projection

I can't remember whether I've said this here or not, doesn't matter, it bears repeating because I've been thinking about it a lot: the problem with these theology classes is that, where before when I encountered a concept I had trouble with, I'd think, "oooh, well, that one's hard for me, but I have so little background in this stuff, maybe it makes sense in some way that I don't understand yet," now I increasingly just think, "NO THAT'S WRONG STOP SAYING IT." Which...is maybe a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing? A sign of me growing older and getting set in my ways? I mean, it's good to have your assumptions challenged, right? But also, well, frustrating. Particularly as it's all mostly in my head, as arguing out loud rarely brings me anything but more frustration. Which I suppose is why this blog is important: it lets me get this stuff off my chest in a way that is theoretically public, but without much danger of me actually being challenged back. Yeah, well. Anyway.

There's this centering exercise, which may or may not have originated with Richard Rohr, that involves praying (singing, in my case) the following sentences, slowly, in succession:

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.

This is from Psalm 46, and it's supposed to help us become present to what is and let go of all those things we can't control - put them in the hands of God, who's got our backs - because anyway...wait for it...we can't control them. An excellent plan.

And there's our book for the Thursday night class, which...tends to set me off by presenting its arguments in black and white when I think there should be a lot more gray involved. 

Example 1

"We believe that God revealed himself once and for all eternity in the person of Jesus Christ."

Aaaack. No. Just stop. Your theology needs to explicitly address the billions of people who do not share your religion. And not by claiming that God forgot about them or created them simply as a missionary project for you.

Try instead: "We Christians base our ideas about God on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and the experiences of his disciples."

Example 2

The book makes a (imho) goofy argument about God and false gods, where one can identify a false god using the criteria in Psalm 115:4-7: 

Their idols are silver and gold,
     The work of man’s hands.
They have mouths, but they cannot speak;
They have eyes, but they cannot see;
They have ears, but they cannot hear;
They have noses, but they cannot smell;
They have hands, but they cannot feel;
They have feet, but they cannot walk;
They cannot make a sound with their throat.

Now as it happens, Caroline has to read a classic book of Greek myths for German class, and as she is not an enthusiastic reader, I've been reading them to her. And I gotta say, those Greek gods seem to have perfectly good eyes and ears and noses and hands and feet. Sometimes far more than the usual number! We may well claim (hope) that our God is the life-giving one, the god that will help us live a good and fulfilled life, but it's a big mistake to go around believing that those other gods don't have power.

Example 3

Here's another way to identify false gods. False gods are projections of human interests. For example, the reigning powers in the Mesopotamian region had big, violent gods: clearly big, violent gods which were projections of - and support for - big, violent rulers. That's projection, not God. 

But the God of Israel, a relatively small nomadic people, THAT God fought on the side of the powerless. Unexpected! Therefore, the true God!

The wait what? I mean isn't it clear enough that the God of Israel is *also* a projection - a projection of a people who are constantly under the thumb of various invading powers? 

And why would this be a problem? Surely we're at the point where we can all agree that in as much as God exists, God is bigger than anything we can comprehend. So, yes, God/gods is by necessity a projection of things we do know and can comprehend. Soylent Green is people! God is us! The goal here isn't to find The Truth, so that when we die we'll get a gold medal for getting the right answer. The goal is to find our truth, so that we can live as the people we want to be. And if the God of a nomadic people - the one who fights on the side of the powerless - is who we want to become, then great, let's gather strength from the traditions and stories that grew up around that. But even more important than that: let's take the time to stop, and look at who we are, and think about who we want to become. 

Be still, and know that we are God.

Thanksgiving

I didn't manage any kind of Thanksgiving meal this year, so it was just Thursday pizza night as usual here. I did manage to bake a sort of pumpkin pie. I couldn't be bothered to get out the pie tin, so I used the tart pan; and also the crust wasn't ideal because I used a store-bought dough that was sitting around in the fridge. But the end result was...at least identifiable as a pumpkin-pie-like dessert. I'll probably end up eating most of it. No complaints.

Some of the other things I'm thankful for today, in approximate order of appearance:

• our apartment (it's messy, but it's home)
• heat
• cuddles in the morning
• two healthy kids
• a hot shower
• my hair
• therapy
• time to drink a coffee and think deep thoughts after therapy
• the optometrist, who helped me feel better about having to order bifocals by rejecting many of the frame options with the phrase "maybe you can wear that in 20 years...you're just not that old yet"
• one of my work colleagues, who dragged me along to lunch at the church-Thursday-lunch-thing. Because it was fleischkäse, which is yummy. (The dictionary says "meatloaf" but fleischkäse is more like what would happen if a hot dog took steroids and shedded its casing.)
• surviving a table conversation without major embarassment
• that I found all three things I went to work looking for
• some quality alone time this afternoon, after I gave up on the prospect of reading for class
• the fact that my dearest husband made the pizzas when I had to go to class because I was off on the timing due to the pumkin-pie-like dessert
• and that he took it upon himself to skype my parents with the kids while I was gone
• and did all the dishes
• and made me a Birchermüesli for playgroup tomorrow
• (Remember how I was annoyed at him the other day? There are in fact good reasons why I married him!)
• that I got to go to class. Even though it gives me high blood pressure. Because even the things that annoy me make me think.
• that I get to write this blog
• my hot water bottle
• and our cozy bed

And most definitely of all for my friends, those who read this blog and those I can go out for a coffee with and those who are far away but near to my heart. I love you all. 💕

zoned out

In preparation for washing the dinner dishes, I started to put away the breakfast dishes. And they struck me as completely foreign. Like, huh, that was this morning? And not, say, days ago??

Yep, definitely this morning. Which seems like days ago. Although absolutely nothing of note happened in between.

Strange. I am very sleepy.

On an unrelated note, here's a picture of Christopher with a terribly cute hedgehog cookie he made at school. He wanted to make sure we took a picture "before it dies." The end came swiftly.

advent

We're doing a kids' service on Sunday, and since it's December 1st the theme has to be Advent, but my partner-in-this-particular-crime and I have decided that this year we are not going to talk about waiting and counting down the days until Christmas. Instead, we're going to ask "what's the biggest gift of all?"

My partner scoured the library and found this sweet story about a girl who brings a box to a new school and tries to use it to make friends. On the first day she puts her teddy in the box, and the kids laugh at her. The next day she puts cupcakes in the box, and the kids go wild, but then wander off and no one even says thank you. Then she puts a puppy in the box, and everybody is excited to play with it, but the caretaker says that the puppy can't stay at school. On the last day, dejected, she crawls into the box herself and just wants to hide. But one kid "finds" her and starts a game of hide and seek. She goes home that night and announces that she has found a friend. "Oh," says Grandpa, "you must have really had something special in that box!"

So that's it. The special thing in the box was her. The biggest gift of all is love, and we ourselves are the lovers and the beloved, participants in the cosmic miracle we're going to celebrate again at Christmas, already here.

Will we manage to communicate this? I hope so? We are often accused of aiming our messages way over the kids' heads. My defense is that these are preschool kids and they're not going to be taking away much anyway, so we might as well say something meaningful to their parents. Also "at kids' level" often feels very much like code for "in Swiss German," which is beyond me in any case, so I do what I can.

Marginally-related aside: well, this is an interesting little corner of Wikipedia.

kingship

Yesterday was the solemnity of Christ the King, a holy day instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925 and moved in 1969 to the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Looking at the devastation of World War I and a still-uncertain future, Pope Pius XI wrote of his vision for a world at peace (?!):

...No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. It cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages this law was often violated; still it always existed as an ideal, according to which one might judge the acts of nations, and a beacon light calling those who had lost their way back to the safe road.

46. There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail. [Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922]

I have to admire this. I have trouble believing in any God at all, and here is someone with great faith not only in a God, but in one who has unambiguously commissioned the institution of the Roman Catholic Church to provide moral leadership, to be an authority "above all nations," to bring God's peace to the world. Christ as King! If only it were true!

But it isn't.

Christ the King always reminds me of my junior year in college, when the position of Catholic priest/theologian at the campus ministry was vacant for a whole year and we had to improvise. My friend Rachel and I would get there early on Sunday morning, wheel the little Catholic cart out of the closet, and set things up. Some random priest from the parish in Claremont would show up, say Mass, and leave; then we'd put everything neatly away. Nobody told us we had to train as sacristans, we just did it. And nobody told us we had to have a theology degree to write the prayers of the faithful, we just did that too - drawing from the gospel reading or whatever was in the news or on our minds that week. On the Feast of Christ the King, we decided that the end of the liturgical year was kind of like a birthday, so we celebrated by decorating the chapel with balloons and streamers. I think we may have even baked cupcakes. (Any excuse to bake, was our motto in college.)

This, admittedly, was less than entirely theologically sound. And yet. In the ragtag little community of college kids who were willing to be awake at 9 am on a Sunday morning (so. early.), I had a home and a purpose and a voice. I didn't ever think that anyone else should to do this, I was just happy that there were a few others who did.

For me, the Kingdom of God is that still small voice of friendship and community. Not Christ over us, Christ in us and among us. The Feast of Christ, the cupcake baker?

truth

Tonight I went to the English service in Winterthur again, and here is a thing I learned that I think is cool. Apparently this comes from Heidegger, but my fact-checking has only gotten me as far as this random website, which I quote:

alétheia and truth: Alétheia is Greek for 'truth; truthfulness, frankness, sincerity'. Aléthés is 'true; sincere, frank; real, actual'. There is also a verb, alétheuein, 'to speak truly, etc' (cf. GA XIX, 21ff.). The words are related to lanthanein, with an older form léthein, 'to escape notice, be unseen, unnoticed', and lithe, 'forgetting, forgetfulness'. An initial a- in Greek is often privative, like the Latin in- or the Germanic un-. (The 'privative alpha' occurs in many Greek-derived words: 'anonymous', 'atheism', etc.) Aléthés, alétheia are generally accepted to be a-léthes, a-létheia, that which is 'not hidden or forgotten', or he who 'does not hide or forget'.

So truth, in this sense, is not a statement measured against some gold standard of reality, but instead means "the things we don't forget."

Which explains quite nicely why my truth can easily be different from your truth. Is in all probability different from your truth - and the more different our backgrounds, the more different our truths. Which isn't something we need to be upset about or educate each other out of (which won't work anyway, because what I remember from that education won't be what you remember!); it's something we need to be aware of. Less judgement, less condescension; more humility, more curiosity. Truth.

British

The thing about St. Andrew's Anglican Church in Zurich is, I'd like to like to go there: I think the Anglicans have their priorities a lot straighter than the Catholics and it would be nice to go to services in English. But, oh, they are sooooo British. You know how when immigrants carry their culture to a new place, that culture gets frozen in time? The ladies of St. Andrew's remind me very much of the ladies of the League of Friends at the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital, Surrey, where I did my PhD. The Friends, a group of elderly ladies seemingly time-machined direct from the 1960s, ran a little café that served simple sandwiches at lunchtime and currant buns with lashings of butter in the afternoon. And tea, of course. Oh, those buns were delicious. But I digress. In any case, we don't go to church at St. Andrew's. But I stalk them on Facebook and try to go to events that sound interesting.

