10/29/2019

love's location


An awareness of stuff I can't perceive is what I think comprises belief, or faith. It's not manufacturing an idea; it is based on an arrival and confrontation: the moment when something happens that I continue not to be able to explain away, even though I may test and compare and contrast and wish it would evaporate. Long ago as a Protestant I journaled, "Real stuff stays." My own academic, scientific statement.

This doesn't mean I can't be mistaken. It's just very compelling. My life turns (or lurches, in trepidatious moments) toward that which I can't escape and which I therefore believe.

Before her birth, my daughter was lifted temporarily outside my body, within my uterus, during a surgery to save my life after an intestinal block threatened both of us. Of course my daughter can't remember our first shared adventure—I didn't see it, either; I just take my mom's word, who spoke with the surgeon. But I know I was in a bad state before the doctors decided they'd operate on this six-months-pregnant person. And I reflect on Victoria's nearness, in that operating theater, to the reality she couldn't yet perceive but that existed all around her.

Three months after my surgery, Victoria exited the birth canal to experience the stuff she couldn't previously perceive but had been in closer contact with on the day of my surgery. Life "out here" had been affecting her all the time; she'd been a part of it without understanding. There's no way to know if she believed she had been in a situation portending more to come; she can't remember, because there was no language into which to put her perceptions. She was from the land of the womb, entering the foreign realm of the world. All was overturned. Adjustments abounded.

In the world's realm, perhaps especially in our cultural day, I possess little to no understanding of what I can't perceive with my senses. Authorities tell me there is nothing real that is invisible. Yet I note that I myself am both visible and invisible--there are aspects of me that can't be accessed by the senses, and when I die, those aspects will no longer exist in the world. This part of me will exit via the canal of death.

If death is final, of course, this invisible me will simply evaporate, absorbed by...something? The atmosphere? I have attended memorial, wake-type services where people talked about the whole person who had died. We didn't make any distinctions regarding the visible and invisible aspects of the person. We helped ourselves to cheese and salami while remembering them. It was fine, but for me deeply unsatisfying.

On the other hand, I've attended memorial services where people spoke as if the deceased were visibly and invisibly whole and running around heaven. And yet the visible part of them had been disposed of. What did and does this mean?


Platonists of old considered the invisible parts of a person to be better than the visible. They believed in a great god of the air who made immaterial stuff well, plus a demigod who messed up in making material stuff, and therefore we experience "all the bad feels," the terrible things of the world's realm some of us know extra well.

There have been many theories. My final Protestant belief was that I was created by God, but that God does not and cannot enter the realm wherein I live (though he can write himself into things, as a character—a burning bush, a savior, and so on). Ontologically speaking, God is real, and I am a character in a book or a player in a performance art piece—a tragic tale, important for some mysterious reason but only as real to God as a good story is to me. I believed this artwork had been in process a long while and would continue into the future after my death, but I had no idea why.

The Orthodox Christian view is that God, who is invisible, created all that is accessible by our senses—visible stuff, including our visible aspects—and that God prepared history for his entrance into the sense-accessible, the visible stuff. This is what's meant by the Incarnation. The reason for this has always been rooted in Love. God is Love. His creation is meant to love and to be loved. I was made to turn irresistibly toward God. As one Orthodox elder, Saint Porphyrios, said, "I have run to the fragrance of your myrrh, O Christ God, for I have been wounded by your love; do not part from me, O heavenly Bridegroom."

Yet the irresistible, the Lovely, can be resisted, because I am free. I can pull away (and I often do). What I do not want to do, sadly, I find myself doing. What I understand as sin is the state of the whole me moving away from Love. As a human being, I first do this inwardly, in my invisible aspect, but later it happens with my visible self. You see the flash of anger in my gaze and feel the sting of my words, while hearing the door slam behind me.

