2009: Year-End Retrospective. Personal - Advent

Blind Willie Johnson - Dark Was the Night



Frankly, dear readers, this was a tough year. Hella tough. Every year, around Christmas, I've written a personal retrospective on the year, and it's traditionally been among the writing I worked on the hardest, and was most proud of each year. This year, I'm going to give you a list of the things I learned, or realized and need to apply, because it was a really full year of stuff to be learned. Before I get into that, here's the big big, tippy-top high point of the year:

On Chuseok holiday, on a pretty little bridge in the loveliest neighborhood in Kyoto, Japan, Girlfriendoseyo and I got engaged. It was pretty sweet. I gave her a nifty ring and now we're working on setting dates and stuff. Anybody out there who can recommend a wedding planner who speaks both English and Korean?

But now, in list form, are the things I learned this year, in no particular order. Some of them have stories, but some of those stories pertain to people who read this blog, so this year's retrospective is going to be a little more circumspect than previous ones. Sometime this year I became circumspect. I'm still deciding how I feel about that.

1. Two things that comfort me are the sounds of ironing, and church. Church totally stomps ironing, though.

2. If I'm not working on improving myself, I'm in decline: human beings are too malleable to stay the same. If I'm not sure how I'm changing, in the absence of actual work on self-improvement, chances are I'm regressing in some area. That's something I learned in the absolute worst way this year. Nope. You won't be hearing the gritty details here. The first place to look to suss out the shape of that regression is where I spend my time. Without a goal, a guide, or a purpose for what I want to become, the combined stimuli of the ways I spend my time will decide for me. I learned this one when, for a while in the middle of the ATEK storm, which kept me crazy busy writing, moderating, and keeping in touch with various players, I assumed an important friendship would be around for me when I got back to it, and because of that neglect, it nearly wasn't.

3. Even when I think my friend is in the wrong, stand by that friend. The middle of a messy situation is not the time to let my friend know we're not on the same page; later, when it's just the two of us debriefing about the situation, is the time to have that conversation.

4. It doesn't take that much time a week working out, to feel a lot better.

5. It doesn't take that much money spent helping people, to feel a lot better. If you don't know yet about KIVA.ORG, then you need to find out, and help out. Seriously. Twenty-five bucks is nothing to most of us, but it can change a life.

6. Be generous with acquaintances but miserly with who I call friends, and who I trust. It helps to have a network of people and connections, but I discovered I need to be really sure about a person before calling them a friend, and be cognizant that usually adding a friend to the circle means having less time for the other friends already in the circle. I started learning this lesson back in 2008, and maybe it's a necessary step in becoming an online presence, but this is especially true of people I meet on the internet, and personalities that gravitate there. That's all I'm saying here.

7. It's worth my while to maintain ties with my family. Traveling back to Canada this summer was an eye-opener for me; it was so wonderful to see my family all together, that it caught me right off guard. Especially those of us who are a long time overseas, it's easy to go "out of sight, out of mind" but it's important not to. In fact, it was kind of shocking to go back and see everybody, like pulling off a bandaid and discovering that I'd missed these people way more than I admitted.

8. Remember my audience, not just in presentations, but in social situations. I hurt some of my friends with careless comments that, though funny, were disrespectful or hurtful to them. (Notice a theme? It's been a tough year friendsip-wise for me this year. I gotta learn to read people better.) This sensitivity is especially important when hanging out with people from a different culture, who might misread the wrong intentions my delivery.

9. Read books. After spending a long time mostly reading online articles and things, I finally started reading books again this fall. Books are great: they just get in deeper than blog posts and newspaper articles, and it's vital to look a little more rigorously at stuff from time to time.

10. I can't be friends through someone. The thing about friends of friends is that they're not my own friends yet, and it takes time and effort to turn those acquaintances into actual friendships. This is especially important in Korea, where people come and go, and the connection through which I knew someone might leave Korea before I have a chance to solidify that friendship, if I'm not on top of things. Gotta take ownership of that stuff.

Dear readers, I'm tired. This year has been exhausting for me, at different times, for different reasons, but sweet mercy, I want to lie in bed for two weeks... except that I'd probably feel worse at the end of that than I did at the beginning. I had a long talk with a friend, just this week, about seeking out quiet, and the way that without some time for introspection, and meditation, things can get hollow, and even worse, important things can be lost without noticing, if one doesn't stop to take stock.

