Being the Resurrection
April 24th, 2011 § 1 Comment
In the spirit of Easter, I’d like to share a poem by Victoria Weinstein that was printed on the back of our bulletin this morning, which I found moving, relevent, and poignant. Alleluia, Christ is risen.
Being the Resurrection
Victoria Weinstein
The stone has got to be rolled back from the tomb again and again every year.
Roll up your sleeves.
He is not coming back, you know.
He is not coming back unless it is we who rise for him
We who lay healing hands on the reviled and rejected like he did
on his behalf–
We who rage for righteousness in his insistent voice
We who love the sinner, even knowing that “the sinner” is no farther off than our own
heartbeat
He will not be back to join us at the table
To share God’s extravagant banquet
God’s love feast, all are invited, come as you are
And so it is you and I who must feast for him
Must say the grace and break the bread and pass it to the left
and dish up the broiled fish (or pour the wine) and pass it to the right.
And treat each one so tenderly
as though just this morning she or he made the personal effort
to make it back from heaven, or from hell
but certainly from death
to be by our side.
Because if by some miracle (why not a miracle?)
He did come back
Wouldn’t he want to see us like this?
Wouldn’t it be a miracle to live for just one day
So that if he did, by some amazing feat
come riding down
He could take a look around and say
“This is what I meant!”
And we could say
it took us a long time…
but we finally figured it out.
Oh, let us live to make it so.
You are the resurrection and the life.
20 Days Till 25
March 5th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Early Morning, March 5
Twenty days until I turn 25. It’s 3 a.m. and I’m sitting on the couch with my computer, still wide awake. The Boy is passed out next to me, cuddling a blanket.
Meanwhile I’m still awake doing the same thing I have since college, and since I quit CVS to move to the city, and since I quit that day job where that office manager yelled at me every day of every week for three months until I decided I valued my sanity and self-esteem more than a paycheck, and since I was “let go” from that other job that wasn’t necessarily my dream job but was a damn sight closer to writing for a living than any other attempt at employment I’ve tried on since graduation. I’m practicing my self-induced insomnia that creeps up on me when I’m bored or indecisive or trying not to think about bills and how much 300-word scholck I’ll have to write tomorrow – on a Saturday – to be able to pay them. I write about payday loans for $8.50 an article so that I can rent my apartment in the city without needing to borrow one myself. The only “easy cash, wired fast!” that will hit my bank account is the weekly payout from a few douchebags in Philly who hired me as their in-house writer and then decided that programmers deserved office space and health benefits more than the person who translates their search engine marketing into readable English that makes Google list their sites first. To quote my favorite line from an Andy Samberg SNL Digital Short, “Welcome to the real world, jackass.”
So this is me at 24-almost-25. Still awake surfing the Internet at 3 a.m. just like I was at 18-almost-19 in college. The setting has changed, but my feelings towards adulthood and my preparedness for it haven’t.
3:24 a.m. Time to close the computer and go to bed. Turn off the kitchen light, rouse The Boy from his sofa slumber.
“Honey…” I stand in front of him, poking his knee.
Sleep grunt. He hides it under the blanket.
“Honey, come to bed.” I shake his other leg.
“Mmm, I mmnammnammm…” His words aren’t working right now.
“Honey…” I curl up on top of him, which is hard because even though I’m tiny, he’s pretty tightly wound. I give a pleading look to his closed eyes. “Get up and come to bed.”
He wakes up with all 100 pounds of me on him. “…Halp.”
Sliding my feet to the floor, I stand, taking his hand to pull him up. He sits on the edge of the cushion for a moment, head dozing forward until I lift his chin and coax him back to bed.
As he stumbles off, I reach up to turn off the light on the bookcase, stroking Kenzy on the nose a few times as I do and wishing him goodnight (he’s been sleeping up there all night, his favorite perch in the apartment). I turn 25 in 20 days, and this cat is the only life form I feel comfortable being responsible for right now.
I’m not old enough to be almost-25. Tomorrow I’m going to clean the apartment like an adult.
Did I Mention my Office Has a View?
June 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
In a fit of relevance, I’ve applied to blog about poverty in America for Change.org despite potential conflict of professional interest. See, I sell payday loans for a living. Kind of. I write lots of web copy for an advertising agency that promotes a lot of payday lending websites and come home feeling like a sleazy car salesman most days. But the lounge has a Wii and payday loans are only a small branch of the company and I have my own office with a view (of incoming Regional Rail trains and Drexel dorms, but it’s still a view!) and this is the first time I’m actually getting paid to use my writing degree, so it balances out, right?
I had a discussion last week with a good friend of mine over $3 merlot about how the university we both attended awarded us degrees with a huge weight of "Change the world or die inside!" philosophy attached to them. It’s not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong. This is a school that grooms the likes of Christian activist Shane Claiborne, who’s deeply invested in reclaiming blighted communities like Philadelphia’s Kensington district with genuine love and charity and now blogging about it and other issues of faith and national poverty for CNN. I’m honored to have interned with people closely connected with him last summer.
But what about the rest of us? Graduates who believe in faith, love, and charity but work standard 9-to-5s trying to love our coworkers as ourselves? Is it wrong to work for Corporate America or Big Retailers or payday loan advertisers (who, incidentally, also promote debt management and online college degree websites so I don’t look like a total soulless sell-out) when we’re called to change the world? What is world-changing, anyway? Is it blogging about complex social issues, or radically changing your lifestyle to support and love the poorest of the poor, or can it sometimes be more subtle than that? Maybe it’s just my guilty conscience speaking as I sit in the air conditioning in my comfortable one bedroom apartment that I make enough money to pay the rent and utilities for on my own.
I want to change the world, but I’m not a Shane Claiborne. I guess I’ll keep the day job for now and find my own smaller ways to influence world change somehow.
