Brian speaks again

“Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends on how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it sees more—more unseen forms become manifest.”

Brian channeled through Sufi Mystic Rumi

Brain lives!!

Paul H. Jones

Brian's Words of Wisdom

Brian is something of an inside joke that evolved and gained speed on the Transy trip to Turkey and Greece. I wish I could somehow explain Brian. Take the joy of laughter, the pause of contemplation, the humor of Monty Python's Life of Brian, and moments that make you realize that life is a worthwhile enterprise. That is Brian.

Dr. Jones developed Brian with our help over the course of Turkey and Greece, and he continues to remind us that "Brian lives!" through group emails that are always titled "Brian's Words of Wisdom".

The Words of Wisdom of the all-knowing Brian are too rich to discard, so they are now to be added to my blog.

There will be more, as long as Brian continues to live. And Brian alone is immortal.

Word of Wisdom #1, June 15, 2007

Brian was invoked last night by daughter Natalie, so he graced me with these words as channeled through Abraham Joshua Heschel.

“God is of no importance unless He is of supreme importance.”

Brian concurs!!

Words of Wisdom #2, June 22, 2007

“Above all, I contend that something called ‘the faith of the church’ has never existed; truth, whether it be religious truth or any other kind, is always evolving and changing, and the moment truth is codified, it begins to die. That makes it very difficult to be triumphal and certain. We Christians are pilgrims walking into the mystery of God, not soldiers marching off to war. There is a great difference.”

Brian channeled through John Shelby Spong

Brian lives!!

I'm not in Europe

I was just re-reading some earlier posts and realized that the first post of this entire blog indicated that I'd be in Eastern Europe about this time. Well, I'm not. I'm in Lexington, at my mom's house, sitting at the kitchen table and watching a cardinal eat from the bird feeder. And I'm supremely happy to be here.

Europe fell through (after lots of planning and excitement that Rob and I would spend time traveling around the Czech Republic and Poland) because Rob didn't get his passport in time. It's taking a long (looooonnnnnnggggg) time to get passports now. A few years ago, Rob would have had his passport within two months time, and we'd be in Prague. But now it takes something like four months to obtain a passport, so we're in Kentucky. And things couldn't be better.

I'm really getting cold feet about going abroad this fall. Life is beautiful here, and I no longer feel a need to run from anything. That was what was attractive about traveling all the time: I got to escape everything that was making me ill at ease. Now, I'm still pretty heavily involved in things that have potential to make me ill at ease (Holocaust and genocide studies, reading "dark" literature about insanity and mind control and alternate realities and the horrors of contemporary existence), but I'm pleased with them. I'm very much in love, and love is liberating. And addictive. I'm afraid that I won't know how to function again if I lose it. So, this is the main reason for the cold feet. I'm accustomed to love again, and afraid of losing it. I'm functioning so well right now, because I have my best friend. I existed, and existed just fine, when I didn't have him. But now I do, and I'd rather not lose him again. Life's just better when he's there.

Sometime soon I'll post more writing, writing that actually says something, and says it well, perhaps. This was just a moment's spasm of the fingers as I watch a squirrel try to attack my mom's birdfeeder. If my mom were here, she come running toward the window, screaming "you nasty squirrel!", and pounding her knuckles on the glass. And the squirrel would freak out and go scrambling away, just barely making the leap from birdfeeder to wooden railing. Or maybe he'd fall to the ground.

Alright. I'm leaving.

from Ayn Rand's "Anthem"

My big sister Charlene sent me this quote in a Facebook message (parents and adults, read "email"). I need to read Anthem again.

"...And the questions give us no rest. We know not why our curse makes us seek. But we cannot resist it. It whispers to us that there are great things on this earth of ours, and that we can know them if we try, and that we must know them. We ask, why must we know, but it has no answer to give us. We must know so that we may know" (Ayn Rand)

Thank you Aunt Peggy

The following article was sent to me by my Aunt Peggy, who lives in Bellevue, Washington. It came at just the right time; it was exactly what I needed to read.

Maybe one day I'll be both Episcopalian and Jewish?

"I am both Muslim and Christian"

By Janet I. Tu
Seattle Times religion reporter

Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill.

