Sadness

G'day.

Usually I'm not one to share this sort of thing, but...

One of my dogs back home just died. It hasn't sunk in yet. I don't even really think there's any point in saying this, because no one who reads my blog will know what my dogs mean to me. For the most part, no one who hasn't seen me with my dogs will. But, well, there you go. I'm saying it anyway.

I feel like putting a big picture of him up here and being all sentimental about it, but, again, what readership I have will not care, so I won't.

The experience of writing this blog has seriously disillusioned me to writing blogs in general. They're interesting, fun, and possibly intellectual, but...don't try getting companionship through one. It can't translate.

I'll talk to you when I'm less emo.

--me

Guessing Game--Glove

G'day.

The other night I was praying, and an image that I thought was particularly apt came to me. It was of me as God's glove. More accurately, I was asking to be God's glove.

Now, if you look at the title, you'll see it's a guessing game. The game is, can you guess what this image means? It's an extended metaphor, of course, so try and think of ways in which Christians might want to act as a glove of God.

It'll likely never catch on as a popular image, but I like it. It would ease my concerns over 'prayer warrior,' which I expressed previously. Though, actually, if we think of it in a C. S. Lewis' theological context, where we are the underground in occupied territory, then 'prayer warrior' makes a lot more sense. Actually, I'm starting to like that... prayer as a weapon against Satan and sin...

(This is all a manifestation of my English-major training: I am obsessed with symbols, narratives, allegories, analogies, and metaphors. It seems my essay-writing skills are not kicking in though: I'm venturing way off topic!)

I'd give the winner something, except that there could be multiple winners. If someone gets one aspect and someone else gets another, then it'd be a mutual win, right? And I can't very well send prizes...hmm... Well, if I like your answer, I'll come up with something.

About Time

G'day.

I read this on Freakonomics--you can see it on my blogroll, at least until they add another post--and was happy. It's about time the media started lauding institutions. I know, in the words of one of those Penny Arcade guys, that you're supposed to stick it to the man, not stick up for him. However, I think it's getting a little ridiculous just how badly we feel we need to thrash our bureaucracies. There are problems with the systems as they stand, of course. But there are also incredible benefits to them, and there are also better ways of fixing the problems than being negative. Being positive is necessary to identifying how we want to implement change. In order to understand how we would prefer our system--our bureaucracy--to work, we need to be able to identify what we like about the existing systems. Trust me, we need bureaucracy. The massive scale of our interdependence requires it.

And don't listen to people who tell you that we need to cut back on interdependence, that we need to strike out on our own without relying on anyone. That is not the most useless statement I have ever heard; that is the most dangerous statement I have ever heard. I am serious. The extent to which people believe it is enough to make me weep in terror. Interdependence is a fact of life, and if we try to severe these ties of mutual requirement, we will all perish--and in misery, too. It's not a live in pain or die happy sort of choice, but live with whatever attitude you choose or die miserable choice, where the first is (inter)dependence and the last is independence. Until we learn to rely on others and to trust, we will all lose.

But anyway, back to the article I've linked to. I'm happy Freakonomics is doing this. We need to highlight the good. Indicating the bad is also necessary, but we do enough of that. The last paragraph I wrote, in fact, is more than enough. I'm very interested to read what people submit.

In church this morning, the pastor asked (rhetorically) what kind of church our city needs. He's fond of doing this. Someone from the congregation said aloud, "It doesn't need a church, it needs people." (I realize that the grammar is wrong, and that, since he spoke, I can't claim that he "wrote" a comma himself. However, it was a comma-length pause, not a semi-colon pause and a period pause with the end of sentence tone of voice, so I used a comma.) The pastor said that it needs people, yes, people who make up the church, and used 'people' and 'church' interchangeably for a bit before going back to using 'church,' to prevent alienation, I suppose, and because he liked the idea of people but needed to go back to the vocabulary of a church for the purposes of the sermon.

My thing, though, is that what the city needs is a CHURCH. People need structure. I am sorry, but we do. People are awesome; people can accomplish a lot. But people accomplish even more if they are organized, and, in the case of Christian activity, the particular units of organization are called churches. If you want to be really egalitarian, I suppose you can use 'congregation' instead of church. However, I think the word church is fairly apt. The image of a church is much more theologically useful than that of a mass of individuals making decisions in or not in concert. If it is theologically useful and has no real problem on a practice side of things (which it doesn't, contrary to popular belief), then it should be used. The city does need people. The city also needs a church. So, you have fancy--and popular, if the assorted no-church Christian movements are any indication--rhetoric, buddy, but the wrong idea.

Which is to say, Yay, institutions! Because, until Freakonomics, it seems no one else was willing to say it.

EDIT 10:00 the same evening: Upon re-reading this post, I think I'm a bit angry sounding. I may have fallen into the habit of producing vitriol and mistaking it for insight. I hope that I have not, but... my apologies if you thought so. If you are new to my blog, I hope that you don't judge me too harshly on this.

Pirates are ambiguous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edelweiss_Pirates

They were cool until they turned on the Allies. But I still think pirates are winning.

Pre-;

G'day.

This is a prelude to another post I want to write sometime, which I intend to entitle ;. Yes, the title will consist entirely of a single punctuation mark. Blogger will then have to deal with that in URL. I am excited to see what genius Blogger produces.

Anyway, it will concern the semi-colon, as is evident. I like semi-colons, and I want to tell you why. However, I have work to do and have to go to class and fun stuff like that, so, in the meantime, you can look at what I wrote on another's Wall and see what directions I might take this.

