on good morning, monday

this week, i decided to start listening to the songs wrapped in memories of different times and places so as to fashion a congruent line between my lives. it'll make me believe in everything again, that the day is opening up for its own possibilities, that the beach is only a bike ride away will be as magical as it was when i first heard this song!!

if this were xanga, i could say what i was currently listening to as effortlessly as pressing a button; instead, you have to imagine the soundtrack to my memories. trust me; it's delightful.

on the whole

everything, if it could breathe, would exhale a gigantic sigh as though the whole earth being porous could squeeze and release all the air pent up inside itself. and, what a tremendous sigh–like a wind that could blow off your hat. all the kids on swingsets and the pushers of kids on swingsets across the world could do underdoggies beneath each other without the peril of hands pressed on plastic seats and ferocious sprinting from behind to below to in front.

it was simpler then, i'll say. life should always be as simple as this. the most terrifying thing in the world should be a gust of wind and the sensation of a friend passing underneath you on the swingset.  or, the most complex thing in the world should be the monkeybars, i could say that, too. the biggest thing we ever do should be climb to the crest of a slide and slip down, courageously, into the mulch below.

instead, i can feel the world breathing beneath my feet.  there was nothing more sure than that the ground would be there at the end of a slide, underneath the monkeybars, at the bottom of a long jump (on the count of 3-2-1) from a swing. but, the ground sags and heaves, rumbles and groans under the weight of ambitious feet–boys who have outgrown the playground but refuse to leap from swing to floor and land as adults on uneven earth.

but, there will be touchdown. one day, we may look like the men in ties and cleanly pressed shirts in coffeeshops on lunchbreaks, talking on blackberry cellphones and saying things like, i look forward to it!! sounds like a winner!! until our neatly-styled hair recedes and we make phone calls like these, to confirm meetings, to talk business over lunch, we'll look at it flabbergasted, how could we become this?!? what will we be looking on at boys in coffeeshops, thinking of ourselves when we were this young, disheveled and lost??

but, we're lost. both of us, me in my tattered jeans, him in his pleated khakis. and you're lost, fingers on a keyboard, eyes to the screen.

the man who just left the bathroom, he looks like Lorne Michaels, except chubbier; he's also taking a handful of free cinnamon bagel samples and stuffing them into his pockets. he knows what he wants. i'll be him and wear my hawaiian shirt in suburban ohio, take free samples without any regard for how much taking would qualify as theft.

on stacking everything I own

most of it fits in boxes–books, clothes, kitchen knives, dvds. and, it will all be on the road soon, headed across states and states. i'll be the one on the road, listening to podcasts with the seats folded away, boxes meticulously tucked away. setting the cruise-control, i'm going to sweep across this country, starting here in the midwest and ending up in the northeast.

because when there's nowhere you're supposed to be, there's everywhere you're gonna go. i'm going to chase God through city blocks in Chicago, to the North Woods of Wisconsin, to Indianapolis, through Ohio, until God hits the sunrise on the Atlantic in Rye, New Hampshire. when that sun breaks across the horizon and the air heats up, the sea sprays against the rocky coast and we're all there. we were all wrapped up in it; now, we're being unfolded with each wave. then, we'll eddy behind neglected sandcastles until another wave takes us out to sea.

we're drifters on an endless sea–try that for a cliché. put words like that on a roadtrip; see how the mixing of road and sea suits entire days spent in cars. an endless sea, that suits the whole of what it is right now.

graduated without much place else to go but drift–i should build a raft out of fallen trees, rope and other island-survivor miscellanea.

on what stands in the way

Roadblocks are big, and they look like sociology papers, portfolios and professors.

on hope

It all comes to a point. As Fr. Richard Rohr says, "Cynicism comes far too easy. Cynicism is the easiest thing. It doesn't take surrender, love, kindness, patience, virtue to be a cynic ... We're not called to cynicism; we're called to faith, to living in the threshold, to living with our feet in both places, to trusting and respecting both worlds–the world as it is and the world as we believe it could be or should be."

It's not sustainable, emotionally or physically, to despair. But, it is at the precise moments of despair that the end of human possibilities are clear. We are simply not capable.


One morning, months ago in Kampala, I awoke at Bishop Zac Niringiye's home and began taking a cup of tea; he was in the frontyard, doing a morning round of exercises with a jump rope. Eventually, he came inside, slightly winded, and greeted me. Apparently engrossed in a thought, he heaved a sigh and gave me these words:

Oh, Jo-el, he said. You are entitled to nothing. You deserve nothing. Nothing that you have you have earned.

He smiled with as broad a smile as I've ever known, the corners of his mouth curled upward and his eyebrows raised. Everything, he said and paused. Everything is a gift of grace. At that, he tossed his jumprope over his shoulder and continued, Jo-el, you are single.

I hummed in agreement. He indicated that Moses, too, was single–Moses, being his nephew whom lived in his home. Moses, sitting in the living room, affirmed it and came into the dining room. Zac said, Don't live life wanting just to be married. Don't live life always anticipating the next moment. The best preparation for the next step is to live fully in this given moment.

Everything is a gift of grace. He laughed heartily, not condescending in the least, on the contrary, affirming and assuring.

I still hear that laugh and remember the assurances of his presence. I long to be content with that presence; I think that cynicism is a sort of discontent improperly emphasized. Hope is discontent tempered in the belief that there will be a better day than this one and the practice of appreciation for the grace that this day holds. Surely, to hope must come after despair, under the feelings that nothing is happening, and that nothing will happen again.

But, despair is not a complete sentiment; it cannot be. To live fully in the moments of despair has to mean that we ultimately believe in hope, believe that the dynamic hope of Christ is real and bodily and here.

Seeing more fully and living more fully is an unfolding of that hope and the way in which it is woven into the grace of every given moment. I'm beginning to see again.