Lessons from Sand Worms

Chances are pretty good that I'm the only minister in Texas who has used (multiple times) the "Litany Against Fear" from Dune during a sermon.  If you're not familiar with it, the main character recites this Litany during a time when his life is at risk: "I will not fear.  Fear is the mind-killer.  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.  I will face my fear.  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.  And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.  Only I will remain."

Don't Mess With Shai-Hulud

Fear as the mind-killer has resonated with me since the first time I encountered the phrase.  When I was young it was merely powerful prose, but as I've gotten older it has become enshrined in my heart as universal truth.  Fear, at its most powerful, obliterates your mind.

But when you ask a nerd about fear, they are much more likely to quote Star Wars before Paul Atreides.  You probably know this one, a meditation on fear by Jedi Master Yoda: "Fear is the path to the dark side.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering."  Again, it was merely pithy when I was younger.  Today?  Well, I live in America and suffer through an endless election cycle.  Yoda is a prophet, man.

The Kwisatz Haderach and Master Yoda were both right: fear destroys your ability to think, it feeds anger, it is the root of suffering.  Fear guides our political rhetoric, fear seeps into religious life, fear haunts even benign holidays like Halloween when FB posts warn you to watch out for razors in your child's candy.  Fear is the root and anger is the bitter fruit that we all seem to be feasting upon lately.  At the end of last year, Slate published an "Outrage Calendar" that listed every topic we yelled about on Social Media by the day.  It was a telling reveal, that our public discourse has become dominated by what is wrong, broken, unfit, paltry, contemptible.  I have to search news with a fine toothed comb to find a semblance of "good" news.  We are all so angry; we are all so afraid.

Part of me wonders if our fear is healthy; life is actually quite fragile and often the worst amongst us have the most power.  But part of me also acknowledges that fear (and its child, anger) grow out from a shattering of expectation.  Maybe Americans are so angry lately because we're finally having to let go of the myth of our national exceptionalism.  Maybe Progressives are angry because the long arc of justice is TOO long and all this work is exhausting.  Maybe conservatives are angry because they feel the tide of the culture war turning against them and they don't know their next move.  Maybe.  Whatever the anger is about, though, I turn my eyes back to the Jedi and the Fremen and remember that our anger is ultimately rooted in our fear about the future.  And that fear?  It's killing us.  It's sapping our ability to think critically.  It's driving us apart from each other.  For God's sake, fear caused the people of Houston to vote AGAINST an Equal Rights ordinance that would have protected religious folk, veterans and the disabled.

Fear leads to suffering.  Fear is also not an appropriate response for Christians.  Over and over again, Jesus told his disciples, "Do Not be Afraid."  Or like the writer of 2 Timothy said: "For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."  We are called to something more: trust beyond fear, hope beyond anger, love beyond hate.  It's harder this way, but its vastly better than the mind obliteration that is our only other option.

Join me my friends.  Clear your thoughts and let your fear pass over you.  Let outrage leach out from your soul, like the poison it often becomes.  Let's discover together what life can be like when we aren't angry all the time.

Of Suns and Trust

Advent is swiftly approaching, the time of anticipation when we Christians prepare our souls and lives for the birth of Jesus.  Traditionally, each week is associated with a different word: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.  Of the three, Joy is the hardest to parse out because our culture doesn’t seem to know how to explain it apart from happiness.  English is a fine language; it is elastic, evolving and eccentric.  But very often, it fails us in the sense that it tries to pack too much meaning into one word; or it makes synonyms of words that demand more differentiation.  As best as I can figure, we English speakers lazily explain that “Joy” is happiness on a deeper level and quickly change the subject when pushed.  I have struggled in many a children sermon on the 3^rd Sunday of Advent when I needed to explain what joy was, but not because I did not know the difference between joy and happiness.  I knew it, but to define it was to reveal too much of myself.

I remember when my son’s head crowned the day he was born, the shocking feeling of his sudden existence apart from my own.  I remember when my husband told me he loved me for the first time, the overwhelming relief of emotion separate from my years of pain.  I remember when my family, friends and colleagues laid their hands upon me at my ordination, the hope of long years birthed under their fingertips.  Those moments were not happy moments, in the sense that happiness is the emotional equivalent of a burst of color and light and trumpeting sound.   They were moments where fear, anticipation, delight, wonder and grace swirled together in a hue of color rarely seen.     These flashes of life (a child born, words whispered, hands resting upon each other), they are my best definition of joy.

Joy is not a feeling in as much as it is a belief in goodness beyond suffering.  Joy is the laughter of memories shared at a funeral, joy is the hope waiting at the opening of a tomb, joy is waking in a hospital room to see your friend sleeping in a chair next to you.  For Christians, joy is trusting that God can mold and shape the clay of this oft wretched world into something beautiful.  Perhaps joy is like happiness, in the same way that the sun is a light.  But who amongst us would truly draw comparison between the churning depths of fire and heat and power that make up our sun to the flickering bulbs that inhabit our ceilings?

I presided over the funeral of a good man last Friday, and I encouraged the assembly to remember that our grief had to be mingled with the joy we shared in his resurrection.  Saturday, I will struggle to believe that as I stand to share my memories of my grandmother.   I will not be happy; there is no happiness to be found in the loss of a woman such as her.  But I will reach deep into the wellspring that God tends within my soul, I will reach deep and swim in the memories of her laughter and her hands and her breath and I believe I will find joy.   Joy that I had the chance to be shaped by her love; Joy that my very life I owe to her own.

Victor Hugo said, “Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.”  What a gift.  

Where is your joy, my friends?

To Sleep on Cold Novembers

If I were to be honest, I'd tell you that I don't much care for "modern" art.  I can appreciate it, it's provocative transgression, the way modern artists subvert medium and expectation to evoke emotion. But "modern" pieces don't elicit  much from me, not the way that realism does.  My taste in art runs quite opposite than my taste in fiction; when I read I desire grand space operas, but when I go to museums I desire pieces anchored firmly in this world.