But all that said... I got engaged this year! If I don't get at least twenty comments of congratulations on this post, I'm shutting down the blog forever.

(image source)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Here is a post I wrote last year for advent.

Back then, almost nobody read my blog; it's a long post, but I'm also more proud of this one than most of the other writing on this blog. Thought I'd draw attention to it, now that I have readers other than my grandma.

It was written for a friend's blog, for advent, and it's a bit more personal than the expat musings and pictures of my awesome weekend. . . but it is what it is, and during the holidays, it seems like a good time for reflection. It's about my search for meaning during one of the most difficult times of my life.

Part one:
http://roboseyo.blogspot.com/2007/12/i-wrote-this-for-tamies-blog-but-ill.html

Part two:
http://roboseyo.blogspot.com/2007/12/part-two-advent-of-meaning-at-least-for.html

Advent Post: How I Almost Decided to Hate God, Authenticity, and why One Sufjan Stevens does More Good Than The Entire CCM Industry... Part 1

Lately, the cause of consternation back home has been the condition of Roboseyo's faith. The last things I wrote here about faith were worrisome enough, (April Fools, when I claimed to have converted to Buddhism, and the provocative title, "Why Modern Religion Deserves Richard Dawkins") but the eight month ABSENCE of writing on the subject seems to be even WORSE, and has been the topic of a handful of phone calls and e-mails.

Fair enough. I steered away from Faith topics here, at about the same time as I started commenting on some of the other Korea blogs, and putting my name out in that community -- I decided to try and get involved in those dialogues, and in doing so, adapted my blog for my new, hoped-for audience. I stayed away from the intensely personal subject of faith for the same reason I put on pants before I answer a knock at my door, and close the blinds when I change: impressive as it may be...don't everybody need to see that business, yah?

But last Christmas, for Advent, I contributed a guest post for my dear friend Tamie's blog, and honestly, it's one of the pieces of writing I'm most proud of. It being advent again, it seems like a good time to add another year's worth of reflection.

And this year, I have a story for you, titled, "How I Almost Decided to Hate God" about, um, just that.

As my long-time readers know, in September 2005, my mother lost her year-long battle with stomach cancer. The family was all at her bedside, and singing a church hymn, when she stopped breathing, and in a nutshell, that's the religious heritage I grew up in. After I returned to Korea, following my Mother's death, a certain, lovely young lady was a large part of my reason to return, as well as a big part of what helped me keep my bearings while watching the tumor in my mother's stomach crowd out the space where food should go. Whatever it was we had certainly had not been built to bear the weight of a giant black obelisk of grief, and fell apart, predictably, but startlingly quickly, at the same time as my best friend was preparing to marry her twin sister.

While my best friend's wedding was a little spark of joy, the few weeks leading up to it were pretty damn bleak, and I had a lot of fingers pointed in anger at God during that time. Quietly, she bore my accusations of her hating me, and even my claims that maybe she didn't exist after all, and certainly didn't give a rip about me (among other things, I have learned since then that God and religion and spirituality are not All About Me. More on that some other time.) As with my relationship with the lovely exgirlfriendoseyo, the faith I'd kept until then, too, didn't seem built to bear the weight of that giant black obelisk of grief, which turned out to pretty much be a wrecking ball.

And so that first year passed by. For a few months, I went to the dance clubs every weekend, not to meet girls or hang out, or have fun drinking, but to dance until I was a sweating, exhausted rag doll, to try and vent at least a bit of my grief and anger. My dad came and visited me, and we shared the kinds of silences that only we two could have shared, having been the two living in the house day by day, watching mom turn away more and more of the meals we set before her, blander in taste and smaller in portion as time went by, until she finally rejected food altogether.

The one-year anniversary of mom's death came and went, and a couple of coworkers took me out for beer so I didn't have to spend it alone in my apartment, staring at a wall and reliving the death-rattle (three years later, I can still conjure exactly the sound, and even the smell of that room. Sour milk and unwashed hair.) We didn't find out until shortly later that one of the two was totally batshit insane.

