Home or Away

I'm still mulling over whether or not to try and stay longer here in Spain. It's taking longer than I expected to hammer out the expenses of every permutation. Where to stay, should I fly, take a train, etc. Also, it's looking more and more like there won't be time nor the money to complete an exhibit before I leave. I'm looking into more long term options at the moment.

Happy Thanksgiving to everybody out there!

Catching up with Sleep.

So I didn't end up going to church with the Mormons today. Stephanie came in from Germany late last night and we all staid up talking. I was too tired to get up early this morning. As far as why I was going to go in the first place, I ran into a pair of them coming home from the train station yesterday. They tried to speak to me in Spanish, but between the three of us, I didn't understand a word they said. Of course they don't realize that I'm not a Spaniard at this point. It seems like it's only the foreigners here that can't seem to figure out that I'm obviously not a Spaniard. Usually the Italian foreigners. I think they were a bit taken off guard when A) I started talking to them, and B) I was speaking English.
Now there might be a few of you out there of the opinion that the act of conversing with a Mormon might send me to hell, but I don't share this perspective and usually try to treat them just like I would any other normal person. (Are there any normal people?) I told them up front that I'm quite firm in my convictions, but that I don't mind talking with anybody about different ideas. And I actually beat them to the punch, I invited them to have coffee sometime. :) But of course, I forgot that they don't drink caffeine, so they had to decline. But they invited me to their church service on the other side (the very far away other side) of town. I don't tend to feel threatened by such things and so I said why not.
Normally, I would feel bad about breaking an appointment. But in this case I won't lose any sleep over it, especially since I was finding that sleep this morning. Besides, I'm sure I'll run into them again at some point.

Flight of the Spruce Goose

Ok, so this wasn't actually the plane that Brenda flew into A Coruña on, but it might as well have been. Pablo, Shana and I all piled into his VW Golf and drove the hour into A Coruña and then spent another twenty minutes finding the airport. We ended up being an hour early anyway, but we didn't mind sitting in the café and browsing through the bookstore. Eventually, her arrival time rolled around and the flashing screen changed from "On Time" to "Arrived". Thirty minutes later, it was still flashing. Now this particular airport would take a maximum of 5 minutes to walk across it's entirety, so this was a bit odd. Finally, there was an announcement that the flight had been redirected to Santiago. We live in Santiago. But don't worry! The passengers were being bused to A Coruña. Eventually, we were able to confirm a message to Brenda who didn't even know that she was in the wrong city, telling her to stay put. An hour later, we picked her up in Santiago. Fortunately, we had a wonderful time the rest of the evening eating and walking around showing her the sites at night.

Monday was spent flying through Madrid and London on our way to Hanover, Germany. Our meeting was at a retreat/ vacation center in the country. Let me tell you something about Germans. They're kind of weird. Spending more than 2 minutes and 30 seconds in a hot shower is a crime against humanity, but they are perfectly willing to spend 30 trillion dollars a year separating the little metal staples from their tea bags so that they can be recycled properly. Germans don't use trash cans. They devote an entire region of their living space to waste receptacles. There are no less than four separate and color coded cans for waste. And if you put the little metal staple in the same can as the rest of the teabag... they will hunt you down, fine you beyond any reasonable year's wages, and deport you from the continent!

Actually, the week went well, but it was fun laughing at the Germans. And it was nice to not feel guilty about speaking English for whole week! We had some good fellowship, some a normal food, and even a little snow the last day we were there. Very refreshing. Now that we're back in Santiago, its back to the grindstone. :)

And tomorrow, I'm going to church with the Mormons! I'll explain next time.



P.S. This is Brenda and me at the Gatwick airport posing as Victorian British people. I'm doing an impersonation of that bad guy from Oliver Twist.

"Here we go in the Gnome mobile..."

Does anybody remember that movie? I don't even know what it's called...

Ok, so quick catch up. Brenda Sanders, my boss, is comming into town today to spend the weekend with us. Then we're going to Germany next week for a meeting. So I managed to hook a friend of mine, Pablo, into giving me a ride to the airport in A Coruña to pick her up. But Pablo doesn't really know where the airport is. This could get difficult...

