Torn Sky

On Dancing, or, "So It Turns Out That that Evil Pastor from Footloose was Wrong After All"

The drums, the drums… and the dark… and the disregard for whether or not I look good. The freedom of anonymity and the safety of my beloved’s happy gaze.

I watch the drunk girl with her Ke$ha posturing and the guy who grinds on her in of-all-things-to-wear-to-the-club, really, pajama pants and it all seems so staged and fake and Jersey Shore-sad and desperate but maybe beautiful because of that… and good for you, pajama pants and all, because even the lamest among us long to be loved.

For years I danced almost every weekend, a blur of big, ravey Jncos and glittery makeup and shady boys with shady intentions and jungle and drum n bass and happy hardcore. As much as it was about the hormones and the alcohol, it was also about the freedom of being young and wild and beautiful (though I never really felt that way) and reckless.

And maybe even more, it was about the freedom from constant self-consciousness and fear of judgment, the two things that have been bearing down on me for my whole life right up to this very day.

And then like a needle scratching across the vinyl, I stopped. I got it into my head that the way I danced attracted the wrong kind of attention, that I could just walk away from it, that it wasn’t grown-up or ladylike or Christian or whatever.

That’s so much crap.

I think it’s true that faith can be tremendously liberating – it has been for me in many ways. But just as often, we find ways to use faith as a convenient excuse to reinforce our pre-existing insecurities or fears or prejudices or politics. I am as guilty of this as anyone.

And saying that I wasn’t going to dance anymore because it wasn’t ladylike or Christian or grown-up was convenient and sounded better to me than the truth, which was closer to “I’ve gained some weight and my body is changing and I’m mostly afraid of looking ridiculous and I never really learned how to do this sober in a way that feels natural.”

I’ve been slowly, meanderingly reading the book of John since Christmas, grappling once again with what it means that God showed up with a body, that the Word became flesh.

Not took on flesh.

Not pure light-and-spirit putting on awkward, clumsy body like an ill-fitting, unfortunate coat.

But became flesh –

- and what that says about God’s regard for human bodies, human bodies being us – because I still have trouble reconciling “I am a body” rather than “I have a body.”

Because if I confess that the clearest and truest truth about God is not words on paper or a vague and nebulous sense of Spirit but Jesus the man with skin and teeth and glands and maybe even parts that jiggled and sagged, then I can no longer hide behind the idea that somehow crawled into my head that God disapproves of bodies or God doesn’t want me to dance, because a God who became flesh surely didn’t mean for us to sit primly in the bleachers until we could be tidily spirited away to heaven, gazing as the dancers float across the floor, the way I spent entirely too many Friday nights in junior high. Longing to be down there, waiting desperately for an invitation instead of simply joining in or God-forbid getting out of my head long enough to notice that there were kids who felt even more left out than me and extending an invitation of my own.

I still struggle with feeling awkward when I dance. Part is being sober. Part is the echo of years of American-Christian-Puritianism and Midwestern-Norwegian stoic culture. Part is that my body doesn’t move quite the same at 33 as it did at 18, so I have to find new movements.

But I can lose myself in the rhythm for whole minutes at a time. 

I find things I can express and ways to be for which words are inadequate.

And I feel a kinship with the others who have also dared to step onto the floor, also awkward, also imperfect, but drawn to the drums and the dark, and I think to myself, “I won’t judge if you won’t, or at least I’ll try not to, and for just this little while I'll try not judge myself either.”

And in the movement the Spirit that dwells within finds its freedom to fly so much more than when I held it safely in my hands from the sidelines.

That Jesus and Religion Video Guy, and How I'd Rather Just Read Tolkien

So, I was a little surprised when my last blog entry got 3 times more hits than all of the previous blog entries I’ve ever written combined. I’m grateful that something I wrote could have such an impact on so many people, and if you are reading this blog because of that particular entry, well, hi there! I mostly write about spirituality/religion from a not-terribly-orthodox Lutheran perspective, my own life and foibles, how much I like using words like foibles, films, books, et cetera. I never write about politics and I don’t really see the point in debating for debates’ sake, although I’m happy to hear what others say and try to better articulate my own perspective when necessary. 

So this video with the guy who loves Jesus but hates religion that everyone is posting on Facebook.

 

Sigh.

It mostly reminds me of Tony Jones' Writing a Book About How RADICAL Jesus Is? Please Stop Boring Me. 

There have been some good responses written by others, so I’ll just link to them… one by Becca Clark, who I’ve never heard of, but she does a good job teasing out the pros and cons, and one by Nadia Bolz-Weber that was apparently written at the request of the ELCA. She is pretty much the closest thing the ELCA has to a rock-star pastor right now, and one of the people that always draws me back to the beauty of the church when I start getting too annoyed with the ugliness.

It’s not that I hate the video… I don’t. But I don’t really love it, either. There are parts of it that are really beautiful and parts that make me go “huh?” and parts where I want to say, “Well, wait, actually…”

For one thing, I’m so desperately tired of the “spirituality vs. religion” or “relationship vs. religion” thing. There was a time I said, frequently, “religion is for people who are afraid of hell, spirituality is for people who have already been there.” How arrogant. As if all people throughout all time, religious or not, don’t go through hell in some way, and as if the only possible reason a person would feel drawn into a community gathered around certain ideas about God would be fear of hell.

