self portrait Saturday: upright

It's enough just to stay upright,

upright in every way,

And pour your love into your children,

til there's nothing left to say.

- Ani Difranco

  

I want to live upright.  These recent weeks of listing and limping along has set me eager for an upright life.  To me that means something about self care and the discipline to hold to that course.  I'm feeling better in the last 48 hours and I'm optimistic that I'm back on track.  My head and my heart have cleared some.  I'm eating nutritiously, have set down the cigarettes, am playing with my son, and pausing for a moment's gratitude and good will.

Of course today, a good day when the doom and gloom has just passed on, upright means more than how I care for me.  It encompasses the big values of environmental stewardship, social justice, advocacy for my son and others on the spectrum, global socio-economic awareness, etc... But let's not call back the clouds of doom and gloom.  Let's start with this good day.  Little N and I composted and recycled.  We ate mostly vegetarian.  We wore second hand clothes.  Yet, we weren't perfect or pure or holy.  I drove the station wagon across town adding to a variety of forms of pollution.  We played in a wading pool that could be considered a waste of water.  And right now our freshly laundered clothes are spinning around in our dryer, rather than being hung out to dry on a line somewhere.

Because that's just how my life is these days.  I yield to some of the conveniences of contemporary life and culture the same way that I yield to passing storms of hard feelings.  I expect that I won't be "upright in every way."  I think, I hope, that's where we lean on grace.  The grace of good friends who email me with encouraging words and acceptance of where I'm at.  The grace of city-wide collection systems that make doing the right thing (compost, recycling) convenient.  The grace of divine (?) forgiveness, of self (?) forgiveness, for all the time when "inconvenient" or "culturally inappropriate" renders doing the right thing "impossible" and left undone.  The grace of clarity and retrospect to try again or simply to call on grace and apologize to whoever is paying attention for where I'm still not quite upright.

commonplacing: TAZ

In my small group at WPUMC we're reading Brian McLaren's Naked Spirituality: A Life WIth God In 12 Simple Words.  It introduced me to the concept of a Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ).

"...rigid conformity and emotional inhibition stultify the human spirit, and so occasionally people defy the authorities and dare to dance.  They create what author Kester Brewin describes as Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs), places where the normal patterns of hegemony and homogeneity are broken."

This is taken from page 65, quoting Barbara Ehrenreich, and citing examples like Woodstock, Burning Man, Mardi Gras.  These events, at their best are about jubilation, freedom, and connection.  He continues on page 67.

"Could it be that the kingdom of God is the ultimate TAZ, the ultimate liberation from the normal oppressive patterns of hegemony and homogeneity."

When I was single and child free it was a lot easier for me to resent and resist hegemony and homogeneity.  Certainly they were always there, but I did feel freer to choose people, interests, and expression that were outside the norm.  I didn't dream of marriage, family, and home ownership.  I dreamt of living purposefully, finding a way to make a difference, to be my own, and to be different.

That desire was part of why I chose the graduate school and program that I did.  Whole Systems Design (WSD) at an alternative university.  My dream took the shape of wanting to write, specifically articles about good news, and then maybe start my own program focused on that kind of story.  Producing the stories.  Training people to seek, articulate, and promote good news.  But WSD didn't work that way for me.  It focused on talking and small groups.  Not my areas of professional interest.  Worse, to me, it didn't help equip me to navigate or talk back to the "real world" of hegemony and homogeneity.  I graduated more adrift and vulnerable than I started.

Reentering the "real world" I married my grad school honey, started an interim job, and suddenly fell pregnant.  Six years later I'm still at the job working as the sole provider for my little family.  I feel trapped in the hegemony and homogeneity of job, home, and child rearing.  Any little gap for autonomy is savored, celebrated, and jealously guarded.

These days I find my Temporary Autonomous Zones in my small groups (ironically enough given the grad school debacle), both the Christian group and the Pagan group.  Granted, we are not dismantling patriarchy or otherwise disrupting the status quo in publicly recognizable ways.  But we are peeling away our conformity and inhibition to unveil to ourselves and these trusted friends our thoughts, feelings, and private realities.  And in Pagan ritual we even "dare to dance."

Today it is easy for me to accept grace as the thing that pierces hegemony and homogeneity and frees us to be authentic souls liberated from the rules that stultify human life.  This definition holds true to the example of Jesus's life - practicing a life of loving others that put him outside the rules and mores of the law and the culture of his time.  He stands as the model of how Christians too ought to live lives of love, lives changed by that grace.  I experience this kind of grace in the Pagan rituals as we minister to each other in ceremony, raise energy together, and "party like Pagans."

But it's challenging me and yet I'm hungry for it, to have this grace in the rest of my life in the "real world."  (I guess that's why they're "temporary" autonomous zones.)  How do I live a daily life of such grace, outside the bounds of hegemony and homogeneity?  Is it just part of being fully human that we develop and abide by these conventions?  To live in this world, a soul and a body, means we entangle ourselves in these invisible, powerful things.  And it's a life of spirituality, of practice and of hunger, that manifests the desire for grace and the means to be grace to ourselves and others.

