted to memorize.  The words are a part of you, so that you feel you are reading not only the Word of God, but your own Word as well.  I love the feel in Matthew that the God of Abraham, Issaac and Jacob, the creator of the universe and the terrifying presence on the mountain with Moses is sitting among his people, speaking his words of love and grace for the first time clearly, without intermediary.  Blessed indeed are those who hear.  And in John I love the raw pain and confusion of the disciples as they struggle to understand where Jesus is going and what he is telling them.  Today I wept again as I read Peter’s plea, “Then, Lord, not only my feet but my hands and my head as well!”  Jesus’ response was a reassurance to me, as well, as I emerge coughing and exhausted from fighting the flu: “He who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet.”  I am not starting from scratch, though it feels like it.  I am on a continuing journey, and it is overseen by One who knows both its beginning and its end.

And so I wash my feet in the Word, and in Nouwen and Dostoevsky, and jump back into the business of life.  Right now my business is fundraising, getting to 70% as quickly as possible so I can get onto campus and start the work I feel called to do.  My business, also, is relationships.  I feel this calling as strongly as any career path.  My old friends, the Greenhaus community, the International students from church, Bagshot Row — these are all my “job” to me as much as InterVarsity.

May the Lord be with you in your business as well.

Nor’easter

Snow in Boston, and I was able to express a part of myself I haven’t in years.

Beauty, freedom and healing. That is what this snow represents to me today. And that it clung to each branch and twig, piling up to an inch thick in places: A miracle of balance and beauty!

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I don’t know if the pictures can communicate the hushed greyness of the day, everything muffled and stilled by the snow: The cars still unshoveled, the heavy branches of the bushes forming arches over the sidewalks.  The clothes of the people walking by were the only bright colors in a peaceful dim closeness. Voices carried as if distance had been compacted; it was impossible for me not to look into the eyes of everyone I passed. Some looked back, and with some I shared a secret smile. You can always tell those people who are noticing the same things you are.  Since I was a kid I could tell.