I was introduced to the Wyeth family of artists my sophomore year in high school, when I had to do an oral analysis of "The Green Knight Preparing to Battle Sir Beaumains", an illustration done by N.C Wyeth in Thomas Malory's "The Boy's King Arthur."  N.C, was skilled at the subtle conveyance of what I interpreted to be melancholy and silence, a skill that he managed to pass on to his son Andrew.  I like the work of N.C, but Andrew speaks to me on a much deeper level.  His beautiful work with his muse Helga makes me proud to have a rounded woman's body; his haunting pieces of winter amongst wooden buildings and dying field grass quiet my soul and make me listen for racing wind.

But today, I remembered this picture, called "Master Bedroom":

The beauty of art is that much of the meaning of a piece comes from the experience of the one who sees it.  Till today, I had always seen this picture to be one of comfort and tranquility.  I had imagined it was a cool fall day, and that the faithful hound in question was merely napping before the master returned.  But today?  Today, it occurs to me that perhaps the master will not be returning.  

My grandmother died this morning.  She had a catastrophic stroke on Saturday the 24th, and died this morning about 4am.  She would have been 84 this month, had been married to my grandfather for 63 years, and today she died. Now, all I can see in this picture is a dog waiting for their master to return, a master who will not return.  What is happening in the world beyond that window frame?  Is it the family gathered around a tombstone?  Or has time passed so that tumbled leaves dance across chiseled letters that read "Beloved Friend"?   Does the dog yet know its loss or does it knowingly return to the place of the one he loved to draw comfort from memory? 

The answer, of course, is that the painting is all of that and none of that; it is what I need it to be, it evokes the grief I need to express.  This is the power of art, that it is all at once mirror, opponent, chaplain, and critic.  Wyeth did not paint for me, but his creation lives beyond its original setting, stretching in purpose for each of its viewers.  In this sense, art is transcendent (even if it’s not by Gignoux).  Wyeth’s art helps me to run backwards in my memory and forwards into my future and to linger in my present, to contemplate all the cold Novembers which have hurt me as well as given me rest. 

Soon I will travel to my grandmother’s funeral, to stand with family and friends as we sing and cry and remember the woman we loved.  We will wonder together how to continue in a world where she is absent.  Then I will return home, and wrap the quilt my grandma made for me around my body; I will wrap it around me and sleep while fall winds knock against my windows.   Because sometimes, life imitates art.

Worlds of Meaning

I read quite a lot, and very little of it is considered "scholarly" or "Christian."  My old standbys are either:
a) full of wizards and magic
b) full of spaceships and future-tech.

Almost none of my favorite stories are based on this planet; I prefer to imagine worlds beyond this one.  Probably the best illustration of this penchant of mine is my shelf of books by Jack L. Chalker.  The Well World books by Chalker center on an artificial planet with 1500 constructed hexagonal biospheres, all wildly different from each other.  Some contain carbon based life forms, some life forms are sentient noble gasses.  The civilization that created these biospheres would eventually transplant the lifeforms from their hexagon to a planet terraformed to match.  

I first read these books when I was a teenager, and I was stunned by the imaginative possibilities.  More than that, however, I was challenged by the implicit moral of these tales: life does not have to look like you to be valuable.  Sci-fi repeats this story often; Star Trek:TNG did it in "Home Soil", and Battlestar Galactica explored this with the conflict between Humans and Cylons.  Jack L. Chalker and his Well World books are probably the reason why I firmly believe that the universe is full of other planets that contain living creatures.  I just don't think that any of them will look like us, act like us, communicate like us, or experience reality like us.  Why should they?  

Of course, what any good science fiction story does is to eventually turn your eyes from the heavens back towards this earthly existence.  I, as of yet, do not have to grapple with the differing lives of aliens.  What I do have to grapple with is a world full of humans whose lives are categorically different than my own.  Sometimes this difference is about preference: I just don’t get the obsession with or enjoyment of baseball.  I’m not opposed or derogatory, I just don’t care.  Sometimes this difference is about privilege: the social power I have as a white, cis-gendered woman creates an entirely different reality than one experienced by a trans-person of color.  We live on the same planet, but our lives are so different they might as well be biospheres on Well World. 

The work of Chalker and Asimov and Roddenberry and Herbert and LeGuin, push me to the edges of my hexagon of existence and force me to look over.  Sometimes, they even hand me a sledgehammer and command me to break down that which separates me from my neighbor.  But they are not the only voices that remind me: Life doesn’t have to look like you to have value.  God, in scripture, sings the same song to me:   “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Welcome the stranger, for you too were once a stranger in a strange land.”

This business of life seems to be one long awakening to the intricacies and difficulties of all the worlds within this one world I live upon.  I have always been treading in and out of alien places, I just didn’t realize that it was happening every time I held out my hand and engaged the stranger in front of me.  To quote Jean-Luc Picard, perhaps this is the goal of every life, the purpose of all our days: to explore strange new places, new civilizations.  Except we don’t need spaceships to do it; we just need eyes open to the people around us, hearts tender to the differences between us, soul awakened to our common human bonds. 

What worlds surround you?  What life have you forgotten to value?  What will you discover tomorrow?  Happy voyage, my friend, whether you head to the stars or merely your neighbors’ front door.

Look Back

There's a story in the Old Testament about Lot and his wife and the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Lot, his wife and his daughters are fleeing from the deadly reign of fire and are warned to not look back.  But Lot's wife can't resist the temptation to see the havoc behind her, so she glimpses over her shoulder.  Her punishment for that fateful neck turn is a metamorphosis: she becomes a pillar of salt, forever facing backwards.  She'll never get to see the future because she was too invested in her past.

I haven't written on this blog since the end of August, partially because I've been afraid of turning into a pillar of salt.

I began writing in earnest as a way to process, in real time, the trials of Cliff's incarceration and my life after the fact.  I continued writing as a I worked through the decision to divorce and live as a single mother.  But somewhere along the way, I started re-processing the same days, the same difficulties, the old news.  Recovering from trauma certainly isn't a linear process, in the same way that grief is not; we often retread old grounds because we realize we hadn't fully comprehended it.  But in my experience working with people, we are all susceptible to the temptation off cycling back to old wounds as a way to reclaim victimhood.   When we suffer, at least publicly, our concentric circles of support turn in towards us and pay us heed.  That gaze can become addictive.

