Wedded Ecstasy

From a classmate's wedding, right before I left Moscow to come home. Dr. Leithart gave the exhortation.

Song of Songs 2:16a: “My beloved is mine, and I am his”; 6:3a: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”; 7:10: “I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.”

“How are you feeling today?” someone might have asked you. How can you answer? Happy? Excited? Overjoyed? Nervous? None of the normal words is big enough to express the magnitude of this day. You reach for something bigger, and you’re tempted to try something faux-German like “Uber-happy” or faux-Greek like “Hyper-excited.”
The emotion of this day is best captured, I submit, by the word “ecstatic.” That’s big enough to get at the joy and delight of your wedding, and, more importantly, it highlights deeper dimensions of what’s happening today, and what you’re committing yourselves to for the unforeseeable future.
Etymologically, the word “ecstasy” means “to stand outside,” and that’s what the English derivative meant for centuries. When Ophelia laments that Hamlet’s “unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth [is] blasted with ecstasy,” she’s not worried that he’s too happy but that he’s mad. He’s “beside himself.” We don’t have to be insane to experience this. “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” we sometimes say. “I feel like I’m standing to the side watching myself.” That’s ecstasy. In the ecstatic moments of life, you can’t hold yourself within your own body; you feel you are both yourself, and not yourself. With so many weddings, it’s easy to get confused about which one you’re attending, but when you realize with a shock that we’re now halfway through your wedding, you’ve had an “ecstatic” experience.
That experience may be comparatively rare, but ecstasy – standing outside yourself – is not. Ecstasy is the human condition, the condition of all creatures. We are vapor, most vaporous vapor. We have no life in ourselves, no resources of our own, nothing that is not gift. “In Him we live and move and have our being,” Paul tells the skeptical philosophers on Mars Hill. In Scripture, this is often described in terms of breathing. Living things are breathing things. The flood destroyed “all flesh in which is the breath of life.” Conversely, death is breathlessness: When the patriarchs died, they “breathed their last,” and when Israel carried out the ban against the Canaanites, they were to leave nothing that breathed. “My life is but breath,” Job says, and if that’s true, then life is not our own but comes from elsewhere. From the moment Yahweh formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils, human life has been outside humans. We all live ecstatically, on “borrowed breath” (David Kelsey).
The life of redemption is, if anything, more radically ecstatic. Through His death, Jesus abolished death and brought life and immortality to light. He died for all, that they who live might live for the One who died. On nearly every page of Paul’s letters, he reminds us that we live not in ourselves but “in Christ.” “I have been crucified with Christ,” Paul says in his most elaborate statement of this reality, “and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered Himself up for me.” As creatures, we live on borrowed breath; as redeemed creatures, we live through Another’s death (Kelsey).
When you say “I do” in a few moments, you’ll be committing yourselves to life-long ecstasy. Ryan, you’ll no longer be simply Ryan; from this day on, you have to learn to live as Ryan-and-Courtney; Courtney, you’ll no longer be yourself, but will be standing outside yourself, living your life in Ryan’s life as he lives his in yours. That’s what being in love is: The excitement of falling in love is learning to identify yourself not just with yourself but with your beloved; it’s grafting your beloved into your own identity. Falling in love is like meeting Jesus: “It is no longer I who live, but another lives in me.” Human existence is ecstatic, redeemed existence is ecstatic, and in marriage, that living icon of creation and redemption, you’re committing yourself to being beside yourself til death do you part.
Ecstasy is the normal state of man because ecstasy characterizes the eternal life of the God in whose image we are made. The Father does not desire to stand alone as God; He doesn’t want to possess His divinity for Himself alone. Out of love, He eternally begets His Eternal Son as an “expression of the [His] ecstatic love” (Mark McIntosh, and the following paragraphs), and that same love produces “the eternal filial response of the Son towards the Father.” The Father is Father because of “his eternal desire to pour out the divine life for the Other-in-God (the Son),” and the Son is Son insofar as He “desires eternally to speak forth the Father’s giving life.” Son and Father both say, with equal totality and intensity, “I am my beloved’s, and He is mine.” Father and Son are each beside themselves with love. Such is the ecstasy of God.
