Writer
“I like to talk about sex.
This is natural for a woman who grew up in a culture that surrounds us with it, who is the product of parents who taught me no topic is taboo. But few who discuss sex with me are prepared for what I divulge:
I’m a virgin.”
Click here to read the rest of this essay I wrote. It’s online now and in print Sunday, June 24, in the Perspective section of the Tampa Bay Times.
I remember this one time I was sitting in front of the TV in the dark crying with a glass of water in my hand. I laughed as I cried because I realized that the light of the TV made the clear water in the amber glass look a lot like scotch.
I really don’t drink.
I especially don’t drink scotch.
So I sipped my water and sat with what I felt. Anger. Loss. Sadness. I wept and I understood it was uncomfortable and temporary.
Sometimes stuff happens. Stuff you don’t want. Stuff that makes your heart throb and your soul ache. Stuff that makes you shake your head and clench a fist and sit in front of the TV in the dark crying with a glass of water.
And this is the sort of stuff that makes you feel a lot of things. Things like anger and loss and sadness. Things that are uncomfortable and temporary.
But the thing about these things is that they are necessary.
They are two kinds of necessary.
First, they are inevitable. If you have a heart that beats, you will feel them at some point.
Second, if you never feel them again, you will never feel their opposites again. You can’t avoid anger, loss and sadness and not avoid things like joy and hope and affection. You can’t numb anger, loss and sadness and not numb things like joy and hope and affection.
You feel them all or you avoid them all.
You feel them all or you numb them all.
And I think that night while I cried and other nights there was part of me that wished what I felt wasn’t so. But I also think there is a part of me that thanks God I feel those things when I feel them. Because that I feel them means I have felt their opposites.
And I think that’s worth it.
Five years ago, my friends Seth and Sarah separately suggested, one within weeks of the other, that I read a book called Blue Like Jazz. So after work one night, I walked to my car from the now-closed Carrollwood bureau, drove to the bookstore down the street and bought a copy.
I read it.
I liked it.
I didn’t touch it again until this year.
Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality is by Donald Miller, and it’s also a movie, as of this year. It played at one Tampa theater for a weekend and I missed it. So in lieu of seeing it on the big screen, I pulled my copy off the bookshelf in my closet.
I flipped through it and found it devoid of notes, but dogeared at the bottom on lots of pages, like I do every time I like what a particular page has to say. As of tonight, Blue Like Jazz is the fourteenth book I’ve read in full in 2012. I liked it better the second time. Frankly, it felt like I hadn’t read it before, like it was wholly new to me, which goes to show how much attention I must have paid it in 2007. Most of the pages I dogeared the first time meant nothing to me this time. But lots of things did mean something to me. Here are some:
On souls unwatched:
“It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in this system of checks and balances. If we get caught, we will be punished. But that doesn’t make us good people; it only makes us subdued. Just think about the Congress and Senate and even the president. The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse.” -page 18
On self absorption:
“‘I’m talking about self absorption. If you think about it, the human race is pretty self-absorbed. Racism might be the symptom of a greater disease. What I mean is, as a human, I am flawed in that it is difficult for me to consider others before myself. If feels like I have to fight against this force, this current within me that, more often than not, wants to avoid serious issues and please myself, buy things for myself, feed myself, entertain myself, and all of that. All I’m saying is that if we, as a species, could fix our self-absorption, we could end a lot of pain in the world.'” -pages 40-41
I’m with Don:
“Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and I honestly don’t care.” -page 103
On belief:
“But the trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn’t like the truth at all because carries responsibility, and if I actually believe those things, I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything.” -page 107
“…what I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do.” -page 110
On boldness:
“I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know form personal experience, however, that you should not keep telling a girl that you like her after she tells you she isn’t into it. You should not keep riding your bike by her house either.” -page 142
From an excerpt of a play Don wrote; lines a husband says to his wife while she sleeps:
“That though He made you from my rib, it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in doing so, revealing Him.” -page 149
“God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.” -page 150
On death to self:
“Bill set down his coffee and looked me in the eye. ‘Don,’ he said. ‘If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.'” -page 185
On understanding:
“Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me.” -page 202
On responsibility:
“I loved the fact that it wasn’t my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God’s, that my part was just to communicate love and approval.” -page 221
– – – – –
Click here to read about all the books I read in 2012.
Click here to read Don Miller’s blog.
Click here to learn more about Blue Like Jazz.
Seventh grade science class.
I faced forward at my desk but reached for the floor to retrieve a book from my bag. In using my hand to find the bag, I felt the floor.
Then I felt the left rear leg of my chair.
Then I felt a tire.
A tire?
“Couldn’t be,” I thought. So I squeezed what I felt — something thick and tough, made of rubber. I rubbed it, built a frame around it using my fingers and thumb, pushed on it and pulled, and squeezed it again. “What is this?” I thought. I had to see.
So, I looked.
Which is when I made the discovery.
What I held in my hand was a shoe.
A shoe propped up against one of my chair legs.
A shoe with a foot in it.
“Ohmygosh!”
I let it go and flailed my arms in the air (like anyone would upon finding a foot).
Which is when it dawned on me that the foot was attached to the body in the seat at the desk directly behind mine. I looked up.
“Hi,” he smiled.
It was Drew.
We lost it. And when the laughter waned, I spoke.
“I’m sorry I squeezed your shoe.”
[callout]This post is part of a series of true stories, called “True Story.” [/callout]
Today’s one of those “I can’t believe I get paid to do this,” days, as in I have the best. job. ever! So while the reporters who surround me chase news and news of thefts and crashes crackle through the police scanner speaker between my desk and my editor’s, I get to read about chastity, love and marriage. Like I said, best job ever. Rather than alarm my colleagues by throwing my fist in the air in a fit of joy, I thought I’d share some fabulous quotes with you. Enjoy!
On sex:
“What can ‘union’ mean when the partners make no commitment to one another, each exhibiting a lack of trust in the other, in him/herself, or in the future?”
On chastity:
“Chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom. The alternative is clear: either [humans govern their] passions and find peace, or [they let themselves] be dominated by them …”
On engaged couples (although parts are applicable to those who are still dating/discerning):
“They should see in this time of testing a discovery of mutual respect, an apprenticeship in fidelity, and the hope of receiving one another from God. They should reserve for marriage the expressions of affection that belong to married love. They will help each other grow in chastity.”
And on marriage:
“It can seem difficult, even impossible, to bind oneself for life to another human being. This makes it all the more important to proclaim the Good News that God loves us with a definitive and irrevocable love, that married couples share in this love, that it supports and sustains them, and that by their own faithfulness they can be witnesses to God’s faithful love.”
and
“After the fall, marriage helps to overcome self-absorption, egoism, pursuit of one’s own pleasure, and to open oneself to the other, to mutual aid and to self-giving.”
and
“It is by following Christ, renouncing themselves, and taking up their crosses that spouses will be able to ‘receive’ the original meaning of marriage and live it with the help of Christ.”
Source: The Catechism of the Catholic Church.