Which is to say that last Saturday I bribed the kids and Dan with the prospect of real scones and dragged them to the St. Andrew's Christmas Bazaar. Which was? Sooooo British. Right inside the door was a kindly-looking older man selling Remembrance Day poppies; across from him was a stand of ladies selling homemade Christmas crackers (!). There were cakes and scones for sale, and a whole stand of British foodstuffs like Branston Pickle and lemon curd. And a café serving tea (what else?) and some kind of open-faced egg salad sandwich things (ooh, more flashbacks to my studentship days). And a kids' corner and a white elephant sale and two whole rooms full of English books. It was the books, of course, that were my real motivation for coming, and sure enough an hour or so later we were leaving with one (1) new lunch thermos for Caroline, a package of Christmas crackers, a bag of scones, a sugar cookie hand-decorated by Christopher, and three (3) new books. So we (and they) did pretty well.

Cracking!

My book is "Religion for Atheists" by Alain de Botton, which I'm enjoying. It's not great - I don't get the impression that he bothered to do a ton of research before writing it, and the number of women mentioned in the book is alarmingly low - but his thesis that religions perform important social functions that are lacking in secular society is one I'm interested in. He tries to imagine new practices entirely divorced from the world of religion; I'm more interested in adapting the practices we already have - and particularly our language around them - to make them accessible to people who aren't willing to surrender their intellects at the door. Which is most people, these days? But contrary to what I often hear in churchy circles, I don't think that these people are superficial or that they don't want or need spiritual support; it's just that they don't want or need to associate with institutions who refuse to accept them as they are. I think we can do better.

Fried-day

These things are true about playgroup:
(1) I dread it.
(2) I get through it.
(3) And then I am a bundle of raw nerves for the rest of the day.

I thought at the beginning that the question was, can I even do this? And the answer to that is yes, I can do it. Sure, in some areas (ooh let's name a random one, SMALL TALK?) I suck, and it seems like literally anyone else on the planet could do a better job, but I do show up every week and I prepare a welcoming and non-judgemental space, and the parents who come seem to value it, and a remarkable number of the little kids get really excited about going to up to the church to sing and light candles, which I feel good about (though let's face it, who doesn't get excited about singing and lighting candles?).

But there's that other question, do I want to do this? The answer to that is yes, in that I want to do something worthwhile and I think this is worthwhile. And yes, in that having a key to church means a great deal to me and my foolhardy Swiss integration project, and at the moment neither I nor anyone else can see another job at church that fits me. And no, in that surely I have other talents that aren't being efficiently used here. Also no, in that maybe (1) and (3) above are telling me something?

Feels like round and round with the same old issues, must try to remember that life is a labyrinth and trust the Spaghetti Monster that somehow, somewhere, progress is being made.

enlightenment

Tonight marked the first night of the Christmas lights in Zurich, which means it's now officially the season for Christmas market stalls and Glühwein stands.

I had class, but I had time to get off the the tram a couple of stops early and soak up a little atmosphere, and afterwards I took advantage of the late shopping hours to buy some yogurt at Migros. That reminded me of my early-motherhood days in Seattle, when we'd finally get the kid or kids to sleep and I'd go out to Target just because I could. After we moved here I had to adjust to nothing at all being open past bedtime, so I'd just go wander the streets, which was undoubtedly healthier and better for the environment, but somewhat less entertaining. Ooh look, chestnut-flavored yogurt!

The lights are not actually that impressive, to be honest. It's the atmosphere that counts. And/or the glühwein.

The Oracle of Zurich. I've never seen two different words on two different sides before, what could this mean?

Class gave me high blood pressure. The trouble is, the more of these classes I take, the more of an opinion I form, and the less tolerance I have for (what I see as) flimsy, misguided, and arrogant claims about God. And false dichotomies. And straw men. Argue your corner, by all means, but have the humility to admit that you might be just as misguided as the next guy. Please?

the chickpea incident

On Sunday, Christopher and I went to visit my friend who has a son Christopher's age, one of the few people on earth who can give Christopher a run for his money in the talking department. The plan was to go in the afternoon and come back in time for dinner, so we could have a relatively normal bedtime routine before school on Monday. I'd left Dan with the kids on Saturday night, and felt a bit bad about making him cook two nights in a row, so before we left I roasted some vegetables and gave him dinner instructions.

Open a can of chickpeas and throw them in with the vegetables, I said.
Put some rice in the rice cooker, I said.
Take out a box of Golden Curry and make the sauce, but don't mix it in with the veggies because then Caroline won't touch any of it, I said.
Should I add onions to the sauce? he asked. Oh sure, that's a good idea, I said.
I'm not putting potatoes into this veg mix because I feel like the rice and the chickpeas are enough starch, I said.

So we got home and dinner was on the table. The vegetables I'd roasted, mostly warmed up. Rice in the rice cooker. And curry sauce with chickpeas and potatoes in it.

WHY??????

I KNOW I should be grateful that I have a husband who is capable of getting that far. Goodness knows my father could never have managed even that much, and I have female friends whose husbands are equally domestically useless.

But WHY????????

It was just...the chickpea that broke Susannah's back. I completely lost it and screamed. A lot.

Yes my daughter is a ridiculously picky eater, but she's also a growing kid and I need to get all the halfway-nutritious foods down her that I can. I think it's important for kids - for girls especially - to be in control of their own bodies. It's my job to cook nutritious food, as best I can; it's her job to decide what to eat. And when I can adjust the meal, especially with no extra effort at all, so that she can eat some of it, I'm going to do it. I'm trying to cut down on the amount of meat we eat; the chickpeas were supposed to pass for a protein. And he effectively took that off her menu.

He thinks she should just eat what's put in front of her.

He thinks that I'm too permissive and that our kids are uncultured heathens who really just need more discipline in their lives.

