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My father and aunts sometimes tell about where they were when the announcement was made of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
My grandmother remembers Pearl Harbor. She was young, all things considered, but old enough to remember many of the effects World War 2 had on her little town and school.
For my generation, the “day that will live in infamy” in our memories is 9-11-2001.
Where were you on September 11? we ask each other. I was a senior at college.
This September 11, I’d like to take a moment to remember how that terrible day taught me–is still teaching me–to pray without words.
Of course nothing could be normal on that day. While some of us with first-hour classes dragged ourselves away from the news screens and tried to keep our attention on class (4th year Spanish, for example), the administration rewrote the day’s schedule to bring us all together into the gymnatorium. And after we’d exited the classroom just in time to see the second tower fall, we were all more than ready to scrap schoolwork and join together in prayer for our country.
The administration tried to say something appropriate, tried to wrap words around the unfolding situation. But how does one wrap words around the unspeakable?
In their attempts, they rambled on, and most of us were thinking one thing—“stop talking about it, and let’s all get to praying!” Even though I’m sure that chapel session was shorter than usual, I’d never sat through a longer set of remarks in my life! I don’t remember a single thing that was said beyond “we’re going to split you all up into prayer rooms by graduation year.” We might as well have adjourned at that moment, for all I heard of the rest.
The seniors were assigned a classroom in the new building. We gathered, we joined up into groups and pairs, some of us got down on our knees, and we started praying.
But how in the world do you pray on a day like that? How do you pray for something you can’t even wrap words around? Our hearts cried out to keep all-day vigil for those in the middle of it, but our words ran out before the first 30 minutes were up.
And that’s when an inner, gentle voice–the kindest most understanding voice in the world–whispered these two verses from Romans 8 to my heart:
In the same way the Spirit also helps us in our weakness, because we do not know what to pray for as we should, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with inexpressible groanings. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because he intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. ~ Romans 8:26-27 (CSB) ~
“The Spirit himself intercedes for us” — the Spirit of God, I realized and remembered, was at that very moment within me, praying alongside me, praying for me, praying on my behalf.
“With groanings that cannot be uttered” — the way the King James translators put it really resonates with me. “Inexpressible groanings” is of course completely, almost elegantly correct. But “inexpressible” is the kind of word that comes after-the-fact, a little further along in the process when we’ve been able to think things through a bit and find a few of the words that were elusive in the first waves of shock and pain. “Groanings that cannot be uttered” is how it feels in the moment: messy and raw. “Groanings” and “uttered” have an onomatopoetic nature: they sound like what they are. “Uttered” is downright guttural, going deep.
And God meets us there in that deep, unutterable place: “He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because he intercedes for the saints.”
This passage is full of mystery, more than I can unpack tonight. More than I need to unpack in this moment.*
The one thing I want to remember tonight is that in all such moments—when things become unutterable and all we have are groans—God is not only there, He is helping us pray. He is hearing the groans and interpreting them for us (possibly into even deeper groans that echo from the deepest heart of things).
We are living in a groaning world. It’s easy to forget—on the good days—just how much hurt there is in the world. Then planes fly into towers, then war erupts in Syria or Ukraine, then a fire burns large swaths of Maui.
And we just. Don’t. Have. Words to pray. We groan deep unutterable groans of longing. For the world to be a safe place. For things to be set right.
Not having words is a hard place to be; uncomfortable, maybe even a bit frightening (if we let our inner child speak up with the truth of it!).
It’s a whole. Lot. Easier to throw ourselves into some kind of active cause than it is to sit in the ache for a bit.
To sit with the groaning and pray from that place is really really hard. And it’s also where God promises to meet us in a really deep and unutterable way.
I don’t know what’s on your heart this season, which one of the many daily fresh or ongoing tragedies and broken places of the world have your heart . . . another school shooting, another encounter with police goes bad, another older Asian man or woman is robbed and beaten . . . I know I don’t have to list them all, that I can’t list them all, that you don’t need me to list them all. Your groaning may be coming from something much much closer to home. And let’s not forget those that are still living with the unchangeable aftermath of one of these heart-wringing things. They still ache and groan, and if we’re honest, we struggle to find words to pray for them, too.
