is sick. Yes, just the left side. I started feeling a cold last night, and by the time I woke up this morning the sinuses on the left side of my face were all swollen. My left eye is red and watery. My left nostril is running. My left eardrum is tender. My left cheek hurts. The left side of my throat is raw from nasal drip. The left side of my neck aches. My left shoulder hurts. My left hip really aches. And I even have gas on the left side of my abdomen.
But my right side is fine. No aches, no runny nose, no gas, no nothing.
It feels SO weird!
I get acupuncture treatments every two weeks for reasons I won't go into online, but the strange thing is that a little over a week ago she did a treatment that focused on the left side of my body. Maybe this is some strange detox. I can't wait to ask her.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Friday, September 28, 2007
More from Dance Therapy Class
Last night my professor was at a Dance Therapists' Conference, so she left two movies for us to watch. The movies showed dance therapy sessions with all kinds of different populations: prisoners, psychiatric patients, a normal (meaning not diagnosed as psychotic) woman, elderly patients confined to wheelchairs, normal preschoolers in a group, disturbed preschoolers in a group, autistic children in one-on-one sessions, the parents of psychotic children in a group of adults. It was fascinating to see the therapy in process. It helped me to get a sense for how what we do together in the class relates to the actual work.
The videos were extremely moving in some cases. The work with the two autistic children moved many in the class close to tears. The children couldn't relate to any other people, they didn't play with toys, they just spent their time in a bare room "stimulating themselves," which sounds funny to me, but that is the technical language that was used to describe autism in the videos. The therapist started by imitating the child's movement, so that the child would understand the therapist as trying to learn her language. Eventually, the child would allow the therapist to get closer, and then touch was allowed, and finally the child would welcome touch and even run after the therapist if she moved away. Once that started, the children would want to be held, nestled, rocked, and basically treated like infants. They would explore the therapist's body the way toddlers explore bodies, touching everything, pulling at her hair. And after that, the children would start to recognize that they had a separate body, studying themselves in the mirror.
This was a common experience for the disturbed children. They needed a certain amount of physical nurturing, and the therapist would imitate nursing positions, pretending to feed the children with her fingers, all to give the children that experience of bonding and love.
When working with adults, the therapy seemed more about free expression of emotions. It was also a return to that primal experience of knowing you have a body and using it to communicate. It seems that with adults, the biggest problem is that the demands on the intellect and conformity lead people to forget about the body. Kind of like I've heard it said about art--most people are encouraged to draw as children, but then we stop once the demands to read and write become more pressing. So most adults draw like children, because they stopped their artistic development as children. It seems that the same can be said about using the body to communicate. The body is our first language, but once we learn verbal language, we can shift to forget about the body. And yet, by returning to the body, adults were able to better access their emotions and learn how to use those emotions well. Anger was the scariest emotion to express, and work with prisoners and psychotic patients really focused on how to express it but not let it overpower and control the person. There was also a lot of work that focused on how to relate to a group, how to stand firmly on one's two feet, and how to feel supported. And with the elderly in wheelchairs, the session was mostly about touch.
I also enjoyed watching the therapists in the videos. There was a noticeable ease that these women had in their bodies. They could be so expressive with their movements. They were so open to their patients. It made it clear that like drawing, this is a skill that will improve with time.
The videos were extremely moving in some cases. The work with the two autistic children moved many in the class close to tears. The children couldn't relate to any other people, they didn't play with toys, they just spent their time in a bare room "stimulating themselves," which sounds funny to me, but that is the technical language that was used to describe autism in the videos. The therapist started by imitating the child's movement, so that the child would understand the therapist as trying to learn her language. Eventually, the child would allow the therapist to get closer, and then touch was allowed, and finally the child would welcome touch and even run after the therapist if she moved away. Once that started, the children would want to be held, nestled, rocked, and basically treated like infants. They would explore the therapist's body the way toddlers explore bodies, touching everything, pulling at her hair. And after that, the children would start to recognize that they had a separate body, studying themselves in the mirror.
This was a common experience for the disturbed children. They needed a certain amount of physical nurturing, and the therapist would imitate nursing positions, pretending to feed the children with her fingers, all to give the children that experience of bonding and love.
When working with adults, the therapy seemed more about free expression of emotions. It was also a return to that primal experience of knowing you have a body and using it to communicate. It seems that with adults, the biggest problem is that the demands on the intellect and conformity lead people to forget about the body. Kind of like I've heard it said about art--most people are encouraged to draw as children, but then we stop once the demands to read and write become more pressing. So most adults draw like children, because they stopped their artistic development as children. It seems that the same can be said about using the body to communicate. The body is our first language, but once we learn verbal language, we can shift to forget about the body. And yet, by returning to the body, adults were able to better access their emotions and learn how to use those emotions well. Anger was the scariest emotion to express, and work with prisoners and psychotic patients really focused on how to express it but not let it overpower and control the person. There was also a lot of work that focused on how to relate to a group, how to stand firmly on one's two feet, and how to feel supported. And with the elderly in wheelchairs, the session was mostly about touch.
