Making Peace

I think I am finally starting to see what my committee wanted to tell me, but utterly failed to do in that letter, thanks to an old friend who knows me well and was on that committee.

I am reworking seminary into the story of all my education, which is that education is for edification, not for job training. I was probably chaffing against that the whole time I was there, but I'll ponder that later, if it proves worrying.

I think where I am now is that I am just sad that there is no place for me in the church. At least not the formal organized religious part of it. I seriously wondered about the sanity of my friend Cynthia when she gave me Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church before I'd even joined (so to speak) but the truth is, my ministry always has been to the people the church would like to leave. And I've always been really honest about that. And I've learned through church and other places too, the absolute tyranny of instiutional memory.

I don't know where people like me go. I don't think that I want to do anything that is a "second string" to ordained ministry, because I honestly don't want to spend the rest of my life getting the Hallmark greeting card message that the Church offers lay ministry, especially those with an education in the church. And the truth is, there are very few priests I have ever met who can engage my in my faith at the level that makes organized religion worthwhile.

Kind of wondering if there is a grass is greener after all. I usually know better, but I might need something more challenging if I am going to be able to keep up the organized part of my faith.

Well, some things just circle around

So, I went looking at chaplaincy stuff today. Not just the schooling but the certification, and guess what? You have to be ordained or some sort of authorized in order to be a chaplain, too. I can't decide if I should start laughing or demagnatize my hard drive.

God continues to be a right bastard. Just saying.

Sorting the Definitions

"Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Women often experience shame when they are entangled in a web of layered, conflicting and competing social-community expectations."  Brene Brown

And since I was talking about who I am - I suppose there really wasn't any way for me to get out of the whole thing without feeling shame. 

'Without justifying or condemning ourselves, we do the courageous work of opening to suffering. This can be the pain that comes when we put up barriers or the pain of opening our heart to our own sorrow or that of another being. We learn as much about doing this from our failures as we do from our successes. In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience-our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity." Chodron

I am very good at empathy and compassion. I guess what I need to figure out is either - what to do when I don't get the return ticket, or what am I resisting in myself when I can't be empathetic. I think the latter is going to be a lot easier than the former for me.

And then there is the whole - dealing with the social anxiety, which isn't even a problem much anymore - I think it is more stuck to this feeling of shame I have acquired as a result of hearing that all that work amounted to nothing when it mattered. 

I'm going to go back and start reading that book my mom gave me. The one where I write all my awesomeness in. Because I think it's time to remember who I am. And I don't have to derive any of my own worth from people who are building a world I am trying to dismantle. I think I'm just a little bit starting to get unstuck, finally.

Pettiness

Sometimes, it takes a long time to to see the moral high ground you are standing on. This is generally because it's made entirely of your own pride. This sucks, for the record.

And a lot of the last year, a lot of being unable to move forward or backward comes from not wanting to prove some people right. Especially right when they gave me nothing. I am, at some point, going to have to do the after action of all this, and now I'm not actively avoiding it. I'm just generally procrastinating. I might work on this with Jane, or I might just unfriend everyone and lie on my resume. It's an open question at this point.

I am coming to terms with the fact that I am hamstringing myself because of a lack of imagination on the part of people that are not actually a part of my life. Some of them, let's be really honest here, I can't even remember their names. It feels pretty lame, when you think you are on the moral high ground, to come to this realization. I wonder if this will be the catalyst so I can stop caring about people I don't know and don't know me. I think I resisted this lesson because it came from Sara, and she doesn't care about people that I at least think she should, if only because they are in her charge. But while I can guess her long game, I don't really care, because the important thing is that I never have to see her again and she will never be in a position to affect my outcomes again. And I can rail against how awful some people have made the church, and I can rail against how mediocre some people want the church to be, but I can also leave the church without leaving God. That has been quite difficult for me.

