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?

3rd and 4th graders are awesome

My 3rd and 4th grade Sunday school students are officially some of my favorite people. They jockey for more verses to read aloud and they ask ferociously indignant questions when they don’t understand something, whether or not it’s related to the actual reading. Sunday we read about Jesus’s baptism:

“Wait—this book is called LUKE!! Why are we reading about JOHN?!?!”
Me: “Different Johns.”
“Oh! That makes sense!!”
(Later) “What happened with Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection? Where’s that?”
Me (after pointing out which chapters in Luke tell that part of the story): “Don’t worry—we’ll spend LOTS of time on that later.”
“Oh good!...But WHY was Jesus crucified?!?”
Me: “…..You mean, why did people crucify him, or why did God—“
“The first one!”
“Well, that’s a long story [tells the long story]”
“That WAS really long!”

They’re all brilliant, and even though they’ve all grown up in the church, so much of the story is still weird and wonderful and confusing to them. We never get to the activities on the handouts because there’s so much to talk about. I’m really ok with that—yesterday the suggested activity involved flicking water at each other as part of the baptism discussion, and I’m thinking that it’s 5° degrees outside and the only reasonable explanation for someone thinking a children’s lesson in January should involve playing with water is that the author is Australian.

So yes, I sometimes play fast and loose with the lessons. When I saw the reading for today was Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 with a big gap in the middle, I decided that darn it, we were going to read the whole thing! I’m a bit of a completionist, and I think it’s important that kids be introduced to what kind of a person Jesus submitted himself to be baptized to—a loudmouth in the middle of the desert who wasn’t afraid to call out the powerful, but of whom the powerful were so afraid that they locked him up and eventually executed him. That matters. So we read that part too, even though it wasn’t going to be the focus of our discussion. And it was initially a weird digression, and they were confused about why Luke stuck that piece of the story there in the middle, but when my student asked (entirely out of the blue) why Jesus was crucified, having that context helped explain why powerful people might have it out for people like John the Baptist and Jesus (no one likes being called a “white-washed sepulcher” or a “brood of vipers”).

I take these stories for granted—I’ve been reading and hearing them for so long (for years I was even taken midterms on them!) that they’ve seeped into my subconscious. But then my students ask questions about something that I always assumed was obvious and I realize it wasn’t really obvious at all—they know individual stories, but they haven’t seen the connections between them. And by having to fill in those gaps I’m reminded of pieces of the story that I barely think about anymore, and suddenly realize how important they are.

Basically, everyone should spend more time talking with 3rd and 4th graders. Especially about stuff that matters.

My kids still complain that I don’t bring them candy every Sunday, but not as much as they used to, and I’ve promised them a LOT of candy if they can memorize the books of the Old and New Testament. Honestly I would be happy with them just being able to identify which book goes in which testament, but I won’t tell them that because they’re smart cookies and I’m sure they can do it. 

The view from the 9th day of Christmas

Christmas (ok, actually most of the month of December) isn’t really a time that lends itself to sitting and writing blog posts. Mab’s home from school, we’re often sleeping in (so B can’t be depended on to take his usual afternoon nap), and my down time is spent on Christmas shopping and sewing projects for gifts, not to mention all the family visiting and cookie-eating. And now it’s 2016 and I’m supposed to go straight from first to fifth gear and resolutely reform all the bad habits I’ve picked up as the weather’s gotten colder and I’ve burrowed deeper and deeper under a thick layer of sweaters, wool socks, throw blankets, festive baked goods, and hot cups of tea with way too much honey.

I do in fact have some healthy practices I dropped last year that I want to restart, but with the new year beginning on a Friday, I’m actually going to start on Monday when our family gets back into our usual routine.

Right now, though, it’s still Christmas. The little hand wheel lectionary calendar I use with my third and fourth grade Sunday School students labels tomorrow “Christmas 2,” and the 12^th day of Christmas isn’t until January 5^th.

The tree may still be up, but I gave up replacing all the ornaments
B pulled down about a week ago.