But maybe what you do need is a quiet invitation. To take a moment with whatever it is that’s breaking your heart and wringing groans from you — to press the pause button before the shock turns to the familiar and comfortingly powerful response of anger** and allow yourself to be wordless, allow those groans to escape from your lips or even just from your heart.^
You’re invited to let God meet you there.
Footnotes:
*All of Nature, Paul tells us in this passage, is groaning in longing for “the sons of God to be revealed.” The sons of God? Who are they? And why does all of Nature long for them? Paul explains that these sons of God are those humans who allow the gentle, unmerited yet unstinted grace of God to make them new; and through them, God will make the world new. It’s a mystery with eternal implications that I would love to have words to wrap around, and maybe one day I will, but The Bible Project really does a helpful (and concise!) job of laying this out in many of its thematic videos. Check this one out here: https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/image-of-god/
**There IS a place for anger, but our anger is often misplaced when we try to jump over this part or to skip it altogether. For some of us, the anger might come before the groaning, and sometimes the anger might be part of the groaning. All of this is ok and normal. I’m just asking us to not let the anger crowd out this important kind of prayer.
^Why?? you may be asking, Why would I want to sit in such a powerless place when what’s needed in this world is action and change?! What good does groaning do? Let me invite you to consider that the groaning is what connects us to the heart of things. And if our anger is going to have any good effect (as opposed to burning its own swaths across our lives), it really really needs to start from a place of connection.
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I’m feeling a nudge to write again. Or at least a nudge to put things up on my blog again.
The thing is that I quite often feel a nudge to write. There’s almost always some big topic (or three!) a-simmer on the back burner of my mind, and it’s a rare week that I’m not drawing out a ladleful and mentally sampling how it would present as a full blog post.
I used to think this was because of my own writerly tendencies. But after years of working with and learning from writers of all ages and stripes + years of observing how social media brings out the writer in all of us, I know I’m not the only one! I may be thinking more of my blog and thinking more in essay form, but it’s really not different at all from my friends who share weekly or daily on their social media pages! We all have writerly tendencies of one kind or another.
One difference, though, might be my times of lying fallow.
We all have them.
Like plots of land that grow different crops and therefore have different soil depletions, our needs for lying fallow may each look a little different. Or perhaps it has more to do with how heavily we’ve been working our land . . . ok, so clearly my meager gardening experience and my agricultural ignorance limit my grasp of the actual details of fallowness! And I guess that’s not all that surprising given how un-agrarian our general society is here in America. Not to mention that modern agricultural experience in general is all about ways of avoiding lying fallow: trying to replenish the soil without having to give the land a break.
Breaks get in the way of always-on assembly-line efficiency — and we expect this even more since the 21st century tech revolution has moved us beyond the Henry Ford club’s wildest efficiency dreams. [I don’t think he actually had a club. He wasn’t the only one, in his era, to be enamored with this kind of efficiency, though.]
But honestly, we humans have never been fans of fallowness. The Hebrew people were given pretty specific instructions about letting their land lie fallow — in a regular-enough pattern that they could plan for those fallow years! Yet they, too, worked their land ragged, skipping all those fallow years. Working over their weekly sabbaths.
Me, too. There’s always some good reason why fallowness should be skipped.
——
I began this blog in 2006, and the friend who urged me to start blogging was right: I have loved it. It suits me and the way my writing works.
I was surprised recently to look back and see how prolific I was in posting during my first several years of blogging!
But. (You knew one was coming, didn’t you?)
I developed Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (often known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) mid-2008, and by 2012, each subsequent ME/CFS flare was bigger than the last, leaving me trying to manage lower levels of functioning than before. In classic ME/CFS fashion, I’ve never quite been able to regain the previous levels of functioning that I had. Like a phone with a worn-out battery, my energy levels give me only about 50% of the oomph they once did (during a bad flare, this can be far less!).
