new year's resolutions

Like most people, I write about ten resolutions every New Year's and then fulfill two of them.

I can't find my list from last year, so that tells you how seriously I took those resolutions. But I do remember writing "finish master's degree" on there, and I think I wrote "find a job" as well. So, there you go, two resolutions completed! Go me!

Resolutions matter a little more to me now, though, as I contemplate 2012. I'm not in school anymore, after so many years of no break, so I don't have those regular deadlines and expectations to keep me accomplishing things. I've got to figure out my own way to keep progressing. 2012 also marks the end of the world, so it seems like a good year to try to keep your resolutions.

I don't want to start too big, however, because that's setting myself up for failure. Instead of writing ten resolutions, then, I'm going to write just five. It increases each goal's odds of landing in one of the two elite goals-that-will-actually-be-accomplished spots. So, without further ado, here are my resolutions for 2012:

1. Read my scriptures in the morning.
2. Read two books a month just for fun.
3. Write something creative everyday.
4. Exercise three or four times a week.
5. Go to Europe!

I feel strongly that Europe will make it to the top two. Exclamation points are so motivating.

favorite books

Probably because I am (was?) an English major, people often ask me about my favorite books--a question I don't find it easy to answer.

Wayne Booth says that books are like friends: each one offers a different experience. When you sit down with a book, you sit down with a particular type of experience. Rather than having favorite books, then, I have books that I return to again and again for particular types of experience. I have books for comfort (Little Women or An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott), books for nostalgia (Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery), books for hard thinking (anything by Kenneth Burke), books for not thinking (Ella Enchanted), books for fun (Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling), books for inspiration (Gifts from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindburgh or A Two-Part Invention by Madeleine L'Engle), and books for pure, unadulterated pleasure (Emma or Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen). All of these books provide me with the particular experience I need when I need it--they're all favorites in that sense, but I can't really call any of them my favorite book.

There are a few books, however, that I do at various times apply the title of favorite to when I have to answer the question. And they are these:

And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

I love these books. I've been trying to figure out exactly what it is about these books that puts them on the top of my favorites list. I realize that the experience offered by each of these books, although different, somehow link together for me. All of them provide me with a spiritual reading experience--an experience I'm not sure how to describe. Romans 8:16 talks about how the Spirit beareth witness with our spirits, telling us things about ourselves in a way that transcends verbal communication. These books speak to my spirit, which is why I call my experience with them spiritual. All of them have played an essential role in shaping the way I think about and interact with the world around me. I remember distinctly my first experience reading each of them.

I read The Chronicles of Narnia first when I was eleven. I cried when Aslan sacrificed himself in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I recognized the clear parallel with Christian theology, and wondered if it was sacrilegious that I was crying for the lion. That moment marked the beginning of my understanding of the Atonement of Christ. When I read about Shasta's long walk with the Lion and the stripes on Aravis' back in The Horse and His Boy (my favorite of all the Chronicles), I imagined my own walk with God and what He might tell me about my journey. Aslan represented to me a very personal, very loving, very tangible view of God. I love these books for teaching me that God has a personality.

I read Les Miserables (complete and unabridged) for the first time when I was fourteen. I remember staying up until 4am one night to finish it and bawling through Jean Valjean's death. I had a headache all the next day because of too little sleep and too much crying. It was the book that really made me fall in love with reading--with the experience of losing myself in another's persons words, words that became mine too as I read them. I decided to major in English after reading Les Miserables.

As for And There Was Light, this book impacted me perhaps the most of all. It's the autobiography of a boy who was blinded at the age of seven and went on to lead a major resistance against Hitler during the German occupation of France. I read it when I was sixteen.

How can you resist a book that contains these opening lines?:

As I remember it, my story always starts out like a fairy tale, not an unusual one, but still a fairy tale. Once upon a time in Paris, between two world wars, there lived a happy little boy.

I think it was in August 2001 that I read And There Was Light. In September 2001, the words of Jacques Lusseyran would play through my head as I tried to process the tragedy of 9/11. Here he is describing how he mentally survived his interrogation from the SS:

One small piece of advice. In a spot like this don't go too far afield for help. Either it is right near you, in your heart, or it is nowhere. It is not a question of character, it is a question of reality. If you try to be strong, you will be weak. If you try to understand, you will go crazy. 

No, reality is not your character which, for its part, is only a by-product--I can't define it, a collection of elements. Reality is Here and Now. It is the life you are living in the moment. Don't be afraid to lose your soul there, for God is in it. 

Make all the gestures you like. Wash your hands if there is a place to wash them, stretch out on the ground, jump up and down, make a face, even shed tears if they help, or laugh, sing, curse. If you are a scholar--there is a gimmick for every category--do what I did that night. Reconstruct, out loud, Kant's arguments in the first chapters of his Critique of Pure Reason. It is hard work and absorbing. But don't believe any of it. Don't even believe in yourself. Only God exists. (245)

This book came to me during perhaps the most difficult year of my life and it taught me that it's important not just to cope with adversity. We must learn to thrive in spite of it and see the beauty available even in ugly times.

