Sunsets

Summer is ending.  The race near over.  I'm panting, with a hundred things yet to do.  I'm longing for the sunset of summer.  The warm night ending the season.  The sunset spent on porches talking of school and Christmas.  The animals grown tall from their arrivals in Spring, and our backs slumped from sunlight and swimming.  3 weddings, and 2 funerals.  

We've laughed no sooner than cried.  We've run and kept running.  I have begun to yearn to sleep with the trees.  To hold quiet in my heart and quiet in my mind.  For the rivers to run still and silent.  To rest in a blanket of white over the vibrancy and turbulence bellow.  To let, and wait, and hold, 'til all becomes nostalgia, 'til new death has lost its sting, and seeds of new joy has time to germinate.  

I want to rest in the fall of text books and teachers, simple days with love, new lessons with puppy, and a church seasons with new church family.  I want to make things with my hands again in the quiet of winter.  I am glad to know my city this winter.  To walk on streets whose names I know, and places pressed with happy memories of summer. Happy that the cold will not blow through me.

Fair well Summer,

SJ

Untitled, Unspoken

What do I say to you?

Bone of your bone,

Of sticks, stones and blood.

Pink paint

and premium price

and collie dog

and the love of your life

What’s a life of broken glass

Bullets and black smoke

And the all the holes

You never could quite seem to patch

And she stayed in your arms

And she held your hand

And she was a bird born to fly

And she will never fly again

The boats that blow our past the bay,

On the glass of windless morning

In the weary watch of sun set

The smell of the home and the turpentine road

The walk, the stumble of man

The breath on the water

and the Michigan’s daughter

And the stories passed on once again

                The house made to laugh once again

Feminism, a critque

1. Justice and Theory

When asked this week in class if I were a feminist I replied no.  No, is strange considering my current major (Gender studies).  Honestly, I can't say there's much in feminist theory I can't at least sympathize and admit to some right, even if my answers and solutions vary. Still, I can't quite bring myself to take on the label 'feminist.'

When I think of feminism, I can't shake the receivable tie it has to justice.  Justice in and of it's self is something I admire.  Admittedly it is also a frustrating facet that seems hell bent on my own intellectual approach to feminism.  Feminism seems to see justice and theory as one and the same, but it's not, GOSH DARN IT! IT'S NOT!  That is to say the the two concepts seem to have frustrating results when mixed.  I credit them.  Justice is no doubt a great fuel to fire the newest delving into gender theory that we see today.  A human, compassionate look at all the facets of our gender in regards to humanity is a welcome change.  Embarrassingly I find once again a place that our Christian cultural norms dropped the ball. Dehumanizing anyone that did not fit into a very narrow box of "God ordered" creation.  While justice makes great fuel it makes fitful theology.  The smallest of questions in segregated to an invented system of understanding is taken as a question of relevance or existence.  For heavens sake I'm a theorist, I'm not questioning your humanity or existence, I just wonder if the limited understanding our language provides and limiting social binaries have given you and I the words to thoroughly express your experience  To which it is suggested that I fuck myself. Oh the joy's of Postmodern dialogue.

And really that is all this is.  Gender Theory is really just theory.  Social science and empirical study only has the facts we knit into our thoughts and arguments.  We must interpret  creating a mainframe for understanding.  In that, I have just as much right as any person to question it.  Perhaps if I were a dolphin I wouldn't, but even then a case could be made...

Justice on the other hand has also warmed my heart.  To hear the truly heartbreaking existence our broken system of gender and culture over and over again I am, changed.  Surely this is the cry of our people and yet while God may have heard their cries, have we?  Over and over, the testimony replays of feelings of brokenness, of a constant strain in feeling wrong and worthless.
 Our silence surely agrees with these fears.

 Our silence agrees with the spirit of this condemnation.  

We revoke the resurrection in our blind eyes as Peter denying the Christ.

I am ashamed to have found my heart stirred with compassion outside the church walls.

2. Post-Modern indulgence of understanding

In feminism I find I am newly tempted to feel injustice with pride.  To become a taster of sorrows like bitter wine. To not stand with the sinner but visit him for a thrilling experience   As our sense and experience spiral up with the worth and sensationalist world I find the pain of humanity also sensationalized.  To seek out the pleasure of knowing, the indulgence of understanding is vile and subtle.  The gross adoration of witnessing a thousand heartbreaks under banners like awareness and empathy we become tourists in pain that is the lifetime of another.   What should never grace a soul we hope to sip like coffee.  The shame of my generation is in how much we know and the pride that we respond with in other's sorrow.  We do not weep with those who weep, we buy two week vacations to sorrow and rejoice.