My daughter and husband are still on break, so our tree is still up and we are still sleeping in and having pancakes almost every morning (when we’re not making egg+bacon+cheese sandwiches on the English muffins my husband baked. He’s fabulous). We’ve gone to the Museum of Science and Industry to look at all the Christmas trees twice, and we’ve been doing a few projects and made a couple big purchases for the house, but only the fun ones (like taking out the little white ceiling fan in the kitchen that tried to illuminate the entire room with only a single inadequate bulb, and replacing the whole thing with a glorious chandelier. I am obsessed with chandeliers—our house currently has four and I’m angling for more).

Let there be light!
Also, the ReStore is the best place for chandeliers.

I moseyed my way through Advent to Christmas, and now I’m continuing to ramble on through Christmas itself. There’s no rush to get back to everyday life if I don’t have to. My best friend and I were discussing how rituals that reinforce different values can help us get ourselves back into balance after a time of getting ourselves out-of-whack while scrambling through a difficult patch. And while my life has, on the surface, been pretty serene, inside I have been all kinds of worked-up, for many reasons. Taking some extra time to drink coffee in the morning with my husband in the light of the Christmas tree and going sledding with the kids has been exactly what I needed to slow my racing thoughts down. Hopefully on Monday I’ll be ready to spring back into action.

Trying Advent

As a kid I didn’t think much of Advent beyond lighting candles to count down to Christmas. Later, I knew other people who “did” Advent, and I enjoyed reading my favorite bloggers (like Sarah Bessey) writing through their Advent experiences, but I was never able to settle myself down to actually try waiting quietly myself, as much as it appealed to me. Besides not being part of a church tradition that recognized Advent, this quiet waiting time also overlapped substantially with Final Research Paper Cramming Season (when I was still doing coursework) as well as Grading Final Projects Season, and we always traveled a lot during December for family things, and so between this and that it never got going. The month before Christmas was always a time of intense busyness and anxiety for me, and the closest I ever got to stillness was the week after finals, right before Christmas, when I would inevitably get knocked out by some virus that had been lying in wait for me to stop moving so it could catch me.

This year I’m settled. We live far enough away from family that although traveling for Christmas isn’t going to be a huge ordeal, we’re too far to make separate trips to all the other holiday parties at the homes of friends and family in Indianapolis over the next few weeks. We’re responsible for shaping our own traditions this year, and while I’m going to miss the always-competitive White Elephant exchange with my mom’s family, I admit I’m also breathing a sigh of relief at not having to make another weekend trip this month.

I have time, space, and quiet for the first time in years to stop and listen and look. I’m lingering in the darkness instead of rushing out to pregame the holidays. This doesn’t mean I haven’t put up my tree, or that I’m not listening to any Christmas music yet, or anything like that (I admit I’m not that hardcore), but I’m taking it slowly. I’m counting down the days on a homemade calendar, trying to do one thing with the kids every day, slowly, a bit at a time, with an emphasis on making things with our hands and giving things away (also hot chocolate and watching movies, because of course). We’re reading parts of the Bible on some mornings, and other days exploring other wonderful stories and traditions, like putting out shoes for St. Nicholas and baking lussekatter on St. Lucia’s Day (no picture of the lussekatter because I am clearly not a food blogger, but they were pretty good for a first try and a good excuse to finally bite the bullet and buy some saffron). 

I hope my kids are getting a broader sense of the Christian narrative and tradition than just “Nativity scene + Tree piled with gifts = Christmas.” I love both those things, but the narrative is so much richer, and I hope that our family can start to see the rich tapestry of stories, traditions, and beliefs that has been woven around the simple yet radical idea of God With Us.

It’s not the super spiritual and disciplined candlit season that I’ve sometimes fantasized about, but I’m ok with that. I’m walking through this time deliberately, at my own pace, instead of scrambling while it rushes past me, and keeping my eyes open as I do.

