Sense of Scale

In the story of Babel that I was taught as a kid, the Babelites were not sure they were going to earn their way to heaven and were uncertain of God’s grace, so they figured they’d just climb. They built a tower that punctured the clouds, hoping to find where God lived.

I love this image. It’s so literal and graphic. It’s also wrong. Robert Alter, my favorite Biblical commentator, says no one was trying to build a tower to get to heaven. The text says that the tower’s top was “in the heavens,” but that “is a hyperbole found in Mesopotamian inscriptions for celebrating high towers” (Alter 39). The Babel built tower is the linguistic and literal equivalent of our “skyscrapers.”

Read More

I Think You Can Do This

In Ether 2, the Brother of Jared approaches God after building boats according to the Lord’s exacting instructions, but he has noticed two problems: Problem 1: These boats are fully enclosed, and the people in them are going to have a hard time breathing. Problem 2: These boats are fully enclosed, and the people in them are going to have a hard time seeing.

God meets him at the top of the mountain tells him to go ahead and cut holes in the top and bottom of the boat that can be very tightly stoppered when the sea is calm, and that way they can get fresh air. (This solution terrifies me, but the Brother of Jared seems to have been chill with it.) Jesus didn’t tell him what to do about the light, though, so after making the tightly stoppered holes, the Brother of Jared hikes back up the mountain to say, “And about the light?”

“What do you think?” God says.

I think, had I been the Brother of Jared, I may have been annoyed by this. I might have thought, “I don’t want to have to keep climbing this mountain when you can just tell me the answer already.”

Read More

I Can Fix That, And Other Lies I've Loved

The first time I got my heartbroken, I was an absolute mess. It was almost comical. It would have been, in a chickflick. It would have been like that part in Legally Blonde where she’s eating ice cream and yelling at the TV. My version involved a lot of crying in stairwells, only eating Clif bars, writing pages and pages of burn letters, and getting very little sleep. After two months of this, a guy in an elevator said to me, “You should probably take a nap.”

As always, my approach to this new problem was research. I listened to podcasts and read blogs and scientific articles. (Did you know that heartbreak is a physical phenomena wherein, deprived of the dopamine and oxytocin the relationship provided you, your body freaks out? Tylenol helps.) In addition to online resources, I pursued more traditional modes of research: people. I asked advice from everyone, all the time. Someone would say, “Hey, how are you?” And I’d say, “Not great. How do you deal with heartbreak?” My favorite response was Bentley’s. He said, “Reread Harry Potter. You’ll feel better by the end.”

Read More

If You Can't Say Something Nice

When I was twenty-one one of my friends told me, “Risa, people don’t know you like them. They can’t tell. You don’t show them.”

Nate was my roommate Shelley’s boyfriend (hi Nate! Hi Shelley!) who had decided to adopt me as a little sister. (“But I’m older than you,” I told him when he informed me of his decision. “That’s OK,” he said, “I’m taller.”) He read my essays, forced me to watch bad actions movies, and coached me in my complete lack of a social life. He was one of my best friends, and he was sitting at my kitchen table, calmly informing me that most people kind of thought I didn’t like them.

I was a little devastated by the thought. I’m a Hufflepuff, meaning (as I explained to my therapist during one of our first visits, all the while saying, “You should really read Harry Potter”) that I am driven forward by relationships, by contact and closeness. By twenty-one I’d shut down the sun-shiny friendliness my mom insists I was born with, but I’d maintained the bounding enthusiasm in the existence of almost everyone around me. I figured that, being as great as they were, they were working off the assumption that I liked them. I didn’t need to go out of my way to communicate it.

Read More

Power and Control

Austin gets grumpy during the semi-annual Sunday school lessons about the difference between joy and happiness, the ones in which we’re instructed to seek after “joy” (which is true and long-lasting) rather than “happiness” (which is fleeting and worldly). I think what actually bothers him is the repetition paired with the expectation that we pretend that this discussion is new to us, but what he usually says is, “They just made that up! I could have said happiness is lasting and joy is fleeting! That difference is pretend!”

This is obviously true—as we’ve discussed before, all words are made up distinctions, and they get especially slippery around any God talk. But here I am. About to do this same thing.

Power isn’t control. Power is actually control’s opposite. And I know these words are slippery and the distinctions are a line in the sand but, as we’ve discussed before, sometimes a line in the sand is all I’ve got. So let me draw the line a little deeper and offer the definition of control I’m working on: I mean absolute control. I mean control like the ability to make something happen, to determine the outcome. Control is a zero sum game—the more that one person has, the less that another has.

Read More

Hope and the End(s) of the World

A few weeks ago, I made Austin and my mother-in-law watch World War Z with me. (Sorry, Kathy).

I’ve loved this movie for a long time, which Austin says is “out of character,” just like my obsession with frozen pizza. I love it for lots of reasons—I like that it’s family instead of romance based. I like that it’s smart, that killing the zombies isn’t just about shooting them, but also about thinking. I like that there are strong women in it who are strong in different ways. What I wanted to watch it for this time, though, was the hope: in the movie the world ends, and it’s awful, but there’s still hope. It’s the worst case scenario, and then things keep going.

I’ve been thinking about how the world has ended lots of times. On March 13, the same day Austin and I decided to get out of Boston and left our apartment two hours later, I was listening to a podcast called Hardcore History on the Celtic Wars. The world ended for the Celts. Their society and culture were razed and their people were slaughtered. The world ended with Noah’s flood. Worlds ended in colonialism—with Native Americans wiped out by disease and violence, with tribes in Africa that lost their cultures and peoples to slavery, with the Hawaiians who saw Captain Cook’s soldiers walk up the beach and called them “ha ole,” no breath, because they were so pale they looked like the death they would bring.

Read More