And since, for me, ME/CFS manifests itself in sensitivity to light and sound and activity — screen time is a huge drain on my battery. Not to mention how brain fog makes it hard for me to hold together all the complex threads needed to weave an essay. And keeping up with comments has its own set of energy and brain-power demands.
And because ME/CFS has ups and downs that change with every variable, I never know for sure when my energy levels will drop. None of which fits the gold standard for any kind of public-facing writing.
ME/CFS manifests differently for different people. This is one thing that has made it difficult for the medical world to accept and be willing to help manage it. Laura Heldenbrand researched and wrote a bestselling non-fiction book via computer when she had ME/CFS. I stopped blogging and dropped social media altogether.
Fallowness.
I didn’t want it. Often feared it (still do!), but I’ve needed it (and hopefully I am more willing to be open to it and to fear it less).
I’m certainly not done learning about it and from it. Seasons of fallowness are here to stay.
———
So I’m feeling a nudge to start posting again. And the truth is that such nudges are often strongest shortly before a “crash” (as people with ME or other autoimmune diseases affectionately call our flare-ups).
This time around I have a gift I did not have before — someone coming alongside me to help me maintain a bit more regularity in my posting schedule in case of a flare-up. Bookphoenix has already been helping behind-the-scenes, and will be helping with some regular feature posts and occasionally guest posting.
And I’ve been able to get more clarity on ways that other friends of this blog (and this blogger!) can come alongside to help as they feel a nudge in their own hearts.
So perhaps this fallowness I’m learning is getting a little structure — like crop rotation. Or (hopefully) more like the wise way the Hebrews were given to do things.
It’s all definitely still a work in progress!!
jmc 2022/12/06
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Cynicism is my Word of the Year.
I know, I know! The Word of the Year is something that’s supposed to be inspirational, aspirational, or at the very least some kind of reminder of my values, right? Leave it to me to have one that’s basically the opposite of all that! Well, I guess it does fall into the category of reminding me of my values, I’ll say that for my Word of the Year!
I don’t normally go in for a Word of the Year; some years there’s a theme or motif, but the whole Word of the Year thing hasn’t really resonated with me and with my own rhythms. However, this year the word Cynicism has cropped up often enough and provided so much food for thought, that it’s earned the title. (Full disclosure: the previous word to hold that title was “Complicity,” but that’s another story for another time.) Honestly, it’s been a really good word to ponder and recognize this year.
One of the things I’m coming to notice about Cynicism is its close ties to Optimism.
Basically, Cynicism is the other side of the same coin as Optimism. When our Grand Hopes for a thing have met the Grand Disappointment of Reality, our original feeling of Optimism has to go somewhere. In my experience, it either turns into Denial or it turns into Cynicism. (Feel free to let me know any others that you’ve seen it turn into!) For me it mostly turns into Cynicism. I go from the sense of the future being bright to the sense that I was completely stupid to ever have thought that the future could be bright at all.
The thing is that neither Optimism nor Cynicism is in touch with Reality to begin with. Optimism tends to be dismissive of the things that can go wrong – maybe in reaction to the overwhelm that comes from facing uncertainty (especially when I’m worn out from dealing with uncertainty in so many other areas of life). I just want one thing that I can feel confident about. But if my Optimism relies on not looking reality in the face, is it truly confidence I am feeling? Cynicism tends to be dismissive of the possibility of goodness in the world. And as author Paul Miller says in his book A Praying Life, Cynicism somehow feels more real, true – authentic. As though I’ve finally discovered Reality and have an actual handle on it, so it can never disappoint me again. I love how one friend put it in his own musings on cynicism: “There is a smugness one is allowed when one has thoroughly accepted the dark state we are in . A feeling that you have finally become all grown up and will no longer be duped by optimistic platitudes” (thank you for this, Peter).
Both of these are rooted in my need to control my world, both are rooted in my fear of uncertainty: basically, both Optimism and Cynicism are me trying not to be hurt. Yet neither one saves me.