On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

She does both, she says, because she's Christian and Muslim.

Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she's ready to tell people that, for the last 15 months, she's also been a Muslim — drawn to the faith after an introduction to Islamic prayers left her profoundly moved.

Her announcement has provoked surprise and bewilderment in many, raising an obvious question: How can someone be both a Christian and a Muslim?

But it has drawn other reactions too. Friends generally say they support her, while religious scholars are mixed: Some say that, depending on how one interprets the tenets of the two faiths, it is, indeed, possible to be both. Others consider the two faiths mutually exclusive.

"There are tenets of the faiths that are very, very different," said Kurt Fredrickson, director of the doctor of ministry program at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. "The most basic would be: What do you do with Jesus?"

Christianity has historically regarded Jesus as the son of God and God incarnate, both fully human and fully divine. Muslims, though they regard Jesus as a great prophet, do not see him as divine and do not consider him the son of God.

"I don't think it's possible" to be both, Fredrickson said, just like "you can't be a Republican and a Democrat."

Redding, who will begin teaching the New Testament as a visiting assistant professor at Seattle University this fall, has a different analogy: "I am both Muslim and Christian, just like I'm both an American of African descent and a woman. I'm 100 percent both."

Redding doesn't feel she has to resolve all the contradictions. People within one religion can't even agree on all the details, she said. "So why would I spend time to try to reconcile all of Christian belief with all of Islam?

"At the most basic level, I understand the two religions to be compatible. That's all I need."

She says she felt an inexplicable call to become Muslim, and to surrender to God — the meaning of the word "Islam."

"It wasn't about intellect," she said. "All I know is the calling of my heart to Islam was very much something about my identity and who I am supposed to be.

"I could not not be a Muslim."

Redding's situation is highly unusual. Officials at the national Episcopal Church headquarters said they are not aware of any other instance in which a priest has also been a believer in another faith. They said it's up to the local bishop to decide whether such a priest could continue in that role.

Redding's bishop, the Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner, says he accepts Redding as an Episcopal priest and a Muslim, and that he finds the interfaith possibilities exciting. Her announcement, first made through a story in her diocese's newspaper, hasn't caused much controversy yet, he said.

Some local Muslim leaders are perplexed.

Being both Muslim and Christian — "I don't know how that works," said Hisham Farajallah, president of the Islamic Center of Washington.

But Redding has been embraced by leaders at the Al-Islam Center of Seattle, the Muslim group she prays with.

"Islam doesn't say if you're a Christian, you're not a Muslim," said programming director Ayesha Anderson. "Islam doesn't lay it out like that."

Redding believes telling her story can help ease religious tensions, and she hopes it can be a step toward her dream of creating an institute to study Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

"I think this thing that's happened to me can be a sign of hope," she said.

Finding a religion that fit

Redding is 55 and single, with deep brown eyes, dreadlocks and a voice that becomes easily impassioned when talking about faith. She's also a classically trained singer, and has sung at jazz nights at St. Mark's.

The oldest of three girls, Redding grew up in Pennsylvania in a high-achieving, intellectual family. Her father was one of the lawyers who argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that desegregated the nation's public schools. Her mother was in the first class of Fulbright scholars.

Though her parents weren't particularly religious, they had her baptized and sent her to an Episcopal Sunday school. She has always sensed that God existed and God loved her, even when things got bleak — which they did.

She experienced racism in schools, was sexually abused and, by the time she was a young adult, was struggling with alcohol addiction; she's been in recovery for 20 years.

Despite those difficulties, she graduated from Brown University, earned master's degrees from two seminaries and received her Ph.D. in New Testament from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She felt called to the priesthood and was ordained in 1984.

As much as she loves her church, she has always challenged it. She calls Christianity the "world religion of privilege." She has never believed in original sin. And for years she struggled with the nature of Jesus' divinity.

She found a good fit at St. Mark's, coming to the flagship of the Episcopal Church in Western Washington in 2001. She was in charge of programs to form and deepen people's faith until March this year when she was one of three employees laid off for budget reasons. The dean of the cathedral said Redding's exploration of Islam had nothing to do with her layoff.

