Van Gogh in Atlanta

Just returned from a wonderful get-away with my good friends from the Trapdoor Society (aka, the Trash Whore Society when the daughter of one of the members misheard her mother explain who she was spending the weekend with). We congregated in Atlanta because one of us lives there and she told us about an exhibit featuring rarely viewed Van Goghs. Like most art-admirers, Van Gogh is my most favorite painter. He expresses so much emotion through all those swirly lines.

It is remarkable to spend time viewing art and then have the time to really discuss it with friends, to go over all the details and the emotions his work evoked etc. I loved having artists with me to hear them work through how they might try to achieve similar effects.

For me, the viewing of art and sharing it with friends is like church. It's a spiritual high.

I've posted three paintings that we viewed here.


Van Gogh befriended the famille Roulin when he lived in Arles (in the south of France) and liked to paint them. I discovered that there are just scads of paintings of this delightful collection of people. We saw two of them: one of the postman and one of his wife. They follow:

Postman Joseph Roulin



La Berceuse (Augustine Roulin)



Of course, the reproductions here lose most of the vibrancy of the originals. And that's what makes Van Gogh so wonderful in person. The "extruded" paint (my new art vocab word for the week—which means globs of paint that raise off the surface) and the way the light bounces off the ridges makes the art come to life.

My favorite is one I have always loved as a print but just felt bowled over by it when I saw it in person.

Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night



(images taken from the High Museum: www.high.org)

I'll post more about the adventures of 12 women who know each other only through the Internet later when I'm rested and have time.

See you Monday

I'm heading out of town over the weekend to hang out with Internet friends and to go to the Van Gogh art exhibit in Atlanta GA.

God bless.

Julie

Martin Luther King Jr.

To celebrate MLK Jr. Day, I thought I'd post quotes from his speeches and letters. I'm now enrolled in the Black Theology course for my spring semester at Xavier and enjoyed watching a documentary of Dr. King's life on Wed. night. I can't understand why the Civil Rights Movement isn't given a more prominent place in our school educations. I lived during those years and yet didn't have a genuine grasp of what they really constituted or meant. To see police turning fire hoses and attack dogs on women and children is too awful to express. I found myself near tears.

The whole idea that segregation lasted 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation... who thinks about it? Well, not me. But I am now. I can see why so many African Americans feel that the struggle isn't over (as much as talk radio asserts that it is). It's been forty years. That's all. Half a lifetime. We want to move on so quickly and forget that our grandparents probably thought "negroes" were inferior human beings. We project ourselves backward into that time and assume we would have marched. It makes me wonder what I am overlooking today that deserves my attention and commitment.

I am also struck by how many similarities there are between Dr. King's thoughts about law and justice and those of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's (I wrote a lengthy paper about his letters and papers from prison last semester). There is much food for thought here as we think about the US role in foreign affairs as well.

Peace,
Julie

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

These come from a page of Selected Quotations of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior.

Family Guy (TV show)

Has anyone seen this cartoon for adults (on Fox)? My teens are crazy about it... and with good reason.

Last night I saw my first episode of Family Guy. The baby talks all the time and is not heard/listened to by anyone. His mission is to eliminate broccoli from the planet so that he will no longer be forced to eat it using Pinky and the Brain kinds of schemes. He speaks with a sophisticated British accent and a highly cultured vocabulary to make his points.



Sometimes this baby hits one out of the park. Last night as his mother carted him off to bed (against his will, of course) he shouted, "Put me down you estrogenical tyrant!"

Next time I'm suffering from PMS, I think I'll shout:

Make way for the estrogenical tyrant!

The Pretty American Missionary

My lower back ached. Hauling my seven-month pregnant body out the door for my daily walk was becoming more of a chore each afternoon. My belly had outgrown my purple djellebba (Moroccan cover up) so I wore a hand-me-down green pinstriped jumper. I was conspicuous as a foreigner, but it couldn’t be helped. Three miles to downtown. I could take the bus back. I walked, determined to loosen the muscles "down there" in order to have a natural birth. My landlady, the nurse, regularly pinched the medicines from her hospital to sell on the black market in our neighborhood, leaving the hosptial without treatments for admitted patients. She also knitted a sweater a day in winter. Nursing care in hospitals didn't offer a comforting vision of attentive, efficient post-op convalescence to say the least. So, I walked.

I merged with the main thoroughfare that ran from Fes to Meknes. I practiced my breathing and got my pace going, arms swinging, belly bulging. Not five minutes into my routine, I heard cat-calls from behind me.

“Hey pretty American. Where you going?”

"Oo, oo oo. Lady..."

No surprise here. Such harrassment was par for the course. But now I had a secret weapon to humiliate ogling men. From behind, my 24-year-old body didn’t reveal my big tummy. I swung side-ways to surprise my two don-juans; they gaped and then burst into laughter. They slapped each other on the arms and strode right by me pulling faces and making a few funny remarks that I didn’t quite catch. They looked back to double check that they had seen me correctly. And laughed again.

