I just love it when I find someone has already figured out something I am struggling with. If nothing else, it always reinforces the idea that heaven would be a library with all the books, understandable in all the languages, and never being hungry, tired or uncomfortable while reading.
Having reached another change point in my personal growth, I am pleased to find this term.
Henotheistic - "I shall use the term henotheistic to characterize a pattern of faith and identity in which one invests deeply in a transcending center of value and power, finding in it a focal unity of personality and outlook, but this center is inappropriate, false, not something of ultimate concern." Fowler (p20 in my particular book)
It even uses my favorite word - inappropriate.
But I think much of my life has been in this place, continually "upgrading" my ultimate concerns. It is certainly true that you don't start with anything really worthy of the word ultimate.
In particular, "In this more noble form of henotheistic faith, identiy is found in losing the self in the service of a transcendingly important, if finite, cause."(21) Which goes a long long way in describing why I keep having the feeling of being knocked off my feet when I do things.
And I realize, in a way that I couldn't before, that all the places and activities and causes I have placed my whole heart into have been human things - since I am no environmentalist to place it in Gaia or some other thing that disappoints. Mine have always been people oriented, since I am so people oriented. And the church didn't cut it, and civil service doesn't cut it, and disaster relief doesn't cut it, so I am completely unsure what the next step is in finding God as my ultimate concern except, maybe, it has something to do with that star - which I am going to laugh and laugh when I find out it was a stationary satellite.
I feel a whole new spiritual autobiography coming on, in a year or two. Someday I might even write the whole thing out, but thankfully, I've got decades left to come to something worth writing about.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Friday, August 15, 2014
O'Shaughnessy Dam
Last night we walked out on O'Shaughnessy Dan to look at the starts. So many city dwellers-so many fears of bears and snakes.
But I look at this dam, this rather pictorially large but actually small piece of the whole story and I am amazed by the remnants of the belief in Progress. I really don't think we believe in Progress anymore-we just use the word. Not that there are not some but collectively, as a whole, we have sold the idea of somthing larger than ourselves for the good of civilization for the very think Marx was so afraid of - except he called in religion, and imagined it was a church or a God when is was really just distraction.
I wonder, now, if the Egyptions actually worshipped cats, or if they had solved enough in the name of Progress that, like the internet today, there really isn't much to do except post pictures of our cats.
I've had another PTSD episode. The kind that make me totally freak out for 4 days (sometimes months) trying to integrate the trauma - the SUPRISE- into my worldview again. Shannon tried some tough love on my, again, because he hasn't quite figured out that stubborn isn't what is going on here and that he isn't telling me something that I don't know-just something that my body has a massive allergic reaction to. So he said something that he has said before, but hasn't quite figured out that it's only result is to make him feel bad. He said I don't get what I want because I keep doing the same thing - not breaking in order to get what I want. That, specifically, I am not a priest because I won't play by someone elses rules and I won't support their vision.
It occurs to me that the trauma is often if not always, that I thought I was. But what I was seeing was God's vision and not human vision. I am always so broken whenevery I think (ok, I invent) a leader in my mind that is the leader I want to support, the leader that is also seeking after God's plan. And when that leader is following a perfectly humanly secular rational goal, I encounter another rift in my soul.
Here, I really want to say that my problem with (often women) leaders is some deep seated bullshit about my mother, it really isn't. It may appear in relation to my Mother archetypes of God, but working through the feminine in God is something I have known I needed to work on for a long time now anyway. I think this is so hard because I have not been in a place to really explore incarnation before, and it will be around incarnation for me to look at Mothering, given that I am a feminine incarnation.
I may finally be in a place to start considering separating the human and the divine. Another step in the process that sucks from this side and sucks more because I know how much more amazing it will be on the other side. And I have done the work to separate God from religion; I think it is time and possible finally to start separating God from humanity. Perhaps this is why incarnation is finally a thing I can contemplate when for so long I was coming to grips with Death-Resurrection.
Last night, laying on the dam, looking at the starts, sattelites and planes, I found myself drawn to just one star, a bright, white steady star directly overhead. And I could look at that start and everything else would fade away and I could feel the fire of life inside me as part of the fire of that star - that burning brightness was where God existed. It had no desires or emotions, it had no needs except the knowledge that it was the shimmering that resonated in me of I AM - and how I AM is enought reason for being, enough reason for keeping body and mind whole in the face of life's bullshit - natural and manmade.
I see so clearly how humans can be - with all this smallness and the flaws and fixes - in relationship with one another and with the systems of humans that doesn't have to change people in order to make the world perfect, and my perfect, I don't mean that all the ills of civilization or humanity are solved in a perfect Skittles rainbow, but how mitigated the difficult bits are when that spark is what motivates us rather than the fears and foibles and discomfort of the vision of perfection.
Beauty is messy and it has warts and all, as they say, but never despite the warts nor because of the warts. Warts just are, why be so obsesses with warts? Focus on beauty without justification and it is so messy and awe inspiring. I can see systems and I love formal logic, but the answers aren't found in it making everything conform to the logic - everything will fall within a standard deviation or two anyway. Help people with falling in the deviations and don't worry about it. Just know people and it will all work out.
One of the things that Shannon and I have been hashing out over the last few days has been my will. I have this vision as part of my will, and one of my superpowers is to build rather than destroy in the pursuit of that will. I can make people see, believe, desire, that vision, and feel their place within it, and that place is always inside the circle. Other people come along and try to exert their will over me, and it is perfectly reasonable, rational, sucessful ways of exerting will and vision, but when it is never as big as mine (will or vision) I am oblivious to it right until I figure out what is happening and I always respond in the same way, which is a problem. Because, not everyone is pursuing the vision of God, and lots of people are probably easily separating their vision and will of God from everything else, and I either can't do that, or more likely, can't imagine why you ever would.
I wonder how people wander around life not always considering how they are making meaning and connecting to their ultimate concern. I wonder if people even know they have one. I wonder why I have always done this instinctively.
But I look at this dam, this rather pictorially large but actually small piece of the whole story and I am amazed by the remnants of the belief in Progress. I really don't think we believe in Progress anymore-we just use the word. Not that there are not some but collectively, as a whole, we have sold the idea of somthing larger than ourselves for the good of civilization for the very think Marx was so afraid of - except he called in religion, and imagined it was a church or a God when is was really just distraction.
I wonder, now, if the Egyptions actually worshipped cats, or if they had solved enough in the name of Progress that, like the internet today, there really isn't much to do except post pictures of our cats.
I've had another PTSD episode. The kind that make me totally freak out for 4 days (sometimes months) trying to integrate the trauma - the SUPRISE- into my worldview again. Shannon tried some tough love on my, again, because he hasn't quite figured out that stubborn isn't what is going on here and that he isn't telling me something that I don't know-just something that my body has a massive allergic reaction to. So he said something that he has said before, but hasn't quite figured out that it's only result is to make him feel bad. He said I don't get what I want because I keep doing the same thing - not breaking in order to get what I want. That, specifically, I am not a priest because I won't play by someone elses rules and I won't support their vision.
It occurs to me that the trauma is often if not always, that I thought I was. But what I was seeing was God's vision and not human vision. I am always so broken whenevery I think (ok, I invent) a leader in my mind that is the leader I want to support, the leader that is also seeking after God's plan. And when that leader is following a perfectly humanly secular rational goal, I encounter another rift in my soul.
Here, I really want to say that my problem with (often women) leaders is some deep seated bullshit about my mother, it really isn't. It may appear in relation to my Mother archetypes of God, but working through the feminine in God is something I have known I needed to work on for a long time now anyway. I think this is so hard because I have not been in a place to really explore incarnation before, and it will be around incarnation for me to look at Mothering, given that I am a feminine incarnation.
I may finally be in a place to start considering separating the human and the divine. Another step in the process that sucks from this side and sucks more because I know how much more amazing it will be on the other side. And I have done the work to separate God from religion; I think it is time and possible finally to start separating God from humanity. Perhaps this is why incarnation is finally a thing I can contemplate when for so long I was coming to grips with Death-Resurrection.
Last night, laying on the dam, looking at the starts, sattelites and planes, I found myself drawn to just one star, a bright, white steady star directly overhead. And I could look at that start and everything else would fade away and I could feel the fire of life inside me as part of the fire of that star - that burning brightness was where God existed. It had no desires or emotions, it had no needs except the knowledge that it was the shimmering that resonated in me of I AM - and how I AM is enought reason for being, enough reason for keeping body and mind whole in the face of life's bullshit - natural and manmade.
I see so clearly how humans can be - with all this smallness and the flaws and fixes - in relationship with one another and with the systems of humans that doesn't have to change people in order to make the world perfect, and my perfect, I don't mean that all the ills of civilization or humanity are solved in a perfect Skittles rainbow, but how mitigated the difficult bits are when that spark is what motivates us rather than the fears and foibles and discomfort of the vision of perfection.
Beauty is messy and it has warts and all, as they say, but never despite the warts nor because of the warts. Warts just are, why be so obsesses with warts? Focus on beauty without justification and it is so messy and awe inspiring. I can see systems and I love formal logic, but the answers aren't found in it making everything conform to the logic - everything will fall within a standard deviation or two anyway. Help people with falling in the deviations and don't worry about it. Just know people and it will all work out.
One of the things that Shannon and I have been hashing out over the last few days has been my will. I have this vision as part of my will, and one of my superpowers is to build rather than destroy in the pursuit of that will. I can make people see, believe, desire, that vision, and feel their place within it, and that place is always inside the circle. Other people come along and try to exert their will over me, and it is perfectly reasonable, rational, sucessful ways of exerting will and vision, but when it is never as big as mine (will or vision) I am oblivious to it right until I figure out what is happening and I always respond in the same way, which is a problem. Because, not everyone is pursuing the vision of God, and lots of people are probably easily separating their vision and will of God from everything else, and I either can't do that, or more likely, can't imagine why you ever would.
I wonder how people wander around life not always considering how they are making meaning and connecting to their ultimate concern. I wonder if people even know they have one. I wonder why I have always done this instinctively.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Art and Christianity
I went to church today - after a fashion. I went to the de Young and to California Academy of Sciences with a friend of mine. We went to see a Modern Art collection on loan from the National Museum and to see the Skulls exhibit. I get to call it church because I especially wanted to see Barnett Newman's Sations of the Cross: Lema Sabbachthani; inspired by this piece I say in Napa.
A couple months ago, I went to the di Rosa museum up in Napa and saw Paul Kos' Chartres Blue installation.
http://www.paulkos.net/Paul_Kos/Artwork_Installation_Chartres_Bleu.html
In brief, this is a lot of TV screens depicting a window in the Chartres Cathedral over the course of a day - but in 12 minutes. It has small pews, is incredibly tiny and dark, just the monitors and some emergency lights near the exits, and a stunning meditation piece. I'd have spent far more time there, but was in a guided tour and wasn't allowed to linger.
The entrance, to this piece, created for this, the permanent installation, was a stations of the cross - and was so overwhelming. And impossible to get picture of, but this is one. It's just Roman Numerals, 10 feet tall, one after the other. Crammed into this walkthrough, you could never do the huddled mass that happens in most churches, circling the pews. You just stand there and it presses down from all sides, with the sound of dripping water, and the only place to go is into this stained glass wall, that you can't tell is flickering until you stop to rest from the overwhelming Romans.
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http://www.paulkos.net/Paul_Kos/Artwork_Installation_Chartres_Bleu,Tunnel_Chapel_2.html
So, today, I went to see Newman's Stations of the Cross. This is what a more articulate person than me says about his work.
Newman began working on the fourteen paintings in this series shortly after his first heart attack. He didn't have a name for them when he began, and only gave them their name after having completed the first four. After naming them, he decided to add the remaining 11 paintings (a 15th painting has a different name--Be Two--but is treated as part of the series). He wrote about how he realized, while working on the fourth painting, that the paintings were having a profound emotional impact on him; it was that emotional impact which gave him the name for the series. In other words, he did not search for iconographic meaning; nor did he try to create it. In fact, as he worked, he treated each painting as a distinct, independent painting at the same time that he conceptualized it as part of the series. Because of this ontology, it is difficult to say when Newman decided to make a series in order to limit the parameters of choice, to have to work within a predetermined framework. There are restrictions in the series--of color and scale--and these restrictions are experienced in a much fuller fashion by seeing 15 paintings than they might have been experienced or even noticed in one or two paintings.
If, as Harold Rosenberg has suggested, Newman's "mission" or passion was the destruction and transformation of self, then in the Stations of the Cross he has applied this goal to what had become his signature style. Conversely, if Newman's Stations is about the Holocaust, than the viewer's experience of this series is one in which the viewer, placed in this position of moving from one painting to the next and visually responding to the restrictions and differences, actively participates in the act of memory and loss, or the memorialization of the Holocaust.
http://www.radford.edu/~rbarris/art428/newman's%20sublime.html
And here is an example of the series. Although, like nearly all the art I go see, the pictures are nearly meaningless in their ability to convey intensity as intended outside their medium. Modern art didn't make sense to me when I was only looking at it in books or on computer screens - so much of it is embodied in the medium itself that you need the thing - the cavnas and the paint and the light - in order for it to make sense.
First Station - http://www.radford.edu/~rbarris/art428/newman's%20sublime.html
You can look for images online - but if you are in San Francisco for awhile, or live near the National Museum of Art - where it usually lives - I suggest you check it out for yourself. This canvas is 5x6.5 feet - they feel big like standing in front of a person. And they tell a tale, but not without the context of the others - at least for me. The tale is told differently taking them in one by one or if you just walk past them one after the other.
So, what I wonder is what happened?
I am always struck by how powerful modern interpretation of Christian themes is, and how, perhaps without fail, they are accompanied by information from the artist and the critics that it isn't religious. I often speculate on what the hell happened in the church that made people pull away so strongly. In a very basic sense, religion is a systemic speculation of meaning. One might say, a collective expression of WTF. And the counter-culture, the post modernist of the 20th century, really were engaged in asking that question. Exactly what were churches doing, that such powerful religious art was created and all I ever encountered were Chick Tracts and song lyrics by Stuart Hine and John Newton (I'll let you look up those incredibly popular songs yourself.) I grew up in a Baptist church, and I don't know them to be very interested in visual arts - so we sang a lot of bloody songs(blood, jesus, lyrics gets you 9.5 million tesults in .33 seconds, each one more banal than the next). As an adult in the Episcopal church, with all that stained glass and stations of the cross around the rooms, I still encountered lots of pithy art, lots of church goods catalog art, lots of imitation and reproduction art from long, long ago, in a mawkish universe far, far away. Yes, it's tasteful, except for all the brass plaques everywhere, but none of it really takes your breath away.
I really want to know why churches and demoninations and Christians (although they are not alone in this) became so sentimental. I want to know why we sing such assinine songs in church - not just the remants of the 70's folk mass, there are agregious examples throughout history, although in a course of music, it seems that the real thrust of nausea started in the late 18th or all of the 19th century. And the mid 20th century was a nostalgic dream that we are still trying to stay asleep for. (Yes, I went to a tiki themed party at the Disney museum for my 19th anniversary. I'm not saying that I am immune to this delusion.) What is wrong with all this? Why is it so tacky and cheesy and boring and tastefully uninspiring? Why, when I live in the 21st century, am I supposed to relate to art from 500 years ago, why is the current stuff all Victorian tripe? Where are all the grown up Christians hiding? Where am I supposed to go when I am not a newbie and I am not interested in exploring the same old introductory to Christianity? How many catechisms am I supposed to attend? No wonder we have the spiritual wanderers? The only way to encounter something new is to find someone elses' introductory materials.
I'm awfully glad I went the art museum today. Awfully glad that I saw examples of creations clever and ingeneous specialization in the Skulls exhibit and our human response to the need to find meaning in our experiences of that creation. I feel far more fed than usual on a Sunday afternoon.
A couple months ago, I went to the di Rosa museum up in Napa and saw Paul Kos' Chartres Blue installation.
http://www.paulkos.net/Paul_Kos/Artwork_Installation_Chartres_Bleu.html
In brief, this is a lot of TV screens depicting a window in the Chartres Cathedral over the course of a day - but in 12 minutes. It has small pews, is incredibly tiny and dark, just the monitors and some emergency lights near the exits, and a stunning meditation piece. I'd have spent far more time there, but was in a guided tour and wasn't allowed to linger.
The entrance, to this piece, created for this, the permanent installation, was a stations of the cross - and was so overwhelming. And impossible to get picture of, but this is one. It's just Roman Numerals, 10 feet tall, one after the other. Crammed into this walkthrough, you could never do the huddled mass that happens in most churches, circling the pews. You just stand there and it presses down from all sides, with the sound of dripping water, and the only place to go is into this stained glass wall, that you can't tell is flickering until you stop to rest from the overwhelming Romans.
http://www.paulkos.net/Paul_Kos/Artwork_Installation_Chartres_Bleu,Tunnel_Chapel_2.html
So, today, I went to see Newman's Stations of the Cross. This is what a more articulate person than me says about his work.
Newman began working on the fourteen paintings in this series shortly after his first heart attack. He didn't have a name for them when he began, and only gave them their name after having completed the first four. After naming them, he decided to add the remaining 11 paintings (a 15th painting has a different name--Be Two--but is treated as part of the series). He wrote about how he realized, while working on the fourth painting, that the paintings were having a profound emotional impact on him; it was that emotional impact which gave him the name for the series. In other words, he did not search for iconographic meaning; nor did he try to create it. In fact, as he worked, he treated each painting as a distinct, independent painting at the same time that he conceptualized it as part of the series. Because of this ontology, it is difficult to say when Newman decided to make a series in order to limit the parameters of choice, to have to work within a predetermined framework. There are restrictions in the series--of color and scale--and these restrictions are experienced in a much fuller fashion by seeing 15 paintings than they might have been experienced or even noticed in one or two paintings.
If, as Harold Rosenberg has suggested, Newman's "mission" or passion was the destruction and transformation of self, then in the Stations of the Cross he has applied this goal to what had become his signature style. Conversely, if Newman's Stations is about the Holocaust, than the viewer's experience of this series is one in which the viewer, placed in this position of moving from one painting to the next and visually responding to the restrictions and differences, actively participates in the act of memory and loss, or the memorialization of the Holocaust.
http://www.radford.edu/~rbarris/art428/newman's%20sublime.html
And here is an example of the series. Although, like nearly all the art I go see, the pictures are nearly meaningless in their ability to convey intensity as intended outside their medium. Modern art didn't make sense to me when I was only looking at it in books or on computer screens - so much of it is embodied in the medium itself that you need the thing - the cavnas and the paint and the light - in order for it to make sense.
You can look for images online - but if you are in San Francisco for awhile, or live near the National Museum of Art - where it usually lives - I suggest you check it out for yourself. This canvas is 5x6.5 feet - they feel big like standing in front of a person. And they tell a tale, but not without the context of the others - at least for me. The tale is told differently taking them in one by one or if you just walk past them one after the other.
So, what I wonder is what happened?
I am always struck by how powerful modern interpretation of Christian themes is, and how, perhaps without fail, they are accompanied by information from the artist and the critics that it isn't religious. I often speculate on what the hell happened in the church that made people pull away so strongly. In a very basic sense, religion is a systemic speculation of meaning. One might say, a collective expression of WTF. And the counter-culture, the post modernist of the 20th century, really were engaged in asking that question. Exactly what were churches doing, that such powerful religious art was created and all I ever encountered were Chick Tracts and song lyrics by Stuart Hine and John Newton (I'll let you look up those incredibly popular songs yourself.) I grew up in a Baptist church, and I don't know them to be very interested in visual arts - so we sang a lot of bloody songs(blood, jesus, lyrics gets you 9.5 million tesults in .33 seconds, each one more banal than the next). As an adult in the Episcopal church, with all that stained glass and stations of the cross around the rooms, I still encountered lots of pithy art, lots of church goods catalog art, lots of imitation and reproduction art from long, long ago, in a mawkish universe far, far away. Yes, it's tasteful, except for all the brass plaques everywhere, but none of it really takes your breath away.
I really want to know why churches and demoninations and Christians (although they are not alone in this) became so sentimental. I want to know why we sing such assinine songs in church - not just the remants of the 70's folk mass, there are agregious examples throughout history, although in a course of music, it seems that the real thrust of nausea started in the late 18th or all of the 19th century. And the mid 20th century was a nostalgic dream that we are still trying to stay asleep for. (Yes, I went to a tiki themed party at the Disney museum for my 19th anniversary. I'm not saying that I am immune to this delusion.) What is wrong with all this? Why is it so tacky and cheesy and boring and tastefully uninspiring? Why, when I live in the 21st century, am I supposed to relate to art from 500 years ago, why is the current stuff all Victorian tripe? Where are all the grown up Christians hiding? Where am I supposed to go when I am not a newbie and I am not interested in exploring the same old introductory to Christianity? How many catechisms am I supposed to attend? No wonder we have the spiritual wanderers? The only way to encounter something new is to find someone elses' introductory materials.
I'm awfully glad I went the art museum today. Awfully glad that I saw examples of creations clever and ingeneous specialization in the Skulls exhibit and our human response to the need to find meaning in our experiences of that creation. I feel far more fed than usual on a Sunday afternoon.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Christian Values in Non Church Settings
Yes, this is the most boring title for a blog post in the history of posting, but this is what I am thinking about this morning.
It seems to me, more and more, that joyfully, openly living Christian values in non-church and non-Christian settings is more important than Sunday services. I can't speak for places I have not lived, so I'm talking really specifically about the West Coast and out West, is where people migrate to in order to get away from whatever they left behind. Sadly, what a lot of people are leaving behind is unemployment and bigotry. I don't think Walmart gets all the blame for the shrinking of the small town in America.
So, at least in terms of faith, what I see a lot of on the West Coast are people who have left home because of a preponderance of bigotry, a lot of it to do with being non-traditional in their sexuality/gender, but also, for simply being too intelligent, too thoughtful. I don't tend to believe in reckonings, they have a tendancy to destroy everything in their path, but I do sometimes hope there is a reckoning for the ways in which people both appealed to and were seduced by small minded, keep doing things the way we have always done it even though it is obviously broken, backwardness.
In terms of how we do church, this is not about changing up the liturgical structure in what are often random and personally preferenced ways. Personally, I like a non-changing liturgical structure that I can sink into and then have space within that for nuance. What is often lacking in my experience of church liturgy - of every single type - is that is holds people static. It is a very difficult thing to facillitate Sunday worship (or any group activity, really) that feeds the uninitiated through what my friend Wendy calls past-Christian, or people who actually think critically (not just negatively) about religion and faith. Somehow, the middle road has been to stay in the framework of grade school social development and this Cleaver model is feeding fewer and fewer people in this world. We could let it go, if we were willing to piss off those few Cleavers left, but they tend to pay the salaries, so who knows if church can do anything except be reborn like a pheonix.
Faith is more than just two hours on Sunday morning. Seriously, I wish we could just set that aside for 10 years and talk about something else. I am a Christian every day of the week, when I am awake and asleep and when I am helping out a homeless vet and when I am picking my nose in traffic. I want to really talk about and really have access to someone who is thinking about what it means to act like a Christian when I am at a drunken orgy. And I am not some 16 year old to be told, oh you shouldn't find yourself in those places. Whether or not I should find myself in some situation is completely a different discussion from what I should do once I've found myself there. It is these missing discussions, I think, that leave us with those tedious repackaged platitudes we find surrounded by flowers and rainbows on facebook. Whether or not I participate in said, theoretical drunken orgy, I should be able to articulate in terms of my faith, why I am there and what I am doing. And it better not be - I'm here to save people from the grip of Satan, or I'll pray for you, a sinner, or Jesus was a hippie free-love communist so pass the beer.
