Late winter and ready to turn

I just read two chapters of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to the kids.  We haven't had the habit of reading all together at bedtime, perhaps because bedtime is not usually my duty.  LWW might be a little over G's head, but she will get some of it.  A seems to be following so far.  I'm sure it will be years and years before they get the religious implications of it, but by then, hopefully, they will know it well and have read all of the books.  I loved those books when I was little, maybe in third or fourth grade.  I LOVED them.  I refused to read the last one because then they would be done, and I wanted to know it was out there still waiting to be read, something to look forward to and to save for when I really needed it.  Then I never read it.  I guess I never got desperate enough, or else when I did finally come against some hard places, I didn't think to escape them in a children's book, even the best of children's books.  Finally, when I was teaching and in my late 20s, one of my senior creative writing students, not a terribly academic person, was raving about the series and we found common ground in Narnia.  I told him about how madly I loved the books and reread them but never finished the series.  The next day he showed up with a copy of The Last Battle.  I went home and, instead of doing my work, read the whole book.  Amazing.  C. S. Lewis is unparalleled.  I was sobbing and rejoicing and my heart was beating and at the same time I was completely at peace and thinking, "Yes.  This is how it is: awful and wonderful, terrifying and yet inevitable."  Oh, I hope my children can someday love books as I do.  It's far too soon to tell though.  A is a good reader, but he is still quite young.  I believe his decoding skills have probably outgrown his other literary abilities.  So it was a joy to visit Narnia together for the first time.

 

The ice encrusted world was very beautiful this morning when the sun came out.  Even this afternoon the tall grass in the praire preserve by my house was still all coated in ice and sparkled in the setting sun.  If one is not trying to train for a long long race, like the Boston Marathon, for instance, there are few things as magically beautiful as world entirely encased in ice but also melting in the sunlight.

All of this is to say that today turned out so very much better than expected.  My overly-vivid and hard-to-shake dream this morning was about getting my foot diagnosis and finding out other terrible things that had nothing to do with my foot, like that I had breast cancer.  I felt terrified all morning, even though I knew rationally that in real life things do not happen that way.  Then, on the way to G's gymnastics, I decided to take another route.  I keep getting caught on the wrong side of the train tracks when the Monday morning train comes through.  I was ahead of schdule, which is hard for me because I like to keep doing things until the last minute, so I took a slightly longer route that didn't cross the tracks.  As I was approaching the park district building I got pulled over for speeding!!  I wasn't even particularly in a hurry.  I was going 41, apparently, which doesn't feel fast to me.  So the truth was that I just wasn't watching my speed.  I also would have guessed that the speed limit there was 35, but it's 30.  And then I couldn't find my insurance card.  The one in my car had expired.  Nice.  Good morning.  Perhaps it all began to turn when the officer only gave me a warning and a smile.  (Appreciate your public servants people!!  I want this man patrolling my neighborhood.  I do not want people speeding down my street either.  And to be reminded in kindness to do right, well, sign me up to pay taxes.  Seriously.  May the man's family all be safe and sheltered and fed and free to also become police officers.) 

 

And then I had my doctor's appointment.  Who ever thought being told I would need surgery would be such good news?  But it feels like it.  The surgery will require anesthesia and so is not something to be taken lightly.  Never take lightly the suggestion that another human should use chemicals to knock you unconscious and then cut into your flesh, past nerves and blood vessels and other important things.  But as far as surgeries go, this one is not bad.  It will require some healing of the wound but not crutches.  It will require wearing a boot for a couple of weeks and a couple more weeks of going easy on the feet, and then I can start getting back to my running, the love of my life.  Two months from now, I might be able to run again.  Without terrible pain.  It's wonderful news!! 

