TheLionRampant.net

As you all know, the G8 Summit is being held here in Scotland and while we were away we missed the opportunity to march in the Make Poverty History protest which was intended to communicate to the world’s most powerful leaders that we supported a full relief of aid-associated debt and that they had the opportunity to actually make poverty history, especially in poor African countries. You also are aware of the recent terrorist attacks in London. Tony Blair flew down from the G8 Summit in Gleneagles to London to make a statement in words which sounded a whole lot like Bush’s speeches after 9/11 — vagueries about freedom and not letting terrorists prevail. I imagine the vagueries are really all that is rhetorically possible, when the government isn’t even sure who or how this happened and has no way to stopping suicide bombings as it deviates from conventional warfare. It does make me think if the world is headed for some WWIII of video game warfare without any recognisable fronts or fighting. But I digress.

We were having a discussion with the Hays last night about fair trade coffee and the ridiculousness of Starbucks having a fair trade option to chose from; as we agreed, if you’re serious about fair trade issues, than make all your coffee fair trade, not just having one option so you appear socially aware and responsible. With the Make Poverty History campaign, I do wonder how much of our ecological-friendly or fair trade buying habits are simply now reactionary, where we are paper dolls who happen to put on the fair trade outfit over our naked selves because it’s what’s the new hip now. And I’m as guilty as the rest. I admit I proudly wore my “Make Poverty History” white band during the conference in Greece and felt pretty cool wearing it, which is completely inane. Buying free range or fair trade has become yet another gold star on my “do-good” chart. Granted, I do think it is our responsibility, indeed a necessity, to buy free range and fair trade products not just because it’s the politically saavy thing to do, but because as Christians we have a responsibility to care for the very least of these — (Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you”; how much do we take this to heart?) which includes seeking to reward business practices that put global ethical responsibility above their aspirations for a huge profit margin.

This, like all “good deeds”, is but filthy rags, a slick new piece of paper which hides our nakedness underneath. We are at bottom sinners, whether this is manifested in deviance or whitewashed moralism. If Christ alone is Truth, as we believe as Christians, than our lives need to emulate this Truth — not because it’s the “right” or “moral” or “proper” thing to do, but because as we are transformed into Christ’s likeness, our lives in turn (including our buying habits) need to be transformed. It’s time we got specific and didn’t settle for pat answers, emotional rhetoric from politicians, or buying fair trade because it makes us feel good about ourselves. If you’re a Christian, you are called to pick up your cross and deny yourself. That may mean not eating meat because of factory farming — or at least buying free range chicken. That may mean you sacrifice your time, money and reputation so that others can have more than you. That may mean you live in a small house so that you can give more of your income to the poor around you or those who do not even have running water or enough food for today. That may mean researching where your food comes from and who sources it so that you are making decisions for more than your immediate desires for brand name washing up liquid. Christianity has never been about being comfortable or following rules. It has always been about Jesus, Jesus who gave himself up for us who never could deserve it. I imagine I shall return again to this topic and so will provide some links to research I’ve found then. For now, I leave you with a portion of a Derek Webb song.

i repent, i repent of my pursuit of america’s dream
i repent, i repent of living like i deserve anything
of my house, my fence, my kids, my wife
in our suburb where we’re safe and white
i am wrong and of these things i repent

i repent, i repent of parading my liberty
i repent. i repent of paying for what i get for free
and for the way i believe that i am living right
by trading sins for others that are easier to hide
i am wrong and of these things i repent

First off, Thessaloniki.

We took the Megabus down to London overnight to make our morning flight to Greece. I don’t recommend the bus for long journeys, yet when it’s 36 pounds from Edinburgh to London (for two) return, I really can’t complain. I can however, complain about Mr Bus-Enforcer-I-have-a-little-power-and-I’m-running-with-it who made a girl cry thinking there wasn’t going to be enough room on the bus. We arrived in Thessaloniki, Greece, with little event on the 28th of June; don’t worry they didn’t want to take me in to the police station this time. Since the conference didn’t start until the evening of the 30th, we spent our first day familairising ourselves with the city, trying to stay cool amidst the heat, and reading by the pool. We found a yummy restaurant right off the main square and I tried some retsina (a white wine aged in cedar casks and so tastes slightly sweet) based on Neyir’s recommendation. All was fine and dandy until they wouldn’t leave and kept bringing us more and more retsina! Needless to say, I had my retsina fix for the week.