Ironically, it was at St. Mark's that she first became drawn to Islam.

In fall 2005, a local Muslim leader gave a talk at the cathedral, then prayed before those attending. Redding was moved. As he dropped to his knees and stretched forward against the floor, it seemed to her that his whole body was involved in surrendering to God.

Then in the spring, at a St. Mark's interfaith class, another Muslim leader taught a chanted prayer and led a meditation on opening one's heart. The chanting appealed to the singer in Redding; the meditation spoke to her heart. She began saying the prayer daily.

Around that time, her mother died, and then "I was in a situation that I could not handle by any other means, other than a total surrender to God," she said.

She still doesn't know why that meant she had to become a Muslim. All she knows is "when God gives you an invitation, you don't turn it down."

In March 2006, she said her shahada — the profession of faith — testifying that there is only one God and that Mohammed is his messenger. She became a Muslim.

Before she took the shahada, she read a lot about Islam. Afterward, she learned from local Muslim leaders, including those in Islam's largest denomination — Sunni — and those in the Sufi mystical tradition of Islam. She began praying with the Al-Islam Center, a Sunni group that is predominantly African-American.

There were moments when practicing Islam seemed like coming home.

In Seattle's Episcopal circles, Redding had mixed largely with white people. "To walk into Al-Islam and be reminded that there are more people of color in the world than white people, that in itself is a relief," she said.

She found the discipline of praying five times a day — one of the five pillars of Islam that all Muslims are supposed to follow — gave her the deep sense of connection with God that she yearned for.

It came from "knowing at all times I'm in between prayers." She likens it to being in love, constantly looking forward to having "all these dates with God. ... Living a life where you're remembering God intentionally, consciously, just changes everything."

Friends who didn't know she was practicing Islam told her she glowed.

Aside from the established sets of prayers she recites in Arabic fives times each day, Redding says her prayers are neither uniquely Islamic nor Christian. They're simply her private talks with God or Allah — she uses both names interchangeably. "It's the same person, praying to the same God."

In many ways, she says, "coming to Islam was like coming into a family with whom I'd been estranged. We have not only the same God, but the same ancestor with Abraham."

A shared beginning

Indeed, Islam, Christianity and Judaism trace their roots to Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism who is also considered the spiritual father of all three faiths. They share a common belief in one God, and there are certain similar stories in their holy texts.

But there are many significant differences, too.

Muslims regard the Quran as the unadulterated word of God, delivered through the angel Gabriel to Mohammed. While they believe the Torah and the Gospels include revelations from God, they believe those revelations have been misinterpreted or mishandled by humans.

Most significantly, Muslims and Christians disagree over the divinity of Jesus.

Muslims generally believe in Jesus' virgin birth, that he was a messenger of God, that he ascended to heaven alive and that he will come back at the end of time to destroy evil. They do not believe in the Trinity, in the divinity of Jesus or in his death and resurrection.

For Christians, belief in Jesus' divinity, and that he died on the cross and was resurrected, lie at the heart of the faith, as does the belief that there is one God who consists of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Redding's views, even before she embraced Islam, were more interpretive than literal.

She believes the Trinity is an idea about God and cannot be taken literally.

She does not believe Jesus and God are the same, but rather that God is more than Jesus.

She believes Jesus is the son of God insofar as all humans are the children of God, and that Jesus is divine, just as all humans are divine — because God dwells in all humans.

What makes Jesus unique, she believes, is that out of all humans, he most embodied being filled with God and identifying completely with God's will.

She does believe that Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected, and acknowledges those beliefs conflict with the teachings of the Quran. "That's something I'll find a challenge the rest of my life," she said.

She considers Jesus her savior. At times of despair, because she knows Jesus suffered and overcame suffering, "he has connected me with God," she said.

That's not to say she couldn't develop as deep a relationship with Mohammed. "I'm still getting to know him," she said.

Matter of interpretation

Some religious scholars understand Redding's thinking.

While the popular Christian view is that Jesus is God and that he came to Earth and took on a human body, other Christians believe his divinity means that he embodied the spirit of God in his life and work, said Eugene Webb, professor emeritus of comparative religion at the University of Washington.

