Advent

Every time I hear Handel's Messiah I cry.  My love affair with this three hour piece of music begins in high school when I first hear it performed by Westminster's Ensemble choir and symphony.  Brian Baumgartner, now famous for his role on the Office, slams into a big drum during a performance of "For Unto Us a Child is Born."  Then the entire choir belts out, "And His name shall be called.  Wonderful! Counselor! The Mighty God! The everlasting Father.  The Prince of Peace."  And I am hooked.  My faithful friend and roommate treks over to Duke chapel with me almost every year of college for their performance of the Messiah.  Even my children succumb during a children's performance in Portland.

 Unexpectedly, it is not the Messiah but the Portland band The Decemberists that brings tears to my eyes on this first day of Advent.  Tossing together a plate of Thanksgiving leftovers for the girls,  I slip the newly ordered CD into my laptop. When I actually lived in Portland I didn't listen to this band, but now far away from its culture and place my eyes start brimming with tears.  When the tears start dropping into my children's leftover mac&cheese I hit repeat again.  Why do we do this to ourselves?!?   I decide to just let it ride and enjoy the music.

Grammy & Pops!

Parking

It's the holidays. 

We all need a little extra cash.

 Chicago is trying to make up its own budget deficits.

How?

By PARKING TICKETS.

But I think Evanston and Wilmette 

have turned parking sign delirium 

into an art form.

See if you can figure out from these photos why,

to park on the North Shore,

you need

a calendar,

 a Northwestern football schedule, 

a ruler, 

a tape measure,

 a holiday schedule, 

 a clock,

and maybe a PhD in logic too.

Sometimes I wonder why the cities 

don't save themselves a little cash on printing

 and just say...

Happy Thanksgiving

From the Little Family

In the Big City

11-11-11

Happy 40th Jason!!!

1 year

3 years

Can we bring back the hair wave?

Senior in High School

August 2011
Summit of the Grand Teton

How Do You Look?

How do you look?  Have you checked?  Caught a passing glance in a reflective storefront window or a long stare in the bathroom mirror?

But how do you look... at others? 

In my last blog entry I introduced Anna Karenina to you as she sat on a train having illicit thoughts about a man.  But what happened after that train ride?  Tolstoy tells us that when Anna got off the train “the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. ‘Oh, my God! Why do his ears look like that?’ she thought” (Tolstoy 120).  Really, ears?  After that dramatic scene in a moving train this is what we get?  Gary Morson points out this famous passage to draw our attention to the way Anna makes a tiny choice to see her husband in an uncharitable light.  By beginning to see in this way she justifies her own guilt, so that it is his unattractiveness and not her unfaithfulness that dominates her mind.  Morson writes, “The more she ascribes lack of feeling to [her husband], the more she comes to see him that way automatically” (84).

Do we do this?  Do we make quick decisions about a person and then fixate on the negative in order to justify ourselves?  How often do we pick people apart so we can feel better than them, not intimidated by them, or more justified in who we are?  Have you ever stood in a grocery store line silently staring at magazine covers hoping to find a flaw in the beauty that shines on the glossy covers?  Why do we delight when the powerful, the beautiful, or the rich mess up?  Deep down do we revel in the failure or demise of those we envy?  Or closer to home, how often do we criticize people in our lives or undermine their accomplishments so they do not threaten our own sense of ‘being better?’  

Morson points out Anna’s reaction to her husband’s ears to show how the tiniest decisions we make about people are often quite ordinary.  Usually we don’t condemn all at once, but bit by bit we adjust our perception of another, focusing on the negative, until we can justify our behaviors or thoughts toward them.  Morson writes,

“We can look charitably or uncharitably. We can pay attention only to what is worst in a person; everyone possesses characteristics that can be seen as irritating or repulsive.  Tolstoy wants to teach us that what we do at every moment of our waking lives-how we look and direct our attention- has supreme moral value precisely because it is so ordinary, precisely because it forms habits” (Morson 84).

How would our relationships change if we viewed others not with a critical eye to make ourselves feel better but with an eye to find the beautiful in them and rejoice in it? 

Today, as you move through your day, how do you look?  On what will you focus?  That which makes you feel better about yourself by picking another apart?  Or that which is truly unique and special about the person?  Will you fixate on their faults and tear them down in your mind?  Or will you seek to find the good to appreciate even if it means making yourself less?

Knowing we are loved by God and knowing that our brief little lives really DO matter in the eternal story of redemption gives us the freedom to rejoice in who God made others to be. Knowing that in Him we can see others with a more accepting love, we are free to be ourselves and love better. Those small little decisions we make about people affect the way we love them. His ears. Her voice. The way he does that.  The way she always does this.  Morson argues that “each uncharitable act of looking is a choice” (85).  

Knowing that God, in His mercy, has looked upon us and made us beautiful in Him, we can see others with the same grace.  How would our hearts change if we sought, by His grace, to look with an eye of charity.  Might these charitable reads on people actually bring us closer to them?

So, how will you look? 

If Life Could Write

A woman sits on a train trying to read a book.  Her mind wanders dangerously to thoughts of a man she shouldn't be thinking about.  The train gets hot and hotter until her surroundings blur from reality into a frightening dreamlike nightmare.  A fur cloak becomes a beast and returns to a cloak as she slides a paper knife slowly down her neck. A peasant is gnawing on a wall... or is he merely checking the temperature in the train?  Shapes and sounds swirl around her as she hears fearful shrieking and banging “as though someone were being torn to pieces.”  She feels as “though she is sinking down.  But it was not terrible, but delightful.”

The latest in late night television?  Some dark horror movie with an erotic bent?  Nope. Leo Tolstoy, my friends, drawing his readers into the mind and imagination of Anna as she begins her descent into her own desires and cravings.  Will they destroy her?  You’ll have to read the novel.  I can’t spoil it for you.  It is just too good.