I also enjoyed watching the therapists in the videos. There was a noticeable ease that these women had in their bodies. They could be so expressive with their movements. They were so open to their patients. It made it clear that like drawing, this is a skill that will improve with time.
Jackson Heights Troubadour
In terms of eccentric residents that I've identified so far, my favorite is the man who dresses up in bright skirts, a pink wig, and a clown nose and rides his bike with his toy poodle and parrot in the front basket. I see him every couple of months on the main drag. Then this Wednesday, I discovered a new delight. My walk to the train was serenaded by a man I'm calling the neighborhood troubadour.
The troubadour is not so eccentric in his dress, though he tucked his pants into his black socks, giving him a strange 80's look. He wore a denim long-sleeve shirt and respectable brown leather shoes. His gray hair was tied back in a bandanna and he has a full gray beard that make him look a little hippy-ish, but nothing outrageous. The remarkable thing about the troubadour was the way he moved.
He had his empty guitar case on his back and hugged the guitar close to his chest. His elbows were tucked protectively around the sides of the guitar and his left hand just barely reached out to caress the neck of the guitar that stuck out to the left. With his right hand he was constantly strumming, and with his legs he marched down the street. He took huge steps, raising his right knee high in the air like a soldier and then following with a more casual swing in his left leg. Up and down went his legs, flashing his black socks pulled up high around his pant legs, moving forward with intention and grace. He attracted the stares of everyone on the street, but his own gaze remained focused on the space directly in front of him, the space he would enter momentarily with his striding.
With his guitar he repeated a succession of chords. Two strums on one chord, then a shift, then another, then something that sounded like a conclusion, and then the first chord again. I would say it sounded like a paso doble, but it seemed too gentle to inspire bull fighting.
I abandoned the bus stop to follow him, and when we reached the next intersection and a red light, he made an abrupt turn to the left, and then swung around and stepped to the right. He continued in this figure-eight pattern until he could navigate a way through the cars, never missing a beat on his guitar. When the light turned, I followed him down 37th street, running to catch up so that I could still hear the music. We walked like this for another six blocks, and then he stopped at the Jewish Center. He approached two old men sitting in lawn chairs out in front of the center and swung his guitar away from his body as he took his last high step and glided to a stop.
The troubadour is not so eccentric in his dress, though he tucked his pants into his black socks, giving him a strange 80's look. He wore a denim long-sleeve shirt and respectable brown leather shoes. His gray hair was tied back in a bandanna and he has a full gray beard that make him look a little hippy-ish, but nothing outrageous. The remarkable thing about the troubadour was the way he moved.
He had his empty guitar case on his back and hugged the guitar close to his chest. His elbows were tucked protectively around the sides of the guitar and his left hand just barely reached out to caress the neck of the guitar that stuck out to the left. With his right hand he was constantly strumming, and with his legs he marched down the street. He took huge steps, raising his right knee high in the air like a soldier and then following with a more casual swing in his left leg. Up and down went his legs, flashing his black socks pulled up high around his pant legs, moving forward with intention and grace. He attracted the stares of everyone on the street, but his own gaze remained focused on the space directly in front of him, the space he would enter momentarily with his striding.
With his guitar he repeated a succession of chords. Two strums on one chord, then a shift, then another, then something that sounded like a conclusion, and then the first chord again. I would say it sounded like a paso doble, but it seemed too gentle to inspire bull fighting.
I abandoned the bus stop to follow him, and when we reached the next intersection and a red light, he made an abrupt turn to the left, and then swung around and stepped to the right. He continued in this figure-eight pattern until he could navigate a way through the cars, never missing a beat on his guitar. When the light turned, I followed him down 37th street, running to catch up so that I could still hear the music. We walked like this for another six blocks, and then he stopped at the Jewish Center. He approached two old men sitting in lawn chairs out in front of the center and swung his guitar away from his body as he took his last high step and glided to a stop.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Reflections from Dance Therapy Class
I LOVE Dance Therapy class. We spend over half of the class moving to music and reflecting on what the experience feels like and what it might mean. It makes us all wake up and leave the class glowing. It makes us feel such love and warmth toward each other, even though we really know nothing about each other except the little we've shared and how we each move.
I don't know why I'm in this class. I have no intention of ever becoming a therapist, dance therapist, or creative arts therapist. In fact the idea is particularly unpleasant. I say, "I'm interested in the mind/body connection." And that is entirely true, but what does it mean? I don't know. I really don't. But nonetheless, there are a few ideas that I would like to think more about, and so I'm recording them here:
1. Dance in some other cultures serves the function of working through everything, such as birth, coming of age, hunting, death.
