Running with Candles

At Princeton Seminary we have a tradition at Christmas.  After our Carols of Many Nations Concert--which ends in a stirring rendition of Silent Night sung while holding candles--we walk out into the main quad, candles still lit, and sing carols.  This is the trickiest part of the evening.  How do you walk dressed in a long choir robe, with a candle in one hand and a program with lyrics for carols in the other?  If you dash out into the night, especially a windy night, your candle will go out (and you might trip to boot).  If you hold your candle too close to your program you may light it on fire, but then how can you see what you're supposed to be singing (especially after they've changed all the hymns to be gender-neutral and you constantly forget to sing "God Rest Ye Merry Christians All" instead of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen")?  So, you must balance, walk carefully into that good night.  You must discipline your steps and keep your eye close on the flickering flame.  

This is where I am.  I'm running with candles.  I have talents, loves, passions.  Like tiny flames they light my way.  But I've decided to run with them, and soon they will flicker out.

Now is the time where you, faithful reader, may assume that I am bragging.  And I probably am, unintentionally.  Nevertheless, I think that in quite a few ways I've scooted through life, run through it without barriers.  School has never been gut-wrenchingly difficult for me.  I've miraculously run right into Graduate school with only a smattering of A- to my name.  I've even somehow received scholarships without interviews, positions without trouble.  Almost everything has gone my way.  And yet.  And yet I feel as if because of that I'm running with candles.

I'm certainly passionate about things: about reading and writing and the people of God.  But I realize that that passion is about to be winked out of existence in the backdraft of my headlong run through life.  Put succinctly: I have no discipline.  I can pass a test by skimming texts, study for two hours when it takes others ten.  I can write a six page paper in under an hour and still get more than a passing grade.  And so I've never steeled myself to discipline.  And in the end, I've given myself the short end of the stick.

I do remember things that I've read that I love, quotes that stick in my mind, but they are vague illusory ghosts, not striking images that shape me, not strong cornerstones of thought.  I do not read as deeply as I would like.  I do not write as often.  Even as I pledged in my last post to be more reckless in not editing myself overmuch, I now have to look at myself and wonder if I don't need to simultaneously be more disciplined.

I don't want to lose these things that I love.  I don't want to fall back into doing something, living something, being something that I don't love because of expediency.  I've seen too many good friends who feel lost and adrift because they lost their grip on the things that made them passionate, the talents that they had.  Instead of nurturing them, they ran wild into the wind, and their candles, their talents, their passions burned out.  

I want to write.  I want to read deeply, to memorize passages, to think again long hours into the night.  I don't want to domesticate myself.  I want to be reckless.  But I'm finding that, in order to be reckless, I must be disciplined.  If I want to read and write every day, I must set aside time to do so.  If I want to write songs again, I must set aside time to do so.  If I want to retain my sanity and protect my tiny light from the ravaging wind of my situation and my needs and the greed and pressure and force of the world, and academia, and the media and entertainment...really the harsh, cold, bitter wind of my own faults and wayward ways...I must have discipline.

So, reading my last two posts together, is there such a thing as Reckless Discipline?  Or a Passionate Routine?

Thanks for sticking with me, faithful reader.

It's About Time

Dear Faithful Reader,

I'm sure this is what you're saying, if you're still following: "It's about time!"  It's about time that Marc blogged again.  It's about time he got back into the swing of things.

I agree with you. It's about time.  So, here's the first post of the new year.  Hopefully I'll blog more regularly this year.  Hopefully a little bit more recklessly as well.

One of the hurdles I still have yet to pass in my life as a person and as a writer is my own penchant for perfection.  I have a difficult time starting something if I can't do it correctly, can't do it fully and can't do it justice.  I've started several blog posts before now, and haven't finished them.  Then I go back to them and the moment is gone, the writing is gone, the idea and the passion are gone.

The same thing has happened to several stories that I've started and since abandoned.

I need to learn to write and to live a bit more recklessly, to throw caution and editing to the wind and to try to simply produce.

I know that I can edit what I write.  I actually enjoy editing, making the words tighter, the meanings more dense.  So, I need to produce.  Produce, produce, produce.  Write, write, write.  Then edit.  I need to finish something, then perfect it later.  

