November 20, 2010 · 9:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: November 20, 2010

Here is this week’s list of poems, blog posts, interactive spreadsheets and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

I, Being a Woman and Distressed. I’ve never read any of Edna St. Vincent’s work before. This is quite the poem.

If Only! A thought-provoking post about people who interfere in the affairs of others because: “If you would only see/do things my way, all of your troubles will be solved!”

Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget. What programs would you cut to balance the U.S. budget in the short and long-term? I’m grateful that I don’t have to make these decisions in real life!

Core Value – Faith. Come check out this discussion I joined about faith. One can have faith in God, of course, but that isn’t the beginning or the end of it.

Rolling on the River. This is one history lesson that is anything but boring. If only stories like this could be included in high school history lessons. 😉

What have you been reading?

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November 18, 2010 · 9:00 am

Plato’s Youth Group

When I was in my early teens one of our church youth group leaders told us the most incredible story.

Imagine

“… that you are in a cave,” he said. “You were born there, as were your parents and grandparents before you. There has never been a time when any of you have left the cave because you are chained to the floor. As far as you know, the cave is the beginning and end of the world itself. There is a wall in front of you. Shadows dance upon it. You don’t have the right knowledge to understand what is creating those shadows so you begin a tradition of telling stories based upon they types of shadows that skim over the wall. Now imagine that your chains are loosened and you stumble out of the mouth of the cave into the real world.”

He continued, “It is painfully bright and it takes you some time to grow accustomed to all of the new sights and sounds. Eventually you realize that the shadows you used to tell stories about belong to all sorts of things that you never could have imagined while you were trying to understand the meaning behind their shadows. You want everyone in the cave to know the truth about their shadow-stories and so walk back into the darkness to find them. The people in that cave are those who don’t know God. It’s your job to show them the truth behind the shadows they follow.”

I’d never heard a story like this one before. As I listened to what he had to say I could feel the gritty surface of the cave floor, hear the creak in my joints as I stood and walked away, wince with pain as my eyes adjusted to unnatural brightness outside, and drink in all of the unimaginable sights and sounds outside of the cave.

Five Years Later

I was sitting in a philosophy class at community college when the instructor mentioned Plato’s cave allegory.

“Cool, another cave story!” I thought. “I wonder how similar it will be to the other cave story I know?” And then she proceeded to tell us the  same story that my youth group leader had shared years earlier. The only real difference: Plato’s story was about the difference between reality and our perceptions of reality. It was never intended as a metaphor for Christian witnessing.

Having assumed that this was either a story that our youth group leader had made up himself or something written specifically to explain the importance of witnessing as a Christian I felt deceived. It was a brilliant story on its own in my teenaged mind; it didn’t need to be portrayed as something that it wasn’t originally meant to be to hold our attention.

Stories Matter

Sometimes when I write short stories I weave niblets of truth into them. Maybe the scene is based on a building, landmark or piece of property that exists in real life or a somewhat similar event once happened to me or someone I know.  I take these niblets and build something new with them, though. If someone who knew the geography or event that loosely inspired the story was to read it, though, they’d never confuse it with a factual account of that place or event just as I would never attempt to pass off my imagined worlds as anything other than fiction.

Context matters. The origin of a story matters. It would have been so much more thought-provoking for my youth group leader to tell us that his story was a re-telling of a far more ancient one.  To quote Anna Quindlen:

Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.




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November 15, 2010 · 9:00 am

Ceiling Walk

I have a homework assignment for you today.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing: lie down for a minute. (If you’re unable to do that lean back in a comfortable position instead.)

What do you see?

Do you spy a cottage cheese ceiling? Are there crown mouldings in the corners of the room that you’ve never noticed before? What sort of lighting is up  there? Are you looking up at trees or clouds?

Most importantly: what obstacles would be in your path if the world turned upside down and the ceiling became the floor?

