Quote for the Day

I ran across this quote while doing some other reading:

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
~ Zora Neale Hurston

This image really struck me, perhaps as a contrast to the overly strategic tasks that have occupied my brain lately, or perhaps for reasons that have little to do with my brain. The resonance and reverberations are a bit hard to put into words. Most simply, I guess, it feels like it speaks to (and for) the hiding that we all do, while offering another way of being, both for the one who bravely steps out of safe familiarity and into new possibilities, and also for the one(s) who invite (love) the other (or oneself) out into life. I also appreciate that it "crawls" out -- slowly, exhaustedly, not even with baby steps, yet also perhaps with the strength of a survivor. I really like this image, and hope I can carry it with my as I trudge strategically onward :)

(BTW, I don't know where she wrote/said this -- let me know if you do!)

Interconnections

I ran across this quote last night, from Frederick Buechner, an american writer and theologian:

The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt (from The Hungering Dark, 1968).

I've been asked to do the "centering" for a meeting this morning, which typically takes the form of a story or anecdote to remind us what we are doing and why we are doing it, helping us be present and grounded as we begin our work together. We each take a turn, and this week it's mine. So this quote is what I'll bring into this meeting today, with the hope of reminding each of us in this group of the many "touches" that we overlook or ignore because we are too busy with our own to-do lists or with the noises in our own heads, forgetting to look at either the "good or ill" that travels out from us unless/until it makes a return trip and directly impacts us again.

I've been thinking about this phenomonon as I have followed the blog of Patrick and Kim Bentrott, as they have reflected on their experiences in pre- and post-earthquake Haiti. Patrick is a graduate of ours, and I remember him exploring in a class of mine (2 years ago) whether or how Sallie McFague's theology might help motivate congregations around life-and-death issues such as environmental destruction and economic injustice that were found in Haiti even then. Now, he is my teacher, particularly around the cultural/religious superiority of certain "relief" attempts and the media's linguistic stereotyping (e.g., "looting" rather than "foraging") in Haiti today. I wouldn't claim that we taught him even a fraction of what he has been teaching the world based on his experiences now, but, at the very least, it's my hope that our setting provided a place for him to develop his voice for the kind of creative, critical, engaging theological reflection that I see in their blog today. It makes me appreciative of the luxury of space, time, and resources for the conversations that we have here, knowing that we can never anticipate the impact those spaces might have on the subsequent journeys we or our students travel.

Buechner's quote is more than just this, though, and I'm not bringing it into this meeting solely as a way to feel good about our educational community (even though, reading the roster of students from that TIC-2 class, I was reminded of the impact our students have made and continue to make in the world -- you all are amazing!). Partly, my interest is in the impact we have "for good or ill" -- not forgeting that what spirals out from us can as easily be harm as it can be good. I was reminded of this yesterday by one of our students, that sometimes how we enter the building or whether or not we call people by name can be as significant as policy decisions or larger institutional commuication patterns (even though these, too, are important) [btw, thanks for that conversation, if you're reading this!].

Beyond this, though, Buechner's phrase "who knows where the trembling stops" is evocative to me, particularly as we think about our institution, not as a place of simple transactional relationships, but as one element in an interwoven tapestry of people and communities. A word spoken out of anxiety in one meeting or one e-mail affects not just those who hear that immediate message but cascades out from there into places and relationships and communities in ways that are unmeasurable. The same is true for messages of anger (we've all seen, and felt, how anger ripples out and has a residual impact on so many others), and I would propose that indifference, arrogance, and self-centeredness have similar "trembling" implications. The challenge, I think, is to explore whether or how other ways of being might similarly move forward. Partly here I think about solid senses of hope and optimism, but I'm more interested in the less certain elements of time and place and and instability and possibility, and even of emptiness, back to my theme of questions rather than answers. How do we carry forward things like risk, uncertainty, and possibility, touching lives, one after the other, in ways that embody openness and authenticity? I'm imagining here what it would be like to be in a meeting or conversation where, rather than seeming to only be about two people who are battling or positioning against each other, we instead were able to place ourselves together in what we do not know and cannot see, letting an authentic mix of possibility and uncertainty move us forward and move forward from us. What difference could that make?

So that's what I'm wondering this morning. I'll let you know whether my listeners in this meeting have any ideas, and look forward to your thoughts as well.

Placing the past

Another quote has been in my head this week, this time from author/poet Wendell Berry, from his essay The Specialization of Words, in the volume Standing by Words: Essays.

The better known part of the quote is this: The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it (p. 14).

Reading the paragraph that leads into that quote, we see a bit more of his own context and concerns: Contemporaneity, in the sense of being "up with the times," is of no value. Wakefulness to experience -- as well as to instruction and example -- is another matter. But what we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often, the real world, and there is no virtue in being up-to-date in it. It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical -- a world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the materials, the disciplines, the restraints, and the work necessary to support human life, and have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery (pp. 13-14).

And then a bit later, immediately before the first quote: Our past is not merely something to depart from; it is to commune with, to speak with (p. 14).

Berry had some very specific issues and concerns in mind here, of course, but these words and images speak to my current explorations as well. As I think about journeying, in all the various ways this blog will explore, it is somewhat easier for me to imagine living into questions as I look ahead, and more challenging to think about how to do so as I look backwards. How do we -- as individuals, or communities, or institutions -- attend to the past in ways that recognize its constitutive value (how it forms and informs us) without settling into a rigid sense that it defines us? A quick reading of Berry's first quote, "The past is our definition," could be used to support a static reading of what has come before, as well as a direct link or cause-effect relationship between the "realities" of the past and the possibilities of the future. But his mention of "adding something" to it, as well as the more active image of "to commune with, to speak with," seems to offer a bit more potential. This sort of perspective, along with words like "wakefulness" and "mystery," offers an alternative, one in which the past is just as open as the future, not for fixing or resolving (answering), but for a living process of engagement and exploration -- questioning, not for the sake of interrogation or justification, but rather for and within that sense of mystery and possibility.

An opening quote...

A friend recently reminded me of this quote, which in some ways is the genesis for this blog. I'm not sure I'm comfortable (yet?) with the idea of the someday-answer, but the description of process resonates with me (and not just because it uses the image of books!).

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet