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Monthly Archives: January 2014

Stamp of approval.

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It benefits the Episcopal Church that I’m not going to get its stamp of approval. I’m pretty out there for them. I actually talk about hearing from God. I am very vocal about radical inclusion. I’m pro- everybody rights. I’m so far out there that they didn’t know what to do with me.

Part of the process of seeing if you are called to be a deacon is seeing if you are willing to submit to their rules and their timetables.

They don’t check to see if you are willing to submit to God’s rules and God’s timetable, which to me seems more relevant. They have confused their paperwork and bureaucracy with God’s power. They’ve substituted themselves for God. This is very dangerous.

I was very angry that I was made to wait three years before the process even began. I wasn’t angry that I was put on hold, for my sake. I get that they need to make sure that someone is suitable before they put their stamp on them. You don’t want some wacko embarrassing the church, after all. You also don’t want someone trying to do something that they aren’t suited to do. It is like affixing a garden hose to a fire hydrant. The force of the water will blow that hose to pieces.

The same thing can happen with people who aren’t called.

I am angry at an institution that doesn’t seem to know how to build up the Body and therefore the Kingdom.

If someone comes to you and says they want to help, and you make them wait three years before you even begin to see if they are suitable in your eyes, then you have wasted a resource. You have wasted a lot of time, and you run the risk of discouraging someone.

Jesus tells us in Luke 10:2 that “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.” There are a lot of broken, hungry, hurting people in the world, who need love and care. Why would you make them wait, by putting a worker on hold?

There are so many sleeping people in church. There are so many people who show up every Sunday and don’t even do anything. They passively listen and they get a warm feeling of smugness or perhaps of assuaging of guilt that they have gone to church and done their duty, and that is all.

It would be so much better if they all took that hour and a half and skipped church and went to serve food in a homeless shelter. Or manned the local crisis line. Or walked to raise money for AIDs patients. Or visited people in hospice care.

Or did any number of things other than sitting on their butts, listening to someone say how awesome God used to be way back when in Biblical times.

God is awesome now, and is real, now. And Jesus isn’t here anymore to heal us. That is our job now. We are to pick up where Jesus left off. We are to get up and be Jesus in the world.

The purpose of church needs to be to train the workers. Church needs to be more like a mobile command unit for a war, because it is a war we are fighting. We are fighting a war against depression and hunger and poverty and abuse. We are fighting for all that is good and right. We are fighting because that is what we were made for.

That is why God put us here, to be God in this world.

Instead of saying “How could God let this terrible tragedy happen?” we really need to say “What are we, the children of God, going to do about it?”

V F W

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We have meeting halls for veterans of foreign wars. But I’m a little weird – I hear the opposite sometimes. Why are there no halls for veterans of local wars? And why are there no meeting halls to honor peacemakers? Surely those people who have dedicated their time to ensure peace are important. Surely they need places to meet to pass on their knowledge to the next generation.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time at Civil War memorial sites. There were huge obelisks dedicated to the dead, mostly young boys. There was a park just up the street from where I lived in Chattanooga. I played there often, climbing on the monuments and sitting on the cannons. Those marble soldiers were my companions.

The glorification of war has never made sense to me.

Sign up to be a soldier and we will pay for your education and give you discounts on home loans and at the hardware store. Sign up to fight and we will pay for your healthcare for life. Sign right here on the dotted line and everything will be fine.

Except it isn’t.

Soldiers die. If they don’t die in battle at the wrong end of an enemy weapon, they die from “friendly fire.” They die at their own hands from suicide. If they don’t die they are wounded so badly that they are disabled or disfigured irreparably.

If they make it back home in one piece they live a half life, haunted by demons in the night, nightmares and fears of being hunted. Depression, stress, and dysfunction follow them like feral wolves, ready to tear them to pieces.

We glorify war because it isn’t glorious. We sell this dream of honor to our children not because we love them, but because we need them. We need them to do our dirty work. We need them to go into danger and risk their lives, their bodies, their minds because we haven’t come up with a good alternative.

