I ran in to a hiccup at bedtime. It wasn’t actually the first time I’ve run into this particular hiccup, but it got me thinking.
Almost every night, I read to my son. It’s great, for all the usual reasons. He gets to discover characters and worlds I loved as a kid, or we discover wonderful new ones. He hears the stories that helped teach me things about bravery, honesty, loyalty, determination, or silliness. We’ve heard from some titans of children’s literature: Roald Dahl is wonderful to read out loud. C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles are better than I remember them: the moral choices children make in his stories are valuable discussion starters for father-son talks about responsibility, consequences, kindness, and listening to your conscience.
But then… at bedtime… there are passages like this.
Cover art from the version I read as a kid.
Turbans and scimitars. Source
From The Horse and His Boy:
"This boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine but the boy is fair and white like the accursed but beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote North [meaning Narnia].” (Chapter 1) C. S. Lewis. The Horse and his Boy (Kindle Locations 79-80). HarperCollins. HOLD ON! So... C.S. Lewis believes dark people are ugly? Am I reading this right?
"The next thing was that these men were not the fair-haired men of Narnia: they were dark, bearded men from Calormen, that great and cruel country that lies beyond Archenland across the desert to the south." C. S. Lewis. Last Battle (Kindle Locations 263-264). San Val, Incorporated.
Yes, the Calormenes, from Calormen, across the desert south of Narnia, worship the cruel god Tash (with hints of human sacrifice). They feature in The Last Battle and The Horse and His Boy and they are clearly coded as Muslims: they are dark-faced, wear turbans, and wield scimitars. They are also described as cruel and exploitative. Oh... and some Dwarves mock them by calling them "Darkie.” And in case you thought you could omit a few details and remove the racial coding... they're drawn on the cover of the version I read as a kid. No getting around it.
The Silver Chair's treatment of the character Jill Pole in particular falls into many old tropes about what girls are and aren't, can and can't do.
Roald Dahl, whom we’d been reading before reading Narnia, had this buried in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator:
'It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr President,' said the Postmaster General. 'The country's so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.' (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (Kindle Locations 302-303).
When they do call someone in China... their names are Chu-On-Dat and How-Yu-Bin, and they address the president as Mr. Plesident. Yeah. Roald Dahl went there. Just skip Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, folks. As sequel letdowns go, it gives Jaws: The Revenge and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a run for their money.
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)
OK. So there's this interesting subplot going on right now, where a Korean blogger named Minerva has been arrested... basically for being popular, and right. He wrote stuff that seemed to show access to inside information about Korea's economic policy, and his predictions were so uncannily accurate that some think his soothsaying turned into self-fulfilling prophecies (or so the prosecution claims) as his following began to use his posts to guide their financial decisions.
Now, he never claimed to be an insider...he just happened to be right, again and again and again, speaking as if he were one, until people assumed he WAS one, until one of his correct predictions supposedly led to a big drop in the Korean won, costing the government a bunch of money needed to restabilize it. (So sez the article.)
1. Foreign bloggers are nervous about Minerva being arrested basically for being popular, and right: a lot of us write stuff that might actually be illegal, naming names, saying bad things about public figures, and such. However, it would be a big black eye, and possibly cause an international incident for Korea if a foreign blogger is investigated for pure speech.
2. There are so many people writing material on blogs that might be construed as illegal, that the bigwigs pretty much get to pick who to prosecute and who to ignore. Unsurprisingly, they pick on people who disagree with them.
3. Free speech in Korea is not protected in the same way it is in the West. Korea's free speech laws balance freedom of speech against the limitation that "neither speech nor the press shall violate the honor or rights of other person nor undermine public morals or social ethics" (quoted from my shortened version, not the original article)... not to mention, rights may be restricted again as necessary "for national security, law and order, or [the public good]"
Now I'm not a lawyer, so I might be getting this all wrong. If I am, please correct me in regular English, not legalese. However, being a Westerner, it makes me nervous that such vaguely defined terms as "honor" "rights" "public morals" and "social ethics" are included in these laws, because terms like "public morals" can be twisted to fit pretty much any definition, if a clever enough sophist is involved.
