There was this really smart scientist guy who said that people can learn a lot from dogs. He said that when someone you love walks through the door, even if it happens five times a day, you should go totally insane with joy.
[Ben Moon, Denali]

This is an article I’ve written for the Duke Divinity School e-magazine Confessio. You can read it here or on confessio.org (for a permalink, go to http://confessio.org/?p=357190057). (And as of today, another magazine I like, The Curator, has put up a version as well — click here.)

DUST WITH JEANS ON: A LENTEN EXPERIMENT

This year for Lent, I am considering wearing some variation of the same outfit from Ash Wednesday to Easter. I am probably not brave enough to do this alone, though, so here’s a dare for you: join me.

  1. Choose one outfit to wear this Lent.
  2. Don’t buy any new clothes for seven weeks.
  3. Be creative. Prepare for resurrection.

This experiment with dressing simply is an attempt to live toward our highest feast, the feast of Easter. It is an attempt to begin to pay gracious attention – to ourselves, our bodies, to others and their bodies, and to God’s creation. It’s not about heroics; it is about receiving the graciousness and generosity of God, the way the dust and mud of Eden received God’s breath, and the way a tree on a riverbank receives water and light and bears fruit. What would it look like to live in the generosity of God rather than in the guilt of our own failure? What would it mean to be free to notice that God is making the world new and that joining in that newness is a gift, and not a crushing burden?

Lent is seven weeks. The “one outfit” recommendation is flexible – this is a creative challenge. Perhaps wear the same pants and same shirt, or the same dress, but different scarves? What about jackets? Hats? Shoes? I’m not proposing no laundry for seven weeks; wash the clothes. I’m also not proposing that you go the gym in dress shoes, or sleep in jeans, or that you freeze during cold snaps and sweat through your shirt when it’s warm. What I am proposing is that we keep some significant part of our clothing stable in a way we wouldn’t normally. And then – from there – we can improvise. Maybe we can follow in the high Church tradition, in which Sundays don’t count as part of Lent. Sundays are the Lord’s Day and therefore they are always feast days, never fast days. Maybe we can wear one basic outfit, like a canvas, as a stable backdrop for a whole variety of appearances. Or maybe we keep one striking item constant, and let the rest of our clothing move around that fixed center.

Editor, philosopher and teacher Gideon Strauss once said that clothing is an act of generosity toward other people. For him, I think this means sometimes wearing colors other than black. As I think of my own clothes-wearing practices, I wonder: have I ever considered my clothing in terms of generosity? What would that even mean? Clothes have had a lot of meanings for me. Over the years, the decision of what to wear has centered around my fear, around self-expression, hiding, guilt, or my desire to fit in. The labels in my shirts name me as a hopelessly privileged person – as an oppressor. Jeans sizes have at times felt like existential labels; the cut of them, or the brands, have been about proving I’m not one of those people, or that I am; clothes have been about proving that I know who I am, and that who I am is different but not freakish. Any part of embodied existence can become a physical language through which I must prove that I deserve to be alive.

What if, in wearing clothing, I were free to be generous? Generous to myself, to my own body, and free to begin uncoiling from my self-obsession? What if I were free not to think of what it says about me that my clothes were made in sweatshops, but instead to begin to think about the hands that made them, and consider the bodies and souls that go with those hands?

Jeff McSwain, who started the Reality Center on Gregson St. in downtown Durham, recently told me about his understanding of the difference between cooperation with God and participation. Cooperation, for him, means that God has done the lion’s share of the work, but that the tiny fragment we have to do is necessary; if we don’t do it, the world will be incomplete. No matter how small our part is, we can still fail horribly by not doing it. Participation, by contrast, means that we are invited to be involved with a God who makes space for us and for our creativity, but does not existentially depend on us. God is inviting us to work within the already-accomplished reality of creation and re-creation. We can be a meaningful part of the triumph, but we are incapable of causing ultimate failure. The Kingdom of God has come, and we live in it or deny it, but we can’t wreck it.