This realization clarified for me when I hopped onto Facebook and looked through my "See what happened years ago on this day" feature.  I should have known better, but who doesn't enjoy nostalgia?  I knew precisely when I'd hit the beginning of "All the Evil" because my status update was just a scripture:

That's what I did in November, and for much of the rest of that year.  I didn't have words so I used the words of scripture instead.   Now, whenever I get on Facebook, and for however long this "window into the past" feature is a part of that platform, I can peer back like Lot's wife.

I'd rather not.  Not anymore.  I think I've done enough time as a frozen pillar of vaguely human likeness, forced to gaze endlessly upon tragedy.

I'd rather discipline myself to look forward, to deal with my present days according to their own merit.  But, to do that, I'm going to have to find a way to organically transition the focus of my writing from backwards to forwards.  That's why I'll be doing NaBloPoMo (National Blog Post Month), an off-shoot of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).  I'm already a day behind (I've never been very organized), but I don't think the blogging gawds will mind much.  My plan is to blog around concepts which give me broad interpretive power.  Through this process, I hope to discern where my heart and mind are spending their times these days, and how my words can continue to touch others.  It is a blog after all; if I didn't care about you readers, this would just be a public diary.

My plan is this:
Sundays - Song
Mondays - Parenting
Tuesdays - The World
Wednesdays - Art
Thursdays - Joy
Fridays - Anger
Saturday - Nature

Thanks for your patience during my silence.  Here's to turning the month of November from a frozen vigil over that which was lost, to a hopeful turn towards the possible days ahead.

http://www.judydouglass.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/source-woman-at-window.jpg

Speaking from Experience

I knew my marriage was deeply and catastrophically unhealthy when I would daydream about how much easier life would be if my ex-husband was killed in a car accident or had a sudden heart attack. During those morbid ruminations, the crux of the relief rested on how "acceptable" it would be for me to move on, to have a new life.  That kind of unexpected, un-asked for tragedy would free me from the painful marriage I was in without me having to "end" it with a divorce.

Then, my ex-husband went to jail for the sexual assault of a minor.  Which, honestly, fell into the "acceptable way to end a marriage" category that I had been pining for.  Who could blame me for divorcing a man who had so clearly disregarded my safety, the well being of a teenager, the unborn son he had yet to father?  I mean, didn't Jesus even give me a clear exit (Matthew 19:9)?

Except that's not how those decisions get made.  Not by a long shot.

I sat with my "acceptable out" for almost two years before I made the decision to pursue a divorce.  Two Years of counseling, life changes, grief and prison visits.  People who haven't been through trauma like this have absolutely no context for the upheaval it causes, spiritually or metaphysically.  I'm not and never have been a member of the armed services, but I DID experience PTSD symptoms in the wake of my ex's incarceration.  I became detached (that leaned towards dissociation), I felt unable to experience positive emotions, I was persistently overcome by shame and anger, but I STILL had to care for my 19 month old son and function in the same environment. The trauma didn't stop for quite some time.  In the midst of my trauma, I was in no shape to make another life-altering, traumatic decision like divorce.

I needed time to make a huge decision without being surrounded by all the mayhem of the original trauma.  I needed time to process what had happened to me.  Not just the crimes my ex-husband had committed; I also needed to process how those crimes had been the culmination of continued and unabated infidelity towards me.  He didn't use Ashley Madison - his dark internet alley to pursue other women on was none other than Craigslist.

Even knowing that, that there had never been in a time in our relationship when he was actually faithful to me, I still took TWO YEARS to divorce him.  My family and friends never guilted me or tried to convince me to stay; they were always firmly on my side and I knew that no matter what I did that they would love and support me.  My Christian community never shamed me about the possibility of divorce; I had advocates for me within my denomination who assured me I could find work in other churches.  I took two years to decide to leave. 

Because of all that, I need everyone who hasn't been through revelations of infidelity and sexual assault of a minor to quit laying down their opinions about the Duggars.  Specifically, about why Anna should leave Josh, or why she shouldn't.

Her life is remarkably different from mine: we were raised in totally different schools of Christianity, we have different education levels, we have different family structures.  I only have one son, and she currently has four children.   I don't know that we would agree on much at all.  But as the Duggar scandals have spooled out over internet and tv, I've felt hurt for her deep down in my heart.  I have some clue to how she might be feeling.

She has every reason to leave her husband and have it be deemed "acceptable" by the world at large.  Child molestation and rampant infidelity? Check and check. Would her family accept a decision to divorce?  Well...that's different.  You can read more about how messed up their theology of sexuality and marriage is here.  But even if she was in an environment that made divorce a viable option, we have no right to dictate the response she should make to this incredibly tragic series of events.  "Quick! Everything you thought about your relationship was a lie and the only man you've ever had sex with has betrayed you and possibly put your health in jeopardy!  Now, leave behind the only life you've ever known with your four children and no job skills and start over!"

STOP IT.

Stop crowing over the continued unfaithfulness of husbands.  Or wives.  Was Josh Duggar a hypocrite who lived in direct contradiction of his values?  Yes.  That's tragic, my friends, not precedent for a party.

Stop dictating personal decisions for people and families you don't know.  Financial decisions, personal decisions, spiritual decisions are based on a billion intricate factors of which outsiders know close to nothing about.

Stop smugly pretending that you could recover from trauma of this scope on a quick time-table.  Anna is living in, what I guess to be, an emotional hell, and doing so under media scrutiny and in the midst of taking care of three kids and a newborn.  In a cultural environment that doesn't encourage therapy.  How could she POSSIBLY be healthy enough (at this point) to make a decision of that magnitude?

Please, I beg you as one of the many women who have lived through this kind of personal apocalypse, stop it.  The incessant avalanche of confused "is she stupid?  How can she possibly stay?" is ungracious, unloving and thoughtless.  Instead, I suggest you use your energy to improve child safety, teach our children about healthy attitudes around sex and relationships, or maybe foster environments that care for families in the aftermath of loss.   All that can lead to prevention of more tragedies like mine, like Anna's.  And isn't that what we actually all want?

To Fear a Future

My son starts kindergarten in 11 days.  My peer group has reached "that age", so I'm seeing lots and lots of FB posts about the beginning of school and "watching our babies grow up."  I expected to be emotionally unmoored by the experience of G starting school, but I thought the grief would mostly be caused by the ever-pouring sands of the hourglass.  You know, time moves on without mercy.

My expectations turned out to be wholly wrong.  Turns out that I'm emotionally unmoored (maybe all of us are) because I'm suddenly remembering all the difficulties of MY school experience.  Not deadlines and tests so much (I mean, I write an 1800+ word paper every week), as the cruel jungle of interpersonal relationships that school ends up being.  My poor husband has been on the receiving end of a litany of my grade-school (and middle-school and high-school) griefs, the stories of bullying that still stay with me.

I was never physically assaulted, so my memories are light in comparison to others (especially to the LGBTQIA people I know).  But still, those lunches when I sat alone (or in the bathroom), those times when I inexplicably got excluded from my circles of friends?  That time when I got glasses and people treated me differently?  That time a much older male bully harassed me on the school bus for weeks on end?  My son's milestone has become a trigger to me, a reason to obsessively worry for his sake.  It's not a question of IF he will be bullied.  It's a question of WHEN he will be bullied.

Is this the reason why parents cry when they drop their kids off for their first day of school?  Because we know they're running down a road that leads to grief and anger and inexplicable cruelty just as often as it leads to joy and laughter and life-long friendships?  Maybe some of us traveled through school with ease, life a privileged set of circumstances that kept us from experiencing the unkindness of others.  But my hunch is that many of the parents I will stand next in these coming days bear the same invisible burdens.  We remember how badly it can go and we know there is little to be done to spare our children.  So we grieve, because this is what it means to live in the world.

In all of my jumbled feelings (yay! no more paying for daycare! oh no! homework!), I need to keep the words of Frederick Buechner in mind: "Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”  I have a tendency towards the maudlin, toward the melancholy, so I am more likely to walk through the halls of a school and see the monsters and shadows of possible pain.  But there was beauty in my school experience as well: teachers who encouraged my writing, theatre experiences which taught me that passion was a gift, group projects which showed me my predilection toward leadership.  "Here is the world."

I should know this lesson already, shouldn't I?  My son's birth was beautiful and terrible.  My time in Waco was beautiful and terrible.  My time in Galveston was beautiful and terrible.  Loving others has been beautiful and terrible.  All of life is a jumbled mess of breathtaking beauty and terror so deep it blacks out the sun.  All of life is this brutiful mess, so why would it be any different for my son?  It was even this way for Jesus, the man who gave sight to the blind and then had every one of his friends abandon him at the lowest point in his life.    "Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen."

I think I must relearn the ending of this lesson, the lesson that Jesus repeated over and over, the lesson that Angels always began with when they brought a word from God: "Do not be afraid."  I find the abandonment of fear the most difficult part of my parenting, of my relationships, of my faith.  Sometimes, the fear of what will come grips me so hard I feel as if I cannot breathe.  I only gasp the air with any regularity when I remember that fear cannot stand in the presence of trust.  I do not mean that I trust in the world to mind it's manners to me.  No, no, the universe is unconcerned with my desires for wholeness or fairness.  No, I've learned to trust that God will be with me no matter if the moment is beautiful or terrible.  That when bullies rear up, I am still loved.  That when I am a bully in need of punishment, I am still loved.  That in dawn or twilight or midday or blackest night, I am still loved.  That neither heights nor depths nor anything in all of creation will keep me from the love of God.  "Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don;t be afraid."

Despite my painful memories, I will take my son to kindergarten.  Every day I will take him and I will release him to his life, his beautiful and terrible life and I will pray to God that God will take away my fear.  The bullies will come.  The pain will come.  The friends will appear.  The joy will shimmer bright like starlight.  He will grow and become more himself and less of me and it will be wonderful and awful and we will lean together.  We will learn to face life with courage.

Here is the world.  Beautiful and Terrible things will happen.  Don't be afraid.

Jennifer Huber - Flickr: Nik Wallenda Trains for June 23, 2013 Grand Canyon Walk at Nathan Benderson Park, Sarasota, Fla., June 7, 2013

#NotAll...

Yesterday, my son and I were talking about rules.

G:    Mommy, kids have to follow rules that grownups tell them?
Me:  Yes, honey.  And grownups follow rules....
G:    That God gives them?
Me:  Well...yes.

At that point, it didn't seem like I needed to get into the idea of moral law, natural law or social contracts with my 5yr old.  Maybe when he's in the first grade?  But, his query got me thinking about all of the rules that I follow, the responsibilities that I have towards the world.  There are lots of them: traffic rules, financial rules, interpersonal rules, parenting rules. The rules that I'm most aware of, however, are the ones I'm beholden to as a clergy person.

When I was ordained six years ago, I was required to make vows and sign a code of ministerial ethics.  Some of that ethical code focused on my responsibility to congregations, some to congregations that I had moved on from, some to myself.  The part of the ethical code that I think about most often, though, has to do with the power that I wield over people as a religious authority figure.  Whether you dig religion or not, religious leaders of almost any tradition can have incredible negative or positive influence on the people over which they are named stewards.  That's why I get called into hospital rooms beside the dying, why I get invited to lead worship services on Easter.  My words, my actions, my presence can help to orient people's perceptions and encourage behavioral change.

Or they can do untold spiritual and mental damage to people.  I don't know that from experience; rather, I know that because of OTHER people's experiences.  I know what my LGBTQIA friends have told me about their treatment at the hands of religious leaders: condemned merely for revealing their attractions, called abomination for existing.  I know what my now non-religious friends have told me about their treatment at the hands of religious leaders: mocked for asking discerning questions, rejected because of differing political views.

I know what some friends have told me about their violation at the hands of their religious leaders: sexual abuse, unreported and unpunished.  That story crosses religious practices, though the Catholic Church has stood at the forefront of stories of clergy sexual predators for several decades now.  Just this week, a Hindu guru fled police custody after being found guilty on twenty charges of sexual violation of underage girls at his Ashram.  The psychological and spiritual left behind when a religious leader preys upon their people is mind-boggling.

I have never violated my congregation members like this, I have never committed such a terrible violation of my ministerial ethics.  But I live in the wake of OTHERS of my kind doing such evil things.  Am I angry at them?  Absolutely; they should be stripped of their power immediately and restitution should be made to their victims.  Do I feel the urge to say: #NOTALLCLERGY? You bet.  When I hear about another person victimized by their religious leader, my instinct is to should that "we are not all like that!"  But I don't do that.  Do you know why?  Because it absolutely does not help.  At all.  It totally misses the point of what the victim is doing by sharing their story.

Obviously, no one thinks that ALL clergy are predators.  But some ARE.  That is a PROBLEM that must be addressed.  For me to rely on self-pitying denial takes energy I could be putting towards reforming the practices of my clergy people to make sure violations like this don't happen again. I am responsible as a clergy person to accept the judgement of others when my fellows (male or female) fail so reprehensible.  The onus is upon ME to live differently, to accept criticism, to take critique, to change my methods of interaction to make religious spheres safer.  Why?  Because I'm the one with the power in this equation; to expect that the people with less power (non-ordained lay people) to institute change is to buck the responsibility I have been entrusted with.  Every time another clergy person commits flagrant misconduct, as a part of a privileged class I have the responsibility to denounce it and reassess the system around me to make sure that I am not putting my own people into vulnerable places.  Spiderman's Uncle Ben said this well: "With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility."

Which is why this last year, with its constant revelation of police brutality towards minority people, I've been so very angry at the defensiveness of Police Unions and Police departments.

Police officers are a part of a privileged class of people within our culture, entrusted with the power of life and death as a part of our criminal justice system.  With that great power comes accountability and responsibility to others.  Police officers and departments are granted POWER, so the people they serve are by necessity less powerful.  But that means the police should be under severe scrutiny at all times.  Like clergy have come to be.   Those with power are under the onus to LISTEN and RESPOND to the critiques, criticisms and calls for transparency that the less powerful ask for.  This is how we maintain a more just system: power is not granted permanently, and powerful individuals are under stricter ethical guidelines than those with less power.

So in the case of the unrest in our country, when episode after episode after episode after episode after episode AFTER EPISODE of police brutality against minority peoples is revealed?  IT IS TIME TO STOP BEING DEFENSIVE.  There is obviously a massive, if not complete, failure in the way policing is being carried out in our country.  Social Media has made it utterly impossible to deny this.  It is time that Police officers, police departments, and police unions STOP tarring victims or standing behind racially motivated police practices.  Those with power have been shown to be violating their responsibilities and the time for restitution has come.

Learn, my police friends, what we clergy people have come to know much too late.  Your power does not make you God.  Your power can be taken away.  Your power means you are responsible to walk a much much much tighter line than anyone else.  You have been called on the table, and now it is time to stop talking and to listen.  To keep your mouth shut when you want to say #NOTALLPOLICE.  Now is the time to look at the fractured edifice of your practices and admit: this isn't working anymore.  Now is the time to make recompense.  Because if you lose the trust of your people?  Oh my friends, do you see the state of the American church?  We lost our people's trust and sometimes I do not think we will ever gain it back.

How much worse will it be if you dig your feet in, and the people stop trusting in the police?

Power has been abused in your name, in a title you carry.  Maybe not by you.  But your privilege makes it your problem.  And Now it is time to make it stop.

A Bitter Brew

After Cliff went to jail, there was a great outpouring of love from my friends and family.  Money, Christmas gifts, food, childcare, I was inundated in the best possible way with gestures of shared grief.  One of those gifts was a book, "Tear Soup."  It was written by a man who worked in hospice, a story for children (and adults too) about the process of grieving.  The main metaphor is this: grief is like making a pot of soup.  It takes time, the ingredients are different according to the griever, and it's only over when it's over.

I read it to my son in the aftermath of his father's incarceration, but he was just a tiny boy then.  Not even 2!  He was too little to process the loss, to truly understand his father's absence.  But last week, he brought it to me on the couch as a part of our bed time ritual.  Could I truly have said no?  I opened the pages and began to read, a story of grief and anger and loss and finally acceptance.  He was very still after we finished.  And then it was bed time.

Last night, G asked me about his scars, so while I gave him his bath we talked about those first terrifying days of his life.  What stuck out to him, however, was not the surgery.  It was the fact that there had been a time when his father WASN'T in jail.  There had been a time when we all lived together, a time he has no memory of.  I wrapped him up in a towel and sent him into his room to get pajamas on, and soon he called to me that he was ready for his story.  So, I climbed up the bunkbed stairs and laid down next to him, expecting to read a comic book or story of mischievous barn animals. 

But he handed me Tear Soup.  

I looked at my son, a boy on the edge of kindergarten, and saw that he was deeply upset.  So I asked, asked a question I knew the answer to.  A question he had the right to answer for himself.  

"Honey, why do you want to read 'Tear Soup'?"  

"Because I'm sad that my daddy is in jail."

"Why does that make you sad?"

"Because he will never live with me again and I miss him."

Then, we cried.  Because what else is there to do?  Do you know it is possible to feel deep, drowning grief and world-scorching anger at the same time? 

I told my dear boy that I was sorry that his daddy made such a bad mistake that he could never live with him again.  It was bedtime, though, so we did not spend overlong on the subject.  He is still only 5, you know. We read the book together, words of Grief, anger and loss, the same story over again because that's how it works with all of us.  Surprisingly, this time G asked a question of me:

"Mommy, did you make Tear Soup?"

"Yes.  I made it a long time ago, when you were still too little to know it."

"How?"

"Well....with my words."  (It's hard to explain a blog to a 5yr old).

Did you know, dear reader, that you were the audience to my cooking grief?  You have been my faithful companions during these last four years, observers to the crafting of my tear soup.  It was busier in the beginning, because cooking soup always takes so much preparation.  Now, though, I do not cook it as often.  The season for soup has passed for me, though I see now that I am preparing to help my son in the task of his own home brewing.  

He will start kindergarten in less than a month, and his father will not be there for the first day of classes.  He will not attend little league games or school performances or stand on the edge cheering for his achievements.  I think we have begun the preparation for G's own soup-making, a process long put-off because he simply was not old enough to understand the magnitude of the tragedy.  But I see it coming, so I'm girding myself with metaphysical apron and trying to gauge the size of the cooking pot he will need.  

