Faster, Sister Exodus! Kill! Kill!

There’s a 67% “recidivism” for murder in America. I know this. Sister Exodus told me so. “67% of murderers who are released from prison will kill again,” she insisted.

Just to clarify: Sister Exodus isn’t a nun. She’s my sister in Christ, and we’ve been emailing back and forth recently. Sister Exodus is all for the death penalty, which, she tells me, should be the sentence for every convicted murderer. And rapist. Every single one.

Kill ‘em all.

According to Sister Exodus, it wouldn’t be fair otherwise. They shouldn’t be “rewarded” for murder (or rape) with the privilege of living (...because once you’ve taken someone else’s life, you don’t have a right to your own?). Countless innocent lives would be spared if we’d please just kill these irrevocably sick convicts.

I could see the logic. But I couldn’t see the Judeo-Christian logic.

My decision to cite the Ten Commandments didn’t come without hesitation. As a general rule of thumb, when I make the choice to bring in the Word of the Lord for the purposes of arguing my point, I try to thump wisely.

I told her that it’s made very clear in those basic Ten - so basic to the faith that some say those very Ten are written on our hearts - among them: Thou shalt not kill.

Sister Exodus answered that God makes it very clear (couldn’t be any clearer, she said) that he wants murderers to die. She cited Exodus 21.12: “Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death.” (NIV) To that 33% who statistically won’t kill again, tough tittie. The Bible tells us so.

The Bible also has its fair share of dinner party scenes.

Allow me to tweak the general idea of inclusion at these dinner parties in order to illustrate what I understand to be the pillar of Sister Exodus's capital punishment theology:

Just like in the real Bible, Jesus broke bread with tax collectors, Pharisees, prostitutes, Gentiles... Jesus didn’t discriminate, except for, apparently murderers and rapists. Sure, those other people around the table sinned, but some transgressions are just plain too despicable.

This is a Warhol. He did a whole series of them.

Does that sound right to you?

Don’t get me wrong.

If one of my loved ones was murdered or raped, in my anger, I’d crave some significantly damaging comeuppance unto the head of the soul responsible (which is NOT the way of peace, by the way). The fulfillment of such a craving would be destructive and unsatisfying to say the least.

I made a suggestion to Sister Exodus, “What about life without parole?”

“That’s not how the American Judicial System works,” she corrected. “Prisoners can get out of jail on parole.”

In these fantasy solutions, Sister Exodus, as long as you’re entitled to your hypothetical death camps, may I please have my hypothetical life camps? Because if I lived in a country where the government not only had no trouble with killing off hella people, but also wove it into their law as The Right Thing To Do, I would be sickened and sad. I realize Sister Exodus desires protection over the lives of the potential victims on the outside. I do, too. But I also want protection for the criminals on the inside.

Those we judge to be hermetically despicable… in this case, to the point where it’s insisted that their bad choices have disqualified them from life itself... even they are God’s children. Irredeemable, hard-wired killing machines unable to change their ways ever? We don’t know that. That’s between them and God.

Far earlier in the same email thread, Sister Exodus expounded to me, with as much vehemence as mere text on a screen can convey, that I am made perfect in Christ Jesus. (In all-caps, too: PERFECT.) I’ll say now that I, every single fiber of me, is no more or less human than anyone who has ever murdered, ever raped, ever collected taxes, or cast lots with their purity. The sins remain unacceptable, but those people - those murderers, those rapists - are also made perfect in Christ Jesus.


What do you think?


UPDATE:  A relevant note on Ten Commandments translations can be read here.

My Brother is in Afghanistan, the Dog Poops in the Afternoon, and I am the Government: in which all your tax dollars go to Twilight marathons.

Prepare to feel deceived.

The title of my blog, “Musings of an Unemployed English Major,”* is a lie.

…okay, “inaccurate” might be a better word than “lie,” and as much as I loath to toot my own horn, I don’t think this inaccuracy injures my overall credibility. At the time of the blog’s inception, I was not telling a lie when I proclaimed myself to be unemployed (save for occasional, few-and-far-between house-sitting gigs, and getting paid under the table to escort the neighbor’s dog around the block for his midday bowel movement). It wasn't until last September, when I went into the payroll office at my school and filled out a bunch of paperwork, that the title officially became inaccurate. These days, not only do I work…

I work for the government.