2. Dance therapy's roots came from modern dance.
3. Who we are is reflected in how we inhabit our body.
4. You won't think clearly if the mind is disconnected from the body. This is just as true for academics as it is for people with psychotic issues.
5. The fundamental principle of dance therapy is for the therapist to pick up on peoples' movement and reflect that back to them and then to orchestrate that movement into the group. (The group might be the group gathered for therapy or society at large. Often patients cannot coordinate their movements to society's movements. Dance therapy tries to guide patients into new movement/cultural movements and help them bridge the gap. This therapy has been particularly effective with people with autism or Alzheimer's.)
6. How we move reflects our culture, our sub-culture, and our personal experiences.
This past Thursday, we practiced moving from different centers of our bodies. For example, we'd try to lead our movement from our belly buttons, then our chests, then our knees, the back of our knees, etc. We imagined there was a light shining from that place of our bodies and we were suppose to share that light with the other dancers. It made people very self-aware and at times embarrassed. It was interesting how different parts of our body liked to shine light and others didn't. It was interesting how when we moved into this exercise, instead of simply doing free dancing, we quickly fell into a linear circle moving around the room. And then when we stopped to analyze the activity, we slipped out of our bodies, and we had to take some time to dance freely to get back in our previous space of experiencing our bodies energetically. When we were talking, I would get tired again. When I was moving, I wasn't tired, or even if I was aware of fatigue, I could find other energy within myself.
I don't know why I'm in this class. I have no intention of ever becoming a therapist, dance therapist, or creative arts therapist. In fact the idea is particularly unpleasant. I say, "I'm interested in the mind/body connection." And that is entirely true, but what does it mean? I don't know. I really don't. But nonetheless, there are a few ideas that I would like to think more about, and so I'm recording them here:
1. Dance in some other cultures serves the function of working through everything, such as birth, coming of age, hunting, death.
2. Dance therapy's roots came from modern dance.
3. Who we are is reflected in how we inhabit our body.
4. You won't think clearly if the mind is disconnected from the body. This is just as true for academics as it is for people with psychotic issues.
5. The fundamental principle of dance therapy is for the therapist to pick up on peoples' movement and reflect that back to them and then to orchestrate that movement into the group. (The group might be the group gathered for therapy or society at large. Often patients cannot coordinate their movements to society's movements. Dance therapy tries to guide patients into new movement/cultural movements and help them bridge the gap. This therapy has been particularly effective with people with autism or Alzheimer's.)
6. How we move reflects our culture, our sub-culture, and our personal experiences.
This past Thursday, we practiced moving from different centers of our bodies. For example, we'd try to lead our movement from our belly buttons, then our chests, then our knees, the back of our knees, etc. We imagined there was a light shining from that place of our bodies and we were suppose to share that light with the other dancers. It made people very self-aware and at times embarrassed. It was interesting how different parts of our body liked to shine light and others didn't. It was interesting how when we moved into this exercise, instead of simply doing free dancing, we quickly fell into a linear circle moving around the room. And then when we stopped to analyze the activity, we slipped out of our bodies, and we had to take some time to dance freely to get back in our previous space of experiencing our bodies energetically. When we were talking, I would get tired again. When I was moving, I wasn't tired, or even if I was aware of fatigue, I could find other energy within myself.
The Differences Between Christians and Jews
It's the Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur. Today is the last day of the holidays, and I will be going to a few of the day's services with Eric's family and then eating a delicious Break Fast at Dorit's. Of course I'm not fasting. I've never been good denying myself food. I like to blame it on my super-fast metabolism and my inclination to get light headed when I don't eat every few hours, but I think it might have more to do with a lack of self-discipline. And since I approach these holidays without spiritual devotion and more a sense of familial togetherness, I find it hard to put myself through the discipline of fasting.
Even though I don't celebrate these holidays out of spiritual devotion, I do really enjoy the annual ritual that has developed over the last six years. I like sitting and being quiet in the services. I like listening to the Hebrew and the singing. I like being part of a congregation. I like eating with Eric's family and wishing them all a Happy New Year with kisses and hugs.
What I don't love is the Rabbi who leads the services we always attend. He is growing on me, but that's the best I can probably say for him. He works at an Episcopal Church in NYC as some kind of interfaith Rabbi. He teaches and spends his days (for the last 13 years) trying to explain Jewish beliefs and practices to Christians. In my opinion, this has left him a little worn out and less than inspired about his own faith. He reads the prayer book and preaches with this slightly annoyed tone, as if to say, "Okay, I'll say this one more time..." And he always preaches on the differences between Christians and Jews.