It is the most remarkable thing about being human that we are such social creatures. I think it really was a good lesson for me to learn that all people are not safe and you don't have to expose your belly in unsafe places. Also, that I do now have an explaination for the somewhat delusional gradiosity that nearly all priest I know have - I think you have to be self centered in order to make it through the proccess as it stands, and it explains, absolutely, why we are such a white-middle class church. That particular individualism is distincly Western and very White American. And I still am not interested in the maintanence of the white- middle class church. I was just confused that the Espiscopal Church might be able to be something different. But rather than more and more deeply embracing the diversity of the Anglican Communion, it is just becoming a louder and louder echo chamber.

I do still like the liturgy. But I might need to find that liturgy somewhere else. The awesome thing about all that education is that I know it's not the only game in town. Kind of expensive research, but there you are.

 “To have courage for whatever comes in life—everything lies in that.” St. Teresa de Avila

Are you fucking kidding me?

A long time ago, in 2003, my husband lost his job and we moved back in with his mother. That was kind of hard, and it was in Bakersfield, and that was a little harder, and I had a pretty new college diploma, which everyone had always told me was the magic ticket to a better life - so here goes, with a newly minted resume, I went off to find a job to support my family.

I interviewed at the Seeing Eye Dog Foundation, or whatever it's called. It was a total front desk job, answering phones and processing applications. It was a job for which I am well suited, it paid enough to live at my mother in laws house rent free, and I had a blind friend in middle school who was just waiting to be old enough for a dog, so I knew first had what a huge difference this service makes in real lives.

The woman told me that I was too smart for this job and that I would be bored so she would not hire me. That in fact, she called me in for an interview only to tell me that , not that it was something she decided while we were talking. I was over educated and too thoughtful and I should be doing something else. I ended up at a temp job creating a Real World database for a Lucich Farms. And, yes, I took my education off my resume to get it.

In the meantime, I said to God and the universe, ok, lets dream bigger. I wrote a now embarassing letter to my agency recruiter, that I still have, about changing my stars. I said I will no longer let the voices in my head or the fears in my heart determine the scope of my abilities or my desires.

And then there was the 2003 General Convention of the Episcopal Church and I met Mark Lawrence. And I can sum this up now, in tiny sentences but it has taken me years to be able to do so and that is - the church is about to die. And it needs shepards to guide it through resurrection. And I am being called to be one of those shepards - one of those place holders - one of those midwives - a Moses. And I am not going to look like what came before because what is coming isn't a patched up old wineskin. I am not going to look like what comes after, because transistion requires something that looks odd both coming and going.

I was never called to look like an ordinary parish priest. But I did feel called to be a parish priest - not a rector, but an interim. My ministry is on Saturdays and I thought it was to the church, but it seems that the church is a hard place to invoke imagination.

And I was utterly flattered and flattened the first time someone called me Jesus but at least God gave him a break at 33 and I'm 41 and I am really really really getting tired of being told I am made for something better. I am really tired of being "special" and I am really tired of people being in awe of me because I went to seminary. Big fucking deal.

I think I have a newfound empathy for people released from prision - how to account for the time missing from your resume, telling the truth makes you a pariah, and dammit, you just don't know anything else. America is not the place to start over anymore. And neither, it seems, is the church.

Thanksgiving -Take Two

I actually tried to write yesterday, except blogger was having kittens and would freeze up every time I touched the keyboard. So, hopefully, I can remember what I was going to write.

A month ago or so, I realized that I don't live here. I breathe and pay rent in San Francisco, but I don't actually live here, to the point that I don't even have a hair dresser. And so, I decided to pay attention to here. And I think that I just needed permission, as we do, in order to let go and move on.

I am not saying that it is easy, or that I don't still have terrible days of depression or anything like that. But I have allowed myself to move from there was perfect and this place is bad to that place was lame and this place is pretty good. Just heads up, Portland people, I'll be dissing you for awhile.

Yesterday, I had 8 people over for Thanksgiving. I invited more, but three didn't make it. I spent three days cooking and had a fantastic time. I had lots of people over, we had a lot of food, I even printed a menu, which was quite over the top. Although the printing did allow me to stop adding to it, or who knows what else we might have had.

