May 14, 2013

More than earrings

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They were a present, a pair of earrings sent to cheer me in a time of personal trial, several years ago. A little gold heart dangles from a little gold ball. I never wore them, because I couldn’t get the backs off. I figured it was something wrong with my hands, or alternatively that this was the reason the earrings had landed in a resale store or a yard sale (the giver being a famous thrifter, for which I admire her).

They sat on a little Wedgwood tray on my my dresser, a special location. Every now and then I would consider wearing them, but face the same problem.

I brought them with me to Pennsylvania. Again, they sat on my dresser. I loved the memory of my friend thinking kindly of me and sending them, but I had long since given up on wearing them.

This morning, choosing jewelry, I looked at them again. I picked them up. I looked at the backs. I tugged on one and again failed to move it.

I directed my gaze through a different portion of my progressive lenses.

I tried to wiggle one of the backs. No luck.

I changed my viewing angle one more time.

And then I realized the problem.

These pierced earrings are screw backs.

I didn’t even know pierced earrings could *have* screw backs.

How many other things do I look at over and over, tug on and try to master, when I simply don’t understand how they work in the first place?

This applies to many, many situations in life, but especially to emotional conditioning. I lived many years thinking there was only one way to put on an earring, only one way to be a success at womanhood, only one way to please the people I believed I needed to please in order to be loved.

When you believe there is only one way to be right, it leaves myriad ways to be wrong. Trying to avoid all the wrong ways can become an obsession so deep it’s unconscious. The thing we have committed to seems obvious.

At long last, those earrings.

At long last, those earrings.

Just like the earring backs. Obviously, they were meant to be pulled off and pushed back.

No. They unscrewed. “Lefty loosey,” I told myself, and the backs were in my hands.

I’ve been unscrewing myself from old ideas and beliefs about myself for the same several years I have not been able to wear my earrings. I’ve been working hard at it, seeking a deeper understanding. I spent three months this winter writing about my life, to help myself get clearer about how I could have missed something so true. How did I manage to see it — to see myself — so wrongly?

By making sure I was right.

Those things are better, but the way I assume others might feel about me, the way I expect to be perceived by the world, the treatment I anticipate receiving really has not changed much. I’m still expecting push back.

Perhaps the lesson of the earrings is to take a different view of the world — to look for a little more lefty loosey, a little less pushing back.

Filed Under: Orientation, The Inner Landscape ·
Mar 27, 2013

The Open Space

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The remote office.

The remote office.

When I agreed to my wife’s suggestion that I take a time of sabbatical after our wedding and my move to live with her, I did it reluctantly. I’ve been pushing hard for ten years in local church ministry, pushing to show I could support my family and pushing to show I could be useful on behalf of Jesus Christ. Laying down both those responsibilities felt strange. While it’s nice for my wife the Presbyterian pastor that I hold a high view of the call to ordained ministry and the duties appertaining thereunto, it took another kind of hard push to detach myself from them, even temporarily. Who would I be without the weekly sermon and all the preparation that contributed to its preparation — the studying and discussing and pondering and praying? the writing itself?

Who would I be without the deadline?

Furthermore, Kathryn and I built a friendship on supporting each other in the sermon-writing process, a foundation we have been inhabiting and expanding upon for almost seven years. Who would we be without that work to share?

Would the one without a sermon to write even matter?

Please be assured, that was my question, not hers.

Now, I know sabbatical derives from Sabbath. In theory, all a sabbatical ought to require is rest and worship, or, at the very least, prayer.

But I’m not wired that way.

six-word-memoir

Six Word Memoirs — go ahead, click on it.

Remember the Six Word Memoir meme from a few years ago?

Mine was as follows:

Proving I was not a mistake.

That’s a big job. How do you do it and not push?

Taking a break seemed scary.

So I:

  1. thought up a writing project
  2. made the bed every day
  3. did laundry as often as I could find enough dirty clothes to justify turning on the machine
  4. folded things and put them away in drawers and closets
  5. read a lot of books
  6. said yes to everything anyone asked me to do (social invitations, opportunities at Kathryn’s church)
  7. worked on the writing project
  8. learned my way around from the Panera to the many locations of GIANT to the Starbucks and home again
  9. cooked things from scratch, including but not limited to chicken parmigiana, eggplant parmigiana, shamrock cupcakes and carrots glazed at least three different ways (maple–yum; honey-mustard–also yum; whiskey–unfreakingbelievable)

honey-im-a-lesbianBasically I aspired to be the lesbian version of a Stepford Wife.