"You have a problem with semi-colons? Semi-colons rock. They're both commas and colons. They're like mermaids or gryphons or Obama: they defy categorical bounds! They're like the border between Ontario and Quebec, stitching together two seperate but inseperable parts. They're just generally excellent, and the only reason people don't like them is that people are afraid of ambiguity. People are afraid of hermaphrodites, cyborgs, conjoined twins, and semi-colons, all for the same reason."

I don't actually think he had a problem with semi-colons; it was more my lamentable semi-colon usage. By this I mean that I've gotten sloppy and used semi-colons where I oughtn't have. And screw you, Vonnegut, there are plenty of uses for a semi-colon outside of showing that you've been the college!

On Praying for Other People

Last night I did something which I ought to do more often, yet do not: I prayed for other people.

Usually, I approach prayer almost formulaically: I offer repentence and ask for forgivenness, with some thought towards a particular transgression I committed that day, understood as a token of my transgressions as a whole; I offer thanks for at least two things for which I am grateful that I experienced that day; I ask to be an agent of God in the world; I ask for particular things I feel I need the following day, most often patience, strength, dedication, courage, and other forms of self-control. Sometimes I also ask for direction, if I feel particularly lost. Last night, though, I didn't do even one of those things.

Last night I prayed instead for individuals and groups, as they came to my mind. Surely I could have thought of others to pray for, but I just let the thoughts come up and I prayed as they came. I prayed for a recently evicted man I meant that night, who had been kicked out of his apartment for allowing a homeless man to take shelter there. I prayed for a girl who said she was trying to resolve thoughts about God. I prayed for someone else who I felt was uneducated about other religious traditions, a problem that I feel is rampant among the Christian community. I prayed for the students of the school I volunteer at, of another school in the city with the Read and Run program, and of my mother's school--and also for the teachers at these schools, whose views of life must be impacted by the financial or emotional poverty of some of their pupils. I prayed for others, too, who gave no particular indication that they needed prayer over the course of yesterday, but that occured to me could use it, even if they didn't ask for it or would be upset if they found out that I had been praying for them. (I here nod to Inara from Firefly--either episode two or the second part of the pilot episode.)

At the end of this prayer I was struck by the serenity in which I rested. Sure, I managed to get antsy and uncomfortable later in the night, obstructing my attempts to sleep, but immediately afterwards the sheer rightness of the experience, the spiritual fulfilment, was overwhelming--and I use this word denotatively. It occured to me that this is what I ought to be doing all the time. I need to integrate this into my nightly prayers. Praying for other people--authentically praying for them--is a necessary part of a Christian lifestyle. It is an act of charity, and a profounder one than the ease of giving it may suggest.

This indicates to me that this is a skill that I need to cultivate. This includes both nightly private prayers and praying aloud for others in those opportunities I have for doing so--not too infrequent, given my weekly participation in a few Christian communities. This involves being publically available for prayer requests, cultivating an image as someone who can provide this service--though not in a bureaucratic or commercial way, despite my word choice. I have occasionally heard members of my Christian communities use the word 'prayer-warrior'; I have always through that there was something both apt and perverse in that phrase. Whether I like the terminology or not, I must become one.

Inversely, I must also make available the opportunities for others to pray for me. If I find others-directed prayer to be liberating, then it seems to make sense that those I encounter might also find others-directed prayer to be liberating. Instead of being vague about my prayer needs, perhaps I ought to be more specific, ought to give someone a real sense of how they can pray for me. Of course, telling someone your prayer needs makes you very vulnerable, and I fear vulnerability almost as much as I fear disappointing people. However, this vulnerability is a fair sacrifice to make, I believe, for giving someone the opportunity to provide this form of charity for you. I can think of bigger sacrifices that have been made in Christian history.

Whether I will maintain these new initiatives is yet to be seen; I am not a very good Christian, to be honest, and often fail to deliver on both Christian-community-expected behaviour and, much more importantly, peronally or Biblically expected behaviour (though I'm not bad at hiding these failures from public sight). This is not to say I do not believe this discovery is true or that I will not continue to believe it is true. It is instead to say that I am as flawed as anyone else, and my revelations do not always impact behaviour, regardless of what Freud may think. Despite what happens, I felt that this experience, this new understanding, is valuable, and worth sharing through this medium, even if only a few people come upon it. Perhaps you already knew this; perhaps prayer is foreign to you, and the effects of it are not something you can yet relate to; perhaps you are new to the game and are exhilerated by some new territory that you could explore. I know that, despite having prayed since I've known how to speak, I am new to the game of prayer. Every time I am asked to pray in public I can feel my amateur status. Whatever your position, whatever my limitations, I hope that this one-sided discussion has in some way illuminated some part of your social or spiritual life.

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In a radical framework shift, I want to encourage you to read my blog posts textually, literarily, formally, deconstructively, post-colonially, archetypically, new historically, anthropologically, marxistly, femininely, queer theoretically, heteroglossically. In many ways I have written my blogs with these criticisms in mind, choosing vocabulary specifically to allow you, as readers, to interpret, analyze, and even criticize in a scholarly fashion. This includes otherwise personal, even spiritual, passages such as this. Essentially, I am becoming familiar with the myriad of ways people tease meaning out of texts, and so I am attempting to frame and in some sense control the processes of that teasing, much as people make jokes at themselves to prevent others from teasing them. As a writer, I cannot predict how you will recover that meaning, but I can predict how might, and work with (against?) that.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I think too much about everything, including myself. I hope that, if nothing else, this makes for interesting reading.