word limits

I went to the symphony two weekends ago. A rare chance at cheap tickets, an excuse to visit the Meyerson, and a way of crossing off one of the things on my to-do-before-i-leave-Dallas list.

It was incredible. The orchestra, the narrated piece using Abraham Lincoln's speech, the jazz violinist and her quartet.

And I was envious, particularly of the violinist.

She did, could and can express herself through music, playing with her whole being- sentiments, thoughts and emotions conveyed with nary a word.

I sat there, listening, and I felt the limitations of words. Of how confined they are, how strict in their form, in their meaning, in their incessant need to draw lines, create definitions and clarify.

Music is limitless. Words constrict and impose order upon things, one line after the next, telling a story, making a point. Perhaps poets operate outside of this feeling of constraint. But as a journalist, a writer, a student, music feels limitless in ways that words are not.

I love words. I have always loved words and languages. I just finished spending the past 17 years of my life thinking about how sentences can be formed and verbs conjugated and ideas expressed through words. Words, used wisely and with creativity, can tell incredible stories and evoke fierce emotions.

But I was envious. Envious of this violinist and her freedom to speak without uttering or writing a word. Without clinging to the concrete nature of the spoken and written word.

This weekend Katie and I made salteñas. One of our favorite (and more complicated) Bolivian foods, we have waited almost two years to attempt them. In cooking salteñas we brought back a piece of our time in Cochabamba, a moment with our host family, a walk through the city, the mountains, our friends, our work.

Words are not always enough. Sometimes it's food that reminds us- a taste of memories. Sometimes it's music that frees us. Sometimes it's silence and stars.

Words are a part, but not all. In prayer, in conversation, in remembering, in living. Sometimes they are the beginning, the middle, the end- but they never fully encapsulate all that there is to know.

prayer is a place

An excerpt from Prayer is a Place: America's Religious Landscape Observed, written by Phyllis Tickle, mixed with pictures from this weekend's City Arts Festival.




"There are far too many words about prayer these days. It is as if, in our starving, we think a cookbook rather than a meal will feed us. That having been said, there are a few things...almost descriptive principles, if you will....that I do know about prayer. The first is that prayer is a place.



Prayer is a nonlocative, nongeographic space that one enters at one's own peril, for it houses God during those few moments of one's presence there, and what is there will most surely change everything that comes into it. Prayer, its opal walls polished to transparency by the centuries of hands that have touched them, is the Tabernacle realized and the wayside chapel utilized.



Ever traveling as we travel, moving as we move, prayer grips like home, until the heart belongs nowhere else and the body can scarcely function apart from them both.



Prayer is dangerous and the entrance way to wholeness."

-pg. 68

¡Preparate!

The story of David and Goliath is about fighting the giant, about facing that which seems so much greater than ourselves. But I think David and his actions also reveal what it means to respond to life and its challenges in a way that is uniquely ours- a reclaiming of our individual natures, of the innate selves that God has created us to have.

David is the little brother who shows up to visit his older brothers who, along with all of the other soldiers, have spent 40 days paralyzed in fear by Goliath's challenge to fight him. He asks what in the world is going on with all of these grown men and then after the explanation,

"David said to Saul, 'Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine; your servant will go and fight him.'

Saul replied, 'You are not able to go out against this Philistine and fight him; you are only a boy, and he has been a fighting man from his youth.'"

-1 Samuel 17:33

But David explains that his whole life has led up to this offer- he is not without practice as he has been keeping his father's sheep safe from lions and other wild animals, just as the little brother was supposed to. His life experience had uniquely prepared him, the little brother who wasn't even supposed to be at the battle, to fight Goliath. Saul is desperate and so he agrees.

"Then Saul dressed David in his own tunic. He put a coat of armor on him and a bronze helmet on his head. David fastened on his sword over the tunic and tried walking around, because he was not used to them.

'I cannot go in these,' he said to Saul, 'because I am not used to them.' So he took them off. Then he took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd's bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine."

-1 Samuel 17:38-40

Saul tries to prepare David to fight with the things that the soldiers would have worn. With what he would have worn, if he were to face Goliath. David walks in them, but just admits he isn't comfortable.

It's like all the times we put on other people's clothing and just can't make ourselves feel comfortable in them.

Instead of believing that he needs to be like the others in order to fight, David simply takes off the armor and fights in his own clothing, with his staff.

And he wins. He responds to the call out of the resources of the experiences that God has used to shape him, to prepare him, to teach him- he is a shepherd and that is the life he knows, the skills he has.

Saul doesn't get this, he wants him to fight as he would, as a soldier, with armor and all that jazz. But David is secure in himself, in who God has created him to be, so he reclaims his individual nature, sheds the world's idea of what a soldier looks like and approaches the giant in his own clothing, his own skin, as who he is, as who the Lord has created him to be.

I'm in a period of preparation. The physical tasks of learning a language, reading up on the country where I'll be going, deciding what I'm going to pack are unable to be begun because I don't yet know where I'll be going or what I'll be doing. All I know is that I will be leaving.

And so I've been reflecting on what it means to prepare for work that feels wholly outside of my realm, a giant of questions and the deep sense that I cannot go with anything other than the skills, experiences and gifts that God has given me. Preparation of the heart has meant examining what it means to be so wholly comfortable with myself, with who the Lord has created me to be that I might approach as David did- doing the work, answering the call in a way that is innate to who he desires me to be.

To rip away the vestiges of the world's idea of armor, the world's way of doing things, the clothing that will only make me unable to walk, unable to respond, unable to approach.

To prepare myself to be me. Nothing more, nothing less.




Christ lives,
Prepare yourself!
So shouts this cliff on Isla del Sol, Bolivia.





And in other things, I love good summer music. I've been listening to this and this on repeat. Both respective albums are excellent as well.