For me, at least for the last 6 or 7 years, it’s spirituality and religion, like the two contact lenses I put on my eyeballs each morning (and isn’t that a weird thing to think about, if you really think about it) that allow me to see clearly. If I leave one of my contacts out, everything looks weird. If I leave them both out, I’m blind as a bat. But with both in place, things look right. So yes. Both-and. That’s the only thing that works for me. Your mileage may vary.

But more than that, I think, was that as soon as I saw the video for the first time, I knew it would be reposted. A lot. And I knew that the inevitable “backlash” blog responses would come, and so on, and so much of what I see online lately feels to me like so much preaching to the choir and I’m just really bored with it.

It might be time for one of those Facebook breaks people talk about, I’m thinking. Just for a little bit. 

And what perfect timing to do it, since I need every spare minute because I’m reading The Lord of the Rings again! The first time I read it was 12 years ago, when I took a Fantasy & Science Fiction class at NDSU. I took that class because I had enrolled for a Women’s Lit course and realized I’d already read all of the books for it, some twice, and I really didn’t want to read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening *again.* I saw that a Fantasy/Sci-Fi course was offered and thought, “Isn’t that stuff pretty much romance novels for boys?” And I took the class and found out I was so wrong, so wonderfully wrong.

The first time I read LOTR, it was in the last years of my drinking, which really took off and took over after I moved to Fargo, even though I somehow managed to stay in school and even do some darn good work while I was there. I can’t say I was particularly spiritual or religious then, and so a good deal of the beauty of LOTR was lost on me. I liked the story enough, and I really love the movies, but the richness of Tolkien’s writing and the depth of it were mostly lost on me.

But it’s so beautiful now. He treats the problem of temptation and sin and the human condition with such real consequence, while at the same time always treating his characters with such grace and mercy. Gollum is maybe the ugliest and most beautiful thing in the world, and ever since I saw this scene from The Two Towers early in my sobriety, I feel a special kinship with him:

 

Aww. It still makes me tear up. The inner conflict and the giddy tense nervousness near the end when he’s finally free… it just, like, nails it.

I also see in the Smeagol/Deagol story echoes of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the whole thing really just has so much depth and weight and grace and beauty to it, more than most books I read. It’s the end of the week and I’m not about to write an in-depth theological study of it just yet (mainly because I’m only 1/3 through the first book), but suffice to say, it is filling my soul with good things, and that’s always necessary.

For Minot

“The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.” – Faulkner

Every media outlet in the world seems obligated to do a year-end roundup of important things that happened or important books or movies or albums that came out that year… I usually like year-end lists; on the artsy lists I learn about things I missed, and I’m reminded of things I loved. On the news lists, I think, “That can’t be six months ago, it seems like just yesterday,” or “That was only six months ago? It seems like ages.” Sometimes both.

But this year, those lists were incomplete. This year, those lists were wrong.

My hometown, Minot, North Dakota, was hit by a flood at the end of June unlike any other in its history – unlike any flood that most communities will ever see.

The dread started at Easter, when I visited my parents’ house and already the river that runs through their yard was rising. But real danger seemed far-off. I’d seen the river high a few years earlier. It rose, it crested, it fell.

The dread continued in May, when my parents came to Minneapolis for my graduation. We spent time together, we ate at my favorite restaurants, we visited the Science Museum, I heard a great sermon and donned a robe and someone important put a hood around my neck that I had to return an hour later. In between, my Mom used my computer to check the river levels  multiple times a day on the Internet, and told me they had a friend checking the house every three hours to make sure their septic system didn’t back up.

And then in June, friends and family who live in Minot started posting on Facebook about mandatory evacuations – first a false alarm.

And then not a false alarm.

I started watching the local news channel’s live stream for hours every day. I prayed. I kept checking Facebook. I felt like I should be in Minot, but I couldn’t be, and anyway what could I do to help, really? My gifts mostly have to do with words, not engineering or disaster preparedness or how to lift sandbags for 16 hours without collapsing.

My parents evacuated.

And the river rose. And crested.

I watched the local news feed as they flew over the town and surrounding area. I tried to locate landmarks. I found myself hypnotized by Facebook photo albums, focusing on street signs, timestamps, descriptions, trying to remember the way the river winds through town.

I saw pictures from the street where my childhood church is. The river was down the block. Then a few feet closer. Then in the parking lot.

After a few days, I stopped watching the news feed all day. I was finishing my final seminary class and just starting my current job, and I told myself that I had to focus on those things.

I was struck with waves of guilt – it was wrong for me to turn off the local news feed when so many hundreds of people I loved couldn’t just turn off what was happening in their lives. I ping-ponged emotionally between feeling helpless and feeling like I had to focus on my own responsibilities and feeling like I had an obligation to watch without turning away because after all, they couldn’t turn away.

But another hard part was feeling like this was all happening to so many people I cared about, seeing how my Facebook wall was covered with updates and laments and little glimmers of hope and everything in between in the weeks following the flood…

…and it seemed like no one around me was paying attention or even knew it was happening.

There was some national news coverage, for a day or two, but not much – a few aerial photos, and then nothing. They prayed for Minot for many weeks at worship services I attended, and I was grateful for that. When I told someone at my new job where I was from and what was happening there, he shrugged. Hadn’t heard about it. Offered a mumbled “that’s too bad,” as he walked away to focus on other things.

