I am a recovering snob

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

You know how you can go about your life, not really thinking about a certain thing, until it keeps coming at you from different and unrelated sources and then it’s all you can think about? I had that recently with snobbery.

Book snob

A couple of weeks ago, a great blog post by author Matt Haig was passed around freely and with glee, although mainly by genre writers: 30 things to tell a book snob. A few of my favorites:

1. People should never be made to feel bad about what they are reading. People who feel bad about reading will stop reading.

2. Snobbery leads to worse books. Pretentious writing and pretentious reading. Books as exclusive members clubs. Narrow genres. No inter-breeding. All that fascist nonsense that leads commercial writers to think it is okay to be lazy with words and for literary writers to think it is okay to be lazy with story.

 23. Imagination is play. Snobbery is the opposite of play.
30. The greatest stories appeal to our deepest selves, the parts of us snobbery can’t reach, the parts that connect the child to the adult and the brain to the heart and reality to dreams. Stories, at their essence, are enemies of snobbery. And a book snob is the enemy of the book.

As a reader, I used to be a more of a book snob, but now I mostly read genres of fiction that many people look down on: romance (historical romance, even), middle grade, young adult. As a writer, there are books that it’s kind of fun to look down on with fellow writers, books that are known for their addictive stories but “bad” writing. This post was a good reminder to not let myself revel in that snobbery.

Philosophy snob

Then, after knowing each other for 12 years, a good friend asked me what I’d learned from my grad school experience, i.e., what did I learn from having gone to grad school to become a philosophy professor and then quitting after two years without getting my Master’s degree.

My first answer: I learned that there are phases in life, and that’s okay. I was going to be a philosophy professor until I decided I didn’t want to be one. I’d explored an option that I decided against. No harm in that. And if anyone looks down on me because I didn’t wind up with an M.A., that is not a person I’d enjoy knowing, anyway.

My deeper answer: I began my struggle with snobbery.

Before that, I’d happily called myself a big city snob as I bemoaned the lack of things to do / provincial mindsets / homogeneity in the small city where my college was. In college, I’d expanded my horizons by pursuing friendships with intellectual / culinary / aesthetic snobs. I’d read opaque and experimental novels and seen highly symbolic movies and cooked complicated meals from impressive cookbooks.

This was a direct response to not being taken very seriously by my social group back home. During college I set out to explore that side of me — even if I was one of the few who knew it was there. I hung out with wonderful people, wrestled with ideas, and ate well.

I was also incredibly full of myself and felt superior to people who didn’t do all those things I did — despite the fact that I loved the farming side of my family and that I had a deep dark secret that I knew wouldn’t be accepted and understood by my college friends: I loved romance novels. Heck, I even ratted on a classmate for hiding a romance behind the textbook and reading her Harlequins in class (while praying that nobody found the stash of same I hid in my night table).

Of course, it’s a normal college thing to experiment with your self-image and go whole-hog into new ways of being. And as a shy person, snobbery provided a relatively safe haven because I was part of a tribe of other like-minded folks.

But it started to chafe in grad school.

Even if you love academic philosophy, you have to admit that there is at least a vein of snobbery in a discipline that once called itself the queen of the sciences. There is an assumption that if you don’t think deeply about things in the way we teach you to think deeply then you haven’t truly dealt with those things. I may be embroidering this memory, but I believe one of my undergrad profs actually said this — without the caveat of “in the way we teach you to think” that my feminist-thinking self must add. On the contrary, I don’t think I have to read a philosophical treatise on suffering to know how to be with someone who is suffering or to endure suffering myself; it may help, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.

I am not saying that every philosophy professor is a snob, or even that any individual prof is a snob. In fact, one of the least snobby people I know is a philosophy professor, highly respected by her colleagues and loved by her students and curious and interested in a wide range of things and I like her very much. I’m also not saying that thinking philosophically isn’t valuable — it certainly is. Neither is philosophy a bad pursuit that nobody should do. It’s a marvelous pursuit and I love that there are people whose lives have meaning and purpose because of philosophy, that it exists for the people it energizes. I’m even grateful for the ability I have to analyze an argument and a text that philosophy helped me hone.

It’s like this: philosophy, for me, is like an antibiotic. Many people can take it and are helped tremendously. I am allergic to it, so I have a bad reaction, a reaction that philosophy didn’t intend, perhaps, but the possibility for that reaction is part of it.

True confessions time. I am ashamed to admit it, but I was very freshly married at the time, and was occasionally embarrassed that my husband was not academic.* Nobody at school ever said anything remotely negative about my husband (except for the idiot who told me he’d be a better man for me because he’d have a photo of me in his wallet; the same idiot who was later kicked out of the program for harassing female students). But those fleeting thoughts taught me more than anything else that this academic philosophical world wasn’t for me. I wasn’t strong enough to resist the pull of snobbery.

So I left.

A recovering snob

Did I leave snobbery behind? Sadly, no. It’s a struggle, but the older I get, the less of a pull it exerts. The more different people I meet, the more I discover that there are many great ways to live a fulfilling life, that the way I’m familiar with isn’t automatically the best way. Being part of a multiracial church hammered that lesson home continually, because to make a truly cross-cultural ministry in which people from very different backgrounds all have power and agency, you can’t assume that your traditions are “right.” You gain so much in return, but you really do have to give that up.

A recent writing job reminded me that I still have a ways to go. I wrote profiles of 15 churches in my area, and the approach I took was to highlight what was great and unique about each of those places. Before I started, I assumed most of the churches would be similar, but they weren’t at all. Each one had something wonderful, something that surprised me, something I could learn from and be inspired by.

