The Taser's Edge:

"Most people say that LiveJournal is a virtual Kentucky--"But T's Edge, nothing good ever comes from there. Why don't you use WordPress?" You forget yourself.  Both Abraham Lincoln and later Wendell Barry came from Kentucky. (Posterity has yet to decide who is the greater American.)  I chose LiveJournal as my blogging site because I was feeling ironic.

I am not trying to say that this post is no different than Honest Abe's first words from a Kentucky cradle (or was it a manger?). I am claiming that the entries that follow will be no less great than the Gettysburg Address."

So began my first blog post ever, July 1, 2006.  Alas, the days for irony are over as the good ship HMS Livejournal is apparently burning, at least according to the competition.  The competition which I have already joined using the LJ export tool.  Get out while you can.  Or at least save your crap before this baby goes down (which is not eminent, as far as I know).

My new home is of course tasersedge.wordpress.com.  Join me in building a beautiful new tomorrow.  And so, just as I began this final LJ post with the beginning of my first post, so I end it with the end of that first post:

"Adieu."

Merry Epiphany!  And I'm Anglican now, so that counts and whatever.

Today was my first interview for a real job--a CPE residency at UNC Hospitals.  It went well--they said so--but I've felt a bit rough since.  It's just so big.  I'm a pioneer camping in Independence, Mo.,  and tomorrow's the big day.  There's a vast wild country in front of me.  It's already fully inhabited, but I don't know that yet.  I'm thinking I'm the first.  And that God is with me.  On that point I'm right.

I haven't yet begun to see the blessings God has in store for us.  Of course I must have had my eyes closed.  What is Duke?  What is Durham?  What is All Saints?  What are all these friends after all?  I am blessed.  I am privileged.  99.998 percent of the world's population, past and present, wouldn't have been taken seriously in that interview today, and yet for some reason I was.

I can't claim that as my just deserts.  God gave me brains, good parents who pointed me college-ward, birth in a place and time where this could happen.  I could call that fortune or good luck.  I have called it bumbling.  But I'm wrong.

And what does what I'm saying say about the families huddled with their children in Gaza tonight, Hamas militants pressed against them in their cramped space, waiting, waiting?  I can't say God cause those particularities, of course.  But at the same time I can't not say that God gifted me with mine, and that God is good.

Lord God, Father of all peoples, we pray for peace in Gaza, for peace on earth under your Holy Spirit's hovering wings, in the name of of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ.  Amen and Amen.

Earlier this afternoon, I sat down to watch Paris, Je T'Aime.  Such auteurs as Gerard Depardieu, the Coen brothers, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuaron, Christopher Doyle (long-time cinematographer for Wong Kar-Wai), Alexander Payne, Gus Van Sant, Steve Buscemi, Natalie Portman, Willem Dafoe, Juliette Binoche, Bob Hoskins, Nick Nolte, Maggie Gyllenhall, and Elijah Wood (as a vampire, of course) join in a series of very lightly connected short films.  Holly wants me to have a favorite (as normal for her) short, but I don't (as normal for me).  But Juliette Binoche may be the most attractive 44-year-old I know, something deeper than her looks.  And as for Steve Buscemi, well...he doesn't really look this bad, but he really does look this bad.  I hope that link didn't cost him starring in my amazing screenplay.  For some reason, I suddenly feel like I'm writing for Us Weekly.

Tomorrow Holly goes back to work with students (having been at school without students on Friday), and she's not yet looking forward to it.



As for my past Friday, I began reading what will surely be my last choose-to-read book for a while here (as the semester is upon us): Time's Arrow by Martin Amis.  I think I randomly picked it up at a Durham Downtown Library book sale.  Buried it in a brown paper bag for 7 dollars or so.  When I pick a new book to read, for some reason I always start at the As on my alphabetized (for fiction, at least) bookshelf.  I think I know a bit too much about this book, namely that it is eventually about the Holocaust (sorry that you too now know too much).  I wouldn't know that yet if I hadn't read the critical blurbs all over the paperback.