This is an over the top example for many people, but it's not off the table for everyone. And I don't think that you need to have a snappy one-line comeback for every angry person who says, "what are you doing, I thought you were some kind of Christian?" Those people are not asking you a genuine question. Those people are not talking to you at all - they are reacting to some echo of hurt within themselves, and it is best neither to take it personally or to think that you can change them right there. My husband has what I think is the best response to these sort of jabs, which is to respond to the effect that he doesn't believe in the God that they are refuting, either.
But if you are at all living an openly Christian life, which many, many people I know are not, someone, eventually, is going to ask you why you bother with all that nonsense, because you are a good and nice person already. And I am reasonably sure that most hidden Christians are good and nice, and that they have absolutely no way to articulate an answer to that. When we complain about the types of Christians who dominate the public sphere, it is because those are the ones who get talking points articulated to them and they are the ones who get people to help them reconcile their faith with their day to day life. If you want to be ashamed of your faith tradition, consider that the bigots are much better at helping people articulate their faith than you are. Consider wether you really have faith, wether you really have a deep seated spiritual life that you are drawing on, if you cannot articulate why you are a Christian for yourself, or help others to do so.
And we don't seem interested in this - in the Epsicopal tradition, at least. I went to seminary, and I had an opportunity to meet seminarians all over the country, and I made it a habit to ask my fellow seminarians to articulate their faith. The answer that sticks with me as the saddest of all, because it came from someone whose faith I deeply respect, was "the Nicene Creed." That is no answer. But it is the answer that discernment committees are looking for. I know - I washed out of discernment because I couldn't, literally could not, say that the changes I saw in a deeply hurting place were because of the Holy Spirit. To say that, which had not even occured to me, would have been a Peter sized denial for me. Maybe the Spirit was doing great things, but I don't measure the work of the Spirit as "butts in seats." And if I get to Heaven and discover that is really all there was to this Christianity that I have committed to - I'm going to ask for a hall pass and never come back.
So, I live out my values in non-Christian settings. I think my faith asks me to see people for who they really are, and not as means to ends. I think my faith asks me to build people up, help them feel whole, happy, to have a sense of belonging, satisfaction, and purposeful. I think my faith asks me to bring my best self forward for the sake of others and that the more I let myself do that, the better chance I have to be on the receiving end of of that same goodness. I think I have a duty to facilitate others - expand their opportunities to share, to laugh, to learn, to be helpful. I think Christ asks me to let myself be broken for others, to be this open knowing full well that some people are going to stab me in the back, use me for their own advantage, and steal or even physically harm me. But to not let the fear of that, or the fact of that, stop me from all these other things. Christ asks me to be honest when someone asks me why I am such a good egg, but never, ever, ever, do I think Christ asks me to proliferate facebook memes of faith. Jesus may love me, and this I may know, but not because the Bible tells me so. It is because in the face of the deepest human rejections I have known, I have also known that I am not valueless, that I am still lovable, and that I can move on - even if I have no idea how at this moment.
That is what my faith gives me. And that face of Jesus, that is the love and sympathy and genuine sorrow that other Christians expressed to me in my darkness. Not some random platitude toting Christians but the ones that I walk my whole life journey with. The friendship and family that the bible does promise. It's the part of Christian life that is really hard to see from the outside, it's really hard to explain on a Sunday morning, and an awful lot of Christians get a few members in their friends and family plan and they just stop being open to more. That is the saddest thing of all. That, I believe, is the real denial of faith and Christ - to not be open to adding more people, not as means to ends, but as fellow loving creatures.
My religion stands on the belief that God walked the earth among us. Lots of gods do this, they were coming down and having sex and creating rivers of sperm for thousands of years before Christ. Gods coming to earth is nothing new. Jesus participating in our suffering, that was new. For all you Star Trek fans - Q pops in and out of our space-time continuum all the time, and tut-tuts at our silliness, wrecks havoc out of distant curiosity, and with the snap of a finger, is gone. That is not what Jesus did. Jesus did the whole human experience - left Godliness behind to experience birth, childhood, adolescence, stubbed toes and hungry stomachs and sore muscles. Also, Jesus experienced happiness and disappointment and love. (While we know little of Jesus' love life - I expect this has far more to do with the need to distinguish our God from a swan shaped Zeus who came to sleep with the ladies, than it does with Jesus not experiencing lust, requited or otherwise.) Jesus stuck it out, to the end. Q would not have tolerated the aches and pains of a bodily existence, let alone stuck around to feel how that body dies.
And that is what sets Christianity apart, what makes it unique among the worshippers of the Abrahamic God. And the ridiculous convolutions we come up with to explain this are probably why people think we are nuts, but for some of us, this is what is important. Me, I don't have much interest in a distant God. In an unknowable God. In a Father God, even. But I have a lot of interest in a God that has enough interest in me to get down on the floor and try to understand what I am going through. And that willingness to really try to understand my point of view makes me more willing to try to see God's point of view.
So, here I am, on Pentecost, the "birthday" of the church, writing my own sermon again, because my parish is having a literal birthday party, complete with presents for the facility. And I like a nice facility as much as the next person, but it's not the church. And as sweet and nice as all the ladies are, they love that building and I actually couldn't care less if we had it. And I'm not sure we have known each other long enough for me to say that church is happening far more in the ride home you give me, or the invitation to the farmers market you give me, or the conversation we have at the bus stop, or even the introduction to your children when they visit, than it is on Sunday morning during Rite II or downstairs at coffee hour unwrapping paper towels for the facility kitchen.
