The Found Nap

The pacifying scene of baby and dad asleep on couch, dad’s feet propped and crossed on coffee table, head rolled back on couch’s crest, baby in aquamarine baby sweats and shirt, he’s like a blob of toothpaste, belly to dad’s belly, a light squat on bread-roll haunches upon dad’s low folded hands, head at canted angle on dad’s lower chest, head cocked up and left. The angles at which a baby’s head rests in sleep, sharp and unlikely, they’d make you worry if not for the fact of a sleeping baby. Baby’s head, a large mass on a tiny hinge, baby’s outsized head the reference point for everything else, the household’s center of gravity is located in baby’s head.

Earlier: baby screeching terse avian shrieks like a bird of prey while dad tries to nap solo, aquamarine teakettle threatening to boil, tired dad just wants to nap. It’s not so much the weary ennui of life’s dregs and crumb-riddled countertops, it’s just Saturday. Dad picks up falcon-baby from baby’s car carrier on living room floor, hand behind baby’s crown, baby’s forehead pressed encouragingly to dad’s shoulder, shhhh, trying to find baby’s snooze button, settling back down to original repose. Baby digs his face into dad’s shoulder, baby’s balled fist up and waving in protest or to rub at sleep-cranky eyes, mostly involuntary, head wallowing, burrowing into dad’s shoulder as if to scratch an itch, small cries and chirps, face scrunched, cracked, threatening to calve off in chunks like a melting polar glacier.

The peace of the found nap is the unrealization that you’ve found it. How you don’t notice that the baby has stopped threatening you with its stop and start cries, has closed its salty eyes, head resting on your solar plexus, how you don’t realize that your own head has pitched back against the couch’s soft suede, how the sun continues its low, slow glide through a cool March sky, its light scumbled by cumuliform clouds.

It’s how the moment that the measured breaths gently and audibly begin to wheeze forth from your palate-pinched airway is the same moment you cannot hear them, how the unheard breaths sound like scrzzzzzh, how baby has become a painting in warm colors and the museum is now closed, how a sleeping baby is the world on its axis, how you and baby have not even agreed to anything, have not even realized that you found what it is you did not know you were looking for.

The Days of Sourdough

You know what I’m talking about. You, too, have recognized and marveled at the sudden and ubiquitous presence of those rounded, textured, floured domes on every social media platform you happen to visit in your quarantined stupor. You have thought, “More of these? And more?” at every 9th photo in your mindless and numbed Instagram scrolling. You have heard the cries for help, does anyone have a starter they’d be willing to share? You’ve seen the grocery shelves void of flour.

I’ve seen more posts about sourdough bread in the past few weeks–these days of quarantine–than I’ve ever seen in a lifetime. People are obsessed with baking in general in this lonely and disordered time, but it’s sourdough in particular on the front cover of Quarantine Magazine, sudden and erumpent like flowers after a wildfire.

Listen, I don’t bake. But I am loving the obsession. I love every photo.

It’s got something to do with those thick, granular crusts, scored on the surface in pleasing patterns, hearty round loaves full of texture, dusty with flour. Photos shot from overhead, fresh loaves left to rest and cool on baking racks. They are a resurrection of the color brown, paint swatch gradients of umber, ocher, sepia–they are making brown great again. They are made in batches of two or three, because loaves is so much better than loaf.

It’s the sensuality of it. You want to trace your fingers over the loaves like a lover, trace the ridges, bumps, and crusted valleys. You want to sneak off with the heel. You want to run a thick knife down the center, watch those crisp flakes chip and gather like sawdust, to feel and hear the crust crackle under the gentle guidance of the blade.

Perhaps you forsake serration altogether, you choose to rip a chunk of the steaming spongey wheaty matter by hand, rip it up Jesus style, share some with your quarantined and love-starved family, housemates, friends, share the rest with your own greedy mouth, let the soft textured insides practically melt on your tongue while molars faithfully grind and crunch the crust, you are as happy as a cow and her cud.

God, what is better than fresh, warm bread?

p.c. Ali Savage, b.c. (bread credit) also Ali Savage

Quarantine is a pagan chaos, and baking brings spiritual order. It’s the liturgy of it, the music and motions and recitations laid out before you. You follow along faithfully. Our lives are derailed these days, the scripts thrown out. We’re thankful for something to do: a recipe, an ingredient list, steps, instructions. Something that occupies several hours. Stuck inside at home, weary of news and immobilized by screens, there is relief in baking’s innate physicality: the measuring, mixing, kneading. The embodied waiting. It’s the good kind of waiting, the kind that ends with russet treasure. Waiting for bread is a welcome displacement of quarantine’s stale vision of featureless time.

Bread is one of our most basic building blocks. Bread has been around a while. We’re lonely for connection, communion, and life, and we’re living in a time that threatens it all. Bread is a conduit back. It’s practically automatic, we can barely help ourselves. In our isolated spheres, our hands faithfully resume their hieratic duties in the making and breaking of bread. They resume their ordained role in the priesthood of all believers. It’s cause for an unexplained joy, this automatic impulse to life and communion.

—–

But it’s sourdough, in particular, making the rounds these days. The difference between sourdough and regular dough is the sour, and the sour is bacteria: Lactobacillus. Sourdough bread is made with a “starter,” a fermented dough of bread and water, alive with wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria. It’s a bubbling sour mess, teeming with microbial life. You have to feed it a small diet of more flour and water, nurture it at the right temperature, let it grow. When you set out to make a few loaves, you always leave some starter aside to recultivate for the next batch and successive batches in the weeks, years, even decades to come.

Before the days of commercially cultivated consumer yeast, most leavened bread would have been “sourdough.” Yeast and bacteria are alive and everywhere: in your flour, in the environment, on your hands, just waiting for the right growing conditions. Before you could buy your yeast in a jar or foil packet, you had to catch it wild. Later, scientists found ways to identify and cultivate specific yeasts for bread baking and mass produce them. Commercial yeasts have the advantage of faster and more predictable leavening. You don’t have to wait around for hours for your dough to rise (or to wonder if it’ll even rise at all). The commercial versions of yeast certainly have their advantages.

Additionally, sourdough starters are notoriously tricky to get started on your own. They are simple in principle: flour, water, let ‘em sit. But there are numerous complications that can arise: contamination from your container, bad flour, poor temperature regulation, chemically treated tap water; and there are just as many solutions, practical and dubious alike: pre-clean the container with baking soda, employ a thermometer, try bottled or filtered water, and what was that about using grapes?

For these reasons, successful starters are more commonly acquired by being passed down in families or shared among friends. They’ll last years, if you care for them, and the flavor of your bread improves and deepens with the maturity of your starter. Some starters are known to be decades old. Some claim centuries.

Sourdough is inherently communal in these ways. We’re drawn to the challenge of making it, eager to engage its temperamentality, and ready to plug ourselves inside a rich tradition of bread-baking. There is a humble thrill in the rediscovery of humanity’s longstanding relationship with the starter’s bubbling microbes. We’re stuck inside, we’re lonely, bored. We want this reconnection.

Sourdough is the nostalgic call to communion with a simpler and fuller past. Remember the days of floured hands and early mornings? Remember the dough waiting there on the wood block? Remember the early rays of morning, the quiet industry of the baker’s humble labor, the alchemy of flour, water, salt, and heat? Remember our symbiosis with the wild yeasts and microbes of yesteryear?

Remember the hospitality of bread? Remember how bread is a sanctuary? An encounter with the Divine? A promise for healing in the midst of brokenness and death?

Remember all the things we never knew to know until now?

Hello, Instagram followers. Remember sourdough?

p.c. Ali Savage

—–

There’s a mystery here in our relationship with this aromatic dough. There’s a subtle irony at play which plunges us into another kind of tradition: the tradition of spiritual paradox. The paradox is this: in order to pass the time while we hide ourselves away from the viral threats of a microorganism at work, we’ve chosen to obsess over an activity in which the essential uniqueness and draw is precisely the result of…

…microorganisms at work.

—–

Like me, you feel the fear, the slight anxious hum beneath you, your elevated awareness. You feel the nagging sense that you ought to be doing something and doing it sooner rather than later, if only you knew what that something was. You wrestle your own selfish impulses, fight the need to build a bomb shelter out of toilet paper, Purell, bulk dried goods, Netflix shows, and trips to the liquor store.

Because, too, you see the cracks in the pavement where kindness and love are beginning to push through like flowered weeds. Strangers helping each other. Advocates for the poor emerging from nowhere. Businesses on the brink of extinction extending themselves for their neighbor. You yourself have at least written a few encouraging notes to your friends, have had strange and love-filled phone calls, are holding more closely to what’s precious than you were before. You are more conscious of what’s cherished and vulnerable.

The days of quarantine are lonely and frightening, touched with absurd humor, kissed with a still and unknown sadness. And yet, too, the aimless days are charged with a deep and unspeakable presence. There’s electricity in the air, it’s there with the flour and dust, backlit by sunlight through the kitchen window, both thrilling and fearsome. It’s something fermenting in the profundity of quiet grief, an urgent rapping on the door of your heart. There’s a stranger at the door.

—–

The baking and breaking of bread is an act of encounter, and this is precisely what hospitality is. The tension of hospitality is revealed in the word’s own etymology. Our word hospitality traces way, way back, all the way back to the Proto-Indo European* word ghos-ti, a word that simultaneously meant both guest and host. The word belonged to a people who are believed to have been largely nomadic. They’d wander the land, occasionally encountering other nomadic tribes, and in this context, the roles of guest and host were more fluid–hence the one word for both meanings. The word trickled through years and tongues into its Latin form, hospes, carrying the same dual meaning of guest and host, and eventually found its way into all kinds of today’s words: hospital, hospice, host, hostel, hotel. Even ghost is a derivative of the same source word, a ghost being a kind of house guest, or a kind of host.