It felt a little like the Thanksgivings we used to have, when the kids were little, in Portland with all my momma friends. I had some friends from Portland come down, and I had friends who were here last year, and I had a bunch more friends. I think that the sense of place comes from the continuity of people and activities over time. Every time I have lived in the Bay Area, it has been with a new set of people. Finally, I have had a recurring set of people experience. In Portland, whenever I came back, it was always to the same group of people, the same core. and that was always the experience of "live here" that happened in Portland.

I think that I might start having that here. I think that here can be all those things that Portland has been, in terms of continuity. I think that this house, that I wanted because it is such a wonderful place for entertaining, and I set up to entertain in, might finally become the busy place I wanted. It has been a very nice sanctuary while I have been recovering. But I think I am ready to start letting in the light, too.

Corporate Prayer and Faith Formation

It occurs to me that I can pray however I like now. No one is judging my prayers life or my ideas of worship for their "unEpiscopalianism". I can't seem to go back to church though, and it isn't to do with trauma at this point, although I am certainly not done with it.  Rather, I am struck by how few Episcopalians practice or believe in foundational Anglican worship. Anglican worship is a practice, not a a belief. And faith is purely private. That doesn't mean personal, just private.

Anglican worship is about giving you, the participant, the opportunity to be shaped into a Christian. Your faith is your own, and the long process of butting heads with your own beliefs in the face of an unchanging presentation of the truth can, if you let it, go a long way towards culling our beliefs and revealing your faith. (Go read James. P Case, The Religious Case Against Belief. Basically what I am calling belief here is what he is calling ignorance but you need to read the book - it's short.) I know my own experience of saying Our Fathers week in and week out gave me lots of time to separate my human ideas of father from a spiritual, perhaps Platonic ideal of father. It seems to me that faith cannot grow without something to struggle against, and changing the language to be more inclusive means we have to struggle less against our beliefs. And soon, I believe, we aren't using religion to hone our faith, but we are using it to support our beliefs - the echo chamber of our own minds, our own human systems, our own popularism.

I'm not saying that change doesn't or shouldn't happen, I'm just saying that in the context of the Anglican expression of Christianity (and some others, too) change is tediously slow. Because it wouldn't show in the worship. It would show in the actions of the people of faith.

I guess some of what I question is related to lex orandi, lex credendi. Very loosely translated as, How we worship is what we believe. I think that in a consumer culture, such as we find ourselves in, in America at this time, it is dangerous to be messing with the worship. How many liturgists actually spend time researching and learning about advertising and marketing - not because we want to market or advertise the church more effectively (although many are quite blatant in the need for this in the consumer culture) but because we want to make sure that we are not changing the worship, changing the possibilities for faith, into just another aspect of the dominant culture. Shouldn't we be helping people see the source of their dissatisfaction and giving them something different? I'm pretty sure manna wasn't actually tasty, but it was certainly appreciated and life changing.

So often, I see liturgists, lay and ordained often working together, to jerry rig a service. The idea is that we should meet people where they are. Somehow, this idea will revitalize the church. If even one person is uncomfortable, we should adjust everything to retain them and manage their feelings. WTF? Really. Since we call people seekers we should think for one minute what that means. Like, if I have vanilla ice cream, but I want or need chocolate, giving me vanilla isn't actually going to do the trick.

The foundations of my corporate worship were in Rite I. Those tiny 8am services, where most everyone was going to breakfast after, but I was going to nursery. The 10am services where everyone participated in sit, stand and kneel together. The words stayed the same, the ritual stayed the same, and the cycle stayed the same. What changed was me.

God meets you where you are. Not religion. Religion most definitely is a thorny path, the path being to God, the thorns being all the people that you have to tolerate in order to get where you are going. But this God, this Christian incarnation of Incarnation, definitely requires people. It is the neighbor religion. And hell is other people.