On Christian Love, or, How to Stop Being Afraid of Emotion

I was just listening to a talk by Wesley Hill, one of my favorite current authors, about the nature of friendship in modern society and especially in the Christian Church* when an idea struck me.  Hill was talking about views of friendship throughout church history, and he quoted Samuel Johnson, who thought the idea of particular friendships were inherently un-Christian.  "All friendship is preferring the interest of a friend," Johnson said, "to the neglect, or, perhaps, against the interest of others. . . .  Now Christianity recommends universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren; which is contrary to the virtue of friendship. . . ."  And this is, of course, at least partially true.  We are called, as Christians, to love our neighbor as ourselves, to pray for those who persecute us, to invite the poor and disadvantaged to eat with us and share our possessions, and to an extent, it makes sense: if we favor one, we are going to favor less or even ignore others.  We simply don't have the capacity to love that much.  (But then, doesn't that make Johnson's point nearly meaningless, anyway?)

But putting that thought aside for a moment, I was struck a little by the implication Johnson makes, one that I think I've seen echoed by many Christians in my day.  The implication is something like this: a rationally "correct" intellectual, detached, disinterested sort of love that checks all of the required boxes is preferable for Christians over an emotionally invested and understood interested sort of love that includes true affection and positive feeling.  The second, I think Johnson would say, is the sort of love that obscures the truth, that puts up blinders and makes us so singularly focused that we do not see the universal need of those around us.  It may even cloud our judgment to the point where we think we are doing good by those around us when in reality we are only really engaging our own emotions and encouraging our own prejudices, and so to counter that, it is best to use a cool, rational sort of love, one disconnected from human passions and directed equally toward all through sheer willpower.  It seems to me to be a similar voice that speaks in the modern day and says, "I do this for your own good; the best way to love you is to show you your shortcomings, to point out to you where you are lacking, and not to get too emotionally close."  It is a voice that is afraid of sentimentality, that relies only on the intellect--that fears that same emotion that most would call "love."

I don't blame them for this.  I have often thought of Jeremiah who says wisely that "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"  I have lamented the corruptibility of my emotions, the way they can bend me like a sapling in a strong wind, seemingly powerless to resist what I know to be incorrect.  I have been crushed under the weight of unrequited love, of loneliness and depression and grief, even when I knew the truth was that I was loved and not alone and full of reasons to be glad and comforted even in my sorrow.  But emotion has a way of convincing you of its truth, even when all of the evidence points in the other direction.  And so I have also had to build barriers.  I have resisted certain friendships; I have filtered my affections.

But then I am surprised again by the gospel.  Over the course of this last holy week I read most of the gospel of John, my favorite of the four, and I was reminded again why it is my favorite.  At the end of the book, after Jesus has died and then risen from the dead, he appears to his disciples who are fishing.  They don't realize who it is at first, but when he tells them to cast their net on the other side of the boat after a very unsuccessful night and they consequently haul up scores of fish, John says to Peter, "It is the Lord!"  And I love what happens next.  "When Simon Peter heard it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work, and threw himself into the sea" (John 21:7, emphasis mine).  Peter was so excited to see Jesus again, so moved by his love for him--and, mind you, this is not the first but the third time that Jesus has appeared to them--that he couldn't wait for the boat to get back to shore and had to swim there himself.  Throughout John, you see this same kind of love manifested by the disciples for Jesus and vice versa.  The disciples loved Jesus fiercely because they knew that he loved them first.  This sort of intense, emotional reaction to the person of Jesus is, perhaps, the only good explanation of why so many of them were willing to die for him, even after he had been gone for decades--and this is only one example of this sort of emotionally compelling, invigorating love.  Is this the love we ought to be showing one another?  Is this the love that Johnson suggests is appropriate?

*     *     *     *     *

The love that Johnson and, I think, many modern Christians advocate for is detached, disinterested, and intellectual--but this doesn't seem to me much like the love Jesus and his disciples had for each other.  John, in fact, never refers to himself in his book in the first person, but always as "the disciple Jesus loved."  This doesn't mean, of course, that Christians shouldn't use care to temper emotion with reason, but it does mean that perhaps Johnson's anti-friendship model of universal love wasn't modeled by Jesus--and, perhaps, that we need not be so afraid of emotion as to cut it out entirely.