But interestingly, the Proto-Indo European word ghost-ti is also the predecessor of our words hostile and hostage. For the guest was also a stranger, an unknown person who held the possibility of harming or taking advantage of you.

Hostility and hospitality, then, are diametric words, siblings of the same parent held in the tension of opposites. The presence of the unknown guest-host has a simultaneous meaning. It is at once the threat of harm and the source of healing and rest.

—–

Our language for what is happening to us and in us is not enough, but it’s doing its best. It’s working inside us like a ghost. Our words are bushwhacking to the silent core.

The feeling is something about possibility, the chance for a love you didn’t even know how to hope for before you were confined to home. You are there now, home with your countertops, your Zoom calls, your iPhone, your bags of flour. You are a little numb some of the time or maybe more, this is part of the dough. In the threat of sickness, in the presence of a world in panic, you feel something stirring within you, ready to burst like a song, to nudge the soil gently aside like a spring tulip. It is something waiting for your hands, your speech, your hospitality. Something is knocking.

It’s the paradox of solitude, of viruses and sourdough–this realization of a deep and profound communion.

A stranger is at the door. It is ghos-ti, they are holding fresh-baked sourdough. You don’t know quite what they have come for, but you can hope. They are you, the world, the sacred ghost.

Do you dare open the door? ♦

 

 

---

*Proto-Indo European is a reconstructed language belonging to an ancient Eurasian people group, and is the parent language for all the languages in the Indo-European family. This includes the Hellenic languages (the languages of Europe, of which English is a descendant), and Indo-Iranian languages (Sanskrit, Iranian, Slavic, and more).

 

References

• Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. New York, NY: Greenwhich House, 1983.
• Stroud, Kevin, host. “Episode 7: More Indo-European Words.” History of English Podcast (podcast), August 8, 2012. Accessed April 10, 2020, https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2012/08/08/episode-7-more-indo-european-words-2/
• Weeks, Eric, and Patricia Gadsby. “The Biology of . . . Sourdough.” Discover Magazine. Discover Magazine, August 31, 2003. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-biology-of-sourdough.

 

 

The Day of the Starling

Image by ArtTower from Pixabay

Things became serious, raw, when the family stopped to pray at the end of a late lunch in the Boettger family main room, table cluttered with emptied paper plates and red, plastic ice cream bowls, idle chatter and joke-making brought to a hush. It wasn’t that things weren’t serious before, just that, now, you could see reality for what it really was.

We’d gathered as a family at the farmhouse of Bob and Nadeen Boettger–Grandpa and Grandma–in Arlington, Nebraska, to celebrate the 4th of July together. We’ve had many such gatherings in years past. But the deeper reason we were gathered this time was to say goodbye to Grandma.

My grandmother sat perched in her wheelchair at the head of the table, a degenerating brain and body racked with injury and grace. Parkinson’s disease is a disorder of the nervous system. It causes nerve cells in the brain to break down and die, resulting in the slowing and stiffening of body and mind over time. Everything slows down: movement, speech, and mental cognition alike. Feet begin to drag, words are slurred and labored, mental acuity is dulled.

In the last years of her life, when she would speak, you would need to lean in close to hear the carefully chosen, quiet, and few words. You’d have to allow time for the words to come out. And not just time, but space, too. When you are close to the end, each word becomes a world to make room for.

Grandma’s increased decline paired with the logistical difficulties of large family gatherings had given us cause to organize one last formal get-together. Around the table were Grandpa and Grandma’s four daughters with their husbands and children, and at the time of the gathering, two great-grandchildren. Grandma would not actually pass away until almost a year and a half later on Thanksgiving of 2019. She died peacefully in the presence of her oldest daughter, my aunt Cindy, who sang “Amazing Grace” and “Jesus Loves Me” to her in the quiet stillness of the farmhouse near midnight.

Time is subject to dilation. Gathered around the table that day in Nebraska, it was as if a camera lens had zoomed in on the moment, aperture set for prolonged exposure, capturing the blurry edges and movements in one still shot. A gentle current of air flowed from an old floor fan pointed and whirring towards the table. The fan was that turquoise color that you only see on appliances from the 70’s.

I was trying so hard to soak it in, to remember, to be an honorable witness to time and to Grandma. Love is in the details. I wanted to remember the exact words that were said, what Grandpa might say in the prayer which would bisect time into distinct entities: before the prayer, and after the prayer. The prayer would be the naming of an ending of this particular configuration of people and place, and the beginning of something else less graspable. Family units provide you with a steadfast post to lean on growing up, something immovable. The immovable post was being moved.

   —–

Grandma’s movement and cognition had slowed significantly, but she knew what was happening. After the prayer, as we began to busy ourselves with cleaning up the table, began saying goodbyes, her eyes welled up with moisture.

“Growing up, I didn’t see my mom cry much, but the last three times I’ve said goodbye she’s cried,” my mom reflected amid her own welling tears when we were pulling away from the farm that day, the gravel clinking in the car’s wheel wells as we rolled down County Road 24.

Grief is a closed door, but it opens up others. It expands you, opens you, gracefully, forcefully. The week Grandma died, I was sitting on the couch with my mom during Thanksgiving break at my brother’s house in Utah. My mom, Nadeen’s second oldest daughter, was reflecting on her own last moments with her mother in Nebraska when she’d been there the previous week. I was feeling the familiar pang of escapism, a resistance to engaging, but I was pulled in anyway–a broken and tender hug from my mom like none I’d ever received before.

We all try to escape. Grandma would reach and reach, reaching to escape the degenerating nerves, muscle, and bone, to grasp the world again. At the cleaning of lunch after Grandpa’s prayer, the world to be grasped was a neglected butterknife on the table before her, her fingers outstretched, leaning forward in her wheelchair. “Let me get that for you, Grandma,” someone said.

Grandpa would consume himself with frantic industry. He’d huff around the house, bang folding chairs down the basement stairway, take out the garbage, push grandma’s wheelchair around a little too forcefully. He’d patrol the metaphorical perimeters of his household, beating back the brushfire of time as it began to encircle him and his wife of fifty-seven years. There was an unending sense of urgency, it seemed, a desperation. If there was a thing to do, it must be done now before it’s too late. There was no time, it seemed, no space.

—–

There was a bird a few years before—a starling. I blasted it out of the sky at the Boettger farm with one of Grandpa’s shotguns, examined it beneath one of the towering trees in the backyard.

Starlings are largely considered pests. They eat crops, spread disease, chase off other wildlife, and propagate madly with no natural predators to keep them in check. In wintertime, they gather in the thousands, weighing down power lines and filling out trees as if they were leaves.They’re the birds you see flying in those huge, hypnotic, pulsing flocks, shifting into shapes and patterns like a series of Rorschach inkblots reflecting back to you the dark, hidden depths of your subconscious mind.

Starlings are not native to North America. On a cold March morning in 1890, a wealthy New Yorker named Eugene Schieffelin opened a crate of sixty or so of the birds in Central Park. He’d had them shipped from Europe, wanting to bring culture to New York City by introducing every bird ever mentioned in Shakespearean literature. It was a 19th century Pandora’s Box. There are now over 200 million of them across America.

Grandpa is a bird lover, but he’s also a shrewd midwestern farmer. Starlings were on the naughty list, and Grandpa deemed them acceptable target practice for his tribe of young, suburban grandkids with itchy trigger-fingers ready to shoot at anything that moved. You had to get Grandpa’s blessing before just running around the property with a gun. Other naughty-listers included rabbits, sparrows, and pigeons. God forbid you take a shot at a robin or cardinal.

I didn’t particularly enjoy these farmyard hunting parties all that much, though I’d join in every once in a while. I’d tell myself, This doesn’t bother me. I rarely hit or killed anything.

On the day of the starling, I found myself hunting solo, the rest of the party chasing down a rogue rabbit on another part of the property. This doesn’t bother me, I’d think between missed shots at starlings in flight between various trees and perches. This doesn’t bother me, I kept saying to myself, until finally, miraculously, a shot connected, an unlikely intersection of high-velocity vectors, and a small, dark, shape tumbled down from sky to lawn.

—–

Before lunch, before the prayer and goodbyes, we had spent the morning in the Boettger living room looking at old photos, family history, names of each family member recorded genealogically on the front pages of Grandma’s Bible. Grandpa was eager both to help our research, and at the same time, to not be too hurt by the possibility of our disinterest. He dredged up boxes of photos and documents from the murky depths of the basement.

I was an embodiment of the divided self. On the one hand, I could feel the gravity of our time together and wanted to absorb the history in the shared company of family. On the other hand, perhaps the stronger impulse, I wanted to tune out, to escape. I wanted to nudge the photo albums off to the side and watch the FIFA World Cup game that had just started on the living room television.

—–

I leaned over the still form of the fallen starling. There was a sour feeling in my stomach as the digestive acids dissolved my claims of This doesn’t bother me into a pulpy nothing. A small bit of blood from where the shot penetrated the birds chest oozed thick and miasmic through its dark feathers like an oil spill. Up close, what I thought were black feathers were revealed as iridescent shades of emerald and plum. I avoided getting too close.

But can you just leave a dead bird in the yard like that? Can you leave death laying around? There was no good place to rest the shotgun while I looked for a stick. I found one, more twig than stick, from a nearby tree. The twig-stick was too short and too thin. I prodded at the limp body, black and purple like a rotting plum, to make sure it didn’t avenge itself at my expense. I began to flick it toward the trees of the windbreak where I could hide it in the tangled pine branches and overgrown grass. Its wings unfolded slightly like the whorl of a galaxy with each flick and fling. The feathers brushed together, light and crisp—I could feel this through the stick. I could feel the bird’s silent weight.