This God, this ecstatic Trinity, chooses to be more ecstatic still. The Father stands outside Himself in the Son, and the Son in the Father, but together they stand outside themselves in creating and sustaining a world that is other than both. The Father eternally speaks His Word, but He chooses to speak His Word not only as Word but as world. For His part, the Son desires His love for the Father to resound not only in the enclosure of perfect divine communion but “from within all creatures.” Father and Son make a world they don’t need, in order to take up this world into their mutual love. The world becomes part of the “love language” of Father and Son (David Field). Creation too is an expression of God’s ecstasy.
But this God, this ecstatic Trinity, chooses to be more ecstatic still. The world doesn’t cease to be the mutual love-gift of Father and Son simply because sin and death enter: In defiance of sin and death, the Father is determined to express His love in the creation, and the Son is still determined that creation will respond to His Father in obedience, faith, and love. In the perfect obedience of the Son, the Son’s love for the Father resounds more richly than ever, for in the incarnate Son “the Word speaks even in the final silence of the cross.” In the incarnation, the Father sends the Son to stand outside God as man, and in His life, death, and resurrection, the incarnate Son renews creation, so that creation can stand outside itself, in God.
All this is done through the Spirit, who is the Love, the very ecstasy of God. “Beguiled” by the Spirit, the Father eternally begets an eternal Word and in the Spirit the eternal Word vocalizes eternal praise. The Spirit is the living breath who energizes the Word by which the Father creates the world, and the Spirit gives life to the creatures through whose praise the Word sings to His beloved Father. In the fullness of time, the Spirit drove the Son into the wilderness of the world, drove Him to the cross, rescued Him from the grave, and now is the Love that is the presence of Jesus, the breath by which we live. Through His Spirit, the incarnate Son stands outside Himself, orchestrating creation, tuning it to praise the Father.
Two days from now is the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the last Sunday in the season celebrating the coming of the Son. Advent discloses the God who is abounding love, whose love abounds even in creation, abounds even to sinful humanity, the God of Love who has determined that, no matter how much the world, the flesh, and the devil try to derail it, His work will stand and His love triumph. Though a cross stand in the way, this God, this God of Advent, this ecstatic Trinity, determines that through the Spirit creation will yet be a gift of love from the Father to Son, and from the Son to the Father. Our prayer is that your Advent wedding will be an annual, a constant reminder that together you serve a God who freely stands outside Himself to create and re-create us.
Advent is also a reminder of your responsibilities, privileges, and joys as husband and wife. The Uber-ecstasy you feel today won’t last forever, but if you are going to have a successful marriage, ecstasy must be the theme of your marriage from this day until you breathe your last, because ecstasy is the form of your life, and of your life together. You have died, your life is hid with Christ in God; you no longer live but Christ lives in you. As those who are centered in Christ, you’re called to a marital love that mimics God’s ecstasy, a love that breaks open the enclosure of self-possession; you’re called to embody what Solomon describes in a chiasm of mutual possession – I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; my beloved is mine, and I am his; I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me –; you’re called to a mutual possession that depends wholly on your continuous ecstatic dispossession. Our confident prayer is that God will grant you grace to live out the ecstasy of the living God, to lose the life that is not really yours to begin with, so that you may find it not in yourself but in God in each other.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I can grow older in my sleep.

