Greek Church and Indians. Vegan Things. Running.

Posted on 21 June 2010 | 3 comments

Last Sunday I went to Holy Apostles Greek Orthodox Church in Indianapolis. I would go there for every liturgy if I could. As it is, they don’t have church every single Sunday yet, because they are a fledgling congregation started by a handful of Greeks who are trying to maintain their faith in a different way. I respect it. Though I can read Greek (not well), I cannot speak a lick of it. What keeps me interested in the Orthodox Church, particularly in which the liturgy is delivered predominantly in Greek? What keeps me coming back is the very old tradition, the way link it provides to the early church, and the way the ceremony of it relates to what I imagine Jewish culture to have contributed to my faith.

Sunday, I noticed a few new facets of the service that speak to me. One is the fact that even if you don’t understand what is being said, you can understand what is being said. I don’t know what the priest intones over the Eucharistic elements, but I can tell by the actions he makes that the moment is sacred and should be revered. I can tell that he is giving great respect to the wine and bread, while also making them holy. How can I tell? He bows his head and covers them with incense before proceeding with any words.

Nothing is done without incense, which brings me to another new thing I learned.Incense is very important. So important that the priest would not even mix the wine and water or bring out the bread until the incense worked. He had to light the charcoal himself because the altar helper couldn’t get it to light. Once the incense got going, the priest, Fr. John, returned to the table of elements and fragranced them in order to continue the liturgy.

The incense difficulty made me think of Saturday night when Adam and I went to Mounds State Park to a summer solstice celebration. We didn’t know when we decided to go to it that the point of the evening was to learn about the Miami Indian culture and to be spectators for their personal tribal summer solstice ceremony, which was held on the Great Mound, an ancient ceremonial mound. Before the ceremony could begin, the mound had to be fragranced with sage. The sage served two purposes: to cleanse the area and to provide a sweet smell to welcome the ancestors. I am still trying to understand the connections between sweet smells and the way they affect our ability to worship and contemplate. I do know that certain smells can instantly transport me to memories, to ideas, to experiences I have had. The smell of Greek Church is a familiar and likable place.

I love Holy Apostles because it is new and is held in the back chapel of another church. It’s young and things get messed up. Fr. John intoned that the readings came from the Gospel of Mark and they really came form Matthew. Those of you that know the liturgy know that the second most important part of the service is when the gospel enters and then is read, so messing up right there is kind of a big deal. However, Fr. John said at the beginning of his homily that sometimes mistakes happen in liturgy, because it is performed by humans. We mess up. “What is important is to keep the peace in the face of mistakes,” he said. Yeah, I agree. It’s important to keep the peace.

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I am giving this vegan thing another whirl, but I am trying not to be an ass about it. I did make a fantastic pasta dish the other night: whole wheat pasta, acorn squash, tofu, a teeny bit of maple syrup, Italian spices, salt and pepper, and a teeny bit of cinnamon and clove. It was delicious. I am hoping to lose a little bit of weight by cutting back on fats and calories through not eating cheese and eggs. We’ll see how long it lasts.

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I ran two miles today and it went well. My heel hurts, but I am still not sure what’s wrong with it. I don’t think it’s an achilles injury, but it could be. I can tell you that as soon as I get health insurance, I am going to get it checked out. For now, though, I am trying a new style of running that seems to help.

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Food: banana, juice, smoothie (tofu, soy milk, strawberries, blueberries, wheat germ), two baby bagels with soy peanut butter, chick pea patty frozen dinner, naked PK breadsticks with pizza sauce, mango smoothie

3 Comments

Posted in Food, Ren, Running, Vegetarian or Vegan

Blah. And some more blah.

Posted on 17 June 2010 | 2 comments

I need to start writing here consistently, and I need to finish the two book reviews that I started when I was in Florida. I need to paint the house. I need to finish the floors. I need to plan for next years’ classes. I need to work on my dissertation and meet with Debbie tomorrow. I need to spend time running. I need to write my presentation for the PCA conference in October. I need to revise a couple of essays and send them out to try to get them published. I need to give time to my friends and family. It’s slightly overwhelming, and all of this in a summer that I thought might be relaxed. I need to not be so overwhelmed by all of my activities, commitments, and self-assigned bullshit.

But, first, I need to finish these end of course assessments for the IEI at Ball State, which is where I have a summer assistantship.I am having a hard time getting motivated because it’s a bit intimidating to make assessments for courses you’ve never taught and probably never will teach, though I’d love to teach in the IEI. I think it would be very satisfying. As for my summer work, it’s different. It’s challenging. It’s fulfilling.

It’s different because I have never considered how to teach a language in a very short amount of time to someone who doesn’t speak it, much less if that person is beginning college or graduate school, which I think are very different considerations. I am not sure that it is as important to teach a graduate student how to keep a daily planner as it is to teach the same skill to a 19-year-old college freshman. All college freshman should have to take a study skills class, regardless of their ability to speak English or not.

