Photina

Photina
n., An issue of water from the earth; a spring; a fountain. v.intr., To rise to the surface, ready to flow; to rise or surge from an inner source. v.tr., To pour forth. adj., In a satisfactory condition; right or proper. interj., Used to introduce a remark, resume a narrative, or fill a pause during conversation; used to express surprise.dictionary.com

Friday, January 10, 2003

I will have to leave you in suspense at this point, because I am about to head off to a conference for the weekend. Thus I've also changed the picture on the site to The Baptism of Christ by El Greco in honor of Sunday's feast. I can't say that I particularly care for El Greco's depiction of Christ in it, but the painting caught my attention because it shows the entire Trinity, just as St. Mark's account of it does.

posted by Heidi | 10.1.03

Road to Rome, Part IV

Toward the end of my sophomore year of college, I discovered rather suddenly that if I played my cards right I could graduate a year early due to the joys of Advanced Placement tests taken during high school (Lit., Comp., US History, Western Civ., Art History--definitely worth it if you know anything at all about art history because no one takes it so the curve is easier, and the Calc AB exam). [Parents: AP tests are definitely cheaper than tuition--and you don't have to have taken actual "AP" classes!] I was not paying for my college education (thank you, Dad & Mom & grandparents!), so my very initial gut reaction was to want to keep this information to myself, spread out my required classes, and just fill in with "fluff." Then I remembered that it was the "fluff" that historically tended to bring down my GPA, so I 'fessed up, then thinking that maybe I could spend a year wandering around Europe before settling down to "real life." But I was not planning on suggesting that to my parents--it was my own nice little fantasy, more than a year off, anyway.

They beat me to the punch, asking if I'd thought about traveling during my "extra" year. Whoo hoo!

As the next school year started, I went out for ice cream with the young woman who would be leading the small group I was in, and she, knowing my still-very-amorphous travel plans, asked if I'd considered "Standing in the Gap," basically an exchange program for university/post-university students between different Christian communities internationally in which they get a chance to live somewhere else doing volunteer work for a year.

I knew there was a community in London, and the opportunity sounded ideal--I'd always wanted to go to London, spending a year in youth hostels was really not what I was looking for, and I knew that there would definitely be opportunities for travel beyond London.

Shortly after that, I talked with the program director, expressed my interest (particularly in London), and then proceeded to wrap myself up in the school year, not thinking too much more about it. My sister was in her freshman year at Michigan State University at that point, and when she came home at Thanksgiving she said that the program director for the MSU University Christian Outreach was hoping to have six volunteers from the Standing in the Gap program for the next school year. I also heard a rumor that London was hesitating about the number of spots they'd have, and there were already a number of people interested in them. The MSU spot, however, sounded promising in that it would involve a fair amount of travel around the U.S., which, though not Europe, is nevertheless interesting.

Internally committed to the program at this point, I resigned myself to a year at Michigan State, and requested an application to one of the two summer programs that were recommended as introductions to a year as a Gapper. I chose Detroit Summer Outreach only because I had lived the previous summer with someone who spent half her summer doing it, so I knew slightly more about it than I did about its companion program, the Summer Internship Program (look at the DSO website & you will come away knowing more than I did when I requested the application...).

I received the application and information packet in the mail, and took a look at it one night (now the middle of December) after I'd climbed into bed. After looking at it, I climbed back out of bed, turned my computer back on, connected to the Internet, and sent an e-mail off to the program director asking if I could Stand in the Gap in Detroit. The information on Cornerstone Schools is what had grabbed my attention. I had spent middle school through high school dreaming of becoming a teacher, reading every single book on education I could get my hands on (especially Marva Collin's Way)--and then got turned off by some rather inane faculty meetings in which I was the student representative during my senior year of high school. Detroit Summer Outreach works closely with the Cornerstone School campuses, and these schools were achieving in Detroit what I had dreamed of during middle and high school.

He e-mailed me back a couple weeks later with the very succinct statement that he was looking forward to talking with me at an upcoming conference.

posted by Heidi | 10.1.03

Road to Rome, Part III

I started college.

Out of a sense of obligation more than anything else, I joined University Christian Outreach when I started school. It was filled with people who claimed that God was a living, active part of their lives, and the brick wall that confronted me whenever I prayed stood out ever more starkly.

November 20 roughly a year later, I was at a UCO prayer meeting and asked a woman to pray with me because I wanted to hear God. My parents could. All these other people could, but I seemed to be deaf as a doorknob. She prayed with me and then said something that was rather frustrating—essentially, that I’d always been able to hear Him, but hadn’t necessarily recognized it. Great.

I went back to my seat, and as I was standing there, I realized that had a song in my head that my mother would sing to us when she put us to bed when I was very young. I started to whisper the words of the song, and just then, across the room someone started to read aloud the psalm that it was based on:

O Lord, You have searched me
and You know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
You perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
You are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
You know it completely, O Lord.

You hem me in—behind and before;
You have laid Your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Where can I flee from Your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, You are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, You are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there Your hand will guide me,
Your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to You;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to You. [& it continues—Psalm 139.]

