one-handed update

I thought I would have updated a long time ago, but late pregnancy and then the postpartum period have taken all my words and sent me way down into myself. I’ve had brief bouts of guilt over this inability to write anything that isn’t scrawled in my private journal, but it isn’t a problem, really. I remember trying to force some writing out a few weeks after Mr. B’s birth (a looming dissertation seemed like reasonable motivation!) and it was all crap that never went anywhere anyway. Dramatic changes--good and bad--have always required me to do significant internal recalibrations.

Six weeks to get back to normal after giving birth is bull. Six weeks to go for a nice long walk, sure. Six weeks to have the exact functionality as you had before giving birth? Ha! And wtf is “normal” anyway? I’m pretty sure my body has permanently changed shape in ways that it hadn’t after my older two were born, and that’s just fine. It’s not surprising if maybe the part of me that thinks the things has changed shape a little, too. So I’m going to be patient and slow and quiet so I can listen and watch and feel to learn what the new normal is as everything settles out. It may be awhile.


I wanted to have some profound thoughts to share about Baby C’s baptism the weekend before last, but it’s mostly a deep happiness that he has such a loving community to surround him as he grows. It matters--belonging to God and to each other--though at the moment I still can’t quite articulate how, plus I’m typing one handed while the other arm supports this little one while he lounges on my lap. But so far we’re doing well, we’re taking our time, and we’re surrounded by love.

On Pentecost and PMTs

When I was about her Highness’s age or perhaps a bit younger, my Mama told me that her favorite color was red. At that moment, I decided that red was my favorite color, too. Even though I probably wear purple more often these days because it’s almost as fun as red but with the advantage of being easier to put outfits together around, red remains my favorite.

Today at church we celebrated Pentecost, when everyone is supposed to wear red to church, and the vestments are red and all the flowers and drapey stuff on the altar and other front-of-the-church fixtures (why yes, I did grow up in a church where the only furniture was chairs and podiums—how could you tell?) are red. The kids made red windsocks with fiery streamers and paraded around them the sanctuary. I was tremendously disappointed that my bright red jeans don’t currently fit, but I made do J

Red is for fire and for the Holy Spirit’s descent like fire on the first Christians at Pentecost—God with them even after Jesus’s ascent—so at Pentecost the church is practically blazing with it. I can’t really grasp it—it’s almost too much for me.

It reminded me of the Tenebrae service. Which seems counter-intuitive, since that service on Good Friday involved every single light in the church being gradually extinguished with each Scripture reading until the moment of Christ’s death, leaving everyone in total darkness. The space that had held the Christ candle (now removed) seemed especially black and empty, and there was a corresponding hollowness in my stomach—that feeling that I get sometimes when it seems like the world itself is empty underneath it all. It feels like the inversion of Pentecost—God wasn’t just gone, but God had been killed.

Except that it wasn’t actually completely dark—the red sanctuary candle reminding us of the eternal presence of God was still glowing in the corner. Even when God was dead, God was there.

In the lab my husband worked in as a graduate student, there was one room that was completely sealed off from light so that they could use special instruments that could count photons. If someone accidentally opened the door and let too much light in, the sensitive photomultiplier tube (PMT) would be overwhelmed and explode. But he also told me that once your eyes adjusted to the darkness, even your human eyes could count the individual photons. It’s kind of miraculous, how our eyes can bear the brilliance of full daylight while also being able to adjust to seeing only the tiniest unit of light.

Sometimes it feels like God’s presence is overflowing, running over and spilling on the floor where we can all splash around, so bright we have to squint. And sometimes it’s just the tiniest point of light, not even bright enough to light our next step. Maybe I can train the eyes of my heart to see the brilliance of God in the same ways—both in the overwhelming fire and in the tiny flicker.

First attempt at another teaching philosophy (this time for Sunday school)

Anyone who has applied for more than a handful of college-level teaching positions is probably familiar with the so-called “teaching philosophy”--a document that attempts to summarize the author’s priorities and philosophical approach to education. I’ve written a few, and while none of them were eloquent enough (or used sufficiently trendy pedagogical lingo) to land me the tenure-track position of my dreams, the process of writing one turned out to be useful for my own classroom. I even made my students write their own “learning philosophies” at the beginning of the semester. In general, writing through a personal philosophy often clarifies it, both for me and for my students. I understood more why certain activities in my classroom were more productive than others, how I could prioritize my time more effectively, and how I knew when something had been a success.