I tutor English at a community college, which is financed partially by student fees, and a-lot-ly by those crazy kids in Sacramento doing their darnedest to run the state. If you were to do something highly illegal (which I wouldn’t encourage at all), and sneak into Payroll to rifle through their files and find the paperwork I filled out that day, my government employee status might be especially evident to you when you find the oath I signed to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

I want YOU to identify the independent clause.

My very best friend, the Anarchist, asked me if this meant I was to physically assault any unpatriotic nebbish I might encounter on the street. And, well… no. Just, no. All the violence stuff is more up my brother’s alley, who made a VERY SIMILAR PLEDGE when he joined the army about two years ago. But I'm an English tutor, and English tutors don’t suit up in fatigues and polish guns when they defend the Constitution.

Even though I can confidently assert how not to do my job, I can’t confidently assert how an English tutor properly fulfills the “Oath of Allegiance” required for employment at our fine a-lot-ly government-funded establishment. I’ve been helping students defend their papers from scrambled theses and run-on sentences, but when it comes to protecting the Constitution, I am amiss.

The oath is worded with such authority and idealism, I’ve often found myself in a tailspin of endless guilt for neglecting the duties it prescribes. This provokes the grandiosity gland (a close sister of the eject button for any rational conceptions of how the world works) in the tempestuous organ that is my brain, and the thinking mutates as such:

I work for the government. Therefore, I am the government. Or part of it. Well, this is a democracy, so, ideally, everyone’s participating in government affairs. The government belongs to the people. I think I’m mostly a person. I am the government. This calls for a Slurpee. (Can you follow that? My shrink couldn’t.)

Therefore, America, your government is not working for you.

Your government is not defending the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.

Your government would prefer to watch the Twilight movies with her fellow, floundering, twenty-something chum to mock the poor quality of cinema and abysmal emotional intelligence of its characters so that they may feel superior and compensate for their shortcomings.

Your government is on Team Edward.

BUT NEVER FEAR, AMERICA! My priorities will shift! I will start exploring how an English tutor is to go about supporting and defending the Constitution in a new blog! Although I currently teem with ambition for departing on this odyssey of wholesome patriotism, I’m sure I will publish posts far less than I wish to if I have any modicum of a healthy desire to pass math.


UPDATE (May 30, 2013):  The proposed project has since been pronounced dead.
*  ANOTHER UPDATE (May 31, 2013):  The title of this blog has been changed to something more accurate.

I Stole God's TV (and a good time wasn't had by all)

The character Sarah Goldfarb, from Hurbert Selby Junior’s novel Requiem for a Dream (and Darren Aronofsky’s film adaptation), loves her son very much, even though he’s a junkie who keeps stealing her television set. Over and over again, the junkie son and his junkie friend take the TV and pawn it for money to buy heroin. Every time this happens, Sarah dutifully leaves her apartment and buys it back. But what’s more peculiar is that every time this happens, it doesn’t make Sarah love her son any less. Because of this, Sarah Goldfarb is like God.

She’s not 100% like God, of course. I don’t think God is addicted to diet pills or squanders much of the day watching a gratuitous amount of infomercials – although, I do believe he manifests in and works through all living beings, including but not exclusive to addicts of any variety. I also believe that God is love. This is something I have in common with the author of 1 John, a small but powerful book you can find toward the end of the New Testament. God cannot help but to love, because God is love. The fourth chapter (v.10) (NIV) says that:

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

I bring this up as a belated rebuttal to one of my beautiful buddies when he said, “Why do you see it as a problem when you purposefully and repeatedly ‘sin,’ Kathryn? If you enjoy it, and Jesus forgives you, why not? It’s not like God’s going to stop loving you.” He’s right about the God-forgiving-me/God-loving-me thing: God is love. God cannot help but to love. God pours out his love indiscriminately, recklessly, infinitely.

But I don’t like me when I steal God’s TV.

My conscience hurts when I am so consumed with the pursuit of experiencing a minor, fleeting feeling of exhilaration, comfort, or what have you by means that God has made clear in my heart he would strongly prefer that I not partake in. God doesn’t encourage me to indulge in anything I want whenever I want it – especially if it’s something as blatantly destructive as heroin. Consider the example C.S. Lewis gave of who God is not:

“We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven, as a grandfather in heaven – a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’”*

Because if I tell God, “Thanks for the capacity to feel happiness, now I will exercise it by stealing your TV many times over,” and I claim to have any inkling of love for the Lord in return… Do you see the problem with this picture? It makes me inconsiderate. It makes me self-serving and advantageous. It makes me a lot of things. A lot of things I don’t want to be.