Again, be assured, this all came out of my head.

Providentially, and referring back to the actual purpose of a sabbatical, I also prayed. This helped in numerous ways, because the past three months also included adjusting to a new family configuration, living far from my daughter, and stressing over where two of my three children will be going to school (college and grad) in the fall.

A little over two months in, I accepted an invitation to supply preach one Sunday at a church in transition. I leaned on what one of our friends calls a Sustainable Sermon, and Kathryn wasn’t preaching, so we missed the chance to prep together. We got up on Sunday morning and went our separate ways. I came home exhausted. I think I cried later. I’ve cried almost every Sunday. I miss LP the most on Sundays. And I miss my identity as pastor and preacher, but not while I’m at church, worshiping. I never miss it then. While I’m at church, I enjoy my new identity as the minister’s wife, as “Kathryn’s Martha,” which again is my way of saying it — such a retro ’5o’s girl I am, turning my tomboy wife into the patriarch. I cry later because I wonder what’s going to become of me vocationally. What does God want from me?

On that day, however, I cried because I faced a realization growing throughout my sabbatical time: a rest from working six days a week meant I didn’t need to rest — literally — as much. I have a chronic, auto-immune disease, and I grow fatigued more easily than the average bird. Let’s just say that when I worked full time, I wasn’t glazing carrots with whiskey or anything else.

“I’m really not up to doing the job, physically,” I confided to Kathryn. I watched the expression on her face, then spoke before she did. “You already knew, didn’t you?” She nodded, slowly, carefully, lovingly.

(LP knew, too, but that’s her story to tell.)

Whatever God wants from me next, it doesn’t seem to be going back into local church ministry.

Accepting this — and there are other reasons to believe it’s true that are not part of this particular blog post — meant rolling over in my head the question of whether I had ever belonged in parish ministry. No need to reassure me. I got over it. But it was an honest phase of my existential angst. I always seem to need to go there, to prove something to myself.

I’ve grappled for five years now with Rheumatoid Arthritis, a noteworthily invisible illness. I kept insisting to myself that I was doing well, that my case wasn’t that bad, proving I could still be useful, pushing back on my fear that I would become the 21st Century equivalent of a bedridden Victorian hymn-writer.

Giving in feels like declaring defeat.

But here’s a story I’ve been saving, from my longtime blogging friend, Milton Brasher-Cunningham (buy his book, it is beautiful and has communion and baseball and poems and recipes, too), who I finally met in person last fall. Over a fantastic lunch at the Great Lost Bear in Portland, he told me about visiting a family member with a young child who played soccer. His relative remarked that the child’s team did unusually well, because of something the coach told them. All the other teams of kindergartners clustered around the ball, moving around the field in a mass of little bodies. This coach told them to look for the open space. He taught them that the open space is where you find opportunity. 

The home office.

The home office.

What does God want from me now? It’s pretty clear what the closed space is, and if I can come out of a three month sabbatical knowing that, I guess it’s something.

In the short term, I’ll test the big decision by covering a friend and colleague’s sabbatical this summer. I’ll be back in the pulpit most Sundays from May 12 to September 1, as well as handling emergencies, all very part time. I’ll be working on sermons across the desk from my wife, and if that’s not a dream come true for two girls who read their sermons to each other over Skype, I don’t know what is.

But mostly, I’m looking for the open space. And when I find it, I’m going to run.

 

Filed Under: Discernment, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Sabbatical, The Inner Landscape, The New Normal ·
Jan 25, 2013

Adjustments (from Thursday afternoon)

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The Coke Machine

The Coke Machine

I’m sitting in Wegman’s, a store you won’t find in Maine, in the huge area for people who want to eat food made on the premises. The WiFi is free, and the sodas comes from an automated soda fountain. Across the table, kathrynzj is working on her laptop, and I’ve been learning how to find a Word Doc in Dropbox, open it in Pages, edit it, then save it as a Word Doc again in Dropbox–all on my new iPad Mini.

I might as well be on Mars, I am so far away from Wednesday afternoons with LP and my laptop at Arabica.

A driver’s license, a library card, a new license plate, an AETNA card for the dental plan all claim I live here now. I’ve had mail from not one but two churches (Presbyterian and UCC). I’m learning the difference between the Giant, Weis and, yes, Wegmans. These are superficial adjustments, like learning how to work a ridiculously complicated remote control. (What the heck is FIOS, anyway? You kids get off my lawn.)

