Brad Fruhauff

Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff observes a paradox of the Lenten season–at least for his family.

This Lent I determined to finally take on the one sacrifice I knew would be nearest and dearest to my heart: caffeine. I’ve been drinking coffee since middle school (when doubtful adults cautioned my friends and I it would stunt our growth; I’m currently nearly 6′ tall and my friend was 6′ 4″ already in middle school, so eat that, doubtful adults).

As a college teacher, my brain is my livelihood, so I went into this period of fasting with a strategy that involved slowly weaning myself off the java juice while also trying to get more sleep. You can perhaps see the apparent contradiction, here, as the reason we usually drink so much caffeine is that we don’t have time to get everything done and still sleep.

But then, one of the “mysteries” of Lent is that you discover how little you need the things you’re sure you need. It turns out I can manage my time better if I try, can sacrifice some things as low priorities, and can function pretty well on peanuts, bananas, and oranges for energy (the Zoo Diet?).

The etymology of Lent is simply the Old English for spring, or, more properly, long day. There’s nothing particularly spiritual about that, but the whole symbolism of Easter has to do with the return of light, the emergence of life from (seeming) death, newness and rebirth in general, so it’s not a far leap to see the insight learned from fasting as participating in this general trend of freshness, emergence, even freedom.

Still, life’s been throwing us curve balls. Or something like IEDs disguised as curve balls but that blow up in your face. This feels more like an autumnal season, a season of losses, than spring. Without unloading too much on you, I’ll just say that the excitement over my new job has been alloyed with the realization that our student loan debts are about to become so burdensome that we may not be able to move to a much larger or nicer place than we’re at. Our cars have been acting up and needing expensive repairs. We’ve been needing new glasses and contacts and other expensive health care items. Our son is growing and so costing us more in groceries every month, and now we find we owe on our taxes. On top of that, our grandmothers all seem to be falling down and feeling generally rotten. Oh, and I have the hiccups. Coming all at once like this has made March a rough month.

I know we sometimes get confused between the “promise” of America and the promise of God. The dream of prosperity is not the same as the dream of kingdom life–except that no one owes us either. The purpose of fasting during Lent is not to learn self-sufficiency but to clarify one’s priorities and to give one’s sacrifice to the one who made Himself a sacrifice. Thus part of the discipline is to hold to it even when it doesn’t seem to be “working.”

I searched for Autumn poems on Poets.org and ran across Keats’s ode “To Autumn.” There Keats imagines the autumn as the “close bosom-friend” of the sun,

Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core

I think it’s interesting that Keats doesn’t waste a breath getting to the positives of autumn. Loss and dying becomes only the preparations for the life to come–and abundant life in which it seems “warm days will never cease.”

The rest of the poem, however, turns to autumn for its own sake, and it ends by insisting that autumn “hast thy music” as well as spring, a music spare and soft as befits it:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

It is easier to appreciate the beauties of a season than of a spiritual state, but much of the Bible contains the poetry of hard times or lament, a reminder that our sufferings do not remove us from the beauty of God or of grace. This Lent, for me, has become one of learning to seek this beauty through and despite emotional and moral exhaustion.

I try to fight a pastoral urge within me to always end with a moral, so let me only suggest what isn’t original or surprising but is worth repeating, that real beauty is hard to come by these days, but it’s worth looking for.

Brad Fruhauff is Poetry Editor for Relief and teaches college English in the Chicagoland area. His poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in catapult, Burnside Writers’ Collective, The Ankeny Briefcase, and Salt. He lives with his wife and son in Evanston, IL. He also hopes you’ll take a moment to donate $15 or $25 to the #LoveRelief campaign.

Stephanie Smith

In our American culture of drive-through coffee, instant Twitter feeds, and video on demand, we prize immediacy. We like to check our email on our touchscreen phone as soon as it hits our inbox, grab lunch to-go, and download live-streaming news. We are a nation of busy professionals, parents, and students living under the banner of “carpe diem,” driven by the idea that there’s no time like the present.

This “now” syndrome certainly has advantages, motivating us to work hard and invest fully in whatever we’re doing, but what happens when we apply our instant-culture values to spirituality?

Last month, I had a bizarre experience with communion that made me consider this question. After months of exhausting church-searching, my husband and I finally found a church where we wanted to stay. It’s a contemporary kind of church, the kind that has a graphic designer on staff and a coffee bar out in the hall, and we came because we like the teaching and the small groups. But you have to understand, the church we went to before we moved was a liturgical church, the kind with Kierkegaard quotes in every other sermon and weekly communion. So we knew we’d have to make some adjustments at our new church.