And we’ll keep building meeting halls and monuments for them. We’ll keep coming up with discounts and promotions to sweeten the deal.

We’ll keep dangling the carrot of free education and special holidays just for them, and they will keep reaching for that carrot, only to realize too late that it is booby trapped.

I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any alternatives. If we quit training soldiers, we will still have enemies. We will still have countries that hate us so much that the only way they know how to express their hatred is to harm us. I can’t see that dropping our guard will do us any good.

But I do think it is time to rethink America’s role in the world. I think it is time for us to stop acting like we are the policemen or the hall monitors of the world. I think that our incessant interfering in the internal affairs of other countries is what causes them to hate us so much, and is what causes them to target us.

Until we teach peace more than we teach war, we’ll continue to build meeting halls for the wounded and monuments for the dead.

I think we owe our children more.

Fighting the Nothing.

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I went to yoga class today. This isn’t normally a big deal. But today was different because my wrist hurts.

I’ve skipped class for various reasons recently. It is too cold outside. I’m tired. I’m out of town. The last one is the only valid one. My wrist hurting seemed like a good reason as well, but I decided that I had to go anyway.

I think I’ve stretched a ligament at work. My work involves a lot twisting my wrist and picking up heavy books. My wrist is getting worn out from it. It would be great if we could replace body parts like we can with car parts. Some we can. Not always. Until then, rest is required.

There are several yoga classes at the Y that don’t do any moves that involve wrists. This is not one of them. Downward facing dog, plank, upward facing dog, fallen triangle – all wrist moves. This is the class I’ve committed to going to because this one is on my day off.

I haven’t been in the past three or so weeks. In part I’ve used the holidays as an excuse. But I’m starting to think that seasonal affective disorder doesn’t have so much to do with less sunlight and a lot to with less activity. Sure, they are connected. Less sunlight means it is colder outside, and it gets darker sooner. Thus, we are less inclined to go exercise outside, or at all. We think we’ll take a break, just like the Earth does. We’ll fly south for the winter, even if it is in our heads. We’ll hibernate as much as we are allowed. We still have to go to our jobs, but that is it as far as activity. Everything else can just wait.

This year of writing has taught me the danger of that. Slow down too much and the doldrums set in. We are dead in the water, going nowhere. There’s no wind in our sails.

Then depression comes for a visit.

And when depression comes to visit, it isn’t really interested in a quick stop. It stays, longer and longer, gathering energy while we lose it. Depression is self perpetuating. It feeds on itself and gets bigger and bigger while our control on our minds gets less and less.

Writing has taught me this. It has made me stop and see patterns that never made sense before. It has made me realize that the only way out of this funk is to pull out the paddles and start rowing for dear life.

So I went to class today. I went even though I could only do half the moves. I went even though it meant that I had to modify all the other ones. Downward facing dog became dolphin. Plank was done on my forearms as well. I’ve never looked forward to doing warrior one and two nearly so much as today. I took child’s pose a lot. I did some of my favorite twists at other times. I tried some moves on my fists instead. It wasn’t that great.

But I went. And I stayed. And I did what I could do and didn’t push myself today. Sometimes yoga is about pushing. Sometimes it is about backing off. You don’t ever want to hurt yourself. The motto “No pain, no gain” is not a healthy mantra.

But really, I did push myself. I pushed myself to get up out of bed, and showered, and dressed, and to the class on time. I know me. If I’d let the doldrums win, that horrible inertia, that nothing that just feeds on itself and gets bigger and bigger, then I would have stayed at home all day and done nothing. Then I’d feel worse. Then I’d do more nothing. And I’d use it as an excuse to not go next week.

And while I wrestle with the concept of stillness, I know that doing nothing is death.

Silent retreat.

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I love going on silent retreats. I love making a special time to be alone with God.

