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Starter marriages

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So many people seem to have starter marriages, the same way that people will get starter homes. When you have a starter home, you have it with the idea that when things change, you accumulate too much stuff, or when you have a child, you’ll get a bigger home. It’s what you can handle and afford at the time but you understand that you could always sell it and get another one.

People have marriages in the same way these days. When they get to be too big or too much they get divorced and move on.

What about the marriage vows? What about the idea on ‘till death do us part’? What about ‘for richer or for poorer’? What about ‘in sickness and in health’? Maybe people can’t handle the “poorer and sickness” parts, and were hoping they’d luck out and get the “richer and healthy” part. It is a package deal, and a crapshoot. You get both, in unequal proportions.

These vows – which are made in front of friends and family and sometimes a minister – don’t seem to mean anything anymore. These are legally binding vows. There’s a document that is signed for the state as well. This is a legal contract.

Perhaps what people mean is that they say “I’ll stick with you as long as things are good. I’ll stick with you as long as you suit my purposes. I’ll stick with you as long as I like you.”

Marriages aren’t about convenience or comfort. Marriages are about committing for the long haul. The other person may drive you completely up the wall but that doesn’t mean that you get to get divorced. The bliss that you have at the beginning of your marriage doesn’t last long. What do you do after that fades?

I’m not quite sure about people who get divorces. Now if you’re on the receiving end of a divorce that’s different. If your spouse initiates it and will not reconcile you don’t have much of a choice. But if you initiate then what do your vows really mean? How can you be trusted to say you’ll do anything? If you can’t honor your wedding vow, then why can you be trusted at work? Why trust you with a home loan? What does your word mean?

Marriage is kind of like buying a present with someone and you’re drawn to the pretty wrapping paper. But once you open the box and start looking inside, you realize that it’s a machine that has a bunch of pieces. They are all jumbled loose in the box, and there’s no instruction manual. You have to figure out how to put it together along with the other person. You both are pulling out pieces and you’re wondering how they go together to make this machine work, this machine called marriage. Since you both come from different backgrounds you both have different ideas about what parts go where and what parts are more important than other ones. But you still both have to work on this thing to make it go. You can’t just throw it away once it gets difficult. You can’t just keep looking at the pretty wrapping paper and wondering why it doesn’t match this difficult thing that is on the inside.

Poem – Poets are born in the strangest of homes.

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Poets are born in the strangest of homes.

Grapes, before they are jelly, are happier.
They don’t know the pain of becoming.

I’ve heard that
the blue fish flies at night
so no one can see it.

It is afraid of being found out.
No one knows it is blue.

On Thursdays,
when the moon is full,
we swim outdoors
hoping to see it.

The light of the moon
makes her scales shine
so merrily.

Only a groundhog can kiss a saint.
The dirt of honesty smudges its nose.
Deep in the soil, deep in the soul,
The Earth’s potatoes watch the stars.

There is something about dirt,
about being unseen,
here.

We are all hiding our true nature,
even from ourselves.

Sometimes what we need
is the slow soft lights
of the evening
to show the way
to ourselves.

They aren’t so bright.
We don’t have to wince
and wink
like we do
in the glare of the sun.
In the evening’s glow we can be
ourselves,
fearless.

Euphemistically speaking

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There is a memorial garden in my town. It isn’t a cemetery, oh no. Nothing that gauche. There aren’t even gravestones. There are little metal vases to hold bouquets of fake flowers. So there is to the eye a field of flowers. Perhaps you have such a place too and haven’t even thought about it.

Have you noticed that people don’t die anymore? They “pass on” or “transition” or are “fallen” if they are military. Even more euphemistically we might say they have “kicked the bucket” or “bought the farm”.

Why have we sanitized death? It isn’t a reality anymore. We no longer think about it in a real way. We no longer see it. We are divorced from it.

