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November 24, 2008

Eternity and endlessness

Filed under: Theology (other) — Camassia @ 8:50 pm

A little while ago one of the many bloggers on The Immanent Frame wrote a post defending non-eternal life. If I understand him right, he says that life really only has meaning if it ends, because if it ends it has narrative shape. A life that goes on forever would be like an endless baseball game without a winner, and so would turn to tormenting boredom. This led to the longest comment thread that I’ve ever seen on that blog.

Oddly enough, I remember making a similar point to Telford in what I think of as the Great Hell Debate last year, only I came to a very different conclusion. Basically, I agreed that the glorification of the saved and the punishment of the wicked makes a good ending to a story, but ceases to make sense if you stretch it out infinitely. Do we want Cinderella to be forever frozen at the point where she marries the prince, and her stepsisters are getting their eyes pecked out? Does being on the winning team really make you happy enough to last for eternity? This was one point I think Marilyn McCord Adams made well in her book: battles damage everybody, including the victors, so the simple assurance of victory does not mean an end to the suffering. Indeed, much of the support that faith seems to offer warriors is that the generations after them will benefit, and that they might someday be reunited with their fallen comrades. But in the afterworld, presumably, there will be no future generations, nor any hope that friends who don’t make it that far will ever return. So the cosmic battle for the world isn’t like your normal war with a normal victory. Making eternal life bearable would call for a much more radical solution.

This did not, however, lead me to conclude that life could only be finite. In fact, it convinced me that narrative isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be. Must everything be a story? Or can eternal life be, to use W.H. Auden’s description of Eden, “being without becoming, and all the suffering that becoming entails”?

For some reason, unlike Patrick Lee Miller, I don’t have much trouble believing such an altered state of consciousness is possible. The perception of time is so subjective — it seems to speed up, slow down, and in some particularly “right brain” moments, become irrelevant. I can’t say I can imagine life beyond time in detail, but I wouldn’t say that it’s “beyond imagination,” even though that seems to be the general agreement at the Immanent Frame.

The funny thing about me saying all this is that I pretty much live and breathe narrative. My job consists of turning the vagaries of real life into stories, and my off-hours are pretty much consumed with stories also, whether as entertainment or instruction or creativity. Yet at the same time being in a story doesn’t seem like such a great deal; as my short-story teacher in college put it, the job of a fiction writer is to put her characters in a tree and throw rocks at them. So there’s always a part of me that’s saying, enough rocks, enough baseball, and I don’t really care who wins. I want out.

November 19, 2008

The sound of blackness

Filed under: Politics and society — Camassia @ 12:15 pm

Well, it looks like the house won’t be sold for about another six months, so I’m going to be in Washington until spring at least. A lot of people have asked me what I plan to do after that, and I always say I don’t know yet. One valuable thing I learned on my road trip was to take one thing at a time. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and all that.

The relatives have all come and gone, though they’ll still be popping in now and then to help clean and organize things. There’s also a pretty big house party shaping up for Jan. 20. In that respect, I’m not alone: the Post has been running articles about the record attendance expected for the inauguration, the fact that people are renting their abodes for thousands of dollars that week, and the plethora of calls Washingtonians are getting to the effect of, “Hey, long time no see … I’ve been thinking of visiting you … how about January?”

In fact, one benefit to Obama being elected is that it made my visiting family a lot less depressed than they would be otherwise. Their only regret was that my grandparents didn’t live quite long enough to see it. (This is one of those commonplaces of a nonbelieving family that I never really thought about until I hung out with Christians. It certainly contrasts to Obama’s own reaction: “I know my grandmother’s watching, along with the family that made me who I am…”)

Two of the home health aides came to visit about a week after my grandmother’s death, and they provided an interesting international perspective on the election. The Ghanaian aide was rather puzzled that Obama is considered black, since he is only half African and was raised by white people. I guess in South Africa he’d be Coloured, in Brazil he’d be mulatto and who knows what else in other countries, but in the end the black people of America and the world seem happy to embrace him as one of their own. The aide said her sister and her friends in London stayed up all night to watch the returns. (It was also interesting to me that, although this particular aide is a real Bible-thumping evangelical Christian, she didn’t get Sarah Palin at all. One night I overheard her saying to another aide, “A pregnant teenage daughter! She should be ashamed!”)

I have been a bit taken aback by how excited the rest of the world seems to have been about this election. When was the last time many Americans stayed up all night to watch a wholly foreign event? Maybe the fall of Communism. Some of the more hyperbolic coverage has compared the two events, though personally I don’t see it. Without really thinking about it, I think I always assumed there would be a black president in my lifetime. I don’t see this as stemming from some starry-eyed optimism about my country — have I ever shown that? — but simply because of the talent pool that has developed. When I first started watching politics in the ’80s, there were no black senators or governors, and maybe one Cabinet official; since then the upper management has been filling up, and it seemed inevitable that some gifted person would take the leap at the right time.

