It's curious...that no allegedly Christian nation has adopted the Golden Rule as a basis for foreign policy...Christianity says that you should love your enemy. It certainly doesn’t say that you should vaporize his children.

it's Christian Peacemaker Teams on a much larger scale. of course, we'd all have to agree where to go next...and would there ever be an end to the list?

from "stupid mouth shut"
written by Dan Messe
performed by Hem

12-year-old Del goes into her younger brother's room to see how he's dealing with the news that his dog, Major, will have to be shot after taking up a late-life hobby of chasing and killing sheep. Their family does not attend church regularly, but Del goes on her own every Sunday to the Anglican church in their town in rural Ontario. To her dismay, she has been unable to convert her brother.

He was sitting on the bedroom floor fooling with some jacks. He was not crying. I had vague hopes that he might be persuaded to make trouble, not because I thought it would do any good, but because I felt the occasion demanded it.

"If you prayed for Major not to get shot would he not get shot?" said Owen in a demanding voice.

The thought of praying had never crossed my mind.

"You prayed you wouldn't have to thread the sewing machine any more and you didn't."

I saw with dismay the unavoidable collision coming, of religion and life.

He got up and stood in front of me and said tensely, "Pray. How do you do it? Start now!"

"You can't pray," I said, "about a thing like that."

"Why not?"

Why not? Because, I could have said to him, we do not pray for things to happen or not happen, but for the strength and grace to bear what does. A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat. But I did not think of it. I simply thought, and knew, that praying was not going to stop my father going out and getting his gun and calling, "Major! Here, Major--" Praying would not alter that.

God would not alter it. If God was on the side of goodness and mercy and compassion, then why had he made these things so difficult to get at? Never mind saying, so they will be worth the trouble; never mind all that. Praying for an act of execution not to take place was useless simply because God was not interested in such objections; they were not His.

Could there be God not confined in the churches' net at all, not made manageable by any spells and crosses, God real, and really in the world, and alien and unacceptable as death? Could there be God amazing, indifferent, beyond faith?

"How do you do it?" said Owen stubbornly. "Do you have to get down on your knees?"

"It doesn't matter."

But he had already knelt down, and clenched his hands at his sides. Then not bowing his head he screwed up his face with strong effort.

"Get up, Owen!" I said roughly. "It's not going to do any good. It won't work, it doesn't work, Owen get up, be a good boy, darling."

He swiped at me with his clenched fists, not taking time out to open his eyes. With the making of his prayer his face went through several desperate, private grimaces, each of which seemed to me a reproach and an exposure, hard to look at as skinned flesh. Seeing somebody have faith, close up, is no easier than seeing someone chop a finger off.

Do missionaries ever have these times, of astonishment and shame?

Our co-worker Jacque shared some gut-bustingly hilarious stories last week about trying to maintain a household (with teen-agers) that goes against the flow in certain ways. I'd like to talk with her more about specifics, but two things she mentioned that she and her husband do are:

• Dry clothes on a clothesline outdoors when the weather is nice.


• Take a month off from TV in the summer.

Also, one of our students has been sharing with me how much she learned when her parents asked her to "earn her keep" last summer by preparing one meal a week for the family. Not only did she come to appreciate her parents' efforts to put a freshly prepared hot meal on the table every night in spite of full-time jobs, she also gained practical experience, learned to think outside of herself on the days she would have just had a bowl of cereal for dinner, and realized a developing appreciation for the significance of food beyond nutrition.

But the whole experience left me feeling like there must be a better way to conduct this transaction, which should be very intimate and humanizing, but is all too often impersonal and dehumanizing. The patient is definitely viewed primarily as a consumer--the first thing you do is pay your co-pay, then fill out forms related to information and billing. You sit in one of many uniformly arranged chairs in a flourescently lit windowless room. Even the plastic clipboard I had to fill out forms on was sponsored by Adderall with a little brain clip for the pen. I don't even know what Adderall does, but it must have something to do with a blue plastic brain. Then you are ushered into a room and treated with as much detached, disposable distance as possible. I was instructed to sit on the crunchy paper covered table (instead of on the nurse's level in one of the chairs) while answering questions about personal medical history. The thermometer I held under my tongue was a disposable piece of cardboard--smart cardboard, but still disposable. Nowhere to put my clothing except on one of the molded plastic chairs. The discreet "outfit" I had to put on was made of bleached paper (not to mention the layout of the room was such that my bum was exposed to the door even with the "sheet" over my lap). And the covers for the stirrups? Proudly sponsored by Somedrugcompany.