Physicists say that space is configured in such a way that, theoretically, if you were to travel far enough and long enough in one direction, you’d eventually end up right back where you started. Space essentially bends back on itself.

The physicists also have something to say about time. For one, time is relative–the closer you get to traveling at the speed of light, the more time slows down. From the reference frame of lightspeed, time ceases to exist. I do not pretend to understand the physics of this.

The distance between the bird’s original resting place and the tangled trees of the windbreak where I hoped to dispose of it was vast. As I traversed the yard, flicking the small, dark body along faster and faster, it felt as if space was bending back on itself, like time was slowing down. It felt as if the fabric of space-time would simply take me back to the dead bird’s resting place over and over again, locked in a timeless, distanceless eternity. How did I get caught up in such a thing? I wanted out. I should have stayed inside. But you can’t just leave death out in the yard.

—–

I wish I could tell it right. I wish I could remember the details, get the facts straight. I wish I could absorb the stories properly and share the right kinds of memories. I want the t.v. turned off, the photo albums open. I want the shotgun to collect dust on its shelf in the garage. I want to put the blood-mottled bird-pest back up in the sky. But the starling knew its death was coming, foretold of it through the shifting, pulsing flight patterns of its winter flock.

There is both comfort and curse in the idea that however far you go, you’ll eventually end up right back where you started. There is both comfort and curse in the fact that from the perspective of light, birth and death are the same moment. Jesus called himself the light of the world. Maybe it wasn’t a metaphor, but a metaphysical claim. Jesus, as light, sees the world in its timeless moment. Sees Nadeen Boettger’s life in Nebraska, sees her grieving husband and daughters. Sees the guilty grandson prodding at the limp body of a starling with a stick. It’s all tied together, it all exists in the same moment. In fact, it’s all there is, and the it that is is infinite.

It is mostly mystery. There is much we don’t know. But I do know that before Grandma died, my aunt Cindy sang “Jesus Loves Me” to her.

“We ask for your wisdom, Father,” is one of the things Grandpa said in that final prayer together, his voice wavering slightly. I remember that now.

 

Excerpts from “The Good Shepherd: Essays About Beyond Malibu,” now available for order

Hi Friends,

Many of you are aware that I’ve been working on a personal writing project about my experiences serving as a mountain guide with Beyond Malibu. That project is finally finished in the form of a printed essay collection, and is ready to share.

The essays are part memoir, part info-mercial for life at Beyond base camp, and part exploration of the topics of creation care, place, material/spiritual dualities, spiritual journeys, and a Christian perspective on the meta-arc of the universe. See details below if you are interested in a copy!

This first excerpt is from the second essay in the book, “The Monastics of Beyond Malibu:”

Talk to anyone who has spent significant time at Beyond base camp, and they will do little else than sing praises about their experience. When you consider all the work, discipline, and tedium involved in its upkeep, how is it that this community carves such a special place for itself in the hearts of those who have visited or served there?

Beyond Malibu base camp really is a special place. You only need one quiet morning alone watching barn swallows dance over the waters of the inlet, all of life hemmed in by plunging slopes on all sides, to surmise its sanctity. There’s a popular notion from Celtic spirituality that calls such locations ‘thin places.’ This refers to those special loci where heaven and earth seem especially close and connection to the divine is palpable and imminent. I’ve often heard this phrase applied to Beyond, mountain trips and base camp alike. There is certainly a sense of sacredness and clarity to being there, and I will be among the first to concede to the mystery of the sacred.

But at the same time, I am not of the mind that Beyond is this way completely by accident. There is a lot of work and thought that goes into sustaining the special quality of life at base camp. And while Beyond is certainly beautiful, the mythic lore invoked in our own storytelling about our experiences suggests more. We post dreamscape Instagram photos of our time there. We struggle to write meaningful reflections to share with our support networks back home. Our brains scramble for words and our eyes go elsewhere when our friends and family ask, “So how was it?” These dreamy remembrances do not begin and end in geographic beauty; nor are they just the product of having had a simple and rustic spiritual retreat. It’s something more.

Here’s another excerpt from the title essay, “The Good Shepherd:”

Travis, now with some urgency, suggests a lightning drill once more. I had been slightly engaged in the zone of stubborn denial, not completely remembering the specific protocol for what to do in case of lightning, and, really, just wanting the mental security of making it to camp. But now, Travis was right. The lightning, at this point, was right on top of us. No denying that.

Things were a bit chaotic as we rushed our exhausted group to get their packs off, throw on some layers, grab their foam pads, and follow us downhill.

When you are miles deep in the backcountry leading an inexperienced group, you don’t shrug your shoulders at impending lightning. You might understand the urgency: lightning kills about 2,000 people worldwide a year. A single bolt of lightning, given certain averages, has enough voltage to power 56 homes for a full day. During a storm, colliding particles of rain, ice, or snow contribute to a negative charge within the lower reaches of storm clouds. Objects on the ground, like trees, rods, Beyond campers, or the earth itself, become positively charged, creating an imbalance that nature seeks to remedy. Nature likes balance.

Here’s the cover:

Ok, so I can only presume you are now hooked like a fish, entranced like a moth to a flame, stuck like dog hair on a lint roller, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

But seriously, if you’d like a copy, please direct message me on Facebook, or email me at jstrain323@gmail.com for details. I wish I had a better system, but you know. Booklets are $10 (this includes shipping), or $7 if we are able to meet up in person somehow!

Thanks for your interest and support!

-Jonathan

How I Decided to Become a Pilot: A Vocational Journey

When it comes to the forging of purpose and identity, it’s hard to know how much, if any, is up to you and how much, if any, is up to God. This is a classic vocational tension that Christians have been wrestling with, like, forever.

But what is most difficult is when you try to step into a life as you sense God calling, and it just doesn’t work out how you thought it was supposed to. God doesn’t seem to uphold his end of the deal, so to speak.

I just recently moved to Salt Lake City, UT to start a flight training program. The goal is to become a commercial airline pilot. Needless to say, given what I thought I’d be doing with my life, this new trajectory is a bit of a non-sequitur, and it still feels slightly absurd. When I initially told my pastor back in Spokane that I was considering this path, he laughed at me.

In the big picture, however, it really isn’t so absurd. But I have struggled to tell the story to myself, and even more so to others, about “why I’m doing it” because this new path was born out of a much deeper, convoluted, spiritual story that is just now just coming into focus. It’s a story that really has nothing to do with becoming a pilot, but at the same time, has everything to do with becoming a pilot.

I wanted to try and get some of this story written down, because it really is a story about  God’s work in my life, a kind of resolution or climax to events several years in the making. It’s often all too easy for me to keep my happy experiences to myself to the benefit of nobody. But I was feeling compelled to write this out, because ultimately it’s a kind of testimony. And testimony–the act bearing witness to God’s work in your life or in the world–is like, the Christian’s ONE JOB.

In addition to that, I think it’ll have a lot in common with those of you who have 1) recently-ish graduated 2) love Jesus 3) have deep hopes for the restoration of the world and for your small role within in it, and/or 4) feel relatively disillusioned or lost or disappointed or sad and feel like you’ve just been treading treading water and wasting time and being a cynical, apathetic lump of dirt in the face of the world’s great need, and lo, even in the face of the world’s tiniest and humblest needs, and holy shit, what gives anyway, like, what’s my problem, and what am I supposed to do in the space of yet another vacuous, absurd, spiritually void day in which I seem to be both the perpetrator and the victim of my own spiritual apathy?

So without further ado:

THE SHORT VERSION OF HOW JONATHAN STRAIN DECIDED TO BECOME A PILOT

Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash

One day in the late fall of 2016, I was on a hike with my Aunt Cindy in Colorado. This was right after all the things I thought I’d be doing with my life had all finally keeled over and died. Aunt Cindy, God’s most dedicated vocational cheerleader, threw out a question somewhere along the lines of, “What’s something you’ve always wanted to try but haven’t, career path or not?”

This was the first time I had told someone out loud, “Well, I’ve always wanted to learn how to fly a plane.”

It was another year and a lot more details in between before this actually became a real plan, but anyway, that’s the short version.

AND SO, BUT OK, THE LONGER VERSION OF HOW JONATHAN STRAIN DECIDED TO BECOME A PILOT

No matter what path you take, I don’t think there’s much escape from your first year or two out of college being an experience of pallid disillusionment in some degree or another. This is for a lot of reasons: loss of friendship, extreme novelty (new job, new home, new city), adjusting to the reality of everyday lived-life after all the “change-the-world” pomp you’ve been blasted with during your years in college, especially if you attended a progressive Christian university.

My first year out of college was no exception. I spent my first year out of school as an AmeriCorps volunteer with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest. This year is a story in itself, but to put it succinctly, it was an intensely internal, spiritually vacuous, soul-stretching year. For a multitude of reasons, I did not ever feel at home during my time with JVCNW.

Don’t misunderstand, though. I am deeply thankful for this year, for my fellow JVs I served with, and for the community that gave us a home there. I do believe that deep work was happening beneath the surface of my being, like a tree sinking its roots deep down. But as far as the experience itself went, there was little fruit produced by that tree in that year. It was a year full of questions.

The early 20th century poet Rainer Maria Rilke was my thematic companion, and his words in the collection Letters to a Young Poet became something of a spiritual bedrock for me. He writes:

“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”¹

One thing that helped me finish out the year with JVCNW was that I started seeing a counselor, and part of what she helped me do was give me allow me to begin thinking in anticipation of the future. She allowed me the space that I wasn’t giving to myself to look forward to life after my service year instead of feeling guilty. Quite a simple concept, but it had a profound impact, and would prove to be a concept I’d have to return to later down the road.  In this context, this meant anticipation for reconnecting with my friends and community back in Spokane, a place where I felt known and loved.