Good things to come.

Taking Care of Business...

...and work'in over-time. Well, not too much. Mainly, the past two weeks have been a bit odd because of holidays and schedule changes due to the absence of our supervisors. From time to time, we hang out with three American families that own a cafe in town. We stop by for coffee, babysit their kids, etc. On Sunday nights we all get together at the cafe for church. Classes, English clubs, and intercambios go on (and on and on). Since the Criders are gone, I've taken over their English club on Monday nights. It's mostly all of their Spanish friends and that makes it a lot of fun because they are all so cool.
But it will be a while before things get back to "normal". Brenda, our boss, is coming into town from Texas this weekend to spend a few days with us before we all go to Germany next week. Theres a conference for all of our students in Western Europe. We've been looking foward to seeing her, but we hadn't planned on the Criders not being here.
I've accumulated a quite a few photos already for my photography project, but I am only just now beginning to hammer out the logistics of an actual exhibit. I had no idea how expensive photography could get! I'm looking around for the cheapest options that hopefully won't involve me duct-taping 5x7 prints onto a bare brick wall. Something slightly more... professional was what I had in mind. If anybody knows anything about this, by all means, give me some suggestions!

"So Tell Me All Your Thoughts on God..."

[My apologies to my friend if this looks very similar to a letter that I wrote him.]


I've been reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, very slowing mind you. It's a bit difficult to process. Its a discussion of the realities of faith using the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Isaac. I kept thinking about a comment my friend said when his father died about how we say "just have faith" and how useless that phrase is.

Kierkegaard says that we treat faith as if it were something that we start with. In reality, we don't understand faith, just as we don't understand love. I think we say "just have faith" when what we are really saying is "just know the right answers about God and everything will feel right". We make it into a game of memorizing all of the right answers, of constructing a finite image of who God is and what he does, because its safer than the unknown. Anyone who questions our consensus must obviously be lacking in faith. We speak of faith as if it were something we pick up off the ground and put in our pocket, like it was a bus token. We think of it as well defined, finite, either possessed or not.

Yet faith is something to spend a lifetime attaining. Abraham, 'the father of faith', had already left the land of his people and land. He grew old through the years that he believed that God would give him a son. He believed God when he was too old to have children that He would make him a father of a great nation. He had already proven his faith over and again. But he was an old man when God told him to sacrifice his son, the manifestation of the fulfillment of God's promise of a nation. "I believe Lord, but help my unbelief", as the man said to Jesus.

To act upon unexplainable but foreseeable understanding is no real faith. It is when what is demanded of us is so totally outside, or even contrary to, our understanding and experience of who God is that we balk. How could God promise a nation through a son and then take the son back? It's contrary to logic, reason, understanding. It doesn't align with any known characteristic of God. God does not lie, he does not deceive. He is good and just.

So this is what I am coming to. All of my life, I have thought about faith as trusting, based on my understanding of God that I presently have, in God's ability to work all things for the best despite my lack of understanding. But Abraham trusted God based on a level of intimacy that he had yet to attain. Even when it seemed as if that higher level of intimacy might prove his present knowledge of God to be false. Faith is not a test, but a lesson. An instruction that leads us into deeper, fuller, more complete knowledge of God. It takes us beyond mercy and justice, free will and selection, love and wraith, beyond every apparent contradiction to a place where we know in full even as we are fully known.

I am reminded of a discussion on the reason why Jesus waited three days before going to see Lazarus, his dear friend. Was he cold hearted, uncaring for the suffering of his friends? Was he eager to show off his latest magic trick? His friends knew that it was well with in His power to heal Lazarus. They had seen him heal countless times before, and this is why they asked for him in the first place. But had he gone to them and healed Lazarus, the knowledge of Jesus Christ as the Healer would have been the extent of their intimacy. Jesus wanted to reveal to them himself as the Conqueror of Death. He wanted to show them who he was. That is why he had to wait through the 3 days of anguish.