I went back to visit on Labor Day weekend.

I’ve always had a weird connection to houses that I see in my day-to-day life. I’ll feel a special affinity for a garden gnome, or a little Victorian cupola, or the way a porch looks so inviting. In my own neighborhood now, I have the Mayberry House, the House That Looks Like California, the 1955 Driveway, the Hippies With a Pile of Plastic Pink Flamingos, and many, many shoddy, slapped-on-looking additions that warm my heart.

I didn’t realize how many of those connections I still had in Minot until I drove around near 4^th Avenue Northwest. And I saw the little blue duplex with the round porthole windows. The long, low ranch house with the ferns that looks so 60’s. The dark brown house with turquoise trim, so unashamed of its ugliness.

Hollow. Dark. Port-a-potties on every corner like periods at the end of tragic sentences.

House after house after house after house after house. Block upon block. Haunted and empty and wrecked and the tears were rising with a tightness in my throat. The thing that came to mind, and I mean in no way to minimize anyone’s suffering, was rape. A violent taking and a violation of trust. A devastation that can’t be undone. And blood and sweat and tears everywhere, poured all over the only place that I’ve ever lived long enough to really call home.

My mom and I visited a family friend, and walked with her through the husk of her home, where I had spent countless teenage hours hanging out with friends.

She showed us where their FEMA trailer would go and worried about whether their dog would do okay in such a small space.

She showed us a statue of the Virgin Mary that had mysteriously washed up in their home.

She told us about the red tape. There is a lot of red tape.

In October, I went back to Minot again to preach at the church where I grew up, Christ Lutheran. The church no longer had carpet or pews or heat or plumbing. It was their first time worshipping in that space since June, and I was humbled that this community who had been through so much would even bother to listen to me, someone who’d watched it all from the comfort of a couch 500 miles away.

And then I went back again for Christmas. There were more FEMA trailers around town, many more. A whole village of them not far from my parents’ house, which had thankfully been (mostly) spared, although their outbuildings and property were hit hard. There was heat in the church, although the future for that building remains uncertain as I write this.

And then the year-end lists came from all the magazines and websites and news shows.

And no one said a word about Minot.

I’m not saying I expected the flood that came through my hometown to be number 1, or even number 2 or 3. A lot of devastating things happened all over the world, and some of them affected many more people than the flood in Minot did. I am troubled by the attitude I’ve sometimes seen in smaller towns that is suspicious or derisive of anyone or anything from a city of over 200,000, that thinks people in big cities are all uncaring jerks who don’t care about the “real” America. That’s not true, and I don’t think that that’s what happened with the year-end lists.

I guess I don’t know what happened.

I’m not saying that what happened in Minot was the most important thing that happened in the world in 2011. But it was the most important thing that happened in my world. And it was the most important thing that happened in the world of hundreds of people I know and care about.

And damn it, it may not be number 1, but it sure as hell belongs on the list somewhere.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

If a river rages through a town and destroys thousands of homes and breaks thousands of hearts and leaves behind millions of dollars’ worth of damage and millions of tears and the national news media ignores it, does it matter?

Ask the families who celebrated Christmas in a FEMA trailer.

Ask my mom, who has to help figure out what to do with a devastated church community in between figuring out ways to remove toxic crud from hundreds of feet of vinyl fencing.

Ask the block after block after block after block of empty houses that still sit dark and hollow, six months later.

Haunted. Empty. Wrecked.

They will tell you the answer you need.

The Ripple, the Whosoever and the Tedious, Tedious Waiting of it All

Ah, the Advent season. That time of year when some churchy types take great joy in reminding everyone that it's about watching and waiting, not shopping, darn it, and some other churchy types take great joy in saying “it’s Merry CHRISTmas, not Happy Holidays!,” darn it, and we all take great joy in eating too much sugar and listening to the Beach Boys’ “The Man With All The Toys.” Or at least we should.

I’ve been lazy about blogging, mainly because my job is taking up a lot of my creative energy. That’s a good thing – when I started this job, I didn’t think I’d get much of a chance to really be creative at all, but lately a lot of what I do is creative and challenging and fun and maybe even theological and all of that good stuff.

Last week I presented a case study on Communications & Culture Change loosely based on David Lose’s work in the whole “Tell a Better Story”/belonging & purpose area, along with Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment and Seth Godin’s All Marketers Tell Stories. It was fun to have a chance to do something a little more challenging and something related to the things I’m most interested in and passionate about, and my ideas were really well-received… so much so that I got to present it all over again for a group of executives this week (who also loved it), and then again today for a smaller group of people who couldn’t be there the first time.

If you had told me a year ago that I would be passionate about shaping corporate culture and genuinely see it as a great opportunity to do ministry, I probably would have laughed.

I used to say, “I got tired of working for the Man, so I’m going to work for the Man Upstairs.”

As if the church is the only place to do that.

Silly me.

I have had so many amazing conversations lately, so many little joys and signs of light in my days at work, and so much of a sense that a) God wants me to be right where I am right now, and/or b) when I decided to hold off seeking a pastoral call because it didn’t work with where my personal life is at right now, God was like, “Oh yeah? Well then, I’m going to have to go ahead use you here. How do you like them apples?”