And one of my coworkers introduced me to a friend of hers: a former student whose family she had met and befriended. I'd heard her talking about them a few times, and asked if I could meet them before she left. Fortunately, she complied, and I was lucky enough to meet a really nice family that included two wonderful young ladies, aged ten and seven at the time. The ten year-old was just ridiculously smart: she showed me a story she wrote, and it was about what I'd expect from a very bright fourteen-year-old Canadian girl, not a ten-year-old Korean kid who'd never been out of the country.

Sally


Lisa

circa November 2006

The younger one quickly earned the nickname Giggles, because she was the funniest little thing you've ever met, and the two sisters loved each other fiercely: the younger one, Lisa, had taught herself to speak English nearly as well as her older sister, mostly out of sheer adulation as far as I can tell, and the older one took care of Lisa like a mother bear. Mom was a bit serious, pushing high expectations on her brilliant eldest, and Dad was a pretty quiet background presence all the way through, but Lisa was without a doubt, the joy in that household, and any time I spent time with that family, she made sure there were bubbles and sloshes of laughter spilling all over the place.

One day I got a phone call from the older sister. "Guess where Lisa went."
As usual, I started off silly. "Um, to Thailand? To Italy?"
"Rob. This is serious." And her voice stopped me in my tracks.
"Lisa went to heaven. She was in an accident and she went to heaven."




Yeah.




It feels impossibly narcissistic to talk about how I felt, in the face of a family losing their youngest sister and daughter. Even now, two years after, I can only type about three words at a time before taking a break to think about what it would be like to have something like that happen in my family, and pause, staggered all over again, and in the face of a tragedy like that, I have half a mind to end the post altogether...

but here's the thing.

That June, if you'd asked me point blank, I would have told you I wasn't a Christian (the label I'd had for myself all my life).  I'd have told you I didn't believe in God at all.  I'd have told you it hurt too much to believe in God, because then somebody must have LET all those life-changing, soul-scouring things happen to me, that it hurt less to believe it was total, random shit-happens chance, than to believe something out there had some kind of PLAN that REQUIRED me to go through what I did.

(by the way, I'm fully aware, and you don't have to remind me, that people have gone through much worse than I did: I've met some of them, and they broke my heart...but they can write their own stories on their own blogs)

But that's where I was at that time. It would have been easier to abandon the idea of meaning, than to have to hash through all the shit that happens to people, and try to keep looking for it, to insist that there IS a meaning, when faced with Erin, who lost her two brothers to malaria at age ten, and her parents to a plane crash at age twenty, and if you'd asked me what I thought about God, I would probably have had a few choice words for you. One of them starts with F.

But a funny thing happened when I got that phone call from Sally, and I still can't explain it. See, as soon as I finished talking to Sally (during which I was very intently focused on talking to this wonderful young lady who looked at me like some kind of big brother or kindly uncle, who'd lent me her Animorphs books), my mind went in two directions simultaneously. One part of me said "Well, fuck. That's it. In case I doubted before, God has very conveniently shown me she doesn't give a flying fuck about any of us here earthside, so fuck her too," and registered that this, if there ever had been, was a perfect moment to abandon God, purpose, pattern, and the search for meaning entirely. That door was hanging wide open, and I don't think anybody could have blamed me for stepping through it, and slamming it shut as hard as I goddamn pleased.

But you see...

at the same time, another part, somewhere in the deeper, vaguer parts of my mind, where thoughts come out as shapes and half-formed pictures and gestures instead of in neat words and phrases, this urgent need to pray for Sally and her family pulled me away from that gaping doorway, before I could make a single motion toward the door, before I could even ponder a post-God life, even though I had practically forgotten the language people use when they pray.

To this day, it remains one of the more mysterious moments in my life, and frankly, I'm still trying to make sense of it.

So where does Sufjan Stevens figure in?

Hang in there, and I'll tell you in part two.

Merry Christmas, all! A little more about Christmas in Korea

A few more thoughts on Christmas in Korea, interspersed with pictures I took downtown on Sunday afternoon and night. Plus a mini-story or two at the end.

A few basic rules of forfeiture, AKA the Having vs. Eating Cake corollaries:

1. If you don't vote, you forfeit your right to complain about the government in power. If you won't even participate in the system, where do you get off complaining about it? I'm not listening. (Hee hee. I'm such a cranky old codger.)

