ThinkBlog

all your dreams collapse to alpha waves
mystical REM revelations find a frozen foundation
flickering falsehoods from which you finally wake
to see the ash around you falling, calming snow, burned expectations
newspapers yellowed, unburned, stacked, neatly piled along matte black paths
down which you stumble, drunk with consequences,
forgotten headlines, age-pressed pages, serifed typeface
called Regret, kitschy elegance, clever crossbars, mocking beaks,
an infinity of sweet words overripe and rotten
you remember when your lovers love their others
discarding you and former things foolish and fallacious;
aluminum poles, wind-pickled, hollow, would howl if wind
still were to animate them, anchored in the papers;
leaning weary, heavy, wiping powdered brow against
a noir raincoat’s sleeve worn long years through the drought
to find the pipes too weak to hold you and your leanings, illusory:
each time an iron clamp of recall clicks too late
when the smell of burning bids you cough and you abstain,
knowing the futility of expectoration, as though through
sneezing or ejaculation one recovered love.

you find yourself a eunuch for lack of trust in saccharine words
spoken bodily with quivering calculation, intuitions compelling
shuffled, careful steps to destinations unseen, distance choked
black with smoke, soot-smeared sidewalks cracked with freezing swells
of winter hopes that melt with summer’s green; illness, flush of
fever, beads of sweat lapping at the cinders swirling round about,
numberless stinging grains each of a price paid for holding fast in
faith that friendship needn’t fornicate, that proximity plays no part,
that time you fail to find for a friend is time you didn’t care–
while each of these you violate in turn, selfish, condescending,
self-condemning by your words. you return your attention to the path
to enjoy what you can: soft, warm snow, tender crackling,
loving words now forgotten, the sulfur-scent of indelible lessons.

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A good salutation requires a bit of thought: are we familiar enough or too familiar with the individual we’re addressing to use dear, should we use first or last names, and if so, how about honorifics? Most of us don’t have to pause over this; and even if we should, we don’t, preferring instead to just slap the standard “Dear [Title] Lastname,” and be done with it. However, the conclusion of a letter, an email, or note should warrant more care—I think of it as a blessing, the final words with which you may ever again address whomever you’re writing.

Those of you with whom I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding personally will know that I conclude, “Be well”—in person as often as in print. There are several reasons, but mainly, I believe it to be a superior cap to the alternatives, some of which I consider presently.

• “Sincerely” has been overused to the point that it almost sounds insincere: it’s like saying, “Can’t-think-what-else-to-say, bye.” It can be used artfully and to great effect, but only if one has covered a broad base of topics and the whole letter could be punctuated paragraph-wise with, “(I mean this quite seriously.)” Furthermore, the focus of “sincerely” is your own attitude, not the well-being of the person you’re addressing. If you are truly sincere, you will be able to convey that by each carefully selected word that crafts every sentence you’re writing—and if it’s a careless letter, why send it as a letter with a proper structure instead of a text message? Overusing “sincerely” is like overtraining your biceps: it’ll look better if you buffer it by something else and give it a rest. Try something else.
• “Be good” is insufficient because of its colloquial use, which is actually just confused with what would otherwise say “be well,” but when taken literally (that is, outside its mostly-Southeastern US context), this conclusion is telling the person to achieve moral excellence or to keep up his or her health. Sounds great, right? But what if the person needs dwell in the grace of Christ more than he or she needs to seek to achieve moral excellence, being already driven unhealthily by a misconception like “performance theology.” Maybe in order to truly be well, this person needs to relax a bit; or even in the long run needs to be sick, yes, even to experience momentary pain, or to be challenged in a new way, in order to grow and ultimately be a better individual and more actively beneficial influence on the persons whose company he or she keeps.
• “Take it easy”—this one always gets me. Hereagain, this well-intentioned phrase is an insufficient blessing. If I have a busy day ahead of me, or if I need to be much higher-strung than I am in order to complete some task or another, then the last thing I need to hear is “take it easy”—either because I’ll take it to heart and fall from underperformance into uniform indolence, or because I’ll mentally contrast what “taking it easy” would look like (e.g., a neat twelve-year Scotch blend, a nice cigar, good friends, good conversation deep into the night) with what must actually be accomplished that day (e.g., finishing work, writing a paper, doing laundry, working out, writing emails, paying bills deep into the night) and will thus be more discouraging than helpful! Furthermore, while some Type-A personalities really do need to hear this and take it seriously, taking it easy is usually the last thing we really need to do, and in the best of cases is still an incomplete motivational invocation.
• “Grace and peace” is the closest letter-closing I’ve ever heard to “be well,” and is characteristically charitable and thoughtful: who wouldn’t enjoy the blessing of grace and peace? And yet, if one is truly to be well, he or she will enjoy the grace and peace of Christ, and many more blessings besides, though the path to get there be riddled with the thorns of hard lessons that inevitably expose that grace and that peace.

