Lost and Found in the Sacred Temple

Book Review: Seven Spirits Burning by John Crowder

2012-01-23T17:06:00.000-08:00

Seven Spirits Burning
John Crowder
Sons of Thunder Ministries & Publications
2010

Mr. Crowder's book is an exploration of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit as the seven spirits before the throne of God in Revelations. He refers the the Holy Spirit as "God in the earth" and "God everywhere". He sees the need for Christians to welcome in the Holy Spirit to their churches and their lives. He also sees the Holy Spirit through a Christocentric lens; that is, he describes the Holy Spirit as being "the spirit of Jesus".

Throughout the book, he examines over and over the concepts of sin, atonement, death, love, pride, intimacy with God, and the nature of the Holy Spirit and Its work. He uses canonical criticism (that is, using scripture to interpret scripture), as well as highly mystical language, with a great deal of allusions to numerology (especially the number seven in chapter 3) and symbology (the menorah/lampstand). Along the way, he presses the reader to abandon a lot of egocentric beliefs and practices that he believes blocks Christians from experiencing true union with God. One is that he believes people browbeat themselves too much into believing they have not been saved, when Jesus has paid all the wages of sin for them, and therefore they are cleared. Others encourage the reader to think of God as being inside and outside the bound of space and time in which we normally place Him. It's definitely a work that inspires imagination on the part of the reader. It has a great deal of luscious and inviting language and imagery. His enthusiasm for the Holy Spirit is infectious, as well as the hopes he has of personal, institutional, and planetary renewal. I think he has a lot of good things to say about not letting the prideful seriousness of Christian religion get in the way of the beautiful and mysterious play that the Holy Spirit is drawing Its followers too.

I must admit, I found myself rather out of my depth with this book. I didn't grow up in a Pentacostal tradition, and don't know much about it. Mr. Crowder makes reference to elements of Pentacostal worship that he is familiar with, and references portions of the Bible in ways that are pretty unusual in the mainline churches that I have grown up with. I have to take his word for it, just because I am used to a different splice of American Christian worship. I am drawn to the poetry of his work, most definitely, and I'm a big fan of the Holy Spirit. I'm just not sure where I fit myself and my thoughts personally into what Mr. Crowder is saying.

There are a few spaces where I disagreed with Mr. Crowder, and I bet a lot of it has to do with simple philosophical and theological differences in our traditions.
First of all, it's pretty androcentric, though Wisdom gets her moment in the sun.
Second of all, I'm not personally a big fan of canonical criticism when it's not used in tandem with another hermeneutic; you can usually find something that contradicts your point somewhere in scripture as well as verses that agree with it, and it just gets too insular after a while. It's like listening to only one radio station all your life and expecting to become an ethnomusicologist. The Bible is too rich and layered a document to be interpreted with only one method.
Third of all, well, and here's where it gets funny for me, a mainline United Methodist: based on my studies and lens of Wesleyan theology, it wasn't...Wesleyan. Crowder's argument that you are cleansed of all sin by Jesus' sacrifice and therefore that if you continue to sin, it's because you're not believing hard enough is something that John Wesley argued against pretty hard. Otherwise, he'd have stuck with the Moravians back in Georgia. Now, all the branches of Christianity can argue over what the precise meanings and occasions of sanctification and justification and salvation are, but on this one, I disagree pretty firmly with Crowder. I'm still working out for myself through study of the Bible and theology what all of it means, but I don't believe the claims he makes on pages 56 and 57. I think he believes they are integral to his whole thesis, and they probably are. I just don't agree, though I still found lots of the book helpful and very thought/soul provoking.

Overall, I do recommend this book. I have never read anything like it, and I think it has some really cool things to say. I am currently contemplating my own pneumatology in its wake. However, if your theology differs significantly from Crowder's, then prepare to disagree!

I leave you with the single most interesting paragraph I have ever read, which is a creative interpretation of Genesis 49: 10-12. Consider it an enticement:

"Did you know that you are a little ass tied to the Vine? You are like the donkey Jesus rides into Jerusalem. Don't despise your own day of small beginnings! You may seem to be an ass, but you have Jesus riding on you! You are literally tied to the vine! Not just any vine - but the choice one that sprouts wine grapes. And Christ's own eyes are bloodshot from drinking the Holy Spirit wine of divine intimacy!" (Crowder 98).

The Depressing Files: Sherry Turkle's Alone Together

2011-12-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a bunch of cautionary books this semester about the way in which technology is colonizing our lives, and how in a lot of cases that it is driving us further apart rather than bringing us together in any meaningful sense. Perhaps if I didn't feel so completely wrung out from work and school and sundry personal issues that come and go, I would take these cautions less seriously. But I find myself so drained, so positively burned out nearly every single day from all the directions my attention is being dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, that I have spent enormous amounts of time simply wasting it on the internet. I'm so tired that I want something mindless, and I usually find it. But in true form, as several of these books have noted, because of the way image works instead of static print, my brain's attention is quickly diverted, leaving me EVEN MORE DRAINED than before. Yet without my computer I feel as though I am wandering around in a sensory deprivation chamber.

Something is seriously off here.

So let me briefly reflect on this book as another part of my class assignment, in which I will lament the loss of my ability to pay non-digital attention to the important things in my life. Sherry Turkle's Alone Together is a combination of facts and startlingly blunt anecdotal stories of people, parents and children, feeling increasingly disconnected from each other and from the world, even as they cling even more closely to the pieces of technology that are doing the separating.

My brain is not running at full capacity this week, as a ton of stress has left me full of adrenaline bumps and exhausted, but I will try to tell you some snippets from the book that bothered me intensely.

One of the moments took place in a discussion of how teenagers, in the wake of Columbine and September 11, see their cell phones as having some kind of talismanic power of safety. This may make sense to many, but it makes no sense to me. Here is why.
1) In the event something like September 11 happens again, you will be lucky to get anyone on your cell phone at all. Towers will be so overloaded by people also trying to call or text that communication will likely be impossible.
2) Kids had cell phones during Columbine, and it didn't stop anyone from dying. Dave Sanders still effing bled to death because it's not communication that was the problem. The people outside knew he was injured and dying. It was a lack of coordination and courage on the part of the authorities.
3) Emily Keyes may have texted her parents during the Platte Canyon High School hostage situation, but it didn't keep the gunman from killing her.
The point being, technology has the power to do many things, but it cannot keep you from being killed in a storm of human evil or ineptitude. Furthermore, as has become obvious in the recent spate of adolescent suicides due to bullying, the technology itself just becomes another tool of human evil, a source of even more vitriol and hate, even when the subject is no longer physically present with you. This can lead to a type of anxiety called hypervigilance, which is often a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Speaking of which, this leads me to my next moment of disturbance, which is...

The manifestation of panopticon, in which the internet, instead of freeing us, becomes a giant endless recorder of every mistake or mishap we will ever commit. Even if you go back and try to edit or delete, someone can keep their own record of it, and later blackmail you. Governments can track your electronic trail. Many people take this as a positive thing, saying "It's not a big deal if you have nothing to hide." But that isn't the question. The question is whether or not people are in a constant state of self-censoring panic because they are afraid of friends, companies, the government, whomever, finding out about them. That is not the road to a more free and just society. That is the road to endless possible permutations of manipulation by forces that probably don't have qualms about throwing people in the garbage to get what they want.

Which makes me wonder about the concept of grace. If grace means that the slate is wiped clean and God forgives, what does that mean in a world where the line in the sand stays drawn? What does it mean if the law has triumphed by cataloguing every sin that has ever been committed? What does it mean if we let ourselves let the law triumph over grace, over the possibility of redemption and starting over?

The desire for redemption and starting over is nonetheless strong and compelling enough to fuel confession sites, however. One of them that I read on a weekly basis is PostSecret. Yet Turkle points out something that finds us all in an emotional dead end when combined with the endless vigilance of the internet's all-seeing eye. We are confessing because we have done something wrong, but confessing online often takes away the whole point of confession: absolution. If we confess our sins to the person whom we have hurt, they may or may not forgive us. We are vulnerable in doing so. Yet because we don't want to risk that vulnerability, because we have not nurtured relationships that can accept this level of interaction, we instead retreat to a place where we feel we won't be hurt when we confess, which is ok because we won't have to face up to the fact that maybe we aren't really sorry. So the internet collects our sins and never absolves us of anything.

One of my friends this week wrote on Facebook that her eschatology has been all messed up in this class; instead of Revelations, the end of the world might look more like The Matrix. I don't know if I can disagree with her. Certainly, all our 'progress' and 'prosperity' of the last two and counting centuries has brought many of us unprecedented levels of health and comfort. Yet it comes at a price, a price which is slowly destroying the environment that keeps us alive, destroying the communities that helped give us meaning, poisoning the food we eat, the water we drink, the interactions we have with one another. We paint each other and ourselves into corners of nonsensical either/or decisions, in which both choices fail us. When someone brings out another piece of technology that is supposed to free us, we use these devices to make the noose around our collective necks even tighter, using our levels of connection and endless feedback loops to make ourselves more isolated.

Wherefore this blog, then? After this class, I don't know. I do know that as an INFJ I am constantly in search of ways to pare down my life and make it less stressful. I am going to one class next semester, which I am hoping will allow me a little more emotional leeway as my job shifts around a bit. I am hoping that maybe I can spend more time with friends in person. My fiance and I held an impromptu dinner party last night that left us both feeling tired, but in a way that wasn't draining. Thanksgiving was a hoot because technology was at a minimum and togetherness and food were at a maximum. I find that a little more rewarding than the last few weeks.

Wherefore God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit? I'm not entirely convinced of deus ex machina as I used to be, and despite the valiant efforts of my professors, I feel less convinced than I did going into the class of the wisdom of churches going online. I know that entire networks of ministry are happening through Twitter and podcasts right now, but I often wonder who they're talking to. Many people I know don't have the time or opportunity to sift through the massive amounts of materials produced in ever increasing numbers by blogs and zines and sites. I don't even have the time anymore. And if I spent more time listening to that, what would the tradeoff be for the people physically in front of me every day? Kairos time is something I desperately need more of, not chronos time.

Would our efforts be better spent by, instead of trying to shoehorn ourselves into technology, advocating for a moratorium on the type of capitalism that is spiralling itself and us toward destruction with its tyranny of time and advocating for a system of kairos that places emphasis on human relationship to one another and nature rather than some twisted notion of efficiency? We'd have to give up a lot of comfort, but in the end we're going to be doing that anyway, according to all the reports from this year saying my generation will be worse off than my parents'. I guess it comes down to a question of whether or not we are willing to give up short-term comfort for long-term survival for everybody, not just us. Maybe I'm setting up a false dichotomy too, but I'm not so optimistic these days.

I guess that's the paradox of Advent though. When you say "Come, Lord Jesus," you're not just talking about the baby in the manger. You're talking about the Cosmic Creator who said He'd return again, and not to make us feel safe or good about ourselves.

Deliver Us From Evil: Psalm 137 and Human Sin

2011-11-20T13:57:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday, I was at a friend's party. She was talking about how that day, she had preached a sermon on the text of Psalm 137. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, here is the psalm for your reading pleasure.

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!’
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!

Apparently one of the lectors at her church will apologize to the congregation for any passage that he reads which implies any kind of violence. The discussion then turned to how barbaric the whole psalm is. I wanted to point out that there is considerable pain and alienation behind the psalm, and people who are facing both of those situations tend to say terrible things about the people who have put them in that situation. However, I was unable to interject before the conversation turned to something else.

To be fair, I don't know what was actually preached. But the conversation struck a nagging chord with me. I am studying the Social Gospel and its impact on churches and American history right now. But the Social Gospel, for all the good it did, could not end human suffering and sin. The Holiness movement would claim that it went about it the wrong way, that it's about personal purity more than the reform of social structures. But neither one of them really has the whole story.

We find ourselves in the midst of some very angry voices, many rightfully so. And the anger is caused by a pretty big problem: the presence of evil. Evil that abuses little boys and convinces people to be silent about it. Evil that exacerbates the social and personal problems of poverty and illness. Evil that seeks to silence those that are trying to call for greater accountability in government and in the economy. Evil that demonizes either side in a political deadlock as children in this country go hungry.

Psalm 137 talks about people who are living in the midst of evil. Their home has been destroyed. Their families and friends may have starved or been killed. They have been taken to a strange land, where the temple of their God exists no longer. They have been shorn of nearly everything that gives them identity. And they are angry. They are angry at their captors, who not only have destroyed their lives but then, perversely, seek to humiliate them further by telling them to sing their songs of worship. Angry people who have had their culture destroyed say things like, "I bet the people who kill your children the way you have killed ours will be happy!" I am not saying this is right. But I am saying it's human. And unless we face up to the human propensity to sin, to retaliate, to want revenge, to attack, etc, we cannot hope to see or confront the evil in our own midst.

To be sure, in American culture, despite the fact that there is a strong send of 'justice' that permeates the systems in which we participate, evil is oftentimes ignored (Penn State), rewarded (why do you think they're occupying Wall Street?), or fetishized (I'm thinking of the response to Heath Ledger's portrayal of The Joker in The Dark Knight). We've been trained to see evil as something that is done by people who are dehumanized and therefore 'monsters'. We've been trained to see ourselves as the 'good guys'. Christianity has probably increase harm as well with its astounding ability to create an in and out crowd of Christians and non-Christians (who can be anything from abortion doctors to gay people to atheists, depending on the day). These delusions are in fact terribly dangerous.

I am not personally a fan of Jonathan Edwards-type Puritanism or hardcore Calvinism which depicts people as completely depraved. Nor do I believe that people are inherently good. I believe people are capable of great good and great evil, and to focus entirely on one or the other creates huge blind spots that in turn create huge amounts of suffering in people's lives and in society at large. The emphasis at all times and all places should be that we have a choice to do good or to do evil, and we must be good stewards of our own behavior instead of externalizing problems to others through blame.

We must also be vigilant for evil in our midst. Unfortunately, far too often, we are afraid of making waves, of hurting an institution, of becoming a target ourselves, and we let evil go by unchecked. We have the illusion that we are good people, and we are silent, and that is all it takes for evil to flourish. By proxy, in our complacency and comfort, we have committed an evil act. In doing so, the boys who were abused by Sandusky, the children abused by Catholic priests, the numerous others who have been victimized and remain so because the people aware of it do nothing, essentially became those Babylonian children whose heads the Israelites longed to dash against rocks.

We are just as sick as the people we claim to abhor, the people we feel the need to apologize for.

I am asking you, and myself, to say something. To do something. To not let this simply go by.

I am paraphrasing Dr. Stacy Floyd-Thomas from her speech last spring at CRCDS: Tell the truth and shame the devil. He has enough people talking for him.

Almost Awesome: Almost Christian by Kenda Creasy Dean

2011-11-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

This blog is experiencing a crossover: I have been asked to start a blog by the professors of my Church in a Digital Age class. They also stated that I could use a current blog if I chose to. Since I already use this blog to talk about churchy/Christian/Jesus stuff, then I have no problem converging purposes here.

Today's assignment is to write a reflection of last week's assigned book Almost Christian by Kenda Creasy Dean. I must say that for the most part, I really dug a lot of what this book has to say. In other places, Ms. Creasy Dean and I disagree. But I think that regardless of the disagreement, it has definitely spurred me to think about current and future uses of ministry, which is the whole point of the book. The way I will construct this discussion is as follows: description, my response/critiques, and how I think this book will influence me (in other words, thesis, antithesis, synthesis).

Almost Christian makes the case that, based on the 2005 National Study of Youth and Religion, most youth (and by extension, their parents and churches) don't subscribe to actual Christianity; what they subscribe to instead is something Creasy Dean describes as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. She believes that most youth are mimicking what they learn at church, as opposed to being, well, opposed to the beliefs of their parents and 'the institution', and what they are mimicking isn't so much orthodox Christianity as postmodern post-Enlightenment New Agey views of a benevolent God who doesn't really have much to say and is there to help them improve themselves.

She goes on to critique the sometimes strange ways in which youth are taught through Christian education and youth groups, as well as lauding the denominational groups (usually conservative or Mormon) that are rigorous in their incorporation of religion into their teenagers' everyday lives. She then devotes a large amount of the book (as she should) with suggestions as to how to demonstrate and teach faith in a much more generative, passionate way that reflects the teachings and love of Jesus instead of glossing over them.

There were several things that I really liked in this book:

- its interrogation of what kinds of youth fellowship activities were really teaching kids about Christ. I didn't like sports growing up, but I was forced to do them in school (isn't it funny that what most people do for fitness as adults does NOT involve group sports, but kids are forced to play them throughout their school years? I would have loved to do yoga and pilates in gym instead of halfassing a game of basketball that didn't do anything for my physical fitness anyway). When I got to church, if I was in youth group or vacation Bible school, half the time I was forced to play them AGAIN. I remember thinking, "geez, I thought church was something I WANTED to do, I thought I was here to learn about Jesus, and instead I'm doing one more thing I hate."

- its interrogation of Christian education and how, for the most part, it results in Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, as Creasy Dean describes it. I've been a big critic of recent Christian education for some time, and how little most churchgoers seem to know about their own denominational orthodoxy and theology (OR THE BIBLE). Though some people might see the dulling of Christianity's historically sharp edges as a good thing, it's really based on a false, Enlightenment-based understanding of what Christian belief and action are supposed to be. You can see it in most debates between Christian conservatives and atheists: both are convinced that their side is factually right, and their interrogations of one another leave no room for poetry, mystery, nuance, love, or beauty. Or, for that matter, a nuanced understanding of Christian theology and scholarship. It's all cold argument about who is smarter and who has better proof. I think this is one factor that has led many mainline denominations away from rigorous education of their members; no one wants to be seen as fanatical, retrograde, or uncool. Another factor is many churches tending away from having church be about God and having it instead be about us. Bible studies are centered around what the Bible can help you with in your life; God is there to help you in your struggles and your desire to better yourself. As always in America, people pay a lot of money to be told how God can help them in their lives. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than at the Women of Faith conference in Rochester yesterday; the songs were about how our God is greater, the stories about how God gives you what you need if you just..., how you need to give your life to God if you're going to get a better life (whatever that means. Not exactly losing your life in order to find it). Forget the idea that following God is not actually about you and your self-actualization. Forget the idea that following God can lead to actual sacrifice. Forget the idea that maybe enacting God's love in the world means getting in a cart and singing hymns and prayers with people on their way to the gallows, or reciting the beatitudes while being gunned down by hired thugs. We can't have any of that difficult stuff when we can either pretend that Christianity is about being nice or being purer than thou (another tendency among American Christians).

- its emphasis on how much parents and role models matter in faith formation. It's true, and I hadn't really thought about it that way until I read this book. I am able to understand my faith because people modeled it for me and took the time to help instruct me in it, or sent me in that direction. It's an important part we forget when church becomes a social club instead of the Body of Christ.

Though overall I think this book is a really important tool for a lot of people who are considering transformation of youth ministry, there are several points that really bothered me.

The first is her upholding of Mormonism as having an ideal method of teaching (indoctrinating?) their youth. Certainly Mormonism (like Catholicism used to) ends up having a lifelong hold on people who grew up in that particular faith that people can't seem to escape even after they left the denomination a long time ago. Where I felt very uncomfortable was the fact that Creasy Dean was using the example of a teenage Mormon girl, who felt passionate about her belief and wanted to go into mission work. However, the girl was fully aware that the church expected her instead to get married early, not to go out on mission, thus sidelining her own call for church expectations. This is the dark side of this kind of teaching; the actual call of the Holy Spirit gets lost in denominational inculturation. Creasy Dean does not even bother to interrogate this problem at all.

The second is her suggestion that encouraging Christian youth to be friends primarily with other Christian youth in order to encourage them to stay on the path might be a good idea. This I find utterly offensive; most of my close friends are not in fact Christian, and yet have been Christ to me in many situations. I can only hope that I have been Christ to them in others. The point of Christianity is that you show love to everyone, regardless of what they believe; being friends with people of other faiths (or lack thereof) brings a richness and understanding of love to your life and theirs that has nothing to do with some kind of agenda and everything to do with the satisfaction of friendship and fellowship.

The third is my question over what Creasy Dean wants taught. She seems to be a fan of the more indoctrinaire method of teaching, with the hope that this kind of immersion is what creates meaning. Trouble is, I know a lot of people who have fallen away from faith post-immersion upbringings. I think what matters is that you teach the catechism, but you also take it apart and give the students (whether they're youth or parents) the ability to examine each part themselves. A class I took last fall on the Nicene Creed did just that, and we came out of it feeling a much closer connection to the creed as a result. What I'm saying is that you can't just tell people something is the truth and trust that it's going to be enough; either it will have a very shaky foundation and the house will come tumbling down or you're just creating sycophantic fanatics who can't critically examine their beliefs but feel the need to foist them on others because that's what they were told to do.

The fourth is the way she makes her case for Christian teaching; she bluntly states that it has eternal bearing on believers or non-believers. I have had it up to here with the constant emphasis on the eternal when people are suffering and starving to death in front of us. Why are we waiting for the hereafter? The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Hell is in the here and now, we create it for one another and for ourselves. We need to stop pretending that the afterlife is the only thing that matters. The eternal is now, the Holy Spirit is not waiting. The invitation is extended.

So taking all of the good and bad into account, I would like to say that this book has (clearly) helped me to better articulate some things that I have been considering for a while, and at the same time be confronted with some things that I had not really considered before. I am hoping that in the future I can help do catechism classes for youth and adults. I am hoping that I can participate in the mentorship of a young person. I am hoping that I can learn from students as well as teach them. This book gives me hope, because it means that some people out there still care about the future of our faith, even if I don't agree with them 100%.

Julie Powell and Redemption

2011-10-23T08:59:00.000-07:00

When Julie and Julia came out a few years ago, I watched the movie and loved it very much. I liked the spunky can-do attitudes of the main characters and the pornographic presentations of French food (I love food, and I really love French food). They lifted my spirits at a fabulously low point in my life and inspired a hilarious, shortlived photo series on my Facebook page, in which I took pictures of ridiculously complicated holiday foods I was making, and then put them alongside ridiculously easy comfort food, like Amy's soups in a can or Annie's organic mac and cheese. But living without a regular internet connection makes such things hard, and I abandoned it.

Then I decided to do some research on Julie Powell and was kind of creeped out.

Before I even read Julie and Julia, I was struck by the implied selfishness and exhibitionism that would go into her book Cleaving. I still haven't read it, mostly because I don't like the idea behind it. A lot of reviews say it lacks perspective. At that point, there's not much for a reader to experience other than voyeurism, something I'm not into. Then I read Julie and Julia, and was struck by Powell's bizarre frequent meltdowns and histrionics. However, it inspired me to do several things, include start drinking gimlets (but with gin, not vodka) and buy Mastering the Art of French Cooking, mainly for the purpose of cooking Brussels Sprouts with 3/4 stick of butter and 1/2 cup of cream (DELICIOUS). It's hilarious enough to pick up when you need something funny to brighten your spirits. It's also brave enough to call people out on the asinine policies and politics of the years just after 9/11. So really, I still recommend Julie and Julia as a book.

But let's get to the heart of the matter. I was thinking about how one review of Cleaving said that it skipped the whole Rise, Stumble, Fall, Redemption of most memoirs, and that made it unusual, but also less boring as a concept (not less boring as a read, according to some other reviewers). I thought about that for a while. I thought about the fact that, from all appearances and no reports I can find to the contrary, Julie and Eric Powell are still married. I thought about the fact that she hasn't appeared much in media since 2010. And I thought about redemption.

In the public eye, Julie Powell hasn't done much to officially 'redeem' herself. Redemption being a powerful narrative in our culture, even politicians who screw up royally go through the motions of being apologetic and then try to go on to do something somewhat redeeming (like resigning in shame, or going on Wife Swap). The whole falling down and pulling yourself back up by your bootstraps has a pretty strong hold on our collective imaginations. It's pervasive in Christianity; St. Paul says repeatedly that people become new creations in Christ. You don't have to let the past dictate your future. God can wipe the slate clean with something called grace. Some people manipulate that beautiful gift, true. But Easter Sunday is the triumph of Christianity. Not even death gets the final say.

However, most of us don't live in a place where the slate gets magically wiped clean. We live with our mistakes, and the nightmares that others have inflicted on us even after we have moved on. Things haunt us. In Shelly Rambo's book Spirit and Trauma, a deacon at a church in New Orleans speaks about how the storm of Hurricane Katrina is 'always with us'. There aren't always neat categories of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, of death and resurrection, of fall and redemption. We keep on living, memories and consequences trailing behind us.

Julie Powell occupies that messy state that doesn't allow us neat and simple categories. Have her actions been, well, appalling? Yes. But somehow, she has moved through it, and moved on. She has even managed to keep her marriage together, God bless her (and her husband). She is like the rest of us, some of us who have made huge mistakes, some of us who have not. She is human. And she lives on, even with the mistakes she has made available to all of us who sit in judgment against her. And she does it with a man who she has sinned against in horrible fashion, and who, according to her, did something similar (just not at the same level).

Maybe that is the terrible, weird truth about what grace and redemption are. We may be new creations, but we are still living in broken old vessels. That's the strange beauty and power of Jesus, who came down and was made flesh. It defies definitions and retains its beauty all the more for being incomprehensible. The church isn't good at teaching anything other than triumphalism, and most people inside and outside don't see this as anything more than to let bad people go free after their crimes. But it's not black and white, as much as we've always been taught it is. Sin is hard and painful. Grace isn't easy for us poor sinning creatures. That's what makes its gift all the more meaningful. Life goes on, even after we have been 'born again' and fucked up and been 'born again' once more. How do you deal? Maybe Julie Powell knows.

Considered Rage: Thought processes and Christian marriage

2011-10-07T15:28:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking of subjects I should be blogging about on a weekly basis, things that really irritate me about American Christianity, or the church, or our current (rapidly degrading) sociopolitical economic situation, most lately illustrated by a bridge being stolen in Pennsylvania. Then I started reading a series of books for one of my classes about how the internet literally wires your brain to lose critical thinking skills. People can argue about the merits of this, but I took this as both a warning sign and an opportunity to do things like cook and clean in my new house. Or spend time with my fiance. Or exercise. All of which I'm enjoying.

But when it comes down to it, aside from being busy and intentionally making different choices, I'm going through one of my periodic interludes where I am hoarding energy and ideas, waiting for them to synthesize. Part of this has stemmed from reflection on a lot of materials I've been reading. Part of this has stemmed from my intentional focus on the people around me and my desire to be present with them. I almost hit the apotheosis moment the other day when I (yes, this sounds so young and arrogant) discovered the works and theology of Karl Barth, and understood that many of the things that have been itching the back of my head as being not-quite-right about Christian theology as I'd heard it could be seen from a different perspective. I have ordered his work on the Epistle to the Romans from the library and look forward to reading it.

My brain has changed a lot, for good and bad, in the last few years. It's taken a great deal of intensive therapy to shine light on and chase away the bloodsucking demons that have been feasting on my consciousness for years, even decades. I used to snap to judgment about something and spill out all my guts and rage about it immediately in the moment. Now, I've begun to burn through the white hot part quickly and wait to see if it is still burning. If it is, I strive to think about it more deeply. As such, I didn't immediately get on here and post about how Karl Barth's idea that the Word of God is not the Bible but Jesus Christ is THE COOLEST IDEA EVER (even if it's pretty darn close). I want to investigate that claim now, want to see its facets, want to see its flaws, before I assess it here.

I continue to hope that brain, my ever faithful if extremely flawed friend, continues to work for greater integration with healthiness, kindness, compassion, critical thinking, and love. That's my hope to give you as well, gentle readers.

Today, I want to talk about something that I've been considering since the time I was old enough to date: the way today's American Protestant Christianity treats marriage (and to some extent how it treats sex and women as well).

This topic leaves me feeling something between befuddlement and rage, most of the time. I am very confused about the ways in which Protestant forms of Christianity have put marriage on this very high pedestal, considering that they don't consider it a sacrament the way Catholicism does. I persist in being confused given that premarital sex rates and divorce rates among, say, evangelical people, who tend to be the loudest about these things, are as high as people who don't identify with this belief system. Not that we aren't all sinners. But why not be more gentle with people on this subject? Why not emphasize the importance of treating one another with respect and love? Why not emphasize the importance of not using one another, not using abusive and manipulative language and actions with one another? Why does it all have to revolve around the right people (only male and female) having sex only if they got a permission slip? Virginia Mollenkott writes that the teachings of the church on the subject of human sexuality lay heavy burdens on people while doing nothing to help them lift these burdens, which can include loneliness, fear, abuse, rape, sexual and domestic violence, closeted homosexuality, etc. I agree with her. If you're going to read a level-headed, compassionate book on Christian sexuality and ethics, Sensuous Spirituality is your best (and perhaps only) bet.

Moving forward, I see that many churches put a great deal of pressure on their members to marry. This may be direct, as the list of spiritually horrific practices at Stuff Christians Like denotes. It may be a lot more subtle; a lot of even small, liberal churches don't have ministries that are geared toward anyone who isn't married, doesn't have a child, or isn't a retiree. I've written with rage, probably here (my memory is bad these days), but also in my diary, about how the church doesn't know what to do with you and really doesn't value you as a woman unless you're married, preferably with multiple children to boost Sunday School numbers. All of these are considered to be outward signs of grace that are really outward signs of cultural acceptance. Single people are seen as occupying a liminal space these days, and if there's anything White Protestant American Church hates, it's people on the margins.

I'm not saying that marriage can't be holy. But when young Christians are being bombarded on all sides with messages about how sex is the worst thing ever until you get that magical permission slip when it's suddenly the best thing ever, all the while not being made to understand that their bodies and desires and feelings are NORMAL, all the while feeling the pressure to marry early or get a ring by spring to have sex and feel accepted in their communities, well...it's just not healthy to me. Choosing to spend the rest of your life with someone should depend on a number of things and a great deal of mature, sobering reflection. Not how much you want to get laid and how if you don't wait, everyone, from your mom to little Mrs. Davis to your pastor to the Little Baby Jesus Asleep On The Hay will be disappointed. Or how if you don't find the person by a certain time in your life (like before college graduation), you'll spend the rest of your life bitter and alone. Because all your life the church has made it clear to you that you have less value as a single person than as a married person. Especially if you're a woman, because having a baby is the unspoken gateway into true "Biblical" womanhood, and God help you if you have one without a marriage certificate.

This sits in the back of my head, along with all the other borderline sick things that Christianity tends to tell people, out of tradition or a desire to control, who knows, and it festers. It festers because it's unspoken and it's there. It festers because I've had these weird things thrown (or not thrown, perhaps stockpiled for later use) at me and people I know. It festers because I've known people who have been through it. And there HAS to be a better way for the church to treat all of us. The first thing it can do is stop treating marriage like some kind of beatified state and instead treat it like a human relationship that needs to be sanely, rationally, compassionately tended. The second thing it can do is minister to single people in a way that stops setting them apart. The third thing it can do is STOP this stupid wankery about sexuality. It's sickening to watch people suffer under it, and it's sickening to watch so much emphasis and rhetoric and money be wasted on holding together a broken dam when the dam doesn't need to be rebuilt; it needs a sturdy bridge. And can we instead start talking about, say, the fact that millions of children are going hungry in this country?

Next time, I want to talk about health care reform, aka PPACA. Not the politics of it. Just what's in it. Because I don't think anyone in this country except for maybe 3 people at the company I work for really know what's in it.

Cheers.

Church, Change, and Corporate Buzzwords

2011-09-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

I came across something today at work that was maybe a lightbulb, but then again, may have been briefly ignited swamp gas or something. I was thinking about a potential exercise my team is thinking of doing, how some people said it was effective and others said it wasn't. The difference between the two was whether or not the group who took part in the exercise took what they learned back to their context and implemented it.

This got me thinking about the ways in which change happens. If you give people ideas but don't give them solid opportunities or suggestions to follow-through and implement said ideas, then there's a good chance that they will fail. Not that failure is always a bad thing. Failure, when it is the result of trying or practice, helps lead to learning. The problem I see in numerous areas of our culture, and that many complain about, is that change fails because not enough effort went into making it work, or because there wasn't a clear goal in mind when it was developed.

Actually, this isn't a post about the Obama Administration, although it could be.

The reason I bring this up is because I'm about to embark on a group project that involves creating a plan for a church/ministry that is centered technology (as a tool and/or concept). I want this project to be something feasible, not just something half-assed, even if it is Version 1.0: Never To Be Seen Again. And I thought about how many ministries and church plants fail. How many people convert in a wild flame of passion (wow, that sounds like it came from a Harlequin novel) and then fall away from their faith rapidly (yes, yes, Mark 4:5-6 and two other synoptic gospels).

Churches are bending over backwards trying to create ministries that last, trying to bring in people to stay, trying to sustain themselves while Christianity in America is largely in decline despite what the media might tell you about a vocal minority. I sympathize with their efforts. I am tempted to get all corporate with my ideas and words when considering these issues, but then I remember that the corporate mindset is about perpetuating capitalism; it's not about God, loving your neighbor, or being a good steward. Yet there are seeds of ideas in corporate thought that are not corporate in nature; they're simply about the ways humans organize and create change in communities.

So as people who are interested in Christian ministry move forward into their projects and missions, perhaps remembering that things like "goals" and "empowerment" aren't just buzzwords. They're real concepts that have to be addressed. Certainly, empowerment is a huge problem in many Christian churches in the US. We are empowered to have "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" and we're empowered to "share that faith" with others, but 1) there is not usually follow through on what that means for everyday life (though there are a sh*t ton of poorly theologized books on the market that will explain the concept to you, usually using corporate ideas, and 2) there is not usually empowerment for people to do things for each other in the church and in the community that doesn't involve some kind of vapid, self-aggrandizing Bible/book study. Christian spiritual life and ethics have been reduced to heavily marketed, personality driven concept books, usually about sex or self-improvement. Or they're about "sharing the good news", whatever that means. It's supposed to mean converting people to Christianity, I guess, but I don't hear much good news coming from the mouths of Christians these days.

In short, I don't feel that American Christian churches have real goals anymore (other than survival; staying relevant in ways that aren't embarrassing is optional). Not even the feeding of their flocks, despite the best efforts of the earnest people working for them. I don't feel they empower their followers and parishioners to be followers of Christ very well either. It has to mean more than personal salvation, Sunday worship, Wednesday Bible study, and writing a check every week. Churchianity is what Fr. Richard Rohr calls it.

But even if goals were to be developed and empowerment were to happen, would it reflect our interaction with the Holy Trinity and all Its mysteries? Or would it reflect the values of the world? Or both? I feel like I'm sounding like some cranky blanket-statement maker here (say that three times fast), but there's something in this. For all our talk of Jesus, we're missing Him by a mile. But maybe in that gaping chasm, the Holy Spirit can bridge the gap. I don't know. Perhaps it's time, however, for us to start thinking beyond this personal self-improvement and salvation playground. John Wesley would be appalled.

Kissing Fish: A Book Review

2011-09-07T08:32:00.000-07:00

This is a little bit later in posting than I originally intended; however, during the past 30 days I moved into a house, complete with most of the headaches that go along with that. But I have triumphed in the realm of time management, even if I only had 15/3500HP left, and I present to you a review of this pretty darn good book.

When considering Roger Wolsey’s new book Kissing Fish, a couple things come to my mind. The first is that it’s bizarre how I’m within two degrees of this man (having been a progressive United Methodist in Denver before moving to Buffalo in 2009) and yet have never met him in person. The second is that, had I read this book in 2007, I probably would have regarded it as one of the greatest books I had ever read. But the ways I have changed since then have tempered my enthusiasm and helped me to look at this book with a discerning eye.

I have to say, it’s really a valiant effort on Wolsey’s part. The man is attempting to do something that hasn’t really been done to my knowledge: (sort of kind of) create an evolving manifesto for progressive Christianity. I know there has been much from the emerging church camp of this nature (A New Kind of Christian and Jesus for President come to mind), but, search as I might (and I could have been looking in the wrong places), I had a hard time finding anything that came from a mainline denomination that was progressive and had the scope of Wolsey’s work. This is despite the fact that portions of mainline Protestant denominations have been doing progressive Christianity for a long time; many of the ministries of the “Big Five” were well established and fighting the good fight long before the post-evangelicals of the Emergent movement came on the scene and decided that maybe women should be in church leadership positions after all. That sounds snarky but is really some affectionate ribbing. I <3 the Emergent church, but I don’t come from an evangelical background. Wolsey’s book has been a great way for me to see the work and love of my churches and friends reflected back in a way that illuminates the efforts of communities believed to be dead by many.

Wolsey does a good, solid job of addressing point for point many of the touch points of Christianity in the United States today. He does so with a great deal of humor and reverent irreverence, which reflects the Generation X and Y mindsets (and some earlier, depending on who you talk to) and makes the book a pleasure to read. Many of his points made me think, groan, laugh, pray, and nod. I think that the chapter on salvation in particular did a great job of elaborating on the complicated nature of atonement theology, and in reading it I definitely and shamelessly identified with his discussions of Arminian perspectives on free will and salvation. I saw a lot of my beliefs reflected on these pages, and I have underlines and notes scribbled on nearly every page. He points out troubling developments in Christian ministries (e.g. prosperity gospel, American exceptionalism, end times prophecies, hypermasculinity in young male ministry) that deserve further thought, consideration, and discernment.

Furthermore, he doesn’t just cover the belief portion. Or as he puts it throughout the book, orthodoxy. He also covers that favorite word/concept of so many progressive and evangelical thinkers, orthopraxy. Right action and spiritual practice have not been well-emphasized for some time in more than the most vague way in Protestant American Christianity. Certainly, there are a lot of ministries that many churches engage in on various levels (local, state, national, international), but for all the emphasis on the individual’s personal salvation and walk with Jesus, there hasn’t been much emphasis on living out what that means other than trying to convert your neighbors or giving money to your church. Wolsey does what many other Christians of this age are trying to do: reminding us that merely being good US citizens doesn’t actually translate to being good followers of Christ. In light of this conundrum, he gives suggestions for practice through pepperings of Gospel verses that champion forms of social justice as well as heavily underlining love and internal as well as external spiritual practices to help us clarify what lies beyond our egotism and sinfulness to see the face of God, usually in a person in need.

What made this book a truly interesting read for me, however, were the places where I disagreed with his view or approach. When, on page 54, he states, “I contend there are two basic approaches to Christianity, conservative and progressive…”, I wrote “Boo” next to it. Whenever anyone says there are two ways, two kinds, whatever, I am reminded of a comic I once saw, in which one person says to the other, “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.” Perhaps he is right, on one level, yet this is not true for all of Christianity in all times, places, and contexts. I have begun to be wary of brash, sweeping statements, even though I have often made (and sometimes continue to make) them myself, because they’re usually too simplistic. Wolsey is responding to a type of Christianity that is very American, very much a product of American post-WWII prosperity, very much a product of a movement in Christianity that has only existed since 1750 (evangelicalism has not been around forever), and is very white, middle class, and male. He also seems to associate a lot of evangelicalism with neo-Calvinism, and I don’t think the two are readily interchangeable. As such, I am careful to put my own critical thinking skills to the test and examine my own experiences and understandings of Christian history and theology into practice to see where there might be more of a middle road, or holes and gaps in “conservative” Christianity that are filled in different ways by people with alternative beliefs.

I bring my own hangups to this book, I readily admit. There are many things that Wolsey says progressive Christians believe which I don’t, and several of my progressive Christian friends would agree with me more than him. I think he falls into the trap of thinking that most progressive Christians are really into, for instance, the metaphorical ideas of Marcus Borg. True, Borg speaks for a significant portion of progressive Christians, but there are a number of us who may not agree with the idea that Jesus was raised primarily in people’s hearts (page 169). So Wolsey walks a fine line here; I know he acknowledges that progressives are a loose conglomeration of people with different beliefs, but there are still some moments where the notes are a little off.

To be nitpicky, I have to say I found a lot of grammar and punctuation mistakes, which may not distract others but totally distract me. I also found the excessive use of websites to be kind of annoying. I know it’s a hallmark of the newer generations to be tech savvy, but I actually found a factual error in footnote 198, where it is said that St. Paul used the Masoretic text while the Book of Hebrews used the Septuagint. This isn’t true, and I have Raymond Brown’s A Guide to the New Testament to back me up. St. Paul used the Septuagint and so does Hebrews; the actual differences come from the way the Greek is written, and the introduction of ideas that Paul never talked about, while ignoring others that he prominently discussed. The point, I am coming to it: peer-reviewed books and articles can still make mistakes, but they are subject to more rigorous examination than websites. So let’s all be good scholars and do our fact-checking.

Lastly, it’s churchy. In that the language is in a churchy vernacular, full of inside jokes and meanings that may be somewhat opaque to people who did not grow up with Christianity. It may even be opaque to lapsed Christians. I think he does a good job of clarifying and explaining a lot of Christian theology, history, the Bible, practice, etc, but I’m nervous that this is really just preaching to the choir, that the intended audience might accidentally end up being agreeing believers like myself. I hope not.

But now I want to get beyond the nitpickiness and the disagreements. I was a little reserved when I began reading this book, but I have to say, the closer to the end I got, the more I felt convicted by it. Wolsey admits to being broken on many levels, which reminds me a lot of St. Paul’s random admissions to his own problems in the Epistles: kind of passive-aggressive, annoying, and funny at the same time. Yet Wolsey’s admissions eased me into the painful truth that I am not doing as much as I could, while telling me that God loves me anyway, so I shouldn’t let it bring me down. And darn if it isn’t working. I don’t feel brought down by this book. I feel empowered by it. I feel empowered by the stories, the theology, the history, and the love that it carries. So what if it has flaws? That’s what makes it great; it gives me something to wrestle with, it helps distill and clarify what I believe, it reminds me of my salvation and nudges me to look beyond my own pain and pleasure to the needs of others.

So I want you, gentle reader, to feel free to go out and read this book. It may seem a little foreign to you if you are not (and haven’t really ever been) a Christian. For those who are long-lapsed Christians, this is a good re-introduction, and it’s far more comprehensive than most Sunday Schools. I say go for it, with gusto.

Reboot

2011-07-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

I've been on blogger hiatus for a while (grief and depression do that to you), and I find myself itching to want to write again.

There have been several things that almost brought me back here. The Mark Driscoll gender police nonsense really lit a fire for me, but in the end, I felt like writing about it wasn't going to do anything except vent my spleen. Which I suppose is the primary purpose of blogging, when you come down to it.

I'm not sure how much I want to vent my spleen any more. I could about any number of things, such as the bizarre insularity of the local annual conference of my denomination, or the lack of education that goes on (and on and on) in the American church and wider American public. But in the end, I feel like I'm writing about surface things that are masquerading for the emotions I'm actually feeling. These emotions are not something that I feel safe sharing on such a public venue, yet they influence what I say and what I don't. While I am a big fan of the statement, "Tell the truth and shame the devil, because he has enough people talking for him", I have reached a point where I can look myself in the face and say "I don't need the validation of other people to know my own truth."

Though this kind of understanding is no doubt the starting point of all kinds of narcissism for some, for me it is a real breakthrough into something approaching self-honesty, self-love, and self-respect. Knowing in my core (and not just that group of muscles you use in pilates class) that God loves me for who I am, not for who anybody else, including the church, wants me to be, has been something I've struggled to find all my life.

As such, living into this truth, and dwelling in it, is beginning to change my perspective on things. I'm still cranky, but not quite as angry. I'm learning to breathe in ways that are helping my mind to be calmed, learning to put myself back to sleep when I wake up in a panic in the middle of the night. I'm learning to see things through the curtain of anger (or drawing the curtain aside) instead of letting the curtain be the only thing I see. Maybe loving myself in a complete and total way will help me to love others in a healthy way; at least, that's what I'm hoping for.

So here's to telling the truth, shaming the devil, being true to ourselves, and loving one another.

Hiatus (?)

2011-05-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

My grandma died on Easter weekend. I have sort of been down the rabbit hole ever since.

Everything is being reprioritized again. And that's probably a good thing.

I am going to take a break for a while. I don't know how long...maybe a week, maybe the whole summer. I still enjoy writing on this blog. I guess I need some time to go inside and sort things out.

Blessed be, gentle readers.

Bang Bang: The Queer Apocalyptic Christology of Lady Gaga

2011-05-01T16:13:00.000-07:00

I'm going to write this post because I like to play with philosophy, theology, feminism, and queer theory. That Lady Gaga has so obliged me with such overt symbolism and statements that I can work her pop culture persona into the group is something that makes my Monday night. If you're going to say something nasty, stop taking yourself so seriously.

I went to see Lady Gaga perform at the HSBC Arena. It was one of the more interesting concerts I've ever attended. People in costume were everywhere. It was the first time I have seen people obviously presenting as GLBT since I've been living in the Buffalo area. There was a sense of excitement and camaraderie among the people attending, like we were all in on some big secret. My fiance and I took what I termed the "Gaga Train" from UB to the arena, and it was overflowing with shrieking, glitzed out women ready to go to the Monster Ball.

The concert opened with Scissor Sisters, which got some airplay in Denver, so I knew about them, though it was clear that most of the audience didn't. The band directly addressed this by saying, "If you've heard of us, you're probably British or gay." They did a good opening set, complete with shiny pleather, red spandex, and assless chaps. Then we waited something like 45 minutes for the emergence of Gaga.

The set was designed to look like a futuristic urban dystopia...I guess the term for it could be "beautiful and dirty/rich", to quote the Lady herself. I found it rather ironic, yet appropriate, because large chunks of Buffalo are still reeling in the aftermath of the economic Rapture that took place here after the 1960s. A trip to the East Side could tell you as much. Furthermore, Lady Gaga's costumes have been criticized as being overtly sexual, as well as extremely bizarre. Camille Paglia thinks that Gaga takes it too far by demystifying sex altogether and making it ugly. But this is where Gaga's creative power (and her Haus of Gaga design team) is at its strongest, even if it is unintentional: she is exploding the mythos of capitalism. Overconsumption and hypersexualization have led us to economic dead zones and a culture numb to the effects of pornography. In the end, we have all become little monsters, partying while the world ends. I think of Gaga as being the harbinger of the end of an era; pop culture is literally eating itself to death right now, and taking everything else out with it. Her style and music, probably unintentionally, reflect that.

So into this apocalyptic arena comes a woman who spent her formative years feeling like a freak, which is possible for people regardless of how privileged an upbringing they lead (though money cushions a lot, let me tell you). She channeled this energy into creating her Gaga persona, working through the age of Britney to create a super Britney, so hypersexualized that no one could accuse her of slutdom because the supposed sluttiness was there for all to see. Gaga claims she is out there dying for us each day, dying for our approval, hungry for the adulation of her "little monsters". No one can tear her down because her persona is such that she has already torn herself down, distorted herself. As a result, no one really knows what to do with her except claim that she might be a man. She has (so far) successfully defied pop culture's ability to destroy someone through slut-shaming or relegation to irrelevance.

Gaga makes herself out to be pop culture's scapegoat, the person who dies for pop culture's sins. During the song "Monster", which the website Jezebel claims is about date rape, the choreography implied Gaga was torn apart by her backup dancers. During the rest of the show, she appeared streaked with fake blood. This violent death/resurrection/scapegoating can't be unintentional; Gaga knows what she is doing. The appeal to Christ's own scapegoating, violent death, and resurrection is too strong to pass up. What is different about it is that Gaga appeals to the human tradition that sees scapegoating as necessary to maintaining the social order. She willingly offers herself up as a paschal lamb in this twisted culture we've built, though some things have not changed since the dawn of human thought however many thousands of years ago. She lets the scapegoat revert to being a symbol. That's where she departs with Jesus: part of His purpose was to show that the scapegoat is indeed a person, not a symbol, and thus disrupt the cycle of violence forever.

Throughout all this Christian-ish symbolism and imagery, she also incorporates elements of horror. After taking on a claw and being streaked with blood, her final act is to kill the Fame Monster. Like the Final Girl who manages to survive in so many horror films by escaping or killing the monster that killed her friends, Gaga emerges triumphant from her battle with the thing that is trying to eat her (re: pop culture). This immediately made me remember a paper I read for my Old Testament class by Amy Kalmanofsky, in which images of horror are used in the Book of Hosea to shame the Israelite men into turning back to God. The image of horror is that of a woman in labor, trembling with pain, shamed for her position as a "prostitute". Yet this woman, the symbolic Israel, bat zion, emerges from battles with her own demons throughout the prophets to sing the songs of second Isaiah. Gaga triumphs and sings her songs as well.

The creation of this frenzied concert full of costumes, videos, music, dance, and elaborate sets so that people might experience something transcendent led me to thinking about a couple of postmodern writers, namely Zizek and Baudrillard. The latter writes about the creation of the hyperreal, in which the substitution becomes more real than reality (see Disneyland vs. Europe or New Orleans). Gaga’s Monster Ball becomes more real than the worship experiences many people have ever had with its tendency toward inducing transcendence, trance, and ecstasy through music and other stimulae. In some senses, Gaga’s concert was like a megachurch service in queer drag (is that a redundant term? Sorry). Zizek writes about how religion was so stripped of its ability to be the bearer of transcendence that we have looked toward ever more ridiculous apocalyptic storylines in order to fulfill our desire to experience the Void. The Monster Ball certainly reflects this proposition. I think some branches of the church have forgotten the importance of letting the Spirit move, as it were, and the ones who haven’t usually have a reputation for being crazy. I’m not saying all religious experiences have to induce ecstasy. Indeed, sometimes you learn more from God when you feel down in the dumps than when you’re high as a kite. Plus being quiet in the Presence is often important. But we could use a little more rejoicing when we sing our hymns about rejoicing. We could also realize that people are going other places get what they used to get out of worship. But for some reason I prefer Gaga’s concert as a place to dance and sing to a megachurch service. At least with Gaga I don’t have to put up with insulting hermeneutics, and I’m actually going to hear good music.

Many of the "little monsters" are people who have been bullied or treated as freaks themselves. Gaga's active support of the GLBT community has led to a strong following on their part. Through her persona and her latest hit song "Born This Way", Gaga absolves her "little monsters" of their freakiness, their outcast position, by telling them that God made them the way they are, so He must love them. In doing so, she shames our culture for casting so many of its children aside for their supposed sinfulness. Though obviously Gaga depends on the consumption and excesses of our culture in order to make her living, and this does not jibe with the Christian emphasis of not letting one’s desires run rampant in order to respect one’s neighbor, she still can teach American Christian churches about what it is to really love their neighbors. All of them.

Gaga tells her “little monsters” to “rejoice and love yourself today”. In a culture where happiness is always put off until you can become a thinner, richer, more fashionable, more perfect version that requires enormous amounts of consumption to achieve, that in itself is a radical statement. Let’s face it, the church has even bought into it, always telling people to “become a better you” and lead a “purpose driven life”, usually through the purchase of some book or attendance at some seminar. The transformation that occurs through becoming a follower of Christ has become perverted to sensationalist and capitalist terms, to the point where you have to have some fancy story of depravity and salvation on the road to Damascus to qualify as being “saved”. Self-recognition as a beloved child of God is just as important as self-recognition as someone who needs God. It is different than the pride so many Christians carry around about being a Christian (particularly the “right kind” of Christian, whatever THAT is). And it’s something that gets lost in the noise of theology of glory that seems to be everywhere these days.

Gaga’s perspective on who Jesus is revolves mostly around the symbolic. Some of it is manifested in her understanding of her own symbolic monstrosity and self-sacrifice. Yet she even talked briefly about Jesus as someone who loved everyone. She then sort of went into this implied comparison with one of her male dancers, who “loves girls, and loves boys too”. The attempt at queering Jesus as a sexual being will not sit well with nearly all Christians (see reactions to the film The Last Temptation of Christ), but with so much emphasis on Jesus’ divinity we often forget that He was also a man, no matter how much we give lip service to the “incarnation”. Our emphasis around the incarnation usually revolves around the suffering leading up to His death, but we should remember that He also lived, experienced, and did normal human things. Whether He struggled with lust is something that is not revealed to us in the Gospels. Yet we know He struggled with other temptations. So Gaga is reminding us that Jesus was indeed a human being as well as divine, even if she is using an unorthodox (and to some, offensive) way of doing so.

But let’s go back to what she said before she made that comparison (which probably could have been a little less creepy, but we didn’t pay for anything less than Crazytime). She said that Jesus loved everyone; she also said that she didn’t understand why so many people try to tell us that He didn’t. She has a really big point here. Why are we trying so hard to hide the Light of the World? Because we’re afraid that what He said will really be true, that the last will be first and the first will be last? Because we want to be right, and want to lord it over people who say we aren’t? People in that arena were starving so much to hear that someone loved them for who they are that they paid a lot of money for Lady Gaga to sing it to them. Something is rotten in Denver, my friends. Something like a big dead elephant in the corner of the room.

In this bizarre turn of events, Lady Gaga has a lot to teach Christians about being Christian, though if you have to look beyond the weird costumes and pop culture vacuity to do it. We don’t get to pretend that hegemony means that we’re right anymore. Postmodernism has exploded that myth on us. We have to look beyond our own boring, hateful, and idiotic drag to remember that the Kingdom of Heaven is around us and the Spirit is moving. Now let all of us little monsters/sinners rejoice that He/She/It is still here with us and that we can participate with one another.

Just dance.

Drinking the Haterade: Christian Bookstores

2011-04-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

I went to a local Christian bookstore recently to look for a copy of Love Wins. Big mistake. So much for supporting local businesses.

I suppose I should have known better. At the place I went to, I was actually told the store would not carry it because it is "too controversial". Ironically enough, I was able to buy a copy of CS Lewis' The Great Divorce, which had some arguments that might also be considered controversial regarding heaven and hell.

But when I was perusing the aisles of this store, I stumbled onto some situations that really bothered me.

Such as

FUN FACT #1: In most Christian bookstores in the US, I will never find a book that is assigned for a seminary course.

Most of the books on the shelves are geared primarily toward evangelicals. They are written by evangelical authors, such as Joyce Meyer and Rick Warren. The best I can say about them is that they are about personal ethics. They are about living your best purpose driven life now, or something. But there is also a heavy dose of books that are full of panic. Books about prophecy and the endtimes. Books full of cranky apologetics against liberals and atheists (who are usually one and the same donchaknow). Books about the rightness of conservative politics and the wrongness of global warming. Books about how the Bible prescribes small democratic governments and free markets (it does? where?). Exegesis? What's that?

I looked for books about Christian ethics, about Christian history. I looked for major names and figures in Western theology. I found one book of Chesterton quotes, Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, two books by John Wesley, and several shelves of CS Lewis, mostly related to the Narnia series.

FUN FACT #2: There are other major theologians than CS Lewis.

FUN FACT #3: The Chronicles of Narnia are CHILDREN'S BOOKS.

No Kierkegaard, no Thomas Aquinas, no Martin Luther. No books about liberation theology or African-American hermeneutics. Or any kind of hermeneutics related to women or people of color. There might have been John Calvin in there, but he seemed to have been superseded by John Piper, who had several titles on the shelf.

FUN FACT #4: Apparently women and people of color don't have much to say unless it contributes to the racist sexist classist ableist cisgender status quo. At least that will be seen in a Christian bookstore.

When I glanced at the teen and college section, I was dismayed to find that every book on the shelf was about waiting until marriage for sex. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

FUN FACT #5: Christian ethics revolves around more than just what people do in the bedroom.

I do not, for the life of me, understand what is going on here. Perhaps I was spoiled by Cokesbury back in Denver, which had the audacity to carry books on every Christian subject under the sun, and even some titles by atheists and leaders of other religions. All that this situation taught me is that American Christians are wrapping themselves ever tighter in a cocoon of commodified gospel that doesn't consider itself responsible for the pleas of the desperate or the culpability of community. While no doubt the people who patronize these stores are involved in mission work here and abroad, the material they are consuming doesn't reflect this. It reflects a culture obsessed with proving itself right in the most simplistic way possible without any measure of introspection or corporate responsibility. It reflects a culture obsessed with the right way of arguing, the right way of doing sex, and the right way of legalistically policing themselves without any understanding of grace or love. It reflects a culture that has no interest in the past...and for many, the only interest in the future revolves around making the Second Coming of Christ happen as soon as possible.

FUN FACT #6: All women's devotionals will have flowers, pearls, pink, purple, cursive writing, or something about being special for God on the cover.

...actually, I'm not even going to write on the topic of devotionals. It depresses me too much.

Ultimately, why is it that a store can't carry a book that has many of the same arguments some Christians have been making for nearly 2000 years? Why can't a store let readers decide for themselves? Is this even going to matter in a future where everyone just orders it and reads it online? I still can't help but feel something is being lost.

I wish I could be more coherent about all the ways in which I am disturbed. But I am happy to say that the woman who cashed me out left a good taste in my mouth. The brief conversation we had, in which she told me about the book situation, told me that she was able to discern outside whatever thought process had led the store to not carry Love Wins. I laughed all the way down the road. Then I ordered it from this awesome place and had no problems whatsoever.

NaPoWriMo: Hamster

2011-04-11T19:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote this poem last night when I was half asleep. It is about my friend Ian's pet hamster.

A quivering ball of fur is a hamster
Twitchy nose and beady eyes
And balls that would make many jealous
So tiny and cautious are they as they ramble
Clutching to the world as if it will fall away at any moment

So there.

NaPoWriMo: Bless/Curse

2011-04-04T15:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry that Lady Gaga has been delayed again. It is 2/3rds written and a lot of fun. But I thought I'd update something else in between times.

I agreed to do NaPoWriMo (whatever that is short for, something to do with writing poetry, I guess). I was already doing the poetry challenge for Lent, so this fit right in anyway. Now, most of the poetry I write is not for general consumption; it usually has deep meaning for me and helps me sort out thoughts and feelings that otherwise I wouldn't speak aloud unless it was to people that I really trusted. But I do want to post a thing or two here. Starting tonight.

Maybe I'm just a liar
Hiding words in pigeon holes
Of he said/she said
Maybe I'm just crazy
And condescension masked in malice
Is the best practice here
Maybe I am unenlightened
And no longer care
Maybe I am broken
And want to be healed
Even if I don't know what that means anymore

When confronted by cows more sacred than people
I am an accidental iconoclast, clumsily swinging about,
Tripping and stumbling, grabbing past the signs
That bear the phrase DO NOT TOUCH.
I have broken and bought more times than I can count
Purchased at an interest rate that has no ceiling.
I am not sure what it means to forgive;
It was on the shelf, but crumbled away under my fingers.

Tactless hypocrite I remain,
Tacky and hapless,
Full of impatient agape.
My trembling ceased in a moment
on hearing the words,
"I love you broken".

Maybe someday the heuristics will finish their run
Until then, I keep the lamp burning.

A Lenten Interlude

2011-03-10T14:21:00.000-08:00

I think that with most of the snow gone we have emerged out of Smarch, which I refer to as roughly the last two weeks of February and first two weeks of March when winter doesn't really know if it wants to be over yet, so crappy weather abounds. Today, it is raining, and despite upcoming chills there doesn't look to be any snow in the 7 day forecast. Spring is arriving like Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday. I missed services for the second time in two years. This year was not due to terrible terrible weather and getting stuck in some driveway on Tonawanda Creek Road. No, this year, my wonderful boyfriend took me to Tempo for filet mignon. On the way to Allentown, I told him all about Ash Wednesday, Lenten practices, and the culmination in Holy Week and the Great Triduum (apparently the church he attended growing up didn't do any of this meaty stuff). So that was an interesting little conversation that made me wonder where in Buffalo I could find a crazy Easter Vigil service.

Anyway, the point is, I guess that due to feeling spiritually that I spent a great deal of time from 2008-2010 in the season of Lent basically nonstop, I haven't been all that eager to head back into the desert. I mean, I'm in the season of Pentecost, darnit, for the first time...ever???

My spiritual practice hasn't been what it was. At the time I was doing it, it felt like it was all that was keeping me on the wagon. It was a way of training my mind to hold on until the deepest part of depression had passed. Since then, it seems that my new ways of relating to the world and my studies are changing the way I relate to my spirituality as well. I haven't reestablished a good spiritual practice other than praying often and learning as hard as I can. I also go to a rather interesting "Bible study" every other Wednesday with women from my church because I like hanging out with them in fellowship and talking about God and Christianity. So I didn't really have any idea of what I wanted to "do" for Lent. Nothing was calling out to me. Nothing was making me particularly averse. I just felt "meh" about everything.

Except poetry.

I had a sudden desire to read poetry last week, so I got some books out of the library. And I went back through some of the poems I've written over the last few years and saw that aside from some needed polish they weren't too bad. So I said "Read a poem! Write a poem! For 40 days!"

There you have it. My discipline. Look for an occasional post here.

Bell vs. Hell. Wait, what?

2011-03-07T12:35:00.000-08:00

So there was a minor hullabaloo in the blogosphere this past week over Rob Bell's new book entitled Love Wins. We've got a bunch of people, mainly Neo-Calvinists as far as I can tell, mad at Rob Bell for what is supposedly going to be in this book. Most of it seems to be based on what he says in his video.

When I watched this video, I didn't recall hearing much about hell in it. What I heard was a distinct attack on penal substitutionary atonement theology. And I thought "This is what people are getting mad about? Peter Abelard made similar arguments in the twelfth century." Furthermore, theologians have spent the better part of the twentieth century completely deconstructing penal substitutionary atonement theology for many of the reasons Bell enumerates in his video: it makes God look like a monster, and that's really hard to reconcile with an idea of an all loving-God.

I've written about atonement theology before. It's a complex idea. I've been working on learning about different perspectives on it. I would like to cover it in greater detail write now, but as I'm in the middle of reforming my beliefs on the subject, I'd like to wait before I elaborate more. So, moving on...

The Neo-Calvinist types who wrote rants about Bell's video/book really focused on the need for God's wrath and hell to keep people in line. This assumption that humans are so depraved as to be nothing but psychopaths that need Angry Sky Daddy to keep us in line is not only insulting but negates the whole point of Jesus and grace. I prefer a more Lutheran or Arminian/Wesleyan perspective on the subject: we are broken, but we encounter God's grace and love and become transformed.

I can't answer the difficult questions about theodicy and the nature of evil in the world. But I do think that it is the power of God's love that helps people to transform their lives, to repent for what evil they have committed, to heal from the brokenness that has been inflicted on them. If the church (meaning everyone who defines themselves as Christians, even if it's only in the vaguest sense) wants to get in on the "will of God", it needs to stop breathing brimstone and continue/amp up whatever activities they do to prevent war/violence, feed/clothe/house those who don't have anything, stand up for those who have been victimized, counsel those who do the victimizing, and support healing efforts everywhere.

The twentieth century should have taught us by now that hell is empty and the devils are here. Over 90 million died in genocides. The point of hell is moot when suffering on a mass scale occurs daily all over the world. It's time for some love.

Next time: The queer apocalyptic Christology of Lady Gaga.

I Am Going To Do This Wrong And I Don't Care: Planned Parenthood, the Book of Amos, and Scapegoating

2011-02-14T18:03:00.001-08:00

This afternoon in my LGBTi and Christian Faith class, I found myself back in the land of gender and queer theory and really truly loving it. I realized just how much I missed being able to work with and disrupt words, images, and ideas. I realized how much I missed being able to upend my own assumptions and those of society to find the weird, creeping fears and desires that lurk under our social order (or chaos). I also realized just how much I had circumscribed all of those tendencies upon re-entering the church as a college educated adult. I sensed that even my very liberal and social justice oriented colleagues were sometimes discomfited by the ideas that had been a hoot in the classroom. So I learned to be safe, and this blog reflects that safety sometimes.

But there's one thing that I'm not going to be safe on anymore, and it is this: Congress needs to stop being assholes about Planned Parenthood.

I am not going to argue about abortion, even if you, gentle reader, bait me in the comments. It's been widely discussed and detailed by smarter people than I, and I refuse to budge on the issue even as I see the other side's arguments. Verboten.

But taking away one of the few options for reproductive health for frightened teenagers, poor women, and people in marginalized communities is despicable.

Bbbbbut SEX WHORES QUEERS SEX PREMARITAL JEZEBEL BABY JESUS THE BIBLE RAWWWWRRRR Okay, that's not a fair characterization of the argument at all. But after hearing it since, oh, about the age of 5, it all sort of bleeds together. It's not hard to discern when a group of people hates your embodiment and expends an enormous amount of energy trying to restrict its use and care.

Self-disclosure: I went to the local Planned Parenthood when I moved to NY because I needed to get my annual exam before my insurance ran out and didn't have the time to wait 6 months for a regular gynecologist to fit me in. I got the care I needed in a timely and friendly manner. I don't know what the hell I would have done without it.

I think part of the problem is our societal refusal to come up with a responsible sexual ethic. It's either "do what you want!" or "no sex until marriage!" Sex education is incredibly important in self-care and public health, but it's only half of the whole, and it's under constant attack. There is some education on how it's not okay to force yourself on someone sexually, but given that, according to the US Department of Justice, roughly one in four American women will be sexually assaulted or raped during her lifetime, it's not a message that's being heard very well. "Do what you want!" doesn't really give people a safety net to find out about what might be right for them without judgment. "No sex until marriage" is all judgment, unrealistic for most, and unfair to those who waited and expected the Second Coming of Christ along with the Kinkiness of Prince. Everyone's either promiscuous or virgins or married. Not that there's anything wrong with those. But a good chunk of people dwell outside that trilemma, and are treated with silence. Sometimes that means you can hide in plain sight. Other times, it means Congress tries to take away your reproductive health care in the name of a Jesus that isn't in the Constitution and doesn't really mean any of the things He says in the Gospels.

Which brings me to the Book of Amos. We've got all kinds of surrealism going down. We've got wild and crazy, untameable God with fruit and corpses. We've got women being carried away on fishhooks. We've got people fleeing from lions and being eaten by bears. The Book of Amos pretty much confounds our abilities to make rational sense of God via the Scriptures. But that's what we try to do all the time, on both sides of the divide. Somewhat bizarrely, as my professor pointed out in the past couple of weeks, we as Christians make a much bigger deal out of sins of lust and the flesh than the Bible does. The Bible's sexual ethics are much less pat and dried than we pretend, for one. But most of what the Bible (and the Book of Amos) goes after is the true Achilles heel of modern capitalist society: greed, waste, and indifference or exploitation of the poor. And we can't face up to that, so we scapegoat women, or the GLBTiQ community, or socialists/communists, or whoever doesn't look, think, or act like the people trying to maintain their power. This denial has most recently taken on the form of trying to disrupt the bodily integrity of all of these people: denial of reproductive health care, attempts to deny GLBTiQ persons the right to marry in addition to threats against their lives, denial of health care to millions of people who desperately need it.

So what are we left with? A preoccupation with performing legalism in the bedroom and in the streets while people who need a doctor can't see one. I mean, for a group of people who believed that Jesus healed all sorts of people on the margins with ghastly diseases (LIKE A WOMAN WHO BLED FOR TWELVE YEARS), we don't really like to provide people with health care based on their social status. I mean, they're doing things which tell us they don't DESERVE it. Terrible things! They are our scapegoats, the people we publicly abhor and despise, those welfare queens, those teenage sluts, those pinko commies, etc that we toss around in the media. But our reinforced social structures put them at a disadvantage that makes it easy for them to get into trouble and remain there while we gloat from our safe positions of supposed righteousness.

Except if we're actually going to face up with OT prophets, we're going to see that the hegemonic, consuming members of society are the ones that the OT prophets are going after. The marginalized are not the ones being carried away on fishhooks. The marginalized are the ones that get to eat dinner with Jesus in the Gospels. The scapegoat is the one who ultimately gets justice in the Bible, to the point that humanity's easy use of scapegoats to solve societal problems has been fairly well disrupted (though not eliminated) in Western society. All are judged and found wanting, yet all are forgiven.

Now, this is all a mere aside from being annoyed at how deeply religion is trying to assert itself on politics here. That's a different post. But the point being: Put Down The Planned Parenthood Funding And Walk Away. No one is secure in their righteousness; that's what GRACE is for. So do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God by giving women (and some men) access to care that they desperately need.

Believing in the Bible

2011-01-24T09:04:00.001-08:00

I hear Christians say, "I believe in the Bible" a lot. It's really beginning to get on my nerves. I kind of wonder if the Bible has become the replacement for the Trinity in the minds of many American Christians.

I'm in a transition period for what I feel like the Bible represents for me and how I feel it should be used, so I can't really articulate all that I'm feeling at the moment about the subject. I think it might take a multi-chapter book to explain.

But I do know that I am not a big fan of, and am actively trying to not believe, treating the Bible like it is God. I feel it is conflating a description/representation with the actual thing.

I have precedent:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became truly human.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Note how the only place that it says anything about the Bible is "in accordance with the Scriptures". There is no "I believe in the Scriptures" or "I believe in the Bible" anywhere in there. You could make a really twisted argument that "in accordance with the Scriptures" makes the case for elevation of the Bible to a higher plane, but I don't think that's what the writers had in mind.

Of course, this presupposes that I choose to accept the Nicene Creed as orthodoxy. I did and do so, after a lot of careful consideration that deserves its own post, that I may get into at some point. But that's where I stand. I just don't think that idolatrous treatment of the Bible is good for Christianity, the church, or Christians' treatment of each other or anyone else. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say or do something offensive or cruel and say "BUT IT'S IN THE BIBLE" when justifying it. That's bad theology and bad neighborship. Is the Bible an important tool for understanding Christian faith and a guide for understanding the Trinity? Yes, and it's one of the few things we have to go on. But treating it as the first, last, and only arbiter of the will of God cuts our religion off at the knees, not to mention depriving the Holy Spirit of its role.

So let's have a little more patience, kindness, and imagination with our religion and with each other. And a little more education about orthodoxy and exegesis/hermeneutics wouldn't hurt either.

End Times? Will there be beer?

2011-01-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

Apparently the apocalypse has begun in Arkansas and I wasn't notified in advance. As a Christian, I feel insulted. But I guess now I don't have to worry about how to make ends meet since my application for Medicaid and food stamps was denied due to having too high of an income.

On Not Being (insert adjective here) Enough

2010-12-27T13:39:00.000-08:00

By hook or by crook, it's been a helluva long time since I've posted anything. But I'm itching to post today.

It's been a year, to say the least, one full of enough reversals to make any sports movie director stand up and cheer. But therapy aside, I find myself at the edge of the abyss of letting others (and/or their disappointment in you) define who I am.

It's been something I've encountered over and over, mostly as an outgrowth of endless childhood bullying. After all, this is the recipe for bullying someone:

1) Take something about a person. It could be something good, something bad, something they're proud of, something they're ashamed of, or something so mundane as to be incomprehensible as a weapon.
2) Harp on them about it in a negative fashion until they learn to hate themselves over it.

On the outside, I learned to define myself as the Other because being the Self was to be something abhorrent, something defined by other people and clearly lacking. Or it was to become a bully myself, which I am ashamed to admit happened a few times because it was the only way I knew how to deal with my pain and self-hatred.

This led to a perpetual chip on my shoulder that I was Not (something) Enough. Not smart enough. Not dumb enough. Not pretty enough. Not sexy enough. Not prude enough. Not competitive enough. Not humble enough. Not Christian enough.

You must see how this is a problem. It's an endless spiral of self-destruction and dependence on others in order to feel something positive about yourself.

When I was studying atonement theology in particular, I paid close attention to the ways that Christianity tells you that you are not (something) enough. I find this in particular in the ways that atonement theology (and other theologies) is/are formulated. Satisfaction and penal substitution theology are predicated on inducing guilt and self-hatred over the Savior who sacrificed himself for our atonement. They set up God as an Angry Sky Daddy who hates all of us, Jesus as a sorrowful and possibly angry figure, and all of us as seemingly broken beyond any kind of redemption, which sort of defeats the purpose of being at-one-ment with God. I'm not entirely sure how either one of these theologies is supposed to induce positive self-change or love for God. Mostly I'm thinking it induces utter fear and despair or maybe self-righteous theology of glory bullshit. Or even some warped theology of the cross that has no problem blaming victims for what others have done to them (I'm looking at you, Pope Palpatine, and the reasons you stated when you killed liberation theology).

So if you've got the despair side of things, you hate yourself because you aren't (something) enough for Jesus. If you've got the pride side of things, you are always telling people that they aren't (something) enough for Jesus.

If you're like me, and looking at Jesus breaking legalism to heal people and conquering hell and death, you're wondering how the f*ck grace and love are supposed to come out of this hornet's nest of manipulation.

That's why I'm more of a fan of a variant on Peter Abelard's Moral Exemplar theology. I feel as though Christ came to heal our brokenness, and that if he did so, we should be looking at the ways in which we can participate with God in the healing of ourselves, each other, and our communities. I find this preferable to endlessly picking at the scabbed and scarring wounds of our own sin and that of others. God loved us enough to try and foster this healing through the death and resurrection of Christ. I think that is reason enough for us to look beyond all the Not (something) Enoughs and ask God to help us heal those places. Or perhaps we can learn to accept the Not (something) Enough areas of our lives and learn to strengthen the places where we Are (something) Enough to the glory of God.

All of these thoughts are retriggered by yet another confrontation with people who do not believe I am (Christian?, conservative?, submissive?, literalist?) enough for their taste. The ontological scandal of being a woman pursuing ordained ministry resurfaces. But there are a couple of things that have happened to me that have kept me from toppling once more into the abyss.

First of all, there is only once in my life where I got some kind of indication from my Creator that I was not (something) enough. I was 15 and I had a dream. I was walking through an office full of desks with a green tile floor. At the end of the room was a big, wooden, old fashioned teacher's desk. At it, God, who was like a big white blur, was sitting and drinking a Coke (yeah, product placement in my dreams, weird crap). What God said to me was, "Dammit, Jessica, you're just not listening to me enough". Yeah, I know, He said "Dammit". So sue me. It was in the dream. Anyway, He was saying that I wasn't listening. Not that I wasn't praying, or reading the Bible, or any other devout kinds of behaviors.

Listening.

So how can someone be angry at me for listening now? For trying to heed the call?

For the last few weeks, I've been participating in a church-wide book study in which we all were called upon to pray for each other more. Being a seminary student, I was asked to join with other ministers (many of whom are also women) at the front of the church to pray with anyone who would come forward. People prayed about any number of things, things we will all struggle with at some point in our lives. Every time I got to pray with someone, I felt the presence of God, and I felt humbled to be part of His love and care for these people.

I'm not going to stop. My deficiencies, my stumbling blocks, my spots where I am Not (something) Enough: God is big enough to help me bridge the gaps and take flight over the abyss. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Biblical Stories and Religious Debates Reduced to Irreverent Snark

2010-11-29T15:19:00.000-08:00

I made these up for my own amusement.

Numbers 21: 4-9

Israelites: We’re a whiny bunch of marauding assholes wandering around Canaan, killing and stealing on our way, but we want to go back to Egypt and be slaves because we think it’s hard to be marauding assholes in the desert.
God: See how you like poisonous snakes, assholes.
Israelites: WAAAAAH!!!!! WE’RE DYING OF POISONOUS SNAKES!!!!!! Ok, fine, we won’t say anything against God again. We’re sorry.
Moses (to Israelites): This is the 9000th time this has happened, but I’ll try interceding for you again. You’re tiresome bastards, you know.
Moses (to God): They say they’re sorry. A little help?
God: Put a bronze snake on a pole and make them look at it.
Moses: Isn’t that forbidden by Exodus 20:4?
God: Do it, lawyer man.
Moses: *puts a snake on a pole and shows it to people*
Israelites: *look at it* Yay we’re alive!!!!
[Moses (to God): Maybe you shouldn’t have done that in the first place.
God: Maybe you should shut up.]*
* Believed to be a later authorial insertion

The Gospels

Some Factions of Judaism: We want a Messiah to deliver us from these despicable Romans who oppress us but are really good at large scale public engineering projects.
Jesus: Whatup, yo. I am a Messiah, but I’m not going to deliver you from the Romans in the way you want.
Some Factions of Judaism: YAY A MESSIAH wait what?
Jesus: *heals people* Also, the law doesn’t work like you think it does. It’s…complicated. It’s about love, not purity.
Some Factions of Judaism: Huh?
Jesus: …dang.
Non-Jewish People: Will you help us too?
Jesus: Sure!
Some Other Factions of Judaism and Some Romans: Jesus! We will execute you for being an ontological scandal!
Jesus: This is all going exactly as I planned.
Some Other Factions of Judaism and Some Romans: Wait, what?
Jesus: HAHA SUCKAZ IT’S DONE! *dies*
Zombie Jesus: *resurrects* Sup babe.
Mary Magdalene: My hero!
The Apostles: We have emerged from our hiding places to start the church!
Zombie Jesus: *smacks them all upside the head* Good to see you losers. Now be nice to the ladies while I’m gone. *ascends into heaven*
Peter and Andrew: We don’t know what he’s talking about.
Mary Magdalene: What else is new.

