Today life is hard.

I'm sick, and I'm worried about it. I need to see a doctor and a dentist. I'm worried about my wife, who is tired from having taken care of the kids for a week while I vacationed. The car we've been using is in need of repair, and our other car hasn't worked for a year now, and we've not the funds to fix either of them right now. Because of my new student income schedule we're low on funds of course. In August, when the funds do come in, much will be used to pay back borrowed monies for the summer.

I've got a presentation on Friday. For this I need a powerpoint, for that I need to walk to campus for a good chunk of each day. This would be okay if I wasn't deathly (and I do mean deathly. I'm so sick I'm scared!) sick, and I didn't feel guilty about leaving Rachel home with the kids, and the reality of her having to deal with them while I'm on campus. Besides this my paper is due a week following, and requires much attention that between my family and my sickness and work will be hard for me to give.

In old San Juan the bricks were blue and over one hundred years old. On the coast by the old fort there were thousands of graves. Over the front gate here was a faded tile picture of John the Baptist in the wilderness. Up the hill from there stood a church, it's doors open, electric fans plugged in everywhere for the faithful. It was comforting to see a Catholic church after all the Pentecostal churches. It was like an oven inside the walls of Old San Juan. Hand bells from vendors peddling their wares rang at random intervals. I couldn't smell the salt water breeze from the ocean, but I could feel it.

I feel like a failure. Like I haven't done too well at this whole "life" thing. I don't think I'm alone in feeling like this, and I don't feel hopeless. I know I'm moving forward. I'm scared, but hopeful. More than that I can't go back on placing my trust in God now, then I would be a hypocrite. How could I with all the blessings I have?

The end.

Love Righteousness

The other night I discovered that I had within me a certain love for righteousness. I was getting ready to go for a run when it hit me: first a sensation not unlike being smitten by a high-school sweetheart, then the implications of harboring such an emotion. I'd never felt that way before.

Years ago, before I converted to Orthodoxy, I had the realization that the spiritual life wasn't merely comprised of NOT doing some things, but in actually DOING other things. The idea was that an upward or forward motion was needed, movement, a drawing closer at all times to God, and not merely a moral obedience. A moral obedience is virutally impossible without this forward movement, or growth, regardless of whether we perceive this.

After leaving my Protestant faith - I'm getting to the point I promise - I disavowed, or attempted to disavow, any semblance of what I called "emotionalism" from my understanding of truth. People tampering with my emotions, basing "worship" on feelings and finely crafted ad campaigns had all taken their toll - I was unable to make sound judgments from within this hyper-emotional context.

Fast-forward to the present day: me with my struggles to harvest the virtues and destroy the passions, to grow closer to God, just like I was then, only equipped with the teachings of the Church (and the language to understand what I'm doing). Now what do I find? I find what I once might have once referred to as a carrot on a stick: this sensation within me that desires righteousness. I feel as though I am and have been such a sinner, that if I could go one day or one hour thinking on or doing something righteous I would feel great!

Granted, righteousness is far from its own end. I've always hated the reward/ effort model of motivation for good works. I've felt that love of God was its own reason, motivation and motivator.

Perhaps Orthodoxy has shown me the connection between righteousness and God, the essence of righteousness which I won't define here (I don't think I could). I know now that I can love righteousness out of my love for God, my desire to please Him.

I used to try and remind myself of the hardness called of me in order to undertake the simplest asceticism of the spiritual life: now when faced with temptation I remind myself to "love righteousness." And right now, thank God, this isn't hard to do. I pray that it stays that way!

Destroying Binaries

When I say "my spiritual life", there are certainly two ways to read it. The first, I suppose, being an indicator that this blog is about a compartment of my life that I give the title "spiritual". This is entirely incorrect. Serious faith, or serious belief, must insist on a lack of disparity between one life with the other. The chief agency of sin is to separate, dispel, dissolve. The duality felt in life between the real and the potential is part of this. Therefore my life, it should be read, is spiritual. Everyone's is. St. John of the Ladder says in "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" that

"God is the life of all free beings. He is the salvation of all, of believers and unbelievers, of the just or the unjust, of the pious or the impious, of those freed from the passions or caught up in them, of monks or those living in the world, of the educated or the illiterate, of the healthy or the sick, of the young or the very old. He is like the outpouring of light, the glimpse of the sun, or the changes of the weather, which are the same for everyone without exception."

Therefore one of the first steps in the spiritual life is destroying the frail barriers we erect in order to understand the world and ourselves. The modern paradigm is one of compartmentalizing: we are comprised of many disparate systems: "emotional", "intellectual", "physical", "spiritual", "financial", etc. that all battle within us. Modern pop-psychology has to do with synchronizing them to the end of fulfilling their various needs, with disastrous ends. This compartmentalization of life is at once our attempt to understand it and the product of our inability to understand it with our fallen logic alone. Bringing the self to one, the aim of the spiritual life, is a matter of pulling these fractured spheres of our self into a harmony with God's will, putting an end to discord, through the harvesting of the virtues and the destruction of the passions.

Holy Father John of the Ladder, pray to God for us!

Everything is a Text

Associations are odd things.

Association is an odd thing. Avoiding it seems to be an act not unlike slipping between the raindrops in a downpour. Is this really how we establish what we know, or think we know?

When you look at me you look at what I'm wearing, my hair, my glasses, my skin color, my gate, etc. All of these thing help you to form an embryonic opinion of me. What follows, if we interact, is either a series of predictable outputs or a litany of surprises, depending on the accuracy of your initial assessment.

When you come to my blog, you look at the colors, the words, the quotes, the links, the titles, my spelling, the topics, the length of posts. A similar assessment is made concerning your opinion (maybe opinion isn't the right word) of me and/or my blog - either my blog, myself via the blog, or the blog's message, or me personally via the blogs message, and whether or not said message is related with skill or not.