In blogging, I need to just finish something.  I need to just put something out there.  So, here's a start to a new year, a new season of blogging.  Hey wind! Here's my caution.  Take it and run with it.

Thanks for sticking with me, faithful reader.

The Margins

Some thoughts after class and a few other things that have been swirling around in my head.

Hebrews 11: 13-16 “All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, or people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them."

I have found myself to be a man on the margins, a member of a small minority taken from a large majority, on a sojourn in a foreign land. I am an Asian man, a minority in the United States, only 4.2% according to the latest census. Yet, considering the whole world, Asian people are in the majority, they are the largest growing group. India and China alone make up almost 1/3 of the world’s population. I am a member of a small minority, taken from a large majority, on a sojourn in a foreign land. While I was living in Salt Lake City, UT, I was in the minority as a Christian. The majority of people in Salt Lake are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Yet, considering the United States as a whole, Christians are in the majority (at least for now). I am a member of a small minority, taken from a large majority, on a sojourn in a foreign land.

Because of this I find great comfort in the affirmation that our God chooses the least and the lost, the outcast, the marginalized and the outsider. God chose a small nation, beaten down by many, the slave and servant and vassal state of a rotating who’s who of nations – Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Greece, Rome – to be the purveyors of glory and salvation and the word of God. God chose to come as a Jewish man from the backwards town of Nazareth (“what good could ever come from there?” Philip asks). God chose fishermen and tax collectors and sinners and lepers as friends and disciples. Christianity, lest we forget, was once the minority. Christianity, lest we forget, was once persecuted because it was not tied to any national identity, because it was a kingdom not of this world.

In fact, I believe that this has been one of Christianity's core problems. Once Christianity became THE state religion, the majority, the world power, things went utterly wrong with it. The Inquisition, the Crusades, Slavery – absolute power corrupting absolutely. The Church is not free from corruption. As much as this may sound un-American (come on, McCarthy) I can't wait for the day when Christianity is no longer the dominant religion in America. It scares me how Christians like James Dobson and his group Focus on the Family can put out letters like this.

Although the writer of this letter insists that Christians should not hope for persecution or for these things to happen, I say: BRING IT ON. I want to remember what it was like to be a child of a God of outcasts, members of a kingdom not of this world, sojourners looking for a better home.

So that is why, for me, the lyrics of a modern-day prophet hit so hard and so true:

A King and a Kingdom
Derek Webb
Appears on: Mockingbird

Who’s your brother, who’s your sister
You just walked past him, I think you missed her
As we’re all migrating to a place where our Father lives
‘Cause we married into a family of immigrants

[Chorus]
So my first allegiance is not to a flag, a country or a man

My first allegiance is not to democracy or blood

It’s to a King and a Kingdom

There are two great lies that I’ve heard

The day you eat of the fruit of that tree you will not surely die
And that Jesus Christ was a white, middle class Republican
And if you wanna be saved you have to learn to be like him

How can we realize that we are part of a family of immigrants, part of Abraham’s family who left home, part of the Israelites who traversed the desert, part of all of those wanderers who never saw the things that they had been promised? How can we reclaim our identity as a wandering people, as sojourners in a foreign land, children of a God who is the God of the outcast, co-heirs of a kingdom not of this world?

Also...

Odd thing, my last post lists the day I began to write it, not the day it was posted.  I wonder if I can change that.  Anyway, faithful reader, I hope that you will also notice that I added a little "widget" to my "about this blog" section.  It's a calculator of a program that I'm working through right now called National Novel Writing Month, or nanowrimo for short.  Basically, it involves writing as much as you can in the month of November, hopefully enough for a 50,ooo word (175 page) novel.  The writing is straight from the hip, no editing, just writing, writing, writing.  I am doing this with the intent to break my habit of over-editing as I write, and to help me to discipline myself to writing more.  As you can see, on day one I did not accomplish much, but I am going to keep trying, going to keep writing.  So, you can follow my progress!

If you want to learn more about nanowrimo, just go to www.nanowrimo.org.

Thanks again, faithful reader!