It's been kind of cute to watch Eric's family get defensive on my behalf in response to these sermons. Lenny will say, "I don't think he knows what he's talking about." Eric will say, "Not ALL Christians are like that!" and last night Arno pulled Eric aside to check that I wasn't offended. Truthfully, I'm not offended, and I kind of enjoy the comparisons. Last night his ending intrigued me. He had been talking about "God" and how people and religions understand God. Is God a projection of all things good? Is God a Judge on high? He said that the greatest Jewish philosopher said it was impossible to make a positive statement about God. You could only say, "God is not..." He said the Jewish Rabbi's worked so hard to not talk directly about God because the effort to prevent idolatry was so central. They felt that if you started to define God, it would lead to idolatry. He mentioned that he found it a little shocking how Christian preachers can talk about Jesus and God without distinguishing between them. "As if they are one," he said shaking his head. And I turned to Eric and said, "well, if you believe They are one, then it makes sense."
After all of this reflecting he closed with these words:
On a related but different topic, this Rabbi made two funny slips of the tongue when reading the prayer book this season. I wrote them down to share with the world. (Poor man) The words in parentheses are the words he added, but aren't in the prayerbook.
Yet we look ahead with hope, giving thanks for the daily miracle of renewal, for the (com)promise of good to come.
As if to say, "fine God, we'll compromise on the fact that we have to wait for our good."
Blessed is the Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, for giving us (His) life.
OOPS! And with that slip he Christianized the sentence.
And one last passage from the prayer book for reflection:
Even though I don't celebrate these holidays out of spiritual devotion, I do really enjoy the annual ritual that has developed over the last six years. I like sitting and being quiet in the services. I like listening to the Hebrew and the singing. I like being part of a congregation. I like eating with Eric's family and wishing them all a Happy New Year with kisses and hugs.
What I don't love is the Rabbi who leads the services we always attend. He is growing on me, but that's the best I can probably say for him. He works at an Episcopal Church in NYC as some kind of interfaith Rabbi. He teaches and spends his days (for the last 13 years) trying to explain Jewish beliefs and practices to Christians. In my opinion, this has left him a little worn out and less than inspired about his own faith. He reads the prayer book and preaches with this slightly annoyed tone, as if to say, "Okay, I'll say this one more time..." And he always preaches on the differences between Christians and Jews.
It's been kind of cute to watch Eric's family get defensive on my behalf in response to these sermons. Lenny will say, "I don't think he knows what he's talking about." Eric will say, "Not ALL Christians are like that!" and last night Arno pulled Eric aside to check that I wasn't offended. Truthfully, I'm not offended, and I kind of enjoy the comparisons. Last night his ending intrigued me. He had been talking about "God" and how people and religions understand God. Is God a projection of all things good? Is God a Judge on high? He said that the greatest Jewish philosopher said it was impossible to make a positive statement about God. You could only say, "God is not..." He said the Jewish Rabbi's worked so hard to not talk directly about God because the effort to prevent idolatry was so central. They felt that if you started to define God, it would lead to idolatry. He mentioned that he found it a little shocking how Christian preachers can talk about Jesus and God without distinguishing between them. "As if they are one," he said shaking his head. And I turned to Eric and said, "well, if you believe They are one, then it makes sense."
After all of this reflecting he closed with these words:
Perhaps we envy people for whom God is a personal God, a God involved in the details of our personal lives. But for us, God has always been a challenge. A challenge to see good in ourselves and in others around us. A challenge to keep seeking that good, even when it feels hopeless.I don't have anything insightful to say about that, but I liked listening to this man say it. I thought it was a small window into his life's struggle of being a Jew among Christians. How it must be strange for him to be constantly defending the Jewish traditions which will welcome Atheist Jews as nothing out of the ordinary to Christians who believe in a personal God asking for belief and acknowledgement.
On a related but different topic, this Rabbi made two funny slips of the tongue when reading the prayer book this season. I wrote them down to share with the world. (Poor man) The words in parentheses are the words he added, but aren't in the prayerbook.
Yet we look ahead with hope, giving thanks for the daily miracle of renewal, for the (com)promise of good to come.
As if to say, "fine God, we'll compromise on the fact that we have to wait for our good."
Blessed is the Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, for giving us (His) life.
OOPS! And with that slip he Christianized the sentence.
And one last passage from the prayer book for reflection:
When justice burns within us like a flaming fire, when love evokes willing sacrifice from us, when, to the last full measure of selfless devotion, we demonstrate our belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and righteousness, then Your goodness enters our lives; then You live within our hearts, and we through righteousness behold Your presence.The language is so familiar to my Christian upbringing. Except that we do freely exchange "Jesus" for "God". Jesus comes to live within our hearts. And that is the key additional step in Christianity. FIRST Jesus comes, we confess sins and receive the sacrificial forgiveness. THEN justice burns in us like a fire, love evokes willing sacrifice, and we demonstrate our belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and righteousness. Isn't it interesting that some people believe there's no skipping the first step, and other people believe the first step is entirely not necessary to achieving the second step. I can't help but be fascinated by that.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Long Post about MK Identity Issues
It's interesting to me that I have titled this with an implied apology. But I do feel a sort of embarrassment/irritation with these parts of myself. But the apology (and warning) out of the way, let me get down to my post.
