Tag Archives: college

SPU’s Affiliation

Posted on by under essays, SPU

Any AFMEI [American Free Methodist Educational Institutions] institution that alters their hiring policy to permit the hiring of individuals living a lifestyle inconsistent with the Free Methodist Book of Discipline’s teachings on sexual purity will be considered to have disaffiliated with the denomination and will not be considered for any level of affiliation as long as this hiring policy is in place.

Free Methodist Church Board of Administration, quoted in an email from SPU’s student government sent May 18, 2022

After careful consideration of multiple and complex concerns, the Board of Trustees has
reached the decision to retain Seattle Pacific University’s current Employee Lifestyle
Expectations regarding sexual conduct. . . .

Seattle Pacific remains committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion for undergraduate and
graduate students, welcoming and supporting each student — including our LGBTQIA+
students — to support their academic pursuits, faith journeys, and life together. To that end,
we continue to strive to create a community where all receive support to thrive and to
belong.

SPU Board of Trustees email, “Board of Trustees reaches decision on Employee Lifestyle Expectations,” May 23, 2022

As a faculty member, I can tell you that the faculty will not be different tomorrow because of the Board’s decision; that you will be welcome in our classrooms and in our offices, and in our hearts, and that will not change. And it will not change that we will not give up. We do not have the right to give up, because you belong to us. I don’t know if you like that, but we claim you as ours. And we will do everything we can to do right by you.

a speech from Dr. Kevin Neuhouser to a rally against the Board’s decision on May 24, 2022; from @engaygetheculture on Instagram

Recent statements from the Free Methodist Church Board of Administration and SPU’s Board of Trustees, quoted above, confirm what I have heard for about half a year, which is that members of SPU’s board would rather let SPU die than hire LGBTQ people as faculty and change their Statement on Human Sexuality. To SPU’s board and to the Free Methodist Church, homosexuality, transness, gayness, queerness, lesbianism, nonbinaryness, etc. are states of living death. To admit open gay, queer, and trans people into positions of authority would be to allow a virus infect the corporate body.

For more than a millennium, Christians have conceived of sexual deviance as a particularly contagious kind of sin threatening the church, so this is no surprise. Punishments for these sins have varied from confession and absolution to hanging and burning to outing and discrediting to withholding sacraments to bullying and “exgay” therapy to the barring of dykes and fags from the priesthood and professorate. Due to the threat of queer contagion – more recently spoken of as recruitment and grooming – Christians hold a special fear of allowing queer people into positions of authority over children and the youth.

So, the Board’s refusal to hire gays and queers does indeed stem from a long Christian tradition, one of Christians portraying us as threats to children and youth. (See Mark D. Jordan’s books The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology and Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk About Homosexuality.) It is impossible to disentangle their insistence on keeping SPU’s discriminatory hiring policies from this Christian tradition, especially in this moment in which the right is passing legislation to keep discussion of gayness out of primary schools and to criminalize being trans. It is a systematic attempt to kill queerness through silence, and SPU’s trustees are prayerfully playing their part, tepidly taking their places next to Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Ron DeSantis.

The irony here is twofold.

  1. Queerness spreads in silence, shadows, under rocks, in margins, and in the bushes. Attempts to prohibit the spread of queers and queerness within the church through keeping us out of education and off of syllabi will always, always fail. What such attempts succeed at is making life more lonely and miserable for young LGBTQ people, leading to increased rates of depression and suicide amongst the very children and youth homophobes claim they are protecting.
  2. The Board says their refusal to hire LGBTQ people is consistent with a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

This second point raises a further irony. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) – as functioning in this statement – are not Christian terms. They are terms of liberal inclusion by which institutions incorporate and regulate difference without fundamentally changing the power structures of the institution. In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Sara Ahmed has described statements such as this one by the Board as “non-performatives”, meaning that they do the very opposite of what they state. She writes, naming such commitments “can be a way of not bringing something into effect” (117). Here, naming the Board’s commitment to DEI is a way of not bringing into effect the space of thriving and belonging they claim to desire. In The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick Ferguson has historicized the way American universities in the 20th century began “producing formulas for the incorporation rather than the absolute repudiation of difference, all the while refining and perfecting its practices of exclusion and regulation” (12). [See also Linn Tonstad’s Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics for how the logics of inclusion play out in the church and potential ways beyond it. For any SPUers wanting something to read while you occupy Demaray, if interested, send me an email and I’ll send some PDFs of some chapters!]