An incredible storytelling maneuver (one which I assume will inform my future viewing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) in which the narrator is living inside a character as that character's life is played in reverse.  Eating, sex, and bathroom use are of course interesting, as is dialogue, which is translated out of backwards gibberish (most of the time), but is not fixed for correct conversational order:

"I promise."
"You promise?"
"Never," she said.
"You wouldn't?"
"But I'd never tell." (p. 36)

The character goes to see a movie, a romantic comedy in which the characters are very close at the beginning, have a bunch of misunderstandings, and then end up parting ways as if they don't know each other by the end.  Pimps become the nice fellows who heal prostitutes (who pay men after having sex with them) with knives and fists.

I thought an excerpt would be helpful for seeing how backward things become, with ER doctors (like the character in which the narrator lives) becoming monsters.  (Presumably the Holocaust will soon be God's gift of life to humanity.)  From p. 76:

"You want to know what I do?  All right.  Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head.  We don't mess about.  We'll soon have that off.  He's got a hole in his head.  So what do we do?  We stick a nail in it.  Get the nail--a good rusty one--from the trash or wherever.  And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he's allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back into the night."

Reminds me of Anthony Burgess, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Joseph Heller, and the like.  And amazingly easy to follow for how experimental it may seem that it could be from my description.


On a more personal note, this Tuesday is my first real-life job interview (projected above, you can see that I already know the power-hold for pens during interviews, as well as how to match my tie and pocket neckerchief), for a CPE residency at UNC Hospital.  I need to gather my thoughts together on this one.  Pray for me if you're the praying type.

I.

            For the past several weeks, I have had brief glimpses of the darkness. Short but lengthening experiences of the blue-purple-black-red bruise that is depression. A month ago, it would last for perhaps half an hour at a time. Two weeks ago, it would last a couple hours or more. Now, it’s getting closer and closer to a full day’s worth (today might be that day), and soon I don’t think it’s going to be limited by a 24 hour period.

            I recognize it’s a sick thought, but it’s my thought all the same, from W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” My depression seems to be growing in this particular season of the year. I know I experience seasonal affected disorder, if not as a clinical diagnosis then at least in comparing how I felt during those long Wisconsin winters with how I feel when May arrives in North Carolina. I love the family connections of this time of year, but I think that what is most depressing is the combination of sun and cold. I know that I am supposed to understand something about the tilt of the earth’s axis and indirect sunlight, but primordially I do not understand.

            This time round I am trying to practice mindfulness as I have been training. Paying attention and simply observing what is going on inside me in the moment in which it is going on. That might be where the image of the bruise comes from. It’s not easy. It is never comfortable to watch a the wreck of a passenger train happening, let alone one that seems to be piling up inside your mind. How do you understand what’s going on and work to fight it?

 

II.

            In our most recent reading for CPE, Edward Wimberly’s Recalling Our Own Stories: Spiritual Renewal for Religious Caregivers, Wimberly provides practical exercises for anyone (not only ‘religious caregivers’) to do some intense self-discovery. In class we focused on the set of questions regarding exploring our earliest memory. It sounds stereotypically psychoanalytic, and I’m sure I’m overanalyzing things (especially because I wouldn’t claim too strongly that the memory I’m about to share actually happened historically), but it was very helpful.

            In my earliest memory, I must be two years old. I’m in the playroom/sun porch, which I remember being at the front of the house. The sun is streaming in and filling the room. And the door has just been closed. That’s the significant action of this scene. Zack (my older brother) and Mom are on the other side of the door, the door has latched, and I’m too young and small to reach the doorknob to turn it. I desperately want to be on the other side of that door, because my Mom is there, and because I’m alone, and because the room in which I am standing is rapidly filling with dread.

 

III.

