Gilead's Balm

Sometimes we come suddenly face-to-face with our own brokenness, and it's as though we could feel its seams like the raised skin of a scar beneath our fingertips, and we are only too aware that we cannot heal ourselves.

There is a song that I like for such days. 

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole.

Sometimes I get discouraged

And feel my hope's in vain.

But then the Holy Spirit

Revives my soul again.

There is a balm in Gilead

To heal the sin-sick soul.

There is a balm in Gilead

To make the wounded whole.

If you can't preach like Peter,

If you can't pray like Paul,

Just tell the love of Jesus

And that He died for all.

A Poem Written Long Ago in a Legal Pad on an Occasion I No Longer Remember

Mantengo mi silencio come la nieve
Que cierra las montañas
Una belleza escondida, tranquila, olvidada
La belleza de monjas rezando
Es mi silencio
Mi silencio una pregunta, una duda, un pacto
Esperando
Mi silencio mantengo

(I keep my silence like the snow
That closes the mountains
A beauty hidden, still, forgotten
The beauty of nuns at prayer
Is my silence
My silence, a question, a doubt, a covenant
Waiting
I keep my silence.)

In Defense of Fake Cheese

I believe that Kraft macaroni ‘n cheese is good for you – or, at least, it’s not going to kill you tomorrow. Here’s why: I have two sisters, and when we were growing up, my mom sustained us on a relativelt healthy diet, punctuated with our favorite stop-gaps: Bisquick pancakes, beef-flavored Top Ramen, and, yes, Kraft macaroni ‘n cheese. I still remember the royal blue cardboard box. The noodles, innocuous enough, had a semolina base. To the boiled noodles you added milk and butter, but the true magic lay in the cheese packet. You ripped open the package with your teeth, and out came a clump of powder glorious to behold, better to taste. God only knows what the fine folks at Kraft put in their fake cheese (fire hydrant paint, from the color of it). Whatever plants or animals it came from originally, upon consumption it was processed, hydrogenated, and emulsified into a vegan’s nightmare. Paradise on a plate. Julia Childs it wasn’t, but it filled me up, and the preparation was simple enough for me to slay my third-grader hunger until dinner time.
Many would gainsay me, among them, presumably, the designers of the food pyramid and legions of parents. I see their point. I’ve downed my share of square meals, and I like it when my food has ingredients I can pronounce. Obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are massive health care concerns, and they must be addressed with improvements to our overall lifestyles. But I think, sometimes and in some places, we’ve gone over the edge. I have seen juice cups wrested from the hands of babes. I encounter parents in the aisles of the supermarket, angst-ridden over the choice between seven-grain Kashi crackers and organic carrot sticks. Don’t we have enough to feel guilty over? Aren’t their enough menaces to truth, justice, and the American way with finding them in the peanut butter jar?
My sisters and I have grown into intelligent, active, cancer-free adults. The occasional enjoyment of fake cheese did not permanently stunt our development, but we might well stunt the rising generation in more grievous ways if we expend our energy on minor battles instead of major challenges. A warming planet will kill us. Multi-resistant TB will kill us. Wars of religion and ideology and oil will kill us. Give the mac ‘n cheese a break.

Cute or Stupid?

Every now and then, I walk up to one of my female friends  and ask, "Cute or stupid?" 

It began as a habit with my sisters. I like to play around with my clothes, my make-up, my hair. Try new ensembles. California is kind to that sort of thing, I suppose, but my judgment in fashion is far from impeccable, so I often approached either of my sisters - both far beyond me in taste, and asked, "Is this cute or stupid?" Had I gone beyond the bounds of good taste? Would the soccer moms tsk-tsk me in the produce section? Would the cheerleaders turn their upturned noses up further than normal? I did it often enough that I could barge into either of their bedrooms and announce, "I need a cute-or-stupid check," to get a final verdict on my way out the door. I could trust them. They loved me; they would not ridicule me, but neither would they, for the mere sake of my feelings, let me walk out the door looking like a train-wreck.

("Almost a month without a blog," you protest, "and this is what we get? The cute-or-stupid checks?" Bear with me, gentle reader. I promise I'm going somewhere.)

A week ago, I spent three days in the woods near Goshen, Virginia for the annual IJM staff retreat. I went for long runs on the misty mornings through stands of pine that favor the sandy soil. I went to bed tired and achy, halfway toasted from a bonfire, hoarse from singing the choruses to songs written before I was born. I slept out under Orion and the Seven Sisters and woke up cold and covered in dew. That was all better than good, but it was not the best.

Every year, IJM studies a spiritual discipline. This year's theme is rest. It's self-consciously ironic; you'd be hard pressed, on any given Monday, to find a more hard-core group of Type-A personalities congregated under a single roof than the staff of International Justice Mission. But, irony acknowledged, we went out of the city for three days, reading and praying and singing about the Fourth Commandment and its application to our complex and demanding existence.

Much of the talking centered around the rhythm of Sabbath. Every seven days, God says, stop what you are doing. Take off your yoke, acknowledge me, and just do nothing. Why seven? It seems arbitrary. 

Mark Labberton, the senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, was our guest speaker for the retreat. Mark suggested that the length of time was indeed arbitrary, but that the arbitrariness itself was significant. "God puts us on a leash. I don't think we can go any longer," Mark mused, "before we start to forget which one of us is God, and which of us is not."

I came away with many new truths to cobble into my daily life, but this one has been particularly resurgent. The sabbath is not just a cessation of work, nor a mere dutiful, religious observance. Like my silly cute-or-stupid checks, the sabbath is a reality check. Sabbath is an invitation to remember that I am human - neither more nor less. 