God is also a big fan of Matt Damon in my head, apparently.

Anyway, it all has me thinking that for each of us, the ripple in the water of the universe that we make is inevitably so much bigger than the boundaries we try to draw around it. And the body of Christ – the “corporate Corpus Christi” if you will – the “whosoever,” as I like to say – is so much bigger than the group of people who call themselves the church.

And the God who became a human just like you because He loves you like a fool is already using you for something surprising today, and is planning something miraculous right now, no matter what you think is on hold or broken or not quite how you planned it to be. 

I am still very much in an area of watching and waiting in so many areas of my life... and doesn't *that* get terribly old and tedious? But isn't that also most of what life is? It seems like for 33 years I've almost always been watching and waiting for something, so maybe it's less about getting to whatever you're waiting for and more about enjoying the journey.

At least that's what everyone's inspirational posters on Pinterest seem to tell me.

And also what I suspect is true, even though I still kind of hate it.

But aside from the waiting and the waiting and the waiting that makes up so much of our terrifyingly short lives, I also feel like I'm learning to be more authentically and expansively myself, to feel less of a desire to apologize for my imperfections even while I pray that they might be transformed to serve others, to listen for what God is calling me to more and more, and to be less cemented in all of my preconceived ideas about what that is supposed to be. 

Happy Advent! 

Eyes Wide Open

Autumn’s chill showed up this week, like a slightly annoying neighbor who wears too much coral-orange lipstick saying, “Remember me? I’m baaack!” The only possible comfort to be found is in those two glorious words…

…hoodie weather.

I wish I could wear one every day, a size 2XL, swimming in it like a blanket with my ridiculous multicolored striped pajama pants and a pair of clean white cotton socks.

But that’s hardly “business casual,” and so I’m grateful for my two capey, sweatshirty Bobeau wraps, lovely garments that feel as forgiving as a hoodie but look drapey and flowing and fabulous.

I’ve been paging through the SoulPancake book and lamenting the fact that it’s so full of really thought-provoking questions and I never take the time to sit down and write or really think about them. I also want to blog more consistently, but don’t always feel like I have anything terribly interesting to write about.

You guessed it. Two birds, one stone.

So when I don’t have anything else I want to write about, I want to try blogging through some of the questions and quotes in it, completely haphazardly and not at all in any kind of order. Which I think is the way they’d want me to do it anyway. I’d also be really curious to hear other people’s answers.

Here goes.

What one eye-opening experience should every person have?

My mom has talked with me a few times about how she’s never been through a breakup. She and my dad have been together since she was a freshman in high school, they got married when she was 18 (She’s always quick to say that she was “almost 19” – as if that makes it more normal!). And heaven knows she’s seen me go through my fair share of breakups (probably more than my fair share… for a long time I had a bit of a “broken picker”).

It’s so strange to me that there is this huge chasm in experience between me and the woman who is one of the most important people in my life, and definitely the most influential female. She’s never gone through a breakup, and I’ve never been even close to going through an almost-40-year marriage, although I hope to share my life with someone.  And as awesome as it is that my parents’ marriage is lasting in a world where so many fail, I really can’t imagine what life would be like if I’d never been through a breakup.

Not just any breakup. The gut-wrenching kind. The kind that brings with it buckets of tears and the searing terrible fear of being foreveralone and carries along a crate full of records by the Smiths and the Cure and Tori Amos. The kind where people around you don’t know what to say to you and you know you’re making them uncomfortable. The kind that hurts not just emotionally but physically. The kind that changes you, the kind where you learn the real meaning of the phrase “if you’re going through hell, keep going.”

I’m in love. And I hope I never have to go through a breakup again. But my breakups have brought out the best in me, too. It was in the middle of a rapidly disintegrating relationship that I found my way back home to the church, and it was in the wake of that breakup that I discovered my sense of call to ministry. I didn’t date for 3 years, and I developed better friendships with women and also found ways to have genuine friendships with men that weren’t just about flirtation or my ego. It was after another breakup that I lost about 70 pounds.  

It’s maybe an indicator of how much I still have to learn about being in relationships, but I’m really good at going through breakups.

I know that it’s okay to be sad, even devastated, and it’s okay to let yourself cry as much as you need to cry.

I know that for a long time it seems like you’ll never have a day that you don’t feel the loss like a gaping emptiness, and then one day you’re okay being alone.

I know that it’s the absolute best time to start a self-improvement project. I know that it’s okay to embark on a self-improvement project purely out of spite or the hope that they will see you and regret breaking up with you, because you’ll improve anyway and the spite will go away on its own.

I know about discovering how much you enjoy your own company and realizing how awesome you really are.

I know about finding out they’re already (seriously?!) in a relationship with someone else long before you even felt almost ready to date. And I learned that you can get through that, too.

It’s not that I think breakups are great. I think they’re one of the most painful things we endure, especially if they come with the realization that the other person never had the golden promise of a forever future together in their imagination the way you did.

But they’re definitely an eye-opening experience.

And as much as they hurt, they’ve also always been the context in which I grow the most. They’ve been the context in which I am reminded of all of the other wonderful types of relationships there are, like friendships and familyships and even surprisingly-compassionate-co-workerships.