I would strongly prefer to not be the kind of person who has no trouble being overtly inconsiderate toward someone else. It doesn’t matter if “someone else” happens to be someone I’m head over heels for, or someone whose company I find very difficult to enjoy. From time to time my words and actions may contradict this, but when it comes down to the wire, I’d prefer not to be a jerk.




* The Problem Pain

Ayn Rand's Space Ship: in which the Tragic Gamer Kid's shameless audacity gets him what he thinks he needs.

This time last year, on Monday evenings, you could find me in a small classroom on the second floor of the Liberal Arts building at my school. My best friend, the Anarchist, had a class on the first floor – a class taught by one of those subversive professors who will start talking louder to compensate for the complacency of others. One of those professors who pulls back society’s curtains so that his students may catch a glimpse of its pretension, its pitfalls, its capitalist corruption… the whole, miserable, bureaucratic, human-rights-violating shebang. One of those professors who teaches classes from which students are sent home under a heavy black cloud, looking like they got the wind knocked out of them, and experiencing a touch of resentment that the blissful ignorance they enjoyed at the breakfast table that morning is lost. Or at least the students who cared.

…anyway…

On these Monday nights of yore, my history class on the second story would get out earlier than the Anarchist’s, so I would sit and wait on the concrete outside Professor Subversion’s room. Sometimes he walk outside after clicking “play” on a YouTube video or DVD to run to his office or something, see me sitting there, and invite me to go inside and watch it.

One night, I left history, turned on my family’s “emergency” cell phone, and stuck it in my sweatshirt pocket as I descended the stairs. I was starting across the LA building’s quad when I saw the Tragic Gamer Kid standing outside the closed door of Professor Subversion’s classroom. As much as I’ve waxed about lecture hall logistics and inconvenient truths, this story is really centered on the Tragic Gamer Kid (and the cell phone).

Sorry if you feel misled.

Being the Anarchist’s senior by not much, and my junior by a little more than not much, the Tragic Gamer Kid wasn’t a kid per se. But he did play a lot of video games, and shouted his life’s narratives as if they were as tragic, important, and ignored as the ones Professor Subversion would speak of with increasing volume.

The Tragic Gamer Kid… actually, we’ll call him Horatio, because “Tragic Gamer Kid” is cumbersome …was supposed to be in his Farsi class in the next building over, but, no. Horatio was here, the light from the door’s tiny window illuminating his face, and his fingers that twinkled and pointed to places he wasn’t supposed to be.

I knew exactly what Horatio was doing. He did the same to me last week.

“Horatio!” Although I wanted to get his attention, I also didn’t want to disrupt any classes, and he was all the way across the quad. My voice came out mangled and croaking, a confused stage whisper. I broke into a run, which prompted the family “emergency” phone – which I frequently carried because, to my small, self-serving mind, aimless texting with the Anarchist and the Fundamentalist Atheist were equivalent enough to emergencies – to bounce out of my pocket. Its major parts cleanly cracked away from each other when it hit the pavement.

I paused, torn. It’s not like the quad was teeming with collegiates like it was during the daytime, but there was still something uneasy about the notion of leaving cell phone innards on the ground in the dark. As I stooped to pick up the closest piece I could locate, I realized that rescuing the cell phone and stopping Horatio weren’t possible.

If it weren’t for that phone, I swear, I could have stopped him. Because in the modicum of time I spent in conflict over the splattered device, Horatio made his move. When I looked up again, his hand was on the doorknob, and me and my mangled croaks of, “HORATIO! HORATIO!” weren’t even close to half-way across the quad. He disappeared into the room.

From what I’ve been told, it transpired like this:

When Horatio initially entered, Professor Subversion offered, “Would you like to take a seat? We’re about to watch a video…”

Horatio stopped the professor, saying, “Excuse me, Mr. Subversion,” then pointed at my best friend when he addressed him: “Anarchist.”