On Sunday afternoon, about a week and a half ago, I was wondering what had possessed me to decide that it was a good idea to show my 3^rd and 4^th grade Sunday school students “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies” during a lesson on the Holy Spirit and the Trinity, much less to follow that up with a little detour on the femininity of the Holy Spirit. Not because it went badly (the faces of the two girls in the class lit up when my response to the question, “So wait, is God male or female?!” was “yes!”), but because it seemed like an odd choice.

And then I realized it was probably time to start thinking about my Sunday school teaching philosophy. At its heart, it’s not radically different from my philosophy of teaching college English—that learning is a lifelong process of exploration and revision that often happens most vigorously in community. But with younger students and subject matter that is primarily tested over the course of lived experiences rather than in coursework and career success, it works itself out a little differently.

When I was in 3^rd grade, I knew all the answers—at least, all the answers to any questions that my Sunday school teacher might ask. For a long time, I thought that was what it meant to be a good Christian—answering all the questions right. That’s about the age I was baptized, and when my pastor met with me to talk to me about whether or not I knew what I was doing, I answered all those questions right, too, or at least right enough that he decided I was enough of a believer for a believer’s baptism. I loved seeking out the right answers—I was a front-row, straight-A student at both school and church. I loved raising my hand and announcing those right answers even more, whether or not anyone had even asked a question. And when I made my faith my own, and stepped out of the church I had grown up in, it was for another church that seemed to have even more right answers to questions that my childhood church hadn’t even asked. I might call myself an answer-addict.

Naturally, I eventually started have questions that my church didn’t have satisfactory answers to—I mean, they did have answers, but they didn’t seem nearly as clear and obvious to me as they did to everyone else. So I scrounged and scrambled and read a lot, but the only thing that became clearer was that those answers weren’t nearly as right as I was told. I found a lot of other answers that *might* have been right, but I couldn’t be certain of any of them. The experience was profoundly disorienting, but eventually my questions and I learned to live together, as I discovered that not knowing the answers often meant it was easier to keep my eyes, ears, and heart open when I encountered new people and new experiences that didn’t square with my previous assumptions.

So, what does this have to do with teaching Sunday school?

I don’t think that 3^rd graders need to be given only answers, or to be encouraged to see answers as being the Answer to their challenges. Kids are good enough at being know-it-alls—they don’t need my help! What they do need is someone who will validate their wonder at this world that grows bigger and more mysterious and beautiful as they grow up and become aware of more and more of it. My students arrive every Sunday full of questions. Some of them are easy: “How do I find 2^nd Samuel?” Some are a little more involved, but I can give a stab at them: “Why did Jesus die?” And some are the questions that used to keep me up at night when I was their age, but I quit thinking about them because not knowing made me anxious: “What existed before God created the world? Where did God come from?” And I’m not doing them any favors if I blow those questions off.

Instead, I go out of my way to show them that they should be asking questions. Everyone should. Hence St. Patrick’s bad analogies. The handout for that day gave them several activities intended to help them get a handle on the concept of the Trinity, but I couldn’t help noticing that an example in one of the activities was also one of the “Bad Analogies” (specifically as an illustration of modalism). My purpose wasn’t to claim that the handout author was an evil heretic (because with the Trinity it's almost impossible to talk about it without accidentally saying something heretical, as poor St. Patrick did, and anyway I'm hardly someone to get my undies in a bunch over a little heresy between friends), but to emphasize that in church we often throw around words and phrases like “Trinity” and “created ex nihilo” without actually having any idea what we’re talking about, and it’s good and proper to find it strange and confusing, no matter how old or how smart or how faithful you are.

I try to make my Sunday school classroom a space where it’s ok to ask those questions, and to make it clear that having answers isn’t what makes you a good Christian. I hope I encourage my students to grow into their questions, because someday they'll probably need to remember that questions don’t have to have answers.

My chat with Aragorn about Donald Trump

Last night, as I watched the presidential primary results trickle in and realized that Donald Trump was about to win everything except Ohio (including my own state), I wondered, “What can one do against such reckless hate?”

My personal internal Aragorn replied, “Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them.”

“Beg pardon?” I mean, Viggo Mortenson as Aragorn is gorgeous and there really isn’t a whole lot I wouldn’t do if he asked me to, but still.