3. The Causality of Redefinition

A blogger once said that feminism once gave her the language to say what she felt.  In latter conversations I have found more two word ways to end a conversation that I ever thought imaginable.  Don't like how a debate is going, insert Ctrl-bigot.  Not willing to hear both sides of a conversation about sexism INSERT-"what about the menz," don't want to hear from 78% of the population? "White privilege."  Don't want to talk to anyone else? "________ privilege."  Because the age old truth never changes, language or no, the decision to hear the other side point never changes.

Perhaps you might want to make the case of trauma making it difficult to hear what some people have to say but to that I argue at what cost will an entire movement be crippled by this?  Are these the philosophers (admittedly bias with their inability to even attempt objectivity) to lead a generation?   Is this all that can be done?  I find myself sinking into a pool of illogical screaming matches, furious at the claims of "emotionalism" and "irrationality" but unwilling to approach topics with decorum, much less logical discussion.

4. The table.

This is the table we prepare to take from.  Advocate, yes, to the minority and the over looked.  But as a discussion to the whole, the sum of the human experience is lacking in its more common stories.  The ones that breath through the bulk of the human experience, lacking.  It is no honor to be collected like a minority playing card game.  Only sorrow for the lack of true unity for the sake of false diversity. It is no wonder that the movement credited for the emerging theories of gender and sex could crumble into the mumbled miss classification and miss representation we have now.  All the thought and study evolved seems to have done little but find new words to toss like stones, new labels to divide people, and new rhetoric furiously misunderstood.

She painted.

In a grey town in Michigan,
she painted for herself, a life with color.

In Hollywood,
she painted her lips red.

In New York,
a family with glamour.

She painted blue in Hawaii.  To the songs of romance and waves, she painted Thanksgivings, Christmases, and Birthdays together.  She danced in the living room to oldies, and loved to surf waves in the rain.

 We painted mountains and snuck wasabi into grandpa's sandwiches. We spent all morning in the sunshine watching the birds eat, all afternoon building a tree house, and night hearing family stories with bad Scottish-brogues in front of a warm fire.

The sunrise on the bay painted our mornings and she painted the childhoods of 30 "kittycats" with imagination.  She made cardboard castles, civil war armies, wagons, teepees, and hope-chests, out of thin air.  She painted laughter on rocks.  In all that was plain and ugly, in all that was cold and unfair, she demanded beauty and defied anything short of joy.

She was our grandmother.
She painted the bathroom sink.

The craft closet is always next door to the nursery.

If you can't handle the truth**** in church,
You have two options,


Because art is a nice, quiet, "activity" to keep you busy while the grown ups talk.  And lets face it, that guy up there in the beginning can whip in shape what ever womanly damage you end up doing in leadership to those kids.

*if you aren't a man
*if you're an unmanly man
*if you like kids
*if you're good at being creative


So be careful when you call me creative...

Why I am a "feminist"...because Grace is too

God.

God have I wrestled with God.  God is irremovable. He's not deconstructable   You can run away, but He's not leaving.

Something interesting is in the God of Genesis.  God, breaths things into being.  We learn that when God speaks things exist.  He speaks=fact.  Our reality of language is fundamentally flawed to this principle.  We think we speak things into existence.  We think, I am a parent, I say clean your room (good) child then cleans his room.  I believe that if I speak, the room is clean.  But your voice did not make the room clean.  You called asking for the obedience but not the being.  

You may call a thing that what it is is something that it isn't, and yet is truly isn't.  

You can say the sky is purple, but it does not change because you speak, it cannot change colors.  Even if you were to reinvent the labels of the colors to our own language where in yourspeak purple=blue, it would not change the color of the sky.  You speak your mind into agreement, but not your existence to change.  There is no time in between for God.  His will can be perfect truly.  His reaction to our failure can be so perfect that it is indistinguishable to His first option.  He can have perfection.
We demand out constraints of 'carrying out' principle to God.  Foolish enough to think that we must believe something into existence because it is not without our agreement.  God spoke into void and there was light, He did not open his eyes, He did not name that which was into words that we can explain.  