I am not God; therefore, if I stop working, the world will go on spinning. And though I am not God, I am still God's; therefore, I have the responsibility to be no less than what I was made to be, "a little lower than the angels." The life I lead I live not for my own gain, or for ends beneath my heavenward calling, but for His pleasure and glory. If I can, every seven days, remember these things, I am markedly less likely to get myself in a fix. I can focus on being fully and merely a creature of God, with all the glory and blissful smallness that entails. 

Sabbath is, in these respects, like looking into the loving eyes of my sisters and saying, "How am I doing? Is this working? Have I gone beyond myself again?" It's just that here, the stakes are far higher. 

Whirlwind

No tomes today.

My IJM mornings begin with thirty minutes of quiet reflection called "8:30 Stillness", thirty minutes in which my prescribed responsibility in the universe is to be quiet before my God. It's as good as it sounds to you.

This morning I spent them leaning over the bannister on an outdoor staircase that leads up to the esplanade. Looking at the sky and the minute people walking below me, I heard the papery chattering of leaves on concrete. I mounted the last flight of stairs to have a look. There, in the corner, was a little wind devil, scudding dead leaves before it in a mad, if harmless, wheel. But in the center were a few leaves unmoving, as still as if the chaos did not exist.

The word for this morning was that I can be like that, centered on my God, still, at ease, though the whirlwind comes and encircles me. Perfect peace is possible where it seems least likely to exist.

My Desk

An old man from Pakistan
Has been staring at me these eight years
Never blinking
Since I put his eyes down in ink
That smelled like a carpet store
And a Crayola red rose
Curls out of a Mason jar
Like a trap-door spider from its hole
Surprising in the veined velvet softness of its petals,
The clock ticks
And I do not hear it
Like I do not hear my breathing
It is one eternal second off
And at my fingers’ touch
I have
A brick made by the hands of a free man
And a crystal perfume bottle from Paris
That keeps winking purple
And a piece of silk sewn
By a girl with almond eyes
Sold to strange merchants in her childhood
And Edmond Dantes, Suffering
And Holly Golightly, Traveling

Under Heaven

There is evil in the world – cruel, brazen, mocking evil in the world. You can stop your ears. You can avert your eyes. You can fortify your life like a medieval castle, complete with moats and turrets, against the day that evil finds you where you live. You can box it up in neat philosophies and tie it with a bow of flawless exegesis. You can sleepily forget that it exists, even for years at a time . . .

But for all that, evil will not suddenly become less real, less aggressive – not to the child sold into a brothel before she can spell her name, not to the homeless man beaten for the amusement of teenagers in an American city, not to the Sudanese woman who bears the child of a systematic rape campaign.

If I have shocked your sensibilities, you who come here for your dose of lyrical prose, I am not sorry. It is midnight, I have turned the lights on, and around the world there are some two million children whose dignity goes for the price of a steak dinner. Tonight I have five of them stuck in my head (the five are somehow less bearable than the two million), so let me for at least five minutes refuse to look away from them.

Evil demands response. It will either run us over or rouse us to combat.

What shall be done?

It is one of the great advantages of Christianity that it takes the reality of evil as its starting place. Pure wickedness, and nothing else, necessitated the work of the cross. Christianity is thus well-reconciled to the accumulated life experience of most people under heaven. This faith becomes more difficult to understand, though, because it does not stop with recognition. It charges ahead with its lovely, terrifying images of the kingdom of God: days of judgment, the drying of all tears, heaven and earth remade without the blot of an accursed rebellion.

Indeed, it goes too far. It strains credulity. Two millennia later, where is the promise? Do the prophets of that kingdom live where the poor live? Do they walk in the Managua trash dumps, the Freetown slums, the Burmese refugee camps? Do they read the same newspaper? Surely they are fools are dreamers all to proclaim that the unjust execution of an itinerant Jewish teacher and miracle worker – a minor act in the history of the world’s gross excesses – will make everything good as Eden again. Evil doesn’t just linger with us; it laughs, it romps. By all appearances, it reigns.

What shall be done?

I have wept at evil. I have wept because it mocks the goodness and glory of my Maker. It treads His name in the gutter.
I have raged blindly at evil. I have raged because it praises the perverse and lays snares for the sacred.
I have sat frozen in the paralysis of despair. I have sat frozen because the weak cried out and the righteous faltered.

What shall be done?

The ancient Scriptures are not silent concerning the reality of evil. Nor are they silent about the end of evil, and how that evil shall be ended. The answer has two parts: “Take heart! I have overcome the world,” says Jesus, the Word whose words are life to us. In His coming, His atonement, His resurrection, He has overcome the resident evil. He has knocked over the first domino. He has sung the first verse of a new and brilliant music. But there is a second part.

“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” This is our mandate, our portion. We are to take up arms against evil, and our arms shall be the same as Christ’s, who wielded both authority and humility, truth and compassion, power and the obedient sacrifice of His will entire will and being.

What shall be done?

I dare you (as I, trembling, dare myself) to let yourself be re-arranged by two realities – the reality of evil and the reality of our responsibility to address it. If you call yourself Christ’s, this is not an additional feature - it is the very substance of the life of redeemed creatures. The answers we find are unlikely to seem rational, reasonable, or sufficiently moderated. But they will have the smell about them of things that are right. And sometimes in this world of unvarying gray, we still have to choose.

Am I ranting more than usual? Undoubtedly.
Am I over-simplifying? Almost certainly.
Am I wrong? I must own the possibility.

But this, God willing and God aiding, is what I shall do.