The fact that I read all of these "favorite" books at very formative ages says something about why the experience of reading them is still so special to me when I go back to them years later. Sometimes, as a jaded MA, schooled in the ability to maintain critical distance, I miss the magic (and, yes, I mean magic) of handing myself over to a book--of making myself vulnerable to all the emotions it asks me to feel and losing myself in believing it--in its honest expression of the thoughts and feelings of another human being and in the honesty and literalness of my own reading of it. I hadn't learned to really question books when I was teenager, so I simply experienced them. Sometimes experiencing them meant making them over in my own image and reading my own experiences and feelings into them perhaps too much, but isn't that the magic of reading? That uncritical process of connecting my spirit with the undefinable spirit of the book is what made reading so personal and so valuable. That was how I read when I was eleven, fourteen, and sixteen. And when I revisit these books, I can read like that again. I go back to them for that experience--the spiritual experience of reading.

What are your favorite books? And what experiences have they offered you?

stick it out: ira glass on the creative process

I think this bit from Ira Glass (which I found here) correctly identifies the problem I've had with any creative work I've done in, say, the past ten years. I quit when what I produce doesn't match up to the vision I have in my head. But what I really need to do is just produce lots and lots more of that unsatisfying work--produce it until it becomes satisfying.

It's the same kind of advice I give to my students: You don't know what to write? You don't know how to say it? Well, just pound something out. Even if it's bad, just pound it out because then you at least have something to work with--something to revise, something to turn in, something. I'm always surprised at how exponentially better a student's writing can become when that student simply produces even one additional, genuinely-revised draft. When she's willing to start over and try it again, her mind starts to make sense of that messy first draft. It doesn't usually make the final draft all the student wants it to be, but it moves it a little closer to what she envisions.

I think creative types (or maybe it's just me, and I don't know if I really qualify as a creative type) sometimes don't want to believe that creativity itself can come down to practice and skill. Granted, some people just seem to have a personality or a mind that's more bent towards creative work. But innate talent isn't enough. Success comes with persistence and hard work. And there's not a way around that.

I guess it's time for me to follow the advice to just pound stuff out.

were you there?

what changes us

"Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but by putting something in—a great Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours, sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only can eradicate what is wrong, work a chemical change, renovate and regenerate, and rehabilitate the inner man. Will-power does not change men. Time does not change men. 

CHRIST DOES."

Today, I read a sermon called "The Greatest Thing in the World," written by Henry Drummond and published first, I think, in 1891. Although the whole sermon is worth reading, I was most struck by the quote above. In recent months, I've been spending a lot of time trying to get things done by will power alone. I make all kinds of determinations about what I'm going to accomplish and what habits I'm going to change and how I'm going to have a good attitude about it all and . . . nothing changes. I determine and determine and I don't make much progress. I think my problem comes in not recognizing the truth expressed above.

This quote from the sermon comes in a section on how maintaining a good temper is part of love. Immediately before this quote, Drummond describes the dangers of doing right and feeling wrong: "[Temper]," he writes, "is the intermittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease within; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath; a sample of the most hidden products of the soul dropped involuntarily when off one's guard; in a word, the lightning form of a hundred hideous and un-Christian sins. A want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity, a want of courtesy, a want of unselfishness, are all instantaneously symbolized in one flash of Temper."

I think this something I'm afraid of--that my outward attempts at goodness aren't penetrating what's inside. That I'm not changing because there is rottenness underneath--and you can't just cover it up. You've got to root it out.

It's not enough to just try to make our outward actions match our ideals--our hearts have to be right on the inside. Drummond's description of the rottenness bubbling underneath reminds me of C. Terry Warner's ideas in Bonds That Make Us Free. Often, we act (self-)righteously and congratulate ourselves on our good behavior and long-suffering when inside our hearts we are at war with those around us. I recognize my own tendencies to fall into this trap of self-justification. The only thing is that recognition alone doesn't solve the problem.

I recognize where I go wrong, and then I become overwhelmed by the sheer number of things I need to fix about myself. Drummond's sermon could have sent me spiraling back into a cycle of guilt and frustration, but the quote at the top of this page prevents that from happening. "Will-power does not change men. Time does not change men. CHRIST DOES." I recognize the wrong inside me and that leads me to want to change, but the key here is that I can't change myself. The burden of guilt and feeling of being convicted that I sometimes feel lifts when I accept this truth: "Will-power does not change men. Time does not change men. CHRIST DOES."

This is why all my best resolutions over the past few months have failed: I've been trying to change things about me while utilizing only my own will power. Reading Drummond's sermon today showed me that I can make determinations all I like, but until I turn the process of change over to Christ, I won't make any progress. I have to be willing, but my will-power won't change me. I have to give Him time, but time won't change me.

Christ will change me.

I find that thought so comforting and relieving. I can leave it up to Him to do His work of changing, and I can stop worrying so much about myself.

Forgetting to worry about myself in turn allows me to focus my attention outward: towards God and those around me. An outward focus leads me to love and this thing, love, Drummond concludes, is the greatest thing in the world. It's Christ's ability to change us that opens in us the capacity for love, the most Godlike quality of all. Said another way, it's the capacity for love, given to us by Christ, that changes us.