It’s challenging because I have some very definite ideas about what students should know when they enter an English 103 or 104 classroom, and my ideas don’t necessarily jive with what the IEI instructors can accomplish in their seven or eight courses, which I believe are taught in seven weeks each. I could be wrong. Anyway, the classes go from fundamental (or survival) through communicative to academic. My task for this week is to design reading assessments for each course to test the learning outcomes for each class. This task is challenging when I have only learning outcomes, and no real grasp on or feel for the students. I said today when I was talking to the director of the IEI that this is challenging for me because I view language acquisition to be a much more organic process than academia views it to be. Think about how you learned language. Did you ever take an end of course assessment? Probably not, but then again, you weren’t trying to acquire a language in a few short months; you had years to do it.

Finally, it’s fulfilling because the end result is that people are equipped with one more skill that will make their lives in the US a little easier. I can imagine nothing more intimidating than being in a new culture without having command of the language of that culture. I by no means believe that all Americans should be required to speak English; we are far too diverse of a culture to require that. I do, however, believe that going to school at an American institution requires that you be able to speak, read, listen to, and write the predominant language of that institution and to be able to do it well. Particularly, the humanities require this. I am still trying to decide if getting a science, math, or another non-language-intensive degree should require a command of English, since we are in the US (I suppose the predominant language at some American universities is Spanish, Portuguese, or French?). I am leaning toward no, but it’s up for debate. At any rate, this summer work is fulfilling, too, because it’s forcing me to have to reconsider all those things I think about language. And, I am learning new things every day. Very good.

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I am at a point where I just want to lose weight, which makes me a very bad fat studies scholar. I love food too much. I love good healthy vegan cooking way too much. I could seriously eat all day long, but then I’d have to run all day long. And my foot’s been really funky, so I haven’t run at all, only walked. And not much.

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I want to write a list poem about freedom, or imprisonment as outlined in Sarah’s post. I just need time.

2 Comments

Posted in Dissertation, Fat, Food, IEI, Pedagogy, Reading, Running, School, Teaching, Vegetarian or Vegan, Writing

Sunday, June 13

Posted on 8 June 2010 | 3 comments

Sunday, June 13 will mark one year of taking life seriously. It will be one year ago on Saturday, June 13 that I weighed myself when I got home from family vacation and decided it was time to do something about my lifestyle. I think the weight, a magical 256.4 pounds on my brother’s bathroom scale, was just the quantitative evidence of the feelings I had been having for quite some time. I have never been one to gauge my health or my happiness by a number on a scale, but I had been feeling particularly unhappy with myself for quite some time. This feeling of unrest had more to do with my inability to find clothes that fit, my disappointment with my level of physical fitness, and my general feeling of blah. I knew I needed to make some changes, so I said to myself that my changes were not going to be about losing weight, but about getting to a place in which I felt good both physically and emotionally. On Sunday June 14, 2009, I started running. Actually, what I started doing was walking. Slowly. I started by running 30 seconds to a minute and walking a minute in between each “run.” I built up to “running” 13.1 miles on May 8, 2010. I didn’t get the time I wanted, but I finished, and as a side perk my blood pressure is lower than normal, I’ve lost 40 pounds, and I feel a million times better.

I suppose since it’s been a year, it’s time to set some new goals. One goal I had already set for this year was to run a marathon the fall after my 36th birthday. I am maintaining it as a goal by signing up for one on November 6. Here is my list of goals for this year from June 13, 2010 to June 12, 2011 (they are in no particular order):

  1. Finish the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon on November 6. Running, walking, or crawling.
  2. Shave my head on June 13 and on the 13th of every month all year long.
  3. Contemplate things outside of myself. Cultivate spiritual wholeness.
  4. Have 75% or more of my students grow one academic year’s worth of growth during the school year.
  5. Finish two chapters of my dissertation.
  6. Run 1000 miles (3 miles per day). Run and walk a combination of 3000 miles (10 miles per day).
  7. Go vegan. Stay at least lacto-vegetarian.
  8. Learn to say only what is necessary. Listen more than talk.
  9. Read one new book and one magazine from cover to cover each week. Follow the news, in print.
  10. Finish painting the outside of the house.

3 Comments

Posted in Dissertation, Fat, Food, Goals, Grace, New Year, Running, School, Teaching, Vegetarian or Vegan

The Naked Gospel by Andrew Farley

Posted on 1 June 2010 | 4 comments

The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church by Andrew Farley begins with an epigraph by Arthur Bury from 1691, making the claim that the naked gospel “was the gospel which our Lord and his apostles preached,” which is what I expected this book to do. I expected to read a new take on Jesus theology, in which I would learn a bit more about what Jesus said and did and the ways in which those actions were revolutionary. I would have loved this book if that had been what it really did. What I got instead was a whole different story involving Paul, a Jew who supposedly grew to have no use for his traditional religious upbringing, and those people who came after Paul who also saw no need for relationship with the Jewish Scriptures. How, can I ask, does this present “the gospel which our Lord and his apostles preached”? Instead, possibly the epigraph should have been a quote from Origen who thought that Paul “taught the Church which he had gathered from among the Gentiles how to understand the books of the Law” and then ignore them. It seems as if Farley spends quite a bit of time discussing Paul and Paul’s aversion to his own tradition, which doesn’t seem like a Naked Gospel, but more of an interrogation of Paul. That being said, this book isn’t all bad; it just wasn’t what I expected.