Where Love locates is meant to be within me—the invisible pouring forth visible, an overflow of sweet-scented myrrh. I pray and go to church in order to discover again the arrival and confrontation of Love in Reality. In many ways the invisible God has provided Traditions, the reasonable processes delivered and received from the beginning, to help any who wish to cease resisting and draw near to the visible God-man, Jesus. He still says, "Without me you can do nothing." His mercy is the only way I can imagine to face the coming departure from this realm, navigating an unperceived canal into the shining invisible.

10/28/2019

reshape, renew, be happy


Mondays bestow reflection. My weekends brim with fullness (mostly joyful), but Mondays find me fairly wiped out. In today's low-energy state I have kept the woodstove insert fiery, thanks to Tim bringing in pieces of scrounged pallets before he left for work. The weather leaves me October chilled even in the sunshine.

My report for today is that I have truly quit Facebook for a time or so. A few weeks ago I recognized it would make me happy to leave that seeming obligation. I realized I was happier to anticipate removing myself from it than I was when I first considered joining ten years ago. And so far I am greatly relieved to leave it.

Other times, I have quit FB in a more dutiful fashion, considering this good for my soul in a fasting sense. Once in a while I would peek over Tim's shoulder at his doings and our friends' profiles before I reached my stated goal, returned to my news feed, and once again played social catch up. But this time I needed real release from it. I am happy and do not wish to return.

As for blogging, I like the thought of renewing habitual postings here, with the knowledge that it will be nearly private, an invisible presence except to those who have a habit of reading Stories Happen for itself, rather than dutifully following a link posted by me on Facebook. I started blogging in 2006 with the idea of becoming known for my wonderful prose-ponderings. The actual, humbling process brought friendships with people whose blogs I check in on, irregularly at best, just as I have rambled along here once in a while.

I will leave today with a sentence I wrote this morning in my journal: "Love is a location." Relating to faith and river walks and even fibromyalgia (I think, maybe), it's something I'd like to expand upon. Perhaps tonight or tomorrow or sometime next month (but by then I will have pondered and journaled something else).

Right now I want to see how this post looks after it's published, with the new blog theme I just switched to. It was time for a bright, autumnal change.


10/03/2019

roles reinventing themselves


For eight months this time, I worked at least two days a week and often three. Over the summer, we moved my parents to independent senior living. Now Mom and Dad are settling in, though always in motion. I am again in a season of no work, and yet there is plenty to do.

As you can see, Clover helps me and hugs me. Tim is very supportive. When I became pretty down over "losing" my quiet space at Windows, my dear man assured me he is grateful for whenever I work there, because I enjoy it and get to recover on the off days. Those are the big pluses. I think about applying elsewhere, and at some point I may do it, but I know the advantages I have are worthwhile.

Anyway, I am writing. In July I invested in an Ipad, which now I'm carrying with me. Waiting in doctors' offices I avoid the internet (hard to do at home) and spend time crafting. A difficult, joyful thing. Like fishing, really. You have to bait the hook and cast the line in the water. And then you wait. You adjust some, you fiddle, you putz, you're distracted by a voice from the opposite shore. But just hang out there long enough, ready, and at last comes a tiny nibble. A strike. A bunch of frustrating reelings-in and rebaiting. Then perhaps, likely after it's started raining, a fish or two.

Yesterday I raised my voice at my father. My dear fishing buddy, whose life involves joy--he owns a power chair that can carry him early mornings a mile from home to Armitage Park along the trout-laden McKenzie. His life often involves pain, too, and midday decisions to visit a doctor, who can't really change things for him, who makes confusing suggestions while his daughter tries to be there and interpret and remember and who sometimes has had enough of a day turning upside down for everyone, but who has no excuses for losing it.

My parents and I talked late yesterday, back in their apartment after I had yelled at Dad in the car and we'd tried to make sense of lots of things that they grasp only somewhat nowadays. In the end we simply held hands and said again I love you and planned to be together today for lunch, for which Tim joined us, along with his father who lives there, too. The menu offered a Catch of the Day, and most of us ordered it. I couldn't help it, since I thought of it first: I said, "Hey, we're all floundering!"

Next to me Dad was distracted with checking his phone. But later he looked over, smiled and piped, "We are floundering, indeed." The fish was delicious.




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