(what's wrong with this picture? absolutely nothing, in Korea. You get used to old ladies mopping around you as you do your business in men's rooms all around South Korea. Took a while, though.)


2. If you wear a low-cut v-neck blouse with a push-up bra, or a short skirt with mid-thigh-high stockings and high heels, you forfeit your right to complain about men staring at you. You know what men are like, and while I'm not excusing our male piggishness, it's a little naive to expect more from us.

3. If you're a country with the 13th largest economy in the world, a world leader in broadband penetration and telecommunication connectivity, and the world's largest microchip exporter, you forfeit the right to say, "don't critique our social issues: we're still a developing country."

Christmas in downtown seoul is shiny. There's an ice rink behind the castle wall.


4. If you don't dress properly for the cold, if you don't zip up your jacket and keep your ears warm and wear some gloves, you forfeit your right to complain that it's cold. You may say "I should have dressed more appropriately for the cold, that was bad planning on my part" and that's all. Or I will take it as tacit permission for me to mock your illogical position.

Yet everywhere I go in Korea, I see girls dressed in spring jackets with short skirts and thick stockings, no hats or gloves, and jackets that aren't even zipped up, stamping their feet and making pitiful puppy-dog faces and complaining "I'm so cold" in Korean: "Chu-aa~".

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, one must take care of basic needs (food, sleep) before one can worry about higher level needs (acceptance by the community, belonging, love, meaning) -- nobody ponders "what ARE my life goals?" when they're hungry; they mostly only ponder, "where can I scratch up some grub?" AFTER you've eaten, you might have time to wonder about the Grand Scheme.

According to Roboseyo's hierarchy of fashion, you only really ought to worry about style once your clothing has adequately protected you from the elements. If you put fashion above function, you won't get ANY sympathy from me when you complain about being cold or wet. Yet there's this disconnect between two, two, and four, here in Korea: as the winter's gotten colder, I'm told that short-shorts and miniskirt sales have actually gone UP! Some of the results are shocking.

I'd say we're looking at somewhere between 35-45% of the fashion-conscious-aged women at the mall on Sunday wearing springwear (at best) in the winter.

I mean, come on! How could that POSSIBLY keep her warm unless she has an emergency thermal blanket tucked into that bag? And it wasn't THAT warm on Sunday -- five celsius in the afternoon, tops.


The receptionists at my school got a kick out of my imitation of Korean girls who leave their jackets unzipped and then complain about being cold. One said, "Robert. Fashion is important." I answered, "Spring, summer, fall, fashion is important. Winter: WARM is important. Fashion is second." They got a good laugh out of it, but I doubt they're convinced.

(Cheonggye stream in downtown seoul puts up christmas lights every year. The poor-quality camera almost makes the light fixtures MORE impressive, because it looks like one big roman candle, instead of structures strung with lights.)


I'm developing a theory that the fashionistas and style-makers are using ridiculous styles like miniskirts in winter basically as a way of flaunting their power over the poor fashion slaves who feel compelled to follow trends. In 2001, every time Avril Lavigne saw some poor teeny-bop fashion victim wearing a tie over a tank-top, she probably secretly high-fived herself and thought, "YEAH! I'm awesome! She's wearing that awful getup because of ME! Poor chump!"



I imagine those contrarian stylemakers like the Wicked Witch of the West, staring at Dorothy's image in the crystal ball, laughing maniacally and cackling, "Shiver, my pretty! Shiver! Mwahahahahahaaaa!" We'll know for sure it's nothing but a power trip of theirs if they make heavy wool sweaters or scarves the stylish thing to wear next July, just as a final "Eff You" to their poor fashion slaves, rubbing in the skirts in winter trend by refusing those poor ladies a single season of clothing comfort. That's my prediction. Put it on the books. See if I'm wrong. I probably will be, but windbags like myself like to speculate. Fills up the hours.



What the heck? I don't know. This inflatable whatonearth was in the window of an art gallery in Insa-dong, the culture/tourist heritage area. Lots of galleries, and this one ALWAYS has something weird in the window.