After he quotes Johnson about friendship, Wesley Hill quotes another in response, this time an English convert to Roman Catholicism, John Henry Newman.  The chunk is good, so let me quote it all here:

"There have been men before now, who have supposed Christian love was so diffusive as not to admit of concentration upon individuals; so that we ought to love all men equally.  And many there are, who, without bringing forward any theory, yet consider practically that the love of many is something superior to the love of one or two; and neglect the charities of private life, while busy in the schemes of an expansive benevolence, or of effecting a general union and conciliation among Christians.  Now I shall here maintain, in opposition to such notions of Christian love, and with our Saviour's pattern before me, that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us" (emphasis mine).

Hill is using this to demonstrate the appropriateness of particular, close friendships, but I want to take it a step further.  If Johnson's universal love was a distant, detached love, Newman's sort is profoundly emotional.

Like I said, we are afraid of an emotional sort of love.  Emotions are difficult to control and are unpredictable, and we are called to love everyone, so we conclude that the sort of love with which we love our neighbors is necessarily a love of the mind, or the will.  But Newman offers a different solution.  Instead of loving out of sheer will, he proposes we train our hearts to love through friendships--essentially, that we practice loving until it comes naturally.  He proposes that we let our love for our particular friends be a force that trains your heart to react charitably toward other people, to reach out in tenderness and compassion, to be humble and gracious and giving and forgiving.

As I think about this option, it rings true to me.  How much more Christlike is it to reach out in love than to build up walls "for our own good"?  How much more like Jesus is it to let ourselves be transformed by compassion than to be driven by a Pharisaical need to be correct according to the letter of a law?

I think, when we are honest, "tough love" rarely seems to be anything like love to anyone involved.  Even the tough-lover doesn't feel like they are loving more often than not, I would wager.  Not to say that there is no place for discipline or reproof; a father who fails to discipline his son is, even in this day and age, ridiculed for it, and parenting experts still warn against giving a child too much freedom or "the benefit of the doubt."  But it seems a little absurd (and extremely contrived) to say that the best way to love a person is to cast them out of your home, or to constantly clobber them with passages detailing their sin, or to refuse to bake them a cake.  It may seem like the most calculated, logical way to deal with something you disapprove of, but I doubt it is what Jesus would have called love, and I can guarantee you that the recipient of this obvious disapproval doesn't think they are being loved at all.

I don't mean to get political.  But is it possible that, in our desire for correctness, we have mistaken what it means to love well?  Is it possible that love really is as straightforward as it seems, that it is in fact largely based on feeling?  Is it possible that we might train our hearts to feel love for those we don't know, even for those who would be our enemies?  And might this radical, powerful emotion of love be so transformational that those who had not known God is drawn to him through this unlikely, even impossible, love of his people for the world?

I am a feeler; I know not everyone is.  But this love that Jesus called us to, this love that motivated the apostles to spread the gospel, even when it led to their death, seems too powerful a thing to be something we can simply will ourselves to.  It seems like it is a result of an inner transformation, one that is begun by the Holy Spirit and that continues under his guidance--and perhaps the Church and the brothers and sisters it gives us, these powerful connections that bond us closer than blood relatives, is a lesson in this same love.  It motivates, it inspires, it moves to action.  It is not a result of personality, but of spiritual growth.  This is the love of 1 Corinthians 13, a love that is patient and kind, that endures all things, that never fails.  Have we forgotten this?  Have we forgotten what it means to love--or worse, have we redefined it to fit our personalities, our cultures?

I surely hope that, by God's grace, we can be known as a people who love.


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*A lot of these ideas of his are also echoed in Wes's book Spiritual Friendship, which you can (and should!) order from Amazon here.

Pride and Privilege, or, A Letter about Why "Straight Pride" Isn't Very Helpful

Tonight I was scrolling through facebook and found a post about "straight pride" that struck me. I'll share it here:

I have recently spent some time talking and thinking about the idea of "privilege," and it seemed a good opportunity to share those thoughts, so I went ahead and started typing a response in the comment box. It got pretty long, and eventually I thought that it might just be something worth sharing to a wider audience.


"Privilege" is an idea that's hard to explain, especially to someone who has enjoyed it. Of course that is no shame, but it does make it harder to empathize with those who haven't. Hopefully this can help to put this conversation in a slightly different light, and hopefully this will explain a little better why these "I'm proud to be in the majority" posts might be missing the point.