I therefore propose “Be well” as the superlative benediction. Maybe it is ultimately in my best interests not to take it easy, but rather to go to the gym and sweat a bit under a squat bar, run in the cold winter sunlight and breathe in the fresh air, write a letter, sing a song, or make a tough call to an old friend or family member with whom I’ve had rough relations in the past. Maybe I need to push past my own limitations and do something that’s quite the opposite of easy, and so become an encouragement to others and become a better man. Maybe what I need to be truly well is to have the opportunity of becoming violently ill in order to re-evaluate my priorities and get my life in order. Maybe I’m in a dead-end relationship out of which I’d never myself see a way if not for the “Dear John” letter that might initially seem to perforate my joy and fill me with dread, but which will seem in the long run a great blessing, as an aerator punctures a lawn and tills the garden to make the plot more fruitful. Maybe, though I might never consciously wish it on myself, I need something other than a candy-coated reality full of apparent charm and warmth in order to become the kind of man that I was intended to become. By wishing my wellness, you invoke all of this—and since true wellness cannot be attained apart from the grace and the peace that surpasses all understanding, you thereby wish that to my person, and I will partake of it if I am well—whether the means be straight and flat or crooked and full of obstacles by which I learn, grow, and am ultimately made better.

And so to you, dear reader, I say, be well.

Technorati Tags: wellness, benediction, blessing

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
—Goethe

When I was just old enough to know that I should control myself in the company of my elders but young enough to know I could still get away with being obnoxiously rambunctious and what was to my parents embarrassingly honest, I found myself confronted by a crisis of conscience.

At that point in my life, I thought of “department stores” as something like cubby holes, only bigger, where adults walked around like they knew what they were there for, while I hid giggling inside the circular standing racks of women’s blouses just because I knew that somehow it was something I could never get away with someday. My mother and I had gone to one such department store, and there in the midst of an aisle was standing a ridiculously irate toddler. He wanted something, clearly, from his mother; or rather, for her to buy him something—you know, I wasn’t clear on how all those transactions worked at just over half a decade old—and I crept up to investigate. I was an extremely shy child, you understand, but I just had to know what that kid was screaming about—and it ended up being something that I thought was utterly ridiculous. I thought to myself that he ought not to have been screaming about something so stupid, so utterly needless. But then, it hit me: maybe that’s how Mom thought of the stuff I wanted….

That didn’t make me want it less, whatever “it” might have been—and I would whine, beg, flash those doe eyes kids and seductresses share, and tug at her blouse to get it (thereby prophetically setting my path before me as a philosopher who would disprove the Socratic knowledge-as-virtue tenet). But that was only because I knew I could get away with it.

Another time, in a J. C. Penney, around the same age, the horrifying fate that must befall all firstborn sons and their poor distraught mothers occurred to me: I got lost. Here in these suffocating cubby holes, these cold, gridded floors with their fake tile and unyielding, Astroturf-esque carpeting that comprised some system that I just couldn’t grasp, I had gotten distracted by a diamond necklace or some such at the jewelry counter. Obediently not touching the glass, I stared in wide-eyed wonder at this sparkly rainbowmaker; and when my reverie broke, I turned to find—men, women, racks of clothing, an infinite sea of “stuff” and “things”—and precisely zero people who were my mother.

Knowing that this was when the “little kids” always panicked, I gathered myself, determined to outstay the anxiety with faith that Mom would realize where I was and come to rescue me from my present state—uncertain, hands clasped behind my back, rocking from the balls to the heels of my feet across the line between pseudotile flooring and stiff beige carpeting. Finally (probably after all of ninety seconds), my resolve eroded and I wandered at a near-gallop past all the places I thought she had been, only to find myself more lost than before, somewhere between “soft shiny things Dad likes on t.v.” (lingerie) and “things that would make Mom sneeze a lot” (perfume)—my sense of direction has only marginally improved since then. It was somewhere around this time that I passed the escalator, that great unmanned beast of a machine I’d heard of trapping my peers’ feet and ceaselessly moving people to and fro, up and down. Presently, I gave up hope, and began to tremble, then to softly weep; for it had been an eternity, and I had moved from the spot I’d been left besides, against all admonitions I’d ever received to the contrary. Lost to my curiosity, inadvertently abandoned light years from home, at the top of the gaping maw of an unfriendly peoplemover, a bad son for making my mother worry (and God only knew what Dad would say when we got home), I presently gave up hope. I felt more vulnerable standing, so I walked very slowly, sobbing quietly into my sleeve, embarrassed at the looks I got and still anxious about (not) being rediscovered—