SPU’s Board is exercising an old homophobia in Christianized DEI drag, a deified DIY DEI, and based on the dispatches I see on Instagram, articles in the Falcon, and conversations I’ve had, SPU’s students and faculty are not buying it. Queer SPU students’ use of memes has been criticized by a professor involved in the Board’s LGBTQIA+ Work Group, but a number of the memes I’ve seen reflect a commitment to the liberatory practice of truth telling. And one truth the students are telling with clarity and precision, even through memes, is that a majority of SPU’s board members are homophobes.

Queer Christians seeking acceptance in the church and its institutions are often forced to tiptoe around homophobia. Or they are wooed and romanced by the promise of minor concessions into believing that they will be rewarded for not calling their oppressors what they are. And people like these Board Members deeply desire to be seen as loving Christians, caught tragically in the grip of Truth – not homophobic, just prayerfully deliberating something that is out of their hands. What is exhilarating about the state of resistance at SPU is not only the broad consensus between students, faculty, administration, and alumni that the Board’s Truth is in fact False – which is, by the way, extraordinarily heartening. What is exhilarating is that the students know full well that they will not be rewarded for playing into the Board’s charade of DEIification. The ground of contestation has now shifted: no longer can the fantasy of changing the Board’s heart provide any hope or sustenance for action; now, as posed by the Free Methodist Church’s Board of Administration, the matter is one of affiliation or disaffiliation.

Talking about the church is always tricky, because there is a) whatever one can say about the church as the Body of Christ, the church as a metaphysical, eucharistic, symbolic, ontological – what have you – institution, but in any given situation, there is also always b) the specific manifestation or manifestations of that body. In the case of SPU, there is the Christian Church as Body of Christ, there is the Free Methodist Church, and there are the various Christian traditions to which SPU faculty, students, administration, and alumni belong – all of which are part of the Christian Church as Body of Christ.

I attended SPU for four years and learned absolutely nothing about the Free Methodist Church – it wasn’t emphasized at any part of my education, which is intentional, as the model of education SPU has settled on is decidedly ecumenical. I did value the local Free Methodist Church that partners with SPU. The music department held performances and recitals there. Faculty held going away parties there. Students got married there. When the June 5th shooting occurred, the church opened its doors to hold our grieving community, and itself not far from the sight of the shooting, it truly shared in our grief. It held services, and it opened up spaces for students to study together. That was an incidence of a particular church being the Body of Christ and being a family.

The language of family and affiliation is important to SPU and to the church broadly. But there are two ideas of church-as-family at play in this dispute between the Boards and everyone else. The Free Methodist denominational leadership and SPU’s Board are modeling one version: a patriarchal model in which authority or the authority figure is the inheritor and guarantor of tradition who must defend tradition and the family from dangers like queer people. SPU’s two BoardFathers have handed down an ultimatum: affiliate or disaffiliate with the Free Methodist Church. “Respect our authority or leave.” This is the Boards’ gospel.

This model is the church as heterosexual family. It understands the purpose of Christian tradition as safeguarding a vision of the world rooted in the procreative sex between heterosexual, cisgender married men and women. The church preserves the heterosexual nuclear family; the heterosexual nuclear family reproduces the church. For straight cis people, the good news is inheritance of the church. For all others, the good news is “get your faggot ass out of my house.” This model of church has lost the eschatological element of Christian faith. The imaginable future is not the Kingdom of Heaven but grandchildren. It has made itself amenable (and has indeed produced) white Christian nationalism, although white people are not the only ones invested in it. Even if the Board would distance itself from white Christian nationalism, both are invested in sexuality as the site where the continuation of a specific cultural heritage is guaranteed, thus necessitating sexual purity. The logic is the same.

