Without Vision The People Perish

The story was simple: Measure 110, the Oregon ballot measure which passed in 2020 decriminalizing drug possession, was a failure. It was the reason you couldn't go to the park without having to scan the playground for used needles while junkies shot up on a bench and others were already passed out. It was the reason there were so many more tents, often with some skinny guy hovering around a mountain of bicycle parts (almost certainly stolen). It was the reason there were so many more people dying of fentanyl overdoses and straining emergency response services. It was the reason so many more people were getting shot and sometimes killed, even in swanky areas like the NW Alphabet District. It was the reason downtown Portland was such a shit hole. The defunct Greyhound bus terminal next to the still busy Amtrak station even stank of literal shit (and still does). 

Right-wing media jumped on the chance to flog its favorite whipping boys of Portland and decriminalization. Soon columnists at the New York Times were jumping in. Portlanders—always exquisitely sensitive to what talking heads in the national media say about our fair city—found this scorn to sting most of all. Plus, all the criticism validated our suffering, made it special and gave us permission to wallow a bit. Hell, even leftists have jumped on the bandwagon, recently calling out our crazy experiment with decriminalization—mistakenly calling it “legalization”—as libertine MANGO wokeness run amok. 

Except the story was wrong. It wasn't Measure 110 causing these problems even if everyone looked around at all this and saw the glaring correlation between it and this recently passed ballot measure. But of course, correlation is not causation. 

Letting Go of Easter

All my talk about mysticism and writing at the end of January had me groping for my dormant liturgical traditions to see if their structures and rhythms might inform my approach to writing as spiritual practice. And since Lent was nigh, I figured I might as well start by taking a stab at observing it for the first time in many years. And since much of the mysticism of the Western Church began in the East—indeed it was the emphasis on mystery that drew me to the Byzantine tradition—I figured I might as well start by attending Divine Liturgy. Or watching it, rather. But I’m in good company. According to St. John Chrysostom, the angels, too, are mere spectators at the “celestial theater” of the Church. 

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In 1999 I became a catechumen in the Orthodox Church, a sort of student studying to convert. It meant leaving evangelicalism and a lifetime of distinguishing myself as the AWANA champion, Miss Conservative Baptist of Oregon 1986-87, and Jesus Nerd par excellence, teaching Sunday School and leading bible studies and worship music all the way up into grad school. My family never had the money to create the hermetically-sealed environment of private or home schooling but I certainly tried to shut out as much of the storm of secularism as I could with daily personal bible devotions, youth group, and Christian music—and tried to ignore where these spiritual and intellectual tarps leaked. In graduate school, my academic speciality was American evangelicalism and the Israel-Palestine conflict, which meant spending a lot of time in the bowels of evangelical history and theology. The growing leaks finally became a flood. I could see how flimsy and tenuous the materials of not only my cognitive coverings but even those seals that were airtight, allowing the solipsism and literalism inside to fester into something noxious and idolatrous. Evangelicalism had made graven images of the individual, the text, and even the nation-state. It was also deeply unsatisfying. I wanted God to be more than just my invisible daddy or bestie. 

Lamb and Freekeh...Whatever

It was going to be the Easter dish of my greatest Instagram fantasies. 

I was going to use Heather Ardnt Anderson’s lamb shank and farro recipe except I was going to give it more of a Levantine twist. I would replace the farro with freekeh, a smoked, unripe rubbed/cracked wheat popular in the Levant, North Africa, and Turkiye. And since I love chickpeas, I’d add those too, making it reminiscent of qidreh, the Palestinian lamb shank dish I’ve made for the last two Easters. Since the assortment of spices called for in the recipe was already part way there, I would swap them out for advieh e-polo (Persian rice seasoning—fresh ground myself). Plus I still had a cup or two of leftover frozen lamb stock to which I had originally added too much mastic (along with baharat, the levantine spice mixture). Adding frozen vegetable stock to meet the four cups called for in the recipe would dilute that lamb stock a bit but still give a hint of something otherworldly. The whole thing would be a glorious Levantine-Persian mash-up appropriate to the current geopolitical moment. 