But then there was a certain man who greeted me sheepishly. He was an elf to my hobbit, tall and thin and full of years yet still youthful somehow. (Looking back, he couldn’t have been any more than in his late twenties.) Kind but somehow timid eyes regarded me beneath a concerned brow framed by a close-cropped shock of black hair; he was dressed in a suit with shoulder pads the likes of which no one has seen since 1989. A regular joe, just a customer in the store, he had found me and asked me if I was lost. Yes, I replied, but truth be told it was Mom who was lost, or both of us, or—oh, I didn’t know! And he smiled a half-smile that bespoke what I later understood to be amusement and a gentle kindness tempered by the social awareness that he was trying to exude extreme professionalism and yet was talking to a lanky wet-faced six-year-old in the midst of a department store in the middle of the afternoon. Still nearly smiling, he offered to help me find my mother. Having grown up with pure, 1980s archetypes of what good and evil looked like (the former with geekiness, silliness, bombasticism, or at least, self-consciousness, and the latter with cigarette-smoking, sleazy self-assuredness, and sly turns of phrase), I trusted him for his half smile and his youth, which won out over his height and suit-wearing.

Rising in a small elevator with no more than this stranger who wore the look of kindness and pathos, my eyes dried. I steeled myself, drawing up my chest and clenching my fists; and with all the power of every bit of manners that had been drilled into me, I thanked the man straight-faced. But it was the kind of caricature of a straight face that I fancied must have looked like Jean Claude Van Damme in every movie in which I’d ever seen him, so I couldn’t help but smile, then giggle in spite of myself.

In what seemed a miracle tantamount to Philip being translocated by the Spirit, the two invested parties found each other upon the opening of the elevator doors. My mother was, as she tells it, “boo-hooing,” thinking she’d lost me forever, and I thought how interesting, how meaningful it was that she was just as upset as I had been (”—and then some,” I’m sure she’d interject). She thanked the man profusely, but kept crying till we got to the car, and even as we were pulling out of the parking lot. Finally, pitying her and thinking she must be going through the same thing I was going through in the store (only outside the store, that whole adults-thinking-abstractly thing), I patted her leg softly and said, “It’s okay, Mom, I’m right here, now. I love you!”

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I learned a lot in those department stores, from the ridiculously chainsaw-loud crying toddler who was murderously desperate for something inconsequential, and the half-smile man in a suit who, though a tall stranger, neither offered me candy nor tried to seduce me into his car. I learned that adults have different priorities than I did; and that if I were to earn worth and respect in their eyes—not as a child, not as a human being, but as someone real, someone worth hearing out—then I was going to have to really think about the things I wanted, and the things I did around them. And I learned that not all strangers are evildoers and “bad” to talk to, and purposed thenceforth to be kind to children when I became an adult—because maybe they would feel suspended in eternity, abandoned in deep space, just like me. In short, I began to really ponder how I came across to others, and how important it was to think and be conscious of how I should interact with what, years later, I would learn Sartre and Camus dubbed the Other. Indeed, how important was maturity itself—to act one’s age was not enough, but to act more than the age that one looked! (In my case that was quite a disparity, being very tall for my age.)

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Just a couple of years later, this concept was gilded into the floor of my psyche.
(more…)

It’s really not like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross got it completely wrong.

It’s just that, perhaps, she didn’t flesh it out enough.  Instead of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, I propose a few less abstract labels.  The first one looks a lot like Pablo Francisco’s sketch of “Tommy” in his standup routine in New York on Comedy Central: “No!  It’s not over!  I love you!  The band’s gonna make it, c’mon”—now, that’s Denial.  Anger, well, maybe it looks something like this.  The third level of stages of grief usually looks like something we’ve all done before, at some time or another, involving some good work that we promise to do (consistently or not) in exchange for a change of a situation for the better.  Of course, none of us hold up our ends of the bargains, but that’s only because we somehow know that if we did, we’d be no better off.  Depression usually looks like something of an amalgam of that which has already been described and that which is yet to come, a transitition : a little anger mixed with acceptance.

Acceptance looks different than acquiescence, though, I think; and a lot different than we have traditionally conceptualized it.  When we grit our teeth, dig in our heels, and accept the situtation for what it is and assume that because of entropy it will only worsen (and remain stable for all that)—that is acceptance.  There is no need for acceptance in the face of true pleasure; so only in the case of pain, we say, “I am content,” and are able to mean it in a sense that extends beyond the moment; come what may, we say, even though the situation shall deteriorate, I will bear it.  Frankly, this is often a beautiful state for one to inhabit, because it makes one aware both of grace and of his or her own relations to others; but sometimes—sometimes—this is the very attitude God uses to shatter the hell-on-earth we take for granted and turn it into something better than we expect.  I don’t recommend adopting my dear friend’s old philosophy that by expecting the worst we will never be disappointed, because if we truly always expect the worse, we will drive ourselves into a state that cannot comprehend the good that happens around us (the same happens in the case that we expect too much; and it is named Depression).

