Inside

Jeremy and I were watching a National Geographic special the other night called "Inside: High Security Prisons." At first, Jeremy didn't think I should be watching it, since we had also recently started the first season of the show Prison Break, and I had been having nightmares and queasy feelings about some of the terrifyingly evil characters.

So Jeremy watched the first ten minutes while I was finishing up a row of crocheting and getting ready to take the dog on a walk. I found myself being pulled into it nonetheless and, strangely, feeling comforted.

The story of line of Prison Break is that an innocent man is framed for murder and is awaiting his unjust execution on death row. His genius structural engineer brother, who has the blueprints of the prison tattooed on his body, gets himself thrown in prison with his brother so he can use all his brains and a lot of good luck to break his brother out before execution day. (Interesting note: The story is based in Joliet, Illinois at a high security prison and is set in 2007. In the show, this prison still uses the electric chair, which hasn't been used in most prisons for decades. In reality, Illinois just recently passed a law to get rid of the death penalty entirely. Someone didn't do their research.)

Throughout the story, the main character/genius/rescuer brother, Michael Scofield, finds himself struggling with all the horrors he sees while in prison: inmates shanking each other, hanging themselves, and killing guards without pity. There is one particularly evil inmate who is incarcerated because he raped and killed five children, and he manipulates and sexually torments weaker inmates in the prison. While disgusted by him, Scofield has to work with him in order to help his brother escape.

The National Geographic special, on the other hand, looked and felt very different even though its subjects were much more evil criminals with many more horrible crimes under their belts. Filmed within the fortress of a super-max prison, where the most dangerous and violent perpetrators are sent (most come from other prisons, sent to the super max because they keep fighting with and even killing other inmates), camera crews were in close proximity with men who had between them destroyed the lives of thousands of people through murder, rape, and absolute savagery.

But somehow, I found myself more disturbed by the fiction than the reality.

At first I thought it might have something to do with the lack of dramatic music, or the lack of unbelievable, high stress situations that the main character faced in the obviously less realistic fictional show. But the more I watched the more I realized it was more than that.

First of all, both shows deal differently with this question: does goodness and justice exist?  Part of the tension of Prison Break is that you struggle with knowing who to trust. Besides Scofield and his brother, nearly everyone else seems crooked to the core, with the guards taking bribes and the Secret Service as the bad guys, framing Scofield's brother and hunting down the rest of his family to use for leverage. Even Scofield has to do some things that go against his conscience in order to survive. While the fight is for justice, the things that are sacrificed for that justice make it almost not worth it.

In the reality of the super-max prison, on the other hand, justice, while still imperfect, is clear. Guards are normal people, just doing their job routinely and thoroughly. When an inmate gets into a fight with another inmate, their charges are written up and reviewed by an unbiased third party (i.e. not a prison employee) and the inmate has a hearing with the disciplinary officer, warden, the third party, and any legal counsel he requests where he can plead either guilty or innocent to his charges. His punishment is then set out as an amount of days he has to spend in solitary confinement, depending on the severity of the charges and the amount of disciplinary points he has already accrued. Even after sentencing, he can always write a letter to the warden requesting a second look and a reduction of punishment.

No crooked guards, no innocents framed, no conscience-killing choices between darker and lighter shades of gray. The rules, punishments and rewards were clear. The employees had not committed crimes. The inmates had. And each inmate knows the crimes for which he has been imprisoned, even if he doesn't regret committing them.

The second, and I think bigger, difference was this: the inmates in the super-max prison were human. They are human. In one perspective, that almost makes things scarier; these people, just like you and me, have torn people apart with their own two hands, raped, destroyed, killed. But on the other hand, I was reminded that they aren't somehow godlike in their evil. They are not supernatural, they are not immortal, they have weak spots. They are humans who have been twisted, who have chosen to do horrible things while other people have chosen to do good things (or at least, not illegal things). And in the end, whether in prison or out, they will die and come face to face with their creator. Unlike the characters in Prison Break, who seem to be unlimited in their evil with no one to stop them.