Here is the letter:

Tension and Truth, or, Thoughts about Life, Ambiguity, and Ferguson

It should be said by someone, and it may as well be me, that I am terribly non-committal.  All my friends will tell you that.  I just don't like to make decisions, even about simple things.  A couple weeks ago, for instance, a friend stayed a couple nights and we decided to go out for a late dinner, but he made me decide where and I kept refusing, and so instead we drove around for twenty minutes, and when we finally did decide where to go (because eventually I forced him to help me), it turned out that most every place was closed or about to close, and we ended up not really having to decide because there was hardly anything open, which made me breathe a sigh of relief, even though it didn't honestly matter where we ate, so what on earth made me so hesitant to say anything?  Anyway, you see that I'm not very good at decision-making.

It gets even worse when things are more important.  Elections always get me anxious, usually for months in advance.  I must admit that this year I didn't really pay any attention to politics at all until, well, election day, which wasn't the most civicly-responsible thing to do, I realize, but it made me feel better about the whole ordeal.  My freshman year of college was a Presidential election year, and I spent a small chunk of time campaigning, going door-to-door and handing out fliers and such, and the whole time I felt pretty uneasy about it.  I mean, I felt like I should be involved, and I generally agreed with this party's views, but I knew there was some ambiguity and some things I just wasn't totally sure about, and I knew that the people in this party tended to hold certain ideas too highly and forget about giving other important matters enough serious thought and feeling, and so I was totally relieved one day when I found out the guy I was campaigning with liked the same kind of music as me and we talked about that the whole time instead of politics.

I think a good chunk of that indecision and uncomfortability--and I hope it goes this way and not the other way around--comes from the fact that most things seem to be held in a kind of tension.  By that I mean that there is usually a good deal of truth on either side of an argument, and both sides push and pull each other, and sometimes the truth seems to be in two places at once.


And if there is a good deal of truth on either side of an argument, maybe it's true that neither is wholly wrong, that there's room for both sides to say something true.  Now don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that there is no truth, or that truth is relative and everyone's individual "truth" is equally valid.  One of the few things I can feel pretty comfortable saying is that I think there is only one truth, and things are right or wrong compared to that standard, and I think that if you throw out that idea that there's not much of a point in talking at all.

But maybe that standard of truth, the way things really are, isn't so black and white as some people want to make it.  Maybe, in fact, the truth sometimes (or usually) holds some kind of tension in itself.

One of my favorite characters in any kind of literature is Tevye, the milkman that the play Fiddler on the Roof is all about.  I just watched the movie version again a few days ago, and one of my favorite scenes is the one where Perchik, a student from Kiev, first arrives in Anatevka, the little Slavic village where Tevye's Jewish community lives.  Tevye is selling his milk to a bunch of men, who are talking about the outside world and cursing everyone, when Perchik comes up and tells them all how silly their cursing is and that they should do something about it instead.  One of the men says that they shouldn't bother themselves about the outside world, and Tevye says that he's right.  But then Perchik retorts that "You can't close your eyes to what's happening in the world," and Tevye, after thinking a bit, says, "He's right."  "He's right and he's right?" another man asks.  "They can't both be right."  Tevye looks at him, goes to scoop another ladle of milk, and says, "You know, you are also right."

And so I know I'm not the only one who has trouble finding truth.  It just seems so terribly hidden sometimes, so awfully complicated, because there are all of these things that at first glance seem to contradict each other, and sometimes they really do, but they all seem true.  I see it in theology a lot.  One of the questions that has baffled me consistently ever since I first thought about it is about free will.  If God is sovereign--that is, he has total control over everything and can do whatever he wills, as long as it is consistent with himself--does mankind really have the ability to make decisions that make a real difference?  Well, it seems like it.  I decided to go to work yesterday.  I could have decided not to, to reject the sub job and stay home, but I went, and as a result of that I spent six hours or so reading tests to students, and I should be getting paid for it in two weeks or so.  Did God decide for me?  I don't think so.  But then, does God have total control over what happens in the world?  Well, yes.  So then, did you really have control over deciding to go to work?  Um, yes?  I think so?

You see it in politics, too (it is good to have freedom, but it is also good to think about other people and to sacrifice freedom), and in morality (it is good to love all people unconditionally, but it is not good to cheat on your wife), and in everything, really.  There is always tension.  Tension, I think more than anything else, characterizes life and being and existence, and tension makes things really hard.

