beauty in the eyes

While visiting my aunt, she recommended I read Change of Heart – and then handed the book to me. I’m not normally a Jodi Picoult fan, but the story pulled me in and soon I couldn’t set it down.

One minor scene describes the beginning point of the physical relationship between Maggie, a weight-obsessed lawyer, and a swoon-inducing British doctor. She wants to hide her body from him, and literally does by retreating into the bathroom and refusing to come out. Once he gets to her and looks at her, he tells her how beautiful she is. Like all women who have ever struggled with weight (read: all women), I was a little touched (and hating myself for it) and also … jealous. Why hadn’t a man ever done that for me?

And then I realized, men have. One does so daily. When a woman is told she’s beautiful, she is being presented with a choice: she can hold on to her view of herself and the cultural expectations for how women should look and keep looking at fashion magazines and Victoria’s Secret commercials and hating her body. Or, she can believe what she’s being told and step into a new reality.

It’s the story of the prodigal son, who can continue believing he’s unworthy of his father’s love, or can accept it. It’s the story of his older brother, given the choice to continue believing that he’s been “enslaved” to his father, or to be willing to see that he had it wrong all along.

I had no reason to mourn that I didn’t have a man who loved me as well as the doctor loved Maggie. I have that man. The only thing I can be sad about is that I’ve so often and so emphatically rejected the possibility of another person finding me beautiful. It’s time to repent, and to accept.

room (w spoilers)

Last week I finished Room by Emma Donoghue. Usually when books have this much hype surrounding them I’m hesitant to pick them up, but this one pulled me in so immediately and thoroughly that I couldn’t put it down.

For the first five years of Jack’s life, his mother creates a world for him inside the shed to which she’s imprisoned. He knows nothing outside of the room; even what he sees on television she tells him is imaginary or on other planets. In Jack’s mind, only what’s in Room is real, and everything on television is pretend. Later we overhear her explain the lie in one of her counseling sessions – she couldn’t bear to tell him that there was a world out there that he couldn’t experience. She wanted to protect him from anything negative.

But Jack is more in-tune with the power and importance of negative emotions than she. Ma begins telling about the experiment in which baby monkeys were separated from their mothers, and then stops and apologizes for telling a “bad story” and says she shouldn’t have told him. Jack says she should: “I don’t want there to be bad stories and me not know them.”

Later, she’s at the dentist getting work done and Jack won’t leave the room. He sits “in the corner and I watch, it’s awful but it’s better than not watching.”

A child who wants to know all the bad things because not knowing is worse. Who wants to see pain because to ignore it is wrong. He seems to intuitively sense that there are things he shouldn’t be closing his eyes to – things he needs to bear witness to, even when that includes bearing the burden of that knowledge and the hurt it brings with it as well.

Which is an important theme in a book about not being seen. Neighbors were just meters from the Room of imprisonment and yet wrote off the tall hedges as a man’s right to privacy, his behavior as quirky.

Where do we not listen to bad stories? How do we numb ourselves to the pain in our backyards, or in the backyards of our neighbors? Perhaps by submersing ourselves in our sub-cultures, our church groups, our book clubs, our books and television and movies, even by submersing ourselves in a steady stream of news from Haiti, Iraq, and Japan – maybe these things all block, distract, or insulate us from the hurt in the room next door.

shelving sympathies ii

Last week I posted about shelving as spiritual practice. Through shelving, I had come to recognize that the library is a source of not only raw information, but is a place of the application of the information to sensitive, emotionally complicated, and often difficult events. And so, I developed new eyes for the patrons.

I also had new eyes for the way reference is handled at libraries.

Reference librarians had ceased to be just people with answers to me. I saw them as intermediaries between people in need of help and the materials that could help them. Librarians would smile politely, point people in the right direction, pluck the proper book from shelves, and say – with the same polite smile all the way through – is there anything more you need?

The interactions are friendly, sure. But they’re not exactly sensitive.

For people using the public library immediately after a cancer diagnosis or in the midst of a spiritual crisis or in filing for divorce, the librarian becomes one more person to whom they must put on a happy face. Smile and don’t let the quiver start in your lower lip, ignore that your throat is tightening, all while you try to explain your personal and heartwrenching situation.

I’m guilty of the polite friendliness, too. I often think back on the time a woman asked me where books on grieving would be. She was obviously in mourning – black layers, glassy no-tears-left eyes, no energy left. I smiled and walked her to the proper shelf, softly and kindly asked if there was anything more she was looking for, and walked away.