Farley provides an excellent critique of our desire to remain staid in our own complacent following of hollow rules that we perceive make us good Christians. However, I am not sure that early Christians would agree with his reading of the meaning of old and new and the ways that he argues Christians are called to live a new life without considering the laws or the Jewish Scriptures. It makes no sense to advocate the very heavy disregard for the early Christians’ previous religious experience, especially because there is substantial evidence to the contrary. In fact, the very people Farley discusses—Peter, Paul, and the other apostles—did not leave the Jewish faith. They merely reconfigured their previous beliefs to fit with their newly acquired faith in Jesus as the Messiah. Particularly, Matthew adheres to his Jewish roots as he tried to convince both Gentiles and Jews that Jesus is the Messiah. Making such an adamant break from discussing Jewish traditions and religion is a major weakness of Farley’s text. I do agree with his assessment that Christians need to learn to avoid “the painful symptoms of un-necessary religion” (31), but does this need to be done by completely breaking away from tradition or previous manifestations of religious worship? I think not. Even Paul, who Farley quotes sometimes very out of context, references his own religious and secular traditions as well as the religious and secular leaders of his time.

The main tenet that Farley proposes with which I agree is the idea that we are free from sin. We are always already forgiven, and too many Christians don’t realize it. They are crippled by the perceived necessity to keep accounts of their sins and to compulsively ask forgiveness for those sins, sometimes to the point of unhealthy self-reflectivity and analysis. I love the song “Everything Glorious” by David Crowder Band, because it makes this claim so well. I think Farley is getting at the same question as Crowder: “You make everything glorious and I am Yours, so what does that make me?” According to Farley, “It’s important to understand that we’re joined to the risen Christ, not to a dead religious teacher” (180). I would even take this a step further and say that we are the risen Christ. Whatever is to be done on this earth now, is to be done through us as we are the manifestation of the work that Jesus did on the cross. We are required to be Christ to people: “Genuine growth occurs as we absorb truth about who we already are and what we already possess in Christ” (187). I concur.

In short, I liked this book because it challenges several commonly held beliefs in contemporary Christianity, such as the idea that we have to change who we are to be perfect Christians. As Farly writes, “Having Christ live through you is really about knowing who you are and being yourself. Since Christ is your life, your source of true fulfillment, you’ll only be content when you are expressing him” (194). I agree but my main complaints about this book can speak directly to this idea: what if the way you experience Christ living through you includes a love for and an adherence to those “Old Testament” ideas that he claims are null and void? Can we really claim that the naked gospel is a gospel void of any sense of tradition or Jewish scripture, relying solely on tradition and reason to inform our actions as Christians? I don’t think so. I don’t think this is really “Jesus plus nothing.” It’s more like Jesus nothing with a heaping helping of misread Paul. I would recommend this book, simply so people could wrestle through all of these ideas as Farley adeptly challenges the reader to think critically about a variety of ideas.

You can read this and other reviews of the same book at Viral Bloggers.

4 Comments

Posted in Grace, Just for Fun, Just Random Stuff, Literature, Politics, Reading, Religion, Writing

Motivation and Book Reviews

Posted on 1 June 2010 | 2 comments

I haven’t been so motivated to write in my blog since I put it private in order to thwart those people who might take what I say here and twist it for their own evil purposes. I am really not paranoid. Paranoia would imply that I have an irrational fear that people are talking about me or that they are out to get me. My fear is not irrational; I have proof. There are people out there who delight in the misfortune of others, who are not above spreading lies or half-truths about people, and who I suppose have nothing better to do than make others miserable by maligning them. But good comes from everything.

I can use this time period of my sequestered blog in the fall when I talk about audience in my English classes. I would like to say that I write for the pleasure of writing, but this few weeks has taught me that I write for the pleasure of knowing that someone is reading it. Is this a bad thing? I think it can be. It can be detrimental to let yourself simply write for the pleasure of knowing that someone is reading it. Shouldn’t someone who aspires to be a writer write for the sake of the act itself? I plan to write and read for pleasure this summer, which may help this malady. School may be part of the reason I write for an audience. I wonder if too many years of writing things for other people to read in order to acquire a grade has ruined my ability to write for pleasure.

Today marks the day when I begin writing here again. I have three book reviews to do for The Ooze, which will be posted here. I have been putting them off because of all the other things I have had going lately. I hope they don’t decide I can’t get books and review them anymore. I’d be sad, even though I have only liked one of the three books I have reviewed. I think I would have liked the other two, but they were advertised as something they decidedly were not. Stay tuned for the three book reviews to pop up shortly. The books I will review will be A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story by Diana Butler Bass, The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church by Andrew Farley, and Who Really Goes to Hell? The Gospel You’ve Never Heard: What a Protestant Bible Written by Jews Says About God’s Work Through Christ. The last book is by far the most intriguing, but they all seem to be a simple rehashing of all that’s come before them. We’ll see as I write three distinct reviews.

2 Comments

Posted in Literature, Religion, Writing