I’ve gotten to a place of acceptance of different points of view and ways of life, but I’d like to take it further and approach more of my interactions from a place of active curiosity. Do you like a genre of fiction I don’t — what do you love about it? Do you like a different worship style than I do — how does God speak to you through it? Do you like really dark TV shows — why?

This doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned value judgments, because there is injustice, there are lifestyles that are unhealthy, and people do treat each other cruelly. I am a Christian, and there are certain tenets of my faith that are not negotiable. There is still good and evil, right and wrong. But most of my daily life is lived in between those two poles, in the realm of preference. And in that realm, I’d rather be big-hearted and curious. I’d rather play. I’d rather hear a story, maybe even yours.

 

* Just so nobody thinks I’m actually dissing my husband here, let me be clear: the man’s musical intelligence and sensitivity is off the chart, his emotional intelligence is something I rely on regularly, and he excels at his intellectually demanding job. As a student, he couldn’t habitually not study for tests and then ace them, and he didn’t generally get all jazzed up about purely academic subjects or arguments with little relation to regular life — that’s what I mean by “not academic.” A tiny drop in the bucket of the awesomeness of my husband.

 

Promises Cut Both Ways

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

This promise from Romans 8:28 is one of my favorites:

And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them (NLT).

I repeat it to myself a lot when things aren’t going well or when terrible things happen to people I love. Depending on the distance from and severity of the event, it’s either encouraging or almost offensive — or both. The idea that trauma can somehow work for good is offensive — why not remove the trauma and figure out some other way for the good to come about? But there it is. In the Bible. And I’ve seen it in my life. I have a friend who can acknowledge the good things that happened in her family because her father died when she was young. Another friend went through a horrible illness, yet in the process of needing so much care, came to know in her bones that her father loved her — something she’d felt insecure about before. So there is pain in this promise, but also hope.

I’ve been part of churches that had to cling onto this promise by our collective fingernails. In one church, there was a situation that halved the membership. It was traumatic and upsetting and terrible. And yet. There were some of what is called, “blessed subtractions” — people who’d become negative voices in the church left. Which meant we could move ahead in different ways than we could when they were there. It took some time, but we were stronger and more unified and built a firmer foundation for growth.

I’m not saying it wasn’t hard. It was, in fact, one of the worst years of my life, at the end of which I blew up at someone who didn’t deserve it, had to apologize to her and ask her forgiveness and accept it when she gave it (yes, it was difficult to accept forgiveness). It was awful. But what came of it was deeply good, both in the life of the church and in terms of my spiritual growth.

Despite knowing what it felt like to be one of the remnant, I left that church last year. It was hard. I’m still sad about it. But I can see things working for good in my life and my family’s life because of it.

And here’s the kicker: I can see it my old church, too. My leaving made people sad, but it did not devastate the congregation. In some ways, it set people free and things are better because I’m gone.

We like to think of ourselves as setting people free from their insecurities, pretensions or anxieties by the wise and insightful things we say or our warm heart, or the intentional way we live. But sometimes we need to leave.

My previous church is experiencing a glorious renaissance in dance. I was a dancer there. Although I’d always been happy to dance under someone else’s leadership (and three of the best dances I’ve ever done were under someone else’s leadership and choreography), the last several years there, I was the sole one who organized and choreographed group numbers. I loved doing it, and did some wonderful work with kids and adults there, including my favorite, the Lord’s Prayer dance in the picture to the left. But I was also the sole one left doing children’s worship, as I had been off and on for many years. I was burned out.

People would encourage me to dance more, always out of enthusiasm and an appreciation for my gifts, and the kids who loved to dance always wanted to do it more (including my own child), but I had no “more” to give. I’d politely evade the request/comment, while inside I was a stew of stress, guilt, and exhaustion.

Somehow, I never said to anyone that I didn’t have to do all the dance stuff, that if someone had an idea, they could go for it. It would have been easy to say. So easy. It wasn’t like I thought I needed to hang onto control of the ministry, but that was the result. I feel bad about that now, because I held people back. One woman in particular only got to dance a couple of times while I was there, but I’ve seen her in church videos many, many times now, almost weekly for awhile, and I haven’t been gone a year.

When I first started seeing this, oh the guilt I poured down on my head. But I’ve gotten to the point now that I can recognize that it’s God, making everything work together for good. It’s embarrassing to me that it took me leaving for my church to get really into dance, but I’m happy for them. And grateful that God used me, even if it in a negative way.

Anyone else out there brought positive change to a group or organization by leaving? Or am I the only one?

 

Jesus the Toddler

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

This is not going to be about what Jesus was like as an actual toddler (although it’d be fun to imagine what a prayer to Jesus-as-toddler might be, a la Ricky Bobby’s prayer to Jesus-as-baby, “Dear Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Baby Jesus, in your golden, fleece diapers, with your curled-up, fat, balled-up little fists pawin’ at the air.”)

Instead, this is about flipping the usual parenting analogy. Most spiritual analogies that involve parenting have God as the Heavenly Parent and us as the unruly, slightly stupid, and really stubborn children. Here, we’re the parent and Jesus is the toddler.

Let me set it up.

I was reading Isaiah last week (in my 3-year-long journey to read the Bible from beginning to end, yes, I’m only up to Isaiah) and came across this from 59:9,10,12:

So there is no justice among us,
we know nothing about right living.
We look for light but find only darkness.
We look for bright skies but walk in gloom.
We grope like the blind along a wall,
feeling our way like people without eyes….
For our sins are piled up before God
and testify against us.

And the image of our sins piled up before God struck me. I imagined a tower of blocks — childhood toy blocks. Probably because those are the kinds of tall piles I’ve made, over and over, while playing with children, both mine and others’.