Anyway, some interesting things came out of the discussion, which I brought into two different classes.
A few of the things I gathered:
1. In America, truth is the ultimate defense against libel: that is, if what you say is true, you're protected from charges of libel. Not so in Korea: as my friend Joe discovered when he got sued by his ex-boss for blogging his attempts to get his contractually-guaranteed severance payment, you can still be found liable for libel, even if you're telling the truth, if you damage someone's reputation, here in Korea. Calling his boss a crook got him in hot water, even though his boss WAS a crook!
2. Now, I'm not a lawyer, but what I gathered from the article and the conversations is basically that in Korea, freedom of speech is balanced against the public good, and social harmony, where in the West, generally truth is the final arbiter of freedom of speech, and other than hate speech or things like holocaust denial, you're pretty much free to say what you like.
3. We discussed the difference between bloggers and journalists, and whether the government just painted themselves as the bogeyman by picking on bloggers, making bloggers who disagreed with the government's policy into sympathetic figures. On the other hand, we also discussed who, if not the government, was to hold journalists to account for distortions, yellow journalism, or agenda-driven writing.
North Korea came up here: see, comparing the USA or Canada, which have enjoyed democracy and a free press just about forever, with Korea, enjoying democracy since 1987, is a case of apples and oranges. Sure, USA can have lots of free speech laws: they don't have an open enemy bordering it, sending spies across their borders with instructions to use whatever means possible to stir up civil unrest and destabilize the government.
4. We discussed some other aspects of what is and isn't discussed in Korea, and how it is or isn't discussed, and I came across this:
First of all, I mentioned how mocking our leadership is practically a national sport in Canada: one of the high points of my week back in high school was the weekly episode of the "Royal Canadian Air Farce," a comedy troupe that deliciously skewered the leaders of the day, and I asked, "I've watched some Korean comedy...do Korean comedians imitate politicians and laugh at them, or make fun of them?"
Blank stares.
Nope. No, they pretty much don't, according to my class.
I showed them this clip, as an example of just. how. far. people push free speech in America, and how these guys got away with giving instructions on how to kill the president (hence the post title: I seriously don't want to kill anyone except that mosquito in my room), under the banner of free speech, and the defense that "I was only kidding!"
One of my students found this video laugh-out-loud hilarious. One was visibly bothered, and several just glazed over with quizzical looks.
5. When harmony instead of truth is the main currency of discourse, identity suddenly becomes important again, doesn't it? After all, if words must be balanced against one's responsibility to play their part in a harmonious society, how is one to be held accountable? Well...maybe the way Koreans are required use their ID numbers to log onto web portals starts making sense then.
6. When I asked two of my students, "If a Korean blogger wrote a page that seemed anti-government, but was actually all a satirical piss-take (I didn't use the word piss-take, but you know)... if the police came to arrest that blogger, and he said, 'but it was all a joke' - what should we do?"
And I was floored by their response. Both my students agreed that the comic intent was beside the point when spreading dissension, even sarcastically, and wouldn't have a problem with that satirist being brought to account. Does this reveal a focus on the effects of one's words, rather than the intentions... I'm not enough of a sociologist to say, nor to fit that into a larger context, but it's something I'll be watching for in the future, and maybe also asking others to weigh in on. It should be noted, and even they mentioned, that they belonged to an older generation, and that it's possible "the young kids" wouldn't have a problem with that kind of satire, even though they, the fogeys, did.
7. In asking about a person's freedom to tell a joke about assassinating a world leader, one of my students spoke up quite passionately, saying that it's not fair -- apples and oranges (I provided that idiom) to compare Canada or America's tradition of free speech with modes of discourse in Korea, that comparing Korea with China or Japan, rather than the USA, gave a more fair context for comparison.
On the other hand, I responded, globalization is pulling societies out of their comfortable contexts, and shining spotlights into dark corners and unspoken social contracts that nobody wanted to mention, in all kinds of countries, and making things way more complex than they used to be, before the days of instant communication.