“What do you want, Horatio?” It’s hard to tell if the Anarchist couldn’t help but to laugh at the absurdity at the time of the event, or it was just him laughing as he recounted to me later.

“We need to talk after class,” Horatio said, still pointing at the Anarchist.

“This couldn’t wait until later, Horatio?”

“No. See you then,” Horatio said, and left.

Although the Tragic Gamer Kid had never been a student of his, Professor Subversion knew Horatio well enough have an acceptance that, That’s Horatio. He’ll do what he wants… and resume where he left off.

Horatio was exiting the classroom when I finally caught up to him. “Horatio!”

“Kathryn!”

“You’re helping me find the pieces of my cell phone!”

I’ll give Horatio this much – he didn’t bail on me while I groped around on the cement. After he returned to Farsi class, with the image of him exceeding the threshold replaying in my mind, it struck me how extraordinarily human Horatio was: a parable, an extreme illustration of what I either actually look like, or of what I am afraid I’ll look like when I ask for help.

Horatio needed a lot of help, to levels at which he would be obnoxious in seeking it. It was a battle to maintain boundaries while in his company. Once any desire to leave was expressed, Horatio would do his best to manipulate his guests into staying longer. Suckers like me (or the Anarchist, although he wasn’t a sucker for as long as I was) would get stuck in phone “conversations” that would last upwards to four or five hours, with nary a word in edgewise. The average call would begin with Horatio complaining about girl problems, which would turn into confident and searing statements that all girls in California were c-nts and whores, or how everyone and their mother were bottom-feeding “betas.” Then it might end with some long verbal dissertation of how Mexico has an “inefficient culture,” why the Germans should have won the war, or how all of Horatio's problems could be attributed to Ayn Rand.

Horatio the Tragic Gamer Kid, makes me not want to ask for help, because I don’t want be obnoxious and overstep my boundaries, blinded by a personal audacity I can’t even tell is there, and misjudging exactly how urgent my First World problems are not. I don’t want to do that if I can help it. I’m not saying all of Horatio’s problems were First World or trivial – I’m just saying that if I need to ask for help, I don’t want to be more of a bother than I can avoid.

At the same time, I have to admit that I also admire Horatio’s boldness in asking for help. At some point, life’s going to rip me a new one (or at least it’ll feel that way) in ways where I can’t deal it by myself, and I’m going to need to go to someone and say, “I need help.” You know, situations like...

Where did the “emergency” cell phone charger go?
What the hell is wrong with my car defroster?
All these people showed up at my house! Would you happen to have any bread I could feed them with?
My space ship crash-landed and got stuck in the mud!
My girlfriend just left me, and she was the only one who knew how to make the baby's diarrhea go away!
I have two broken arms / a bad case of vertigo / suicide ideation / a burst appendix, may I impose on you to give me a ride to the hospital?
I told my friend, who’s in the hospital because she broke both her arms / got a bad case of vertigo / told everyone she’d eat three bottles of sleeping pills and was serious / her appendix burst, that I’d bring her clean socks and underwear, but her parents aren’t home like we thought they’d be. Do you have a key to her house?

I guess it comes down to some things that are obvious, and simple enough: knowing what’s truly worth making a spectacle out of yourself and interrupting Professor Subversion’s lecture, realizing you may very well annoy someone when you ask for help but that shouldn’t be the reason why you decide against it, and empathizing when someone goes to very stupid lengths to get you to help dislodge their space ship from the mud.

What does it come down to for you? Do you know of any special trick to make diarrhea go away? What do you think of Ayn Rand? Would you ask Ayn Rand to help you fix your space ship? How about my ex-girlfriend?

Tyrannical Certainty

Alllll the way back in September, I was sitting in the hallway of the Learning Center at my school, killing time before tutor training class, when one of my fellow novice tutors showed up with a brochure in one hand and a sandwich in the other. It was around lunchtime, but the sandwich would go uneaten for a while. Her appetite was lost during her walk across campus, due to the enormous banners with equally enormous pictures of aborted fetuses outside the library.

“There’s dead fetus pictures?” I said.

She confirmed that yes, this was true, and, “Don’t you think it’s a little extreme?”

Before I had seen the banners for myself, or even thumbed through the brochure which had even more dead fetus pictures, the sensationalism had seduced me. “There’s dead fetus pictures?” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“Could you watch my stuff?”