I stack the blocks and the kid knocks them down — gleefully. And cries, “Again!” I race to build as much of the tower as I can before the kid knocks it down. And then we do it all over again, and again, and again. The kid has endless energy for knocking that tower down.

Isn’t this like Jesus? We’ve got this tower of sins that blocks us from God and Jesus knocks it down. That’s what Christians celebrate at Easter.

I have a vivid mental image of a particular little boy I had in children’s worship last year who’d let me build a tower of blocks as tall as him before he’d bust it down with the most delicious belly laugh and victorious jumping up and down. I like this image for Jesus scattering my tower of sins because it punctures my angst and navel-gazing with a KAPOW!

But I’m not done.

Here’s where the analogy stretches a little, because it isn’t Jesus begging us to build up the tower of our sins again, it’s us. We take the things we’ve already been forgiven of, things that are laying scattered on the floor, and stack them back up. We cannot give them up.

I guess I’m assuming things about you, but I can tell you with full confidence that there’s a lot I have a hard time giving up.

  • Any stupid or unkind thing I’ve said.
  • Confidences I failed to keep.
  • Plans to help someone that I never acted on.
  • Disciplines I haven’t been able to keep up.
  • An unwise decision I made in college that I asked forgiveness for several times because I kept forgetting whether I’d done it.
  • Excessive use of sarcasm with my children.
  • Irritability with my family.
  • Anger and bitterness that I can leave on the floor for months before letting them sneak back up into a wall.
  • Crippling disappointment — I say “crippling” because there’s plenty of fleeting disappointment, but I’m talking about that Job-level of complaint, “I’ve done so many things right. Why isn’t X going like I want it to?” Which is really this in disguise: “I’d run my life so much better than you, God!”
  • The need to both be right and be acknowledged as right. About way too many things.
I ask to be forgiven and Jesus knocks down my tower, KAPOW. Then, while we’re laughing and gleeful, I scoop a few blocks back and stack them. Jesus knocks them down with a karate kick this time. I try to hide the tower, to prevent him from knocking it down, so I build it behind me. But he finds it and body slams it. Even while I’m smiling at some of those blocks that flew all the way across the room, out of my reach (for now), my fingers scrabble for other blocks and…. You get the picture.
In real life, I, the adult, get tired of this game long before the toddler does. Loooong before. Similarly, Jesus does not tire of knocking down my tower of sins. He’ll do it every time I ask.
What kind of difference might it make to pray, “Jesus, I’m tired, so tired of building up this particular tower. Help me keep that block on the floor”?
My prayers are getting simpler as I get older. And I tend not to dictate as much to God exactly how things should look or go, at least as far as my spiritual life goes. Because I don’t want to limit God’s creativity. Maybe, if I notice the tower I keep rebuilding and admit my exhaustion and ask for help, instead of just knocking it down, Jesus will shrink those blocks, a little more every time I ask, until they’re so small that I go to rebuild it and can’t find them. There may be new blocks, but at least Jesus will have taken care of those old ones.
What’s in your tower? Are you as tired as I am of rebuilding with the same $%*^ blocks, over and over again?

 

I Really Like These People

~ Natalie Hart ~ 4 Comments

Sometimes, I don’t feel like thinking deeply.

I worked a field trip all afternoon, corralling a group of 10 8th graders around the sculpture park at Meijer Gardens.

One of my son’s friends rolled down a hill for the sheer fun of it for the first time in his life. He’s a big guy with a visible mustache at age 14, and is rarely seen without a technological device in his hands. But after watching about half of our group, including the two other geeky dudes, roll down the hill and stumble around, laughing, at the bottom, he took his shot. The whole way down, he gave that high-pitched giggle that boys whose voices have changed can still produce. It took some doing to get him to stand (and I hope his mother isn’t upset with him for the grass stains on his pants), but he was happy. And I was happy watching these kids, normally so concerned with how “old” they seemed, fling themselves down the hill with such abandon.

But I’m fried. And unable to think clearly enough to write a “real” blog post, and I don’t want the week to go by without one. I’m so fried that I was convinced it was Friday, and was about to say something about the weekend, but realized just before I hit “publish” that it’s actually Wednesday. So instead of attempting something complex, I’m going to share the love and write about blogs by people I know. And like.

 HartyHaRHaR This one belongs to my cousin Rod, who writes about his life as an ex-court-beat newspaper reporter, current music store owner, and frequent victim of being run over by the rock and roll bus. Most posts are casual and funny (and way more frequent than mine), but he’s not afraid to bust out some more emotional or thoughtful stuff now and then, like this one about his daughter.

Make Time Make Art is by my friend Amanda, a graphic artist who blogs about creativity, detailing her projects and chronicling the inspiration she finds everywhere, including in a mossy crack in the sidewalk. And now and then, I get to see pictures of her kids, which makes me happy.

MeyerTurner No list of blogs by people I like and even love would be complete without this one. Although the author died earlier this year, her family is keeping the posts up, and I like to pop in and browse a bit. She was a wise and funny chronicler of her life with cancer, and a truly world class storyteller. I will always love this story about her and her dad.

Cole Ruth is a writer/sailor/chef I got to know right out of college. I was with her when she learned this valuable lesson: when catering a wedding that has food buffet-style, it’s better for your food planning to have caterers serving the guests, instead of letting guests choose their own portions. If I remember, someone had to run out to buy more ham in the middle of service. Now she’s got it all down and cooks with TV chefs and sails on boats with person-sized puppets.