Bryce wandered around the city, did a bunch of reading, and visited some Greek Orthodox churches. We also climbed the White Tower — a sort of Thessalonikian iconic image. It’s part of the ancient (13th c) Roman walls and has been camoflauged during WWII, whitewashed by the Turks and when Thessaloniki was freed from Turkish rule back in 1913, it became a symbol of the people’s solidarity. We also climbed up a few hills to see what was left of the “Turkish quarter”, which was mainly little lanes and houses from the 19th c and which were much more picturesque than the rest of the city. I’ll let Bryce tell you more about his wanderings if he feels so inclined.

The conference was great. I met lots of academics who were all very interesting and surprisingly easy to talk to. One guy brought his parents, next to whom we sat at dinner. It was great to hear his mother yelling (as her husband is a bit hard of hearing) to her husband and son about the Tunisian eggplant on the menu and her son, stopping his literary conversation to kindly tell his mother it could be found on page 3. I gave my paper on 1 July in the evening. The room was very packed — probably 50 or so people. I do need to work on my delivery skills and remember to bring my water glass to the podium, but the paper went very well. I received a few good questions and one of which (according to my supervisor who was also at the conference) was “more or less idiocy”. A number of people told me how much they enjoyed the paper and one man who is on the advisory board for the journal told me he thinks I should submit it for publication, which is very encouraging and also, means a bunch more work for this summer.

We flew back to London on the 4th of July and stayed overnight with my parents’ friends before taking the bus back to Edinburgh. The following morning, we got the keys to our new flat and began the move-in process. Neyir kindly took off work and helped Bryce paint our living room from the baby-poo yellow to what we like to call Wedgewood blue, while I cleaned the flat and scrubed windowsills. We’re still unpacking but we’re mostly there. Tomorrow, the Crocketts (Bryce’s sis and fam) are coming to spend the weekend with us which will be great fun. I hope the sunny weather holds. We should be back into the blogging game by next week. Pictures coming soon as well.

We’re back, we’ve moved, and we’re almost unpacked. Details coming soon.

Every fortnight Manders, Laura and I will be reviewing a section from Marilynne Robinson’s second and Pultizer Prize winning novel, Gilead, which you can buy here. Here is my first review and here is the second.
*****

This section of the novel tends to deal more with John Ames’ own father and grandfather as well as his namesake, the son of another minister, John Ames (Jack) Boughton. For the Christian there are some wonderful reminders in this section of the novel. Jack Boughton, the epitome of the unrepentant wayward son, is a sort of thorn in the flesh of our narrator; Ames passes on some valuable information to his son that has been passed down from his father and in turn, his grandfather:

‘When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. [...] He [the emissary] would probably laugh at the thought that hte Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is the perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it’ (141).

[First I would think that 'participating in the grace that saved me' is a response to this grace that saved me, rather than an actual participation in salvific grace. If Robinson means the latter, than I'd take that up with her on theological grounds.] Robinson so clearly captures the instances of grace and our own fallen attempts at carrying it out that, often, we frankly, lean towards the ‘first impulse’ rather than ‘demonstrat[ing] [...] faithfulness’. Such small instances of grace — and indeed the failures of following in that grace — that John Ames is so ready to tell his son, illustrate the continuing sanctification of our narrator (if fictional sanctification is even able to be written about). For he doesn’t have it all figured out and his appeal to his reader (both fictional and actual) are these moments of realisation of his innate sinfulness — that he is entirely human; but one who, through grace alone, has the potential to transcend the petty insult.

John Ames returns to several images that stick with the reader — ones to note are the pulling down of the Baptist church struck by lightning (he recalls that he once though ‘the purpose of steeples was to attract lightning [...] to protect all the other houses and buildings, and that seemed very gallant to me’ [130]) and receiving an ash-covered piece of bread from his father, which the narrator compares to partaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s table. Another image is the prevalence of light, which like the church, provides a unifying motif throughout the novel as it morphs and is re-expressed in new situations and with new language. Inbetween paragraphs analysing Jack Boughton is placed these two lovely paragraphs:

The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point.