I guess it's all relative.  When I was planning to give away a kidney, the prospect of not running for six to eight weeks was almost as much sacrifice for me as the removal of the actual organ.  (Oh yeah, and I am terrified of surgery and anesthesia.) Now, six to eight weeks is nothing compared to the months and years of injuries I've been dealing with.  The surgery thing is still scary, but having a stray fragment removed from a foot joint is just not quite the ordeal that having a vital organ removed would be.  And then more perspective arrived.  I had talked to Cassie last night, and it seemed likely that she had a really really really bad condition that was going to plague her the rest of her life.  She is down to 93 lbs and cannot eat anything.  No meat, no fat, no dairy, no fiber.  There's nothing left.  The treatment for what they thought she had was more drugs that would affect her current drugs. Ugh.  When she called today, I was thinking I had such good news to tell her about my foot, but what is that compared to her struggles? And then she had really really great news.  She has a bacterial infection that is often lethal and somehow wasn't this time, and they can give her antibiotics for it and she'll be better in a couple of weeks!!  Woah.  So in comparison, saying "Yay! I need surgery!" seemed less exciting, but we are still both happy for each other.  Then we laughed that we should be so rejoicing to hear that we have infections and surgeries.  But it's all a matter of perspective.

A day of badness turned all good.  I like when that happens.

A rose by any other name....

For reasons that I will write about at another time, I find myself not eating meat.  I'm having trouble with expressing this succinctly and purposefully to both my loved ones and myself.  What does this mean?  Am I a vegetarian now?  And why does saying, "I am a vegetarian" feel so very uncomfortable when the actual decision not to eat meat happened so effortlessly that it was almost unintentional?

It's made me think about other labels and the value and discomfort in them.  I have two friends who became addicted to running fairly recently, in their mid-thirties.  Friend A has done a number of races, 5Ks, 10Ks and a half marathon.  Friend B has worked up to a similar pace and has done a ten-mile race.  Both run regularly and with some discipline.  Friend A will begin tales involving her running with the preface, "Well, I'm not a runner...."  Friend B joyfully and proudly embraces the label of runner.

And how about "Christians."  There are those who go around with WWJD bracelets and cross necklaces and would proudly proclaim to anyone they came across in the grocery st"ore that they are Christian and will be so bold as to ask their not-yet-acquaintance if she has been "saved."  (Yes, this happened to me.  I told the Christian that hopefully we won't know for some time.)  But there are those who would hesitate to call themselves Christians but quietly go about studying Jesus and trying to live by his example. 

Why does the name matter?

Perhaps it is inevitable, this desire to label and name.  We are linguistic creatures, hard-wired, or so it seems (if you haven't read The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, I highly recommend it.)  We begin to order the world with words before we can even move through the world on our own.  The things that a baby can name are always most exciting and most eagerly sought out.  It's comfortable to know the names of things.  Labels help us order who we are and what we do.  They keep every moment and every act from being a surprise, from distracting us from things that are truly new and unpredictable.  A runner is a person who runs, a person who knows about chafing and can have long conversations about shoes or certain bodily functions or injuries.  A vegetarian is a person who is not going to be appreciative of the steak you serve her.  It's helpful, the label.  If nothing else it gives others a fair warning.  And Christians?  Well, that one's a bit more tricky.

A name can be a tool for inclusion and community.  We runners hang out together; we have things in common.  It's also good for discipline.  You get up and do your morning run even though it's raining and still dark because you are a runner and that's what you do.  I find these aspects of the vegetarian label both useful and disturbing.  On the one hand, it's helped me find cookbooks.  (All this time trying to cook without milk and eggs, and I never thought to check out a vegan cookbook!)  On the other hand, I had just told my friends that I might now be a vegetarian, and then they asked me to join them for sushi.  I did not care to put the discipline of my new eating habits over the relationships that I so value, to cherish the label more than people.  And anyway, is sushi considered meat?  Would eating it be breaking the discipline? 

Taking a word and it definition too seriously, one gets all tangled up in a new mess of names and definitions.  Does it really matter if sushi is meat?  It does not seem to violate the ecological, political or health principles which motivated my abstention from meat.  Not eating the sushi would have interrupted a precious opportunity for communion with people I love.  The definitions can get in the way of good things.  Commitment to the label rather than the spirit of a decision is perhaps why, in spite of our need for naming and ordering, I tend to pull away from declaring myself one thing or another.