On the Christmas Music front:

Dire news: it happened. It ACTUALLY happened. I was sitting in an ice cream shop eating a sorbet, and after a shabby Korean cover of Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" (why why why do they love Mariah so much here?), that asinine song you've heard me complain about here before, came on:

"Last Christmas, I gave you my heart. . . "

FOUR TIMES IN A ROW! The George Michael version, then the Bi version (Korean star) then a techno/discopop + children's choir mix, and finally it was the first song (and its chord progression was the foundation) in a medley of, seriously, FOUR of the ten tackiest Christmas songs in existence. I actually stayed in the ice cream shop after I finished my ice cream, in utter disbelief, as one slowing his car down to gawk at the car wreck and see if that's blood or oil, just daring that damn medley to top itself and actually get worse, and each new song in the medley WAS! From "Last Christmas," it went to "Happy Christmas, War Is Over" to "Do They Know It's Christmas" to "Feliz Nevidad" and then I really did have to go, before I felt the urge to injure myself with a plastic ice cream spoon. I'm disappointed to tell you that I was wrong: every Starbucks in Korea DIDN'T spontaneously implode in response to that awful lineup. Good thing, too. The Peppermint Mochas this December are quite nice.

I like blue lights best.


This is cute: the Korean language doesn't have a character for the "V" sound, so the "V" sound is usually substituted with the Korean character bieup, which sounds about halfway between a "B" and a "P". This leads to the cute pun on this brand: Viewty, when pronounced by most Koreans, sounds exactly like the word "Beauty".





As always, the station was attended by some Viewtiful girls in short skirts, but I've ranted enough about the latent (and totally accepted) sexism in Korea for one post (it seems protesting would be immodest I guess -- I asked Girlfriendoseyo about the state of feminism in Korea and she described what English speakers call lip-service).


(But did you know the OECD released statistics stating that Korean women work more hours for less pay than any other country in the OECD, and unlike in the Netherlands, where college educated women have a 20% higher employment rate than women without, Korean college educated women's employment rate is actually 2% LOWER than women without! I'll leave the comment board open for theories as to why that might be.)

Back to light stuff:

Santa and Rudolph's freaky love-child.



Sometimes, the lack of a "V" is a little funnier: one day, my best friend Matt was walking through a riverside park and came upon an outdoor concert of five hundred middle-aged women. When the performer finished a song, they chanted, "ANCHOR!" (which is how Koreans call for an encore) and the singer shouted, "PAPSONG!" (popsong). The singer started singing, and the old ladies sang along. Problem was, because of the V-B/P substitution, as they sang along to the old '80s song, the end result was 500 middle-aged women jumping up and down with their hands in the air, not able to pronounce "I'm your Venus," and hollering "I'm Your Penis" instead.


Lee Hyori is one of the hottest Korean stars these days (has been for a while.) For all the fanboys, here's a new way to get close to her (if you don't mind endorsing soju at the same time).


More lip/smile/teeth related stuff:
Hyori again (from above) -- showing surprisingly few teeth for a photo spread.


Ad for lip gloss.

There are creepy santa statues everywhere. Some are lifesize enough that they startle me as I walk around, making me go, "Bwah! Somebody's standing there! Oh wait. Nevermind."


On Friday, my face froze this way. I guess that'll be it for the rest of my life. Better hold on to the friends I already have.


This is my favourite picture from the city hall pictures. You're not supposed to climb up inside the rainbow seashell monument, but the security personnel were too busy, I guess, stopping people from leaning on bridge railings (see story below). I'm really proud of the composition and the light/dark contrast of this picture: this is about as good a picture as you can get on the cruddy cameraphone I have. This, or the layered coloured leaves picture from my Kyunghee university post.


EVERYBODY had a camera -- it was like nametags at a convention. I was afraid that if I put my cameraphone in my pocket, somebody'd ask me to show it to them or they'd have to escort me off the premises.


Every direction you moved, you were walking through somebody's picture.



At COEX mall, there are 3-D movie posters where you can interact with the movie ad, and take pictures in it, or sit in the chair, or stand behind Hannibal Lecter's mask so that it looks like YOU're the one in restraints. Cool, especially for a shutterbug-mad population like downtown Korea's.


I was gonna play a game of count the cameras, walking around on Sunday night, but I ran out of fingers and toes in five seconds.