In all of this soup making, I am deeply and unfathomably thankful for Gene and his choice to be a father to G.  His presence, affection and steady commitment to our family will make it so G's soup is not so bitter, not so angry, not so full of self-doubt.  His love will change the course of G's becoming, a grace from God that I am in awe of.  So it is some source of comfort to know that as I tie the apron on my waist, so does my husband.  Together, we will guide my son together in the crafting of this course in his life.

To all my friends who have begun the stock for your tear soup: I see you.  I'm sorry.

To all my friends who have finally turned off the burner under their grief: I see you.  Thanks be to God, you made it.

To all my friends who have yet to learn the recipe of your grief: I will be here if you need me, apron in hand.

The Comfort in Cataclysm (Isaiah 40:3-5)

Last week, I was in Columbus, Ohio for my denominational General Assembly.  I was honored to be asked to preach in a local church on the Sunday of our Assembly.  The following is the sermon I preached at Karl Road Christian Church on July 19th, 2015.  The sermon text is based on Isaiah 40:3-5, and I tied it into the assembly theme of "SOAR" based on Isaiah 40.
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When I was in college, a massive infrastructure project was taking place in Dallas. The 75 Central Expressway and Interstate 635 met in the outer edges of the downtown area and had become choked with growing traffic. There weren't enough lanes for all the cars and traffic was only going to get worse, so in 2002 a 260 million dollar construction plan began. Finished in 3 years, the lanes and bridges that came to be known as the High Five (which topped out at 12 stories), used 2.2 million cubic yards of earth, 350,000 cubic yards of concrete, and 75000 linear feet of drainage pipe. It is a marvel, as all roads are if you consider it. I have a long admiration for roads – my parents gave me a post-apocalyptic science fiction story that remembered our civilization only by the roads we left behind.  And isn’t that how we speak of Rome?  We measure its power in the long-lasting nature of its road-system.  But in every day parlance, the infrastructure, resources, manpower, ingenuity, creativity and sheer might that it takes to build roads rarely get any attention; we are too busy driving on roads to care how they came to be.

But in our scripture this morning, God is in the road building business. The road which God is building is so massive that it will require even more resources and power than any road human kind ever conceived of or constructed. God is going to build a road for his people, but to do so God will need to go to extremes. In fact, this construction effort is going to look much more like an apocalypse than anything else. Comfort, comfort my people, says God, I'm going to tear it all down. 

Since when was cataclysm comforting?

Perhaps because the people had already lived through one cataclysm already.

As we settle into our scripture this morning, one of comfort and provision, we've got to remember how the people of Israel found themselves in need of a road at all. Generation after generation were caught in the throes of worshipping idols, complicit in building up empires on the enslavement of their brothers and sisters. For centuries, God had sent prophets with the message that Israel and Judah needed to repent. But they ignored God's warning cries. The northern kingdom of Israel fell first, and Judah had lasted 130 years more before their enemies came through Jerusalem like a purging fire. The people of God were left wandering dazed in a desert of their own making, their futures reduced to sackcloth and ashes. The roads in the wasteland of their exile lead only to Babylon and into the hands of their enemies.

The song of Isaiah that we heard this morning seems to say that those wandering days are over, but God makes no apology for their years spent languishing in their road-less twilight. Even in the midst of proclaiming that their punishment was at an end is God's unflinching assessment: you are like grass, blown about by the wind. Their sins, their callous exploitation of one another, was the paving on the road that had led them to their present. It was a road that was too corrupted and pitted to lead them back. They needed a road builder to bring them out of this living death.

Those foolish people. Isn’t that usually our response to the text? To distance ourselves in space and time from these fragile and broken tribes, to wonder at how they could have ignored God's cries against their evil? 

Oh, my friends. There is almost no distance between us at all.

The Guardian has begun to keep track of the number of police related deaths in the United States. Did you know we are already at 626? Did you know, just from these numbers alone, that unarmed Black Americans are killed by police are twice as likely to be unarmed as white people? Just this last week, two African American women, Sandra Bland and Kindra Chapman, died suspiciously within police custody, their bodies discovered hanging like strange fruit in their police cells. Routine traffic stops don't usually lead to death, but as we are becoming more and more aware, our black brothers and sisters often experience out of proportion violence when they encounter our criminal justice system. 8 African American churches have burned down since the end of June, more than half of them because of arson, and this year alone protests have filled our streets with people who chant #BlackLivesMatter and the names of the dead: Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, John Crawford, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott.

For hundreds of years we enslaved God's children, and even after Emancipation crafted a system of rule and life that disenfranchised and belittled the lives of African American people. And now, now a for-profit prison system makes money off of the imprisonment of a disproportionate portion of the African American men of our country. Doesn't that sound like the sins of Israel? Exploitation, marginalization, enslavement. As a denomination we gather together and wonder at the decline of the Christian sphere of influence, at finding ourselves in a road-less desert. But have we ever stopped to consider that we might have paved the road that led us here? That perhaps our silence about the evils of slavery, that our complicity with systemic racism, our marginalization of and violence against women and LGBTQIA people were the stones under our feet to this place of fear and confusion? Did it ever occur to us that we may have earned our present?

But wasn’t I supposed to be comforting you?

Comfort, comfort, God says. And despite the fact that the previous 39 chapters of Isaiah have been anything but comforting, these words truly are. God, despite the sin of Israel, despite the knowledge that people are inconstant and as fleeting as grass, has decided that reconciliation is possible, that re-creation is possible. Just as once the people were lead from Egypt through a desert and into life, they will be lead through this desert of their desolation.

But this time, God isn't using the same road as before. The road that God is building them will not be like the road they walked on the way into Babylon and Exile. It will not be created by the might of Nebuchadnezzar or Cyrus of Persia. No great work-gangs will pull stone from the earth and construct routes around mountains and through valleys.

God is the foreman of this new road and isn't going to put up with all of the complications of changing terrain. God has decided to make a way for the people out of their suffering and sin and this is how God does it - God heaves the valleys up, God smashes the mountains low, God smooths the terrain in front of them, God mixes the elements of space and time, laying out the foundation of the greatest path ever made.