But this is what I did not expect: communion that is served before the service, an addendum tacked onto and separate from the worship service. So we set our alarms a little earlier, entered the sanctuary, and found only a fraction of the congregation had shown up. The pastor said a prayer for this handful of early-risers, and at his invitation we filed up front and received the elements, and then it was over. The whole ordeal took literally five minutes. There was no time of confession before receiving the sacrament. There was no benediction afterwards, charging us to go forth bearing Christ into the world. There was no community, only a faithful few. There was no ritual, no careful unfolding of holiness.

It was like grabbing Christ’s blood of the covenant, His outpouring for the world, in a Styrofoam to-go cup. It was a sacrament dictated by convenience, quickly squeezed in between other items on the agenda, and left out of the greater context of cosmic redemption.

The problem with an instant culture, and an instant church, is that a preoccupation with the present diminishes our ability to see seasons, to see story, to observe the unfolding of time. This is the pivotal idea of the sacrament of communion: Christ asks us to remember Him by taking the bread and wine (Luke 22:19), and to anticipate the future when we will eat and drink with Him face to face (Matt. 26:29).

As we now enter the season of Lent, we enter a time of waiting. There is no immediacy or convenience here. But there is a story of cosmic proportions unfolding, as we take the forty days of Lent to remember, to walk through the events of the life of Christ: the temptation in the desert, the agony of Good Friday, the silence and sorrow of Holy Saturday, and the joyful victory of Sunday morning.

It is often difficult for us to lay down our gadgets and agendas to just sit for a while, quiet our souls, and dwell with God. And yet, He laid down everything for us, making Himself “nothing” and emptying Himself to the point of death (Phil. 2:7-98). In his beautiful poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” John Updike writes of the agony of the cross, “Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience…” As we cross the threshold of Ash Wednesday, let us reflect sincerely and sorrowfully on Christ’s suffering for us, so that on Easter morning, our hearts will grasp the incredible joy in His resurrection.

Stephanie S. Smith graduated from Moody Bible Institute with a degree in Communications and Women’s Ministry, which she now puts to work freelancing as a book publicist and writer through her business, (In)dialogue Communications, at www.stephaniessmith.com. After living in Chicago for four years, traveling to Amsterdam for a spell, and then moving back home to Baltimore to plan a wedding, she now lives with her husband in Upstate New York where they make novice attempts at home renovation in their 1930s bungalow. She writes for www.startmarriageright.com and manages Moody Publishers’ blog, www.insidepages.net.

Stephen Swanson, despite his public expressions of dislike of columns governed by the calendar, writes about a personal struggle with “snark”.

“Snark”, a Definition and Use

In addition to the definitions from urbandictionary that I link to above, I think it important to give a personal definition in order to further what might be perceived as an overly general terminology.  “Snark”, the combination of “snide” and “remark”, fills a large quantity of time in on-line communication and chiefly serves as a tone for self-righteous indignation and belittling of others.  For that reason, my omission of snark for the coming weeks might appear as a wholly beneficial enterprise, and to some degree, they have significant points.

At the same time, my snarkiness also serves as an outlet of frustration and a mask for more overtly offensive reactions to others.  Rather than calling someone an idiot or just staring at them aghast and their comment question, I can compose a snarky reply in my mind which I will post later.  It allows for some degree of fantasy play where I star in an amazingly hilarious sit-com filled with cutting commentary and insightful absurdity.

The Cost of Snark

However, as with all fantasies, there remains a significant price to be paid.  Just like hours-upon-hours of GTA can breed a desire to not stop for a stoplight or an urge to pull in front of a better car and pull the driver out to claim their wheels as your own, snark can explode or, in my case, leak.

I find myself leaking snark in a variety of ways.  First, I make noises.  A not-so-subtle “humph” or a snicker that is not quite masked by a cough can emerge at the most inopportune times, faculty meetings for example.  Second, my eyes tell my story.  It is not just the huge eye-roll of adolescence.  Even a looking away or a squint can be noticed and queried by a friend, student, family member, or coworker.  It’s unavoidable.  We are conditioned to pick up non-verbal cues, and when they are left unexpressed, the audience can interpret them as they will, often to my own detriment.  After all, people will often assume the worst when left to their own devices.

What to Do?  What to Do?

Well, I’m hoping to employ a two-pronged approach.  First, I’m going to work on composing the snark into specific communications, things I CAN actually say or write to people.  This will not only still allow me to think and create an outlet for my feelings but also force me to channel that into something public and more productive.

For example, this week in a college meeting, I was growing increasingly frustrated at the lack of direction in the meeting.  We’d been there two hours and not really made any progress.  A member of the campus communications and marketing area was having a devil of a time of pinning faculty down on who they were supposed to reach out to and what the message needed to be.  Generally, I would spend that time creating snark.  It’s fun.  It makes for good bar/party stories and generally makes me feel better.