If a South-African is arrested on Korean soil for running a website through a British portal that uses satiric humor to mock the Korean president, and he says, "I was just kidding: don't you understand my quirky South-African sense of humor?"...which country's rules should we use to judge him?
Personally, I'm torn. Even for a Korean on Korean case, for example, if Jang Ja-yeon, the Korean actress who committed suicide, knew that the truth was an iron-clad protection against libel, she might still be alive and fighting against the bastards who mistreated her, instead of her dying, and her manager facing a libel lawsuit from the same @$$holes who (allegedly) abused her. On the other hand, is my hard-nosed "The truth will set you free" wish for such unflinching truthspeaking just a leftover of my upbringing, and an unfair judgement on a high-context culture I ought to judge from the inside instead of the outside? Ech. I don't know. I think I'm not against free speech being balanced against responsibility. As a blogger whose real name is on his blog and circulated out and about, I know that my words will be attached to me. And I'm OK with that. In a way, yeah, I think people shouldn't write stuff online that they wouldn't want attached to their real name. Unless, for example, you're getting information about police suppression of Tibetan citizens out to the world. But you know, if your idea of fun is to write the most offensive blog you possibly can (and no, I'm not linking it), well, that's being irresponsible with your right to speak freely, frankly, and while I suppose you're free to do what you like as anonymously as you wish, buddy, I have nothing but contempt for your cowardice and pettiness.
I have a much lower "delete comment forever" threshhold for comments left anonymously, compared to commenters who leave a name and a link.
Let it be known that my students are not stupid. They know that the system ain't perfect, that right now the person in power gets to define what "the social good" means -- I asked if they thought those Suncheon bloggers would be in trouble if the articles they'd cheated to promote were pro-Lee Myungbak, and I got the kinds of knowing smiles that said they knew who had the power, and exactly how it was being wielded. I also asked what they think the president should do instead of arresting bloggers, but didn't have much class time to tease that out.
But until next time..."I was only kidding" doesn't quite carry the water it did back home, so be careful and all.
Now that I think about it, it might be another step towards understanding why discussions with Koreans about hot topics are often fairly humorless: When I joked back in World Cup '06 that the winner of the next Korea-Japan soccer game should keep Dokdo, my Korean friend snarled, "But DOKDO belongs to KOREA!" failing completely to catch my attempt to make light of a hot topic. Even just last Saturday, a friend's offhand Dokdo quip got girlfriendoseyo's hackles up a bit, the topic had to be changed rather than things smoothed over. Sure, she was tired at the time...but still. This might well be a language gap, or a gap in types of humor...but might a cultural tendency not to make light of current affairs (at least not in a mocking way) play a part of it?
So the question of the post, after all that meandering, is: I've heard it said before that Korean comedy shows are pretty much devoid of political humour. What about conversations? Especially for those of you who are behind the language barrier (because Koreans who have learned English very well have adapted more to western modes of discourse, so as a sample group, they're spoiled): is there such thing as a Dokdo joke behind the language barrier? Are politics made light of, laughed about and mocked, or does the awful earnestness of Dokdo advertising campaigns, for example, or humourless political discussions in English conversation classes, carry right through into the Korean language discussions of the same?
OK. They say well begun is half-done, so what does it mean that I’ve started this post five times now?
You can hit play and start reading...but I almost want to encourage you to just listen to the song without any interruptions once, and be moved by it before you hit replay, and THEN start reading. The song deserves it.
Holy Holy Holy, by Sufjan Stevens.
Sufjan Stevens is an artist. He makes music. He writes songs with a delicacy and creativity that stays constantly intriguing. He tells stories that are easy to care about. Whether the events he sings about are true or fiction, I don’t know, but he sings about them honestly. And I would, in a heartbeat, will the entire Christian Contemporary Music industry out of existence, in order for one other artist like him to come into being.
While I have other issues with the Christian Contemporary Music industry that I won’t get into here, one of the fatal flaws in it is, in my opinion, that it exists at all. See, by the sheer existence of a genre, a label, and even separate shops to sell Christian music, a very clear line has been drawn between Music For God and Music For Everything Else.