Venturing out to the library would prove to be a stupid idea for more reasons than the mere fact that I have a runaway imagination that has no trouble soaking up extreme images and reproducing them at night while I’m trying to go to sleep. This is why many of my nights are spent with the light on.

…shut up, don’t judge me.

My beloved fundamentalist atheist friend later told me that most of the pictures pro-lifers use are actually pictures of pig fetuses, but the ones on campus that day looked pretty darn human to me. As I inspected the gruesome depictions like a sick voyeur, I was approached by a middle-aged guy with a baseball cap and an armful of brochures. He held one out for me to take.

“I’m okay,” I said. “We’ve got plenty in the Learning Center.” This wasn’t a lie. After I left my backpack with the fellow novice tutor, I noticed several abandoned here and there on my way out to indulge in all this sensationalism and contagious outrage. The baseball cap guy wasn’t frothing at the mouth or anything, but I did pass a rather fervent young man who was laying down some Thus sayeth the LORD rhetoric on someone he’d managed to stop.

These pictures of pig fetuses… I mean, human fetuses… (Like I said, they didn’t look piggy to me, but the beloved atheist is very passionate about certain things. When statistics and whatnot are used to support said certain things, to the inexperienced ear, it’s hard not to take it as fact without any grains of salt or research on one’s own.) Anyway… these pictures of human fetuses, this carnage, Baseball Cap says, if it was in the newspaper and on CNN, abortions would be outlawed licketty split because, well, it’s carnage.

He gestured to the banner for effect, carnage….

You gotta wonder what the banner-making place thought of all this.

While he’s in the vein of TV news, Baseball Cap cites Vietnam: when people turned on the tube to see good American boys being slaughtered overseas, they were like, oh snap, this is real, and this is carnage. I don’t like this war anymore.

This is when I made my mistake. Or at least, this is when it started.

I engaged him.

It was an accident, I swear.

I said, “Well, we didn’t see the dead bodies from the Iraq war on TV.”

I thought it was something I could just throw out there, get a short, semi-neutral response from him, then I could return to the Learning Center and relieve the sandwich tutor of her stuff-guarding duties.

But Baseball Cap insisted we did see the carnage of the Iraq war, just not as much as Vietnam. He knows this. As far as he’s concerned, it’s fact.

I said, “But the president at the time was like, don’t show our dead boys on TV, that’s depressing.” I know this. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fact.

“No,” Baseball Cap says. “They showed some.” Then he kept going about Vietnam. Then Vietnam turned into the Civil Rights movement.

I went ahead and assumed he meant the one in the 60s. My black history teacher said there was more than one. Just because the one in the sixties is all kinds of famous doesn’t mean it’s correct to call it THE Civil Rights Movement. I don’t correct Baseballs Cap on this, even though, as I far as I’m concerned, it’s fact. You gotta pick your battles right? And I was still hung up on how WRONG Baseball Cap was about dead soldiers in Iraq on the TV, and how RIGHT I am about the lack of them.

Baseball Cap said when how terribly the black protesters were being treated was shown on TV, people were like, oh snap, that’s horrible. What can we do about this? The media was the catalyst for change, Baseball cap said.

Yeah, and even more people would have said that about the war in Iraq if THEY SHOWED THE DEAD BODIES ON TV. Maybe Baseball Cap was looking at the wrong footage and got confused. Maybe he was looking at a televised footage of aborted pig fetuses in fatigues. But I wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t have been wrong. I was right.

However, I didn’t want to get into it with this guy, because, as far as he was concerned, Baseball Cap was right, too. I considered my options:
1) continue to be talked at by this guy
2) do what I already decided I wouldn’t do: let him keep talking, but yell my opinions loud enough to drown out his
3) say, “Well, I’m going to be late for class! Thanks for the chat!” and bail.

I went with option 3, even though it wasn’t true that I would be late for class. I had plenty of time to track down fellow tutors in the hallway, in the back room of the writing lab, even to the parking lot and back when I followed my friend out to her car, all the while prattling on about this dumb pro-life guy. I mocked him. I ranted about him. Anything in the conversation – not just the Iraq stuff – was fair game to manipulate into making him look absurd and incoherent.

“One of those pro-lifers was talking at me for hella long about the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” I’d say. To which someone else would respond, “…why was he talking to you about the Montgomery Bus Boycott?”