There is something about which we all grit our teeth and bear it.  Some are more punishing than others, but we all have one or two at the top of our list that have been there so long we’ve forgotten them; or, more accurately, we’ve become jaded to them to the point that we take them as for granted as gravity in our lives, that force by which we are dragged down but against which we struggle with some measure of success day by day, and becomes as natural to us as breathing.

As a major in philosophy, I love to challenge people’s beliefs; I love to discuss why and how you and I believe that which we believe.  As a psychologist, sometimes that includes the feelings that we have for each other, against each other, and generally in our own lives.  (As a cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist, that makes me extremely curious about the nature of subjective experience in general and, particularly, how we conceptualize sorrow; but that’s, of course, beside the point for this post.)  Where the rubber meets the road?  Right at our points of the most certain.  Until a few weeks ago, I was sure that the surest thing in the world apart from “Sol appears to rise on such-and-such a time within such-and-such a solstice from the planet Earth” was “She and I shall never again share laughter or fellowship—only bare-bones forgiveness at best.  Maybe in the same sense that you can live in a structure with four walls and a roof against the elements and call it a house (though never a home).  But like a character out of a Dickens novel, I eventually took this for granted; not as a thing to be warred against, but an obstacle to be worked around.  One more wall in a life-perimeter lined with failed expectations, lost promises, and quiet acceptance of what must have always been.

Nevertheless: for Christmas, God granted me reconciliation and laughter.

We all get used to the ruts in our lives, our minds, our patterns of behavior, without knowing it; that’s how they become ruts, after all.  You make a decision and that’s final, and it will never change; whatever else happens, you know that X is in stone, and that’s all there is to it.

The force that took me down was more powerful and more subtle than the brute force (including argument) of which I’m so fond: it was the true Laughter that I’ve been missing for more than half a decade.  My favorite method of argument to coming around to a mutually agreeable solution is that of intense fighting, from a position of rock-solid opinionation to open-minded willingness to really listen on both sides.  But for Christmas, I was given something sweeter and more powerful than a brute-force argument: mutual laughter.  What?

Seriously.  This is the man in whom the Dragon dwells; this is he who stands, a statue in the cracked desert floor, another simple program in the great OS from the sky, and nothing more.  And yet—

Aye, the impossible was granted.  The best Christmas present I’ve received in memory was over half a decade in the making; and it was Yield in the form of Laughter that had nothing to do with artifice generated by comedy flicks, stand-up, or what-have-you.  I would never have thought that Laughter could have melted the fortress of ice I’d hid myself in; but nothing says “sovereign” like something five years in the making.

I just finished the final, ten-page paper of my entire undergraduate career. This Monday, I will graduate with a dual BA in experimental psychology and philosophy from the University of South Carolina. It’s been a long road, and I wouldn’t know where to begin to thank everyone that’s helped me get here.

But I just have to thank a few, even though I’ll miss a multitude and have to keep updating the post. My friends I’ve met in Columbia since I arrived here a couple of long years ago, you’ve been an enormous encouragement. If I named you all I’d be here till noon and this would look like Facebook!

JCS, JMB, SKM, CAC, DHN3, APS, HCI, B#L, DRP, JRM, D#A, &c.—your solidarity through the years means the world.

Thom C.—I’m a better writer, thinker, and Christian man because of your influence.

Drs. F. Provenzano, A. Almor, R. Bruster, C. Bryson, H. Sefrin-Weis—you are who inspired me to pursue my dreams in academia.

To my dear friends from Louisville back in ‘01-’02, if you ever somehow see this, know that your tireless patience and thoughtful questions gave me direction when I thought the only way was down.

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You know what this means, right? With all the new time I have after work to read, think, and write, you can expect excellent things from ThinkBlog and ThinkForums in ‘07! (And I’ll also have time now to reply to all those messages and go through those stacks of papers that have been waiting on me for literally years! Ha!)

But if I say, “I will not remember Him
Or speak anymore in His name,”
Then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire
Shut up in my bones;
And I am weary of holding it in,
And I cannot endure it.

Jeremiah 20:9, NAS

If I don’t write what’s really important to me, I lose the fire to talk about it at all; but then it becomes to me almost like a sin of omission, after the fact. This weekend promises to sharpen my focus; more on that later.

