BTS 13

I found suspicious letters and numbers spray painted on a neighbor's fence directly behind my house today - BTS 13. Today, I was struck by the elements of words - letters - and the power of those elements, not only to compose words but, on occasion, to bring up strong emotion. BTS 13 is a tag sign for Big Time Surenos, one of Longmont's 14 gangs.

What is a gang member doing behind my house? What is a gang member doing tagging a fence behind my house? It will sound pretentious no matter how I ask it, but what are gangs doing tagging in my neighborhood? Anger, fear - only last week I was in the alley after dark taking out trash. I did my civic duty and reported it to the police, and I closed the curtains across the kitchen windows that can be seen from the alley.

Logophile

A few weeks ago, I took a young friend, Hannah, to see "Golden Compass." I had read the books years ago, but really wanted to see it because of the perverse adolescent in me. Around when the movie first came out, I received an e-mail from a friend that said something along the lines of "Don't go see the Golden Compass. The author is an atheist and trying to turn children away from God." Let's go! How, I wondered, can we be so naive to think a movie can have such an impression.

And then two of the bazillion fun trailers before "Golden Compass" played were based on two other books, "Spiderwick Papers" and "Inkheart," both of which, at their core, explore the power of words and books and the scary and eye-opening places they can take us. I remembered the different physical and emotional reactions I had reading Aristotle and Kant in college - brain fatigue but also a dizziness. Readng Neitszche, I learned that the Nazi party was influenced by his ideas. Last weekend, while in Nashville, I saw "The Great Debators," a movie about a debate team at a small black college in Texas during the Jim Crow Laws. Two of the debate team speeches brought me to tears. Thinking back over the last year and a half, there are many hurtful words that bubble to the surface unexpectantly. The wounds are closing but still have a haunting ache. I have often marveled that after the fall God gave Adam the ability to name all the animals, to set words to everything he saw and that God changed the single langauge of those who built the tower of Babble so that the builders could not communicate.

My love of books and words is partly because of the power of words to relay emotion, to portray a world we've never been in (have you ever been reading a book that takes places in a snow storm, looked up and found sunny skies and wondered why it wasn't snowing?), to let us enter another's life. My difficulty in expressing things verbally comes from the power of words, the inability to edit my speech and the impact a misspoken word, an emotional but untrue statement can have on the listener. "Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures of the sea are being tamed and have been tamed by man, but no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison." (James 3:5-8) I have a fear of what words might reveal to another about my heart and what will be done with my heart once it's laid bear for another to see.

I had a mental argument as to whether "The Golden Compass" was really so dangerous that an e-mail campaign should be launched against it (a similar campaign was launched against "Harry Poter" at many churches in the south while I lived there) or whether I could pooh, pooh it. We are bombarded by so many words throughout our day, throw them off like worn out socks throughout the day, are they really so powerful? After the movie, Hannah and I got in the car and talked about the movie. Rumor was that in the last book the series God is killed. We talked about what could be God in the movie and whether it was the God we know.

Words are powerful. There is no doubt. But the ability to think about words we hear and read and speak (do old words haunt us? are we controlled by others' words? do we speak words of love and truth or fire and dishonesty? do we blindly hear and see words? do we appreciate words in our life?) is another gift given to us and one more powerful than the use of words.

Hurrah for 2008

The holidays this year were more torturous than normal, taking lots of effort to do normal holiday things in the midst of a major life crisis (think trying to hold a birthday party on a cruise ship going over Niagara falls). By December 31, I was ready to forget about holidays for awhile. I spent New Year's Eve at home, the kids in bed and falling asleep without a thought of celebrating. No champagne, no bubbly cider, no Scrabble games, no watching the ball descend, no fun kisses. It wasn't intentional - there was just nothing left in me to have another celebration.

Returning to work on January 2, I charged in like it was still 2007. Just another flip of the calendar. Another month ahead. I stopped for a few minutes in my bosses office and listened to her ideas for our organization for the coming year. There was a revived energy in her voice, a revived energy about her position and leadership. "It's so nice to have a fresh start," she said. And for the first time in 2008, I felt that fresh start. By marking the end of a year, there is a sense that we have ended something, that the race or the walk or even the crawl at the end of the year has ended. I wonder how our bodies must recognize this as the days get shorter and shorter until the solstice, and then start to lengthen again. The earth has completed a revolution and begins a new one - count down to zero, and then start counting up. So do we complete a year and start another one, a fresh start.

Even with a fresh start, I have some trepidation about 2008. The last two years have had such special (that's sarcastic) blow ups, and I have a whole new opportunity for more specialness. Someone recently warned me that I can expect more testing in the months ahead, testing of my decisions and my values as I figure out what my marriage future will be. Hurrah for 2008.

So it is that I am waffling between feeling like I have a fresh start and feeling like this race is never going to end, between a sarcastic laugh at our artificial calendar and celebration of a new year and appreciation for beginning a new revolution around the sun.