Poetry Series: Part 1 of 11 - The Collector

Greetings faithful reader.  I apologize for my long absence, time has not been my friend (see the poem below)!  Also, I started this post almost two weeks ago, and only finished it now.  I have three posts 3/4 composed, waiting to be finished and published.  So, finally, here's one.  Hopefully the other ones will be posted soon.  

I hope that you are well.  I'd like to move back in this blog to some thoughts on writing.  In fact, I'd like to present a miniature series of poems.

I'm taking a class right now entitled Writing as Faith Practice.  One of our requirements is to write three pieces, two of which can be academic papers, and one of which must be creative.  Or, we could simply write three creative pieces (which is the option I chose).  I started out this bold endeavor in my favorite realm: the short story.  Unfortunately, after a few weeks of writing nothing solid was coming on a story.  So I decided to try my hand at poetry.  What came out was a series of eleven acrostic poems, using favorites quotes from the Bible as the spine of each poem.  The poems are named after either the writer of the quote, the person speaking the quote, or the person about whom the quote was written.  I'll present each of them here, in the order that I wrote them, and then discuss the writing process below.  I hope you enjoy.

The Collector

Even eternity used to seem small,

Tucked in my heart like a toddler in my arms,

Eyelids drooping, breath running slow,

Resting its rosy cheek in the crook of my chest.

Now I wonder if my fear of the unknown is lack of love,

If infinity is rendered harmless when you hug it like a child.

Time marches like a two-year-old trying to run,

Yielding to the gravity of my mind.

I used to gasp when it fell down hard;

Now I know it's more resilient than I am to its changing.

The truth of the matter is I don't understand

How it works; I stand in wonder of it, winded by its

Embrace as it rushes to hug me 'round my hips.

Helpless, I watch it grow, coming slowly to understand that

Eventually I'll have to let it go.  I'm

An unwilling parent of an unruly child,

Remembering the good old days when it used to

Take my hand as we walked together and

Squeeze it tight.

Or maybe I'm the child, the prodigal son of

Father Time, running from home with my inheritance.

Maybe eternity waits with a fatted calf, arms outstretched to

Embrace me.  And maybe, instead of holding it tight, I

Need to rest in its arms and let it rock me to sleep.

Now, this acrostic comes from one of my favorite lines in the book of Ecclesiastes: "I have seen the burden God has laid on men.  he has made everything beautiful in its time.  He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." - Eccl. 3:10-11  This passage, by the way, comes right after the long litany made famous by the Byrds: "A time to be born; a time to die..." etc.  If you've never heard the song before:

The reason I love this passage is that it says, yes, there is a time for all of these things, for even death and war, but that these things, too, will pass away and that everything will be made beautiful in its time.  God has, therefore, set eternity in our hearts, has given us a hope beyond ourselves, beyond our understanding.  Derek Webb put this whole passage into song much better than I think I ever could in poem:

This Too Shall Be Made Right
Derek Webb

Appears on: The Ringing Bell

Lyrics:

people love you the most for the things you hate
and hate you for loving the things that you cannot keep straight
people judge you on a curve
and tell you you’re getting what you deserve
this too shall be made right

children cannot learn when children cannot eat
stack them like lumber when children cannot sleep
children dream of wishing wells
whose waters quench all the fires of Hell
this too shall be made right

the earth and the sky and the sea are all holding their breath
wars and abuses have nature groaning with death
we say we’re just trying to stay alive
but it looks so much more like a way to die
this too shall be made right

there’s a time for peace and there is a time for war
a time to forgive and a time to settle the score
a time for babies to lose their lives
a time for hunger and genocide
this too shall be made right

I don’t know the suffering of people outside my front door
I join the oppressors of those who i choose to ignore
I’m trading comfort for human life
and that’s not just murder it’s suicide
this too shall be made right

Also whistling around in my head while I wrote this poem was a quote from one of my favorite old-timey theologians: St. Augustine: "You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." from Augustine's Confessions.

The idea of comparing time to a child came to me through the idea of having something tucked into our hearts, even something like eternity.  How can something that large fit into something so small?  A mystery.  And a welcome one.

Blessings to you, dear faithful reader.