The New Testament

The Church: Hey! The kingdom is here! Jesus is awesome!
Many People: We like these drunks, their message of love, and their anachronistically communist communities.
Roman Authorities: …who are these weirdos and where did they come from?
St Peter and St Paul: Jesus will triumph! Caesar is not Lord!
Roman Authorities: We’re going to execute you. Nothing personal. We do it to everyone who challenges us. I mean, if we let all you crazy people run around doing what you wanted, then we wouldn’t be an empire, you know?
~
St Paul: I will now invent the basis for most Christian theology.
The Church: We like you, St Paul!
St Paul: Never put jam on a magnet. Stop being assholes toward each other. And stop hurling the law at each other. You don’t understand the law, and you don’t understand Jesus.
The Church: …maybe we don’t like you so much anymore.
~
James: HEY! You have to do good works!
Martin Luther: You shut your face.
~
The Author of 1 and 2 Timothy: I will pretend to be St. Paul so I can oppress women in the church more effectively!
Many Modern Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christians: We like the way he thinks!
Feminist Theologians: Not so fast, imposter man.
Mainline Denominations: …we could do something about this, but it’d be easier not to. I guess we’ll just ordain women but leave the larger sexist system intact.
Feminist Theologians: Maybe we should just convert to Wicca.
~
St John the Divine: I wrote this about the end of the world! Possibly while high!
Many Modern Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christians: We like the way he thinks! Let’s use this to screw up politics around the world, oppress random groups of people we don’t like, and contribute to the conflicts in Israel!
God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Communion of Saints: WTF.

Modern Arguments Between Atheists and Christians

Many Christians: RAWR! The Bible is the Inerrant Word of God! The world is only 6000 years old! Women are sinful! Homosexuals should die! Muslims are evil! OBAMA IS A COMMIE MUSLIM!
Dawkins, Hitchens, and many atheists: For many reasons to do with philosophy, humanism, and science, you’re wrong, and you should shut up. Also, your Bible says terrible things and all of you should believe it literally or you’re not real Christians. But that makes you terrible, terrible people.
Mainline Denominations: We shall form a committee to deal with this challenge.
Many Biblical Scholars: You know, science, philosophy, and theology haven’t been the same discipline for the last 500 years. And for most of Christian history, the Bible was not interpreted literally most of the time. And look, there’s this wealth of scholarship that deconstructs the Bible as a factual source but leaves its symbolic and most of its historic meaning intact. So maybe we Christians should stop acting so nonsensically and maybe we can find common ground with other religions and those who don’t believe!
Everyone Else: Shut up.
Many Christians: We appeal directly to Jesus!
Jesus: When you stop treating the Bible like the fourth person in the Holy Trinity, I will consider your request.

It's going to get nerdy in here

2010-11-27T11:37:00.000-08:00

My final projects for school are as follows:

1) Exegesis paper on Rachel's theft of the teraphim in Genesis 31.

2) Developing a three week study for parishioners on three cultural or theological developments in early and medieval Christianity (Chartres Cathedral, the music of Hildegard von Bingen, and Gregory of Nyssa's homilies on the Song of Songs).

3) A paper on the theologies of battered women, their intersection with Christian atonement theologies, and possible implications/developments of liturgy that can arise from these intersections.

A week ago these challenges were seriously bumming me out. However, a week of delicious food, time with family, and straight up REST has given me the energy and enthusiasm to move forward. I don't think I've ever been this excited about finals and academic ass kicking, which says a lot because I'm a chronically good student. But this giant, sometimes batty and incoherent brain is a gift from God, and I intend to use it to its fullest extent.

Bullying, Christianity, and the Culpability of All: I am writing this post instead of doing homework

2010-11-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

Last week in class I hit the wall. Seriously hit it. Seminary has been stirring up a lot of untreated trauma I thought was dealt with, and clearly it was not. I think that's what happens when you're dealing with questions of good and evil on a regular basis.

This isn't going to be all that coherent, so please bear with me.

I pointed out in class how oftentimes, canonical criticism is used as a kind of closed feedback loop in which people support just about any kinds of godawful ideas as being "in the Bible", how many people treat the Bible as some sort of ultimate arbiter which gives the people who wield it as a weapon the upper hand while those who contradict that kind of attitude and belief are cast out as being "unbiblical", and how we act like the biggest struggles in Christianity (like slavery and the poor treatment of women) are over because those things have supposedly been vanquished in the US when in fact there are many groups of people who are acting out and ramping up some serious violence in this country in the name of God.

I was told that we have to treat everybody with respect because no one is going to convince anyone else and by the way, how do you know you're right? I responded by saying, "Well, what I believe and what I do doesn't have its end cause in the suffering of others." But apparently this isn't good enough...now I have to respect people who have no problems seeing members of my family suffer or die for being gay?

Others came to my defense, saying that silence in the face of oppression is not okay, and that it is the power of the Holy Spirit, and not idolatry of the Bible, that should inform Christian practice. That's all a very treacherous road to walk down, I admit, but the responsibility of communities to arbitrate factions headed toward violence cannot be ignored.

I mulled over why this argument made me angry for several days. By the end of probably the fourth or fifth day, I came down to it in my own prayers: I have been praying all of my life that someone will stop the bully from hurting me, because nothing I am doing will stop it. I have watched through most of my life as bullies made me an endless target to the point where I doubted every single part of myself, hated every single part of myself, and adults stood by and did NOTHING. Children stood by and did NOTHING. It was seen as being MY FAULT for any of this happening, when most of the time these bullies appeared from nowhere and proceeded to pick on me until I nearly had a nervous breakdown at the age of 10. This pattern continued in much more subtle ways right up until not long ago, when enough was enough. I am tired of apologizing for who I am and always being on the defensive so I can be the foil for someone else's misery, insecurity, and power trips. I am done.

That's why I cannot see Jesus of Nazareth as being a bully, or siding with anyone who is. And I get angry that Christianity would ask anyone to suffer at the hands of individuals, governments, churches, or anyone who is behaving in a manner that resembles a bully. Someone, at some point, needs to stand up and say STOP. And it takes a village, literally, for it actually to do so.

We are living in a world where people have killed themselves over bullying. We are shocked and say we will do something. Yet we do not; we allow it to continue because it is easier to blame the victim than to transform society. And it is easier to write off a group of people as just being a bunch of fundamentalist crazies than to look at the society that created them or try to keep them from hurting the people they do. I am not talking about force. I am talking about something other than O'Reilly Factor rhetoric, and I am talking about something other than the polemics I see every day. I am talking about seeing people as humans, and that's really only going to work if people on BOTH sides of the table can do so.

I have been talking respectfully to bullies all my life, because I saw myself as a good, rational person, and it got me nowhere, because as the victim I was always destined to lose. I am talking about the intervention of someone who is neither victim nor bully, because this has to stop, and that's the only way I can see how.

Whose Wife Will She Be? Luke 20:27-38

2010-11-08T08:36:00.000-08:00

I done made a sermon. I said it in church. People liked it.

This story starts with a trick question. The text even tells you it’s a trick question. So we have the elitist fundamentalists approaching this young upstart to try and traphim because he’s got these crazy newfangled ideas about the Torah. That Maccabean Revolt, corrupting the minds of our youth, giving them foolish notions about scriptures and resurrection. So they’re hoping that maybe they can declare Jesus a heretic if he sticks with the Pharasaic/apocalyptic idea of resurrection but can’t back it up with Torah. Or if he splits the difference and tries to please both parties, they can call him a flip-flopper or some such. It seems like Jesus is in a tight spot. But it’s Jesus, so we as readers can expect him to come up with something suitably badass that will amaze and confound the people listening to him. And oh look, he does.

First of all, let’s lay a little historical groundwork for our text. The Torah does not say explicitly that there will be a resurrection after death. Therefore, the Sadducees didn’t believe it. In fact, the concept of the resurrection belonged to the apocalyptic prophetic tradition, which the Pharisees were part of. They developed it in response to what seemed like the endless suffering of the Jews at the hands of everyone ever without much of a reprieve. So their response was to remain faithful to their beliefs even while suffering in the hope that God would vindicate them, resurrect them after death, and reward or punish them accordingly. This contrasted with the traditional prophetic attitude in Judaism, which maintained that if you were suffering, you must have done something to deserve God’s wrath, so haha loser, oh wait, we meant to say you should repent. And when you died, you stayed dead, or maybe you went to Sheol. Who knows, really.

Jesus does, apparently. He fights Torah with Torah, saying that resurrection was already hailed by Moses when he declared the Lord to be the God of those three crazy patriarchs. And since God isn’t the God of the dead, but of the living, then those three crazy patriarchs must be alive in some sense.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Jesus is talking about something that is happening now, and something that hasn’t happened yet. Three dead patriarchs must somehow be alive to God, because all are alive to God, even if the resurrection of the dead hasn’t happened yet (and we know it hasn’t happened because we are not currently barricaded in this church fending off zombies or watching angels breaking seals or sounding trumpets). So we have the comfort of knowing that we will be with God when we die even if we don’t get the shiny new body until all our eschatological dreams have been fulfilled. All right, great, we’re covered when we croak. wipe brow But what bearing does this have on us now?

The Gospel of Luke has no problem illustrating the apocalypticism of Jesus’ message, but it is clear throughout the gospel that its writer was concerned not just with the hereafter but the here and now. And not just the spiritual here and now but the material here and now. Flesh and blood, food and clothes. So Jesus in this gospels is not just saving peoples’ souls, he’s saving their lives. And here, he is giving us insight into the way the Kingdom of Heaven works: it’s here already, but isn’t here yet. Both immanent and transcendent.

Jesus invites us into the mystery of contemplating what it means to become a child of God, to have all the baggage and brokenness of this world stripped away and have only love remain, and your identity as a child of God, a part of his beloved creation. And through Christ, even the material world, perceived to be corrupt and sinful, is redeemed and made new. His teachings here foreshadow what he will do both for the now and for the end of time: his own death and resurrection. In doing so, he ushers in God’s kingdom for us to participate in now and to look forward to.

Each day, we fall into sin and suffering. We witness death and destruction. We even participate in it. And yet, through the grace of Christ, we are constantly made new, constantly washed clean of our sin once more. We are echoing Christ’s own death and resurrection in our death to sin and rebirth in him, which is why St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, “what you sow does not come to life unless it dies.” We are then invited to participate in his great work that is being fulfilled even as we speak though it will be completely fulfilled in the time to come. Our God is not a God of death but of life, and we sing about it, preach about it, and profess it in our creeds. Jesus is where he always is, asking us when we’re going to start doing something about it.

So where do you feel that you are called to participate in the Kingdom of Heaven in the here and now?

If you are not sure, or if you want a better understanding of what any of this means, I’d like to ask you to take time this week, this month, this year, and pray to God about where you are being led. And by praying, I don’t mean talking. I mean listening.
The new liturgical year is almost here. The story begins again. The hope is for all time. The invitation is for now.

And that’s all I got.

Now They Have One More Reason To Laugh At Us: American Christians Fail Religious Knowledge Survey

2010-10-12T11:52:00.000-07:00

I encountered an NPR blog today discussing the statistical study that found atheists and agnostics to be more knowledgeable than religious people about religion. I've been reading through the executive summary on the Pew Research website. It's...depressing, to say the least, but it's not surprising to me at all.

First of all, it's not a secret that Americans are lagging behind the rest of the developed world on education. This alone probably trips people up on historical questions. Not to mention the distinct anti-intellectual streak that seems to be gaining steam. So we'll chalk part of this up to our excessively bizarre understanding about what helps sustain an economy and a society over the long term. Apparently, instead of "education", it's “innovation”, but that's not so much an actualization anymore as much as it is a vague buzzword that gets bandied about when someone suggests regulation in the banking industry.

But let's get a little deeper into what might be behind these results, aside from obvious caveats about any statistical study. What might be behind these results? Let anecdotal speculation abound!

Apparently one of the reasons why atheists and agnostics scored more highly is that most of them had achieved higher levels of education, which is also consistent with higher scores on the survey. I'm thinking for most of the people who fall into this group, they may have either come from religious backgrounds, struggled with it, tried to learn more, and based on what they learned probably gave up their faith. It's not uncommon for people going through seminary or religious studies to be challenged by what they learn about church history, doctrine, orthodoxy, and Scripture. I've also had many friends (not in seminary) who have given up on religion when confronted with what seemed to them a cognitive dissonance between faith and reason. So education probably has something to do with it.

I would also guess that many atheists and agnostics educate themselves regarding religion as ammunition for the inevitable pushback that many religious people probably give them on a regular basis. Don't pretend nonreligious people don't get harassed. They do. Similarly, don't pretend non-Christian religious people don't get harassed. They do as well, and it's abominable the way all these people are spoken to and treated and condescended to by Christians. When I hear about how Christians are so "persecuted" in the US, my usual reaction is that they probably provoked a vitriolic reaction on the part of someone that they're condemning to perdition or hurling the Bible at.

But when it comes to the responses of evangelicals, Protestants, and Catholics, I am not really surprised either. Anecdotal trends I have noticed in my own lifetime include the following:

a) Dumbed down understandings of the Bible. People hear the pastor say, "The Bible says this," and they believe it. They don't investigate it themselves. In fact, I call shenanigans on people in the same study saying they read the Bible outside of church. Even if they do, they in all likelihood are not given any sort of understanding of the context in which the text was written or the history behind it, which deprives the text of nearly all meaning. Most Biblical scholars say this is the WRONG WAY to read the Bible, and the history of Christian hermeneutics indicates that most texts most of the time were interpreted symbolically or metaphorically, not literally.

b) Dumbed down understandings of theology, if they get any at all. Most of the pastors I’ve met in my life have waged a gallant battle in attempting to translate exegesis and hermeneutics into language they think is relevant to the context they’re preaching in. At its best, this really does work and get the point across. At its worst, people are left with a kind of hazy understanding of what the day’s text was supposed to be about. This is if you’re lucky enough to go to a church where a pastor makes an effort to do that kind of work. Many churches feature pastors who rail against the perceived evils of the world, peppering their sermons with quotes from the Bible that seem to support their ideas. Many others ramble on about Word of Faith kind of stuff (i.e. Jesus wants you to be rich; God is a celestial slot machine). These kinds of sermons are really about making people feel good and righteous. They aren’t about critical self-examination or learning about Christian thought and belief.

c) Lack of Christian education. This seems to be a problem everywhere. I seem to recall youth groups as a place where you were forced into doing activities you didn’t like with kids who spent most of their time bullying you, with some Jesus name-dropping here and there. Either that or something resembling a white suburban cult. Adult Sunday School classes at many mainline churches I’ve been to have been geared toward people ages 65 and up, or are a secret that never gets talked about. Bible studies tend to take place during working hours. A good chunk of devotionals I’ve seen have taken Bible verses and stretched them so far out of original context in order to fit some feel-good idea about postmodern life that they’re unrecognizable. I’ve been lucky enough here and there to actually be part of a Bible study or theology group that has the guts to take on education in a way that challenges people to think and helps them learn, but they’ve been few and far between. Some of them have been pretty awkward, especially for me, because I usually have something to say, and almost everyone else sits in stony silence.

d) Persistent insularity and refusal to engage in ecumenism or interfaith work. This has two roots that I can see. The first is all the places in the gospels where Jesus insists that he is the only way, and all the places in the New Testament where St. Paul reiterates this claim. The second is the way in which Christianity, over a span of 600 years, became the dominant and hegemonic power in the West, and during those times slowly shut down the religious diversity that existed in the Roman Empire, especially after its collapse. The good news is, these days there is a lot more ecumenistic and interfaith work going on than there has been in the past. However, based on the survey, it’s clear that these movements haven’t been powerful enough.

So we have this sad state of religious knowledge in our country among the religious, who don’t know much about their own religions and know even less about those of others. How are we supposed to move forward, as a nation and as a planet, and face the many challenges of the coming 50-100 years if we don’t understand or respect one another? I know what some evangelicals would say on the subject, and their answer fills me with fear and loathing.

Shame, fear, and having enough

2010-09-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

There are times when I will express my frustration here, simply because discouragement is part of the journey and try as I might, I can't always work up the courage to RAWR HULK SMASH my way through all my problems (though eventually I do find the strength and move through it).

But the fear of not having enough is real, real enough to breathe down my neck, real enough to see it on the faces of the people I live near, the people at the store, the people at church, the people at school. It's not something that a magical prayer to Jesus can fix. It's not something that being reminded of all the things I have can fix. It's not something that is easily fixed in a system that is broken to the point where one in six children lives in poverty in this country, where millions are still without health insurance, where poverty programs have kept 3 million desperate people OUT OF poverty, where one in ten people are still out of work, where the gap between rich and poor is growing and social mobility has stalled. The people around me will not let me go without, but the shame that undergirds this is powerful, and so is the ultimate killer of all that is good: fear.

I have only halfway learned to accept that sometimes you're the deacon that hands out the right portions to the widow, and sometimes you're the widow accepting those portions. Dear God, help me, and help us all. The empty rhetoric of our politicians will not feed us.

There is no time, and no one actually cares

2010-09-25T13:36:00.000-07:00

I have many ideas that flit in and out of my head throughout the week on the many blog posts I could write. Stuff about the problems with conflating patriotism and Christianity, stuff about the many readings I'm doing, further discussions about gender and the church.

By the time I get down to 5 minutes with a computer and some time and an internet connection, I'm either too damn tired and not feeling it or about to start class.

Most of my spare time has departed in a flurry of moving into a (cheap) (reeking of cigarettes) new apartment while working a part time job and going to school full time. The fact that I've been able to pull off as much time spent with my significant other is a coup, but I will be paying for it in having to cram tomorrow and Monday morning.

I wish that pursuing my following was easier. I wish that it didn't involve me living in poverty, applying for public assistance, squeezing every drop out of my parents while putting the heat under my boss for a raise (which I got), and applying for more loans to pay for school. I wish it didn't involve the nagging sensation that the institution that I want to work for is indifferent to me altogether, not to mention my plight. I wish that getting them to respond to me didn't involve multiple phone calls and email reminders over weeks and months at a time.

I wonder what success that leaves me feeling well used and decently compensated feels like.

A Quick Reflection Before Class

2010-09-21T05:17:00.000-07:00

Given the huge amount of material we've been handed in the last few weeks regarding the origins and history of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, I find myself once again reflecting on how little of this is actually shared in churches these days. Christian people in mainline denominations don't seem to have a strong understanding of their own history, creeds, doctrine, and orthodoxy, let alone that of the texts that they read every Sunday. So when some emergent folk believe that we need to toss out said doctrines and even seminaries, I wonder whose purpose that will serve. We already have a multitude of churches for whom nothing but the (idolatrous) inerrancy of the Bible matters. Not history, not context, not nothing but an illiterate understanding of the text. Do we really need to throw all that out?

Others are proponents of giving people the tools of theological understanding so they can figure it out for themselves. I think that's a great idea. I also think it will require a lot of work on the part of the pastor.

We have a big task ahead of us. Many times (like this past weekend, when I moved into a new apartment and struggled against the smell of stale cigarette smoke therein), I wondered if I was equal to this class + work + commuting + homework + trying to fit the rest of my life in there somewhere. I have a choice, I know, but with this calling, I feel compelled to move forward, even if it's kicking and screaming.

We gonna light it up like it's dynamite!

2010-08-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

I wish I had the time to mull one of these over into a full post instead of just posting a bunch of random, semi-cryptic observations, but unfortunately, time is short for now. Perhaps in the future I will have more time.

I feel like I am walking on a bridge over a fairly large abyss that is literally being built as I continue to walk. It freaks me out a little, but just when I think one part is going to give I step onto a stronger piece. Things are coming together haphazardly, but nonetheless they are coming together. For this, I am overflowing in gratitude.

I love my quirky little divinity school. I know that after the first day. I love that it's all in some American Gothic Revival building with a huge bell tower and a dark little chapel. The people in my tiny 26 person class, are from all walks of life, have interesting stories to tell, and are devoted to God and the concept of Christian love/community. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find a place to crash when I'm commuting on Monday nights. Turns out that, for now, I needn't be worried. There are enough spare couches and beds to go around that fellow students are willing to share. My adviser is a recent transplant from London who teaches a Bible and Film class. There is a strong multiracial presence in the student body and classes, as well as a distinct program for gender and women's studies. One of the classes that I won't be able to take this semester, but hope to at some point, involves discussion of queerness in the Bible. LOVE!~ But for now, it's all Intro to the Old Testament and Intro to the Gospels and Early/Medieval Church History (<3) and crazy dissections of the church creeds. YES, MY FRIENDS. YES.

And I still love my job for letting me stay through the end of the year and possibly longer.

It's funny. I was so busy fretting this past weekend over a number of things. Totally stressed. Didn't know what I would do. And I went to church Sunday morning. Text was from Jeremiah, where God chastises the people for building cracked cisterns instead of drinking from the fountain of living water. My pastor took it and said "even when things are tough, you have to be thankful for what you have." It kicked me in the face. I was so busy fretting and complaining that I didn't step back and look at the big picture. In the big picture, there was a lot I was missing, a lot that was necessary in rounding out what reality actually was. So I let go. In doing so, I was able to understand that my situation was not as terrible as I had thought. I was also able to toss aside some of the bad shit from my past that was still getting me down. I kept looking back and hurting. Then I said, "Wait. I stand on the brink of a new program I can't wait to start. I have a job I love. I have a boyfriend I love. The future is brighter than I can possibly imagine, and I can't see it for all my fear and pain. It's time for this to stop."

I stopped.

I am free.

Letting Go, Beginning Anew

2010-08-20T15:39:00.000-07:00

Last year, I left home with a full backpack and a very large, very full suitcase, out of which I planned to live for the following year. Over time, some new articles have made their way into my possession. But this weekend, I chose to return home to Denver and start clearing out all the stuff I no longer needed.

It's funny what falls by the wayside over time when you don't have it in front of you. I rediscovered all sorts of things I had forgotten I owned. The cute magnets. The giant collection of spices. The random mugs. The lamp that I love and that I can't take with me right now. The pairs of shoes I thought I had given away. Clothes I used to love in high school but which no longer fit me.

So after carefully combing boxes, under-bed storage bins, and my closet, I have given away 6 boxes full of stuff, and will soon give away at least 4 more bags of clothes and purses. I'm not even finished going through my dressers. I cheerfully gave a few things away to one of my friends yesterday who had dropped by to chat and give me a hand. The 6 boxes went to the ARC. My clothes will probably go to Goodwill.

Everything I own is in fairly good shape. The clothing in particular is of high quality and pretty. As someone who needed to find such clothing in a thrift store, I was happy to luck out and find things that weren't horribly old fashioned, stained, or ripped. Now I return the favor to someone else.

I've never been very good at letting things go, but this past year has been incredibly useful and eye-opening in helping me understand that what I really need to get by is a lot less than I previously thought. In this age of overabundance (and this house where my parents are accumulating but never seem to get rid of anything), it's refreshing to know that I don't need a lot to live well. By living simply and reducing my consumption, I am reducing my share of this heinous overconsumptive nightmare our society has become.

I'm packing a lot of household goods in my bag, like good solid cookware and bed/bath linens. I joked with my mom that I may not have any furniture in my new apartment, but I'll be able to cook myself a damn good meal! I've survived in funky situations before. I'll do it again. Even if it means an inflatable mattress and my sleeping bag.

Why suffer?

2010-08-19T22:46:00.000-07:00

There have been many times in the last year where I started framing decisions in terms of the following phrase: Why suffer?

Martyrdom and passive aggressiveness are a way of life in my family. Unlearning those behaviors has been really hard, and I'm not quite there yet. But learning to give myself permission to NOT do something that a) I don't want to do, b) I don't have to do, and c) I feel that others expect me to do is something that I have endeavored to let happen.

I saw a bumper sticker a few weeks ago that said "Don't worry about what other people think. They don't do it very often." It made me laugh out loud. And then I understood something that was similar but true: most people don't think about me quite as much as I think they do. So flying under the radar is more possible than I previously believed.

In therapy last week, my therapist said, "You've finally figured out that the only person who is responsible for meeting your needs is you. Expecting others to take care of you is no longer going to work." I replied, "Well, gee, I feel stupid for not having figured that out sooner." She said, "Why? Most people don't figure that out until they're 40."

I am trying to make a decision. I am trying to discern my reasons behind the way I feel about it. I am trying to ask the question of "Why suffer?", for the decision revolves around my own suffering, and the burden of the expectations of others. And I'm understanding that in the context, the people in question may rumble, but ultimately will not think much of it. In the end, I have to do what is right for me, and doing that is fairly easy when the decision is not a moral one.

So here's to refusing to suffer.

Anne Rice has a point

2010-08-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

Apparently Anne Rice quit Christianity.

I guess I should be upset about this or something, but all I can come up with is this:

The Christian Church at large has dug itself into a lot of holes and then seems surprised that some people want out of them.