I burst into tears. I wasn't angry with them. I wept for them.

Not because they had tried to “come on” to me.
Not because they were rude.
Not because they were two in a long string of Moroccan men who saw right through my clothes to my underwear.

I cried because they were bound for hell and I had no way to save them.

I tried to fix my gaze straight ahead. I sang praise songs to distract me from the familiar tidal wave of anxiety that was mounting inside. Who was I kidding? Everywhere I looked, Moroccans were on their way to hell.

The taxis passing me were full of hell-bound Moroccans. The women with babies strapped to their backs, hands waving in the air, were heading for hell. The street vendors—going to hell. Everywhere I looked, Moroccans had no idea that they were oblivious to the most important fact they’d never know—that without Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, they would spend eternity in torture. Torture—the kind that we don't even allow our government to inflict on terrorists. Hot flames, eternal solitary confinement, pain, horror unspeakable. I believed it all. I believed it more than most of the Christians I knew.

My tears knew no limit. I sobbed for the entire three miles. I had no way to stem the tide of hell-bound Moroccans, no matter how well I learned Arabic, no matter how many friends I made, no matter how much couscous I ate. Everywhere I looked, happy, bored, hardworking, lazy Moroccans were doing time on earth until they would be justifiably judged as rebels against God and sentenced to an eternity of constant, unrelenting, eternity-sized torment. I couldn't bear the image.

My imagination tried to rescue me. Maybe God would save Moroccans without my witness in some mysterious way. Maybe there would be many who would be given dreams of Jesus. Maybe God was about to pour out his spirit in an unprecedented move that would sweep the nation into the loving arms of the Almighty Christian God and I'd be there to watch and celebrate! I breathed in the moment’s reprieve while I prayed fervently for that to happen, for God to be a better missionary than me, for him to care more than I did… until another suffocating vision occurred to me.

How would I be able to tell these new Christians (assuming God would rescue these in the highways and bi-ways before me) that their grandparents and ancestors had been born too early to hear the good news? Their loved ones were already being tortured in hell. They had been born in the wrong place, at the wrong time. (Missionaries had only been in Morocco about a hundred years at that point. Perhaps a total of about a hundred conversions had resulted.)

More tears. We were a million dollars short and centuries too late. Millenia, in fact.

Morocco isn’t like America in almost any way. But it is especially not like a Christian country. Five times a day, a muzzein calls Muslims to prayer. Christmas is a work day. Ramadan (the month of fasting) is the high point of the year. Religion and daily life fuse at every turn from how they greet each other “Peace be with you” to how they curse “God give your mother a fever!” The core of who they are is Muslim, even if they are backsliders and hypocrites.

I'd always read that to be true, but living in the midst of it is something else. There's no relief from the inescapable evidence that Christianity in that world was not Good News, but Bad News. To convert meant that everything that gave Moroccan lives meaning, ritual, celebration, and relational cohesion would be thrown out the window in favor of an unknown quantity. In America, conversion meant joining a community of people who had potlucks and family nights, weekly meetings with music and a place to belong and serve. In Morocco, conversion meant job loss, alienation from one's family (and possible death), being on the government's "list" with fear of impending imprisonment, losing place in the mosque (the community center) and having to be friends with foreigners who speak accented Arabic, primarily (the worst punishment of all, as far as I could tell). What American would do half so much for a religious faith?

There was no simple answer to the unsaved millions, indeed billions, through history who hadn't heard the message about Christ. I reasoned that if we simply trusted to God’s mysterious ways to save those who haven’t heard, then we would be avoiding facing squarely the essential mission of the church as proclaimed to us repeatedly by pastors, forefathers in the faith and Jesus himself: Matt 28. It would have been much easier for me to live in the States near my mother while pregnant than in a foreign country preaching a message in bad Arabic that no one really wanted to hear! If I had believed that God would save them without my help, then I wouldn’t have gone to begin with.

The entire missionary enterprise would have been pointless.

It’s easy to feel good about a few Jesus dreams that God scatters through the Middle East when they are reported in American midwestern churches during missions’ conferences. But even dozens of dreams won’t compensate for millions upon millions who spiritually sleep through their days and nights without any revelation or insight into what Christians consider the core of reality, the truest message ever, the only message that saves a soul.

And it's not enough to say that faithful people will find God and be saved through Jesus without knowing it, as Lewis wants us to accept in his Narnia Chronicles. The numbers don't add up. Most people aren't "faithful" (Christian and otherwise) and doesn't that move us away from "saved by grace" and put us right back into "saved by works"? What constitutes a "faithful life" if we take away faith in Jesus Christ? How many people in the US, for instance, begin life by distrusting their spiritual heritage hoping that God will find them even though they don't know what they are looking for? It's so ludicrous that it can only work as an argument for those who don't want to feel responsible for the lostness of fellow human beings living in far away places and other times.