My second favourite picture from right at the head of Cheonggye stream.


Mini-story 1: my girlfriend is funny.

We were walking across one of the bridges over Cheonggye stream (pictured above) and we leaned against the bridge. Some dude came up to tell us we couldn't lean on the bridge for safety, but he told us in Korean. Girlfriendoseyo (normally a very sweet not-making-waves type of person) decided she wanted to lean, dammit! So she turned to the Korean safety guy and said to him, "Whaaaat?" EXACTLY the way some Californian tourist might say it. He repeated himself in Korean and (emboldened by being with me, clearly an outsider, and thus able to get away with pretending to be a tourist,) she kept going, "I'm sorry. What's wrong? What is it? Why?" she asked as he stammered, "No lean. Umm. . . sorry. . . no. . . lean. . . safe. . . lean no!" she said, with a perfect, vacant intonation, "Why noOOoooot?" and, completely out of English words, the poor guy made a funny half-smile and said, "Secret".

We howled. . . as soon as we were out of earshot from the guy.

Christmas is more fun if you're with kids. . . or at least in a public place where you get to watch them.
Mini-story 2: my most unexpected smile this Christmas day (I had all the expected ones from spending it with Girlfriendoseyo [we cooked spaghetti together], but this one was the bonus.)

I was walking around with Girlfriendoseyo outside Sookmyung Women's University, and she asked me to carry the bag of stuff she bought from the stationery store. I pretended it was so heavy I couldn't walk in a straight line (it was a very light bag), and got some grins from a group of people walking by. True to Roboseyo form, I hammed it up a bit more once I had a reaction, and so I curled around and started hobbling in a circle, as if I couldn't walk in a straight line at all. The people who'd smiled at me before were gone, walking away with their backs to me, so I thought I was doing it solely for Girlfriendoseyo's benefit, but suddenly I heard this rattle-rasp and wheezy laugh of this wonderful old woman with a raisin-wrinked twenty-five-years-in-the-rice-paddy face, just hooting with laughter at my silliness, swinging her hand to slap the table where she sat, and rollicking side to side with her eyes grinned right shut.

I'm still smiling about that old lady: I love old people. They don't give a flying rat's ass who sees them laugh at the things they like anymore: they're old, they've paid their dues. They don't bother doing a "modest" twitter behind a shielding hand, either. If they think something's funny, they let it rip, and I love that. Old people who don't care anymore, and little kids, who don't care yet are far and away the most fun for people-watching.

Merry Christmas, everyone. I love you all a lot, and I hope your holidays are full of revelations and observations and crammed with tiny details of joy.

Part two: The Advent of Meaning. . . at least for one guy.

This is the second part of a two-part post. Please read the first part first, here.

Rilke again, 'cause dammit, he deserves to be read twice. (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

"How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage. . .
place and settlement, foundation and soil and home"
(still elegy number 10)

Another pitfall:

I am surprised and amazed at how impatient people who grieve can be, for their own wholeness (myself included). I am dismayed, but not quite as surprised, at how impatient OTHER people can be with mourners, dispensing Bible verses like medical prescriptions and declaring the issue done with. "Why are you still sad? I told you to give your grief to God a month ago!"

When Bruce Lee injured his back in 1970, he spent six months in bed, reading, because if he took a short-cut or rushed his recovery process, he would have put a ceiling on his own post-recovery ability, or worse, re-injured himself. The human body needs recovery time for injuries. That's just how it works. (Bonus points: I just compared myself to Bruce Lee! I kick ass!) Seriously, though, why do I think my heart would work any other way than the rest of me? The only part of me that can change quickly is my mind, and even then, the mind often has to wait for the heart to catch up -- that's why it was so hard to break up with exgirlfriendoseyo, even when I could see that we had no future.

I finally realized it's OK to say "actually, my life is pretty shitty right now," instead of "God is teaching me patience", when my friend wrote "I think God honours honesty more than anything else we try to give him" in an e-mail. I'll buy that. Isn't that what the entire book of Job is about: finding an honest answer instead of a quick answer? Also: thanks for that, Mel.