This is more of a thank-you post than it is theoretical or even practical in any sense. I can be myself around PJ, my former roommate and my constant friend. He is, like me, goofy, Christian, and southern—but he especially keeps me rooted when I come visit him in Charlotte and I realize only by his invitations to southern restaurants and by his jabs at my non-regional intellectualism that I can by my hailing-from-SC self with him. Last week we went to John’s Country Kitchen in Charlotte, voted by all sorts of quasi-unofficial organizations the “Best Breakfast” and “Best Southern Food” in Charlotte, for lunch. It was the best meat loaf I’d ever had, let alone the gravy, lima beans, fried okra, and sweet tea and cornbread I’d had short of Grandmama Leila. Seriously, what more could you possibly ask for? (I have a menu here that I’ve been meaning to scan in, but as I write this, I don’t have access to that scanner. Will upload ASAP.)

Took the GRE on Halloween, and did well. Next step? Applying to grad school. Will keep you posted.

This year (last night), I went to a Halloween party dressed in my dad’s old fatigues from the Army reserve. Other than being a commentary on how well U.S. Army-made clothing holds up after thirty years, I’m sure it also says something about how things change and yet stay the same….

Went to the state fair yesterday with a friend, where an amusing thought struck me as we strolled beneath the creaking, flashing rides.

You enter from the larger reality—in this case, the city of Columbia, SC or, more broadly, the state itself—and don’t quite know what to expect. You come in. There’s a lot of food the eating of which feels really great for that moment and the penalty for which is an expanding waistline and gastrointestinal distress the likes of which could fell pachyderms. There are many distractors: sirens blaring, lights flashing, rides running, workers shouting their a priori approval of your skills at whatever rigged game they’re standing before to entice you to spend wads of cash on meaningless oversized schwag that somehow seems really important at the moment. Everything seems urgent, controlled chaos. The amount of work it took to throw this expensive multifaceted party is almost inconceivable—and it’ll all be over in a few short days, mere moments in which children cry and laugh; in which children of all ages eat and overeat all sorts of things that even a McDonalds junkie wouldn’t touch more than once a year; in which fun will be had, people and jackets will get lost and found, and then—they’ll tear it down for another year.

And it hit me: the fair is like Creation. Insofar as we may attribute “labor” to omnipotent deity, God labored for six days to separate the waters, to scatter the stars in the heavens, to make plants and fish and man. People enter not knowing what to expect, get distracted by all sorts of things that at best don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, eat too much, are unhealthy—then POOF, everyone has to leave the fair sometime and go out into the larger reality, and at the end of time the fair is taken down, and that’s it. All that hullaballoo for just a short burst, in terms of the long run. (Of course if I held to the Greek conception of time, the analogy would go further: the universe would be remade and unmade, time without end, in a cyclical pattern. But I digress.)

I must take your farewell,
carried by destiny: bound to obey

I must take your farewell;
trails of discovery: meet me an ocean away

—Kamelot, “Farewell”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the inevitability of things, and why the inexorable march of time makes me somehow so angry. I’ll be posting more along that line as I figure out where it’s all coming from.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some thinking, but of course you wouldn’t know it, because I haven’t been active! Let’s call September an unintentional hiatus; October will find me applying to graduate school, working toward December graduation, and hopefully, keeping up with the ‘blog!

Lately, especially since the move, my circadian rhythm has been completely jacked. I mean normally it’s sort of jacked; but especially lately.

Theeeeeeere is my roommate;
He sleeps all daaaaaaay—
And blogs all niiiiiiiight!

Thanks, Andy.

Getting some good sleep now, nevermind this time stamp, so I’m glad of that. Expect many more good things as I get more boxes unpacked and rediscover all the stuff I meant to blog about before I left the old place.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that I’d been thinking about some things that involved (i.e., were sparked by) the live performance of the Sonata Arctica song Replica. Here’s a little bit of an explanation about that; I’d like to see whether you can relate. [This is taken from hastily-typed notes from 20 June; please ask if anything’s unclear.]

The thing that struck me about this song in particular is that it’s sung in a minor key, an almost archetypically tribal sort of song that I imagine being sung for a fallen Saxon hero, especially as it is on the live album (in a way that is, of course, not caught on the studio recording; but you still can get a feel for the mournful tone, especially in the last chorus).

For me, innocence has been something of a long-lost memory; but I have gotten only what I wanted in my foolishness several years ago; I forsook the singular pursuit of the Gospel for the knowledge that can only come by pain, that peculiar fall from grace that one chooses consciously so as to Know (experientially) rather than to Believe (even if it’s the truth). What struck me about this song in particular was the sense of one’s crying over oneself, a new and less pure self still able to mourn the loss of an old “self.” “Empty shell inside of me: I’m not myself, I’m a replica of me—” This is the essence of emotional self-awareness, being able to recognize one’s own fall and to mourn it, so as to move past it. I have not been able to do that; I have not been able to believe I have been or am worth crying for, either by myself or by another. Much like Aristotle’s definition of a happy (eudaimon) life, it is only once all the deeds and circumstances of my whole life have been tallied up can I be called a “happy” person, or allow myself a blessed existence. I don’t even like Aristotle; why would I agree with him here? Yet only after I am dead may I be mourned.