As far as I can tell, all good things have the potential to also be bad things.  For all of the understanding and fair warning a name often provides, it can also mislead.  It can assume a life of its own, more unmanageable than the thing it was meant to tame.  A label is intimidating.  If you call yourself a runner, will people assume you can run a sub-8:00 mile?  Will they assume you do marathons?  Will they be disappointed if you do not?  If you start down that vegetarian road, will people think you're little more than a poser if you go out and gorge on sushi?  Will your entire faith journey be discredited if you wear your religious affiliations on your chest and then are discovered to be, in private but in reality, your everyday unoriginal sinner?  Yes, a word may call one to discipline, but it's almost certain to set that same one up for miserable failure when the discipline turns out to be more of an ideal than an achievable reality.  

The truth is that a single word never ever tells the whole story.  If you study the Bible, you see that even a whole single story never tells the whole story.  Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna illustrates over and over that the most important part of the story is the hole within it.  A person takes an entire lifetime to tell the true story of who they are, and it is constantly subject to revision and, for most of us, a few literary techniques, like hyperbole, just to make it more interesting and, sometimes, more true.  This is why my husband complains that at every social gathering attending mainly by my running friends, he gets dragged into multiple 30-minute conversations about races, about injuries, about shoes or even about shoe stores.  And the stories are all different.  There isn't one "runner" story.  I have a running friend who wins her age group at major international marathons, a friend who runs 80-100 miles a week, friends who never run faster than a nine-minute mile, even in a short, fast race, and some friends who don't race at all.  I have friends who train all year for one marathon and friends who do a few a year without being too concerned about any particular one.  I have friends who don't care to run in snow and cold and friends who run every day, no matter what.  And don't get me started on the Christians.

So here's some of my story: I have not eaten meat (except for sushi) for a week and a half.  While I find that I haven't particularly missed the meat, and I've been pretty comfortable with my internal rationale for my behavior, I haven't defined well enough for myself what that means to be able to declare anything to the world.  Two days ago my husband came home with some grocery bags, one of which contained a package of sun dried tomato and chicken sausages, a meat product I have in the past eaten without much concern.  This morning, he suggested we eat them for dinner, grill them outside, given the lovely warm spell and extended daylight we are enjoying.  I haven't decided what to do about that.  And if I do not eat the chicken, how will I explain that?

For you

Today was the day I spoke at the iwitness service.  I didn't cry; at least, not until I stumbled back into my pew and into the arms of my fellow sopranos.  And then I cried again when people came up to hug me afterwards and tell me that what I had said was something they needed to hear.  Oh, and people said all sorts of loving and encouraging things, things that made me take another deep breath and be thankful that I seem to have done something for people with words.  I do want to be able to "speak" to people, to start conversations that people secretly want to have.  One person thanked me for being the one who is willing to go to the uncomfortable place for the sake of others, and that just about perfectly expresses what I was hoping I could do.  God (if He's there) knows I was shaking and asking over and over again that my mouth be stopped if what I was going to say was not going to be a blessing to others.  But if that discomfort eased the way for someone else, I would do it again tomorrow. 

After church I mentioned to someone who told me I should write that I was going to start this blog, and she was overjoyed at the possibility of sharing with someone outside our church the things I had said in church.  So I'm making good on my word, only sooner.  No need to wait until that hypothetical "tomorrow" if the blog is here waiting for me today.  It's still scary to me, but while I have the momentum, while I still have some affirmations echoing in my head, I will offer this to you, reader, and whomever you think would feel better about their own doubts and personal sense of hypocrisy if they read about mine.  And so I humbly submit to you what I said in church today.  I send it out into the world for you to use in whatever way makes the world hurt a little less.

Why I’m Still Here

        The way Pastor Bill explained this service to me, it’s not my job to speak about why I might not be here, but rather to explain why I am still here in spite of the kinds of things Andrew and Matthew just pointed out.  However, having been educated in the classical strategies of persuasive argument, I don’t want to minimize the fact that I really might not be here.