So the question is not: Do I believe that God is in control? The question is: Do I really want to find out that God is not who I thought he was? That's a pretty big bubble, and it took a long time and a lot of anguish to arrange it. Do I really want to discover that love & justice, right & wrong, and truth are not really at all what I thought they were? Because if I have faith, then I will discover these things. It will change everything. Everything. My desires, my purposes, what I hold dear. The rosy picture that I have of myself in the light of my present understanding of God. What did the revelation that came because of faith cause the disciples to do? Become martyrs. What did faith cause Abraham to do? Leave his country and to be prepared to give up not just his son and his promise, but his god.

So this is what "having faith" really means, to be prepared to give up what you know as God in order to know the real thing.

The Old man and the Sea

So I've met my first honest Spaniard over the weekend. I'm sitting in this pub in Lugo, eating really early, like 8:00 or 9:00 at night. I'm talking to the barmaid who is sitting next to me at the bar because there is no one else in the pub, it's that early. After about 5 minutes of chit chat about the elections and Osama bin Ladin, she looks at me and says, "You really need to improve your Spanish a lot!" I almost choke on my food. I'm laughing so hard because most of my friends try to tell me how much my Spanish has improved. Either they lied, or my Spanish used to be beyond belief!
Choking aside, I've had a few thoughts while traveling to the sea over the weekend. I'm still trying to put them all together, but maybe I'll get a bit philosophical in the next post.

Back Home (that's Santiago now)

I realize that this will be my third post in a row without any photos. I got half way to the internet cafe before I remembered that I'd left all of my new photos at the flat. Sorry, you'll all have to wait until tomorrow. But here's a short synopsis:

Saturday.
Had to find the right city bus to take me to the bus station. It was clear across town and I didn't really know where it was. After several vague responses from my Spanish friends about where would be the best place to go to the coast for the weekend, I decided to go see "La Playa de Las Catedrales" (the Beach of the Cathedrals). Its a beach in the north-east corner of Gallecia, just outside of the port village of Ribadeo, which has really tall cliffs that form natural arches. The arches look similar to the flying buttresses you see on the outside of a lot of Gothic cathedrals. However, getting there was slightly complicated. First, I had to take a bus to Lugo where I had to stay the night and get the first bus the next day to Ribadeo.

Sunday.
Everything is closed because it's Sunday. I had a few hours in Lugo before my bus left, so I walked around the town on top of the medieval city walls. That was pretty cool. It's just as medieval as Santiago, but somehow totally different. Had a bit of a scare when I went to check on the bus times. I thought I'd missed my bus by 15 minutes only to figure out that I had forgotten to set my watch back an hour the night before for the time change.
Arrived in Ribadeo that evening as it was getting dark. It took some time to find a hostel.

Monday.
Everything is closed because its a holiday. It also meant that there were no buses or trains going to the beach 8 kilometers away. Had to get a taxi, but it wasn't as expensive as I thought it would be. Got down to the beach and scouted it out. Found out that my timing was good because I had an hour to low-tide. The bad news was that the part of the beach with the flying buttresses is only "dry" for about 15 minutes. By dry, I mean fordable with pant legs rolled up. So I have to time it just right, dash across some very cold water barefoot, get loads of beautiful pictures and get back across the water in 15 minutes or I get stuck in the surf. Hurrah.... The pictures had better turn out. Anyway, I didn't want to spend money on another taxi ride, so I hoofed it back to town in my wet pants. It was actually kind of relaxing taking a hike down the coastline. Kind of reminded me of England. Didn't have time to make all of the transactions required to make it back to Santiago that day, so I had to stay another night.

Tuesday.
Yeah, I missed class. It's only the second time! Finally got back into Santiago. It was cold. Didn't want to wait forever for the same bus that I had come on, so I took a strange one that would apparently take me to my street. Unfortunately, the driver failed to mention that we would first be stopping in a zig zag pattern at every other street corner in Santiago. I could have walked back in less time, but I suppose it was worth it to be dropped off practically in front of my house.

Hope everyone had a happy Halloween. I'm looking forward to getting back into the fray now that I'm all refreshed. :)