I believe an honest doubt honours God more than a blind faith, and waiting for real meaning is more beautiful, and more consecrated, than skipping to a rote, ready-made meaning, even if the quick answer comes in the form of a bible verse. I think an afternoon volunteering at an orphanage or a soup kitchen honours God more than either of those. (And helping others can do wonders for one's own hurt.)

During the dark, disappointed, meaningless parts, I found comfort remembering that during the wait for a messiah, God made Israel the nation it needed to be, not through a series of growing successes, but through a string of spectacular failures. (Don't believe me? Go read Numbers, Judges, and Chronicles.) Ditto for Saint Peter. The word Israel does not mean "He Who Has All His Shit Together" or "He Who's Squared Things Up With God". Israel means, "He Who WRESTLES with God," and what a wonderful name for a chosen people!

So after all that grief, after avoiding those false trails, where am I now? What meaning HAVE I found? Well, my ideas about God are very different than they used to be, and I think that's a good thing. There's a lot more honesty in the mix now, and a lot more knowledge of my weaknesses.

I no longer think of faith as a helicopter, lowering a ladder from the sky, to rescue me from my griefs -- I think now that faith is more like a walking companion, someone with well-worn shoes and holes in the knees, who doesn't always know the way, and certainly doesn't have all the answers, but who'll point out a root across the path, or pick me up after I trip on it, who makes interesting observations about the trail, who'd have my back in a pinch, and who's always good company. No, he doesn't make the path shorter, but at least he makes the time pass faster, and maybe from time to time, he just happens to have an umbrella when I really need one, or a pocketknife, or a joke that helps me laugh through a windstorm. In my diary, four months before my mom died, I wrote "I want a faith like a steel cable: tough, flexible, and useful." Maybe I'm closer to that now than I was before, but I'm not out of the woods yet.

I'm beginning to think it's OK not to be out of the woods, maybe that's not a statement of despair, but a statement of hope, hope that there's still more to be learned, if I keep myself open to learning. Maybe admitting "I'm not out of the woods yet" authentically IS the best thing I can come away with, and maybe The Lesson I've Learned is that life doesn't fit in boxes, nor needs to: Things I've Figured Out quickly become Prejudices, if I decide I don't have to keep thinking about them. Maybe some honest stumbling about in the woods IS an act of worship, and by being OK with that, or even celebrating that, it might even become a celebration of the fact we need never cease our search for meaning, that every part of our life can continue being deepened and enriched, long after we stop feeling sad.

"Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. . . .
How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you."

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Tenth Elegy, Opening)

I wrote this for Tamie's Advent blog, but I'll post it here in two parts.

Without advent, Christmas arrives through the side door, and startles me while I'm brushing my teeth for bed. With advent, it enters with fanfare, as the culmination and final satisfaction of a month-long buildup. Opening presents is the fun of Christmas, but lighting candles and reading Isaiah, looking forward to something just beyond my fingertips, is the feeling of Christmas.

Waiting is the most underrated, quickly-forgotten experience-enhancer: nothing improves a food's taste more than hunger, yet nobody thinks fondly back on hovering by the oven door, sniffing for the smell of roast turkey: caroling, presents, stuffing and snowball fights monopolize our nostalgia. Advent, though, is soaked in waiting, it drips with anticipation.

So many of us live our lives between our reach and our grasp, waiting for. . . something, and the thing between my reach and my grasp for the last two years was another very human thing: meaning.

Meaning is the rope that lashes us to the pier. It's the string wound out, that will lead me back out of the maze after battling the minotaur. "Man's Search For Meaning," (highly recommended) by Victor Frankl (a concentration camp survivor), says that meaning has the power to make any ordeal bearable, as long as we can firmly believe that our trial brings us closer to a greater goal.

Losing meaning is a scary thing - people lash out and lose rationality when their lives' meaning is merely DISPARAGED (when somebody says, "You should quit your job and raise kids" or "Just a house-mom? I thought you'd amount to more than that" hackles rise, fast. As for religious debate -- well, nobody ever strapped a bomb on his body to prove "Pet Sounds" is better than "Sergeant Pepper"). To actually lose meaning is downright terrifying -- how do you measure anything when you don't trust your own reference points anymore? Friedrich Nietzsche described it this way:

"We have left the land and have embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean. . . but. . . you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. . . and there is no longer any 'land'!"