The second model is one displayed by Dr. Kevin Neuhouser in his megaphoned words to protesters a week ago. Speaking on behalf of the faculty, he said, “We do not have the right to give up, because you belong to us. I don’t know if you like that, but we claim you as ours. And we will do everything we can to do right by you.” Dr. Neuhouser – who I had as a professor a decade ago now – has been an advocate for queer students on campus for a long time. His “I don’t know if you like that” – which got the crowd laughing – may be a recognition that the language of belonging and claiming might feel imposing to some queer people, as those words have been so abused by Christians (see, again, the statement from SPU’s Board). But what he and other faculty and staff members have been modeling for years now (take for example this 2011 letter of SPU faculty support for queer students following then President Phil Eaton’s refusal to let Haven meet on campus) is how to be the church as a community of love within and against institutional and ecclesial strictures against love. How to be in solidarity. This is straining for truer relation within and against a context of exploitation, which – to be clear – is what the Board is defending in taking queer students’ money while refusing to hire queer professors.

What I hear in Dr. Neuhouser’s statement is something like the enactment of a new kind of family. The text I’m currently reading as I study for my second comprehensive exam in my theology doctoral program is John Zizioulas’s Being As Communion. Zizioulas makes a distinction between biological and ecclesial understandings of personhood, which he speaks of using the word hypostasis. Drawing on 1 Peter 1, he talks about new life in baptism: “As the conception and birth of a [person] constitute [their] biological hypostasis, so baptism leads to a new mode of existence, to a regeneration [], and consequently to a new ‘hypostasis'” (53). Baptism means freedom “from the relationship created by [one’s] biological identity. This means that henceforth [one] can love not because the laws of biology oblige [one] to do so… but unconstrained by the natural laws” (57). This approach to nature could be leveraged into a broader argument about the ok-ness of gay sex, but that’s not the argument I’m making. For Zizioulas, being free from biology means that one is free from exercising exclusion against others. Life in the church is marked by the eucharist, which, he says, “is first of all an assembly [], a community, a network of relations, in which [one] ‘subsists’ in a manner different from the biological as a member of a body which transcends every exclusiveness of a biological or social kind” (60). The church, if understandable as a family at all, is a different kind of family: one not bound by the logics of biology and reproduction, but rather, one in which we, all the baptized, are made siblings in Christ.

The Free Methodists and SPU’s Board of Trustees have made clear that the inclusion of LGBTQ people is not an option – their lip service to the thriving and belonging of gay/queer students is as laughable as it insulting. So, we turn again to what they do offer: the options the Free Methodist Church has given the faculty, administration, and students of SPU are affiliation with the FMC and subordination of LGBTQ students and faculty or disaffiliation from the FMC and the hiring of openly LGBTQ people.

SPU’s faculty is already vastly ecumenical, with all kinds of Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox professors, students, and staff members. They represent vastly different Christian views on baptism, the eucharist/communion, the trinity, abortion, sex within heterosexual marriage, gay marriage and relationships, etc. Students come from faith traditions besides Christianity and no faith tradition at all. So in one sense, disaffiliation with the Free Methodists would be a simple recognition of the school SPU already is. In another sense, it would be an arduous and difficult logistical happening, a very important element of this moment that I am not equipped to even begin considering here!

Whether or not disaffiliation is a possibility, questions to consider are: What is new life in Christ? What is the affiliation to which Jesus calls us? What is the church? Who and whose is the church? If the Boards’ gospel of “no gays or get out” isn’t compelling today, what is compelling?

Disaffiliation from the Free Methodists may be painful for many SPUers, but what is clear to me – and has been clear to me for years – is that SPU’s faculty have been seized by a profound love for their students. They are aware of their fundamental, baptismal affiliation with LGBTQ students and colleagues. And it is clear that SPU’s Board of Trustees has nothing meaningful to say to that powerful affiliation. They don’t understand it, because they are removed from all aspects of day-to-day life on campus.

A professor once told me that Seattle Pacific may have a unique place and role to play within the kingdom. It is well situated within the landscape of US-American evangelicalism. And this doesn’t sound like dreaming to me – I agree. As more and more Christians become convinced that gay and trans people ought to be able to hold positions of leadership in church spaces, that we ought to be able to teach, and that students – queers and nonqueers alike – would benefit from our teaching, there will be more and more Christians, including evangelicals, who will be looking for Christian universities that have the faculties (in both senses of the word) to think well about how the gospel is lived out in and reinterpreted in present circumstances.

