In the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man. “Who sinned,” his followers ask, “him or his parents? Why is he blind?”
“Neither,” Jesus said. “He’s blind so that you and everyone else could know that he could be healed.”
Read MoreA Wrinkle in Time is a weird book. It’s theological children’s science fiction. It’s about good and evil, angels that look like old women but are also something like pegasuses or stars, different planets, and giant brains. I love it. Like all really good science fiction, it’s much more about the power of love than it is about aliens.
There’s this moment in A Wrinkle in Time that I think about a lot. Meg passes through the Black Thing. The Black Thing is evil—literally, it is the physical form of evil, and by touching it, she is hurt. The wise people of a new planet treat her and help her regain her physical strength, but she is still wounded. When she lashes out at her most important people, her alien caretaker says, “Don’t judge her harshly, She was almost taken by the Black Thing. Sometimes we can’t know what spiritual damage it leaves.”
Read MoreThings that happened over the last year that you might not know if I haven’t talked to you recently:
Austin graduated from law school, graduated from business school, passed the bar, and became an attorney at law at a law firm in downtown Boston, and we are Very Proud. (I am Very Proud. Austin is weirded out by having an assistant.)
I got a job at Harvard Divinity School as a faculty coordinator, which means I run schedules and process financials, do some occasional editing and research. It’s not glamorous or important, and I like that. I’ve liked having a job that I don’t care about very much, because it means that it doesn’t figure into my identity very much, which feels both healthy and unlike anything I’ve ever done before.
If you’ve never been to IFS therapy (interfamily systems), then a session sounds nuts. It sounded crazy the first time I went. “I feel like I’m making it up,” I told my therapist.
“So?” she said.
In IFS, we try to identify feelings or urges as “parts” (or “peeps,” as my mom says) with names, personalities, ages, purposes, and desires that may conflict with each other. (Think Inside Out.) As a rule, no matter what a part’s job is or how destructive their work is becoming, they’re there to help. My anger is there to protect me. My sadness lets me know what I value. My tired tells me to rest. But they’re all a part, and it’s my job as the Self to be the whole. I’m the grownup, and I have to help them realize when their job is done or redirect their energy when they’re being hurtful.
Read MoreWhen I was twenty-two, I ran into a professor in the elevator who said, “Hey, I need someone to do research for me in London. Want to go?”
Going to London is one of those turning points in my life. I spent six weeks there, and it had undue effect on the person I became. Like, I’d always ascribed to second wave feminism enough that I’d refused to care about clothes or makeup or anything appearance related, and then I went and was like, “There are exactly zero guys here I’m trying to impress, and I still want to know what I look like with eyeliner, so I’m gonna do it.” I’d always thought I didn’t like being outside, and one day, on the top of White Horse hill with the wind whipping around me, I found out that I loved being outside. Not being around people I knew meant that I could become who I wanted without fighting their expectations.
Read MoreA few weeks ago I went with my in-laws to the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit. We sat in a room as 600,000 cubic feet of projections and Van Gogh’s artwork flooded around us. “There’s two ways to watch this,” the ticket handler at the door told us, “You can watch it like a movie or you can experience it.”
I’m not very good at experiencing art. I feel bad about this, but so it is. Usually I walk around a museum for about twenty minutes, and then I think, That was cool. Is there a cafe or a gift shop? I don’t really know enough about art for it to touch me most of the time—but every once in a while, every once in a while it barrels past my ignorance and tags me anyway.
In the exhibit, they sometimes animated the paintings, and one in particular caught my eye. It was on every wall, this rocking man, gnarled and bent over, rocking back and forth and I thought, I recognize that. I know that feeling.
Read MoreAustin 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 MoreThings that happened over the last year that you might not know if we haven’t talked recently:
I graduated from divinity school! It was online, which was sad. But Yo-yo Ma played, which was lovely, and I can report that he has a very normal bookcase in his house.
Austin and I spent more time with our families than we have in our adult lives. Which was not the way we’d planned to start our marriage, but wasn’t a bad way to start: we know each other’s families much more now. Austin’s had time to convert my parents to boardgames, and I’ve had time to get his parents addicted to The Great British Baking Show.
I read 53 books, most of which were escapist. Persuasion is as good as you remember.