So, This is Where I Am

I've been miserable sick for most of the last month. I had a few days to start a huge pile of projects at the Red Cross and then drop them, because I was too sick to roll over. And while I was gone, my team there did all sorts of things without me, and it is the very best feeling. (It's weird, because I am just noticing this, but it's the very thing that happened at St. David's and the very thing that Sara couldn't understand.) Maybe I am weird, but the best feeling is the knowing that I am replaceable - knowing that life was happening before I stumbled along, and will go along after I'm gone, but if in my passing, that life became brighter, smoother, more compassionate and maybe even a little more understood. Well, then I have done what I was sent to do.

While I was sick, I went off my meds. It was unintentional, although I had always planned to do so this January. One year was enough, especially since I have been feeling dissatisfied and looking around for myself lately. It has been interesting - the light headed dizziness aside - to find my tears again. I just feel more even though I hadn't really noticed. I suppose if I fall into depression again, I will be ok if I have to take the medication my whole life, but it is good to know the difference if that is the case.

I supposed the best way to describe it is being present. I'm really good, and have put a lot of work into being good, at being present to whomever and whatever is in front of me. Not trying to change it, just paying attention to what is really there, and being really honest about what I think and feel in the moment. It is what makes it possible for me to have such tiny profound experiences. And those experiences are what make me feel alive - how I know I'm doing that thing I am supposed to be doing in this life.

So, I have a few things to finish up, things I started while I was having my breakdown, and that I owe at least a little bit of cleaning up my own mess. But things that were good to keep me busy even if they are not things that make me alive. Yes, the PTSA and the Red Cross have been good to me, but they have not fed me. They have not kept me whole, they have only kept me from spinning out of control. And I know, with absolute certainty that those things are not my calling. Still, I will give them a couple of months to clean up.

I went through all my books from seminary. I picked out all the books that pulled at my heart, and filled two bags (about a third of the total) of books that didn't move me. This is the second purge, the first was the congregational development stuff, which was perhaps a knee jerk reaction, but this time, it was a lot of old dead white theologians. I kept the things that teach, theology that is a bit quirky, my strange collection of books by and about other denominations, my Benedictine Rules, and collections of prayers. And from there, I am thinking about what I am going to do next.

That strange collection of things tells me that I am going to be a chaplain. So, I am going to do my CPE (clinical pastoral education); that thing that I couldn't/wouldn't make time for during seminary. I'm going to see about doing the year long residency, but I might have to do the summer internship first. I'll just have to see.

What I am looking for in my corporate spiritual life

I've been thinking about what I actually want out of a corporate spiritual life. Besides not beeing taken for the priest or at least a priest everywhere I go. (Don't think the Catholics don't have this in their favor.)

I've a deep call to preaching. And pastoring. And I have a horrible sneaking suspicion that this makes me a writer - although I've killed all my writing skills with the preaching, because talking and writing actually should look different. My writing is a mess and it will take a very long time to get it back after the last several years, but that may be what I need to do.

Here is the thing about the Eucharist - I am deeply called to liturgical worship, and I love the coming together on Sunday morning, but my ministry was never to be a Eucharistic Minister. I care that it is done right, well, meaningfully, but the forgiveness of sins part has always been more important to me than the offering of sacrifice. We love the ritual, I think because it satisfys that very part of us that Jesus said we didn't really need to be satisfying. I don't know. Actual meals are more important to me. Actually eating together, whether you give the meal the ritual flare or not, actually talking about what Scripture says and how to turn that into livable action, today, in my affluent life, is what matters more.

I suppose I never did actually fit into what a typical Episcopalian is trying to become. I just don't have the patience to be a "social justice fill-in-the-blank." I care about the metanoia, the changed heart. You can, in your affluent life, do all sorts of good things without ever changing. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to sponsor a child in Vietnam for 28 dollars a month. I can sponsor a dozen children on just the cost of my own childrens music and swimming lessons. If I had a coffee habit, I could sponsor three. It's easy to give up nothing tangible and feel good.

But I am interested in how my heart turns towards people. How do we turn our hearts towards people, not just throw our spare change at them. When our hearts turn, then we start to have compassion for the system that we all struggle in, the affluent and the poor, and we can start to find ways to change that system.

Anyway, I am wondering where I am going to find my next group of study partners for my spiritual life. Jonathan suggests I start my own cult, but where to find the people?

I don't miss the Eucharist, but I miss the rhythm, and I miss the Wednesdays nights something fierce. I don't know if I need to search for that again, and figure out how to recreate it, or if I need to treat it like much of the rest of my life in Portland, as something to grieve if necessary, but to recognize as a particular time in my life and then move forward.

I've been seeing a lot of internet billboards to the effect that as long as I am looking backwards, I won't be able to see where I am going, or better yet, aim for a desired direction.

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.