And they’ve been the context in which I discover who I really am, where I can confront honestly what I did and didn’t do wrong, my own part in the disintegration of the relationship, my fragile human failings, my jealousy and my fear of confrontation…

…and where I can also acknowledge that I tried my legitimate-damnedest to love and was not loved in return, and in that revelation find the ability to forgive myself for being hopeful enough to get hurt, and the ability to forgive the other person for being human.

I want to always be hopeful enough to get hurt.

I want to know that I tried my legitimate-damnedest to love.

I want my heart to break open and open and open until the pieces scatter and the light inside pours out on everything that does and doesn’t deserve it.  

 

The Most Real Thing

I haven't blogged for a while... that's usually how blog entries start when a person blogs again for the first time in a long time, but then it ends up being their only blog entry for another long time and so on... I hope that's not the case. I miss blogging. I miss the conversations it sparks, and on a personal level I miss how it lets me sift through my brain, giving me the space to let my thoughts form more fully and completely and find a home, or maybe to let them go if they're no longer helpful.

As usual, I digress.

I didn't blog for a long time because it was summer and I was busy and I was doing a lot of discerning and for a while I didn't want to write about that here and then for a while I didn't know how... But now that seems silly and the dust is mostly settled and I can just say the thing plain...

After a lot of thought and prayer and conversation I'm taking a step back from the call process temporarily. For a year or two, probably. My boyfriend and I have talked about the long term - quite a bit - but we've only been dating 11 months and 1 day as of this writing. And when the reality of being far, far apart in a blizzard-prone state stared me in the face, I flinched, and I realized that I don't want to subject such a relatively-new relationship to the stresses of being long-distance, of being a solo first-call pastor all alone in a place I've never been, etc. I was lucky enough to find a job in the Twin Cities as a Proofreader, and I've talked with my Bishop and my Candidacy Committee contact, and for now... I'm waiting. I still feel called to ministry. But I also feel called to share my life with someone, and you can't always control when that someone comes along.

There are times when I'm doing marketing stuff in my gray little cubicle and I read another Facebook update about someone getting ordained or doing pastoral care or officiating a wedding and I stop and go, "What on earth am I doing here?"

But most of the time my work is okay, and I'm good at it, and I have a Lutheran understanding of vocation that helps me not feel like I'm squandering the gifts God has given me. I still love living in the Twin Cities, and I'm hoping that by being conscientious about blogging again and getting more involved with the congregation I worship with, I can feel more like I'm involved in something where my own gifts are being used to chip further away at the cracks where the Kingdom shows through. 

Anyway... yesterday I was at church, and it was okay... I love Mercy Seat, I love the worship, I love the pastors, and I'm betting I would love the people if I would stop being so shy and bother to hang around after worship for their fabulous food-and-book-centric events. (I love food and books! Why have I not been staying and getting to know these lovely folks who also enjoy these things?  Weirdo.) So yeah. I was at church, and it was just kind of okay. I wasn't really "feeling it."

I know there are people out there who are all, "feeling spiritual doesn't matter," and make fun of those people who earnestly talk about being spiritual but not religious, but the freedom to be "spiritual but not religious" in a 12-step community allowed me to experience God when I needed God and brought me back from complete hopelessness, so I get kind of annoyed at those people who find "spiritual-but-not-religious" experiences so worthless and meaningless. There are people who find the church profoundly, even actively unwelcoming, or who don't relate to what we do in church, or who have had really bad experiences of the church in the past, and who the heck are churchgoers to say that we have the monopoly on experiencing God anyway?

So yeah... I like that "spiritual feeling." I have been doing this long enough to get through those periods when I don't "feel it," but a big part of that is reminding myself of the times when I do. And I wasn't feeling it last night...

...until we started singning "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing."

There may be a day, someday, when I can sing that song in worship without getting choked up and overwhelmed with gratitude and whatever that hard-to-pin-down "spiritual" feeling is, but last night wasn't it. 

It doesn't do that to me when I sing it by myself, around the house or in the car or whatever... but it gets me every time if I'm singing it with other people.

I may not know on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis what the heck I'm doing. A lot of times working in marketing feels at-the-very-best-neutral in the grand scheme of things. And I've always been prone to daydream through sermons. And I don't always "feel it." 

But when I do, it's the most real thing.

More real than the ultimate meaninglessness of cubicle life where it's always about "taking it to the next level" and your job never involves sitting around and chatting and eating pie. (I miss that part.)

More real than the petty insecurities that hold me back from living fully in community, even when I really want to.

More real than the doubts that sometimes creep in about whether or not I really deserve to share my life with a man so fun and forgiving and genuinely kind, who challenges me and surprises me.

It's the most real thing. So I hold onto that when it doesn't feel real. And I hope that in some small way the words I write or speak can maybe help reveal the most real thing for others. 

 

Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be
Let that grace now like a fetter bind my wandering heart to thee
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love
Here's my heart oh, take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above. 

A Broad Place

While I was at camp a few weeks ago, spending time balancing on things alone or in groups and discussing it for graduate credit (okay, we did more than that… but we really did physically balance on a lot of things), one of the discussions that emerged was a comparison between balancing and “the narrow way.”

I countered that with – “Yeah, but doesn’t the Bible also say something somewhere about 'you have set me in a broad place?'”