And in that I recognized the voice of God. Fluke? One incident? How could I know... But a relationship began. No disembodied voices, but Bible verses started standing out as I read them in the morning, and then popping up in the most uncanny way in the most unlikely places, beginning with verses about God’s love. Ephesians 3:17-19, And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Bible verses, books, people in just the right place at just the right time, sudden thoughts from the blue that settle scattered pieces into place, and on and on.

I was finally aware of God's hand on my life, but it was definitely still my life for which I had my plans.

posted by Heidi | 10.1.03

Road to Rome, Part II

I attended a public school through third grade, and then in fourth grade I moved to a Christian school that had been established by the ecumenical community our family was in. The school was ecumenical but populated predominantly by Catholics, and once a week during fourth and fifth grades, all of the Protestant students in the class would be excused to go to the library for study hall while the Catholics had CCD for an hour. I loved time in the library, but I was curious about what the Catholics were learning back in the classroom (though they attested that they'd much rather be having free time in the library), and I'd grill one of my friends about it as we walked home from the bus stop after school. I could never get enough out of her to satisfy me--I was fascinated. I was attracted to it, but also found it frightening. The Lutheran Church was more comforting in its reasonableness--the Presence in, with, and under the Elements versus the naked Body and Blood...

Almost everyone in my eighth grade class headed off to the local Catholic high school; I and two other girls started ninth grade back in public school, and denominational issues were abandoned for the time being in favor of the more encompassing questions--given the existence of God, how do I know He's the God of the Bible and not some other religion's god? If He's out there, why doesn't He want a relationship with me--I talk and talk and yell and get no answer... Loving? Prayer-answering? Prove it.

I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church on June 4 of the summer after my sophomore year of high school. A month later, five days before my sixteenth birthday, my grandfather died. In the beginning of September, the president of my class, whose locker was next to mine, was killed in a car accident. My aunt and uncle filed for divorce. Another aunt found out that her ex-husband was supplying her middle-school-age kids with alcohol and pot. My grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. This was all first semester. I was taking the heaviest academic load of my life and working part-time on top of it; I spiraled into depression.

I ruled out suicide mostly because I cared enough about my family to not want to inflict them with more of what they were already dealing with, and I yelled at God. I yelled at my parents that I was yelling at God and that He wasn’t doing anything. They, in their wisdom, didn’t feed me pat answers or tell me to stop asking questions or tell me that I was wrong or bad or evil for being so frustrated—-they told me to keep yelling.

One night that February, as I felt like I was drowning in the middle of this roiling, swirling chaos, I confronted the most basic question I had. I believed in God; I'd seen too many examples of His action to simply throw out His existence. The question wasn’t whether God existed—-the question was whether He was truly a God of love, Love itself, or whether He was as He seemed to be—-an arbitrary, capricious, malevolent deity who was (contrary to Einstein) playing dice with the universe.

Everything I looked at seemed to tell me that God was, in fact, a malicious, malevolent deity.

I decided that night that if the god ruling the universe were a malicious, malevolent deity, I would rather go to Hell than spend eternity in “heaven” with him. So, in an act of strange defiance, I chose to believe in a god of love, a god of order, a god with love as his ultimate plan and purpose—-deciding that I would worship this god at the very least because when I finally appeared before the throne of the malevolent deity, if that was who was on the throne, I would be able to tell him that I’d spent my life worshipping a god of love and would happily go to Hell for rejecting the true ruler of the universe.

I had been raised to believe that the Christian God was a God of love. I didn’t feel like I had much evidence of it, but I decided that if the god that I’d chosen to believe in—-a god who did have a loving order and plan in this universe—-actually existed & was, moreover, the God of Christianity, He was welcome to make that clear to me, and since Christianity claimed to believe in a loving God with a loving plan and purpose in the universe, I might as well seriously investigate it.

Two years of silence, during which I read the entire Bible.

posted by Heidi | 10.1.03

The Gospel for today is Christ's healing of the leper from Luke 5:12-16, so the picture on my desktop and this blog is a manuscript illumination, Christ's Cure of the Leper, from the Gladzori Avetaran (Glajor Gospel), an Armenian translation of the Gospels from the beginning of the fourteenth century.

posted by Heidi | 10.1.03

Thursday, January 09, 2003

Road to Rome, Part I

I was raised Lutheran. Not only Lutheran, but a Lutheran preceeded by (as my Dad calculated at some point) somewhere around 2,000 man-years of pastoral service by my largely German-Lutheran ancestors (much of it occurring simultaneously rather than consecutively). There's a joke that all Lutherans are related. Related? Who knows--but shortly after my parents were engaged, they discovered that their families had met before--when one of my great-great-grandfathers on my Dad's side confirmed one of my great-grandfathers on my Mom's side in a tiny little Lutheran church in a tiny little town in an entirely different state.

We were Lutheran, but first and foremost we were Christian--Luther was not a fourth person in the Trinity. I knew from the time I was very young that God was real and personal, simply because I saw my parents relate to Him as such. Even in the throes of adolescent doubts and questionings, I found it difficult to doubt the existence of God because I had too much evidence--even if it was largely via my parents rather than first-hand at that point--that He existed.