There was nothing, and then there was.  

The opening of the bible.

And so, for some this is swallow-able, but it does not end.  God keeps speaking.  This book is about a redefined existence, not a redefined dictionary, or a redefined perspective.  A reality spoken.  It is the unity of causality and cause.

And so He makes male and female. 
Human and equal.  
Beautiful. Good. 
We were made 'very good.'

And then, we effed it up...

And then, we get this curse...

Unto the woman he said,"I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in sorrow you shall bring forth children; and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you."

What a strange curse.  So so so taken for granted.  That we, must obey as the good-children. That (gladly) we must punish the woman as man finds himself punished in his work, we find ourselves so endowed to bring God's word into being.  Because while He spoke us into being surely He cannot bring this curse about.  

And this is the causality of sin.  That we are both the curse and the cursed locked in a spiral downward, into entropy we inflict just as we are afflicted. 

Isn't this the definition of sin, in the rejoicing of another's sorrow, to laugh while another mourns, to weep while others rejoice, to take pleasure in the punishment of another? Is that not the definition! The opposite of sin is not obedience but love.  To walk with God in the garden, or hide from him in the bushes.  To rejoice in the unity and love of man and woman and God, or demand distance. Hierarchy is the distance of God manifest.  The disbelief in God at His word, that His curses are made manifest by His speech and then broken in the grace speech of Christ's life.

The woman longing for her husband and cursed to be ruled over.  To live a servant in distance, longing for a lover. It is the festering of sin in the world not just to women.

"It’s about justice for the college student facing expulsion from her school for ever so bravely speaking up about being raped by a fellow student. 

It’s about justice for the young woman in Delhi who was brutally raped and murdered last December on her way home from a movie.

It’s about justice for the women who are paid only 77 cents on average for every dollar her male colleagues do for the same exact work. 

It’s about justice for those who identify outside of traditional gender norms and orientations to be who they are without fear of bullying, harassment, abuse, or even murder.

It’s about justice for the one-third of servicewomen who have courageously and heroically defended our country, only to be sexually assaulted and harassed by their fellow comrades. 

It’s about justice for the men, women, and children who are bought and sold in brick kilns and brothels and farms every day. 

It’s about justice for the young men and women stepping out from abusive church communities and seeking true freedom in Christ."

--Danielle (blogger: fromtwotoone.com)

It is the reconciliation of Christ and His bride as we are brides to man. That thousands of years lived and died longing and sorrow, thousands of years in brokenhearted distance, from billions of voiceless, the property and enslaved, would come to an end--could come to and end, as God speaks and we respond to speak,

Christ in me, the hope of glory

To carry out a curse upon another, is to drink the cup ourselves, it is to join with the sin and brokenness of a human short fall and deny the cup of grace, of blood spilled out for us.

Thoughts and a Wedding

Weddings don't make sense.  They are the ultimate contradiction.  In the mist of this chaotically crumbling social structure is the insurgence of social-media community.  That the peak of the redefined family unit, from the 3 generation, to the atomic, to the collaborate family, we are in love with tradition?  Weddings are strange, they are the glorious celebration of human rite and passion.  Endlessly unique in the celebration of rules as ageless as can be. It is the masterful redefinition and emotion in Micheal Angelo; confined to the canvas and paint, but also expressed within the system.

Culture? Culture doesn't get it.  Pinterest rules with a mighty grip far, far a head of the curve in fad and fashion.  The wedding magazines don't hold a candle to the collective luminary of the internet. This is the peoples party.

And why get married? Why?  To the religious it is the destination, it is the opening of a new life.  It is the start and the finish.  It is the expression of a love once whispered.  To the Greek the inevitable?  The love that is worth the journey, not for sex or acceptance.  A wedding is merely a stop along on the road.

To both it was a part of growing up.  Of establishment.  Of joining the next phase of life in society.  A wedding is garbing hands with the adult community of the time.  Of becoming woven into the loom of history and time and raising up another generation.  It is the nod to the past and the gaze of the future, fleeting as flowers and timeless as diamonds.  It laughs at its own fads and equally at its traditions.  It is human, all too human.

http://vimeo.com/29497176