Spiritually Frozen

I am pretty good with the Spiritual but not Religious. I'm comfortable with them. I suppose they are my people.

I've got a knack with the immediate aftermath of traumatic death. Liminal Spaces R Us or something like that. I'm good at getting the narratives to hear each other. I'm good at keeping the energy flowing. I'm good at giving the Spirit some room to move.

But, I'll tell you, I'm used to people who are looking for that space or have been dropped in it so suddenly their guard is down.

I'm telling you - I've had it easy.

My friend has cancer. The relationship we have shared has been around volunteerism and art and Thai food. I knew she had some grown children and that she was divorced. I think I knew she was from the East Coast. But mostly, I knew that she loved the arts and loved finding ways to get in for free or cheap - don't we all.

Things I did not know include that she was an addict who went to rehab when her kids were young. Things I did not know include the interesting ideas that the best way to solve a problem and to show love is to throw money at it.

The things that chemo brain will reveal.

Somehow, either because cancer is perhaps tragic but not fast enough to be traumatic (personally, I'm finding a strange anxious numbness I've never before experienced), no one in this family is really interested in contemplating the spiritual. Perhaps this moment happened when the diagnosis was given - I didn't find out until the last three months, right before hospice became an option - and now there is a hard scab or perhaps that moment didn't come, the scabs are really decades of walls that have never been scaled.

So, I have this open space - but it's empty. Nothing is moving to fill it. And I don't have to be the center of the universe. It's hard work and exhausting for one thing. But I say yes. And that often is enough for currents to flow. Often, really, I don't have to do much of anything, just watch while it happens. But now, I've opened the gates and nothing.

This family is frozen. They might be talking to each other, but they aren't talking to or through me, and the anxiety and depression of my friend doesn't seem to move at all either. Because, it's ok if they don't want to talk to me. But I can usually feel the movement of the emotions, of the spiritual anyway, and I don't feel anything. I don't even have anything to work with when my friend tells me she is bored, that she doesn't know how to feel. She believes she has done all the spriitual work, decades ago through AA, so any nudging I send that way gets shut down.

I'm trying to figure out how to cope with the fact that I would like to stay open, just in case, but it leaves me personally unbalanced, that there is nothing but a dry wind blowing through the place. I find myself especially anxious when I go visit or even plan to go visit.

What is it like to minister to the spiritually frozen? This, like always, is the last thing I thought I was learning.

Uncle

OK universe. Crying uncle. You win, but I'm still getting my EMT and I am still getting a boat and I'm still going to live in the Carribean.

But I said yes of my own free will. I just didn't realize you were creating a backlog.

Charity vs Hospitality

(A perfect example of how things end up in drafts. Half finished thoughts.)

Shannon and I touched on this idea of where the line between hospitality and charity happens. I think it is that we are hospitable to those we consider to be equals in some way and charitable to those who are not. Generally speaking, hospitality is something that could be reciprocated and charity is never expected to be reciprocated. The assumption that the person recieving charity could have nothing to offer in return.

I don't think that is really as true as we think, and we are called to be in community with the poor precisely so they can offer us hospitality in return. No, they may never ask us to dinner but their friendship and perspective and sympathetic ear are more valuable to someone who has never been hungry for a mere meal.

Love of God

(More unoriginality from the drafts pile.)

We had a rousing discussion on the way to church yesterday. It centered around the idea of a meddlesome God. And I tried to explain that the sort of love that is authoritarian, one that will trip you for your own good is a dangerous God to get involved with. Also, a God that makes everything for a reason, and that reason being to bring us back to Him is also a dangerous God to get involved with.

Or perhaps not, perhaps the danger is thinking we can accurately interpret God's intention with whatever happens in this life. I think that is a very short path to hubris. And evil. People refuse to grasp how much power they possess, because they think being powerful is synonymous with being evil. But if you do not own your power and responsibility for making Heaven in the Incarnation, then you are, actually being evil.

Things left undone are probably the worst sins of all.


God does not make suffering so that we can be better people. Suffering is the result of the fall - the corporate and even individual sins of humanity. To say that God created a hurricane so that people would suffer and be better for it is completely wrong - that is hardly loving? But to say that hurricanes happen because of the activity of the world necessary to sustain life on a planet is totally accurate. To say that within the entire event of a hurricane - where the action of wind and weather meets the human response, we find God in the response. If a hurrican is from God, then the response of humans towards other humans is the opportunity to act as God towards each other, to show the love of God towards each other, to see God, Jesus if you will, in the suffering that comes out of it.