I saw my impending return to Spokane as an opportunity to step more fully into the values that drew me to JVCNW (community, simple living, social justice, spirituality), but in a setting that was less inherently temporary.  I had learned to see all the problems of the world as being an interconnected web, and that the most direct way to begin to address systemic brokenness was to align my own life into a new system of living. When it came to issues like national health crises, climate change, generational poverty, the breakdown of families, income inequality, overconsumption of fossil fuels, global hunger, and the list goes on and on–the basic gist is that I came to believe that the simplest and most profound way to help the hurting world was to begin by helping your hurting neighbor, and maybe planting a garden on the side.

I wanted to be more holistically involved in my Spokane church, which was and still is dreaming about being neighborhood-centric in its missional scope. I believed, firmly, in the necessity of the social Gospel, that the Church is not limited to facilitating personal salvation experiences for nice, middle class, white people, but that Jesus calls us outward into a systemically broken world: poverty, racism, sexism, homelessness, whole populations of people getting the short end of the cultural stick in ways that were not only being ignored by the American church, but often even perpetuated.

In the model of Jesus, I aspired to a lifestyle of downward mobility. I wanted to intentionally abdicate the power my culture affords me, to live below my means, to be a servant. I saw this not as the righteous path of the privileged white liberal with a guilt-ridden savior complex, but as the authentic call of my own faith journey, a moving outward from the work Jesus had done in my own life. It was one of those I-don’t-actually-know-how-to-do-this-but-I-trust-that-Jesus-will-show-me types of calls. This is important to note, because in spite of all that would happen later, I still sense the authentic reality of this call in my life with the same degree of importance.

But now, I also have an abiding peace and freedom sourced from the well of kairos, the deep well of God’s time which has its fullness in every moment. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In my return to Spokane, I envisioned a life of creative simplicity, routine, and purpose, all in the scope of greater Christian community. I wanted to learn how to keep bees (or something), build my own stuff, mentor at-risk youth, and to write. Employment, as a way to make a living, would simply enable me to engage in these pursuits. The pursuit of future schooling or vocational training, I hoped, would flow out of this vision, rather than the other way around. All of this was rooted in my earnest and informed desires to be in close connection to God’s earth as producer and consumer, to be more rooted in a particular place with particular people in community, and for all these endeavors to be a grand labor on behalf of and because of the Kingdom of God as I grew to understand it, love it, and hope for it. Essentially, I wanted to be a modern monastic, a Super Monk!

Unfortunately, Super Monk began to die almost as soon as he took his vows.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Back in Spokane, I hit the ground running. I got a job at a coffee shop, and started volunteering as a high school leader with a youth ministry in Spokane called Youth For Christ (YFC) which was rooted in serving kids in one of Spokane’s more low-income and racially diverse neighborhoods. As an added bonus, my dear friends Jon and Emily Royal were also working at YFC as full time staff. I reconnected with my church, which later even moved into that same neighborhood to share YFC’s building. I moved into a house of guys I knew from Whitworth, and even impulse-bought a drill for all the DIY projects I was sure to begin working on–building my own furniture and garden beds and all that. Life held the possibility of Super Monk’s ecstatic vision.

But as I began to walk through actual lived life, the vision started to fall flat. My sense of connection and care paled in comparison to the grand, though admittedly oblique, vision of Super Monk, and the realities of daily existence began setting in. I wasn’t working nearly enough hours, and was anxious about money. I was not experiencing or acting upon the grand connection to community I had envisioned. I felt disconnected from my housemates for what seemed like no reason at all. I slept in a lot, worked my 15-20 hours a week as a barista, drank beer, and forced myself to keep showing up at YFC, a place where I certainly felt a deep sense of spiritual vitality–the work of the Holy Spirit moving–but not in my own connection to it.

Part of my hope for becoming a YFC leader was to invest in longer-term mentoring relationships (even just 1 or 2) with kids in the neighborhood. But at this prospect, I balked. Every once in a while, I did have moments of connection with students that were life-giving, joyful, and natural. But on the whole, when it came down to the routine discipline of connecting with students, I just didn’t want to do it.  And who would want to be mentored by someone who is acting more out of abstract obligation and idealism, rather than because of you? I struggled with this though, because oftentimes our heart really does follow our actions.  I desperately wanted to want to do it, and assumed it was well within God’s power to give me that willingness if he saw fit. Sometimes we have to step into the unknown thing and trust that God will provide us with what we need, and this ministry was a significant part of what I felt called to in this season of my life. And YFC, like any Christian youth ministry, was always hungry for qualified volunteers.

But in a context like YFC, where many of the youth have been hurt by a lack of follow-through from the adult figures in their lives, you can actually cause more harm than good through a flabby commitment. I continued to waver on this prospect of mentoring, and kept myself from really diving in.

When it came down to doing all the things I had envisioned myself doing, I simply would not and could not do them. I found myself relating much to the old doctor that Father Zosima speaks of in The Brothers Karamazov. “‘I love mankind,’ he [the doctor] said, ‘but am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons…I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,’ he said.”²

I, too, seemed to be experiencing this inverse ratio between love for people in the abstract and love for individuals in real time, becoming more stubbornly resolute in my abstract vision even as it fizzled in reality. When it came down to putting the vision of Super Monk into action, I just didn’t know where to start, and didn’t care to find out. I felt bogged down, lethargic, desensitized. I kept all these troubles and tensions mostly to myself, and in the stress of this self-imposed isolation, isolated myself further.

But what else was there to do? The ultimate failure, in my mind, was to give up on Super Monk, get some dumb job I didn’t like that paid the bills, and live a comfortable, self-contained life.

I was unable to voice this to myself or others at the time, but I recognize now that my basic posture toward the Super Monk vision had become an over-extension of personal responsibility. I often thought that it seemed all-too-convenient that so many privileged Christians didn’t feel “called” to the difficult work on the cultural margins. In the context of what I perceived to be a largely apathetic and privileged culture, I thought, If I don’t do this important but difficult work, then who will? If I can’t even get myself to live according to these values, how can I even hope that others might too? So I slogged forward.

This kind of posturing, I am convinced now, is not a Gospel posture. But at the same time, it was a way of being that I could not will myself out of, and it needed to be allowed to die. The New Thing does not come until the Old Thing dies. This is at the very heart of Christianity, woven into the death and resurrection of Jesus, the moment in time in which all time is contained. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

It’s important to note that this is much easier to say from the perspective of New Life I believe I am now writing from in the context of this particular story, a perspective I could not have imagined until it was given to me later. But when I was in the midst of the dying process, all I felt in the moment was how confusing and painful it was. Death hurts.

—–

Naturally, with Super Monk looking all frail and sickly as he was, I started to look at other options for moving forward with my life. My best answer for this, as it is for many bachelor-wielding millennials, was grad school. I didn’t really know what I wanted to study, but knew, vaguely, that I cared about writing, communication, language, and the process of meaning-making. My own grassroots Super Monk lifestyle was failing to take shape, but I still felt called to its vision, and began to envisage a life from an academic vantage: the life of a professor.

An academic career seemed potentially well-suited to my temperament and gifts, and I felt it could be a platform from which to play a key role in the formation of beliefs and behaviors of young people at a critical time in their lives. This, I thought, might be a better use of my gifts, a more natural way to use my abilities as a thinker, analyzer, and observer of the big picture as a way to help others do the same. It seemed more distant and aloof than the more “important” hands-on work of Super Monk, but if I couldn’t be a Super Monk in a direct sense, I wanted to at least be in a position to help others to be. And so I sought the path of the Benevolent Professor. I started to research graduate programs in the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition, around the wintertime of 2014 and into 2015.

But the Benevolent Professor was quickly asked to pause the application process, because in January of 2015, a different opportunity came up literally out of nowhere, one that would prove to be a kind of experiential foreshadowing of the New Life. This opportunity was an invitation to join the staff of Young Life Beyond Malibu as a mountain guide.

Photo from Erika Schultz, fellow Beyond staffer

Serving with Beyond Malibu was the most profoundly formative experience I’ve ever had. The opportunity came up out of nowhere, a total curveball. But as I involved myself in the application process, I knew that it was where I needed to be. Additionally, since serving as a Beyond Guide requires you to maintain your involvement in youth ministry, movement forward on this path created an energy and engagement with YFC that I did not have before. I spent the springtime before my 1st summer feeling energized, connected, and vital. It was a breath of fresh air.

The most direct effect Beyond had on me was engendering a sense of spiritual confidence and resilience that I simply did not have before. It is such an unmediated, highly distilled spiritual existence up there, with highs and lows experienced with great intensity. And I had never felt more spiritually alive. I had never felt so capable. The Gospel truths about myself, the world, and God’s work in all of never felt truer.

But it was also a temporary experience. It was certainly real food, like manna in the desert for the Israelites, but it did not necessarily translate outside its own experience right away. Like the manna in the story, it didn’t keep overnight. It seemed to feed me only in its own context and timeline.

Because eventually, in spite of my little spiritual revival as a Beyond guide, the Benevolent Professor caught whatever fatal disease Super Monk had. When it came time to make a move, the energy and spark was not there.

So upon finishing my second summer as a mountain Guide with Beyond, I had decided on trying out one last option: a master of fine arts (MFA) in creative writing in order to pursue writing as some kind of full-time venture. It was the path of the Starving Writer, my last semblance of any kind of plan that made sense given how I understood my gifts in conjunction with what I thought was God’s call on my life.

Anyway, try to guess what happened to the Starving Writer.

It was not too long after that, on that hike with my Aunt Cindy in Colorado, that I said, not unflippantly, “Well, I’ve always wanted to learn how to fly an airplane.”

—–

I don’t exactly know what happened to Super Monk and the gang. I honestly think, if God had wanted to, he could have freed me from that posture of over-responsibility I was chained to without having to kill everybody off like that.

