A Most Spectacular Dusk Phenomenon

I’ve been trekking to The National Library of France in Paris (La Bibliothèque Nationale de France, site François Mitterand) almost every day for dissertation/research work.  It takes about an hour on the metro to get there from where I’m staying.  The Library is built around a garden and where I work is the bottom floor (rez de jardin, or garden level), so I can look from inside the Library, out the expansive glass windows and up towards the tall trees in that garden, as I head for my reserved desk space, take a break from being academic, or head out for home, which is usually around the latter part of dusk.  It is at that time that a most spectacular phenomenon takes place, every day for at least 10 minutes: swarms of what seem like flies loop above the garden, but as the swooping figure eights descend closer to the treetops, you can make out the silhouettes of fluttering bird wings against a murky blue sky.  Just as one wave of birds settle into their respective trees, another wave would come spiraling towards the garden in preparation for their descent into arboreal refuge.  Wave after wave of birds.  And as I leave the library, emerging from the escalator, I hear the concert of their chirping, sounding too excited for birds returning home after a day of doing whatever birds do during the day.

Gramma’s Generosity and God’s Grace

I like to look at her round, twinkly eyes, twinkling for eighty plus years and counting.  It’s been awhile since she’s been a little shorter than me, which makes her...pretty small.  Ever since college, with the exception of the year between college and grad school, there are only a few months in the year—the only times when I’m back on this side of the world—when I would see my paternal grandmother. 

Even though she no longer walks as fast as the rest of us, of which I’m reminded when I lose sight of her and then retreat a few steps to her pace, she’s still as lucid and sociable as ever, enjoying her weekly mahjong with friends, asking us out for dim-sum and attending church activities.  None of that grouchiness I’ve seen develop as certain people age.  I can only hope that same lucidity and sociability despite age are hereditary.

My grandmother seems like an albeit aged, cute child to me.  Her size 3.5 feet make shoe shopping difficult, or impossible, in the adult department.  “You can wear kids’ shoes,” I tell her.  “They’re not as stylish,” she says, “but I can wear shoes for 10 year-olds.”  She also holds steadfastly onto her belief in rice, with the same conviction as a child believing in Santa Claus: “I have to eat rice.  You don’t have energy if you don’t eat rice.  Rice keeps you warm.” 

What’s most remarkable about my gramma, to me, is her generosity.  Not knowing what I want and convinced of the Chinese practicality of giving cash gifts, she would sometimes bestow sums too generous for me to accept without hesitation.  In such cases, the first thing I’d want to do is tell her it’s too much, followed by wanting to give her back some portion of the present, feeling utterly undeserving of the whole.  But who does that?  Essentially, I’d be saying, “I can’t take all.  I don’t deserve all, but I can maybe deserve part of it and this is how much I think I can deserve.”  Few things can be brattier than that.  

And what about God and His grace?  Might we be doing a similar thing to Him sometimes?  Of course we know how absurd it is to negotiate with God, not necessarily having direct, tangible contact with Him as we would with a grandparent, but we might reject the extent of what He gives us, by our good deeds.  Granted, faith without works is dead and good deeds cannot substitute the faith that brings salvation, but to approach good works with the attitude that we owe God for what He’s done for us is not quite right; we shouldn’t do good in the effort to make us feel we would be more acceptable to God and more deserving of His grace.  The Christian faith, as my pastor says, is not based on doing things to earn God’s favor, but that His favor has already been bestowed on mankind by what Jesus did on the cross, dying in our place (and resurrecting), if only one would believe.  He says also that nothing one does or does not do will make that person any more or less loved already by God.     

Well, I’m grateful for my gramma’s gifts, humbled by her generosity and can do nothing but enjoy her kindness.  I’m also thankful to God, who gave me this gramma, whose generosity makes me reflect upon His grace. 

Merry belated Christmas.

Robot Love (aka Tardy, Superfluous Thoughts on “Wall-E” with Potential Spoiler)

When my boyfriend sent me a link to the trailer of “Wall-E” I forget how many months before the movie came out, I was not impressed.  A beat-up robot that collects garbage—kind of like a vacuum cleaner.  In fact, it looks even more beat-up than my vacuum cleaner.  My boyfriend was excited about the movie; I was tepidly interested.