My Apartment

would have a rough cottage cheese floor. The windows would begin about six inches off the floor and there would be ungainly steps to every other room in the house. The walk to the front door would be especially treacherous with a light, fire alarm, smoke detector and carbon monoxide detector all crowded around the step to the hallway. The door handle would be a little difficult for me to reach without some sort of step stool.

It wouldn’t be as difficult as hanging onto the nubs of buildings or the spindly fingers of trees outdoors, but I can imagine tripping a time or two before I grew used to the change. Luckily, we wouldn’t have any staircases to navigate at home in the event of a topsy-turvy world. Learning to slide down what was once their smooth, gradually-sloping ceilings would be rather tricky.

Why Do This?

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”——The White Queen, from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

I like these types of exercises because they stretch the mind, encouraging one to think not only outside of the box but of a world in which the box may not always sit nicely on the floor, have the same number of sharp corners or actually be a box at all from one day to the next.

More importantly, it’s entertaining. One of the worst things about becoming an adult is how serious life becomes all of the sudden. Play is pushed to the dankest, most remote corners of our lives if it is even allowed to continue at all. Yes, sometimes the bills need to be paid, the house cleaned, the laundry folded, the toilet fixed, the groceries purchased and put away.

At other times, though, one needs to play.

What hurdles are on your ceiling?

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November 13, 2010 · 9:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: November 13, 2010

Here is this week’s list of articles, interviews, videos and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

As H.I.V. Babies Come of Age, Problems Linger. I have a distant relative who has been living with HIV/AIDS for close to 20 years. I had no idea, though, that people who are born with it often have developmental problems related to the disease and the medications they take to stay alive.

My Secret Self .  This special about the lives of three transgendered kids immediately captured my attention. One of the kids profiled began correcting her parents when they referred to her as a boy as soon as she was old enough to talk. The most incredible part of this series, though, is the unconditional love these parents have for their kids. It makes me wish I could share my family with all of the people I’ve known who have been rejected by their families for various reasons.   Part two, three, four, five.

God Loves Jay Bakker via Godspam. This is a NY Times interview with my favourite preacher’s kid of all time, Jay Bakker (son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker). The description of his church almost made me want to visit it. He sounds like someone who genuinely respects and listens to other points of view. We would have much to talk about. From the article:

It’s hard not to respect someone who won’t abandon the church even as it tries to abandon him, and who aggressively searches for truth without claiming that he owns it.

This Call Has Been Terminated. One of the funniest things I’ve read in quite a while. If only playing into someone else’s delusion (or deep misunderstanding?) was actually a helpful thing to do in these cases.

What have you been reading?

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November 11, 2010 · 9:00 am

Loophole for the Unforgotten

Toronto is full of pigeons. Most big cities are, I’d imagine. Sometimes we half-jokingly call them sky rats because they’re everywhere and are thought to be dirty and potentially disease and pest-carrying.

Last winter I was walking to work when I saw a pigeon run over by a car. It happened in a slow instant. A heavy thud as the bird made contact with the car, sliding to the ground, one of the wheels possibly thumping over it as the car ambled on. If the driver noticed what had happened it didn’t affect his or her speed or control of the vehicle.

The bird lay in the middle of the street. I paused for a moment, watching it breathe, wondering if I should call a vet, if a vet would be willing to work on a wild animal, and if survival was ever a possibility in these cases. One moment it was breathing, one eye watching me, the next it twitched violently, and then the only movement was a slight wind ruffling feathers.

The silence rushing in was a flash flood.

As a child I was never satisfied with Mom’s answers about what happens to animals after they die. One time she told us that they stopped existing because they didn’t have souls but that we shouldn’t feel sorry for them because they weren’t self-aware. They didn’t know enough to know that they existed in the first place and wouldn’t be able to understand it even if we could somehow explain that people live on after death.

