Take Me Home Tonight
I was speaking with my mother on the phone recently, and she made the observation that I use the term "home" rather loosely. I think the specific context of this reference was that I had mentioned that I would be going "home" to visit her and my dad during spring break. Of course, the strange thing about calling Tupelo my "home" is that I haven't lived there for any substantial period of time since the summer of 2001, which was the summer after my sophomore year of college. Since then, "home" has been the dorm on campus, the cabin where I lived as a summer camp staffer, my petit logement in southwest France, and now, the duplex that I share with two roommates in Clinton. I think my mother has trouble accepting my liberal use of the word--as she has the right to do, being my mother--but I'm pretty sure such a mutable context for the word is appropriate to the manner in which we are to live as participants in the shifting scheme of life and in the ever-seeking state of the mind and soul.

In case you haven't caught on yet, I'll just let the proverbial cat out of the bag now and admit that I'm a student of medieval literature, particularly medieval British literature. Far from being an authority in the field, I consider myself more of a spectator at this point, looking on with a great deal of awe for the remnants of this culture and respect for the society that produced them. One thing that I admire about Old English literature is its inescapable awareness that things are coming to an end:

"So this middle-earth each and every day declines and falls...the wise warrior is able to perceive how ghostly it will be when all this world's wealth stands waste." --the wanderer

"Thus the joys of the Lord are warmer to me than this dead life, transitory on land. I do not believe that earthly happiness will endure eternally." --the seafarer

"There I must sit the summer-long day, where I can only weep about my exile, about many hardships; because of this I cannot ever rest from the sadness of my heart, or from all the longing which takes hold of me in this life." --the wife's lament

"I will have need of friends on that journey, when alone I have to seek a permanent home, an unknown dwelling; have to leave behind my body, this portion of earth, the spoils of death , to remain as a treat for the worms." --the fates of the apostles

The tone of these verses is frank and startling. A coldness pervades the actions of earth because of the knowledge of death. Yet, as elements of Christianity begin filtering into Anglo-Saxon culture, the acknowledgement of death becomes an ambiguous hope. This world is full of exile. I often find myself alone, hopeless. With the truths of Christianity come the glimmer of a promise that things may not always be this way. It is just a glimmer because it does not wholly change the situation at hand. The writers are still in exile, still alone, but there is now some hope.

The problem with Christianity in America today is that we don't really need deliverance from exile. We speak of exile and deliverance metaphorically: "I was delivered from my addiction to pornography." "I was delivered from my bondage to alcohol." "Jesus rescued me from the exile of my own ways." (I am not saying that these are not real problems for folks today or that "deliverance" from addictions cannot be attributed to divine intervention. I am simply noting that where bondage once referred to an actual, physical restraint, we have applied this language as an image of invisible states of being.) Since we view the exile and deliverance metaphorically, I think we become more prone to viewing the hope of Christ metaphorically. Christianity becomes a language that we use, a society that we create, a program that we adhere to. It's not that Christ does not change lives anymore...it's just that once lives are changed, they now have a tendency to conform to pre-assigned slots in the church body so that deliverance becomes a new kind of bondage.

We've got the metaphor backwards these days, and we wonder why Christians become disillusioned and non-Christians refuse to believe. The exile and deliverance--those are the real things. The homes of this world and the systems of our Christianity--these should be the figures of speech. I wish we could live in a manner that more accurately depicts our roles as wanderers on this earth. I wish we could make evident the truth that we are never really home in this world so that anywhere we play a role, or fulfill a function, may equally be referred to as our home in the figurative sense. Because in the course of the divine, any use of the term home that is not in reference to Christ is an ironic application of the word anyway.

[By the way, the Old English quotations/translations came from Elaine Treharne's first edition anthology. As an English major, I know you've gotta give credit where credit is due.]

Do Not Touch My Stuff
I'm convinced that one of the root causes of evil in the nature of man is the disposition of selfishness. Early thoughts of my childhood ferry in memories of altercations about which toy belongs to whom and adherence to an imaginary line across our car's backseat that acted as a boundary between my area and that of my sister. (If either of us crossed that line with any part of our bodies, that body part was liable to be slapped, squeezed, thumped, bitten, or whacked with a foreign object. And you couldn't really voice a valid complaint about it...you had crossed the line.)

Being now in my mid twenties, I do not find myself in many disputes concerning the rightful ownership of a particular toy, but I am still all too aware of the responsibility of "protecting my stuff" and of the acknowledgement of certain imaginary boundaries of personal space. I will go ahead at this point and confess one of my most embarrassing sins: I have a 60-gig i-pod with my name engraved on the back. The thing has twice the memory as the laptop that I'm using to type this blog entry. With all the music I "own" (how can one own music?) I barely come close to putting a dent in the thing's capacity. Yes, I use the thing quite often to play my tunes--in the car, working out, around the house--but it seems that the pleasure of having this device stems more from my knowledge of a status label than from its convenience or practicality.

Furthermore, my coming into possession of this status device was accompanied by an unexplainable paranoia concerning its well-being. I'm afraid I'm gonna drop it. I'm afraid I'm gonna scratch it. I'm afraid it's gonna be stolen...in which case the thief would probably enter some identity crisis since my name's in full view on the back...