“For death and glory.”

“No, actually—you see, I don’t actually have a horse and these aren’t really orcs—“[i]

And that’s the problem. The same people who support banning Muslims from entering the country, or deporting all undocumented immigrants, who stand by and watch as fellow rally-attendees assault protesters, are also our neighbors and relatives. It’s easy on the internet to dismiss them as little better than orcs, but that’s a lie we tell ourselves to make it easier to be righteously angry about the very real evils that are being propagated through this campaign.

They’re not evil, or at least not remarkably more evil than any of us. They’re just scared. And as we all know, “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate.”

So how do you ride out against fear? Especially fearfulness of wide-ranging cultural shifts and nightmarish, unpredictable attacks across the world? Because honestly, I’m scared too. I got my positive pregnancy test the evening after the attacks in Paris back in November, and had spent most of the day agonizing over the burning of a French refugee camp in apparent retaliation for the attacks and the hateful rhetoric I was reading online against desperate, innocent people whose only crime was being a similar shade of brown to the attackers. When I got the positive result, my first thought was, “Oh God, what have I done?” Realizing how many people are so openly full of hatred for others and disdainful of their shared God-imaged humanity is terrifying. And it makes me want to hide away and lob insults from the safety of my computer keyboard and to Other those Trump supporters in the same way that they’ve Othered those who look differently or think differently or worship differently from them. I can only see violence and death down that path. We’ve been there before, and there’s no reason to think we won’t do it again.

But as Fred Clark (linked above) concluded, “I think there exists a more excellent way.”

In one of my absolutely favorite books of the Bible, the author says that

“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love. We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first. If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.”[ii]

My love is not particularly well-formed. It’s a half-assed, when-I-think-of-it kind of love, but God has loved me first. And I’m not so idealistic as to think that I, by myself, can somehow fix everything, but perhaps I can bring a little more love into my own community. If God’s love in me can drive out my fear, maybe more love can help other people take a deep breath and step back from their own fears, too. So ride out with me. Ride out and love them.

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[i] Though if this primary season really were the Battle of Helm’s Deep, Marco Rubio would probably be that poor elf guy whose name I can’t remember because he was only in the movie and not in the book and died tragically in dramatic slo-mo without having been able to affect the plot in any meaningful way.

[ii] 1 John 4:17-21

In which I preach about stories

For my church's midweek Lent services this year, the pastor has asked members of the congregation to do the preaching on a series of assigned themes and passages. It's been a wonderful opportunity to hear voices that I don't usually get to hear, especially loud and clear and up front. Yesterday was my turn. I was very loud and up front--hopefully I was also clear. 

"Open Our Ears"

Texts: Isaiah 50:4-5, Psalm 40:1-8, Matthew 13:10-17

By the time we get to today’s Gospel reading, Jesus and his disciples have had a busy day—he starts off by getting in trouble with the religious leaders for breaking the Sabbath, follows that up with some healings, tells a bunch of parables, offends his family who have come to see him by announcing that anyone who does the will of God is his family, and then tells another story—the Parable of the Sower. He’s thoroughly confused everyone around him. And finally his exhausted and exasperated disciples ask, “WHY do you always only teach in stories?” And Jesus answers them.

It’s easy to criticize the bewildered crowds for not understanding his stories. We see ourselves as the disciples, the ones who Jesus says have “been given insight into God’s kingdom.” We like to imagine that we “know how it works” and when we hear Jesus say that “Not everybody has this gift,… it hasn’t been given to them” we maybe feel sorry for everyone else, and maybe even a little smug, imagining ourselves as the ones with the “ready hearts” who have all kinds of insight. Or maybe that’s just me. Which is why, incidentally, I’m using the Message’s translation—it’s so very different from all the other translations I’ve used my whole life that the stories get my attention again and I actually listen to them. Which is important!

But anyway, as I was reading the other passages for this evening, I found it harder and harder to blame the people for having trouble listening to Jesus. You never know what could happen when God opens your ears. For the psalmist, God opening ears brings delight. In the Message, in fact, it says,

^“So I answered, “I’m coming.
    I read in your letter what you wrote about me,
And I’m coming to the party
    you’re throwing for me.”

That’s when God’s Word entered my life,
    became part of my very being.”