This is a claim that comes out of a deep, gracious theology of what it means for us to live in God’s creation and to work with God in restoring the world. Our work is real, and yet it is work within a reality that God has already brought into being. Participating with God is not about constructing new realities; it is about giving up on our denial of what is most deeply true. Participating with God does not mean inventing the kingdom of God. It means listening, and paying attention, and realizing that the kingdom of God is here, that it is real, that it is a place we can live, right now. God has made the world new in Christ. God has made us new. It is finished, and it will be completed.

And so this one-outfit idea is about giving in to reality. It is, for me, about reading the tags in my clothing rather than trying to forget that they say, Made in China, Indonesia, or the Philippines. It is about making a beginning with honesty, and trusting that God can show up. No: even more, it is about trusting that God has shown up.

Poet Mark Strand begins his poem “Keeping Things Whole” with the lines, “In a field / I am the absence / of field.” The poem follows the speaker moving through the world, understanding himself always as a negative, displacing presence. Everywhere, he is the absence of whatever was seamless until he came. The poem ends with the line, “I move / to keep things whole.”

This Lent, stop moving to keep things whole. Early in his Institutes, Calvin writes that the Spirit with “tender care supported the confused matter of heaven and earth until beauty and order were added” (1.13.22). Either that is what the Spirit is still doing, as God makes the broken world new in Christ, or we are desolate and beyond hope. In either case, we are not the ones making anything whole. Not by our pretense, our heroics, or anything we’ve ever done or ever will do.

In slightly colder climates than ours, Lent is the time of year when the bare ground slowly wakes up.  This is the premise, I think, of the “fasts” the church calendar encourages us to practice during the days of Lent. Fasting is not negation; it is the space of new green shoots, the bare ground unfreezing and growing fertile again. Luther, in writing of our life in Christ, draws on the biblical image of a tree. What we do in God, he says in “On the Freedom of the Christian,” is like the growth of a tree. And what we do without God is, by implication, as useless as trying to build a tree out of scrapwood. Another image Luther uses is of dry ground waiting for rain. We are like that ground: we can no more produce life than cracked mud can produce plants. But once the rain comes, all sorts of new life is possible.

So what if it’s true? What if God’s tenderness, drawing the tips of plants up out of the ground, is the deepest source of reality? What if that tenderness is where all true beauty and order have their source? Then we can pray for Egypt. We can pray for Iraq and Afghanistan and the United States and Mexico. We can pray for the L.A. police force. For AIDS in Uganda. We can pray for downtown Durham. We can go to these places, in thought, in spirit, in tears, in laughter, and in body. We can pray for ourselves, our families and churches, and the friendships and communities where much has died and is dying. We can pray in spite of words we can’t take back. We can pray in spite of cancer, in spite of divorce. We can live. We can die (protesting nonviolently among bombs, or sleeping in beds in a neighborhood from which you can’t hear bombs). We can die the small deaths of the everyday as well as the physical death of which Lent reminds us – a death that goes through the Cross, into the ground, and rises into a life that is truly life.

Wearing one outfit all of Lent is not going to answer all my questions about what I mean in this body, what this body means in the world, or how I might begin living faithfully toward other bodies. But this Lent, as I consider my wardrobe, I am going to practice living on the premise that when God looked at creation and said, “this is good,” that meant me too. And that in spite of the fall, that means me now. It means me, and you, and billions of yous whose names I don’t know. “In Christ you are a new creation” has power today. I can groan with the waiting creation, rather than plugging my ears because that groaning makes me feel so guilty. God has something more to say to me than that I’ve failed, again, at living this resurrected life.

Let’s think of our one outfit as the garment in which Christ clothes us, our humanity made whole again. Then it can help us remember that in Christ, we are free to stop pretending that we are anything other than dust held together by the breath of God.

Read Mark Strand’s poem here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177001.

Check out Jeff McSwain’s (and many other people’s) work at the Reality Center here: http://realityministriesinc.org/.