I read into their faces the reaction I wanted.

And I looked like a complete tool.

I wasn’t the kind of person you could sit down and have a real, two-way conversation with. I could say that I had crowned myself King of the Mountain, but it was more like I had placed myself on a pillar. People can climb mountains, reach the self-crowned monarch, deluded with her certainty, and at least try to have a civilized conversation.

I was closed off to any such civilized, intelligent conversations. I was right about this one thing. There was no room for another person on top of my pillar. There was no room for generosity, unity, understanding, and civility. It is almost hell in a way, because when swept away with this, I close myself off from authentic human moments. When I stand there, nothing and no one is three-dimensional.

And I looked like a tool (quite embarrassing in retrospect!). I was so swept away by this overwhelming notion that I was RIGHT, that if there was someone or something with an opposing view, I must assert the undeniable veracity of my righteousness. Say I was frothing at the mouth about something that was worth having an intelligent conversation about? A conversation that mattered, or even changed things? Being on top of this pillar wouldn’t just be a matter of me making an ass out of myself. What if someone started associating a topic actually worth exploring with my nuttiness? They’d look at dead pig fetuses in fatigues and not see the spark for an intellectual discussion to be taken seriously, but an association would be made with me snorting the cocaine of self-righteousness, and nobody would take pig fetuses in fatigues seriously. The audience would be lost.

I hate that. Contrary to all that noise, I would like to uphold the virtues of unity and fellowship in the way I actively live my life and interact with others.

These types of one-sided conversations don’t help a lot of things, let alone tutoring.

I don’t want to rant about these people.

The top of the pillar is hell. I have enough hell to deal with already, thanks very much. Like the grueling first world problems of trying to figure out the window de-fogger in the car and finding a spot in my room that sustains a wireless internet connection long enough for me to watch all 26 minutes of the Kung-Fu Panda holiday special on Instant Netflix.

Dead Dreamers and Greek Words

“Emotional instability… Basically, what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly.” This is what a boy said after inspecting the stolen diaries of Cecilia Lisbon. For those of you unfamiliar with Jeffery Eugenides’s novel, The Virgin Suicides, (or Sofia Coppola’s film adaptation) thirteen-year-old Cecilia jumped from her bedroom window to be impaled on the spike of a fence: the first of the five Lisbon sisters to end themselves.

There are points in our lives, however long those points last, that we’ve endured emotional hells. We’ve all had our turn(s) at finding ourselves separate from the better lives we want to lead. In this hell, it is too easy to give up hope on remedying the situation – perhaps even despairing of life itself.

It is true that we must die to escape hell on earth. But Cecilia was tragically wrong in the way to go about it. When I say we must die, I mean the death Jesus was referring when he said, “Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12.25, NIV)

In this particular passage, the original Greek word for “love” is φιλέω (phileó). This of course is not to be confused with agape (there are several Greek words for “love” in the New Testament). “Phileó” is widely understood to mean a brotherly love. Vine’s Expository Dictionary for Old and New Testament Words expounds further that phileó “conveys the thought of cherishing the Object above all else.”

To cherish something above all else gives that object a lot of power. It would influence our decision-making, how we spend our money and manage our time. Such an object could be a relationship that needs to end because you want different things, or there’s abuse or something else, but you can’t bring yourself to end it because you love the person so much. I’m going to take this business of cherishing a step further and say that in the context of John 12.25, it could be something you hate that exerts the same power and influence over your life. It may consume you to the point where you perceive the object to be as much a part of you as your hands or your feet. In the case of our friend Cecilia, it would be what Daniel Goleman calls “intrusive thoughts” that life is not worth living.

In which case, we must consider Matthew 18.9, in which Jesus tells us that, “if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.” And how we manage to do this is a matter of repentance.

In the New Testament, the original Greek word for “repentance” is μετάνοια (metanoia). Metanoia means a change of mind, of perception: giving us new eyes to see and new ears to hear. If you prefer psych-speak to this Bible jargon, you can refer to Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, where he touches on challenging our thoughts, “cognitive reframing” and the required self-awareness for the task.

But let’s go back to speculating Cecilia. What if Cecilia likes drawing, and would prefer not to stop drawing? What if there is a possibility that, in her personal μετάνοια process, she finds that drawing and misery are mutually exclusive. If what she draws could be used to identify her as “emotionally unstable,” it must be connected somehow! This side of the mind change, if it will cost her something she likes doing, then how is Cecilia supposed to believe the mind change is worth it?