I have seen this same false binary drawn in the characters and philosophies of a number of religious people I’ve known. They seem to delineate the parts of their life into Things Of God and Things Of The World. Here: I’ll give you some examples: yeah, it’s a bit of a caricature, but what ya gonna do?
How Roboseyo Lived His Life Until 2002:
Things of God Church Bible Study My mind/spirit/soul My friendship with John (who’s a good Christian) My friendship with Janice (I’m trying to get her to come to Church with me) 1/3 of my music collection (the CCM stuff and the classical stuff by Bach, because he wrote “to the glory of God” at the end of his compositions)
Things of The World The R-Rated Movies I own, including three with nudity My coworker Jeff (who swears, and doesn’t believe in God) My body (especially the parts that excrete things) 2/3 of my music collection (the devil music) My job (money is Of This World, but you gotta eat) The “dirty” pictures on my hard drive, which I periodically delete because I feel guilty, but then find more My favorite restaurant (I should give that money to the poor, and it’s a fleshly indulgence, and I should fix my mind on higher things, not animal pleasures like food, but it’s just so darn good)
and the thing is, by drawing a circle around Things of God, and keeping them separate, Things of God are slowly painting themselves into a corner, a little niche so specific that it’s no longer relevant to anybody’s life. I wrote a poem once that described it as a leviathan trapped in a well. I mean, come on. Who except Christians listens to Christian Contemporary Music? And why do THEY listen to it? Because it’s comforting and comfortable, (usually) not because it’s making them think about new things or pushing the envelope, either musically or lyrically. Most praise songs are written to be easy for a near-novice to learn how to play on guitar, so that church bands can sing them without throwing the amateur praise leaders for a loop. The lyrics? Don’t get me started.
sidenote: please do not confuse Christian Contemporary Music with Sacred Music.
But the problem is this: the more I think about it, the more I reject this kind of reductionist view of the world. Compartmentalizing things might make them easier to manage, but it’s just not true to life. (and yeah, I know this is a bit of a straw man argument, and I’ve unfairly characterized/simplified the binary here. You don’t have to tell me that. There may even be some CCM artists worth their salt, but I’m just not ready to wade through the rest to find them. Sorry.)
Back to Sufjan Stevens. He sings about God. He drops a reference to bible study into his song, he met the girl after church one day. He also sings about serial killers, ex-presidents, leukemia, Santa Claus, and cities he’s visited, and lakes, and it’s all one. It’s all Sufjan, and the spiritual stuff is in contact with all the other topics he sings about, and when it does come into play, it’s all the more surprising for its appearance, like a flashbulb at midnight, or an unexpected hint of lemongrass in a stirfry, BECAUSE it’s in the mix with everything else, and not segregated, the way Elvis made Gospel Albums, and Rock Albums, and nary the two should mix. This means all Sufjan’s work shimmers with this sensitivity, everything is enhanced by his spirituality, and we end up with this feeling that the guy down the street is sacred, is just as sacred as the altar at the front of the church, even. And it's not affected, there are no strings attached: he never stops singing and says, "Well, now that I've got your attention, I'd like to tell you a story about a man who lived a long time ago..." with that "I know what's best for you" tone that's so off-putting.
This is what Franny wanted to realize when she tried to Pray Without Ceasing in Franny and Zooey. It’s what Zooey was driving at when he said, “There isn’t anybody out there who isn’t the fat lady” and later, “Don’t you know who that fat lady is?. . . It’s Christ himself.”
And that’s what spirituality is like. Or should be like, I think: if I have to draw a line around what’s spiritual and what isn’t, then the sacred, the holy, well, yeah, it has a pretty space, when I go there, but for the rest, it kind of doesn’t affect my life, does it?
So I haven’t been to church in a year. I’ve been in churches. Some beautiful churches, churches built for God’s Glory, and been moved by the way the architect did his work as an act of worship. But not during a 9 a.m. church service, not with hymns, organs, announcements, a sermon, handshakes with strangers, and a closing song. Not where we orally read bible passages or creeds in call and response.