Even when a person is happy, a big moves means some complicated adjustments. I’ve hesitated to rhapsodize about the good parts because certain people miss each other. I’ve hesitated to whine about the ways I feel a bit displaced and disconnected because the reason I made this move is because certain people missed certain other people.

And because I believed, and still do, that God called me to it.

“…and do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.” Nehemiah 8:10b

I am admittedly ignorant of Nehemiah. The longer sense of the passage is this: the people are hearing the word of the Lord, and they are rejoicing and weeping, because God’s love is a lot to get your head around, really, but they are reassured that it is God’s good day. Go home, eat and drink, because the Lord’s Day is not for mourning and weeping. Make arrangements to care for those in need, yes, but seriously, be less serious. Eat the fat and drink the sweet wine.

Somewhere here in South Central Pennsylvania, between the places I’ve fallen off the GPS grid and the places that now feel as familiar as home could ever feel, is God’s joy for me. I keep trying to call it a thing I’ll do, but kathrynzj points out that it’s enough to be here and be me. This bird is having Sabbath in her new nest, and it’s okay.

Believing that may be the biggest adjustment of all.

Filed Under: Reflectionary, Relocation, Sabbatical, The Inner Landscape ·
Oct 5, 2012

…a teenager, an old dog and their lesbian mom walk into the…

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A colleague asked a few months ago, “Why did you stop writing for the local paper?”

I pondered, then smiled. “My last child at home is 17, my dog is a rescue from so close by I don’t want to reveal his provenance and I just came out to my congregation.”

He chuckled, “Those sound like three great columns to me.”

Yes, yes, we laughed. But these topics felt tender, especially the last one. I had to grow accustomed to new information about myself, looking back into the past to wonder why I didn’t know better and what took me so long and why God, who made me as I am, hadn’t intervened sooner? Because this felt like an intervention, a moment of truth, one I could not deny later the way I had the other time the universe got me to look at myself in the mirror and see who I really was.

I was 37, divorced, mom of 3, and my new best friend wasn’t like any of the other girlfriends I’d ever had before. She was more dashing, less domestic, and not straight. We met for coffee, lunch, dinner. At the end of each meeting, we got out our books to see when we could get together again. It was 1998, and calendars were made of paper.

She had a pair of tickets to an event and invited me to join her, and we agreed to meet for dinner beforehand. I prepared carefully. I put on makeup. (I rarely wear it.) And as I looked in the mirror, I had a moment of knowing myself as I hadn’t before.

I liked her as more than a friend. I was getting ready as if for a date.

A period of self-examination ensued, lasting many months according to the journals I kept at the time. Later I laughed it off as my “lesbian wannabe phase,” a time no doubt influenced by sadness over a broken marriage and a lack of confidence around men and really what I liked about her were the ways she resembled a guy and …

And I convinced myself that this was not my path, not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I began looking rather desperately for a man to validate my existence.

Recently I went back to those entries to refresh my memory about the dates, and I read a confession, written to myself, about the power of my feelings not only for this friend, but for other women I knew at the time, specific other women whose company gave me a charge. How carefully did I pack these feelings away, that I was able to actually forget them?

Being gay seemed complicated. Think of all the things I would have to explain, all the people who would have to re-learn my identity.

Especially me.

Many years went by. I got married again, and I gave it a good effort, if by “it” I mean telling myself a story about being straight and also telling myself that this was marriage. This was what men and women must be like together. And if the love wasn’t deep and pure and lasting, it must be my fault for being an inadequate wife. I saw couples who really loved each other many years into marriage. I saw older couples in airports and wondered what held them together. I thought, “I don’t see that happening for me. Why not?”

As it turned out, it took more than a look at myself in the mirror to get the message across to me. The plain of my life already storm-scorched, I pulled myself into a protective shelter, frightened of what might come next.  Revelation came with the force of hurricane lightning, blowing open the doors enclosing my heart.

Now when I see a long-loved couple, I know I can be one of them.

***********************

(More on the girl and the dog another time.)

Filed Under: Orientation, The Inner Landscape ·
Jul 12, 2012

Who is My Self?

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Others treat you the way you treat yourself so…

1. Be yourself
2. Know yourself
3. Forgive yourself
4. Like yourself
5. Love yourself

This list of five sensible, impossible, necessary steps toward wholeness appeared today on the blog of a singer-songwriter I love, Nhojj. He performed at the book party for the collection of poems in which I had some work published last year, and although I did not get to attend the launch, I started following his blog. He’s a person of faith, African-American, gay, and inspirational. When he puts up a post that suggests stopping to listen to a song, I do it.

So this afternoon I’m contemplating his music and #1 on the list above.

Be yourself.

That is very confusing advice to someone who grew up thinking the key to life was to be who someone else wanted me to be. Every move I made seemed to be the wrong one. I was too loud, too clumsy, too short, too smart, too lazy, too … Because I rarely received a compliment, I gathered that I did not deserve any. (Those who grew up in the era before self-esteem know what I mean.) I know it’s not unique, nor is it universal, that adopted children have an uncanny feeling they ought to be someone else, or maybe somewhere else, but that was part of my experience.

Be myself.

I came to think I ought to be a live doll, a representation of quiet girlishness.

I failed, largely.

This is my grandmother’s doll, Miss Emily. She named the doll after herself. Really, she was ahead of her time with this turn-of-the-last-century MyTwinn. Miss Emily Spong walked “Miss Emily” in a white wicker perambulator. She was passed down to a friend’s daughter and granddaughter and then returned to her original mistress, and from there to my excited hands. I changed her clothes and carried her dangerously up and down stairs and put her to bed in an antique six-month crib passed down from the other side of the family, covering her with an heirloom quilt.

When I was older, she sat elegantly on a built-in window seat under the fan-shaped window on the third floor of our historic home. Miss Emily represents history, lineage, gentility, life indoors, well-polished tables and well-cared for things of old.

A doll with different ideas.

 

There was another doll who had an influence on me, when I was younger, before I was allowed to touch Miss Emily. I loved the naked, woods-dwelling heroine of Dare Wright’s “Take Me Home.” She is unfortunately taken home to a proper house, by a proper little girl who dresses her in lovely clothes and does her hair.

The little naked doll, whose name is the appropriately androgynous Robin, has an eclectic community of her own making, various elders and mentors and peers and protectors who find her charming and delightful.

Happily, the wild woods animals who love her manage to kidnap her back.

It is completely true that I adored both dolls, but in nuanced ways. I reverenced Miss Emily, but I identified with Robin.

I felt more like Robin, but I wanted to be Miss Emily.

Except when I didn’t.

Now, there’s more to a woman than can be expressed with two dolls, I hope. But these two dolls are speaking to me today. And the truth is I can appreciate the elegance of a tea party and a beautiful old doll because they point to the courage and determination of the forward-thinking grandmother who used her standing in the community to get things done, who could love old things and buildings without letting her mind get stuck in the old ways they could represent. But there’s more of me in the doll who tried, at least a little, to please the human mama who tied a sash around a pretty dress, all the time yearning for more open places.

The trouble for me was the other reality was unknown. I didn’t have friends to come and rescue me using an upside down umbrella or a way to build a bridge between some life I thought of as “real” and the family where I struggled to be accepted.

And I wonder now if it might have been different if I’d just been myself instead of trying to read what I thought other people wanted me to be. If you do that long enough, you don’t remember much anymore.

(More to follow.)

Filed Under: The Inner Landscape ·
Mar 21, 2012

Twenty Years Later

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I was 30, married, the mom of two little boys, 14 months and almost 6. It was Christmas, and I had bronchitis, and the doctor prescribed antibiotics, and they made me sick to my stomach, but even after ten days had gone by, I still felt sick.

You’d think I would have known by then, after two children and two first trimester miscarriages in between.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. (Psalm 51:1, NRSV)

You’d think.

But it didn’t seem real, quite, until yet another week went by and I still felt nauseated.

This is the year it’s been twenty years since then, and in some ways it feels like it all never happened, and in others it feels like five minutes ago.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. (Ps 51:2-3)

I was a funny bird in those days. I had lived a very clean, straight life. Really, I was a professional good girl. I put being good ahead of most everything else. I had two or three college stories about drinking a little too much, had only smelled pot from a distance and had absolutely no sexual history outside of marriage, which believe me was unusual for someone who graduated from college in 1982, all of it, even among “nice” and “Christian” young people.

Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment. (Ps 51:4)

I worked hard at being good to compensate for feeling I was bad in every way.

It’s possible we can blame Calvinism for this, or Southern Baptists, or Southern culture and its emphasis on feminine purity, or my mom, or just my innate personality. I’m not sure where the fault actually lies; I only know I was conditioned or wired to take the responsibility on myself, whatever befell.

Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me. (Ps 51:5)

Ah, well there’s the key, perhaps. I had two mothers, the one who conceived me, and the one who raised me, and that’s where it gets complicated, which is to say, right from the beginning. Because the mother who raised me never seemed to be able to forgive me for coming from somewhere else, from someone else, from a mysterious past that could not be controlled or known. I went into my teenage years terrified of repeating what my birth mother had done, even though I had no idea of her circumstances, the underlying understanding being that if she couldn’t keep me she must have been some kind of a slut, and that wasn’t what I was going to be, even if and maybe especially because the mother who raised me was so afraid I would.

I realize this is a charged word, especially now, but it is the word I had in my mind then, and it shows the kind of world in which I lived, full of judgment of women and their sexual behavior in particular. It’s different in my mind now, but the world hasn’t changed as much as one might hope.

I was determined to overcome that expectation. I had to overcome it. It seemed like the only chance I had to live the life my mother taught me I ought to want: to achieve the successful marriage, which was the only validation any woman needed to have.

(Brutal. It was brutal. I hope no one taught you these lessons. I do everything I can to teach my daughter something different.)

You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. (Ps 51:6)


I was in high school and started college in the 1970s. Young people were having sex, lots of it, in those days before we knew about AIDS, and girls were getting pregnant. Nice girls, Christian girls, all sorts of young women were having sex and getting pregnant. In my neighborhood outside Williamsburg, Virginia, we whispered about the family that paid for three abortions in the same year: one for their daughter and two for girls their son had gotten pregnant. I took the unsurprising attitude for an adoptee that this had to be a bad thing. After all, would I even be here if abortion had been so readily available in the year I was born?

I took that attitude, but when my friend, S, needed a ride to the clinic in college, I took her. She was afraid a pregnancy would crush her parents, who were already having a tough year because her father had been laid off.

And when my friend, P, who was if anything a good-er good girl than I, more pious — she even became a charismatic at college!! — when she told me about her multiple abortions, which she had because she never planned to have sex and therefore never had protection available, she told me her mother said to think of it as making a blood sacrifice.

Some mothers will tell us anything to get the story to turn out the way they want it.

Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. (Ps 51:6-7)

Wash me clean.

Well, if you don’t get dirty, you won’t need to be washed clean. That seemed to make more sense. If I could only be good enough, truly good, more good than P or S or the family down the street in the upscale suburb, no one would have to talk me into anything.

But in 1992, no matter how good a wife and mother I tried to be, nothing about the pregnancy felt real to me, except that something felt wrong. We couldn’t figure out when the baby was conceived; the predicted due date was a shock. Then prenatal tests pointed to a problem and more tests confirmed a genetic abnormality. I didn’t expect to be talking to my trusted doctor and hearing him say I had a choice about whether to carry to term.

Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. (Ps 51:8-9)

I believe we made the best choice at the time. That does not mean I felt good about it, or that I regarded the life lost casually, as some people think women who terminate pregnancies must.

Most everyone close to me (parents, in-laws, spouse) felt ready to move on, relieved that the procedure was safe and legal, that it could take place in a fine hospital in my own city, that I received high-quality medical care.

Oh, it pleased my mother!  (I believe she feared her impaired grandchild would survive. This, too, was brutal.)

Meanwhile, my milk came in.

I grieved. 

I felt guilty, though I did not regret the decision, and I wondered, unsurprisingly, why this terrible choice had to be part of my life, why God’s eye had been off the ball when I was clearly such a good, good, good girl and such an unlikely candidate for an abortion.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. 
(Ps 51:10-11)

When you’re hoping to go to seminary, and you end up in the hospital to have a pregnancy terminated on Good Friday, it’s a dark place to be.

For me, it remained dark for a long time. I felt cast away from God’s presence, and I hated that. Later I was angry. My pastor assured me that God was big enough to handle my anger, but that made me madder! Surely there had to be a better way for God to run things than to let misery occur and then be receptive to our anger?!?!!

I concluded, eventually (and this is good news for everyone to whom I ever have or ever will be a pastor), that sometimes bad things happen and those bad things are not a judgment on the people who suffer them. And where God is at those moments remains a mystery, although I will say that when I have been at my lowest, God has reliably provided the help that I needed to get from one day to the next until I could do it by myself again.