So for my birthday I roasted brussel sprouts with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (from an Ina Garten recipe, though I didn't add parmesan and toasted pine nuts--although I would have loved too). And I made a soup with all my favorite things in it: rutabaga, sweet potato, rosemary, red wine, wild rice, thyme, garlic, carrots and onions. I also added kale ribs while it was simmering for extra flavor. And then for dessert I made brownie pudding/Denver chocolate pudding.
I found a Williams Sonoma recipe online, and instead of just plain old boiled water over the top, I first poured the water through Lauryl's aeropress. We have a family version that uses instand coffee powder in the topping, but I was not going to buy instant coffee just to get a tablespoon or so. So I used real coffee. And then I whipped cream with a little brandy (to go with the homemade vanilla extract made with brandy). The cream didn't really whip up--maybe it had been open too long. But it still tasted awesome. I also managed to get some friends together practically last minute. That with Shanna's Turkish groove music saved the day. Happy Birthday to me.

This is the site where I found the brownie pudding recipe: www.mybakingadventures.com (And by the way, I had better success typing in "Denver chocolate pudding" than "brownie pudding."

I suppose I'm technically being lazy since I haven't been posting much of my own writing, thoughts or pictures over the last couple entries. Technical life has gotten a bit more tricky since my computer has been out of commission over the last few weeks. But the quotes I've been putting up from my pastors and teachers have also expressed thoughts that I found wonderful and freeing and wanted to share.
I have been writing short pieces for my teachers, but generally they need recontextualization to make them appropriate for a broader audience.

So here's another from Dr. Leithart:

Carey Ellen Walsh (Exquisite Desire) points to the difference between classical responses to desire and the account of desire in the Song of Songs. Using Odysseus and the Sirens as an illustration, she notes how this scene reveals the Greek instinct that desire “harbors danger by rendering its victim under its spell.” To counter desire, one needed to exercise rational management and control: “The Greek philosophical tradition placed desire under the care of rationality. Hence, Odysseus did just what desire calls for; he bested emotion with a reasoned plan. Under this classical influence, Foucault argues, desire became for the West largely something to manage, dominate, and even defeat.” Sexual desire needed to be control, and that control is what makes someone virtuous.
The Song doesn’t minimize the power of desire to control us. On the contrary, it emphasizes that potency even more than the Greeks. It isn’t just possible that desire will escape our control; it’s the very nature of desire to burn like the flame of an uncontrollable fire. Yet “that is no reasons to avoid it.”
“The Hebrew writer might see the classical attempts to secure reason’s mastery over desire as futile and misguided. Flames and the grave have, as it were, a life of their own. Desire’s muscled, tried independence is seen in the Hebrew writer as an essential and not correctable facet. It is most vitally an utter, thrilling loss of control, a giving over to the sensation of want, a foregrounding of that exquisite, aching sense of yearning, while everything else blurs, falling to the wayside. In a real sense, it had better be out of control, or it is not desire.” We our “helpless in desire” and the Song makes “no attempt to domesticate desire, to rid it of its risks, either through moral legislation, shaming, or reason’s mastery.”
Wisdom and virtue are not found in mastering desire, but in the maturing of desire. For the lovers, the “journey through desire is an education between them and for them.” One of the bits of wisdom is precisely about the power of desire: “Desire envelops people, coloring and reorienting their world and their worldview.” Another insight is that “any force that all-consuming has the power also to wound, through exhaustion, disintegration, or despair, dangers for which a person might likely be ill-equipped.” The woman’s education also involves a “cautionary wisdom” that connects love with death and also, importantly, focuses on timing: “do not stir up or arouse love until it delights.” This is not an insight that comes from confining and controlling desire, but comes along the pathway of desire.
Behind all this is, I think, an anthropological point. Desire is extroverted, ecstatic; Narcissus is a case at the margins, and even he falls in love with his image, desires himself as other. Yet desire is intimate, arising (so the Bible says) from the innards, the “reins” or “kidneys.” Desire tells us that at the heart of who we are we are not ourselves; desire teaches us that what is most inner in us is turned inside out. We don’t like to be destabilized that way, and Greek wisdom is largely the wisdom of trying to keep myself to myself, keep my inner self properly inside, under the watchful eye of reason. For the Bible, human beings are much more radically social creatures, oriented without ourselves, finding ourselves not by keeping our “reins” in but finding ourselves along the journey out.
This is also a social and political difference, and a cultural/literary one. Odysseus is curious, but rationally so; and he wants to head home, so he get things back under control. Christianity invented adventure, the journey out and out.
And this, finally, is a difference, as all are, of theology proper. For our God is radically, eternally ecstatic. The Father finds Himself and knows Himself in the Son and by the Spirit. Christianity honored desire because it worshiped a God who went outside Himself. Christianity invented adventure because it proclaimed a gospel of advent.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pastor Wilson in one of his wedding exhortations charged the groom to "want way more than you do" and said that the desire for marriage is just the "training wheels of desire." As a female, emotional and desiring marriage, family, and many other things, I continually wonder how my emotions and desires fit into the world. I sympathize more with the squashing of emotion than letting it all hang out, but still, hearing that desire does not have to act destructively is a relief and a freedom. Even the more untamed parts of me have a place and purpose in the order of things.

