Bar set high

I watched Pride and Prejudice last night (the BBC version of course) and wrote a florid piece about the good and bad of Mr Darcy's love. Last night, it looked like it could be a watershed moment in literary history - today, well, it's not completely crap. But I thought I'd pen you a more, economical, version.

Mr Darcy's okay. His assured bearing, laconic address, intense passion and ardent gaze are perhaps too much to ask of any - real life - man, but his kindness, his deep regard and love for Lizzie, and his eagerness to win her hand and see her happy, these are all precious things.

Indeed on reflection, I think Mr Darcy sets the bar too low. His tender, passionate, sacrificial love is a sweet, and vapid, shadow of the love of God. God, who gave up everything, even his divinity (and who can comprehend that?), to rescue unlovely women and men. Who kept nothing back for himself. God the Son who became weak and grotesque and died as the wrath of the Father bucketed down on him.

This pitiful-glorious romantic deed is the model for every other. Men, we are not asking you to be like Mr Darcy, we are asking you to be like Christ Jesus. Darcy gets to us chicks because he's a bit like the other Man, the Man we're really longing for.

But the bar that Jesus sets is far, far above than Mr Darcy's showjumping pole. So then women, have compassion. Your guy is learning what it is to love, and so are you. Try not to let your heart be broken when he gets it wrong or when no guy is there - turn your heart to the God who looks at you with a compassion and fervent care far more profound than Mr Darcy's, and truer and kinder and all that is good.

Retell yourself the old story of your Saviour's love for you, so that it defines your world even on days when it does not feel true. If you are single (and if you are not), take comfort that you are much loved. Don't settle for crappy guys. Don't obsess. Be glad of your standing and of all that is good. Because you have this one thing, look outside of yourself. If you want for a man, then pray and take what chances come, and God will very likely send someone your way and you will be blessed by that man's sweet, vapid mirroring of the love of your God. And should he not, you are already blessed: ask that you would know it.

Spice

I'm still recovering from buying all the stuff for my place and so had trouble understanding when a Chilean friend living abroad wrote of missing "the fact that, by default, nothing is easy". Until today when another friend described traveling overseas for the first time, landing in Germany and sensing the system's oiled, powerful presence - nothing to stop you nicking the lollies off the supermarket shelves except that's not what's done; good quality furnishings in every home; streets streamlined enough to avert tripping or the build-up of water; and everything organised such that you need only simply, straightforwardly fulfill your part. Now I suspect this ease of living leaves space and energy for creative thought, but, to friends accustomed to another way of life, it can get pretty boring. On this continent, you never know if things will go smoothly or awry so life's lived in a state of alertness, ready for the moment people don't do as they should and 'the system' falls apart or bears its cracks. I think this is why simple errands have left me so drained. But with defensiveness comes offensiveness. Latinos are born improvising which, if nothing else, is interesting and can even be fun.

Homosexuality

People continue to write real, deeply felt and helpful stuff about homosexuality. Here's a link my friend posted on facebook. And her marvelous, marvelous comment that includes these guys, and everyone else, in its grasp:

When we are uncomfortable with holding up the beauty and blessing of celibate service as a joyous path, we are saying that Jesus is not quite good enough to give satisfaction to the single person or the widow or the same-sex attracted person... and by extension we cheapen the joy he offers to everyone else.

H/T Laura :)

Cazuela de pensamiento

I've got myself totally out of the groove with blogging, so this one's as much to help myself become reaccustomed as it is for you, dear reader. It'll be blathery and various. So, here's some things I've been thinking about/learning over the last weeks...

