Well. As the newest member of Houghton College's crack security force, I am once more enjoying the perks of being paid to sit around waiting for stuff to happen. But now I have free, unlimited access to the internet--the perfect place to while away hours without the needless fear of being productive or useful.

And since I've finally got access to a computer less than five years old, I've been happily introduced to incredible time-wasting power of Google Earth. Never before has a mere computer program come so close to actually making me nauseous. If you start, for example, with **** Centerville Drive, Houghton NY 14744--my current living address--you will see satellite photographs dimly displaying the foresty setting of the northern "suburbs" of Houghton, NY as witnessed from a simulated altitude of 4,485 feet (a little under a mile up). Type in "Moshi, Tanzania" and the earth falls away beneath you as you soar, digitally, to a simulated altitude of 1,503 miles in less than two seconds. The earth moves beneath you as you move eastward, crossing the Atlantic ocean in the time it takes you to sneeze, and suddenly you are falling, quite rapidly, crossing all those tiny West African countries, gaining speed as the Democratic Republic of the Congo speads out beneath you, falling even faster as you move over Lake Victoria and the massive Mt. Kilimanjaro fills your vision...

Actually, your computer screen. At any rate, your descent slows as the land becomes blurry and green, as if your eyes were sparing you your impending impact, a moment frozen in terrified agony in your head. And you are there. 7,657.23 miles away, as the crow flies if he happens to be a crow capable of cross-oceanic endeavors and feels so inclined. It's quite disorienting, at first.

And, in six days, this old crow, charting a course from Buffalo, NY to Washington DC(282.5 miles), across the Atlantic Ocean to London, the UK (3,672.31 miles), take a short layover (6 hours), then hop to Amsterdam (the shortest leg yet at 230.22 miles), followed by the longest layover in the trip (16 hours, overnight), and then embark on the longest flight (a whopping 4,275.65 miles) to Kilimanjaro International Airport, Moshi, Tanzania, arriving on the third day of his sojourn, logging an extra 45.13 miles overland (as even the average crow could fly, with proper motivation) and an additional 803.45 air miles (should the airline pilots choose to follow the incredibly overachieving crows and their ridiculously straight lines).

Ahhh. Thanks to all who chose to contribute their opinions and the ever-accommodating Amazon.com, I will be accompanying myself with good reading. Thanks to none of you, I'll be provisioning myself with granola bars, oatmeal, crackers, cheese, and a beef stick for the duration of what will be, if all goes according to schedule, something like 52 straight hours of airline flights and layovers. Note to self: bring the nalgene bottle.

Well. Cheerio! I'm off to explore blog-land and try to find Mollie's blog again. (hint, hint...Mollie). Until next shift, cheerio!

okay, so my phone died and I have an appointment with traffic court to explain why I haven't fixed the muffler on my truck which is currently immobile due to a faulty alternator, so this will be very short:

1. and most important. I am going to have a lot of empty time in my life soon and reading will be very important. I'm putting in an order to Amazon by the end of the week. What should I buy/borrow/read? Stipulations: absolutely nothing involving analyses of postmodernism and/or Evangelical Christianity.

2. no, it's not a sin to not feel as I feel; but it is a sin not to feel at all, or to feel only what it is safe or accepted to feel. Remember the ringing condemnation of Christ: We played a dance for you, but you did not dance. We played a dirge for you, and you would not mourn. Mindless obedience or the heartless participation of a safely detached observer, both are missing something vital. If you can witness something beautiful or sorrowful without being moved, isn't there something disturbingly wrong with you? Something problematic with your soul?

Furthermore, there are sins that are not individual: corporate sins of a church that emphasizes dogmatic intellectual conformity over freedom in Christ--freedom to explore, learn, grow, experience, and express in the guidance of the Holy Spirit the fullness of a unique and awe-inspiring human life. A fullness that goes far beyond attaining correct theology or learning how to go through the motions of some particular Christian community.

A church where people are incapable of independent response to something beautiful and human because they have been trained into passively waiting for someone in authority to tell them how to act appropriately is a broken, dysfunctional, lifeless church. If you have to curtail or conform your actions because of the sanctions or standards of a church, isn't there a problem with that church?