My writing teacher suggested that I read the writing of other MKs when I told her I was writing about my MK experiences. She tells us that we learn to talk by imitating and that we learn to write the same way. So we shouldn’t be afraid to read writing that’s doing exactly what we want to do, because if we stick with it long enough, it will become more than imitation.
So I took her advice to heart and have been looking for writing about the MK experience. I haven’t done an extensive search, but I Googled several search terms and searched through Amazon, and I was surprised at how there is almost nothing written by MKs about their experiences. I found two memoirs, both written by people in my parents’ generation. It made me wonder if we are just such a small segment of the population that it’s natural that not much would have been written/published. Or is there something about the experience that makes it hard to write, or hard to publish.
Also, when I did find writing, it was almost all about MKs who are still Christians or who went on to become missionaries themselves. I did find one book, Through Isaac’s Eyes, which seems to be written by an MK who is willing to talk about how he felt sacrificed by his parents’ decision to go to the mission field. It was published in 1996 by a man born in 1955. He waited until long after his father had died. Maybe his father’s death inspired the reflections that led to the book.
I am really, really enjoying this book. It’s clear writing that gets to the heart of Evangelical Christian beliefs. He does such a good job writing about his father and how the beliefs and culture of the religion made his father the man that he was. And the father he portrays is a genuinely loving man who is incredibly tender and wise and gentle with his son. His father was a preacher who decided to go to Vietnam in 1967. Daniel Barth Peters, the author of the book, was 13 when his parents left to go to Vietnam. He was the youngest of four children, and the only child to go to Vietnam. A little over a year after arriving, the mother and son were evacuated because the war became so serious.
What I respect about this book is the ordinariness of his MK experiences. He focuses in on the little things, the little moments, the moments of cross-culture shock and shame. I like that it’s not a book like the Poisonwood Bible where the father is such a fanatic. It’s not an extreme book about abuse and sick, twisted faith. It’s a book about a loving father and a respectable faith experience. It’s about a father who knew when fundamentalist beliefs were crazy, about the calm, rational choices that the father made for his own faith. And yet that faith, which can inspire respect, also was the source of profound, life-long pain for his son.
It’s a book that can publish this quote on its cover: “Your book stirred me deep down in my heart. I wept and rejoiced at the love your daddy had for Jesus.”—Bill McCartney (Founder, Promise Keepers)
When I read that quote, I thought, “oh, maybe this isn’t a book that I’ll relate to so much.” But then I started noticing what the author hides in more symbolic language. I noticed the silences, the way he comes right up to the edge of his own doubts and anger and stops short of spelling it out. And I realized that I probably have a kindred spirit after all.
I’m going to put some quotes from the book that I feel like I could have written they so poignantly capture emotions that I’ve known (or still know).
“To be in the world, but not of it, was the most bittersweet knowledge that a boy my age could have. I had heard of it and even sung it—
This world is not my home,
I’m just a-passing through.
If Heaven’s not my home,
Then, Lord, what will I do?
But until this moment that song had been just a Sunday school chorus that we sang….Now, however, I realized we believed those words. We acted on those words.”
“All that had been mine…was either gone or in a barrel in the basement of a house that was no longer ours. The things that had brought me such happiness, defined my status in the neighborhood, were now as irrelevant as Daddy always believed they should have been. I did not know then that I would never again be able to sort out the piles of my life, throw some away, stuff the rest in a barrel and snap on the lid.”
“Starting the ninth grade was almost as frightening as the war.”
“Then he turned to me and said, “You new here?”
“Yeah.”
“Where you from?” he asked.
I was stunned. I could not answer. I no longer knew. The question made my feet feel no longer attached to the earth, as though I simply floated. Oh sure, I walked here and there and rode my bike, but that gravity of the soul that keeps one attached to the earth was gone. I became conscious of myself in a way that made normal living impossible. It was as though I knew that I was adrift in the universe, that I had no power to determine my own direction or fate, that life was bigger than I was. Not only could I not control it, I could not even influence it….I was no longer even a traveler, for travelers have a sense of where they come from and know where they are headed. I looked in at life from the place that only I knew. A private place, a lonely place.”
“I had no idea of what to wear or how to act. Carmen’s motherly instincts took over enough to get me some white jeans and a new shirt so that I looked almost normal. But looking normal was a long way from my sense of life. Ever since coming back I had been trying to participate in talk about baseball and girls and television, but it always seemed that while my words and theirs were derived from the same language, mine were empty of meaning, hollow….My body walked and talked and laughed, but there was a new distance between myself and it, and between myself and the people around me. This distance was new and sharp. I felt out of place when I first arrived in Saigon, yet I was still somehow present. But life back here, especially among all the kids…whom I knew and had grown up with, existed on the other side of a clear thin wall. I could see them through it. I could see myself acting on a stage while standing outside of it, unable to even push my hand through that clear thin wall.”