It seems to me, more and more, that joyfully, openly living Christian values in non-church and non-Christian settings is more important than Sunday services. I can't speak for places I have not lived, so I'm talking really specifically about the West Coast and out West, is where people migrate to in order to get away from whatever they left behind. Sadly, what a lot of people are leaving behind is unemployment and bigotry. I don't think Walmart gets all the blame for the shrinking of the small town in America.
So, at least in terms of faith, what I see a lot of on the West Coast are people who have left home because of a preponderance of bigotry, a lot of it to do with being non-traditional in their sexuality/gender, but also, for simply being too intelligent, too thoughtful. I don't tend to believe in reckonings, they have a tendancy to destroy everything in their path, but I do sometimes hope there is a reckoning for the ways in which people both appealed to and were seduced by small minded, keep doing things the way we have always done it even though it is obviously broken, backwardness.
In terms of how we do church, this is not about changing up the liturgical structure in what are often random and personally preferenced ways. Personally, I like a non-changing liturgical structure that I can sink into and then have space within that for nuance. What is often lacking in my experience of church liturgy - of every single type - is that is holds people static. It is a very difficult thing to facillitate Sunday worship (or any group activity, really) that feeds the uninitiated through what my friend Wendy calls past-Christian, or people who actually think critically (not just negatively) about religion and faith. Somehow, the middle road has been to stay in the framework of grade school social development and this Cleaver model is feeding fewer and fewer people in this world. We could let it go, if we were willing to piss off those few Cleavers left, but they tend to pay the salaries, so who knows if church can do anything except be reborn like a pheonix.
Faith is more than just two hours on Sunday morning. Seriously, I wish we could just set that aside for 10 years and talk about something else. I am a Christian every day of the week, when I am awake and asleep and when I am helping out a homeless vet and when I am picking my nose in traffic. I want to really talk about and really have access to someone who is thinking about what it means to act like a Christian when I am at a drunken orgy. And I am not some 16 year old to be told, oh you shouldn't find yourself in those places. Whether or not I should find myself in some situation is completely a different discussion from what I should do once I've found myself there. It is these missing discussions, I think, that leave us with those tedious repackaged platitudes we find surrounded by flowers and rainbows on facebook. Whether or not I participate in said, theoretical drunken orgy, I should be able to articulate in terms of my faith, why I am there and what I am doing. And it better not be - I'm here to save people from the grip of Satan, or I'll pray for you, a sinner, or Jesus was a hippie free-love communist so pass the beer.
This is an over the top example for many people, but it's not off the table for everyone. And I don't think that you need to have a snappy one-line comeback for every angry person who says, "what are you doing, I thought you were some kind of Christian?" Those people are not asking you a genuine question. Those people are not talking to you at all - they are reacting to some echo of hurt within themselves, and it is best neither to take it personally or to think that you can change them right there. My husband has what I think is the best response to these sort of jabs, which is to respond to the effect that he doesn't believe in the God that they are refuting, either.
But if you are at all living an openly Christian life, which many, many people I know are not, someone, eventually, is going to ask you why you bother with all that nonsense, because you are a good and nice person already. And I am reasonably sure that most hidden Christians are good and nice, and that they have absolutely no way to articulate an answer to that. When we complain about the types of Christians who dominate the public sphere, it is because those are the ones who get talking points articulated to them and they are the ones who get people to help them reconcile their faith with their day to day life. If you want to be ashamed of your faith tradition, consider that the bigots are much better at helping people articulate their faith than you are. Consider wether you really have faith, wether you really have a deep seated spiritual life that you are drawing on, if you cannot articulate why you are a Christian for yourself, or help others to do so.
And we don't seem interested in this - in the Epsicopal tradition, at least. I went to seminary, and I had an opportunity to meet seminarians all over the country, and I made it a habit to ask my fellow seminarians to articulate their faith. The answer that sticks with me as the saddest of all, because it came from someone whose faith I deeply respect, was "the Nicene Creed." That is no answer. But it is the answer that discernment committees are looking for. I know - I washed out of discernment because I couldn't, literally could not, say that the changes I saw in a deeply hurting place were because of the Holy Spirit. To say that, which had not even occured to me, would have been a Peter sized denial for me. Maybe the Spirit was doing great things, but I don't measure the work of the Spirit as "butts in seats." And if I get to Heaven and discover that is really all there was to this Christianity that I have committed to - I'm going to ask for a hall pass and never come back.
So, I live out my values in non-Christian settings. I think my faith asks me to see people for who they really are, and not as means to ends. I think my faith asks me to build people up, help them feel whole, happy, to have a sense of belonging, satisfaction, and purposeful. I think my faith asks me to bring my best self forward for the sake of others and that the more I let myself do that, the better chance I have to be on the receiving end of of that same goodness. I think I have a duty to facilitate others - expand their opportunities to share, to laugh, to learn, to be helpful. I think Christ asks me to let myself be broken for others, to be this open knowing full well that some people are going to stab me in the back, use me for their own advantage, and steal or even physically harm me. But to not let the fear of that, or the fact of that, stop me from all these other things. Christ asks me to be honest when someone asks me why I am such a good egg, but never, ever, ever, do I think Christ asks me to proliferate facebook memes of faith. Jesus may love me, and this I may know, but not because the Bible tells me so. It is because in the face of the deepest human rejections I have known, I have also known that I am not valueless, that I am still lovable, and that I can move on - even if I have no idea how at this moment.
That is what my faith gives me. And that face of Jesus, that is the love and sympathy and genuine sorrow that other Christians expressed to me in my darkness. Not some random platitude toting Christians but the ones that I walk my whole life journey with. The friendship and family that the bible does promise. It's the part of Christian life that is really hard to see from the outside, it's really hard to explain on a Sunday morning, and an awful lot of Christians get a few members in their friends and family plan and they just stop being open to more. That is the saddest thing of all. That, I believe, is the real denial of faith and Christ - to not be open to adding more people, not as means to ends, but as fellow loving creatures.