I suppose that, for people inside the Soviet bloc, the build-up to the collapse might have been more obvious than to those of us watching from outside. In any case, this all might just be my American provincialism talking. I don’t live in a world where the 800-pound gorilla is a foreign country.

I didn’t vote in the election myself. I still have some residual Anabaptist ambivalence about it, but more to the point, I live in D.C., so why bother? But this is all a rather awkward reminder that American domestic politics, however exhilerating or embarrassing, take place on a very public stage.

November 10, 2008

Waving as I pass by

Filed under: Personal stuff — Camassia @ 2:24 pm

Thank you, friends and readers, for your kind words and emails this past week, and sorry I haven’t been able to respond much. Since my grandmother’s death I’ve had a continuous stream of relatives visiting, which will go on for another week yet. And I’ve been working, and trying to help clean the house, and in the middle of all this I caught a cold. On election night I was so tired and ill that I could only make myself stay up long enough to hear that Obama won Virginia, and went to bed figuring that was enough. A little while later I heard some whooping and firecrackers out in the street, which affirmed my assumption. D.C. voted 93% for Obama, and there were some huge impromptu festivities here that night. (Interestingly enough, Obama lost his grandmother at almost exactly the same time I did. It must have been a very strange week for him.)

I’m feeling better this week, especially since I’ve now moved from the unheated attic into an actual bedroom. The master bedroom is very nice, but it was a little too weird to sleep in the bed I saw my grandmother die in so recently, so I’m in the room that used to be my mother’s. It’s another link to the past that I find oddly reassuring.

So last week was all aunts, uncles and neighbors, and this week will bring a wave of cousins from the far reaches. It will be nice to be among people my age again. And after this is all over, I hope to get back to blogging. Thank you for your patience, loyal readers…

November 3, 2008

It is finished

Filed under: Personal stuff — Camassia @ 5:18 pm

My grandmother gave up the ghost at about a quarter to one this morning. I was still awake when it happened, because at about nine I went by her room and heard a sound like the last dregs of a drink sucked through a straw, only terribly, horribly loud. It was the sound of her breathing.

Fortuitously, my aunt had signed up with a hospice service just the day before. They gave me a 24-hour hotline in case anything happened, so I rang up and they sent a nurse over. Well, eventually. It took a while for them to get hold of the on-call nurse, and then for the nurse to get there. So as the clock dragged towards midnight I wandered in and out of my grandmother’s room as the home health aide sat vigil, wanting to keep her company but feeling that she did not really see me, and innately terrified of that ghastly sound.

I fidgeted. I prayed. I rearranged my closet. I cracked open my Bible for the first time in a while and tried reading psalms. But they all sounded so … harsh. Weariness was overtaking me, but I had to stay awake, and wait.

Finally the nurse came and examined her, and said she appeared to be “actively dying” and might not last the night, but then again, might last a few days. She propped my grandmother up on pillows and her breathing seemed to improve; she gave her a few drops of medicine, and went on her way. I called my aunt and uncle in Maryland and they said they’d come over. And I, exhausted and still assuming I’d have to get up and go to work in the morning, shuffled up to the attic, took a sleeping pill, and went to bed.

I had barely turned out the light when the home health aide ran up the stairs calling me. “She’s dead!”

Actually, she didn’t appear to be quite dead when I arrived back in her room. I distinctly saw a shoulder move, her eyelids roll closed, her mouth twitch. But when I called the aide back she felt her chest and shook her, and said definitively, “She’s dead.”

My aunt and uncle still hadn’t arrived, so I called the hospice back, and then my mother. Then I sat on the floor next to the bed and gazed at the body.

It’s a cliche, but true enough, that she looked remarkably peaceful in death. She had spent so much of the recent past in obvious fear, that dead she seemed strangely … friendly. I didn’t feel at all squeamish about being so near a corpse. Yet with the dim light, and the emotion, and the dizzying effects of the sleeping pill, the very matter around us seemed unsettled. I kept thinking I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, which stilled under a direct gaze. First one of the mounds of white comforter over her leg would seem to move; when I looked at it I could see it did not move, but then I would catch an eyebrow lifting. Unlike her last dying motions, I knew this was some kind of illusion, yet it fascinated me. I kept looking from one thing to another, until even what I stared at straight seemed to swim unsteadily before me.

Eventually the others arrived, and the hospice worker pronounced her dead, putting to rest the last shreds of doubt I may have had. We all fell asleep towards morning, except for the aide, who spent the rest of the night packing up her room.

I can’t say I’ve been the world’s greatest companion in old age, but I fulfilled the modest goal I’d set for myself. I was there. I’m glad I did it, and I hope that, wherever my grandmother is or isn’t, she’s glad too. Now my job is to stay on while we pack up the house in preparation for its sale. Given the decades of accumulation, that could take a while. And if any ghosts are still lingering about, I have no reason to fear them.

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