Archive for category Faith
Leaving Life to the Man Upstairs
Posted by LeannFischel in Faith, Life on August 21, 2010
Leann Fischel
The scent of a Hallmark store gives me the same feeling as when I inadvertently remember how my kindergarten teacher smelled. It was a heartwarming scent, though an odd memory, but more than recognizable for reasons understood only in my brain. The ladies at the front greeted me as I entered an almost empty store. They asked if I needed help. I should have said, “Yes.” The maze of greeting cards tested my will. In all the stores I have been to for Hallmark, I’ve never had such difficulty finding what I wanted; after all, she will be 81 years young August 31st and I have to find the perfect card. I found rows of “sympathy” and “thank you” cards, of “get well soon” and “congratulations cards”, and the all-too-exciting milestone cards. Round and round I went through the aisles till I found “her birthday.”
I’m one of those people who is less than satisfied with looking at only five or six cards and picking one. Oh no. I must have opened thirty cards, and the second one I read, that’s the one I chose. I have to make sure I’ve picked the very best I can. I have to make sure it says everything I want it to say without being more than eight lines; I don’t give books inside cards. As I wandered through these cards, I considered that this may be the last one I give her; this may be the last August that she sees. But I quickly push that thought away. She has been a devoutly religious woman since as long as I can remember. God has been good to her, she would say. God has blessed her with long life and the chance to see her grand babies.
Many of my friends have never met their grandparents, or were not old enough to remember them. The lady at the register told me how lucky I was that I had the chance to spend time with my grandmother, that most people never get that chance. I considered the concept, the idea of not having that chance, but had no way to fathom it. All four of my grandparents are still alive. All of them are almost eighty, if not already. My grandparents would all tell you it is God who has gifted them with long life and a chance to see their grandbabies. What about chance? The chance that they still live to this day, that they have been alive through more than fifteen presidents, through the Depression, World and Gulf Wars, through the times of housewives and flappers, less than a decade after women gained the right to vote, through a time when inequality of races and sex was a perfectly accepted concept? But leave long life to chance? Never.
Leann Fischel is about to become a 2010 graduate of Sam Houston State University where she spent the last three years falling in love with writing. She has read the classics by Twain, Shakespeare, Dostoevskyand many others and yes, the Harry Potter AND Twilight series. She hopes a job will find her in San Antonio in the next six months so she can be a workin’ woman.
What Can I Do With Writing?
Stephen Swanson grows tired of the continual questioning of the power of communication, especially from students. “Why would I need to write essays,” has become a standard of expressing frustration, and even veteran writers feel that way sometimes. So, he offers this micro-blog…
Why Writing Matters (Vol. 1):
It Pushes Me to Care
(“Vol. 1″ in no way implies that additional volumes will certainly come in the future, although they might.)
This week, I read this (http://blog.sojo.net/2010/04/21/arizonas-immigration-bill-is-a-social-and-racial-sin/), and it renewed my faith that writing can accomplish the task of informing and motivating in ways that stem from fundamental desires to congregate rather than divide.
Palabras, Parabolas, and the Perception of Flaws
Posted by Michael Dean Clark in Faith, Writing on April 22, 2010
Michael Dean Clark
This is the fourth and final installment in a series on “being” a writer. You can find the first three here, here, and here.
I suck at math. Just thought I’d start with that. I was alright until people started adding letters to numbers and then the unknowns won. Kicked my butt is more like it. My geometry teacher rounded up my 69.45 percent to a 70 so she wouldn’t have to oversee my repeating the class. Lucky her, she got me two years later in my second trip through Algebra II (a trip that ended in a gift B-). Tutors didn’t help. Calculators were useless.
The one thing that made sense to me was parabolas. I loved drawing parabolas. Still do. There’s just something spiritual about an infinite curve that meets at the base of its own horseshoe and while simultaneously angling up and away from itself forever. It was, for some reason, a more attainable idea than any Pythagoras ever came up with.