My religion stands on the belief that God walked the earth among us. Lots of gods do this, they were coming down and having sex and creating rivers of sperm for thousands of years before Christ. Gods coming to earth is nothing new. Jesus participating in our suffering, that was new. For all you Star Trek fans - Q pops in and out of our space-time continuum all the time, and tut-tuts at our silliness, wrecks havoc out of distant curiosity, and with the snap of a finger, is gone. That is not what Jesus did. Jesus did the whole human experience - left Godliness behind to experience birth, childhood, adolescence, stubbed toes and hungry stomachs and sore muscles. Also, Jesus experienced happiness and disappointment and love. (While we know little of Jesus' love life - I expect this has far more to do with the need to distinguish our God from a swan shaped Zeus who came to sleep with the ladies, than it does with Jesus not experiencing lust, requited or otherwise.) Jesus stuck it out, to the end. Q would not have tolerated the aches and pains of a bodily existence, let alone stuck around to feel how that body dies.
And that is what sets Christianity apart, what makes it unique among the worshippers of the Abrahamic God. And the ridiculous convolutions we come up with to explain this are probably why people think we are nuts, but for some of us, this is what is important. Me, I don't have much interest in a distant God. In an unknowable God. In a Father God, even. But I have a lot of interest in a God that has enough interest in me to get down on the floor and try to understand what I am going through. And that willingness to really try to understand my point of view makes me more willing to try to see God's point of view.
So, here I am, on Pentecost, the "birthday" of the church, writing my own sermon again, because my parish is having a literal birthday party, complete with presents for the facility. And I like a nice facility as much as the next person, but it's not the church. And as sweet and nice as all the ladies are, they love that building and I actually couldn't care less if we had it. And I'm not sure we have known each other long enough for me to say that church is happening far more in the ride home you give me, or the invitation to the farmers market you give me, or the conversation we have at the bus stop, or even the introduction to your children when they visit, than it is on Sunday morning during Rite II or downstairs at coffee hour unwrapping paper towels for the facility kitchen.
Friday, May 16, 2014
Jeremiah is a prophet for our times. Ouch.
Jeremiah 22:13-17
New International Version (NIV)
13 “Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness,
his upper rooms by injustice,
making his own people work for nothing,
not paying them for their labor.
14 He says, ‘I will build myself a great palace
with spacious upper rooms.’
So he makes large windows in it,
panels it with cedar
and decorates it in red.
his upper rooms by injustice,
making his own people work for nothing,
not paying them for their labor.
14 He says, ‘I will build myself a great palace
with spacious upper rooms.’
So he makes large windows in it,
panels it with cedar
and decorates it in red.
15 “Does it make you a king
to have more and more cedar?
Did not your father have food and drink?
He did what was right and just,
so all went well with him.
16 He defended the cause of the poor and needy,
and so all went well.
Is that not what it means to know me?”
declares the Lord.
17 “But your eyes and your heart
are set only on dishonest gain,
on shedding innocent blood
and on oppression and extortion.”
to have more and more cedar?
Did not your father have food and drink?
He did what was right and just,
so all went well with him.
16 He defended the cause of the poor and needy,
and so all went well.
Is that not what it means to know me?”
declares the Lord.
17 “But your eyes and your heart
are set only on dishonest gain,
on shedding innocent blood
and on oppression and extortion.”
Oh, I hate cherry pickers, but this so sums up Jeremiah. And gets right to the heart of what makes me so angry about peope who say they are Christians on one hand and then do everything in their power to create more and more poverty with the other.
To me, this is exactly what we mean when we say Jesus did not come to overturn the law but to fulfill it.
Benedict and Me
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: OF A CERTAIN CLERGYMAN, WHOM VENERABLE BENEDICT FOR A TIME DELIVERED FROM A DEVIL.
http://www.osb.org/gen/greg/
The conversation between Gregory and Peter revolves around the holiness of Benedict and how he could know the intentions of God enough to know this information for the cleryman.
I'm not really interested in knowing about the relationships between God and saints, but I am really intriqued by this cergyman. A long time ago, when I first felt a call to Holy Orders, I prayed to God to put rocks in my path so I would know that it wasn't for me - because I already knew that it was as convoluted as humanly possible - as though persevering through the trials and tribulations to become a priest in the church were proof of concept. Through my own process and those of my companions and friends in Holy Orders in the church, I know that this tends to backfire and cause the very results we are intending to avoid. Such is life. In the same way Jesus said the poor will always be with us, I think the church will, too. Both are the result of our well intentioned and willful misinterpretation of humanity.
I think that I will keep thinking about this story - as time goes by. Because I though it was pretty funny that I went to meet the priest of my new congregation, and although I told him I was not interested in The Process anymore - he wouldn't let me leave until he gave me the membership forms to transfer my membership. And said, it's just paper work at this part, so don't worry. Although I will say, that my pride was soothed when he also said, having come off the COM for the last 6 years, he didn't see any reason I wouldn't be sucessful. I told him he really didn't know me all that well, but that I was glad to change my membership since I was pretty sure my previous parish would be glad to see the back of me in any case.
Still, I'll change my name to Ambrose because that's what it's going to take for me to be ordained. I've had way too much therapy to wade back into that shark fest again and I feel, for me, that this clergyman may be a lot closer to my story than anything else I've read.
At the same time a certain clergyman, that served in the church of Aquinum, was possessed: whom the venerable man Constantius, Bishop of the same city, sent to many places of holy martyrs for help: but God's holy martyrs would not deliver him, to the end that the world might know what great grace was in the servant of God, Benedict: wherefore at length he was brought to him, who, praying for help to Jesus Christ our Lord, forthwith cast the old enemy out of the possessed man's body, giving him this charge: "Go your way, and hereafter abstain from eating of flesh, and presume not to enter into holy orders, for whenever you shall attempt any such thing, the devil again will have power over you."
The man departed safe and sound, and because punishment fresh in memory used to terrify the mind, he observed for a time what the man of God had given him in commandment. But after many years, when all his seniors were dead, and he saw his juniors preferred before him to holy orders, he neglected the words of the man of God, as though forgotten through length of time, and took on him holy orders: whereupon immediately the devil that before had left him entered again, and never ceased to torment him, until he had separated his soul from his body.