But more than just the fact that these men are going to die someday and face judgment for their actions, my real comfort came in seeing the near-hilarity of their sinfulness--what all of us have in common with them. Jeremy noted that one inmate who was interviewed about why he always ended up in fights sounded like a boy who has just been pulled into the principal's office after giving another kid a bloody nose at recess. They make excuses, they protest that they have good reasons, that the way they live is the way they have to live. There is no other choice, and they shouldn't be to blame. Whatever they did, it was justified. The punishment, though they might not deny that they deserve it, is always unreasonably severe.

One man interviewed told the story of how he once killed and chopped into tiny pieces another man who had insulted him. After telling the whole story without emotion of any kind, he put up his chin proudly, as if to say, "That's just what happens if you insult me. He should have known better. He deserved what he got."

And yet, when their punishments were read out, the mask of violence and toughness slipped just slightly enough to see the abused and broken little boys underneath.

All of us are these men. We just haven't made the choices they've made to end up where they are, haven't bred sin within us to the extent that it has completely destroyed our lives and the lives of others. But the seeds of all of it are within us all the same. And there are other things that we water in secret, things that are not illegal, more easily hidden. Secret lusts and hatreds, envy, and our precious idol most in common with theirs: pride.

Jesus relates anger to murder during his sermon in Matthew 5. All kinds of sin, he reminds us, have the same root, all grow from the same poisoned soil of our perverted and twisted hearts. All of us are murderers and rapists filled with a destructive evil on the inside, all of us locked up in a super max prison built for us by our forefathers and fortified with our own hands. Little children beaten and abused, we have grown up to hurt others in the same way, and we suffer the punishment of absolute isolation for our crimes.

He sees all this, but instead of leaving us where we deserve to be, he died a death much worse than the electric chair in order to not only pay the price of our evil, but also to effectively abolish the evil we have inherited and nurtured inside ourselves. He sets us free not just from prison, but from the things that put us there.

Sometimes, I think that I am the worst of sinners compared to other people I know and that there is no way God could possibly stand my pathetic self for more than a few seconds at a time, that he won't let me into heaven simply because he can't bear to be with me. I hear myself say, "Well, at least you're not a murderer," and feel the hollow echo of the lack of the comfort this thought was meant to provide.

In the show, I did see the hearts of murderers, and realized that they aren't any different from my own, or from those belonging to people who made me feel so insecure, not when considering our innate sinfulness. The only difference I could point to was that grace given to me freely, nothing more and nothing less. Beyond all reason, he chose to save me, for no reason other than his own glory. And in that, I see the only true comfort I could ever find.

We are those men, and he loves us still. We are those men, and yet he has sacrificed everything for us. He is the ultimate judge, wielding the only true justice, and yet he has chosen mercy. In this, all of us have the only hope of freedom through change, from the inside out.

With Child

I knot the lines of your first blanket,

Child, though you are not mine

I hold your weight in my belly all the same.

Like an unspoken promise, one read in

Eyes and lips and subtle hands,

Are the flutters of your non-existence within me.

I loop and loop yellow yarn for your mother

But really for you, child I have not met,

Wishing you were mine, flesh of my flesh,

Blood of my blood. But you are not,

And so I knit you a blanket

Dreaming of that one whose life

My life will knit together.

Blank Pages

blank pages, you mock me

singing your song of perfect

nothing

pen marks only mar.

dare to write, you chant,

create, you our ridiculous god,

begin what isn't.

but i hear another ancient song

and write what has already been

written and sung and lit into flame,

myself being the perpetuation of

exponential imperfections

multiplying the mysterious workings

of deformities forming

the very flesh of beauty.