Clearly, you can see that I’m not one of those preachers who has the Bible memorized. I mean, I know what’s in there, for the most part. But I am terrible at quoting things verbatim, chapter-and-verse, and often have to look things up.

Anyway. We did look it up, and there are indeed a number of places in the Bible where the phrase “a broad place” comes up. So I didn't just pull that out of thin air, which is good, because people do that to the Bible a lot. And the "broad place" passage that has really been speaking to me over and over for these past few weeks is Psalm 31:7-8. Here it is, for my fellow chapter-and-verse challenged brothers and sisters:

I will exult and rejoice in your steadfast love,
because you have seen my affliction;
you have taken heed of my adversities,
and have not delivered me into the hand of the enemy;
you have set my feet in a broad place.

I’ve been getting back into doing yoga, and as I struggle with balancing poses and the fact that my feet naturally turn out a little bit which makes it hard to do some poses, and the fact that I’m still a little overweight which makes it hard to do other things… that last line keeps coming back to me.

Because the mat is long and narrow, but it feels for me like a broad place. A place where I can slow down and focus on my breathing and accept my body exactly as it is. A place where, for once, I don’t feel like people will laugh if I fail. And one of the few places where I sometimes feel genuinely strong.

***

The call/job/vocation saga continues. I am grateful for a Lutheran understanding of vocation – the understanding that all work can be spiritual in nature, and a good secretary does God’s work as much as a good preacher.

I’m also grateful for a Christian understanding of identity – in the words of Tyler Durden, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your [bleeping] khakis.”

(Jesus might add “You are who God says you are in your baptism.” Tyler Durden doesn’t go that far, but hey, Fight Club is still a really great movie and I still think that the ending where they bomb all the banks to erase the debt record is maybe one of the best metaphors for the cross and salvation in recent pop culture history. But as usual, I digress.)

I got a phone call on Tuesday to offer me a good administrative job where I would be able to use my English background and editorial skills at a rapidly expanding company. Delighted at the prospect of being employed, I went in on Wednesday to fill out some additional paperwork…

Thursday morning, I got a call from the Bishop’s office to tell me about a lovely little church on a lake in a small town in central Minnesota.

Of course I did!

I joked about this possible scenario - the Bishop's call coming as soon as I got a regular job - to several people before it actually happened. But the fact that it actually happened is less funny and more fraught with questions and confusion and half-remembered quotes about things happening in God’s time and constantly reminding myself that God didn’t have me meet and fall in love with a wonderful person just to take that away from me, and God really doesn’t want me to be miserable… although sometimes I really think God likes to mess with us to see what we’ll do.

(That’s not a very Lutheran thing to think – we’re not big on the whole “God is testing you” thing – but sometimes it’s hard not to go there.)

And through it all, that passage keeps coming back to my head – “you have set my feet in a broad place.” Even though it feels like a tight, anxious spot, I have to trust that I’m set in a broad place. That there is room to wonder, to discern…

...space for conversations with the people I need and trust the most in my life…

…or just space to rest and discover the next right action when it reveals itself to me. And I trust that it will.

Anyway, I’m sort of in the middle of it all, and it’s way too early to say anything, probably too early to even be blogging about it but sometimes the way I hear what I need to hear from the universe is through writing about things. Regardless, things are bubbling and brewing and the Spirit is blowing... and sooner, much sooner than later, I will have some idea where the next chapter of my life will take me.

I don’t know where that is yet.

But I know that it, too, will be a broad place.

 

***In searching for an image to put in this blog, I just discovered that Jurgen Moltmann wrote a whole book called A Broad Place. I heart Jurgen Moltmann. I should probably read that.***

Child's Pose

I suppose I should be grateful to have two weeks with nothing much to do except a little bit of summer school homework.

But instead I stay antsy, wondering when exactly I will get some news... any news... about a call or even just a regular jobby-job, not sleeping well, obsessing about the future and money and blah blah blah.

I've been trying to use the extra time to do some of the things I let slide a bit during the school year... eating better, going to yoga, doing the things that keep me (relatively) sane and spiritual. They make me feel better and keep me from spiraling too deep into my stupid obsessions and the dubious selections in my Netflix Instant queue. 

It almost surprises me a bit how deeply/emotionally this period of uncertainty is hitting me. I've been without work before for stretches of as long as a few months, and I never questioned myself so much or struggled with it so much...

Maybe because those times I hadn't invested 4 years of my life in graduate school. Maybe because those times the lack of employment didn't make me question whether or not I had correctly discerned God's will for my life. Maybe because those times I had cable teevee to distract me. 

I don't know.

I went to yoga today, despite the fact that I slept terribly last night and spent the morning manically submitting resumes for administrative jobs on Craigslist. I figured it would be good for me to get out and go to class, even though my brain would really rather spend the day obsessing.

They say you're not "good at yoga" if you can bend into all kinds of crazy poses, but rather, you're "good at yoga" if you can stay focused on your breath and your own body's strengths and limitations - you push yourself, but you also pay attention to what feels good or what hurts, and there are some things you simply can't do without having practiced yoga for a long, long time... and since I'm just getting back into it after months of not really working out at all, even some of the simple poses I had previously worked up to are challenging or impossible. 

