What's the Point of Singleness?

Credit Skyly Photographer. Flikr.

An op-ed in the New York Times on finding meaning in life caught my eye, as an example of a problem with where we Americans think we can find happiness in life and what single people's lives often look like.

David Brooks, who fancies himself a philosopher but mostly produces fluff, observes that however many graduation speeches there are about having big ambitions, reaching for the stars, changing the world, people find as much contentment (more even!) in simply living everyday life well: being kind, tending a garden, spending time with family.

That last one was the one that caught my attention. Brooks quotes at length from several people who wrote to him, describing how they find meaning in life. One says this:

I have a terrific wife, 5 kids, friends from grade school and high school, college, army, friends locally, and sometimes, best of all, horses, dogs, and cats.

Leaving aside the horses and the dogs (and we won't even mention the cats!), I find it interesting that heading this list of what gives meaning to life is a wife and kids, the immediate family. It's interesting because it's so ubiquitous: Watch any film, read any book produced lately in the United States, and someone is bound to say that our family is what gives life meaning.

Seriously, I watched Looper last night. Even that film, of all things, locates the source of happiness (indeed, the very forces that keep us from going bad!) in a mother's love. The message that family is what makes life meaningful is everywhere.

Orson Scott Card, in one of the many additions to Ender's Game, put it this way:

Here is the meaning of life: for a man to find a woman, for a woman to find a man, the creature most unlike you, and then to make babies with her, with him, or to find them some other way, but then to raise them up, and watch them do the same thing, generation after generation, so that when you die you know you are permanently a part of the great web of life. That you are not a loose thread, snipped off. 

While there's been some politically correct huffing and puffing over the fact that Card, a Mormon, describes the family in terms of a man and a woman, most of America shares his essential idea about the meaning of life: You find someone you care about, you make a family with them, you spend time with them, and voila! Your life has meaning. 

(As an aside, even the fact that, according to Card, part of the reason that having children makes life meaningful is that it carries on our genes is common enough. No one wants to be snuffed out; everyone wants to leave a piece of themselves behind; what better way to do that than a child, who carries your genes and your values forward for the rest of the human race? This is what makes apocalyptic movies particularly distressing, the idea that no one's progeny will survive.)

But here's the problem:

We singles don't have this. 

Sure, we have family. I am very thankful for my parents. And we have friends.

But parents and friends are not at the head of that list in Brooks's essay. Wife and kids are. Cut it anyway you like, when our society says that we find meaning in life by spending time with the people we love, what our society usually means is that we find meaning in life by spending time with our significant other. Example: Almost every single Disney Princess movie ever.

At this point, I could complain about the American vision of happiness. I could say, "Let's talk about a vision of happiness that singles can have."

But maybe the point isn't that we develop a more inclusive vision of where we find meaning in life.

Maybe the point is that we adjust our vision, that we stop looking at this life and start looking at the next. 

Here's the thing: As a single woman, I'm probably lonelier than most of my married friends. My new favourite novelist Marilynne Robinson says the delights of loneliness are underrated. Indeed, the pleasures of singleness in general are underrated. I love stocking my pantry with peanut butter without worrying about a husband's allergies, deciding to watch Firefly for the third time without hearing any complaints, and (very occasionally) just having ice cream for dinner.

But the fact remains that my life is less well-stocked with important people, the people that our modern society says are essential to a meaningful life, than our married friends' lives are. My closest family member (an elderly grandmother) lives three hours' drive by car away; the rest live two or three times that. I don't see my family for months at a time.

And I'm not alone. A single friend of mine recently confided in me how much she misses her family, living five hours to the south of here. Other single friends have told me similar things, that there are fewer (or at least fewer obvious) human connections in our lives than in the lives of married people.

So yeah, sometimes we single people are lonely. Sometimes that hurts.

But honestly, what did we expect?

Here on earth you will have trials and sorrows, Jesus says. If we have hope only in this life, Paul says, we are of all men most to be pitied. 