That being said, by this point, you've probably stopped reading and clicked "back" on your browser, though not before at least some of this had taken place.

Perhaps I haven't satisfied you. Perhaps the requisite photo and caption weren't present. An obsession with these associations can lead to the habit of either attempting to fulfill all of these expectations or circumventing them altogether, neither of which being completely possible.

If I place a cross, or an icon of the crucifixion on my blog, you know exactly what I am, what my blog is about, what "I am about". So I'm reticent to do it. What if I told you that I believed the crucifixion was the profound center of the earth, of reality, of time, the cosmos? Or that I believed that "the greatest and most perfect thing a human being can ever desire to achieve is to come near to God and dwell in union with Him"?

What does that do? To us?

Words are a strange thing. I spend my time writing them, and I believe that they spring from this mysterious center of the cosmos, but I hardly ever turn to this thing as a subject of my writing. But everything is a text.

Readership

So this is familial bliss. He thought.

The sun shone off the newly swept wood floors (in the morning it reflected off the birdbath through the window and onto the ceiling, but this was the evening). The old mismatched sofa, love-seat and chair were clear of the usual clutter - laundry and/or toys and library books - the dining room table was cleaned off. His eldest was already in bed, tired out from a day of exploring, swinging and going down the big slide. On the back porch there were a number of containers with soil, surely dead by now earthworms, an eggshell or two, a dead cockroach and a couple of tiny maple trees that had miraculously forced their way out of their respective helicopters. The back porch was swept and the recycling was in its' bins. Mother was on the phone with her mother, and baby boy's thoughtful almond eyes were smiling at the window or the ceiling light; the icons or his papa. He punched and kicked profusely and babbled, the drool bubbling and cascading over an assortment of rolls that belonged to his face, chin and/or torso. His diaper was dry and that was bliss.

Later, walking down a dark alleyway, relaxed and lucid, he remembered all of this with clarity, and returned home again to it, though the shades were drawn and the windows dark. A warm lamp that used to belong to an old friend glowed in the dining room, waiting for him to return. He brushed his teeth, washed his hands, ate a piece of bread and drank a glass of water. All of these things he did within the context of his family. The whole house breathed with them as they slept.

Who were his readers? He had thought that earlier. He had no photo of the fun to share, no fashion tips or celebrity sitings. And now his glass was empty. It was time to sleep.

I don't know nothin' about no Mexico.

A day or two ago. Our car sounds like an idling jet engine chewing up sand and chalk. I drove it up to the University anyway, hoping to get some face time on a computer, betting on the quality of our crystallized conversation. I would net it, like a digital butterfly and "email it to myself". It would pass through the ether and be waiting at home should I find more time or the need to continue.

Campus was as near deserted as I'd ever seen it. I parked in a random spot I wasn't sure I was supposed to. Seeing the Union closed I damned its eyes, but noticed the cloud work up and to the north, mostly hidden by the Union and the new Multicultural Resource Center. The parking garage was all but empty so I found a spot to sit and watch the array of colors and shapes that filled the sky. My mind raced for words to describe it immediately, but I knew it was in vain. Who could relay such information?

To the west a broad thunderhead was fanning out at mind-altering hights. The sun as it set shone through its curling silver lining (or set it on fire - it looked high enough), just enough so as to throw a stark golden spray on the main event: a line of developing thunder heads cummulo nimbi or some such thing, that stretched out to the north west, above the Kaw Valley, swooping just close and low enough to brush the north face of Mt. Oread, to acculmulate in an odd dark-blue stasis just over downtown Lawrence. The clouds there swept down in coudal-arch patterns, scrapping tree tops and buildings. Further north the rain was dripping from the flat undersides of the clouds, and I could tell it was falling on highway 24, Perry and the power plant. Names and places synonymous with my life. The backside of the line of clouds was the real breath taker. There is no way to imagine the pinks and blues and oranges, how high the contrast could be and gentle the shades, how clear their outline could form, how immovable and liquid it seemed.

It was almost perfectly still down on the ground. The birds were still singing, the slightest of cool breezes blew now and again. Silent lightning feathered out sporadically on the cloud's underbelly, spreading like fire on a ceiling and then disappearing.

Funny.

I've written my share of jokes. If by my share I mean no one has ever either asked or commissioned me to do it. And those who have heard the finished product have asked me never to utter another word under the heading "A Joke I Wrote" again.

My jokes have the profound ability to make everyone who comes near them feel intensely awful about humanity and long for something as pleasant as shame or embarrassment to feel.

So in order to both not be and be cruel, here are the only two completed jokes I've ever written.

Joke #1

When I was a teenager I was trying to change the oil in my car for the first time. The only thing was: I had no funnel. My dad, seeing what was going on told me to hold on and he'd show me a trick. Emerging from the garage with a piece of paper he fashioned it into a funnel-esque shape.

"Aw Dad." I said. "That's no FUN-nel!"

(I can feel you dying.)

Joke #2

What do you call a raccoon with pincers on his front paws and six legs?

"Crab Raccoon."

Wow.

The only other one I have I've only written half of, that is, the setting and the punchline. It happens at an archeological dig in Egypt and at the end of it, a guy says:

"Well, at least we have Toots-n-common."

Of course it's a fart joke. I think the joke will actually turn out to be the whole explanation of trying to write the joke and then springing the punchline on my listeners because it seems to be funny enough on its own.

I used to have a theory of hierarchy of funny involving elements like whether or not the joke involves rhyming, is dirty, is a pun, etc. But besides being ridiculously subjective, I really don't care anymore. It was probably those jokes.