            Today I’m depressed. All I want to do is get out of this place in my mind. I want to get out of this room in my mind, but I can’t. I’m not sure if there even is a door, but I know I can’t open it and escape. So I return to that oldest memory, and now I am able to notice how much I am striving—hysterical for the other side of that door—and how much I am not able to see in my struggle that the sun porch is actually full of light. How can I turn around from fighting depression’s grasp, so that I might see the light that is in here with me?:

           

“Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there…

If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,

And the light around me become night,

Even the darkness is not dark to you;

For night is as bright as the day,

For darkness is as light to you.” (Ps. 139:7-8, 11-12)

 

            It is not that I try to escape. It is that I notice.  God is in this place of darkness with me. I am in the tomb, but Jesus knows all about tombs, and he is here with me. There will be resurrection, and this will end, but until then, I will try to notice the light.

 
           In a weekly reflection very early in the semester, I wrote about my thinking through mindfulness (in particular, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s version of it) as a Christian practice.  Two weeks ago I began a mindfulness class through CAPS at Duke, and I found myself needing to work through some theological issues again.  At the beginning of the first session, part of each person’s self-introduction was to say what we were hoping to gain from a mindfulness class, and why we had come.  My personal reason was that I deal with anxiety and depression and have found this to be helpful in the past, not only in overcoming mental illness, but in becoming more self-aware emotionally.  A broader reason is that one of my gifts and interests in the church is prayer and prayer ministry.  I believe that there are some parts of mindfulness training that can support and add to healthy prayer lives, both my own and those of future Christians whom I disciple.

            But there is a problem—mindfulness in itself is not prayer, nor does it aim or claim to be.  It is more similar to physical exercise than it is to prayer, a practice used for mental and emotional (and according to several studies, physical) self-care, not for connection, communication, or communion with God.  Most of the people in my mindfulness class have no previous experience with meditation, and no one other than me spoke of any spiritual or religious aspect to their practice of meditation, but I do not know what meditation is unless it is religious.  Or at least, I do not see meditation’s worth for myself when it is only a mental exercise which might help me to be a little more patient, and might lower my blood pressure a tad.

            Perhaps it says as much about my priority-setting as it does about my religious outlook, but I need meditation to be prayer, both so that I can see its worth in my own life, and so that it will fit within the very real time limitations under which I live.  If I want to take God’s call to prayer seriously, spend significant time in prayer each day, for myself, my family, my friends, my community, the Church, all God’s children, and God’s world, but those twenty minutes I spend on two mindfulness sessions do not “count” as prayer, then it’s going to be hard for me to find a place in my schedule for mindfulness.  It will probably be impossible, and I probably won’t do it.

            Skipping over the admittedly major issue of why I would be concerned with what “counts” as prayer, I would like to say that I really do believe that mindfulness can function as prayer, even as I am still working to discover what that looks like.  For me, the most practical difference that made me feel better about this practice was when I began practicing centering prayer as mindfulness.  When I do centering prayer, it is easy for me to choose a word or phrase which is too abstract.  “God is perfect” is true and great, but I don’t really know what it means in any real sense, and all the idea does is make me wish for a perfection in myself that is probably totally unlike God’s perfection.  For this reason, Scriptural phrases are often the best.  This week, what came into my mind was “His banner over me is love” (Cant. 2:4b).

            It’s a nice theme verse for the week, and the other one is “cease striving,” which is known in another translation as “Be still and know that I am God” from Psalm 46.  Both verses point me to God’s overwhelming love for me.  They remind me that all is accomplished in Christ.  When I step back from “striving,” then I also can step back from worry and fear in CPE, at Duke Divinity, and (although still getting there…) life.

I turned to this book with a lot of trepidation.  I first became familiar with Peterson through The Message, the Bible paraphrase which I have (perhaps unfairly) hated since I first heard it.  Of course, I’ve never actually read much of it.  Then my first semester at Duke, I had to read Eat This Book, about the centrality of the Bible in ministry and the image of eating the Word of God.  It’s a nice Biblical image, but then Peterson just repeats himself over and over, never really moving beyond the basic meaning of the title.  I also saw him speak at Duke, and it was a similar experience—nothing all that new, inspired, or inspiring.  (It is, of course, possible that I didn’t give him a fair chance.  But it’s hard to forgive someone who murders the poetry of the Psalms for the sake of straightforwardness of meaning.  Again—probably an unfair statement.)

