The case for pleasure

About two days ago, the atmosphere in my house was a bit crazy.

I have an adorable Chinese flatmate, and she was getting a visit from a friend's father. The friend lives in Shangai but her father has found a job in a restaurant in Britain and was visiting my flatmate. From the beginning, something was strange... My flatmate, who is the most laid back and generous person on the planet, was arguing with him (in Chinese) and crying hard.

Personally I had a ton of teaching and marking to do, so I wasn't exactly available, but I did ask her what was going on: basically, the guy had been in Britain since January and had developed a number of addictions, alcohol and gambling in particular: he was racking up huge debts and really sliding away. He would bow down for me all the time but his eye contact was evasive and the conflict between them was huge and intractable.

Then on Thursday, I was alone in the house with our guest, working at the computer when he started to cook. I had decided that there was not much I could do (he speaks only Chinese) and resolved to touch base with my flatmate the minute he walked out of our house.

The cooking smelled good, very good. I was not very hungry but Gosh it smelled good! And hell did I want one of those deep fried prawns! -Some of my readers who know about my love of dim sums will no doubt understand-. I could not focus on my work, I wanted a prawn. I fought the urge, not wanting to be rude, but hell I just wanted a prawn, and I wanted it then!

So after twenty minutes of heroically fighting my inherent rudeness, I just gave in, and using my hands and facial expressions I somehow conveyed that I would have loved to try a prawn.

The friend not only understood but started loading a plate for me, as if saying: "try this, and try that too". He was pleased that I had made contact with him, and that I was so appreciative of his cooking and of his inherent goodness too (ha! The power of the deep fried prawns!).

We sat down at the dinner table together, communicating with hands, facial expression and a few words of English, when my flatmate walked in. She was relieved that I was there, and that I had managed to defuse the surly atmosphere. We spent the meal sharing cultural differences ("do you guys eat this soggy rice for breakfast?" "Do westerners think we're unhygienic when we eat from the same central dish?" "what is the first food you give to babies?").

On the whole the meal went really well, the conflict toned down after that and my flatmate able to convey what she thought without running into a wall of defensiveness.

There's a German saying which Germans sometimes put up on their wall, on a tacky Bavarian piece of wood. It says "Love me when I don't deserve it, that's when I need it". I have worked with that principle forever. I cannot emphasise too much the importance of appreciation. Find something you truly appreciate, something that genuinely gives YOU pleasure, even if it's just deep fried prawns. Convey that somehow. Then you can sit back and watch the results.

(umm... and by the looks of it I'm still "going to hell", eating a prawn is an abberation (Lev 11.10) and gluttony is a capital sin, so there we go :-)

Wow!

No here's a blog that puts most wannabe neomonastics to shame: Cindy has adopted several groups of siblings from very rocky backgrounds (a total of 39!), and is clearly having a rolling time. It makes for compulsive reading too, and the personal pictures -here, here and here for instance- are amazing.

Of course, I'm aware of the issues regarding the separation of kids from their birth families, partly because I've met mothers who were dangerously close to losing their kids, and the prospect of it was throwing them into despair. This is a very, very complex field.

C'est pas d'l'amour

Ça ressemble à la Toscane douce et belle de Vinci
Les sages et beaux paysages font les hommes sages aussi
Ça ressemble à des images, aux saisons tièdes, aux beaux jours
Au silence après l'orage, au doux toucher du velour

C'est un peu comme ces musiques qu'on entend sans écouter
Ces choses qui n'existent jamais tant que le manque qu'elles ont laissé
Ça ressemble à ces grands-routes, sans virages, sans détour
La dolce vita sans doute
Mais en tout cas, c'est pas d'l'amour

Ça ressemble à la sagesse, à ces paix qu'on signe un jour
Juste au prix de nos jeunesses, sans trompettes ni tambours
C'est plein de baisers caresses, plein de mots sucrés d'enfants
Attestations de tendresse, rituels rassurants

Harmonie, intelligence et raison ou sérénité
Complice connivence, autant de mots pour exprimer tout ce que c'est
C'est un peu tout ça tour à tour
Mais en tout cas, c'est pas d'l'amour

Sans peurs et sans solitude, le bonheur à ce qu'on dit
Y a bien des vies sans Beethoven et sans avis
Pourquoi pas des vies sans cris?