But whatever the case may be, it was exactly in that space of loss, confusion, and mourning that I believe God opened up the possibility for me to understand the New Life.  Like the counselor I saw during my year with JVCNW, I sensed God trying to help me understand that I could envision a different path for my future entirely, without guilt or failure.

It’s not like I didn’t understand how or didn’t believe that God could act in spite of my own lived experience. And it’s not as if there weren’t moments of joy, clarity, or purpose along the way. But the big picture I’m trying to paint about the experience I was having throughout these years was that, overall, it just felt mostly like a tiresome, joyless slog through the mud. I didn’t know what to work towards, and any attempts to move my life forward were met with my own sustained indifference and lethargy. Even though I hoped for more than this, I also began to lament that life would never be anything different, Jesus or no. It wasn’t anything so dramatic like despair. Just more of a sad resignation. Weariness. Boredom.

It wasn’t such a leap to step into this unimagined future, when the opportunity arose, because everything that I thought I was supposed to do was dead. So why not just step into something new and enjoy it? It’s not like I had anything else going on.

—–

I can’t claim any kind of long-standing passion for flying airplanes. I had never done it before, and I didn’t grow up around anybody that did. All I can claim is that ever since college, learning how to fly a plane had continuously made it onto various bucket lists (presumably once I became filthy rich from the opulent Super Monk lifestyle), and that whenever I flew commercially, I always chose the window seat near the wing and stared out at what was happening the whole time.

But in the movement forward on this path, I started sensing that same spark of energy that the possibility of being a mountain guide had provoked. As I looked into it more, I found that it was not so absurd that I was drawn to it, and that it synced up intuitively with my temperament and gifts. It was concrete work that I can enjoy and feel proud of, but also a lifestyle that would allow enough margin to invest my creative and emotional energy wherever else God might call me. Over time, with much research and processing with family, mentors, and friends, I decided to take the plunge.

But like I mentioned before, while this is a story about how I decided to become a pilot, it also has almost nothing to do with becoming a pilot. I don’t know how else to say it other than, over the space of this last year, God has been showing me a renewed possibility of life. All the things that I had hoped for in that abstract way died painfully, but on the other side of their death, in the space of the New Life I believe God has given me in this season, they are fully alive, having resurrected into the space of God’s time, the fullness of time.

What I mean is that in this last summer, I finally planted a little garden. I brewed beer with my friend Sagen, like good monks do. I finally made a humble and vulnerable move toward Christian community by joining a small group at church.  I finally finished (ok almost) a collection of essays about serving with Beyond that I’ve been working on for friggin forever, and I am proud of the result (to be printed and available probably by the end of April). I continue to wash and reuse Ziploc baggies, because somebody has to save the planet.

Per Rilke’s suggestion, I have done my best to live the questions: Will I live simply? Will I become a writer? Will I work on behalf of the poor and marginalized? Will I be more than a passive, privileged, white dude in the face of the world’s global injustices? Is it possible for me to engage in the important work of the world and enjoy it? Does God care? Is the arc of the universe really bending toward justice, restoration, and joy?

And per God’s grace, I am now seeing that I have begun to live my way into the answers. In the death of the life I was hoping for, even felt called to, I am finding that nothing has been lost or wasted.

I have no doubt that God will use me as he sees fit, in his timing, according to the work of the Spirit. I mean, I believed that before, too. But now I can actually say, after like four years of relative spiritual drudgery, that God is honoring that faith in real time. But God has also given me the eyes to see that this reality is true for all time. The Bread of Life, Jesus, broken for me, the manna sent down from heaven which sustains our lives both now and forever. Heart of my own heart, whatever befalls, as the hymn goes. The true life that lives on and through and in spite of all our pathetic little gestures, or lack thereof.

I have confidence that my life will undoubtedly be used, and that it already has been and even is now. I have confidence that the path forward is one of freedom and joy rather than of obligation. There is certainly work to do. But because of the freedom of the Gospel, I can act from the knowledge that this call does not rest solely upon my shoulders.

Like, duh. But do you know what I mean?

I sense the resurrected ghosts of Super Monk, the Benevolent Professor, and the Starving Writer all looking down upon me, the spirit of their hopes and dreams not so dead after all.

All that, and I get to fly airplanes.

—–

1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 27.
2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 57.

On Moving

My personality is not very compatible with the process of moving. I tend to like things slow, settled, and ordered by the thorough process of time, like dust settled on the ocean floor. Once I have an order for things, that order does not change unless something external forces my hand.

When I put pictures up on the wall in their perfect places, meticulously hung, they stay in those exact spots, never to be moved or rearranged. The way I’ve ordered my books and knick-knacks on my bookshelf has stayed mostly unchanged the past three years.

But I am moving again. I’ve done this at least once every year–sometimes more– for the last eight years of my life.

I’m getting smarter with moving. I know myself now. In the past, I have spent hours–and I do mean literal hours–arranging and rearranging furniture to get it right in my new living space. In the past, I’ve painstakingly racked my brain to remember how it was I had arranged my books and souvenirs and artifacts on my bookshelf and desk, because doing it differently just didn’t feel right.

By now, I’ve learned what the rules are and I’ve learned how to live with them. The bed is ideally near a window. I must not have my back to the door when sitting at my desk. Windows should not be blocked by my dresser or bookshelf. Consider the view from the outside looking through the window. Consider the view from the door to the room looking in. Do not block heating ducts. Consider convenient loci of electrical outlets in proximity to desk and bedside table respectively.

“What if I stop being so picky and just do it differently this time?” I used to wonder. But this was almost always followed by cursing myself later as I re-rearranged the furniture in accordance to the rules which simply will not be broken.

By now, I can anticipate my perfectionism, and I don’t ridicule myself for being so doggedly obsessive about my private living space. This time around, I took a picture of my bookshelf before packing everything away to better facilitate its restoration. This time, I brought a tape measure to my new room to pre-plan where my furniture will go so I can get it right on the first try. This time, the sea creature stirring up dust on my settled ocean floor will not steep me in chaos for long. I will bring my order with me.

Change, chosen or not, doesn’t ever stop happening–you just get a little better at parrying its blows.

For me, the physical act of moving almost always feels a little bad. This is because I don’t process change until the change becomes physical. I don’t feel the bittersweet emptiness of a life season’s end until my actual room is empty. Novelty is not real until I’m staring at the new ceiling in my new room on my first night of a new chapter.

Inevitably, moving forces me to confront all the little pet projects that I never quite got around to. Here is the stack of letters and postcards that I never wrote replies to. Here is the shirt with the missing button I was going to resew. Here are all the books accumulated from thrift stores which have not been put on my bookshelf, because I may need them for quick reference for the writing project that I still have not completed.

Invariably, packing up my things takes forever, and there’s no way around it. That’s another rule I’ve learned to live with: packing takes forever. Any expectation to the contrary will only be met with frustration.

It isn’t enough just to put things in boxes. Moving becomes, by some inner compulsion, a time to undergo a complete inventory of all my belongings, assessing their practical and symbolic value to me, and deciding what stays and what goes.

This time, and not any other time, is the time to go through all my unworn clothing. This time, not later, is the time to get rid of one more symbolic trinket from high school. This is the time, upon reaching the shelf containing my old journals and notebooks, to divine nostalgia from the entries of a younger me who, although he has changed almost indescribably since the years he first wrote on those pages, has simultaneously stayed almost exactly the same.

In fact, it’s the objects most tied to childhood and adolescence that are hardest to move past with any efficiency–I won’t tell you you how old I was when I finally threw away the tattered remnants of my baby blanket–and personal journals or diaries are probably hardest of all. These things are a black hole, activated only when it’s time to pack and move.

I’m pretty amazed at how productive I become at everything else when there is one activity I don’t care to do. Instead of dealing with the clutter in my half-disassembled bedroom, for example, I am in the living room, writing this. This completed essay was written almost entirely in one sitting–I couldn’t have done that if I had tried. Maybe it’s my own way of giving the finger to forced transition. You can make me leave, but I’m gonna do it my own way in my own time. Or maybe I’m just good at living in the moment, soaking in what’s important rather than fretting about transition. Or maybe it’s just straight up denial.

Most probably, it’s a mix of all three.

—–

Contrast this with my housemate Sagen, my good friend who I have lived with for four out of the last five years of my life. Sagen begins mourning and celebrating change sometimes months in advance. He tastes it in the air in the same way elephants perceive impending hurricanes and start marching inland long before humans do. When we found out that our landlord was going to sell the house sooner than expected, Sagen’s change-adaptation systems kicked in right away. Almost overnight, our conversation and activities shifted from the routine  tell-me-about-your-day variety to a distinctive brand of reflective comments from Sagen, such as, “It’s been a real good time in this house,” or, “We’ve really had it good, haven’t we?” or, “I’m really going to miss living here. We’ve had it really good.”

He started making comments like this the day or two after we found out we’d have to move, even though we we still had a month or more to go in the house.

—–

By packing up your things, you are unpacking all of the memories and value and meaning that they hold. In the face of the newness of the life you are moving into–or away from–each object must be reassessed in light of that newness. This process for me has become familiar. I’ve changed a lot these last five years, but those changes aren’t reflected too much in lifestyle and the belongings that reflect it. I have been confining my belongings to a single room in accordance with a lifestyle of a single, working bachelor for a good while now. I have not married, and so my belongings have not had to pass the scrutiny of a spouse. I have not moved from a single room to a full-sized house of my own, nor from a full house to a single room, and so no considerable upsizing or downsizing has occurred. My hobbies are mostly the same, and so all of the relevant paraphernalia makes the cut each time.