Halfway to Normal Kristin is a friend from early motherhood days. We were in a playgroup and, for awhile, looked to start a church together. Now she writes about belief, culture, love — just those little things 😉

Urban Onramps is by my church friend, Rudy, who dreams big and encourages even bigger. He writes about urban ministry, business as mission, and curates content from around the web about justice issues, techie stuff, web stuff, lots of stuff. But I also like to see the pictures of his kids, half of whom I’ve had in children’s worship.

Open Doors and Blank Pages Jack and Kelly are two of the dearest young people (they’re half my age, I can say that) I know. They were college students when I met them and became two of my steadiest children’s worship leaders. Jack hold the distinction of being sillier with the kids than me. They got married and a few months later hopped on a plane to do ministry in Romania. This is a blog about their experiences.

And then there are friends who have blogs they rarely update, but I love it when they do: QueFascinante, Lovely and All We Have. Both of these women blog about spiritual topics (and not the kind of thing my Dutch grandmother used to call “spirituals” — i.e. after-dinner alcoholic beverages). Always thoughtful and thought provoking. When they write.

Seeking the Inner Ancient There’s one more friend, but it’s funny, because I’ve never met him. Vaughn is an online writer friend who, like me, has been writing novels with the hope of publication for many years (more than 5, less than 10). Although, when his books come out (they will!), I’ll be more likely to hand them to my fantasy epic-reading son, what he shares about his writing journey always resonates with me.

Top 40 This one isn’t a blog, but my husband put it together, so I have to include it: it’s his Top 40 favorite songs. He put them together the year he turned 40.

So there they are. Not so many. There are plenty of other blogs I love and visit regularly, but all those people are famous. And not anyone I could call friend.

Do you have any blogging pals you’d like to give a shout-out to? Let me know in the comments and, in the name of sharing the love, I’ll check them out.

Why I Do What I Do

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

“What I do” is turn the power of my imagination, my knowledge of story, and my historical research onto biblical stories in the hopes of developing a better and deeper understanding of who God is and what God wants of me by way of what God wanted of his followers in the Bible, and to share that with my readers.

That’s all 😉

Sometimes, the Bible is its own barrier. The way of life 2,000 – 4,000 years ago was so different from our own that there are all kinds of things we miss: jokes, radical ideas, contemporary ideas biblical writers may have been trying to counter.

Not to mention the differences in translations. Look at these two versions of Psalm 116, verse 5

How kind the Lord is! How good he is! So merciful, this God of ours! (NLT)

Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful. (NRSV)

That’s mostly a matter of style; some will prefer the more casual, others the more formal. But sometimes there’s a difference in substance, like in Psalm 138, verses 17-18 (emphasis mine):

How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! And when I wake up, you are still with me! (NLT)

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you. (NRSV)

Those are not the same thing. In the NLT, God’s innumerable thoughts are about me and they’re precious. In the NRSV, God’s thoughts are general and weighty. Many other translations combine the two, and have God’s thoughts as precious, but, again, they’re general thoughts. Just that one translation choice makes the difference between a God who intimately knows me and is thinking about me all the time (like a parent thinks about their child all the time) and a God who’s, at worst, inaccessible or, at best, impossible to understand.

And then there’s this: the Bible can be boring to read. There. I’ve said it. It’s out there. The more I know about the context of its writing, the more interesting I find it, but there’s no denying that getting through a book like Numbers is a real slog. If I were the editor of the Bible, several books would have been half as long, because so many verses are (unnecessarily!) repeated almost verbatim within the same book, sometimes the same chapter.

We are the problem, too, sometimes, when we approach Bible reading with too much seriousness, too much pressure to hear from God in a way that applies to my life right now; we can wind up confused and discouraged when the Bible doesn’t deliver.

A friend who read the first of the final drafts of It Is You admitted that she didn’t much like reading the Bible because she couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t get into what was going on. Indeed, it can be difficult to read, the ideas opaque, the stories violent, the heroes unheroic by today’s standards. She said that my writing brought the story of David and Saul alive for her in a way her own reading never had and that she had been engrossed in the story. That, right there, is why I do what I do.

I’m not the only person who uses imagination and research to explicate the Bible, of course. Children’s worship leaders do this every time they ask kids the “I wonder” questions. And anybody who’s been in an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship inductive Bible study does it.

My husband and I are back in an IVCF-style Bible study for the first time in 15 years, and it’s fantastic. And illuminating. For the first meeting, one of the leaders read the entire book of Ephesians out loud to us — just as it would have been read out loud, in its entirety, to the church at Ephesus. I was astonished at how different Paul’s words felt with that presentation, as opposed to the few-verses-at-a-time pace I was accustomed to. It was a much more encouraging and uplifting book than I’d ever thought.

And then, at the next meeting, that same leader shared some historical research with us. She noted that, in Ephesus, at the time, the ideas of Fate and Destiny were heavy burdens. Seers made a living both predicting your fate and accepting payment so you could buy off the more unpleasant parts of your fate. And then in comes Paul with his idea of predestination. In Ephesians 1:5, we are predestined to be adopted as sons of God — feminist though I might be, I’m sticking with sons here, because this means that daughters and lowly eighth sons were, by God through Jesus, given the higher status of the son who will inherit his father’s wealth. “Adopted as sons” is a good and radical thing, in this context.

In fact, the two times predestination is mentioned in verses 1-14, it is used in the same breath with adoption (v.5) and inheritance (v.11). This, to me, says that God has already made us part of his family: no matter what happens to us (our “fate”) or when we discovered him, God, through the sacrifice of Jesus, has already embraced us. In this reading, predestination takes away the heavy burden of worrying about our fate, which is the exact opposite of my previous understanding of the term. I find this very exciting and freeing.

And now I’m sharing it with you, my readers. In the hopes that you, too, will appreciate this take on predestination in Ephesians.