I do not ascribe to a vengeful God. I think that a vengeful God is our projection onto God, and yes, I believe that lots of what is in the bible is our projection. Humans wrote the thing in response to God - because seriously, why would God write such tripe and nonsense as we find in the bible.

Men's Group

(More things found in the drafts pile.)

From the twitterverse: @avika says, "Most programming job descriptions basically translate to this: how compatible are you with our ongoing poor choices and can you save us?"

This so completely sums up how I feel about joining a new church. I expect all clergy feel this way, but it is much the same way with any parishioner.

My local parish is a wealth of possibilities, as I suspect all parishes are, and it is quite an achievement as a memorial to mid century America, a la San Francisco. I must admit, I love Rite II, Prayer A, week in and week out. I appreciate with my whole heart that we sing old standards and new, that are both musically challenging and theologically rich. I even love the 2 minutes of every 20 that I get from the sermon. I could do without the other 18 minutes of exegesis, but you can't have everything, I suppose.

I absolutely despise how tightly everyone is cleaving to walking up the aisle in precisely the correct manner. I absolutely despise that in a congregation of 25, there are 4 people seated behind the altar, and that the bishop's chair is squarely between the altar and the Cross. I also don't know what to do with the eternal, we must raise money in order to keep the building open.

I do not care about the building. Any care I have about a building is the care that we are leveraging the miracle of non-profit, non-mortgaged real estate in San Francisco.

I would not mind having a bible study - with all the academics hauled out. I kind of miss this, and didn't get enough of it in seminary, too much learning of criticisms, less application.

I would love to have the thing they call a "men's group." They never have this for women. Women get together and fundraise or fundraise or maybe clean and cook. Men go out to breakfast and talk about how to be Christians in the actual world, not the church kitchen.

Gaiman Sermon ette

(Things you find in drafts.)

I just finished The Ocean at the End of the Lane, I think that is what it is called. In any case, it's the new Neil Gaiman book, and I keep falling asleep last night trying to read the last 10 pages. I'm so pleased that someone is still creating mythology in this world.

It quite allowed me to coalesce something that has been floating around in my head. Which is the desperation, often not in the slightest bit quiet, that permeates the Christian religion I encounter these days. It looks a little different, depending on where you encounter it, but it never ceases to extrude desperation all over the conversation.

In one place, it is the desperation to care for the poor. Great gaping maws of need, and I'm not talking about actual poor people, but those who support and care for them. So much energy, bustling, running, yelling with words and actions, the physical needs of the world. The environment, the rights of this or that group, the food insecurity, the lack of clothing, water, immunizations, and on and on. It reaches as loftily as the well off can imagine and as nitty gritty as the lowliest child dying in his mother's arms as I write this.

It's all the same cry. Give me peace. Jesus left peace here. It's all around us. It's inside every one of us. How does that verse go, Peace I bring you, God's own peace I leave you. Something like that. But we keep running around as though if we dump enough sand in the hole, it will be an adequate substitute for peace. Neither chicken little, nor Joel Ostrogoth have peace. They are not sharing it with you. They are throwing sand, hoping to obfuscate the the lack of peace, because neither know what it is.

It is not catastrophizing, as my therapy puts it, even if there is a catastrophe looming.

It is not material security, as though most material security isn't a crap shoot of luck and circumstance.

It isn't even “making peace” with a situation, a pretty form of giving up.

I certainly can't give you any of those things. I spent too much time in therapy and I'm actually pretty shallow and selfish with my money. And if anything, my gift to this world is to point out the lameness, and I am never content. I have no idea what that means, and even medication isn't giving it to me. We are not meant to be content in this world. But it doesn't mean we are to be chasing money or solving problems, either.

This is the peace of the Lord.

I SEE YOU.

I HEAR YOU.

There is not, really, a damn thing that I can do to change your circumstance, to make your life into something it is not, but I can see it, I can hear it. And to the very, very, very best of my ability, I can see and hear your life through your own filter and not my own.