 

But Working the Angles is one of the required readings for the Anglican Missional Pastor, the pastor training program in which I am enrolled through the Anglican Mission in America.  During the next two years, I will have to read all five of Peterson’s books on pastoral ministry.  The other four are Under the Unpredictable Plant, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, The Contemplative Pastor, and Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work.  I am not sure of the order, but they apparently don’t need to be read in order either.

 

I began with Working the Angles because I randomly was given a copy this summer, among 300-400 other books from a pastor’s and a church’s libraries.  But if I had not been assigned to read it, I do not know that I would have.  I’m incredibly glad that I did, however.

 

The title comes from an image that Peterson creates in the opening section of the book: “I see [the] three essential acts of ministry as the angles of a triangle.  Most of what we see in a triangle is lines.  The lines come in various proportions to each other but what determines the proportions and the shape of the whole are the angles.  The visible lines of pastoral work are preaching, teaching, and administration.  The small angles of this ministry are prayer, Scripture, and spiritual direction…Working the angles is what gives shape and integrity to the daily work of pastors and priests.  If we get the angles right it is a simple matter to draw in the lines.”

 

As in Eat This Book, Peterson draws the whole book around a central visual metaphor.  Here, however, it is not annoyingly repeated on every page, but is fleshed out.  In my understanding of pastoral ministry, there is a way in which the parts he names are arbitrary.  What I like about the book, however, is not that I think he nailed the three essentials, but that he speaks about them as very important parts of the pastor’s life, and that he has insights to offer about each one.  I look forward to reading the next one in the series, and I just-a-hair-less-than-loved this book, but I would say that it (like Eat This Book) struggles to offer anything particularly original or insightful when Peterson writes about Scripture and its use in pastoral ministry.  You may disagree.

Over a month ago, I wrote a reflection on my difficulties with entering patients’ rooms.  Much of what I wrote about may have had something to do with my personality.  I am not one to initiate conversations with strangers in normal, daily life.  This week I began feeling overwhelmed again, this time by even the thought of those hospital doors.

            One Tuesday, I did one visit, and then spent 45 minutes transcribing the conversation into a notebook and then a Word file.  It is factually accurate to say that I need to write several more verbatims by the end of the semester and that the most accurate verbatims come from writing down the conversation immediately.  However, to say that I chose those long moments in order to make sure I recorded the patient’s words as accurately as possible is really not true.  The reality was that one visit into the day, I needed a break.

            It’s not that I feel guilty about it.  I was sitting in the break room on the floor.  Nurses knew where I was if they needed me.  After a couple conversations with my CPE supervisor I knew that this “counted” as clinical hours, because I was still making myself visible and available to the floor on which I serve.  What’s more, Duke has no visit quotas for its chaplains.  And at any rate, guilt is not what this is about.  It’s really about noticing for the first time how my outside experiences affect my ministry as a chaplain (hence this reflection’s loopy title).

            Stress Outside: The problem is that I may be transitioning from the United Methodist Church into the Anglican Mission in America.

            Stress Inside:  I have been going through a period of several days of intense anxiety about choosing next semester’s classes, because of how my denominational decision will affect my class requirements.

            Stress Outside: This stress is what was being “acted out” (and I use this in the psychological sense of my conscious actions and emotional state being determined by unconscious emotional sources within me) in my sense of being overwhelmed on my unit.

            Stress Inside: I internalized this inability to enter rooms as a failure to be doing what I needed to be doing, a failure of faithfulness, not just to the CPE program, but to God’s call on my life.

            Just like it sounds, that’s a lot of stress to bear.  Although I recognized long ago that my experiences affect my chaplaincy in a macro- sense (hopefully a no-brainer), this week showed me the same truth in a micro- sense.  Not only do all of my life’s experiences determine the shape of how I listen and care for patients in general, but the stuff that’s going on in my life today determines the shape of the visits I make today.  It’s something I’m glad to be aware of.  It’s also kind of scary.