          On the most obvious surface level, let’s just say that I have other things to do.  Like most of you, I am over-busy.  I could do some of these things on Tuesday mornings while my daughter is in PDO, but I go to Pastor Bill’s Bible study instead.  I could do them Thursday nights, Monday afternoons, Sunday mornings, Thursday mornings, or the times when various committees and planning groups meet.  Instead, I’m here.  I could be cleaning or cooking or running or practicing music or writing or reading or biking or swimming or volunteering at the elementary school or tending a garden or decorating my house (you get the picture,) but I’m doing religion.

          Not only am I busy, I am also undeceived.  I may have grown up an innocent in the church, but at this point I’ve been to college and graduate school.  I’ve met some get-ahead non-Christians and befriended confirmed atheists.  I’ve glimpsed some of the ugly side of religion in general and of this church in particular.  I love you people, and I’ll say more about that in a minute, but I’ve served on the Staff Parish Relations Committee; I’ve helped hire a youth pastor and spent nights and weekends in conflict resolution over performing that duty.  I’ve seen what happens when someone starts saying something about how we should love and include everyone, even, say, homosexuals.  It’s not always an easy or heartwarming experience to stick around.

          So obviously there’s more to this church membership thing, and some of it is this: you people are my family.  Literally, my parents and sister and nieces also attend this church.  But it’s also for me as Pastor Bills says it will be at a baptism.  The people in this church are parents and siblings to me.  The people in this church helped raise me, and they are currently helping me to raise my children.  On any given Sunday, I can sit in the choir and see out in the congregation the people who taught me the songs “Jesus Loves Me” and “All God’s Creatures Got a Place in the Choir.”  I could point out the people who taught me to give thanks before eating, the people who taught me the Ten Commandments, the people who taught me the Lord’s Prayer, the people who, when my youngest sister was hospitalized with kidney failure, showed up at our door night after night with multi-course meals for us two girls still left parentless at home and who showed up at the bloodbanks for the sister who was not.  Here are the people I sing with and the people who came to my band concerts this past December.  And there’s a whole other list of people who are raising my children, who are their family and therefore mine.

          One reason I am here every week, almost every day, is that I know that what you do in a family is show up.  Even if you’re busy.  Even if you know someone is going to say something annoying or act predictably irrationally.  You show up at holidays and birthdays and graduations and baptisms and hospital beds and band concerts.  It’s what a family does.  I’d be lying if I said no one here ever made me want to stomp out muttering self-righteous things.  But I’ve also done that to my mom.  She’s still my mom, and I’m every day thankful for that.  I’m here because, as Jesus said, you are all my mothers and brothers (Mark 3:33-35).  You are stuck with me.  I appreciate that when I show up, you hug me and smile and almost never stomp out of the room muttering.

          But now for the harder stuff.  I have some bigger issues with the church than being busy and having been shown the dirty laundry.  The bigger issues are the ones that make me balk when asked to speak in church and the ones that make me hesitant to represent myself as a Christian when I’m not in church.  I won’t get into the details of how I disagree with some of the interpretations of the word “Christian” and how it’s portrayed in the media.  I won’t mention any of the historical “Christian” moments I so vehemently disagree with.  Let me jump right to my own heart and, after many years, make my confession before you: the reason it’s really and truly surprising that I continue to participate in religion the way that I do is that I am not sure that there is a God.  Yes, I was born into the United Methodist Church to parents who also grew up in the Methodist Church.  I’ve been attending this church in particular for 32 of my 36 years, and I’ve never been really certain that you all aren’t completely deluding yourselves.  So now it’s out there and you know it.  It’s a very uncomfortable thing to say aloud anywhere, much less standing in the front of the church.

          So then why church?  Sure, the people here are my people, but I do have other ways of making friends and finding community.  I belong to a running group and a concert band.  I have friends from college.  I could join the Geneva Mother’s Club and the school PTO.  I could even come here only on Sundays, or better yet, just on the big holidays when everyone else is sure to be here too.  Why spend a lifetime showing up to and reading about and talking about something that might not even exist?