Another thing I’m noticing about Cynicism is how it numbs me and makes it hard to connect with my life.
It doesn’t stop me from feeling the pain of disappointment. It may numb that pain, but it also traps me in it. And looking through its lenses, everything turns ugly. And that sense of ugliness isn’t something I can just turn off. Not something I can reason my way out of — in fact, it feels like the most reasonable response of all! No. It’s something I have to be rescued from. Over and over and over again, right?
Just the other day, we were listening to a Josh Groban concert on our local PBS station, and he began singing “Bring Him Home” from Les Miserables and I found myself being rescued by that song.
Unexpectedly: I hadn’t even realized I was in the grip of cynicism that day.
Disarmingly: the song called up in me all the things that I long to be right in the world, hand-in-hand with how wrong they’ve gone. The song let me feel both my hopes and my disappointments.
It’s funny how the cure for Cynicism isn’t Optimism. It’s feeling both my hopes and my disappointments, holding them both in my hands.
Here’s Josh Groban’s rendition in case you want to take a listen: https://youtu.be/fXnRf3TQcpk
It’s been so nice to post to this blog again this month! I think of so many things I wish I could post, but time and energy are limiting factors. If you’d like to contribute to supporting my energy, you can click on this link to do so via my online tip jar —
Dear Friend,
When you and I first began our partnership, there was so much to say, so much to share! Not every day, of course, but quite often. And as with any new venture, everything was exciting, and everyone was excited, and there were comments to answer (usually about the least-deep things I wrote) and responses to learn (such as how little one finds to say in response to the deep thoughts other share on their own blogs; and that a silent reader may still be a thoughtful reader).
My posting has gone through many periods of boom-and-bust over these many years. Yet no matter the reason for my absence, you have remained, faithfully holding the archives and directing people to the post that probably dropped them there in the first place–often as a detour in their Google search for something else (like actual recipes for Christmas cookies, not essays about Christmas cookies). You’ve probably lost count of the number of people searching for Langston Hughes’s short couplet on dust and rainbows. Well, on second thought, I have lost count, but I realize you probably have a record somewhere of precisely how many visitors have come looking for the poem. You may even be able to hazard a guess as to how many searchers it took to put our site into top billing for the poem on Google’s search engine!*
Please except my thanks for holding up your end so reliably. For greeting each reader with the same calm demeanor and blessing them with the prayer that they always see and recognize the good hand of God in their lives. For keeping track of the site statistics and maintaining the guestbook. For catching and cleaning up the spam that inevitably comes our way.
I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten you, haven’t lost interest. The newness may have worn off long ago, but my appreciation for you has not changed.
What has changed is my energy levels – and I’d like to think my good sense. I don’t have the energy to keep all the plates spinning, and I’ve been working on developing the good sense not to try. I still have times when ideas for posts fill my mind, yet the energy I’d put towards posting is needed for other, more basic things. Things like working, eating, sleeping, interacting with those around me, even doing dishes.
Perhaps, too, my views have changed a bit regarding what is most important in life. Books and written material have made such an impact on me that I used to long for that kind of influence in the lives of others. I used to think of the written word as the most important avenue to influence others for good, and I used to see a broad and probably-unknown audience as my greatest legacy. I do still believe in the power of the written word, and I do still love the flow of language; but I have come to see my relationships with those around me – particularly those closest to me – as my greatest legacy. I can understand a little better, I think, what the Apostle Paul meant when he told the Corinthian believers that they themselves were his letter to the world, written not with pen and ink on paper but written in their hearts. I don’t want to be a prolific writer whose relationships are cold and distant, whose devotion to Art leaves neglect in its wake.
And so, dear blog, I think of you often, and my hopes and plans for posting and for building our collection are big and bright and myriad; but they are also limited. My energies are not boundless, and my priorities must be for the here and now. I am ever grateful for the moments of overflow when I can work with you again.
Affectionately yours,
Joy 🙂
October 21, 2015
*at the time of the writing of this letter. (As of publishing date, other sites have replaced this at the top of the Google searches.)
