The Spirits of All Three

Scrooge at one of our performances of Dickens' story

At the end of Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Scrooge vows, "I will live in the past, present and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me." I'm not sure I ever truly thought about what this meant until last night. We had our annual Christmas Carol party and reading, a tradition for more than 20 years in our home. During the party, our small house is stuffed with guests who join together in reading a one-hour scripted version of Dickens' story. The party functions as a merry rehearsal of sorts for when we perform it at local residential care facilities.  A few hours before this year's party, my husband and I attended a Memorial Service. At the party, we heard about the death of a friend. And all through the evening, memories of past parties and past performances were layered over every moment.

The spirit of Christmas Past - friends and loved ones no longer with us, the children who were Tiny Tims and have now gone off to college, the years we did 14 performances, the years snow prevented even one, the era of performing the story at the local AIDS hospice until one day it was no longer necessary, and so many more. Every phrase I've just written is connected like a fine gold filament to a deep, rich, true story woven into my heart - some joyful, some wrenching, and I wouldn't trade a single one.

The spirit of Christmas Present - embodied in every friend who came to celebrate with us last night, new faces and familiar faces, the laughter and conversation and food and drink, the preparations, the last lingering musings late into the night, even the clean-up - as well as the many moments of human connection this week with my students at school, my colleagues, my friends and family near and far. Again - not all of it happy, but all of it so real and true and enriching in the best sense of the word.

The spirit of Christmas Future - the knowledge of mortality, which becomes ever more real with each passing year, as friends and family shuffle off this mortal coil. Scrooge's redemption doesn't mean he won't die. We all die. Dickens' Christmas Future is frightening, yes, and yet Scrooge says he will live with that spirit, too, and it is that spirit, that awareness of how "any spirit working kindly in its little sphere will find its mortal life too short," that ultimately brings about Scrooge's fullest change of heart and his commitment to a different path.

We are here on this earth for but a blink of the divine eye. Most of us don't consciously carry that knowledge of impending mortality with us all the time. It's too much too bear. It must be tempered by the spirits of Past and Present. But it must be somewhere in our minds and hearts, for it drives us, too. It drives us to remember what truly matters. What legacy do we wish to leave? How do we wish to be remembered? How shall we live while we are here? Will we connect with our fellow human beings? Will we honor and cherish what we learn from our past, embrace our present regardless of our circumstances, and be cognizant of our future?

Scrooge doesn't say the spirits of all three will co-exist peacefully, mind you. He says they will strive within him. Miriam Webster defines strive as "struggle in opposition" or "endeavor." I think "struggle in opposition" fits here. The three spirits contend with one another, and out of that struggle comes a potent energy for good. It's very much in keeping with the Christianity I know and love, a religion born out of struggle, a religion in which sorrow and joy, death and rebirth, God and man commingle. It is Jacob wrestling with the angel.

Long live the power of struggle! May the spirits of past, present and future strive within all of us to drive our best selves and illuminate all that it means to be human.

Finding a Kindred Voice

I just finished reading Leaving Church, by Barbara Brown Taylor and I found myself wanting to post in here, after a long time away. I came upon Ms. Taylor's name in an article in Time Magazine. Although her journey is very different from mine in many, many ways, it spoke to me and resonated at its core with a kind of quiet profundity. Her understanding of Christianity and God, and the humility and open-mindedness with which she explores that understanding, connected with me. Reading her story made me think back over my own journey and look at all its steps with reverence and affection. It made me want to reconnect with things from which I have drifted away. It renewed my desire to approach my job, my vocation, as a teacher with a sense of holiness, with the notion that my time in the classroom is a prayer and that teaching is how I serve God. When she described looking over her hymnals and the other items from her time as a rector, I found myself thinking warmly about my own well-worn Bible, with its note cards and papers tucked into the pages, and feeling so very grateful for all of the life experiences it held in its pages, moments great and small and most often profound. Ms. Taylor's book gave me a gift of seeing my journey through new eyes, and of knowing I am not alone in the "neither this nor that" it represents. I never lost my faith, but my faith changed and evolved. It is so hard to explain it clearly to someone else, and to read a book that spoke from such a similar place, to discover another voice that shared that perspective, was a great blessing. I'm posting about it here with the thought that it might be a blessing to someone else, too.