No. There was a real problem with the theology I'd believed and tried to practice. And I couldn’t face how deeply tortured this version of God’s love was until another ten years went by.

My Spiral Staircase

I've come very nearly to tears five times today. I continue to make my way through Karen Armstrong's poignant and powerful biography The Spiral Staircase. Several people recommended this book to me, in particular, saying that I might identify with some of Karen's journey. On the surface, that seemed unlikely—she's British, I'm American; she was a Catholic nun, I was an evangelical missionary; she's remained single while I married at 22 and had five children.

Yet the spirit of her story is so familiar that I find myself writing my own corresponding chapters in my head. Her time in the convent reminds me of my time as an isolated missionary newly married in an oppressively male Muslim culture. How could that be? What could those experiences possibly have in common? And yet they were similar—similar in the earnestness of my desire to serve and know God, the willingness to subordinate my theological questions and experiences to those in authority over me (including authority like a literal interpretation of the Bible), the sense of alienation from self, the repeated and failed attempts to fit into the culture I wanted to adopt as my own, the chastising voice of my Moroccan landlady that might have been Karen's Mother Superior, the puzzling sense of failure at the thing I had thought God called me to, had designed me for...

She's got me thinking.

The noise that won't stop

I open my book The Pocket Muse and it asks me to write about the noise that won't stop.

There's a humming in my ears that won't stop. And an endless drone of electronics and noises in the room—the whir of the refrigerator, the creaking of my daughter's chair every time she leans back while typing IMs to her friends, the click of the keyboard that won't stop, can't stop because I have so much to do, so much to write and post and fix and prepare, so many connections to make, so many thoughts to silence so I can sleep when I should be sleeping, the pounding feet that charge down the stairs, followed by the clicking of dog nails on the old linoleum and the "Mom, I think Rocky needs to go pee"...

Slide, goes the sliding glass door. Pound, pound, pound go the feet. Another pair race down the stairs, the door slides open again and "Rocky, come on!" as the two bound up the stairs once more. Giggles cascade down the halls and a strange dripping sound that I can't trace creeps into the air when the other sounds take a rest.

A clinking cup, and the shhhh of water—the faucet goes on for the "last drink of the night." The toilet flushes with roaring and splattering and plunking all the way down the pipes in the wall beside me.

My own voice reminds reluctant kids "Time to go to bed now" since they seem unable to stop all the restless padding on the creaky upstairs hallway to finally crawl under soft blankets.

The dog races down the stairs again. He chomps his late night snack, pushing the dried, same-old, same-old food around with his nose. Lap, lap, slurp goes the water onto his long tongue. He slithers away more quietly now. I hear him licking his chops.

Noises... crushing my creative voice that needs quiet... that I thought required quiet, that now seems to be saying, strangely enough, noises draw me in and make me take notice...

Rustling papers, a squeaking door opens and now the low volume of music I don't recognize comes from Johannah's computer followed by the rising "boos" from the Orange Bowl leveled at poor Ashleigh Simpson. The "bing" of email hits my in-box and the familiar tug to abandon what I'm doing to see what someone else wants...

"Mom?"

The one sound that always gets my attention.

Yahweh, by U2

Some visuals to go with the first verse and chorus....

Take these shoes
Click clacking down some dead end street



Take these shoes
And make them fit


Take this shirt
Polyester white trash made in nowhere



Take this shirt
And make it clean, clean


Take this soul
Stranded in some skin and bones
Take this soul
And make it sing



Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born



Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn



I love this song....

Revising my site

My business is on a tear. I'm having so much fun, but I'm just about snowed under. I've got all kinds of pages to fix and revise and am feeling a bit like this:



See you soon!

Breaking out the champagne!

Clink, clink! Here's to Jon and me.



I can finally get off this nifty little slave machine, aka my iBook G4.

I am celebrating my five year anniversary as a business owner. The very first Brave Writer class began five years ago in January 2000. What began as an email list of about 20 women has steadily grown to a business that has served hundreds of families. We cracked the thousand mark this month. Woo-hoo!

In celebration and in further expansion of the services we offer, today Jon and I launched the Brave Writer Lifestyle, my newest Brave Writer program to support homeschooling moms in their desire to teach writing and language arts. Jon redesigned the logo and is responsible for the website design.

Check out my website:

Brave Writer

I've also started a Brave Writer blog:

Brave Writer Blog

We even figured out how to host the blog on my website. No blogspot in the URL.

I've learned more about html and css this week than I ever thought I would in a lifetime. Jon has the real skills, but I'm at least getting a feel for how things are done and am doing some of it myself.

Just had to celebrate a bit!