It sounds great. BUT—when I was reading Isaiah, I accidentally read the next verse when I was first preparing for this, and then I couldn’t get it out of my head. Here’s what happens to the speaker in Isaiah, in the verse right after the passage we read in which God opens his ears and he listens:

The Master, God, opened my ears,
    and I didn’t go back to sleep,
    didn’t pull the covers back over my head.
I followed orders,
    stood there and took it while they beat me,
    held steady while they pulled out my beard,
Didn’t dodge their insults,
    faced them as they spit in my face.

Jesus’s audience was probably aware that listening to God—really listening—waking up, getting out of bed instead of pulling the covers up over your head to hide from the truth, and facing whatever is out there—can be risky—sometimes painful, and even dangerous.

And this is why God is described in all these passages as the one who opens ears—because it’s very unlikely that we’re going to do it on our own. “Being religious” and “acting pious,” like the Psalm says, seems like a safer alternative. But the psalmist already said, “Doing something for you, bringing something to you—that’s not what you’re after. that’s not what you’re asking for.” More than anything else, God wants us to listen—to hard things, to joyful things.

And God has an amazing tool to help us to listen—stories. In the Message version of this passage, Jesus explains that he tells stories because, “Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight.” When I sent this version of the text to a friend, she replied, “Wow, that sounds a lot less condescending that I remember!” And it explains why not only did Jesus tell stories, but often afterwards he would explain those stories to his disciplines, who then wrote down the stories and their explanations for us, later. The stories, and the explanations, are a gift to us from a God who loves us and wants us to understand.

When God met us, we didn’t get a book of theology. We got a Person who told stories, and who lived a story for people to wrestle with and retell to each other. A painful, awkward, confusing story full of things we don’t understand and things that sometimes make us uncomfortable. All we have to know Jesus are the stories he told and the stories other people told about him, and the ponderings of other humans trying to make sense of those stories.

Even now, the only way to hear Jesus, and through Jesus, God, is to listen for the voice speaking within stories, giving us clues about how God is moving in the world today, and how God wants us to move in the world.  This is true for the big stories on the news AND the little stories we tell each other, that seem so minor but can mean so much. When we listen to stories, we can hear the subtle ways the Kingdom of God is growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk—for example, as Pastor and I were able to do when we visited RefugeeOne’s offices late last fall to deliver the coats from the coat drive and hear the people who work there tell stories of how their own families had once been refugees and now they were able to turn around and give that help to others. Or when I was at the food pantry booth during Hometown Holidays and met a man who’d been helped by the food pantry in the past and now was giving back, both to the food pantry and to other vulnerable lives he encountered. Small stories about struggling families who have been loved with full pantries and warm homes don’t seem like much, but God is speaking love all through them.  

But, it can also be hard to listen to some stories—the families who don’t get fed, the refugee families who never make it to a haven someplace like Chicago, the many people who are marginalized or abused by those in positions of power—and it’s easy to dismiss them, tell ourselves we know what’s really going on, and close our ears to the pain of the storyteller.

And again, this is true for the small stories and small, secret hurts, too. I used to follow a lot of parenting pages on facebook, but I quit most of them because so often when a mom told her story about how she fed or birthed or disciplined her child, an army of moms would appear and tell her she was wrong wrong wrong and asking if she’d tried this or that (and she almost always had!) and it was obvious that very few people listened to her and heard how tired and anxious she had been, how difficult it was to get through the day trying to mother the way these moms wanted her to. No one loved her the way she needed to be loved or understood the struggles in her story. Instead almost everyone tried to rewrite it into the story they thought it ought to be—a story a little more like their own story.

But when someone is telling their story, the most important thing in that moment is to let God open your ears to hear the story rather than rushing to cover it up with, “Well, they must have done something wrong” or “They’ve got to be exaggerating,” or whatever.

And the good news is that God does open our ears so that we can understand those stories and respond to them with love! Jesus has done it over and over—for the disciples, sometimes that even meant taking them aside after telling the story and explaining it for them.