A friend of mine had recently blogged about her experience that she had had, a “word of knowledge” if you will regarding her own beauty in Christ, that she had worth and was beautiful. Everyone needs and, I believe, has this experience at some point in his or her life; but needs this consistently, and to believe it is not revoked. It has been said that women need to feel beautiful; and I believe it. Women who do not believe in their own beauty and who are not consistently supported in that are driven to eating disorders and anger issues; but men need it too. Men need to know that they are good leaders, that they are beautiful and efficient, effective and truly excellent at whatever it is they are best at, whatever it is that they are trying to be. Men and women both, though, need to know that they are beautiful for who they are, not just because of what they can or do produce to be used. They need to know that there is substance to their purposes in life and that they are not “done” on Earth. Everyone who understands this dilemma and still doesn’t take his or her own life understands intuitively, if not explicitly, that there is a purpose to his or her life in just this very sense.

How does one lose this sense of being worthy of mourning by oneself or by another? For me it came by a series of decisions that I can remember beginning to add up at a Fall Retreat at my church in the late 1990s. I was still considered a “youth,” if a bit old, and I sat listening to the speaker talk about some “youth issues” and whatnot one night. There, as the sun set into a dark, cold hillside, I listened to the speaker’s illustration about romantic love. In this particular situation, he held up a stereotypically-shaped red construction-paper heart for all to see, and he showed us that giving ourselves wholly to other people when Christ should be (or have been) the focus is like tearing up bits and pieces of that heart: he ripped a corner off. “You know that girl you dated and gave too much to?”—Another piece came off. “And that friend who convinced you to smoke?”—another piece. “How about that guy you never told anyone about?”—He looked the girls over and solemnly tore another large chunk off. Eventually, he was done, and the red, full paper heart, now a foreign amoeba lying dead on the floor, was the despised bit of nonsense that dwells in the believer when he or she sins—the way I had, I thought.

I then turned, gradually, to outward confirmation. I had entered the realm of women already; but they became my sole crutch, the crux of my value. But how easily does “Thou, my beloved” turn into “Thou hateful wretch!” Much after this long-past fall retreat, a girlfriend told me she loved me unconditionally. I knew it wasn’t true, but it gave me a cold chill to think that we could all make promises like that, which would ultimately fail. I don’t believe in unconditional love from any human; to do so, in my opinion, is an invitation to destruction and chaos. Believing so, we will test, wittingly or un-; and, testing, will find that the human heart is “exceedingly wicked” and fickle, and in fact places many conditions on its love.

So the eternal love of God becomes corrupted and localized into a human being, a singular woman, whom I ultimately have disappointed; and between us both pass the tacit words, “YOU have failed ME, to whom you’ve given your heart. You were but are not; the period in which you have done me good was brief and now over.” What then of the tender moments? Burned away, leaving by the flame of tearing two souls from one another a proud and tender bitterness like char, bleeding sap on the scorched side of a tree, where blessing and forgiveness used to flow.”

How can we deny this statement power, this position of finding love in a “lover” instead of God, the Lover of Alll and Over All? We start from a position of “you were crafted in the imago Dei, you are human, you therefore have worth.”

But that becomes quickly, “You [the lover] have worth to me.” This secondary worth flows from anything that we find desirable externally in that person as it relates to us. Exempli gratia, “You are beautiful, and I appreciate your body; you are strong, and you can protect me; you are poetic, and my soul cries for someone to touch it tenderly and not with the cold blade of logic; you are literary and I, too, am well read; you are an available mistress, and my wife is too busy and frigid to have me; you are good at taking dictation, and I need a secretary.” Whatever.

Then, gradually as we recover from lust and greed, selfish pride and utter deceit, we rediscover in those things their worth for that person, purely as they uniquely manifest the Imago Dei— the way that such-and-such a person is beautiful insofar as they are made in the image of God, and insofar as they uniquely show what they are, “from” God. This happens at various rates in various areas of a person’s life as it relates to the other’s. For instance, if you are going through a period of learning about the grace and beauty of Christ in acts of service, it may strike you as particularly beautiful for me to make you dinner, whereas it would normally not.

But what of the ultimate result of the vast majority of relationships? “I love you” is answered with, “Aye, so you say now, but know you not the words with which you’ll curse me in the soon-coming day when we part company?” And so the constant knowledge that you have to prove yourself has altogether replaced the “unconditional” love of before, and the genuine, non-quote-qualitified unconditional love of Christ which has long been forsaken.