In 1992, that help took the form of an older friend whose own history contained abortions she didn’t really want to have. She sympathized with the complex nature of my situation, and instead of trying to redirect me to the relief felt by my family, she said, “Why don’t you pray Psalm 51?”

I remember reading it for the first time — well, it probably wasn’t the first time ever, but it felt new — and thinking, “This is not me! I didn’t do anything wrong!” Holding that thought was making it possible to get up and get my boys ready for the day. Holding that thought was crucial.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit. (Ps 51:12)

I kept going, barely, but I was still bone-crushingly sad. It really didn’t get better until I was able to hold both the relief and the sorrow together, to know in my marrow that I could feel both at the same time. Then I began to feel restored.

God did not do this thing to me. God did not condemn me for making the best choice I could knowing what I knew then, and although my life has been personally complicated and not even close to what my mother would have deemed successful, I do not feel punished by God.

And I am grateful for and to the friend who knew, from her own hard experiences, how much a psalm could mean, those old words forming a ritual expression intended to bring us back into relationship with the God we blame when the fault is really in the frailty of humankind, in our complicated bodies that don’t always work perfectly, and in our striving minds that don’t always reach the right conclusions, and in our broken and breaking hearts that don’t always give the love we want to receive.

I continue to struggle with taking the blame for, well, almost everything, but twenty years later, I don’t feel I was at fault for what happened in my life that winter and spring, and I willingly take responsibility for the choice I made, and although I still feel sad about it most every Lent, I do not regret it.

And if there are parts of the story for which I needed to be forgiven, rest assured, it has all been asked and answered, long ago.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

Filed Under: Abortion, Adoption, Lent 5B, Personal History, Psalm 51, Sex, The Inner Landscape ·
Mar 15, 2012

Stopping the Car, Part 2

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In which we explore the 3rd thing on the list…

  • Pay attention to how your brake pedal feels. If it’s soft and goes to the floor, you may have low fluid, a faulty master cylinder or problems with your drums or calipers. You may be able to rebuild some braking pressure by pumping the brakes.
    • If, however, your brake pedal is hard and does not move, something in your brake system may have seized or you may have an obstruction under the pedal. Try to feel with your foot (or have a passenger look) to see whether you have something under the brake pedal.

Hmmm. Let’s think about the brake pedal that isn’t stopping the out-of-control whatever you’re driving in your life — your temper, your self-control, your desires, your _____. For me it’s the habit of mind I’m trying to amend by fasting from it during Lent, and I need to tell you that while it’s going better each day, there have been some dramatic failures. Unlearning a habit is HARD. 


So, whatever is the driving force, the thing moving you through the world the way you don’t want to go, the impulse you want to stop, it doesn’t matter, because the situation is, your brakes fail. Then what? 


Pay attention to how it feels when you try to stop and fail. 


Is the pedal soft? In other words, is it still moving, as if maybe there’s a chance you could stop if only you pump it just the right way? 


I so identify with that. If only I could do this (whatever “this” is) more perfectly, if only my technique were better, surely there would be no problem. 


But sometimes the pedal is hard, immovable, because something has seized up on the inside or something is obstructing you on the outside.


Okay, now I think I might tell you what my Lenten Discipline is, because seriously, this hard brake pedal demands it. 


I’ve been attempting to fast from saying mean things to myself. It’s habitual. I think it relieves the strain of other feelings, such as anger or sadness or disappointment in others or frustration with the way things are. Sometimes I’m trying to avoid hearing the criticism I fully expect from another person or people. I turn it on myself, which is painful, and if someone else is involved in the conversation — in other words this isn’t happening when I’m alone — I do a worse thing, which is beat myself up and then apologize for being awful, even though I frequently don’t mean it. 

And sometimes I do this because of the soft pedal, because I have low fluid (I’m tired or worn down), or a faulty master cylinder (Baby, I was born this way, or got there so soon I can’t remember it.) or problems with my drums or calipers (Could these be a metaphor for brain chemistry? I might need to listen to Car Talk to be sure.). 


And sometimes I do this because of the hard pedal. I seize up because of the way I’m interacting with someone who pushes my buttons, Or there may be an obstruction because the other person is just like that. 


It’s a relief to recognize it’s not all interior, though the habits were formed so long ago that I suspect I attract people into my life who set up the same darn dynamics with me.
If I were a car, I could have the brakes replaced and try again. But this ’61 Songbird has to make do with the brakes she has. They can be tuned up, but ultimately I need them to work, for myself and for others.