When our pets died the story changed. They still were un-souled, but Mom said it was possible for God to keep part of them in existence if there was a human who would love and miss them otherwise. That comforted me…

Until I thought about all of the pets who live and die abused, forgotten and unloved. They hadn’t asked to be created or to suffer. How could they never find peace in the end?

I decided to create a loophole: if I loved the forgotten ones, God would have to reconsider the rules. Mom’s asthma and my allergies prevented us from having family pets after a while, but the loophole has somehow stuck around even after my belief system evolved into I just don’t know. I still believe in second chances and in embracing those who have been rejected. I do not believe in the idea of worthless animals or people.

Respond

What are your remnants? That is, what small beliefs, hunches or inklings have you carried with you even as larger capital-B Beliefs evolved or were left behind? My example was about a leftover from religious beliefs, but any belief counts.

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November 8, 2010 · 9:00 am

Secular Meditation Update

About six weeks ago I blogged about my earliest experiences with secular mediation. Today I’ll be sharing an update on my progress.

A Confession

To be honest, I don’t meditate every day. At the beginning of this experiment it was something I did fairly infrequently and I am now slowly folding it more and more often into my schedule.

When I was a kid the idea of praying and reading the Bible every day was drilled into us. I never did those things either.  Doing something simply because one ought to do it doesn’t appeal to me. As selfish as this may sound, I need more concrete reasons to adjust my habits.

The Nuts and Bolts Of It All

Meditation, when it is portrayed at all in the media, tends to show people sitting down and concentrating. This isn’t something that has worked for me yet. My mind wanders, my toes itch, my bones creak and I have the urge to do anything other than sit cross-legged with my eyes closed at that particular moment in time.

Two things do work for me: lying down and relaxing as many muscles as possible (including my brain, although I don’t think that is technically a muscle 😉  )and clearing my thoughts over a nice long walk. Either I need to be completely relaxed or my legs need to be free to roam around to reboot my brain, so to speak.

Results

My natural state is to worry just a little more than the average person; true relaxation isn’t something that comes easily. These tendencies will always be part of who I am, I think. Some people struggle with a short temper, others have a propensity to gossip or to feel envious of what other people have that they do not. If there are any perfect people in this world I have yet to meet them.

My intention with meditation, then, isn’t to change the foundations of my personality. Actually, I started this without any real sort of purpose at all. I’d simply heard so much about it and wanted to know what all of the fuss was about.

So far I can say that I’m learning how to relax, release worrisome thoughts, and how not to have to think through everything that has happened or could possibly happen. I’ll always be someone who lives in thought, of course. I wouldn’t be the same Lydia without the ability to imagine what could be a thousand ways from Sunday but I don’t worry about it as much any longer. Things will happen that I wish hadn’t happened. Thinking about them cannot change the outcome. Things will cease to happen that I wish would stick around. Thoughts won’t change that either. I can even bring about this sense of detachment sometimes now when I’m not meditating. Thinking about the act is enough to spark a shift in my mood at least occasionally.

This is a definitely a welcomed change. I hadn’t realized in the past how tense I was – not always, of course, but enough that now that I’m beginning to see how to live more calmly. I wonder what other grooves are dug into life with our habits?

New Goals

Now that I’ve seen some positive results from this experiment, I’m ready to try meditating more regularly. I’m still uninterested in the religious aspects of it but wouldn’t mind reading books or watching online clips that talk about the history behind it or of other meditation techniques.

Those of you who meditate or who are good at creating new habits: do you have any suggestions?

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November 6, 2010 · 9:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: November 6, 2010

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, photos, comics, videos and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

OMG. Gorgeous photos of a petrified cryptocrystalline quartz clam. Geology and Palaeontology are such compelling fields to study individually; together they are irresistible!

Caring for Your Introvert. One of the reasons that Drew and I get along so well is that he groks introversion. In our six years together he has never once been offended by me saying, “I love you but I need some time alone right now.” 🙂

From What Does it Take to Start a Movement?