The thing about tension, and one of the big problems about it, is that things are never just one way.  You can't just look at a situation and know what the answer is, because there are always 47-billion different variables, and every one of them has some effect on the whole and makes it unique, and that makes it almost impossible to categorize anything.  Even the simplest situations have so many implications that it's hard to know what to do.  Last year I had a student in class that I found out was spending a lot of time in the hallways when he was supposed to be on his way to another building.  As it turned out, he didn't go to that building at all, so I got prepared to write him up, but then when I talked with him, it didn't seem like that was the right answer at all because of some bit of information that I don't remember off the top of my head.  It didn't help that this student wasn't doing well in his classes, but I had only just developed enough of a relationship with him to help him see things a little differently and he seemed to be making some progress, and making assumptions now about his character would put that relationship in jeopardy.  And so I sat there at my desk, with all of the authority to do whatever I wanted, the write-up in hand, looking at this student in the eyes, totally clueless as to what I needed to do next.

Of course, moral ambiguities aren't the same as the state of truth, but you get what I mean, I hope.  Truth is like that, too, and sometimes it's really hard to know what it is at all.

When I was a senior in high school, we had an assignment in our English class where we had to do a good amount of research on a single word, finding definitions, etymology, common and published uses, and so on.  I chose the word truth, and of all the things I remember from the assignment (which, honestly, amounts pretty much to this one thing that I'm about to tell you, the fact that I had to actually look up my definitions in an impossibly huge physical copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, and another student's paper that inexplicably featured a mad-scientist protagonist), the thing that made the biggest impact on me is the story of Pontius Pilate.  He was the guy that ordered the crucifixion of Jesus (one of the sources we had to use was the Bible, on the account of it being the single greatest literary influence of all of Western culture), but he only did so after trying to get the people in his province to lay off a bit and let him free.  After he tries a bunch of things and finds out that the Jews really don't like Jesus at all on account of him calling himself God and such, he talks to Jesus and asks if he's a king, to which Jesus replies rather cryptically that he came to testify to the truth.  At this point I think Pilate is probably pretty flustered, seeing that he's trying to do the right thing but no one seems to agree with him, and Jesus isn't really helping because he's not giving him any straight answers, and he responds to Jesus with a short but incredibly profound question: "What is truth?"

And I think that pretty much sums up most of my thoughts most of the time, which is probably why I find myself watching movie trailers more often than I do pondering the nature of reality.  Movie trailers are a lot easier to deal with, and if there is tension in a movie, it will probably solve it for you, and it might even give you a hint about the real tension behind the truth about everything.  Just thinking about that tension on my own is pretty overwhelming, and making moral judgments about things that are really difficult seems like a really stupid thing to do when I don't really understand much of anything in the grand scheme of things.

Which is why all of the controversy in the last 24 hours or so makes me uncomfortable.  People, and by that I mean most people, and by that I mean the people that are really loud about everything and make sure that their voices get heard, have been very good about telling everyone what the correct thing to do in a given situation is.  Specifically, I'm talking about the Ferguson decision, which is really interesting because it wasn't even a trial, but everyone is certain that it was a really big deal, and it probably was.

See, I'd really like to just not comment on it, because the situation seems to be really complex, and it also seems like this decision is not at all an isolated incident but is a part of a much larger issue, and I simply don't know enough about everything to know what to say.  But it has become the socially acceptable thing to be outraged about it, and everyone who is socially conscientious is saying something and telling everyone about how important it is, and again, they are probably right that it is all very important.

But I find it really unlikely that all of these people, with all of the things that are going on in their lives like grad school and internships and jobs that demand a lot of them, know about everything that is going on, especially when the attorney on the news last night said that most of the important evidence has been kept from the public on purpose.  I think what he said about social media blowing things up is probably true, even if this really is a very important issue, because I know how some people get really excited and angry about things like how someone said something that offended someone else, and then they tell all of their friends how terrible that person is, and then that person says something publicly that sheds new light on everything and now what they said doesn't seem so awful, and then that person on social media feels silly in front of everyone and knows they made this person look much worse than they really are and repents for what they said.  Or maybe they are still angry about it and make up an excuse so that it looks like they are still right and they just continue to be angry, which probably happens just as often.