Anyway. All the crap going on in my brain showed up loud and clear in body during today's class. I couldn't hold any balance poses for more than a few seconds. I felt like I had no strength in my arms or my upper legs. At one point I was ready to swear off ever doing a stupid chair pose again. (Seriously. This instructor *loved*  her chair poses.) While everyone else balanced and twisted and looked calm and spiritual, I found myself feeling frustrated and repeatedly going back to resting poses - downward-facing dog or child's pose - and halfway through the hour I decided my only real goal for the day was to stay in the room for the full hour.

But that's something.

Downward-facing dog doesn't really look much like a dog to me, but child's pose is the perfect name for what you do with your body in that pose. You sit back on your knees on the mat, so your butt is touching your heels (or close to it), and fold your upper body and head forward until your forehead touches the mat, with your arms either straight out in front of you on the floor or laying at your sides. It looks like a position of complete submission, kinda like, well, what a tired child might do when she just doesn't want to keep going. 

Child's pose is a "restorative" pose, meaning it's not about pushing or straining, but a pose that lets your body rest and recuperate. 

And during the class today, I realized that taking child's pose when I need to is a vital part of the practice, and a vital part of life. Knowing that I need to go into child's pose and doing it even if everyone else in the room is happily going into some crazy, body-pushing balancing pose... that's brave. Acknowledging weakness when I'm feeling weak can be as brave - maybe braver - than being strong on my most powerful-feeling day. 

And pretty soon, I get up out of child's pose and join back with what the rest of the class is doing.

And it's okay. Because my goal doesn't have to be to do what everyone else does or feel how everyone thinks I should feel. Sometimes just staying in the room is the only goal you can muster up. 

I feel kind of like that's what God is trying to teach me right now. That I am strong - stronger than I could possibly know - but that being vulnerable and honest about it is another side of strong that I need to learn to live into without shame.

That it's okay and necessary to say "I have no idea" and to let others teach me.

That it's okay and necessary to ask for help. Often.

That it's okay and necessary to go into child's pose.

If you're the praying kind, please keep me in your prayers. I need it right now. And also my family, as they struggle with their own challenges brought on by the flood in Minot in the last weeks/months.

And if you see me in child's pose, well, hey... I'm still in the room.

Fearless Identity, "Bill Cunningham New York," and What I'm Wearing for the Rapture

Finally, a Christian blogger who's not going to write some thoughtful / progressive / snarky / whatever response to the Judgment Day hullaballoo. I don't really think it's going to happen, but I'm already bored with everyone making fun of it, and hey... if tomorrow really is Judgment Day, I'm hoping to weasel my way into getting raptured, so it would probably be best not to have a blog entry on the record making fun of everyone who told us it was going to happen. Amirite? 

I saw Bill Cunningham New York today, and it was so inspiring. Full of beautiful, exciting people doing beautiful, exciting things with clothes; both the rich-and-fabulous types we usually think of when we think of capital-F Fashion, and regular-and-fabulous types who just know how to rock clothes.

So many movies and magazines about fashion treat it as an inaccessible or aspirational thing. It's all designer stuff you will never be able to afford worn by people who are thinner than you will ever be to places you will never be cool or rich enough to go.

But Bill Cunningham New York tells the truth about fashion instead - that almost anyone in almost anything can be amazing if it's done right, that it's more about the look than the label, and that it's not about being rich or thin or cool but about being yourself, unapologetically and fearlessly.

My own attitude toward fashion has done almost a complete 180 since I started losing weight about a year and half ago. When I was at my heaviest, shopping for clothes was such a pain... I hated going to what I called the "Fat Girl" section of the store (or shopping at "Lame Giant, " even though they actually have great clothes and I sometimes miss shopping there). I mostly wore black metal-band t-shirts with jeans and tennis shoes, I had maybe one or two dress shirts to wear with my one or two pairs of dress pants... and no dress shoes. I have a picture of me meeting the ELCA Bishop when I went to Mexico for the International AIDS Conference, and I'm wearing a black band t-shirt and baggyish denim capris... and you can't see it, but I'm pretty sure I was wearing white New Balance tennis shoes with that. Eek.

Part of why I put almost no thought into a "look" or whatever for so long was that I wasn't happy with my body, and it's hard to get excited about wrapping the package when you don't like anything about the package you're wrapping.

It started changing when I did CPE, and I started doing some internal work around issues of embracing the power / authority that comes with being a public leader. I'm using those words in the most positive sense - I hate the idea of "authority" as ruling over someone or being the arbiter of others' behavior/beliefs, and for me it's more about recognizing that if people have given you the privilege of being in charge of something or care enough to listen when you say something, you should make damn sure to use that power wisely and for good, not evil. Anyway.

It changed even more once I started reading Beauty Tips for Ministers, where I found writings that made me think about the connections between leadership and presence and appearance.

It changed the most once I started losing weight and was finally happier with myself and my body. I think I've written before about how I cried the day that I tried on clothes from the "normal" section for the first time in four years. It was overwhelming for a few months - I was used to having so few options, and even fewer exciting or attractive options. I would walk into the regular womens' clothing section and feel like there was just too much to choose from. 