Lessons from a book I finished this morning. We can never truly see ourselves, wisdom won't bring it, therapy won't bring it, Strength Finder 2.0 is a waste of money if that is what you are trying to do with it. We can see others, if we stop trying to use them as mirrors as we seek ourselves.

I see you.

There is peace, because we so much want to see ourselves, know ourselves, understand ourselves.

The peace Jesus brings, the peace of the Lord is being seen. Being known.

And anybody can do it. It's not some special thing you learn in school, nothing about the circumstances of your birth or upbringing. Anyone can stop looking for themselves and start actually looking at other people.

I see you.

And when I am actually seeing you, actually hearing you, no matter who you are or what your circumstances, I can only love you. Not do anything for you or with you or about you. I can only love you, because you are shockingly amazing.

Another lesson from the book this morning – Personhood isn't a pass/fail exam. It just is.

But in those moments when I stop looking for me and start connecting with you. Then I am peace, I am the peace that Jesus brought to this world. And without doing a single thing, I bring about the kingdom of God.  

Autosermonium, a telling of Jonah and the Bush

This is the title of the book I will never publish. The sermons I write myself. There are a few on this blog already. Coming out of (I sure hope coming out of) 6 months of insanity, I'm sitting here carrying a migraine. The ones I bring on myself when, for lack of better language, I don't let my chi flow free. Surely there is some adequate Christian language for this, lost in a hole in the ground before the nutjobs raided the castle.

So here I am, hardly a Mothers Day sermon, although, if the church is your mother, here's my truth this week.

A reading from Johah 4 (paraphrased)

Jonah left the city and squatted down in the hills outside to watch God raise Holy Hell. God put up a bush to give him shade but in the morning, God killed the bush to get Jonah's attention. "Oh kill me already," said Jonah. "You're that angry about the bush, then," said God. "So angry I want to die," said the emo Jonah. "Jonah, you are all beat up about a stupid bush and you are completely avoiding the point - which is all the people in that town you stormed out of yesterday." Here endeth the lesson, and the book.

I've heard preaching on Jonah before. Usually, people talk about the whale and spend a ridiculous amount of time discussing the difference between a whale and a big fish. Which is a bush if I ever heard one.

I'm coming off a long season. In short, I skipped the liturgical celebration of holy week because I actually had to live it a couple weeks before and after that, anyone talking to me about the woes of the altar guild or copier errors would have sent me into a rage spiral. If you mentioned those things on facebook, I've unfollowed you. I'll try to remember after ordination season to put you back in the newsfeed.

So today, when I decided I needed to find a totem bible figure for this season of my life, Jonah came quickly to mind. I've always had a soft spot for Jonah and that damnable bush. So, I pulled up the story and read Chapter 4. The part I paraphrased.

And I realised, that stupid bush is the church. Which is just perfect, and horribly accurate, and why didn't I see this before. But really, the church is this dumb bush. The exact quote: " You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night." I can't tell you how many articles get rewritten every single day about the death of the church in America. Frankly, I don't have much patience for them anymore. Because at the end of the day, it's all summed up right here.

I suppose the impatience I have had with the church for so long has everything to do with the fact that they are still watering the damn bush half a mile out of town, leaving everyone to try to figure out how to save themselves.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to save people these days. Not in the Old Time Religion sense of getting them wet so they can clean toilets in heaven, but in the sense that the world is such a fucked up mess of a place to try and live and how do we all stop from going completely bonkers. For real, that trauma has replaced suffering in the common language is perhaps not a total disgrace, but that barely anyone can actually speak between the two languages without sounding like a complete twat is actually beyond disgraceful.

I spend a huge amount of my time with people either getting slammed by life, common enough, or escaping it, also common. The ordinary time of this culture, all of Western Civ, I expect, no longer has anything to hold it together. And I'm not proposing we try, like many Islamic countries are, to put the lid back on Pandora's box. The only way out is through, and I have no idea where all this leads. But, given the obsession of my generation with tribes, with creating family of choice rather than the national nuclear familial project we inherited, I expect that the larger project of culture will continue to wander down it's barrren path.