What would it look like to start imagining Christian education from within the space of deep affiliation between SPU’s faculty and its queer students? A couple of obvious changes would be the removal of the Board, yes, the hiring of gay/queer people, and the elimination of the Statement of Human Sexuality. But that may just be a start. What kind of prayer, worship, theology, life together, could God be calling this small pocket of the kingdom toward? SPU is being baptized by fire. May it become more of what it already is.

Lodged and Loving

Posted on by under essays, SPU

This post is in response to a post by Laura Nile, who says that Seattle Pacific University is hiding its faith. It is a thoughtful post by a wonderful woman who is genuinely concerned with the affairs of her university. The following are musings on themes raised in her post.

—–

That SPU doesn’t talk about Jesus enough wasn’t something that ever crossed my mind until this summer, when, after a panel discussion for people previewing the school, a family shuffled over to me. The mother, who seemed flustered, introduced herself and said, “Thank you. We have been touring the school all day—going to presentations, talking with advisors—and you were the only person who has said anything about Jesus. When we visited [another Christian school in the state], they spoke about Jesus a lot. Does SPU even care about him?”

I was a bit flabbergasted. In response I reassured her that Jesus is very much at the core of what SPU does, even if we don’t say his name a lot at all events for prospective students. I think part of her disappointment as a previewing parent (which is, granted, different than a student) comes from trouble differentiating between the role of evangelism and preaching in the church and the role of recruitment in the university. Talking about your love for Jesus when discussing your faith with believers and nonbelievers alike is a good and necessary thing that we as Christians must do. It is different to talk about your love for Jesus in the context of an admissions event designed to convince prospective students that this school is the school you should attend (and send your money to) over that school. I think it is possible to do so tastefully, but you run the risk of muddling the goals of the two institutions. The goal, or function, of the church is to be the body of Christ—worshiping God and showing God’s love to the world. The primary goal of a university is to educate. A Christian university does this differently than other universities because it sees an individual’s education and vocation as parts of the larger mission of the Church.

In her post, Laura shares pictures of banners from SPU’s new “FROM THIS PLACE” campaign that tell of alumni who have gone on to end river blindness in Ecuador, launch Washington state’s first Asian giving circle, and engage the culture and change the world (the final of these being the school’s motto). Laura writes,

These are wonderful achievements from some talented and gifted alumni, but not one of them mentions a single thing about Christ. Not one of them even hints at our Christian identity. We will boast about non-profits, development work, social justice, and professional athletics, but Heaven forbid we boast about Jesus Christ.

Advertising and branding campaigns are intended to pique curiosity. As a university, SPU wants to showcase its graduates, hence the “FROM THIS PLACE” campaign. It is true that the banners from this campaign do not mention Christ, but the variety and nature of the jobs they describe (treating “veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” or playing pro soccer) suggest the sundry ways that someone motivated by a their Christian education would go forth into the world to serve their God. Not everyone is the same; people serve in different ways. The body has many parts. If the banners were to “boast about Jesus Christ,” I worry that the line between evangelism and recruitment would be too blurred, given that the purpose of the banners is indeed to advertise. What would such banners say? “We believe in Jesus Christ” or “Our students lead lives of Christian integrity” or “Christ has risen!”? There is something I don’t like about putting credal truths and other things about Christian living onto advertising banners. Let them know we are Christians by our mission statement, our magazines, our non-mandatory chapel services, the Bible verses engraved onto the stone of our buildings, and yes, our love.

Laura also raises the concern that our advertising runs the risk of being dishonest to non-Christians about what is most important to us—our Christian identity. She writes,

Sadly, the false advertisement is hurting the non-Christian students who we attracted, who feel tricked into coming to a Christian school.

