What is Church for?

My wife is Catholic and I am not—not by a long shot.  But since we’ve come back to the US, going to mass with my wife on Sundays is the best way for the two of us to connect, as a couple, with the Korean community.  It also makes the in-laws happy.

As a laissez-faire agnostic, I naturally don’t follow the service very carefully—it helps that the mass is said in Korean—but I do need to do something with the time.  Last Sunday, I found myself questioning whether or not this was perhaps the origin of ‘sitting still and being quiet’ for yours truly.  Upon closer thought, I’ve decided that whether or not I believe in and worship a deity, I do indeed go to church when I go to church.  Or, I can if I choose to attend my own church in the church of others—a church of sitting still and being quiet.

Let me lay it out like this.  Monday through Friday, from about 8:00 am until about 5:00 pm, give or take (actually, it’s from 8:00 am to 9:00 pm on Tuesdays!), my thought must be directed toward my duties as instructor and student.  Graduate school is for sure a full time job and then some.  Saturdays is for chores and errands before anything else.  I might be heard at 8:30 on Saturday morning already reciting my own rosary: “laundry, dishes, wash the car, get a haircut, go shopping for light bulbs…amen.”  So, the joy of attending church, for me, is that from 10:30 until noon on Sundays, my brain can basically do whatever it wants.

I might have done a good deal of begging, complaining, or crying; but through whatever technique of persuasion I won the privilege from my parents, at the age of 9 or 10, to do the following things ever Sunday:

1.     To read a book during church, as long as it stayed on my lap.

2.     To sit by myself in the back of the sanctuary, or even in the balcony seats that were sometimes used as a choir loft.

3.     To leave the service early (after communion, which, being unbaptized, I never received)

Why did I want to do any of these things?  Because, obviously, church was boring.  It wasn’t for me, it wasn’t about me, and nothing about it spoke to me.  At that age, I ‘already’ had it figured out: life lessons, check; institutionalized morality—that makes sense; adults and their coerced children wearing dressy clothes because ‘that’s what you do at church,’ double-check!  The spiritual, recuperative potentials of more general features of the experience, like stillness, meditation, and such, were not at all coherent, let alone compelling.

But in those situations (1-3) above, what was I actually doing?  In fact, all those activities touch what I consider as essential to church anyway—sitting still, being quiet, and reflecting.  So while some people (some of them even Catholic friends of mine!) might wonder why I don’t have issues attending a church to which I don’t belong in any spiritual sense, it makes a lot of sense to me.  And I’m happy to have that time.

Sit still, be quiet, and get your wife a visa...

So, it's been a few months since my last post.  And I've missed a lot of opportunities to blog:
*I feverishly read Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Life while on a ferry between Estonia and Finland
*I attended an intellectually stimulating conference (also in Estonia) of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature.
*I've done a lot of reading and research on stuff I'll be working on as a PhD student.

So what's my excuse?  I'm gonna blame the government.  Governments, actually.  The long, drawn out process of getting a visa for my wifely-doo was sucking my will to live from early May until just a few days ago.  That's a bit much, actually, but it was taking a lot of my time and mental energy - and the record does reflect that something was sucking away my will to blog, if nothing else.  Again, I blame the governments of the USA and ROK and perhaps bureaucracy in general.  Let me explain the process and hopefully you will sympathize rather than empathize...I don't want you to stop reading due to the soul-crushing tedium.

1st Period: Winter 2011
This was before I was married.  I had to declare, in various ways, to both the Korean Government and the US Embassy that I would be getting married.  This cost somewhere around $100, if memory serves.  In my simple little brain I assumed this meant that both governments would be able to draw the logic conclusions.  Well: Korea did but the US most decidedly did not.  This leads to the second period.

2nd Period: Winter/Spring 2012
For some reason, I had to declare - to a different part of the US Embassy - that the woman I had married was now my 'Alien Relative.'  I honestly don't see how I could marry a Korean and not have said spouse as an 'Alien Relative.'  It seems that some column in some government spreadsheet somewhere should've reflected the forms filed in the 1st period.  Charles Robinson: Married to Alien/Alien Relative --> YES  Something like that.  But no.  I had to fill out a form virtually identical to the the declaration of marriage form and pay another $300 dollars or so.  And this process was simply to make my wife eligible to apply for an immigration visa.

3rd Period Spring/Summer 2012
About a week after we filed the 'Alien Relative' declaration, my wife received an email with 'instructions' on how to apply for the visa.  They reminded me of those matrix puzzles we sometimes did in math classes in elementary and junior high school. ("John hates spaghetti and can't work on Tuesday evenings"; "Sally hates that John hates spaghetti and refuses to work any shift John doesnt't work"; "Mary wants to work on Wednesday mornings and paints pictures of unicorns in her spare time.")  And this is where our woes actually began in earnest.

The first problem was the medical stuff, which got drawn out and expensive-ized when the doctor mistook my wife's recent cough/cold/bronchitis for "possibly TB or Pneumonia."

As this drama progressed, the government also expressed vague distaste for my lack of (US) tax documents accurately reflecting my income.  It turns out that if I had concealed my Korean income completely, everything would be fine.  But since I 'declared' my Korean income with a document that the visa officer could read but couldn't accept, and since said officer couldn't 'unsee' the 'unacceptable' document, I had to spend about $400 dollars on a tax expert to sort out the tax issue.

But finally, we have the visa in hand and we will be on our way to the US in about a week .  I hope to blog more frequently as my graduate student life (re)commences, but we shall see.  Another thing to look for in the future is a new blog I may be starting with my friends from University of Chicago, but it is a little to soon to give any substantial details.

Until next time!

Introductions are in order

Hello Everyone and Anyone...hopefully not no one,

I've had it with losing the ideas and impressions I have of books! Good, bad, strange, or predictable, they deserve to be remembered. So do the books.

So what you've found here is my shiny new blog. Strangely I have much less difficulty remembering or conjuring anything related to movies and music. But, for the sake of the theme, if nothing else, I'm going to be cataloging, summarizing, and responding (all action verbs, I assure you--and where there's action, adventure isn't far away...oh god shoot me now...) to the various media that require my still and quiet-type efforts: books, writing projects, movies, television, and music. Comments, suggestions, recommendations (if they somehow differ from suggestions, especially) are all welcome; these are the synapses, ligaments, tendons, bones--whatever--of a healthy life of reading, writing, viewing and listening.

 Over the next weeks or so, I hope to be process a backlog going back a few months. The goal is mainly to avoid that sickly look that blogs are wont to have in their first weeks. If only I could start at the beginning...I wouldn't need the blog in the first place! I'll be starting with the books that I've assigned to my students and myself for academic purposes this fall semester of 2011.

Which reminds me--in case you wanted to ask--to say a word about myself:

I am a (newly) 30-something English teacher currently living in the Mohyeon area of Yongin City, 30-40 kilometers south of Seoul, South Korea. Though I currently teach English as a foreign language, I mainly teach classes from the standpoint of my education in the philosophy, literature, and cultural studies. My first wedding anniversary is quickly approaching and my wife and I are currently planning a move (back, in my case) to the USA. I will definitely say more about that in the coming months. So that's it. The first post on my new blog...yet another adventure in sitting still and being quiet! 

~Chuck

 (...I need theme music...this will do:)