Webb says it's possible to be both Muslim and Christian: "It's a matter of interpretation. But a lot of people on both sides do not believe in interpretation. "

Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky, agrees with Webb, and adds that Islam tends to be a little more flexible. Muslims can have faith in Jesus, he said, as long as they believe in Mohammed's message.

Other scholars are skeptical.

"The theological beliefs are irreconcilable," said Mahmoud Ayoub, professor of Islamic studies and comparative religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. Islam holds that God is one, unique, indivisible. "For Muslims to say Jesus is God would be blasphemy."

Frank Spina, an Episcopal priest and also a professor of Old Testament and biblical theology at Seattle Pacific University, puts it bluntly.

"I just do not think this sort of thing works," he said. "I think you have to give up what is essential to Christianity to make the moves that she has done.

"The essence of Christianity was not that Jesus was a great rabbi or even a great prophet, but that he is the very incarnation of the God that created the world.... Christianity stands or falls on who Jesus is."

Spina also says that as priests, he and Redding have taken vows of commitment to the doctrines of the church. "That means none of us get to work out what we think all by ourselves."

Redding knows there are many Christians and Muslims who will not accept her as both.

"I don't care," she says. "They can't take away my baptism." And as she understands it, once she's made her profession of faith to become a Muslim, no one can say she isn't that, either.

While she doesn't rule out that one day she may choose one or the other, it's more likely "that I'm going to be 100 percent Christian and 100 percent Muslim when I die."

Deepened spirituality

These days, Redding usually carries a headscarf with her wherever she goes so she can pray five times a day.

On Fridays, she prays with about 20 others at the Al-Islam Center. On Sundays, she prays in church, usually at St. Clement's of Rome in the Mount Baker neighborhood.

One thing she prays for every day: "I pray not to cause scandal or bring shame upon either of my traditions."

Being Muslim has given her insights into Christianity, she said. For instance, because Islam regards Jesus as human, not divine, it reinforces for her that "we can be like Jesus. There are no excuses."

Doug Thorpe, who served on St. Mark's faith-formation committee with Redding, said he's trying to understand all the dimensions of her faith choices. But he saw how it deepened her spirituality. And it spurred him to read the Quran and think more deeply about his own faith.

He believes Redding is being called. She is, "by her very presence, a bridge person," Thorpe said. "And we desperately need those bridge persons."

In Redding's car, she has hung up a cross she made of clear crystal beads. Next to it, she has dangled a heart-shaped leather object etched with the Arabic symbol for Allah.

"For me, that symbolizes who I am," Redding said. "I look through Jesus and I see Allah."

DC

(1) National Cathedral rose window
(2) I found my name when I was getting lost in Brookland.
(3) My life partner and me at Marrakesh, a ridiculously expensive and equally tasty Moroccan restaurant.

Review of April 2006-May 2007

The following is my "review" of the trip I took to Turkey and Greece with my class at Transylvania. When I got home and wrote it, I debated whether or not to post it on this blog. It's been in my Facebook "notes" for a while, where some friends have read and commented. But this blog---well, this blog was created as a hunky-dory travel blog to be read by my mom, and by church and dance friends. I didn't know if I wanted something this personal to be posted on this blog.

But here it is. I was just accused by Clay, my best friend (and everything else), of being "transparent". Well, maybe so, but not to anyone who normally frequents this blog. Very few people, friends at school included, really know me..... and I could now ask the annoying philosophical question, do I really know myself? what is self? And on and on. but I'll stop. those questions drive me crazy.

So, read at your own risk. It was written originally at about two in the morning after a weekend trying to sleep off jet lag. And it's not your normal rosy-colored review of a trip. Just warning.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In class last Friday, I commented on my strange reaction to photographs I had taken of the sites we visited. I looked at the Library of Celsus, at the theatre in Pergamum, at the Parthenon, at Sounion. I marveled at the fact that I was not only the owner of the pictures, but the photographer. I didn’t think it amazing that I had actually stood in those ruins—I still do not entirely feel as though I was there. I said on Friday, “I don’t know where I was, but I wasn’t there.”

