Good Friday! Goodnight!

Sitting on a toilet at 3 AM, pants on, with a laptop as a companion, can breed a variance of thoughts...

In the upper West side of New York City, the surroundings to me at first glance seem incommensurate with all the ideals of a community I most cherish: the intangible value of families sharing the same home-base and zeal for its health, a radical inclusivity shaped and molded by a conscientious shattering of all, power-based distinctions that create barriers between individuals and breed all sorts of stereotyping, and, well, doors with windows and formidable houses turned into homes by years of nurturing care. In her nursing years, Dorothy Day used to drink until the morning with Eugene O'Neill across town from here, listening to his retelling of the times he almost drowned himself in the darkness of the river at night. At the same time Bob Dylan and Harry Smith searched through Smith's collection of 7” for the perfect track to accompany a night of exploration into a realm created by drugs paid for by Smith's ever-growing collection of university grant money. My ever-curious, ever-unsatisfied mind wants to barrage my sister with all of the questions it can put forth related to this place, seeing as I better get all of the opinions I can get before I denigrate an entire city with my pathetic opinions. Becca is radiant; the wrinkles on her face when she smiles attest to the rapture she seems to be feeling now that her family has insurrected her apartment, her untraditionalism no longer slated into the minority of these apartment dwellers. My father's grunts, snorts, reverberant throat infestations, oftentimes abysmal to my sister and I growing up, are now innocuous at the least to all of us, and dare I say, cherishable. Seeing a woman forging through black garbage bags outside of this apartment complex, looking for fitting clothing, makes me realize the ever-existing incongruities between “the rich” and “the poor.” Is it disrespectful and shamelessly discourteous to offer this woman a sweater or a meal, just exaggerating these distinctions?
Reading on educational reform in Africa while sitting in a comfortable fold-out bed says to me again that I am too oftentimes unaware of the privelege that I have, and so far removed from anything African, other than a couple of books bought for what can bring hundreds of people clean water, that it is simply naïve, childish-thinking to want to go there. I remember reading an interview with a man who said, “Americans seem to take pity on Africans because we have so little, but I pity Americans. Americans expect to be taken care of, whereas with every thing we receive, we thank God for his provision.” I'm reminded of Joseph Farrel, a sixty year-old broom-toting, Gospel-laden street gyspy, whom I am priveledged to know as my friend, and co-conspirator. I pray I will never give into the provocative insulation that replaces groveling, grateful, thankfulness with lamentable expectation.

Reflecting on Reflection

I've always been a cheap philosopher by nature, so here it goes...
I sometimes rant about blogs being the perpetrators of what I perceive to be one of the most grievous and confusing travesties of technology: the proclamation of some personal inwardness at the expense of it being regarded as entertainment, or maybe worse, fodder to perpetuate vanity on the part of the writer. The former can be seen in the popularity of those uber-serious dating television shows and the public's response that is little more than some type of destructive emotional pornography, the same emotional pornography which feeds the exploitation of intimacies otherwise known as common gossip. It should be no surprise to me that these things take natural sentiments and distort them, but it still really makes me angry. Curiosity about an individual should first and foremost be taken directly to that individual, and the prevelance of Facebook or Myspace being some type of mashed-up destroyer of the graces and beautiful gifts of intimate communication, is very troubling. In other words, using the intimacies of others without temperance or regard for their soul seems to me to be a usurpation of what I hope our natural sentiments are for: training us to regard others as better than ourselves and training us to bear with the sufferings of others. For these things to happen, first and foremost, I have to abandon superficial regard for how I am perceived, and as Oswald Chambers says, “my right to myself,” my own falsely perceived “rights” I think I have to my own feelings or “needs,” above the needs of those around me. I haven't greeted my brothers and sisters together in vulnerability to each other and before God in my home church, through trust in Christ, since Christmas Eve, and I now realize the incredible responsibility I have to them. Here's how Merton speaks of this:

“Of course no one assumes this responsibility merely in obedience to arbitrary whim or to the delusion that one is of oneself capable of taking the troubles of the whole Assembly on one’s own shoulders. But one emerges “in Christ” to share the labor and worship of the whole Christ, and in order to do this one must sacrifice one’s own superficial and private self. The paradoxical fruit of this sacrifice of one’s trivial and “selfish” (or simply immature) self is that one is then enabled to discover one’s deep self, in Christ."

I'm hoping that blogging, in one sense, can be a medium that fuels trusting abandonment at the expense of my own “need to be taken seriously” which is fundamentally vain bullshit more than anything else.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the idea of self-contemplation, and the ever-foreboding thought in my mind in the midst of contemplation that -- self-contemplation isn't bringing me anywhere but to a place of despair, or at the least, confusion. Though I perceive it as a way of understanding myself and my actions in hopes of justifying myself to myself, in vanity justifying myself to others, and less frequently to God, it becomes a bludgeoning tool--some purveyor of a perceived isolation, instead of bringing me the inner consolation I am looking for. Walker Percy has quite a bit to say about our failure to know ourselves completely through self-scrutinization, reverberating Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky's assessments that as human beings, we are fundamentally enigmatic to ourselves. We try to understand ourselves through our own eyes and through the eyes of others, but to no avail. We can never know ourselves through everyone else or through self-scrutinizing examination. Kierkegaard writes in “The Present Age,”

"For unless the individual learns in the reality of religion and before God to be content with himself, and learns, instead of dominating others, to dominate himself, content as priest to be his own audience, and as author his own reader, if he will not learn to be satisfied with that as the highest, because it is the expression of the equality of all men before God and of our likeness to others, then he will not escape from reflection."

It seems to me that we can only know our true selves through seeing ourselves as Christ sees us: together unworthy, together soaked in sin and self-obsession, and together goaded in patience and mercy to accept grace and realize that it is ultimately up to Christ, not our own limited perspectives, what takes place after this life.