On Experience

To enjoy life rquires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attatchment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.
Montaigne, "On Experience."

Food for thought

From today's eucharistic meditation:

Many unbelievers have dismissed this Table before us as a great superstition. Two thousand years after Jesus lived and died, here we are gathering to eat His flesh and drink His blood. What kind of sense does that make?

The first thing to note about this charge is the truth of Chesterton’s observation—a man who refuses to believe in something does not believe in nothing, but rather he eventually come to believe in anything. The cavalier dismissal of this Table as the center of the world has not banished superstitions; rather, it has opened the door wide open to them.

Unbelievers instinctively know that we are saved by what we eat. That is quite true. But we have to eat the body of Christ, drinking His blood, and we have to do this by true faith in the Word that is declared over it. If you refuse to partake of this, then there may be a brief period of food atheism, or perhaps food agnosticism. But when that brief period is over, the superstitions will come flooding in, and people start trying to align themselves to some arbitrary standard of righteousness by what they put in their mouths. It is inescapable—you will either put salvation in your mouth through evangelical faith, and it will come in the form of bread and wine, or you will try to justify yourself by some other form of salvation food, some other kind of false gospel food.

If you eat and drink grace, then it will go down the way grace always does, smoothly, and you will be doing it with deep gratitude. If you eat and drink works—and this is the only alternative to grace—you will be trying to choke down sawdust cakes, molded and shaped by carpenter’s glue. So come, here, now, in true faith. The Table is set before you. God’s grace is before you.

"Pain is your goldmine"

says a writing teacher to his students.

Let's see.

Two weddings. Two funerals (and another one coming this week). My brother getting ready to leave home; for us, a complicated process. Many friends moving away. Difficulty finding a job (along with plenty of my peers). Biblical Horizons conference. A ridiculous number of engagements. A family reunion. Grandfather with cancer. His wife with a brain hemorrhage. A wrongful arrest. A suicide.

Real life is not wished, it is lived; stories and novels, whose subject is human beings in relationship with experience to undergo, make their own difficult way, struggle toward their own relationships. Instead of fairy immunity to change, there is the vulnerability of human imperfection caught up in human emotion, and so there is growth, there is crisis, there is fulfillment, there is decay. Life moves toward death. The novel's progress is one of causality, and with that comes suspense. Suspense is a necessity in a novel because it is a main condition of our existence. Suspense is known only to mortals, and its agent and messenger is time.

Eudora Welty, "Some Notes on Time in Fiction," On Writing, 96.

Food

Well, here's some of my culinary output in the last two months or so.

Baked ricotta, with lemon and black pepper. Good on bread.

French lentils: beautiful itty bitty ones, mottled grey and green and even a little blue. Not the average drab dust-colored ones. I cooked them with caramalized red onions and lots of red wine, and I think cumin. They turned out marvelous, simultaneously sweet and savory. So good!

Fried egg in a corn tortilla, simmered black beans from the NY Times recipe (now one of my favorite recipes---you must never never never buy canned beans again!), avocado, and paprika sprinkled over top. I love paprika; it's now one of my favorite spices, up there with ginger and cumin and white pepper.

Homemade pizza with all the works. My dad especially liked this one. I think it was the little bit of sugar in the Penzey's pizza seasoning. (Usually I add the salt before I remember the pizza seasoning; and since the pizza seasoning already has salt in it, I forego it.) Oh, the other spice I've discovered I really like: fennel seed. Good on pizza too.

Company appetizer platter.

My brother's graduation cake, from an Ina Garten recipe.

Half-frosted: see the dark cake underneath? I didn't care too much for the frosting (my mom really liked it though) but the cake was lovely. It would work particularly well in an icecream cake. I would just like a bit with some melted chocolate, berries, and some almonds.

In the early stages. One of my best frosting jobs, actually. The frosting was very forgiving. I just don't particularly care for frosting: too much extra stuff. Just give me the chocolate.