See, I think there are a lot of true things being said by people, and some of them are from these loud people on social media, and I think they are probably doing many good things by it.  I have heard a lot about how things have been very racially tense in Ferguson, and about how there are way more arrests of black people than white people and how that probably is due to severe racial profiling, and about how this racial profiling has gone on for decades unchecked and so now it's blowing up and lots of people are angry.  And I've seen a lot about how white people should be concerned about injustice too, and that it shouldn't just be the minorities who experience it the most that speak up, and I think all of that is probably true as well.

But then, I think what that attorney on TV said is probably also true, and I think that in part because of how gracious and careful he was to say everything, though I know that is not necessarily a good litmus test of bias, and that the grand jury who decided not to charge the police officer probably has a better idea about who is guilty or not guilty in this situation than pretty much anyone else in the world, even a better idea than those loud people on social media.

And so we have a lot of different bits of truth out there--truth about justice and truth about whether or not Brown actually did something wrong and truth about who knows the truth and truth about how people ought to be treated and truth about why things are the way they are--and they probably all complement each other quite nicely when they are put together the right way, when they are all lined up correctly with the big Truth of Reality, but most people only see a few pieces, and it's easy to think that things are different from what they actually are when you only have a few pieces of something.  You end up putting some things upside down and fitting some things together in ways they weren't really meant to be fit together, and if you had all the pieces you probably wouldn't do that, though even then it would probably take a lot of time and a lot of thinking to make it look the way it's supposed to.

I guess I say all this--all this about tension and reality and pieces of truth--to say that it probably isn't really fair to get angry with one another.  People are doing the best they can with the pieces of truth that they have, and there is a lot of tension between different bits of truth, and sometimes it's hard to balance when you're being pulled in many different directions.  I don't blame people for losing their balance every now and then.  I think that's probably pretty normal.

I think it's also important to realize that perhaps we don't have all the pieces we need, either.  Yes, there is a lot of truth about being socially responsible and about being just, about fighting things like racism and sexism and homophobia and all kinds of hatred, about looking after our brothers and sisters, and I think that sometimes we need little reminders to do those things, or sometimes really big, obnoxious reminders that inspire newscasts that interrupt the dancing show I was watching on TV.  (I really hope Alfonso wins.)  But sometimes very lofty feelings about very good ideas make us think funny, and sometimes we feel so strongly about things like justice and love that we become quite unjust and unloving to one another, and that, frankly, is pretty stupid.  If my lofty feelings about squelching racism make me angry enough at everyone to start saying nasty things to them, or to start throwing things and destroying things and stealing things and making places quite unlivable, maybe my lofty feelings about racism aren't very helpful after all.

Of course, it's usually more subtle.  It usually has more to do with insinuations, with people who feel very sure of themselves letting people know in very subtle ways that if they don't feel very sure of themselves in the same ways then they are very wrong and need to change very quickly, because how could you possibly think that, and don't you care about justice and goodness, and it's because you're white, isn't it, and you must not be as cultured or refined or academic or socially-conscious as I am.  And of course it goes the other way, too: don't you have any respect for the authorities, and why are you so passionate about this, anyway, and aren't there more important things.  I hope I'm not a part of either of those crowds right now.

When I think about all of this, about truth and tension and justice, I start to feel very small.  I get to hoping no one ever asks me important questions, because I'm scared that I won't be able to give them the right answer, and I probably won't have an answer at all, to be honest.  I can't solve the big questions.  I can't even solve the little questions of what I'll be doing next fall or what I'll eat for dinner or what I'll say tonight when I meet with a friend.

Of course, that doesn't mean I should do nothing, and I'm glad that the loud people are on social media, because they remind me that I ought to get out there, although I do wish they'd say it a little more nicely and not burn down Walgreen's. There are things I can do.  I can love people, giving them my time and my ears and the warmth of a friend.  I can fight racism in my school, in my town, in my heart, and stand up for the people I know that have been oppressed.  I can have the hard conversations and wrestle with the tension and find out how to love people and to love God in it all.  I can do some things, and I'm glad the loud people remind me of that.