But what if leaders didn’t have followers? Would they still be leaders? Part of me says yes, of course; leadership is a way of being. But maybe it’s not the initial leader, but that first follower who has the most impact.

Imagine a World Without Books. Whenever I read articles like this I think about all of the low-income people I’ve known who can scarcely afford to pay their current bills much less sign up for internet access. I wonder how many years it will take before internet access becomes as common as electricity or water – that is, something virtually everyone in North America can afford?

Comic About Discussions of Sexism on the Internet Provokes Anti-Feminist Backlash, Proves Its Own Point. I don’t remember if I’ve talked about this here before but institutionalized sexism was one of the reasons why I stopped attending church in my late teens. It’s one thing to acknowledge that deep-down one still holds certain prejudices; frankly, I’d be rather wary of anyone who claims to be wholly unaffected by anything. It is quite another to overlook instances of discrimination, interpret them as something good and God-ordained or to say that they don’t exist in the first place.

What have you been reading?

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November 4, 2010 · 9:00 am

Culturally Christian

Today I’d like to talk about what it means to be culturally Christian.

My Background

Christianity affected where my family lived, where we vacationed, what we did on the weekends, what we listened to, read and watched, how we dressed, with whom we were friends, and which holidays we celebrated and how we observed them. Yes, much of this was due to the fact that Dad was a pastor.   There were many other families who lived as strictly as we did, though. Some families were even more strict.

When I was a Christian I took it all very seriously. If the Bible taught X according to my spiritual leaders (even if X was only one of many interpretations, even if what we think of as X today was not what the original authors were thinking about when they wrote what they wrote), I believed it at that time.

No one in my immediate family ever went to seminary, but we studied and discussed the Bible on a regular basis. I knew all but the most obscure stories in the Old and New Testament before I learned to read them for myself.

In other words, our faith wasn’t just something we did once a year (or even a few times a week.) It permeated every part of our daily lives, as much so as us being Caucasian or living in a succession of primarily working-class neighbourhoods. It was part of who were were as a family and as individuals in a bone-deep way.

Culturally Christianity?

In the last few years I’ve become friends with various people who identify as Christian. They are wonderful, kind, amazing, intelligent, witty people who just don’t happen to seem all that interested in the particulars of their faith.

It puzzles me that they don’t appear to follow many of the rules that most of the Christians I grew up with knew almost intuitively. They drink alcohol (although not in a destructive manner), attend church sporadically, watch secular movies and television shows, read secular books and dress, talk and behave just like us non-believers.

I realize that there are many different degrees and expressions of the Christian faith out there and that the churches I grew up in came from a small sliver of Christendom. Part of my confusion is no doubt related to the different sets of rules that different denominations adopt, especially when one compares Christians living in a small, rural, midwestern town in the United States to Christians living in a large urban area in southern Canada. I’m going to assume that these are cultural (or even just family/individual) differences.

There’s something else going on, though: these friends don’t seem to know the Bible or church history that intimately. Sometimes Drew will make what I think of as a fairly common Bible reference or joke and they seem to don’t understand what we’re talking about. Spending time with them is no different than hanging out with our friends who are spiritual but not religious or atheist in the sense that their faith doesn’t come up as a topic of conversation.

This is all highly unusual to someone who grew up in churches that heavily promoted ideas like friendship evangelism and the importance of fellowshipping with other believers, to say the least!

Q&A

I fully acknowledge that I grew up in a family that encouraged us to read the Bible and ask intellectual questions and that not all Christians were raised in a similar environment or even are interested in the minutia of faith. Belief cannot be limited to what one reads in a book but this all still puzzles me.

How does one believe in God and identify as a Christian without wanting to know more about what it is that he or she is agreed to when he or she became a Christian? From my point of view this is like accepting a job (or moving in with someone you just met, or signing consent forms for elective surgery, or agreeing to any sort of business contract) without reading the fine print first to see what it is exactly that you are agreeing to do except that in this case one is deciding the fate of his or her soul for all eternity (assuming a traditional, Christian view of the afterlife.)