I think if he thinks he can do better he can very well quit his fucking well-paid job with free food, and come try mine for a while. See how it feels to take on most of the housework, most of the cooking, and the entire emotional burden of four people - for no money, no retirement savings, and career prospects of "ooh if you work really hard on the language front you might someday be able to teach Sunday School to obnoxious Swiss kids."

Screaming doesn't help. I scream, he just sits there and stares back at me like a recalcitrant teenager.

Why did you do that?
     I thought the sauce needed some fat in it.
The curry cubes ARE fat, why would they need more?
     I just thought there had to be something in the sauce.
It's a SAUCE. And anyway why did you put the potatoes in when I explicitly said I was leaving them out?
     I like potatoes in my curry.
Fucking hell Dan, do you know why I cooked the vegetables ahead of time? Because I wanted to save you the work, but also because I can't trust you to do it. You would undoubtedly have "forgotten" to put in the fennel.
    Yeah probably, I don't really like fennel.

Fuck. I'm not a huge fan of fennel either. But it came in the vegetable box, which gets delivered to our doorstep every week so that I have to come up with things to cook and don't feed the family hot dogs and cereal every night. He benefits from this arrangement. But does that mean he has to participate in it? Apparently not.

And does he have any better ideas? Of course not. As soon as I stop screaming our argument will float out of his head like a fluffy cloud on a sunny day. The man is a born fucking Buddhist.

Communicate better, the experts say. But you can't communicate when only one party is willing to engage. And we've been through *that* argument so. many. times.

I thought the compromise we'd come to is okay, I won't attempt to talk these things through with you any more, and I won't expect you to think through them for yourself, but when I ask you to do something you'll do it.

Except time and again he does some, but not all, of "it."

Because I'm too bossy? His precious male ego is bothered by the concept of taking direction? He is incapable of communicating his opinions using words, so he shows me with his actions that he doesn't agree with my approach?

Who knows? It doesn't matter. Once again I am the one screaming (screaming at your spouse causes irreparable damage to your kids, the experts say) and the kids have long ago left the table and I think maybe Caroline ate four chunks of carrot and three helpings of white rice for dinner and it is all my fault.

Once again, I KNOW I should be more grateful. Daniel has many good qualities. We are very lucky. No relationship is perfect. And it doesn't do me any good to bang my head against the wall of how-things-should-be.

But sometimes I do it anyway.

practice

Today we were having a "training" about a new document camera at church (read: how to plug the thing in), and towards the end of it one of my colleagues - with whom I have had reasonably long conversations - walked up to me, got her face about six inches from mine, and said in slow, clear German, "DID YOU UNDERSTAND THAT SUSANNAH?"

Ah, the joys of being a foreigner.

Ok I'm being too negative. What am I grateful for today? Bullet points coming up!

• Dan made me breakfast and I lounged in bed until well past 7.
• I managed to check a couple of things off my to-do list at work.
• In the afternoon I had a nice coffee (actually, golden milk, which is totally my new thing) and talk with my friend Mike.
• Christopher did his homework more or less correctly and more or less without a fight.
• I made a yummy squash risotto for dinner and Caroline declared it "edible." 
• Tonight I wrote an email I've been mulling over for a long time. And sent it off.

Ooh and now it's 00:00. Bedtime.

prophetic (2)

I don't generally like to throw around the term misogyny, because my own experience with gender discrimination was much more about men not understanding and not valuing women's experiences, usually unconsciously and usually a result of ignorance. It felt like...an uphill battle, to be sure, but not an impossible one.  But in the Bible, it does not seem like an understatement to talk about hatred of women.

The word of the Lord came to me:
“Son of man, when the house of Israel lived in their own land, they defiled it by their ways and their deeds. Their ways before me were like the uncleanness of a woman in her menstrual impurity.
So I poured out my wrath upon them for the blood that they had shed in the land, for the idols with which they had defiled it...." Ezekiel 36,16-18

The metaphor continues, it's lovely. Ezekiel, dude, the most offensive thing you can think of is a woman menstruating?? It's a natural bodily function! She can't do anything about it!

Our book takes a moment to note that this is, indeed, sexist, and further, that this isn't the only place where Ezekiel shows himself to be a raging misogynist. The author theorizes that as part the Babylonian exile, the traditional male-dominated power structures had been dismantled, and women may have held positions of more-than-usual power in the exiled communities, "which then in turn led to overreactions like these on the male side." Um...I suppose this is the same argument that says white anxiety about Obama led to the election of Trump. Maybe true but also NOT OKAY.

The trouble is, if this was the reigning view of women, then I think we can be pretty sure that women's opinions and perspectives did not make it into the Bible. What would it look like if they had? What are we going to use as a corrective?

three lists

How I can tell that things could be going better with me, mental-state-wise-speaking:

1. I have those little patches of eczema on my scalp that appear when I'm stressed.

2. I'm irritable and I have very little patience - with Dan, with the kids, with work, with anything.

3. I am hungry all the time and eating like crap.

4. I pretty much constantly just want to go to sleep and/or take a bath.

5. The house is yucky and I am not getting around to cleaning it.

6. My step count is way down. (Goal: 12,000. September average: 13,385. October average: 9,960. November average: 7,389. So far today: 12. Ha. But to be fair that's because I don't take my phone with me on the laundry trips up and down the stairs.)

Why this might be:

A. Just another wave of depression, which happens, because brain chemistry or whatever.

B. As much as I've said for weeks now that I'm looking forward to getting back into a normal routine, now that the normal routine is here it feels simultaneously overwhelming and boring. Did I mention that it's laundry day again? Yay.