And saying this will cause a great deal of concern for some of my family back home. They might think I’m falling away from God, but they’d be wrong.
You see, I have met God this year, and spent time with her in a zillion places. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and JD Salinger's books. In the laugh I unintentionally got out of an old lady while goofing off for girlfriendoseyo, in the mountainsides of Gyungsan province on the train to Andong, in the Korean fireworks and the jjim dalk. In the bamboo forest. In a Korean Traditional performance, and in Blue, by Joni Mitchell. In me and my best friend finishing each-other’s sentences, or making the same wise-crack at the same time, while our significant others watch, bemused. In this incredible meal at a two-person restaurant near Dongguk University. In a musical bliss-out, and a lot of caramel macchiatos. In cherry blossoms and fall colors and pigeons scattering as the kid runs out to catch them. In telling stories with a few old Canadian boys over beers. In a coffee shop near Inwang Mountain, in sunlight waking me up through my curtains, in a brilliant witticism from a level one student, in a little girl on the subway who became my friend in five seconds, in smooching with girlfriendoseyo.
I have found the community of God’s people and the exhilaration of minds meeting in truth in conversations with pastors’ wives, atheists, muslims, Christians (with a big c), christians (with a small c) pantheists and buddhists, in the bible, in books of poetry, in the Dalai Lama’s teaching, and in some photography that moved me. In watching a person make the friends she needed to survive in Korea, in seeing my best friend be goofy-in-love with his wife. And you can’t discount that. You can’t discount any of that: if that stuff’s not sacred, then nothing is, and if I’m not allowed to appreciate its sacredness, I don’t want to hear what else you have to say about what is and isn't holy and worthy of my startled wonder. Again, from JD Salinger’s “Seymour, An Introduction,” “Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one piece of holy ground to the next. Is he NEVER wrong?”
This is the world, this is life, and God made all of it, and it is wonderful, and seeing that and appreciating it is an act of worship, and an act of thanks, if ever there was one, and if you tell me it’s not, if you tell me I’m not as close to God as I once was, because I haven’t gone to Church, or if you ask me about my journey not to hear about it, but to evaluate it, and judge whether I'm checking the right boxes and will still get to heaven...
I’ll change the topic, dodge the questions, or say what you want to hear and move on, because frankly, you’re not God, and I don’t need anybody but her to approve my journey before I can be sure that me and the hep-cat upstairs are square.
So when I wanted to pray for Sally, instead of rejecting God altogether, sure, you can call that the Holy Spirit calling... I’ll accept that. And yeah, when people tell their stories in Church, about how God pulled them back to The Fold after they’d wandered far, they invoke the Holy Spirit too, but somehow, the Holy Spirit isn’t leading me to the place everyone expects, when somebody tells a story like that, and I'm not going to retroactively revise the story in order to fit the normal testimony arc. Starting my spiritual narrative on a half-truth is pretty shaky, if you ask me. I still don’t know just where I'm going, except that one: God ain't through with me yet, and I'm not through with God, and two: I’m still moving, and listening, and trying to become Who I Really Am (which is another way of saying Who God Created Me To Be, for those of you who prefer blogs to be written in Christianese). Honestly, if the journey keeps going like this, full of learning, growth, change, and spackles of beauty all over the place, I'd even argue that Getting Home is overrated.
So I was tempted to say I’m taking the long way home... and that phrase gives me an excuse to put this lovely, lovely Tom Waits song, which had a lot of meaning for me in 2006, into the post. (Soundtrack: hit play and keep reading: The Long Way Home, by Tom Waits [later covered by Norah Jones. He did it first.])
but I don’t think it’s about getting home anymore: as I said in last year's advent post, when I wrote about recovering from grief:
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.