But there are also things I can't do.  I can't reverse decisions made by juries, nor can I force my way onto one by shouting my meagerly-formed opinion loudly enough. I can't right all of the wrongs of the world, though I can fight against them in small, and sometimes even in quite big, ways.  I can't show love by shouting at people or insulting them in subtle ways even if I'm trying to help them see truths about justice and goodness.  And I can't make much of a real difference by saying something mostly because I want people to think I'm socially-conscious and educated and fashionable, either.

And I think the world would probably be better served if we embrace the tension, accept our limitations, stop shouting, assume the best we possibly can of one another, and begin to radically love other people in ways that, for someone, at least, really do make a difference.

Where I Am Now, or, Why I Spend Most Nights at Home, or, Where Do I Go from Here?

I've been in a bit of a rough spot lately.  By that I mean that I haven't really felt at peace about where I am in life.  I know that some of that is simply because I graduated a year and a half ago and haven't yet landed anywhere in particular, and transition phases are always tricky.  No one likes to be in between things, because then questions like "What are you up to nowadays?" and "So, are you in school?" get really complicated, long-winded responses, which are tiring, and honestly, I'm never entirely sure what the answer is until I give it.  The conversation usually looks something like this:

So are you going to school?
"Well, no, I actually graduated a year ago."
Oh, so you have a job now?
"Oh, er, well, I'm substitute teaching."
Ah, so you're looking for a full-time position?
"Well, no, not really, see, I don't think I want to be a teacher anymore."
You mean you're not going to use your degree?
"Uh, nope, it doesn't look like it.  I might go back to school, though."
Oh.  Huh.  Alright.

Around then the conversation gets really awkward, because I'm not really sure what to classify myself as, and the person talking to me doesn't feel like they've gotten anywhere, and so we look at one another for a while until one of us makes up an excuse to leave.  If I'm at a social gathering with lots of people, I might replay this conversation several times, each one getting shorter and more tense until I just decide I don't really care that much about making friends, anyway.  Needless to say, I don't go out that often.

But it's been rough for other reasons, too.  I've found that after college, it's hard to make friends.  (It's no easier if you're not really sure what you should be doing with your life.  See above.)  I find myself at home most nights, and it's a bit of a shock going from school and camp, where I'm surrounded by community, to home, where I have to actually find things to do.  I've read more these last few months than ever before, probably, I've watched tons of movies and even some TV, I am constantly scrolling through facebook and I've gotten addicted to puzzle games.  I have lots of time, but most of it I spend alone.

And that has effects on everything else.  My spiritual life has been pretty rocky.  I don't find myself in the Bible or praying very often because, well, I just don't have any motivation to, even when I know I should.  I've found myself slipping into old habits and ways of thinking that I thought I had reasonably controlled.  And then I find myself getting really selfish.  I have lots of time, but I don't want to give it to people, or I get annoyed when they don't say the right things, or when they say something silly, or when they say anything at all, or when they look at me funny.  I think I'm getting pretty socially awkward, honestly.  People aren't supposed to be hermits, really, but I feel quite out of place anywhere I go.

Mostly, I just feel stuck in the mud, stagnant, without direction.  I don't say that to make anyone feel sorry for me, it's just the way it feels.  Over time I seem to be getting more deeply introspective, more into myself and my current spot than in getting out of myself and looking on, wherever that may be.  The more time I spend here, the more comfortable I get, though all the while the futility of staying here grows on me.  I know I'm not going anywhere.  I know I was made for more than this.

The trouble is, I can't for the life of me figure out what.

I have ideas.  I might go back to school.  Maybe I'll leave the country with friends.  Maybe I'll give the teaching thing another go.  But all of these are just thoughts, and I don't know if I have the gumption to turn them into movement.  I feel trapped here, waiting for some I-don't-know-what.

About here is where I should have a moral, something I've learned from all of this, but I'm not really sure what that is.  Perhaps this is just a season and I'm here for a reason, though I cannot begin to imagine the reason for being so stagnant, and maybe I'm struggling through some tension now to learn something, though it feels less like tension and more like an interminable amount of slack from all sides.  Except, maybe, from below, where I'm being anchored to the spot.  But right now, I have nothing.  No glimmer of wisdom, no direction, no "and this is what we've learned today."

I don't mean to be dramatic or fatalistic, but I think it's true that we won't always have something to say or a take-away from every situation.  This is one of those times that I'm not sure I have anything clever or profound to say.  I suppose all I can do is hang on in faith, do what I know I ought to do, as difficult as that is and as unsuccessful as I have been in the recent past, and look forward.

