someone who has a compulsive and unrelenting need to work
I have to confess that I have been a workaholic since I was 13. About 18 months ago, I fell off the wagon. I thought I could manage my addiction, thought that I could set boundaries and stay within them.
I also thought that I understood what was at the root of this compulsion to see so much of my self-worth in how much money I make and how much I can achieve within a professional setting. I thought I understood the damage this does to those I love, to myself and to the fabric of the relationships I am part of.
This is I know (again): I am Bob - and I am a workholic.
Mine is a relentless scar, one that that I have tended for so long I can not even imagine what life looks like without it. It is a steady climb, always up - I am sad to say too often over.
I have hiked the mountain range of sugar cubes - short bursts of esteem and self-definition that never satisfy my hunger, never satiate my need. There is no peak to my compulsion, though there are deep valleys. For me, there is only the climb.
I am Bob - and I am a workholic. Today, as best as I can, I'll stay transparent with those I love, stay grounded in being a beloved creature of God, stay connected in the communities I am blessed to be weaved into.
Today, a favorite blogger of mine - Paul Fromont - points to a quote from Henri Nouwen that reminds me how lucky we are that we have found such a wonderful home in Austin:
Each of us is like a little stone, but together we reveal the face of
God to the world. Nobody can say: "I make God visible." But others
who see us together can say: "They make God visible."
At the wacky faith community we live among, the way you become a member is a wonder - you take a stone or pebble or rock, write your name on it - and shazam, you are a member. We do not really know what to do with these rocks - sometimes they sit in a basket, occasionally they get lost. One by one, you can see the crags, the cracks, even the dangers of that rock - taken together we are a mosaic, together making God visible.
Today our icons - our rocks - showed up in a pond under a cross that was being showered:
For me, it captured so much of the meaning I find in God - a liquid God, made up of the elements, blown by the ruach, showering love by transforming an icon of death into new life. That God washes over us & around us and even through us. For communion, we took bread & water - the meal of prisoners - and we poured some of the water onto the rocks in the pond. An outward & visible sign of grace flowing like a river.
In the Nouwen quote that Paul points to, it ends with this statement of what makes community such powerful soil for me to be planted in:
I am re-reading Neil Gaiman's book American Gods, joining more than 500 people around the world who are part One Book, One Twitter. Jeff Howe came up with the idea for 1B1T, inspired by the one city, one book program that so many cities & towns around the world have adopted. Howe's idea was very simple - use the micro-blogging service Twitter to get a bunch of people all reading and talking about a single book. Another fun example of how a bunch of "strangers" connect via the Web, cluster around a social object and spur a fascinating conversation.
I just finished the first chapter - I'll be posting my ahas on my Twitter feed.
10 years, you were smart if you saw the technology trends.
3 years ago, you were smart if you saw the cultural trends.
3 months ago, you were smart if you saw the traffic trends.
right now, we'd be smart to realize that this happening now
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Priest Religious, But Not Really Spiritual
BOSTON—Father Clancy Donahue of St. Michael Catholic Church told reporters Wednesday that while he believed in blindly adhering to the dogma and ceremonies of his faith, he tried not to get too bogged down by actual spirituality. "I'm not so much into having a relationship with God as I am into mechanically conducting various rituals," Donahue said. "To me, it just feels empty to contemplate a higher power without blindly obeying canon law and protecting the church as an institution." Donahue emphasized that although he did not personally agree with those who pondered the eternal, he had nothing against them.
Poetry is a funny thing in American culture. We dedicate a month to it - April was Nat'l Poetry Month - there are 300 to 400 literary journals that are dedicated to sharing poets and their work. It probably will be shocking to most people that more than 100,000 poems will be published in 2010 - roughly 10% of all books published this year. That seems big - then I run into a word like zettabyte - which IDC reports will be the total amount of data stored in the world’s computers in 2010.
Poetry seems a bit ridiculous in the face of the bits & bytes of the information shared on computers around our world. Aside from Billy Collins or SARK, I suspect no one who starts writing a poem expects to make a living from being a poet. It's something a cab driver does while she is waiting for a fare, that a corp exec does to keep his soul on life support, something an English teacher does to quiet the din of those squealing kids or that stack of papers to be graded.
With that as context, this piece by David Biespiel frames the insidious way poetry has become a mirror for what is happening in America right now:
The same forces that make the American citizenry anti-poetic have also made Americans, including poets, anti-civic. The citizenry has turned inward and toward very specific pursuits—so while the American poet was specializing in the self, the potential audience for poetry was too.
America’s poets have turned insular and clustered in communities of aesthetic sameness, communicating only among those with similar literary heroes, beliefs, values, and poetics. Enter any regional poetry scene in any American metropolis or college town, and you will find the same cliquey village mentality with the same stylistic breakdowns. Over here you have the post-avant prose poets, over there the kitchen-sink confessionalists, and across the road are the shiny formalists—and no one ever breaks bread together.
As with politics, where you have “I’m voting for That One” liberals and “Time for a Tea Party” conservatives, poetry has evolved into a self-selected enclave, and also—exactly like other sectors of American life—it has stratified into enclaves within enclaves that are hyper-specific and self-referential.
Reading that made me think of a form of poetry that is hyper-specific and extremely self-referential. Slam poetry, which began in this iteration in 1986, seems to communicate a fierce-ness and an intensity for the people who speak it and the people who hear it. Much like folk music set poetry to music, slam poetry and rap seemed to be intermingled in that ways that heighten the urgency of the message & the beats. Like Yeats or Homer, slam poets & rappers seem to hone meaning from the struggles around them.