So, you know, I haven’t turned my back on God. I just don’t think that’s how things work. See, saying I’ve switched from Christianity to Buddhism (as I did on April Fools’ Day) doesn’t really wash to me either, because that’s just a label, and my label can’t change the way my mind has been wired for 29 years now, how my character has been put together. It seems to me, switching which book I read for my morning meditation and which building I visit to worship, balanced against the sheer mass and inertia of my 29 years of life and thought and choice-making, is about as fundamental a change as painting my black car red, and saying it’s a new one. I’ll still be the same guy, either way, I’ll still treat strangers the same way, and follow the same steps to solve a problem, and be moved to a place of sacredness, meditation, or elevation by the same things. I don’t even think it’s possible to turn my back on God: she’s been woven into my cloth too intricately, and I wouldn’t want her out anyway. Instead, I think it’s more accurate to say that God has spilled out of The Church Space, and started making every part of my life shine, exalted and transubstantiated entire tracts of what used to be The World, and soaked them with holiness. Jeez, guys, God is way bigger now than she used to be...and quite a bit awesomer, too, to be honest.
This song was also on Sufjan Stevens' Christmas album. (Seriously, go and buy it. You can download it for free, but you should buy it, so that you're supporting the artist.) I'd listened through the album a few times, but then one night I was walking around Gyungbok Palace with girlfriendoseyo, and we were sharing the MP3 player in that cheesy way couples do in Korea, and this song came on, and in the dark and cold, walking with my lady, the gentle beauty of Sufjan Stevens' songs, about all kinds of holiday topics, led us to a point where I was finally ready to be moved by this song again.
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing
And the a cappella verse moved me to tears that night: somehow the bottom dropped out of this Christmas album, and it went from some very nice Christmas music to a moving experience. It has stayed in that wonderful place since, and I've been listening to it like an addict.
O to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be! Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee. Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.
I went home after that night, and watched the Youtube video of "Holy Holy Holy" before bed (the same one that started out this post), and again, was moved right to tears, and God was absolutely in the room, saying, "Our story's not finished yet, pal." There's no way I can walk away from that. Absolutely no way. Yeah, the way I worship now looks way different from how it looked five or seven years ago, but more places shine now than then, more of the world is sacred and beautiful now than then, and God is way, way bigger now. Where we go from here, I don't know. Whether I talk about it with a single soul in the universe remains to be seen...though I wouldn't be surprised if God and I saw fit to keep it mum, it being only between us anyway.
To the people who are missing me and thinking of me this Christmas: merry Christmas. I miss you too.
To everybody else who was patient enough to read this whole thing. . . wow. Good on ya. And merry Christmas to you, too.
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 nevercease 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)
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.
Here's another example, one that cuts both ways, from where I see it.
(Leading in:) After World War II, the US came clean on the Japanese internment camps they'd run, made reparations, made a public, official apology, and so made it possible to start healing. Germany did the same in Europe regarding the holocaust, making it possible to normalize relations between them and the other countries of the EU.
Over in East Asia, though, relationships between Japan, China and Korea are strained these days because Japanese history books and politicians are smoothing over, or flatly denying a pair of disgusting blots on Japan's wartime history. There was a huge civilian massacre in Nanking during the war, the seriousness, and the very veracity of which Japan has disputed, and Japanese soldiers also kidnapped hundreds or maybe thousands of young women out of their villages in the territories they occupied during the war (Korea, China, Indonesia, etc.), housed them outside the soldiers' camps, and basically forced them to be sex slaves for the duration of the war. They were euphemistically called "comfort women" because that sounds better than "sex slaves" or "rape-bunnies". Japan's politicians have been saying that these women went voluntarily, or that they were amply compensated. Nationalist Japanese politicians are grumbling "I'm about fed up with being asked to apologize" when nobody's ever owned up to it specifically, and Japanese history textbooks have been de-emphasizing or trivializing such events. The Japanese emperor made a number of blanket apologies and such after the war, but Japan has refused to make the kinds of reparations and official statements necessary to allow China and Korea to move on . . . and when they HAVE made apologies, they've often been loaded with vague words, and evasive qualifiers, not ratified by any official bodies, or (former Prime Minister Koizumi caught a lot of flack for this) immediately after apologizing, the apologizers went and paid respects at a war memorial that honoured, among the others, dead war criminals.
