Memories, Dreams, Memories

First thing's first: Happy Anniversary, honey! 11 years, not too shabby.

I have to admit I was a little taken aback by the June 4 This I Believe essay on NPR, which described a fine line between settling for and accepting a "good enough" marriage. The author sounds practical, down-to-earth, sensible, but I also thought, if she hopes for certain things in her marriage, why not ask? She writes,

"My husband is not my best friend. He doesn't complete me. In fact, he can be a self-absorbed jerk...On the other hand, he doesn't beat or emotionally abuse me. He doesn't drink or chase other women. He's a good provider. So I'm sticking with him...

"...yes, I'm settling. Sure, I wish my husband would kiss me more often, tell me he loves me every day, and get as excited about my accomplishments as I do. Emptying the dishwasher without being asked and giving me unsolicited foot massages wouldn't hurt, either.

"All that would be nice, but it's not necessary. I'm happy with my husband who, despite his flaws, is a caring father, capable of acts of stunning generosity and fiercely protective of his family. Thinking about him may not set me on fire as it used to, but after 17 years and two kids, our love is still warm."

I guess I have to be enormously thankful. My husband, in addition to all the amazing qualities I wrote about in my Gabriel's Oboe post, is generous with his affections, compliments me and verbalizes his love every day, gets excited when I'm excited about something I've done or gotten interested in, is a supportive partner and devoted father, does more than his share of housework, is noble and compassionate in his work and his attitude to others, does volunteer to give massages, and is indeed my best friend in the world as well as a shameless flirt with me after more than a decade.

I've heard other folks tell me, "Oh, it's so nice that he still tells you you're beautiful (I'm not, actually, but he tells me I am). Mine never compliments me," or "When you two look at each other, the room still disappears," or my personal favorite, my daughter saying, "Marriage is life's great happiness." And when I asked her where she got that idea, she answered matter-of-factly, "You two." I wish I could impart some secret ingredient or piece of advice to her for when her time comes. The things that come to mind about why we "work" are, we make each other laugh; we can cry together too; we learn from each other; we hug each other often; and we pray together. Oh yes, and when we fight, we make up. That always helps. And we try to accept (sometimes even cherish) each other's imperfections (many, in my case, poor guy). I guess that's the same point the NPR essayist was driving at: "happily ever after" comes with a healthy dose of patience, humility, and acceptance. But I don't think "settling" is necessary or something to encourage. Maybe it's all just semantics?

I hope my children have blessed relationships in which their preciousness is SEEN, recognized, and truly, deeply loved.

***

Today's the last day of the IDRS conference. Wish I could have gone this year, even if I can barely play two notes on an oboe! The above photo is of the Fossati table at the conference, I think (got it from the Fossati Paris website). *Sigh*

I DREAM of getting a Fossati E30...We're supposed to go visit my husband's relatives in France this summer, but I'm too embarrassed to walk into the Fossati atelier as a flaming beginner and ask to try one. Their company philosophy sounds so supportive of all levels of musicianship, but I mean, you can just imagine - I walk in there and start HONKIN' around on their BEAUTIFUL, superbly crafted instruments...wouldn't they want to rescue the poor oboes out of my hands and boot me out of the store? That's if they can stop rolling their eyes long enough... :)

When we bought our lovely little upright piano for our daughter, going to the piano store was FUN. It was at the top of a three-story walk-up in an old building. There was a workshop area with piano parts in one corner of the place that looked like an "exhibit for the anatomy of a piano." Neat! My father and I walked in and just started playing. He did some Beethoven, I think, and I pulled out the old Mozart concerto, and we had a blast! "Oh, this one's out of tune, that one's too bright and plinky, but this one's JUST right." You just get a feel for the instrument, a comfortable feeling like coming home and putting on something cozy that fits perfectly, and you hear a sound that's true to what you have to express, and you know you've found it. But I can't go and do that at FOSSATI. Wish I could bring Kyoko along!

***

I am on call all weekend again. Bummer.

***

Blogging here at the hospital after an embouchure-destroying practice session in our little lounge. I must be doing something wrong. I am sputtering more now than I used to. My lips got so pooped out after only 45 min. that I had to stop. I guess that's better than my former 20 min., but still, I feel like such a WEAKLING!

Have been idly leafing through magazines on a lunch break. Another reminder to be thankful for anonymity (and for the freedom to leaf through magazines in the first place). I was just perusing an article about the Princes of Wales and thinking back to Princess Diana's tragic death. I remember clearly the moment I heard it on the news. I was pregnant with my daughter and unable to sleep. I went to the living room to watch a little TV late at night, and there it was.

This made me think of that famous recurring question, "Where were you when such-and-such happened?" I started to make a list (as is my wont):

Event (occurrence or report of occurrence) & where I was at the time:

9/11: visiting Mount Sinai medical school in New York City as a 4th-year medical student, on a rotation through their genetics clinic

Death of Princess Diana: in my living room watching very late night news

O.J. Simpson verdict: coming out of the T station at Harvard Square

Shuttle Challenger explosion: being interviewed for a scholarship at what would be my high school

Pope John Paul II shot by Mehmet Ali Agca: at home; my mom said I cried (I was 9).

Pentecost Thoughts

Happy Pentecost!