Filed Under: Lent, The Inner Landscape ·
Mar 14, 2012

Stop Right There

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It’s a bad lectionary week when we’re sitting in Preacher Group, and we’ve read the Hebrew Bible lesson and the Psalm and the gospel, and I say, heavily, “What’s the Epistle?”

I almost never preach the Epistle.

Mostly they annoy me. I’ve been skittering around the progressive edge of mainline Christianity for years now, ever since the Unitarian wannabe phase I experienced in seminary. As recently as three years ago, I was arguing away from the cross and repentance, I really was.

But this year I am drawn to it, because I’m feeling again the truth of the trope, “There is no Easter without Good Friday.”

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. (Ephesians 2:1-3, NRSV)

I know this one probably isn’t written by Paul, and it sounds absurd and condemnatory and extreme and … truthful.

“You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived.”

Stop right there.

You were dead.

It’s a way we feel sometimes, isn’t it? Laid down under a weight of disconnection and despair roughly equal to that of the stone that seals a tomb.

There is no rebirth without a death.

I’m in a place in my life where everything feels new, almost literally everything. I am driving on the same roads and looking at the same water and the same trees and even seeing the same crocus bulbs send up their tiny little shoots, the shoots that last year this time were still underground and under a foot or so of snow. I am seeing all these familiar sights of mud season in Maine, and they are made new.

There is nothing new without the end of something old.

What was old was my sense that I already knew everything, that I had myself and the world and maybe even God figured out, that my life experience and my study of scripture and my deep thinking and playful writing had unearthed some meaningful truth.

I was stopped right there, stopped by a recognition that some of the things I knew to be true were, in fact, not. I was stopped, right there, by a dawning realization that life held other possibilities and likelihoods and gifts and healings and miracles — yes, miracles — beyond my wildest expectations.

Because I was dead, you see.

Dead.

Lying under a stone I had effectively rolled onto myself.

Then, like the little shoots of the crocus, I began to poke my way up through the earth, eyes squinting against unfamiliar sunlight, ears muffled first then overwhelmed by songs of beauty and joy and love.

But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ–by grace you have been saved–and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:4-7, NRSV)

I most likely first read this passage in high school, from a copy of “Good News for Modern Man.” It looked like this:

But God’s mercy is so abundant, and his love for us is so great, that while we were spiritually dead in our disobedience he brought us to life with Christ. It is by God’s grace that you have been saved. (Eph 2:4-5, GNT)

I know I found this annoying, as I said above, because I was nothing if not obedient. I was an obedient, good, probably annoyingly pious teenage girl. I wrote songs and played them in church on my guitar. I never missed Sunday School or youth group or anything else that a super-good Christian young lady could do at church.

I read my Bible.

But I did not understand it. I did not understand it. All I could see was this part: “we were spiritually dead in our disobedience.” I stopped right there.

I did not see the part that mattered:

God’s mercy for us is so abundant, and God’s love for us is so great.


I think I’ll stop there, for now.

Filed Under: Lent 4B, Spring, The Inner Landscape ·
Mar 12, 2012

Stopping the Car, Part 1

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Last week I had a dream in which my brakes failed.

Let me start by saying, my brakes are fine. Someone who also drove my car in the past ten days reported that the brakes were so good we might stop harder than desired because the brakes back home took more effort. And I’ve had a car (a Toyota purchased for $900) with brakes that needed to be replaced, so I’ve lived with that problem, and I’m sure the brakes on my Volvo are fine.

Therefore, I moved immediately to the symbolic.

Without telling you any more about the dream, I will say I felt among other possibilities it could be applied to my (I know, I know, it’s as-yet-unspecified) Lenten Discipline.

And always willing to explore a metaphor, I Googled “what to do when brakes fail.” This turned up an incredibly helpful list on the Auto version of WikiHow.

First of all, the title of the article is “How to Stop a Car with No Brakes.” Somehow that has a different nuance for me than “brake failure,” which was the phrase in my mind after the dream. The car had brakes, but they didn’t work for some reason. That’s different than no brakes at all, but no brakes at all seems to be more like the way it feels when I engage in the habit of mind from which I am trying to fast this Lent.

It had eleven recommendations, almost all worth exploring, but let’s start with just the first two.