All of Christianity comes back to this idea, that this world is broken and we have to hang on for the next. This is an idea that we single people are living testaments to. In us the world is so obviously broken; we are not part of the great web of life; we are a loose thread, snipped off; and when we die, everything that we are dies with us.

The world says this is reason for despair. All the more reason to put our hope in Jesus. We may not have a happy life in the way the world imagines it. We have something better: the One who is Life Himself.

The truth is, in the end there is nothing but Jesus for any of us. Family fades away; friends disappear. Only Jesus remains. You can simply see this a little bit more clearly in the lives of us single people, who are literally right now without the family, without the husband or wife, that modern society says we need to be happy.

So essentially, the purpose of singleness is to be a reminder. To ourselves, singleness (and its loneliness) is a reminder to go back to Jesus, to rest in Him. To the church, and the world, the reminder is the same: Go back to Jesus. Find your hope in Him.

On Dante (Canto 7)

When Dante crosses from the circle of the gluttonous to that of the avaricious, his way is barred by Plutus. Virgil comes to the rescue, saying to Plutus,

Shut up, you cursed wolf of Hell!
Swallow your rage and let it gnaw your guts!
His passage to the hollows has its cause.
It is willed from on high, whence Michael brought
Vengeance against  the arrogant revolt.

The thing is, this has happened before:

When Dante tried to enter the circle of the gluttonous, his way was barred by Cerberus, and Virgil came to the rescue.

Before that, when Dante tried to enter the circle of the Lustful, Minos blocked his way, and was reprimanded by Virgil.

Before that, when Dante first entered Hell, Charon blocked his way, and was reprimanded by Virgil.

At every stage of Dante's journey, he is checked by the forces of evil.

This suggests two things to me, on an allegorical level. One, Satan stands in opposition to our spiritual growth. You say, Duh. But this bears repeating because we are not likely to persevere in our walk with God, unless we realize that Satan is putting rocks in our way to trip us up and turn us back. Were Dante not with Virgil, he would have been turned back four times already in his journey towards God; if we are not connected to God ourselves, vigilant and seeking the help of others, we too will be hindered in our walk with God.

Two, Satan defends his territory. Again, duh. But what surprised me about Charon and Minos and Cerberus and Plutus is that their territory is terrible; there's nothing pleasant or good about Hell to make it worth protecting; yet protect it they do, against any inroad that goodness, in the form of Dante and Virgil, wish to make. This made me think of the territory that Satan has staked out in this present world: widespread human trafficking, religious violence in the Middle East, even the consumerism and narcissism of American culture. He has also tried to stake out territory in the lives of individual believers: addictions and besetting sins. When we seek to make inroads into the territory which Satan has claimed in our world and in our lives, he resists us.

But thankfully, Satan loses.

When Dante passes Plutus, Virgil tells Plutus that Dante's trip is "willed from on high," an echo of Virgil's comment to Charon and Minos that in Heaven "power is power to do whatever it will." In other words, Dante goes forward because Dante going forward pleases God. Satan objects, but God's will simply steamrolls him. All Virgil has to do is speak of God's will, and forward Dante goes, no matter what Satan thinks of it. God's desires trump all.

This is encouraging, for God desires us to walk closer with Him, and to overturn the strongholds Satan has built in this world and in our lives. We may feel that we have the fight against evil harder than Dante does; after all, we have no Virgil to simply command that we be let go. We are living in a world under Satan's sway, and so we will feel as though we have to fight harder than he does, to see victory. Yet see victory we will. That is assured, on the basis of God's will and power and provision for us in Christ.

On Dante (Canto 5)

I've been re-reading Dante, and right now I'm in Inferno. Tonight I came to Canto 5, when Dante and Virgil, having passed through Hell's vestibule and through Limbo, approach the entryway to Hell. There they meet Minos:

Horrible Minos grunts there [in Hell] like a bull,
weighs all the sins and sends the wicked down
according to how far he winds his tail.
I meant that when one born in evil hour
appears before him, he confesses all,
and then judge Minos, the sin-connoisseur,
Discerns what place in Hell is fit for him.

What struck me about this passage was that Minos is described as a connoisseur of sin. The temptation is to read this simply as a fancy way of saying that Minos knows about sin. 