I’ve often wondered why I have this love affair with a diagram, as I’m sure you’re wondering why I feel the need to share my sickness with you. And yes, I do remember this is a column about writing. So let me attempt to make a little sense. When I was in college, I saw a 3-D rendering of a parabola in space. It was a simple computer image, basically turned to provide the depth lacking in the 2-D versions of my high school textbooks. I wanted to hug it. Now, I know why. That’s how stories should be.
In grad school we talk a lot about our “aesthetic.” When I talk to normal people, I call it “what matters to me when I tell a story.” Now I’ll tell both groups this – good stories operate in that three dimensional parabolic space.
First, I want my stories to operate along a vertical plane in which my characters do what I do – wrestle with a God who can be difficult to pin down or even feel at times. This does not mean all of my characters are Christian or even spiritual.But they are all confronted with divinity and respond in the variety of ways people do everyday. Without that vertical component, I see no point in telling stories.
But, just as the lines of a parabola move away from each other, so do many of the horizontal relationships of my characters. Life is hard. Love is harder. And people fall away from each other. Inherent in all of this are pain and hope and trauma and grace. But what I’m most concerned with is the continued presence of that point of connection, the joining of lives that would otherwise continue on, one moving gradually east while the other goes west. And that bond only really happens in the scope of a vertical and horizontal space.
And then there’s the third dimension – what I’ll call depth. For the first few years I flirted with the parabola, she was just a flat, u-shaped thing. But that slight shift of the picture opened up a possibility of growth and change that I want my characters to possess. Our culture trains us to judge people visually and immediately. We size up and reject or accept as soon as we can take in their hair, features, and clothes. Sometimes we make that choice sooner. But sometimes, if we wait, we experience something else about that person. And the experience opens us up to the possibility that our perceptions are flawed; that we are flawed. As a writer, I am possessed by the desire to communicate that our flaws are neither permanent, nor outside the healing influence of change.
So being a writer is about the depth of our flaws, the space between ourselves and the people around us, and the heights to which we are willing to climb or depths we will fall to find what is outside of ourselves. In other words, I’m still drawing parabolas, just without the numbers that might mistakenly make people think my fiction assumes certainty in and of itself.
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Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and nonfiction and now an Assistant Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. He is also mere inches from earning a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. His work is set primarily in his hometown of San Diego and has been known to include pimps in diapers, heroin-addicted pastors who suffer from OCD, and possibly the chupacabra.
When We All Become Zombies, What a Day of Rejoicing That Will Be…
Posted by Relief Editor in Editor's Blog, Faith, General, Life on April 5, 2010
Christopher Fisher
I imagine (and hope) most of you spent your Easter Sunday relaxing after church with bellies full of ham and mashed potatoes, followed by sporadic nibbles of chocolate, of course. I, however, had to work. In preparation for a much anticipated move to Virginia this summer, we’re planning to list our house sometime this week in the floundering real estate market. So we’re up to our eyebrows in last minute projects, cleaning, spot painting, etc. I didn’t have time to get online yesterday, so I’m just now getting caught up with all the online Easter well-wishes. But there’s a lot of something else I missed out on yesterday–though I can’t say I minded missing it–something I guess would be the opposite of Easter greetings.
Now, I understand that not everyone shares my belief, and I don’t expect them to. I can see how the idea of a bodily resurrection from death can sound ridiculous. In all honesty, there are times I question it myself, as any rational human being would. I also am aware that we live in a time and culture where animus toward religion–particularly the “establishment” religion of Christianity–is very much in vogue. But I don’t know whether to laugh or rant at the new buzz word many of my non-Christian friends and colleagues are applying to all things Easter.
An old, old story, how a zombie came from glory…
If I have before heard the word zombie used to describe the risen Christ, I don’t recall it. But today the word seems to be everywhere. One versed in Christian tradition might at first think that anyone who draws such a comparison must have a less than rudimentary understanding of our faith. But to compare Christ’s resurrection to Night of the Living Dead is more than an innocent misunderstanding of Christian doctrine. It is an accusation. It is a pointing finger that says, “see the fool and all his silly, foolish ways!” (Incidentally, this is also a typical Reducto ad ridiculum/straw man fallacy: a mind-numbed, brain-eating zombie makes an easy target to tear down, but anyone who is half-way familiar with both zombies and the account of the risen Christ must admit that–even taking both characters as fiction–they are not the same. Not even close. It’s like comparing Prometheus to Spongebob. Apples to maggots.)