Then the movie came out and my interest remained tepid, while a handful of friends and acquaintances made their way to the big screen.  It wasn’t until more than a month had passed and other movies had claimed my money (“The Dark Knight”: deservingly, “Hancock”: mistakenly*) that I found another friend who had not yet seen “Wall-E” and convinced her to go with me, with the help of positive things I’d heard from said handful of friends. 

I was skeptical of robot love: robot + love = viable combination? 

While Wall-E is a beat-up trash compactor, he is an upbeat garbage-cruncher that can bust out a Gene Kellyesque dance to impress the sleek, way more powerful Eve.  This guy robot with goofy huge eyes gets romantic ideas from a video, falls in love at first sight, does everything ranging from silly to self-sacrificing to please Eve, tries to hold her hand and in the end, of course, succeeds when amnesia from a heroic act threatens to wipe out their relationship. 

Were Wall-E (and Eve) human, such a love plot might not work out so well.  In fact, it might even be offensively cliché with no demonstrated effort to at least embellish an over-recycled romantic sequence.  Yet, transferred to robots, it works, satisfyingly too, because that was how Wall-E, especially, was humanized and thereby became endearing.  This robot is familiar to us, who are well educated in the cliché, and I found myself enjoying his innocent endeavors in romance and almost as crushed as Eve when it seemed like their relationship and Wall-E, as we knew him, were over. 

Now I just need to convince my boyfriend, whose interest somehow turned tepid, to watch the movie, so I can see it a second time.      

______________

*It’s hard not to be disappointed when you walk into a movie expecting a comedy and realize it was not meant to be comedic.  Genre expectation.  How could they not develop the anti-superhero idea into something funnier than “Men in Black?”   

From the Forest

The bottoms of my running shoes crunch mostly decisively, other times slowly and softly, meanderingly, until audible traces of my steps disappear into the cold, damp, packed mud—part of the trail not sprinkled with gravel—then if I see a crunchy leaf, if it’s not too out of the way, I will go stomp on it, breaking the silence.  The mute steps continue until the gravel reappears to provide crunching ground for my soles.  I dodge dogs attached by their leashes to their owners and close my hand around my airy leash, pretending for a moment that I too am walking a dog.  I feel the low 70’s cool on my arms and legs and marvel at the otherwise almost blinding sunlight, were it not filtering through the late May foliage above.  At this moment, I am happy.

All God

“Three three-hour written exams and a two-hour oral exam.”  Daunting, but by then, I’d be ready.  I don’t need to worry about that now.  Those were my thoughts when I was first applying to graduate schools and read about the required preliminary exam.

If I were to use an adjective to describe how I had been feeling for the past 2.5 years leading up to the prelim, it would be this: scared.  I was scared, stressed and so far from feeling ready.  There was this haunting sense of guilt that I had not been diligent enough in my exam prep and that I was horribly, hopelessly behind.  It felt like my laziness and inadequacy were digging myself into this hole so huge that I wondered how God would/could help me get out of it.          

The past week or so had been rough.  The written exams spanned a week, which felt like a marathon I had to sustain through, as opposed to a one-time deal that I could just crash and burn (and recoup).  How did I get through it?  Prayer—lots of it.  I am very blessed to have the prayers and encouragement of family and friends.  I also prayed like crazy:  when I had to drag myself out of bed, continue reading when I didn’t feel like it anymore, feeling sick and tired.  Sometimes the prayer would be a desperate, “God, help me,” because that was all I could manage.   

The implications and consequences of the prelim are huge.  Based on this exam and whether I’d pass or not, I would finally really know what the academy, represented by my 4-person committee, thinks of me.  Do I have what it takes to continue in the PhD program?  Do my professors see me as a future colleague?  Is being/becoming a Christian professor in the humanities still a vocation?  What happens if I don’t pass?  Retake, or complete uncertainty. 

What does it mean to have faith in God?  I think it means clinging onto God no matter what the outcome, singing and living, “Blessed be Your name when I’m found in the desert place though I walk through the wilderness [and] when the sun’s shining down on me when the world’s all as it should be.”* 

My committee could have easily asked me many questions that would betray my ignorance, but His grace is sufficient for me and His strength is made perfect when I am weak.  If I had finished all the reading for the exam, which was humanly impossible, I might be able to boast in myself, but the fact that I didn’t/couldn’t finish and yet still passed, I could only attribute that to God. 

*Matt Redman’s “Blessed Be Your Name”