memorials

The kids and I flew up to Ohio last week to visit with my dad. Why January? Good question. I can only answer that apparently we are slightly insane. Thankfully, a friend down here provided a wonderful coat for Michael and scarves and hats galore. Whew! When we got there, Dayton was covered in old snow, which melted after a day or so, but not before the kids got to play in it. Sunday morning, it was snowing like crazy, so they were able to play outside in the snow as it was falling. Since this trip was about their second experience ever with snow, I was pretty pleased with that.

We went to church with my dad on Saturday night. Although this is the church in which I grew up, this building is still quite unfamiliar to me because it was built after I graduated from high school. My brother had a small farm plot on the land one summer (pending building) as part of a fundraiser for a youth trip. I have to confess, my mind wandered a bit during the service as I looked around and thought about the roots of this church, and the history to get there.

What I was mainly thinking about was that my parents were on the leadership team for the Sow What? campaign--the fund drive for the building which now holds this church. I remember my mother working (chemo and all) to make this property and building a reality. This is a very contemporary church, with no pews, no stained glass, and no gold plaques. My mother's name isn't inscribed anywhere in the building, or in the youth building next to it (in lieu of flowers, my father requested that donations in her name be made to that), but for all that, in a very real way, and maybe only to me, that building is a memorial to my mother. She invested herself in it because she believed in our church and its mission.

Don't worry, I have no delusions that she single-handedly built the church or anything like that--it's a big church and a lot of people poured themselves into it. But just knowing my mother, and how practical she was, and what was important to her, I was thankful to look around at all the unfamiliar faces that night and know that their presence in that building was a small part of her legacy. I think she would like that better than a fancy granite monument, which she doesn't have anyway. I am very thankful for my mother's drive, dedication, and passion, and for the ways in which she chose to invest herself.

a piece of my mind

I just have to share with you this passage from a textbook for my class next week:

"We have seen that postcoloninal criticism is often impaled on the horns of the following dilemma: whether to align itself with humanist notions of an autonomous, sovereign subject and so run the risk of subsuming heterogeneous identities and histories in to an abstract essentialism, or of embracing a post-structuralist antihumanism and so denying any universal moral platform from which to contest the material and epistemic violence of the colonial encounter. Gayatri Spivak has suggested a ‘strategic essentialism’ as a way of resolving this dilemma: that while theory recognizes only the dispersal of ‘subject-effects,’ emancipatory practice requires us to adopt and essentialist stance toward the colonized self. "

It is just me, or the lateness of the hour, or my punchiness due to caffeine and late-night study – but is this not just hilarious? Have a look at those words, and say them with a straight face and serious tone … do I hear you giggle?

The strange fact is that if you read enough of this, you actually begin to understand it. The book is called Subverting Global Myths and it is actually quite remarkable. But this paragraph left me grinning and just begged to be shared.