So, what do you think?

 

 

 

The Insidious “They”

~ Natalie Hart ~ 5 Comments

This post would be so much better if I could find the article that prompted it, but my Google-fu has failed me, and the piece remains floating out there in the aether of the internet. So instead of a concise summary, you get my memory of it.

Last summer, a friend alerted me to an article about the use of the word, “they.” The author, who was proud of his concern for the poor and the downtrodden, found himself making pronouncements about what “they” needed to do to change “their” situation. At some point (during or after the conversation) he became aware of how unbearably smug he sounded. How, by his use of “they” in that repetitive and sure fashion, he was presenting himself as The One Who Knows Best, although he did not grow up with the people he was discussing, did not live in that neighborhood, and had not talked with the “they” in question about their own analysis of their situation, nor had he talked with them about any history of attempts to address their low socioeconomic status. His language revealed him as exactly the kind of person he didn’t want to be, and he vowed to stop using “they.”

Although we can’t really remove “they” from our vocabulary, because it is the grammatically correct pronoun for a group of people that doesn’t include you, we can work on removing the sureness that we are right and if only “those people who can’t understand themselves” would only listen to “the one with the correct interpretation,” all would be solved.

Because often “they” know better than The Experts.

There’s a TED talk to cover every topic, and this is no exception. This one is about an international aid guy, Ernesto Sirolli, who refused to swoop in as an “expert” about what people in impoverished situations needed, and, instead, listened to the people in those situations. He hung out in coffeeshops and gave small amounts of money to local entrepreneurs who, in turn, made huge changes in their lives and fortunes. The talk is, perhaps unsurprisingly, called, “If you want to help someone, shut up and listen.”

Here’s an example, not from that TED talk (although the TED people are on to this kid). In Kenya, lions are a major tourist attraction, but they kill a lot of livestock, and then people kill lions in retaliation. There are fewer than 2,000 lions in Kenya now, down from 15,000 ten years ago. People were looking into this problem, and the best solution they found was for property owners to install huge and prohibitively expensive fences. Then they heard about an 11-year-old kid, Richard Turere, who discovered that lions stayed away from his family’s cattle at night when someone walked around with a flashlight. He rigged up several flashlight bulbs, wired them to a motorcycle indicator box, and powered them with a car battery and solar panel. The lights flick on and off all night to imitate a person walking outside. No lions have attacked his family’s livestock in the two years Lion Lights have been installed, and now families all over Kenya are using them. At a cost of about $10 per installation. Very cool.

That doesn’t really have to do with the topic at hand — I’ve just been wanting to share that story.

So back to us and them

The article about the guy not wanting to use “they” anymore stuck with me, because, when I read it, my husband was being courted for a job at a new church, which meant we’d be attending said new church as a family. It was quite different from the church we’d been part of, and we were full of talk about what “they” needed, and what “we” could bring to “them.”

On the one hand, this was correct. They wanted to hire him because of what they thought he could bring to them, and my husband wanted the job because, with his unique blend of gifts and experience, he felt he could make a difference there. But there was more than a hint of smugness in our conversation. And it didn’t sit well.

It takes time for “them” to become “us.” I moved to the U.S. from Canada when I was 18, and, although I was granted American citizenship before arriving, it took several years for me to say “us” and “we” about my adopted country. I had to drop my Canadian disdain for how much America loved itself, my Canadian distrust of how much power the U.S. wields. I had to recognize that I wasn’t moving back to Canada: I chose to stay during the summers, I kept dating American boys, and I didn’t even look for a job in Toronto after graduation. I was an American. So I started talking like one. And feeling like one.

It’s taking time at the new church, too. But it’s happening. The more people we get to know, the more we worship and pray together, the harder it is to maintain the separation necessary to see these wonderful and complex people I worship with as “they.” Which is how it should be.

The best “them into us” moment came the last time I led children’s worship. I’ve written before about how worshipping and sharing Bible stories with kids has become a real passion, a calling, even. At the old church, I knew all the kids so well. I was more comfortable talking with them than with many of the adults. And we did talk and interact outside of our children’s church time. We had real relationships. At the new church, I don’t have that yet, although I’m getting there.

Last month, at the end of our time together, we were singing their favorite silly song about Joshua and the Israelites blasting their trumpets and the walls of Jericho coming tumbling down. We’d done about four rounds and were all in a good mood. I was still kneeling on the floor when the quietest little girl came up and gave me a hug. It was so sweet. And then her sister joined her. And then another kid. And then all the kids left “the wall” and piled on me until they knocked me flat on my back. We got up, and they did it again. And then again.

It was one of my happiest moments at this church so far.

I love that they felt so free with me. It suits how I am with them — a little less formal, a little wackier than the other worship leaders. It gave me hope that I’ll get to the point of knowing them and them knowing me.

Their dogpiling of me was like the Kool Aid man busting through a foam brick wall in those old TV commercials: now there’s a huge hole in the wall of “they.” And the warmth of “us” is shining through.

I’m not saying I want them to do it the next time. That might be too much of a good thing. But God sure did use those kids that day.

 

Kool Aid man image found here.

To Be Seen, But Not Loved

~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

Last year, I did a number of posts that revolved around seeing: being seen (human and divine editions), and a couple about invisibility. All of these have the theme of being seen and being loved = a very good thing. I feel like I’ve experienced what it’s like to be seen without being loved, thanks to a novel I recently read: J.K. Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy (ACV).

I should note here that I am crazy in love with her Harry Potter series. I’ve read each book multiple times, and even took a class called “Harry Potter for Writers.” They’re not perfect books, but I love them.

