As life goes on...

I read this article the other day and was struck by how beautifully written it was and the message behind it. As life goes on, you are often forced to rethink things.

Rethinking His Religion - Frank Bruni, New York Times

I MOVED into my freshman-year dorm at the University of North Carolina after many of the other men on the hall. One had already begun decorating. I spotted the poster above his desk right away. It showed a loaf of bread and a chalice of red wine, with these words: “Jesus invites you to a banquet in his honor.”

This man attended Catholic services every Sunday in a jacket and tie, feeling that church deserved such respect. I kept a certain distance from him. I’d arrived at college determined to be honest about my sexual orientation and steer clear of people who might make that uncomfortable or worse. I figured him for one of them.

About two years ago, out of nowhere, he found me. His life, he wanted me to know, had taken interesting turns. He’d gone into medicine, just as he’d always planned. He’d married and had kids. But he’d also strayed from his onetime script. As a doctor, he has spent a part of his time providing abortions.

For some readers his journey will be proof positive of Rick Santorum’s assertion last month that college is too often godless and corrupting. For others, it will be a resounding affirmation of education’s purpose.

I’m struck more than anything else by how much searching and asking and reflecting he’s done, this man I’d so quickly discounted, who pledged a fraternity when he was still on my radar and then, when he wasn’t, quit in protest over how it had blackballed a Korean pledge candidate and a gay one.

Because we never really talked after freshman year, I didn’t know that, nor did I know that after graduation he ventured to a desperately poor part of Africa to teach for a year. College, he recently told me, had not only given him a glimpse of how large the world was but also shamed him about how little of it he knew.

In his 30s he read all 11 volumes of “The Story of Civilization,” then tackled Erasmus, whose mention in those books intrigued him. When he told me this I was floored: I knew him freshman year as a gym rat more than a bookworm and extrapolated his personality and future from there.

During our recent correspondence, he said he was sorry for any impression he might have given me in college that he wasn’t open to the candid discussions we have now. I corrected him: I owed the apology — for misjudging him.

He grew up in the South, in a setting so homogeneous and a family so untroubled that, he said, he had no cause to question his parents’ religious convictions, which became his. He said that college gave him cause, starting with me. Sometime during freshman year, he figured out that I was gay, and yet I didn’t conform to his prior belief that homosexuals were “deserving of pity for their mental illness.” I seemed to him sane and sound.

He said that we talked about this once — I only half recall it — and that the exchange was partly why he remembered me two decades later.

Questioning his church’s position on homosexuality made him question more. He read the Bible “front to back and took notes of everything I liked and didn’t like,” he said.

“There’s a lot of wisdom there,” he added, “but it’s a real mistake not to think about it critically.”

He also read books on church history and, he said, “was appalled at the behavior of the church while it presumed to teach all of us moral behavior.” How often had it pushed back at important science? Vilified important thinkers?

Even so, he added to his teaching duties in Africa a weekly, extracurricular Bible study for the schoolchildren. But the miseries he witnessed made him second-guess the point of that, partly because they made him second-guess any god who permitted them.

He saw cruelties born of the kind of bigotry that religion and false righteousness sometimes abet. A teenage girl he met was dying of sepsis from a female circumcision performed with a kitchen knife. He asked the male medical worker attending to her why such crude mutilation was condoned, and was told that women otherwise were overly sexual and “prone to prostitution.”

“Isn’t it just possible,” he pushed back, “that women are prone to poverty, and men are prone to prostitution?”

He has thought a lot about how customs, laws and religion do and don’t jibe with women’s actions and autonomy.

“In all centuries, through all history, women have ended pregnancies somehow,” he said. “They feel so strongly about this that they will attempt abortion even when it’s illegal, unsafe and often lethal.”

In decades past, many American women died from botched abortions. But with abortion’s legalization, “those deaths virtually vanished.”

“If doctors and nurses do not step up and provide these services or if so many obstacles and restrictions are put into place that women cannot access the services, then the stream of women seeking abortions tends to flow toward the illegal and dangerous methods,” he said.

He had researched and reflected on much of this by the time he graduated from medical school, and so he decided to devote a bit of each week to helping out in an abortion clinic. Over years to come, in various settings, he continued this work, often braving protesters, sometimes wearing a bulletproof vest.

He knew George Tiller, the Kansas abortion provider shot dead in 2009 by an abortion foe.

THAT happened in a church, he noted. He hasn’t belonged to one since college. “Religion too often demands belief in physical absurdities and anachronistic traditions despite all scientific evidence and moral progress,” he said.

And in too many religious people he sees inconsistencies. They speak of life’s preciousness when railing against abortion but fail to acknowledge how they let other values override that concern when they support war, the death penalty or governments that do nothing for people in perilous need.

He has not raised his young children in any church, or told them that God exists, because he no longer believes that. But he wants them to have the community-minded values and altruism that he indeed credits many religions with fostering. He wants them to be soulful, philosophical.

So he rounded up favorite quotations from Emerson, Thoreau, Confucius, Siddhartha, Gandhi, Marcus Aurelius, Martin Luther King and more. From the New Testament, too. He put each on a strip of paper, then filled a salad bowl with the strips. At dinner he asks his kids to fish one out so they can discuss it.

He takes his kids outside to gaze at stars, which speak to the wonder of creation and the humility he wants them to feel about their place in it.

He’s big on humility, asking, who are we to go to the barricades for human embryos and then treat animals and their habitats with such contempt? Or to make such unforgiving judgments about people who err, including women who get pregnant without meaning to, unequipped for the awesome responsibility of a child?