I don’t worship a zombie. I don’t know anyone who does. Unless you count the throngs of George Romero fans, which collectively do form something of a cult, though it’s not really the same thing. But even these, should they ever decide to cross over from fanaticism to full-blown zombie worship, would probably be given a modicum of tolerance (though probably not respect). Which makes me wonder, when it comes to Christ’s resurrection, why the spite and condescension? Why the willful malice?
Perhaps there’s something more…
Consider this. If tomorrow we thawed and revived Walt Disney, cured his every sickness and human frailty, and set him back to sketching delightful little cartoon characters, then not only would this be accepted by the secular world; it would be hailed as the apex of scientific achievement, the climax of the human story. April 6 would ever after be remembered as the day our race conquered our own mortality.
If we say, however, that this has already been done by a person/spirit/force of infinitely greater intelligence and power than our own, then we can expect nothing less than ridicule and contempt. The truth is that it’s not the notion of resurrection that many find incredible, even offensive. It’s the source of that regeneration. To accept the resurrection of Christ, through the power of God, is to accept our own smallness and reliance on Another for our every breath of life. And it is to acknowledge that to this power we are all accountable.
This, I believe, is the true stone of stumbling for skeptics of resurrection. Not the possibility that the dead may have risen or may one day rise, but the distasteful notion that we are inadequate, incapable of saving ourselves, and not truly our own.
Good Friday.
Posted by Michelle Metcalf in Faith, Life, Writing on April 2, 2010
In Cincinnati, it is supposed to be 85 degrees today. Record breaking temperatures for the first weekend in April in the Tri-state. The sun in my porch where I sit is warm. My dog has had no trouble finding a patch of sun to bathe in. Already, we have been to Starbucks and the dog park. The sun has made us want to get out of bed earlier to live a longer day, be outside in the open air. Already, before 9am I am in a pair of beat up shorts and a white tank top, flip flops and shades. Today is (a) Good Friday.
This morning, already, has been a good morning. It has been a morning of not wanting. A morning of not longing for sun, which, of late, has become my usual Cincinnati practice. Today has not been a morning of wearing my brown down coat to take the dog outside for her stroll. It has not been a morning of grey sky and wind and hair in my face. Today has been a morning of light, of leaves on the trees, of clover flowers pushing through a small corner lawn that suddenly needs to be mowed. It has been a morning of less aches and pains than those I went to bed with last night, a morning of a glass of cold water from the Brita pitcher in the fridge. It has been a morning of small, good things.
Looking around my new house, boxes everywhere, walls un-painted, the kitchen a mess, I am unshaken. And I don’t mind that my hooded sweatshirt is at my feet on the floor in our living room. I don’t mind that the kind size green quilt that I napped with last night is heaped in a ball on the floor just where I threw it off without putting it neatly away before bed. And the pillows on the couch are a mess. And the mail is stacked on the entry table. And my bags are still unpacked from Costa Rica. And the laundry: wet towels, smelly hiking shoes—none of it is done. But there is no hurry. How long since I have been present to my own life?
This morning, the pilgrims of our city will gather outside in the hot sun to take part in the Cincinnati tradition of praying the 84 steps at Holy Cross Immaculata church in Mt. Adams. They will pray the rosary together and walk one step at a time up the hill to mark their reverence of this Holy Day. I will mark this day too, in small steps, living my prayers instead.
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Michelle Metcalf resides in Cincinnati, OH with her husband, Benn and her dog, Elsie. She is currently working on a collection of humorous essays about growing up in Midwestern Suburbia.
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The Midnight Diner: Volume 3
Through the Veil