I did not love her adult outing. It was masterfully written and observed; that I cannot deny. But it was written in a style that I have a hard time connecting with: omniscient, or if not omniscient, then distant third with a crazy amount of headhopping (using multiple POV characters in the midst of almost every scene). But the thing that really got me, was that the characters are seen with brutal precision and completeness, but little to no affection.

Which is odd, given that there is so much palpable affection for her characters in her writing for young people, even the villains.

In ACV, I could understand the characters and their motivations and their histories and their relationships, but I didn’t enjoy them. And I’m shallow enough to want to enjoy spending that much time in people’s heads. Let it also be said that I don’t really want to know what teenage boys think about sex and how they talk with each other about sex: in this case, I will be happy with general knowledge, not specific.

Many characters had wonderful arcs. All my favorites were in a place of better understanding about themselves and their relationships at the end, and I appreciated that. The main antagonists got a certain level of comeuppance, which was somewhat satisfying — but not entirely, because their circumstances altered, but their assumptions and morals did not. They did not achieve any self-understanding; if anything, they were more entrenched in their views than before. That’s pretty standard for villains, though, I guess.

Back to being seen but not loved

There is some horrible bullying between teenage characters in ACV, and and it’s heartbreaking how the victim buys into everything the bully says about her. From her point of view, the bully is the one who sees her clearly. It’s brutal clarity, but she  looks at herself and sees the truth of what he says about her, and compounds it with her own hateful self-talk (fuel also added by her mother). If there weren’t a grain of truth to what the bully said (according to her), it wouldn’t carry as much weight.

Who does JKR have problems with?

I had a brief discussion with someone on Facebook about whether this novel reveals that JKR has problems with fat people. The other person thought so, but I didn’t.

The character whose obesity is most discussed has serious moral failings, to be sure. And there is a scene wherein another character delivers a blistering speech that likens the cost to the taxpayer for the treatment of his obesity to the cost to the taxpayer for the treatment of drug addiction — treatment he spent the novel decrying while he worked to shut down an addiction treatment facility in his village. His failure here is not his size, per se, but his hypocrisy; his size is the occasion to reveal it.

If I take the evidence of her story, the problem I think she has is with attractive people. There are two people who are widely considered to be beautiful in the novel and they are stock characters with little of their interior life shared. We are briefly permitted into the mind of the sexy teenage girl, but her feelings and reactions are stereotypical and understandable for someone in her position: from the big city, forced to move to a small town by her mother who was following a boyfriend the daughter saw with far more clarity than the mother, disdainful of the lameness of the people who think they’re cool in this backwater, knows how her looks affect people, winds up champion of the underdog and pro diversity. She does one mildly stupid thing while blindly drunk, but repairs the damage.

The movie-star-gorgeous Sikh cardiologist barely gets more than 10 lines, all of which are kind or funny and show his ease with and care for the people around him. We never get a glimpse inside him, but other characters frequently mention his looks.

So my question is, why are the beautiful people noble yet essentially uninteresting, outside of the pleasure of looking at them? Why are they not given real problems? Why are they allowed to skate through the story as foils for all the other, far more interesting, characters?

Give the beautiful people real and interesting problems, too! Let them be seen, and not just looked at.

(You see how I tied that in to the theme at the end, there?)

 

You are the hero of your own life

~ Natalie Hart ~ 6 Comments

Given the title of this post, you may be expecting a rah-rah go you, you’re awesome, you’re the star, so get out there and do it! kind of post. Not from me. Those words terrify me. I’m the hero?

Hear these encouraging words by Lisa Cron about the hero from Wired For Story (substituting hero for protagonist):

…as much as you love your [hero], your goal is to craft a plot that forces her to confront head-on just about everything she’s spent her entire life avoiding. You have to make sure the harder she tries, the harder it gets. Her good deeds will rarely go unpunished. Sure, every now and then it’ll seem like everything’s okay, but that’s only because you’re setting her up for an even bigger fall. You want her to relax and let her guard down a little, the better to wallop her when she least expects it (p.169).

Constantly upping the ante gets the [hero] in shape, which is crucial, since the final hurdle he’ll have to sail over will be impossibly high. The more you put him through before he gets there, the better (p.174).

…it’s your job to dismantle all the places where your [hero] seeks sanctuary and to actively force him out into the cold…a hero only becomes a hero by doing something heroic, which translates to rising to the occasion, against all odds, and confronting one’s own inner demons in the process (p.183).

Leaving aside the issue of whether you believe there is an Author of your life, and whether that idea pisses you off or comforts you, the above sounds like life to me.

Heroes are always in the middle of the action. Bad things happen to them and to people they love. Things feel out of control. Heroes are forced to confront their fears, their deepest assumptions about themselves or others; sometimes these are confirmed, often they’re challenged. Some challenges may be exhilarating, others painful and sad.

In the middle of the situation, heroes are always thinking, “things can’t get any worse,” or “this has got to be the bottom,” and “after this, things will get better,” and that’s rarely the case. In fact, it’s usually the sign that things are about to get way worse. (Kind of like when another character says, “trust me” — always a bad sign.)

Heroes are not alone. There are plenty of people in heroes’ lives who are ready to help and to hinder. But which is which? Is the advice from the hero’s dearest friend good, or is he a gatekeeper, who, out of love (or his own fears), wants the hero to stay the same/safe/like him? Does the comment from someone the hero don’t like contain the truth of her situation, a truth she needs in order to move ahead?

Moreover, heroes don’t correctly interpret their trials. They follow the wrong leads or make bad assumptions or miss the red flags (and the green flags!) in front of them, or they listen to bad advice or keep getting in their own way. No matter what kind of villain heroes are fighting, heroes are often their own worst enemy.