Amos 8:1-2

Amos sees a basket of ripe fruit
What do you see? says the Lord
I see a basket of ripe fruit
The time for judgment is ripe
Sweet smelling, shiny-skinned
Juiciness running down between fingers
Like blood on the hands of the murderer
We all pay for the sugary nectars
Under our tongue, turning bitter,
Rotting away our teeth
We cannot speak in our own defense
Our mouths overflowing, full of the fruit
Of our own destruction
I am only saved if you take my plate away
For I can do nothing but eat
What my own hands have prepared
So many dead bodies
Silence

Falling

leaves you float
falling
shocking gold carpet
beautiful in death

tiptoeing softly over
in shiny gold shoes
I hate to bruise you
friends

frozen I soak up your sunshine
as my hopes fall
fluttering
loneliness my constant winter

in death and life
beautiful
if I could only join you
in your sleep

Crabapple Tree

Fruit sweet, mostly sour,
(I can eat more than anyone)
We gather up in black garbage bags,
Not really sure why.
I tell them we will sell them, or
Make pies. Mostly I eat the good ones,
Keeping an eye out for worms.
Once I ate half of one,
The other half wriggling, dying, in the white circle
Left by my last bite.
We built a ladder from old rope
And sticks, even though the tree was small and we could reach
The lower branches. Adventurers use rope ladders, I told them.
It broke while I climbed it,
My wind knocked out on the roots. But I didn't,
Wouldn't tell anyone it hurt. I laughed and said
Oh well. The cold grass felt good on bruises
Anyway.

Forgetting

I can't remember a lot of things nowadays. My boss always makes fun of me for being absent-minded, forgetting how to do things she's told me a few times. It's always extremely embarrassing, because I pride myself in my ability to remember silly pieces of trivia that impress people, trivia that I never really have a chance to bring up at work.

Today at church we were talking to a friend about the Roman empire and the downfall of Greece, and somehow I remembered that Alexander the Great died young and Greece was split up between his generals, making it weak and easily conquerable by the Romans. The friend asked, "Did you go to Moody?" (assuming, of course, that I went to Moody Bible Institute with my husband and therefore took an Old Testament class that included ancient history). When I told him no, he asked, "Then how do you know that?" I didn't know what to say, so I made some flimsy attempt at explaining that I'm good at that sort of thing without sounding pretentious.

So I remember the history of the Greek nation from a freshman classical literature survey class, but I can't remember where to find the double tab manila folders that my boss is wanting me to retrieve.

I also can't remember anything I liked about high school. Sometimes, I can't remember the good friends I've had, but only the ones that have left or betrayed me. I can't bring to mind a time when I've been truly happy in church, or when I've really felt completely saved and at peace with God. I can't remember ever liking myself.

It would seem that I have a memory problem.

Even as a natural pessimist, I know that my life has not been all bad. In fact, I have had a rather good life if I try really really hard (giving myself a headache in the process) to think about all the good things I've seen, done, learned, loved, and lost.

But there are difficult, painful things that I've faced as well, things that have hurt my soul, and they seem to be the things that I remember. Why is this?

I think one reason is because I don't want to forgive myself for my own part in making my life miserable. Moving on would mean letting myself be happy, even after all the ways that I've screwed up myself and others. Because I am not so delusional that I don't know how I've hurt others as much as they've hurt me; we're all, even unintentionally, little fleshy vehicles of destruction. In a lot of ways, through my own choices and actions, I've hurt myself and those around me. And I want to make myself pay.

Another reason is because I want to make sure that God and the world know that my pain is important, that it really, really hurts (at this point you are allowed to roll your eyes at me, I can't see you anyway). Those punches that I took, the pieces of myself I lost bit by bit, the gashes and rips I've collected over my measly twenty two years, I want those to mean something. I want my suffering to matter somehow. Which, in and of itself, I don't believe to be a bad desire. God does care about our pain, and suffering of all kinds is evil. When it means, however, that I hold on to my pain to make other people feel sorry for me instead of healing and using my experience to help heal others, this is a problem. I'm just sitting in a puddle of my own filth, so to speak, calling to the passerby to help me out but not taking the hands that are offered.

I know I'm not alone in this. I can't name names, of course, but, while I don't excuse myself, I have seen and copied some bad habits I've observed in others. Church, school, family, friends: we are all human, and we all seem to have bad memories concerning the way things really are.

