Home » 2014 » February (Page 4)

Monthly Archives: February 2014

Aho!

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I’ve recently heard the word “aho” used in several different gatherings. In the context it is being used it sounds like it means “I agree” or “awesome”. I looked it up, and it could be one of two things. According to Wikipedia, it is either a Native American word or a Japanese word.

If it is a Native American word (and the tribe is not specified, so it sounds questionable to me) it means something like what I think I’m hearing. It means something like “So be it” or “Amen.”

If it is Japanese, it means “idiot.”

So I’m not using this word.

First off, I’m not going to confuse people. If they know that the word exists in two different languages and means two entirely different things, they don’t know which meaning I’m using. If they don’t know what the word means, then it is going to be even more confusing.

Neither of these languages are my language. Not only are they not my native tongue, they are not languages I’ve learned and am fluent in. So it doesn’t make sense to use this word.

I totally respect the idea that sometimes there are words in other languages that aren’t in my language. Sometimes you have to borrow a word from another language because there isn’t a word in yours. Sometimes ideas are more fully expressed in another language.

But that isn’t the case here. There is a word. It is “Amen.”

Perhaps people frown on the use of this word. Perhaps people are afraid of it because they are refugees from church. I get that. I am.

But I’m giving up the church as we know it. I’m not giving up the idea of God, and of Jesus.

In the same way I’m wary of people who refer to God as Source or any of any other myriad of other terms I’m hearing. I’m not even sure what they are talking about. I’m not even sure they know either.

As for me, I’m going to keep saying “Amen” and “God”, because I think it is best to say what I mean and not be ambiguous about it. Perhaps it is politically correct to be vague and use broader terms, but after a while I’m not even sure if we are all taking about the same thing when we start using different words. So I’m sticking with the known good.

Recovering church member.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Christians in recovery aren’t like recovering alcoholics. We are more like food addicts. We can’t do without food. We just need a healthy relationship with it.

When you are a recovering alcoholic you have to learn to live your life without alcohol. But you can’t live without food. You have to relearn how to eat. The trick is to learn what is a healthy relationship with food and what isn’t. The trick is to set up boundaries.

In the same way as food addicts, people who have been hurt by mainstream church (by the current definition of what “church” means) are renegotiating this relationship. They can do without the top-down leadership, the politics, and the obsession with money that comes with church as it is currently defined.

When we have had an unhealthy relationship with church, we have to renegotiate the deal. We often try to stay away from church. Sometimes we go back but to a different denomination and we find we are welcomed. Sometimes we find that welcome is short lived and we discover the same bad processes and unhealthy ways of thinking that plagued our old churches. Sometimes we start to think that the whole idea of Christianity is wrong, and we stay away from anything associated with the idea.

The only problem is that the thing that drew us to church, and the thing that got us to leave is the same thing. It is Jesus in both cases. Those of us who leave church don’t do it because we don’t love Jesus. We do. We just weren’t finding him in church, or at least any modern definition of it.

As for me, I wasn’t finding him in the activities that the church sponsored. I wasn’t finding him in the book clubs that featured books that had nothing to do with how to be a better Christian. I wasn’t finding him in the margarita karaoke evenings. I wasn’t finding him in the Bunco gatherings that were held in the parish hall. And I certainly wasn’t finding him in a minister who told me to stop talking about how God was and is interacting with my life.

I left church, but I couldn’t leave Jesus. The only problem is in trying to figure out how to have one without the other. Just like with food addiction, I need Jesus in order to live. I just can’t handle all the extras that have been added on top of him.

So much was put on my plate when I’d go to church that Jesus became the side dish instead of the main course. There were so many garnishes and condiments and appetizers and desserts that I couldn’t see him at all. When I left church and left all of that, I missed him, and I got hungry for him all over again.

I think this is true of many people I’m meeting. We love Jesus. We just don’t love how he’s been served to us.

Just like a food addict, we need to strip it all down to the basics and start from scratch. We need to reevaluate our relationship. We need to set up healthy boundaries. We need to figure out what we need and what makes us feel ill.

For me, one of the big things is that the group not have a permanent building. Jesus didn’t build a church with bricks, but with bodies. The church is the people, not the place. The more money that is spent on a church building, the less that is spent on helping people who need it.

Another thing is there needs to be no one minister. We are all ministers, by virtue of our baptism and our acceptance of Jesus into our lives. To have only one person sharing their story, and only one person making the decisions, is to take away the God-given power, voice, and ability that we all have.

So while I really like the gatherings that I’ve been going to, I’m still missing Jesus in them. I think we’ve all gotten so afraid of how we were treated at church that we’ve just dumped everything and been feeling it out. We are reassembling the jigsaw puzzle but without the picture on the box, and we are leaving out all the bits that we are afraid of.

While I like that the meetings are in friend’s homes and we all get to share our stories openly and honestly, I feel that we are missing something really important. We forget to invite Jesus to our circle. We don’t talk about him. We don’t have communion. Well, not openly. Tea and cookies can count, but it has to be intentional for it to count.

I think we feel that because we don’t talk about Jesus, because we don’t invite him to our circle, that we aren’t going to get hurt like we did the last time we were in a place that mentioned Jesus. And we might. We might get hurt because whenever we gather with other people, we gather with other people’s problems. I also think that we still need to try. Just like renegotiating a relationship with food, I think we need to renegotiate a relationship with Jesus. I think we need to invite him in, to help heal that brokenness and that hurt. I think if we don’t, then we will start to feel more and more empty.

Clean plate club

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Are you a member of the clean plate club? Remember that from childhood? Remember the shame your parents would put on you to finish everything on your plate?

Even if you were full, even if there was something on your plate that disagreed with you, that made you sick, you were expected to finish it off.

I get it. Our parents didn’t want us to be wasteful. They needed us to learn to appreciate what we had. They also didn’t want to have to feed us at irregular times. If we didn’t eat at lunch time, we’d be hungry at 2, and they would have to make more food for us. That is inconvenient for them. It also teaches the child that he is in charge, and that is a bad precedent.

But there is a problem here. The child didn’t fill his own plate. There may be too much on it. There may be items on it he is allergic to.

Children are not small adults. Their stomachs are smaller. To insist that they eat the same amount and at the same times as adults is to ignore that fact.

To insist that they clean their plate when they had no say as to what and how much went on it is to teach them to ignore their own body’s needs and their own feelings. It is to tell them that their own needs and feelings do not matter.

It is exactly the same as force feeding the child. Actually it is worse. It is expecting the child to force feed himself. It sets him up for a lifetime of not listening to his own body’s needs. It sets him up for obesity, at a minimum.

At the worst it teaches him that his own needs and feelings do not matter, do not count. It teaches him that he, himself, as a person does not matter and does not count.

On names – what does it mean to be a Christian?

Posted on by | Leave a comment

“Israel” means to struggle with God.

“Islam” means to submit to God.

So what does it mean to be a Christian? In a way it means a little bit of both. It means to serve God. It means that you believe that God loves us so much that God decided to get down to our level and understand things from our perspective. It means that we are to follow Jesus’s example and to allow God to work through us to bring healing to the world. It means we are to be obedient to the will of God and put our own desires and wants last. Not second.

Now God will never ask us to ignore our needs. And we aren’t meant to be zombies.

This all sounds a lot like the word “submit”, but I think “to serve” is more accurate. To be Christian is to intentionally, willingly, and (hopefully) joyfully serve God.

How do we serve God? The easy answer is to be a minister. The hard answer is just as you are. You can go to school and learn how to tend God’s sheep. Or you can take care of them right now. Mother Teresa taught us that we don’t have to help everybody all over the world. We just have to help one person at a time.

God made you the way He made you because He needs you that way. We aren’t all supposed to be the same. Your differences are your strengths. Consider a garden. A garden full of the same kind of flower is boring. God made us all different because we are more beautiful that way.

Pods!

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Check out this awesome seed pod.
pod1

It is about 6 inches long, and an inch and a half wide.

Let’s look at it closer.
pod2

Such a pretty color. Sort of like a fig, all purple and brown. I think it might be a honey locust. I’m not sure. It is way too big and too thick to be a redbud pod.

It is ripe. Here is a picture of it turned on the side. The seeds are trying to come out.
pod3

And another.
pod5

Yet another.
pod4

I kept trying to take a picture of just the seeds, but my camera wanted to focus on the ground instead.

Then I had to smell it. The smell was warm and a little musty. The seeds had rotted a little with all the rain. This pod had sat on the ground a while. The skin of the pod is very thick, but the shell had opened so the seeds could get out. This also means rain can get in. It smelled a little sweet, like honey.

It is good to stop and examine things anew – to see them and try them out. When was the last time you picked up something interesting off the ground and looked at it and smelled it? I hope you do so very soon. It is rewarding.

Poem – Body

Posted on by | Leave a comment

The Body is strong enough for everybody,
even the misfits, the oddballs.
There is a space for everybody
in the Body of Jesus.

We are all welcomed
We are all blessed.
We are all sacred.
We are all kissed
by the tears of Jesus.

He welcomes us,
includes us,
even though we don’t feel worthy.

We are to do likewise
to the rest,
to the forgotten,
to the forsaken.

We are to include
the excluded.

We are to embrace
the unloved.

Go and do likewise.

