The Sandpaper Chronicles

In case you were wondering...

No fruit in Pepsi. Glad we cleared that up.

Things happen

that I hesitate to talk about sometimes because it sounds so scary when you are, for example, my mother reading from home. For me to give this post the heading "Nearby Church Bombing", for example, may cause (unnecessary degrees of?) fear. What to do?

The truth is, there was a bombing in a Catholic church in my general neighborhood this past Saturday. (Nepali churches meet on Saturday.) I lived about 100 yards from this church this past October through December, with friends of mine who still do live there. They heard the explosion from their place Saturday morning. Two were killed and 15 injured, several still in critical condition in the hospital. An unknown woman came into the church, left her bag and asked someone to watch it while she went to toilet, and then the bag blew up when a young girl of 15 looked into it at someone's prompting. So I hear. (This girl was one of those killed.) A militant Hindu group has taken responsibility.

Disconcerting things include the fact that this is the first such anti-Christian bombing in Nepal. I did read that a few weeks ago the same group took responsibility for killing a priest in another part of the country, but generally, this formerly Hindu kingdom come secular republic has been a place relatively free of religious extremist violence and conflict. Let us pray and hope that this case is isolated.

And on the same day, to give a mini political update, a new Prime Minister was instated, while the Maoists burned effigies of him and other people they don't like and the former PM called the new PM a "poisonous plant." So now they are busy putting together yet another new government while, more noticeable to the rest of us, the latest garbage strike is underway and the stinky piles of rubbish on the streets build up.

Apparently not

to follow up my last post. Nothing of note has changed. Seems like the usual childish antics continue under the name of party politics and life goes on as normal for the rest of us...

Hell breaking loose in Kathmandu?

In recent weeks ruling parties have been going back and forth about what to do with the head of the Nepal Army. Yesterday the Prime Minister fired him and one of the political parties pulled out in protest. As of this morning's BBC headline, the president was telling him not to leave. (Background -- the Prime Minister Prachanda is head of the Maoists and was leader of the insurgency that has been settling down as he and his party took to traditional politics in the past couple years. But for over a decade prior to this, his people fought the Nepal Army. Plenty of human rights violations on both sides. Now he wants to integrate the Maoist army into the Nepal Army and it's a sticky situation.)

The U.S. Embassy has been sending out warnings to avoid the main part of town where political rallies usually take place. A curfew was almost issued last night. And today I have been getting updates from a UN friend. She just wrote that PM Prachanda just gave an address moments ago and RESIGNED. The President is supposedly speaking at 5:00. But we might have complete chaos by then. At the moment I hear someone shouting on a megaphone speaker from the closest main road.

I don't know what this will mean, really. I don't imagine he'll just bow out quietly. Hopefully it's not the unravelling of the entire peace process thus far....Hmm....

Continuing on themes of late

I have already posted more eloquent scribblings from Foster, Eliot, etc. (It is obvious by now how I've been spending at least some of my free time recently. Tired of poetry, anyone?) So now for some of my own thoughts on the wilderness thing, as I feel like I have lived in it much of the time these past couple years.

God calls us, in following him, into the wilderness. It isn't really wilderness, if that is defined as a place of lost and uncertain emptiness, but it feels like it because it's the place where everything we know and lean on - everything that isn't truth - is dropped or whittled or taken away. It's the place where he calls us in our hearts and makes us go if we are serious about following him, the place where he refines us by again and again pushing the depth of our commitment to him vs. our work, vs. our earthly desires, vs. the world, etc.

I am learning and living more and more the reality that if we really want to follow God, where ever in the world we may physically be, we have to be willing to walk in the wilderness -- to feel at times completely helpless, completely clueless, completely alone, completely at the end of our ropes or wits or human wisdom. He's always there, and we'll see him more and more as we go along, but throughout, there is much to lay on the altar. Death of earthly desires, death of earthly identity and false selves, death of anything untrue and impure in our view of God or his plan for our lives or our work for him. Or just death. There's no easy way around it. I think it's just part of life, part of how God works in the lives of some of us at least, some of his pilgrims.

It is a life of such mixed joy and grief.

He's in the wilderness -- in the wind, in our dreams, in the smiles of strangers, in laughter shared with friends, in time spent with family, and especially in our praises, our prayers and our tears. I continue to believe, and I have to believe that he is, and that the at times open, doubtful, confused, broken, searching, clinging-desperately-to-small-shreds-of-faith hearts we bring him are the best offerings we can give.

To the point, on following Christ

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

                                ( - Eliot again)

from "East Coker"

Part of one of the five sections (I recommend you read them all, and the other quartets) of one of 'Four Quartets' by T. S. Eliot.  Another take on the dark night of the soul:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

                                    You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
    You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
    You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
    You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
    You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

Advent

(I should have put this one up on Easter but didn't think to do so until yesterday. By Sheldon Vanauken, and featured in his book A Severe Mercy, a recent read.)

Two thousand years go by while on the Cross
Our Lord is suffering still -- there is no end
Of pain: the spear pierces, nails rend --
And we below with Mary weep our loss.
The chilling edge of night crawls round the earth;
At every second of the centuries
The dark comes somewhere down, with dreadful ease
Slaying the sun, denying light's rebirth.
But if the agony and death go on,
Our Lady's tears, Our Lord's most mortal cry,
So, too, the timeless lovely birth again --
And the forsaken tomb. Today: the dawn
That never ended and can never die
In breaking glory ushers in the slain.

On Being Human

Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence
Behold the Forms of nature. They discern
Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities
Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.
Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,
Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,
High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal
Huge Principles appear.

The Tree-ness of the tree they know-the meaning of
Arboreal life, how from earth's salty lap
The solar beam uplifts it; all the holiness
Enacted by leaves' fall and rising sap;

But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us
-An angel has no skin.

They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it
Drink the whole summer down into the breast.
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
That from each smell in widening circles goes,
The pleasure and the pang --can angels measure it?
An angel has no nose.

The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes
On death, and why, they utterly know; but not
The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries.
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves,
Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges.
—An angel has no nerves.

Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery
Guards us like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
Forever ours, not theirs.

And thus concludes this particular foray into the poetry of C. S. Lewis.

As the Ruin Falls*

All this flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

*Lewis wrote this one to his dying wife, whom he met and married later in life. (...Anybody out there got a fife?)