Mais qu'on soit contre au qu'on soit pour
Et en tout cas, c'est pas d'l'amour
C'est pas d'l'amour
C'est plus d'l'amour

Jean-Jacques Goldman, C'est pas d'l'amour (I like my yang with a bit of yin, I think this song is beautiful) .

That stylish poverty

One of my friends has simplified life to the extreme. His life is full of classical music, a rather limited wardrobe, a few books, and a few great friends. Yesterday night we went to see Mozart's Requiem, we walked back in the starry night, talking about the Benedictine ethos and gossipping around. Then we shared a cup of tea and some rather fine biscuits at 11 pm before I walked home.

Not too far from Durham, there are pockets of another poverty. The one that is hard to tell, because people are not quite homeless. Rather, they own about six or seven of the newest mobile phones. Their home is about to be repossessed, and since they don't have any access to any form of credit anymore, they survive on cheap plastic bread, not getting proper nutrition and feeling quite weak as a result. When you walk down the street you would never know.

So there's an elephant in the room. I'd been secretely hoping that someone in the blogosphere would take up the topic, because I'm just too lazy to spell it out myself, but really someone's got to engage with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of Habitus. It's Habitus that is going to come back and bite us on the ass as we move out of our comfort zone. If I don't get my Requiems, my educated friends and my civilised cups of tea I get grumpy. The result of it all: I watch tasteful "social" movies about people whose taste I don't share, the irony! Gosh do I have a long way to go...

What's wrong with being bored?

There's a line in Camus in which one of his characters says that he doesn't like people who join the revolution because they are bored. This is echoed by quite a few committed radicals who love to criticise the "disillusioned bourgeois kids". Get your stones ready because I'm one of them. I'm one to say that the mainstream, upper middle class lifestyle is BORING and soul-deadening, and I actually think that there is a lot of value in this realisation, where else are we supposed to start? The trick is that you've got to find something that you value more.

I see where everyone is going though... what about solidarity? What about caring for others? Maybe I've got an underdevelopped notion of sacrifice, but hang on a sec: caring for each other is pleasurable, very much so... if we lose this we're fried.

The trajectory vs. the starting point

I've been reading excerpts from "The Poverty of Riches: St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered" by Kenneth Baxter Wolf. What struck me was the way in which Wolf remains fairly unimpressed by Francis' deliberateness in agressively pursuing holy poverty.

At the same time, my own thinking was taking me back over and over again to the social organising in two "poor" parts of the world in which I ended up living, without even intending it.

The first community was Penalolen, near Santiago de Chile. After I had ominously declared to my parents that I planned to visit Chile on my own at 19, my mum phoned up all her friends to find out if anyone knew anyone in Santiago. The sister of the friend of a friend offered to accomodate me while I looked for another place. So I ended up in Penalolen, surrounded by a very lively pentecostal community, which at the time freaked me out a bit.

The second community was Anenii Noi, Moldova. I had just graduated and was temping while looking for a "serious" job, when one of my best friends invited me up to Moldova, his home country. Needless to say, I was up for that!

The level of sharing and tangible interdependency I noticed in these two places was mind-blowing, not to mention the people's huge omnipresent faith. In Moldova especially, I did not have to do anything, but I felt that I was getting healed on a very deep level, just by standing by. I spent a month with my eyes wide open: now what the heck is this? Why does it feel like Christ's resurrection happened next door, here in Anenii Noi, just about two weeks ago. This was mega weird.

And the thing is... none of these communities was deliberate. They were not trying to be "faithful", they were not trying to achieve "holy poverty". They were not trying much at all.

So now I'm reading half a gazillion western Christian blogs, in which we all seem to struggle with our "responsibilities". So we're "emergent", "neomonastic" and what else... But reflecting back on Wolf's book, maybe the notion of incremental downward mobility is a lot of BS. Keep the upward mobility, but start from the bottom, within an (expanding) community of sharing.

This is weird...

This Sunday my boyfriend of one month will be presiding an Anglican service and he asked me to come along. This is possibly one the most "high chuch" service in Durham -bring on the smells and bells! I am rounding up all of my friends for moral support.

Last week, I e-mailed a friend of mine who is also a priest. I asked him to return Torture and Eucharist to the University Library because I had forgotten to renew it and it was now overdue. He replied by writing that he wanted to hold on to the book and that he would pay any library fines, then he wrote that he wanted to use it for his reading group. So now Durham Catholics are reading Will T. Cavanaugh.