C. Hangover from more or less keeping it together this summer.

D. Continuing total lack of future plan / general existential angst.

What I could potentially do about it:

I. Ride it out. One foot in front of the other. Tomorrow is another day. And so forth.

II. Get more sleep. Should be an obvious one but this means no more staying up late writing, and I feel like the writing is important for some reason (see C., above).

III. Stop eating sweets. I know that as soon as I have a little something, many more little somethings follow and I *also* know, as much as I hate this fact, that chocolate eating is highly correlated with yelling at the kids.

IV. Go to the doctor and get an iron infusion. Which I hate. Or try eating chicken livers, which I like.

Chicken livers it is, then?

booked

Booking travel is really not my favorite thing. At all. But I struggled through it tonight, and kids and I are now officially no-changes-no-refunds flying to Seattle for three weeks this summer. Here is the picture I got with my flight confirmation. It makes me sort of dizzy and ill. Which I dearly hope is not a premonition about the trip. 

zusammenfassung

Well, tonight's GCL session is...over. 

Did it go well? It went fine. 

Did I do well? Not really. Once again I got tongue-tied and made six grammar errors for every German word that came out of my mouth and also mispronounced most of them. And things started out well with the group singing, but by the end I'd totally lost the plot and kept starting on fully the wrong note.

The ladies were nice about it, because of course they were. But it was still very awkward. I'm not entirely unhappy that I'm going to miss the next session. (It conflicts with Christopher's debut concert as a musician. Recorder. He's been playing for a year and a bit. The song is maybe 30 seconds long. It's going to be fabulous.)

And yet...in theory at least, this is what I want to do with my life. Lead small group sessions, I mean. Tonight we talked about our childhoods, and the stories were deep and engaging and powerful. We don't live in villages where everyone knows everyone else's business any more; where else are we going to encounter each other like this?

I wonder if I can find a way to try this in English, and if *that* fails, I'll finally take the hint and give up and go back to...programming or something.

 

After GCL I bought some dinner (new Vietnamese place in Zürich, bahn mi CHF 11.50, pricey but not as pricey as other places and it wasn't half bad!) and then I went to the big once-yearly Taizé service at the Grossmunster. 

Here is what I learned: The Grossmunster is so solid that even when all the bells in the city are ringing, it's nearly silent inside the church. Crazy huh?

I sang pretty much straight through from 6:30 to 9, and my throat is a bit sore now, but in a good way.

Good night!

adult education

No writing tonight because Friday, an also I am working on the plan for the GCL group meeting I'm supposed to lead tomorrow (eek?) but related to that, I love this article,

"My Classroom Is Not a Safe Space" by Elizabeth Hunt. Go read the whole thing but the meat of it, I think, is:

Here’s the thing: Safe spaces emerge. They are not created. They are not designed. And they are most definitely not announced. Moreover, one individual cannot unilaterally declare a safe space as a universal truth to a group of people.

Do you know who gets to declare a space safe? An autonomous individual who felt safe in a space. It goes something like this: “Hey, I really felt safe in this space today.” Unless you’re from Montreal, in which case it goes: “Me, I really felt safe in this space today.” (Do not underestimate the power of the superfluous “me.” It forces you to speak only for yourself.)

Participants and students — not teachers, trainers, or observers — get to name whether a space is safe. They do so for their own individual selves, not the entire group or any other individual. And only after the fact, not before an event has started.

...

What do I do instead of declaring my classroom a safe space?

• I start from the assumption that every student in my classroom is a capable, self-managing, responsible adult. Even if they are only 20. Even if they are sullen and look grumpy.
• I operate from the principle that I know absolutely nothing about what each student has had to weather in life. Even if they are only 19. Even if they are cute and bubbly.
• I design my classes with lots of time for students to connect with each other in a convivial way — especially if we’re addressing serious topics — so we can slowly build relationships.
• I try to create an environment where we can be imperfect, where half-formed thoughts are invited into discussions and awkward silences are allowed to just be.
• I build question-asking activities into every class.
• I am honest and transparent when I’m struggling with how to teach (which is all the time).
• I take responsibility and apologize if I mess up or say something untoward (also all the time).
• I don’t get defensive if a student challenges me. And if I do feel defensiveness creeping up, I try to identify it.
• I set boundaries and uphold them, whether this applies to deadlines, office hours, or student requests.

In essence, the only things I can control in a classroom (or in life) are my assumptions, my beliefs, my behaviors, my choices, my actions, and my reactions — basically me. Everything else is out of my grasp.

I have zero control over how my students experience me and my class, and even less over how this experience intersects with who they are and how they feel on a particular day (or every day). I certainly have no say in what constitutes a safe space.

My classroom is not a safe space.

But maybe, just maybe—if my intentions line up with my actions, if I approach my teaching with kindness and confidence, if I create the conditions for students to connect meaningfully with each other, if what I offer resonates with what they are ready to learn—a student will say, “Me, I really felt safe in this space today.”

fundamental

Tonight I got to go to class by myself, yay. And I've found a spot to sit where I can hear and see, and bonus! the people next to me don't seem to mind me when we do group work. (Read: they are foreigners too.)

Turns out the instructor only got through half his slides last week, so I got to hear the end of the presentation I was complaining about reading on Friday night. It both was and wasn't what I thought it would be. The story, roughly, is that the idea of the Holy Trinity isn't biblical - it evolved after the Bible was codified, in a time Christians were trying to describe themselves in the vocabulary/context of Hellenistic philosophy. Then it got set in stone for 1600 years and now, when we try to explain it, we have the problem that we've lost the cultural context in which it was formed and we also can't point to the Bible for support. Conclusion: we should stop worrying about it and go back to the ideas of God that are in the Bible.