Perhaps there are those who wouldn't be excited to celebrate the "birthday of the Church." Lately, decrying the evils of institutional religion has been the fashion in literary circles, as shown by books like Letter to a Christian Nation , The God Delusion, God: the Failed Hypothesis, and God is not Great. I certainly agree with the thesis that people's manipulation of religious belief throughout the centuries has often resulted in tremendous injustice, violence, suffering, intellectual backwardness, and cruelty. Galileo's trial? Stupid. The postmortem excommunication of Wyclif? Asinine. The Crusades and the Inquisition? Hideous. All the recent scandals, insults, and pastorally insensitive decisions too numerous to name? Frustrating beyond expression. All these are certainly far easier to notice than the quieter moments of individual heroism, the openness of some churches (including mine) to advances in scientific understanding and scriptural scholarship, the call to recognition of the sacred, and the evolution throughout the centuries of hospitals, social programs, and educational programs throughout the world, which have been achieved in great part thanks to the works of the church.

To blame the religions and not ourselves for the utter failure to respect human rights, be educated and thoughtful, and live in peace, as most religions call people to do, is lame and incorrect. It's so much easier to point the finger than hold up a mirror. The institutions constructed by human society don't fail us; we fail them. One could easily say about anything institutionalized - government & politics, for instance - that it is divisive and corrupt.

I believe it's abundantly clear that fundamentalist or militant groups claim the name of God for their own purposes without any understanding or even concern for whether their ideals and actions are consistent with their religion's teachings about humanity and God's relationship to it. It seems to me that these groups would be violent out of pure hatred for "the other" regardless of the existence of religion. There's always an excuse to hate for those who hate. Those types will always be around, even if a thousand years from now societies come to embrace rational empiricism and look back on religious belief as primitive or a function of some neuroanatomical phenomenon - even though belief that God isn't there, that reality is comprised only of what can be proven, is, like all other faiths, nothing more than belief too. Just as the poor, the enraged, the miserable, and the hateful will "always be with us," I also believe, contrary to views I heard expressed on TV by supporters of the recently opened Creation Museum, that there will also always be people who strive to live loving, moral lives regardless of their understanding of God or belief in his existence. In fact, I believe that those who work to live moral lives not because of fear of punishment, which is indeed a primitive, thoughtless motive for embracing virtue, but rather because morality benefits human lives, show superior moral reasoning.

So I do celebrate. Pentecost - this is a joyful, wondrous feast, when we remember an event so indescribable and inexplicable in the history of the early church that authors could only describe it by comparing it to the rush of a great wind, or to the descent of tongues of flame over a group of believers. Christians believe they were on fire with the Holy Spirit, and that when they spoke the good news that they were burning to tell people about, listeners miraculously heard their words in their native languages. I love the story for its mystery, its sense of something momentous and transfiguring in people's lives, its implication that God comes alive in givers and receivers and the transactions in between, intimately connecting us with each other and with a life greater than our own.

Being a Star Trek fan, sometimes I ask myself, if it happened as described, what might provide a natural explanation for it? Did some alien civilization swoop in with their huge space ship (hence the wind) and implant "universal translators" into people's brains, using some visible energy that hovered over their heads like flames? Was some omnipotent life form, like the Q on Star Trek: the Next Generation, controlling their minds and perceptions, trying to see if they could induce a religious movement based on a mythic (or staged) resurrection story, some miracles, and a whole lot of machinations?

Well, sure I guess. Doesn't quite meet Occam's Razor criteria, but it could be a valid theory in this little mental game, though I laugh to myself thinking there are less absurd things.

But perhaps there's a less outlandish "natural explanation" that could explain Pentecost, the way mental illness or seizure disorders are now thought to explain entities once attributed to demonic possession. How about, they were all in a room, there was a huge gust of wind, they went into a mass hallucination, and somehow managed to communicate with people from various cultures about their experience? Hmm, a little vague, but maybe.

Are any of these possibilities less absurd than the possibility of Emmanuel: God with us? Or the possibility that love is real? If there is Life from whom all life proceeds, an energy Source that set all of the natural world in motion, is it then so unbelievable that such a generative energy be a loving one, one that could be present among us, BE us, and triumph over human limits, even the perceived limits of physics and biology?

I am no theologian. I will not pretend or claim to understand spiritual mysteries, to know God or Christ or any of the world's holiest prophets. For me, story and ritual nourish that part of my brain / mind / heart / spirit that longs for transcendence, and I am at peace with incomplete understanding. The doctor in me usually has to know about things; there is a part of me, though, that doesn't need to know or understand everything, that has found peace in mystery, in the process of reaching for greater wisdom whether or not such wisdom is attainable. Trying to find natural explanations for events and experiences is a good thing. Reason is a human gift. We're supposed to use it. But perhaps in some cases, going through all sorts of intellectual contortions to try to understand certain human experiences is futile and, in the end, missing the point.

Something happened back then. I don't know exactly what. But the world was never the same afterward, in both good and bad ways. So that Something made a real dent in our physical and historical reality, and I think our task now hundreds of years later is to let that same Spirit work through us, like hands kneading bread, or leavening that makes bread rise.
-What are we on fire about?
-What would we give our lives to communicate?
-How can we transform ourselves, our world, into something greater than the sum of its imperfect parts?

***

This morning my family, here and in Manila gathered around NPR's webcast of Weekend Edition Sunday (it's amazing that we could even do this!) to listen to a short essay I wrote and recorded for their series This I Believe. I don't know if this was coincidence, but they chose to air the essay, which is essentially about spirit and mentions spirit a lot, on this day of all days, the day of the Holy Spirit. Listening to it reminded me that the Spirit doesn't always have to come in a big gust of wind. Elijah found it in a whispered breeze outside his cave. I see it in my children and my husband every day - in their questions, their joy, their sorrows, their love, in everything that makes us living beings, in all those moments that create our human life.