1. Don’t panic! Overreacting to this situation will only make it more dangerous.

This made me laugh. How would you not panic when your brakes don’t work? But it works as a suggestion when I pair it with the second.

2. Take your foot off the gas and turn off cruise control (if on). Cruise control systems should turn off as soon as you touch the brake or clutch, but to be safe, make sure it’s switched off.


Take your foot off the gas. In other words, stop fueling the feeling or the mental pattern. I may be accelerating without realizing, which we might literally do in a moment of panic. Or perhaps I’m so locked into thinking in certain ways that I am locked into cruise control. I have to consciously say to myself, “Take your foot off the gas.”

Here’s a reminder of a car I admired when I was a little girl.

The Flintstones powered their car with their feet. It didn’t need brakes. All they had to do was pick their feet up and stop.

I’m trying.

I’m trying.

(My thanks to the very dear Mary Beth Butler, who got me thinking recently about the importance of a Pause, which is the same idea without the risk of a metaphorical car crash on the other side.)

Filed Under: Lent, The Inner Landscape ·
Feb 10, 2012

Things I cannot say

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I used to write about the events of my day — let’s say going to the 2008 Democratic Caucus — and reflect on the world and the family and maybe the weather and frequently, though not always, reach some sort of artistically-rendered conclusion that I hoped made it sound like I had it together.

(Except for the times I wrote about not having it together, artfully, I hoped.)
On that political occasion, I ended up standing in line in the snow with my interested-in-the-process 12-year-old and both husbands (then current and former), and on the way I called both boys (one at boarding school, the other at college) to tell them about it, whether they wanted to hear it or not.
I marveled at how much we had in common, “Yes We Can” Democrats, all.
This morning The Father of My Children told me he is going to the other caucus on Saturday (What?!?!!!), and the other husband is so far out of the picture I don’t know where he lives (well, I have his address, for the forwarding of things that won’t stop coming here, but I have no picture in my mind of where it is), and there will be no attending a caucus for me, and I only hope the boys, who are men now, will remember to vote in the fall and be what I think of as right-minded, and I have to look back at what seemed so winsome — our multiply-located family that was somehow of one mind — and recognize that it was an illusion.
It was fanciful, by which I mean a creation of my fancy, and it was purposefully  sweetened, because I couldn’t bear for it to be bitter. I couldn’t bear it.
Worse, it was falsified. 
I wrote a story of our lives based in what I dearly wanted, and it may be that some parts were true, at least the parts about the kids. And the dogs. Dogs are inherently truthful.
I wrote a story of my life based on what I knew, but some things were withheld from me, and I created a narrative out of my partial knowledge. 
I wrote a story of my life, long before I was a blogger, about who I thought I was supposed to be, because I could not see myself for who I was, and it never occurred to me that seeing something other than what other people seemed to want was an option.
I have to look back and remember that every cozy picture I painted was layered over my anxiety about the shaky reality of my day-to-day life, as if someone found a canvas portraying a woman having a nightmare — I had the most terrible nightmares and woke up sobbing, often — and painted over it a woman living a full and contented married life. 
When I wrote more about my life, I had a lot of rules and followed them, mostly. 
  • Don’t blog anything you wouldn’t say in a sermon. (Even though there are plenty of things I’ve blogged that aren’t sermon-worthy.)
  • Don’t be unkind about the former spouse even when he’s bugging you. (Especially because he used to read the blog, as did the boys! But people, we could NOT live together. We parent well together, reasonably, but we mostly do NOT get along. This is no secret. And if he’s still reading, well, there it is.)
But the unwritten, unacknowledged rules mattered more to me, and I internalized them. 
  • Don’t say how hard the current marriage is. 
  • Don’t admit how anxious you are. (I had a secret blog for that. Thank God for the friends who read it and accompanied me through the whirlwind.) 
  • Don’t admit to yourself that the words for your relationship and your feelings are bereft, barren, desert, empty, starving, thirsty, the words for a wilderness walkabout lasting far longer than 40 days.
The truth is, I am stubborn, and I held on until there was absolute, brutal honesty, even though I really didn’t want to hold on anymore. I suppose I needed words as sharp as a sword’s edge to cut me loose.
There are still things I cannot say here, but when I look in the mirror now, I know what’s true, about my life and about my heart and about my self. 
Life is entirely different than it was on caucus weekend four years ago.
And the nightmares have gone away.  
Filed Under: Personal History, The Inner Landscape ·
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