Clarification: heroes don’t correctly interpret their trials when they’re in the middle of them. A particular struggle may take days to resolve, or months, or years. The struggle may even be chronic, and heroes can only change their thoughts and feelings about it. Heroes can only draw the proper connections by looking back over time, sometimes in the middle, but often not until a situation has been resolved.

Isn’t this just like life?

For example

Let’s say you’re an out-of-work hero, and all you want to do is find a job and make a living. In fact, you need to find a job so you and your family have food and shelter. You start out with a plan, and it’s a good one, so you execute that plan. Some heroes will be hired at this point, but if your plan doesn’t land you a job, you cast your net farther afield, maybe you take what you think of as bad jobs, maybe you stop talking about your search, maybe you talk about nothing but your search, maybe you get even more disciplined, maybe you give up and get depressed. Maybe you lose your house and have to live on friends’ couches for as long as they’ll have you. Maybe you have a few close calls, when you’re in the top two or three for a job that you’re sure you’re perfectly suited to, but you don’t get it. Maybe you don’t even get a call-back for jobs you should at least get an interview for. Maybe some job-related, one-time mistake keeps coming back to bite you. Maybe it’s all a series of bad breaks, but maybe there is something wrong with your skill set or your self-presentation. Maybe you need to change careers, or give up on the current dream and exchange it for another. You don’t know and probably can’t recognize the series of events, conversations, connections that land you that job — until you land that right job that allows you to shine.

Looking back, you can trace your story and see how it made sense, how one lesson lead to another which lead to another which lead you to take one action that seemed so tiny at the time, but it was the thing that led to another thing that finally tipped the scales. In the middle, it’s a horrible, confusing, frustrating mess that makes you doubt your value to the world.

Let’s see:

* Places where you seek sanctuary dismantled … check — you have no job in a society that highly values paid work. Perhaps you had to swallow your pride and accept help from family, friends, the government, charitable organizations. Perhaps all the above turned their backs on you.
* Actively forced out into the cold … check — you kept looking, kept putting yourself out there, kept trying to figure out what all this might be telling you.
* Rising to the occasion, against all odds … check — you followed every possible lead and personal insight you could.
* Confronting your inner demons in the process … check — your skills, dreams, sense of value and purpose were all in question. You probably had to overcome some assumptions about yourself or others, or how easy things should be “when they’re right,” and work through deep-seated fears.

In other words, you’re the hero of your own life. It may look like a horrible mess, and you might follow some red herrings, but some of those red herrings may give you precisely what you need to resolve your situation. You might hit your “dark moment when all seems to be lost” many times.

But you’re the hero. Your change drives the action. So keep at it.

That’s what I’m saying to myself these days about my writing and publishing struggle. Things were pretty dark last fall and early winter. I put my best work in years out there, a project I was deeply passionate about, and I got nothing. Not one request for a full manuscript. And you know why? Because it wasn’t good enough. My recent reading of Wired For Story reminded me of an off-hand comment my mother made to me about the main hero of my story: David didn’t change. His situation did; his life was very dramatic. But he, himself, remained static. That’s not good.

Lisa Cron states, in no uncertain terms: “Story is about change, which results only from unavoidable conflict” (p.124). And, “the why carries more weight than the what. Think of it as a pecking order: the why comes first, because it drives the what” (p.152).

So I need to tease out David’s character arc. It won’t be hard; I already have it all planned out. The seeds were in the story the whole time. But I needed that dark period to make me keep seeking answers. Will this revision be the one that tips the scales towards publication? I have no idea.

But I’m the hero. My change drives the action. So I’m keeping at it.

You keep at your struggle, too, whatever it is. We’ll form a hero support society. We need all the encouragement we can get.

 

 

 

Ask the tough questions and then get to work

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

Last month, I was singleminded about getting my physical house in order, and only seven of the original 50some bulleted tasks remain. I did it. But I didn’t do it for its own sake. I took the month off from all my other obligations so I’d be set free to throw myself into my writing as I haven’t in several months.

So yesterday, I was terrified.

I’d had the build-up. Now it was time for the pay-off. And I choked. I retreated for the entire day in laundry (9 loads, no joke), groceries, bill paying, household filing, and kid wrangling. My heart thumped hard and I was as jittery as if I were about to go on stage to dance. All day. Because I had to return to normal life after my big task was over. No more complete focus on one thing; now I have to negotiate all the needs and schedules and emotions and move ahead.

I have a number of friends going through something like this, but on a far deeper level. They are past the intense period of caring for a dying loved one, which has such a purity of purpose that normal life can’t hope to compete. They’re past the all-consuming period of public grief, when family and friends gather around and cry and laugh and hold each other up. They are at normal life. Without the woman they love. They’ve got to go back to negotiating a variety of needs and schedules and emotions, all while being constantly reminded of who is missing, because she was part of normal life, too, once.

That’s hard. Way harder than my task.

But none of us can avoid it. Oh, we can. There are all kinds of ways to avoid how hard it is. Let’s use the 7 deadly sins as an organizing factor:

Lust, gluttony, and greed: throwing yourself into an other (whether person, food, drink, or thing) to distract you from what you’re feeling.
Sloth: this one can be either checking out and retreating, or becoming so busy that you flit on the surface of everthying.
Wrath: it’s easy to let everything feed your sense that the world has wronged you, especially when you have been horribly wronged; anger at yourself fits here, too.
Envy: after all, it’s so easy for all those other people (is it?).
Pride: the temptation to act as if everything is fine, that you’re handling it all, that it isn’t hard so everyone will look at you in awe and wonder.