But the reality is more complicated. When I think of a connoisseur, I think of someone who really knows their wines, someone who appreciates tiny details, who makes a careful study of the subject, who appreciates it deeply. This is Minos with sin: Dante is not saying that Minos knows about sin; he's saying that Minos gets it. Minos knows sin inside and out; he pays attention to the little details which make one evil different from another; he loves evil.  

When humankind fell in the Garden of Eden, we fell (at least in part) for the sake of the Knowledge of Evil. Surely we already knew Goodness, at least a little. After all, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden and were visited regularly by God; it was because the tree was promised to bestow knowledge of good and evil together that we ate its fruit. 

Some people, me included, have a hard time seeing how this was such a bad decision. Don't get me wrong: That our first parents disobeyed God and destroyed the whole human race was obviously not good at all. But still, imagining the human race stuck in a naive, childlike innocence in the Garden of Eden, in perpetuity, is hardly an inspiring vision. In general we consider that knowledge, any knowledge, is better than blind ignorance. 

And yet Minos is in Hell. All his knowledge of evil gives him nothing good; in fact, given that Minos's whole purpose in Hell is to judge sinners' misdeeds, his knowledge of evil is a punishment itself. 

Perhaps this is why our Father, through Paul, urges us to focus on that which is good, and true, and holy. Whenever we turn back to contemplate the intricacies of sin, we are turning back into Hell. But when we think about that which is Good, we turn towards Heaven. For what it's worth, I rather doubt that the Knowledge of Good will be as dull and uninspiring as we imagine, when we imagine Adam sinless in the Garden. I've been reading The Great Divorce with my Literature class right now, and again and again we come back to the idea that evil is but a twisted form of good; that which is good is the real thing, bigger and stronger. When we contemplate goodness, then, we are thinking about something that is worth thinking about, that can stand up to deep thoughts and hard questions. 

Obviously, this doesn't mean that we should never think about evil, or about sad things. When Dante meets Minos, he has another twenty-eight cantos of Hell to travel through. And Purgatory, after that, is no picnic. But his progress through Hell brings him into heaven, which suggests that when we think about evil things, those thoughts should be redemptive. Minos is a connoisseur of sin; sin is where his thoughts start and end. Our thoughts may start with evil, yes, but they should not end there. They should end with goodness. 

Why I Call Myself a Feminist

I have called myself a feminist for nearly ten years.

Yet no one in my family calls themselves feminist. Very few of my friends do. They nod in understanding when I explain what I mean by the term, but then they explain to me that they consider the term too loaded with negative connotations to use themselves.

So why do I use this term? This post is an attempt to answer that question, not in terms of justifying my use of it but in terms of describing where my use of this term came from in the first place.

I first called myself feminist at college. This was not because I was exposed to a strong liberal curriculum. Exactly the opposite. I attended a fundamentalist Christian university. There, feminism was seen as one of Satan's lies, just another example of how postmodernism blurs clear morals and gender roles.

But it was also there, at my fundamentalist Christian university, that I noticed something interesting: Women's lives revolved around men: in particular, around finding one to marry. When, at the start of my freshmen year, I attended the university-wide required revival service, I had my freshmen roommate point out that the boy sitting next to us couldn't keep his eyes off me. Once a year campus "societies", mandatory student groups with Greek names, hosted a dating event for its members, to promote romance. I went to one, with a friend, and found myself trapped in a kind of kissing game, a relay race which involved passing a Lifesaver from person to person using toothpicks held between our lips.

Nor were these two events the only ones. Scattered throughout every semester were regular prayer services, concerts, operas, and plays, all of which we were encouraged to attend with a date. The idea that women could attend on their own, or with a friend, was not talked about, much the same way scandalous or uncomfortable topics (Did Jane and John actually break up? Is Jesus the only way to God?) are never brought up in polite company. The whole school simply assumed that women were looking for a man, and refused to look in the eye the truth that some of us were doing just fine without one. 