Conformity to Christian social structures is not holiness; in the words of Flannery O'COnnor, to be holy is "to be specially, super-alive:" full of the grace of God, and participating fully in the image of God--the creative and oft-surprising image of God that is reflected with special treasure differently and uniquely in each and every human being.

There were at least five people at that concert who, well schooled in the consequences of being nonconformist in Christian communities, disappointedly sat down because they were the only ones standing in a crowd who stood and sat as if someone was holding up signs: "applause," "stand," "clap," "sit," "heel," "stay," "good boy, have a biscuit."

I'm not saying that everyone there should have participated or involved themselves in that particular moment. But they came and provided an environment where they remained disinterested observers while musicians laid their souls bare with incredible grace, beauty and energy; and I find their response tremendously callous and fearful.

Callous hearts worry me, and strong social structures that encourage and discipline (to use Foucoult's words) hearts in conformity or quick obedience to the status quo terrify me. The church should have noting to do with these things. The church is where people come alive in Christ. If music and poetry cannot move you--either to mourn or to dance or even to lift your eyes to heaven and not see whether the people next to you are standing or sitting or leaving--what can?

I don't think it's just a matter of taste--that the polite, detatched spectators in this moment would be fully awake and alive in another context. I think there's some genuine soul pathology at work here. And God wants souls to be alive and involved, sensitive and able to percieve and respond to people in a myriad of ways and expressions.

Well, I could go on. But the pathos of my daily life is calling. Actually, not calling, since my phone won't work. Alas. I'll be in Buffalo next week, working overtime for the holidays, and if I don't call--sorry. no phone...

wow

just got back from an internet-less week in Buffalo. put in 86 hours of ambulance work in six days...and a Jars of Clay concert.

conclusion: i love EMS, so long as I'm not burnt out. and Jars so helps you not be burnt out...pretty stinkin' incredible show. BUT...I was absolutely furious at the tepid audience response. I have decided that it is a sin to pay someone stand up in front of you and pour out their heart and energy and emotion and just sit and watch and refuse to answer with the same heart and energy and emootion. The whole audience just stood there. And sat down on cue the moment a slower song began. It's like they were totally incapable of experiencing passion or emotion publically without someone telling them what to do: stand, sit clap, yell, sway from side to side, move around...but only on cue. And only when everybody else is too.

It's wierd. I guess I got pretty indignant...work makes me pretty hardened, pretty deadened, pretty numb. We work in an efficient health-care machine and we are expected to be clinical and detached. It's like working with inks or motor oil or concrete or manure--it gets under your fingernails and in your hair and imbeds itself in your skin and you start smelling like death all the time.

And then something like Jars of Clay or Kate York comes along and sings and dances over you like clean pure spring water and you know what it meant to fishermen and camel drovers and dusty-street-worn tax collecters to have their feet washed by a man who's eyes were everything not deadened and stale. You know you need it, just to stand and let something real and human and intimate wash over you so you can feel something again, anything again, like a real breathing person and not some machine.

It's just plain wrong to see something beautiful or heartbreaking and appreciate it detatchedly. There's no way to avoid it in the information age, with the overwhelming flow of more information than can possibly be attended to. But when you pay someone to come and strip themselves (metaphorically) naked on the stage and be intimately human in the most powerful manner possible, and just sit and watch, that's wrong. Dead wrong. Detachment will kill your soul so fast it's unbelievable. And a little salvation is right there saying, uncross your arms, shake your feet, stop looking for the right cues and right responses, and live in this beautiful moment. Breathe or dance or close your eyes or sign along or something, please give me a sign that your heart is still beating! Respond to beauty and sorrow, feel beautiful or broken yourself through identification with something human, participate somehow for the salvation of your soul...it may not feel safe because it requires creativity and initiative and risk-taking...someone may ridicule you, or despise you, or see you vulnerable, or worst of all you may see yourself in all your glory and weakness...

but the smug alternative is so much worse.

thought of the day:

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." --C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves