Sustaining

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.