Driver's Ed.

Let's waste time

Chasing cars

Around our heads.

- Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol

As some of you might know, Bethel is not accessible by road from the outside. It makes me think of Pleasantville sometimes when Reese Witherspoon's character asks, "Outside of Pleasantville? Like, what's at the end of Main Street?" and her teacher replies, "Mary Sue. You should know the answer to that! The end of Main Street is just the beginning again". Most of the roads within the town are winding bumpy silt roads that weave you around the residential areas. There are two "stoplights" (and by stoplight I mean yellow blinking lights) on the one "highway" (and by highway I mean a paved single lane road where going 40mph feels like you're Marty McFly driving the Delorean it's so fast). With this in mind, this is one of the reasons why people don't normally lock their cars. Because if someone stole it, seriously where are you going to go? Despite this, we had heard that recently there was a "high speed" car chase around town that only ended with one of the guys running out of gas or something. I would love to know what brought such an endeavor on and how they thought it was going to end.

When I have access to Fr. Chuck's church truck when he's gone I usually drive some of my roommates to work in the morning. Now many of you from home that have seen me drive can sympathize with Michael's comment to me this morning where he said as I was waiting to turn back onto the highway, "You know, this is the scariest part of my day". See the problem is, is that I can't always tell how far away a car is or judge how fast it's going. So I have this constant interior monologue of, "Oh here comes a car... should I go... now? No it's too close... crap no it wasn't I should have gone... Should I now? Uhhh no too close too close. Oh it's clear... crap, no it's not, but I'm in the middle of the road anyway... go go go!!!" After Michael had said this my response was, "well I've never actually killed anyone so that's good". Oh if the DMV only knew.

All of this discussion about driving got me thinking about that proverbial driver's wheel in my life. Then lyrics from a favorite Incubus song draw my mind's attention: Sometimes, I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear/And I can't help but ask myself how much I let the fear/Take the wheel and steer. Do I drive my life the way I drive a car, where I'm either too cautious or too head on? Do I like knowing the rules and guidelines while simultaneously not being able to see when to use them? Or am I like those men chasing each other around a town that has no exit? Why is there no road map in life or to God's Divine Will? Or is there and we are too distracted to notice?

I keep thinking about that car chase. Maybe they just felt stuck, confined by the bordering tundra. Perhaps it was representative of their caged emotion, unable to get away completely yet unable to control its movement within you. That stirring seething fiery emotion that chases reason around inside of you until it just can't anymore or it explodes. Though it probably sound idiotic to say, but I admire those car chasers. Sometimes I want to just be able to through reason out the window and let it disperse as it crashes on the hot pavement. Allow emotion, spontaneity, and lunacy to drive me, rather than me driving them away as I sometimes do. I'd also love to schedule an appointed "loose my mind" time, perhaps on a bi-weekly basis...just kidding.

Maybe what I'm really getting at in this reflection is to simply say, "wake up!". Do what you need to do to realize the potential of each day, to be able to quiet our souls enough to hear God say "this way" or "that way", to remember that we're alive (hopefully without doing harm to ourselves or to others that is). We get so caught up in everything. I've even got caught up writing this post because I've been trying to multitask. Carpe diem. Seize the day and make it live.

If I lay here

If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old

Show me a garden that's bursting into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars

Around our heads

Lunch Break

My poverty is not complete: it lacks me. - Voces by Antonio Porchia

Last week or so, a very special and personal event happened that I will remember and cherish for forever. It was my roommate Erin's turn to make dinner. And she made it very well. The dish she made was superb. It was something of a culinary fantasy that reminds you that you have a palette, and a fine one at that. This dish that I had never had before that gave me such joy was grilled cheese. Or as Lemony Snicket's Count Olaf might say, it's the Swedish term for cheese that is grilled. I'm not entirely certain as to why I had never given grilled cheese a try before, but I am not going back to such a life of deprivation. So to Erin, I am eternally grateful.

In any case, a discussion about the price of bread and cheese ensued because of how expensive it is up here, which then got us talking about how much we work for the amount of pay we receive and the perspective that we should keep that we are volunteering. But then an unsettling realization began to cloud over me as I pondered this word that I had written about in my first reflection: volunteer. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a volunteer is defined as, "a person who freely offers to do something" and "a person who works for an organization without being paid". Especially in terms of the second definition, what am I doing here? Or even still to echo Hamlet's resounding question in its agelessness, "to be or not to be" a volunteer... to be or not to be who I thought I was going to be when I signed up for this program.

Why is my work at the Church considered my "position" rather than my job? I get paid to do it, though not much. Yet, what is much? According to Globalissues.org, half of the world accounting for three billion people lives on less than $2 a day; UNICEF reported that 26,500-30,000 children die each day due to poverty; less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen; 20% of the population in the developed nations, consume 86% of the world’s goods; and the list goes on and on.

We hear these facts and figures time and time again. We take mission trips, immersion trips, and study the problems and solutions behind modern Gothic architecture walls and 1 1/2 inched grass that you can't walk on. But where is this poverty? Where is this concept that we want to volunteer for, however you define volunteering? Yes it is in those empty bellies, in the facts, in those idealistic papers we write, on the news, out your front door, and maybe even in your home. But I ask you where should this poverty be? In your heart. A poverty so rich in humanness, in reality, that it holds and embraces in place our restless souls just looking for the answer to that question, "to be or not to be" or "why am I here". It calms us in the depths of our heart's floundering to breathe in that breath of clarity so we look at that answer of charity. It is the poverty that is and it is the charity that does.

It is true what they say that money cannot solve poverty, that would be missing the point. I want poverty to be in my heart, and not just around me or in my thoughts. How do I find that poverty that is always hungry to give, always thirsty for truth, and always yearning for the good? Poverty that is a vow to our interconnectedness, to dependency on charity that is to be given and charity that is to be received. Can I find it by working with my education from the top down through governmental organizations or from the bottom up? Can I still have it in my heart if I make a lot of money, but donate some of it and invest in my future children's education? Must I teach them this idea of poverty through monetary poverty additionally and always? It's one thing for me, but would it be another if I ever have a family? ... I digress.

How we are called to live this out I don't know. What I do know, is that Christ told us, "blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God" (Mt 5:3). And in that sense poverty is not just a way of living, but a way of being.

Is your heart complete? What do you lack?