1. It's stressful moving house in a foreign country. Or maybe it's not? Maybe it's just that it's stressful buying a house-worth of goods when you never particularly feel at ease doing practical jobs. Or maybe it's this plus the fact that in this particular foreign country each shop's stock is unpredictable so you have to trek all over the city searching for what you want. And even more stressful when you care about what you want. It certainly must be something to do with these things because I've moved house stress-free many, many times before.
2. It's scary starting off a new life as an independent adult in a foreign country... especially when you're an introvert and no good at inviting people round even when that's exactly what you want to be doing.
3. It's hard to know what to do when you're feeling stressed because it's hard to get your mind clear. This is where muddled prayers, a deep confidence in God's final, shepherding control (even admist a lack of trust in his care for the details), and the advice and prayers of friends all come in handy. And time away and swimming. Swimming! And a new resolve to read the Bible and pray regularly, to entrust even my productivity to him, and to slowly but surely work out goals and take small but definite steps towards them each day.
4. I feel more whole when I have been for a swim. Ah yes, that's who I am! I love the city but I'm kindof still a kid - I need to dance, to get dirty, to shoot along the bottom of a pool. I've gotta find a pool nearby. Gotta find a way to go dancing without getting hit on too badly by sleazy (Cuban) men.
5. Hugo Chavez must really be sick, and when you see his parliamentarians interviewed they look just like the politicians here, but their words sound like they spring from some party manual. I guess that's what politicians often do in Australian too, but it's the cult of chavismo that's so striking, the speaking about him as the hope, almost as the demigod, of a land. The presidents of Argentina and Peru have both just been in Cuba, the Argentinian president visiting Chavez and the Castros and the Peruvian on other business. I've only been able to read the paper for the last few weeks, so I still don't know much about the politics of Latin America, but I do wonder what's going on there?
6. Meanwhile in the south of Chile, some Mapuchean activists burnt a rich couple's home to the ground with them in it. I've not seen the reasons given anywhere, but from what I can tell it was in protest against what is regarded as exploitative, monopolising, agrandising hegemony within a broader context of a struggle for indigenous landrights. However the couple's relatives say that they weren't landowners, but rather community-minded, peaceable business owners, and that, anyway, no landrights claims have been made for the land they did own. Like Australia, noone seems to talk too much about this sort of thing and I've no doubt that the situation's every bit as complex and difficult to resolve.
7. Back in Santiago - and back to less important things - I've been realising how difficult it is to visually assess a room's aesthetics when you've gone through the process of buying each item in it. Impossible to see as you do when walking into a already completed room. I can 'see' enough to know I'm happy with the elements and how they interact, but I just don't know if it's hit the mark as a whole. How do interior designers do it?
8. Also, in working hard to create an ambiente you can lose that very thing. I liked the space but the pieces had just become pieces and so I found myself sitting in a two-room flat (four if you count the kitchen and bathroom) exposed to the windows of the surrounding buildings and all the people walking by, like the outside space was seeping in and intermingling with the inside. But since getting back from an (awesome) camp, I've been retelling myself the story of my flat. Now it's something like a safe, sweet little eyry tucked away in the midst of the city's bustle and hum. I'm also trying to remember the jealousy I would have felt passing by and seeing someone sitting on my balcony, but it's harder coming.
9. I liked being on camp from when I first got there. This doesn't always happen in Australia. I think it was because, in my mind at least, camps feel more 'natural' here. Because Chile is more community-oriented than Australia, camps feel more like an expected extension of normal life, where in Australia I think we do them because we know they're good for us, but spending that much time with other people and in such close quarters is weird and we don't quite know how to act . . . or that might just be me. Also it didn't feel strange to be sharing a cabin with women a whole lot younger than me (it was a youth leaders' camp) - there's a way of relating here that's open and spontaneous and for all. 
10. So camp was awesome - great pool, fantastic, grounded, clear teaching, time for 'devotionals', fun games, the whole lot. The youth leaders were pretty mature and on-board and knew a thing or two about their Bibles. Except that... on the first day kicking off the level-one group training on how to make sense of a Bible passage, we were given a tough passage and asked to each read over it a few times by ourselves. Now I'd bet good money that in Australia there'd be a lot of angst and moaning when we came back together, lots of "man, that was hard" (or whatever it is the youth are saying). But here we came back together, the leaders asked how we found it, and everyone said "fine", "not too bad", "good", and proceeded to springboard off a solitary word or idea in the passage in an attempt to summarise its message as a whole. I've seen this done before and I'm sure this time wasn't the last. So it looks like before helping folks understand the Bible, it'll be important to help them see when they don't. 
11. I think the youth of any country can look pretty international - creative, experimental, striving, free. But over time, and especially after having kids, most people seem to settle into a more 'chastened', conservative version of themselves. So I wonder if it's simplest to look to middle-aged folks in seeking to understand a culture as a whole. So for example, here, as in Australia and I suppose everywhere, there are stereotypical concerns and forms of speech. But what's unique about these forms? Why do they make for smooth relating here? What do people talk about, what charms and horrifies them? I'm not sure I know the answers for Australia, but these are the sorts of things I want to be looking out for, either systematically or in a more intuitive sort of way.
12. I'm at an odd stage of language learning. I did the intermediate stage DELE Spanish test the other day, not under test conditions but without any outside help, and got 87% of the grammar and vocab right, so, technically speaking, I'm at an advanced level and yet... when I speak I still often can't remember how the irregular verbs are formed or think quickly enough to correctly use all the things I do remember, and when I'm telling a story and need to use a less usual form in a sustained way I often lose... courage more than anything, and flip-flop my way between forms. Also, I can read the paper now and am getting quite a bit of exposure to more sophisticated ways of constructing a sentence and yet when I'm speaking I often find myself quite unable to think of how I could express something exactly or gently, and am left with option of either keeping my mouth shut or saying it bluntly. Oh and while I do mostly understand what people are saying, there are still a good many times when I'm almost completely lost or when I only get the basic gist. It's very odd to live with this mix. And I think this is where my language will be at for a while to come - a level I find oddly more discouraging than my earlier inabilities. But I still do love Spanish and it doesn't feel foreign to me, I mean I feel like myself when I speak it - so that's all a lovely blessing. 
13. I first heard about the bushfires in Tassie when I switched on the morning news after coming back from camp. They were saying something about 100 fires burning and 100 people disappeared... in Tasmania. I mean you never hear about Australia, let alone Tasmania, from over here, so it made me think whatever was happening must be really bad. I don't know why I didn't think of bushfires - that would have been the obvious thing - but because in my head I translated desaparecido as "disappeared" (instead of "missing"), and perhaps because in Chile this word is associated with violence at the hands of the military government, and perhaps also because the last time I was away from Tasmania and heard news about my homestate was when Martin Bryant killed all those people - because of all these things I was thinking that maybe something like a massacre had happened. Anyway I did eventually find out what was going on and am so amazed and grateful to God that noone died. It's yucky not being home when something bad goes down - you just want to be there to be there, to commiserate and share in your people's sorrow. And when some people (my Christian family here) asked me about it, they were full of concern; but when others asked, you could tell it was abstract for them, that they weren't realising you knew the streets and bays that were names on the news, that you might know the people, and it was hard to convey the concrete reality of it in my reply.