And then I hate it. I feel like I’ve gone on a long road trip and I’ve forgotten something. I feel like I’m four hours away from my hairdryer or the book I meant to bring.

No matter where you go, there you are.

And that is the problem. When you go on a silent retreat, there you are. You can’t get away from yourself. You can’t talk to other people to distract you from you. You can’t listen to their problems so you don’t think about your own.

You are stuck.

And that is where the magic happens. You have to learn to live with yourself, and love yourself. You have to learn that this crazy mixed up bag of humanity that is you is loved, by God, completely and totally, head over heels, no doubt about it, loved.

You have to relax into it, this love. It is pretty overwhelming. To know that you, yes you, are beloved. To know that God wants to talk with you and listen to you, directly, no intermediaries, no message takers. There is nothing between you and God.

Everything is stripped away, and all that is left is all that is needed.

Going on retreat is like going to a deserted island, but everything is taken care of. There’s a bed, and food, and things to read, and arts and crafts to work on, and a nice place to stroll.

There’s a whole lot of nothing, and that is everything.

We spend our days just jam packed with noise. We have so much noise all the time we can’t hear ourselves think.

So we certainly can’t hear God.

Sure, you can go on retreat in your house. You don’t have to go anywhere. You can’t get away from God. God is stuck on you closer than a Band-Aid.

But sometimes you need to make a point of getting away. Sometimes you have to leave home to get it. Home has too many distractions. Home is too easy. Sure, you can turn off the television and the computer and you can set aside this time, from here to there, that you will do nothing but listen to God.

Sometimes that works.

For when it doesn’t, you have to go on retreat, with other people, where you all do it together. All together you get on that boat and you head out into the sea that is God, and there is no life raft, or oars, or sail. You are adrift on that sea, with no way of knowing where you’ll end up.

Sounds scary, right?

It is. And it is beautiful, and wonderful, and amazing. And God’s got you the whole time.

Poem- being OK with silence

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It is about being OK with silence.
With not having words.
With not knowing how to fix it.

With being rooted where you are.
And not worrying about where you are headed.

It’s about celebrating the brokenness
because that is how the Light will get in.

It’s about making the broken bit
the centerpiece.

It’s about making the leftovers
the main course.

It’s about not holding on,
not hoarding
not being a homeless dog gobbling up all the food
for fear
there won’t be more.

And it is about being OK even when I do all these things wrong.

It’s about knowing that I am loved regardless,
not in spite of my brokenness,

but

because of it.

Because of my brokenness
Jesus came
to let me know
I’m not broken
I’m human
And it’s OK.

On process and pain – chewing the steak.

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We all have problems. Don’t identify with your problem.

You aren’t an addict. You aren’t an abuse survivor. You aren’t a cancer patient.

With the new guidelines for talking about children with disabilities, we are supposed to talk about the child first, and the disability second. He isn’t an autistic child. He is a child with autism. He is a person first. He isn’t defined by his diagnosis.

Apply the same rules to yourself. You are a person first. The diagnosis is second. It isn’t you. It isn’t who you are. It affects you, certainly. But you are so much more.

When you define yourself by your diagnosis, you are giving it power, and you are diminishing your own.

Now, you also aren’t going to win any friends if you are constantly talking about your terrible childhood or your abusive husband or your sciatica or how you have to take care of your Mom with Alzheimer’s.

We all have problems. We all have something we have struggled with. Sometimes we have overcome it. Sometimes not. Sometimes it seems we can’t ever catch a break. But if you only talk about this, you are going to be lonely. The only companion you will have will be your problems.

Buddhism has a story that speaks to this. A lady’s child had died, and she was unable to accept it. She carried her dead child around the village, going to every house asking for medicine. They were all horrified. One kind person suggested she go to the teacher and sent her to Buddha. Buddha told her to go to each house and ask if they had experienced a death in the family. If nobody had died in that family, she was to get a mustard seed from them. She was to collect all the mustard seeds and bring them back to Buddha, who would then make a medicine for her.