Imbolc ritual

We celebrated Imbolc Friday night with a beautiful ritual among kind friends.  The ritual impressed upon me additional elements of the holiday that hadn't stood out to me before.  Imbolc is Brigid's day, goddess of hearth, home, healing waters, light, inspiration, poetry, and even smithing.  She's a triple goddess and with her sisters shares these skills and gifts.  We honored Brigid with candlelight, poetry, blessed water, and new spring plants.

I'm not usually very attached to or inspired by particular gods and goddesses.  They tend to feel flimsy to me; spent inventions belonging to another people and another time.  But the character of Brigid reached me last night both as an icon imbued with things that are important to me and as a messenger bearing news about something about which I am very vulnerable and unsure.  Brigid told me that I am a writer.  She would know... as a goddess of inspiration, poetry, and intellect.  The message came with clarity and courage in my heart to keep putting words together about what I feel, know, and experience.

Brigid's message carried another insight too.  She convinced me of the significance and power of knowing your gods and goddesses.  I still don't perceive supernatural entities hanging out in the ether guiding, protecting, or judging us.  I don't experience divine presence that way (if at all).  But I do recognize the utility and power of recognizing and committing to strong characters holding and exemplifying our highest values.  They provide models, guides, examples, good company as we navigate change and confusion, celebrate our arrivals into new good places in our lives, and generally strive to live well with each other.

For years now I've played with the metaphor of the madwoman in the attic, where God is the madwoman.  Inherent to that metaphor has been my own struggle to perceive a divine feminine.  An aspect of the madwoman has been the male God in women's clothing.  I couldn't shake the masculine deity of my formative faith.  But through the icon of Brigid, within the ritual's meditation, I recognized and felt the madwoman as her own distinct feminine sacred self.  And with the new beginnings of Imbolc, I committed this year to knowing her character and committed my writing to her.  What does this mean?  I'm still translating the feelings of that night into meaning and action, but it's something about mercy, creativity, release rather than rules, love rather than laws, sharing my struggle, celebrating each tiny success, and knowing the sacred and holy in the good company of other people.

self-portrait Sunday: reinvention

once upon a time I was special

today I am ordinary

In my college years, overwhelmed with all the theories at school, the religion of my family and school, the grief and confusion of my family after my father's death, I cemented myself in the notion that if a given idea didn't work for "ordinary people" then it wasn't worth anything.  Over the years, I shucked off much of what made me special, and stripped my life down to an "ordinary person." 

In many ways my life today is 100% the life I never wanted.  I have a husband and a child, rather than the freedom of singleness.  I have financial responsibilities for this family rather than just the risks or security for myself.  I work a day job.  First as an assistant.  Now in sales.  I live in a generic, off-white walls, carpeted apartment behind a shopping plaza.  I have no socio-political action in my regular routine.  I've given up protests, letter writing campaigns, and even volunteering.  Writing classes and book binding workshops are a distant memory.  I work a job.  Tend my family.  Sleep. Rise to do it again.  My 20-year old self is cringing.

In ways that matter to me today, my life is exactly what I value. I have a partner I can rely on.  When postpartum depression stunned me, L was there to show me how to mother, and later to take over as primary caregiver when I went back to work.  I love Little N, who is a bright light, teacher, and playmate to me.  I live a simple, affordable lifestyle.  I share moments of resonance with a few really special people.  I am reconnected to family and relatives, something I never anticipated.  I have rooted myself in love and time.  Time with the folks I love.  Something I consider an important part of my father's legacy and a value I hold as my own.  But all this sums to an ordinary life.

I miss my own specialness.  I miss creating.  I miss believing.  I miss knowledge and connections and expression.  That's why "my time" is so important to me right now.  How will I inhabit that time?  What will I do with those precious minutes that will resurrect and strengthen my gift, my work?  What are the tasks and practice to my achievement?

It's too bittersweet to be rock bottom or a rude awakening.  This is simply an awakening.  One of those events that we are graced with from time to time in life.  That nudge from one route and collection of practices and people into another.  Everything in my life up until this point has brought me here and prepared me for what's next.  My morning pages sketch a path and now it's my turn, my time, and my effort to do the work.

women's experience of "otherness"....

for years and years I was thinking about and reading about and writing about... women's "otherness" - spirituality, religion, relationships, health, literature, vocabulary, fat-ness & fitness, history & her-story, equal pay & child care, mothers & daughters, on and on...