So the love of the Other is revoked. And with it, the promises, the love, the forgiveness, the grace, all human-conveyed and human-retracted. And, left alone with these pieces of a paper heart, what is one to do? Only to seek first the Kingdom, and, failing that, seek ultimately the Kingdom once one has had his or her fill of pain. Only then can we understand that we are worth something, not conditionally, but eternally. If God is love, and Love never fails, then emotion and temporal girl-boy love can’t be the benchmark by which other Loves are examined.

Here’s to regaining that sense of worth that will allow us to mourn over our pasts and forge ahead to genuinely joyful and productive futures.

Having moved into my new place with a solid roommate just outside of downtown asphalt-wasteland Columbia, I’m back on the grid. It’s been quite a nightmare getting moved in, but I’m thinking this will set the stage for better things.

The few days in which I was moving in were some of the worst, most harrying of my life. Seriously. A friend of mine had an away message on his AIM account not too long ago that read something along the lines of, “There is no worse hell than moving.” I disagreed, till that last night. It was 05:45 and I had passed over the “be-out-by” deadline by a day already: I was sweating that ammoniated, salty sweat of extreme fatigue; and alternately standing unsteadily, loading things into boxes, and becoming infuriated over the Sisyphean task before me. I had turned the A/C off in the apartment to conserve energy, but I shouldn’t have. Wisdom told me to turn it down to 60°F, but I left it as it was. Later, the only thing keeping me awake was raw anger; I wasn’t even upset about anything in particular, I was just enraged, lest unconsciousness take me.

And I agreed with my friend, there really is no worse thing to face in that sense. In the physically-taxing, why-am-I-here’ing futility of moving, one finds in his physicality the prison actualized that I pictured it to be from my first taste of Cartesian dualism in high school: just as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Case thought of his body as a carrier for the mind, a stupid piece of meat, so did I think of it thus; a damnable prison to be ruled over and destroyed to continue. Sleep and exhaustion became absurdities in those early morning hours, when I’d had three hours of sleep over the past 50+ and had had to present a final project in my psychology class. Necessity of sleep, like the existence of spiders, became evidence of a fallen Creation; if only I had something to block the adenosine receptors perfectly, to kill all the other physiological needs for sleep in my brain, I would be all right. But I didn’t. The authority of the body was dragging me down, and I got to the point I was slinging fists into walls, objects, freezer doors: I didn’t care, I was a poorly-oiled machine that was moving objects into boxes and carrying those boxes to the vehicle that would take them to the new apartment. What a hateful time. I was grateful that it was as short as it was. I ended up doing well in the class and moving just fine (with the help of my dear mother, who drove down to gather stuff for me as I passed violently into unconsciousness to sweat out the ammoniated sweat of someone hatefully punished by his own body).

That’s only one small piece of what made last week one of the longest of my life. It is a week that shall live in infamy; you know the kind. It’s one that’s a concatenation of several eternal days filled with strife back upon you get to look later in life and laugh, sweat on the brow no matter how hot, and say: “At least it’s not as bad as it was then.”

So thanks for those of you who wondered where I’d gotten to. I’m back, and the regularly scheduled daily-and-then-some-posts should be flowing again as of today. Note: I haven’t decided whether I’m going to backpost; but if you see anything on the main site between now and the 26th of July of this year, that’s a backpost.

I have a hard time with nicknames, because I read into them too much. It’s hard for me to call a friend by a nickname unless I’m introduced to them as such, or I’ve understood that they’re quite happy with it (to the exclusion of their given name—Boo is an example).

It’s because it seems to me a sign of a lack of respect for the person as they are if someone dubs another with a nickname. It’s like the difference between “Jesus Christ per se” and “my Jesus,” to some extent—that’s not inherently disrespectful at all, just indicative of difffering worldviews, right? It doesn’t diminish the divinity or person of Christ to claim Him as one’s own. Same with nicknames, but in a way that might actually diminish that person.

For example. When I go to work at places, I often introduce myself as “Mike,” not Michael. Using my full first name gives a sense of intimate familiarity. There is to me a shaving off of part of myself to truncate my name; you shan’t know “Michael,” thinker, dreamer, writer, student, son … but as my coworker you will know the Mike that gets things done, the efficient and dynamic coder (or whatever) who will write programs for you and shoot the bull with you at lunch break. If we end up going for drinks after work sometime, call me Michael.

Same with the last name. There is one person on this earth who can call me “Phillips” without my taking offense, and that’s because she and I have been best friends for more than a decade. It’s used in the Army because it’s the closest thing you can come to a statistic; I remember wearing my father’s old, too-small black trench coat to my classes my freshman year of college because I was bedarkened of mind and affect, and didn’t want anyone to know me; “You shall know me as Phillips, not as your intimate colleague Michael.”