Where was I, then? I was internal, removed. The trip was enlightening—I finally saw a glimpse of the person I (perhaps) am becoming. I observed carefully. I wanted to be fully aware of everything I was experiencing, every smell, sight, taste. But while maintaining some sort of hyper-awareness, I lived fully inside myself. This is a rather new development in the story of me. I used to be one to wear my emotions on my sleeve. I used to live life externally. Now I have come into myself, living and feeling fully what it is to see the world through this body. I chose the word “through” intentionally. It is through this body that I am experiencing that world, but my body is not all of me. To feel deeply, I don’t need outside stimuli. To live, I don’t need the world. My body lives in the world; I live in my own world. In my mind. I wish I could describe it, but I am no poet. I see long, flowing strands of color and light. They are far-reaching, absorbent. They touch, feel, taste, and see, and then, every once in a while—and this is what is fascinating, beautiful, and exciting—they retreat to their source. The color and the light comes cascading inward, and are captured, extremely concentrated. It is in the concentration that I feel most alive. I did not feel as though I was in Priene, Miletus, or Athens, because I was not there. The colors and the light touched these things, and the places and people added to the color and light. Now that I’m home, I’m experiencing the delight of the retreat. The colors and light return and remind me of the wonder of the trip, of the people, of the experiences. Through the retreat, I return to the Mediterranean. It is brilliant, this event, and trying to contain it in words is impossible. This description is inadequate, but all others would be as well. Should I try one thousand times to name it, I would fail.

This piece of writing is blatantly stream-of-consciousness, but that is where I am now, both with the trip and with life. The trip culminates a year-long journey to myself. This year has been one of the most difficult of my life. Here now I’ll try to demonstrate the journey through adjectives and phrases, perhaps a short anecdote or two. Perhaps this paper is meant to be merely a reflection on Turkey and Greece, but Turkey and Greece were a microcosm of the transitions of the past year. I reflect on Turkey and Greece—I reflect on an entire year of my life.

April/May 2006
shy, unsure, naive, excited, headstrong, dedicated, determined, self-righteous, getting ready to embark upon a new chapter of life: boyfriend, apartment, first summer of college

June/July/August 2006
trying to settle down, domestic, struggling with myself—wanting to be something I’m not, pushing myself to do things I can’t, trying to convince myself that there is no such thing as “can’t” when deep down I know I’m not born to fly, learning how to be in a relationship, falling in love, bad habits, I know better than everyone else, bits and pieces of resentment towards myself and my inadequacy, ignorance, the fissures in the sacred canopy that had enveloped my life widen, awkward, out of place, trying to maintain who I thought I was but learning that it’s not who I am at all, argumentative, still reeling from Poland and refusing to speak about it—I start to look at pictures from Poland. This is difficult and not understood or appreciated in the way I think it should be. In general, very little is understood or appreciated in the way I think it should be. I expect too much, set unrealistic standards, place my presuppositions on life. Presuppose life and you will always be disappointed.

September/October 2006/November 2006
my self starts to crumble, religion, philosophy, ideas, thoughts start to break me, dependency gets the best of me, I need reassurance, I need a helping hand, I need a shoulder to cry on. The person I want most in the world to be everything to me refuses to be. I have to do it alone. I collapse. I can’t live this way, I can’t be me anymore, I’m so unhappy, so confused, questioning my memories, what did I think was truth anyway? Truth with a capital T eludes me, but now truth, what I had thought was truth, what I thought I could hold and what I thought would keep me safe—it doesn’t exist either. Questions. So many questions that it hurts to think. Soon it hurts to cry, and then I can’t cry. But I’m miserable, and that won’t go away either. It just hurts to live. I retreat, and not to a good place. I retreat from feeling, I retreat from friends, I retreat from who I was, I try to become numb but instead feel too acutely. All I can make myself do is work. I force my mind and my body to go through the motions, and scream at my brain when it thinks it’s too sad to continue. I fight within myself. I must do my reading. I must do my math homework. And dammit, this has to stop hurting. I can’t get anything done with this impenetrable sorrow, misery, and crushing feeling of solitude never subsiding. Am I worthy of happiness?