But as with any uncomfortable topic, ignoring this one simply made everything more uncomfortable still: At my fundamentalist university, set around with dating couples but dateless myself, and wanting to make it somewhere in life besides just the altar, I felt pretty uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong: I wasn't miserable. I had good friends. I enjoyed the plays. I really enjoyed going to the plays without going through the hullabaloo of dressing up for a date. But I definitely felt like an outsider. And I started calling myself a feminist.

For what it's worth, the culture in which women's lives revolve around men goes far beyond the walls of my fundamentalist alma mater. This happens in the secular world, just as much as in the religious world. But as my experience is nearly entirely from the religious perspective (I was homeschooled), and as this is my story I'm telling, I want to stick to the religious world.

After college, of course many people are married, and the pressure to marry becomes somewhat less intense. But I still notice that in evangelical Christianity at least, women are frequently seen in the context of the men in their lives.

During prayer every Sunday at church, the prayer asks that God will bless the expectant mothers and those raising children. Then the prayer stops. No mention is made of those whose children are out of the house, or those who, like me, have neither husband nor children.

When women stand up in church, to read Scripture or lead the congregation in prayer, their husband stands at their side.

We talk about Ruth who married Boaz and Esther who was the king's wife. We talk about Eve, and some people point out she sinned because she left her husband's guidance. We talk about Mary, the mother of Jesus.

We celebrate marriages with wedding showers and births with baby showers, as we should. But where are the celebrations for those of us who have had no wedding, and no child?

Even when we do talk about women who have no man in their lives, we talk about waiting for a man. Whenever singleness is addressed, it's seen as a short-term trial to purify us before marriage. People pretend they are "older singles" when they really got married at 25 or 26. Celibacy is talked about, but it's talked about as something to be endured prior to the full delights of married sex, not as something good in itself.

But what these prayers and celebrations and Bible studies all assume is that women's lives include men, that a woman's greatest needs and joys and spiritual journeys involve the man whom God has brought into her life. I acknowledge that for many women, this is true; God has brought a man into their lives, and for them joy and heartache and spiritual growth often, in some way, involve that man. I also acknowledge that I can learn a great deal from Ruth's story, and Esther's.

But I have no husband, nor am I likely to have one soon. Again, I feel like an outsider, someone the church doesn't understand and doesn't say much about. I feel like evangelicalism, focused as it is on marriage, is missing part of the picture:

Here's what I see:

I see my own life: I started running a few years back, I publish on Christ & University, I get to teach students to love and learn from "books that are not about Jesus", as a student of mine once put it. I cook good food and have good friends. I have no husband, and yet I am very happy.

I see my single friends leading godly, satisfying lives. One of my friends recently purchased a house. Another serves Muslims in a large European city. A third is pursuing a lifelong dream, a PhD. We are accomplished, and enjoying God's blessings, apart from any man.

I see the stories of Deborah, who led an army, and Jael, who killed the Philistine Sisera as inspiring.

I see other women, unmarried women, as inspiring: Lilias Trotter, who in the 1800s brought the Gospel to Algerian Muslims; Dorothy Sayers, who hobnobbed with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and published the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

I see the young women in my classes, dateless like I was in college but making progress towards fantastic dreams: teaching the Bible, starting a farm, translating Scripture, working as a computer scientist. Are these not dreams worth celebrating?

With those in the evangelical world, I feel like an outsider. With all these women, though, I identify. Single women are my people.

And so, I call myself a feminist: not because I want to put down men, but because I want the world to see what I see, and celebrate women. Not all of us have a husband, or are interested in one, but we are nonetheless accomplished and blessed.

Will I keep calling myself a feminist?

I don't know.

Someone whose opinion is worth considering recently suggested I rethink my use of the term. I'm reluctant to drop it, but I know that it has problems.

One is that when I use it, people don't assume that I'm celebrating women. They assume that I hate men, or worse. This is not true, but no matter how much I explain myself, some people still believe this.

Another is that while I've come to see single women as my people, I recognize that my people, my tribe, is much larger: the body of Christ. In identifying with single women, am I (however unintentionally) pulling back from my brothers in Christ? Am I pulling back from the community and interdependency which the Christ-life demands?