Much of what I see in the news is part of the deep darkness of waiting—mass shootings, terrorist attacks, burned mosques, hateful rhetoric coming from people who worship a God who is love. But the words we speak and sing in church, the children’s Christmas pageant, the food pantry down the hall from where I teach 3^rd and 4^th grade Sunday School, pictures from all the church toy drives I’ve seen all over Facebook, the stories I read about the loving welcomes that refugees have been getting in both Canada and the United States (even in spite of the efforts of certain state governors)—these are the promise of coming light. I’ve never been so aware of that tension before, between the now and not-yet. 

On the first day of Advent, after church, Queen Mab and I went to go see the Nutcracker, and on the drive home, as we were talking about the lights and decorations and church, I quizzed her if she knew what season it was (we had talked about it in Sunday School that morning and I was curious about how much she had been listening).

“Winter?”

“Well yes, but also--”

“Advent?”

“Yes! And what’s Advent about?”

“Hope!”

She's listening and watching with me.

Kicking tables, clearing space

I try to maintain a pretty even keel, and sometimes I look pretty successful (at a Parents Association meeting last year when I was trying to listen while B cavorted around the conference room, another mom told me she admired how “zen” I was about it. She should have seen me trying to get Queen Mab out the door that morning). I’m naturally a pretty passionate person, though—I feel things deeply and my instinctive reaction is to yell about it or cry (about both good and bad things). But that’s exhausting, and I have a child whose emotions are just as difficult to regulate as mine. So I’ve put a lot of work into practicing calm and patience and peace, and on the whole, I’ve gotten better about it (hence the zen comment)—feeling my feelings without necessarily splattering them all over the place.[1]

But of course I can’t just will myself into it like “BE CALM, YOU!” (as much as my husband has tried to tell me to “just calm down!” Nice try, honey). I’ve had to be careful about avoiding things that set me off if I’m not mentally prepared to deal with it right at that moment, especially online, where everything in the world could theoretically pop up on the screen in front of me. So for example, I try to limit Facebook to staying in touch with people I care about and following my favorite bloggers. This certainly includes discussion about all kinds of hot topics, but if I find that I’m spending too much time agonizing over whether or not to reply to any particular person or page’s posts that I strongly disagree with, I unfollow them. Because either this is a person whose posts are mostly just going to make me angry and I had better protect any real-life relationship by not letting the things I dislike about them constantly appear on my screen, or because they and I just don’t have the kind of relationship to safely have the intensity of discussion that their posts are calling for. There’s no hard and fast rule for this, or percentages of cute-baby-picture : ill-researched-“satirical”-meme that I follow, just an effort to pay attention to how I feel. Other times, if a friend just tends to share a lot of frustrating posts from one particular page, I just hide the page and continue enjoying their cute babies/funny cats/interesting anecdotes.

Lately this approach has been wildly inadequate, because the questions and fears are too big and the conversations and arguments about national security against terrorism versus protecting the victims of that terrorism have been bleeding all over the place. It’s impossible to open Facebook without stumbling across thousands of comments from people I don’t know, claiming to share my faith while saying things about refugees that chill me to my very soul. My hands start shaking when I see calls for massive acts of violence, for reviving the old Japanese internment camps, callous suggestions that war orphans just go back where they came from.

And there I go into online-social-justice-warrior mode. It starts off feeling awesome and righteous, but I’m sure you can imagine how it ends up.

After someone I trust very much privately pointed out to me that maybe I was getting a little carried away, I took a few deep breaths and tried to figure out what to do with all this energy I have. Because I know that anger, especially against injustice, isn’t a bad thing in itself. I mean, look at the Old Testament prophets! And didn’t Jesus go around overturning tables?! If I didn't figure out something, I was going to end up looking for more tables to kick over.

A few minutes later the same person who had (metaphorically) taken me aside  suggested, “Let your sadness spur you on to good works -- being the hands and feet -- you know? invite the broken to YOUR table as a way of pointing to His.” At the same time Esther Emery shared this good word: “We…do well in the world not by multiplying and extending our outrage, but by multiplying and extending our relationships.” 