My parents met each other in the context of the charismatic movement of the seventies that brought forth the ecumenical, charismatic community that I grew up in until it split when I was in middle school. "Charismatic." Scary word for many, including rationalistically-oriented me for awhile. (Let alone "ecumenical.") I'm not going to get into that too much during this series of posts--I'll save that for a different time. But for any tempted to throw that bathwater out, you'd be throwing this baby with it--because in a large part it was that very "charismaticism" (and definitely the ecumenism) that brought me to Rome's door. That I will be talking about.

My parents, and in particular my father, took as their guiding principle in raising us (I have two younger sisters) that our childhood experience of God was largely through them--our experience of His love came to us primarily through them, our experience of His provision came to us primarily through them, and our experience of His discipline came to us primarily through them. This is true whether or not parents admit it--your experience of your parents' love has a significant impact on how you initially perceive God--and I am grateful to my parents for acknowledging and being intentional about this reality.

The flip side of this, however, is that even as a child my issues with my parents' decisions in discipline were not limited to them, but were extended to theological questions--were they wrong in their handling of the situation, or was there something I was not understanding about the way God handles things?

Let me make this very practical. My parents' discipline philosophy: Swift, short, painful, non-injurious, and smothered in love. A spanking followed by discussion, reconciliation, and a hug was the application of this when I was a child. What I could not understand, however, was that I would be begging and pleading for forgiveness for x, y, or z as I was being hauled up the stairs to be spanked, and I would still get spanked. I knew they would forgive me, but here I was, definitely sorry, and definitely asking for forgiveness, and I was still getting spanked. This was further complicated by an example used in a children's sermon of some sort that compared Jesus to an innocent brother who volunteered to be spanked instead of his guilty brother. I was still bothered by this long after I had graduated from spankings.

I also clearly remember being in early elementary school sitting in the lazyboy rocker in the basement contemplating hell. Not fire and demons, but hell as my father had very accurately summarized it for us: eternal separation from God, Love Himself. Eternal. Separation. I pictured sitting alone in a wooden rocking chair in a gray void forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever, figuring that I might as well picture it so that I could adjust to it, because I could not grasp the concept of salvation as I understood it. I had to "believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and died and rose again to save me from my sins." I didn't have a problem believing that phrase. I did have a problem believing that I believed it, and had a problem with what-about-people-who-believe-it-and-sin-deliberately-anyway. So I'd sit in the chair in the basement with one half of my mind saying, "I believe I believe I believe I believe" as if repeating it enough would get me to heaven, and with the other half of my mind contemplating the inevitability of a rocking chair alone in a gray void forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. And there I'll leave you 'til tomorrow...

posted by Heidi | 9.1.03

I think I'm going to begin to tell the story of my road to Rome, especially since Karen Marie Knapp of From the Anchor Hold has so kindly solicited prayers on behalf of me and the other catechumenal bloggers (thank you!). Bear with me, though--it'll take a number of posts.

posted by Heidi | 9.1.03

Images!

I tend to be a very visual person (I was organizing my crayons and markers in "rainbowbetical" order long before I ever heard of "Roy G. Biv" as a mnemonic device for memorizing the order--and then I wondered what idiot stuck indigo, a combination of a combination (purple + blue), in the rainbow). Ahem. Visual person. So I've gotten into the habit of changing the image on my computer desktop daily based on either the day's feast or the readings for the day as a way of reinforcing them to myself. (Doesn't take me very long with Google Image Search.)

Today's Gospel reading is Luke 4:14-22--Jesus's reading from the prophet Isaiah

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

in the synagogue in Nazareth with the announcement Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist of the twentieth century. I am deliberately taking his painting Yellow Crucifixion out of Chagall's context in pairing it with this passage. Chagall painted it in 1943, in the center of the turmoil of World War II, and for him the crucifixion of Jesus, a Jew, captures the essential suffering of the Jewish people, further portrayed in the figures around the cross. (See "Jesus in Jewish Art.")

Nevertheless, though Jesus's ministry of healing and proclaiming the Gospel was very truly fulfilled as He preached in the Nazareth synagogue, His ultimate fulfillment of that message was through, not despite, the cross. Through, and beyond. Jesus' death and resurrection were not about the removal of earthly suffering but rather about the redemption of suffering--suffering no longer as a curse for sin but as a means of blessing. This is brought out in the Apostolic Letter Salvifici Dolores: The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering.

posted by Heidi | 9.1.03

Tuesday, January 07, 2003

I'm back!

I am feeling a bit at sea because I do not have a 2003 desk calendar yet--I'm attempting to hold out for Borders' next calendar-price reduction to get the Ansel Adams 2003 calendar--we'll see.

My house has resumed Ordinary time--the Christmas tree is out by the curb, my ornaments are sitting on my desk waiting to be packed away. Yea though yesterday was the Twelfth Day, the rest of this week still counts as "Christmas"--right up until the celebration of Jesus's baptism this Sunday.

posted by Heidi | 7.1.03