Understand, too, that I was given a ridiculous nickname in middle school, and some still call me by that; back then, it wasn’t funny, and it’s still not, but it does have enough time between the dubbing and the present to lend some joviality to the nickname.

On most forums or sites, you will know me as tek1024; tek as a truncation of my old ICQ moniker “Technophile,” lover of both technology and techno (music); and 1024 as the beautiful “round” number 2^10, representing my history in computer science and enjoyment of the different mindset of “hacking culture.” But even with this self-given nick, you don’t know me; you merely see a side of me, a splinter of myself that I present, like a résumé tweaked for a certain job description.

And there is a difference between nicks given to oneself and those given by others; but for me, they all signify a hiding of myself (if I coined it) or a “making less complicated than the whole” if given by another. For instance, my nickname from middle and high school describes that aspect of me that was the outgoing entertainer, the track-and-fielder, the high-jumper who jumped over the hoods of cars and beds of trucks for fun and amusement.

So it’s difficult for me when friends dub themselves differently, because I don’t want to come across as disrespectful. It’s only recently that I’ve been exposed to a nickname that empowers, that gives another meaning. A friend of mine has just such a nick she gave herself; it’s difficult for me to adopt it, not merely because of habit, but because something in me catches when tempted to say or type it: “No! I will respect you for who you are, all of you, by your full first name!” But it’s taken as more respectful if I do use it, in this case.

When it comes down to it, perhaps this giving of nicks to oneself comes from a desire to more accurately depict one’s full self, like the first name. As intimate as it may be for someone to call me by my full name, intimately, quietly, with the authority of our relationship, it is still only a designation, a serial number, until we reach Eternity.

Revelation 2:17 says of believers, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.”

In Hebrew, to name someone was to describe their essence; thus Jacob, for instance, was “the supplanter,” literally “One who grasps the heel,” and sure enough, not only was he the second-born grasping the heel of his brother at birth, but was by God’s own Providence the favored son on whom the blessing rested. In the same way, the Hebrews called God “Ha’Shem,” literally “The Name,” because to pronounce the very essence of God with unclean lips was very literally to commit blasphemy. Doesn’t it make you wonder what will be written on that white stone? When the Lord whispers in your ear, if you believe and persevere to the end, your full name, not a quasi-unique phonetic designation given by your biological parents, but your very essence intoned!—what will it say? It makes even our full names merely nicks we use for a while, shards of our whole selves.

A relic from the humanistic, psychoanalytic self-report diagnostic tools of the 1950s remains at least one designed by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham: the Johari and Nohari “windows.” You pick five or six from 55 static adjectives, alphabetically arranged in a grid, about yourself; then you have your friends (or whomever) pick five or six from the same list, and compare your results in a grid (the windows compute this for you).

Kevan has designed one that is particularly useful, sleek, and accessible; I recommend it if you want to give it a go.

What’s curious is that, though the Johari can be for your friends and acquaintances a nice way to pass three minutes while complimenting you, the Nohari is something that almost no one touches. When I posted both links from my IM away message, I got more responses than I expected from the former, and only two from the latter.

Both individuals who responded know that I trust them enough for them to lay bare my heinousness before me. It fulfills Proverbs 27:6,

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend,
But deceitful are the kisses of an enemy.”

Now, I don’t recommend going around stabbing and punching your friends; because you will then be in jail with no friends, and rightly so. But I know that there are a few friends I can remember throughout my life with great fondness and respect because they called me on my bulls—t and didn’t let me get away with dishonesty or bile like some yes-men employed by a corrupt dictator.

It’s a really, really common thing for guys to console other guys in a roundabout way. If they are just enough of a friend to be your yes-man, they’ll get you riled up, let you spew as much nonsense as you can, and then agree with you—”Ya dude she was like totally a total —tch, fah rill.” Then they’ll buy you another round. In light of Mt 12:36 and all the rest, why would you want a yes-man? But there was one time more than half a decade ago that I was going on and on about what “she” had done to me, &c., the usual indignation at that stage of grief—and my friend asked me pointed questions about what exactly I was upset about, and about what perhaps I’d done to “her” (I frankly don’t recall the exact person, isn’t that something?). Not only did it de-fuse (and diffuse!) my anger, it shamed me and brought me back to reality. I didn’t like it at the time, and I pouted like a kid for about twenty minutes that he wasn’t “with me,” but I appreciate that one time more than all the rounds I was ever bought by friends who weren’t willing to come through for me with an honest word for fear of my reaction. (Thanks, Dan. )

If you have the such and such, then, I recommend putting aside two and a half minutes some rainy afternoon and sending out links to both your “windows.” (And for the remainder of the hour, pestering your friends to fill out both….)

Technorati Tags: friendship, wisdom, breaking up, johari, nohari, humanism