I'm just really suspicious of this idea of going back, and it comes up a lot - going back to the Bible, or back to Jesus's teaching, or back to the early Christian communities. Don't we have to go forward towards seeking a place for Christianity in a postmodern, atheistic world? Isn't the problem less that people tried to explain their religious ideas in a new context than that we stopped doing that, and started memorizing formulas in the terribly misguided belief that they could communicate some universal truth independent of cultural context? As well-intentioned as the various forms of small-f fundamentalism may be, erasing the intervening hundreds of years of imperial and colonial Christianity seems like yet another act of violence against their victims. And for all we've screwed up, we have also managed to learn a thing or two since 300 CE. Right??

But then, what does it mean to be "Christian"?

Poor Daniel wants to go to bed and I should too, there's playgroup tomorrow morning. More on this...sometime...

more music

I do get the distinct impression that I'm repeating myself here, so dear reader (hi, Sben), my apologies. But I just did a search of my own blog [1] and as far as I can tell I haven't written this before, so...

There's this gospel (in the American not the European sense!) musician and minister, Bishop Freddy Washington, who has been coming from New Jersey to Switzerland to give workshops for something like 25 years. I haven't been able to make it to one in a while, which is sad, because they are all sorts of awesome, but there's a concert at the beginning of December that I hope I'll be able to see.

The white-person rhythmical abilities of the Swiss (and I'm fully Swiss, in this case) do not actually improve on contact with Actual Musical Talent (holy shit can this man play the piano), and yet his passion is contagious and people end up singing their hearts out even if the result isn't always ready for prime time.

There's a long-time-Swiss-resident Elvis impersonator from Hawaii who is almost always there, too - in fact I think he's organizing the workshop in December.

It's one of those things...fully American and yet if I'd stayed in the US I'm pretty sure I never would have experienced anything like it.

I'm kinda down on Christianity lately, but this gives me hope. Here's a song of his.

https://soundcloud.com/bishopfreddywashington/tracks

Also on the topic of gospel, on the plane to Dulles I watched Amazing Grace. Best flight in a long time.

[1] Blogger, will you please add the eye-roll emoji? I really need it! Thank you.

this! this! this!

Here's a cool little documentary about Choir! Choir! Choir!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaDbjDy0R0k

Interviewer: At the end of the day, what do you hope people will take away from this?
Daveed: Love.
Nobu: Um....I would like people to take away that they're not alone, and that they can reach out and they can be part of something that will enrich themselves personally but also bring them closer to other people and maybe...possibly create bonds that then will...they can move forward together with those.
Daveed: I just want people to have memories ...

and also:

Daveed: It's about us connecting fans and blurring the line between performer and audience and allowing them to meld and create something new in that in-between space that we occupy as performers.

Love. Connecting people. Creating something in that in-between space. It drives me crazy when churchy people think they have a corner on this, because they don't, and all too often we spend so much time and effort putting up walls and worrying over the details that we lose the plot entirely. Let us open our hearts and our doors and rejoice with all that is Love, wherever it appears.

blue

The Blue Mosque in Istanbul is a major architectural landmark that can hold 10,000 people, has six minarets, and is bathed in blue light at night.

The Blue Mosque in Zürich is hidden in among some taller apartment buildings, hosts up to 200, has no minarets (they're famously forbidden here), and is painted cornflower blue.

Blaue Moschee Merkez, Zürich

This the kids and I learned today at the Tag der offenen Moscheen (Mosque open house day?). They were not exactly overrun with visitors: when we were there it was me and the kids, a couple who live nearby, and two religious studies students. Two very kind men of Turkish descent showed us around and sat and talked with us over tea and cake. It was kind of stark and very obviously a converted space, but the cushy carpet everywhere and the sincere welcome made it easy to see how this unassuming building would be an important part of home for Swiss Muslims and new immigrants.

We heard that one of the main goals of the umbrella association of mosques in Zurich is to get themselves officially recognized as a religious organization so that they can get state support - but this is a status that the Catholics in Zürich only won in 1961 and certain Jewish communities in 2005 (!), so nobody is holding their breath.

On the other hand, they made a point of speaking Hochdeutsch for the benefit of the American; and as we left the man who was showing us around got into a deep discussion with the couple about people they knew in common, so they're way more integrated than I am. I mean, obviously. But also, sigh...

cash

Today we got to properly leave the house for the first time in three days, yay!

There's this building on Dan's commute that from time to time has convoys of police cars in front of it, and for a long time we wondered what it could be...a jail? But it turns out that it's owned by the publishing company Orell Füssli and they print banknotes there. The company traces its roots to Christoph Froschauer, who famously printed Zwingli's Bible translation, and today they had an open house to celebrate 500 years of the printing business. So we got to go inside the building where they print Swiss money! Cool...

They had a Froschauer Bible on display, and a little exhibit of posters and maps that the company had printed.

Here's one for the Swiss rail company, by Swiss graphic designer Hans Erni. Apparently this was before they added the Italian "FFS" to their acronym.

And here's part of an exhibit on banknote printing. The company printed a special commemorative note for their 500th anniversary, and Christopher was sorely disappointed that we couldn't figure out how to acquire one.

Not pictured: in the very slow freight elevator that connected the exhibitions to the cafe, we learned two nicknames for Orell Füessli, Orell Furtzli (Orell farts) and Ohrli Füssli und Schwänzli (ears feet and tail, as in the leftover animal parts you'd get at the butcher). Tee hee.

friday night rambling

In grad school we had a professor who taught molecular biology for engineers, and he was super into making animations for his class...little blobby enzymes happily plugging along the DNA track, doing their particular transcribing duties. Great. He was also super into selling the idea of animations as a teaching tool. Not so great, because it seemed obvious to me that his presentations were successful because he put a lot of thought and work into them and not because they were animated - and that giving animation tools to lesser lecturers with would likely be a time suck that made their bad presentations even worse.