Another mother approached me after that panel last summer, along with her daughter. During the panel earlier she had asked questions pertaining to SPU’s faith. When she spoke to me afterwards I learned that she was curious because she and her daughter are liberal Jews, wary of SPU’s Christian class requirements. They didn’t need a banner to tell them SPU cares about Jesus. The mother was concerned that because her daughter had a different faith that she would feel alienated here. “She’s bright and she doesn’t let other people say things that they believe without questioning them to see if they’ve actually thought things over.” I told her that SPU’s faculty does not let their students’ beliefs go unchallenged. Many students struggle with ideas like creation or the possibility that some of their beliefs were formed through careless eisegesis. I told her about how the community supported me so amazingly—students and faculty alike—when I came out a year ago. I also told her that being different is both hard, when you feel like no one understands you, and good, when you are able to engage in tough conversations about those differences. By the end of our twenty minute talk the mother and I pretty much agreed that we’d be best friends if things were different, and in retrospect, I don’t think I had to ignore Jesus at all.

Putting the banner issue aside, I really appreciate Laura’s post. While my experience has been a bit different than hers, I think, (or perhaps we just have different expectations), I admire the courage she has to critique something that she loves. Many people are quite willing and eager to point out the flaws in things they dislike (ex: “NASCAR—it’s just driving in circles, amirite?”), but it is more difficult to give a thoughtful critique of something dear to you. Compassionate criticism is necessary in the Church. It calls us to ask ourselves questions like “Why are we here?” and “Why do we do what we do?”—questions whose answers reveal what lies at our core. And, like Laura, it is my prayer that SPU continues to remain firmly lodged in Jesus. I also pray that SPU does this without forgetting that to be in Christ is to “Walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:2, emphasis mine).

I’m at Oxford

Posted on by under travel

Since starting this blog, I have generally tried to keep its contents different than what you might find in my journal. My journal mostly contains descriptions of what I do in a particular day in addition to anything that is particularly wearing on my mind. I try to only blog about something if I think that others will either find it interesting, helpful, or well-crafted. The more mundane things go on my Facebook.

But now I am studying in Oxford, with less access to Facebook and less desire to access Facebook. Instead, I will put up a new blog post now and then to keep those I promised I would keep informed informed.

After a looooooong summer of work I packed up everything in the flat I shared with two coworkers over the summer. Looking ahead, when I go back to Seattle in January I will not be living in the same place, so in addition to Oxford packing I had moving packing to do. I had to leave 6:30 am the next morning to catch my flight. As all of my possessions (including my burgeoning library) were being fit together into boxes like the dullest of all 3d block puzzles that someone inevitably gives you for Christmas, I began to lose it. Maddie and Meredith, two of my favorite ladies (and each wonderful poets), held me together until 1:00 am, when the packing was finished. We crammed my luggage into Maddie’s car and drove to Beth’s Diner for a late night breakfast.

Nothing revives like Beth’s.

I got three hours of sleep that night and one hour the next night on my flight to Heathrow from JFK (having flown there from Seattle). I landed in London at 7:30 am, cleared immigration, and hopped aboard an Oxford-bound bus with several other people I recognized from Facebook. I am here with Best Semester’s Scholars’ Semester in Oxford (SSO). I’m a scholar now, Ma.

Myself and two new friends checked in to Wycliffe Hall, our home for the next few months, before finding a pub to eat, drink, and be as merry as one may be after two and a half days with four hours of sleep. Over the past few days, other students and I have journeyed numerous times into the heart of Oxford for books, groceries, tours, and meals. Those trips occur when we weren’t in some sort of orientation for the programme.

We will soon be falling into a regular schedule of classes. Until the Oxford term starts in about five weeks, we will be taking a class called British Landscapes. It is basically an English history and culture class, from what I understand. It may be taken with specific focuses on various disciplines. We will also begin the Seminar class on a discipline of our choosing that. We will meet with a professor once a week as a group until Oxford term starts. After that, we will attend 16 lectures and write a research paper on a topic of our choosing within the selected discipline. For both the Seminar and British Landscape class I chose Art History. A better understanding of art will enrich my understanding of history and increase the areas I can write about. Plus, it gives me an excuse to go to all of the wonderful museums here.

When the Oxford Michelmas term starts, I will be diving into Shakespeare with my primary tutorial. It’s nice because I have one book for that class: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ha. I won’t read all of it, but I’ll make a good dent. My secondary tutorial will be on Modern Literature. For the purpose of this class, ‘modern’ means 20th century. The authors I’ll read are Waugh, Woolf, Elliot, and Plath.