She went all over the village and wasn’t able to find a single family that had not experienced death. She came to realize that her experience wasn’t unique or special. She came to realize that death was part of life, and to hold onto it and identify with it was causing her more problems than the death itself.

Simply going to each person’s house, she created her own medicine. Buddha taught her to look outside of herself, and to not identify herself with her suffering.

How often do we hold on to our pains and sufferings, just like that lady carried around her dead child? How often do we think we are alone in our suffering, that we have it worse than anybody else?

We all suffer. That is just part of life. Holding onto it makes it worse. Accept your loss and your pain, but don’t identify with it. Accept it, because to not accept it means to not process it.

Pain, like a big steak, needs to be chewed thoroughly to be digested. Choke it down and you’ll get sick. Spit it out and you’ll miss the lessons it has to teach you.

Pain teaches us about holding on and letting go. It teaches us about what we think we have to have in our lives and what we really need. It teaches us to accept, and live in the now, rather than in the past or the future.

The past never was as awesome as we think it was. Even in the past we were looking back to “the good old days” and thinking about how great things will be “if only I get…if only I can have…when I finish…” In the future we will do the same thing.

The only island is now. When we aren’t on that island, we are drowning in the sea, stuck away from the solid stability of that island. The past isn’t real. The future isn’t real. The more we live there, the more we are missing out on the only real thing that is, and that is now.

How to get back to now? Start looking at it. Start being thankful for it. Make a gratitude list. Notice what you have, right now, and be thankful.

Pain teaches us about ourselves.

Once we are through chewing on it, we need to swallow it, and then digest it. Then it does its work and then we have to let it go. Holding into pain is just like holding onto poop. We get sick if we can’t eliminate our toxins. But it still has to go through us, all the way. Resist it, fight against it, and you’ll only hurt yourself. Just like a tree in a strong wind, if you don’t bend, you’ll break.

Sing – on shame, and dreams

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When I was a child, my father played classical music records all the time. In fact he made a point of rushing into the house when Mom brought me home to put Beethoven on the stereo to make sure that was the first music I heard.

One day I was singing along to the music. I’d heard it all my life by that point, and I knew most of the works by heart. When he heard me sing, instead of being happy that his child shared an appreciation for his music, he shouted “Let the musicians play!”

I suspect he had no idea how damaging this was. It has been 40 years and I still remember how much shame I felt from hearing those words

The “musicians” weren’t live. He could pick up the needle on the record and play that piece again. He couldn’t replay the joy of hearing his child. I was live. They were recorded.

I think about his childhood, what would have made him do that.

I remember him telling me stories of how he would have to listen to his classical records in the closet. His parents thought that he was wasting his time. Perhaps they thought that he wasn’t being manly enough. I can remember he told me that he would secretly buy records.

Imagine being made to feel shame for buying and playing classical music, like it is the same as doing illegal drugs.

He wanted to be a conductor. He was taught that was not something to aim for. It wouldn’t support a family. It wasn’t practical.

He kept his love of classical music, but dropped his dream. He had a family and barely had enough money to support them.

I think we always hope that we aren’t going to be like our parents, but it is very hard. We try to remember all the things they did wrong and we resolve to not do them, but it is hard to undo our programming.

Especially when we don’t realize we’ve been programmed.

My father never did this work. He never dug down into himself, into his history. He never faced his fears and his brokenness. He was sad a lot. It was called depression, but that is just another name for sad.

He was sad because he wasn’t allowed to be himself. His parents were told the same story, and I suspect their parents were told the same.

The story was this – Don’t be yourself. Don’t be different. Fit in. Go for the safe route, the sure thing.

He didn’t remember them shaming him. So he shamed me for showing joy at something he loved. He was taught this. So then he did it to me.

To this day I cannot listen to classical music without crying.

Ring – getting hit on at the library.