I started to wonder about that story of Jesus overturning tables. He was so angry, and then what? What did he do after he starting throwing furniture and kicking people out of the Temple? I realized that while I've heard that story so many times, I hadn't heard much about what comes after. So I checked. According to Matthew,

“Jesus went straight to the Temple and threw out everyone who had set up shop, buying and selling. He kicked over the tables of loan sharks and the stalls of dove merchants. He quoted this text:

My house was designated a house of prayer; 

You have made it a hangout for thieves.”

And the very next verse says, “Now there was room for the blind and crippled to get in. They came to Jesus and he healed them.”

His anger cleared out the clutter that was getting between him and these people who needed him, and then filled that empty space with healing and compassion, "multiplying and extending" relationships with other people. These healings were probably small things to everyone around him, affecting only the poor and marginalized who had little to no influence on society. I bet those loan sharks and merchants set up their tables again as soon as he was gone. The whole thing probably just seemed like an awkward blip in the middle of a long day, but they mattered to the individuals who met him, and he'd made a very clear point about who belongs in that sacred space. It's a story that has resonated for years, even if the immediate effects seemed negligible.

The still, small voice sometimes has to repeat itself a few times to be sure I get the message. I'm very glad, though, that it sometimes speaks to me through the internet, since that's where I usually am when I need to hear it the most.

I don't have the power to solve the world's problems. I can't protect anyone from terrorists and extremists--I can't even make anyone to understand what seems so clear to me! But if my outrage leads me away from mere anger and into relationships and small acts of love, it will be enough.

[1] For example, I try to take a “gentle parenting/attachment parenting” approach (because they have the most useful parenting tools for me for trying to parent my intensely passionate kid without letting my own intensely passionate self become a big jerk about it), but I’ve unfollowed all but a couple parenting Facebook pages because of a few too many comments or shared blog posts that said things like, “My precious angel has never once made me think of laying a hand on him aggressively and anyone who feels differently is a monster,” (to which I respond with all kinds of words I can’t write here in case someone shares this with one of my grandmas).

A letter to my alma mater

It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.(…) For the first of all the marks of love is seriousness: love will not accept sham bulletins or the empty victory of words. It will always esteem the most candid counsellor the best. -G.K. Chesterton (The Defendant, Chapter 16: “A Defense of Patriotism”)

I first read this passage in my Advanced Christian Thought class in high school, and it comes to mind whenever I encounter some pseudo-patriotic variant on the “love it or leave it” theme protesting any criticism of the United States. While my opinion of Chesterton has shifted over the years (he’s an excellent writer, which cleverly disguises the vapidity of many of his arguments), being introduced to his work was only one of the many gifts I was given at my high school. Covenant is my alma mater in the truest sense—there I was encouraged to grow into the earnest overthinker you all know and love, to paint the walls (literally) with the colorful overflowings of my imagination, to think deeply about art and literature, and to look for the movement of God in even the most mundane circumstances.

I love my high school. And because I love it, Chesterton expects me to be its “most candid counsellor.”

Since I graduated in 2004, I have become increasingly conscious that while I had an amazing experience at my school, many LGBTQ students did not. And furthermore, while we were encouraged to discuss many aspects of Christian faith and practice from multiple angles, questions of sexuality and gender were not among them (heck, even the possibility that women could be pastors or equal partners in their own marriages was never honestly explored, which caused me no end of trouble for the first few years of my marriage). It took me years to discover and then independently fill those massive gaps in my understanding of human experience. There are too many stories that can’t fit neatly into the boxes on a table of “the Christian worldview” (in fact, the suggestion that there’s only one “Christian worldview” is laughable).

A large group of alums sent our high school a detailed letter back in August explaining these concerns and other, related problems. I sent my own letter, signed by my husband and his brother who are also alums, and we waited for a response. When it finally came it was underwhelming. Like Chesterton, it was well-written but with little substance. Disappointing, but not surprising. 