The empty cross

Posted on by | Leave a comment

cross1

I love this shape. It is the cross, the intersection of heaven and earth, but empty. It is filled with the wearer.

I love that it is a quatrefoil. It reminds me of a four leaf clover. It looks medieval, yet the place I bought it from calls it “Moroccan.” It isn’t just one thing, and that kind of thing makes me really happy.

It reminds me of the bead that launched my love of beads way back when I worked in Washington D.C.

cross4

I loved that bead so much that I got a tattoo of it. In fact, it was my first tattoo.

cross3

I’ve since added to it, as you can see. But it is the center of the design.

This tattoo reminds me that God is always with me. It got it after the first time I was in the hospital for my bipolar disorder. They take away all of your “stuff” when you are in a mental hospital. That is the one place where you need something solid to hold on to. Me? I chose to have a reminder of God’s love with me. I figured they couldn’t take this from me.

But this symbol – this empty cross, I like even more. It is the same shape as that bead of course, but it means more because it is less. By having the center of it empty, it shows the wearer through it. It reminds me that I carry God with me, and so does everyone else.

I made this version of the empty cross necklace with green, orange, and purple. I’m not sure why these colors keep standing out for me. I like them, sure. They seem a little more vibrant than I normally work with though.

cross2

I’m a little limited on these crosses – the batch I have only comes in green, and it is a bright green at that. No hiding it! But in a way I like that too. Green is a color of growth, and this vibrant green is a good reminder to be alive in my faith.

Picture-story part four – introduction

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I’m sorry – I guess I should introduce myself. I’m Torii Jane. My friends call me Jane. I can’t tell you when America adopted the family name first practice like the Japanese do. Somewhen with all the computer files and doctor’s offices it seemed more sensible. We were sorted by family name first anyway. Somebody decided it would just be easier to make it all the same.

Torii? Yeah. That sounds Japanese too. It is. My family name means gate, but it isn’t like a gate anybody uses anymore. It’s a gate without a lock. It’s a simple thing really. It doesn’t keep anybody out. It just lets people know they’ve arrived.

Turns out the Inuit had something similar, in their inuksuit. They made stone structures to point the way. My name’s kind of like that. My family was full of people like that, people who knew where the line was between “here” and “there,” and how to get “there” in a really good way.

I sure miss them.

I started selling survival kits door to door to try to find people who saw things like me, but I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know that was why I felt so different. I didn’t know that was why I’d fallen out with so many friends. I was becoming invisible.

Maybe this is why they’ve not sent a search party for me. I’m not missed. I’ve spent so long moving away from them and their drama and their parties that they don’t even notice I’m gone.

Maybe here I can find a new home for myself.

What am I thinking? I’ve got an apartment back home. I’ve got bills to pay. I’ve got a Book of the Month club membership. I can’t just give all of that up. How will I survive?

All right. Get a hold of yourself, Jane. You’ve survived this long without those things. You sell survival gear, remember? You’ve lived on your own for what, twenty years?

Good Lord. Now I’m talking to myself.

Picture-story part three – gold

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I’ve finally met some people. They tell me they call this planet Graille. I didn’t see them at first because nobody sees them at first. They’ve become invisible. Well, not really invisible, but nobody notices them.

They came here because they could actually see each other. The closer you get to being awake, the more visible you become to each other, and the more invisible you become to everybody else.

Everyone else is so busy watching reality TV that they have stopped noticing what reality even looks like anymore. They are so used to artificial colors and flavors that they don’t know what real food looks like or tastes like anymore either. No wonder the real people have become invisible.

That field of stars I saw? That’s gold. It isn’t a field of stars at all. It’s a compost pile of sorts.

There was a hoarding of it around the turn of the century, a century ago. Every street corner and every abandoned building became a place to buy up gold. “Cash for gold”, they said. “Best prices!”

Some of these invisible people set up these shops, alongside the end-of-the-world doom mongers. They did it to collect more gold. They knew that money wouldn’t do them any good where they were going, but gold would.

It wasn’t for a profit. It was for the planet. This planet.

The gold feeds the soil. They use it with their compost, their kitchen scraps. The gold cancels out the acidic soil here, makes it come alive again.

They discovered that digging up all the gold was why the Earth’s soils stopped producing food, why they had to start 3D printing it out of plastics and polymers. That food fills you up, same as eating Styrofoam. It just leaves you hungry for more because you never got filled up with food in the first place.

The soil needed the gold under it all along. That’s why the Creator put it down there in the first place. Funny people, digging up the wrong thing. They thought if they dug up more gold, they could buy more food. Turns out if you leave it where it is, you get more of what you were looking for.

(After a long amount of wrestling with this, I’ve decided that if the words come without the picture, to let them. And if they are not 1000 words a section, that is OK. Rules cannot get in the way of the goal.)