Revisiting Biblical Stories You Think You Know: Adam and Eve

I've been working on a short story inspired by Genesis.  It's gotten me thinking about Biblical stories that have gotten a bad rap or been misinterpreted throughout the years.  I thought I'd post about a few of them, and I'm starting with the most obvious one.  After all, you might as well begin at the beginning.  Adam and Eve, specifically, the eating of the apple.

I can't tell you how many times when I was in college I heard people reference this story as a demonstration that Christianity and the Bible was, at heart, anti-intellectual.  Now, if you're a thinking person, that struggle between the intellectual and the spiritual is a pretty big struggle, and this story is often at the heart of it, this idea that God is so anti-intellectual that he doesn't want Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of knowledge.

The thing is, it's not the tree of knowledge.  It's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  And that's a whole different thing.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Think about it for a minute.  It's the awareness of morality.  That's what gets Adam and Eve kicked out of paradise.  That's what makes them ashamed of being naked.  That's where all the trouble begins.  The development of morality.

But there's more.  The reason Eve eats the fruit.  Eve gets the biggest bad rap of all in this story, but the reason she eats that apple isn't because she's stupid or easily tricked.  It's not because she's evil (she doesn't even know what that is yet, remember?).  She thinks she's doing the right thing.  She eats it because she sees that it is "good for food, pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom."  Gaining wisdom.  She's making the best decision she can with the information available to her.  And remember, she doesn't know about good and evil.

It makes you wonder.  If Adam and Eve don't have a sense of right and wrong yet, then why are they punished?  They're punished just for disobeying.  But if they don't know good and evil, then they don't truly know disobedience as a wrong.  To me, this is the part that makes the story troubling.

Still, it's troubling to me in a good way.  It forces me to meditate on the ethical questions of our decisions and choices.  What weight should be given to obedience as opposed to wisdom or nourishment?  What would be involved in decision-making if you had no notion of good and evil?  Why would a loving God want to protect us from the knowledge of good and evil?  Was it an effort to protect the kind of childlike innocence we see in a newborn child?  And why, through the ages, has Eve been given such a bad rap when she was seeking wisdom?  The Bible has many, many other passages that indicate that the search for wisdom is a good thing.

I don't have answers, but I do believe these questions are worth contemplating.  Like Eve, I am seeking wisdom, I guess.  That quest may mean losing innocence, being cast out of a paradise of contentment.  The questions ruffle the smooth waters of the mind.  So be it.  After all, that's how the journey of humanity begins.  

Faith and Artistic Expression - Is "Christian" Synonymous with "Family Friendly"?

Just saw a post for a Christian film festival.  Here's what it said:  

Committed to the highest quality productions in the film industry, The San Diego Christian Film Festival is trying to Change the Face of Film with better stories, exceptional productions, and family friendly movies for the entire world to watch.

(The emphasis on "family friendly" is mine.)

I couldn't help wondering why a Christian film was assumed to be family friendly.  The Bible is filled with violence, and even sex, polygamy and incest.  The Christian story has plenty of room for the dark side.  When we start thinking "Christian" means "whitewashed," I think we've missed something.  The crucifixion, for example, is not family friendly (i.e. I can bring my children).  Wrestling the dark side of human nature, facing down your greatest temptations, aren't necessarily family friendly topics.  But they are, in my opinion, Christian topics.

This bothers me, this implicit assumption of what Christian art or literature may encompass.  It is small.  Narrowing.  The Christianity I learned about was predicated on the notion that human beings are, by nature, flawed, imperfect and incapable of living up to the level of purity required by God.  Part of what makes the gospel powerful is the idea that God came down and lived as a human being, with all the doubt and longing and darkness and grief and misery that implies, thereby creating a bridge between us humans, fallible and flawed creatures, and the divine.  So, an artistic exploration of Christian faith should allow for an exploration of those flaws, imperfections, ugliness.  

If you want a "family friendly" film festival, call it that.  It is, after all, one view of the role of art - to depict something beautiful and transcendent towards which we might strive.  But it's not the only view of art.  The Christianity I know is not necessarily synonymous with "family friendly."  And that's not a bad thing.