Our family members die in hospitals, alone or with strangers. They no longer or rarely die at home if it is an expected death. Their bodies are taken away by other strangers, who wash them and clothe them and lay them out. They put makeup on them so they look “natural”, because it is important for us to have a good memory of death. They look peaceful, because that is what we want to think of when we think of death.

We’ve done the same with birth. It is far more common these days for a woman to give birth in a hospital than at home. This wasn’t always the way. Birth is now treated as a medical condition rather than a life event. Women are treated as passive observers and no longer participants in this experience. It is something that happens to them rather than something they participate in. Sure, there are some home births and some midwives, but they are seen as the exception rather than the rule.

Ignorance causes pain. The more you know about something the easier it is to deal with. The more we ignore our own reality of birth and death, the more anxiety we feel.

I am for everyone breaking the taboo about talking about important life events, and for being aware of the lies we tell ourselves.

I wonder what it is about the English language that we can’t bother to
actually say what we mean. When we go to the bathroom we more often use the toilet than the tub. It isn’t a bath that we need.

I’d never thought about it until I went to England and asked where the bathroom was. The clerk looked at me funny and said they call it the toilet. I winced. “Toilet” sounds dirty, vulgar. It is accurate, but so gauche. But he had a point. We do this all the time.

We have “correctional centers” instead of prisons.

We have “medical centers” instead of hospitals.

Newspeak is here, right now. We don’t even fight it. It is time to notice how we are lying to ourselves.

Mother’s Day isn’t always flowers and candy. Sometimes it is painful.

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Today is Mother’s Day in the United States. This is seen as a day of happiness and joy, where we celebrate our Mothers. Moms usually get taken out to supper at a nice restaurant and get gifts of flowers or candy or jewelry.

But Mother’s Day isn’t all beautiful and easy. We pretend like it is. We fake it for the purpose of keeping the peace. We do that a lot. We don’t like to tell others that we aren’t what they think we are. We don’t like to admit our weaknesses.

There are those whose mothers have died. There are those who had a terrible relationship with their Moms and don’t talk to them anymore. There are those who never knew their Moms.

Then there are women who want to be Moms but can’t. There are women whose children have died. There are women whose children are estranged from them. There are women who have children and wish they didn’t.

What if your mother was abusive? What if she was an addict? What if she is the reason for your therapy sessions? What if your mother died when you were very young? What if she is still alive and very feeble and can’t remember who you are while you take care of her?

Mother’s day is hard for many of us. For many people it isn’t flowers and candy and hearts. It is painful. It is very sad. But we often fake it. We pretend that everything is fine. We don’t tell others our painful truth because we don’t want to bother them. We think we are alone in our pain so we don’t want to trouble others.

But what if everybody else is faking it too?

I was at a Chinese buffet recently and the manager and I have become friendly. He asked me what my plans were for Mother’s day. I decided to be honest. I tried to be gentle with it, because this information isn’t easy for others to hear sometimes. I paused, and told him that my Mom died when I was 25. This turned out to be a good thing to say. It somehow gave him permission to be honest about his mother. She had died when he was very young. She had cancer, and one day had gone to take a nap and just didn’t wake up. To this day he still misses her and is confused how someone can die so simply, without drama.

We were able to share a moment of being real together. In that space, in that time, we were real, and we were vulnerable, and we were both sad. But in our shared sadness we were stronger. We no longer had to carry our sadness alone. We knew that we weren’t alone. There was real beauty in that honesty and vulnerability and sadness.

Why do we fake who we are? Do we do it because we don’t want to rock the boat or upset the apple cart? Perhaps if we were more honest we’d actually be doing the world a favor. By being ourselves, we’d be giving other people permission to be themselves.

We will fake that we are straight, or that we live in a happy family, or that we enjoy our jobs, or that we like pop culture, or that we have lots of friends. We fake that we love what we don’t, and pretend that we don’t like what we do.

All this lying causes pain.

Perhaps we aren’t even aware of how often we fake being ourselves. It is often when people are faced with their own mortality that they open up and decide to be who they really are. Sometimes then it is too late to do anything about it.