          Perhaps part of the answer is that I’m really hoping to be convinced.  Those of you who have seen God, felt God, heard God, and claim to know Jesus are the kind of people I want to be.  Sure, there are unappealing Christians in the world.  But there are also Christians like Joan P and Judy B, and I wouldn’t mind being either one of them when I grow up.  Sure, there have been terrible things done in the name of religion, but there have also been things like Kids Alive and Appalacia Service Project and Third Tuesday Suppers and all of the things that are happening in Taurage as a result of our church’s support.  Missionaries have conquered and trampled and killed in the name of God, but they’ve also run homeless shelters and soup kitchens and built orphanages and drilled wells, no questions asked, and it seems to me that those are the people who are really following the Jesus I keep studying.  I want to do those things too.  I want the courage to love the world as much as the Bible claims God and Jesus do.  I want to make it hurt less. 

          I take communion once a month along with the rest of you because even though I’m sometimes pretty skeptical about the existence of God or the reality of the resurrection, I still do want to sit down at a table where a guy like Jesus is host.  I really really like what he did and said.  I adore his stories.  I like the God he claims to know.  If there is a God, I hope he is as Isaiah says.  I hope he cares less for the rituals than for the people who are sincerely and unintentionally hungry.  I hope God is as Jesus claims and that he will chase after the one lost sheep even if that means leaving the rest of the others to take care of themselves for a while.  I like the vision of the way the world would be if Jesus was, in fact, Lord. 

          I long for the world to look like the Kingdom of God.  I like the thought of a world full of forgiveness and not violence, a world where no one needs to go hungry, a world where the most valuable possession one has is love.  I ache for a world where no one feels like a widow or an orphan.  I like the thought of love covering a multitude of sins, of love casting out fear.  I may not be ready to leave my net full of fish and my father in the boat; I may not feel like I can leave my family or sell all of my possessions just yet, but it seems like as noble a goal as any to someday be like some of the people I’ve met while spending a lifetime in the church.  And, quite honestly, I don’t know anyone outside the church as worthy of emulation as some of the mothers and brothers and sisters who have been in this room today.

          Jesus promises, “Seek, and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7, Luke 11:9).  I stay in the church because I know that a person rarely finds something she isn’t taught to see.  A couple of years ago, in trying to find the answer to a bizarre dysfunction in one leg, I saw a number of different medical professionals.  The physical therapist found a muscle imbalance.  The chiropractor discovered that my hips were out of alignment.  The surgeon didn’t even examine me: he only looked at the MRI results that showed two herniated discs in my lower spine.  The neurologist couldn’t find any reason for the problem at all and told me to just run.  It was a very frustrating experience, but from it I saw firsthand that a person eventually finds what she has been trained to look for.  For me, having sincere doubts is not a reason to leave the church.  It’s the reason I stay.

         

          So now you know.  I am perhaps not who I seem to be.  Perhaps, for me, a state of complete conviction is impossible.  If that is the case, I imagine I will seek forever because equally impossible for me is the state of lazy capitulation to my doubts.  I may sometimes doubt the existence of God, but about one thing I am sure.  If there is a God, yours is it, and He’s the One who will seek out every last wandering sheep, even the ones who were lost while standing at the front of the church.

Amen.

Going Public

It has been a season of retreat for me.  My foot forced a retreat from running.  That, in turn, meant that a lot of my running relationships have been put on hold.  Not lost, necessarily, but put away at a distance for a while.  Conflicts in the family schedule caused me to not participate in either the women's advent service or the cantata.  I just decided not to force the issue of Christmas cards, and I didn't do it.  And more than that, I've found myself feeling the need to pull away, to draw into my shell, into my home and family and my own silence.  It's harder to talk to people I usually talk to.  I haven't had much to say.  My writing and correspondence became stilted and far more difficult than just being silent and keeping to myself.

And then.