There it is, a basic summary of my time at Oxford so far. And now, off to bed.

holy rollers for love

Posted on by under essays, music, SPU

Ask anyone on campus how they are doing and the response will inevitably involve something to do about death, hell, or research papers. It is the week before finals at SPU. Third quarter finals—the final finals. I have certainly been feeling the Pull these past couple of weeks. The Pull is the raw gravitational force that constantly tugs at the corners of your mind saying Go to bed. Just go to bed! Wake up in a week. Finals will be done and it will be summer. Oh it will be summer! But the Pull is a lie. Last night I got a solid seven and a half hours of sleep and still I awoke feeling as if God, going for the extra point after a touchdown, had kicked me intending to fly me victoriously through the goal posts but in fact sending me on a beautiful arc ending in the unforgiving track that surrounds the football field. The crowd stops cheering and sits down knowing that their team will lose because of that one lost point.

Tonight I went to a coffee shop that closes at 1:00 am in Capital Hill with some friends to finish off an assignment due tomorrow. Due to the craziness of the day and the week—read the chapters, write the reflection, map out your fourteen-page paper on the Brothers Karamazov that’s due in less than a week, get to a Post Office to drop off the form that was due a week ago, rush back to speak at an admissions panel, go to the Hall council meeting, and try to polish off the 3rd movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto—I was bordering on an embarrassing meltdown while attempting to read about China’s economic turnaround in the late 20th century.

I unfairly hoped that someone would interrupt me.

Continue reading →

naming (spacebags)

Posted on by under essays, SPU

My freshman friends call me Spacebags Goat. Spacebags comes from something I posted on their class’ Facebook page last summer. These pages are where you can ask the important questions like “Who else likes taking picture?!??” and “Does it get cold in Seattle? That’s what I’ve heard :(” and “Am I the only one who LOVES country music here?” These questions bring people together around common interests (photography), common conversation topics (the weather, and Seattle’s lack thereof), and uncommon interests (country music). These questions also give returning students who really don’t belong on the page at all the chance to adopt the role of the mother/father/older sibling who has all of the answers. The sophomores—and some juniors—try to hype the freshman up for their first year away from home. I am the king of this. After months of not-school I was salivating for social interaction. The literal “natural thing to do” would have been to avoid Facebook like undercooked cafeteria meat and instead bloom where I was planted, whatever that means. Instead, I opted for the figuratively speaking “natural thing to do,” which was to join the incoming class’ Facebook group and snort up the their questions like an addict.

Wise sophomore me was eager to pass along his knowledge of adjusting to college life. This peaked in a video that I posted on the page. I was in the midst of packing for Seattle, so I made a video about packing. More specifically, I made a video about a very convenient tool that has simplified my packing life, allowing me to say goodbye to the frustration and anxiety that comes along with it. Let me introduce you to a close personal friend of mine: the Space Bag. Imagine a ziploc bag, but big enough to put a torso in—or seven bulky sweaters. You then suck the air out of it with a vacuum cleaner hose, and ta dah! you can fit everything you need to take with you into your luggage without a hassle. Obviously, I’m quite passionate about the Space Bag. I wanted to impart my secret to a new generation of SPUers, so I made them a 10 minute tutorial on how to properly use Space Bags. If any of them were weirded out by the sophomore obsessed with an As Seen on TV product, they had the decorum to keep on scrolling without saying so.

Continue reading →

old white men

Posted on by under music, SPU

The first full week of the second quarter of my sophomore year of college is over. And, as it often happens at school, I have gone the week without a post here. Here are a couple of fragments about two strangers I’ve seen in the last week or so.

The first one is something I posted on Facebook while flying back to Seattle a week and a half ago:

There is a bearded old man sitting across the aisle from me in the airplane. So far, he has written a couple stanzas of poetry, the first line of which ended with “solitude,” and ordered the cheese, crackers, and fruit box—he fumbled with the crackers’ wrapper for a solid minute. Now he is on ebay looking through hundreds of antique Persian rugs. When I started writing this status, my intent was to say, “Well isn’t he weird,” but I’ve just realized I might be intruding on the privacy of my future self.