So if God is still speaking to us today and teaching us how to live and to love others, then the first place to look for those messages is in stories. If we want to carry out God’s love to the people around us, we have to listen to their stories too. God speaks to us through their stories, and that’s when God and God’s word enters our lives and we hear the things God wants us to hear. It’s through their stories that we’ll be able to know them and love them and bring God’s love to them. We don’t write other peoples’ stories—we listen to them. Listening—really listening instead of prejudging the storyteller or glossing over the ugly parts with our own assumptions—is loving. And when we do we may even hear God speaking through the story, telling us how much he loves the storyteller, and us, helping us love them better too. And that’s when God’s word enters our life, and their life, and we can delight in God and each other.

Cake and ashes

Yesterday I baked a cake and celebrated the day I was born. Tonight my pastor will put ashes on my forehead to remind me of my death. These moments when birth and death run up against each other sometimes feel like thin places, those moments when the veil ripples a little in the breeze and we catch a glimpse of something behind it all.

The reveal isn’t always so subtle, though. A few summers ago when I was breastfeeding my newborn at his uncle’s funeral, it felt more like a jagged crack. A famous poet once described eternity as “a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright”[1] but at the time it was very dark, as if the world was breaking apart, a thin shell enclosing nothing at all.

I’m not feeling any particular existential angst this time—just an unsettled sense that this is not where I expected I would be at this age. The crack isn't a gaping chasm oozing darkness—it's an uneven split on the sidewalk that I trip over Every. Single. Time. I thought that by the time I turned 30 I would have a more established place in the world, which I would have of course built on my years of education and experience, a place that would include what my husband, tongue firmly in cheek, calls “an established daily dress code.” 

He’s not very sympathetic to me, as you maybe noticed. When I told him I felt like I was still in just as much a state of *becoming* (as opposed to *being*) at 30 as I was at 20, he remarked, “You know when that stops, right? About six months after you’re dead.” Thanks, love.

Though of course he's right. Growth will happen no matter where we are. And a crack might be a spot of damage and weakness, but it’s also a wonderful place to put down some roots and bloom in unexpected places. Here’s to another year of finding those thin places and gaps in the world, of becoming and blooming where I never imagined I could.

This sprouted in our front steps last summer, and I hope it comes back this year, too.

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[1] Henry Vaughan, “The World”

Speech and silence

I’ve been feeling weirdly restrained lately, especially online. There's been a lot of news online that I’ve had powerful feelings about that I’ve just—swallowed. I haven’t blogged about it and I’ve barely reacted to it on Facebook, either (aside from some passive ‘likes’ of things other people have posted, and even those I’ve scaled back). And it’s been wearing on me—while I tend not to get super opinionated online, having a voice to talk about the things on my heart is essential to me, even if no one’s reading. It’s not like I made a conscious choice to be quiet, either—I just keep choking when I want to talk.

One reason is that I’ve had a lot of things going on in my life that I’m not ready to talk about online yet, but they take up so much head space that they keep encroaching on the rest of the things I want to talk about, and it’s hard to untangle things. So sometimes it’s easier to just be quiet. The other reason is that I’ve found myself afraid of my audience.

While we were visiting family over Christmas, I found out that a couple (somewhat distant) family members had gotten upset by something innocuous I had posted on Facebook that revealed that I supported (or at least, didn’t not support) a political candidate they found appalling. So appalling that they felt compelled to tell another (closer) relative how appalled they were by my post, and this other relative then relayed this information to me.

It came at a time when I was already feeling particularly overexposed (due to those other things going on), and I wanted to shrink back in myself and hide. It wasn’t the fault of the person who told me (or really even the people who were upset by my post)—if I had been in a different headspace at the time, I would have laughed it off and maybe cheerfully (and invisibly) flipped off the offended party and gone on writing. But now I’m scheduled to preach during one of our church’s mid-week Lenten services, and as I started writing my sermon I realized how much I hadn’t been saying lately.

Ironically, the post that got people upset isn’t even the sort of thing I can control or predict—it was a sci-fi joke comparing a presidential candidate to an Asimovian robot—and there’s no way I can self-censor enough to prevent that kind of misunderstanding or overreaction. But I don’t want to unnecessarily provoke conflicts, either. So it’s got me thinking about what sorts of posts I would be willing to risk hearing, “So-and-so was really upset by Thing you wrote last week” at family gatherings (because there’s a difference between Anonymous Jerk online and Real Person you actually know).

I have some thoughts, but none particularly settled yet. Friends who post things on Facebook beyond recipes and pictures of cats/kids/dogs/bunnies: how do you decide which things are worth posting and which things are worth letting slide?