To a woman in deep and obvious need, I offered nothing. A cold shelf of books. I often wish I could go back and start a conversation, ask how she was doing, or at least offer my condolences in addition to the pages.

I don’t know what a better system would look like, other than this: I want to acknowledge that every person I encounter is a person to be encountered.

shelving sympathies

A couple months ago I quit my job at the public library. It was a great decision. In the last two months I’ve made so much progress on other goals that were more important to me – writing, cleaning out my parents’ house, art projects (recycled journals, watercolor stationary), I’m even playing violin and piano again.

The only thing I miss is shelving books as spiritual practice.

First, there’s something about having such a clear sense of moving from chaos to order. Everything has a place and you know exactly what that place is by the call number. It’s what God did in Genesis 1 – moving the universe from order to chaos – on a significantly smaller scale. It’s living the first command God gave to humans – to subdue the earth. I get a little bit of this same sense in ordering my parents house, but that takes much more discretion and patience. But in a library… everything has a clearly designated and labeled home, and putting items where they belong has the capacity to soothe even the most anxious person.

The other mode of shelving as spiritual practice is in the content of the books. When shelving Spanish or Vietnamese books, I think of the people who had checked them out, living in a city so far from home. In the 200’s are books about religion, many of the ones checked out about how could God let terrible things happen. 300’s have books on bankruptcy and finances. Science sections sound safe until you come across books like “Eating with your Anorexic Child” or a pile of books returned on leukemia or depression.

Some of these I can write off as people using for research papers or abstract knowledge. But I can’t use that excuse as often as I would like to. Putting away the materials that other people have needed brought me outside of myself and my world. My biggest problem was that I was busy and stressed, but in shelving I was reminded that all around me, even in that very building, are people whose children are sick. Foreigners who miss their mother tongue. Workers who are losing their houses. People whose friends are dying. Parents who just want to share a meal with a teen repulsed by food.

The library isn’t a place people just go to for information. Public libraries can be so much more – a tool for answers, sure, but also for hope, healing, and help.

anthem

Sorry Mars Hill people, not about our awesome high school ministry. Instead, I’m writing about – don’t cringe – the Ayn Rand book, Anthem.

It’s dystopian, a world in which only plural pronouns exist and no man is to ever be alone or have private thoughts. People’s souls are denied for the sake of uniformity and peace. It took this community fifty years to invent candles because of the bureaucratic systems involved.

Our main man, Equality 7-2521, eventually runs away after being condemned for having discovered electricity. On his progression through the uncharted woods he writes, “We go on and we bless the earth under our feet. But questions come to us again, as we walk in silence. If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, then what is good and what is evil?” (85) My first thought was, where does he come up with this word bless? Surely it wasn’t used in the society from which he claimed. Is this something that a man who has never been in nature and never been alone intuits – that the very ground is more fulfilled by human presence?

His question of what and is good and what is evil came back to me later, after he finds remnants of a civilization:  “I have read of a goddess … who was the mother of the earth and of all the gods. Her name was Gaea. Let this be your name, my Golden One, for you are to be the mother of a new kind of gods… I shall live here, in my own house. I shall take my food from the earth by the toil of my own hands…” (99). Which leads me to the same question he came up with: what is good and what is evil? Genesis 3 teaches that woman’s curse is in child-bearing and man’s in “painful toil” of the ground. But in Anthem the highest hope he holds for this woman is to bear children; his highest hope for himself is to work the earth and live off what he produces with his own hands (which any craftworker or parent will tell you is rewarding – to produce something useful and beautiful, concrete and external that is of you but very distinct from you).

In the same way we use compliments to veil insults, perhaps God uses a curse to veil a blessing. Perhaps he’s saying, Go and be human. Be what you were designed to be. It will be difficult, but the most fulfilling thing you will know.

information sciences

Growing up I never would have thought that I would be preparing to enter the career I’ve recently decided on. Even a few months ago that statement would still be true. Actually, this whole change might be best portrayed by my reading in the last week.

In March I put a book on hold that I was pretty excited about: This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. In it, Marilyn Johnson not only praises librarians for all they do, but actually explains what they do. She describes how we are overloaded with information, the Internet putting out more every day. “I felt like I was three years old,” she describes, “high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata – I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more” (16). It’s librarians who swoop in to organize data, verify facts, and patiently explain to us everything from how to use a mouse to navigating the LexisNexis database. As I placed the hold on it for the soonest available copy I thought to myself, Yes! This is what I need! Someone praising librarians to re-invigorate my passion for organization and free information!