Our living spaces and the things that we fill them with say a lot about us. They are a reflection of our very selves: who we are, what we like, where we’ve been, what we aspire to. In my room, I have a piece of art from each significant geographic location that I have lived in to remind me of those places and the memories they hold. I have photographs of my family next to books containing ideas that have defined me. I have aesthetic knickknacks and decorations galore: coasters made from Douglas fir rounds; tealight candles placed in thrifted glass teacups; a leather throw from the Bavarian Lodge in Leavenworth, WA gifted to me by a former housemate; symbolic trinkets from trips to El Salvador, New York, Boston, South Africa, and Nebraska.

And I have what you may call a strong affinity for containers. Tins, cups, baskets, jars, and boxes of all kind made from wood, ceramic, straw, glass, tin, plastic, and cardboard are everywhere in my living space. These are as varied in their history as their make and model: the jar holding a candle that used to contain Adams Peanut Butter during my year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps; the pencil box carved from mango tree wood left behind by a former roommate; the rectangular porcelain thing purchased at flea market because I couldn’t resist the color and texture–it now holds my wallet, keys, and receipts; a mug from my college dining hall. These containers are the artifacts of a museum. They are a short history of Jonathan Strain.

Moving is the labor of self-reflection and self-confrontation. As each thing comes into your hand to be packed away for the next chapter, you ask yourself, “What is this, what does it do for me, does it still have value or meaning for me now, and will it still have meaning or value for me in this next season?”

Personally, it’s no surprise to me that moving becomes such an episode of minor trauma. It’s exhausting to reevaluate your own identity multiple times in a year.

I have a personality that is highly attuned to the symbolic meanings of my things, which is maybe why moving is extra difficult for me. Just when I think I have everything defined, settled, in its place, subdued, and known, yet another “life transition” comes along and blows it all to bits again.

But not everyone is like this. My personal traumas are another person’s adventure and lifeblood. For some, moving is an opportunity, a way out of stifling boredom and mundanity, freedom from the suffocating shackles of being tied down to an effete lifestyle. Sometimes I even catch a whiff of this sensation myself.

There are also the people who don’t reflect at all. They simply accrue so many things, having hauled them all from place to place, that their houses and garages are so stuffed with stuff that a confrontation of this stuff’s history and what it says about them is just a little too harrowing to even broach, and so they just deal with it by not dealing with it at all.

To each their own.

—–

Physical stuff is one thing when you are moving. Live relationships with other people are quite another. I’ve lived Sagen for four out of the last five years of my life. That’s a long time to live with someone who isn’t your spouse or family member. We share similar values and outlooks on life. We want the same things from a living space. And, ultimately, we’ve just been pretty lucky. Our lives have taken similar enough courses that it has made sense to keep living together, even in the midst of all the turbulent and divisive changes that happen in your 20’s. We’ve been lucky enough to keep finding jobs or pursuits in which we grow and move forward that also keep us both in Spokane. At this point, we’re almost like an old married couple. We intuit each other’s grooves and rhythms with relative accuracy. The familiarity to me of sharing a living space with Sagen is so great, it’s almost banal.

Our friendship isn’t defined so much by crazy adventures or shared passions or constant, deep conversations, although we’ve certainly had those things in their own turn and form. Rather, it’s more the type of rare and companionate friendship that is the product of empathy, circumstance, and time. We see each other. And without too much fuss, we protect and honor what we see. We manage to lead different sorts of lives while maintaining a common respect and concern for each other that I don’t share with too many other people. In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, a favorite of both of ours, our friendship is one in which “each appoints the other the guardian of his solitude” (On Love and Other Difficulties).

—–

Moving is not just about trading one roof for another. It’s often indicative of bigger changes that are afoot, and even if you really are just changing locations, even a physical move can create subtle riffs and changes in your various relationships. Physical proximity is a huge factor in determining what kind of time you spend with who and when–much more than we usually realize. And while good friendships endure big or small shifts in proximity, they do not go unchanged by them.

A friendship is not any more immune to the demands of change than the rest of life. But if the friendship is a good one, it will have it’s own rules that it won’t be broken. It too will adapt. It will carry its order with it.

—–

Sagen is a master of ceremony. This is through intentional effort and also just because of who he is. He recognizes the important times and events in life and makes the importance manifest in rituals that are almost liturgical. Need to vent anger about a frustrating thing that happened to you? It’s nothing that a session with the Smash Bat can’t help. Need to process a life change? A walk and talk with a smoke late at night is just the thing. Did you get the job? Did you ask the girl on the date? Did you make a difficult but courageous decision about something? That calls for a toast with some of the fine whiskey from Sagen’s stash, which he will always share.

If you are celebrating a new life season, having a birthday, mourning a breakup, processing a big decision, or just want to have a party, Sagen is the person you want to have around. There is no noteworthy event in life that passes by his watch without some form of recognition. This is one of the reasons Sagen is such a good friend for me. I love to be recognized, but it’s not the same if I have to ask for it.

It’s partially because he’s been disappointed by too many unrecognized changes in his own life. Letdowns gone unmourned. Victories passed uncelebrated. But beneath that is something more automatic, more innate.

He has his own rules to follow in the face of transition, after all, and he too has learned to adapt.

—–

Still, Sagen’s preemptive initiative of Last Rites seemed a little insulting to me at first, something akin to talking about someone in the past tense who hasn’t actually died yet. Not only did he start all this a month or two early, it was being done in the face of a move that isn’t about big life changes quite yet. Our landlord is simply selling the house sooner than we anticipated, so it’s time to find somewhere new to go before the real transition happens. We will still, at this point, both be in Spokane for several more months. But with a little more thought, I see that he is right in his witness of endings. Things are about to be very different.

This might be a crass binary, but our instinctive responses to big change might be thus: Sagen acknowledges outright the reality of what is changing, while I hold fast to what need not change at all.

In this, we sort of shield each other from the transitional brisance. We are celebrants. Witnesses. Guardians of solitude.

—–

Most of the weirdness of moving and transitioning is how commonplace it all is. If you are lucky, you have people in your life to help you see the sacredness of change. But most of us do not have this. Moving is often just one of those things that happens to you and you deal with it. We might crave recognition for the important changes in our lives, but we don’t know how to ask for it.

—–

Eventually, we will all have to move, physically or otherwise, from where we are now to somewhere new, and the move will happen with our consent or without it. Even if you live in the same place the rest of your life, you will have to make other kinds of moves: relational, spiritual, emotional, and so on. We will move over and over again until our bodies are moved, finally, into the earth. It is our rite as pilgrims and aliens of the world.

Soon, if not today, you will find yourself standing at the threshold of your now empty home, dust bunnies in the corner, skeletal coat hangers on the floor, one lone extension cord which, having slithered away beneath a couch who knows how long ago, is now exposed. When you are in this moment, you will see that place for the home that it was and for the empty space it now is. And you will leave it for a strange new place that has not yet accommodated itself to you, for a place that you do not know.

When you find yourself in the doorway between from and to, with no witnesses or closure or form through which to name how frightening, bittersweet, and strange it is, know that Sagen and I invite you into the heart of the celebration and mourning of that which changes, as well as into the heart of companionship and love which never does. We raise up our glasses. We see you.

 

Bored observations from a crowded coffee shop and my subsequent discovery of the official Greater Spokane Coffee Shop Schedule

N.B. This is not Indaba. This is a nice stock photo I got for free on the internet.

Indaba Coffee, West Central
Sunday Afternoon

–There are so many people here. I think they are all college students here to “study,” but the proliferation of high-decibel verbal exchange going on right now greatly undermines the signified value of the word, “study.”

–Granted, my sense of what it means to study (i.e., private, concentrated silence) is reflective of the dominant western pedagogies that I was brought up in. Maybe colleges have transcended this limited way of teaching and learning, and this high-volume and ebullient free flow of ideas going on in Indaba is actually more conducive to effective learning? Who am I to be so annoyed?

–“IT’S TOO COLD FOR ICE CREAM!” says a well-groomed male student sitting across from a pretty-looking female. It’s hard to know what this has to do with the Biblical Greek Grammar textbook next to his laptop, but then again, I didn’t study Biblical Greek.

–The guy sitting in the chair next to me (there is no private space, currently, in this crammed coffee shop) appears to be Skyping someone, and he’s managing to do it without any sign of self-consciousness. This is to both my annoyance and to my great awe.

–I hope my Skyping tablemate doesn’t look over and read what I’m writing. I have sort of tilted my laptop screen away from him, to discourage this.

–To my relief, nobody saw me watching this dog video that a friend sent to me, as far as I can tell.

–Even though it’s crowded and loud, I think I prefer the college students to other alternatives. There was another time that I was in this same coffee shop (a Tuesday afternoon), and interspersed perfectly at every other table were white males all in the 20-35 year old age range, all dressed somewhere between an REI and Nordstrom Rack, all working independently on something on a computer, all wearing a baseball cap of some kind. I sat down, hating myself, and took my computer out, and removed my hat.

–I’ve seen three of the same people here that I ‘sort-of-know’ that I saw on a Sunday a couple weeks ago at a different coffee shop. The reason I came to this coffee shop and not the other was to avoid dealing with the irksome swarm of ‘people I sort of know.’ I think Spokane needs some more coffee shops. Or maybe all the people who keep going to the same coffee shops need to find something else to do. Including myself. But what else is there to do?

–Is there just a rotation that happens? Is there some sort of posted schedule that I’m missing? There has to be.

–I’m eating an apple that I’ve brought from home, but I’m worried that my munching is annoying the guy sitting across from me. He has headphones in, but that doesn’t mean anything because I also have headphones even though I’m not listening to music (as a signifier to “leave me alone”). He hasn’t said anything, and his body language could be interpreted either way. However, I don’t want to ask him if my apple munching is bothering him in the off-chance that it currently isn’t, but that by bringing it into his awareness I cause him to be bothered by it thereafter. But I’m really hungry, so I can’t just not eat my apple. My course of action is to take smaller bites, and to try to chew quietly. His departure 10 minutes later is as open to interpretation as his body language.