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I wear a wedding ring for a reason, but it doesn’t seem to mean much to some people.

I was at work yesterday and a patron came in who has been a regular for the past few months. He is in his mid 60s, weighs around 250 pounds, and gets only movies. He also reeks of alcohol. He smells so much of it that it is obvious that even if he isn’t drunk at that moment, he is drunk often enough that it is just part of his body chemistry now.

It was single digit weather, and he was wearing just a long sleeve shirt and overalls. He didn’t feel the cold, because the alcohol had numbed him.

He worked up the courage to ask me if he could see my hands. He said that he is a palm reader. Sure. Why not? So I gave him my hands and he decided that they said I had two children.

Nope, unless you count jewelry and writing. They are certainly creative outlets I have, and I put a lot of energy into them. But I don’t think that is what he meant. I already know that this is going to be weird from that start, but I let him continue. I’m curious by this point.

He goes on, with some vague things and nothing specific. I think if you want to know about somebody you’d be better off asking them than looking at lines in their palms, but it was making him happy. Meanwhile I’m breathing very shallowly because he smells so strongly of alcohol.

I let him do this because it afforded me a chance to see a different side of him. Sadly, I got to see more than I wanted. One day I’ll remember that being friendly is often seen as being a friend.

At the end he said that he’d wanted to read my palms ever since he met me, but just wasn’t brave enough. He mentioned that he was glad he finally did.

He left and then came back. His car wouldn’t start and he’d called a friend. He was going to wait in the library. I could tell that he wanted to talk more to me, but I didn’t want to talk to him. I have work to do, and I really wasn’t getting anything out of this interaction. Plus, again, the smell. I started getting books to check in and putting them up. This kept me from constantly being at the desk. He didn’t quite catch the clue so I suggested he go look for more things to check out while he waited for his friend.

He left again, and again came back. This time he said “I wonder if it would be too forward to ask you out to dinner sometime?”

Really?

I said my usual line for this “I think my husband would have a problem with that.”

Not to mention me. What would I get out of spending an hour or so with this man? He’s old enough to be my father. He’s an addict. He doesn’t even read. Totally not my type.

I can see why he’d want to be with me, but why would I want to be with him?

I study human nature, sure. There’s that. But I like going to the zoo, where the animals are in their cages and safely away from me. I don’t invite them in my home. I don’t go out on safari to find them either. So no, I’m not going out to dinner with him.

How could he not notice the ring? I wear only one ring. It is gold. It is plain. It is on the proper finger. There is no ambiguity about it.

He had my hands right in front of him and he still didn’t get it.

Or maybe he did and he just doesn’t care.

Things will be awkward between us for a while. He was embarrassed. That is obvious. But will he even remember? Who knows how much he can retain these days. He’s pretty pickled.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been hit on at the library. It is always by older men. Sometimes when I remind them that I’m married they say things like “That doesn’t matter in my crowd.” Uh, it matters to me. If I was into that, I wouldn’t have gotten married.

Some ask me out and they have just met me. They don’t even know my name. They don’t know anything about me other than I am female.

Do they go hunting with birdshot? The wide dispersal pattern has to hit something, right? If they ask everybody out, they’ll eventually get lucky.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking that I’m really glad to be out of that rat race.

It isn’t about finding just anybody. Most of it is being OK with yourself first. I want to ask these guys, would you date you? Really? If not, then work on that first. Get sober. Get healthy. Develop a hobby. Be interesting. Don’t be desperate.

Because women can smell desperate the same way they can smell the fact that you’ve been drinking yourself to sleep every night since your wife left.

And any woman who says “yes” to that isn’t worth having.

Crazy hair – on poverty.

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You know those people that you can look at and tell they are poor? We have several of those in the library. Some seem one month away from homelessness.

There’s a new lady who has started coming in who this describes. I’m going to call her Tommie. She only gets videos, and they are for herself and her husband. She is short and wears leftover clothes and has hair that is wild and stringy. Recently she held out her hands and showed me her French manicure. This was her Christmas present. She was really excited about it.

I was a bit conflicted. It was beautiful work. It was the one beautiful thing she had done for herself. She would have done better if she had gotten her hair treated so it didn’t look so wild. Her hair is a white person’s equivalent of an afro. It isn’t as thick or as tall, but it is very wavy. It looks like she hasn’t put conditioner in it in ever.

Of course, she doesn’t have to. There is nothing saying that people have to manage their hair, exactly the same as people don’t have to wear makeup or shave. But if they don’t do these things, they will get judged as different or as dirty. I understand this all too well. I don’t wear makeup or shave my legs, and I understand the social lines I’m crossing when I do it.

One of my coworkers thinks she and the friend who drives her to the library are both dirty. I don’t think they are. I’ve never noticed a smell coming from them. We have plenty of patrons who smell very badly. Sometimes the smell is best described as a blend of cheap cigarettes, the sweat that comes from lack of showering and a diet of convenience store foods, and ferrets. They too get only DVDs, and the cases come back reeking of this poisonous cocktail.

Then again there are people who are aware of how they smell and they try to cover it up with perfume that is very strong. As much as I dislike strong body odor, I prefer it to the perfume because it doesn’t set off my asthma.

Back to Tommie. I can only imagine what it was like for the tech who did her nails. That is literally hands-on work. Our counters are pretty deep, so we don’t have to touch anybody. We also generally don’t have to deal with them for long. Doing someone’s nails is another thing entirely. Maybe the tech doesn’t even think about this. She does this all day long. This is her normal. But for me to have to hold someone’s hands while working with them would be really strange.

Don’t get me wrong – Tommie is a nice person. Simple, but nice. I just can’t imagine spending a lot of time in close proximity with her.

It was also weird because getting your nails done is a very girly act, and there is nothing girly about Tommie. Sure, she is female. But she doesn’t seem to care about it at all. Maybe I’ll see her in a different light once winter is over and she stops wearing that immense grey puffy jacket. Maybe she will wear something pretty and colorful. I doubt it.

She reminds me a lot of a friend I had in high school. I’ve talked about her before. That friend who I was assigned to for her good, not mine. That friend who had no friends. Perhaps that is why I notice her, and why I’m curious/concerned about her.

I had suggested that she ease up on the constant diet of movies and she assured me that she soon was going to get books because she needed to study for her GED. I wasn’t surprised. This just seems to be such a cliché all around. If you want to stay poor, drop out of school and watch a lot of movies.

One reason why we eat too much.

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I believe that our bad relationship with food is taught to us as children. We are taught to deal with our emotions by eating. Food is offered instead of comfort. When bad feelings happen, food fills the gaps.

How often do you see a parent putting a pacifier in her child’s mouth when he cries? This is so normal that we don’t even think about it. The child has legitimate need that needs to be addressed, and instead of getting help for his problem, something is put in his mouth.

Every time he is hungry, or tired, or wet, or sad, or upset, or too cold or too hot – something is put in his mouth. After months of this, he learns that this is how you deal with problems. Something isn’t right? Put something in your mouth.

This child will internalize this. He’ll either learn to eat or smoke or drink whenever he feels any twinge or any anxiety. When things aren’t going right, don’t find the reason for the problem. Self soothe by putting something in your mouth.

This is so simple that it is overlooked. This is so obvious that nobody sees it.

We need to stop using a pacifier and actually pacify children who are upset. We need to find out what the problem is and address it. They can’t fix their own problems. They can’t change anything about their environment. They let parents know that something is wrong by crying. Crying is natural. Crying keeps them alive. Ignoring it is neglect.

Say they have had enough food, and their diaper has just been changed, and they are still crying. They might just need love. They certainly don’t need a piece of plastic shoved in their mouths.

We have to think about the deeper lessons we are teaching children, those lessons we don’t even realize we are teaching them.