I also know that I'm not alone because I know there are a lot of other people who visit the pharmacy for my same prescription. Lately, I've had to start taking medication due to this particular form of memory loss; namely, the type that causes me to remember only the bad things and therefore makes me extremely anxious and depressed. Ironically, this medication actually makes my "real" memory worse than it was before. So to improve my spiritual memory, so to speak, my Jeopardy-winning trivia memory has had to be decreased significantly.

But it's worth it, because I don't want to live only in the memory of all the dark things I've done, the dark things other people have done to me. Indeed, I can't live this way. My body literally cannot handle the stress and my soul cannot handle the strain of keeping my self together.

I'm sure everyone has heard the phrase, "Forgive and forget." My experience has led me disagree with this maxim. I don't believe forgiveness is ever about forgetting, but about remembering things the right way. I can only forgive myself if I remember not only what I've done wrong but what was done to make me clean in the eyes of God. I can only forgive others not by trying to ignore the scars they so obviously left on my heart, but by remembering that I am just as guilty as they, if not in the same time and place, and that God loves them just as much as He loves me. In fact, forgiveness is really just about remembering that one thing:God loves us.

Forgiving is about remembering, because frankly, there are just some hurts that can't be forgotten. And there is only that one truth that even begin to heal us.

So I'm trying to remember that while I didn't fit in at high school, that there were a few people who showed me kindness; that even in my mistakes I grew stronger and began to see others struggling with the same darkness; that the people who injured so terribly made me cling closer to my God as the only safe place I had left. This is not whitewashing, this is not forgetting. This is remembering the truth that in the end, love wins.

Flesh and Bones

"...I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, 'Son of man, can these bones live?'

I said, 'Sovereign LORD, you alone know.'

Then he said to me, 'Prophesy to these bones and say to them, "Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin. I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.'"

Ezekiel 37:2-6

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 was last Sunday, as everyone in the world knows. "The whole planet mourns with us," they say. But I heard the speeches, I saw the political posturing, I see the American flag, and I felt nothing but a strange emptiness. To me, all of it seems immeasurably hollow. Now, before I am crucified by my readers, allow me explain.

I will start by bringing to mind the example of a high school graduation: music is played, caps and gowns are donned, speeches are given, and a solemn awe surrounding the magnificence of the future is encouraged. But through it all, everyone sitting in the audience and every single student knows the reality is much more than the hollow good wishes of the speech-givers.

No matter how moving the speeches or how emotional the music or how pompous the dress, nothing can be said or done that reflects the depth of how exciting, depressing, terrible and wonderful the future will be for each student, or even the depth of what they have experienced so far in eighteen measly years. So, on graduation day, each student who is honest with him or herself will have the feeling that something is missing.

To me, the memorializing surrounding this tenth anniversary echoes with the same emptiness. It's not that I don't think that 9/11 was a day horrible beyond words. It's not that I don't feel a deep sadness when I think about how many people died, how many families lost someone who couldn't be replaced. But in all the speeches, all the politics, in all the ceremony, I can't help but feel that something is missing.

That something, I believe, is the breath of truth.

I consider in particular our discussions and attitudes towards death and grief. Instead of letting ourselves break down in weeping, or sit in silence under the weight, or tear our clothes in our anguish, we turn geninue mourning into "a celebration of life." We avoid the pain by talking about the good things the dead accomplished before the end. We look forward to the growth that will come out of the ashes. We convince ourselves that they are in a "better place" and cross our fingers behind our backs.

I do not mean to say that some of these things aren't good and proper, when at the right place and time. But they are not grief. They are not mourning. And when they are confused as such, an empty void takes up the place that rightfully belongs to grief. They become something false, a marble statue compared to a real living, breathing person.

When I think of real grief, living and breathing grief, I think of the scene in heaven in the book of Revelation when all the angels and the creatures and God Himself express furious outrage at the murders of Christians during the tribulation. These deaths are mourned, even though a certain hope of their resurrection and eventual glorifcation is expressed at the same time. How does this make sense? It only does when one realizes that to God, all death is evil in and of itself.

We water down this truth. We say, "They lived, a long full life." Or, "They died sacrificing themselves to save another." Yes, these make death more bearable for us, but they do not make it less of an awful separation.