–The nice thing about being in a coffee shop filled entirely with what you suspect are Bible college students is that you don’t have to bother with the need to secure all your valuables whenever you get up to go to the bathroom.

–Ok, so while I was waiting in line for the bathroom, I absently scanned Indaba’s bulletin board, and sure enough, slightly concealed beneath an advertisement for a Yoga workshop, I found it: the Greater Spokane Coffee Shop Schedule. I KNEW it existed. I’ve summarized it below for you.

The Greater Spokane Coffee Shop Schedule

This Sunday, Moody Bible Institute students will be at Indaba (I knew it), and Whitworth students will be at Vessel. The following Sunday, they’ll switch. White moms with babies have the Rockwood on Thursday midmorning, from 10-11:30. Church pastors from all over greater Spokane have the Rocket on Garland forever and ever, amen. White males with nothing to do have Indaba on Tuesday afternoon from 2-5:30, but also on Wednesday morning from 7-8am (this is for the white-males-with-nothing-to-do “early bird contingency” sub-grouping). The early bird contingency hour is dependent on how much seating remains unclaimed by small groups and book clubs who have Indaba Wednesday morning from open until noon. Gonzaga students will be wherever the hell it is Gonzaga students go to study. Grassroots activists will be at Atticus on Saturday morning, until they are annoyed out by cappuccino-sniffing corporate assholes from Spokane’s business elite around 11. Boots Bakery will receive the displaced activists on Saturday afternoon, along with all the other displaced people they receive, God bless them. Older people living on the north side are encouraged to brunch casually at Petit Chat from 10-2 on any weekday, in spite of the disorganized and anxiety-inducing frenetic service they will receive from the staff there whenever it gets remotely busy. Nobody will be at Batch Bakeshop in West Central, because they never seem to be open when you want to go.

Everyone else not covered by the schedule as posted is encouraged to patronize one of Spokane’s many drive-through coffee stands, those stands that when you drive by them you think, “How are there so many of these?”

5 Reflections on the Writing Process

If you supported my writing project, it’s unlikely that you remember that I said it was my goal to have it finished before Christmas. But if you did remember, it’s VERY unlikely that you received a finished publication from me.

Long story short, I didn’t meet that goal.

But I fully intend on finishing the dang thing and fully intend on honoring the support that you all gave me. That is certain. But as far as timelines go, I don’t know. Turns out it is pretty hard to sit down and write, even with all the right parameters. Who knew?

As tempting as it is to throw a pity party about “not meeting goals” and how “even with the best intentions, I’ll still fail” and how “see, this is what happens when you put yourself out there” and all other highly reasonable conclusions to such a catastrophic failure, I won’t do that. You’re welcome.

Instead, here’s a very blog-posty blog post about the writing process so far, with all the blog-posty blog post crucial elements, including 1) Catchy, list-oriented title 2) Pithy self-reflections 3) Word count appropriate for internet attention spans 4) a trendy stockphoto depicting some hipster’s hip, staged workspace .

Ready, set, Blog!

5 Reflections on the Writing Process

1. Even though this project hangs over my head like Eeyore’s rain cloud from Winnie the Pooh, I’m so glad that I committed to this thing. Sure, it feels like I was blindfolded and then sent to navigate backwards through a room fool of furniture and large blunt objects. But as I stumble over things, and even though I sit on the things I trip over and sulk for long periods of time, I’m gradually learning a lot about this room and how to navigate it. It feels good to be committed to something that also feels personally worthwhile.
2. As an example of blindfolded stumbly-type learning, I learned that the kind of writing I tend to be drawn to is actually a real form of writing called “Personal Essay Writing” or the “Personal Narrative Essay,” just like the Sonnet or Villanelle are forms of poetry. It seems so obvious now, like, of course those are real forms of writing. But for the longest time I couldn’t describe to people what it was I was trying to do, and felt somehow egotistical and unimaginative for only writing out of my own experiences. Of course, there are many bad personal essays out there, but that doesn’t mean that personal essays are inherently that way. In fact, some of my favorite nonfiction writers (David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, Jonathan Franzen) use the personal narrative form quite often, and the results are as diverse, imaginative, and engaging as the writers themselves.
3. It gave me an excuse to buy a printer. I write from the gut first, which means a lot of the initial work is throwing a bunch of word slop onto a variety of different documents, and then shaping and arranging until what I see in front of me matches the gut sensations I’m writing from. The problem is that I am very visual, and need to physically “see” how it’s all going to be laid out (which a single laptop screen does not afford you to do). So I bought a printer, printed off all my different bits of writing, and then cut different sections apart to arrange them, physically, to see how the larger project might flow together. You guys, l I felt so proud of myself for that. My shoulder is sore from all the pats I gave it.
4. I don’t want to write as a way to make a living. I mean, good grief. Are you kidding me? My proverbial chapeau is tipped in admiration to all the professional writers out there. Maybe someday that will change, but by raising money for this project (as a way to feel like I was getting “paid” to write something) I’ve discovered that writing as my job is just not what I’m interested in. Of course, that’s also indicative of my life stage and the type of writing I’m ultimately interested in. But trying to do this and live off it is unrealistic for me. Simply put, I don’t want to. And that’s ok.
5. I’m proud of what I’m producing. It’s slow, tedious, and painful, and I feel like I’m mostly going in circles. The ratio of ‘time put in’ to ‘work produced’ is abysmal, you guys. But bit by bit, the essays are taking shape, and I’m genuinely happy with the direction things are going. Can you hope for anything more?

Church, politics, depression (or something), an amateur foray into rhetoric and semiotics, and of course, Jesus

At church this last Sunday, when Rob asked the congregation the question, “What are some ways we might be the peace of Christ in the world?” I sat kind of dumbly in a fog and couldn’t think of anything.

I walked in late to church today, even though the building where we meet is only a 6 minute walk from my house, because I really couldn’t decide whether or not it was worth all the fuss of going, the fuss of impending socialization and demand on my brain and emotions and all. But I had told my girlfriend I’d be there, and she said she’d bring me coffee, so that was enough accountability to make the guilt of skipping outweigh the potential relief. Good thing there are girlfriends.

It was Christ the King Sunday, the last day in the Christian liturgical calendar. Rob preached out of Ephesians 2, primarily focused on the beginning line of verse 14: “For he is our peace…” When Rob posed his peace question, “What are some ways we might be the peace of Christ in the world?” to the congregation, he had us share answers among ourselves, and then had us volunteer to share some of our answers out loud with the rest of the church.

It is as an important time as ever to brainstorm what it means to be the peace of Christ in the world, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. This is, in part, because I am worn out by the hyper-virility of words. I am especially worn out by words that are meant to signify actions and a willingness to do them, which I do not have, even if those words and actions are good and worthwhile.

The reason I don’t have this willingness to talk or act could be because of life season, or depression, or cowardice, or because of white privilege, or an addiction to comfort, or for a whole slew of other endless reasons we could discuss endlessly with endless words. We could then respond to those discussions with poignant counterpoints and with fresh critical perspectives and with more words and ideas, and we could do this forever.

Most of this discussion could take place online, the most convenient place for sharing ideas and arguments and perspectives.

But the reason I have a hard time speaking up or thinking of ideas is largely endemic of the problem itself, which is this: even with our many words, we are failing to fully share ourselves with each other. We are failing to understand, and more frustratingly, to be understood.

—–

Rob’s sermon was direct and poignant. He did little tip-toeing in regard to the tensions within our country and culture right now, especially in light of the election. He mentioned, up front, “Normally I like to sprinkle in some humor in my message, but I am just not going to do that today.” But while he strode boldly into his sermon, he did so without angry condemnation nor with righteous defense of this or that political figure or party. Rather, he preached on the Kingdom politic–the idea that God’s kingdom is NOT apolitical, but nor are the politics of God’s kingdom embodied in any one political platform as we see in our country. The church, as the body of Christ, is meant to live in such a way that we are the embodiment of Good News, which involves, for one example, caring for the life of an unborn child just as much as it means caring for the expecting, unwed mother.

The ideas Rob shared in his sermon were not revolutionary ideas, as far as ideas are contained as words. The historical church has been talking about how to be the “body of Christ” in radical ways for a long time. And lately, this discussion has multiplied into a passionate and robust cacophony of voices, at least in my own circles.

But the problem is not with the words and ideas themselves. The problem, rather, is embodied in my own self in this very moment: even in writing the above synopsis of some of Rob’s sermon, I already became tired of my own words. Right now, I’m already starting to shutdown, which is my habit in the face numerous, opposing viewpoints.

Due to how we live and talk these days, goaded by the nature of Facebook and internet mediated discourse, we have a hyper-virility and excess of words. This, of course, makes me question the utility of this very post: there is a certain irony that tends the attempt to use words to talk about the low value of words, and then posting those words online to be accessed through a Facebook feed. Even if they are good words, or true words, they are still reduced to almost worthlessness because of the sheer number of words already blowing around like valueless paper cash in a hyper-inflated economy.

And yet, at church this last Sunday, and in Sunday’s past, I keep being reminded of something urgent and true, something that transcends the irony of using words to talk about the low value of words. In my experiences at Immanuel in Spokane, WA, I am somehow finding access to my deep need, the need driving me to write all this out anyway, and that need is this: to return to the place where words gained their meaning in the first place.

—–

Words, as they are supposed to function, are symbols, and a symbol is composed of two things: sign and signified. The sign is the thing processed by your senses: E.G. Shiny chunk of red, octagonal metal with the characters S-T-O-P emblazoned across.

The sign then signifies something which is processed by your brain. E.G. Slow your car down to a halt before passing the shiny chunk of red, octagonal metal.