There are no easy answers to these questions. The problem is further complicated by the fact that I like controversy. As a child, I stood on desks and waved my fingers at people to emphasize a point; argumentation and debate and disagreement are not uncomfortable things for me. I may prolong a controversy, simply because I like it, without realizing that people around me, including my students, are uncomfortable with it.

Yet regardless of whether I keep the term or jettison it, the fact remains that I started using it because my experiences taught me that single women have a very small place in the Christian world. Yet God made women as well as men. He made them in His glorious image. Can we then celebrate women, regardless of whether they are married or not?

Lent, Part 2

Back in February, I mentioned that I was going to try Lent: I was going to give up humor websites (such as Buzzfeed), and I was going to read The Prodigal God.  

Lent wrapped up last Sunday, and since then, I've visited most (not all) of the websites I avoided. I've finished and reviewed The Prodigal God. With Lent behind me, and a return to "normal" life, I have a few thoughts:

Like many people who fast from something besides eating, or who give something up, I was surprised how little I missed what I was giving up. Putting Buzzfeed and similar websites aside made me really feel how shallow, how superficial they are - and so, on what shallow things I was spending my life. Sure, they're fun; who wouldn't want to peruse a list of sea salt & dark chocolate desserts, or read about why having a cat is better than a boyfriend? 

But when Lent was up, I was reluctant to go back to Buzzfeed, and humor websites in general. The web sucks down attention, energy, and time and doesn't give it back. During Lent I finished a book on nuclear warfare, started one on injustice in America, and read three books by Marilynne Robinson. Maybe I would have read just as much, even if I weren't avoiding humor websites. Certainly, however, I wouldn't have devoted as much mental energy to those books. If the purpose of Lent is to retrain our mind on God, then certainly I learned more about His truth and beauty, and about how we have broken the world he gave us, by reading these books. Reading Housekeeping is an activity much closer to the divine life within us than reading about housecats.

During Lent I moved. I filed my taxes. I graded perhaps a hundred papers. With no humor websites to distract me, I felt more productive. I felt like I not only got more done, but I did it better, than I would have if I checked Buzzfeed after every third paper. We are made to work, and to rest, in cycles, and avoiding humor websites helped me do both, better. 

I also noticed how much I enjoyed a regular time set aside to read a devotional book, something besides Scripture (though I read more Scripture than usual during Lent, and thoroughly enjoyed that as well.) While The Prodigal God was not as good as I hoped it would be, it was nonetheless worthwhile. It reminded me of God's spendthrift love for me, and urge me to build a healthy, working relationship with God. 

Also, I think regularly, steadily making progress through a book about faith nourishes meditation in a way that other spiritual encounters may not. When I read a devotional online or in a magazine such as WORLD, what I learn may be just a little nugget of truth. Like a tray of hor d'oeuvres, these bite-size chunks of truth are good enough, but don't leave a chance for real appreciation. For real appreciation, you need a full meal, and reading a book, over a long period of time, gives me the chance for rumination and meditation that I would not have otherwise.

So where do we go from here?

I've noticed that even when I forbid myself from visiting humor websites, I can easily spend a great deal of time on the Web. I may consider other rules limiting my web usage, not meant to improve my spiritual life, just my life in general. For instance, I'm toying with a "No Web after 10.00 PM" rule or a "No Web in bed" rule (Yes, I do read The Atlantic at 10.30 before I go to bed. Yes, I am a bit geeky. Why do you ask?)

I've also thought that next year for Lent, I may "up the ante". I'd like to give up something more costly. Not sure yet.

This Easter, Christ impressed upon me what the Resurrection means: His triumph over death and sin in our lives. We tend to interpret this as a promise of physical resurrection and of sanctification, at the end of all things. But it's more than that. His Resurrection is for here and now; He is in us, with power, to undo the spell that sin casts over our lives. When I feel new after laying aside humor websites, when I am able to think and meditate again, I like to think I taste His Resurrection power.

Do Teachers Care?