At the same time as it refuses to come clean on its own war atrocities, Japan is campaigning to become a permanent member of the U.N. security council. Is there something wrong with this picture? Could anyone seriously trust Japan in concerns of world stability when it won't even play straight with its own history?
Michael Honda is the American politician who led a resolution through congress formally urging Japan to come clean, and he says, among other things (read the article) that "If you want to be a global leader, you have to first gain the trust and confidence of your neighbors."
Here are some pictures of former comfort womenI saw in a display outside Seoul's City Hall about the comfort women. Many of them were ostracized as "damaged goods" when they came back to Korea, and never married.
This next one especially breaks my heart because her face reminds me of my mom. It could have been anyone's mother -- that's the shocking thing about it.
Here's a painting that expresses the terror and degradation pretty clearly.
On the other hand, Korea has its own problems with moral authority: Koreans cry for an apology and compensation to the surviving comfort women (and their numbers are dwindling as many pass on from old age). It's a shame that Korea waited so long to begin campaigning for their vindication (the comfort women issue was hidden like a shameful secret until the 1990s), but the Korean agitation for an apology is toothless, in my opinion.
You see, the Korean government's refusal to enforce their own laws against prostitution cut Korea's protests to Japan off at the knees. How can Korea claim any moral authority, how can their criticism that Japanese soldeirs violated these young women's basic human dignity hold any water, when it's still common for Korean businessmen to visit "business clubs" and "massage parlours" and "barber shops" where the services for sale degrade the women forced to work there? Sure, there isn't a gun to these women's heads, but it doesn't wash for Korea to demand recompense for women who were degraded in the past, when Korea today STILL degrades their own women through the sex industry, and even the government turns a blind eye to it (after passing some token laws to divert international criticism).
Some links about prostitution in Korea from a site that translates articles in Korean newspapers.
It's common here for Russian or Indonesian or Philippino women to come to Korea to work in the lucrative sex trade: travelling to Korea and selling herself for a year will bring a woman enough profit to support her family back home for two more years! The "entertainment" districts are well known in Seoul (Mia, Chongnyangni, Yongsan, there was one in Bangi-dong where I lived before; there are many more), and range from places where you can pay for a woman to simply entertain you (a little like a geisha in Japan - she'll sing and converse and pour your drinks), to (in and) outright brothels. Though it's getting better in recent years, it's common enough that a few years ago, there was actually a campaign where an organization was handing out free movie tickets as an alternative to bosses taking their employees to "business clubs" for their Christmas bonuses. It's never spoken in polite company, but a student told me (and the male student who'd completed his military service turned red, but didn't deny) that when a Korean man is about to begin his military service, a common initiation custom is for his friends, or his senior soldiers, to take him to a brothel, if he's still a virgin, and make sure he loses his cherry before he goes out defending his country! Korea's stand on comfort women doesn't wash to me, because their own record for defending the human dignity of women over in Chongnyangni is pretty poor, while Japan's petition to become a permanent member of the security council rings hollow, too, because of their denial of the past.
All this is not to say that the speaker's character is the ONLY concern in discourse -- the fact Nietsche died in an asylum doesn't mean his ideas aren't worth serious consideration, and the fact some particular writer/poet/politician/artist was gay/a pedophile/rude/a plagiarist doesn't mean we can ignore their ideas completely (the ad hominem attack is an ancient, and petty trick). Shakespeare's sexual orientation has no effect on his genius, and more than a big nose would have!
But in certain arenas, especially those on a national and international scale, where practical action is required, and where a lot of people are affected by movers' and shakers' opinions and decisions, and especially in cases where the people effected by those decisions have little or no power, or voice, or wealth, I think one DOES need to look at the entirety of a group's choices and decisions, sniffing around for ulterior motives, in order to lend them credence. If Nike is planting trees to make up its carbon debt, that's good, but they're STILL running sweat shops in Cambodia. Megaphones and mufflers! I wrote in one of my notebooks in highschool (I'm not sure if I stole this from somewhere or not, but. . . ) "Our words show what we want to be; our actions show what we are."
