During her semester in Italy, Lissy asked me, “What
sustains you?” And now, Lissy is back from Italy and we are writing a long overdue post. Enjoy!
In the following blogpost, I (Kyle) offer some thoughts on the topic of what sustains me. I (Lissy) offer a poem reflecting on the giving and receiving of sustenance discovered in a small community.
Economists and environmental scientists use the term ‘sustainable’
freely. I have a bottle made from over 30% post-consumer plastic. One company’s
business ethic considers the environmental consequences of their practices on
not just the next generation, but seven generations out. The lingo of sustainability has
helped to educate, inspire activism, and cultivate care for the earth. Those
cautious to jump into this ideological ocean with both feet may not trust its
ideological cousins (for example, that tolerance or “coexistence” is chief
among virtues) often sold in the same political shrink wrap.
The more I think about it, sustainability strikes a
chord with my Christian understanding of stewardship. God governs the world,
and yet He has called us to be stewards. Perhaps
sustainability is shorthand for the human endeavor—to cultivate a world to
God’s glory, which is a living glory.
In Lissy’s coming Senior Art Project, she hopes
to make pieces to portray how dynamic a plate of food is—how it is not just the
calories that sustain us, but the symbols and relationships involved, too.
“What sustains you?” she asked me. This isn’t so much a question about my
ecology, but rather it asks me about what keeps me going, what are the sources
of the meanings that motivate me, what nourishes me personally. I ask you, the
reader, this same question.
Let me share a few of my thoughts:
As we think about entropy (that all matter tends
towards decay), it is clear that all things as we know them have a life-span. Sustaining
is not about becoming immortal, but is more about the quality of life. There is
a great mystery in the question of what sustains me, as there is so much brokenness and longing,
as well as movements and growth in my personal experience. There is an
upside-down nature of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus told
his disciples, “Give and it will be given to you.” Yet as I am learning through
personal experience, unless we allow God to give to us first, our efforts to
give can make us feel taken advantage of and “burned out”.
C.S.
Lewis in Mere Christianity described
God like petrol (gasoline), which humans need to “run”
properly. Profoundly, the Psalmist wrote, "The LORD is my
strength and my shield" and “The LORD sustains me.” Ken Shigematsu in
God in My Everything suggests that
spiritual disciplines and Christian practices give us the staying power to not only
sustain our faith, but to grow us closer to the source of the One who sustains
us. Whether mediated through others or directly through prayer and the like—and
God is the source of what we need—we are being transformed and continually
filled by God. Giving of ourselves, as mentioned above, is one of the ways that
God sustains us and grows in us the capacity to be shaped by Him.
Ode to the Young
People
by Elissa Sundet
This is for the young people,
those flames glowing in the dying garden,
for you and you and me;
we are a constellation in the dusky moss.
What is left in our lives
but to be the sustenance
to those we love and to one another?
I have held each of you
as warmth on a November evening
bleeding through my frozen shirt sleeves.
Drink as smooth as honey filtered through your calloused
fingers,
Into my cupped hands, into my blood, veins, the mess of
ventricles.
What is left but this?
In my blindness, I have only ever offered up
a single lukewarm cup of water to chapped lips.
How strangely then was
I myself sustained.
If I gave and gave
until only broken glass
lit by dying embers was left,
how soft and malleable
would I be, dusty with refined satisfaction?
There was a time I was a fatalistic, famished pubescent,
and I scoffed at the enlarged, swollen heart
of my childhood.
Now the child cradles the broken juvenile.
There is no time for cynicism;
we are made of melting wax and golden wick,
Tossing out our light to one another in the dark.
No, there is no time
for one last glossy coat of polish
so that I can hide myself from your touch.
There stands only one option,
Begging me to burn on
the edge of that edge,
where both pain and beauty can unsettle me
and sweep me up in a warm breath.