I think we are afraid to face this reality of the evil of death and truly mourn because that would mean admitting that something is wrong with the world. If we are to say that death is wrong, then we are in fact admitting that death is not the way things are supposed to be. In saying this, we are saying that things were originally designed differently, but something, or someone, made a mistake.

We are, in fact, faced with the reality of God.

The atheist cannot mourn death. How can he? Death is the way of all things that are alive, and if no one died, how could anyone live? Death is natural, normal, for lack of a better word. If they are to mourn, the atheist can only (possibly) mourn the contributions to society that might have been made by the person that died "before their time." But if no contribution really matters, because there is no such thing as eternity, then why should he care? The dead will not only pass out of existence, but also out of memory and time, along with the rest of their species one day, and that will be the end of it.

But with God, we have reason to mourn. God hates death. Death is the perversion, the disease, that plagues the world. And so with God, we can hate death as well. We can wail at it, weep because of it, throw ourselves to the ground in grief. With God, the hollow space is filled with truth: death is shown to be what it is, and we feel its weight in our souls.

So when the speeches last Sunday were all spoken, when all the music had been played, when the memorial was been unveiled, something was still missing. That something, someone, is God. Without knowing His tears, how can we grieve? Without knowing He is angry, how can we express outrage? Without His healing, how can we heal?

And without knowing the He died and rose again to destroy death forever, how can we celebrate?

For without Him, this is the way things always have been and always will be: innocents will be murdered and the guilty will go free, the best young men of a nation will die in its wars. So without Him, there is no reason to have a memorial service at all. Without Him, 9/11 is just the way things are. 9/11 is...normal. And we have no reason to mourn.

Without Him, all things are dry bones. Let us pray for the breath that gives flesh to grief, to celebration, to life.

Mashed Brains and Mashed Potatoes

So I said in May that I would begin writing again after a year's absence, but it has only been the competition of a fellow blogger (who happens to be my best friend) that has spurred me to finally fulfill my promise. It has gotten rather embarrassing to hear the doomsday phrase "Have you started writing yet?" every time I talk to her on the phone, so here, Sarah: a blithering nothing to begin.

To be honest, I think I was waiting to sit down and write until I had a moment of peaceful clarity, wisdom, insight, beautiful vocabulary. Unfortunately, and as I should have remembered from the naming of this blog, my current stage of life is one of anything but rare insights and peaceful clarity. My life is a compilation of mostly boring moments. I am not a guru (i.e. MFA student). I am a gerbil on a wheel working in a small enclosure also known as a cubicle. Okay, that was a little harsh. It is actually not all that bad of a place to work, if construction is your thing. Well, if managing construction projects is your thing. We don't actually build anything, we just subcontract with trade contractors to build things. And that's my job: writing contracts. On a scale of one to ten measuring creativity: -12.

As I'm sure you can feel all your creative juices and hope to do something meaningful with your life melting away as I describe my job, I will change subjects. Also, my husband just popped my creative bubble by reminding me that my employers might end up reading this blog somehow (hence the exclusion of my company's name in the previous paragraph). Sigh. No such thing as speech without consequences in the public sphere...

I made the most delicious mashed potatoes in the world a few days ago. I've been taking the leftovers out the fridge and eating them cold. Better than ice cream. Martha Stewart moment:

1. put 10 golden potatoes (the yellow kind with the smooth, thin skin) in the microwave for 25 minutes (if you have a tiny microwave like ours, you might need to do more than one batch)

2. cut up hot potatoes with the skin still on and put them in your mixer

3. add a stick of butter, softened

4. mix potatoes and butter using the whisk attachment (if you have an awesome KitchenAid mixer). don't use too much speed or you'll get a chunk of blazing hot potato in your eye!

5. when you've mixed a potatoes a little, add a little bit of milk at a time. you're going to need a lot more than you think. keep adding until your potatoes aren't sticky anymore (you know what I'm talking about)

6. add salt, pepper, and more butter if you want

7. eat up!