How have we become so tied to the things that we have that the prospect of something happening to the things affects us personally? How can we deny the fact that all around us, things are slowly corrupting, breaking down, becoming useless, even ceasing to exist? It is imminent. The longer I live in this house, the more the foundation corrodes. The longer I drive my car, the more I have to replace its parts. The longer a human lives, the greater the possibility that the body will begin to shut down. As the sun rises every morning as an image of the resiliency of life, or the faithfulness of its Creator, the setting sun reminds us of our transience.

The reminder should not be a shocking one or even a sorrowful one, for such has been the cycle of life since the Fall, yet the realization should spur us on to operate out of a different scheme of values than we did in our selfish childhood--one of vulnerability. I could use the word "selflessness," but that choice would pose a problem because it is itself a negative term, being defined by what it is not. (I think Lewis wrote about that in "The Weight of Glory," but I'd have to check my reference...read "The Weight of Glory" anyway if you haven't done so.) Moreover, living "selflessly" is, I think, too narrow a description for what I'm talking about because it carries the association of us dealing with "things"; living "vulnerably" expands the meaning to put us at the disposal of others regardless of whether or not we are speaking of "things." It means that our time may be monopolized by others, it means our privacy may be invaded, it means we must sever our attachment to our stuff...in all cases, it means that we may be hurt. Fortunately, we're all going to be hurt anyway, so to operate out of such a mindset does not alter our fate but prepares us to face it more assuredly and to live in the manner that requires us to encounter our fellow man (and woman).

At my office job, I sometimes see signs posted on peoples' cubicles: "DO NOT TOUCH MY STUFF." (The all caps is evidently how you indicate that you are serious.) I've been tempted to put a similar sign on my cubicle wall and add to it, "AND DO NOT EVEN LOOK AT IT. IN FACT, DON'T TALK TO ME EITHER. I WILL NOT BE TIED TO THE HUMAN ORGANIZATIONAL CONSTRUCT OF WHICH I AM A PART. I REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE SOCIAL CONVENTIONS OF THIS COMMUNITY. I AM AN ISLAND."

Why Blog?
As I set out to create this profile, the question occurred to me, "Why should I blog?" Besides the obvious personal response to this question ("because I like writing"), a more practical answer came to mind that I have heard from time to time...because writing releases me from my own subjectivity. I'm not sure if I buy that completely. The simple translation into words of the thoughts and feelings that I am experiencing cannot really, in itself, connect me to others that surround me--and it certainly cannot force others to see as I see. I guess William Wordsworth came closest to achieving this in some of his verse, but I still feel that his accomplishments were more sleight of hand, relying too fully on passion and emotion, which are far too easily manipulated in people like me. Yet, even if writing does not completely release us from our individual perceptions, from our absorbment into self, from the prison of our own minds, there remains a particular value: the fact that words can make concrete our temporal experiences in some regard (even to strangers like our selves). In such a capacity, words are certainly powerful.

Human society has always been established on the story, or more specifically, the shared story. Even as I sit in my bedroom this morning, I can look around and see the trappings of others' experiences, the artifacts of truth, simply thrown about in bits of narrative. One of my roommates enjoys keeping us updated on the newsworthy events that occur in our area--the new cigarette tax being debated by the legislature, the semi that turned over on I-20 leaking some sort of dangerous gas/liquid (I still don't know what that was all about), or the brick wall of a prominent area night club that collapsed into a busy downtown road during rush hour traffic. When he starts off on one of these updates, he usually begins with, "Basically..." and proceeds to condense the event into a few short sentences that can best depict the primary significance of the occurrence. The process is one of storytelling, of taking a remembrance of particular narrative events, translating them into words, and making the events relevant to the listener. Similarly, my other roommate is frequently the bearer of "strange" news. He enters the room and begins straight into a tale of what happened to him on any particular day with no introduction: "I was driving on I-20, saw a wreck, and can you believe that no one there had a cell phone? The one guy was probably from Simpson county, and he was wearing a wife-beater..." The technique is a bit different--no overt relevance except for the entertainment factor--but there always comes some sort of self-evalutation at the end: Am I like that guy in the wife-beater who was driving after having too much to drink? Probably not.

But taking these two techniques of storytelling hand in hand, we find that in relating narrative, in putting into words that which we experience, we can help others to experience. The goal is not some transcendent sort of subjective connection...it is the experience. Though the experiences may be distinct and subjective for each teller, language gives us a common arena, a community. This is why storytelling is such an indispensable part of cultures. Consider the prominence of myth for early societies, the classic epics of Greece and Rome, the banquet settings of King Arthur's court, or even the "story-time" feature of any American pre-school or kindergarten or grade school that brings the class together to hear a single narrative. The hearing unites us, but it cannot take place without the telling.

Hopefully, the stories that are told here will help others see the society around them and to see who they really are, or are not. Words, then, do not so much change the state of the writer but impact the state of all parties involved. By attempting to allow words to only benefit our selves, we narrow their potential. Words are a lot more powerful than we give them credit for. What we thrive on is the experience of the telling, the thrill of the discussion, and the energy of a common culture that language allows. So let's start bearing our voices.