In the space of six months from late 2005 to early 2006, I lost my mother, the woman I'd intended to marry, and several other things that were crucial to the person I believed myself to be. When my mom died of stomach cancer at age 53, I was at her deathbed. Being right there to hear her stop breathing was like being at ground zero of a meaning-grenade blast. Later, breaking up with the girl I loved was another such blast. By April 2006, every mooring was loose - I had the rope in my hand, but the other end wasn't tied anywhere! I was like a cat in zero gravity.



(hee hee hee)

The layers of meaning that had kept me warm were torn off like shrapnel shredding a winter coat, and nobody can survive winter, naked in the snow. But, I also didn't want to drape myself about with the nearest rags, overestimate my preparedness, head into the storm, and freeze anyway.

When it comes to searching for meaning, "Any port in a storm," is not enough, and I didn't want to short-circuit my own search for meaning. The German poet Rilke (one of my best friends), says, in his tenth Duino Elegy,

"How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage. . .
place and settlement, foundation and soil and home"

Sure, things were going badly, but I didn't want to squander my hours of pain, to short-cut through them and thus waste them, if I could instead come through them richer, deep green with tough foliage, rooted with place, foundation and home.

See, sometimes it seems like the world takes a perverse pleasure in poking our softest spots (it actually doesn't: sometimes life sucks, but it's nothing personal. Just trust me on this one). Faced with disillusionments that are sometimes sudden and forceful, like a nuclear bomb, and other times slow and soul-sapping, like a trench war, short cuts are easier than gritting teeth and gutting through life's challenges. Bad ports are rife in the storm, and inviting.

To boot. . .

I used to say things like, "God is teaching me patience." There's nothing wrong with saying that, and sometimes there's deep truth there. Sometimes, though, skipping to the lesson one wants to learn from a situation is a way of hijacking any true learning that might have happened.

Consider this analogy: in university, I studied literature, and discovered that there's a huge difference between reading The Great Gatsby for its colour imagery, and actually reading the Great Gatsby, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it. Sure, if colour imagery (or Freudian symbolism, or power and gender relations: pick your essay topic from those listed on the handout) is what I'm looking for, I'll find it -- but if that's all I'm looking for, a lot of other things might pass me by.

I didn't want to be like Prince Humperdink (skip to 1:58 in the clip if you can), bellowing "Skip to the end!" instead of bearing through the full marriage ritual.



So, instead of "squandering my hours of pain", instead of just saying, "Skip to the end. . . say Man and Wife!" I wanted to dig in deep, and commit to every step of the journey through the dark valley -- because you never know which patch of mud in that valley has diamonds in it, especially if you're only scanning the tree-branches for silver apples, or thinking about the beef stew at the hostel on the other side.


Another shoddy port for the storm:

One Sunday, I heard a pastor tell a story about his brother-in-law being senselessly murdered in a parking lot by street thugs. The shock-power of the story silenced everyone, and the pastor intoned, "That story just proves that life is war. . . spiritual war," the theme of his sermon.

If that really was all he learned from his brother's death, what a narrow, embittering grief he must have had! And if it wasn't, I thought with outrage, how dare he exploit his brother-in-law's murder, using it as a prop for his own message, to shock people into listening! I wondered how many other themes he'd tacked onto that tragedy, and whether he realized his lurid tactics left such a sour taste.

It is wrong, and it trivializes a tragedy, to put a false meaning in, where one is waiting for a true meaning. The pastor who blamed the 9/11 attacks on the US Government's tolerance of gays ought to be. . .what's the religious leader's equivalent of disbarred? Publicly and loudly reproached, at least. Ditto for the pastors who blame the Colombine shootings on politicians' taking prayer out of school (did any of you get that e-mail forward, too?).

There are some situations in life where, when faced with such difficult realities, the only appropriate response is deep, sad, and searching silence. No parent who has lost a child deserves to have her child's death used as a political platform, and it dishonours my mother's death, and cheapens the entire rest of my journey, if I twist that tragedy to reinforce my own prejudices. I'd rather wait for something true. The meaning will come, but meaning can be like a shy cat: sometimes we have to stop yapping, clicking and beckoning, before it'll approach.


(part two. . .)