So let’s try something. You are a mortal being. You are dying, every single moment. This life is an illusion. It is temporary. All the stuff you have is temporary. Nothing is permanent.

Yet, every single moment you have the choice to live. Every single moment you have the ability to move towards life, and be the person you were called to be. Be that person. Choose this time, now, while you can.

I offer you the best Mother’s Day gift ever – the permission to be who you were born to be, who you were created to be by our Creator.

Tradition will kill you.

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“We do it this way because we’ve always done it this way.”

I find it interesting (and disturbing and sad) that the only person who has talked to me about staying in church has used this as an explanation.

We need to keep this going because it is tradition.

I remember seeing a psychological study about peoples’ reaction to smoke coming under the door. There is a subject in an office waiting room with other people, but the other people are part of the study. Smoke starts to come under the door. The subject sees it, but doesn’t alert others, and doesn’t leave. This happened time and time again. When asked later why they didn’t react to it, the answer was that they didn’t want to cause a fuss. So, for the sake of keeping the peace, everyone will die. They’d rather be quiet than get everybody moving towards safety.

If we are in a car that has gotten off the road and is headed towards a cliff, we need to jump out of the car.

If the church goes one way, and Jesus goes another, we know who we must follow.

I’m finding it amazing the number of people who are on the same page here. People are leaving church not because they haven’t heard the Gospel. It is because they have heard the Gospel. They have heard the message to love and serve, and they are seeing a huge disconnect. They are seeing hypocrisy. They are seeing that church is self-serving rather than self-less.

The tithe goes to keep up the building and pay the staff. It doesn’t go to feed the hungry or clothe the naked.

The ministers have all the power, and they don’t teach the members how to be ministers.

We need to all think for ourselves. We all need to read the Bible for ourselves. If what the church says does not line up with what God says, then we are obliged to try to reform the church. Or leave. To stay and pretend that everything is fine is to give support to something that we know is wrong.

Sometimes things start off ok, but then they get sidetracked. I read about a women’s prayer organization that is for Anglican women. The charter said that no money would be raised in the name of the organization. Yet, years later after it was founded, they take up dues. They collect money for various scholarships for their members. I’ve heard that there is no proper accounting for this money. So, the start was good, but it got off the track.

Plus, I’m against anything that doesn’t allow someone membership based on something they have no control over. Only women can join? What about men who want to pray? God calls everyone.

This is like saying only men can be priests. Yes, I have a problem with that too. But I also believe from my studies of the Gospels that every person is called by God to know and love and serve God. It isn’t for the few, the proud, the priests. It is a gift that is given freely to all by the Holy Spirit.

We pray for soldiers who are at war. Yet we are told to love our enemies, and “thou shalt not kill.” There is a huge conflict here. We are praying for the safety of people who are doing something that we know from the commandments we are not to do. This is crazy-making.

Sometimes something is so broken that it can’t be fixed from within and you have to start all over.

God is constantly talking to us. He never stopped. It behooves us to listen to God talking in all things. God didn’t stop talking when the Bible was written. You can find truth everywhere.

But don’t take my word for it. Read, pray, think on your own. Stretch your horizons and boundaries.

Don’t be afraid. Love. Perfect love casts out all fear, remember?

Church shouldn’t involve money, or a building. It isn’t a place. It is a gathering. Look up the meanings of “ekklesia” – the root word for church. It is pretty surprising.

I don’t know what church should look like yet. I’m thinking I should send my tithe money to a charity, like the American Red Cross, or the Nashville Rescue Mission. My Sunday mornings are changing. There should be time to read the scriptures and time to pray and listen to God. I know there is a lot of healing to be found in a small circle of people who are willing to be open and honest with each other.

But I know I can’t be part of something I feel is wrong. And I know I’m not alone.

Let us pray together for the strength to return to the beginning. Let us examine everything in light of Jesus’ teaching to Love. What practice shows love? Do it.