Credit where it’s due: This idea was partly inspired by a story told of a woman at Ched Meyers’ Sabbath Economics conference last fall, who only buys one dress every twelve months, and partly by Gideon Strauss’s daughters Hannah and Tala, who, every October, “along with several hundred of their closest friends,” choose one dress and wear it for the month, for the sheer fun of it.

If you’d like to join me in the clothes adventure, drop me a line and we can embark together: stephanie.gehring@duke.edu. (If you find the whole project terminally intimidating but also attractive, drop me a line especially; I bet we can find some variation of it that will let you join us. That, in fact, is the whole idea – being exuberantly creative.)

“Some old men came to see Abba Poemen, and said to him, Tell us, when we see brothers dozing during the sacred office, should we pinch them so they will stay awake? The old man said to them: Actually, if I saw a brother sleeping, I would put his head on my knees and let him rest.”

[from Desert Wisdom, translated by Yushi Nomura.]

Here is Chesterton, essentially baiting skeptics–the accusation, very Chestertonianly, is that Christians have more fun, because they are the ones who have real celebrations. The “splendid effort” he is referring to is the French positivist Auguste Comte’s “Church of Humanity,” which was founded as a positivist religion and had a religious calendar, services, and temples/chapels. Chesterton says that “I myself, to take a corpus vile, am very certain that I would not read the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever. But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.” (A “corpus vile” is a “vile body,” which is to say, a body or thing fit only to be the object of an experiment.) So, on to the skeptic-baiting:

That splendid effort failed, and nothing in the style of it has succeeded. There has been no rationalist festival, no rationalist ecstasy. Men are still in black for the death of God. When Christianity was heavily bombarded in the last century upon no point was it more persistently and brilliantly attacked than upon that of its alleged enmity to human joy. Shelley and Swinburne and all their armies have passed again and again over the ground, but they have not altered it. They have not set up a single new trophy or ensign for the world’s merriment to rally to. They have not given a name or a new occasion of gaiety. Mr. Swinburne does not hang up his stocking on the eve of the birthday of Victor Hugo. Mr. William Archer does not sing carols descriptive of the infancy of Ibsen outside people’s doors in the snow. In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth. Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it. In all the winter in our woods there is no tree in glow but the holly.

G.K. Chesterton, from Heretics

In addition to skeptic-baiting, Chesterton is in a sense pagan-praising here too, which is also fairly characteristic (though he ultimately accuses paganism of despair). Possibly my favorite line in the whole thing, though, is the image of “the many acting poetry instead of the few writing it.” That’s a world I want to live in.

From XKCD.

This is the first paragraph of a chapter sent to me by Karl Johnson, of the Chesterton House in Ithaca, NY. It is full of Chesterton’s large and sweeping delights and denunciations, and of his plain old good fun — which shows even in the title of the book from which it comes: Alarms and Discursions.

My forthcoming work in five volumes, “The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,” is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful if I shall live to finish it. Some overflowings from such a fountain of information may therefore be permitted to sprinkle these pages. I cannot yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of the nursery rhyme which says: “If all the trees were bread and cheese”–which is, indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher gluttony. If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living. Wild and wide woodlands would reel and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus. Except Virgil and this anonymous rhymer, I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word; it rhymes to “breeze” and “seas” (an essential point); that it is emphatic in sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis, will often say, “Cheese it!” or even “Quite the cheese.” The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient–sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks, not lightly to be corrupted with soda-water. You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine, and ale. Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.

(By the last line, I think he means that sparkling water is an inferior, non-Edenic drink.)

For reasons not entirely clear to me, I like eating breakfast on the floor in the kitchen. It might be a kind of Temple Grandin impulse (she is autistic and a writer, and learned by watching cattle go calmly through narrow chutes that she likes being tightly enclosed). Leaning against the refrigerator, I can see out the two kitchen windows, up through tree branches into the sky. I feel safe on the floor, out of view, in a semi-enclosed space — sometimes sitting on a chair at a table feels like way too much space.

This is a poem by Billy Collins, sent to me by David Taylor in honor of Advent.