There are going to be new bushes. But they are going to be like any salvage plant - a tiny leaf in rooting powder and the rest of the plant, soil and pot, tossed in the trash to keep the rot from contaminating this new plant. And it probably won't even work. (Can you tell I do this sad trick often in my own gardening?) It's going to be very custom work, very small scale, and it's going to be hard pressed to attach the word institution to it. It's certainly not going to be paying anyone's salary.

And what's going to be the hardest I think, is that I have this great resource, but mostly, it's going to have to spend some time in quarantine before we see if it's going to survive. And in the meantime, I've got to figure out how to hold people together, navigating trauma and suffering, saving the people while decontaminating them, helping them toss the dead parts, the old soil and possibly even the pot.  (I think I've walked this metaphor right off the end of the branch, surely a sign to hit post and run.)




In case you are too lazy to go looking for this on your own...

Jonah 4 (NRSV)

But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’And the Lord said, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

 The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’

 But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’

Banal Bites

For here
it's the banal
that pops up from no where

It's the things
young college students
with their new lease on
suffering
call "triggers."

I hope
you never meet any real triggers
and that someday
you learn to appreciate

The banal bites for what they are

Tiny moments for healing

Pocket Wisdom

The mind has wall
Brick Stone Dirt Paper

A corrall for everything
 and for not anything

Today

I'll look behind
Door #2

But I may choose
not to play with
who or what
 I find

Burnt Offering

Why
Why How
How
How Why

Finding a reason
for a reason
for a reason

Seems like cheating

There is no how
no why
for death

Just excuses
we make up
to comfort ourselves

To push back the darkness

On a clear day, it just looks like depression

We grow up
And we stop thinking we can control everything

Which is good, I suppose

But all those
Catastrophe preventing
Superstitious actions

That don't comfort you anymore

At least got the housework done
Bills paid
And kids fed

Triduum

Thursday 5:30am
Accident
Doesn't look good
Calling The Family

On the road

Thursday 6:30pm
nonononononononono

Friday 2:30am
Sleep

Friday 10:00am
Water
Tissue
Discussion
Repeat
Repeat
Repeat

Friday 6:30pm
It is Done

Friday 2:30am
Sleep

Saturday 10:00am
Water
Tissue
Discussion
Repeat
Repeat
Repeat

Saturday 6:30pm
24 more hours
Cannot let go
Cannot let the heart stop beating
Cannot let go
Go outside
Breathe fresh air
Breathe
Cannot let go

Sunday 2:00pm
Church
Definitely not a funeral
But church
And success
And tears
And talking
And we have to leave
Now

Sunday 5:30pm
We walk with demons
Until we stop seeing them
As demons
And let angels do their job

Still Sunday
Toast a life
Thank a nurse
Leave
Begin again
With shoes
Stairs
First time
First time since
First time since Wednesday
First time since Wednesday died

Monday 10:00am
Tea
Tears
Laughter
Lunch
Terror
Betrayal

Tuesday
How can there still be birthdays

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Repeat
Repeat
Repeat

Differentiate

All that time, money and therapy
To keep one step ahead
Of that chrysallis wiggling child
To be the better mother
Than the one you had.

All that painful insight
All that diligent remembering what it was like
To be a child yourself

And the day comes
You've got nothing
And you are your own mother
Watching her do the impossible
You've got nothing
Nothing

All that time, money and therapy
To keep one step ahead
Of that chrysallis wiggling child
To be the better mother
Than the one you had.

It turns out
Letting go
Is the hardest part.

45.586517,-122.792891

We've geochached the boy
No prizes for digging up the tree
But take all the pictures you want

Friday

The windows are all open
Karl is supposed to come home tonight
But I won't believe it
                                  until
I see the white whisps over the neighbors houses.

I'm just waiting for everyone to catch up.

Breathing

I'm obsessed that there is something wrong with the dog.

I'm pretty well trained
I know that this is transference and other technical terms
I know that it is normal
And I know to work through it.

But I look at that dog and
After several days of being home
I just want it to end.

The damn dog breathes
Just like a ventilator
Every time I look at him

Sleeping
In his usual spot in the sunshine
He shifts in just that way

I can't even remember
Probably he always slept like this-

But I can't unsee
The strange pulsing
Artificial breath
And feel like it will never end.