The conversation between Gregory and Peter revolves around the holiness of Benedict and how he could know the intentions of God enough to know this information for the cleryman.
I'm not really interested in knowing about the relationships between God and saints, but I am really intriqued by this cergyman. A long time ago, when I first felt a call to Holy Orders, I prayed to God to put rocks in my path so I would know that it wasn't for me - because I already knew that it was as convoluted as humanly possible - as though persevering through the trials and tribulations to become a priest in the church were proof of concept. Through my own process and those of my companions and friends in Holy Orders in the church, I know that this tends to backfire and cause the very results we are intending to avoid. Such is life. In the same way Jesus said the poor will always be with us, I think the church will, too. Both are the result of our well intentioned and willful misinterpretation of humanity.
I think that I will keep thinking about this story - as time goes by. Because I though it was pretty funny that I went to meet the priest of my new congregation, and although I told him I was not interested in The Process anymore - he wouldn't let me leave until he gave me the membership forms to transfer my membership. And said, it's just paper work at this part, so don't worry. Although I will say, that my pride was soothed when he also said, having come off the COM for the last 6 years, he didn't see any reason I wouldn't be sucessful. I told him he really didn't know me all that well, but that I was glad to change my membership since I was pretty sure my previous parish would be glad to see the back of me in any case.
Still, I'll change my name to Ambrose because that's what it's going to take for me to be ordained. I've had way too much therapy to wade back into that shark fest again and I feel, for me, that this clergyman may be a lot closer to my story than anything else I've read.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Mother's Day for Minnie
My sister-in-law was the first to post the reminder of how badly some people handle this particular Hallmark holiday. Whhich made me incredibly sad, because she is one of the most amazing mothers I know - even if she hasn't expelled a parasite of her own, or taken just one or even two of the creatures from someone else.
Pregnancy, honestly, is all about a woman and her issues. Pregnancy can help you resolve issues around your bodily integrity and sense of self control, but so can a good therapist and a will to change. Don't get me wrong, because I loved pregancy, and I'd have happily been pregnant 12 more times just for the balanced horomones I don't have any other time of the year. But pregnancy is something that happens to and about one person. (Plenty will disagree, but in any case, pregancy and mothering really don't have anything to do with each other.)
Things mothering is not - it's not the feeding, cleaning up poop, remaking lunch, doing laundry, cheering at a soccer match which you hate, making tea party 8 times a day which you used to love, or really, even kissing boo boos.
Mothering is different, and harder, than all of those things. Mothering is having the back of some half formed human being that will turn on you in an instance and then ask why you are mad. Over and over and over again. Mothering is seeing that someone is struggling or celebrating or about to sneeze and being there with a hug, a high five or a tissue. Mothering is anticipation. Mothering is tolerance and acceptance of human foibles.
You don't have to live with someone to do this - you don't have to be a woman to do this - you don't even have to be an adult or have a legal minor in your home. Mothering is what we do when we we see the needs of others and unfailingly think that their needs matter. (Mothering is not martyrdom; mothering is seeing someone falling into martyrdom and stepping in with childcare and a pedicure and a stern word about "killing yourself.")
A couple of decades ago, "it takes a village" was popularized by the First Lady. And it does. When my spawn were small, we called their childless mothers "auntie" and without MacKendrie and Tabitha, they would not be alive. How would any of us survived my own forays into personhood without Jessica and Jeremy to anticipate things I was flat out ignoring. And childed mothers, they usually were called by name, as opposed to "somebody's mom." Adolescence would not be this wonderful without Shannon and Kelly to have been able to take up the slack of anticipation and joy in things that were frankly freaking me out.
Without "biologicals" we might die out as a species, but without mothers, all the instances of mothering, we would die out as human beings. For all the mothers in my life and the life of my parasites, I honor you on this day. Especially the ones that mother the whole world and "other" people's children. (The rest of you can wallow in your dry toast and over creamed coffee.)
Pregnancy, honestly, is all about a woman and her issues. Pregnancy can help you resolve issues around your bodily integrity and sense of self control, but so can a good therapist and a will to change. Don't get me wrong, because I loved pregancy, and I'd have happily been pregnant 12 more times just for the balanced horomones I don't have any other time of the year. But pregnancy is something that happens to and about one person. (Plenty will disagree, but in any case, pregancy and mothering really don't have anything to do with each other.)
Things mothering is not - it's not the feeding, cleaning up poop, remaking lunch, doing laundry, cheering at a soccer match which you hate, making tea party 8 times a day which you used to love, or really, even kissing boo boos.
Mothering is different, and harder, than all of those things. Mothering is having the back of some half formed human being that will turn on you in an instance and then ask why you are mad. Over and over and over again. Mothering is seeing that someone is struggling or celebrating or about to sneeze and being there with a hug, a high five or a tissue. Mothering is anticipation. Mothering is tolerance and acceptance of human foibles.
You don't have to live with someone to do this - you don't have to be a woman to do this - you don't even have to be an adult or have a legal minor in your home. Mothering is what we do when we we see the needs of others and unfailingly think that their needs matter. (Mothering is not martyrdom; mothering is seeing someone falling into martyrdom and stepping in with childcare and a pedicure and a stern word about "killing yourself.")
A couple of decades ago, "it takes a village" was popularized by the First Lady. And it does. When my spawn were small, we called their childless mothers "auntie" and without MacKendrie and Tabitha, they would not be alive. How would any of us survived my own forays into personhood without Jessica and Jeremy to anticipate things I was flat out ignoring. And childed mothers, they usually were called by name, as opposed to "somebody's mom." Adolescence would not be this wonderful without Shannon and Kelly to have been able to take up the slack of anticipation and joy in things that were frankly freaking me out.
Without "biologicals" we might die out as a species, but without mothers, all the instances of mothering, we would die out as human beings. For all the mothers in my life and the life of my parasites, I honor you on this day. Especially the ones that mother the whole world and "other" people's children. (The rest of you can wallow in your dry toast and over creamed coffee.)
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