Poets priestsandpoliticians havewords to thankfor their positions. Wordsthat scream for your submission and no-one's jamming their transmission
Jamming the transmission - that really clicks with me in terms of the ridiculous power that poetry can have. In my late teens & early 20s, I wrote poetry. I was a hacker, but the craft, the revision and the flow transported me in a way that jammed up the transactional world of commerce. In faith communities, I have been lucky to live around poets, people who could not run a meeting or balance a budget - but who can hone meaning out of our shared lives.
Jamming the transmission of our culture, not giving into the Big Sort that Bill Bishop framed and that Biespiel observes in the world of poets - that is a goal worth of all of us who love words string together by a teenage poet, a slam poet or even a hacker like me.
i love writers - the craft, the editing & proofing, the heroes of writing and the hackers like me who write because it helps us make meaning. or because there is paper and something to write with.
or just because.
readers are a tribe that I am proud to be part of. getting lost - truly lost - in someone else's writing can exquisite or maddening or even transformative. i am quite promiscuous in where, when & how I will read.
much of my life has been bound up in books. the faith tradition I grew up in - the Episcopal church - places at its core 2 collections of books. deep in the center is the Book of Common Prayer, from which all right thinking & right practice flows. mixed in with that core set of books are the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity - no, not the New York Times - the 39 books of Hebrew scripture and the 27 books of Christian scripture.
I love libraries - I find them more safe & comforting than houses of faith or places of business. there is a quality to the silence in libraries that wraps me up in libraries, a sense that all those stories & all that information swaddle me tightly.
I have spent most of my professional life in or around the business of publishing - the pipes that connect writers & readers. those pipes are awfully rusty, they are leaking - the joints are coming apart at the seams.
Truth be told, this coming apart at the seams has been going on for more than 200 years, long before Tim Berners-Lee built a new publishing ecosystem. Ralph Rochester has a great post at The Literary Platform that includes this line:
The cognoscenti sneered at the quality of the mass produced books with their library bindings.
We place an enormous amount of authority and power in the concept of a bound book, of knowledge wrapped up in a library binding. We exchanged the power of an oral tradition -- of voices shared among tribes -- for one of a bound nature, with peer review and perished publication too often substituting for wisdom & truth.
as this upheaval tears more & more at the binding, the cognscenti - the parts of the world invested in that binding, that too often sneers at changes - have a challenge wrapped in an opportunity in front of us. as people of the book, a challenge is how to stay engaged with writers & readers - rather bind that engagement in one form only (the produced book). an opportunity is that the new new is not known yet - the volving web affords us the chance to share passions and questions in a way that broadcast mediums rarely did.
a little over a year ago, the New Zealand Book Council produced a video that frames much of the tumultuous nature of this challenge and the promise of this opportunity:
So I am back. Hard to be believe it has been almost 10 months since I have last posted. That is the longest gap in this blog since I started 7 years ago.
It would be easy for me to say I got tired of posting or that the conversation flagged or that the SPAM comments got exhausting to keep up with deleting. Easy, but untrue.
Instead, the truth is I gave up - I waved the white flag of surrender.
Straddling a formal setting and the voice I can embody here got too much for me. I tried - a few posts here & there, comments on folks I adore. But the straddle became too tough, the division hard to do in plain sight.
But the universe moves in the most interesting ways - and I am back. Back to the corner, a place that has been so generative for me, a place where I can muse and write and not have to make sense.
On my bike ride today, I listened to a great podcast from Sounds True. In it, a hero of mine - Parker J. Palmer - spoke about divided lives:
Here is the ultimate irony of the divided life: live behind a wall
long enough, and the true self you tried to hide from the world
disappears from your own view!
My self-imposed exile over the last year resonates with Palmer's insight. So here I am - over the wall again, striving for a deeper acceptance of my own nature and that of the world.
At our worship gathering at the warehouse yesterday, it was all about love.
it made me think of 3 great bits from lovers I like:
Jean Vanier, the founder of L'Arche, an international organization which creates communities where people with developmental disabilities and those who assist them share life together, writes in Community and Growth:
It is important that [those] who hear the call of God or of the poor
come into community to be there as a sign of the Kingdom, a sign that
love is possible and that there is hope.
Nothing in this world is an end in itself, including Church,
pastors, priests, bishops, popes, laws, Bible—nothing! Only God is an
end; everything else is a means. Only God can save us, not the Church
and not any formula, technique, or pious practice.
The Church is a beautiful gift given by God to preach that word
which will set us free. But when we instead preach "Church" itself, we
are not necessarily proclaiming the Great Mystery. We often are
preaching ourselves. Jesus never preached Israel, he preached Yahweh.
He preached the absolute transcendence of Yahweh and fidelity and
obedience to Yahweh.
At the same time Jesus never put Israel down. He loved Israel.
Insofar as Israel was true to the covenant and true to the prophets,
Jesus was obedient to Israel, obedient to the priests, obedient to "the
Church." But he wasn't afraid to keep knocking on the door. He kept
inviting Israel to be true to itself. Jesus taught us to love the
unlovely, exactly as it was.
If we simply love that which is worthy of love, we will never love
at all. The Lord loved "the Church," Israel, exactly as it was. You
cannot love the Church as it was fifty years ago. That's a cop-out. The
only Church you must love is the Church today.
When you’ve been involved in something like this, no matter how long
ago it happened, no matter how long it’s been absent from the news,
you’re fated, nonetheless, to always search it out. To be on alert for
it somehow, every day of your life.