At several times during the flight I felt the strong urge to strike up a conversation with him. I waited for the right moment. Asking a stranger about his solitude poetry seemed inappropriate, but asking to see if he wanted help opening his crackers after watching him struggle for a while might have been a nice gesture. Or, I suppose, it could have made him feel pathetic. After an hour of his persian rug browsing, I considered tapping his shoulder to tell him “I like the pattern on that one” but I didn’t want to make him feel obligated to buy a rug he wasn’t all that interested in. They were at least $150 each, so it would have been an investment.

I didn’t talk to him.

Continue reading →

lions and vomit and crows, oh my

Posted on by under childhood, SPU

Earlier today I was walking from my survey of music literature class to the office building of my faculty advisor when I realized that I was the only student in that part of campus. But I was not alone. I was surrounded by figures shrouded in black from head to toe. It was the closest I’ve ever come to running into the mafia. It wasn’t the Italian mafia, Chinese, Swedish, or 3-6. It was a large group of crows—what has been eerily labeled a “murder.” All black, hateful stares, forced nonchalant demeanors, sharp memories, and when you get a group of them together you’re going to have a murder… mafia.

I’ve also heard that a group of lions is called a pride. When I hear “the pride of lions” I think that the lions must especially pleased with themselves for some reason. Or maybe one of the cubs is displaying great potential in training for the hunt, so she is regarded as “the pride of the lions.” If lion parents had bumpers, her parents would have “Proud parent of a gifted prowler” or something to the effect.

The only thing I really pride myself in is a personal record—a PR for you sports-minded people out there. I have not vomited since the Ravens won the Superbowl. That was, what, 2001? Nerves spit-ups, sure. Acid reflux, a little. But not a full blown PLUGHHHH. I bring this up whenever a friend mentions a bad case of food poisoning or the upward stomach flu. “My dad is the same way.” Just so they know.
Continue reading →

being back

Posted on by under depression, essays

Dad and I flew out of Grand Rapids yesterday morning and arrived in Seattle yesterday morning.  It was a pretty long morning.  I started a new journal on the plane and wrote a good six pages in it.  Rainier from the plane…

DSCN2943

Dad helped me settle into my room a bit and headed out.  I should mention that I came early because I will be serving my residence hall as president this year.  Nearly every minute since Dad left has been leadership training, eating, or preparing for Welcome Week—the half-week when all of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed freshmen come in and we inject excitement straight into their veins.  Busy, busy.  But good busy.  Busy with the really fantastic people in Hall Council with me.  It will be a great year. Continue reading →

search and rescue; call and response

Posted on by under depression, essays, picture, SPU

The college search is hard for many people.  Some lucky duckers know what they want to do and where they want to do it, only apply to that place, get accepted and attend.  Others, like myself, have a vague sense of what they’d like to study and maybe a lead on a school they could be interested in.  I thought that I’d like to study one of the liberal arts and I applied to eleven or twelve schools.  Halfway through application season (January or so), I switched my intended major to music.

Some of my Christian friends have a strong sense of God’s will for their lives.  Whether they use the phrase or not, you can tell they know—or at least think they know—which school God wants them to attend, what career God has prepared for them, etc.  “God has a plan for you, and that is so beautiful and exciting!”  This sort of language, although well-intended and true, confused me during my college search, and still does.  The idea of ‘God’s plan’ wasn’t very comforting either, because I thought that it meant I had a one in twelve chance at choosing the Right School, and a similar chance at choosing the Right Major.  There was a lot at stake and I didn’t want to screw my life up.

All right, close your eyes.  Raise your hand if you think that sounds ridiculous and a little melodramatic.  I see many hands in the air, belonging to agnostics, atheists, and believers alike.  Oops, I raised my hand, too.  Ok, hands down, hands down.

I still don’t understand the concept of God’s will, although I’ve learned that it involves a lot more freedom than I had previously thought.  But I couldn’t see that in my senior year of high school.  The fear that I could permanently remove myself from the Right Trajectory of Life added to my depression and anxiety, and was the cause of a couple panic attacks.  I didn’t speak to anyone about this because I felt alone.  Who would listen? Continue reading →