This comes at the end of the book, and he’s talking about an expensive football his father gave him as a gift when he returned from the mission field. Later, he feels such guilt about having that expensive gift when orphans were being bombed in Vietnam. His father comes in to talk to him.
“His explanation may have helped me go to sleep that night, but it did not diffuse the confusion—was this a bomb, or was it a special gift from Daddy and God? The confusion settled into a permanent discordant resonance and left me to walk an uneven, rutted road, first lurching to the left and then to the right.”
(I don’t think I’m reading into this to see the football as symbolic of the faith he received from his father.)
And a final reflection on his father:
“There on the front lines, his body on the line, Daddy was able to kill the self, the carnal self, and move to that spiritual state of being filled with the resurrected Christ where joy and sorrow mix and confuse the mind but clarify the vision of the heart.
I cannot see through Daddy’s eyes, or through Mother’s, the ironic self-fulfillment that came with self-sacrifice. I can only see through Isaac’s eyes—for while he left the other kids behind as adults, it was me, the favored heir, whom he tethered down on the altar of Saigon. An act that confused us both by the simultaneous joy of obedience and horror of human sacrifice.
Total surrender to God’s will. In God’s will is perfection. In God’s will is security. In God’s will is the knowledge that all things work together for good, even the sobs of little boys in the night longing for big brother, even ducking for cover as the shrapnel flies, even the decision to send Mother and me home, and for him to stay. God’s will is that we present our bodies a living sacrifice. God’s will is for the son to be sacrificed. This is the old, old story.
This ideology of sacrifice, of ultimate denial, of humans bearing the pain of the universe by the giving up of the self and the giving up of what one truly loves as the way to God, this is the Christian story. This story is rooted in the God/Jesus story, but does God condemn us to endlessly repeat it for our own salvation? And in sacrificing me, why is it that Daddy had the Epiphany of his life?…”
My writing teacher suggested that I read the writing of other MKs when I told her I was writing about my MK experiences. She tells us that we learn to talk by imitating and that we learn to write the same way. So we shouldn’t be afraid to read writing that’s doing exactly what we want to do, because if we stick with it long enough, it will become more than imitation.
So I took her advice to heart and have been looking for writing about the MK experience. I haven’t done an extensive search, but I Googled several search terms and searched through Amazon, and I was surprised at how there is almost nothing written by MKs about their experiences. I found two memoirs, both written by people in my parents’ generation. It made me wonder if we are just such a small segment of the population that it’s natural that not much would have been written/published. Or is there something about the experience that makes it hard to write, or hard to publish.
Also, when I did find writing, it was almost all about MKs who are still Christians or who went on to become missionaries themselves. I did find one book, Through Isaac’s Eyes, which seems to be written by an MK who is willing to talk about how he felt sacrificed by his parents’ decision to go to the mission field. It was published in 1996 by a man born in 1955. He waited until long after his father had died. Maybe his father’s death inspired the reflections that led to the book.
I am really, really enjoying this book. It’s clear writing that gets to the heart of Evangelical Christian beliefs. He does such a good job writing about his father and how the beliefs and culture of the religion made his father the man that he was. And the father he portrays is a genuinely loving man who is incredibly tender and wise and gentle with his son. His father was a preacher who decided to go to Vietnam in 1967. Daniel Barth Peters, the author of the book, was 13 when his parents left to go to Vietnam. He was the youngest of four children, and the only child to go to Vietnam. A little over a year after arriving, the mother and son were evacuated because the war became so serious.
What I respect about this book is the ordinariness of his MK experiences. He focuses in on the little things, the little moments, the moments of cross-culture shock and shame. I like that it’s not a book like the Poisonwood Bible where the father is such a fanatic. It’s not an extreme book about abuse and sick, twisted faith. It’s a book about a loving father and a respectable faith experience. It’s about a father who knew when fundamentalist beliefs were crazy, about the calm, rational choices that the father made for his own faith. And yet that faith, which can inspire respect, also was the source of profound, life-long pain for his son.
It’s a book that can publish this quote on its cover: “Your book stirred me deep down in my heart. I wept and rejoiced at the love your daddy had for Jesus.”—Bill McCartney (Founder, Promise Keepers)
When I read that quote, I thought, “oh, maybe this isn’t a book that I’ll relate to so much.” But then I started noticing what the author hides in more symbolic language. I noticed the silences, the way he comes right up to the edge of his own doubts and anger and stops short of spelling it out. And I realized that I probably have a kindred spirit after all.
I’m going to put some quotes from the book that I feel like I could have written they so poignantly capture emotions that I’ve known (or still know).
“To be in the world, but not of it, was the most bittersweet knowledge that a boy my age could have. I had heard of it and even sung it—
This world is not my home,
I’m just a-passing through.
If Heaven’s not my home,
Then, Lord, what will I do?