Can you imagine standing by as God worked? You would watch as God destroyed everything you ever knew, and created a landscape totally new. It’s the first disaster movie!  I love disaster movies, the terrible writing and the fast-and-loose maneuvering around science.  The best one is still 2012, because it managed to encompass every possible disaster.   To my delight, the first disaster movie can be found in scripture and its screenwriter is Isaiah. This is the promise God gives to the people: I’m making a way for you, but to do so I will take away what you knew, what you recognized, what you relied on, what you felt comforted by. I’m making a way in the wilderness, a highway. But to gain life, you must lose the life you knew. God can always make a way for his people, but that way comes at a cost. As I think, it should. How comforted do you feel? 

God's solution seems to be a Divine Riot: God will make this better by bringing it all crashing down.

Do not misunderstand me: I believe truly and deeply in God's gracious love, that God is more than able to redeem us from the worst of ourselves. I also believe that God lets us walk by ourselves, in our own direction if we set our minds to it. Even when that journey take us into painful places. Into desolate places. I think that is where we find ourselves as a denomination, as Christians in America. Firmly we have made our way, racist step by sexist step by hetero-sexist step by exploitative step and we cry out to God to make us a new road because the one we followed has betrayed us.

I think much like in our scripture, God says: be comforted, oh you disciples. I'll build you a road out of the wilderness. But to do so, I've got to knock it all down, change it all. You will lose your bearings, you will lose your footing, you won’t know which way to turn. The way forward will be unrecognizable, the path forward will require sacrifice and trust and faith that what you are leaving behind is nothing compared to what God can do. 

I know this journey because I have been on it before.

I have been through my own desolation, the cataclysmic destruction that left me horrifically betrayed, to raise a 19 month old child on my own. And God made me a road out of the desert but only by sweeping the horizon clear of anything I’d known before. Sometimes the greatest comfort God can give us is the unknown before us, the past a wreckage un-traversable. Isn’t that the story of Easter? Our King on a cross, who's defiance of death was heralded in the mouth of a tomb?

Comfort, Comfort my people, says God. I am building them a road. A mountain leveling road. A horizon clearing road. And all the people shall see it.

Stand with me friends as we watch the end of all things, the leveling of that which we know, of the dismantling of all the evil we have let fester within us and around us. I am afraid to witness this alone. Without you, I would tremble in the maelstrom of God's apocalyptic power. But if you will stand with me, here on the edge of something new, then I think I could bear the loss, bear the desperate hope for a new road. With you, I think I believe that God will give us the strength to run and not be weary, to walk and not faint, to fly...

maybe even to soar.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kenlund/16723768946

Impossible Trees

I drove through the hill country on Tuesday afternoon, on my way to a conference for Young Clergy Women.  Part of my drive took me through Bastrop, TX, an area of the state that was consumed by wildfires several years ago.   I traveled through a substantial section of that ravaged forest, amazed to see that tragedy of which I had only previously heard.  Large trees flanked the road, branches like claws reaching toward a too-blue sky, blackened bark where greenery once spilled forth.  It was grim to travel through the scars of devastation, to imagine the fear and loss echoing beyond ear shot.  

Upon an even deeper look (as deeply as one can look when driving 75+ miles per hour), green was peeking up everywhere in this graveyard forest.   The slender trunks of young trees were springing forth between their dead foremothers, verdant beneath shadow.  I had heard of this before, that life spills out of loss; even children learn that the soil around volcanoes is especially fertile.  I know that some trees in California need the fires of summer to open their hard pods and release the seeds of their next generation.    Life often demands fire, sacrifice and risk to continue on.

But what I did not expect was the one tree that couldn't make up its mind.  Half of the tree was scarred and burned beyond life.  Broken branches still dangled perilously over the earth, jagged edges to be carefully maneuvered by.  The other half, though, cascaded with green growing leaves, an audacious explosion of possibility firmly attached to a visage of death.   How was that possible?  The myth of Janus tells us that we often contain contradictions within ourselves: that love AND hate tumble within us always.  But how could a tree be both living and dead?  The tree seemed impossible.

Sometimes I feel like that tree.  These days, I present a green and growing face to those I love and serve.  Here are the branches of my new call, here are the buds of joyful relationship, here are the fruits of love bursting forth.  But I know, despite what is seen, that a black thread runs through my life’s tapestry.  Less visible is the scarred and burned part of me, the aching grief that still whispers internally.  I have trimmed my new growths around me, to shade the scars, to draw your eyes away from the places where life no longer grows.   You would need to look closely to truly see that I am an impossible tree, that life and loss linger near each other and brush against one another on windy days. 

I don’t often let eyes linger on my scars, but I have discovered that sometimes people need to see them.  In the time since I began to write of my grief, I have been party to conversations that never could have happened without my continued unveiling.  Women and men who suffer through the incarcerations of their loved ones, through adultery, death, depression and the tangling of their lives, they find me and speak to me.  They bare the red, raw edges of their wounds, they uncover the burned and blackened remnants of their lives on fire, and they say “it hurts!”  I have discovered that all they need from me is to pull back the obscuring greenery of my new life, to show the gnarled edges of my own pain.  They need to feel the ridges of my scars alongside tender unmarred skin to believe that it is possible. 

Jesus did this, you know.  The story goes that he appeared to his disciples after his death and resurrection.  They trembled alone and afraid and he appeared to them with open wounds on his side and in his hands and feet.   He was their friend and God, the one who had died on a tree and came back as a living one.  An impossible man, an impossible hope, an impossible tree.  Perhaps that’s why I tell my story, again and again.  Perhaps that’s why I’ve chosen to spend my life telling the story of Jesus.  Because people need to believe.  To believe that they themselves can be impossible trees, that they can stand under too blue skies in the midst of devastation and defiantly exist as a crossroad of life and death.

How did Whitman say it? 

Do I contradict myself?  