Somewhere in the Middle

Be in the present
They say it's the best place to be
Maybe it is
Certainly, when I am in the zone
Amazing, miraculous things happen
Things that are certainly not of my doing

But there is another way of being in the present
Trapped
Can't go back
              Can't go forward
Can't even turn around
Totally in the present
And the present is completely black

It's the shoe waiting to drop
And the waiting persists
Even without the shoe.

Platitudinal Preaching

"I found this pamphlet in the bushes
while unlocking the building this morning
and it reminded me of today's gospel."

Do not forget the nasaly, British accent, of my friend Danny.

We have a phrase for this -
"Calling it in."
If you haven't spent at least a little time thinking about
how to connect all this birth
                                      and life
                                           and death
                                                   and vomit
that I live with every day,
is there any reason for you to wonder why I don't listen to you?
Yes, my phone is
in point of fact
providing me with more answers.


"With the gospel in one hand
and the newspaper in the other."

Repeated by Barth,
ad nauseum advise
received since the 20's,
In the birth of narrative journalism.

Not only
does my life not happen in the newspaper;
when it does
I don't need your platitudes.

I need you to stop hitting me with
handbags and hatred
for trying to pee in safety.

It's Always Saturday in Philadelphia

It's Holy Week again.
Damn thing comes around once a year,
      it's more persistent than Christmas,
      takes longer and has less opportunities for joyful inebriation, too.
I think that may be why we have the Easter Bunny and all that candy -
     we really need it,
especially if we've ridden the roller coaster.

I was planning to ride again.

I've no patience for so much bullshit
     that fills the days of the body corporate the rest of the year,
but this finely honed cosmic moment
     is what keeps me a professing Christian.
The universe cares so much it's willing to walk a mile in our shoes,
     and so violates our petty expectations that we try to kill it.

But life persists.
Life sneaks into all the cracks in the pavement we cover ourselves with;
life pushes through persistent,
steady,
gently,
breaking,
always breaking the baked on shell,
and presents us with a tiny
                                            fragile
                                                        bit
                                                              of
                                                                   green.

Now you know why my yard looks like it does.
I am awestruck in the face of weeds,
especially pavement weeds,
especially pavement weeds I've assaulted with Roundup.
Life persists.

I like Holy Week.
It is probably the closest the church year ever comes
to my place in the cosmos,
even though it gets the least attention,
even in Holy Week.

Still,
people are trying.
I appreciate the effort.
I know it's a hard place.
Of course I do, I live there.

Today starts the steady march to Easter.
It's so silly to me -
                               set up, tear down, polish, wax, mop, dust.
Look busy - Jesus is coming.
                                               I am sure this was first said by an altar guild director.
As though Jesus gives a shit.
Jesus is rather too busy to look for dust bunnies under the bishops throne.

Still.
I was going to overlook that.
I always feel that we are trying to hard -
always riding the surface of Holy Week,
always escaping what it really signifies
by hurrying up and scheduling, polishing and planning for the next day.

Maybe it's the difference between a nurse and a doula.
A nurse is cleaning up as we go,
a doula just comes back when it's over and cleans up the mess.
Maybe this is why I could never be a nurse -
in the moment,
                         I just don't care about the mess -
it's not going anywhere but people's souls are in danger.

I think I just found another foil for the Mary and Martha story, but that isn't part of this week's lessons.

As though it matters where we put it as long as we can find it when we need it.

Oh yeah, definitely a doula, definitely that Mary.

I have never been that other Mary.
I have never lost my own child.
But I have walked with Mary twice.
I have been those unnamed companions of Mary.
Twice.
I know why they have no names.
They cannot have names.
When the Holy Spirit borrows your body,
your name doesn't matter, doesn't exist.
And that is the gift the Spirit gives you in exchange.

It's Holy Week again.
Jesus is going to doula the world.
Again.
It seems even more unbearable this year, because we never stop
muttering,
praying,
whispering,
shouting, his name.

Perhaps this is why Holy Saturday is so empty,
so devoid of all the other ritual housework.
Saturday is that doula time,
when the only thing that makes it bearable is that it isn't you.

This namelessness,
I have never before understood.
I never had to.
There are unnamable,
almost unspeakable places in this life,
so many Saturdays in this life.
And the blessing of self immolation,
that makes possible the work of shifting pain from people to it's rightful place in God,
sound like insanity on any given Tuesday.

Religion points.
Priests point.
Church points.
Sunday points.

But a really good Saturday is clear smooth glass.

God in relationship

A lot of people wander about this life talking about their "personal" "realationship" with "Jesus." And they are generally creepy to me, even when they are my family and I love them.

One of the many struggles I have had in my faith has been the struggle of gendered language and breaking through the nonsense I was taught as a child. Getting to the point where "Our Father" did not mean, my bastard of a father, writ large, or some evil patriarchy that was either fearful or envious of my vagina took a long time. And it isn't that there are not other metaphors in the bible for the relational qualities of the God-human experience, there are plenty, but they aren't lifted out in the same way as the Father, Righteous Bastard image.

I think what I find most appalling in the personal relationship with Jesus attitude, and it happens in many places that never use that phrase, is that people never seem to step back and listen to what they are saying. Most of these relationships are incredibly rude and abusive and militant. And to question them is to set off all sorts of crazy baggage in people.

Now, I happen to believe that God is good, and that God is engaging in as healthy a relationship as possible. Because I also know, in all the relationships of my whole life, I bring plenty of baggage and my best trick is to project it onto the other party and then make out like they are oppressing me.

And given how complex and subtle a relationship with God is, most of the action - it's actually coming from me. Especially the drama. And I will admit, it is very, very hard to separate God from my drama and all the drama everyone else is projecting all over the place, too.

Here is a bit from Freitham, The Suffering God, on the "organ-ismic" as opposed to the "monarchical" God:

"The world is not only dependent upon God; God is also depended upon the world. The world is not only affected by God; God is affected by the world in both positive and negative ways. God is sovereign over the world, yet not unqualifiedly so, as considerable power and freedom have been given to creatures. God is the transcendent Lord; but God is transcendent not in isolation from the world, but in relationship to the world. God knows all there is to know about the world, yet there is a future which does not yet exist to be known even by God. God is Lord of time and history, yet God has chosen to be bound up in the time and history of the world and to be limited thereby. God is unchangeable with respect to the streadfastness of his love and his salvific will for all creatures, yet God does change in the light of what happens in the interaction between God and the world."

So basically, if you are totally freaked out by all that, you aren't having a personal relationship with Jesus, because you can't even imagine your God as capable of having a human interaction with you. Now to be totally fair, I don't really want to have a personal relationship with Jesus, and I pretty much never want to ponder or enact "what would jesus do" because Jesus generally does all the things that I don't want to. Most especially, Jesus DIED for me, and I have no intention of DYING for you. That is the theoretical that I aim for, but at the end of the day, that is the cold hard truth of the matter. And if you don't answer your bracelet with that, you should just take it off and stop embarrassing yourself.

What do Christians Look Like

(The lovely thing about reading Stringfellow is the huge sigh of relief that I am not the only person to have ever thought this. I am not the only person to have believed the church to work this way. It also means I don't have to think so damn hard - the wheel is already there.)

"For lay folk in the church this means that there is no forbidden work. There is no corner of human existence, however degraded or neglected, into which they may not venture; no person, however beleagured or possessed, whom they may not befriend and represent; no cause, however vain or stupid, in which they may not witness; no risk, however costly or imprudent, that they may not undertake. This intimacy with the world as it is, this particular freedom, this awful innocence toward the world that Christians are given, makes them look like suckers. They look like that to others because they are engaged in the wholesale expediture of life. They look like that because they are without caution or prudence in perserving their own lives. They look like that because they are not threatened by the power of death either over their own lives or over the rest of the world. They look like that because they are free to give their lives - to die - imminently, today, for the sake of anyone or anything at all, thereby celebrating the One who died for all though none be worthy, not even one (cf 1 Cor. 12:19)."

*all the bold and italics mine. And yes, still Stringfellow, A Private and Public Faith.

Without quoting, he goes on to say that the priesthood, the ecclesiastical orders, are there to support that work, not to be a substitution to that work. I had felt it a sacrifice to take on the priesthood, to support others doing the work, to make my world smaller so others could see the world as bigger. But that isn't how most laity or most in ecclesiastical orders see what they are doing. So, you know. That is probably the biggest reason no one had my back in all that mess I let go on for way too long.