December 2006
A moment of hope. Maybe things just needed time. Of course I still love you, of course I do. Oh I know. I figured you still loved me. And things “begin” again. Only to fail. Bad habits still exist, broken personalities, confusion and loss of self—these impede anything constructive or beneficial. We just rip each other apart. My already broken self is ground down into dust, then discarded. He is gone. And with him, with us, I am gone as well. The year ends, and I don’t know what I’m doing. I dive into books—I consistently carried six with me from coffee shop to coffee shop, from car to airplane to grandma’s for Christmas. I was reading twelve books simultaneously—just to do it—but only could fit six in my backpack. I’m always reading, because then I don’t have to talk. When I talk, I don’t like what comes out. So I’d just rather not say anything, thank you. When I read, I feel. I don’t know what I feel, but at least it’s something. And it’s other people’s something—not just mine. My feelings are getting annoying. They’re ever present and ever painful, and just obnoxious. So I want to feel other people’s pain. Their pain is different, uncharacteristic, at least. If the pain won’t leave, maybe I can just change the way I feel it. And I so read, and I felt. And it hurt, and muddied the waters even more. Good. The more ambiguous, the more dirty and confusing, the better.

January/February/March/April 2007 (a mixture of thoughts)

A new leaf. New classes, new resolve, new way of feeling numb so I don’t have to acknowledge that I have to see him every other day. After a few weeks at home, I’m able to return and write him off—just kind of edit him from my dictionary. And I feel energized, ready to dive into work, dive back into life. Because there is life out there. I don’t know how I discovered it. My sadness got annoying, and soon other people’s problems—from the books—got annoying too. The human condition got annoying, so I chose to forget its problems and just feel happy. School was a joy because everything was new, but familiar. It struck the perfect balance. Things were fine, and then the shock of the year came out of left field. I agreed to be the accompanist for the musical. Ok, fine, I can deal with the fact that he’s in the musical. But wait—hey..........what did you say? WHAT? ? ? He’s the lead? ? ? So began a painful coming-to-terms-with-him-and-his-new-love-interest-and-with-myself. “He” and his relation to “me” permeates this writing, but this was the major shaper of my year. Through everything I learned, he was always there. So, the musical. He was the lead, she—the new love interest—was in it too. And I had class with both of them. Joy of joys. And I refused to talk badly about her, she hadn’t done anything to me. I told her I was sensitive—“please be sensitive to the fact that this is hard for me.” And she complied, beautifully. I somehow made things work. Academically, beliefs and truths were quickly shifting. God was uncontainable, now unknowable, unnameable, untouchable, wholly other, and finally God only existed within the confines of language and of subjectivity. “Faith” was redefined as simply my intellectual life, my world of thoughts........fitting an unknowable, unnameable entity who didn’t exist empirically back into such a world seemed impossible. And this struggle has remained to the present time. The musical made me grow up, watch him from afar, and recognize that I love him, regardless of what he does, says, how he behaves. The musical helped me to redefine what it means to love. I can’t define it now by rambling off a soliloquy about love, I can only show you. It is to appreciate fully, to adore, to find unique and precious and beautiful, to care without expecting to be cared for, to adore without expecting to be adored, to find the person’s mind complex and unique, to recognize not only the uniqueness of this one individual, but of all individuals, everywhere. To appreciate this individual’s story, and thus to recognize the immensity of all human stories. To see, through this one, how incredible humanity is. How beautiful, diverse, transformative, unique, genuine. And the semester closed, academically/intellectually, with me kind of at a loss. It was the thoughts about humanity and individuals that I learned through my love for him that followed me on this trip.

