The Awkward God-Bearer

On Sunday I visited the Episcopalians. The high liturgy mixed with a sleepy small church atmosphere was immensely comforting to me. The people were only vaguely welcoming, as if daydreaming about lunch. The service provided ample opportunities for kneeling, bowing, turning, and crossing ourselves. We chanted the Psalm, which always makes me feel like I am wrenching an epic lament from the depths of my soul, even when the words are something as historically contextual as: "You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth before Ephraim and Benjamin and Mannessah."

But my favorite part was the woman who preached. She was a retired priest, a round-faced and ruddy-cheeked woman with absolutely no sense of decorum. Her meandering, train-of-thought sermon started with going to the Hubble 3D movie at Imax with her grandson and applying Jesus' command to "Keep awake" to intergalactic discovery, and ended with embracing our imperfections and recognizing that God gave us all something beautiful to share in the world. She made out-of-place jokes that no one laughed at, but clearly she thought they were funny. She launched into the Eucharist by saying, "OK everybody, I'm gonna try and sing this thing." She proceeded to butcher the traditional musical setting of the Eucharist with an ear-splitting lack of tune. I have rarely seen someone so transparently flawed, and so at peace with it.

I left with my poised little walk, my gracious smile, my scarf wrapped loosely—my clumsy attempts to seem like I've figured out how to live life—and I thought, "Praise the Lord. If I ever learn how to stop trying so hard to be a certain way, maybe I will make space in my life to get to know God."

During my first semester at seminary, I have lost many of my illusions of control over how people view me. My intellectual prowess and my artistic talents seem to have abandoned me. My social graces are not faring so well either. Some people make me nervous because I think they don't like me. Other people make me nervous because I like them too much.

Maybe God is trying to empty me of all my former gifts so that I can receive something new. The Spirit seems to move easiest in hollowed-out bodies. I suppose it is appropriate that this Advent season, I am left with nothing more than to wait for God to become incarnate in me.

Yesterday I played Mary in a liturgical drama at chapel. The birth of Jesus was foretold by a homeless, impatient angel Gabriel holding a cardboard sign on the street, and Mary was a stressed-out young professional in the throes of wedding planning. I assumed it would just come across as a funny, light-hearted piece. People didn't laugh as much as I thought they would, and I shrugged and figured it was due to my poor acting skills, along with everything else I'm bad at. I have little experience with acting. I could do nothing more than make Mary awkward, uncertain and girlish, like me.

To my surprise, several people came and told me afterwards how deeply my portrayal of Mary had touched them. One fellow student told me that it had brought tears to her eyes when I said, "I am the servant of the Lord." I had said it like a question rather than a statement. I realized then that I really had been playing myself, in a way. I identify more with Mary than I ever have this Advent. She was just a young girl, given an enormous and illogical task from God. To have a baby when she was a virgin. To bear God in her womb.

How on earth does one do such a thing? Certainly not of her own initiative. That is why God has brought down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. Only God can fill me with the good things that I need to do the beautiful. Only God can empty me out enough that I recognize my need. So that I can become bumbling, inadequate, and unapologetically authentic.

When the chuño blooms

Today I thank God for vivid dreams that re-enchant my life with resonances to the mythological narrative that has been unfolding in my soul all along.

After the Thanksgiving dinner at Candler School of Theology, I sit down outside the festivities with a jar of Bolivian chuño to share with my childhood best friend. She gets up to leave and I remain alone. But then at just right the moment, the person who makes my heart speed up walks past and smiles at me. I offer to let him try some of my chuño.

"Thanks," he says. "What is this made out of?"

I jump up and walk along beside him to tell him the story of chuño. We walk outside of the Candler building and into the yard of the farm where I was born.

"After the potato harvest in the cold months of the altiplano," I tell him, "they pick out all the potatoes that won't sell at the market—if they have bad spots, say, or they are too small—and then they spread them out on the bare ground and let them freeze overnight."

He gestures to the old metal swing set by the chicken coop and suggests we sit down to swing and eat our chuño there.

I don't make it to the part about how the hot altiplano sun cuts through the icy potatoes each morning, and they stomp on them in their bare feet for several days in a row until they get all the moisture out. I become distracted, because I have never tasted chuño so delicious. It is salty, meaty and dense, but it melts in my mouth.

Instead I explain to him the magical properties of chuño. "It's worth eating this right now, even though we are full, because it's like this compact morsel of energy and nutrition. It absorbs all these vitamins and minerals from the dirt as they stomp it. It's as good as eating a peice of steak, and it fills you with all this energy and inspiration."

"Yes, I think I can feel it!" he says. Then he asks me if I've read any Reinhold Niebuhr. He always has some theologian to recommend. He pontificates for awhile on the relevance of Niebuhr's work to our lives, but I am not listening. I am looking over at the black walnut tree by the sandbox and remembering how we used to climb it as children.

When my attention returns, he has finished his discourse and I have nothing to say but, "Yeah, I should read some Niebuhr." I could argue with this person who makes my heart speed up about how sharing the substance of chuño, which connects us to each other and to the feet that stomped it and the earth that enriched it, is a more profound revelation of God's truth in this moment than thousands of years of theological tradition. When we share chuño, we are prophets. But maybe I'll save that argument for waking life.

"We should probably go catch the North DeKalb bus," he says, and hops off his swing.

"Yes, let's go," I agree, and try to stuff my remaining chuño back into the jar. Whenever I take it out, it seems to expand exponentially, like the loaves and fishes multiplying to feed the five thousand. Chuño works its own miracles.

But I do get it back in, and then follow after the person who makes my heart speed up, across the barnyard of my childhood to the shuttle bus stop of Emory University.

When I wake up, I am grateful for longing. I remember my deep longing for Bolivia, where I found a new home for my soul. And I remember this song:

"Don't say that you've forgotten the land where you were born

They say you're returning / You will return / As the river flows to the lake

They say you're returning / You will return / When the chuño blooms"

Another new beginning

The title of this blog is the Spanish translation of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” I like the Spanish better, because in my life, grace comes not so often in amazing glory as in sublime, subtle, almost imperceptible movements that I must be paying close attention to catch. These movements are what Mary Oliver described after observing an owl's flight in which "everything trembles and then settles from mere incidence into the lush of meaning." This summer, I moved through a foggy, vague depression in the wake of finishing the Biggest Thing I Ever Done (my 300-page undergraduate thesis). One of the primary themes of this time for me was the nagging suspicion that I am not living my life very consciously. That I have not been doing so for a long time. Yet I also knew that perhaps the only reason I developed this nagging suspicion is that I am, in some small and painful way, starting to become more conscious. My challenge as I begin seminary, then, is to learn to pay attention. To really pay attention to each moment. From this, and only this, will grace emerge.