A QUESTION ABOUT ANGELS

Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

Since I was nine, I have been far away from close friends, and have intermittently expended great energies in feeling guilty for not writing, or for not writing often enough. Since I first learned that Germans set the table and use silverware differently than Americans do, I have also been a little frightened of manners.

I was delighted, therefore, when I discovered that an authoritative person had written about etiquette, and this many decades ago, back before standards went all to pot. Upon acquiring an early edition of her book for two dollars at the Ithaca Library Booksale (thick, with pages the color of an old person’s teeth back before dental bleaching, and a stiff navy blue cover stamped ‘ETIQUETTE’ in fading gold), I opened at random and found myself in a chapter on proper letter-writing.

When I began reading, I found Mrs. Post entertainingly pompous, but also startlingly human and wise. Here she is, for example, on letters of condolence:

Intimate letters of condolence are like love letters, in that they are too sacred to follow a set form. One rule, and one only, should guide you in writing such letters. Say what you truly feel. Say that and nothing else.

Those are instructions for good friendship, for humanness, and (as I find is often the case) for good writing.

Here she is on general letter-writing:

HOW NOT TO BEGIN

Even one who ‘loves the very sight of your handwriting’ could not possibly be expected to find pleasure in a letter beginning:

‘I have been meaning to write you for a long time but haven’t had a minute to spare.’
Or:
‘I suppose you have been thinking me very neglectful, but you know how I hate to write letters.’
Or:
‘I know I ought to have answered your letter sooner, but I haven’t had a thing to write about.’

The above sentences are written time and again by persons who are utterly unconscious that they are not expressing a friendly or loving thought. If one of your friends were to walk into the room, and you were to receive him stretched out and yawning in an easy chair, no one would have to point out the rudeness of such behavior; yet countless kindly intentioned people begin their letters mentally reclining and yawning in just such a way.

What strikes me among other things is her total lack of irony. The phrase “friendly or loving thoughts” makes me want to giggle, or roll my eyes. (Not to mention the reclined yawn.) And yet what else is a letter between friends for, really? She goes on:

If you are going to take the trouble to write a letter, you are doing it because you have at least remembered some one with friendly regard, or you would not be writing at all. You certainly would like to convey the impression that you want to be with your friend in thought for a little while at least—not that she through some malignant force is holding you to a grindstone and forcing you to the task of making hateful schoolroom pot-hooks for her selfish gain.

A new friend here (Banks Clark) introduced me to The Wailin’ Jennys this week. I love them. I think I stopped traffic yesterday skip-hopping and twirling along the sidewalk while I listened to them through earphones (there was a very slow car that got honked at, though possibly they were also just looking for a house number).

This is one of their sad songs, which I think is a beautiful prayer because it is genuinely faithful — it is from the place before an answer, the place where the longing is all we can touch. I find this sort of song helps me live because it does not make me feel crazy in the places when the whole world feels like broken edges that can’t possibly fit back together.

Of which there are so many.

[The title of a song is a link to the mp3; click to listen.]

Starlight

[from the album “Firecracker” by The Wailin’ Jennys]
I have come back to you broken
take me home
And my body bears this trouble
take me home
Take me back to my beginning
Before the hell of night set in
And I came to this border
take me home

I have toured the endless starlight
take me home
I have shattered under midnight
take me home
There are no vultures in this clearing
Except the ones who brought me here
And I’ll no longer feed them
take me home

Kingdom come, their will was done
And now the earth is far away
from any kind of heaven
Hallowed be these frozen fields
And every single one of us
still left in want of mercy
Take us home

Now the bells stand still and hollow
take me home
And no one has come to mourn me
take me home
Find me where I close my eyes
Beneath this sky of powerlines
And let me see us clearly
take me home

Kingdom come, their will was done
And now the earth is far away
from any kind of heaven
Hallowed be these frozen fields
And every single one of us
Still left in want of mercy
Take us home…

Some genius pasted this into the shared study google doc for one of my finals.