Last week, my on-call followed two nights of six or fewer hours of sleep.  The day before mine was terribly busy, and the person whom I relieved had only been able to lie down to sleep at 4:30 in the morning.  This was good news for me, as long as the general pattern held—busy night followed by slow day.  But my night was well-punctuated—one call every two to three hours.  The final page came in at 6:10 a.m.

            It was for a family in the Pediatric ICU, whose child had been flown in from South Boston the night before after some type of critical incident.  I never knew what had caused her condition (but I overheard something about sickle cell from some nurses who also referred to her as “the girl who’s dying in xxxx”), and I never looked at her chart.  When I arrived, the mother was with two other family members in the conference room.  I introduced myself to her, and all she could say was, “So, do you want to come see her?”  We walked into the child’s room, took both parents’ hands in mine (the father was already in the room) and we began to pray for their child just as she coded.

            Instantly the room was filled with the medical team.  To my surprise, although they pushed us out of the way, they didn’t ask us to leave.  The parents stood there, the mother crying out to God over and over.  And in the commotion, I was shoved across the room, where I prayed and concentrated on radiating my pastoral presence throughout the room.  (I don’t really think it works like that, but this is not the only time I have found myself trying.)

            Thankfully, the nurse who was charting all the procedures done as the team revived the little girl gave me an opportunity to be helpful: “What’s today’s date?”

            “I think it’s the 24^th,” I said.  As far as I can tell, that’s the best ministry I did in that room.  And when I make that comment, I'm not trying to say I was useless in the situation.  I'm saying that that is the way in which chaplains are sometimes helpful.  That is the way that pastoral care sometimes looks.

For my class Slavery and Obedience I had to read William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man.  He has some great (or otherwise thought-provoking) things to say:

To plenty of American Christians today:
"Prosperity is a right curse and a thing that God giveth unto his enemies.  Woe be to you rich saith Christ (Luke 6[:24])."

While riffing on Galatians 3:28:
"In Christ there is neither French nor English: but the Frenchman is the Englishman's own self, and the English the Frenchman's own self."

On grace (and his syntax can be dense [so I helped out]):
"It is [one] thing to believe that the king is rich and [another to believe] that he is rich unto me, and that my part is therein: and that he will not spare a penny of his riches at my need."

But, since he's writing as a Protestant in 1528, it predictably sometimes has a harsh and anti-Catholic outer layer which needs stripped away to find something beautiful:
"We are called, not to dispute as the Pope's disciples do, but to die with Christ that we may live with him, and to suffer with him that we might reign with him."

Not to entirely let him off the hook, but everybody was anti-everybody else, religiously speaking, for a while there (coming up on 500 years and counting).  If I had owned a first edition of the book at the time, I could have literally been burned at the stake for it under English law.  In fact, Tyndale (who you might know better as the translator from whom the great majority of the King James Bible was 'borrowed') was himself burned at the stake, but only after having his fingerprints filed off.  This was a formal way of saying that he was being stripped of his priesthood and thus could no longer perform the Mass.  If they had only read his book, they would have known that he didn't really want to perform the Mass anymore.  That's a heck of a quote (whether real or legendary) coming from his mouth in the picture that heads this entry.  ("Lord ope[n] the King of England's eyes," if you can't quite make it out.)


( CLICK HERE FOR THE THRILLING SECOND HALF!!! )

One of the distinctive parts of CPE is a thing popularly known as a Verbatim.  At Duke, they call them Pastoral Work Reports.  By any name, a PWR is a tool by which you are supposed to go back into an encounter and analyze what happened, in order to see how the encounter affected you, and to see what other options there may have been that were missed in the moment.  Thought you might want to see one.  (And yes, the identity of the patient is always obscured, as is the identity of the presenter in this case.)

 

 

 

                                   

 

 

 

( Wiithout further ado, click 'ere now!!!!! )