For some reason, out of the safety and quiet, I felt nudged to speak.  First, I felt that people ought to read some of what I write, not that I write much or that it's brilliant.  No, I don't feel confident in my writing at all, so I do not understand the sudden reemergence of the desire to be read.  Why would I want that?  And yet, I sent links to my journal to a couple of people.  Then I posted one journal entry on Jen's facebook wall.  I immediately freaked out and wanted to delete it.  Why the freak out?  Someone might read it.  And in reading it, they might know me, or at least a little part of me.  I have become very aware that while I am hungry to pour myself out to someone, to be fully known and still loved, I am absolutely terrified of being known more than a little piece here or a little piece there.  I didn't realize how carefully I guard the essence of what is really me.  I always have.  I guard it well enough that one journal entry that reveals a humorous scene with my daughter and a thought about religion seems like I've blown open a hole in my heart and invited anyone who passes by to take a good long look at what kinds of things go on there.  Today, just for kicks, I googled it, and guess what, that particular entry has been shared around enough that it comes up on google on a site for links that have been shared within the last hour.  I can't breathe and think about that fact at the same time.  It's really so mediocre, so unfinished, so flawed and not thought-through.  And people read it and suggested other people read it.  Why would people want to read about my life?  How self-indulgent and self-important to suggest that they might.  (And yet I like to read about other people's lives. Hypocrit.) 

And then.

Even though I did not much savor that experience, even though I remember none of the exultation of having written something I liked for a few minutes and all of the horror of realizing that I put something mediocre out there onto the INTERNET (!!!), I still kept researching starting a more public blog, one with pretty pictures that is more inviting to read.  And I started one here, on blogspot.  Why would I do such a thing?  I'm worried I might actually post things on it.  And then I might tell people how to find it.

AND.

A week ago Pastor Bill e-mailed me to ask me to help lead iwitness.  Maybe it's the same ridiculous compulsion that made me post things on the internet that made me e-mail him back that I probably would do it, but that I wasn't sure that the kinds of things I might say would be entirely appropriate.  We talked, and he said they were OK, so I said I would do it.  Ummmm....  what?  I said that I would stand in front of a sanctuary, during a church service, and confess my very most private opinions about God?  Am I CRAZY?  Yes.  Yes, because then I went directly to the nearest table (in the church library) and started to write.  I wrote more that afternoon.  More that evening.  It's raw and real and terrifying to me, mostly because it's unbelievably personal.  I tried to keep a little distance, and for the first third or so, I succeeding in not saying anything that anyone else might not say.  It's completely true, but also nice and unsurprising.  But a little voice in me kept insisting that I poke another hole in the exterior.  And this time, I'm not just posting it somewhere for someone to maybe come across.  I'm saying out loud in the front of a church where people will be sitting with the sole purpose of listening to and thinking about and evaluating the things being said by the person in the front.  Shit.

And yet.

I feel the same kind of ambivalence about this message thing that I did about the blogs.  On the one hand, I am a little bugged that an e-mail went out from the church saying that one of the three of us speaking, not the one that is me, will be giving the message.  So people all think it's him, and no one knows it's also another person and me too.  Part of me resents that it looks like it's his show.  Part of me wishes people were also excited to come see me.  There is a whole other section of the church that would make a point of going to that service just because I am going to be in it, and now they won't know.  Of course, I could publicize that I am speaking, as the other person has done, posting it repeatedly on facebook and telling anyone I suspect might be interested, but there again, although for some reason I feel bugged by my exclusion from the publicity, a part of me would rather eat raw cat litter than make a big deal about what I am going to say because  (a) that seems so arrogant, and (b) people might truly be interested, and they might show up.  And listen.  And hear.  And know.

The thing to do, I suspect, is pray about this.  I don't really understand the prayer thing, so I might do that, but what I always have done is write stuff out.  So here it is.  And do not think that I am not aware that there is a great deal of irony attached to the fact that these things are the things that are causing me a level of anxiety so high that I have physical symptoms, and yet, I am about to hit "post" and send them out into the world for anyone to see.

Oh Lord.  What next? 

I'm not sure if that last question is a whine or a request.