So I've been thinking lately about different kinds of power and influence.
There's a theory of diplomacy that says there are three ways to influence people: hard power, financial power, and soft power. We might also call them sticks, carrots and models. Here's how it works.
If I want you to do something, here are my possible methods:
The Hard Power Way: I threaten to hit you with a stick. Obey me, or you will SUFFER! Internationally, this means military power.
The Financial Power Way: I offer you a carrot -- think of a donkey pulling a cart in order to reach the carrot dangled in front of its nose. If you do what I ask, I'll make it worth your while! Internationally, think of aid, lifting sanctions, lower trade tariffs, free trade agreements, opening doors for investment. This is certainly a more positive kind of power than hard power.
The Soft Power Way: I model the behaviour I'd like to see you try, and hopefully my way helps ME so much that you try it too, in hopes that it'll help YOU, too. Think of how many more people a cheerful, kind, peaceful monk will attract to his religion than a prosletyzer with a big sign saying "No Jesus: Hell!" (to say nothing of a suicide bomber). I want to get my marriage advice from an insanely happily married counsellor, not from one going through her third divorce.
This kind of soft power has no relationship to my ability to punish or reward you -- the richest countries are not necessarily the ones with the most soft power (other than in their economic infrastructure).
Countries like Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Canada regularly top worldwide lists of the top places to live, because of education, health care, social support and diplomacy, so when Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper criticizes China's human rights track record, people listen a lot more carefully than if, say, your friendly South American despot does. Maybe the best measure of a country's soft power is simply this: how would it go if you backpacked around the world with their flag on your t-shirt, and what kind of conversations would it bring about?
The strongest kind of soft power, I think (is strong soft power a contradiction in terms?) is moral authority -- I've been thinking a lot about moral authority. Fact is, in the arena of moral choices and exercising of power (particularly where one's power effects the basically powerless), your actions act as a megaphone or a muffler for your words. Being a leader and/or taking a stand puts one under a microscope, and it ought to, I think. So, when Mrs. Bush phones world leaders about the urgent human rights situation in Burma, all it does to me is highlight the fact her husband has no leg to stand on when it comes to a question of human rights violations, and if he took a posture against the Burmese junta, he'd be laughed right off his high horse (Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, etc.)
I had some interesting conversations in my classes about the American multinational companies that run sweatshops in China and South Asia -- I asked the question, "Does a company have a responsibility toward the community where it operates?" and if the company, with lots of money and power, doesn't protect and help its employees living on barely-sustenance wages, who will?
I talked about the hypocrisy of Nike projecting an image of empowerment when their shoes are manufactured in sweat-shops where women (along with men) work in ugly, ugly conditions these links are outdated, and I can't tell whether it's because Nike has made positive progress to improving conditions, or because their lobbyists are doing a better job of burying such stories before they get to the papers. Anybody have anything more current than these articles?
Think about how much credibility the Catholic Church lost in America when the pedophilia/cover-up scandal broke, or Senator Larry Craig flushing his reputation in a men's room. On the other hand, when Bill Gates created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he set an example for the rich and powerful that really shames guys like the CEO of Samsung (Korea's largest conglomerate) who's catching heat now in a bribery scandal/coverup. Al Gore should have gotten rid of his private jet before he made "An Inconvenient Truth" -- sure, he was buying carbon credits, sponsoring woodlands in India or wherever, but why not protect the rain-forest AND get rid of your private jet, if you're throwing down in the environmental arena, anyway?
Meanwhile, nobody buys it anymore when G.W. Bush talks about bringing freedom INTO Iraq, because his interests reveal that he cares more about getting oil OUT of Iraq -- if it were actually about freedom, he would have gone after Robert Mugabe, too; if it were actually about WMDs, he would have dislodged Kim Jong-Il in North Korea before he aimed his big guns at Sadaam.
Names like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ghandi STILL carry influence, far out of proportion with the ACTUAL power they had, because they spoke moral truth to power.
Stay tuned for Moral Authority and Soft Power, part two: indeterminate bat-time, same bat-channel!