But... where is forward?

A Letter for You, or, Happy October 11th

Dear friends and family,

This message has been a long time coming.

The truth is, I haven't been very honest with some of you. While I've tried to be more upfront about everything in recent months, there are still a lot of things that I've kinda kept hidden from many people. I suppose most people have some kind of skeleton in their closet; but it will stay there and haunt you until someone opens the door and turns on the light and shows it for what it really is. So, keeping that in mind, I think it's time I turned on the light for good.

The first time, I probably wasn't entirely honest. Let me re-introduce myself.

My name is Jacob Swanson. I'm a 24-year-old male, born, raised, and currently living in West Michigan, the oldest of four children of two pretty incredible parents. I love singing classical music and show tunes, backpacking in the woods, drinking good coffee, playing whatever instrument I can get my hands on, and reading really good literature. I have a degree in English and a teaching license. I have strange fascinations with old buildings, interesting phonology, record covers, and all things Scandinavian. Most importantly, I'm a Christian who, while always struggling to believe truly and live rightly, has learned to love and trust in Jesus.

I also happen to be attracted to men.

What I'm Learning About Friendship, or, Long-Overdue Thoughts from Summer

Five months ago I wrote that I was leaving for camp soon, and I had the enlightened idea to blog weekly about my camp experiences.  I would be able to reflect on how things were going, practice writing for a public forum, and involve others in camp ministry.  It was a grand idea!

Since then, I have written once.  Oops.

Mostly, I think, I didn't write because I lacked the time.  But to some extent, I think I didn't write because I felt I had nothing to write about.  After getting home, people will invariably ask, "So, how'd your summer go?" and I have found myself more than once in the awkward position of not knowing how to answer them.  Was it a good summer?  I guess so.  Was it hard?  Yes.  Am I glad to be done with it?  To be honest, yes.  But how was my summer?  Gosh.  How do I begin?

It was an odd summer.  For the first time at camp, I was on leadership staff, which meant I had the added task of scheduling, training, organizing, communicating, and otherwise leading 12-ish support staff.  Not only was I a leader, but I was positively old.  Most of the staff this year were just out of high school; I, a year out of a five-year bachelor's degree, was practically ancient.  As such, I was supposed to be the wise old sage that knew everything and could solve every problem.

That's how it went in my brain, anyway.

Turns out I'm none of those things.  Not practically, anyway.  It's been a struggle teaching, too.  Teachers and supervisors and those sorts are supposed to know what to do all the time, and they're supposed to take initiative.  I'm bad at taking initiative because I'm usually not sure which initiative to take.  Leadership is hard and confusing.

But so is friendship.  See, I kind of expected to have some difficulty being in leadership.  I don't tend to be overly assertive, so it's always a bit of a challenge pretending to be.  Friendship, though, is something I do a lot more often, and I think I'm better at it than leadership.  Every once in a while I think about how many good friends I have and I'm a little surprised by it.  I think I probably just got lucky, honestly.

But it turns out that it's still confusing to me, and I still do it pretty badly sometimes.  I think it was the biggest thing I learned this summer, actually, which is a little disappointing, to be honest.  Other people came out of this summer having learned amazing things about how God loves them and how they can make a difference in children's lives and how God is still moving in amazing ways today.  I learned that I need to not suck at being a friend.

A Journey in the Dark, or, A Long-Expected (Bachelor) Party

I haven't written in quite some time.  I had grand aspirations to blog weekly about my fourth summer of camp life, but that clearly didn't work out.  I feel like I will have plenty to say about all that later.  The last few days, however, have been phenomenal, and there ought to be a written record of it somewhere.  Besides, it gave me an excuse to use Lord of the Rings chapter names as my post's title, which makes my soul inexplicably happy.

So, a few weeks ago I was asked by a friend to be an usher at his wedding this summer, which gave me an in to his bachelor party as well.  Usually these are fun but predictable and fairly forgettable: a few rounds of laser tag, a few drinks at someone's house, a short game of golf turned into a longer game of golf-cart polo.  (Well, that last one was pretty cool.)  Mostly they are a time to cut loose, have fun, "be guys" (whatever that actually means), but not commit to anything too extreme or time-consuming.