PowerPoint, it seems to me, has the same problem. I wish every instructor for my theology courses could be forced to read Tufte's book on PowerPoint. Which I didn't even like that much, all those years ago when I read it, because I believe that good PowerPoint presentations are possible and useful. But there are so very many terrible ones out there trying to prove me wrong.

For example. I was just looking over the slides for the lecture I missed last night and I cannot tell you what the guy's major point might have been. There are 26 slides about the history and peculiarities of the doctrine of the trinity, and then on the last slide he appears to say, "...and no sane person can possibly understand any of this, so we should just give up and revert back to the God of the Bible, who was unambiguously One."

Don't quote me on that, that's a wild guess. But why should I have to wildly guess? Shouldn't the evening's thesis be obvious even to the language-impaired foreigner who missed the lecture? Darn you, PowerPoint.

It all gives me a headache, anyway. If God is the name we give to the thing so big we can't hope to conceive of it, then there are no wrong answers - just an enormous set of pictures and approximations that are true only to the extent that they help us become better individuals and a better human race. God is one, God is three, God is many, there is no God - all true! Can't we all just get along??

I'm seriously considering Pastafarianism.

headache

Daniel is away and Christopher was sick today so I had to skip both my therapy appointment and my class tonight. Waaaah. Of course I'll live. I hope he's better enough tomorrow morning to come with me to church while I set up for playgroup. And I hope that Caroline doesn't catch whatever it was, not least because she's a hormonal mess as it is. Also I hope I can get out with them and do some fun-ish things this weekend. Lots of hoping going on here.

In what brain space I could muster today I was thinking about my list from yesterday: how the positive things on it are for the most part concrete and practical, and the negative ones largely sweeping generalizations. Of course women work in Switzerland, of course not everyone is racist, and goodness knows I shouldn't be throwing stones about communication... Underneath all that is a great deal of diffuse frustration about fundamentally not fitting in, and...not wanting to face the fact that these going-on-nine years of trying to put down roots are very likely going to end in having to rip everything up and start again somewhere else. I know a significant part of the solution lies in making a home within my own skin and gracefully walking my own meandering path. And I'm working on that. Some days more successfully than others.

why?

Seems like it's time for a list...to be edited as I think of more...


Good Things about Switzerland

• Dan has a good job here, and it pays better than the same job in the US, with almost certainly a far better commute
• one parent at home means (when and if that parent manages to stay sane) less housework stress and more quality family time 
• we use our car maybe twice a month
• renting means no yard work
• our apartment has so many nice windows and skylights that we don't have to turn on lights during the day, even in the middle of winter
• you can't walk a mile around here without tripping over six cool historical things
• Germany, France, and Italy are mere hours away on the train
• ...and it's hardly necessary to visit them because Switzerland speaks all their languages and then some
• so many beautiful mountains
• the kids walk to school
• ...and get to be bilingual
• the chocolate is fabulous
• the rights of workers and renters are taken seriously
• the health insurance system is not a disaster
• 6,500 km of hiking trails
• not nearly as much corporate bullshit

Crappy things about Switzerland

• there's no popular concept of a naturalized citizen. Sure, you can get a passport, but if you weren't born Swiss with Swiss great-grandparents on both sides, you ain't never gonna be "really Swiss." There wasn't ever going to be hope for Dan or me, but I'm sorry that the kids have to fight this.
• coffee shops, apart from Starbucks, are never open late
• a woman's place is in the home
• customer service is not a thing
• valuing diversity is not a thing
• nepotism is absolutely a thing
• racism and xenophobia are widespread and rarely questioned
• communication can be bewilderingly indirect
• change is to be feared and avoided

prophetic

My Tuesday class ("Old Testament 2"), on the other hand, is something I'm enjoying. Maybe because both the book and the instructor are at a level that's not as far over my head as usual, but also because we're looking at the prophets, and the prophets are pretty bad-ass. 

In the first class session I learned that YHWH, the name for God in the Hebrew scriptures, was probably at one point just that: the name of a God, specifically the god of the Israelites, who were also cool with there being other gods with other names for other tribes. As monotheism evolved, YHWH became the unpronounceable name of the one and only God, and, as Wikipedia says:

Observant Jews and those who follow Talmudic Jewish traditions do not pronounce יהוה, nor do they read aloud proposed transcription forms such as Yahweh or Yehovah; instead the word is substituted with a different term, whether used to address or to refer to the God of Israel. Common substitutions in Hebrew are Adonai ("My Lord"), HaShem ("The Name") and hakadosh baruch hu ("The Holy One, Blessed Be He").

If you're a creative reader you could substitute any appropriate term for God (cf. the 99 attributes of Allah) when the tetragram appears, and it appears a lot - over 6,000 times in the Hebrew Bible. The German translation we're working with translates YHWH as HERR... So if you know that's what's going on, you can think about substituting your own appropriate term for God in all those places - but if you don't know, you just read Herr/Lord 6,000 times and a whole layer of complexity just kind of disappears. Did everyone but me know this already?

In the second class session I learned that the books of the prophets are the main books in the Old Testament that have a verifiable historical basis - unlike, for example, the books of Moses / Pentateuch, which are more like legends. So Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt probably was not a thing that really happened; when Amos rails against leaders who "trample on the poor" (Amos 5,11) he is critiquing a society that we know existed. 

In the third class session we read Hosea and omg misogyny in the bible IS A THING. 