When I started teaching, I imagined myself taking a kind of pleasure in failing students. It wasn't that I took a witchy delight in students'  difficulties, but more that I took pride in what I considered high standards, a sense of satisfaction that I was not letting students slide, I was not inflating grades, I was actually teaching. 

In the years since then, I've learned that I am not the only one who imagines that grading papers F gives teachers a sense of pride. Professional development books I've read frequently include anecdotes of teachers who report failing a third of their class, or awarding no As - evidence, they believe, of their high standards as teachers. 

Think of the teacher in Peanuts, or in Calvin & Hobbes, or in Foxtrot: Each of these teachers is distant from her students, ineffective, continually frustrated by her students' low performance. Do we not assume that Peppermint Patty's teacher finds a kind of vindication in giving her a D-? That Calvin's teacher feels vindicated, a good teacher plagued by poor students, when she fails the test he copied from Susie, or the bug collection which included a squashed fly and a bit of lint? 

All this is evidence of the prevailing assumption in our culture today: Teachers don't care about students' success. 

But this is not true, or at least not quite.

Bad teachers do not care about their students' successes.

Good teachers do. 

Five minutes ago, I read one of the best literary analysis papers I've read in years of teaching Intro to Literature. It was thoughtful and clear, elegantly worded and supported with ample quotations from the text. Marking an A on it makes me happier than marking an F ever has.

Marilynne Robinson is fond of pointing out that there are more cells in the human brain than in the entire Milky Way. This makes us the most precious, the most miraculous thing in the universe. When my students earn an A, I get to see a little bit of that miracle. 

This is not to say, of course, that the students who earn Fs are not equally precious. They are. But the tragedy of a poor work, and the joy of excellent work, is that students who struggle are struggling to use the wondrous powers of thought and reasoning which God has given to us; students who succeed are learning to use those powers in a new, astonishing way. They are like eaglets, taking that first, soaring flight from the eyrie above the mountains, rejoicing in the power of their wings.

To the American public, I want this to be a reminder: Do not believe the stereotypes of teachers in the media, whether that be Calvin & Hobbes or God's Not Dead. 

To my students, I want this to be reassuring. It's been a long time since I've been a student, so I could be wrong about this: But I wonder, do you sometimes hesitate to ask a question, or seek help, because you think I do not care about your success? Do you think I am hard grader, simply because I like being hard, or because I think you're a "hopeless" case, or because I simply have fun handing out low grades? I don't, I promise. Your other teachers don't, either.

We are not rooting for you to fail. We are rooting for you to fly.

Mexican Rice Soup

One of my favourite things to do is invent new recipes - in particular, new soup recipes. These are easy and endlessly versatile. A week or so back, I riffed on a Quinoa Mexican Soup recipe to create an Italian Quinoa Soup. Today, I riffed on the original recipe still further to create Mexican Rice Soup.

It was delicious, so I'm doing something I rarely do: writing down the recipe, so that I can remember how I made it, and you can try it. Because I play fast and loose with food, ingredient amounts are approximate:

• 3 cups coarsely diced tomatoes (I used yellow tomatoes that I froze last summer)
• 2 oz mild green chilies 
• Half a red onion
• 1 green onion
• 1/4 tsp chopped garlic, from one of those glass jars in the refrigerator
• 1/2 cup brown rice
• 1 cup white beans
• Approx 3 cups of liquid (I used the water from defrosting the tomatoes, but chicken or vegetable cooking stock would work nicely if you're using canned tomatoes).
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp Spanish paprika
• 1/2 tsp oregano
• 1/8 tsp cayenne
• 1/8 tsp coriander

Cook the onions and garlic in 1 TBSP olive oil until tender. Add the spices and stir until the onions and garlic are coated. Add the liquid, tomatoes, rice, and white beans; if it doesn't look like there's enough rice, add more rice (I was using leftover rice from my freezer). Add in the green chiles. Bring to a boil, then turn down and simmer for 30 minutes or so. 

Serve with salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper. I also put chopped white cheddar cheese and some leftover avocado on my soup, along with a few blue corn crackers. Green onions or cilantro would also make a nice topping.