As a physician, he said, you’re privy to patients’ secrets — to their truths — and understand that few people live up to their own stated ideals. He has treated a philandering pastor, a drug-abusing financier. “I see life as it really is,” he told me, “not how we wish it were.”

He shared a story about one of the loudest abortion foes he ever encountered, a woman who stood year in and year out on a ladder, so that her head would be above other protesters’ as she shouted “murderer” at him and other doctors and “whore” at every woman who walked into the clinic.

One day she was missing. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s O.K.,’ ” he recalled. He walked into an examining room to find her there. She needed an abortion and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose, unprincipled.

She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my relationship isn’t where it should be.”

“Nothing like life,” he responded, “to teach you a little more.”

A week later, she was back on her ladder.

The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows

I was a junior in high school way back in '03 when this song first came out. I remember listening to it for the first time and it immediately became clear that it had the potential to become one of my all-time favorites (along with Everlong and There Is A Light...), which it soon did. 

It was only until recently that I started thinking about the lyrics and sought to interpret what they mean. The general background seems to be about a couple once young and madly in love, now faced with the difficult choice of marriage/staying together after the relationship has fallen apart and all the problems that come with it... 

We saw the western coast 

I saw the hospital // The west represents the end of the frontier in American history, and this symbolizes when the singer realizes that his love for her is nearing an end.

Nursed the shoreline like a wound

Reports of lover's tryst

Were neither clear nor descript // The shoreline symbolizes breaking up, which he does not do but rather he nurses his pain and carries on. His love for her, having faded, is questionable.

We kept it safe and slow

The quiet things that no one ever knows // He is unhappy but cannot let go. For the sake of staying together, he keeps things safe and slow and continues the relationship. All his thoughts/feelings of sadness and regret are kept to himself...

[Chorus: x2]

So keep the blood in your head

And keep your feet on the ground // He must keep his feelings and emotions bottled and in check.

If today's the day it gets tired

Today's the day we drop out // Emotional fatigue is taking its toll and should he lose it, his emotions will get the better of him and he will end it.

Gave up my body and bed

All for an empty hotel

Wasting words on lower cases and capitals // He has sacrificed a great deal through all of this.

I contemplate the day we wed

Your friends are boring me to death

Your veil is ruined in the rain // The future with her looks bleak, he dislikes her friends/family, the marriage appears doomed to fail.

By then it's you I can do without

There's nothing new to talk about // He is unhappy and bored, his interest is gone.

And though our kids are blessed

Their parents let them shoulder all the blame // They are bound to this relationship because of their children, they carry the blame.

[Bridge: x2]

I lie for only you

And I lie well...

Hallelu... // He wants to scream his heart out to her. I lied to you and did it so well that we are still together. I don't love you anymore. 

Mitt Romney: the least interesting man in the world.

In defense of America

I recently had a drunk Swedish dude rant to me about America after I told him I was from The States. I recall him comparing America to a cancer upon the world. I explained to him that not all of America was as retarded as we are portrayed on TV and that he would find a lot of parts of the country (especially Los Angeles) very progressive.

Let's face it, America is an easy target for criticism. I am as guilty as anyone as I will demonstrate now - our politicians, our lack of universal healthcare, our foreign policy, our crazy religious folks, our increasingly expensive higher education, our corporate greed/consumerism etc. So basically, there is a lot we can improve upon.

But with all that being said, I believe that America maintaining its role as the world's primary superpower is a far better alternative than to have the next biggest and ascendant power (i.e. China) replace us. By all accounts, their TV shows suck.

Vår i Lund

Heineken Brewery

My idea of traveling consists almost entirely of eating, drinking, walking and repeating. This also includes avoiding tourist traps like the fucking plague but I do make exceptions every once in a while. 

Amsterdam Street Art

While wandering the city, I stumbled upon some pretty cool street art and an interesting van...

Amsterdam

Recluse

As of late, due to the inclement weather (mild by Swedish standards, insane by mine), sometimes I don't really feel as though I am living in a foreign country. This is due to the fact that I spend most of my time indoors, relegated to my apartment, where I only watch TV shows that I have downloaded (naturally, all American), the only radio I listen to is NPR on the web, and Google has been set to English/America.

I feel like Napoleon after being exiled to Saint Helena (not the best reference, I know) ...or maybe what I am experiencing is just your average Swedish winter?

On a more exciting note, I will be escaping to Amsterdam for a short trip in about a week! Can't wait for warmer temperatures and cheaper prices - definitely a reason to celebrate :)

Medley: Life

“Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

but...

"The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss."
- Thomas Carlyle

so...

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
- Henry David Thoreau

Construction

New apartments are being built as can be seen from the kitchen window. Breakfast has never been more annoying, although being Swedish, they are relatively quiet... mostly cause they don't blast Ranchera like back home.

Beautiful day

Bright sunshine and an especially clear, blue sky made for a beautiful day.

Biking in Lund

College towns are generally expected to be bike-friendly but Lund definitely takes it to a whole 'nother level. Lund is by far the most bike-friendly city in the country and is known as the 'city of bicycles' among Swedes.

While I often miss my baby (Civic), it is so refreshing to see an environmentally-friendly means of transportation being utilized on such a large scale. In most cases, it is more convenient/faster to hop on the bike than to drive. Seeing parents riding around town with their toddlers on bikes equipped with a child-seat is a very common sight here in Lund and I must admit, is pretty cute.