But until this moment that song had been just a Sunday school chorus that we sang….Now, however, I realized we believed those words. We acted on those words.”
“All that had been mine…was either gone or in a barrel in the basement of a house that was no longer ours. The things that had brought me such happiness, defined my status in the neighborhood, were now as irrelevant as Daddy always believed they should have been. I did not know then that I would never again be able to sort out the piles of my life, throw some away, stuff the rest in a barrel and snap on the lid.”
“Starting the ninth grade was almost as frightening as the war.”
“Then he turned to me and said, “You new here?”
“Yeah.”
“Where you from?” he asked.
I was stunned. I could not answer. I no longer knew. The question made my feet feel no longer attached to the earth, as though I simply floated. Oh sure, I walked here and there and rode my bike, but that gravity of the soul that keeps one attached to the earth was gone. I became conscious of myself in a way that made normal living impossible. It was as though I knew that I was adrift in the universe, that I had no power to determine my own direction or fate, that life was bigger than I was. Not only could I not control it, I could not even influence it….I was no longer even a traveler, for travelers have a sense of where they come from and know where they are headed. I looked in at life from the place that only I knew. A private place, a lonely place.”
“I had no idea of what to wear or how to act. Carmen’s motherly instincts took over enough to get me some white jeans and a new shirt so that I looked almost normal. But looking normal was a long way from my sense of life. Ever since coming back I had been trying to participate in talk about baseball and girls and television, but it always seemed that while my words and theirs were derived from the same language, mine were empty of meaning, hollow….My body walked and talked and laughed, but there was a new distance between myself and it, and between myself and the people around me. This distance was new and sharp. I felt out of place when I first arrived in Saigon, yet I was still somehow present. But life back here, especially among all the kids…whom I knew and had grown up with, existed on the other side of a clear thin wall. I could see them through it. I could see myself acting on a stage while standing outside of it, unable to even push my hand through that clear thin wall.”
This comes at the end of the book, and he’s talking about an expensive football his father gave him as a gift when he returned from the mission field. Later, he feels such guilt about having that expensive gift when orphans were being bombed in Vietnam. His father comes in to talk to him.
“His explanation may have helped me go to sleep that night, but it did not diffuse the confusion—was this a bomb, or was it a special gift from Daddy and God? The confusion settled into a permanent discordant resonance and left me to walk an uneven, rutted road, first lurching to the left and then to the right.”
(I don’t think I’m reading into this to see the football as symbolic of the faith he received from his father.)
And a final reflection on his father:
“There on the front lines, his body on the line, Daddy was able to kill the self, the carnal self, and move to that spiritual state of being filled with the resurrected Christ where joy and sorrow mix and confuse the mind but clarify the vision of the heart.
I cannot see through Daddy’s eyes, or through Mother’s, the ironic self-fulfillment that came with self-sacrifice. I can only see through Isaac’s eyes—for while he left the other kids behind as adults, it was me, the favored heir, whom he tethered down on the altar of Saigon. An act that confused us both by the simultaneous joy of obedience and horror of human sacrifice.
Total surrender to God’s will. In God’s will is perfection. In God’s will is security. In God’s will is the knowledge that all things work together for good, even the sobs of little boys in the night longing for big brother, even ducking for cover as the shrapnel flies, even the decision to send Mother and me home, and for him to stay. God’s will is that we present our bodies a living sacrifice. God’s will is for the son to be sacrificed. This is the old, old story.
This ideology of sacrifice, of ultimate denial, of humans bearing the pain of the universe by the giving up of the self and the giving up of what one truly loves as the way to God, this is the Christian story. This story is rooted in the God/Jesus story, but does God condemn us to endlessly repeat it for our own salvation? And in sacrificing me, why is it that Daddy had the Epiphany of his life?…”
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Confession
A change of plans in my internship means that I have more time this week than I expected. Does this mean that I'm doing my writing homework? No! It means that I'm finding new and useless ways to be in my house. Sometimes I so frustrate myself!
Saturday, September 15, 2007
After a Dry Spell
Okay, so I haven't posted since July 24th. I lost inspiration, I lost motivation, and I started to get a little scared to have my thoughts posted live, but I've decided to start up the conversation again. Since I now have Firefly checking in, and Robyn (if she hasn't given up on checking), I figured I'd start keeping up my end of our various conversations.
My Current Reason for Inspiration
I love my classes. I'm taking a writing class and a dance/movement therapy class. The writing class is a workshop format with a lot of flexibility. So far the teacher has asked me to write 15 minutes daily and compose a one to two page "sketch" of someone I know intimately. Though I wrote these assignments down thinking it would be no problem, I'm finding it difficult to do them. I'm better than 50% on the journal, but I'm not satisfied with my "sketches" yet. I need to devote more time to this. I need to stop telling Scholastic I'll work for them so that I'll have time and energy to do this. But the money is so irresistible.