In the case of words, the signs are the jumble of letters on a page or sounds gurgling from somebody’s mouth. And when you take in this data with your senses, something magical happens. The jumble of letters and the gurgles of sound are transformed into meaning!

The signified is obviously the more complicated piece. While we can get pretty close to “saying what we mean” through symbols–words or otherwise–we don’t have full control how another person interprets our messages. Our interpretation of words is packed with our own histories, lenses, and biases.

The word cat, for instance, seems objectively to mean “small, domesticated carnivorous animal with short fur and retracted claws,” but even with the ‘objective’ definition or image in our head, that definition is attended by our own particular histories and experiences with cats. Is a cat a loyal, intelligent, play companion? Or is it a snotty, entitled, piece-of-crap-killer of mice and joy, secretly plotting your murder? Or is it something in between? Or is it your friend, Catherine, who goes by “Cat” for short?

Your interpretive definition of the word cat will be as nuanced and individual as you are. Add that to the fact that we string hundreds and thousands of these words together in sentences, multiplied by the number of responses we have even just to the person crafting the message in addition to the message itself, stirred up by other factors such as tone of voice or body language or what mood we happen to be in, and it’s a miracle that we understand the signified meaning in the signs of language and communication at all.

Words, as symbols, are most effective when sign and signified are in their proper alignment, when the words and how they are employed, as signs, are arousing the same signified meaning in your audience as they signify within your intended usage. You, as the user of words, arrange words into sentences and sentences into messages and utilize methods of delivering those messages to an audience in order to foster a union of meaning with your audience. You want them to understand, to reason, and to feel about things in the way that you do. It’s why you’re putting all those articles and status updates on Facebook, after all.

The study and practice of this attempt to generate unity, to use words and symbols in such a way to get people to understand things like you do, is classically called “rhetoric.” And rhetoric has more to do with the Christian faith and how we arrive at meaning than you might initially think.

—–

The word “rhetoric” is almost always used and understood in a pejorative sense (i.e. “You wouldn’t BELIEVE the rhetoric coming out of that idiot’s mouth!”). We hear “rhetoric,” and perceive “malicious verbal trickery!” But it need not be. We are constantly conversing with each other rhetorically, crafting messages and using symbols strategically in order to persuade others of something we believe to be true. Your construction of your Facebook profile–your profile photo, posts, interests, relationship status, etc, is a rhetorical act. You are trying to signify something about yourself through the signs (words, photos, updates) that decorate your page.

One aspect of the heart of the Christian faith, as I have grown to love and understand it, is the fact that Jesus is a rhetorician. Did you know that? These are things you discover when you study theology and communication at the same time.

But the rhetoric of Jesus, as far as we are talking about Jesus himself (his followers, “the church,” are a different story), is without the flaws, malice, and disconnect that are inherent in all symbols. That is because the symbols that Jesus uses to win others over to himself are…himself. Jesus is both sign and signified, in perfect alignment. “For he is our peace,” says Ephesians 2:14, our text from Sunday, “…in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”

Jesus certainly used words in his teachings, but he also is the Word (John 1). It’s no wonder Jesus makes statements like “I am the bread of life” and “I am the vine” and “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” He wasn’t being cryptic; just direct. But the truth wasn’t in his words alone, the signs and signifieds of which could be (and often are) received and interpreted in misunderstanding and error. Rather, the truth is in his selfhood, the meaning to which even his own words are the signs of.

Our country is suffering from many things right now, and one aspect of that suffering is a failure of our words to symbolize the meaning we so desperately want others to share. It’s a tough time for an aspiring writer, whose whole endeavor depends on the economy of words. But it isn’t that words are now meaningless. It’s just that in the way they are being used, they are failing to be effective signs for what we are hoping to signify. If our words are hyper-inflated, like too much printed cash added in a country’s struggling economy, the solution can’t be in simply generating more words. Rather, we need to return to the meaning we’ve been wanting to communicate all along, to the source that gave our metaphorical dollar its value in the first place. As Christians, we believe this source to be Jesus, and, per Jesus’ own teaching, is to be found in his body, the church.

All of the things we do at my church, even if they are extremely ordinary, are becoming important to me, because they are the actions of the body of Christ attempting to follow one of the Kingdom Politic’s most basic dictums: that we gather together. And while there are certain intentional things we do as Christians as symbols of our Christian life together (represented in the liturgy: worship, prayers, the sharing time, communion, etc), there is also just the ordinariness of a bunch of people gathered in one spot for something: inside jokes, schedules, in-groups and out-groups, not knowing who to talk to during meet-and-greet, forgetting people’s names, saying hi to people you know, saying hi to people whose names you’ve forgotten, making social plans. But this ordinariness, too, is redemptive and healing.

I am in a weird place in my life right now (but who isn’t?) which is plagued with a lot of withdrawal and isolation. It’s hard for me to want things, even good things, like serving the community, working on behalf of the marginalized, even just hanging out with my own friends, even though I know that these things are healthy, worthwhile, and good.

I think something magical starts to happen when the body, people truly after the heart of Jesus, physically gather together and sing together and share things out loud together. And even though this last Sunday, and this current season in my life in general, I hardly feel like I’m participating, and even though I just sat by my girlfriend instead of talking to people during meet and greet, and even though a lot of the service still felt like just more words, and even though I maintain the cynical suspicion that it doesn’t matter how special things feel on Sunday if it doesn’t make a difference in your life on Monday, and even though I left pretty much right away afterwards without saying goodbye to anybody, I still believe that this body of people is a body to which I am being drawn into and healed, that I am being invited into something wholesome and true, and that when this healing is done, I will be sent “out” again in mission to proclaim the truth, that Jesus is who he says he is, that the world will be as he says it shall be.

The paradox, and the beauty, is that this restoration of ourselves and being sent out into mission is often a process that happens all at the same. I am in that process, and I proclaim that mission here in the small way I feel willing and motivated.

If you want to join us, please do. We meet at the Youth For Christ building off Sharp Ave. and Ash at 10am on Sundays. I’ll be the guy not talking to you.

—–

“All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”
John 14:25-27

 

Melodramatic Beyond Guides (and an update on my writing project)

Beyond Malibu guides and summer staff returning from their summers in the Canadian mountains are notoriously melodramatic when it comes to transitioning home. In stark contrast to the strong, capable leadership they demonstrate on the mountain and basecamp, the behaviors of Beyond staff in post-season are more in line with a person having a bad drug experience or the quirks of a nervous dog: refusing to sleep or pee indoors, ears perking at sudden noises or passing cars, being overwhelmed in large public spaces, failure to accept the basic principles of money as a commodity of trade and exchange. Not to mention the persistent, guttural whining noises.

As much as I’d like to be, I am not immune from the shock of transition. To my credit, I have been sleeping indoors and I’ve only peed in my backyard once. But upon arriving home, I found myself almost instantly returning to The Hole, a routine of irresponsibility and passivity that I find somewhat inescapable whenever I don’t “have” to be doing something, like guiding backpacking trips.

In the face of a mountain of things to do (fun things, necessary things, and tedious things alike), I’ve resorted to the classic behaviors of The Hole, with the usual berating from The Tenant: social isolation, staying up late doing nothing, drinking beer with heightened inclination, scrolling endlessly through social media, and then sleeping in because I stayed up late. All this occurs in spite of strong desires to get up early and be a productive, active human being with goals to achieve and stuff to move and bills to pay and marathons to train for and vehicle registrations to renew (I learned the importance of that last one the hard way).

On a hazy, hot Spokane afternoon in the clutch of The Hole, I am sorting through my stack of mail from the summer. 70% of it is credit card crap because I mistyped payment information while setting up online autopay in the spring, and my payments were declined all summer. Wifi bills, wedding announcements, credit card offers, an REI catalogue with expired 4^th of July sales. Racked with the demands of life on earth and a fear of the all-consuming nature of The Hole, I open the big yellow envelope from my parents, which I’ve saved for last, and in it are several signifiers of the grace of God: a ladder out of The Hole. It’s contents:

Some money: a cash gift from the group to help me resettle, and to me, a reminder of God’s promise to take care of us as he sees fit. It’s manna in the desert—just enough to get us through the present, and never more.

A reminder of who I am: My mom wrote, “Dad and I kept pinching ourselves to think that you are our amazing son!” The Father rejoices in the Son. And through the Son, we become coheirs of the Father’s riches. My family’s pride is the real and metaphorical extension of the Father’s pride for his Son, Jesus, and through him, his pride for me—uniquely and exclusively for me. I’m prone to forget my true identity.

Photos from the trip: In these photos, a reminder of the greater picture of community, history and tradition. I do not journey alone to create meaning out of nothing. Rather, I am an inheritor of a family legacy. The Strain Family–the faithful, dorky, courageous figures posing in those photos–is one strand of this legacy. Greater still is the story that our history of faith has been witnessing, telling, and co-creating together since the beginning of time. I’m reminded that nothing depends on me, that this pressure on myself to be, do, or produce in a certain way is not only misguided, but selfish.

And yet, while nothing depends on what I do or don’t do, I am given the opportunity to weave my thread into that story’s tapestry. The stories and ideas I hope to convey through this little project will be simple in their foundation: I hope to tell of the cycles of birth, death, and new life in creation’s onward journey toward some kind of finality. Through the spiritual and physical topography of Beyond Malibu, I will explore these cycles in the journey of my own life, in the life of community, the life of creation, and in the life of the cosmos (and not just their lives, but their ensuing deaths and dramatic re-imaginings as well).

That is a rough sketch–we’ll see what actually emerges when I dive in more fully. I hope to get creative, and in my naive youthful optimism, I’m biting off way more than I can chew. So here we go!

***If you want a copy of the finished product, just enter your contact information here:

***If you’d like to learn more about the project or support it financially, visit my gofundme page here.

Cheers!

–Jonathan