But my friend Kellan is a bit more, well, extreme than that.  I met him my second year at summer camp, when we were both counselors together.  At the time, he had a mountain-man beard that scared the crud out of me.  He was training to be a police officer, and he had the build and stature to prove it.  He carried around weights in his backpack everywhere he went, simply because it was a challenge.  (Rumors varied between 40 and 60 pounds of additional weight, put there for no good reason but to be heavy.)  This man was not about to simply play laser tag for his bachelor party.

So we decided to go backpacking--because carrying everything needed to survive with you for three days is decidedly more manly than a game of golf--and we settled on a trail in a national forest about an hour's drive from home.  Even though he was the groom, Kellan ended up doing most of the planning and the packing, just because that's who he is.  (He would have paid for the whole thing if we'd let him, and he probably paid for most of it anyway, bless his heart.)  He'd hiked the trail a few times before, so he was our guide more often than not as well.

We left home around 8 p.m., which didn't put us on the trail until almost dark.  We hiked for an hour or so before it was too dark to go any farther and then set up camp.  (My hiking and camping experience is pretty small, and my backpacking experience prior to this trip has consisted of nothing more than day hikes, so this was a bit of a challenge.)  After s'mores over the fire, we went to bed, just before midnight.

It's an interesting thing to go hiking with people you know well; it's a stranger thing to go hiking with people you hardly know at all.  The groom himself was the only guy I knew with any intimacy; one other I had met a handful of times, another I had seen but never talked to, and another I didn't see until we met up to head out.  Now on an extended hike, there is nothing to do but walk and talk.  When you know your fellow hikers well, conversation comes pretty naturally.  When you only know one out of four half-way decently, it's a heck of a lot more difficult.  Even though I hit it off pretty well with a couple of them, there was a lot of silence--not necessarily because conversation had been exhausted, but because we didn't really know how to have it in the first place.  The first night was awkward and wieldy, and it felt like it was strained and shallow.

But you learn interesting things about people when you spend three days together without showers or electricity or, you know, any kind of building to speak of.  I learned that Blair liked to stare at cool views and take photos; I learned that Alex sings all the time, whether real songs or not; I learned that Jason likes to run up hills, which is actually kind of helpful and not just lunacy like I thought at first.  And over time, we got past the awkward "So, what's your major?" questions to the more interesting "Where would you go if you could visit any country in the world?" questions, and even the stupid poop questions that for whatever reason guys tend to ask each other when they feel comfortable.  (Why the discussion of bowel movements is an indicator of male bonding, I may never know.)  It was when we started making up alternative greetings ("Why do we tell each other that it's a beautiful day?  Let's tell people we pass that there's a bear ahead instead...") that I knew we'd gotten somewhere as a group.

But I think the best part of the trip for me was simply getting away from the craziness of life and slowing down.  The beauty and frustration of backpacking is that, for the vast majority of the time, there is simply nothing to do besides hike and talk.  Even when you set up camp, you don't have anything to occupy yourself with besides conversation and exploring.  I spent a lot of time just looking, sitting, being, which was marvelously refreshing.  No papers, no planning, no organizing or scheduling or anything.  Simply being.  It is good once in a while to take time to be.

And even I was surprised at some of the views we found an hour away from home.  I went hiking in Kentucky a year ago and saw some of the most incredible landscapes I've ever seen, but there were bluffs and waterfalls and valleys on this Michigan trail that could take your breath away.  I didn't bring a camera, half on purpose--I wanted to enjoy without feeling the need to document--but part of me wishes I had.  I spent a few minutes every morning taking in the view apart from the others, watching the river wind around the trees from 100 feet above, the other side of the valley rising, forested, in the distance.  There's something beautiful and wild about a forest, something that is only augmented by the smell of campfire smoke and the hard ground underneath.  I didn't even bring a sleeping pad, and I think I'm almost glad of it.

This afternoon we left the forest, celebratory.  We hiked about 15 miles yesterday, which was long for our out-of-shape legs, and it was relieving to get back to pavement and motors and speeds above 3 miles-an-hour.  But there's something downheartening about leaving these four guys, and something even more depressing about knowing I'm going back to work tomorrow, even if "work" is running activities at camp.  Still, I suppose life can't be lived in solitude, and there are things to be done, and I am always surrounded by the beauty of earth if I only look for it.  I'll see these guys again at Kellan's wedding, and I'll have the grandeur of Michigan in the summertime until then.