Plead with your mother, plead—
    for she is not my wife,
    and I am not her husband—
that she put away her whoring from her face,
    and her adultery from between her breasts,
or I will strip her naked
    and expose her as in the day she was born,
and make her like a wilderness,
    and turn her into a parched land,
    and kill her with thirst.
Upon her children also I will have no pity,
    because they are children of whoredom.
For their mother has played the whore;
    she who conceived them has acted shamefully. (Hosea 2, 2-5)

Weirdly, though perhaps understandably, the author of our textbook takes this opportunity to go on a long digression about how researchers believe that YHWH might, at one point, have had a female counterpart, Aschera, and concludes:

Wir müssen also davon ausgehen, dass die Darstellung der Bibel von einem von Anfang an monotheistischen Glauben Israels, der später dann immer wieder durch fremde Götter gefährdet war, nicht der Historie entspricht. Eher war es umgekehrt: Der Glaube an den einen Gott ist im Laufe der Geschichte erst gewachsen. Am Anfang standen auch in Israel vielfältige Formen der Gottes- und Göttinnenverehrung. Die Durchsetzung des Monotheismus geschah in einem komplexen Prozess, in dem vor allem der Glaube der Frauen zunehmend verdächtigt und ausgegrenzt wurde.

We must therefore assume that the presentation in the Bible of a faith in Israel that was monotheistic from the beginning, and later endangered by foreign gods, is not historically accurate. It was, in fact, more the other way around: the belief in the one God developed over the course of history. In the beginning there were a variety of forms of devotion to both gods and goddesses in Israel. The development of monotheism was a complex process in which, most notably, the faith of women was over time increasingly condemned and excluded.

There's a moment in the #Female Pleasure trailer (not a great name, very good movie, see it if you can) where Leyla Hussein says, in a disbelieving tone, "what is it that happened, millions of years ago, that they felt that they had to do this to our bodies?" What an unfathomably large amount of work we have ahead of us if we want to undo this damage...

protestants and witches

Last week I took the train to Neuchâtel to visit the American woman I met all the way back in May at a GCL gathering. Which seems far away but - news flash - Switzerland is not a big country, so I managed to get there, have a lovely lunch with her, and get back before the kids got home from school. She told me about a conversation with one of her English-tutoring clients where she had to explain that there's a huge difference between the American concept of "friend" and the Swiss one. An American will point across the room and say "that's my friend" about someone she met two minutes ago (and mean it!); in Switzerland a friend is ideally someone you went to school with - or in any case, friendship-forming is a years-long process that may not even be possible over the age of 20.

Which is to say that on Sunday morning I went to church and it just felt...awful. Like, I've been going here for eight years now, I work here for goodness' sake, and yet there is not a soul who cares whether I'm here this morning. It was like that time I had a shitty job and came back from a week away to find I had zero emails and no one had missed me. I've tried to make this work. I probably have to face the fact that it isn't working and won't ever work. But what is exactly is "it"? This particular job or Switzerland in general? Or both? And what do I do about it?

I spent the day in bed.

In the evening, in a long-shot attempt to cheer myself up, I took the train to Winterthur (Zürich's industrial but more chill sister city, kind of like...Tacoma?) to go to church again. Because there's a pastor there who works for the normal Swiss protestant church but is also American and decided to start a monthly service in English. It was worth the trip. If only to hear from someone who is exceptionally well-integrated that the need to speak English and make friends - in the American sense - is perfectly normal...

And on Friday night I was invited to Gina's house to celebrate the Wiccan ritual of Samhain, which was friendly and intense at the same time. I love Gina's knack for being serious about her rituals without taking them too seriously, if that makes any sense. And I think...well I don't think what god (if any) we worship matters nearly as much as the coming together and facing hard things and working on becoming the best versions of ourselves.

Which will, by definition, always be a work in progress. So, onwards, I guess.

wine

Once upon a time, some brilliant and well-connected individual decided that as the weather gets colder and there are fewer tourists interested in round-the-lake boat rides, the sightseeing ferries of Zurich could be put to good use as a...trade show venue? So they all get tied together at the Bürkliplatz docks, a couple of smaller boats serve as restaurants, and there you have it, the yearly "wine ships." Taste wine until you feel tipsy...or maybe that was just a little wave?...

So there we were, Daniel and I, wine tasting at 2:00 on Thursday afternoon, because that was the only time we could go together without logistical drama on the home front. It was, as you might expect (hope?), relatively empty. We'd run into a woman who goes to our church. She was manning a both of Portuguese wines. And while Dan talked to her, I was talking to her booth partner, a Polish woman in her early 40s. Or anyway, she was talking to me. About her plans to offer training courses for expats, because there are so many expats in Zurich and she thinks it's very important for them to connect and make friends. I think this, too! But I could not for the life of me hold up my end of this conversation. I'd already dismissed her in my head. I couldn't think of any good questions to ask her, struggled to maintain eye contact, and wished I could just give up and sip my wine and listen to the conversation next to me. Or honestly, just sip my wine.

I'm terribly lonely, and I'm terribly picky about who I hang out with. These two things may be related. Also, I'm afraid this bodes badly for my prospects of getting a job where interaction with strange humans is required.

list: uplifting

My favorite YouTube videos, which is to say those I watch when I'm emotionally exhausted and need some motivation. Like, say, on a rainy Friday afternoon. In no particular order. What are yours?

Spooky Men's Chorale - Crossing The Bar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvFNn4a5srk

Rev. Ernest Davis, Jr. & the Wilmington Chester Mass Choir - Ain't Got Time To Die 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7DUFXzIaeI

Conspirare - Unclouded Day, arr. Shawn Kirchner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE3nN6IvlGA

Pia Douwes - Ich gehöre nur mir

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxIifJnVPf4

Nathan Clark George - Remember O Thou Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fPfmPcys8M

MILCK + Choir! of 1300 Can’t Keep Quiet!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cc_neVdjb4