I HAVE been thinking about this a bit more, especially in the context of what I believe Jesus’ gospel is: The Kingdom of God is at Hand; in other words, God is directly accessible to us. I’m also thinking about something else that I heard a lot from a teacher back home, which is that my relationship with God is something only I can have with God. With both thoughts, it’s interesting to factor in the idea of interacting with people who are hurting and unaware of how accessible God is, unaware of the peace and love available to them if they want it. Our job would be to “point them towards God,” somehow and I think we, embedded in our culture, look for shortcuts or formulas to make this job easier.
When I think of your ministry at Servant Partners, though, or what I know of it–the idea of living among people in order to show them Jesus, first by learning their language, next by taking care of their children, praying with them, going to the temple with them (I am thinking of Lexie’s post from a while back that totally kicked my ass), I’m really, I don’t know, grateful to know about it? Encouraged.  I suppose there is good strategy and bad strategy and living among the people you want to introduce to God seems pretty great.  It seems as though if you were talking and listening and living with those you were ministering to, you’d have a hard time thinking you could rely on a formulaic approach to God.   The anecdote of marketing might be just what I see happening in your community: getting to know people well, forgiving them, offering them peace, interacting with them the way Jesus said.

Maybe the trouble with marketing strategies is that they are so impersonal.  Or maybe, if we want to flip this thing around, we could see Jesus using a strategy that is personal.  We see that he doesn’t have formulas when it comes to healing people (his healing methods vary, as do the methods of talking to people one-on-one.  He’s all over the map), but when speaking to the masses, the strategy is to tell a ton of stories that force his listeners to seek God and ask questions.  His goal is to bring them to God out of the masses so that they can be consumed by his love.  He doesn’t want to give us five steps that are easy to remember because he likes it when we need to return to him to ask for a reminder of what to do next.

ALSO:

I just read Home and Gilead last semester. Wonderful, wonderful books.  I wish you could meet Lisa, who introduced them to me.  Which book did you like better?

ALSO:

I miss BKK a lot, too, though the fact that we have good pineapple in Florida does help with the sadness part.

Right now I am thinking a lot about this Moth Podcast I heard about a woman who left her church and Mary Kay at the same time because she was tired of looking at people as “lost sheep”.  That wasn’t her quote, but that was the essence.   She was on the “core executive” committee for her church because she was so good at selling things.  She decided to step down (and move to NY) when she heard her pastor say that they needed a five step plan, or something, about salvation with five words to help people remember it.  And, he said, all of the steps had to begin with the same letter.  This sickened her, as it did me, and made her leave the church.

I’m scared of  marketing infiltrating into faith communities, I will admit.  It sickens me.  The idea of manipulating people to follow Jesus with a good marketing strategy seems about as evil as it gets.  It presents Jesus’s love as something to be consumed, rather than something that should consume us.  And I do believe love should consume us.

Look at his life.  He didn’t use marketing strategies.  He just taught what he knew about God.  Sometimes it drew people to him.  Sometimes it turned them away.  Jesus never turned people away, but sometimes he said things that made people throw up their hands and turn around.   His goal, clearly, is not to attract masses but to teach about God.  What do we make of that?

I’m really asking myself.  What do I make of that?  There’s a feeling I get from capitalism: obligation.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing by itself, I suppose.   I don’t want people to feel obligated to believe what I believe or worship where I worship, the way I worship, etc.  Whenever someone does something for me and I can tell they feel an obligation, it makes me uncomfortable.

I’m not writing with answers here.  I’m trying to work this out.

About six weeks ago, I confronted him about the work he hadn’t turned in and he told me that he’s going to try to catch up, but he’s been hit with some major family problems.  This is a common excuse, I know, but something in his tone made me trust him.  Just try and believe me when I say I could tell something serious was going on.  I told him he can start working now and catch up and he said he would.

He kept coming to class but his performance didn’t change, so today I conferenced with him and showed him the rubric and what he’d need to do in three short weeks in order to pass (that is, get a C, since our department sees D as standing for Do-over in this particular course).  Again, he said he was going to pull it together before the end of the semester.  I don’t know if he will.

My thoughts were angry as I prepared to meet with him but when he sat across from me at the table in the coffee shop where I held conferences (and office hours, since my office is in a scary basement that I don’t want my students to know exists), I realized that I was really rooting for him.  I really wanted him to succeed.

What I realized was that in my personal pedagogy, it’s important that I stay on the side of the student, especially when that student seems to have the world against him.  Everybody else might dismiss him, but I won’t.  It’s perhaps too generous of an approach, and I do have my hesitancies, but it feels like the right perspective.