It seems to me to be a metaphor of the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love. I’ll try to remember to use this. I believe I see a place for it in my thoughts on Hagar and Ishmael. Their time in the wilderness seems like a specific moment of divine Providence within the whole providential regime of Creation’ (136).

What I particularly like about this stream-of-consciousness (in the best sense) bit of reflection is first the detail of his observation and secondly the language with which it opens, ‘light within light’. Written by a woman steeped in Scripture and the Christian faith, the phrase immediately resonates with the language of the Nicene Creed when describing Jesus: ‘God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God’. I also appreciate that this passage looks at one simple image — the light of the moon in the warm evening light — and extrapolates truths by extension about Jesus, about language, about life, about the narrator’s sermon on Hagar and Ishmael, and about the whole providence of God (which earlier he says he needs to remember that ‘Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s’ [135]). The moonlight becomes so much more than cliche, it becomes the metaphoric vehicle to enter in to thoughts about the very stuff of life that makes his own life worth living; the physical presence of the moon, becomes the vehicle whereby grace is experienced. This image, like the ash-covered biscuit Ames’ father gave him, like his father’s trek to find his own father’s grave, like his grandfather’s bloody shirts were to him, are tangible symbols of remembrance, of meaning, and ultimately of grace as each sought to be faithful to his calling as a minister, but most of all, to his calling to live out faithfully what it means to be human.

I’ve been repeatedly listening to an Iron & Wine album lately and it conjures up a sort of ersatz nostalgia, a nostalgia for something I’ve never experienced except through a genetic transmission of weeping willow trees, blackstrap molasses, lightening bugs, wrap-around porches, generational quilts and rocking chairs. The music transports me to another life, another possible self — one where I perhaps have a university education, am clad in a yellow sundress, my feet bare as I dig in my garden, a small towheaded girl next to me, digging up worms with sticky berry residue on her lips. It’s a life of ripe tomatoes, shaded sunshine, smiles, old houses and hours of family congregating to snap peas, discuss life and read together on a huge creaky porch or, in the winter, in front of a roaring fireplace. It’s me and motherhood — slowly, naturally, selflessly, graciously — without suburban ladder-crawling, utilitarianism and endlessly juggling career and family.

But, I am not this mother with happy dirt under her nails. My ‘academic’ skin bristles when girlfriends ask me if not having children is a sin, implying somehow our identity as Christian women is encapsulated in a hierarchy of roles: mother, wife, individual. And yet there are many things – yellow sundress, homeschooling, and organic garden and all – that are immensely appealing to this alternative mother-self; things which make me want to give up my ‘academic’ self in favour of home-grown food, patchwork quilts and go to a place where daily laundry becomes a type of sacramental ritual of self-emptying. But I am and cannot be that yellow-clad bean-snapping self just as I cannot be the academically regaled, multiple-degree success story either. There will always be people exceedingly more brilliant than me, while I constantly doubt if I can even make it through my Ph.D., let alone become an inspirational professor.

I am neither fully one nor the other of these women, and yet both of them.

Whichever of these selves I live out more transparently in the world, I will always fail, but for the grace of God. I cannot be fully either self, for each places and romanticizes a role on centre stage while duties to others and to the Church are mere chorus dancers, materialising briefly and flitting off to the stage wings, in comparison. Encapsulating my role as either only a mother or only a career-woman misses the point: instead, my identity is hid in Christ; for God has exchanged the filthiness of motherhood mud and fatigue as well as the career-climbing lust for advancement and renown for the righteousness of Christ. Whether it’s garden-inches and diaper-inches or office-inches and book-inches, Christ claims every square inch of a woman’s life. The gospel needs to be lived out in both selves. Now it’s just figuring out how to get these selves in me to work together! But that, too, is a work of Christ and for that, I am utterly grateful.

Today, I’m giving my paper at the Symbiosis biennial conference held in Thessaloniki, Greece. I’m part of a panel entitled, ‘Travelling to, from, and through America’ to take place this evening (Greek time). I hope all goes well and I’d appreciate your prayers especially during the Q and A time. If anyone feels so inclined, I’ll post my paper when I return for any eager readers.

Regardless how the paper goes, at least we get to enjoy sunshine and yummy food! Have a good week everyone.