During my middle school years, the whole world changed. Literally, the whole world. Yes, my personal world was turned upside down—a move across the country, a tiny house in a huge city instead of a sprawling house on the outskirts of a small city, and a traditional classroom with new and more urban peers instead of self-study amid childhood friends—all of those together do constitute the equivalent of a personal 8.4 earthquake. But my personal changes are not what I am writing about today.*
I am writing about how the world itself changed during my middle school years.*
[Hint: I am about to wax autobiographical. So: if you don’t have time for a jaunt through personal history followed by multiple reflections, then before you leave this page, you REALLY should skip to the end and follow the link at the * note. That’s really the best part. My favorite part. And the point of the whole thing, really.]
I grew up under the shadow of Communism. Grew up watching shows about American spies—the good guys—outwitting the Russian secret service—the bad guys. Grew up hearing about Christians persecuted under Communist rule and reading about the lack of freedoms that people in Communist countries enjoyed. The imaginative games my friends and I played—aside from some creative forays into historical worlds—were infused with Communist bad-guys chasing the good guys and almost catching them. The good guys were captured sometimes but always managed to escape and save the day . . . provided the game didn’t end prematurely when our teachers or parents called a halt to play time. After all, that’s what always happened in my favorite tv show Scarecrow and Mrs. King.
Russia, Communist headmaster of the USSR, was a country cloaked in mystery and competition. Mystery because few people were allowed behind the Iron Curtain and even fewer people allowed out. Competition because Russia was determined to steal all of our secrets and win all the Olympic medals. Not to mention the space race (but that was a topic that went above my the radar of my elementary mind).
I loved the Olympics, especially the winter Olympics and especially the figure skating competitions. I always wanted skaters from “the free world” to win over those from the Communist world, of course, but I couldn’t help but love and admire some of the skaters from the USSR. Their stories, told Olympic style in all their inspirational warmth, gave me a glimpse into the lives of real people. There were real people living behind the Iron Curtain, real people who somehow didn’t get in trouble for thinking and who somehow made a living . . . and whose lives were decided for them from childhood. Just like that. Sergei Grinkov and his partner Ekaterina Gordeeva were my heroes. Sergei’s sudden death in 1995 touched my heart with genuine sorrow. I may have cried, but I don’t remember. My parents bought me the memoir his wife wrote of his life. Their childhood skating partnership had eventually turned into love that led to marriage. They were a Russian fairy tale.
All of this feels so long ago and so far away.
25 years ago, in fact.*
Spectators walk between balloons of the art project and remains of the former Berlin Wall at the wall memorial Bernauer Strasse in Berlin, Germany. USA Today – Picture by Markus Schreiber, AP
This week, the city of Berlin celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall that divided Communist-controlled East Berlin from self-governing West Berlin. The Berlin Wall that physically represented the metaphorical curtain that shrouded all of the countries of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the watching eyes of the rest of the world. As a child I always wondered what the “Iron Curtain” was—besides one of those things that everyone talks about and everyone knows about and everyone says without explaining what it means to the listening children. I think that somehow I imagined it was a wall like the Berlin Wall, but was never quite sure. Substituting “Berlin Wall” into every sentence where “Iron Curtain” was used did not always bring the clarity I imagined it would. Eventually, yes, I did come to understand that the term was metaphorical for the measures of secrecy and red tape that the Soviet states employed to keep the world out and keep their own people in and behind which the Soviet government ran its powerful schemes of control ranging from semi-absolute to moderately intrusive.
As a child, I knew nothing of John F. Kennedy’s mistranslated but heartfelt pledge to the people of Berlin—Ich bin ein Berliner—nor even what his speech meant to the people of Berlin.
If I did hear about Reagan’s demand that Mikhail Gorbachev “take down this wall” in Berlin, it either went over my head completely or was far less interesting to my child-mind than the latest episode of Scarecrow and Mrs. King.