A Twenty-Year Old Hail Mary

(Workshop of Andrej Rublëv, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Note: I first published this post twenty years ago today. While obviously I was not able to attend today's Divine Liturgy for the Feast of the Annunciation in person (and only managed about twenty minutes of an online service this morning before life forced me to deal with more mundane matters), I couldn't help but think of this old post since I'm actually trying to observe Lent for the first time in many years. My faith has changed during these two decades. Reading this now, there is still the faint whiff of the new convert five years after leaving Evangelicalism for Byzantine-rite Catholicism. I would write this differently today. But only slightly so. 

It feels odd not to be fasting on Great and Holy Friday. But, it's one of those once in a lifetime occurrences when the Feast of the Annunciation falls on this somber day. And in the Eastern Church, we don't move dates. So, tonight we commemorated both the beginning of God's finite form and its end with the only Divine Liturgy served on Holy Friday since 1931 as well as the traditional vespers service complete with procession and burial of Christ's icon shroud. The combined liturgies lasted for three hours. Ample time to contrast the joy of God becoming Immanuel -- God with us -- and the suffering such empathy entailed.

"Not Another Tragic Fattie"

Burningword Literary Journal: “Not Another Tragic Fattie”

In sixth grade, a boy tried to make fun of me for being fat. It did not go as he expected. Instead, he was the one who ended up being marginalized. I’ve always remembered it over the years as him being ostracized because he made fun of me. But I suspect I was mixing up correlation with causation. It’s likely he was also a dick to others. So the class decided collectively, if unconsciously, fuck that asshole.

I wanted to write about this memory to push back on the idea that being fat is always tragic. That the fat kid is always bullied and miserable. Most memoirs and novels I’ve read with fat characters focus on fatness as the result of trauma (overeating to create a larger, protected body) and/or the trigger of trauma (childhood bullying). But sometimes one is just fat. It’s not positive and beautiful. It’s not repulsive and wretched. It just is. Like being short. Or neurodivergent. Or having red hair. 

Michelle's Oatmeal-Cranberry Chocolate Chip Cookies

 

I’m probably typical among GenXers in learning to bake via the Toll House cookies recipe on the back of the harvest yellow package of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips. I have a vague memory of my mom and I in our kitchen that seemed tiny even to my six-year-old self, her showing me how to crack eggs, measure flour, and spatula the cookies off our blotchy brown cookie sheet. But as with so many things when it came to my mother, I was left to my own devices soon afterward. Which has given my kitchen practice a bit of a FAFO flavor—making it all the more fun. “There is no room for imagination in cookery,” says Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables. “You have to follow the rules…” Ah, but once you know the rules, oh the scope for the imagination! And an ineffable but relatively quick sense of satisfaction at creating something delicious and maybe even beautiful with your own two hands. 

Midwinter Spring Is Its Own Season

(Silly blueberry bush, it's January!)    

It is not uncommon to have a break from the seemingly interminable Portland rain in mid to late January. After months of dim, gray-white skies, the sun feels almost aggressive, with a glare that is blindness in the afternoon even as we all luxuriate in its heart’s heat. Sometimes we even get temperatures in the upper 50s, teasing the bulbs with spring only for the most gullible daffodils—or blueberries (such as mine above)—to bloom and then die in a February cold snap. 

Between melting and freezing, my own soul’s sap is quivering with a tentative spring. Though at 53 years old I’m more in the autumnal time of life rather than winter. Still, a spring time out of time’s covenant. My pedometer may continue reading only 300-400 steps/day (especially since starting the Estradiol patch in August 2024), but I seem to be doing more with those steps. A bit more cooking in the kitchen. A bit more trimming and planting in the garden. An hour or two more out of bed here and there.