May 2007
And perhaps it was these thoughts about human beings that kept me removed from the sites, that prohibited me to feel the power of the place. I felt through the trip not the power of place, but the power of people. I wrote the short piece below while waiting for the ship that would take us from Mykonos to Athens:

May 10, 1:25pm
One of the most amazing, fascinating things to watch is the building of relationships. Watching the interaction between two people, or a group, or a community...trying to objectively (ha!) observe the vicissitudes of life, viewing the developing identities of individuals and communities—it’s one of the most intriguing things to watch. Simple yet incredibly complex, surface and external yet infused with subtext and depth—it’s like watching creation.
It is in watching and participating in relationships that I find the most joy. Relationships can cause pain and confusion, loss of self and a sense of purposelessness, but it is also within relationships that one experiences the soaring heights of joy, the luscious breath of love, the elation of laughter. When all else can be questioned and rendered obsolete, relationships — be they honest, open, loving, spiteful, hierarchical, disfunctional, sexual, innocent, hurtful, loyal, dependent, demanding, long-living, parasitic, awkward, long distance, local, time consuming, expensive, fulfilling, one-sided, fragile, passionate, reciprocal, comfortable, unconditional, endearing, a roller-coaster—will always be there, always bearing the weight of the human condition, always telling with blinding truth what it means to be alive. They’ll always be shaping us, even when we try to force them not too. When all else fails, the transformative power of relationships is dependable. Relationships will always be the arbiters of the truth of what it is to be alive.

Poor writing, as most of mine is, but it conveys something of what I was feeling, sitting on a cement wall in Mykonos, watching people mill about. And it conveys what I feel now. I used to disregard relationships and people that I found unnecessary or not beneficial to me. I now find my former attitude disgusting and misguided. Who am I to decide whether a person is necessary or beneficial? Do we not all breathe the same air and are our bodies not of the same basic constitution? Now I feel strongly that every person with whom I come into contact is necessary and beneficial—every relationship, no matter how “deep”, is of the utmost importance to my becoming. And no relationship ever dies, or is really ever born at all, but just comes into being, comes into its time, perhaps. Every relationship transforms me. Every human being I meet changes who I am. And so no relationship dies; relationships just transform. So the fight now is to continue to live in this view, that all human beings are important to me, are beautiful and intricate and transformative. This is especially difficult when I find the person abrasive, or callous, rude, ignorant, etc. But to write them off because this is how I feel towards them, well, that would only be my embodying traits that I find disruptive. I battle with myself, and strive to dignify each individual I meet and each relationship I have—to recognize the individual in each human being.
This is what preoccupied me in Greece and Turkey—the feeling of being overwhelmed by humanity, while also being constantly stripped of that feeling. It also bothered me that we moved so quickly, establishing ourselves for only a few days in one location, and then hopping back on a bus or a boat to move on. I wanted to settle down, I wanted to feel people. I feel as though I missed out on life, because as soon as I began to feel it, it was removed, or rather, I was forcibly removed from it. But this also made it possible to experience the relationships forming between people on our trip, in a different way. The bonds that were formed on the trip, the jokes, the laughter, the layer upon layer of discussion, questions, answers, questions, issues, laughter, confusion, and feeling of loss—these were experiences of relationships, too. And it is the intricacies of the trip and the people and the bonds that are inexplicable to friends at home. I can’t even give a small nugget to my mother for her to understand what happened on the trip, even though she begs, “I want to know everything.” Everything? Ha! How can someone explain two weeks, and millions of memories? Impossible.
I appreciated the trip not because of the food, the sites, the photographs, the smells, the music, the traveling, the cultural and linguistic barriers, nor even the memories, but because human beings brought them to me. Owen asked me while sitting in the lobby of the museum in Athens, “What are you passionate about?” “People,” I answered. “Human beings.” Experiences, solely events, don’t add depth to life. It is the human beings who bring about the experiences that add richness. The depth of the human experience is found in others.
The running commentary on how I now view my development over the past year is incomplete and rushed, to say the least. It is also seemingly out of place for a reflection on Turkey and Greece, as well. This year of my life, all the memories and events, came rushing back to me while we were abroad, though. As I said, to reflect on Turkey and Greece is to reflect on a year of my life. Turkey and Greece provided the right context in which to sit back and sift through myself, or at least to begin sifting. This reflection is incomplete, because I haven’t finished sifting. Who am I kidding? Does one ever finish sifting? These are probably just the preliminary thoughts, preceding more major self-analyzation. Thank God for the trip. Self analyzation is what I needed, and need. And I began it in the company of friends, in a community of trust and like-mindedness, of respect and genuine compassion. Thank you, Dr. Jones, for wisely planting seeds that allowed for such a community. The trip could not have been better.