It's changing more now... now that I'm no longer overwhelmed by the selection, now that the prospect of presenting myself as a public person/leader is imminent, now that I've started to get really encouraging feedback about the metal/theology stuff I'm into and wondering how that gets interpreted in my appearance (e.g., how to present myself in a way that is congruent with the things I'm thinking and writing about, if that makes sense...), and most importantly, now that I'm realizing more and more the need to claim my own God-given identity and be unapologetic and fearless about it in a world where so many ideas and so many people and so many corporations do everything they can to stake their claim on the minds and bodies of others and colonize them.

Bill Cunningham New York is more than a movie about a guy who takes great pictures of great clothes. It's a portrait into one man's quest to make the radical claim that what is beautiful matters, and matters especially in a world where there is so much that's ugly and horrifying. It's about lifting others up instead of tearing them down, and about celebrating both your own unique and awesome God-given identity as well as the spectacular diversity of people all around you.

It's about the impact that one person can have on millions of other people by simply getting up every morning and deciding to get out in the world and celebrate what it means to be alive in some small way.

If the Rapture really does come tomorrow and I get raptured, I'll be sad. There's so much more that I want to do, and so many people and places I want to experience again or experience for the first time. If the Rapture comes and I don't get raptured, well, I'll be available to hang out with the rest of you heathens tomorrow night, I suppose. 

Either way, it's probably out of my hands now.

But either way, I'll be wearing my knee-high black leather Doc Marten 3-strap boots with something glam-meets-industrial/rock n' roll and sparkle eyeshadow and shiny lips. And I'll go out knowing I was trying to live as fully as possible into the fabulousness for which we were all created. 

And if the Rapture doesn't come... well, those boots are seriously really awesome. It'd be a shame to save them for the end of the world.

 

One Glittering Shard at a Time

So I’ve been pretty mope-tastic lately. So many of my classmates are getting interviews or calls… and I suppose in most cases it’s kind of like when you’re not in a relationship and all of your friends are getting married, and you look around and think, “Well, I wouldn’t necessarily want to marry any of those guys anyway,” but you’re still kind of bummed about the fact that they get to go try on dresses and eat free cake samples while you have to go see Hesher all by yourself.

(I’m joking. Of course I want to see Hesher by myself! Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks pretty darn good as a metal guy. I digress.)

Anyway. It feels like Arcata outside today, all rainy and cloudy and there’s no point in straightening my hair. I finished my last homework assignments for the semester yesterday, and I have two weeks until graduation and the start of my summer class, which leaves me with plenty of time to do one of two things:

1. Sit around and freak out some more about things I can’t control in between wasting time on the Interwebs.

2. Read some of those books I haven’t had time to read for the last 13-14 weeks (or the last 4 years). Get my résumé together and get on Craigslist (y’know, just in case). Stop isolating all the time and engage in the kinds of normal social interactions that most people, myself included, find life-giving and worthwhile. And still have plenty of time left over to waste on the Interwebs.

There are glittering shards of light and grace peeking through the clouds. They force their way through and poke me on the shoulder and say, “Hey you! Yes, you! We know that you’re determined to be all mopey, but we’d like to remind you that God exists and loves you, that many, many people give a damn about you, and that you are more than capable of injecting something good into the universe if only you’d get off the pity pot and stop worrying about what’s going to happen several months from now. Because God is on it. He really is. So seriously, check this out…”

(I have really verbose and kind of aggressive shards of light and grace, don’t I? I'm also a little annoyed that they use the expression "Get off the pity pot." I hate that expression. Anyway.)

Like there was this kid at the post office pretending his sleeve was a bow and arrow. And he pointed the “bow” and “shot” me, so I pretended I was hit and clutched my chest and made a pained expression. Three times.

Because it’s so crucial to play, even when everything feels like a job. Maybe especially then.

And I listened to the new Beastie Boys album and I felt like I was 18 all over again, and everything was possible and I wasn’t so cynical or jealous or suspicious. And I wanted to dance like I did back then, alive and electric in every inch of my body, free and flowing and not caring what it looked like because it felt good.

Because it’s so crucial to dance, even when it’s hard to really hear the music of life. Maybe especially then.

And someone said the most amazing and encouraging things that were exactly what I needed to hear, which was so good because I’ve felt so let down lately. And the fact that I didn’t even really want to be there and I wasn’t even expecting to be lifted up made it that much sweeter.

Because it’s so crucial to hear the truth about who you really are, even when you’re in the depths of convincing yourself of the lie. Maybe especially then.

And I found out there is a huge picture of me on the back cover of The Story magazine, which is completely random and weird and I had no idea they were going to do that. And I don’t have any profound nugget of insight about that… but it’s not a bad picture and hey, now I can technically say I've been on the cover of a magazine, so that’s not the least-cool thing to ever happen, right?

And a random quote that I posted on tumblr from Motley Crue’s truly excellent autobiography The Dirt got reblogged 27 times in the last few hours, so that’s pretty rad, too.

All this is to say that I am continually reminded of how much light and grace there is in the world, even when I insist on wallowing in the dark.

I am urged into joy despite my willingness to hang out in the land of boring and bleak.

I am touched to the core of my soul by other people despite my tendency to isolate more than I should.

And I am convinced that there is a reality beyond what we see in front of our faces, beyond what we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other, beyond our ability to conceive or wonder or imagine.

And it is revealing itself to us one glittering shard of light and grace at a time.

And someday we will wake up drenched in it and wonder how we missed it for so long when we were swimming around in it the whole time.