Perhaps I would be the unusual outlier on a consumer preference survey. Perhaps most people prefer as much anonymity and sterility (of all kinds) as possible when they go to the doctor, but I don't think I'm too strange in my desire for more holistic care. I'll keep looking for that rare doctor who's rebelled against the system aesthetically and economically, but in the meantime, it seems like doctors and groups within the sytem could make a few changes that would subtly alter the patient's experience and downplay the consumer identity.

• Intentionally craft the waiting room, one in which you'd feel comfortable watching a movie after office hours. Put meaningful, original art on the walls. Create conversation spaces, even if people don't converse. Use natural and incandescent light wherever possible.


• Give the receptionist an open desk instead of a little window cluttered with garishly colored competing signs about fees and co-pays and insturance. Post one simple sheet with current notices.


• Politely decline the pens, clipboards, stirrup covers, travel clocks and other branded promotional items offered by door-to-door pharmaceutical sales people. It's not only insulting to patients, it's insulting to doctors as well to be treated as consumers and marketers in their own workplaces. If there's any advertising in the space, make it for local parks, organizations, restaurants and businesses that will contribute to a patient's overall health before he or she needs a prescription medication.


• Have a small wardrobe in the examination room where patients can store their clothing during an exam. More original art here, too--themes of healing and wholeness and the joy of physicality. Put up the doctor's bio and interests for patients to read while they wait. Use skylights to get natural light into the room. Communicate warmth and relaxation with colors and sounds and light, rather than cool sterility.


• Use sterile, but re-usable products when possible--a cotton gown, a real thermometer, etc. Surround patients as much as possible with materials that have some kind of natural integrity: cotton, wood, glass, metal, as opposed to plastic, plastic, plastic.


• Building from the ground up? Emphasize green features that express care for the environment that, in turn, has an effect on our personal physical health. Build on a bike path and have bike racks outside. Build in a walkable area of a town or city.

I looked up Adderall, by the way. It's for ADHD. Go figure.

I'm calling it The Curved Path in honor of a return to my roots. I adopted the pseudonym online about four years ago, while I was an intern at Sojourners magazine. Perhaps the most important truth I took away from that formative year was that everything about life was messier and more complex than I could possibly imagine. That realization was encapsulated for me one day at a retreat center, when I walked a labyrinth, a spiritual metaphor for life on - you guessed it - the curved path.

You can read about that experience in my most recent column for catapult magazine. If you want the condensed version of this blog's m.o., however, look no further than the pithy prayer I read before setting foot to ground in the labyrinth:

O God of many paths, I stand before this labyrinth today, metaphor of my journey to you. In the Western world I have been taught that "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line," and being an impatient person, I am uncomfortable with waiting. I have often modeled my journey to you on the straight line. But you, God of infinite patience, have shown me that there is another path: the curved path.

Whether by choice or by necessity, this path is the one I've been taking lately. It's full of detours, but those are usually the most interesting part of the journey, even though they're often the most irritating in the moment. (Just ask my roadtrip buddy/sparring partner/lifelong fling Nathan.)

My former blog was about the journey itself, the Big Picture and its corresponding Big Questions. But this one is for the detours, which is to say: the recipes, the television programs, the terrifying but surprisingly alluring prospect of having children, the satisfying yet difficult new career, the half-assed sewing projects, the neighborhood gossip, the daily sadnesses and outrages, the good things my friends are doing, and the photos that document all of the above. (Well, except for the third item down the list - I'll spare you that.)

In short, the curved path is made up of what Kathleen Norris calls "the quotidian mysteries." She subtitled her little book on the subject "Laundry, Liturgy, and 'Women's Work,'" which might be suitably applied to this blog as well. Ordinary time, ordinary life, is sanctifying. The mundane is where the holiness happens, when it happens at all. I try to keep my eyes open so I'll know it when I see it - and I'll try to write it down here when I do.