I found this quote via Jezebel that I think applies:

'Christianity "has become so bogged down with cultural baggage that it has marginalized its followers. I know exactly how Anne feels: that Christianity has been hijacked."'

I feel like that every time someone uses the phrase "Bible-based", because it's usually followed by a line of hateful bullshit. Anyway.

What I think it comes down to is this: people don't want to keep being given the false choices of shut up and believe everything we say or get out. They want a place to question and discern and understand. Unless I'm all wrong and what they really want is an angry sky daddy to tell them what to do and wrangle their sociopathic impulses with threats of hell.

I guess the sheer irony of the whole thing is that she says she feels like an outsider. The first followers of Christ were by and large outcasts, and the prophet Isaiah, not to mention the four Gospels, is full of promises of deliverance and hope being made to those whom society had cast off and rejected. I'm not saying she's wrong for feeling that way; I've felt the same way many times myself. I'm saying that a hegemonic institution that pretends it is subaltern while ignoring the actual subaltern isn't doing itself, its founder, or anyone else any favors by behaving like a whiny child or a steamroller whenever anyone tries to question it.

Hubris and Humility: In Which I Contemplate Precolumbian History and Societal Collapse

2010-08-02T15:12:00.000-07:00

I am a sporadic participant in a local book club. Last month's book...well, I feel bad, but I got about 10 pages in and couldn't work up the effort to care. But this month's book, The Lost City of Z, I couldn't put down. It was the first real page turner I'd read since The Da Vinci Code, and it gave me the satisfaction of reading something because I found it rich and compelling, not merely because I had a lurid fascination about what would happen next.

The slow recovery of what was a massive city in the Amazon is absolutely incredible. What little that archaeologists have been able to uncover with regard to this civilization reflects a society that was able to perform social and environmental engineering on a large scale. This fits in pretty well with the histories of other civilizations in North and Mesoamerica. To think that so many of the peoples living in these cultures were killed due to the massive epidemics carried by Europeans is sobering and saddening. The Europeans then moved in and nearly finished wiping everyone left off the face of the earth. In the book, several native tribes who were nearly killed by "civilizing" colonists became extremely warlike and killed any white people they could find.

To read this book, for me, has been another opportunity to gaze into the abyss of colonialism and Christianity's complicity with it. Although many Christian people came to the defense of the native populations who were being killed by disease or enslavement, still more believed that it was God's will that such things would happen. Yet there were obsessions with finding so-called "Lost Tribes of Israel" (if you ever see some theory touting this, the words RACIST IDEOLOGY AHEAD should flash in your mind), of "civilized" natives who knew of Jesus or Moses or some such nonsense. In other words, white people. I don't get it. It's sick and stupid and wrong.

Another equally disturbing section was the author recounting his trip into the Amazon and seeing areas of forest that had been completely leveled for the purpose of ranching and farming. Although it's easy for someone like me, comfortable in my home with plenty to eat, to say that deforestation is wrong, I'm not under the impression that the people doing the logging, farming, and ranching are the poor just trying to get by in a harsh climate. I'm under the impression that they're either enslaved or working for desperate wages while the "business" folk are making profits off of them. I'm also under the impression that the Brazilian government doesn't have enough control to stop the rich ranchers from hiring thugs to kill and threaten to "protect their interests". Grann's story of one such group gunning down an elderly American nun who was attempting to act as an advocate for the local tribes leaves a chill in my heart. So I guess in this case the arrogance and complicity of the church has been superseded by the violence of capitalist greed?

The history of a few civilizations in the Americas (Anasazi and Mayans, for instance) leaves me with the understanding that even if you are able to perform environmental engineering on a massive scale, you are still at the mercy of Mother Nature. The fact that Western civilization has somehow managed to overcome Mother Nature thus far means that the bigger and more complex we get, the more devastating the disaster will be when collapse comes. And it will come. All signs point to indicating that we will overconsume ourselves into oblivion if current trends do not change. I know there are many Christian people who have woken up to that fact, just as there are many who have woken up to the fact that forms of oppression, such as sexism, racism, and (neo)colonialism, are inherently anti-Christ's teachings. I am wondering if all of us can work together in time to bring ourselves back within the earth's capabilities. I am wondering if we will feel the need to let more people die (probably the world's poorest, who are not white) before we will do something.

Satori and stupidity, solidarity and fidelity

2010-07-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

A great deal of rage and frustration was released in my post two days ago. Unfortunately, I will probably have to deal with it again and again as I pursue my career.

However, in reacting to this situation, I chose to contact a local female pastor that I had met a month or two ago. She had offered at the time to meet and chat if I ever wanted to know what it was like to deal with the church in this way. So in response to my email, she called me back. She set up a meeting with me and promised to connect me with other local female pastors who might be able to help me out.

So out of someone treating me with contempt, I was able to find help to further my cause even more. Oh how the world works.

Furthermore, the night it happened, I ended up talking (sobbing) the whole thing over with a friend of mine. I was a wreck of feeling over someone who ultimately doesn't matter. He offered some really interesting support and advice, and the whole point of why I'm doing what I'm doing kind of kicked me in the face. I am not just called to stand in solidarity with those the church has broken. I am called to stand in fidelity with those who would hurt, deny, or betray me. It's not a warm fuzzy feeling, but it IS one I have to look at full in the face. And in doing so, I was able to let go of a great deal of anger and hatred that I felt at people who had hurt me in the past.

I'm still feeling kind of wobbly in the aftermath of this sudden understanding, but it's like a really big weight was lifted off my chest. Hard feelings rear their heads a little every now and then, but they eventually die off when I look at them with a dispassionate eye. So I sheepishly and meekly return to my task of getting ready for this fall. And I'm hoping to hear from potential new roommates soon. :-)

So "Bible-based" really means "pedantic legalist excuses for treating people like shit"

2010-07-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

This is the place where doubt and faith take on a completely different outlook.

I have been confronted in the last few weeks by Good Christian People (tm) who implied that I am doing something wrong simply by being who I am. Tonight, I got a face full when some Catholic lady told me that I'm in the wrong for being ordained because Jesus didn't bring women into the sacred 12 apostles. Which is really bullshit. I mean, Mary Magdalene was kind of a big deal before she got whitewashed out, Judas of the sacrosanct 12 fucking betrayed him, and Peter fucking denied him three times. It wasn't men who wrapped his body, put it in the tomb, and then discovered that it was gone 3 days later. Furthermore, when I handed her St Paul's 'in Christ there is no male or female', she was like "Oh, that's just for salvation, not for church leadership."

I kept throwing history at her, saying that what we think of as God ingrained tradition was something that somebody guessed at or established at some point, like during the Council of Nicea. But it's hard not to take it personally when someone tells you that a call from God is bullshit because of your genitalia.

I mean, I get why my atheist friend would say my calling is bullshit, for obvious reasons. But being told in 2010 that I'm still defined by my body and not my mind by people of my own basic religious understanding is not only discouraging, it's rage-inducing.

And it's disappointing since all my Catholic relatives are so cool with my calling.

I can safely say that in my life, I have been treated worse by fellow Christians than I have by any atheist, agnostic, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, or Muslim that I have ever met. And I can say that because I've known all of these different religious and non-religious people.

For a religion that is supposed to be about subverting might makes right paradigms and treating people with respect, Christianity is so in love with its own power, privilege, and hegemony that it can't bother with the ultimate point of what Christ taught.

When I encounter stuff like this, I wonder why I'm even going into the church. What is the point of subjecting myself to this kind of treatment? What is the point of encountering the sexism, the ignorance, the cruelty, the indifference, and the hatred? I wish I could say that I'm called to bring light into dark places; that sounds like laughable delusion at best, theological arrogance at worst. The best I can say is that I'm standing in solidarity with all of the people who, like me, have been partially or wholly broken at the hands of Christian treatment.

Is God laughing or crying? I can't tell. But I feel like crying right now, and hate that some ignorant bint makes me feel that way.

I kind of feel defiant though. Keep pushing me one way, and I adolescently want to go the other. It involves the use of the word fuck quite often though.

And if I hear the phrase "Bible-based" one more time, I'm going Elijah on someone's ass.

A Bunch of Thoughts: Racism, Classism, and Gutting the Public Sector

2010-07-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

When I read this article last week about the NAACP president Benjamin Jealous confronting the Tea Party movement about its racism, I couldn't help but think 'racefail' when the Tea Party spokesman responded. His comments pretty much confirmed everything that the NAACP alleged about the movement. The idea that the NAACP profits off of 'race-baiting', or that they somehow profit "more" than slave traders is stupid, and the comparison is creepy and evil.

This, as well as the ongoing recession, is making me think a lot about race and class. The persistence of racism and the persistent invisibility of classism in the United States have both been on my mind for years, and every once in a while there is a convergence of issues that leads me to take a bigger look at them.

Since I have moved to New York state, I have heard a number of things out of the mouths of the people around me that make me cringe:

1) The continued use of outdated racial terms or even racist slurs. I guess in a place where postcolonial discourse hasn't sunk in outside the university, white ethnicity still matters, and people are still struggling from the massive flight of manufacturing with nothing but casinos as replacement, it's not surprising, but it's disturbing.

2) White people going on about how hard they have worked for all the things they have while other people (i.e. nonwhites) 'sit on their asses and milk the system'. But I hear this everywhere in the US. Because invisible privilege is a powerful ally in continuing to be an ignorant bozo.

3) 'That Obama'. Classy.

4) How much they hate the welfare system and how people are lazy and take advantage of it and have all these kids and how those people don't even try and blah blah blah.

I stated above that class in the US is invisible. For people of color, class is NOT an invisible issue, as it is usually tied to white complaints about people of color 'abusing the system'. Whether it is illegal immigrants or black people on welfare, (usually) white privileged male pundits are always propping up some demon of undeserving poor people of color taking advantage of a system supposedly only paid for by hard-working whites and therefore only reserved for deserving white people. But the system is of evil socialism, and therefore should be dismantled.

More on this in a minute.

In comes this white guy to the fray. He talks about the inherent classism in the American post-secondary education system, and how while low-income people of color have a good acceptance rate, low-income and rural white applicants are at a disadvantage as opposed to their upper-class white peers in terms of being accepted to college.

Note that I am definitely not arguing that affirmative action be taken out of the equation. It's incredibly important. But this is not good. White privilege is very real, but the explosive combination of this sense of privilege, the globalized economy of outsourcing, and increasing anti-intellectual attitude in this country, fostered by classist discrimination and the way that post-secondary aid has been gutted by anti-public sector legislators, has created a group of people with a giant chip on their shoulder and some half-baked notions that there is going to be a race war or that socialist fascism is on its way.

(One of the minor ironies is that kids who participated in 4-H and FFA were at a bigger disadvantage, when these days going organic is all the craze and people are starting to use their backyards as experiments with animal husbandry and hobby farming. But 'organic' has been a giant class thing since the beginning, in case the nickname for Whole Foods (Whole Paycheck) didn't clue you in. Hipsters and yuppies need only apply, I spose.)

I went to a high school with a socially mixed population. You could see the way things would shake out class-wise right off the bat. All the IB kids, who came from incredibly privilege families, all went to college, often at elite schools. Most of the more middle class kids ended up at state colleges. The lower income kids ended up at community college if they went at all. Grades and extracurriculars were enormously important among the college-bound, something our parents and teachers harped on constantly. I think the teachers of classes outside the honors/AP/IB system were just happy if they could get their students to turn in their homework. Where was the push for those students? Where was the drive? And it wasn't just the white kids; the kids of color were not really encouraged either.

When I did go to college, I ended up at an expensive private school. I can't tell you how many kids would tell me about the importance of protesting against the Bush administration or ending the predominance of American corporations in the Third World, but stare at me blankly when I told them that the welfare system fed, clothed, and sheltered my family when we were in need. And those were the liberal kids. I didn't bother uttering any such thing to a conservative student.

So here we have a tottering system that people still desperately need, but no one will take responsibility for it. The systemic, chronic, intergenerational poverty that persists among blacks and whites alike continues because there isn't enough money or will to actually address what is at the root of the problem (lack of education and job training probably are a big factor). The people who pay for entitlement programs are either struggling themselves or, through that devious social message that has been running through conservatism and even liberalism for a few decades, they believe it's Not My Problem, and They Should Take Responsibility For Themselves. And they believe the answer is to further dismantle what remains of the public sector and give it over to God only knows what. Wolves, I imagine. The ones that Sarah Palin hasn't shot out of a helicopter.

The true problem lies in the following, in my opinion: lack of imagination. Lack of willingness to invest in the public as a community and come up with new solutions. Lack of courage to face up to the multiple global crises we are facing. Lack of willingness to use the famous social engineering that has created this endless monster of conspicuous consumption and use it to engineer something fairer and sustainable (but that's SOCIALIST!). Lack of ideas other that 'the free market' and deregulation, which got us into this stupid mess in the first place.

In conclusion, I've said a lot. I hope what came across was the following: racism and classism are bad, ignoring problems is bad, gutting the public sector is bad, education is good, and coming up with ideas that involve better education for everyone and more collective responsibility is good.

Strengths and Weaknesses

2010-07-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

Since I've been reading Now, Discover Your Strengths, I've been wondering on and off about the strength/weakness paradigm. This may not be very coherent, so bear with me.

According to the people who wrote the book, far too much of corporate America is focused on fixing weaknesses (which they term 'damage control') than honing strengths and natural talents to better harness the skill of people working as well as improving productivity and worker happiness. They want the emphasis to be on the development and honing of strengths and talents instead. To me, this actually makes a lot of sense. I mean, sometimes weakness will need to be mitigated in order for strengths to really shine, but the happiest people I've known at any job I've had are the ones who feel they're being used well, and the unhappiest are the ones who feel their strengths are going to waste while being told constantly that they have to get better at things they can't improve.

On one hand, I get a little leery of self-improvement guides sometimes. Some of it is a bit too prosperity gospel for me, the emphasis far too much on making yourself a God and puffing up your ego to new heights. But this book is good at emphasizing that false humility and ignoring your strengths often leads to useless martyrdom and further unhappiness. Heaven knows I've been there. Between acedia and bullying, I always had a chip about wanting to "work to my degree" and being unable to communicate what it was I was good at after having been told that what I was good at wasn't good enough, therefore working jobs that were far beneath my skill level and being unable to access the ones that would use me well (the nature of the current economy is NOT helping).

I tried out a new church this past Sunday (which I actually like quite a bit, though finding a place I feel I really belong to has been a struggle), and the pastor was talking about that even in a fallen world, God didn't make a mistake when He made us. I know that this sounds incredibly pat and perhaps even false given the complex and painful world we live in. But taking a seed from that, bear with me: if I was built in a certain way, then ignoring the talents I have that could be put to use helping others is kind of a sad waste of a gift from God. Given that I have a choice in the matter, I think I'd rather go to work doing using the talents I have than continuing to waste them.

When it comes to my weaknesses, there are times that I have mitigated them when necessary, but rarely have I let something go that I wasn't good at and then missed it further down the road. I feel (oh God this is cliche) that God has often been able to fill in when my weakness was most profound or destructive. Part of it, though, is that I've chosen to let that happen. Part of it is that I've been lucky. I've had a family to catch me when I fell. Not everyone is so lucky, as this article on NPR makes clear. So I hope to use my talents in a way that might help people in similar situations at some point.

I found an interesting quote from Nadia's sermon on the Good Samaritan this past week that really described all I've gone through, in terms of God making me a "new person". Losing my life in order to find it, really. "Becoming new people comes from being beaten. Beaten down by the impossibility of perfect self-improvement. Beaten down by the bondage of resentment and entitlement. Beaten down by a society in which we are never ever enough. And from the ditch where we lay unable to rise to the occasion, unable to do for ourselves, unable to justify ourselves, unable to choose our mode of healing."

This has certainly been true for me, and probably part of the reason why I've been able to discover my strengths through a method I thought was crap five years ago in an internship I never thought I'd be working in a town I never thought I'd move back to. Every time I thought there was an obstacle I couldn't get over, God was there to help smash it down, including my own demons. In the process, something very different has arisen from the ashes of my former life, and only by the grace of God does it exist.

If you think I haven't been cringing at the way most of this sounds smug and self-satisfied, believe me, I know. However, knowing that soon I'll be heading in a direction where I can work more effectively and more happily while helping more people gives me more to look forward to than almost any work I've done since I graduated from college.

Letting Go and Buckling Down

2010-07-09T13:31:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged in weeks! Inexcusable!

Well, no, not at all. Just in the labyrinth again. I found the somewhat different explanation of labyrinth in Kafka on the Shore to be incredibly useful to me. There's a lot going on in the head (and sometimes in the body, as yoga last night reminded me). At some point, I plan on debriefing a little.

Part of the reason I haven't blogged much is that I am really busy, though my census job has FINALLY come to an end (after much hassle and unnecessary paperwork). Part of it is that I don't want to bore you with endless gushing about my extremely happy and satisfying relationship. Part of it is that I don't have the internet at home, so driving elsewhere just to blog is sort of annoying. Even if I do have a great spur of the moment idea to just expound upon, by the time I'm at a computer where I can do so, I have completely forgotten about it.

These days I'm willing to let that go a little. I'll work on building up again soon. I've spent a lot of time understanding that people have given me a lot of shit about myself that a) I can't change and b) isn't really all that bad in the first place, just for whatever reason they find it intimidating, threatening, or annoying. So one less thing to feel bad about? Yeah, I'll take it.

You might be able to tell from current or past readings of this blog that I have spent a large portion of my life being bullied. It's a common, if obliquely referenced theme throughout my posts here. I am processing through it; anger tends to leak out here. It's about time I directed this anger outward in a healthy way instead of inward (though never at you, gentle reader), so if I blow off steam here, don't take it personally.

Today I took the StrengthsFinder test. I find the philosophy behind it to be pretty positive and useful, so I'm excited to see what I can do with my results: Empathy, Input, Individualization, Intellection, and Maximizer. More to come! The library is closing now, though, so I better get going. Cheers, gentle readers.

You can't stop the motion of the ocean or the rain from above

2010-06-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

Look at how all this time has passed and I haven't updated. It's not because I'm not thinking deep thoughts, it's just that between tying up the remnants of my census job, which is going to officially be over next week, working more hours at my first job, and spending ridiculous amounts of time in my car taking care of stuff, the time I've had left over I've decided to use by spending time with my new boyfriend, working on an art journal challenge (which is just about one of the most fun challenges I've taken on EVER), and reading interesting books like Kafka on the Shore and Burning Bright. It's summer, and I'm relaxing a little.

I went to Ann Arbor last weekend to hang out with some friends of mine from college and go see a Patty Griffin concert (which was probably one of the best concerts I've ever been to in my life; her special guest Buddy Miller was equally as amazing). In all honesty, it was really cool spending time with some of my favorite people ever. We'd riff off each other with ease, moving from one geeky reference to the next. I guess what disturbed me was how easily we fell into this weird habit of staring at a computer or screen or something else when the conversation went dry instead of finding a new topic or doing something else. To be sure, it seemed like we were all exhausted from our normal lives and trying to catch up on sleep, but it was still a little sad. Change is funny.

In the last few weeks I have faced some of the weirdest, deepest things in the labyrinth of my psyche and my life. And I am sometimes still inside, still not. I really don't know how much more I can say about it, save that one of my friends called me incredibly brave for doing so. All I know is that it is something that must be done. To hit the brakes and walk away would be tantamount to disaster. I wish I could come up with an awesome metaphor right now but I can't. Can't stop the rain coming from the sky? Hey, that one's all right.

o.O

Go read Hark, A Vagrant.

ETA: This quote from Jezebel made me realize just how much this confrontation with the weird shit in my labyrinth has just as much to do with, well, the exact kind of nonsense in the quote:

"Gender becomes such a vital part of how we judge others, and the idea that a girl's anger is irrational is instilled, and then the girl with the eating disorder or the girl who cuts herself is ignored or scrutinized for having feelings and wanting help. It has to be realized that if a woman or girl is upset about something, it's not just because she wants attention. And if she does want attention, maybe it's because she wants care. Is that something to dismiss? What happens when we do dismiss it? I'm not sure I want to know."

How about that...

Battling the Shadow Self 2: Electric Boogaloo

2010-06-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

Not to diminish this at all. Really. I use humor as a defense mechanism because generally I prefer laughing to screaming.

Taking on acedia is a battle that simply continues a struggle I've had with my shadow self in the past, one that has involved confronting parts of myself I definitely did not like but felt powerless to change, or even reticent to do so because there was something about them that I liked. Let's face it, despair isn't something you go chasing after, but the pride you wrap around yourself to justify your pain, like you're some magnificent martyred warrior in the War of Life (or some crazy shit like that), that's like a drug. The stupid shit I would do to get a rush that would leave me emotionally devastated...that also was like a drug. The ways people would hurt me, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, finally broke the camel's back. So I found myself abstaining from life in quite a big way. I functioned. I spent time around people. I was "busy". But so much of what was going on with me was internal. I shied away from doing the daring things I did in the past out of fear. I talked a lot about the processes, but talking and doing are two different things.

In the past week or so, something big has really rocked my life. And so far, it's been incredibly positive. I've been able to let go a lot of my fear, able to come out my shell and, well, be myself again. But behind all this joy, there's a an even bigger temptation lurking, one that threatens all my time in ye desert.

I encountered it most profoundly this morning. I was in church, and the pastor was exhorting us to let God have a bigger impact in our lives and use us to build His kingdom. And I was sitting there wrapped up in my, "Well, I'm going to do something like this, but I don't want to jeopardize what I've got going now!" And then I stood back and said "Wait one damn minute. The only reason this is happening is BECAUSE of the grace of God. And I'm trying to put limits on that grace because I'm selfish and want my focus to narrow to keep me happy. But I won't be happy if I trade the bigger for the smaller."

So this is a tricky process. I literally don't know what's going to happen in the next 3 years, or where I will be led. I have ideas, but they tend to shift, and I'm hoping studying will give me a better focus, or help me sharpen the tool of discernment.

But in that moment I was willing to trade everything I had gained through pain and suffering for comfort. And that's really damn scary.

The process for me now is NOT to give this new addition away. It's to learn to have it (or something similar) be a part of my life without letting it take over my life, which is something I would have to learn to do eventually anyway, whether with work, family, or something else. I just need to pray now harder than ever, and be vigilant.

In For A Penny, In For A Pound: Evil and Acedia

2010-05-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

In the last month, I read and finished The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. It was sort of a gateway book into Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris, which was recommended to me by the lovely and perceptive Amanda.

The first was, for me, incredibly convicting. Evil is, without a doubt, insidious and hard to avoid. Intentionality of action was clearly part of what Lewis was trying to drive the reader toward, and it is something that I have been lax about as of late. There were some commentaries on society that I sometimes disagreed on, but I found the book overall to be fairly convincing. The commentaries on social justice and democracy in particular really got to me. On one level, I'm not one of those people who bemoans that "There's no such thing as decent morals anymore!" I'm no paragon of virtue, which I admit while being keenly aware of the bullshit people have unfairly accused me of in the past (*snarl*). We're all sinners, and as Lewis himself says, nostalgia is a useful tool in trapping people's beliefs in a better past that never existed. But the headlong descent into the lowest common denominator of entertainment and education while public works decay and the social fabric frays in this country is not something to be taken lightly by any means. The Christian tendency in America has been varied: either responding with extreme priggishness (and resultant hypocrisy), apathy/confusion, or social justice efforts. But we can fall again into the trap of making the social justice of greater importance than the words of Christ, and of making deals with the devil in the name of expedience. It's a precarious path, no way to beat around it.

This led nicely (heh) into Acedia and Me. Norris' book, disturbingly, has been one of the most accurate descriptors of my behavior since the Meyers-Briggs test. I'm thinking that my past struggles with depression (which she is smart enough to say is a mental illness instead of a spiritual condition, and should be treated medically) have cycled into acedia, and acedia back into depression, like an endless feedback loop of dysfunction. It gets more disturbing when I realize just how many people in my life are probably suffering from it as well, since it's sort of a society-wide pandemic at this point, but I digress.

Norris' words not only describe a lot of my struggles accurately, and the problems that stem from them; they also give me courage in knowing that I am not alone, and that there are things I can do to fight the noonday demon, as she refers to it. Intentionality and discipline are two of them, just like Lewis implies, just like the Zen Buddhists teach. But it took Norris to wake me up to it in language I could understand, with suggestions that I can follow.

I find it remarkable how thoroughly Western society has just sort of adopted acedic tendencies, and then continues to be surprised when suffering on enormous levels continues largely unchecked. There is so much hurt and anger behind this uncaring feeling, this endless cocoon of comfort and fear. And that's where true evil can do its work: in the places where people are so wrapped up in themselves that they either can't see what's going on or don't care.

What I do take comfort in is the fact that my own spiritual tool of prayer is one of the best ways for me to combat this feeling, even as the practice convicts me to move out of my comfort zone. I know this is going to be a struggle for me for the rest of my life, but the Promise (as Norris puts it, paraphrasing from Pilgrim's Progress) of being able to rely on God gives me courage.

So I take the headlong plunge into taking on the devil himself, apparently. I really don't know what I'm doing, but then again, neither does anyone else, and God loves them too. So I'm going for it, as my title says.

Dating Jesus: A Tongue In Cheek Assessment of My Relationship With Everyone's Favorite Savior

2010-05-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

The upside to dating the Incarnate iteration of the Holy Trinity:

Whenever I screw up and say, "I'm sorry," he says, "I forgive you," and means it.