I can check the “done it” box in each of those categories. The flitting busy-ness version of sloth, oh, just yesterday. I’ve even consciously embraced some of them as a temporary coping or reward strategy, and encouraged others to do the same — temporary being the key. They don’t work as long-term strategies.

All of which keeps bringing me back to the homily given at my friend’s funeral last week, in which we were encouraged to ask the tough questions, and then roll up our sleeves and get to work.

In my anxious state, what are the tough questions?

What am I so anxious about?
Am I afraid that the work will be hard? That what I produce will suck beyond my ability to fix it? That I’ll never be published? That I’ll never validate all these years of working at my writing? That my husband’s stress as the sole breadwinner will have been in vain?
That if I decide to self-publish, nobody will buy it?
That my discipline won’t be enough?
That I’ll drop right back into the spiral of discouragement and frustration and self-recrimination I wallowed in this fall?
That I can’t untangle the lack of concrete success from my sense of self-worth?

Now I’m getting somewhere. That last one brought tears burning at the back of my eyes. What makes me worthy? Is it publishing success? Number of page views on this blog? Acclaim as a school volunteer? A clear sidewalk and driveway, even though I shovel by hand? A well-run household? Thriving children? Financial stability? Following through on my intentions? All of the above? None?

I’m a religious lady, and I know the “right answer”: I’m a child of God. That is enough. Should be enough. Also, I’m not worthy. I cannot earn what is most important: it’s all grace.

But how to get to a point where the above answers feel inspiring and freeing? The only strategy I have is to not shy away or distract myself from asking those questions. Repeatedly. And then to roll up my sleeves and get to work. To do Barbara O’Neal’s 20-minute win. To keep the momentum going. To look for places to go deeper with my characters and my writing. And myself. To trust my vision. To keep up my spiritual practices. To talk over these things with friends, family, fellow writers.

And, right now, to make dinner so we won’t have to eat at Wendy’s after my daughter’s volleyball game this afternoon (a too-regular occurrence during my son’s soccer season). I’ll do a 20-minute win while I wait in the school pick-up line later this afternoon. I hope to get back to work this evening. That’s my negotiation today. Tomorrow’s will be different. That’s normal life.

Feng It Up …

~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

So we’ve reached the last day of January, the month I’ve given myself to take care of as many nagging jobs and deferred decisions in my house as I could. I started the month with a list of 52 items. As of this morning, only 18 remain undone.  And at least 8 of those will be taken care of by the end of today.

For me, that’s nothing short of miraculous.

I actually did what I set out to do. I didn’t give up halfway through. I’ve written before about how emotional all this getting rid of stuff has been, but there has been another emotional aspect. Any time I go through a process of fixing up the house, I think of my friend Natasha, who loved fussing with her house. This was more intense than usual this month, because she was very ill, and then dying, and then she died.

She once described the process of purging her attic as, “Feng-ing it up and shui-ing it out.” Feng shui (pronounced fung shway), in case you don’t know, is the ancient Chinese art of managing the flow of energy in a space (home, office, wherever), a major tenet of which is getting rid of clutter. It is not normally used as a verb, neither is it generally spoken of so flippantly, which made it memorable, even for my husband, who is not as allergic to feng-ing things up and shui-ing them out as some other husbands I know, but he doesn’t delight in it like I do. Even so, the phrase has a permanent spot in our family vocabulary.

There’s a flipside to all this weepiness over getting rid of things and reveals the best purpose behind clearing the clutter: Which emotional items to keep? Which objects can now shine?

I’ve gotten rid of some of my kids’ baby clothes, but I’m still keeping others. I discovered that I’ve kept fewer of my son’s baby things than my daughter’s, which makes me feel like a bad mommy. In my defense, he did have baby boy cousins who I passed a lot of clothes down to, and the quilt I made him became damaged, so I threw it away in my last giant purge session. But I do have the little grey and red sweater and booties my cousin Esther (who died several years ago) knitted for him, so that counts extra. And I have vowed to store what I decided to keep properly so nothing else will get irreparably damaged.

I took photos of all my kids’ school projects — the giant tri-folds, the dioramas, etc. — but said good-bye to the originals.

I framed a few beloved T-shirts, just for fun.

Then came the big one: wedding paraphernalia. I still had everything except my borrowed item, a beautiful pearl necklace that went back to my mother-in-law. My headpiece and bouquet rested in a lovely basket … shoved in a far corner of a shelf in the storage room. They were dry. Dry. I tried hard not to even sneeze near them in case they’d fall apart. They were still lovely — my friend Rose did a great job with them 18 years ago (see the original to the left).But it was time to say good-bye.

So I put on my wedding dress and had one last photo session.

     

You may have noticed that not everything in the bouquet has faded with time. There was a red fabric rose in there. I’ve had it since I was sixteen, when my father gave it to me along with this poem (reprinted with permission, also note that Vader is Dutch for father, not a Star Wars reference, and I am my father’s only daughter):

I know you did not know it,
But your Dad can be a poet;
All it takes
Is someone who makes
My heart rejoice
At the sound of a voice
With such joie de vivre.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I love you true;
And until there is a Fred,
This could be the last chance when I may
As a Vader
On this sweet sixteenth birthday
Give the single red rose
to the girl I chose
to be my favourite daughter.

And as you’ll notice
Unlike some roses
Which fade,
This rose is made
to be a lasting reminder,
though lovers may be fickle
And make you feel like a pickle,
You will always be
Your Vader’s
Favourite daughter.

I’m keeping the red rose. And the poem. Nothing could persuade me to part with them. They’re why the fenging up and shui-ing out is good: now the important stuff can shine.

What sentimental items repeatedly survive in your house?