However, it does not really solve the underlying problem, and that’s the problem that I’m really seeing with snark, especially when compared to effective satire or critique.  It papers over the issue and ignores the underlying causes, and I’ve determined that these sorts of communication represent central concerns in any hope in overcoming significant issues to our culture today.  It’s much easier to snarkily point out others and label them as such.

As I tell my students, it’s easier to construct a fallacious argument or a general opinion than it is to construct something thoughtful and useful.  I need to give it a try.  I need to cage the snark.

***

Stephen Swanson teaches as an assistant professor of English at McLennan Community College. Aside from guiding students through the pitfalls of college writing and literature, he spends most of his time trying to remain  aware of popular culture, cooking, and enjoying time with his wife and son. He holds degrees in Communications (Calvin College), Film Studies (Central Michigan University), and Media and American Culture Studies (Bowling Green State University. In addition to editing a collection, Battleground States: Scholarship in Contemporary America, he has forthcoming projects on Johnny Cash and depiction of ethics in detective narratives.

Michael Snyder’s first book, My Name is Russell Fink, is #2 of 100 on Amazon’s “Bestsellers in Kindle Store” page.  The digital text download is currently FREE, so head on over to the Bestsellers page and get yourself a copy!  Michael Snyder’s story “Normal People”–mentioned in Robert Garbacz’s blog on texture last night–can also be found in digital form on our Scribd page under Issue 3.1.

In case you missed it…

Relief is thoughtfully reading through some Psalms during this Lenten season, and you are more than welcome to join us.  In case you missed the first post on Left Relief, click here.

We are also sold out of Issue 3.2.  A blog was written about the details of the sell out, but, in case you missed it, click here.

Amanda C. Bauch

Relief‘s Assistant Editor, Amanda C. Bauch, ruminates on ritual compulsions and Lent.

My fingers were bleeding. Again.

Even as I pause while typing this, my right hand reaches over to the left hand, longing to pluck at a piece of loose skin on my pointer finger. I worried this piece of loose skin on the drive home yesterday, when I was working out, and while I watched the Winter Olympics with my husband.

But it’s not only the fingers. It’s also my legs, my face, my scalp. All subjected to frequent, almost ritualistic, picking. I’ve scratched and dug at my legs so often that they’re bloody and bruised. My face bears scars from years of attempting to rid myself of imperfections, whether real or perceived.

The face digging began when I was in junior high. The finger mangling started in college. The leg scratching and scalp digging are fairly new developments, added to my repertoire over the past year or so.

The escalation of my finger picking during college prompted me to seek counseling. I felt out of control, and I knew the problem wouldn’t go away on its own. All of my fingers wrapped in band-aids, torn and bloody, I cried as I told the doctor that I couldn’t stop and I actually enjoyed hurting myself on some level.

This initial appointment set me on a road I’ve now been on for over a decade, trying to understand why I do what I do.

While I’ve been diagnosed with OCD for some time, I’ve only recently learned about a disorder that goes by many names, but is most frequently referred to as dermatillomania. In layman’s terms, compulsive skin picking.

Viewing a variety of websites and reading testimonies of those who suffer from this ailment, I am amazed to see my story reflecting back at me from my computer monitor. However, one young lady’s comment resonates: “I have not felt worthy.”

Now that we’ve entered the holy season of Lent, I had to decide if I was going to give something up, and if so, what. During Ash Wednesday service, I sat in the pew, praying to God to help me make this decision, all the while picking my cuticles into oblivion. I pulled a particularly tenacious piece of skin I’d been attacking for some time, immediately feeling the tingle and rush of pain derived from tearing off layers of skin.

At that moment, I knew it had to stop, and I felt that God was telling me that it was time.

Granted, this skin picking is a habit I’ve developed over about twenty years of my life, and I know that it’s not going to vaporize overnight. However, I made a commitment to the Lord to try to change. To truly believe that with Him, all things are possible. I am learning to trust Him, trust myself. I’m learning to combat the self-criticism and feelings of unworthiness with His Word: “When I said, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your love, O Lord supported me. When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought joy to my soul” (Ps 94:18-19).

Over these forty days of Lent, I’m giving up my self-criticism. I’m giving up the belief that if I just had enough faith, all of my problems would be resolved. And perhaps most importantly, I’m giving up the belief that I am unworthy.

***

Amanda C. Bauch, is Relief‘s Assistant Editor, a writer, and a teacher. She fled the harsh Upstate New York winters and now resides outside of Jacksonville, Florida.  She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently working on a young adult novel and a memoir.  Her short fiction has appeared in Tattoo Highway, Bent Pin Quarterly, The Hiss Quarterly, and nonfiction pieces have been published in Writer Advice, Empowerment4Women, as well as two print anthologies, Tainted Mirror and MOTIF: Writing By Ear. She is also a monthly contributor to 30 Points of View, a blog/ezine/something-or-rather ( www.30pov.com).