If there is anyone reading this who has ever identified with this way of thinking about one’s religious beliefs, can you explain it?

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November 1, 2010 · 9:00 am

The Velveteen Politician

Preamble

The Velveteen Rabbit was one of my all-time favourite stories as a child. Click on the link if you’ve never read the story (or want to read again!)

Election Canada

About a week ago Canada held another election. Unlike the US, elections here aren’t held on a predetermined schedule. They must happen every four years but can be called earlier if the current party in power loses a no confidence motion. Over the last several weeks local, municipal candidates have been attempting to convince us that they have the best ideas for our future. Several local candidates have dropped off shiny brochures at my apartment fill with glowingly vague recommendations from their business and public service associates. At the end of the brochure I’ve learned only two concrete things about each candidate: the address of his or her election website and for which office or ward he or she is campaigning.

Everything else is buzzwords and praise that could, in many cases, just as easily be applied to you or me.

Like politicians everywhere, our politicians excel at making themselves look good and telling us what (they think) we want to hear. Canadian politics tend to be less bloodthirsty than the three-ring circus that comes to town in the US, but we still have our share of shady deals, broken promises and government officials who do foolish things.

Every election I look for the velveteen politicians – that is, people who are real. With rare exceptions, velveteen people seem to stay far, far away from politics. This is a real shame.

Elected officials, of course, cannot become close, personal friends with every single one of their constituents. To argue otherwise would dull the definition of friend in the first place. There’s something strange about the ways in which many of the men and women in politics present their personal and professional lives, though, as if the only way to be accepted as a leader is if they maintain the illusion of everything’s fine even when it isn’t.

Imagine

What would local, state/provincial, and national politics look like if the people running for office were able to reveal their true selves, if they weren’t afraid to mention past mistakes and regrets, areas of running a government in which they don’t have much experience, or even the parts of their lives that politicians (especially in the US) often  sweep under the rug or bury in the backyard?

Would this newfound honesty bleed over into how they presented their views? Could we finally get rid of doublespeak/euphemisms like family values, support the troops, or economic uncertainty? Do you think that they would become more comfortable stepping outside of cotton-candy promises and begin sharing concrete ideas for how they want to change the landscape of their communities?


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October 30, 2010 · 9:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: October 30, 2010

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poetry and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Paranormal Investigation of the Amargosa Hotel, Part 1.  Happy Halloween! I thought I’d share Erin Pavlina’s 5-part series on a night she recently spent investigating spirits and ghosts at the Amargosa Hotel. Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. I tend to believe that most hauntings can be explained as either mind tricks or misinterpretations of natural events. It’s an intriguing subject to explore, though.

From Somewhere In Between:

We’re not altogether as loving as we could be, but we’re concurrently not as mean-spirited or hateful as we could be either. Most of us certainly are more selfish than we might like to think, but most of us can also be very selfless, at times.

Here’s to Being Willing to Fall Down a Few Times for Our True Callings. Yes, it is incredibly hokey to tell people to follow their dreams. Many an after-school special and feel good movie of the year has been dedicated to this topic. This doesn’t make it any less true, though.

Debt and Success: Why I Said No to Graduate School. As a teen and young adult I thought I’d earn at least a Master’s degree, if not a Ph.D, in 19th century literature. I hadn’t picked a specific body of work or author to focus on yet, but I had narrowed it down (probably) to my favourite authors from that century: Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe. Ultimately the massive student loans I’d have to take out for that degree (and the low probability of finding a tenure-track position after a decade or so of intense learning) changed my mind. I still read and think about their poetry and stories, though.

Glory. A poem about the because I/God/*insert holy book here* said so aspect of religious teachings by my friend Sarah. This vaguely reminds me of another poet I once read. If only I could remember the name of the poet or his or her poems!

What have you been reading?

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