When I'm upset about something, he either says "Hey, I know how you feel" (and he means it) or "Hey, you really ought to think about that and try to fix it. But I will give you some help."

He's patient. Really patient.

He doesn't throw the fact that he died for my sins in my face. Only other people do that.

He's so great he forgives my enemies even when I don't.

He, like, defeated sin and death.

He actively works against the forces of sin and death in the world, battling evil and the stupid, cruel actions of people.

He manages to defy everyone's attempts to put him in a box.

Even when I'm really angry and throwing my rage around and blaming him, he is steadfast.

He not only doesn't care about my baggage, he asks me if he can carry it.

He loves me.

The downside:

He refuses to smite my enemies.

His sense of time is really different than mine. So is his sense of what is good for me.

But...

He is always right. Always. No matter what. So frustrating sometimes. But somehow I end up in the right place in the end, and it's all because of him.

And there is literally nothing physical about this relationship, except for the fact that I get my daily bread.

So there you have it. And if you want to send me rants about how I'm crazy or deluded or disrespectful, I kindly request that you get a sense of humor.

Sense and Sensibility and Mr. Darcy and Sharks In Space Riding Motorcycles Plus There Is A Time Machine: Mashup Reviews!

2010-05-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

Short, sweet reviews of this wonderful revisionist mashup literature.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Now, I liked the original, and the brooding Colin Firth BBC miniseries even more, but this book hit me in all the right places. I mean, I can't not love a book wherein Elizabeth dropkicks Darcy into the fireplace mantle after he first proposes marriage most insultingly, or wherein she obliterates three of Lady Catherine de Bourgh's finest ninjas, all while making feminist comments about early 19th century English society. The discussion questions made me laugh until I cried.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters: I think the author had less patience with the original source material here...the commentaries on the situation within the narrative are considerably sharper. The idea of Colonel Brandon as a badass gentleman with tentacles on his face which produce strange noises was hilarious, as was Margaret's slow devolution into a savage creature awaiting the return of the Leviathan. Lastly, we all knew Lucy Steele was really a sea witch even before this book pointed it out. I didn't like it as much as PPZ but I still liked it more than what I'm currently reading: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which should really be titled The Unbearable Pretentiousness of This Book.

Jane Slayre: This particular iteration was so well done I think I liked it more than the original. Jane has a great deal more pluck than her namesake did in Bronte's hands, and her ability to go toe to toe with Rochester whilst also being proper and slaying zombies and vampyres brought me a lot of cheer during a not so great week. I felt the original and modern narratives were actually brought together pretty well, creating a neo-Gothic thriller that impresses as much as it entertains.

Little Women and Werewolves: So I totally forgot how damn moralistic the original Little Women was. Every time you turn around in that book, someone's being taught a lesson. I mean, it's a good book, but even the addition of werewolves didn't dampen the Sunday School nature of the narrative. I also forgot how much I hated Amy's character; I still hate her. All I can say at this point is that if I had read this version in the 8th grade, my pop-up book that I did for my book report would have been a lot more fun and artistic. Also, did Beth have an awkward relationship with Laurie's grandfather the first time around? It seems a bit fanfiction-ish but also sort of appropriate for both of those lonely characters.

People are like "We're so over this!" I'm like "People have artificially short attention spans!" I personally prefer these to, say, Twilight, or the endless stream of bullshit chick lit. It's all about preference, what can I say.

Random stuff, like shoes and dreams

2010-05-16T10:59:00.001-07:00

I have this pair of Converse that I love so much I wore them nearly every day for two years. The soles were pretty worn, and starting to come apart in the back before I left for Prague, so I bought a pair I didn't love quite so much and have since then been missing them more than I expected.

When I told my mum I wanted them back, no matter how messed up, she struck on the bright idea of getting them repaired. So they're in the shop and new soles have been ordered...I'm kind of wondering what they'll look like when all is said and done. Now I'm getting to the season where I really miss them, so I hope I can get them back soon.

I am really tired of working 7 days a week...it stinks. I've missed out on two fairly important things in the last few weeks. I am hoping to be done with it by the end of this month. However, the stories have been entertaining, and learning to think on my feet and supervise others has been an important experience for me, one that I feel will be very valuable in the future.

When I was a little girl, I had a dream that, upon later reflection, I felt had the effect of subconsciously binding my innate power. It sounds terribly wonky to say so, but at the time, it had a profound effect on me, and remains one of the stronger memories of my early childhood. The funny part is, two nights ago, I had a dream that was its opposite. The power inside me broke loose, and the people around me were affirming of it instead of negative toward it.

Since then, I feel like I've been in a bit of a daze, but nonetheless am excited about the potential implications. We'll see where it takes me, in other words.

Wrestling With Angels: In which Jessica haphazardly takes on moderate hermeneutics with only a basic understanding of what she's talking about.

2010-05-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

Beware, this could get dicey, LOL.

In this season of Easter, Year C of the lectionary, there has been a cycle of readings from the Book of Revelation, which as far as I’m concerned is one of the more bizarre books in the Bible. The lectionary, which is not followed by many of the fire and brimstone types who have become the primary association of Christianity in the popular mindset, actually tends to shy away from passages from this book. It shies away from other scripture as well, like big chunks of the Old Testament (wait, there’s a book of Obadiah? What’s up with this crazy shit at the end of Daniel? And why don’t we ever read from Song of Solomon?). The tendency is to try and fit passages together based on the teachings in the Gospel. There are a lot of points in which Jesus refers to some scriptural Old Testament passage, and you can bet that any week one of those references shows up in the Gospel reading, the original passage will show up in the Old Testament reading. Paul is pretty good about those references too, so those will show up as well. Though his admonishments about circumcision (which was apparently a really big deal in the early church) tend to get left out.

At any rate, the lectionary apparently disciplines the pastor into following a pattern of thought and understanding regarding hermeneutics within a community, and also tends toward discouraging the abuse of confusing passages on a credulous and vulnerable public. So it makes sense that even despite six weeks of readings from Revelation, the more violent passages regarding plagues, angels, the Whore of Babylon (LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!), and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (I love you, Apocalypse Pony!) have been eschewed in favor of “he will wipe every tear from their eyes” (which I personally find a lot more comforting than the ocean turning into blood and people being crushed by giant hailstones, but that doesn’t say much for what I go to church for). I mean, despite the fact that there is always some subset of Christians believing that their generation will be the last before Christ comes, the lectionary has chosen to take a long view on eschatology, choosing to focus their attention on the already and not yet of God’s kingdom. The way it is set up clearly tries to encourage people to be stewards and followers of Christ in the present instead of nihilistically hoping for the violent end to come soon in the name of “hope”. The pastor of a church I attend remarked on this via a passage from The Screwtape Letters, saying that keeping people trapped in worry and planning for the future, instead of attending to the present in the name of eternity, is the best way to keep them in sin and paralysis.

But there’s something bugging me here, and I’m not sure what it is. I’m pretty sure it was bugging this particular pastor as well. He makes reference repeatedly to spiritual warfare, but usually swings it back around to encouraging the church members to continue and renew their faith and work in Christ. However the undertone of his sermons suggests there is something that is unsettling him about this particular cycle of scripture.

Understand that this is not a critique of the lectionary but with our larger treatment of the Bible. Part of me wonders why we can’t take the weird shit in the Bible head on and grapple with what is going on in it, historically, culturally, and spiritually. I mean, this is the stuff that invariably gets hurtled at us more moderate types by both sides of the fundamentalist/atheist divide. We treat certain passages in the Bible like toxic waste, something to be buried someplace where it won’t have to be dealt with very often, or we smooth it over by saying, “We don’t have to understand it, we just have to accept it.” What a load. In other words, we’re neither hot nor cold when it comes to this, but lukewarm, and it kind of sucks.

Avoiding abuse and demagoguery in the church via the use of the lectionary is really a good idea. Given the violence that has saturated Christian history, discouraging it as much as possible makes perfect sense. But there’s something more sinister going on here. In light of the post-Enlightenment rationalism under which we all operate, I understand that most mainstream Christianity has adapted itself in ways that sanitize, cover up, or outright reject old ways and beliefs that seem superstitious and irrational. We try to make ourselves fit in as much as possible with the general consensus through our apologetics and our outward conformity. The more evangelical and fundamentalist types, ironically enough, in embracing the irrationality of Christianity, have created a bizarro alternate culture that basically mirrors the mainstream consumerist model with a distorted Jesus as its figurehead. Both of these approaches miss the point in significant ways. I am not trying to set up an us vs. them mentality, but if Christianity means that one has to live according to the teachings of Christ, then this means we should be living out a different paradigm and embracing those who aren’t Christian, not merely conforming to the comfortable tit for tat, getting my share attitude of mainstream life, all the while condescendingly condemning those whose culture we consume to hellfire. Or treating them like we know something they don’t. That’s not transformation. That’s trading everything that is beautiful and dangerous and mysterious about our faith and our God for a bag of dust.

What if we took a hard look at the Bible, and instead of being afraid of the texts of terror, acknowledged them as being part of a larger, more complex narrative that defies our ability to compartmentalize it into neat bullet points on how to “be a better you”? What if we explored these texts in all their weirdness and violence? What if we started understanding that our understanding doesn’t get us very far in a universe of magnetic reversals, string theory, and singularity cycles, and that these texts might be the key to letting go of our illusions of control and civility? What if we actually started taking the long view suggested by the lectionary throughout this cycle, our need to follow Christ in the present in order to cut the chains of the future?

What if we acknowledged that, you know, we might actually need Christ? To turf us out of our cozy cocoons, and to heal our brokenness in all its manifestations.

I’ll try to take a long view on this one too, and understand that, heh, it’s never really going to happen until Jesus comes back. Except it sort of happens a little every day. That’s what’s so weird about this already and not yet that convicts me. I stand in awe and am transformed in the aftermath of the God-shaped hole that has been left in me, in the comfort and struggle I find in these texts and the communities I am called to live into.

What a year has taught me

2010-05-12T09:37:00.000-07:00

Insights given in the darkness have given me courage to stride forth into the light once more.

"What though my joys and comfort die? The Lord my Saviour liveth;
What though the darkness gather round? Songs in the night he giveth."

I am never alone or abandoned, and I am made whole and strong by Christ's love and power when I am weak and broken.

Thanks be to God, always.

How can I keep from singing, indeed?

No, really.

2010-05-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

Grace.

Already and not yet.

Too Close to the Madding Crowd

2010-04-19T13:32:00.000-07:00

G.K. Chesterton mentioned in his book Orthodoxy that it isn’t religious men who go mad, but scientific men. Now, before I get all sorts of angry retorts about how this is not the case, bear in mind that what I wish to discuss is precisely the madness of certain religious people.

Clearly, religious fanaticism has always been a problem, and as of recent years it has had a particularly strong impact on the geopolitical situation. The flashpoint of Israel, in which the concentrated fury of three major religions grapples for power, seems to color violence around the world to a much greater extent than would seem proportionate given the situation. But what brings this on, particularly with regard to Christian culture?

Since its inception, Christianity has had a sort of us vs. them mentality, believing that the kingdom of God is at hand and that we must prepare for it by converting those who do not believe and using the transforming love of Christ to lead better lives. The man (or men) who authored the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts in particular had a very specific mindset in which they believed Christ had been wronged and that his return was immanent. However, the major crisis of the early Christian church is that Christ did NOT return, despite the urgency of their early teachings, beliefs, and writings, many of which are currently the central texts of the Christian church (see most of the New Testament). So for 2000 years, we have been to some extent caught in a feedback loop that fetters us in dualistic thinking as much as it invites us to move beyond eschatology into some greater beauty.

Today, it is hard not to look around and see the ways in which militant Christianity is manifesting in the United States. From the militias based on the Rapture to the Quiverfull movement to the assassination of Dr. George Tiller to the ways in which evangelical churches contribute to the settlement crises in the West Bank, Christians are looking toward violence, rebellion, overbreeding, and retribution in order to either bring on the end of the world and the return of Christ or establish theocratic governance in the United States (and I'm only telling you about a handful; there are many, many more examples). All of these manifestations claim to be based on biblical principles. Yet all of them miss the point in tragic and incredibly dangerous ways.

Jesus came into the world at a time when the Judean peoples were suffering under the imperial rule of Rome, and many were looking to the promise of the Messiah as the one who would deliver them from oppression. Jesus proclaimed himself the Messiah, but he did not join in with those who hid in the countryside, waiting to attack the Romans. He did not participate in the violence and retribution that so many were demanding.

Instead, he wandered around and told people to love one another while healing the sick and the unclean.

He defeated both the opportunistic legalist establishment and the violent countermovement when he could easily have fallen in with either side and become a prince of this world. That he did not do either, but chose the reject them both in favor of grace, forgiveness, and love, is really the best news that Christians could ever hope for, even though it’s the message they refuse to hear (and preach) the majority of the time. It’s so alien to our sense of justice that we reject it in favor of new kinds of legalism and plotting to kill the Other we’ve been commanded to love in new and horrific ways for His glory.

Ew.

Ironically enough, all the death talk Christians have in their discussion of the Rapture (WHICH IS AN INVENTION) bears a lot in common with the past violent rhetoric of those godless Communists they were (are?) always railing against.

But anyway, back to this madness thing. A lot of people (that I've been reading, anyway) attribute the rise of fundamentalism to the triumph of rationalism, which on one level rendered Christian truth as something that couldn’t be scientifically corroborated, and therefore irrelevant. That’s a pretty simplistic description of this argument, but bear with me. Rationalism in a way has led to nihilistic thinking (the universe is come from nothing, going nowhere, and has no meaning), and the ways in which rationalism was adopted into Christianity have been nihilistic, through the application of reductionistic reasoning to texts that are already complex and lives which are infinitely more so. There is no hope for anyone in literalism, in legalism, in idolatry of the Bible, even though so many people who are trying to trigger the Rapture claim that the coming of Christ is about hope. What hope is there in destroying the earth on which we live? What hope is there in killing our neighbors? What hope is there in forcing the hand of God when we really don’t know what we’re doing?

That isn’t hope. It’s despair. When it becomes about our attempts to control God, it is despair.

And that’s the ultimate madness, isn’t it? Believing we can control God with our laws and our actions.

It really isn’t a new idea, the notion of controlling God. It’s just been repackaged in the shiny boxes of so-called logic and rationalization (so-called logic because there isn't anything logical about it). And it’s still just as broken as any Spanish Inquisition or Crusade.

So our broken feedback loop is constantly proclaiming that Christ is coming, and because he hasn’t and hasn’t and HASN’T we feel we have to move things along because we’re impatient and screwed up. In doing so, we adamantly refuse to join hands with the current “already and not yet” Kingdom of Heaven that Christ brought to us with love and grace. We instead turn toward the idols of this world, an action God is well acquainted with, pretending that one-upping, converting, or destroying our neighbor is somehow going to score points with the Almighty.

I'm sure Jesus is probably pretty annoyed with our attempts to take credit for what he did (i.e. saving humanity from their sins) instead of, you know, actually following his teachings.

I’d ask if we’re going to start changing our tune soon, but we already know the answer, no matter how hard we try. I guess that’s what grace is for. Madness, yes, grace is, but I’d rather live with that than the devil’s arithmetic of each little despot believing he or she has power over our Creator.

Home, Magic, and Belonging

2010-04-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

I was born smack in the center of Niagara County, this place that manages to embody both beauty and toxicity, prosperity and depression. Many distinct memories lie hidden along the roads through farmland, vineyards, and orchards, where we traversed the drives between wherever we happened to live and Grandma’s House, which was sort of the center of my little universe.

Grandma’s House is a story for another time, though.

When I came back to live here, it was as though, despite the familiarity of my surroundings and my uncanny ability to find my way around by sight, even though I hadn’t lived here in 15 years, all the magic of my childhood had somehow been sucked out of the place. Initially, I chalked it up to growing up, or the massive mental illness I was suffering at the time. Things do change, after all.

I’ve spent most of my life living in and around Denver, Colorado, a place I love. But for whatever reason, it never made its way into my heart as the place I belonged, even though I thought of it (and continue to think of it) as home. It houses a climate, a familiarity, and a quirkiness that quickens my spirit and makes me long for it when I am not there. Yet when I am there, it never seems to be the place I…fit.

So in other words, I have become used to the idea of finding things I love in a place even if the notion that I belong there never enters my soul. The change in my perspective of belonging in Lockport was disappointing, but not something I hadn’t felt for a long time.

Here’s the really strange part.

Last weekend, I drove a minor highway down Lake Cayuga to Ithaca. And all this past week, I drove rural roads from South Lockport to Medina.

The feeling came back.

I don’t know how or why or even what it means. I just know that in the April sunshine, under masses of trees newly sprung with baby leaves, past the farms and small towns, I felt a sense of belonging once more. And it was magic. Like there was once more the promise of a place to be, as if I had been grown from the ground.

I’m not sure what to do with this. At least three years of school lie ahead, beyond which I cannot scry. But I have a really odd feeling that I may just be led back here, the place I least expected to end up.

The thought makes me alive with joy and mysterious expectation.

Acceptance, Or Giving It The Hell Up

2010-04-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

As you can tell if you've been following this blog for any length of time, there came a point in my life where it felt like literally no efforts I made would lead anywhere positive. It was like the episode of The Simpsons where Homer becomes Mr. Burns' caretaker for a week and attempts to make breakfast for him. All of his breakfast iterations burst into flames, including the bowl of cornflakes and milk.

Yeah, life felt like that.

"Donuts?! I told you, I don't like ethnic food!"

Since then, with the help of therapy and haphazardly practiced Zen Christian thinking, I've been able to accept certain part of myself and my situation that I don't feel are very acceptable, and thus give them up to Jesus, so to speak. Since all my efforts pretty much came to nothing, there wasn't anything else for me to lose.

The aftermath has for the most part been very positive. Things I didn't expect to come up just...happened, and good things happened as a result, or were resolved in a good way.

I'm not saying this is a magic bullet. In my experience and that of others I have spoken with, prayers have a tendency to be answered in very unexpected ways. You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, blah blah blah Mick Jagger you get the idea. Garth Brooks likes to sing that some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers; one could say that. I would say they are all answered, and that the answer is sometimes no, which happens. Just because you knock on a door doesn't mean you'll get the answer you want; it just means you'll get an answer.

Note: Expressions like "Let go and let God" and "God never gives you more than you can handle" (ARGH F^&*$#^&$*#) to me are bloody well useless and dismissive of the pain of people because they DON'T acknowledge the difficulty of the situations people are dealing with. So really, don't use them on yourself or others. Denying or minimizing pain isn't going to do shit and will probably make the situation worse.

So this last week, I finally, after a great deal of struggle and false starts, looked my biggest qualm in the face, accepted it for what it was, and gave it up to my creator.

This is pretty much the culmination of years of struggle on this particular point. I can't say it feels that much better, but it does feel like something had changed, even if I'm impatient for it to get better and change in the way I want. Knowing the way things have transformed so far, it won't be the way I expect or want. That doesn't stop me from hoping, LOL.

Have to admit, it's getting better!

2010-04-08T12:09:00.000-07:00

I got some really excellent news today. I have a second job for the next two months. No doubt I will be exhausted by the time I'm done, but I am relishing the challenge for the moment.

I guess it's just springtime and the simple beauty of Easter, but I am feeling so very happy and confident right now. Every time it rains, I get a big smile on my face. Flowers have been emerging for the last month, and things just keep getting greener (if a little flooded; hopefully the sumps won't fail!!). I am seeing animals everywhere around the farm. Frogs, snakes, muskrats, bunnies, opossum, birds, geese (there's a nesting pair in the field across the road), and even a big fat woodchuck that lives in the old cow barn. It's been a while since I've been able to experience nature as a part of my daily life in a less controlled and drastically changed environment, so it's helping me further bring my "be present" attitude into sharper focus. Even if I'm still really far away from always being present (I'm a daydreamer by nature AND nurture, thank you very much Anne Shirley!).

I've been reading Columbine by Dave Cullen for the book club I joined. I had a hard time starting the first two chapters...the whole situation was a nasty time for my community, and there was a lot of unresolved pain that just sort of echoed for years. But once I got into it, I felt like it helped me put a lot of my confusion and lingering unease to rest. Reading about the whole thing in Buffalo 11 years later, however, is a very surreal experience.

And I leave you with this thought-provoking article by Zizek, who somehow gets Christianity's power on one level while missing some importantly intrinsic parts.

Holy Week Shifts and Dyngus Day!

2010-04-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

I kind of wondered how Holy Week would turn out. It was a weird, uncomfortable week. There were some big disappointments, but also some good moments.

I felt like several of my expectations that had been getting in my way, through fear, just up and died. And it's left me feeling a little unsteady, but ultimately peaceful.

This isn't the final stop, and there will be other things that will build up again through time. But I am so profoundly grateful to Christ and the mystery of it all for leading me to this point. There's no way I could have done it on my own.

I guess my biggest breakthrough is knowing, deep in my bones, that I'm tired of being bullied and I'm not going to put up with it anymore.

On a much lighter note, I decided to attend Dyngus Day in Historic Polonia! I haven't seen that much public drunkenness since New Year's Eve 2006. I watched a rather bizarre parade wind through a neighborhood distinguished by a number of abandoned buildings. I found a guy to dance the polka with me while the rest of the people stood around looking grimfaced to what had to be the most entertaining band ever (Those Idiots). I enjoyed the beautiful disaster that is the inside of the old Central Terminal. I watched some Polish dancers in their really pretty costumes doing folk dances. I was told by a drunk old lady that I should smack any cute guys I saw with a pussywillow switch because "they love it!" (not sure their mean-looking girlfriends would have loved it...I abstained. My flirtatious switching days are over, methinks.) I randomly ran into a friend from OF and drank beer with him and his friends. I did not steal the kishka. I ate the richest cheese-filled pierogi ever. I marveled at the lewdness of the various Polish shirts people were wearing, that involved plays on the words "dyngus" and "kielbasa". I kept looking at Polish phrases and thinking "they spelled it wrong!" because it wasn't Czech. I told a kid with a Pilsner Urquell shirt on that he had the wrong country. I took pictures of St. Stanislas in the beautiful afternoon sun. I got smacked with pussywillow switches by some drunk guys in the parking lot. Overall, I was glad I went. I mean, to miss Dyngus Day in Buffalo when it may have been my only chance to go would have been sad indeed.

I'm sorry

2010-04-03T15:45:00.000-07:00

It has been brought to my attention that I have been a jerk here, saying some things that were hurtful to people.

In the process of dealing with my own shit, I haven't always been cognizant of the thoughts and feelings of others. I am sorry for letting my own noise get in the way.

Please accept my apologies.

Holy Week Reminder

2010-03-31T12:15:00.000-07:00

Let's be clear on something, friends.

If you attempt to jump start The Rapture, or some sort of Tribulation, you won't be bringing on the End Times.

You'll just be killing a lot of people Jesus already died to save, and under His sacrifice and the concept of grace, you have no excuse for what you're doing.

I could go on for days about how creepy and evil the idea of bringing on the Rapture is. How it's theologically irresponsible. How it claims to speak for God in the most horrific way. How it's built on the dead and wounded bodies of the Children of God.

You have a choice, my Christian brothers and sisters. You can work toward the Kingdom of Heaven by loving your neighbor as Christ taught you. Or you can actively send us all to hell with your paranoid dreams of war and violence.

The fact that I even have to state that chills me to the bone. Then again, this week we're remembering the fact that we crucified the son of God a couple thousand years ago, so maybe it's never very far from the mark.

Come to the waters

2010-03-26T10:36:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, during one of our tumultuous pub churches, I got asked about how I think God speaks to me or reaches out to me. At some point I mentioned that usually when God speaks to me, it's something along the lines of "Wait" or "Trust". I can't describe it other than this deep-seated sense of comfort and peace that envelopes me. During one of the most painful moments of my life, I heard, "You're going to be all right."

This morning, my friend Roshi Doshi sent me a poem that he had revised. It's one of my favorites that he's ever written. While I was thinking about it, I heard God speak again.

"I put you here to be yourself. That is special. Stop acting like it's not."

It sort of reminds me of a dream I had when I was fifteen. I dreamt that I was brought before God, who apparently works in a 1950s style school office. I could not see Him because He was surrounded by white light, but I shit you not, he was drinking a Coke (wtf, product placements in my dreams of the Almighty). And He said "Dammit, Jessica, you're just not listening to me enough." And I made all sorts of excuses. I don't remember any more of the dream. He wasn't really angry, just sort of exasperated.

Clearly, I've been making excuses for a long time.

I feel like I've been leading a Lenten life in the desert for three years. Easters have come and gone, false hopes and misconceptions. Pentecost? A distant memory. But this year, I might just be able to put away my own self-absorbed bullshit long enough to really feel it in my bones when I sing "Jesus Christ Is Risen Today! Alleluia!"

The embrace of my own totality isn't the narcissistic arrogance I once thought it was. It's rejecting all the petty insecurites that have blocked my path with God. And I've only been able to get to this point through Him.

Bahhhh I can't express myself clearly about this. I just sound silly. Just that I am grateful to be moving in this direction. I am grateful for the approach of Easter. I am grateful to be shedding years and years of built up crap.

Lo, the winter is past, and the rain is over and gone

2010-03-21T15:19:00.000-07:00

Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.

He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow

Will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.

(Psalm 126:5-6)

Similarly, by Parker Palmer:

The plow has savaged this sweet field

Misshapen clods of earth kicked up

Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view

Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.

I have plowed my life this way

Turned over a whole history

Looking for the roots of what went wrong

Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.

Enough. The job is done.

Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be

Seedbed for the growing that’s to come.