Okay, so I'm not Martha, but I know my comfort foods. And nobody can put a black mark on my record for talking about how good I am at making mashed potatoes. Except, perhaps, Martha, who could very well sue me for using her name without permission...

Through that recipe I came up with ideas for a few more things to write about, but I'm out of time, so tune in again for:

My Husband the Sample Man

Dogs and Their People in the City

Living Miscellaneous

"Perhaps, until one starts at the age of seventy to live on borrowed time, no year will seem again quite so ominous as the one when formal education ends and the moment arrives to find employments and bear personal responsibility for the whole future." - Graham Greene

One year and a week ago today, I found myself self-consciously hurrying across a brightly lit stage, handed a diploma case (without the actual diploma inside), and shooed along into a life I thought I already understood. Marriage June 19th then moving to Chicago and finding a job to pay the bills, I repeated over and over to interested parents and grandparents and parents and grandparents of friends and my mother's coworkers and the professors who didn't know me very well and didn't really care where I ended up, so long as they tried to seem interested as they felt obligated. And I felt obligated to give them this very prescribed answer, to play the part in this last dance of hierarchical roles, until I finally drove away with the final evidences of my college education (ugly bedspread, cheap lamp, etc.) stuffed haphazardly into the back seat of my car.

One year and a week later, I know I could have never anticipated or prepared for this thing we like to call "adult life." (Really, it's not that we become adults after we graduate, but that the falsified semblance of life also known as the college culture has been broken down and carted away, like a movie set after the last scene has been cut.) Though my obsessive note-taking personality would have loved to have taken a class called "How to Be a Functional Member of Society 101" my senior year, I know that nothing I wrote down would have been helpful, partly because no one can ever hope to prescribe to every individual what they would need to know, and mostly because I would have no clue what important points I would need to write down.

So I suppose, in a roundabout way, this explains why I have decided to redesign and begin to write again on this blog. Unlike many other "periods" in my life, I don't feel as if I have changed into someone no one (including myself) knows, so that I must re-explain myself and my every thought in order to be understood. In fact, I would like this refreshing of sorts to move away from the religion of self-centeredness somewhat inadvertently encouraged by the unspoken undergraduate motto, "Discover yourself, develop your talents, be all that you can be." In fact, I would like the posts on this blog, as suggested by the title, to be completely miscellaneous, unrelated to any notion of "self discovery" except for the incontrovertible fact that they are things experienced by me, filtered through my brain, and then written by me. Oops. I suppose there are some self-centered aspects of the act of writing that just can't be avoided.

Back to my abstract explanation. You see, one thing I have learned since graduation is that life doesn't include as many categories as I had been previously led to believe, and yet the categories themselves are sometimes too subtle for us mere mortals to define. There is love and there is hate, no in-between. And yet both love and hate have their subtleties that sometimes disguise them as each other, twin sisters swapping name tags. There is peace and and there is fear, there is hope and there is despair. There are believers, and there are unbelievers. Though the unbelievers like to pretend they are saved, while we sometimes like to forget that we are, and it is easy to get confused.

I thought (a self-centered statement already, dang it) that my blog should come to reflect this. Life is, in short, miscellaneous. The large categories are all that matter, and yet the larger categories never seem to cut it in terms of understanding, of really seeing and knowing. There are no Sparksnotes for life, no back-of-the-book synopsis, no Life for Dummies how-to guide. Life is a thousand million puzzle pieces, some fitting together, others being pushed to the edge of the table to find a partner or two at a later date. I know they will all fit together some day, but as for me and my house, we can't even seem to find all the edge pieces.

My prayer is that you find hope in the randomness: the randomness of my posts, the randomness of my own scattered existence, the randomness you realize you share with me. It is harder, sometimes, to be confident, hopeful, joyful in randomness, the unknown, than it is to be patient in suffering. In suffering, we at least know there is an end. But in the random, the unexpected, the miscellaneous, there is no preparing, no enduring, only a living within, a trying to keep your footing while you're walking on the water. But when you begin to see the beauty of this uncertainty, how it points you toward the only true stability, hope grows into something close to joy.