Moving

Currently Reading The Tao of Physics By Fritjof Capra see related

On Sunday my sister Stephanie was baptized, rather belatedly (she is twenty).  This was at Miami Valley Baptist Church For the Deaf and Hearing, the church she has been attending while finishing her degree in Manual Communication.  Attending a church for the deaf is rather strange, as one might expect.  The service is entirely conducted in sign language, with an interpreter translating into spoken English for the few hearing people in the congregation.  The fact that most everyone is deaf means that noise disturbances go unnoticed: babies cry, children talk, adults yawn and cough and shift their position noisily.  When music is played, it is blasted from the speakers at the maximum bass setting so everyone can feel the vibrations.  Prayer is a sort of reverent pantomime; singing, a more expressive variety of the same.

When she took her oaths, my sister never said a word.  Her hands confessed her faith.  Then the pastor's hands became the words of consecration, and, after dancing the threefold Name of God, they plunged her beneath the water.

Currently Reading Baltasar and Blimunda By Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero see related

REAL Ultimate Power: Ninja Workout

Currently Reading Cosmicomics By Italo Calvino see related

So the teaching job fell through, which is rather disappointing.  However, it seems my NSA credits will transfer to Antioch College, which is encouraging and wonderfully ironic.

I'm feeling smugly pleased with myself just recently.  Last week I was able to throw in a good word for a guy I have never met and know of only on the basis of hearsay to his girlfriend.  The guy in question seems to be pretty awesome, and I felt like I was making a small strike for perichoretic hotness.  Also, yesterday I stopped to help a man who had a seizure while driving.  By the time I got to him his convulsions had stopped and his breathing seemed okay, so I checked his mouth to make sure he hadn't bitten off his tongue, helped another guy unbuckle his safety belt and shift him into a better position (he had lurched over to one side), and waited until ambulance came (the police, who arrived before the ambulance, asked my to stay because I had medical experience).  Of course, in the aftermath of these events I've conducted myself as a model of maturity--with preposterous vanity and self-congratulation.

Currently Listening Mitch All Together By Mitch Hedberg see related

Yesterday was my best friend Josh Gibbs' wedding.  The following is a speech given at the reception by the best man (another great friend), Jon Paul Pope:

When I look at Josh and Paula, I see two very creative people—Josh, with your powers of storytelling, and Paula with your gifts in the visual arts. It might be suggested that the union of two artists is a recipe for insanity. This is not the case at all.

 

To create is truly divine. We know that we are not animals because we make things—specifically, because we make things for the sheer sake of making things. Like the God who made us, creating appears to be the kind of thing we do because we need to do it. Artists like you, Josh and Paula, feel this need in a particular way, and it is manifested in your dedication to writing stories and painting pictures. I say dedication because at the very foundation of the creative act is fidelity. 

 

Josh, when you sit down to write a story, if the story is in fact to be written, you must first commit yourself to it. To begin writing is to make a promise—else, it very well may be that nothing is written. Once the first word is on the page a promise has been made, and the rest of the story is written in fidelity to that promise.

 

Paula, in the same way, the choices you make while working on a particular painting flow out of an original promise, a troth to make something. With every brushstroke, you try more and more to render an image that is not yet. It is a fidelity to the not-yet-image that drives your painting.

 

I would say that married artists do not necessarily turn themselves into raving lunatics. In fact there is something of a contradiction that happens when a marriage of two artists falls apart. For marriage is very like a work of art. It is a story. Marriage is a creative act, and like all creative acts it of course requires fidelity to a troth—faithfulness to a not-yet-image. To say that someone is a great artist, but a horrible husband or wife, is to acknowledge only a quasi-creativity. For the real creator is the artist on the page and in life.

 

All of this said, I want to admonish you to beware. For creating in life is not exactly like creating on a canvas or on a computer screen. In marriage you are not the master creator, but rather a sort of character/creator--a writer that writes himself into the plot, a painter that paints a series of self-portraits.

 

God uses the creative act of marriage as a means of sanctification, of further recreating us in the image of his son. In our marriages, we are to create the image of Christ and His church. And, of course, it takes time. Just like writing and painting, surprises pop up, and you’ve got to deal with them. You do deal with them because you made a promise. To refuse is to cease to create—to scrape the canvas, to hit “delete”.

 

Josh and Paula, you are artists. Be creative in your marriage as well. I am young, and I cannot tell you about the marvelous rewards that await your fidelity to each other. But I can say this, that in our marital fidelity, we fulfill a most extraordinary, god-given, and sanctifying need: the need to create.

And my own modest toast:

I would like to propose a toast to the fulfillment of a hope long deferred, and the genesis of new and greater hopes; to the warm annihilation of two persons immersed in each other and raised as one; to unfamiliar sacrifices and unsuspected joys; to the crucible of your shared life--its labors, its fruit; and to a good death like your sleep before your wedding day, anticipating the morrow.  We rejoice together with you today, for the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our sight.

To Josh and Paula...