Actually, what I'm realizing the more I try to make myself write, is that I'm not sure if I'm ready to be as vulnerable and honest as I need to be to write. I like very raw writing. I recently read Toni Morrison's novel Love, and I was reminded of how much I love her work. Why? Because it's so insightful and honest and raw. And though I'm hardly saying that I have any illusions of writing like Toni Morrison, I do feel like it represents the type of writing I want from myself. I think I expect myself to be as honest as I am capable of being. But honestly, I don't show that part of myself to anyone. I slowly let bits and pieces out to my close friends, to Eric, but it comforts me to think of the things that I control, that I never reveal. This feels like a profound dilemma if I want to continue teaching myself to write.
My Dance Therapy class, by comparison, is just a release. We talk for a while and then the teacher puts on music and everyone in the class moves (dances) around the room. We do this for a long time, and then last Thursday she gathered us into a circle and we tried imitating each other's movements - one at a time. We only had time for five people, and I was one of the five people. While the class was trying to imitate the selected student's movement, the teacher would ask us to analyze the movement. What part of the body initiated the movement? Was everyone able to do it? Did it feel strange in our bodies? Why? Was it different from our comfortable movement? How? The most fascinating observation for me was that when I was "leading" I was completely as ease and could have continued that movement indefinitely. But when I was imitating the other four people, I quickly became tired, even if the movement was very simple. It was effort, because it didn't flow from my unconsciousness. It made me really wonder about movement. Where does it come from? How do we develop a comfort level with some movement but not others? How long does it take for a movement to become part of us?
The teacher said that she thought my movement was very interesting, that it was an interesting combination of elements. She said that it was interesting to her to know that I had a multi-cultural background, because she could recognize such different influences in my movement. I really didn't understand what she was talking about, but I didn't have the courage to ask her more about it after class. Maybe I'll figure it out as the class continues.
I'm filled up with thoughts and ideas from these classes, but I've also been working a lot and not giving myself time to process it all. And I haven't even mentioned my internship with the storytellers, which is still being shaped. I'm once again faced with the question, "what age group do I want to be working with?" I always find that such an overwhelming question.
That's all for now.
La Loba
My Current Reason for Inspiration
I love my classes. I'm taking a writing class and a dance/movement therapy class. The writing class is a workshop format with a lot of flexibility. So far the teacher has asked me to write 15 minutes daily and compose a one to two page "sketch" of someone I know intimately. Though I wrote these assignments down thinking it would be no problem, I'm finding it difficult to do them. I'm better than 50% on the journal, but I'm not satisfied with my "sketches" yet. I need to devote more time to this. I need to stop telling Scholastic I'll work for them so that I'll have time and energy to do this. But the money is so irresistible.
Actually, what I'm realizing the more I try to make myself write, is that I'm not sure if I'm ready to be as vulnerable and honest as I need to be to write. I like very raw writing. I recently read Toni Morrison's novel Love, and I was reminded of how much I love her work. Why? Because it's so insightful and honest and raw. And though I'm hardly saying that I have any illusions of writing like Toni Morrison, I do feel like it represents the type of writing I want from myself. I think I expect myself to be as honest as I am capable of being. But honestly, I don't show that part of myself to anyone. I slowly let bits and pieces out to my close friends, to Eric, but it comforts me to think of the things that I control, that I never reveal. This feels like a profound dilemma if I want to continue teaching myself to write.
My Dance Therapy class, by comparison, is just a release. We talk for a while and then the teacher puts on music and everyone in the class moves (dances) around the room. We do this for a long time, and then last Thursday she gathered us into a circle and we tried imitating each other's movements - one at a time. We only had time for five people, and I was one of the five people. While the class was trying to imitate the selected student's movement, the teacher would ask us to analyze the movement. What part of the body initiated the movement? Was everyone able to do it? Did it feel strange in our bodies? Why? Was it different from our comfortable movement? How? The most fascinating observation for me was that when I was "leading" I was completely as ease and could have continued that movement indefinitely. But when I was imitating the other four people, I quickly became tired, even if the movement was very simple. It was effort, because it didn't flow from my unconsciousness. It made me really wonder about movement. Where does it come from? How do we develop a comfort level with some movement but not others? How long does it take for a movement to become part of us?
The teacher said that she thought my movement was very interesting, that it was an interesting combination of elements. She said that it was interesting to her to know that I had a multi-cultural background, because she could recognize such different influences in my movement. I really didn't understand what she was talking about, but I didn't have the courage to ask her more about it after class. Maybe I'll figure it out as the class continues.
I'm filled up with thoughts and ideas from these classes, but I've also been working a lot and not giving myself time to process it all. And I haven't even mentioned my internship with the storytellers, which is still being shaped. I'm once again faced with the question, "what age group do I want to be working with?" I always find that such an overwhelming question.
That's all for now.
La Loba
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