More importantly, the lack of reinforcing this message is what keeps me out of church on Sundays. It was bad enough when I knew I could preach to myself or I could meet with a bible study group that supported the hard work. But anymore, I just can't stomach the aren't we so special, we Episcopalians, we tolerate and gracious people of God who being mostly of the well to do class, can rest on our paying taxes and who vote to let the state do the supporting of the poor, prisoners, widows and orphans.

And I can't even bear the thought of returning to the "we are the oppressed people of God, whom, if we could just get the poor, prisoners, widows and orphans to just go away, could all receive all the fame and fortune God is just waiting to give us."

What I really want to rant on today is tangentially related to this, so I'll add it anyway. Why is it that all of our laws, all of our structures, are defined by the private sexual relations of two people? The definition of household, what it means to have/be a dependent in the tax and housing codes? What would it look like to bring back economic patriarchy? Would we have more art? Would we all be able to eat better? Would we be healthier and happier? Because it seems to me that the dismantling of the extended household has been a terrible idea, something that has created even more problems for widow, orphan, poor, and prisoner. 'Merica is a terrible overlord. Just sayin.

The definition of failure

(November and December were a bit of Mr. Toad's wild ride around here, in a good way, though. What fell through the cracks was my morning reading, which I decided to take a bit of time and do this morning.)

Stringfellow describing the revival of a local church who had lost the building some 20-30 years ago.

We "...gathered as a house church, reciting the daily office or, occasionally, antecommunion, doing some Bible study, and discussion the news of the island and the world. Once in a while a priest would visit and there would be Holy Communion. Free of the usual parish encumbrances of organization and property, the house church gradually attracted more and more people, and in the summer weeks it seemed appropriate to begin to have weekly services with a visiting priest at the site of the ruins of the building that had been demolished by act of God in 1938."

"That may have been a fatal decision..... We do not do Bible Study any more; we do not seriously consider the mission of the church in the world, including Block Island; we seldom ask any ecumenical question. We are into raising money, which we will likely spend to embellish the social life of Episcopalians and their kindred in the summer colony. Has anyone ever heard this story about the church before?"

William Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word, excerpt from Simplicity of Faith, 1982

That, right there, sums up the whole of the problem. And not just with my current local parish, but with the parish I started the whole mess in up in Portland. I don't want to be on the vestry, I just don't give a rat's ass about the building - especially if the building is for the sake of the Episcopal congregation that meets there - even if they are sharing the space in order to keep the lights on. That happens all the time. That drives me insane: Dear God, I am going to follow your itinerant preacher son by erecting an edifice and then working to my last breath to makes sure that it remains standing.

You know, one thing the Mormon's are pretty spot on about is the church building. All the money is raised up front, and various "subchurches," groups we would have pushed to build their own "local" church building, share that building until it literally cannot hold any more. Then, the whole group starts raising money, until it's all paid for, to build another building, when they then rework the boundaries and spread out the people and then when two buildings are full and so on.

It is not about the building. It is not about the stained glass. The stained glass wasn't even about itself - it was about the arts and supporting the arts and recognizing that artists have a special connection and means of sharing about God. We really don't support artists having visions anymore, and when artists do have visions of an overt religious nature, they have to go on and on about how the work is not religious in nature so that they can actually show it. And so the world very carefully has religious experiences that they pretend they are not having, and the church keeps on inviting preschools that are not "churchy" into their buildings in order to keep the lights on for the 12-25 people who show up on Sunday morning at 10am.

I don't dislike those Sunday morning people. They are generally doing so much good in the world, maintaining mission and ministry that was the passion of someone long dead that they can't actually do anything but church with a side of family. For me, to be a 40+ year old woman and a "church lady" keeping up appearances and keeping up the building and the ministry to the Lion's Club that was the passion of Fred whose been dead these past 10 years is to be a failure in my faith.

Failure. The definition of church as I see it almost everywhere is my own definition of failure. And spending my life being judged by people who are failing seems to be a complete rejection of all that metanoia I got from all that therapy that the church insisted I needed and then rejected the fruits of.

I think I'll just keep reading to myself in the morning for now. I think I'll just keep being in the world and being an example of some different way of being present (although I'm pretty bad at it these days) and maybe, just maybe, in the future, some other opportunity for religion in an organized fashion will pop up.