I had no idea that in the year I turned 10, a mistake was made in a speech by an East German official giving permission for the gates to be opened and East Germans to walk freely through them—and across the former “death space”—and into the West Germany they’d been longing to rejoin.*
I was dimly aware of the news that the Berlin Wall itself had been torn down.
But I remember vividly sitting in my 8th grade social studies class and being introduced to a brand new, redrawn map of Europe. Our teacher asked us that year to memorize maps of all the continents, all the countries of the world. None was so interesting as the map of Europe—the map on which we could no longer find some countries (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia), the map with so many new countries that hardly knew what to do with themselves. The map that was history being made in our lifetimes.
All of a sudden, those probably dangerous and definitely mysterious potential-spies dressed in long dark coats and fur-rimmed hats became real people. People who enjoyed owning property, people struggling against crushing economic forces, people trying to figure out self-government. People like us. People who didn’t have it easy but were people again instead of a mass to be ruled and managed.
We don’t hear much about Communism anymore. Sometimes I think that may not be a good thing—now that the Cold War is over, now that China is the smiling face of Communism and cheap labor, I sometimes fear we no longer remember or care about the foundational differences between Communism and freedom. And those differences are very important to remember because those differences cost the lives of thousands upon thousands of people—in places and during times that have nothing to do with American capitalist interference. And those differences still cost many lives hidden away in secret places where no one but God can really see them. Sometimes I wish we remembered that Communism teaches beneficial change can only come through bloodshed of the ignorant masses. That Communism does not really see people as people.
But I am glad that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain has taken Communism out of our working vocabulary and away from the forefront of our imaginations (though I do pity the kids who have less perfect bad-guy material to use in their imaginary games—a dark, tricky, and impersonal force from across the world really does make for a good force of evil to fight against). Most of all, I am glad for Berlin because for all the difficulty that reunification brought—and it really did bring a lot of difficulty for every country that had been a member of the Soviet bloc—but for all of that difficulty, Berlin made it work.
The wall coming down was nothing short of a miracle. So many people had hoped and prayed and worked for it. And then it actually happened. It must have seemed like a dream. Like a perfect dream. But it was real life, not a dream, and real life is a lot more difficult to negotiate than dreams are. But Berlin lived up to JFK’s statements about them and embraced reunification so well that today it is hard to tell where West Berlin ended and East Berlin began.
And it makes me think about how true JFK’s claim really was—Ich bin ein Berliner—or as his interpreter correctly retranslated for him: I am a citizen of Berlin.* Because I think that all of us are citizens of Berlin.
We all face conflicts and divisions. Sometimes we build walls to protect our interests; sometimes we build walls to try to control what we think we have a right to control in our lives and the lives of others. Sometimes we feel closed in by walls we did not want built or have come to regret; sometimes we are the maintainers of walls, just doing our jobs. Sometimes we are the ones looking at walls that others built and mourning the broken relationships on both sides. We are Berliners. And like the citizens of Berlin, sometimes we see the walls come down.
And like the people of Berlin, when the walls come down, we find that working out the differences, extending freedom to all, and patching up the damage is not an easy task. (Sometimes we wish the walls had just stayed up!). It takes work to see and treat each other as real people. We aren’t born being good at it.
But I have to hand it to Berlin—they did it. Like JFK said, the people of Berlin were a model to the world: in his time, they were a model to the world of how terribly divisive and cruel Communism was. And when the wall came down, they modeled to us reunification. Not automatic, not easy, but a task worth doing. A miracle worth receiving.
A victory worth celebrating.
Happy 25th anniversary, Berlin!
*Note: Watch Tom Brokaw’s view of the celebration–he was there in 1989, and again 25 years later. His clip tells stories from multiple angles and is my favorite of all the things I saw and read. It encapsulates it all. Please watch it.