That hold was filled last week. When I went to pick it up, there was another book I had requested on the shelf next to it. This one I had asked for about a month ago, called Flickering Pixels by Shane Hipps, the new teaching pastor at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids where I attend. I had requested it not only because I had read his first book and was interested in what he had to say, but also because lately he’s become one of God’s voices in my life. This started in April when I made the thirteen-hour drive down to North Carolina to visit both my sister and UNC Chapel Hill for their library school. I was pretty set on Chapel Hill: they were ranked top in the nation, the climate and campus are beautiful, my sister and her boyfriend are nearby, it seemed like an easy choice. But as I stepped into the library science building, I instantly felt disheartened. God just didn’t want me there, and I was beginning to think he didn’t want me in library sciences at all.

When I got back to my sister’s house that evening, I listened to a Mars Hill podcast that I had missed a few months prior. It was coincidentally (or maybe … divinely) Shane’s first sermon as the new teaching pastor, titled “Calling.” He describes how happy he was with his life and work in Arizona; his family was happy, they had a community, a house, friends… he had no desire to leave. He didn’t apply for the teaching pastor position in Grand Rapids. The first couple times the Mars Hill team approached him asking him to take the position, he politely said “no, thanks.” But eventually, they approached him and said “we’ve discerned that you belong here.” He decided that if God had spoken to them then he should do some discernment work too. Back in Arizona, he did… and couldn’t stop thinking that maybe he should be teaching at Mars Hill. He brought his wife and family in on the decision. Then his church elders and members. They all came to the same conclusion: You may be happy where you are, but God tied part of your soul to Grand Rapids, and that’s where you belong.

That was exactly the feeling I’d been looking for, and now he put a word to it: calling! I love my life in Grand Rapids; I’ve developed a social network of supportive friends; I have strong bonds at my Krav Maga studio; I adore my yoga instructor; and most of all, I can’t imagine leaving a church that people around the world wish they could attend. I knew I would have to move somewhere for any kind of grad school, but it would be difficult to leave Grand Rapids. I had to feel a stronger calling to go elsewhere to trump my enjoyment of my life here.

I abandoned librarianship at that time; I knew that if God didn’t want me at any of the schools I’d visited, it was safe to say that he didn’t want me in the profession at all. So, frustratingly, I decided to just sit back and see what happened, see where he was leading me and what he was calling me to do.

At the same time as I was having my career crisis, I had taken over organizing a Short Circle I was in through Mars Hill. We signed up to meet for six weeks, but decided to continue after those were finished. Somehow I ended up being the one to send out emails, coordinate events and locations, and organize discussion materials. I began meeting with Steve Weber, a community life pastor at Mars Hill, to deal with my issues concerning being a woman leader (and with being any kind of leader). Slowly, more and more people were telling me how good I was doing at all of this. When people asked me about my career decision, they would often say: what are you passionate about? And my first thought, unspeakable for fear, was God and love.

I was baptized in May and shared my story with the church. Afterwards Rob Bell approached me to say “that was so … articulate” and to tell me that I “have no idea how many people’s lives you touched today.” I was hesitant to believe him until afterwards, while I was still drenched in holy water, strangers approached me to tell me how meaningful my story was to them, and could they hug me? One man asked me if I’d be willing to meet with him and his wife to discuss intellectualizing God. A couple weeks later, I got an email from Mars Hill about a lady who was trying to contact me – she and her daughter spontaneously decided to be baptised, and would like to meet with me. I met with friends and they began talking to me about their questions about God. I became notorious among certain friends for inviting them to church every week – even though every week they said no. Finally, I couldn’t ignore what was happening in my life. With defeat, I said “okay, God, I’m listening. Here I am.” by clicking on google and searching for seminaries. Two days later, Shane spoke again on calling. This time I didn’t even think coincidence; my boyfriend Keller looked at me in the first minutes of the service and we both thought, divine timing.

Oh, and as for my passion for free information and empowering the masses? Shane verbalized what it was that made me hesitant in that area as well, in Flickering Pixels: “Information alone is strength without coordination. We become a danger mostly to ourselves when we have it. Understanding is the ability to coordinate that raw information in meaningful ways. Understanding creates a certain enthusiasm. We can direct our knowledge toward potentially usefully ends — but we may also be a danger to others. Wisdom, however, is knowing how, when, and why we use our understanding; wisdom is settling into our understanding without being too enamored by it” (71). I’m not abandoning information; I just want to organize it into wisdom for something greater.