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?

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.