I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons–

The farmer plows to plant a greening season.

Thanks be to God. Spinning out into infinity.

The Inadequacy of Gratitude

2010-03-20T07:38:00.000-07:00

I had one of those super busy weeks where everything somehow goes to hell and yet people all around you are willing to help you get back on your feet.

After a terrifying realization on Tuesday night, I was able to dig out the infected parts and redevelop some serious steel, though it took its toll: I spent all of yesterday in bed from exhaustion and a virus. Yet my friends and family were there at various points to give me a hand when I needed it.

I guess I could make some contrite tie in about Jesus, but nothing I can say really envelopes how much I appreciate these gifts I have been given. Being pulled back from the brink of the abyss, or given shade in the desert of my own self-aggrandizement, a chance to reevaluate and push restart. These things have come to me without me having to arrogantly go tromping off in search of them. Every time I turn around and immediately tumble over, face down in the mud, a hand is there to take mine and lift me back up again.

Gratitude isn't a big enough word to cover it.

In the midst of death, we are in life

2010-03-14T12:55:00.000-07:00

We buried my great aunt yesterday. I didn't know her well, and her decline had been a long time coming, so I can't say I was the most involved mourner ever, but I did go to the funeral with my grandparents and my aunt and uncle. It was mostly attended by numerous cousins that I vaguely remember from childhood.

What struck me the most during the funeral itself was how the emphasis was on the joy of being received into Christ, and the resurrection we go through after we die. It doesn't make any rational sense, but the part of me that hungers for what the rational cannot and will not feed doesn't just find it comforting; it finds it true, in some mysterious, bizarre, uncomprehending way.

We went to the graveyard in howling wind and pouring rain. As we stood graveside, soaking and shivering, singing a verse of "I Know That My Redeemer Lives," we proclaimed her and Christ risen, indeed, alleluia, in the middle of Lent, in the middle of the cold, muddy mess and joy of our lives.

Alleluia.

When birds do sing hey ding a ding a ding

2010-03-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

For some reason, this quote from a song by Snow Patrol (*sigh* yes, them) is really significant this week:

With a name I've never chosen,

I will take my first steps

As a child of 25

I've felt like a kid all week. It's been sunny and warm for a week, which is putting this endless surge of glee inside my head. I'm unproductive as hell at work, even though I still love it. I just want to be outside, basking in the sunshine. At lunch, I walked to Mighty Taco and thought of wandering around Prague the way I used to. It wasn't really a sad thought, though being able to access beauty pretty much anywhere I went without a car is an unimaginable privilege I'm missing now. But I'm here, and life is good, so I won't complain much. I went for a 3 mile run outside for the first time since December...the road has been too messy/dangerous and the weather too cold to do it since then. It felt wonderful. All the weight training I've been doing at the gym has actually improved my running time. I'm dreading getting reacclimated to running at altitude again, though.

I've been saying to myself for some time now that Sassy Jess is making a comeback. I think at this point, she's just here to stay, and I'm totally happy about it.

Come and join the feast

2010-03-08T16:02:00.001-08:00

In honor of International Women's Day, I am posting my first sermon. What does that have to do with IWD, you might ask? Well, given that I'm heading into a profession that is still forbidden to women in some denominations and an institution that still has a long way to go in terms of actively supporting women as equal children of God(dess), I consider it to be a feminist thing to do. But it's not just about that, obviously. It's about answering the call of God, and trying to be discerning of what is being asked of me.

Anyway, that's not very coherent, but here we go. As given to some very cool people at Parkside Lutheran on March 7, 2010.

The gospel reading this week, as usual, dispels the societal myths we build around ourselves as to how we think God, justice, and morality work. Our tendency to see God as an Angry Sky Daddy who punishes us when we’re bad and rewards us when we’re good is incredibly strong even today, as can be seen in the desperate attempts of people trying to curry favor with God through works and donations, or blaming victims of rape for dressing in a provocative manner. In this passage, we are told that Gentiles who were no better or worse than anyone else in their culture were randomly killed in the sacrifices of Pilate and that a tower collapsed and killed eighteen typical people. Jesus himself is telling us that we don’t know the capricious turns that life will take. The people of Haiti and Chile could tell you something about this uncertainty.

We like to live within the comforts of our own rationalizations, believing that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. Our society tells us that this is how the universe is supposed to work. Ultimately, it becomes how we justify our entitlements and privileges while blaming the poor and unfortunate for their poverty and misfortunes. Clearly, they must have done something to deserve their lot, while we must have done something to earn ours. It’s called the just-world hypothesis. We use it out of laziness and comfort, or discomfort at the thought that you could be living a largely blameless life and then killed in a car accident tomorrow. Heaven forbid we ever confront the fact that we aren’t always in control and admit that we can’t do anything without the help of God. It’s insulation against our own terror of the unknown, whether that stands in our minds as the future that is in question or is embodied in the form of our neighbor, needy or broken.

The thing is, Jesus never promised us happily ever after. He promised us life abundant, which is something very different. And sometimes we have to lose our lives in order to find them. Or maybe cut them down.

The pastor on Working Preacher.org, where I looked for some guidance toward the writing of this sermon, sees this passage as a call toward repentance, telling us that just because we so far have escaped the ax doesn’t mean that we are bearing good fruit. Complacency is not a substitute for the call of Christ. We cannot control the situation in which we come into the world and usually cannot control how death comes to us. Nor can we always anticipate the ways in which life will send the destructive equivalent of a runaway semi at us, which will invariably happen at some point in our lives. The only thing we can control is what we do with those crises, with the knowledge that those events can and will happen. We can control our choices, and our repentance, even when it seems that we have been cut down.

Slavoj Zizek, the atheist jester of the postmodern academic world, wrote a book on how revolutionary Christianity is and attempts to theoretically explore his admiration for it. According to his interpretation, we are no longer bound by the superego twins of nature and nurture that dominate our lives from birth. Our stations in life, social status, poor choices, and inevitable victimhood no longer have to bind us in pain. We can become new creations in Christ. However, this transformation is not without violence and pain. Repentance and being cut down from our old lives and our old ways of thinking are not easy to face.

Yet the good news, Zizek goes on to say, is that through our rebirths and acceptance of the agape, or love of humankind, that Christ calls us to, we are able to interrupt the endless cycle of violence and karmic retribution that traditionally dominates our moral universe. Furthermore, Christ asks us to turn to our neighbor, this creature who is not some mirror image of our own self/ego that some New Age types would have us believe, but an actual Other which we are terrified of. He commands us to learn to love our neighbors for who they are instead of narcissistically trying to love the parts of ourselves we see in them. By learning to love the Other and by returning hatred with love, we in Christ turn the just-world hypothesis on its head.

But maybe we don’t like the idea of a world where an eye isn’t taken for an eye, or our own meager accomplishments don’t earn us salvation. Our resentments and hurts are very precious to us, and let’s face it, are sometimes fairly justified. But Isaiah 55 reminds us that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor his ways our ways. Our desire for justice is strong, as evidenced by our endless cultural stories of vengeance, but God is interested instead in meeting the thirst for his love that we are all born with. This includes both healing our own wounds and the pain of those who wounded us. It also includes Christ reminding us that he paid it all; there is nothing we can do to work or buy our way to him. Sometimes this turns into what Father Richard Rohr refers to as a resented feast, where we cannot accept the love and grace God has for us. Yet the invitation stands, if we can trust enough to make the step into God’s imagination.

Instead of starving in fear of one another and the future, endlessly wounding and justifying in our fight to get a bigger piece of the pie, we are invited into this feast of rich foods that we don’t have to pay for because we have stopped toiling for those vengeances and empty promises which don’t feed us. The king has issued an edict releasing us from our debts. We, the sinners, the wicked, those who bear no fruit or bad fruit, have a chance to repent and to be reborn. Because with Jesus, not even death itself gets the final say.

We don’t get any guarantees in life. One day I was sixteen and working as a camp counselor with a good kid two years younger than me; two years later he was killed with his girlfriend in a head-on collision during a rainstorm. My second cousin, the same age as me, was killed by an IED a month before he was supposed to come home from Iraq. The CEOs of Wall Street live on in luxury while desperate people rely on food banks in order to eat because their unemployment benefits have run out. The only hope I can see most days is Jesus and the grace he has given, that enables me to slowly escape the chains of fear and rage that have shackled me all my life. The grace guarantee, as stupid as that sounds, means that we can replant when the hailstorms blow our tree down. It means we get to try again. It means we can replace the fear, hatred, wounds, pride, and justifications with love. I’d like to close with a poem translated from Swedish that well embodies the resurrecting power of Christ in our lives:

It is not true

That death begins after life.

When life stops

Death also stops.

Jouissance Denied: Zizek, Stephen King, and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves

2010-02-28T09:33:00.000-08:00

I just finished Zizek’s The Fragile Absolute after having finished about half of it and then putting it down for a month and a half. I have a problem with books that force me to think at a really high level over a period of time; when reality reasserts itself, I have to put down the rigorous exercise and rest for a while. I’ve taken years to finish some books, sometimes bordering on the realm of the absurd. DeLillo’s The Names and Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn took me 5 years to finally digest; I still can’t face the violence in King Leopold’s Ghost long enough to get through the blasted thing. I suppose Zizek would say something about me confronting the horror beyond the veil or something. I still only get what he’s saying three quarters of the time.

The Fragile Absolute wanders all over postmodern Marxist psychoanalytic theory and back trying to rehabilitate the Christian legacy as truly revolutionary. He does so haphazardly. There are some passages that are magnificent in their ability to describe the truth behind the strange turns our world has taken, like our obsession with apocalyptic scenarios and storylines being a manifestation of the modernist attempt to deem God irrelevant, the disturbing permissiveness behind fundamentalist/totalitarian ideologies, most chillingly described via a Serbian journalist: “[Milosevic] gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons,” and the way Christianity disrupts the endless ‘pagan’ cycle of violence in retaliation for violence. He cuts through a lot of sacred cows involving capitalism and the New Age paganism that seems to be an ultimate product of capitalism.

Yet I expected there to be more discussion of the problems of fundamentalist Christianity, and more discussion of the links between Christianity and Marxism. Most of all, I expected him to stumble onto grace, which I feel is the most revolutionary aspect of Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy. But some treatment of agape aside, he doesn’t ever mention it. It’s like trying and trying and getting so close…and then your partner switches strokes on you and everything falls apart. His argument degenerates into some bizarre several page discussion of Medea, Antigone, and Sethe from Beloved as examples of ultimate self-destruction to end some vicious cycle in the style of Christ, but without the grace part that makes the whole thing have some higher meaning. He gets agape and the love of the neighbor pretty darn well, and kind of skewers our typical understanding of God via Christ’s sacrifice (either as some tragic hero subject to a higher destiny (Abraham was just a dry run) or a perverse subject playing games with humanity and his own son in order to intervene on purpose). But he fails to rehabilitate Christ in a way that…well, makes sense. Now, normally I can live with shit not making sense in theology and Christianity (and there is now a ladybug crawling on my screen), but Zizek has taken me into some crazy ass grotto on Isla De La Muerte and I’m not sure how I got here or how to get out. He winds up saying that the Crucifixion is “a happy event – in it, the very structure of sacrifice, as it were, sublates itself, giving birth to a new subject no longer rooted in a particular substance, redeemed of all particular links (the ‘Holy Spirit’)”. He also says that “when we abandon the fantasmic Otherness which makes life in constrained social reality bearable, we catch a glimpse of Another Space which can no longer be dismissed as a fantasmatic supplement to social reality.”

Yeah, I’m not really sure about what the hell he’s saying either.

To be fair, he made the case earlier that it is in Christian agape that we truly glimpse the beyond in love for the neighbor as Other. Then he blathered on about the Law and sin for a while, saying the standard stuff about Christian guilt without any sort of step into the beyond of grace, which makes no sense considering its prominence in all of our theology. But what is really odd is how he finishes up, saying that our encounters with the Absolute in its fragility (aka Holy Spirit) instills enormous beauty and terror in us. I can follow that, to be honest. I can definitely say I’ve experienced it. But I still don’t know how he missed the most important part. Or did he address it and I do the missing? Can I wade through enough of his postmodern language and pop culture references to get there?

This, in my train of thought, leads me to a book of short stories I finished this week, entitled St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised By Wolves by Karen Russell. This terrific series of short stories revolves around children somewhere in that magical cusp between the end of childhood and true puberty, living in semi- to full blown supernatural circumstances somewhere in the swamplands of the deep South. I found myself 13 again as I read through them, trying to scry the bizarre adult world I was headed toward while knowing too much about human nature for my own good. I got lost in all of them, with their compelling characters and the demons, real and imagined, which haunted them. But what puzzled me most was how Russell crafted each story to end right at the moment of climax. You are led up to an exciting scene wherein the tension will be resolved, and suddenly, it ends with you still in midair. Except it doesn’t leave you with the major disappointment of little death denied. It sort of almost propels you over the edge with its mystery, and the disappointment diminishes.

It’s got a bit of sexual play to it, like a couple that is playing the orgasm denial game.

To be fair, the odd climax of these stories leave a tang of flavor that is lacking in, say, the work of Stephen King, who can’t end a book to save his life. His philosophy on this was accidentally summed up in the afterword of the seventh installment of his Dark Tower series when he accused his readers of being the type who have sex for the orgasm, neglecting to enjoy the ride (heh). He berated them for wishing to deny the characters their Grey Havens, their place of rest after a hard day’s storyline. Ironically enough, he then goes on to violate this tenet with Roland of Gilead, arguably one of his greatest creations. So the final novel of the magnum opus of his life is left on an edge that tries to replicate the magic of St. Lucy’s but in the end sort of pisses the reader off. The jouissance denied is less of a playful extension than the author’s inability to just…get off.

So we have an experienced lover who refuses (or ignores) requests to satisfy his lover’s main desire, a newcomer who delights in power games dressed up as innocent play, and a graying veteran who never really learned how to finish up. In a literary sense, it makes me want to invest some time in something that provides a bit more satisfaction on a basic level, if not an intellectual one. I guess I’ll be on the lookout for Nora Roberts novels the next time I hit the library.

What hath I wrought? Awesome, my friend.

2010-02-23T15:06:00.000-08:00

I painted this. For reals. Holy crap.

Drive-By Devil: The Spiritual Warfare Post

2010-02-21T09:30:00.000-08:00

I have gone back and forth on spiritual warfare for a long time. The rational, logical side of me hates the concept of spiritual warfare, thinking it's the favorite stomping ground of bonkers Pentecostals who can't face up to their own capacity for evil or call to love all people like Jesus said, instead willy nilly condemning them to hell (my rational side is also clearly very Judgy McJudgerson, a tendency I can't quite ever shake).

However, the rather mystical side of me understands spiritual warfare on a deeper level than I'd care to admit. Even as a little girl, while I could feel the presence of God, I also felt the presence of something extremely sinister lurking in the background. I would always expect for it to make its move in some overt fashion; after all, those are the kinds of stories we tell in our culture. But throughout my life, it has manifested in insidious ways that have slowly built to eventual devastation. As bizarre as this sounds, I kind of liken it to Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5, in which the agony of the Stalinist regime and the triumph of evil over good is actually voiced musically, sounding like a capitulation to the demands of a revolution that promised to liberate and instead set up a new kind of slavery. There have been many times and choices that I thought would work out incredibly well, and instead led me into nasty brambles or even a kind of hell on earth. It sounds dramatic, but it has been very real.

Today, ye first Sunday in Lent, the gospel reading was Luke 4:1-13, which is the temptation of Jesus in the desert just after his baptism. I heard the devil's possible temptation characterized as "drive-by devil", which cracked me up since I read Sinfest. But this morning, I heard a sermon that really hammered home to me just how real this temptation thing is. I got a bit of drive-by devil this past week. I have staked out some serious (and at this point, fragile) healing, and I want it to become stronger and deeper, really transforming. I found myself, however, really tempted to take some old roads, repeat some old behavior patterns. And I had to have a reality check about them today. If I go down those roads, I am going to end up in the brambles again. After this past year (during which, the words just spilling out of my mouth during a conversation with a good friend of mine, I described as feeling like demons were eating me), I can't turn aside and do the old me thing again. I want to, because it's very familiar even as it is destructive. But no. Can't. Not again.

I joked on facebook this morning that in light of the drive-by devil, I need an upgrade in spiritual firepower, and posted a pic of Cyborg Pirate Ninja Jesus (no mercy). It's a half joke, really. I need all the help I can get in order to shake this, and the notion that God is with me on this one feels reassuring. Even as I'm a bit unnerved. Buh.

This is how this post ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Where's my Holy Spirit flamethrower?

Transfiguration Station: Thoughts on Lent and Grace

2010-02-15T11:46:00.000-08:00

This weekend I did a lot of extra praying, and was a bit more attuned to the divine presence than I normally would be. It paid off.

The "high school" party I attended with a bunch of friends was a pretty good time. I was dragging and needed some INFJ-by-myself-recharge time by the end of breakfast (the most delicious breakfast I have ever eaten, dear God), but overall I had fun. I had never shotgunned a beer before, but now I have. LOL.

We had a Bible study last night, with several of the same people who were at the party. I fell asleep during the opening prayer, and don't quite recall everything I said, even though I was surprisingly coherent for having had only 3 1/2 hours of sleep. I remember saying that guilt is a f*cking useless emotion. We talked about using the Transfiguration to get ready for Lent. I think I analogized the Transfiguration as being kind of like satori or kensho, where you have a sudden revelation and enlightenment about yourself/the universe, and then Lent is the period of time where you use that revelation to grow without holding on to it. One of the guys said "you can't take it and put it in a tent", which fit perfectly in. Nate made a point of how we use Lent as a time to climb our way to God instead of letting God come to us. Another girl said that Lent is the time we can strip down to the essence of who we are without all the bullshit we like to surround ourselves with, and understand who we are in God's love. I thought everyone was pretty onto the idea. It was a good discussion.

Lent for me this year is quite different than it was last year. I had this premonition that I was going to die about a week or two before Ash Wednesday, and for all intents and purposes since then my old life really bit the dust on every possible level. I have a lot of feelings regarding that but would rather not discuss them here. At any rate, I guess the premonition came true, on one level. Last year I was pushing so hard to find out what was going on, so I set up a really vigorous discipline. It was well-meant, but at the time I really didn't know what the hell I was doing. I am not a fan of self-inflicted suffering, despite how incredibly good I am at it (indeed, it may be one of my greatest talents), but the suffering I have been through this past year, as well as the healing that I have been given and achieved, have really cleared a lot of the garbage out that got in my way last year. This year, the biggest discipline I will go for will be keeping the divine hours (I already do a daily office, which I do as soon as I wake up so I don't forget). I am trying very hard to finish Thomas Merton's Contemplative Prayer, and several things I read this morning really truly resonated. (Can I remember them in detail now? Nah. But I hope to share them soon.) In reading them, I understood that my efforts in the past (and even now) are often misplaced. Where I'm headed now is a direction that is more restful, more Zen (in a way), more "shut the f*ck up and listen" than I've been willing to do.

All my efforts to "brain" (heh) my way to God, which usually are stimulating and fun, really don't get to the heart of the matter. It's the faith part that is leading me tantalizingly forward, revealing itself in community, communion, dreams, and occasionally solitude. Sometimes there is a transfiguration moment. Often, it's more small and quiet, though it resonates just as powerfully.

I've been reflecting a lot on the anger of the people in the ELCA at the passage of the measures that extend more rights within the church to the queer community. I don't get as angry about it as I used to when I think about it for a while. But as I understand it, it comes down to the same tension that just about every controversy in the church comes down to: law vs. grace. Nadia once said in a sermon that we humans are arrogant enough to think that somehow the issue of who is in or out of God's tent is up to us when it's really up to God. And everyone's already in the tent, or at the cool kids table, because we're all God's cool kids. That's grace. And everyone gets it, no matter what, even the people I can't stand or who have hurt me gravely. But ultimately, I guess I choose that over pride and despair, where the law takes us. Because if it were up to us, there would be no heaven, just a hell full of endless torment and despair, people inflicting their pain on each other forever. Garrison Keillor mentioned something about that as a joke on Prairie Home Companion two weeks ago, when he said that the Lutheran church was having their annual meeting on the budget and they were going to vote on it. And he said that it's a good thing that things like sanctification through grace and forgiveness weren't on the ballot, because they probably wouldn't pass. I think he's right. God's economy doesn't work like ours. God's economy is about giving poor people good things to eat for free and releasing prisoners and forgiving debts. And all of Jesus' talk about cutting down trees that don't bear fruit or bear bad fruit aren't even what we think they're about; he rose from the dead, and raised Lazarus from the dead. We get to try again, make new choices, go in a different direction. My old life didn't bear fruit anymore, so when it died, I got a new one that does. Death and failure don't get the final word, even when we'd like to shove God into one of our pretty boxes and pretend that they do when we want to control people.

Ok, I'm going to stop rambling now.

Not So Liveblogging the Olympics

2010-02-13T09:32:00.000-08:00

I decided to watch the Olympic opening ceremonies on Canadian television last night and was by and large not disappointed. There are distinctly fewer commercials and a lot less inane babble on the part of the commentators. Bring on the curling, CTV, and I will bring the Labatt's.

Also, RIP Nodar Kumaritashvili. What a terrible tragedy. I hope nothing else happens like that for the rest of the games. Or, you know, ever again.

And now, may the silliness begin.

1) That was a Tim Horton's commercial?!?

2) Yay mounties!

3) How cool is it that the Canadians are making First Nation culture part of their ceremony centerpiece? The US is terrible about that.

4) Ohhhhh Canadaaaaaaaa....someday I will learn all the words to this and sing it at inappropriate times, similar to my plans to cruise down Federal on Bastille Day with a giant French flag waving out my car window.

5) I will cheer for any team of athletes smaller than 10 people.

6) Oh Joe Biden.

7) This Nelly Furtado/Bryan Adams song is weird, but not too cheesy. Her shoes are freakin insane.

8) Weird Quebec commercial

9)The commentator is telling me to suspend logic. It's interpretive dance, I figured that out.

10) Alberta Ballet is pretty rockin. Go Berta!

11) I am massively coveting the music and costumes of the fiddle players/dancers. And there was a pinch of Loreena, but no actual Loreena.

12) Oh Joni. Your song makes me cry.

13) This part should have been more interesting, but it wasn't. I guess it's more thrilling in person.

14) This poem was pretty cool. Go Canada!

15) I bet they regret giving all those hockey players drums.

16) Oh hai, kd lang. This is a very strange choice of song.

17) I dig hearing French along with English.

18) Can I go to bed yet?

19) 12 more minutes. Tiiiiiired.

20) Donald Sutherland is Canadian? Barbara Anne Scott is tiny. Oh hai, a female astronaut.

21) That lady has some serious hair.

22) The wind machine isn't working well on the flag.

23) This Olympic song lasts forever. I bet they're dragging it out to get more time for the torch.

24) Moment of silence. Sad.

25) Oath. Women's hockey! Yeah!

26) Strange French song. Strange French dude.

27) Oh good! The torch!

28) Rick Hansen = Badass

29) A bunch of Canadian athletes!

30) GRETZKY

31) ...what are we waiting for?

32) Uh oh, busted hydraulics.

33) Oh yay, it's working! Sort of...

34) FLAMES

35) White Canadians have a name for their god: Gretzky.

36) Bed

Emerging

2010-02-12T14:27:00.000-08:00

I skimmed over something that said "I am emerging", referring of course to the church. I think I am also emerging, but not in terms of the church today.

I am emerging out of a murky tar pit of a lot of negativity into seeing myself for who I am and accepting it. I have had one particularly powerful tool for doing it, and am profoundly grateful for it.

I was called "brilliant" by someone this week. I think I'm finally ready to step up to the plate and own that instead of pretending I'm not simply because there are other people out there who are smarter than me. Playing small hasn't done me any favors except in very brief, necessary moments. I'm not meaning losing my humility. I mean being who God made me to be and not letting other people interfere with that. I've been bullied all my life for who I am, even by people who professed to admiring me while being cruel because they were intimidated by it, and I'm tired of it.

I painted a picture this week for the first time since high school. It isn't the most beautiful piece of art ever, but I really like how it turned out, even if I'm still trying to grasp some basic techniques. Armed with this newfound confidence, I embarked on a much more ambitious project last night at Organic Faith's craft night. I was offered a larger canvas to work on if I promised to give whatever I produced back to the group. So I painstakingly sketched out a picture of the Madonna and Child taken from a picture I took in the cemetery at Vysehrad. I think I'm going to start painting it tonight. I was surprised at how well my sketching turned out. I'm not really any good at shading or creating my own work but I can reproduce things all right. I will post the results here when I'm finished.

I also went rock climbing with an acquaintance I met through my cousin this week. It was the first time I'd done it in quite a long time. I was really nervous at first, but all the strength training I've done at the gym has really helped; I was able to use my arms more than I have in the past, and by the end of the night was having a much easier time and less terror of the heights I was getting to. I was happy to have attacked some fears in that regard, and really enjoyed watching the other folks boulder around on the walls. All in all, it was a good time.

I'm preaching for Lent. AAH! I have to get ready! But in the meantime, emerging goes on, and I am grateful. So grateful.

The silly is strong with this one

2010-02-10T09:59:00.001-08:00

I can't tell you how many times I've felt like this in the past year. Luckily, I haven't had much cause for it lately.

Hee.

PS I aced the census test after the breakfast of champions. I AM A NEW ANIMAL!