We have that saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”  I see that statement as also a call to responsibility.  Whatever the case may be, my job as a teacher is to be leading my students to water.  I think this is my job as a human being, too.  It’s about trying to live life with a generous spirit (some people call it “benefit of the doubt”).  It’s really tempting to pit myself against people and lead them to the desert because they’ve pissed me off, but especially in the case of teaching, I can’t take behavior too personally. I want to just assume that everyone, in one way or another, is thirsty.

This mini-essay came out of a writing exercise (the first one in “The Practice of Poetry,” edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell).   It’s a collection of exercises written by poets.  The first one is from Ann Lauterbach and she just says to write about an early experience with words.    She says the purpose is to “trigger your initial experience with language” (3), and to link experiences with reading and writing.  I did the prompt and thought it was something worth archiving in my blog. I may keep working with it and better shape it–polish it, but here it is in its rough form. Also, I may have written something like this on the blog before because it’s a memory I come back to a lot. Whatever. Enjoy.

Each Sunday my parents took me to a meeting with their Christian fellowship. We met in an elementary school.  I was younger than six and too young, at least for me, to wonder what was the function of the room when it was not used for the Sunday meeting.  The room was simply where we went on Sundays before I went off to Sunday school; it was the place where I must sit still and endure three songs, sharing, and a prayer.  I recall a brown carpet, folding chairs.  The room was narrow and there was a hallway with a staircase nearby.  Sunday School was up these stairs and in another room that was small and also brown and had lots of bookshelves.  I was too young to wonder what kinds of books these were and I don’t know if I was old enough to read.  This is the very fact that makes me think that in this memory I was too young to read.  If I could, I would have been more interested in the books because I am pretty sure I have been obsessed with books since I knew how to use them.

Our church was never called church but called “fellowship” and our services were never called services but “meetings”, which now strikes me as a bit cult-like, but really, the gesture was meant well; the grown ups did not want to align themselves with the unattractive aspects of how Christianity had evolved over the years.

We began each meeting with singing; these songs were not planned out beforehand but requested on the spot from fellowship people.  In other words, we sang what other people felt like singing. It was democratic. We used a songbook somebody in the fellowship put together by numbering songs and sticking them in a folder with a table of contents.  (These folders were definitely brown, though the other brown details I am unsure of.  It could be that because these folders were brown that I see this entire memory in different shades of brown).  The lyrics were typed on an old type writer and I believe ridden with typos, though I didn’t notice this yet because, again, I couldn’t read.  Most of the songs were hymns, popular hippie christian songs (a crust of bread in a house of peace is worth much more than the finest feast), or songs people in the congregation wrote.  My mother had a song in this book that I would hear many times before I knew it was hers.

So, we were singing.  It was right before my father prayed for the kids to go off to Sunday school–or as I later joked, “prayed the kids out of there”–and one of the songs, called “Yahweh,” had an eerie tune.  I took interest in darkness even as a toddler and I tended to prefer songs set in a minor key.  I still prefer them.  In the song we sang, “Though I walk through the fire, I will not be scorched or burned.” I realized what the song was saying and thought about them somewhere along the lines of: whoa. shit.

I was sitting next to my Sunday school teacher, Claudine (a Swiss woman who was the mother of my best friend at the time), and I asked her what those words meant.  Why was the speaker of the song walking through fire (and the sea in an earlier verse)?  Wasn’t that dangerous?  She asked me to bring it up in Sunday School.

I don’t remember what Claudine said about it to the other children.  Undoubtedly, something about God’s protection. I don’t remember who else was in that room or what the other children said.   I probably said a lot.  I talked a lot then in class as I do now.  All I can remember is that I understood that the fire in the song was not a literal fire.  I think this was my first time understanding that language can be figurative, that language can have layers, that it can be used in different ways to connect to people.  In this case, an image: walking through fire unscathed.

Thank you for sending us “What You Are Doing on This Side of Town”. There are a lot of positive things happening in “What You Are Doing On This Side Of Town” that make it an interesting read. However, we don’t think it is quite ready for publishing yet–there are issues with the use of the 2nd person. We understand the why behind it–it helps to immerse the reader in an unknown world. But you run into logic problems like on page 1: “You don’t know that he is Cambodian and lost his limbs while crossing landmines to reach the Thai border.” The “you” voice isn’t a narrator-on-high (and isn’t for much of the story). So either “you” know this, or it can’t be present. The same problem shows up in the next graph when “You don’t understand the vendor” after the author writes what he said and again on page 4 when, after receiving directions that are in the story, the author writes “And you thank him, pretending you understood every word.

While this particular piece isn’t quite what we’re looking for, we were very impressed by your writing. We hope you will feel encouraged by this short note and send ****** something else in the near future.

We look forward to reading more.

Sincerely,

(Editor)

I feel like I should also note that I’ve sent this story to about 60 places. I’ve revised it at least seven times.  (Three major revisions and lots and lots of polishing.)  I don’t know why I feel so dedicated to this thing–it’s not the best I’ve written, but I think I’m trying to prove something to myself about how stubborn I can be?  I don’t know.  I wonder how many writers have a similar experience.