**Note: What JFK really said in German was “I am a jelly doughnut.” A Berliner was a kind of pastry. By throwing in the article “ein,” he changed the German sentence from “I am Berliner” (a citizen of Berlin) to “I am a Berliner” (a jelly-filled doughnut-pastry-thing). I love listening to his speech because when he first says that misinformed sentence, a whole lot of things happen at once: the interpreter catches and rephrases the mistake, a buzz of excitement runs through the audience, Kennedy realizes that he has made a mistake of some kind and enters the general laugh himself by thanking his interpreter for helping him out. Kennedy has no idea what the mistake was, but his gracious poise and interaction with his audience is beautiful and perfect. What is even more beautiful is that at the end of speech when he makes the same ill-worded comment, a buzz of excitement runs through the audience again, but with a very different note than the earlier buzz. Nor does the interpreter need to make a correction this time. The people know exactly what Kennedy is really saying. The first buzz of excitement may have been good-natured laughter; the latter is cheering and connection with JFK’s message: you’re not alone, Berlin, because the whole free world stands with you.
That was a truly beautiful moment.
Other Berlin Wall and Communism resources:
Berlin Wall —
1) BBC/Wikipedia History of the Wall — http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/places/berlin_wall
2) History lesson links and Berlin Wall quiz — http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/text-to-text-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-reporting-in-1989-and-remembering-25-years-later/?_r=0
Communism —
(these are books, not sites; very retro, I know, but they did a good job of helping me get a picture of it . . . a consistent picture, even though none of the sources were connected with each other)
1) biography: God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew (first-hand experiences)
2) classic fiction: Animal Farm by George Orwell (explores the natural end of the ideology . . . in fairy-tale form)
3) play: Letters to a Student Revolutionary by Elizabeth Wong (this comedy/drama is about Communism in China)
4) children’s book: The Mystery of the Smudged Postmark by Elizabeth Rice Handford (this one touches on the reasons people wanted to leave, from a child’s point of view)
5) historical fiction series: The Russians by Michael Phillips and Judith Pella (Last 3 by Pella alone)–this series is pretty long, but by the end of book five, you have a pretty good idea of what Communism sounded like and what it looked like in actuality. It’s like watching a train wreck.
By now you may have noticed that none of these are treatises on Communism. Those are readily available through an internet search, but sometimes it’s a biographical or fictional story that helps us to really see what is going on. And piques our curiosity to search. And no, none of these are the sensational Hollywood spy-style-stories I loved as a kid. (Ok, so the only one that gets close to it is so true, it’s stranger and more amazing than fiction!) 😀
A few years ago, I asked my grandmother what events in her life struck her generation like 9-11 struck mine. She said that Pearl Harbor Day was like that for her–totally shocking. And memorable. And she still remembers it every Pearl Harbor Day . . . while for me that day feels like almost any other day, even though I know what happened.
Like all tragedies, this date and its impact has faded for me into the background of daily activities, more easily running into the weeks and months and years. In some ways I am sad for that–sad to lose that noble sting. In some ways I am glad for the sign of moving through the grieving process.
But I will always remember where I was on Sept 11 when the Twin Towers fell. I will always remember little details about the next months and years. Like the birth of my brother and my sister, I can hardly remember how we lived before that date. Can hardly remember when TSA lines were not routine. Because whether we remember it or not, 9-11, like Pearl Harbor Day, redefined our world and our nation.
I pray that it has redefined us for the better and for the nobler. That the courage and unity demonstrated on that day will not be swallowed up in the fear of being hurt and in the determination to be safe above all else. But like all wounds and all grief, it is our choice what we will do with the pain. Will we run and hide? or will we dare again to be ourselves? Will we play it safe or will we continue to take risks in the pursuit of what is right?
We know what the Pearl Harbor Generation did. They didn’t do it perfectly, and they didn’t do everything right. But they rose to the challenge nobly. May history show us to have done the same with our redefining moment.
From thirsty, parched soul
To bubbling fountain
Christ makes you the miracle
Broken wounded hearts
Stars seemingly numberless
He knows all their names
jmc 1-30-2011
vii
Because sometimes Love means both
The letting go and the hanging on.
It asks of us that we open our hand
(That we not hinder)
But requires of us, strictly,
To harbor that unlikely songbird
Hope
In our heart of hearts
To sing in the darkness.
Joyous Thirst 
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