Very well then I contradict myself, 

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Sometimes life is ash.  Sometimes it is growth.  And many times, it is both.

http://www.gettyimages.dk/detail/photo/new-growth-in-boreal-forest-after-fire-high-res-stock-photography/123519682

Seeing and Speaking

We went on vacation last week, the full family of 5.  Husband's family lives on the East Coast, and most of them had never met me or my son.  So we flew out early on Saturday morning and returned on a Thursday, tired and glad for all the new memories.  I came home with one very clear realization: "Oh.  THAT'S why my parents always slept a lot on vacation."  Did you know children are exhausting?  Children are exhausting.  They're beautiful, funny, entertaining, challenging, and exhausting.  And a vacation with them is NOT the same as a vacation without them. Having one son and two step-children has broadened my understanding of my own parents, and I'm reliving my own memories in a new way.

Maybe it is the nature of our own experiential blindness, that we cannot see that which we have never lived in the midst of.  Even with twitter and access to a world of news, there's still a hard limit to that which we can truly "know" and grasp viscerally.  My vision has been limited by my life, my knowledge of the world dictated by the borders of my race, my gender, my age, my ability, my politics, my faith, my nationality.  This is true for all of us.  The world I saw before my ex-husband's incarceration was never colored by prison or courtrooms or the psychic aftermath of betrayal.  But the world I saw afterwards?  That world has prisons and courtrooms and counselors offices as permanent fixtures in the landscape.  I once was blind to them, but now I see.

Now I see, so now I can speak as well.  I've got lived experience, so I can talk a young woman I know through the incarceration of one of her loved ones.  I've got lived experience, so I can share with clergy friends about how to go about prison visitation.  I've got lived experience, so I can counsel folks who've suffered through infidelity.  I've got lived experience, so I understand and have solidarity with single parents.  

But I've also learned enough to know that my narrow sliver of the suffering pie does not give me the right to speak into ALL moments of suffering.  I've suffered through misogynistic treatment as a professional woman, but I've NOT suffered through racist-misogynistic treatment that women of color live through.  I can see, but I'm learning to listen rather than to be quick to speak.  I've had painful and unkind encounters with the justice system (police, lawyers, judges, etc.), but I've NEVER feared that I would be treated with the contempt that many people of color live with.  I can see, but in a peripheral way.

So as Caitlyn Jenner finds her way in the world, as the Rachel Dolezal story continues to broil, I know that the trajectory of my life has given me enough vision to see and know part of their stories.  But I know that my voice isn't necessary in explaining their stories.  I don't have the lived experience to act as an expert.  I'd rather my friend Jetta told you about the difficulty of the trans life and the phenomenon of "passing"; I'd rather you read the words of Rev. Sandhaya Jha and what it means to "pass for white" as you try to be an ally to the black community.   I don't have any issue with admitting my own limits, the ways I'm still on the margins of important culture moments.

Perhaps what I'm saying is this: We can help others from the places of our own suffering.  That is a great good.  But we can also help by halting ourselves from generalizing our experiences over into the lives of other people.  Speak when you should.  Listen more than you speak.  And learn, we must learn, to tell the difference between the moments of speaking and hearing.

 

Mother's Day

Facebook has this new timeline feature which by you can see what you posted on that day, years in the past.  Since Mid April, I've been reliving G's impending arrival, his birth, his hospitalization, and today, his release from the hospital to head home.  His first day home was Mother's Day, which seemed appropriate.  That was a happy Mother's Day, uncomplicated by background grief.  It was the last Mother's Day that would be so.  The next year, we were all under the shadow of Cliff's impending trial and the year after that was my first (Single) Mother's Day.  I've got to tell you, being in charge of your own Mother's Day is not awesome. This Mother's Day will be much more joyful than the ones before: I'll wake up alongside my husband and I'll listen to the early-morning ramblings of 3 boys playing.

But that doesn't make Mother's Day less complicated for me.  And I'm not the only one for whom that is true.

There's this idea called the "Platonic Ideal" in which an abstract concept underlies our ability to categorize things within that abstract.  That sounds obtuse, but here's an easy exercise to explain it.  Imagine a tree.  Did the thing you imagine have a trunk, branches?  Did it grow out of the ground?  I'm betting that a room full of 10 people could all say yes to that.  But those same 10 people would have differed on some details - whether their tree had fruit, flowers, leaves, or animals in its branches.  They probably look different, but all are "trees."  They all fit within the concept of "tree" while not being "THE TREE" or the "PLATONIC TREE".  There's an ideal form, and then there's the diversity of forms that make up that form.

I think Mother's Day, at least in America, worships the Platonic Ideal of Motherhood.  This Platonic Mother looks like this: She's white, she's happily married, her house is clean, her clothes are trendy, her children are obedient, she's got no financial struggles, the yard is mowed by a service, pinterest copies HER.  If you don't believe me, go to: http://itsliketheyknowus.tumblr.com/ and there you'll see the Platonic Mother in all her glory.  It's funny, I promise.

But she's not real.  She just isn't.  Even if someone you know fits this EXACT DESCRIPTION, she's not the Platonic Mother.  Because lurking in the background of your first impression is reality and that reality is:

A woman with kids could have a terrible relationship with her own mom
A woman with kids could actually be the aunt and struggling with infertility
A woman with kids could be depressed and regretting having those kids
A woman with kids could be raising those kids alone and is TIRED of all the shit-talking about single moms
A woman with kids could be grieving the miscarriage she just had.  Or the anniversary of her oldest child's death.

The Platonic Mother doesn't exist but this upcoming holiday worships her and left in the dust are all of us, not just women.  When we worship the ideal, we lose our ability to have compassion upon those who don't fit it.  When we enshrine the ideal, we create a game that no woman could ever win.  When the ideal trumps the actual, outliers become pariahs.

Let's kill the Platonic Mother.  

The only way to kill her, though, is to start telling the truth to one another. Women talking about how mothering is difficult.  Women talking about the grief of infertility.  Women talking about (and not being shamed for) their happiness WITHOUT children.  Women talking about their flawed (or even BAD) moms.  Women speaking up about the real cost of parenting.  Women speaking anger, grief, joy, TRUTH.

This holiday isn't going away.  But together, we can make it something better, something more true, something more reflective of the diversity of what motherhood ACTUALLY IS.  We can change the narrative about mothering, so that no more women have to wake up on Sunday morning and wince.

Join me?

PS - Go here to learn more about how Mother's Day began.  Spoiler Alert: It's about protesting War.