I’ll say this: if, for Cecilia, this purpose to draw is not a parasite parading as a body part, but the authentic stuff of eternity; if, for Cecilia, when she puts pencil to paper, it infuses and enthralls her with the real joy and beauty and love that comes from The Legit Source – then drawing will still be written on her heart after the appropriate death. But, if drawing is the cherished object that needs to be sacrificed in order to enter life, the sacrifice will be worth it. In his book Love Wins, Rob Bell describes this life as “an extraordinarily complex, interconnected, and diverse reality, a reality in which individual identities aren’t lost or repressed, but embraced and celebrated. An expansive unity that goes beyond and yet fully embraces staggering levels of diversity.”

Cecilia was a dreamer. Imagine what might have happened if she stuck around. Her individual identity could have blessed the world in ways we can’t even imagine. The contributions of dreamers are invaluable, regardless of what medium they manifest in. And imagine how fulfilling it must be for the dreamer to see their dreams take flight!

And who isn’t a dreamer?

How is that which you phileó holding you back?

Chicken Noodle Dark Night of the Soul

One of Warhol's famous soup cans,
as shown on gallerywarhol.com

“The dying, the cripple, the mental, the unwanted, the unloved they are Jesus in disguise.” – Mother Teresa

Call me unimaginative, but I didn’t think I could find any similarities between Andy Warhol’s work and Psalm 23 …although I may have implied otherwise during one of my church’s fabulous sermon discussion groups. In retrospect, it may have been because the two are so dissimilar that our associate pastor, Paul, who was sitting across the table from me, said he’d love to read something on that very subject.

Paul has led many conversations at our church about living into God’s story as opposed to living into culture’s story. Living into God’s story requires trusting in God and finding our meaning and comfort in Him. Psalm 23 uses organic imagery – still waters, green pastures – to illustrate how God comforts His beloved.

Warhol’s imagery is synthetic. The images Warhol is known for are not rendered to be realistic, but simplistic, making them easier to reproduce en masse. Warhol and his team would churn out this kind of work at his studio, “The Factory,” like how Campbell’s churns out cans of soup. This is the consumer culture’s story. The NIV translation of Psalm 23 says that The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing. But in consumer culture, you have to lack something, otherwise you wouldn’t need to buy soup or art or cars or Brillo pads or any of those other thingamabobs out there for purchase.

However, God is not altogether absent from Warhol’s work, and I don’t just mean his series of silk-screened Last Suppers. For holiness, I would look to the movie star portraits (not to make them Golden Calves). What Warhol does with chicken soup, he does with movie stars. The problem therein being that movie stars are people, and when it is attempted for them to be mass produced and treated like soup, a few things fall through the cracks. Dimension is lost. Flat representations of faces are colored with unrealistic, garish hues. In half of Marilyn Diptych, for example, Marilyn Monroe’s skin is Pepto Bismol pink.

Diptych is a solid block of Marilyns: the same picture repeated over and over and over again, with minor imperfections. She is set up to be the supply for any public demand of her, something to be used then thrown away…then used again. On the second half of the canvas, the Marilyns are in black and white. They’re dark, blotched, blackened, their quality even less consistent than those of the left half. After the faces get the blackest, the Marilyns then start fading, until she is depleted to whispers of facial features at the right end of the canvas.

Marilyn Diptych demonstrates a consequence of living into culture’s story. It’s true that when we seek comfort in things that are not eternal, ultimately they will not nourish or satisfy. Tragic still is when people themselves are treated and/or treat themselves as mere commodities to be sold and used. However you invest yourself in culture’s story, faith in the temporal has a way of culminating into a serious why have you forsaken me? moment, because here, in the black, synthetic darkness, it’s terribly difficult to find those green pastures and quiet waters.

When looking for God in Warhol, go to the blackest faces in Marilyn Diptych. When the garish colors’ promise turns out to be false, it doesn’t feel like the aforementioned waters and pastures are a reality. But God is also in the suffering, as Mother Teresa would say, Jesus in a distressing disguise. Even if they’ve been putting their trust into something else until then, God is with those whose stories have failed them.