The year of the Lord's favor

2010-02-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

About a week ago I was told two things by someone I respect a great deal:

I should concentrate on doing things that I love.
I should concentrate on cultivating a close relationship with God.

It sounds like something I should have been doing all along. I think it was my intention to do so in the first place. But somehow, along the way, I got sidetracked. Some of these sidetracks began three years ago, two years ago, about a year ago. Some were more recent. So this past week I concentrated on those two things just as hard as I could and the following resulted:

I had a really amazing week. I am thoroughly happy.

I reflect on what is still to come. I have a feeling a lot more will be asked of me soon, and that part of me is currently resisting the idea that anything more CAN be asked. So I sat and looked at the situation dispassionately. At least, as dispassionately as one can look at a situation like this. Heh. I realized that my efforts have brought me pretty far in terms of changing my mentality, behavior, and actions to be more Christ-oriented, but the resistant part of me is fairly powerful and starting to interfere. So I'm doing the "God, I can't do this alone" prayer. Because I can't do it alone, and trying harder will probably just turn out in the nasty snarl of knots that happens at the end of arrogance, pride, and self-delusion.

In the interest of trying something new, I asked a friend of mine about her painting hobby. She responded by giving me three small canvases on the promise that I would show her my efforts (she is one of the most generous people I've ever met). My grandma has a box of painbrushes she hasn't used in years, so I stopped by Crafts and Creations last night to buy some paint, then sketched out an idea for a painting in my head. My own design actually surprised me. I think it's going to turn out really well.

Veil of the Temple

2010-02-08T15:06:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to a tiny worship service for Organic Faith. I showed up early to help set up; we were going to use the sanctuary but discovered to our surprise that an orchestra was going to be practicing during our service time. So we instead set up in an upstairs office largely devoid of furniture. Pillows scattered in a circle around a cross, lined with Christmas lights. Small chairs draped with gorgeous vestments donated to us, embroidered silk. Tea lights everywhere. We sat in a circle and listened to music, reflecting on quotes read aloud at the beginning of each song. We sat there like this for at least a half hour, soaking up music, scripture, guidance. Then we got up and stood around a table for communion. As we held hands and spoke The Lord's Prayer, I almost started crying. It felt tangible, more real in some ways than a lot of worship has for me lately. I know that worship isn't always going to be a transcendent experience, and I won't hold on to it. But I am grateful for this flash of heaven's curtain being pulled back.

Lost and Found

2010-02-06T13:39:00.000-08:00

I really like my job. It's crazy awesome and badass. They're going to give me more hours, which I am super psyched for. I'm going to work the 2010 census too, methinks. The only fly in my ointment is that I feel like I'm coming down with some kind of upper respiratory ick. Ick.

I finished The Lost History of Christianity, which chronicled the rise and fall of Christian churches in Asia and Africa between the time of the apostles and roughly the fourteenth century, and included information regarding the fate of the remnant churches even up through the 20th century. It was an extraordinary trip through what was once a series of rich church cultures that dialogued with Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Manichaesm, and had their own liturgies, art, scholasticism, and architecture. Their collapse was a mix of bad choices, bad luck, and straight up human nature.

The author has some interesting things to say about the whole situation. He doesn't pull any punches regarding the fact that the Asian and African churches were destroyed by Islam, but also pointed out that Christianity did the same to Muslims in Spain and Jews throughout Europe. What becomes clear is that people do bad shit to each other for reasons that are religious, but also political and economic, in order to gain, hedge, and maintain power. One of the more interesting connections he draws is that the violent overturning of Christianity in Asia coincided with anti-Semitic violence in Europe, the Black Death, and general famine due to the Little Ice Age. In other words, it was a bad time to be alive, period, and if you happened to be a minority, you got scapegoated. The rise of the modern nation state extended the ability of the state to control isolated areas that once housed lingering minorities, and the extension of the state's power meant that these minorities were therefore extinguished.

On a spiritual level, he discusses the interesting theological questions that the church's destruction poses: was God angry with the followers to the point that their city's reduction to a pile of skulls by Timur's army was justified? Does God favor Islam? In the past, people may have thought this (some people STILL think this way). Instead, he chooses to step away from such black and white ideas about humans knowing the will of God and reminds us to be more humble in terms of timelines and history. Churches which once existed and were destroyed could eventually be reborn. Islam, despite the negative connotations currently associated with it, clearly has an appeal and spiritual benefits for a billion people in the world; God is big enough to work in many ways through many people, even if we don't see it. The author actually poses an interesting challenge: the theology of extinction. Given that I have spent a great deal of my life attending mainline churches whose heydey was long before I was born, I understand his challenge. It's been a common question nearly everywhere I've gone. I wonder about it in the context of the Rocky Mountain Conference of the United Methodist church, where tiny churches are barely surviving. Yet sometimes different forms take shape. When the United Methodist church in Clarence Center closed, the Sikhs bought the building and now use it for their temple. At House, we use a building whose congregation has long disbanded for our worship and vestments that were donated because they were no longer being used by those congregations.

I think humility is ultimately the message here: hegemony does not guarantee that one will remain that way. God doesn't work the way we expect. What once was lost can be rebuilt, and what is strong now may soon die. We don't know. All we can do is the best we can with the time that is given to us.

The words of men and angels

2010-01-29T11:05:00.000-08:00

I am currently in a game of cat and mouse with one employer, trying to get someone to contact me back about starting a part time job next week. The other part time job officially begins Monday morning. I'm hoping for some reprieves from the crap weather we've had this week; driving has been treacherous, and one of my jobs requires me to drive anywhere from Niagara Falls to Orchard Park. Yeeeah.

My family came and went. It was a good week/weekend. My bro and I got to have some alone talk/sing time, and Dad and I got to have hang out/Tai Chi time, both of which are pretty important to me because they don't happen very often. My relationship with both has often been rocky, so being in a place where we get along together and there isn't any conflict or tension is such a gift.

I keep making bizarre personal discoveries that have been buried or unrecognized my whole life but are coming to the surface for healing or to be used in a positive way. It's actually a relief to feel these things opening up. There were some things that confirmed just how far beyond words this faith thing goes for me. Words barely scratch the surface. I'm not sure how much I feel comfortable describing here yet. It's one of the more profound things I've encountered, and yet I feel largely incapable of describing it (and even rather reluctant to do so as it is so personal).

Some friends of mine are coming to visit this weekend. I hope the weather holds so that they can get here and go home safely. Dang it, it's snowing again.

Uh oh, now I have to make a decision.

2010-01-23T12:27:00.000-08:00

It always goes down like this:

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

SUDDENLY 4 JOB INTERVIEWS/OFFERS AND ACCEPTANCE TO ILIFF.

I have another day to sort through and see what comes through.

Life abundant indeed.

Helter Skelter

2010-01-18T12:10:00.000-08:00

The endorphins I got from working out today are battling the depression I've felt since Saturday. This makes me feel very strange today.

I got a lead on the job front, which as serendipity would have it led me back to someone I networked with at my grandparents' church. I wonder if it will work out.

I also got the strangest feeling that one of Sunday's PostSecrets was written to me. I've never felt that way before, just that I could often say "me too" to many of them.

Speaking of PostSecret, that came up in conversation last night at Bible Study. We were talking about confession and absolution. In church liturgy, community confession is a way of acknowledging the ways we've fallen short of God, and the absolution is really a mechanism to hammer home that we've already been forgiven of our sins by God. PostSecret was interpreted by one person as being the confession without the absolution, which is where the church could step in and minister to people, but another person brought up the fact that, attention getting aside, many people use it because there is a lack of judgment involved, and involving the church would on some level imply judgment. I think the second person was right; PostSecret reveals this emotional subculture of shame and guilt in our society (or a lack thereof, in some cases) and the fear we have of being judged. In that regard, PostSecret does a service to those who are suffering in silence by providing that outlet of sharing in the midst of their terror, fear, shame, and guilt. One of the sources of negative and positive tension in this bizarre sharing/voyeurism is that there is no resolution unless people write that there was some kind of resolution. So we rarely get to find out if the person's burden was lifted.

How would the church step in to this situation? I don't even know if it would be possible or desirable. The only thing I could imagine at all would be Jesus reading each one and saying "I love you" regardless of what was on the card. He might also say "I'm sorry" or "That's funny" or "Be careful", but love would be the main theme. Since we can't speak for Jesus, the only part I know for sure would be the "I love you" part. And probably "you're forgiven". I don't know. I think the church needs to do a better job of addressing our guilt and shame and secret fears and needs for lamentation. A lot of people go to church to be uplifted, but we can't deny or avoid the negative feelings forever, and we need to stop pretending that becoming a Christian means that your life will automatically become bunnies and rainbows if you just put the right coins into the celestial slot machine.

Monday needs to stop being so weird.

The Wine Ran Out

2010-01-17T09:35:00.000-08:00

There are some times when I am more than happy to express my beliefs and reasons for them to others. But there are other times, especially in the face of hostility, where doing so is quite exhausting to me.

Last night, I found an article that Nadia wrote for The Lutheran at Zion. In it, she discussed our BYOB Bible Study, which throughout last year was one of the most fun and spiritually fulfilling of my spiritual practices. She talked about how we would find the texts funny and interesting. At one point, she actually quoted me. We were joking about how in one particular text, Jesus wanders on the water around behind his friends, coming up from behind them, and it was like he was trying to sneak up on them or something.

I like to believe that Jesus had a sense of humor. He saw his disciples as friends. Friendship involves laughter and jokes. Even if he wasn't trying to sneak up on them, it's still a strange story, and he probably found ways of laughing with his friends in other ways.

My grandma insisted on seeing this article, then proceeded to basically interrogate me about how I could possibly see this as a respectful form of spiritual discipline, as well as questioning why I like certain kinds of worship and music instead of others, why I don't go to evangelical churches (ironic since she's gone to bloody mainline churches all her life), why I don't do this or that, how I can think in this way, etc. It's so tiring to have to support what I feel feeds me spiritually in the face of someone who thinks I'm wrong, which is why I don't like to go after atheists or agnostics for their lack of belief. Usually, the only people I go after at all are Christians whom I believe are harming others with their practices. At any rate, the whole conversation was exhausting, and she just kept pushing until I finally said "we agree to disagree" and left it. This morning she tried to start in again, but I refused. She says she's trying to learn and that she's curious, but the way she pushes and the questions she asks tell me that she wants someone to tell her she's right, not that she wants to actually learn anything.

I guess I should have more patience, but I spent most of yesterday feeling very depressed and today isn't shaping up to be much better. In this situation, my capacity for rational defense of my beliefs is getting low, and may soon border into harsh words. I've spent a lot of my time since I was 13 under the impression that she didn't think my beliefs were correct simply because they didn't reflect her own. That's not a very good place to start, and she has a tendency to push and push until no one is happy, because she feels any difference in belief from her own is somehow a judgment on herself. I've worked to unlearn this behavior, and I still see it in a lot of people I know. I'm trying to leave it behind. It doesn't always work.

In today's lectionary reading, Jesus is changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana. This is a very hilarious text, when it comes down to it. But there are so many times when it seems like the wine has run out; it's run out for the entire nation of Haiti. I pray for changes in hearts and minds, and for strong hands and plentiful supplies for aid workers. I pray that I have the strength to walk away and be renewed instead of losing my temper. I pray that she can just let it be.

Oh hai, dis poem sez what Im tryin to say

2010-01-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

As I just got done with the terribly unclear and somewhat unstable of TNR's review, I read this poem Mr. Roshi Doshi put on his blog. It sort of says everything I believe.

Biggest Fish I Will Ever See by Jessica Fordham Kidd

Biggest fish I will ever see,
men caught you
and hung your death
on a tree by the river.
That night I slept in a huge bed
on a screen porch.
I heard your skull talking,
and in their skulls
the men heard you too.
No one knows exactly what you said
and continue to say.
Your bones are long gone.
The nail that held you
remains to be swallowed up
by years of bark.
It is all just water.
I believe that's what I heard -
It is all just water -
the reason it feels so good
to swim in dark rivers.
Why men eat fish that felt that good.
Why people put their wet mouths together.
The reason I know what you said
even though my ears are full of air.

The Next Reformation: At Last, A Review. Kind Of.

2010-01-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I'm finally getting down to reviewing Carl Raschke's The Next Reformation. I found a succinct and accurate summary over here.

There are a few things that I really agree with the author on. One of them is that the point of Christian faith is the relationality of it. We who are Christians often have faith because it comes to us through personal means, individually and collectively. We experience the love of God and Christ in our dark times, in our good times, and with others. Often, people try backing up this kind of feeling about the nature of reality through rationalization, which has similarity to science without the rigors of the scientific method or fact. This is where Christianity in the West has stumbled, though, and I still agree with Raschke on this: trying to pretend that our faith makes sense in a rational, scientific way only makes us look like simple fools or intolerant jerks.

To some extent, in 1 Corinthians 1 St Paul already foresaw the entire point of grace and the cross as being something absurd, a stumbling block even, to people who were of different religions or philosophical persuasions (the Greeks and Jews respectively, as he was writing about in the texts). He goes on to say that God's foolishness is wiser than our wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength. In this text we get a brief glimpse of a deity whom we really cannot put in a box, despite our 2000 years of attempting to do so with words and phrases that end up raising more questions than they answer and hurting people Christ ultimately commanded us to love. So to move forward from both Raschke and St Paul, moving toward relationality and away from the idolatry of our own rationalism (and rationalizations) about God in the way of Christian faith requires radical humility, admitting that we don't have all the answers or the knowledge, but we have this great idea that we should love everyone, regardless of who they are.

The same guy who gave the summary wrote a review of TNR, which can be read here. I want to address some of his points as well as the ones in Raschke's book.

First of all, I'm a bit leery about Raschke's beliefs in spiritual warfare and pentecostalism. I think that different people have very different experiences and reactions to different worship styles, and that just because one set works for one group of people doesn't mean that it'll work for everyone. Moving on from this, I have concerns about discernment. Just because we don't feel we need to justify ourselves with excessively philosophical ideas about our faith doesn't mean that we as a group don't need to practice wisdom and discernment with regard to whether or not the church is reflecting Christ in its practices. I also don't know how I feel about spiritual warfare; I feel that too often Christians blame sh*t on the devil, or on demons, instead of taking a hard look in the mirror and really understanding each person's capacity for evil and their responsibility thereof. I mean, what's the point of grace if the devil makes you do it and you aren't responsible? However, I have encountered some fairly evil shit in my life, in human capacity and something that indicates something bigger in the background. So I just don't know. I guess that's where discernment really comes in. Raschke might argue that discernment stifles the Holy Spirit; I think that without discernment, Christians may just get themselves into some bad shit that stifles the Holy Spirit just as much as discernment could.

Another question I have is about Scriptural inerrancy. Raschke claims that the Bible too often has become an idol in the evangelical church, a fourth person in the Holy Trinity as it were, a claim I would support. The reviewer says that we can trust God via inerrancy because He speaks the truth through Scripture. Raschke believes it is the Word of God because of what it does in our lives. Though I may be falling back on rationalism here, I think there's a different kind of rationalization that goes on when one talks about Scriptures as being the inerrant Word of God. I think there is so much to be gained when one really digs into the Bible with all your tools in the box: historical context, linguistic understanding, theology, rationality, and personal reactions/feelings. But given how much the text has been tampered with over time, the purposes it served as a record of tribal history, how it isn't consistent, and how it can still be used to hurt certain people, I'm leery of saying this is the inerrant Word of God. That's another putting God in a box thing that I can't stretch myself to. Does it provide a powerful source of comfort and wisdom to me in a holy sense? Absolutely. Does it provide a really big insight into the general f*cked up nature of humankind, their ideas about the divine, and their desperate need for love? Yeah, that too. There's also the reality that the Bible was filtered through human consciousness and that religion is ultimately about human experience. If we're going relational here, we have to go full throttle and understand that even 2000 years of Christian praxis, tradition, and theology aren't going to make Christianity into verifiable scientific fact or the Scripture into the Ultimate Truth. Both are as flawed as we are in our need for grace, through which God comes to us.

I don't know. I'm just tired of people hurling f*cking Leviticus at people I love and telling them they're going to hell Because The Bible Says So. It misses the entire point of Jesus, the cross, and grace. Had the Gnostics won out over the objections of St Paul and the eventual Council of Nicaea, Christianity, orthodoxy, and the Bible would look very very different. So let's have some courage and humble ourselves and actually love Christ and our neighbor instead of constantly trying to impose our collective will on the rest of the planet.

And that's my review of The Next Reformation. Heh.

But then we will see face to face

2010-01-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

I wish I had some sort of new theological insights to post here, but the ones I have had in the last week or so are of a really personal, if earth-shattering, nature, and I'm not ready (don't know if I ever will be) to discuss them here. They've been pretty positive, though, and are leading me in good directions.

I have been networking extensively. For some people, it may not be very extensive; for me, it's been pretty stretching. But I've made some great new friends as well as good acquaintances, and it's been nice to know that people are willing to root for you or give you a hand as needed.

I've also found a few jobs that I've applied for that a) I'm qualified for, b) would be good at, and c) I would absolutely love doing. It's a great feeling to finally find those. One of them is my dream job. I don't think I'd be able to touch it, but I applied anyway. It's nice feeling like there might be a good place for me to land after all the strange hardships I've been through.

I've finished A Scanner Darkly and begun Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I'm not sure what this says about my state of mind. I feel like I've been looking through a glass darkly for some time now, and parts of it might be coming clear that have been intensely murky for over a year.

Nil canitur suavius, nil auditur jucundius, nil cogitatur dulcius, quam Jesus Dei Filius.

2010-01-11T07:59:00.000-08:00

I went on a retreat this weekend with a bunch of Organic Faith/Zion kids about my age this weekend at Lake Chautaqua Lutheran Camp. It was a very snowy, very fun, very community-oriented weekend. I spent nearly all of my time around others, which is normally a very tense, exhausting thing over time for me, but in this case, I was actually quite invigorated and content. I think there are some good reasons for this.

To be blunt, most social interactions at House were always fraught for me. Though perception-wise people saw me as a friend or acquaintance, I always felt on the outside of things, like there was some secret language I wasn't speaking or some unspoken etiquette I hadn't learned. I don't know why. House has its clique-ish tendencies. I felt more welcome before its expansion than I did after it. I'm not sure how things would be once I return. I'm not saying it's anyone's fault, I'm saying that I am not sure what the deal is, especially since I have a lot of good friends there. I felt like BYOB and Theology Pub were the two places where I fit in the most.

With this group of kids here in Buffalo, it's like I was instantaneously welcomed and accepted. People were happy for me to be there, and made a point of inviting and including me on activities. If I wasn't up to a particular activity, they wanted me to participate in something else or even just stick around and talk. They were very much "we're all in this together, going down similar paths, struggling with similar things, so we need each other to help out." This concept and idea is where I've been headed for a while and I'm so glad I found it here. They also commented that they think I'm like a puzzle piece that fit in perfectly. I haven't had anyone say that to me in a long time. I also haven't had that feeling since I was with my group of friends in college.

I noticed that in the welcome, in the games and fellowship, in the discussions, in the shared meals, that pathways inside my brain were being reopened. I have felt unsafe in community for so long, even as I have longed for it, that I literally walled off a whole section of myself because of fear and distrust. I did not trust the people around me to see who I was and accept me. I assumed that they either did not care about who I was or would be actively hostile toward it. I was full of shame over who I was. Recent experiences gave me that fear, or contributed to it. And now I'm a little scared to be that open and vulnerable again, but I think it's a necessary step toward healing, toward rebecoming myself without the shame, fear, distrust, and silence. I understand what Dorothy Allison means with the phrase 'public silence, private terror.'

I remember really beginning the path I am on now, writing a poem about God holding up a mirror and me being forced to look at it. For so long, I thought that the mirror was about me having to do all this work to become better, to have a solid identity so that I could be an agent for God in the world. But now I understand differently. God held up a mirror so that I could see what She sees, which is an intensely beloved creation.

I have skidded around the black abyss of darkness that threatened to swallow me whole. I am choosing the path of the knight of faith, yet again, making my leap over the void, trusting that I will find solid ground beneath my feet or be given wings to fly.

Yes, we're still having this discussion. And we will not shut up and return to the kitchen.

2010-01-08T11:35:00.001-08:00

Okay, this article deserves its own nuanced post, but I'm not in a position to really scrub my brains over it today.

I'll just offer an anecdotal story.

My mother used to be employed by a company that is in the top 10 of the Fortune 500. They laid her off and gave her severance in the early part of last year after 15 years of service. At one point, she was participating in an office party potluck. Her boss (a man) brought in this really elaborate concoction. When she asked him where he got it, he said "My wife made it for me." She said "Gee, I wish I had a wife to do that kind of stuff for me." He just gave her a puzzled look.

It's a bigger deal, at every level, than you think.

There would I find a settled rest while others go and come

2010-01-08T10:59:00.001-08:00

My grandmother is living in a growing terror that she's not doing enough to become a better person. True, she has been negative and not very nice to my grandpa and even me lately, but she's also sort of working herself into a frenzy of guilt over it. She can't quite make the leap that God isn't some sort of big angry Sky Daddy waiting for her at the end of her life (which she senses is coming soon and is also afraid of), but someone who is waiting for her to loosen the grip of her own control (salvation?) to be let in. I'm not sure how to give that to her, or even if I can. I'm also not sure if she's ready to receive it yet. It's a long process of transformation to accept, and even if we get it once, we may have to get it over and over for the rest of our lives. I mean, that's what grace is about, to step in after each screwup. As it is, I'm not sure how to handle it.

What I do know is that I'm really tired of the fire and brimstone types putting people so much in the fear of hell that they can't accept grace, or letting them pump up their egos in false glorification so that hell is actually created by the violence people feel it is acceptable to do to each other. There is no healing of anything because there is no acknowledgment that we are broken, that we need to see one another as God's children, or that we can even be healed. It never fails to upset me (or even scare me) the way that we twist the message of love and grace into something that wounds and kills.

Anyway, I'm off tonight to a retreat with some young folks, some of whom are Organic Faithers. Hopefully the weather and roads will cooperate with our safe journey and return.

The Job Fair Rag

2010-01-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

I made it through snow and ice and crazy drivers to and from the job fair in Buffalo yesterday with no death or destruction. The roads yesterday and today were terrible because it appears that we are in the middle of a two week cold snap and seemingly endless procession of snow. I need to put sandbags back in the trunk of my car, because the control is slippery even when the roads are clear.

Jobs fairs are such an odd mix of people. Recruiters of big companies tend to send young cheerleader types to recruit and never seem to have any jobs they're actively recruiting for. One government agency sent one of the more antisocial people I've ever encountered at a recruiting table. There always seems to be a contigent of people who don't know how to dress for a job fair, or who seem to have just rolled out of bed.

I found two good leads though, as most of the time there was spent manuevering through the mass of humanity that showed up. I say that a lead is good when they take my resume, look it over, and write down departments or people they want to contact with my information. I hope to follow up in a few days.

What does this have to do with Christianity? Nothing, really. It has a lot to do with Marxist theory, I suppose, and the commodification of our labor in order to exist and survive within the capitalist system. I have to sell myself to a stranger in order to convince them that I would somehow be an asset to their company. It's a strange order of things, especially when you consider that, in most interpretations of Christ teachings, you have intrinsic value by just existing (there are those that would disagree, but their version of Christianity is not something I plan on following). So having to prove your worth when you know you have intrinsic worth, and that everyone else does too, is kind of a braintwist. No doubt someone would come forward and say "but that's the way it's ALWAYS been!!11!1!one!eleventy! Well, no, that's not always the way it's been, and you can read Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation for more information on the subject. I understand that for now, in this situation, it's what I will deal with and live with. But I just wonder what other possibilities exist. Hoping Zizek will give me some more ideas. Though I'm over halfway through and Jesus has shown up only once. But I'm still digging his ideas!

That's all. Hopefully I can succesfully commodify myself into an ideal position soon.

Weird

2010-01-05T09:48:00.000-08:00

I have really been drawn to work in law enforcement lately. I wonder why that is. I mean, I'm really anti-law in the realm of religion, but I guess I'm interested in keeping people safe, or helping them. I don't know.

Ontological Scandal!

2010-01-04T11:05:00.000-08:00

So, 2010. A new year, a new decade. I might feel more enthusiastic if I hadn't spent most of this morning shoveling copious amounts of snow. About a foot fell at the farm in the last two days. Luckily, my efforts were assisted by a couple of kind people with plows who plowed most of the large driveway.

I picked up The Fragile Absolute by Slavoj Zizek at Borders the other day. The mind-bending postmodern talk is taking my mental capacity to the limit, but I'm happy to say I'm managing to keep up. I'm about 4 chapters in and not seeing where Jesus comes in yet, but am guessing that some theoretical framework is being laid. His discussions of things like ontological scandals, Marx's failure to articulate an economic system that actually didn't have anything to do with capitalism, the commodification of art and how it impacts the way the sublime is treated, and a bunch of other things I can't really type up because they wouldn't make much sense in my way of phrasing them are keeping my mind humming.

I studied postmodern Marxism of the Rethinking Marxism via theorists like Resnick and Wolff and Gibson-Graham, and they really influenced my ideas about how we can use nondetermination to approach theories, the continued importance of class analysis, performance roles in class appropriation, multiple economic systems interacting with one another as a destabilizing force within capitalism, and so on. So reading Zizek, who is a Marxist of a different color, is a chance to use my training and let it interact with these new perspectives. Once I finish, I hope to have something more to say than this general blather; then again, I promised a review of The Next Reformation, and it's seemed to be such a monumental task that I haven't applied myself yet. Yarg.