I approached God through the metaphor of madness - a exponential and powerful otherness.

and now.
my son.
DNA coded for otherness.

what have I really learned about otherness?
how will I mobilize that knowledge into relationship, proximity, knowing him?
advocating for him?
Seeing him.

in 3's

pastor asked us today
"what is your ministry?"

the consultant at work wants to discuss my
"personal growth plan"

and I recently woke from a dream compelled to
"tell the story"

commonplacing: yeast & the feast

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast," we heard him say, "that a woman took and mixed with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."
Judith put her hands to her mouth and actually giggled.
"What's so funny?" I wondered.
"Don't you know, Mary? The rabbis consider yeast unclean. Only women handle it. Who but our Jesus would dare to compare it to the Kingdom of God!"
Many times I witnessed the gap-toothed grins of old women, and the clapping and dancing of younger ones as they recognized themselves and their lives in the stories: the persistent widow demanding justice, the woman throwing a party when she finds the lost coin. They needed no explanation. They understood: the Bridegroom was here in their midst. They were invited to the feast." pp 414-415

First, the obvious things that I like about this passage:
1) Jesus speaks directly to women's lives - rather than overlooking us or lumping us into stories where men are normative & primary.
2) Jesus says and does the things that are vitally different from the conventions of his time & place and through that conveys the heart of his message.
3) Jesus used stories about people's real lives to share that message and to welcome & cultivate a community who got the message.

Now, maybe more subtly, how this passage applies to me.

In the last few weeks, my little family took a pause from our church attendance. We need more time as a family, interacting with each other, doing fun stuff, chatting, chasing & getting chased by Baby N.... When we go to church we feel like we give the best hours of the day (before N's nap) to an event that doesn't give us much room to interact with each other. It felt like a loss. Plus, I tend to come home all riled up.

But in the course of Sunday night's June moon ritual, something came to me. I need to go back to church:
1) Because it's good for me to hear other people's ideas about Christianity. Some of the folks in this congregation have powerful love and commitment to Jesus. They tell stories of their experiences of the presence of Christ in their lives.
2) Because I want to do good work in my community and this church does that all day, every day. They are sharing "the feast" in tangible ways (rent, food, recovery groups, access to medical care...). I will be a lot more effective as part of this community than I will be on my own.
3) It's good for me to get riled up. Maybe not every Sunday, & certainly not to the point where I get bitter & dried up, but enough to point me to something vitally different as illuminated by Jesus & to prompt me in how I'm going to live that.
4) [bonus!] This is a congregation of quirky loving folks that I enjoy. They love my son. They welcomed my family from minute 1. (They shared "the feast" even with us?) Churches like this are rare. People like this are to be held onto.

So, this Sunday, Baby N and I will be heading around the corner to church. Instead of family time, L will get a morning to himself - to play bass or read philosophy or take a long bath. All the good refreshing restorative things that a stay-at-home parent rarely gets to do for himself. And we'll work it out, like all families do. We'll keep moving so that each of us is growing and challenged, nurtured and celebrated. And I hope we'll bring a little bit more into our time together from this kind of time apart.

Cunningham, Elizabeth. The Passion of Mary Magdalen. New York: Monkfish. 2006.

commonplacing: chosen, befriended & blessed

"What does it mean to be chosen by God?"

The question derived from today's Gospel reading - a passage about being chosen by God and now being a friend of Christ, rather than a servant. Pastor J posed it to the congregation and then gave us five minutes to discuss it with our neighbors in the pew. Whoah. Huge! I put my head down - not ready to chat about this. The conversations around me wandered away from the topic.

I have no idea what it means... and I know it means so many things. What does it mean to me? Do I even believe it? (& how does it relate to last week's message about acceptance & pruning by God?)

Walking home I remembered reading some encouraging and challenging ideas about being chosen by God in Henri Nouwen's Life of the Beloved. I want to claim his words as my answer to the question... but really I'm still trying to understand & believe it.

"Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that call us the 'Beloved.' Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence." p. 28

"Becoming the beloved is the great spiritual journey that we have to make." p. 32

"First of all, you have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is: manipulative, controlling, power-hungry and, in the long run, destructive. The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to remain realistic enough to reminder yourself of this." p. 49

"Secondly, you have to keep looking for people and places where your truth is spoken and where you are reminded of your deepest identity as the chosen one. Yes, we must dare to opt consciously for our chosenness and not allow our emotion, feelings or passions to seduce us into self-rejection." p. 49-50

"Thirdly, you have to celebrate your chosenness constantly. This means saying 'thank you' to God for having chosen you, and 'thank you' to all who reminded you of your chosenness. Gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are not an 'accident' but a divine choice." p. 50

"When we claim and constantly reclaim the truth of being the chosen ones, we soon discover within ourselves a deep desire to reveal to others their own chosenness. Instead of making us feel that we are better, more precious or valuable than others, our awareness of being chosen opens our eyes to the chosenness of others." p. 52-53

"The characteristic of the blessed ones is that wherever they go, they always speak words of blessing. It is remarkable how easy it is to bless others, to speak good things to and about them, to call forth their beauty and truth, when you yourselves are in touch with your own blessedness. The blessed one always blesses." p. 67

And I think this is the link between last week's message & this week's:

"Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am, in fact, thinking of, talking about an doing from hour to hour. ... When our deepest truth is that we are the Beloved and when our greatest joy and peace come from fully claiming that truth, it follows that this has to become visible and tangible in the ways that we eat and drink, talk and love, play and work." pp. 39-40


Nouwen, Henri. Life of the beloved: Spiritual living in a secular world. NY: Crossroads. 1993.