Need:  (I eyeballed all of these, but I’ll try to give measurements)

collard greens–about a 1/4 cup? Chop em up real small

1/4 small white onion: I chopped it so there were small strips of onion, not diced.  Dicing would probably be fine, though.

chives.  As many as you want.  I used about 2 stalks.

goat cheese-two tablespoons?

mushrooms-I used about 10, diced

some cayenne pepper- to taste

some white pepper-small amount–maybe a shake

salt-to taste

honey-let’s say a teaspoon

diced tomato: i like roma tomatoes and used one.

cream

3 eggs per omelet

3 cloves of garlic

butter (I used unsalted).

1. Sautee (as much as you want–enough to make the omelet filling) onion, (I used half a small one),  mushrooms, a little bit of cayenne pepper.  add some salt. drizzle some honey (not too much).

Let the onions caramelize and then add collard greens and

garlic.  When the collards are mostly soft, put all of this aside.

2. In a separate bowl, mix: 3 eggs per omelet, a shake of white pepper (it’s easy to put too much of this), a shake of salt, and a little bit of cream.  Beat together.

Now, make the omelet.  For those who aren’t sure how:

3. put a tablespoon of butter on the skillet and once it bubbles away, add the egg so it blankets it.

wait until you can stick a spatula beneath the egg to put, in the center:

diced tomatoes

goat cheese

your collard/onion mixture

chives

4. when the egg is all the way cooked, fold it over, let it cook like 5 more seconds and slide it on a plate.

Sorry there are no pictures!  This website helped me:

http://www.ehow.com/how_13824_make-basic-omelet.html

NOTE: I like collards more than spinach, so I use them a lot in this sort of dish.

Haven’t done one of these in a while.  It’s late.  I need sleep. But… Oh Well.

Reading:  Collected Works of Raymond Carver and a bunch of Wordsworth poems for classes; listening to “Home” by Marilynne Robinson on audiobook while I clean dishes.

Listening to:  audio books (see above).  I just finished Gilead this week, also.  I’ve been listening to podcasts of an NPR show called Being (formerly Speaking of Faith) and this morning I shook it to James Brown.

Writing:  poems and stories for workshop

Teaching: Freshman Comp (1102) about how to write research papers. Woo.

Eating:  Beans and rice.  Gourmet beans and rice.  Also, I’ve been drizzling goat cheese with honey and almonds and baking it for 5 mins.  It’s so good.  It’s a miracle.  Eat it with bread or apples, crackers–you’ll be glad you did.

Watching: Madmen.  Just finished the second season.

Needing: to be writing more.  I don’t write enough.

Buying:  the bare necessities.

Enjoying: Tallahassee folk, catching up with new and old friends, my apartment, which is cute and clean since I’ve been here.

Cursing: my tendency to get discouraged about my writing.  to write for workshop rather than the enjoyment of it.

Thankful for:  the opportunity to keep studying. my students,  who have been fun this semester.  new friends.  the church i’ve been attending here, (Called E3)

Should be:  sleep.  going for more walks.

Shouldn’t be: on the internet but hey! I’m almost done so I might as well finish it.

In the habit of saying:  crude and shocking words.

Missing: Thailand, Detroit, family

Anticipating: turning in my story on wednesday.  and my essay on Carver due the same day. the next season of Madmen. my next trip to Bangkok (December, y’all!)  My next trip to Detroit (Thanksgiving! Even sooner!)

Anyone using “but it really happened like that” as a defense for shoddy, unconvincing fiction should enter journalism. They’ll love you.

I like this workshop already.

The book isn’t long and it moved really quickly, except when I would stop to underline something really interesting I thought it was saying about perspective and storytelling, which seem to be my two favorite subjects to read about these days.
There’s also some nice things going on about race and gender, which are also my favorite subjects to read about.

*The book is a retelling, sort of, of the Robinson Crusoe story.

And you say to yourself just what am I doin’
On this road I’m walkin’, on this trail I’m turnin’
On this curve I’m hanging
On this pathway I’m strolling, in the space I’m talking
In this air I’m inhaling
Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard
Why am I walking, where am I running
What am I saying, what am I knowing
On this guitar I’m playing, on this banjo I’m frailin’
On this mandolin I’m strummin’, in the song I’m singin’
In the tune I’m hummin’, in the words I’m writin’
In the words that I’m thinkin’
In this ocean of hours I’m all the time drinkin’
Who am I helping, what am I breaking
What am I giving, what am I taking?

~Bob Dylan, “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie”

My friend recently exposed me to Dylan’s poem and that quote in particular captures how I feel this week–transitioning from one place (school and degree) to the next.   Especially the last two lines.