So here’s my letter. If nothing else, maybe it will be helpful for someone else who's come to the same sinking realization I did, that the way I had been trained to read the Bible had somehow put me on the wrong side of Augustine of Hippo's admonition that “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.”* 

I truly believe that the people who responded to our letters sincerely think they're showing love to their students, but if your students consistently feel marginalized and dehumanized, I suggest you reconsider your definition of "love"—you keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means.

August 31, 2015
Covenant Christian High School Administration

7525 W 21st Street

Indianapolis, IN 46214

To the board and administration of Covenant Christian High School,

As Covenant alumni who benefitted greatly from our education there, we are writing in support and affirmation of the August 25^th letter from Marianne Richardson et al. Their requested changes to Covenant school policies are necessary for the mental, emotional, and spiritual health of not only Covenant’s LGBTQ students, but all students of every orientation and identity, by better preparing them to be loving, compassionate members of their communities.

Covenant’s core values as listed on the school’s website include

• Loving Community: a joyful pursuit of Christ in faith, hope, love, freedom, grace, and truth. 

• Human Dignity: all persons are created in the image of God and deserve of love and respect. 

• Academic Integrity: passionate, careful, honest, and charitable engagement with ideas.

• Church Solidarity: dedicated to a thriving local and globally diverse community of God.

A community that casts out its own when they fail to live up to expectations is neither loving nor in pursuit of Christ, especially when those who are being cast out are already marginalized by society and at a dramatically increased risk for suicide, homelessness, and assault. Neither does this treatment of these marginalized individuals respect their human dignity as being created in the image of God.

Furthermore, Covenant’s refusal to acknowledge alternate perspectives on human sexuality as held by many faithful biblical Christians gives the lie to both the claims to academic integrity and church solidarity. Currently Covenant cannot honestly claim to envision the “total preparation of the student” because upon graduation, many of us are totally unprepared for and completely flummoxed by the mere existence of ordinary individuals such as an office mate who is both lesbian and Baptist. This represents a failure of Covenant’s model of Christian education, in that not only are LGBTQ students further marginalized by the very people who should have shown them the most radical love and acceptance, but even straight, cis-gendered students are ignorant of the lived experience of faith and sexuality outside Covenant’s walls.

We challenge Covenant to live up to its values—to lovingly embrace all their students in the community of Christ, to respect them as children created in God’s image still learning what it means to live out God’s will for their lives, to welcome generous and respectful debate, and to embrace the whole church even when those diverse limbs and organs of the body of Christ have similarly diverse beliefs about the Christian life.

Erin (Hall) Kissick (Class of 2004)

David Kissick (Class of 2004)

Scott Kissick (Class of 2006)

*(Since I blame Augustine for Western Christianity's unhealthy fixation on sexual sin, I think it's only fair to enlist his support in trying to alleviate some of the symptoms of this pathology.)

(and here's a link to the Google Doc version) 

Writing goals (and why I'm not writing a novel in November)

I've wanted to do NaNoWriMo for ages, but instead I've always ended up writing things like my dissertation (or, like last year, defending it). And this year---

I'm still not writing a novel.

But I will be working on this book that's been rolling around in my head since May (since the ICMS conference in Kalamazoo, more specifically). I keep poking at it and thinking, "Meh, maybe later. I've got to write Other Little Thing right now and a book seems big and scary." But the things I'm wanting to write about for this book keep popping up in blog posts and poems, and I guess I should actually face this beast.

The advantage of hitching my project to something like NaNoWriMo is that it requires me to actually write every day, even if I don't feel inspired, and it precludes me from spending B's valuable naptime revising instead of generating material. Because I can sit and fiddle with the wording of a single sentence for hours, just to avoid facing a case of writer's block.

For now I'm calling it Kitchen Mystic, because reasons. And having a name for it makes it seem more like a real thing, even though it will almost certainly evolve away from that name as it grows. But I'm letting you all know about it now, because it will make it harder for me to bail on this project in a week if it turns out to be hard ;-)

Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo in some form?